I've been playing as the Overlord in a two-player campaign where my friend controls two heroes simultaneously, Grisban (berzerker build) and Leoric (Necro build). After doing pretty well with this combination early in Act I, things started to seem more and more hopeless as we got closer to the Interlude, and the beginning of Act II seemed borderline impossible.

I guess I'm interested to hear if anyone else has any experience playing this type of two-player campaign with no heroes capable of healing, and what kind of success they've had.

For the record, we skipped First Blood and just started everybody off with one XP. We then played Death On The Wing, Castle Daerion, and The Cardinal's Plight, as well as What's Yours Is Mine from the first expansion pack. I don't have the campaign sheet in front of me (I'm at work on luch atm), but I believe the heroes won Castle Daerion and Death On The Wing and I won The Cardinal's Plight and What's Yours Is Mine.

I smoked him in the interlude, basically going easy on him a bit to try and see if he would be able to pull it off, but with my constant respawns and his rather slow movement, he was just continually running into fresh reinforcements and gradually getting ground down until the point where I couldn't justify holding back any more and just went ahead and won the map.

We started Act II with The Dawnblade and the only way he was able to win was to get to Arcite's tomb and die there and just wait until the turn right before the ray of sunlight moved on to it to stand up. I'm not even sure if this is a legal strategy. I couldn't find anything clear in the rules about whether you have to stand up in your very next turn, or if you can elect to stay knocked down as long as you want.

At that point we buckled and decided to add a cleric and he did lose the second encounter, but only really due to a total lucky draw on my part (Dark Charm FTW!).

Just realized lunch was over 22 minutes ago, so I'll have to check back on this later. Work to do.

Considering the temporary nature of the knockouts in the game, I'm not seeing why a healer would be necessity in a two player game (not sure how the final scenerio plays out without a healer though). It's all about efficiency of actions, and with two players there are less monsters but also you are going to be weak in at least one area of the game, whether it is searching, damage, control, defense, speed or healing.

I don't know enough details on why your party failed some encounters, but it may have had little to do with healing capacity, especially with two hero abilities which somewhat mitigated your need for healing. Maybe just having more control in the game for example, being able to immobilize or stun enemies either with the right weapons or with a runemaster would have been enough to change the outcome. And at the same time picking a healer or another combo in a two player game probably would have left you weak in another area, and you might have lost different encounters instead. It also comes down to some quests are just harder in games with two heroes, while a few are easier.

Also, as overlord I would have given the players 25 gold per hero in the game for skipping first blood as well as a shopping trip, as that's the minimum they would have almost certainly gotten had they played the quest out. And a hero doesn't have to standup or do any action if they want to pass, but if a hero is knocked out the only action they can do is stand up, so it was played right.