Help please! Euphrates II final boss (SPOILERS)

[Artimise Flare]

So I am kind of stuck on this fight and am not sure how to go about it.

I am currently playing on "Normal" difficulty, and my party consists of the following

Me: Arch militant (Sword/Plasma pistol & Plasma gun)
Ulfar: Arch Militant (Chain sword/Bolt pistol & Muilti melta)
Argenta: Arch Militant (Heavy Bolter & Melta gun)
Pasqal: Grand Strategist (Omnissian axe & Plasma pistol)
Cassia: Master Tactician (Navigator staff)
Abelard: Vanguard (Thunder Hammer & Las Gun)

Spoilers ahead

So in this fight I can't seem to even get out of turn one or two without having my party getting annihilated by the traitor astartes. Even setting up the tactic zones to try and maximize dodge/parry and trying to stay behind cover, by the time my retinue can get a move off again, half of them are either dead or critically wounded. I've tried tying up the ranged astartes in melee to force them to move, but because they get so many attacks, this doesn't tend to work.

Kunrad's chain lightning makes staying behind cover or close to each other on strategic zones suicide, and Urlaron's ability to grant extra turns to just about any unit also makes things very difficult.

Skill issue I know, so any advice for how to take this fight would be appreciated. Absolute worst case scenario I can think of is I'll have to revert to and older saved game and re-spec my characters or turn down the difficulty.

For those who have completed this fight, how did you guys/gals go about dealing with this fight?

[Cyroy]

With that load out you might want to try and get Abelard to draw as much attention as he can using his various taint abilities, support him with either the big box zone or the dodge increase zone. Use Cassia to move as many enemies as possible towards favorable positions, make her buff her own will power so her navigator abilities hit much harder. And use the various debuffs that Arch militants can get to spread bleed and prone.

[Artimise Flare]

Originally posted by Cyroy:

With that load out you might want to try and get Abelard to draw as much attention as he can using his various taint abilities, support him with either the big box zone or the dodge increase zone. Use Cassia to move as many enemies as possible towards favorable positions, make her buff her own will power so her navigator abilities hit much harder. And use the various debuffs that Arch militants can get to spread bleed and prone.

Sadly, I think I screwed up with my spec for him since he tends to go 2nd to last, so by the time I can get him to try and taunt the enemies, he's either nearly dead from the spraying of bolter shells or everyone else in the retinue is dead or critically wounded.

[Cyroy]

Originally posted by Artimise Flare:

Originally posted by Cyroy:

With that load out you might want to try and get Abelard to draw as much attention as he can using his various taint abilities, support him with either the big box zone or the dodge increase zone. Use Cassia to move as many enemies as possible towards favorable positions, make her buff her own will power so her navigator abilities hit much harder. And use the various debuffs that Arch militants can get to spread bleed and prone.

Sadly, I think I screwed up with my spec for him since he tends to go 2nd to last, so by the time I can get him to try and taunt the enemies, he's either nearly dead from the spraying of bolter shells or everyone else in the retinue is dead or critically wounded.

Hmm. Yeah. I realized quickly that agility is pretty important for all classes as it lets you act earlier in initiative so I worked on buffing that for all my characters. In that case you could try and let Cassia hit the more important enemies with here lidless stare to stun them for a turn. Gather them up with her forced movement abilities and slap them with that. That's a other option to help you gain some momentum. Alternatively the hardest hitting enemies you can hit with Pasqal's banishment to reduce some of the incoming damage.

[Nickname0329]

You should have the Commander's notes at this point, gotten from Chapter 3. Use Frontline from Pascal on Abelard, use Combat Locus Stratagem on him. The rest of your characters you put in the rear combat zone, hopefully you have the talent Diversion Zone to drop all those characters to low priority for enemies. This way all the people in the Rear Combat Zone are low priority and Abelard will get default aggro.

Use Combat Tactics with Pascal to consume exploit stacks to give him damage and your team more armor. If you are using Seize the initiative, give the first turn to Pascal so he can consume earlier and have more turns to consume exploit stacks. Hopefully you have him set up so that he generates a ton of Exploits.

Equip all your units with Medkits and actually use them, especially on Abelard, as healing doesn't take your attack in this game and Abelard should have enough free Common Talents and Exemplar talents to specialize in healing himself.

Use Machine Banishment on Pascal to nerf whatever enemies are hitting you. Normal hits most bosses with a 30% damage reduction iirc, and this stacks with Intimidation (Pascal should also have this) and Inflict Despair, making it literally impossible for units affected by all 3 debuffs to even do damage.

[serand]

By stacking tactical knowledge on top of the grand strategist zones. But I have a lot of operatives, three grand stategists (and no officers) in my party.
To keep in mind, there is a bug with some aoe abilities, and afaik tactical knowledge is among them, that don't work if the character applying them is behind full cover.

[Artimise Flare]

Originally posted by Nickname0329:

You should have the Commander's notes at this point, gotten from Chapter 3. Use Frontline from Pascal on Abelard, use Combat Locus Stratagem on him. The rest of your characters you put in the rear combat zone, hopefully you have the talent Diversion Zone to drop all those characters to low priority for enemies. This way all the people in the Rear Combat Zone are low priority and Abelard will get default aggro.

Use Combat Tactics with Pascal to consume exploit stacks to give him damage and your team more armor. If you are using Seize the initiative, give the first turn to Pascal so he can consume earlier and have more turns to consume exploit stacks. Hopefully you have him set up so that he generates a ton of Exploits.

Equip all your units with Medkits and actually use them, especially on Abelard, as healing doesn't take your attack in this game and Abelard should have enough free Common Talents and Exemplar talents to specialize in healing himself.

Use Machine Banishment on Pascal to nerf whatever enemies are hitting you. Normal hits most bosses with a 30% damage reduction iirc, and this stacks with Intimidation (Pascal should also have this) and Inflict Despair, making it literally impossible for units affected by all 3 debuffs to even do damage.

Redid some my specs on pasqal to make him more ranged focus and to give him more strats, but sadly, even with all the defensive buffs, I'm still getting my butt kicked in this fight on normal. This fight is just brutal, the fact that there are so many traitor astartes that naturally get a mess ton of attacks makes this fight feel incredibly unfair.

Will keep trying to figure out how to do this fight. The priority targets appear to be the flame thrower astartes near the door, followed by either the melee or bolter focused traitor astartes since they appear to push the most damage out besides Kunrad's chain lightning.

[Aien]

Well, last time I had worst start of combat when all 3 chaos space marines, Uralon and Kunrad acted first (save one Cassia's bonus turn), but I still ended it within one turn, on Daring.

You really need high dodge without or with minimal buffs on start.
Try to force enemies attack your most durable and/or less userful characters by placing them together away from others. Use bonus turns to create additional cover with Vanguard or/and to buff dodge/armor of your bait. Both active and passive abilities that reduce enemies' offensive stats also help.

You can also try to savescum a good start to have enough time to kill some enemies or to prepare your party but idk how much time it will take.

[wei270]

ok you guys have to stop giving master tacticals to cassia, i had cassia for this fight and she is grand stratgy, and was able to get a officer heroic on the first turn, give it to pascal, then have him kill ulron before he even get a turn.

[Zsrai]

Operative BH RT w/ Sniper Rifle, Plasma & Bolt Pistol
Argenta Master Tactician w/ Heavy Bolter, Heavy Flamer
Ulfar AM w/ Chainsword & Pistol, Astartes Flamer
Pasqal Assassin w/ AdMech Axe, Ancient Plasma Rifle
Jae Master Tactician w/ Blast Pistol & Splinter Pistol, whatever her off set is who knows
Abelard Vanguard w/ 2h Power Sword, Power Axe & Melta Pistol

Just use both MT's to buff Argenta & my RT, killed everything in 2 turns. Ulfar "died" really early on (his ability kicked in, so he was stunned but recovered HP), the CSM kind of focused him early, but I killed all the chaff Dark AdMech and Kunrad before they got any attacks off. I think the only enemy that got more than 1 round in was Uralon.

What difficulty are you playing on? Also, what's your Agility? Mine tends to be pretty high across the board (like all 50-80) because it gives, very importantly, initiative and dodge.

[nedia]

Everyone's posted some good ideas, but honestly, the way I got through it was just RNGing the heck out of that first turn with the SM that pinballs around wiping everyone before they even go.

I moved everyone as faaaaaaaaar away from him as I could, set up strategist zones, and reloaded over and over until he finally did a pass that didn't take everyone out. Still lost Cassia second turn, but honestly, once you get past that first one, the rest is handleable even with just five characters.

My party was:
me (crime lord operative bounty hunter with two serious laser snipers)
Abelard (vanguard with a massive thunder hammer)
Heinrix (assassin with auto-striking sword main hand and some other good one that I don't remember now in off)
Pasqal (grand strategist with plasma pistol and the omnissiah axe off the kiava gamma boss, iirc)
Ulfar (I switched out for a better sword, but was still basically his comes-with loadout at this point)
Cassia (officer grand strategist with a heapload of navigator powers)

[Vesemir]

Originally posted by wei270:

ok you guys have to stop giving master tacticals to cassia, i had cassia for this fight and she is grand stratgy, and was able to get a officer heroic on the first turn, give it to pascal, then have him kill ulron before he even get a turn.

Master tactical Cassia is totally valid for a buffer/healer strategy, she doesn't shoot big guns but who cares, buffs seem to apply on navigator power anyways (self-buffed 500+ health ass Cassia fat).

[Artimise Flare]

Originally posted by Vesemir:

Originally posted by wei270:

ok you guys have to stop giving master tacticals to cassia, i had cassia for this fight and she is grand stratgy, and was able to get a officer heroic on the first turn, give it to pascal, then have him kill ulron before he even get a turn.

Master tactical Cassia is totally valid for a buffer/healer strategy, she doesn't shoot big guns but who cares, buffs seem to apply on navigator power anyways (self-buffed 500+ health ass Cassia fat).

Okay, finally managed to kill this darn mission.

Ranged focus Pasqal and tanking Abelard made a big difference. Phase II of this fight, Cassia' buffs as a master tacticion that gives temporary HP to Abelard really carried everything for me. Especially after the latter stage OHKO'd my primary ranged damage dealer Argenta (My character was good at it, but Argenta with a heavy bolter is just kind of nutty)

[Tony Hawk's Dad]

Originally posted by Zsrai:

Operative BH RT w/ Sniper Rifle, Plasma & Bolt Pistol
Argenta Master Tactician w/ Heavy Bolter, Heavy Flamer
Ulfar AM w/ Chainsword & Pistol, Astartes Flamer
Pasqal Assassin w/ AdMech Axe, Ancient Plasma Rifle
Jae Master Tactician w/ Blast Pistol & Splinter Pistol, whatever her off set is who knows
Abelard Vanguard w/ 2h Power Sword, Power Axe & Melta Pistol

Just use both MT's to buff Argenta & my RT, killed everything in 2 turns. Ulfar "died" really early on (his ability kicked in, so he was stunned but recovered HP), the CSM kind of focused him early, but I killed all the chaff Dark AdMech and Kunrad before they got any attacks off. I think the only enemy that got more than 1 round in was Uralon.

What difficulty are you playing on? Also, what's your Agility? Mine tends to be pretty high across the board (like all 50-80) because it gives, very importantly, initiative and dodge.

That sounds like a good strategy if you get two turns to work with. In my run only Cassia get s to go before Uralon. Uralon gives 1 CSM an extra turn and he takes 3 burst shots and wipes at least two people. Ulfar is last in turn order and is guaranteed to go down.