@Alesia_BH , Squee! Squee! ::jumping up and down in uncontrollable fangirl excitement::
::stammering and blushing in the manner of a mere mortal suddenly in the presence of a great celebrity::
Oh! Oh! I am *SO* happy to see you! You are my mentor in all matters of BG No-Reload Land! You are the Great Queen and original ruler of all no-reloaders everywhere!
:beginning to hyperventilate::
All worship and praise to You, O Great Goddess of the No-Reload!
::bowing over and over with excessive obsequiousness::
I want to be your cleric! Please allow me to introduce you as the Goddess of the No-Reload as you are, my Lady!
::BelgarathMTH passes out from hyperventilation due to too much religious ecstasy from meeting the Goddess once again.::
Imber and company mopped up Kalah. The circus has often been a refreshing relief fight for me, since I have for quite some time been playing Chateau Irenicus as if you're only allowed one rest.
Ghoul Touch is overkill on Kalah considering Imber's Minute Meteors, so it didn't do much in this battle, but that spell really doesn't get enough love. It's a nonmagical weapon with a long-duration paralyzing effect on a failed save vs. death. It should be a fantastic option against mages with PFMW, considering their lousy saves vs. death.
We get surprised on the way out. I forgot about the night-time ambushes from the Tactics install. I never liked those guys. We have several melee enemies, plus a cleric... I completely overlooked the mage, since I saw no magical defenses (MGOI, spell deflection/turning, Mirror Image). I was operating on the assumption that the enemies were going to appear prebuffed, and the graphics would be a dead giveaway to the presence of mages. Without prebuffs, the mage escaped my notice long enough to hit the party with Slow. Only Poppy, with her slightly better save vs. spell, managed to escape its effects.
I didn't want to spawn in a Cowled Wizard, so I avoided using spells. I spent a fair amount of potions, and I might not have survived had Imber not entered the battle with Minute Meteors already at hand. She slew the enemy mage with Minute Meteors while the other party members moved around to force the enemies to retarget--each of my party members has different AC against and different resistances to each form of damage, so some of them can't be allowed too close to certain enemies.
Rius is the perfect example. She has -50 slashing resistance and a -5 AC penalty against slashing damage, and her pitiful HP doesn't help. A big part of maximizing a randomized party is micromanaging their positions. Rius can easily die to a stray longsword.
I got some help from an Amnish Soldier. I love these guys. After running out of Minute Meteors, Imber switched to darts to bring down the enemy cleric.
I reminded myself to never walk around Athkatla at night.
As usual, my first quest out of the Promenade is the Slums. I trigger the first dream, and boy does Imber look creepy following Imoen around Candlekeep.
I gave her the female vampire animation, and copied some passive effects from Slayer Shadows to turn her form completely black. Vampire shadows look very wicked. I did the same for an old Improved Anvil run I never finished, and decided to bring back the look.
Poppy gets Lilarcor. I used to love that sword for its crazy banter. But I've grown much more fond of its immunities than anything else.
Rius has 11 INT, and for once I'm playing on Core, so she's got about a 50% spell scribing success rate. After collecting a dozen or so scrolls, I search around a lot before I finally track down a decent source of Potions of Genius: appropriately enough, the Temple of Oghma in the Docks.
I love those XP rewards. May they never end.
Remember that time I said I wouldn't travel around Athkatla at night? Well, Mae'var's quest demands that I visit the Temple District after dark. It doesn't go well.
The problem with my party is that, although all of them has magic resistance, their elemental resistances aren't too great. Only Yi Grovana, in Salamander form, is very resistant to fire damage. Rius? Not so much.
Once again, Imber is slowed, she's out of Stoneskins, and the party is injured. I decide to flee to the sewers to rest, but the enemy follows me in before I can do so. I have to finish the fight.
Luckily for us, the Cowled Wizards don't scan the sewers for magic. Imber's casting time is too poor to use magic--she's better off using Minute Meteors--but Poppy has a bonus to casting time, and helps turn the tide of the battle.
We fetch Mae'var his silly gaudy necklace and end up being assigned to murder a Cowled Wizard. Rayic Gethras is our next target.
We're still at a really low level. And normally I hesitate to face Ray-Ray in SCS2 if I'm doing a no-reload run, since he has access to Sphere of Chaos, and Imber's Enrage is not equal to Death Ward. But since there is no prebuffing, I decide we're capable of handling him.
Right after the fight begins, he activates a Spell Trigger with Improved Invisibility and SI: Divination. Yi Grovana's True Sight, cast at the beginning of the battle, is now useless. But her Dispel Magic ability is not. I allow Ray-Ray to flee to the west, space my party members away from him to protect their own defenses, and manage to dispel both his invisibility and his Stoneskin with a single Dispel Magic, though his Contingency brings up a new set of skins.
Ray-Ray casts PFMW, but I have already anticipated this. Imber has arrived without Minute Meteors, meaning she is able to equip nonmagical darts instead. Worse yet for Ray-Ray, Poppy has Poison Weapon and a nonmagical two-handed sword. Her THAC0 is weak, but she still makes the hit.
Poppy has pretty wings thanks to 1PP. I've always wanted to give her wings to match her portrait.
Rayic Gethras is doomed. Even if he survived a little longer to cast a spell, both Poppy and Imber are Wizard Slayers, and his casting failure would have been sky-high.
In search of easy XP, I head to the Graveyard, only to realize I have forgotten another component of Tactics: an improved Crypt King! I buff with Stoneskin, expecting a melee battle, only to be confronted with a Horror spell. Without Enrage, Imber panics. With the Crypt King's allies crowding up the space, I might well end up pinned in a corner and unable to escape.
Poppy, however, makes her save, and as a Paladin/Sorceror/Bard, she has Remove Fear in her spellbook. The party is up and functioning within the next round, and all the Crypt King can do is beat up on poor Yi Grovana, who despite her saves is the only member of the group without Mirror Image or Stoneskin.
Then I had some weird technical problems.
I noticed my computer was overheating, so I decided to uninstall 1PP, to lift the processing burden from my computer. This started an extremely lengthy process in which I realized that, apparently, once you create a game with 1PP installed, you can never return to that save game without 1PP installed. The game crashed every single time I reloaded Imber's save file. Even after I removed all traces of 1PP from my computer, and reinstalled BG2 from scratch, and used SK to remove every item and visual effect related to 1PP from my save file. I reinstalled BG2 in a new directory, only to find the problem persisted: I could no longer access any of Imber's save files. Not unless I reinstalled 1PP, and got my computer overheating again.
My only option was to move all the relevant kit tables and other files to the new BG2 directory, start a new game, and manually copy and paste all the resistances and modifiers from the old save onto the new save. It took ages to sort out this whole business, but on the plus side, I discovered that reinstalling the game bumped up the window size for BG2 and fixed a couple of recurring bugs in another game. It also gave me the opportunity to add in some more fixes for my characters, who had illegal proficiencies I had added in by accident. I cheated them back out of Chateau Irenicus and skipped the quests I had already completed in the other save, since the new party inherited the same XP as the old one.
Either way, it's fixed, and the party is back on track.
I can't wait IMPORT a TOB level character to Chain Contingency: Horrid Wilting at them to poison their a@@es with poisonous gasses....
@Ygramul Horrid wilting has nothing to do with poisonous gases. The gas effect that you see is the moisture being vaporised and bodily fluids sucked away from the area and the bodies of your enemies. If you take a close look you may see the gases are actually rising from the area, not falling on top of it. The little ghostly skull is drinking them all in. It is a very cool looking animation and nasty, cruel effect.
@semiticgod whoa, that randomisation thingie looks a bit broken, but may be fun to experiment with! Any chance you will release it as a mod? (Compatible with ee)
@lunar: I can explain how to do it. I have an Excel document that produces all the right numbers. I'm afraid it can't be done as a mod, unless someone is willing to spend days (literally 24-hour days, I'm sure) creating a custom item or items that would have a 1% chance of giving you 54% acid resistance, 1% chance of giving you 55% resistance, etc. But I can send you an Excel sheet, and if EEKeeper has the same features as Shadowkeeper, you could give your characters random stats and so forth. You might need Near Infinity to merge kit tables, like I did. It shouldn't take long, unless you're trying to create an illegal class like Poppy's Paladin/Sorceror/Bard with multiple kits.
It's not exactly broken, I would say. I got a couple stellar characters out of the deal, but the others have some pretty severe weaknesses. The Halfling Paladin and gnomish Cleric are excellent examples: they're incapable of moving. With previous systems, I've come up with godly mages that can't cast spells, and indestructible tanks that cannot walk. Imber has Improved Alacrity, but the chances of that happening are less than 0.3%.
Same goes for Poppy, who has a minimum HP value of 1... she can't be killed with damage, actually. Pretty crazy. I forgot to mention it, and now that I look back at the files, it seems I've already benefited from it once (it saved Poppy from the Spirit Trolls' spells), though I didn't intend to ever rely on it.
Anyway, they do have some nasty weaknesses. Half the party can't use magic items, two of them can't put more than one pip in melee weapons despite being fighters, one can't use missile weapons despite being an Archer, and they've all got very limited armor options. And that's just the kit abilities, not counting their horrible THAC0, poor damage, awful saving throws, and screwed up spell slots.
A tenday has passed since Gorion's sad quietus. Imoen, Neossa, and I have already seen much of the Sword Coast, although there's lots more for us to discover still. Our journey to Baldur's Gate we made in vain, for we found the city locked up as a preventive measure against the rampant banditry.
We couldn't argue against that because we had already had our share of the bandits. North of the Friendly Arm we escaped an ambush thanks to Neossa who had cast Invisibility 10' Radius upon us.
And we slew one bandit that was trying to bully three fishermen into handing him a golden bowl and other possessions.
We spoke to the fishermen after that, and they asked us to get a priestess of the evil goddess Umberlee off their back. We went to pay the priestess a visit, north of the fishermen's homes. The lands were infested with Ankhegs, but we kept to the shore where the creatures woudln't show themselves. The priestess of Umberlee attacked us after we asked her about her version of the story. A Command and some non-lethal violence
made the girl - for she couldn't be called a woman - see reason though. We learned that Tenya, as she called herself, was an orphan, that the fishermen had killed her mother and stolen her bowl of Umberlee. Imoen and I were moved by Tenya's story and offered the girl to return to the fishermen to claim the bowl for her. The fishermen didn't like our change of allegiance, but seemed too afraid of us, armed as we were, to deny us the bowl. We gave Tenya the bowl, and she Dimension Doored away. That girl must be truly blessed by her goddess; it's a spell that I cannot cast. Even further north the farmlands were plagued not by Ankhegs but by Zombies. We must have slain twenty of them. The farmers were very grateful, rewarding us with 150 GP, and eager to continue their work.
Our good deeds for Tenya, and for the farmers, make me feel good about our trip, even though we failed at our original plan of finding shelter in Baldur's Gate. Said failure does have consequences for Imoen and me. We're living a nomadic lifestyle, roaming the Sword Coast without much of a purpose but to stay alive. We returned to Beregost and decided to travel further south, to Nashkel. Maybe we would meet Khalid and Jaheira there. On the road we ran into more bandits, human and hobgoblin. Their archers were particularly dangerous, but my spells (Sleep, Blindness) helped us pull through.
There were spoils as well, a Ring of Protection +1 that Imoen spotted on top of a large stone, glistening in the evening sun, a pair of Boots of Stealth on one of the Hobgoblins we slew, and a Ring of Human Influence that a kindly nobleman gave us. In Nashkel we met an Amnish soldier who told us about his former captain that had inexplicably started killing innocents, and then disappeared, and with mayor Berrun Ghastkill who told us he hadn't seen Khalid and Jaheira yet. This surprised me, worried me even. In the Nashkel inn another bounty hunter recognized me, a priestess. Before she could hurt us, I Held her (an ability that Baervan had recently bestowed on me).
She fell to my bullets and Imoen's arrows. The realization that we made that woman pay with her life for a wrong decision filled me with grief. On the other hand, how many victims would she have made if we hadn't stopped her?
We went looking for Khalid and Jaheira south of Nashkel, in the Mines area, because that's where Berrun Ghastkill told us the town's troubles were. We asked a young artist, a sculptor who was working on a beautiful image of Ellesime, Lady of the Elves of Suldanessalar, but he had seen no one that matched the descriptions we gave him of Khalid and Jaheira. It didn't surpise me because he seemed much to deeply engaged in his work, and overcome by his fear of a man called Greywolf, a Bounty Hunter who was after two emeralds he had apparently stolen. We met this Greywold a short while later, and soon understood why the artist had been so terrified. Greywolf was a fearsome warrior with an enchanted blade that cleaved through my magical defense (I was protected by Shield), as if it weren't there, when I tried to Hold him as I had done with the priestess in the Nashkel Inn. Fortunately I had more success with a Blindness.
Even when blinded he moved quite rapidly, and at one point we lost him. In our search for him, we were ambushed by a pack of Kobolds. Kobolds are amongst the oldest racial enemies of my kin, and understandably so. The dastardly cretaures tend to attack in large packs, and they use poisoned daggers, snares and other tricks to inflict suffering on their foes. The animosity was felt on both sides, because the creatures targeted me rather than Imoen.
I ended up tanking them, allowing Imoen to shoot them down.
An Amnish guard named Dandal told us that these Kobolds were the problem in the Nashkel Mines. They had pretty much taken over the lower levels. Imoen and I decided to wait with investigating the mines because larger packs than the one we had just dealt with could cause us a world of pain. We needed to be better prepared. We found Greywolf, who dealt both Imoen and me a heavy blow when his Blindness had worn off,
and suffered ten charges of Imoen's Wand of Magic Missiles (consuming it) before one of many sling bullets launched from my trusty sling saw him collapse.
When we went to check on the sculptor we witnessed him finish his work, and drop down, dead as well. A sad end, even if he did mange to complete his masterwork.
Imber is off in search of cheap XP, and the Windspear Hills is next. I figure the two encounters before freeing the dryads won't be anything my party can't handle.
Problem is, we arrive without buffs, and Rius has some pretty lousy resistances, on top of her mediocre HP. She gets a 29% bonus to her HP, but has a Constitution of 2 (actually 1, but Shadowkeeper bumped it up to 2 and I'm too lazy to fix it). Her piercing resistance is tolerable, at -4%, but her crushing and especially slashing resistances, at -37% and -50%, are crippling.
The other party members managed to tough it out, largely thanks to Spirit Animals, Slow, and Imber's Minute Meteors. Imber is really carrying the group.
Notice that Yi Grovana has Mirror Image--this is because she picked up Ilbratha from the Umar Hills. It is her only solid defense until we can get her the Defender of Easthaven. Also notice the screen size is bigger than my previous posts. My reinstallation appears to have bumped up the size of windowed mode.
I talk-block Garren Windspear to make sure I can pick up the monsters' loot (including lots of potions) and Rius' gear before being transported to Garren's home. Plath Rededge launches an attack, with her trademark dramatic flourish.
She talks pretty loud for a mage without buffs. Imber put the dwarf to sleep with Power Word: Sleep (which in Spell Revisions can knock out critters with over 20 HP, if they fail a save at -1) before slaying Plath Rededge with Minute Meteors.
I CTRL-J over to the dryad queen and head to Trademeet rather than continue to Firkraag's lair. I want to bring back Rius at the Temple of Waukeen, but raising her nearly bankrupts us.
I chat with Lord Logan Coprith, visit Cernd, and head to the Druid Grove. This is because Trolls all attack with piercing weapons, and Poppy has fantastic AC against piercing damage.
Unfortunately, I have Tactics-style Spirit Trolls in my install, which means they throw out Greater Command, Flame Strike, and Unholy Blight. Poppy gets targeted by a Greater Command spell early on. In Spell Revisions, you get to save each round to wake up, but the spell comes with a -4 save penalty. With her base save vs. spell of 10, her innate -2 bonus, another -2 from SR Spirit Armor, and another -3 from SR Blur, she has a save vs. spell of 3. It seems she barely makes her save.
Notice the humongous distance between Poppy and the rest of the group. I saw the Greater Command spell coming, and since Imber didn't have enough time to activate Enrage, I had her and the other characters run north to escape the spell's area of effect. With their boosted movement rates--everyone in the party has above average movement speed, except for the two permanently held characters, the halfling and gnome, whom I discarded--they were able to avoid the spell entirely. It's a pretty big deal, considering their penalties to their saves vs. spell.
But that's only one spell, and Poppy isn't the only one who gets targeted. While Imber struggles to kill the far away Spirit Trolls and put an end to their antics, Yi Grovana, Rius, and Imber all get blasted by Unholy Blight, and Yi Grovana isn't able to heal herself fast enough to survive. On top of that, Poppy gets hit by a Flame Strike spell.
Poppy's HP can't drop below 1, which is probably why she survived. I forgot about that at the time, in any case, so I had her retreat and heal up.
The tide of battle changed shortly thereafter. Imber started bringing down the Spirit Trolls with Minute Meteors, neutralizing the enemy's spellpower. On top of that, one or more of the Spirit Trolls I had spotted apparently fled the battle, and I could not find them later on.
With Yi Grovana dead, and many more Spirit Trolls to go, I decided that the Druid Grove was an unacceptable risk. I brought back Yi Grovana in Trademeet, this time for only 800 gold, and decided to look elsewhere for XP.
After finding a single Arrow of Detonation, I believe in Anath's cavern, I looted the first room of Watcher's Keep and threw the Paladin's Bracers on Rius to give a boost to her poor HP. Next up is the Temple Ruins, but first, I decide to pay Mencar Pebblecrusher a visit.
I have Imber cast her newest spell, Sunfire, on Pooky and Amon, while Rius and Poppy begin with Spirit Armor. Amon doesn't do too well.
In Spell Revisions, Sunfire does not bypass magic resistance, due to having a new projectile, nor does it give the caster temporary immunity to fire. But it does have a casting speed of 1, which means Imber can spam it mercilessly if she's willing to expend the spell slots.
Does anybody know the difference between Sorcerous Amon and Amon of the Purple Brotherhood?
Brennan Risling flees early on, and despite my best efforts to block him in, he slips past and heads for the stairs. I cast Power Word Sleep on him, twice, but he makes his save both times, and we lose his loot forever.
Mencar and Smelly Porkslicer aren't too much trouble on their own, though they do have tons of healing potions. Yi Grovana has to back off from the battle to avoid spending potions, while the others try to take down Mencar quickly to keep him from drinking his own potions.
SCS2 enemies are stuffed with potions, especially healing potions, and it's good to take them down quickly, since they usually drink the best ones early on.
Finally, we go to the Temple Ruins and plow through the various undead goons skulking in the dungeon. A funny note is that Shadows in SCS2 carry potions, but they won't get to use them if you lure them to the Sun Gem pedestal in the far western room, since they die before they have a chance to heal themselves.
We get a bunch of new scrolls, including PFMW, and also pick up a Simulacrum scroll from a fallen Skeleton Warrior. We even found, earlier on, a Spell Trigger scroll (!), but have been saving them up for when we can get a Potion of Genius. A 99% chance of successfully scribing a scroll just isn't good enough for Spell Trigger.
Another important find is a Wand of Lightning. If I decide to abuse it, for fun or out of desperation, I can have Imber use it to cast Called Shot 6 times with one casting, which at 12th level will give me -6 STR drain per hit. She can even stack multiple castings of Called Shot to add more STR drain, and stack True Strike to give her 95% hit chance, and drain tens of STR in seconds, but I don't think I'll be doing that, since it would get boring... much like relying on Poppy's inability to die from damage alone. It's usually more fun to try many different things, rather than just using a single infallible trump card.
For the Shade Lord, though, I'm willing to tolerate an infallible trump card, in the form of a Protection from Undead scroll on Imber. Imber casts Invisibility on Rius and Yi Grovana, while Poppy has to cast Improved Invisibility on herself, since Poppy is immune to level 3 spells and below. Then Imber uses the scroll on herself and we enter the Shade Lord's... lair? It's not a lair if its outdoors, is it?
I send Poppy away from the battle so she isn't in sight when her invisibility wears off, then have Imber break down the Shadow Altar with Minute Meteors to prevent the summoned Shadows from clogging up the screen. She hits Shadow Patrick and some Shadows with Sunfire, finishes him off with Minute Meteors, and then turns her attention to the Shade Lord itself.
Area effect spells like Sunfire and Cone of Cold requires saves vs. breath in Spell Revisions, since they're supposed to represent your ability to dodge the damage (like a 3E Reflex save) rather than resist it. And Sunfire has a -4 save penalty, to boot... which I feel is a bit excessive. Enemies don't make their saves that often in BG2, or even ToB. ToB enemies, from Abazigal to Yaga-Shura, tend to have a save vs. death of 3 and a save vs. spell of 6. It's only ToB player characters that get negative saving throws all over the place.
The Shade Lord falls to Minute Meteors, and we get the one prize I was most looking forward to: the Cloak of the Stars. This item is ludicrously overpowered in SCS2 as in vanilla, as the darts it creates can break through Improved Mantle. You can only create 6 per day, or 18 for a single fight, unless you store them in an Ammo Belt or use the Wand of Lightning trick to increase production, but that's usually enough to hasten an enemy mage's demise.
You know what the really crazy thing about the +5 darts are? They're tagged as usable by Kensais, at least in vanilla. Even Rius can use them, and her Kensai and Archer damage bonuses both apply to darts.
I don't know if there are any different requirements for posting a non-image file, but I've attached an Excel sheet to this post. The document contains the system I used to create Imber and company. Details in spoiler tags to avoid cluttering up the thread.
This information is more clear if you view it alongside the Excel document.
Your Character's Stats: Each aspect of the character is determined by a random number generator in a specific cell. The random number cells are all in green. The cells around the green numbers indicate what the green number indicates. For instance, under the ABILITIES section, the number next to Strength is the character's STR score.
Your Character's Classes: Other numbers aren't so obvious. Humans are always single-classed until you dual-class, but to determine a non-human character's class, we have the MULTICLASS section. If you roll a 9 to 20, then you have one class; if you roll a 3 to 8, then you have two classes; if you roll a 1 or 2, then you have three classes. Which classes do you get? That's determined by the green numbers under the CLASS section. If those numbers are 6, 4, and 3, then you have a Fighter, Fighter/Cleric, or Fighter/Mage/Cleric, depending on how many classes you rolled under the MULTICLASS section. If you roll the same class more than once in a row, or you roll an illegal combination (Ranger/Thief) and you don't want to, just look at the next number. That's why there are 9 cells under CLASS, even if you can only have up to three classes.
Your Character's Kits: You can roll up to 5 kits. The number of kits is determined by the bolded green number right beneath KIT. Which kits do you get? There's a list of kits to the right, with numbers next to each one, and the cells beneath KIT roll for those numbers. If you roll a 1, you get a Kensai kit; if you roll a 2, you get a Bounty Hunter kit, and so on. If you roll the same kit more than once in a row, just look at the next number. That's why there are 8 cells under KIT, even if you can only have up to five kits. Proficiencies are managed with the same system, and are located to the right. You also roll for your race and gender with the same system, on the left side of the sheet.
Your Character's Unique Effects: If you want to assign your characters unique effects, or immunities to certain effects, you need to have a list of opcodes, which is included in the documentation with DLTCEP. The IMMUNITY TO and OPCODE sections both roll a number between 0 and 317, and each of those numbers corresponds to a BG2 opcode, which you can look up in the BG2EFFECTS Notepad file that comes with DLTCEP. Many opcodes have different effects depending on the parameters of those opcodes (the Notepad document explains which parameters mean what), so the Excel sheet includes different rolls. For instance, if you roll opcode 145 for your OPCODE cell (very bad luck!), you will have one type of spellcasting disabled, either priest spells, mage spells, or innate abilities, depending on whether the second parameter is 0, 1, or 2. In the Excel sheet, the "Zero to 2" section beneath "Parameters for opcodes" rolls a 0, 1, or 2. If you need to roll a unique set of numbers, then you can type a new random number generator into a new cell. For instance, if you want to generate a number between 1 and 52, you can type "=RANDBETWEEN(1,52)" into an empty cell, without the quotes, and that cell will generate a random number between 1 and 52.
Want to Roll a New Character? All of the green numbers will be re-rolled if you double-click or edit any cell. If you want to roll a new character, just click on an empty cell and press delete, or double-click any cell. But if you don't want to roll a new character, make sure you don't double-click something by accident, or the current numbers will be lost.
So How do You Get Those Values onto a Character? In order to give your characters the stats indicated in this document, you will need to use Shadowkeeper, or EEKeeper, if you have BG2:EE, and assuming EEKeeper has the same features, to add them in. Some of these things have to be done via the "Affects" [sic] tab in Shadowkeeper. You may have to copy some passive effects from existing characters in order to get the effect you want, since SK's "Affects" tab doesn't always say exactly what each effect actually does. You can tweak an effect by double-clicking it and typing in new values. The "Type" section is what the effect actually does, and you can change the effect by typing the hex version of the opcode in the BG2EFFECTS Notepad file. The magic resistance opcode is 166, which is A6 in hex, so "Type" should be "0x000000A6." The "Target" section should be "0x00000002," to target the right character. The "Flags" section should be "0x00000009," to make the effect persistent after death. The "Probability" section be 100. The "Time" section should be 0 (negative 1 may also work), or else the effect may wear off. The "Resource 0" section is only necessary if the opcode requires a resource key to work. It may be the name of a spell or item or .eff file, depending on the opcode. The "Parameter 1" and "Parameter 2" sections are also dependent on the opcode. The other "Resource" sections are not necessary; they simply indicate where the effect is coming from.
It's strange how fast the days go by, even when not much happens. Many hours we spend walking, enjoying the outdoors (I'm glad Imoen likes nature as much as I do), and chatting. The two of us must be a curious sight to behold: the tall, trim human ginger and the wee, brown-skinned gnomish whitebeard. Anyway, Imoen and I decided to explore the lands west, north-west of Nashkel, without much of a plan. The thing is there's not much reason to plan anything. Good people and work can be found wherever we go, it seems. I do feel safer in the wilderness than in places like Beregost or Nashkel where there's a higher probability of Bounty Hunters finding out about me.
Our travels brought us all the way to the southcoast, where we had two interesting encounters. First of all there was Charleston Nib, the archaeologist. With his crew he was digging up an ancient settlement of a long extinct race. He hired us to protect him against bandits, but in the end it was his own people we had to protect him from: a treacherous associate that asked us to kill the man, and a group of diggers that went berserk all of a sudden, possibly due to the foul air in which I sensed a mysterious evil. Almost reflexively I put the hostile diggers to rest with a Sleep spell, and after that Imoen and I put them to rest in a more permanent fashion. It was a dark day for us Charleston, Imoen and me. Slaying six or seven men to save one; I'm still unsure whether we did the right thing. On a more positive note, we managed to avoid bloodshed when we ran into Captain Brage, the Nashkel guard captain. He was very confused and later, when we pacified him, repentant about his own actions. It turned that his violence had never sprouted from his own will, but rather from a cursed greatsword he had wielded. Imoen and I escorted him back to Nashkel where we brought him into the care of Nalin, the local priest of Helm.
On our way to Nashkel we saved a rooster from an attacking wolf, and were in for a big surprise when it thanked us in a male voice, speaking the common tongue. Melicamp as he called himself, told us he was Thalantyr's apprentice and asked us to bring him to the High Hedge to get him restored into his human form. After our visit to Nashkel, this was what we did. Thalantyr made us take down a Skeleton for its skull, and used it succesfully for Melicamp's restoration. [Note B.: I can no longer complain about Thalantyr; this must have been his 3rd or 4th success in a row.]
In nearby Beregost Imoen told me she had bought an enchanted, charisma-increasing cloak from a merchant at Feldepost's Inn. When I told her I wanted to to go and have a look at his wares, she became all nervous. After a pause she said the merchant had already left Beregost.
Instead of visiting Feldepost's we decided to check one of the other taverns, the Red Sheaf. That proved a bad idea. We were accosted by an angry-looking Dwarf who made it very clear to us that he was to take the bounty on my head. Nothing personal, it was just what he did for a living. I Blinded, and later Held him; he ended up like the other bounty hunters...
I felt no sorrow this time.
Day 27:
This entry isn't about the adventures of the party of Imoen, Neossa, and Lenhardt, but those of the party of said three and Quayle. Yes, a new member has joined us, and he's a kinsman no less, a rock gnome and a Hoodwinker of Baravar Cloakshadow, with a variety of arcane tricks up his sleeve as well. We met him at the Nashkel Carnival after a we completed a mission east of Beregost for Keldath Ormlyr. Hmm, maybe I should relate that mission first, for it was quite the adventure. We were to slay a number of Basilisks, led by an evil wizard named Mutamin, that had petrified many innocents and were gradually making their way westward, to the town of Beregost. If the wizard was unwilling to cease his nefarious activities, he too could be slain. We found the Basilisks easily enough. I had a green scroll of Protection from Petrification to protect myself against their gaze attacks, but it wore off when i still had three of the creatures to deal with. A Ghoul that had little love for the lizards helped me with one of them, but it got Blinded by the wizard (a fellow gnome!) when it attacked another one. This enabled the Basilisk to slay its attacker without difficulty. From a distance I Blinded the Basilisk just when it killed the Ghoul.
It fell to my sling bullets. A Greater (and final) Basilisk suffered the exact same fate.
[Note that there was no risk here. The Greater Basilisk was neutral, presumably because Mutamin hadn't said hi yet.]Mutamin was infuriated by our slaying of the Basilisks he had charmed. I Silenced him, but he cast Vocalize in response. Imoen, Neossa and I fought him with what we had, arrows, claws, bullets, and spells. It didn't stop our foe from Charming Imoen (who unlike me has no defense against charms), before Neossa slew the wicked wizard.
Back to the Nashkel Carnival. In one of the tents we had thought a shop, Imoen and I had a violent encounter with a wizard we had witnessed killing a female sorceress for no reason but her being a 'witch'. After a while of ineffective spellcasting,
and clumsy fighting,
on both sides, Imoen managed to fell the evildoer with a well-placed arrow.
It was after that skirmish that Imoen and I met Quayle. Well aware of both his strengths and weaknesses (maybe a bit too aware of the former, but he's a bit older and may have seen more of the world than we have), it was Quayle who suggested we join our forces. Like me, he is a spellcaster with arcane as well as divine powers.
Our first adventure with Quayle took us to the coast again, where the Hoodwinker said he was headed (albeit only after we had told we were going there.) It was a perilous journey. The shores were inhabited by Sirines, and a bit further inland, an army of Hobgoblins (including elite archers) had colonized the soil.
It's good that Neossa, Quayle and I are all more or less skilled in illusion magics; we slipped by the soldiers invisibly avoiding a battle we couldn't win. We entered a cave to get some rest but found it guarded by Flesh Golems, and full of snares (one of which painfully triggered by me).
With Imoen, Neossa and Quayle as invisible diversions, I managed to destroy the Flesh Golems without getting myself killed.
Near a deserted lighthouse I rescued a boy from three Worgs,
before we left the area, fearful of detection by either Sirines or Hobgoblins.
@semiticgod Very interesting party setup you have going above. I have been meaning to ask you, since you have these unusually edited characters:
- can you make a Sorcerer/Paladin multiclass (Now, I know that keeper does not let you edit it, since it is an engine limitation. So this would have to be a sorcerer kit or something [see below]. I know nothing about editing kits myself, so consider this a friendly plea, prettypleasewithsugarontop. )
- could it be done in the EE install (as I understand you use the original BG2 install for your mods)
Here is an idea for a kit [practically my wetdream for a Bhaalspawn]:
advantages: +1 Thac0 every 3 levels up to 20 +1/2 APR at lvl 10 and 20 + weapon selection every 4 levels (and one extra at lvl 1) + ability to specialize in any melee weapon and style (for flavor, probably exclude shields) + hit dice: d6
disadvantages: - can cast 1 less spell per level (like DD) - caster level reduced by 1/4th (rounded up) - spell progression reduced by 1/4th (e.g. you get your first 3rd level spell at lvl 8 etc.) - cannot wear armor or shields
The idea is that you play this as a spellsword where you select buffs for your spells.
Example: at end of SoA you have an 18th level Edlritch Knight (effective Sorcerer level of 14) that knows 1 lvl 7 spell, 2 lvl 6 spells, can cast stone skin 4 times a day etc. dual wielding katanas for 3APR thac0 of 7
Comparable to Fighter/Mage at same XP -- arguably better for being able to cast your selected buffs more consistently.
@Ygramul: I don't know about EE. But everything in your post can be done in the vanilla game: the slower spell progression, the melee abilities, the altered caster level, the works. You might need Use Any Item to use fighter-type weapons, though, unless you're willing to tweak some item files one by one.
It depends on if the capabilities of Near Infinity for EE are the same as for vanilla BG2. But they probably are. If you like, I can send you a detailed description of how all this can be done.
@Alesia_BH , Squee! Squee! ::jumping up and down in uncontrollable fangirl excitement::
::stammering and blushing in the manner of a mere mortal suddenly in the presence of a great celebrity::
Oh! Oh! I am *SO* happy to see you! You are my mentor in all matters of BG No-Reload Land! You are the Great Queen and original ruler of all no-reloaders everywhere!
I want to be your cleric! Please allow me to introduce you as the Goddess of the No-Reload as you are, my Lady!
::BelgarathMTH passes out from hyperventilation due to too much religious ecstasy from meeting the Goddess once again.::
It's good to see you again too, BelgarathMTH! We miss you on the Bioware forums.
I guess I never got around to telling you that compliments make me uncomfortable. Or that I'm resolutely egalitarian. But they do. And I am so...Yeah...
That's ok. I can tell you're just trying to have fun. And I'm all for fun. Fun is good.
But no: you can't be Cleric BelgarathMTH in the Church of Goddess Alesia. I prefer you as just BelgarathMTH. And I prefer to be just Alesia_BH. I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
It's funny how we tend to single out and celebrate individuals even when their actions are products of the communities and cultures that they're a part of. The No Reload Challenge has a history dating back before the current ~500 page thread, back to the original Bioware forums. It was started by Retet and was supported by a number of talented players, including Canman, Rheannan, and Frabjous. By the time I came along there were already many pages of content. Much of what I know about the game, and the approach I take to play, comes from my experiences with them. I'm not special. I'm just a link to an earlier generation of players.
When I took a multi-year break from BG, the challenge was rebooted on the new Bioware forums by Corey Russell and G Admiral Thrawn. Corey Russell has supported the challenge consistently since then. Other dedicated players, including Gate70, Grond0, SergBlackstrider, and USSNorway, have kept it vibrant even as I've drifted in and out of BG play. New players revitalize it on a daily basis, and the thread is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts due in part to Blackraven and CT, amongst others. I've had a few memorable runs, but -fortunately- I'm not unique in that regard: there have been many memorable runs by many talented players over the years.
Anyhoo. I'm glad you and others have enjoyed my contributions to the thread. But those contributions constitute just a fraction of the No Reload Challenge's content, and my contributions wouldn't have been possible were it not for the broader community. If I've played a unique role the Bioware threads, it's only in the sense that I've provided a link between the old forum and new forum communities. Perhaps I, Blackraven, CKT, CrevsDaak -and anyone else who frequents both the Bioware.com and Baldrusgate.com forums- can play a similar role here.
Best of luck everyone! I hope this thread will have a storied history! I'll be in touch.
@Alesia_BH: Humility serves well those who wield it well.
I hear you. Maybe hero worship is a little excessive, but it's not just your record in no-reload runs. You have also been a friendly and supportive voice in the community and we appreciate it. If you can't accept our worship, then please accept our respect.
Another tenday has passed and I haven't updated this journal. I always postpone this (I find my spellbooks more interesting than my journal), and yet I do feel satisfied each time I write in here. Keeping a record of my party's exploits makes them 'official', and lasting. (Though I could lie or exaggerate and who'd know the difference?)
After our evasion of dangerous creatures in the Lighthouse Area, we weren't so lucky further north. Quayle and I had to draw heavily on our spell repertoire to keep us safe against differnt types of Ogres and Wolves,
and when we had run out of offensive spells, I had to rely on a Shield to tank some of the creatures.
Later Quayle and I summoned Skeletons, but we found no more Ogres to fight. However, something worse awaited us: an encounter with a Nereid named Shoal, a creature of the sea and a perfidious one at that. We found her inland and agreed to escort her back to the shores, but she rewarded us, or Quayle at least, in a most unfitting way: with a kiss that sucked the life energy out of him.
Battle ensued. I ordered the Skeletons to attack Shoal, but she summoned a powerful ally of her own, a fast moving Water Weird. It caught up with Imoen, and drowned her.
Blinded and poisoned by some kind of toxic substance Shoal had thrown at me, I decided to retreat. I heard the Skeletons make short work of the Water Weird,
but knew Shoal was still around. I carefully approached, and was relieved when she surrendered after she took a hit from one of the Skeletons. She brought Quayle and Imoen back to life, but they were still very weak. So when an Ogre Mage in league with Shoal came teleporting in, Imoen, Quayle and I got away. We had a most fortunate encounter with a man who simply called himself 'the Surgeon'. He healed my comrades and warned us of his evil brother Davaeorn, a powerful wizard.
We ran into the Ogre Mage, but had a remarkably easy time dealing with it. Quayle and I almost simultaneously cast Silence 15' Radius at the creature, and saw it affected by at least one of those spells. It nevertheless started casting a spell (a Vocalize no doubt), but I interrupted the monster with a well-aimed sling bullet.
After that the Ogre Mage fell to the Skeletons' melee attacks and the party's ranged attacks.
This eventual triumph was followed by a mistake on my part and Imoen's. Maybe the two of us had become overconfident, maybe we had gotten a bit too eager to 'save the Sword Coast'.
At any rate, the party traveled further north to the Ankheg-infested area that Imoen and I had visited before. Thanks to E's magical ring I had plenty of Sleep spells, so I thought I would just put the giant insects to rest, so that we could dispatch them without risk. Initially this worked well enough,
but things were different when we ran into two Ankhegs together. One of them appeared to be insusceptible to my repeated Sleeps, and with its acidic spit it felled Imoen,
and Quayle.
With the help of a Ranger I then slew the Ankheg,
But that wasn't the last Ankheg I would have to deal with.
Both Imoen and Quayle were more dead than alive. [Note B.: as a Bhaalspawn, and thus a non-resurrectable being, Imoen can't die in this playthrough, at least not until Spellhold because there would be no logical explanation for her return in SoA.] I had to haul my friends back to the Friendly Arm Inn, a few hours from where I found myself. To relieve myself of the burden of their packs, I entered an Ankheg nest, battled my way past three or four Ankhegs (relying on the precious Wand of Paralyzation and on a summoned Skeleton), and stored most of Quayle's and Imoen's belonngings in a small treasure hoard. (At least everything would be safe from bandits and scavengers I reckoned.) I found the corpse of a young man in a state of decomposition, no longer resurrectable. It was the lost son of Brun, a husbandman we had met on the farmland near the Ankheg nest. I brought Brun the body, and helped him bury his son. I also gave him 100 GP to tide him over. I then asked Brun to help me haul Imoen and Quayle back to the FAI for treatment by Gellana Mirrorshade, and he agreed. Better prepared, with three Skeletons, and with my companions more cautious this time around, we returned to successfully clear the Ankheg nest (and to reclaim my companions' stored goods and to fetch some loot).
When we were done Imoen told me she wanted to dedicate herself fully to the arcane arts. It was something I should have seen coming. After all she had spent quite some time studying the spellbook of that Necromanecr we killed in front of the FAI, she was quite interested in my magic and Quayle's, and she had even produced a contraption that allowed her to magically increase her dexterity once a day. I protested, and told her we were much too reliant on her thieving skills for her to dedicate herself fulltime to arcane studies for an indefinite amout of time, but when I saw her eyes grow all sad, I relented.
Day 47:
Imoen's focus on her arcane studies created a vacancy in our party: we needed someone who could scout and was skilled with locks and traps. We decided to visit the fabled Firewine Ruins, a place where adventurers like ourselves were relatively likely to be found, we thought. Invisibly we walked the Firewine plains. We ignored small bands of Ogres and bandits, with the intention of returning later to make those plains a safer place. We did intervene when a pack of Xvarts were trying to kill a farmer's cow.
When we reached the Firewine Bridge, still invisible, we found the ruins heavily guarded by Kobold archers. I considered these kinds of mobs very dangerous for us, so we decided to sneak past them and to wait with entering the ruins for a more convenient occasion. Not far from there, we met what looked to be a possible future companion, a human male, clad in light armor and carrying a katana - a rogue of some type. I approached him to size him up and perhaps propose a partnership, but he claimed he was the best swordsman on the Sword Coast and that he didn't need any partners. I summoned two Skeletons, and asked him to show his skill. He somehow took this as an insult, and proceeded to attack not only the Skeletons but also Imoen. Two simultaneous Hold Persons sealed his fate.
In nearby Gullykin, a hobbit settlement, we had better luck in our search for a companion, for we ran into a young swashbuckling Halfling girl that was more than willing to join our band. Alora is her name, a loveable lass really. She gets along particularly well with Imoen,
which gladdens me; I think it's good for Imoen to have a female friend to laugh with and to discuss girlie things with. With our new companion we trekked to Durlag's Tower, another place that we thought would attract adventurers. We met but one, Rigilio, a human Thief, but he had no interest in traveling with us. The tower was full of traps, and dangerous creatures (we spotted various Ghasts for example), so we didn't stay long. I did read a tome containing a dry analysis of legal battles, historic events, government policies, philosophical treatises, and theories of magic and metaphysics. As such this wouldn't deserve mentioning here, but when I finished reading I was able to cast another tier 3 spell, so I suspect the tome held some kind of powerful enchantment. Unfortunately it dissolved when I closed it.
Our new band has been on the road most of the time, and our travels have been largely uneventful though there have been two notable exceptions: in Beregost we Silenced and slew a Bard that attacked us after we refused to kill three innocent men for her,
and in the High Hedge area we welcomed an Elven Archer into our ranks, Kivan, who helped us defeat Bassilus, a wicked Cyricist with a 5000 GP bounty on his head. Two Hold Persons by Quayle and me made the battle against him and his undead minions a formality.
After we pocketed the 5000 GP reward from Keldath Ormlyr, we went shopping. Now I'm not the party treasurer, Alora and Imoen have filled that role, so I can't tell for sure, but I was surprised about the amount of gold we had and all the valuable items we could afford. Our prized possessions now include a suit of Shadow Armor (Alora), a suit of Caster's Chain (Quayle) [note B.: Alora stole this AC 5 armor at the Nashkel Carnival], the Claw of Kazgaroth with all kinds of protective properties (myself), a Shield Amulet as improved by Thalantyr (permanent AC 4 and +1 to saves when equipped, myself), a Robe of the Good Archmagi (Imoen), and Cloak of Displacement (myself) and a Returning Frost Dart (Imoen) we bought in the fishing village of Ulgoth's Beard after a tip from Alora. [Note B.: The party hadn't spent much gold on items up till then; I think only on two Ioun Stones. In Nashkel, Alora stole other goods apart from the Caster's Chain, and sold them to Erdane the fence near Durlag's Tower, furnishing the gold for the above-mentioned purchases.]
Your install seem to be more dangerous then mine. Though some of the more powerful items probably balance it somewhat. In my runs, I usually leave Lighthouse areas for very late. (Charm is very dangerous in BG.)
I also like how Alora is more accessible in your version. I almost never use her, because by the time I reach her my party is already settled...
I have the Cloak of Stars, but I can't make the +5 darts permanent until I get the Ammo Belt, since selling them and buying them back, the other method to make them permanent, is too time-consuming. So, I need to go just far enough into Watcher's Keep to nab the Ammo Belt. This means fighting the Vampiric Wraiths and their level drain attacks.
Luckily, their level drain counts as a level 1 spell, and Poppy is immune to level 3 spells and below.
Or, at least, she should be. Her spell level immunities don't seem to be functioning properly. She's been able to resist an Invisibility spell from Imber, but not a Web spell. It turns out she's only immune to level 3 spells, not level 3 and below, and apparently the Spell Revisions version of Invisibility counts as a 3rd-level spell!
With a lot of finagling and maneuvering and politicking and lollygagging, we manage to bring down the quickly-regenerating AND self-healing Vampiric Wraiths with Minute Meteors. Imber again carries the party, while her friends serve mostly as decoys.
Funny thing is, Imber herself is completely immune to level drain while under the effects of Enrage, and True Strike should have been more than enough to compensate for the penalties of using missile weapons at close range. Imber could have dealt with the critters on her own. I could have saved 1000 gold in Restoration spells had I simply used Imber as my tank.
The other enemies of the area--Sword Spiders, Phase Spiders, Mephits, and a room full of jellies--aren't too much trouble (Minute Meteors for the first three, and Sunfire for the jellies), but there was a brief scare when Rius wandered over a petrification trap. I had her drop most of her equipment during pause in the off chance that she should be shattered and lost forever, but she made her save nonetheregardless.
We manage to store the darts successfully in our newfound Ammo Belt, but hit a snag when retrieving them.
I can't remove the darts! It's only one space in Rius' inventory, but I'm not willing to let that go. I get rid of the item with SK and decide to use CLUAConsole to create darts in the future, to save myself the trouble of dealing with the bug.
It's an excellent display of my priorities. I'm perfectly willing to exploit the bug that makes the darts permanent, but not willing to accept the bug that makes some of them unmovable.
We still haven't bothered visiting Pai'Na--we were in a big rush to get those darts--so we finally head back to the Graveyard and enter the lower crypts. Yi Grovana, always eager to help, sneaks ahead and tries to backstab a Giant Spider. She fails in a most spectacular fashion.
No, I don't think this party is too overpowered.
Poor Grovana. She just wants to help out. But she has to run back to the group and let Imber deal with the creepy crawlies.
On to Pai'Na! We don't have a whole lot of area-effect spells--both Rius and Poppy get a -3 penalty to their 3rd level spell slots, so we don't have much room for Fireballs--so the spidies could cause a problem. I want Imber to focus her Minute Meteors on Pai'Na, so I have Poppy use her one Sunfire spell to clear up the critters, once they've gathered in a tight circle.
I'm not entirely sure why I let her do that when Imber was so close. I already know from the readme for Spell Revisions that Imber's Mirror Images will no longer protect against area-effect damage like Sunfire. And I know she has a -31% weakness to fire. And I know her HP pool is basically just that of a normal mage. And I know her saves aren't stellar.
She only survived the Sunfire spell thanks to Enrage. Normally when we think Berserker we think immunities, but in this case, it's the temporary HP boost that saved Imber's life.
We defeat Pai'Na with Minute Meteors and retrieve the spider figurine. Now we can summon Kitty! I should probably reinstall the Item Upgrade mod, though, to make sure Kitty is actually going to be of much use against SCS2 enemies.
I feel we've gotten strong enough to safely tackle the Spirit Trolls of the Druid Grove, so we return and pick up where we left off. As before, Poppy runs to the front because of her AC bonus vs. piercing damage, then casts Spirit Armor, which is just fast enough with her casting speed bonus to kick in before the Trolls can take a swing at her. She has about -10 AC against piercing attacks and immunity to Unholy Blight, but no defense against Flame Strike or Greater Command. Behind her, Rius also casts Spirit Armor (her AC is worse and her casting time slower, so she hangs back), Yi Grovana does nothing, and Imber activates Enrage, and summons Spirit Animals to gang up on the Trolls.
It's a decent formula for dealing with the Trolls, but we still have to make saves, and though Poppy is immune to Unholy Blight, the party is quite vulnerable to magic damage. Only Imber has resistance to it; her friends have weaknesses against magic damage.
The formula is a little less effective, though, when we're facing more than two solitary Trolls. For some reasons, Umber Hulks have joined the party. I've never seen them in the Druid Grove before. To deal with the additional threat, Imber buffs herself up and distracts some Spirit Trolls just long enough to blast them with Sunfire.
So why am I not using Sunfire to deal with everything? Well, the party does have decent MR overall, and Sunfire in Spell Revisions does not bypass MR, but the reality is that most of the party has pretty lousy saves vs. breath, the new Sunfire has a save penalty of -4, and, as if that wasn't enough, most of my party members have weaknesses to fire damage... it's not just Imber that's vulnerable. Only Yi Grovana, in Salamander form, is safe.
So why don't I just buff everybody with Protection from Fire? Well, there are four different problems with that. First, Rius and Poppy barely have any 3rd-level spell slots, so they couldn't cover everybody. Second, we have other 3rd level spells more worth taking. What happens if my party gets paralyzed and I don't have Remove Paralysis?
You might wonder why I have Remove Paralysis in a party without clerics. Well, both Poppy and Rius are supposed to have Paladin levels, and I've added Remove Paralysis and other cleric spells to their spellbooks. I know neither of them should be high enough level for a Paladin to cast 3rd level spells, and one of them is supposed to have a -3 penalty to 3rd-level PALADIN spells as well (which means no 3rd-level Paladin spells, ever), but I'm too lazy to do that much micromanaging. I just treat them as mage spells. The Cowled Wizards do.
The third problem is quite simple. Poppy is immune to level 3 spells, so she can't benefit anyway.
And the fourth problem? In Spell Revisions, Protection from Fire isn't a 3rd-level spell in the first place, making all of my previous claims pointless. It's been bumped up to 5th level, both the priest and mage versions. And guess what? Both Poppy and Rius ALSO have -1 penalty to their 5th-level spell slots. And Rius, being a Bard with stunted level progression, only HAS one such spell slot, so she's got nothing.
Imber is an absolute monster with Sunfire. But she's liable to toast one of her sisters, and we have to spend over 1000 gold to raise just one of them, since we have no cleric.
There's still a place for Sunfire, though. Half the Trolls inside the Troll Mound died to Imber's Sunfire spells.
Anyhoo, next we have to deal with Kyland Lind, and also some people fighting Trolls just west of Kyland Lind. Yi Grovana hides in shadows to scout ahead.
Does it seem odd to you that a great flaming salamander like Yi Grovana can hide in shadows? It seems odd to me. But with her 3 base STR, she can't really move unless she's shapeshifted, and the Salamander form is the fastest.
Kyland Lind is a problem. In SCS2, he uses Insect Plague, and again, my party members have awful, awful saving throws. But I have a plan for that.
You know how the OP suggested we avoid prebuffing, for enemies as well as ourselves? Well, I've found a way to re-interpret those rules.
I can certainly cast buffing spells during combat. Nobody's questioning that. So why not cast a whole bunch of buffing spells during the fight before Kyland Lind, when the humans are keeping the hostile Trolls busy, and then approach Kyland Lind with all of my buffs active? Technically I didn't cast them outside of battle.
The funniest part is Rius casting MGOI and Imber casting SI: Conjuration when there are no spellcasters in sight.
Poppy greets Kyland Lind with a poisoned dart to the fact. Yi Grovana throws out Dispel Magic, in case the druids have Ironskins pre-cast, and Rius, just to be a pain, casts Web.
What's especially unfair is that, despite Kyland Lind giving us a stern warning and turning hostile, his Shadow Druid buddies and spirit animals stay neutral... at least, until we attack them, though even then, their circles don't turn red.
Sunfire isn't much use against the Shadow Druids, who appear to have an innate immunity.
It still fries their animal pals quite readily, and the Druids themselves, whether due to staying neutral, being webbed, or just getting hit over and over again, fail to get any spells off the ground. Kyland Lind tries to flee, but we pick him off before he can escape.
The Myconids, always a chaotic mass, manage to confuse our summons and clog up the bridge as usual, but we have enough ranged power to get rid of the Spore Colonies before they can summon too many Myconids. The only oddity is a Spore Colony mysteriously "walking" around.
Normally these guys tend to stay in one spot. Anybody know why they might decide to start sliding around?
Dalok and his friends also went down with Web and ranged weapons, and Cernd killed Faldorn. We return to Trademeet, but pick up three Potions of Stone Form from Adratha on the way.
Why Potions of Stone Form? Well, Khan Zahraa and his less leg-having fellow djinn use Flesh to Stone spells, and though we do have two Wizard Slayers on the team, high APR, and a fair amount of magic resistance, I can't guarantee Imber will survive unless I get her saves below zero. And Potions of Stone Form are stackable, so I can make Imber, if no one else, immune to Flesh to Stone. The best way to prevent Imber from turning to stone is to turn her to stone!
Shortly before the fight, I realize that Wizard Slayers can't use Potions of Stone Form.
Turns out it doesn't matter. Khan Zahraa doesn't do too well against a barrage of poisoned darts.
Faafirah manages to cast Stoneskin, but his defenses don't last long. The last of the djinn fall, and we report our success to Guildmistress Busybody and Lord Logan Coinpurse.
The Shadow Hippies are dead! Now Trademeet can make MONEY again! Woo! Woo! Woo!
Thanks @Ygramul. I normally visit the Lighthouse Areas early, but avoid contact with the Sirines. In vanilla/SCS they are doable for characters with Charm Protections, but aTweaks gives them a bunch of other abilities that make them very dangerous. You're right that some of the mod-added items compensate fr the increased difficulty. (Lenhardt for instance is very pleased with his improved Shield Amulet and with his Helm of Charm Protection.)
How is your run going? On hold, thanks to PoE? Would be understandable, looks to be a great game.
@semiticgod, nice to see you make some good progress there. I have little in terms of tips or other input because it's pretty much a different game you're playing
We traveled south from Ulgoth's Beard, although we made a detour around the vast Cloakwood (Kivan's recommendation, those woods are apparently very dangerous). On the northcoast we helped a kinsman of Kivan, the Elf Keth'sim Dwin'anea, fight three Sahuagin that had come for him after their Malenti slave had refused to kill him.
We then continued our southerly course, to Nashkel, because I considered our band of five, six if I include Neossa, ready to face the Kobolds in the Nashkel Mines. However, in Nashkel we ran into an evil Red Wizard of Thay (hmm 'evil Red Wizard', that sounds a bit pleonastic) who wanted us to accompany him to a Gnoll Fortress to the west to assassinate a female wizard. We refused to join with him, but we decided to head west anyway, to investigate (and if necessary warn) the woman. We've already traversed a large part of the Cloudpeaks, and made the area we've covered so far somewhat safer. We ran into ruffians
bandits,
and Skeletons
It gladdens me that these evildoers no longer plague these lands, but am uncomfortable with the fact that I was the one that ended up meleeing our opposition. I'd much rather be slinging spells and bullets from the back. It made me realize that a strong warrior might be a welcome (last) addition to our party.
[Note B.: I'm going on a nice little trip to the country with my girlfriend tomorrow and won't be back until next weekend. I don't think I'll be online much (if at all). This mini-installment is mainly for myself, to know exactly what Lenhardt's status is / plans are, i.e. rescuing/recruiting Dynaheir, clearing the Nashkel Mines, maybe getting tank Minsc in Kivan's place.]
Since we had managed to deal with the Spirit Trolls of the Druid Grove, I figured the party could take on the Trolls at the De'arnise Hold as well. The big group of Trolls in the middle of the first level never appeared, thankfully, but the keep was still crammed with the things.
The Yuan-ti mage didn't have much chance to do anything. It got one casting of PFMW off the ground, plus a Contingency (I think) for Stoneskin, but Poppy's poisoned darts went right through PFMW.
I'm starting to think that this no pre-buffing thing is really putting enemy mages at a disadvantage. They just don't have time to protect themselves from spell disruption. If they have defenses against physical attacks, you can hit them with Magic Missile. If they have defenses against magical attacks, you can hit them with physical attacks. Without prebuffing, they don't come with both, so they have no window of safety in which to operate.
I played things a little risky against the Spirit Trolls, neglecting to activate Enrage on Imber.
Thankfully, she recovered soon after. SR Greater Command allows you to save each round to wake up, greatly reducing the effective duration.
Imber hit 12th level around here, and chose Improved Haste as her first pick. This is to empower her STR drain. If I really want to go for broke, I can activate three Called Shots in sequence, use True Strike to boost her THAC0, and then attack at 10 APR for -3 STR drain per hit. But that's for special occasions.
Glaicas falls quickly to Imber's Minute Meteors, despite his high HP.
Is this because Imber has a +4 damage bonus on top of her Archer bonuses? Well, actually, no. I just checked her file in Shadowkeeper and found that she has no Archer bonuses to hit and damage with ranged weapons. She should have another +4 to hit and damage with missile weapons. I corrected the error.
Yi Grovana was also missing +1 to hit and damage with ranged weapons. And Rius was missing most of her Kensai bonuses. She's supposed to have another +4 to hit and damage. I just corrected these errors. I've been playing the game up until now without the right bonuses.
Now Imber should be doing 1d4+8 damage per hit with Minute Meteors. Plus another 5 fire damage, since SR Minute Meteors have less base damage and more fire damage than in vanilla. So she's actually got more damage output than a normal Sorcerer with Energy Blades, at least if she casts Improved Haste on herself.
I test out the STR drain on a Spirit Troll, and find that it dies just a little bit before it would have died of HP loss.
All that's left is Torgal.
Since I know Tactics-style Torgal comes with Yuan-ti Mages as support, I decide to lure him closer to me before the mages can take action. Oddly enough, they don't follow Torgal at all--in SCS2, all opponents should make effective calls for help--and I get to fight him alone.
STR drain fails to kill him, oddly enough, but I do deal tons of damage to him.
Since the Yuan-ti Mages still haven't joined the fray, I decide to take the battle to them. While Torgal is dying, I summon a bunch of critters to draw enemy fire--again, casting buffs during battle to circumvent the no pre-buffing rule.
To my further surprise, the Yuan-ti Mages are bolstered not simply by a group of Spirit Trolls, but by an Umber Hulk Elder. And the mages already have their buffs active.
I underestimated this group. But the biggest problem was the Spirit Trolls, and their Flame Strike spell. It hits Rius.
Rius is honestly not a key part of my strategy. Imber is the only essential character--and not just because she's our Charname--so losing Rius is not going to weaken our power by 25%, as it normally would for a 4-person group. But the loss of Rius suggests to me that we're not in good enough shape to handle this battle. The enemy mages have visible buffs active, there are still lots of Spirit Trolls hanging around, and the Umber Hulk Elder is a heavy-hitting fighter type that could easily take a chunk out of our HP with a lucky swipe.
I decide to flee. Torgal is already dead, so the quest is completed, and all I'll be missing is the loot by Nalia's father's body. I pick up all of Rius' most important loot, drop all the stacks of darts cluttering up my inventory, and pick up Torgal's claw and other items on the way out.
Imber gets hit by Breach on the way out. You might notice I had Spell Immunity active in the previous post, but it's not SI: Abjuration; it's SI: Enchantment, since Imber would be vulnerable to Greater Command during the fatigue period after raging. I don't have time to pause for Stoneskin, so I just keep running.
The Elder Umber Hulk follows us on the way out. It confuses Yi Grovana and starts pummeling her, and her crushing resistance just isn't enough. With her AC as bad as it is, the Elder Umber Hulk can hit her reliably, and since she's confused, she can't drink any potions.
I have no Rod of Resurrection, so I can't heal her from afar. Instead, I try to disable the Elder Umber Hulk, and manage to scare it with Spook. It runs around in circles while we attack it from afar.
The monster falls and Yi Grovana recovers. We give up on taking down the Yuan-ti Mages and Spirit Trolls, and instead simply report our success to Nalia.
While inside the hold, I tested out Poppy's Polymorph Self spell and the jelly form, which in SR does not have the 100% magic resistance as in vanilla. But it does get a very nasty 5d5 acid damage ranged attack, with a nonmagical, level 0 slow effect on a failed save vs. polymorph, that I can boost with Belm in the off hand. It's an excellent ranged alternative to the Flail of Ages, although the jelly form is almost incapable of moving.
I do some poking around in DLTCEP and discover that, at least in SR, the Polymorph Self spell has the same structure as the Shapechange spell. This means that the Shapechange trick will work for Polymorph Self. If I have Poppy cast Polymorph Self, kill her, rest, and then raise her with a Rod of Resurrection, the shapeshifts will be permanent, and she won't have to cast the spell ever again.
It's not really necessary, but I like the idea. Problem is, you really do need the Rod of Resurrection to make it work. Raising them with a spell will not, because in ToB, the Raise Dead, Resurrection, and Mass Raise Dead spells all remove polymorph abilities. The Rod of Resurrection, however, does not, and therefore can perform the Shapechange trick even in ToB.
But the Rod of Resurrection costs over 10,000 gold at the Adventurer's Mart, and we can nab one more cheaply from Mekrath. So, we need to head to the Temple sewers to enter his lair. On the way, we encounter some Beholders, an SCS2 addition. I use my standard formula for dealing with them: turn invisible and lead some summons over to deal with the Beholders instead of exposing myself to them directly.
There's one other thing I want to do before we go any further, though. I leave the Temple sewers and head to the Docks.
Renal Bloodscalp wears an extra pair of Boots of Speed. But if you attack him, a super-powered version of Arkanis Gath spawns in to kill you. Arkanis Gath has the MINHP1 item, making him unkillable and immune to all disablers, and he has a +3 short sword with a range of 15 (same as a dart) that kills you instantly unless you have immunity to opcode 55, which you can only get through Death Ward or the upgraded form of Hindo's Doom, neither of which I have.
Arkanis Gath can only be killed through stat drain, and has 18 STR, which I can drain in 6 hits. But since I have no defense against his attack, unless I go to the trouble of buying and using a PFMW scroll (which I'd rather save for more important encounters) before battle, I can't expect Imber to survive. I do a test run to see how it goes.
Arkanis Gath spawned in a different location than I expected. The last couple times I've seen him, he appeared right next to Renal Bloodscalp, but this time, he appeared right next to Imber, a little ways south-southwest of Renal Bloodscalp, and targeted her right after slaying Yi Grovana, ignoring all the summons I had placed on his ostensible spawning point to distract him.
The weird thing is that, even though his sword has a range of 15, he actually didn't take a swing at Imber until he was within the range of a normal dagger. When Imber ran, he gave chase rather than striking from afar. I hoped to avoid his second attack of the round, since Imber's AC vs. piercing damage is quite strong (though his THAC0 is -4), but he managed to land a hit.
The test run failed, so no Boots of Speed for me. Not until Spellhold and the Planar Prison. But Arkanis Gath's unwillingness to attack at long range suggests he could be outmaneuvered. I decide to try and see if I can take him down again. I reposition my group based on his new spawn point and keep Imber well out of the way.
He targets my summons, slaying them quickly, but he only has 2 APR, 1 base APR and another from a permanent haste effect. This gives me enough time to start hitting him with Minute Meteors. Rius, our second Archer, also pitches in with darts. Yi Grovana has the Archer kit as well, but I prefer to keep her in Salamander form, so no ranged attacks for her.
Arkanis Gath, the unkillable thief, has fallen. But since these were test runs, I don't get to keep Renal Bloodscalp's boots. Instead, I slink away to Bodhi for some quest XP.
Bodhi has such excellent lines.
I still have to fight Arkanis Gath, but not the unkillable version: I just have to face a normal thief alongside Mook and the other Shadow Thieves at the south end of the Docks.
I use the skirmishes with the Shadow Thieves at the front of their headquarters as an excuse to cast my buffs in preparation for the fight with Mook. Since SR buffs tend to last much longer than in vanilla, I don't have to worry about running out in the middle of the fight. Blur, notably, lasts 5 turns, and though it's not longer stackable, it gives a +3 bonus to saves instead of +1. And my characters need all the saves they can get.
Mook is not actually much of a threat. Yi Grovana can reveal all of the thieves at once with True Seeing, and we have lots of summons to help us out.
I still have difficulty evaluating just how tough my party really is. The advantages are crazy, the disadvantages are crazy, I'm dealing with a spell mod I've never used, and unlike my normal SCS2 runs, the spellcasters don't pre-buff. The gameplay is very foreign to me.
I think I will tweak my install to allow pre-buffing. It will give me an incentive not to use minor skirmishes as opportunities to buff before the big fights, and it will keep the enemy mages from dying quite so easily.
I tweaked my install to allow pre-buffing. Now the enemy mages should actually be an issue.
To test out the new settings, I decide to take on a higher-level enemy party: Gaius and his sewer-dwelling pals. I buff up the party, manage to lay a trap (Imber, as a Bounty Hunter with no thief or bard levels, only has 15 in Set Traps), and begin the attack. I avoid targeting Gaius to make sure his buffs come out before I can start to harm him.
Rengaard is paralyzed! And Imber lands a critical on Tarnor the Hatchetman. With her Archer bonuses finally factored in, the damage is quite excessive. Notice that Poppy and Imber are protected by SI: Abjuration, but Rius, as a bard with -1 level 5 spell slots, gets no such spell.
Yi Grovana casts Dispel Magic at level 15. SCS2 nerfs the Inquisitor Dispel Magic ability to cast at 1.5x caster level. It doesn't bring down Gaius' defenses, but it seems to have removed some early buffs from the others.
Notice Tarnor the Hatchetman is dead. Same goes for Rengaard. Zorl isn't far behind.
Why haven't I closed in on Gaius? The thing is, he's got PFMW active. So why don't I just nail him with nonmagical darts?
Well, I dropped all of my stacks of darts when I was fleeing Torgal's minions, to make room for magical items and other valuables. And I forgot to buy new ones. So Gaius is immune to all of our weapons, as well as our area-effect spells, by virtue of his spell protections.
But wait! Sunfire can break through GOI!
Though it's not so effective when the target is immune to fire. Like Gaius is. But I certainly did do a lot of damage to Rius. Too bad she's on my side.
Gaius gets a Horrid Wilting spell off the ground, but I minimize the damage by having his target, Yi Grovana, flee to the east. Soon his PFMW wears off (SR reduces the duration to 3 rounds, notably), and he only has Stoneskin to protect him.
His Stoneskins vanish. That tends to happen when you're getting hit by 20 attacks per round.
Notice the abnormally large stack of +5 darts in Imber's hands. I did go to the trouble of fetching the Ammo Belt before I let myself have any permanent darts from the Cloak of Stars, but I'm honestly too lazy to keep creating them, so I cheated in a permanent variant, which saves a lot of time.
We have another mage battle right after this. I want Mekrath's Rod of Resurrection, and we've got a Coiled Cabal in his lair. Actually, I don't know if you have to fight the Yuan-ti, but I do know SCS enemies like to call in their friends, and I'd hate to attack Mekrath only to get ambushed by the Yuan-ti Mages rushing in to rescue Mekrath, and crowding up the narrow hallway that would be my only escape.
We send in the Flesh Golem to get the ball rolling, followed by a Dispel Magic from Yi Grovana.
This is more through habit than anything else. They're not stupid enough to waste their best spells on an enemy they can slay in one round, so the Flesh Golem doesn't actually drain their spellpower. I rush in and start slaying the non-mage Yuan-ti, waiting for their PFMW spells to wear out. One of them casts Greater Malison, exacerbating our already terrible saving throws, while another conjures a Mordenkainen's Sword. These guys are pretty high level. I'm a ways away from getting any 7th-level spells.
Still, once their PFMW spells wear off, I pelt them with darts and their Stoneskins fall.
Imber also lands a rather impressive critical hit.
The Yuan-ti Mages fail to disable us. The fight ends pretty quickly.
Finally, I get some nonmagical darts (CLUAConsole, since they're so cheap anyway) and pay Mekrath a visit. I accidentally tell him I'm going to leave--I normally lie to Rayic Gethras about my motives, but tell the truth to Mekrath--so I attack him to get him hostile. He brings up PFMW, so we switch to nonmagical darts. Anticipating Mekrath's PFMW spell, I failed to have Imber conjure Minute Meteors, to ensure that she could equip nonmagical weapons.
He fails a spell despite Stoneskin. Wizard Slayers are wicked.
He falls under sustained pressure and we obtain the Rod of Resurrection.
Thanks @Ygramul. I normally visit the Lighthouse Areas early, but avoid contact with the Sirines. In vanilla/SCS they are doable for characters with Charm Protections, but aTweaks gives them a bunch of other abilities that make them very dangerous. You're right that some of the mod-added items compensate fr the increased difficulty. (Lenhardt for instance is very pleased with his improved Shield Amulet and with his Helm of Charm Protection.)
How is your run going? On hold, thanks to PoE? Would be understandable, looks to be a great game.
For some reason, I totally failed to find a Helm of Charm Protection in my current run (it's great to not remember where it was supposed to be!). So, even though I am already to the city of Baldur's Gate, I have avoided Sirines (and a rather nasty looking Hamadryad).
My own run (Khael, FMC) is on pause largely due to Real Life (TM) at the moment. [See, my charname has an avatar in this here world that worries about things like 'job', 'love' etc... Party members had been egging him on to drop such silliness and get on with his own story.]
[Also, I did peak at PoE for a bit: it looks promising and after some patching I look forward to playing it sometime. Though, time will decide if it is no-reload balanced for a good challenge. e.g. IWD just is NOT. I found myself playing BG/BG2 with over 10x frequency compared to my IWD clock time for this reason.]
... but hey it is fantastic to be able to read all your ongoing adventures even when mine is going through a Spring-induced coma at the moment.
Now we can try out the Shapechange trick. The Shapechange trick has always been kind of crazy, but I do love the Iron Golem form. Since Poppy, being a Wizard Slayer, can't drink the Potions of Insight we buy from the Temple of Helm in the Bridge District, I have Yi Grovana drink the potion. You need high WIS, I believe, to get access to all of the one-time wishes from Limited Wish... a scroll we bought a while earlier from Lady Yuth. Rius casts the spell, since she has 24 WIS and there's a chance the SR mod fixed the trick in which you could have one character cast the spell (Rius) and another character talk to the djinni and get the benefit (Yi, who cannot use scrolls until she gets UAI).
The exploit is still open--Yi can talk to the djinni. She picks the Shapechange option, gains access to some new forms on top of her Avenger forms, and is promptly slain by her teacher, Imber.
We rest, resurrect Grovana, and check her innates. She has the Iron Golem form! Although she's missing the Fire and Earth Elemental forms, she's got the most important one. I test out the forms and check the resistances.
There's something terribly wrong with the Iron Golem form's resistances, though.
No. No, that's just not acceptable. A character in Iron Golem form is supposed to have 20% physical damage resistance. This is just silly.
She even has immunity to poison. Iron Golems get that immunity, but not people in Iron Golem form. I try pelting Yi with a Minute Meteor. She's immune to them! She's even got the Iron Golem's immunity to +2 weapons and below!
I check the files. It turns out Spell Revisions tweaks the Shapechange spell. The new forms are much more balanced, with one exception:
-The Mind Flayer form isn't affected much. It doesn't get the physical damage resistance bonuses of my SCS2 install, only the vanilla resistances, and it also drains 4 INT per hit instead of 5.
-The Greater Wolfwere is greatly nerfed, and rightly so. The original 8 HP regeneration per second made the caster virtually unkillable. Now it's been reduced to 2 HP per second, and the form is now immune to nonmagical weapons.
-The Troll form is now a Spirit Troll, regenerates only 1 HP per 2 seconds, has permanent improved invisibility, and drains 1 STR on a failed save vs. death for 5 turns. The vanilla Troll form was pointless, as the Greater Wolfwere form was superior in every way.
-The Earth Elemental form gets physical damage resistances, as does the Fire Elemental form, to a lesser extent. Now they're pretty decent alternatives to the other forms.
The Iron Golem form, however, has experienced dramatic buffs. Its fist damage has been reduced from 4d10 to 2d10+4 (with an added +4 to hit as well), but it now gains immunity to poison, can only be hit by +3 weapons or better, gets 25% crushing damage resistance, and 50% resistance to slashing, piercing, and missile damage.
If Yi Grovana uses this form... she'll be invincible. She's immune to magic and all the elements, 70% resistant to magic damage, as if it matters with 100 MR, has 90% immunity to slashing and piercing damage, and has 50% resistance to crushing.
I give her the original Iron Golem form with Shadowkeeper instead.
The resistances are still terribly high, but she's not flat-out invincible anymore.
I honestly don't think I'll use the Iron Golem form, even the vanilla version--at least not until epic levels, when Imber can cast Shapechange, and even then, Yi Grovana would probably be too strong.
I don't have anything against cheesy tactics or cheap tricks or cheating or whatever. But using the Shapechange abilities would interfere with my original goal in this run: to test out some fully randomized characters. It's the same problem with the Wand of Lightning trick to stack Called Shot effects. I won't learn very much if I use every dirty trick at my disposal.
I tweaked my install to allow pre-buffing. Now the enemy mages should actually be an issue.
*shudder*
I remember Dooku's line in 'Attack of the Clones': "Brave, but foolish, my friend." (Of course, Dooku did not survive, after all.) Then again your mage battles seem to be going well so far.
I lost some games to the sewer party before. And I decided to permanently remove the mage prebuff component after a SCS Lavok wiped the floor with me. (After death, I reloaded to test if it was possible for me to survive at all -- short of cheese an early BG2 party WILL die to SCS-enhanced Lavok...)
Despite not using the Iron Golem form, Yi Grovana has managed to make herself useful in combat. Torgal's claw, a +3 dagger from Tactics that slows or drains 1 STR on a failed save vs. death at -4, and does 2d6 base damage instead of 1d4, proves to be a much more effective backstabbing weapon than a Salamander spear.
The Rakshasa got one PFMW spell, one Cloudkill spell, and one Skull Trap spell off the ground before perishing. The Skull Trap was a bit of a scare, but thankfully Imber has a slight resistance to magic damage... though her friends take the Skull Trap pretty hard. They all have weaknesses to magic damage.
I finally get around to doing the Shapechange trick again, this time with Poppy and Polymorph Self, mostly just for convenience's sake, so we don't have to re-cast Polymorph Self.
Problem is, I can't actually kill Poppy. She has a minimum HP of 1.
The "Spell Ineffective" message is because Minute Meteors' fire damage counts as a level 3 spell, to which Poppy is immune. But Poppy is still perfectly vulnerable to stat drain. Imber activates Called Shot three times, and kills Poppy in four hits.
Nobody in my party has high STR. I rest, resurrect her, and check her innates. Success!
I wonder if I'll ever actually use those forms.
The problem with Firkraag's dungeon in SCS2 is that it has vampires in it depending on your level. And we're high enough level to trigger the vampires.
And they're not just vampires. Whenever I've seen them, they're all Ancient Vampires, with one or two Elder Vampires mixed in. In SCS2, vampires have CON drain, they target NPCs without Negative Plane Protection (not that anyone in my party actually has NPP in the first place), they throw around charm spells, they summon hordes of diseased rats, they summon Dread Wolves, they shapeshift to get ridiculous damage resistances, they turn invisible, they turn to mist and become immune to all damage... and they regenerate. This means that you have to kill them fast, because they can disappear, and regenerate while hidden, or shapeshift, and regenerate while they're resistant to your weapons, or just flat out turn to mist, and regenerate no matter what you do.
I assume SCS2 vampires were meant to be fought without resorting to Protection from Undead. But I hate these things, and for some reason I use Protection from Undead scrolls instead of just uninstalling that component of SCS2.
But there are only so many scrolls in the game. So who do I protect?
Rius, Poppy, and Yi Grovana all have pretty poor damage output, relatively speaking. Imber has crazy damage output, but she doesn't have True Sight. Yi Grovana does. Eventually I decide to use one of the scrolls on Yi Grovana, and have her deal with the vampires. Grovana is far too stupid to use the scroll herself--her INT is 3--so her teacher does it for her. Grovana runs through the door, shuts it behind her, and starts flinging darts at the vampires.
Her first target turns to mist--invincible and regenerating--so she finds a new one. This one tries to stave off death by shapeshifting into a rat, reducing Grovana's damage to 1. To get around this, Yi uses the Flail of Ages with Belm, and does 4 damage with the flail where her darts would have done 1. Belm itself is useless, though; these vampires are immune to +2 weapons and below.
Despite her best efforts, Yi Grovana cannot deal enough damage to overcome the vampire's regeneration. They're just too sturdy.
So, Imber uses a second scroll on herself and hurries through the doorway. Yi Grovana only has so many castings of True Sight, so when the vampires vanish, we start using summons to lure them out: the Efreeti Bottle, Kitty, the Iron Horn of Valhalla, and Imber's spirit animals. With Imber alongside her, both using darts, they're able to take down the vampires quite easily.
Using summons still caused some problems. If SCS2 vampires see your summons, they can summon their Dread Wolves and rats, and the wolves and rats aren't fooled by Protection from Undead scrolls. We had to fight off the rats and wolves before finishing off the vampires, and since the spread of the rat summons is quite large, even Rius and Poppy had to fight some.
When the vampires started to vanish, we did one final sweep of the area with a Spirit Lion and True Seeing and tracked down the last vampire. You have to make sure you leave none of them alive--they will hide from you if you're using Protection from Undead, and they will ambush you the next time you rest in Firkraag's dungeon.
The vampires are the worst of Firkraag's pets, but they're not the only nasty fight in this place. Samia and her fellow adventurers are quite tough, and they come right after the vampires.
We get lucky, though. Imber managed to lay one Special Snare out of three before they arrived, and Samia's brigade made some pretty lousy saving throws.
Chak is not actually held--he has an Enrage ability of some sort, as do many Orogs and Orcs in SCS2--but that's still half the enemy party disabled. Only Ferric Ironblade (rather redundant name, honestly), Kaol, and Chak remain functional. Yi Grovana casts True Sight to reveal Kaol, and Poppy activates Offensive Spin so she can break down his Stoneskins and tack on spell failure with nonmagical darts. Meanwhile, the rest of the group focuses on beating down Chak, who falls in seconds.
We tear through the remaining enemies quickly. Only Kaol lingers for long. Despite Poppy's best efforts to scramble his spellcasting, he manages to avoid the spell failure. Still, he doesn't have much time left. There's just too much APR flying around for Kaol to maintain his defenses.
For the Guardians, I have Poppy talk-block them to make sure Yi Grovana gets in a backstab. For those who aren't aware, talk-blocking causes the target to always face the person who initiated the talk-block, which means you can rotate your target as you like. This is the only way to backstab the easternmost Guardian, unless you push him around, which itself also requires talk-blocking.
The Greater Wolfweres proved remarkably easy to kill. With two Archers and one Kensai, we actually have pretty decent damage output for a party with innate penalties to hit and damage. Imber has a +4 innate bonus to damage, but on average, the party has penalties.
The Adamantite Golem fell to +5 darts. With her buffs active, Poppy was able to resist the golem's poison cloud ability. Tazok and Chieftain Digdag died under a barrage of darts.
Only one more battle before we can free Taar. If your Charname is female (I understand most are not), then Garren's child is a young man named Taar... not to be confused with Daar, the young man in Imnesvale who's in love with Jermien's daughter Colette. Anyhow, Conster--not to be confused with Carston, the mad king and prisoner of the Machine of Lum the Mad--carries the key to Taar's (not Daar's!) cage.
Conster starts out with PFMW and promptly turns invisible. Yi Grovana reveals him with True Seeing and we pelt him with nonmagical darts. This is what we managed to do before he charmed Yi Grovana with a double Charm Person Minor Sequencer.
That's six hits from our Wizard Slayers, Poppy and Imber, and therefore 60% spell failure for Conster despite his PFMW. Yi is no longer under our control, and in fact her True Seeing dispels all of our illusion spells since she's hostile, but Conster's Stoneskins quickly run out, and his spellcasting is shot.
Poison Weapon is completely unnecessary. But very satisfying nonetheless.
Now there's only one problem left.
Firkraag remains.
Normally, I don't fight Firkraag in my no-reload runs. Why bother? He's got over 500 HP in SCS2, and since I seldom fight him even when I can reload and try again... I have absolutely no familiarity with the battle.
I don't know how it works. In vanilla and in SCS2, my strategy for dragons is to just hit them with Feeblemind and hack at their ankles until they collapse.
Imber just hit 13th level and got to choose a new 5th-level spell. But she didn't choose Feeblemind, even though in SR it comes with a completely gratuitous -4 save penalty. SR adds save penalties to so many spells that SR's nerfing Greater Malison is even meaningful. So how am I supposed to kill a dragon without Feeblemind?
Well, there's another cool tweak from Spell Revisions. In SR, Disintegrate doesn't hit the enemy with an instant death effect--to which so many critters are immune. Instead, it does 2d6 damage per caster level, or 5d6 on a failed save.
That means Imber, as a 13th-level sorcerer, will deal 21d6 damage to Firkraag if he fails his save against spell at... a -5 penalty. Firkraag's save vs. spell is 6, so he has a 50% chance of taking 140 damage from Disintegrate. We could cut Firkraag to pieces if we only had some means of ensuring that this spell gets past his base 65 MR, when Poppy and Rius can't afford to use Lower Resistance, since they need their precious few 5th-level spell slots for Protection from Fire. We need those spell slots dedicate to improving our already mostly negative fire resistance. So we need to take down his MR without using Lower Resistance.
Of course, this is a moot point, since Imber actually chose PFMW as her second 6th-level spell pick, right next to Improved Haste. So she doesn't have Disintegrate in the first place. It's actually a downgrade in her damage output, in fact, since the casting time is so long (7, for Imber) and she already does so much damage with Minute Meteors.
But why am I even bothering with Firkraag? Well, Poppy, Rius, AND Yi Grovana all have paladin levels, and all of them can approach 100 MR if they equip Carsomyr. I can't afford to let Carsomyr slip by.
I need that sword. But I have no experience actually fighting this dragon, and the party is still underleveled. So how do I do it?
It takes a lot of thought, but I finally come up with a plan.
Comments
::stammering and blushing in the manner of a mere mortal suddenly in the presence of a great celebrity::
Oh! Oh! I am *SO* happy to see you! You are my mentor in all matters of BG No-Reload Land! You are the Great Queen and original ruler of all no-reloaders everywhere!
:beginning to hyperventilate::
All worship and praise to You, O Great Goddess of the No-Reload!
::bowing over and over with excessive obsequiousness::
I want to be your cleric! Please allow me to introduce you as the Goddess of the No-Reload as you are, my Lady!
::BelgarathMTH passes out from hyperventilation due to too much religious ecstasy from meeting the Goddess once again.::
Ghoul Touch is overkill on Kalah considering Imber's Minute Meteors, so it didn't do much in this battle, but that spell really doesn't get enough love. It's a nonmagical weapon with a long-duration paralyzing effect on a failed save vs. death. It should be a fantastic option against mages with PFMW, considering their lousy saves vs. death.
We get surprised on the way out. I forgot about the night-time ambushes from the Tactics install. I never liked those guys. We have several melee enemies, plus a cleric... I completely overlooked the mage, since I saw no magical defenses (MGOI, spell deflection/turning, Mirror Image). I was operating on the assumption that the enemies were going to appear prebuffed, and the graphics would be a dead giveaway to the presence of mages. Without prebuffs, the mage escaped my notice long enough to hit the party with Slow. Only Poppy, with her slightly better save vs. spell, managed to escape its effects.
I didn't want to spawn in a Cowled Wizard, so I avoided using spells. I spent a fair amount of potions, and I might not have survived had Imber not entered the battle with Minute Meteors already at hand. She slew the enemy mage with Minute Meteors while the other party members moved around to force the enemies to retarget--each of my party members has different AC against and different resistances to each form of damage, so some of them can't be allowed too close to certain enemies.
Rius is the perfect example. She has -50 slashing resistance and a -5 AC penalty against slashing damage, and her pitiful HP doesn't help. A big part of maximizing a randomized party is micromanaging their positions. Rius can easily die to a stray longsword.
I got some help from an Amnish Soldier. I love these guys. After running out of Minute Meteors, Imber switched to darts to bring down the enemy cleric.
I reminded myself to never walk around Athkatla at night.
As usual, my first quest out of the Promenade is the Slums. I trigger the first dream, and boy does Imber look creepy following Imoen around Candlekeep.
I gave her the female vampire animation, and copied some passive effects from Slayer Shadows to turn her form completely black. Vampire shadows look very wicked. I did the same for an old Improved Anvil run I never finished, and decided to bring back the look.
Poppy gets Lilarcor. I used to love that sword for its crazy banter. But I've grown much more fond of its immunities than anything else.
Rius has 11 INT, and for once I'm playing on Core, so she's got about a 50% spell scribing success rate. After collecting a dozen or so scrolls, I search around a lot before I finally track down a decent source of Potions of Genius: appropriately enough, the Temple of Oghma in the Docks.
I love those XP rewards. May they never end.
Remember that time I said I wouldn't travel around Athkatla at night? Well, Mae'var's quest demands that I visit the Temple District after dark. It doesn't go well.
The problem with my party is that, although all of them has magic resistance, their elemental resistances aren't too great. Only Yi Grovana, in Salamander form, is very resistant to fire damage. Rius? Not so much.
Once again, Imber is slowed, she's out of Stoneskins, and the party is injured. I decide to flee to the sewers to rest, but the enemy follows me in before I can do so. I have to finish the fight.
Luckily for us, the Cowled Wizards don't scan the sewers for magic. Imber's casting time is too poor to use magic--she's better off using Minute Meteors--but Poppy has a bonus to casting time, and helps turn the tide of the battle.
We fetch Mae'var his silly gaudy necklace and end up being assigned to murder a Cowled Wizard. Rayic Gethras is our next target.
We're still at a really low level. And normally I hesitate to face Ray-Ray in SCS2 if I'm doing a no-reload run, since he has access to Sphere of Chaos, and Imber's Enrage is not equal to Death Ward. But since there is no prebuffing, I decide we're capable of handling him.
Right after the fight begins, he activates a Spell Trigger with Improved Invisibility and SI: Divination. Yi Grovana's True Sight, cast at the beginning of the battle, is now useless. But her Dispel Magic ability is not. I allow Ray-Ray to flee to the west, space my party members away from him to protect their own defenses, and manage to dispel both his invisibility and his Stoneskin with a single Dispel Magic, though his Contingency brings up a new set of skins.
Ray-Ray casts PFMW, but I have already anticipated this. Imber has arrived without Minute Meteors, meaning she is able to equip nonmagical darts instead. Worse yet for Ray-Ray, Poppy has Poison Weapon and a nonmagical two-handed sword. Her THAC0 is weak, but she still makes the hit.
Poppy has pretty wings thanks to 1PP. I've always wanted to give her wings to match her portrait.
Rayic Gethras is doomed. Even if he survived a little longer to cast a spell, both Poppy and Imber are Wizard Slayers, and his casting failure would have been sky-high.
In search of easy XP, I head to the Graveyard, only to realize I have forgotten another component of Tactics: an improved Crypt King! I buff with Stoneskin, expecting a melee battle, only to be confronted with a Horror spell. Without Enrage, Imber panics. With the Crypt King's allies crowding up the space, I might well end up pinned in a corner and unable to escape.
Poppy, however, makes her save, and as a Paladin/Sorceror/Bard, she has Remove Fear in her spellbook. The party is up and functioning within the next round, and all the Crypt King can do is beat up on poor Yi Grovana, who despite her saves is the only member of the group without Mirror Image or Stoneskin.
Then I had some weird technical problems.
I noticed my computer was overheating, so I decided to uninstall 1PP, to lift the processing burden from my computer. This started an extremely lengthy process in which I realized that, apparently, once you create a game with 1PP installed, you can never return to that save game without 1PP installed. The game crashed every single time I reloaded Imber's save file. Even after I removed all traces of 1PP from my computer, and reinstalled BG2 from scratch, and used SK to remove every item and visual effect related to 1PP from my save file. I reinstalled BG2 in a new directory, only to find the problem persisted: I could no longer access any of Imber's save files. Not unless I reinstalled 1PP, and got my computer overheating again.
My only option was to move all the relevant kit tables and other files to the new BG2 directory, start a new game, and manually copy and paste all the resistances and modifiers from the old save onto the new save. It took ages to sort out this whole business, but on the plus side, I discovered that reinstalling the game bumped up the window size for BG2 and fixed a couple of recurring bugs in another game. It also gave me the opportunity to add in some more fixes for my characters, who had illegal proficiencies I had added in by accident. I cheated them back out of Chateau Irenicus and skipped the quests I had already completed in the other save, since the new party inherited the same XP as the old one.
Either way, it's fixed, and the party is back on track.
@semiticgod whoa, that randomisation thingie looks a bit broken, but may be fun to experiment with! Any chance you will release it as a mod? (Compatible with ee)
It's not exactly broken, I would say. I got a couple stellar characters out of the deal, but the others have some pretty severe weaknesses. The Halfling Paladin and gnomish Cleric are excellent examples: they're incapable of moving. With previous systems, I've come up with godly mages that can't cast spells, and indestructible tanks that cannot walk. Imber has Improved Alacrity, but the chances of that happening are less than 0.3%.
Same goes for Poppy, who has a minimum HP value of 1... she can't be killed with damage, actually. Pretty crazy. I forgot to mention it, and now that I look back at the files, it seems I've already benefited from it once (it saved Poppy from the Spirit Trolls' spells), though I didn't intend to ever rely on it.
Anyway, they do have some nasty weaknesses. Half the party can't use magic items, two of them can't put more than one pip in melee weapons despite being fighters, one can't use missile weapons despite being an Archer, and they've all got very limited armor options. And that's just the kit abilities, not counting their horrible THAC0, poor damage, awful saving throws, and screwed up spell slots.
Day 11:
A tenday has passed since Gorion's sad quietus. Imoen, Neossa, and I have already seen much of the Sword Coast, although there's lots more for us to discover still. Our journey to Baldur's Gate we made in vain, for we found the city locked up as a preventive measure against the rampant banditry.
The priestess of Umberlee attacked us after we asked her about her version of the story. A Command and some non-lethal violence
The fishermen didn't like our change of allegiance, but seemed too afraid of us, armed as we were, to deny us the bowl. We gave Tenya the bowl, and she Dimension Doored away. That girl must be truly blessed by her goddess; it's a spell that I cannot cast.
Even further north the farmlands were plagued not by Ankhegs but by Zombies. We must have slain twenty of them. The farmers were very grateful, rewarding us with 150 GP, and eager to continue their work.
Our good deeds for Tenya, and for the farmers, make me feel good about our trip, even though we failed at our original plan of finding shelter in Baldur's Gate. Said failure does have consequences for Imoen and me. We're living a nomadic lifestyle, roaming the Sword Coast without much of a purpose but to stay alive.
We returned to Beregost and decided to travel further south, to Nashkel. Maybe we would meet Khalid and Jaheira there. On the road we ran into more bandits, human and hobgoblin. Their archers were particularly dangerous, but my spells (Sleep, Blindness) helped us pull through.
In Nashkel we met an Amnish soldier who told us about his former captain that had inexplicably started killing innocents, and then disappeared, and with mayor Berrun Ghastkill who told us he hadn't seen Khalid and Jaheira yet. This surprised me, worried me even. In the Nashkel inn another bounty hunter recognized me, a priestess. Before she could hurt us, I Held her (an ability that Baervan had recently bestowed on me).
We went looking for Khalid and Jaheira south of Nashkel, in the Mines area, because that's where Berrun Ghastkill told us the town's troubles were. We asked a young artist, a sculptor who was working on a beautiful image of Ellesime, Lady of the Elves of Suldanessalar, but he had seen no one that matched the descriptions we gave him of Khalid and Jaheira. It didn't surpise me because he seemed much to deeply engaged in his work, and overcome by his fear of a man called Greywolf, a Bounty Hunter who was after two emeralds he had apparently stolen. We met this Greywold a short while later, and soon understood why the artist had been so terrified. Greywolf was a fearsome warrior with an enchanted blade that cleaved through my magical defense (I was protected by Shield), as if it weren't there, when I tried to Hold him as I had done with the priestess in the Nashkel Inn. Fortunately I had more success with a Blindness.
We found Greywolf, who dealt both Imoen and me a heavy blow when his Blindness had worn off,
Problem is, we arrive without buffs, and Rius has some pretty lousy resistances, on top of her mediocre HP. She gets a 29% bonus to her HP, but has a Constitution of 2 (actually 1, but Shadowkeeper bumped it up to 2 and I'm too lazy to fix it). Her piercing resistance is tolerable, at -4%, but her crushing and especially slashing resistances, at -37% and -50%, are crippling.
The other party members managed to tough it out, largely thanks to Spirit Animals, Slow, and Imber's Minute Meteors. Imber is really carrying the group.
Notice that Yi Grovana has Mirror Image--this is because she picked up Ilbratha from the Umar Hills. It is her only solid defense until we can get her the Defender of Easthaven. Also notice the screen size is bigger than my previous posts. My reinstallation appears to have bumped up the size of windowed mode.
I talk-block Garren Windspear to make sure I can pick up the monsters' loot (including lots of potions) and Rius' gear before being transported to Garren's home. Plath Rededge launches an attack, with her trademark dramatic flourish.
She talks pretty loud for a mage without buffs. Imber put the dwarf to sleep with Power Word: Sleep (which in Spell Revisions can knock out critters with over 20 HP, if they fail a save at -1) before slaying Plath Rededge with Minute Meteors.
I CTRL-J over to the dryad queen and head to Trademeet rather than continue to Firkraag's lair. I want to bring back Rius at the Temple of Waukeen, but raising her nearly bankrupts us.
I chat with Lord Logan Coprith, visit Cernd, and head to the Druid Grove. This is because Trolls all attack with piercing weapons, and Poppy has fantastic AC against piercing damage.
Unfortunately, I have Tactics-style Spirit Trolls in my install, which means they throw out Greater Command, Flame Strike, and Unholy Blight. Poppy gets targeted by a Greater Command spell early on. In Spell Revisions, you get to save each round to wake up, but the spell comes with a -4 save penalty. With her base save vs. spell of 10, her innate -2 bonus, another -2 from SR Spirit Armor, and another -3 from SR Blur, she has a save vs. spell of 3. It seems she barely makes her save.
Notice the humongous distance between Poppy and the rest of the group. I saw the Greater Command spell coming, and since Imber didn't have enough time to activate Enrage, I had her and the other characters run north to escape the spell's area of effect. With their boosted movement rates--everyone in the party has above average movement speed, except for the two permanently held characters, the halfling and gnome, whom I discarded--they were able to avoid the spell entirely. It's a pretty big deal, considering their penalties to their saves vs. spell.
But that's only one spell, and Poppy isn't the only one who gets targeted. While Imber struggles to kill the far away Spirit Trolls and put an end to their antics, Yi Grovana, Rius, and Imber all get blasted by Unholy Blight, and Yi Grovana isn't able to heal herself fast enough to survive. On top of that, Poppy gets hit by a Flame Strike spell.
Poppy's HP can't drop below 1, which is probably why she survived. I forgot about that at the time, in any case, so I had her retreat and heal up.
The tide of battle changed shortly thereafter. Imber started bringing down the Spirit Trolls with Minute Meteors, neutralizing the enemy's spellpower. On top of that, one or more of the Spirit Trolls I had spotted apparently fled the battle, and I could not find them later on.
With Yi Grovana dead, and many more Spirit Trolls to go, I decided that the Druid Grove was an unacceptable risk. I brought back Yi Grovana in Trademeet, this time for only 800 gold, and decided to look elsewhere for XP.
After finding a single Arrow of Detonation, I believe in Anath's cavern, I looted the first room of Watcher's Keep and threw the Paladin's Bracers on Rius to give a boost to her poor HP. Next up is the Temple Ruins, but first, I decide to pay Mencar Pebblecrusher a visit.
I have Imber cast her newest spell, Sunfire, on Pooky and Amon, while Rius and Poppy begin with Spirit Armor. Amon doesn't do too well.
In Spell Revisions, Sunfire does not bypass magic resistance, due to having a new projectile, nor does it give the caster temporary immunity to fire. But it does have a casting speed of 1, which means Imber can spam it mercilessly if she's willing to expend the spell slots.
Does anybody know the difference between Sorcerous Amon and Amon of the Purple Brotherhood?
Brennan Risling flees early on, and despite my best efforts to block him in, he slips past and heads for the stairs. I cast Power Word Sleep on him, twice, but he makes his save both times, and we lose his loot forever.
Mencar and Smelly Porkslicer aren't too much trouble on their own, though they do have tons of healing potions. Yi Grovana has to back off from the battle to avoid spending potions, while the others try to take down Mencar quickly to keep him from drinking his own potions.
SCS2 enemies are stuffed with potions, especially healing potions, and it's good to take them down quickly, since they usually drink the best ones early on.
Finally, we go to the Temple Ruins and plow through the various undead goons skulking in the dungeon. A funny note is that Shadows in SCS2 carry potions, but they won't get to use them if you lure them to the Sun Gem pedestal in the far western room, since they die before they have a chance to heal themselves.
We get a bunch of new scrolls, including PFMW, and also pick up a Simulacrum scroll from a fallen Skeleton Warrior. We even found, earlier on, a Spell Trigger scroll (!), but have been saving them up for when we can get a Potion of Genius. A 99% chance of successfully scribing a scroll just isn't good enough for Spell Trigger.
Another important find is a Wand of Lightning. If I decide to abuse it, for fun or out of desperation, I can have Imber use it to cast Called Shot 6 times with one casting, which at 12th level will give me -6 STR drain per hit. She can even stack multiple castings of Called Shot to add more STR drain, and stack True Strike to give her 95% hit chance, and drain tens of STR in seconds, but I don't think I'll be doing that, since it would get boring... much like relying on Poppy's inability to die from damage alone. It's usually more fun to try many different things, rather than just using a single infallible trump card.
For the Shade Lord, though, I'm willing to tolerate an infallible trump card, in the form of a Protection from Undead scroll on Imber. Imber casts Invisibility on Rius and Yi Grovana, while Poppy has to cast Improved Invisibility on herself, since Poppy is immune to level 3 spells and below. Then Imber uses the scroll on herself and we enter the Shade Lord's... lair? It's not a lair if its outdoors, is it?
I send Poppy away from the battle so she isn't in sight when her invisibility wears off, then have Imber break down the Shadow Altar with Minute Meteors to prevent the summoned Shadows from clogging up the screen. She hits Shadow Patrick and some Shadows with Sunfire, finishes him off with Minute Meteors, and then turns her attention to the Shade Lord itself.
Area effect spells like Sunfire and Cone of Cold requires saves vs. breath in Spell Revisions, since they're supposed to represent your ability to dodge the damage (like a 3E Reflex save) rather than resist it. And Sunfire has a -4 save penalty, to boot... which I feel is a bit excessive. Enemies don't make their saves that often in BG2, or even ToB. ToB enemies, from Abazigal to Yaga-Shura, tend to have a save vs. death of 3 and a save vs. spell of 6. It's only ToB player characters that get negative saving throws all over the place.
The Shade Lord falls to Minute Meteors, and we get the one prize I was most looking forward to: the Cloak of the Stars. This item is ludicrously overpowered in SCS2 as in vanilla, as the darts it creates can break through Improved Mantle. You can only create 6 per day, or 18 for a single fight, unless you store them in an Ammo Belt or use the Wand of Lightning trick to increase production, but that's usually enough to hasten an enemy mage's demise.
You know what the really crazy thing about the +5 darts are? They're tagged as usable by Kensais, at least in vanilla. Even Rius can use them, and her Kensai and Archer damage bonuses both apply to darts.
This information is more clear if you view it alongside the Excel document.
Your Character's Stats:
Each aspect of the character is determined by a random number generator in a specific cell. The random number cells are all in green. The cells around the green numbers indicate what the green number indicates. For instance, under the ABILITIES section, the number next to Strength is the character's STR score.
Your Character's Classes:
Other numbers aren't so obvious. Humans are always single-classed until you dual-class, but to determine a non-human character's class, we have the MULTICLASS section. If you roll a 9 to 20, then you have one class; if you roll a 3 to 8, then you have two classes; if you roll a 1 or 2, then you have three classes. Which classes do you get? That's determined by the green numbers under the CLASS section. If those numbers are 6, 4, and 3, then you have a Fighter, Fighter/Cleric, or Fighter/Mage/Cleric, depending on how many classes you rolled under the MULTICLASS section. If you roll the same class more than once in a row, or you roll an illegal combination (Ranger/Thief) and you don't want to, just look at the next number. That's why there are 9 cells under CLASS, even if you can only have up to three classes.
Your Character's Kits:
You can roll up to 5 kits. The number of kits is determined by the bolded green number right beneath KIT. Which kits do you get? There's a list of kits to the right, with numbers next to each one, and the cells beneath KIT roll for those numbers. If you roll a 1, you get a Kensai kit; if you roll a 2, you get a Bounty Hunter kit, and so on. If you roll the same kit more than once in a row, just look at the next number. That's why there are 8 cells under KIT, even if you can only have up to five kits. Proficiencies are managed with the same system, and are located to the right. You also roll for your race and gender with the same system, on the left side of the sheet.
Your Character's Unique Effects:
If you want to assign your characters unique effects, or immunities to certain effects, you need to have a list of opcodes, which is included in the documentation with DLTCEP. The IMMUNITY TO and OPCODE sections both roll a number between 0 and 317, and each of those numbers corresponds to a BG2 opcode, which you can look up in the BG2EFFECTS Notepad file that comes with DLTCEP. Many opcodes have different effects depending on the parameters of those opcodes (the Notepad document explains which parameters mean what), so the Excel sheet includes different rolls. For instance, if you roll opcode 145 for your OPCODE cell (very bad luck!), you will have one type of spellcasting disabled, either priest spells, mage spells, or innate abilities, depending on whether the second parameter is 0, 1, or 2. In the Excel sheet, the "Zero to 2" section beneath "Parameters for opcodes" rolls a 0, 1, or 2. If you need to roll a unique set of numbers, then you can type a new random number generator into a new cell. For instance, if you want to generate a number between 1 and 52, you can type "=RANDBETWEEN(1,52)" into an empty cell, without the quotes, and that cell will generate a random number between 1 and 52.
Want to Roll a New Character?
All of the green numbers will be re-rolled if you double-click or edit any cell. If you want to roll a new character, just click on an empty cell and press delete, or double-click any cell. But if you don't want to roll a new character, make sure you don't double-click something by accident, or the current numbers will be lost.
So How do You Get Those Values onto a Character?
In order to give your characters the stats indicated in this document, you will need to use Shadowkeeper, or EEKeeper, if you have BG2:EE, and assuming EEKeeper has the same features, to add them in. Some of these things have to be done via the "Affects" [sic] tab in Shadowkeeper. You may have to copy some passive effects from existing characters in order to get the effect you want, since SK's "Affects" tab doesn't always say exactly what each effect actually does. You can tweak an effect by double-clicking it and typing in new values. The "Type" section is what the effect actually does, and you can change the effect by typing the hex version of the opcode in the BG2EFFECTS Notepad file. The magic resistance opcode is 166, which is A6 in hex, so "Type" should be "0x000000A6."
The "Target" section should be "0x00000002," to target the right character.
The "Flags" section should be "0x00000009," to make the effect persistent after death.
The "Probability" section be 100.
The "Time" section should be 0 (negative 1 may also work), or else the effect may wear off.
The "Resource 0" section is only necessary if the opcode requires a resource key to work. It may be the name of a spell or item or .eff file, depending on the opcode.
The "Parameter 1" and "Parameter 2" sections are also dependent on the opcode.
The other "Resource" sections are not necessary; they simply indicate where the effect is coming from.
Day 20:
It's strange how fast the days go by, even when not much happens. Many hours we spend walking, enjoying the outdoors (I'm glad Imoen likes nature as much as I do), and chatting. The two of us must be a curious sight to behold: the tall, trim human ginger and the wee, brown-skinned gnomish whitebeard.
Anyway, Imoen and I decided to explore the lands west, north-west of Nashkel, without much of a plan. The thing is there's not much reason to plan anything. Good people and work can be found wherever we go, it seems. I do feel safer in the wilderness than in places like Beregost or Nashkel where there's a higher probability of Bounty Hunters finding out about me.
Our travels brought us all the way to the southcoast, where we had two interesting encounters. First of all there was Charleston Nib, the archaeologist. With his crew he was digging up an ancient settlement of a long extinct race. He hired us to protect him against bandits, but in the end it was his own people we had to protect him from: a treacherous associate that asked us to kill the man, and a group of diggers that went berserk all of a sudden, possibly due to the foul air in which I sensed a mysterious evil. Almost reflexively I put the hostile diggers to rest with a Sleep spell, and after that Imoen and I put them to rest in a more permanent fashion. It was a dark day for us Charleston, Imoen and me. Slaying six or seven men to save one; I'm still unsure whether we did the right thing.
On a more positive note, we managed to avoid bloodshed when we ran into Captain Brage, the Nashkel guard captain. He was very confused and later, when we pacified him, repentant about his own actions. It turned that his violence had never sprouted from his own will, but rather from a cursed greatsword he had wielded. Imoen and I escorted him back to Nashkel where we brought him into the care of Nalin, the local priest of Helm.
On our way to Nashkel we saved a rooster from an attacking wolf, and were in for a big surprise when it thanked us in a male voice, speaking the common tongue. Melicamp as he called himself, told us he was Thalantyr's apprentice and asked us to bring him to the High Hedge to get him restored into his human form. After our visit to Nashkel, this was what we did. Thalantyr made us take down a Skeleton for its skull, and used it succesfully for Melicamp's restoration. [Note B.: I can no longer complain about Thalantyr; this must have been his 3rd or 4th success in a row.]
In nearby Beregost Imoen told me she had bought an enchanted, charisma-increasing cloak from a merchant at Feldepost's Inn. When I told her I wanted to to go and have a look at his wares, she became all nervous. After a pause she said the merchant had already left Beregost.
Day 27:
This entry isn't about the adventures of the party of Imoen, Neossa, and Lenhardt, but those of the party of said three and Quayle. Yes, a new member has joined us, and he's a kinsman no less, a rock gnome and a Hoodwinker of Baravar Cloakshadow, with a variety of arcane tricks up his sleeve as well. We met him at the Nashkel Carnival after a we completed a mission east of Beregost for Keldath Ormlyr. Hmm, maybe I should relate that mission first, for it was quite the adventure.
We were to slay a number of Basilisks, led by an evil wizard named Mutamin, that had petrified many innocents and were gradually making their way westward, to the town of Beregost. If the wizard was unwilling to cease his nefarious activities, he too could be slain. We found the Basilisks easily enough. I had a green scroll of Protection from Petrification to protect myself against their gaze attacks, but it wore off when i still had three of the creatures to deal with. A Ghoul that had little love for the lizards helped me with one of them, but it got Blinded by the wizard (a fellow gnome!) when it attacked another one. This enabled the Basilisk to slay its attacker without difficulty. From a distance I Blinded the Basilisk just when it killed the Ghoul.
Back to the Nashkel Carnival. In one of the tents we had thought a shop, Imoen and I had a violent encounter with a wizard we had witnessed killing a female sorceress for no reason but her being a 'witch'. After a while of ineffective spellcasting,
Our first adventure with Quayle took us to the coast again, where the Hoodwinker said he was headed (albeit only after we had told we were going there.) It was a perilous journey. The shores were inhabited by Sirines, and a bit further inland, an army of Hobgoblins (including elite archers) had colonized the soil.
Very interesting party setup you have going above.
I have been meaning to ask you, since you have these unusually edited characters:
- can you make a Sorcerer/Paladin multiclass
(Now, I know that keeper does not let you edit it, since it is an engine limitation. So this would have to be a sorcerer kit or something [see below]. I know nothing about editing kits myself, so consider this a friendly plea, prettypleasewithsugarontop.
- could it be done in the EE install (as I understand you use the original BG2 install for your mods)
Here is an idea for a kit [practically my wetdream for a Bhaalspawn]:
** "Eldritch Knight" (yes, *that* one) - Sorcerer kit:
advantages:
+1 Thac0 every 3 levels up to 20
+1/2 APR at lvl 10 and 20
+ weapon selection every 4 levels (and one extra at lvl 1)
+ ability to specialize in any melee weapon and style (for flavor,
probably exclude shields)
+ hit dice: d6
disadvantages:
- can cast 1 less spell per level (like DD)
- caster level reduced by 1/4th (rounded up)
- spell progression reduced by 1/4th (e.g. you get your first 3rd
level spell at lvl 8 etc.)
- cannot wear armor or shields
The idea is that you play this as a spellsword where you select buffs
for your spells.
Example: at end of SoA you have an 18th level Edlritch Knight
(effective Sorcerer level of 14) that knows
1 lvl 7 spell, 2 lvl 6 spells, can cast stone skin 4 times a day etc.
dual wielding katanas for 3APR
thac0 of 7
Comparable to Fighter/Mage at same XP -- arguably better for being
able to cast your selected buffs more consistently.
It depends on if the capabilities of Near Infinity for EE are the same as for vanilla BG2. But they probably are. If you like, I can send you a detailed description of how all this can be done.
Perhaps, upon completing my current run (Khael the FMC), for better or for worse, I'll try to construct such a character. I'll ask for your help then.
Meanwhile, I'll be following the exploits of your team.
I guess I never got around to telling you that compliments make me uncomfortable. Or that I'm resolutely egalitarian. But they do. And I am so...Yeah...
That's ok. I can tell you're just trying to have fun. And I'm all for fun. Fun is good.
But no: you can't be Cleric BelgarathMTH in the Church of Goddess Alesia. I prefer you as just BelgarathMTH. And I prefer to be just Alesia_BH. I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
It's funny how we tend to single out and celebrate individuals even when their actions are products of the communities and cultures that they're a part of. The No Reload Challenge has a history dating back before the current ~500 page thread, back to the original Bioware forums. It was started by Retet and was supported by a number of talented players, including Canman, Rheannan, and Frabjous. By the time I came along there were already many pages of content. Much of what I know about the game, and the approach I take to play, comes from my experiences with them. I'm not special. I'm just a link to an earlier generation of players.
When I took a multi-year break from BG, the challenge was rebooted on the new Bioware forums by Corey Russell and G Admiral Thrawn. Corey Russell has supported the challenge consistently since then. Other dedicated players, including Gate70, Grond0, SergBlackstrider, and USSNorway, have kept it vibrant even as I've drifted in and out of BG play. New players revitalize it on a daily basis, and the thread is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts due in part to Blackraven and CT, amongst others. I've had a few memorable runs, but -fortunately- I'm not unique in that regard: there have been many memorable runs by many talented players over the years.
Anyhoo. I'm glad you and others have enjoyed my contributions to the thread. But those contributions constitute just a fraction of the No Reload Challenge's content, and my contributions wouldn't have been possible were it not for the broader community. If I've played a unique role the Bioware threads, it's only in the sense that I've provided a link between the old forum and new forum communities. Perhaps I, Blackraven, CKT, CrevsDaak -and anyone else who frequents both the Bioware.com and Baldrusgate.com forums- can play a similar role here.
Best of luck everyone! I hope this thread will have a storied history! I'll be in touch.
Cheers,
A.
I hear you. Maybe hero worship is a little excessive, but it's not just your record in no-reload runs. You have also been a friendly and supportive voice in the community and we appreciate it. If you can't accept our worship, then please accept our respect.
We're just glad to hear from you.
Best,
A.
Day 37:
Another tenday has passed and I haven't updated this journal. I always postpone this (I find my spellbooks more interesting than my journal), and yet I do feel satisfied each time I write in here. Keeping a record of my party's exploits makes them 'official', and lasting. (Though I could lie or exaggerate and who'd know the difference?)
After our evasion of dangerous creatures in the Lighthouse Area, we weren't so lucky further north. Quayle and I had to draw heavily on our spell repertoire to keep us safe against differnt types of Ogres and Wolves,
At any rate, the party traveled further north to the Ankheg-infested area that Imoen and I had visited before. Thanks to E's magical ring I had plenty of Sleep spells, so I thought I would just put the giant insects to rest, so that we could dispatch them without risk. Initially this worked well enough,
Both Imoen and Quayle were more dead than alive. [Note B.: as a Bhaalspawn, and thus a non-resurrectable being, Imoen can't die in this playthrough, at least not until Spellhold because there would be no logical explanation for her return in SoA.] I had to haul my friends back to the Friendly Arm Inn, a few hours from where I found myself. To relieve myself of the burden of their packs, I entered an Ankheg nest, battled my way past three or four Ankhegs (relying on the precious Wand of Paralyzation and on a summoned Skeleton), and stored most of Quayle's and Imoen's belonngings in a small treasure hoard. (At least everything would be safe from bandits and scavengers I reckoned.) I found the corpse of a young man in a state of decomposition, no longer resurrectable. It was the lost son of Brun, a husbandman we had met on the farmland near the Ankheg nest. I brought Brun the body, and helped him bury his son. I also gave him 100 GP to tide him over. I then asked Brun to help me haul Imoen and Quayle back to the FAI for treatment by Gellana Mirrorshade, and he agreed. Better prepared, with three Skeletons, and with my companions more cautious this time around, we returned to successfully clear the Ankheg nest (and to reclaim my companions' stored goods and to fetch some loot).
Day 47:
Imoen's focus on her arcane studies created a vacancy in our party: we needed someone who could scout and was skilled with locks and traps. We decided to visit the fabled Firewine Ruins, a place where adventurers like ourselves were relatively likely to be found, we thought. Invisibly we walked the Firewine plains. We ignored small bands of Ogres and bandits, with the intention of returning later to make those plains a safer place. We did intervene when a pack of Xvarts were trying to kill a farmer's cow.
With our new companion we trekked to Durlag's Tower, another place that we thought would attract adventurers. We met but one, Rigilio, a human Thief, but he had no interest in traveling with us. The tower was full of traps, and dangerous creatures (we spotted various Ghasts for example), so we didn't stay long. I did read a tome containing a dry analysis of legal battles, historic events, government policies, philosophical treatises, and theories of magic and metaphysics. As such this wouldn't deserve mentioning here, but when I finished reading I was able to cast another tier 3 spell, so I suspect the tome held some kind of powerful enchantment. Unfortunately it dissolved when I closed it.
Our new band has been on the road most of the time, and our travels have been largely uneventful though there have been two notable exceptions: in Beregost we Silenced and slew a Bard that attacked us after we refused to kill three innocent men for her,
Now I'm not the party treasurer, Alora and Imoen have filled that role, so I can't tell for sure, but I was surprised about the amount of gold we had and all the valuable items we could afford. Our prized possessions now include a suit of Shadow Armor (Alora), a suit of Caster's Chain (Quayle) [note B.: Alora stole this AC 5 armor at the Nashkel Carnival], the Claw of Kazgaroth with all kinds of protective properties (myself), a Shield Amulet as improved by Thalantyr (permanent AC 4 and +1 to saves when equipped, myself), a Robe of the Good Archmagi (Imoen), and Cloak of Displacement (myself) and a Returning Frost Dart (Imoen) we bought in the fishing village of Ulgoth's Beard after a tip from Alora. [Note B.: The party hadn't spent much gold on items up till then; I think only on two Ioun Stones. In Nashkel, Alora stole other goods apart from the Caster's Chain, and sold them to Erdane the fence near Durlag's Tower, furnishing the gold for the above-mentioned purchases.]
Your install seem to be more dangerous then mine. Though some of the more powerful items probably balance it somewhat. In my runs, I usually leave Lighthouse areas for very late. (Charm is very dangerous in BG.)
I also like how Alora is more accessible in your version. I almost never use her, because by the time I reach her my party is already settled...
Good luck.
Luckily, their level drain counts as a level 1 spell, and Poppy is immune to level 3 spells and below.
Or, at least, she should be. Her spell level immunities don't seem to be functioning properly. She's been able to resist an Invisibility spell from Imber, but not a Web spell. It turns out she's only immune to level 3 spells, not level 3 and below, and apparently the Spell Revisions version of Invisibility counts as a 3rd-level spell!
With a lot of finagling and maneuvering and politicking and lollygagging, we manage to bring down the quickly-regenerating AND self-healing Vampiric Wraiths with Minute Meteors. Imber again carries the party, while her friends serve mostly as decoys.
Funny thing is, Imber herself is completely immune to level drain while under the effects of Enrage, and True Strike should have been more than enough to compensate for the penalties of using missile weapons at close range. Imber could have dealt with the critters on her own. I could have saved 1000 gold in Restoration spells had I simply used Imber as my tank.
The other enemies of the area--Sword Spiders, Phase Spiders, Mephits, and a room full of jellies--aren't too much trouble (Minute Meteors for the first three, and Sunfire for the jellies), but there was a brief scare when Rius wandered over a petrification trap. I had her drop most of her equipment during pause in the off chance that she should be shattered and lost forever, but she made her save nonetheregardless.
We manage to store the darts successfully in our newfound Ammo Belt, but hit a snag when retrieving them.
I can't remove the darts! It's only one space in Rius' inventory, but I'm not willing to let that go. I get rid of the item with SK and decide to use CLUAConsole to create darts in the future, to save myself the trouble of dealing with the bug.
It's an excellent display of my priorities. I'm perfectly willing to exploit the bug that makes the darts permanent, but not willing to accept the bug that makes some of them unmovable.
We still haven't bothered visiting Pai'Na--we were in a big rush to get those darts--so we finally head back to the Graveyard and enter the lower crypts. Yi Grovana, always eager to help, sneaks ahead and tries to backstab a Giant Spider. She fails in a most spectacular fashion.
No, I don't think this party is too overpowered.
Poor Grovana. She just wants to help out. But she has to run back to the group and let Imber deal with the creepy crawlies.
On to Pai'Na! We don't have a whole lot of area-effect spells--both Rius and Poppy get a -3 penalty to their 3rd level spell slots, so we don't have much room for Fireballs--so the spidies could cause a problem. I want Imber to focus her Minute Meteors on Pai'Na, so I have Poppy use her one Sunfire spell to clear up the critters, once they've gathered in a tight circle.
I'm not entirely sure why I let her do that when Imber was so close. I already know from the readme for Spell Revisions that Imber's Mirror Images will no longer protect against area-effect damage like Sunfire. And I know she has a -31% weakness to fire. And I know her HP pool is basically just that of a normal mage. And I know her saves aren't stellar.
She only survived the Sunfire spell thanks to Enrage. Normally when we think Berserker we think immunities, but in this case, it's the temporary HP boost that saved Imber's life.
We defeat Pai'Na with Minute Meteors and retrieve the spider figurine. Now we can summon Kitty! I should probably reinstall the Item Upgrade mod, though, to make sure Kitty is actually going to be of much use against SCS2 enemies.
I feel we've gotten strong enough to safely tackle the Spirit Trolls of the Druid Grove, so we return and pick up where we left off. As before, Poppy runs to the front because of her AC bonus vs. piercing damage, then casts Spirit Armor, which is just fast enough with her casting speed bonus to kick in before the Trolls can take a swing at her. She has about -10 AC against piercing attacks and immunity to Unholy Blight, but no defense against Flame Strike or Greater Command. Behind her, Rius also casts Spirit Armor (her AC is worse and her casting time slower, so she hangs back), Yi Grovana does nothing, and Imber activates Enrage, and summons Spirit Animals to gang up on the Trolls.
It's a decent formula for dealing with the Trolls, but we still have to make saves, and though Poppy is immune to Unholy Blight, the party is quite vulnerable to magic damage. Only Imber has resistance to it; her friends have weaknesses against magic damage.
The formula is a little less effective, though, when we're facing more than two solitary Trolls. For some reasons, Umber Hulks have joined the party. I've never seen them in the Druid Grove before. To deal with the additional threat, Imber buffs herself up and distracts some Spirit Trolls just long enough to blast them with Sunfire.
So why am I not using Sunfire to deal with everything? Well, the party does have decent MR overall, and Sunfire in Spell Revisions does not bypass MR, but the reality is that most of the party has pretty lousy saves vs. breath, the new Sunfire has a save penalty of -4, and, as if that wasn't enough, most of my party members have weaknesses to fire damage... it's not just Imber that's vulnerable. Only Yi Grovana, in Salamander form, is safe.
So why don't I just buff everybody with Protection from Fire? Well, there are four different problems with that. First, Rius and Poppy barely have any 3rd-level spell slots, so they couldn't cover everybody. Second, we have other 3rd level spells more worth taking. What happens if my party gets paralyzed and I don't have Remove Paralysis?
You might wonder why I have Remove Paralysis in a party without clerics. Well, both Poppy and Rius are supposed to have Paladin levels, and I've added Remove Paralysis and other cleric spells to their spellbooks. I know neither of them should be high enough level for a Paladin to cast 3rd level spells, and one of them is supposed to have a -3 penalty to 3rd-level PALADIN spells as well (which means no 3rd-level Paladin spells, ever), but I'm too lazy to do that much micromanaging. I just treat them as mage spells. The Cowled Wizards do.
The third problem is quite simple. Poppy is immune to level 3 spells, so she can't benefit anyway.
And the fourth problem? In Spell Revisions, Protection from Fire isn't a 3rd-level spell in the first place, making all of my previous claims pointless. It's been bumped up to 5th level, both the priest and mage versions. And guess what? Both Poppy and Rius ALSO have -1 penalty to their 5th-level spell slots. And Rius, being a Bard with stunted level progression, only HAS one such spell slot, so she's got nothing.
Imber is an absolute monster with Sunfire. But she's liable to toast one of her sisters, and we have to spend over 1000 gold to raise just one of them, since we have no cleric.
There's still a place for Sunfire, though. Half the Trolls inside the Troll Mound died to Imber's Sunfire spells.
Anyhoo, next we have to deal with Kyland Lind, and also some people fighting Trolls just west of Kyland Lind. Yi Grovana hides in shadows to scout ahead.
Does it seem odd to you that a great flaming salamander like Yi Grovana can hide in shadows? It seems odd to me. But with her 3 base STR, she can't really move unless she's shapeshifted, and the Salamander form is the fastest.
Kyland Lind is a problem. In SCS2, he uses Insect Plague, and again, my party members have awful, awful saving throws. But I have a plan for that.
You know how the OP suggested we avoid prebuffing, for enemies as well as ourselves? Well, I've found a way to re-interpret those rules.
I can certainly cast buffing spells during combat. Nobody's questioning that. So why not cast a whole bunch of buffing spells during the fight before Kyland Lind, when the humans are keeping the hostile Trolls busy, and then approach Kyland Lind with all of my buffs active? Technically I didn't cast them outside of battle.
The funniest part is Rius casting MGOI and Imber casting SI: Conjuration when there are no spellcasters in sight.
Poppy greets Kyland Lind with a poisoned dart to the fact. Yi Grovana throws out Dispel Magic, in case the druids have Ironskins pre-cast, and Rius, just to be a pain, casts Web.
What's especially unfair is that, despite Kyland Lind giving us a stern warning and turning hostile, his Shadow Druid buddies and spirit animals stay neutral... at least, until we attack them, though even then, their circles don't turn red.
Sunfire isn't much use against the Shadow Druids, who appear to have an innate immunity.
It still fries their animal pals quite readily, and the Druids themselves, whether due to staying neutral, being webbed, or just getting hit over and over again, fail to get any spells off the ground. Kyland Lind tries to flee, but we pick him off before he can escape.
The Myconids, always a chaotic mass, manage to confuse our summons and clog up the bridge as usual, but we have enough ranged power to get rid of the Spore Colonies before they can summon too many Myconids. The only oddity is a Spore Colony mysteriously "walking" around.
Normally these guys tend to stay in one spot. Anybody know why they might decide to start sliding around?
Dalok and his friends also went down with Web and ranged weapons, and Cernd killed Faldorn. We return to Trademeet, but pick up three Potions of Stone Form from Adratha on the way.
Why Potions of Stone Form? Well, Khan Zahraa and his less leg-having fellow djinn use Flesh to Stone spells, and though we do have two Wizard Slayers on the team, high APR, and a fair amount of magic resistance, I can't guarantee Imber will survive unless I get her saves below zero. And Potions of Stone Form are stackable, so I can make Imber, if no one else, immune to Flesh to Stone. The best way to prevent Imber from turning to stone is to turn her to stone!
Shortly before the fight, I realize that Wizard Slayers can't use Potions of Stone Form.
Turns out it doesn't matter. Khan Zahraa doesn't do too well against a barrage of poisoned darts.
Faafirah manages to cast Stoneskin, but his defenses don't last long. The last of the djinn fall, and we report our success to Guildmistress Busybody and Lord Logan Coinpurse.
The Shadow Hippies are dead! Now Trademeet can make MONEY again! Woo! Woo! Woo!
How is your run going? On hold, thanks to PoE? Would be understandable, looks to be a great game.
@semiticgod, nice to see you make some good progress there. I have little in terms of tips or other input because it's pretty much a different game you're playing
Lenhardt, Gnome Cleric/Illusionist, 5th (very brief) update
Day 54:
We traveled south from Ulgoth's Beard, although we made a detour around the vast Cloakwood (Kivan's recommendation, those woods are apparently very dangerous). On the northcoast we helped a kinsman of Kivan, the Elf Keth'sim Dwin'anea, fight three Sahuagin that had come for him after their Malenti slave had refused to kill him.
[Note B.: I'm going on a nice little trip to the country with my girlfriend tomorrow and won't be back until next weekend. I don't think I'll be online much (if at all). This mini-installment is mainly for myself, to know exactly what Lenhardt's status is / plans are, i.e. rescuing/recruiting Dynaheir, clearing the Nashkel Mines, maybe getting tank Minsc in Kivan's place.]
The Yuan-ti mage didn't have much chance to do anything. It got one casting of PFMW off the ground, plus a Contingency (I think) for Stoneskin, but Poppy's poisoned darts went right through PFMW.
I'm starting to think that this no pre-buffing thing is really putting enemy mages at a disadvantage. They just don't have time to protect themselves from spell disruption. If they have defenses against physical attacks, you can hit them with Magic Missile. If they have defenses against magical attacks, you can hit them with physical attacks. Without prebuffing, they don't come with both, so they have no window of safety in which to operate.
I played things a little risky against the Spirit Trolls, neglecting to activate Enrage on Imber.
Thankfully, she recovered soon after. SR Greater Command allows you to save each round to wake up, greatly reducing the effective duration.
Imber hit 12th level around here, and chose Improved Haste as her first pick. This is to empower her STR drain. If I really want to go for broke, I can activate three Called Shots in sequence, use True Strike to boost her THAC0, and then attack at 10 APR for -3 STR drain per hit. But that's for special occasions.
Glaicas falls quickly to Imber's Minute Meteors, despite his high HP.
Is this because Imber has a +4 damage bonus on top of her Archer bonuses? Well, actually, no. I just checked her file in Shadowkeeper and found that she has no Archer bonuses to hit and damage with ranged weapons. She should have another +4 to hit and damage with missile weapons. I corrected the error.
Yi Grovana was also missing +1 to hit and damage with ranged weapons. And Rius was missing most of her Kensai bonuses. She's supposed to have another +4 to hit and damage. I just corrected these errors. I've been playing the game up until now without the right bonuses.
Now Imber should be doing 1d4+8 damage per hit with Minute Meteors. Plus another 5 fire damage, since SR Minute Meteors have less base damage and more fire damage than in vanilla. So she's actually got more damage output than a normal Sorcerer with Energy Blades, at least if she casts Improved Haste on herself.
I test out the STR drain on a Spirit Troll, and find that it dies just a little bit before it would have died of HP loss.
All that's left is Torgal.
Since I know Tactics-style Torgal comes with Yuan-ti Mages as support, I decide to lure him closer to me before the mages can take action. Oddly enough, they don't follow Torgal at all--in SCS2, all opponents should make effective calls for help--and I get to fight him alone.
STR drain fails to kill him, oddly enough, but I do deal tons of damage to him.
Since the Yuan-ti Mages still haven't joined the fray, I decide to take the battle to them. While Torgal is dying, I summon a bunch of critters to draw enemy fire--again, casting buffs during battle to circumvent the no pre-buffing rule.
To my further surprise, the Yuan-ti Mages are bolstered not simply by a group of Spirit Trolls, but by an Umber Hulk Elder. And the mages already have their buffs active.
I underestimated this group. But the biggest problem was the Spirit Trolls, and their Flame Strike spell. It hits Rius.
Rius is honestly not a key part of my strategy. Imber is the only essential character--and not just because she's our Charname--so losing Rius is not going to weaken our power by 25%, as it normally would for a 4-person group. But the loss of Rius suggests to me that we're not in good enough shape to handle this battle. The enemy mages have visible buffs active, there are still lots of Spirit Trolls hanging around, and the Umber Hulk Elder is a heavy-hitting fighter type that could easily take a chunk out of our HP with a lucky swipe.
I decide to flee. Torgal is already dead, so the quest is completed, and all I'll be missing is the loot by Nalia's father's body. I pick up all of Rius' most important loot, drop all the stacks of darts cluttering up my inventory, and pick up Torgal's claw and other items on the way out.
Imber gets hit by Breach on the way out. You might notice I had Spell Immunity active in the previous post, but it's not SI: Abjuration; it's SI: Enchantment, since Imber would be vulnerable to Greater Command during the fatigue period after raging. I don't have time to pause for Stoneskin, so I just keep running.
The Elder Umber Hulk follows us on the way out. It confuses Yi Grovana and starts pummeling her, and her crushing resistance just isn't enough. With her AC as bad as it is, the Elder Umber Hulk can hit her reliably, and since she's confused, she can't drink any potions.
I have no Rod of Resurrection, so I can't heal her from afar. Instead, I try to disable the Elder Umber Hulk, and manage to scare it with Spook. It runs around in circles while we attack it from afar.
The monster falls and Yi Grovana recovers. We give up on taking down the Yuan-ti Mages and Spirit Trolls, and instead simply report our success to Nalia.
While inside the hold, I tested out Poppy's Polymorph Self spell and the jelly form, which in SR does not have the 100% magic resistance as in vanilla. But it does get a very nasty 5d5 acid damage ranged attack, with a nonmagical, level 0 slow effect on a failed save vs. polymorph, that I can boost with Belm in the off hand. It's an excellent ranged alternative to the Flail of Ages, although the jelly form is almost incapable of moving.
I do some poking around in DLTCEP and discover that, at least in SR, the Polymorph Self spell has the same structure as the Shapechange spell. This means that the Shapechange trick will work for Polymorph Self. If I have Poppy cast Polymorph Self, kill her, rest, and then raise her with a Rod of Resurrection, the shapeshifts will be permanent, and she won't have to cast the spell ever again.
It's not really necessary, but I like the idea. Problem is, you really do need the Rod of Resurrection to make it work. Raising them with a spell will not, because in ToB, the Raise Dead, Resurrection, and Mass Raise Dead spells all remove polymorph abilities. The Rod of Resurrection, however, does not, and therefore can perform the Shapechange trick even in ToB.
But the Rod of Resurrection costs over 10,000 gold at the Adventurer's Mart, and we can nab one more cheaply from Mekrath. So, we need to head to the Temple sewers to enter his lair. On the way, we encounter some Beholders, an SCS2 addition. I use my standard formula for dealing with them: turn invisible and lead some summons over to deal with the Beholders instead of exposing myself to them directly.
There's one other thing I want to do before we go any further, though. I leave the Temple sewers and head to the Docks.
Renal Bloodscalp wears an extra pair of Boots of Speed. But if you attack him, a super-powered version of Arkanis Gath spawns in to kill you. Arkanis Gath has the MINHP1 item, making him unkillable and immune to all disablers, and he has a +3 short sword with a range of 15 (same as a dart) that kills you instantly unless you have immunity to opcode 55, which you can only get through Death Ward or the upgraded form of Hindo's Doom, neither of which I have.
Arkanis Gath can only be killed through stat drain, and has 18 STR, which I can drain in 6 hits. But since I have no defense against his attack, unless I go to the trouble of buying and using a PFMW scroll (which I'd rather save for more important encounters) before battle, I can't expect Imber to survive. I do a test run to see how it goes.
Arkanis Gath spawned in a different location than I expected. The last couple times I've seen him, he appeared right next to Renal Bloodscalp, but this time, he appeared right next to Imber, a little ways south-southwest of Renal Bloodscalp, and targeted her right after slaying Yi Grovana, ignoring all the summons I had placed on his ostensible spawning point to distract him.
The weird thing is that, even though his sword has a range of 15, he actually didn't take a swing at Imber until he was within the range of a normal dagger. When Imber ran, he gave chase rather than striking from afar. I hoped to avoid his second attack of the round, since Imber's AC vs. piercing damage is quite strong (though his THAC0 is -4), but he managed to land a hit.
The test run failed, so no Boots of Speed for me. Not until Spellhold and the Planar Prison. But Arkanis Gath's unwillingness to attack at long range suggests he could be outmaneuvered. I decide to try and see if I can take him down again. I reposition my group based on his new spawn point and keep Imber well out of the way.
He targets my summons, slaying them quickly, but he only has 2 APR, 1 base APR and another from a permanent haste effect. This gives me enough time to start hitting him with Minute Meteors. Rius, our second Archer, also pitches in with darts. Yi Grovana has the Archer kit as well, but I prefer to keep her in Salamander form, so no ranged attacks for her.
Arkanis Gath, the unkillable thief, has fallen. But since these were test runs, I don't get to keep Renal Bloodscalp's boots. Instead, I slink away to Bodhi for some quest XP.
Bodhi has such excellent lines.
I still have to fight Arkanis Gath, but not the unkillable version: I just have to face a normal thief alongside Mook and the other Shadow Thieves at the south end of the Docks.
I use the skirmishes with the Shadow Thieves at the front of their headquarters as an excuse to cast my buffs in preparation for the fight with Mook. Since SR buffs tend to last much longer than in vanilla, I don't have to worry about running out in the middle of the fight. Blur, notably, lasts 5 turns, and though it's not longer stackable, it gives a +3 bonus to saves instead of +1. And my characters need all the saves they can get.
Mook is not actually much of a threat. Yi Grovana can reveal all of the thieves at once with True Seeing, and we have lots of summons to help us out.
I still have difficulty evaluating just how tough my party really is. The advantages are crazy, the disadvantages are crazy, I'm dealing with a spell mod I've never used, and unlike my normal SCS2 runs, the spellcasters don't pre-buff. The gameplay is very foreign to me.
I think I will tweak my install to allow pre-buffing. It will give me an incentive not to use minor skirmishes as opportunities to buff before the big fights, and it will keep the enemy mages from dying quite so easily.
To test out the new settings, I decide to take on a higher-level enemy party: Gaius and his sewer-dwelling pals. I buff up the party, manage to lay a trap (Imber, as a Bounty Hunter with no thief or bard levels, only has 15 in Set Traps), and begin the attack. I avoid targeting Gaius to make sure his buffs come out before I can start to harm him.
Rengaard is paralyzed! And Imber lands a critical on Tarnor the Hatchetman. With her Archer bonuses finally factored in, the damage is quite excessive. Notice that Poppy and Imber are protected by SI: Abjuration, but Rius, as a bard with -1 level 5 spell slots, gets no such spell.
Yi Grovana casts Dispel Magic at level 15. SCS2 nerfs the Inquisitor Dispel Magic ability to cast at 1.5x caster level. It doesn't bring down Gaius' defenses, but it seems to have removed some early buffs from the others.
Notice Tarnor the Hatchetman is dead. Same goes for Rengaard. Zorl isn't far behind.
Why haven't I closed in on Gaius? The thing is, he's got PFMW active. So why don't I just nail him with nonmagical darts?
Well, I dropped all of my stacks of darts when I was fleeing Torgal's minions, to make room for magical items and other valuables. And I forgot to buy new ones. So Gaius is immune to all of our weapons, as well as our area-effect spells, by virtue of his spell protections.
But wait! Sunfire can break through GOI!
Though it's not so effective when the target is immune to fire. Like Gaius is. But I certainly did do a lot of damage to Rius. Too bad she's on my side.
Gaius gets a Horrid Wilting spell off the ground, but I minimize the damage by having his target, Yi Grovana, flee to the east. Soon his PFMW wears off (SR reduces the duration to 3 rounds, notably), and he only has Stoneskin to protect him.
His Stoneskins vanish. That tends to happen when you're getting hit by 20 attacks per round.
Notice the abnormally large stack of +5 darts in Imber's hands. I did go to the trouble of fetching the Ammo Belt before I let myself have any permanent darts from the Cloak of Stars, but I'm honestly too lazy to keep creating them, so I cheated in a permanent variant, which saves a lot of time.
We send in the Flesh Golem to get the ball rolling, followed by a Dispel Magic from Yi Grovana.
This is more through habit than anything else. They're not stupid enough to waste their best spells on an enemy they can slay in one round, so the Flesh Golem doesn't actually drain their spellpower. I rush in and start slaying the non-mage Yuan-ti, waiting for their PFMW spells to wear out. One of them casts Greater Malison, exacerbating our already terrible saving throws, while another conjures a Mordenkainen's Sword. These guys are pretty high level. I'm a ways away from getting any 7th-level spells.
Still, once their PFMW spells wear off, I pelt them with darts and their Stoneskins fall.
Imber also lands a rather impressive critical hit.
The Yuan-ti Mages fail to disable us. The fight ends pretty quickly.
Finally, I get some nonmagical darts (CLUAConsole, since they're so cheap anyway) and pay Mekrath a visit. I accidentally tell him I'm going to leave--I normally lie to Rayic Gethras about my motives, but tell the truth to Mekrath--so I attack him to get him hostile. He brings up PFMW, so we switch to nonmagical darts. Anticipating Mekrath's PFMW spell, I failed to have Imber conjure Minute Meteors, to ensure that she could equip nonmagical weapons.
He fails a spell despite Stoneskin. Wizard Slayers are wicked.
He falls under sustained pressure and we obtain the Rod of Resurrection.
My own run (Khael, FMC) is on pause largely due to Real Life (TM) at the moment. [See, my charname has an avatar in this here world that worries about things like 'job', 'love' etc... Party members had been egging him on to drop such silliness and get on with his own story.]
[Also, I did peak at PoE for a bit: it looks promising and after some patching I look forward to playing it sometime. Though, time will decide if it is no-reload balanced for a good challenge. e.g. IWD just is NOT. I found myself playing BG/BG2 with over 10x frequency compared to my IWD clock time for this reason.]
... but hey it is fantastic to be able to read all your ongoing adventures even when mine is going through a Spring-induced coma at the moment.
Cheers all around fellow no-reloaders!
The exploit is still open--Yi can talk to the djinni. She picks the Shapechange option, gains access to some new forms on top of her Avenger forms, and is promptly slain by her teacher, Imber.
We rest, resurrect Grovana, and check her innates. She has the Iron Golem form! Although she's missing the Fire and Earth Elemental forms, she's got the most important one. I test out the forms and check the resistances.
There's something terribly wrong with the Iron Golem form's resistances, though.
No. No, that's just not acceptable. A character in Iron Golem form is supposed to have 20% physical damage resistance. This is just silly.
She even has immunity to poison. Iron Golems get that immunity, but not people in Iron Golem form. I try pelting Yi with a Minute Meteor. She's immune to them! She's even got the Iron Golem's immunity to +2 weapons and below!
I check the files. It turns out Spell Revisions tweaks the Shapechange spell. The new forms are much more balanced, with one exception:
-The Mind Flayer form isn't affected much. It doesn't get the physical damage resistance bonuses of my SCS2 install, only the vanilla resistances, and it also drains 4 INT per hit instead of 5.
-The Greater Wolfwere is greatly nerfed, and rightly so. The original 8 HP regeneration per second made the caster virtually unkillable. Now it's been reduced to 2 HP per second, and the form is now immune to nonmagical weapons.
-The Troll form is now a Spirit Troll, regenerates only 1 HP per 2 seconds, has permanent improved invisibility, and drains 1 STR on a failed save vs. death for 5 turns. The vanilla Troll form was pointless, as the Greater Wolfwere form was superior in every way.
-The Earth Elemental form gets physical damage resistances, as does the Fire Elemental form, to a lesser extent. Now they're pretty decent alternatives to the other forms.
The Iron Golem form, however, has experienced dramatic buffs. Its fist damage has been reduced from 4d10 to 2d10+4 (with an added +4 to hit as well), but it now gains immunity to poison, can only be hit by +3 weapons or better, gets 25% crushing damage resistance, and 50% resistance to slashing, piercing, and missile damage.
If Yi Grovana uses this form... she'll be invincible. She's immune to magic and all the elements, 70% resistant to magic damage, as if it matters with 100 MR, has 90% immunity to slashing and piercing damage, and has 50% resistance to crushing.
I give her the original Iron Golem form with Shadowkeeper instead.
The resistances are still terribly high, but she's not flat-out invincible anymore.
I honestly don't think I'll use the Iron Golem form, even the vanilla version--at least not until epic levels, when Imber can cast Shapechange, and even then, Yi Grovana would probably be too strong.
I don't have anything against cheesy tactics or cheap tricks or cheating or whatever. But using the Shapechange abilities would interfere with my original goal in this run: to test out some fully randomized characters. It's the same problem with the Wand of Lightning trick to stack Called Shot effects. I won't learn very much if I use every dirty trick at my disposal.
I remember Dooku's line in 'Attack of the Clones': "Brave, but foolish, my friend." (Of course, Dooku did not survive, after all.)
Then again your mage battles seem to be going well so far.
I lost some games to the sewer party before. And I decided to permanently remove the mage prebuff component after a SCS Lavok wiped the floor with me. (After death, I reloaded to test if it was possible for me to survive at all -- short of cheese an early BG2 party WILL die to SCS-enhanced Lavok...)
The Rakshasa got one PFMW spell, one Cloudkill spell, and one Skull Trap spell off the ground before perishing. The Skull Trap was a bit of a scare, but thankfully Imber has a slight resistance to magic damage... though her friends take the Skull Trap pretty hard. They all have weaknesses to magic damage.
I finally get around to doing the Shapechange trick again, this time with Poppy and Polymorph Self, mostly just for convenience's sake, so we don't have to re-cast Polymorph Self.
Problem is, I can't actually kill Poppy. She has a minimum HP of 1.
The "Spell Ineffective" message is because Minute Meteors' fire damage counts as a level 3 spell, to which Poppy is immune. But Poppy is still perfectly vulnerable to stat drain. Imber activates Called Shot three times, and kills Poppy in four hits.
Nobody in my party has high STR. I rest, resurrect her, and check her innates. Success!
I wonder if I'll ever actually use those forms.
The problem with Firkraag's dungeon in SCS2 is that it has vampires in it depending on your level. And we're high enough level to trigger the vampires.
And they're not just vampires. Whenever I've seen them, they're all Ancient Vampires, with one or two Elder Vampires mixed in. In SCS2, vampires have CON drain, they target NPCs without Negative Plane Protection (not that anyone in my party actually has NPP in the first place), they throw around charm spells, they summon hordes of diseased rats, they summon Dread Wolves, they shapeshift to get ridiculous damage resistances, they turn invisible, they turn to mist and become immune to all damage... and they regenerate. This means that you have to kill them fast, because they can disappear, and regenerate while hidden, or shapeshift, and regenerate while they're resistant to your weapons, or just flat out turn to mist, and regenerate no matter what you do.
I assume SCS2 vampires were meant to be fought without resorting to Protection from Undead. But I hate these things, and for some reason I use Protection from Undead scrolls instead of just uninstalling that component of SCS2.
But there are only so many scrolls in the game. So who do I protect?
Rius, Poppy, and Yi Grovana all have pretty poor damage output, relatively speaking. Imber has crazy damage output, but she doesn't have True Sight. Yi Grovana does. Eventually I decide to use one of the scrolls on Yi Grovana, and have her deal with the vampires. Grovana is far too stupid to use the scroll herself--her INT is 3--so her teacher does it for her. Grovana runs through the door, shuts it behind her, and starts flinging darts at the vampires.
Her first target turns to mist--invincible and regenerating--so she finds a new one. This one tries to stave off death by shapeshifting into a rat, reducing Grovana's damage to 1. To get around this, Yi uses the Flail of Ages with Belm, and does 4 damage with the flail where her darts would have done 1. Belm itself is useless, though; these vampires are immune to +2 weapons and below.
Despite her best efforts, Yi Grovana cannot deal enough damage to overcome the vampire's regeneration. They're just too sturdy.
So, Imber uses a second scroll on herself and hurries through the doorway. Yi Grovana only has so many castings of True Sight, so when the vampires vanish, we start using summons to lure them out: the Efreeti Bottle, Kitty, the Iron Horn of Valhalla, and Imber's spirit animals. With Imber alongside her, both using darts, they're able to take down the vampires quite easily.
Using summons still caused some problems. If SCS2 vampires see your summons, they can summon their Dread Wolves and rats, and the wolves and rats aren't fooled by Protection from Undead scrolls. We had to fight off the rats and wolves before finishing off the vampires, and since the spread of the rat summons is quite large, even Rius and Poppy had to fight some.
When the vampires started to vanish, we did one final sweep of the area with a Spirit Lion and True Seeing and tracked down the last vampire. You have to make sure you leave none of them alive--they will hide from you if you're using Protection from Undead, and they will ambush you the next time you rest in Firkraag's dungeon.
Vampires suck.
We get lucky, though. Imber managed to lay one Special Snare out of three before they arrived, and Samia's brigade made some pretty lousy saving throws.
Chak is not actually held--he has an Enrage ability of some sort, as do many Orogs and Orcs in SCS2--but that's still half the enemy party disabled. Only Ferric Ironblade (rather redundant name, honestly), Kaol, and Chak remain functional. Yi Grovana casts True Sight to reveal Kaol, and Poppy activates Offensive Spin so she can break down his Stoneskins and tack on spell failure with nonmagical darts. Meanwhile, the rest of the group focuses on beating down Chak, who falls in seconds.
We tear through the remaining enemies quickly. Only Kaol lingers for long. Despite Poppy's best efforts to scramble his spellcasting, he manages to avoid the spell failure. Still, he doesn't have much time left. There's just too much APR flying around for Kaol to maintain his defenses.
For the Guardians, I have Poppy talk-block them to make sure Yi Grovana gets in a backstab. For those who aren't aware, talk-blocking causes the target to always face the person who initiated the talk-block, which means you can rotate your target as you like. This is the only way to backstab the easternmost Guardian, unless you push him around, which itself also requires talk-blocking.
The Greater Wolfweres proved remarkably easy to kill. With two Archers and one Kensai, we actually have pretty decent damage output for a party with innate penalties to hit and damage. Imber has a +4 innate bonus to damage, but on average, the party has penalties.
The Adamantite Golem fell to +5 darts. With her buffs active, Poppy was able to resist the golem's poison cloud ability. Tazok and Chieftain Digdag died under a barrage of darts.
Only one more battle before we can free Taar. If your Charname is female (I understand most are not), then Garren's child is a young man named Taar... not to be confused with Daar, the young man in Imnesvale who's in love with Jermien's daughter Colette. Anyhow, Conster--not to be confused with Carston, the mad king and prisoner of the Machine of Lum the Mad--carries the key to Taar's (not Daar's!) cage.
Conster starts out with PFMW and promptly turns invisible. Yi Grovana reveals him with True Seeing and we pelt him with nonmagical darts. This is what we managed to do before he charmed Yi Grovana with a double Charm Person Minor Sequencer.
That's six hits from our Wizard Slayers, Poppy and Imber, and therefore 60% spell failure for Conster despite his PFMW. Yi is no longer under our control, and in fact her True Seeing dispels all of our illusion spells since she's hostile, but Conster's Stoneskins quickly run out, and his spellcasting is shot.
Poison Weapon is completely unnecessary. But very satisfying nonetheless.
Now there's only one problem left.
Firkraag remains.
Normally, I don't fight Firkraag in my no-reload runs. Why bother? He's got over 500 HP in SCS2, and since I seldom fight him even when I can reload and try again... I have absolutely no familiarity with the battle.
I don't know how it works. In vanilla and in SCS2, my strategy for dragons is to just hit them with Feeblemind and hack at their ankles until they collapse.
Imber just hit 13th level and got to choose a new 5th-level spell. But she didn't choose Feeblemind, even though in SR it comes with a completely gratuitous -4 save penalty. SR adds save penalties to so many spells that SR's nerfing Greater Malison is even meaningful. So how am I supposed to kill a dragon without Feeblemind?
Well, there's another cool tweak from Spell Revisions. In SR, Disintegrate doesn't hit the enemy with an instant death effect--to which so many critters are immune. Instead, it does 2d6 damage per caster level, or 5d6 on a failed save.
That means Imber, as a 13th-level sorcerer, will deal 21d6 damage to Firkraag if he fails his save against spell at... a -5 penalty. Firkraag's save vs. spell is 6, so he has a 50% chance of taking 140 damage from Disintegrate. We could cut Firkraag to pieces if we only had some means of ensuring that this spell gets past his base 65 MR, when Poppy and Rius can't afford to use Lower Resistance, since they need their precious few 5th-level spell slots for Protection from Fire. We need those spell slots dedicate to improving our already mostly negative fire resistance. So we need to take down his MR without using Lower Resistance.
Of course, this is a moot point, since Imber actually chose PFMW as her second 6th-level spell pick, right next to Improved Haste. So she doesn't have Disintegrate in the first place. It's actually a downgrade in her damage output, in fact, since the casting time is so long (7, for Imber) and she already does so much damage with Minute Meteors.
But why am I even bothering with Firkraag? Well, Poppy, Rius, AND Yi Grovana all have paladin levels, and all of them can approach 100 MR if they equip Carsomyr. I can't afford to let Carsomyr slip by.
I need that sword. But I have no experience actually fighting this dragon, and the party is still underleveled. So how do I do it?
It takes a lot of thought, but I finally come up with a plan.
... yay