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Please fix the garbage dragon fights


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For those saying 'you should need to reload once in a while': I disagree entirely.  When the game has an ironman option that forces the player to prepare and adjust to fights when things go bad, throwing a bull**** encounter at him that's nearly impossible is really bad design.

 

The problem isn't that the dragon fights are hard, the problem is where the difficulty comes from.  They aren't hard because they force you to rethink tactics, they're hard because the difference between wiping and not wiping more often than not is based on a d100 roll that influences if and how long the dragon is paralyzed, petrified, or otherwise CC'd.  They're hard because the dragons do 150ish damage with their main attack, but if they randomly decide to do a breath attack, tail lash, or the wing attacks then they do 200ish to the entirely party.  They're hard because their AOE attacks seem to be targeted, meaning when you see the dragon using an AOE attack even teleporting out of range or a supposed arc of fire doesn't work.

 

There are no advanced tactics to beating them, just dumb cheese that breaks the game.

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For those saying 'you should need to reload once in a while': I disagree entirely.  When the game has an ironman option that forces the player to prepare and adjust to fights when things go bad, throwing a bull**** encounter at him that's nearly impossible is really bad design.

 

The problem isn't that the dragon fights are hard, the problem is where the difficulty comes from.  They aren't hard because they force you to rethink tactics, they're hard because the difference between wiping and not wiping more often than not is based on a d100 roll that influences if and how long the dragon is paralyzed, petrified, or otherwise CC'd.  They're hard because the dragons do 150ish damage with their main attack, but if they randomly decide to do a breath attack, tail lash, or the wing attacks then they do 200ish to the entirely party.  They're hard because their AOE attacks seem to be targeted, meaning when you see the dragon using an AOE attack even teleporting out of range or a supposed arc of fire doesn't work.

 

There are no advanced tactics to beating them, just dumb cheese that breaks the game.

 

The Ardra Dragon fight is certainly not thrown at the player.  The player has twelve levels of warning.  Some of those levels include very nasty fights if you're under-levelled (ogre druids, drake, fampyrs).  And Iron Man mode is entirely optional.  And even in ironman mode you can skip the fight either by not going there, or by using the dragon fighter option.  So it's hardly thrown at you.

 

Also, for the Ardra dragon, it relied on positioning much more than dice rolls.  Turns out that having your entire party stand in front of a dragon was a bad idea.  Dominate the dragon or the adragans, suddenly your enemies are tanking for you.  Boost accuracy with spells.  I'll admit that the numbers did see a huge jump, and the difficulty curve had a vertical climb when you got to the Ardra dragon.  But I don't think that's the same thing as the whole encounter being bull****.

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The issue i have with poe is that on order to beat them you need to have very good gear and once you beat them for some loot there is really nothing worthy after that. In BG the bosses were hard, required some meta knowledge and some levels (GL beating Kagnaxx the first time around without prior knowledge in BG2 or DGangsta in ToB) but they were not brokenly OP (wepl.maybe DG was). Here not only.they have huge AoEs, but they also have a lot of adds and you cannot prebuff.and you have no items that grant you immunitiee or spells granting immunities... buffing is cool but even a graze charm or petrification can destroy your plan

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The problem with the Adra Dragon is that you have to spam paralize and maelstrom scrolls the entire fight since there's just no way you can really go toe to toe with it like you could in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The Alpine Dragon isn't that hard, it's just the annoying minions you have to dispatch first.

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I don't know, I always felt the dragons in BG were too easy - I insta-gibbed one with disintegrate in one fight, that felt very anti-climatic. Here I really fear them, so much that I actually didn't fight the adra dragon the first time. That feels a little more "realistic" than my complete disregard for them in BG, where they were basically just a little tougher fights with great loot. I even had more problems with the Drow than the silver dragon..

 

Suppose they are pretty tough fight to balance. They have to be epic hard, but having to cheese also ruins the experience.

Fortune favors the bald.

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My only experience with Adra dragon was little after the game first came out so apologies if things changed. Fight basically sucked on PotD. The only way to beat it was cheesing it by petrifying it. that just sucks ass. It wasn't fun or challenging, it was retardedly overpowered, at least his breath was which usually killed everyone except for Eder.

 

No problems with the other dragons. Still for a none experienced guy, fighting the dragons in Baldur's Gate 2 and killing them for the first time was much more fun and felt much better than fighting them in PoE.

 

Getting great loots after a hard fight was the best moment in BG2, getting a scale to upgrade a generic item not so much.  ~opinion and all that.

Edited by iLurk
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The problem with the Adra Dragon is that you have to spam paralize and maelstrom scrolls the entire fight since there's just no way you can really go toe to toe with it like you could in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The Alpine Dragon isn't that hard, it's just the annoying minions you have to dispatch first.

 

Again, I beat the dragon (hard or normal, don't remember which), without using scrolls or paralyze.  It's a tough fight, but I gave everyone beast-slaying weapons, had a max party, consistently tanked it so that my party was attacking the side, saved Pallegina's rez spell for Durance alone, dominated the adds so the dragon killed them first, ate a lot of food, and used a lot of healing potions.  I can't say anything about potd, but besides the opening breath salvo (watching your party wipe sucks), he can just be straightup ground to death in a slugfest.  I didn't even get scalebreaker (because I wasn't using metaknowledge).

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The problem with the Adra Dragon is that you have to spam paralize and maelstrom scrolls the entire fight since there's just no way you can really go toe to toe with it like you could in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The Alpine Dragon isn't that hard, it's just the annoying minions you have to dispatch first.

 

Again, I beat the dragon (hard or normal, don't remember which), without using scrolls or paralyze.  It's a tough fight, but I gave everyone beast-slaying weapons, had a max party, consistently tanked it so that my party was attacking the side, saved Pallegina's rez spell for Durance alone, dominated the adds so the dragon killed them first, ate a lot of food, and used a lot of healing potions.  I can't say anything about potd, but besides the opening breath salvo (watching your party wipe sucks), he can just be straightup ground to death in a slugfest.  I didn't even get scalebreaker (because I wasn't using metaknowledge).

 

 

Yeah, sure. You can kite the hell out of him but it seems like such a massive chore. Most players will just go for the scrolls.

I don't know, I always felt the dragons in BG were too easy - I insta-gibbed one with disintegrate in one fight, that felt very anti-climatic. Here I really fear them, so much that I actually didn't fight the adra dragon the first time. That feels a little more "realistic" than my complete disregard for them in BG, where they were basically just a little tougher fights with great loot. I even had more problems with the Drow than the silver dragon..

 

Suppose they are pretty tough fight to balance. They have to be epic hard, but having to cheese also ruins the experience.

Eh, maybe if you're a D&D veteran or something. When I played BG for the first time and wound up facing Firkraag at level 9-10 I **** my pants. Took me an ungodly amount of time to kill that bastard.

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Wow, what a lot of raging. Relax OP.

 

Hmmm, honestly I'm struggling with both dragons a little on hard. It's all those extra creeps/spell-casters that come with the dragons...
 

I do kind of think a lot of the tougher fights in this game boil down to "does my paralyze/petrify spell hit?" If yes, easy-peasy, if no... prepare for your team to get paralyzed/petrified/charmed...

But then I don't claim to be particularly good. 

I do hope that in POE2 there are some strategies that don't completely rely on status effects...

 

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Lot of the late game fights are annoying in general especially with the new AI that ignores melee engagement and swarms like on Paranas on that one odd party member wearing armor that is not plate.  And the abundance use of crowd control effects that always tend to hit. Buffing spells in a game where buffs suck are even worse to use now. So paladin and majority of the clerics spells are useless. If you don't toss out offensive cc spells every encounter you die.

In my experience, in Path of the Damned at least, some fights are incredibly hard if you don't buff your accuracy and defenses.

 

Priests are great. They have some of the best spells in the game (though not more than other casters).  Here are some of them:

  1. Crowns for the Faithful
  2. Shields for the Faithful
  3. Devotions of the Faithful
  4. Salvation of Time
  5. Champion's Boon
  6. Prayer against X

I think the facts you don't use buffs and that you find crowd control effects to always hit are somehow related.

 

Paladins are... well, they have some pretty good buffs, actually. They're one of the better warrior classes, in my opinion. Ultimately, they just get overshadowed by the casters, though. But that definitely includes Priests.

 

It's true that in the harder difficulties you have to use crowd control. You also have to use movement, buffs (at least in my experience), and damaging attacks. Though crowd control is by far the flashiest thing you do, it's not very useful without a healthy dose of damage, and you can't use it if you're dead.

 

Priests also have some amazing offensive spells :)

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We need some buff spells like "chaotic commands" and "freedom of movement" that allow consistent immunity to enemy CC.

No we don't. That would just make it mandatory and totally kill the purpose for enemies to have these in the first place.

 

And I'm saying this as someone who fought

Fampyr illusionists + darguls @5th lvl in White March (that left map) who constantly paralyzed + dominated. Fight was challenging but it was won (POTD) after some adjusting.

 

Edited by Killyox
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We need some buff spells like "chaotic commands" and "freedom of movement" that allow consistent immunity to enemy CC.

No we don't. That would just make it mandatory and totally kill the purpose for enemies to have these in the first place.

 

And I'm saying this as someone who fought

Fampyr illusionists + darguls @5th lvl in White March (that left map) who constantly paralyzed + dominated. Fight was challenging but it was won (POTD) after some adjusting.

 

 

 

SO how many times you had to reload and did it not come to you that the time you won, you were lucky on some RNG?

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Honestly, I haven't been able to beat either the Adra or Alpine dragon yet. I beat the Sky dragon first attempt but I guess she's the easiest one. I've tried all sorts of tactics, and it makes me smile now when people say things like 'you just need to CC the minions first'. Sometimes I'm dead before Durance & Aloth get their first spells off!  

 

The first time I walked into the Alpine dragon I thought, well, I'll give it a try, it can't be that much harder that the Sky dragon can it? About 1s in, surrounded by bloody minions the dragon does some sort of breath attack the one shots my party. F it, I thought. Reload, my party took the option to leave and got the hell out of there! Haven't been back since. God damned dragons!   

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Your fun is wrong.

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Both Adra and Sky dragon fights are quite dull once you realize that  they are simply overbuffed from the point of DPS and the proper strategy would be to avoid getting any damage from them at all rather than trying to resist it . So all you need to beat them are paralyzation scrolls. You just need 10 paralyzation scrolls or so to keep dragon paralized all the time so that it cannot deal any  damage to your party  whille your wizards/druids  cast various pure damage spells on dragon and various area attack spells on other mobs. This way I killed both adra and sky dragon at hard level without any troubles.

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Noob question but still: those Dragons can't resist scrolls?

Because when I tried to cast cc spells by mages it worked maybe on third or fifth attempt when most of my group was already on the floor biting the dust...

 it seems to be accuracy issue. Try first to buff accuracy of the character which will use these scrolls.

Edited by Rusknight
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The problem with the Adra Dragon is that you have to spam paralize and maelstrom scrolls the entire fight since there's just no way you can really go toe to toe with it like you could in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The Alpine Dragon isn't that hard, it's just the annoying minions you have to dispatch first.

 

Again, I beat the dragon (hard or normal, don't remember which), without using scrolls or paralyze.  It's a tough fight, but I gave everyone beast-slaying weapons, had a max party, consistently tanked it so that my party was attacking the side, saved Pallegina's rez spell for Durance alone, dominated the adds so the dragon killed them first, ate a lot of food, and used a lot of healing potions.  I can't say anything about potd, but besides the opening breath salvo (watching your party wipe sucks), he can just be straightup ground to death in a slugfest.  I didn't even get scalebreaker (because I wasn't using metaknowledge).

 

 

Yeah, sure. You can kite the hell out of him but it seems like such a massive chore. Most players will just go for the scrolls.

 

 

It's not kiting, it's literally moving the fighter up first and so that he turns 90 degrees.  Then you just watch your fighters health, drink your potions, buff accuracy and grind away.

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Never have I fought such uninspired and ****ty fights in my entire life. I've beaten both Adra and White March dragon, but they ****ing suck. It's literally just getting lucky rolls: the fight. If not, re-roll and win. Please make something with a little more substance. 

Not having read the thread, my biggest issue with the Adra Dragon and the Sky Dragon was how little character/personality development they had. I think I've said before that one of my absolute favourite dragon encounters in videogames is Grigori from Dragon's Dogma, and in large part that's due to his well developed character and ****ing bad ass lines. Pillars of Eternity dragons are just one more monster that barely says anything relevant and are just there for the sake of having a tough fight in the game.

I wish they'd write some sort of bad ass dragon for Pillars of Eternity II that wasn't a braindead retard that just wanted to destroy stuff because that's his nature (not saying Adra and Sky are these types of dragons, but ultimately they come off as extremely dull enemies and feel like wasted opportunities). Doesn't even need to be an enemy.

I hate Unity.

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Really are poorly designed fights, and the game is just not designed well for trying to position something so a cleave doesn't hit the team. Plenty of times had to reload because the dragon wanted move funky, and cleaved the team dead. Wouldn't bother me so much if it was what the dragon wanted to do, but it was just the engine not handling the mechanic well.

 

I can't say I've ever beat the fight non-cheese style. I guess closest I got was in Chanter+5x Ranger play through, keeping moon well on the pets to keep them up between breathes, and using a revive scroll on them after every breath, as unlike a PC, they have infinite health. But that's really just abusing a different kind of scroll, which are themselves pretty cheezy.

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Yeah, went through this already in the LotER forum. Chris Taylor from ZRG was long-suffering and kind with mister potty-mouth. I can't see anything he says for some good reason. 

 

You really don't need to act like I abused him, I just didn't like the stupid dice or the meme pig. Soooo SORRY that I wanted the chanter cards sooner and the \kickstarter slowed enough that it looked like it wasn't gonna happen. I've been super nice to them on KS and other stuff. 

 

Also if cursing upsets you that much then trigger warning, one of the dozens says the f word at the end of the second act

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