Has anyone done this? I haven't played the Backer Beta a lot so I am still raw to all these mechanics, but the other PotD fights up until the first Engwithan Titan along the critical path (lagufeth, delemgan encounter, boarding the enemy ship, everything else outside poko kahara) I've done already and they were nicely challenging and totally within normal possibility.

 

In previous BBs, when the Titan gets to a low health, a couple desert scarabs spawn. Surprising, but not too bad.

 

In the current BB, when the Titan gets to low health, not only do a couple desert scarbs spawn, but a crapload of desert blights, including at least three Greater Blights also spawn. The Titan fight is a slow and tedious slog in the best of cases (currently it can one shot any of my non-"Mercenary Fighter" PCs with the grab if I don't have an interrupt ready), so the extra scarabs are a challenging surprise. The army of blights that appear, however, well it's almost literally an instant wipe as soon as they appear. (The titan itself also appears to have gotten a bit harder with the latest BB.)

 

Wondering if anyone else has done this on PotD yet, or if there's something I'm missing with my BB noobness (like some quest that disables the desert blight spawns). Because currently it seems like a complete miss on difficulty balancing and it seems like an impossible encounter, unless I go grind some levels and get much better gear elsewhere somehow. (And this is still the same path I did in previous BBs just fine.)

 

Maybe I should just try to kite the titan far away from that spawn point...

Edited April 1, 20188 yr by thelee

 Yeah, I think the change was reeally excessive. I do get it's hard to make these big boss fights in these sorts of games challenging for a full party without making them health sponges or dropping a lot of adds, but spawning halfway through the fight with no warning is just not fun for me.

 

 My preference would be to give it more abilities, maybe with some way to regain its Concentration so it's not just getting stunlocked. For the record though, I'm of the opinion the Adra Dragon fight could have been improved by dropping most/all of the Adragans and giving the dragon some Cipher abilities or something. 

 

 Also this might be a symptom of me not being great at this game and running a fairly unoptimized party, but until the Blights spawned, I thought the tune-up to the Titan's difficulty was OK; not too health spongey but felt more like a significant challenge.

I've only been playing on Classic difficulty but agree that the developers have overcompensated on the difficulty of this fight. 

 

The buffs to the Engwithan Titan have definitely improved the feel of the fight but the spawning of three greater sand blights all dropping Sciroccos within seconds of spawning is a bit too much. Making them normal or lesser sand blights would be enough.

 

As it is the only way I've been able to win this fight in the latest beta is to draw the titan away from the entrance to the ruins. Round by the side entrance should be far enough but I prefer to go to the Xaurip camp. If you do this the blights (and presumably scarabs on PotD) spawn by the ruin's entrance and are not drawn into the fight, turning one very difficult battle into two moderate battles. 

Update, tried it again and succeeded on first try thanks to these two things:

 

a) kiting the titan _really_ far away from where he spawns. kiting him just a screen or two didn't help because as soon as the blights spawned they beelined right twoards me. across the map, however, and they stayed put.

b) TIL that unlike PoE1 you can actually run out of range of abilities that have begun targeting. So when I didn't have an interrupt ready I just ran whatever squishy was being targetted by his grab, since the titan drops engagement when he begins charging up with the grab. This wouldn't have helped with the blights but made the titan fight a bit more interactive and less "crap did I miss with my interrupt."

 

I mean, I still have two screens full of blights and greater blights to clear out (and a couple of probably-very-confused scarabs), but it's way better than just instawiping at the titan.

 

EDITed to add: once I accidentally figured out (B) (happened while I was kiting with the "Mercenary Rogue"), I actually really liked how the titan fight went down. Strategic interrupts (after working through his concentration x4), and then tactially moving targetted squishes out of ranges when I didn't have an interrupt ready. It felt like a really technical fight, kind of like classic World of Warcraft raid bosses, and I mean that in a good way (as opposed to like a classic BG2 fight where it's just the enemy and your best mage emptying out your spellbooks as quickly as you can while everyone else is potion-drinking-cannon-fodder). Too bad the sudden, unannounced swarm of blights kind of ruins that.

Edited April 1, 20188 yr by thelee

I've only been playing on Classic difficulty but agree that the developers have overcompensated on the difficulty of this fight. 

 

The buffs to the Engwithan Titan have definitely improved the feel of the fight but the spawning of three greater sand blights all dropping Sciroccos within seconds of spawning is a bit too much. Making them normal or lesser sand blights would be enough.

 

As it is the only way I've been able to win this fight in the latest beta is to draw the titan away from the entrance to the ruins. Round by the side entrance should be far enough but I prefer to go to the Xaurip camp. If you do this the blights (and presumably scarabs on PotD) spawn by the ruin's entrance and are not drawn into the fight, turning one very difficult battle into two moderate battles. 

 

The fact that swamp_slug also has discovered that the way to deal with the newly upped titan fight is to kite the titan far away from blight spawn point suggests to me that the blight spawning may not be appropriately balanced...

Sorry to multipost, but I seriously just have to rag on Obsidian here.

 

Trying to clean up the blights, and seriously: what were they thinking here. Sirococco is not an attack that is easily dodgable (it appears to have unlimited range and center on a specific character, isntead of an area), which means even if all I do is kite, I still almost instantly wipe when 3-4 Sirococcos go off around my fleeing party members. I'm probably eventually going to manage this, but I can't understand how this was suppossed to be a balanced fight when they were a part of the titan fight, given how insane this swarm of blights is on their own.

As stated by Josh, gotta take into account that we're really, like really-really undergeared.

But I do want a Dev video's proof that they actually beat this fight, as geared as we are.

 

The Titan in itself is fine, it's the dozen [8] of Sand Blights that are over the top.

lol, same. Beat the titan with ease, but then got killed by the sand blights. How embarrassing!

+1 here, the titan itself is ok. The sand blight adds are impossible if you don't kite the titan away from the ruins. That was with the premade party and a herald though. Maybe if I had 5 fancy multiclass and/or more optimized characters it would have been more easy, but really... if they give me this party to test out and then design something invincible to take on, I can't say that feels very good to play. 

same outcome on Classic, blights appear to be indefensible

 

shame, always had a thing for that classic VW Scirocco

Lol. Unending recovery time. You cannot do anything to save the situation. Absurd. End of the battle.

 

Blights > Titan.

Edited April 1, 20188 yr by theBalthazar

The blights are tougher than the damn titan itself. I pulled the titan away, then cleared out the blights later, and they gave me a much harder time. It doesn't help that when telling a party member to leave the sand AoE, my order would get canceled when the damage ticked and I'd have to keep repeating the move order...

It doesn't help that when telling a party member to leave the sand AoE, my order would get canceled when the damage ticked and I'd have to keep repeating the move order...

Yes! Thats infuriating. Interupts cancel move orders as well? It must be unintentional.

Yeah, titan is ok, greater sand blights are very strong just with their regular autoattacks, but their Scirocco ability is just insane. It's pretty much a mass retreat anytime you seem them casting it.

Yeah, titan is ok, greater sand blights are very strong just with their regular autoattacks, but their Scirocco ability is just insane. It's pretty much a mass retreat anytime you seem them casting it.

I think that's the idea. A few enemies in the beta have abilities which force you to move. Scirocco is devasteting if you stay in place.

 

I did beat it on veteran, by luring titan away. Titan was certainly the biggest danger, and mopping up Blights wasn't much of an issue, though three Greater Blights are a disaster.

 

If this time they will balance game properly, it is possible that veteran will be a challenging but fair difficulty. I didn't feel compelled to try PotD in the Deadfire as of yet, which is a good sign. It is possible that Blights are broken in PotD. On veteran Scirocco is dangerous, but you just need to move out of the way.

I wonder if it's intentionally unbalanced, as a beta-specific thing for the people on here who've been making crazy optimized builds to test those builds' limits. I've seen somewhere Josh saying that was one of the reasons they chose this area, with the titan, in the first place, but that it wasn't doing its job for various reasons. If so I think that'd be cool, but unless they explicitly say it we obviously can't assume it to be the case. And it certainly is too much for the default squad right now.

Except this is not a question of optimized or not here.

 

Blights can wipe out 90 % of my best teams in PoTD and also litterally my best team. You cannot do anything if you cannot move with any of 5.

 

It is more a challenge, it need a special thinking arround to win.

 

Seems a joke or an error. First april ? : p

Edited April 1, 20188 yr by theBalthazar

-On Veteran:

 

-The titan feels fine (could be a bit stronger / healthier / have more concentration, even).

-It feels like there's at least one too many Greater Sand Blights. I dominated the Titan and the Titan died to Sirocco really quickly.

+1

 

I'm on classic. The titan itself is not an issue. He spends the entire fight blinded and exposed and stripped of armor and deflection. But then four blights spawn and wipe my party within seconds.

 

On my second try, I did maneuver my characters away from the blights, but not nearly far enough, it seems. Guess I'll have to try this kiting plan.

Yeah, titan is ok, greater sand blights are very strong just with their regular autoattacks, but their Scirocco ability is just insane. It's pretty much a mass retreat anytime you seem them casting it.

 

Yeah, titan is ok, greater sand blights are very strong just with their regular autoattacks, but their Scirocco ability is just insane. It's pretty much a mass retreat anytime you seem them casting it.

I think that's the idea. A few enemies in the beta have abilities which force you to move. Scirocco is devasteting if you stay in place.

 

I did beat it on veteran, by luring titan away. Titan was certainly the biggest danger, and mopping up Blights wasn't much of an issue, though three Greater Blights are a disaster.

 

If this time they will balance game properly, it is possible that veteran will be a challenging but fair difficulty. I didn't feel compelled to try PotD in the Deadfire as of yet, which is a good sign. It is possible that Blights are broken in PotD. On veteran Scirocco is dangerous, but you just need to move out of the way.

The problem with Scirocco is that it doesn't give you much response time, unlike say Engwithan Saint's Seal of Pain and that close-range spiky/icy aura. The Seal of Pain gives you a really huge UI effect and a few seconds to run out of it, and the spiky/icy aura thing ticks periodically at close range so you can stay back. Scirocco, by contrast, will lock onto anything that's within the blight's range, and ticks immediately. One greater blight is bad, but when you have ~5 (as on PotD for this fight), even if all you're doing is fleeing, what can happen is

 

a) Scirocco lands, which instantly blinds and briefly stops movement.

b) urgently order my party to keep moving

c) Other Scirocco from other blights start landing, taking advantage of that brief interruption

d) essentially stunlocked and wipe within seconds

 

In the end what I did was send out a lone Mercenary Fighter to do all the kiting himself, stopping every once and a while to deliberately coax Sciroccos out of the blights. He was only able to do this because it was easier to order one PC through all that mess, and he had veteran's recovery and second wind for instant heals.

 

Again, given how many attempts it took me just to deal with the blights alone, how on earth did they think this was a balanced fight with the titans.

Edited April 1, 20188 yr by thelee

Adding my voice to the others here.

 

I was playing on Veteran and the fight was still very difficult indeed - I had to cheese it by drawing the Titan away.

 

Multiple Greater blights using scirocco makes for a fight that goes from "under control" to "everyone taking damage and essentially stun locked, unable to respond" in alarmingly rapid fashion.

 

Both that ability and the number of greater blights might be an issue. Ability is generally manageable, but only because other packs only include one greater blight at a time. Might also be an issue later in the game if there are packs with multiple greater blights.

We were tweaking that fight prior to the last Backer Beta.  It looks like the final changes did not make it into the last Backer Beta release unfortunately.

 

We've already fixed it internally.

Thanks for the very prompt and clear response Matt.

Huh, I thought Obs removed "kiting" as a "feature". Cool that its viable again.

My party of default mercs got destroyed by 2 or 3 greater desert blights on normal difficulty, lol.  They're way scarier than the Titan himself.