Amazing! You were lucky with Imoen. I'm not sure this run urge me to play a no-reload SCS run, or not, but it's exciting read for sure! Thanks for sharing!
One of the trials at the Final Seal in Watcher's Keep is a fight with an unnamed Green Dragon. I originally intended to just do some of the less dangerous quests on this level tonight, but on a whim I decided to go for the dragon, and do it without memorizing lots of Feeblemind spells beforehand.
I didn't manage it too well.
Despite the fact that I knew it was a green dragon and green dragon use acid breath and Sil HAD the Protection from Acid spell in her spellbook, I decided not to protect myself from green dragon's acid breath. I just ran in. Guess what happened the first round?
The HP boost from Vampiric Touch is awesome. Jan is at a major disadvantage without it. I've underestimated the limitations of the Illusionist mage kit.
Anyway, after having most of my characters drink Potions of Superior Healing, Aerie summons a Deva to join the Mordenkainen's Sword we summoned before the battle began.
Since I'm quite proud of Sil's high potential damage output, I concentrate on getting her buffed and in position. She switches to Iron Golem and starts pummeling the dragon's back.
It doesn't work too well. Eventually I realize Sil's THAC0 is just too poor. It's at 5, and the Dragon has -11 AC. She can barely land a hit. While Sil and the rest of the party are struggling to break through the dragon's hide, we soak up a lot of damage from the green dragon's acid breath, and drink a fair number of potions to keep the party alive.
Finally, I decide to bring out Nalia, who has been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the right time to trigger her Chain Contingency. I put her at a safe distance from the dragon and cast Time Stop.
Unfortunately, as I just now realized, I'm supposed to do that AFTER I trigger Nalia's Chain Contingency, not before. So now, when I do spawn in Nalia's clones, none of them will have Time Stop.
And any spells she casts during Time Stop will be deducted from her clones' spellbooks. I just have her summon a Planetar instead, replacing Aerie's now-unsummoned Deva, and Nalia spends the rest of the Time Stop picking at the dragon's ankles with the Dagger of the Star (I'm still not sure if dragons are immune to all physical projectiles, but I was pretty sure the Crimson Dart wouldn't work).
Nalia retreats to her original spot, triggers her Chain Contingency, and the clones all cast Mordenkainen's Sword.
Mordenkainen's Swords cannot be killed by the dragon's physical attacks, and have excellent THAC0, damage, and APR. Unfortunately, the dragon is very fond of Wing Buffet, which costs us a lot of damage.
Eventually we whittle it down to half its HP, triggering a Contingency that I suppose was inevitable.
The funny thing is, Heal would have dispelled Feeblemind. If I had gone about this my normal way, I might have found myself facing a fully conscious dragon at full health, without any clones, and with our buffs quickly running out. That could have gone very badly.
Unfortunately, Nalia memorized no Feeblemind spells to begin with. I think we only have two such spells party-wide. So, the clones rush in, one after another, to cast Pierce Magic. I catch the dragon using its acid breath, so I have to hold back three of the clones to prevent them from getting hit by it. I had to time their spellcasting so it came right after the dragon's; a Wing Buffet or the dragon's acid breath could disrupt their spells.
The dragon finally concentrates on Sil, and manages to break through her Stoneskins.
Since I prepared no Armor of Faith Minor Sequencer, and I failed to unequip the Sling of Everard before shapeshifting (which prevents me from switching out the Shield of the Lost for the Defender of Easthaven), my physical damage resistance won't be enough to protect me. Sil flees the scene to recover. The dragon does not chase her for long.
With the dragon's magic resistance lowered, Nalia's clones are prepared to hit the dragon with damaging spells. Two of them cast Magic Missile for safety's sake; the other two cast Horrid Wilting. The Magic Missiles hit their target.
The Horrid Wilting spells don't.
The clones flee. They wait a few seconds until the dragon is done casting its next spell, then hurry back in to use their last two Horrid Wilting spells. Aerie uses Energy Blades to interrupt the dragon's spells, to ensure the clones' safety.
With the Mordenkainen's Swords and Imoen blocking the dragon in, the Horrid Wilting spells make contact. Notice that the Mordenkainen's Swords aren't next to the dragon in the above screenshot: they got hit by Wing Buffet while the Horrid Wilting was traveling across the map.
Bolstered by the Mordenkainen's Swords, Nalia's Planetar lands the final blow.
Sil chooses Comet as her next HLA. In SCS2, it does crushing damage instead of fire damage, and while its unconsiousness effect does not have Dragon's Breath's -10 save penalty, it is nonmagical and lasts for 18 seconds instead of 3. With the party's THAC0 the way it is, we can really use the automatic hits that an 18-second disabler could give us.
Aerie chooses Implosion. It's single-target, which means it can't bypass Spell Deflection/Turning/Trap, but its monstrous damage, at 20d10, half crushing and half fire, should be an instant kill on many enemies. It will go right through PFMW, though we still need to use Breach if we want it to deal its fire damage on pre-buffed mages. Plus, it bypasses magic resistance.
We still have some nasty battles ahead of us, even if we skip Xei Win Toh. We'll just have to see how things go.
Umm I always thought Green dragon does poison damage with its breath? Acid was black's mojo. So poison immunity might have helped. If the immunity grants %100 poison damage resistance, as well. Cavalier's flat poison immunity prevents from being poisoned, but offers no resistance to straight poison damage, IIRC.
That would explain why Sil still got damaged by the dragon's breath weapon while she was in Iron Golem form. The Iron Golem form has immunity to acid damage, but not poison damage.
I set out to squeeze as much XP out of Watcher's Keep as I can. A few modest challenges, a few bigger ones, and... unfortunately... a couple of rather foolish decisions.
First off, I had two trials left for the southern segment of the Final Seal. An Imp with a riddle and a game of wits, and an endurance challenge against a bunch of Orcs. Since I didn't know which door led where, I decided to buff beforehand.
In the process, I spotted something rather nice.
Vampiric Touch is indeed overpowered. Sil just got quadruple the normal bonus. To give some perspective, that's more HP than a 30th-level Barbarian with 19 CON. And the Helm of Balduran.
I think Vampiric Touch gives the duplicated bonuses more often when you've been casting it many times over the course of the game. I didn't see quadruple bonuses earlier in the game.
We emerge in the Orc challenge room and we're off to a bad start.
We need Blur spells to avoid hits. Our AC isn't that great otherwise. We're locked in a room with instantly respawning Orcs until the time limit expires. That's a lot of attack rolls, and these Orcs, thanks to SCS2, use a rage ability that makes them immune to disablers.
The enemy mages toss out a Teleport Field. We summon a Deva (saving the Planetar for later) and Sil casts Comet. May as well use it now.
Notice Sil's simulacrum in Mind Flayer form. I had hoped to use Psionic Blast on the Orcs, forgetting they were immune. The enemy mages weren't, but I wanted to use the Psionic Blast on the melee goons.
Instead, I targeted the enemy mages with Jan's flashers, to great effect. Sil switched to Iron Golem form to took advantage of the free hits.
Unfortunately, there are lots of mages, and the Teleport Field messes with our targeting. Worse, one of the mages uses Remove Magic.
Now all of our buffs are gone. I've been neglecting to cast SI: Abjuration due to a paucity of spellcaster foes.
But the Orcs have rather little in the way of offensive power. The mages are very much geared towards their own defenses, as most SCS2 mages are (with the pre-buffing component, at least), and we muddle through the fight until the timer runs out and the spirit thingy gives us XP.
Haer'dalis can now cast a 6th-level spell! All we have to do to get an Improved Bard Song going in the background is earn Haer'dalis another 1,500,000 XP. Piece of cake.
Next up is the Imp challenge. We get a riddle about the Imp's siblings, but it's awful hard to know what to choose
Seven.
without knowing
the Imp is female
Once we solve the first riddle, we play a game of coins.
I used to suggest the Imp make the first move, assuming that was the clever thing to do.
It's not. The Imp is giving you an advantage by having you go first.
Jan reaches a new level and gets a new HLA. Thieves get a lot of rather lame HLAs, right next to some really overpowered ones.
Assassination is the best choice over Spike Trap. I'll explain why later.
I head to the next challenge, the Warrior Spirit text adventure. I don't buff before I open the door, since you don't fight anything personally in this challenge.
Aside from these guys. Nobody likes fighting these guys.
We flee the scene--Devil Shades are quite vicious--to get the breathing room to summon a Planetar, a Flesh Golem, and Chan, Elemental Prince of Air. Sil casts Comet to get in some quick damage.
Comet does precious little. The enemy is immune to fire (over 100% resistance) and immune to unconsciousness. Nalia jumps into action to compensate for Sil's incompetence.
Horrid Wilting more or less ends the battle. We move on to the next challenge.
You play as the Warrior Spirit, and run through a teeny-tiny gauntlet, structured like an old school text adventure.
This section was very cool the first time I played it. My favorite part is this picture:
The fact that the Gibberling flees without any sound or visual effect seems kind of cool. A little monster runs in, perfectly quiet, and then runs out, perfectly quiet once again.
One section left before the Final Seal battles. We have to summon a bunch of increasingly difficult enemies and kill them. The nominal puzzle aspect of this section is that you have to
put green globes in the green pillar, red globes in the red pillar, purple globes in the purple pillar, and blue globes in the blue pillar.
The notable encounters here include (1) four mages who come out individually (2) a pack of Wolfweres (3) a gang of Vampires (4) a gaggle of Beholders, and (5) a cabal of Liches. Luckily for me, GameFAQS said you don't have to fight all of them.
Apparently any green globe, for example, can be put in the green pillar to solve the puzzle. Same goes for the other colors. I thought you need to get all four globes, and put the right one in the pillar, but all globes work.
So, I prepare the party and summon one of the mages.
Jan's Time Trap gives him automatic hits for just over a round. And since the Mage's defenses don't come out immediately, Jan gets in a free backstab.
We try it again on the next Mage.
See the red icon on Jan's portrait? That's the Assassination icon. Assassination lasts 6 seconds and makes all hits into backstabs. This works marvelously with the right setup.
Same as normal, Jan shapeshifts into a spider, dispels the spider weapon with a Minor Sequencer, and Aerie casts Improved Haste on him, giving him 8 APR. When the Mage comes out, she triggers Jan's Time Trap, giving Jan 10 seconds of automatic hits. Jan activates Assassination, so he gets 8 automatic backstabs at 5x damage. If his target has no Stoneskins and doesn't have Improved Mantle or Absolute Immunity, Jan can deal hundreds of damage before the Time Trap's duration runs out. In this case, he's using the Staff of the Ram, for over 60 damage per hit on average.
The party has some rather remarkable damage dealing capabilities, but they are very inflexible in how that can be done. They require certain assumptions in order to operate as fighters effectively. Fortunately, HP-heavy enemies tend not to be spellcasters, which usually simplifies the picture. The Greater Wolfweres are a good example: since they do little more than run at you and attack, our buffs remained untouched. Sil might not be able to tear apart a dragon in Iron Golem form, but she can easily chunk Greater Wolfweres and other melee-based enemies.
GameFAQS misled me on one point. The second undead group (there are four encounters for every color; purple is all undead) turns out not to be a horde of Shadows, but a horde of Devil Shades.
Remember how nobody likes these guys?
Luckily, we have the spells to hold off the group for a moment, and Nalia has a Chain Contingency ready.
Horrid Wilting clears the scene very quickly.
Anyway, I got surprised again. This time it was a worse surprise. I decided to summon the gaggle of Beholders, only to find that there were more than mere Beholders in the bunch.
A Hive Mother. A Death Tyrant. And an Elder Orb. The three deadliest kinds of the single deadliest enemy type in BG2. Thank goodness we prepared.
Well, prepared in the sense that we summoned some critters and cast Energy Blades and Shapechange. Not prepared in the sense that we didn't cast ANY buffs. All we've got is the Cloak of Mirroring and Sil's Iron Golem form.
And, of course, since these are Beholders, Jan naturally set two Time Traps and five normal traps. So he's got 20 seconds to act before the battle really begins.
Unfortunately, since he's not in spider form, there's not much he can do besides use the Wand of Spell Striking to cast Breach on the Elder Orb and Hive Mother, and fire some Bolts of Lightning at the Death Tyrant.
While time was stopped, Nalia's Chain Contingency triggered. I move her clones out of the way, very aware of how easily the Beholders could disable the whole bunch.
Imoen summons the Flesh Golem, Aerie attacks with Energy Blades, and once Sil is in Iron Golem form, she rushes up to slap around the Hive Mother. The clones begin to cast Time Stop.
We begin with a Greater Malison spell, then just use Horrid Wilting and either Vampiric Touch or Magic Missile. The clones also throw some darts during the Time Stop. I notice somewhere along the way that there are only two Beholders left, so I go back to see if the third one died.
All the Beholders got hit by Jan's traps, but the Death Tyrant took FAR more damage than the others. The Hive Mother is very resistant, and the Elder Orb flat-out immune.
With the area suffused with Horrid Wilting spells, the Beholders start to come down.
All our summons suddenly dry up. We resort to a group charge, but none of us besides Sil is particularly strong. Magic Missiles from the clones speed things up.
The Hive Mother has some healing magic, which helps it cling to life a bit longer.
We all contribute our little spells. Implosion doesn't do much, but it's still a lot more effective than Magic Missile.
The Hive Mother falls right before casting some Conjuration spell. I'd hate to see what a Beholder would summon. The last summoning spell I saw from a Beholder brought out a Death Tyrant.
I almost forget to pick up the Cloak of Mirroring. SCS2 Beholders like to steal it from you.
The rationale is that they see their rays aren't getting their way through the cloak, so they use telekinesis to nab it from you. Same goes for the Shield of Balduran. Not sure why they don't use their telekinesis powers to steal your weapons, which would be a lot easier to pull off than a shield. I guess they don't view other items as a threat.
The Final Seal battles lay ahead. I haven't decided if I'll save them for later, but there's a big reward if I do. I don't plan on fighting Demogorgon, so once I've broken the final seal, the quest can be completed without any further risk.
Very entertaining run. Hate to be a party pooper, but I think Haer is a better fit than the ridiculous Cernd, though Cernd was clearly better. Can he get trap HLAs in your setup? UAI is handy either way, though for a Bard its much worse than a Thief. Maybe he can wield Carsomyr for you? 50% MR is handy situationally, though APR could be bothersome.
Haer'dalis can indeed get trap HLAs. But we likely won't see him using any until TOB.
Haer'dalis is a better fit in the sense that he's an arcane spellcaster, like the rest of the party, while Cernd was divine only. Cernd was indeed the odd ball out, being the humongous fuzzy wuzzy as he was, but I picked Cernd because he would get his big power-up earlier in the game than Haer'dalis, who I mostly wanted for the Improved Bard Song.
The thing is, I originally wanted this run to be a multiplayer run, to test out a party of spellcasters and see how well they performed as a melee-based group. Then I found out how ridiculously awesome Jan's flashers were, so I decided on a single-player run.
I should clarify. The party I originally planned was composed of the following characters:
-Cleric of Lathander, dual-classed to mage at level 11 (basically, Sil) -Cleric of Helm, dual-classed to thief at level 11 -Shapeshifter -Conjurer, dual-classed to cleric at level 11 -Skald -Skald
These were the reasons I chose these characters, and the weapon setups they would use:
The Cleric of Lathander/Mage: I have long been interested in APR, since non-fighters have so few ways of getting beyond 2 APR with (Improved) Haste, and this party was conceived to evaluate ways of achieving high APR without fighter levels. The Cleric of Lathander, as in the current run, would reach 3 base APR with two castings of Boon of Lathander. Level 11 gives an extra casting of Boon of Lathander (also an extra casting of Hold Undead), hence the dualing time for the CoL/M. Early game: Staff Spear in spider form Midgame: Flail of Ages in spider form Late game: Iron Golem form, Defender of Easthaven in off hand
The Cleric of Helm/Thief The same goes for the Cleric of Helm, which gets an extra casting of Seeking Sword and True Sight at level 11. Seeking Sword sets the caster's APR to 3, strikes as a +4 weapon, gets a +4 to THAC0, and does 1d8 damage, but prevents spellcasting entirely. This is why the CoH/T was chosen as our thief. Partly it's because the Seeking Sword can be used to backstab, but mostly because a thief wouldn't be bothered so much by the inability to cast spells while using the sword. Early game: Seeking Sword Midgame: Seeking Sword Late game: Seeking Sword, Kundane
The Shapeshifter: Basically, the same role as I had for Cernd, though I did not plan to dual-wield two copies of the Greater Werewolf Token. In fact, I planned on using vanilla shapeshifting, and removing the werewolf weapon to replace it with another. Early game: Belm in werewolf form Midgame: Gnasher in greater werewolf form Late game: Impaler in greater werewolf form (impossible with SCS2 shapeshifting)
The Conjurer/Cleric: I had done an insane solo poverty run of a Conjurer dual-classed to cleric before and found that it had a lot of potential. Mostly this character's role would just be a normal cleric, with a handful of extra spells to help it out. Early game: Staff Spear in spider form Midgame: Staff of Rynn in spider form Late game: Staff of Rynn in spider or Energy Blades
The Skalds: The Skalds were simply meant as support characters. The others all had terrible THAC0, and having a pair of Skalds would greatly improve the situation. Testing found that, with a couple of bards singing their songs together, the party's damage output and general sturdiness would be roughly the same as a normal party with multiple fighter types.
I considered the party I ended up with to be something of a watered-down version of my original plan, though Sil remained the way I wanted her. Cernd replaced the Shapeshifter, Jan replaced the Cleric of Helm/Thief, Aerie replaced the Conjurer/Cleric (as she was the party's main cleric), and Haer'dalis would replace one of the Skalds. The remaining character would be filled by Nalia and then Imoen.
I changed up the equation due to the difficulty of obtaining Haer'dalis. I knew the Planar Prison was very dangerous, and I would not be able to take it on right away. Instead, we stuck with Nalia, and Imoen tagged along as an auxiliary spellcaster.
Haer'dalis would have pulled his weight at epic levels, but he wasn't really what I needed when it came to the first half of the game. Until we hit epic levels and got the Improved Bard Song, Haer'dalis would just be another Fighter/Mage type, and that role was already filled: we had Cernd as our tank, Sil as our damage dealer, Jan as our disabler, Aerie as our buffer, and Nalia as our debuffer. Haer'dalis would have made the party stronger, but he wouldn't have filled in any gaps, so he wasn't worth the risk of saving earlier in the game.
The first battle is with Aurumach and Ferrumach Rilmani, a mage and a cleric who come with a small team of armored grunts. Although it's a high-level encounter, it's actually relatively straightforward. Aurumach and Ferrumach don't come with many defenses, so mostly we can just whomp away until they fall.
The Planetar and Chan don't have any flashy abilities, but they do a lot of damage and are terribly hard to kill. It's a big contrast to the party itself, which mostly employs a tank and toolkit strategy, with very little emphasis on raw damage output.
Next is Azamantes (another awesome name), a Lich who comes bolstered by a circle of Flaming Skulls, who cast fire-based area effect spells and explode in a "Skull Trap" when they death, though the projectile for their self-destruction is actually the same as the Horn of Blasting, which covers much more area than a Skull Trap spell.
I try to keep Nalia at a safe distance, lest the Flaming Skulls disrupt her spells. Sil stays in Iron Golem form for safety's sake, while Jan has finally started using his spider form in battle. Haer'dalis and Jan are both quite vulnerable to the Flaming Skulls' fire spells, as I didn't buff Haer'dalis with Protections from Fire, and Jan loses his fire immunity due to shapeshifting.
Incendiary Cloud is a major problem in this fight. Only Sil can safely stay within its area of effect; the others have to flee, and Incendiary Cloud's wide spread is very bad for the party's mobility.
Notice our Planetar running off to kill the Flaming Skulls we failed to destroy earlier.
Nalia helps break through Azamantes' defenses during Time Stop, but she can't stay close for long due to the Incendiary Cloud. Imoen and Haer'dalis use Wands of Spell Striking to get rid of the lich's PFMW, but our problem doesn't end there. Azamantes dies, but his Simulacrum--which I thought was a Mislead spell--is alive and well.
The clone starts casting a Necromancy spell, clearly pointed at Haer'dalis, but he can't cancel the Lich's spell with Mislead. I accept that he is doomed and send him off to draw the Horrid Wilting spell away from the group.
Finally we break through the clone's Stoneskins.
He falls shortly thereafter. No surprise contingencies or Spell Trigger.
From there, all we have to do is clean up the Flaming Skulls.
I am quite pleased with Sil's damage output, though I do wish she had more means of improving her THAC0. Holy Power reduces her base THAC0 by 3, but it reduces her STR.
Finally, the last battle of Watcher's Keep before Demogorgon. We have Xei Win Toh, a 20th-level Kensai; the Huntress, a 20th-level Archer; Y'tossi, a Marilith with various elemental damages on hit; Ameralis Zauviir, a 27th-level drow cleric with slow on hit; Nalmissra, a level-draining Succubus; and a Hive Mother. The enemy has lots of HP, magic resistance, many attacks, and access to weapon immunity spells. Thankfully, they do not have any Time Stop spells or mage HLAs, but Xei Win Toh and the Huntress have Greater Whirlwind Attack.
I noticed in the Beholder fight earlier that, when Jan set two Time Traps, they went off one after the other, not simultaneously. That is, one would trigger at the start of combat, and the other would trigger as soon as the last one wore. I decided to try out a set of seven Time Traps, which ostensibly would give Jan 70 seconds of free reign.
Notice the Skeleton Warriors Aerie has summoned (I got rid of the excess Skeletons with CTRL-Y). Normally, I don't use Animate Dead much except to get targets for Vampiric Touch, but this is a big fight and having a few extra helpers could make a big difference.
The Time Traps go off, and they work as I expected. The enemy's weapon immunities (Improved Mantle and two Protection from Magical Weapons spells) will wear off midway through Jan's initial rampage, although unfortunately only one member of the enemy party in vulnerable to backstabs.
Jan can't backstab Ameralis Zauviir, but he still has enough time to bring her down.
Since I neglect to time exactly when the enemy's weapon immunities wear off, Jan wastes some time attacking them and failing. Because of this, and an inability to decide who to focus on, he is only able to kill Xie Win Toh and Ameralis Zauviir, and bring Nalmissra and the Huntress down to Injured.
The battle has now begun, and the enemy is on an even playing field, though they are much weaker than they would have been otherwise. Xei Win Toh activates Greater Whirlwind Attack the first round, which would have let her remove all the Stoneskins from any of my party members within a few seconds.
Nalia flees the scene to get enough breathing room to cast Project Image and Time Stop, though she needs PFMW to protect herself from the nearby Huntress. The casting time for Time Stop is instant. I forgot to take off the bracers of aura cleansing I use to speed up pre-battle buffing. Casting haste show the Aura Cleansed message, confirming my mistake.
I will have to wait several seconds before letting any of Nalia's clones cast spells, to compensate for the improved casting time.
So, I have the first clone cast Maze on the Huntress, which fails to work, and throw out a couple of Horrid Wilting spells to soften up the other enemies. Their MR is stellar, but spells are still Nalia's best option.
Nalmissra panics! High-level enemies like these almost never try to flee. It's an excellent outcome, saving us several rounds of potential level draining.
I keep the Horrid Wilting spells coming, and the Hive Mother, thankfully, fails to resist it.
The Hive Mother is gone. Nalmissra is at Near Death, so we switch focus to her. It doesn't take long to bring her down as well.
At some point, Nalia's clones vanish, though I'm not sure it's due to their time running out or Nalia getting hit. Either way, she and her clones manage to trap the Huntress with some Mordenkainen's Swords, allowing her to help us bring down Y'tossi, without having the Huntress chasing after. After we breach Y'tossi to get rid of her Blade Barrier, Nalia casts Time Stop to cast Pierce Magic and sneak in a little more damage.
Again, Y'tossi has very high MR, even with Pierce Magic, but with the rest of the enemies gone (besides some unimportant Skeleton Warriors), spending high-end spells on a magic-resistant enemy is more than worth it.
Aerie tries to summon a Deva to help take down the Marilith, but the spell fails, saying we can't summon more than 5 critters. I had forgotten about the Mordenkainen's Swords hacking away at the Huntress. I bring them over to help out.
Y'tossi has a seemingly endless supply of Stoneskin spells. Thankfully, we have a near-endless supply of Breach spells. Notice also that Sil has fled: she ran out of Stoneskins just as she got poisoned. Thankfully, Y'tossi's poison only does 10 damage over 5 seconds, so Sil returns to the fray once she's had a moment to drink a potion.
A Magical Sword lands the final blow. They are really are quite excellent summons.
Y'tossi drops a scroll of Wish and Nalia hits level 20, gaining an extra casting of Time Stop. The way forward is clear. Before we enter the Imprisoned One's lair, we buy back the Paladin's Bracers from Garlena, since they get an upgrade in TOB.
The Imprisoned One has an awfully creepy introduction.
Five manacles on the floor, four of them broken. A single restraint on a massive but invisible and nameless creature.
Once we've got a hold of the proper scroll, we seal Odren and his brethren inside with the Imprisoned One. Watcher's Keep has been sealed, keeping Demogorgon safely locked away.
Sil hits level 20 as well, allowing her to cast both Wish and Shapechange. It's a pity that Wish, as powerful as it is, is so dependent on chance. It cannot be made into a strategy, even if I use Project Image to save on castings, since there's no guarantee of getting a useful outcome. We're basically guaranteed to get at least one good option, since Sil has such high Wisdom, but we don't know if it'll actually have any impact in a given situation. I need reliable options more than I need strong options.
Watcher's Keep has been completed and cleared. The only things left to do in Shadows of Amn are the Twisted Rune, Kangaxx, Bodhi, and Suldanessellar.
Well, when you first enter the Graveyard to confront Bodhi, she greets you with a vampire ambush. It changes to night immediately, allowing the vampires to spawn, and it also dispels all of my buffs.
Wow. The party stood there for hours, waiting just long enough for night to fall. The perfect time to go after vampires: when you can't escape by running outside.
Well, I have a solution to that. We lay down and rest for 8 hours right in front of Bodhi. The vampires spawn in as normal, but they vanish in the mist to escape the sunlight.
Oh, and we get 3000 XP from an unrelated side quest.
We enter the crypts and Sil switches to Iron Golem form before heading up the hallway. The Iron Golem's wide selection circle will hold back the vampires. We still get ambushed from behind, but we have some fast-casting spells to bring it down before it can drain our levels.
Nalia uses her first Flame Arrow of the entire run. She's finally at level 20, and gets the maximum damage from Flame Arrow. Haer'dalis just casts Mislead, since he was the vampire's first target.
With the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart by our sides, we make short work of the vampires. Sil remains our biggest source of melee damage, not counting summons.
Vampires appear to be really big on the ambushes. They just pulled off two failed ambushes in the past 9 hours. They try again.
It doesn't work. Nalia had memorized an extra PFMW spell for just this reason.
Sil runs ahead to take stock of the situation in the main room. I suppose it's what I should have expected.
I'd hoped to play conservatively, and save some of our spells for later, but since there's such a huge concentration of Ancient Vampires in this one little spot, I decide to go all out. Nalia spawns her clones. Aerie casts Project Image as well, to cast Sunray on the vampire group. Nalia's clones begin casting Time Stop.
The clones have some trouble getting to the main room, since there's a cluster of characters and monsters and clones in the middle of the hallway, but eventually we get it sorted out. Some Horrid Wilting spells and a Sunfire later, the gang of vampires croaks.
The last group of vampires before Bodhi was pretty straightforward. It basically just looked like this.
Sil lost over 50 HP to a Cloud of Bats that lingered long after the battle ended. She could soak it up with little risk, though, with her high base HP.
I had intended on relying on Sunfire spells a lot more in this area, but I refrained from using them to avoid antagonizing the paladins and Drizzt and company.
Next up, Bodhi.
Under my install options, Bodhi is a "toned-down" version of the Bodhi from the Tactics mod, with some better scripting, to boot. In the Tactics mod, Bodhi gets a constant effect Fire Shield that does magical cold damage, and sources of magic cold resistance are very uncommon. Plus, she gets some outrageously overpowered area-effect innate spells with -10 save penalties, including blindness, slow, an 8d8 Horrid Wilting spell, and an extra-powerful variant of Insect Swarm, which cannot be blocked by Fire Shield, only SI: Conjuration. I don't know how exactly SCS2 tones down the encounter, but we're dealing with a fairly overpowered foe.
Oh, and she has two vampire mages at her side. Plus the normal vampires and doom guard whatevers.
Since Drizzt and one of the paladins are with me, I decide not to rest and repeatedly add up Jan's traps. Instead, I just lay two: one Spike Trap, and one Time Trap.
Notice the Deva, already summoned. Its immunity to level drain is a big plus in this battle.
Once we've thrown some holy water into the blood pools to weaken the vampires, Sil throws out a Comet spell. We anticipated using a lot of fire damage in this battle, but we can't use Incendiary Cloud or Sunfire without turning Drizzt, the paladin, and/or our Deva hostile. So, Comet it is.
The rest of the party is stuck in the hallway. I wanted to keep them out of harm's way for a bit.
This was not a good move on my part.
Jan's traps activate, but they're not much help.
Without adequate preparation, Jan can't make much use out of a 10-second Time Stop effect.
Immediately afterwards, Nalia's clone finishes casting Time Stop.
She can't get through the doorway. She can use her spells on the nearest vampires, but Bodhi is well out of reach. Two or three Time Stop spells go to waste because of this.
Bodhi's too far away, but we can get at Bodhi's two vampire mages. Jan in the above image is trying to dispel their illusions, but in the end it doesn't matter. They get overwhelmed by spell damage, and soon we are left with Bodhi herself, who has been hiding in her room, sulking as is her wont.
She's in pretty bad shape, and with two Nalia clones left (I don't know where the other two went), we bring her down to Near Death with single-target spells. Aerie's Implosion is especially effective.
Bodhi heals herself. Nalia's clones start casting Time Stop.
See the grey circle to the right? That's the Deva, despawning earlier than I expected, right before the Time Stop begins. Very disappointing.
Then both of Nalia's remaining clone despawn, right in the middle of the Time Stop. Also very disappointing.
Newly freed from her Project Image spell, Nalia hurries over to help out. Everyone starts casting some direct-damage spells, which will helps us avoid getting hit by Bodhi's Fire Shield.
She interrupts everyone's spell but Sil's, since Sil was protected by the Cloak of Mirroring.
Bodhi abruptly teleports over to Jan, only to get teleported by Teleport Field into the middle of the room, right after Nalia finishes casting Time Stop. The two teleportations in quick succession make me worried that Bodhi is going to blink away when the Time Stop ends, dodging Nalia's spells, but I don't have much choice. Nalia casts Improved Alacrity and uses all the spells she can. No Flame Arrow, Magic Missile, or Pierce Magic, though, since Bodhi is invisible at the moment.
Nalia casts two Horrid Wilting spells, Dragon's Breath, Mordenkainen's Sword, Summon Planetar, and Improved Haste on the Planetar before the Time Stop and Improved Alacrity run out.
Bodhi blinks away, dodging much of the spell damage coming her way.
She still takes a lot of damage, however, and we have a Planetar under Improved Haste to help us bring her down. The rest of the party uses ranged weapons to avoid Bodhi's Fire Shield.
The final blow comes!
I am really, really unhappy with this.
Bodhi is one of the toughest fights in the game, and she offers a ton of XP on her defeat. Drizzt just stole the kill and all the XP that went with it. This is exactly why I never ask Drizzt to come along. He does this all the time.
I look for Drizzt after the battle, but he vanished without a word. I would have nailed him with CTRL-Y if he hadn't gone away.
This was a fairly uninterested battle, for me. Horrid Wilting killed basically everything. It's a great spell and everything, but it's relatively boring compared to the other stuff I've done in this run of the game. Stunning Myconids with flashers from a gnomish spider was much cooler than just using a 20d8 direct damage spell. Horrid Wilting is little more complicated than pointing and clicking.
Well, Bodhi is dead. Imoen is restored. And we're on our way to Suldanessellar, and lots of quest XP. But I'm not happy.
Hey @semiticgod, in the process of catching up with your journal. Am impressed and quite surprised that this is still a no-reload run, considering the experimental character of parts of your playthrough. I think I'm even a bit jealous, because the game always seems to find ways to punish my no-reload characters whenever I decide to try with new strategies...
Hats off and best of luck in Suldanessalar/Hell!
Are you playing with SCS v21 / Tactics style Improved Irenicus in Hell? (More recent versions of SCS no longer contain that component.)
@Blackraven: I've got the Improved Irenicus installed. I think it's the medium-difficulty version, the one that adds in SCS2 scripting but reduces the extra Tactics powers. I don't know the details, though. Why did they take out that component in new versions of SCS? Did they replace it with something else?
As for how the party survived so long... honestly, I would credit part of it to DLTCEP. I have formed a habit of looking stuff up in lieu of testing. That's how I know Xei Win Toh was vulnerable to backstabbing, but the rest of the Final Seal battle party was not. It's kind of a cheat, but it's really just an extension of otherwise standard metagaming. I know Irenicus can summon a Dark Planetar in Spellhold through prior experience; I know Xei Win Toh can be backstabbed thanks to DLTCEP. In neither case would Sil know what to do.
Beyond that, I would credit having a caster-based party as the reason why things have yet to go truly, catastrophically, irreparably wrong. One of the things I've noticed, in terms of very broad strategy, is that the best setup usually is very loose, very flexible. Since I like explaining, I'll explain.
Skull Trap is generally considered the best 3rd-level mage spell in the game. With a high damage cap and a hard-to-resist magic damage type, it's just very, very strong. And presumably, if you wanted Nalia to be an effective caster, you'd load up on Skull Traps so she could dish out tons of damage.
That was usually how I would run things in earlier games. Then, one day, on a whim, I decided to try a fighter-based party. Aerie would be my only spellcasters, and as an additional restriction, she could only memorize one spell of each type per day. So, instead of Shield and four Magic Missiles for 1st level spells, it would be Shield, Magic Missile, Chromatic Orb, Blindness, and Charm Person.
I found that Aerie's new strategy was actually surprisingly successful. It made the party much more adaptable, much more capable of responding correctly when things went wrong. I've very much taken this to heart in my more recent runs: the greatest strength of mages isn't their immunities, or the raw damage they can deal, or the wicked disablers they can use. It's their flexibility.
In a normal party, when things go wrong, you might need to pull your primary spellcaster out of the way and spend one to three rounds healing the character, repositioning it, and/or bringing up a new defense spell. All the while, the rest of your party, assuming it's available, is trying to fight the enemy while handicapped, since their support character isn't helped them. My party members have overlapping powers, so while they're weaker overall, it's hard for the enemy to prevent them from functioning.
So, if something goes wrong with my party, they have the tools to handle it. If Jan is dead, Nalia is disabled, Aerie is injured, Sil is cornered by enemies, and Cernd is busy dealing with an important enemy I can't just ignore, then we can split the necessary fixes between the remaining characters. Cernd uses the Rod of Resurrection to bring back Jan, since Cernd can't cast any other spells that would help. Sil is uninjured but stuck, so she casts Remove Paralysis to release Nalia. Nalia casts Teleport Field to release Sil. Aerie has both Teleport Field and Remove Paralysis, and can also use the Rod of Resurrection, but her round is better spent drinking a potion, so she focuses on her own safety. After several seconds, Sil can wiggle her way out the fray, regaining her mobility, while Jan recovers his equipment. In this example, we are hit by several very nasty problems, but we can repair the situation within one round.
Constrast that with a more standard party. You have one cleric, one thief, one mage, and some fighter types, and everyone is equipped with the best damage-dealing capabilities they can handle. They have the ability to reverse problems, too, but those "fixes" only belong to a few members of the group. If the cleric gets disabled, the mage needs to cast Dispel Magic, jeopardizing the party's buffs. If Minsc is trapped and in danger, your mage might have to make a decision between using Breach on the enemy mage or using Teleport on Minsc, since you can only cast one of those this round. If a fighter dies, they'll come back without their armor, and therefore be very vulnerable. This party is much better at killing things, but not as good at bouncing back when things go wrong.
Plus, the "balanced" party can't keep the entire group covered with Chaotic Commands and Death Ward. It might be less likely to fail its saves, but a party with two clerics doesn't need to make saves. Chaotic Commands and Death Ward make your saves for you.
That's why my party tends to have rather weird spell selections. Half the party has Slow, half the party has Spell Thrust, half has Breach, half has Secret Word, half has Teleport Field, half has Invisibility 10' Radius, and half has Haste. These are all redundant--we're never going to be hasting the party three times in one day--but that's not the point. These spells are all "fixes" for bad situations. We might not be dealing as much damage as a party armed with a bunch of Skull Traps, but if we need to escape, or improve our mobility, or screw up the enemy's positioning, or take down a fully protected mage in one round... we can do it.
The party is weaker because of the redundancies and because their THAC0 and base APR are so poor. But they are extremely, extremely resistant to bad luck. They may be slow to take down a midlevel enemy, but against the bigger threats, where things are more dicey, this party can keep operating effectively even if the party gets completely trashed, and recover very quickly. For a no-reload, you need flexibility more than strength. Would you rather run a race with a 20-pound weigh on your back, or a 10-pound weight on one foot?
Or maybe it's just Chaotic Commands. Disablers are the major game-enders in BG2.
Or maybe I'm just stacking lots of Blur spells and it makes the party super-hard to hit. But a Teleport Field contingency at the start of important battles would accomplish much the same thing at greater inconvenience, and the Shield of Reflection, in the right hands, could deal with enemy archers. And I never really buff with Mirror Image, which would work, too.
Thanks for explaining. I like the idea of having your casters all capable of performing the same tasks so that they can stand in for each other. I'm very much a solo player, but I'll keep your approach in mind for my group runs.
Re: Improved Irenicus, according to the SCS v28 Readme DavidW dropped the component because he didn't like it much.
This may well be one of the best threads that I've ever read. My excitement to read a new post is only surpassed by a new OotS comic at this point in time.
I never liked that blank, sickly green background. I know a different shade of green wouldn't have been much better, but there really should have been a texture. A flat color calls to mind mist, and pale green mist doesn't look real. You can't see it on the map, at least. Though we do have some laggy parts.
It might just be an SCS2 thing, since so much more is happening in SCS2 than vanilla BG2.
Suldanessellar has several clusters of difficult encounters. The Rakshasas are immune to lots of things, abuse the hell out of area effect attacks, and come protected with lots of illusion spells. We also have to deal with the toughest golems in BG2.
Everybody does very pitiful damage against Adamantite and Iron Golems, even Sil.
We get ambushed on the way to some Skeleton Warriors. These golems are all over the place.
Aerie summons a Deva. By this time in the game, there aren't a lot of critters that can stand up to our summons.
Instead of fighting Raamilat face to face, we just throw out Comet and Dragon's Breath. He's immune to cold and magic damage, but not fire.
He failed his save against Dragon's Breath, but the unconsciousness only lasts 3 seconds. Comet knocks the victim unconscious for 18 seconds, but has no save penalty, and Raamilat was unaffected. To keep the party fully buffed, Jan runs away, so Raamilat's Remove Magic only hits Jan.
The Nabassu is in really awful shape. Raamilat, meanwhile, is struggling to keep up his defenses. He has Improved Mantle, and since we're too lazy to break down his spell protections, we can't hit him very often for a moment.
He also has a PFMW Contingency, but we can get past that. Sil and Aerie equip normal bullets, Jan equips normal bolts, Haer'dalis takes a short sword in his main hand, Nalia switches to a short bow (she normally uses the Crimson Dart and Buckler +1) and she and Imoen use normal arrows.
Haer'dalis still gets a Weapon Ineffective message due to having Kundane in his off hand.
I was particularly worried about the group of Rakshasas outside the Temple of Rillifane, so I had Sil cast Farsight so Nalia's clones could run in during Time Stop (currently, Nalia can cast Time Stop twice per day) and throw out Horrid Wilting spells.
In between Horrid Wilting spells, the clones throw the Crimson Dart at the Iron Golem. Automatic hits because of Time Stop, and they have lots of attacks per round.
I think the reason why projected images can sometimes attack is because their base APR is set to zero, and that's what is supposed to prevent them from attacking. But if the character is using, say, the Crimson Dart, the dart's base 3 APR setting overrides the clone's zero APR, so it attacks normally when using the Crimson Dart. This would explain why Nalia's clones have never been able to attack with the Dagger of the Star: it has no passive APR effect.
A Maharajah managed to survive the first assault, and drank a potion or two while invisible, but when he returned to attack us, he no longer posed a threat.
Rakshasas have excellent immunities in the sense that they're immune to level 7 spells and below (except, in SCS2, Breach), immune to normal weapons, and can cast PFMW, but they're otherwise fairly weak. Horrid Wilting bypasses their spell level immunities, and since they don't have Protection from Magical Energy or MR, they crumple under the weight of Horrid WIlting.
For the other group of Rakshasas, Nalia created no clones, and instead attacked directly. Dragon's Breath also goes right through Rakshasa spell level immunities.
Basically the same thing happens in Demin's house.
I had considered tricking Nizidramanii'yt into handing over the Goblet of Life, but eventually decided to fight him. Normally, he will give you the Goblet willingly in exchange for all of your gold and all of your items. If you drop all of your items before talking to him, then he only takes your gold, and if you spend all your gold on items beforehand, you can save much of your gold, as well. But I had over 70,000 gold at this point and didn't want to lose so much. I got ready for another dragon fight.
I'm still in no mood to take big risks, so Feeblemind is still the plan. We have better chances, now, though, since Nalia has an extra casting of Time Stop and can throw out more Feeblemind spells safely before Nizidramanii'yt can attack.
Sil buffs most of the party with Protection from Acid and casts Farsight to expose Nizidramanii'yt. She casts Wish just in case it gives us anything, and fortunately, it gives us the rest option.
Now we can buff the whole party with Protection from Acid, but there's not much else to do. Nalia spawns her clones and we begin.
It's a very safe, very simple formula, even against the toughest SoA dragons. But we screw up our timing.
Since the first clone had to run forward a bit before casting her first spell during Time Stop, the Time Stop ended earlier than we planned. And since she was too close to the dragon when the Time Stop ran out, Nizidramanii'yt gives chase.
He brings up the dialogue. I consider agreeing and giving him our stuff, not realizing that would give him all of our equipment, too, since I failed to drop everything. Luckily for us, I decide to fight.
Nizidramanii'yt opts to take our stuff by force. His rampage is short-lived.
I still have to be careful. If I let our Planetar attack him, the Planetar might dispel the Feeblemind. Worse, Nizidramanii'yt might have a Contingency with Heal, which would also dispel the Feeblemind. To make sure Nalia's clones are still around if or when Nizidramnii'yt escapes his Feeblemind, we barrage him with Horrid Wilting spells to trigger his Contingency, if he has one. Better he escapes the Feeblemind when our clones have 10 rounds left than when our clones have 3 rounds left.
We already lowered his resistance with Pierce Magic, so he has no defense against our spells.
There is something to be said for raw damage power. But Feeblemind is still the safer option, I would say, than Horrid Wilting.
The Temple Rillifane is controlled by a mage named Suneer, a Nabassu, an Iron Golem, and a Rakshasa, a peculiar group congested in a very small area. Since Nalia and Aerie come prepared with Energy Blades, I decide to attack him right off the bat.
That really wasn't fair. He didn't even get to activate his buffs.
The rest of the group is also kind of boring to fight.
The Rakshasa is basically helpless, and the other two critters are little more than oversized grunts with magic resistance. The encounter ends abruptly.
Suldanessellar is saved. We grab some nuts from the Tree of Life and open the way to Irenicus, but we have some stuff to do before the final battle.
Mostly, we have items to buy and sell. But there's one last quest remaining besides Kangaxx and the Twisted Rune. The Temple of Lathander wants me to defend them against a Talassan attack. I run into some Storm Knights on the way to the Temple of Talos.
Storm Knights don't mess around. They start the battle with a Chain Lightning spell, and with their large HP pools, they soak up all of Aerie's and Nalia's Energy Blades.
We begin the battle inside the temple with Comet. It's a monstrously powerful spell, but these guys are awfully sturdy.
Even Dragon's Breath right after that doesn't finish off all of them.
Notice that Sil is using +4 Bullets. It's because Aerie can conjure 5 of them each day with the Erinne Sling, and I've been using the Wand of Lightning trick to speed up production. I decided to avoid using exploits for this run, but I've made an exception for convenience's sake. And unlike the +4 Darts from the Cloak of Stars, the bullets created by the Erinne Sling don't vanish over time.
The clerics of Talos stick around for quite some time. With Sanctuary and a whole bunch of healing spells, they are rather hard to kill.
I wonder how this fight would have gone had I done it at an earlier level.
Once the last of the Talassans are dead, I return to the Temple of Lathander and receive a vacation to recover from the violence.
I start gathering every item in SoA that I might need in ToB, since I can't come back for them once I fight Irenicus at the Tree of Life. Earlier, I had sold off many ToB item components from Watcher's Keep, in order to make room in my inventory.
Now that we're about to leave, we need to get back those items. Aerie casts Friends to make our gold stretch as far as possible.
Unfortunately, I forgot to have her equip the Ring of Human Influence beforehand, which must have cost us thousands if not tens of thousands of gold. I arrive at the Adventurer's Mart almost bankrupt, and find that there are three really useful level 9 spell scrolls that I still have not bought: Spellstrike, Spell Trap, and Chain Contingency.
I sell off a lot of magical ammunition and other unimportant stuff to make room for the scrolls. Nalia learns Spelltrike and Spell Trap; Sil learns Chain Contingency.
I do some tests and find that Chain Contingency works just like I want it to. Sil has just receive a massive boost in melee power as well as spellpower.
Projected images can attack while shapeshifted due to shapeshifting changing the caster's base APR. Now that Sil can spawn four clones at once, just like Nalia, we can have up to four Iron Golem attacking at once, and since each clone gets one casting of Time Stop (the other 9th-level spell Sil has is reserved for Shapechange), they can get automatic hits as well, reducing the need for improved THAC0.
I haven't quite decided how to approach Irenicus, but one possibility might be chaining Time Stop spells to wear out his weapon immunities. Spell durations continue to run while Time Stop is active, so every casting of Time Stop cuts 3 rounds off of everybody's buffs, including the enemy's. With four Time Stop spells across Sil's clones, we could potentially have 8 rounds of free attacks, or 4 if Irenicus has a contingency with a weapon immunity spell. With 10 Stoneskins to cut through, we should be able to bring him to Near Death quite quickly.
But that would probably be better suited to Nalia's clones, since she is our standard wearer of the Robe of Vecna and can get Time Stop off the ground faster. And if she takes a step back and forth while in Time Stop, she can make sure her hits from the Crimson Dart occur in a stream rather than all at once, ensuring Irenicus' first spell gets interrupted.
Kangaxx will stay in his tomb, where he belongs. And the Twisted Rune will stew in their lair unmolested. The XP rewards will not get me anything important at this stage of the game. Nor do I have any particular need for the Staff of the Magi or Ring of Gaxx.
Before I leave Athkatla for Suldanessellar, I decide to check up on Roger and see if he has any potions I have yet to purchase. On the way, I run into a couple of Talassan priests, who for some reason didn't attack me the last time I visited the Temple District.
Talon Nirkhas and Talon Zogas. Talon Nirkhas is an okay, but Talon Zogas sounds pretty badass. But that's not the best part.
The way they say that line--"Justice shall be swift and final"--it just sounds so great. It's like the Deva's and Planetar's battlecries, "I shall prevail" and "The light shall fall before me." I can't decide which one is my favorite battlecry. The shrill, nasal battlecry of the drow is also quite nice: "The drow rule supreme." It sounds like a Svirfneblin is chanting it.
Oh, and the clerics died.
Pity.
Well, Roger had no potions I wanted, but then, I already have over 10 Potions of Magic Protection and 10 Potions of Magic Resistance, on top of a bunch of other defensive-type potions. I erased everybody's contingencies and sequencers with CTRL-R and reset all of them. I also reorganized our spellbooks.
Nalia's Spell Sequencer switched from Teleport Field+Haste+Invisibility 10' Radius to Flame Arrow+Flame Arrow+Flame Arrow. I no longer needed the escape option, but a triple Flame Arrow sequencer could be very useful if I broke through Irenicus' defenses, as its base damage on a successful save is about 100, equal to Irenicus' maximum health. We added extra castings of Magic Attacks, Flame Arrow, and Protection from Magical Energy. Otherwise, we were already quite well prepared for a mage fight.
We entered the stairway down to the Tree of Life where Irenicus was doing his magical wizardy stuff and scouted the area. Jan laid down two Time Traps, two Spike Traps, and three normal traps. Can't be too careful.
I could have left and rested to replace the normal traps with HLA traps, but I didn't feel like it. It's already silly enough, taking several days off in between clearing Suldanessellar and actually confronting the guy behind it, and I'm sure the traps will be enough as they are.
To save spells, Stoneskins, and HP, Aerie summoned some undead to hold off the elementals guarding Irenicus' weird-looking parasites. The summons held off the elementals long enough for us to bring them down with missile weapons.
Before we take down the last parasite, we bring up all of our buffs. And there are a lot of them. Multiple Spell Shields, to serve as backups. Multiple Spell Immunities, to maintain SI: Abjuration if the fight should drag on. Eight spellbooks in total, crammed with everything that could possibly be useful in this fight.
We take down the last parasite and are teleported over to Irenicus. We listen to his griping--the Seldarine took away his ability to even remember what it was like, to remember having feelings. Emptiness beyond emptiness.
Ellesime flees to rally the other elves, in case we fail to stop Irenicus. I don't know what shape they're in to fight, though, and I know from experience that even if the elves can take down Irenicus, they don't raise you from the dead afterwards.
Irenicus goes hostile. Jan's first Time Trap goes off.
He fires off two Bolts of Lightning with the Light Crossbow of Speed--the most damage he can do in this short time--and uses the Wand of Spell Striking on Irenicus, so it will take down a spell protection right after his defenses come up.
The second Time Trap activates. Jan realizes he can do more damage by dual-wielding Celestial Fury and the Scarlet Ninja-to, but it's no use.
SCS2's pre-buff scripting can fire off multiple times if you begin the fight with Time Stop. I don't know why, but it makes Irenicus more or less impossible to hit. Jan uses the Wand of Spell Striking again, the Breach option this time, but otherwise there's not much he can do.
The moment time returns to normal, Nalia casts Project Image. I want her clones up and casting Time Stop as fast as possible. But my timing is off by a second.
Irenicus, like many other enemy mages in SCS2, has a Chain Contingency with Horrid Wilting, and though Nalia has Protection from Magical Energy active, the spell hits her, canceling the only Project Image spell she had. Hopefully the Chain Contingency will trigger anyway, but I can't count on it.
Irenicus begins his next spell. He has Improved Mantle and Stoneskin active, which means he can only be hit by +5 weapons or better, but will block the first ten. Time Stop could have let us wait it out, but right now we have no way of getting through it. Sil can break through Improved Mantle with the Sling of Everard, as she has been doing since the Planar Sphere, but she can't break through ten Stoneskins anytime soon, and her time is better spent doing something else.
She uses Comet instead.
I don't really understand why Irenicus didn't come prebuffed with Protection from Fire, like he did with Protection from Cold. With GOI active, the only cold spell that could hurt him is Cone of Cold, but Sunfire, Delayed Blast Fireball, and Incendiary Cloud can all break through that, to say nothing of HLAs.
Irenicus has pre-cast Energy Blades, so we're not in a good position to start casting big spells. He could easily interrupt us without PFMW. But we have a slight delay here, and Nalia at least can cast Energy Blades fast enough to avoid getting interrupted. She casts it along with Aerie. Energy Blades strike as +5 weapons, set the caster's APR to 4.5, add Improved Haste to bring it up to 9, and the disks themselves have a +10 bonus to THAC0. Plus, they deal 1d10 electricity damage per hit. They're practically made for interrupting spells. Irenicus has gone invisible, so Jan seeks him out. Jan brings good news.
Irenicus is almost dead. And we know he's perfectly vulnerable to fire damage.
Nalia casts Dragon's Breath. Sil does, too.
Irenicus has gone invisible once again, so Jan must reveal him. He actually got knocked down--I assumed he was immune to unconsciousness by virtue of being a plot character (unconsciousness prevents dialogues that occur on defeat). The moment he appears, we attack. Aerie and Nalia still have tons of Energy Blades left, so Irenicus has to deal with almost 18 guaranteed attacks per round if he wants to keep fighting.
But our earlier blitzkrieg proved more than enough.
The battle ended in five rounds, including two rounds from Jan's Time Traps.
Out of all the spells I prepared just for this fight, none of them were important. HLAs and Jan's Detect Illusions ability did basically everything for me.
Unfortunately, there's a wacky magical screwup somewhere along the way, and Sil and all her friends get pulled down into the Nine Hells to contest for ownership of her soul. Jan sums up the situation perfectly.
The party retains most of its buffs and has all its spells restored, so I hurry and take down Sarevok in the Wrath Trial. The other trials need not be completed with violence.
I just took on Irenicus in Hell. This is an exceptionally long story, so I will split it up into multiple posts. This will take a very long time to explain.
After finishing the test of Wrath, I didn't have much else to do. I only really wanted the Tears of Bhaal from the Greed test and the Selfishness test. To avoid losing anything in the Selfishness test, I used an old trick to become immune to the stat reductions. You can avoid all penalties by using SI: Divination. But I actually used the Wand of Lightning trick to achieve immunity to all spell schools, just in case I was wrong about the school.
You still get the message, but it has no real effect. Hence the Spell Ineffective message. Notice that Sil has the menu for SI spells. When you use the Wand of Lightning trick to cast Spell Immunity, that menu doesn't go away after you cast the first spell, so you can achieve immunity to all schools and maintain it indefinitely, as long as you don't switch to another character.
Before we do our final preparations, I set up Sil's Tears of Bhaal rewards. There's a trick that I'm very fond of that allows you to get multiple bonuses of the same kind, instead of getting one of each reward, good or evil. Sil picks the Selfishness test and Greed test because they give very nice defensive bonuses: magic resistance and save bonuses. I will give her the save bonuses twice so that her base save vs. spell and death are at -2 when she has the Ring of Protection +2, Robe of the Good Archmagi, and Helm of Balduran equipped. That's an undispellable immunity to basically all save or else spells. With the Shield of the Lost, Robe of the Good Archmagi, and the MR bonus from the Machine of Lum the Mad, the Hell bonus to MR to will put her magic resistance at 50, which will allow her to reach 100 MR with a single Potion of Magic Protection.
The trick is to remove all Tears of Bhaal from your inventory except the one that corresponds to the bonus you want. You click the door, wait for the screen to shake, and remove the Tear of Bhaal. You get the bonus without losing that Tear, allowing you to reuse it. Unfortunately for us, the door always opens after five bonuses have been activated, even if you only ever trigger the Greed bonus.
You still get the message saying you lost the Tear, not that it matters.
To get a better idea of what I was facing, I double-checked the SCS2 readme and also re-watched Stworca on Youtube play through this battle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBe8EV_MCgM This let me know where each enemy would first appear.
Jan sets some Spike Traps in the right places. Four of them go to where the Dragon of Pride spawns, which should be enough to kill it.
Three of them will also go to the Orb of Fear's spawn point, which might not be enough to kill it, but will still help out.
I went through our spellbooks several times and made some tweaks to our setup. For one thing, we decided to use Limited Wish to cast Chain Contingency, which allows Jan, Aerie, or Imoen to get extra clones, though only Aerie can put three Project Image spells in the contingency. We pick Jan over Imoen on the grounds that he has some better tools at his disposal.
In lieu of a third Project Image, we pick Spell Deflection, since it will save us a 6th-level spell slot, which we need for Protection from Magical Energy. In his playthrough, one of Stworca's characters took 54 damage from Irenicus' Horrid Wilting even after down a Potion of Magic Shielding, which would have cut damage in half and ensured a successful save. None of our characters could survive a Horrid Wilting spell that did over 200 damage on a failed save. So, we need immunity to magic damage.
This is what the party looked like before the battle began.
Aerie
Sil
Jan
Nalia
Imoen
Haer'dalis
Notable things: 1: We have five Wands of Spell Striking, which have varying numbers of charges. Somehow we picked up a lot in Watcher's Keep. 2: We have a Red Globe, Purple Globe, and three Green Globes. The Red Globe heals 64 HP. The Purple Globe sets STR to 23 or so for 10 turns. One of the Green Globes summons a friendly Shambling Mound; the other two cast Acid Arrow and Invisibility. I don't know which is which, so we'll use all of them. 3: Sil has a scroll of Black Blade of Disaster. I couldn't decide if I wanted her to scribe this scroll, so I saved it. The weapon itself is notable for having +5 to THAC0 and doing 2d12 base damage, which is 24 if Sil uses Righteous Magic. It's a strong alternative to the Iron Golem form. 4: Jan has a Vampiric Touch scroll. He can't normally cast it, but I saved this one to make sure that he could get a little extra HP for this fight. 5: Everybody appears to be wearing Bracers of Defense AC 8. That's actually the custom item I use for buffing, with Improved Alacrity and +9 to casting time, but for this battle I decided not to use it. Our buffs would only last as long as they normally would.
But since I really want to make sure we're at our absolute strongest when the fight begins, Sil has memorized Wish, which she will cast after all of our relevant spells have finished casting. We will repeat the process until it lets us restore our spells, which will help us if our buffs get dispelled.
Just kidding. I used Shadowkeeper to restore everybody's spells, for convenience's sake. Here we are with a bunch of summons, all buffed and ready to go, but also with a full spellbook for the whole party. Quite nice.
Sil runs up and clicks on the door. She gets her final magic resistance bonus, and Irenicus appears.
On the plus side, one enemy is already dead. Unfortunately, that was the sword, which was probably the least dangerous enemy of the group. I was trying to kill the much more dangerous dragon. Either way, the fight begins.
Remember how I said you need SI: Illusion to protect yourself from Irenicus' Shatter Magic spell?
Well, I forgot to cast it.
The battle has begun, and though we have all of our spells, we are completely defenseless.
If this were any other run, I would have just reloaded and tried again. But we're stuck. We have to keep going.
I go to the Auto-Pause menu and set it so the game pauses at the end of a round. This will slow down the pace of the battle and help me keep control of things.
Notice that the Orb of Fear, Wraith of Wrath, and Dragon of Pride are all right next to us. My memory tells me that each critter normally spawns a ways away, and then runs up to fight you. As time drags on and our Skeletons keep triggering auto-pauses, I realize that the monsters aren't going away.
The Wraith of Wrath, Orb of Fear, and Dragon of Pride are directly on top of the party. We will have no breathing room to re-cast our buffs.
The SCS2 readme says the Dragon of Pride is basically a clone of the Shadow Dragon, but since I saw no mention of a breath weapon in the dragon's files, and since I don't remember encountering the breath weapon in the past (I've fought this battle on two previous runs), I assumed the Shadow Dragon Breath did not come with it.
I was wrong. And Imoen is the first target. This is how bad she was hit.
Imoen has effectively lost all of her spells. We only have one scroll of Restoration, and we don't have much room to use it. Besides, restoring her levels won't get her spells back. We could also use a Deva to cast Restoration, but it's not worth our limited time.
While the rest of the party keeps the enemies busy, Nalia retreats to the south to spawn her clones and cast Time Stop.
She divides her time between throwing the Crimson Dart at the Orb of Fear and trying to hit the dragon with Feeblemind. I checked its files and found that it was not, surprisingly, immune to Feeblemind. I'm pretty sure dragons are immune to all projectiles (except maybe Jan's flashers, since they're a unique thing), so I don't bother trying to hurt the dragon, even though the dragon has -20 AC to the beholder's -10, and will be harder to kill outside of Time Stop.
Meanwhile, I have great difficulty deciding what to do with the rest of the party. Sil has tons of excellent options, but they all bear huge opportunity costs. Spawning her clones would interfere with Nalia's, since Time Stop reduces the duration of all the party's buffs and summons, including Project Image. Sil could also use her HLAs, but all of her HLAs could be useful against the second phase, when you have to fight Irenicus solo. Plus, any non-HLA spells she cast will be deducted from her future clones' supply.
I eventually decide to cast Stoneskin, a safe long-term option that her clones likely won't be casting more than once at most. Plus, a lucky critical hit from a Skeleton interrupts the dragon's next spell.
Note that Irenicus is missing from the picture. He's hiding in the south, presumably because he's supposed to represent the Selfishness test and therefore has his flunkies take the heat.
The next Time Stop from Nalia's clones arrives, and then I see a disturbing message.
That can only mean Irenicus has triggered one of Jan's Spike Traps. And the other two are right next to it.
Sure enough, Irenicus triggers the others.
And now he is dead.
Why is this a problem? Well, Stworca mentioned in his Youtube playthrough of this fight that, if you let any other monsters survive after you kill Irenicus, then they continue on to phase 2, when you fight Irenicus solo. And I know that there's no way Sil could defeat all four of the remaining enemies by herself, when phase 2 removes all of your items.
All I can do now is hope that phase 2 won't begin until the others are dead. Hopefully the switch to phase 2 won't trigger until we're at least partly ready for it.
In the meantime, we keep trying to kill the beholder and Feeblemind the dragon.
Imoen is no longer level drained. The Planetar must have restored her at some point. Still no high-level spells, but at least she'll be harder to kill.
Things are going steady, but painfully slow. The Orb of Fear doesn't have hundreds of health, but it does have pretty high resistances.
The Wraith of Wrath and the Dragon of Pride are still trying to get past the horde of Skeletons surrounding them. But then, only a few rounds have elapsed so far. Most of this battle's in-game duration has been spent under Time Stop.
In fact, so much time was spent during Time Stop that Nalia's Project Image spells just ran out.
We still haven't managed to Feeblemind the dragon. Later, I would I check the file again, and find out why.
The dragon has 80% magic resistance. I thought it had 25%. That was why I never memorized Lower Resistance or Pierce Magic. So many wasted rounds. But I didn't know that at the time.
The dragon rears its head, confirming that our attempts to disable it have failed. I've seen this motion many times.
Either that's a spell he's casting, or--more likely--it's his breath weapon. And judging from the angle, it looks like he's targeting our group.
Breath weapon. But that's not all. Jan is now under the enemy's control, and we prepared no Dispel Magic spells specifically because we'd only have a 1% chance of dispelling Irenicus' magic. So Jan is out of our hands for a few rounds.
I already equipped Jan with his flashers, just in case he failed his save. The party is immune to the flasher projectile, so I assumed he'd be harmless to us as long as he was using his flashers.
Some unknown damage source hits Jan and Imoen, who both are currently charmed. Since it just says they took damage, it's not clear where it came from.
And thanks to Imoen's contingency, we now have a hostile Teleport Field.
Not that it makes much difference. We are not a melee-heavy party anyway.
The situation worsens. We continue to fail to kill the Orb of Fear, and then Aerie gets level drained.
Multi-class characters get hit extra hard by level drains. Aerie loses twice as many levels as Haer'dalis would have. But at least she made her save, and level drain apparently does not remove SCS2's innate HLAs.
Although Nalia's clones are gone, we've made sure to memorize extra copies of Project Image, across the party, in case we ever needed them. Nalia sends out another clone, but we're still very behind on this battle.
Then, while Nalia's clone is trying to tack a little more damage onto the Orb of Fear, we get a disturbing message once again.
Shapechange is one of the few spells (the only, in fact, that I know of) that cannot be dispelled. Shapechange persisted despite Shatter Magic, but now it's run out.
Fifty rounds have already passed since we cast it, at the beginning of our buffer period.
Time returns to normal. Imoen's charm wears off, and she drinks a potion to recover from the earlier damage.
We deal the final blow against the Orb of Fear! But not before it fired one last ray at the party.
Fortunately, Haer'dalis has not been shattered yet. We still have a chance to bring him back to life. Since Haer'dalis was carrying our scroll cases, they got transferred automatically to Sil, so Sil draws out our only Stone to Flesh scroll and hands it to Imoen, who, thanks to her now nearly empty spellbook, can spend a round bringing back Haer'dalis without much opportunity cost.
With the Orb of Fear dead, we have two critical enemies left: the Dragon of Pride, and the Wraith of Wrath. With -20 and -24 AC, and 80% magic resistance and total immunity to magic, respectively, our only realistic chance of beating them without using our very limited supply of HLAs is for Sil to spawn her clones and attack them during Time Stop, in Iron Golem form. Sil retreats to the south to cast Shapechange. Otherwise her clones won't be able to attack.
Our summons are running very thin. Soon the wraith and dragon will have no one to fight but us. At least that means we can summon a Deva or Planetar, but we won't need to if Sil can pull this off.
Imoen is knocked unconscious, preventing her from bringing back Haer'dalis.
If we don't get him back fast, then he might get shattered, and we lose a very useful TOB ally, plus Kundane and Angurvadal. The Chaos Blade, however, got transported to Sil's inventory, so it safe with us... either because I was afraid of losing it if Haer'dalis got chunked, or because the Chaos Blade is treated the same way as quest items and containers, and therefore reverts to Charname if the user is petrified.
Imoen doesn't stay down for long. The cause must have been a Wing Buffet. She runs over to Haer'dalis once more.
We actually have to apologize to this bastard to get him back in the party.
Sil finishes casting Shapechange, then spawns her clones. The rest of the party, however, is not doing too well.
Jan might have been killed by any number of things; Aerie simply got level drained to death. Imoen got level drained, too.
This is all that's left of her spellbook.
We don't have time to dwell on Imoen's weakness, however. Sil's first clone has already begun casting Time Stop.
Time Stop only gives her 18 seconds to act, so we can't waste any time. The clone casts Boon of Lathander for an extra damage boost. I'll need all the APR I can get if I'm going to take down the dragon.
Then I remember.
The Dragon of Pride is the only enemy in this battle that's not immune to INT drain. Sil's clone switches to Mind Flayer form.
By now, Sil's Chain Contingency has triggered. We have three more clones, each of which can cast Time Stop one time. Since I've only got one enemy left, and the clones won't be much use in phase 2 of this battle, I have them all cast Improved Haste on themselves, to make sure they'll be able to deal enough damage to the Wraith of Wrath.
Time Stop is another few seconds away, so I turn the rest of the party's attention to recovery. Imoen picked up a lot of Jan's equipment already, so once we've gotten the Rod of Resurrection into the right hands, we get ready to bring back Jan.
Nalia's clone doesn't have much to do, hence the Improved Haste on the Skeleton Warrior.
I order Sil's first clone, no longer capable of reliably hitting the wraith, to make room for the next clone. I pull back our other summons, too. Iron Golems have pretty strong reach, but with their gigantic circles, they can easily get stuck behind other critters.
She only has enough time to shapechange and cast Boon of Lathander. But it's enough to get in some strong hits on the Wraith of Wrath.
That isn't nearly enough to bring the wraith down. But we still have two clones left.
The wraith goes down. We resurrect Aerie, collect our lost equipment, and wait for the next battle to begin.
We managed to pull through phase 1, despite a complete lack of buffs, a misfiring of our traps, a string of level-draining dragon breath attacks, and no respite from combat. We still have some Project Images left, two for Sil and two for Nalia, but that's about it. Level drain robbed us of our other castings of Project Image.
Sil, still under the effects of Project Image, gets teleported back to the center of the map to talk to Irenicus in his new form. Then she gets teleported up against the northern wall, thanks to Imoen's Teleport Field contingency firing while she was charmed.
Irenicus looks awful insidious in his outfit. I am reminded of the Black Mamba from Megamind.
Sil is shorn of her items and teleported to the south end of the map. Project Image is still active, so Sil is paralyzed. Her summons, unfortunately, are of no interest to Irenicus, nor are they able to stop him from dashing across Hell to poke at Sil with a duplicate of the Dragon's Breath halberd. That's a +4 weapon that does 1 point of fire, acid, cold, and electrical damage--an excellent weapon for breaking through Stoneskin.
But, the Dragon's Breath halberd's elemental damage, unlike the Dragon's Breath spell, does not bypass magic resistance. And with 30% base magic resistance, Sil actually a decent shot at avoiding all damage, making Stoneskin a viable defense. But first we should get back our equipment.
Irenicus hits very fast and runs even faster, so generally the best way to stay on top of this battle is to cast PFMW and run up to the top of the map to recover your items. Otherwise he's very hard to kill.
Luckily, I thought ahead, and dropped a single Oil of Speed on the spot where you begin this phase of the battle.
This would be the second time where I forgot to do something really important. There's no Oil of Speed here. Now I have to outrun him without haste or Boots of Speed. But first, I have to wait for him to hit me, and he manages to take down at least one Stoneskin before his elemental damage breaks through my Stoneskin and dispels all of my clones.
We still have the Shambling Mound from before, plus a Skeleton Warrior, so Sil isn't completely alone, but Irenicus has no interest in attacking anybody other than Sil, so they're useless as cannon fodder.
The nice thing about Irenicus using a duplicate of the Dragon's Breath halberd is that halberds have terrible, terrible attack speeds. So I can actually just run off and he can't really hit me, because his speed factor is too slow. He can easily catch up to me, but I escape his reach before he can make an attack roll.
On the way up to my equipment, Sil brings up Stoneskin. She drinks an Oil of Speed, pulls on her boots, and starts running, though she still can't lose him, so she won't have time to put on her robe. I don't know if Sil's Potion of Magic Protection is in effect, nor do I bother to check.
She still has enough MR to escape the damage, but she uses PFMW to make sure she's safe. Since I've still got a Project Image or two left, I decide to summon a clone, and have her attack during Time Stop instead.
Irenicus' single-minded focus on attacking Sil prevents him from taking a swipe at her clone, which means he misses an easy chance at interrupting the clone's Time Stop.
She doesn't have much time. Like we did with the Wraith of Wrath, Sil's clone just casts Boon of Lathander and whacks away.
It's not enough to take Irenicus down. But he's in pretty bad shape.
Sil is low on spells, so, to save her last casting of PFMW, she runs around in circles, casting her combat buffs: Improved Haste, Righteous Magic, and Boon of Lathander.
Then, foolishly, I start casting Time Stop without PFMW active. I only have Stoneskin, and less than 100% magic resistance to protect me.
Irenicus has a base THAC0 of -10. The Dragon's Breath halberd gives a bonus of 4. His high ATR, at 25, puts his THAC0 at perhaps -21, meaning 95% hit chance on all but the most thoroughly buffed characters. And he has multiple attacks per round. And there's almost 6 full seconds of casting time for Time Stop.
But he doesn't interrupt it. Sil switches to Iron Golem form. It's over.
Irenicus' second form has just fallen. There's only one left.
The mage version, with permanent aura cleansing, improved casting time, and infinite spells.
And here we are. After a month of real time, almost a year of in-game time, and many hours just today, focusing on this one battle, we are at the final stage of Shadows of Amn. The last chance for Irenicus to end this no-reload run.
And in the middle of Hell, right before we face the final form of one of the most powerful mages in the history of Faerun, Haer'dalis finds the time to charm Aerie.
What are you gonna do? The guy's a bard.
Irenicus is not in sight, but we can tell from the combat log that he has come prepared.
It's not impenetrable, though. He has lots of specific protections, as well as Improved Mantle, but he's only got three spell protections: Spell Shield, Spell Deflection, and Spell Turning. We have five Wands of Spell Striking between us, so we can bring the whole thing down in a single round. The only problem is that he can bring it back up, and teleport away to do so.
We all drink Oils of Speed to make sure we can keep up with his teleportation. Meanwhile, our two remaining summons head south, giving away Irenicus' location. He casts Spell Turning, again, then turns invisible, leaving our Skeleton Warrior and Shambling Mound apparently stumped.
Right about now, we hear him casting a transmutation spell. It can only be Time Stop.
We send Jan running off to the northeast, to lay traps on one of Irenicus' teleport destinations. He always teleports to the corners. Jan will first lay normal traps, because of their lingering damage that can disrupt spells. Then he will start laying Spike Traps, which hopefully will kill Irenicus outright.
Sil, however, drinks a Potion of Magic Protection and walks south a short ways while the rest of the party migrates north. Sil, with her immunity to magic, will be completely immune to Irenicus' spells, since SCS2 mages don't use Imprisonment on the main character. But first, Irenicus goes for the summons.
Irenicus trashes the Shambling Mound during Time Stop. That only bought us a short reprieve. Irenicus approaches from the south, fully buffed and ready.
We have two Protection from Magic scrolls in our inventory. There's no saving throw, and no spell protections can stop it, but the item file indicates that the scroll can be blocked by magic resistance, and this version of Irenicus has 40% MR. If we use both scrolls on him, he has only a 36% chance of resisting both times. To avoid wasting one of them, we decide to only use one on the first round of combat. Imoen puts the scroll in her quick item slot. Other party members target Irenicus with the Wand of Spell Striking. Sil starts to summon a Planetar, who should be able to dispel Irenicus' defenses with a single hit--if we're lucky.
Imoen uses the scroll.
And Irenicus is covered in a blue globe. That should indicate a successful hit, but we can't be sure. Graphic effects have misled us in the past (no pun intended).
We attack him, just in case he's immune to spell failure.
We hit him. His Improved Mantle is no more. And on inspecting the combat log, we find that Irenicus failed his spell without our dealing damage to him. He does, in fact, have 100% spell failure, and will have it for the next 10 turns.
I'm afraid the Planetar may dispel the scroll's effects and liberate Irenicus, so I send it away while the rest of the party keeps attacking Irenicus.
Irenicus can still teleport away, but there is no place to hide.
Sil gets the final blow, as she should.
Irenicus is finally dead.
And yet... the ending cutscene has not arrived. We're still in Hell. Nothing has changed.
But a lone Skeleton, one of our summons, appears to be active, according to the dialogue box. We run out to the center of the map to search for the problem. It doesn't take long to find.
Irenicus was not the end. There is still one enemy left to defeat, a creature I did not know ever appeared in this battle.
One last foe before the end of the game.
We attack.
The ending cutscene finally triggers. The battle is won. And when Ellesime brings us back to life, we see our last reward from our trials in Shadows of Amn.
That's almost 500 XP, for just one creature.
Irenicus is dead. Sil is alive. And after almost a year of in-game time, and nearly a month in real time, Shadows of Amn finally comes to an end.
I really enjoyed reading this. Glad to see everything worked out in the end. And, speaking as someone who doesn't really know what SCS2 is, it's fascinating to see the alterations to both the combat and the story. I'm not that good at Baldur's Gate or "gaming" in general, so thanks for illuminating this for me.
Comments
I bet you're pretty find of Imoen by now.
One of the trials at the Final Seal in Watcher's Keep is a fight with an unnamed Green Dragon. I originally intended to just do some of the less dangerous quests on this level tonight, but on a whim I decided to go for the dragon, and do it without memorizing lots of Feeblemind spells beforehand.
I didn't manage it too well.
Despite the fact that I knew it was a green dragon and green dragon use acid breath and Sil HAD the Protection from Acid spell in her spellbook, I decided not to protect myself from green dragon's acid breath. I just ran in. Guess what happened the first round?
The HP boost from Vampiric Touch is awesome. Jan is at a major disadvantage without it. I've underestimated the limitations of the Illusionist mage kit.
Anyway, after having most of my characters drink Potions of Superior Healing, Aerie summons a Deva to join the Mordenkainen's Sword we summoned before the battle began.
Since I'm quite proud of Sil's high potential damage output, I concentrate on getting her buffed and in position. She switches to Iron Golem and starts pummeling the dragon's back.
It doesn't work too well. Eventually I realize Sil's THAC0 is just too poor. It's at 5, and the Dragon has -11 AC. She can barely land a hit. While Sil and the rest of the party are struggling to break through the dragon's hide, we soak up a lot of damage from the green dragon's acid breath, and drink a fair number of potions to keep the party alive.
Finally, I decide to bring out Nalia, who has been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the right time to trigger her Chain Contingency. I put her at a safe distance from the dragon and cast Time Stop.
Unfortunately, as I just now realized, I'm supposed to do that AFTER I trigger Nalia's Chain Contingency, not before. So now, when I do spawn in Nalia's clones, none of them will have Time Stop.
And any spells she casts during Time Stop will be deducted from her clones' spellbooks. I just have her summon a Planetar instead, replacing Aerie's now-unsummoned Deva, and Nalia spends the rest of the Time Stop picking at the dragon's ankles with the Dagger of the Star (I'm still not sure if dragons are immune to all physical projectiles, but I was pretty sure the Crimson Dart wouldn't work).
Nalia retreats to her original spot, triggers her Chain Contingency, and the clones all cast Mordenkainen's Sword.
Mordenkainen's Swords cannot be killed by the dragon's physical attacks, and have excellent THAC0, damage, and APR. Unfortunately, the dragon is very fond of Wing Buffet, which costs us a lot of damage.
Eventually we whittle it down to half its HP, triggering a Contingency that I suppose was inevitable.
The funny thing is, Heal would have dispelled Feeblemind. If I had gone about this my normal way, I might have found myself facing a fully conscious dragon at full health, without any clones, and with our buffs quickly running out. That could have gone very badly.
Unfortunately, Nalia memorized no Feeblemind spells to begin with. I think we only have two such spells party-wide. So, the clones rush in, one after another, to cast Pierce Magic. I catch the dragon using its acid breath, so I have to hold back three of the clones to prevent them from getting hit by it. I had to time their spellcasting so it came right after the dragon's; a Wing Buffet or the dragon's acid breath could disrupt their spells.
The dragon finally concentrates on Sil, and manages to break through her Stoneskins.
Since I prepared no Armor of Faith Minor Sequencer, and I failed to unequip the Sling of Everard before shapeshifting (which prevents me from switching out the Shield of the Lost for the Defender of Easthaven), my physical damage resistance won't be enough to protect me. Sil flees the scene to recover. The dragon does not chase her for long.
With the dragon's magic resistance lowered, Nalia's clones are prepared to hit the dragon with damaging spells. Two of them cast Magic Missile for safety's sake; the other two cast Horrid Wilting. The Magic Missiles hit their target.
The Horrid Wilting spells don't.
The clones flee. They wait a few seconds until the dragon is done casting its next spell, then hurry back in to use their last two Horrid Wilting spells. Aerie uses Energy Blades to interrupt the dragon's spells, to ensure the clones' safety.
With the Mordenkainen's Swords and Imoen blocking the dragon in, the Horrid Wilting spells make contact. Notice that the Mordenkainen's Swords aren't next to the dragon in the above screenshot: they got hit by Wing Buffet while the Horrid Wilting was traveling across the map.
Bolstered by the Mordenkainen's Swords, Nalia's Planetar lands the final blow.
Sil chooses Comet as her next HLA. In SCS2, it does crushing damage instead of fire damage, and while its unconsiousness effect does not have Dragon's Breath's -10 save penalty, it is nonmagical and lasts for 18 seconds instead of 3. With the party's THAC0 the way it is, we can really use the automatic hits that an 18-second disabler could give us.
Aerie chooses Implosion. It's single-target, which means it can't bypass Spell Deflection/Turning/Trap, but its monstrous damage, at 20d10, half crushing and half fire, should be an instant kill on many enemies. It will go right through PFMW, though we still need to use Breach if we want it to deal its fire damage on pre-buffed mages. Plus, it bypasses magic resistance.
We still have some nasty battles ahead of us, even if we skip Xei Win Toh. We'll just have to see how things go.
Excellent read!
First off, I had two trials left for the southern segment of the Final Seal. An Imp with a riddle and a game of wits, and an endurance challenge against a bunch of Orcs. Since I didn't know which door led where, I decided to buff beforehand.
In the process, I spotted something rather nice.
Vampiric Touch is indeed overpowered. Sil just got quadruple the normal bonus. To give some perspective, that's more HP than a 30th-level Barbarian with 19 CON. And the Helm of Balduran.
I think Vampiric Touch gives the duplicated bonuses more often when you've been casting it many times over the course of the game. I didn't see quadruple bonuses earlier in the game.
We emerge in the Orc challenge room and we're off to a bad start.
We need Blur spells to avoid hits. Our AC isn't that great otherwise. We're locked in a room with instantly respawning Orcs until the time limit expires. That's a lot of attack rolls, and these Orcs, thanks to SCS2, use a rage ability that makes them immune to disablers.
The enemy mages toss out a Teleport Field. We summon a Deva (saving the Planetar for later) and Sil casts Comet. May as well use it now.
Notice Sil's simulacrum in Mind Flayer form. I had hoped to use Psionic Blast on the Orcs, forgetting they were immune. The enemy mages weren't, but I wanted to use the Psionic Blast on the melee goons.
Instead, I targeted the enemy mages with Jan's flashers, to great effect. Sil switched to Iron Golem form to took advantage of the free hits.
Unfortunately, there are lots of mages, and the Teleport Field messes with our targeting. Worse, one of the mages uses Remove Magic.
Now all of our buffs are gone. I've been neglecting to cast SI: Abjuration due to a paucity of spellcaster foes.
But the Orcs have rather little in the way of offensive power. The mages are very much geared towards their own defenses, as most SCS2 mages are (with the pre-buffing component, at least), and we muddle through the fight until the timer runs out and the spirit thingy gives us XP.
Haer'dalis can now cast a 6th-level spell! All we have to do to get an Improved Bard Song going in the background is earn Haer'dalis another 1,500,000 XP. Piece of cake.
Next up is the Imp challenge. We get a riddle about the Imp's siblings, but it's awful hard to know what to choose
without knowing
Once we solve the first riddle, we play a game of coins.
I used to suggest the Imp make the first move, assuming that was the clever thing to do.
Jan reaches a new level and gets a new HLA. Thieves get a lot of rather lame HLAs, right next to some really overpowered ones.
Assassination is the best choice over Spike Trap. I'll explain why later.
I head to the next challenge, the Warrior Spirit text adventure. I don't buff before I open the door, since you don't fight anything personally in this challenge.
Aside from these guys. Nobody likes fighting these guys.
We flee the scene--Devil Shades are quite vicious--to get the breathing room to summon a Planetar, a Flesh Golem, and Chan, Elemental Prince of Air. Sil casts Comet to get in some quick damage.
Comet does precious little. The enemy is immune to fire (over 100% resistance) and immune to unconsciousness. Nalia jumps into action to compensate for Sil's incompetence.
Horrid Wilting more or less ends the battle. We move on to the next challenge.
You play as the Warrior Spirit, and run through a teeny-tiny gauntlet, structured like an old school text adventure.
This section was very cool the first time I played it. My favorite part is this picture:
The fact that the Gibberling flees without any sound or visual effect seems kind of cool. A little monster runs in, perfectly quiet, and then runs out, perfectly quiet once again.
The notable encounters here include (1) four mages who come out individually (2) a pack of Wolfweres (3) a gang of Vampires (4) a gaggle of Beholders, and (5) a cabal of Liches. Luckily for me, GameFAQS said you don't have to fight all of them.
So, I prepare the party and summon one of the mages.
Jan's Time Trap gives him automatic hits for just over a round. And since the Mage's defenses don't come out immediately, Jan gets in a free backstab.
We try it again on the next Mage.
See the red icon on Jan's portrait? That's the Assassination icon. Assassination lasts 6 seconds and makes all hits into backstabs. This works marvelously with the right setup.
Same as normal, Jan shapeshifts into a spider, dispels the spider weapon with a Minor Sequencer, and Aerie casts Improved Haste on him, giving him 8 APR. When the Mage comes out, she triggers Jan's Time Trap, giving Jan 10 seconds of automatic hits. Jan activates Assassination, so he gets 8 automatic backstabs at 5x damage. If his target has no Stoneskins and doesn't have Improved Mantle or Absolute Immunity, Jan can deal hundreds of damage before the Time Trap's duration runs out. In this case, he's using the Staff of the Ram, for over 60 damage per hit on average.
The party has some rather remarkable damage dealing capabilities, but they are very inflexible in how that can be done. They require certain assumptions in order to operate as fighters effectively. Fortunately, HP-heavy enemies tend not to be spellcasters, which usually simplifies the picture. The Greater Wolfweres are a good example: since they do little more than run at you and attack, our buffs remained untouched. Sil might not be able to tear apart a dragon in Iron Golem form, but she can easily chunk Greater Wolfweres and other melee-based enemies.
GameFAQS misled me on one point. The second undead group (there are four encounters for every color; purple is all undead) turns out not to be a horde of Shadows, but a horde of Devil Shades.
Remember how nobody likes these guys?
Luckily, we have the spells to hold off the group for a moment, and Nalia has a Chain Contingency ready.
Horrid Wilting clears the scene very quickly.
Anyway, I got surprised again. This time it was a worse surprise. I decided to summon the gaggle of Beholders, only to find that there were more than mere Beholders in the bunch.
A Hive Mother. A Death Tyrant. And an Elder Orb. The three deadliest kinds of the single deadliest enemy type in BG2. Thank goodness we prepared.
Well, prepared in the sense that we summoned some critters and cast Energy Blades and Shapechange. Not prepared in the sense that we didn't cast ANY buffs. All we've got is the Cloak of Mirroring and Sil's Iron Golem form.
And, of course, since these are Beholders, Jan naturally set two Time Traps and five normal traps. So he's got 20 seconds to act before the battle really begins.
Unfortunately, since he's not in spider form, there's not much he can do besides use the Wand of Spell Striking to cast Breach on the Elder Orb and Hive Mother, and fire some Bolts of Lightning at the Death Tyrant.
While time was stopped, Nalia's Chain Contingency triggered. I move her clones out of the way, very aware of how easily the Beholders could disable the whole bunch.
Imoen summons the Flesh Golem, Aerie attacks with Energy Blades, and once Sil is in Iron Golem form, she rushes up to slap around the Hive Mother. The clones begin to cast Time Stop.
We begin with a Greater Malison spell, then just use Horrid Wilting and either Vampiric Touch or Magic Missile. The clones also throw some darts during the Time Stop. I notice somewhere along the way that there are only two Beholders left, so I go back to see if the third one died.
All the Beholders got hit by Jan's traps, but the Death Tyrant took FAR more damage than the others. The Hive Mother is very resistant, and the Elder Orb flat-out immune.
With the area suffused with Horrid Wilting spells, the Beholders start to come down.
All our summons suddenly dry up. We resort to a group charge, but none of us besides Sil is particularly strong. Magic Missiles from the clones speed things up.
The Hive Mother has some healing magic, which helps it cling to life a bit longer.
We all contribute our little spells. Implosion doesn't do much, but it's still a lot more effective than Magic Missile.
The Hive Mother falls right before casting some Conjuration spell. I'd hate to see what a Beholder would summon. The last summoning spell I saw from a Beholder brought out a Death Tyrant.
I almost forget to pick up the Cloak of Mirroring. SCS2 Beholders like to steal it from you.
The rationale is that they see their rays aren't getting their way through the cloak, so they use telekinesis to nab it from you. Same goes for the Shield of Balduran. Not sure why they don't use their telekinesis powers to steal your weapons, which would be a lot easier to pull off than a shield. I guess they don't view other items as a threat.
The Final Seal battles lay ahead. I haven't decided if I'll save them for later, but there's a big reward if I do. I don't plan on fighting Demogorgon, so once I've broken the final seal, the quest can be completed without any further risk.
Haer'dalis is a better fit in the sense that he's an arcane spellcaster, like the rest of the party, while Cernd was divine only. Cernd was indeed the odd ball out, being the humongous fuzzy wuzzy as he was, but I picked Cernd because he would get his big power-up earlier in the game than Haer'dalis, who I mostly wanted for the Improved Bard Song.
The thing is, I originally wanted this run to be a multiplayer run, to test out a party of spellcasters and see how well they performed as a melee-based group. Then I found out how ridiculously awesome Jan's flashers were, so I decided on a single-player run.
I should clarify. The party I originally planned was composed of the following characters:
-Cleric of Lathander, dual-classed to mage at level 11 (basically, Sil)
-Cleric of Helm, dual-classed to thief at level 11
-Shapeshifter
-Conjurer, dual-classed to cleric at level 11
-Skald
-Skald
These were the reasons I chose these characters, and the weapon setups they would use:
The Cleric of Lathander/Mage:
I have long been interested in APR, since non-fighters have so few ways of getting beyond 2 APR with (Improved) Haste, and this party was conceived to evaluate ways of achieving high APR without fighter levels. The Cleric of Lathander, as in the current run, would reach 3 base APR with two castings of Boon of Lathander. Level 11 gives an extra casting of Boon of Lathander (also an extra casting of Hold Undead), hence the dualing time for the CoL/M.
Early game: Staff Spear in spider form
Midgame: Flail of Ages in spider form
Late game: Iron Golem form, Defender of Easthaven in off hand
The Cleric of Helm/Thief
The same goes for the Cleric of Helm, which gets an extra casting of Seeking Sword and True Sight at level 11. Seeking Sword sets the caster's APR to 3, strikes as a +4 weapon, gets a +4 to THAC0, and does 1d8 damage, but prevents spellcasting entirely. This is why the CoH/T was chosen as our thief. Partly it's because the Seeking Sword can be used to backstab, but mostly because a thief wouldn't be bothered so much by the inability to cast spells while using the sword.
Early game: Seeking Sword
Midgame: Seeking Sword
Late game: Seeking Sword, Kundane
The Shapeshifter:
Basically, the same role as I had for Cernd, though I did not plan to dual-wield two copies of the Greater Werewolf Token. In fact, I planned on using vanilla shapeshifting, and removing the werewolf weapon to replace it with another.
Early game: Belm in werewolf form
Midgame: Gnasher in greater werewolf form
Late game: Impaler in greater werewolf form (impossible with SCS2 shapeshifting)
The Conjurer/Cleric:
I had done an insane solo poverty run of a Conjurer dual-classed to cleric before and found that it had a lot of potential. Mostly this character's role would just be a normal cleric, with a handful of extra spells to help it out.
Early game: Staff Spear in spider form
Midgame: Staff of Rynn in spider form
Late game: Staff of Rynn in spider or Energy Blades
The Skalds:
The Skalds were simply meant as support characters. The others all had terrible THAC0, and having a pair of Skalds would greatly improve the situation. Testing found that, with a couple of bards singing their songs together, the party's damage output and general sturdiness would be roughly the same as a normal party with multiple fighter types.
I considered the party I ended up with to be something of a watered-down version of my original plan, though Sil remained the way I wanted her. Cernd replaced the Shapeshifter, Jan replaced the Cleric of Helm/Thief, Aerie replaced the Conjurer/Cleric (as she was the party's main cleric), and Haer'dalis would replace one of the Skalds. The remaining character would be filled by Nalia and then Imoen.
I changed up the equation due to the difficulty of obtaining Haer'dalis. I knew the Planar Prison was very dangerous, and I would not be able to take it on right away. Instead, we stuck with Nalia, and Imoen tagged along as an auxiliary spellcaster.
Haer'dalis would have pulled his weight at epic levels, but he wasn't really what I needed when it came to the first half of the game. Until we hit epic levels and got the Improved Bard Song, Haer'dalis would just be another Fighter/Mage type, and that role was already filled: we had Cernd as our tank, Sil as our damage dealer, Jan as our disabler, Aerie as our buffer, and Nalia as our debuffer. Haer'dalis would have made the party stronger, but he wouldn't have filled in any gaps, so he wasn't worth the risk of saving earlier in the game.
The first battle is with Aurumach and Ferrumach Rilmani, a mage and a cleric who come with a small team of armored grunts. Although it's a high-level encounter, it's actually relatively straightforward. Aurumach and Ferrumach don't come with many defenses, so mostly we can just whomp away until they fall.
The Planetar and Chan don't have any flashy abilities, but they do a lot of damage and are terribly hard to kill. It's a big contrast to the party itself, which mostly employs a tank and toolkit strategy, with very little emphasis on raw damage output.
Next is Azamantes (another awesome name), a Lich who comes bolstered by a circle of Flaming Skulls, who cast fire-based area effect spells and explode in a "Skull Trap" when they death, though the projectile for their self-destruction is actually the same as the Horn of Blasting, which covers much more area than a Skull Trap spell.
I try to keep Nalia at a safe distance, lest the Flaming Skulls disrupt her spells. Sil stays in Iron Golem form for safety's sake, while Jan has finally started using his spider form in battle. Haer'dalis and Jan are both quite vulnerable to the Flaming Skulls' fire spells, as I didn't buff Haer'dalis with Protections from Fire, and Jan loses his fire immunity due to shapeshifting.
Incendiary Cloud is a major problem in this fight. Only Sil can safely stay within its area of effect; the others have to flee, and Incendiary Cloud's wide spread is very bad for the party's mobility.
Notice our Planetar running off to kill the Flaming Skulls we failed to destroy earlier.
Nalia helps break through Azamantes' defenses during Time Stop, but she can't stay close for long due to the Incendiary Cloud. Imoen and Haer'dalis use Wands of Spell Striking to get rid of the lich's PFMW, but our problem doesn't end there. Azamantes dies, but his Simulacrum--which I thought was a Mislead spell--is alive and well.
The clone starts casting a Necromancy spell, clearly pointed at Haer'dalis, but he can't cancel the Lich's spell with Mislead. I accept that he is doomed and send him off to draw the Horrid Wilting spell away from the group.
Finally we break through the clone's Stoneskins.
He falls shortly thereafter. No surprise contingencies or Spell Trigger.
From there, all we have to do is clean up the Flaming Skulls.
I am quite pleased with Sil's damage output, though I do wish she had more means of improving her THAC0. Holy Power reduces her base THAC0 by 3, but it reduces her STR.
Finally, the last battle of Watcher's Keep before Demogorgon. We have Xei Win Toh, a 20th-level Kensai; the Huntress, a 20th-level Archer; Y'tossi, a Marilith with various elemental damages on hit; Ameralis Zauviir, a 27th-level drow cleric with slow on hit; Nalmissra, a level-draining Succubus; and a Hive Mother. The enemy has lots of HP, magic resistance, many attacks, and access to weapon immunity spells. Thankfully, they do not have any Time Stop spells or mage HLAs, but Xei Win Toh and the Huntress have Greater Whirlwind Attack.
I noticed in the Beholder fight earlier that, when Jan set two Time Traps, they went off one after the other, not simultaneously. That is, one would trigger at the start of combat, and the other would trigger as soon as the last one wore. I decided to try out a set of seven Time Traps, which ostensibly would give Jan 70 seconds of free reign.
Notice the Skeleton Warriors Aerie has summoned (I got rid of the excess Skeletons with CTRL-Y). Normally, I don't use Animate Dead much except to get targets for Vampiric Touch, but this is a big fight and having a few extra helpers could make a big difference.
The Time Traps go off, and they work as I expected. The enemy's weapon immunities (Improved Mantle and two Protection from Magical Weapons spells) will wear off midway through Jan's initial rampage, although unfortunately only one member of the enemy party in vulnerable to backstabs.
Jan can't backstab Ameralis Zauviir, but he still has enough time to bring her down.
Since I neglect to time exactly when the enemy's weapon immunities wear off, Jan wastes some time attacking them and failing. Because of this, and an inability to decide who to focus on, he is only able to kill Xie Win Toh and Ameralis Zauviir, and bring Nalmissra and the Huntress down to Injured.
The battle has now begun, and the enemy is on an even playing field, though they are much weaker than they would have been otherwise. Xei Win Toh activates Greater Whirlwind Attack the first round, which would have let her remove all the Stoneskins from any of my party members within a few seconds.
Nalia flees the scene to get enough breathing room to cast Project Image and Time Stop, though she needs PFMW to protect herself from the nearby Huntress. The casting time for Time Stop is instant. I forgot to take off the bracers of aura cleansing I use to speed up pre-battle buffing. Casting haste show the Aura Cleansed message, confirming my mistake.
I will have to wait several seconds before letting any of Nalia's clones cast spells, to compensate for the improved casting time.
So, I have the first clone cast Maze on the Huntress, which fails to work, and throw out a couple of Horrid Wilting spells to soften up the other enemies. Their MR is stellar, but spells are still Nalia's best option.
Nalmissra panics! High-level enemies like these almost never try to flee. It's an excellent outcome, saving us several rounds of potential level draining.
I keep the Horrid Wilting spells coming, and the Hive Mother, thankfully, fails to resist it.
The Hive Mother is gone. Nalmissra is at Near Death, so we switch focus to her. It doesn't take long to bring her down as well.
At some point, Nalia's clones vanish, though I'm not sure it's due to their time running out or Nalia getting hit. Either way, she and her clones manage to trap the Huntress with some Mordenkainen's Swords, allowing her to help us bring down Y'tossi, without having the Huntress chasing after. After we breach Y'tossi to get rid of her Blade Barrier, Nalia casts Time Stop to cast Pierce Magic and sneak in a little more damage.
Again, Y'tossi has very high MR, even with Pierce Magic, but with the rest of the enemies gone (besides some unimportant Skeleton Warriors), spending high-end spells on a magic-resistant enemy is more than worth it.
Aerie tries to summon a Deva to help take down the Marilith, but the spell fails, saying we can't summon more than 5 critters. I had forgotten about the Mordenkainen's Swords hacking away at the Huntress. I bring them over to help out.
Y'tossi has a seemingly endless supply of Stoneskin spells. Thankfully, we have a near-endless supply of Breach spells. Notice also that Sil has fled: she ran out of Stoneskins just as she got poisoned. Thankfully, Y'tossi's poison only does 10 damage over 5 seconds, so Sil returns to the fray once she's had a moment to drink a potion.
A Magical Sword lands the final blow. They are really are quite excellent summons.
Y'tossi drops a scroll of Wish and Nalia hits level 20, gaining an extra casting of Time Stop. The way forward is clear. Before we enter the Imprisoned One's lair, we buy back the Paladin's Bracers from Garlena, since they get an upgrade in TOB.
The Imprisoned One has an awfully creepy introduction.
Five manacles on the floor, four of them broken. A single restraint on a massive but invisible and nameless creature.
Once we've got a hold of the proper scroll, we seal Odren and his brethren inside with the Imprisoned One. Watcher's Keep has been sealed, keeping Demogorgon safely locked away.
Sil hits level 20 as well, allowing her to cast both Wish and Shapechange. It's a pity that Wish, as powerful as it is, is so dependent on chance. It cannot be made into a strategy, even if I use Project Image to save on castings, since there's no guarantee of getting a useful outcome. We're basically guaranteed to get at least one good option, since Sil has such high Wisdom, but we don't know if it'll actually have any impact in a given situation. I need reliable options more than I need strong options.
Watcher's Keep has been completed and cleared. The only things left to do in Shadows of Amn are the Twisted Rune, Kangaxx, Bodhi, and Suldanessellar.
I am not happy.
Well, when you first enter the Graveyard to confront Bodhi, she greets you with a vampire ambush. It changes to night immediately, allowing the vampires to spawn, and it also dispels all of my buffs.
Wow. The party stood there for hours, waiting just long enough for night to fall. The perfect time to go after vampires: when you can't escape by running outside.
Well, I have a solution to that. We lay down and rest for 8 hours right in front of Bodhi. The vampires spawn in as normal, but they vanish in the mist to escape the sunlight.
Oh, and we get 3000 XP from an unrelated side quest.
We enter the crypts and Sil switches to Iron Golem form before heading up the hallway. The Iron Golem's wide selection circle will hold back the vampires. We still get ambushed from behind, but we have some fast-casting spells to bring it down before it can drain our levels.
Nalia uses her first Flame Arrow of the entire run. She's finally at level 20, and gets the maximum damage from Flame Arrow. Haer'dalis just casts Mislead, since he was the vampire's first target.
With the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart by our sides, we make short work of the vampires. Sil remains our biggest source of melee damage, not counting summons.
Vampires appear to be really big on the ambushes. They just pulled off two failed ambushes in the past 9 hours. They try again.
It doesn't work. Nalia had memorized an extra PFMW spell for just this reason.
Sil runs ahead to take stock of the situation in the main room. I suppose it's what I should have expected.
I'd hoped to play conservatively, and save some of our spells for later, but since there's such a huge concentration of Ancient Vampires in this one little spot, I decide to go all out. Nalia spawns her clones. Aerie casts Project Image as well, to cast Sunray on the vampire group. Nalia's clones begin casting Time Stop.
The clones have some trouble getting to the main room, since there's a cluster of characters and monsters and clones in the middle of the hallway, but eventually we get it sorted out. Some Horrid Wilting spells and a Sunfire later, the gang of vampires croaks.
The last group of vampires before Bodhi was pretty straightforward. It basically just looked like this.
Sil lost over 50 HP to a Cloud of Bats that lingered long after the battle ended. She could soak it up with little risk, though, with her high base HP.
I had intended on relying on Sunfire spells a lot more in this area, but I refrained from using them to avoid antagonizing the paladins and Drizzt and company.
Next up, Bodhi.
Under my install options, Bodhi is a "toned-down" version of the Bodhi from the Tactics mod, with some better scripting, to boot. In the Tactics mod, Bodhi gets a constant effect Fire Shield that does magical cold damage, and sources of magic cold resistance are very uncommon. Plus, she gets some outrageously overpowered area-effect innate spells with -10 save penalties, including blindness, slow, an 8d8 Horrid Wilting spell, and an extra-powerful variant of Insect Swarm, which cannot be blocked by Fire Shield, only SI: Conjuration. I don't know how exactly SCS2 tones down the encounter, but we're dealing with a fairly overpowered foe.
Oh, and she has two vampire mages at her side. Plus the normal vampires and doom guard whatevers.
Since Drizzt and one of the paladins are with me, I decide not to rest and repeatedly add up Jan's traps. Instead, I just lay two: one Spike Trap, and one Time Trap.
Notice the Deva, already summoned. Its immunity to level drain is a big plus in this battle.
Once we've thrown some holy water into the blood pools to weaken the vampires, Sil throws out a Comet spell. We anticipated using a lot of fire damage in this battle, but we can't use Incendiary Cloud or Sunfire without turning Drizzt, the paladin, and/or our Deva hostile. So, Comet it is.
The rest of the party is stuck in the hallway. I wanted to keep them out of harm's way for a bit.
This was not a good move on my part.
Jan's traps activate, but they're not much help.
Without adequate preparation, Jan can't make much use out of a 10-second Time Stop effect.
Immediately afterwards, Nalia's clone finishes casting Time Stop.
She can't get through the doorway. She can use her spells on the nearest vampires, but Bodhi is well out of reach. Two or three Time Stop spells go to waste because of this.
Bodhi's too far away, but we can get at Bodhi's two vampire mages. Jan in the above image is trying to dispel their illusions, but in the end it doesn't matter. They get overwhelmed by spell damage, and soon we are left with Bodhi herself, who has been hiding in her room, sulking as is her wont.
She's in pretty bad shape, and with two Nalia clones left (I don't know where the other two went), we bring her down to Near Death with single-target spells. Aerie's Implosion is especially effective.
Bodhi heals herself. Nalia's clones start casting Time Stop.
See the grey circle to the right? That's the Deva, despawning earlier than I expected, right before the Time Stop begins. Very disappointing.
Then both of Nalia's remaining clone despawn, right in the middle of the Time Stop. Also very disappointing.
Newly freed from her Project Image spell, Nalia hurries over to help out. Everyone starts casting some direct-damage spells, which will helps us avoid getting hit by Bodhi's Fire Shield.
She interrupts everyone's spell but Sil's, since Sil was protected by the Cloak of Mirroring.
Bodhi abruptly teleports over to Jan, only to get teleported by Teleport Field into the middle of the room, right after Nalia finishes casting Time Stop. The two teleportations in quick succession make me worried that Bodhi is going to blink away when the Time Stop ends, dodging Nalia's spells, but I don't have much choice. Nalia casts Improved Alacrity and uses all the spells she can. No Flame Arrow, Magic Missile, or Pierce Magic, though, since Bodhi is invisible at the moment.
Nalia casts two Horrid Wilting spells, Dragon's Breath, Mordenkainen's Sword, Summon Planetar, and Improved Haste on the Planetar before the Time Stop and Improved Alacrity run out.
Bodhi blinks away, dodging much of the spell damage coming her way.
She still takes a lot of damage, however, and we have a Planetar under Improved Haste to help us bring her down. The rest of the party uses ranged weapons to avoid Bodhi's Fire Shield.
The final blow comes!
I am really, really unhappy with this.
Bodhi is one of the toughest fights in the game, and she offers a ton of XP on her defeat. Drizzt just stole the kill and all the XP that went with it. This is exactly why I never ask Drizzt to come along. He does this all the time.
I look for Drizzt after the battle, but he vanished without a word. I would have nailed him with CTRL-Y if he hadn't gone away.
This was a fairly uninterested battle, for me. Horrid Wilting killed basically everything. It's a great spell and everything, but it's relatively boring compared to the other stuff I've done in this run of the game. Stunning Myconids with flashers from a gnomish spider was much cooler than just using a 20d8 direct damage spell. Horrid Wilting is little more complicated than pointing and clicking.
Well, Bodhi is dead. Imoen is restored. And we're on our way to Suldanessellar, and lots of quest XP. But I'm not happy.
The only character I now want dead just got away.
Hats off and best of luck in Suldanessalar/Hell!
Are you playing with SCS v21 / Tactics style Improved Irenicus in Hell? (More recent versions of SCS no longer contain that component.)
As for how the party survived so long... honestly, I would credit part of it to DLTCEP. I have formed a habit of looking stuff up in lieu of testing. That's how I know Xei Win Toh was vulnerable to backstabbing, but the rest of the Final Seal battle party was not. It's kind of a cheat, but it's really just an extension of otherwise standard metagaming. I know Irenicus can summon a Dark Planetar in Spellhold through prior experience; I know Xei Win Toh can be backstabbed thanks to DLTCEP. In neither case would Sil know what to do.
Beyond that, I would credit having a caster-based party as the reason why things have yet to go truly, catastrophically, irreparably wrong. One of the things I've noticed, in terms of very broad strategy, is that the best setup usually is very loose, very flexible. Since I like explaining, I'll explain.
Skull Trap is generally considered the best 3rd-level mage spell in the game. With a high damage cap and a hard-to-resist magic damage type, it's just very, very strong. And presumably, if you wanted Nalia to be an effective caster, you'd load up on Skull Traps so she could dish out tons of damage.
That was usually how I would run things in earlier games. Then, one day, on a whim, I decided to try a fighter-based party. Aerie would be my only spellcasters, and as an additional restriction, she could only memorize one spell of each type per day. So, instead of Shield and four Magic Missiles for 1st level spells, it would be Shield, Magic Missile, Chromatic Orb, Blindness, and Charm Person.
I found that Aerie's new strategy was actually surprisingly successful. It made the party much more adaptable, much more capable of responding correctly when things went wrong. I've very much taken this to heart in my more recent runs: the greatest strength of mages isn't their immunities, or the raw damage they can deal, or the wicked disablers they can use. It's their flexibility.
In a normal party, when things go wrong, you might need to pull your primary spellcaster out of the way and spend one to three rounds healing the character, repositioning it, and/or bringing up a new defense spell. All the while, the rest of your party, assuming it's available, is trying to fight the enemy while handicapped, since their support character isn't helped them. My party members have overlapping powers, so while they're weaker overall, it's hard for the enemy to prevent them from functioning.
So, if something goes wrong with my party, they have the tools to handle it. If Jan is dead, Nalia is disabled, Aerie is injured, Sil is cornered by enemies, and Cernd is busy dealing with an important enemy I can't just ignore, then we can split the necessary fixes between the remaining characters. Cernd uses the Rod of Resurrection to bring back Jan, since Cernd can't cast any other spells that would help. Sil is uninjured but stuck, so she casts Remove Paralysis to release Nalia. Nalia casts Teleport Field to release Sil. Aerie has both Teleport Field and Remove Paralysis, and can also use the Rod of Resurrection, but her round is better spent drinking a potion, so she focuses on her own safety. After several seconds, Sil can wiggle her way out the fray, regaining her mobility, while Jan recovers his equipment. In this example, we are hit by several very nasty problems, but we can repair the situation within one round.
Constrast that with a more standard party. You have one cleric, one thief, one mage, and some fighter types, and everyone is equipped with the best damage-dealing capabilities they can handle. They have the ability to reverse problems, too, but those "fixes" only belong to a few members of the group. If the cleric gets disabled, the mage needs to cast Dispel Magic, jeopardizing the party's buffs. If Minsc is trapped and in danger, your mage might have to make a decision between using Breach on the enemy mage or using Teleport on Minsc, since you can only cast one of those this round. If a fighter dies, they'll come back without their armor, and therefore be very vulnerable. This party is much better at killing things, but not as good at bouncing back when things go wrong.
Plus, the "balanced" party can't keep the entire group covered with Chaotic Commands and Death Ward. It might be less likely to fail its saves, but a party with two clerics doesn't need to make saves. Chaotic Commands and Death Ward make your saves for you.
That's why my party tends to have rather weird spell selections. Half the party has Slow, half the party has Spell Thrust, half has Breach, half has Secret Word, half has Teleport Field, half has Invisibility 10' Radius, and half has Haste. These are all redundant--we're never going to be hasting the party three times in one day--but that's not the point. These spells are all "fixes" for bad situations. We might not be dealing as much damage as a party armed with a bunch of Skull Traps, but if we need to escape, or improve our mobility, or screw up the enemy's positioning, or take down a fully protected mage in one round... we can do it.
The party is weaker because of the redundancies and because their THAC0 and base APR are so poor. But they are extremely, extremely resistant to bad luck. They may be slow to take down a midlevel enemy, but against the bigger threats, where things are more dicey, this party can keep operating effectively even if the party gets completely trashed, and recover very quickly. For a no-reload, you need flexibility more than strength. Would you rather run a race with a 20-pound weigh on your back, or a 10-pound weight on one foot?
Or maybe it's just Chaotic Commands. Disablers are the major game-enders in BG2.
Or maybe I'm just stacking lots of Blur spells and it makes the party super-hard to hit. But a Teleport Field contingency at the start of important battles would accomplish much the same thing at greater inconvenience, and the Shield of Reflection, in the right hands, could deal with enemy archers. And I never really buff with Mirror Image, which would work, too.
Re: Improved Irenicus, according to the SCS v28 Readme DavidW dropped the component because he didn't like it much.
I never liked that blank, sickly green background. I know a different shade of green wouldn't have been much better, but there really should have been a texture. A flat color calls to mind mist, and pale green mist doesn't look real.
You can't see it on the map, at least. Though we do have some laggy parts.
It might just be an SCS2 thing, since so much more is happening in SCS2 than vanilla BG2.
Suldanessellar has several clusters of difficult encounters. The Rakshasas are immune to lots of things, abuse the hell out of area effect attacks, and come protected with lots of illusion spells. We also have to deal with the toughest golems in BG2.
Everybody does very pitiful damage against Adamantite and Iron Golems, even Sil.
We get ambushed on the way to some Skeleton Warriors. These golems are all over the place.
Aerie summons a Deva. By this time in the game, there aren't a lot of critters that can stand up to our summons.
Instead of fighting Raamilat face to face, we just throw out Comet and Dragon's Breath. He's immune to cold and magic damage, but not fire.
He failed his save against Dragon's Breath, but the unconsciousness only lasts 3 seconds. Comet knocks the victim unconscious for 18 seconds, but has no save penalty, and Raamilat was unaffected. To keep the party fully buffed, Jan runs away, so Raamilat's Remove Magic only hits Jan.
The Nabassu is in really awful shape. Raamilat, meanwhile, is struggling to keep up his defenses. He has Improved Mantle, and since we're too lazy to break down his spell protections, we can't hit him very often for a moment.
He also has a PFMW Contingency, but we can get past that. Sil and Aerie equip normal bullets, Jan equips normal bolts, Haer'dalis takes a short sword in his main hand, Nalia switches to a short bow (she normally uses the Crimson Dart and Buckler +1) and she and Imoen use normal arrows.
Haer'dalis still gets a Weapon Ineffective message due to having Kundane in his off hand.
I was particularly worried about the group of Rakshasas outside the Temple of Rillifane, so I had Sil cast Farsight so Nalia's clones could run in during Time Stop (currently, Nalia can cast Time Stop twice per day) and throw out Horrid Wilting spells.
In between Horrid Wilting spells, the clones throw the Crimson Dart at the Iron Golem. Automatic hits because of Time Stop, and they have lots of attacks per round.
I think the reason why projected images can sometimes attack is because their base APR is set to zero, and that's what is supposed to prevent them from attacking. But if the character is using, say, the Crimson Dart, the dart's base 3 APR setting overrides the clone's zero APR, so it attacks normally when using the Crimson Dart. This would explain why Nalia's clones have never been able to attack with the Dagger of the Star: it has no passive APR effect.
A Maharajah managed to survive the first assault, and drank a potion or two while invisible, but when he returned to attack us, he no longer posed a threat.
Rakshasas have excellent immunities in the sense that they're immune to level 7 spells and below (except, in SCS2, Breach), immune to normal weapons, and can cast PFMW, but they're otherwise fairly weak. Horrid Wilting bypasses their spell level immunities, and since they don't have Protection from Magical Energy or MR, they crumple under the weight of Horrid WIlting.
For the other group of Rakshasas, Nalia created no clones, and instead attacked directly. Dragon's Breath also goes right through Rakshasa spell level immunities.
Basically the same thing happens in Demin's house.
Rakshasas are boring at this level.
Next up, Nizidramanii'yt and Suneer.
I'm still in no mood to take big risks, so Feeblemind is still the plan. We have better chances, now, though, since Nalia has an extra casting of Time Stop and can throw out more Feeblemind spells safely before Nizidramanii'yt can attack.
Sil buffs most of the party with Protection from Acid and casts Farsight to expose Nizidramanii'yt. She casts Wish just in case it gives us anything, and fortunately, it gives us the rest option.
Now we can buff the whole party with Protection from Acid, but there's not much else to do. Nalia spawns her clones and we begin.
It's a very safe, very simple formula, even against the toughest SoA dragons. But we screw up our timing.
Since the first clone had to run forward a bit before casting her first spell during Time Stop, the Time Stop ended earlier than we planned. And since she was too close to the dragon when the Time Stop ran out, Nizidramanii'yt gives chase.
He brings up the dialogue. I consider agreeing and giving him our stuff, not realizing that would give him all of our equipment, too, since I failed to drop everything. Luckily for us, I decide to fight.
Nizidramanii'yt opts to take our stuff by force. His rampage is short-lived.
I still have to be careful. If I let our Planetar attack him, the Planetar might dispel the Feeblemind. Worse, Nizidramanii'yt might have a Contingency with Heal, which would also dispel the Feeblemind. To make sure Nalia's clones are still around if or when Nizidramnii'yt escapes his Feeblemind, we barrage him with Horrid Wilting spells to trigger his Contingency, if he has one. Better he escapes the Feeblemind when our clones have 10 rounds left than when our clones have 3 rounds left.
We already lowered his resistance with Pierce Magic, so he has no defense against our spells.
There is something to be said for raw damage power. But Feeblemind is still the safer option, I would say, than Horrid Wilting.
The Temple Rillifane is controlled by a mage named Suneer, a Nabassu, an Iron Golem, and a Rakshasa, a peculiar group congested in a very small area. Since Nalia and Aerie come prepared with Energy Blades, I decide to attack him right off the bat.
That really wasn't fair. He didn't even get to activate his buffs.
The rest of the group is also kind of boring to fight.
The Rakshasa is basically helpless, and the other two critters are little more than oversized grunts with magic resistance. The encounter ends abruptly.
Suldanessellar is saved. We grab some nuts from the Tree of Life and open the way to Irenicus, but we have some stuff to do before the final battle.
Mostly, we have items to buy and sell. But there's one last quest remaining besides Kangaxx and the Twisted Rune. The Temple of Lathander wants me to defend them against a Talassan attack. I run into some Storm Knights on the way to the Temple of Talos.
Storm Knights don't mess around. They start the battle with a Chain Lightning spell, and with their large HP pools, they soak up all of Aerie's and Nalia's Energy Blades.
We begin the battle inside the temple with Comet. It's a monstrously powerful spell, but these guys are awfully sturdy.
Even Dragon's Breath right after that doesn't finish off all of them.
Notice that Sil is using +4 Bullets. It's because Aerie can conjure 5 of them each day with the Erinne Sling, and I've been using the Wand of Lightning trick to speed up production. I decided to avoid using exploits for this run, but I've made an exception for convenience's sake. And unlike the +4 Darts from the Cloak of Stars, the bullets created by the Erinne Sling don't vanish over time.
The clerics of Talos stick around for quite some time. With Sanctuary and a whole bunch of healing spells, they are rather hard to kill.
I wonder how this fight would have gone had I done it at an earlier level.
Once the last of the Talassans are dead, I return to the Temple of Lathander and receive a vacation to recover from the violence.
I start gathering every item in SoA that I might need in ToB, since I can't come back for them once I fight Irenicus at the Tree of Life. Earlier, I had sold off many ToB item components from Watcher's Keep, in order to make room in my inventory.
Now that we're about to leave, we need to get back those items. Aerie casts Friends to make our gold stretch as far as possible.
Unfortunately, I forgot to have her equip the Ring of Human Influence beforehand, which must have cost us thousands if not tens of thousands of gold. I arrive at the Adventurer's Mart almost bankrupt, and find that there are three really useful level 9 spell scrolls that I still have not bought: Spellstrike, Spell Trap, and Chain Contingency.
I sell off a lot of magical ammunition and other unimportant stuff to make room for the scrolls. Nalia learns Spelltrike and Spell Trap; Sil learns Chain Contingency.
I do some tests and find that Chain Contingency works just like I want it to. Sil has just receive a massive boost in melee power as well as spellpower.
Projected images can attack while shapeshifted due to shapeshifting changing the caster's base APR. Now that Sil can spawn four clones at once, just like Nalia, we can have up to four Iron Golem attacking at once, and since each clone gets one casting of Time Stop (the other 9th-level spell Sil has is reserved for Shapechange), they can get automatic hits as well, reducing the need for improved THAC0.
I haven't quite decided how to approach Irenicus, but one possibility might be chaining Time Stop spells to wear out his weapon immunities. Spell durations continue to run while Time Stop is active, so every casting of Time Stop cuts 3 rounds off of everybody's buffs, including the enemy's. With four Time Stop spells across Sil's clones, we could potentially have 8 rounds of free attacks, or 4 if Irenicus has a contingency with a weapon immunity spell. With 10 Stoneskins to cut through, we should be able to bring him to Near Death quite quickly.
But that would probably be better suited to Nalia's clones, since she is our standard wearer of the Robe of Vecna and can get Time Stop off the ground faster. And if she takes a step back and forth while in Time Stop, she can make sure her hits from the Crimson Dart occur in a stream rather than all at once, ensuring Irenicus' first spell gets interrupted.
Kangaxx will stay in his tomb, where he belongs. And the Twisted Rune will stew in their lair unmolested. The XP rewards will not get me anything important at this stage of the game. Nor do I have any particular need for the Staff of the Magi or Ring of Gaxx.
Before I leave Athkatla for Suldanessellar, I decide to check up on Roger and see if he has any potions I have yet to purchase. On the way, I run into a couple of Talassan priests, who for some reason didn't attack me the last time I visited the Temple District.
Talon Nirkhas and Talon Zogas. Talon Nirkhas is an okay, but Talon Zogas sounds pretty badass. But that's not the best part.
The way they say that line--"Justice shall be swift and final"--it just sounds so great. It's like the Deva's and Planetar's battlecries, "I shall prevail" and "The light shall fall before me." I can't decide which one is my favorite battlecry. The shrill, nasal battlecry of the drow is also quite nice: "The drow rule supreme." It sounds like a Svirfneblin is chanting it.
Oh, and the clerics died.
Pity.
Well, Roger had no potions I wanted, but then, I already have over 10 Potions of Magic Protection and 10 Potions of Magic Resistance, on top of a bunch of other defensive-type potions. I erased everybody's contingencies and sequencers with CTRL-R and reset all of them. I also reorganized our spellbooks.
Nalia's Spell Sequencer switched from Teleport Field+Haste+Invisibility 10' Radius to Flame Arrow+Flame Arrow+Flame Arrow. I no longer needed the escape option, but a triple Flame Arrow sequencer could be very useful if I broke through Irenicus' defenses, as its base damage on a successful save is about 100, equal to Irenicus' maximum health. We added extra castings of Magic Attacks, Flame Arrow, and Protection from Magical Energy. Otherwise, we were already quite well prepared for a mage fight.
We entered the stairway down to the Tree of Life where Irenicus was doing his magical wizardy stuff and scouted the area. Jan laid down two Time Traps, two Spike Traps, and three normal traps. Can't be too careful.
I could have left and rested to replace the normal traps with HLA traps, but I didn't feel like it. It's already silly enough, taking several days off in between clearing Suldanessellar and actually confronting the guy behind it, and I'm sure the traps will be enough as they are.
To save spells, Stoneskins, and HP, Aerie summoned some undead to hold off the elementals guarding Irenicus' weird-looking parasites. The summons held off the elementals long enough for us to bring them down with missile weapons.
Before we take down the last parasite, we bring up all of our buffs. And there are a lot of them. Multiple Spell Shields, to serve as backups. Multiple Spell Immunities, to maintain SI: Abjuration if the fight should drag on. Eight spellbooks in total, crammed with everything that could possibly be useful in this fight.
We take down the last parasite and are teleported over to Irenicus. We listen to his griping--the Seldarine took away his ability to even remember what it was like, to remember having feelings. Emptiness beyond emptiness.
Ellesime flees to rally the other elves, in case we fail to stop Irenicus. I don't know what shape they're in to fight, though, and I know from experience that even if the elves can take down Irenicus, they don't raise you from the dead afterwards.
Irenicus goes hostile. Jan's first Time Trap goes off.
He fires off two Bolts of Lightning with the Light Crossbow of Speed--the most damage he can do in this short time--and uses the Wand of Spell Striking on Irenicus, so it will take down a spell protection right after his defenses come up.
The second Time Trap activates. Jan realizes he can do more damage by dual-wielding Celestial Fury and the Scarlet Ninja-to, but it's no use.
SCS2's pre-buff scripting can fire off multiple times if you begin the fight with Time Stop. I don't know why, but it makes Irenicus more or less impossible to hit. Jan uses the Wand of Spell Striking again, the Breach option this time, but otherwise there's not much he can do.
The moment time returns to normal, Nalia casts Project Image. I want her clones up and casting Time Stop as fast as possible. But my timing is off by a second.
Irenicus, like many other enemy mages in SCS2, has a Chain Contingency with Horrid Wilting, and though Nalia has Protection from Magical Energy active, the spell hits her, canceling the only Project Image spell she had. Hopefully the Chain Contingency will trigger anyway, but I can't count on it.
Irenicus begins his next spell. He has Improved Mantle and Stoneskin active, which means he can only be hit by +5 weapons or better, but will block the first ten. Time Stop could have let us wait it out, but right now we have no way of getting through it. Sil can break through Improved Mantle with the Sling of Everard, as she has been doing since the Planar Sphere, but she can't break through ten Stoneskins anytime soon, and her time is better spent doing something else.
She uses Comet instead.
I don't really understand why Irenicus didn't come prebuffed with Protection from Fire, like he did with Protection from Cold. With GOI active, the only cold spell that could hurt him is Cone of Cold, but Sunfire, Delayed Blast Fireball, and Incendiary Cloud can all break through that, to say nothing of HLAs.
Irenicus has pre-cast Energy Blades, so we're not in a good position to start casting big spells. He could easily interrupt us without PFMW. But we have a slight delay here, and Nalia at least can cast Energy Blades fast enough to avoid getting interrupted. She casts it along with Aerie. Energy Blades strike as +5 weapons, set the caster's APR to 4.5, add Improved Haste to bring it up to 9, and the disks themselves have a +10 bonus to THAC0. Plus, they deal 1d10 electricity damage per hit. They're practically made for interrupting spells.
Irenicus has gone invisible, so Jan seeks him out. Jan brings good news.
Irenicus is almost dead. And we know he's perfectly vulnerable to fire damage.
Nalia casts Dragon's Breath. Sil does, too.
Irenicus has gone invisible once again, so Jan must reveal him. He actually got knocked down--I assumed he was immune to unconsciousness by virtue of being a plot character (unconsciousness prevents dialogues that occur on defeat). The moment he appears, we attack. Aerie and Nalia still have tons of Energy Blades left, so Irenicus has to deal with almost 18 guaranteed attacks per round if he wants to keep fighting.
But our earlier blitzkrieg proved more than enough.
The battle ended in five rounds, including two rounds from Jan's Time Traps.
Out of all the spells I prepared just for this fight, none of them were important. HLAs and Jan's Detect Illusions ability did basically everything for me.
Unfortunately, there's a wacky magical screwup somewhere along the way, and Sil and all her friends get pulled down into the Nine Hells to contest for ownership of her soul. Jan sums up the situation perfectly.
The party retains most of its buffs and has all its spells restored, so I hurry and take down Sarevok in the Wrath Trial. The other trials need not be completed with violence.
I just took on Irenicus in Hell. This is an exceptionally long story, so I will split it up into multiple posts. This will take a very long time to explain.
After finishing the test of Wrath, I didn't have much else to do. I only really wanted the Tears of Bhaal from the Greed test and the Selfishness test. To avoid losing anything in the Selfishness test, I used an old trick to become immune to the stat reductions. You can avoid all penalties by using SI: Divination. But I actually used the Wand of Lightning trick to achieve immunity to all spell schools, just in case I was wrong about the school.
You still get the message, but it has no real effect. Hence the Spell Ineffective message. Notice that Sil has the menu for SI spells. When you use the Wand of Lightning trick to cast Spell Immunity, that menu doesn't go away after you cast the first spell, so you can achieve immunity to all schools and maintain it indefinitely, as long as you don't switch to another character.
Before we do our final preparations, I set up Sil's Tears of Bhaal rewards. There's a trick that I'm very fond of that allows you to get multiple bonuses of the same kind, instead of getting one of each reward, good or evil. Sil picks the Selfishness test and Greed test because they give very nice defensive bonuses: magic resistance and save bonuses. I will give her the save bonuses twice so that her base save vs. spell and death are at -2 when she has the Ring of Protection +2, Robe of the Good Archmagi, and Helm of Balduran equipped. That's an undispellable immunity to basically all save or else spells. With the Shield of the Lost, Robe of the Good Archmagi, and the MR bonus from the Machine of Lum the Mad, the Hell bonus to MR to will put her magic resistance at 50, which will allow her to reach 100 MR with a single Potion of Magic Protection.
The trick is to remove all Tears of Bhaal from your inventory except the one that corresponds to the bonus you want. You click the door, wait for the screen to shake, and remove the Tear of Bhaal. You get the bonus without losing that Tear, allowing you to reuse it. Unfortunately for us, the door always opens after five bonuses have been activated, even if you only ever trigger the Greed bonus.
You still get the message saying you lost the Tear, not that it matters.
To get a better idea of what I was facing, I double-checked the SCS2 readme and also re-watched Stworca on Youtube play through this battle.
This let me know where each enemy would first appear.
Jan sets some Spike Traps in the right places. Four of them go to where the Dragon of Pride spawns, which should be enough to kill it.
Three of them will also go to the Orb of Fear's spawn point, which might not be enough to kill it, but will still help out.
I went through our spellbooks several times and made some tweaks to our setup. For one thing, we decided to use Limited Wish to cast Chain Contingency, which allows Jan, Aerie, or Imoen to get extra clones, though only Aerie can put three Project Image spells in the contingency. We pick Jan over Imoen on the grounds that he has some better tools at his disposal.
In lieu of a third Project Image, we pick Spell Deflection, since it will save us a 6th-level spell slot, which we need for Protection from Magical Energy. In his playthrough, one of Stworca's characters took 54 damage from Irenicus' Horrid Wilting even after down a Potion of Magic Shielding, which would have cut damage in half and ensured a successful save. None of our characters could survive a Horrid Wilting spell that did over 200 damage on a failed save. So, we need immunity to magic damage.
This is what the party looked like before the battle began.
Aerie
Sil
Jan
Nalia
Imoen
Haer'dalis
Notable things:
1: We have five Wands of Spell Striking, which have varying numbers of charges. Somehow we picked up a lot in Watcher's Keep.
2: We have a Red Globe, Purple Globe, and three Green Globes. The Red Globe heals 64 HP. The Purple Globe sets STR to 23 or so for 10 turns. One of the Green Globes summons a friendly Shambling Mound; the other two cast Acid Arrow and Invisibility. I don't know which is which, so we'll use all of them.
3: Sil has a scroll of Black Blade of Disaster. I couldn't decide if I wanted her to scribe this scroll, so I saved it. The weapon itself is notable for having +5 to THAC0 and doing 2d12 base damage, which is 24 if Sil uses Righteous Magic. It's a strong alternative to the Iron Golem form.
4: Jan has a Vampiric Touch scroll. He can't normally cast it, but I saved this one to make sure that he could get a little extra HP for this fight.
5: Everybody appears to be wearing Bracers of Defense AC 8. That's actually the custom item I use for buffing, with Improved Alacrity and +9 to casting time, but for this battle I decided not to use it. Our buffs would only last as long as they normally would.
But since I really want to make sure we're at our absolute strongest when the fight begins, Sil has memorized Wish, which she will cast after all of our relevant spells have finished casting. We will repeat the process until it lets us restore our spells, which will help us if our buffs get dispelled.
Just kidding. I used Shadowkeeper to restore everybody's spells, for convenience's sake. Here we are with a bunch of summons, all buffed and ready to go, but also with a full spellbook for the whole party. Quite nice.
Sil runs up and clicks on the door. She gets her final magic resistance bonus, and Irenicus appears.
On the plus side, one enemy is already dead. Unfortunately, that was the sword, which was probably the least dangerous enemy of the group. I was trying to kill the much more dangerous dragon. Either way, the fight begins.
Remember how I said you need SI: Illusion to protect yourself from Irenicus' Shatter Magic spell?
Well, I forgot to cast it.
The battle has begun, and though we have all of our spells, we are completely defenseless.
I go to the Auto-Pause menu and set it so the game pauses at the end of a round. This will slow down the pace of the battle and help me keep control of things.
Notice that the Orb of Fear, Wraith of Wrath, and Dragon of Pride are all right next to us. My memory tells me that each critter normally spawns a ways away, and then runs up to fight you. As time drags on and our Skeletons keep triggering auto-pauses, I realize that the monsters aren't going away.
The Wraith of Wrath, Orb of Fear, and Dragon of Pride are directly on top of the party. We will have no breathing room to re-cast our buffs.
The SCS2 readme says the Dragon of Pride is basically a clone of the Shadow Dragon, but since I saw no mention of a breath weapon in the dragon's files, and since I don't remember encountering the breath weapon in the past (I've fought this battle on two previous runs), I assumed the Shadow Dragon Breath did not come with it.
I was wrong. And Imoen is the first target. This is how bad she was hit.
Imoen has effectively lost all of her spells. We only have one scroll of Restoration, and we don't have much room to use it. Besides, restoring her levels won't get her spells back. We could also use a Deva to cast Restoration, but it's not worth our limited time.
While the rest of the party keeps the enemies busy, Nalia retreats to the south to spawn her clones and cast Time Stop.
She divides her time between throwing the Crimson Dart at the Orb of Fear and trying to hit the dragon with Feeblemind. I checked its files and found that it was not, surprisingly, immune to Feeblemind. I'm pretty sure dragons are immune to all projectiles (except maybe Jan's flashers, since they're a unique thing), so I don't bother trying to hurt the dragon, even though the dragon has -20 AC to the beholder's -10, and will be harder to kill outside of Time Stop.
Meanwhile, I have great difficulty deciding what to do with the rest of the party. Sil has tons of excellent options, but they all bear huge opportunity costs. Spawning her clones would interfere with Nalia's, since Time Stop reduces the duration of all the party's buffs and summons, including Project Image. Sil could also use her HLAs, but all of her HLAs could be useful against the second phase, when you have to fight Irenicus solo. Plus, any non-HLA spells she cast will be deducted from her future clones' supply.
I eventually decide to cast Stoneskin, a safe long-term option that her clones likely won't be casting more than once at most. Plus, a lucky critical hit from a Skeleton interrupts the dragon's next spell.
Note that Irenicus is missing from the picture. He's hiding in the south, presumably because he's supposed to represent the Selfishness test and therefore has his flunkies take the heat.
The next Time Stop from Nalia's clones arrives, and then I see a disturbing message.
That can only mean Irenicus has triggered one of Jan's Spike Traps. And the other two are right next to it.
Sure enough, Irenicus triggers the others.
And now he is dead.
Why is this a problem? Well, Stworca mentioned in his Youtube playthrough of this fight that, if you let any other monsters survive after you kill Irenicus, then they continue on to phase 2, when you fight Irenicus solo. And I know that there's no way Sil could defeat all four of the remaining enemies by herself, when phase 2 removes all of your items.
All I can do now is hope that phase 2 won't begin until the others are dead. Hopefully the switch to phase 2 won't trigger until we're at least partly ready for it.
In the meantime, we keep trying to kill the beholder and Feeblemind the dragon.
Imoen is no longer level drained. The Planetar must have restored her at some point. Still no high-level spells, but at least she'll be harder to kill.
Things are going steady, but painfully slow. The Orb of Fear doesn't have hundreds of health, but it does have pretty high resistances.
The Wraith of Wrath and the Dragon of Pride are still trying to get past the horde of Skeletons surrounding them. But then, only a few rounds have elapsed so far. Most of this battle's in-game duration has been spent under Time Stop.
In fact, so much time was spent during Time Stop that Nalia's Project Image spells just ran out.
We still haven't managed to Feeblemind the dragon. Later, I would I check the file again, and find out why.
The dragon has 80% magic resistance. I thought it had 25%. That was why I never memorized Lower Resistance or Pierce Magic. So many wasted rounds. But I didn't know that at the time.
The dragon rears its head, confirming that our attempts to disable it have failed. I've seen this motion many times.
Either that's a spell he's casting, or--more likely--it's his breath weapon. And judging from the angle, it looks like he's targeting our group.
Breath weapon. But that's not all. Jan is now under the enemy's control, and we prepared no Dispel Magic spells specifically because we'd only have a 1% chance of dispelling Irenicus' magic. So Jan is out of our hands for a few rounds.
I already equipped Jan with his flashers, just in case he failed his save. The party is immune to the flasher projectile, so I assumed he'd be harmless to us as long as he was using his flashers.
Some unknown damage source hits Jan and Imoen, who both are currently charmed. Since it just says they took damage, it's not clear where it came from.
And thanks to Imoen's contingency, we now have a hostile Teleport Field.
Not that it makes much difference. We are not a melee-heavy party anyway.
The situation worsens. We continue to fail to kill the Orb of Fear, and then Aerie gets level drained.
Multi-class characters get hit extra hard by level drains. Aerie loses twice as many levels as Haer'dalis would have. But at least she made her save, and level drain apparently does not remove SCS2's innate HLAs.
Although Nalia's clones are gone, we've made sure to memorize extra copies of Project Image, across the party, in case we ever needed them. Nalia sends out another clone, but we're still very behind on this battle.
Then, while Nalia's clone is trying to tack a little more damage onto the Orb of Fear, we get a disturbing message once again.
Shapechange is one of the few spells (the only, in fact, that I know of) that cannot be dispelled. Shapechange persisted despite Shatter Magic, but now it's run out.
Fifty rounds have already passed since we cast it, at the beginning of our buffer period.
Time returns to normal. Imoen's charm wears off, and she drinks a potion to recover from the earlier damage.
We deal the final blow against the Orb of Fear! But not before it fired one last ray at the party.
With the Orb of Fear dead, we have two critical enemies left: the Dragon of Pride, and the Wraith of Wrath. With -20 and -24 AC, and 80% magic resistance and total immunity to magic, respectively, our only realistic chance of beating them without using our very limited supply of HLAs is for Sil to spawn her clones and attack them during Time Stop, in Iron Golem form. Sil retreats to the south to cast Shapechange. Otherwise her clones won't be able to attack.
Our summons are running very thin. Soon the wraith and dragon will have no one to fight but us. At least that means we can summon a Deva or Planetar, but we won't need to if Sil can pull this off.
Imoen is knocked unconscious, preventing her from bringing back Haer'dalis.
If we don't get him back fast, then he might get shattered, and we lose a very useful TOB ally, plus Kundane and Angurvadal. The Chaos Blade, however, got transported to Sil's inventory, so it safe with us... either because I was afraid of losing it if Haer'dalis got chunked, or because the Chaos Blade is treated the same way as quest items and containers, and therefore reverts to Charname if the user is petrified.
Imoen doesn't stay down for long. The cause must have been a Wing Buffet. She runs over to Haer'dalis once more.
We actually have to apologize to this bastard to get him back in the party.
Sil finishes casting Shapechange, then spawns her clones. The rest of the party, however, is not doing too well.
Jan might have been killed by any number of things; Aerie simply got level drained to death. Imoen got level drained, too.
This is all that's left of her spellbook.
We don't have time to dwell on Imoen's weakness, however. Sil's first clone has already begun casting Time Stop.
Time Stop only gives her 18 seconds to act, so we can't waste any time. The clone casts Boon of Lathander for an extra damage boost. I'll need all the APR I can get if I'm going to take down the dragon.
Then I remember.
The Dragon of Pride is the only enemy in this battle that's not immune to INT drain. Sil's clone switches to Mind Flayer form.
By now, Sil's Chain Contingency has triggered. We have three more clones, each of which can cast Time Stop one time. Since I've only got one enemy left, and the clones won't be much use in phase 2 of this battle, I have them all cast Improved Haste on themselves, to make sure they'll be able to deal enough damage to the Wraith of Wrath.
Time Stop is another few seconds away, so I turn the rest of the party's attention to recovery. Imoen picked up a lot of Jan's equipment already, so once we've gotten the Rod of Resurrection into the right hands, we get ready to bring back Jan.
Nalia's clone doesn't have much to do, hence the Improved Haste on the Skeleton Warrior.
I order Sil's first clone, no longer capable of reliably hitting the wraith, to make room for the next clone. I pull back our other summons, too. Iron Golems have pretty strong reach, but with their gigantic circles, they can easily get stuck behind other critters.
She only has enough time to shapechange and cast Boon of Lathander. But it's enough to get in some strong hits on the Wraith of Wrath.
That isn't nearly enough to bring the wraith down. But we still have two clones left.
The wraith goes down. We resurrect Aerie, collect our lost equipment, and wait for the next battle to begin.
Sil, still under the effects of Project Image, gets teleported back to the center of the map to talk to Irenicus in his new form. Then she gets teleported up against the northern wall, thanks to Imoen's Teleport Field contingency firing while she was charmed.
Irenicus looks awful insidious in his outfit. I am reminded of the Black Mamba from Megamind.
Sil is shorn of her items and teleported to the south end of the map. Project Image is still active, so Sil is paralyzed. Her summons, unfortunately, are of no interest to Irenicus, nor are they able to stop him from dashing across Hell to poke at Sil with a duplicate of the Dragon's Breath halberd. That's a +4 weapon that does 1 point of fire, acid, cold, and electrical damage--an excellent weapon for breaking through Stoneskin.
But, the Dragon's Breath halberd's elemental damage, unlike the Dragon's Breath spell, does not bypass magic resistance. And with 30% base magic resistance, Sil actually a decent shot at avoiding all damage, making Stoneskin a viable defense. But first we should get back our equipment.
Irenicus hits very fast and runs even faster, so generally the best way to stay on top of this battle is to cast PFMW and run up to the top of the map to recover your items. Otherwise he's very hard to kill.
Luckily, I thought ahead, and dropped a single Oil of Speed on the spot where you begin this phase of the battle.
This would be the second time where I forgot to do something really important. There's no Oil of Speed here. Now I have to outrun him without haste or Boots of Speed. But first, I have to wait for him to hit me, and he manages to take down at least one Stoneskin before his elemental damage breaks through my Stoneskin and dispels all of my clones.
We still have the Shambling Mound from before, plus a Skeleton Warrior, so Sil isn't completely alone, but Irenicus has no interest in attacking anybody other than Sil, so they're useless as cannon fodder.
The nice thing about Irenicus using a duplicate of the Dragon's Breath halberd is that halberds have terrible, terrible attack speeds. So I can actually just run off and he can't really hit me, because his speed factor is too slow. He can easily catch up to me, but I escape his reach before he can make an attack roll.
On the way up to my equipment, Sil brings up Stoneskin. She drinks an Oil of Speed, pulls on her boots, and starts running, though she still can't lose him, so she won't have time to put on her robe. I don't know if Sil's Potion of Magic Protection is in effect, nor do I bother to check.
She still has enough MR to escape the damage, but she uses PFMW to make sure she's safe. Since I've still got a Project Image or two left, I decide to summon a clone, and have her attack during Time Stop instead.
Irenicus' single-minded focus on attacking Sil prevents him from taking a swipe at her clone, which means he misses an easy chance at interrupting the clone's Time Stop.
She doesn't have much time. Like we did with the Wraith of Wrath, Sil's clone just casts Boon of Lathander and whacks away.
It's not enough to take Irenicus down. But he's in pretty bad shape.
Sil is low on spells, so, to save her last casting of PFMW, she runs around in circles, casting her combat buffs: Improved Haste, Righteous Magic, and Boon of Lathander.
Then, foolishly, I start casting Time Stop without PFMW active. I only have Stoneskin, and less than 100% magic resistance to protect me.
Irenicus has a base THAC0 of -10. The Dragon's Breath halberd gives a bonus of 4. His high ATR, at 25, puts his THAC0 at perhaps -21, meaning 95% hit chance on all but the most thoroughly buffed characters. And he has multiple attacks per round. And there's almost 6 full seconds of casting time for Time Stop.
But he doesn't interrupt it. Sil switches to Iron Golem form. It's over.
Irenicus' second form has just fallen. There's only one left.
The mage version, with permanent aura cleansing, improved casting time, and infinite spells.
And in the middle of Hell, right before we face the final form of one of the most powerful mages in the history of Faerun, Haer'dalis finds the time to charm Aerie.
What are you gonna do? The guy's a bard.
Irenicus is not in sight, but we can tell from the combat log that he has come prepared.
It's not impenetrable, though. He has lots of specific protections, as well as Improved Mantle, but he's only got three spell protections: Spell Shield, Spell Deflection, and Spell Turning. We have five Wands of Spell Striking between us, so we can bring the whole thing down in a single round. The only problem is that he can bring it back up, and teleport away to do so.
We all drink Oils of Speed to make sure we can keep up with his teleportation. Meanwhile, our two remaining summons head south, giving away Irenicus' location. He casts Spell Turning, again, then turns invisible, leaving our Skeleton Warrior and Shambling Mound apparently stumped.
Right about now, we hear him casting a transmutation spell. It can only be Time Stop.
We send Jan running off to the northeast, to lay traps on one of Irenicus' teleport destinations. He always teleports to the corners. Jan will first lay normal traps, because of their lingering damage that can disrupt spells. Then he will start laying Spike Traps, which hopefully will kill Irenicus outright.
Sil, however, drinks a Potion of Magic Protection and walks south a short ways while the rest of the party migrates north. Sil, with her immunity to magic, will be completely immune to Irenicus' spells, since SCS2 mages don't use Imprisonment on the main character. But first, Irenicus goes for the summons.
Irenicus trashes the Shambling Mound during Time Stop. That only bought us a short reprieve. Irenicus approaches from the south, fully buffed and ready.
We have two Protection from Magic scrolls in our inventory. There's no saving throw, and no spell protections can stop it, but the item file indicates that the scroll can be blocked by magic resistance, and this version of Irenicus has 40% MR. If we use both scrolls on him, he has only a 36% chance of resisting both times. To avoid wasting one of them, we decide to only use one on the first round of combat. Imoen puts the scroll in her quick item slot. Other party members target Irenicus with the Wand of Spell Striking. Sil starts to summon a Planetar, who should be able to dispel Irenicus' defenses with a single hit--if we're lucky.
Imoen uses the scroll.
And Irenicus is covered in a blue globe. That should indicate a successful hit, but we can't be sure. Graphic effects have misled us in the past (no pun intended).
We attack him, just in case he's immune to spell failure.
We hit him. His Improved Mantle is no more. And on inspecting the combat log, we find that Irenicus failed his spell without our dealing damage to him. He does, in fact, have 100% spell failure, and will have it for the next 10 turns.
I'm afraid the Planetar may dispel the scroll's effects and liberate Irenicus, so I send it away while the rest of the party keeps attacking Irenicus.
Irenicus can still teleport away, but there is no place to hide.
Sil gets the final blow, as she should.
Irenicus is finally dead.
And yet... the ending cutscene has not arrived. We're still in Hell. Nothing has changed.
But a lone Skeleton, one of our summons, appears to be active, according to the dialogue box. We run out to the center of the map to search for the problem. It doesn't take long to find.
Irenicus was not the end. There is still one enemy left to defeat, a creature I did not know ever appeared in this battle.
One last foe before the end of the game.
We attack.
The ending cutscene finally triggers. The battle is won. And when Ellesime brings us back to life, we see our last reward from our trials in Shadows of Amn.
That's almost 500 XP, for just one creature.
Irenicus is dead. Sil is alive. And after almost a year of in-game time, and nearly a month in real time, Shadows of Amn finally comes to an end.