With the exception of Elder Orbs, all beholders throw are gaze attacks. That's a narrower range of attack options than say, a dragon has. If you get shut down by a single shield or potion that's a fairly good indicator of low variety imho.
Nitpick: I don't think there are any Potions of Mirrored Eyes in all of BG2. At least, I've never found one as a drop or in the potion shops I've bought from. Shield of Balduran is the only hard-and-fast defense.
I wasn't trying to be mean, I just had no idea what you were talking about. I guess you meant Crom Faeyr?
You're right, they're all gaze attacks but they have a huge variety of effects and the gaze part doesn't really have any mechanical implications (they're just treated as spells, and a beholder is like a spellcasting machine gun). They don't look it, but dragons actually have surprisingly few attack options. If you can counter their breath and their melee they will have a hard time killing you. The tricky part there is figuring out how to protect your entire party and (perhaps the harder part) keeping them protected.
That's fair, I kind of cheated and imported my bg1 char. And the counterargument they have a wide range in their gazes is fair too. I hadn't realized the game provides so few answers to gaze attacks.
EDIT: Ah, I did mean Crom Faeyr... I'll just apologize now and walk out quietly.
I don't see how polymorphing yourself into a form that counters them is better than buying an item that does just that. After all both are earned through honest adventuring career. Bah, polymorph requires you to know who you'll be fighting 8 hours in-game time before while shield wants you to know that when you're at one specific shop. And polymorph has other uses while the shield besides it's main purpose is medicore, high-level standard equipment, easy to get better. And don't get started on Cloudkill, cheese to rule them all. Not Batman-style preparation but a bug in AI behaviour that makes them stand there and die if they didn't see you casting.
Balduran's shield is the most honest way to deal with Beholders right after straight up fighting them and hoping for the best in terms of saving throws.
@nano But that's still my point (I used "better" there as in "balanced/fair" meaning) - what I'm disagreeing with is the topic of the thread. When every other way of dealing with Beholders proposed in this thread is better (in terms of efficiency) than the shield why do we whine about the shield beeing IMBA.
I disagree that there are lot of other more efficient ways of dealing with beholders than a shield. With Shield of Balduran you can just stand in one place and wait for the creatures to kill themselves (the Elder Orb being one and only expection).
Polymorphing yourself in a jelly means you have to attack them. It's still as safe as using the Shield of Cheese, but you have to make effort of killing Beholders by yourself.
Summoning magic resistant/immune to rays summons is still risky, if your party is in Beholder's range of sight. I have played BG2 long time ago, so I'm not sure about that at all, but from what I can recall Beholders are targeting their targets at random. So, even if you send your summons, you can be still in danger.
Polymorphing yourself in a jelly means you have to attack them. It's still as safe as using the Shield of Cheese, but you have to make effort of killing Beholders by yourself.
So it's the effort of having to click "attack" (or not if you have AI on) against spending 20 000 gold.
But it's a waste of 20000 gold for an extremely situational item that you really don't even need. It would be one of the last things I would buy in SOA and only if I'm being completionist and buying everything.
There are much better items to spend gold on early, Vecna/Easthaven/Scarlet/sling/harp/belt pretty much anything useful I would buy before that babby mode shield.
I never really used the shield, but I just played the beholder lair yesterday after rushing to the Underdark as fast as I could with a lower level party. Now I wanna dual wield the damn thing.
@nano But that's still my point (I used "better" there as in "balanced/fair" meaning) - what I'm disagreeing with is the topic of the thread. When every other way of dealing with Beholders proposed in this thread is better (in terms of efficiency) than the shield why do we whine about the shield beeing IMBA.
I get what you were trying to say but I believe that it's up to each player to decide what they're comfortable with using, so I didn't have anything to discuss on that matter. I figured it wasn't directed at me, anyways. If you're okay with the shield but refuse to use cloudkill it's fine by me. I will say though that you will have a hard time fighting beholders without some sort of "unfair" advantage. In any case I usually play a rogue so the whole concepts of "fighting fair" and "honest adventuring" are kind of lost on me. I just come up with tactics and let other people decide if they want to use them.
@nano Right, that wasn't really directed at you, just a good statement to restate my point around. Hell, without you posting other ways of dealing with Beholders my argument against the OP wouldn't exist, it needs those other cheesy ways for comparison
And I completely support your rogue in using whatever works, that shield is an obligatory part of my eq. And it would still be if it were the only cheesy way of dealing with them. That's how I like to play.
Yep, most of the beholder-fighting tactics are similar in my mind. They nullify their abilities as a whole rather than looking at what each ray does. They way I'd like to fight them is to break down the problem and say "okay, there's a petrification ray, so I need p.f. petrify, a death ray so I need Death Ward, a lightning attack so I need lightning resistance"... but then the antimagic ray comes into play and suddenly you need undispellable protection for each category and you're like "screw it, just gimme the shield". I did like the method that someone suggested of lowering your undispellable saves into the negatives and then using Inertial Barrier + boots of grounding/cloak of reflection (not mirroring).
The way they are now, the easiest way is definitely to use some kind of silver bullet tactic. Just be rich (Shield of Balduran), be strong (Slayer form), be clever (polymorph self), be wise (animate dead) or fight dirty (spells from outside of vision range). None of those require you to know what the beams do because they counter all of them at once.
Honestly speaking, Beholder's are the enemy in the game I find it hardest to not cheese against. If you try to play 'dumb' to them (IE, pretend your character name doesn't know they're there and go in with no buffs), you're probably going to end up dead. Plain and simple. I hate using the Sheild of Balduran or the 'cast spells beyond their range of reaction' strategies, because I (and I personally) find that cheesy. So I generally end up flailing around with summons and going Slayer if things start looking bad in their dungeon.
In the sewers, where my characters *really* have little idea what's going on (especially if INT is low- in the Underdark, you generally know you're in a beholder lair, at least), I just pray a lot and use flesh to stone scrolls. Some answers aren't simple. If I prebuffed, I could beat them, but that involves metagaming, which makes me feel sad, so I don't metagame, and I get my butt kicked... the cycle goes on and on.
Hmm... @Twani you're not buffing specifically for Beholder fights, or at all? Because if it's the latter than I find it a bit weird. One does not survive to level 10 without being a bit paranoid. Or batshit insane paranoid seeing how the game likes it's save or die spells and traps. Baldur provides some means of scouting (invisibility, hiding in shadows, companion you don't like) and original RPG format had lots of others. Bah, in some places you didn't touch anything before your rogue twook 20 on a search for traps test and even then only stepped on exact same spots as your summor/prisoner/hired peasant trap detector mk1. And now since you can see giant evil floating eye before it sees you you are authorized to buff, treating unknown danger as A-class enemy.
Also, there *must* be a reason why beholders don't rule the world... The way I figure, the shield is that reason! Every couple of hundred years, when their population swells to a dangerous size, some enterprising hero gets the shield and (perhaps unwittingly) saves human(oid)ity...
This is where the fantasy nerd in me comes out... Though they could likely conquer the world if they worked together, beholders are highly paranoid and actually have split personalities. They tend to fight among themselves just as much as they fight others, so there's little to no chance that a large group would work together toward a common purpose, though there are individual exceptions. (The Forgotten Realms wiki page provides more detail, and I'm sure @KidCarnival could fill us in on his unique personality.)
The way they are now, the easiest way is definitely to use some kind of silver bullet tactic. Just be rich (Shield of Balduran), be strong (Slayer form), be clever (polymorph self), be wise (animate dead) or fight dirty (spells from outside of vision range). None of those require you to know what the beams do because they counter all of them at once.
The way they are now, the easiest way is definitely to use some kind of silver bullet tactic. Just be rich (Shield of Balduran), be strong (Slayer form), be clever (polymorph self), be wise (animate dead) or fight dirty (spells from outside of vision range). None of those require you to know what the beams do because they counter all of them at once.
20k is not a lot of gold
That's one and a third Imoens! You won't catch me wasting my hard-earned Imoens on such frivolous things when the darkness in my soul is free.
The way they are now, the easiest way is definitely to use some kind of silver bullet tactic. Just be rich (Shield of Balduran), be strong (Slayer form), be clever (polymorph self), be wise (animate dead) or fight dirty (spells from outside of vision range). None of those require you to know what the beams do because they counter all of them at once.
20k is not a lot of gold
That's one and a third Imoens! You won't catch me wasting my hard-earned Imoens on such frivolous things when the darkness in my soul is free.
Do keep Imoen in the party? She is always too low to be kept, unless you really like her I always finish every quest in the game before going to spellhold and I normally have about 300.000 gold after my spendings.
Wait, are you saying I can sell her instead of just ditch her? Does that only work if I wait with the "take over your own slav..." I mean, "DESTROY the evil, evil slavers" quest after Spellhold?
Maybe some of the lonelier storeowners would accept an Imoen as payment...
I gotta say it's a surprisingly useful unit. 300,000 gold is a cool 20 Imoens; Azuredge is about a quarter Imoen; a charged wand of cloudkill is about three fourths of an Imoen; your standard issue Robe of Vecna will run you about an Imoen and a half depending on reputation; in dollars, a new Civic is about 1.2 Imoens, while an Audi A8 is 5 Imoens; the speed of light in vacuum is 20 Imoen-kilometers a second...
Maybe some of the lonelier storeowners would accept an Imoen as payment...
I gotta say it's a surprisingly useful unit. 300,000 gold is a cool 20 Imoens; Azuredge is about a quarter Imoen; a charged wand of cloudkill is about three fourths of an Imoen; your standard issue Robe of Vecna will run you about an Imoen and a half depending on reputation; in dollars, a new Civic is about 1.2 Imoens, while an Audi A8 is 5 Imoens; the speed of light in vacuum is 20 Imoen-kilometers a second...
@nano if you are playing evil you cold always trick them by paying in Project Image Imoens, and for the store-owners that are extra-rude like that gnome in Imnesvale, you could even trade him a Mislead Imoen.
Bernard and Ribald seem like tough customers, so maybe a Simulacrum Imoen just to be safe?
Comments
You're right, they're all gaze attacks but they have a huge variety of effects and the gaze part doesn't really have any mechanical implications (they're just treated as spells, and a beholder is like a spellcasting machine gun). They don't look it, but dragons actually have surprisingly few attack options. If you can counter their breath and their melee they will have a hard time killing you. The tricky part there is figuring out how to protect your entire party and (perhaps the harder part) keeping them protected.
EDIT: Ah, I did mean Crom Faeyr... I'll just apologize now and walk out quietly.
And don't get started on Cloudkill, cheese to rule them all. Not Batman-style preparation but a bug in AI behaviour that makes them stand there and die if they didn't see you casting.
Balduran's shield is the most honest way to deal with Beholders right after straight up fighting them and hoping for the best in terms of saving throws.
Polymorphing yourself in a jelly means you have to attack them. It's still as safe as using the Shield of Cheese, but you have to make effort of killing Beholders by yourself.
Summoning magic resistant/immune to rays summons is still risky, if your party is in Beholder's range of sight. I have played BG2 long time ago, so I'm not sure about that at all, but from what I can recall Beholders are targeting their targets at random. So, even if you send your summons, you can be still in danger.
Generally, I'm glad that you have disagreed with me, @Deltharis .It feels good to realize that I'm not using such cheesy solutions. Thank you.
There are much better items to spend gold on early, Vecna/Easthaven/Scarlet/sling/harp/belt pretty much anything useful I would buy before that babby mode shield.
Now I wanna dual wield the damn thing.
And I completely support your rogue in using whatever works, that shield is an obligatory part of my eq. And it would still be if it were the only cheesy way of dealing with them. That's how I like to play.
The way they are now, the easiest way is definitely to use some kind of silver bullet tactic. Just be rich (Shield of Balduran), be strong (Slayer form), be clever (polymorph self), be wise (animate dead) or fight dirty (spells from outside of vision range). None of those require you to know what the beams do because they counter all of them at once.
In the sewers, where my characters *really* have little idea what's going on (especially if INT is low- in the Underdark, you generally know you're in a beholder lair, at least), I just pray a lot and use flesh to stone scrolls. Some answers aren't simple. If I prebuffed, I could beat them, but that involves metagaming, which makes me feel sad, so I don't metagame, and I get my butt kicked... the cycle goes on and on.
She is always too low to be kept, unless you really like her
I always finish every quest in the game before going to spellhold and I normally have about 300.000 gold after my spendings.
I gotta say it's a surprisingly useful unit. 300,000 gold is a cool 20 Imoens; Azuredge is about a quarter Imoen; a charged wand of cloudkill is about three fourths of an Imoen; your standard issue Robe of Vecna will run you about an Imoen and a half depending on reputation; in dollars, a new Civic is about 1.2 Imoens, while an Audi A8 is 5 Imoens; the speed of light in vacuum is 20 Imoen-kilometers a second...
Bernard and Ribald seem like tough customers, so maybe a Simulacrum Imoen just to be safe?
Hmm, maybe that's what Irenicus' cloning tanks were for, when they're not being used for Ellesime. He was funding his plans with unlicensed Imoens...
Oh.