How do you use Haer'Dalis?
MonoCanalla
Member Posts: 291
I'm a Blade, so he is on my way to my stronghold. And I fucking love tieflings!
Thing is, first time I will play him since my first playtrough since 2000. Now i get bards are cool. Question is, how people plays him?
-Like a Blade? A kind of magic protected warrior.
-Like a arcane spell caster who has two swords for when he consumes his magic or if an any gets too close.
-Like a singer.
Thing is, first time I will play him since my first playtrough since 2000. Now i get bards are cool. Question is, how people plays him?
-Like a Blade? A kind of magic protected warrior.
-Like a arcane spell caster who has two swords for when he consumes his magic or if an any gets too close.
-Like a singer.
0
Comments
1. Extra damage dealer or tank: This is how I mostly use him. Exactly as described by @Corvino.
2. Arcane support: He's great at casting certain spells due to his caster levels, so I use him for that. His buffs and damage-dealing spells scale the best (until your mage reaches level 20 anyway). His dispels are always superior due to his fast leveling. So for example I use him to buff with Improved Haste, to lay down some Skull Traps or to breach mage defenses with Remove Magic and Breach.
3. Singing: He sucks at it (as in: don't bother) until you get Enhanced Bard Song, then he's suddenly awesome. Use him to avoid all kinds of nastiness such as stuns and fears (there are stuns all over the Underdark, for example). You lose his DPS while he's singing, but the song adds damage too so if you have good melee that's amazing. The song also subtracts 4 AC from everybody and 10(!) AC from Haer'Dalis. By all means pop Defensive Spin before singing. This gives him -20 to AC so he's virtually untouchable for the first 4 rounds while singing.
4. (Once you get HLAs) He can get Spike Trap, and Spike Trap is extremely overpowered. This is the best HLA for Haer'Dalis once you have Use Any Item and Enhanced Bard Song. Time Trap is useful too, but a few enemies (very few) are immune to it. Don't bother with Alchemy or Scribe Scrolls. They suck. Evasion too. Haer'Dalis should use Defensive Spin, Stone Skin, Mirror Image, PfMW, that kind of thing if he wants to avoid death.
In any case, my point is that UAI, Enhanced Bard Song and traps are cool, but the rest is a big pile of mediocrity. I took some of the others last time just for fun, but I didn't even have fun with them
In case you were wondering, you won't get HLAs until you hit 3 million XP.
1. Defensively: in Yaga Shura's lair I scouted ahead with my thief to find half a dozen fire giants waiting. Load up HD with stone skin, mirror image and greater evasion and then send him in before popping a defensive spin. With his armour class now hovering around -25 the rest of the party (Mazzy, Keldorn, Sarevok, Korgan and PC swashbuckler) rush in and whirlwind attack. Result, within 1 round, is six dead fire giants and HD with not a scratch.
2. Offensively: in the midst of battling Sendai's various statues, HD leaves the rest of the party battling a statue and the drow near the door to drop a time-stop trap at the back of the room. The next statue to come to life trips this and in the 10 seconds of frozen time HD runs over and hits this statue 4 times while wielding blackrazor and angurvadal +5 (he gets 2 pips in long sword if you pick him up after lvl 15). The first and third hits each activate the blackrazor special ability, draining 8 levels from the statue and raising HD's strength to 25! When time comes back the statue is dead.
3. Support: in that same Sendai battle HD's first action is to cast mislead. His clone then runs to a safe corner and sings enhanced bard song for the duration, giving my all-melee party some serious buffs.
Mid-way through the battle Keldorn is chunked by a 160-point backstab (ouch!). Oh dear, no more instant dispel or Carsomyr I think. But wait, HD is wearing robe of vecna and has 3 dispels memorised for this exact reason. His level 30 dispel is almost as fast as keldorn's. And when he has a spare minute he runs over to keldorn's body to pick up the blessed bracers, using UAI he slips them on and casts resurrection to bring keldorn back.
And in my experience his defensive spin does work against dragon's wing buffet. He is always the first in to battle dragons for this very reason.
I never tested his Defensive Spin against a dragon. Nice if it does work, but I still don't think it makes sense that by doing some fancy moves you can resist the sheer force of a dragon.
Exactly. As Xykon would say, "in every fight there is certain amount of force against no tactic can succeed"