I just finished him on normal, but found the fight extremely easy and satisfying. I just ran around, keeping up quen, and hitting him with hard combo attacks. I think the key here is patience. But with no one else surrounding me, no painful barriers like fire, and being able to use my full witcher skills, this fight was really a cake walk.

I had problems beating the big bosses (where I turned down difficulty level) but I didn't find this fight particularly hard: I beated him on hard without too much pain and without bombs or knives.
I just kept quen on me, put a yearden trap as soon as his protection wear off (running in circle when he was protected) and when he activated my trap hit him with 2 strong attacks and more fast attacks until he parrys: as soon as he parrys roll away and repeat.

25 grapeshot bombs and letho is done in 10 secconds

People who specced sword but forgot to get rank 2 parry find this fight almost impossible without spamming bombs. You really badly need the ability to parry without taking damage to kill Letho. Unfortunately, parrying without taking damage doesn't seem important to someone playing through the game for the first time UNTIL you get to that fight.

I bet there are other skill tree combinations that would make this fight very, very tough, too.

Of course, no one would have any trouble if we had the ability to drink potions without meditating. But alas, we don't, and the alchemy tree suffers horribly.

I never even got a single rank in parry - and I won the fight first time. Took most of his health from hacking away, then rolling away, then hitting him in the back, dodging his magic, and using a knife or 3. I didn't even use bombs! As I said, I just wonder if gamers have simply become crap at playing games - I'm far from the best player there is, but when so many people act as if this game is so hard when it takes me just a few tries at most to get past it ...

His recoils take a little while. So roll away when he comes at you, and attack him from behind.

I had an impossible time with him at first, but restored a save game, crafted some armor, did some side quests to level up, mutated some talents, built some bombs, then came back and beat him... This game doesn't tell you anything explicitly like everything else seems to these days. I found that it was a much more "fair" fight after I beefed up my armor class a lot.

I never managed to kill him. After I lower his health to half its maximum a cutscene triggers and he beats the hell out of me, and goes after Triss.

Is there a way to actually kill him? I don't want him to kidnap triss.

At first I raged too at this boss fight, especially because the autosave didn't let me use potions. Anyway, this fight is way too easy if you keep on doing that:

* circle around him closely all the time, so he doesn't use his shield.
* use aard, attack 2 times or 3, if you are brave enough :)
* repeat

you don't need anything else but staying close to him, he is quite slow and you can abuse that quite easily.

Possible minor spoiler ....


I don't believe there is any way to totally beat him; Triss is going to be captured. if I'm wrong, then chapter 2 has a totally different main plot that I haven't seen in either of my two play-throughs!

nope, you can't kill him.

On hard I found the easiest way to beat him for me(without "cheesing" with bomb/dagger spam), was to run around dodging his attacks until his Quen goes down, hit him with a Igni, then charge him with a 1-2 combo (that is, quick attack followed by a strong attack, he can't block either), cast Aard making him unable to block yet again, another 1-2 combo, repeat until you run out of vigor.
You can also use bombs and traps to get rid of his Quen earlier.

It should take you a few repetitions of this to get it, depending on the amount of vigor you have.

2/2 in the improved dodge skill helps out immensely.

I completely disagree with this. There is one disproportionately good way to beat him, and that's with almost exclusive sword use. I am a magic build, and attempts to intelligently use all of my signs failed (I died about 25 times) because he usually did the same thing I was trying to do, but faster (even when my signs cast properly, but especially when I stood there for 6 seconds doing nothing while I tried to cast with full vigor) and better. Igni, traps, bombs (an entire inventory of them), and throwing daggers barely made a dent in him.

I came here, read that most people who were successful by being aggressive with the sword (possibly using daggers or Aard to allow continued sword use) and beat him on the very next try. So, sword is so much better (against this guy, but possibly in general) that even someone with 0 points in the sword tree is more successful with the sword than using any ability they've put points into.

It's additionally frustrating that in order to have potions in the battle, you need to load an older save and race through the cut scenes so that they don't expire. Or, as some suggested, load an older save and stock up on a particular type of bomb, or daggers. There's a big difference between a challenge and requiring your character to know what is about to happen to him in order to not die - it really pulls you out of the world if you need to die, go back, and prepare based on what you learned by dying by doing things your character would have no way of knowing they needed to do yet. Maybe this is fine for an Emerald Weapon (or for non-FF7-fans, a super-hard endgame sidequest that is only really for people with the game guide that have played the game through 4 times), but not for a main quest line.

>_>

Thats a lot of talking for something so simple.
You have quen which gives you unlimited and free trail-and-errors.
Learn using that. If you can, you just are not good enough at timing. Train.

Also, another reason you might lose this fight is lag from playing in a higher graphic level than your comp can handle. It makes things appear as if you dodged but only the image geralt dodged not the actualy model in the game or soemthing like that

Btw, with quen on, i can kill Letoh without losing any health any day given enough room to roll and no lag. Its not that hard you just have to roll roll roll till his quen is out then bomb, dagger or aard to top his swinging then atk atk atk till he destroy your quen
repeat