Now that 1.10 is out

[Crystalion]

viable character in hell, even solo, but I think the Ancients are going to be a solid brick wall. I'll probably be able to kill Korlic and Talic, but Madawc is lit immune and there will be no corpses around (other than my merc's  :) ). Lower resist might be my only chance. I had a hell of a time with him in nightmare. He totally ignored my shadow 90% of the time, and blade fury only connected on about 1 out of 15 shots.

Well, if Madawc is your problem I think you're in luck, because the Thrower is probably the easiest of the three from a behavioral point of view (his AI has a strong tendency to stay put or move based on what you do, so he can be manipulated easily).

I'm assuming you want to solo this so I'm going to ignore help from others (even if you were just in a game with an Enchantress she could bless you with enough +fire/AR that your AR/damage Blade Fury problem would likely be solved).

As for Lower Resist, Madawc will be ~93 resistant to lightning for ~20 seconds a charge (the ~ are because I don't know if you'll have a slvl 1 or 2 charges item). This seems like a hard way to go.

Your Venom might still be appliable by Blade Sentinel (moves around obstacles) while you avoid things. It might have less problem hitting him (poor AR but tries alot, hitting at most once per second). Certainly I'd expect you to do better than once in three seconds while being less tied down.

One thought is to suggest that, like BF/ITD for normal monsters, this may be one of those times when Eths to make BF/venom work is appropriate, since you have a pretty high level of venom. Still, like my comment about Lower Resist, this seems like it is going to be slow going.

Another idea would be to shop nightmare Akara via cow portal (wands) or nightmare Anya (claws) for a weapon with lots of fire damage. Those could only take a couple Eths though, and you seem to have an AR problem in general. This makes me wonder if Malice's -100 to monster DR per hit works on superuniques, because that would be an easy AR solution (hit him with Malice BF 21 times and poof! no more DR to worry about and you can weapon switch back to whatever you really want to use). Of course this brings up the point that the Malice Open Wounds is likely, in this case at least, to be significant damage (compared to the other stuff you're trying).

One last warning, if you focus on elemental damage, would be to make sure Madawc doesn't spawn with a bonus to his resist for that element (you can check out the long list of such bonuses: Arreat Summit special monster bonuses webpage)