Stuck at Pilgrimage

[It Isn't Busbus!]

This game was a pleasant surprise from the recent Ukraine Bundle. Thank you to the devs for participating in that bundle!

I've found myself stuck at the third stage of the tunnel up to the castle. This fight has always generated with four frost giants and seven trolls, and I'm having a lot of trouble keeping my party alive. I've tried changing out classes and equipment (everyone's a top-end class with purple or gold equipment), but the result has consistently been the same: I get pushed in and suffer a casualty before I'm able to activate everyone. I can generally only get two actions in before they get in my line and start steamrolling me.

I'm not able to produce enough damage to kill multiple 200-250HP creatures to make being outnumbered any better. The enemies reduce or reverse unnerves so trying to keep them stunned doesn't work, and the map is too small for slows to do any good. The deploy zone is too small to spread my party out enough to mitigate their AOE (the frost giants at this level have a water teleport attack that hits 2 squares away!). Pushing my units to the back of the map leaves them in a line and vulnerable to AOE, but staggering them and moving them forward gives the giants the opportunity to teleport to the side and start unnerving me. It feels like I need to win this in the first couple of moves but I don't see any other levers available for me to do that.

I've since read that the game's difficulty is tied to your levels and unlock progress. I went around the world and collected all of the unlockable classes before doing this. Have I screwed myself into an impossible situation? Other fights (even red-ringed ones) have been tough but still winnable, but this one feels deterministic in all the wrong ways.

If you encountered this fight, how did you end up beating it?

[Soul4hdwn]

you can try removing people from team too. otherwise i hope someone else has better suggestions...
there are however weaker skills that hit everything on map and cause a delay in turns, mix that with back attacks for more wiggle room.
that said... some towers are slightly too brutal for same reason... 8 vs my 3? excuse me???

[It Isn't Busbus!]

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

there are however weaker skills that hit everything on map and cause a delay in turns, mix that with back attacks for more wiggle room.

Frost giants invert unnerve effects, so that actually moves them up :C

I ended up getting through this by dying and retrying until a combat generated that had fewer giants and trolls. This was a really disappointing outcome since I still don't feel like I passed the challenge, just went around it. Occasionally being handed an impossible (or at least vastly more difficult) battle at random feels unsatisfying.

[cuthalionxvi]

I'm hitting the same problem. I already turned the difficulty all the way down to -0.5 today so I could beat what I'd thought was the last elven artifact place, the place (server farm) with the silos (though it still took several more tries). Finally beat that and got an achievement for it, but still not the fae-infused artefacts achievement. No idea where the last one(s) is.

Now I just took several swings at a tunnel fight to get onto the plateau/castle, and a combo of frost giants, behemoths, and goblins keep annihilating most of my party before I get two moves. There's just no way I can see to do it. Like you said, stun-locking isn't possible with frost giants, and almost everything has tons of HP and does AoE. Even cheesing water-spreading attacks doesn't work because it can't kill anything with that much HP in the one or two turns you have to work with. Also tried using my bog witch to throw up shrubs in the way, but it didn't really work (and the first attempt, the enemies went first, my bog witch got bumped down from 1 to like 12 in a series of hits).

I'm not even making it to stage 3, I'm dying in round one of stage 1!

Again, this is after already turning the enemy generation difficulty all the way down. Guess the auto-leveling makes things basically impossible if you try to do all the side quests first like I did (unlock classes, beat the towers and landmarks, get every class to level 7).

The last few days I played, I kept thinking, "Today will be the day I finish the game," but I think now I'll be happier if I just give up. It was an interesting game, fun atmosphere and combat, love the goblins, but... I think I'm done.

[cuthalionxvi]

I suppose I could try getting in fights and fleeing a lot. Maybe the auto-difficulty would start ratcheting down? I usually retry fights and don't flee much, so maybe that's backed me into a corner.