So I've found two "Proffesional Muscles" and sent them after Connie Lee, the tenacious hunter. 5+ times in a row they were unsucesfull. I mean "Tenacious hunter will SOMETIMES survive attacks otherwise unstoppable." Is this some balancing issue or did RNG just have its way with me?

RNG seems a bit unfair to us players. I summoned the "Maiden in the Mirror" or something (10 winter & 10 edge aspect) and sent her out on the hunter. He simple escaped TWICE in a roll with his TENACIOUS attribute lol.

I also managed to bring up a super hunter with GRIM, METICULOUS & TENACIOUS :P

Yeah, those are annoyingly hard to kill.

I'm unsure whether using a grail aspect follower to seduce them, or simply exposing them to tier 10 lantern or winter lore would be more efficient. The second option pretty reliably drives a hunter insane.

EDIT: There's also a tag that renders the hunter more-or-less immune to summoned entities. Lovely. The Hunter in question also had the Tenacius tag, and exposing her to Winter lore rendered her an Idealist (and thus, immune to that...).

Took about 7 or 8 attempts to kill her. (3 using summons, then realizing the tag, then another 4 or so rounds with a knive 10 aspect assassin.)

I'm sure this would make for a lovely short story - either as comedy of errors, display of incredible skill and cunning, or sheer dumb luck, depending on how you want to spin it...

Havent been able to summon anything yet so i dont know what you are talking about :P

While it's got little to do with the original hunter issue...

Summons/Rituals are pretty counterintuitive. There's more than half a dozen rites in game, each requiring a different thing to be sacrificed. Or not.

To summon something, you need a knock component. Either some knock lore, an item with knock resonance, or a cultist with knock levels.

You also need 2 more influences, depending on what you want to summon. The maid-in-the-mirror for example, a rather beastly creature to summon, requires both winter and edge influence. Some summons seem to require a corpse as well, but I've had little luck with those so far.
So, you need to fill your rite slots with things that provide those levels. Depending on the rite, you might have to sacrifice lore, an item, an influence (which are powerful, but volatile as hell, sticking around for a VERY short time), a follower.

Some of the lore cards provide hints, but there's more than one way to summon a Byakhee, so to speak. The exact combo matters little, as long as you provide enough influence levels.

Summons have a limited lifespan, but some can be "recycled" rather painlessly by sacrificing them in order to summon the exact same type of creature. They usually provide the influences required to summon them by themselves, so all you need is a bit of knock.

For shit and (insane) giggles, you can also portrait them as a painter.

There are also some Rituals that allow you to shift reason to passion and vice versa, and restore health from decrepitude. They only seem to require 2 influences, but very high levels of them in order to succeed.

And of course, there is that pesky ascension business at the end of the game, which requires a rite and very strong influences as well. Unless you come across that one rite that allows you to sacrifice half a dozen things at once, using a summon to provide the needed influence makes that whole ascension thing a lot easier.

Thanks! I learned a lot from your post.

I've been struggling with this game (last night I learned that being passionate about your work is akin to suicide - very funny). One thing I've struggled with is why the heck some things succeed and on some, the button stays dark. I've been using what the slot hints say as my guide, but now I see that that they tell very little. So there are secret lists embedded in everything, and success in the game requires that I discover and memorize them all? I may never get half-way through, if that is the case, since my memory is pretty bad. I can't imagine going to cookbooks online because that would take the fun out of the game. I think I will leave the game alone for a few days and see how I feel when I come back to it.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions. I've completed the game successfully for the second time now, and I think I have a pretty solid grasp on the current mechanics (of course, they might change in the very next patch, so that's that).

It's only confusing until you get the basic mechanics down. But they are not explained anywhere in-game, representing the struggle a cultist would face in order to acquire occult knowledge. Admittingly, wrestling the secrets from the game is half the fun.

From the patch notes...

Turns out that there was indeed a bug involving tenacious hunters being far too tenacious. Should be fixed now, at least in the experimental branch.