*Spoiler ahead*

This is about an encounter in Act 4, early in Arx.

Just outside of one of the city gates is a group of Paladins cornered by a group of Voidwoken. When you get close enough, you will be forced into a huge brawl.

Whoever reworked this fight, did you actually play through it completely?

1) If you approach this encounter normally, the boss Voidwoken and possibly a couple others will target you as soon as you join combat. I don't know about lower difficulties, but on Tactician with their insane damage output they can easily kill one or more party members before you even get a chance to do anything. While playing on Tactician is my choice, the fact that these enemies instantly turn to target you even though their original targets are still right there in front of them, is cheesy enough. Having one or more party members instantly killed before you ever get a chance to do anything is just unnecessarily lame. Granted, this behavior is in the classic edition too. I know many people have no problem with having their tank go first to tank the initial attacks, but don't you think having to rely on metaknowledge and doing this kind of thing is lame? My point is, as you join combat, you are placed at the end of the round. So AT LEAST give the party a break until the next round. What's so wrong with that?

2) During this fight, when you kill one Voidwoken, one or two more will show up. The first problem here is the fact that they get to take their turn IMMEDIATELY. With their damage output at this point in the game, they can easily finish off a couple of your party members who are not beefy enough. But the more frustrating problem is that, as they show up like this, they INTERRUPT your turn (after you get the kill) and PUSHED YOU BACK to the next turn. OR, the game sometimes would skip the turn of the party member who is supposed to go next, entirely.

- Combat order is: Beast - Lohse - Ifan - end round.
- Lohse kills a Voidwoken and ends her turn at the same time.
- Now it should be Ifan's turn. But no, as a new Voidwoken shows up, it gets to go immediately, and SKIPS Ifan's turn entirely. Unless it kills him outright of course.
- If I don't protect Ifan during Beast's turn, the Voidwoken will kill him when it shows up. If I do protect him, it *may* skip Ifan's turn entirely. This doesn't always happen, but it can.

In some of my retries, sometimes new enemies would show up randomly during my turn, and cut my turn short. I would have to reload and wait for them to show up and do their things FIRST, before properly taking my turn.

3) The weird lighting. After some time, the ENTIRETY of this area has blood-red lighting, making it really hard to make out anything. Is it intended or not?

I have no trouble WINNING this fight, even in my first time going through it, with all the nasty "surprises" and even making a bunch of mistakes too. Had to use 6 or 7 rez scrolls, but I did manage to beat it. THE THING IS, it FEELS incredibly cheap and is unnecessarily frustrating. Other players might say you could cheese it like this or like that and avoid all that problem. You're telling me I HAVE to cheese it just because this fight is not meant to be done LEGITLY without having to deal with all the frustration? If this "new enemies showing up taking turn instantly and finishing off party members" idea was seriously intended, your idea of fun is just twisted.

Sometimes I ask myself, WHAT THE HELL happened to the quality assurance of this game? How much time did you guys actually spend playing your own game after implementing all of your stuff?

the main problem I saw when I fought that battle was that you'll loose the rest of your turn the moment you kill the wawe and spawn more.
as a work around I can suggest to use the delay turn to get the last initiative with whole your party. then when the voidwoken will spawn you'll loose the turn of the killer, but the rest will go after the spawned.

also...normally? when you approach encounter you see paladins fighting voidwokens. there are at least 3 ways to proceed:
1) approach with party(or with one, especially in multiplayer where only 1st character will have a chance to roll init and others will go last)
2)jump on a high ground(maybe even with stealth). if you choose the lest side you'll have the benefit of fighting enemies one-by-one. cuz there is only 1 voidwoken per wave. if you choose the right side you'll be able to take a tower and you'll have a constant high ground. both ways are viable
3)you can wait til all paladins are dead. then you will not have to worry about accidentally angering them.
...oh, right... just remembered:
4)you can throw deathfog into them. there are 2 barrels near Lady Vengeance crash site


I though your 3rd problem is a result of lots of necrofire in the area... you can zoom out and it'll become much brighter.

That's what I did (or tried to do) when I first got to this part. I clicked for the party to move up to the rampart to the left, but only my main made it up there, because combat started at the same time she was climbing the wall. Given my experience playing this game on Tactician, I suppose I could have been smarter and had the entire team jump up from afar instead of climbing.

But here's the thing: you would have to separate all your party members first, then have them jump up one by one, while the Voidwoken murder the magisters. I guess it's my fault that I try to role-play a bit and rush to their rescue. I simply didn't expect that approaching this encounter casually on ground level could lead to such a huge disadvantage for the party. Disadvantage is one thing, but it's just that it feels unsatisfying, the way it happens.

AFAIK, it's possible for two suicide bomb Voidwokens to show up at the same time, one after the other. Probably it happens if you kill two or more Voidwokens in a turn. It happened to me a couple times. Once two of them went for Beast and did something like 4000 damage, almost killing him.

As for the "waiting for all magisters are dead" strat, I suppose it's just another fault of mine. I'm one of those players who care about such things. The point of the encounter is to save them. So I don't want any of them to die. I know my personal ways of doing things make things harder than necessary at times. My whole point is that, this encounter could've been implemented in a way that induces less frustration, while still keeping it challenging. Also the fact that, if you don't take full advantage of metaknowledge, the whole thing can be a rather bad experience.

Voidwoken can cast corpse explosion and cursed fireball. So keep away from corpses and teleport away corpses. Also use Evasive Aura and increase fire resistance.

Thanks but I don't need tips for this encounter. Corpse Explosion is one of the first things I know they can do cause that's one of the very first things they tend to do when you join combat if you approach on ground level, which is the most likely scenario. Why do you think they placed two corpses conveniently near the combat trigger point? There's only one in classic edition. One possible scenario is that the boss Voidwoken and one Vampire Voidwoken will use back-to-back Corpse Explosion on the two corpses, dealing a huge total amount of damage to your party. How do I know this? Because that's what happened in one of my retries. Apparently the Corpse Explosion in your face trick was cool enough they HAD to add a second one. But like I said, I didn't complain because I had trouble BEATING this.

when I did that encounter I made sure my mage had a first turn (cuz I always spend 1st turn buffing with adrenaline\flesh sacrifice for 4-5 ap...and cast something big on a last 1-2... mass CE in my case). it killed everyone and on the next turn he had 6 ap kill wave 2 and 3.

also iirc to prevent CE from enemies you can use bone armor\bloatet corpse or similar spell...

ps: now when I think about it that encounter was indeed very buggy. but at least not as buggy as the battle with paladins inside arks(where you can use phoenix totem(or invis) to end the combat and everyone will be oblivious to what you've done.

I finally managed to get through this encounter cleanly, without any party member falling or any paladin getting killed.

I got close enough so that I could see the NPC's, without being forced into combat. Guess what, because I was far away enough, the NPC's were actually invulnerable and could not be harmed by the Voidwoken. So I waited a bit until all the Voidwokens had taken their turn, then had only Beast go in exactly at the same time the paladins started to take their turn, and tank all the bullshit the boss Voidwoken promptly threw at him. The fight went much more smoothly. Sometimes you just have to resort to doing things like this if you're too much of a perfectionist.

I must say I'm still eager to see what other "surprises" the DE has in store when I get inside Arx proper.

there are other surprises outside of arx, i won't say more than that if you have yet to find them

i remember the turn skipping being an issue they fixed (sort of?) in other encounters too, including the final boss fight in the game. they should really fix it for this fight too