Breath of Winter Fight Design Difficulty POTD

[SilverSaint]

Is it me or are some of these fights simply outrageously difficult just from the design standpoint, let alone the enemies?  So far numerous fights have had insane groups of enemies that swarm your backlines, teleporting in some cases, and just decimate your casters/ranged.  Let alone I am level 18 (so overleveled though with level up scaling) and have basically the best gear, only my party makeup (the surviving characters from a pure bad stuff occurred run) is a problem.

For example the Inquisitor Trial fights have literally 18 enemies, of which 4 are spell casters, a few are ciphers, and the rest are monks.  You spawn in and the enemies engage you on their terms from two sides and swarm (all dex immune) you with monks that just try and stun your characters, meanwhile the ciphers are charming your characters, the arcanists are throwing insane fire AoE damage at your characters that can't move since they are surrounded, the inquisitors are debuffing, summoning, and causing AoE damage.  Since you are engaging on their terms you have no positioning advantage and the fight is literally as chaotic as possible with almost no ability to target specific enemies.  Its almost seemingly luck based if the enemies target your healer down or get off a charm or stun on any character early the fight is instantly over.  I have completed 2 of the 3 of these Trial fights so far and I have come to the conclusion its just pure luck for me to win.

Meanwhile if you could strategically position advantage in anyway (for these fights specifically its literally impossible) I could keep the ciphers off my lower will party members or funnel the literal army of enemies so they can only attack my frontline and summons.

Am I the only way experiencing this?

Edited August 12, 2018 by SilverSaint

[1TTFFSSE]

It is good that in PotD there are finally some technically challenging fight.

 

Things you can do:

 

-use items like invisibility potions to "reset" an encounter and start it on your own terms

-use figurine summons on particularly challenging fights to get more meatshields up

-since you know the enemy ai will go for your squishies buff them immediately at the start of a fight with robust (paladin greater lay on hands/ ciphers pain block, druids nature's vigor)

-set up defenses up immediately with moonwell under everyone, circle of greater protection, woodskin etc

[Porcelyn]

Using a tank to pull one or two around a corner has been working for me along with a healer and back up healer both with multiple scrolls.

[SilverSaint]

Using a tank to pull one or two around a corner has been working for me along with a healer and back up healer both with multiple scrolls.

 

I am going to assume you have yet to do any of the fights I specifically referred to as there is no pulling, corners etc.  Its just you and them in a round arena you teleport into with them starting agro'd.

[Clawdius_Talonious]

I never fight the trials in Endless Queries, those fights are optional and can easily be avoided. Fighting gives you motes of anger or whatever anyway, so fighting the trials isn't the optimal way to deal with those encounters. The only fights you have to do in Endless Queries are the fights on the tower map (although you can sneak by the three minotaur dudes at the northern/upper end of the map pretty easily).

 

Optional content like that is probably not a super high priority for balance, and since these fights don't even have a skill requirement or anything, they're really very optional if you're willing to figure out what to say to avoid the fights. Some people probably want harder encounters, and compared to High Abbot Kaoto or whatever from WM2 these monk enemies aren't that big a deal (they at least don't split off copies of themselves, and the Abbot usually managed to create 4 copies of himself before I could take him down.) I know it's not ideal, but there are still probably fairly large balance changes to be made that would render fine tuning of encounters like this a waste of time since fine tuning will still be required after any larger balance passes.