This has been my experience as well. Stupid bots being denied recursive requests. I modified my fail2ban script to autoban them which helped considerably.
Well, fail2ban can help, but that is only going to be generally quick enough to keep up with the initial ramp-up of the attack I'd expect. Once the full attack gets going you're probably going to be seeing requests from thousands of hosts at any given time. I haven't specifically tested under that scenario with fail2ban, but I imagine that it would have trouble keeping up with such a flow.
My experience was that fail2ban mitigated it pretty much completely for my small server (which no doubt was only allocated a small number of bots to be attacked with). It took about an hour to build up a list of about 16,000 machines and then basically things were fine again.
