@Arctodus I'm glad WoP made it easier for you to fight greater wolfies. Too bad you've not found Greenstone Amulet there - Item Randomizer is so unpredictable... - but I hope you've had a fun. IR makes a game *fresh* each run and that's a great experience by itself. Not having to rely on the same path each time and more space for improvisation it brings makes it invaluable. I can't imagine making a run without it nowadays.
I absolutely agree with you, @Serg_BlackStrider. While I don't use Item Randomizer in BG2, because I really like the revamped economy implemented by IR there (which means that you can't have every magic items in the game and thus have to make choices), Item Randomizer is a marvel for BG1. It just freshen up the game and forces you to rely on improvisation instead of precise planning, just like you said.
If I have a small complaint about Item Ramdomizer, it's that it renders money just about unnecessary before you get to Baldur's Gate, because only Thalantyr has items worth of buying. There should be a randomization of items sold by Thunderhammer Smithy, not stripping his store of magical items all together. However, I just can't play BG1 without it, because the good of Item Randomizer by really far outweight the bad.
Edit : Oh, and yeah, I had fun in Wolfie Island ! It also got me almost at level cap for everyone. Only Miluiel and Alora can get another level, and they're really close to it.
I don't have a lot to write about De'Arnise Keep. It was all summons + ranged weapons, with some buffs and a breach added for the yuan-ti mage:
Glaicus was charmed:
And 2 fire elementals + 2 aerial servants with a couple of buffs turned out to be powerful enough to take down an iron golem:
I don't have any screenshots for Tor'Gal, but there's nothing to say about the battle anyway.
The Mae'Var-questline was next on our list. We played a little trick on Rayic: Entering his floor invisibly, waiting out his true sight-duration and going in unseen once again. Now he was out of divination spells, and we could do just whatever we wanted - and we wanted breach + insect plague:
Of course, the main danger during this questline would be any backstabbing by the thieves in the actual guild, so we took the precaution of keeping our party hidden while summons dealt with our foes:
Additionally, Mae'Vae's group was hit by greater malison + chaos, just in case:
The next thing I wanted to do was get the boots of speed for Jan, and so we entered the sewers once again. This umber hulk group took out huge amounts of summons before we finally managed to defeat it:
However, the imp with the mirror was somewhat less powerful:
We also killed Mekrath with insect plague and breach, our usual anti-mage package. Am I the only one who gets the feeling that his spellcasting is somehow uninterruptable in the vanilla game? I thought this guy was an arcane spellcaster - or does he also have cleric levels?
Now, our party entered the astral prison with full buffs. We breached the mage on the left and summoned a spirit animal to distract our foes on the right. A flamestrike was absorbed by Jan's MI, and so was a backstab - it's lucky that he was the one getting attacked. With both the spellcaster and one backstabber down, most of the danger was gone:
After winning this battle, we rested and summoned new forces to take out the next slaver group. However, the one after that turned out to be hugely problematic for us: Umber hulks and powerful mage spells were utterly demolishing our summons, and as we constantly had to resummon and would be running out of skeletons soon, I decided to assist with ranged damage, despite knowing the risk (not everyone could be protected against confusion from the umber hulks, and who knows what the mage could still do to our party?). This turned out to be a terrible idea, as the opposing spellcaster managed to land an invocation spell on Aikar - chain lightning. Not the most dangerous spell, exactly, but with LoB extra-damage it could certainly be a problem if it'd jump to the rest of the party. Of course, I tried to separate Aikar from everyone else asap, but he wasn't fast enough. The spell hit Anomen (lots of damage, but he was alive) - at this point I thought, well, if it won't hit Jan, we'll be fine. Of course, I noticed the spell going after Jan next. I looked into my potion bag and my inventory. No boots of grounding because I didn't get around to buying them yet. No potions of insulation because I sold them - thinking that they are strictly worse than potions of absorption anyway. The only problem: I didn't have any potions of absorption! Yes, I thought I had some with me but didn't. Why did I think that? Propably because my potion bags were always full of them in BG1 and in SoD - but they are quite rare in SoA, it seems.
And so, thanks to me stupidly selling potions I'd actually need because I didn't properly check my inventory, Jan got hit with an unreduced chain lightning - from full hp (56) to, you guessed it, chunked:
Not good.
The party rested, and a new round of summons took out the remaining foes on the right with relative ease. The same was true for the Master of Thralls:
The Warden was guarded by a huge group of umber hulks - these are really tough for our summons to deal with, so we tried to pull them back - still, I needed another rest to finish off all of them:
He himself was then easily destroyed:
The first thing we did after getting out of the astral prison was buying boots of grounding and three potions of absorption from Roger the Fence. Next, we recruited Yoshimo as our new thief (we plan to replace him with Imoen). Shortly after that, Arbogast hit level 14 and was able to insect-plague his way to the Great Druid title (and a shiny new RoP +2):
Next time, we'll try our hand at the Unseeing Eye quest.
@Enuhal Bummer about Jan - but not exactly unusual for the low HP NPCs of BG 2. He and Aerie have gotten chunked a lot in my runs because of their HP. But your new thief strategy looks pretty sound to me. Keep up the fight.
If I have a small complaint about Item Ramdomizer, it's that it renders money just about unnecessary before you get to Baldur's Gate, because only Thalantyr has items worth of buying. There should be a randomization of items sold by Thunderhammer Smithy, not stripping his store of magical items all together.
True. There is an option to *randomly not randomize items* but I have not tried it so can't comment on how it works in case of stores. Item Revisions' Store Revisions sounds good, I have them installed for this run in conjunction with Randomizer - will see how it works. Another thing I have a tiny complaint about Randomizer is that it put some high tier items in encounters I always play non-violently RP wise (Ragefast and Iron Throne leaders back in Candlekeep) but I can live with that (if only they don't have one of the Tomes... ). Well, enough grumbling
@JuliusBorisov I truly appreciate a great concept you have for your run! Believe it or not but I now came to think of my very first run of Baldur's Gate game when it were just released. I didn't even knew back then I can redistribute the attribute points upon character creation and had to run a very silly mage with abnormal physical stats... I think I'll try this approach in character creation next time. Anyway, have a good time with your run and safe travels for your Crew!
06:10 Ankhegs annihilated 19:47 Druids defended (I almost always help the druids anymore, since this way you get Kondar - one of a very small number of Anti-Werewolf weapons - for basically free) 29:18 Spider Woods scourged (this is... basically most of what happens in this session) 40:49 Centeol cleansed 59:05 Forest Mine found 1:01:47 Requisite closing character record view
Have I found the Greenstone Amulet ? Nope. Nowhere to be found. The only place left is the last floor of Durlag's Tower. But I won't go there. Even if I'm pretty confident that I could take on the Chess fight (I got arrows of Explosion to spare...), I'm not in the mood for it. We'll press on without the nice trinket. The next post will be about the end of BG1.
I seem to remember one of the NPCs in SoD having a Greenstone Amulet - maybe Item Randomizer won't have taken that one ...
first bridge, I collected the gang for one last dungeon bash before saying goodbye to J and hello to her replacement ranger... she can use 'raise dead' scrolls so thats fine as a back up for Viconia. the rest of the run went by the numbers except the dwarfs decided to attack me as I was saving their worthless hides... I assume it was the undead being on 'my side' that upset them but I don't know for sure.
party; Viconia, + 3 wisdom Schael, Minsc and Dynaheir
That would be Minsc. He should have it when you find him at the inn.
@Grond0 only if you didn't have Minsc in your party at any time... otherwise he will still have whatever you gave him at the time you kicked him out of the party includes; equipment + stats (wisdom, str etc) and character level
items in his inventory (at the time you kicked him) but not equipped are not counted
After trudging through some problems installing eet (because IA is not coming out soon I think), I got most of the mods I want to install. Only scs did not work but I do not consider it a great loss since I don't know half the quest mods I installed anyhow so I will probably die in them anyway.
I will post an install log and character screenie soon. Suffice to say is that my protagonist will be a female cleric of tyr and I will dual her somewhere around casting of level 5 or 6 spells into ranger. I am guessing that is around the start of SoA but who knows. I will play her with decreasing reputation due to corruption of the realms, and she will dual away from cleric to nature, meaning ranger. Then at some point I will have such low reputation that the ranger should actually be a fallen ranger, but since the game won't let a dual class ranger fall I will effectively be an evil ranger minus the alignment part but I will have full spell casting, stealth and charm animal.
Anyway, that is the road to take, now to make it real.
Then at some point I will have such low reputation that the ranger should actually be a fallen ranger, but since the game won't let a dual class ranger fall I will effectively be an evil ranger minus the alignment part but I will have full spell casting, stealth and charm animal.
A RL distraction caused a moment's hesitation in movement in the Lake area in my first run and an ogre berserker took the opportunity to get a critical hit in - the party were unable to put Misty back together again except by way of invoking the special Candlekeep resurrection protocol and I duly did so.
Before starting again I rather cheesily replaced Misty's useless sleep spell with protection from petrification. Melody already had that, but basilisks will automatically try and melee characters protected with the mage spell, which makes it impractical for a single low-level character to attack them. However, with 3 characters protected at once it was possible to deal with the basilisks without investing in the green protection scroll. This time Whistle laid traps ahead of tackling Kirian's party and silence, doom & blind worked well once more - meaning it was only a minor convenience when Lindin was held.
Back in civilisation I didn't bother (as usual) to scout ahead in the area south of Beregost. That means it's important to react quickly to enemies, but I was a touch slow to respond to the appearance of a hobgoblin elite - meaning he got a second shot off just before Misty could get out of range to rack up a first death. Charming the hobgoblin set it up for a first backstab of the run to get some revenge.
Further down the road I got a bit tired of dealing with all the kobolds and hobgoblins - but you just can't get away with careless placement against kobold archers and Melody went down (in SCS the mages are nearly always the prime targets, so at low levels are very vulnerable if you don't move them carefully).
After finally clearing the road, the WIP moved on to Nashkel where Neira was successfully silenced twice to keep her quiet while being shot down.
That was a bit more productive than dealing with kobolds, but I still felt it was time for a greater boost so took a trip to Durlag's Tower. A battle horror was blinded there and the WIP took it in turns to try stealth attacks on it. That made slow progress though and it still had 175 HPs when it regained its sight - and resisted 2 more attempts at blindness.
After running away I attempted to get a staff upgrade from Silke. A bunch of traps and initial attacks took her to near death and she lost 8 stoneskins before a minor sequencer allowed her to disappear (presumably her scripted buffs had included vocalise to overcome an initial silence). Misty managed to survive the subsequent attack though and Whistle ran her round until he successfully dispelled her mirrors - the others then joined back in and Silke, still slowed from the traps, only lasted a few seconds more.
Next they went to the Nashkel Mines area and picked up the frost wand there. They also doomed Greywolf and held him at the third attempt - even with LoB HPs he didn't survive that.
Back at Durlag's Tower they had another go. This time the battle horror was down to 116 HPs when the first blind wore off - and this time it was blinded again. Artemis was hit in the ensuing attacks, meaning another hit would almost certainly be fatal - but it was the battle horror that went down first.
That was a lot of effort getting the battle horror into position time after time for stealth attacks, but still much easier than trying to kill hundreds and hundreds of kobolds - so they did it again! This time I think the technique was slightly better and rolls were luckier so it probably only took half the time.
Inside the Tower there was an early shock when a ghast somehow managed to get upstairs without being near the stairs. That meant Perky running a couple of ghasts around on the bottom floor, while the errant one sneaked up on Melody and butchered her.
After another trip to the Temple, blindness proved very useful to disable chasing groups and reduce the amount of micro-management required. Despite not being able to disarm the trap leading to the roof the WIP went through it - everyone surviving, though the 30 damage Artemis took would have killed anyone else in the party.
With 5 PfP spells available it was then easy enough to kill the basilisks on the roof, though Misty was hit once and required a quick slow poison to survive.
The levels gained there enabled Tawny to become fireproof while robbing the container.
Everyone survived again on the way back into the tower and the WIP killed a few more ghasts while picking up the tome there. One of the ghasts also dropped a knock spell for Melody to learn, though her open locks skill would work on most things by now anyway. Outside, the WIP drained the skeletons on the wall of arrows, before inflicting a death of a thousand cuts on them.
With call lightning and skeletons of their own they then managed to kill the battle horror without using stealth
and then performed similar tactics to deal with the doom guard on the other side. Melody had got another thief level there and with find traps up to 75 was able to loot most of the upper tower before the party left.
Party LoB + SCS run - First Steps Start of the run After paying tributes to Jagen's teacher, now dead Gorion, the party cleared the Lion's Way. 3 wolves and 1 black bear, all separate, of course, were first distracted by a spirit bear, then blinded, and afterwards shot down.
The group rested, and set off for the Friendly Arm Inn, as Gorion had told them. In order to reach it, the group went through the Coast Way, clearing all of it. The local fauna (an ogre, a wolf, 2 bandits, a dozen of diseased gibberlings, and a few xvarts) didn't harm anyone in the group, as the exploration was slow and full of rests. I actually like how the spirit bear puts enemies into panic - on LoB it helps to shoot an opponent down while it doesn't respond.
Right in front of the entrance of the inn, they were attacked by a lone wizard. As soon as they understood the wizard had hostile intentions, they retreated a bit. It let the spirit bear get closer to Tarnesh. The mage injured the spirit heavily, but still party's third or forth Blindness worked successfully while the spirit was still there. Tarnesh was dead shortly afterwards, although it required a bit of chasing the wandering wizard.
The party rested in the inn and talked to all of its patrons, agreeing to help Landrin to get rid of spiders in her house in Beregost. Being good, they returned to Unshey the Girdle of Piercing they had found on the ogre from the Coast Way. All hobgoblins to the north of the Friendly Arm Inn were dispatched, and the group retrieved the Flamedance ring to Joia.
Without any troubles, travelling only during the daytime, the party reached Beregost. They started the town's exploration with Landrin's house. Spiders were blinded and killed with ranged weapons.
Zhurlong from the Burning Wizard Inn asked to return his stolen boots from the hobgoblins on the South Beregost Road. The group had experience of dealing with hobgoblins and decided to do exactly that. The spirit bear drew attantion of an enemy archer, which let the party blind the hobgoblins.
The group cleared the whole area, killing 2 ogrillons, a few ghoulds and several packs of gibberlings and one hobgoblin elite. The Boots of Stealth were returned to Zhurlong (again, remember that the party is of the good alignment), while Mirianne was happy to find out her husband was alright.
They continued to explore Beregost, and found another assassin, Karlat, in the Red Sheaf inn. While the dwarf was gulping a potion of speed, the group summoned the spirit bear and blinded Karlat (when three casters attempt to blind one enemy, the chances of success improve drastically). Karlat then ran crazy around the inn, while the party gradually kept taking him down.
To the north of the Red Sheaf inn the group found Neera, a woman who asked for help against wizard bandits. The main threat was over the moment the enemy wizard became sightless. Then everything possible was done to draw attention of other bandits, but Neera kept trying to melee them. Being of the 1st level, no one in the party could help Neera not to die there. The battle was won, though, without any troubles for the group.
P.S. It is fun to see post-by-post reports about LoB from different players, and to compare the experience
I had to search back 10 pages to find our last update, but eventually tracked it down amid all the action on this thread in the last couple of weeks .
We started the session by looting the catacombs. Skull took the wisdom tome, but handed Ern the strength one as the gain by bumping up his strength from 9 to 10 would be minimal. A greater doppleganger was rather stuck up,
while Prat's team failed to deal with area disablers on the way out.
Back in the City there was a bit of shopping and sorting out inventory. As part of that Skull passed Twinkle to Ern, who picked it up inside his bag - only to see it vanish into mid-air. That prompted a rousing chorus of "Twinkle, Twinkle little star, how I wonder where you are". I think this is the result of the asynchronous updates on the 2 machines meaning that the game can get confused if items are passed between players and then moved too quickly. To guard against that try and limit inventory transfers and, in particular, don't both work in inventory at the same time. Alternatively you can do as we almost always do and just accept the odd glitch as a casualty of war .
Slythe and Krystin were outclassed by nymphs and soon knew that.
At the palace Skull used more nymphs (all with domination disabled to avoid potentially fatal results if charmed dopplegangers attack). No potions were taken, but both dukes survived with a little bit in hand.
Ern pointed out the severe lack of spirit summons in the session to date, so Skull placated him by producing a pair to munch on some skeleton warriors.
More spirits, along with area disablers saw the Undercity party wiped out without taking any action before moving on to Sarevok.
Ern's dispelling arrow missed Sarevok there and Ern was briefly vulnerable when he got stuck in the web trap - but he'd retreated quickly enough that Sarevok didn't follow. Meanwhile spirit summons were enjoying the stinking cloud they were sitting in - unlike Semaj.
With him out of the way Sarevok chased a summons, but only into a web put up by Ern. With summons, magic missiles and insects all biting at him and afflicted by malison and doom, he failed to get out again.
Skull levelled up to L11 at the start of the dungeon, which made fire elementals possible. However, rather than resting to get them he just used totemic summons to help blast through a few groups of undead. The final group of mercenaries before Korlasz proved more of a problem when the spirits chased a mercenary into the side room filled with skeletons and a skeleton mage. That led to Ern being badly hurt, but he quickly retreated to chat up the Flaming Fist healer to be ready for the final battle. Nymphs used their disablers there effectively on the guards, but Korlasz somehow managed to dodge an insect plague and took a while to track down - though he had no success with his own spell attempts in return.
In Baldur's Gate a few things were sold before Ern talked nicely to the Dukes to get a shiny +2 ring of protection. After leaving the City Skull quickly sought out Tsolak the vampire to get a ioun regeneration stone.
In case that proved to be not totally effective Skull splashed out on some raise dead scrolls after seeing Ern nearly in trouble against some laggy trolls before a fireball helped put them out for the count.
The final action saw the duo whipping round the area, initially looking for menhirs to sing to. Short of time and with carelessness creeping in Skull found himself webbed by a spider and about to die from the twin attacks of a pair of sword spiders - Ern's aura cleared just in time to send him invisible though.
Then, clearly in a spirit of anything you can do ... Ern found another group of spiders to get webbed himself. This time it was Skull's turn to intervene and persuade the spiders to attack him - allowing Ern to survive long enough to escape from the web and get his poison cured.
Skull then finally brought out the big guns in order to ensure that Teleria would not capitalise on the final moments of our dodgy play.
Alice is a nice girl. It took me a bit of time to get a nice portrait out but I'm good I think. I made her a Cleric of Tyr rather than a Cleric of Lathander (what I used to do in vanilla BG2) and I got a bit lucky with the first roll. I only moved a few points around to allow me to dual to ranger later on (17 str, dex, wis), docking it from charisma because that is not an interesting stat for me.
Easy start, nothing important at all. I get an easy kill with the belt fetish ogre which results in a studded armor +1 (item randomizer I suppose). Just a slight bit further Montaron is the first casualty due to some damage from the ogre, a lightning strike from weather and a critical from a xvart. I got through FAI where we bury Montaron, then fight Tarnesh who gets killed by guards (bleh), and went south to Beregost.
Moving on to the Lake area which ended their first run, the WIP were once more just too slow to save Drizzt - but were able to quickly revenge him.
There were quite a few trash mobs, so it took a while before the WIP were able to finish clearing the area with Teyngan's group.
A bit nearer the coast they drew Brage away from his cousin before accepting a lift to Nashkel. That meant Laryssa (with her magic shield) was still there when they returned.
They took on the Doomsayer, but were unlucky that none of their 5 attempts to blind it while doomed worked. It still had 150 HPs after fighting off an initial melee assault using skeletons and a spirit lion and Artemis and Melody should have been able to finish it off playing hide and seek round the wall. However, I was short of time to finish the fight and after carelessly letting Artemis get hit resorted to a few wand blasts for the final touches.
Starting again I decided it was necessary for the completionist run to allow Bar'uk to talk and produce his kobold commandos. They are extremely dangerous in this installation, so not a good risk. However, skeletons and a spirit lion helped kill one and a second was taken down by sniping fire from extreme range while it was firing at the last skeleton. The others were all a bit damaged and as they chased after the WIP, several of the girls successfully stealthed and turned to occupy the kobold commandos in melee, where they're much less powerful. That worked well enough that everyone survived.
At the Lighthouse I expected the sirines to be relatively easy. However, when one of them charmed Melody Whistle was instructed to lead her away from the others and lose her. Unfortunately I think I clicked on a piece of impassable ground with Whistle and didn't react fast enough when he didn't move - resulting in Melody claiming a friendly fire victim.
Rather than let XP be distorted the others ran away, although it would have been easy to finish off the sirines then. Coming back they were lucky though with no-one being charmed despite several attempts on them.
Sil's group is easier due to the chance to prepare while they're neutral and Artemis only had to resist one charm attempt (I'm a bit surprised the sirines targeted her given she's an elf).
Summons couldn't hurt the golems, but they could occupy them while the WIP meleed them.
Artemis grabbed the tome to extend even further her HP lead on everyone else.
In the rest of the area Arkushule managed to cast a chromatic orb despite being poisoned a couple of times by spirit snakes - but Misty saved.
I was then feeling quite pleased to have dealt with a large group of chasing hobgoblins, only to learn once more not to count my chickens. A couple of hobgoblin elites had been handled by attacking in melee under stealth and then blinding them while they tried to get back to range. I then effectively discounted them from the combat while finishing off the last of the normal hobgoblins - only to move right back on top of one of the blinded ones, who gleefully one-shotted Melody.
After another temple visit they returned to complete the remainder of the area and put another tick on the map.
The next target was the xvart village where, after clearing a large group of the little blue monsters, there was another self-inflicted casualty. One possible tactic with summons is to drag them between areas by using force-attack. How they react varies between areas, but a common result is that they come to the next area and then lose lock. They won't be controllable at that stage, but leaving the area and then re-entering will give you control back. However, on some occasions they don't lose lock and will therefore keep jumping backwards and forwards with you - and that can be dangerous as Perky found out.
Back with the xvarts again and Tawny made good use of her charm person spell. That's under-rated in the standard game, but in LoB it really makes a huge difference in terms of keeping groups of enemies occupied. This time, rather than trying to drag things into the cave, they dragged the bear outside where shooting it down was simple. With the rest of the area clear they rested in order to get fresh summons and took on Borda. The snakes did a good job there in shutting him down and he died without casting a spell (other than scripted buffs).
The WIP then turned to the Nashkel Mines area. There was a potentially fatal mistake there when I came across a pair of winter wolves and decided to equip Gorion's belt for the first time. However, I put it on Melody instead of Artemis - fortunately noticing immediately when Artemis starting feeling the chill of death creeping over her.
For the mine itself the WIP tended to stay behind summons or use stealth to get the drop on archers. The archers still took the odd pot-shot at them though, even while in melee, but everyone survived. The closest call was when a large group of kobolds switched between areas, blocking the exit. A couple of area transitions split the group between areas before the WIP tried to force their way back towards the first level (where they could rest in safety). Misty needed a slow poison at 1 HP to survive there.
Eventually they shot down the kobold shaman
and moved smoothly on to Mulahey. I let my guard down here a bit though after having done all the hard work in the mine and took the kobolds in the cave too lightly. Despite being blinded one of them got 3 quick attacks in on Melody and she suffered another death.
That decided me not to give Mulahey a chance and, once the WIP got back from the temple, they silenced him and shot him down.
Back in Nashkel Nimbul was taken to near death by an initial attack. For a moment he thought his chances had been revived as he disappeared into invisibility, only to be revealed almost immediately by Whistle's searching.
Tranzig also suffered against spirit snakes to open the way to the Bandit Camp.
The WIP have an awful lot more exploring to do before they'll be going there though.
The Unseeing Eye: Getting the first part of the rift device turned out to be pretty easy - a couple of summons, Nahema using the Shield of Balduran and Arbogast using his Bhaalspawn CLW ability. On our way back, we encountered something very strange - a harlot, wandering around near the tomb of the lich:
Talking to her, it turned out that she was from the docks - how did she get here? Did the lich order a callgirl? Very unusual indeed.
Well, we had to move on to ghoul town (though not before having Yoshimo prepare some traps for when we eventually take on this lich). There, we used a nearly endless horde of summons to take down the undead - they almost managed to drain us of summoning spells, but not quite:
After some more beholder killing by Nahema, we moved on to the eyeless priests. Skeletons, greater malison, chaos and insect plague did their job:
The Unseeing Eye didn't survive long enough to even get its protection spells up - the rift device was used right away and took it to 1 hp, and a skeleton hit took it down:
Not wanting to get hacked to pieces by a bunch of hasted elite guards, we decided to let fire elementals deal with the final battle for this questline:
Next up, the planar sphere. We started with the halflings, sending in summons one by one to waste our opponents spells while staying out of sight:
It took quite a while, but eventually they had nothing of substance left. We moved on and cleared the rest of the level with our remaining summons, resting before we took down the group of golems (we need a full group of aerial servants and fire elementals to deal with clay golems, as they are the only save source of blunt damage). For Tolgerias and his mage, I tried something different - I hadn't used spirit snakes for a while, but they turned out to still be great at dealing with spellcasters (their poison effect seems to hit through stoneskins, so only PFMW will help) - the unnamed mage got poisoned right away:
And Tolgerias failed to kill our spirit snakes before getting affected himself (despite using spells like horrid wilting):
By now Anomen had reached level 15, so we have access to "real" skeleton warriors - Lavok was unable to deal with a single one's magic resistance:
Finally, we took out all of the demons outside. This turned out to be rather easy with a bunch of hasted summons, as long as our party was kept out of sight - For some reason, the demons just wouldn't use their stun attack on the summons, so as long as we stayed far away, they didn't resemble a threat at all:
After the disaster at the planar prison, I'm glad to see that we didn't encounter any serious trouble during these quests. Only Firkraag's Dungeon and Bodhi remain in Chapter 2/3, as we are saving any high level encounters (like dragons, liches, mind flayers, the twisted rune or the guarded compound) for when/if we get back from the Underdark.
I should also mention that I agree with @JuliusBorisov - it's great seeing other players dealing with the early struggles one has to face in LoB. @Grond0 I'm somewhat glad to see that I'm not the only one losing party members to random hobgoblin elites during the early game
@Grond0 I'm somewhat glad to see that I'm not the only one losing party members to random hobgoblin elites during the early game
I think I hate kobold commandos even more, but I agree hobgoblin elites are pretty nasty .
By the way the EE did deliberately change poison some time ago so that it would go through stoneskins - that makes the spirit snakes pretty vicious against mages, but darts of wounding / arrows of biting etc are also a good option.
I lied last comment. Apparently, what we're doing before Maevar, before tomb raiding, and before trolls is we're returning to Trademeet and helping Mazzy's sister. And finishing off Rejiek, for whatever that's worth. We prepared beforehand and had Alina memorize a Lesser Restoration, so Raissa's good as new. Three rests later to get Mazzy back and we're off again.
Now we're back to the trolls. We have significant physical damage and protections against bruisers: most trolls require a critical to hit us. Jaheira's protected with Ironskins and Sebastian by the rare critical hit immunity, so the fights aren't memorable. We quickly make it to the drawbridge.
And after failing to make dog stew (a mod made the dog meat stackable, and putting it on the stove consumed ALL of the stack, so impossible to click 4 times...) we approach the first true danger of the keep: a Yuan-ti mage. Who is Blinded, and being shot at by multiple normal weapons. Why's Alina using a sling? I've no idea.
No pictures, but Mazzy shot up the Iron Golem under protection from the Periapt against Poison, and the Clay Golems fail to land a hit on any of our party members. A summon might've been cursed, but no biggy. After taking on the Umber Hulks with little problem, since a Skald's level 9 song under RR protects vs Confusion, I do a quick test to see what happens if I kick a player-created-character: they leave permanently, apparently. So much for getting Nalia into the party for an additional 10k gold. Oh well. Summons AI meant that invisibly pulling Torgal doesn't work, as I can't get to the door to close it due to their clustering. We take, the fight anyways. The Yuan-ti mages feel content to buff their defenses rather than casting offensively, and the doorway offers a good chokepoint for defense against the Umber Hulk Elders. Eventually, Torgal is left alone long enough to actually fall unconscious, and a Melf's finishes him off. The others fall quickly after.
We claim the 50k exp per person and... apparently manage to get Nalia irritated enough that she's gone from being a recruitable NPC. Huh. Another mage/thief isn't what I need anyways for this run, but still.
Tomb-raiding time, as promised! The only truly difficult fight is against the Crypt King, and, well...
Blinded and executed.
Looked in the Bridge district for the Horn of Valhalla: IR moves it somewhere, apparently. But while looking at a walkthrough, it noted that there were three hostile opponents in an eastern building in the Bridge district. They don't even say anything, and they're named and everything. I have legitimately no idea who they are or why they're angry, but they're worth a good amount of experience.
Oh, here's a screenshot of an IR item! Being a Buckler, I snatch it up for Baroque immediately, 11k gold notwithstanding.
We kill a bunch of spiders, and save Ardouline (from RR). A Fireball from Vista clears 80% of the spiders, and melee pressure destroys Pai'na's Ironskins.
Not willing to go into the Vampire lair just yet, we take on the Beholder cult instead. Or rather, Sewers first. First, we kill Roger and his gang. Second, we kill a Rakshasa. Third... Despite what the console looks like, the Invisibility was cast awhile back, and we walk invisibly trying to trigger this tele-gank.
Regardless, Vista doesn't have enough damage spells memorized, and fails to kill the Beholder herself. Summons are tried, but they aren't enough to kill the beholder. The Beholder is wandering, though, so Vista sets up a series of traps. The second's poison damage is enough to finish it off, and the Gauths don't have Petrification, so...
According to my screenshots, I can't decide what I'm trying to do, so I'm doing Maevar next, apparently. I might've been in the sewers waiting for night to steal the Talosian necklace, actually. Regardless, Rayic is taken down by Bolts of Electricity, and the rest of the fetch quests go simply. While waiting to sleep in the Docks district, we fight the pirates behind the false wall... And a 42 damage crit kills Jaheira, the first death in the BG2 portion of this run.
Mae'Var is killed shortly after, with Truesight running to avoid the Thief backstabs. We report to Renal, and go shopping for scrolls: Vista gets Cloudkill added to her damage spell repertoire. Time to kill a bunch of Beholders. A slight surprise was had on the way to Ga'al the first time, as a bunch of Hellhounds spawned, but Baroque has the ring of Fire Control equipped (50% Fire resist, summon a lesser fire elemental 1/day), so there's no true danger here. Alina levels again killing undead.
There's no Coiled Cabal down here for whatever reason, only Gibberlings, and Vista eventually firebombs the Beholders across the bridge. And here I forget where the traps are, and WHAT they are, and almost end the run right here. Sebastian is fortunately leading, and comes into contact with the Petrification trap. We fight our way back to the surface, purchase a few StF scrolls, and fix him and continue.
The Undead are not really a problem in the Ghoul Town, and the Beholders are bombed from out of sight again (2 Cloudkill, 2 Ice Storm, 3 Fireball). We put together the Rift device, and use it on the Unseeing Eye, and I hear a "Vita". And like an idiot, I move Alina back to the rest of the team. Freaking ow.
After anticipating his arrival for a few rounds, and healing, I send Alina back out to find where the 1 HP Eye is. We're searching for awhile when I see this:
That was from a trap I set several minutes earlier, for the first Beholder group in the area, that they never triggered. It works, I suppose.
Bodhi, finally. We do the first fights fairly quickly, and then the real fight starts: Tanova.
We send Skeleton Warriors at her position. And apparently she doesn't have Death Spell in her spellbook, because those two Skeleton warriors absorb almost all her spells. The rest of the guild is clockwork, and Bodhi herself is not appreciating the high missile damage boosted by a Skald: our summons are still alive at the end of this fight. I might re-install Improved Vampires after this run, since although I dislike the CON drain this was simply too easy.
Just a funny moment here, as the IR cloak of the stars has a 20% chance of anyone who hits the user getting hit by a Call Lightning. A bandit mage is killed by using a Greater Malison. Even funnier is the fact that there's no one that can use the lowered saving throws, since he was the last spellcaster.
Finally, I remember where IR put the Mace of Disruption: in the Lathander shop. I purchase it, and start to get it improved. While I'm back in Umar hills to find Gorje (Unfinished Business), we kill Thaxxy. Because why not? Alina and Mazzy are doing serious damage right now.
Finally, after all the upgrades, I elect to take Rasaad's and Neera's quests for the gold. My thoughts about Neera's area: First of all, I don't think the animators know what a Tiger looks like. They have stripes.
Second, I freaking hate the Wild Forest.
Not shown: the entire party almost getting destroyed by a random repeating fireball trap spread across the forest floor. Fortunately, it was only triggered twice and no one died. Third, the Cats. I shamelessly used CTRL-J to hunt those suckers down after clearing all the traps in the area. Still took like 10 minutes. Finally, the Enclave itself is fine, lore notwithstanding. Neera did end up dying as she ended split from the party, and I didn't end up using a Potion of Invisibility on her. One rest later, she's alive and we're getting ready to finish the Enclave.
The WIP made plenty more progress today, but ultimately to no avail. Continuing their clearing expeditions the WIP explored the Carnival area. The first group of 30 or so kobolds in the north had no archers and a mere 600 or so missiles and the odd charm dealt with them. The second group was of similar size and nature, but was taken down rather quicker thanks to initial use of summons. Those would actually have been better kept for the third group, which did include archers. However, running and shooting at extreme range kept the return fire to a minimum and everyone survived. To finish off work in the area they confronted Zordral - but only after several of them sneaked into his tent and put up a few skeletons. Zordral hid behind his bookcase, but that only meant he could only target summons with his spells and had no joy trying that.
Next they dived into the Cloud Peak Mountains. The usual tactics were used there with no problems. Artemis took the charisma tome to bump that up to 18. I did have to make an unnecessary trip back to Nashkel when running short of ammunition at the Gnoll Stronghold at one point and Molkar took the opportunity to spring a trap. The opening exchanges saw Drakar blinded, but Misty slept. That left the party with only one blindness spell, but Melody made that count. She had to save against a couple more sleeps, but essentially it was easy enough running the two active enemies around without bumping them into Misty or getting too close to the blinded enemies.
Back at the Gnoll Stronghold many of the gnoll guards followed them back to the bridge where the wood groaned under the weight of the dead bodies. More gnolls upstairs were stymied by blinding one of them at a choke point. There was quite a bit of respawning, so there was plenty more running and shooting required, but eventually the area was able to be declared complete.
To the north there was plenty more shooting, though summons were used to clear the bridge of ogre berserkers and hobgoblin elites and, after a rest, more summons helped against the gibberling hordes - though not enough to save Laurel.
After stocking up on ammunition again the WIP headed for Samuel's area, but were confronted on the way by another all-girl party. However, rather than seeking to make common cause the newcomers proved hostile. Perky immediately ran at the disappearing backstabbers, hoping to get them to target him while Tawny summoned a spirit lion and Whistle tried to dispel illusions. Misty blinded Zeela, but Lamalha resisted Melody's blindness spell and looked like she was casting either unholy blight or animate dead - both of which would be a pain. That encouraged me to try and squeeze a couple of attacks in on her, but I misjudged how quickly Telka would move and she got an attack in on Misty as she was starting to run away - and that was that for her.
I would be happy to take blame for Misty's death as I think I was a touch slow to get her moving. However, the problem of dealing with backstabbers was made clear when Maneira managed to get an attack in on Melody despite her being fully on the move - and she disappeared from the screen as well.
Artemis was then hit twice by arrows of fire before being held and the fight looked like being lost there. However, Tawny came to tank Telka in time to avoid her finishing Artemis off and then successfully tagged her with rigid thinking when she tried to withdraw. Whistle lasted long enough in melee with Maneira to prevent her switching to missile weapons as well until the spirit lion finished off Lamalha and could come to help out with the others.
Despite taking the time to seek revenge on the amazons however, as per my normal rules on chunkings I'm ending the run there.
Certainly would be better against backstabbers Corey . I think I'll have one more go with the mixed party though, to see if I can get the synergies from different classes working together.
I decided to go for the Bodhi questline before entering Firkraag's Dungeon, mostly for the iMoD +2. When going to meet Aran, LoB made this encounter a little bit weird:
It took this assassin quite a long time to kill the traitor, but he still didn't think about fighting back or running away.
Anyway, Bodhi's Lair: Our skeleton warriors did a great job at tanking against vampires, including Tanova:
Not wanting to rest, we took out the group downstairs without any summoned help, just having Nahema tank, with some sunrays for extra damage and the hope of an instant kill:
Finally, Nahema lured Lassal back to our skeletons and we confronted Bodhi. She was defeated almost immediately:
With the iMoD +2 forged, Anomen, while protected from undead, took down the vampires at Firkraag's:
Samia ran into some trouble when half her party got removed from combat via Yoshimo's special traps, giving our summons always a numbers advantage:
After the enemy mage wasn't trapped anymore, he managed to cast death spell, forcing us to add spirit animals to take him down:
Destroying adamantite golems took forever, and while moving some summons around, Yoshimo got pushed to the front - but luckily, even a 63 damage hit wasn't enough to kill him right away:
Conster was dealt with via traps + breach:
Finally, we went back to Aran to leave Athkatla behind us for now - though we had to deal with a vampire ambush right away. With everyone immune to charm (either via helm or via cc), that wasn't much of a problem:
Next time, we'll further explore Brynnlaw and Spellhold.
I collected J again and kicked the ranger... the good one, not Minsc. I wanted to at least try saving Khalid so we put up 'Clairvoyance' | 'Farsight' to keep an eye on him, then pushed the crusaders into the barricades... Viconia is unimpressed by all this heroic BS and tells me I'm going to have to knock it off if I want to keep her on side. I swapped out my mage then the rest of the run went by the numbers except the big bug decided not to attack so I didn't get both the hides... a shield for J will have to do and my funds are way down because I'm not selling off cloaks of evil + I invested in some magic boots that didn't exactly endear me to gnomish workmanship.
party; Viconia, + 3 wisdom + 1 Dexterity (i forgot all about giving her the dex) Jaheira, Minsc and Neera
There was a disappointing finish to the previous run. I'd deliberately created Whistle and given him a high dispel illusion ability to try and tackle invisible backstabbers and he'd used that ability to good effect a few times, but against the amazons the SCS targeting of casters proved too accurate and quick to give him much chance of revealing the attackers.
I'll have one more go to see if the party can make better progress. However, after doing so much work on trash mobs last time, this run I won't require them to complete all maps. Instead they'll be looking to make much quicker progress by concentrating on rewarding encounters.
This morning's progress has included: - all the basilisks, but I decided not to ride my luck this time by attacking Kirian yet. - Tawny was killed when a spirit lion died unexpectedly quickly against the ankheg near Tenya and the others exposed themselves to finish it off.
- pushed reputation up to 20 by prioritising relevant quests. - used potion of master thievery from Vitiare to be able to pickpocket Algernon's Cloak. With prices at rock bottom looked longingly at a Robe of the Archmagi, but didn't have enough funds for that then. - at the Lighthouse area a spirit bear didn't last quite long enough to shoot down all the sirines, but the last one tried following the WIP and ran into a nest of traps.
With few magic weapons available yet (annoyingly it appears I must have had a full inventory when trying to pick up Greywolf's sword as I don't have that) most of the damage to golems was done with traps. - used Algernon's Cloak for the first time to pull the sirines out from the Beregost Temple to their doom. That got Perky up to level 5 and with skeletons now available the battle horrors at Durlag's didn't last too long. The ghasts in the tower and the basilisks on the roof also provided a nice boost.
Melody was also able to disarm some of the traps and the loot gained helped purchase the desired Robe for Misty. - after Tawny ran out of breath while kissing Shoal a couple of spirit snakes looked to have Droth under control despite him sleeping Misty. A pair of wandering ghouls happened by at just the wrong time though and nearly took advantage of the free gift, but Perky used his Acclamation ability to revive her just in time.
- Mad Arcand was charmed and helped destroy the ogre clan (greater command doing good work there). - Bassilus was already in trouble when he was silenced, preventing anyone hearing the screams as he was blinded and killed.
His hammer was one desired melee weapon and the reward for Bassilus covered the purchase of another, i.e. the staff at Ulgoth's Beard. Further proficient melee weapons were obtained by charming Poe to get his spear and getting Meilum's longsword in place of Greywolf's lost one.
That leaves only Whistle short of a magic katana to complete the melee selection. - Kirian's group managed to kill Melody as a result of Lindin mysteriously recovering from blindness (possibly I missed a dispel magic or cure disease somewhere), meaning I didn't manage to finish Kirian off while she was silenced.
- more equipment upgrades included a +1 short bow, the Army Scythe, a ring of fire resistance and Zal's bracers.
Also used 3 potions of perception to pickpocket Dushai's ring of free action.
We only got two fights left : the doppelgangers in the Ducal Palace and Sarevok himself. In the Ducal Palace, we had no problem : Xan casted Invisibility on Liia Jannath, and the rest were attacking the priest and the mage in priority. After a rather uneventful fight where both Dukes survived, we triumphed.
It was time to go for the final fight. I bypassed Rahvin's party, because I wanted none of that fight.
You know, I like prebuffing. I like the routine of it. It's not too long in BG1, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to plan my prebuffs thouroughly at every stage of BG2, if I make it there. I'll probably write down my prebuff routine, either in an Excel sheet or in a text file. And it's gonna be fun, because I like this kind of micromanaging.
I got none of that in the last fight of BG1. My basic plan for it is to initially use a thief to backstab Diarmid repeatedly through the use of invisibility potions, which I usually horde only for that fight. So, I was planning to prebuff after Alora had dispatched Diarmid to maximize the buffs duration. However, you have to plan your thief's aura intelligently to be able to backstab and then go invisible ; after a backstab, your aura has to be clear to drink a invis potion. That's what I didn't do : be intelligent. I used a potion right before my first backtab of Diarmid, rendering my aura clouded, thus triggering the fight a lot earlier that I wanted. Alora took a few hit from Diarmid and Sarevok because of my stupidity.
So, scrambling was to be the strategy. Xan and Miluiel, the closest of the enemy, drank invis potion for protection and the rest of the team hid in the southeast corner of the map while summons distracted Diarmid and Sarevok. Alora then managed a spectacular backstab to rid ourselves of Diarmid, thanks to the Short Sword of Basktabbing, which gives a +1 bonus to backstab.
While Sarevok was busy cutting down our summons, Tazok decided to show himself by attacking Branwen in the southeast corner. After a good hit on our cleric, he was taken out rather fast by Kivan, Branwen, Jaheira and Alora ganging up on him.
Semaj and Angelo were already active in the fight. Kivan was rocking those Arrows od Dispelling, but since they allow a save vs spell for no effect under IR, they weren't really all that good. Spell Thrust from Miluiel and Secret Word from Xan were more effective to remove their defense. After a bit wands charge/ranged attacks, Semaj was the next one to go. Angelo rejoined his acolyte not so long after with the same strategy.
Only Sarevok left, so that meant we had won. A single melee grunt, regardless of his strength, couldn't do much against us. Xan was used as a bait while everyone were using ranged weapons on him. He eventually fell.
Soooo, That's it for BG1. Outside of that last fight where I needed to improvise much more than I was planning, there was no real threat to Miluiel during the first game. We'll try to continue our success in SoD.
In Brynnlaw, we quickly completed the various quests and killed Perth, who fell to a single breach spell:
I remembered at the very last second to remove Yoshimo's equipment in Spellhold so Imoen would have some items to use right away. Anyway, Arbogast sacrificed a point of wisdom and defeated Bhaal, who forgot to bring a magical weapon:
Imoen joined the party and watched, as skeleton warriors and other summons cleared the first dungeon level - and we finally got our first bag of holding, thank god! For the undead at level two, we once again used a protection scroll and the iMoD +2:
Though it seems like greater mummies can never fail the saving throw, so it took quite a while to kill those. We obtained a second pair of boots of speed in the third level, the only encounter worth mentioning here might be the battle against three clay golems - they were killed by 3 aerial servants and 2 fire elementals, buffed with bless, chant, haste and defensive harmony, while the party waited safely outside:
Now, Irenicus - he himself was brought low enough to leave even before Wanev's timestop (though it took a while for the trigger to happen), but we still had our party clones to deal with:
Arbogast's nature's beauty got rid of three of them. Meanwhile, as a final gift, Irenicus threw a dispel magic at us before teleporting away, so all our buffs were gone - not the best situation to be in with a group of LoB thieves about to attack us. Yoshimo appeared while Arbogast was still casting ironskin, and he went right for our main character after turning invisible - luckily, he didn't manage to reach and hit him before the protection spell was completed:
Meanwhile, with more and more murderers spawning in, some of them going for Arbogast, I had to get my bhaalspawn to the backline, with the others throwing their bodies at the enemies to distract them. Mostly, I managed to get them to attack Mazzy and Nahema, who have great ac with their shields. One backstab landed on Aikar, but it was by far the least impressive backstab I had encountered during this entire playthrough so far:
Seriously, Irenicus, you should have just hired the scouts from Caelar's Crusade.
Meanwhile, I finally had the time to have Nahema cast true sight, critically reducing the danger of any chunkings happening here. Imoen's chaos spell also managed to affect Yoshimo, and Arbogast provided the party with some much-needed summons:
From this stabilized position, it was easy to defeat the remaining enemies and make our way to the City of Caverns, where we will continue next time.
1:20 Tasloi trashed 2:27 First ambush 3:43 Guards ganked 12:18 SCIENCE! 14:45 - 19:36 Level 1 of the Mines 19:36 - 28:35 Level 2 of the Mines 28:35 - 35:09 Level 3 of the Mines (first push) 33:14 Neera died again (first death of the session). All those memorized magic missiles and I didn't think to try interrupting spellcasting with them. 37:04 Second ambush 40:07 I try (and somehow fail) to recharge a wand 41:22 This spellbooking sequence is the root cause of Neera's third death of the session. Specifically, the fact that I didn't memorize Invisibility. 43:53 Third ambush. Neera died again (second death of the session). I should have tossed her an antidote since Grant's aura wasn't clear. I also should have disengaged her once the northernmost spider was killed since then she had an escape route. 45:12 Fourth ambush 48:11 The CTRL-J's begin. I don't like using it on principle, but at this point I was very annoyed at constantly retreading my steps for no good reason just for some routine map crossing. 48:15 Fifth ambush 48:22 Sixth ambush 48:57 - 49:47 Level 3 of the Mines (second push) 49:55 Level 4 of the Mines (first attempt) 50:54 This is when I realize that I can't safely attempt to disarm the traps between myself and Davaeorn thanks to not having Invis prepared. So I try to rest and memorize one. Unfortunately, I got ambushed and didn't set up a safety trap. 53:56 Neera died again (third death of the session). As a change of pace, Garrick died first. I had plenty of CLW potions to burn but it wouldn't have helped. 57:11 This SHOULD have been the Seventh ambush, except the game crashed. So, I get Crash-Related Reload #2. Joy. The minidump is attached.
Comments
All the best in the BG1 final acts, take care!
@semiticgod Congratulations!
If I have a small complaint about Item Ramdomizer, it's that it renders money just about unnecessary before you get to Baldur's Gate, because only Thalantyr has items worth of buying. There should be a randomization of items sold by Thunderhammer Smithy, not stripping his store of magical items all together. However, I just can't play BG1 without it, because the good of Item Randomizer by really far outweight the bad.
Edit : Oh, and yeah, I had fun in Wolfie Island ! It also got me almost at level cap for everyone. Only Miluiel and Alora can get another level, and they're really close to it.
Previous posts:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904835/#Comment_904835
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904866/#Comment_904866
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906579/#Comment_906579
BG2 start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906698/#Comment_906698
Part XXVI: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906798/#Comment_906798
Part XXVII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907259/#Comment_907259
I don't have a lot to write about De'Arnise Keep. It was all summons + ranged weapons, with some buffs and a breach added for the yuan-ti mage:
Glaicus was charmed:
And 2 fire elementals + 2 aerial servants with a couple of buffs turned out to be powerful enough to take down an iron golem:
I don't have any screenshots for Tor'Gal, but there's nothing to say about the battle anyway.
The Mae'Var-questline was next on our list. We played a little trick on Rayic: Entering his floor invisibly, waiting out his true sight-duration and going in unseen once again. Now he was out of divination spells, and we could do just whatever we wanted - and we wanted breach + insect plague:
Of course, the main danger during this questline would be any backstabbing by the thieves in the actual guild, so we took the precaution of keeping our party hidden while summons dealt with our foes:
Additionally, Mae'Vae's group was hit by greater malison + chaos, just in case:
The next thing I wanted to do was get the boots of speed for Jan, and so we entered the sewers once again. This umber hulk group took out huge amounts of summons before we finally managed to defeat it:
However, the imp with the mirror was somewhat less powerful:
We also killed Mekrath with insect plague and breach, our usual anti-mage package. Am I the only one who gets the feeling that his spellcasting is somehow uninterruptable in the vanilla game? I thought this guy was an arcane spellcaster - or does he also have cleric levels?
Now, our party entered the astral prison with full buffs. We breached the mage on the left and summoned a spirit animal to distract our foes on the right. A flamestrike was absorbed by Jan's MI, and so was a backstab - it's lucky that he was the one getting attacked. With both the spellcaster and one backstabber down, most of the danger was gone:
After winning this battle, we rested and summoned new forces to take out the next slaver group. However, the one after that turned out to be hugely problematic for us: Umber hulks and powerful mage spells were utterly demolishing our summons, and as we constantly had to resummon and would be running out of skeletons soon, I decided to assist with ranged damage, despite knowing the risk (not everyone could be protected against confusion from the umber hulks, and who knows what the mage could still do to our party?). This turned out to be a terrible idea, as the opposing spellcaster managed to land an invocation spell on Aikar - chain lightning. Not the most dangerous spell, exactly, but with LoB extra-damage it could certainly be a problem if it'd jump to the rest of the party.
Of course, I tried to separate Aikar from everyone else asap, but he wasn't fast enough. The spell hit Anomen (lots of damage, but he was alive) - at this point I thought, well, if it won't hit Jan, we'll be fine. Of course, I noticed the spell going after Jan next. I looked into my potion bag and my inventory. No boots of grounding because I didn't get around to buying them yet. No potions of insulation because I sold them - thinking that they are strictly worse than potions of absorption anyway. The only problem: I didn't have any potions of absorption! Yes, I thought I had some with me but didn't. Why did I think that? Propably because my potion bags were always full of them in BG1 and in SoD - but they are quite rare in SoA, it seems.
And so, thanks to me stupidly selling potions I'd actually need because I didn't properly check my inventory, Jan got hit with an unreduced chain lightning - from full hp (56) to, you guessed it, chunked:
Not good.
The party rested, and a new round of summons took out the remaining foes on the right with relative ease. The same was true for the Master of Thralls:
The Warden was guarded by a huge group of umber hulks - these are really tough for our summons to deal with, so we tried to pull them back - still, I needed another rest to finish off all of them:
He himself was then easily destroyed:
The first thing we did after getting out of the astral prison was buying boots of grounding and three potions of absorption from Roger the Fence. Next, we recruited Yoshimo as our new thief (we plan to replace him with Imoen). Shortly after that, Arbogast hit level 14 and was able to insect-plague his way to the Great Druid title (and a shiny new RoP +2):
Next time, we'll try our hand at the Unseeing Eye quest.
Enuhal
Another thing I have a tiny complaint about Randomizer is that it put some high tier items in encounters I always play non-violently RP wise (Ragefast and Iron Throne leaders back in Candlekeep) but I can live with that (if only they don't have one of the Tomes...
@JuliusBorisov I truly appreciate a great concept you have for your run! Believe it or not but I now came to think of my very first run of Baldur's Gate game when it were just released. I didn't even knew back then I can redistribute the attribute points upon character creation and had to run a very silly mage with abnormal physical stats... I think I'll try this approach in character creation next time.
Anyway, have a good time with your run and safe travels for your Crew!
"The Nobody of Parting"
Have I mentioned that I hate Cloakwood?
06:10 Ankhegs annihilated
19:47 Druids defended (I almost always help the druids anymore, since this way you get Kondar - one of a very small number of Anti-Werewolf weapons - for basically free)
29:18 Spider Woods scourged (this is... basically most of what happens in this session)
40:49 Centeol cleansed
59:05 Forest Mine found
1:01:47 Requisite closing character record view
SP-2,
first bridge,I collected the gang for one last dungeon bash before saying goodbye to J and hello to her replacement ranger... she can use 'raise dead' scrolls so thats fine as a back up for Viconia.
the rest of the run went by the numbers except the dwarfs decided to attack me as I was saving their worthless hides... I assume it was the undead being on 'my side' that upset them but I don't know for sure.
party;
Viconia, + 3 wisdom
Schael, Minsc and Dynaheir
only if you didn't have Minsc in your party at any time... otherwise he will still have whatever you gave him at the time you kicked him out of the party
includes; equipment + stats (wisdom, str etc) and character level
items in his inventory (at the time you kicked him) but not equipped are not counted
I will post an install log and character screenie soon. Suffice to say is that my protagonist will be a female cleric of tyr and I will dual her somewhere around casting of level 5 or 6 spells into ranger. I am guessing that is around the start of SoA but who knows. I will play her with decreasing reputation due to corruption of the realms, and she will dual away from cleric to nature, meaning ranger. Then at some point I will have such low reputation that the ranger should actually be a fallen ranger, but since the game won't let a dual class ranger fall I will effectively be an evil ranger minus the alignment part but I will have full spell casting, stealth and charm animal.
Anyway, that is the road to take, now to make it real.
Previous run:
A RL distraction caused a moment's hesitation in movement in the Lake area in my first run and an ogre berserker took the opportunity to get a critical hit in - the party were unable to put Misty back together again except by way of invoking the special Candlekeep resurrection protocol and I duly did so.
Before starting again I rather cheesily replaced Misty's useless sleep spell with protection from petrification. Melody already had that, but basilisks will automatically try and melee characters protected with the mage spell, which makes it impractical for a single low-level character to attack them. However, with 3 characters protected at once it was possible to deal with the basilisks without investing in the green protection scroll. This time Whistle laid traps ahead of tackling Kirian's party and silence, doom & blind worked well once more - meaning it was only a minor convenience when Lindin was held.
Back in civilisation I didn't bother (as usual) to scout ahead in the area south of Beregost. That means it's important to react quickly to enemies, but I was a touch slow to respond to the appearance of a hobgoblin elite - meaning he got a second shot off just before Misty could get out of range to rack up a first death. Charming the hobgoblin set it up for a first backstab of the run to get some revenge.
Further down the road I got a bit tired of dealing with all the kobolds and hobgoblins - but you just can't get away with careless placement against kobold archers and Melody went down (in SCS the mages are nearly always the prime targets, so at low levels are very vulnerable if you don't move them carefully).
After finally clearing the road, the WIP moved on to Nashkel where Neira was successfully silenced twice to keep her quiet while being shot down.
After running away I attempted to get a staff upgrade from Silke. A bunch of traps and initial attacks took her to near death and she lost 8 stoneskins before a minor sequencer allowed her to disappear (presumably her scripted buffs had included vocalise to overcome an initial silence). Misty managed to survive the subsequent attack though and Whistle ran her round until he successfully dispelled her mirrors - the others then joined back in and Silke, still slowed from the traps, only lasted a few seconds more.
Back at Durlag's Tower they had another go. This time the battle horror was down to 116 HPs when the first blind wore off - and this time it was blinded again. Artemis was hit in the ensuing attacks, meaning another hit would almost certainly be fatal - but it was the battle horror that went down first.
Inside the Tower there was an early shock when a ghast somehow managed to get upstairs without being near the stairs. That meant Perky running a couple of ghasts around on the bottom floor, while the errant one sneaked up on Melody and butchered her.
Everyone survived again on the way back into the tower and the WIP killed a few more ghasts while picking up the tome there. One of the ghasts also dropped a knock spell for Melody to learn, though her open locks skill would work on most things by now anyway. Outside, the WIP drained the skeletons on the wall of arrows, before inflicting a death of a thousand cuts on them.
Perky - Priest of Tyr L5, 33 HPs, 11 kills, 1 death
Misty - Fighter / illusionist L4/3, 32 HPs, 39 kills, 1 death
Melody - Fighter / mage / thief L3/3/4, 28 HPs, 41 kills, 2 deaths
Artemis - Archer L4, 50 HPs, 67 kills
Tawny - Totemic Druid L5, 38 HPs, 8 kills, 0 deaths
Whistle - Bounty Hunter L5, 30 HPs, 9 kills, 0 deaths
Start of the run
After paying tributes to Jagen's teacher, now dead Gorion, the party cleared the Lion's Way. 3 wolves and 1 black bear, all separate, of course, were first distracted by a spirit bear, then blinded, and afterwards shot down.
The group rested, and set off for the Friendly Arm Inn, as Gorion had told them. In order to reach it, the group went through the Coast Way, clearing all of it. The local fauna (an ogre, a wolf, 2 bandits, a dozen of diseased gibberlings, and a few xvarts) didn't harm anyone in the group, as the exploration was slow and full of rests. I actually like how the spirit bear puts enemies into panic - on LoB it helps to shoot an opponent down while it doesn't respond.
Right in front of the entrance of the inn, they were attacked by a lone wizard. As soon as they understood the wizard had hostile intentions, they retreated a bit. It let the spirit bear get closer to Tarnesh. The mage injured the spirit heavily, but still party's third or forth Blindness worked successfully while the spirit was still there. Tarnesh was dead shortly afterwards, although it required a bit of chasing the wandering wizard.
The party rested in the inn and talked to all of its patrons, agreeing to help Landrin to get rid of spiders in her house in Beregost. Being good, they returned to Unshey the Girdle of Piercing they had found on the ogre from the Coast Way. All hobgoblins to the north of the Friendly Arm Inn were dispatched, and the group retrieved the Flamedance ring to Joia.
Without any troubles, travelling only during the daytime, the party reached Beregost. They started the town's exploration with Landrin's house. Spiders were blinded and killed with ranged weapons.
Zhurlong from the Burning Wizard Inn asked to return his stolen boots from the hobgoblins on the South Beregost Road. The group had experience of dealing with hobgoblins and decided to do exactly that. The spirit bear drew attantion of an enemy archer, which let the party blind the hobgoblins.
The group cleared the whole area, killing 2 ogrillons, a few ghoulds and several packs of gibberlings and one hobgoblin elite. The Boots of Stealth were returned to Zhurlong (again, remember that the party is of the good alignment), while Mirianne was happy to find out her husband was alright.
They continued to explore Beregost, and found another assassin, Karlat, in the Red Sheaf inn. While the dwarf was gulping a potion of speed, the group summoned the spirit bear and blinded Karlat (when three casters attempt to blind one enemy, the chances of success improve drastically). Karlat then ran crazy around the inn, while the party gradually kept taking him down.
To the north of the Red Sheaf inn the group found Neera, a woman who asked for help against wizard bandits. The main threat was over the moment the enemy wizard became sightless. Then everything possible was done to draw attention of other bandits, but Neera kept trying to melee them. Being of the 1st level, no one in the party could help Neera not to die there. The battle was won, though, without any troubles for the group.
P.S. It is fun to see post-by-post reports about LoB from different players, and to compare the experience
Skull (Half-elf Totemic Druid, Grond0); Ern (Human Bard, Gate70)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904615/#Comment_904615
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904876/#Comment_904876
I had to search back 10 pages to find our last update, but eventually tracked it down amid all the action on this thread in the last couple of weeks
We started the session by looting the catacombs. Skull took the wisdom tome, but handed Ern the strength one as the gain by bumping up his strength from 9 to 10 would be minimal. A greater doppleganger was rather stuck up,
Back in the City there was a bit of shopping and sorting out inventory. As part of that Skull passed Twinkle to Ern, who picked it up inside his bag - only to see it vanish into mid-air. That prompted a rousing chorus of "Twinkle, Twinkle little star, how I wonder where you are". I think this is the result of the asynchronous updates on the 2 machines meaning that the game can get confused if items are passed between players and then moved too quickly. To guard against that try and limit inventory transfers and, in particular, don't both work in inventory at the same time. Alternatively you can do as we almost always do and just accept the odd glitch as a casualty of war
Slythe and Krystin were outclassed by nymphs and soon knew that.
Ern pointed out the severe lack of spirit summons in the session to date, so Skull placated him by producing a pair to munch on some skeleton warriors.
Skull levelled up to L11 at the start of the dungeon, which made fire elementals possible. However, rather than resting to get them he just used totemic summons to help blast through a few groups of undead. The final group of mercenaries before Korlasz proved more of a problem when the spirits chased a mercenary into the side room filled with skeletons and a skeleton mage. That led to Ern being badly hurt, but he quickly retreated to chat up the Flaming Fist healer to be ready for the final battle. Nymphs used their disablers there effectively on the guards, but Korlasz somehow managed to dodge an insect plague and took a while to track down - though he had no success with his own spell attempts in return.
In Baldur's Gate a few things were sold before Ern talked nicely to the Dukes to get a shiny +2 ring of protection. After leaving the City Skull quickly sought out Tsolak the vampire to get a ioun regeneration stone.
The final action saw the duo whipping round the area, initially looking for menhirs to sing to. Short of time and with carelessness creeping in Skull found himself webbed by a spider and about to die from the twin attacks of a pair of sword spiders - Ern's aura cleared just in time to send him invisible though.
Skull, Totemic Druid 11, 74 HPs (incl. 5 from helm), 141 kills
Ern, Bard 11, 73 HPs, 199 kills
Alice is a nice girl. It took me a bit of time to get a nice portrait out but I'm good I think. I made her a Cleric of Tyr rather than a Cleric of Lathander (what I used to do in vanilla BG2) and I got a bit lucky with the first roll. I only moved a few points around to allow me to dual to ranger later on (17 str, dex, wis), docking it from charisma because that is not an interesting stat for me.
Easy start, nothing important at all. I get an easy kill with the belt fetish ogre which results in a studded armor +1 (item randomizer I suppose). Just a slight bit further Montaron is the first casualty due to some damage from the ogre, a lightning strike from weather and a critical from a xvart.
I got through FAI where we bury Montaron, then fight Tarnesh who gets killed by guards (bleh), and went south to Beregost.
Next time more play.
♪"Tender young Alice" they say♪
Previous updates:
Moving on to the Lake area which ended their first run, the WIP were once more just too slow to save Drizzt - but were able to quickly revenge him.
A bit nearer the coast they drew Brage away from his cousin before accepting a lift to Nashkel. That meant Laryssa (with her magic shield) was still there when they returned.
Starting again I decided it was necessary for the completionist run to allow Bar'uk to talk and produce his kobold commandos. They are extremely dangerous in this installation, so not a good risk. However, skeletons and a spirit lion helped kill one and a second was taken down by sniping fire from extreme range while it was firing at the last skeleton. The others were all a bit damaged and as they chased after the WIP, several of the girls successfully stealthed and turned to occupy the kobold commandos in melee, where they're much less powerful. That worked well enough that everyone survived.
At the Lighthouse I expected the sirines to be relatively easy. However, when one of them charmed Melody Whistle was instructed to lead her away from the others and lose her. Unfortunately I think I clicked on a piece of impassable ground with Whistle and didn't react fast enough when he didn't move - resulting in Melody claiming a friendly fire victim.
In the rest of the area Arkushule managed to cast a chromatic orb despite being poisoned a couple of times by spirit snakes - but Misty saved.
The next target was the xvart village where, after clearing a large group of the little blue monsters, there was another self-inflicted casualty. One possible tactic with summons is to drag them between areas by using force-attack. How they react varies between areas, but a common result is that they come to the next area and then lose lock. They won't be controllable at that stage, but leaving the area and then re-entering will give you control back. However, on some occasions they don't lose lock and will therefore keep jumping backwards and forwards with you - and that can be dangerous as Perky found out.
Back with the xvarts again and Tawny made good use of her charm person spell. That's under-rated in the standard game, but in LoB it really makes a huge difference in terms of keeping groups of enemies occupied. This time, rather than trying to drag things into the cave, they dragged the bear outside where shooting it down was simple. With the rest of the area clear they rested in order to get fresh summons and took on Borda. The snakes did a good job there in shutting him down and he died without casting a spell (other than scripted buffs).
The WIP then turned to the Nashkel Mines area. There was a potentially fatal mistake there when I came across a pair of winter wolves and decided to equip Gorion's belt for the first time. However, I put it on Melody instead of Artemis - fortunately noticing immediately when Artemis starting feeling the chill of death creeping over her.
Back in Nashkel Nimbul was taken to near death by an initial attack. For a moment he thought his chances had been revived as he disappeared into invisibility, only to be revealed almost immediately by Whistle's searching.
Perky - Priest of Tyr L5, 33 HPs, 34 kills, 2 deaths
Misty - Fighter / illusionist L4/4, 35 HPs, 116 kills, 1 death
Melody - Fighter / mage / thief L4/3/4, 32 HPs, 139 kills, 4 deaths
Artemis - Archer L5, 68 HPs, 187 kills
Tawny - Totemic Druid L6, 45 HPs, 21 kills, 0 deaths
Whistle - Bounty Hunter L6, 38 HPs, 26 kills, 1 death
Previous posts:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904835/#Comment_904835
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904866/#Comment_904866
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906579/#Comment_906579
BG2 start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906698/#Comment_906698
Part XXVI: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906798/#Comment_906798
Part XXVII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907259/#Comment_907259
Part XXVIII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907527/#Comment_907527
The Unseeing Eye: Getting the first part of the rift device turned out to be pretty easy - a couple of summons, Nahema using the Shield of Balduran and Arbogast using his Bhaalspawn CLW ability. On our way back, we encountered something very strange - a harlot, wandering around near the tomb of the lich:
Talking to her, it turned out that she was from the docks - how did she get here? Did the lich order a callgirl? Very unusual indeed.
Well, we had to move on to ghoul town (though not before having Yoshimo prepare some traps for when we eventually take on this lich). There, we used a nearly endless horde of summons to take down the undead - they almost managed to drain us of summoning spells, but not quite:
After some more beholder killing by Nahema, we moved on to the eyeless priests. Skeletons, greater malison, chaos and insect plague did their job:
The Unseeing Eye didn't survive long enough to even get its protection spells up - the rift device was used right away and took it to 1 hp, and a skeleton hit took it down:
Not wanting to get hacked to pieces by a bunch of hasted elite guards, we decided to let fire elementals deal with the final battle for this questline:
Next up, the planar sphere. We started with the halflings, sending in summons one by one to waste our opponents spells while staying out of sight:
It took quite a while, but eventually they had nothing of substance left. We moved on and cleared the rest of the level with our remaining summons, resting before we took down the group of golems (we need a full group of aerial servants and fire elementals to deal with clay golems, as they are the only save source of blunt damage). For Tolgerias and his mage, I tried something different - I hadn't used spirit snakes for a while, but they turned out to still be great at dealing with spellcasters (their poison effect seems to hit through stoneskins, so only PFMW will help) - the unnamed mage got poisoned right away:
And Tolgerias failed to kill our spirit snakes before getting affected himself (despite using spells like horrid wilting):
By now Anomen had reached level 15, so we have access to "real" skeleton warriors - Lavok was unable to deal with a single one's magic resistance:
Finally, we took out all of the demons outside. This turned out to be rather easy with a bunch of hasted summons, as long as our party was kept out of sight - For some reason, the demons just wouldn't use their stun attack on the summons, so as long as we stayed far away, they didn't resemble a threat at all:
After the disaster at the planar prison, I'm glad to see that we didn't encounter any serious trouble during these quests. Only Firkraag's Dungeon and Bodhi remain in Chapter 2/3, as we are saving any high level encounters (like dragons, liches, mind flayers, the twisted rune or the guarded compound) for when/if we get back from the Underdark.
I should also mention that I agree with @JuliusBorisov - it's great seeing other players dealing with the early struggles one has to face in LoB. @Grond0 I'm somewhat glad to see that I'm not the only one losing party members to random hobgoblin elites during the early game
Enuhal
By the way the EE did deliberately change poison some time ago so that it would go through stoneskins - that makes the spirit snakes pretty vicious against mages, but darts of wounding / arrows of biting etc are also a good option.
I lied last comment. Apparently, what we're doing before Maevar, before tomb raiding, and before trolls is we're returning to Trademeet and helping Mazzy's sister. And finishing off Rejiek, for whatever that's worth. We prepared beforehand and had Alina memorize a Lesser Restoration, so Raissa's good as new. Three rests later to get Mazzy back and we're off again.
Now we're back to the trolls. We have significant physical damage and protections against bruisers: most trolls require a critical to hit us. Jaheira's protected with Ironskins and Sebastian by the rare critical hit immunity, so the fights aren't memorable. We quickly make it to the drawbridge.
And after failing to make dog stew (a mod made the dog meat stackable, and putting it on the stove consumed ALL of the stack, so impossible to click 4 times...) we approach the first true danger of the keep: a Yuan-ti mage. Who is Blinded, and being shot at by multiple normal weapons. Why's Alina using a sling? I've no idea.
No pictures, but Mazzy shot up the Iron Golem under protection from the Periapt against Poison, and the Clay Golems fail to land a hit on any of our party members. A summon might've been cursed, but no biggy. After taking on the Umber Hulks with little problem, since a Skald's level 9 song under RR protects vs Confusion, I do a quick test to see what happens if I kick a player-created-character: they leave permanently, apparently. So much for getting Nalia into the party for an additional 10k gold. Oh well. Summons AI meant that invisibly pulling Torgal doesn't work, as I can't get to the door to close it due to their clustering. We take, the fight anyways. The Yuan-ti mages feel content to buff their defenses rather than casting offensively, and the doorway offers a good chokepoint for defense against the Umber Hulk Elders. Eventually, Torgal is left alone long enough to actually fall unconscious, and a Melf's finishes him off. The others fall quickly after.
We claim the 50k exp per person and... apparently manage to get Nalia irritated enough that she's gone from being a recruitable NPC. Huh. Another mage/thief isn't what I need anyways for this run, but still.
Tomb-raiding time, as promised! The only truly difficult fight is against the Crypt King, and, well...
Blinded and executed.
Looked in the Bridge district for the Horn of Valhalla: IR moves it somewhere, apparently. But while looking at a walkthrough, it noted that there were three hostile opponents in an eastern building in the Bridge district. They don't even say anything, and they're named and everything. I have legitimately no idea who they are or why they're angry, but they're worth a good amount of experience.
Oh, here's a screenshot of an IR item! Being a Buckler, I snatch it up for Baroque immediately, 11k gold notwithstanding.
We kill a bunch of spiders, and save Ardouline (from RR). A Fireball from Vista clears 80% of the spiders, and melee pressure destroys Pai'na's Ironskins.
Not willing to go into the Vampire lair just yet, we take on the Beholder cult instead. Or rather, Sewers first. First, we kill Roger and his gang. Second, we kill a Rakshasa. Third... Despite what the console looks like, the Invisibility was cast awhile back, and we walk invisibly trying to trigger this tele-gank.
Regardless, Vista doesn't have enough damage spells memorized, and fails to kill the Beholder herself. Summons are tried, but they aren't enough to kill the beholder. The Beholder is wandering, though, so Vista sets up a series of traps. The second's poison damage is enough to finish it off, and the Gauths don't have Petrification, so...
According to my screenshots, I can't decide what I'm trying to do, so I'm doing Maevar next, apparently. I might've been in the sewers waiting for night to steal the Talosian necklace, actually. Regardless, Rayic is taken down by Bolts of Electricity, and the rest of the fetch quests go simply. While waiting to sleep in the Docks district, we fight the pirates behind the false wall... And a 42 damage crit kills Jaheira, the first death in the BG2 portion of this run.
Mae'Var is killed shortly after, with Truesight running to avoid the Thief backstabs. We report to Renal, and go shopping for scrolls: Vista gets Cloudkill added to her damage spell repertoire. Time to kill a bunch of Beholders. A slight surprise was had on the way to Ga'al the first time, as a bunch of Hellhounds spawned, but Baroque has the ring of Fire Control equipped (50% Fire resist, summon a lesser fire elemental 1/day), so there's no true danger here. Alina levels again killing undead.
There's no Coiled Cabal down here for whatever reason, only Gibberlings, and Vista eventually firebombs the Beholders across the bridge. And here I forget where the traps are, and WHAT they are, and almost end the run right here. Sebastian is fortunately leading, and comes into contact with the Petrification trap. We fight our way back to the surface, purchase a few StF scrolls, and fix him and continue.
The Undead are not really a problem in the Ghoul Town, and the Beholders are bombed from out of sight again (2 Cloudkill, 2 Ice Storm, 3 Fireball). We put together the Rift device, and use it on the Unseeing Eye, and I hear a "Vita". And like an idiot, I move Alina back to the rest of the team. Freaking ow.
After anticipating his arrival for a few rounds, and healing, I send Alina back out to find where the 1 HP Eye is. We're searching for awhile when I see this:
That was from a trap I set several minutes earlier, for the first Beholder group in the area, that they never triggered. It works, I suppose.
Bodhi, finally. We do the first fights fairly quickly, and then the real fight starts: Tanova.
We send Skeleton Warriors at her position. And apparently she doesn't have Death Spell in her spellbook, because those two Skeleton warriors absorb almost all her spells. The rest of the guild is clockwork, and Bodhi herself is not appreciating the high missile damage boosted by a Skald: our summons are still alive at the end of this fight. I might re-install Improved Vampires after this run, since although I dislike the CON drain this was simply too easy.
Just a funny moment here, as the IR cloak of the stars has a 20% chance of anyone who hits the user getting hit by a Call Lightning. A bandit mage is killed by using a Greater Malison. Even funnier is the fact that there's no one that can use the lowered saving throws, since he was the last spellcaster.
Finally, I remember where IR put the Mace of Disruption: in the Lathander shop. I purchase it, and start to get it improved. While I'm back in Umar hills to find Gorje (Unfinished Business), we kill Thaxxy. Because why not? Alina and Mazzy are doing serious damage right now.
Finally, after all the upgrades, I elect to take Rasaad's and Neera's quests for the gold. My thoughts about Neera's area: First of all, I don't think the animators know what a Tiger looks like. They have stripes.
Second, I freaking hate the Wild Forest.
Not shown: the entire party almost getting destroyed by a random repeating fireball trap spread across the forest floor. Fortunately, it was only triggered twice and no one died. Third, the Cats. I shamelessly used CTRL-J to hunt those suckers down after clearing all the traps in the area. Still took like 10 minutes. Finally, the Enclave itself is fine, lore notwithstanding. Neera did end up dying as she ended split from the party, and I didn't end up using a Potion of Invisibility on her. One rest later, she's alive and we're getting ready to finish the Enclave.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907798/#Comment_907798
The WIP made plenty more progress today, but ultimately to no avail. Continuing their clearing expeditions the WIP explored the Carnival area. The first group of 30 or so kobolds in the north had no archers and a mere 600 or so missiles and the odd charm dealt with them. The second group was of similar size and nature, but was taken down rather quicker thanks to initial use of summons. Those would actually have been better kept for the third group, which did include archers. However, running and shooting at extreme range kept the return fire to a minimum and everyone survived. To finish off work in the area they confronted Zordral - but only after several of them sneaked into his tent and put up a few skeletons. Zordral hid behind his bookcase, but that only meant he could only target summons with his spells and had no joy trying that.
Next they dived into the Cloud Peak Mountains. The usual tactics were used there with no problems. Artemis took the charisma tome to bump that up to 18. I did have to make an unnecessary trip back to Nashkel when running short of ammunition at the Gnoll Stronghold at one point and Molkar took the opportunity to spring a trap. The opening exchanges saw Drakar blinded, but Misty slept. That left the party with only one blindness spell, but Melody made that count. She had to save against a couple more sleeps, but essentially it was easy enough running the two active enemies around without bumping them into Misty or getting too close to the blinded enemies.
Back at the Gnoll Stronghold many of the gnoll guards followed them back to the bridge where the wood groaned under the weight of the dead bodies. More gnolls upstairs were stymied by blinding one of them at a choke point. There was quite a bit of respawning, so there was plenty more running and shooting required, but eventually the area was able to be declared complete.
To the north there was plenty more shooting, though summons were used to clear the bridge of ogre berserkers and hobgoblin elites and, after a rest, more summons helped against the gibberling hordes - though not enough to save Laurel.
After stocking up on ammunition again the WIP headed for Samuel's area, but were confronted on the way by another all-girl party. However, rather than seeking to make common cause the newcomers proved hostile. Perky immediately ran at the disappearing backstabbers, hoping to get them to target him while Tawny summoned a spirit lion and Whistle tried to dispel illusions. Misty blinded Zeela, but Lamalha resisted Melody's blindness spell and looked like she was casting either unholy blight or animate dead - both of which would be a pain. That encouraged me to try and squeeze a couple of attacks in on her, but I misjudged how quickly Telka would move and she got an attack in on Misty as she was starting to run away - and that was that for her.
I would be happy to take blame for Misty's death as I think I was a touch slow to get her moving. However, the problem of dealing with backstabbers was made clear when Maneira managed to get an attack in on Melody despite her being fully on the move - and she disappeared from the screen as well.
Previous posts:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904835/#Comment_904835
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904866/#Comment_904866
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906579/#Comment_906579
BG2 start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906698/#Comment_906698
Part XXVI: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906798/#Comment_906798
Part XXVII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907259/#Comment_907259
Part XXVIII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907527/#Comment_907527
Part XXIX: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907875/#Comment_907875
I decided to go for the Bodhi questline before entering Firkraag's Dungeon, mostly for the iMoD +2. When going to meet Aran, LoB made this encounter a little bit weird:
It took this assassin quite a long time to kill the traitor, but he still didn't think about fighting back or running away.
Anyway, Bodhi's Lair: Our skeleton warriors did a great job at tanking against vampires, including Tanova:
Not wanting to rest, we took out the group downstairs without any summoned help, just having Nahema tank, with some sunrays for extra damage and the hope of an instant kill:
Finally, Nahema lured Lassal back to our skeletons and we confronted Bodhi. She was defeated almost immediately:
With the iMoD +2 forged, Anomen, while protected from undead, took down the vampires at Firkraag's:
Samia ran into some trouble when half her party got removed from combat via Yoshimo's special traps, giving our summons always a numbers advantage:
After the enemy mage wasn't trapped anymore, he managed to cast death spell, forcing us to add spirit animals to take him down:
Destroying adamantite golems took forever, and while moving some summons around, Yoshimo got pushed to the front - but luckily, even a 63 damage hit wasn't enough to kill him right away:
Conster was dealt with via traps + breach:
Finally, we went back to Aran to leave Athkatla behind us for now - though we had to deal with a vampire ambush right away. With everyone immune to charm (either via helm or via cc), that wasn't much of a problem:
Next time, we'll further explore Brynnlaw and Spellhold.
Enuhal
SP-3,
second bridge,I collected J again and kicked the ranger... the good one, not Minsc. I wanted to at least try saving Khalid so we put up 'Clairvoyance' | 'Farsight' to keep an eye on him, then pushed the crusaders into the barricades... Viconia is unimpressed by all this heroic BS and tells me I'm going to have to knock it off if I want to keep her on side.
I swapped out my mage then the rest of the run went by the numbers except the big bug decided not to attack so I didn't get both the hides... a shield for J will have to do and my funds are way down because I'm not selling off cloaks of evil + I invested in some magic boots that didn't exactly endear me to gnomish workmanship.
party;
Viconia, + 3 wisdom + 1 Dexterity (i forgot all about giving her the dex)
Jaheira, Minsc and Neera
Previous run:
There was a disappointing finish to the previous run. I'd deliberately created Whistle and given him a high dispel illusion ability to try and tackle invisible backstabbers and he'd used that ability to good effect a few times, but against the amazons the SCS targeting of casters proved too accurate and quick to give him much chance of revealing the attackers.
I'll have one more go to see if the party can make better progress. However, after doing so much work on trash mobs last time, this run I won't require them to complete all maps. Instead they'll be looking to make much quicker progress by concentrating on rewarding encounters.
This morning's progress has included:
- all the basilisks, but I decided not to ride my luck this time by attacking Kirian yet.
- Tawny was killed when a spirit lion died unexpectedly quickly against the ankheg near Tenya and the others exposed themselves to finish it off.
- used potion of master thievery from Vitiare to be able to pickpocket Algernon's Cloak. With prices at rock bottom looked longingly at a Robe of the Archmagi, but didn't have enough funds for that then.
- at the Lighthouse area a spirit bear didn't last quite long enough to shoot down all the sirines, but the last one tried following the WIP and ran into a nest of traps.
- used Algernon's Cloak for the first time to pull the sirines out from the Beregost Temple to their doom. That got Perky up to level 5 and with skeletons now available the battle horrors at Durlag's didn't last too long. The ghasts in the tower and the basilisks on the roof also provided a nice boost.
- after Tawny ran out of breath while kissing Shoal a couple of spirit snakes looked to have Droth under control despite him sleeping Misty. A pair of wandering ghouls happened by at just the wrong time though and nearly took advantage of the free gift, but Perky used his Acclamation ability to revive her just in time.
- Bassilus was already in trouble when he was silenced, preventing anyone hearing the screams as he was blinded and killed.
- Kirian's group managed to kill Melody as a result of Lindin mysteriously recovering from blindness (possibly I missed a dispel magic or cure disease somewhere), meaning I didn't manage to finish Kirian off while she was silenced.
Perky - Priest of Tyr L6, 54 HPs, 16 kills, 0 deaths
Misty - Fighter / illusionist L4/4, 36 HPs, 42 kills, 0 deaths
Melody - Fighter / mage / thief L4/3/4, 30 HPs, 61 kills, 1 death
Artemis - Archer L5, 51 HPs, 64 kills
Tawny - Totemic Druid L6, 50 HPs, 7 kills, 2 deaths
Whistle - Bounty Hunter L6, 40 HPs, 13 kills, 0 deaths
Miluiel, the elven bard
BG1 posts : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6Notable mods
- SCS
- IR/SR
- Rogue Rebalance
- plenty of NPC mods
- Tweak Anthology
- Item Randomizer
We only got two fights left : the doppelgangers in the Ducal Palace and Sarevok himself. In the Ducal Palace, we had no problem : Xan casted Invisibility on Liia Jannath, and the rest were attacking the priest and the mage in priority. After a rather uneventful fight where both Dukes survived, we triumphed.
It was time to go for the final fight. I bypassed Rahvin's party, because I wanted none of that fight.
You know, I like prebuffing. I like the routine of it. It's not too long in BG1, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to plan my prebuffs thouroughly at every stage of BG2, if I make it there. I'll probably write down my prebuff routine, either in an Excel sheet or in a text file. And it's gonna be fun, because I like this kind of micromanaging.
I got none of that in the last fight of BG1. My basic plan for it is to initially use a thief to backstab Diarmid repeatedly through the use of invisibility potions, which I usually horde only for that fight. So, I was planning to prebuff after Alora had dispatched Diarmid to maximize the buffs duration. However, you have to plan your thief's aura intelligently to be able to backstab and then go invisible ; after a backstab, your aura has to be clear to drink a invis potion. That's what I didn't do : be intelligent. I used a potion right before my first backtab of Diarmid, rendering my aura clouded, thus triggering the fight a lot earlier that I wanted. Alora took a few hit from Diarmid and Sarevok because of my stupidity.
So, scrambling was to be the strategy. Xan and Miluiel, the closest of the enemy, drank invis potion for protection and the rest of the team hid in the southeast corner of the map while summons distracted Diarmid and Sarevok. Alora then managed a spectacular backstab to rid ourselves of Diarmid, thanks to the Short Sword of Basktabbing, which gives a +1 bonus to backstab.
While Sarevok was busy cutting down our summons, Tazok decided to show himself by attacking Branwen in the southeast corner. After a good hit on our cleric, he was taken out rather fast by Kivan, Branwen, Jaheira and Alora ganging up on him.
Semaj and Angelo were already active in the fight. Kivan was rocking those Arrows od Dispelling, but since they allow a save vs spell for no effect under IR, they weren't really all that good. Spell Thrust from Miluiel and Secret Word from Xan were more effective to remove their defense. After a bit wands charge/ranged attacks, Semaj was the next one to go. Angelo rejoined his acolyte not so long after with the same strategy.
Only Sarevok left, so that meant we had won. A single melee grunt, regardless of his strength, couldn't do much against us. Xan was used as a bait while everyone were using ranged weapons on him. He eventually fell.
Soooo, That's it for BG1. Outside of that last fight where I needed to improvise much more than I was planning, there was no real threat to Miluiel during the first game. We'll try to continue our success in SoD.
Previous posts:
BG1 end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904835/#Comment_904835
SoD start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/904866/#Comment_904866
SoD end: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906579/#Comment_906579
BG2 start: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906698/#Comment_906698
Part XXVI: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/906798/#Comment_906798
Part XXVII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907259/#Comment_907259
Part XXVIII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907527/#Comment_907527
Part XXIX: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907875/#Comment_907875
Part XXX: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/907944/#Comment_907944
In Brynnlaw, we quickly completed the various quests and killed Perth, who fell to a single breach spell:
I remembered at the very last second to remove Yoshimo's equipment in Spellhold so Imoen would have some items to use right away. Anyway, Arbogast sacrificed a point of wisdom and defeated Bhaal, who forgot to bring a magical weapon:
Imoen joined the party and watched, as skeleton warriors and other summons cleared the first dungeon level - and we finally got our first bag of holding, thank god! For the undead at level two, we once again used a protection scroll and the iMoD +2:
Though it seems like greater mummies can never fail the saving throw, so it took quite a while to kill those. We obtained a second pair of boots of speed in the third level, the only encounter worth mentioning here might be the battle against three clay golems - they were killed by 3 aerial servants and 2 fire elementals, buffed with bless, chant, haste and defensive harmony, while the party waited safely outside:
Now, Irenicus - he himself was brought low enough to leave even before Wanev's timestop (though it took a while for the trigger to happen), but we still had our party clones to deal with:
Arbogast's nature's beauty got rid of three of them. Meanwhile, as a final gift, Irenicus threw a dispel magic at us before teleporting away, so all our buffs were gone - not the best situation to be in with a group of LoB thieves about to attack us. Yoshimo appeared while Arbogast was still casting ironskin, and he went right for our main character after turning invisible - luckily, he didn't manage to reach and hit him before the protection spell was completed:
Meanwhile, with more and more murderers spawning in, some of them going for Arbogast, I had to get my bhaalspawn to the backline, with the others throwing their bodies at the enemies to distract them. Mostly, I managed to get them to attack Mazzy and Nahema, who have great ac with their shields. One backstab landed on Aikar, but it was by far the least impressive backstab I had encountered during this entire playthrough so far:
Seriously, Irenicus, you should have just hired the scouts from Caelar's Crusade.
Meanwhile, I finally had the time to have Nahema cast true sight, critically reducing the danger of any chunkings happening here. Imoen's chaos spell also managed to affect Yoshimo, and Arbogast provided the party with some much-needed summons:
From this stabilized position, it was easy to defeat the remaining enemies and make our way to the City of Caverns, where we will continue next time.
Enuhal
"The Nobody of Parting"
Neera died again. Neera died again. Neera died again.
1:20 Tasloi trashed
2:27 First ambush
3:43 Guards ganked
12:18 SCIENCE!
14:45 - 19:36 Level 1 of the Mines
19:36 - 28:35 Level 2 of the Mines
28:35 - 35:09 Level 3 of the Mines (first push)
33:14 Neera died again (first death of the session). All those memorized magic missiles and I didn't think to try interrupting spellcasting with them.
37:04 Second ambush
40:07 I try (and somehow fail) to recharge a wand
41:22 This spellbooking sequence is the root cause of Neera's third death of the session. Specifically, the fact that I didn't memorize Invisibility.
43:53 Third ambush. Neera died again (second death of the session). I should have tossed her an antidote since Grant's aura wasn't clear. I also should have disengaged her once the northernmost spider was killed since then she had an escape route.
45:12 Fourth ambush
48:11 The CTRL-J's begin. I don't like using it on principle, but at this point I was very annoyed at constantly retreading my steps for no good reason just for some routine map crossing.
48:15 Fifth ambush
48:22 Sixth ambush
48:57 - 49:47 Level 3 of the Mines (second push)
49:55 Level 4 of the Mines (first attempt)
50:54 This is when I realize that I can't safely attempt to disarm the traps between myself and Davaeorn thanks to not having Invis prepared. So I try to rest and memorize one. Unfortunately, I got ambushed and didn't set up a safety trap.
53:56 Neera died again (third death of the session). As a change of pace, Garrick died first. I had plenty of CLW potions to burn but it wouldn't have helped.
57:11 This SHOULD have been the Seventh ambush, except the game crashed. So, I get Crash-Related Reload #2. Joy. The minidump is attached.