Nice to see an avenger attempt @Trouveur - Good luck in SoD!
I would like to update my run, but when I try to upload images, I tend to get a "the file failed to upload" message (some rare images seem to work, but most don't) - maybe the forum isn't 100% back yet? How did you manage it/did you have this problem?
Thank you. 🙂.
I had this message with one of my screenshots, which was over 1mb. After reducing it to less than 1mb I could post it.
If your images are png files try saving them as jpegs. That's what I do. The files become much, much smaller from 1.2 MB to 220kbytes!
I open the screenshot in Paint and save as a jpeg. Dead easy and the resolution is fine.
Nice to see an avenger attempt @Trouveur - Good luck in SoD!
I would like to update my run, but when I try to upload images, I tend to get a "the file failed to upload" message (some rare images seem to work, but most don't) - maybe the forum isn't 100% back yet? How did you manage it/did you have this problem?
Thank you. 🙂.
I had this message with one of my screenshots, which was over 1mb. After reducing it to less than 1mb I could post it.
If your images are png files try saving them as jpegs. That's what I do. The files become much, much smaller from 1.2 MB to 220kbytes!
I open the screenshot in Paint and save as a jpeg. Dead easy and the resolution is fine.
They all were saved as JPG, only one weirdly was over 1mb, whereas others was at 700kb.
I use the new screenshot capture software from Windows 11, which allows to save them in multiple formats. 🙂
So, we start in SoA - say what you want about static charge - it's slow, it often doesn't hit who you want it to hit - but it is undeniably powerful, and just having it active in the background is imo totally worth it:
Since we can only rest once in the opening dungeon, we save our first round of buffs for the big mephit fight:
Our insect plague is used for the second duergar wizard:
And we have a bunch of conjured magical weapons (most of them with an anti-undead bonus) to kill the vampire:
Here's a strange bug I noticed with SoA: My wizards both have this random ray of enfeeblement in their special abilities - it does actually work (I tested it on my own party), and you can use it an infinite number of times. This is clearly not intended, so I won't make any use of it:
Outside, there's Mencar and his gang to take care off - this is just a matter of having a good opening against both spellcasters and the summons to tank the fighters:
After dealing with the circus tent, we take on the slavers at the slums. Not too troublesome for this party:
Insect plague does work against the two wizards, especially when combined with malison:
With all that done, we buy a magic license and do the minor sidequests at the government district. Next, the docks, where Livia gets to have some fun:
Ambushes can be quite dangerous with SCS, but if I get to cast a single malison + mass cc combo, the battles are generally just over:
Insect plague is deployed in the graveyard at the spider nest:
And our fire elementals are there to help out at the lower crypts:
We return to the docks for the harper quest (we have also cleared out the pirate hideout) and move on to the bridge. The skinner murders are potentially dangerous due to the rune assassins who can see through invisibility, so we fully buff up and take them down with true sight running before they can potentiall backstab Livia:
Well, this is awkward - I forgot about the flesh to stone trap on this lich's lair - luckily, stone to flesh is easily available. First big mistake in SoA:
Octavia has just gained access to 6th level spells - we randomly found a pw:silence scroll, which turns out to be very useful due to the very quick casting time and no saving throw being allowed:
Our final stop at the bridge district is the hidden party in the house, which we respect enough to fully buff up:
On to the temple district - we deal with the minor helmite tasks, the fallen paladins and clear the upper level of the sewers - for that, Livia gets to backstab again, and the party follows up with summons, full buffs and some malison / chaos / slow action:
With our buffs still runing, the rakshasa is defeated as well:
In a final step, the first level of Watcher's Keep - minus the statues - is visited, mostly for the containers. Vampire wraiths can be dangerous, but when fully prepared and ready with buffs and powerful summons, it's easy enough to take them down within seconds.
Everything non-stronghold related (except for the stuff I usually save for after the Underdark, aka liches, dragons, mind flayers, guarded compound, twisted rune) is done. We're getting unlucky on our slowed down reputation gains and are constantly low on money, but that's fine. In the next update, we will do the 4 easiest stronghold quests.
We start our stronghold run with Livia's very own guild - which is relatively easy to acquire. Rayic falls to a PW:Silence:
How do we make sure to survive the various backstab attempts when fighting Mae'var's thiefs? Easy enough - Livia just stays invisible (while detecting illusions to counter invis potions) while the better protected party members do the fighting (with true sight running as well). Mae'var himself gets to feel the power of the SCS 35 high level air elementals - their new spells at 16+ HD are available via the special abilities button, and the whirlwind immediatels stuns Mae'var - his fate is sealed:
I'm still mostly sticking to fire elementals. The reason is simple: Air&Earth elementals, while powerful, get very large hitboxes if their high HD variants are summoned and just can't move through many areas without getting stuck. I guess I could use more water elementals, though.
For the only real sidequest of the stronghold, we use malison + chaos - which works against stealthed opponents quite well:
De'Arnise keep is our next stop. We have a good toolkit against trolls (Biter +2, Firetooth, Stonefire Axe...) - SCS spirit trolls are a danger, but unholy blight doesn't work against us (all neutral reputation), and at least Livia gets chaotic commands against greater command (while Ung is often raging, our elf/half-elf are resistant to sleep, and others have great saving throws due to shorty bonuses). The totemic druid summons are very helpful against the iron golem:
We're forced to kill Glaicus, as 4 charm attempts in total all fail (should've had dispel magic ready):
The yuan-ti mage on that level just died to summons, due to a lack of physical defenses that go beyond stoneskin. However, the one helping Tor'gal gets the special PW:Silence treatment (whenever I see a opposing spellcaster that uses MGOI/GOI instead of (minor) spell deflection/turning, I just can't resist - this would likely not work on insane SCS difficulty, as they usually have both, but on tactical some early game spellcasters will randomly only use one of these, though that doesn't last for long - soon enough, at least double spell thrust/secret word will generally be needed, or even more powerful spell defense removal):
Overpowering the trolls with full buffs at our disposal is easy enough:
The FoA is a very useful prize for our efforts.
We turn to the druid grove, which is much of the same in terms of trolls:
The big druid group gets hit with mass confusions:
We buff up for the gauntlet of spore colonies/shambling mounds and also take down the rakshasa trio. Cernd gets to deal with Faldorn, so we don't have to worry - some trademeet sidequests are done, and we move to Umar Hills.
We've done the sidequests around here earlier on (forgot to mention that - we also turned in the dryad acorns), so we just have to clear the temple ruins. Most of that is easily done with the help of fire elementals, we only need to help out against bone golems - however, whenever we do that, we have to contend with the more powerful greater mummies:
Our tactic for the shade lord is simple - equip everyone with a ranged magical weapon, buff up, secret word + breach him and kite to avoid level drain via his darkling aura - Kriemhild has to stay still for a breach spell, which means that she takes a hit, but other than that, everything works as intended:
Four strongholds down (which also means that Joluv spawns in, but we have zero money to buy anything from him, we're still constantly broke - this party can make use of a TON of vendor items and our reputation is still fairly average) - time for a break, as in the next update, we will let Kriemhild rest for a while as we deal with a large variety of companion quests.
As our reputation is still low and Ung is at level 13, this is the perfect time to pick up Dorn for his questline (he needs to be level 12 to finish it and won't join at reputation 18-20). Taking down a single priest is easy enough. Fire elementals and malison + insect plague help out with the paladin camp. The demons for the final quest part are a bit more challenging (luckily, Livia is protected against stun via chaotic commands), and I make a mistake with dialogue options, missing out on The Visage and accidentally letting Dorn fall.
Rasaad is next, and we get our mirror image ring with the help of insect plague:
During that questline, Agrippina gets access to 7th level spells - I encounter another bug, this time with spell names:
As we progress with the trials at the hidden temple, Livia uses a ton of buffs and potion of power as she has to solo some invisible stalkers, not exactly her strength:
A successful PW:Silence against the sorcerer during the final battle is extremely helpful and neutralizes much of the threat. The follow up - insect plague, malison, chaos, slow - seals the deal:
We pick up Hexxat. We can just about get to 6 chaotic commands by missing out on insect plague, ironskins and true sight, but it's worth it to safely face the mind flayers at the first crypt:
Some greater mummies have to die, which means more work for our fire elementals. The second crypt is super easy to clear if you don't bother with the various treasure puzzles (which are most certainly not worth it). The only relevant fight are the three wizards, which I was able to just overrun. Since Neera's quest is by far the hardest (also true in ToB), I went for the classic NPCs and their (rather short) minor quests, with a few exceptions: No Nalia, as her quest is bugged and doesn't trigger unless you take her into De'Arnise keep. No Edwin - with the new resting restrictions, this would take SO much time for very little reward as the red wizards only show up after quite a long time. No Anomen, because that requires going forth in the romance, which takes real time to progress. Also, as it turned out, no Jan, because his quest - for the first time for me - bugged out, and I didn't think it was worth using the console (Uncle Gerhard wouldn't have his quest dialogue available, no matter what I tried). I saved Jaheira for last, as this is a long one - but potentially worth it because we might eventually get UAI for the harper pin:
I left the game paused in the background while doing other stuff to get Terminsel to show up.
A short interlude: We do Aran's quests and recruit Kriemhild again for Bodhi's Lair. Tanova is hit with true sight, secret words, breach and attacks:
Ung takes down Lassal, we get our hand on the iMoD and Bodhi gets taken down early, as per usual:
Finally, we recruit Neera. We screwed up during Rasaad's quest by not talking to Wilson before freeing him, which means he just disappears, so I won't be able to help out Zaviak. The other wild mage sidequests are quickly done, so we get to the real challenge, the red wizard compound - this one's always tricky. The space is cramped, the wizards have a large variety of prebuffs, they use dispels, they have crowd control and strong damage spells - I also got into more trouble as one of them pretty much immediately fled to the next room, so I couldn't go for the dialogue solutions there and had to fight two rooms at once - Ung was able to block off the entrance for a while, but soon had to retreat as he was taking too much damage:
As you can see, this is the first time I have SI:A and entropy shields on my spellcasters going - losing buffs can be devastating here. Livia already got dispelled (and Ung lost some as well, but has enrage going), and she will stay very far back for the rest of the battle. The wizards from the first room are soon taken down - actually, malison + chaos help with that, as one of them gets confused. Agrippina takes over for Ung with her ironskins and good AC (thanks to ankheg plate and Shield of the Lost), spams three spirit animals into the other room, uses nature's beauty (taking down/blinding some melee fighters) and insect plague with much success:
With that, we finally have the space to go directly after the wizards. Enemy PFMWs are gone by now, some breaches help with the cleanup, but we can just punch through stoneskins as well:
This was a bit of a close one, but then again, it pretty much always is unless done at higher levels. However, the Lanneth fight is very easy in comparison this time around, because our opponent actually just dies while we target her before the minotaur cutscene starts:
This wasn't really my intention, but I'll take it. We free the wild mages and recruit Kriemhild again. Now we're caught up to the actual run again, and I will continue with the remaining stronghold quests, starting at Windspear Hills. We also bought our reputation up to 18 as we've been getting so unlucky with the SCS RNG. Still broke (the prize for Gaelan is was also increased by SCS), but now I've bought every non-consumable I'm going to need from non-Joluv vendors, so we might finally get to visit him with the money gained from the remaining stronghold quests.
The first challenge in the Windspear Dungeon, aside from golems, which were easily dealt with by having Mordenkainen's swords tank them (luckily, I found a scroll for that one fairly early on), is the big group of vampires - for that, we had prepared both the false dawn spell and Ung with the iMoD +2 and improved haste:
Luckily, golems have very poor AI, so this adamantite golem tried killing our magical sword for the entire time we fought it:
After taking down Tazok and Conster (the latter one with the help of some traps), we still had to deal with Samia - using protection from fire and some elementals for the guardians, and some chaos, nature's beauty and the like for her companions:
We moved on to the astral prison - first, we had to take down a group of yuan-ti mages - spell shield, SI:A and entropy shield (hopefully ISOM soon as well) will see a lot more action from now an, as we begin to face higher level spellcasters and keeping our buffs active becomes more and more crucial. For these guys, detect illusions, some secret words and breaches were enough - same for Mekrath:
After resting, we return the gem and entered the prison, fully buffed and with direct attacks against both bounty hunter spellcasters (a backstab attempt failed as the bounty hunter turned around just before the attack, but the damage was enough for a direct followup kill anyway):
However, Livia did her job more successfully against the thrall wizard to the east:
Those without SI:A or entropy shield active got dispelled here by the three remaining yuan-ti wizards, but as soon as I realized that they relied on PFMW instead of some type of mantle for their physical defenses, I switched everyone to excellent (non-magical) weapons which I keep around specifically to counter PFMW, allowing me to take the now undefended yuan-ti down:
Livia gets back her CC and death ward, Ung his improved haste, and we are happy to see that the air elementals with the master of thralls don't seem to have enough HD to get the whirlwind ability (btw, our own aerial servants don't get that one either - unlike the ones we encountered in SoD):
I like to rush the warden upon destroying the orb while he's still busy killing thralls. However, I did not find his prebuff information in the combat log, and he didn't have any visual animations suggesting some kind of spell protections - however, our weapons proved ineffective, and a breach attempt didn't go through, so he seemed to have both physical and spell protections. However, switching to excellent weapons did the trick - seems like he was using PFMW - and while we took some damage, he didn't do any additional spellcasting before he fell:
And then, when talking to Haer'dalis, upon returning back to Athkatla, my game crashed (I remember having this exact crash before), I had no save games in the prison, so I had to redo the entire thing again. Things went much the same, though the yuan-ti mages didn't manage to dispel me this time around and I was faster to kill the warden as I already knew to use normal weapons - two screeshots of the second go around:
Well, that was unfortunate, but luckily we only lost some time.
In any case, we moved on to the old tunnels, to deal with the Unseeing Eye. We don't have good tools to deal with beholders. The level 11 version of skeleton warriors just aren't that strong - unbuffed, they got quickly destroyed by the first group we encountered. A careful combination of throwing in more summons, especially our flesh golem, and some ranged attacks, eventually allowed us to whittle down these dangerous foes:
The undead at ghoul city (two bone golems, a greater mummy, but no lich) fell to more iMoD action. I found that the trick to using our level 11 skeletons against beholders was to just buff them up as hard as possible - this gave them enough damage output to kill a beholder group before the beholders were able to deal too much damage, and I was able to use that method for the hive, while the party took down the blind priests. The Unseeing Eye doesn't have death tyrants with it on tactical, so we just used the rift device and killed it:
Now, for the final stronghold quest - the planar sphere. Here, we will have to deal with truly high level wizards for the first time. First, the halflings - we worked with summons for a bit here - a death spell killed my fire elemtnals, but this was their only one - spirit lions actually hit through mantle (and improved mantle), even with SCS, as Kayardi found out:
Next, the two halfling spellcasters further into the sphere - it was secret word + breach fort these, though one of them had a powerful 3*skull trap sequencer to unleash on us. Luckily, it wasn't enough damage to kill anyone:
It was time to meet Lavok. He opened with a powerful chain contingency including spell protections plus improved mantle, and he had SI:A going. I tried to get through all that with secret words, but he used timestop before I could do anything. Luckily, he only used that for true sight, remove magic, a GOI and an attempt at a third spell, which I was able to interrupt through stoneskins as the timestop made his improved mantle run out:
He followed up with absolute immunity, though, and was able to cast an ADHW (which I noticed in time to be targeting Ung, so I moved him away) and remove Livia's remaining buffs:
However, his absolute immunity ran out before he could actually follow up with anything truly dangerous:
We rested after that battle, made sure to have 6 chaotic commands + death wards at the ready and used those chaotic commands to find and kill the demons outside. Tolgerias was the next big bad wizard foe - as is often the case, despite use of the belt of hill giant strength + DUHM, he was able to survive our opening backstab:
To counter his opening CC, which included 2 hakaeshars and mass invisibility, we used true sight and quickly took down the lower level wizard (secret word + breach was enough):
Tolgerias used timestop, but he again wasted his time on stuff like true sight, GOI and breaches instead of dealing serious damage to us, and he did not follow up with AI when his first physical protection spell ran out, sealing his fate:
After clearing the elemental rooms, we used magical sword and stoneskins/ironskins to tank the golems:
And that's it for chapters 2/3. We move on to Brynnlaw, though before I quit the session, I had Ung deal with the vampire ambush:
Continued from previous page. Journal of Halma the Helmite Coninued.
While I rested with an ale in one of Beregost's many inns Gnomus investigated the town and brought back quite a lot of gold and gems. We sold most of it and bought equipment such as a +1 dagger, a +1 sling and several throwing daggers.
We returned to High Hedge and sadly Gnomus was slain by a skeleton.
I was able to rescue Melicamp and took his body to High Hedge where his body was returned to normal.
As a result I reached level 3 and my reputation was raised.
I took the body of Gnomus to the Temple of Lathander after selling enough gems to raise him.
We rested and are about to head for Nashkel.
Gold is currently in short supply.
We killed two ogrillon and collected Mirianne's ring of protection before heading to Nashkel. Picked up the Colquetle amulet on the way using sanctuary to avoid combat. Killed a bandit and kobolds without injury. Collected the ankheg armour, and wand of frost. Spoke to Noober and turned down Oublek's offer.
Returned the Colquetle amulet before heading for the FAI. Picked up the ring of protection and ring of wizardry. With that Gnomus can use his armour spell and still have slots for sleep which were used against the hobgoblins.
We headed north and spotted a bandit. Moved south to sleep and when we returned he was no longer there. We killed Sonner and cohorts before taking the bowl to Tenya.
Gnomus became a level 2 thief as a result. Put proficiencies in finding traps.
Thhe battle against the nearby ankheg was too close for comfort, however the 500gp for the shell will be most welcome.
Upon sleeping I gained the ability to cure light wounds.
We returned Joia's ring and thereby became heroes.
Returning to the ankheg nest we killed one before going outside to rest. We were ambushed by another ankheg and I was badly wounded before we were able to escape to the FAI where we rested.
We killed another ankheg which caused me to be a level four cleric. A proficiency point was put in maces.
There were a few glitches with the game at the start of the session, possibly as a result of having 3 people, but only 2 characters between them. The first bit of business was therefore to put the group back together by raising Coremage and then going to get Hotstuff's statue active again. With that done we attacked Mutamin. He has pretty good saving throws and was not held at all by a first web. Merlin tried another of those though and Mutamin soon got stuck - and then surprisingly was immediately blinded by Hotstuff, making a kill simple.
Kirian's companions were all blinded before a web was cast to allow her to be shot down.
Heading to the FAI saw us pick up the Ring of Wizardry. There was strong competition for that, but Hotstuff ended up with it on the grounds of getting the most additional spells.
A trip through the Cloud Peak Mountains was pretty routine, with blindness taking care of Zal & Vax and Caldo & Krumm. Merlin took the charisma tome as, even though Hotuff had a higher charisma, the tome would allow Merlin to reach 20 with the help of friends.
Next, we went to find Greywolf, in search of a better sword for Coremage. We hadn't rested recently though and, when Greywolf resisted 3 attempts to blind him, that left us short of options. Hotstuff tried to run him round while the others shot, but Greywolf managed to get into range and a single swing of his sword was too much for the dragon disciple.
That prompted Merlin to take a bit of a risk by throwing down a web and then trying to skirt that closely enough that Greywolf would get stuck when cutting a corner. That worked and Greywolf quickly got stuck. He did break free when at near death and that could have been fatal as Merlin managed to get stuck himself when trying to run further round the edge of the web. Fortunately, Greywolf got stuck again allowing Coremage to finish him off.
Samuel was rescued and returned to the FAI. On the way there, Hotstuff fancied barbecuing some spiders.
Three of them survived the blast, but Hotstuff was able to get back outside where his companions could help finish the job.
Bassilus was webbed and blinded immediately after talking to him.
We also picked up Melicamp in that area, but he failed to survive his transformation. While at High Hedge, Coremage bought a PfAcid scroll. That gave him the confidence to take on the ankhegs, despite still having relatively limited HPs. In the event the ankhegs only managed a single hit on him anyway.
By this time reputation was up to 19 and escorting Brage back to Nashkel temple maximised that. A visit to Ulgoth's Beard then procured some goodies, including the Greenstone Amulet. With that in hand we went to the Lighthouse area to take on some sirines. Merlin was able to throw 3 webs at them and Coremage added in a stinking cloud - and neither group of sirines were able to withstand that combination.
Inside the pirate cave, Coremage used the Amulet to avoid danger from the charm and hold traps. A potion of absorption and the crushing belt made it hard for golems to hit him and none of them succeeded in that while Coremage cut them down to size - though, surprisingly, he didn't actually get the killing strike on any of them.
For the final bit of action in the session we travelled up the coast and killed the other group of sirines there. Hotstuff helped them on their way with another of his dragon breaths, but was caught out by the fact that spreads out so far to the side - fortunately Merlin saved against the damage and survived the blast comfortably.
Unfortunately the save taken after that appears to be bugged, so it looks like we'll have to use the autosave and Merlin will thus have the opportunity to improve his dodging skills against those sirines next time ... Illusionist 5, 26 HPs, 36 kills
Dragon disciple 5, 41 HPs, 31 kills, 2 deaths
Fighter 4 / mage 4, 41 HPs, 75 kills, 1 death
@Grond0 Interesting run.
Journal of Halma the Helmite Continued.
We continued hunting ankheg and at first the battles were quite difficult.
We went outside the nest to rest when we were nearly out of spells and found ouselves being ambushed by ankheg again and again. Occasionally we took them on, sometimes prevailing and sometimrs fleeing.
We took the body of Farmer Brun's son to him and gave him 100gp
We fled to Beregost when a particularly difficult ankheg saved against all our spells.
Just north of there we killed an ogre whose belt should make future battles considerably easier.
Selling ankheg shells has made us moderately wealthy so we started by buying spells and a wand of sleep plus some amulets and scrolls at the carnival.
Unfortunately Greywolf kept saving against our spells and Gnomus ended up dead. I also was badly hurt so I cast sanctuary before killing Greywolf with the One Gift Lost. It took three blasts. I levelled up and went to a temple to raise Gnomus. 400gp - Ouch!
We headed back to the mines and were ambushed by bandits. Gnomus was again killed. [He should have been wearing armour] Raising him again reduced our gold to 48 !!!
We spoke to Prism and our reputation was raised to 19.
An ambush by a ghast was quite welcome as it raised the levels of Gnomus so that he can now cast mirror image!
We picked up a ring that protects from fire, met a gnome who gave us a pfm scroll and took Samuel to the FAI.
Reputation now 20. We needed more ankheg shells so that we can go on a shopping spree.
After killing a few ankheg we went for Bassilus. With the aid of buffed skeletons he didn't prove to be a problem though one of the skeletons died.
We used the influx of gold to buy the army scythe and dagger of venom. We sold three +1 daggers that are no longer required.
We now feel a lot more secure in our ability to take on the current potential enemies, ambushes no longer being a cause for concern.
We were able to kill all the sirines in the Lighthouse Area plus one that awakened us whilst resting. Skeletons did a lot of the work being immune to poison and charm.
Skeletons were also useful against the flesh golems even though their attacks were ineffective.
As I often do, I backstabbed Perth in Brynnlaw. However, this time I rolled really low on damage and he actually survived, forcing me to dodge a potential timestop by running outside and returning with my party for secret word + breach:
The other island sidequests were quickly done, and we moved into the Asylum, where I had some trouble getting Bhaal to follow me inside the library. It must have taken me about 20 attempts, and he just wouldn't come with me to meet Imoen - until it suddenly worked, even though I did nothing special:
Now things get interesting - since this is truly a full SCS installation, we lose all of our gear in Spellhold. I have prepared my spellbooks for this with extra summoning spells, and spells to summon magical weapons (such as MMMs). For the most parts, we get fire elementals and aerial servants to do a lot of the work, and fallen summons are replaced by spirit animals - we assist those with buffs for tougher battles, such as the portal pit fiend:
The enchant weapon spell allows Ung to fight on against all the monsters here that need magical or even +3 weapons to hit them. Traps are also a useful tool in our arsenal when fighting opponents that are just too dangerous to face directly:
On the big undead spawn, we didn't get a lich, but 2 bone golems, a greater mummy, some more mummies and skeleton warriors. Easy enough with some MMM kiting, summons and the like:
And even without any magical items, Ung and his rage is enough to take down Dace:
Trolls are quite easy with this setup - both fire elementals and MMMs do great against them. I was a bit scared of Livia running into Bodhi, so I had her go in invisibly to check things out, heavily buffed up - the vampires scattered a bit, giving us a good opportunity to reveal ourselves in order to take minimal damage:
Another round of traps for the ulitharid:
And we summon an earth elemental to help out with the three clay golems. After we obtain our boots, we turn towards Irenicus. As per usual, we already take him down to "I have to flee-HP" while he casts his clone spell. Strangely enough, the clones stay friendly throughout the entire fight (I even had death spell prepared for them):
The city of caverns isn't much of a challenge, it mostly serves as a source of some easy experience and a piece of the wave halberd for us. In contrast, the Underdark is where things get quite dangerous, and we're happy we have gained all that extra experience from playing SoD and doing the NPC sidequests. First challenge is the balor, where we buff everyone with fire resistance, death ward and CC and count on a quick kill, which we get:
I started the elemental portals sidequest without thinking much about it. This was a big mistake. The earth elemental portal turned out to maybe be the most dangerous fight we had encountered in this run so far - primary reason: The earthquake spell cast by the greater earth elemental. Earthquake has some pretty tough saving throws (-6) - and my chaotic commands, who, according to the wiki, do protect against the unconsiousness effect, had already run out (I started casting them right after entering the underdark, to deal with the triple mind flayer group to the north). As a result, everyone except for Livia and Octavia gets knocked down - and the earth elementals can quickly kill anyone who can't move and gets automatically hit:
The knockdown lasts for 4 rounds. Livia tries to backstab one of the elementals to death using invisibility potions, but her damage is too pitiful. Octavia summons magical swords, physical-immune distractions for the elementals, though they don't take the bait. I get very lucky here - as the four rounds are over, everyone is still alive - I pause and hand out invisibility potions, and the party actually remains entirely alive, despite the odds:
That was rough. Needless to say, I have to rest, and I make sure to learn 6*protection from fire and protection from lightning spells, as I intend to take the other elemental gates very seriously. They, however, turn out to be super easy anyway - nothing these elementals have is nearly as powerful as earthquake. Notably, the air elementals do NOT use the new level 6 whirlwind ability that the aerial servants in SoD used - these are still the only hostile air elementals that I have seen using that one, and they were the first ones I encountered.
We take down the drow parties and free the prisoners in the central structure before moving to the kuo-toa caverns. A 70 damage backstab on Livia serves as a quick scare, but luckily, there's no followup:
Octavia speeds up fighting the massive amounts of kuo-toa with a delayed blast fireball:
We buff up to clear the drow party at the underdark gates, starting with a backstab:
The prince is a pushover, and we gain access to our first HLAs at this point (summoning celestials seems the most useful at this point) - Octavia's planetar makes its debut against the demon knights:
Nibel is at cleric level 14, but I want level 15 skeleton warrios before entering the beholder hive, so I take on the illithid city first. For that, we buff up a lot as we can't rest there with SCS - protection from magical energy on 5 party members (Ung only gets the belt for 50% resistance), the usual chaotic commands (we can't push everyone's saving throws low enough yet, though I guess I could have done so for a few party members - that would've been better), oils of speed, some heroism/invulnerability/giant strength and defense potions. The ballistic attacks SCS mind flayers can use to deal crushing damage are the most important threat here - the fact that Ung is not immune to magical damage helps, as they still spend time on using detonate, which does very little. Most of the party has great AC and high intelligence, so we don't get close to a death. The spell descriptions do lie to me, however - I had given Nibel Symbol of Pain as his first 7th level spell, as it now has no saving throw and the spell description clearly states that it only affects enemies. That seems to be wrong, as we suffer friendly fire:
Still, we make our escape before the oils of speed even run out:
Speaking with the prisoners does grant Ung the desired cleric level 15, and we use the skeleton warriors to clear out the beholder hive. Easy enough in the beginning:
The two elder orbs, though, have actual death spells, not just death rays, so we need more summons - we send in celestials, spirit animals and new skeletons - for a short moment, Livia, who serves as a stealthed scout, gets revealed, but luckily, she's immune to everything thrown at her:
We're down to only a few summons, but we take down the final elder orb:
Dorn joined us and taking on Kryll was straightforward. We then bade him farewell.
We joined up with Xzar and Montaron. Xzar was left in an outbuilding at the FAI. Montaron's excellent pickpocketting gained us Algernon's Cloak, a web scroll, Edventar's Gift, the Kneecapper hammer and a few minor scrolls.
We bade him farewell there and bought the greenstone amulet.
We killed a pack of wolves east of Beregost.
We sold a lot of equipment in order to buy the Robe of the Good Archmage.
The two of us are now pretty well equipped and I now have aconstitution of 20.
Minsc joined us and upon finding Dynaheir she also joined us.
We had no problems with the basilisks and Mutamin. Stinking cloud neutralised Mutamin and web did the same for the party of adventurers.
We rested at the FAI.
We then went in search of Arghain. Now Minsc has an unbreakable +1 sword. Alternatively he can use the +1 mace from Beregost.
To win the wizard duels, gating in a planetar is basically enough. Meanwhile, we also have to kill Qilue. Her wizards were surprisingly slow to obtain significant physical protections, so a quick assault was all that was needed:
Traps were used for the second Phaere quest, we went the peaceful/tricky route for anything else. I suffered a dispel when fighting the slime priests, forcing a second rest:
Deirex would be the first lich we would face, but it turns out I overbuffed for him, thanks to the iMoD:
We did use our buffs (and renewed some short-lasting ones) to clear house Jae'llat:
Now, we just had to execute the egg swap, which was easy enough, and leave the Underdark.
Outside, we ran into Kruin while quite unprepared, but making full use of our HLAs gave us a quick victory nonetheless (also, Livia herself has good enough unbuffed saving throws (at least against spells and death, which are the most important) to avoid almost any type of surprising crowd control or instant death spells:
After visiting Cromwell, we travelled to the graveyard with equipped helms of charm protection and let the iMoD take care of the vampire ambush:
No reason to go after Bodhi yet, I just wanted to clear the place for resting (good for city activities, as it saves the time of walking to an inn when, for example, preparing new sequencers/contingencies - btw, I should mention that I'm running 3*secret word and 3*pierce magic sequencers/triggers, and sometimes a 3*pierce magic chain contingency when I'm going to face a powerful spellcaster (such as a lone lich). I took some time to clear the newly unlocked forest areas. After that, I returned to the graveyard to face Bodhi. Ung did most of the work by himself:
For Bodhi, I had some sunrays prepared and used energy blades for more damage. Livia had a vampire on her and got level drained once (before going invisible), but the battle was pretty easy over all. On tactical, Bodhi doesn't get her most powerful SCS abilities, so I didn't buff everyone with protection from cold, which would've been needed otherwise:
Now, time for all the loose ends left from earlier chapters - liches, dragons, mind flayers, guarded compound, twisted rune and WK statues + level 2. This involves a lot of buffing up, and we need to protect these buffs as much as possible, so expect to see SI:A/Spell shield plus Entropy Shield/ISOM a lot. Livia and Ung don't have that luxury, but both have negative spell saving throws, Ung can enrage, and Livia has avoid death and (greater) evasion if more defenses are needed. We start off at the city gates and just throw our pierce magic contingency/spell trigger + breach at the lich:
Next, we move against the elemental/shade liches. Both of these died to failed iMoD saving throws or Daystar hits before their buffs went up. For the elemental lich, I got this long succession of saving throws for Octavia in my log, and I have no idea what they were rolled for:
Things got a lot more interesting when facing the alhoon. We have experience with mind flayers, and I avoided chaotic commands on Livia and Ung this time around to encourage some more stun/domination attack attempts (which wouldn't work due to their great saving throws, but aren't as dangerous as detonate/ballistic attacks). I kind of forgot how powerful of a spellcaster the alhoon is in SCS and didn't rest after visiting the shade lich, so I had no SI:A/Entropy Shield up. It was easy enough to isolate the powerful foe:
My oversight allowed him to dispel our buffs - and Kriemhild, unlike Livia and Ung, doesn't have unbuffed negative spell saving throws, so she immediately got stunned by the alhoon - he had black blade of disaster active, so no intelligence damage, but real hits instead - however, he died shortly before he would've taken Kriemhild down:
Still, that will teach me to be more carefull with my buffs.
Dragons don't get their HP buff on tactical, so both of them died super early on - Firkraag was able to use his dispel, but only in the moment of his demise:
Next, the guarded compound. I did trigger the acid slime trap when moving upstairs, but that allowed me to take out the enemy wizard extremely quickly. With true sight in the mix to avoid enemy backstabs, that basically sealed the deal:
The Twisted Rune was a bit more interesting. The lich turned out to be quite good at survival, with a huge variety of protections, the ability to quickly renew them and go invisible for a time - I ended up taking down Vaxall first. Having three energy blade users really adds a lot to our damage output:
Livia used the gem of true seeing, allowing us to finally pierce and breach the lich:
I have no idea what Layene did in the meantime - whatever it was, it certainly didn't hurt us very much. I did throw a flaming cloud into her part of the map early on, but she seemed to be well protected - still, when she finally approached us, she had no physical immunity going, so she didn't pose much of a challenge:
On to Kangaxx. It seems like SCS has finally decided to add protection from magical energy into his arsenal in his demi-lich form - because I tried my usual "kill his lich form and triple sunray his demi-lich form" strategy, but that wasn't enough. Kangaxx (who had already hurt the party with an ADHW as part of his chain contingency) was able to cast his timestop, and during that, he tried to imprison Ung. The berserker enraged immediately after the timestop, which was enough to save him - interestingly, Kangaxx tried to imprison him yet again, which seems strange to me - I though the SCS AI doesn't do that to targets that are clearly immune. In any case, we started to deal some damage as PFMW was gone by now, especially Kriemhild with Daystar was doing a lot - specifically, the added magical damage against undead. So, I think I might have breached PFME away, or there was another reason why my sunrays didn't do the job. A bit strange, because I'm not sure if I was able to get a successful breach spell through. In any case, Daystar's great for this. Kangaxx, already near death, unveiled the devastating 3*remove magic sequencer (and it seems like Agrippina's entropy shield had already run out). A followup might have been deadly, but luckily, the demi-lich was destroyed before that could happen:
On to the WKI statues. We open up with a dragon's breath:
We're able to stay on one of the statue wizards, but the other gets to cast a (very defensive) timestop:
They're both trying to flee into adjecent rooms, but as their buffs run our or we're done dealing with their allies, we can focus on secret word/breach combinations and take them down:
Downstairs, we clear the four elemental libraries. When fighting the guardian of air (buffed with protection from lightning spells) we encounter whirlwind - for the first time since SoD:
A quick frost protection spell helps with the dangerous ice golem, and we prepare for the chromatic demon with some fire damage spells - in particular, a triple delayed blast fireball CC:
Our party is, of course, fully protected from fire, and we spam firestorm, more delayed blast fireballs, flamestrike etc. - we get the kill before the demon switches out of ice form:
Buying a few potions and scrolls rounds off our time in Amn. The elven city awaits.
Magical swords are a great help against groups of dangerous golems:
And Livia still can do work with her backstabs:
The black dragon was a bit of a disappointment. He didn't even use his insect plague, he just fell over:
So did Irenicus at the tree. I intentionally didn't use any traps to give him a chance, but just the auto attacks were enough to end things prematurely:
Since I had all these buffs still going, I used them to go after wraith Sarevok and the beholder group for the hell trials. The latter part was a bit sketchy, though even an elder orb couldn't get easily through my protections, especially since we mostly attacked from range with a planetar in front, allowing only one of the beholders to attack us at a time. The Elder Orb, however, used a dangerous and somewhat unexpected tripe cone of cold spell trigger, which almost killed Nibel and Octavia, who ended up surviving at 10 hitpoints:
SCS has diversified its damage sources (from mostly fire + magical to all types, though acid is still rare - I've encountered a dangerous 3*chain lightning spell trigger as well, and the new high level spells, which I haven't encountered yet so far, should provide even more options) - this is also why you'll constantly see Livia herself being buffed with cold protection as well, something I never used to do (the harper pin already protects her from lightning, and fire protection is pretty standard, although her item-based one is high already).
So, we do all trials the good way and prepare for Jon - traps only to the edges of the combat area to help with the balors. We take down the demons first. Jon has a ton of protections, we try to get through a few of them with our various pierce magics and secret words, but are somehow unable to do so. Still, at some point, his absolute immunity (or PFMW, not sure what he used) just runs out and we beat him to death - his aggressive actions have been mainly limited to physical attacks, which do hurt, but are not nearly enough to kill anyone:
Well, that was easy. Let's also get at least to Saradush. This is the non-Ascension SCS version of Ilasera, who doesn't use all these special archer attacks, instead mostly being a high level spellcaster (she, similiar to the alhoon or the planar prison warden, relies on Black Blade of Disaster to deal damage, while protecting herself with a whole bunch of things). While we take down her allies as fast as possible, Kriemhild and Octavia remove her magic protections and breach her (due to a PFMW contingency they also have to do so a second time):
Now to meet the first real challenge in the SCS version of ToB - the first pocket plane challenge. The encounter with Irenicus, Bodhi and Sarevok is not at all an easy one. Our opening is fairly strong, with true sight and dragon's breath in the mix, but I forgot about Bodhi's insect plague, so my spellcasters aren't protected against that:
Irenicus was able to dispel Nibel (whose entropy shield seems to have run out) and Ung. Meanwhile, Jon stops time, casting mordenkainen's force blade and phantom door - he'd go on to attack Kriemhild and almost kill her with the force blade, as her stoneskins were seemingly already weak:
Since Nibel and Ung have lost their buffs, Irenicus' flaming cloud deals a lot of damage to them, and Bodhi also takes chunks out of Ung's life. Kriemhild obviously has to retreat. To keep Jon busy and under pressure, Agrippina calls in Sunnis. Meanwhile, I decide to try and kill Bodhi before Nibel and Ung retreat, as she's been near death for a while now - they succeed, both badly wounded, while Livia, Octavia and Kriemhild make sure to kite Sarevok:
Meanwhile, Irenicus casts improved alacrity, but since everyone has moved eastwards, he has to waste time walking up to the party as it takes down Sarevok. Nibel heals himself, the others use healing potions, and Irenicus approaches with a meteor - luckily, this is the weakest HLA he could've unleashed on us, as we see the target early and can move them away so others don't get hurt (Ung, in this case - he also drinks a fire resistance potion) - meanwhile, we're throwing our spell triggers and sequencers at Jon to break his defenses:
Jon's teleport field doesn't hinder our ranged attacks, and we're finally able to breach and kill our foe:
I'm not going to lie, that was a bit rough - then again, this battle is usually quite the difficulty spike with SCS installed.
Ah yeah, the triple Cone of Cold Spell Trigger. Ate that one once tackling the Drow party guarding the Underdark exit, good times.
Triple Disintegrate is another piece of nastiness, though maybe SCS doesn't do that anymore, haven't seen it for a while.
Also once had the Pirate Mage in the hideout behind the Sea's Bounty toss a triple Vitriolic Sphere Spell Sequencer at the protagonist when I was arrogant enough to not even pre-buff with MSD (fortunately damage rolls were low).
We enter Saradush. During the Kiser sidequest, the mage is able to cast his timestop (he uses PFMW, but we're unable to get through his stoneskins with normal weapons before the cast is finished) - the rule changes to imprisonment in newer SCS versions seem to encourage its use by the AI, but, just like against Kangaxx, Ung simply enrages right after timestop ends:
For the other wizards we encounter in Saradush, quick energy blade attacks or backstabs do the job, sometimes I have to switch to normal weapons, but no wizard chess is generally needed:
The vampires all die to the iMoD, and we face Gromnir. We now have access to all the new spells, and the one we actually end up using a lot is telekinetic storm, which is kind of like ADHW with a little less damage, but no necromancy school, so our illusionist can use it (it also hits faster and works against all types of enemies) - so, we finally have a powerful chain contingency option:
Kharun the Black dies to our energy blades before his buffs activate, the other wizard uses PFMW and is killed with normal weapons while the energy blade users (who can't switch to normal weapons) kill Gromnir:
So, we move through the north forest towards the temple. Sunray + telekinetic storm for the master wraith:
The skeleton wizard provides us with our first fallen planetar battle. Ung and Livia both get dispelled and stay away from the planetar while the protected party members destroy the celestial:
Since the skeleton wizard is on the top of their physical immunity buffs, we use pierce magic and ruby ray before breaching and killing it:
Since I still had a lot of spellslots left, I decided to move a bit into the fire giant temple (with fire resistance spells for everyone). Using my preferred strategy for the opening fire giant ambush (enter invisibly, use a magical sword to gather up the fire giant, cast nature's beauty to blind all of them without a chance for a saving throw, take them down at range), I cleared part of the area, but left when I ran low on impactful spells, as I wanted to do EE companion quests first:
Before we get access to Amkethran, we can only do the Rasaad's and Neera's quests. Rasaad's is easier, so we start with that (and do it without resting). Some standard buffs and a few improved hastes make way for big AoE (dragon's breath) for the group before we enter the shadow realm. The shadow dragon isn't too hard to kill, as we call in a bunch of summons to keep Algoroth busy:
As per usual, the escape takes a while because Rasaad just doesn't want to go, sowe take a bunch of damage on the way out, but eventually, we make it:
There's a TON of loot to get from this quest, which gave us enough gold to buy all the remaining spellscrolls for Kriemhild before swapping her out for Neera again. The red wizard ambush is countered by some traps, telekinetic storm, storm of vengeance and the like:
Two red wizards escape the area effect, one of them casts disintegrate on Neera, which could potentially end the quest right here - luckily, we are able to throw her a potion of stone form to get her to a guaranteed saving throw, and we are able to survive unscathed:
We fight through the arena, which is easy enough, before buffing up for Vicross' estate. Disarming traps, taking down red wizards and guards around the outside, we make sure to move towards Vicross from the east (because we can easily take down the dispel trap from that way). Vicross can be a really tough fight, especially with SCS (because she can summon multiple balors via rigged wild surges, and SCS balors aren quite dangerous), but it seems like she forgot protection from magical energy in her list of prebuffs and died to a 3* telekinetic storm contingency that I had prepared just before moving in:
Szass Tam luckily sends us back before his buffs fire up, and we recruit Kriemhild again to continue at the Marching Mountains. The fire lich has a record number of PFMW buffs, but he acts very slowly - because his spell protections are extensive and I'm feeling lazy, we just move out of sight whenever he refreshs PFMW until he's out of that spell:
Since we're getting too many potions for our potion bag, we drink a bunch of them and call in an elemental prince and planetar to help deal with Brimstone and Berenn:
The Wave gets its only use against the prince of fire:
Nyalee is defeated, and we face Yaga-Shura. Turns out that the super high and slowly reducing damage resistance is apparently either not in on tactical mode or its a feature of ascension, not of SCS, so he dies within a round:
Since we can only refresh provisions at inns, I also make sure to clear the Oasis to get acess to Amkethran before stopping for now. The new and improved elemental swarm is a good way to level the playing field against big groups of enemies when starting without any buffs:
After a problem with the last save we were faced at the start of the session with redoing the sirines in Shoal's area. That can lead to carelessness, but the gap of a week probably minimized that chance. Merlin was charmed by the final sirine just before it died, but that was no great problem.
Meilum's bracers were the next target and Hotstuff deployed a favourite tactic there of initially using glitterdust to blind him before applying a more permanent blindness effect to make finishing him off easy. Moving on to Gullykin, Molkar and his cronies were encased in webs and stinking clouds before being attacked. Hotstuff got too close to the area effects and was incapacitated for a while, which meant Morvin managed to outlast the spell durations - but Hotstuff redeemed himself with a quick blindness to ensure there were no problems in finishing the job.
Using knock also gained us a second +1 sling from one of the halfling houses.
Looking for some quick XP, we moved on to Durlag's Tower next. Blindness and magic missiles took care of the battle horrors before PfP allowed us to deal with some basilisks. Coremage was stunned by the trap on re-entering the tower and while he was out of action, the others picked up the tome (Hotstuff demonstrating his elvish resistance to charm in the process) and fooled Riggilo into accepting a dodgy headpiece before blinding him for disposal.
With levels making the odd hit on us less of a concern, we moved on to the Nashkel Mine. Mulahey was webbed there and given no chance to call for help.
Outside, the amazons also failed to break free from web / stinking clouds. The same happened to Nimbul, who bequeathed a find familiar scroll to Merlin (though writing this up, I don't think he's actually got around to making use of that yet ).
After Tranzig was beaten up, we went to High Hedge to dispose of some equipment and buy Robes of the Archmagi for Merlin and Coremage. There was one slightly dodgy moment there when Coremage saw an opportunity to use his wand of fire to roast a group of skeletons, just as Merlin moved to attack them - his ring of fire resistance helped him survive reasonably comfortably.
At the Bandit Camp, Merlin tended to lead the way on the grounds that the bandit archers needed a critical as a result of wearing appropriate boots and belt. They did get a couple of those, but without causing undue alarm. We'd bought a few spells in High Hedge and that allowed us to go invisibly into the tent and use blindness and webs to give the defenders no real chance.
Coremage quaffed a potion of absorption to avoid any danger from the trap there.
In the Cloakwood, invisibility was used to trigger the webs in the second area and we moved swiftly on to the mine. Drasus' companions were blinded there initially and the same happened to him once he was incapacitated.
There was the odd comment during the session about the one-sided nature of some of these combats, but no-one seemed to be worrying too much about being fair to the opponents .
Inside the mine there were no problems in moving down to the bottom level. The battle horrors there were drawn back individually and blinded before Coremage used a potion of magic blocking to attack Davaeorn. The 5 round duration of that though proved not quite enough and Coremage was held. Davaeorn followed that up by casting a summon monster spell, which looked like bad news for Coremage. Merlin and Hotstuff had been hanging back, but Merlin decided to help out by going to make Coremage invisible. There was a slight risk in doing that as I was fairly sure that Coremage had not set off one of the traps in the corridor when he initially moved through there. That did inflict damage, but not enough to cause a problem. Davaeorn was now out of spells and was duly cut down.
We ended the session by moving on to Baldur's Gate and buying a few more spells at Sorcerous Sundries.
We enter Amkethran and start with the sidequests. Vongoethe is the one worth mentioning - I decide to not go for traps, so we have a fight on our hands - the lich is able to dispel Livia and Ung:
As we start taking down his allies and working on his spell protections, he stops time, calling in some HLAs in the process - dragon's breath we can easily evade, a fallen planetar is quickly taken down:
Finally, we're able to chain enough ruby ray/pierce magic spells in order to breach the lich:
Time for the final 2 EE companion quests - we recruit Dorn and make it through the planetar of justice ambush with some heavy HLA usage:
After buffing up, we enter Celestia - no significant challenges here - we take down the scribe, one of the silver dragons dies to traps we had prepared when moving in:
Hexxat's ToB quest is arguably the easiest one - some greater mummies, some sand golems, a tiny amount of beholders and a few bonefiends before yet another lich battle. This one is great at going invisible whenever we're about to breach him, so we have to repeat the spell a few times while detecting illusions and sometimes dispelling new spell protections:
We're done with EE stuff now and enter Sendai's Enclave. Didn't expect telekinetic storm to take down a hive mother:
We rotate improved haste buffs on Ung to speed clearing up the hordes of myconids, drow, spiders, duergar etc. - Odamaron is our first serious opponent, and he does a bit of damage to us with a horrid wilting and dragon's breath (mostly evaded). We take a while to get through his buffs and have to contend with the spells of the lich and the apprentice added into this battle by SCS - however, once his physical protections drop, we have both the iMoD and the Runehammer equipped:
The same fate befalls the apprentice:
Meanwhile, the lich actually manages to imprison Kriemhild (before dying to an "undead destroyed" effect as well):
However, a quick visit to the pocket plane where Octavia memorizes freedom, and we're back to our full party. This also means we have fresh buffs - we face Ogremoch next:
We lay down a few traps for safety before facing Diaytha, which get triggered by the teleporting demon knight:
With a planetar at the front, we move into the room - Ung gets dispelled, but that's no trouble, his enrage and high hit point pool protects him from pretty much everything:
The hive mother falls fairly quickly, and Livia wins her duel by kiting the captain until one of her kuo-toa bolts manages to stun him and she can use assassinate to finish the fight.
For the mind flayer ambushes, we take advantage of the energy blades hitting as +6 weapons, because these wizards here use improved mantle, leaving them vulnerable:
We still have a good amount of buffs but want fresh spells for Sendai, so we take the opportunity to do the second pocket plane challenge - Octavia gets fully dispelled here, hiding via staff of the magi:
Now we face Sendai. We get the lucky double elemental prince trigger and have the planetar from Dorn's quest in addition to our own one, so our forces are pretty overwhelming, even for multiple Sendai's at once:
The two wizard Sendai clones are of course the real danger here, but as I noticed the Dorn planetar managing to remove magic on one of them, I realized that their level might not be that high - though Octavia had already dispelled the other wizard a few times and was ready to breach, but a dragon's breath interrupted her:
Our planetar heals her, we follow up with remove magic and it does the job - the real Sendai spawns, but immediately dies to intial physical attacks:
We killed Droth and Shoal, delivered a ring and killed some sirine beforegoing down the Nashkel mines. Everything straightforward. We recruited Xan and killed the Amazons before going to the carnival to rest.
The belt that we had found on Gorion's body was quite useful when we were attacked by two winter wolves whilst resting outside the Nashkel Mines.
We have now reached the Bandit camp and will loot as much as we can without fighting.
I tried different tactics to see how it worked. Xan charmed Taurgosz instead of attacking him. It worked to an extent. He killed a few bandits but the charm didn't really last long enough. However when the charm wore off he had nobody to help him so disposing of him was straightforward.
At least the battle was a little different this time.
The battle in the tent was staightforward. Minsc used the pink phial found outside to all but kill three of them who followed him outside to be killed by the skeletons waiting there. Then the entire party entered to finish of Hakt who hadn't followed.
My paladin Jelia and her party of Valygar, Imoen, Sarah, Aerie, and Isra have successfully finished Shadows of Amn. Of note is that the Rhynn Lanthorn quest forced us to take on some extra opponents whom the paladin Jelia would rather not have tangled with- she left alone several quests that weren't entirely moral. My play was a bit slapdash but in this install I switched off HLAs for the most part for SoA so it was a bit of an old school BG2 feel which was nice, but somewhat less dangerous. Think I'll park her for now again, ToB seems like a chore for now even with the Ascension fight waiting at the end. Rather hoping that one or two of my friends who've got into BG3 will be interested in coming back around to multiplayer 1&2 at some point. Happy gaming.
We decided to tackle Watcher's Keep level 3-5 next, to gain a bunch of experience and some powerful new weapons before we tackle Abazigal. The randomized teleporter maze was always going to be one of the bigger challenges of this run (as we are playing with full SCS, but not Ascension, so the final battle shouldn't be as overwhelmingly difficult compared to the rest). The main issue here is, due to the unpredictable nature of the map and the likelihood of teleporting into one of the two no-magic zones, you will almost never be buffed in any way before walking into a bunch of demons - rebuffing is rather pointless if there's a decent chance you will lose all your buffs when walking through the very next portal (ideal play would propably still involve that, but I don't think the time investment is justifiable and it would certainly be no fun at all). The most dangerous situations involve going directly from a no-magic zone into a dangerous battle (the two named demons or the demon wraith especially), because the no-magic debuff can last for a short time after leaving the zone (I would guess that it is tied to the round timer), so you can not always instantly start buffing.
I always use a hand-drawn map for the randomized maze (my memory is not good enough to remember where every single portal I walked through takes us). I did start with some buffs in the hope we wouldn't immediately teleport into a no-magic zone - that was a futile hope, we went right into the no-magic zone with the balor. Unbuffed we don't want to melee that demon, but we have very good ranged weapon skills for such an occasion. Our 3*telekinetic storm cc triggered (contingencies or item-based abilities don't care about the spell failure debuff), taking down some of the demons, and we shot down the Balor:
From there we teleported right to Tahazzar - our party is completely neutral, so I was about to make a deal with him, when, suddenly, another dialogue started up (with us doing nothing in between) and he decided to attack us:
I wasn't ready for that - we still had the no-magic debuff on us as you can see, so I decided to flee through the portal I arrived at and arrived at the quasits in their wild-magic zone - relatively easy to take down unless you get unlucky with their wild surges, which I did - I took a lot of damage here, which forced me to return to the pocket plane to rest. This also meant I had a new telekinetic storm CC, which was very helpful when I ran into the tieflings at the next portal:
So, from this wild magic zone we walked into Ka'rashur. This time, I decided to stay and fight, as at least we didn't have any spell failure debuff still active. Buffing Ung with improved haste so he could go head to head with the named devil while we called a planetar and elemental prince in were our first moves, and Nibel used recitation which is just generally always helpful - Ung used critical strike and started dealing massive damage:
A quick follow-up - prayer, stoneskins and energy blades - and with Ka'rashur gone, the cleanup wasn't all that difficult (Tahazzar is much more dangerous):
We had a few buffs now, but instead of keeping them, we ran right into the next no-magic zone, the one with the pit fiend - here, we had Livia disarm traps before moving forward and had our two item-based fear immunities (runehammer and the dragonslayer longsword) ready - Agrippina can't equip any of these, so she still got feared:
We moved on and entered the glabrezu room, which is one of the most dangerous ones due to the massive SCS buffs to these guys (and their high numbers). Luckily, you always start out of sight of these guys to the north-west and can recognize the room via the distinct obelisk - this allowed us to go to the pocket plane and buff up for this fight (for once). Now, the key was to quickly dispel PFMWs that these glabrezus are constantly throwing up and not get overwhelmed by the summons - Ung took a lot of damage, but glabrezu numbers really started to go down quickly when Ocatavia was able to hit a large number of these with a remove magic:
Sadly, we teleported right back to one of the (now-cleared) no magic zone after that, losing our buffs. Shortly after, we found the demon knight room - turns out this cambion is a thief - who would've guessed? Luckily, Octavia survived:
Next, we ran into the succubi - easy enough, we have item-based charm immunities for everyone, just had to move some gear around. We were looking to get back to Tahazzar, and after some travelling I was able to find a portal from the glabrezu room back to the balor no-magic room which I already knew lead to Tahazzar. This meant we would 100% start without buffs and possibly a round of spell failure - luckily, the spell failure debuff immediately disappeared this time around. I left my anti-charm items on (Tahazzar has a succubus) and opened like I did against Ka'rashur - However, Tahazzar is a balor and has much better defenses and more dangerous spells (no fire protection buffs on us, so his firestorm was a bit dangerous, and his aura of flaming death made it hard for Ung to go after him). Livia used her gem of true seeing and we went after the other demons first while casting heal on Ung and kiting Tahazzar around, shooting him at range:
Now we had to find the demon wraith - which took us a while. Turns out the only way to him was another path from the balor no-magic zone, so we once again entered without buffs, and this time, the spell failure buff persisted for a while (felt longer than one round, honestly) - This made it impossible to start buffing right away, so we used some item-based buffs/summons to start things off and Livia started detecting traps so we could move around more freely. In his opening moves, the demon wraith shot a 3*chain lightning spell trigger at us - luckily, I paused the game before that one hit us but after it was fired off, so I was able to go deep into my bag of holding to find all kinds of lightning resistance items and spread them around the party, and I was able to get everyone to at least ~80 lightning resistance, making this not much of a threat (this is, so far, the only time I made use of any of the resistance items that I keep in my bag for just such an occasion - I pondered selling them a few times, but now I'm happy I kept them). Another opening spell was some type of chaos variant, which affected Agrippina (who has our worst spell saving throws). Livia had protected herself with greater evasion (the first time I used that one, but it goes through spell failure) and the spell failure buff was still going, massively reducing our options for the second round of combat:
The demon wraith moved towards us and spell failure finally disappeared. I had Octavia attack Agrippina with the staff of the magi, which seemed like the best way to get rid of the confusion effect while working on our opponents spell protections with our spell triggers. Nibel started calling in a deva:
My spell triggers didn't do anything and I realized that I had missed a spell trap in the demon wraith's prebuffs. Kriemhild used ruby ray and Octavia cast spellstrike, and finally we got rid of these spell protections:
Breach via wand of spell striking from Livia, and we started dealing damage:
Surprisingly, the demon wraith cast imprisonment on an already raging Ung - the second time this happened in this playthrough so far. It seems SCS is not good at recognizing the berserker enrage and its immunities:
We followed up with implosion and HLA fighter attacks, which granted us victory:
We lose every bet against the cambion - no spectral brand for our druid
Time for level 4 - much easier in total. The gith aren't much of a challenge:
Saladrex is able to dispel only a few of Ung's buffs before dying:
Now we have the demi-lich. Livia stays outside, everyone else has some kind of imprisonment protection. Our foe uses timestop + improved alacrity, throws down greater malison, a fallen planetar and a dragon's breath - which hurts Ung, but the others are protected:
Since the lich still has protections, we quickly kill the planetar while Kriemhild and Octavia once again use spell triggers, ruby ray and spellstrike - we also need truesight before we can breach:
The breach goes through and we start dealing damage. Kriemhild's Daystar is super effective against demi-liches, the bonus-damage is not affected by the high damage resistance of our foe:
Now we have to face the illithids. I secure Livia with PFME, the others take some damage from detonate, but never too much. Rock and Garock get HLA'd:
We used Lum's machine, buff Ung with frost resistance, take down the golems and do the orb puzzle in the next level before doing the imp riddle and using green scrolls of poison protection before taking on the green dragon (not needed, it dies immediately):
We deal with the orc horde and the spirit warrior maze (using the safest path). As we face the seal guardians, a quick note on traps: I've been using them very sparingly in this run, but there's only so many thief HLAs you can reasonably pick before investing in HLA traps (especially with our saving throws, its not like we need tons of greater evasions or avoid deaths - we do spread our trap points around, so its not fall spike traps), and not using them at all takes away a lot of power from the class. I'm never resting just to place more traps in this playthrough, but since we get tons of levels as a single-class thief, we basically always have more traps at the ready. I know where specific seal guardians spawn, so I place my party accordingly - with some damage from normal traps and a few explosion traps to take down some of its allies, the aurumach rilmani dies before they have a chance to stop time:
Some spare traps for Azamantes, and we're able to kill him before his buffs go up. The flaming skulls die immediately to "undead destroyed"-effects from runehammer and iMoD.
Now we do have to rest because we've not done so since some point in WKIII, and we want our regular protections available for the final seal guardian group. The traps are placed in order to take down the succubus - there's a time trap in there as well, but Livia doesn't do anything great with the opportunity. Kriemhild has recently reached level 9 wizard spells, so she has a 3*ADHW cc now in addition to Octavia's telekinetic storms. We focus our attacks on the hive mother:
The hive mother doesn't get a full dispel on any of us, so cleanup is quite easy:
We use the scroll of Helm and return to Amkethran to rest at the inn in order to regain supplies. Abazigal awaits.
I had been playing a fighter with ***** in slings using the sling of everadd. His party was doing great. On the way to Balthsazar he lost Imoen and Jaheira (good dragon in Underdark - needed her blood), Serena (a MP character who was a fighter/mage she died to Firkraag) and also got Sarevok chunked in my battle with Sendai. Ended up with two MP characers (fighter/thief and fighter/cleric), Keldorn, Mazzy and Aerie (who was pregnant). In the fight with Balthsazar I lost track of where Coreslinger was - was trying to lead Balthsazar to the traps at the entrance but late noticed Coreslinger was pinned by two monks and they quickly burned down his HP despite his -14 AC - RIP Coreslinger II.
New run is a bounty hunter (protagonist) and he has two MP characters (half-orc bersker) and a gnomish fighter/illusionist and so far have recruited Ajantis, Branwen, and Khalid (who is being used as an archer). Party low level about level 2 headed to basilisk's area.
Here we are, at Abazigal's Lair, facing Draconis - green acid protection scrolls and all available acid protection items equipped. The dragon is able to survive our initial onslaught, activate his buffs (though his summons die to our CC's) and start up a timestop:
We've moved away for a bit once we realized we wouldn't get through his protections before the timestop cast was finished, so he didn't get done much. Then, I realized that he was using PFWM instead of absolute immunity, and I saw no reason why he'd be immune to normal weapons (dragons usually aren't), so I switched to excellent weapons to try my luck - perfect:
Draconis changed into his true form - once again using PFMW as his physical protection. He did have stoneskins up, but with both Kriemhild and Ung attacking with a total of 20 apr those stoneskins didn't last too long - we were able to bring him down before any invisibility shenanigans or further dispels (Ung got hit with one earlier on, though it didn't remove everything):
The next big fight involves the double lizardmen shaman group (SCS exclusive), which can be extremely dangerous, but we still had most of our buffs so I rushed downstairs. Notably, I had my dragon's breath spells and was able to prepare new chain contingencies, ending the battle rather quickly in an orgy of AoE spell damage (still got hit by a creeping doom or insect plague, though):
We move on to the yellow dragon, who isn't as strong as some others of his kind and quickly yields (we did renew our SI:A/entropy shields for this):
Some cold protection spells, and we take down the prince of water:
Now we had to return to Amkethran for the rope. We place some traps as we leave to prepare for the quadruple dragon ambush, changing it into a triple dragon ambush in the process. Many buffs are prepared, including full fire protecitons, upon our return. However, on tactical this all isn't nearly as difficult as on insane. Without the extra HP for dragons, at this point, we just deal so much damage if they have no physical protections up that they don't last long enough to deal serious damage (I got hit by one poison breath, that's about it):
Now, we had to face the tyrant golems. Just for them, I got greater deathblow on Ung (they are low enough in level to get killed by this). He went in alone with his great saving throws and cloak of mirroring (which beholders can steal, but they will wait a short while before they do so):
The party rushed in to help with the death tyrants (they don't die to the deathblow) and we freed Bondari before turning to Abazigal. Lots of buffs, including some frost protections and full electricity protection. We have the planetar of justice and 3 magical swords (via cc) to help us out, and while we ran around, killing salamanders, the planetar distracted Abazigal until we returned and took his human form down:
Abazigal changed forms, and Kriemhild + Octavia used their spell triggers (Kriemhild currently had a breach in there, which turned out to be useful because Octavia's alone was enough to get rid of Abazigal's spell protections). It seems like Abazigal took a step to the east, because a second after that, he triggered some explosive traps I had placed near the entrance for safety:
With that damage added into the mix and the dragon still breached, this was maybe the fastest Abazigal battle I've ever fought:
All the extra dragons in this room I've often faced in previous SCS/Ascension runs seem to have been added by Ascension, as Abazigal was alone here (apart from the salamanders that are always there).
The fourth pocket plane challenge:
And we return to Amkethran, going invisible to visit Saemon. We buff up and use our chain contingencies for the monestary guards:
Balthazar seems to be suffering by not having ascension here as well. As far as I can tell, he only used his vanilla abilities (we took down his monks first, so he had some time to do stuff), nothing like the breach/dispel-attack he gets in his ascension version - this made the battle a bit easy, all we had to do was attack:
Now we have the Ravager. I decided against using traps to get a real battle here, but I prepared my chain contingencies and a spell trigger with lower resistance, which gave us huge magical damage right out of the gate:
Quick update on Corethief XXIX the gnomish bounty hunter:
Traveling with: Serena (berserker), Sarah (fighter/illusionist), Branwen, Shar-Teel, Khalid
The party is about level 4. Major areas cleared are Nashkel Mines, basilisks' area and ankhegs. Surprisingly with Serena's and Shar-Teel's AC of -4 they didn't take a single hit with the 13 ankhegs engaged. We were able to loot a lot of ankhegs and sell them to then order some Ankheg armor.
Things have been pretty smooth, except Ajantis got petrified in a basilisk ambush. The only problem about that is he had the Dexterity gauntlets and +1 medium shield from Bjornin but the run must continue. Since we have a berserker, sirines are our next target.
@Corey_Russell Grab a Potion of Mirrored Eyes, a scroll of Stone to Flesh and keep traveling in the same area where the ambush occurred. Eventually you'll trigger a new ambush, Ajantis' statue will be there, and you can revive and recruit him.
@Corey_Russell Grab a Potion of Mirrored Eyes, a scroll of Stone to Flesh and keep traveling in the same area where the ambush occurred. Eventually you'll trigger a new ambush, Ajantis' statue will be there, and you can revive and recruit him.
Yes I know about that, but didn't have money for mirror eyes. It's okay don't need him right now, can get him later if I get some chunkings.
The start to today's session was rather dodgy - and succeeded very quickly by the finish ...
We found ourselves in Sorcerous Sundries and walked upstairs to investigate. Merlin considered throwing a couple of webs out into the shadows, which would probably have made the fight simple, but didn't do that in case one of his companions walked into those. Instead, Hotstuff showed himself - though only after a group of 5 monsters were summoned with the aim they would act as cannon fodder for the enemy mages.
An immediate horror response proved extremely effective. Despite that, Merlin's chances at that stage still seemed pretty good, as only Coremage was further away from the enemies. However, only Merlin and an ogre ran towards them, while everyone else that was scared moved the other way. That led to Merlin soaking up two Melf's Acid Arrows from the next round of spells. A couple of hobgoblins did a good job of shooting down the opposition and we had the slight consolation of seeing the last of them collapse just before Merlin succumbed to the ongoing acid .
mea culpa on previous game - should have realised by talking to the mages I ran the chance of the multiplayer client quirk where the client game goes unresponsive for 10 seconds or so. My intention of retreating after talking came and went, and Hotstuff dragged her companions into early deaths by being the spellcasters initial target for a horror spell
The upside of Donna Summer's Hot Stuff song finally not reverberating through my head is nullified by feelings of clumsiness spoiling the session for my companions. Anyway on to:
Trio 62 - link to trio 61 conclusion Rusty - human male bard; lawful neutral (Gate70)
Lickle - half elf male conjurer; chaotic neutral (Grond0)
Coredual - human male berserker; chaotic good (Corey_Russell)
We rolled up 3 further victims and set about making ourselves personas non grata at Candlekeep in less than seven minutes.
Corey mentioned he couldn't see Grond0's charater portrait, as is often the case for me. To our surprise, Grond0 also said he couldn't see the portrait which was a bit of a surprise and maybe we'll sort it out for next time. On doing end-session screenshots I noted the larger portrait worked fine though
Shoal the nereid's death gave Rusty a first level, and a trio of gnolls playing with a stolen shortsword paid a similar price
We moved on to Beregost, blind-targeting any female spellcasters in our way (Neera and Silke then)
Down we went towards Nashkel picking on and up various encounters. By the time we arrived we'd grabbed a few potions. Coredual brushed dirt off ankheg armour and we shot Noober down before leaving.
Albert and Ruffie preceded Zal and Vax, then a quick tour of map destinations to the southwest before alighting at the gnoll fortress. At this point Coredual was keen to get the tome of leadership identified but Rusty stubbornly refused for the remainder of the game (his lore is only 25 at session close). Several other items remain unidentified for the same reason so our berserker endured a pack-horse situation where more and more heavy unidentified items land with him.
Our usual routes past a polar bear is once more followed, with a brace of winter wolf pelts making their way to Coredual at ambush sites. We bashed Bjornin's ogre-foes apart athen neutralised Teyngan and gang. On to Bassilus - figuring he'd have no answer to berserker fury, and this proved to be the case
Finally, back to High Hedge. Why return there you ask, apart from Lickle having used her non-proficient quarterstaff for much of the game. Skeletons donated throwing daggers to her cause, and while Coredual made one or two further comments Rusty noted that Lickle continued primarily in melee with her staff.
Our mystery tour of the wilds continued with Rusty not knowing where he trod (my memory of EE map navigation has merged with BGT/Tutu/original and all very blurry now - oh dear). Lickle at one point asked if Rusty was looking for a character with 100% magic resistance, Rusty knew who he meant but Coredual surprised by announcing the name (Borda) as soon as he realised who we were trying to remember the name of. We avoided him but Rusty was adept at running into the wildlife - usually at times where Lickle was hanging onto life as our attempts to rest were interrupted by angry hordes.
A few more quests and actions continued before Coredual mentioned ankhegs - he felt confident that his ankheg armour plus magical shield were up to the job. Which they were, despite at least 4 critical hits on him
With 1hour and 44 minutes on the clock we ran out of time and saved for another week. Characters and inventory
footnote:
Coredual can dual class to Conjurer or Thief with current stats
Livia, halfling thief - exploring SCS v35, final update
Notable additions for our final battle prebuffs are more potions (invulnerability, cloud giant strength (after a while, we would switch to storm giant strength), defense, later on also power and heroism and even magic shielding), but also, more importantly, the rare and extremely valuable spell immunity scrolls for Livia, useable via UAI (as spell immunity: abjuration to protect her buffs):
Just like against the Ravager, I had prepared the 3*ADHW/Telekinetic Storm CC's plus a 3*Lower Resistance spell trigger from Kriemhild, which she opened with in order to end the first battle rather quickly:
This is only the second time I've ever fought Melissan with SCS but not Ascension installed. The first time, I made use of traps (because I knew nothing about the SCS version of the battle) - this time, I decided to limit myself to 1 trap per battle, to give a slight damage boost and not invalidate all those HLA points, but not actually skip any battles. I also checked the SCS readme for any changes to Melissan, but it seems like she only gets an improved AI, no actual significant changes to the fights.
So, because battle 1 ended as soon as our chain contingencies hit, we still had all of our buffs. There are vampiric wraiths at the first pool, so only Kriemhild (who has Angurvadal) and Ung (who used enrage) took down the air elementals. We immediately activated the pool without any breaks or rebuffs (the others were a) setting a trap, b) calling in a planetar and c) calling in an elemental prince in the meantime) in order to make the most of our opening buffs. We called in Mel, activated fighter HLAs and just went to town. Amelyssan is woefully lacking in physical protections/prebuffs, compared to your typical lich, which she can only compensate with lots of hitpoints and resistances, but once we punch through her stoneskins the sheer amount of attacks per round amongst our party take her down way too fast for her to get threatening. One of her death tyrants was able to dispel Octavia, and that's the only thing that happened in this round. Octavia rebuffed with the most important stuff as I activated a few cold protection scrolls/spells for the next pool, as there's an ice golem involved.
We call in magical swords in the hope of stopping the incoming slayer shadows that join Mel's third incarnation and rebuff a little bit (new SI:A's/Entropy Shields, most importantly, also new improved haste for Ung and Kriemhild). I didn't really expect that the slayer shadows would still get stuck fighting the swords in SCS, as the AI improvements were most likely going to stop that - I called in Mel, moved to the north with the swords in place. My planetar from earlier was still around - 2 shadows followed the party, unbothered by the swords, but 2 stayed around and fought the planetar. After dealing some damage to Mel (and interrupting her next spell, most likely a timestop) we quickly switched to the slayer shadows near the party and took them down - the planetar down south even managed to vorpal one of their foes:
With that, its once again fighter HLAs and attacks (we also throw in a breach because our foe has some physical buffs, though no significant protections). Mel doesn't last for long.
For the final pool, Kriemhild gets to drink a wisdom potion, limited wish for timestop and keep casting from the 5 timestop scrolls I had assembled over the course of the game while taking down the fallen solar and its allies:
Now we rebuff - we still have everything ready we could've wished for, and we never got hit by a full dispel except for Octavia. Some more potions, and Octavia drinks a wisdom potion and starts wishing. 3 wishs later, nothing useful, but we also have 2 scrolls of wish - the first scroll grants us the rest option:
Our spells are all new (we also end up wishing for hardiness and greater deathblow, but nothing too special). We could now go for the chain contingencies with lower resistance again, but I decide against that and just cast a bunch of improved hastes on everyone, energy blades on those who aren't great fighters otherwise, new SI:A/Entropy Shield stuff and go. This ist either the first or second round, and Mel is already near death:
Victory is ours just a fraction of a second later, and Livia joins the Hall of Heroes!
It seems like SCS by itself doesn't really do much to improve the five, with the exception of Sendai and maybe Illasera (or tactical difficulty isn't enough for a lot of these buffs). Ascension, on the other hand, maybe overdoes it a little for the final battle. As a result, I felt like improved Watcher's Keep actually offered the biggest challenges in ToB, especially WK3.
@Enuhal Congratulations and well played. Yep, nothing but kits remaining. At this rate, you'll probably scratch off the other 8 before my Necromancer makes it to BG2... not that that's a bad thing.
Comments
If your images are png files try saving them as jpegs. That's what I do. The files become much, much smaller from 1.2 MB to 220kbytes!
I open the screenshot in Paint and save as a jpeg. Dead easy and the resolution is fine.
I use the new screenshot capture software from Windows 11, which allows to save them in multiple formats. 🙂
Since I haven't been able to update in a while, I'm splitting this update in three parts - it would just be too long otherwise.
Livia, halfling thief - exploring SCS v35, update 8
So, we start in SoA - say what you want about static charge - it's slow, it often doesn't hit who you want it to hit - but it is undeniably powerful, and just having it active in the background is imo totally worth it:
Outside, there's Mencar and his gang to take care off - this is just a matter of having a good opening against both spellcasters and the summons to tank the fighters:
Everything non-stronghold related (except for the stuff I usually save for after the Underdark, aka liches, dragons, mind flayers, guarded compound, twisted rune) is done. We're getting unlucky on our slowed down reputation gains and are constantly low on money, but that's fine. In the next update, we will do the 4 easiest stronghold quests.
We start our stronghold run with Livia's very own guild - which is relatively easy to acquire. Rayic falls to a PW:Silence:
For the only real sidequest of the stronghold, we use malison + chaos - which works against stealthed opponents quite well:
De'Arnise keep is our next stop. We have a good toolkit against trolls (Biter +2, Firetooth, Stonefire Axe...) - SCS spirit trolls are a danger, but unholy blight doesn't work against us (all neutral reputation), and at least Livia gets chaotic commands against greater command (while Ung is often raging, our elf/half-elf are resistant to sleep, and others have great saving throws due to shorty bonuses). The totemic druid summons are very helpful against the iron golem:
We turn to the druid grove, which is much of the same in terms of trolls:
We've done the sidequests around here earlier on (forgot to mention that - we also turned in the dryad acorns), so we just have to clear the temple ruins. Most of that is easily done with the help of fire elementals, we only need to help out against bone golems - however, whenever we do that, we have to contend with the more powerful greater mummies:
Four strongholds down (which also means that Joluv spawns in, but we have zero money to buy anything from him, we're still constantly broke - this party can make use of a TON of vendor items and our reputation is still fairly average) - time for a break, as in the next update, we will let Kriemhild rest for a while as we deal with a large variety of companion quests.
As our reputation is still low and Ung is at level 13, this is the perfect time to pick up Dorn for his questline (he needs to be level 12 to finish it and won't join at reputation 18-20). Taking down a single priest is easy enough. Fire elementals and malison + insect plague help out with the paladin camp. The demons for the final quest part are a bit more challenging (luckily, Livia is protected against stun via chaotic commands), and I make a mistake with dialogue options, missing out on The Visage and accidentally letting Dorn fall.
Rasaad is next, and we get our mirror image ring with the help of insect plague:
We pick up Hexxat. We can just about get to 6 chaotic commands by missing out on insect plague, ironskins and true sight, but it's worth it to safely face the mind flayers at the first crypt:
A short interlude: We do Aran's quests and recruit Kriemhild again for Bodhi's Lair. Tanova is hit with true sight, secret words, breach and attacks:
Finally, we recruit Neera. We screwed up during Rasaad's quest by not talking to Wilson before freeing him, which means he just disappears, so I won't be able to help out Zaviak. The other wild mage sidequests are quickly done, so we get to the real challenge, the red wizard compound - this one's always tricky. The space is cramped, the wizards have a large variety of prebuffs, they use dispels, they have crowd control and strong damage spells - I also got into more trouble as one of them pretty much immediately fled to the next room, so I couldn't go for the dialogue solutions there and had to fight two rooms at once - Ung was able to block off the entrance for a while, but soon had to retreat as he was taking too much damage:
The first challenge in the Windspear Dungeon, aside from golems, which were easily dealt with by having Mordenkainen's swords tank them (luckily, I found a scroll for that one fairly early on), is the big group of vampires - for that, we had prepared both the false dawn spell and Ung with the iMoD +2 and improved haste:
We moved on to the astral prison - first, we had to take down a group of yuan-ti mages - spell shield, SI:A and entropy shield (hopefully ISOM soon as well) will see a lot more action from now an, as we begin to face higher level spellcasters and keeping our buffs active becomes more and more crucial. For these guys, detect illusions, some secret words and breaches were enough - same for Mekrath:
In any case, we moved on to the old tunnels, to deal with the Unseeing Eye. We don't have good tools to deal with beholders. The level 11 version of skeleton warriors just aren't that strong - unbuffed, they got quickly destroyed by the first group we encountered. A careful combination of throwing in more summons, especially our flesh golem, and some ranged attacks, eventually allowed us to whittle down these dangerous foes:
Now, for the final stronghold quest - the planar sphere. Here, we will have to deal with truly high level wizards for the first time. First, the halflings - we worked with summons for a bit here - a death spell killed my fire elemtnals, but this was their only one - spirit lions actually hit through mantle (and improved mantle), even with SCS, as Kayardi found out:
Journal of Halma the Helmite Coninued.
While I rested with an ale in one of Beregost's many inns Gnomus investigated the town and brought back quite a lot of gold and gems. We sold most of it and bought equipment such as a +1 dagger, a +1 sling and several throwing daggers.
We returned to High Hedge and sadly Gnomus was slain by a skeleton.
I was able to rescue Melicamp and took his body to High Hedge where his body was returned to normal.
As a result I reached level 3 and my reputation was raised.
I took the body of Gnomus to the Temple of Lathander after selling enough gems to raise him.
We rested and are about to head for Nashkel.
Gold is currently in short supply.
We killed two ogrillon and collected Mirianne's ring of protection before heading to Nashkel. Picked up the Colquetle amulet on the way using sanctuary to avoid combat. Killed a bandit and kobolds without injury. Collected the ankheg armour, and wand of frost. Spoke to Noober and turned down Oublek's offer.
Returned the Colquetle amulet before heading for the FAI. Picked up the ring of protection and ring of wizardry. With that Gnomus can use his armour spell and still have slots for sleep which were used against the hobgoblins.
We headed north and spotted a bandit. Moved south to sleep and when we returned he was no longer there. We killed Sonner and cohorts before taking the bowl to Tenya.
Gnomus became a level 2 thief as a result. Put proficiencies in finding traps.
Thhe battle against the nearby ankheg was too close for comfort, however the 500gp for the shell will be most welcome.
Upon sleeping I gained the ability to cure light wounds.
We returned Joia's ring and thereby became heroes.
Returning to the ankheg nest we killed one before going outside to rest. We were ambushed by another ankheg and I was badly wounded before we were able to escape to the FAI where we rested.
We killed another ankheg which caused me to be a level four cleric. A proficiency point was put in maces.
Merlin - human illusionist (Grond0)
Hotstuff - elf dragon disciple (Gate70)
Coremage XXVI - half-elf fighter mage (Corey_Russell)
Previous updates
A trip through the Cloud Peak Mountains was pretty routine, with blindness taking care of Zal & Vax and Caldo & Krumm. Merlin took the charisma tome as, even though Hotuff had a higher charisma, the tome would allow Merlin to reach 20 with the help of friends.
Next, we went to find Greywolf, in search of a better sword for Coremage. We hadn't rested recently though and, when Greywolf resisted 3 attempts to blind him, that left us short of options. Hotstuff tried to run him round while the others shot, but Greywolf managed to get into range and a single swing of his sword was too much for the dragon disciple.
Bassilus was webbed and blinded immediately after talking to him.
By this time reputation was up to 19 and escorting Brage back to Nashkel temple maximised that. A visit to Ulgoth's Beard then procured some goodies, including the Greenstone Amulet. With that in hand we went to the Lighthouse area to take on some sirines. Merlin was able to throw 3 webs at them and Coremage added in a stinking cloud - and neither group of sirines were able to withstand that combination.
Illusionist 5, 26 HPs, 36 kills
Dragon disciple 5, 41 HPs, 31 kills, 2 deaths
Fighter 4 / mage 4, 41 HPs, 75 kills, 1 death
Journal of Halma the Helmite Continued.
We continued hunting ankheg and at first the battles were quite difficult.
We went outside the nest to rest when we were nearly out of spells and found ouselves being ambushed by ankheg again and again. Occasionally we took them on, sometimes prevailing and sometimrs fleeing.
We took the body of Farmer Brun's son to him and gave him 100gp
We fled to Beregost when a particularly difficult ankheg saved against all our spells.
Just north of there we killed an ogre whose belt should make future battles considerably easier.
Selling ankheg shells has made us moderately wealthy so we started by buying spells and a wand of sleep plus some amulets and scrolls at the carnival.
Unfortunately Greywolf kept saving against our spells and Gnomus ended up dead. I also was badly hurt so I cast sanctuary before killing Greywolf with the One Gift Lost. It took three blasts. I levelled up and went to a temple to raise Gnomus. 400gp - Ouch!
We headed back to the mines and were ambushed by bandits. Gnomus was again killed. [He should have been wearing armour] Raising him again reduced our gold to 48 !!!
We spoke to Prism and our reputation was raised to 19.
An ambush by a ghast was quite welcome as it raised the levels of Gnomus so that he can now cast mirror image!
We picked up a ring that protects from fire, met a gnome who gave us a pfm scroll and took Samuel to the FAI.
Reputation now 20. We needed more ankheg shells so that we can go on a shopping spree.
After killing a few ankheg we went for Bassilus. With the aid of buffed skeletons he didn't prove to be a problem though one of the skeletons died.
We used the influx of gold to buy the army scythe and dagger of venom. We sold three +1 daggers that are no longer required.
We now feel a lot more secure in our ability to take on the current potential enemies, ambushes no longer being a cause for concern.
We were able to kill all the sirines in the Lighthouse Area plus one that awakened us whilst resting. Skeletons did a lot of the work being immune to poison and charm.
Skeletons were also useful against the flesh golems even though their attacks were ineffective.
We will now do some recruiting.
As I often do, I backstabbed Perth in Brynnlaw. However, this time I rolled really low on damage and he actually survived, forcing me to dodge a potential timestop by running outside and returning with my party for secret word + breach:
The city of caverns isn't much of a challenge, it mostly serves as a source of some easy experience and a piece of the wave halberd for us. In contrast, the Underdark is where things get quite dangerous, and we're happy we have gained all that extra experience from playing SoD and doing the NPC sidequests. First challenge is the balor, where we buff everyone with fire resistance, death ward and CC and count on a quick kill, which we get:
We take down the drow parties and free the prisoners in the central structure before moving to the kuo-toa caverns. A 70 damage backstab on Livia serves as a quick scare, but luckily, there's no followup:
Speaking with the prisoners does grant Ung the desired cleric level 15, and we use the skeleton warriors to clear out the beholder hive. Easy enough in the beginning:
Dorn joined us and taking on Kryll was straightforward. We then bade him farewell.
We joined up with Xzar and Montaron. Xzar was left in an outbuilding at the FAI. Montaron's excellent pickpocketting gained us Algernon's Cloak, a web scroll, Edventar's Gift, the Kneecapper hammer and a few minor scrolls.
We bade him farewell there and bought the greenstone amulet.
We killed a pack of wolves east of Beregost.
We sold a lot of equipment in order to buy the Robe of the Good Archmage.
The two of us are now pretty well equipped and I now have aconstitution of 20.
Minsc joined us and upon finding Dynaheir she also joined us.
We had no problems with the basilisks and Mutamin. Stinking cloud neutralised Mutamin and web did the same for the party of adventurers.
We rested at the FAI.
We then went in search of Arghain. Now Minsc has an unbreakable +1 sword. Alternatively he can use the +1 mace from Beregost.
We start our stay in Ust'Natha by freeing Phaere:
Outside, we ran into Kruin while quite unprepared, but making full use of our HLAs gave us a quick victory nonetheless (also, Livia herself has good enough unbuffed saving throws (at least against spells and death, which are the most important) to avoid almost any type of surprising crowd control or instant death spells:
Dragons don't get their HP buff on tactical, so both of them died super early on - Firkraag was able to use his dispel, but only in the moment of his demise:
Magical swords are a great help against groups of dangerous golems:
So, we do all trials the good way and prepare for Jon - traps only to the edges of the combat area to help with the balors. We take down the demons first. Jon has a ton of protections, we try to get through a few of them with our various pierce magics and secret words, but are somehow unable to do so. Still, at some point, his absolute immunity (or PFMW, not sure what he used) just runs out and we beat him to death - his aggressive actions have been mainly limited to physical attacks, which do hurt, but are not nearly enough to kill anyone:
Triple Disintegrate is another piece of nastiness, though maybe SCS doesn't do that anymore, haven't seen it for a while.
Also once had the Pirate Mage in the hideout behind the Sea's Bounty toss a triple Vitriolic Sphere Spell Sequencer at the protagonist when I was arrogant enough to not even pre-buff with MSD (fortunately damage rolls were low).
We enter Saradush. During the Kiser sidequest, the mage is able to cast his timestop (he uses PFMW, but we're unable to get through his stoneskins with normal weapons before the cast is finished) - the rule changes to imprisonment in newer SCS versions seem to encourage its use by the AI, but, just like against Kangaxx, Ung simply enrages right after timestop ends:
Nyalee is defeated, and we face Yaga-Shura. Turns out that the super high and slowly reducing damage resistance is apparently either not in on tactical mode or its a feature of ascension, not of SCS, so he dies within a round:
Merlin - human illusionist (Grond0)
Hotstuff - elf dragon disciple (Gate70)
Coremage XXVI - half-elf fighter mage (Corey_Russell)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1207702/#Comment_1207702
Looking for some quick XP, we moved on to Durlag's Tower next. Blindness and magic missiles took care of the battle horrors before PfP allowed us to deal with some basilisks. Coremage was stunned by the trap on re-entering the tower and while he was out of action, the others picked up the tome (Hotstuff demonstrating his elvish resistance to charm in the process) and fooled Riggilo into accepting a dodgy headpiece before blinding him for disposal.
After Tranzig was beaten up, we went to High Hedge to dispose of some equipment and buy Robes of the Archmagi for Merlin and Coremage. There was one slightly dodgy moment there when Coremage saw an opportunity to use his wand of fire to roast a group of skeletons, just as Merlin moved to attack them - his ring of fire resistance helped him survive reasonably comfortably.
In the Cloakwood, invisibility was used to trigger the webs in the second area and we moved swiftly on to the mine. Drasus' companions were blinded there initially and the same happened to him once he was incapacitated.
Inside the mine there were no problems in moving down to the bottom level. The battle horrors there were drawn back individually and blinded before Coremage used a potion of magic blocking to attack Davaeorn. The 5 round duration of that though proved not quite enough and Coremage was held. Davaeorn followed that up by casting a summon monster spell, which looked like bad news for Coremage. Merlin and Hotstuff had been hanging back, but Merlin decided to help out by going to make Coremage invisible. There was a slight risk in doing that as I was fairly sure that Coremage had not set off one of the traps in the corridor when he initially moved through there. That did inflict damage, but not enough to cause a problem. Davaeorn was now out of spells and was duly cut down.
Illusionist 7, 37 HPs, 81 kills
Dragon disciple 6, 38 HPs, 71 kills, 2 deaths
Fighter 6 / mage 5, 58 HPs, 186 kills, 1 death
We enter Amkethran and start with the sidequests. Vongoethe is the one worth mentioning - I decide to not go for traps, so we have a fight on our hands - the lich is able to dispel Livia and Ung:
For the mind flayer ambushes, we take advantage of the energy blades hitting as +6 weapons, because these wizards here use improved mantle, leaving them vulnerable:
We killed Droth and Shoal, delivered a ring and killed some sirine beforegoing down the Nashkel mines. Everything straightforward. We recruited Xan and killed the Amazons before going to the carnival to rest.
The belt that we had found on Gorion's body was quite useful when we were attacked by two winter wolves whilst resting outside the Nashkel Mines.
We have now reached the Bandit camp and will loot as much as we can without fighting.
I tried different tactics to see how it worked. Xan charmed Taurgosz instead of attacking him. It worked to an extent. He killed a few bandits but the charm didn't really last long enough. However when the charm wore off he had nobody to help him so disposing of him was straightforward.
At least the battle was a little different this time.
The battle in the tent was staightforward. Minsc used the pink phial found outside to all but kill three of them who followed him outside to be killed by the skeletons waiting there. Then the entire party entered to finish of Hakt who hadn't followed.
We decided to tackle Watcher's Keep level 3-5 next, to gain a bunch of experience and some powerful new weapons before we tackle Abazigal. The randomized teleporter maze was always going to be one of the bigger challenges of this run (as we are playing with full SCS, but not Ascension, so the final battle shouldn't be as overwhelmingly difficult compared to the rest). The main issue here is, due to the unpredictable nature of the map and the likelihood of teleporting into one of the two no-magic zones, you will almost never be buffed in any way before walking into a bunch of demons - rebuffing is rather pointless if there's a decent chance you will lose all your buffs when walking through the very next portal (ideal play would propably still involve that, but I don't think the time investment is justifiable and it would certainly be no fun at all). The most dangerous situations involve going directly from a no-magic zone into a dangerous battle (the two named demons or the demon wraith especially), because the no-magic debuff can last for a short time after leaving the zone (I would guess that it is tied to the round timer), so you can not always instantly start buffing.
I always use a hand-drawn map for the randomized maze (my memory is not good enough to remember where every single portal I walked through takes us). I did start with some buffs in the hope we wouldn't immediately teleport into a no-magic zone - that was a futile hope, we went right into the no-magic zone with the balor. Unbuffed we don't want to melee that demon, but we have very good ranged weapon skills for such an occasion. Our 3*telekinetic storm cc triggered (contingencies or item-based abilities don't care about the spell failure debuff), taking down some of the demons, and we shot down the Balor:
Time for level 4 - much easier in total. The gith aren't much of a challenge:
I had been playing a fighter with ***** in slings using the sling of everadd. His party was doing great. On the way to Balthsazar he lost Imoen and Jaheira (good dragon in Underdark - needed her blood), Serena (a MP character who was a fighter/mage she died to Firkraag) and also got Sarevok chunked in my battle with Sendai. Ended up with two MP characers (fighter/thief and fighter/cleric), Keldorn, Mazzy and Aerie (who was pregnant). In the fight with Balthsazar I lost track of where Coreslinger was - was trying to lead Balthsazar to the traps at the entrance but late noticed Coreslinger was pinned by two monks and they quickly burned down his HP despite his -14 AC - RIP Coreslinger II.
New run is a bounty hunter (protagonist) and he has two MP characters (half-orc bersker) and a gnomish fighter/illusionist and so far have recruited Ajantis, Branwen, and Khalid (who is being used as an archer). Party low level about level 2 headed to basilisk's area.
Livia, halfling thief - exploring SCS v35, update 18
Here we are, at Abazigal's Lair, facing Draconis - green acid protection scrolls and all available acid protection items equipped. The dragon is able to survive our initial onslaught, activate his buffs (though his summons die to our CC's) and start up a timestop:
The fourth pocket plane challenge:
Traveling with: Serena (berserker), Sarah (fighter/illusionist), Branwen, Shar-Teel, Khalid
The party is about level 4. Major areas cleared are Nashkel Mines, basilisks' area and ankhegs. Surprisingly with Serena's and Shar-Teel's AC of -4 they didn't take a single hit with the 13 ankhegs engaged. We were able to loot a lot of ankhegs and sell them to then order some Ankheg armor.
Things have been pretty smooth, except Ajantis got petrified in a basilisk ambush. The only problem about that is he had the Dexterity gauntlets and +1 medium shield from Bjornin but the run must continue. Since we have a berserker, sirines are our next target.
Yes I know about that, but didn't have money for mirror eyes. It's okay don't need him right now, can get him later if I get some chunkings.
Merlin - human illusionist (Grond0)
Hotstuff - elf dragon disciple (Gate70)
Coremage XXVI - half-elf fighter mage (Corey_Russell)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1207702/#Comment_1207702
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1207823/#Comment_1207823
We found ourselves in Sorcerous Sundries and walked upstairs to investigate. Merlin considered throwing a couple of webs out into the shadows, which would probably have made the fight simple, but didn't do that in case one of his companions walked into those. Instead, Hotstuff showed himself - though only after a group of 5 monsters were summoned with the aim they would act as cannon fodder for the enemy mages.
An immediate horror response proved extremely effective. Despite that, Merlin's chances at that stage still seemed pretty good, as only Coremage was further away from the enemies. However, only Merlin and an ogre ran towards them, while everyone else that was scared moved the other way. That led to Merlin soaking up two Melf's Acid Arrows from the next round of spells. A couple of hobgoblins did a good job of shooting down the opposition and we had the slight consolation of seeing the last of them collapse just before Merlin succumbed to the ongoing acid
The upside of Donna Summer's Hot Stuff song finally not reverberating through my head is nullified by feelings of clumsiness spoiling the session for my companions. Anyway on to:
Trio 62 - link to trio 61 conclusion
Rusty - human male bard; lawful neutral (Gate70)
Lickle - half elf male conjurer; chaotic neutral (Grond0)
Coredual - human male berserker; chaotic good (Corey_Russell)
We rolled up 3 further victims and set about making ourselves personas non grata at Candlekeep in less than seven minutes.
Corey mentioned he couldn't see Grond0's charater portrait, as is often the case for me. To our surprise, Grond0 also said he couldn't see the portrait which was a bit of a surprise and maybe we'll sort it out for next time. On doing end-session screenshots I noted the larger portrait worked fine though
Shoal the nereid's death gave Rusty a first level, and a trio of gnolls playing with a stolen shortsword paid a similar price
Albert and Ruffie preceded Zal and Vax, then a quick tour of map destinations to the southwest before alighting at the gnoll fortress. At this point Coredual was keen to get the tome of leadership identified but Rusty stubbornly refused for the remainder of the game (his lore is only 25 at session close). Several other items remain unidentified for the same reason so our berserker endured a pack-horse situation where more and more heavy unidentified items land with him.
Our usual routes past a polar bear is once more followed, with a brace of winter wolf pelts making their way to Coredual at ambush sites. We bashed Bjornin's ogre-foes apart athen neutralised Teyngan and gang. On to Bassilus - figuring he'd have no answer to berserker fury, and this proved to be the case
Our mystery tour of the wilds continued with Rusty not knowing where he trod (my memory of EE map navigation has merged with BGT/Tutu/original and all very blurry now - oh dear). Lickle at one point asked if Rusty was looking for a character with 100% magic resistance, Rusty knew who he meant but Coredual surprised by announcing the name (Borda) as soon as he realised who we were trying to remember the name of. We avoided him but Rusty was adept at running into the wildlife - usually at times where Lickle was hanging onto life as our attempts to rest were interrupted by angry hordes.
footnote:
Coredual can dual class to Conjurer or Thief with current stats
Notable additions for our final battle prebuffs are more potions (invulnerability, cloud giant strength (after a while, we would switch to storm giant strength), defense, later on also power and heroism and even magic shielding), but also, more importantly, the rare and extremely valuable spell immunity scrolls for Livia, useable via UAI (as spell immunity: abjuration to protect her buffs):
So, because battle 1 ended as soon as our chain contingencies hit, we still had all of our buffs. There are vampiric wraiths at the first pool, so only Kriemhild (who has Angurvadal) and Ung (who used enrage) took down the air elementals. We immediately activated the pool without any breaks or rebuffs (the others were a) setting a trap, b) calling in a planetar and c) calling in an elemental prince in the meantime) in order to make the most of our opening buffs. We called in Mel, activated fighter HLAs and just went to town. Amelyssan is woefully lacking in physical protections/prebuffs, compared to your typical lich, which she can only compensate with lots of hitpoints and resistances, but once we punch through her stoneskins the sheer amount of attacks per round amongst our party take her down way too fast for her to get threatening. One of her death tyrants was able to dispel Octavia, and that's the only thing that happened in this round. Octavia rebuffed with the most important stuff as I activated a few cold protection scrolls/spells for the next pool, as there's an ice golem involved.
We call in magical swords in the hope of stopping the incoming slayer shadows that join Mel's third incarnation and rebuff a little bit (new SI:A's/Entropy Shields, most importantly, also new improved haste for Ung and Kriemhild). I didn't really expect that the slayer shadows would still get stuck fighting the swords in SCS, as the AI improvements were most likely going to stop that - I called in Mel, moved to the north with the swords in place. My planetar from earlier was still around - 2 shadows followed the party, unbothered by the swords, but 2 stayed around and fought the planetar. After dealing some damage to Mel (and interrupting her next spell, most likely a timestop) we quickly switched to the slayer shadows near the party and took them down - the planetar down south even managed to vorpal one of their foes:
For the final pool, Kriemhild gets to drink a wisdom potion, limited wish for timestop and keep casting from the 5 timestop scrolls I had assembled over the course of the game while taking down the fallen solar and its allies:
It seems like SCS by itself doesn't really do much to improve the five, with the exception of Sendai and maybe Illasera (or tactical difficulty isn't enough for a lot of these buffs). Ascension, on the other hand, maybe overdoes it a little for the final battle. As a result, I felt like improved Watcher's Keep actually offered the biggest challenges in ToB, especially WK3.
Stalker
Priest of Helm, Priest of Talos
Avenger
Abjurer, Conjurer, Diviner, Necromancer
Bounty Hunter
The basic character classes are now finally all done