Jun 5, 2011
Killing the Kayran is by far the most difficult fight you’ll encounter in the first few quests of the game. Fiendishly powerful and possessed of devastating melee blows which knock Geralt off his feet while dealing massive damage, the Kayran is a multi-phased fight which will keep players on their toes. But for all its power, it is possible to slay the Kayran. Join us in this special strategy guide and find out how.
Despite all of the hullaballoo about making a Kayran trap and getting the Ostmurk herb to withstand the creature’s poison, Geralt can win the battle just as easily without fancy frills, provided you know what you’re doing. If you’ve completed the witcher contracts to kill the nekkers and endregas which threaten Flotsam, chances are you’ve already run into the ingredients necessary to make a Mongoose potion. You’ll only need one for the battle, so while the Ostmurk quest provides a bit more experience and treasure, you can skip it if you’re short on time. As for the Kayran traps, they are a poor substitute for the Yrden Sign, as they require both an expensive recipe (sold by Cedric the elf) and rare ingredients (including successfully stealing an iron frame from a cache of merchants’ supplies in Loredo’s personal stores). You can save yourself money and time by just making a Mongoose potion and perhaps a few more defensive elixirs, like the Sparrow or Tawny Owl potions.
Geralt is fighting the Kayran in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Before you kill the Kayran, make sure you milk the townsfolk for your service. A merchant in Flotsam will pay you if you kill the beast, and as town leader, Loredo will pledge his personal support if you save Flotsam from its nemesis, though how benevolent Loredo turns out to be will depend on your personal relationship with Loredo and Iorveth. There are “feeder quests” which should walk you through the necessary preparation for killing the Kayran: at a bare minimum, make sure you’ve gotten the Mongoose potion recipe from Triss before heading into battle.
When you’re ready, head to the upstairs rooms at the inn, and notify Sìle de Tansarville. She will accompany you to the bridge overlooking the Kayran’s lair and tell you her plan: Sìle will cast spells to lure the creature out of the water, at which point it’ll be Geralt’s job to kill it. Say goodbye to Sìle and head down the path to the Kayran’s lair. But before you reach the bottommost outcropping of rock, be sure to stop and meditate. Drink the Mongoose potion, and anything else you’ve brought with you. The Kayran is immune to poisons and bleeding, so focus on defensive potions. Then approach the beast’s lair and get ready.
The first phase of the fight is fairly straightforward. Your goal is to trap the Kayran’s tentacles and cut them off, and the easiest way to do that is with Yrden and a strong sword arm. Scan the battlefield for two glimmering golden trap icons positioned half way across the field, on either side of the monster. Doing your best to avoid the wildly swiping tentacles, make your way to the trap icon on the left side of the battlefield and cast Yrden. Then stand near enough to your Sign that the Kayran will attempt an attack. If you’re careful, you should be able to dodge the tentacle as it lands. If not, Geralt will be knocked down, though hopefully you’ll have trapped the tentacle as well.
Killing the Kayran is by far the most difficult fight you'll encounter in the first few quests
The moment you’ve trapped a tentacle, begin attacking the bulbous end of it. After a bit of hacking and slashing, Geralt will sever the tentacle in a quick cutscene. The moment the cutscene ends, turn and run to the far corner of the battlefield near where you started the fight, to avoid the Kayran’s massive rage attack.
If you’re worried about sustaining damage and you’ve got some vigor to spare, you may choose to cast Quen before heading back into battle. Otherwise, make your way back to the left side of the battlefield and repeat your attack: cast Yrden, let the Kayran line up its attack and dodge. Once again, when you’ve hacked off a tentacle, take shelter on the far side of the battlefield.
As you fight, you’ll notice the bridge above the Kayran starting to give way. The battlefield will slowly become littered with shards of masonry, making it harder to wend your way across the clearing. Be careful, too, of the sticky slime along the sides of the Kayran’s lair – if Geralt gets too close to the edge of the battlefield, he may become trapped, triggering a Quick Time Event. Spam your right mouse button as quickly as possible to command Geralt to cut his way out of the muck.
With two tentacles down, make your way to the right side of the battlefield, next to the other golden trap icon. Cast Yrden again, and hack your way through a third tentacle. The moment you have done so, start moving back across the battlefield to the left-hand side. You may hear Sìle shouting that the Kayran is getting ready to break free.
Avoiding the tentacles is not an easy task
Once you’ve severed three tentacles, the Kayran will trigger another QTE, this time scooping Geralt off the ground on one of its spiny arms. Spam your left mouse button to command Geralt to cut himself free of the creature’s grasp.
The moment the QTE concludes, rush to the left side of the battlefield and make your way to broken bridge piece that fell during the fight, being sure to hide behind the larger pieces of masonry as you go. The Kayran will start flinging pieces of fallen masonry all over the battlefield, and Geralt will be overwhelmed unless you find shelter. If your health is low at this point, you may consider casting Quen to deflect the worst of the attack.
Move Geralt to the base of the fallen bridge and start climbing toward the Kayran, being sure to avoid the tentacles as you go. While this phase isn’t as physically demanding as the rest of the fight, it will require precision timing. Geralt makes very slow progress climbing the bridge, and a single swipe of a tentacle will send him tumbling back down the rubble again. The good news is, he is completely shielded from the Kayran’s throw attacks, so if you have a potion like Sparrow active, you can actually regain health during this phase, if needed. Take a moment to orientate yourself to the timing of the tentacles, and keep climbing. Whenever possible, re-cast Quen to give yourself a bit of a cushion against the tentacle attacks.
Once you reach the top, the game will switch back to a cutscene. Sit back and enjoy as Geralt lands the killing blow, before heading back to town to collect your reward.
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Maybe you can help me.In Witcher2, the Kayran fight I’ve cut off the tentacles many times and rode the tentacle many times but can not fill up the yellow line by hitting the left mouse button. I’ve even tried it using a windows 360 gamepad. Am i missing something? or doing something wrong?Would appreciate any help. Thankyou
You’re not alone in experiencing difficulty with the QTE event, as it’s making quite a stir in the GoG.com and Steam forums. So far, the solutions presented involve switching QTE keymapping from the mouse to the keyboard, lowering screen resolution for the duration of the fight, or lowering the difficulty level of QTEs via the game menu. This thread on GoG.com also presents a few other options, so perhaps you’ll find a solution here: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/a_savegame_from_a_desperate_man
Good luck!
The Witcher 2 is a pile of shit, it is far too hard to do anything on regular difficulty. Easy is too easy and anything else is FUBAR. This game has poor interfaces and the tutorials are mediocre at best. It took basically blind button mashing to figure out menu commands.
@Hunter, I think you are just frustrated at the games difficulty. I am playing it on Hard, never played Witcher 1, and sure its hard at parts; but definitely not FUBAR. There is nothing wrong with the interfaces, they are quite simple and easy to figure out.
If you are angry you can’t beat the kayran, don’t attack the game! If you’re having troubles with this, wait until the Letho fight…:)
@JayDizz, to create a game that demand that you destroy the mouse button to play or even a gameplay that cannot figure out anything but QUE is wrong. I enjoy Witcher 2 however I would enjoy it 200% more if the QUE were gone. And it is only the QUE sequences I have a issue with, sword fighting dont have to be that (and in my case isnt since i use E alot). And please dont tell people if they can be dissapointed or not over a game, you like QUE games fine, others dont and yes those that dont, have every right to be dissapointed.
Are you just making up acronyms? QUE dosnt mean anything and you typed it 4 times…exchange the ‘U’ for a ‘T’and you’ll start making sence.
PS. Im dissapointed
Well, I’m fed up w/Witcher 2. First of all the game lags even on lowest settings, so if I can’t satisfactorily play a game on an $800 laptop then the game/program is a waste of $60 to me! I am a veteran of all of the Silent Hills, Res Evils, Twisted Metals, Fables, Diablos, Balder’s Gates, Duke Nukems, Tomb Raiders, Metal Gear Solids, Halos, GTAs, Soul Reavers, and many others including one of my favorite EA games: Saboteur, ect; most of which I enjoyed immensely, but Witcher stopped being an entertaining game (of make believe) early on. Any time I am forced to spend as much time researching key parts of any game as ‘playing’ in an attempt to discover how many items I missed and how many ‘better’ choices I could have previously made and back-tracking then at that point I realize that I am no longer ‘playing’ a game but now merely conducting extensive homework, (ultimately for no benefit). I guess Witcher is not for me, and will remember to take the advice and ratings of game appraisers with a grain of salt as it seems this game was so highly recommended apparently by so many “independent” game evaluators -come- promoters. Ha.
I can’t think of a single $800 laptop that is designed for gaming, period. Laptop graphics are always weaker than desktop graphics due to power requirements, and in order to run this game, you’ll need a dedicated card of at *least* GeForce 560M caliber, and that’ll run you at least $1300.
As far as researching things to find out what you missed or what other choices there were, it sounds like you’ve never actually played any kind of open RPG before. This is how the *entire genre* works. These criticisms puzzle me.
Yeah, an 800$ laptop is not meant for this type of gaming. at least you will have to disable anti-ailiasing, ubersampling, shadows, and maybe even more. I was playing the game with x2 GTX550Ti in SLI with an intel 2600 processor and STILL had to disable ubersampling to rid lag(although everything else maxed). the game still looks awesome and i’m at optimal framerate. NO LAG AT ALL and i don’t even have the GTX560.
don’t trust the product overview that says gaming laptop. unless you are shelling out huge amounts of cash you are just eating a pitch.
I have a $800 pc (or there abouts) running it on high settings just fine. Laptops aren’t PCs, and aren’t the best for gaming.
If you don’t need to move it, desktops are the way to go for price / performance in gaming *definitely*. But it can be done: on my 6990M the game runs fluently at 1080p / high so long as I turn AA and Ubersampling off. Of course, this thing cost over $2000 and has a power adapter you could club a man to death with…
It is a challenging game for sure. I am playing it on normal with Difficult QTES and it is quite doable. If you expect to beat every fight the first time then the problem is not with the game. The Kayran fight killed me several times. Each time I learned a new part of the strategy and when I learned the strat I was able to beat it with 90% health left. So the problem is definitely not the game.
Also the game doesn’t lag for me until I turn the graphics up. The graphics are quite nice and beyond most games I see out there. A $800 laptop is barely above a internet/email laptop so for a game that does have these graphics then of course it is going to lag. My computer is several years old and just begins to lag a bit on High graphics. When I enabled both cards (which I don’t do for normal gameplay) I can play it on Ultra with zero lag. Not bad for an older computer.
So except for some graphics tearing (which was fixed by rebooting after a week up) the game seems to work great. It is not a problem with the game but over expectations of the persons ability or low end machine.
Many, MANY thanks for this guide. The Kayran was just wiping me out, because it was the first time in the game I really had to keep my Quens up and just wasn’t paying enough attention. It was good to find an account on the internet proving that yes, it’s doable!
This is not a game that babies you, that’s for damn sure. And I like it, because you get a real feeling of accomplishment when you manage to kill the krak- err, Kayran,
Is there a cheat code to get past this part? I’m at normal level.. I can get to two tentacles cut but don’t see the yellow map icons on my minimap to help me place the Yrdens.. Also I’m typically way low on health by now as even when I hide by the bride base where the Foot statue is .. the rocks still fragment and kill me while I’m recharging health.. I have swallow at like 4 minutes left and about 4 minutes left on the Ostmurk at about here.. I have tried well over thirty times and get get this done.. I’m not mouse challenged or anything.. I dodge and still get killed every time..
RC – Try watching youtube vids of the fight. Worked for me
I am trying to beat the kayan…i cut off all 4 tentacles…took the ride…but it wont knock down the rest of the bridge to complete the scenertio…I am thinking about reloading and seeing if that will fix it!
I have found that the best way to beat him is have your sword tree ability that makes your dodge movement 200% further. Even 100% will help. Cast your spell, wait a sec until the tentacle starts to come down (it will quiver a little before crashing down so you can time it), roll out of the way, attack with your strong attacks, repeat with the other ones. I have found that starting at the right works best for me, although it may not for others. As far as using the QTEs. You can turn those completely off except for places where you are fist fighting. Once you get the tentacles beaten it will go to a cut scene and the wall will crash down. You have to dodge the tentacles as you make your way to the top. Once you get to the top another cut scene will come on and that’ll be the end.
Well oh my god Qte is Really hard but i did and it was really nice watching it`s brain blowing up! ahaha anyways Witcher2 is one of hardest games i ever played on hard diff… Btw TQ for help
The Yrden doesn’t work on this boss at all. I’ve fought him a dozen times, watched him smack a tentacle down on the trap every time, and it never works. I guess I spent $50 to play chapter one because now I can’t go any further.
The key is the Quen spell. Rather than use Yrden as my default, I switched to Quen, cast it early and often, and rolled around the field while chopping off tentacles after trapping them with Yrden conservatively applied. Once I did that, I had almost full health and no trouble. (Console version – XBox 360)
What would be the level requirements and what would be the armor requirements for this level. Because when I tried this level is still had the blue stripes uniform.
Just finished this fight with half health on dark. Its a lot easier if you use the kayran trap. I had the witchers superb silver sword and shiadhals armorial and Geralt was level 9. Thanks for the guide.
I abandoned the game at the Kayran fight months ago, and just decided to give it another try. I read all the walkthroughs on this impossible fight (something I’d normally consider cheating, but this fight is truly impossible to figure out on your own). And I still don’t get there.
I managed to cut off 3 tentacles. After that, I’m supposed to ride a fourth tentacle, right? It should pick me up or something? Doesn’t happen. It keeps mashing at me with its tentacles. Should I just try to cut the fourth tentacle off too?
By the way, why do I have to do QTEs? I thought I had them turned off?
Another thing that really sucks about this, is that I can’t save during the fight. It is incredibly frustrating to have to redo the entire thing dozens of times in a row. I’m sure they intended this to be epic, but it’s turning out to be the stupidest part of an otherwise brilliant game.
Immediately after posting this, I tried again and got him. Here’s what I did:
set difficulty to “easy”
use lots of quen, keep an eye on your queen timer
get the two tentacles on the left side
get the first tentacle on the right side
run back to the left side. This seemed to trigger me riding the last tentacle.
mash that mouse button for the QTE, even if you have them turned off
when you get on the ground again, run to the left side, run up the piece of fallen bridge, use queen, try to dodge, but keep running up.
then I messed around a bit trying to figure out what to do. If you reach the right spot at the top, the final cut scene is triggered and you win.
Afterwards, search the body thoroughly.
I’ve cut of all four tentacles and I get the QTE (or whatever it’s called) I get the QTE bar filled, but always get thrown off. I’ve done this at least 25 times. Help?