A group of us have just started playing this great game. After getting the first dungeon down we moved onto the second. How do you deal with the named giants that keep resurrecting? I know if you can kill the ogre with his heart he will stay dead. It might not be so bad if he resurrected where he died at but it seems like he can come back almost anywhere as long is it is in an activated area and he is 8 spaces away from the characters. My friends and I cleared his room, picked up the loot and made our way back down the hall, he was waiting around the corner for us. He's really hard to kill, we had almost 0 piercing damage. We did manage to take him down but his brother just destroyed us because we could barely get through his armor.

Am I missing something? It seems like such a huge step up in difficulty between the two. The starting equipment from town is crap and no matter which room you go into first you're fighting a super beast.

The second quest is a giant trap designed to murder the heroes until they learn the value of speed and correctly prioritizing their objectives. Once you figure out what to do, the quest is stupidly easy. Unfortunately, they designed the quest to be extremely unforgiving, and you have to figure out what to do almost instantly or the quest becomes a giant grindfest (no pun intended).

Long story short, on the same round that you open the door to one of the areas with a giant, you should also be picking up the rune key, activating the glyph, and, optimally, also collecting the treasure chest. And you should be using the rune key on the very next round. While laughing at the pathetically slow giant as he futilely attempts to catch up to you before you destroy his heart.

On a side note, you mention "piercing damage", which makes me think you're one of numerous people who have misunderstood the Pierce ability, because there is no such thing. Pierce doesn't cause a certain amount of your damage to ignore all armor, it causes all of your damage to ignore a certain amount of armor. Each rank of Pierce is effectively the same as +1 damage, except that it only works up to the amount of armor the target has.

I hadn't thought of just ignoring him alltogether until you have his heart. I'll have to try it. My understanding of pierce is that each point allows you to ignore one armor. So say you roll for 4 damage with 1 pierce against a monster with 4 armor, you would do 1 wound to the monster. So in the case of that giant who has 6 armor if I remember right, you need to do either 7 damage to even hurt him for 1 wound or have some piercing. That's crazy hard to do with characters who are using the crap equipment that is bought from town initially.

The example you choose does not make it clear whether you understand Pierce or not. Here's how it works:

4 damage with Pierce 3 vs. 6 armor = 1 wound
2 damage with Pierce 3 vs. 6 armor = 0 wounds
4 damage with Pierce 3 vs. 1 armor = 4 wounds
2 damage with Pierce 3 vs. 1 armor = 2 wounds

The giants in this quest are very hard to kill with shop weapons, whether you have Pierce or not.

Just to reiterate what Antistone was saying about Pierce in slightly different words: Pierce is not equal to "automatic wounds." Pierce reduces effective Armor on the target, but you still have to score enough damage (ie: hearts on the dice) to get over the new, reduced Armor value if you want to actually hurt the target.

So, per you example, you would need to roll 7 damage without Pierce or 6 damage with at least 1 Pierce to hurt the giant. (Or 5 damage with at least 2 Pierce, etc.)