Wrath of hakkon and hakkonites

Was it just Hakkonite Archers? I thought all the Hakkonites had the Hakkon's Wrath trait? Take a hit from any of them and you're in trouble. I got one shotted by the Hakkonite mages, assassins, archers and brusers. It's only the warriors that I seemed to survive, but that's because I flattened them first.

It's partly a debuff of Cold Resistance. Every stack (see below) is -10% cold resistance. But it's more than that. There is either an additional defensive debuff, lowering your armor, or it's an offensive buff for their cold attacks. I'm not sure anyone has confirmed one way or the other. And it stacks, so you can have more than one debuff going at a time, which works as a damage multiplier. It's kind of like Sundered in that way.

In any case, keep an eye on your status icons. I think Hakkon's Wrath is a snowflake. If you see that on your character, run away. Or take a health regen potion or use some kind of defense like Elusive. Or, what I like to do is take a Rift Mage with me and Veilstrike them before they can even aggro. If they can't get up off the ground, they can't hit you. Killing them quickly also helps.

Gearing for a lot of cold resistance also helps, but that only deals with the cold resistance debuff.

It's not a snowflake. It's a blue icon, kind of looks like a wall of ice. Here is a screenshot from a video:



See the icon circled in red? That's Hakkon's Wrath status.
It you take more than one hit simultaneously and don't notice, your debuff could be larger than you think.
That's the size of the stack. Three means you took 3 hits with Hakkon's Wrath. In the picture above you can see a "2" by the status icon, that's 2 stacks of Hakkon's Wrath, meaning the character took 2 hits, which matches what it says in the Tactical details.

It depends. For my mages and rogues, 1 stack of HW was enough to enable the next hit to kill them. For warriors, seems to take 2 or 3. Seems to ignore barrier as well, since my mages could have full barrier and still get one-shotted. That was without cold resistance gear. With 40%+ cold resistance, no one was getting one-shot, but still mages and rogues were losing more than 1/2 their health.

Best way to deal with the hakkonites is CC. Panic, stuns, sleeps and knockdowns. For warriors war horn, templars' Wrath of Heaven and reavers terrifying presence. Trying to out dps hakkonites at range without CC is liable to get you killed.

Zeypher,
agreed, panic and knockdown are part of my party build. Good party dps helps also a lot. useful masterworks like walking fortress for defense and walking bomb does great job doing massive AOE damage.
don't underestimate rogues as well... i did recently the jaws of hakkon dlc with my tempest, and she was always able to kill almost the half of ennemies before combat starts.
sorry for my ignorance but what do you mean exactly by "CC"?
thanks for your sharing.