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I've been tinkering with my team in hard mode with the newest update, and really enjoying the challenges. I keep things fairly balanced (I think) with Elenor as a thief, plus Loren (duh), Amukiki, Sauzor/Ramas (depending on the battle), and usually alternating between the rest of the mages or the archers based on what opponents I'm facing.

I am having a real big problem with defeating Karen in Hard Mode for Loren's personal quest though. Loren's at level 19 at the moment, but Karen usually takes me down in just a couple hits! Any suggestions?

I think depends which skills you have with Loren, when I tried that battle (was lower level) I had Knockdown which causes Staggering, so reducing attack/defense/speed values of Karen and making possible to defeat her.

Hm, guess I'll try that then. I've mostly built up Loren's Rally, double weapon skills, and health.

My tips for beating Karen:

1) De-equip Karen. It will make things slightly easier since it will lower her stats when you face her.
2) Start in the back row. Enemy Karen will always start before Loren and will deliver a painful Knockdown on Loren. Starting in the back row means that Karen will instead defend on her first turn and you will avoid her first salvo.
3) Buy lots of Haste potions. On your first turn, drink one so that you can get in 2 or 3 attacks on Karen before she gets to act.
4) Pay attention to the turn bar on the right. When you see that Karen will act next, defend so that you don't take as much damage and don't get staggered.
5) Repeat step 3 and 4 until she dies.

My skill choices for Loren were double weapon, health and Taunt so it should be roughly the same for you I suspect.

Ah interesting. Amazing how having the right skills (KnockDown an No Mercy in my case) can make a 1 vs 1 combat much different/simpler!

Definitely having the damage skills for it would make that particular fight easier and less trick dependent. But even if you don't, there are still ways around it which I think is pretty damn good, given that in certain other games, not having the right trick spells restarting the whole game. So plus point for Loren the Amazon princess: all fights are beatable no matter what!

Thanks. All those hours I spent tweaking the skills/rules were well spent then

Wasn't sure were to put this. I've put the skill points for the gladiator into the shield wall skill. But I have also noticed that the skill isn't always available. I'm thinking it has to do with the type of shield he has. I did his quest and equipped him with his special shield. But this shield doesn't seem to work with the shield wall skill either. Am I doing something wrong? It doesn't seem right that his best shield would be excluded from his skill set. This means all those skill points are wasted. And since this one requires you select the skills on both sides of it, that's a lot of skill points!

Hopefully I'm just doing something wrong. Thanks for the help.

Will check that, normally should work.

By the way, I loaded the savegame you sent me, and it was done in the versions 1.1 to 1.1i which were the "Ren'Py bugged ones". Probably you missed it since there were lots of posts. Anyway the summary is: I tried to use a new Ren'Py version which had autoupdater and was faster, but turned out it wasn't really well tested and was full of bugs. People experienced crazy bugs like the one you described, so I had to revert to the previous version of Ren'Py.
You can continue a savegame from the original game but you can't load any saves done in those first beta versions since aren't compatible anymore.

Ok I tried here quickly but the skills works fine (tried several shield). I think if you're playing in that outdated beta version that might be the problem, it caused lots of random bugs that had no relationship with the game code