What's silly is I'm not really sure how to tell my level!......on the Hero page, I see Novitiate, and 7 slots filled below...so does that mean level 7?

Looking at this made me realize I made an error along the way.....I thought I had Aard lvl 2, but it's only lvl 1....I did Igni lvl 2 instead, incorrectly, I think. That's probably why I'm having such a hard time stunning the Beast, I imagine. Not sure I have an earlier save point...or even sure I want to go that far back!....maybe I need to, though....guess I could get the spell from the witch too...and i never got to complete the preacher's last quest, as well.

If you have a few unfinished quests, maybe that is enough to put you up another level. Not played the game in a good while, but think it was 1000XP for each level (and you get less XP for enemies as you level up, like pretty soon just 1XP for each drowner, and there are millions of those things!).

1 point into Aard is probably not enough to stun the beast, short of great luck. With two it should happen more often.

The first time I played the game I had built the character 'wrong' (which of course was hindsight knowledge...), so was running around like an idiot in circles with the mini-beasts behind me, while trying to slowly heal.

Think it should also be possible to stop the mini-beasts from spawning, by squashing the bonfires or whatever it was. I never managed that because they kept messing me up, but I seem to recall it was an option for making the fight easier.

Honestly, the best way to deal with it is to have enough points into Aard, be a little lucky and manage to stun the beast, and the finish it off with a simple kill within 5 seconds. Otherwise the fight is a massive slog.

And they certainly didn't help themselves by the need to go through that loooooong cutscene with piles of speech options every time either. I've no idea how people have the patience to go through even sillier stuff in Dark Souls and such games without burning their house down in sheer frustration.

Thanks for all the help.....I decided to just start the game again.....and was sort of glad I did, as I had little idea what I was doing at first, and missed picking up a lot of loot, by not holding Alt down.

Getting there, but tonight played awhile, and the game crashed, so guessing lost all progress!:( That's a first, so sure hoping I don't see that anymore....got to learn to F5 more often.