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You should have willpower (and grit) up to six by the time you fight her, so at this point in the game you should be able to laugh as most attempts to CC you fail to your 90% saves. If that much CC is working on you it sounds like your grit and willpower are very low. (Enraged also grants immunity to charmed and I think very high level bard can remove it.)
I would advise a Respec to fix this, especially if you intend to tackle the EE added content... Also get a good supply of Constitution and Speed potions stockpiled so you are harder to kill. Hopefully you have gear that boosts grit and willpower, if not go shopping. Leadership six also boosts both of them as well as pretty much everything else important, so get that too.
As you seem to have noticed your own CC doesn't always work so well at higher levels, and that trend will only get worse. When you Respec try to focus your builds more on dealing and taking damage than trying to CC for it's own sake, as you will have a very hard time in some of these fights if CC is your main way to win...
Grutilda is a very tough fight, gl.
Thanks for the advice though, seriously! What are you thoughts on how to distribute ability points in schools vs passive buffs i.e. Metamind/WIllpower/Physique? If it matters, my party is a tank who splashed Hydosophist, a pure rogue, a witch (Witchcraft/Hydro, wands), and an artillery piece (Pyro/Aerotheurge with a Hydro splash b/c Jahan has an unremovable point in Hydro, staffs). The party is currently level 14.
Tactician is an old pro at this mod and gives several good suggestions here. What I find interesting is that I would have advised you to do almost exactly the opposite! This speaks to the flexibility of the mod in terms of viable strategies. You really can win in just about any fashion; it mainly boils down to your preference of tactics. Just to give an example based on this fight. The last test that I ran before the Artificers update, I beat Garkulda with a 3-man party that won by a combination of blitzing enemies to death in a couple turns, perma-CCing enemies that I could not or did not want to death with right away, and exploiting Finger of Death. In this test Garkulda never actually managed to use charm arrows because she was immediately CC’d and then killed with a barrage of poison attacks. The mod will present you with a wide variety of puzzles to solve, and some builds will do better than others at certain encounters, so don’t feel bad if a fight seems hard to you that others claim is easy. It is very likely you can steamroll a different encounter that kicks their party to the curb.
So, you are at level 14. Grutilda, If I rember right, is level 17 or something and arguably the most difficult vanilla boss in the game, even worse imo than a certain Rabbit with a Fiery Temper, the Crazy Lady in Red, and the actually really cool looking Void Lizard. If you think you can take her on at your current level without a party of destroyers and alot of cheese (which I don't think you have and seem reluctant to do) you are crazy.
Grit and Willpower: Level 14 with no defence is actually not a disaster. Personally at level 15 I started focusing exclusively on defence because I knew things like Grutilda were coming, and the EE content can be BRUTAL in regards to needing high saves. By the time you are at 17 you should have grit and willpower both at 4 at the very least. If you only have them at one in the late game... my condolances. You can get away with a lower grit score if you have the talent that reduces the duration of effects to 1 turn, but it is still important and that talent is still good to have even at grit 6. Belts and Sarongs are your friends for increasing these, leadership 6 gives your whole party one of each and your source hunters an extra willpower point with the obedient trait. You shouldn't have to put more than four points in either of them and if you have good gear you can bring that number down to 3 or even 2.
Not Dying: Having your characters die in one hit from most enemies is another reason to respec. Put some more points in constitution, do some crafting to get your resistances and armor as high as you can get them. Hire a low level character and use all their free skill points to get a high level in crafting if you need to. You only need 15 in any of your main stats to have max effect and you can get by just fine with 12 or 13 for something like using magic schools as a secondary class for buffing your party members. The exception to this is strength if you are using the Crush and Lifelink Soldier abilities, and probably some other stuff that I never used and don't know anything about. Speaking of Lifelink, as soon as you can get it on your tank. It lets them tank damage for other caracters even when the baddies ignore your tank and go after your squishies.
Witchcraft also has a neato spell called Invulnerability, which for two rounds works as advertised and is a good way to keep your mages alive.
Leadership: High Leadership is objectively a must have in EE. It not only grants immunity to fear but buffs damage, armor, initiative, grit, willpower, crit chance. All very nice things to have! If you really want to you can get leadership six on both SH by the time you finish Cyseal, through gear and the righteous trait . Five is ok too but if you have the right gear you can have leadership 6 with only 3 points actually in the skill. One or two points with what are usually wimpy weapons with boosts and the artifact ring. (Which I was quite literally "lucky" enough to find two of :P) It's usually better to spend skill points than use leadership weapons though...
"Passive Skills" All your characters should intentionally or otherwise just happen end up with at least one free point in metamind from gear or traits, and more can be added from gear if needed. For identifaction I just had my crafting character with metamind 7 do everything at once when my inventory was getting full. Willpower and Grit should be at six as soon as you can manage it, it will make your fights so much easier even if your characters are squishy. Physique does not matter unless you are wearing heavy armor, just increase it as you find better armor that needs more of it.
Cheese: Cheese however much or as little as needed to win. EE is hard and they expect you cheese to beat it. Trust me, I know. If they do not want to you cheese something they have ways to make your cheese not work... so otherwise go crazy!
My last playthrough my own level 15+ party was two 1h and shield SH tanks and two archers. I focused on luck from the early game and ended up with a bunch of STR + INT gear, so both my tanks had a bit of Witchcraft and much later on some Hydro. Both archers had a bit of rogue for haste and adrenaline, and one had Tenebrium with occultist. The other had Hydro, Geo, and Witchraft. Not maxed out in any of them, just the minium needed for the buffs I wanted. (Yes, this guy was running around with low saves until the level 20s...and sometimes paid dearly for it!) I also had a crafting character and a bartering character.
It was simple, direct, complimentary and effective. If the archers go down oh well, the SHs are the ones that mattered and they were as close to immortal as I could get them. I had two Lifelinks, two Crushes, THREE Oath of Desicrations, three resurections, and three destroy summons. Many encounters I was able to simply overpower just from that. I didn't even bother with intentional CC, I don't trust their effectiveness and most enemies couldn't take me out before I could kill them (or at all in many cases) so there was no need. Unintentionally, Crippling Blow from my tanks did alot of damage for 4 AP and a one turn cooldown, Battering Ram was a good way to move around, sometimes the ground got electrifed, and having my archers pull dual Predator shots from that was just a bonus.
Ok back to cheese. Personally I pop mass healing on my party before every fight that lets me, AP free heals every turn for 5-7 turns, and you can keep Hydro at 4 to do this. I then spend my entire first turn buffing my party with rage, blessed earth, empowered fortify if I have it, water of life, encourage, empowered winged feet and survivors karma. I then deploy whatever summons I will be using, but I save Oath of Desicration for when It is needed due to the longer cooldown. I usually don't even attack my first turn, except to maybe have Bairdotr apply delirium. I then let the enemy waste their AP coming to me, and the fight progresses from there. I called this "Standard Procedure" For fights against enemies I could kill (or mistakenly thought I could kill) in the first round I just applied the damage buffs and had at them. I called this "Killing Procedure."
If I was VERY mistaken about being able to use Killing Procedure, I reloaded and went to Standard. If I got my ass handed to me in standard, I went to "Cheesing Procedure." Cheesing procedure involved using my ever growing collection of level 20 invulnerable treasure chests that I had been collecting the entire game to change the terrain to my advantage. This could be deployed in the middle of combat for 2 AP a pop or preferably beforehand. My elaborate portable forts and doorway blockers won me many battles, and considering what the mod does to the game I don't feel guilty in the least. Neither should you.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1301935235
Seriously, they WANT you to cheese, they designed the difficulty with cheesing in mind! You are not only expected to use creative thinking to beat EE, in some fights it is required. Incidently boxing her in does not work on Grutilda, she has battering ram. :(
If Cheesing Procedure was still not enough, well... I am both creative and very stubborn. Twice I respecced SH tanks into lone wolves with massive health pools and damage resistance (and most of my usual buffs) just to kill some particularly...special bosses. For Leandra I dropped every grenade I had picked up over the course of the game while she was stuck in conversation and opened up the fight with a rain of arrows.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1304704634
And for the last EE boss I fought I spent an hour and a half of preperation just so I could take out all three enemies in a single round by repeatedly metamind dropping a 5000+ weight object on them after hitting them with Crush.
Yes, I do have a bit of a bias against CC. It just never seemed to work for me so eventually I got fed up and did what I had to to almost ignore the mechanic entirely, namely maxing out saves and only using abilities that did damage over abilities that just did some sort of CC, while doing everything in my power to tank whatever the enemy hit me with.
This mod is amazing in the ways it gives players to solve problems. Just because my method was the best one for me doesn't mean that builds and strats I never even considered are not better for somebody else.
"Pathing blocker abuse," eh? I seem to recall my chests literally falling through the floor when I tried to use them in a certain EE encounter.... And another one where the floor itself literally tried to kill me as a exponential amount of teleporting spider-things made my defence useless! Especially since the only way to deploy them in that area was to drop them, drag placement did not work... Battering Ram also makes it quite innefective...
If you don't want people to do this remove most invulnerable chests. Even a high level lock is not much of a barrier when players can have a limitless supply of unlock scrolls and non combat support characters with very high tricks of the trade. Being able to smash the things to get at what's inside just saves time, and is a waste of points in luck. Alternatively, make them very heavy so they can't be carried. Most of them only wiegh 10. Though, this causes another balance issue...
I haven't used Crush on my tank at all, honestly because her strength isn't all that high- she has to put points into Strength, Int, Con, and Speed, so she doesn't have much to spare. (The rogue can already kill any squishy in a turn- thanks Preparation and Execute). I'm really hesitant to use Lifelink on her frankly- I'm pretty sure it'd just be suicide for her. As I read the ability, it redirects a certain amount of damage taken by an ally, after resistances, to the tank. The tank is only surviving right now through extremely high resists (above 60% to all elements, ~65% physical damage reduction from armor). I feel like Lifelink would just give the enemies a backdoor to her HP bypassing her resistances. It's very odd to me that you mentiont that Crippling Blow was dealing significant damage for you; my tank has a pretty strong onehanded weapon right now, and never deals more than ~10% of a standard enemy grunt's HP with it (generally quite a lot less, IIRC). I'm honestly almost considering ditching the Opportunist talent on her, because she just doesn't deal any kind of meaningful damage with it. She's currently using a level 13 crafted Buffalo Sabre hitting for 108-158 with +1Str, +1Con; the damage on it outstrips any other 1H weapon I've found so far.
I keep seeing people mentioning crafting/bartering characters, and I'm super confused. I figured that people were just playing the entire game with only two characters, and had a third dedicated to nothing but crafting and bartering? But I thought that was people just playing on an esay mode, or intentionally challenging themselves by playing with less characters than they could? But I see you mentioning a four-man party, PLUS a crafting/bartering character. Are you running a mod that allows more than four party members? 0.0
Re:Cheese; I guess I just figured that the game is eminently cheesable, but that in order to get the best experience out of the mod I should avoid doing so? Like I feel guilty whenever I pre-summon or cast Water of Life before a fight, but I often do it now because I simply can't survive otherwise. The fight with the sleeping goblin encampment, literally half my party died if I didn't open the fight with Horrific Scream. I find it interesting that your standard procedure has enemies wasting their AP coming to you; in my experience, if I don't apply some sort of debuffs or kill somebody in the first round, the enemies pick a squishy to target and I usually have one of my characters die in the first turn. It's especially frustrating how close the game groups characters by default when combat starts; often all 4 party members get hit by a single AoE, and there's nothing I can do about it...
(I find it hilarious that you suggest killing the shamans before Grukilda, honestly XD How on earth do you expect me to do otherwise? She's so absurdly tanky it would take my entire party multiple rounds to kill her, so of course I focus adds first! The elite orc Grunt can kill either mage in a single round if he starts his turn next to them, and still have enough AP left over to attack somebody else).
Also, an interesting quirk of this party build? My strongest single-target damage is actually Demon reactions, hilariously enough. I think I killed Grukilda by proc'ing three demon reactions on her in a row after damage amping Jahan and debuffing her XD The more expensive fire/lightning spells are actually often hard for me to justify casting; elemental affinity + Audacity means many of my Pyro nukes are a single action point!
P.S.- if it makes a difference, I'm strictly speaking running XC_Encounters, not Epic_Encounters- but I believe the differences are minimal aside from convenience. (In fact I think that XC_Encounters reduces the HP increase of enemies on Tactician... so things should be even harder than they are right now! XD)
I wanted to quickly chime in to add that it was never our intent to require cheese to win even the most difficult fights--rather to provide encounters that initially seem overwhelming and, therefore, feel very satisfying when defeated. That being said, the game is supposed to be fun and, in my opinion, as long as the combat leaves you feeling satisfied in the end, who cares how you did it, right?
Personally, I tended to "pre-buff" with spells like water of life and summons very commonly, I think it takes an exceptionally optimized and encounter-tailored party to conquer the harder challenges without doing so.
@Ithuriel: I very commonly entered combat without my party members "linked," so that I could pre-position each member advantageously. Additionally, this allows you to use only a single party member to make the initial engagement--you can even engage with a summon cast at a distance, which can be a very safe way to begin most fights. Do note, though, that leaving party members very far away makes it possible for some of your party to be out-of-combat when the fight begins. This can be potentially harmful or helpful, depending (certainly it does open up some options which are, in my mind, pretty cheesy).
@Tactician: The "mechanic" of chests falling through the floor on that particular fight was actually not intended! But I guess that is how it will remain :)
It's good to hear that some element of pre-casting isn't considered cheap; I always felt kind of guilty when I did so, tbh >.< I felt the same about unlinking party members; I think I viewed it as "This is the way that the game was designed, so I should play it that way!" Now my pyromancer will no longer ignite half my squad when he pops self-immolation!
Funny thing about that, I actually had a squad of four archers until level 14 until it didn't work anymore. The way I managed this was I snuck all the way to Hunters Edge at level four and looted it and almost every non combat area in between for high level gear and xp. I offically left Cyseal at level 8 and all my archers were basicly tanks until level 12. I was intending to respec my party at 15 anyway so my plan almost worked. Archers have alot of AOE attacks and can shoot basically any kind of damage so hitting enemies with that x4 let me breeze through Cyseal and half of silverglen until Grukulda and the goblins. Then I switched my SHs to tanks.
The main reason I use my later game party composition is that with high strength Crush lowers physical resitances by 40% or more and archers with their piercing damage take advantage of that alot better than mages. Some of those damage spewing ranger abilities on a crushed enemy that has been hit by a silver arrow are brutal...
My mage archer was an archer first and only used the spells for buffs and summons.
Yes normal bow attacks can be underwhelming even though they do decent damage on paper but rangers have so many abilities that do said damage to the whole group of enemies at once and supercharged attacks that do obscene damage to single enemies. Splintering Arrow and Fulisade actually work quite well on only a single target, and Karma gives a 10% crit chance to my whole party. Crush + a crit on Splintering does obscene 4 digit damage to a target. Another advantage of archers is that at high levels with gear that adds reflexes they can dodge a fair amount of attacks and get out of dying that round just from that.
I rarely ever use poision for the reasons you dislike it. I avoided the hybrid geo/ranger abilities and even refused to use any otherwise good weapon with poison effects.
The debuff from reviving only lasts two turns. Most fights with enemies nasty enough to take out my characters lasted a bit longer than that... Obviously try to position your newly revived character as far from danger as possible and next to somebody who can heal them. One of my personal goals for the game is to never have a SH down when an enemy is killed, as that character then misses out on the XP. I was able to adhere to this successfully for almost my entire playthrough and I don't even know when I messed up, I think it may even have been some non combat related thing that only applied xp to one of them... Multiple characters with revive also lets you plan on just when you will revive your fallen comrade so that it is your own characters who get to go next to cover for them and heal them back up instead of enemies who will kill them. And if they still die again then no big deal, I have two more tries to get them up safely without wasting scrolls. Or I might just decide I can win without them.
Crush is only good with a high strength. With all my characters beelining two luck and having Karma up that to four from the early game by the time my tanks came to be I had ALOT of nice gear for them. I actually originally intended for them to just be pure melee tanks but I had so much STR + INT gear that I didn't even need to put points in INT to use my level 3 witchcraft spells from either of them.
By level 15 your tank should have an above 40% block chance and yes, high elemental resists to actually do their job.
You are right to believe that putting Lifelink on my archers occasionally got my tanks into trouble, but far more often it resulted in me having two moderately damaged characters than one useless tank not doing their job and one dead archer. All my characters had at lest one healing ability and potions so what didn't kill me in a single round was going to lose. I also had two tanks, so in particularly difficult situations I could have them apply Lifelink to each other. Even in EE on tactician mode there aren't that many things that can take out the full HP of two tanks in a round. All my characters also had alot of HP and decent resistances to everything but poision and tenebrium. The average grunt *usually* couldn't kill my archers in a single turn by themselves even without lifelink...
Crippling blow deals more damage than a normal attack for one more AP with a one turn cooldown. Add that to Crush, my fairly high crit chance, all my damage buffs, and the potential to hit that Crushed and now crippled enemy with two Predator shots then yes Crippling blow does alot of damage.
Opportunist itself is situational, but it unlocks Centurion, which lets you get free standard attacks when blocking enemies in range. If my tanks were in a good slugfest with the enemy melee attackers this ability alone acounted for half their damage output and even got kills.
For weapons I only used ones with damage boosts, and at level 24 I crafted the Buffalo Sabre and Sword of planets to finish the game with.
I had a party of four max but I also had two noncombatant support characters that I switched out when I went shopping or needed crafting done. One had high level crafting, blacksmithing, and metamind, and the other had Barter, luck, tricks of the trade, and just enough crafting to get me unlock scrolls. The "merchant" character also used the respec demon to increase their reputation to the point where they had 100 influence with everyone and got even better prices.
Every time I went shopping I would buy all the crafting materials and give them to the "Crafter." However, Merchant left me with so much gold just from selling excess gear that I rarely needed to craft for funds even though I was always buying up any interesting piece of gear I found, even if I ended up never using it. As a bonus, sidekicks level up with the source hunters when they enter the party, so every time I did this my archers recovered the XP they from all those mid battle naps they took when they rejoined the party.
Use however much or however little cheese you need to beat whatever it is you are fighting. Obviously if something can one shot your characters when it takes you several rounds of focusing to kill it (except you are dead by then so you can't) you can quite reasonably give yourself some leeway to beat it...
Remember, I had two tanks, my party was designed and even expected to take some hits. With Elemental Tortoise on the tanks were not going anywhere without using battering ram so it is much more effective to let the enemies walk all the way over to me so I can kill them instead of the other way around. You will understand this more when you get to the EE added content where the enemy sight ranges are often too great for any meaningful round one attack on them to work well due to the distance involved.
I typically tried to position my party so that the enemy had to get through my tanks/summons before they could get at my archers. Both my tanks also had Taunt, which sometimes actually took when I needed it most. This defence didn't always work of course (hence the need for lifelink and my collection of large constitution and armor potions) and almost always resulted in all my summons dying on the first turn but when my next turn came around with all my buffs in place, mass heal doing its thing, and several enemies in reach of Crush without my tanks even needing to move I hit them HARD.
AOE attacks are annoying, yes. With defences up to six most of them that just did CC failed. The ones that did damage hurt a bit but my party was usually still standing by the time my turn came around and my own AOE heal took effect.
Incidently, ranger wolves and witchcraft skeles also synergize well with Crush due to their physical damage :) Summons are so much more useful when all their attacks deal triple digits.
My second attempt at her:
Turn one: "Ok, so this Orc Lady is dangerous! I better take her out!" -Buffs- -Summomns to distract henchmen-
Turn two: -Oath, some arrows but saving AP, Oath, Battering Ram, Crush, Crippling Blow, other tank repeats but without Crush-
Turn three: -Grutilda killed by archers- -Grutilda resurected- -All my high damage stuff is on cooldown...- -My archers are defenseless!- -There are TWO shamen!- "Oh....nevermind!" -Load Game-
Yeah Pyromancer and Demon always did sound interesting but I never got to use it. I also think there is this Pyro/Aero spell that works like a mage version of Crush. Astrologers Gaze might also help you out but I could never personally justify the point cost compared to actually just increasing damage.
Hey if your party has the kind of synergy to dump three of the things on one enemy like that keep doing what you are doing lol. I would still respec at around level 15 and 20 to optimize your builds and maybe try new ones if you want/need to. I found that even when I think I'm doing everything right having all my stats to allocate at once results in stronger builds than haphazard placement every time I level up. Plus, it lets you optimize around your gear. Say you found a bunch of great STR gear for your tank but you need the weaker CON gear they have now just to stay alive, a respec would let you change your stats to accomodate.
This is actually good, it gives you the ability to have limitless money. You will never be lacking in merchant bought gear.
Also, re:Grukilda- it went like this the first few times:
Turn one: Oh god there's an Elite Shaman, kill it! *rogue blinks to said shaman, burns it down with prep+execute* Everybody else buffs/summons/prepares (the rogue opened out of stealth with Eye Gouge on Grukilda so she was blind for a turn).
Turn two: Grukilda resists blind. Elite shaman gets res'd by other shaman, I'm sad. A single archer takes down ~75% of the pyromancer's health. I output some damage, tank charges in.
Turn three: Grukilda charms two party members, rest of the party is dead by the end of the round. As it turns out, a pyromancer with two Master buffs and Oath of Desecration wipes your party very fast if he gets charmed XD
I think my attitude unfortunately tends to be "if something can one shot your characters when it takes you several rounds of focusing to kill it (except you are dead by then so you can't)" I'm clearly bad and I should have done something better, made better decisions or builds or something XD