Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Help/Tips/Tricks Advice for playing HARD difficulty?

Im playing Hard mode right now, and Skeletal guardians/conjurers have 750 HP and do 120+ damage. Orc Wardrummers have 1500 HP and up to 250 damage.
I can kill orcs, boars, bees, snakes in melee combat, but its quite painful (what I expect at level 7), but trolls, corpses and steel warriors (archer in Abby) do more than 70 damage per hit against my level 7 character with 100 Vitality. I still have yet to clear the last battle in the Catacombs because Im afraid of multiple 750+ vitality skeletal lords that can kill me in 1 hit. I might be level 9 by then, but thats only 30 more Vitality or so if I dont find several +30 Vit items first.

I feel the standard monsters are appropriately challenging, but its the tougher versions of these that may require Death Scorpians, or archery for 4 minutes running around, unless I can figure something else out <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" /> I really dont want to resort to scorpians. Any Advice? Has anyone here gone far in HARD mode with a melee character?

IS HARD DIFFICULTY BUGGY?

I got the ID Monster skill, so I now see that normal variety monsters have standard vitality and damage expected in "normal difficulty". The only change I see in "hard" mode is that certain mini-bosses, Heavy Orc, Orc Wardrummer, Skeletal conjurer, etc, all have TEN TIMES the normal Vitality and their damage power increase at least five times if not more...

This is not what I call a good challenge, if the normal monsters are just as easy to kill as ever, but the occasional baddie is nearly impossibly difficult, and impossible to fight toe-to-toe.

Is anyone finding HARD mode different than this? I wonder if my save games are glitched. I started this NEW "hard" game after I patched to 1.33.

I think this difficulty is done in order to check YOUR wits and not your PC's abilities. Obviously the direct route is inappropriate in such cases. The challenge is to manage to lure those minibosses into various kinds of traps and hit them while they cannot hit you. Try using a bow for this task. You can create barriers with barrels or boulders in confined rooms so they cannot reach you, you can freeze them, you can throw steelscorpions and NOT shoot them so they just try to destroy those almost indestructible steelscorpions (steelscorpions are SO very powerful, they are actually essential. Throw 10-15 of them in a cave, let them wander a bit, go make coffee or eat something and then voila! the cave is free of almost every monster, however powerful, with the XP in your pocket!)

And where is the fun of it? I can drink coffee whether I play DD or not. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

Ya i started a mage after teh patch.. I forgot to save at the 2nd lvl of catabombs and went up the stars, and boom, zombie killed me with one hit hehe <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

No fun in using traps <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

Hrm, well I'm turning it back to normal than if that's all it does. That's not my idea of fun (taking advantage of the system, with freeze scorpions etc.)