I was able to beat that stuff just last night at level 3. They crushed me at level 2. I'm playing on challenging which is one up for normal.
A couple things I did different the second time around:
Load up my tank physically and magically. Spent a pile of cash on a +1 full plate armor for her that Oleg had for sale. She also has a bracer of armor and a ring of protection and a cloak of something or another. I then buff her with shield of faith and mage armor. And then have her play in defensive stance most of the time. And then I set the dwarf cleric to mostly just load up on heals and he fights beside her with one of those team defensive abilities (which she has too) and just starts throwing heals the moment she takes hits. I have the bard back her up with cure light wounds too. (I could probably swap the bard for a dedicated healer but she's also my rogue for traps and such.) In a pinch she can drink heal potions.
Things usually go well enough then. If the tank goes down I pretty much have to reload because all my defense was right there but it made the room full of skeletons and the elk temple doable.
I think if I start over again I'm going to try to plan the party better:
Dedicated tank
Dedicated healer
Dedicated buffer (mainly for the tank)
Dedicated debuffer
Dedicated DPS x2
"Dedicated debuffer" maybe being a necro wizard? Usually my debuffs all get resisted but if I specialized I could probably get past that.
I could also see getting two tanks. The skeleton room was a little tricky because someone ends up off tanking.
My first play attempt I was trying to do more of a party of generalists but I think to really beat a lot of these encounters on the harder difficulties you need specialists. My party of generalists whiffed way too much and just got crushed by incoming damage. Second time around I made my character be a balls to the wall evocation wizard but still waffled a bit with the rest of the party. By level 3 I knew more what I wanted though and took that level up to make them more team oriented and more specialized. (i.e., picking up the dwarf cleric and changing his memorized list to pretty much just all heals)
Tempted to try the Vllad plan and start over again and get a party of mercenaries. Apparently you can custom design them? It's too expensive at level 3 though.
A couple things I did different the second time around:
Load up my tank physically and magically. Spent a pile of cash on a +1 full plate armor for her that Oleg had for sale. She also has a bracer of armor and a ring of protection and a cloak of something or another. I then buff her with shield of faith and mage armor. And then have her play in defensive stance most of the time. And then I set the dwarf cleric to mostly just load up on heals and he fights beside her with one of those team defensive abilities (which she has too) and just starts throwing heals the moment she takes hits. I have the bard back her up with cure light wounds too. (I could probably swap the bard for a dedicated healer but she's also my rogue for traps and such.) In a pinch she can drink heal potions.
Things usually go well enough then. If the tank goes down I pretty much have to reload because all my defense was right there but it made the room full of skeletons and the elk temple doable.
I think if I start over again I'm going to try to plan the party better:
Dedicated tank
Dedicated healer
Dedicated buffer (mainly for the tank)
Dedicated debuffer
Dedicated DPS x2
"Dedicated debuffer" maybe being a necro wizard? Usually my debuffs all get resisted but if I specialized I could probably get past that.
I could also see getting two tanks. The skeleton room was a little tricky because someone ends up off tanking.
My first play attempt I was trying to do more of a party of generalists but I think to really beat a lot of these encounters on the harder difficulties you need specialists. My party of generalists whiffed way too much and just got crushed by incoming damage. Second time around I made my character be a balls to the wall evocation wizard but still waffled a bit with the rest of the party. By level 3 I knew more what I wanted though and took that level up to make them more team oriented and more specialized. (i.e., picking up the dwarf cleric and changing his memorized list to pretty much just all heals)
Tempted to try the Vllad plan and start over again and get a party of mercenaries. Apparently you can custom design them? It's too expensive at level 3 though.