Sarevok's Magic Resistance

MilesBeyond

So, while messing around in BG Tutu, I was doing the last fight. I had Jaheira call up a Nymph. During the battle, this Nymph happened to let off a Hold Monster spell - which completely paralyzed Sarevok, making him easy pickings for my fighters.

Whoops.

Setting aside Sarevok's classification as a monster for a minute, I just hope the dev team remembers to make Sarevok immune to the new spells, otherwise it will be quite an easy battle...

Shin

I'd have hoped for a bit of balance myself. New spells should be taken into account of course, but granting an enemy immunity to every single status effect and 100% magic resistance is a fairly cheesy way to make a battle difficult.

kilroy_was_here

Isn't DnD hold monster supposed to be better than hold person? The way I remember it hold person can only be used on humanoid targets but hold monster can be used on anything, not just 'monsters'. Maybe 'hold anything' just sounded too silly.

Shin

@kilroy_was_here That's pretty much the case, yeah.

taletotell

I would like to see Sarevok's PC portrait used.

kilroy_was_here

@Shin I was just remembering the rules for the 3e monk. At level 20 they transcend normal mortals and are classified as outsiders. The rulebook gives the example that 'hold person' wouldn't work on an outsider but 'hold monster' still does. I suppose the same must be the case in 2e. Sadly, my own monk never got that far: making the mistake of attempting the 3e version of the Tomb of Horror. Never made it past the first hallway...

@MilesBeyond You probably just managed to get really lucky that you overcame his magic resistance and also managed to make him fail his save. Enjoy your victory, sometimes lady luck comes 'a knocking.

Schneidend

Shin said:

I'd have hoped for a bit of balance myself. New spells should be taken into account of course, but granting an enemy immunity to every single status effect and 100% magic resistance is a fairly cheesy way to make a battle difficult.

I don't think Sarevok is immune to any status effects, just has like 99% magic resist. A Monk could potentially use stunning blow on Sarevok, for instance.

MilesBeyond

kilroy_was_here said:

@MilesBeyond You probably just managed to get really lucky that you overcame his magic resistance and also managed to make him fail his save. Enjoy your victory, sometimes lady luck comes 'a knocking.

Huh, that's a distinct possibility as well.

I didn't get too lucky, though, considering how a couple of misplaced clicks ended up frying my PC with Fireballs. Through some strange twist of fate, Charname and Sarevok ended up dying at almost the exact same time.

kilroy_was_here

@MilesBeyond But the question is: who died first? I know that CHARNAME's death is an instant game over, but is Sarevok's? I don't remember the details.

MilesBeyond

Sarevok's is, but it takes a bit after his death. With CHARNAME it's instantaneous, so I lost instead of winning. But it's a victory in my heart.

kilroy_was_here

I always thought that there should have been a 30 second delay or so after CHARNAME's death before the game ends to give a party member the chance to revive you. Supposedly as soon as you die your taint (and thus the plot) leaves you, but that never seems to happen to Imoen.

I guess your party members all forget about you the instant you die:
'Hey, who's this dead guy? He looks kinda familiar...'
'Nah, never seen him before. You wanna grab a drink?'
'Sure, but it's your night to buy.'

MilesBeyond

kilroy_was_here said:

I always thought that there should have been a 30 second delay or so after CHARNAME's death before the game ends to give a party member the chance to revive you. Supposedly as soon as you die your taint (and thus the plot) leaves you, but that never seems to happen to Imoen.

I guess your party members all forget about you the instant you die:
'Hey, who's this dead guy? He looks kinda familiar...'
'Nah, never seen him before. You wanna grab a drink?'
'Sure, but it's your night to buy.'

LOL.

I'm guessing that with Imoen they hadn't anticipated her being... what she is... back in BG1. I think BG2 starts off assuming she didn't die once in BG1, and of course, she can't die in BG2 until after she gets her soul sucked out of her, so the Imoen thing kinda makes sense

kilroy_was_here

But even after you get her soul back in BG2 it still doesn't matter if she dies. Oh well, having to always protect one party member is trouble enough.

kiros

Shin said:

I'd have hoped for a bit of balance myself. New spells should be taken into account of course, but granting an enemy immunity to every single status effect and 100% magic resistance is a fairly cheesy way to make a battle difficult.

Sarevok does have an abnormally high magic resistance (around 90% range) but that is intentional, he is suppose to be highly resistant. Their are various spells that can drop his Magic resistance to counter this but if that fails it just comes down to pure melee combat which is why sarevok is so efficient at combat.

If he had low magic immunity, people would be using cheesy tactics to kill him i.e stun/charm/death spells.

Shin

@kiros I know, but it also leads to tactics heavily weighted towards whittling him down in melee rather than being able to use a wide variety of the tools you have amassed while playing through the game. Of course, since the Sarevok encounter isn't all that difficult you still have a lot of leeway, but I generally oppose the principle of difficulty by way of immunities and resistances.

And cheesy player tactics are hard to get rid of if the player is intent on using them (Sarevok isn't backstab immune for instance, so you can more or less oneshot him with a proper setup) - you end up with something like Improved Anvil where there are so many immunities that there's often just one set way to defeat an enemy, with trial and error until you find it.

kiros

Shin said:

you end up with something like Improved Anvil where there are so many immunities that there's often just one set way to defeat an enemy, with trial and error until you find it.

hehe that was such an absurd mod, the battles became silly.
One of the thing's that annoyed me is that while the creator implores you not to use cheesy pre-buffs or exploits because the enemies don't.. meanwhile the enemies are allowed to set off 20 spell contingencies and have infinite immunity spells while you're buffs are manually stripped off for no reason..Nonsense.

Sorry went off topic I really think they intended players to confront Sarevok on a more physical basis as opposed to magical. And yeh, their will always be cheesy tactics of bringing him down but reducing his immunities would just make him that much easier to beat. Besides, I don't think his companions are as resistant to magic which does add a level of strategy to it.

DavidW

Just to confirm: Sarevok has a save of 1 in each category and is 90% resistant to all forms of elemental damage (and 50% resistant to elemental damage) but he doesn't have any specific resistances otherwise (in vanilla BG1).

Lemernis

So in vanilla BG Sarevok isn't immune (or 90% so, whatever it is) to the following spells?

Sleep
Horror
Blindness
Color Spray
Hold Person
Charm Person
Dire Charm
Slow
Confusion
Emotion: Hopelessness
Domination
Feeblemind
higher caster level effects of Chromatic Orb: stun, weakness, and paralysis
Polymorph Other, i.e., turning him into a squirrel (BG2 spell, but of course Irenicus has those)

i.e., spells that affect the mind, body (other than via elemental damage), or movement.

Because I would dearly love to see him faint dead away into a heap with Color Spray, lol.

I don't recall ever having had any success when casting those types of spells on him, and using wands on him, i.e., sleep, horror, paralysis.

kilroy_was_here

Well, if he does have a save of 1, then unless your effect applies a penalty to the save it only has a 5% chance of working. Even without any innate resistance that's pretty good. Color spray I believe has limited effects to anything with more than... 5 hit dice? Don't know how much good that will do exactly.

Also I know that wands in BG don't always use the rules they are supposed to. Creatures with magic resistance sometimes don't apply it against wands even for the same spell. (cloudkill and mind flayers come to mind for me) Probably this will be corrected in the EE.

As far as cheesy tactics go, one that will almost certainly still work even after all bugfixes is just summoning as many monsters as you can and sending them in, even from offscreen. Once Sarevok's party has used up most of their best attacks to kill them, summon a second wave and follow them in attacking with bows and slings.

LadyRhian

@Kilroy_was_here Color Spray doesn't affect anything over level 3/having more than three hit Dice. Sleep similarly doesn't affect things with more than 4+3 hit dice. (Ogres only have 4+1). Sarevok isn't going to be affected by either spell. Blindness should work in theory- it's not limited by the Level or Hit Dice of the target. But it *is* an illusion spell. If he had a 20 Int (whether from natural abilities or items, or just had something that made him immune to low-level illusions, that wouldn't work, either.

Dragonspear

Honestly I think at this part of the game a cleric can have both doom and greater malison. With that you might actually be able to get a blind off on our ole buddy sarevok.

LadyRhian

Cheapest way to Kill Sarevok- Cast Cloudkill when you can just see the edge of the dais on which he and his party are sitting. When they die, summon lots of monsters and send them after Sarevok. Pepper him with missile weapons. Profit! (i.e. he dies) I killed him once with exactly this tactic, and my party didn't take a single hit point in damage. I'm not joking.

MilesBeyond

I'm assuming, though, that BG:EE will have BG2's summon monster limit of 5

Dragonspear

@LadyRhian I tried that once as well and felt so dirty afterwards I went and fought him again with the same party.

kilroy_was_here

@MilesBeyond Is that summon 'monster' limit or the a summon 'ability' limit? If I cast a low-level summon monster spell I might get 3 orc warriors. Do they count as 1 summon or 3? I never really used summons much in BG2.

Lemernis

Some threads on this subject report that Sarevok has a non-removable ring that grants Free Action, 100% MR, and doubles his Attacks per Round. In vanilla BG1 that is, sans ToSC.

Schneidend

LadyRhian said:

Cheapest way to Kill Sarevok- Cast Cloudkill when you can just see the edge of the dais on which he and his party are sitting. When they die, summon lots of monsters and send them after Sarevok. Pepper him with missile weapons. Profit! (i.e. he dies) I killed him once with exactly this tactic, and my party didn't take a single hit point in damage. I'm not joking.

Weeeeeeak! I ended BG1 the way it was supposed to end, with CHARNAME matching his +3 greatsword blow for blow against Sarevok's Blade of Chaos.

MilesBeyond

kilroy_was_here said:

@MilesBeyond Is that summon 'monster' limit or the a summon 'ability' limit? If I cast a low-level summon monster spell I might get 3 orc warriors. Do they count as 1 summon or 3? I never really used summons much in BG2.

Monster. You cast Monster Summoning 2 and get 5 Hobgoblins, you can't summon anything else. But casting Summon Deva five times is legit.

Shin

I'd recommend Sword Coast Stratagems to make the encounter a bit more interesting. It makes it so you can't kill Sarevok until you've killed his followers, and they only appear after you've engaged him, so you can't cloudkill from offscreen. To me it also seems suitable from an RPG point of view to leave Sarevok for last, and to engage him only with my PC once his followers are down.. sibling vs sibling and all that.

kilroy_was_here

@Shin unless your half of the sibling rivalry is a mage or something. Going mano-a-mano didn't work so well for Gorion...

LadyRhian

@Schneidend @Dragonspear I *did* say it was the cheap way. Better is to equip main character with boots of speed, give them grand mastery in bows and have them run away, pepper Sarevok with arrows, run again when he gets close, lather, rinse, repeat. Arrows of Biting and Detonation especially. Less Cheap, tastes more filling!