Ok, you can think that if you want, but (A) the trolls are static, not random, and (B) plenty of people (including myself) have done the fight without Trolls or stone skin. It's definitely a hard fight, but people have posted multiple strategies, and yes, quite a few don't rely on trolls/stone skin. In fact, the trolls/stone skin approach only really popped up as part of a no-loss run.

I didn't have trolls and beat if fine. On hard vs normal. People talking about resurrection or other things are mostly just trying to do the fight with zero losses. Just being able to kill the spider itself is more a matter of good solid army planning and strategy, and not about having a few really powerful effects.

If you really want help, post a save game and we'll see what you have going for you. If you just want to complain, then please take it to your personal blog or twitter account.

In which shop they're being sold? Can you give the exact directions?

This thread has some pics that detail the location.

I beat the Spider on Impossible without trolls ... so it should be really doable on Normal

I used all 3 variants of Snakes, which are very good against the spiders due to their high poison resistance. I only used their ranged strike against the spider boss in order to avoid melee retaliation (ensure that there are no adjacent units when making a ranged attack on boss, since boss can choose to retaliate with webbing which has a chance of catching one adjacent unit as well). I always used Dispel to remove the 2-turn stun when possible. Other 2 units were Assassins (which I used to mop up spiders) and Berserkers (can deal big damage early on when berserking if you're lucky with crits).

Still needed a bit of luck with criticals to take the boss down, and I was left with only half-stacks of Assassins and Royal Snakes.

Or ... you could use trolls. I wasn't aware of the hidden shop on Vestlig. Beating the Spider the hard way was very satisfying though.

Oh hey, did you use that one quest item? You get a staff from the witch that increases your damage with snakes by like 2 or something silly. I bet that'd rock with an all snake army at that point.

Hm I don't think so. Completed the Witch's quest before attempting the Spider. I wasn't even expecting to use any snakes in my playthrough lol ... but I was forced to experiment with all sorts of army compositions, probably spent like 4-5 hours stuck at that fight.

I was seriously wondering if there were going to be any quest items that were too awesome to give up. I confess that after checking a lot of them, I'd given up, and so I missed out on this.

I've always wanted a snake army.

Well, you get that snake ring in return which may be even more useful - but only when upgraded. It will probably be impossible (or at least very hard, as one should be careful with the word "impossible" in this game) to do the upgrade fight before the spider boss, though. So keeping the staff until then sounds like a wise choice if you intend to use snakes on the boss...

FINALLY! I found the store selling trolls and kicked that stupid giant spider's hairy butt. In fact, it was piece of cake with trolls - lost only a few troops. This is without a doubt one of the most unbalanced, frustrating and silly boss fights in gaming history. So congratulations to the developers, I guess.

Thanks for everybody's help.