Winski Perorate Flamestrikes

Vellin

This may be me just bitching, but I present to you a ridiculous situation. CHARNAME goes to Sorcerous Sundries looking for spells to help stop an assassination, buys Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, tells his party mage to use it on one of the dukes (who fails the save and is now perfectly safe), kills the doppelgangers, presents evidence of Sarevok's madness/treachery to the other duke, hurts Sarevok slightly, and then gets instant oneshotted through invisibility by some jackass.

After reading a bit, I learned that casting Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on Liia might be what triggered Winski's instant Flamestrike when he spawned in to rescue Sarevok. Indeed, on loading up the auto-save, I let Liia die, and when Winski ported in, he didn't cast a flamestrike. In my opinion, Winski's behavior cannot be reconciled with an in-game explanation (i.e. this character's save file is still intact).

So my question is this: Why does Winski still have an instant cast flamestrike? Is the developer's contract with WoTC so stringent that they could not spruce up this terrible encounter?

lunar

I guess the game counts otiluke as an attack on the dukes. And if you attack or hurt dukes yourself, or both dukes are killed, your quest fails:no one will believe you and Sarevok wins:winski just insta-kills you.

In BG2 there is notorious Arkanis Gath who one shots you if you attack Shadow thieves while allied to them:you botch your quest and there is no other option to continue. Hence the game mercy-kills you to make you realise you've done something wrong.

bbear

lunar said:

In BG2 there is notorious Arkanis Gath who one shots you if you attack Shadow thieves while allied to them:you botch your quest and there is no other option to continue. Hence the game mercy-kills you to make you realise you've done something wrong.

In theory, one can avoid the instant death effect w/ Death Ward or PFMW. Arkanis Gath can be legitimately killed by mind drain (he is immune to Cltr-Y). In a recent game I sided w/ Shadow Thieves. My party returned to Athakla in Chapter 6 and decided to eradicate the thief problem in the city. As a surprise loot, the leader carried a Boot of Speed. It was put in a very good use. In the beginning of ToB, all 6 party members had a Boot of Speed.

Vellin

I didn't say it in the original post, but on a previous playthrough after using otiluke's on Liia, my player character survived Winski's Flamestrike because he was wielding Icingdeath and Batalista's Passport, and then he cleared durlag's, killed aec'letec, and then came back for Sarevok. So this was not the executioner's scripted deathblow; it was just some BS attack.

I'm just moaning because the encounter requires careful use of metagaming to successfully complete 100% of the time.