@j4j: Epic Encounters Braccus is no joke. I tend not to fight him immediately, but come back later once I have some gear and levels. He scales very well, and this tactic might make the fight tougher overall, but I prefer to have more tools of my own when I fight him. A Frew miscellaneous tips for the fight at any level:

1. Stack as much fire resistance as you can.
2. Stack as much poison resistance as you can.
3. Have a tank with high armor to take hits from Braccus and Diederick
4. Summons deployed at opportune moments will help a lot because they can absorb a hit or two, or waste some enemy movement in blocking scenarios. They won't win the fight, but they will take the edge off so that you can regroup. Particularly useful summons are usually the Undead Decapitator or the Toxic Horror, but the little skeleton is decent too.
5. Grit and/or willpower reduction is important to help CC at least one or two of the combatants. Choose one to focus on to force a status effect, and then move on to the next--do the same with your damage. Usually I take out Ghoul, then whatever I can weaken more or whatever is more threatening to my particular party composition.
6. Silencing the Ghoul seems to be a very strong strategy, in my experience
7. Leave Bracus for last--hunting the crystals wastes too much AP that you will need to control the flow of battle. A well-prepared party should be able to tank him if there is not excessive interference from his minions.
8. Pulling the group back into the antechamber before Braccus' room usually helps, especially if you are having a lot of trouble with the Ghoul since you can then use LoS a little bit. Of course, the side effect of this is that you restrict the battlefield, so when enemy AOEs do get through things get "interesting."
Especially at lower levels, your choice to try a ranger over a rogue will probably help, but that is not to say that rogues are ineffective here—they just take a little more effort to get to work properly.

Originally posted by jihad4jesus:

7. quite possibly the hardest part: looks like twins + ghoul + brachus all throw mortar spells so i havent figured out LOS rules and if theres any way to prevent them from AOE'ing my team on round1/2. (TwinsFireball, Brachus Fireball, and Ghouls Deadly Spores all seem to go thru smoke whether i place my team in smoke, or the NME in smoke... am i doing it wrong?)

You can cheese this fight with smoke bombs and arrows, I used six for entire fight, usually two smoke clouds at time to cover entire team. Just watch that none of your summons are outside of smoke, since they gonna get targeted with AOE and it will hit everybody else. Archers and wand users can shoot targets they can't see if you target a spot behind.

I've no idea how to beat it without smoke or other exploit. Outleveling and returning on lvl 15 may be a way, Enemies gonna be upleveled but except for Braccus other three have reduced vitality, maybe they can be outleveled. Also it gonna be much easier to get entire party to max fire and poison resists, and get leadership 5. On level 11 I certainly didn't have enough items with resists for everyone.