I've been having a blast these last few days, bought the starter pack even, but now I don't really want to go on. My options are the Arena, where the 2nd fight seems unfair for level 9s (especially when the dwarf fighter started on one side of my wizard with a wall on the other side... great), or Return to Woodhome, which has a pretty crappy epic reward that I don't actually want at all. I have no idea what inspired the devs to make an "epic" weapon with 5 different ways to debuff or harm yourself or your team, but I would never even consider using it. I'm stuck. I guess I can keep retrying the arena until I get an ideal start position layout. I don't think that is how that fight should work, either, while I'm moaning.
Yeah, the second fight was one of the hardest fights in the game for me, but you do have some options. It should be possible to beat it even with very weak gear. I would advise killing the hulk first as he has by far the strongest attacks and can easily kill a character in a single turn. Kill the hulk at range if possible with stabs (range 2 melee attacks) or distance mage attacks. If you have it, lava terrain helps a whole lot here if you think the hulk has used all his movement up. The zombies can only move 1 square per move, so it is easy to ignore/outrun them until the two threats are dead. The dwarf warrior is your second priority once the hulk is down (it's ok if you sacrifice your warrior to kill the hulk, since you can beat the rest with just two people.) He has mostly chops but doesn't usually exceed 5 or 6 damage per strike. Then once he is dead if your mage is alive at all you should be able to kill the zombies (make sure some sort of armor destroy is somewhere in your mage's deck for when they draw resistant hide). All in all, equip as many stabs as possible on your melee characters and distance damage/lava terrain (hot spot and wall of fire) on your mage. Keep your distance from the hulk as much as possible and focus your damage on it. If you absolutely can't get past it, you always have to option of playing a few multiplayer maps each day in hopes of better gear. You can get two gold chests with guarenteed rares in them for relatively little effort each day (you should be able to win three games eventually even with the starter pack gary gives you). I agree that the guarenteed epic from woodhome isn't very useful for the arena, but that's ok because the guarenteed epics for paid content aren't designed to be the "best" epics (otherwise it would be pay to win). As an absolutely last resort you can grind the earlier maps and level your characters up, but the game is designed so that shouldn't be necessary.
Funny, the Giant Skeletal Arm is the only treasure hunt reward I'd consider using. And I found the arena qualifiers to be easy compared to the surrounding dungeons. If you can't get lucky with your starting position in the second map, just skip the dungeon and try the level 10 ones instead. I found them harder, but for completely different reasons.
Don't feel bad, a lot of people hit this type of situation on the first time through the game. I'll give my standard suggestion. Now that you have some items, but are struggling with your specific party, start another party from the very beginning. Try out different race/class combinations. You'll find it to be easier as you already have some better items to start them with. As you replay the adventures you will of course obtain new items that will be able to help you out. And by the time you get back to the level 9 adventures you'll also have more options in terms of characters you can use on any adventure (maybe you don't use a dwarf warrior on that adventure?).
