Thanks for the tips guys. I realized that I got caught up in the main quest and didn't keep up with weapon upgrades, so I was doing minimal damage. I just ended up turning down the difficulty. Thanks for the tips though, I'll be sure to keep them in mind when I do a more thorough play through.

I had to turn down difficulty to easy from hard.
I didnt want to replay the "undead" fight over and over.
I must say that the boss fights (and save system) are very poorly designed and ruin this wonderful game.

Put down a bunch of snare traps before the minor Draug attacks you. Do the minor Draug, then wait for big Draug to appear. Lead him into your traps and lol as he is insta-killed within a few seconds of beginning the fight.

I never bothered to find out exactly how many were required, so 40 traps was probably a bit of overkill... this was on hard difficulty.

I think this borders on being an exploit, as I doubt CDPR intended it to be that easy. The same cheesy tactics work for some of the other minor bosses.

Would it still be poorly designed if you didn't die as much? :P

my tips

quen
dodge
strong hit from behind
take cover during his barrages(more than one escape route)

hard took about 5 minutes

about potions before hand, technically you are in control, you've just been taken control of , plus you re gen health out of combat anyway

It's not related to how many times I die as soon as the fight is fun and the savegame system doesn't force me to play the undead sequence before the boss over and over again.
I'm ok with difficult: at the beginning when you are weak at hard you die a lot and have to repeat many fights but every time you learn something and improve your fighting skills.

Boss fights on the other hand are , imho, not fun at all and also doesn't look like rpg fights but more like console-action game.

That's how it was for me as well (second attempt). Though I'd like to add that my Geralt had the Enhanced Yrden sign ability.

This. I killed on the second try. Second try because I forgot about Yrden the first time.

First time as swords I just put Quen up, rolled behind him and annihilated him with heavy attacks from behind.

Second time as magic was a little more awkward, I ended up getting a full adren bar in the fight before hand, dropping heliotrope and then hitting him with 5/6 Igni and then spamming heavy attacks.

This on hard, okay, two yrdens and a few more hits. Afterwards I doublechecked that I was indeed playing on hard difficulty and hadn't changed it by accident. After killing it on the first try and doing the doublecheck I was pretty sceptic and thought the fight would resume any second...

Yep.
I was using a red meteorite silver sword and it was stupidly easy.

I died a few times. Eventually won by casting quan (several times) and rolling around dodging arrows,boulders and his charges all the while throwing daggars and bombs which gradually took down his shield and health .......

and then moving in for a final heavy sword blow that killed him. Felt pretty epic.

but i hated the reload back to before the solider fights (really annoying and a poor design decision IMHO)


btw - doesn't seem you can use potions for this boss fight. they cancel out. its not the duration - Im using the 30 mins duration mod and I had no potions active despite drinking 3 at the start of the section. Something about the way they designed the fight cancels out the potions - I dont know wether it was intentional or something they will fix in a patch.

I noticed the same thing. Gonna suck when I play as Alchemist next. :P

(I wish I could say I am not doing that fight until they patch the Auto Save there. But, I probably will.)

This is bullshit, the game is glitchy as fuck and the controls are freezing and not responding when fighting draug
is there a fucking cheat?
this is bullshit
also, the game is fun in chapter 1 but after that it became repetitive and boring
also, why the fuck did the assholes make us restart from way back when we get killed by draug? why is the loading time so fucking slow (i have a fast fucking gaming pc)
each time you get kille dby the fucking draug you are made to start from the tedious beginning fighting the weak ass pawns that takles too long!
why cant we restart from draug right away!?
fuck this shit im tired of going thru the fucking motions just to get to this fucking draug and then have my fucking controls randomly freeze, unable to jump away or roll or move around or anything
and is there a way to lower the difficulty like in other games? i want to skip thi sbullshit