I realy try to love this game i realy do but combat is aggravating because of bugs and difficulty spikes. Played Poe and Poe 2 on hardest difficulties and finished them without a problem because there was always a way to prepare to hard battles. In this game thou its just so badly executed. I mean the game is designed around bottlenecked situations where you are introduced to a certain premade scenarios that favors certain build types and if you are not using them than you will struggle a lot or even fail and find it impossible to finish. This means that you are forced to memorize all encounters so you know what to pick and when so you can deal with that scenarios ( kills freedom a bit because there are a lot of wrong choices that you can make, on paper all great but at that certain scenario it sucks). What that means its YOU cant go on high difficulty levels 1st playtrough because if you didnt memorized enemy types and counters you will hit a wall and be forced to change difficulty or reroll your hero. Have a fight with gargoyles in the cave and this fight is so aggravating to play it. No matter what i do all fight the aggro is only on my main character. Tried everything. Buffing him to the point that i cant buff him anymore( so he can survive )or taking all the gear from him so he dosent get aggro. Tried going invisible which is my main grievance( dosent work at all). ALL gargoyles ALWAYS go for my main character even if he is invissible and no matter what his position is. They always ignore all others and go straight for my main and cast smite on him while he is invissible and kill him and i need to load game. CC dosent work even if i buff my casters to 22 int, char or wis (including other buffs )they still miss (web, grease, sink hole etc.). Why when i go invis they ingore it and go straight for my hero which is realy bad game design because there is no counter if you didnt know what to expect at this point and build accordingly. If it was possible to grind levels at least but they make choke points so you cant do nothing realy but lower difficulty or reroll. You can turn on respec but this is stiring purist inside and when hard dosent have it in settings i feel like im cheating when i turn it on.

there are some fights, which get a lil bit "must kill mainchar" . imo even on normal some encounters are so overbuffed in stats, its disgusting. like literalls every "creep" has con 30, dex 30 and strength 50. or even like 50 lvl's.

but. i realised, those extreme stats are actually modified by difficulty... i was like wtf did they balance this ♥♥♥♥ of ? holy crap.

I turned it down to "normal rules" with enemy difficulty reduced to "-40" - yeah... no more does the critter have 300 hp and +20 natural armor. cool.

it actually feels now like a normal neverwinter nights run im used to. its not unfair, you don't have to fear "death" everywhere. but the encounters that are supposed to be hard, are hard.

Originally posted by Bonusgold:

there are some fights, which get a lil bit "must kill mainchar" . imo even on normal some encounters are so overbuffed in stats, its disgusting. like literalls every "creep" has con 30, dex 30 and strength 50. or even like 50 lvl's.

but. i realised, those extreme stats are actually modified by difficulty... i was like wtf did they balance this ♥♥♥♥ of ? holy crap.

I turned it down to "normal rules" with enemy difficulty reduced to "-40" - yeah... no more does the critter have 300 hp and +20 natural armor. cool.

it actually feels now like a normal neverwinter nights run im used to. its not unfair, you don't have to fear "death" everywhere. but the encounters that are supposed to be hard, are hard.

My problem is when you make set of rules that enemies can ignore and you dont. Tell me how they can focus my invisible main and ignore that he is invisible from across the map and go kill him without any abbility to see invis. If thats not bugged or badly designed than i dont know what is.

Guy who isn’t very good at the game plays on hardest difficulty and complains it’s too hard … ok

Overall, most battles aren't as bad as the gargoyle cave fight. I remember being frustrated over that one for the exact same reason 0P mentions. But I was playing on core difficulty and I managed to finish it without changing that. Took a few tries though.
I can stand having to replay battles if the difficulty arises from fair challenges, and most of the time in this game, that is the case. It's not fair to label the whole game as badly designed for the relatively few cases where this happens.

The worst fights for me are the ones with NPC's involved (like the gargoyle cave fight). The AI is ridiulously dumb sometimes. NPCs are going in a straight line to their preferred enemy even if it's on the other side of the battlefield and will casually walk through harmful area effects and especially threatened spaces, triggering attacks of opportunity like nobody's business.
That's ridiculous. I mean; the game does just fine warning you when you try to plot a move action for each place you will trigger an AoO. That means, programmatically, the hard work of detecting it for an NPC is basically done.
It's harder to manage an AI to realise whether or not it is worth it, I'll give it that, but I don't think triggering an AoO is even a factor in AI decision making, where that wouldn't require more than a single if-clause.
As a programmer, I find this very very sloppy, and not something I would allow myself to get away with as being finished.

Originally posted by RiidiKarly Rae Marxsen:

Guy who isn’t very good at the game plays on hardest difficulty and complains it’s too hard … ok

Memorising encounters and restarting game and building accordingly isnt hard just time consuming and bottlenecked to certain builds and playstyles for certain ecounters. That dosent change that this game is realy badly designed for higher difficulty levels and also bugged as hell.

un·fair
/ˌənˈfer/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
adjective: unfair; comparative adjective: unfairer; superlative adjective: unfairest

not based on or behaving according to the principles of equality and justice.
"at times like these the legal system appears inhumane and unfair"
unkind, inconsiderate, or unreasonable.
"you're unfair to criticize like that when she's never done you any harm"
not following the rules of a game or sport.

What you are describing is exactly what UNFAIR is meant to be. UNFAIR....

They didn't name it "Extreme" or "Excessively Hard" difficulty they named it UNFAIR.

By definition UNFAIR is UNFAIR and for all intents and purposes you shouldn't be able to beat UNFAIR at all.

If they had named the hardest difficulty "You can't beat the game" would you still be complaining about how hard it is?

Originally posted by Cry Baby Kyle:

un·fair
/ˌənˈfer/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
adjective: unfair; comparative adjective: unfairer; superlative adjective: unfairest

not based on or behaving according to the principles of equality and justice.
"at times like these the legal system appears inhumane and unfair"
unkind, inconsiderate, or unreasonable.
"you're unfair to criticize like that when she's never done you any harm"
not following the rules of a game or sport.

What you are describing is exactly what UNFAIR is meant to be. UNFAIR....

They didn't name it "Extreme" or "Excessively Hard" difficulty they named it UNFAIR.

By definition UNFAIR is UNFAIR and for all intents and purposes you shouldn't be able to beat UNFAIR at all.

If they had named the hardest difficulty "You can't beat the game" would you still be complaining about how hard it is?

Thou i play on hard. Read what i wrote. I tried 1 char on unfair and than changed it to hard which i wrote earlier so this wall of text is kinda miss. This playtrough is 100% on hard

Originally posted by burner19:

Originally posted by gamers.txt:

Sorry, that was directed at the OP, who I suspect is playing too hard a difficulty for their lack of game knowledge and might benefit from learning the system on a easier difficulty - which you suggest.

Tried unfair and changed to hard. But if you need to change difficulty in hard encounters than like i said it is a bad game design. You always need to give a player a way to overcome obstacle. Its a bad game design if you need to do a bugged or broken build only. Like i said poe done that perfectly in higher difficulties. Beside its not my first dnd crpg. I know the systems. With no other dnd game using invisibility to take aggro fro my main means that enemies can i still see you without proper abbilities on them and i ignore everything and go for your hero. Dont even defend this crap. Its not about building your hero its about not memorising every encounter and than building accordingly to counter each point that you memorised which is like i said bad game design. You should be always able to do something if you didnt royaly botched your build.

its not bad design this game runs of pathfinder rule sets and it does not hold your hand on core or above.

you can also customize the difficulty, things like additional abilites and more enemies really make the game harder.

I experienced this situation too - well - I don`t like to do that and usually avoid it, but if you turn down the difficulty it is different and manageable. And turnbased should be preferred.

What difficulty?

Changed to normal, if I remember correctly. But you can change anytime. Just save and try.

Originally posted by Tokala:

Changed to normal, if I remember correctly. But you can change anytime. Just save and try.

Sorry, that was directed at the OP, who I suspect is playing too hard a difficulty for their lack of game knowledge and might benefit from learning the system on a easier difficulty - which you suggest.

Originally posted by gamers.txt:

Originally posted by Tokala:

Changed to normal, if I remember correctly. But you can change anytime. Just save and try.

Sorry, that was directed at the OP, who I suspect is playing too hard a difficulty for their lack of game knowledge and might benefit from learning the system on a easier difficulty - which you suggest.

Tried unfair and changed to hard. But if you need to change difficulty in hard encounters than like i said it is a bad game design. You always need to give a player a way to overcome obstacle. Its a bad game design if you need to do a bugged or broken build only. Like i said poe done that perfectly in higher difficulties. Beside its not my first dnd crpg. I know the systems. With no other dnd game using invisibility to take aggro fro my main means that enemies can i still see you without proper abbilities on them and i ignore everything and go for your hero. Dont even defend this crap. Its not about building your hero its about not memorising every encounter and than building accordingly to counter each point that you memorised which is like i said bad game design. You should be always able to do something if you didnt royaly botched your build.

I seriously hope you don't try to play it on unfair for your first playthrough without having deep understanding of both pathfinder rules and wotr gimmicks/encounters. Because It's called unfair for a reason. It's pretty obvious that you don't use spells like glitterdust or rainbow pattern to prevent their stealth or summons to block their path, which alone shows that you're not prepared for this encounter.

Also I don't think any of gargoyles there have true seeing, so casting invis should actually work.

On unfair the gargoyle cave fight is almost impossible. I used mass dimension door to escape to a safe place where the gargoyles can't reach you. From there you can use spells and ranged weapons.