So, last night I ran Fane of Kaprima for the first time. I found most of the fights to be interesting and challenging, in a good way. I was fortunate enough to have a good group; it seems like it would've been a nightmare with a poor one.

Then we got to Kaprima itself. We did kill it, but... am I alone in thinking that the fight is really poorly designed? It feels like they manufactured difficulty by including a lot of very cheesy copout mechanics. For example:

• Two AoE abilities, one of which requires you to stand inside the ground effect, one of which requires you to stand outside of it. Doing the wrong thing gets you one-shotted, and both effects look identical with only a text popup to identify which is which. This seems really sloppy to me, forcing players to read text to know what to do. Couldn't they have made the pentagrams a different colour or something?

• Inescapable red circle. What is the deal with this? When the fight was explained to me, I was told to run out of it. It's impossible to run out of it; top speed isn't fast enough. If you Backstep out of it, it follows you and kills you. Is there a specific time you need to Backstep? What about classes who don't have a rapid escape; do Berserkers have to Block it? Again, it just seems needlessly cheap and contrived.

• At one point in the fight, Kaprima leapt on top of me and one-shot me with no warning given or time to react. In a game where dying causes you to permanently lose potentially expensive item enhancements, is it really acceptable to include unavoidable instant-death mechanics? Or was this somehow my fault or the tank's fault?

I've heard Balder's Temple is worse, and that makes me really apprehensive about trying it. I understand "challenging", but when it starts to border on "ruthlessly unforgiving and cheesy" in normal modes... I dunno, it just seems a bit cheap to me.

Edit: Well, thanks for all the comments. I suppose the source of my frustration is how quickly the fights reach this level of difficulty. Most of the dungeons are not particularly tough, excepting Saravash and I suppose the dragon at the end of Sigil Adstringo... even Killian and Thulsa are pretty simple, then you get to Kelsaik, FoK, and BT and the difficulty increase is so dramatic it's a slap in the face.

At any rate, I'm sure I will get used to it with a little practice and some gear upgrades. Thank you for the insights. At the very least, I ought to have a better idea of what to do when I get the orange circle next time. :)