First of all I didn't play much of Grymforge since it first released, so my info might be out of date:
I played it once, when it cames out and rage quit on Nere's fight, triggered mad by the poor panel of choices and the insane difficulty of the encounter. I mean, the map is beautifull, I just loved the exploration part with secret door, moving platform and everything, but the hell! How am I supposed to deal with the boss encounter with a 4 members party size at level 4 ?! Even with speed potion I spend half of my actions resurrecting those who were killed just before. How is that supposed to be a fun fight ?
I don't remember it being particularly challengine EXCEPT for the instant death pits - as long as half of my party wouldn't get shoved into lava through a distance of an entire width of my screen (exaduration, but not by much) it was fine. So usual strategy - huddle in a corder as far from lava as possible and everything will be just fine.
So here I was, trying to defeat the Golem. I put two characters under invisibility, open lava valve with the third, and use the last one to focus the golem attention and brought it under the hammer. Use one of the hidden character to pull the lever and BIM! The golem lost more than half of its amount of life points. Nice, I thought, I just had to do it again one more time (or maybe two, because, you know, dice roll) and done. I did it, 3 or 4 times. All the sequence : agro, lava, bring it under the hammer, smash it with lava up. For all these tries, the amount of life points lost by the golem was... 0! It just didn't work anymore.
That is odd. Sounds to me more like a bug then intentional design - in general Larian doesn't seem against stuff like that. When I fought him way back I didn't figure out hammer trick - he seems to aggro at first character who attacks him. I used it to pingpong him between ranged characters without him actually getting to either of them.
I also disagree that the combat is what makes grymforge unfun. Personally I hate the exploring there with all the traps and weird gimmicks to get around.
I will agree with you there. I overall like design of grymforge, but I find controls too clunky to not find enviroment frustrating. Jumping around just isn't fun, jumping my party isn't fun, my party memeber triggering traps when I tell them to disarm them isn't fun. Overall the area felt very unfinished to me - I hope it will get major uplift when the game is complete.
