wtf water elemental

[torvon]

sorry but wtf is that water elemental fight -- am i taking a fight i wasn't supposed to take? got 1000+ hours on pathfinder games and there is no chance i can win this fight without cheese. and the fight comes like 30 minutes after the tutorial ends. what the hell? what happened there? it one shot kills each of my characters, and easily hits AC 23. it's hard to hit and has damage reduction.

[Guitarist with Osteoarthritis]

I use my tanks to fight defensively, I buff them with protection against cold, and protection against evil. Camillia using her hex ability evil eye helps a lot. The smite evil spell helps with the creature not hitting me as much. I still die a lot, but eventually, I hit it more times than It hits me. lol

[Mad Beetle]

You don´t need to fight it.
It´s an optional mini-boss. The rewards are minimal.
But really it´s not that tough, depending on your build.

[PostalGibbon]

Buff Seelah (drink potions of barkskin, shield of faith, reduce person put fighting defensively on). MC use master work glaive (or long spear) drink enlarge person potion.
Lann/Wendu drink enlarge person potion use bow. Have Camellia cast bless and bull strenght to MC.
Send Seelah first to aggro water elemental then send your MC to behing Seelah and use glaive/long spear with reach advantage. Lann/Wendu pepper water elemental full of arrows Camellia cast Protective luck on Seelah every turn or evii eye on elemental or auto cast dazzling display every turn (keep Camellia out of melee range of elemental at all cost). If water elemental hits/crits Seelah and kills her RELOAD and try again to get better dice rolls.

[QuinZ33]

Did you miss the part of the tutorial that explicitly calls out that there's a very difficult optional mini-boss when you open the door?

[forkofspite]

To be fair, you get the prompt in another location of the shield maze - although that is another optional encounter, it's not exactly warning-worthy.

Most first time players will likely receive the warning for the water elemental first, though.

[PostalGibbon]

Water elemental is easy real hard fight is in room left of water elemental with 4 corrupted mongrels (AKA ranger i have dice with on only 20's on it, raging red destroyer i chop Seelah pieces its little friend non rager and forth the little wimp who dies first). On core difficulty that is hardest fight in whole chapter one. No matter if you have protective luck or all the buff you can get that point Seelah dies in first turn 9 out 10 times. It is fight where i have to reload 20-30 times because bad dice rolls. If anything goes fine and dandy maybe 3-5 times reload.

[MjKorz]

Originally posted by PostalGibbon:

Water elemental is easy real hard fight is in room left of water elemental with 4 corrupted mongrels (AKA ranger i have dice with on only 20's on it, raging red destroyer i chop Seelah pieces its little friend non rager and forth the little wimp who dies first). On core difficulty that is hardest fight in whole chapter one. No matter if you have protective luck or all the buff you can get that point Seelah dies in first turn 9 out 10 times. It is fight where i have to reload 20-30 times because bad dice rolls. If anything goes fine and dandy maybe 3-5 times reload.

Like everything else in chapter 1, the answer is the same for all difficulties: just Grease it.

As for the water elemental on unfair difficulty: Camellia with Evil Eye save debuff + Grease + Glitterdust + cycle charging buffed Seelah with a glaive for maximum damage = victory.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2779320396

[Granat]

There's plenty of stuff you can find in the labirynth to make the fight substantially easier - Radiance Sword, Potion of Haste, Potion of Cold Resistance, etc. - as I've written in another similar thread to this, the key is to use Inflict Serious Wounds scroll by Camellia and hope he fails the saving throw (odds are naturally against you but it's not something impossible, pretty much there was a wider margin than 19-20 lucky throw).
As one of the users have written earlier on - honestly the fight with 4 mongrels with that annoying monk is far harder - Elemental is alone and is generally slow, in worst case you can try cheesing him with ranged characters - to my knowledge it works, although I've beaten him conventionally on Core on my 2nd try.

[Baldurs_Gate_2]

Shrouded Step + Vital Strike easy

[rumburak2006]

I do everything in the Maze and leave the elemental last. Then use the Protection Cold Potion on Seelah and enlarge and the other cold potion, resistance, on a secondary melee. Wenduag/Lann can do Range, leaving one healer/buffer. Works all the time for me unless the Boss crits Seelah.

[forkofspite]

Originally posted by MjKorz:

Like everything else in chapter 1, the answer is the same for all difficulties: just Grease it.

One, maybe two, scrolls of grease are available. DC 11, of course. Seelah, Camellia, Lann/Wendu do not have grease with their natural progression. So your suggestion reduces the game to a few possible methods:

1) Cross-class at least one of the above mentioned companions immediately
2) Play a main with access to grease
3) Hope you use the grease scroll(s) for the correct encounter(s) - again, DC 11
4) Use various mods to change builds wherever and whenever you want to deal with the next problem

Like everything in this game, there are multiple ways of handling everything in the Shield Maze. For the water elemental, buffing Seelah (Paladin 2) with the consumables available in the maze is usually sufficient.

[Moss]

u can run it around in a circle...use divine zap.

[Sultryhag]

I put everyone on ranged even the melee had crossbows and just kited it. Basically Lann did the most damage.

[Balekai]

Originally posted by Sultryhag:

I put everyone on ranged even the melee had crossbows and just kited it. Basically Lann did the most damage.

This. Just the most optimal way of killing it without too much hassle, death or item/buff usage.

[jojobe]

use spells that drain like horrid wilting or finger of death. elementals and constructs have terrible saves.