So I'm playing this game for the first time with the Flash Mod (harder mode) on Normal difficulty.

I've gotten to the Chapter 2 sewer with the greater cockatrice fight, and it's honestly impossible for me to beat. The beast always changes to attack me instead of Siegfried when I approach. Even when his back is turned he seems capable of causing damage to me without an animation, and when my attacks interrupt his ones he still hurts me regardless. Meanwhile for some reason my combos seem to cancel themselves even if I get them right (perhaps due to path-finding issues in the sewer tunnels).

In a straight up fight, his attacks usually cause knockdown, which means I'm caught in an endless stunlock of knockdowns and poison until I die, unable to do a thing about it. In addition, the Blizzard potion doesn't seem to help my dodge chances at all, and I have no Swallow potions (fortunately found a fire to meditate at). Tempted just to ragequit on the entire game :P Nobody else seems to have any issues with this section.

Edit: Since 'solved' this by brute forcing the issue and chipping away at its health until it died.

Oh and problem 2: I briefly installed, then removed, the movement speed mod. Now, despite no longer having it, Geralt and other creatures/NPCs' movement speed seems to vary wildly every time I load a save. Even the combat seems faster (it's hard to keep up).

Thanks in advance for any help!

My advice... don't play a hard difficulty mode. The game can be hard enough on normal.

I wonder if this may be the cause of the combat difficulty too; I don't recall that fight being too hard. I'd recommend backing up your saved games, then completely uninstalling and reinstalling the game to make sure all traces of this mod are gone.

As for the fight, make sure you use fast style, and you can also use the Igni sign. If you can make one, try drinking a Willow potion to make you immune to knockdown effects (I can't remember if you have the formula for that yet at this point in the game... if not, and you don't mind looking it up online, you can make it manually).

Honestly though, just using the fast style for a while was enough for me even on Hard difficulty. This is why I think it may be residual effects from that movement speed mod that are messing you up.

I've since managed to cheese the fight by running round the sewers so my HP and endurance recharge, then just igni'ing it to death with Siegfried as my cannon fodder. This is normal, with the mod. Besides, as a Gothic II NotR fan, I found this game too easy when I tried playing without mods on normal difficulty. It's possible. I removed the mod files from the override folder and even downloaded files with the vanilla speed values to replace them (found them in a comment on the Nexus page). If anything, wouldn't the issue exist in my save files? Might see if it persists in a new game... but I don't understand how reinstalling would help.

No, I didn't have willow at the time (do now, as a druid just gave it to me). I had no idea you could manually make potions without the formula. I'm not the biggest fan of using out of character knowledge like that but it's cool.

Glad you got past that part, after that fight is when the game really starts getting good! I hadn't thought about the problem existing in the save files. It's possible, but I would have guessed that the mod simply made changes to the game files themselves to change movement speed, rather than storing movement speed info in the savegame files (could be wrong). I thought maybe the removal of the mod hadn't fully cleaned out the changes, so figured a full uninstall / reinstall of the game would ensure that everything went back to normal. It sounds like you've probably removed the mod effectively but it wouldn't hurt to try a clean reinstall of the game to see if it fixes the movement speed issues you've been having.

If it turns out the problem IS in your save files, you can see if someone else has a save from the same point in the game that you can use. I've seen others in these forums provide such saves when someone ran into a bad bug or other issue.

Well i deleted all the mods edited move speed files in the override folder. I guess it may be worth a try but I'm too lazy :P Besides, the game is still playable for the moment. Maybe if I get stuck again...

I don't like swapping save files. Much prefer to stick to my one character throughout a game. I think there's a save editor out there though, that may be worth playing with :)

Thanks for the help! And yeah, Chapter 2 is a lot of fun.