Twisted enemies absorbing all my attacks?

[Don Kanaille]

I recently started playing Banner Saga 3 after playing through the first two parts years back. It took me a bit to get back into the gameplay and the story, but I feel I´m making decent progress. However, recently I´ve had my first battles against the twisted enemies in the darkness and I need to ask: Is it normal that these guys absorb and deflect so many attacks? Usually, the game communicates quite clearly if attacks are chance based, can miss or be absorbed - but against these purple people I had to find out by trial and error, and so far, it looks pretty random to me. Is there something I´m missing? Can I somehow check to see what chances my attacks have of succeeding against them? How come some attacks do go through, but only deal partial damage? Is this mechanic influenced by something, for example, does reducing the Twisted´s armor make them less likely to deflect or absorb attacks?
I´ve really enjoyed the tactical combat in the Saga games so fr, but a lot of these new battles feel pretty random to me, which is quite the turn off. I cannot really tell which attacks do what to my enemies and sometimes a whole turn is wasted because everything bounced off the AI. Can somebody explain to me how this works?

I´ve gotta say, I´m worried about the scaling of the game as a whole. After my caravan went through two games already, all the fighters have their stats pretty much maxed out, and the skills to learn from there on are (almost) all based on randomness... I can deal with that if its my own people, for I only take the guaranteed events for granted and all the randomly triggered stuff is just a nice bonus. But when the AI starts going by these rules it really sucks the fun out of the combat, for the careful planning can be ruined by an unlucky dice roll. Is this just the design now or am I doing something wrong?





PS: Why do the devs hate Egil so much? Dragged him through two games and now he got killed in a one-sentence cutscene. Nobody even mourned him, it was just "he got stabbed" and then it moved on without another word...

[Hevi]

They will absorb damage as long they have willpower left. Click on them and you can see their skills.

[Troll]

The smaller warped enemies have a Passive that uses their WILL as a STR resist buff.
Whenever you hit for STR, you will first hit its WILL and when it reaches 0 it damages STR. If an attack damages WILL to 0, it will continue onto STR if there is some power left behing the strike.


Egil can die, but most of the caravan can too, if "proper" choices are taken. Potential deaths are often hinted at by text or context. For example Petrus tells you you shouldn't tarry long when traveling in the city and stuff like that.

[Don Kanaille]

Thats at least an explanation. Thank you.