Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 7
Time to head to Sancre Tor! Sancre Tor is an ancient Ayleid ruin, the home of the elvish wizard lords of Cyrodiil who used to enslave humankind before the slaves wiped them out. Anyway, we need to go grab a suit of armor from same famous hero so Martin can scrape some of the hero's dried blood off of it and use it for some evil ritual and stuff.
Sancre Tor is crawling with high-level undead, from nether liches to full liches to Gloom Wraiths, ghosts, and skeletons.
Fortunately, there are no zombies (anything but Oblivion zombies), and we can sneak past most of the critters with Invisibility. We still need to slay some Undead Blades--high-powered skeletons with rusty helmets and katanas--by repeatedly summoning Dremora Lords to die against them until the skeletons finally fall apart.
It's a simple enough task. When the Undead Blades collapse, their ghosts (skeletons can have ghosts; shut up) lead us to the armor.
Martin sends us off to another undead-infested ruin called Miscarcand right afterward. Unfortunately, this place does have zombies. The fact that I can let my Dremora Lord do the fighting is little comfort.
It might be because I ran into a ReDead in Ocarina of Time when I was 8 years old, but for some reason, I have an intense fear of horrible corpses.
We make our way through the otherwise uninteresting dungeon and find the Great Welkynd Stone, the last of its kind that hasn't been stolen by graverobbers. It's not hard to tell why so many of them got stolen. They kind of stand out.
Then the King of Miscarcand, a lich with a powerful lightning staff, arrives on the scene to stop us from escaping with his big fancy rock.
But again... even liches can't see through Invisibility in Oblivion, and with our 100 Intelligence and Willpower, we have the magicka to remain invisible indefinitely, even as we throw out Dremora Lords to whittle down our enemies.
Martin only needs one more thing for his ritual: a Great Sigil Stone, the counterpart to the Great Welkynd Stone (because slaveholding elves are the opposite of evil demons for some reason). The only way to get one is to voluntarily let the daedra open an Oblivion gate outside Bruma and attempt to obliterate the city.
We've already recruited soldiers from across the province to keep the daedra from overwhelming the humans. All we have to do is hold off the daedra for a little while, then hop through a portal and grab the stone.
One tiny problem: during the invasion, Martin becomes mortal, and if he dies, it's game over for our no-reload run.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 8
We march out to the battlefield where Martin will risk his life defending his men, even though his presence is completely unnecessary and his death means the end of the world. Our allies have joined us, but they're a pretty sorry sight. We only have like a dozen people to hold off a horde of demons, and most of them don't even have names.
This is because Oblivion was a very graphics-intensive game for its time, and the platforms it ran on weren't strong enough to render lots of critters all at once. Rendering an entire army was not realistic given the limitations of 2006 hardware.
I have Zoreii spam a string of Fortify Magicka spells to dramatically boost our magicka regeneration rate over the course of the fight. This allows us to cast incredibly expensive spells without running out--including a special defensive spell I've created specifically to keep our poorly-equipped soldiers from dying horribly.
It says we don't have enough magicka to cast it, but a couple seconds later, we do. When you've fortified your magicka to 900, you regenerate like 40 per second at 100 Willpower.
You may notice I have a Chameleon effect active, and it happens to be 100% (per my rules, though, it doesn't come from equipment). I didn't feel like creating new custom spells with short-duration Invisibility effects tacked on to each one, so I just used 100% Chameleon to replicate the effect with fewer steps.
The daedra come out sooner than I expected, and our poor soldiers have some big critters to tackle. Thanks to our level-grinding earlier on, the gate spawns Xivilai and other high-end demons.
Really not trusting Martin to keep himself alive, I manage to hit him with a custom 100% Chameleon spell on touch (though it takes a few tries; he has Spell Absorption and/or Reflect Spell active). This will keep enemies from targeting him, but since I'm still worried that he'll get hit by stray attacks or something, I fire off some area-effect Calm spells to pause the fighting.
Finally, the gate opens. Once we head inside, Martin is guaranteed to survive on the other side.
But we still another potentially game-ending condition on hand: we have to reach the Great Sigil Stone in 15 minutes, real time, and while we have a compass and Invisibility to avoid fights, Oblivion realms are not known for being easy to get around in, and I have a terrible sense of direction.
Worse yet, I don't remember the exact pathway. And when I follow the compass instead, it's telling me to cross a broken bridge...
...and it's a very long fall onto hard rocks and lava. Zoreii is unencumbered and has high speed, but if I mis-time the jump, death is virtually certain; the maximum difficulty multiplies fall damage and lava damage just like everything else.
I search for an alternate path, but I just don't see one. We have no choice but to jump.
Zoreii just barely makes it across the bridge. I'm still not confident in our success; I wasted a lot of time searching for another way across. I hurry to the tower our compass is pointing to and open a gate.
But there are three exits from our current tower that all face the same direction, and I'm not sure which one the compass is pointing to. Eventually, I figure it out and hurry to the central tower.
I'm glad we have Invisibility, because even outside of a maximum difficulty run, I don't want to get distracted by any of the fights around here. OOO has put one of those orange-armored Dremora right on the first level!
Now that I know I'm in the right tower, I think I have enough time to make it with a little bit to spare. Knowing that Zoreii is still a single trap away from instantaneous death, I take care to check for traps. Sure enough, they have those falling swords that killed me once before.
I run into a lock that presumably could be opened with the Sigil Keeper's key from the first level, but fortunately, it's not a "needs a key" lock; we can pick it.
Another Dremora Prince is guarding the Great Sigil Stone. But again, Oblivion enemies are completely incapable of dealing with Invisibility. The stone is ours, and the gate collapses.
Outside, the colossal war engine falls apart. I see one of the soldiers go flying when a piece of the engine catches them, and I search the area for the dead. I don't care too much about Burd not making it, though I do find it notable that the blow was so massive that it ruined all of his armor...
...but it upsets me that Jauffre and worse yet Baurus also lost their lives in the attack.
I liked Baurus. Unfortunately, he is not considered plot-critical after the quest in the Elven Gardens sewers, which means he loses his immortality.
Martin now has all of the ingredients he needs for his ritual. He opens a portal directly to Mankar Camoran's Paradise.
All we have to do is go in, kill Camoran, and take back the Amulet of Kings so Martin can re-light the Dragonfires.
"Paradise" is Camoran's word. It's awfully pretty...
...but apparently the "Savage Garden" is a playground where demons violently murder Camoran's own followers over and over and over again, without end.
It's possible that the idea is to toughen them up and test their strength, but the reality is that you've just got a bunch of naked, unarmed, completely defenseless civilians getting butchered by giant monsters. Like making a small child immortal and then forcing it to fight an 800-pound gorilla over and over until it wins--which will be never.
A Dremora is guarding the path to Camoran. Being a demon warrior with some rather twisted values, he respects Zoreii for so effortlessly killing his own people earlier in the run.
Little did he know, Zoreii never killed any of his people. She just summoned more Dremora to do it for her. He learns this at the cost of his life.
Camoran is a bit of a nutjob. He has bizarre theories about the Prime Material Plane (known as Mundus in the Elder Scrolls universe) being the province of a long-lost Daedric Prince he fails to even name.
We head into the tunnels, where Camoran's less-favored disciples are trapped in cages that are constantly dipped into lava. They basically get boiled alive for eternity.
But our buddy Eldamil is here to help! Apparently he's a bit unsatisfied with his current job.
We need him to escape the tunnels, but we've got some daedra to deal with. As usual, I rely on my Dremora Lord and Command spells to turn the enemies against each other...
...but somehow, the spell completely fails. I re-cast a Chameleon spell to hide, but I get attacked!
I discover the problem: Zoreii's spell effectiveness is at 84%; all spells are at 84% magnitude. This means that our level 25 Command spells, which normally work on critters of any level, now only work up to level 21. We can't Command anything anymore. Why is our spell effectiveness not 100%? We have no armor equipped.
But we do. Apparently the Bands of the Chosen, the bracers we needed to enter this area, are classified as light armor. This means our low Light Armor skill penalizes our spellcasting.
The bands can't be removed until we leave the dungeon, so we have to use a Chameleon potion to escape and let our Dremora Lord spell finish the daedra. In the chaos of combat, Eldamil ends up falling into the lava...
...but he respawns pretty quickly and removes our bracers so we can leave the chamber and get our spell effectiveness back up to 100%. Camoran keeps droning on about being the big bad villain guy.
The rest of the dungeon is just spamming Summon Dremora Lord. Eldamil gets in the way and antagonizes our Dremora Lord, earning him a swift death. Apparently this counts as a murder, even though Zoreii hasn't directly killed anything since the starting dungeon.
It's time to proceed to Mankar Camoran himself, a high-level mage with lots of crazy defensive powers and his son and daughter, who are also high-level mages. Zoreii casts her buffs and cranks her Health and Magicka up to ludicrous values, as well as bumping her Resist Magicka over 100.
With 1500 base Magicka, we have virtually infinite magic for the next minute or so, and near-infinite magic for the minute after--which we can restore at will.
Summoning a Dremora Lord by itself won't let us take down Camoran; he can neutralize the effect by summoning his own.
I don't think a war of attrition will work, either; mages in Oblivion can cast healing spells, and since magicka regenerates, a mage can heal themselves indefinitely. How am I going to deal enough damage to him?
His own children provide the answer. They don't have their father's innate Spell Absorption or Reflect Spell effects, which means we can easily just Command them.
Camoran and his Dremora Lord slay his daughter in short order, but shey'll respawn. In the meantime, I realize I can also Command his son and his Dremora Lord using an area-effect Command spell.
I keep throwing out Command spells, but I'm not sure I'm making much progress. Command spells aren't perfect and can be canceled if they're attacked by a friendly target, which means that sometimes our allies get confused and fight amongst themselves, ignoring Camoran entirely.
Zoreii has lost no resources since the fight began, so it's not like Camoran is winning, but this strategy just doesn't seem very fast. I decide to go ahead and kill Camoran myself. How do we do that when the maximum difficulty cuts all of our damage to 1/6 of its normal value?
Easy. We just poison the Blade of Woe with our best anti-mage poison and paralyze Camoran.
The Blade of Woe strikes fast, and I can re-poison the dagger from the inventory screen in between strikes. Each use of the poison does rather little damage, but I can lock Camoran down with paralysis poisons, and the damage builds up. His health bar shrinks to a sliver.
We take the Amulet of Kings, return to Mundus, and give the amulet to Martin. It's time for the new emperor to finally be crowned. But when we head to the Imperial City for the coronation, we receive a nasty surprise.
We head outside to tackle the daedra. Once again, Martin foolishly puts his life in danger to fight the enemy--in robes instead of armor. I make a point of healing him, but he seems to be in okay health for the time being.
All we need to do to beat the game is get Martin to the palace. I hurry ahead and run right into another Dremora Prince, but like everything else in the game that doesn't have Spell Absorption or Reflect Spell, he's perfectly vulnerable to Command spells. I send him off to kill a Xivilai.
Then I suffer massive damage from a stray hit, even though Zoreii is fully buffed.
Using Fortify Health potions is dangerous in the long run because its long duration will keep us from drinking an additional potion long into the future, but we only need to survive a few moments more. We hurry over to Mehrunes Dagon, who has finally breached the liminal barrier and entered Mundus. It's too late to light the Dragonfires--Dagon is here, and a Daedric Prince is invincible--but Martin has a plan.
Before we bring Martin into the next area, I buff him with a long-duration healing spell, and just for good measure, I use a Chameleon spell to turn him completely invisible.
It works! No one can target Martin for a short time, and I only need seconds to make it inside the palace.
We get inside! Martin automatically teleports to us, just in time to say goodbye before he implements his last plan.
Dagon smashes open the palace to crush Martin, but Martin uses the Amulet of Kings to transform into an avatar of Akatosh, the dragon god.
The dragon goes for the throat and then torches Dagon, banishing him to his home plane.
Its job done and its energy spent, the dragon turns to stone.
Dagon is gone, and with the destruction of both the amulet and the last of the imperial line, the liminal barrier is forever secure. Tamriel is safe, but for the first time in its history, the Empire has no Emperor. All that's left of Martin is a massive statue of a dragon in the middle of the city.
Here's Zoreii at the end of the game.
One no-reload Oblivion run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul at the maximum difficulty setting, complete.
I'm not quite done, though. I like how the run turned out, but such heavy use of such a boring glitch--even if it was more of a convenience cheat than anything else--made the run less impressive than I'd like it to be. If I'm going to use an exploit, I'd rather use one that I designed myself.
So I'm going to give another shot at an Oblivion run, this time without using item duplication, even for convenience purposes. This will be on normal difficulty, since I've had about my fill of the maximum difficulty setting.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 9
This run is going to be a little different from the previous ones. First of all, we're not going to use any glitches or exploits aside from the fatigue boosting trick, my old favorite. Second, our new Breton, Zoreii, can wear no armor or clothing besides the Sack Cloth Pants, Shirt, and Sandals we start the game with. All our power will have to come from spells and our trusty little bow. Here's Zoreii at the start of the game.
While fiddling around during character creation, I found out I could give her some violet rings around her eyes and tweaked her hair color to match. She actually looks a bit like my friend Pam if she wore spooky eye makeup.
The Thief birthsign gives us some nice bonuses to our skills and our Speed, and unlike the Atronach birthsign, it will let us regenerate magicka. This means we can train magic skills by casting low-cost spells when I'm wandering around doing other stuff.
First up, we need to get some money and improve our Alchemy skill. Frostcrag Spire apparently comes with the garden even if you haven't bought the alchemy lab, so we go harvesting ingredients.
Next, we join the Mages Guild and rob each guildhouse of all their fine clothes and alchemy equipment so we can sell it off and generate some quick, safe gold.
We buy up cheap ingredients from alchemists all over the place and craft a bunch of potions, which further increase our supply.
Our farming and mining starts giving us level ups. We don't get very good stat bonuses, but I don't mind--we don't need high stats in this run; I just want to get the early game done quickly.
While leveling Alchemy, I keep training other skills and building up resources.
That Silence poison will be especially important later on; we have a couple of nasty mages to deal with.
We get in trouble while wandering around outside. OOO bandits are rather dangerous for low-level characters like Zoreii, and our Summon Skeleton spell is not enough to keep the enemy at bay.
We use Dragonskin to get 50% damage reduction and hurry away to heal, and eventually we bring down the bandit. A Conjurer appears from nowhere to join the fight...
...but a Silence poison shuts down his spellcasting, and Conjurers aren't very tough without their spells.
To save money, I'm going to complete the Mages Guild recommendation quests, as it will obviate the need for purchasing expensive Magetallow Candles for Frostcrag Spire. Once we complete all of them, we'll be able to create custom spells at the Arcane University, which is absolutely necessary for getting our base fatigue to 1.
First is Caminalda, the bandit mage who loudly introduces herself to you and warns you to be careful the night before she ambushes you.
I poison my next arrow and draw the bow before speaking with Caminalda, which ends up causing me to fire early. It's no trouble, though; she's largely harmless once she's been Silenced. She doesn't even have a weapon.
A bug of some sort crashes the game and forces me to start over. This time I decide to grab some followers before dealing with Caminalda or any other enemies, just in case. I still need to fight the ogres at Weatherleah, but some cheaply-made poisons are enough to bring down ogres with their innate weaknesses to poison.
With the ogres gone, I can recruit Reynald and Guilbert Jemane and take them to Bleak Flats Cave to rescue Erthor. I hate zombies, so I let the Jemane twins fight them while I hang back.
I need to bring Erthor back to Skingrad to complete the recommendation quest, but that can wait. For now, we're going to use Erthor in a few fights. This time, I just hide from Caminalda with an Invisibility spell and let my allies bring her down. Notice the battlemages pitching in--they're not followers, so they only help out with this one fight.
Next up, the Leyawiin Mages Guild questline. This is the most dangerous one; it requires fighting lots of Marauders as well as an enemy mage.
@Arthas not sure about mods (I don't use them), but of the many accounts I have read of the chess fight, it seems opening with mass fireballs seems to work well to whittle the enemies down quickly.
The above linked in with web and cloudkill works well. A bit TOO easy.
Others use resistances that protect from lightning. I haven't tried it though.
I made a mistake when looking over my screenshots: in this Oblivion run, I didn't plan on getting negative Strength; I planned on getting negative Willpower. The idea was to take advantage of magicka regeneration to train some skills (which couldn't be done with the Atronach birthsign), then revert to a non-regenerating, fatigue-boosting-oriented build. Choosing the Atronach is a good long-term option with this build, but it's not great for grinding magic skills. So, this run will involve damaging Willpower, not Strength.
If you noticed the previous posts (which I've since edited) mentioning damaging Strength, then you can probably guess what happens to this current run.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 10
Moving right along: The Marauders in the Leyawiin Mages Guild quest are much tougher than I expected. Our unarmored followers get torn apart in moments.
Notice the summoned Dremora (not Dremora Lord; just the normal kind), courtesy of grinding Conjuration to 50. We manage to scrape by using poisoned arrows from our little shortbow, but there are more fights deeper in the dungeon, and our followers and Dremora tend to collapse before our poison can take its toll.
In the end, I have to return to town to create more potions and poisons (getting our Alchemy up to 50) before completing the dungeon. With many more poisons on hand, we can take a more offensive role. I still use sneak attacks to seize an early advantage.
Theoretically, I could always just let my immortal followers handle everything, but that would be less interesting. When my followers collapse, I intervene.
After failing to trigger a pressure plate trap with an arrow (I had to walk around it) and hastily drinking a potion when I let a Marauder get close enough to put Zoreii in danger, we reach the final chamber, where a pair of imps are waiting for us. They're hard to see against the gray background, but I knew to look for them.
The last threat is Kalthar, who locks us in the chamber before ambushing us. I let our followers tackle him, but he runs right after me, and I suffer heavy damage before healing myself and going invisible.
I finish him off with a Silence poison, though I nearly die in the process. He does remarkably high damage with his dagger, and I don't know why.
When Kalthar falls, we can complete the last Mages Guild recommendation quest and access the Arcane University. I hurry up and create our primary Fortify Fatigue spell as well as a new Command spell, then craft some high-end emergency potions using Garlic and Morning Glory Root Pulp, which I never before realized could be used to create a Frost Shield effect to stack with a normal Shield effect, plus a few high-damage potions in case I really need an extra boost.
Oblivion suffers from the same weaknesses as Morrowind: casting a spell of a certain school gives the same amount of experience regardless of its cost. This means we can create low-cost custom spells and spam them to level important skills. I remap the spell casting button to a key, put the end of a shaver on the keyboard, and let Zoreii hit 75 in Conjuration and Illusion.
We don't need to get them any higher than that, really (getting them to 75 just unlocks a higher maximum cost for spells; we can't cast bigger spells at lower skill levels). We don't need to be able to cast 100% Chameleon spells or summon Gloom Wraiths or Liches or Xivilai, nor do we need any other skills to be particularly high, especially not in the early game.
Finally, I damage Zoreii's Willpower into the negatives to shrink our base fatigue and make Fortify Fatigue effects exponentially stronger. We head to Kvatch and put our ludicrous damage output to good use with our little shortbow.
The Jemane twins are on hand to distract our enemies, but they make crossing the Sigil tower bridges a little nerve-wracking.
I push them out of the way and inadvertently nudge them off the bridge. Guilbert falls over a hundred feet onto solid rock, but according to the message in the upper left corner of the screen, he only suffered a minor concussion.
We proceed to shoot down everything in our path, one-shotting Dremora that would normally pose a threat against a low-level, unarmored character like Zoreii.
With the Oblivion gate closed, we proceed to clear the courtyard and liberate the castle from the daedra. Our low Shield without potions puts us in some danger in a courtyard fight when a Clannfear chases us, but running away casting healing spells keeps us safe.
We let the Imperial Legion do most of the work, because I might accidentally kill one of them if I tried to fire an arrow into the fray. The one time where I rush ahead to pave the way for them, I sorely regret it--I run right into a Hunger's Drain Health spell and lose half of my Health in one blow.
I go invisible and escape.
Now I must be honest for a moment. Since I basically never react in time to take a screenshot when I die, I don't have any record of what actually killed me; I just have the screenshots and the save game before death. I've had the same problem for other deaths in these runs: I had to work backward from minimal clues and my own memory, and the earlier deaths were the hardest to remember. I think this run right here ended when a Dremora Prince killed me with a paralysis effect on a warhammer during the Bruma gate quest, or maybe to a giant sword trap... except, in my previous posts, I already attributed those exact two deaths to the end of two other runs.
So, I might have matched some deaths with the wrong runs. In fact, I think my death to Caminalda, which I mentioned in a previous post, actually happened in this run, and it was because I still had the difficulty set to maximum.
I don't know how I died in this run. Maybe it was because of that trap on the pirate chest; I don't know.
At any rate, this run is over. The new run is the one with negative Strength.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 11
This time around, we pick the Lady birthsign, because it gives us a slight boost to Willpower (which we'll have trouble increasing since we won't be using much Restoration, Destruction, and Alteration spells) and more importantly Endurance.
In a normal run, that +10 bonus to Endurance should get us +30 Health by level 11, but OOO changes the formula somehow. I don't know what OOO's formula is, but you'll notice that our current Health of 67 is not a multiple of 5, as it normally would be.
As usual, most of our class skills are magic-oriented with Marksman so that we don't lose fatigue when drawing a bow. This time, though, we have Armorer on hand, which will help us very slightly increase our Endurance when leveling, and therefore increase our Health.
By now, our early game resource gathering chores have become pretty standardized: create potions, steal from the Mages Guild, learn new spells, and gain a few quick levels to increase Intelligence, Endurance, and Willpower/Speed/Luck. Since we need high Alchemy to get better Damage Strength potions, we purchase the Frostcrag Spire alchemy lab, a purchase that leaves us with a single gold coin to our name.
Next, we buy one of the most important spells in the run.
Why is Ease Burden so important? Well, it has to do with our new fatigue boosting strategy.
In the past, I reduced my Willpower to negative values to get 1 base fatigue and multiply damage output with Fortify Fatigue effects. The disadvantage is that it eliminates magicka regeneration once you get a little lower than -30, which isn't that convenient for mage-oriented characters (which synergize the best with fatigue boosting).
The alternatives aren't very good. The first option, negative Agility, makes arrows deal zero damage and makes it extremely hard to avoid getting staggered. You can still deal damage with melee weapons, but if you try to deal 300 damage to a Clannfear with a 20% Reflect Damage effect, you take 60 damage--which is easy to overlook if you're one-shotting everything in sight. Also, swinging a weapon takes fatigue, while a bow takes none if your Marksman is at least 25.
The second option, negative Endurance, is even worse. Living with 1 point of base Health means anything that deals 1 damage or more will kill you. A high-Restoration character can fortify their Health, but that's a lot of upkeep.
The third option is negative Strength. That reduces melee damage to zero, but a character with fatigue boosting should ideally be using a bow anyway. It also reduces your encumbrance to 0, but you can fix that with a Feather spell like Ease Burden. Unfortunately, there's a weird issue where a character carrying 50 pounds and casts a 75-point Feather spell will only get 50 points of Feather, and picking up a single more pound will overburden them until they re-cast Feather.
But negative Strength instead of negative Willpower will allow us to regenerate magicka, which is a massive, massive advantage. With magicka regeneration, we can spam buffing spells and Invisibility spells and all kinds of other things without worrying about running out or needing to drink a Restore Magicka potion.
That means I'm not going to avoid casting a critical buff because I'm saving my magicka for later. That means I'm less likely to get caught off-guard.
Also, we're not going to use the Staff of the Everscamp anymore, because that 20-point Speed penalty is really crushing. Instead, we're going to use our Absorb Strength spells on a different target: the daedra worshippers at the shrine of Peryite along the Silverfish River.
Five people who are completely unconsciousness and take no action when attacked (unlike the Everscamps) and can be pushed into a tight circle to affect all of them simultaneously with a single area-effect spell.
But I don't yet have that spell; I can't create custom spells until I either buy some overpriced Magetallow Candles for Frostcrag Spire or complete the Mages Guild quests. The latter seems faster than paying for the former, so I head out to Bleak Flats Cave with the Jemane twins to rescue Erthor.
Even with the gigantic yellow object indicating a missing mesh or texture in my install, the cave is still creepy to me. Those zombies blend in with the environment, and even though I know the rough location of each one by memory, finding them in the shadows is still difficult and I always think they're going to appear right in front of me and pounce.
Erthor joins the team. As before, I nail Caminalda with a Silence poison and let the others deal with her.
I accidentally kill somebody while doing my chores, so Lucien Lachance appears to congratulate me and invite me to join a secret guild of assassins. The Jemane brothers don't seem perturbed.
On the way to a fort in the Leyawiin questline, I spot an imp just outside the city and decide to help one of the Imperial Legion soldiers bring it down.
It proves remarkably sturdy, surviving five attackers at once.
It's also much larger than most imps, which clues me in that this is not an ordinary imp. When one of the twins falls, I get worried.
When it kills an Imperial Legion Soldier, I panic.
The imp then flies off to kill another soldier closer to the gates. I monitor the situation under Invisibility with some Restore Magicka potions to keep my magicka full--and then, despite me being completely invisible, the imp spins around in midair and begins casting a spell at me, at point-blank range... with the telltale red lighting effect that indicates a Drain Health effect that, knowing OOO for what it is, could be a one-hit kill for a low-level character like Zoreii.
I avoid getting hit and hurry back, and thankfully the imp turns its attention back to our followers, two soldiers, and a random unarmed civilian who decides to pitch in.
Finally, the imp falls, and when I look in its inventory, I discover that it's not an imp at all--it's a Gargoyle, an OOO-introduced enemy, apparently, that drops a special stone that works just like a Sigil Stone.
None of the loot has any real use to me. I hate to think what would have happened if I hadn't had so many allies to deal with the Gargoyle.
Since we still don't have fatigue boosting on hand, the Marauders in the Leyawiin quest are still pretty tough, and our followers can't do much on their own. Erthor prefers to stay out of combat entirely. Here he is, patiently waiting for the Jemane brothers to return as a Marauder charges over to kill him.
I contribute a few poisoned arrows to the fight, but our followers do most of the work. I have to cast Dragonskin for safety's sake, which means we have to return to Leyawiin, wait 24 hours to get Dragonskin back, and then go back to the fort to fight more Marauders. Erthor continues to avoid the fight whenever possible.
But when the Jemane brothers fall--as they constantly do, because they're low-level characters that don't even wear armor--the Marauders come to find us, and Erthor is forced into combat because, unlike Zoreii, he knows no Invisibility spells.
Finally we reach the last chamber, where we have a special poison in store for Kalthar.
I activate Dragonskin, drink a Shield+Frost Shield+Restore Magicka potion to get our Shield all the way up to 85%, and engage Kalthar. Paralysis buys us about 3 seconds of free attacks, which amounts to multiple chances to apply another poison--all of which stack. By the time he climbs to his feet, he's already almost dead and the poisons haven't even come close to running out.
We finally complete the Mages Guild recommendation quests and gain access to a spellmaking altar. We leave the Jemane brothers at Weatherleah, make our Absorb Strength spells, and fast-travel to the shrine of Peryite to use Damage Strength potions to decrease our Strength far below zero and get our base fatigue down to 1.
Our 100-point Fortify Fatigue spell will now make all of our arrows deal 101 times as much damage as normal. We are ready for the main quest.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 12
I have no screenshots for Kvatch, the Mythic Dawn meeting, the Dagon shrine, the Bruma spies, Sheogorath's quest, or the Bruma gate. Apparently they got overwritten or deleted.
It was probably mostly just running around killing everything with arrows. Just imagine a demon getting blasted off of his feet by an arrow from a tiny Breton woman with a toy bow, and that's probably what most of the fighting looked like.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 13
Without a sky-high Restoration skill, I can't cast gigantic buffing spells on allies like I could in the previous run, or spam Illusion spells to halt combat during the Bruma attack. That means Martin will be in greater danger in this run, and I don't know by how much.
Accordingly, I'm going to solicit more troops for that battle to give us an edge, which involves tackling all of the Oblivion gates outside each of the major cities. One of the gates is especially frustrating.
We have to reach that tower at the top, but there's no clear path to it or visible doorway. I hike up and down the mountain and find nothing nowhere.
After ages of wandering, I finally find the doorway up the mountain hidden low on the ground.
Nothing else interesting happens; the whole gate is just about finding that tiny doorway.
We're making steady progress gaining levels. Zoreii's magic stats are getting stronger. We're gaining Willpower faster than I expected because we've been casting so many Alteration spells.
But every time we level up and increase our Willpower or Endurance (or Agility, if I ever bothered increasing it), our base fatigue gets bumped up a little, and then it's back to the shrine of Peryite to absorb more Strength and then damage it back down to zero so it resets to a lower negative value, keeping our base fatigue at 1.
We have some pretty solid skills at this point and 130 Health...
...but most of our defenses depend on maintaining buffs. It's quite liberating, though, to be able to spam buffs over and over without worrying about running out of magicka at a bad time.
We keep closing Oblivion gates. The others are easier to navigate, which means completing them is less about wandering the landscape and more about knocking Dremora off their feet with super-powered arrows.
You might notice that most of these shots are done at point-blank range. It's the best way to ensure that I don't miss. Archery with fatigue boosting is less about kiting and more about drawing the bow, charging right at your opponent, and then shooting them in the face.
The Skingrad gate is also hard to get around in, though it's not so bad as that first one. Basically, there are several towers, and you have to unlock gates in each one in order to reach the top of the tower. One of the cool things is when the bridges from two towers stretch out to connect each other.
Now that we're a decent level, we get some rather lovely loot from these gates, including a bunch of high-priced rings. I burn some extra gold on a super-powered potion, just in case we get in serious trouble at some point in the future.
By the time we're done, we're at level 12 with -168 Strength. Next up, the Ayleid ruins of Sancre Tor and Miscarcand.
A fighter/cleric of Helm run that was going pretty well until I foolishly took on the Revenant Single-handed and got held. The only difficult part up until then was clearing the ankheg nests as I had to keep resting after killing every two or three ankhegs. Images are self-explanatory.
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Remove fear and unfailing Endurance proved to be excellent spells against Tarnesh and Zordral.
Next run another fighter/cleric, this time an Arctic Dwarf. At the beginning of the game Arctic Dwarves have a decided advantage, but the 20% reduction in experience soon whittles that away.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 14
Back to Sancre Tor! This time around, we'll actually be fighting the enemies directly instead of sneaking past them and relying on summons. To my surprise and alarm, one of the Undead Blades survives one of our arrows!
But another shot brings him down, though, and the shortbow draws quickly enough that we can land the second shot before he can reach us. Notice that there are four different icons in the upper right corner of the screen--the three on the left are a custom Fortify Fatigue, Shield, and Fortify Health spell that I can cast constantly to ensure that I can land a high-damage arrow at any time, and to keep Zoreii in good, safe condition at all times.
The dungeon isn't too exciting. The Undead Blades go down in two or three hits each, and the numerous Ancient Ghosts (who are actually really powerful critters) die in a single hit, provided we use silver arrows to get past their 100% Resist Normal Weapons effect.
We get some neat gear, including a shield with a 6% Reflect Damage effect. Reflect Damage won't do much since we seldom engage in melee, but it's the only way to further reduce damage once you get to the 85% damage reduction cap from armor and Shield spells. Normally a shield would harm our spell effectiveness, but as long as you aren't using a one-handed weapon, the shield will apply any enchantment bonuses even though it's not actually being worn (you won't get the armor bonus, though).
Next up, Miscarcand! We have to deal with some zombies, unfortunately, but our summons can distract them long enough for us to land a fatal shot with our bow.
Midway through the dungeon, we hit Restoration 50 simply because our primary buffing spell is a Restoration spell that we cast constantly (more often than every 30 seconds).
Finally, we reach the Great Welkynd Stone. We don't even need to use our powerful anti-mage poisons; a single shot with a silver arrow slays the lich in a single hit.
We gain a level, go back to the shrine of Peryite, and re-set our base fatigue back to 1. This is what Zoreii looks like at level 13, already at virtually maximum power.
You know, in a normal run, a character build like Zoreii could benefit so much from a suit of armor and a good melee weapon. But fatigue boosting with negative Strength makes so many things completely unnecessary. We already have decent stats, some good defenses thanks to being a Breton with high Alchemy, and a bow that can deal over 300 damage with every arrow.
We just need to make sure we don't get overconfident. With 144 Health unbuffed, we could still die from a paralysis effect, a trap, lava damage, a bad fall, or a surprise attack from a high-level enemy. I don't have enough meta-knowledge about OOO to foresee every possible scenario, so I'll need to be careful.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 15
It's finally time to deal with the attack on Bruma. As before, we have a small horde of daedra to fend off, and if Martin dies during the fight, the game is over. Since we aren't as high-level as we were in the previous run, the daedra should be weaker than normal, but so will the soldiers backing us up. Thanks to having 50 Restoration instead of 100, our buffing spell for our allies is only so strong.
The good news is that we have more allies on hand than before since we spent more time closing Oblivion gates and soliciting aid from the other cities of Cyrodiil.
But as it turns out, our allies prove all but unnecessary. With fatigue boosting, I can pick off the enemies one at a time as they come through the gates.
Only a tiny number of daedra make it past Zoreii, and they don't have nearly enough time to endanger Martin before the Great Gate opens. Once we're through, Martin is completely safe; he can't die after you've already entered the portal.
We still have to deal with that 15-minute timer, though, and the game is over if we don't make it to the Great Sigil Stone in time. I take a different route this time after seeing somebody else tackle the quest efficiently on Youtube, and this time around, I don't need to worry about being able to jump across the bridge, because we have a buff to help us make the leap.
We easily make it across and open the gate to the next area. We sneak inside the main tower, and while I can probably one-shot everything in here, I decide not to engage the Dremora Prince at the bottom level.
Notice that there are three more icons in the upper right; I've added Fire Shield, Frost Shield, and Shock Shield to my standard set of buffs, slightly improving Zoreii's defenses.
We move slow and make sure not to run into those giant sword traps. I get worried when I run into a lock, but we just happen to have 8 lockpicks left--not much, but enough to pick the lock.
I arrive at the top of the tower with plenty of time to spare, so I decide to give a shot at slaying the Dremora Prince nearby. A single sneak attack with our bow takes him down. Notice how far his body is from his dropped shield; that's how much force our arrows apply when they knock critters off their feet.
Sadly, Baurus didn't make it in this run, either. I think he just got crushed by the siege engine again. Baurus deserved better.
With the Great Sigil Stone in hand, we're finally ready to confront Mankar Camoran and take back the Amulet of Kings.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 16
Martin opens the gate to Paradise. We need to get through the tunnels to reach Mankar Camoran, but Kathutet stands in our way... for a moment.
Those arrows can take down pretty much anything. We get surprised by a spider daedra in the tunnels, but even she goes down with a single shot.
A Xivilai survives one of our arrows, however.
But he doesn't survive two.
We hurry through the tunnels and arrive outside Camoran's lair. I have a special poison for him in mind.
But as it turns out...
...the poison doesn't even have a chance to affect him. He dies in one hit.
I hurry to snatch up the enemy's gear before we're teleported back to Mundus. It's time to head to the Imperial City for the final phase of the game. We get attacked by daedra, but I'm extremely hesitant to fire arrows in Martin's defense, lest I accidentally one-shot him and end the game instantly. I aim for an enemy Dremora's feet and only fire when I can see clearly that Martin is backing away.
Outside, we're attacked by daedra again, and while we come out okay, I catch myself aiming an arrow straight at Martin! I quickly turn away.
Only one more area to deal with: the outside of the temple, where a Dremora Prince is waiting. I decide to take him out early.
But he survives, and when I back off to fire another shot, he survives that, too--in fact, he barely takes any damage from it. What's going on?
I check my inventory and stat screens and discover the problem. My base fatigue is no longer at 1! Zoreii's Strength is at 0 instead of the negative 170s!
How did this happen? It looks like we have some Drain Attribute effects, and it seems that a Drain Strength effect re-set our Strength to 0. I've seen similar things happen with Restore Attribute and Fortify Attribute effects.
With our Strength at 0, our arrows are now extremely weak--I only do a few points of damage per shot, instead of hundreds.
I was relying on fatigue boosting for almost all of our strength. Without it, Zoreii has lost the vast majority of her power.
It's time to run. We take heavy damage from the Dremora attacking us from behind.
Then we get locked in place--we're not paralyzed, but we can't move anywhere. I check our inventory and discover the problem: we just got hit with a Dispel effect that removed all of our buffs, including the Feather spell we needed to avoid being over-encumbered!
Worse yet, the Dispel effect failed to dispel our potions because our potions, with their multiple effects, had high effective magicka costs for the purposes of the Dispel check (Dispel removes effects based on the base magicka cost of the source). Why is that a problem?
It means we can't drink an Invisibility potion.
We're at half our normal Health and I don't know how much longer it will last. Do I cast Dragonskin to get high damage reduction at the cost of being stuck a moment longer, or do I cast Ease Burden with its Feather effect to get moving?
I don't trust Dragonskin to give enough damage reduction to keep us alive for the 2-3 seconds it would leave us rooted in place, so I opt for casting Ease Burden. With our encumbrance reset, we can move again, and we make it to the exit in one piece.
We're safe for now, but we need to go back out there. I restore all of our buffs and prepare to head back into battle. I have a special treat in store for the Dremora Prince.
I don't see him, though, so I run ahead to Mehrunes Dagon so I can report the news to Martin. I turn and run back.
But in the chaos of battle, I get hit, and while our massive 85% damage resistance keeps the damage below, we get paralyzed.
It's a poison. OOO enemies use poison, and this Dremora Prince is one of them. He hit me when I wasn't looking.
There's no way I can survive more than a few seconds on the ground. But I have made sure that we're prepared for this problem.
Zoreii has not drunk any potions yet. This means she has room for a Cure Paralysis potion!
Cure Paralysis has no duration, which means that we can drink another potion right after Zoreii starts climbing to her feet. I opt for a healing potion.
You see that telltale shimmer? It's just to the right of the potion list, just above "Resist Fire" in the list of the healing potion's effects, and just to the left of Zoreii's bow.
That's the Dremora Prince. He's using a Chameleon effect to screw with our visibility. That's why I couldn't see him coming; he was nearly invisible.
Then he nails me with another Dispel effect, taking away all of Zoreii's buffs, including our Ease Burden spell. We're locked in place once again.
But I know I can escape him just by re-casting Ease Burden. Once we can move again, we escape the area and speak with Martin. This dialogue, only accessible once you've spotted Dagon, is an important trigger for the end of the game.
All we have to do is run past the daedra and enter the temple. Then the final cutscene will begin. It will only take a few seconds if I avoid getting paralyzed again, but if something goes wrong, Martin could die; Oblivion moves very fast in combat. I make a point of applying our buffing spells to Martin and the soldiers, but Martin appears to reflect or absorb every such spell.
I take it as a good sign. I knew Martin had Reflect Spell and Spell Absorption active, but if they're this high, he should be a little safer against enemy spells.
I head back to the Dremora Prince area with Martin in tow. I arrive with low magicka due to buffing the soldiers, but I quickly get back enough of it to cast an Invisibility spell.
For some reason, I don't have the Invisibility icon, but since the Dremora Prince is distracted by other soldiers, we have a few seconds of safety at least.
A few seconds is all we need. We make it to the palace! The final cutscene begins.
Dagon bursts into the temple, but Martin is scripted to win. Martin transforms into a dragon, torches Dagon, tears out his throat, and banishes him back to his home plane, sealing the barrier between Mundus and Oblivion. His labors complete, Martin turns to stone.
Oblivion is over! I take Zoreii back to Frostcrag Spire to get her next level and re-set her base fatigue to 1. Here is what she looks like at the end of the game, wearing Mankar Camoran's robe now that the run is over.
One no-reload Oblivion run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, with no item duplication, complete.
With Morrowind and Oblivion complete, it's time to move on to Skyrim! Since Skyrim Special doesn't seem to recognize SKSE, the script extender, there are some mods that I can't install. Instead, we're going with three mods that don't require SKSE: Ordinator, an overhaul to the perk system, MorrowLoot, which reorganizes the loot system, and Smilodon, which overhauls combat and makes weapons much more deadly.
We have an additional restriction: I can't do any crafting whatsoever. No Smithing, no Alchemy, no Enchant, and no cooking. Skyrim rewards grinding crafting skills far more than actually playing the game, and crafting skills can completely break the difficulty, so we're going to avoid our three strongest skills completely.
Nor can we stun-lock everything with the Impact perk from the Destruction tree; Ordinator removes that perk entirely. We're going to have to improvise a great deal, especially because I've never played any of these mods before; all I've ever tried is SkyRe. All I know is that we're going to choose the Vancian Magic perk.
But since we can't get until we hit 30 Alteration, we'll discuss that later. We will be playing a Breton once again, but Bretons are far weaker in Skyrim than in Oblivion; their Resist Magicka is reduced to 25, their Dragonskin blocks spells instead of weapons, and enemy spells are much less dangerous than enemy weapons in Skyrim. Honestly, Orcs and Argonians and High Elves are easily the strongest races in Skyrim.
Anyway, Skyrim starts out on the wagon to Helgen. We, along with three other guys, are being escorted to our public executions. One of the guys is taking it pretty hard.
At the last minute, Lokir protests that he's innocent--he's not one of the rebel Stormcloaks--and tries to make a break for it. Unfortunately, the Imperial Legion that's holding the execution has an archer on hand.
We're not part of the rebellion. We're not even on the Imperials' own list of people to be executed; we're not supposed to be here at all. But the captain isn't willing to take any chances.
The Stormcloak rebellion is serious business in Skyrim. The rebel leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, used the power of the Voice (more on that later) to kill his king and take the throne for himself. But now Ulfric has been captured, and the leader of the Imperial Legion in Skyrim, General Tullius, takes a moment to grandstand.
First on the block is a nameless rebel. He interrupts his own last rites so he can hurry up and go to Sovngarde, the Elder Scrolls version of Valhalla.
He gets his wish. The captain kicks his body aside to make room for Frost, our Charname in this run, to get her head chopped off as well.
Right before we lose our head, a dragon lands on the tower behind the executioner...
...and throws everyone off their feet with a Shout. The dragon puts the torch to the entire town, and everyone forgets about the execution to focus on staying alive amid the chaos.
At the end, Ralof and Hadvar, a rebel and a soldier, offer to save us. We side with Ralof and spend the starting dungeon killing Imperial Legion soldiers with fire and the Conjure Familiar spell. Enemies deal 50% more weapon damage at Adept difficulty, so I hang back and let Ralof tank for me.
The dungeon is little trouble otherwise. We make it outside and receive our first quest: we need to report the dragon attack to the Jarl (local lord) of the city of Whiterun, because dragons aren't actually supposed to exist in Tamriel. Until now, the only known dragons are the god Akatosh and the Daedric Prince Peryite.
First, though, we have a couple stops. Just outside the starting dungeon, there are three "standing stones" which give us mutually exclusive but really awesome powers. As always, I play a magic-heavy character, so the choice is obvious.
The next stop is Bleak Falls Barrow (not to be confused with Bleak Flats Cave, mentioned in the Oblivion run). Before I head out, I purchase our first and only Alteration spell.
Alteration has long been a rather weak skill in Skyrim, largely because these armor spells cost so, so much magicka to cast. It's generally better for mages to just wear heavy armor, since armor imposes no spellcasting penalties in Skyrim--it just slows down your movement and makes you lose Stamina (the Skyrim version of fatigue, but much less important) faster when running.
We hike out to Bleak Falls Barrow, which is guarded by a gang of bandits. Fortunately, my mods aren't as vicious as OOO, so dealing with bandits at level 1 isn't as dangerous as it was in OOO in Oblivion.
To get our Alteration up to 30 and pick the Vancian Magic perk, we need to cast Oakflesh many times, but we can only do it in combat (combat spells don't give experience if cast out of combat). We pick our first perk to lower the cost of the spell and let us cast it a little more often.
In vanilla Skyrim, the first perk reduces Novice spell cost in half; the Ordinator perk reduces all spells, not just Novice ones, to 65% their normal cost and even makes them scale with skill level (a long-running problem with Skyrim is that spells don't scale nearly as much as weapons).
We run into a stronger bandit shortly into Bleak Falls and take a lot of damage really fast. Fortunately, drinking potions in Skyrim is instantaneous and there's no limit to how many you can drink!
You just have to make sure you have enough potions on hand and that you react in time to open the inventory screen and drink them.
The Wounded Frostbite Spider also does far more damage than I expected, and I nearly die before I access my inventory.
But, as it happens, the giant spider can't fit through the doorway to the previous area. We can retreat and the spider can't follow!
The spider is smart enough not to stand in the doorway, however, so we can't attack it without entering its lair and exposing ourselves to danger.
We can, however, summon a familiar over and over to do the work for us. The process is slow, so I pitch in with an arrow, but the spider has a ranged poison attack that can nail me even if the familiar is blocking the way. We put it down with an arrow to the face.
Most of the enemies in this dungeon are draugr, fairly weak undead warriors. Restless Draugr have much more Health, however, and have more time to deal damage before they go down, and Draugr Wights (which don't appear in Bleak Falls) are tougher still.
The end boss is a Draugr Deathlord, who uses a minor Shout, hits hard, and lasts much longer than any of the other draugr. Fully buffed, he still drains most of our potions before going down.
Bleak Falls is a very long dungeon with lots of loot. By the time we return to Riverwood to get our reward and sell off our extra loot, we have over 1,400 gold--a very good start to the run.
Time to head to Whiterun. The dragon fight will give us an opportunity to grind Alteration in safety.
We report to the Jarl, there's some boring lore about politics or something, and he gives us a rather awesome pair of boots before sending us out to a tower outside Whiterun, where a dragon will ambush us and a group of soldiers.
The dragon, Mirmulnir, is actually no threat at all. The soldiers can do all of the work; they don't need any help to kill it. Instead, we hide at the tower chain-casting Oakflesh to level our Alteration skill.
We absorb the dragon's soul with some flashy visuals...
...and some random dude says we're the Dragonborn. The Dragonborn is a special hero or something who eats souls and yells at people. The Jarl tells us to go to High Hrothgar, where the shoutiest dudes in all the land will teach me how to yell loud enough to save the world from dragons. We get a badass warrior chick to help us along the way.
But we're not ready for High Hrothgar just yet. First, I want to join the College of Winterhold, where we can buy some new spell tomes and stuff. Getting into college is as simple as casting a single spell, which the resident dark elf teaches to us for 30 gold.
Magic isn't well appreciated in Skyrim, and Winterhold is especially hostile to magic, to the extent that the mages apparently come up with plans on how to defend themselves with lethal force.
We're joined by three other new apprentices, who want our teacher, Tolfdir, to teach them how to blow stuff up. Since a no-reload run is all about not dying, I advocate safety first.
Learning about safety involving Tolfdir throwing a fireball right in your face until you learn how to block it. We get it right on the second try.
Next, we have a field trip to Saarthal, a dusty archaeological site. While poking around, a homely elf in weird robes appears in a vision to tell us that something extremely important and vague is going to happen.
Whatevs. I don't plan on completing the College of Winterhold questline, so this is irrelevant; we're only here to complete the main quest.
We keep exploring and thrash the local undead. Finally, we spam Oakflesh enough to hit Alteration level 30! Now we can finally choose the Vancian Magic perk.
We'll only be able to cast 20 spells per dungeon, which is a huge drawback. But restoring them doesn't take all that much time, and the benefits are spectacular. All Restoration spells will now heal twice as much, all Destruction spells will deal twice as much damage, all Alteration and Conjuration spells will last twice as long, and all Illusion spells will affect creatures twice as high-level as normal.
Better still, our magicka is now irrelevant; we no longer use it for anything. That means we require no Fortify Magicka equipment, no cost-saving gear, no Restore Magicka potions, and we don't need to spend any level ups increasing magicka; we can instead pour all of that into Health instead.
Finally, a sustained spell--a spell which lasts as long as you concentrate on it--only counts as one spell, no matter how much time you spend concentrating on it. This means that, for the cost of only 2 spells out of our 20, we can heal ourselves 20 Health per second and inflict 16 fire damage per second, indefinitely.
I still have to let it down every now and then just so I can see properly and gather loot and stuff, but there aren't a lot of threats at this point in the game that can deal more than 20 damage per second. We can outlast all kinds of critters, even high-level enemies with lots of Health.
We find a big glowy orb thingy at the end of the dungeon, which can only mean a successful expedition. We report our success to the Archmage and then get out. We stop by Markarth, where some guy knifes some poor lady and is promptly axed by a nearby guard...
...then to Riften, where a dragon flies menacingly around the city but never actually lands, allowing us to just leave it alone...
...and then, after buying some healing potions to replace all the ones we've already lost, we start heading towards High Hrothgar. On the road, we run into an old orc who says he wants to die in battle. Even though he apparently just wasted two sabre cats on his own, I decide to take him on.
Unfortunately, I end up torching Lydia in the process. Apparently she's not truly immortal; she's just a "protected" character, which means only the player can permanently kill her.
I proceed on my own (after looting her body, of course) and realize I have to cross a river. The shortest method appears to be a gigantic log stretching a hundred feet across a massive gorge...
...but when I hear that bandit threatening me, I decide to take the long way around it. I don't think a bandit's arrow is likely to take me down, but I'm concerned that it could shake me enough to send me tumbling off the log, and I don't think falling from that height is exactly.
Down by the river, I stumble upon a Frost Troll. I can't deal much damage to the thing with arrows, so I just wait for it to approach so I can torch it while maintaining a healing spell.
He lands one hit on me and takes a huge chunk out of our health bar, but I figure that healing 20 Health per second will be more than enough to keep us alive.
We scrape by with the help of some potions and start the ascent to High Hrothgar. Since we made it past a Frost Troll, I think we'll be okay; a Frost Troll is the worst there is on the way up the mountain.
Then we run into an Ice Wolf. After torching several wolves in the past, I assume he'll fall in short order, but he does massive damage.
I count on my healing spell to keep me alive... but then, despite being at over half Health, I die in one hit.
At first, I think it's a bug, because I didn't even see a game over screen; it just automatically loaded the last save. But when I go back up the mountain and jump from a fatal height, I see the same result: Frost hits the ground in third-person mode and the game automatically loads the last save. It wasn't a bug.
Helgen is fairly similar; the starting dungeon is never really new. Outside Riverwood, though, we get attacked by a gang of bandits where I didn't expect to see any until Bleak Falls Barrow. Fortunately, the more heavily-armored bandits are slower than Frost, which allows us to run away and buy enough time to fire off arrows.
Ralof and some other Riverwood natives end up helping us take down the bandits.
Up at the first level of Bleakwood Falls, I discover that we can easily train Alteration at low risk just by isolating an archer and then dodging her arrows.
She fires at regular intervals, making it pretty easy to scoot out of the way, and many of her arrows are blocked outright by the environment. This lets me wait for my magicka to regenerate and re-cast Oakflesh.
We get Alteration up to 30, but don't yet pick Vancian magic because I want to save it for later in the dungeon. The bow takes care of the Bandit Outlaw (a stronger version of a normal bandit) and the Wounded Frost Spider (we use hit-and-fade tactics abusing the doorway).
Then I get a new idea. If I cast two healing spells at once and hold them indefinitely, I can heal myself for 40 points per second--which means I can let the draugr attack me indefinitely and train both Restoration and Heavy Armor to any level I want!
But I fail to test it out first, and it turns out that letting three draugr attack me at once was a little too much. I can only handle two. The three of them manage to overcome Frost's regeneration and end the run prematurely.
But now I have a solid early game strategy: use an archer to train Alteration until we can get Vancian Magic, then use Vancian Magic to stay alive while a pair of draugr attack us and increase our Heavy Armor and Restoration skills while we wait. This time, I use the bandit archer at the watchtower near Bleak Falls and pick the first Alteration perk to make Oakflesh cost less magicka, speeding up the process. I also use a shield to train Block a little. At first, the bandit stays in place while I dodge not far away, but eventually the bandit gets stuck on an incline and can't reach us at all.
Combat is still active as long as someone is attacking you (or trying to), which means our Oakflesh spells grant experience, even though we're not in any real danger.
I enter Bleak Falls Barrow, fight my way down to the draugr, and reduce a pack of draugr from 3 to 2 to make sure they don't deal enough damage to overwhelm us. I set Frost to constantly cast two healing spells at once and watch her level Heavy Armor and Restoration as the draugr struggle to overcome her massive regeneration.
It takes some minutes, but we get both skills above 50, giving us lots of level ups very early. We then use Flames to burn down the rest of the opposition in the dungeon.
We sell off the loot, then go the College of Winterhold to buy some new spells. With Vancian Magic doubling the effectiveness of all spells, we have some pretty strong options at our disposal, and we don't have to worry about the magicka cost at all.
Our bed at the college counts as our own, which means we can recharge spells at it for free. Since it's 60 seconds away from a fast-travel point, it's also very easy to reach whenever we run low on spells.
Our only problem is that we need to ration spells carefully. I make a point of avoiding casting too many spells by using sustained spells, which only count as one.
Then, after a short fight with several draugr at once, I find that I'm already out of spells.
I have no idea how I lost 20 spells already. I rested (in my own bed) before entering Saarthal, and we barely spent any.
Unfortunately, we can't leave Saarthal until it's complete; the door is locked behind us. I decide to move forward and rely on our sword and healing potions to get by until Tolfdir rejoins us.
But the draugr are really tough because I gained so many levels by increasing Heavy Armor and Restoration. I start losing potions fast.
Then a Draugr Wight weighs down on us, and we quickly run out of potions even as we deal almost no damage to the enemy.
There's no way I can take down this creature without any more potions; it's dealing far too much damage and we're dealing far too little. I run away and scour my inventory, but there's only a single option.
Hopefully the fire damage from this scroll will help turn the tide. I turn around and begin casting the spell.
But this is a master-level spell, which means it takes several seconds to play the entire casting animation. It doesn't come out fast enough, and the draugr kills us.
Losing all my spells seems like a bug. I reload and do some tests and confirm that I entered the dungeon with 20 spells, but no matter how badly I play the game, I never come close to burning 20 spells by the time I reach the point where I ran out the first time around. There were only 7 draugr in 3 fights, and I had 19 spells by the time I reached them (I spent one opening a door). If I used an armor spell for each fight (which I wouldn't have), a healing spell for each fight, and used a separate Destruction spell for each draugr (when it really would have taken at most 5 or 6 to kill them all), and then just blasted 5 random spells at the wall (which I also wouldn't have), I still would have had at least 2 spells left at worst. At best, I would have had 14 spells left.
I fiddle with the Amulet of Saarthal to see if it messed with my spellcasting somehow, but I can't replicate the bug. I have no idea how I ended up with zero spells, but I just can't figure out how I could have lost the legitimately.
Even so, I don't want to spend a lot of time continuing the run if there's a chance that I'll figure out, much later, that the death wasn't due to a bug. I decide not to reload.
For a while, I consider not continuing in Skyrim. There's very little growth for mages; there just aren't very many spells to get. The full list of Skyrim spells is ridiculously short. I decide that spending half the game spamming Flames and then spending the other half of the game spamming Wall of Flames is just not going to be that much fun.
Then I have a new idea. I wasn't able to install Apocalypse, but I can still install other spell mods. I search the Nexus and come up with a new install:
Smilodon MorrowLoot Ordinator High Level Enemies Better Master Spells Patron Gods of Skyrim Phenderix Magic Evolved Simple Mark and Recall Tomebound Telekinetic Shove Spell Weapons and Armor Fixes
This should keep things a little more interesting and less reductive with Vancian Magic. The Mark and Recall spells will be especially convenient for the perk.
The Patron Gods of Skyrim is for roleplayers, but it offers great bonuses for powergamers. The new temple available shortly after Helgen, in which you can choose which god or Daedric Prince to worship (you can only get one at a time, but you can switch whenever you want), offers some pretty excellent rewards for worshippers. There's also a massive amount of free loot, from dragon bones and scales to an orcish sword and helmet.
In general, I like Hermaeus Mora, simply because a god of knowledge appeals to me personally. Also, he's very creepy and cool (I've played through the Dragonborn expansion before) and it makes sense for a mage character like Frost.
Same as before, we head out to the bandits to grind Alteration, get Vancian Magic, and use Destruction magic to steamroll the draugr of Bleak Falls Barrow.
We proceed to the College of Winterhold and discover some really, really excellent new spells for sale.
How can I afford all these new tomes? We go bankrupt just buying a few of the best ones. The solution is another perk from the Ordinator mod.
Eminently abusable, we can generate gold whenever we want simply by using the "wait" function or fast-traveling from city to city. I use it to buy a Mark and Recall spell, which I can use to teleport back to our bed at the college whenever we run low on spells. We also have a slightly slower-casting spell to teleport to Riverwood.
That last one is very important. It means that we can both teleport to any given location that we set, as well as a static location in Riverwood. We can Mark a spot in the middle of Saarthal, teleport out to Riverwood, and then return to Saarthal with a Recall spell after resting fully, completely avoiding the drawbacks of the Vancian Magic perk at the cost of a slight inconvenience.
We do just that, and it means that we don't have to worry about running out of spells in the middle of a dungeon we normally couldn't leave early. We zap all the draugr inside.
We head to Whiterun and find even more awesome spells on hand. Normally, their magicka cost would balance them out, but Vancian Magic negates the issue of magicka cost.
Next up is the dragon outside Whiterun. This time, we don't need the guards to do the work. We just go right up to the thing and spam Lightning Bolt until we fry it.
I teleport back to the college and find that I've accidentally teleported one of the local guards with me.
For a moment, I think that the college is going to have a Whiterun Guard loitering around forever. But then he leaves my room...
...and starts making his way out of the college to return to his old post.
Whiterun is in the middle of Skyrim. Winterhold is in the far northeast. That poor guard has to walk halfway across Skyrim just to get home.
(I wrote the following and all the upcoming updates about this character a couple of days ago when I lost access to the internet, just for context.)
Hey everyone,
So... I wasn't going to play Baldur's Gate again until 2.5 would be complete, but then my entire internet broke down for multiple days (I'm currently writing this three days after losing access, in the hopes of posting this on the forums at a later date, once I'm able to go online again), which left me in the position of not being able to do the things I had planned to do. One of the few available options to fill my freetime was... playing Baldur's Gate again, as steam can, luckily, be started in offline-mode.
So... still no patch, and certainly no capability to download any mods. What's left to do in the vanilla game? Well...I don't like leaving things unfinished, and there are two types of game I've tried in the past but failed to succeed at – a) an actual solo run and b) the meatgrinder challenge. However, I wasn't in the mood for b), especially after the awkward ways in which my previous attempts ended. A) it was.
I'm actually quite bad at soloing – propably because I don't like to play with no party in a party-based game, which results in me not having a lot of experience and not knowing about a couple of crucial solo strategies. While my first 3 serious solo attempts (the totemic druid and two ranger/clerics) made it all the way to Amelyssan (for the first) or Abazigal (for the two ranger/clerics), everything I did after that, with a less calculated and careful mindset (which is something very hard to maintain for me while soloing), failed.
All these runs are undocumented, but to give you a brief taste (of what I can remember): A dark moon monk got killed by a high hedge skeleton (yes, really), a F/M/C died during the Neera encounter, a F/I was destroyed by the adventuring party in the basilisk area, a barbarian (of all classes) got charmed by the Hamadryad (still don't know how I managed to do that), another F/MC was killed by Semaj's Cloudkill (the most successful run of these), a berserker failed to win the ducal palace fight (which is at least somwhat understandable)... I lost at least another F/MC and a shadowdancer to now unknown foes, and there might have been more.
This time, I planned to learn from all of these mistakes. I went for the approach I thought to be the safest possible during all stages of the game, though I mostly worried about late ToB – Abazigal and Amelyssan. This is why I chose a dwarven defender – with high damage reduction and Simmy+PfM abuse, those encounters seem to be possible even for a bad solo player like myself. I also thought up a ducal palace strategy which I hoped would work much better than just trying to deal as much damage as possible – more of that later.
Now: Meet Cendrosch, the Dwarven Defender – shortly after killing Shoal and doing a couple of other quests.
My approach to early BG1: Kill Shoal, do easy quests to get reputation to 20, buy Greenstone Amulet (very important!) and protection from petrification scroll, kill basilisks, kill sirens, get useful items, start doing the main quest.
To that end, I went with **Sling (for kiting and, later, for Belhifet) and **War Hammer (primary melee weapon for the entire saga), later on getting **Longbow (to apply arrows of dispelling, which I planned to use during the ducal palace event, the Sarevok battle and against all kinds of SoD mages).
Here's Cendrosch and his buddy Corax:
And here's a very effective potion of firebreath to get that full plate from Taugosz Khosann:
It should be mentioned that all potential problems introduced by dangerous crowd control spells (or, even worse, charm) were solved by rigorous use of the Greenstone Amulet. I still only had to rebuy it once and had lots of charges left by the time I got to the later stages of BG1.
Speaking of which, if Greenstone isn't enough to protect a dwarf, protection from magic does an even better job, right, Davaeorn?
In the big city, I bought a bunch of tactical arrows and obtained more crucial items, like the Helm of Balduran... and the Cloak. Poor Quenash:
I got some extra gold for the tons of potions needed for protection against all possible bad things and also saved up some valuable items (mostly gems) to sell in SoD later on. Not all quests were finished, and eventually, it was time to take down the Iron Throne party:
I used my strength potions and DUHM to get all the tomes in Candlekeep and skipped through most of the fighting via Sandthief Ring. Back in Baldur's Gate (and after killing the assassins), it was time for the first big hurdle of this run: The Ducal Palace.
This was my plan: Use the Nymph's Cloak to charm the noblemen to the south and southeast before the event starts and send them far away, so that when they transform, they won't enter combat right away. Use dispelling arrows while under effect of an oil of speed to get rid of any haste effects, greatly reducing the doppelganger's damage. I also used a strength potion and heroism for additional damage output. So far, so good – my plan seemed to work just fine; While Belt was almost dead, Liia was still unhurt, and the only doppelganger still around was only interested in targeting Cendrosch:
Now, here's where things get weird. Turns out the two noblemen I had sent away didn't transform into doppelgangers at all, and Belt refused to acknowlegde that the battle was over. He just stood there and wouldn't talk to me. I was stuck – so I thought I might've to get rid of those untransformed noblemen somehow. Afraid of what might happen if I simply would attack them or if I'd use them to attack Belt, I got them to attack each other – which did result in one of them turning hostile and getting killed by the flaming fist. So far, so good, but the other one was still left, not having turned hostile. Seeing no other choice, I struck him down (as I was pretty sure that having him attack the Flaming Fist, Belt, Liia or Sarevok would result in an immediate game over). This had a very weird effect: Liia and the flaming fist turned hostile (though I didn't lose any reputation), but Belt continued to stay friendly. In fact, while Liia and the mercs tried to kill me (failing to do any damage at all), Belt instead started to cut his own allies down – and they wouldn't attempt to strike back at all, still focusing on Cendrosch.
So I waited until Belt was done, hoping he would now finally acknowledge that the battle was over. He didn't. He was still standing around, and I couldn't talk to him. My last attempt to get out of this situation was charming Belt myself using the Nymph's Cloak charges, and when that didn't work, charming every NPC in the room (except for Sarevok). Didn't work either:
I figured that the situation definitely constituted a gamebreaking bug, so I reloaded and tried this approach once more, with similar results: The battle was won, but the game was stuck:
It seemed like my well thought-out strategy was simply unworkable. This left me no choice but to reload again, and, this time, don't attempt the apparently gamebreaking Nymph's Cloak charms, potentially making this attempt much more difficult. I planned to throw in a wand of sleep charge for good luck (I think it has only a 10% chance to work, but if it works, it is a huge relief). While Cendrosch started to get good dispelling arrow hits in, the wand took down 2 doppelgangers! Very lucky indeed!
It's hard to see, but the one to the south of Belt and the one next to Sarevok are asleep. The other two who are attacking the dukes have lost their haste effect, and the remaining two are only chasing after Cendrosch. Ironically, this ended up being my most successful attempt of all three, with Belt having lost the least amount of HP and Liia still at her maximum:
So, I was finally done with this event. Not the cleanest way to do it, getting stuck due to a bug two times, but I hope that most people will agree that in this case, reloading was justified.
Anyway, I invisbly made my way directly to Sarevok and lured him closer to the temple entrance with another dispelling arrow:
The now very slow Sarevok wasn't even there in time to help out poor Semaj, who immediately got his buffs dispelled as well:
All Cendrosch had to do now was kiting around Sarevok with his sling:
And BG1 was done! I am actually quite happy with my performance, though I did rely heavily on the Greenstone Amulet – the reason I'm happy is that I never got myself into a situation where I had to make a saving throw, which is something I didn't achieve with my previous totemic druid run. The only time where I felt that I had to get at least some RNG on my side was during the ducal palace fight – missing with multiple dispelling arrows, not affecting anyone with the wand of sleep and not getting any of the doppelgangers to chase Cendrosch around could've certainly ended the run.
Using the well-established combo of invisibility and protection from undead, I made my way to Korlasz. Since Cendrosch can't disarm the dispelling trap in front of her lair, he had to fight at least one group of foes, using necklace of missle charges:
Yes, that is him once again using the Greenstone Amulet for safety (which is actually very needed during this encounter, as these mages tend to cast spook). Korlasz got hit by dispelling arrows and hammered down until she gave up:
At this point, I bought a bunch of potions in the city and cleared the Coast Way Crossing. Nothing of note here (the Ring of Freedom remains useful), as a protection from undead scroll turned the Repository of the Undead into a cakewalk. A note: Without the internet, I couldn't look up any SoD trap locations (which I don't know entirely by heart – though almost), and since I don't know a lot of the trap effects, I only opened chests or containers if needed for quests or very useful items. I also stopped using the Greenstone Amulet, since there are tons of clarity potions available in SoD, and they a) last longer and b) start working instantly, while the amulet has a short activation delay.
Making my way to the Troll Claw Woods, I had no issue meleeing even dangerous foes like trolls or greater wyvern – with very good AC, constantly swapping about AC-improving belts and defensive stance available, Cendrosch has yet to meet someone he can't melee down in SoD. The dragon was killed via throwing dagger, which also got me to the SoD XP cap – a shield made from his scales improved AC even more. The Temple of Bhaal turned out to be rather easy, as I still had a strength potion, an oil of speed and heroism going (I buffed before taking on the dragon in case something went wrong with the dagger plan). The Neothelid was defeated:
And while Aerial Servants really pack a punch, forcing Cendrosch to drink a couple of healing potions even when protected by defensive stance, the Wardstone was eventually his.
I surrendered the fort (but not before making 80 voidstone bullets), used invulnerability to counter the scripted greater malison effect and cleared the bridge:
At the camp, I quickly obtained the thac0 +2 amulet, pulled the genie into the prime to buy some more items and got myself some lucky boots (+3 to all saving throws for dwarves – now this is something I would like to take into BG2!). I didn't get the +3 warhammer because I couldn't deal with the lock on the chest, but I planned to use bullets against big B anyway. At the underground river, I talked to the ogres, killed the couple from Rashemen, murdered Strunk (with the crusaders just watching – they usually go hostile!):
After that, I moved downstairs, poisoned the supplies, placed the barrel and ran out as soon as Hephernaan got his dialogue in:
I should mention that I previously got Corinth's Bow and the Ring of the Crusade from the Crusader Camp. The bow now played a minor part in taking down the waves attacking the Coalition Camp (the primary part was played by lots and lots of detonation arrows). For the first time in my life, I didn't use the warmages against the third wave, saving them for the final hostile party – this and more detonation arrows made the encounter rather easy:
During the siege, I kept shooting things with my detonation arrow to clear out the enemy forces as quickly as possible:
I agreed to Ashatiel's duel and won via PfM-Scroll:
Now, Avernus – I skipped the first level as usual, buffed with some potions for the second (clarity being the most important) and used all the remaining potions and scrolls to get full immunity to Belhifet's and his devil's abilities, not counting their actual physical damage. I decided to ignore the summons this time:
I kept kiting big B around – all the devils continued to teleport to Cendrosch's position constantly, so I really had to keep moving all the time:
However, none of my foes came close to threatening the Dwarven Defender, and with the 33rd Bullet of Darkness, Belhifet was slain (so really, there was no threat of running out of ammo).
We start with Dungeon & Circus Tent, walking around in the city for a bit (and buying some potions for safety while doing minor quests – oh, and we also see this very rare sight: First attack, instant crit, one hit kill for Shank):
Anyway, moving on to the Druid Grove. Cendrosch has a Ring of Air Control in his pocket – not only to potentially improve saving throws, but to flee any potentially dangerous druid battle. With Bassilus' Hammer transfering over from SoD to SoA now, a +2 weapon is available to use hit and run strategies against the Rakshasa – which is the primary reason we are here:
Though Cendrosch also gets to watch Cernd kill Faldorn. Now, we get our reward: The Shield of Harmony +2, which will saves us from all kinds of nasty effects, and the reason we started SoA with a visit to the Grove.
Next up, De'Arnise Keep – because it's easy and SoD already showed us that Cendrosch can deal with all kinds of trolls. We use our **Longbow to finish off the unconscious monsters with fire arrows, otherwise relying on the newly bought Dwarven Thrower +3 – our primary weapon until we get Crom Faeyr.
Speaking of weapons, this is the plan for Cendrosch's pips: He started with ***War Hammer, **Longbow and **Sling. We won't use longbows anymore except to kill trolls and sometimes apply dispelling arrows, and sling will be rarely used as well, because we have the Dwarven Thrower. We will get the final * in War Hammer first, after that **Mace (because the iMod +2 will be the primary weapon against all the undead), **Flail (while we might use the FoA sometimes, this is mostly for the Defender of Easthaven), ***Two-Weapon Style (so we can use the Defender in our offhand) and, finally **Halberds (nothing important to spend points on, but I plan to use the Wave +4 a couple of times to instantly kill fire-based enemies in ToB).
Anyway, back to De'Arnise Keep: Our weapon lets us easily take care of the golems:
Tor'Gal falls, and we get our stronghold. Sadly, the stronghold quest bugs out after three weeks, and since I can't go online right now, I can't look up any potential console codes to fix it. Not too important, but rather sad.
Back in Athkatla, Cendrosch pays Gaelan to obtain the RoP +2. in Combination with some saving throw-improving items from trademeet and a soon-to-be obtained necklace from the sewers, we are already at all-negative saving throws, and we have the option to get much lower using defensive stance and Ring of Air Control. To get that necklace, we have to go through Gaius, which is made easy by approaching with improved invisibility and using a very impressive potion of firebreath:
After that strong opening, defensive stance easily lets us deal with the remaining foes. Now, we free Haer'Dalis and go to the Planar Prison. An oil of speed and a frost giant strength potion are used to speed up the killing, and they stay active for the entire place (I used a RoR charge as a heal so I didn't have to rest after facing the Master of Thralls). The Warden falls before even taking down all the freed slaves:
Normally, I'm not that aggressive when fighting the Warden, but I knew that my oil of speed would run out soon and I trusted in my saving throws.
Next, I entered Bodhi's Lair to get the MoD before bringing it to Cromwell (I didn't go after Bodhi herself yet, because of Tanova). With the iMoD +2 at the ready and a protection from undead scroll activated, the temple ruins were cleansed of all evil:
Well, except for the shadow dragon – for now.
At this point, I had enough money for a big shopping tour. Most importantly, I acquired the cheese combo I planned to use against those mages who can circumvent my saving throws by using spells like Maze or Imprisonment: Helm of Vhailor and Protection from Magic scrolls. I used protection from undead to kill some liches and get access to Kangaxx, who was killed via iMoD +2. The Ring of Gaxx improves Cendrosch's saves even more (putting saving throws vs spells to -4 – which isn't totally save against abjurers using symbol spells, but when combined with defensive stance, ring of air control, stoneform or invulnerability – to name a few optioons – almost nothing should affect our defender if it can be saved against – the other saves are even better, depending on what items I have equipped).
If you thought that rebuying the Greenstone Amulet was cheesy, avert your eyes: Cendrosch is walking right into the Twisted Rune, just for fun (I need neither the experience nor the gold):
Here we do the same thing with the Guarded Compound, but adding defensive stance because of high physical damage, and our first GWWs:
But really, I do feel somewhat bad abusing PfM. I try limiting its use to battles in which I have a reasonable fear of getting Mazed – for the two dragons, for example, no PfM is needed:
We're simply using the simmy as an additional fighter, getting us to those sweet 20 APR with GWWs.
That being said, by now completing the rest of the chapter 2/3 quests was merely a formality (or, rather: I just had to avoid doing any major mistakes, and luckily, I picked a class where making mistakes is rather difficult). Spellhold was finished without significant incidents (though the Boots of the North will hopefully play an important role against Mel in ToB, if I make it past Abazigal for once). I got my Cloak of Mirroring, which I basically don't use at all because my HP pool is very, very high and magical damage doesn't seem to matter a whole lot – I prefer the extra saving throw bonuses granted by displacement for now. Now, the Underdark.
Balors have vorpal hits, and there's no save, right? I read that somewhere, once, but I'm not 100% sure if it's true in vanilla. Since I can't look it up (still no internet), I'm just staying far away from this one, using the Dwarven Thrower at range. Also: Because he might be – for some reason – a conjurer (why not? Stranger things have happened) I add invulnerability for extra saving throws:
The Demon Knights are dealt with, so is the first room of the Beholder Lair (I ended using PfM for that one because the Elder Orb casts imprisonment). Now, we have a new amulet with the ability to get our Save vs. Spells to -6 without any additional buffs, potions etc. Nice. I decide to clear mind flayer city (just for the ring of fire control, really). While Cendrosch does have 19 intelligence, some kiting is required to stay save and not risk a quick succession of mind flayer hits:
Cendrosch starts the Ust'Natha questline, skipping the sidequests for now (and buying some potions – great stock, that merchant!). Near the end of the questline, we reach the level cap. Here's a look at our entire HLA selection.
Yes, that's 20 GWWs and nothing else. Hardiness isn't needed thanks to defensive stance, critical strike doesn't do a lot for us... smite could be nice, but really, all I want is more damage.
Oh, and the Ust'Natha questline grinds to a halt thanks to a bug – we get the neccessarry blood for the Matron Mother, Phaere invites us to come to her – but she doesn't leave, and both her and her mother claim that we didn't bring them the blood. Another questbug, and because I, once again, can't look up any console commands, I have to leave Ust'Natha. I could kill Adalon, but why? Instead, I bribe the drow guards. This results, btw, in Cendrosch now (and propably forever, don't know how it will be in ToB) still looking like a drow. Strange – Elhan and his elves don't seem to notice. The whole silver dragon egg thing is left unfinished, but luckily, I don't really need any items I could get there.
We forge Crom Faeyr and the Wave, put the iMoD +2 in our mainhand with Crom Faeyr providing offhand strength and go to the graveyard. Those vampires simply melt. And, after Drizzt stealing the last hit against Bodhi multiple runs in a row, Cendrosch actually succeeds in getting it for himself:
We make it to the elven city and kill some golems – easy with Crom Faeyr, though it still takes 3 GWWs to take down an adamantite golem. But we have 20, so there. The dragon doesn't stand a chance, the avatar is summoned and we fight Irenicus at the tree. Yes, I'm using PfM here. Don't want to get mazed. I can think of several other ways around that, but I already commited to the PfM cheese, might as well continue to use it.
The hell trials are completed the good way. There might be better boni for some specific evil choices, but since I very rarely play evil, I don't know them by heart, and I can't look them up right now. I know that the good choices include +2 to all saving throws – that one seems great, so I'm fine with going good. Jon is once again challenged, with the simmy taking down the Balors (just in case these also can deliver vorpal hits). Protection from magic is used, but not needed – none of my foes does anything meaningful, the few spells Jon gets to use would've resulted in guaranteed saves:
After killing Ilasera and completing the first pocket plane challenge, Cendrosch rushes through Saradush – doing no sidequests except for getting the spellbook back and buying some potions in the process. I chose the prison as the faster route, killed only the soldiers blocking my way and made my way to Gromnir. With his 2 high level mages, it's time for PfM once again; Defensive stance is added to deal with multiple backstabs and Gromnir's own physical damage output.
Outside of Saradush, protection from undead allows us to take down the demon wraith and the other undead at the temple. I try various item setputs against fire giants (relatively easy to gain full immunity to fire and blunt weapons), but in the end, there's no reason to kill them – they can't see through invisibility. However, some other monsters around here, including fire trolls, can. Cendrosch didn't expect this and gets himself into a bad situation, unable to escape a full surround in a corner – this forced me to use the second RoR charge of this run:
However, Crom Faeyr instantly kills fire trolls, so we are end up victorious despite getting caught off guard. Since flaming skulls and the type of cats around here also can see through invisibility, as do bone fiends, we end up having to kill quite a few foes, though we skip as many battles as possible by using invisibility potions – we have tons of those, so no worry. In the end, we do take down the prince of fire with The Wave +4 before escaping invisibly with the two hearts:
Now, Yaga Shuras himself is found and challenged (we don't bother fighting Nyalee's creatures, as running away is enough). After wounding him, we drink a heroism potion for good luck, he reappears, and we take him down with our very first GWW:
No need for PfM here.
The Oasis and Amkethran were mostly skipped over, though I did help out the smugglers to get my hands on the Boots of the Gargoyle for additional protection – I also bought some more potions. Next, I killed the woodcutter at Sendai's and once again realized that there's no way to get Clangeddin's Rune without a thief. Entering the enclave, most battles were skipped using invisibility. With PfM for the lich and Diaytha plus over 100% crushing damage resistance against Ogremoch, Sendai's servants didn't stay alive for very long. She herself didn't do much of anything either:
I decided to go for Watcher's Keep next, mainly to get my hand on the white dragon scales (for Mel) and Lum's machine, though I also didn't mind going further and taking the gauntlets of extraordinary specialization. I experience my first two instances of losing control over my character in WK2: First in the Room of Air, where a short series of relatively harmless knockouts doesn't seem to offer any saves, and against the snake in the slime room – a stun effect with no saves, or so it appears (or is there a save, but it's almost impossible to make? I don't know):
Luckily, the stun didn't last too long, and I was able to finish off my foe:
I used PfM for most of level 3, fighting hordes of demons without any trouble:
During the game against the Cambion, I got plague and guile (which means: a curse to lower con and a bunch of backstabbing thieves) – my first chance to use those gargoyle boots to avoid a barrage of deadly backstabs:
Of course, I didn't win anything.
Level 4 almost introduced me to the end of this run: Trying not to permanently walk around under PfM, I managed to not know about the maze trap in the southern part of the mind flayer lair. I did see the maze animation in time to use one of my two actual PfM scrolls from my inventory, without the simmy – so I'm down to one scroll. If something like this happens again, my entire strategy for Abazigal is gone.
I actually had to gather Lum's notes, since I couldn't look up the combinations online without internet. I didn't find the one to improve intelligence, but I didn't look very hard, as it really isn't needed at this point.
Level 5 provided me with another almost dangerous surround situation against a bunch of golems, which were dealing heavy damage (I forgot to equip the Gromnir's helm, which would've prevented this from ever happening). Eventually, I had to drink an invisibilty potion to heal up and activate defensive stance:
PfM made killing the seal guardians really simple – and gave me the opportunity to take out the fighter-types first:
With WK done, time to move on to Draconis. Basically, I just stood there and attacked with PfM and defensive stance active, spamming GWWs. I didn't equip any acid protection items because I thought my hp pool could handle a few breath attacks, and so it did – I still had a comfortable amount of hit points left without using any potions:
Against Abazigal, I was actually able to use my simmy (and I made sure to equip items with electricity immunity before summoning it):
Even when turning to dragon form, he didn't bother to get rid of it, so it was basically two Cendroschs against one dragon the entire time. Once again, no healing potions or RoR charges were neccessary for this fight:
After losing my two cleric/ranger solos to Abazigal before, this character was basically designed to finally take him down (I think even my totemic druid got somehwat lucky during his solo victory for this battle). So there's a success.
However, that would remain the only one. I made a huge mistake when fighting Balthazar. The battle seemed easy, and I didn't pay close attention, when suddenly, Cendrosch got stunned with apparently no save – I think a result of the smite-like Tiger Strike ability? (if anyone can correct me on that, it would be appreciated) – He started with around 202 hp. Note that defensive stance isn't active, because I know Balthazar tends to run around and didn't want to lose mobility (this is were at least one Hardiness could've been nice):
Then, at 62 hp, the stun effect finally ended – I had hope; Just one RoR activation and I would be saved:
However, the stun affect was applied AGAIN before even the RoR activation took effect – Cendrosch was defeated:
About two seconds after seeing the death screen, I realized that Balthazar deals crushing damage and equipping Gromnir's helmet could've turned Cendrosch completely immune to his attacks. This is one of the reasons why this was a huge mistake and not at all just bad luck.
Anyway – as it turns out, even if I would've thought of that, Mel would've ended my run, shortly before the end: I played on to see if my plans for her would've worked (boots of the north and white dragon scale to get item-based 100% frost resistance was a big part of it, other than that the usual 80% resistance to all physical damage and spamming GWWs). However, Mel also seems to have some kind of on-hit stun effect – potentially with no save once again? Or with an extremely difficult one (I did have to unequip my RoP +2 to use the white dragon scale, so my save vs spells was "only" at -7)? Still, Mel's first two phases were no trouble, but during the third one, the one where she teleports away, she managed to basically stunlock Cendrosch to death. During another attempt, I also learned once again (something that I knew, but forgot about) that the succubus near the fallen solar has some kind of ridiculous save penalty when it comes to her charm spell (at least -8 I think). I actually had to redo the throne fight 3 times before achieving success, so clearly my strategy simply wasn't good enough. To be honest, despite all the PfM abuse, my dwarven defender (though he did feel more powerful) barely did better than my completely exploit-free cleric/rangers and he ended up doing worse than my totemic druid. Stun is clearly a problem (being some kind of halfling and thus able to equip Mazzy's sword might've been nice).
I might try this again at some point, propably with another class. Good luck to everyone else. By the time you read this, I might've started another run, because no internet means that this update is at least a couple of days old, maybe older. But if the patch didn't come out by now, I'm propably playing another game or working on creating a P&P RPG system.
@Enuhal shame not to see a dwarven defender triumph, though I don't actually think it's that much easier than a standard fighter - the inability to stack hardiness with defensive stance reduces significantly the kit benefits in the late game, though GWWs largely compensate for not being able to get grand mastery with weapons.
A few points I noted in reading through: - at the palace you can charm the nobles, but Belt won't recognize your victory until all the dopplegangers are dead (killing them as nobles doesn't count). If you charm them therefore you will have to wait until the charm wears off and they change (you can rest once to cut down on the waiting). - the snake in Watcher's Keep does have a no-save stun. If you're aware of that though it's easy to keep out of its reach. - Balthazar is indeed another no-save stunner. Your favorite from BG1, the Greenstone Amulet, is your friend there if you don't have high crushing resistance. - the Greenstone Amulet can also potentially help against Mel (though she tends to dispel protections a lot). I normally just stay out of melee range of her and rely on missile attacks (you can also use the Reflection Shield to bounce her own missiles back on her).
@Enuhal Great run - as usual. I have had a DD in mind as well, and have spent ages rolling him/her - I saw your post about which classes hadnt succeded yet...
You have obviously done well (as usual), and I can only add one thing for you to consider: going for a female dwarf next time. The female should have a better chance against the succubus charm - males have to make the save at -10 and female at 0 as I recall. I had rolled up a male DD, but started rerolling a female when it dawned upon me.
Think I'll just post my thoughts and not make this a narrative, I get too invested if I try to narrate and then get pissed off when my Charname dies...
I just entered Nashkel after cleaning up the areas between the Friendly Arms and Nashkel and am now level 4. My first impression so far is that the archer is awesome against slow creatures but squishy against fast creatures and enemy shooters. Wolves are damned tough at low level! I had to waste 4 healing potions because of those buggers. Bears and spiders are pretty easy though and a source of some really quick xp...
My next impression is that it's easy to get cocky because of the archer's power. I just defeated Neira in the Nashkel Inn by turning her into a pincushion. I was hitting her so easily, however that I decided to go toe-to-toe with her instead of kiting her outside by Rasaad like I initially planned (in case I got held I thought Rasaad or guards would cover for me). In the 3rd round of combat my arrows all missed and the wench successfully cast hold on me. If I hadn't made the save it would've been game over for Hanslow Tinderbow!
Lesson learned without permanent consequences (this time)...
Edit: Thought I'd also share my plans for this run. This will be a long-haul run through the series if I can stay alive. I haven't rolled many 98's and want to make the most of it. No mods except cap-remover. I will try to get through Durlag's Tower and Werewolf and Ice Islands as well as SOD. Traps WILL be a problem but want to give it a college try as a completionist run. I will save before each TOTSC challenge and if I fail will restart at that point and give up that particular challenge (entire challenge - so no just enter Durlag's for a few items and then leave - all or nothing). That way I can test my skills without risking oblivion. SOD will not be treated that way but I may just speed-run through it and avoid many of the tough fights. I really want to take Hanslow through SOA and TOB if I get that far.
(I wrote the following and all the upcoming updates about this character a couple of days ago when I lost access to the internet, just for context.)
This was my plan: Use the Nymph's Cloak to charm the noblemen to the south and southeast before the event starts and send them far away, so that when they transform, they won't enter combat right away. Use dispelling arrows while under effect of an oil of speed to get rid of any haste effects, greatly reducing the doppelganger's damage. I also used a strength potion and heroism for additional damage output. So far, so good – my plan seemed to work just fine; While Belt was almost dead, Liia was still unhurt, and the only doppelganger still around was only interested in targeting Cendrosch:
Now, here's where things get weird. Turns out the two noblemen I had sent away didn't transform into doppelgangers at all, and Belt refused to acknowlegde that the battle was over. He just stood there and wouldn't talk to me. I was stuck – so I thought I might've to get rid of those untransformed noblemen somehow. Afraid of what might happen if I simply would attack them or if I'd use them to attack Belt, I got them to attack each other – which did result in one of them turning hostile and getting killed by the flaming fist. So far, so good, but the other one was still left, not having turned hostile. Seeing no other choice, I struck him down (as I was pretty sure that having him attack the Flaming Fist, Belt, Liia or Sarevok would result in an immediate game over). This had a very weird effect: Liia and the flaming fist turned hostile (though I didn't lose any reputation), but Belt continued to stay friendly. In fact, while Liia and the mercs tried to kill me (failing to do any damage at all), Belt instead started to cut his own allies down – and they wouldn't attempt to strike back at all, still focusing on Cendrosch.
So I waited until Belt was done, hoping he would now finally acknowledge that the battle was over. He didn't. He was still standing around, and I couldn't talk to him. My last attempt to get out of this situation was charming Belt myself using the Nymph's Cloak charges, and when that didn't work, charming every NPC in the room (except for Sarevok). Didn't work either:
I figured that the situation definitely constituted a gamebreaking bug, so I reloaded and tried this approach once more, with similar results: The battle was won, but the game was stuck:
It seemed like my well thought-out strategy was simply unworkable. This left me no choice but to reload again, and, this time, don't attempt the apparently gamebreaking Nymph's Cloak charms, potentially making this attempt much more difficult. I planned to throw in a wand of sleep charge for good luck (I think it has only a 10% chance to work, but if it works, it is a huge relief). While Cendrosch started to get good dispelling arrow hits in, the wand took down 2 doppelgangers! Very lucky indeed!
It's hard to see, but the one to the south of Belt and the one next to Sarevok are asleep. The other two who are attacking the dukes have lost their haste effect, and the remaining two are only chasing after Cendrosch. Ironically, this ended up being my most successful attempt of all three, with Belt having lost the least amount of HP and Liia still at her maximum:
So, I was finally done with this event. Not the cleanest way to do it, getting stuck due to a bug two times, but I hope that most people will agree that in this case, reloading was justified.
Now, time for SoD!
I had exactly the same problem when I tried the same tactic.
FYI the same problem occurs if you put the noblemen to sleep before they change to doppelgangers.
Comments
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 7
Time to head to Sancre Tor! Sancre Tor is an ancient Ayleid ruin, the home of the elvish wizard lords of Cyrodiil who used to enslave humankind before the slaves wiped them out. Anyway, we need to go grab a suit of armor from same famous hero so Martin can scrape some of the hero's dried blood off of it and use it for some evil ritual and stuff.Sancre Tor is crawling with high-level undead, from nether liches to full liches to Gloom Wraiths, ghosts, and skeletons.
Fortunately, there are no zombies (anything but Oblivion zombies), and we can sneak past most of the critters with Invisibility. We still need to slay some Undead Blades--high-powered skeletons with rusty helmets and katanas--by repeatedly summoning Dremora Lords to die against them until the skeletons finally fall apart.
It's a simple enough task. When the Undead Blades collapse, their ghosts (skeletons can have ghosts; shut up) lead us to the armor.
Martin sends us off to another undead-infested ruin called Miscarcand right afterward. Unfortunately, this place does have zombies. The fact that I can let my Dremora Lord do the fighting is little comfort.
It might be because I ran into a ReDead in Ocarina of Time when I was 8 years old, but for some reason, I have an intense fear of horrible corpses.
We make our way through the otherwise uninteresting dungeon and find the Great Welkynd Stone, the last of its kind that hasn't been stolen by graverobbers. It's not hard to tell why so many of them got stolen. They kind of stand out.
Then the King of Miscarcand, a lich with a powerful lightning staff, arrives on the scene to stop us from escaping with his big fancy rock.
But again... even liches can't see through Invisibility in Oblivion, and with our 100 Intelligence and Willpower, we have the magicka to remain invisible indefinitely, even as we throw out Dremora Lords to whittle down our enemies.
Martin only needs one more thing for his ritual: a Great Sigil Stone, the counterpart to the Great Welkynd Stone (because slaveholding elves are the opposite of evil demons for some reason). The only way to get one is to voluntarily let the daedra open an Oblivion gate outside Bruma and attempt to obliterate the city.
We've already recruited soldiers from across the province to keep the daedra from overwhelming the humans. All we have to do is hold off the daedra for a little while, then hop through a portal and grab the stone.
One tiny problem: during the invasion, Martin becomes mortal, and if he dies, it's game over for our no-reload run.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 8
We march out to the battlefield where Martin will risk his life defending his men, even though his presence is completely unnecessary and his death means the end of the world. Our allies have joined us, but they're a pretty sorry sight. We only have like a dozen people to hold off a horde of demons, and most of them don't even have names.This is because Oblivion was a very graphics-intensive game for its time, and the platforms it ran on weren't strong enough to render lots of critters all at once. Rendering an entire army was not realistic given the limitations of 2006 hardware.
I have Zoreii spam a string of Fortify Magicka spells to dramatically boost our magicka regeneration rate over the course of the fight. This allows us to cast incredibly expensive spells without running out--including a special defensive spell I've created specifically to keep our poorly-equipped soldiers from dying horribly.
It says we don't have enough magicka to cast it, but a couple seconds later, we do. When you've fortified your magicka to 900, you regenerate like 40 per second at 100 Willpower.
You may notice I have a Chameleon effect active, and it happens to be 100% (per my rules, though, it doesn't come from equipment). I didn't feel like creating new custom spells with short-duration Invisibility effects tacked on to each one, so I just used 100% Chameleon to replicate the effect with fewer steps.
The daedra come out sooner than I expected, and our poor soldiers have some big critters to tackle. Thanks to our level-grinding earlier on, the gate spawns Xivilai and other high-end demons.
Really not trusting Martin to keep himself alive, I manage to hit him with a custom 100% Chameleon spell on touch (though it takes a few tries; he has Spell Absorption and/or Reflect Spell active). This will keep enemies from targeting him, but since I'm still worried that he'll get hit by stray attacks or something, I fire off some area-effect Calm spells to pause the fighting.
Finally, the gate opens. Once we head inside, Martin is guaranteed to survive on the other side.
But we still another potentially game-ending condition on hand: we have to reach the Great Sigil Stone in 15 minutes, real time, and while we have a compass and Invisibility to avoid fights, Oblivion realms are not known for being easy to get around in, and I have a terrible sense of direction.
Worse yet, I don't remember the exact pathway. And when I follow the compass instead, it's telling me to cross a broken bridge...
...and it's a very long fall onto hard rocks and lava. Zoreii is unencumbered and has high speed, but if I mis-time the jump, death is virtually certain; the maximum difficulty multiplies fall damage and lava damage just like everything else.
I search for an alternate path, but I just don't see one. We have no choice but to jump.
Zoreii just barely makes it across the bridge. I'm still not confident in our success; I wasted a lot of time searching for another way across. I hurry to the tower our compass is pointing to and open a gate.
But there are three exits from our current tower that all face the same direction, and I'm not sure which one the compass is pointing to. Eventually, I figure it out and hurry to the central tower.
I'm glad we have Invisibility, because even outside of a maximum difficulty run, I don't want to get distracted by any of the fights around here. OOO has put one of those orange-armored Dremora right on the first level!
Now that I know I'm in the right tower, I think I have enough time to make it with a little bit to spare. Knowing that Zoreii is still a single trap away from instantaneous death, I take care to check for traps. Sure enough, they have those falling swords that killed me once before.
I run into a lock that presumably could be opened with the Sigil Keeper's key from the first level, but fortunately, it's not a "needs a key" lock; we can pick it.
Another Dremora Prince is guarding the Great Sigil Stone. But again, Oblivion enemies are completely incapable of dealing with Invisibility. The stone is ours, and the gate collapses.
Outside, the colossal war engine falls apart. I see one of the soldiers go flying when a piece of the engine catches them, and I search the area for the dead. I don't care too much about Burd not making it, though I do find it notable that the blow was so massive that it ruined all of his armor...
...but it upsets me that Jauffre and worse yet Baurus also lost their lives in the attack.
I liked Baurus. Unfortunately, he is not considered plot-critical after the quest in the Elven Gardens sewers, which means he loses his immortality.
Martin now has all of the ingredients he needs for his ritual. He opens a portal directly to Mankar Camoran's Paradise.
All we have to do is go in, kill Camoran, and take back the Amulet of Kings so Martin can re-light the Dragonfires.
"Paradise" is Camoran's word. It's awfully pretty...
...but apparently the "Savage Garden" is a playground where demons violently murder Camoran's own followers over and over and over again, without end.
It's possible that the idea is to toughen them up and test their strength, but the reality is that you've just got a bunch of naked, unarmed, completely defenseless civilians getting butchered by giant monsters. Like making a small child immortal and then forcing it to fight an 800-pound gorilla over and over until it wins--which will be never.
A Dremora is guarding the path to Camoran. Being a demon warrior with some rather twisted values, he respects Zoreii for so effortlessly killing his own people earlier in the run.
Little did he know, Zoreii never killed any of his people. She just summoned more Dremora to do it for her. He learns this at the cost of his life.
Camoran is a bit of a nutjob. He has bizarre theories about the Prime Material Plane (known as Mundus in the Elder Scrolls universe) being the province of a long-lost Daedric Prince he fails to even name.
We head into the tunnels, where Camoran's less-favored disciples are trapped in cages that are constantly dipped into lava. They basically get boiled alive for eternity.
But our buddy Eldamil is here to help! Apparently he's a bit unsatisfied with his current job.
We need him to escape the tunnels, but we've got some daedra to deal with. As usual, I rely on my Dremora Lord and Command spells to turn the enemies against each other...
...but somehow, the spell completely fails. I re-cast a Chameleon spell to hide, but I get attacked!
I discover the problem: Zoreii's spell effectiveness is at 84%; all spells are at 84% magnitude. This means that our level 25 Command spells, which normally work on critters of any level, now only work up to level 21. We can't Command anything anymore. Why is our spell effectiveness not 100%? We have no armor equipped.
But we do. Apparently the Bands of the Chosen, the bracers we needed to enter this area, are classified as light armor. This means our low Light Armor skill penalizes our spellcasting.
The bands can't be removed until we leave the dungeon, so we have to use a Chameleon potion to escape and let our Dremora Lord spell finish the daedra. In the chaos of combat, Eldamil ends up falling into the lava...
...but he respawns pretty quickly and removes our bracers so we can leave the chamber and get our spell effectiveness back up to 100%. Camoran keeps droning on about being the big bad villain guy.
The rest of the dungeon is just spamming Summon Dremora Lord. Eldamil gets in the way and antagonizes our Dremora Lord, earning him a swift death. Apparently this counts as a murder, even though Zoreii hasn't directly killed anything since the starting dungeon.
It's time to proceed to Mankar Camoran himself, a high-level mage with lots of crazy defensive powers and his son and daughter, who are also high-level mages. Zoreii casts her buffs and cranks her Health and Magicka up to ludicrous values, as well as bumping her Resist Magicka over 100.
With 1500 base Magicka, we have virtually infinite magic for the next minute or so, and near-infinite magic for the minute after--which we can restore at will.
Summoning a Dremora Lord by itself won't let us take down Camoran; he can neutralize the effect by summoning his own.
I don't think a war of attrition will work, either; mages in Oblivion can cast healing spells, and since magicka regenerates, a mage can heal themselves indefinitely. How am I going to deal enough damage to him?
His own children provide the answer. They don't have their father's innate Spell Absorption or Reflect Spell effects, which means we can easily just Command them.
Camoran and his Dremora Lord slay his daughter in short order, but shey'll respawn. In the meantime, I realize I can also Command his son and his Dremora Lord using an area-effect Command spell.
I keep throwing out Command spells, but I'm not sure I'm making much progress. Command spells aren't perfect and can be canceled if they're attacked by a friendly target, which means that sometimes our allies get confused and fight amongst themselves, ignoring Camoran entirely.
Zoreii has lost no resources since the fight began, so it's not like Camoran is winning, but this strategy just doesn't seem very fast. I decide to go ahead and kill Camoran myself. How do we do that when the maximum difficulty cuts all of our damage to 1/6 of its normal value?
Easy. We just poison the Blade of Woe with our best anti-mage poison and paralyze Camoran.
The Blade of Woe strikes fast, and I can re-poison the dagger from the inventory screen in between strikes. Each use of the poison does rather little damage, but I can lock Camoran down with paralysis poisons, and the damage builds up. His health bar shrinks to a sliver.
We take the Amulet of Kings, return to Mundus, and give the amulet to Martin. It's time for the new emperor to finally be crowned. But when we head to the Imperial City for the coronation, we receive a nasty surprise.
We head outside to tackle the daedra. Once again, Martin foolishly puts his life in danger to fight the enemy--in robes instead of armor. I make a point of healing him, but he seems to be in okay health for the time being.
All we need to do to beat the game is get Martin to the palace. I hurry ahead and run right into another Dremora Prince, but like everything else in the game that doesn't have Spell Absorption or Reflect Spell, he's perfectly vulnerable to Command spells. I send him off to kill a Xivilai.
Then I suffer massive damage from a stray hit, even though Zoreii is fully buffed.
Using Fortify Health potions is dangerous in the long run because its long duration will keep us from drinking an additional potion long into the future, but we only need to survive a few moments more. We hurry over to Mehrunes Dagon, who has finally breached the liminal barrier and entered Mundus. It's too late to light the Dragonfires--Dagon is here, and a Daedric Prince is invincible--but Martin has a plan.
Before we bring Martin into the next area, I buff him with a long-duration healing spell, and just for good measure, I use a Chameleon spell to turn him completely invisible.
It works! No one can target Martin for a short time, and I only need seconds to make it inside the palace.
We get inside! Martin automatically teleports to us, just in time to say goodbye before he implements his last plan.
Dagon smashes open the palace to crush Martin, but Martin uses the Amulet of Kings to transform into an avatar of Akatosh, the dragon god.
The dragon goes for the throat and then torches Dagon, banishing him to his home plane.
Its job done and its energy spent, the dragon turns to stone.
Dagon is gone, and with the destruction of both the amulet and the last of the imperial line, the liminal barrier is forever secure. Tamriel is safe, but for the first time in its history, the Empire has no Emperor. All that's left of Martin is a massive statue of a dragon in the middle of the city.
Here's Zoreii at the end of the game.
One no-reload Oblivion run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul at the maximum difficulty setting, complete.
So I'm going to give another shot at an Oblivion run, this time without using item duplication, even for convenience purposes. This will be on normal difficulty, since I've had about my fill of the maximum difficulty setting.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 9
This run is going to be a little different from the previous ones. First of all, we're not going to use any glitches or exploits aside from the fatigue boosting trick, my old favorite. Second, our new Breton, Zoreii, can wear no armor or clothing besides the Sack Cloth Pants, Shirt, and Sandals we start the game with. All our power will have to come from spells and our trusty little bow. Here's Zoreii at the start of the game.While fiddling around during character creation, I found out I could give her some violet rings around her eyes and tweaked her hair color to match. She actually looks a bit like my friend Pam if she wore spooky eye makeup.
The Thief birthsign gives us some nice bonuses to our skills and our Speed, and unlike the Atronach birthsign, it will let us regenerate magicka. This means we can train magic skills by casting low-cost spells when I'm wandering around doing other stuff.
First up, we need to get some money and improve our Alchemy skill. Frostcrag Spire apparently comes with the garden even if you haven't bought the alchemy lab, so we go harvesting ingredients.
Next, we join the Mages Guild and rob each guildhouse of all their fine clothes and alchemy equipment so we can sell it off and generate some quick, safe gold.
We buy up cheap ingredients from alchemists all over the place and craft a bunch of potions, which further increase our supply.
Our farming and mining starts giving us level ups. We don't get very good stat bonuses, but I don't mind--we don't need high stats in this run; I just want to get the early game done quickly.
While leveling Alchemy, I keep training other skills and building up resources.
That Silence poison will be especially important later on; we have a couple of nasty mages to deal with.
We get in trouble while wandering around outside. OOO bandits are rather dangerous for low-level characters like Zoreii, and our Summon Skeleton spell is not enough to keep the enemy at bay.
We use Dragonskin to get 50% damage reduction and hurry away to heal, and eventually we bring down the bandit. A Conjurer appears from nowhere to join the fight...
...but a Silence poison shuts down his spellcasting, and Conjurers aren't very tough without their spells.
To save money, I'm going to complete the Mages Guild recommendation quests, as it will obviate the need for purchasing expensive Magetallow Candles for Frostcrag Spire. Once we complete all of them, we'll be able to create custom spells at the Arcane University, which is absolutely necessary for getting our base fatigue to 1.
First is Caminalda, the bandit mage who loudly introduces herself to you and warns you to be careful the night before she ambushes you.
I poison my next arrow and draw the bow before speaking with Caminalda, which ends up causing me to fire early. It's no trouble, though; she's largely harmless once she's been Silenced. She doesn't even have a weapon.
A bug of some sort crashes the game and forces me to start over. This time I decide to grab some followers before dealing with Caminalda or any other enemies, just in case. I still need to fight the ogres at Weatherleah, but some cheaply-made poisons are enough to bring down ogres with their innate weaknesses to poison.
With the ogres gone, I can recruit Reynald and Guilbert Jemane and take them to Bleak Flats Cave to rescue Erthor. I hate zombies, so I let the Jemane twins fight them while I hang back.
I need to bring Erthor back to Skingrad to complete the recommendation quest, but that can wait. For now, we're going to use Erthor in a few fights. This time, I just hide from Caminalda with an Invisibility spell and let my allies bring her down. Notice the battlemages pitching in--they're not followers, so they only help out with this one fight.
Next up, the Leyawiin Mages Guild questline. This is the most dangerous one; it requires fighting lots of Marauders as well as an enemy mage.
Others use resistances that protect from lightning. I haven't tried it though.
If you noticed the previous posts (which I've since edited) mentioning damaging Strength, then you can probably guess what happens to this current run.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 10
Moving right along: The Marauders in the Leyawiin Mages Guild quest are much tougher than I expected. Our unarmored followers get torn apart in moments.Notice the summoned Dremora (not Dremora Lord; just the normal kind), courtesy of grinding Conjuration to 50. We manage to scrape by using poisoned arrows from our little shortbow, but there are more fights deeper in the dungeon, and our followers and Dremora tend to collapse before our poison can take its toll.
In the end, I have to return to town to create more potions and poisons (getting our Alchemy up to 50) before completing the dungeon. With many more poisons on hand, we can take a more offensive role. I still use sneak attacks to seize an early advantage.
Theoretically, I could always just let my immortal followers handle everything, but that would be less interesting. When my followers collapse, I intervene.
After failing to trigger a pressure plate trap with an arrow (I had to walk around it) and hastily drinking a potion when I let a Marauder get close enough to put Zoreii in danger, we reach the final chamber, where a pair of imps are waiting for us. They're hard to see against the gray background, but I knew to look for them.
The last threat is Kalthar, who locks us in the chamber before ambushing us. I let our followers tackle him, but he runs right after me, and I suffer heavy damage before healing myself and going invisible.
I finish him off with a Silence poison, though I nearly die in the process. He does remarkably high damage with his dagger, and I don't know why.
When Kalthar falls, we can complete the last Mages Guild recommendation quest and access the Arcane University. I hurry up and create our primary Fortify Fatigue spell as well as a new Command spell, then craft some high-end emergency potions using Garlic and Morning Glory Root Pulp, which I never before realized could be used to create a Frost Shield effect to stack with a normal Shield effect, plus a few high-damage potions in case I really need an extra boost.
Oblivion suffers from the same weaknesses as Morrowind: casting a spell of a certain school gives the same amount of experience regardless of its cost. This means we can create low-cost custom spells and spam them to level important skills. I remap the spell casting button to a key, put the end of a shaver on the keyboard, and let Zoreii hit 75 in Conjuration and Illusion.
We don't need to get them any higher than that, really (getting them to 75 just unlocks a higher maximum cost for spells; we can't cast bigger spells at lower skill levels). We don't need to be able to cast 100% Chameleon spells or summon Gloom Wraiths or Liches or Xivilai, nor do we need any other skills to be particularly high, especially not in the early game.
Finally, I damage Zoreii's Willpower into the negatives to shrink our base fatigue and make Fortify Fatigue effects exponentially stronger. We head to Kvatch and put our ludicrous damage output to good use with our little shortbow.
The Jemane twins are on hand to distract our enemies, but they make crossing the Sigil tower bridges a little nerve-wracking.
I push them out of the way and inadvertently nudge them off the bridge. Guilbert falls over a hundred feet onto solid rock, but according to the message in the upper left corner of the screen, he only suffered a minor concussion.
We proceed to shoot down everything in our path, one-shotting Dremora that would normally pose a threat against a low-level, unarmored character like Zoreii.
With the Oblivion gate closed, we proceed to clear the courtyard and liberate the castle from the daedra. Our low Shield without potions puts us in some danger in a courtyard fight when a Clannfear chases us, but running away casting healing spells keeps us safe.
We let the Imperial Legion do most of the work, because I might accidentally kill one of them if I tried to fire an arrow into the fray. The one time where I rush ahead to pave the way for them, I sorely regret it--I run right into a Hunger's Drain Health spell and lose half of my Health in one blow.
I go invisible and escape.
Now I must be honest for a moment. Since I basically never react in time to take a screenshot when I die, I don't have any record of what actually killed me; I just have the screenshots and the save game before death. I've had the same problem for other deaths in these runs: I had to work backward from minimal clues and my own memory, and the earlier deaths were the hardest to remember. I think this run right here ended when a Dremora Prince killed me with a paralysis effect on a warhammer during the Bruma gate quest, or maybe to a giant sword trap... except, in my previous posts, I already attributed those exact two deaths to the end of two other runs.
So, I might have matched some deaths with the wrong runs. In fact, I think my death to Caminalda, which I mentioned in a previous post, actually happened in this run, and it was because I still had the difficulty set to maximum.
I don't know how I died in this run. Maybe it was because of that trap on the pirate chest; I don't know.
At any rate, this run is over. The new run is the one with negative Strength.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 11
This time around, we pick the Lady birthsign, because it gives us a slight boost to Willpower (which we'll have trouble increasing since we won't be using much Restoration, Destruction, and Alteration spells) and more importantly Endurance.In a normal run, that +10 bonus to Endurance should get us +30 Health by level 11, but OOO changes the formula somehow. I don't know what OOO's formula is, but you'll notice that our current Health of 67 is not a multiple of 5, as it normally would be.
As usual, most of our class skills are magic-oriented with Marksman so that we don't lose fatigue when drawing a bow. This time, though, we have Armorer on hand, which will help us very slightly increase our Endurance when leveling, and therefore increase our Health.
By now, our early game resource gathering chores have become pretty standardized: create potions, steal from the Mages Guild, learn new spells, and gain a few quick levels to increase Intelligence, Endurance, and Willpower/Speed/Luck. Since we need high Alchemy to get better Damage Strength potions, we purchase the Frostcrag Spire alchemy lab, a purchase that leaves us with a single gold coin to our name.
Next, we buy one of the most important spells in the run.
Why is Ease Burden so important? Well, it has to do with our new fatigue boosting strategy.
In the past, I reduced my Willpower to negative values to get 1 base fatigue and multiply damage output with Fortify Fatigue effects. The disadvantage is that it eliminates magicka regeneration once you get a little lower than -30, which isn't that convenient for mage-oriented characters (which synergize the best with fatigue boosting).
The alternatives aren't very good. The first option, negative Agility, makes arrows deal zero damage and makes it extremely hard to avoid getting staggered. You can still deal damage with melee weapons, but if you try to deal 300 damage to a Clannfear with a 20% Reflect Damage effect, you take 60 damage--which is easy to overlook if you're one-shotting everything in sight. Also, swinging a weapon takes fatigue, while a bow takes none if your Marksman is at least 25.
The second option, negative Endurance, is even worse. Living with 1 point of base Health means anything that deals 1 damage or more will kill you. A high-Restoration character can fortify their Health, but that's a lot of upkeep.
The third option is negative Strength. That reduces melee damage to zero, but a character with fatigue boosting should ideally be using a bow anyway. It also reduces your encumbrance to 0, but you can fix that with a Feather spell like Ease Burden. Unfortunately, there's a weird issue where a character carrying 50 pounds and casts a 75-point Feather spell will only get 50 points of Feather, and picking up a single more pound will overburden them until they re-cast Feather.
But negative Strength instead of negative Willpower will allow us to regenerate magicka, which is a massive, massive advantage. With magicka regeneration, we can spam buffing spells and Invisibility spells and all kinds of other things without worrying about running out or needing to drink a Restore Magicka potion.
That means I'm not going to avoid casting a critical buff because I'm saving my magicka for later. That means I'm less likely to get caught off-guard.
Also, we're not going to use the Staff of the Everscamp anymore, because that 20-point Speed penalty is really crushing. Instead, we're going to use our Absorb Strength spells on a different target: the daedra worshippers at the shrine of Peryite along the Silverfish River.
Five people who are completely unconsciousness and take no action when attacked (unlike the Everscamps) and can be pushed into a tight circle to affect all of them simultaneously with a single area-effect spell.
But I don't yet have that spell; I can't create custom spells until I either buy some overpriced Magetallow Candles for Frostcrag Spire or complete the Mages Guild quests. The latter seems faster than paying for the former, so I head out to Bleak Flats Cave with the Jemane twins to rescue Erthor.
Even with the gigantic yellow object indicating a missing mesh or texture in my install, the cave is still creepy to me. Those zombies blend in with the environment, and even though I know the rough location of each one by memory, finding them in the shadows is still difficult and I always think they're going to appear right in front of me and pounce.
Erthor joins the team. As before, I nail Caminalda with a Silence poison and let the others deal with her.
I accidentally kill somebody while doing my chores, so Lucien Lachance appears to congratulate me and invite me to join a secret guild of assassins. The Jemane brothers don't seem perturbed.
On the way to a fort in the Leyawiin questline, I spot an imp just outside the city and decide to help one of the Imperial Legion soldiers bring it down.
It proves remarkably sturdy, surviving five attackers at once.
It's also much larger than most imps, which clues me in that this is not an ordinary imp. When one of the twins falls, I get worried.
When it kills an Imperial Legion Soldier, I panic.
The imp then flies off to kill another soldier closer to the gates. I monitor the situation under Invisibility with some Restore Magicka potions to keep my magicka full--and then, despite me being completely invisible, the imp spins around in midair and begins casting a spell at me, at point-blank range... with the telltale red lighting effect that indicates a Drain Health effect that, knowing OOO for what it is, could be a one-hit kill for a low-level character like Zoreii.
I avoid getting hit and hurry back, and thankfully the imp turns its attention back to our followers, two soldiers, and a random unarmed civilian who decides to pitch in.
Finally, the imp falls, and when I look in its inventory, I discover that it's not an imp at all--it's a Gargoyle, an OOO-introduced enemy, apparently, that drops a special stone that works just like a Sigil Stone.
None of the loot has any real use to me. I hate to think what would have happened if I hadn't had so many allies to deal with the Gargoyle.
Since we still don't have fatigue boosting on hand, the Marauders in the Leyawiin quest are still pretty tough, and our followers can't do much on their own. Erthor prefers to stay out of combat entirely. Here he is, patiently waiting for the Jemane brothers to return as a Marauder charges over to kill him.
I contribute a few poisoned arrows to the fight, but our followers do most of the work. I have to cast Dragonskin for safety's sake, which means we have to return to Leyawiin, wait 24 hours to get Dragonskin back, and then go back to the fort to fight more Marauders. Erthor continues to avoid the fight whenever possible.
But when the Jemane brothers fall--as they constantly do, because they're low-level characters that don't even wear armor--the Marauders come to find us, and Erthor is forced into combat because, unlike Zoreii, he knows no Invisibility spells.
Finally we reach the last chamber, where we have a special poison in store for Kalthar.
I activate Dragonskin, drink a Shield+Frost Shield+Restore Magicka potion to get our Shield all the way up to 85%, and engage Kalthar. Paralysis buys us about 3 seconds of free attacks, which amounts to multiple chances to apply another poison--all of which stack. By the time he climbs to his feet, he's already almost dead and the poisons haven't even come close to running out.
We finally complete the Mages Guild recommendation quests and gain access to a spellmaking altar. We leave the Jemane brothers at Weatherleah, make our Absorb Strength spells, and fast-travel to the shrine of Peryite to use Damage Strength potions to decrease our Strength far below zero and get our base fatigue down to 1.
Our 100-point Fortify Fatigue spell will now make all of our arrows deal 101 times as much damage as normal. We are ready for the main quest.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 12
I have no screenshots for Kvatch, the Mythic Dawn meeting, the Dagon shrine, the Bruma spies, Sheogorath's quest, or the Bruma gate. Apparently they got overwritten or deleted.It was probably mostly just running around killing everything with arrows. Just imagine a demon getting blasted off of his feet by an arrow from a tiny Breton woman with a toy bow, and that's probably what most of the fighting looked like.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 13
Without a sky-high Restoration skill, I can't cast gigantic buffing spells on allies like I could in the previous run, or spam Illusion spells to halt combat during the Bruma attack. That means Martin will be in greater danger in this run, and I don't know by how much.Accordingly, I'm going to solicit more troops for that battle to give us an edge, which involves tackling all of the Oblivion gates outside each of the major cities. One of the gates is especially frustrating.
We have to reach that tower at the top, but there's no clear path to it or visible doorway. I hike up and down the mountain and find nothing nowhere.
After ages of wandering, I finally find the doorway up the mountain hidden low on the ground.
Nothing else interesting happens; the whole gate is just about finding that tiny doorway.
We're making steady progress gaining levels. Zoreii's magic stats are getting stronger. We're gaining Willpower faster than I expected because we've been casting so many Alteration spells.
But every time we level up and increase our Willpower or Endurance (or Agility, if I ever bothered increasing it), our base fatigue gets bumped up a little, and then it's back to the shrine of Peryite to absorb more Strength and then damage it back down to zero so it resets to a lower negative value, keeping our base fatigue at 1.
We have some pretty solid skills at this point and 130 Health...
...but most of our defenses depend on maintaining buffs. It's quite liberating, though, to be able to spam buffs over and over without worrying about running out of magicka at a bad time.
We keep closing Oblivion gates. The others are easier to navigate, which means completing them is less about wandering the landscape and more about knocking Dremora off their feet with super-powered arrows.
You might notice that most of these shots are done at point-blank range. It's the best way to ensure that I don't miss. Archery with fatigue boosting is less about kiting and more about drawing the bow, charging right at your opponent, and then shooting them in the face.
The Skingrad gate is also hard to get around in, though it's not so bad as that first one. Basically, there are several towers, and you have to unlock gates in each one in order to reach the top of the tower. One of the cool things is when the bridges from two towers stretch out to connect each other.
Now that we're a decent level, we get some rather lovely loot from these gates, including a bunch of high-priced rings. I burn some extra gold on a super-powered potion, just in case we get in serious trouble at some point in the future.
By the time we're done, we're at level 12 with -168 Strength. Next up, the Ayleid ruins of Sancre Tor and Miscarcand.
The only difficult part up until then was clearing the ankheg nests as I had to keep resting after killing every two or three ankhegs. Images are self-explanatory.
Remove fear and unfailing Endurance proved to be excellent spells against Tarnesh and Zordral.
At the beginning of the game Arctic Dwarves have a decided advantage, but the 20% reduction in experience soon whittles that away.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 14
Back to Sancre Tor! This time around, we'll actually be fighting the enemies directly instead of sneaking past them and relying on summons. To my surprise and alarm, one of the Undead Blades survives one of our arrows!But another shot brings him down, though, and the shortbow draws quickly enough that we can land the second shot before he can reach us. Notice that there are four different icons in the upper right corner of the screen--the three on the left are a custom Fortify Fatigue, Shield, and Fortify Health spell that I can cast constantly to ensure that I can land a high-damage arrow at any time, and to keep Zoreii in good, safe condition at all times.
The dungeon isn't too exciting. The Undead Blades go down in two or three hits each, and the numerous Ancient Ghosts (who are actually really powerful critters) die in a single hit, provided we use silver arrows to get past their 100% Resist Normal Weapons effect.
We get some neat gear, including a shield with a 6% Reflect Damage effect. Reflect Damage won't do much since we seldom engage in melee, but it's the only way to further reduce damage once you get to the 85% damage reduction cap from armor and Shield spells. Normally a shield would harm our spell effectiveness, but as long as you aren't using a one-handed weapon, the shield will apply any enchantment bonuses even though it's not actually being worn (you won't get the armor bonus, though).
Next up, Miscarcand! We have to deal with some zombies, unfortunately, but our summons can distract them long enough for us to land a fatal shot with our bow.
Midway through the dungeon, we hit Restoration 50 simply because our primary buffing spell is a Restoration spell that we cast constantly (more often than every 30 seconds).
Finally, we reach the Great Welkynd Stone. We don't even need to use our powerful anti-mage poisons; a single shot with a silver arrow slays the lich in a single hit.
We gain a level, go back to the shrine of Peryite, and re-set our base fatigue back to 1. This is what Zoreii looks like at level 13, already at virtually maximum power.
You know, in a normal run, a character build like Zoreii could benefit so much from a suit of armor and a good melee weapon. But fatigue boosting with negative Strength makes so many things completely unnecessary. We already have decent stats, some good defenses thanks to being a Breton with high Alchemy, and a bow that can deal over 300 damage with every arrow.
We just need to make sure we don't get overconfident. With 144 Health unbuffed, we could still die from a paralysis effect, a trap, lava damage, a bad fall, or a surprise attack from a high-level enemy. I don't have enough meta-knowledge about OOO to foresee every possible scenario, so I'll need to be careful.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 15
It's finally time to deal with the attack on Bruma. As before, we have a small horde of daedra to fend off, and if Martin dies during the fight, the game is over. Since we aren't as high-level as we were in the previous run, the daedra should be weaker than normal, but so will the soldiers backing us up. Thanks to having 50 Restoration instead of 100, our buffing spell for our allies is only so strong.The good news is that we have more allies on hand than before since we spent more time closing Oblivion gates and soliciting aid from the other cities of Cyrodiil.
But as it turns out, our allies prove all but unnecessary. With fatigue boosting, I can pick off the enemies one at a time as they come through the gates.
Only a tiny number of daedra make it past Zoreii, and they don't have nearly enough time to endanger Martin before the Great Gate opens. Once we're through, Martin is completely safe; he can't die after you've already entered the portal.
We still have to deal with that 15-minute timer, though, and the game is over if we don't make it to the Great Sigil Stone in time. I take a different route this time after seeing somebody else tackle the quest efficiently on Youtube, and this time around, I don't need to worry about being able to jump across the bridge, because we have a buff to help us make the leap.
We easily make it across and open the gate to the next area. We sneak inside the main tower, and while I can probably one-shot everything in here, I decide not to engage the Dremora Prince at the bottom level.
Notice that there are three more icons in the upper right; I've added Fire Shield, Frost Shield, and Shock Shield to my standard set of buffs, slightly improving Zoreii's defenses.
We move slow and make sure not to run into those giant sword traps. I get worried when I run into a lock, but we just happen to have 8 lockpicks left--not much, but enough to pick the lock.
I arrive at the top of the tower with plenty of time to spare, so I decide to give a shot at slaying the Dremora Prince nearby. A single sneak attack with our bow takes him down. Notice how far his body is from his dropped shield; that's how much force our arrows apply when they knock critters off their feet.
Sadly, Baurus didn't make it in this run, either. I think he just got crushed by the siege engine again. Baurus deserved better.
With the Great Sigil Stone in hand, we're finally ready to confront Mankar Camoran and take back the Amulet of Kings.
Zoreii: No-Reload Oblivion Run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Part 16
Martin opens the gate to Paradise. We need to get through the tunnels to reach Mankar Camoran, but Kathutet stands in our way... for a moment.Those arrows can take down pretty much anything. We get surprised by a spider daedra in the tunnels, but even she goes down with a single shot.
A Xivilai survives one of our arrows, however.
But he doesn't survive two.
We hurry through the tunnels and arrive outside Camoran's lair. I have a special poison for him in mind.
But as it turns out...
...the poison doesn't even have a chance to affect him. He dies in one hit.
I hurry to snatch up the enemy's gear before we're teleported back to Mundus. It's time to head to the Imperial City for the final phase of the game. We get attacked by daedra, but I'm extremely hesitant to fire arrows in Martin's defense, lest I accidentally one-shot him and end the game instantly. I aim for an enemy Dremora's feet and only fire when I can see clearly that Martin is backing away.
Outside, we're attacked by daedra again, and while we come out okay, I catch myself aiming an arrow straight at Martin! I quickly turn away.
Only one more area to deal with: the outside of the temple, where a Dremora Prince is waiting. I decide to take him out early.
But he survives, and when I back off to fire another shot, he survives that, too--in fact, he barely takes any damage from it. What's going on?
I check my inventory and stat screens and discover the problem. My base fatigue is no longer at 1! Zoreii's Strength is at 0 instead of the negative 170s!
How did this happen? It looks like we have some Drain Attribute effects, and it seems that a Drain Strength effect re-set our Strength to 0. I've seen similar things happen with Restore Attribute and Fortify Attribute effects.
With our Strength at 0, our arrows are now extremely weak--I only do a few points of damage per shot, instead of hundreds.
I was relying on fatigue boosting for almost all of our strength. Without it, Zoreii has lost the vast majority of her power.
It's time to run. We take heavy damage from the Dremora attacking us from behind.
Then we get locked in place--we're not paralyzed, but we can't move anywhere. I check our inventory and discover the problem: we just got hit with a Dispel effect that removed all of our buffs, including the Feather spell we needed to avoid being over-encumbered!
Worse yet, the Dispel effect failed to dispel our potions because our potions, with their multiple effects, had high effective magicka costs for the purposes of the Dispel check (Dispel removes effects based on the base magicka cost of the source). Why is that a problem?
It means we can't drink an Invisibility potion.
We're at half our normal Health and I don't know how much longer it will last. Do I cast Dragonskin to get high damage reduction at the cost of being stuck a moment longer, or do I cast Ease Burden with its Feather effect to get moving?
I don't trust Dragonskin to give enough damage reduction to keep us alive for the 2-3 seconds it would leave us rooted in place, so I opt for casting Ease Burden. With our encumbrance reset, we can move again, and we make it to the exit in one piece.
We're safe for now, but we need to go back out there. I restore all of our buffs and prepare to head back into battle. I have a special treat in store for the Dremora Prince.
I don't see him, though, so I run ahead to Mehrunes Dagon so I can report the news to Martin. I turn and run back.
But in the chaos of battle, I get hit, and while our massive 85% damage resistance keeps the damage below, we get paralyzed.
It's a poison. OOO enemies use poison, and this Dremora Prince is one of them. He hit me when I wasn't looking.
There's no way I can survive more than a few seconds on the ground. But I have made sure that we're prepared for this problem.
Zoreii has not drunk any potions yet. This means she has room for a Cure Paralysis potion!
Cure Paralysis has no duration, which means that we can drink another potion right after Zoreii starts climbing to her feet. I opt for a healing potion.
You see that telltale shimmer? It's just to the right of the potion list, just above "Resist Fire" in the list of the healing potion's effects, and just to the left of Zoreii's bow.
That's the Dremora Prince. He's using a Chameleon effect to screw with our visibility. That's why I couldn't see him coming; he was nearly invisible.
Then he nails me with another Dispel effect, taking away all of Zoreii's buffs, including our Ease Burden spell. We're locked in place once again.
But I know I can escape him just by re-casting Ease Burden. Once we can move again, we escape the area and speak with Martin. This dialogue, only accessible once you've spotted Dagon, is an important trigger for the end of the game.
All we have to do is run past the daedra and enter the temple. Then the final cutscene will begin. It will only take a few seconds if I avoid getting paralyzed again, but if something goes wrong, Martin could die; Oblivion moves very fast in combat. I make a point of applying our buffing spells to Martin and the soldiers, but Martin appears to reflect or absorb every such spell.
I take it as a good sign. I knew Martin had Reflect Spell and Spell Absorption active, but if they're this high, he should be a little safer against enemy spells.
I head back to the Dremora Prince area with Martin in tow. I arrive with low magicka due to buffing the soldiers, but I quickly get back enough of it to cast an Invisibility spell.
For some reason, I don't have the Invisibility icon, but since the Dremora Prince is distracted by other soldiers, we have a few seconds of safety at least.
A few seconds is all we need. We make it to the palace! The final cutscene begins.
Dagon bursts into the temple, but Martin is scripted to win. Martin transforms into a dragon, torches Dagon, tears out his throat, and banishes him back to his home plane, sealing the barrier between Mundus and Oblivion. His labors complete, Martin turns to stone.
Oblivion is over! I take Zoreii back to Frostcrag Spire to get her next level and re-set her base fatigue to 1. Here is what she looks like at the end of the game, wearing Mankar Camoran's robe now that the run is over.
One no-reload Oblivion run with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, with no item duplication, complete.
Frost: No-Reload Skyrim Run
Part 1
With Morrowind and Oblivion complete, it's time to move on to Skyrim! Since Skyrim Special doesn't seem to recognize SKSE, the script extender, there are some mods that I can't install. Instead, we're going with three mods that don't require SKSE: Ordinator, an overhaul to the perk system, MorrowLoot, which reorganizes the loot system, and Smilodon, which overhauls combat and makes weapons much more deadly.We have an additional restriction: I can't do any crafting whatsoever. No Smithing, no Alchemy, no Enchant, and no cooking. Skyrim rewards grinding crafting skills far more than actually playing the game, and crafting skills can completely break the difficulty, so we're going to avoid our three strongest skills completely.
Nor can we stun-lock everything with the Impact perk from the Destruction tree; Ordinator removes that perk entirely. We're going to have to improvise a great deal, especially because I've never played any of these mods before; all I've ever tried is SkyRe. All I know is that we're going to choose the Vancian Magic perk.
But since we can't get until we hit 30 Alteration, we'll discuss that later. We will be playing a Breton once again, but Bretons are far weaker in Skyrim than in Oblivion; their Resist Magicka is reduced to 25, their Dragonskin blocks spells instead of weapons, and enemy spells are much less dangerous than enemy weapons in Skyrim. Honestly, Orcs and Argonians and High Elves are easily the strongest races in Skyrim.
Anyway, Skyrim starts out on the wagon to Helgen. We, along with three other guys, are being escorted to our public executions. One of the guys is taking it pretty hard.
At the last minute, Lokir protests that he's innocent--he's not one of the rebel Stormcloaks--and tries to make a break for it. Unfortunately, the Imperial Legion that's holding the execution has an archer on hand.
We're not part of the rebellion. We're not even on the Imperials' own list of people to be executed; we're not supposed to be here at all. But the captain isn't willing to take any chances.
The Stormcloak rebellion is serious business in Skyrim. The rebel leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, used the power of the Voice (more on that later) to kill his king and take the throne for himself. But now Ulfric has been captured, and the leader of the Imperial Legion in Skyrim, General Tullius, takes a moment to grandstand.
First on the block is a nameless rebel. He interrupts his own last rites so he can hurry up and go to Sovngarde, the Elder Scrolls version of Valhalla.
He gets his wish. The captain kicks his body aside to make room for Frost, our Charname in this run, to get her head chopped off as well.
Right before we lose our head, a dragon lands on the tower behind the executioner...
...and throws everyone off their feet with a Shout. The dragon puts the torch to the entire town, and everyone forgets about the execution to focus on staying alive amid the chaos.
At the end, Ralof and Hadvar, a rebel and a soldier, offer to save us. We side with Ralof and spend the starting dungeon killing Imperial Legion soldiers with fire and the Conjure Familiar spell. Enemies deal 50% more weapon damage at Adept difficulty, so I hang back and let Ralof tank for me.
The dungeon is little trouble otherwise. We make it outside and receive our first quest: we need to report the dragon attack to the Jarl (local lord) of the city of Whiterun, because dragons aren't actually supposed to exist in Tamriel. Until now, the only known dragons are the god Akatosh and the Daedric Prince Peryite.
First, though, we have a couple stops. Just outside the starting dungeon, there are three "standing stones" which give us mutually exclusive but really awesome powers. As always, I play a magic-heavy character, so the choice is obvious.
The next stop is Bleak Falls Barrow (not to be confused with Bleak Flats Cave, mentioned in the Oblivion run). Before I head out, I purchase our first and only Alteration spell.
Alteration has long been a rather weak skill in Skyrim, largely because these armor spells cost so, so much magicka to cast. It's generally better for mages to just wear heavy armor, since armor imposes no spellcasting penalties in Skyrim--it just slows down your movement and makes you lose Stamina (the Skyrim version of fatigue, but much less important) faster when running.
We hike out to Bleak Falls Barrow, which is guarded by a gang of bandits. Fortunately, my mods aren't as vicious as OOO, so dealing with bandits at level 1 isn't as dangerous as it was in OOO in Oblivion.
To get our Alteration up to 30 and pick the Vancian Magic perk, we need to cast Oakflesh many times, but we can only do it in combat (combat spells don't give experience if cast out of combat). We pick our first perk to lower the cost of the spell and let us cast it a little more often.
In vanilla Skyrim, the first perk reduces Novice spell cost in half; the Ordinator perk reduces all spells, not just Novice ones, to 65% their normal cost and even makes them scale with skill level (a long-running problem with Skyrim is that spells don't scale nearly as much as weapons).
We run into a stronger bandit shortly into Bleak Falls and take a lot of damage really fast. Fortunately, drinking potions in Skyrim is instantaneous and there's no limit to how many you can drink!
You just have to make sure you have enough potions on hand and that you react in time to open the inventory screen and drink them.
The Wounded Frostbite Spider also does far more damage than I expected, and I nearly die before I access my inventory.
But, as it happens, the giant spider can't fit through the doorway to the previous area. We can retreat and the spider can't follow!
The spider is smart enough not to stand in the doorway, however, so we can't attack it without entering its lair and exposing ourselves to danger.
We can, however, summon a familiar over and over to do the work for us. The process is slow, so I pitch in with an arrow, but the spider has a ranged poison attack that can nail me even if the familiar is blocking the way. We put it down with an arrow to the face.
Most of the enemies in this dungeon are draugr, fairly weak undead warriors. Restless Draugr have much more Health, however, and have more time to deal damage before they go down, and Draugr Wights (which don't appear in Bleak Falls) are tougher still.
The end boss is a Draugr Deathlord, who uses a minor Shout, hits hard, and lasts much longer than any of the other draugr. Fully buffed, he still drains most of our potions before going down.
Bleak Falls is a very long dungeon with lots of loot. By the time we return to Riverwood to get our reward and sell off our extra loot, we have over 1,400 gold--a very good start to the run.
Time to head to Whiterun. The dragon fight will give us an opportunity to grind Alteration in safety.
Frost: No-Reload Skyrim Run
Part 2
We report to the Jarl, there's some boring lore about politics or something, and he gives us a rather awesome pair of boots before sending us out to a tower outside Whiterun, where a dragon will ambush us and a group of soldiers.The dragon, Mirmulnir, is actually no threat at all. The soldiers can do all of the work; they don't need any help to kill it. Instead, we hide at the tower chain-casting Oakflesh to level our Alteration skill.
We absorb the dragon's soul with some flashy visuals...
...and some random dude says we're the Dragonborn. The Dragonborn is a special hero or something who eats souls and yells at people. The Jarl tells us to go to High Hrothgar, where the shoutiest dudes in all the land will teach me how to yell loud enough to save the world from dragons. We get a badass warrior chick to help us along the way.
But we're not ready for High Hrothgar just yet. First, I want to join the College of Winterhold, where we can buy some new spell tomes and stuff. Getting into college is as simple as casting a single spell, which the resident dark elf teaches to us for 30 gold.
Magic isn't well appreciated in Skyrim, and Winterhold is especially hostile to magic, to the extent that the mages apparently come up with plans on how to defend themselves with lethal force.
We're joined by three other new apprentices, who want our teacher, Tolfdir, to teach them how to blow stuff up. Since a no-reload run is all about not dying, I advocate safety first.
Learning about safety involving Tolfdir throwing a fireball right in your face until you learn how to block it. We get it right on the second try.
Next, we have a field trip to Saarthal, a dusty archaeological site. While poking around, a homely elf in weird robes appears in a vision to tell us that something extremely important and vague is going to happen.
Whatevs. I don't plan on completing the College of Winterhold questline, so this is irrelevant; we're only here to complete the main quest.
We keep exploring and thrash the local undead. Finally, we spam Oakflesh enough to hit Alteration level 30! Now we can finally choose the Vancian Magic perk.
We'll only be able to cast 20 spells per dungeon, which is a huge drawback. But restoring them doesn't take all that much time, and the benefits are spectacular. All Restoration spells will now heal twice as much, all Destruction spells will deal twice as much damage, all Alteration and Conjuration spells will last twice as long, and all Illusion spells will affect creatures twice as high-level as normal.
Better still, our magicka is now irrelevant; we no longer use it for anything. That means we require no Fortify Magicka equipment, no cost-saving gear, no Restore Magicka potions, and we don't need to spend any level ups increasing magicka; we can instead pour all of that into Health instead.
Finally, a sustained spell--a spell which lasts as long as you concentrate on it--only counts as one spell, no matter how much time you spend concentrating on it. This means that, for the cost of only 2 spells out of our 20, we can heal ourselves 20 Health per second and inflict 16 fire damage per second, indefinitely.
I still have to let it down every now and then just so I can see properly and gather loot and stuff, but there aren't a lot of threats at this point in the game that can deal more than 20 damage per second. We can outlast all kinds of critters, even high-level enemies with lots of Health.
We find a big glowy orb thingy at the end of the dungeon, which can only mean a successful expedition. We report our success to the Archmage and then get out. We stop by Markarth, where some guy knifes some poor lady and is promptly axed by a nearby guard...
...then to Riften, where a dragon flies menacingly around the city but never actually lands, allowing us to just leave it alone...
...and then, after buying some healing potions to replace all the ones we've already lost, we start heading towards High Hrothgar. On the road, we run into an old orc who says he wants to die in battle. Even though he apparently just wasted two sabre cats on his own, I decide to take him on.
Unfortunately, I end up torching Lydia in the process. Apparently she's not truly immortal; she's just a "protected" character, which means only the player can permanently kill her.
I proceed on my own (after looting her body, of course) and realize I have to cross a river. The shortest method appears to be a gigantic log stretching a hundred feet across a massive gorge...
...but when I hear that bandit threatening me, I decide to take the long way around it. I don't think a bandit's arrow is likely to take me down, but I'm concerned that it could shake me enough to send me tumbling off the log, and I don't think falling from that height is exactly.
Down by the river, I stumble upon a Frost Troll. I can't deal much damage to the thing with arrows, so I just wait for it to approach so I can torch it while maintaining a healing spell.
He lands one hit on me and takes a huge chunk out of our health bar, but I figure that healing 20 Health per second will be more than enough to keep us alive.
We scrape by with the help of some potions and start the ascent to High Hrothgar. Since we made it past a Frost Troll, I think we'll be okay; a Frost Troll is the worst there is on the way up the mountain.
Then we run into an Ice Wolf. After torching several wolves in the past, I assume he'll fall in short order, but he does massive damage.
I count on my healing spell to keep me alive... but then, despite being at over half Health, I die in one hit.
At first, I think it's a bug, because I didn't even see a game over screen; it just automatically loaded the last save. But when I go back up the mountain and jump from a fatal height, I see the same result: Frost hits the ground in third-person mode and the game automatically loads the last save. It wasn't a bug.
I sigh and start over from Helgen.
Frost: No-Reload Skyrim Run
Part 2
Helgen is fairly similar; the starting dungeon is never really new. Outside Riverwood, though, we get attacked by a gang of bandits where I didn't expect to see any until Bleak Falls Barrow. Fortunately, the more heavily-armored bandits are slower than Frost, which allows us to run away and buy enough time to fire off arrows.Ralof and some other Riverwood natives end up helping us take down the bandits.
Up at the first level of Bleakwood Falls, I discover that we can easily train Alteration at low risk just by isolating an archer and then dodging her arrows.
She fires at regular intervals, making it pretty easy to scoot out of the way, and many of her arrows are blocked outright by the environment. This lets me wait for my magicka to regenerate and re-cast Oakflesh.
We get Alteration up to 30, but don't yet pick Vancian magic because I want to save it for later in the dungeon. The bow takes care of the Bandit Outlaw (a stronger version of a normal bandit) and the Wounded Frost Spider (we use hit-and-fade tactics abusing the doorway).
Then I get a new idea. If I cast two healing spells at once and hold them indefinitely, I can heal myself for 40 points per second--which means I can let the draugr attack me indefinitely and train both Restoration and Heavy Armor to any level I want!
But I fail to test it out first, and it turns out that letting three draugr attack me at once was a little too much. I can only handle two. The three of them manage to overcome Frost's regeneration and end the run prematurely.
But now I have a solid early game strategy: use an archer to train Alteration until we can get Vancian Magic, then use Vancian Magic to stay alive while a pair of draugr attack us and increase our Heavy Armor and Restoration skills while we wait. This time, I use the bandit archer at the watchtower near Bleak Falls and pick the first Alteration perk to make Oakflesh cost less magicka, speeding up the process. I also use a shield to train Block a little. At first, the bandit stays in place while I dodge not far away, but eventually the bandit gets stuck on an incline and can't reach us at all.
Combat is still active as long as someone is attacking you (or trying to), which means our Oakflesh spells grant experience, even though we're not in any real danger.
I enter Bleak Falls Barrow, fight my way down to the draugr, and reduce a pack of draugr from 3 to 2 to make sure they don't deal enough damage to overwhelm us. I set Frost to constantly cast two healing spells at once and watch her level Heavy Armor and Restoration as the draugr struggle to overcome her massive regeneration.
It takes some minutes, but we get both skills above 50, giving us lots of level ups very early. We then use Flames to burn down the rest of the opposition in the dungeon.
We sell off the loot, then go the College of Winterhold to buy some new spells. With Vancian Magic doubling the effectiveness of all spells, we have some pretty strong options at our disposal, and we don't have to worry about the magicka cost at all.
Our bed at the college counts as our own, which means we can recharge spells at it for free. Since it's 60 seconds away from a fast-travel point, it's also very easy to reach whenever we run low on spells.
Our only problem is that we need to ration spells carefully. I make a point of avoiding casting too many spells by using sustained spells, which only count as one.
Then, after a short fight with several draugr at once, I find that I'm already out of spells.
I have no idea how I lost 20 spells already. I rested (in my own bed) before entering Saarthal, and we barely spent any.
Unfortunately, we can't leave Saarthal until it's complete; the door is locked behind us. I decide to move forward and rely on our sword and healing potions to get by until Tolfdir rejoins us.
But the draugr are really tough because I gained so many levels by increasing Heavy Armor and Restoration. I start losing potions fast.
Then a Draugr Wight weighs down on us, and we quickly run out of potions even as we deal almost no damage to the enemy.
There's no way I can take down this creature without any more potions; it's dealing far too much damage and we're dealing far too little. I run away and scour my inventory, but there's only a single option.
Hopefully the fire damage from this scroll will help turn the tide. I turn around and begin casting the spell.
But this is a master-level spell, which means it takes several seconds to play the entire casting animation. It doesn't come out fast enough, and the draugr kills us.
Losing all my spells seems like a bug. I reload and do some tests and confirm that I entered the dungeon with 20 spells, but no matter how badly I play the game, I never come close to burning 20 spells by the time I reach the point where I ran out the first time around. There were only 7 draugr in 3 fights, and I had 19 spells by the time I reached them (I spent one opening a door). If I used an armor spell for each fight (which I wouldn't have), a healing spell for each fight, and used a separate Destruction spell for each draugr (when it really would have taken at most 5 or 6 to kill them all), and then just blasted 5 random spells at the wall (which I also wouldn't have), I still would have had at least 2 spells left at worst. At best, I would have had 14 spells left.
I fiddle with the Amulet of Saarthal to see if it messed with my spellcasting somehow, but I can't replicate the bug. I have no idea how I ended up with zero spells, but I just can't figure out how I could have lost the legitimately.
Even so, I don't want to spend a lot of time continuing the run if there's a chance that I'll figure out, much later, that the death wasn't due to a bug. I decide not to reload.
Frost: No-Reload Skyrim Run
Part 3
For a while, I consider not continuing in Skyrim. There's very little growth for mages; there just aren't very many spells to get. The full list of Skyrim spells is ridiculously short. I decide that spending half the game spamming Flames and then spending the other half of the game spamming Wall of Flames is just not going to be that much fun.Then I have a new idea. I wasn't able to install Apocalypse, but I can still install other spell mods. I search the Nexus and come up with a new install:
Smilodon
MorrowLoot
Ordinator
High Level Enemies
Better Master Spells
Patron Gods of Skyrim
Phenderix Magic Evolved
Simple Mark and Recall
Tomebound
Telekinetic Shove Spell
Weapons and Armor Fixes
This should keep things a little more interesting and less reductive with Vancian Magic. The Mark and Recall spells will be especially convenient for the perk.
The Patron Gods of Skyrim is for roleplayers, but it offers great bonuses for powergamers. The new temple available shortly after Helgen, in which you can choose which god or Daedric Prince to worship (you can only get one at a time, but you can switch whenever you want), offers some pretty excellent rewards for worshippers. There's also a massive amount of free loot, from dragon bones and scales to an orcish sword and helmet.
In general, I like Hermaeus Mora, simply because a god of knowledge appeals to me personally. Also, he's very creepy and cool (I've played through the Dragonborn expansion before) and it makes sense for a mage character like Frost.
Same as before, we head out to the bandits to grind Alteration, get Vancian Magic, and use Destruction magic to steamroll the draugr of Bleak Falls Barrow.
We proceed to the College of Winterhold and discover some really, really excellent new spells for sale.
How can I afford all these new tomes? We go bankrupt just buying a few of the best ones. The solution is another perk from the Ordinator mod.
Eminently abusable, we can generate gold whenever we want simply by using the "wait" function or fast-traveling from city to city. I use it to buy a Mark and Recall spell, which I can use to teleport back to our bed at the college whenever we run low on spells. We also have a slightly slower-casting spell to teleport to Riverwood.
That last one is very important. It means that we can both teleport to any given location that we set, as well as a static location in Riverwood. We can Mark a spot in the middle of Saarthal, teleport out to Riverwood, and then return to Saarthal with a Recall spell after resting fully, completely avoiding the drawbacks of the Vancian Magic perk at the cost of a slight inconvenience.
We do just that, and it means that we don't have to worry about running out of spells in the middle of a dungeon we normally couldn't leave early. We zap all the draugr inside.
We head to Whiterun and find even more awesome spells on hand. Normally, their magicka cost would balance them out, but Vancian Magic negates the issue of magicka cost.
Next up is the dragon outside Whiterun. This time, we don't need the guards to do the work. We just go right up to the thing and spam Lightning Bolt until we fry it.
I teleport back to the college and find that I've accidentally teleported one of the local guards with me.
For a moment, I think that the college is going to have a Whiterun Guard loitering around forever. But then he leaves my room...
...and starts making his way out of the college to return to his old post.
Whiterun is in the middle of Skyrim. Winterhold is in the far northeast. That poor guard has to walk halfway across Skyrim just to get home.
Hey everyone,
So... I wasn't going to play Baldur's Gate again until 2.5 would be complete, but then my entire internet broke down for multiple days (I'm currently writing this three days after losing access, in the hopes of posting this on the forums at a later date, once I'm able to go online again), which left me in the position of not being able to do the things I had planned to do. One of the few available options to fill my freetime was... playing Baldur's Gate again, as steam can, luckily, be started in offline-mode.
So... still no patch, and certainly no capability to download any mods. What's left to do in the vanilla game? Well...I don't like leaving things unfinished, and there are two types of game I've tried in the past but failed to succeed at – a) an actual solo run and b) the meatgrinder challenge. However, I wasn't in the mood for b), especially after the awkward ways in which my previous attempts ended. A) it was.
I'm actually quite bad at soloing – propably because I don't like to play with no party in a party-based game, which results in me not having a lot of experience and not knowing about a couple of crucial solo strategies. While my first 3 serious solo attempts (the totemic druid and two ranger/clerics) made it all the way to Amelyssan (for the first) or Abazigal (for the two ranger/clerics), everything I did after that, with a less calculated and careful mindset (which is something very hard to maintain for me while soloing), failed.
All these runs are undocumented, but to give you a brief taste (of what I can remember): A dark moon monk got killed by a high hedge skeleton (yes, really), a F/M/C died during the Neera encounter, a F/I was destroyed by the adventuring party in the basilisk area, a barbarian (of all classes) got charmed by the Hamadryad (still don't know how I managed to do that), another F/MC was killed by Semaj's Cloudkill (the most successful run of these), a berserker failed to win the ducal palace fight (which is at least somwhat understandable)... I lost at least another F/MC and a shadowdancer to now unknown foes, and there might have been more.
This time, I planned to learn from all of these mistakes. I went for the approach I thought to be the safest possible during all stages of the game, though I mostly worried about late ToB – Abazigal and Amelyssan. This is why I chose a dwarven defender – with high damage reduction and Simmy+PfM abuse, those encounters seem to be possible even for a bad solo player like myself. I also thought up a ducal palace strategy which I hoped would work much better than just trying to deal as much damage as possible – more of that later.
Now: Meet Cendrosch, the Dwarven Defender – shortly after killing Shoal and doing a couple of other quests.
My approach to early BG1: Kill Shoal, do easy quests to get reputation to 20, buy Greenstone Amulet (very important!) and protection from petrification scroll, kill basilisks, kill sirens, get useful items, start doing the main quest.
To that end, I went with **Sling (for kiting and, later, for Belhifet) and **War Hammer (primary melee weapon for the entire saga), later on getting **Longbow (to apply arrows of dispelling, which I planned to use during the ducal palace event, the Sarevok battle and against all kinds of SoD mages).
Here's Cendrosch and his buddy Corax:
And here's a very effective potion of firebreath to get that full plate from Taugosz Khosann:
It should be mentioned that all potential problems introduced by dangerous crowd control spells (or, even worse, charm) were solved by rigorous use of the Greenstone Amulet. I still only had to rebuy it once and had lots of charges left by the time I got to the later stages of BG1.
Speaking of which, if Greenstone isn't enough to protect a dwarf, protection from magic does an even better job, right, Davaeorn?
In the big city, I bought a bunch of tactical arrows and obtained more crucial items, like the Helm of Balduran... and the Cloak. Poor Quenash:
I got some extra gold for the tons of potions needed for protection against all possible bad things and also saved up some valuable items (mostly gems) to sell in SoD later on. Not all quests were finished, and eventually, it was time to take down the Iron Throne party:
I used my strength potions and DUHM to get all the tomes in Candlekeep and skipped through most of the fighting via Sandthief Ring. Back in Baldur's Gate (and after killing the assassins), it was time for the first big hurdle of this run: The Ducal Palace.
This was my plan: Use the Nymph's Cloak to charm the noblemen to the south and southeast before the event starts and send them far away, so that when they transform, they won't enter combat right away. Use dispelling arrows while under effect of an oil of speed to get rid of any haste effects, greatly reducing the doppelganger's damage. I also used a strength potion and heroism for additional damage output. So far, so good – my plan seemed to work just fine; While Belt was almost dead, Liia was still unhurt, and the only doppelganger still around was only interested in targeting Cendrosch:
Now, here's where things get weird. Turns out the two noblemen I had sent away didn't transform into doppelgangers at all, and Belt refused to acknowlegde that the battle was over. He just stood there and wouldn't talk to me. I was stuck – so I thought I might've to get rid of those untransformed noblemen somehow. Afraid of what might happen if I simply would attack them or if I'd use them to attack Belt, I got them to attack each other – which did result in one of them turning hostile and getting killed by the flaming fist. So far, so good, but the other one was still left, not having turned hostile. Seeing no other choice, I struck him down (as I was pretty sure that having him attack the Flaming Fist, Belt, Liia or Sarevok would result in an immediate game over). This had a very weird effect:
Liia and the flaming fist turned hostile (though I didn't lose any reputation), but Belt continued to stay friendly. In fact, while Liia and the mercs tried to kill me (failing to do any damage at all), Belt instead started to cut his own allies down – and they wouldn't attempt to strike back at all, still focusing on Cendrosch.
So I waited until Belt was done, hoping he would now finally acknowledge that the battle was over. He didn't. He was still standing around, and I couldn't talk to him. My last attempt to get out of this situation was charming Belt myself using the Nymph's Cloak charges, and when that didn't work, charming every NPC in the room (except for Sarevok). Didn't work either:
I figured that the situation definitely constituted a gamebreaking bug, so I reloaded and tried this approach once more, with similar results: The battle was won, but the game was stuck:
It seemed like my well thought-out strategy was simply unworkable. This left me no choice but to reload again, and, this time, don't attempt the apparently gamebreaking Nymph's Cloak charms, potentially making this attempt much more difficult. I planned to throw in a wand of sleep charge for good luck (I think it has only a 10% chance to work, but if it works, it is a huge relief). While Cendrosch started to get good dispelling arrow hits in, the wand took down 2 doppelgangers! Very lucky indeed!
It's hard to see, but the one to the south of Belt and the one next to Sarevok are asleep. The other two who are attacking the dukes have lost their haste effect, and the remaining two are only chasing after Cendrosch. Ironically, this ended up being my most successful attempt of all three, with Belt having lost the least amount of HP and Liia still at her maximum:
So, I was finally done with this event. Not the cleanest way to do it, getting stuck due to a bug two times, but I hope that most people will agree that in this case, reloading was justified.
Anyway, I invisbly made my way directly to Sarevok and lured him closer to the temple entrance with another dispelling arrow:
The now very slow Sarevok wasn't even there in time to help out poor Semaj, who immediately got his buffs dispelled as well:
All Cendrosch had to do now was kiting around Sarevok with his sling:
And BG1 was done! I am actually quite happy with my performance, though I did rely heavily on the Greenstone Amulet – the reason I'm happy is that I never got myself into a situation where I had to make a saving throw, which is something I didn't achieve with my previous totemic druid run. The only time where I felt that I had to get at least some RNG on my side was during the ducal palace fight – missing with multiple dispelling arrows, not affecting anyone with the wand of sleep and not getting any of the doppelgangers to chase Cendrosch around could've certainly ended the run.
Now, time for SoD!
Using the well-established combo of invisibility and protection from undead, I made my way to Korlasz. Since Cendrosch can't disarm the dispelling trap in front of her lair, he had to fight at least one group of foes, using necklace of missle charges:
Yes, that is him once again using the Greenstone Amulet for safety (which is actually very needed during this encounter, as these mages tend to cast spook).
Korlasz got hit by dispelling arrows and hammered down until she gave up:
At this point, I bought a bunch of potions in the city and cleared the Coast Way Crossing. Nothing of note here (the Ring of Freedom remains useful), as a protection from undead scroll turned the Repository of the Undead into a cakewalk. A note: Without the internet, I couldn't look up any SoD trap locations (which I don't know entirely by heart – though almost), and since I don't know a lot of the trap effects, I only opened chests or containers if needed for quests or very useful items. I also stopped using the Greenstone Amulet, since there are tons of clarity potions available in SoD, and they a) last longer and b) start working instantly, while the amulet has a short activation delay.
Making my way to the Troll Claw Woods, I had no issue meleeing even dangerous foes like trolls or greater wyvern – with very good AC, constantly swapping about AC-improving belts and defensive stance available, Cendrosch has yet to meet someone he can't melee down in SoD. The dragon was killed via throwing dagger, which also got me to the SoD XP cap – a shield made from his scales improved AC even more. The Temple of Bhaal turned out to be rather easy, as I still had a strength potion, an oil of speed and heroism going (I buffed before taking on the dragon in case something went wrong with the dagger plan). The Neothelid was defeated:
And while Aerial Servants really pack a punch, forcing Cendrosch to drink a couple of healing potions even when protected by defensive stance, the Wardstone was eventually his.
I surrendered the fort (but not before making 80 voidstone bullets), used invulnerability to counter the scripted greater malison effect and cleared the bridge:
At the camp, I quickly obtained the thac0 +2 amulet, pulled the genie into the prime to buy some more items and got myself some lucky boots (+3 to all saving throws for dwarves – now this is something I would like to take into BG2!). I didn't get the +3 warhammer because I couldn't deal with the lock on the chest, but I planned to use bullets against big B anyway. At the underground river, I talked to the ogres, killed the couple from Rashemen, murdered Strunk (with the crusaders just watching – they usually go hostile!):
After that, I moved downstairs, poisoned the supplies, placed the barrel and ran out as soon as Hephernaan got his dialogue in:
I should mention that I previously got Corinth's Bow and the Ring of the Crusade from the Crusader Camp. The bow now played a minor part in taking down the waves attacking the Coalition Camp (the primary part was played by lots and lots of detonation arrows). For the first time in my life, I didn't use the warmages against the third wave, saving them for the final hostile party – this and more detonation arrows made the encounter rather easy:
During the siege, I kept shooting things with my detonation arrow to clear out the enemy forces as quickly as possible:
I agreed to Ashatiel's duel and won via PfM-Scroll:
Now, Avernus – I skipped the first level as usual, buffed with some potions for the second (clarity being the most important) and used all the remaining potions and scrolls to get full immunity to Belhifet's and his devil's abilities, not counting their actual physical damage. I decided to ignore the summons this time:
I kept kiting big B around – all the devils continued to teleport to Cendrosch's position constantly, so I really had to keep moving all the time:
However, none of my foes came close to threatening the Dwarven Defender, and with the 33rd Bullet of Darkness, Belhifet was slain (so really, there was no threat of running out of ammo).
Victory – and time to move on to BG2:SoA!
We start with Dungeon & Circus Tent, walking around in the city for a bit (and buying some potions for safety while doing minor quests – oh, and we also see this very rare sight: First attack, instant crit, one hit kill for Shank):
Anyway, moving on to the Druid Grove. Cendrosch has a Ring of Air Control in his pocket – not only to potentially improve saving throws, but to flee any potentially dangerous druid battle. With Bassilus' Hammer transfering over from SoD to SoA now, a +2 weapon is available to use hit and run strategies against the Rakshasa – which is the primary reason we are here:
Though Cendrosch also gets to watch Cernd kill Faldorn. Now, we get our reward: The Shield of Harmony +2, which will saves us from all kinds of nasty effects, and the reason we started SoA with a visit to the Grove.
Next up, De'Arnise Keep – because it's easy and SoD already showed us that Cendrosch can deal with all kinds of trolls. We use our **Longbow to finish off the unconscious monsters with fire arrows, otherwise relying on the newly bought Dwarven Thrower +3 – our primary weapon until we get Crom Faeyr.
Speaking of weapons, this is the plan for Cendrosch's pips:
He started with ***War Hammer, **Longbow and **Sling. We won't use longbows anymore except to kill trolls and sometimes apply dispelling arrows, and sling will be rarely used as well, because we have the Dwarven Thrower. We will get the final * in War Hammer first, after that **Mace (because the iMod +2 will be the primary weapon against all the undead), **Flail (while we might use the FoA sometimes, this is mostly for the Defender of Easthaven), ***Two-Weapon Style (so we can use the Defender in our offhand) and, finally **Halberds (nothing important to spend points on, but I plan to use the Wave +4 a couple of times to instantly kill fire-based enemies in ToB).
Anyway, back to De'Arnise Keep: Our weapon lets us easily take care of the golems:
Tor'Gal falls, and we get our stronghold. Sadly, the stronghold quest bugs out after three weeks, and since I can't go online right now, I can't look up any potential console codes to fix it. Not too important, but rather sad.
Back in Athkatla, Cendrosch pays Gaelan to obtain the RoP +2. in Combination with some saving throw-improving items from trademeet and a soon-to-be obtained necklace from the sewers, we are already at all-negative saving throws, and we have the option to get much lower using defensive stance and Ring of Air Control. To get that necklace, we have to go through Gaius, which is made easy by approaching with improved invisibility and using a very impressive potion of firebreath:
After that strong opening, defensive stance easily lets us deal with the remaining foes. Now, we free Haer'Dalis and go to the Planar Prison. An oil of speed and a frost giant strength potion are used to speed up the killing, and they stay active for the entire place (I used a RoR charge as a heal so I didn't have to rest after facing the Master of Thralls). The Warden falls before even taking down all the freed slaves:
Normally, I'm not that aggressive when fighting the Warden, but I knew that my oil of speed would run out soon and I trusted in my saving throws.
Next, I entered Bodhi's Lair to get the MoD before bringing it to Cromwell (I didn't go after Bodhi herself yet, because of Tanova). With the iMoD +2 at the ready and a protection from undead scroll activated, the temple ruins were cleansed of all evil:
Well, except for the shadow dragon – for now.
At this point, I had enough money for a big shopping tour. Most importantly, I acquired the cheese combo I planned to use against those mages who can circumvent my saving throws by using spells like Maze or Imprisonment: Helm of Vhailor and Protection from Magic scrolls. I used protection from undead to kill some liches and get access to Kangaxx, who was killed via iMoD +2. The Ring of Gaxx improves Cendrosch's saves even more (putting saving throws vs spells to -4 – which isn't totally save against abjurers using symbol spells, but when combined with defensive stance, ring of air control, stoneform or invulnerability – to name a few optioons – almost nothing should affect our defender if it can be saved against – the other saves are even better, depending on what items I have equipped).
If you thought that rebuying the Greenstone Amulet was cheesy, avert your eyes: Cendrosch is walking right into the Twisted Rune, just for fun (I need neither the experience nor the gold):
Here we do the same thing with the Guarded Compound, but adding defensive stance because of high physical damage, and our first GWWs:
But really, I do feel somewhat bad abusing PfM. I try limiting its use to battles in which I have a reasonable fear of getting Mazed – for the two dragons, for example, no PfM is needed:
We're simply using the simmy as an additional fighter, getting us to those sweet 20 APR with GWWs.
That being said, by now completing the rest of the chapter 2/3 quests was merely a formality (or, rather: I just had to avoid doing any major mistakes, and luckily, I picked a class where making mistakes is rather difficult). Spellhold was finished without significant incidents (though the Boots of the North will hopefully play an important role against Mel in ToB, if I make it past Abazigal for once). I got my Cloak of Mirroring, which I basically don't use at all because my HP pool is very, very high and magical damage doesn't seem to matter a whole lot – I prefer the extra saving throw bonuses granted by displacement for now. Now, the Underdark.
Balors have vorpal hits, and there's no save, right? I read that somewhere, once, but I'm not 100% sure if it's true in vanilla. Since I can't look it up (still no internet), I'm just staying far away from this one, using the Dwarven Thrower at range. Also: Because he might be – for some reason – a conjurer (why not? Stranger things have happened) I add invulnerability for extra saving throws:
The Demon Knights are dealt with, so is the first room of the Beholder Lair (I ended using PfM for that one because the Elder Orb casts imprisonment). Now, we have a new amulet with the ability to get our Save vs. Spells to -6 without any additional buffs, potions etc. Nice. I decide to clear mind flayer city (just for the ring of fire control, really). While Cendrosch does have 19 intelligence, some kiting is required to stay save and not risk a quick succession of mind flayer hits:
Cendrosch starts the Ust'Natha questline, skipping the sidequests for now (and buying some potions – great stock, that merchant!). Near the end of the questline, we reach the level cap. Here's a look at our entire HLA selection.
Yes, that's 20 GWWs and nothing else. Hardiness isn't needed thanks to defensive stance, critical strike doesn't do a lot for us... smite could be nice, but really, all I want is more damage.
Oh, and the Ust'Natha questline grinds to a halt thanks to a bug – we get the neccessarry blood for the Matron Mother, Phaere invites us to come to her – but she doesn't leave, and both her and her mother claim that we didn't bring them the blood. Another questbug, and because I, once again, can't look up any console commands, I have to leave Ust'Natha. I could kill Adalon, but why? Instead, I bribe the drow guards. This results, btw, in Cendrosch now (and propably forever, don't know how it will be in ToB) still looking like a drow. Strange – Elhan and his elves don't seem to notice. The whole silver dragon egg thing is left unfinished, but luckily, I don't really need any items I could get there.
We forge Crom Faeyr and the Wave, put the iMoD +2 in our mainhand with Crom Faeyr providing offhand strength and go to the graveyard. Those vampires simply melt. And, after Drizzt stealing the last hit against Bodhi multiple runs in a row, Cendrosch actually succeeds in getting it for himself:
We make it to the elven city and kill some golems – easy with Crom Faeyr, though it still takes 3 GWWs to take down an adamantite golem. But we have 20, so there. The dragon doesn't stand a chance, the avatar is summoned and we fight Irenicus at the tree. Yes, I'm using PfM here. Don't want to get mazed. I can think of several other ways around that, but I already commited to the PfM cheese, might as well continue to use it.
The hell trials are completed the good way. There might be better boni for some specific evil choices, but since I very rarely play evil, I don't know them by heart, and I can't look them up right now. I know that the good choices include +2 to all saving throws – that one seems great, so I'm fine with going good. Jon is once again challenged, with the simmy taking down the Balors (just in case these also can deliver vorpal hits). Protection from magic is used, but not needed – none of my foes does anything meaningful, the few spells Jon gets to use would've resulted in guaranteed saves:
Time to move on to ToB!
After killing Ilasera and completing the first pocket plane challenge, Cendrosch rushes through Saradush – doing no sidequests except for getting the spellbook back and buying some potions in the process. I chose the prison as the faster route, killed only the soldiers blocking my way and made my way to Gromnir. With his 2 high level mages, it's time for PfM once again; Defensive stance is added to deal with multiple backstabs and Gromnir's own physical damage output.
Outside of Saradush, protection from undead allows us to take down the demon wraith and the other undead at the temple. I try various item setputs against fire giants (relatively easy to gain full immunity to fire and blunt weapons), but in the end, there's no reason to kill them – they can't see through invisibility. However, some other monsters around here, including fire trolls, can. Cendrosch didn't expect this and gets himself into a bad situation, unable to escape a full surround in a corner – this forced me to use the second RoR charge of this run:
However, Crom Faeyr instantly kills fire trolls, so we are end up victorious despite getting caught off guard. Since flaming skulls and the type of cats around here also can see through invisibility, as do bone fiends, we end up having to kill quite a few foes, though we skip as many battles as possible by using invisibility potions – we have tons of those, so no worry. In the end, we do take down the prince of fire with The Wave +4 before escaping invisibly with the two hearts:
Now, Yaga Shuras himself is found and challenged (we don't bother fighting Nyalee's creatures, as running away is enough). After wounding him, we drink a heroism potion for good luck, he reappears, and we take him down with our very first GWW:
No need for PfM here.
The Oasis and Amkethran were mostly skipped over, though I did help out the smugglers to get my hands on the Boots of the Gargoyle for additional protection – I also bought some more potions. Next, I killed the woodcutter at Sendai's and once again realized that there's no way to get Clangeddin's Rune without a thief. Entering the enclave, most battles were skipped using invisibility. With PfM for the lich and Diaytha plus over 100% crushing damage resistance against Ogremoch, Sendai's servants didn't stay alive for very long. She herself didn't do much of anything either:
I decided to go for Watcher's Keep next, mainly to get my hand on the white dragon scales (for Mel) and Lum's machine, though I also didn't mind going further and taking the gauntlets of extraordinary specialization. I experience my first two instances of losing control over my character in WK2: First in the Room of Air, where a short series of relatively harmless knockouts doesn't seem to offer any saves, and against the snake in the slime room – a stun effect with no saves, or so it appears (or is there a save, but it's almost impossible to make? I don't know):
Luckily, the stun didn't last too long, and I was able to finish off my foe:
I used PfM for most of level 3, fighting hordes of demons without any trouble:
During the game against the Cambion, I got plague and guile (which means: a curse to lower con and a bunch of backstabbing thieves) – my first chance to use those gargoyle boots to avoid a barrage of deadly backstabs:
Of course, I didn't win anything.
Level 4 almost introduced me to the end of this run: Trying not to permanently walk around under PfM, I managed to not know about the maze trap in the southern part of the mind flayer lair. I did see the maze animation in time to use one of my two actual PfM scrolls from my inventory, without the simmy – so I'm down to one scroll. If something like this happens again, my entire strategy for Abazigal is gone.
I actually had to gather Lum's notes, since I couldn't look up the combinations online without internet. I didn't find the one to improve intelligence, but I didn't look very hard, as it really isn't needed at this point.
Level 5 provided me with another almost dangerous surround situation against a bunch of golems, which were dealing heavy damage (I forgot to equip the Gromnir's helm, which would've prevented this from ever happening). Eventually, I had to drink an invisibilty potion to heal up and activate defensive stance:
PfM made killing the seal guardians really simple – and gave me the opportunity to take out the fighter-types first:
With WK done, time to move on to Draconis. Basically, I just stood there and attacked with PfM and defensive stance active, spamming GWWs. I didn't equip any acid protection items because I thought my hp pool could handle a few breath attacks, and so it did – I still had a comfortable amount of hit points left without using any potions:
Against Abazigal, I was actually able to use my simmy (and I made sure to equip items with electricity immunity before summoning it):
Even when turning to dragon form, he didn't bother to get rid of it, so it was basically two Cendroschs against one dragon the entire time. Once again, no healing potions or RoR charges were neccessary for this fight:
After losing my two cleric/ranger solos to Abazigal before, this character was basically designed to finally take him down (I think even my totemic druid got somehwat lucky during his solo victory for this battle). So there's a success.
However, that would remain the only one. I made a huge mistake when fighting Balthazar. The battle seemed easy, and I didn't pay close attention, when suddenly, Cendrosch got stunned with apparently no save – I think a result of the smite-like Tiger Strike ability? (if anyone can correct me on that, it would be appreciated) – He started with around 202 hp. Note that defensive stance isn't active, because I know Balthazar tends to run around and didn't want to lose mobility (this is were at least one Hardiness could've been nice):
Then, at 62 hp, the stun effect finally ended – I had hope; Just one RoR activation and I would be saved:
However, the stun affect was applied AGAIN before even the RoR activation took effect – Cendrosch was defeated:
About two seconds after seeing the death screen, I realized that Balthazar deals crushing damage and equipping Gromnir's helmet could've turned Cendrosch completely immune to his attacks. This is one of the reasons why this was a huge mistake and not at all just bad luck.
Anyway – as it turns out, even if I would've thought of that, Mel would've ended my run, shortly before the end: I played on to see if my plans for her would've worked (boots of the north and white dragon scale to get item-based 100% frost resistance was a big part of it, other than that the usual 80% resistance to all physical damage and spamming GWWs). However, Mel also seems to have some kind of on-hit stun effect – potentially with no save once again? Or with an extremely difficult one (I did have to unequip my RoP +2 to use the white dragon scale, so my save vs spells was "only" at -7)? Still, Mel's first two phases were no trouble, but during the third one, the one where she teleports away, she managed to basically stunlock Cendrosch to death. During another attempt, I also learned once again (something that I knew, but forgot about) that the succubus near the fallen solar has some kind of ridiculous save penalty when it comes to her charm spell (at least -8 I think). I actually had to redo the throne fight 3 times before achieving success, so clearly my strategy simply wasn't good enough. To be honest, despite all the PfM abuse, my dwarven defender (though he did feel more powerful) barely did better than my completely exploit-free cleric/rangers and he ended up doing worse than my totemic druid. Stun is clearly a problem (being some kind of halfling and thus able to equip Mazzy's sword might've been nice).
I might try this again at some point, propably with another class. Good luck to everyone else. By the time you read this, I might've started another run, because no internet means that this update is at least a couple of days old, maybe older. But if the patch didn't come out by now, I'm propably playing another game or working on creating a P&P RPG system.
A few points I noted in reading through:
- at the palace you can charm the nobles, but Belt won't recognize your victory until all the dopplegangers are dead (killing them as nobles doesn't count). If you charm them therefore you will have to wait until the charm wears off and they change (you can rest once to cut down on the waiting).
- the snake in Watcher's Keep does have a no-save stun. If you're aware of that though it's easy to keep out of its reach.
- Balthazar is indeed another no-save stunner. Your favorite from BG1, the Greenstone Amulet, is your friend there if you don't have high crushing resistance.
- the Greenstone Amulet can also potentially help against Mel (though she tends to dispel protections a lot). I normally just stay out of melee range of her and rely on missile attacks (you can also use the Reflection Shield to bounce her own missiles back on her).
Great run - as usual. I have had a DD in mind as well, and have spent ages rolling him/her - I saw your post about which classes hadnt succeded yet...
You have obviously done well (as usual), and I can only add one thing for you to consider: going for a female dwarf next time. The female should have a better chance against the succubus charm - males have to make the save at -10 and female at 0 as I recall. I had rolled up a male DD, but started rerolling a female when it dawned upon me.
Hanslow Tinderbow
Elf Archer - 98 roll
Strength - 18(66)
Dexterity - 19
Constitution - 17
Intelligence - 10
Wisdom - 16
Charisma - 18
Initial Skills:
Longbow**
Longsword*
Scimitar*
2WF**
Favored Enemy - Demonic/Fell
Think I'll just post my thoughts and not make this a narrative, I get too invested if I try to narrate and then get pissed off when my Charname dies...
I just entered Nashkel after cleaning up the areas between the Friendly Arms and Nashkel and am now level 4. My first impression so far is that the archer is awesome against slow creatures but squishy against fast creatures and enemy shooters. Wolves are damned tough at low level! I had to waste 4 healing potions because of those buggers. Bears and spiders are pretty easy though and a source of some really quick xp...
My next impression is that it's easy to get cocky because of the archer's power. I just defeated Neira in the Nashkel Inn by turning her into a pincushion. I was hitting her so easily, however that I decided to go toe-to-toe with her instead of kiting her outside by Rasaad like I initially planned (in case I got held I thought Rasaad or guards would cover for me). In the 3rd round of combat my arrows all missed and the wench successfully cast hold on me. If I hadn't made the save it would've been game over for Hanslow Tinderbow!
Lesson learned without permanent consequences (this time)...
Edit: Thought I'd also share my plans for this run. This will be a long-haul run through the series if I can stay alive. I haven't rolled many 98's and want to make the most of it. No mods except cap-remover. I will try to get through Durlag's Tower and Werewolf and Ice Islands as well as SOD. Traps WILL be a problem but want to give it a college try as a completionist run. I will save before each TOTSC challenge and if I fail will restart at that point and give up that particular challenge (entire challenge - so no just enter Durlag's for a few items and then leave - all or nothing). That way I can test my skills without risking oblivion. SOD will not be treated that way but I may just speed-run through it and avoid many of the tough fights. I really want to take Hanslow through SOA and TOB if I get that far.
FYI the same problem occurs if you put the noblemen to sleep before they change to doppelgangers.