I started a new run of IWD. It's an Insane mode run with both the double XP and double damage disabled--that is, the only difference from Normal mode is the extra monsters in certain fights. I never liked the double damage, since all it did was make the gameplay harder instead of newer. The XP bonus makes the gameplay a little more interesting, but it's not balanced without the damage, and I don't think it's worth the irritation of the double damage.
My special rule for this run is that I can't use the spells I normally prefer to use. No more Fireball, no more Chromatic Orb, no more Web, and no more Static Charge. Also, no single-classed clerics or bards, because I have those in every run. I want to start using some new tactics. But I'm still going to be using some old tricks of mine.
My party:
Zulfer, Human Cavalier (axes and maces, because I've done swords too much)
Bezolten, Half-orc Kensai (katanas and spears, because I like the idea)
Eliza, Half-elf Totemic Druid
Dyn, Human Bounty Hunter
Onin, Human Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage
Sha Heitian, Half-elf Sorcerer
Why these guys? First, I wanted to use a paladin again because it's been so long since I had one in the group. And though the Undead Hunter has better stuff overall, I like the Cavalier's immunity to poison (if I was using Fireball again, its 20% resistance to fire would also fit nicely with the 80% resistance from Protection from Fire). The lack of missile weapons is pretty bad in IWD, but I don't really feel like using them in this runu anyway; I've used them too much already.
I normally don't like the idea of a Half-orc Kensai, but I knew the Kensai was a suboptimal choice for a game like IWD and wanted to try it out, and I really wanted to go all out on the damage potential (normally I'd consider a dwarf, gnome, or halfling to be the better race for a Kensai class due to saving throws).
Finally, I have some reliable damage dealers. I can hit things without tons of buffs or disabled enemies.
I still have a druid, even though I've basically always had one in every run, because I felt like trying out Spirit Animals in IWD. But the main reason is because I wanted at least one full-time healer.
Why only 3 cleric levels? I've gotten tired of having exactly one cleric in every game, and it takes forever to get Raise Dead with a multi-class, so I thought I'd just dual-class from cleric before level 9 and use Raise Dead scrolls when I needed to resurrect somebody. The Cleric of Tempus kit is because its once-per-day Holy Power spell is identical to the priest version--that is, the level 1 version casts as a level 7 version, setting your THAC0 to 14 instead of 20, albeit only for 7 rounds. And since it's an innate spell, it will work marvelously with spider form once I get Polymorph Self. I dualed at level 3 instead of level 2 just so I could put DUHM in a Minor Sequencer and get 19 STR instead of 18/00 in spider form.
Notice I'm still using a Bounty Hunter. This is because I never made much use of the blind thief trick until Dorn's Deep in my previous run. My sorcerer can blind my Bounty Hunter with Color Spray for 3 rounds, and since I'm using a human instead of my normal halfling pick, she will more often fail the save. Conveniently enough, a Bounty Hunter will basically always be one or two levels higher than a sorcerer (at least in normal mode, before really high levels), which is exactly the level you need for the blindness effect of Color Spray.
Setting traps in plain sight will let me do party-friendly area-effect missile damage. Before level 11, a normal snare does 2d8+5 damage; a Special Snare does 3d8+5. That's actually a lot, considering how much of IWD consists of large hordes of enemy grunts--and considering she doesn't need to make an attack roll to make it work. Unlike my BG2 runs and my last IWD run, the Bounty Hunter is here to deal damage, not to use Maze traps.
Her traps killed basically everything in Easthaven and Kuldahar Valley, and she did most of the party's overall damage in the Vale of Shadows. She even got us past that infamous Sleep trap, since her own traps just killed all the skeletons before they could hurt anything. Bounty Hunters are absolute monsters in Icewind Dale outside of Heart of Fury mode.
Well I WAS doing a no-reload run through IWD EE for my first play through, but those damn Beetles at the beginning of Dragons Eye ended that lol.
So then I started a new party (minimal reload this time, to be reserved for extreme cases like chunking). This time I made myself and my fiancée.
Sir Shawn - Elf Cavalier
He's got proficiencies put into Long Swords and Dual Wielding right now. I'll probably add in Bastard Swords or Axes later.
Kourtney - Half-Elf Avenger
She'll be sticking to Darts with Sword and Shield style to maximize her defenses, sling spells and perform healing. I was going to go Totemic Druid like I did on my failed first attempt, but I wanted to try out the different IWD shapeshifts.
Taylor Swift - Human Jester
No, Taylor doesn't fit the Jester description. But I really wanted to give Jester a try. I have Rogue Rebalancing installed so the song works a little differently from vanilla. Since I already had two real life people turned into characters, I chose a famous singer for my bard
Here is the Jester description:
Alessia the Dragonborn - Human Dragon Disciple
One thing I remembered clearly from my previously short-lived attempt was the lack of scrolls. I didn't want to play vanilla Sorc, so I went with the DD. I've heard one of the big complaints with DD is the once per day use of their breath, so probably every 6 levels I'll add another use. When she isn't slinging spells or breathing fire, she's slinging darts.
Hrothgar, Fist of Tempos - Human Fighter/Priest of Tempus
This is a multi, with the kid added in EEKeeper. I used the colloquial spelling of Tempos, to better match with the local barbarian tribes Dual wielding Morningstars ftw.
Baron von Shortstuff - Gnome Bounty Hunter
Shorty whipping around throwing daggers, and a trap enthusiast. With RR installed, the Bounty Hunter's traps function a little differently. In addition to the trap changes, they also can no longer throw them across the map.
We started out our adventure in Easthaven. Hrothgar told us to have a look around town, so that's exactly what we did. Turns out the local barmaid needs to seriously consider investing in a can or two of Raid...then later on Taylor bonded with a local sea nymph, swapping songs on the lake shore.
Before leaving on this expedition of Hrothgar's, we had to check up on a supply caravan that was supposed to have arrived in town a few days ago. We grabbed some gear from that pompous lout Pomab, and headed south. Some goblins were harassing a local boy, and stole his catch of fish. We showed them the error of their ways, and continued east out of town.
After traveling for an hour or so, we came upon the site of a raided caravan. A couple wolves were prowling nearby, and we noticed a trail of dropped supplies leading into a cave. We entered and were immediately spotted by a few orcs! Hrothgar let out a mighty war chant, and he and Shawn proceeded to slaughter the brutes. Taylor sung a haunting ballad that thoroughly distracted the orcs, making them easy prey. Baron von Shortstuff snuck ahead and scouted out a few more groups of orcs lead by shamans. He set a few traps in the tunnels, and attempted (read: failed) to backstab the shaman. I brought the party up to fortify his location, and he ran back towards the group, allowing the traps to cover his escape.
We cleared out the central and northern portion of the cave system and then made our way to the southern tunnel. I was not expecting such a large group of orcs (and some ogres!). Kourtney threw out a Web spell to help paralyze the group, and Taylor moved into position so her song would hit the most orcs. I hadn't gone into this fight very well prepared, so it was the Web spell that saved the day here.
Kuldahar Pass proved to be quite a bit more exciting on Insane than on Core. Many more goblins were present, as well as Goblin Marshalls. Kourtney threw out a Web spell to try and halt the approaching horde, but it was only partially effective.
Alessia had recently gained her breath ability and she attempted to use it to quickly wipe out the Marshalls marching towards Kourtney. It worked alright...but it nearly killed some of my party members! I'll have to practice aiming it a bit for next time.
Kourtney shared her special brownie recipe with the Ogre in the tower, so hopefully his headaches go away. I killed all the goblins at the windmill and coaxed the little boy out of hiding. Finally, we cleared out the goblin/beetle cave at the north end of the map before heading to Kuldahar.
I decided to give Minsc the Elven Chain +3 we found in the Severed Hand, because he has great stealth skill that I need him to use, as Imoen is terrible at it, thanks to her dual class - her dual class that I disapprove of strongly, and would discourage her from doing in BG if I had a choice. Oh well, at least she can Identify items, as Dynaheir cannot under IWD rules.
So, here, I had Minsc use his fantastic stealth skill to scout out this area, which is kind of like the "boss battle" of this level. He found a mob of melee troops and archers to the south, and another melee/archer troop to the east that was headed by a dude wearing archmage robes. Um, so, Captain Obvious says, the archmage is the boss here.
We need to avoid confronting the archmage until the troops from the south are dealt with. So, we maneuver very carefully to allow Jaheira, Minsc, and Khalid to exterminate the southern troops without alerting the eastern group to our presence. (The ability to do this is unrealistic and cheesy - what, they don't hear the commotion right outside their chambers, and they don't react when Dynaheir starts Fireballing them? But, the game will cheese US to death if we try to play it straight. So, I will exploit the game with no guilt, since the game is trying to exploit me. Fair is fair.)
So anyhoo, Minsc scouts out the location of the archmage and his guards, and then places a mark for Dynaheir and me. And, as we like to do, we pretty much empty our spellbooks at them. Hmm, the archmage has magic resistance. Silences are cast, Fireballs are cast, Web is cast, Greater Shadows are summoned, Holy Smite is cast. Ooo, looky, my Holy Smite gets past his magic resistance and Blinds him. This battle is effectively over.
Now, into the lower chambers, and up against the final (well, at least you think he's final) lich for Upper Dorn's Deep. My Turn Undead is in top form here. It doesn't work on the lich though.
So, we have the key to lower Dorn's Deep, the lich is gone, and all is well. Yay for us!
Wait a minute, now we have to get through four Bronze Sentries to get back out. Oh dear.
The Sentries slaughter all our summons in rounds. Jaheira tries to cast her second Iron Skins and gets interrupted. (Yikes!) Jaheira and I are then Near Death. (I have TWO hit points left.) Luckily, Dynaheir is able to land a Haste before she also goes to Near Death. Jaheira and I run for our lives to try and heal ourselves. Dynaheir lands a Teleport Field to assist us. Minsc and Khalid do most of our damage. Imoen really can't help much - she has good magic melee weapons, but she can't tank them, especially since I gave the Elven Chain to Minsc, and Khalid has our precious few remaining magic arrows (He goes through arrows like popcorn at 5 APR). The Sentries are magic resistant, so attack spells are of little use. After a lot of very intense rounds, we finally prevail without any deaths.
@BelgarathMTH: Don't pay a second thought to fighting enemies group-by-group. IWD was balanced assuming you didn't fight all the enemies of a given area at once. It's how the game was meant to be played.
It is a sad, tragic day for the party. Khalid, mighty archer Khalid, has fallen. That is, he got chunked. Body in pieces, desecrated beyond all hope, even by a Resurrection spell. Curse my overconfidence!
Things were going so well. We freed the slaves and slaughtered the entire population of evil frost salamanders in the fallen Wyrm's Tooth Museum (formerly a dwarven temple to Gond, I believe, built by the brother of a mad dwarven king). Summoned creatures kept the frost demons and their deadly cold auras at a distance from our party. Against the mighty summoning magics of Imoen and Dynaheir, they didn't stand a chance!
Afterwards, Silvanus granted Jaheira sixth circle spells for her bravery in fighting these tree-freezing abominations. She can now summon a huge fire elemental, even stronger than Imoen's.
Perhaps this was what caused Jaheira's and my hubris that led to the tragedy. At first, everything was fine. Minsc scouted out the place, and found the locations of evil frost giants and an evil Aurilite priestess commanding a squadron of Blackguard. We decided to attack her first. As we enter her chambers, we are swarmed by ice trolls and ice demons. Our summons are very helpful, but Jaheira's big fire elemental gets severely weakened, and finally falls to the yeti squadron guarding the northern approach to the Aurilite's camp.
After finally defeating all the guards, Minsc gives us a mark just out of sight of the Aurilite and her Blackguard squadron, We throw summons, Webs, Fireballs, Silence, Holy Smite, and Skull Trap into the area. All the Blackguard but two are down. The priestess comes out into the Web and manages to land a Slow on the party. It won't help her. Dynaheir keeps lobbing Chromatic Orbs at the remaining Blackguard. Khalid kills the Aurilite. Sigh, Oh Khalid, you were our best party member! What are we going to do without you?
Flush with victory, I order an attack on a pack of frost wyrmlings Minsc scouted out. They were eating captured humans, elves, and dwarfs! I will regret this mistake for the rest of my life. "Pride goeth before the fall". Their cold attacks go right through Jaheira's Iron Skins, and the intelligent oldest wyrmling and his siblings bring her almost instantly to Near Death with their deadly cold-laced bites. We need to get out of here, now! But, with the narrowness of our escape route, and in the stumbling all over ourselves in panic, things go very, very badly.
(In hindsight, Dynaheir had a Teleport Field ready that just might have saved Khalid if cast in time. I didn't think to order it, and she didn't think to try it. I do not not blame her for this, as any one of those wyrmlings could have bitten her in two with a single bite, and she was understandably trying to get away. I blame myself for being a horrible leader. )
They follow us outside, and four of us escape across the bridge. But Khalid is surrounded, and they begin to tear him to pieces. Dynaheir is trapped behind them. Again, if only that Teleport Field...but what she thought of was to begin summoning Shadows and Haste them. They probably saved her, but they couldn't save Khalid.
Jaheira and I hear his screams, and then watch helplessly as one wyrm takes his head, and another two take an arm and a leg each.... It is too horrible to describe. Jaheira and I both scream "Khalid, noooooo!" in terrible, hellish two-part harmony. The scene will haunt me for the rest of my life. Dynaheir's shades and our desperately thrown arrows and my Flame Strike manage to destroy the wyrmlings at last, saving our lives from the ravenous monsters.
We drag ourselves back to Kuldahar to regroup. Khalid has a note in his pack willing his Bow of Sseth, his artillery belt, and his extensive collection of magic arrows to Minsc, who must now take over Khalid's role in our party. He almost breaks down emotionally and says he can't do it, but Boo crawls out, nuzzles his ear, and Minsc says that his Boo tells him he must go on, and become our new archer in honor of Khalid.
And now we are five. I have no faith left that we can defeat the Frost Giant King without Khalid, much less any other of the remaining Demonic Six. Lathander help us.
Next up: Against the Frost Giant King and beyond, with a party of five.
Whoops. Well. Seems I've never updated since my original post.
Dekros and company, after a month, have taken down Sarevok and co.
I've lost track of number of deaths; almost everyone's died at least once.
Major fights/mistakes made: Gavin died almost instantly, getting talked to by Shoal by accident.
Mutamin. Bloody Mutamin. He kept escaping after using Remove Magic on Gavin or whoever was fighting the Basilisks. Even with almost all of Lyssinia's level 1's being Protection from Petrification, we were forced out of zone 3 or 4 times before we finally managed to collapse on him with no basilisks around. Peter's squad doesn't fare well against our spell casters... I think they were hit by silences beforehand.
Our path from there was Nashkel -> Greywolf -> Gnoll fortress -> Doomsayer -> Brage before heading into the mines. Sleep from an Enchanter has, with the additional +2 save difficulty, neutralized most easy mobs, and Charm Person and True Seeing has negated many other threats here.
Narcillius is a hard fight, though. We simply can't play mage chess without even the lowly Spell Thrust, so we're stuck waiting durations out while getting hammered by Mustard Jellies. We take him out with everyone at half HP, the three that could even pretend to melee the jellies slowed, and we make a retreat to the north instead. We return the next day and tediously bring the jellies down for 3 levels.
Nimbul is simply murdered by True Seeing -> Call Lightning. The game crashed after the first time I killed him though, forcing me to redo the section. Tranzig's much more troublesome, as I can't seem to get a single spell to stick on him. He still doesn't kill anyone, but he's at least brought half my team to half health.
Ankhegs are put to Sleep, Sirenes are easy picking after True Seeing, and Battle Horrors in front of Durlag's tower are painfully killed for experience. We also climb the tower for the WIS tome: I'm giving all 3 of them to Aduroc, none to Dekros. We also encounter both sets of assassins during this time; Dire Charm and True Seeing, and then Call Lightning, Spirit Animals, Hold Persons, and Ray of Enfeeblement neuter all the ambushes with no deaths.
The wolf of Ulcaster: a Fireball trap killed Lyssinia, and the holding bite killed Gavin. The thing absorbed 2/3 charges of a Wand of Fire in scorcher mode and of Wand of the Heavens while at Near Death. Gavin's still the only reason we survived this fight, with his Cavalier Remove Fears getting us through the fight.
Bandit camp went well; Dire Charm on Taugosz and a Cloudkill (from scroll) up to the north means very few threats pressuring us, and a few charges of the Wands of Fire finish off what Cloudkill didn't. Plisina attempts to memorize Spell Thrust, and success! I have a way of bursting MGoI now.
Lyssinia dies AGAIN, this time to Centeol and her cheap Wand of Frost trick. One-shot, but no freezing death at least.
Cloakwood mine: Drasus and co. don't have a very good time vs True Seeing and Dire charm. Dire Charm picks up Genthore while Gavin and Drasus duke it out. Meanwhile, both mages are desperately trying to get some type of defense up, but True seeing doesn't allow them too and the Spirit Animals and Plisina with her Composite Shortbow make quick work of the assassin group.
Davaeorn: Gavin under Pro. Magic fights alone. The entry is covered by a Dryad, a spirit Lion and Wolf, and a Skeleton while the rest of the party simply waits in a side room, or in Plisina's case, invisibly guiding the summons. Davaeorn manages to steal 4k experience by blowing up his own Battle Horror.
There's a weird bug at the Merchant's League at Balder's gate for me, probably due to my mods somewhere. Aldeth refuses to accept that all the doppel's are dead, depriving me of 5k exp. Whatever. Gavin dies to a random Evil Fighter in his home, as the guy apparently had 100% MR and after drinking a STR potion... Iron Throne fight actually goes fairly well for the first time that I've actually taken it head-on. Two Fireballs from the necklace and a wand, and Lyssinia uses a scroll of Chaos. With Enchanter bonuses, it's a -6 to save vs spell or be Confused... Even so, it wasn't enough to disable everyone, and a return Confusion makes things dicy. Plisina and Lyssinia both die in the carnage, but it was enough time to allow Dekros and Aduroc to recover from Confusion (Gavin wasn't hit) and the battle soon resolves in a kite.
An Ogre Mage almost kills Lyssinia, but she lived, and that ambush is thwarted as well.
Pratt and his gang are also kind of destroyed by True Seeing and Emotion:Hopelessness, and the Spirit Animals on top of that is just kind of cruel. A cast of Pro. Petrification sees another 8k added to our totals: I'm not actually aiming to hit the EXP cap, since I really dislike the TotSC content... I've gotten destroyed enough times on the werewolf island, Durlag's tower, and even Shandalar's island to want to go there in a no-reload.
Funny events as I'm trying to get to Slythe; I'm followed by a Flaming Fist Enforcer in the sewers, so I rescue duke Eltan first trying to get him to disappear. No luck. I'm forced to Hold Person him while I get the letters from Slythe. Even with True Seeing, he gets two backstabs onto Gavin, almost killing him, but Slythe dies first.
Ducal Palace: Plisina goes first and casts Invisibility on Liia to be on the safe side. She's ganked by a Doppel Assassin for her troubles soon after; I forgot to cast Mirror Image first, it seems. Lyssinia casts a Chaos into the mix, getting the Mage and around half the Greater Doppels! The assassin and Shaman are pretty much the only threats left, and focused fire stopping spellcasting means that's not too much of a threat. Both Belt and Liia survive in the first time in forever.
Undercity Party is fought for no other reason than I have around 75 charges of Wand of Fire between like, 4 wands, so why not?
Sarevok fight!
Strategy: Invis:30ft for everyone besides Gavin. Gavin reads the last Pro. Magic scroll, and simply survives and eventually winning with the +2 returning throwing axe. Plisina's used now and then to snipe off important buffs with her Arrows of Dispelling, like Sarevok's haste.
Execution: ... Almost. Lyssinia and Aduroc die when I decide to fight after they cast a Detect Invisibility spell after like, 5 minutes of fighting, and they're both incinerated by a Sunfire before I can get them out of the radius. Plisina and Dekros drink potions of Invisibility, head to the northwest while Gavin continues his dance around the temple in the southeast. Time to head to SoA...
We have defeated Joril, the Frost Giant King. Apparently he had an alliance with the frost wyrmling that killed Khalid. (He killed Khalid! That bastard!) We basically threw every summoned creature at our considerable magical disposal at his army and him. Dynaheir got a Ring of Wizardry from the Aurilite, and can now cast ten Chromatic Orbs every day. The frost giants are very susceptible, as she paralyzes one after the other of them.
Jaheira and I each gain levels. Unfortunately, Lathander still hasn't seen fit to answer my prayers for sixth circle spells and my own holy summons, the Aerial Servants. I feel my faith is being tested, and I need to make atonement for my foolish pride.
It felt easy to defeat the frost giants, who crumbled before our powers effortlessly, but the victory tastes very bitter in my mouth.
We've cleared the first floor of Lower Dorn's Deep and taken the Watch Tower. What remains is the palace, the svirfneblin village, the town overrun with umber hulks, the fire giants' lair, and Poquelin's chambers where the six keys go.
I'm not sure what order to do them in for minimum risk. Since the svirfneblin gave me the quest to look for food in the palace, I think I'll try to go there first and find the food.
Here I find out the hard way that Flame Strike is not party friendly in IWD. Oops.
I learn that fire elementals are excellent against fire salamanders, because they're immune to the fire aura. This one is tanking a mob of them for us while we pick them off with ranged fire.
Dynaheir's Chaos spell has good defensive effect in this mob of thieves. I also had her cast Teleport Field, but I think it might have been easier without that, as enemies that are blinking around randomly are very hard to target and finish off.
We take the Watch Tower, where we can make our base of operations and rest safely. The game does its annoying thing where it puts Dynaheir and Imoen in front and my tanks in back, so I try to work around that by running back outside and reversing the party order.
With my Defensive Harmony spell, Jaheira has an AC of -11. And they still hit every time, and take her almost instantly to Near Death. I find out later that that is probably because they are all using Arrows of Piercing +4. We have to run back outside to heal twice more before somebody gets chunked. It feels cheap to do this, since they don't follow, but I do have a giant fire elemental summoned out there, so I guess we could say it blocked the door for us or something, since it couldn't go in.
We are at last able to finish them using Haste and Hold Person. Imoen lobs Skull Traps up to the top of the stairs, where the explosions hit the archers but not us. (We're just out of the 18' range. Fireball would have lit up the whole tower including us.) Once my Hold Person hits them, they're done for.
Next up: Dorn's Palace - unless we start to get our butts kicked in there, in which case I might decide to get out and try another area first. Really, every remaining area except the Svirfneblin Village has an extremely hard boss fight in it, and I'm pretty scared at this point. Tune in to see what happens.
EDIT: Well, right after I posted this, I checked Steam, and BG:EE 2.0 just went live. I still have to run a character through it to get ready for SoD, so I guess I'm going to put this run on hold, even though I'm really into it. Probably everybody is going to be too busy with SoD over the next few weeks to pay much attention to this thread anyway. I had thought about finishing this first, but now that 2.0 is sitting there beckoning, I can't resist starting it. Inspired by the priest I'm playing here, I think I'll go with a Priest of Tyr Charname.
@BelgarathMTH I've just asked Cameron Tofer on twitch if he thinks Minsc is more a ranger or a berzerker. He said Minsc is a ranger, and he has an animal companion. So you chose right
Okay, I've not seen anybody on the forum post a run yet using 2.0, so I guess I might as well post my first run in it as a no-reload entry, until I fail it. (Which I probably will sometime between now and Sarevok - BG is *much* harder to no-reload than IWD because of Charname vulnerability.)
I am loving, loving loving 2.0 . So far, I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Thank you so much to all of you here in the forum who laboriously beta-tested it, so that I could have a more clean and fulfilling "virgin" experience with it.
This run will be completely unmodded, core rules. Max hit points on level up is OFF. I did not allow myself to use + or - keys on character creation. I am going to be a Priest of Tyr. On my second character roll, I just happened to roll a character with the potential to dual class to mage in BG2, something I will seriously consider doing after I have access to Anomen, or possibly in SoD if I find another cleric there.
I rolled about 20 or so more times and didn't see anything even close to better than that second roll. I think Tyr is trying to tell me something.
Here's the main character:
Here's our first party rainbow pose:
This will be a role-played run. I am trying as much as possible not to allow metaknowledge use. For example, I made myself wait to talk to Tarnesh and seeing him go hostile before I cast my Remove Fear spell. (My standard tactic is, see a hostile mage, cast Remove Fear immediately.)
First, after the dialogue when we agreed to help her and told the Red Wizards she was with us, she turned red (hostile) and ran off to the north. Huh? Is that a BUG?
Then, the Red Wizard who remained after the scripted teleport-away of the archmage cast Mirror Images, and then cast FLAME ARROW at me for his next spell.
Well, this feels very unfair as a no-reload ender, but, I'll continue my run on my own as a minimal reload. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Just for anyone interested, on my second try at this, I ran away as fast as my little Cleric of Tyr legs would carry me once Neera turned hostile. This time, she cast something (not sure what) on the Red Wizard before she started wandering about randomly as though she were under a confusion effect.
The Red Wizard cast his Mirror Images, and then his Flame Arrow, at Neera this time, instantly killing her. After that, he and his two guards were pretty easily killed by Jaheira, Khalid, and Imoen.
I see a huge problem here for both no-reloaders and anybody who wants to use Neera as a party member. I actually don't see how it's possible to even get Neera as a party member with the game like this.
On a nicer note, I bought SoD, and it changed my BG interface to the slick black interface of SoD. I like that. I'm still loving the situation, despite the probably bugged Neera encounter that ended my no-reload. This encounter cannot be avoided unless you use metaknowledge to carefully walk around it in Beregost, every time you're there, until you're ready to handle a Red Wizard with Flame Arrow. And I'm still not seeing how you'd get Neera into your party if you wanted to (which I don't, thankfully).
Here's a picture of us standing over Neera's and the Red Wizard's dead bodies, with the shiny new interface:
@Pteran, I just found another bug where I cannot scroll down in my kit descriptions, meaning I cannot access the information past the first few lines. This is not looking good, and is kind of "killing my buzz". Sigh. I guess I'll just need to be patient. The skeleton of this upgrade is amazing; I just need to give Beamdog time to flesh it out and polish it. I am holding to faith that we will eventually have a great product here.
@semiticgod , LOL. Maybe in a while. I'm not done pressing forward in BG:EE 2.0. If I encounter more game breaking bugs, or more just plain irritating bugs, (such as not being able to access full kit information), I may decide to come back to my IWD run and wait for some patches.
EDIT: Then again, maybe I should finish IWD before Beamdog forces an "upgrade" to the buggy 2.0.62 in IWD! I sure hope they get 2.0.* debugged before they mess up the almost perfectly running IWD:EE 1.3 with a forced patch!
Our intrepid adventurers continue their journey across the frozen wasteland landscape! Arundel asked for our help in solving the problems plaguing Kuldahar (Seriously? The druid wants us to make the snowstorms go away? Go dance in the forest and pray to the squirrels or something!)
We head to the Vale of Shadows, which is as creepy as it sounds. Ghosts everywhere! Do they just use this place to dump the bodies of those wronged in life or something? We carve a bloodless path (they're ghosts after all) across the terrain, plundering crypt after crypt! When we reach the far side of the valley, we come upon a much more ornate and foreboding looking tomb. We're pretty banged up, and this place looks dangerous, so we attempt to find somewhere to camp for the night.
Kourtney noticed a cave a short way back on the path, so we head there to sleep for the night. Of course we've got to massacre a band of Tundra Yeti to make the place habitable! We rest to refresh our spells and slap some Band-Aids on our wounds. Despite being full of Yeti, it's pretty clear that at least one other person has been here recently. There are a few crates of supplies stashed along the back wall...To make sure we aren't disturbed, Baron von Shortstuff sets up a bunch of traps to keep unwanted visitors away. Thankfully we rest undisturbed
Once day breaks we set out for the fancy looking tomb. Apparently it belongs to a dude with a serious wolf fetish. There are huge black paw prints adoring the entrance and the walls as we travel along. We get plenty of exercise from bashing in skulls all day long. Baron von Shortstuff saves us from a few nasty traps along the way. The further down we go into this place (How rich was this guy?? This is a HUGE crypt!) the more undead we find.
When we finally hit the bottom floor, we immediately get swarmed by skeletons and zombies. We manage to clear a path through the horde of undead, only to attract the attention of enemies just out of view. In an alcove to the south, Magic Missiles come flying out of the darkness, and zombies start pouring out of the doorway! Alessia yells for everyone to get the hell out of dodge, and unleashes her Dragon Breath attack. Hrothgar wasn't quite quick enough, and gets a few hairs signed off in the process.
We approach what looks like the final chamber (there are more wolf prints adoring the entrance), and get spotted by a mass of Spectral Knights and Skeletons. Hrothgar summons his own cadre of undead (I love that you get multiples in IWD!) to aid in the fight. Kourtney throws out a Web to try and slow their advance, and then adds a Spike Growth into the mix. Most of my party is ranged, so they're safely out of the Web. Hrothgar and Shawn charge in close to the Spectral Knights to block their advance towards the squishier characters. The Skeletal Mage throws out some kind of gas cloud, which seems to knock out my players =/
I forgot that Spike Growth is not party friendly, so Kourtney quickly kills off our own undead mob, and does a significant amount of damage to the Spectral Knights as well as Shawn and Hrothgar. A few well timed healing spells and (temporarily) regaining control long enough to chug a potion or two saved my life.
After nearly getting my own guys killed in the process, we've managed to clear this entire place. We have a chat with the owner, a rather friendly chap named Kresselack. After scolding us for slaughtering his bouncers, he tells us about an Aurilite priestess who wants to come turn down the thermostat in his crypt...like way down, to a completely unreasonable and not at all comfortable to sleep in level! Kresselack loves to entertain, throwing parties for his other undead buddies. Just because they're all dead doesn't mean they like the cold any more than the rest of us! We promise to take care of this troublesome priestess (I mean it IS our fault that she's now got free run of the place...we killed his guards).
We make our way (it's a loooong way back to the surface) back out to the Vale, and begin our search. After the other crypts turn up empty, we remember about the supplies in the yeti cave. SOMEONE has to be using it as a base of operations! Sure enough, when we go back inside we see a woman hiding in the back. Shawn thinks, "This is too easy..." but approaches the woman to talk. Turns out our investigative skills are pretty good, because we found our icy priestess. She is NOT happy with us telling her she cant freeze over the nice ghosts tomb, and calls for her yeti friends.
As luck would have it, Baron von Shortstuff's traps were still active, so that did a fair amount of damage to the monsters. Lysan the priestess started casting a spell, but Alessia shot her with a Chromatic Orb. She failed the save, and got stunned (gotta love that!). With her temporarily disabled, we made short work of the yetis.
We go back to tell Kresselack the good news. His hot yoga classes are free to continue, and no ice priestesses are gonna be bothering him any time soon! He clues us in on the fact that he's not the one bothering Kuldahar, and as near as he can tell it's not coming from anywhere inside the Vale of Shadows.
Back in Kuldahar, Arundel is both pleased and disturbed by the news. He's happy that there's not a horde of undead about to march on Kuldahar, but it's also bad because now he's got no leads. He tells us about a scrying device called the Heartstone Gem, and asks us to go retrieve it. It's being kept safe at a temple only a short march from Kuldahar. He marks the location on our map and sends us on our way!
@Pteran , That's a great report. I like your writing style. What difficulty setting are you using? (I didn't find that info in your starting post.) Is Rogue Rebalancing the only mod?
The big changes come from RR and Tweaks. I removed race/class restrictions because I didn't like being limited in a role-playing game. For example, I have free reign to make a Gnome Paladin if the mood strikes me. I adjusted the spell tables to be in line with their P&P counterparts (this doesn't change TOO much, but it does allow Bards to cast level 7-8 spells at high levels). Probably the biggest change of all was adjusting the Druid XP table to match Clerics. In BG2 I hated playing Druids simply because of the 13->14->15 XP spike. I haven't made it far enough into the game yet to know just how game breaking that might be...
A lot of the other changes are simply quality of life improvements like item stacking, higher HP on level up (I might change this one, but the extra HP seems critical on Insane), etc. They also have a nifty little component to help recover spent ammunition. I set it to 25%, because it makes sense that a lot of the arrows/darts/bullets/knives would be damaged beyond repair after striking the enemy.
EDIT: Oh I forgot! I found this one a while back, so I can't find the link anymore. But it allows non-fighters to get the extra HP from 16+ Con. I haven't taken advantage of it as of yet, but it should do very interesting things for my DD when she hits those levels. It was simply an alteration to the HPCLASS.2DA and HPCONBON.2DA files.
Hey there hi there everyone! It's been more than months, and with no less than 2740 notifications to sort through, I don't think I'll ever manage to catch up with everything that's been going on here at the forums. I also intend to avoid looking around much, as I don't want to spoil myself about the contents of Siege of Dragonspear, which I'll buy when it becomes available on GOG. I've had a lot of things going on in RL (alas not all good, but I'm ok), and I've only really returned to playing on the long (Easter) weekend. It's nice to see people explore Icewind Dale in a no-reload context. I've thought of jumping on that bandwagon, but eventually returned to good old Baldur's Gate, and now I've come here to say something about my latest playthrough.
Bardin, my Gnomish LN Cleric/Thief executioner, is still alive and kicking in ToB. Two months ago he cleared the first two levels of Watcher's Keep but ran into difficulty on the Demon level (had to retreat somewhere). I remember finding this a bit embarrassing for an XP-capped character, and I can only hope these experiences aren't foreboding of his future. I'll continue his run sometime, but am in no rush after this break. Instead I did some BG1EE on insane difficulty, which proved a humbling experience. The fact that I didn't post any updates earlier this week speaks volumes. I do have an Elven Dragon Disciple-led party of chaotic neutral free spirits with Garrick, Neera, Safana, and - by way of exception, for the romance - brooding Xan. The run has been fun so far, but I've found myself playing my DD as a normal Sorceress in terms of spell picks (think Blur, Invisibility and Mirror Image as level 2 spells), which might make the run less interesting to share here. Other than the DD, it's been mainly failures... Two separate Archers were done in by Silke (one suffered a Hold Person successfully cast by the thespian inbetween or despite arrow of biting poison ticks, and the other succumbed to two Magic Missiles in a Sequencer). An evil Blade in a party got one-hit-killed by an Ogrillon due basically to poor pathfinding. I also had an Avenger whose death I don't even remember right now. And a solo Diviner got her Elven arse handed to her by a party of ambushing Hobgoblins, just when she was on her way to the FAI to buy potions of genius and whatever the other one is called (the blue one) to scribe Invisibility amongst other spells. Should have used the Nashkel Carnival red potion for her first scribing session. I liked her quite a lot, but like my DD, she too was effectively a rather generic mage in my hands. In my defense it's hard to role-play an adventuring solo Diviner and keep her alive in an SCS no-reload setting on insane difficulty. Still, the Diviner experience had me thinking.
Regardless of their specialization schools (if any), I mostly play my mages using a combination of the best spells available to them, i.e. a mix of spells from different schools, probably because it's the easiest thing to do. But wouldn't it be nice for a specialization school to be more noticeable and meaningful in actual gameplay? The dark Necromancer who animates corpses and drains life and levels, the ferocious Invoker that dishes out raw elemental and magic damage, the manipulative Enchanter who disarms foes with spells that affect the mind, the lazy Conjurer who relies on summons that do their bidding, etc. Specialists the way I like to imagine them. Being too opportunistic to roll a specialist and limit them to strictly casting spells from their own school ("opportunistic" - that's a nice euphemism for powergamey no?), I came up with a compromise. I would roll a specialist, allow them to use any defensive spells they can legally cast, but have them rely heavily on spells of their own school for offensive purposes, except in situations where the latter spells are useless.
I went with an Enchanter Mage because the Enchantment/Charm school's all-or-nothing (as opposed to save for reduction of the spell's effect) spells are amongst those least used by me. I created a custom party for her to help her at her difficult job of being an Enchantress. For flavor I made them all Elves or Half-Elves and I gave them Welsh names that are more or less descriptive of who they are. First of all I give you sensual Enchantress Eirian (pronounced I-rian, "shining"):
Eirian's starting proficieny was Dart and her starting spells were Armor, Find Familiar (hence the extra HPs) and Sleep. Note that enemies who aren't Enchanter Mages receive a -2 penalty to saves vs spells from Eirian's school of specialization, all the more reason to cast those spells. Note also that I'm playing with the SCS mod that makes sequencers and triggers learnable by all mages. The second character I created is a mirthful Archer, Gwendolen ("holy bow", ** shortbow, * long sword, * war hammer).
As of level 8 Archers' Called Shot gives a -1 saves vs. spell penalty for each hit landed while that ability is activated. She'll also get her first divine spells, including Doom, by that time. Thirdly there's amazingly gifted Canaid (Can-ide, "song", * short sword, * axe), just look at that roll.
Canaid's a funnyman except when he's singing, for his song is the sorrowful tune of the Dirgesinger Bard, of the Song & Silence mod:
As you can see, Canaid's song should further boost the effectiveness of Eirian's charms. Apart from that, he can contribute with his own spells. The fourth character is Bleddyn ("wolf-like", * dagger, * TWF), a grumbly Shapeshifter Druid.
The role I had in mind for him was to contribute with castings of Doom and with tanking, but that was because I originally wanted to stick to four characters. However I decided to roll two more characters, who may help with the tanking, so I can see Bleddyn cast his charms and other save or else spells as well. Spunky Swashbuckler Alys ("noble", * katana, * dagger),
is my fifth character. I ended up creating her because traps are tedious at best and deadly at worst for a rogueless party, with no shorty saves to rely on, and with insane trap damage on insane difficulty. There isn't really a way for any type of thief to contribute to making the save-or-else theme work, but I didn't want any multiclasses in the party. However, as the game progresses, she should become an expert fighter who could use save-or-else weapons. Kachiko's Wakizashi, Celestial Fury, and Pixie Prick for example all impose mental status effects that can be saved against. Besides there's UAI for casting from scrolls. The sixth member of the crew is Ifor ("warrior", * mace, * sling),
a passionate Feywarden of Corellon (Divine Remix kit),
I picked the kit mainly to add to the Elven flavor, though weapon specialization one daily casting of Spell Immunity once every five levels are nice perks.
The party is currently in Nashkel, without having achieved much as of yet. They equipped themselves in Candlekeep, with Alys stealing a star sapphire to finance her katana. South of the FAI, they slew a Wolf and an Ogre and picked up a Ring of the Princes. Near the inn they found a Ring of Wizardry and returned Joia's ring. In Beregost Canaid miraculously survived a poisoning when he failed to lure Unshey's Spiders outside.
Eirian managed to put all four spiders to Sleep in one go, and healing potions and CLWs from Bleddyn and Ifor kept Canaid alive. Alys broke into every home in Beregost and only got caught once, resulting in a reputation decrease by 1, while Canaid pickpocketed Algernon's cloak. Ogrillons and Flaming Fist mercenaries south of Beregost were put to Sleep and slain; Hobgoblins and a Ghast were taken care of with range attacks. In Nashkel Neira took a lot of kiting (and a save vs a Hold Person spell by Canaid) before she fell. The Amazing Oopah (range) and Noober offered some more XP, enough for Alys, Canaid, and Ifor to have reached level 2. Characters receive full HPs when they level up btw.
@Blackraven your party sounds like a lot of fun to play! I especially enjoyed reading your views on specialist mages. While it may not always be the most functional option, I agree that specialists should focus mainly on their own school of magic. I'd wager that most of us end up playing them as regular mages with an extra spell slot. I'm excited to read more about your adventures!
Shawn and Kourtney continue their escapades! After a good night's rest at the Evening Shade Inn, our band of adventurers set out for the Temple of the Lost God (I bet he wishes he had Google Maps!).
The party headed due east from Kuldahar. The trail wasn't easy to follow, but Arundel pointed out landmarks beforehand to keep them on the right track. Most of the goblins they came across were too frightened to harass the group, but more than one Yeti failed in an attack. It took about a day and a half of marching through the mountains, but they finally arrived at the Temple.
As they approached, lumbering footsteps could be heard from inside. Suddenly a hulking figure, a verbeeg, rushed outside. He shouted for the party to get out of his way. Shawn, rather hesitantly as the creature was easily 9ft tall, asked the creature what he was running from. "Red Toe no have time to talk. Bad priests attacked us. Red Toe pretended to be dead and needs to leave before they come back." With that the creature ran past the group and quickly disappeared down the mountain trail.
They cautiously made their way inside, only to find a hallway littered with bodies large and small. Blue robed priests and verbeegs had held a monstrous battle here merely a few hours ago. A blue robed priest rounded the corner and shouted out, "Intruders! Have you come to slay more of my brethren?" Alessia answered him, "No good priest, we've been sent here by Arundel to retrieve the Heart Stone Gem." The priest snorted in derision and spat out, "You think I would fall for that twice in one day? Your friends infiltrated our ranks earlier today!" He immediately began chanting a spell, but a well placed dagger from Baron von Shortstuff silenced him. Taylor chimed in with a wink and knowing smile, "I guess you could say there was bad blood between these priests."
The group slowly made their way deeper into the temple, battling priests and their guardian verbeegs. The individuals and smaller groups weren't too bad to tackle, but then I got swarmed on the lower level. On insane, these guys pack quite a wallop. Healing spells/potions, Bless, Armor of Faith, and Slow help keep us from getting overpowered.
We cleared out the adjoining alcoves before heading down the main hallway. Shawn almost hit the trip wire, but Baron von Shortstuff noticed it just in time! The group of verbeegs and priests at the end of the hall proved to be quite the challenge. Two of the priests managed to get off an Entangle, which it turns out verbeegs are immune to. Alessia got lucky and stunned two of the giants with her Chromatic Orbs, which is probably what saved Hrothgar and Shawn from being killed.
With the path clear, we entered the lowest level of the temple. We didn't find any enemies there, only a large group of dead priests and verbeegs. They died guarding the altar where the Heart Stone Gem was housed. I'm not sure yet who managed to force their way in here, but they must be powerful. They killed quite a few verbeegs and priests to do it! One of the invading priests bore the vestments of a Talonite priest, as well as a vial of mysterious liquid.
While looting the chests on the way back out, I found a pretty sweet bastard sword for Shawn to use! Taylor managed to identify it thanks to her high Lore level, The Snow Maiden's Reaver +2
We made the long trek back to Kuldahar to share the bad news with Arundel. He's able to identify the mysterious liquid as relatively freshly drawn venom, and a potent strain at that. With no other clues to guide us, Arundel asks that we make the trek to Dragon's Eye.
Okay, my first run of 2.0 is actually going quite well now, so I've decided to reopen it as a no-reload, because I think this thread needs a BG:EE 2.0 no-reload run or two in it.
This is going to be a tainted no-reload, due to the Charname death against Neera's encounter.
Here's what I've figured out about that Neera encounter that I've decided to ignore for no-reload status purposes:
-She doesn't actually go hostile, it's just that her default foot color circle is red, making it easily confused with a hostile foot circle. However, her script has been changed, likely in response to complaints about that Color Spray spell that used to be her opening spell, and now is not.
-Her new script appears to make her behave completely randomly, either casting a spell, or else running away or wandering about aimlessly as though under a Confusion spell. I doubt that this is intended. But, if her script is bugged, it is probably at the bottom of the devs' priority list at the moment.
-The red wizard's new Flame Arrow spell may be intended to put Neera's encounter on par with Garrick's and Silke's, as Silke is also 7th level and has a 3rd level Lightning Bolt. If intended, I think this is a huge mistake on the devs' part. Silke's encounter can be avoided easily by simply not talking to Garrick, or by turning his request down. The player must click on Garrick to start the encounter. Neera's encounter, on the other hand, cannot be avoided unless the player knows about it and avoids walking on the north side of Beregost. Also, the red wizard's current script appears to target the Flame Arrow spell at random, meaning that Neera or Charname are likely targets, and instantly killed. That will make few new players and no-reloaders ever use Neera. In fact, on my next no-reload, I intend to tell the red wizards to go ahead and take Neera, please, and good riddance!
-Further making this encounter enraging for no-reloaders, the cut-scene involved forces the player's carefully positioned party out of position, dragging the entire party into a scatter formation around the wizard and his guards. Since the wizard is now scripted to cast a Flame Arrow randomly at any party member, or Neera, this is the height of unfair stupidity on the part of the devs as far as I'm concerned. Grrr. I call shenanigans on the DM!
So, now that I've got that bad taste out of my mouth and have ruled that the ending of my no-reload was completely unfair, I am having fun with 2.0 again.
One nice new feature is that you can use screen shots of the journal in these run threads to give a quick summary of everything you've accomplished, no typing required.
So, having completed the Nashkel Mines, killed Tranzig, and gotten the information we need to search for Tazok and the bandit camp, we decided to finish helping the peoples of Beregost and Nashkel, as well as clearing Liandrin's spider house, before heading back north to search for the camp.
We visited the carnival briefly. The encounter with the mage in the carnival tent has been changed. He no longer uses his Power Word: Kill to kill the hostage if you give him reasonable answers. So, you can no longer get the hostage's mage robe unless you are Evil McEvil and deliberately kill her. I applaud that change in scripting.
Here is our party pose for today. The hit points distributions are coming out quite interestingly for random hit point rolls. Jaheira and Khalid have been lucky. Minsc and I, not so much. Also, Khalid is an awesome fighter for our party. I think all the Khalid-haters are just prejudiced against shy, introverted people who admit when they're scared.
I am doing the purest possible roleplaying for this no-reload, in that, I don't go wandering off into the wilderness unless I have a quest-given reason to. So, large swaths of wilderness will remain unexplored in this run. I do not enter houses without being invited, I certainly keep Imoen on a short leash and do not permit her to break into locked houses, or rob inn guests. I do nothing that sounds incredibly stupid to do with no good reason, and I do nothing that even smells like Evil. It will be interesting to see what level that puts me at for SoD.
Next up: Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother's House We Go. What big teeth she has! And oh yes, bandits!
The party sails through the Vale of Shadows with ease, wiping out vast swathes of undead with traps from our blind thief, Dyn. But we receive two deaths in the final battle of Kresselack's lair when I knowingly send our Cavalier, Zulfer, unprotected into a Stinking Cloud spell. Unlike in BG2:EE, unconsciousness effects in IWD:EE don't end when the character is struck. Zulfer fails two saves vs. death in a row and is cut down early on.
Thanks to our traps, the enemy thins out quickly afterward, leaving the Skeletal Mage to fight us alone. It slays our sorcerer, Sha Heitian, with a Lightning Bolt, but falls to a Magical Stone spell from our Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage, Onin. Magical Stone has always been extremely powerful in the Vale of Shadows, killing most enemies in a single shot.
We kill Lysan with a pair of Magic Missiles and a Melf's Acid Arrow, which easily disrupt her own spells.
One notable weakness of our party is the lack of cleric spells above level 2. I learn the hard way that this leaves us with no defense against hold effects, as our Totemic Druid has neither Remove Paralysis nor Free Action. This nearly kills Zulfer a second time in the Temple of the Forgotten God when he fails a save against Hold Person, but a convenient choke point allows our Kensai, Bezolten, to take the damage instead.
We get a lovely random drop in the temple: the Reinforced Leather +1, which grants 35% resistance to crushing damage. It's situationally powerful.
Zulfer fails yet another save against Hold Person in Dragon's Eye, but a Color Spray from our sorcerer, Sha Heitian, rescues him. Color Spray is inordinately strong in IWD:EE. Aside from conveniently blinding single-class thieves in the party, it knocks most enemies unconscious and prevents them from waking up--any enemy equal to the caster's level or below gets put to sleep.
Zulfer dies again when surrounded by Trolls and spiders on the second level. His immunity to poison helps him a lot, but having -1 AC just isn't good enough to tank everything all at once. But for the most part, the second level is easy. We just have to blast everything with traps, Lances of Disruption, and Color Spray.
Lance of Disruption does more damage than Fireball, but it isn't always the best bet. Since it does crushing damage, few enemies will resist it, but it's also much more likely to get party members and summons killed for the same reason. Also, its line-shaped projectile makes it easier to avoid hitting the party, but harder to hit the enemy. Mostly I like this spell because it has a habit of chunking things--it's a very visually appealing spell.
After slaying Presio and her many minions with traps, I decide to kick our Kensai out of the party. For reasons I don't fully remember, I replace her with a gnomish Fighter/Illusionist. I think it was because I wanted to cast Color Spray more often, and at the time I believed Color Spray was an illusion spell in IWD (it's actually alteration) and would therefore benefit from the kit's bonuses.
One nice thing about Fighter/Illusionists in IWD is that they don't need potions to guarantee successfully scribing the ever-important Mirror Image scroll. I still have 150% scribing chance for everybody, but I'm going to use potions to scribe scrolls this time, since I know better where to find such potions. For this reason, our gnome only has 18 INT instead of 19--it doesn't make any difference if you're just going to use potions to scribe scrolls anyway.
Another nice thing is that they can use the Helm of the Trusted Defender, which I have missed. It grants +3 to AC and immunity to sleep and fatigue, and makes the user a much stronger tank. I can afford it because we've suffered almost no deaths.
I've been resting a lot less than I did in my level 1 Heart of Fury mode run. It is no longer necessary to cover the party with multiple layers of buffs--I can just march right in.
In the Eldathyn Lair, I fail to stop a Yuan-ti cleric from buffing a horde of Yuan-ti with Righteous Wrath of the Faithful. It's a hideously powerful spell, but imposes a crippling fatigue penalty at the end.
I run away from the Yuan-ti until they stop glowing. When I engage them in combat once more, they only do 1 damage per hit, due to the -10 luck they have.
We run into more trouble with the group of Yuan-ti Mages and Yuan-ti Elites to the east. Our sorcerer gets Feebleminded, our Bounty Hunter gets charmed, and our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, sorcerer, and Totemic Druid all get killed by Vitriolic Sphere and Melf's Acid Arrow spells. It was nearly impossible to disrupt the enemy's spells, as they came pre-buffed with Stoneskin and added on Protection from Normal Missiles on the first round. We only got the upper hand when the enemy ran low on spells.
When our Bounty Hunter recovered from the charm effect, we threw a couple of traps at the High Summoner and his cronies, slaying the last of the enemies. But losing our cleric as well as two other characters cost us thousands of gold.
Out of curiosity, I try to clear out the enemies in Yxunomei's lair with as few rests as possible. I only have to rest twice to take everything down, not counting Yxunomei herself. Mostly this was due to memorizing lots of healing spells and taking a low-pressure approach in every fight--with the exception of the High Archer fight and the gang of Yuan-ti at Yxunomei's door, which I hit with Slow and Glitterdust, respectively, on top of all the traps we could manage.
What about Yxunomei herself?
Before we fight the marilith and her snake buddies, we trap the previous corridor, rest, and then disarm the enemies traps using the Detect Traps spell from our Cleric of Tempus/Mage while under the effects of Invisibility 10' Radius. Our thief can't really detect traps while blind, but she can still disarm them if our cleric helps her out.
I use Onin, our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, to initiate the battle. When he lobs a rock at one of the Yuan-ti, he spawns the enemy mages into the corridor with the rest of the party. The mages trigger the traps and die instantly.
But Onin gets all of his buffs dispelled when an enemy mage hits him with Dispel Magic. Just like in my previous run, but this time, only Onin got debuffed. He tries to restore his Mirror Image, but an arrow disrupts the spell, and when he tries to run, Yxunomei summons a ring of undead around him, trapping him. He has to down a precious Potion of Invisibility to escape and heal himself.
Our Bounty Hunter's traps kill basically everything. The Yuan-ti die in record time, as does Yxunomei herself. One of the marilith's best defenses is her AC, but traps don't require attack rolls and they hit hard and fast. Once again, blind traps prove instrumental in our success.
Our Totemic Druid, Eliza, hits level 10. Her Spirit Animals are now immune to nonmagical weapons. Those Spirit Animals single-handedly take down almost every enemy in the entire Severed Hand, because so few of the enemies had magical weapons.
On to Dorn's Deep. Valos, our Fighter/Illusionist, is a spectacular tank. With the Helm of the Trusted Defender, Kaylessa's chainmail, and the Bitch Queen's Envoy (a +2 shield in Yxunomei's lair, which pops up sometimes instead of the Red Knight's Shield), Valos' AC is at -9 without buffs. And he can cast Stoneskin and Mirror Image. He's almost impossible to kill.
But I grow too confident in his abilities and let him tank a group of Drow Spellswords and Vanguards by himself. He only fails one save against a Bolt of Biting, but I delayed drinking an Antidote until I realized Slow Poison wasn't enough, and by the time he drank it, his defenses were down. A series of critical hits disrupted his spells and nearly killed him.
But we trapped the drow, saving Valos' life, and our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, Onin, takes on the drow in Valos' place. By combining his priest kit's innate Holy Power spell (with a casting time of 1!) with spider form and the Symbol of Corellon Larethian, he can strike 5 times per round at 9 THAC0, poisoning his targets without a saving throw.
He still nearly dies for his efforts, but he did a lot to weaken the enemy, and by the time we were ready to bail him out, the drow were already half-dead. We completed the area without a single rest, which I'm not sure I've ever done before.
Next up is Terikan. Terikan's Greater Mummy buddies use Symbol of Hopelessness, a 20-round stun spell with a -2 penalty. Normally, this would be a nightmare for our party, as we have no bard to sing Tymora's Melody to improve our saves and no real cleric to cast Free Action or Remove Paralysis to prevent or cure the stun effect.
But we do have a Remove Paralysis scroll, plus some Dispel Magic spells, and we have both the Mantle of the Coming Storm (which you can get at the tavern after killing Lysan) and the Girdle of Labelas (a random drop in the Severed Hand) to grant us Free Action.
Despite the spell description, it seems that Dispel Magic works the same way in IWD:EE that it does in vanilla BG2. It has a certain chance of success based on the caster level of the spell effect in question. In vanilla IWD, it automatically dispelled everything. We fail to rescue our Totemic Druid when she is stunned by Symbol of Hopelessness, and have to fight Terikan several more times while she recovers, since he re-spawns every few rounds.
I turn the whole party invisible and use the map to locate Terikan's phylactery and the place where you have to bring it to kill the lich. IWD:EE puts labels on both rooms, which makes it a lot easier for me, since I keep forgetting which rooms I have to visit to destroy Terikan's phylactery. We get the Bastard Sword +2, Conflagration, as a random drop, which has a 10% chance per hit of launching a Fireball. But I'm not protecting the whole party with Protection from Fire in this run since I'm not casting my own Fireball spells, so this sword isn't much use, aside from the 50% fire resistance it grants.
Kerish and the Frost Salamanders actually do a lot to hurt us. Normally this area isn't too bad, but our Spirit Animals aren't immune to the enemy's weapons (though they are immune to all the cold damage), and apparently only clerics, but not druids, can cast Resist Fire/Cold. We do have a Protection from Cold mage spell on our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, but we can only cover half the party with it, and when we get flanked by salamanders, we take a lot of damage.
Our Spirit Animals also fail to resist the Frost Giants' attacks. I thought that because they dropped nonmagical two-handed axes, their attacks were nonmagical. But apparently their real attacks strike as +3 weapons. Our Spirit Animals get crushed.
Valos, however, our Fighter/Illusionist, tanks every Frost Giant in the area and survives just fine.
We trap Kontik into oblivion, and her Black Ice Knights aren't far behind. Then I find one of the best random drops in the entire game, which I've known about for ages but never actually found: The Two-Handed Sword +3: Bane.
Aside from being a +3 weapon that grants 10% magic resistance, it has a 25% chance per hit of inflicting a permanent disease effect with no save that deals 1 damage every 2 seconds, stackable. It's a death sentence for any enemy not immune to disease or poison damage.
Only neutral and evil characters can use it, so no one in my party can use it, but it gives me reason to export it into another game.
Turns out I've been under-investing in our Bounty Hunter, Dyn's, find traps skill. She is unable to disarm the petrification traps in the Blind Minotaur and Umber Hulk area. But I already know the traps are on the big eyes painted on the ground, so I just walk around them.
Zone of Sweet Air fails to save the svirfneblin from the golems' Cloudkill ability, but the Iron Golems don't last long. Our Fighter/Illusionist and Cavalier, Valos and Zulfer, take them down in a few rounds.
Malavon teleports in when his clone is dead. He Breaches Eliza, our Totemic Druid, but her Ironskins don't get removed. He also gets in a Flesh to Stone spell on Valos, but he makes his save. Level 11 normal snares from Dyn disrupt some of Malavon's spells, and soon he collapses under sustained pressure.
Malavon has a habit of teleporting around and likes to throw out Webs followed by Death Fog. It's a deadly combination, but Zone of Sweet Air removes Death Fog. It's a convenient counter to one of his deadliest options.
We plow through the salamanders and other minor fights with brute force. Then we have to deal with the Fire Giants, who can land a hit on Valos with an attack roll of 12, if not lower. Not a good sign. We throw out a bunch of traps and a couple Slow spells to weaken them. Sha Heitian, our sorcerer, outright slays one of them with Polymorph Other. Even if the target is immune to polymorph, it still sets their maximum HP to 10, making it very easy to kill them in a single hit.
Maiden Ilmadia runs in to help, only to fail a save against Hold Monster. She is doomed. The Fire Giants collapse, and we run down to fight the drow cleric/mages that Ilmadia forgot to bring with her.
They both cast Righteous Wrath of the Faithful followed by haste--a pointless combination, since the two are exclusive in EE (in vanilla you could combine them if you cast them in the right order). But it makes them extremely dangerous. So I cover the group with Invisibility 10' Radius to wait out the RWF spells.
Eliza, our Totemic Druid, isn't close enough to turn invisible--the drow could crush her in moments. But the drow don't have ranged attacks, so she leads them on a chase around Ilmadia's tent until they stop glowing yellow. When it's over, they have a -10 luck penalty, and are no longer any threat.
Fleezum goes down to melee attacks; Flozum fails a save against Polymorph Other. The backstabbing thieves in this area die to blind traps while they waste their attacks on Valos' Mirror Images and Stoneskins.
I go visit Nym and avoid antagonizing him this time. I purchase Solemn Duty, a +3 katana that EE introduces. IWD:EE contains three guaranteed drops for katanas: a +1 katana in Kresselack's tomb, a +2 katana, Darkened Glory, in Dragon's Eye or the Temple of the Forgotten God, and Solemn Duty from Nym, just in time for the final battle, which requires +3 weapons or better to win. These drops make katanas a rather excellent choice for an IWD character... but since there are only three such katanas, there's little point in giving pips in katanas to more than one character.
I buff our front line with Protection from Cold and have Valos drink a Potion of Insight before reaching Market. The potion makes sure we can nab Marketh's equipment without killing him, which costs us some XP from Ginafae. The Protection from Cold is to protect us from the Kraken Society Mages' Cone of Cold spells.
Special Snares paralyze the backstabbers in this fight, while normal traps deal poison damage to disrupt the mages' spells. We crush most of the enemies, but Sha Heitian gets Breached, then has a Stoneskin spell disrupted by a backstab, then gets finished off by Cone of Cold. He was the most vulnerable enemy to Cone of Cold, as Dyn had evasion and the other four characters were immune to cold damage--I thought Sha was least likely to get hit by Cone of Cold.
The Idol can be a tough battle, but it ends when the Idol itself collapses, as most of the other undead die with it. We therefore haste the party and rush the Idol, using Dyn's traps to disrupt the Greater Mummies' Symbol spells. Brother Harken talks to us about the Voice of Durdel Anatha, which dies right after our conversation--the quest seems to have been broken, though I'm not sure why.
We don't buff much before the fight with Belhifet. I cover Sha Heitian with Stoneskin, Mirror Image, Shield, and Spell Immunity: Abjuration, and also blind Dyn. I use a scroll of Chain Contingency to store some buffs on Valos, since contingencies can't be dispelled. He puts a Blur spell, Mirror Image, and Stoneskin in the contingency and sets it to "on hit" so it will appear the moment it needs to (in BG2, at least, contingencies set to fire on "enemy sighted" tend to be slow). Finally, our Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage, Onin, pre-casts Detect Traps. During the cutscene, that spell highlights the traps in the area, so I know exactly where they are when the fight begins.
The moment Belhifet's dialogue ends, I pull back Dyn, our Bounty Hunter, and send Zulfer, our Cavalier, out a couple steps. This accomplishes two things: first, it lets Dyn just barely avoid the Remove Magic and preserve her blindness (in case that failed, we also had a Color Spray+Blindness Minor Sequencer on our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, plus a bunch of Color Spray spells from our sorcerer). This means we can keep using blind traps. Second, it means Belhifet will attack Zulfer first. Zulfer is the only party member immune to both poison and disease, which would cripple our other party members.
But Zulfer gets trashed on the first round. His AC just isn't good enough to take on Belhifet and his two Cornugons. Meanwhile, the rest of the party flees from the two Iron Golems and their Cloudkill spells. Valos' contingency triggers, the other spellcasters cast some buffs, and then we get to work on bringing down the Iron Golems.
Dyn's traps make a huge difference, speeding up the deaths of the Cornugons and Iron Golems both. Zulfer, whom I expected would be a stronger tank, is forced to flee while Eliza, our Totemic Druid, Heals him.
Onin gets stunned by a Cornugon. I should really start killing the Cornugons first instead of the Iron Golems, as they have dreadful on-hit effects, including a bleeding effect that bypasses basically all defenses. Onin still survives, as we manage to take down the Cornugons soon after he is stunned.
Dyn runs out of traps and engages in melee combat, still blind. I'd remove the blindness with a Cure Disease from Zulfer, our Cavalier, but he needs to spend those rounds drinking potions if he is to survive. Dyn is rewards with a sword to the face and a poison effect, and Eliza fails to heal Dyn when a dead Cornugon's bleeding effect disrupts her spell. We lose another Elixir of Health--I neglected to buy any new ones, so we only had 6 when we entered the fight, compared to more than 20 in the last run.
Zulfer clings to life, but he costs us all of our Potions of Extra Healing. It doesn't matter in the end. Dyn's traps took about 70-90 HP from every enemy, significantly reducing the pressure we suffered from the Iron Golems and Cornugons and allowing us to face Belhifet in fairly good shape. Although Zulfer proved an ineffecient tank--for all my worries about disease and poison, most of the damage was just plain slashing damage--he and Valos, under Improved Haste, found it easy to whittle away at Belhifet's health.
The fight is ours. One Insane mode fight with no extra damage or XP, and no Chromatic Orb or Fireball or Web spells, complete.
We've finished the bandit camp. Good ol' Web and Hold Person spells are really useful here.
So, we are off to the Cloakwood. I forgot to buy potions of Free Action before coming here, so I'll need to try to get Imoen to "disarm" all the spider webs. Here's the Chapter 4 quest log. It didn't see when we sided with the druids against Sashenstar, so it's not perfectly polished yet, but I really like the feature.
1. After having played Insane mode in both vanilla and EE, and having just tried out a normal mode run with Insane mode extra monsters, I can say that the extra XP from higher difficulties does not, contrary to popular opinion, over-compensate, or even somewhat compensate, for the extra damage. Adding a single level to every party member is not worth cutting your HP in half. In a low-level, melee-heavy game like IWD, raw damage output is the most important factor in the outcome of a fight. On many occasions, I saw my characters drop down to half their HP. If I had enabled the extra damage, I would have died many times. An extra point of THAC0, an extra use of a special ability per day, or an extra high-level spell is simply not going to double your survivability, the way that Insane mode cuts it in half. Playing IWD with double damage on your party is like playing BG2 with save penalties on your party--and no immunities to disablers. It's the worst single handicap you can have.
2. The blind thief trick, as strong as it is in BG2, is even stronger in IWD. The damage output is just so high. Area-effect spells have always been strong in IWD's horde-based battles, and the damage per trap is itself overwhelming. Enemies in IWD start out with HP in the single digits and end up with HP in the triple digits by the end. Total trap damage per enemy per day starts out in the double digits and ends up in the triple digits. Traps will wipe out early game enemies and severely weaken late-game enemies.
3. Summons are priceless in Heart of Fury mode. They make far superior tanks to any player character. You can certainly go without them, but it cripples your party's survivability.
4. Totemic Druids are a distinct improvement on normal IWD druids, despite losing access to IWD's excellent shapeshifts. Those Spirit Animals are terribly strong. That said, the immunity to normal weapons loses its impact a chapter after it kicks in. They took out the entire Severed Hand for my group, but a fair number of late-game enemies have magical weapons in EE. If it weren't for Valos, my Fighter/Illusionist, the Spirit Animals wouldn't have been able to hold off everything. That said, they were an important instrument throughout the game, and would be even more important in Heart of Fury mode--to the extent that a Totemic Druid would be a very viable solo HoF build.
5. Immunity to poison is a big deal in select instances, but it matters less than I thought. Antidotes are plentiful--you get more than 15 of them at the start of Dragon's Eye, on top of a few Elixirs of Health over the course of the game. Even at higher difficulties where poison damage can wreck a character through Stoneskin, an Antidote will likely be sufficient. This is an important detail because the only characters that can attain innate immunity to poison are Cavaliers, monks, and druids, none of whom can cast mage spells. Pestilent Dawn, a +4 club, can also grant immunity to poison, but is only available at the end of HoW, when you can't go back to the main quest anymore. It's an excellent choice to import, though.
6. Color Spray is brutal when you're facing non-undead enemies. A multi-classed character won't get quite as much mileage out of it, since it only knocks enemies unconscious if they're at your level or below, but a bard should be able to knock out anything. it amounts to a fast-acting area-effect stun spell. Because of its cone-shaped projectile, it's also very easy to aim it away from your party members. But if you do hit a party member with it, it could prove fatal, as your characters won't wake up after being hit. Note that being an elf or half-elf does not grant any immunity to the sleep effect.
7. Stinking Cloud has the same property, but is much less party-friendly. It also puts people to sleep without letting them wake up on hit. It's potentially fatal in the Vale of Shadows, but you can turn it to your favor in later fights, where the enemy is not so undead-heavy.
8. Gnomish Fighter/Illusionists, like Cleric/Illusionists, are extremely tough. Having the Helm of the Trusted Defender (which blocks the sleep effects of Color Spray and Stinking Cloud!) is a huge boon to your AC, and combining it with Mirror Image produces a nearly indestructible tank early in the game.
9. The last battle is invariably a low-buff ordeal. Spell Immunity scrolls only appear in Trials of the Luremaster--only sorcerers can reliably defend themselves from the Remove Magic at the beginning of the fight, and the Iron Golems with their Cloudkill spells, and Cornugons with their bleeding effects, and Belhifet with his disease and poison effects without save, all impose tremendous pressure on the party, inhibiting spellcasting and putting you on the defensive for many rounds. Once those Cornugons and Iron Golems are gone, however, it's a fairly low-intensity fight, as Belhifet periodically teleports away, granting your breathing room... even though he gains absolutely nothing in the process, due to having no healing abilities or regeneration. Unless you know exactly where the traps are and are able to keep track of everybody's position (characters have a habit of wandering off when Belhifet teleports), it's generally safest to stick to the corners and avoid the ring of traps around the middle.
10. Free Action will block Symbol of Hopelessness outright, as it uses the stun opcode.
11. It is very, very important to have a cleric in the group. It is not simply the ability to use cheap Raise Dead scrolls or spells in lieu of visiting a temple--it is the fact that clerics contain important defensive options like Remove Paralysis, Resist Fire/Cold, Cure Disease, Slow Poison, Exaltation (immunity to sleep!), Free Action, and Defensive Harmony.
12. Entropy Shield is a fantastic anti-mage tanking spell--most of the time. It grants immunity to stuff like Melf's Acid Arrow and Magic Missile (very important at higher difficulties) and resistance to stuff like Vitriolic Sphere and Fireball. But unlike Ironskins, it can be Breached, and IWD:EE mages can and will use Breach against the party. A Cleric/Illusionist can protect itself with Minor Spell Deflection or the like, but IWD:EE mages also use Spell Thrust.
13. A few mages in IWD:EE do arrive pre-buffed, and they are monsters. They use everything from Dire Charm to Feeblemind to Vitriolic Sphere to Mordenkainen's Force Missiles. It's easy to get surprised by these guys since melee enemies tend to be predominant and attract the most attention. But a party without some anti-mage defenses is going to suffer against the handful of properly buffed mages in the game.
14. If the enemy casts Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, run. They'll be pitifully weak when they stop glowing yellow.
15. The Two-Handed Sword +3: Bane is in fact in the game. Previously Heart of Winter removed it from the random drop lists. But it's back, and it's a fantastic weapon for any neutral or evil fighter.
16. Saves do matter... sometimes. Few battles force you to make saving throws, but when they do, they're almost as important as they are in BG2. Bombardier Beetles, mages, clerics, Umber Hulks, spiders, and other assorted critters will force you make saving throws. A bard on hand with Tymora's Melody will mostly resolve this problem when it does come up. Other times, you may need immunities--which don't usually come cheap in a low-level damage-heavy game like IWD, when Chaotic Commands is normally less useful than Mass Cure and Free Action is normally less useful than Defensive Harmony. There's a tradeoff between being prepared for enemy disablers and being prepared for enemy weapons. A bard can handle both threats using Tymora's Melody, the Siren's Yearning, and the War Chant of the Sith.
17. The scorcher loop kills everything but Belhifet. And if you cast Protection from Fire (the priest version) on a fire-immune enemy to lower its fire resistance to 80%, the scorcher loop kills everything but Belhifet. And if you forget to make all your party members immune to fire, the scorcher loop kills EVERYTHING but Belhifet.
18. Enemies will follow you if you turn the party invisible. Invisibility 10' Radius does not guarantee you a safe rest.
19. It's not just spiders that are immune to Web. Ogres, Lizard Men, and other large critters are also immune.
20. Death Fog deals hideous damage to basically all enemies, and works wonders with Web... whether it's you that's using it, or Malavon.
21. Ignore the thieves when you fight at Marketh's place. The mages are the true threat, and can easily kill or chunk your party members in a single round with Cone of Cold or Horrid Wilting. Prep the party with immunity to cold, and if you see a necromancy spell coming, scatter.
22. Polymorph Other in IWD:EE, like in BG2:EE, sets max HP to 10 on a failed save. Even enemies immune to polymorph will suffer that effect. It's a poor man's ranged Harm spell.
23. Druids don't keep their immunity to poison when shapeshifted.
24. Regardless of the difficulty mode, having fighter levels is very important. The battles take much, much longer without a steady supply of reliable damage.
25. IWD:EE isn't quite as hard to play no-reload as BG2. You don't need to worry about the main character dying, several spells like Web and Fireball are accessible early on and powerful at every stage in the game, enemy mages seldom have many defenses, and instant death spells and high-powered disablers are very uncommon.
The party was at the Nashkel Carnival last time I reported on them. From there they traveled to the Nashkel Mines area, where patient and careful kiting saw Archer Gwendolen rewarded with Varscona. To the east the party found a Ring of Fire Resistance, received a scroll of PfMagic, and met Samuel the Deserter whom they brought to Gellana at the FAI. I made sure to travel north from one area to the next (instead of going straight for the FAI), so that Eirian would be protected by a pre-cast Armor spell in case of any ambushes. At the FAI entrance I had Feywarden Ifor deal with Tarnesh on his own. Ifor had buffed with Remove Fear to counter Horror and SI:Evocation to neutralize Magic Missiles. (Spell Immunity is the special ability of Divine Remix Feywarden of Corellon priests.) However my habit of not challenging Tarnesh at low levels had made me forget that the wizard casts Sleep as well. Luckily Ifor saved, and stunned his foe with the Stupefier. A bit further north Shapeshifter Bleddyn wasn't as fortunate when the Ankheg with Nester's dagger one-shotted him before Eirian put the creature to Sleep.
Helping Tenya and farmer Brun (corpse picked up by Sanctuaried Ifor) saw Eirian and Gwendolen make their first level-ups. The companions headed south again, to the Red Canyons, where they slew a wolf to svae Melicamp. They did not make haste with visiting Thalantyr though. Instead they slew six berserk diggers at an excavation site, after Eirian had put them to Sleep, and they escorted Brage back to Nashkel to redeem himself. At the Carnival the companions bought a suit of Caster's Chain for Dirgesinger Canaid and a scroll of PfPetrification for Gwendolen. A bandit ambush confirmed that Eirian's strategy of traveling with Armor up was a wise one.
The Basilisks east of Beregost were easy pickings for Gwendolen, and Mutamin posed no threat after Korx held him and Gwendolen poisoned her with an arrow of biting. In nine Sirines, the Archer made more victims in the coastal regions. Swashbuckler Alys de-trapped Alaric's cave, and Ifor looted it under Sanctuary. Thalanthyr killed Melicamp and sold the party several spells for Eirian and Canaid to scribe with the help of INT boosters. The Enchantress tested one of her new spells, Enfeeblement, on Karlat, but the Dwarf proved uninhibited by incumbrance in spite of being connected by the spell, because he quaffed a hill giant strength potion. Ifor Held the bounty hunter, so he fell easily after all. Bleddyn sacrificed himself a second time, for Shoal. Eirian used a wand to paralyze Droth and gave her Shapeshifter companion the Ogre's Helmet of Defense. This was followed by some shopping (Greenstone Amulet, Cloak) and stealing (Ring of Free Action, courtesy of Canaid) in Ulgoth's Beard. In their hunger for more experience and more wealth the company traveled to DUrlag's Tower, where two Battle Horrors were defeated with wands of fire/frost. They also engaged a Doom Guard on one of the terraces. I had a short break here, but long enough for me to do something really stupid: I had Eirian and Canaid mistake Ifor for the Doom Guard. Due to his colors, Ifor has a red circle around him, and his Flaming Fist helmet and plate armor made him look a bit Doom Guardy at first sight. This was the result:
(@BelgarathMTH, you're not the only one haha.) In the consternation that followed Canaid managed to finish the real Doom Guard but then walked straight into Eirian persistent wand scorcher:
All this only took me about a minute of gaming... As the party were pretty much broke, they had no way to get Ifor and Canaid raised, so they returned to the Red Canyons, where Eirian expended several charges of her wand of fire on Bassilus, disrupting the priest's casting and eventually killing him. The party claimed the bounty on their victim's head and had Keldath raise Ifor and Canaid. Back at Durlag's Tower, Gwendolen dealt with three Greater Basilisks and one Lesser, while safe from their gazes thanks to PfPetrifications that Eirian would cast on the Ranger. On the floor inhabited by the Ghost, the party suffered another casualty. Alys had just explored and looted the entire floor except for the corridor that led to the dangerous Ghost, when suddenly a group of Ghasts appeared from a recently explored hallway. This was very unexpected. This wasn't an ambush; the party hadn't rested. Either way one of the Ghast Held Alys, on the stairs just before she could retreat. The others came to her aid but couldn't stop the undead from laying the Swashbuckler down.
Alys was raised, and the remainder of the upper levels looted. Kirinhale was eschewed. The tome of wisdom went to Ifor as I reckon he will be casting more as a cleric than Bleddyn as a Shapeshifter Druid. Dismayed with their lack of resources and progress, the party had Canaid sell and steal back some gear at the Nashkel Carnival, allowing the purchase of Shadow Armor, a Robe of the Neutral Archmagi, the Claw of Kazgaroth (for 18 CON Eirian), some ioun stones, and a Helmet of Charm Protection. The companions than cleared the Cloudpeaks without incident and picked up the CHA tome at the Gnoll Stronghold (but did not enter the fortress itself). This brought in a lot more gold, most of which they've just exchanged for the Martial Staff, several scrolls, a Wand of the Heavens, and a magical harp in Ulgoth's Beard.
The Druid and the rogues are level 6; Eirian, Gwen and Ifor level 5. Progress feels slow, and Eirian hasn't been able to do much yet with her Charms. Canaid's song, with its Curse effect, has so far been useful more for the Thac0 penalty cursed enemies suffer than for its saves penalty. I hope things will pick up for this party at higher levels, when Eirian and Canaid get to cast more spells, and Greater Malison comes into play.
EDIT: PS @Pteran, thanks for your kind words, and congrats on your impending wedding BTW I wonder how you're going to experience the RR Bounty Hunter. I never use RR for Thieves, only for Bards.
Comments
My special rule for this run is that I can't use the spells I normally prefer to use. No more Fireball, no more Chromatic Orb, no more Web, and no more Static Charge. Also, no single-classed clerics or bards, because I have those in every run. I want to start using some new tactics. But I'm still going to be using some old tricks of mine.
My party:
Zulfer, Human Cavalier (axes and maces, because I've done swords too much)
Bezolten, Half-orc Kensai (katanas and spears, because I like the idea)
Eliza, Half-elf Totemic Druid
Dyn, Human Bounty Hunter
Onin, Human Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage
Sha Heitian, Half-elf Sorcerer
Why these guys? First, I wanted to use a paladin again because it's been so long since I had one in the group. And though the Undead Hunter has better stuff overall, I like the Cavalier's immunity to poison (if I was using Fireball again, its 20% resistance to fire would also fit nicely with the 80% resistance from Protection from Fire). The lack of missile weapons is pretty bad in IWD, but I don't really feel like using them in this runu anyway; I've used them too much already.
I normally don't like the idea of a Half-orc Kensai, but I knew the Kensai was a suboptimal choice for a game like IWD and wanted to try it out, and I really wanted to go all out on the damage potential (normally I'd consider a dwarf, gnome, or halfling to be the better race for a Kensai class due to saving throws).
Finally, I have some reliable damage dealers. I can hit things without tons of buffs or disabled enemies.
I still have a druid, even though I've basically always had one in every run, because I felt like trying out Spirit Animals in IWD. But the main reason is because I wanted at least one full-time healer.
Why only 3 cleric levels? I've gotten tired of having exactly one cleric in every game, and it takes forever to get Raise Dead with a multi-class, so I thought I'd just dual-class from cleric before level 9 and use Raise Dead scrolls when I needed to resurrect somebody. The Cleric of Tempus kit is because its once-per-day Holy Power spell is identical to the priest version--that is, the level 1 version casts as a level 7 version, setting your THAC0 to 14 instead of 20, albeit only for 7 rounds. And since it's an innate spell, it will work marvelously with spider form once I get Polymorph Self. I dualed at level 3 instead of level 2 just so I could put DUHM in a Minor Sequencer and get 19 STR instead of 18/00 in spider form.
Notice I'm still using a Bounty Hunter. This is because I never made much use of the blind thief trick until Dorn's Deep in my previous run. My sorcerer can blind my Bounty Hunter with Color Spray for 3 rounds, and since I'm using a human instead of my normal halfling pick, she will more often fail the save. Conveniently enough, a Bounty Hunter will basically always be one or two levels higher than a sorcerer (at least in normal mode, before really high levels), which is exactly the level you need for the blindness effect of Color Spray.
Setting traps in plain sight will let me do party-friendly area-effect missile damage. Before level 11, a normal snare does 2d8+5 damage; a Special Snare does 3d8+5. That's actually a lot, considering how much of IWD consists of large hordes of enemy grunts--and considering she doesn't need to make an attack roll to make it work. Unlike my BG2 runs and my last IWD run, the Bounty Hunter is here to deal damage, not to use Maze traps.
Her traps killed basically everything in Easthaven and Kuldahar Valley, and she did most of the party's overall damage in the Vale of Shadows. She even got us past that infamous Sleep trap, since her own traps just killed all the skeletons before they could hurt anything. Bounty Hunters are absolute monsters in Icewind Dale outside of Heart of Fury mode.
So then I started a new party (minimal reload this time, to be reserved for extreme cases like chunking). This time I made myself and my fiancée.
Sir Shawn - Elf Cavalier
He's got proficiencies put into Long Swords and Dual Wielding right now. I'll probably add in Bastard Swords or Axes later.
Kourtney - Half-Elf Avenger
She'll be sticking to Darts with Sword and Shield style to maximize her defenses, sling spells and perform healing. I was going to go Totemic Druid like I did on my failed first attempt, but I wanted to try out the different IWD shapeshifts.
Taylor Swift - Human Jester
No, Taylor doesn't fit the Jester description. But I really wanted to give Jester a try. I have Rogue Rebalancing installed so the song works a little differently from vanilla. Since I already had two real life people turned into characters, I chose a famous singer for my bard
Here is the Jester description:
Alessia the Dragonborn - Human Dragon Disciple
One thing I remembered clearly from my previously short-lived attempt was the lack of scrolls. I didn't want to play vanilla Sorc, so I went with the DD. I've heard one of the big complaints with DD is the once per day use of their breath, so probably every 6 levels I'll add another use. When she isn't slinging spells or breathing fire, she's slinging darts.
Hrothgar, Fist of Tempos - Human Fighter/Priest of Tempus
This is a multi, with the kid added in EEKeeper. I used the colloquial spelling of Tempos, to better match with the local barbarian tribes
Baron von Shortstuff - Gnome Bounty Hunter
Shorty whipping around throwing daggers, and a trap enthusiast. With RR installed, the Bounty Hunter's traps function a little differently. In addition to the trap changes, they also can no longer throw them across the map.
We started out our adventure in Easthaven. Hrothgar told us to have a look around town, so that's exactly what we did. Turns out the local barmaid needs to seriously consider investing in a can or two of Raid...then later on Taylor bonded with a local sea nymph, swapping songs on the lake shore.
Before leaving on this expedition of Hrothgar's, we had to check up on a supply caravan that was supposed to have arrived in town a few days ago. We grabbed some gear from that pompous lout Pomab, and headed south. Some goblins were harassing a local boy, and stole his catch of fish. We showed them the error of their ways, and continued east out of town.
After traveling for an hour or so, we came upon the site of a raided caravan. A couple wolves were prowling nearby, and we noticed a trail of dropped supplies leading into a cave. We entered and were immediately spotted by a few orcs! Hrothgar let out a mighty war chant, and he and Shawn proceeded to slaughter the brutes. Taylor sung a haunting ballad that thoroughly distracted the orcs, making them easy prey. Baron von Shortstuff snuck ahead and scouted out a few more groups of orcs lead by shamans. He set a few traps in the tunnels, and attempted (read: failed) to backstab the shaman. I brought the party up to fortify his location, and he ran back towards the group, allowing the traps to cover his escape.
We cleared out the central and northern portion of the cave system and then made our way to the southern tunnel. I was not expecting such a large group of orcs (and some ogres!). Kourtney threw out a Web spell to help paralyze the group, and Taylor moved into position so her song would hit the most orcs. I hadn't gone into this fight very well prepared, so it was the Web spell that saved the day here.
Kuldahar Pass proved to be quite a bit more exciting on Insane than on Core. Many more goblins were present, as well as Goblin Marshalls. Kourtney threw out a Web spell to try and halt the approaching horde, but it was only partially effective.
Alessia had recently gained her breath ability and she attempted to use it to quickly wipe out the Marshalls marching towards Kourtney. It worked alright...but it nearly killed some of my party members! I'll have to practice aiming it a bit for next time.
Kourtney shared her special brownie recipe with the Ogre in the tower, so hopefully his headaches go away. I killed all the goblins at the windmill and coaxed the little boy out of hiding. Finally, we cleared out the goblin/beetle cave at the north end of the map before heading to Kuldahar.
Up next, the Vale of Shadows!
We have completed Upper Dorn's Deep.
I decided to give Minsc the Elven Chain +3 we found in the Severed Hand, because he has great stealth skill that I need him to use, as Imoen is terrible at it, thanks to her dual class - her dual class that I disapprove of strongly, and would discourage her from doing in BG if I had a choice. Oh well, at least she can Identify items, as Dynaheir cannot under IWD rules.
So, here, I had Minsc use his fantastic stealth skill to scout out this area, which is kind of like the "boss battle" of this level. He found a mob of melee troops and archers to the south, and another melee/archer troop to the east that was headed by a dude wearing archmage robes. Um, so, Captain Obvious says, the archmage is the boss here.
We need to avoid confronting the archmage until the troops from the south are dealt with. So, we maneuver very carefully to allow Jaheira, Minsc, and Khalid to exterminate the southern troops without alerting the eastern group to our presence. (The ability to do this is unrealistic and cheesy - what, they don't hear the commotion right outside their chambers, and they don't react when Dynaheir starts Fireballing them? But, the game will cheese US to death if we try to play it straight. So, I will exploit the game with no guilt, since the game is trying to exploit me. Fair is fair.)
So anyhoo, Minsc scouts out the location of the archmage and his guards, and then places a mark for Dynaheir and me. And, as we like to do, we pretty much empty our spellbooks at them. Hmm, the archmage has magic resistance. Silences are cast, Fireballs are cast, Web is cast, Greater Shadows are summoned, Holy Smite is cast. Ooo, looky, my Holy Smite gets past his magic resistance and Blinds him. This battle is effectively over.
Now, into the lower chambers, and up against the final (well, at least you think he's final) lich for Upper Dorn's Deep. My Turn Undead is in top form here. It doesn't work on the lich though.
So, we have the key to lower Dorn's Deep, the lich is gone, and all is well. Yay for us!
Wait a minute, now we have to get through four Bronze Sentries to get back out. Oh dear.
The Sentries slaughter all our summons in rounds. Jaheira tries to cast her second Iron Skins and gets interrupted. (Yikes!) Jaheira and I are then Near Death. (I have TWO hit points left.) Luckily, Dynaheir is able to land a Haste before she also goes to Near Death. Jaheira and I run for our lives to try and heal ourselves. Dynaheir lands a Teleport Field to assist us. Minsc and Khalid do most of our damage. Imoen really can't help much - she has good magic melee weapons, but she can't tank them, especially since I gave the Elven Chain to Minsc, and Khalid has our precious few remaining magic arrows (He goes through arrows like popcorn at 5 APR). The Sentries are magic resistant, so attack spells are of little use. After a lot of very intense rounds, we finally prevail without any deaths.
Next up: Lower Dorn's Deep
Not that I'd even care if it wasn't.
It is a sad, tragic day for the party. Khalid, mighty archer Khalid, has fallen. That is, he got chunked. Body in pieces, desecrated beyond all hope, even by a Resurrection spell. Curse my overconfidence!
Things were going so well. We freed the slaves and slaughtered the entire population of evil frost salamanders in the fallen Wyrm's Tooth Museum (formerly a dwarven temple to Gond, I believe, built by the brother of a mad dwarven king). Summoned creatures kept the frost demons and their deadly cold auras at a distance from our party. Against the mighty summoning magics of Imoen and Dynaheir, they didn't stand a chance!
Afterwards, Silvanus granted Jaheira sixth circle spells for her bravery in fighting these tree-freezing abominations. She can now summon a huge fire elemental, even stronger than Imoen's.
Perhaps this was what caused Jaheira's and my hubris that led to the tragedy. At first, everything was fine. Minsc scouted out the place, and found the locations of evil frost giants and an evil Aurilite priestess commanding a squadron of Blackguard. We decided to attack her first. As we enter her chambers, we are swarmed by ice trolls and ice demons. Our summons are very helpful, but Jaheira's big fire elemental gets severely weakened, and finally falls to the yeti squadron guarding the northern approach to the Aurilite's camp.
After finally defeating all the guards, Minsc gives us a mark just out of sight of the Aurilite and her Blackguard squadron, We throw summons, Webs, Fireballs, Silence, Holy Smite, and Skull Trap into the area. All the Blackguard but two are down. The priestess comes out into the Web and manages to land a Slow on the party. It won't help her. Dynaheir keeps lobbing Chromatic Orbs at the remaining Blackguard. Khalid kills the Aurilite. Sigh, Oh Khalid, you were our best party member! What are we going to do without you?
Flush with victory, I order an attack on a pack of frost wyrmlings Minsc scouted out. They were eating captured humans, elves, and dwarfs! I will regret this mistake for the rest of my life. "Pride goeth before the fall". Their cold attacks go right through Jaheira's Iron Skins, and the intelligent oldest wyrmling and his siblings bring her almost instantly to Near Death with their deadly cold-laced bites. We need to get out of here, now! But, with the narrowness of our escape route, and in the stumbling all over ourselves in panic, things go very, very badly.
(In hindsight, Dynaheir had a Teleport Field ready that just might have saved Khalid if cast in time. I didn't think to order it, and she didn't think to try it. I do not not blame her for this, as any one of those wyrmlings could have bitten her in two with a single bite, and she was understandably trying to get away. I blame myself for being a horrible leader.
They follow us outside, and four of us escape across the bridge. But Khalid is surrounded, and they begin to tear him to pieces. Dynaheir is trapped behind them. Again, if only that Teleport Field...but what she thought of was to begin summoning Shadows and Haste them. They probably saved her, but they couldn't save Khalid.
Jaheira and I hear his screams, and then watch helplessly as one wyrm takes his head, and another two take an arm and a leg each.... It is too horrible to describe. Jaheira and I both scream "Khalid, noooooo!" in terrible, hellish two-part harmony. The scene will haunt me for the rest of my life. Dynaheir's shades and our desperately thrown arrows and my Flame Strike manage to destroy the wyrmlings at last, saving our lives from the ravenous monsters.
We drag ourselves back to Kuldahar to regroup. Khalid has a note in his pack willing his Bow of Sseth, his artillery belt, and his extensive collection of magic arrows to Minsc, who must now take over Khalid's role in our party. He almost breaks down emotionally and says he can't do it, but Boo crawls out, nuzzles his ear, and Minsc says that his Boo tells him he must go on, and become our new archer in honor of Khalid.
And now we are five. I have no faith left that we can defeat the Frost Giant King without Khalid, much less any other of the remaining Demonic Six. Lathander help us.
Next up: Against the Frost Giant King and beyond, with a party of five.
Dekros and company, after a month, have taken down Sarevok and co.
I've lost track of number of deaths; almost everyone's died at least once.
Major fights/mistakes made: Gavin died almost instantly, getting talked to by Shoal by accident.
Mutamin. Bloody Mutamin. He kept escaping after using Remove Magic on Gavin or whoever was fighting the Basilisks. Even with almost all of Lyssinia's level 1's being Protection from Petrification, we were forced out of zone 3 or 4 times before we finally managed to collapse on him with no basilisks around. Peter's squad doesn't fare well against our spell casters... I think they were hit by silences beforehand.
Our path from there was Nashkel -> Greywolf -> Gnoll fortress -> Doomsayer -> Brage before heading into the mines. Sleep from an Enchanter has, with the additional +2 save difficulty, neutralized most easy mobs, and Charm Person and True Seeing has negated many other threats here.
Narcillius is a hard fight, though. We simply can't play mage chess without even the lowly Spell Thrust, so we're stuck waiting durations out while getting hammered by Mustard Jellies. We take him out with everyone at half HP, the three that could even pretend to melee the jellies slowed, and we make a retreat to the north instead. We return the next day and tediously bring the jellies down for 3 levels.
Nimbul is simply murdered by True Seeing -> Call Lightning. The game crashed after the first time I killed him though, forcing me to redo the section. Tranzig's much more troublesome, as I can't seem to get a single spell to stick on him. He still doesn't kill anyone, but he's at least brought half my team to half health.
Ankhegs are put to Sleep, Sirenes are easy picking after True Seeing, and Battle Horrors in front of Durlag's tower are painfully killed for experience. We also climb the tower for the WIS tome: I'm giving all 3 of them to Aduroc, none to Dekros. We also encounter both sets of assassins during this time; Dire Charm and True Seeing, and then Call Lightning, Spirit Animals, Hold Persons, and Ray of Enfeeblement neuter all the ambushes with no deaths.
The wolf of Ulcaster: a Fireball trap killed Lyssinia, and the holding bite killed Gavin. The thing absorbed 2/3 charges of a Wand of Fire in scorcher mode and of Wand of the Heavens while at Near Death. Gavin's still the only reason we survived this fight, with his Cavalier Remove Fears getting us through the fight.
Bandit camp went well; Dire Charm on Taugosz and a Cloudkill (from scroll) up to the north means very few threats pressuring us, and a few charges of the Wands of Fire finish off what Cloudkill didn't. Plisina attempts to memorize Spell Thrust, and success! I have a way of bursting MGoI now.
Lyssinia dies AGAIN, this time to Centeol and her cheap Wand of Frost trick. One-shot, but no freezing death at least.
Cloakwood mine: Drasus and co. don't have a very good time vs True Seeing and Dire charm. Dire Charm picks up Genthore while Gavin and Drasus duke it out. Meanwhile, both mages are desperately trying to get some type of defense up, but True seeing doesn't allow them too and the Spirit Animals and Plisina with her Composite Shortbow make quick work of the assassin group.
Davaeorn: Gavin under Pro. Magic fights alone. The entry is covered by a Dryad, a spirit Lion and Wolf, and a Skeleton while the rest of the party simply waits in a side room, or in Plisina's case, invisibly guiding the summons. Davaeorn manages to steal 4k experience by blowing up his own Battle Horror.
There's a weird bug at the Merchant's League at Balder's gate for me, probably due to my mods somewhere. Aldeth refuses to accept that all the doppel's are dead, depriving me of 5k exp. Whatever. Gavin dies to a random Evil Fighter in his home, as the guy apparently had 100% MR and after drinking a STR potion... Iron Throne fight actually goes fairly well for the first time that I've actually taken it head-on. Two Fireballs from the necklace and a wand, and Lyssinia uses a scroll of Chaos. With Enchanter bonuses, it's a -6 to save vs spell or be Confused... Even so, it wasn't enough to disable everyone, and a return Confusion makes things dicy. Plisina and Lyssinia both die in the carnage, but it was enough time to allow Dekros and Aduroc to recover from Confusion (Gavin wasn't hit) and the battle soon resolves in a kite.
An Ogre Mage almost kills Lyssinia, but she lived, and that ambush is thwarted as well.
Pratt and his gang are also kind of destroyed by True Seeing and Emotion:Hopelessness, and the Spirit Animals on top of that is just kind of cruel. A cast of Pro. Petrification sees another 8k added to our totals: I'm not actually aiming to hit the EXP cap, since I really dislike the TotSC content... I've gotten destroyed enough times on the werewolf island, Durlag's tower, and even Shandalar's island to want to go there in a no-reload.
Funny events as I'm trying to get to Slythe; I'm followed by a Flaming Fist Enforcer in the sewers, so I rescue duke Eltan first trying to get him to disappear. No luck. I'm forced to Hold Person him while I get the letters from Slythe. Even with True Seeing, he gets two backstabs onto Gavin, almost killing him, but Slythe dies first.
Ducal Palace: Plisina goes first and casts Invisibility on Liia to be on the safe side. She's ganked by a Doppel Assassin for her troubles soon after; I forgot to cast Mirror Image first, it seems. Lyssinia casts a Chaos into the mix, getting the Mage and around half the Greater Doppels! The assassin and Shaman are pretty much the only threats left, and focused fire stopping spellcasting means that's not too much of a threat. Both Belt and Liia survive in the first time in forever.
Undercity Party is fought for no other reason than I have around 75 charges of Wand of Fire between like, 4 wands, so why not?
Sarevok fight!
Strategy: Invis:30ft for everyone besides Gavin. Gavin reads the last Pro. Magic scroll, and simply survives and eventually winning with the +2 returning throwing axe. Plisina's used now and then to snipe off important buffs with her Arrows of Dispelling, like Sarevok's haste.
Execution: ... Almost. Lyssinia and Aduroc die when I decide to fight after they cast a Detect Invisibility spell after like, 5 minutes of fighting, and they're both incinerated by a Sunfire before I can get them out of the radius. Plisina and Dekros drink potions of Invisibility, head to the northwest while Gavin continues his dance around the temple in the southeast. Time to head to SoA...
We have defeated Joril, the Frost Giant King. Apparently he had an alliance with the frost wyrmling that killed Khalid. (He killed Khalid! That bastard!) We basically threw every summoned creature at our considerable magical disposal at his army and him. Dynaheir got a Ring of Wizardry from the Aurilite, and can now cast ten Chromatic Orbs every day. The frost giants are very susceptible, as she paralyzes one after the other of them.
Jaheira and I each gain levels. Unfortunately, Lathander still hasn't seen fit to answer my prayers for sixth circle spells and my own holy summons, the Aerial Servants. I feel my faith is being tested, and I need to make atonement for my foolish pride.
It felt easy to defeat the frost giants, who crumbled before our powers effortlessly, but the victory tastes very bitter in my mouth.
Next up, Lower Dorn's Deep proper
We've cleared the first floor of Lower Dorn's Deep and taken the Watch Tower. What remains is the palace, the svirfneblin village, the town overrun with umber hulks, the fire giants' lair, and Poquelin's chambers where the six keys go.
I'm not sure what order to do them in for minimum risk. Since the svirfneblin gave me the quest to look for food in the palace, I think I'll try to go there first and find the food.
Here I find out the hard way that Flame Strike is not party friendly in IWD. Oops.
I learn that fire elementals are excellent against fire salamanders, because they're immune to the fire aura. This one is tanking a mob of them for us while we pick them off with ranged fire.
Dynaheir's Chaos spell has good defensive effect in this mob of thieves. I also had her cast Teleport Field, but I think it might have been easier without that, as enemies that are blinking around randomly are very hard to target and finish off.
We take the Watch Tower, where we can make our base of operations and rest safely. The game does its annoying thing where it puts Dynaheir and Imoen in front and my tanks in back, so I try to work around that by running back outside and reversing the party order.
With my Defensive Harmony spell, Jaheira has an AC of -11. And they still hit every time, and take her almost instantly to Near Death. I find out later that that is probably because they are all using Arrows of Piercing +4. We have to run back outside to heal twice more before somebody gets chunked. It feels cheap to do this, since they don't follow, but I do have a giant fire elemental summoned out there, so I guess we could say it blocked the door for us or something, since it couldn't go in.
We are at last able to finish them using Haste and Hold Person. Imoen lobs Skull Traps up to the top of the stairs, where the explosions hit the archers but not us. (We're just out of the 18' range. Fireball would have lit up the whole tower including us.) Once my Hold Person hits them, they're done for.
Next up: Dorn's Palace - unless we start to get our butts kicked in there, in which case I might decide to get out and try another area first. Really, every remaining area except the Svirfneblin Village has an extremely hard boss fight in it, and I'm pretty scared at this point. Tune in to see what happens.
EDIT: Well, right after I posted this, I checked Steam, and BG:EE 2.0 just went live. I still have to run a character through it to get ready for SoD, so I guess I'm going to put this run on hold, even though I'm really into it. Probably everybody is going to be too busy with SoD over the next few weeks to pay much attention to this thread anyway. I had thought about finishing this first, but now that 2.0 is sitting there beckoning, I can't resist starting it. Inspired by the priest I'm playing here, I think I'll go with a Priest of Tyr Charname.
I am loving, loving loving 2.0 . So far, I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Thank you so much to all of you here in the forum who laboriously beta-tested it, so that I could have a more clean and fulfilling "virgin" experience with it.
This run will be completely unmodded, core rules. Max hit points on level up is OFF. I did not allow myself to use + or - keys on character creation. I am going to be a Priest of Tyr. On my second character roll, I just happened to roll a character with the potential to dual class to mage in BG2, something I will seriously consider doing after I have access to Anomen, or possibly in SoD if I find another cleric there.
I rolled about 20 or so more times and didn't see anything even close to better than that second roll. I think Tyr is trying to tell me something.
Here's the main character:
Here's our first party rainbow pose:
This will be a role-played run. I am trying as much as possible not to allow metaknowledge use. For example, I made myself wait to talk to Tarnesh and seeing him go hostile before I cast my Remove Fear spell. (My standard tactic is, see a hostile mage, cast Remove Fear immediately.)
Next up: The road south to Beregost and Nashkel
Neera's encounter in Beregost killed me.
First, after the dialogue when we agreed to help her and told the Red Wizards she was with us, she turned red (hostile) and ran off to the north. Huh? Is that a BUG?
Then, the Red Wizard who remained after the scripted teleport-away of the archmage cast Mirror Images, and then cast FLAME ARROW at me for his next spell.
Well, this feels very unfair as a no-reload ender, but, I'll continue my run on my own as a minimal reload. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
The Red Wizard cast his Mirror Images, and then his Flame Arrow, at Neera this time, instantly killing her. After that, he and his two guards were pretty easily killed by Jaheira, Khalid, and Imoen.
I see a huge problem here for both no-reloaders and anybody who wants to use Neera as a party member. I actually don't see how it's possible to even get Neera as a party member with the game like this.
On a nicer note, I bought SoD, and it changed my BG interface to the slick black interface of SoD. I like that. I'm still loving the situation, despite the probably bugged Neera encounter that ended my no-reload. This encounter cannot be avoided unless you use metaknowledge to carefully walk around it in Beregost, every time you're there, until you're ready to handle a Red Wizard with Flame Arrow. And I'm still not seeing how you'd get Neera into your party if you wanted to (which I don't, thankfully).
Here's a picture of us standing over Neera's and the Red Wizard's dead bodies, with the shiny new interface:
Also nice work finding that bug! It would seem none of the beta testers like Neera lol.
EDIT: Then again, maybe I should finish IWD before Beamdog forces an "upgrade" to the buggy 2.0.62 in IWD! I sure hope they get 2.0.* debugged before they mess up the almost perfectly running IWD:EE 1.3 with a forced patch!
wastelandlandscape! Arundel asked for our help in solving the problems plaguing Kuldahar (Seriously? The druid wants us to make the snowstorms go away? Go dance in the forest and pray to the squirrels or something!)We head to the Vale of Shadows, which is as creepy as it sounds. Ghosts everywhere! Do they just use this place to dump the bodies of those wronged in life or something? We carve a bloodless path (they're ghosts after all) across the terrain, plundering crypt after crypt! When we reach the far side of the valley, we come upon a much more ornate and foreboding looking tomb. We're pretty banged up, and this place looks dangerous, so we attempt to find somewhere to camp for the night.
Kourtney noticed a cave a short way back on the path, so we head there to sleep for the night. Of course we've got to massacre a band of Tundra Yeti to make the place habitable! We rest to refresh our spells and slap some Band-Aids on our wounds. Despite being full of Yeti, it's pretty clear that at least one other person has been here recently. There are a few crates of supplies stashed along the back wall...To make sure we aren't disturbed, Baron von Shortstuff sets up a bunch of traps to keep unwanted visitors away. Thankfully we rest undisturbed
Once day breaks we set out for the fancy looking tomb. Apparently it belongs to a dude with a serious wolf fetish. There are huge black paw prints adoring the entrance and the walls as we travel along. We get plenty of exercise from bashing in skulls all day long. Baron von Shortstuff saves us from a few nasty traps along the way. The further down we go into this place (How rich was this guy?? This is a HUGE crypt!) the more undead we find.
When we finally hit the bottom floor, we immediately get swarmed by skeletons and zombies. We manage to clear a path through the horde of undead, only to attract the attention of enemies just out of view. In an alcove to the south, Magic Missiles come flying out of the darkness, and zombies start pouring out of the doorway! Alessia yells for everyone to get the hell out of dodge, and unleashes her Dragon Breath attack. Hrothgar wasn't quite quick enough, and gets a few hairs signed off in the process.
We approach what looks like the final chamber (there are more wolf prints adoring the entrance), and get spotted by a mass of Spectral Knights and Skeletons. Hrothgar summons his own cadre of undead (I love that you get multiples in IWD!) to aid in the fight. Kourtney throws out a Web to try and slow their advance, and then adds a Spike Growth into the mix. Most of my party is ranged, so they're safely out of the Web. Hrothgar and Shawn charge in close to the Spectral Knights to block their advance towards the squishier characters. The Skeletal Mage throws out some kind of gas cloud, which seems to knock out my players =/
I forgot that Spike Growth is not party friendly, so Kourtney quickly kills off our own undead mob, and does a significant amount of damage to the Spectral Knights as well as Shawn and Hrothgar. A few well timed healing spells and (temporarily) regaining control long enough to chug a potion or two saved my life.
After nearly getting my own guys killed in the process, we've managed to clear this entire place. We have a chat with the owner, a rather friendly chap named Kresselack. After scolding us for slaughtering his bouncers, he tells us about an Aurilite priestess who wants to come turn down the thermostat in his crypt...like way down, to a completely unreasonable and not at all comfortable to sleep in level! Kresselack loves to entertain, throwing parties for his other undead buddies. Just because they're all dead doesn't mean they like the cold any more than the rest of us! We promise to take care of this troublesome priestess (I mean it IS our fault that she's now got free run of the place...we killed his guards).
We make our way (it's a loooong way back to the surface) back out to the Vale, and begin our search. After the other crypts turn up empty, we remember about the supplies in the yeti cave. SOMEONE has to be using it as a base of operations! Sure enough, when we go back inside we see a woman hiding in the back. Shawn thinks, "This is too easy..." but approaches the woman to talk. Turns out our investigative skills are pretty good, because we found our icy priestess. She is NOT happy with us telling her she cant freeze over the nice ghosts tomb, and calls for her yeti friends.
As luck would have it, Baron von Shortstuff's traps were still active, so that did a fair amount of damage to the monsters. Lysan the priestess started casting a spell, but Alessia shot her with a Chromatic Orb. She failed the save, and got stunned (gotta love that!). With her temporarily disabled, we made short work of the yetis.
We go back to tell Kresselack the good news. His hot yoga classes are free to continue, and no ice priestesses are gonna be bothering him any time soon! He clues us in on the fact that he's not the one bothering Kuldahar, and as near as he can tell it's not coming from anywhere inside the Vale of Shadows.
Back in Kuldahar, Arundel is both pleased and disturbed by the news. He's happy that there's not a horde of undead about to march on Kuldahar, but it's also bad because now he's got no leads. He tells us about a scrying device called the Heartstone Gem, and asks us to go retrieve it. It's being kept safe at a temple only a short march from Kuldahar. He marks the location on our map and sends us on our way!
Difficulty: Insane (requires liberal use of potions/spells and planning out my attacks)
Mods:
Minor NPC Portraits for IWD EE
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/37001/mod-minor-npc-portraits-for-iwdee/
More Style for Mages
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/18108/mod-more-style-for-mages-ranged-staffs-circlets-robe-tweaks-familiar-tweaks-v1-5-released
Rogue Rebalancing
http://www.shsforums.net/topic/27169-rogue-rebalancing-v480-released/
The Tweaks Anthology
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/48165/testers-wanted-tweaks-is-dead-long-live-tweaks
The big changes come from RR and Tweaks. I removed race/class restrictions because I didn't like being limited in a role-playing game. For example, I have free reign to make a Gnome Paladin if the mood strikes me. I adjusted the spell tables to be in line with their P&P counterparts (this doesn't change TOO much, but it does allow Bards to cast level 7-8 spells at high levels). Probably the biggest change of all was adjusting the Druid XP table to match Clerics. In BG2 I hated playing Druids simply because of the 13->14->15 XP spike. I haven't made it far enough into the game yet to know just how game breaking that might be...
A lot of the other changes are simply quality of life improvements like item stacking, higher HP on level up (I might change this one, but the extra HP seems critical on Insane), etc. They also have a nifty little component to help recover spent ammunition. I set it to 25%, because it makes sense that a lot of the arrows/darts/bullets/knives would be damaged beyond repair after striking the enemy.
EDIT: Oh I forgot! I found this one a while back, so I can't find the link anymore. But it allows non-fighters to get the extra HP from 16+ Con. I haven't taken advantage of it as of yet, but it should do very interesting things for my DD when she hits those levels. It was simply an alteration to the HPCLASS.2DA and HPCONBON.2DA files.
I've had a lot of things going on in RL (alas not all good, but I'm ok), and I've only really returned to playing on the long (Easter) weekend. It's nice to see people explore Icewind Dale in a no-reload context. I've thought of jumping on that bandwagon, but eventually returned to good old Baldur's Gate, and now I've come here to say something about my latest playthrough.
Other than the DD, it's been mainly failures... Two separate Archers were done in by Silke (one suffered a Hold Person successfully cast by the thespian inbetween or despite arrow of biting poison ticks, and the other succumbed to two Magic Missiles in a Sequencer). An evil Blade in a party got one-hit-killed by an Ogrillon due basically to poor pathfinding. I also had an Avenger whose death I don't even remember right now. And a solo Diviner got her Elven arse handed to her by a party of ambushing Hobgoblins, just when she was on her way to the FAI to buy potions of genius and whatever the other one is called (the blue one) to scribe Invisibility amongst other spells. Should have used the Nashkel Carnival red potion for her first scribing session. I liked her quite a lot, but like my DD, she too was effectively a rather generic mage in my hands. In my defense it's hard to role-play an adventuring solo Diviner and keep her alive in an SCS no-reload setting on insane difficulty. Still, the Diviner experience had me thinking.
Regardless of their specialization schools (if any), I mostly play my mages using a combination of the best spells available to them, i.e. a mix of spells from different schools, probably because it's the easiest thing to do. But wouldn't it be nice for a specialization school to be more noticeable and meaningful in actual gameplay? The dark Necromancer who animates corpses and drains life and levels, the ferocious Invoker that dishes out raw elemental and magic damage, the manipulative Enchanter who disarms foes with spells that affect the mind, the lazy Conjurer who relies on summons that do their bidding, etc. Specialists the way I like to imagine them.
Being too opportunistic to roll a specialist and limit them to strictly casting spells from their own school ("opportunistic" - that's a nice euphemism for powergamey no?), I came up with a compromise. I would roll a specialist, allow them to use any defensive spells they can legally cast, but have them rely heavily on spells of their own school for offensive purposes, except in situations where the latter spells are useless.
I went with an Enchanter Mage because the Enchantment/Charm school's all-or-nothing (as opposed to save for reduction of the spell's effect) spells are amongst those least used by me. I created a custom party for her to help her at her difficult job of being an Enchantress. For flavor I made them all Elves or Half-Elves and I gave them Welsh names that are more or less descriptive of who they are.
First of all I give you sensual Enchantress Eirian (pronounced I-rian, "shining"):
The second character I created is a mirthful Archer, Gwendolen ("holy bow", ** shortbow, * long sword, * war hammer).
Thirdly there's amazingly gifted Canaid (Can-ide, "song", * short sword, * axe), just look at that roll.
The fourth character is Bleddyn ("wolf-like", * dagger, * TWF), a grumbly Shapeshifter Druid.
Spunky Swashbuckler Alys ("noble", * katana, * dagger),
The sixth member of the crew is Ifor ("warrior", * mace, * sling),
The party is currently in Nashkel, without having achieved much as of yet. They equipped themselves in Candlekeep, with Alys stealing a star sapphire to finance her katana. South of the FAI, they slew a Wolf and an Ogre and picked up a Ring of the Princes. Near the inn they found a Ring of Wizardry and returned Joia's ring. In Beregost Canaid miraculously survived a poisoning when he failed to lure Unshey's Spiders outside.
Good to hear RL permitted a promising return yet. (Mine binds far to heavily to make much progress these days.)
Looking forward to Eirian's adventtures.
(... and something tells me we will see many travel to Dragonspear soon.)
The party headed due east from Kuldahar. The trail wasn't easy to follow, but Arundel pointed out landmarks beforehand to keep them on the right track. Most of the goblins they came across were too frightened to harass the group, but more than one Yeti failed in an attack. It took about a day and a half of marching through the mountains, but they finally arrived at the Temple.
As they approached, lumbering footsteps could be heard from inside. Suddenly a hulking figure, a verbeeg, rushed outside. He shouted for the party to get out of his way. Shawn, rather hesitantly as the creature was easily 9ft tall, asked the creature what he was running from. "Red Toe no have time to talk. Bad priests attacked us. Red Toe pretended to be dead and needs to leave before they come back." With that the creature ran past the group and quickly disappeared down the mountain trail.
They cautiously made their way inside, only to find a hallway littered with bodies large and small. Blue robed priests and verbeegs had held a monstrous battle here merely a few hours ago. A blue robed priest rounded the corner and shouted out, "Intruders! Have you come to slay more of my brethren?" Alessia answered him, "No good priest, we've been sent here by Arundel to retrieve the Heart Stone Gem." The priest snorted in derision and spat out, "You think I would fall for that twice in one day? Your friends infiltrated our ranks earlier today!" He immediately began chanting a spell, but a well placed dagger from Baron von Shortstuff silenced him. Taylor chimed in with a wink and knowing smile, "I guess you could say there was bad blood between these priests."
The group slowly made their way deeper into the temple, battling priests and their guardian verbeegs. The individuals and smaller groups weren't too bad to tackle, but then I got swarmed on the lower level. On insane, these guys pack quite a wallop. Healing spells/potions, Bless, Armor of Faith, and Slow help keep us from getting overpowered.
We cleared out the adjoining alcoves before heading down the main hallway. Shawn almost hit the trip wire, but Baron von Shortstuff noticed it just in time! The group of verbeegs and priests at the end of the hall proved to be quite the challenge. Two of the priests managed to get off an Entangle, which it turns out verbeegs are immune to. Alessia got lucky and stunned two of the giants with her Chromatic Orbs, which is probably what saved Hrothgar and Shawn from being killed.
With the path clear, we entered the lowest level of the temple. We didn't find any enemies there, only a large group of dead priests and verbeegs. They died guarding the altar where the Heart Stone Gem was housed. I'm not sure yet who managed to force their way in here, but they must be powerful. They killed quite a few verbeegs and priests to do it! One of the invading priests bore the vestments of a Talonite priest, as well as a vial of mysterious liquid.
While looting the chests on the way back out, I found a pretty sweet bastard sword for Shawn to use! Taylor managed to identify it thanks to her high Lore level, The Snow Maiden's Reaver +2
We made the long trek back to Kuldahar to share the bad news with Arundel. He's able to identify the mysterious liquid as relatively freshly drawn venom, and a potent strain at that. With no other clues to guide us, Arundel asks that we make the trek to Dragon's Eye.
This is going to be a tainted no-reload, due to the Charname death against Neera's encounter.
Here's what I've figured out about that Neera encounter that I've decided to ignore for no-reload status purposes:
-She doesn't actually go hostile, it's just that her default foot color circle is red, making it easily confused with a hostile foot circle. However, her script has been changed, likely in response to complaints about that Color Spray spell that used to be her opening spell, and now is not.
-Her new script appears to make her behave completely randomly, either casting a spell, or else running away or wandering about aimlessly as though under a Confusion spell. I doubt that this is intended. But, if her script is bugged, it is probably at the bottom of the devs' priority list at the moment.
-The red wizard's new Flame Arrow spell may be intended to put Neera's encounter on par with Garrick's and Silke's, as Silke is also 7th level and has a 3rd level Lightning Bolt. If intended, I think this is a huge mistake on the devs' part. Silke's encounter can be avoided easily by simply not talking to Garrick, or by turning his request down. The player must click on Garrick to start the encounter. Neera's encounter, on the other hand, cannot be avoided unless the player knows about it and avoids walking on the north side of Beregost. Also, the red wizard's current script appears to target the Flame Arrow spell at random, meaning that Neera or Charname are likely targets, and instantly killed. That will make few new players and no-reloaders ever use Neera. In fact, on my next no-reload, I intend to tell the red wizards to go ahead and take Neera, please, and good riddance!
-Further making this encounter enraging for no-reloaders, the cut-scene involved forces the player's carefully positioned party out of position, dragging the entire party into a scatter formation around the wizard and his guards. Since the wizard is now scripted to cast a Flame Arrow randomly at any party member, or Neera, this is the height of unfair stupidity on the part of the devs as far as I'm concerned. Grrr. I call shenanigans on the DM!
So, now that I've got that bad taste out of my mouth and have ruled that the ending of my no-reload was completely unfair, I am having fun with 2.0 again.
One nice new feature is that you can use screen shots of the journal in these run threads to give a quick summary of everything you've accomplished, no typing required.
So, having completed the Nashkel Mines, killed Tranzig, and gotten the information we need to search for Tazok and the bandit camp, we decided to finish helping the peoples of Beregost and Nashkel, as well as clearing Liandrin's spider house, before heading back north to search for the camp.
We visited the carnival briefly. The encounter with the mage in the carnival tent has been changed. He no longer uses his Power Word: Kill to kill the hostage if you give him reasonable answers. So, you can no longer get the hostage's mage robe unless you are Evil McEvil and deliberately kill her. I applaud that change in scripting.
Here is our party pose for today. The hit points distributions are coming out quite interestingly for random hit point rolls. Jaheira and Khalid have been lucky. Minsc and I, not so much. Also, Khalid is an awesome fighter for our party. I think all the Khalid-haters are just prejudiced against shy, introverted people who admit when they're scared.
I am doing the purest possible roleplaying for this no-reload, in that, I don't go wandering off into the wilderness unless I have a quest-given reason to. So, large swaths of wilderness will remain unexplored in this run. I do not enter houses without being invited, I certainly keep Imoen on a short leash and do not permit her to break into locked houses, or rob inn guests. I do nothing that sounds incredibly stupid to do with no good reason, and I do nothing that even smells like Evil. It will be interesting to see what level that puts me at for SoD.
Next up: Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother's House We Go. What big teeth she has! And oh yes, bandits!
Thanks to our traps, the enemy thins out quickly afterward, leaving the Skeletal Mage to fight us alone. It slays our sorcerer, Sha Heitian, with a Lightning Bolt, but falls to a Magical Stone spell from our Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage, Onin. Magical Stone has always been extremely powerful in the Vale of Shadows, killing most enemies in a single shot.
We kill Lysan with a pair of Magic Missiles and a Melf's Acid Arrow, which easily disrupt her own spells.
One notable weakness of our party is the lack of cleric spells above level 2. I learn the hard way that this leaves us with no defense against hold effects, as our Totemic Druid has neither Remove Paralysis nor Free Action. This nearly kills Zulfer a second time in the Temple of the Forgotten God when he fails a save against Hold Person, but a convenient choke point allows our Kensai, Bezolten, to take the damage instead.
We get a lovely random drop in the temple: the Reinforced Leather +1, which grants 35% resistance to crushing damage. It's situationally powerful.
Zulfer fails yet another save against Hold Person in Dragon's Eye, but a Color Spray from our sorcerer, Sha Heitian, rescues him. Color Spray is inordinately strong in IWD:EE. Aside from conveniently blinding single-class thieves in the party, it knocks most enemies unconscious and prevents them from waking up--any enemy equal to the caster's level or below gets put to sleep.
Zulfer dies again when surrounded by Trolls and spiders on the second level. His immunity to poison helps him a lot, but having -1 AC just isn't good enough to tank everything all at once. But for the most part, the second level is easy. We just have to blast everything with traps, Lances of Disruption, and Color Spray.
Lance of Disruption does more damage than Fireball, but it isn't always the best bet. Since it does crushing damage, few enemies will resist it, but it's also much more likely to get party members and summons killed for the same reason. Also, its line-shaped projectile makes it easier to avoid hitting the party, but harder to hit the enemy. Mostly I like this spell because it has a habit of chunking things--it's a very visually appealing spell.
After slaying Presio and her many minions with traps, I decide to kick our Kensai out of the party. For reasons I don't fully remember, I replace her with a gnomish Fighter/Illusionist. I think it was because I wanted to cast Color Spray more often, and at the time I believed Color Spray was an illusion spell in IWD (it's actually alteration) and would therefore benefit from the kit's bonuses.
One nice thing about Fighter/Illusionists in IWD is that they don't need potions to guarantee successfully scribing the ever-important Mirror Image scroll. I still have 150% scribing chance for everybody, but I'm going to use potions to scribe scrolls this time, since I know better where to find such potions. For this reason, our gnome only has 18 INT instead of 19--it doesn't make any difference if you're just going to use potions to scribe scrolls anyway.
Another nice thing is that they can use the Helm of the Trusted Defender, which I have missed. It grants +3 to AC and immunity to sleep and fatigue, and makes the user a much stronger tank. I can afford it because we've suffered almost no deaths.
I've been resting a lot less than I did in my level 1 Heart of Fury mode run. It is no longer necessary to cover the party with multiple layers of buffs--I can just march right in.
In the Eldathyn Lair, I fail to stop a Yuan-ti cleric from buffing a horde of Yuan-ti with Righteous Wrath of the Faithful. It's a hideously powerful spell, but imposes a crippling fatigue penalty at the end.
I run away from the Yuan-ti until they stop glowing. When I engage them in combat once more, they only do 1 damage per hit, due to the -10 luck they have.
We run into more trouble with the group of Yuan-ti Mages and Yuan-ti Elites to the east. Our sorcerer gets Feebleminded, our Bounty Hunter gets charmed, and our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, sorcerer, and Totemic Druid all get killed by Vitriolic Sphere and Melf's Acid Arrow spells. It was nearly impossible to disrupt the enemy's spells, as they came pre-buffed with Stoneskin and added on Protection from Normal Missiles on the first round. We only got the upper hand when the enemy ran low on spells.
When our Bounty Hunter recovered from the charm effect, we threw a couple of traps at the High Summoner and his cronies, slaying the last of the enemies. But losing our cleric as well as two other characters cost us thousands of gold.
Out of curiosity, I try to clear out the enemies in Yxunomei's lair with as few rests as possible. I only have to rest twice to take everything down, not counting Yxunomei herself. Mostly this was due to memorizing lots of healing spells and taking a low-pressure approach in every fight--with the exception of the High Archer fight and the gang of Yuan-ti at Yxunomei's door, which I hit with Slow and Glitterdust, respectively, on top of all the traps we could manage.
What about Yxunomei herself?
Before we fight the marilith and her snake buddies, we trap the previous corridor, rest, and then disarm the enemies traps using the Detect Traps spell from our Cleric of Tempus/Mage while under the effects of Invisibility 10' Radius. Our thief can't really detect traps while blind, but she can still disarm them if our cleric helps her out.
I use Onin, our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, to initiate the battle. When he lobs a rock at one of the Yuan-ti, he spawns the enemy mages into the corridor with the rest of the party. The mages trigger the traps and die instantly.
But Onin gets all of his buffs dispelled when an enemy mage hits him with Dispel Magic. Just like in my previous run, but this time, only Onin got debuffed. He tries to restore his Mirror Image, but an arrow disrupts the spell, and when he tries to run, Yxunomei summons a ring of undead around him, trapping him. He has to down a precious Potion of Invisibility to escape and heal himself.
Our Bounty Hunter's traps kill basically everything. The Yuan-ti die in record time, as does Yxunomei herself. One of the marilith's best defenses is her AC, but traps don't require attack rolls and they hit hard and fast. Once again, blind traps prove instrumental in our success.
Our Totemic Druid, Eliza, hits level 10. Her Spirit Animals are now immune to nonmagical weapons. Those Spirit Animals single-handedly take down almost every enemy in the entire Severed Hand, because so few of the enemies had magical weapons.
On to Dorn's Deep. Valos, our Fighter/Illusionist, is a spectacular tank. With the Helm of the Trusted Defender, Kaylessa's chainmail, and the Bitch Queen's Envoy (a +2 shield in Yxunomei's lair, which pops up sometimes instead of the Red Knight's Shield), Valos' AC is at -9 without buffs. And he can cast Stoneskin and Mirror Image. He's almost impossible to kill.
But I grow too confident in his abilities and let him tank a group of Drow Spellswords and Vanguards by himself. He only fails one save against a Bolt of Biting, but I delayed drinking an Antidote until I realized Slow Poison wasn't enough, and by the time he drank it, his defenses were down. A series of critical hits disrupted his spells and nearly killed him.
But we trapped the drow, saving Valos' life, and our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, Onin, takes on the drow in Valos' place. By combining his priest kit's innate Holy Power spell (with a casting time of 1!) with spider form and the Symbol of Corellon Larethian, he can strike 5 times per round at 9 THAC0, poisoning his targets without a saving throw.
He still nearly dies for his efforts, but he did a lot to weaken the enemy, and by the time we were ready to bail him out, the drow were already half-dead. We completed the area without a single rest, which I'm not sure I've ever done before.
Next up is Terikan. Terikan's Greater Mummy buddies use Symbol of Hopelessness, a 20-round stun spell with a -2 penalty. Normally, this would be a nightmare for our party, as we have no bard to sing Tymora's Melody to improve our saves and no real cleric to cast Free Action or Remove Paralysis to prevent or cure the stun effect.
But we do have a Remove Paralysis scroll, plus some Dispel Magic spells, and we have both the Mantle of the Coming Storm (which you can get at the tavern after killing Lysan) and the Girdle of Labelas (a random drop in the Severed Hand) to grant us Free Action.
Despite the spell description, it seems that Dispel Magic works the same way in IWD:EE that it does in vanilla BG2. It has a certain chance of success based on the caster level of the spell effect in question. In vanilla IWD, it automatically dispelled everything. We fail to rescue our Totemic Druid when she is stunned by Symbol of Hopelessness, and have to fight Terikan several more times while she recovers, since he re-spawns every few rounds.
I turn the whole party invisible and use the map to locate Terikan's phylactery and the place where you have to bring it to kill the lich. IWD:EE puts labels on both rooms, which makes it a lot easier for me, since I keep forgetting which rooms I have to visit to destroy Terikan's phylactery. We get the Bastard Sword +2, Conflagration, as a random drop, which has a 10% chance per hit of launching a Fireball. But I'm not protecting the whole party with Protection from Fire in this run since I'm not casting my own Fireball spells, so this sword isn't much use, aside from the 50% fire resistance it grants.
Kerish and the Frost Salamanders actually do a lot to hurt us. Normally this area isn't too bad, but our Spirit Animals aren't immune to the enemy's weapons (though they are immune to all the cold damage), and apparently only clerics, but not druids, can cast Resist Fire/Cold. We do have a Protection from Cold mage spell on our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, but we can only cover half the party with it, and when we get flanked by salamanders, we take a lot of damage.
Our Spirit Animals also fail to resist the Frost Giants' attacks. I thought that because they dropped nonmagical two-handed axes, their attacks were nonmagical. But apparently their real attacks strike as +3 weapons. Our Spirit Animals get crushed.
Valos, however, our Fighter/Illusionist, tanks every Frost Giant in the area and survives just fine.
We trap Kontik into oblivion, and her Black Ice Knights aren't far behind. Then I find one of the best random drops in the entire game, which I've known about for ages but never actually found: The Two-Handed Sword +3: Bane.
Aside from being a +3 weapon that grants 10% magic resistance, it has a 25% chance per hit of inflicting a permanent disease effect with no save that deals 1 damage every 2 seconds, stackable. It's a death sentence for any enemy not immune to disease or poison damage.
Only neutral and evil characters can use it, so no one in my party can use it, but it gives me reason to export it into another game.
Zone of Sweet Air fails to save the svirfneblin from the golems' Cloudkill ability, but the Iron Golems don't last long. Our Fighter/Illusionist and Cavalier, Valos and Zulfer, take them down in a few rounds.
Malavon teleports in when his clone is dead. He Breaches Eliza, our Totemic Druid, but her Ironskins don't get removed. He also gets in a Flesh to Stone spell on Valos, but he makes his save. Level 11 normal snares from Dyn disrupt some of Malavon's spells, and soon he collapses under sustained pressure.
Malavon has a habit of teleporting around and likes to throw out Webs followed by Death Fog. It's a deadly combination, but Zone of Sweet Air removes Death Fog. It's a convenient counter to one of his deadliest options.
We plow through the salamanders and other minor fights with brute force. Then we have to deal with the Fire Giants, who can land a hit on Valos with an attack roll of 12, if not lower. Not a good sign. We throw out a bunch of traps and a couple Slow spells to weaken them. Sha Heitian, our sorcerer, outright slays one of them with Polymorph Other. Even if the target is immune to polymorph, it still sets their maximum HP to 10, making it very easy to kill them in a single hit.
Maiden Ilmadia runs in to help, only to fail a save against Hold Monster. She is doomed. The Fire Giants collapse, and we run down to fight the drow cleric/mages that Ilmadia forgot to bring with her.
They both cast Righteous Wrath of the Faithful followed by haste--a pointless combination, since the two are exclusive in EE (in vanilla you could combine them if you cast them in the right order). But it makes them extremely dangerous. So I cover the group with Invisibility 10' Radius to wait out the RWF spells.
Eliza, our Totemic Druid, isn't close enough to turn invisible--the drow could crush her in moments. But the drow don't have ranged attacks, so she leads them on a chase around Ilmadia's tent until they stop glowing yellow. When it's over, they have a -10 luck penalty, and are no longer any threat.
Fleezum goes down to melee attacks; Flozum fails a save against Polymorph Other. The backstabbing thieves in this area die to blind traps while they waste their attacks on Valos' Mirror Images and Stoneskins.
I go visit Nym and avoid antagonizing him this time. I purchase Solemn Duty, a +3 katana that EE introduces. IWD:EE contains three guaranteed drops for katanas: a +1 katana in Kresselack's tomb, a +2 katana, Darkened Glory, in Dragon's Eye or the Temple of the Forgotten God, and Solemn Duty from Nym, just in time for the final battle, which requires +3 weapons or better to win. These drops make katanas a rather excellent choice for an IWD character... but since there are only three such katanas, there's little point in giving pips in katanas to more than one character.
I buff our front line with Protection from Cold and have Valos drink a Potion of Insight before reaching Market. The potion makes sure we can nab Marketh's equipment without killing him, which costs us some XP from Ginafae. The Protection from Cold is to protect us from the Kraken Society Mages' Cone of Cold spells.
Special Snares paralyze the backstabbers in this fight, while normal traps deal poison damage to disrupt the mages' spells. We crush most of the enemies, but Sha Heitian gets Breached, then has a Stoneskin spell disrupted by a backstab, then gets finished off by Cone of Cold. He was the most vulnerable enemy to Cone of Cold, as Dyn had evasion and the other four characters were immune to cold damage--I thought Sha was least likely to get hit by Cone of Cold.
The Idol can be a tough battle, but it ends when the Idol itself collapses, as most of the other undead die with it. We therefore haste the party and rush the Idol, using Dyn's traps to disrupt the Greater Mummies' Symbol spells. Brother Harken talks to us about the Voice of Durdel Anatha, which dies right after our conversation--the quest seems to have been broken, though I'm not sure why.
We don't buff much before the fight with Belhifet. I cover Sha Heitian with Stoneskin, Mirror Image, Shield, and Spell Immunity: Abjuration, and also blind Dyn. I use a scroll of Chain Contingency to store some buffs on Valos, since contingencies can't be dispelled. He puts a Blur spell, Mirror Image, and Stoneskin in the contingency and sets it to "on hit" so it will appear the moment it needs to (in BG2, at least, contingencies set to fire on "enemy sighted" tend to be slow). Finally, our Cleric of Tempus(3)->Mage, Onin, pre-casts Detect Traps. During the cutscene, that spell highlights the traps in the area, so I know exactly where they are when the fight begins.
The moment Belhifet's dialogue ends, I pull back Dyn, our Bounty Hunter, and send Zulfer, our Cavalier, out a couple steps. This accomplishes two things: first, it lets Dyn just barely avoid the Remove Magic and preserve her blindness (in case that failed, we also had a Color Spray+Blindness Minor Sequencer on our Cleric of Tempus/Mage, plus a bunch of Color Spray spells from our sorcerer). This means we can keep using blind traps. Second, it means Belhifet will attack Zulfer first. Zulfer is the only party member immune to both poison and disease, which would cripple our other party members.
But Zulfer gets trashed on the first round. His AC just isn't good enough to take on Belhifet and his two Cornugons. Meanwhile, the rest of the party flees from the two Iron Golems and their Cloudkill spells. Valos' contingency triggers, the other spellcasters cast some buffs, and then we get to work on bringing down the Iron Golems.
Dyn's traps make a huge difference, speeding up the deaths of the Cornugons and Iron Golems both. Zulfer, whom I expected would be a stronger tank, is forced to flee while Eliza, our Totemic Druid, Heals him.
Onin gets stunned by a Cornugon. I should really start killing the Cornugons first instead of the Iron Golems, as they have dreadful on-hit effects, including a bleeding effect that bypasses basically all defenses. Onin still survives, as we manage to take down the Cornugons soon after he is stunned.
Dyn runs out of traps and engages in melee combat, still blind. I'd remove the blindness with a Cure Disease from Zulfer, our Cavalier, but he needs to spend those rounds drinking potions if he is to survive. Dyn is rewards with a sword to the face and a poison effect, and Eliza fails to heal Dyn when a dead Cornugon's bleeding effect disrupts her spell. We lose another Elixir of Health--I neglected to buy any new ones, so we only had 6 when we entered the fight, compared to more than 20 in the last run.
Zulfer clings to life, but he costs us all of our Potions of Extra Healing. It doesn't matter in the end. Dyn's traps took about 70-90 HP from every enemy, significantly reducing the pressure we suffered from the Iron Golems and Cornugons and allowing us to face Belhifet in fairly good shape. Although Zulfer proved an ineffecient tank--for all my worries about disease and poison, most of the damage was just plain slashing damage--he and Valos, under Improved Haste, found it easy to whittle away at Belhifet's health.
The fight is ours. One Insane mode fight with no extra damage or XP, and no Chromatic Orb or Fireball or Web spells, complete.
We've finished the bandit camp. Good ol' Web and Hold Person spells are really useful here.
So, we are off to the Cloakwood. I forgot to buy potions of Free Action before coming here, so I'll need to try to get Imoen to "disarm" all the spider webs. Here's the Chapter 4 quest log. It didn't see when we sided with the druids against Sashenstar, so it's not perfectly polished yet, but I really like the feature.
1. After having played Insane mode in both vanilla and EE, and having just tried out a normal mode run with Insane mode extra monsters, I can say that the extra XP from higher difficulties does not, contrary to popular opinion, over-compensate, or even somewhat compensate, for the extra damage. Adding a single level to every party member is not worth cutting your HP in half. In a low-level, melee-heavy game like IWD, raw damage output is the most important factor in the outcome of a fight. On many occasions, I saw my characters drop down to half their HP. If I had enabled the extra damage, I would have died many times. An extra point of THAC0, an extra use of a special ability per day, or an extra high-level spell is simply not going to double your survivability, the way that Insane mode cuts it in half. Playing IWD with double damage on your party is like playing BG2 with save penalties on your party--and no immunities to disablers. It's the worst single handicap you can have.
2. The blind thief trick, as strong as it is in BG2, is even stronger in IWD. The damage output is just so high. Area-effect spells have always been strong in IWD's horde-based battles, and the damage per trap is itself overwhelming. Enemies in IWD start out with HP in the single digits and end up with HP in the triple digits by the end. Total trap damage per enemy per day starts out in the double digits and ends up in the triple digits. Traps will wipe out early game enemies and severely weaken late-game enemies.
3. Summons are priceless in Heart of Fury mode. They make far superior tanks to any player character. You can certainly go without them, but it cripples your party's survivability.
4. Totemic Druids are a distinct improvement on normal IWD druids, despite losing access to IWD's excellent shapeshifts. Those Spirit Animals are terribly strong. That said, the immunity to normal weapons loses its impact a chapter after it kicks in. They took out the entire Severed Hand for my group, but a fair number of late-game enemies have magical weapons in EE. If it weren't for Valos, my Fighter/Illusionist, the Spirit Animals wouldn't have been able to hold off everything. That said, they were an important instrument throughout the game, and would be even more important in Heart of Fury mode--to the extent that a Totemic Druid would be a very viable solo HoF build.
5. Immunity to poison is a big deal in select instances, but it matters less than I thought. Antidotes are plentiful--you get more than 15 of them at the start of Dragon's Eye, on top of a few Elixirs of Health over the course of the game. Even at higher difficulties where poison damage can wreck a character through Stoneskin, an Antidote will likely be sufficient. This is an important detail because the only characters that can attain innate immunity to poison are Cavaliers, monks, and druids, none of whom can cast mage spells. Pestilent Dawn, a +4 club, can also grant immunity to poison, but is only available at the end of HoW, when you can't go back to the main quest anymore. It's an excellent choice to import, though.
6. Color Spray is brutal when you're facing non-undead enemies. A multi-classed character won't get quite as much mileage out of it, since it only knocks enemies unconscious if they're at your level or below, but a bard should be able to knock out anything. it amounts to a fast-acting area-effect stun spell. Because of its cone-shaped projectile, it's also very easy to aim it away from your party members. But if you do hit a party member with it, it could prove fatal, as your characters won't wake up after being hit. Note that being an elf or half-elf does not grant any immunity to the sleep effect.
7. Stinking Cloud has the same property, but is much less party-friendly. It also puts people to sleep without letting them wake up on hit. It's potentially fatal in the Vale of Shadows, but you can turn it to your favor in later fights, where the enemy is not so undead-heavy.
8. Gnomish Fighter/Illusionists, like Cleric/Illusionists, are extremely tough. Having the Helm of the Trusted Defender (which blocks the sleep effects of Color Spray and Stinking Cloud!) is a huge boon to your AC, and combining it with Mirror Image produces a nearly indestructible tank early in the game.
9. The last battle is invariably a low-buff ordeal. Spell Immunity scrolls only appear in Trials of the Luremaster--only sorcerers can reliably defend themselves from the Remove Magic at the beginning of the fight, and the Iron Golems with their Cloudkill spells, and Cornugons with their bleeding effects, and Belhifet with his disease and poison effects without save, all impose tremendous pressure on the party, inhibiting spellcasting and putting you on the defensive for many rounds. Once those Cornugons and Iron Golems are gone, however, it's a fairly low-intensity fight, as Belhifet periodically teleports away, granting your breathing room... even though he gains absolutely nothing in the process, due to having no healing abilities or regeneration. Unless you know exactly where the traps are and are able to keep track of everybody's position (characters have a habit of wandering off when Belhifet teleports), it's generally safest to stick to the corners and avoid the ring of traps around the middle.
10. Free Action will block Symbol of Hopelessness outright, as it uses the stun opcode.
11. It is very, very important to have a cleric in the group. It is not simply the ability to use cheap Raise Dead scrolls or spells in lieu of visiting a temple--it is the fact that clerics contain important defensive options like Remove Paralysis, Resist Fire/Cold, Cure Disease, Slow Poison, Exaltation (immunity to sleep!), Free Action, and Defensive Harmony.
12. Entropy Shield is a fantastic anti-mage tanking spell--most of the time. It grants immunity to stuff like Melf's Acid Arrow and Magic Missile (very important at higher difficulties) and resistance to stuff like Vitriolic Sphere and Fireball. But unlike Ironskins, it can be Breached, and IWD:EE mages can and will use Breach against the party. A Cleric/Illusionist can protect itself with Minor Spell Deflection or the like, but IWD:EE mages also use Spell Thrust.
13. A few mages in IWD:EE do arrive pre-buffed, and they are monsters. They use everything from Dire Charm to Feeblemind to Vitriolic Sphere to Mordenkainen's Force Missiles. It's easy to get surprised by these guys since melee enemies tend to be predominant and attract the most attention. But a party without some anti-mage defenses is going to suffer against the handful of properly buffed mages in the game.
14. If the enemy casts Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, run. They'll be pitifully weak when they stop glowing yellow.
15. The Two-Handed Sword +3: Bane is in fact in the game. Previously Heart of Winter removed it from the random drop lists. But it's back, and it's a fantastic weapon for any neutral or evil fighter.
16. Saves do matter... sometimes. Few battles force you to make saving throws, but when they do, they're almost as important as they are in BG2. Bombardier Beetles, mages, clerics, Umber Hulks, spiders, and other assorted critters will force you make saving throws. A bard on hand with Tymora's Melody will mostly resolve this problem when it does come up. Other times, you may need immunities--which don't usually come cheap in a low-level damage-heavy game like IWD, when Chaotic Commands is normally less useful than Mass Cure and Free Action is normally less useful than Defensive Harmony. There's a tradeoff between being prepared for enemy disablers and being prepared for enemy weapons. A bard can handle both threats using Tymora's Melody, the Siren's Yearning, and the War Chant of the Sith.
17. The scorcher loop kills everything but Belhifet. And if you cast Protection from Fire (the priest version) on a fire-immune enemy to lower its fire resistance to 80%, the scorcher loop kills everything but Belhifet. And if you forget to make all your party members immune to fire, the scorcher loop kills EVERYTHING but Belhifet.
18. Enemies will follow you if you turn the party invisible. Invisibility 10' Radius does not guarantee you a safe rest.
19. It's not just spiders that are immune to Web. Ogres, Lizard Men, and other large critters are also immune.
20. Death Fog deals hideous damage to basically all enemies, and works wonders with Web... whether it's you that's using it, or Malavon.
21. Ignore the thieves when you fight at Marketh's place. The mages are the true threat, and can easily kill or chunk your party members in a single round with Cone of Cold or Horrid Wilting. Prep the party with immunity to cold, and if you see a necromancy spell coming, scatter.
22. Polymorph Other in IWD:EE, like in BG2:EE, sets max HP to 10 on a failed save. Even enemies immune to polymorph will suffer that effect. It's a poor man's ranged Harm spell.
23. Druids don't keep their immunity to poison when shapeshifted.
24. Regardless of the difficulty mode, having fighter levels is very important. The battles take much, much longer without a steady supply of reliable damage.
25. IWD:EE isn't quite as hard to play no-reload as BG2. You don't need to worry about the main character dying, several spells like Web and Fireball are accessible early on and powerful at every stage in the game, enemy mages seldom have many defenses, and instant death spells and high-powered disablers are very uncommon.
The party was at the Nashkel Carnival last time I reported on them. From there they traveled to the Nashkel Mines area, where patient and careful kiting saw Archer Gwendolen rewarded with Varscona. To the east the party found a Ring of Fire Resistance, received a scroll of PfMagic, and met Samuel the Deserter whom they brought to Gellana at the FAI. I made sure to travel north from one area to the next (instead of going straight for the FAI), so that Eirian would be protected by a pre-cast Armor spell in case of any ambushes.
At the FAI entrance I had Feywarden Ifor deal with Tarnesh on his own. Ifor had buffed with Remove Fear to counter Horror and SI:Evocation to neutralize Magic Missiles. (Spell Immunity is the special ability of Divine Remix Feywarden of Corellon priests.) However my habit of not challenging Tarnesh at low levels had made me forget that the wizard casts Sleep as well. Luckily Ifor saved, and stunned his foe with the Stupefier.
A bit further north Shapeshifter Bleddyn wasn't as fortunate when the Ankheg with Nester's dagger one-shotted him before Eirian put the creature to Sleep.
The companions headed south again, to the Red Canyons, where they slew a wolf to svae Melicamp. They did not make haste with visiting Thalantyr though. Instead they slew six berserk diggers at an excavation site, after Eirian had put them to Sleep, and they escorted Brage back to Nashkel to redeem himself. At the Carnival the companions bought a suit of Caster's Chain for Dirgesinger Canaid and a scroll of PfPetrification for Gwendolen. A bandit ambush confirmed that Eirian's strategy of traveling with Armor up was a wise one.
Thalanthyr killed Melicamp and sold the party several spells for Eirian and Canaid to scribe with the help of INT boosters. The Enchantress tested one of her new spells, Enfeeblement, on Karlat, but the Dwarf proved uninhibited by incumbrance in spite of being connected by the spell, because he quaffed a hill giant strength potion. Ifor Held the bounty hunter, so he fell easily after all.
Bleddyn sacrificed himself a second time, for Shoal. Eirian used a wand to paralyze Droth and gave her Shapeshifter companion the Ogre's Helmet of Defense. This was followed by some shopping (Greenstone Amulet, Cloak) and stealing (Ring of Free Action, courtesy of Canaid) in Ulgoth's Beard.
In their hunger for more experience and more wealth the company traveled to DUrlag's Tower, where two Battle Horrors were defeated with wands of fire/frost. They also engaged a Doom Guard on one of the terraces. I had a short break here, but long enough for me to do something really stupid: I had Eirian and Canaid mistake Ifor for the Doom Guard. Due to his colors, Ifor has a red circle around him, and his Flaming Fist helmet and plate armor made him look a bit Doom Guardy at first sight. This was the result:
As the party were pretty much broke, they had no way to get Ifor and Canaid raised, so they returned to the Red Canyons, where Eirian expended several charges of her wand of fire on Bassilus, disrupting the priest's casting and eventually killing him. The party claimed the bounty on their victim's head and had Keldath raise Ifor and Canaid.
Back at Durlag's Tower, Gwendolen dealt with three Greater Basilisks and one Lesser, while safe from their gazes thanks to PfPetrifications that Eirian would cast on the Ranger. On the floor inhabited by the Ghost, the party suffered another casualty. Alys had just explored and looted the entire floor except for the corridor that led to the dangerous Ghost, when suddenly a group of Ghasts appeared from a recently explored hallway. This was very unexpected. This wasn't an ambush; the party hadn't rested. Either way one of the Ghast Held Alys, on the stairs just before she could retreat. The others came to her aid but couldn't stop the undead from laying the Swashbuckler down.
Dismayed with their lack of resources and progress, the party had Canaid sell and steal back some gear at the Nashkel Carnival, allowing the purchase of Shadow Armor, a Robe of the Neutral Archmagi, the Claw of Kazgaroth (for 18 CON Eirian), some ioun stones, and a Helmet of Charm Protection.
The companions than cleared the Cloudpeaks without incident and picked up the CHA tome at the Gnoll Stronghold (but did not enter the fortress itself). This brought in a lot more gold, most of which they've just exchanged for the Martial Staff, several scrolls, a Wand of the Heavens, and a magical harp in Ulgoth's Beard.
The Druid and the rogues are level 6; Eirian, Gwen and Ifor level 5. Progress feels slow, and Eirian hasn't been able to do much yet with her Charms. Canaid's song, with its Curse effect, has so far been useful more for the Thac0 penalty cursed enemies suffer than for its saves penalty. I hope things will pick up for this party at higher levels, when Eirian and Canaid get to cast more spells, and Greater Malison comes into play.
EDIT:
PS @Pteran, thanks for your kind words, and congrats on your impending wedding
BTW I wonder how you're going to experience the RR Bounty Hunter. I never use RR for Thieves, only for Bards.