Why is this battle so hard? The mercenary that starts near you is WAY OP with all his armor and high damage long reach attacks! And it's almost impossible to get to Lord Stafford without stacking your deck full of Scamper cards. The only way I finally beat it was by getting the perfect draw with my wizard so I could spam Firestorm, protect myself with Resistant Hide and then snipe away at Lord Stafford, once I was close enough, with Fireball and Sizzling Bolt. It's crazy hard to even got near him. Anyone else have an issue with the difficulty of this quest?
Only been playing since Monday, but have beat it twice. Once with a party of Dwarf Fighter, Dwarf Cleric, and Human Mage at an equal level. And again today with a new party of human cleric, and 2 elven mages which beat it while all one level lower than the adventure (took 2 tries though). A good choice of bolt cards can do plenty of damage as you move down towards the treasure room, the Lord doesn't seem to block anything. It requires a good amount of offense to clear the guard and dogs while still moving forward. Whirlwind can help relocate everyone, a card that grants flight can help clear the tunnel faster too.
My Warrior/Priest/Priest party did it by stacking their decks with 'Step' cards. Since I had plenty of healing, I even put my Warrior in the otherwise useless Sharp Shell just for the extra Lunging Thrust. Got a slightly lucky opening hand, so I was able to kill the mercenary in the first round. But that didn't matter much because I accidentally caused myself a traffic jam in the hallway, forcing one of my priests to twiddle his thumbs for most of two rounds.
If you can get access to it Whirlwind Enemies is particularly useful in this scenario, as is Whirlwind to a lesser extent. It can often reduce or remove the inherent time limit and allow you to focus on bringing down the more dangerous NPC's.
just got to this guy today and he is destroying me, by time i get anywhere near him he wins by just sitting there collecting vp.
Most likely, youll have to change your strategy for him....go with discard if your around lvl 8. You should also have a few boil armors maybe....failing that, go back and do the adventures that still give xp and build your lvls and item collection. I did it with step attacks too IIRC.
got through it with some gear rearranging and some lucky card draws, it came VERY close but i managed to get 2 of my people in there when he was 1 VP away from winning and from there he was a piece of cake.
