I keeping finding that for my build (full finesse focusing on daggers) boss battles are really fucking hard unless I cheese like a mofo or go into reckoning mode which just feels cheap as well.

Most of my attacks only work well if I can stagger the enemy but because the bosses have high resistance to that I have to strike and evade like hell of.

For one of the House of Ballads faction quests I had to fight two Crudocks and a Fae with a sword. It took me 10 minutes to slowly whittle down each of the Crudocks health and then when it was just the fae dude, whale on him with crit attacks.

I died later and had to redo the fight so I just went into reckoning mode and because they were too slow to interrupt my attacks took all three of them down in less than a minute.

Am I playing finesse wrong? I haven't been using any of the trap abilites. It seems sorta busted that the these fuckers wont let me use my core combos because they interrupt me so frequently.

Since everybody else is saying the game is easy it's likely that you're playing it wrong.

I'm playing pure Sorcerer, so I dunno, but answers have got to be in your skill tree/options. Maybe look at that real close, and respec a bit w/a fateweaver.

Using a bow, or any other ranged weapon?

And yeah I agree Reckoning mode kinda feels like a cheestastic resort, against bosses anyway.

@Gargantuan said:

Since everybody else is saying the game is easy it's likely that you're playing it wrong.

Mostly every other fight is very easy. The bosses are just fucking annoying. I could just go into reckoning mode to cheese them all to hell but i don't want to.

If your using only your daggers and not any of your other abilities of course it is going to be difficult.

Finesse is gross dude, something isn't right. I'm playing on hard and found daggers just stun everything constantly.

I was full finesse until i realised Might/Finesse is even more overpowered.

Big fuck off hammer damage + sustained poson on hit + 30% crit sustained.

And that's just at low level.

@david3cm said:

If your using only your daggers and not any of your other abilities of course it is going to be difficult.

I'm using the sustained abilities mostly. I do use the attack from behind thing, but that does minimal damage for the mana it costs.

I'll look into the traps but it still seems weird.

I tend to rain arrows on Crudoks, when they cast that mosquito spell. In general, use your bow to its full effect. Lay down traps when you got them staggered/stunned from bowshots. Use lunge to evade incoming blows and get in a couple of cheap shots in the back. Keep your cool and block ranged attacks. If you evade, remember not to evade prematurely.

House of Ballads was early on, so I must have been pretty low-level. Back then, I used alchemy buffs out of the wazoo for tackling boss encounters. Do that. If all else fails, engage in Reckoning mode. I never failed, because if I'd have failed, I did pop Reckoning mode. No shame in using all your tools, when it's necessary. Even if it feels a bit cheesy. If I remember correctly I did eventually use it in the House of Ballads fight.

High level Finesse is crazy powerful. Thanks to insane synergies and utility. Gambit, Frost Trap, Smokebomb and Lunge and Stealth - in combination with Bow and one of the two melee weapons. You can't have more fun than that.

@Seppli said:

I tend to rain arrows on Crudoks, when they cast that mosquito spell. In general, use your bow to its full effect. Lay down traps when you got them staggered/stunned from bowshots. Use lunge to evade incoming blows and get in a couple of cheap shots in the back. Keep your cool and block ranged attacks. If you evade, remember not to evade prematurely.

House of Ballads was early on, so I must have been pretty low-level. Back then, I used alchemy buffs out of the wazoo for tackling boss encounters. Do that. If all else fails, engage in Reckoning mode. I never failed, because if I'd have failed, I did pop Reckoning mode. No shame in using all your tools, when it's necessary. Even if it feels a bit cheesy. If I remember correctly I did eventually use it in the House of Ballads fight.

High level Finesse is crazy powerful. Thanks to insane synergies and utility. Gambit, Frost Trap, Smokebomb and Lunge and Stealth - in combination with Bow and one of the two melee weapons. You can't have more fun than that.

Sounds like I've invest too much in the melee bonuses. I'll respec next time I play, take more advantage of the bows and traps.

Boss battles are not hard, at all. I was playing Mage for a while, never had a problem with bosses (and pretty much never used reckoning mode) then I switched to warr and again just destroyed all bosses. What boss specifically are you speaking of?

@matthias2437 said:

Boss battles are not hard, at all. I was playing Mage for a while, never had a problem with bosses (and pretty much never used reckoning mode) then I switched to warr and again just destroyed all bosses. What boss specifically are you speaking of?

In the house of Ballads story line, theres a battle with two Crudocks and a fae knight.

@Canteu said:

Finesse is gross dude, something isn't right. I'm playing on hard and found daggers just stun everything constantly.

I was full finesse until i realised Might/Finesse is even more overpowered.

Big fuck off hammer damage + sustained poson on hit + 30% crit sustained.

And that's just at low level.

If you're referring to the Finesse Aura it's 30% crit damage which is only good if you stack a hell of a lot of crit, which you're only going to get by blacksmithing a whole shitload (and retrying salvages a bunch), not to mention crit itself has pretty intense diminishing returns.

Bosses were semi difficult to start with on hard, hardest fight I've had is with a non-boss boss super Niskaru, immune to flame when my primary attack was Mark of Flame at the time (ridiculous damage), didn't have fate up. The timing on dodges aside from trolls is kind of rough. Fate may be cheap but bosses are going to give you more exp anyway, stack that with a booster potion and you can get 4-5k exp easily, if you don't want to straight out kill the boss with it than widdle it down first. Some bosses can 1-2 shot you with projectiles that move in less than half a second, cheap isn't the first thing I'm concerned about.

It is against forum rules to include swearing in a thread title so this is probably gonna get blocked pretty soon.

Daggers + a Bow. Pretty much any good crafted daggers make the entire game a joke. Seriously.

House of Ballads boss battle is probably the single most difficult fight in the entire game. Mostly because it is so early and you are forced to deal with a lot of nasty enemies. But even then a single use of Reckoning mode and it's an easy win even on hard with any class. Just did it on hard with a pure finesse  heavily undeleved/undergeared (doing 0 sidequests, no crafting run).  All other boss fights further into the game steadily get easier with gear/level as you can pretty much stop taking damage altogether.

I generally use reckoning mode in each boss battle, if you don't want to do that, I would suggest using potions, I'm playing finesse and it takes a long time to get going but once you get poison and bleeds applied, other abilities start kicking in and whatever you are fighting just drops, use potions to get these status effects going faster.

I've found the build more challenging than say a Might build, but the rub seems to be with Finesse builds that you've got to be willing to play like a lightly armored, quick fighter. Swing in for a few swipes and then dodge away. Try to catch them after they've missed an attacked on you.

Unfortunately, this isn't always the most fun way to play, and it can be really frustrating when you end up caught in attack loops that kill you when you've spent the last 5 minutes whittling away at a boss, but realistically, you just have to play very defensively. I've found that throwing a few points into Might here and there helps to boost your armor to make the weaker finesse equipment palatable. I've not found a fondess for bows, but it looks like that might be an option if you want to play at a distance.

@Rayeth said:

Daggers + a Bow. Pretty much any good crafted daggers make the entire game a joke. Seriously.

Crafting kind of breaks the game. I don't use it as a result.

Just fought the gauntlet in Cradle of Summer (includes 3 Crystal Trolls), not especially sure how a purist would go about beating that fight on hard (have to keep the Fae alive alongside dodging). On that note there is one thing fairly cheap about the game: Every consumable stacks with every other consumable. That plus fate and decent daggers = 1800 a hit 3-4 times a second.

@BrockNRolla said:

@Rayeth said:

Daggers + a Bow. Pretty much any good crafted daggers make the entire game a joke. Seriously.

Crafting kind of breaks the game. I don't use it as a result.

Playing the game breaks the game. Seriously, the more you play the more the difficulty consistently plummets as a result. It's due in no small part to how few enemy types there are, and it feels like I've been fighting the same fucking mage (no matter who it is, they'll always utilise the exact same 3-4 spells) for hours now...

Man, this game I tell yeah. Kudos to Jeff for somehow managing to stretch 60 hours outta this. I've hit around 44 and that's still like 10 hours more than I'd of liked. I was originally planning on completing it (including most of the side quests) so I can post a fair user-review. But at this point I can't even be arsed simply sticking to the main story. I'm not even finding any decent loot anymore (I don't craft either btw) so that side of things is mostly moot now.

@Abyssfull said:

Playing the game breaks the game. Seriously, the more you play the more the difficulty consistently plummets as a result. It's due in no small part to how few enemy types there are, and it feels like I've been fighting the same fucking mage (no matter who it is, they'll always utilise the exact same 3-4 spells) for hours now...

Man, this game I tell yeah. Kudos to Jeff for somehow managing to stretch 60 hours outta this. I've hit around 44 and that's still like 10 hours more than I'd of liked. I was originally planning on completing it (including most of the side quests) so I can post a fair user-review. But at this point I can't even be arsed simply sticking to the main story. I'm not even finding any decent loot anymore (I don't craft either btw) so that side of things is mostly moot now.

I have beaten the game now. Jeff is not joking when he said to ignore most of the side quests and ignore 100% of the tasks. They seem like they are useful early on, but you really really don't need them once you get maybe 15 hours in.

Follow the faction quests (which I found interesting throughout, as long as you are buying into the fiction), and the main quests and then you will be fine.

I think I finished in under 60 hours despite skipping large portions of the side quests. I even skipped a whole zone I think.

@bio595 said:

I keeping finding that for my build (full finesse focusing on daggers) boss battles are really fucking hard unless I cheese like a mofo or go into reckoning mode which just feels cheap as well.

Most of my attacks only work well if I can stagger the enemy but because the bosses have high resistance to that I have to strike and evade like hell of.

For one of the House of Ballads faction quests I had to fight two Crudocks and a Fae with a sword. It took me 10 minutes to slowly whittle down each of the Crudocks health and then when it was just the fae dude, whale on him with crit attacks.

I died later and had to redo the fight so I just went into reckoning mode and because they were too slow to interrupt my attacks took all three of them down in less than a minute.

Am I playing finesse wrong? I haven't been using any of the trap abilites. It seems sorta busted that the these fuckers wont let me use my core combos because they interrupt me so frequently.

For that fight I spammed the heal button until I won. Question, what if you buy and use all of the health potions from the merchants?

@Rayeth: Yeah, the House of Ballads quest line was one of the first goals I set out to do. I think the main story point was still stuck at ''meet Arden'', like straight after you only first meet Agarth, by the time I completed House of Ballads.

The side quests, though, it's that same annoying compulsion that prevents me from letting them go... I can't help but accept 'em all and attempt to finish 'em of hope for some lewt or whatever. It gradually began to cave in of course, whereas initially I would actually listen to all the dialogue, and now I sometimes won't even read it. I still plan to complete it someday, but I'm going to have give myself a lengthy break in between. I still don't think it's a particularly good game, even if I were to stick to the main story/faction quests mind you; when Amalur is at it's best, it's still only just scraping the edge of being ''above average''.

If anything, playing through the main story is almost as depressing as the quicksand mentality of the side-stuff. I mean this is the main story, and yet 95% of the time you're still just going through dungeons repeating the same skewed combos/abilities against the same limited enemy variety - and the story is still primarily pushed forward by two people standing opposite each other whilst one pours out exposition as the other just stands there gape-eyed like a voodoo victim.

This is my main problem with the game frankly. Cutting off all the rolls of excess fat, and the pointless town perusal, leaving you with the meat - and even that isn't all too polished either. Amalur would of benefited if it was more like Dungeon Siege III frankly. Relatively straight-forward dungeon-crawler, allowing for more money be put towards improving the combat variety and what have you because of the much more focussed design.

Mad Spoilers Below! You have been warned!

I will try and cover some of them but I don't think I'll get them all.

@Abyssfull:

Really the issue IMO, is that it is simply too long. If they had cut everything from the area where you get your house to the desert area with the gnome city. And then maybe have 1 area in between there and Rathir, and like 3 less areas in the last continent it would be a way better game. The combat only gets boring because the game is too long. Cut out about 30-40% of the stuff in between and it starts feeling much better.

You're right though, this is still no God of War. Which is probably the problem.

So I guess I agree that it isn't the best game ever. I think you can still justify playing it (especially in later days for $20 or $30), but its no Baldur's Gate 2 (still my favorite RPG to play) or Planescape: Torment (still the best RPG writing to date, IMO), or even God of War III (best character action IMO). It sort of tries to do all 3 and ends up be a pretty mediocre game because of it. Ah well.

@Rayeth said:

Daggers + a Bow. Pretty much any good crafted daggers make the entire game a joke. Seriously.

Yeah I found that recently. Bows are fucking awesome!

@BrockNRolla said:

I've found the build more challenging than say a Might build, but the rub seems to be with Finesse builds that you've got to be willing to play like a lightly armored, quick fighter. Swing in for a few swipes and then dodge away. Try to catch them after they've missed an attacked on you.

Unfortunately, this isn't always the most fun way to play, and it can be really frustrating when you end up caught in attack loops that kill you when you've spent the last 5 minutes whittling away at a boss, but realistically, you just have to play very defensively. I've found that throwing a few points into Might here and there helps to boost your armor to make the weaker finesse equipment palatable. I've not found a fondess for bows, but it looks like that might be an option if you want to play at a distance.

THIS. Exactly!

What's so great about bows? Sceptres fire faster, spells do more damage and cover an area faster. Daggers I can see, but bows just seem sort of meh relative to the other more overpowered things.

@Fredchuckdave said:

What's so great about bows? Sceptres fire faster, spells do more damage and cover an area faster. Daggers I can see, but bows just seem sort of meh relative to the other more overpowered things.

Bows get into their own only if you fully invest in their tree.

Scattershot at point blank can wipe out several standard enemies and one shot jotun/ettin/bogan of same level. (on hard)

I had the exact same issue with that exact fight, and the advice here to use your bow early on is a good one. I think that for me, it was having a super early set of weapons and basically working straight to that quest--the daggers didn't cause enough stagger to keep a decent chain going. Upgraded weapons, relied more on bows to begin fights and it became way, way easier.

You know what's really busted?

The last boss battle with 4 Fate potions ... lmao

@Tennmuerti: How about every damage boosting consumable (and every variant of it) + that? I'm curious if there's a damage limit

@Fredchuckdave said:

@Tennmuerti: How about every damage boosting consumable (and every variant of it) + that? I'm curious if there's a damage limit

The reason i mention 4 fate potions for the last boss battle is not damage related. I don't want to spoil the fight for you. But if you really really want to know the mechanics of it (not the actual boss):

You can't damage the boss normally, he takes away all your fate and summons dudes you defeat to gain fate back, once you fill up your fate meter activating Reckoning will stun the boss and allow you to deal damage to get him to next stage, this repeats 3 times, you win. So with s afew fate potions you can just instantly refill your fate at every stage, basically you don't actually have to fight anything, just hack away at a boss that does nothing and win; finishing the "fight" in like 30 seconds or less.

Try hitting something from behind rather than just trying to battle it. There's a higher chance of causing stagger when you do that, and also make sure you are switching out your weapons when they are staggering. Finish one weapon combo, then use the next weapon combo. This will extend the stagger.

Beyond that, if you don't have longbow proficiency as a Finesse build, you are SOOOO doing it wrong.

Might/Finesse is brilliant, though.

No you just need to wake up and realize that is exactly what reckoning mode is for. You are supposed to use it to make boss fights easy mode, not to mention get a shit ton of bonus exp.

You really dont need to use bows at all as a thief...just take the ability which enables you to switch to the mobs backside and you can avoid some of the damage that way. Also invest into either the poison skill or the honed edge skill. Either one will get you some pretty nice procs towards the end of the fight.

Also get damage potions or damage deflecting potions. Use fate ability for the bosses with potions and you can do some major damage in a relatively short time.

Raise gambit skill to the max...when you get the hang of throwing bombs around you can sometimes kill a giant with half of its health left.

Thief is also pretty dependant of the weapon that he uses so if you are able to find a nice epic weapon you will find killing stuff a lot easier.

I dont know man like Im goin full stealht assassin finesse build which has pretty hight dps either Im killing everybody with sneaking attacks or killing everybody with two or three attacks. Playin on hard. But what is happening in boss fight Im just now against some kind of stone/ice giant dude something starting at Atha somethin he s just oneshoting me either with his ***** frost attack where he s just oneshoting me even when Im mashin dodge as MF or after one of his phases he s summoning some stone statues which u cant dodge cos why could u and then u die cos game said so. So yeah. Tried like 37 times and kinda thinkin that this is the worst possible boss I ever encountered. Side note I know it s just me but I hate arena bossess in general when the game said okay u playin sneaky assassin character so when u fightin boss Im gonna take away all ur skills and tactics and put u on one on one fight in small arena cos it makes total sense and developers are lazy and copy paste this standarts from 80s where every boss was arena based. And 60 years later nobody thinks that it s not so overaged that need to make it changed. So yeah. Im kinda thinkin abotu uninstaling the game right now which is sad cos I had blast playin it until this boss. Yeah I died few times but it was mostly my mistake and I kinda didnt saw enemy behind me and stuff. but here he s just freeze me and oneshotin me. Distuptin my dodgin and just oneshoting me with his AA or some other totally balanced BS. So yeah I feel your pain dude. I hate playin OP warriors and mages Im hard core finesse fan but this game copypasting the same ideas like million game before where they took all us advantages and fun parts of the build and put u in small arena with broken boss. Imune to frozen traps etc.