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.
Fireball-Quickened Fireball on the first turn takes out a lot of the duergar, after that it was just mopping up.
I used a crooked wand of fireball I found for pretty similar results, evens the playing field quite a bit at the cost of some healing afterwards