Urgent help needed
 

Hey guys. I can't get past the first boss (giant spider). It's kicking my butt every time I try. Can you give me some advice? By the way, I checked some of the older threads and people usually advice using trols. In my game there are no trolls in the first four islands. So that's out.

Check the thread for the 'hidden' store on the second island. It is said to always have trolls, but I missed it my first play through.

Other than that, spider checklist:

1) Did all quests before it?
2) Level 17 (if on impossible) 20 or higher on other difficulties?
3) Using the Leadership Valkyrie for extra army size?
4) Replace any rage gear with leadership gear

Good, now lets talk how to kill it. This is a fight that you want to take your time with. If your army is the right size and strength, you want something big and tanky (jotun, jarl) to smack away at the spider, while everyone else just kills the little spider stalks. If you have trolls, they are the perfect tank, since they heal each turn.

1) Yes.
2) Level 18 on normal. Can't get any higher.
3) Yes.
4) Yes.

Tried everything I possibly could. The closest I could get was lower its HP to 1600. I guess all it comes down to is luck. I read previous threads and more than one person suggest using trolls (and I have none in my game).

You know, I've always been a fan of KB but it seems to me that they've dropped the ball in this one. Translation issues, ridiculous amounts of gold, impossible (and stupid) boss fight, countless bugs, etc. Good thing I'm playing with a pirated copy. It would've really sucked if I'd have actually paid for it. Thank god for hackers.

It is a hard fight, but I don't it is stupid or even unfair. What troops are you using?

Also 'haha, I pirated it' is sorta immature to say when asking for help.

I tried various combinations: vikings, berserkers, royal snakes, jotuns, assassins, axe throwers, etc.

Also my intention is not making fun of anyone who paid for the game. But let's face it, WotN really sucks. They've obviously rushed it and I would've feel cheated if I'd paid for it.

Well, just to put it out there, I used Jotuns, Jarls, Royal Snakes, Maidens and Soothsayers. Got through with fairly minimal casualties (a few snakes, one jarl, one soothsayer). Jotun and Jarls smacked the spider around, snakes and others smacked the little spiders around. Used resurrection when needed, stone skinned both troops hitting the spider.

Here's my problem: I didn't find any trolls, royal griffins or maidens (they're all recommended in various posts). I also didn't find any stone skin or resurrection scrolls either. Now, I'm sure that I'll find those in later areas, but I can't get there BECAUSE OF THAT DAMN SPIDER! So I'm basically stuck. You see my point when I say WotN sucks and I'm glad I didn't pay for it?

He said Royal Snakes, not Griffins. Snakes are guarunteed to exist in the underground area on Istering. You almost certainly have the Trolls as well, but they are in an unmarked mountain area in Vestlig.

You don't need Royal Griffons, and you don't NEED the maidens either, they just reduce the total number of casualties. I don't want to make too big of a point here, but just because you can't figure out how to win a fight, doesn't mean there is a flaw in the game.

I know what he said and I have lots of royal snakes. But in another post someone recommends using royal griffins. As for the trolls, there're none in my game (I've looked everywhere; there're only jotuns and they're crap). As you may know units spawn randomly and I guess I'm sh*t out of luck. Oh, I also couldn't find any stone skin or resurrection scrolls and a lot of people say they used those spells to win.

Look, I'm not some newbie playing his first turn-based strategy game. I'm telling you; it's just not happening without trolls and/or stone skin spell. Goddamn spider summons hundreds of its babies, then either hits close-by units with melee or throws goo. Then it's rinse-and-repeat. Is there another way to defeat that thing (I mean without trolls and stone skin)?

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.

I actually have 3 Snake Rings XD
Still, another boost would have been nice. They'd be doing... what? Triple their normal damage?

I wish there was a way to consistently summon snakes, though. Lunge doesn't count bonus damage form equips, iirc.

I actually think the fight is very very unfair for mages. All other fights - even the ones after are trivial in comparision

I played on normal i had about 3200 leadership so max 2 trolls, i killed every enemy before the spider, was level 19 i think on normal

I didnt find any resurrect scrolls, or mana spring or whatever. I tried multiple combinations of snakes, trolls, sea pirates etc - the problem was that every round - 3-4 spiders came and the stack grew. I would be able to clear the spiders but than i couldnt harm the giant one - or even with summoning level 3 animals - the spider just hits to hard - even using range attacks.

After 4 tries which each took about 20-25min i never got her below 5000 - and even if you killed the spider you need to kill the remaining spiders too.

So anyway, before i threw the game away for being such a ******* unfair game to a mage (the fight would be a cakewalk with double leadership) i cheated with shift+^ and set doublearmy to every of my troops except one - now, with basically 6400 leadership - the fight was done in 3 rounds.

I hear you, buddy. But all you need to do is to buy some trolls, attack the giant spider with them and use your other troopes to destroy the little ones. Then it's actually quite easy.

This is a really stupid boss fight.

As a mage the fight is also not really difficult. You just need a couple of hard hitting melee units. I used a stack of polar bears and Berserkers. Always attack the big spider with the melee units, the other 3 unit stacks attack the little spiders. Don't use range attacks against the big spider to avoid the web.

I agree that it CAN be hard. However, I had an Ancient Phoenix and Books of Evil at the time, so I was able to no loss it. There's honestly a lot of luck involved.

I had those, however due the counterattack from the spider the troops will be down to 0 after 4-5 hits - and i had no resurrection.

I really don't get it. Are we even playing the same game? When I attack the giant spider with anything but trolls, the spider makes short work of them; even my toughest units (jarls and jotuns) can't survive against that monstrosity for long.

Toughest, hmm what's your poison resistance oh right 0 :) Suspected the giant spider hits with physical and or poison. Try attack him with Royal snakes.

As for the babies, crowd control + frenzy , your Jarls have a very useful swing attack, Axemen too though I wouldn't suggest them. Still raving about Sea Dogs, used a stack for killing the babies, tri attack, dodge and run, worked really well.

After spending many HOURS trying to do no-loss with trolls, I can assure you, Stoneskin works on the Giant Spider's attack. It is physical.

Head: 500-1000 physical
Left/Right feet: 700-1300 physical
Spit: 400-900 magical

Does the head also 'poison' you like previous games?

As for the spit being magical. Ugh. Double ugh.

There's no poison that I can see. The only "special" seems to be a chance to "curse" - with 100% for the head, 25% for the feet (and 10% when webbed). There's 2nd type of curse that has a 100% chance for the spit. I haven't really looked into what exactly each "curse" does.

Oh, and while I'm at it, the spider boss's resists:
physical=10
poison=50
magic=10

So Royal Snakes might be a poor choice to fight it, especially as it always retaliates.

Yeah I noticed that he retaliates against even no retaliation attacks. The snakes are a good choice against the babies, I just had a bunch of Jotuns and Polar Bears clobber ugly guts while the Sea Dogs, Jarls and Snakes handled the little ones.

Thanks Bhruic. Now I know next time not to attack the left and right feet!

I used Snakes as hybrid ranged characters, and only ever attacked the boss with Lunge. The ranged retaliation deals the least damage + the boss has a chance to stun with webbing instead (no damage done, so your troops survive longer), which can be dispelled.

I would strongly advise against using too many melee troops to dps the boss on Impossible, since it has 34k hp ... every stack of melee troops (except trolls) I tried would pretty much die out before the boss hit red health.

Ah yes, the glowing magical spit ball. Yeah, I don't bother using stoneskin for that... since it didn't seem to do much or do anything -- looks like I was right as it is magical! Good information!

The "curse" drops your morale to "unhappy". I'm not sure if it has any additional side effects, but it gives him a chance to kill my trolls since my defense drops enough.

Actually, sometimes the arms are still better to go for because you can only be attacked by 2 spider stacks at once vs 3 in the middle. Plus, getting 'cursed' is a terrible terrible thing since you will get a bad morale. This is with the triple troll stack build.

Yeah, bosses tend to have special characteristics with retaliation. Aka, all ranged units will be retaliated against.

If you want to hit the spider boss WITHOUT retaliation, you can use jarl with SWEEP strike on an adjacent spider. This will hit the boss with ZERO retaliation.

Also, I have no idea how this triggers but sometimes you can hit the arm with a troll and ZERO retaliation occurs. Not sure if it is a small chance to not retaliate or not. In any event, don't bet your money on it. He retaliates 98% of the time.