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.
Huh, I have no memory of such a fight - my conclusion to Act 1 was a fight against the Githyanki inquisitor (equally fucking hard though, the dice were being hugely unkind to me). Was this in the underdark? I never did go down there for long.
Yes, OP describes a fight in the underdark. I managed to skip it by accident even though that’s the route I took.
God this game has so much replayability, so many optional plot points!
Oh shoot I forgot that there’s other paths now besides the underdark. Wife and I have just been revisiting the early access content.
Honestly the almost immediate beholder and minotaur encounters from one of the entrances left me too terrified to return. Ended up taking the mountain pass instead, and it was beautiful.
I never even saw the beholder this time! Did a little exploring beforehand and by the time I went to the beholder and all the petrified drow, it wasn’t there.
The fight is doable. A Control Wizard/Sorc, Repelling Blast Warlock, or Tavern Brawler Barbarian/Stronk/Fighter/Druid make pretty short work of it by tossing all but 4 (Nere, Thrinn, the Merchant, and the Archer on the high ground) into the lava or off the stage.
I killed all the druegar (a lot of yeeting into oblivion) before fighting nere.
I made the mistake of leaving the area without resolving that situation, and when I came back the fight was over. lol.
spoiler
It took me ages to figure out how to navigate that location, and so I left and returned. But I left after I had spoken to Nere through the cave-in. Then when I returned a little while later the Duergar’s had already killed Nere and executed all the gnomes. Oops. ::: spoiler
Unfortunately I missed it completely. While exploring Grymforge I accidentally took the boat back to the underdark beach and by the time I returned and fully explored the rest of Grymforge before going to meet Nere he was already dead. I didn’t realise it was on a timer.
After doing the forge stuff I then just went the mountain pass route instead to genocide the githyanki.
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.
I did not get the impression you had to fight him at all, though I chose to do so knowing I was in league with the duregar. Sounds like you deliberately picked a fight with a guy that had a lot more friends than you — I would kind of expect that to be hard.
