Well, it was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last that long .
We started the session by returning to the basilisk area. Kirian's friends were all blinded before going into sight of Kirian - her fate was sealed after Glitterdust blinded her as well.
Blindness and magic missiles picked off the battle horrors at Durlag's Tower. However, some of the accompanying skeletons managed to get shots into Suer - taking her down to 3 HPs. Deciding that going through the stun trap to the roof would be a bit too risky, we headed down to Nashkel to learn Bhaal CLW - Suer doing well to survive an ambush by kobold archers on the way.
Once healed we returned to Durlag's to pick off a few ghasts along with the basilisks on the roof.
After a few tasks in Beregost we went back south and blinded Greywolf - picking up a 6th level for Suer there. A quick trip through the Nashkel Mine then saw Mulahey sitting in a stinking cloud. He did wake up from that - but by that time he was already low on HPs and he panicked before calling in any reinforcements.
Tranzig failed to survive some magic missiles and we moved on to the Bandit Camp. Arctica was hit by a few arrows on the way to find Taurgosz, but after he was blinded and killed the remaining bandits were soon cleared away from the tent. Neither of us had learnt invisibility, which meant that entering at this stage was a bit of a gamble - but we decided to have a go anyway. Venkt managed to cast his horror and send Arctica running. He'd moved away from Suer though to ensure she was unaffected, but with the enemies all targeting her she failed to get any more spells off. She did though act as a target to soak up both Venkt's acid arrows before she died. That meant Arctica had at least some chance of survival as Venkt's LMDs would not have been enough to kill him by themselves - but once Raemon found a critical with a frosty arrow, it was all over bar the shouting and a second critical in a row just put Arctica out of his misery.
With decent numbers of vampires and ancient vampires, live enemies of roughly equal nominal strength have no real chance. There's still a need to beware the chance of critical hits from stronger enemies, but the use of an ice ball against missile units and weakness / fear / trap / slow against others can manage that. I was able to clear everything in the Creiston Mines without any problems, including giving the Baron in the castle a good kicking.
In order to avoid losing any creatures it's important to keep at as high a strength as possible while moving through the game. Hence I went back to the Freedom Islands to kill all but a few of the stacks there. That got me up to level 14 prior to the final combat in the area with another boss monster - this time a kraken. Rage abilities can't be used against those, but by this time I had got a full frenzy bonus of +6 to attack every time an enemy stack is killed - greatly increasing damage done. Although the size of the summoned stacks increases over time, the kraken was dead well before they were any threat.
After a few tidying up tasks I went to the dwarven areas. Typically I try and pretty much clear those in sequence, but this time I decided to go rapidly through to Ardan's Peaks, where a vampire ring was on sale (adding 20% to HPs of vampires). I was nearly there when I attacked an enemy with a large stack of cannoneers. They have a very damaging special salvo ability and their first attack killed 70% of the ancient vampires. However, the cannoneers took a lot of damage from an ice orb in return and after being slowed couldn't then move away from it in order to shoot again. At that point the battle was essentially won, but care was still needed and I forgot to renew slow on the cannoneers. They then moved away from the ice orb and once more chose to use their salvo on the ancient vampires. Though there were far fewer of them by this time and they did less than half the damage of their opening attack, the ancient vampires hadn't recovered a lot yet and the damage was just enough to kill all those remaining.
Trio Update Yeldon - half-elf cleric/ranger, protagonist (Corey_Russell) Keras - dwarven kensai (Grond0) Denko - human dark moon monk (Gate70)
The Trio is making great progress. We found ourselves in Firkraag's lair. We used Daystar ability to clear out some undead. We had summons a few buffs for Samia's group - they did not last long.
The genies were tanked by a protected from fire Yeldon. We then has some minor enemies and some golems to dispose of.
Finally was time for Conster. With Death Ward on Yeldon, Conster wasn't able to do much and duly died. The daughter of Garren was freed. Time for the red dragon - Yeldon did extensive buffs and summons preparation, then he gave the signal for his allies to attack. Anti-climatically, Denko slew Firkraag with a single blow! (quivering palm).
Grond0 said the Crom Fayer would be useful to him. So the duo went into the planar sphere. This went mostly by the numbers. The most dangerous fights were the demons and Tolgerias. Keras managed to slay Tolgerias before he could get his buffs up. And we had a deva distraction for the demons, which worked out great.
Yeldon has MASSIVE selling to do, so he did that. We also realized we had yet to slay Mencar Pebblecrusher so we did that as well.
In order to forge the Crom Fayer, we needed to venture into the Illithid lair in the sewers. Once again, Chaotic Commands and mass of potions of genius allowed Yeldon to tank these enemies. Denko kept underestimating the opponents though. First he got stunned and drained to ONE INT point - death was certain he survived somehow. Denko did not learn his lesson and tried to stealth to the last group of powerful enemies. He duly got stunned and killed. But the funny part is - Denko had brine potions in his inventory and could have defended himself from the stuns!!! But Yeldon and Keras were able to bring back their friend with a RoR.
We forged some items from Cromwell, and decided we will deal with Bodhi once and for all next session.
Well my King's Bounty game might have come to a grinding halt, but progress was pretty smooth in today's BG hour, where: - reporting back to Trademeet and then clearing the tomb and helping Tiris pushed reputation to 20 - I belatedly realized I'd got a level there.
- back in Athkatla Brennan Riesling was stuck in a stinking cloud to ensure he didn't run away and the others were struck down as well without bothering with area transitions.
- after buying the Blade of Roses to get charisma to 20 I did shopped for a few items. There was still enough cash left though to pay Gaelan Bayle. - Lassal drained me, but the Shield of Harmony provided protection while Azuredge cut him down. - the Guild Contact shrugged off a stinking cloud quickly enough to drink a healing potion, but not the 2 potions of invulnerability he carries. - Azuredge and the Shield of Harmony cut their way through the Graveyard. Down below, picking up Kitthix was enough for another level.
The vampires nearly all died to Azuredge - Tanova wasting her time casting true sight as she sensed an invisible figure approaching.
There was just time left to send Bodhi packing,
but reporting in will have to wait for next time.
Dwarven defender L15, 144 HPs, 326 kills (+535 in BG1)
It's great to see this thread is still active. I got a lot of reading to catch up on.
Same here. When I got back to it, there were 37 unread posts'
Dreadnought the Black after fulfilling most of the quests at Baldur's Gate was accosted by Davenport just South of the FAI. He and his thugs were easily dealt with, web and fireballs being most effective. This led to them investigating the Section HQ in Beregost. This was a slow tedious but safe job until we met some Ashirukurus. They killed Montaron. It's not a good idea taking them on. No possessions or experience to talk of, and they are quite deadly. The party went invisible to leave as we didn't want to talk to Nikita at that time. Montaron was raised and then dropped in favour of Nikita. It turned out to be very wise to raise him as we will probably need him again. As a result of clearing the Section HQ the party became VERY rich and bought numerous scrolls and potions. (Not as many as should have been bought, but hopefully enough.) The Oversight HQ in Baldur's gate was next. Although we killed everyone there, some of the quest was undoable due to the methods that were used. I'll know better next time. The lower part of Durlag's Tower was then completed. The improved battle against the demonknight proved to be tough and only three of the party survived the encounter. What was even worse was the encounter upon leaving the room. Nikita was frozen which meant that we have lost her excellent abilities. It now seems that an excellent decision was made when Montaron was resurrected. Drizzt intimated that extra pertsonel were dropped, so they were left in Beregost. Dreadnought went solo to Ulgoth's Beard where he picked up Thorin before joining Drizzt and departing for the nine hells. In the nine hells sleep was often interrupted by demonknights. This proved to be a blessing as our potions of superior healing mounted up as well as experience.
I've been thinking that with the number of potions that I have been using in Icewind Dale, I should have spent some extra time experience mining and collecting extra potions of superior healing in the nine hells.
I used a LOT of potions against the spider queen and the tanarii.
Still, I have a few left. Just hope that it's enough. Was able to rest uninterupted after that battle, which is just as well.
Bruenor with the help of rings to protect him from fire killed the Dragon Golem Skulls.
Now for the BIG battles. Not that hopeful of survival. If Regis survives, I'll be very surprised.
As the hours spent on this run tick over into double figures, I continued with another smooth session: - told Aran Linvail I wouldn't be leaving for Spellhold just yet (level 16). - did the Sir Sarles quest to get illithium (using Kitthix to web Neb for an easy kill).
Then upgraded the MoD (about time too, as I was drained again during the Tanova ambush). - extorted a ransom from a noblewoman. - repaired reputation by handing in Neb's head and sorting out the Fallen Paladins (meleeing them all with a bit of help from the efreeti and Kitthix).
- finished off the Mae'Var quests (and Mae'Var himself - getting up to level 17 in the process).
- cleared a route through the Temple sewers, picking up a cloak there.
- used a PfU scroll to kill all the liches (Kangaxx perishing to the first love-tap from the iMoD to get me to level 18).
- there were still a few minutes left in the hour, which were spent sorting out inventory and travelling back to the Temple sewers with the Shield of Balduran in hand - I wonder what good that will be .
Dwarven defender L18, 153 HPs, 406 kills (+535 in BG1)
Hour 11 started with an assault on the Unseeing Eye. With unbuffed saving throws of -3 to protect against the lich and Balduran's Shield for the beholders, that was an easy source of XP and it didn't take long to get up to level 19. Gaal and his guards were then enough for a first HLA.
While in the neighbourhood, Mekrath lost out to Gaxx improved haste
and Gaius was forced to waste his true sights so he couldn't see an assault coming.
Next up was an assault on the Planar Prison to get those sweet boots of speed. That didn't take long and produced another level up.
Typically I invade the top floor of Watcher's Keep rather earlier than this and I've been missing the ability to put missiles into a container. However, waiting till now did make the fights there simple. The first lot of statues got me to level 22 before the remaining ones were meleed down.
I will recover the poison head for the FoA from the next floor, but with time up that will have to wait for tomorrow.
Dwarven defender L22, 165 HPs, 589 kills (+535 in BG1)
After exploring the Coalition Camp, we got off to a terrible start at the Bloodbark Grove, with Ceres accidentally walking into a group of enemies and instantly dying to bombardeer beetle acid damage - nothing her stoneskin would protect her against:
I think that I had accidentally equipped her with her melee weapon, and with her boots of speed, she ran in before I was able to notice anything. The plan was certainly for only skeletons to tank, with everyone attacking at range. In any case, Ouranos raised her again, and we cleared the remaining area. The shadows in the cellar were approached with full buffs, and I was able to take down the unsleeping guardian before it was able to use any of its abilities:
Ouranos' high level turn undead secured our victory:
The outside areas of the Dead Man's Pass were cleared with summons and fireballs. The one dangerous encounter is usually the mimic cave. I had prepared buffs, summons, traps and free action or cc for everyone. Some of the traps hit unaffected slimes, but the mimic was also heavily injured:
A very clean victory:
Now, for the outside area of the Underground River, I failed to get access to the ogres (no dialogue option to intervene), but everything else went quite well. Because of the various stealthy scouts spawning at the crusader fort battle, I prepared with some traps and true sight in a defensive position, which solved these problems rather quickly:
A bunch of mages teleported in, but none of them got to use any offensive spells:
I killed the Rashemeni couple and ventured inside. Propably because of low charisma on Cephalus, I had to fight this rather high-level group of spirits, but was able to stay at a safe distance:
Protection from acid scrolls were used against the blind albino wyrmlings - only Kaveh got hit by their breath weapon once:
I killed Strunk via traps and made my way to the druid area:
The druid was also trapped and the drow couple rescued. At Kanaglym, I used by final PfU scroll:
For the necromancers, it was crucial to throw my fireballs before they'd be able to activate their MGoIs:
Now, I only had to get downstairs and make it to Hephernaan. The first group was firebombed, I poisoned water and food supplies, running away and past the guards as soon as Hephernaan talked to me, which cleared up the elevator:
In order to secure a safe retreat, I had traps prepared at around the point where I remembered the mage who would usually dispel our invisibility would spawn - with success:
Back at camp, we buffed our party with protection from fire scrolls and potions while equipping our detonation arrows. With 3 bow users, it was easy to quickly take down the attackers. The enemy mages managed to throw a wand of fire charge at my party, but with everyone being immune to fire, we could only laugh at that:
For the final attack on the camp, I had my dwarves and warmages at the ready, staying in the backline using fireballs and other wand charges - also, true sight because of the thieves:
That went rather well. Now, time to lay siege to Dragonspear Castle!
Well, Regis did not survive, neither did any other party member as I opted to fight AGAINST Drizzt and the others. As a result Dreadnought's allies were reduced to two, albeit quite powerful ones. Jarlaxle a drow fighter Level 17 and Artemis Entreri, a human level 15 thief.
As they left they were transported to the Mountain of the Dead. Jarlaxle was level drained by the vampires and died as a result. I now realise how to avoid it happening again. I'm not yet sure if I'll be able to raise him. I'll see.
Dreadnought and Artemis are now at the Bear Clan Village. Reputation has dropped to 18 However since they have killed Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor, Regis and Cattie Brie, the reputation is surprisingly high.
I am now treading in new territory so whether Dreadnought survives is highly uncertain. Dreadnought took on four Frost Giants and prevailed before returning to the village for healing. After that Dreadnought was careful to only take on one Frost Giant at a time. He successfully returned with the baby.
After returning to the Bear Clan Village and getting the reward they were sent elsewhere with a windwalker scroll. They found a rod of resurrection, sold it, bought it back and raised Jarlaxle.
A big mistake was made. He forgot to put on Lord Foreshadow's ring and therefore wasted a LOT of gold. At least Nib Jansen has a lot more gold to repair his flying ship.
Went to the FAI to pick up Baeloth. Rep now down to 16.
I realised I didn't have any way to kill the Desert Trolls on the second floor of Watchers' Keep - so took a detour to the de'Arnise Hold. There was nothing threatening there and it didn't take long to make my way through and use a single GWW to sort out TorGal.
I took a level earned in the Hold, but rejected the chance to take it as a Stronghold.
Back in Watcher's Keep the Desert Trolls lost out to my new default weapon - Frostreaver. Killing the Guardian of Air was worth another level before the Giant Snake was killed by missiles to avoid the possibility of being stunned.
I left after picking up the poison flail head.
At this level pretty much all the standard encounters are simple and a few minutes at Umar Hills gained me Ilbratha (though I almost never get around to actually using that). A minute or two more and another level ticked up at the temple.
After Azuredging the liches, I waited out a malison from Thaxy before finishing him off. The Shade Lord then fell to the first hit on him - providing yet another level.
After reporting back to the mayor, the last few minutes were spent sorting out inventory and making the Shadow Dragon Armor. I realized while doing that I'd forgotten to pick up Valygar's body, so that will be done at the start of the next session.
Dwarven defender L26, 177 HPs, 740 kills (+535 in BG1)
My plan for the siege was to demolish the opposing forces with detonation arrows while Cephalus would make sure to consume a potion/scroll every round in order to prepare for the duel. If I had time, I'd also apply some potion buffs to the remainder of the group. The first detonation arrow assault worked out quite well:
The second (and final) wave of crusaders was approached. I wanted to stay with my troops to make use of their momentum and go on with more detonation arrows right away - which led to absolute disaster. As we approached the right flank, we encountered two crusader mages, and despite withdrawing right away, both of them used their wand of fire to hit the party from off-screen. The terrible outcome: Ouranos dead, Oedipus at 1 hp, Kaveh at 13 hp, Ceres chunked, gone, no arcane spellcaster for us, and the party down to 4. Cephalus was fine, he had already used a fire resistance potion during his buffing routine in addition to his items (note that Oedipus and Kaveh also have resistance to fire thanks to their rings - propably saved their lives, may even have prevented more chunkings):
I immediately used my first charge of Durlag's Goblet to save Oedipus, and Kaveh started drinking healing potions. Cephalus shot some more detonation arrows into the enemy forces, eventually causing Ashatiel to appear by himself (he had already quite a few buffs going at this time). My plan for the duel was simple: Just keep attacking with dispelling arrows:
Ashatiel was mostly busy trying to re-apply her buffs, which was not a very effective plan. She did try to attack Cephalus two times, but missed (thanks to the invulnerability potion).
We rested up and resurrected Ouranus. With only four party members (and Ceres having been our most powerful pone by far) the chances of this run succeeding have dropped even further. However, I still felt that at least Belhifet and early SoA would be doable. My Belhifet approach is quite safe at this point, since I know all the abilities involved in the entire fight on the various difficulty levels and which items to use to get full immunity to everything except for physical attacks. All it takes with that knowledge and preparation is lots of kiting - so we can't mess that up.
We entered Avernus, applied some buffs such as chaotic commands (from scrolls) plus oils of speed and ran past the first battle, upstairs. The following devil groups were taken down with massive buffs on our side (no reason not to use anything we didn't use for Belhifet, and having lost another party member, we had even more stuff we weren't going to need). On the elevator, I especially tried to time my true sight right before the final battle would start, which worked out rather well. All buffs were applied (or so I thought) and I got Caelar to join me. This is a bit of an exception to my "no new party members" rule, and I didn't add her in my solo runs, but I generally feel like taking her along here is fine - if we would still be at full numbers, she wouldn't even be in the party, and she doesn't really feel like a full party member (it's more like recruiting allies for the battle against Bodhi). We started taking down the various unnamed devils, while Caelar, using an oil of speed, just tried to stay alive after tanking the initial dispel magic:
I soon realized that Caelar (who I've never had in my party before) was immune to fear, so I could give her Durlag's Goblet - she had to drink one of her other potions first (because it's impossible to change out her quickslots otherwise), but after that, she had a powerful healing option at her disposal:
With only four party members, it took a while to get rid of all devils (while we were still busy with that, Belhifet also gated in another group), but eventually, our foe was isolated.
At this point I wondered: How is it that my party is actually taking any damage at all? Our kiting has been on point so far, and we should be immune to everything else:
Upon checking our resistances, I realized that I had forgotten to drink fire protection potions! The green scrolls were in effect, and with everyone having another item with resistance on it, any fire damage would be very low, but no full immunity was established. This was quickly rectified, and now we were in almost no danger provided we wouldn't mess up the kiting. Not that we were actually doing a lot of kiting at this point: We still had Caelar, so why not use her and our remaining goblet charges to have her tank? This didn't make much difference to the outcome of the battle, but it was a fun alternative. Belhifet was only able to gate in one more group of devils and teleport away once (his improved invisibility was foiled by true sight) - nothing too threatening. Both of our clerics had 40 +3 bullets, Kaveh had 40 or 60 +3 arrows and Cephalus had 80 void-tipped arrows. Everyone had full buffs, so you can imagine that the devil didn't stand much of a chance:
Victory!
I'm happy we finished SoD despite huge setbacks. The chances of going all the way seem slim without Ceres - she would've been hugely important in BG2/ToB. However, with careful play, we should be able to make it through early SoA, carried by skeletons and aerial servants. Our ranged damage will be heavily nerfed, so summons are our best hope. Still, the very late stages of the game seem super difficult (though not completely impossible) right now.
The 13th hour didn't prove unlucky as I: - made my way through the Planar Sphere without problems, picking up another couple of levels there.
- the only real potential danger at Windspear Hills was not buffing against Firkraag's wing buffet and breath weapon. However, he didn't get an opportunity to use the latter on me and I picked up another 2 levels during those adventures.
- I forged some more dragon armor before using Tazok's key to go and wipe out some illithid. Alhoon was destroyed by Azuredge before he could buff and the other illithid managed only a single hit on me.
- though there were still a few other bits and pieces not done, I decided the last encounter prior to leaving for Spellhold would be the Guarded Compound. As usual they were no trouble after being dragged downstairs in small groups.
- the last couple of standard minutes were used sorting inventory out. However, I then breached my normal limit of an hour by going to buy the Defender of Easthaven (I forgot that with my last attempt with a dwarven defender and thought I should do it while I remember this time). I also used Vhailor's Helm for the first time to get the berserker - though that's unlikely to see much action.
Dwarven defender L31, 192 HPs, 938 kills (+535 in BG1)
I noted in a recent thread my view that a caster-heavy party should work well in LoB - partly as a result of enemy saving throws in v2.5 being bugged and not as good as they should be. I thought perhaps I should do a fully arcane party to test that out. Some years back I did a no-reload of a party of pure-class mages, but this group is more mixed up - with only 1 pure class, 3 specialist mages, a sorcerer and a dragon disciple.
In Candlekeep Carbos was their first victim, though I wasted lots of spells there - everyone cast at him, but he actually had an automatic fail against spells.
The game engine automatically fails saving throws if the base saving throw is 20+ - and the bug that adds 5 to enemy saves in LoB means that low level creatures will be in that situation (LoB also gives a +5 adjustment to the die roll for saving throws, but that makes no difference to the automatic fail if the base saving is 20+ to start with). This run is in an SCS installation, so Carbos wasn't automatically doomed by being blinded - but the Army managed to avoid his wanderings until their slingshots took effect (the penalty from blindness meaning they didn't quite need criticals to hit).
After shooting Imoen, Xzar and Montaron to get their equipment, the Army moved on to Beregost and shot Algernon down. Landrin's spiders were all blinded as they emerged from their house and, as they don't run around, were easily shot down before they recovered. To the south some ogrillons and hobgoblins allowed a couple of mini-quests to be completed before the Army headed north - though with high HPs and low AC it takes a while for criticals to finish off opponents.
Travelling at safe times they blinded an ogre on the way to the FAI. Killing that is not easy due to its wandering habit, but they eventually managed to do so without resorting to Algernon's Cloak by blinding all 9 of the other enemies they wandered into.
At the FAI Succour, as the one with the most spells, got to put on the Ring of Wizardry.
Heading north again they killed some fishermen and returned a bowl to Tenya before blinding and shooting down the nearby ankheg.
Moving on to Ulgoth's Beard they charmed Dushai and moved her away from the villagers before blinding and shooting her.
Returning south they looked in on the Lake area to see if they would have any luck with Drizzt. Two gnolls were activated as usual and attacked Drizzt while he was out of sight. I don't normally allow autopause, but decided to take the opportunity of doing a bit of work while that fight was going on - and activated pause on enemy sight to ensure there would be no danger if the gnolls came after me once Drizzt was dead. In the event Drizzt was partially triggered quite early on in the fight (that can happen for instance due to a lightning strike) and killed one of the gnolls. The other though battered its way through several hundred HPs without ever breaking its halberd and I thus didn't get any easy XP for killing Drizzt.
To push reputation up to get Bhaal CLW the Army attempted to travel back to Beregost to help out Firebead and Mr Colquetle. However, I didn't check the time before travelling and met a bit of an obstacle - Iluse's additional HPs from his familiar being the only thing that saved him from the dreaded bandits there.
After a visit to the temple the Army sorted out equipment and did their reputation tasks in Beregost. Travelling safely this time they returned to the FAI to help Joia and then charmed a couple of guards to kill Tarnesh.
After returning Landrin's goods and picking up the pantaloons they also charmed Jaheira and pulled her outside to kill her for her invisibility potion - just in case of any more ambush errors.
There were no ambushes while going to find Brage and get a lift to Nashkel and talking to Oublek pushed reputation up to 10 to allow learning CLW.
After doing all that work the Army were still not even up to 2,000 XP each and I decided they deserved to do something easier and more productive. The sirines at Beregost temple looked to be a good target for that and a couple of them were enough for a first level.
A third gave them an early boost towards the next level, though the final one perished to a big critical from a blinded bear.
Dreadnought has completed most of the NSoSC quests without too much difficulty. The Dark Hand Cultists did quite a lot of damage with their arrows of detonation/fireballs (I don't know which. However, whilst they did kill Jarlaxle, I had plenty of gold for resurrections.
Then on to the Iron Throne. The only problem there was that Tenya and Artemis were confused and continued to fight each other after the enemies were wiped out. However, the spells did wear off and the party went onto the roof to kill the last of the enemy. The party then rested and exited the building.
Candlekeep next. There were some parts of quests that I was unable to complete due to doing them in the wrong order. Hopefully next time will be better.
Next time I intend to end up with a drow party: Viconia, Baeloth, Jarlaxle, Vynd. + PC as a drow Champion of Bane. Are there any other drow NPCs available? Yes, I know of the one in BG2 and I could have Drizzt instead of Jarlaxle. I can't have both Drizzt and Jarlaxle though. That makes sense.
We started in SoA by fighting our way through the dungeon and finishing the circus tent quest (no problem with true sight) before using our traps and summons to take down Mencar's group early:
After making it to the slums, I rested and prepared for the Suna Seni ambush via 2*sanctuary, stealth and the sandthief ring, making my party invisible - which allowed us to retreat for a bit, summon and buff up:
That way, a possibly very dangerous fight was turned into a cakewalk:
While travelling around in order to pick up and complete minor quests, the second ambush occured - this time, I was unprepared. I soon realized that I wouldn't be able to stop the wizard from casting lightning bolt, so I decided to burn the protection from lighting scroll from the opening dungeon, which turned out to be a very good idea:
One of the more difficult encounters around the city that I decided to take on pretty soon was the bridge district party - it felt like a good idea because I had the advantage of traps and luring enemies outside:
With Ceres gone, none of my characters can tank in melee combat at all. I have to rely on summons for that, but getting these ready takes time. For enclosed spaces or sudden combat without preparation time, I would need the instant statue summons. The berserker horn was easily obtained, and I ventured into the sewers to buy a fireball potion in order to get the black spider figurine:
Having done most of the easy non-stronghold quests around the city, Ouranos made it to level 11 - new and better skeleton warriors! With these at the ready, I decided to take on the sewer party. I already had chaotic commands and death ward for everyone, and with invisibility potions as a defensive option, I felt fairly confident. The enemy wizard barely survived my initial attacks, getting his protections ready - but Ouranos was able to finish the job with a wand of the heavens charge, as I had noticed that he had no protection against that one:
While some of my summons were defeated during further combat, all of the buffs resulted in my side easily prevailing:
One area in which my statue summons were crucial was the tanner's basement - rune assassins can see through invisibility, and backstab is usually a one-hit-kill, so the only way to survive for my party was to distract these foes with instant summons before they'd decide to focus on a party member:
The final non-stronghold quest on my list was the second part of the slaver questline in the slums, where I used invisibility/sanctuary to start in a corner, allowing the party to call some summons before the majority of enemies could engage:
The second big battle was only a formality:
From there, I travelled to the Umar Hills. After doing the sidequests there, the temple ruins were easy to clear - Ouranus' turn undead was powerful enough to instantly kill shadow fiends, but we were not high level enough to encounter liches. We also had a ton of summons - not only skeletons, aerial servants and statues, but also Cephalus' beastmaster summons - giving us lots of fodder to even take down bone golems with our measly ranged weapons:
Sunstone bullets were very helpful against the Shade Lord:
Cephalus would go on to complete the ranger stronghold quests later on. For now, we tried our hands at the druid stronghold quest. Relatively easy for our party. Skeletons are good against druids, fire arrows are good against trolls - we had both of these, and Cernd took out Faldorn.
So, for now it might seem that SoA was going very well. However, all that was about to change. I really screwed up at Rayic Gethras' house. Things started of fine - Ouranos entered with storm shield, absorbing all of the special mephit attacks he was now immune to. He used sanctuary to explore upstairs, trying to get into a safe position out of sight of the two stone golems to summon aerial servants. However: These golems tend to wander - he was discovered before being able to complete his spell - and to my absolute horror, I discovered that he had no oils of speed or invisibility potions in his inventory. A grave mistake, obviously. He tried to run to the stairs, while Kaveh ran upstairs in order to hand him an invisibility potion. I was extremely lucky that Ouranos only got hit once by the golems before the potion was transferred to him:
After resting, I now tried to lure the golems downstairs into waiting traps and summons. This isn't as easy as it sounds: They tend to spawn in front of however got them downstairs, so it's quite dangerous - in fact, as Ouranos took another golem hit, I was forced to burn a second invisibility potion. Luckily, these aren't nearly as rare in SoA as they are in BG1:
Now, on to Rayic. I wanted to try out a strategy that has been mentioned many times in this thread - triggering the fireball trap in his room purpose with an immune party member multiple times. However... I misremembered which of the two traps in his room was the fireball one. Ouranos, who was protected with storm shield (which grants immunity to several elements, including fire) tried to execute my plan - only to confidentely walk up to the wrong trapped contained, triggering a deadly acid trap with 94 damage - and it just so happens that acid is the one element storm shield is completely useless against. Ouranos not only died, he also got chunked. We are down to three and have lost our best spellcaster:
This was a failure of memory on my part - a really stupid one, to be sure. I shouldn't even use untested strategies in no-reload runs. My back-up plan of luring Rayic downstairs into a bunch of traps should've been plan A. I ended up easily succeeding with that one. The loss or Ouranos is another painful one. I still think our chances are not quite 0% yet, but they're getting closer. Single class divine spellcasters fall off later on, and we still have Oedipus for cleric spells - but still, things will get harder and harder.
The thief questline was completed by entering Mae'Var's guild invisibly and letting summons tank any backstabs:
The Cult of the Eyeless was next on our list - we had the Shield of Balduran for beholders and a PfU scroll for the undead (still no liches):
With the Rift Device, summons and traps ready and waiting, the Unseeing Eye didn't stand much of a chance:
The De'Arnise Keep was easy at this point - even the golems and Tor'Gal couldn't handle our buffed-up summons and magical ammo (some of which we had gotten from the previously cleared WKI (though we didn't touch the statues yet)):
Finally, we took care of Bodhi. Not much to say here - we had chaotic commands, we still had lots of summons, we still did decent damage once buffs were applied. The only critical point was getting Lassal out of the spike room. I had to count on Ilbratha's MI for that one - which, luckily, worked out. No trap hits got through the mirror images. Bodhi was mostly taken down by traps and a few ranged attacks. Now, we have the Windspear Hills, the Planar Sphere and the Planar Prison still to go. Let's see what we can do with our remaining party of three.
Now, on to Rayic. I wanted to try out a strategy that has been mentioned many times in this thread - triggering the fireball trap in his room purpose with an immune party member multiple times. However... I misremembered which of the two traps in his room was the fireball one. Ouranos, who was protected with storm shield (which grants immunity to several elements, including fire) tried to execute my plan - only to confidentely walk up to the wrong trapped contained, triggering a deadly acid trap with 94 damage - and it just so happens that acid is the one element storm shield is completely useless against. Ouranos not only died, he also got chunked.
Enya knew PfP as a starting spell and used that on Succour at the basilisk area. He dragged away one or two basilisks at a time to be blinded and then shot up by the full Army. The amount of time that took meant there was a real danger of blindness running out, but all the separated basilisks were eventually done - with another level each being acquired in the process. The lesser basilisk near Mutamin was charmed in the hope that could be done before Mutamin turned hostile, but that didn't work and the basilisk immediately died to a chromatic orb. With Mutamin now active, he would chase them anywhere they were on the map without having to see them again - making that a dangerous place to visit without invisibility.
The Army therefore left the area and toured round looking for bits and pieces of XP. The best source was charming more sirines at the Lighthouse and leading them away to be beaten up, though there was a near death experience there when I was away from the game and some of the attackers ran out of ammunition - I came back with Dazzler dead and just as Iluse came under attack. After a temple trip the remaining sirines were cleared with the exception of Sil. However, when the Army killed the last of those they were apparently too close to Arkushule and she went hostile (I was aware of that as a potential problem, but thought she was far enough away). A quick run for it and rest led to a successful charm on her and she was then used as distraction to go and blind Sil.
That still left everyone about a thousand XP short of level 4. Touring a few areas, avoiding the more dangerous ambushes, eventually plugged the gap and got everyone to level 4. That allowed the sorcerers to take invisibility and open up new opportunities. The battle horrors at Durlag's Tower provided a decent XP harvest and I spent a while clearing the exterior area. Immediately after doing that though I tried to rest outside rather than going in - and Destiny paid for that when pathfinding didn't allow me to run into the tower after a gnoll ambush triggered.
After another trip to the temple the Army returned to the Tower and cleared it of ghasts - again making use of invisibility as well as blind. Destiny died again in there though when I was trying to lure some ghasts into a position where I could attack them without them running round all over the place and one of them sneaked round by another route while I wasn't paying attention. The Army didn't fancy their chances of surviving the trap leading on to the roof, but did blind Riggilo - he disappeared using a potion though and the Army ran away.
Invisibility allowed easy access to some other encounters - such as going to get Meilum's bracers. It also opened up the Cloud Peak Mountains - I'd avoided those up to then because of the potential for lethal ambushes. However, though there was now the potential to travel safely I normally couldn't be bothered to do that and that led to an encounter with an ogre mage - even though it was blinded Enya was affected by an acid arrow and that was an inevitable death. I tried to kill it, but the long period of wandering round was a bit tiresome and Destiny eventually got a bit too close when it was almost dead and got taken down himself by a magic missile.
After going to the temple they tried travelling back to where they were and ... met another ogre mage. This time they at least had full spell books and could finish the ogre mage off a bit more quickly once its shield had worn off - only Succour dying from the initial acid arrow.
The Valley of the Tombs was the last of the southern areas, but I didn't fancy taking on mustard jellies at the moment, so left Narcillicus for now. However, I tried out the Revenant for size by caging that in 4 invisible characters. Unfortunately it proved to have both better sight range and a longer reach than it should have when blinded and Succour died once more. I didn't have enough damage to kill it purely with magic missiles and it fully regenerated when resting, so I decided to go and use those tactics on the Doomsayer instead - that would have just about been enough for another level.
On the way though I hit a gnoll ambush. That shouldn't be any danger, but I couldn't be bothered to move all the characters individually and that provided an opportunity for a gnoll to get a whack in - and he took full advantage by chunking Enya.
Unlike @Enuhal I don't normally continue when one of a full party is chunked, so the Army will have to start again from Candlekeep.
It's been a rough week for no-reload attempts over here. After my last ignoble run with Ellisar, I rolled another random character:
Glasha; neutral evil female half-orc fighter-cleric. Allowed a party of 6 (Dorn, Tiax, Baeloth, Viconia, and Safana). She made it through the Bandit Camp, the mines, and most of Baldur's Gate. She had a lot of trouble with low reputation... mostly keeping things in check with temple donations. But after she killed a Harper mage near the BG docks, she started attracting serious attention from Flaming Fist bounty hunters. Tired of temples, she chose to answer with violence. Safana wasn't up for it, and abandoned the party. Glasha ended up charging straight up to the top of the Iron Throne tower, recklessly throwing herself into the flunkies without using any retreat options. Most of the party died, but Glasha survived (she was charmed or under rigid thinking after her party died, and should have been killed if the enemy were behaving rationally, so the victory seemed hollow. Also was feeling guilty about Baeloth - under the new SCS NPC leveling behavior I'm using, he got a bunch of unwarranted extra spells to memorize and cast; felt like cheating). Lost enthusiasm and quit.
[Question from that run: does anyone know how an evil character would advance the plot in the first chapter that includes the city of Baldur's Gate? I was staying away from Scar because of the troubles I'd had with the Fist at low reputation... Normally, Eltan gives a quest that leads to the Iron Throne. Anything similar on the evil path?]
[Also for future reference; evil parties can get a lot of dispelling arrows as drops from dead Flaming Fist bounty hunters. Notable if you've eliminated those from stores.]
Next up was Gorch, true neutral male half-orc (changed to half-elf to make legal), fighter-druid, solo. He failed a save against Mutamin's sleep early in the run and got bludgeoned to death.
Currently up: Sylvia, true neutral female half-elf fighter-druid, allowed one companion (right now Imoen, but may switch to others for specific tasks). So far she's survived Mutamin's garden, one ankheg fight (for armor), and a few minor encounters. I'm liking the fact that SCS has added some spells from other Infinity Engine games; it's spicing up the early druid levels. Will give a brief report on her progress (or her death as the case may be) in the next few days.
Edit: Sylvia
And to clarify, all runs are with full (and recent) SCS on hardcore or insane, BG1 NPC, some ease-of-use tweaks, and always a freshly installed item randomizer.
[Question from that run: does anyone know how an evil character would advance the plot in the first chapter that includes the city of Baldur's Gate? I was staying away from Scar because of the troubles I'd had with the Fist at low reputation... Normally, Eltan gives a quest that leads to the Iron Throne. Anything similar on the evil path?]
As far as I'm aware there is no separate evil path for that, i.e. you have to investigate the Iron Throne in order to proceed.
I missed a day due to concentrating on LoB, but this morning saw me back to the rather faster progress offered by this run: - the only thing done in Brynnlaw was chop Perth down before he could talk (level 32).
The first page turned in his book was True Seeing and I left it stuck there. - in Spellhold there was another level for Azuredging Dace. In the second area I rested to trigger the Slayer transformation near the clay golems - I hadn't intended that to lead to attacking them, but it did and the golems were slaughtered within a few seconds.
I got a further level before progressing to judgment. Lonk was stunned by a first use of Power Attack HLA and Jon then found a single GWW too hot to handle.
- in Fish City I picked up the Cloak of Mirroring before killing both the King and Prince.
- in the Underdark some drow and myconids were meleed on the way to the Western Tunnels. With sub-zero saving throws and the Cloak of Mirroring the kuo-toans and drow there were no threat and the Prince's impressive regeneration was not quite impressive enough.
The demon knights died to missile attacks, taking me to level 36.
- with the hour up, the rest of the Underdark will have to wait for tomorrow.
Dwarven defender L36, 207 HPs, 1,167 kills (+535 in BG1)
Addi did very well in BG1, completing pretty much the entire game, and that included the defeat of Sarevok. In SoD a very caster-heavy party was formed, with Baeloth, Glint, Edwin, M'khiin and Corwin. They were very competent throughout SoD thanks to their wands (especially fire), crowd control spells (Web, Slow, Chaos) and summons (Skeletons). However the final battle was a different story altogether. First I made the mistake of letting the cutscene play out. It resulted in Addi's SI:Abjuration running out right before the enemy's opening Dispel Magic hit. All his buffs were gone and he got poisoned by one of the devils. He barely escaped and managed to rebuff while the others were engaing Belhifet and aides. The plan had been to lower Belhifet's magic resistance, but with Glint detecting illusions (100 score), Belhifet somehow timed his Improved Invisibilities so that Addi's, Edwin's, and Baeloth's (2x) castings of Lower Resistance were all wasted. Meanwhile devilish summons kept arriving and only Corwin had the firepower to kill those monsters but she received a lot of aggro too, including a stun / rigid thinking / feeblemind type effect that I wasn't prepared for. I basically gave up and let Addi die. Maybe I would have made it at core difficulty, but at insane I just couldn't see it. So Belhifet - Blackraven 1-1 so far.
Now thinking of a new Charname for the holidays.... Good luck in the meantime for @Enuhal, whose determination I admire, @Grond0, whose Dwarven Defender looks like Throne material, @Wise_Grimwald with a character that might beat BG1, and @Blind_Visionary with a new character.
Gorion drags his ward through the woods, trying to get as far away from Viper as he can. He can't even think of the character's name. Four letters maybe, could start with an S. Whatever. It's not important at this point so long as these two are separated.
In his rage, he blunders straight into Sarevok and fails to escape. The ward, of course, runs through the night into the next morning when Viper finally catches up with the survivor. One thing leads to another and this is bad news for Shoal the Nereid, Neera and a couple of ogrillions on the way to Nashkel.
There are a few more minor skirmishes as we kill some hobgoblins then Zal and Vax before returning Samuel to the Friendly Arm Inn. Viper finds himself falling into an ankheg nest and almost makes it to a treasure cache before his companion's casting of Sleep fails twice in a row. Viper slumps to the ground and a wounded ankheg turns towards the necromancer.
Three wand (missile) charges later, three healing potions have been consumed and a game of hide and seek has the ankheg dead. The necromancer uses their natural strength of 18 to pick up most of Viper's items and heads to a temple. 400gp later Viper is restored and a rest is called for.
Moments after the rest, Viper attacks Zhurlong who retaliates. The necromancer had been trying to heal Viper but instead Zhurlong's attack lands and Viper slumps to the ground. The necromancer unleashes a sling bullet and heads to the temple with another 400gp.
So how did we fare in the Windspear Hills? Well, things didn't start out well - once making it to the main dungeon, our (invisible) trio was looking for a safe place to summon a little bit of help (I wanted to avoid the initial orc ambush). I did find such a place near the troll cook, but during the battle with the nearby hobgoblin group, the hobgoblin mage released a very unexpected lightning bolt which bounced through the room about 5 times (one of the most enduring lightning bolts I've ever seen), killing Oedipus in the process. I wasn't fast enough on my pause key to save him with a potion of absorption. No chunking, but since he's our only cleric, this meant we had to go back to Trademeet to resurrect him:
After that, I was much more careful around the place. The vampires were killed with PfU and the iMoD +2. For the various adamantite golems, I had Dwarven Thrower +3, Firetooth +4 and the Sling of Everard +5 at my disposal:
Making it to Conster was easy enough with the help of our summons. The mage died to the poison damage of our traps:
Skeletons dealt with the various guardians of the tomb, and Samia's group didn't stand much of a chance against summons, traps and ranged weapons. We moved on to the Planar Sphere, mostly using skeleton warriors and an additional wave of summons (the animal summoning III fodder available to Cephalus is actually still decent for most purposes at this stage in the game) to deal with the halflings, until their spellcasters were left with an empty spellbook. Tolgerias refused to fall to a cleric-buffed backstab attempt by Oedipus:
Oedipus was able to leave his line of sight before the mage's first offensive spell would be cast. I sent in the summons and continued to add in more while waiting off screen. Some traps, set as a precaution, helped with Tolgerias' own summons. I still had a bunch of stuff at my disposal as our enemies finally ran out of spells:
While clearing the ice room and the golems was easy enough, the fire room proved to be tricky, because my party got hit with a nasty scorcher ray, and my remaining summons didn't perform very well. I had to burn two fire protection potions and a green scroll to ensure survival (certainly worth it). After Lavok had a little chat with one of my skeletons, the party buffed up once again to go demon hunting:
Now, the Planar Prison remained as our only pre-Spellhold option (discounting lich battles and the like). I first brought back Mekrath's mirror, only to kill the mage after getting the quest exerience:
The opening Planar Prison battle could be deadly for this party. We really can't take any serious fight without a safe position and some opening summons, especially if there are spellcasters and thieves involved. This is why we not only included a few more item buffs than usual, we also started invisibly, immediately running to the north - hoping that there would be a safe place between the initial group and the warden where buffing up and summoning could be possible. I had to be fast to avoid the bounty hunter's true sight and careful not to get sucked down by one of the fleshy eyes here. Oedipus did actually get sucked down, but he was protected by sanctuary. He made it back up, and I did find a safe spot (though any more than 3 people propably can't be placed here - I was extremely close to being in line of sight of both the warden group and the bounty hunter group:
I now had the opening advantage needed for an easy victory:
Rushing further to the east, my skeletons were eventually defeated by a group of yuan-ti mages, but additional summons prevailed:
Traps killed the Master of Thralls, and instead of resting (which propably would've been the best move), I decided to see if I could clear the entire area in one go with even more summons. I ended up sending literally every summon at my disposal (which is a lot, considering Cephalus only has summoning spells in his spellbook), with the berserker warrior being the last one - and indeed, despite me missing this in the combat log, when I took a quick peak at the battleground, the warden was already dead:
I didn't forget to pick up the key this time, so getting out of the prison alive officially makes this my most successful meatgrinder attempt yet.
I made a few purchases in the city before taking the boat to Brynnlaw, were Perth didn't survive Oedipus' second backstabbing attempt:
After entering Spellhold and giving up on a point of wisdom, Cephalus has now cleared the first level without much trouble. Let's see if we can make it to the Underdark!
In a second attempt I had a very clean run up to level 4. However, in trying to track down and finish off Greywolf I suffered a first casualty when a second lot of kobolds joined an existing battle and I didn't take the time to move everyone individually. That probably reflected having been playing too long and within a minute or two after that Iluse himself died. Everyone had been ordered to attack the blinded Greywolf using slings and I didn't realize until fractionally too late that Iluse's order had lapsed due to following Greywolf for too long while he ran around blinded - as a result he simply ran up right next to Greywolf and died just as I realized the problem.
A third run was marred by everyone except Iluse getting killed in a bandit ambush, but otherwise was going well enough with the Army just shy of level 4. I made the mistake though of trying to help Charleston Nib despite knowing the difficulty of moving in tight surroundings. 5 of the 6 diggers were blinded to try and keep them away, but one of the blinded ones still managed to block the exit and it and the sighted one both hit Iluse at the first attempt.
In the first run I was playing sort of fair with the game by taking on an awful lot of low value combats. I had also not learned any new spells for any of the mages, which was significantly nerfing them by the end of the run. Since then I've gone for more high-value encounters and made heavy use of Iluse's pseudo-dragon, both for distracting enemies and direct tanking. One of the oddities of LoB is that familiars are far, far better in combat than when playing on Core - they benefit from the LoB bonuses to attack and defense and most of them get 44 rather than 12 HPs, but they don't take the double damage inflicted on party members.
I've also rerolled several of the characters to make minor changes - in particular ensuring everyone has 18 strength and 19 dexterity to help their sling damage.
I'll give it one more try and see if I can discipline myself to avoid taking chances this time. Progress to date has been pretty straightforward: - went to kill Shoal. - checked to see if there was some easy XP on offer from Drizzt after activating a single gnoll. In the first run there wasn't, the second there was, the third there wasn't. It could therefore be felt I was due a kill this time - and indeed that was the case though it took a long time for a single gnoll to knock Drizzt unconscious .
The cool 12,000 XP provided a first level up. - killed Algernon for his cloak and travelled north to Ulgoth's Beard to get Dushai's ring, getting up to level 3 on the way by returning Tenya's bowl.
- with reputation down to 3, visiting a town could be a problem, so they arranged for reputation boosts from Joia and Brage before making donations at the temple on arrival in Nashkel to ensure Iluse would learn CLW.
An early-morning session saw: - a balor distracted with summons while being cut down.
- an elder orb stunned by power attack to ensure it had no chance to do anything nasty.
I just went invisibly through the rest of that area though to pick up the Greenstone Amulet. - quickly dealt with the illithid, mainly using missiles to protect my limited intelligence. Got up to level 38 there.
- briefly went into the drow city to visit the merchants, but then took the short-cut of killing Adalon.
- after returning invisibly to Athkatla, did some final shopping and forged Crom Faeyr, Gesen, Wave and Silver Sword. - the top layer of the vampire guild has been cleared, getting me to the XP cap in the process.
Next time should see the final confrontation in SoA.
Dwarven defender L40, 219 HPs, 1,264 kills (+535 in BG1)
I wanted something different, and ended up with a Dark Moon Monk. I had played Annick before for a solo LoB playthrough but discontinued that run very early on because her future seemed a bit too grim for me. Rerolled her as I didn't have her char file anymore, and got a 93 after eleven rolls. I allowed myself to min-max for a change since I'm unfamiliar with Monks but I do understand they're considered a very weak class for BG1 and SoD.
The setup is my usual setup (BGQE, BG1NPC Project, UB, RR for Bards, Divine Remix, some aTweaks and Anthology tweaks, and SCS with full prebuffs, all tactical challenges and creature buffs, and most rule/content changes). I may be more detailed in my reporting because as I said, playing with a Monk is unchartered territory to me.
Character record:
Annick is proficient in the use of daggers and darts. I intend her to be a ranged character for much of her early adventuring career. Daggers do good damage thanks to her high strength, while darts can be used for their disabling effects.
Early days
Annick did her chores in Candlekeep, escaped Gorion's killier and Imoen, and set out to explore the Sword Coast on her own. She worked as a mercenary in Beregost. Jobs for respected people like Bjornin the paladin and Firebead Elvenhair made her both richer and more reputable. With her above average movement speed and her high strength and dexterity, she did pretty well with her daggers. Her first two level-ups and the acqusition of a pair of Worn Whispers saw Annick become stealthier. She also learned to handle a melee weapon (short sword / ninja-to).
Stealth allowed her to enter and leave the FAI without being noticed by any people she didn't want to notice her, like the Necromancer by the doorway. Several missions farther afield led Annick to reach level 5: north of the FAI, for farmer Brun (using stealth in the ankheg cave), a frightened widow, and a young priestess (attacking Tenya from stealth), saving a Drow priestess from a Flaming Fist mercenary, protecting Charleston Nib, lifting the curse on Captain Brage, and some tasks around Nashkel.
Building a party
In Nashkel she ran into a fellow Monk by the name of Rasaad. He was spreading the word of Selûne. His openness, the way he just laid his cards on the table, intrigued her. Annick was an agent of Shar, of secrecy and guile. Rasaad learnt little of her but she reckoned she could learn much about "the other side" through Rasaad, and invited him to join her. When Annick ran into the Drow priestess she had helped before, not far from where they had previously met, she decided to have a word with her. Viconia turned out to be a rogue priestess of Shar (Nightcloak of Shar/Thief), who was forced to keep a low profile all the time because of her race. Annick offered her fellow follower of Shar companionship and the dark elf accepted. The trio slew the Necromancer in front of the FAI (Blindness + Command) and invited a fourth member to the party, a half-orc warrior, as they could use a strong arm. He reacted very disimissively initially, but things changed when they ran into him again on the road and saved his life. Eldoth, a Skald who had just joined the company, fireballed some bandit archers, and Vicky cast Confusion (kit ability) and Hold Person on two warriors that were attacking Dorn. The Half-Orc was impressed and offered to lend his blade to Annick's cause. It was Dorn who was responsible for a final addition to the party: a Barbarian named Shar-Teel challenged him to a duel and lost, which made her join the company.
Empowering the party
The party had limited gold and mostly mundane gear, and the companions decided that had to change. When Annick spoke to Viconia of Drizzt Do'Urden, the well-known Drow ranger she had met northwest of Nashkel, Vicky urged her to seek him out. It had been his house that had murdered her family, and while she's had little love for most of her family, the loss of her brother still pained her. Rasaad's evasion skills, Annick's throwing daggers, Viconia's bullets, and Dorn's arrows avenged House DeVir.
(Annick got charmed once, but had moved away from the others before the spell hit her.) Somehow word of the slaughter of Drizzt spread, and it did the party's reputation no good. They ended up selling a ring of wizardry at the FAI and donating several tithes to the Temple of Garl Glittergold to somewhat restore their reputation.
Notable exploits that followed were the defeat of Greywolf (Confusion, Blindness, Hold Person), the slaying of Arghain, the rescue of Arabella, the looting of Black Alaric's cave (by Sanctuaried Viconia), the assassination of Kryll and her undead aides, and the dispatchment with brute force of Sendai, Vax, Zal, Krumm and Caldo, Ingot, and Gnarl and Hairtooth. As suggested first by I think @Tresset, Rasaad donned Relair's Mistake, and wolf form does make him a better warrior, with higher strength and dexterity, and more APR. What makes him even more powerful is equipping a weapon in the off-hand while in wolf form. It grants anther attack for 7/2 APR, and there is no penalty in either hand for wielding an off-hand weapon. This makes some sense as I think wolves should be pretty much completely ambidextrous. Realistically though, only a small off-hand weapon sounds believable to me. Think the dagger of venom attached to one paw, much like fighting roosters have blades attached to their claws. Rasaad however shamelessly equips Twinkle in the off-hand (he's proficient in scimitars after all).
The party have just defeated Bassilus, with some difficulty. Viconia and Annick failed to confuse and charm their foe, respectively, so he managed to summon an aerial servant. The companions ran straight into three dread wolves and were busy fighting those when Bassilus arrived. Annick Blinded him while he was casting probably a Hold Person. Shar-Teel enraged and Rasaad transformed, and they closed in on him. The others, save constantly singing Eldoth, attacked with ranged weapons. It was enough to secure victory, away from the aerial servant.
They cleared the remainder of the area, i.e. some ghasts, Zargal & Co, and Melicamp's wolf, and saw Thalantyr successfully retransform Melicamp. With a favorble repuatation and with the bounty on Bassilus in addition to previous savings, they've gone shopping: Army Scythe for Dorn, Deep Red Ioun Stone for Rasaad (for 18 STR and 18 DEX wolf form), Shadow Armor for Vicky, Fragment of Enlightenment Ioun Stone and Buckley's buckler for Eldoth, and the Claw of Kazgaroth and a Cloak of Displacement for Annick.
Still playing safely the Army went to Mutamin's garden and picked off all the separated basilisks. Korax joined in the fun by paralyzing Mutamin and the death of his pet basilisks provided everyone with a 4th level.
Kirian's friends were all charmed before she was blinded. She saved against charm initially, but after a rest another attempt from invisibility worked and she was duly finished off.
With invisible travel now possible, the Army went to the Cloud Peaks. Their first victim was Greywolf, who was put in an invisible cage before suffering the indignity of being pummeled to death with non-proficient staves.
There were no ambushes when taking Samuel to the FAI and they returned south to do more reputation tasks, pushing that up to 20. They also recovered the charisma tome from the Gnoll Stronghold - using invisibility to avoid various trash fights there.
With prices now looking reasonable, Iluse bought 150 +1 bullets and used those to attack golems in an invisible cage at High Hedge. Dazzler supported with the +1 staff from Silke (who was charmed and whittle down by spiders), though that would have been very slow going without the bullets.
Enya, who has a base 18 intelligence, got to learn some spells there and Iluse boosted his intelligence with some genius potions from the FAI to give himself a decent selection.
With 4 of the party now able to cast invisibility, movement could be made safe much more easily. Iluse had also learnt web and that allowed ankhegs to be tackled without much risk,
so that was the next destination. All went smoothly in the nest there until the final ankheg. On rare occasions it's possible in the game for line of sight to be asynchronous - so an enemy can see you without you seeing them for instance. That happened here and Succour's chances of survival when an acid blob suddenly appeared in front of him seemed slim - but he lucked out.
However, a lack of concentration proved costly when trying to clear the ankhegs in the main area. One of those chose to try and attack Enya in melee rather than range and I didn't notice for a fraction of a second that it had moved far enough towards the others to come into sight of Dazzler as a result. It took advantage of that slight delay by immediately switching back to range attack and sending a fatal blob of spit.
Not content with that it chased the others and was able to get a further attack in, just before Succour went invisible, to claim another victim.
I made it to the temple without further incident and raised the dead with some of the money earned from selling ankheg shells.
After finishing off the last few ankhegs I went in search of some more treasure at the Lighthouse area. Using invisibility, Dazzler could sneak up on sirines and charm them and that soon dealt with those. The first golem in the cave was caged and laboriously struck down, but trying that with the second found another one demonstrating a reach significantly greater than it should have been capable of.
Coming back from the temple they came across a couple of dread wolves - and the first of those provided the opportunity for everyone to level up. They then had another go at the golem that killed Dazzler - and this time successfully beat it to death after 4 hours of game time. The other golem was treated the same way, though this time it took an impressive 10 hours of game time (I should really have bought the +3 staff before that ).
The extra level had greatly increased the amount of spell damage the party could do - 2 mages with 3rd level spells, the 2 sorcerers had both taken Acid Arrow and everyone was doing a lot more damage with magic missiles. They tested that out at Durlag's Tower and found they had more than enough damage to kill battle horrors without resting. However, I wasn't paying full attention when working on the second one of those and used the invisible blocking character to attack - with predictable consequences. After another temple visit the rest of the exterior was safely cleared.
I suspect my concentration was still wavering from playing for too long though as, while attacking some ghasts inside the tower, I seemed to lose sight of the familiar for a moment - until it reappeared trapped in the jaws of a ghast.
There were 2 of those attacking the familiar and Iluse tried to draw away the sighted one, while Succour went to cast invisibility on the familiar. He would have been in time to save it - except that the ghast attacking Iluse switched targets to Succour at the last second and one-shotted him.
There was no one else in position to use invisibility, so the pseudo-dragon's number was up.
In LoB the death of the familiar not only robs you of the previous bonus, but inflicts 88 magic damage which can't be blocked by any magic abilities - and even a ToB mage is going to struggle to survive that, let alone one in BGEE .
The session started by beating up Bodhi to get the Rhynn Lanthorn
and moments later I was in Suldanesselar. I avoided quite a lot of the combats there using invisibility, but did slug it out to pick up another dragon scalp.
The Avatar then cleared the area and I moved on to the Tree. The only danger there is getting too close to Jon, but summons occupied him and True Seeing exposed him before he felt the force of a dwarven throwing hammer.
In hell I went the evil route and sacrificed a companion and doubled-down on that to get Blackrazor and rage at Sarevok. In the final battle I used the throwing hammer again to kill the demons and then triggered True Seeing to get a shot at the Slayer. PfMW made me wait a few rounds, but then the end came swiftly.
The game had another trick to play though as it froze during the cutscene and I had to do the final fight again. With that finally out of the way I could move on to ToB, where a single GWW was too much for Ilasera. The first pocket plane challenge wasn't much harder
and I went on to Saradush to open up Lazarus' selection to buy the spells needed to upgrade the +2 cloak.
Some vampires invited me for a tryst, but were ignored as I went to find Gromnir's palace. The hour ticked over as I beat up the mage on the middle floor,
so Gromnir will have to wait until tomorrow.
Dwarven defender L40, 234 HPs, 1,329 kills (+535 in BG1)
Dreadnought's planned return to Candlekeep hasn't occurred due to the NSoSC mod kicking in.
Having completed the Drizzt Saga the battles were not too much of a problem though NPC deaths did occur. Baeloth died the most often whilst Tenya died once. She and Dreadnought both got level drained in the NSoSC area of Firewine Ruins. If I play that mod again I'll know to have a cleric with spells to remedy that. I wasn't expecting vamypes in BG1.
I am left with a problem. There is an area I cannot access and I think that it is important to get the tome back to access Candlekeep.
Comments
Arctica (elf fighter/mage, Grond0); Suer (elf sorcerer, Gate70)
Previous update:
Well, it was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last that long
We started the session by returning to the basilisk area. Kirian's friends were all blinded before going into sight of Kirian - her fate was sealed after Glitterdust blinded her as well.
Blindness and magic missiles picked off the battle horrors at Durlag's Tower. However, some of the accompanying skeletons managed to get shots into Suer - taking her down to 3 HPs. Deciding that going through the stun trap to the roof would be a bit too risky, we headed down to Nashkel to learn Bhaal CLW - Suer doing well to survive an ambush by kobold archers on the way.
After a few tasks in Beregost we went back south and blinded Greywolf - picking up a 6th level for Suer there. A quick trip through the Nashkel Mine then saw Mulahey sitting in a stinking cloud. He did wake up from that - but by that time he was already low on HPs and he panicked before calling in any reinforcements.
Tranzig failed to survive some magic missiles and we moved on to the Bandit Camp. Arctica was hit by a few arrows on the way to find Taurgosz, but after he was blinded and killed the remaining bandits were soon cleared away from the tent. Neither of us had learnt invisibility, which meant that entering at this stage was a bit of a gamble - but we decided to have a go anyway. Venkt managed to cast his horror and send Arctica running. He'd moved away from Suer though to ensure she was unaffected, but with the enemies all targeting her she failed to get any more spells off. She did though act as a target to soak up both Venkt's acid arrows before she died. That meant Arctica had at least some chance of survival as Venkt's LMDs would not have been enough to kill him by themselves - but once Raemon found a critical with a frosty arrow, it was all over bar the shouting and a second critical in a row just put Arctica out of his misery.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1001507/#Comment_1001507
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1001516/#Comment_1001516
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1001649/#Comment_1001649
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1002257/#Comment_1002257
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1002376/#Comment_1002376
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1002631/#Comment_1002631
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1002724/#Comment_1002724
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034213/#Comment_1034213
With decent numbers of vampires and ancient vampires, live enemies of roughly equal nominal strength have no real chance. There's still a need to beware the chance of critical hits from stronger enemies, but the use of an ice ball against missile units and weakness / fear / trap / slow against others can manage that. I was able to clear everything in the Creiston Mines without any problems, including giving the Baron in the castle a good kicking.
In order to avoid losing any creatures it's important to keep at as high a strength as possible while moving through the game. Hence I went back to the Freedom Islands to kill all but a few of the stacks there. That got me up to level 14 prior to the final combat in the area with another boss monster - this time a kraken. Rage abilities can't be used against those, but by this time I had got a full frenzy bonus of +6 to attack every time an enemy stack is killed - greatly increasing damage done. Although the size of the summoned stacks increases over time, the kraken was dead well before they were any threat.
After a few tidying up tasks I went to the dwarven areas. Typically I try and pretty much clear those in sequence, but this time I decided to go rapidly through to Ardan's Peaks, where a vampire ring was on sale (adding 20% to HPs of vampires). I was nearly there when I attacked an enemy with a large stack of cannoneers. They have a very damaging special salvo ability and their first attack killed 70% of the ancient vampires. However, the cannoneers took a lot of damage from an ice orb in return and after being slowed couldn't then move away from it in order to shoot again. At that point the battle was essentially won, but care was still needed and I forgot to renew slow on the cannoneers. They then moved away from the ice orb and once more chose to use their salvo on the ancient vampires. Though there were far fewer of them by this time and they did less than half the damage of their opening attack, the ancient vampires hadn't recovered a lot yet and the damage was just enough to kill all those remaining.
Yeldon - half-elf cleric/ranger, protagonist (Corey_Russell)
Keras - dwarven kensai (Grond0)
Denko - human dark moon monk (Gate70)
The Trio is making great progress. We found ourselves in Firkraag's lair. We used Daystar ability to clear out some undead. We had summons a few buffs for Samia's group - they did not last long.
The genies were tanked by a protected from fire Yeldon. We then has some minor enemies and some golems to dispose of.
Finally was time for Conster. With Death Ward on Yeldon, Conster wasn't able to do much and duly died. The daughter of Garren was freed. Time for the red dragon - Yeldon did extensive buffs and summons preparation, then he gave the signal for his allies to attack. Anti-climatically, Denko slew Firkraag with a single blow! (quivering palm).
Grond0 said the Crom Fayer would be useful to him. So the duo went into the planar sphere. This went mostly by the numbers. The most dangerous fights were the demons and Tolgerias. Keras managed to slay Tolgerias before he could get his buffs up. And we had a deva distraction for the demons, which worked out great.
Yeldon has MASSIVE selling to do, so he did that. We also realized we had yet to slay Mencar Pebblecrusher so we did that as well.
In order to forge the Crom Fayer, we needed to venture into the Illithid lair in the sewers. Once again, Chaotic Commands and mass of potions of genius allowed Yeldon to tank these enemies. Denko kept underestimating the opponents though. First he got stunned and drained to ONE INT point -
death was certainhe survived somehow. Denko did not learn his lesson and tried to stealth to the last group of powerful enemies. He duly got stunned and killed. But the funny part is - Denko had brine potions in his inventory and could have defended himself from the stuns!!! But Yeldon and Keras were able to bring back their friend with a RoR.We forged some items from Cromwell, and decided we will deal with Bodhi once and for all next session.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
Well my King's Bounty game might have come to a grinding halt, but progress was pretty smooth in today's BG hour, where:
- reporting back to Trademeet and then clearing the tomb and helping Tiris pushed reputation to 20 - I belatedly realized I'd got a level there.
- Lassal drained me, but the Shield of Harmony provided protection while Azuredge cut him down.
- the Guild Contact shrugged off a stinking cloud quickly enough to drink a healing potion, but not the 2 potions of invulnerability he carries.
- Azuredge and the Shield of Harmony cut their way through the Graveyard. Down below, picking up Kitthix was enough for another level.
Dwarven defender L15, 144 HPs, 326 kills (+535 in BG1)
Same here. When I got back to it, there were 37 unread posts'
Dreadnought the Black after fulfilling most of the quests at Baldur's Gate was accosted by Davenport just South of the FAI. He and his thugs were easily dealt with, web and fireballs being most effective. This led to them investigating the Section HQ in Beregost. This was a slow tedious but safe job until we met some Ashirukurus. They killed Montaron. It's not a good idea taking them on. No possessions or experience to talk of, and they are quite deadly.The party went invisible to leave as we didn't want to talk to Nikita at that time. Montaron was raised and then dropped in favour of Nikita. It turned out to be very wise to raise him as we will probably need him again.
As a result of clearing the Section HQ the party became VERY rich and bought numerous scrolls and potions. (Not as many as should have been bought, but hopefully enough.)
The Oversight HQ in Baldur's gate was next. Although we killed everyone there, some of the quest was undoable due to the methods that were used. I'll know better next time.
The lower part of Durlag's Tower was then completed. The improved battle against the demonknight proved to be tough and only three of the party survived the encounter.
What was even worse was the encounter upon leaving the room.
Nikita was frozen which meant that we have lost her excellent abilities. It now seems that an excellent decision was made when Montaron was resurrected.
Drizzt intimated that extra pertsonel were dropped, so they were left in Beregost.
Dreadnought went solo to Ulgoth's Beard where he picked up Thorin before joining Drizzt and departing for the nine hells.
In the nine hells sleep was often interrupted by demonknights. This proved to be a blessing as our potions of superior healing mounted up as well as experience.
I've been thinking that with the number of potions that I have been using in Icewind Dale, I should have spent some extra time experience mining and collecting extra potions of superior healing in the nine hells.
I used a LOT of potions against the spider queen and the tanarii.
Still, I have a few left. Just hope that it's enough. Was able to rest uninterupted after that battle, which is just as well.
Bruenor with the help of rings to protect him from fire killed the Dragon Golem Skulls.
Now for the BIG battles. Not that hopeful of survival. If Regis survives, I'll be very surprised.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
As the hours spent on this run tick over into double figures, I continued with another smooth session:
- told Aran Linvail I wouldn't be leaving for Spellhold just yet (level 16).
- did the Sir Sarles quest to get illithium (using Kitthix to web Neb for an easy kill).
- extorted a ransom from a noblewoman.
- repaired reputation by handing in Neb's head and sorting out the Fallen Paladins (meleeing them all with a bit of help from the efreeti and Kitthix).
Dwarven defender L18, 153 HPs, 406 kills (+535 in BG1)
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
Hour 11 started with an assault on the Unseeing Eye. With unbuffed saving throws of -3 to protect against the lich and Balduran's Shield for the beholders, that was an easy source of XP and it didn't take long to get up to level 19. Gaal and his guards were then enough for a first HLA.
While in the neighbourhood, Mekrath lost out to Gaxx improved haste
Next up was an assault on the Planar Prison to get those sweet boots of speed. That didn't take long and produced another level up.
Typically I invade the top floor of Watcher's Keep rather earlier than this and I've been missing the ability to put missiles into a container. However, waiting till now did make the fights there simple. The first lot of statues got me to level 22 before the remaining ones were meleed down.
Dwarven defender L22, 165 HPs, 589 kills (+535 in BG1)
Previous updates:
Update 1: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1028542/#Comment_1028542
Update 2: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1029429/#Comment_1029429
Update 3: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1030921/#Comment_1030921
Update 4: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031740/#Comment_1031740
Update 5: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031786/#Comment_1031786
Update 6: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033031/#Comment_1033031
Update 7: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033340/#Comment_1033340
After exploring the Coalition Camp, we got off to a terrible start at the Bloodbark Grove, with Ceres accidentally walking into a group of enemies and instantly dying to bombardeer beetle acid damage - nothing her stoneskin would protect her against:
I think that I had accidentally equipped her with her melee weapon, and with her boots of speed, she ran in before I was able to notice anything. The plan was certainly for only skeletons to tank, with everyone attacking at range. In any case, Ouranos raised her again, and we cleared the remaining area. The shadows in the cellar were approached with full buffs, and I was able to take down the unsleeping guardian before it was able to use any of its abilities:
Ouranos' high level turn undead secured our victory:
The outside areas of the Dead Man's Pass were cleared with summons and fireballs. The one dangerous encounter is usually the mimic cave. I had prepared buffs, summons, traps and free action or cc for everyone. Some of the traps hit unaffected slimes, but the mimic was also heavily injured:
A very clean victory:
Now, for the outside area of the Underground River, I failed to get access to the ogres (no dialogue option to intervene), but everything else went quite well. Because of the various stealthy scouts spawning at the crusader fort battle, I prepared with some traps and true sight in a defensive position, which solved these problems rather quickly:
A bunch of mages teleported in, but none of them got to use any offensive spells:
I killed the Rashemeni couple and ventured inside. Propably because of low charisma on Cephalus, I had to fight this rather high-level group of spirits, but was able to stay at a safe distance:
Protection from acid scrolls were used against the blind albino wyrmlings - only Kaveh got hit by their breath weapon once:
I killed Strunk via traps and made my way to the druid area:
The druid was also trapped and the drow couple rescued. At Kanaglym, I used by final PfU scroll:
For the necromancers, it was crucial to throw my fireballs before they'd be able to activate their MGoIs:
Now, I only had to get downstairs and make it to Hephernaan. The first group was firebombed, I poisoned water and food supplies, running away and past the guards as soon as Hephernaan talked to me, which cleared up the elevator:
In order to secure a safe retreat, I had traps prepared at around the point where I remembered the mage who would usually dispel our invisibility would spawn - with success:
Back at camp, we buffed our party with protection from fire scrolls and potions while equipping our detonation arrows. With 3 bow users, it was easy to quickly take down the attackers. The enemy mages managed to throw a wand of fire charge at my party, but with everyone being immune to fire, we could only laugh at that:
For the final attack on the camp, I had my dwarves and warmages at the ready, staying in the backline using fireballs and other wand charges - also, true sight because of the thieves:
That went rather well. Now, time to lay siege to Dragonspear Castle!
As they left they were transported to the Mountain of the Dead. Jarlaxle was level drained by the vampires and died as a result. I now realise how to avoid it happening again. I'm not yet sure if I'll be able to raise him. I'll see.
Dreadnought and Artemis are now at the Bear Clan Village. Reputation has dropped to 18
I am now treading in new territory so whether Dreadnought survives is highly uncertain. Dreadnought took on four Frost Giants and prevailed before returning to the village for healing. After that Dreadnought was careful to only take on one Frost Giant at a time. He successfully returned with the baby.
After returning to the Bear Clan Village and getting the reward they were sent elsewhere with a windwalker scroll. They found a rod of resurrection, sold it, bought it back and raised Jarlaxle.
A big mistake was made. He forgot to put on Lord Foreshadow's ring and therefore wasted a LOT of gold.
At least Nib Jansen has a lot more gold to repair his flying ship.
Went to the FAI to pick up Baeloth. Rep now down to 16.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034865/#Comment_1034865
I realised I didn't have any way to kill the Desert Trolls on the second floor of Watchers' Keep - so took a detour to the de'Arnise Hold. There was nothing threatening there and it didn't take long to make my way through and use a single GWW to sort out TorGal.
Back in Watcher's Keep the Desert Trolls lost out to my new default weapon - Frostreaver. Killing the Guardian of Air was worth another level before the Giant Snake was killed by missiles to avoid the possibility of being stunned.
At this level pretty much all the standard encounters are simple and a few minutes at Umar Hills gained me Ilbratha (though I almost never get around to actually using that). A minute or two more and another level ticked up at the temple.
After reporting back to the mayor, the last few minutes were spent sorting out inventory and making the Shadow Dragon Armor. I realized while doing that I'd forgotten to pick up Valygar's body, so that will be done at the start of the next session.
Dwarven defender L26, 177 HPs, 740 kills (+535 in BG1)
Previous updates:
Update 1: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1028542/#Comment_1028542
Update 2: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1029429/#Comment_1029429
Update 3: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1030921/#Comment_1030921
Update 4: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031740/#Comment_1031740
Update 5: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031786/#Comment_1031786
Update 6: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033031/#Comment_1033031
Update 7: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033340/#Comment_1033340
Update 8: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034874/#Comment_1034874
My plan for the siege was to demolish the opposing forces with detonation arrows while Cephalus would make sure to consume a potion/scroll every round in order to prepare for the duel. If I had time, I'd also apply some potion buffs to the remainder of the group. The first detonation arrow assault worked out quite well:
The second (and final) wave of crusaders was approached. I wanted to stay with my troops to make use of their momentum and go on with more detonation arrows right away - which led to absolute disaster. As we approached the right flank, we encountered two crusader mages, and despite withdrawing right away, both of them used their wand of fire to hit the party from off-screen. The terrible outcome: Ouranos dead, Oedipus at 1 hp, Kaveh at 13 hp, Ceres chunked, gone, no arcane spellcaster for us, and the party down to 4. Cephalus was fine, he had already used a fire resistance potion during his buffing routine in addition to his items (note that Oedipus and Kaveh also have resistance to fire thanks to their rings - propably saved their lives, may even have prevented more chunkings):
I immediately used my first charge of Durlag's Goblet to save Oedipus, and Kaveh started drinking healing potions. Cephalus shot some more detonation arrows into the enemy forces, eventually causing Ashatiel to appear by himself (he had already quite a few buffs going at this time). My plan for the duel was simple: Just keep attacking with dispelling arrows:
Ashatiel was mostly busy trying to re-apply her buffs, which was not a very effective plan. She did try to attack Cephalus two times, but missed (thanks to the invulnerability potion).
We rested up and resurrected Ouranus. With only four party members (and Ceres having been our most powerful pone by far) the chances of this run succeeding have dropped even further. However, I still felt that at least Belhifet and early SoA would be doable. My Belhifet approach is quite safe at this point, since I know all the abilities involved in the entire fight on the various difficulty levels and which items to use to get full immunity to everything except for physical attacks. All it takes with that knowledge and preparation is lots of kiting - so we can't mess that up.
We entered Avernus, applied some buffs such as chaotic commands (from scrolls) plus oils of speed and ran past the first battle, upstairs. The following devil groups were taken down with massive buffs on our side (no reason not to use anything we didn't use for Belhifet, and having lost another party member, we had even more stuff we weren't going to need). On the elevator, I especially tried to time my true sight right before the final battle would start, which worked out rather well. All buffs were applied (or so I thought) and I got Caelar to join me. This is a bit of an exception to my "no new party members" rule, and I didn't add her in my solo runs, but I generally feel like taking her along here is fine - if we would still be at full numbers, she wouldn't even be in the party, and she doesn't really feel like a full party member (it's more like recruiting allies for the battle against Bodhi). We started taking down the various unnamed devils, while Caelar, using an oil of speed, just tried to stay alive after tanking the initial dispel magic:
I soon realized that Caelar (who I've never had in my party before) was immune to fear, so I could give her Durlag's Goblet - she had to drink one of her other potions first (because it's impossible to change out her quickslots otherwise), but after that, she had a powerful healing option at her disposal:
With only four party members, it took a while to get rid of all devils (while we were still busy with that, Belhifet also gated in another group), but eventually, our foe was isolated.
At this point I wondered: How is it that my party is actually taking any damage at all? Our kiting has been on point so far, and we should be immune to everything else:
Upon checking our resistances, I realized that I had forgotten to drink fire protection potions! The green scrolls were in effect, and with everyone having another item with resistance on it, any fire damage would be very low, but no full immunity was established. This was quickly rectified, and now we were in almost no danger provided we wouldn't mess up the kiting. Not that we were actually doing a lot of kiting at this point: We still had Caelar, so why not use her and our remaining goblet charges to have her tank? This didn't make much difference to the outcome of the battle, but it was a fun alternative. Belhifet was only able to gate in one more group of devils and teleport away once (his improved invisibility was foiled by true sight) - nothing too threatening. Both of our clerics had 40 +3 bullets, Kaveh had 40 or 60 +3 arrows and Cephalus had 80 void-tipped arrows. Everyone had full buffs, so you can imagine that the devil didn't stand much of a chance:
Victory!
I'm happy we finished SoD despite huge setbacks. The chances of going all the way seem slim without Ceres - she would've been hugely important in BG2/ToB. However, with careful play, we should be able to make it through early SoA, carried by skeletons and aerial servants. Our ranged damage will be heavily nerfed, so summons are our best hope. Still, the very late stages of the game seem super difficult (though not completely impossible) right now.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034865/#Comment_1034865
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035101/#Comment_1035101
The 13th hour didn't prove unlucky as I:
- made my way through the Planar Sphere without problems, picking up another couple of levels there.
Dwarven defender L31, 192 HPs, 938 kills (+535 in BG1)
I noted in a recent thread my view that a caster-heavy party should work well in LoB - partly as a result of enemy saving throws in v2.5 being bugged and not as good as they should be. I thought perhaps I should do a fully arcane party to test that out. Some years back I did a no-reload of a party of pure-class mages, but this group is more mixed up - with only 1 pure class, 3 specialist mages, a sorcerer and a dragon disciple.
In Candlekeep Carbos was their first victim, though I wasted lots of spells there - everyone cast at him, but he actually had an automatic fail against spells.
After shooting Imoen, Xzar and Montaron to get their equipment, the Army moved on to Beregost and shot Algernon down. Landrin's spiders were all blinded as they emerged from their house and, as they don't run around, were easily shot down before they recovered. To the south some ogrillons and hobgoblins allowed a couple of mini-quests to be completed before the Army headed north - though with high HPs and low AC it takes a while for criticals to finish off opponents.
Travelling at safe times they blinded an ogre on the way to the FAI. Killing that is not easy due to its wandering habit, but they eventually managed to do so without resorting to Algernon's Cloak by blinding all 9 of the other enemies they wandered into.
Heading north again they killed some fishermen and returned a bowl to Tenya before blinding and shooting down the nearby ankheg.
Returning south they looked in on the Lake area to see if they would have any luck with Drizzt. Two gnolls were activated as usual and attacked Drizzt while he was out of sight. I don't normally allow autopause, but decided to take the opportunity of doing a bit of work while that fight was going on - and activated pause on enemy sight to ensure there would be no danger if the gnolls came after me once Drizzt was dead. In the event Drizzt was partially triggered quite early on in the fight (that can happen for instance due to a lightning strike) and killed one of the gnolls. The other though battered its way through several hundred HPs without ever breaking its halberd and I thus didn't get any easy XP for killing Drizzt.
To push reputation up to get Bhaal CLW the Army attempted to travel back to Beregost to help out Firebead and Mr Colquetle. However, I didn't check the time before travelling and met a bit of an obstacle - Iluse's additional HPs from his familiar being the only thing that saved him from the dreaded bandits there.
After a visit to the temple the Army sorted out equipment and did their reputation tasks in Beregost. Travelling safely this time they returned to the FAI to help Joia and then charmed a couple of guards to kill Tarnesh.
There were no ambushes while going to find Brage and get a lift to Nashkel and talking to Oublek pushed reputation up to 10 to allow learning CLW.
After doing all that work the Army were still not even up to 2,000 XP each and I decided they deserved to do something easier and more productive. The sirines at Beregost temple looked to be a good target for that and a couple of them were enough for a first level.
Dazzler (Dragon Disciple) - L2, 16 HPs, 9 kills, 1 death
Enya (Enchanter) - L2, 11 HPs, 5 kills, 1 death
Mazy (Pure-class) - L2, 9 HPs, 7 kills, 0 deaths
Iluse (Illusionist - PC) - L2, 32 HPs (incl. 22 from familiar), 13 kills
Succour (Sorcerer) - L2, 10 HPs, 13 kills, 1 death
Destiny (Diviner) - L2, 10 HPs, 5 kills, 1 death
Then on to the Iron Throne. The only problem there was that Tenya and Artemis were confused and continued to fight each other after the enemies were wiped out. However, the spells did wear off and the party went onto the roof to kill the last of the enemy. The party then rested and exited the building.
Candlekeep next. There were some parts of quests that I was unable to complete due to doing them in the wrong order. Hopefully next time will be better.
Next time I intend to end up with a drow party: Viconia, Baeloth, Jarlaxle, Vynd. + PC as a drow Champion of Bane. Are there any other drow NPCs available? Yes, I know of the one in BG2 and I could have Drizzt instead of Jarlaxle. I can't have both Drizzt and Jarlaxle though. That makes sense.
Previous updates:
Update 1: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1028542/#Comment_1028542
Update 2: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1029429/#Comment_1029429
Update 3: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1030921/#Comment_1030921
Update 4: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031740/#Comment_1031740
Update 5: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031786/#Comment_1031786
Update 6: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033031/#Comment_1033031
Update 7: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033340/#Comment_1033340
Update 8: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034874/#Comment_1034874
Update 9: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035114/#Comment_1035114
We started in SoA by fighting our way through the dungeon and finishing the circus tent quest (no problem with true sight) before using our traps and summons to take down Mencar's group early:
After making it to the slums, I rested and prepared for the Suna Seni ambush via 2*sanctuary, stealth and the sandthief ring, making my party invisible - which allowed us to retreat for a bit, summon and buff up:
That way, a possibly very dangerous fight was turned into a cakewalk:
While travelling around in order to pick up and complete minor quests, the second ambush occured - this time, I was unprepared. I soon realized that I wouldn't be able to stop the wizard from casting lightning bolt, so I decided to burn the protection from lighting scroll from the opening dungeon, which turned out to be a very good idea:
One of the more difficult encounters around the city that I decided to take on pretty soon was the bridge district party - it felt like a good idea because I had the advantage of traps and luring enemies outside:
With Ceres gone, none of my characters can tank in melee combat at all. I have to rely on summons for that, but getting these ready takes time. For enclosed spaces or sudden combat without preparation time, I would need the instant statue summons. The berserker horn was easily obtained, and I ventured into the sewers to buy a fireball potion in order to get the black spider figurine:
Having done most of the easy non-stronghold quests around the city, Ouranos made it to level 11 - new and better skeleton warriors! With these at the ready, I decided to take on the sewer party. I already had chaotic commands and death ward for everyone, and with invisibility potions as a defensive option, I felt fairly confident. The enemy wizard barely survived my initial attacks, getting his protections ready - but Ouranos was able to finish the job with a wand of the heavens charge, as I had noticed that he had no protection against that one:
While some of my summons were defeated during further combat, all of the buffs resulted in my side easily prevailing:
One area in which my statue summons were crucial was the tanner's basement - rune assassins can see through invisibility, and backstab is usually a one-hit-kill, so the only way to survive for my party was to distract these foes with instant summons before they'd decide to focus on a party member:
The final non-stronghold quest on my list was the second part of the slaver questline in the slums, where I used invisibility/sanctuary to start in a corner, allowing the party to call some summons before the majority of enemies could engage:
The second big battle was only a formality:
From there, I travelled to the Umar Hills. After doing the sidequests there, the temple ruins were easy to clear - Ouranus' turn undead was powerful enough to instantly kill shadow fiends, but we were not high level enough to encounter liches. We also had a ton of summons - not only skeletons, aerial servants and statues, but also Cephalus' beastmaster summons - giving us lots of fodder to even take down bone golems with our measly ranged weapons:
Sunstone bullets were very helpful against the Shade Lord:
Cephalus would go on to complete the ranger stronghold quests later on. For now, we tried our hands at the druid stronghold quest. Relatively easy for our party. Skeletons are good against druids, fire arrows are good against trolls - we had both of these, and Cernd took out Faldorn.
So, for now it might seem that SoA was going very well. However, all that was about to change. I really screwed up at Rayic Gethras' house. Things started of fine - Ouranos entered with storm shield, absorbing all of the special mephit attacks he was now immune to. He used sanctuary to explore upstairs, trying to get into a safe position out of sight of the two stone golems to summon aerial servants. However: These golems tend to wander - he was discovered before being able to complete his spell - and to my absolute horror, I discovered that he had no oils of speed or invisibility potions in his inventory. A grave mistake, obviously. He tried to run to the stairs, while Kaveh ran upstairs in order to hand him an invisibility potion. I was extremely lucky that Ouranos only got hit once by the golems before the potion was transferred to him:
After resting, I now tried to lure the golems downstairs into waiting traps and summons. This isn't as easy as it sounds: They tend to spawn in front of however got them downstairs, so it's quite dangerous - in fact, as Ouranos took another golem hit, I was forced to burn a second invisibility potion. Luckily, these aren't nearly as rare in SoA as they are in BG1:
Now, on to Rayic. I wanted to try out a strategy that has been mentioned many times in this thread - triggering the fireball trap in his room purpose with an immune party member multiple times. However... I misremembered which of the two traps in his room was the fireball one. Ouranos, who was protected with storm shield (which grants immunity to several elements, including fire) tried to execute my plan - only to confidentely walk up to the wrong trapped contained, triggering a deadly acid trap with 94 damage - and it just so happens that acid is the one element storm shield is completely useless against. Ouranos not only died, he also got chunked. We are down to three and have lost our best spellcaster:
This was a failure of memory on my part - a really stupid one, to be sure. I shouldn't even use untested strategies in no-reload runs. My back-up plan of luring Rayic downstairs into a bunch of traps should've been plan A. I ended up easily succeeding with that one.
The loss or Ouranos is another painful one. I still think our chances are not quite 0% yet, but they're getting closer. Single class divine spellcasters fall off later on, and we still have Oedipus for cleric spells - but still, things will get harder and harder.
The thief questline was completed by entering Mae'Var's guild invisibly and letting summons tank any backstabs:
The Cult of the Eyeless was next on our list - we had the Shield of Balduran for beholders and a PfU scroll for the undead (still no liches):
With the Rift Device, summons and traps ready and waiting, the Unseeing Eye didn't stand much of a chance:
The De'Arnise Keep was easy at this point - even the golems and Tor'Gal couldn't handle our buffed-up summons and magical ammo (some of which we had gotten from the previously cleared WKI (though we didn't touch the statues yet)):
Finally, we took care of Bodhi. Not much to say here - we had chaotic commands, we still had lots of summons, we still did decent damage once buffs were applied. The only critical point was getting Lassal out of the spike room. I had to count on Ilbratha's MI for that one - which, luckily, worked out. No trap hits got through the mirror images. Bodhi was mostly taken down by traps and a few ranged attacks. Now, we have the Windspear Hills, the Planar Sphere and the Planar Prison still to go. Let's see what we can do with our remaining party of three.
Previous updates:
Enya knew PfP as a starting spell and used that on Succour at the basilisk area. He dragged away one or two basilisks at a time to be blinded and then shot up by the full Army. The amount of time that took meant there was a real danger of blindness running out, but all the separated basilisks were eventually done - with another level each being acquired in the process. The lesser basilisk near Mutamin was charmed in the hope that could be done before Mutamin turned hostile, but that didn't work and the basilisk immediately died to a chromatic orb. With Mutamin now active, he would chase them anywhere they were on the map without having to see them again - making that a dangerous place to visit without invisibility.
The Army therefore left the area and toured round looking for bits and pieces of XP. The best source was charming more sirines at the Lighthouse and leading them away to be beaten up, though there was a near death experience there when I was away from the game and some of the attackers ran out of ammunition - I came back with Dazzler dead and just as Iluse came under attack. After a temple trip the remaining sirines were cleared with the exception of Sil. However, when the Army killed the last of those they were apparently too close to Arkushule and she went hostile (I was aware of that as a potential problem, but thought she was far enough away). A quick run for it and rest led to a successful charm on her and she was then used as distraction to go and blind Sil.
That still left everyone about a thousand XP short of level 4. Touring a few areas, avoiding the more dangerous ambushes, eventually plugged the gap and got everyone to level 4. That allowed the sorcerers to take invisibility and open up new opportunities. The battle horrors at Durlag's Tower provided a decent XP harvest and I spent a while clearing the exterior area. Immediately after doing that though I tried to rest outside rather than going in - and Destiny paid for that when pathfinding didn't allow me to run into the tower after a gnoll ambush triggered.
After another trip to the temple the Army returned to the Tower and cleared it of ghasts - again making use of invisibility as well as blind. Destiny died again in there though when I was trying to lure some ghasts into a position where I could attack them without them running round all over the place and one of them sneaked round by another route while I wasn't paying attention. The Army didn't fancy their chances of surviving the trap leading on to the roof, but did blind Riggilo - he disappeared using a potion though and the Army ran away.
Invisibility allowed easy access to some other encounters - such as going to get Meilum's bracers. It also opened up the Cloud Peak Mountains - I'd avoided those up to then because of the potential for lethal ambushes. However, though there was now the potential to travel safely I normally couldn't be bothered to do that and that led to an encounter with an ogre mage - even though it was blinded Enya was affected by an acid arrow and that was an inevitable death. I tried to kill it, but the long period of wandering round was a bit tiresome and Destiny eventually got a bit too close when it was almost dead and got taken down himself by a magic missile.
After going to the temple they tried travelling back to where they were and ... met another ogre mage. This time they at least had full spell books and could finish the ogre mage off a bit more quickly once its shield had worn off - only Succour dying from the initial acid arrow.
The Valley of the Tombs was the last of the southern areas, but I didn't fancy taking on mustard jellies at the moment, so left Narcillicus for now. However, I tried out the Revenant for size by caging that in 4 invisible characters. Unfortunately it proved to have both better sight range and a longer reach than it should have when blinded and Succour died once more. I didn't have enough damage to kill it purely with magic missiles and it fully regenerated when resting, so I decided to go and use those tactics on the Doomsayer instead - that would have just about been enough for another level.
On the way though I hit a gnoll ambush. That shouldn't be any danger, but I couldn't be bothered to move all the characters individually and that provided an opportunity for a gnoll to get a whack in - and he took full advantage by chunking Enya.
Unlike @Enuhal I don't normally continue when one of a full party is chunked, so the Army will have to start again from Candlekeep.
Glasha; neutral evil female half-orc fighter-cleric. Allowed a party of 6 (Dorn, Tiax, Baeloth, Viconia, and Safana). She made it through the Bandit Camp, the mines, and most of Baldur's Gate. She had a lot of trouble with low reputation... mostly keeping things in check with temple donations. But after she killed a Harper mage near the BG docks, she started attracting serious attention from Flaming Fist bounty hunters. Tired of temples, she chose to answer with violence. Safana wasn't up for it, and abandoned the party. Glasha ended up charging straight up to the top of the Iron Throne tower, recklessly throwing herself into the flunkies without using any retreat options. Most of the party died, but Glasha survived (she was charmed or under rigid thinking after her party died, and should have been killed if the enemy were behaving rationally, so the victory seemed hollow. Also was feeling guilty about Baeloth - under the new SCS NPC leveling behavior I'm using, he got a bunch of unwarranted extra spells to memorize and cast; felt like cheating). Lost enthusiasm and quit.
[Question from that run: does anyone know how an evil character would advance the plot in the first chapter that includes the city of Baldur's Gate? I was staying away from Scar because of the troubles I'd had with the Fist at low reputation... Normally, Eltan gives a quest that leads to the Iron Throne. Anything similar on the evil path?]
[Also for future reference; evil parties can get a lot of dispelling arrows as drops from dead Flaming Fist bounty hunters. Notable if you've eliminated those from stores.]
Next up was Gorch, true neutral male half-orc (changed to half-elf to make legal), fighter-druid, solo. He failed a save against Mutamin's sleep early in the run and got bludgeoned to death.
Currently up: Sylvia, true neutral female half-elf fighter-druid, allowed one companion (right now Imoen, but may switch to others for specific tasks). So far she's survived Mutamin's garden, one ankheg fight (for armor), and a few minor encounters. I'm liking the fact that SCS has added some spells from other Infinity Engine games; it's spicing up the early druid levels. Will give a brief report on her progress (or her death as the case may be) in the next few days.
Edit: Sylvia
And to clarify, all runs are with full (and recent) SCS on hardcore or insane, BG1 NPC, some ease-of-use tweaks, and always a freshly installed item randomizer.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034865/#Comment_1034865
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035101/#Comment_1035101
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035456/#Comment_1035456
I missed a day due to concentrating on LoB, but this morning saw me back to the rather faster progress offered by this run:
- the only thing done in Brynnlaw was chop Perth down before he could talk (level 32).
- in Spellhold there was another level for Azuredging Dace. In the second area I rested to trigger the Slayer transformation near the clay golems - I hadn't intended that to lead to attacking them, but it did and the golems were slaughtered within a few seconds.
Dwarven defender L36, 207 HPs, 1,167 kills (+535 in BG1)
Addi
Addi did very well in BG1, completing pretty much the entire game, and that included the defeat of Sarevok. In SoD a very caster-heavy party was formed, with Baeloth, Glint, Edwin, M'khiin and Corwin. They were very competent throughout SoD thanks to their wands (especially fire), crowd control spells (Web, Slow, Chaos) and summons (Skeletons). However the final battle was a different story altogether. First I made the mistake of letting the cutscene play out. It resulted in Addi's SI:Abjuration running out right before the enemy's opening Dispel Magic hit. All his buffs were gone and he got poisoned by one of the devils. He barely escaped and managed to rebuff while the others were engaing Belhifet and aides. The plan had been to lower Belhifet's magic resistance, but with Glint detecting illusions (100 score), Belhifet somehow timed his Improved Invisibilities so that Addi's, Edwin's, and Baeloth's (2x) castings of Lower Resistance were all wasted. Meanwhile devilish summons kept arriving and only Corwin had the firepower to kill those monsters but she received a lot of aggro too, including a stun / rigid thinking / feeblemind type effect that I wasn't prepared for. I basically gave up and let Addi die. Maybe I would have made it at core difficulty, but at insane I just couldn't see it. So Belhifet - Blackraven 1-1 so far.
Now thinking of a new Charname for the holidays.... Good luck in the meantime for @Enuhal, whose determination I admire, @Grond0, whose Dwarven Defender looks like Throne material, @Wise_Grimwald with a character that might beat BG1, and @Blind_Visionary with a new character.
?? (human necromancer, Gate70); Viper (human blackguard, Grond0)
Gorion drags his ward through the woods, trying to get as far away from Viper as he can. He can't even think of the character's name. Four letters maybe, could start with an S. Whatever. It's not important at this point so long as these two are separated.
In his rage, he blunders straight into Sarevok and fails to escape. The ward, of course, runs through the night into the next morning when Viper finally catches up with the survivor. One thing leads to another and this is bad news for Shoal the Nereid, Neera and a couple of ogrillions on the way to Nashkel.
There are a few more minor skirmishes as we kill some hobgoblins then Zal and Vax before returning Samuel to the Friendly Arm Inn. Viper finds himself falling into an ankheg nest and almost makes it to a treasure cache before his companion's casting of Sleep fails twice in a row. Viper slumps to the ground and a wounded ankheg turns towards the necromancer.
Three wand (missile) charges later, three healing potions have been consumed and a game of hide and seek has the ankheg dead. The necromancer uses their natural strength of 18 to pick up most of Viper's items and heads to a temple. 400gp later Viper is restored and a rest is called for.
Moments after the rest, Viper attacks Zhurlong who retaliates. The necromancer had been trying to heal Viper but instead Zhurlong's attack lands and Viper slumps to the ground. The necromancer unleashes a sling bullet and heads to the temple with another 400gp.
Previous updates:
Update 1: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1028542/#Comment_1028542
Update 2: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1029429/#Comment_1029429
Update 3: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1030921/#Comment_1030921
Update 4: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031740/#Comment_1031740
Update 5: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1031786/#Comment_1031786
Update 6: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033031/#Comment_1033031
Update 7: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033340/#Comment_1033340
Update 8: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034874/#Comment_1034874
Update 9: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035114/#Comment_1035114
Update 10: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035699/#Comment_1035699
So how did we fare in the Windspear Hills? Well, things didn't start out well - once making it to the main dungeon, our (invisible) trio was looking for a safe place to summon a little bit of help (I wanted to avoid the initial orc ambush). I did find such a place near the troll cook, but during the battle with the nearby hobgoblin group, the hobgoblin mage released a very unexpected lightning bolt which bounced through the room about 5 times (one of the most enduring lightning bolts I've ever seen), killing Oedipus in the process. I wasn't fast enough on my pause key to save him with a potion of absorption. No chunking, but since he's our only cleric, this meant we had to go back to Trademeet to resurrect him:
After that, I was much more careful around the place. The vampires were killed with PfU and the iMoD +2. For the various adamantite golems, I had Dwarven Thrower +3, Firetooth +4 and the Sling of Everard +5 at my disposal:
Making it to Conster was easy enough with the help of our summons. The mage died to the poison damage of our traps:
Skeletons dealt with the various guardians of the tomb, and Samia's group didn't stand much of a chance against summons, traps and ranged weapons. We moved on to the Planar Sphere, mostly using skeleton warriors and an additional wave of summons (the animal summoning III fodder available to Cephalus is actually still decent for most purposes at this stage in the game) to deal with the halflings, until their spellcasters were left with an empty spellbook. Tolgerias refused to fall to a cleric-buffed backstab attempt by Oedipus:
Oedipus was able to leave his line of sight before the mage's first offensive spell would be cast. I sent in the summons and continued to add in more while waiting off screen. Some traps, set as a precaution, helped with Tolgerias' own summons. I still had a bunch of stuff at my disposal as our enemies finally ran out of spells:
While clearing the ice room and the golems was easy enough, the fire room proved to be tricky, because my party got hit with a nasty scorcher ray, and my remaining summons didn't perform very well. I had to burn two fire protection potions and a green scroll to ensure survival (certainly worth it). After Lavok had a little chat with one of my skeletons, the party buffed up once again to go demon hunting:
Now, the Planar Prison remained as our only pre-Spellhold option (discounting lich battles and the like). I first brought back Mekrath's mirror, only to kill the mage after getting the quest exerience:
The opening Planar Prison battle could be deadly for this party. We really can't take any serious fight without a safe position and some opening summons, especially if there are spellcasters and thieves involved. This is why we not only included a few more item buffs than usual, we also started invisibly, immediately running to the north - hoping that there would be a safe place between the initial group and the warden where buffing up and summoning could be possible. I had to be fast to avoid the bounty hunter's true sight and careful not to get sucked down by one of the fleshy eyes here. Oedipus did actually get sucked down, but he was protected by sanctuary. He made it back up, and I did find a safe spot (though any more than 3 people propably can't be placed here - I was extremely close to being in line of sight of both the warden group and the bounty hunter group:
I now had the opening advantage needed for an easy victory:
Rushing further to the east, my skeletons were eventually defeated by a group of yuan-ti mages, but additional summons prevailed:
Traps killed the Master of Thralls, and instead of resting (which propably would've been the best move), I decided to see if I could clear the entire area in one go with even more summons. I ended up sending literally every summon at my disposal (which is a lot, considering Cephalus only has summoning spells in his spellbook), with the berserker warrior being the last one - and indeed, despite me missing this in the combat log, when I took a quick peak at the battleground, the warden was already dead:
I didn't forget to pick up the key this time, so getting out of the prison alive officially makes this my most successful meatgrinder attempt yet.
I made a few purchases in the city before taking the boat to Brynnlaw, were Perth didn't survive Oedipus' second backstabbing attempt:
After entering Spellhold and giving up on a point of wisdom, Cephalus has now cleared the first level without much trouble. Let's see if we can make it to the Underdark!
Previous run:
In a second attempt I had a very clean run up to level 4. However, in trying to track down and finish off Greywolf I suffered a first casualty when a second lot of kobolds joined an existing battle and I didn't take the time to move everyone individually. That probably reflected having been playing too long and within a minute or two after that Iluse himself died. Everyone had been ordered to attack the blinded Greywolf using slings and I didn't realize until fractionally too late that Iluse's order had lapsed due to following Greywolf for too long while he ran around blinded - as a result he simply ran up right next to Greywolf and died just as I realized the problem.
A third run was marred by everyone except Iluse getting killed in a bandit ambush, but otherwise was going well enough with the Army just shy of level 4. I made the mistake though of trying to help Charleston Nib despite knowing the difficulty of moving in tight surroundings. 5 of the 6 diggers were blinded to try and keep them away, but one of the blinded ones still managed to block the exit and it and the sighted one both hit Iluse at the first attempt.
In the first run I was playing sort of fair with the game by taking on an awful lot of low value combats. I had also not learned any new spells for any of the mages, which was significantly nerfing them by the end of the run. Since then I've gone for more high-value encounters and made heavy use of Iluse's pseudo-dragon, both for distracting enemies and direct tanking. One of the oddities of LoB is that familiars are far, far better in combat than when playing on Core - they benefit from the LoB bonuses to attack and defense and most of them get 44 rather than 12 HPs, but they don't take the double damage inflicted on party members.
I've also rerolled several of the characters to make minor changes - in particular ensuring everyone has 18 strength and 19 dexterity to help their sling damage.
I'll give it one more try and see if I can discipline myself to avoid taking chances this time. Progress to date has been pretty straightforward:
- went to kill Shoal.
- checked to see if there was some easy XP on offer from Drizzt after activating a single gnoll. In the first run there wasn't, the second there was, the third there wasn't. It could therefore be felt I was due a kill this time - and indeed that was the case though it took a long time for a single gnoll to knock Drizzt unconscious
- killed Algernon for his cloak and travelled north to Ulgoth's Beard to get Dushai's ring, getting up to level 3 on the way by returning Tenya's bowl.
Dazzler (Dragon Disciple) - L3, 17 HPs, 7 kills, 0 deaths
Enya (Enchanter) - L3, 17 HPs, 4 kills, 0 deaths
Mazy (Pure-class) - L3, 18 HPs, 10 kills, 0 deaths
Iluse (Illusionist - PC) - L3, 36 HPs (incl. 22 from familiar), 8 kills
Succour (Sorcerer) - L3, 105 HPs, 2 kills, 0 deaths
Destiny (Diviner) - L3, 16 HPs, 5 kills, 0 deaths
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034865/#Comment_1034865
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035101/#Comment_1035101
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035456/#Comment_1035456
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035865/#Comment_1035865
An early-morning session saw:
- a balor distracted with summons while being cut down.
- quickly dealt with the illithid, mainly using missiles to protect my limited intelligence. Got up to level 38 there.
- the top layer of the vampire guild has been cleared, getting me to the XP cap in the process.
Dwarven defender L40, 219 HPs, 1,264 kills (+535 in BG1)
I wanted something different, and ended up with a Dark Moon Monk. I had played Annick before for a solo LoB playthrough but discontinued that run very early on because her future seemed a bit too grim for me. Rerolled her as I didn't have her char file anymore, and got a 93 after eleven rolls. I allowed myself to min-max for a change since I'm unfamiliar with Monks but I do understand they're considered a very weak class for BG1 and SoD.
The setup is my usual setup (BGQE, BG1NPC Project, UB, RR for Bards, Divine Remix, some aTweaks and Anthology tweaks, and SCS with full prebuffs, all tactical challenges and creature buffs, and most rule/content changes). I may be more detailed in my reporting because as I said, playing with a Monk is unchartered territory to me.
Character record:
Early days
Annick did her chores in Candlekeep, escaped Gorion's killier and Imoen, and set out to explore the Sword Coast on her own. She worked as a mercenary in Beregost. Jobs for respected people like Bjornin the paladin and Firebead Elvenhair made her both richer and more reputable. With her above average movement speed and her high strength and dexterity, she did pretty well with her daggers.
Her first two level-ups and the acqusition of a pair of Worn Whispers saw Annick become stealthier. She also learned to handle a melee weapon (short sword / ninja-to).
Stealth allowed her to enter and leave the FAI without being noticed by any people she didn't want to notice her, like the Necromancer by the doorway. Several missions farther afield led Annick to reach level 5: north of the FAI, for farmer Brun (using stealth in the ankheg cave), a frightened widow, and a young priestess (attacking Tenya from stealth), saving a Drow priestess from a Flaming Fist mercenary, protecting Charleston Nib, lifting the curse on Captain Brage, and some tasks around Nashkel.
Building a party
In Nashkel she ran into a fellow Monk by the name of Rasaad. He was spreading the word of Selûne. His openness, the way he just laid his cards on the table, intrigued her. Annick was an agent of Shar, of secrecy and guile. Rasaad learnt little of her but she reckoned she could learn much about "the other side" through Rasaad, and invited him to join her. When Annick ran into the Drow priestess she had helped before, not far from where they had previously met, she decided to have a word with her. Viconia turned out to be a rogue priestess of Shar (Nightcloak of Shar/Thief), who was forced to keep a low profile all the time because of her race. Annick offered her fellow follower of Shar companionship and the dark elf accepted.
The trio slew the Necromancer in front of the FAI (Blindness + Command) and invited a fourth member to the party, a half-orc warrior, as they could use a strong arm. He reacted very disimissively initially, but things changed when they ran into him again on the road and saved his life. Eldoth, a Skald who had just joined the company, fireballed some bandit archers, and Vicky cast Confusion (kit ability) and Hold Person on two warriors that were attacking Dorn. The Half-Orc was impressed and offered to lend his blade to Annick's cause. It was Dorn who was responsible for a final addition to the party: a Barbarian named Shar-Teel challenged him to a duel and lost, which made her join the company.
Empowering the party
The party had limited gold and mostly mundane gear, and the companions decided that had to change. When Annick spoke to Viconia of Drizzt Do'Urden, the well-known Drow ranger she had met northwest of Nashkel, Vicky urged her to seek him out. It had been his house that had murdered her family, and while she's had little love for most of her family, the loss of her brother still pained her. Rasaad's evasion skills, Annick's throwing daggers, Viconia's bullets, and Dorn's arrows avenged House DeVir.
Somehow word of the slaughter of Drizzt spread, and it did the party's reputation no good. They ended up selling a ring of wizardry at the FAI and donating several tithes to the Temple of Garl Glittergold to somewhat restore their reputation.
Notable exploits that followed were the defeat of Greywolf (Confusion, Blindness, Hold Person), the slaying of Arghain, the rescue of Arabella, the looting of Black Alaric's cave (by Sanctuaried Viconia), the assassination of Kryll and her undead aides, and the dispatchment with brute force of Sendai, Vax, Zal, Krumm and Caldo, Ingot, and Gnarl and Hairtooth.
As suggested first by I think @Tresset, Rasaad donned Relair's Mistake, and wolf form does make him a better warrior, with higher strength and dexterity, and more APR. What makes him even more powerful is equipping a weapon in the off-hand while in wolf form. It grants anther attack for 7/2 APR, and there is no penalty in either hand for wielding an off-hand weapon. This makes some sense as I think wolves should be pretty much completely ambidextrous. Realistically though, only a small off-hand weapon sounds believable to me. Think the dagger of venom attached to one paw, much like fighting roosters have blades attached to their claws. Rasaad however shamelessly equips Twinkle in the off-hand (he's proficient in scimitars after all).
The party have just defeated Bassilus, with some difficulty. Viconia and Annick failed to confuse and charm their foe, respectively, so he managed to summon an aerial servant. The companions ran straight into three dread wolves and were busy fighting those when Bassilus arrived. Annick Blinded him while he was casting probably a Hold Person. Shar-Teel enraged and Rasaad transformed, and they closed in on him. The others, save constantly singing Eldoth, attacked with ranged weapons. It was enough to secure victory, away from the aerial servant.
Edit: adding party info for a change
Annick, Dark Moon Monk, level 5, 72 kills (Drizzt)
Rasaad, Sun Soul Monk, level 5, 29 kills (Greywolf), 0 deaths
Viconia, Nightcloak of Shar/Thief, level 4/5, 5 killls (Xvart), 0 deaths
Eldoth, Skald, level 6, 30 kills (Half-Ogre), 0 deaths
Dorn, Blackguard, level 5, 19 kills (Winter Wolf), 0 deaths
Shar-Teel, Barbarian, level 5, 35 kills (Ghast), 0 deaths
Previous updates:
Still playing safely the Army went to Mutamin's garden and picked off all the separated basilisks. Korax joined in the fun by paralyzing Mutamin and the death of his pet basilisks provided everyone with a 4th level.
With invisible travel now possible, the Army went to the Cloud Peaks. Their first victim was Greywolf, who was put in an invisible cage before suffering the indignity of being pummeled to death with non-proficient staves.
With prices now looking reasonable, Iluse bought 150 +1 bullets and used those to attack golems in an invisible cage at High Hedge. Dazzler supported with the +1 staff from Silke (who was charmed and whittle down by spiders), though that would have been very slow going without the bullets.
With 4 of the party now able to cast invisibility, movement could be made safe much more easily. Iluse had also learnt web and that allowed ankhegs to be tackled without much risk,
However, a lack of concentration proved costly when trying to clear the ankhegs in the main area. One of those chose to try and attack Enya in melee rather than range and I didn't notice for a fraction of a second that it had moved far enough towards the others to come into sight of Dazzler as a result. It took advantage of that slight delay by immediately switching back to range attack and sending a fatal blob of spit.
I made it to the temple without further incident and raised the dead with some of the money earned from selling ankheg shells.
Dazzler (Dragon Disciple) - L3, 23 HPs, 17 kills, 1 death
Enya (Enchanter) - L4, 22 HPs, 8 kills, 0 deaths
Mazy (Pure-class) - L4, 23 HPs, 15 kills, 0 deaths
Iluse (Illusionist - PC) - L4, 42 HPs (incl. 22 from familiar), 22 kills
Succour (Sorcerer) - L4, 20 HPs, 17 kills, 1 death
Destiny (Diviner) - L4, 19 HPs, 12 kills, 0 deaths
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1036118/#Comment_1036118
After finishing off the last few ankhegs I went in search of some more treasure at the Lighthouse area. Using invisibility, Dazzler could sneak up on sirines and charm them and that soon dealt with those. The first golem in the cave was caged and laboriously struck down, but trying that with the second found another one demonstrating a reach significantly greater than it should have been capable of.
Coming back from the temple they came across a couple of dread wolves - and the first of those provided the opportunity for everyone to level up. They then had another go at the golem that killed Dazzler - and this time successfully beat it to death after 4 hours of game time. The other golem was treated the same way, though this time it took an impressive 10 hours of game time (I should really have bought the +3 staff before that
The extra level had greatly increased the amount of spell damage the party could do - 2 mages with 3rd level spells, the 2 sorcerers had both taken Acid Arrow and everyone was doing a lot more damage with magic missiles. They tested that out at Durlag's Tower and found they had more than enough damage to kill battle horrors without resting. However, I wasn't paying full attention when working on the second one of those and used the invisible blocking character to attack - with predictable consequences. After another temple visit the rest of the exterior was safely cleared.
I suspect my concentration was still wavering from playing for too long though as, while attacking some ghasts inside the tower, I seemed to lose sight of the familiar for a moment - until it reappeared trapped in the jaws of a ghast.
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032457/#Comment_1032457
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1032927/#Comment_1032927
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033210/#Comment_1033210
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033397/#Comment_1033397
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033645/#Comment_1033645
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1033891/#Comment_1033891
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034225/#Comment_1034225
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034519/#Comment_1034519
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034736/#Comment_1034736
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1034865/#Comment_1034865
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035101/#Comment_1035101
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035456/#Comment_1035456
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1035865/#Comment_1035865
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1036079/#Comment_1036079
The session started by beating up Bodhi to get the Rhynn Lanthorn
In hell I went the evil route and sacrificed a companion and doubled-down on that to get Blackrazor and rage at Sarevok. In the final battle I used the throwing hammer again to kill the demons and then triggered True Seeing to get a shot at the Slayer. PfMW made me wait a few rounds, but then the end came swiftly.
The game had another trick to play though as it froze during the cutscene and I had to do the final fight again. With that finally out of the way I could move on to ToB, where a single GWW was too much for Ilasera. The first pocket plane challenge wasn't much harder
Some vampires invited me for a tryst, but were ignored as I went to find Gromnir's palace. The hour ticked over as I beat up the mage on the middle floor,
Dwarven defender L40, 234 HPs, 1,329 kills (+535 in BG1)
Having completed the Drizzt Saga the battles were not too much of a problem though NPC deaths did occur. Baeloth died the most often whilst Tenya died once. She and Dreadnought both got level drained in the NSoSC area of Firewine Ruins. If I play that mod again I'll know to have a cleric with spells to remedy that. I wasn't expecting vamypes in BG1.
I am left with a problem. There is an area I cannot access and I think that it is important to get the tome back to access Candlekeep.
I need a key, but where is it?
This is the area that I cannot access.
Any answers anybody?
Happy Christmas everybody.