*spoilers abound*

I posted yesterday about a highly overtuned fight and.. I was wrong. I thought that I had known overtuned meant until I did the final fight in this act.

What.. the literal fk.. I cheesed the fight by putting my entire party sans main character out the front gate.. started the dialogue with 3pots+frost shield on a geared dwarf tank teleported him out (running out would proc 600 damage opportunity attack) on my mages turn.

2 of the magisters did not participate in the fight for the first few rounds. I then bombared the front door with fire and poison as they funneled through and took damage. The only 3 that made it into the first 3 rounds are the gheist the rogue and the bishop

So far the fight is the most ideal it could be 2 didnt join 3 funneled through damage and its 4v3. The gheist focuses my 2h warrior and armor saved his life however the number of attacks that npc has is insanely ludicrous. The rogue I widdle down his magic resist and stun him and the bishop I teleport out the room to have to run to us again.

So again 100% ideal situation bishop did not get to attack and minimal damage from the other 2 (because if he did your completely overtuned damage would 1 shot anyone but the dwarf)

I kill the gheist and rogue while the magister knight works his way in. I knock out the bishops shields and freeze him. At this time the giant worm pops up luckily im in the other room and second luck was the worm deciding the magister caster that has not participated in the fight would be a good target.

The magister knight finally makes it in while bishop freeze breaks the magister knight then 2 shots my warrior who was weakened by the gheist because for some god unknown reason the sword and board hits harder than a 2 hand warrior. Meanwhile my dwarf with damned good gear (completely explored map before fight) tickles with his 1 hander.

At this point the worm has killed the magister that hasnt fought at all and decides to join us outside. Emerging between my spread out rogue and healer dealing moderate damage and knocking down. bishop even with a giant worm which we dialogue is after us both decides to target my healer luckily she lives through the stupidly op strike and yet again teleports him outside the room.

My rogue and Dwarf take out the magister knight because as scary as the worm is the knight hits just as hard and doesnt have astronomical armor and hp. Before the end of the turn the worm kills my mage and my rogue resurrects the 2h warrior.

The next turn the worm petrifies the fresh ressed warrior and luckily for me decides to shoot the bishop. I use this opportunity to res the mage and do some damned good damage to the worms armor and magic defense barrier.

Following turn the worm instantly gibs the mage again before she could act (res put her on bottom of initiate) followed by the petrified warrior. Its now 2v2 and the bishop hasnt figured out who he wants to fight so I use a freezing arrow on him and then focus both on the worm due to gear and dodge luck I survive 2 turns and get the worm down to about 40% health. The worm kills the dwarf warrior by petrification + shooting him to death and the rogue sets on killing the worm and ignoring the bishop.

The bishop heads in and actually hits the worm I think "Hurrah! I will deal with him when the worm is gone" next round I deal more damage to the worm and the bishop stops his worm assault to "Blinding radiance" 1 shot the ranger.

Conclusion: This is the second fight where I am absolutely sure it was designed by an asshole. Every NPC has rogue level initiave scores regardless of class, they all hit like a mac truck dual wielding freight trains regardless of class even their grenades deal 100+ damage, Mid fight when exploits go my way and I might win you then introduce a CC immune raid boss who would be difficult 4v1 let alone on top of still having to deal with the magisters. The bishops entire kit can 1 shot anyone who isnt a tank and a crit can one shot the max geared tank. His max range AoE blind deals massive damage as if blind wasn't bad enough.The only thing the ice dragon who owed me favor did was kill some shriekers and make ice spots then peace out.

TL;DR I exploited NPC tactics/pathing had ideal circumstances, chain CCd the bishop, and still lost. Did all side quests got all gear from the puzzles+Braccus gear+ vendor blues. Having got the worm and the bishop to 25% with a ton of luck you can absolutely win this fight but you programmed the AI to be as cheesy as possible.

I completed this fight, and I have to agree that the way it is set up right now is a bit more reliant on luck than I would personally like unless you set out to really exploit the fight. I managed to beat it after 3 tries, but I had to get really cheezy about it.

It seems pretty clear that once the worm shows up, it and Alexander are meant to beat on each other for a little bit to make things more manageable for you, however a couple of times they outright ignored each other and exclusively targeted my party.

Also, I noticed Alexander apparently doesn't get a unique model? I know there are pictures of him in-game, yet he doesn't really resemble them clothing/appearance wise.

-Also, would be nice if there was a teleportation shrine beside this place. Hope the fight isn't made trivialized in any case, it was quite fun.

I managed to beat the encounter on my first try, which is surprising because I can clearly see how difficult it should be plus I think I was underleveled (all characters level 7).

This is the end of EA for now, right? I went to talk to Gareth and it says we get on the boat but nothing happens.

I'm so envious of you guys having finished the fight! I've failed like 5 times now!

The last time, I managed to defeat Alexander and most of his cronies by attacking from the right raised platform. That left only one magister on the far left platform who didn't join in (was too far away). At this point, I'm down to 2 characters and am out of revival scrolls. I go to take out the magister, and succeed and behold this crazy ass worm shows up and is nigh impossible to tank! 2 rounds is all I lasted. lol.

You can absolutely win.. however.. you need to 1 exploit NPC tactics as much as humanly possible and 2 get very lucky on what mcslashyoneshotface decides he wants to do. Your best bet once Dune arrives is to teleport mccheesyfuck on the exact opposite side of the worm as your party. Hoping his AI decides the worm is his target and at the same time the worm decides to hit him instead of focusing your caster every gdamn round

I do not think this can be done legitimately at the current softcap of 7 (Covered most the map not close to 8) by legitimately I mean walk into the encounter room and face it as intended.

Even trying to place ranged on the wings is sketchy because Larian thought this encounter wasn't cheesy enough so they placed oil barrels on the wings and an NPC AI programmed to ignore all tanks wide out in the open and phoenix diving to that spot on round 1 before the ranged wits oriented rogue acts.

The DPS of every NPC other than Sandworm (Hes cool in my book) needs to be reduced and the absolute hardon Larian has for all NPCs acting first regardless of role needs to go out the window. Lengthen the fight with hps or something but make it less reliant on cheese/cc spam/do not get hit ever. Let the player position his party or at least spread out I swear I am getting Baccus Rex flashbacks with the round 1 first initiative AoE party wipe fire rain.

Seriously, how you are supposed to fight this group without using cheesy tricks?

The mage on the left can alone ONE-SHOT your ENTIRE party using a meteor rain spell(!)

I managed to finish this encounter by luring enemies away one by one. Well, mostly one by one. And
I tried to keep them always frozen\stunned

Then I tried to kill dat mage and got one-shotted ..like everybody got one-shotted lol

Anyways, I managed to save-scum through this encounter and BAM! right after the mage died a giant worm spawns right on top of my party. Needles to say I wasn't ready for this and got owned. Reloaded and then killed it saving every turn.

I thought the dragon was supposed to attack these dudes after you help him but he doesn't


PS Balancing issues aside I loved this game. It is much better than the original. Especially when it comes to writing. I couldn't finish the first one coz of dat silly writing..

I actually had no real difficulty with this encounter and did it on my first attempt, so reading all these posts was really interesting.

Had Ifan cloak and dagger to higher ground and chuck grenades at everyone. Red prince tanked hits using fortify, and frost armor, main character used holy fire and water to keep the party alive, he also used the acid spores and Steam Lance for high damage and heals early on, Loshe sat back and did heals, and the Magisters were more concerned with the worm then they were with any of my party, and each turn the worm killed a Magister in 1-shot without fail.

Hmm. Fight was hard, but not that hard. My red prince with burn my eyes(dispel blind), haste and rage was critting bishop for 350, so it only really took two rounds of attack for him to go down. He also had comeback kid, which was a big help i suppose..

rest of the team was just supporting the prince really, since rage and warlord(especially in combination) are so inanely OP atm..

I know on the internet that no matter what you claim to have difficulty with "Climbing Mount Everest was hard" someone will responsd with "QQ EZ did it 3x this morning" but this takes the cake.

While no doubt min maxing alpha balance issues can give you strength I highly doubt you face tanked this fight legitimately. I also use 2h Rage Red Lizard as already had a sword/board dwarf hes the highest output in the party but he dies, gets petrified, comboed by ghast+knight etc.

You countered the blind and I absolutely believe you crit for 350 but he crits for 600 and has more defense/offense not to mention the rest of his party is pretty beefy. Now you may have dumped stat points into wits on all characters knowing that NPCs have abnormally high initiative, perhaps got more CC off even exploited pathing better than i did giving you time to nuke bishop but there is no way in hell you can honestly say this is balanced properly.

If you walked in the front door faced this encounter as intended with your party in the room/on the wings I want a video to match the claims you make. If you got lucky burned down bishop before he got to wreck and managed to split the rest then congratulations on the luck its not a l2p issue.

Although quite hard it was definitely not impossible and by no means unfair. Actually, if you do it right it's really easy.

Our first try failed because we obviously didn't know what we were getting into, we were lvl 8 and decently geared. Mage killed us a few rounds in with meteor shower.

I started the fight out with my enchanter lizard i placed her and my archer both on the left tower wall (2nd floor), as soon as my turn started i teleported Alexandar far out down the road to the boat and nuked him with an oil field to prevent him from going anywhere and from blinding the entire party (and doing crazy damage with it), then used my archer to CC the Mage and the Archer on the opposite wall. My brother, phoenix dived in with his melee character, blood sacrifice and raged, then 1 shot the archer while he was immobile and made sure he stayed out of range of the melee guy who's capable of a one shot if you got less than 300-400 hp. He moved the red prince in position to gang up on the melee enemy. The enemies pretty much did exactly as expected, the Gheist tried coming up to my Enchanter and so did the Mage and the Melee guy all standing close to each other. In my turn i nuked them with frost shards freezing 1 of them and chilling the other 2. I cast infection, everyone around me gets poisened, i continue with bless to buff myself for the next round, my Archer buffs adrenaline to get 2 more AP, shoots a poison cloud arrow and a fire arrow down to the 2 chilled guys making them explode and burn and then using electric discharge to stun both of them for the next 2 rounds. My brother buffs himself a bit and skips his turns to get more AP. Back to my Enchanter, staff of magus, fire breath and another electrical discharge to create a electrical steam cloud. When the enemy mage was finally not stunned anymore he immediately started bombarding me with fire balls, unlucky for him he caused the small gas cloud close to me to explode and burn up the entire second floor, which was immediately (for some reason, not sure if it was the enemy or something i did) transformed into holy fire, essentially making me and my archer invincible forever. Gheist and Melee started moving but immediately got stunned again. Brother phoenix dived down to the red prince getting into position throwing a oil field for the soon arriving Alexandar. I continued blowing the Melee, Mage and Gheist up with my ready spells and some grenades/arrows combo-ing as many fire, poison and DoT's and CC's as possible instantly killing the mage. As Alexandar finally arrived in the castle again he was immediately teleported into the oil field, followed by a inferno bottle, poison cloud arrows, more oil bomb skills and a stun arrow making him essentially useless for the next 2 rounds. Gheist and Melee moved, got burned and died both before reaching the second floor. Alexandar then got raped by our melee characters and knocked down again when he got up (300-400 damage per melee swing). After Alexandar died the sandworm popped up which was basically just a combo-fest, all damage he did (his damage is really shit) was instantly healed by holy fire beneath me.

The key in this fight is to trivialize Alexandar and get the mage killed or at least stunned as soon as possible and as long as possible to prevent him from casting the meteor shower which is essentially a party wipe.

All in all i found the fight one of the best, if not the best (the other one being the dweller one you complained about which we easily finished being underleved 2 levels.)

Teleporting him down to the boat is a great strat. Having all 4 custom characters helps more than you know as most of us were stuck with recruited pregens

Aside from that advantage I noticed 2 things that allowed your victory.

1 your archer was able to round 1 CC both the mage and enemy archer. How did he get past the mag armor + phys armor CC immunity as most aoe CC would run into one of those? if there is an arrow/consumable combo that good I definitely want to know.

2 you got very lucky twice. Pathing: you were able to keep agro without any agro abilities and kite the melee who can definitely wreck most. And secondly some of the deadliest NPCs clumped up without any direct position manipulation from you allowing for the the most OP ability in both damage an CC (Hailstorm) which was then followed up by aoe consumable spam.

Were you forced to actually deal with the gheist warrior and mage on an individual level it would have turned out much differently.

Given the vibe of your comment (underleveled ezmode gg ez ) You seem to have confused luck, exploiting, and min maxing with skill/balance. At these difficulty levels a fight should be tough for a rounded party, not a faceroll for min maxers, and difficult for those who fail to do research.

Congratulations on the encounter however in both cases exploits combined with pathing errors and luck allow you to complete events even under leveled. For example my bugged completion of the Dweller encounter no character dropped below 80% health It did not make me think I was skilled nor that the encounter was well designed as I can look at the situation and see how it should have gone if both NPC and PC were on equal footing.

I do hope that larian balances this difficulty mode based less on the opinions of those who abuse broken game mechanics and make the encounter a struggle instead of a test of cheese and save scumming. I personally open with a roleplay approach and then resort to funneling/cheesing when the going gets tough. I note in this post that even with some of the scummiest tactics the fight can be uphill.

ps. I am also guilty of walls of text but put a space inbetween on occasion.

Lol, this battle is so cheesy and unbalanced. I had to teleport my party to the inaccessible broken bridge on the left side and then lure enemies closer by teleporting one of my companions down the beach. The worm was no help at all, attacking my party as well.
I dunno how can anyone survive this straight on without cheese, especially considering I saved that seeker leader ass but when push came to show his whole vanguard party that was supposed to help me fight Alexander bugged out back to their sanctuary.

Devs, noone likes encounters that depend on RNG. And noone likes Boss oneshots where you cant do anything. Tell this to the dude who designs your encounters

They were supposed to help our party? I never saw them. I mean I saw them running to a boat and disappearing is all. rofl

Through dialogue, you can ask for two Seekers to stay back and fight.

I cheesed this fight as well - I positioned my party outside the front gate and just started everything by casting Hail on Alexandar. I then teleported him into the corrupted blood by where the Shriekers were, and stunlocked him. In one playthough, the guy actually healed himself to full when he was nearly dead, so stunlocking him was the only way I could win this. Two magisters didn't bother joining the fight, so I was able to deal with a rogue and a knight.

When the worm appeared, my two Seeker allies ran in to attack, like idiots. So I stayed back and let Gheist and the other magisters fight the worm, with my guys getting caught in the AoE. I brought my party in after Gheist went down. I remember examining the worm, and he had massive resistance to everything except (I think) ice ... I focused him down, and then finished the mage on the platform.

One thing - I believe casting Bless on fire changed fire into holy fire, which helped a ton while fighting Alexandar and the rogue. I cast it on one of my guys that was on fire ... quite serendipitous

I made it through this fight by letting Worm and bishop fight each other while moving my party (well half of the party, 2 died) away from their agro range. Until Worm appeared bishop was stunlocked (frozen, stunned, teleported out), while i was killing secondary enemies (2 of my party members died during the process, but dont remember exactly how).

By the way fight between Worm and Alexandar was kind of funny, because Disease effect is bugged. When it apllies, it heals you to max health. And when it wears off it heals you to max health too.
So i had to wait for the right moment when they were both low on hp to jump in there with my fighter on Rage and finish them off
PS: actually Alexandar won the duel and i finished him off after that

Yea, that seeker leader told me to meet them all at their old camp. But he bugged because he didn't appear with the rest of them at the camp, I went to check on him and he was stuck on that wooden rampart at the sanctuary and I couldn't even talk to him.
And so as I moved closer to Alexander by purging the shriekers all those npcs that were following me disappeared. I went back again and sure as hell they were all back at the sanctuary.
Buggy buggers

Btw, it would have been cool if the purged dragon that you can release helped with that encounter. That would have been epic - a dragon, a giant worm and seekers vanguard (when they're fixed) vs. big Bad and a bunch of tough evil magisters! That would have surely ended Act I with a bang

Oh, I wondered where everybody went: for a moment I thought I had half a dozen or so fairly hardcore allies behind me, and then... nothing. I somehow scraped through the fight by accident thanks to having most of my party still on the wrong side of the doorway when Alexander cast his blind spell and then levelling up just as two or three of my party were getting a bit low on health. And a couple of resurrection scrolls.

I kinda feel quite cool about getting through it, but I admit that actually I totally suck at combat and strategy and it was definitely a case of more luck than judgement.

I thought the fight is actually okay. Not extremly hard but also not easy.
Played with a friend and we used the pregen chars. 1 Rogue ( Human Male ) 2 Handed Warrior ( Elf ) + Red Prince and the Mage ( Human Female ).
Red Prince had Leadership maxed ( + 10 Initiative ) -> Mage was able to cast Hail Strike and freeze Alexander.
The Rogue could easily kill the Mage. If you cant kill him fast just bless someone and the meteorite spell becomes worthless because fire becomes blessed fire -> burn becomes holy fire -> you get healed by the mage.
Use encourage and you should have enough HP to survive for atleast 1 Round and just heal.
As soon as Alexander has no Armor you can just CC lock him and the worm wasnt a problem.

I didn't know bless had this effect.. it would have certainly made my fight much easier.

I must admit I have no idea what leadership and bless actually do. My combat style has always lacked any sort of finesse and aptitude which is probably why I suck at it so much.

Yeah, Leadership is pretty much a godsend since you can usually find an item that boosts it by 1 so you should have an average of 4. That means your baseline initiative for 3 members of the party is near 15 and you get other bonuses along with it.

Will copy-paste my post from bugs section:

Fight does not requires ANY GEAR and any levels at all:

Shriekers + tp = insta win vs bishop(lvl 10 fight, i was lvl 5-6), (need tp skill<-( tp to shriekers area) or gloves of tp, + hail storm<- ranged aggro) - no damage done, by heroes[except tp damage])

http://imgur.com/a/Z5S8W

This fight seemed impossible without the perfect setup and I don't understand the purpose of the 2 npcs helping you, when they are only lv1 and almost do nothing at all.

In the end my mate and I cheesed this fight. We found a greatsword in the hidden pirate treasure which was irreparable and was way stronger than a normal greatsword, it had around 420-440 damage. So we fully buffed my Elf Paladin who then proceeded to 3 hit kill the Bishop/Worm with 600+ damage hits and 1 hit kill everything else.

But after that fight it got really messy and buggy. After all enemies were killed, Gareth rejoined our party, but was hostile towards 3/4 of our party members (everyone but my Elf Paladin), so I had to kill my own party members to end that fight. After that the story continued as normal.

Leadership buffs everyone that sees the leader.
Buffs include: +crit chance +hit chance +initiative +resistances etc.
The leader wont get these buffs -> I take leadership on my tank/heal guy.
Bless is the opposite to curse.
You can cast it on someone to bless him and grant him buffs including resistances dodge hit chance etc.
Also if someone who is blessed touches ANY surface it will become blessed ( or uncursed if it was cursed ).
If someone who is cursed touches any surface it becomes cursed.
Some examples.
A fire surface does damage and applies burning ( fire damage every round until extinguished )
Cursed fire ( green ) does way more damage and applies necrofire ( LOTS of damage and -40(?)% fire resitance -> around 100 dmg/round ) and CANT be extinguished.
Blessed fire ( blue ) heals you and applies holy fire ( +150% fire resistance -> fire heals you and you cant be frozen anymore )
Also if one of your guys is burning you can bless him and the burning will transform into holy fire too or curse a burning enemy to transform it into necrofire.

One fun combo is casting rain under lots of enemies -> water surface. Freeze it with Winters call ( dunno the name ) and curse someone on it -> The ice gets transformed into cursed ice ( Applies chilled and frozen while standing on it xD )

Or maybe you saw a fire surface somewhere in the world -> bless someone and you can heal yourself in it.

If you have at least 1 healer and use all your resources (bombs, arrows, anything) to CC Alexandar for the beginning fight, that part is a joke. After you break his armors you can perma cc him and just wail on the rest of his friends until you win. Once the worm fight starts, you have to just be careful and not group up, then at most the worm will hit 1 party member. Use potions to stay alive if needed and just hit the worm. It is only 1 thing, if you're apart it can't hit more than one person at a time. It will eventually go down.

That said, Leadership helps a ton with the initiative issues. I put a lot of points on Ifan into wits to discover secret stuff and for some early cc (sleep grenade is fantastic at breaking a lot of magic armor). So he went first. I used him with adrenaline and grenades to sleep Alexandar and after that the fight was cake. Being able to keep the ring that teaches you restoration helps a lot.

Did it relatively easy with my level 7 party. The bishop was strong but i stunned/iced him. My fighter died too many times so left him dead. My ranger and mage were able to kill them all. my mage tanked then the worm while the ranger just broke it easy.

Whaaaa... 440 damage sword? Could you upload a pic of that?

Thanks for the info! I'd somehow managed to completely fail to pick up on any of this stuff. I guess I could've experimented with bless, though leadership's benefits seem harder to ascertain. I'll give them a go on my next play-through.

After going through a second play through (again with pre generated characters aside from my main) I don't really think the final boss fight is overtuned at all. In a matter of fact, I would say it's tuned pretty close if not a bit under strengthed.

I feel that way because if you have a backstabber the entire fight is trivial; you can one shot him with your rogue on the first pass -> adrenaline, rage, elven active, vault, drink a potion of invis or stealth, then fatal blow (or whatever that move is called). Alternatively, you can have your 2H knight do the exact same combo and then do crippling strike/overpower and you'll come pretty close to killing him if not gibbing him outright. Also, Alexander has pretty bad magic defense so you can chew through that and CC him.

Beyond that all you need to do is take out the caster which you can dedicate 2 or 3 party members for and from there on out the worm will take care of one or distract someone and then your casters will have free reign for a turn or two -- unload your AoEs (chainlighting, spores, all the fire spells) preferrably from high ground - teleport your own casters there if you have to (which is what I did since it's 1AP). To deal with the Giest just drop hailstorm for 1AP and he's more or less CC'd.


All four times I've fought the encounter the worm has tied up 1+ npcs and even when it was just one I still managed to wipe the battlefield; my party composition was the following: Red 2H Knight, Murderous Elf Lady as a rogue, Loshe as a standard caster with most points going into Aero, and my main which was a caster with almost all points into fire. I had at least two characters with leadership 4 at all times. And everyone in my party had 110+ magic armor to counter blinding radiance. Beyond that, I would say if you're running for a long term fight you're probably better off using Bless to mitigate the shitstorm of necrofire.

This one is probably right on the borderline of being too difficult, & might feel a little better if a) a few unfinished/buggy quests (& areas like the Gargoyle Maze w/ the Historian) were finished, w/ a couple more encounters or opportunities for gear/XP, b) if Garreth, the Seekers & the Dragon reliably joined the fight (Garreth bugged out & never left camp, the dragon flew over as I approached & chilled my squad then disappeared, & a few of the Seekers only joined the final stage of the fight against the worm, only to die instantly, b/c he happened to pop up in sight range of them.) The Seekers could stand to be beefed up considerably, I could have beaten them all by myself pretty easily at level 2 or 3, especially Gratiana, a thousand year old badass w/ 86 hp, c) if the loot system were a little more ironed it; I had to do another full sweep of every nook & cranny on the entire island for gear to sell, then visit all vendors again to reliably find decent upgrades to go into the last fight.

It ended up being a pretty fun fight when I forced them to come to me by luring them w/ my tank (Red Prince w/ obscene Physical Armor, who used Overpower on the Bishop instantly dropping his armor), and when the worm showed up the only available targets were the magisters, which it chewed through like paper, then I managed to position the gheist against the worm & rained AoE on them while CCing the Bishop at the doorway & whittling him down. The worst part of the first part was that the rogue got behind my mage & archer, but the worm triggered pretty early, took out their knight and mage, and forced their archer to retreat. I only survived the worm (w/ several casualties & resurrections) b/c a few Seekers made themselves fodder for his OHK attack while my main was levitating over AOE pools & doing 100+ damage per hit w/ a spear.

This fight really is supposed to be the VERY LAST thing you do, meaning you should have already wrung every last drop of XP out of the island, grabbed all the best unique items & spent most of your coin on upgrades.

So I did this fight on my first try and I think the MVPs are mages. Netherswap, Teleport, Hail Storm, and Winter Blast are particularly strong. A mage that has dumped points into Aerothurge will one-shot most magic armor with a well-placed Hail Storm. At the start of the fight I TPed Alexander next to the gheist, netherswapped my archer with the archer near the gheist, tped that enemy archer near Alexander then froze them all. The fight is more manageable then so the team focuses on the remaining rogue and warrior. The mage w/ meteor rain took a turn to run the fight. Over the next few turns, I just killed the unfrozen people while keeping Alexander CC'ed. I tactical retreated my archer over near the mage and got dmg off before getting one-shot by the meteor storm spell. But after it's on cooldown, the mage isn't too big a threat. The rest of the fight including the arrival of the worm is just keeping people healthy. Repositioning skills are a great tool for efficiently dispatching enemies with AoE.

I completed this fight the normal way (walking in his range and talking) and I have no tank, just squishies.

I won that fight in classic by:
1. blessing all fire surfaces
2. teleporting my archer to the top left tower, while teleporting their archer down to a pit of fire.
3. cheesing the front door
4. Wearing down their magic shields asap, which are MUCH lower than their armor. Once magic was down for everyone, it was just poison, stun, freeze, repeat. gg ez

I only had 3 characters too. Red Prince (necromancer), Ifan (scoundrel), and Elf Girl (huntsman). Idk why I didn't pick up Lohse T_T.... I'll find her next playthrough.

I can do most of the fight though I'm a bit low on Resurrection scrolls. The worm however can just one-shot my party and if I don't constantly CC Alexander, he will also one shot my party. A lot of my success in the fight has come down to confusing the AI and using those oil barrels. Again, none of this is any good though since once Alexander is down, the worm proceeds to kill multiple party members with one spell.

My main issue with right now with this fight is that I can't find any other way to level up. The entire island's map is uncovered and almost all of my quests are resolved (can't figure out the maze so I teleport cheesed it and it seems a few quests were bugged and just can't resolve). I know I'm missing something but I have to ask how are people even getting to level 8?

Did this fight on a solo run, Knight with some Necromancy. I had tons of initiative so I always move first. Drew aggro from Alexandar and his goons, killed the gheist and the rogue and then teleported Alexandar back into the middle of the keep when the worm spawned and stayed far away enough so that they whittled eachother down and the worm killed the mage, then I phoenix-dove into the fray again and started hacking at the worm with all I had. It was still a close call, as I forgot to bless myself and the worms attack whittles down magic armor, not physical armor, which I had very little of. If I hadn't had a few health potions I don't think I would've made it.

It's incredibly easy to exploit enemy AI right now. I really hope to see some improvements. That are about a dozen ways you could cheese any particular fight.

I also think that 100% success rate of conditions after armor is gone needs to be revisited. It makes CC immensely powerful (more than it already was in os1) to the point of completely trivializing every encounter.

Me(a priest) and 3 of my friends(mage/warrior/enchanter) did this fight by me and my brother(priest/mage) walking behind the boss(on the higher part), then my 2 other friends (warrior/enchanter) standing next to the boss but far enough away to not get hit by AoE
Teleported 1 guy so 2 are standing next to the boss
Freeze all 3 of them with the hail strike and other AoE freeze skill
And i blessed our warrior

My brother teleported the archer next to us into the group of 3
Threw poison and fire on it

The warrior ran in and crippled all of them, knocked 3 of them down while killing one

The enchanter gave some buffs and killed one
And then we just slowly killed them while keeping them cc'ed without losing any hp really.


The worm fight was basically just everyone keeping the warrior alive while he hits it for 200 per hit a couple times per turn while hasted/healing per turn/blessed/enraged/fortified
The worm is the only one which (with his movement+knockdown skill) got one of us to nearly die

I'll share my experience, since it seems somewhat different than most here.

Attempt 1 : Start the fight - round one aggro and kill magister swordsman. Round 2, Alexander moves into the middle of my party and one shots two of them with his melee attack. I give up

Attempt 2 : Start the fight - round one aggro and kill magister swordsman, then move back a bit. Round 2, Alexander, gheist, and a magister don't quite reach me. Use teleport to group them up, then you AOE magic to strip their armor. Spend the next 5 turns with them perma stunned / frozen / petrified / etc, while I kill them all. Combat ends without the other two magisters being involved.

Save at this point. Thinking I have the battle won, I advance into the courtyard. The battle starts, and the mage one shots my entire party.

Reload. Teleport up to the ledge behind the mage, battle starts with only half my team up there. His meteors somehow mostly miss, so I bless the fire and quickly kill him. At this point, a giant worm shows up out of nowhere, CCs the one party member (rogue)still on low ground. The lone remaining magister enters the battle, alternating between killing my poor permastunned rogue and the worm. The rest of my party heals up and blasts the worm. Its CC immune, but its damage is lackluster. It teleports up and down a few times (long after the rogue is dead), but only manages to petrify once. After a few rounds it goes down easily. I revive the rogue and finish the last magister.

Thoughts - This battle really shows the weaknesses of the no armor = 100% cc system we have now. Alexander goes from being able to solo 3/4 party in one turn to absolutely useless after removing his 150 magic armor with 2 spells. This trivializes almost the entire fight. In fact, in order to make the other large enemy (the worm) scary, its made immune to all cc. I really don't like either option very much - in one, your just slapping on a bunch of arbitrary rules, different from the rest of combat you encounter, to make cc not work so the battle is actually hard. On the other hand, cc is ridiculously effective in the standard system, so I can see the appeal...

Also, the magister mage being able to one shot my entire team (making it more dangerous than Alexander OR the worm) feels wrong. If an enemy has an ability that strong, I think we should be warned somehow...

I think for a second we need to step back. I know the "Did it solo at lvl 4 ez qq" crowd will lie saying they did it naked using a spoon at lvl 1. We all know it can be beat but really take a step back and look at the game and think "Is this how it should be balanced?"

Should we be balancing fights around min maxed characters abusing AI and permastunning the combatants? Should it be "Oh he reached my party and one shot reload save try again". Yes we can use smoke bombs, abuse AI pathing, group them together for the hailstorm doom, spam consumables so they never act, or put all your eggs in the rage+warlord+cripple 2hander. But would you rather have a fight where you deal some damage set up some battlefield control the enemy reacts and a constant back and forth, healing wounded party members repositioning etc.

Me just like in DOS1 I reserve the "front door cheese" for when I think that I cannot approach the encounter in a traditional manner but much prefer the fights where its a constant back and forth and maybe I barely win or get crit and have to try again. But the play perfect don't get touched or one shot them mentality is boring to me.

Or it may show that the encounter is under-tuned or it shows that you can tackle the encounter through various means; some people face tank it, others exploit terrain + teleports, some people just snipe Alexander right off the bat, others use fighting retreats, others stun lock all the mobs and play the long game.

Also, in these games, 'slapping a bunch of arbitrary rules' is the norm; every single ability is virtually an exception to the rules. Basically, it's a test of 'how flexible is your party' in almost all of these games.

It should be pretty damn apparent to anyone who is playing that there is always a good chance of getting one shotted; you can one shot the enemies and enemies have the same abilities you do at times, plus, just playing in general if you play recklessly you can easily see, long before the final encounter, that you can die in one hit.

This is not a hard fight at all. I've played this one two times now, one try, clean victory. The problem most people might be having is that the fight is unfavorable to certain groups, but me and a friend had a setup with 2 mages, 1 archer, 1 melee 2 handed and it was a breeze honestly. Alexander dead on 2 turn along with most of the enemies as well, then it's just cleaning up the rest and dealing with the worm later. Seriously, I think just a decently built mage coupled with a 2 handed warrior can make this fight too easy to be honest. The game is heavily unbalanced at the moment in favor of players if you know how to build, unfortunately

I don't know if it's normal, but I actually passed this fight without a problem.

There is a bug (I think), if you talk to the chief and meanwhile your mate attack the other, you can keep talking to him and he doesn't fight, you got 1 of your character blocked in a chat with him, but with that you can kill all of them and then fight him, by the way the big worm don't spawn either, if the chief don't fight there is no worm, so you can kill the chief and the worm in a 1v4 XD

(sorry if i don't explain it well, i suck at english).

Some claim this fight were easy, not realising that they are probably using a lot of overpowered mechanics. Also you should acknowledge that the current maximum difficulty is "normal", there will probably be something like a tactician mode as well.

Overpowered mechanics:

Leadership 4+: Gives you an insane amount of initiative, basically guaranteeing that your party goes first, which is probably more of a flaw with the current initiative system.

Rage+Blood Sacrifice+Warlord: All those skills are overpowered, make you deal way too much damage and allow you to chain kill all the weaker enemies.

Rage+Blood Sacrifice+Sneak+Guerilla+Snipe: Too many combined damage bonuses make oneshots too easy.

Hail Storm: Way too much damage, huge aoe and freezes. The damage is so high, that you often freeze targets that started with full magic armor.

Winter Blast: Costs 1AP, 2 turn CD and freezes for 2 rounds in an aoe.

Perma CC in electrified surfaces (or perma CC in general): Abusing the currently flawed armor+CC system which guarantees CC to work after removing a little bit of armor, allowing you to completely negate problematic foes, like the Bishop.

The list goes on, but you probably get my point by now.

Take away all those mechanics, approach this fight head on without cheesing and imagine being in tactician mode. Now tell me how fair the fight is.

"Take away all the ways to deal with it and tell me how fair it is"
Those are powerful solutions yes, but what would be an acceptable solution for you? Is there another way besides walking straight in and turning it into a slugfest that would not be "using overpowered" mechanics?

Yeah, If you're not using the mechanics the game gives you, you're only limiting yourself, and if you're doing that then it's your fault, not the game dificulty. The Magic resist bar is there with the sole intention of blocking CC. If you can break that and permacc someone before killing, then you did great. That's no flaw, that's the way it is, and if you're going around that and avoiding using CC on them that's just artificial dificulty, much like playing dark souls bare handed or something.

I have to agree that there are some stuff way too overpowered at the moment though, like Warlord and Rage, but they are what they are, and if not that there would be another way to build to be strong too. I've breezed through DOSEE Tactician and I'm anciously waiting for that mode on DOS2 as well, because that sure is gonna be harder than the first game.

I've posted this response in other similar threads about this fight, but..

I actually thought the fight was way too easy. It's supposedly designed for level 9-10 but I completed the fight easily (none of my party members died) at level 8. If anything, these are super weak enemies for being level 10ish. If I was level 10 I could finish the fight in about 3-4 rounds without losing anyone. It might even be possible to finish the entire fight without taking any HP-damage, at that level.

The fight with the voidwoken and undead was actually more difficult than the end fight, for its level. Several ranged guys spread out on different elevated platforms in an ambush position that suddenly pop-in when you get close enough.

At least with the final fight you can see where everyone is ahead of time (before you start the fight) and you basically have infinite time to prepare your strategy/tactics before the fight even begins.

This is a big problem for me in the game at the moment. Quest fights are always way too easy because most of them has some sort of dialogue before, so you can simply see every enemy and position accordinly before finishing the chat. There should be some sort of proximity trigger for these kind of fights, as this makes is retardly easy to fight. This gets you the upper hand even when lower level, allowing one to sneak past enemies, place barrels at will and simply set terrain to their advantage while the whole enemy team just sits and watches while chatting.

And to note that I haven't even done that in the final fight and still found it an easy encounter. The only dificulty one might have is Alexander big health and resist pools, but if you're playing/build right that should be easy to deal with, specially if you have a marksman elf with rage+sneak+snipe+racial skill to open the fight with, which means you almost instanly oneshot him.