Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

This is quite difficult since Lord Bane begins battle with a LOT of life points, around 380 I think. The key to beating him lies in one particular spell, the "Death Gaze", which chops your opponent's life points in HALF, so you need to make sure to get this. To do that you have a) have a mage tower in your citadel, b) capture a liche and c) beat the mini-game with the scrolls to "learn" that spell. A and B are not too hard, but C can take a lot of patience and persisting, so don't lose heart oh fearless warrior!

However that in itself is not enough. The spell requires 45 green mana and 30 red mana to cast, so you have to make sure your "earth" skill level is high enough that you actually GET 45 green mana points. So I would recommend that every chance you get to level up, you add something to your "earth mastery". Mine was at 34 before I could finally amass enough green mana to cast the spell, in conjunction with the Relic of Ymorgia (see next paragraph). You can also buy skill points at shops in the game if need be, but they are quite expensive.

As for items to equip, the Relic of Ymorgia is the most important because it adds 5 to your Earth Mastery and will save you a lot of time levelling up this skill. Also important was Erik's Bow, which adds a point of damage for every 8 of your levels. So once you reach level 48 or above, your skull combos should be doing double digits of damage every time with this weapon (assuming a half-decent "battle skill" rating... mine was 26). I forget which quests you get these items from, but just playing through the game will unlock them. I don't think really matters which armor or helm you equip.

Other miscellaneous hints: Bane will do a lot of damage to you, so having a healing spell such as Cauterize (which unlocks at Level 20) is very useful. Aside from that and Death Gaze, you won't really need any of the others though. Having Darkhunter in your party is handy for the damage he does at the start... likewise Patch, although he only does damage 20% of the time. Winter and Sunspear's Spirit are also useful, but not essential.

In the actual battle, your priority needs to be to amass enough green and red mana to use the Death Gaze. The time I beat him, I managed to use it twice, once for 158 points of damage and again for nearly 50! Obviously you need to still use any skull combo that appears too, because if you don't then Bane will! So you have to use it for defensive reasons as much as any other, but your main attacking weapon is Death Gaze.

This approach is not faultless, and beating Bane will never be easy; it took me 4 or 5 attempts because Bane seems to try and steal the green gems away from you with his spells (unusually smart for an AI!) and also he is able to block your spells sometimes, which can be frustrating. But persevere, and you too can beat death.

Unless you are an over-achiever, the easiest way to beat Lord Bane is to simply lower the difficultly to easy. On the page after you select quest mode, you can change the games difficultly in the upper right hand corner.

Bane attacks rarely on easy and doesn't protect himself as much. I am a level 50 knight and I used the Greater Troll Ring to boost my health every turn for having enough blue mana in my pool.

I found that the trample spell is great to use if you can get lucky enough that he doesn't keep spell blocking you. It only took me one try on easy, so hopefully you won't have that hard of a time either.

I would almost complete agree with the solution Th34lb1n0k1d with some minor additions:

1st - You really don't have to level up only your "Earth". You can simply BUY it in your Citadel. I'm not sure how much, but I bought the most of my 34-Earth Levels. And I think its really the only good thing you can do with all the gold you winning.

2nd - Besides from "Death Gaze" you should have some more useful spells for this fight. They are:

---- BURIAL(Doomknight) - This turns all Skulls and Coins in GREEN gems (so you get a bunch of them right after you cast it. Cos it depends on the positions of Skulls and Coins... )

---- PETRIFY (Medusa) - Make you enemy lose 2 turns + 1 additional for every 20 green gems you have. (As up to this point in time you should be able to collect at least 45 green gems to make Death Gaze - it means you enemy will loose FOUR TURNS)

---- FLAMMING SKULLS (Wizard lvl 15) / STONE GAZE (Medusa) - This turns all the green gems into skulls.

3rd - I used the dragon spider lvl 10 as my "hose"... :) It gives you another powerful spell: Breathe Fire it make 1 pt. damage for every point of red mana you have. Thereby you need at least 30 to make Death Gaze this will make at least 30 pts. damage.

Using this four spells I've beat Lord Bane at my first try. I even barley got hurt. I started with 180 LP and Ended up after about 15 Turns with 138 LP. And I played on "Normal" and not "Easy" difficulty.

The STRATEGY:
1. Pay attention to the possibility of getting extra turn by hitting 4 or more gems at the time. This IS the FIRST Priority.
2. Get gems you needing for the BURIAL.
2a. Try to collect also as much RED GEMS as you can.
3. Cast BURIAL.
4. How much gems did you get ?
- a) USE EVERY POSSIBILITY TO GET MORE TURNS.
- b) If you have enough gems - cast PETRIFY. (Its your fist choice. Now you have plenty of time and possibilities to collect green gems again.)
- c) The field looks not that good. and you can't get more green gems, but some of them lying near some skulls - cast FLAMMING SKULLS or STONE GAZE. It will clear some parts of field and in most cases it also will produce some extra turns.
- d) Do you have enough to cast BREATH FIRE - its Ok too.

So this was my way to deal with Lord Bane. Hopefully I could help... :)

After all the side-quests were done, I had two options for the end: enter Lord Bane’s citadel, or follow my sword as the necromancers instructed. I did go so far as to try the latter, but when you do so, you get some dire warnings from Princess Serephine (who threatens to leave you if you continue on that course) and a final opportunity to chicken out, which I took. I may play through again with another character class, and if I do I’ll definitely want to give the alternate ending a look. But for now, Bartonia is safe.

Beating Lord Bane took me five tries, with various different collections of stuff, including some items I forged specifically for this fight. Lord Bane’s basic trick is that he casts spells that make him more powerful. For each element, he has a spell that destroys all of that element on the board and increases his mastery of that element by the number of gems destroyed, and in addition, his equipment makes his elemental masteries benefit him in other ways. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is his shield, which gives him +1 to all resistances for every 3 points of Earth mastery. So if you let him get enough Earth mastery, your spells start fizzling more and more. As I see it, there are three things you can do to overcome this. First, you can do what you can to hurt him with spells at the beginning of the fight, before he can resist it. Second, you can try to forestall his resistance by having high earth resistance yourself (to keep him from casting the spell that raises his earth mastery) and by using up the green gems on the board before he gets them. Third, you can increase the damage you do when matching skulls so that you’re less dependent on spells to kill him.

Here’s the combination of equipment that ultimately worked for me:

Spells: Channel Air, Entangle, Forest Fire, Sanctuary, Lightning Storm, Charge!
Equipment: Quartz Relic (+5 damage for each full mana reserve, +8 Air Resistance), Armor of Minogoth (prevents 1 point of damage when you receive 2 or more, +15 Earth Resistance), Deep Edge (+6 damage when you do 6 or more damage, +8 Earth Resistance), Frozen Harp (+4 to all mana reserves when you match 4 or 5, +8 Fire Resistance)
Mount: a level 8 Wyvern (Rend spell, +6 to Battle skill)

By this point, I had enough Battle skill that just matching three skulls did 6 damage, and thus triggered the Deep Edge bonus. Like I said, I wanted Earth resistance more than any other kind, but this loadout provides a certain amount of resistance in all elements (water resistance being provided by one of the companions). As for the spells, I basically didn’t use Sancutary (adds to your resistance in a randomly-chosen element) at all, and would have swapped it out for something else if I had to give the fight another try. The most useful spells were Entangle and Charge!, both good for setting up moves; if you can get a foursome out of them, they can almost pay for themselves, given the effect of the Harp. Charge! is notable in that it takes advantage of the board in ways that Lord Bane can’t, so it’s relatively safe to cast when he has high resistance: you lose an opportunity, but at least that opportunity can’t be used against you. In the end, despite Lord Bane’s increased resistance, I struck the final blow with the direct-damage spell Forest Fire.

All in all, this was a satisfying game. Tile-matching games provide one of the purest experiences of flow, and RPGs, with their promises of greater power if you keep leveling, provide buckets of player motivation even when the gameplay isn’t particularly compelling, so it’s a winning combination. And on top of that, it has excellent production values. I haven’t even mentioned the sound: cascades involve one of the best thunderclap sounds I’ve heard in a game, and the background music has prominent bassoon solos. (Or possibly english horn. It can be hard to tell sometimes. Regardless, it’s a good thing.) I understand there’s a sequel due out soon, with a sci-fi setting and hexagonal tiles. I’ll definitely be playing that when it’s released for PC, which will probably happen months after it’s released for everything else.