The thing that bothers me most is that you can't immediately go from a swing to a block, as there's this pause in between where the enemy can hit you while you stand there like a moron. I find that it also causes you to stagger, and then it takes mashing at the forward key to keep from being massacred.

I agree somewhat with the OP, at the very least the combat area should've been wider, the flames don't make it easy. Only section of the game where I had to drop my difficulty to normal, downright impossible.

wrong. that was my favorite part of the game. learn to block and time your strikes, moron.

Not helpful.

the hardest fight in the game is the dragon. it force me to use quen alot. I died about 12 times before I man up and started using quen.

1 + 1 boss fights is the easiest ever. kayran was harder, with the dragon being the hardest.

if you are talking about the fights before the boss in the ghost battle fields, I just don't get how you think it is hard :( the parrying is 360. I am not kidding try it. I just block and bam, every single mob around me is recoiling. and the guy I am controlling kills all of them with just 2-3 hits.

that was a very easy fight for me.

I played Chapter2 on hard as it was way to easy once i got certain talents in swordplay tree and decent armor/weapons. In this "mist" part of the game i never dropped bellow 90% life and all i did was run around opponents and hit them from behind. And when i got to Draug and thought i will actually get some decent challenge i just dodged his charge attack and hit him 4 times with strong attack and he died.... I had 30-33 silver sword with specter oil on it and no potions and it was that easy...

The only hard part in this game so far - i am in the middle of Ch3 was whole chapter 1 and the operator in Ch3 sewers, everything else should be made more balanced...

I was going to open a new thread, after ragequitting yesterday due to the Draug combat.

First of all, I loved TW1, I'm a huge fan (to the extent of being a fanboy), and I'm loving TW2 (except for a bunch of issues that, fortunately, don't drag too much the experience in the "shitty" experience).

BUT, said that, the Draug combat and whole "third" part of the Mist section has been thought by an imbecile, plain and simple.

I've specced FULL Alchemy, with just 3 talents in the Sword tree, I always relied all game (playing on HARD) on potions + adrenaline + Berserker, just to discover that, when you finally get to fight the Draug as Geralt, you don't have any pots active (even if you drank it before entering the Mist, as I did) AND you can't drink any in any part in that third section.

I didn't got problems fighting with the ghosts, I don't find what OP said as a problem (it was really easy to get rid of the enemies at the start of the section), but fighting the Draug with just Quen lvl 1, 3 Vigor and just Specter Oil on my silver sword and nothing else is near impossible, you have just to hope to avoid all the damage that the Draug can do, roll roll roll and hit him enough times to get him down, using a "lvl oneish" character since all MY talents are substantially down the drain. And it's boring that I have EVEN to start again fighting with the knight instead of starting directly against the Draug (autosave anyone?).

I think I'll need to switch at Easy for this, but I'm REALLY pissed off by this choice, it's really poor (just to don't say anything worse) gameplay design.

... it is a bit of a rant.
if you are talking about the Seltkirk part where you are fighting without the use of magic or rolling or items against multiple opponents, the trick is simply divide and conquer: don't rush them, just slowly walk towards them, and only 1-2 will attack at the time. If you just walk straight to them and keep on walking, then all of them will come out at you.

I think what it reveals about the combat is that Parry and Riposte are very, very important.

It has more to do with the fact that you're not using a witcher sword than not being able to roll or use signs. The sword you're using is horribly slow and has only like 4 attacks, with no separation for fast/strong.

I wouldn't call it hard though, since you have very high armor/HP there.

I made it all the way through this section last night for the first time, on normal. I was really surprised at just how easy this part is, condiering I had to turn the difficutly to easy on the Kayran fight. Without oils or potions, I beat the Draug inside of 30 seconds. I yrden'd him twice, and opened up with a chain of strong attacks. Easy. The fight before with the multiple guards was also easy. Instead of rolling, you run. I would run around in circles, Benny Hill style, and strong attack their backs when they were trying to re-orientate themselves.

Man, and I thought I was getting crappy at video games in my old age. You guys whining about the difficulty make me feel like a video game pro!

I'm playing this game on normal and so far it hasn't given me any issues in regards to difficulty with the exception of the Kevran fight, and that was also easy once I figured out the boss attack patterns.

I beat the Draug on my first playthrough, on Normal, in that 20-30 seconds, yeah.

Then on Hard, he killed me like 30 times in a row. Boy I was so mad! I just couldn't understand or think of what combo of abilities and augumentations made him so easy the previous time.

He was whirlwind-ing the hell out of me, and I couldn't dodge his charges. The big difference was, Yrden wasn't freezing him.

Finally, exceedingly po'd, I loaded a previous save, and made like 50 Grapeshot bombs. That got me past him.

Yeah Yrden was pretty much hit-and-miss for that guy. I wasn't happy about the message that he is ensnared when in fact, he is not. After some strenuous dodging (boy am I glad I put 2 talents into that), I manage to backstab him to death.

Necroing this thread just to say that most of the people defending the combat have absolutely no idea of what they are talking about.

Playing on dark difficulty, I went for a full mage build so I didn't put any points on riposte.

During this poorly thought out quest, geralt is possesed by random grunts,and you cannot roll out of the way, use signs, or any other kind of "witcher" thing.

Since I didn't invest in riposte, I was left with a character that could only very slowly walk arround, and parry.

All you can do is cheese the AI and do 1 strike on the first enemy comming forward, parry all the attacks comming soon after, HOPE you don't get insta killed by the shitty parry mechanic, and then run arround while your HP regens.

Having played W1 and W3, I can say without a doubt that W2 combat is even clunkier than W1. It's absolute stupidity to block essential combat mechanics behind skill talents without warning the player beforehand.