Arena fights

[Finn]

The arena fights are a good example for really poor game design. You have to succeed in 3 fights in a row without being able to save in between. Three fights last about 1.5 hours. When you start a new fight you have no clue what the environment does, which means you cant succeed the first time.

On top of that you need to save Aurelia in each of the nine fights. However in fight 8 she gets randomly attacked by those swords when the aligators take the weight off the platforms. This can deal MORE damage than her hitpoints and you can not avoid it. She just randomly DIES without my being able to do anything about it, after I already invested more than an hour to get to this point.

I'm too frustrated to keep playing this ♥♥♥♥. I know there is a patch planned for auto-saves between battles, but its just too late now. Dont publish an alpha version and please take some lessons in game design before you try again. Look at Banner Sage for instance if you want to see how its done right.

[5pam!]

Those arena fights were rather easy, imo. And if you fail you can retry the current battle.
The thing which is rather poor design is, that you have to heal your party during the crocodiles fights, otherwise the last battle might be impossible. And the planned autosave would not change this.
Another problem that might occur is, that one of your probably essential mage users cannot be used in the final 3 rounds, which is indeed very poor game design when you cannot respec! Maybe i was just lucky because my main character was mage aswell so he could help with healing. And reloading a save which is probably 10h older would indeed lead to ragequit on my side.

As for the stages:
First 3 fights are filled with traps, spot them or lose.
Fight 4-6 were quite easy, smash and win. No tactics needed.
Fight 7 was rather annoying and by far the most difficult one, dealing with heavy poison and remembering the trap rotation/position.
Fight 8 is easy, use the traps for your advantage and heal the party on those wells. Aurelia can take quite a few hits. The crocodiles had rather poor AI, some of them run away from me so i could shoot them for free. Leave one alive until everybody is healed and has enough MP.
The last battle has alot of luck involved, one fighter left, one fighter right and hope that they dont die to fast and attract all the lice and the big one.

[Finn]

All the battles are massively RNG-based. Playing one battle takes about 30 min and you have to do it over and over again to learn the exact hex where enemies will spawn etc. Its an extremely frustrating experience. Strategical play or a profound understanding of the char development system is not rewarded at all.

I know I can retry the fights. But if I leave the game and come back later I have to start with the very first fight again. After 2 hours of frustration, I just want to save and leave, but if I do I lose ALL THE PROGRESS.
I tried the last fight 5 times, invested 2 hours, but didnt succeed. If I wanted to try again I had to play for another 2 HOURS JUST TO GETBACK TO THAT POINT AGAIN. You cant tell me thats good game design. ITS A HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE.


-> I would never recommend this game and feel dumb for buying it. Thats always the worse part. All I got for my money is hours of frustration. I already kept playing longer than I should because I wanted to get a return on my money, but all I got was more frustration.

[Neunmalklug]

in future patch notes they say that between battles in a row will be a autosave. great news for boring chapter 2. so you can play 1 battle after another and not "waste" a whole day.

[5pam!]

The enemies and your chars always spawn on the same field and the positioning for Takate and Naurim is always good enough to let them move forward for tanking.
And of course the game is RNG because you roll a dice for nearly everything! Its based on P&P rules (roughly). Maybe you got extremly unlucky, as i did during the "free the lady" fight.
But aside from that enemies always behave the same way. You did the siege of the town battles, it is basically the same for arena.
You know that you can save after 3. and 6. battle? Dont know why it took you 2h for 3 fights. You can change difficulty on the fly, if its to hard. On easy Naurim can one-hit an enemy with power blow.

This game has indeed some poor game design decisions i have to agree, and the arena fights are surely one of them. The dwarf games and the siege battle are also very harsh.
I watched some YT vids before, and read on the forums here because many people complained. I did some in depth research before spending skill points, which i always do when playing those kinda games. (And because i spend some time on the wiki pages...obviously the only one if i look into the history)
Maybe those are the reasons i could finish this part without problems, i knew what was coming. And i saved every f*kng step before, during and after everything i did.

[Skyfall]

I personally loved that arena fights. The traps, three fights in row slowly erroding your resouces. It was awesome. I know three in row with no save is rough and they are addressing it, but those were some of my favorite fights from the game.

Tips, direct all fire power toward you tanks. The arcane wall is great for this, create one and hide your mages behind it in the begining of the fight. This should direct all ranged attacks at your melee. Second Niam's speed rank 3 spell is the best spell in the game. Your melee can move long range and get 2 attacks in a single round. also pump up her atral points to 30 so she can cast it twice. Third weaken (wound) but do not kill the last enemy on the field then just cycle rounds until you refill hp and atral points (usually make this a mage or archer forced into melee combat). A level 3 heal spell will cure wounds. Level 1 lightning find you can cost as little as 3 astral points with the right mage build.

I did notice one funny thing during those fights. If I used perception to find the traps then whent the enemies walked acrossed them they didn't get poisioned but my team still did. Shouldn't it be revesed? I used perception so my team knew about the traps, they didn't so they shouldn't.

Also for the Lice Queen I recommend using the spiked mat trap. She will take damage every round she is on it.

[Kanjejou]

those battle are heavily bugged or badly programmed/made... for exemple the one with the poison traps computer can walk on them taking no dmages but not you...(which mean a free retry becasue thepoison dmages are so high even taking one tick +ttrap=15-25hp lost... hlf hp for one mistak e youa re the only oen to be able to suffer from)

"alligator battle" they will ignore you to go eat a piece of meat... with two the alligator are placed bottom two meat are automaticly lost at turn 2 and if four are eaten you lose.

plus pure joy alligator are almost immune to debuff and wounds and have super high dodge(higher than the boss)... why? why are annimals stronger than ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss monsters you get after that?

[Kukiełek]

In "aligator battle" just heal Aurelia when needed.

[Drifter]

The arena fights work very well if you are carefull and use your characters wisely. I play DSA as pen&paper and even though the game only has parts of the actual rules, it still is easy to understand and makes sense knowing the base material.
The big problem I have is that my second bow and mage are gone for the last three fights. And even though it is very possible for me to defeat arena 7 and 8, 9 is just plainly impossible. It is mathmatically impossible. I could try it on lower difficulty but I hate it when games require me to basically cheat to get anywhere.

The problem is, that I need 2 strong hits to defeat one of those damn insects. There are 5 at any given time as they respawn. I have only 4 characters. Every single enemy is at aurelia within 2 rounds. Aurelia takes at max health 4-2 hits before she's dead.
That means If I'm lucky I can kill 2 enemys per round, leaving 3 that will get to Aurelia in the next round. And even if I am lucky then Aurelia will be attacked by at least one enemy. But in that time the enemys that I killed before respawn and there are again 5 enemys 2 of which will be at Aurelia within the next round.
So just by that I can tell you it is impossible to defeat the small enemys and still deal any damage at all to the boss.
In addition to that enemys explode 2 rounds after they entered that stupid poison on the ground. And I could use that to my advantage, but they prioritise Aurelia, so If I am too far away from her they straight up ignore me and attack her.
If I stay close enough for them to attack me, then all characters are together in one area, which means after 2-3 of the enemys explode both my melee characters are dead and at times my mage or my archer.

I really liked the game up until this damn fight, I even liked the first 8 Arena fights, but the last one is just a bad joke, that should be entirely reworked. If you have only 4 Characters to fight do not give us more than 3 respawning enemys. Don't just lay out that explosive poison everywhere, make a puddle that the enemys go for before attacking, And If you really want this fight to be this dull, then at least give us some deus ex machina to win.

[Kanjejou]

yeah this figth was pure annoyance...

plus the when the fourht meat piece is eaten and autrelia take 120 damages cant heal her from this much damages

[dwig]

Hmm, I just fought through chapter 2 (hard mode) a few days ago. I found that if I moved Takate and MC aggressively onto the map towards the holes that the lice would chase them instead of Aurelia. Z was able to heal her through the few that got through and exploded anyway.

[albert.brady12]

I had a guide written for the arena fights, but i lost the file. I will upload the walkthrough in a couple weeks.