I'm playing on the PotD difficulty and my party is level-14.

And I just had a failed attempt of beating The Messenger, who is the first boss of Beast of Winter.

The fight is difficult for first timers, and it's not just me. A search on Google reveals that many players have the same thought. For example, see this Reddit thread.

As a player said in the Reddit thread, this fight basically forces you to learn the Interrupt and Concentration mechanics.

I'm fine with learning, but not in such a frustrating way.

You should have educated players the importance of Interrupt and Concentration against a certain enemies outside of combats, such as having a sage or a wizard teaching you and emphasizing the importance of these mechanics in a dialogue or something.

In my opinions, if a quest requires most players to learn the keys of its boss fight through party wipes, such a quest design is questionable.

In real life, there is no such thing as learning through deaths.

Edited Friday at 09:11 AM5 days by IanTheWizard

As I told you in another thread, potd is not the difficulty if you don't know concentration and interrupt. If your pride doesn't allow you to learn at a lower difficulty, maybe it can also help with constant complaining?

The fact that concentration/interrupt being a big deal for you in this fight also means your party isn't optimized enough. You're not ready for potd in every sense, that's it.

Lastly, do you expect to beat everything in every game in one go or they are forcing you to learn by death? Even in "modern" games that treat the players like 3 yos, a boss can require a specific technique yet doesn't pause + highlight "PRESS THIS BUTTON" every time. How do you play games at all? I'm being blunt but filling a mostly dead forums with complaints that are what I avoided calling last time, skill issues, won't help anyone. If you have to do it, reddit is the place.

@yorname Thanks for your input. My purpose was not to complain, but to inform the developers what I regard as a flaw in their quest design. In the future, I'll try to make such new threads of mine look more like insightful feedbacks rather than unhappy complains.

But I can hardly agree that not being familiar with Concentration/Interrupt means not being ready for PotD. In the Normal difficulty, I guess players either win the fight without much hassle or lose the fight just like in PotD, and either case does not help players learn the mechanics in advance. As I described in my original post, the importance of the mechanics should have been communicated to players through in-game dialogues (or any other reasonable form of in-game education) rather than forcing players to learn through losing the fight.

Edited Sunday at 04:11 AM3 days by IanTheWizard

@IanTheWizard The game is pretty much dead, even if it gets updates like poe, structure is not going to change. Posting in stories won't change that.

Not every game does tutorial the same way. I didn't pay attention, but I think there's tutorial popup about most mechanics. IMO teaching players in dialogues or creating a scene for every game mechanic breaks immersion, and is exactly the kind of handholding in modern games that makes players feel they're treated like idiots.

From my experience deadfire is far from a punishing game even at potd. You open a new 4X strategy game and play at the hardest difficulty, you'll get steamrolled. Mainstream rpgs now usually have a difficulty for new game+ that if you go in blindly, you get punished at every step. And soulslikes don't even need a difficulty setting to torture a large number of players. I honestly don't know how party wipes due to not knowing mechanics in deadfire potd is bad design and something need fixed. Also don't ignore the part I said your party is simply not good enough if interrupt feels so important in this fight. The concentration/interrupt mechanics is not the focus of the fight and not the reason you feel it's hard.

So you mean normal is not punishing that you don't bother learning, but potd is also bad because it actually punishes you? There are 2 more difficulties in between. I'm also a player that always starts a new game at the hardest difficulty so I know the mindset, you need to accept the fact that you are not playing the intended difficulty as first playthrough and you asked for every moment of frustration. Repeating "it's not me because others also complained about it" is not going to change it. Of course there can be valid criticism but I've yet to see them, tbh you don't know the game enough to say design is good or bad, and saying it teaches poorly is simply not true. It's like dying to the first common soldier in Sekiro and saying there should be a dialogue to tell me to parry.

I don't think I can change the way you play, but since others don't bother to reply, please just don't make more threads in stories. This is not the place. And this is not helping the game.

Edited Sunday at 12:49 PM2 days by yorname

== Update ==

Today, when searching for a solution, I was lucky to find a strategy suggested by @Boeroer .

After I followed his instructions, the fight became so easy!

All my party members are level-16 wizards. After reducing the Messenger's Fortitude defense and casting Combusting Wounds, I let three of my party members cast Wall of Flame and Ray of Fire, and an Evoker casted Ray of Fire and Minor Missiles. And then the Messenger's HP dropped so fast that it died in like 10 seconds!!! 10 seconds!!! 😆😆😆

Kudos to Boeroer for saving my day!!!

P.S. Somehow, I could not reply to that thread. Hence the update here.

Edited Monday at 02:48 PM1 day by IanTheWizard