the bridge district lich (possibly SCS specific question)

ChildofBhaal599

ok so I am trying to get Kangaxx and killed the lich in the sewers already, but the other guy is just too much. i am not sure if this is SCS or normal, but he comes with a mage, vampire, beholder, human, and then himself. i can use summons to distract the vampire and kill the mage before she gets protections up via a backstab, but the beholder is not going down, and then I also have a lich! i was hoping somebody here might be able to give me a strategy here. the party is fighter/thief, jaheira, minsc, aerie, viconia, neera. we have up to level 7 mages spells at our disposal, and viconia recently got level 7 cleric spells. i may have to return to this after the underdark, but I am hoping to be done everything before then because at that chapter it feels like I should be rushing to Irenicus, not killing liches just for their ring.

nano

That's the Twisted Rune, nothing to do with Kangaxx. The lich is next door

nano

If you want to beat the encounter, my recommendation is to fight them one at a time. Turn everyone invisible and wait for someone to split away from the others. If they're not moving go to a corner, summon some fodder, and turn invisible again. Once you manage to get one of them alone, jump on them with your entire party. I would try and drop the lich first because he spawns a little way away from the others and he's really dangerous. You can stack some traps on the spot he teleports to if you're comfortable with that ^_^

Pibaro

That's a place where the "protection from undead" and "protection from magic" scrolls are very useful, if you really can't win in a fair fight.

Skaffen

You took the wrong door but might as well stay for the best staff in the game while you are there

The usual tips for tough fight apply: don't forget your potions, esp. invulnerability which gives +5 on saves and the magic protection one that automatically passes all saves. Fortitude for 18 con which will give a 18 hp boost to most of the NPCs. Buff up, summon meatshields (but hold back the ones from items to easily get reinforcements during the fight), put a stack of skull traps in the path the attackers are going to take. Lay traps with your thief. Equip your best arrows and bolts. Wand of cloudkill for some AoE damage, ... Oh, and don't forget your rod of ressurection if you bought/looted one.

This fight is tough but beatable, I recently did it solo with a lv 16 sorceress.

ChildofBhaal599

This is the wrong lich? Crap well that sucks I guess I will still try to beat it though. Thank you all I will try tomorrow what you all said and hope something works

Serpion

That battle was uunexpected easy for me (especially due I play SCS version). Main problem was a lich which teleport to my characters. I beat him via 5-6 delayed fireballs ^_^ Thief traps could works too. All other guys... I cast 2-3 8 lvl AoE cloud spell and summon around 7 skeletons as meat and sending them to twisted rune guys.


Ah, forget. Main cheese here is Neera project image -> chaos shield + Nahal's Reckless Dweomer

kaffekoppen

You won't think it sucks when you get the rewards

Traps make this fight entirely trivial (without SCS anyway). Otherwise it's pretty tough. The thing about thief traps is that the poor lich doesn't even get to get his defenses up. Skull traps work fine against the others in my experience.

kryptix

I had to thief trap this one with SCS to kill shangalar but I took it rather early. Then I took out the beholder with nukes, and the vampire was straight forward with anti undead but the Mage had gated in two fiends and was improved invis with all protections up so I had to stall since I didn't have ruby ray yet...

Ended the fight with only char name alive at like 30 hp lol...

I had to wait for hexxat to respawn and take advantage of her bag of holding to get everything out of there...

ChildofBhaal599

ok now I beat the battle but it was a bit cheesy. I ended up actually killing the lich before he could do anything through focus fire and my fighter/thief backstab, meanwhile cloudkills were destroying the beholder while the vampire and human got through and we had to kill them. with all that done the mage was easy, despite Neera summoning a pit demon instead of breach. however, it all felt so cheesy for my tastes, and was just wondering is there anything more I could have done for the beholder? he casts protection from magic weapons, spell turning, and immunity: abjuration. i don't see anyway way around that! if not then maybe I just used the only tactic I could to kill him. still kind of cheesy the way I killed the lich though. i think the beholder is the biggest threat though and I was just left unable to find a way to defeat it other than that.

Bayaz

I don't see what's cheesy about that. I mean the entire game is all cheese, there is no avoiding it, just a matter of what level of cheese you use.

Ultimate cheese is thief trap spam closely followed by mace of disruption/immunity scrolls.

syllog

Haha! I remember last time I did that.
I rp'd not knowing what I was doing. Walked in without any real prep. (Minus some minor "this place is creepy" casting once I entered.)

Viconia got disintegrated and all of my party got wiped out except my main who turned invisible and was left with the vampire and a beholder (and a mage?) remaining.

I squeezed back to as remote a place as I could get then waited till the vampire (who kept circling the two rooms) was out of site and kept casting Chaos (via NRD? don't recall) out of site of beholder until he was gibbered. Then I tried to take him out before the vampire noticed me.

It was a min-reload run, but half my reloads were in that room. Trying to isolate and kill off everyone left just my wounded relatively low-level main.

Fun times!

[Note & Suggestion: I modded the Staff of the Magi so that it didn't auto-invisible my char, but instead had 9-daily charges of invisibility that required activation and so dispel-on-hit effect allowed a save at penalty (instead of no save). Much more fun IMO. (I chose 9 just for numeric aesthetics : the abilities then read 9-3-1.)]

nano

It's an elder orb right? It has no special immunities so you can bypass PfMW with a normal weapon or with Gesen/Firetooth. If you want to break his protections, secret word will break spell turning. I thought he used spell trap though, in which case you need ruby ray. Then just breach that sucker. SI abjuration almost never matters to me because enemy levels are too high to bother dispelling. It's only useful on players most of the time.

kaffekoppen

The issue I have is that I meet them at a low enough level that I can't breach their protection spells. Really annoying! I just fought the Crooked Crane lich. Used all the breach-type spells I had and it wasn't enough. I may have dispelled one, but he just has more immediately. Thing is, my Edwin and my Haer'Dalis joined with less than half XP of the rest of my party thanks to silly game mechanics, so they can't cast the higher-level breach spells.

Lucky for me, I did have the sense to death ward my party and use normal weapons to breach his PfMW. Or rather, I developed that sense after realizing he *really* likes death spells

I actually have a lot of experiences meeting things before I'm ready for them. The last vampire encounter at night (Tanova I think) requires a +3 weapon. I had none except for Pixie Prick. That sure is a fun fight when Negative Plane Protection lasts all of 5 rounds!

nano

kaffekoppen said:

Lucky for me, I did have the sense to death ward my party and use normal weapons to breach his PfMW. Or rather, I developed that sense after realizing he *really* likes death spells

Since he's a lich isn't he immune to normal weapons?

Sounds like you need some Azuredge in your life for Tanova. Or some running

kaffekoppen

That's true. I may be wrong about the normal weapons then. It was a summon that started hitting him while my fighers couldn't (it was the big skeleton warrior). It could have been in the delay between two PfMW. It doesn't last very long but he casts it a lot.

I actually have no excuse for my poor gear. I have nearly 180k gold and I haven't bought any of the cool weapons because I'm so cheap

ChildofBhaal599

nano said:

It's an elder orb right? It has no special immunities so you can bypass PfMW with a normal weapon or with Gesen/Firetooth. If you want to break his protections, secret word will break spell turning. I thought he used spell trap though, in which case you need ruby ray. Then just breach that sucker. SI abjuration almost never matters to me because enemy levels are too high to bother dispelling. It's only useful on players most of the time.

you know what? i actually never think about carrying normal weapon for these situations lol. maybe I should think about that some more and get a normal counterpart to all my weapons. that way I can deal damage until I bring it down

nano

@kaffekoppen 180k gold, jeez O_o
I hoard items and waste gold on spells I don't really need so I'm perpetually short on money

@ChildofBhaal599 yep, it's nice to keep one around so you never have to stop swinging. I always forget to buy one though. You definitely want a normal weapon for ToB content because there's certain golems that can't be killed at all without one.

ChildofBhaal599

nano said:

@kaffekoppen 180k gold, jeez O_o
I hoard items and waste gold on spells I don't really need so I'm perpetually short on money

@ChildofBhaal599 yep, it's nice to keep one around so you never have to stop swinging. I always forget to buy one though. You definitely want a normal weapon for ToB content because there's certain golems that can't be killed at all without one.

the magic golems in the keep have normal weapons in the area though. very convenient

nano

suspiciously convenient...

Gentblue

kaffekoppen said:

The last vampire encounter at night (Tanova I think) requires a +3 weapon. I had none except for Pixie Prick. That sure is a fun fight when Negative Plane Protection lasts all of 5 rounds!

Pixie Prick is an immensely powerful weapon when wielded by a fighter, though it doesn't put the Undead to sleep IIRC. You have probably forgotten about your wands though. Everyone forgets about their wands!

kaffekoppen

In defense of my gold hoarding, I was just trying to see how much you could get. I'm sure you can get much more if you really try.

I spent about 100k now on various things and the vampires don't bother me anymore. Still too cheap to buy everything so I had Haer'Dalis rob a poor merchant's entire selection of spells... and some potions. I kind of feel bad about it, but hey, they did put the steal functionality in the game.

Anyway, back to the liches. Besides Kangaxx and the Twisted Rune, I find the most difficult lich to be the one in the Crooked Crane. There's just not enough room to maneuver and he immediately casts Time Stop, Meteor Swarm, Protection from Evil, Gate, and then you get to do something. I am aware that you can just keep running out of the room and back in to exhaust his spells, but I refused to do that.

The lich guardians of Kangaxx were never very difficult for me for some reason.

kryptix

kaffekoppen said:

In defense of my gold hoarding, I was just trying to see how much you could get. I'm sure you can get much more if you really try.

I spent about 100k now on various things and the vampires don't bother me anymore. Still too cheap to buy everything so I had Haer'Dalis rob a poor merchant's entire selection of spells... and some potions. I kind of feel bad about it, but hey, they did put the steal functionality in the game.

Anyway, back to the liches. Besides Kangaxx and the Twisted Rune, I find the most difficult lich to be the one in the Crooked Crane. There's just not enough room to maneuver and he immediately casts Time Stop, Meteor Swarm, Protection from Evil, Gate, and then you get to do something. I am aware that you can just keep running out of the room and back in to exhaust his spells, but I refused to do that.

The lich guardians of Kangaxx were never very difficult for me for some reason.

SCS doesn't let you run in and out but it does still let you run in with one character and resurrect them outside... Took me an hour to burn enough of his spells to kill him that way though with my level 9 party...

syllog

kaffekoppen said:

Anyway, back to the liches. Besides Kangaxx and the Twisted Rune, I find the most difficult lich to be the one in the Crooked Crane. There's just not enough room to maneuver and he immediately casts Time Stop, Meteor Swarm, Protection from Evil, Gate, and then you get to do something. I am aware that you can just keep running out of the room and back in to exhaust his spells, but I refused to do that.

Polymorph self.

(That said - while I'm pretty anal about not cheesing my enemies I don't think running out of a room is always bad play - if I know someone can cast a fireball you can bet I'm going to shoot arrows at them while standing next to a doorway I can duck around! I forget if the CC lich can follow or not - if not: yeah it's too cheesy, I agree.)

kaffekoppen

I agree that it's not always cheesy. It would be natural to run out when he casts Meteor Swarm. I don't think that's too cheesy. In fact, the game's being a little cheesy dropping that on your head in a broom cabinet.

nano

I figure he magically locks the door to keep you in there. I dunno, I find door tricks pretty cheesy because he should really be able to launch a cloudkill through the doorway if it wasn't a zone change. But it's not so much the realism aspect as the fact that it's ridiculously powerful.... you can block any spell headed your way that way. It makes mages a little too easy IMO.

I think one thing that quickload encourages us to do is to try and beat every encounter as soon as we meet them, which shouldn't be the case. There are some encounters that aren't even supposed to be beaten at low levels but because we can try as many times as we want we feel like we can't move on until we win. And because there's no way we can win in a straight up fight we end up pulling out all sorts of cheese to power our way through. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but I think you get a better or at least more satisfying experience by leaving for a while, thinking about what exactly you need to win the fight, and coming back with a plan and the right tools for the job.

foolstone

When I solo with sorcerer my first thing is to come here to get her weapon, I always only kill the mage to get the item and kill the beholder to get the eyeball to leave there.

kryptix

@nano SCS does lock the door behind you, but I think that makes it so you can haves hexxat drain all of his spells a ghost before you go into the room with the rest of the team...

Jarleale

Zone of sweet air made that encounter a breeze without cheese

nano

@kryptix yeah but that is some funky cheese...

kryptix

nano said:

@kryptix yeah but that is some funky cheese...

But daystar so nice! Lol...

I did that lich right after copper coronet this time and I did it by using a rod of resurrection on mr buffed viconia to waste all of his spells so that's pretty much just as cheesy...