Overlord Difficulty

[Xanirus]

This has been my first time encountering an overlord since the major changes, and, well, he really does feel like an overlord now.  But really, twice the level of the continent?  I normally play the game on skilled but I had to tone it down all the way to the easiest difficulty just to make it the Overlord zone manageable, (not to mention I had 3 ghosts and one bee boss in one of the rooms in a very confined area, wasn't very fun) and I felt like there was nothing I could do about it.  For whatever reason on my list of "Things to do" I had "get two ranged spells to level 6," even though I already did.  I knew I couldn't get any better enchants as the continent was as high as it was going to get already, and a lot of my spells were level 6 as well.  I took it slowly, keeping my distance for the regular enemies, but bosses in the tower?  Ouch.  Was I missing something, something I could of done to make it easier?  (Other than the difficulty.)

[x4000]

Goodness, it's suicide to go after him at that point still!  You'll want to make sure that you kill the lieutenants, as that lowers his level.  And if you did that (it sounds like you did), make sure to use your NPCs to soften up the overlord before you go in on foot.  If you don't like the NPCs stuff, you can down the citybuilding difficulty to the lowest level and that won't be part of it anymore.

Hope that helps!

[Xanirus]

Yes, I did kill all the LT's.  But I was under the impression that sending NPC's to the boss was offering a chance to outright kill him or not at all, not just soften him up.  And since the % was quite low anyway, I figured there was no chance or you just weren't meant to send them to the overlord; as if it was a task meant for the player alone.

[x4000]

Ah, gotcha.  Yeah, you have to increase the skill of your NPCs.  And I believe that the descriptive text on the Attack Overlord mission has details on how it just removes one level rather than killing him.  Also I think that the "increased level" message shows that now, too.  But it's easy to overlook those things when you're already familiar with how the game was!

[Snave]

What is kinda neat about the current setup is that perservering and beating up some of the monsters and sub-bosses in the overlord's chunk/lair provides a fast, albeit difficult, method to amass shards. Once all four lieutenants have fallen, I've found it quite doable to defeat all sub-bosses in the lair after only a single NPC dispatch, but the overlord remains impossible to scratch. Then, using the shards accumulated from clearing out his lair, I can easily level up another NPC to run a second or even third dispatch to knock the overlord down to possible or reasonable levels. Having said that, this approach can be quite swingy. The present setup of having NPCs deal great damage (1 whole level!) but be both difficult to procure and expensive to train is rife for RNG misbehavior.

What isn't very neat is that there is little guidance with regard to using NPCs. They're pretty much ignorable up to this point and then BAM! No warning, essential part of the game.