Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Who made this encounter final bossfight edition

*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.