@Myrag OK thanks, that is clear. I think I'm confused from your answer to my previous question, in which you mentioned "capped at 20"
Ok then above was a simple will we cast alright or will we get a wild surge, that concludes a first basic thing about wild mages.
Second thing wild mages get are caster level bonus/reduction of -5 levels up to +5 levels. This means a mage of level 15 can cast a spell at caster level from 10 to 20. This is completly random roll.
The thing is that almost all spells in the game are capped at the level 20 so it doesn't matter if your sorcerer/mage is at level 31 or 20 when casting most of the spells.
For example, a mage of level 31 which casts protection from evil which lasts 2 rounds per level will get a duration of 20 * 2 = 40 rounds, instead of 31 * 2 - 61 rounds as you could think, basically netting a same effects as those of a mage level 20.
How this related to a wild mage? If wild mage gets random bonus of -5 to +5 levels then at level 25 at the very worst roll of -5 spell levels your spells are cast at level 20; This which completly negates random spell levels roll the effect. Same goes for some cool wild surge effects like 'spell cast at double level' will still be capped at level 20.
Only very few spells in the game scale further like dispel magic or remove magic which at their very best can be cast with surge effect of 'double level' and +5 being 72 level. But this is so rare it never happed for me in years of playthrough so we can negate this chance.
@Myrag It seemed I didn't state my question clearly, what I meant to ask was what's the Wild Mage's level bonus cap in Wild Surge tables? Sorry for my bad English
@Myrag It seemed I didn't state my question clearly, what I meant to ask was what's the Wild Mage's level bonus cap in Wild Surge tables? Sorry for my bad English
Not sure I follow, what cap are we talking about. A wild surge table consist roll values from 1 to 100, anything above 100 is set as 100 for purposes of determining the the wild surge effect.
Room with vampires was simply said too hard to run in and smack them with regular onslaught. Even with summons this was simply too much for the party.
Couple of reasons that this would be insane fight even on high levels are that 2x ancient vampire, 4x elder vampire and lots of undead means protection from negative plane wouldn't last long enough. Much easier would be to tackle this fight with amulet of power, yes... I quite would like this.
With this amount of high level vampires a charm party members lands very often even on DD who has immense saves. 4 rounds for NPP is simply too short for this.
I had to resort to something I had only used once in entire trilogy before which is multiple webs with greater malisons and spam skull traps while DD and WS were throwing damage from the range. Azuredge was nice but not game breaking here, it managed to still score two elder vampires decently easy (so maybe game breaking?). As I cleared a bit an FMT ran in with freedom potion and sunrayed the heck out of those undeads who with greater malison 6 of them disappeared. Fancy tactics.
Still I had to micromanage this fight to the slightest bit to not get level drained and even after all that I noticed my WS->Druid got hit once. Sad face as I don't have restoration scrolls so I will need to run quick town errand after clearing the dungeon.
FM is very strong with CF and improved haste, I've sent him solo to clear guardians as he got buffed with 100% fire resistance from Druid. With this high APR he pretty much stun locked the guardians so no big deal.
I was surprised by how the director went... he was completely MEH... didn't get buffed by SCS I guess, went down in two rounds didn't land a single damage on my party.
Ambush party also went super easy, I guess meta gaming went into play as my thief put 3 traps before engagement started which happily landed on their mage putting that sweet poison in. After picking items my sorcerer rushed back in with true sight which was immediately followed by wizard slayer daggers on their mage. With disabled mage fight was over in seconds.
Dragon bane sword will be nice with its double damage against dragons tomorrow, especially since my FMT is specialized into long swords.
I guess that's it for Today, let's beat from dragons tomorrow.
Improved Vampires is one of the components of SCS that really annoys me HARD on LoB. Why? Because of the stupid swarm of rats they summon, each of which is now a giant damage sponge and clutters the entire area.
Summons in general are super annoying in LoB and it's totally understandable why people want to use them themselves. So many mages that just end up spamming monster summoning or shadows at some point, flooding the area with tons of annoying critters. Can't wait to play with the latest SR where Banishment actually seems to reliably work.
Improved Vampires is one of the components of SCS that really annoys me HARD on LoB. Why? Because of the stupid swarm of rats they summon, each of which is now a giant damage sponge and clutters the entire area. .
I just encountered 3 vampires in Waukeen's Promenade at night, the female leader offers me a way out, but I want to fight, and I don't have the casting permit and have triggered the warning (intend to keep this way so I was limited to Divine spells). The female leader seems immune to +2 weapons and they summon rats across the map, dealing Disease status, blocking ways. All amnish soldiers are drown to the fight, it was quite a sight, though these soldiers are busy dealing with rats most of time.
I am amazed there're that many night encounters across Athkatla in chapter 2, which I wasn't paying much attention before this run, I wander how many of them, I'm trying to trigger them all, but they seem to have "recharge" timers, ie. can't encounter twice in the same night.
I think there's 3, 2 against vampires and 1 where a vampire is involved but sets a bunch of thieves against you and flees. Or maybe it's only 2?
Actually there're many , not all require fighting though, some scenes showing how vampires luring thieves, at least 3 vampire vs. thieves(all blue), 3 vs vampires, some are just night thugs, mainly happened in Dock, Bridge ,Promenade area, none in Graveyard, Slums afaik, some are cross areas. Also the "random" encounter while traveling doesn't seem random at all, they're area based, like one destined to trigger when first leaving Graveyard... I'm still in Ch.2, don't want to advance too quickly to miss, maybe because of mod restoration? I don't know.
I'm sure mods interfere with random encounters in some way. SCS has components that suggest so, but I'm no longer familiar enough with vanilla to tell what they change :P
There's definitely some kind of timing component to the early city encounters, but I've found them in transition from various areas, not just the Graveyard.
Discussing peoples tactics against certain enemies. There is so many possible ones starting from summons, going through web/greater malison/freedom pots, sunrays, kiting, scrolls, one protected tank and all ranged etc. Some tactics also work only in SCS and some don't at all. Great example of this are ancient vampires in SCS that disregard existence of my tanks and go straight for my sorcerer and skald meaning tactic where you simply send in melee to tank doesn't work, they just go bat form and fly to you.
I just wonder what are people favourite tactics versus some enemies. People can be creative and their ideas spark ideas for other people
@Myrag While that's a good idea, I fear it would quickly fragment because people just have too different setups in their games. What works for one setup may not work at all for another, and so on.
Here at least we can reasonably assume a somewhat comparable baseline, i.e. SCS and LoB, which by itself tends to streamline the setups involved. Though there certainly remains a big difference between users of IR/SR and those not yet converted
Also, I feel that for me at least there are many outside factors that influence my behavior. Fighting the vampires in Bodhi's lair, for example is very different from fighting the nest in Windspear Hills.
@Lord_Tansheron yea but that is exactly my thought, one will advertise his setup to fight against certain enemy, other will suggest spells, some will focus on tactics and the rest will prefer brute force. All are fascinating to read, even more so when they differ from mod to mod.
Setup is always key factor but there are fights in this game and quite a lot of them where brute forcing usually works better because giving enemy too many rounds is just too much.
My original playthroughs many many MANY years ago were decently hard as I was playing defensively too much. Now I focus on DPR with disablers and enablers storming through LOB/SCS as if it was unmodded core game. One could wonder what tactics I haven't had a chance to execute yet.
also, I feel that for me at least there are many outside factors that influence my behavior. Fighting the vampires in Bodhi's lair, for example is very different from fighting the nest in Windspear Hills.
True but that would be for most things, you could go granular to discuss each fight in the game as they differ one way or another. This would be especially true for something like "let's talk mages" where there are sooo many of them in the game.
By all means start threads like that, I'm not the forum police
I'm sure some people are happy to discuss these things in great detail. For me personally, it's TOO great detail, because there are so many special cases, exceptions, and variables. But I'm not everyone.
4 reloads in total, on 5th try he fell. Took me two tries to realize that I should position my DD on opposite side of the dragon so that wing buffet won't be knocking away everyone from the melee.
100% fire resist is very important here, fis fire breath managed to hit my DD for 170 damage on one try when it landed... ouch! Sadly DD does not have any way to protect himself from dispels so I had to drink pots between. I switched to dragon helmet/shield/ring on last try to get 90% undispellable resistance.
I was happily surpised by the fact most powerful enemies so far go for my DD and boy he can stand there and take some smacking but if defensive stance is down he drops like a fly. I wonder how would other tanks work here FMC/FM/FD?
Anyways it took me about a turn as I had to refresh some spells mid combat. Now the red drake it down, let's head for next challenges.
Btw my sorc is at 1474000 XP so she wasn't yet able to summon OP morde swords which would prove very useful here. A lot of party members will get level at 1,5mil XP breakpoint.
I guess time for some side quests before I takle on unseeing eye, not sure I'm ready for belholder nightmare. I also got key to mindflyer lair in the temple district, not sure of this either
Damage output of WS->Druid is so much weaker than WS->Cleric, even thought the flat DPR at this stage would be comparable (around 150 DPR) cleric dual would have -6 Thaco vs 0 Thac0 of druid dual. This is significant difference in damage output versus decent AC enemies, I tested with both of them taking down my DD and WS->cleric pretty much did the job almost twice as fast. Of course this will be smaller of a difference at the late stages where druid dual will reach -10 Thac0 at max level which is close to enough to hit anything in the game (pre LOB of course). I guess idea of druid is to have druidic spells.
Maybe next run I will ditch DD for FMC or FD (with scs shapeshifting) he should get 90% resistance too then I could dual WS to a mage for a third dual wielding character, this way I still get WS debuff and druid spells but won't nerf my damage output so much.
Also with bard hat I can have skald cast 2 spells every three rounds (even 3 if micromanaged), maybe this would be good to get a blade instead for offensive/defensive spins with MMM between song casts?
I wonder how would other tanks work here FMC/FM/FD?
Firkraag is actually extremely easy to tank as a Mage, as long as you dodge the dispels. That was trivial when the old Dispelling Screen just lasted the entire fight, but it's probably doable with the new one as well, since he doesn't cast Dispel Magic very often and you can probably refresh your Screen after each. Without Dispels, all he does is pound harmlessly on your Mirror Image/Stoneskin defense. Just make sure you time your Stoneskin refreshes well so you don't risk getting interrupted. 100% fire resistance is mandatory, of course, but easy to achieve.
I killed LoB Firkraag with a solo pure fighter, and it was actually real easy. With 100% undispellable fire resistance (which is easy to achieve as @Lord_Tansheron said), his breath attack is no threat at all.
He does hit like a truck though, but with a simple pair of boots of speed, you'll outrun him without problem. Use a sling that adds strength to damage (every single one in the original game, only one under IR) and you'll deal solid damage at long range. You'll then be able to kite him all day long.
It's true that my fighter was in HLA territory, thus could go for double GWW on him with a Simulacrum from the Vhailor's helm to take a good chunk out of his hp pool, but the blueprint should work fine even without HLA.
Well, kiting is the safest way by far. In a no-reload context, it's easily the superior choice. In a solo context, it would often be the only option.
I generally prefer to avoid kiting--not because I think it's wrong or suboptimal (I think neither), but simply because I already know kiting is extremely effective in almost every context, and I want to find new ways of doing things. I learn more that way.
"This strategy would definitely succeed. But what else might work?"
"Best", of course, is always a term relative to various factors. Safety is just one aspect, and it may be more important (e.g. in No-Reload) or less. Efficiency is another, and here 6-character parties tend to blow solo out of the water because their damage output is just so much higher - but if solo is all that matters to you, that's hardly important.
The more I go the more I realize utility besides usual DPR is the strongest value of character. The latter is obtained from many factors ranging from magic, skills and items. Sadly DD does not provide almost any, problem with DD is that he has to use DoE in offhand which limits him to one handers and while there are many great ones in BG not many give utility bonuses like AoE or Answerer but answerer's AC bonus is close to useless with insane thac0 in ToB and Magic Resistance is too situational.
This brings me back to my one favorite characters Archer. In fact, this is my first playthrough in years where I didn't pick it. Archer's called shot is probably one of the strongest utility skills in the game, with massive 10APR that he reaches in early BG2 (IH + Tuigan) called shot reduces enemy thac0 by 10, strength by 10 and save vs spell by 10... I mean, those are insanely overwhelming penalties to any enemy. With greater malison and doom you can drop enemy save vs spell to the point celestial fury stunlocks him to death or spell disablers almost always land even in LOB. Archer is also perfect user for vahlior helmet for even bigger penalties.
While yes archers damage is much lower than maximized to the teeth 24str melee bruiser like FM or FMT but the utility it brings might be just worth it. Note that SOD also brought archers eye in the game for additional 5% crit chance.
My next playthrough is most likely FM, FMT, Skald (or blade for bard hat combo), Sorc, WS-Cleric, Archer. The only issue I've always had with archer is that in SCS enemies like to target her first making me micromanage a lot, especially vs vampire bat forms.
Sadly DD just doesn't cut the powergaming sweetspot for me
I've had a little bit of time to test this weekend, and I must say that while DD is powerful when tanking, it is also INFURIATING to no end thanks to the (presumably SCS) scripting of enemies. Their hatred for Defensive Stance reaches ridiculous levels, at times having them STUTTER IN PLACE DOING NOTHING because they are trying to reach the rest of the party and the DDs are blocking the path. It turns DS into a defensive skill of a whole different kind, because activating it basically makes sure NO ONE WILL ATTACK YOU - effectively making its defensive bonuses either useless or insane, depending on your viewpoint.
While my previous attempts with an F/M tank were extremely smooth in terms of mob control and it was very easy to have things stick to the tank, the short run I did with two DDs was micromanagement hell. You constantly have to block off all corridors and choke points, having it all fall apart in an instant when your characters decide to move an inch on their own, or when enemies do something like teleport or turn invisible or whatever. A lot of the time it was easier NOT using Defensive Stance to tank, which sort of defeats the purpose of the entire exercise. While 30-50% damage reduction is nice, it is not enough to sustain against large numbers of LoB enemies. Single hard hitters like Baron Ployer could even obliterate a tank on their own easily.
It does seem that the scripting is a bit weird when only a single enemy is involved, though. I haven't had time to test this comprehensively, but it appeared to me that tanking only a single enemy I could use Defensive Stance without them breaking off. But as soon as multiple enemies were involved, activating DS basically equaled going invisible. Sadly much of LoB involves larger groups of enemies (partly because summons are rampant).
There are definitely many opportunities for choke-point play, though, where DDs shine like no other tank. They hold doorways better than Hodor, and healing via Vampire's Revenge was enough to last basically forever (well, untils DSs run out) even without 100% resistance. Unfortunately there are also plenty of times where you cannot effectively choke, and there DDs just turn into very mediocre Fighters who trade GM and the option to dual for a few points of damage resistance. I imagine that in ToB especially, this will become a severe problem, and so I've decided to put this particular experiment on hold for now.
For reference, the party was:
DD DD F/M/C Inquisitor Skald Archer
As for the future, I'm not sure where to go next. I really enjoyed my F/M tank run, but that was so contingent on the old Dispelling Screen I'm not sure it can be replicated anymore. Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea of tank + ranged and go back to a more rounded group of resilient melee fighters with high damage output. Maybe something like this:
F/C F/M F/M or Archer Inquisitor Skald Archer
Actually I think I've already done that one...
Maybe I'll give Sorcerer another try. It seems a bit anemic without summons, but perhaps the CC etc. is enough to warrant its inclusion. I'm always worried about damage output, of course, but turning the rest of the party into melee-based killing machines could perhaps provide enough damage to make another pure support worth it if I can use it defensively.
Because it seems that DD are actually more of a liability than they are useful in LoB/SCS and also because your run was indeed reliant on an old dispelling screen version, I will go ahead and suggest again cleric-->fighter dual. Under these new circumstances, I think this unit could satisfy your cleric needs while also have awesome dps, mainly because fighter's HLA > cleric's HLA. You'll have a very good slinger/user of blunt weapon while giving you some serious utility. Level 11 seems the sweet spot to dual in my opinion.
You got your base pretty much covered for anything. Lots of tanking, arcane power and divine casting, all that while having a really high dps output. You could also swap f/m/t for the f/m if your not averse to strong smelling cheese like mislead backstabbing.
What's the big advantage of C->F over F/C, though? Just GM/Boon of Lathander? Considering I use IR (so no IH to double APR) and how many GWWs you have late game, APR doesn't seem THAT amazing compared to more high-level Cleric spells and Turn Undead (which while severely diminished in LoB does still work at higher levels).
Other than that, I'm definitely considering just using F/M/C instead of F/M or F/C in all slots. The lower levels seem to matter less and less the higher you go, while stacking buffs and utility can be very helpful - until you get dispelled
Not sure. More time in the think tank. At least Archer/Skald/Inquisitor seems a fairly set trifecta >_>
EDIT: nvm what was I thinking, there's not enough good blunt weapons to support multiple F/M/Cs I don't think.
@Lord_Tansheron: One thought occurred to me. Do enemies switch targets when Defensive Stance is active, or do they switch targets when a character's damage resistances reach a certain threshold? Because if it's the latter, you could avoid it by tweaking the Dwarven Defender's item choices and keeping their resistances high enough to keep them alive, but low enough to keep the enemy's attention.
Unless the threshold is 70%, which is the minimum amount a level 20+ Dwarven Defender can maintain under Defensive Stance.
Comments
Second thing wild mages get are caster level bonus/reduction of -5 levels up to +5 levels. This means a mage of level 15 can cast a spell at caster level from 10 to 20. This is completly random roll.
The thing is that almost all spells in the game are capped at the level 20 so it doesn't matter if your sorcerer/mage is at level 31 or 20 when casting most of the spells.
For example, a mage of level 31 which casts protection from evil which lasts 2 rounds per level will get a duration of 20 * 2 = 40 rounds, instead of 31 * 2 - 61 rounds as you could think, basically netting a same effects as those of a mage level 20.
How this related to a wild mage? If wild mage gets random bonus of -5 to +5 levels then at level 25 at the very worst roll of -5 spell levels your spells are cast at level 20; This which completly negates random spell levels roll the effect. Same goes for some cool wild surge effects like 'spell cast at double level' will still be capped at level 20.
Only very few spells in the game scale further like dispel magic or remove magic which at their very best can be cast with surge effect of 'double level' and +5 being 72 level. But this is so rare it never happed for me in years of playthrough so we can negate this chance.
It seemed I didn't state my question clearly, what I meant to ask was what's the Wild Mage's level bonus cap in Wild Surge tables?
Sorry for my bad English
feel free to also check those
https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur's_Gate:_Wild_Surge_Table
https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur's_Gate:_Wild_Mage_Compendium
Room with vampires was simply said too hard to run in and smack them with regular onslaught. Even with summons this was simply too much for the party.
Couple of reasons that this would be insane fight even on high levels are that 2x ancient vampire, 4x elder vampire and lots of undead means protection from negative plane wouldn't last long enough. Much easier would be to tackle this fight with amulet of power, yes... I quite would like this.
With this amount of high level vampires a charm party members lands very often even on DD who has immense saves. 4 rounds for NPP is simply too short for this.
I had to resort to something I had only used once in entire trilogy before which is multiple webs with greater malisons and spam skull traps while DD and WS were throwing damage from the range. Azuredge was nice but not game breaking here, it managed to still score two elder vampires decently easy (so maybe game breaking?). As I cleared a bit an FMT ran in with freedom potion and sunrayed the heck out of those undeads who with greater malison 6 of them disappeared. Fancy tactics.
Still I had to micromanage this fight to the slightest bit to not get level drained and even after all that I noticed my WS->Druid got hit once. Sad face as I don't have restoration scrolls so I will need to run quick town errand after clearing the dungeon.
FM is very strong with CF and improved haste, I've sent him solo to clear guardians as he got buffed with 100% fire resistance from Druid. With this high APR he pretty much stun locked the guardians so no big deal.
I was surprised by how the director went... he was completely MEH... didn't get buffed by SCS I guess, went down in two rounds didn't land a single damage on my party.
Ambush party also went super easy, I guess meta gaming went into play as my thief put 3 traps before engagement started which happily landed on their mage putting that sweet poison in. After picking items my sorcerer rushed back in with true sight which was immediately followed by wizard slayer daggers on their mage. With disabled mage fight was over in seconds.
Dragon bane sword will be nice with its double damage against dragons tomorrow, especially since my FMT is specialized into long swords.
I guess that's it for Today, let's beat from dragons tomorrow.
Summons in general are super annoying in LoB and it's totally understandable why people want to use them themselves. So many mages that just end up spamming monster summoning or shadows at some point, flooding the area with tons of annoying critters. Can't wait to play with the latest SR where Banishment actually seems to reliably work.
I am amazed there're that many night encounters across Athkatla in chapter 2, which I wasn't paying much attention before this run, I wander how many of them, I'm trying to trigger them all, but they seem to have "recharge" timers, ie. can't encounter twice in the same night.
Also the "random" encounter while traveling doesn't seem random at all, they're area based, like one destined to trigger when first leaving Graveyard... I'm still in Ch.2, don't want to advance too quickly to miss, maybe because of mod restoration? I don't know.
There's definitely some kind of timing component to the early city encounters, but I've found them in transition from various areas, not just the Graveyard.
For instance
"Tactical Challenges: Let's talk Vampires and Undead"
"Tactical Challenges: Let's talk Dragons"
Discussing peoples tactics against certain enemies. There is so many possible ones starting from summons, going through web/greater malison/freedom pots, sunrays, kiting, scrolls, one protected tank and all ranged etc. Some tactics also work only in SCS and some don't at all. Great example of this are ancient vampires in SCS that disregard existence of my tanks and go straight for my sorcerer and skald meaning tactic where you simply send in melee to tank doesn't work, they just go bat form and fly to you.
I just wonder what are people favourite tactics versus some enemies. People can be creative and their ideas spark ideas for other people
Here at least we can reasonably assume a somewhat comparable baseline, i.e. SCS and LoB, which by itself tends to streamline the setups involved. Though there certainly remains a big difference between users of IR/SR and those not yet converted
Also, I feel that for me at least there are many outside factors that influence my behavior. Fighting the vampires in Bodhi's lair, for example is very different from fighting the nest in Windspear Hills.
@Lord_Tansheron yea but that is exactly my thought, one will advertise his setup to fight against certain enemy, other will suggest spells, some will focus on tactics and the rest will prefer brute force. All are fascinating to read, even more so when they differ from mod to mod.
Setup is always key factor but there are fights in this game and quite a lot of them where brute forcing usually works better because giving enemy too many rounds is just too much.
My original playthroughs many many MANY years ago were decently hard as I was playing defensively too much. Now I focus on DPR with disablers and enablers storming through LOB/SCS as if it was unmodded core game. One could wonder what tactics I haven't had a chance to execute yet. True but that would be for most things, you could go granular to discuss each fight in the game as they differ one way or another. This would be especially true for something like "let's talk mages" where there are sooo many of them in the game.
I'm sure some people are happy to discuss these things in great detail. For me personally, it's TOO great detail, because there are so many special cases, exceptions, and variables. But I'm not everyone.
4 reloads in total, on 5th try he fell. Took me two tries to realize that I should position my DD on opposite side of the dragon so that wing buffet won't be knocking away everyone from the melee.
100% fire resist is very important here, fis fire breath managed to hit my DD for 170 damage on one try when it landed... ouch! Sadly DD does not have any way to protect himself from dispels so I had to drink pots between. I switched to dragon helmet/shield/ring on last try to get 90% undispellable resistance.
I was happily surpised by the fact most powerful enemies so far go for my DD and boy he can stand there and take some smacking but if defensive stance is down he drops like a fly. I wonder how would other tanks work here FMC/FM/FD?
Anyways it took me about a turn as I had to refresh some spells mid combat. Now the red drake it down, let's head for next challenges.
Btw my sorc is at 1474000 XP so she wasn't yet able to summon OP morde swords which would prove very useful here. A lot of party members will get level at 1,5mil XP breakpoint.
I guess time for some side quests before I takle on unseeing eye, not sure I'm ready for belholder nightmare. I also got key to mindflyer lair in the temple district, not sure of this either
A mage stronghold is next I like the magic sphere and its quests
Maybe next run I will ditch DD for FMC or FD (with scs shapeshifting) he should get 90% resistance too then I could dual WS to a mage for a third dual wielding character, this way I still get WS debuff and druid spells but won't nerf my damage output so much.
Also with bard hat I can have skald cast 2 spells every three rounds (even 3 if micromanaged), maybe this would be good to get a blade instead for offensive/defensive spins with MMM between song casts?
Choices choices choices.
He does hit like a truck though, but with a simple pair of boots of speed, you'll outrun him without problem. Use a sling that adds strength to damage (every single one in the original game, only one under IR) and you'll deal solid damage at long range. You'll then be able to kite him all day long.
It's true that my fighter was in HLA territory, thus could go for double GWW on him with a Simulacrum from the Vhailor's helm to take a good chunk out of his hp pool, but the blueprint should work fine even without HLA.
I generally prefer to avoid kiting--not because I think it's wrong or suboptimal (I think neither), but simply because I already know kiting is extremely effective in almost every context, and I want to find new ways of doing things. I learn more that way.
"This strategy would definitely succeed. But what else might work?"
This brings me back to my one favorite characters Archer. In fact, this is my first playthrough in years where I didn't pick it. Archer's called shot is probably one of the strongest utility skills in the game, with massive 10APR that he reaches in early BG2 (IH + Tuigan) called shot reduces enemy thac0 by 10, strength by 10 and save vs spell by 10... I mean, those are insanely overwhelming penalties to any enemy. With greater malison and doom you can drop enemy save vs spell to the point celestial fury stunlocks him to death or spell disablers almost always land even in LOB. Archer is also perfect user for vahlior helmet for even bigger penalties.
While yes archers damage is much lower than maximized to the teeth 24str melee bruiser like FM or FMT but the utility it brings might be just worth it. Note that SOD also brought archers eye in the game for additional 5% crit chance.
My next playthrough is most likely FM, FMT, Skald (or blade for bard hat combo), Sorc, WS-Cleric, Archer. The only issue I've always had with archer is that in SCS enemies like to target her first making me micromanage a lot, especially vs vampire bat forms.
Sadly DD just doesn't cut the powergaming sweetspot for me
While my previous attempts with an F/M tank were extremely smooth in terms of mob control and it was very easy to have things stick to the tank, the short run I did with two DDs was micromanagement hell. You constantly have to block off all corridors and choke points, having it all fall apart in an instant when your characters decide to move an inch on their own, or when enemies do something like teleport or turn invisible or whatever. A lot of the time it was easier NOT using Defensive Stance to tank, which sort of defeats the purpose of the entire exercise. While 30-50% damage reduction is nice, it is not enough to sustain against large numbers of LoB enemies. Single hard hitters like Baron Ployer could even obliterate a tank on their own easily.
It does seem that the scripting is a bit weird when only a single enemy is involved, though. I haven't had time to test this comprehensively, but it appeared to me that tanking only a single enemy I could use Defensive Stance without them breaking off. But as soon as multiple enemies were involved, activating DS basically equaled going invisible. Sadly much of LoB involves larger groups of enemies (partly because summons are rampant).
There are definitely many opportunities for choke-point play, though, where DDs shine like no other tank. They hold doorways better than Hodor, and healing via Vampire's Revenge was enough to last basically forever (well, untils DSs run out) even without 100% resistance. Unfortunately there are also plenty of times where you cannot effectively choke, and there DDs just turn into very mediocre Fighters who trade GM and the option to dual for a few points of damage resistance. I imagine that in ToB especially, this will become a severe problem, and so I've decided to put this particular experiment on hold for now.
For reference, the party was:
DD
DD
F/M/C
Inquisitor
Skald
Archer
As for the future, I'm not sure where to go next. I really enjoyed my F/M tank run, but that was so contingent on the old Dispelling Screen I'm not sure it can be replicated anymore. Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea of tank + ranged and go back to a more rounded group of resilient melee fighters with high damage output. Maybe something like this:
F/C
F/M
F/M or Archer
Inquisitor
Skald
Archer
Actually I think I've already done that one...
Maybe I'll give Sorcerer another try. It seems a bit anemic without summons, but perhaps the CC etc. is enough to warrant its inclusion. I'm always worried about damage output, of course, but turning the rest of the party into melee-based killing machines could perhaps provide enough damage to make another pure support worth it if I can use it defensively.
You could build something like :
- f/m/c
- f/m
- c-->f
- Inquisitor
- skald
- archer
You got your base pretty much covered for anything. Lots of tanking, arcane power and divine casting, all that while having a really high dps output. You could also swap f/m/t for the f/m if your not averse to strong smelling cheese like mislead backstabbing.
Other than that, I'm definitely considering just using F/M/C instead of F/M or F/C in all slots. The lower levels seem to matter less and less the higher you go, while stacking buffs and utility can be very helpful - until you get dispelled
Not sure. More time in the think tank. At least Archer/Skald/Inquisitor seems a fairly set trifecta >_>
EDIT: nvm what was I thinking, there's not enough good blunt weapons to support multiple F/M/Cs I don't think.
Unless the threshold is 70%, which is the minimum amount a level 20+ Dwarven Defender can maintain under Defensive Stance.