That’s a really tough fight but I think it’s fun. The four broaches thing is a dick move, but I only found out about it the other day. Having played through Exile a bunch of times and this version of Avernum twice (except for the escape quest, which I didn’t get to this time before it stopped working), I never tried it with less than 5. I did read about it recently when I was looking up something.

In Exile the Hawthorn fight was like the Grah-Hoth fight, where it wasn’t that hard to figure out how to do it with no damage.