Hayte

Adra Dragon is immune to petrify (but not paralysis). Alpine Dragon is immune to paralysis (but not petrify). The boss/dragon fights are more like puzzles where you have to find a weakness in its immunities and then target the appropriate defence. One method of taking out the Alpine Dragon is what I described above - buff accuracy to hit, target fortitude and petrify lock. One method of taking out Adra Dragon is to buff accuracy to hit, target will and paralyze lock. The difficulty with these two dragons is more about doing that with all the support adds harassing you. You could buff accuracy and spam scrolls of confusion since confused on the adds will make the dragon kill them for you. Could also work for tankless groups when you need to keep it busy somehow. Adra Dragon is probably easier than Alpine because it is much easier to separate the dragon from the adds. You just stick your party to the left wall of the pit. The adds will almost always arrive well before the dragon because they walk alot faster. In any event, the adra dragon gets stuck on the stairs where the pit becomes narrow. Your party will be conveniently out of breath attack range. A more interesting boss fight would probably be immune to petrify and paralysis as well as the other big disables such as stun. So to control the boss you would need to slow its movement speed and kite your party around the boss arena. Something like that.

The dragon has deathblows meaning that if you have 2 or more status effects on you, you will get mega owned. Remember that Dragons have a terrify aura so that is one status effect automatically. In terms of companions, you want these guys: Eder, Aloth, Hiravias and Durance. Move Eder solo to the left side of the cave and give him a ring of suppress affliction. If you don't have one, you have to manually cleanse him. Eder should have potion of major recovery, potion of major endurance, potion of llengrath's displaced images and scroll of defence. You get the idea - its to make Eder's deflection/defenses as high as possible and have some heal buttons in case he eats an unlucky crit. Position the rest of the party somewhere in the middle and south of the cave, where the bones are and close to where the spirits will spawn. When you go hostile with the dragon the first few actions will involve cleansing everyone of negative status effects. So use your liberating exhortations, your prayers against fear, suppress afflictions etc. This is good for two reasons - you won't lose a tonne of accuracy from being terrified and Eder is less likely to get owned by deathblows. Eder should throw up a potion of displaced images immediately, followed by a scroll of defense. The rest of your party should spend their first few actions buffing accuracy so you can reliably hit the dragon with your debuffs. The main buffs to get up are Crowns for the Faithful + Devotions for the Faithful, Champion's Boon (on your best damage dealer) and Citzel's Martial Power on your Wizard. You want to use any aoe buffs that give you +perception and lots of accuracy. When your whole party has like 120+ accuracy, Hiravias should use Returning Storm. This is not for the dragon (which is immune to stun I think). It is to mass stun all the spirits that spawn on your party when you start attacking the dragon. Because you have decent accuracy, you can now hit the dragon with stuff that will reduce its defenses. The main one you want to reduce is fortitude so drop Venombloom and Insect Plague on it to make it sickened and weakened. why fortitude? Because the dragon is immune to most disables like paralysis, stun and prone but it is not immune to petrification. Gaze of Adragan is a petrify spell opposed by fortitude. Hover over the dragon to check if sickened and weakened are applied. If they are, its time to cast Gaze of Adragan. When petrified hits, it will absolutely destroy the dragon's deflection and reflex so you can get easy melee/ranged crits and any spell that targets reflex will be pretty much guaranteed to hit. You need to quickly dump all your damage, so use your big aoes and per encounter/per rest abilities like Scale Breaker and recast Gaze of Adragan. Remember to re-suppress afflictions if they pop back up on your party. Once you land the petrify, the dragon will die very quickly. Maybe 10 to 20 seconds tops with a level 14 party. You can mostly ignore the spirit adds because they will be constantly stunned by Returning Storm. You can use a melee damage dealer or single target ranged damager dealer to clean up some of the blights as your party is buffing but once Hiravias casts Returning Storm, you can pretty much just ignore the adds and focus on the dragon.

I found this fight a little annoying, mainly because of the death knights that take forever to kill. If you are really struggling, you can put boots of speed on Eder (or whatever tank you got) and place the rest of your party near to the switch that opens the cave. Run Eder in to trigger the dialogue sequence and run straight back out to rejoin your party. Everything except the 2x void seers guarding the door will leash and walk back to Concelhaut's study. Kill the void slayers and quicksave so you don't have to do the dialogue again. Now just run Eder back in and out. The mobs will follow and leash. You hit them with ranged attacks and kill them 2 or 3 at a time. When Concelhaut is alone, run Eder in with scrolls of defence, potions of displaced images and major recovery on hand. Use the time to buff your party with accuracy/might buffs like Crowns of the Faithful and Devotions of the Faithful etc and when you are ready, move your party up and burn him down.

Is it worth going bows over blunderbuss for 80% of the game though? I thought durgan refined Rain of Godagh Fields was definitely better than Stormcaller on a Cipher...at level 13-14. Theres an Alpine Dragon sitting on Sabra Marie so if you know how to cheese abuse that fight at low level, you could probably get it early but due to the army of adds, lots of people have trouble with this fight at level 12+. Both Rain and Lenas Er can only be acquired in act 3 and the game is literally over by that point. If playing with a 6 man party you will be running around with infinite prone/blind spamming engines of destruction by mid Act 3. Maybe the bow option works best as a high level respec on a completionist run where you have squeezed as much juice from Blunderbuss as humanly possible and the only place left to make dps bigger is high speed bow strats. I think gauntlets of swift aim don't even appear in random loot containers until act 3. I haven't tried getting drunk on potions of deleterious alacrity for the entire game and I'm not sure how feisible that is.