UK_John: Once again it would seem a developer is only interested in Warrior class! Bethesda with Oblivion gave you bows, but nowhere to get arrow, with even a specialist arrow shop only having half a dozen iron and steel arrows! Then you had Bioware with it's Dragon Age. Almost every DLC gave you, as a prize, heavy armour for the warrior class - never anything for the Mage or Rogue class!
Now we have CD Projekt Red that have given us a Dragon boss in the third chapter that you cannot beat it you put too many skill points into magic and alchemy and not enough into swordsman! I have seen two video's on You Tube and both that beat it first time had nearly all their points in their swordsman skill tree - going all the way to the top of that tree. Neither had hardly anything in the other skill trees.
So if you want to win this game and not give up in Chapter 3, like me, where I cannot beat the Dragon even on Easy, not even denting his vitality, because I put too many points in my magic, from early on start choosing swordsman skills.
Like so many RPG's, however much you want to play an RPG, it becomes an action game in the last 1/3 as the developers get lazy. It happened with Vampire: Bloodlines too.
I will look for God Mode mods or cheats to get past the Dragon, but even if they are out there, I resent having to use them just because of lazy-ass developers that are only interested in the first two thirds of RPG's!
Donno about that. I beat it on normal with a magic build. I had two points in swords (feetwork) ,1 point in alchemy (alchemist), the 6 mandatory points in the training tree, and everything else in magic.
For the first part of the dragon fight, i just stood at the top of the stairs and threw bombs at him till that part finished. His fire breath couldn't do diddly against my Quen -- or maybe it was my good armor ... whatever, he couldn't touch me. For the second part of the fight, I used up the rest of my bombs, which didn't kill him but did hurt him a little more; then I finished him off with my sword. I did have to reload a few times on the second part, but no more than on the Kayran fight.
I will say that if you want to just stand there in your undies and throw Igni at him, it'll be tough. My only use of magic in the fight was Quen. I went into the fight wearing the Armor of Ys, wielding Deithwen, and carrying 53 grapshot bombs.