For most of act 1, fights felt reasonably difficult. There were only a few points where I had a tpk. However, between early access and now, that last fight felt like a sharp spike in difficulty.
My first time through, it took me and my wife 2 days to finally cheese it. This time around it still took us 3 or 4 reloads and something I’ll talk about in the spoiler section before we made it.
It seems like you suddenly need to get good at really strategizing or find some extra wrinkle to make it possible. But I’m curious to hear how other folks managed to get through the fight.
Spoilers
I had no idea until today on our third reload that you could recruit the duergar rebels to fight with you against Nere. Suddenly having an entire army of allies to help out really feels like how the fight was intended. It was only through abusing running away to long rest and have Withers res folks that we managed to take everyone on by ourselves before.
I had always figured there was some weirdness in encounter balance and not that I had missed the way the fight is supposed to play out. If someone here managed to take down Nere, his followers, AND the rebels, please let me know how you pulled that insanity off. I can already tell that Act 2 is going to force me to step up my game on the strategy end of things.
I tried that fight a couple times before giving up on the quest because I already had another route to Moonrise. I expect recruiting allies is necessary because fighting that many duergar is mega difficult
Spoilers
If you let Nere kill the gnomes and Captain Thrinn, you can agree to fight on his side (to the disapproval of some companions), but the fight is still ridiculously hard.
It’s very cool that there’s now a lot more flexibility to how you can approach these situations compared to what we had in EA. I’m excited to get fully past act 1 so that I’m not going off of how EA conditioned me to approach everything