A tale of the battle of Thorn Ford on hard difficulty [SPOILERS]

[Gregorovitch]

I present my experiences of the battle against Kessle and her crew at Thorn Fordon hard diffIculty at level 2 for observations and debate for those interested. I was playing a conjugation wizard in the company of Valerie, Linzi, Amiri and Harrim. I am lawfull nuetral so the “good” dialog options were unavailable.

First contat was at the bottom of the map from the east where I was heavily restricted by terrain and so got wrecked two or three times before exploring the northern approach. This proved to be prefferable, so I started exploratory attempts at this encounter from there.

After two or three attempts I got the measure of the AI's tactics – Kessle would come straight at me, her two melee henchmen would slog up a round or two later and her three archers would line up behind using Rapid Shot. I discovered Kessle was attacking at +13 with dual hatchets and hads an AC of 24 or 25 IIRC. She demonstrated her ability to destroy Valerie, even in defensive stance, and Amiri within two or three rounds on her own.

I also discovered that in defensive stance Valeries was unable to hit her except on a natural 20, Linzi was unable to land a Hilarious Laughter on her, Harrim again required a natural 20 and my wizard main had virtually no chance of landing a Colour Spray or Sleep on her and about a 20% chance of hurting her a little bit with an Acid Dart. Judging from the few hits Amiri got against her Kessle had roughly 50HP. I further discovered that against Amiri Kessle had to roll only a 2 or better to hit her with her +13.

Bascially it became obvious that if Kessle remained alive for more than a couple of rounds, say, then she would destroy my party since nobody was capable of standing against her +13 To Hit.

So having spent maybe 7 or 8 reloads working this situation out I determined that the only possible way to win this fight was to kill Kessle within two rounds and since Amiri's crit range was lower than Kessle's total HP pool the only possibole way to do this was for Amiri to roll two hits in a row against her, one of which had to be a crit, or two decent hits plus my wizard had to lans a 20% Acid Dart shot on her, meanwhile Harrim and and Linzi had to wind up pre-heals on Amiri to keep her alive.

Since Amiri was going in requiring IIRC to roll a 16 or maybe 17 to hit Kessle once although I didn't count I would estimate it took 15 maybe 20 reloads for the necessary rolls to come up for Amiri and my wizard. Eventually Kessle was down by the alloted round three and the second part of the plan was put into action:

This was for Amiri and Valerie to deal with the two remaining Melee (Harrim was already out from an archer barrage) whilst my wizard tried to put two of the archers to sleep and Linszi hit the other with Hilarious Laughter. My thinking was that the main thing to do here was to neutrralize the archer threat ASAP.

Unfortunately I was undone here by some very good AI programming. One of the melee decided to break off from Valerie (and seemed to survive any AoO from). Clamly walked a few feet to my wizard and 1-shotted me before I could get the Sleep off. The other one critted Amiri at the same time. Ho hum.

Learning from this I decided it would be necessary to finish off the two melee quickly and with certainty before tackling the archers. One of them was immune to Colour Spray but it wasn't to Hilarious Laughter (something I had leaned from prelimarary explaratory reloads) so I restared the RNG reload sequence to kill Kessle again and after 10-15 further attempts it came up trumps finally.

I timed my Colour Spray and Hilarioius Laughter on the two melee pretty well and fortuitously both landed, disabling them both nicely for Amiri and Valrie to deal with (and they obliged handsomely on this occasion, they're not so tough rolling around in the dirt it seems). Then Lindzi's final Hilarious Laughter went off on the detatched archer and I cast a Sleep on the other two. Lindzi's hit, mine hit one.

So, having dispatched the two melee, Amri was avaiable to charge the detatched, now laughing archer and Valerie charged the awake one. Valerie nearly killed hers on the spot, but Amiri gutted the laughing one in one shot, trotted over to the sleeping one, instagibbed that one too and finally flicked her sword to wipe the last couple of HP off the last one (which I imagine left Valerie a bit disgruntled actually).

And so ended the Battle of Thorn Ford.

So what do I think about this? Well.....

1 The preliminary reloads to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, in this case the measure of Kessle bascially, and deciding on a plan is fun. Whether you should have to do this (if you got a popup for the enemies stats for example instead) is open to question. But it's only a few reloads, so heh.

2 The long (10-20) sequence of Hail Mary RNG reloads necessary to kill Kessle quickly enough is definitely not fun. Especially if you have to do it more than once as I did.

3 The remainder of Kessle's mob was easy-peasy to deal with. It took me only two attempts overall to dispatch them taking barely a scratch across the party in the process on the second succesfull attempt. Although very welcome after the collossal struggle to deal with Kessle herself, in fact this is not what I would describe as actually fun – too easy for a main encounter.

In short my view is Kessle is so powerfull that you are forced to neutralise her immediately or you are certain to lose, but she is also so difficult to neutralize mathematically that it takes many, many attempts to do so and there is no skill involved, purely RNG.