Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks Void Dragon (balancing or bugs?)

Wait so you don't want spoilers but you enter a thread titled "Void Dragon"? Really? That's like stabbing yourself with a pencil in the eye and then asking why there was no label saying it's not intended for stabbing.

If I were the OP I'd just say: Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize someone could really be stupid enough not realize there'd be spoilers in here.

Not to mention the section of the forum you're in automatically implies spoilers are everywhere because tips cannot be given or asked for without detailing what the hell's going on.

I am having big problems with this fight. I've tried and failed three times to beat the dragon and with no success. Each of those attempts has lasted in the neighborhood of 90 mins and I am exhausted and discouraged. I am sure it's my fault as I have not leveled properly. Thing is my chars are all lvl 21 and the dragon is lvl 20.

Biggest problems:
1.Unlike the fight with the Trife Astarte is useless in this fight. I am puzzled by why she stands still the whole fight with the dragon which is unlike the previous fight. If she is transfixed by the dragon then the developers of this game have failed to give her dialogue that would indicate this. She also will not aid my fighters as she did in the fight with the Trife. This is a bad design decision and I am not pleased with it.
2. This might be a bug but my melee fighters, when they are close to the dragon, do little more than kick at it with their feet and refuse to use their weapons (which are elite and or Tenebrium). I've checked the condition of the weapons and they are not broken nor are my melee fighters under any weakness spell or any other spell.

Coupled with the fact that my chars get two attacks while a lower lvl dragon gets 4 each turn and this is absurd.

Also I never seem to have the ap to allow Jahan to use a meteor strike. And if he gets close to being able to use it he usually has to heal Astarte or something.

I am going to try again on the weekend but I've reloaded an earlier save so I can make sure everyone has ice shards and rain or whatever it will take to stun these creeps. I have been playing this for a month and I do not want to have to start all over again. I am a relatively inexperienced gamer despite being 46. I never played many rpg's and this is one of the first so I may have plotted this whole thing wrong due to inexperience. I was enjoying the game until this point and now I am pretty disgusted. I even dropped the difficulty down to easy for this fight and it's still a grind.

The last fight is not about dealing as much damage to the dragon as possible, but to keep him unable to act through status effects.

So basically you whittle him down over time by keeping him frozen or stunned? Ok I will try that this coming weekend (weekend cause I can see through the 90 min attempt I made yesterday that I will need to block out a couple of hours for this).

Someone else suggested not trying to take out his initial summons in any hurry but to keep them occupied with my own summons while I alternately heal astarte, stun/freeze the dragon and whittle away at his health.

I am going to go out and steal every painting, loot every house, buy every scroll, potion, power/attribute I can before I head back into this fight and I will scroll this sob to death if I have to!!!!

Just take over the big spider with Charm.

The dragon is vulnerable to blind. With enough int (17 I think, easily reachable), the blind has a good success rate (near 100% if you combine with other spell such as enfeeble or divine light). All it takes is 4 Ap every 3 turn to remove the void dragon from the fight while you take care of the summon.

The main difficulty comes from the storm of status effect the void dragon inflict on its first turn. It helps if you have some defence against these type of attacks with enough bodybuilding/willpower as well as a level 6 leadership character. Counter measure such as cleansing water, purifying fire may help as well. Some orange item also grant immunity to disabling effect such as stunning.

Orange item?

I don't have a leadership 6 char although all my chars are close to that. I've got blind and I'll try that. I did manage to freeze it a couple of times last night so I do plan to add ice shard and rain to a few chars before my next attempt.

Ah wait I know what you mean now!

I first assumed he'd be rather difficult to status. The first time I fought him (on Hard) I didn't even try to status him as a result, and I still did rather well, since I have one character with over 120% resistance in five elements (the four main plus poison). He just sat there in the corner and tanked a huge number of breath attacks. However, without the ability to use attacks due to his extremely high evade (you pretty much have a 0% chance of hitting him), I mostly attacked the spawns and flung spell damage at the dragon. This worked slowly but reasonably well, getting him below half health when one turn he decided to use the Tenebrium breath three times in a row, killing my tank (who had 0 Tenebrium resistance)... and from there things went downhill. Prior to that, Astarte herself was never in any kind of serious, or even moderate, danger, because the dragon's breath attacks all went off to the side.

On the retry one of the spawns just happened to be near the dragon, so I cast Boulder Bash on the both of them, and imagine my surprise when the very first attempt to status him (it wasn't even much of an attempt, really), actually worked. From there, the rest of the fight was cake, having my attackers focus on the now easy-to-hit dragon, while the mages handled crowd control.

It is worth noting, however, that the dragon is almost entirely elemental and Tenebrium damage, so if you get a character with high resistances you can tank him extremely well, which positioned correctly can keep Astarte extremely safe.

Actually, it's wayt better to have only 1 character with leadership level 6 than 4 character with level 4 leadership as the buff doesn't stack. The only case where it would be better to have several leader is if you abuse of invisibility or smoke screen.

Well it's too late to do anything about that now unless I trash about 5 lvls of the game and start again from there which I am loathe to do.

ScrotieMcB-Thanks! My plan is to try and deal with his summons using my two tanks while my ranger/rogue and mage deal magical attacks on the dragon in the form of freezing/fire/and bouldering. It may take hours but I'll give it a go. I also have noted the effect "charm" has on those spiders so I will keep them charmed and hopefully grind out a win.

In the future though I hope Larian will decide to allow Astarte to at least attempt to deal some damage of her own so that she can at least be a more active participant. I don't think the balancing is quite right yet for this fight.

Knock the dragon down = win

Simple as that really. 100+ percent elemental resistance can also be helpful.

Yeah, statusing him means not having to tank him at all. Tanking should be a plan B thing (and an answer to the hypothetical "what if he shrugs off the knockdown before I have a chance to re-apply it?").

Yup... same here... just finished it.

Soulsap (BAM! 3000HP instantly gone) + blind = Dragon unable to do anything what-so-ever.
Add some Boulder Dash or Cripple for the 50% Bully bonus my melees had, add some summons to add to damage, and it's just punch-the-useless lizard. Handy of blind is that it also gives you 100% chance to hit the target.
But yeah, I guess it was odd Astarte did nothing except comment once-in-a-while, and there was no special music for the battle.

Guess I got lucky I had a Witch I guess though... didn't really figured out how powerful Soulsap until like 2 fights before that. Description made it sound horrible... Then I saw HP-reduction, damage reduction, -50 to saves and resistances, and even with 1 turn duration I could cast it each turn on my mage.

Did it. Finally!! Took two hours because I probably didn't have my party built or buffed as properly as I could have. But did learn some things and some things here were useful.

1. Stay well away from him with your party till the very end when he is nearly dead. He is deadly until then.
2. Save often. Save after every moment when you either hurt him or stun or freeze him.
3. Drain Willpower and Soulsap are your friends just keep pounding him with them.
4. I came into the fight with 20 stun arrows for my ranger. After he was soulsapped and drained I just kept hitting him with those and ice shards. Took a long time but did the trick (knockdown less effective and seems to work only once out of every three tries).
5. Keep a bloodswarm on him. He seems to be able to miss their attacks less frequently than other summons. I don't know why.
6. Do charm that spider.

Divinity Original Sin - EPIC FINAL BATTLE - ONE Vs Void Dragon & Strife - OverPowered!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=injC_DfI3sg

What is up with Astarte? I mean if everything other people wrote in this thread actually was true, I would be able to finish this fight no problem, but Astarte goes into complete retard-mode here, standing still and casting bless once in awhile. In my first attempt she had like 4hp (I don't have any healers in my party, as I built my group around the idea that they all were zombies basically (zombie-perk)) and she doesn't heal herself at all, she casts something that COULD be a healing spell (it has a blue ankh appearing above her) but doesn't do anything at all.

The void dragon itself never gets knocked down and my int20 Jahan keeps being unable to blind, stun, knock him down or disable him in any way. So basically I'm trying to keep the dragon from instagibbing Astarte with his multiple breath attack (she died from full hp in the third attempt I had, from ONE group of attacks from him). How Astarte supposedly were to stand a chance against the void dragon at all with some crappy blessings and completely ineffective non-healing heals I dunno. This fight is completely immersion-breaking to me. It's a pity, because up until this point this has been the best RPG of all time for me (aside from one or two epic nuisances).

Personally, I think I'll end up accepting the VOID-ending out of sheer spite for Asstarde.

Lol so much hate for our little goddess.

Odds for blinding, stunning etc... can be improved by lowering enemy willpower/bodybuilding. To this end, cast before divine light, drain willpower or enfeeble/soulsap. There is no save throw for these 3 spell.

That is a really disappointing fight, at least in normal (rah once again why did I start a game in normal difficulty ?). Nailed it on the first attempt, wasn't even close not to win.

Seriously, with any cleverly build character, it brings no difficulty... I did not have to heal any char... With boulder bash stun, there's no challenge (ok, to be fair, the last challenging fight was the source king anyway).

Astarte kept using her useless water of life {E}, it was even more ridiculous...

I don't min-max, stat-whore, I role play. To me this is an RPG, not an effectivity simulator. It has taken me 100 hours to get to this final fight (on hard) and I've been playing the game according to my characters stats. Not going for the most effective spells in each scenario. I tried doing that once in NWN2 which led to a completely boring experience.

My biggest problem here though is that the fight is completely immersion breaking, why would Astarte stand still? Why would she only cast useless spells? Why on earth would she position herself so that she takes the brunt of the damage? And why, when she OBVIOUSLY has the power to heal herself, would she not heal herself? My party certainly don't have any healing spells. They essentially are zombies. They're great at poisoning, using some earth & witchcraft magic combined with melee attacks and curses, diseases, raising dead, and such. I do have the soulsap-spell which lasts one turn, and I do have the boulder bash, but either I'm the most unlucky player in the world, or it just won't work like you describe it. Because that void dragon keeps not getting knocked down, and keeps taking feeble damage.

It's frustrating, every encounter until now has made sense to some degree, I wish I could have had more options to live in the grey area of the game, I still do not want the world to succumb to the void, but I very much appreciate the options to choose to kill Arhu for example. I would've wanted to see alliances/factions play a bigger part in this game, and choices between them.

The dragon has Willpower and Body Building 10, which subtracts 100 from the listed success rate of your status effects. So if a low int char uses a stun spell with a listed success rate of 115% it will fail 85% of the time. However if you use spells that decrease Willpower/Body Building (Drain Willpower for -5 Willpower) in in combination with a high int char (19 int for Shocking Touch), you can get a guaranteed success on the negative status effects.