Fire wine is cleared. Kahkr was surrounded from six sides. That way his lightning bolt was less damaging.
I the tunnels Kagain dies from a trap but furthermore nothing spectacular. We cleared the ogre mage from the back entrance making it easy to interrupt him.
Next the party went to Vax and Zal. By far Lucius was the more damaging darter in the realms. Going up the coast now. Only Durlags Tower is in the East, and Rasaad but I think I will skip him.
Lucius 0 deaths
Kagain 3 deaths
Shar-Teel 1 death
Garrick, Imoen, Viconia 0 deaths
out of party
Montaron, Khalid 3 deaths
Branwen 2 deaths
Jaheira, Xan 1 death
Kivan, Minsc, Xzar 0 deaths
Edwin and Dynaheir dead
@Klorox You came close to it, but your stalker would only fall if your reputation would have dropped to below 7, so you were still one point away (the other way to fall is due to hell trial choices in the SoA endgame). If you happen to fall on accident late in BG1 or early in SoA, it's propably best not to give up quite yet, as ranger status can be fully restored (only this once) by finishing the ranger stronghold questline.
@Klorox You came close to it, but your stalker would only fall if your reputation would have dropped to below 7, so you were still one point away (the other way to fall is due to hell trial choices in the SoA endgame). If you happen to fall on accident late in BG1 or early in SoA, it's propably best not to give up quite yet, as ranger status can be fully restored (only this once) by finishing the ranger stronghold questline.
Thanks!
So, to piggyback on what I said earlier, the dialogue between Branwen and Rasaad during his quest was pretty cool. She’s a good character.
The Elementals still had no defences against petrification, so left the basilisks on Durlag's roof for now. They did some shopping at High Hedge, including buying quite a few acid darts. I probably won't use those in BGEE, but thought I would have them just in case I saw the need.
Back at the Lighthouse area killing the sirines didn't take long, though the party had to wait around for a while for Flash to recover from the feeblemind effect inflicted by the first group. They took a fair bit of damage from the golems, but bulldozed through them without bothering to rest. Rime took the constitution manual, as the character most likely to need lots of healing.
In search of more sirines further up the coast, the Elementals dealt with an ogre clan blocking the way - Lucid using call lightning for the first time there. After being sidetracked by various wolves and ghouls they failed to make a precision attack on the sirines and paid for that by having to retreat twice when party members were charmed - but they got the job done in the end.
After a few minor encounters they returned to the same area in search of Shoal. Flash deliberately put himself forward for a kiss as the protagonist can no longer be directly killed by that - but he still slumped down unconscious with a single HP left. He got up in time to make himself scarce though before Droth arrived and left it to the rest of the party to deal with the ogre mage. Once that was done the party decided to just kill Shoal as that gives a far greater reward than completing her quest (following which she now disappears instantly, giving no chance to attack her a she leaves).
The Elementals were still a long way from another level, so decided to go to the Nashkel Mines rather than spend time doing relatively minor work. There were no alarms going through there and Toxic opened proceedings against Mulahey with a backstab. Although that would seem pretty clear evidence of hostility, Mulahey was convinced to remain peaceful - so Toxic hit him with another backstab and this one proved fatal.
Outside the mine, the Elementals had their first death. I didn't make sufficient allowance for the short range of Blast's scorcher and he moved past Rime to cast that and was targeted by the Amazon archers - and poisoned by Maneira's darts. I did actually have a green scroll which would have been allowable to cure that, but was concentrating on other characters and Blast died before I got around to taking action on him.
After putting Blast back together Nimbul failed to survive a Toxic backstab. Tranzig was just standing around begging to be attacked and the elementals obliged him - Blast getting the kill there with a shocking grasp. At the Bandit Camp he attempted to do the same to a near-death Taurgosz, but failed to get a hit even with a roll of 18 (changing this spell to require a hit without even a bonus seems unreasonable to me for a spell that should work just with a touch) and had to settle for finishing the job with a scorcher. With the exterior clear, they rested before taking on Venkt & co. A backstab from Toxic and follow-up stealth attack from Sting was too much for Venkt and the rest of them soon followed. All Toxic's thieving points have gone into stealth, but even his original 20 was sufficient to disarm the lightning trap - he was rewarded for that with the bracers of weapon expertise to help his backstabs.
Resting allowed Flash to learn Bhaal slow poison. It's not quite clear whether Talos is permitting him to use that as a reward for his exemplary service, or to avoid annoying Bhaal - but either way that will reduce the chances of further deaths from poison.
In the Cloakwood, I don't normally bother with the tasloi guarding their prized cloak, but they were a tempting target for a glyph of warding. Flash chose to fight Seniyad and his druids and was targeted by call lightning. He was though wearing both boots and helm to give 70% protection and survived that easily enough - Seniyad was not so lucky when Lucid responded in kind. In the second area slow poison was used a couple of times. With the way phase spiders bounce around, spells against them are rather risky and group attacks too chaotic to control. A safer tactic was for Rime to show himself as a target with Toxic waiting to do a backstab while the others stayed away to avoid triggering more teleports.
They were ambushed by wyverns on the way to the next area, but were fully rested prior to that and had no problems dealing with them. Backstabs dealt with the druids in the next area, with Amarande already badly injured when following Toxic downstairs into an ambush.
In the 4th area several groups of baby wyverns were mobbed, gaining enough experience for the Elementals to take their next level. That gave Blast a considerable upgrade, with the ability to use Melf's Minute Meteors. I should have saved the game there, but tried to squeeze in a clearance of the wyvern cave, only to quickly get into trouble. The problems began when I didn't notice that Toxic had lost his stealth when moving in for a backstab and he was poisoned by a baby wyvern. That needed immediate action to save him and Flash moved round a group of wyverns to use slow poison. Meanwhile though, Lucid had been moving to one side to try and get lucky with a lightning bolt and Blast had moved to the other to use a scorcher. Both of those needed care to use and the distraction of saving Toxic meant they didn't get that. As a result Blast and Sting both took heavy lightning damage, but both survived. There wasn't too much left of the wyverns, but then Flash got poisoned. If that had been one of the others I would have left them to their fate, but with the run at stake Flash used the party's only green scroll to cure himself and shortly afterwards the last of the wyverns died.
We fight our way through the Candlekeep crypts, preparing our lightning protection spells for the battle against Prat. Our lightning bolt casts are countered by invisibility, though, and once we get around to a second round of spellcasting, most enemies are already dead to the lightning ammo:
Unlike with our previous 4 person groups, with a party of 6 characters, we are not likely to get to the XP cap (since we're skipping Durlag's dungeon and Balduran's island again), but as we have some PfM scrolls left and no restrictions on their use, I decide to gather a bit of extra experience by sending Obram on a solo mission against all the wizards on the ice island - this is fairly safe to do (with SCS they have a bunch of relatively strong summons that make it a bit harder, but in vanilla the risks are low if you can deal with the ankhegs):
Time to get back to the city. Since, for some very strange reasons, the guards at the flaming fist HQ are clerics and love to spam glyph of warding after their inital hold persons, we use our lightning protection spells there. We also eat one hold person, but it's not really a problem:
After getting Sarevok's diary and our invitations, we make it to the ducal palace. No room for our lightning spells due to their AoE component (except for shocking grasp, I guess), so its giant strength + heroism potions, haste and the regular buffs - the battle is quite successful, as both dukes survive:
Usually I would go for some potion/scroll shopping now, but I decided that we had enough consumables already to finish the game. We use webs and lightning bolts against the undercity party:
After a short rest, we drink our remaining potions and pull Sarevok towards us with an arrow of dispelling:
Semaj teleports in. I am ready to pause and drink additional potions to protect against his chaos spell, but we don't need it - he dies soon enough:
With Sarevok having 90% electrical resistance, there isn't much of a point of trying to kill him with lightning damage - we just take him down with our weapons:
At the Cloakwood Mine, Toxic killed Rezdan with a backstab, but was sent running by a horror in return. Sting was hit by a bouncing lightning bolt, but otherwise the rest of the clean-up operation went well. Rime took the boots of speed. Inside the mine Flash used 3 glyphs to reduce the numbers of Hareishan's guards. She took no damage from the glyphs, but still did not have the HPs to survive a backstab. On the next level down, the ogre mage also fell to a backstab before he could do anything. Natasha though survived hers and managed to cause some trouble with a chaos and then lightning bolt before she went down.
On the bottom level, Lucid used Flash as a target to throw a lightning bolt into the distance. That did a bit of damage to Davaeorn and his battle horrors. A successful backstab, a couple of MMMs and a stealth attack from Sting all broke through mirrors to finish Davaeorn off. I remembered at the last minute to go and speak to Rill before flooding the mine and hence avoided responsibility for drowning lots of innocents.
In the City, Rime had a potential claim on the dexterity tome - to give him a natural 18 and improve AC. However, ultimately Toxic claimed it given the restricted thieving points available to assassins. With so much party XP still needed they did all the major encounters in the City and progress was generally fairly uneventful. For the Mountain Maulers, Lucid was successful with her first attempted Poison spell. I've always thought that spell has potential, but it always tends to be crowded out by other options so it's good to be forced into using it here. Toxic was bumped out of the way when attempting a backstab on Lothander, but the others dealt quickly with him anyway and Sting inherited his boots of speed. A backstab nearly killed Marek though and Rime ensured he was unable to finish his cast. I tried to kill the basilisk without using one of the potions finally acquired. Only one of the 4 glyphs produced any damage though and a backstab from Toxic and immediate follow-up from Sting didn't quite finish it off - so Toxic quickly had to gulp a potion.
The XP all added up and they were eventually able to level up again while helping out Aldeth Sashenstar once more. That just leaves the Iron Throne to be done in the City before returning to their old haunts in Candlekeep.
At the Iron Throne enemies were led downstairs into an ambush and none of them were able to put up much of a fight. After reporting in to Duke Eltan they returned to Candlekeep where the real Iron Throne party were softened up with several glyphs before being overwhelmed. Two potions of perception were sufficient for Toxic to disable the traps and loot the tombs. Toxic held on to the strength tome to help his backstabs hit.
Five glyphs did a reasonable amount of damage to Prat's party. He chased after Flash, but failed to complete his lightning bolt spells thanks to a couple of area transitions. The rest of his party soon followed him. By this time Toxic could no longer disable the web traps, but he could use stealth and his new ring of free action to activate them harmlessly before helping to deal with the spiders. Flash wanted to kill the basilisks with glyphs, but after a number of failed attempts to rest he gave up on that and blast finished one off with a first use of his new fireball spell before the last few HPs of the other were lost to a stealth attack.
With the party still well below 100k XP each, they returned to Durlag's Tower, where Rime used a green PfP scroll to kill the basilisks. Under the tower, more potions of perception allowed Toxic to detrap the first level. Avarice died from running into some glyphs after already taking fireball damage. Fear followed Rime, but only found a backstab. Love was another backstab victim leaving Pride the last to go in a general attack. By that stage Toxic's potions of perception had run out and he chose not to renew them.
Back in Baldur's Gate, a glyph and a couple of fireballs broke the back of the resistance as the Elementals rescued Duke Eltan. Cythandria shrugged off damage to complete a chaos spell which confused 3 of the party - but that wasn't enough to save her. Slythe ate a backstab and didn't last long, while Krystin saved against several attempts to poison her but couldn't do anything about weapon damage.
At the palace I considered making use of potion buffs for the first time, but decided to continue without. One of the dopplegangers latched onto Flash and did quite a bit of damage, but otherwise everything went smoothly and both dukes were saved. After clearing out the maze, glyphs and fireballs softened up the Undercity party. A few more skeleton warriors died, but the party were still miles off another level and decided to go straight after Sarevok rather than seek XP elsewhere.
In the temple some glyphs were pre-laid for Semaj, but I didn't think they would work - and they didn't. I was a bit more hopeful about poisoning him, but he saved against those attempts and a chaos confused Toxic and Sting. Sting then ran towards the dais and brought Angelo and Tazok into the battle (along with a battle horror), which looked like being a problem. Meanwhile, Rime had been tanking Sarevok, but broke that off seeing what was happening elsewhere and tried to lose Sarevok round a pillar. He'd not been successful in that when Sting went down and Angelo sought fresh targets.
Flash bravely confronted him in melee, but Angelo continued to fire exploding arrows and Lucid was the next to fall.
Semaj targeted Flash with a lightning bolt, but only succeeded in killing himself. Meanwhile, Angelo was still firing exploding arrows at Flash - his Storm Shield protected him from the explosions, but the missile damage was getting serious. On the plus side, another battle horror that had joined the contest was killed by the explosions - though yet another joined in moments later.
With Flash in serious danger, Rime dashed down to confront Angelo and successfully bludgeoned him to death.
It was only around this point that I realised that Lucid had not just been killed, but chunked. That meant the run could not continue under my normal party rules, but I continued the fight to see if the run could at least end with a bit of glory ...
Toxic finally recovered from his confusion and managed to drag one of the battle horrors away and backstab it while Rime ran the others round.
Rime attempted to hold fast for a moment to allow Toxic to target the other battle horror, but was hit by Sarevok when he had seemed to still be out of range, leaving him one hit from death.
Toxic did though eventually manage to separate Tazok and the remaining battle horror and they were duly backstabbed as well.
At that point Blast rejoined the contest and hit Sarevok with a few MMMs and followed up with a series of Melf's Acid Arrows. There had been plenty of tricky maneuvering doing that as Sarevok was constantly trying to switch targets to his new attacker and Rime had to work hard to keep him occupied, but things had gone well - until they didn't. I clicked to move Rime, but nothing happened (which is not particularly unusual). I clicked again and once more nothing happened (which is much more unusual). A 3rd click did get him started, but not quite quickly enough to evade Sarevok's 2-handed reach and Rime collapsed to the floor.
Blast bravely kept running around and managed to set Sarevok up for a backstab - one more of those would take him down.
Blast tried to set him up again, but this time Sarevok got an attack in - and a critical cut poor Blast in half.
That just left Toxic to support Flash and he had a hard task initially as he was in stealth while (a still hasted) Sarevok was within sight of Flash. A bit of dodging and invisible blocking opened up a small gap and Toxic was then able to attack Sarevok and get him to switch targets. A bit of hiding round the pillars followed and a 3rd attempt at a backstab was successful to see the end of Sarevok .
Our primary strategy for bigger battles in early SoA is to buff all party members with protection from lightning and have our three spellcasters cast 1-2 lightning bolts each into the room - that ends most battles fairly quickly:
Though not all lightning bolts are made equal: This one was the weakest one I had, aside from one cast at level 1 in early BG1:
If the room is very confined and we can get reliable bounces, the damage is quite high, though:
We make sure to get our hands on some early lightning damage weapons - Ashideena from the dungeon and Borok's fist from Ribald (the SoA copy of Ashideena), The Army Scythe from Copper Coronet... for that one, we need bolts of lightning. There's an opportunity to obtain these and another lightning damage weapon, Usuno's Blade, at Watcher's Keep, so, once again, we go there very early on.
One thing I learned here, which is very useful to know for this run: Did you know that shadow fiends, specifically, have a lightning resistance of MINUS 128? Which means they take a TON of extra damage from any source of lightning damage. See for example: Our best shocking grasp yet:
With that knowledge, those encounters will be a lot of fun in the future
Well, luckily we once again don't get vampire wraiths here (they would've likely forced us to flee). We have to take a rest after the first group of statues, but we obtain the blade:
To get the bolts of lightning, we also need to clear the air library in level 2. A bit dangerous, as its guarded by kuo-toans who have their stunning bolts, but we're able to carefully lure one of them towards us, kill it, loot some bolts and use those against the others while carefully approaching with berserker rage. All right - 3 characters now have lightning damage weapons. Our wizard won't get one, sadly, and Iseri will have to wait for a while, but we can get one for the avenger at the graveyard - the spear, Halcyon.
Here's a shadow fiend against bolts of lightning:
Chain lightning (from our avenger) helps clear the spider hive:
And we get to play with another shadow group - here's just a regular lightning bolt:
The next two weapons we want: Belm to get more Usuno's attacks, and the Staff of Thunder and Lightning, which doesn't exactly do lightning damage by itself, but has a ton of charges with lightning spells. That means one thing: Druid Grove - against the shadow druid groups, we once again unleash triple lightning bolts:
So far, so good. To get the staff, we can't have Cernd fight Faldorn - Alaniel is ready, though. However, it turns out Faldorn seems to start with a hidden protection from lightning (despite her pre-buffs only suggesting protection against fire and ice, plus regeneration):
Since lightning damage can't do the job, we have no bad feeling about using our shapeshifting to win: The baby vyvern has a truly terrifying poison effect which gives us the damage we need:
Time to return to Athkatla - we have left most minor quests open (only doing the circus tent, Mencar battle and freeing Hendak) before travelling to WK and Trademeet, so its time to do all of these with the new tools at our disposal.
Looking good @Trouveur ! That's a lot of progress; I'm confident that you will make it to the throne, but the Ascension battle is always a tough one. I'm sure you're prepared for that as well, though.
I don't know if my preparations will be enough, but I hoarded all what I could doing a completionist run : two mindflayer circlets, all the protection from magic scrolls, many potions...
Anyway, it's time for Wilkim part 4 !
So I at last finished SoA side quests.
I helped Rasaad, no real struggles here considering our XP and gear. Poor Dark Moon Monks were slaughtered.
I finished almost all Bioware NPC quests, with Edwin meeting a tragic end when at last released from Edwina curse :
Poor Salvanas was killed too... But luckily Bernard and Hendak survived the cone of cold.
Mazzy's poisoned sister quest didn't want to trigger,so I gave up on this one. But she could beat the ogre.
The sewers mindflayers were easy preys thanks to chaotic command.
The chapter 6 new areas were cleared fast, Coran couldn't be saved sadly.
Neera quest was done without trouble, but I forgot how to save the half orc, so he was killed by the red wizard. Also I met a bug where the game thought Neera was dead, and so all the wild mages in the refuge were invisible. It was a variable to fix, and all went well after that.
I didn't do Dorn's quest since I have Anomen and another paladin in the party.
After that cleaning of Suldanessalar at last started. Golems, rakashas and demons were crushed by buffed party.
Surprisingly, I had harder times with the black dragon. I wasn't expecting it since SoD green dragon,shadow dragon, Firkraag and the Tartarous dragon didn't pose much troubles.
Even with my usual buffs, I found the black one hitting hard, resisting magic, but in the end I could feeblemind him too. But it was a good reminder than, how easy finishing side quests and areas from SoA and cleaning Suldanessalar, my party was not invincible and could be defeated.
My avenger hit level 15 just before Irenicus. I didn't rest to memorize my new elemental summoning spell.
Irenicus lasted a little longer than usual because I had exhausted all my breach spells, until I remembered I also have some wands of spell striking.
In the Abyss, Fear test was a little messy and Anomen was imprisoned by an elder beholder. Two ADHW later, Nalia used a freedom scroll to free him.
Weirdly, Slayer Irenicus was killed faster than Irenicus at the tree, without any difficulty.
And that's it for SoA ! Time for ToB !
Fearing Ascension Illasera, I put the reflection shield, cast physical mirror on Anomen and Wilkim, and summoned some greater skeletons near Illasera starting point.
The fight was easier than expected, and since it was in outdoor Wilkim uses his favorite spell :
It was AFTER this fight I remember I had planed to lower difficulty settings from insane to core when doing Ascension improved fights. Since all went fine even with insane, I decided to keep insane up until Crucible mod and Throne fight.
I was expecting an harder challenge with the first pocket plane challenge, and so prepared newly learned planetar with Nalia, but at the end no Irenicus, Bodhi and Sarevok showed up. Maybe with my 3 millions XP I was a little too low for them ?
I did all Saradush quests without troubles, Anomen's turn undead destroying all the vampires but their leader (but his MoD did it).
Ascension Gromnir saw his team decimated by two ADHW, and the fight rapidly turned bad for him.
Fun fact, one of his guy went invisible and reappeared AFTER Melissan came back to told us about Yaga Shura.
Before doing Yaga part, I at last went to Watcher Keep and cleared the first two levels. Of course given my levels it was not difficult, and the chromatic demon wasn't resistant to the staff doing magic damage from Barovia (great too against golems).
I left other levels for later.
Fire temple was done slowly but without troubles, thanks to vorpal hits from Xzele and slow spells from Nalia and Neera.
Whoever said foes always succeed at their saving throws in ToB was wrong. Same for only dual wielding or+4 or +5 weapons as being viable. Silver Sword was a real helper against the giants.
The wraith and its undead were easy prey for Anomen.
So we arrived to face Yaga Shura.
Foes after the bridge came from all sides, but we managed to hold them while reaching Yaga. I forgot he first flees, so I had to track him on the bridge, while holding both sides from incoming reinforcements.
A three lower resistance sequencer, followed by greater malison allowed a slow spell to land. Xzele switched the Silver Sword for the underappreciated Soul Reaver, and after a greater whirlwind, Yaga didn't hit Khalid and Anomen any longer.
Second challenge went fine.
It was time for Neera quest, two ADHW cleaned the initial ambush, and the Yuantis were slaughtered too.
Vichross was more resilient.
I hit another critical bug when a vorpal hit from a planetar killed Szass Tam (plotwise he's supposed to be unkillable), obviously preventing him to send us back to ToB areas.
So I had to fight him again, the game didn't allow me to accept his first offer to be send back, so I had to fight him for some more time before at least to be send back. And of course Neera didn't acknowledge the quest completion, so no XP reward either...
Anyway I did then Rasaad quest, without bugs or difficulties, even if the dark moon guys in the fortress were annoying.
Surprisingly, the final fight felt easier, with the shadow dragon being dispel then killed by a planetar.
After the Oasis fight without things worth mentioning, I did Amkethran side little quests.
It was time for Reunion mod, with a return with Nalia to the De Arnise Keep. Fights were easy, and the plot surprising.
Then it was Hexxat's turn, raiding another tomb.
So all NPC quests were done (except Dorn's again of course), beside Juniper's one.
Time to go back to Ravenloft, this time in the desert. Beautiful areas, nice puzzle to solve, and not too difficult fights.
Silver Sword was still a great asset.
I then decided to go after Sendai.
The elder beholder surprised me and succeed at holding Anomen, but a planetar saved the day.
Clearing the enclave took far less time than in my previous ToB run. The lich had many protections, but nothing against turn undead.
Ascension doesn't improved Sendai, so the fight was a little disappointingly easy. I forgot to take a screen of Sendai demise.
Before going after Abazigal (and dreading Draconis), I decided to finish Watcher Keep. Level 3 didn't pose much troubles despite wild and dead magic (far less troubles than my previous attempt), and Anomen could recover Purifier. And Xzele can use it !
I decided to bet with the demon, and won both the wish scroll and Spectral Band. Cespenar upgraded it and Wilkim have now a nice melee weapon for the few times it's needed.
I let him go and didn't try to get the Deck of Many Things. Too risky for my taste.
I'm currently in level 4, mindflayers and githyanki parts have been done.
On a side note, Wilkim contribution to the fights didn't went down in ToB despite using Firetooth dagger with only 2 APR.
On the to do list :
- finishing level 4 and 5 of WK
- Abazigal's Lair
- entering the monastery and convince Balthazar to side with me
- last two challenges
- Crucible mod
- Throne fight
Great job @Trouveur !
Sad to see the end of your run despite technically beating BG1 @Grond0
The Lightning Party, update 6
On to Athkatla sidequests - the slavers really got to feel the power of triple lightning bolts:
Opportunites to use call lightning are somehwat rare in BG2, so we take them whenever we can:
Even minor spell deflection isn't enough to protect against the number of lightning bolts we have - we simply break the defense with enough total spell levels. It seemed to me that each bounce removes spell protection levels as well, but I'm not 100% sure:
Also, we use the AI weakness of the city gates lich (who doesn't open with his protections the second time you enter his lair) to obtain a wand of lightning:
Our first significant mistake of SoA occured in the sewers, where a random kobold wizard was able to hold Selwine - I was eventually able to save her with an invisibility spell:
However, even low hp on Selwine didn't stop us of lightning bolting the sewer party to an early grave:
All sidequests and minor encounters were done, so only stronghold quests and Aran's missions remain. We've already done the druid grove, so our next plan is to do the 3 other easy stronghold quests - Umar Hills, De'Arnise Keep and Mae'Var's Guild.
I swapped Imoen for Safana and cleared the West Coast. I can now start cloakwood. Nothing special happened. Kagain and Shar-Teel got charmed a few times but if you just walk away there is nothing going on.
I the siren cave I missed three of the four traps but they had at this level little impact. The hold trap was after all flesh golem were killed. The glyph hurt but only a quarter health of several characters, and there is an arrow trap or something that did low damage. I was searching for the traps but on mobile it is not easy. You mis-click very easily on a 4.6 inch screen.
Small note. Lucius now does a maximum of 8 damage per dart. He has 477 kills compared to 211 from Kagain, 140 of Shar-Teel and Imoen had 150 or such. Of course Shar-Teel and Kagain are not exactly the same amount of time in the party, but my my my what an enormous amount even before we get to the city.
I should try to check how many kills the other npcs all had (if that is saved in a local variable I might see it I think). Mostly though, they will not surpass 50 I am sure.
Lucius 0 deaths
Kagain 3 deaths
Shar-Teel 1 death
Garrick, Safana, Viconia 0 deaths
out of party
Montaron, Khalid 3 deaths
Branwen 2 deaths
Jaheira, Xan 1 death
Kivan, Minsc, Xzar, Imoen 0 deaths
Edwin and Dynaheir dead
The gameplay for the previous attempt felt a bit too unbalanced, with 2 of the characters having nothing much to do most of the time. To help with that I decided to start again, but this time with slightly looser restrictions. My originally stated rules did actually allow the use of elemental darts and potion buffs, but in the event I actually avoided using either of those. This time I think I will make use of them, which will ensure the avenger can have something to do all the time. The other character that was usually at a loose end was Flash, the Priest of Talos. He can't use darts and had an extremely restricted spellbook last time (nothing at 1st level, flame blade at 2nd, glyph of warding at 3rd and poison at 4th). This time I'll allow him, as the PC, to be more favoured by Talos and able to make use of self-buffing spells (but still not area spells or spells targeted on others).
As before, the XP for a first level came courtesy of Korax and some basilisks. I forgot to take that immediately though and decided to wait until everyone had 5,000 rather than get levels out of order. I hadn't realised though that Korax was immune to both cold and electricity and had no way to kill him even after knocking him unconscious once Mutamin and the basilisks were all dead.
The Elementals got to their XP mark after a few more tasks in Beregost by returning Mirianne's letter.
With the arcane casters both at level 3, they took advantage of the availability of chromatic orb to go after Greywolf. He was still active though when they were out of damaging spells and Blast incautiously used his breath weapon on him. That didn't kill Greywolf and the stasis following the use of breath meant Blast could not run away - Rime was just too late to save him by beating Greywolf unconscious.
After a temple run they went to get their next weapon from Bassilus. There wasn't any drama there, but I was tending to take more risks and Toxic paid for that when trying to kill the golems inside the magic shop rather than dragging them out where there was plenty of room - he expected to kill one that was already near death with his next hit, but didn't quite manage that and got caught between them.
At the ankheg area the Elementals had cleared almost the whole area, but failed to identify that the last one attacked was targeting Blast and he suffered a second death.
On the upside the death of that ankheg provided the XP allowing everyone to level up following their temple visit.
Next up, Rime led the way in attacking some sirines at the Lighthouse. Toxic did most of the work on the golems though with stealth attacks. A few more sirines further up the coast were followed by Droth - Flash once more taking Shoal's kiss there before the others dealt with the ogre mage. With reputation now at 20, some shopping included getting the Dagger of Venom for Sting.
A return to complete their belt collection courtesy of Kirian saw her doing surprisingly well to complete a lightning bolt spell just before she died, but that did relatively little damage. Moving on to Durlag's Tower, call lightning helped make short work of the battle horrors. Toxic missed with the backstab intended to kill Kirinhale, but his backstabs were working better on the roof - a critical one-shot on the last basilisk ensuring that only a single potion of mirrored eyes was required. Toxic used 3 potions of perception to detrap nearly all of the first level down, though killing the enemies on the way meant the potions didn't quite last the distance. The first two of the warders were split up and followed the Elementals upstairs and were dealt with without too much trouble.
However, when they went back down, Love was waiting with a skull trap that caused massive damage.
The warders followed back upstairs and Love picked on Lucid to attack first - she had nowhere to go and died before Rime could intervene.
Most of the others switched to using acid darts for the first time against Fear, but found it hard to hit him and Rime collapsed to the ground as his rage ran out.
Fortunately though, Fear chose not to finish him off and Flash was able to take over kiting duties long enough for the darts to do their job.
That left the party close to another level and escorting Brage to Nashkel proved enough to allow that.
At the Umar Hills, I decide to explore the area at night on purpose, in hopes of getting to use my lightning bolts against more shadow fiends for the nice bonus damage:
This works out rather well at the entrance of the temple ruins:
Not too much problems inside: We don't get a lich spawn, we don't even get any extra bone golems or greater mummies, so it's mostly an easy clear:
As for the thief stronghold, Rayic is just breached and killed:
Though Mae'Var gets to taste some lightning bolts/chain lightnings:
At De'Arnise keep, we take advantage of some pretty reliable lightning bounces to get through the yuan-ti mages minor spell deflection:
An attempt was made to use the avenger chain lightning (which, for some reaons, unlike the wizard version, ignores magic resistanc entirely) against the golems, but it turns out that most types of golems are just immune to lightning damage as well and don't even need their magic resistance:
We found and killed Tor'Gal downstairs, though I didn't take a screenshot. Once again no extra spawns yet - since we started SoA relatively far away from the BG1 experience cap and are in a full party of 6 all the time, our overall experience level isn't too high compared to my usual runs.
I've put my Necromancer run on hold for the moment, but may return to it at some point; if someone else fancies a Necromancer, please, feel free.
Instead, I figured I'd try to up the difficulty bar a notch: Introduce a little anarchy randomness.
Starting: In BG1EE.
Protagonist: Conjurer, Lawful Evil Human Conjurer (see below).
Difficulty: Insane with no difficulty-dependent damage increase.
Mods: Full SCS 35.18.
Rules for this run:
Independently generate three full parties comprised of six random characters, where each such generated party obeys these rules:
1. At least one of the characters in each party must be a Conjurer (the protagonist).
2. At least one of the characters in each party must be some kind of Thief (lest I go insane from trying to remember all trap locations/damage types and not getting to loot most locked containers).
3. None of the characters in each party may be a Wild Mage (I'd just end up using them as wand monkeys to be completely safe, and that seems boring/a waste)
4. No exact duplicate characters in each party. With pseudo-RNG's, you tend to get sudden streaks of identical results, and while a party with four Fighter / Thief characters would be playable, it'd get a bit dull (and redundant).
For each such generated party, I may regenerate a single character once: If I choose to do so, I must use the newly generated character.
I then select the party I like best, and set to work!
Stats are rolled using the BG1EE engine, and this is quite punishing:
Each character gets to roll best out of three, but may not increase/decrease stats, and may not move stats around. This makes good rolls quite unlikely, and the kind of optimized characters you usually see simply never appear.
Proficiencies, Thief skill points and starting spells are also randomized, as is every choice made during level-up, and naturally we're using random hitpoints.
Let's get on with it then. Our initial party choices are:
1. Swashbuckler + Priest of Tempus + Dragon Disciple + Fighter + Conjurer + Cleric / Mage
2. Fighter / Cleric + Shaman + Thief + Conjurer + Cleric / Mage + Shadowdancer
3. Fighter / Cleric + Priest of Helm + Barbarian + Cleric / Thief + Conjurer + Priest of Tyr
That's surprisingly non-horrible. None of the parties are excellent, mind you, but they're all playable.
Let's see if we can't improve this a bit.
Party 1: Reroll the Dragon Disciple. Result: Fighter / Cleric
Party 2: Reroll the Shadowdancer. Result: Fighter / Druid
Party 3: Reroll the Priest of Tyr. Result: Berserker
Any of these amended parties will eventually become powerful.
I somehow settle on Party 1, but Party 2 would've been a blast as well.
Details on starting characters are found in the spoiler for those interested (stat order STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA).
Protagonist: Conjurer
Lawful Evil Male Human Conjurer
Quarterstaff *
9 10 18 14 11 15
Armor, Magic Missile, Reflected Image
It might not seem like it, but we keep lucking out.
Both frontliners have decent CON, and can (after we get the STR tome) wear Full Plate.
Even more amazingly, Fighter has specialization in a decent weapon! You rarely see that, especially right out of the gate.
Conjurer didn't get stuck with 9 INT.
Priest of Tempus... OK. At least she has good AC.
Cleric / Mage has good CON, good INT and great WIS; she'll be taking the WIS tomes for sure.
Swashbuckler... well. He doesn't get a minus to Thief skills, let's leave it at that.
To keep from cluttering, I'll give details on level-up results at the end of each update.
And so we set out on our grand adventure, with the odds stacked against us.
Even so, above all else: We must survive.
Calculating Conjurer: A Random Run, Part 1
Part 2 found here
Candlekeep passes without incident, as does the two initial areas (Color Spray does the Belt Ogre in).
With three Clerics of some variety, Tarnesh cannot stand for long: Well, he literally lies down due to Command and that's it.
We clear the FAI Hobgoblins and head south.
Neera's ambush is dealt with using Command. If you accept her into the party but then boot her (since we're now at 7 characters), you get to keep her Gem Bag, so we do that.
We're saving quests with potential reputation reward until after we've bribed reputation up, and we're also saving the few with better rewards for 18 CHA characters, so beyond talking down Marl and dealing with Karlat, there's not much else to do in Beregost: Spiders are too risky at level 1 without Sleep, Silke is too risky for a long time. We head towards Nashkel.
Not much happens on the way: Command and Color Spray make short work of most things, though Hobgoblin Archers are still dangerous, since two rapid hits will kill any of our characters with bad luck.
The Amazing Oopah does drop a Stinking Cloud scroll when he explodes, heh... that will actually be useful.
Bit of a heart attack when we got a Bandit ambush while travelling during the day; but there were seemingly only four of them?
Conjurer pops a LMD against the closest Bandit who is also commanded, and we escape uneventfully.
We had an ulterior motive in coming to Nashkel: Our greed. More specifically, we pick up the Red Potion, begrudgingly pay 100 gold to have it identified, then spend the lion's share of our meager remaining gold on some key scrolls from High Hedge for Cleric / Mage: Conjurer cannot learn Identify, after all.
Cleric / Mage gets some vital options this way, including Sleep and (for later) Invisibility, Stinking Cloud, etc.
Conjurer has 15 CHA, so we purchase a Friends scroll first and use it before buying the rest; this saves us quite a bit of gold.
We put Sleep to good use by eradicating the Beregost Spiders.
With the potions of Master Thievery and Agility obtained by clobbering Vitiare, Swashbuckler manages to snatch Algernon's Cloak: This puts Conjurer at 17 CHA, with 18 to come once we obtain the tome. Good stuff.
We keep doing safe things: Retrieving Perdue's sword, dealing with some Hobgoblins at the temple etc.
Still, this just isn't enough to tide us over. We'll have to risk the parts near Baldur's Gate Bridge.
We snatch the Ankheg treasure under Sanctuary, then head north, clearing the Ankheg near Tenya's hut and subsequently finishing her quest, then eradicating a Zombie infestation.
We head south and slowly but safely (owing to Command) chip away at Ankhegs. Then it's off to Drizzt's area, where Teyngan fails his save against Hold Person, and the hopeless Half-Ogres are just Slept.
Thinking it's been way too long since we came close to defeat, Conjurer steps up to the plate when we head towards the Nashkel Mines and run into the scripted ambush (if you've spoken with Dorn).
Really glad we farmed a bit of Ankheg experience before attempting that. That's a single critical for 16 HP, one HP short of outright killing Conjurer. Notice the graphic on the offending Bandit: I tested it later, and PW: Sleep seems bugged, in that enemies still get to attack while seemingly unconscious. Noted.
Anyway, at the Mines, Greywolf is kited, but we refrain from speaking to Prism because again, we might get a reputation boost (and we're saving them).
Next, we delve into the Mines proper, ending up using nearly all our healing potions, as both frontliners have abysmal DEX.
We do manage to punch through to Mulahey's chambers, though, and loot his chest under Sanctuary: The main draw is of course the scroll of Web therein.
We feel up to taking on Bassilus now: Triple Silence 15' Radius spells his end convincingly.
OK, time to finish our gear. We need Bracers of Dexterity and the Charisma Tome, so head west of Nashkel.
Xvart Village has no answer for Sleep, Neville and the Polar Bear have no answer for Command, and the local Ogre Berserkers and their Hobgoblin Elite cronies get to serve as wand targets (Lightning, Cold, Fire... we don't discriminate, if it shoots something, we use it).
At the Gnoll stronghold, we pick up bracers and the tome, and clear the rabble without incident.
Last and possibly least, we deal with the Cloudpeaks, and that little area with Sendai: Command / Hold Person does a good job.
Having consumed the tome, Conjurer now has 18 CHA with Algernon's cloak, so we pick up some quest rewards: Landrin (not a reward but you do get 6 Antidotes on accepting the quest if you have high enough reaction score), Jared and someone else I'm sure I'm forgetting are visited.
We also finally have the money to bribe reputation all the way up to 18, so commence talking to reputation boosting quest givers.
We luck out with Bjonin providing the last point: Reputation 20 and CHA (boostable to) 20+ means best possible store prices,
so we head to High Hedge and buy a slew of good scrolls for Conjurer for later use.
We're running low on easy pickings, but the Doomsayer is not quite cold immune.
OK, we're strong enough. Time for Mulahey.
Jeez. You can never let your guard down. Mulahey had a Mental Domination prepared, and Fighter willingly obliged. We shuffle around quite a bit but eventually manage to get things under control, phew.
Back in Nashkel, Nimbul falls to Command, but not before cutting down brave brave sir Oublek, who volunteered to lead the charge while certainly not under the influence of Algernon's Cloak: We shall spend the 2700 gold and 2 emeralds he dropped freely, since it's what Oublek would have wanted.
Conjurer immediately casts Find Familiar from the scroll, boosting his fragile HP somewhat, and we head north.
Tranzig manages a Lightning Bolt, which could've been very dangerous, but we lucked out in that he only hit the frontliners (and they both saved), with no bounces.
Northward, both Larswood and Peldvale are cleared easily; Osmadi and Corsone are victimized by Silence 15' Radius en masse.
We reach the Bandit Camp and head back home when, finally, we get an ambush worth the effort: It's Molkar and his merry murderers.
Of course, both the Illusionist and Cleric here are very low level and completely susceptible to Command, proving their (and the party's) undoing.
The fun doesn't stop here; on our way back to the camp, Amazons enter the fray.
And quickly exit: Both their Clerics are silenced, Priest of Tempus has reached level 5 so reveal the stealthed Thieves using Invisibility Purge, and once the Thieves drop, the Clerics can't do much on their own.
A rest later, it's the Bandit Camp. Here we actually get in serious trouble, mostly owing to my stinginess.
So we have two Web scrolls available, one from Mulahey's chest, one from the south-eastern most hut in the camp (Swashbuckler stealthed in and stole it). I definitely want Conjurer to scribe one soon, but we could (and usually do) use the second one to hinder the horde here. I however decide not to: Our only crowd control will be a solitary Stinking Cloud by Cleric / Mage.
This proves... most unwise. Venkt makes his save, and proceeds to drop a Slow on us, affecting everyone but Cleric / Mage!
Here we should've run, but opt to stay and fight: Fighter quaffs our only Oil of Speed, countering the Slow and keeping Taurgosz from clobbering him.
I say should've, since Venkt manages a Sleep as well before we put him down.
Amazingly, the entire party makes their save. A few more bombardments lets us pull through, though that was a bit too close to disaster for comfort (Cleric / Mage got a taste of Britik and his Strength potion, as the Gnoll made it past the Stinking Cloud).
We can't loot most of the containers since Swashbuckler (see report at the end) hasn't lucked out with Open Locks yet, but we gather what we can and proceed with the plot.
Conjurer finally gets to update his spell selection too, doing so under 3 intelligence-boosting potions (14 INT base...).
Well, that was nerve-wracking. Cloakwood should be less dangerous (not really).
Again Druids have no recourse under Silence 15' Radius, as Seniyaad and some Shadow Druids (not the Archdruid though, we're leaving him for later) find out.
We're about to get a piece of key loot for Fighter: Spider's Bane. So of course something bad must happen to balance out the good.
Cleric / Mage got webbed and literally died in two seconds. Still, it's our first death this run, so it's fine.
We collect the loot and make our way back to civilization, shelling out the 600 gold for a Raise Dead.
Even with Spider's Bane, the party is just absolute rubbish in a straight melee/ranged fight, so we rely heavily on Bless / Chant / Chaos of Battle to carry us through more difficult battles, as the Cloakwood Wyverns find out.
We take a break before pushing on to the Mines, gathering some easy experience: Silke finally gets her comeuppance, a local Wolf Pack is eradicated, dealing with a Revenant and Narcillicus (5x Animate Dead), Zordral eats his just desserts, etc.
Though again: Don't underestimate Zordral. Never shall I learn this.
OK, Drasus: Your time is up.
Animate Dead x5, Bless, Chant, Remove Fear... and that's about what we have for buffs. Charge!
So that's a good start, but then Rezdan and Kysus start their summoning routine.
Fighter just can't hold off those numbers, so Genthore breaks free (he's quite nasty if allowed to use his Throwing Axes), but we do manage to pop Rezdan.
We redirect Fighter / Cleric to lock down Genthore and try to use Priest of Tempus to round up the summons while the rest of the party chases after Kysus. Things are looking really iffy for a few rounds, as Kysus shuffles this way and that, but finally, finally, a wand blast spells his end.
I think that's the Revised Death Effects component of SCS preventing Kysus from freezing and shattering? Not that I'd be particularly saddened to lose a scroll of Fire Shield: Red if it meant us surviving, but still.
With just Genthore and some melee chumps remaining, we clear the field comfortably.
Into the Mines.
We get some funky behavior with Hareishan: Swashbuckler accidentally shows himself to a guard in her room, but the guards just follow piecemeal, some taking the long way around to reach us (we're in the side tunnel to the east of the room).
It turns into a fun little battle where we're fighting off reinforcements constantly for a few turns, but Hareishan never shows herself. We hunt her down eventually, and she goes down rather unceremoniously to a wand blast, though not before Charming / Dire Charming / Chaosing our frontliners.
The Ogre Mage below is still such low-level that he doesn't get to save against Command.
We clear the Hobgoblin Elites out of Natashas room, as they're not linked to her, and settle in for a gruesome battle, softening her up with Skeleton Warriors.
Our resolve turns out unnecessary, as the last Skeleton Warrior cuts her down without incident. Doesn't even warrant a screenshot, but well, OK.
We polish off Davaeorn's private guard and head back outside to rest before the final confrontation.
Naturally, this means an ambush by Giant Spiders who proceed to poison and kill Priest of Tempus (I don't understand how this happened, she was webbed about 3x longer than they usually last).
A long trip back-and-forth and 800 gold later, we're all set.
I'm betting on Davaeorn's fight still working the same way as previously, and it turns out I'm right.
The battle starts the moment anyone, even under Invisibility or Sanctuary, enters Davaeorn's field of vision: The Battle Horrors move to engage, but D couldn't care less. He also couldn't care less about a pitched battle between our party and a total of some 20 guards taking place not 30 meters away, apparently. Good news for us.
We clear the Battle Horrors and deal with the 5 waves of 4 guards each.
Following this, everyone heads south to the Mustard Jelly room: Swashbuckler stealths, the Clerics use Sanctuary, and Conjurer and Fighter get Invisibility.
We do this since the south is entirely safe: D will never teleport down here, unlike the room to the north.
Commence standard operating procedure: Animate Dead! And Wand of Monster Summoning when that fails!
We retreat, rest, and under Cat's Grace and a few Potions of Perception, Swashbuckler (still no luck on the Open Locks front...) manages to loot the place for us.
The mines are flooded, and we make our way back to civilization uneventfully.
And that is where we stand now, awaiting fresh adventures (perhaps a tour of the big city?) at the FAI.
One really close call (single HP left), one potentially very bad situation where we lucked out with a good party-wide save against Sleep, and a protagonist stunned by Zordral. Other than that, we've been fortunate... in some ways.
Let's hope it continues. It's been great fun so far, at least: I have to actually make an effort when we simply lack the melee/ranged brute force to solve most encounters by auto-attack, although this will become less of a concern as frontliners keep leveling, I imagine.
Under this ruleset, Fighter / Clerics, Cleric / Rangers, Fighter / Druids and yes, Beastmasters (!) are much more powerful than normal: This is since they have so comparatively few proficiencies available that they are likely to achieve at least one specialization before SoA, and all but guaranteed to do so before ToB, so it's good we got a Fighter / Cleric at least.
Level-up results at the end of the session: Conjurer, level 6 Conjurer
+5 / +6 / +6 / +5 / +6 HP (total 38 HP including 4 from Familiar since it's an Imp), Dagger * at level 6 Fighter, level 6 Fighter
+11 / +6 / +12 / +7 / +11 HP (total 59 HP), Bastard Sword * at level 3, War Hammer * at level 6 Fighter / Cleric, level 5 / 5 Fighter / Cleric
+5 / +7 / +5 / +6 / +3 / +5 / +3 / +6 HP (total 52 HP), Sling * at Fighter level 3 Priest of Tempus, level 6 Priest of Tempus
+2 / +3 / +6 / +4 / +8 HP (total 36 HP), Sword and Shield Style * at level 4 Swashbuckler, level 7 Swashbuckler
+3 / +3 / +4 / +3 / +2 / +1 HP (total 22 HP), Scimitar / Wakizashi / Ninjato * at level 4
Open Locks 25 / Find Traps 65 / Pick Pockets 45 / Move Silently 25 / Hide in Shadows 35 / Detect Illusion 20 / Set Traps 20 Cleric / Mage, level 5 / 5 Cleric / Mage
+3 / +2 / +2 / +2 / +5 / +2 / +2 / +2 HP (28 HP total), , Single Weapon Style * at Cleric level 4
I was surprised by the demilich on WK4, but I quickly retreated and send alone Wilkim since he wears items making him immune to imprisonment and death effects. Spectral Band did its job.
I decided not to fight Saladrex.
At WK5, I opened too soon the hardest seal by inadvertence, but Comet, Dragon Breath and ADHW, coupled with Shield of Balduran, assured a quick victory.
The lich survived turn undead but not Runehammer.
I read the first scroll then the second and avoided to fight Demongorgon (but kept a savegame there to try it after my run).
Abazigal's Lair was next, I freed the green dragon from the geas.
Against Abazigal and Tamat, I had Neera and Nalia had both a chain contingency with three ADHW, full buffs on the warriors, and an elemental prince and a planetar summoned before talking to Abazigal.
Sunnis and Anomen held human Abazigal while the planetar occupied Tamat. Meanwhile, Khalid dual wielding Answerer and Argunandval and Xzele with Soul Reaver finished the drakes, before joining the planetar against Tamat and using GW to land enough hit to weaken its MR, AC and thAC0.
Abazigal morphed into a dragon a little too soon, but a second Sunnis replaced the first, and after Tamat's death, Khalid and Xzele could join Anomen against the blue dragon, which failed just after wasting his imprisonment against the planetar.
I don't know what happened during this game session, but Windows didn't let me take a screenshot. Each time I clicked on the 'full screen" choice, it send me back to Windows 11 with my game reduced.
I entered the monastery with the help of Saemon, and succeed at convince Balthazar to join me. I don' tknow if it is a bug or an oversight, but leaving the monastery after that led to monks and mercenaries attacking me beside the new alliance.
For the last two challenges, I summoned an elemental prince and a planetar, buffed up and for the fourth had two chain contingencies with three ADHW... Cyric's favourites didn't last long.
For the slayer, I concentrated attacks from again Soul Reaver and Answerer with greater whirlwind against it, while Nalia was invisible and Wilkim and Neera playing cat and mouses with the bone blades.
@Trouveur Don't forget about your plan to lower the difficulty to core from here on
@aldain Sad to see you necromancer run on hold, but, of course, you should play what is most fun for you at the moment. Interestingly, your conjurer random party run is very similiar to a plan I came up with for what I'd want to do with a conjurer bhaalspawn as one of the few missing kits - with the idea being that I create the conjurer, and the other 5 party members are basically treated as fully randomized summoned characters, called in via conjuration magic by the bhaalspawn to help on his journeys. I'm curious to see how it will go for you
@Enuhal The concept works equally well for any other missing kit Please feel free to modify it to your tastes and use it when you push the next kit into the Hall after your Priest of Talos!
First things first, we free Haer'Dalis and take down Mekrath:
Entering the planar prison, we took out the opening party and moved to the right - the thrall wizard there actually tried to hit us with chain lightning - big mistake, as we're always buffed with full lightning immunity for most battles:
A quick onslaught on the Warden before he's done dealing with the remaining thralls, and we're out again:
We got into a bit of trouble in the old tunnels when I misjudged the position of the web trap, which resulted in Obram getting webbed. I was forced to throw a bunch of lightning spells in his direction to save his life:
Now... in the next fight, things went wrong. Quite wrong, in fact.
So far, we haven't had any terrible accidents with our lightning bolt bounces - mostly due to being very careful where and when to use them. However, it was only a matter of time until we made some kind of mistake witht this unpredictable spell. This was it: We opened the door to the cultist compound while fighting the vampiric wraiths and threw out a lightning bolt to finish our soon-to-be invisible foes. I should have left the door closed here until I was done with combat - The lightning bolt, predictably, bounced into the cult compound and hit a cultist and one of the guards:
The results of this are pretty devastating. I already knew: If the cult turns hostile you have to kill both Ghaal and the Unseeing Eye (which spawns in at the cult headquarters in that case) right there, and Ghaal does not drop his key for the locked of part of the old tunnels - in fact, there is no way at all to get past that locked door once the cult is hostile, meaning that we miss out not only on a bunch of experience and quite a few items, but also on the Ring of Gaxx, thanks to the shade lich being inaccessible now. Not good.
Still, this is by no means a run-ending mistake. We will just have to do without all that stuff... luckily, the Unseeing Eye spawned just around the corner and didn't have the party in its sight, allowing me to send some summons after it. It threw 3 ADHWs at our summons (which killed the first two, but we brought in more of them in time), following up with a few power words, but it wasn't over all hard to take down:
This means that we can do the Talos stronghold questline right away - not something I've done a ton (only once I believe), and I had to look up some of the correct choices here. Storming the Temple of Lathander (I had bought everything I would need from there previously) was rather easy, especially compared to the opposite (at least with SCS, the Talos temple isn't actually that easy to take out):
Still a bit crazy that you don't lose a single point of reputation during that entire questline.
We've now bought everything we could need, but we're also basically out of bolts of lightning (starting from our visit to WK until now, we basically almost always had some of them with us, as we bought all available ones from merchants as well). We decided to pay Gaelan and take down Bodhi before going to the Windspear Hills, to get the iMoD for the vampires. True sight and some patience for Tanova:
Glyph of warding has the advantage of unlimited level scaling, so at this point, since lightning bolt is capped at 10d6, it's starting to overtake the bolt (chain lightning, which only gets a bonus every 2 levels, is still weaker than both of these, which is why you don't see it as much). If the glyph didn't allow for a full resist on a saving throw, I would be using it a lot more. Still, it can do a decent amount of work:
After our berserker uses Ilbratha to find and kill Lassal, we take down Bodhi as soon as she appears:
@Trouveur Don't forget about your plan to lower the difficulty to core from here on
Thanks for the reminder. :-)
Wilkim part 6 :
I forgot in my last report to talk about Draconis. I dreaded this confrontation, so buffed up. With two shadow dragon armours, I also had a nice helmet giving 80% acid resistance from Call of the Lost Goddess, and many green scrolls.
I started to send him a planetar and an elemental prince from afar, and I saw him coming invisible (but with a protection circle) and wounded to my party. I send the casters as far as possible, and when he was seriously wounded retreated the frontliners, fearing the sticking bug.
The dragon went after Nalia, but his acid breath didn't do much damage. I used improved haste on Khalid and Anomen, and surprisingly he fell relatively fast.
I also forgot two screenshots from WK :
Back to Crucible now :
Indeed this mod is high end content. Beautiful areas from Acifer, and three main stages, with demons and fallen planetars. I indeed lowered difficulty from insane to core for it, and didn't visit any area without always death ward on all the party.
Two succubus succeed at charming Khalid then Anomen (chaotic command must have been either dispelled or ended up), but Wilkim had the staff of command (domination with no save, I wonder if it would work on Sarevok ? I know the Five are immune to charm.) ready to counter it.
There was another dragon fight with new scales, and some few good new items but mainly for evil party.
One of them is a desperate measure, allowing a mage to recover all spells at the cost of permanently losing 20% max HP !
Story wise it was interesting to discover Amelyssan's minions, and some more lore about Bhaal.
Entrance of Bhaal's palace, stunning isn't it ?
Last opponents are crushed, now the Throne awaits !
I will be travelling during this weekend, so the climax of this long journey will wait a little.
I will do a last check of all items before entering the final stage.
@Trouveur That's actually a really clever use of the Staff of Domination, I'll steal that.
Recovering spells for a permanent HP decrease seems a no-brainer during the Throne battle, I can see that turning the tides if you're in a tight spot. Nice work overall.
Yogii has made it out of the starting dungeon. I dismissed Yoshimo and Minsc, tackled the circus tent and have decided to next head to the Copper Coronet, someplace I strangely told my companions to meet me at, even though I’ve never been there myself.
Playing will be sparse this weekend, it’s my weekend with the kids and we’ve got a lot of activities planned. I might get some time in today though.
I’m very pleased to announce that Yogii the elven stalker has made his way to Chateau Irenicus.
I skipped SoD.
Now comes the real challenge. I’m scared.
Single class stalker can be a super fun full run. I have successfully done BG1 years ago with one, but died in BG2.
It's a class that can evolve over the course of a run like no other. I felt starting as an archer in BG1 was ideal. Then adding quarterstaff for backstab. Then eventually transitioning to some kind of slashing or piercing dual wield for late SoA/ToB. Three weapon slots. Max of two pips means you can experiment a bit.
Arguably the highest versatility of any kit out there frankly, with a little bit from all of four base class types -- divine caster, arcane caster, thief and fighter.
I’m very pleased to announce that Yogii the elven stalker has made his way to Chateau Irenicus.
I skipped SoD.
Now comes the real challenge. I’m scared.
Single class stalker can be a super fun full run. I have successfully done BG1 years ago with one, but died in BG2.
It's a class that can evolve over the course of a run like no other. I felt starting as an archer in BG1 was ideal. Then adding quarterstaff for backstab. Then eventually transitioning to some kind of slashing or piercing dual wield for late SoA/ToB. Three weapon slots. Max of two pips means you can experiment a bit.
Arguably the highest versatility of any kit out there frankly, with a little bit from all of four base class types -- divine caster, arcane caster, thief and fighter.
IDK, to each their own. I’m not going to say I’m not having fun. And I’ve never done the ranger stronghold, so I look forward to that.
I haven’t had any close calls yet. If I really wanted this style of game, I would’ve played a F/T though.
With the iMoD, AoP and berserker rage in hand, we felt ready to take on the vampires at the Windspear dungeon. Too bad vampires and mummies are resistant to lightning damage:
However, the same is not true for Samia's party - here, we can prepare and use the tiny tunnel to our advantage - we got tons of bounces and fried most of the group within seconds:
The old fashioned way would have to do against the various golems, and we took down Conster with a breach spell:
Time to enter the planar sphere. We decided to unleash our wands of lightning for the first time here, against the halflings - its six lightning bolts at once (though at reduced strength):
And some lightning bolts for the second group:
Lavok is first distracted by an aerial servant, who sadly gets dominated, so we have to step in with breach:
As for Tolgerias and his wizard friend, their spell protections prevent us from blasting them with lightning spells right away, but we can still make use of our bolts of lightning, especially after a well-timed breach:
Some ranged weapons were used against the golems:
Sadly, most demons outside proved to be entirely immune to lightning damage:
But still, we returned the sphere back to Athkatla and are now ready to leave for Spellhold.
I’m very pleased to announce that Yogii the elven stalker has made his way to Chateau Irenicus.
I skipped SoD.
Now comes the real challenge. I’m scared.
Single class stalker can be a super fun full run. I have successfully done BG1 years ago with one, but died in BG2.
It's a class that can evolve over the course of a run like no other. I felt starting as an archer in BG1 was ideal. Then adding quarterstaff for backstab. Then eventually transitioning to some kind of slashing or piercing dual wield for late SoA/ToB. Three weapon slots. Max of two pips means you can experiment a bit.
Arguably the highest versatility of any kit out there frankly, with a little bit from all of four base class types -- divine caster, arcane caster, thief and fighter.
IDK, to each their own. I’m not going to say I’m not having fun. And I’ve never done the ranger stronghold, so I look forward to that.
I haven’t had any close calls yet. If I really wanted this style of game, I would’ve played a F/T though.
TBF, the kit doesn't unlock much of its powers until BG2. The backstab starts too low to be worth it. The added mage spells don't come until you get spellcasting. The free points towards dual-wielding pay off much better in BG2 as well, where melee weapons get better. So you're just banking on that bonus 15% to stealth for much of BG1.
The key is to made a long term plan towards a build that takes advantage of these unique perks, aiming towards a flexible fighter. Otherwise, you will just long for the F/T as you say. That's why I suggest, quarterstaff for backstabbing, eventual dual-wield longswords and the longbow really make this character shine throughout the saga. In a way that's different than F/T.
Other key is alleviates some thief pressure on your party comp. You can feed most stealth gear to the stalker and still get benefit. So even Neera can work as your main thief.
I’m very pleased to announce that Yogii the elven stalker has made his way to Chateau Irenicus.
I skipped SoD.
Now comes the real challenge. I’m scared.
Single class stalker can be a super fun full run. I have successfully done BG1 years ago with one, but died in BG2.
It's a class that can evolve over the course of a run like no other. I felt starting as an archer in BG1 was ideal. Then adding quarterstaff for backstab. Then eventually transitioning to some kind of slashing or piercing dual wield for late SoA/ToB. Three weapon slots. Max of two pips means you can experiment a bit.
Arguably the highest versatility of any kit out there frankly, with a little bit from all of four base class types -- divine caster, arcane caster, thief and fighter.
IDK, to each their own. I’m not going to say I’m not having fun. And I’ve never done the ranger stronghold, so I look forward to that.
I haven’t had any close calls yet. If I really wanted this style of game, I would’ve played a F/T though.
TBF, the kit doesn't unlock much of its powers until BG2. The backstab starts too low to be worth it. The added mage spells don't come until you get spellcasting. The free points towards dual-wielding pay off much better in BG2 as well, where melee weapons get better. So you're just banking on that bonus 15% to stealth for much of BG1.
The key is to made a long term plan towards a build that takes advantage of these unique perks, aiming towards a flexible fighter. Otherwise, you will just long for the F/T as you say. That's why I suggest, quarterstaff for backstabbing, eventual dual-wield longswords and the longbow really make this character shine throughout the saga. In a way that's different than F/T.
Other key is alleviates some thief pressure on your party comp. You can feed most stealth gear to the stalker and still get benefit. So even Neera can work as your main thief.
The party is shaping up as:
Yogii the stalker
Jahiera
Anomen
Nalia
Jan
Keldorn (I still need to add him, but I figure I can pickpocket a bunch in Amn first, I don’t think he’d approve).
This looks like a well rounded, (mostly) good aligned party to me.
Calculating Conjurer: A Random Run, Part 2
Part 1 found here
Part 3 found here
Baldur's Gate is next on the agenda for the random roustabouts.
We are tactical in our approach: There are many quests here with none or very mild combat encounters, so we clear that out of the way first.
There are also several tomes available: I agonized quite a bit on what to do with the DEX tome, but ultimately decided it was best spent on Fighter / Cleric.
Conjurer, Fighter and Cleric / Mage have too low DEX to get any benefit. Swashbuckler would reach 15 DEX for +1 AC (and nothing else... no thievery bonus), and Priest of Tempus would get +1 ranged THAC0. Ultimately, I figured +1 unconditional AC by going from 15 to 16 DEX on frontliner #2 was the best bet.
Oh yes, I said we were tactical. Of course, enemies don't really care about that, as Vay-Ya demonstrated by coming perilously close to frying Swashbuckler (earlier, Niemain was also very liberal in his use of a Wand of Fire, incinerating one of his own allies).
Conjurer was able to move out of the way, so no real harm done.
On the subject of tomes again, the INT tome ends up going to Cleric / Mage.
It hardly matters under the current ruleset anyway, but next time I do a run I'll make a modification to the rules such that intelligence actually matters for mages.
In this case, the reasoning was simply that at 16 INT, it lets Cleric / Mage scribe with guaranteed success using only two Potions of Genius. Eh.
I've really been missing out by being so stingy on wands. Normally in BG1, you barely have the arcane slots to protect your casters and tear down the enemies defenses: By the time you do so, you're usually stuck throwing Chromatic Orb at them (since you can't strip their Shield yet, even). But with no MSD/MGoI, they're completely vulnerable to wand bursts, as Sunin found out to his detriment.
Being Lawful Evil, Conjurer does not object to brutalizing Lothander for his boots.
Observe the very respectable damage output of Fighter: He's finally getting enough THAC0 (with a simple Strength spell from Conjurer, which lasts a very long time) to be a dependable source of damage.
Alright, time for a slip-up (that actually made things less dangerous, not more).
I had for some reason gotten it into my head that you can assemble your party in one of the corners atop the Iron Throne building without the acolytes spotting you. I wasn't quite certain enough to just race straight up there, but had Swashbuckler stealth in and have a look.
It turns out no, you cannot do that.
It also turns out that Swashbuckler isn't as stealthy as I'd like, as he fails his check and goes visible, turning every acolyte red.
Swashbuckler scrambles downstairs evading pursuit, and we figure fine... it's an outright battle.
Buff up, ascend the stairs, firebomb!
Oh... brutal. It seems none of the enemies went with MGoI, so we outright fried three of them and severely wounded another three to the point that they died almost instantly.
Wait, are there supposed to be nine enemies here? Oh well, never mind that now.
Beyond the two rogues getting a juicy backstab on Swashbuckler forcing him to quaff a Potion of Invisibility, that was a remarkably clean victory.
And that was about it for Baldur's Gate. Even though we weren't THAT high level, it went quite smoothly.
There are still many areas left, though: Sirines on the West Coast are treated to fully buffed Skeleton Warriors (to the former's detriment): The spoils of war, namely the CON tome, is another precious prize.
After a bit of agonizing, Fighter claims it.
Yes, it would push Fighter / Cleric to 18 CON meaning +1 to saves from the Shorty bonus, but Fighter is always getting hit: He needs every last HP he can scrape together.
In other news, Shoal is saved, Droth is relieved of his helmet, and a local gang of hopeless Ogres are put down.
We even clear out Arghain's area (it's a steamroll by now), and Firewine Bridge, snatching the PfM scroll off Bentan in the process, for the meager price of a single Potion of Master Thievery to push Swashbuckler's Pick Pockets upwards a bit..
Alright, it's time for meatier fare.
First: Basilisk hunting. Which of course is cake. Korax is joined by Skeleton Warriors in force, as well as both Fighter and Fighter / Cleric, and we clear the entire map including the adventuring party in about 6 minutes flat.
This was just a pit stop on the way to our real destination though: Durlag's Tower. We can do it!
So, the plan.
Swashbuckler still needs potions to do his job here, though his Find Traps is good enough that with Cat's Grace a single Potion of Perception is sufficient to push him above 100 (and Potions of Master Thievery are more plentiful, so locks aren't an issue).
That said, I'd like to be efficient here, so we'll do this in stages.
Stage 1: Invisible and buffed, Swashbuckler detraps the entire tower above ground as well as the mini-cellar with the coughing elf.
Stage 2: Party rumbles on through, dispatching dastardly foes.
Step 3: Now quite visible Swashbuckler picks every lock and, after deducting 5% for reasonable expenses, shuffles the ill-gotten gains into the party's funds.
Works like a charm. With three Clerics, the Ghost can't keep up with the never-ending tide of Skeleton Warriors, and he's the only real threat above ground.
The WIS tome of course goes to Cleric / Mage, now sitting pretty at 19 WIS, which will be 20 before long.
Now granted, 4th level Cleric slots (which is what you mainly get out of going from 17 to 20 WIS) aren't that impressive, although Recitation is really powerful.
Still, it's much better than nothing, and for the really dangerous fights, I find Farsight very useful for directing the (summon) action while keeping the party entirely out of harm's way.
The Warder level goes reasonably smoothly: The Skeleton Warriors get some good hits in, but it's never life-threatening.
Alright: Warder time. Just take down whoever you can the fastest; that usually means you start with Fear.
Good stuff. Some Skeleton Warriors are keeping Pride at bay (we actually landed a Slow on him, Fear and Avarice, countering their Haste), Fighter is keeping Love occupied with the help of the Greenstone Amulet, and Avarice keeps going invisible: A backstab on Cleric / Mage later, the former does get his comeuppance.
Meanwhile, Fighter has really gone to town on Love: By the time we start thinking about helping out, Love is already down.
On his own, and absent his Haste, Pride can't do much. He does manage to chew through our last Skeleton Warrior before dropping, though.
Again, a very clean win. We like.
Next level is... annoying. The Dopplegangers keep cycling through Islanne (with her defenses) and Durlag (with his heavy damage), putting a real strain on our resources, but we pull through absent deaths. Phew.
Downward!
The Greater Wyverns are treated to a hasted contingent of anti-heroes, and said anti-heroes are then instructed to turn on each other.
And in comes a death (cue dramatic music!).
There is apparently (at least) one very nasty trap in the maze down here: Swashbuckler inadvertently tripped it as I was a bit too fast to order him to move on.
It first dealt 8 damage, and I shrugged it off. Two seconds later it dealt 9 damage... then another 8... then it kept dealing damage until Swashbuckler had enough.
Straining our inventory to the breaking point, we manage to bring everything back with us.
800 gold and a long return trip later, Swashbuckler scopes out some Skeleton Archers for us to use as wand targets.
Our objective: The 12 Arrows of Dispelling these little boneheaps are lugging around (which they will gleefully shoot at you if they see you).
They never do spot us, and so the arrows are ours: Good insurance for the final fight, as Sarevok is a lot less threatening without his Haste effect.
OK, we clear the level from bottom to top, everyone gets a Potion of Absorption, and we finish with the Cold room.
We teleport just fine, fire barrage ensues, and even though two Knights make it through since they're hasted, the enemy King drops within a few rounds, and victory is ours.
Fighter now has a +3 weapon, though he won't get to use it for very long. Let's make it count.
On the final level, I pop two Protection from Undead scrolls on Fighter and Fighter / Cleric.
It gets a bit annoying with the Greater Ghouls running this way and that since they can't percieve their attackers, but these things can be very nasty, especially in large numbers (and they do come running from all over the place once you engage one of them), so I prefer this to dealing with them upfront.
We reach Grael with most of our resources intact, so he gets the full Skeleton Warrior treatment.
And with that, there's just one combat encounter left down here: Some spiders that pose no problem.
We loot everything, and leave the Demon Knight sitting pretty where he is: The (admittedly minor) risk isn't worth the non-existing reward. We teleport out, hack up Kirinhale on the way since we forgot about her first time around, and that's it!
Durlag's Tower cleared! Well, except the boss.
We're making excellent progress. Everyone except Swashbuckler is at their final levels, though we're still about 20k off the cap.
I want to do Ice Island (for Stoneskin) and Wolf Island (for the Chainmail +3 to import into BG2), so that's next time.
Since we came this far, we'll storm through Ulcaster Ruins as well, even though there's nothing we need there, and deal with the Red Wizards for their ring.
Then it's back to Candlekeep and the very endgame. Unless something truly unexpected happens, this should be smooth (and fast) sailing.
The only fly in our ointment is that Fighter / Cleric caught a real bad break on reaching Fighter level 6, as detailed below... but I'm confident he'll make up for lost ground by Fighter level 9!
Level-up results at the end of the session: Conjurer, level 9 Conjurer
+5 / +6 / +5 HP (total 54 HP including 4 from Familiar since it's an Imp) Fighter, level 8 Fighter
+10 / +8 HP (total 84 HP, 89 with Helm of Balduran) Fighter / Cleric, level 7 / 7 Fighter / Cleric
+5 / +4 / +3 / +7 HP (total 70 HP), Sword and Shield Style * at Fighter level 6 (yuck) Priest of Tempus, level 8 Priest of Tempus
+4 / +4 HP (total 36 HP, 44 with Buckley's Bucker which I forgot she was using last update), Sling * at level 8 Swashbuckler, level 9 Swashbuckler
+6 / +4 HP (total 32 HP), Longsword * at level 8
Open Locks 45 / Find Traps 80 / Pick Pockets 50 / Move Silently 25 / Hide in Shadows 35 / Detect Illusion 25 / Set Traps 25 Cleric / Mage, level 7 / 7 Cleric / Mage
+4 / +2 / +5 / +2 HP (41 HP total)
Yeah, I don't really get what's happening with the HP either, they seem to be off by plus minus one for some characters. Meh.
If the SoD import screws them up further, I at least have the history here so I can fix them.
After the excitement of the previous session, things were back to being relatively placid this time. The session started with us reporting the death of the Unseeing Eye - giving Wolfie a level. He savored that as it will be a while before he gets the 1.5m needed for his next one. Getting to L14 though also opened up a new challenge to take on the hierarchy at the Druid Grove. Use of insect plague in the challenge pit there meant it was safe to transform to werewolf shape to rip up his opponent.
Wolfie was thinking of the Planar Prison next, but Ash pointed out that we hadn't yet done Mae'Var - so we went to find Rayic Gethras. Russell got a few buffs there and was able to shrug off the mage's spells while working through his defenses.
Mae'Var himself never stood a chance.
On to the Planar Prison, where Ash used his new mass invisibility spell to give us a free attack on entry - that was sufficient to kill the mage bounty hunter before he could buff and his companions failed to do us any damage. There were no problems working anti-clockwise round the prison on the way to confront the Warden. He had a large cohort of umber hulks that could have done lots of damage - if they hadn't all evaporated in a death spell. The Warden himself was exposed by True Seeing and didn't last long against a general assault.
One major piece of equipment not yet acquired was the Ring of Gaxx. Wolfie had one PfU scroll and used that to kill a couple of liches, but Ash pointed out that everyone would need to be protected against Kangaxx. A trip to the Temple District later and Russell was using his new Daystar weapon on the lich/demi-lich.
In addition to major improvements in saves and AC, the ring gave him a nice source of regeneration. The constitution bonus Ash got at level 15 activated natural regeneration for him and, with Wolfie also naturally regenerating while in greater werewolf form, we will need even less healing in future.
We did Sir Sarles and the follow-up temple quest for the Dawn Ring before turning to Aran Linvail's remaining tasks. The Guild Contact at the Bridge District was never going to survive long of course, but he was an early victim to the narcolepsy inflicted by the mighty Pixie Prick Ash had picked up in the Planar Prison. Then it was time to invade vampire HQ. Russell was immune to charm and level drain and did most of the hard work there. Wolfie contributed an insect plague to shut down Tanova's spell casting - though she managed to transform to bat form and flap away at near death. Bodhi similarly escaped after making a pretty feeble attempt at damaging us.
We hadn't yet done the Planar Sphere, but Wolfie was keen to take an ocean voyage and we just had time in the session to make the iMod and buy a couple of last minute goodies at Trademeet before taking ship for Brynnlaw.
Shapeshifter 14, 87 HPs, 210 kills (+254 in BGEE)
Dragon disciple 15, 79 HPs (incl. 7 from ioun stone), 318 kills (+99 in BGEE), 1 death
Paladin 14, 121 HPs (incl. 5 from Helm), 289 kills (+194 in BGEE), 6 deaths
More enemies faced this time were high enough level to resist Ash's death spell, but he still got a reasonable number of victims with that and managed to marginally increase his kills lead over Russell.
We entered Spellhold after getting the wardstone from a breached Perth. Outside, we got another chance to lightning bolt a shadow group:
I decided that Iseri would defeat Bhaal by only using electrical damage:
Kamillio has recently gotten access to spell sequencer (which will always be filled with 3* lightning bolt), but his first attempt was utterly thwarted by a bunch of immunities and resistances:
All in all, we didn't get the greatest amount of use out of our lightning spells in the asylum. At least it was a quick and successful visit:
I did, however, forget to do the statue riddles, so we're missing out on a ring of regeneration and some experience.
The city of caverns was next. Not too much to say about that one, and I didn't take any screenshots. I just entered the underdark, and aside from a short battle against the three mind flayers near the entrance and the first drow party, where I confirmed that avenger chain lightning does indeed ignore magic resistance, I haven't done anything down there yet. Also, this is the first time we're caught up to the actual gameplay with the reports for this run, so things might slow down from now on.
Too bad chain lightning has such a poor damage output, especially on a druid with relatively slow levelling at this point.
Comments
I the tunnels Kagain dies from a trap but furthermore nothing spectacular. We cleared the ogre mage from the back entrance making it easy to interrupt him.
Next the party went to Vax and Zal. By far Lucius was the more damaging darter in the realms. Going up the coast now. Only Durlags Tower is in the East, and Rasaad but I think I will skip him.
Lucius 0 deaths
Kagain 3 deaths
Shar-Teel 1 death
Garrick, Imoen, Viconia 0 deaths
out of party
Montaron, Khalid 3 deaths
Branwen 2 deaths
Jaheira, Xan 1 death
Kivan, Minsc, Xzar 0 deaths
Edwin and Dynaheir dead
Thanks!
So, to piggyback on what I said earlier, the dialogue between Branwen and Rasaad during his quest was pretty cool. She’s a good character.
Only the main quest and Durlag’s to go!
Previous updates
The Elementals still had no defences against petrification, so left the basilisks on Durlag's roof for now. They did some shopping at High Hedge, including buying quite a few acid darts. I probably won't use those in BGEE, but thought I would have them just in case I saw the need.
Back at the Lighthouse area killing the sirines didn't take long, though the party had to wait around for a while for Flash to recover from the feeblemind effect inflicted by the first group. They took a fair bit of damage from the golems, but bulldozed through them without bothering to rest. Rime took the constitution manual, as the character most likely to need lots of healing.
In search of more sirines further up the coast, the Elementals dealt with an ogre clan blocking the way - Lucid using call lightning for the first time there. After being sidetracked by various wolves and ghouls they failed to make a precision attack on the sirines and paid for that by having to retreat twice when party members were charmed - but they got the job done in the end.
After a few minor encounters they returned to the same area in search of Shoal. Flash deliberately put himself forward for a kiss as the protagonist can no longer be directly killed by that - but he still slumped down unconscious with a single HP left. He got up in time to make himself scarce though before Droth arrived and left it to the rest of the party to deal with the ogre mage. Once that was done the party decided to just kill Shoal as that gives a far greater reward than completing her quest (following which she now disappears instantly, giving no chance to attack her a she leaves).
The Elementals were still a long way from another level, so decided to go to the Nashkel Mines rather than spend time doing relatively minor work. There were no alarms going through there and Toxic opened proceedings against Mulahey with a backstab. Although that would seem pretty clear evidence of hostility, Mulahey was convinced to remain peaceful - so Toxic hit him with another backstab and this one proved fatal.
Outside the mine, the Elementals had their first death. I didn't make sufficient allowance for the short range of Blast's scorcher and he moved past Rime to cast that and was targeted by the Amazon archers - and poisoned by Maneira's darts. I did actually have a green scroll which would have been allowable to cure that, but was concentrating on other characters and Blast died before I got around to taking action on him.
After putting Blast back together Nimbul failed to survive a Toxic backstab. Tranzig was just standing around begging to be attacked and the elementals obliged him - Blast getting the kill there with a shocking grasp. At the Bandit Camp he attempted to do the same to a near-death Taurgosz, but failed to get a hit even with a roll of 18 (changing this spell to require a hit without even a bonus seems unreasonable to me for a spell that should work just with a touch) and had to settle for finishing the job with a scorcher. With the exterior clear, they rested before taking on Venkt & co. A backstab from Toxic and follow-up stealth attack from Sting was too much for Venkt and the rest of them soon followed. All Toxic's thieving points have gone into stealth, but even his original 20 was sufficient to disarm the lightning trap - he was rewarded for that with the bracers of weapon expertise to help his backstabs.
Resting allowed Flash to learn Bhaal slow poison. It's not quite clear whether Talos is permitting him to use that as a reward for his exemplary service, or to avoid annoying Bhaal - but either way that will reduce the chances of further deaths from poison.
In the Cloakwood, I don't normally bother with the tasloi guarding their prized cloak, but they were a tempting target for a glyph of warding. Flash chose to fight Seniyad and his druids and was targeted by call lightning. He was though wearing both boots and helm to give 70% protection and survived that easily enough - Seniyad was not so lucky when Lucid responded in kind. In the second area slow poison was used a couple of times. With the way phase spiders bounce around, spells against them are rather risky and group attacks too chaotic to control. A safer tactic was for Rime to show himself as a target with Toxic waiting to do a backstab while the others stayed away to avoid triggering more teleports.
They were ambushed by wyverns on the way to the next area, but were fully rested prior to that and had no problems dealing with them. Backstabs dealt with the druids in the next area, with Amarande already badly injured when following Toxic downstairs into an ambush.
In the 4th area several groups of baby wyverns were mobbed, gaining enough experience for the Elementals to take their next level. That gave Blast a considerable upgrade, with the ability to use Melf's Minute Meteors. I should have saved the game there, but tried to squeeze in a clearance of the wyvern cave, only to quickly get into trouble. The problems began when I didn't notice that Toxic had lost his stealth when moving in for a backstab and he was poisoned by a baby wyvern. That needed immediate action to save him and Flash moved round a group of wyverns to use slow poison. Meanwhile though, Lucid had been moving to one side to try and get lucky with a lightning bolt and Blast had moved to the other to use a scorcher. Both of those needed care to use and the distraction of saving Toxic meant they didn't get that. As a result Blast and Sting both took heavy lightning damage, but both survived. There wasn't too much left of the wyverns, but then Flash got poisoned. If that had been one of the others I would have left them to their fate, but with the run at stake Flash used the party's only green scroll to cure himself and shortly afterwards the last of the wyverns died.
Berserker 6, 78 HPs, 243 kills, 0 deaths
Archer 6, 63 HPs, 70 kills, 0 deaths
Priest of Talos 6, 51 HPs, 30 kills
Assassin 7, 47 HPs, 78 kills, 0 deaths
Avenger 7, 56 HPs, 14 kills, 0 deaths
Dragon Disciple 6, 41 HPs, 51 kills, 1 death
We fight our way through the Candlekeep crypts, preparing our lightning protection spells for the battle against Prat. Our lightning bolt casts are countered by invisibility, though, and once we get around to a second round of spellcasting, most enemies are already dead to the lightning ammo:
Next time: Starting with SoA.
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209733/#Comment_1209733
At the Cloakwood Mine, Toxic killed Rezdan with a backstab, but was sent running by a horror in return. Sting was hit by a bouncing lightning bolt, but otherwise the rest of the clean-up operation went well. Rime took the boots of speed. Inside the mine Flash used 3 glyphs to reduce the numbers of Hareishan's guards. She took no damage from the glyphs, but still did not have the HPs to survive a backstab. On the next level down, the ogre mage also fell to a backstab before he could do anything. Natasha though survived hers and managed to cause some trouble with a chaos and then lightning bolt before she went down.
On the bottom level, Lucid used Flash as a target to throw a lightning bolt into the distance. That did a bit of damage to Davaeorn and his battle horrors. A successful backstab, a couple of MMMs and a stealth attack from Sting all broke through mirrors to finish Davaeorn off. I remembered at the last minute to go and speak to Rill before flooding the mine and hence avoided responsibility for drowning lots of innocents.
In the City, Rime had a potential claim on the dexterity tome - to give him a natural 18 and improve AC. However, ultimately Toxic claimed it given the restricted thieving points available to assassins. With so much party XP still needed they did all the major encounters in the City and progress was generally fairly uneventful. For the Mountain Maulers, Lucid was successful with her first attempted Poison spell. I've always thought that spell has potential, but it always tends to be crowded out by other options so it's good to be forced into using it here. Toxic was bumped out of the way when attempting a backstab on Lothander, but the others dealt quickly with him anyway and Sting inherited his boots of speed. A backstab nearly killed Marek though and Rime ensured he was unable to finish his cast. I tried to kill the basilisk without using one of the potions finally acquired. Only one of the 4 glyphs produced any damage though and a backstab from Toxic and immediate follow-up from Sting didn't quite finish it off - so Toxic quickly had to gulp a potion.
The XP all added up and they were eventually able to level up again while helping out Aldeth Sashenstar once more. That just leaves the Iron Throne to be done in the City before returning to their old haunts in Candlekeep.
Berserker 7, 93 HPs (incl. 5 from helm), 330 kills, 0 deaths
Archer 7, 70 HPs, 108 kills, 0 deaths
Priest of Talos 7, 57 HPs, 41 kills
Assassin 8, 53 HPs, 118 kills, 0 deaths
Avenger 8, 61 HPs, 19 kills, 0 deaths
Dragon Disciple 7, 48 HPs, 73 kills, 1 death
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209733/#Comment_1209733
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209754/#Comment_1209754
At the Iron Throne enemies were led downstairs into an ambush and none of them were able to put up much of a fight. After reporting in to Duke Eltan they returned to Candlekeep where the real Iron Throne party were softened up with several glyphs before being overwhelmed. Two potions of perception were sufficient for Toxic to disable the traps and loot the tombs. Toxic held on to the strength tome to help his backstabs hit.
Five glyphs did a reasonable amount of damage to Prat's party. He chased after Flash, but failed to complete his lightning bolt spells thanks to a couple of area transitions. The rest of his party soon followed him. By this time Toxic could no longer disable the web traps, but he could use stealth and his new ring of free action to activate them harmlessly before helping to deal with the spiders. Flash wanted to kill the basilisks with glyphs, but after a number of failed attempts to rest he gave up on that and blast finished one off with a first use of his new fireball spell before the last few HPs of the other were lost to a stealth attack.
With the party still well below 100k XP each, they returned to Durlag's Tower, where Rime used a green PfP scroll to kill the basilisks. Under the tower, more potions of perception allowed Toxic to detrap the first level. Avarice died from running into some glyphs after already taking fireball damage. Fear followed Rime, but only found a backstab. Love was another backstab victim leaving Pride the last to go in a general attack. By that stage Toxic's potions of perception had run out and he chose not to renew them.
Back in Baldur's Gate, a glyph and a couple of fireballs broke the back of the resistance as the Elementals rescued Duke Eltan. Cythandria shrugged off damage to complete a chaos spell which confused 3 of the party - but that wasn't enough to save her. Slythe ate a backstab and didn't last long, while Krystin saved against several attempts to poison her but couldn't do anything about weapon damage.
At the palace I considered making use of potion buffs for the first time, but decided to continue without. One of the dopplegangers latched onto Flash and did quite a bit of damage, but otherwise everything went smoothly and both dukes were saved. After clearing out the maze, glyphs and fireballs softened up the Undercity party. A few more skeleton warriors died, but the party were still miles off another level and decided to go straight after Sarevok rather than seek XP elsewhere.
In the temple some glyphs were pre-laid for Semaj, but I didn't think they would work - and they didn't. I was a bit more hopeful about poisoning him, but he saved against those attempts and a chaos confused Toxic and Sting. Sting then ran towards the dais and brought Angelo and Tazok into the battle (along with a battle horror), which looked like being a problem. Meanwhile, Rime had been tanking Sarevok, but broke that off seeing what was happening elsewhere and tried to lose Sarevok round a pillar. He'd not been successful in that when Sting went down and Angelo sought fresh targets.
Toxic finally recovered from his confusion and managed to drag one of the battle horrors away and backstab it while Rime ran the others round.
Our primary strategy for bigger battles in early SoA is to buff all party members with protection from lightning and have our three spellcasters cast 1-2 lightning bolts each into the room - that ends most battles fairly quickly:
One thing I learned here, which is very useful to know for this run: Did you know that shadow fiends, specifically, have a lightning resistance of MINUS 128? Which means they take a TON of extra damage from any source of lightning damage. See for example: Our best shocking grasp yet:
Well, luckily we once again don't get vampire wraiths here (they would've likely forced us to flee). We have to take a rest after the first group of statues, but we obtain the blade:
Here's a shadow fiend against bolts of lightning:
Anyway, it's time for Wilkim part 4 !
So I at last finished SoA side quests.
I helped Rasaad, no real struggles here considering our XP and gear. Poor Dark Moon Monks were slaughtered.
Mazzy's poisoned sister quest didn't want to trigger,so I gave up on this one. But she could beat the ogre.
The sewers mindflayers were easy preys thanks to chaotic command.
The chapter 6 new areas were cleared fast, Coran couldn't be saved sadly.
Neera quest was done without trouble, but I forgot how to save the half orc, so he was killed by the red wizard. Also I met a bug where the game thought Neera was dead, and so all the wild mages in the refuge were invisible. It was a variable to fix, and all went well after that.
I didn't do Dorn's quest since I have Anomen and another paladin in the party.
After that cleaning of Suldanessalar at last started. Golems, rakashas and demons were crushed by buffed party.
Surprisingly, I had harder times with the black dragon. I wasn't expecting it since SoD green dragon,shadow dragon, Firkraag and the Tartarous dragon didn't pose much troubles.
Even with my usual buffs, I found the black one hitting hard, resisting magic, but in the end I could feeblemind him too. But it was a good reminder than, how easy finishing side quests and areas from SoA and cleaning Suldanessalar, my party was not invincible and could be defeated.
My avenger hit level 15 just before Irenicus. I didn't rest to memorize my new elemental summoning spell.
Irenicus lasted a little longer than usual because I had exhausted all my breach spells, until I remembered I also have some wands of spell striking.
In the Abyss, Fear test was a little messy and Anomen was imprisoned by an elder beholder. Two ADHW later, Nalia used a freedom scroll to free him.
And that's it for SoA ! Time for ToB !
Fearing Ascension Illasera, I put the reflection shield, cast physical mirror on Anomen and Wilkim, and summoned some greater skeletons near Illasera starting point.
The fight was easier than expected, and since it was in outdoor Wilkim uses his favorite spell :
I was expecting an harder challenge with the first pocket plane challenge, and so prepared newly learned planetar with Nalia, but at the end no Irenicus, Bodhi and Sarevok showed up. Maybe with my 3 millions XP I was a little too low for them ?
I did all Saradush quests without troubles, Anomen's turn undead destroying all the vampires but their leader (but his MoD did it).
Ascension Gromnir saw his team decimated by two ADHW, and the fight rapidly turned bad for him.
Before doing Yaga part, I at last went to Watcher Keep and cleared the first two levels. Of course given my levels it was not difficult, and the chromatic demon wasn't resistant to the staff doing magic damage from Barovia (great too against golems).
I left other levels for later.
Fire temple was done slowly but without troubles, thanks to vorpal hits from Xzele and slow spells from Nalia and Neera.
Whoever said foes always succeed at their saving throws in ToB was wrong. Same for only dual wielding or+4 or +5 weapons as being viable. Silver Sword was a real helper against the giants.
The wraith and its undead were easy prey for Anomen.
So we arrived to face Yaga Shura.
Foes after the bridge came from all sides, but we managed to hold them while reaching Yaga. I forgot he first flees, so I had to track him on the bridge, while holding both sides from incoming reinforcements.
A three lower resistance sequencer, followed by greater malison allowed a slow spell to land. Xzele switched the Silver Sword for the underappreciated Soul Reaver, and after a greater whirlwind, Yaga didn't hit Khalid and Anomen any longer.
Second challenge went fine.
It was time for Neera quest, two ADHW cleaned the initial ambush, and the Yuantis were slaughtered too.
Vichross was more resilient.
Anyway I did then Rasaad quest, without bugs or difficulties, even if the dark moon guys in the fortress were annoying.
Surprisingly, the final fight felt easier, with the shadow dragon being dispel then killed by a planetar.
After the Oasis fight without things worth mentioning, I did Amkethran side little quests.
It was time for Reunion mod, with a return with Nalia to the De Arnise Keep. Fights were easy, and the plot surprising.
Then it was Hexxat's turn, raiding another tomb.
So all NPC quests were done (except Dorn's again of course), beside Juniper's one.
Time to go back to Ravenloft, this time in the desert. Beautiful areas, nice puzzle to solve, and not too difficult fights.
I then decided to go after Sendai.
The elder beholder surprised me and succeed at holding Anomen, but a planetar saved the day.
Clearing the enclave took far less time than in my previous ToB run. The lich had many protections, but nothing against turn undead.
Before going after Abazigal (and dreading Draconis), I decided to finish Watcher Keep. Level 3 didn't pose much troubles despite wild and dead magic (far less troubles than my previous attempt), and Anomen could recover Purifier. And Xzele can use it !
I decided to bet with the demon, and won both the wish scroll and Spectral Band. Cespenar upgraded it and Wilkim have now a nice melee weapon for the few times it's needed.
I let him go and didn't try to get the Deck of Many Things. Too risky for my taste.
I'm currently in level 4, mindflayers and githyanki parts have been done.
On a side note, Wilkim contribution to the fights didn't went down in ToB despite using Firetooth dagger with only 2 APR.
On the to do list :
- finishing level 4 and 5 of WK
- Abazigal's Lair
- entering the monastery and convince Balthazar to side with me
- last two challenges
- Crucible mod
- Throne fight
Easy isn't it ?
Sad to see the end of your run despite technically beating BG1 @Grond0
The Lightning Party, update 6
On to Athkatla sidequests - the slavers really got to feel the power of triple lightning bolts:
I skipped SoD.
Now comes the real challenge. I’m scared.
I the siren cave I missed three of the four traps but they had at this level little impact. The hold trap was after all flesh golem were killed. The glyph hurt but only a quarter health of several characters, and there is an arrow trap or something that did low damage. I was searching for the traps but on mobile it is not easy. You mis-click very easily on a 4.6 inch screen.
Small note. Lucius now does a maximum of 8 damage per dart. He has 477 kills compared to 211 from Kagain, 140 of Shar-Teel and Imoen had 150 or such. Of course Shar-Teel and Kagain are not exactly the same amount of time in the party, but my my my what an enormous amount even before we get to the city.
I should try to check how many kills the other npcs all had (if that is saved in a local variable I might see it I think). Mostly though, they will not surpass 50 I am sure.
Lucius 0 deaths
Kagain 3 deaths
Shar-Teel 1 death
Garrick, Safana, Viconia 0 deaths
out of party
Montaron, Khalid 3 deaths
Branwen 2 deaths
Jaheira, Xan 1 death
Kivan, Minsc, Xzar, Imoen 0 deaths
Edwin and Dynaheir dead
Previous run
The gameplay for the previous attempt felt a bit too unbalanced, with 2 of the characters having nothing much to do most of the time. To help with that I decided to start again, but this time with slightly looser restrictions. My originally stated rules did actually allow the use of elemental darts and potion buffs, but in the event I actually avoided using either of those. This time I think I will make use of them, which will ensure the avenger can have something to do all the time. The other character that was usually at a loose end was Flash, the Priest of Talos. He can't use darts and had an extremely restricted spellbook last time (nothing at 1st level, flame blade at 2nd, glyph of warding at 3rd and poison at 4th). This time I'll allow him, as the PC, to be more favoured by Talos and able to make use of self-buffing spells (but still not area spells or spells targeted on others).
As before, the XP for a first level came courtesy of Korax and some basilisks. I forgot to take that immediately though and decided to wait until everyone had 5,000 rather than get levels out of order. I hadn't realised though that Korax was immune to both cold and electricity and had no way to kill him even after knocking him unconscious once Mutamin and the basilisks were all dead.
With the arcane casters both at level 3, they took advantage of the availability of chromatic orb to go after Greywolf. He was still active though when they were out of damaging spells and Blast incautiously used his breath weapon on him. That didn't kill Greywolf and the stasis following the use of breath meant Blast could not run away - Rime was just too late to save him by beating Greywolf unconscious.
After a temple run they went to get their next weapon from Bassilus. There wasn't any drama there, but I was tending to take more risks and Toxic paid for that when trying to kill the golems inside the magic shop rather than dragging them out where there was plenty of room - he expected to kill one that was already near death with his next hit, but didn't quite manage that and got caught between them.
At the ankheg area the Elementals had cleared almost the whole area, but failed to identify that the last one attacked was targeting Blast and he suffered a second death.
Next up, Rime led the way in attacking some sirines at the Lighthouse. Toxic did most of the work on the golems though with stealth attacks. A few more sirines further up the coast were followed by Droth - Flash once more taking Shoal's kiss there before the others dealt with the ogre mage. With reputation now at 20, some shopping included getting the Dagger of Venom for Sting.
A return to complete their belt collection courtesy of Kirian saw her doing surprisingly well to complete a lightning bolt spell just before she died, but that did relatively little damage. Moving on to Durlag's Tower, call lightning helped make short work of the battle horrors. Toxic missed with the backstab intended to kill Kirinhale, but his backstabs were working better on the roof - a critical one-shot on the last basilisk ensuring that only a single potion of mirrored eyes was required. Toxic used 3 potions of perception to detrap nearly all of the first level down, though killing the enemies on the way meant the potions didn't quite last the distance. The first two of the warders were split up and followed the Elementals upstairs and were dealt with without too much trouble.
That left the party close to another level and escorting Brage to Nashkel proved enough to allow that.
Berserker 6, 79 HPs, 155 kills, 0 deaths
Archer 6, 63 HPs, 17 kills, 0 deaths
Priest of Talos 6, 52 HPs, 0 kills
Assassin 7, 46 HPs, 65 kills, 1 death
Avenger 7, 63 HPs, 11 kills, 1 death
Dragon Disciple 6, 35 HPs, 36 kills, 2 deaths
At the Umar Hills, I decide to explore the area at night on purpose, in hopes of getting to use my lightning bolts against more shadow fiends for the nice bonus damage:
Next up: Planar Prison and Unseeing Eye.
Instead, I figured I'd try to up the difficulty bar a notch: Introduce a little anarchy randomness.
Starting: In BG1EE.
Protagonist: Conjurer, Lawful Evil Human Conjurer (see below).
Difficulty: Insane with no difficulty-dependent damage increase.
Mods: Full SCS 35.18.
Rules for this run:
1. At least one of the characters in each party must be a Conjurer (the protagonist).
2. At least one of the characters in each party must be some kind of Thief (lest I go insane from trying to remember all trap locations/damage types and not getting to loot most locked containers).
3. None of the characters in each party may be a Wild Mage (I'd just end up using them as wand monkeys to be completely safe, and that seems boring/a waste)
4. No exact duplicate characters in each party. With pseudo-RNG's, you tend to get sudden streaks of identical results, and while a party with four Fighter / Thief characters would be playable, it'd get a bit dull (and redundant).
For each such generated party, I may regenerate a single character once: If I choose to do so, I must use the newly generated character.
I then select the party I like best, and set to work!
Stats are rolled using the BG1EE engine, and this is quite punishing:
Each character gets to roll best out of three, but may not increase/decrease stats, and may not move stats around. This makes good rolls quite unlikely, and the kind of optimized characters you usually see simply never appear.
Proficiencies, Thief skill points and starting spells are also randomized, as is every choice made during level-up, and naturally we're using random hitpoints.
Let's get on with it then. Our initial party choices are:
1. Swashbuckler + Priest of Tempus + Dragon Disciple + Fighter + Conjurer + Cleric / Mage
2. Fighter / Cleric + Shaman + Thief + Conjurer + Cleric / Mage + Shadowdancer
3. Fighter / Cleric + Priest of Helm + Barbarian + Cleric / Thief + Conjurer + Priest of Tyr
That's surprisingly non-horrible. None of the parties are excellent, mind you, but they're all playable.
Let's see if we can't improve this a bit.
Party 1: Reroll the Dragon Disciple. Result: Fighter / Cleric
Party 2: Reroll the Shadowdancer. Result: Fighter / Druid
Party 3: Reroll the Priest of Tyr. Result: Berserker
Any of these amended parties will eventually become powerful.
I somehow settle on Party 1, but Party 2 would've been a blast as well.
Details on starting characters are found in the spoiler for those interested (stat order STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA).
Conjurer
Lawful Evil Male Human Conjurer
Quarterstaff *
9 10 18 14 11 15
Armor, Magic Missile, Reflected Image
Fighter
True Neutral Male Dwarf Fighter
Two-Handed Sword **, Sling *, Single Weapon Style *
15 13 16 7 15 9
Fighter / Cleric
True Neutral Male Dwarf Fighter / Cleric
Two-Handed Weapon Style **, Club *, Mace *
14 15 17 12 12 10
Priest of Tempus
Chaotic Evil Female Gnome Priest of Tempus
Single Weapon Style *, Flail / Morning Star *
12 18 14 12 9 14
Swashbuckler
True Neutral Human Swashbuckler
Crossbow *, Dagger *
13 14 14 13 9 14
Set Traps +5, Find Traps +20, Open Locks +10, Pick Pockets +5
Cleric / Mage
Neutral Evil Female Half-Elf Cleric / Mage
Sling *, Quarterstaff *
9 13 17 15 17 11
Armor, Color Spray
It might not seem like it, but we keep lucking out.
Both frontliners have decent CON, and can (after we get the STR tome) wear Full Plate.
Even more amazingly, Fighter has specialization in a decent weapon! You rarely see that, especially right out of the gate.
Conjurer didn't get stuck with 9 INT.
Priest of Tempus... OK. At least she has good AC.
Cleric / Mage has good CON, good INT and great WIS; she'll be taking the WIS tomes for sure.
Swashbuckler... well. He doesn't get a minus to Thief skills, let's leave it at that.
To keep from cluttering, I'll give details on level-up results at the end of each update.
And so we set out on our grand adventure, with the odds stacked against us.
Even so, above all else: We must survive.
Calculating Conjurer: A Random Run, Part 1
Part 2 found here
With three Clerics of some variety, Tarnesh cannot stand for long: Well, he literally lies down due to Command and that's it.
We clear the FAI Hobgoblins and head south.
Neera's ambush is dealt with using Command. If you accept her into the party but then boot her (since we're now at 7 characters), you get to keep her Gem Bag, so we do that.
We're saving quests with potential reputation reward until after we've bribed reputation up, and we're also saving the few with better rewards for 18 CHA characters, so beyond talking down Marl and dealing with Karlat, there's not much else to do in Beregost: Spiders are too risky at level 1 without Sleep, Silke is too risky for a long time. We head towards Nashkel.
Not much happens on the way: Command and Color Spray make short work of most things, though Hobgoblin Archers are still dangerous, since two rapid hits will kill any of our characters with bad luck.
The Amazing Oopah does drop a Stinking Cloud scroll when he explodes, heh... that will actually be useful.
Bit of a heart attack when we got a Bandit ambush while travelling during the day; but there were seemingly only four of them?
Conjurer pops a LMD against the closest Bandit who is also commanded, and we escape uneventfully.
We had an ulterior motive in coming to Nashkel: Our greed. More specifically, we pick up the Red Potion, begrudgingly pay 100 gold to have it identified, then spend the lion's share of our meager remaining gold on some key scrolls from High Hedge for Cleric / Mage: Conjurer cannot learn Identify, after all.
Cleric / Mage gets some vital options this way, including Sleep and (for later) Invisibility, Stinking Cloud, etc.
Conjurer has 15 CHA, so we purchase a Friends scroll first and use it before buying the rest; this saves us quite a bit of gold.
We put Sleep to good use by eradicating the Beregost Spiders.
With the potions of Master Thievery and Agility obtained by clobbering Vitiare, Swashbuckler manages to snatch Algernon's Cloak: This puts Conjurer at 17 CHA, with 18 to come once we obtain the tome. Good stuff.
We keep doing safe things: Retrieving Perdue's sword, dealing with some Hobgoblins at the temple etc.
Still, this just isn't enough to tide us over. We'll have to risk the parts near Baldur's Gate Bridge.
We snatch the Ankheg treasure under Sanctuary, then head north, clearing the Ankheg near Tenya's hut and subsequently finishing her quest, then eradicating a Zombie infestation.
We head south and slowly but safely (owing to Command) chip away at Ankhegs. Then it's off to Drizzt's area, where Teyngan fails his save against Hold Person, and the hopeless Half-Ogres are just Slept.
Thinking it's been way too long since we came close to defeat, Conjurer steps up to the plate when we head towards the Nashkel Mines and run into the scripted ambush (if you've spoken with Dorn).
Really glad we farmed a bit of Ankheg experience before attempting that. That's a single critical for 16 HP, one HP short of outright killing Conjurer. Notice the graphic on the offending Bandit: I tested it later, and PW: Sleep seems bugged, in that enemies still get to attack while seemingly unconscious. Noted.
Anyway, at the Mines, Greywolf is kited, but we refrain from speaking to Prism because again, we might get a reputation boost (and we're saving them).
Next, we delve into the Mines proper, ending up using nearly all our healing potions, as both frontliners have abysmal DEX.
We do manage to punch through to Mulahey's chambers, though, and loot his chest under Sanctuary: The main draw is of course the scroll of Web therein.
We feel up to taking on Bassilus now: Triple Silence 15' Radius spells his end convincingly.
OK, time to finish our gear. We need Bracers of Dexterity and the Charisma Tome, so head west of Nashkel.
Xvart Village has no answer for Sleep, Neville and the Polar Bear have no answer for Command, and the local Ogre Berserkers and their Hobgoblin Elite cronies get to serve as wand targets (Lightning, Cold, Fire... we don't discriminate, if it shoots something, we use it).
At the Gnoll stronghold, we pick up bracers and the tome, and clear the rabble without incident.
Last and possibly least, we deal with the Cloudpeaks, and that little area with Sendai: Command / Hold Person does a good job.
Having consumed the tome, Conjurer now has 18 CHA with Algernon's cloak, so we pick up some quest rewards: Landrin (not a reward but you do get 6 Antidotes on accepting the quest if you have high enough reaction score), Jared and someone else I'm sure I'm forgetting are visited.
We also finally have the money to bribe reputation all the way up to 18, so commence talking to reputation boosting quest givers.
We luck out with Bjonin providing the last point: Reputation 20 and CHA (boostable to) 20+ means best possible store prices,
so we head to High Hedge and buy a slew of good scrolls for Conjurer for later use.
We're running low on easy pickings, but the Doomsayer is not quite cold immune.
OK, we're strong enough. Time for Mulahey.
Jeez. You can never let your guard down. Mulahey had a Mental Domination prepared, and Fighter willingly obliged. We shuffle around quite a bit but eventually manage to get things under control, phew.
Back in Nashkel, Nimbul falls to Command, but not before cutting down brave brave sir Oublek, who volunteered to lead the charge while certainly not under the influence of Algernon's Cloak: We shall spend the 2700 gold and 2 emeralds he dropped freely, since it's what Oublek would have wanted.
Conjurer immediately casts Find Familiar from the scroll, boosting his fragile HP somewhat, and we head north.
Tranzig manages a Lightning Bolt, which could've been very dangerous, but we lucked out in that he only hit the frontliners (and they both saved), with no bounces.
Northward, both Larswood and Peldvale are cleared easily; Osmadi and Corsone are victimized by Silence 15' Radius en masse.
We reach the Bandit Camp and head back home when, finally, we get an ambush worth the effort: It's Molkar and his merry murderers.
Of course, both the Illusionist and Cleric here are very low level and completely susceptible to Command, proving their (and the party's) undoing.
The fun doesn't stop here; on our way back to the camp, Amazons enter the fray.
And quickly exit: Both their Clerics are silenced, Priest of Tempus has reached level 5 so reveal the stealthed Thieves using Invisibility Purge, and once the Thieves drop, the Clerics can't do much on their own.
A rest later, it's the Bandit Camp. Here we actually get in serious trouble, mostly owing to my stinginess.
So we have two Web scrolls available, one from Mulahey's chest, one from the south-eastern most hut in the camp (Swashbuckler stealthed in and stole it). I definitely want Conjurer to scribe one soon, but we could (and usually do) use the second one to hinder the horde here. I however decide not to: Our only crowd control will be a solitary Stinking Cloud by Cleric / Mage.
This proves... most unwise. Venkt makes his save, and proceeds to drop a Slow on us, affecting everyone but Cleric / Mage!
Here we should've run, but opt to stay and fight: Fighter quaffs our only Oil of Speed, countering the Slow and keeping Taurgosz from clobbering him.
I say should've, since Venkt manages a Sleep as well before we put him down.
Amazingly, the entire party makes their save. A few more bombardments lets us pull through, though that was a bit too close to disaster for comfort (Cleric / Mage got a taste of Britik and his Strength potion, as the Gnoll made it past the Stinking Cloud).
We can't loot most of the containers since Swashbuckler (see report at the end) hasn't lucked out with Open Locks yet, but we gather what we can and proceed with the plot.
Conjurer finally gets to update his spell selection too, doing so under 3 intelligence-boosting potions (14 INT base...).
Well, that was nerve-wracking. Cloakwood should be less dangerous (not really).
Again Druids have no recourse under Silence 15' Radius, as Seniyaad and some Shadow Druids (not the Archdruid though, we're leaving him for later) find out.
We're about to get a piece of key loot for Fighter: Spider's Bane. So of course something bad must happen to balance out the good.
Cleric / Mage got webbed and literally died in two seconds. Still, it's our first death this run, so it's fine.
We collect the loot and make our way back to civilization, shelling out the 600 gold for a Raise Dead.
Even with Spider's Bane, the party is just absolute rubbish in a straight melee/ranged fight, so we rely heavily on Bless / Chant / Chaos of Battle to carry us through more difficult battles, as the Cloakwood Wyverns find out.
We take a break before pushing on to the Mines, gathering some easy experience: Silke finally gets her comeuppance, a local Wolf Pack is eradicated, dealing with a Revenant and Narcillicus (5x Animate Dead), Zordral eats his just desserts, etc.
Though again: Don't underestimate Zordral. Never shall I learn this.
OK, Drasus: Your time is up.
Animate Dead x5, Bless, Chant, Remove Fear... and that's about what we have for buffs. Charge!
So that's a good start, but then Rezdan and Kysus start their summoning routine.
Fighter just can't hold off those numbers, so Genthore breaks free (he's quite nasty if allowed to use his Throwing Axes), but we do manage to pop Rezdan.
We redirect Fighter / Cleric to lock down Genthore and try to use Priest of Tempus to round up the summons while the rest of the party chases after Kysus. Things are looking really iffy for a few rounds, as Kysus shuffles this way and that, but finally, finally, a wand blast spells his end.
I think that's the Revised Death Effects component of SCS preventing Kysus from freezing and shattering? Not that I'd be particularly saddened to lose a scroll of Fire Shield: Red if it meant us surviving, but still.
With just Genthore and some melee chumps remaining, we clear the field comfortably.
Into the Mines.
We get some funky behavior with Hareishan: Swashbuckler accidentally shows himself to a guard in her room, but the guards just follow piecemeal, some taking the long way around to reach us (we're in the side tunnel to the east of the room).
It turns into a fun little battle where we're fighting off reinforcements constantly for a few turns, but Hareishan never shows herself. We hunt her down eventually, and she goes down rather unceremoniously to a wand blast, though not before Charming / Dire Charming / Chaosing our frontliners.
The Ogre Mage below is still such low-level that he doesn't get to save against Command.
We clear the Hobgoblin Elites out of Natashas room, as they're not linked to her, and settle in for a gruesome battle, softening her up with Skeleton Warriors.
Our resolve turns out unnecessary, as the last Skeleton Warrior cuts her down without incident. Doesn't even warrant a screenshot, but well, OK.
We polish off Davaeorn's private guard and head back outside to rest before the final confrontation.
Naturally, this means an ambush by Giant Spiders who proceed to poison and kill Priest of Tempus (I don't understand how this happened, she was webbed about 3x longer than they usually last).
A long trip back-and-forth and 800 gold later, we're all set.
I'm betting on Davaeorn's fight still working the same way as previously, and it turns out I'm right.
The battle starts the moment anyone, even under Invisibility or Sanctuary, enters Davaeorn's field of vision: The Battle Horrors move to engage, but D couldn't care less. He also couldn't care less about a pitched battle between our party and a total of some 20 guards taking place not 30 meters away, apparently. Good news for us.
We clear the Battle Horrors and deal with the 5 waves of 4 guards each.
Following this, everyone heads south to the Mustard Jelly room: Swashbuckler stealths, the Clerics use Sanctuary, and Conjurer and Fighter get Invisibility.
We do this since the south is entirely safe: D will never teleport down here, unlike the room to the north.
Commence standard operating procedure: Animate Dead! And Wand of Monster Summoning when that fails!
We retreat, rest, and under Cat's Grace and a few Potions of Perception, Swashbuckler (still no luck on the Open Locks front...) manages to loot the place for us.
The mines are flooded, and we make our way back to civilization uneventfully.
And that is where we stand now, awaiting fresh adventures (perhaps a tour of the big city?) at the FAI.
One really close call (single HP left), one potentially very bad situation where we lucked out with a good party-wide save against Sleep, and a protagonist stunned by Zordral. Other than that, we've been fortunate... in some ways.
Let's hope it continues. It's been great fun so far, at least: I have to actually make an effort when we simply lack the melee/ranged brute force to solve most encounters by auto-attack, although this will become less of a concern as frontliners keep leveling, I imagine.
Under this ruleset, Fighter / Clerics, Cleric / Rangers, Fighter / Druids and yes, Beastmasters (!) are much more powerful than normal: This is since they have so comparatively few proficiencies available that they are likely to achieve at least one specialization before SoA, and all but guaranteed to do so before ToB, so it's good we got a Fighter / Cleric at least.
Level-up results at the end of the session:
Conjurer, level 6 Conjurer
+5 / +6 / +6 / +5 / +6 HP (total 38 HP including 4 from Familiar since it's an Imp), Dagger * at level 6
Fighter, level 6 Fighter
+11 / +6 / +12 / +7 / +11 HP (total 59 HP), Bastard Sword * at level 3, War Hammer * at level 6
Fighter / Cleric, level 5 / 5 Fighter / Cleric
+5 / +7 / +5 / +6 / +3 / +5 / +3 / +6 HP (total 52 HP), Sling * at Fighter level 3
Priest of Tempus, level 6 Priest of Tempus
+2 / +3 / +6 / +4 / +8 HP (total 36 HP), Sword and Shield Style * at level 4
Swashbuckler, level 7 Swashbuckler
+3 / +3 / +4 / +3 / +2 / +1 HP (total 22 HP), Scimitar / Wakizashi / Ninjato * at level 4
Open Locks 25 / Find Traps 65 / Pick Pockets 45 / Move Silently 25 / Hide in Shadows 35 / Detect Illusion 20 / Set Traps 20
Cleric / Mage, level 5 / 5 Cleric / Mage
+3 / +2 / +2 / +2 / +5 / +2 / +2 / +2 HP (28 HP total), , Single Weapon Style * at Cleric level 4
I was surprised by the demilich on WK4, but I quickly retreated and send alone Wilkim since he wears items making him immune to imprisonment and death effects. Spectral Band did its job.
I decided not to fight Saladrex.
At WK5, I opened too soon the hardest seal by inadvertence, but Comet, Dragon Breath and ADHW, coupled with Shield of Balduran, assured a quick victory.
The lich survived turn undead but not Runehammer.
I read the first scroll then the second and avoided to fight Demongorgon (but kept a savegame there to try it after my run).
Abazigal's Lair was next, I freed the green dragon from the geas.
Against Abazigal and Tamat, I had Neera and Nalia had both a chain contingency with three ADHW, full buffs on the warriors, and an elemental prince and a planetar summoned before talking to Abazigal.
Sunnis and Anomen held human Abazigal while the planetar occupied Tamat. Meanwhile, Khalid dual wielding Answerer and Argunandval and Xzele with Soul Reaver finished the drakes, before joining the planetar against Tamat and using GW to land enough hit to weaken its MR, AC and thAC0.
Abazigal morphed into a dragon a little too soon, but a second Sunnis replaced the first, and after Tamat's death, Khalid and Xzele could join Anomen against the blue dragon, which failed just after wasting his imprisonment against the planetar.
I don't know what happened during this game session, but Windows didn't let me take a screenshot. Each time I clicked on the 'full screen" choice, it send me back to Windows 11 with my game reduced.
I entered the monastery with the help of Saemon, and succeed at convince Balthazar to join me. I don' tknow if it is a bug or an oversight, but leaving the monastery after that led to monks and mercenaries attacking me beside the new alliance.
For the last two challenges, I summoned an elemental prince and a planetar, buffed up and for the fourth had two chain contingencies with three ADHW... Cyric's favourites didn't last long.
For the slayer, I concentrated attacks from again Soul Reaver and Answerer with greater whirlwind against it, while Nalia was invisible and Wilkim and Neera playing cat and mouses with the bone blades.
Now it's time for the Crucible part...
@aldain Sad to see you necromancer run on hold, but, of course, you should play what is most fun for you at the moment. Interestingly, your conjurer random party run is very similiar to a plan I came up with for what I'd want to do with a conjurer bhaalspawn as one of the few missing kits - with the idea being that I create the conjurer, and the other 5 party members are basically treated as fully randomized summoned characters, called in via conjuration magic by the bhaalspawn to help on his journeys. I'm curious to see how it will go for you
First things first, we free Haer'Dalis and take down Mekrath:
We got into a bit of trouble in the old tunnels when I misjudged the position of the web trap, which resulted in Obram getting webbed. I was forced to throw a bunch of lightning spells in his direction to save his life:
So far, we haven't had any terrible accidents with our lightning bolt bounces - mostly due to being very careful where and when to use them. However, it was only a matter of time until we made some kind of mistake witht this unpredictable spell. This was it: We opened the door to the cultist compound while fighting the vampiric wraiths and threw out a lightning bolt to finish our soon-to-be invisible foes. I should have left the door closed here until I was done with combat - The lightning bolt, predictably, bounced into the cult compound and hit a cultist and one of the guards:
Still, this is by no means a run-ending mistake. We will just have to do without all that stuff... luckily, the Unseeing Eye spawned just around the corner and didn't have the party in its sight, allowing me to send some summons after it. It threw 3 ADHWs at our summons (which killed the first two, but we brought in more of them in time), following up with a few power words, but it wasn't over all hard to take down:
We've now bought everything we could need, but we're also basically out of bolts of lightning (starting from our visit to WK until now, we basically almost always had some of them with us, as we bought all available ones from merchants as well). We decided to pay Gaelan and take down Bodhi before going to the Windspear Hills, to get the iMoD for the vampires. True sight and some patience for Tanova:
Wilkim part 6 :
I forgot in my last report to talk about Draconis. I dreaded this confrontation, so buffed up. With two shadow dragon armours, I also had a nice helmet giving 80% acid resistance from Call of the Lost Goddess, and many green scrolls.
I started to send him a planetar and an elemental prince from afar, and I saw him coming invisible (but with a protection circle) and wounded to my party. I send the casters as far as possible, and when he was seriously wounded retreated the frontliners, fearing the sticking bug.
The dragon went after Nalia, but his acid breath didn't do much damage. I used improved haste on Khalid and Anomen, and surprisingly he fell relatively fast.
I also forgot two screenshots from WK :
Back to Crucible now :
Indeed this mod is high end content. Beautiful areas from Acifer, and three main stages, with demons and fallen planetars. I indeed lowered difficulty from insane to core for it, and didn't visit any area without always death ward on all the party.
Two succubus succeed at charming Khalid then Anomen (chaotic command must have been either dispelled or ended up), but Wilkim had the staff of command (domination with no save, I wonder if it would work on Sarevok ? I know the Five are immune to charm.) ready to counter it.
There was another dragon fight with new scales, and some few good new items but mainly for evil party.
One of them is a desperate measure, allowing a mage to recover all spells at the cost of permanently losing 20% max HP !
Story wise it was interesting to discover Amelyssan's minions, and some more lore about Bhaal.
Last opponents are crushed, now the Throne awaits !
I will be travelling during this weekend, so the climax of this long journey will wait a little.
I will do a last check of all items before entering the final stage.
Recovering spells for a permanent HP decrease seems a no-brainer during the Throne battle, I can see that turning the tides if you're in a tight spot. Nice work overall.
Playing will be sparse this weekend, it’s my weekend with the kids and we’ve got a lot of activities planned. I might get some time in today though.
Single class stalker can be a super fun full run. I have successfully done BG1 years ago with one, but died in BG2.
It's a class that can evolve over the course of a run like no other. I felt starting as an archer in BG1 was ideal. Then adding quarterstaff for backstab. Then eventually transitioning to some kind of slashing or piercing dual wield for late SoA/ToB. Three weapon slots. Max of two pips means you can experiment a bit.
Arguably the highest versatility of any kit out there frankly, with a little bit from all of four base class types -- divine caster, arcane caster, thief and fighter.
IDK, to each their own. I’m not going to say I’m not having fun. And I’ve never done the ranger stronghold, so I look forward to that.
I haven’t had any close calls yet. If I really wanted this style of game, I would’ve played a F/T though.
With the iMoD, AoP and berserker rage in hand, we felt ready to take on the vampires at the Windspear dungeon. Too bad vampires and mummies are resistant to lightning damage:
TBF, the kit doesn't unlock much of its powers until BG2. The backstab starts too low to be worth it. The added mage spells don't come until you get spellcasting. The free points towards dual-wielding pay off much better in BG2 as well, where melee weapons get better. So you're just banking on that bonus 15% to stealth for much of BG1.
The key is to made a long term plan towards a build that takes advantage of these unique perks, aiming towards a flexible fighter. Otherwise, you will just long for the F/T as you say. That's why I suggest, quarterstaff for backstabbing, eventual dual-wield longswords and the longbow really make this character shine throughout the saga. In a way that's different than F/T.
Other key is alleviates some thief pressure on your party comp. You can feed most stealth gear to the stalker and still get benefit. So even Neera can work as your main thief.
The party is shaping up as:
Yogii the stalker
Jahiera
Anomen
Nalia
Jan
Keldorn (I still need to add him, but I figure I can pickpocket a bunch in Amn first, I don’t think he’d approve).
This looks like a well rounded, (mostly) good aligned party to me.
Part 1 found here
Part 3 found here
We are tactical in our approach: There are many quests here with none or very mild combat encounters, so we clear that out of the way first.
There are also several tomes available: I agonized quite a bit on what to do with the DEX tome, but ultimately decided it was best spent on Fighter / Cleric.
Conjurer, Fighter and Cleric / Mage have too low DEX to get any benefit. Swashbuckler would reach 15 DEX for +1 AC (and nothing else... no thievery bonus), and Priest of Tempus would get +1 ranged THAC0. Ultimately, I figured +1 unconditional AC by going from 15 to 16 DEX on frontliner #2 was the best bet.
Oh yes, I said we were tactical. Of course, enemies don't really care about that, as Vay-Ya demonstrated by coming perilously close to frying Swashbuckler (earlier, Niemain was also very liberal in his use of a Wand of Fire, incinerating one of his own allies).
Conjurer was able to move out of the way, so no real harm done.
On the subject of tomes again, the INT tome ends up going to Cleric / Mage.
It hardly matters under the current ruleset anyway, but next time I do a run I'll make a modification to the rules such that intelligence actually matters for mages.
In this case, the reasoning was simply that at 16 INT, it lets Cleric / Mage scribe with guaranteed success using only two Potions of Genius. Eh.
I've really been missing out by being so stingy on wands. Normally in BG1, you barely have the arcane slots to protect your casters and tear down the enemies defenses: By the time you do so, you're usually stuck throwing Chromatic Orb at them (since you can't strip their Shield yet, even). But with no MSD/MGoI, they're completely vulnerable to wand bursts, as Sunin found out to his detriment.
Being Lawful Evil, Conjurer does not object to brutalizing Lothander for his boots.
Observe the very respectable damage output of Fighter: He's finally getting enough THAC0 (with a simple Strength spell from Conjurer, which lasts a very long time) to be a dependable source of damage.
Alright, time for a slip-up (that actually made things less dangerous, not more).
I had for some reason gotten it into my head that you can assemble your party in one of the corners atop the Iron Throne building without the acolytes spotting you. I wasn't quite certain enough to just race straight up there, but had Swashbuckler stealth in and have a look.
It turns out no, you cannot do that.
It also turns out that Swashbuckler isn't as stealthy as I'd like, as he fails his check and goes visible, turning every acolyte red.
Swashbuckler scrambles downstairs evading pursuit, and we figure fine... it's an outright battle.
Buff up, ascend the stairs, firebomb!
Oh... brutal. It seems none of the enemies went with MGoI, so we outright fried three of them and severely wounded another three to the point that they died almost instantly.
Wait, are there supposed to be nine enemies here? Oh well, never mind that now.
Beyond the two rogues getting a juicy backstab on Swashbuckler forcing him to quaff a Potion of Invisibility, that was a remarkably clean victory.
And that was about it for Baldur's Gate. Even though we weren't THAT high level, it went quite smoothly.
There are still many areas left, though: Sirines on the West Coast are treated to fully buffed Skeleton Warriors (to the former's detriment): The spoils of war, namely the CON tome, is another precious prize.
After a bit of agonizing, Fighter claims it.
Yes, it would push Fighter / Cleric to 18 CON meaning +1 to saves from the Shorty bonus, but Fighter is always getting hit: He needs every last HP he can scrape together.
In other news, Shoal is saved, Droth is relieved of his helmet, and a local gang of hopeless Ogres are put down.
We even clear out Arghain's area (it's a steamroll by now), and Firewine Bridge, snatching the PfM scroll off Bentan in the process, for the meager price of a single Potion of Master Thievery to push Swashbuckler's Pick Pockets upwards a bit..
Alright, it's time for meatier fare.
First: Basilisk hunting. Which of course is cake. Korax is joined by Skeleton Warriors in force, as well as both Fighter and Fighter / Cleric, and we clear the entire map including the adventuring party in about 6 minutes flat.
This was just a pit stop on the way to our real destination though: Durlag's Tower. We can do it!
So, the plan.
Swashbuckler still needs potions to do his job here, though his Find Traps is good enough that with Cat's Grace a single Potion of Perception is sufficient to push him above 100 (and Potions of Master Thievery are more plentiful, so locks aren't an issue).
That said, I'd like to be efficient here, so we'll do this in stages.
Stage 1: Invisible and buffed, Swashbuckler detraps the entire tower above ground as well as the mini-cellar with the coughing elf.
Stage 2: Party rumbles on through, dispatching dastardly foes.
Step 3: Now quite visible Swashbuckler picks every lock and, after deducting 5% for reasonable expenses, shuffles the ill-gotten gains into the party's funds.
Works like a charm. With three Clerics, the Ghost can't keep up with the never-ending tide of Skeleton Warriors, and he's the only real threat above ground.
The WIS tome of course goes to Cleric / Mage, now sitting pretty at 19 WIS, which will be 20 before long.
Now granted, 4th level Cleric slots (which is what you mainly get out of going from 17 to 20 WIS) aren't that impressive, although Recitation is really powerful.
Still, it's much better than nothing, and for the really dangerous fights, I find Farsight very useful for directing the (summon) action while keeping the party entirely out of harm's way.
The Warder level goes reasonably smoothly: The Skeleton Warriors get some good hits in, but it's never life-threatening.
Alright: Warder time. Just take down whoever you can the fastest; that usually means you start with Fear.
Good stuff. Some Skeleton Warriors are keeping Pride at bay (we actually landed a Slow on him, Fear and Avarice, countering their Haste), Fighter is keeping Love occupied with the help of the Greenstone Amulet, and Avarice keeps going invisible: A backstab on Cleric / Mage later, the former does get his comeuppance.
Meanwhile, Fighter has really gone to town on Love: By the time we start thinking about helping out, Love is already down.
On his own, and absent his Haste, Pride can't do much. He does manage to chew through our last Skeleton Warrior before dropping, though.
Again, a very clean win. We like.
Next level is... annoying. The Dopplegangers keep cycling through Islanne (with her defenses) and Durlag (with his heavy damage), putting a real strain on our resources, but we pull through absent deaths. Phew.
Downward!
The Greater Wyverns are treated to a hasted contingent of anti-heroes, and said anti-heroes are then instructed to turn on each other.
And in comes a death (cue dramatic music!).
There is apparently (at least) one very nasty trap in the maze down here: Swashbuckler inadvertently tripped it as I was a bit too fast to order him to move on.
It first dealt 8 damage, and I shrugged it off. Two seconds later it dealt 9 damage... then another 8... then it kept dealing damage until Swashbuckler had enough.
Straining our inventory to the breaking point, we manage to bring everything back with us.
800 gold and a long return trip later, Swashbuckler scopes out some Skeleton Archers for us to use as wand targets.
Our objective: The 12 Arrows of Dispelling these little boneheaps are lugging around (which they will gleefully shoot at you if they see you).
They never do spot us, and so the arrows are ours: Good insurance for the final fight, as Sarevok is a lot less threatening without his Haste effect.
OK, we clear the level from bottom to top, everyone gets a Potion of Absorption, and we finish with the Cold room.
We teleport just fine, fire barrage ensues, and even though two Knights make it through since they're hasted, the enemy King drops within a few rounds, and victory is ours.
Fighter now has a +3 weapon, though he won't get to use it for very long. Let's make it count.
On the final level, I pop two Protection from Undead scrolls on Fighter and Fighter / Cleric.
It gets a bit annoying with the Greater Ghouls running this way and that since they can't percieve their attackers, but these things can be very nasty, especially in large numbers (and they do come running from all over the place once you engage one of them), so I prefer this to dealing with them upfront.
We reach Grael with most of our resources intact, so he gets the full Skeleton Warrior treatment.
And with that, there's just one combat encounter left down here: Some spiders that pose no problem.
We loot everything, and leave the Demon Knight sitting pretty where he is: The (admittedly minor) risk isn't worth the non-existing reward. We teleport out, hack up Kirinhale on the way since we forgot about her first time around, and that's it!
Durlag's Tower cleared! Well, except the boss.
We're making excellent progress. Everyone except Swashbuckler is at their final levels, though we're still about 20k off the cap.
I want to do Ice Island (for Stoneskin) and Wolf Island (for the Chainmail +3 to import into BG2), so that's next time.
Since we came this far, we'll storm through Ulcaster Ruins as well, even though there's nothing we need there, and deal with the Red Wizards for their ring.
Then it's back to Candlekeep and the very endgame. Unless something truly unexpected happens, this should be smooth (and fast) sailing.
The only fly in our ointment is that Fighter / Cleric caught a real bad break on reaching Fighter level 6, as detailed below... but I'm confident he'll make up for lost ground by Fighter level 9!
Level-up results at the end of the session:
Conjurer, level 9 Conjurer
+5 / +6 / +5 HP (total 54 HP including 4 from Familiar since it's an Imp)
Fighter, level 8 Fighter
+10 / +8 HP (total 84 HP, 89 with Helm of Balduran)
Fighter / Cleric, level 7 / 7 Fighter / Cleric
+5 / +4 / +3 / +7 HP (total 70 HP), Sword and Shield Style * at Fighter level 6 (yuck)
Priest of Tempus, level 8 Priest of Tempus
+4 / +4 HP (total 36 HP, 44 with Buckley's Bucker which I forgot she was using last update), Sling * at level 8
Swashbuckler, level 9 Swashbuckler
+6 / +4 HP (total 32 HP), Longsword * at level 8
Open Locks 45 / Find Traps 80 / Pick Pockets 50 / Move Silently 25 / Hide in Shadows 35 / Detect Illusion 25 / Set Traps 25
Cleric / Mage, level 7 / 7 Cleric / Mage
+4 / +2 / +5 / +2 HP (41 HP total)
Yeah, I don't really get what's happening with the HP either, they seem to be off by plus minus one for some characters. Meh.
If the SoD import screws them up further, I at least have the history here so I can fix them.
Wolfie - half-elf shapeshifter (Grond0)
Ash - human dragon disciple (Gate70)
Russell XXXVI - human paladin (Corey_Russell)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1208471/#Comment_1208471
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1208625/#Comment_1208625
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1208890/#Comment_1208890
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1208991/#Comment_1208991
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209094/#Comment_1209094
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209253/#Comment_1209253
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1209576/#Comment_1209576
After the excitement of the previous session, things were back to being relatively placid this time. The session started with us reporting the death of the Unseeing Eye - giving Wolfie a level. He savored that as it will be a while before he gets the 1.5m needed for his next one. Getting to L14 though also opened up a new challenge to take on the hierarchy at the Druid Grove. Use of insect plague in the challenge pit there meant it was safe to transform to werewolf shape to rip up his opponent.
Wolfie was thinking of the Planar Prison next, but Ash pointed out that we hadn't yet done Mae'Var - so we went to find Rayic Gethras. Russell got a few buffs there and was able to shrug off the mage's spells while working through his defenses.
On to the Planar Prison, where Ash used his new mass invisibility spell to give us a free attack on entry - that was sufficient to kill the mage bounty hunter before he could buff and his companions failed to do us any damage. There were no problems working anti-clockwise round the prison on the way to confront the Warden. He had a large cohort of umber hulks that could have done lots of damage - if they hadn't all evaporated in a death spell. The Warden himself was exposed by True Seeing and didn't last long against a general assault.
One major piece of equipment not yet acquired was the Ring of Gaxx. Wolfie had one PfU scroll and used that to kill a couple of liches, but Ash pointed out that everyone would need to be protected against Kangaxx. A trip to the Temple District later and Russell was using his new Daystar weapon on the lich/demi-lich.
We did Sir Sarles and the follow-up temple quest for the Dawn Ring before turning to Aran Linvail's remaining tasks. The Guild Contact at the Bridge District was never going to survive long of course, but he was an early victim to the narcolepsy inflicted by the mighty Pixie Prick Ash had picked up in the Planar Prison. Then it was time to invade vampire HQ. Russell was immune to charm and level drain and did most of the hard work there. Wolfie contributed an insect plague to shut down Tanova's spell casting - though she managed to transform to bat form and flap away at near death. Bodhi similarly escaped after making a pretty feeble attempt at damaging us.
We hadn't yet done the Planar Sphere, but Wolfie was keen to take an ocean voyage and we just had time in the session to make the iMod and buy a couple of last minute goodies at Trademeet before taking ship for Brynnlaw.
Shapeshifter 14, 87 HPs, 210 kills (+254 in BGEE)
Dragon disciple 15, 79 HPs (incl. 7 from ioun stone), 318 kills (+99 in BGEE), 1 death
Paladin 14, 121 HPs (incl. 5 from Helm), 289 kills (+194 in BGEE), 6 deaths
More enemies faced this time were high enough level to resist Ash's death spell, but he still got a reasonable number of victims with that and managed to marginally increase his kills lead over Russell.
We entered Spellhold after getting the wardstone from a breached Perth. Outside, we got another chance to lightning bolt a shadow group:
The city of caverns was next. Not too much to say about that one, and I didn't take any screenshots. I just entered the underdark, and aside from a short battle against the three mind flayers near the entrance and the first drow party, where I confirmed that avenger chain lightning does indeed ignore magic resistance, I haven't done anything down there yet. Also, this is the first time we're caught up to the actual gameplay with the reports for this run, so things might slow down from now on.