Ok, I'm at the part where you first enter the mist and have to play as the soldier. I have no idea how I'm supposed to beat the standard bearer.

Whenever I enter the fight area, the knights swarm me and knock me into the flames and I die within a few seconds because I can't move. (I miss being able to flip over enemies so much!)

Is there some trick to this? I've been leveling the magic tree, and it's painful to not use any spells at this point.

lol, I jsut defeated the bearer.

Tip: use your block. I have 5 vigor points from the magic tree, so i had plenty.
lol, man.. u'll love the next bit

Argh, I only have 3 vigor points, so they swarm, I block all three at once, roll, then run around in circles until they kill me. This battle may take a very long time for me. :P


And they seriously didn't think to put an auto save after the cut-scene?

I didn't want to create a new thread so I'll bump this one back up.
I am also having an incredibly difficult time with this mini-boss. Everyone's complaining about the Kayran boss being too difficult or being poorly designed or whatever, but this really takes the cake!

My first problem is that the arena is too small. If I get knocked into the fire, I keep staggering there, loosing more and more health. If I DO manage to get out, I already lost half my health. So that sucks.

The other problem is that I can't fight any of them head-on. They quickly surround me, and while I can block only a few swings, once I run out of blocks or someone hits me I keep staggering, unable to move, and lose more and more health. I can't fight around them because the arena is too small due to the first problem and also because I can't roll or do anything else.

HELP!

Bump!

Can anyone offer any advice for this area? I am getting soooooooo frustrated!

It took me a dozen or so tries to figure out a good strategy. If you can call it that.

Maybe this is a glitch, but I noticed it you stand close to the edge of the flames, from where you first enter the area, the knights and draug will ignore you. You should be able to rejuvenate your health and then go back to the fight. It doesn't always work - sometimes they keep chasing you - but it might be worth trying.

Other than that, I just tried to target one knight and kill it off before working on another. Blocking isn't so bad if you stand in the middle of the arena, then they can't push you into the flames.

There was a lot of running in circles involved as well. Although that might've cost me more health than anything...

Hope that helps a little.

I thought this was difficult at first, but it ended up being pretty easy, as long as you manage to not run into the fire (which was what caused my initial reload more than anything else).

The trick for me was to stay mobile at first, running around the perimeter, and striking opportunistically here and there to whittle down the more fragile guards, while staying on the move to not get surrounded. Then I settled in to a simple block>strike strike strike>block cycle with the remaining couple guys. The big dude actually isnt that tough.

I'd like to add that I found this extremely frustrating as well. Not difficult really, just frustrating. Having such as small space to fight, which had walls that seemed more dangerous than those I had to fight, fighting as someone with no skills other than swinging and blocking, and being unable to save after the cutscene... all of that was just frustrating; and now I'm on the next part of the quest. Even more frustration. I wanted to put together, constructively, why I'm not enjoying this particular part, but instead I'm just going to paste how I described it via instant messenger to my best friend, who doesn't currently have the game [with his text removed]:

there is this mission
where you have to kill a bunch of dead people
but
you don't play as The Witcher
you play as this dead soldier
and
he sucks massive balls at everything

you have to kill 2 groups of dead soldiers
and then a big demon thing
and then a bigger demon thing

but inbetween all this
YOU CANNOT SAVE

and there's no autosave

and if you try to save
it'll tell you in all caps
YOU CANNOT SAVE AT THIS TIME

and i'm all like, "i fucking hate you, game that i love :/"

the thing is
it's not that hard but
there are cutscenes
and the guy i'm playing as sucks massive balls
and i have to go slow
AND I CAN'T SAVE
so
it's frustrating :/

For the first battle (hapless, untrained soldier against group of elite knights and their big brother): There's a tree within the circle you can "hide" behind. Found it on my third attempt and it worked beautifully. You don't even have to step into fire.

Found it quite easy intil the big guy. Went straight for the standard bearer and killed him before the others could hurt me too much. Soon as he dies it goes to next cut scene. The soldiers were easy, i just pulled one at a time.
The big boss is a pain though, just tried 3 times and getting fed up of having to do all that other shit again.
Loving the game except for these boss fights were they just chuck you in without giving you a chance to use potions, save etc. Hate going back and redoing shit in any game, so much prefer the old witcher style boss fights.

I had a rough time with that section my first play as Magic build. I don't remember details enough to give many pointers, unfortunately. (Gonna roll Magic again on my fourth run, now that I know what I am doing.)

I can say this: My second game, as Swordsman taught me to always pick up Riposte, no matter what build. Makes the entire section WAAAAAYYY easier.

That doesn't solve your troubles right now. But at least there is hope! ;p