Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Guardian Wishing Well Hiberheim - latest patch

I am just again at the guardian in Hiberheim which guards the Wishing Well. In former patches I defeated it with fire and teleport. In the new patch Larian obviously not only removed teleport as an option (stated in the patch notes) but upped fire resistance.

Fine. Why? I donï½´t really get it. The fight will now only need much, much more time than previous, still without any remote chance that the guardian kills just one character, not to talk about the whole party. Or, which is more likely, I will skip the fight, acquire tenebrium skill, get the wand from Hilda, one shot the guardian. And am thus forced to come back to Hiberheim later.

There is really no point in this design decision - it only makes the fight more tedious either way. Not a good change at all.

Regards,
Thorsten

Okay. 3 rounds into the fight. Guardian stunned, slowed, blinded, resistances lowered. Appr. 50 damage per turn for the whole party, Guardian with a basic health of 2900? I am out of patience so I will come back later.

This is NOT a difficult fight at all. Only a tedious one. And that is what I call bad design!

Regards,
Thorsten

Never mind, I am a bit stupid - come back after having acquired the next bloodstone of course. Still - bad design

I've just hit this as well - tedium in the extreme. I haven't got Tenebrium yet. I recall defeating it first time. I've been plugging away at it for over an hour now and got it down to 1800HP. What is this all about?

The first time I encountered this guy, I was lucky to have a character with 5 Loremaster. After seeing that it had 90 percent resistance to everything, I used the Flee button.

There is an incredibly easy way to kill him though, you can discover it before you even meet him.

Looks like the devs want to enforce the "easy" method on you. Donï½´t know why, but it is a not very clever game design. In effect forcing player back later or have him to deal with an annoying disadvantage for quite some time.

If the normal fight would at least be difficult. No, just stupidly tedious.

Regards,
Thorsten

So I need a weapon that do Tenebrium damage to kill The Guardian in Hiberheim ?

Or is there another thing I can do ?

Sorry? It's simple: You can fighter smarter, or you can fight harder. Your choice.

It's not just a random enemy, it's a guardian chosen by the king of the realm to guard some important stuff. It's not supposed to be a joke enemy, weak and easily defeated.

You can walk over most enemies in the game in your sleep with the right skill combination, but because some very special enemies can't be cheesed, that's suddenly Bad Design? I don't think so.


To kill it, you have to:

Thanks for the hint Stabbey !!

To kill the Guardian, you can also

Well the worst problem is, using the T-staff nets no XP for his kill (roughly 6k). And as most crucial skills need clvl 13-16 and enemies do not respawn, the player desperately needs every experience point available.
So I'm no fan of this encounter either.
But at least with warm + imunity against freezing he "only" has 55% fire resistance and is managable when prepared with fire staves/weapons.
Nonetheless... long and boring.

On my 1st playthrough, I was 2 lvls above the enemies in the late game, which was detrimental to the gameplay, because it made the game even easier. Phantom Forest and final bosses were incredibly too easy. So just destroy the Guardian with the wand if you find the fight boring.

I almost didn't finish the game because the Guardian fight bored me (I wasn't aware about the wand). I saved in the middle of the fight and stayed 1 month away from the game.

Yes later (lvl 16+) XP are way less important. With a good "build" one then can handle enemies a couple of levels higher. But the problem is to reach that point.

Finishing Braccus Rex' quests, going to Silverglen and exploring Hiberheim without killing the Guardian gives you lvl12 before you reach King Boreas (lvl12), so, imo, the Guardian's XP is not desperately needed.

Adam Ries says: 12<16 ... but well...
I definately think gameplay is short of too much aspects before high levels, nonetheless to each his own.

Oh, sorry, Seelenernter, I didn't get your point properly.

I think many of the lv13-16 skills are underwhelming. There are good ones, but they're not exactly crucial, since by the time they get available, we can already be very resourceful.

Imo, the good lv13-16 skills are:
Arrow Spray: Requires to get to close range on normal-sized enemies, not as important for its AoE;
Mass Disease: Decent, but situational and often unnecessary;
Mass Slow: Good, but there are other sources of slow;
Restoration: Good to have, but Strong Regenerate is enough;
Nullify Resistances and Soulsap: They're so good it feels like cheating heheh;
Death Punch: Touch range crushing dmg for mages.

By lvl10, we already have access to what I believe are the crucial skills:
Oath, hastes, slows, knockdowns, charms, Blind, Flurry, teleports, good elemental spells, relevant summons, stances, healings, cures.

Well that ofc also depends on ones preferences. But yes some of the lvl 10 skills are in there too, but reachable at only about 1/3 of the game it's at the brink of beeing "ok" for me. (there's still 2/3 of the game left to utilize them)
But soulsap and nullify resistances alone are mandatory sadly, as most enemies have absurdly high amounts of resists, and the physical-res can only be lowered by these two.
Only melee PCs with their extreme damage can somewhat circumvent that.

What lv13-16 skills do you think are crucial?

Soulsap and Null Res are very powerful, but not mandatory. Before lvl16 enemies, certainly not. I usually use one of them just for the pleasure of seeing really high numbers. They make the fights EVEN MORE one-sided.
It's possible to do crazy amounts of damage and disables with only lvl1-10 skills.
Rangers can also destroy enemies without those skills.

I can only think of both skills being mandatory on weak or not very diversified party compositions, or on parties built around them.

Do you mean it's crucial to be overleveled at some points? I'm certain that not receiving the Guardian's XP won't make the party nowhere near underleveled.

As I already said, it's to each his own opinion.
But as you can't get over the word "mandatory" let's call it differently, and let's just say the worth of some skills is off, especially with the fact of reaching them so late.
And also the game is quite easy without these. You can even deliver crazy damage numbers with no skill usage at all. Using the "good skills" beeing underleveled is absolutely no problem.
Nonetheless that's no point against proper balancing.

And ofc these 6k XP aren't all XP in the game, shure, but a step.
Thats btw. the reason I dislike the level requirements of all the skills. So reqs in the form of character-aspects yes, levels no. Simply unnecessarily cuts freedom.

Exactly. What I'm trying to do is understand your opinions, share experiences and discuss more about these topics.

What I was getting from your word choices is that you were meaning that before we can get these skills, the game didn't provide enough tools to make fights easy and enjoyable. But this doesn't seem to be exactly the case as you explained now.

I think the lvl requirement of skills are there to contribute to the game's progression, appeal and balance. The big problem is that the difficulty progression seems to be broken.
It's nice to have the expectation of being able to get new, better and more fun stuff as we lvl, instead of having access to everything since the beginning. It also helps to create a kind of learning curve and not overwhelm new players with a multitude of things to know (something that happens with blacksmithing and crafting).

If the difficulty progression gets fixed, would you still think the lvl requirement is an unnecessary limitation?

You did not get my complaint. I have no objection zo a hard fight, but any objection to a boring one. IF the guardian was in any way equipped to do real damage to my party, fine. As he is not, it is just and only boring. Hard would be different.

Thanks for the spoiler, but I already play the game since quite some time ...

Regards,
Thorsten