- Ekrast v2: Low mobility of my team (other than the sharpshooter) really hurt here, I don't think my breaker landed a single hit on him other than firebombs... and his melee AOEs are devastating even with guard up. This was probably the only battle where I was very conscious of my sage's MP (just 22) as I didn't have the luxury to use prayer every 2-3 turns (she was also in charge of pushing people out of death lazers in addition to buffing/healing).
- This is going to sound silly, but... the 4 birds on the mountain right after you leave town for the first time. They can gib everyone in two hits (and they will gang up on your squishiest guy), they have a better movement range than you, they can FLY (so no chokepointing / positioning tricks), and at that point you don't have anything good to deal with them quickly, whether skills or items (no firebombs yet, f'rex). I ended up throwing everything I had on the frontmost bird to kill it ASAP, then bunching up (deny back attacks and only allow two birds to attack one character) and sandbagging with bandages and stuff while my highest-damage characters killed them one by one, also sending my sharpshooter wannabe off to sacrifice himself and buy some time. In retrospect, I should've just picked up the bomb from Morin to blow them up!
- Ekrast v1: That melee attack is brutal, and the gate attacks aren't much better... worse yet, his huge HP pool and condition resistance means that I have to recast ward and guard at least once during the fight, which just gives him the opportunity to straight up gib people if I mess up the timing. OTOH after I discovered that he isn't immune to sleep darts, the fight became much simpler, basically just had to rotate my control abilities on him (Freeze was the other one) and prevent him from casting spells while beating his face in with my breaker spamming Shatter. I suspect blind works well too. Now I wish I had fought Ekrast v0 (in the forest) with the same tactics, but I assumed he was immune to status effects.
- The 3 snakes in one of the secret areas: I managed to cheese them out by grabbing the loot, using the crystal, then returning later on to engage them outside melee, but their ranged attack hurts a lot, too -- unless it's magic damage in which case I was just dumb not using Ward. Sleep darts may have helped here, but I left the wine marsh for last...
- Any of the anti-air -- the dual anti-air fight was especially rough. People get gibbed unless I stack up to recast Ward, but that means a bombardment, so everyone needs to be topped off. A single mistake / miscalculation and someone goes boom! Tons of HP too, immune to pretty much everything, and not easy to restrict their movement especially with lower-mobility characters.
+1: the worm that splits on physical damage in the starter cave. I figured this was going to be super easy, then when it was getting below 11 hp, BAM big heal. I check its skills, and sure enough, the jerk has the "recover HP when critical" passive. Thankfully my warrior could do
precisely 11 hp with a hammer, so I just min-maxed my damage to put the worm at the threshold then hammer it for the kill. Of course some of that damage had to come from my sharpshooter, so there were quite a few worms running around by the end. Oh yeah, that reminds me that the little worms in the tangle all have the "restore 3 hp to adjacent allies at beginning of turn" passive too, though they're easy enough to one-shot, so no big deal.
I think I missed some secret area in the Blood Quarter (necromancer and zombies?) Though zombies were kinda trivial via Unmaker + Sage nuking + walls to block their movement as well as the aforementioned corpse bodyblock 'technique'.
I didn't dare try Vise and friends. Just looked at all the classes and passives they had and went "nope, not happening". I have a save just after arriving at the tower, may try beating my head against the Seartial army at one point -- the melee guys should be easy enough, it's all the support / ranged units that are going to be a massive pain.