best way to approach fights?

[GERONIMO]

expect to see my name a lot on this forum - this is my first isometric rpg and im having a hard time with the mechanics.

when going into a fight outnumbered, i like to check all my opponents weaknesses and immediately try to capitalise on them. however, this doesnt really get me far as my team just gets seperated and engaged before they get to the target i was trying to hit. so maybe i send in my mele charactrs first, but then theyre engaged and someone is attacking my archer/support mage and theyre getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

i also cant seem to keep my ranged characters in one place. theyre just running all over the place, getting engaged with hard hitters and dying.

so what is the best way to approach an outnumbered fight with a 4 member team, and how do i keep my ranged characters at range and protected?

ty

[wendigo211]

First off the AI is extremely stupid in Tyranny, turn it off and order your companions manually. It's called RTWP gameplay for a reason, use pause liberally to issue commands.

Best way to maximize your survival is to find a choke point, put your archers on one side, your tanks in the middle and the enemy on the other side. Early on, unless your main is a tank, that's about the best you can do, Barik is about as threatening as an asthmatic kitten. Don't be afraid to pull enemies, if you find a choke point set up your party and have a tank pull the enemy group to your position (sometimes you can pull just part of the group to your position which makes the fight easier). Just because the game puts your enemies in a good position doesn't mean you have to fight them there.

Later on you'll have some options, the best of which is to use crowd control spells: Illusion has False Pit, Gravelight has a paralysis effect, Stone has a flesh to stone and a prone spell, there's a sigil that addds a root effect (enemies can't move) to force and atrophy spells and another that adds a stun to all lighting spells.

The other thing is don't proritize enemies based on how easily you can dispatch them, prioritize them based on how dangerous they are to you. It's better to take out the guy that does 100 points of damage a hit, than kill two guys who do 30 each. Generally my prority list is: mages>archers>two-handed weapon users>dual-wielding enemies>shield using enemies. Bosses are a bit different. Sometimes it's better to kill the boss first (e.g. Malices) other times its better to kill the adds first (Havocs, and some of the human commanders and Archons).

[Texonater]

Prebuffing before fights is a big one. Add Duration and AOE1 to buff spells (Vital body in the life magic for example). Then bunch your group up before a fight and cast so that the enchantment is cast on your entire group. do this with multiple buffs and weapon enhancements, then charge in and wreck shop.

[DownSouth05]

To the OP regarding "how to look at them before they engage" I approach every potential combat in stealth mode. Creep in slowly until you can see all of them. Usual number of enemies on 'normal' setting is 4. Once you can see them then you can set your targets. As was previously stated 'turn off the AI' ! It is beyond stupid. I take a different approach reagarding which ones to kill first. Yes something that does 100 damage per shot is far more dangerous than 2 that do 30. But while you are taking 5 turns to kill that one armored knight, those 2 that you are ignoring are piling up the damage. So what to do? What I do is try to keep them knocked down, or better yet keep that one armored knight knocked down and take the other ones.

I just got into mt 5th play through and I managed to ally with the Vendarian Guard and the battle for ascention hall. Difficulty is hard with the expert box checked. The final battle was just Barrik left at 1/2 health and two archers left to kill. Got through it though. Party consisted of Verse, Lantry and Barrik, My character is a duel wield ranger and Verse is specced as a ranger as well. Yea, dumb, but I wanted to see how it worked out. Poorly given how hard the fights were lol But I'lll keep playing it, see how it goes.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Texonater:

Prebuffing before fights is a big one.

This is a big one. It's a nuisance and incredibly boring to have to slog through a repetative pre-buff ritual before every fight, but the game was designed to be played that way unfortunately and it makes a massive difference.

In this game everyone is a caster. Even Barik starts witrh two spell slots and a short way up the Leadershiup tree you can up this to four. Every one should have a heal and a blur and some other buffs appropriate for role.

Originally posted by wendigo211:

First off the AI is extremely stupid in Tyranny, turn it off and order your companions manually.

This will also make a massive difference. Turning off party AI completely makes the game easier, and more enjoyable, by a factor of about one difficulty level.

Other random points (bear in mind I've only played PotD so some might not apply on normal/hard):

* Melee damage output of your characters early game is pathetic compared to offensive magic. Buy every spell scroll you can lay your hands on, get every spell slot for your team you can and train your spell casters in Lore, Lore and more Lore. Experiment with creating spells often.

* Study the character talent trees carefully and partucularly for melee charcters like Barikk and Verse bee-line the key damage dealing talents. For Barik it is his five engagement based talents (two on the sentinel tree allow additional enemies engaged and three on the Punisher tree give him free shots against engaged enemies) and for Verse it is the thre Killing Spree ones. If you play Verse you need to play to get her her first kill to trigger Killing Spree which is a bit gamey but it works.This implies Barik should go 2H and Verse dual wield for max damage output. Forget sword and shield.

* Don't be afraid for one moment to put mages like Lantry, especially Lantry, in the heaviest armour you can get hold of. This is stupid, but in this game it works, enemies will no longer target him in the same way. The enemy AI targets dangerous opponents that have the lightest armour forst and they don't care about breaking engagement to do it. The heavy armour stops that to some extent.

* as has been pointed out you can make a lot of fights easier by using choke points and also by pulling one or two enemies from a mob at a time and dispatchinn them in detail but you can by no means always do that especially in the harder set pieces. The implication of this is tjhat becasue you only have four party members and enemies will break engagement freely to get at weaker party members you have to think in terms of both survivability and lethality of each and every party member or encounters where you can't use choke point and pull tactics will be difficult. This game is about stand and deliver - face them down and kill them before they kill you. If your charcters are getting hurt too quickly or they can't kill enemies fast enough do something about it.

* Watch wounds careffully and learn to heal in time to prevent them. Wounds are OTT crippling in this game, massive penalties. Note that potions are consumed more or less instantly so are very useful. Everyone also needs a heal spell as potions are on cooldown. Heal early and heal often is the best policy to avoid them. A side effect of this wounds thing is that resurrecting party members is of questionable if any use: resurrection doesn't heal wounds and takes ages to do. Better use the time to kill the enemy with those still on their feet and use the talents for something that helps to kill enemies.

* others may disagree but in stark contrast to Pillars of Eternity I find offensive magic to be far more effective than support magic in this game. Part of this is because casters are so remorselessly targeted and unprotectable and if they can't kill their attackers themselves they just get cut down and partly it's becesue the the debuffs and diisables in the game are of pitifully short duration and partly becasue the cooldown system severely limits support magic options. This makes the game IMO far less tactically rich than PoE. Others may think it makes it more exiting, Whatever. I mention this becasue you said this is your first isometric cRPG in the classic style and if for any reason you find the game lacking in sublety or depth combat-wise (note this critisism doesn't apply to the story,characterisation or lore) then you may prefer Pillars.

* Make sure you get the Magefire accent sigil and prioritise getting it added to your firem and frost speells asap - the best and most consistent damage dealing item in the game IMO.

[DownSouth05]

I want to add there is a spell, forget the sigel, but it allows you to apply any elemental core as a weapon buff. Then you add the aceent "volcanic weapon" Turns every thurst of a weapon into a fireball PLUS the elemental core you started with. I can't vouch for PoTD or the Iron Man Difficulty levels, but on Hard with the expert box checked off my party was able to easily destroy all 4 archons. The only Archon battle that is tough, is Graven Ashe. Spoiler hint if you fight Bleden Mark in Ashenwood, instead of the throne room there are no summoned adds

[OnlyOffensive]

Originally posted by Texonater:

Prebuffing before fights is a big one. Add Duration and AOE1 to buff spells (Vital body in the life magic for example). Then bunch your group up before a fight and cast so that the enchantment is cast on your entire group. do this with multiple buffs and weapon enhancements, then charge in and wreck shop.

Using some consumables before "dialogue fights" or at least most of them lead to bug that will permanently increase portion of your stats that they provide. I had this bug with Azurebelle leaving +2 finesse and mageberry or whatever it name left my Lantry permanently +25% movement speed and extra resolve. Spells doesn't share this bug at least as far as i can say.

Just saying so people might avoid this bug, that make you way more stronger than you supposed to be and they don't want to reduce any challenges in fights. Using them directly in fights doesn't seem to cause a bug, only preuse before dialogues, although there might be something that also affect it.

[Dorok]

In my opinion it's a bit weird all advices rely on micro manage everything, it's a lot of micro management.

I know the companions AI isn't as well tuned than in Dragon Age series, but I believe there are AI setup that can work well enough, at least at Hard or Normal, PotD is another matter but PotD isn't advised to a newbie.

The current main problem of AI is coming from spells, typically you have a long range character and you give him a close range spell, that's the cause of OP problem with long range going close range.

For long range character you don't plan micro manage much:
- Give him only long range spells.
- Change AI setup to select the long range option of the companion.
- Don't equip him with close range weapons if the AI tend switch to them, it shouldn't if you select a long range AI.

But it's not only long range characters that will give troubles. The game is better suited to spread a bit the team than was PoE. Alas there's a side effect because of an AI problem, a close range character could travel a long distance just to support another character. To avoid this problem in AI you should not select defend the group. But this will also involve to ensure such character is always involved in the combat, like by making him start attack.

I'm exploring AI options so I haven't yet much advices, but at Hard a heavy micro management isn't required.

[Echo913]

Practically everything above are pretty strong considerations but I'd like to add that there should be consideration for damage types if you're trying to run an archer or any archer in your party.

For Archers, especially early on, your damage is significantly impacted by the sorts of enemies you deal with and their resistences to piercing attacks. If I recall correctly that Bows are predominantly Piercing damage, most enemies in the game have a fair bit of piercing resistence. This means that it is very essential for you to make armor penetration a very strong consideration so spells and abilities that enhance your armor penetration are quite key early on. Vigor spells are essential to this as the Material Force spell you can get early in Act 2 (from Revos at the first spire) combined with Vigor gives +4 armor penetration, this on top of the armor penetration from the bow and the +4 from the mighty stance in the Power tree synergize fairly well in my experience of POTD difficulty.

Force magic is also essential because of Haste which can drastically reduce recovery time. This is a key thing to have regardless of any class but it benefits two-handed weapons and archers the most as auto-attacks would be your bread and butter offense tool aside from what inherent abilities you would get.

[ApathicAlpaca]

Doesn't putting mages into Plate Armor reduce their effectiveness by a huge degree? I face the same issue: AI is very much focusing light armor wearers (which is actually sensible) but what's not OK is the lack of ways to stop that. I tried frost and other debilitating spells but it's not really working out so far. If I focus archers and mages first I can as well say good-bye to my 'softies' because enemy melees will decimate them.
Tricky.
However I also never thought about 'pre-buffing' and giving every character blur/heal. That will definitely help. Too bad there are so many scripted combats with no way to pull it off.

[Doombringer]

>4 year old necro...

Armor is kind of bad in this game, if you can't ignore the slow down you shouldn't use it.
(Min recovery time is 1s for most characters, 1.2s for siren, I think 1.6 for Kills, and just awful for Tin Can Man...)
Putting your guys right on top of each other and pre-combat casting your best mirror image with +AoE, then blur (on everyone or whoever normally gets focused).

Unravel Minds or Waves of Despair + Frost (or Fire with Frostfire mod) can keep most enemies from doing much. (Frost slows animation time, daze/fatigue slow recovery time)
Prone (False Pit), Sleep, Stuns, Interrupts, etc. (or killing fast) are a major defense in this game.
Vs. melees you can kite or use sigil of rooting.

Siren gets a ton of defensive buffs, so I use her as the tank in my all mage party.
Nothing lives past the 1st round of Scorching Missiles usually...

[yezhanquan]

At higher levels (level 50+), you'll want the Gravelight missile with bounce.