As always, we enter the ambush while invisible. Our invisibility gets dispelled, but only after we have enough time to flee to the northeast.
I proceed with my normal strategy. I bring out some cheap summons, send them southwest and then hurl disablers at the enemy. But our disablers don't arrive fast enough to keep us safe.
The enemy mage, untroubled by our Invoker's Stinking Cloud spell thanks to her own MGOI pre-buff, gets a Chaos spell off the ground, and the enemy cleric lands a Hold Person. Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, gets paralyzed. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, Valos, our Necromancer, and Espellier, our Invoker, all get confused. Only Jan and Poppy, our Enchanter and Charname, retain their faculties.
Then, the enemy cleric fires off an Unholy Blight. Only Jan and Valos, our two Chaotic Neutral characters, remain unharmed. Poppy, Espellier, and Laosha get crushed, and Sil dies from the impact.
Laosha approaches death, but Jan hides him with Invisibility 10' Radius. Poppy brings out the Wand of Lightning to heal herself, making a Potion of Healing restore 60 HP in an instant.
Espellier has neither invisibility nor the ability to use potions, and shortly dies. Emotion knocks out several bandits... but fails to take down the cleric that's quickly breaking down our confused Necromancer's Stoneskins.
We fail to stop a hostile enchantment spell. Poppy and Jan scatter so it will only affect one of them. Despite her enchantment specialization, Poppy fails her save. Only Jan remains under my control.
Jan is forced to manage on his own, but has few options besides his flashers. Valos recovers from Chaos and ventures out to check on the remaining bandits--we've barely made a dent in the enemy--only to fail his save against another Chaos spell.
Valos, confused and distant from his fellows, runs out of Stoneskins. Meanwhile, Laosha recovers from Hold Person, but has to spend some time drinking potions before he's ready to engage the enemy. We send out Jan in spider form to poison the enemy mage, but he gets charmed a moment later.
That could have been immensely helpful for us. Spider form is our only truly reliable source of damage, and it's excellent for spellcasters, though damage in 2.1 no longer guarantees spell disruption even for non-scripted spells.
Valos is cornered, confused, and beyond our help. A bandit sword chunks our Necromancer. It wasn't even a critical hit.
Without Jan's poison to trouble her, the enemy mage can easily land a Flame Arrow on our poor spider gnome. It kills him instantly.
We've placed far too little importance on our defenses against spell damage. Normally I think of defenses in terms of Stoneskin and Chaotic Commands; I give too little thought to Flame Arrow and Skull Trap.
Poppy fails a save against Rigid Thinking and I almost panic, but our surviving cleric has the Tyr kit and thus can cast Acclamation, removing the confusion in an instant.
Notice the charm icon on Laosha. He's not actually charmed; the Helm of Charm Protection blocked the charm effect but not the icon.
I forgot that I had already picked up Renfeld earlier, so I thought I had to beat these bandits before exiting the area. But with four characters dead and the remaining two low on spells and defenses, I wasn't sure how to proceed.
Eventually I went for broke and combined the Wand of Lightning with a scroll of Invisible Stalker before downing a Potion of Invisibility. Our Invisible Stalkers broke the strength of the enemy single-handedly.
When I figured out that Renfeld was nowhere to be found, I gathered all the equipment our remaining two characters could carry and scribed a bunch of scrolls to free up space before leaving the area. A miserable end to a brutal fight.
With only Xzar and Imoen to back me up, I was really scared of the half-orc in the mines, so I lured him to the north part of the cave to have more room to fight the summons. A bit cheesy, I know, but I wasn't too confident. My plan B was an ice wand, but I didn't want to froze my loot! This should be interesting.
The fight with Mulahey was tough but Conor fought well and even resisted a melee with skeletons and kobolds.
Conor knew enough about magic to be scared of it so he was not in a hurry to face more spell-casters. It wouldn't be long until a guy called Nimbul tried to end him and apparently everyone else in Nashkel. Enough Larloch's minor drains and at least he didn't quite succeed at conjuring more magic missiles for Conor. That baldy monk actually helped. After that, a wizard tried really hard to kill Conor and, what's worse, his pet rabbit! If his magic resistance hadn't saved him, Conor would have been a very sad adventurer for the rest of the story. The blasted mage even scared Conor off with a horror spell. Not very heroic of him. Luckily, Imoen and her magic missile wand did their job. And look, another magic wand!
Conor had been wanting to buy some magic now that he had a little gold. The wizard in High Hedge sells a lot of cool stuff, but Conor could not help himself and bought five (really expensive!) acid arrows. Maybe that wasn't the best investment, but Conor did feel like an arcane archer when he made short work of a assassin mage at the Friendly Arm Inn. One arrow and he was down!
I was planning on asking Khalid and Jaheira for help, but I got to the FAI only to learn that they are gone for good after you clean the mines. Noob move... Since I am up here, I will try to have Ajantis join me (if he doen't mind my ehem questionable reputation). I am not going anywhere with this three-member party without a tank.
@Pteran: I honestly wouldn't recommend Legacy of Bhaal mode for pretty much anyone. The lengthy battles are more often tiresome than interesting. If it merely doubled enemy HP and added maybe 30 HP on top of that, instead of triple HP plus 80, it would be much more fun. Even better would be increasing enemy spawns. Long fights entail more strategy, but when it gets too long, it just slows the game down. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't recommend the mode even if you enabled bonus XP, as I have.
Come to think of it, maybe I should make this a minimal reload run. Because starting over would be especially unpleasant considering how slow LoB normally moves.
The only reason, honestly, why I'm using LoB mode is because it's the only way to abuse the Wand of Lightning as thoroughly as I want to without destroying the challenge. Duplicating the effects of Potions of Healing, Sunfire, Divine Favor, Boon of Lathander, Wands of Cloudkill, Wail of the Banshee, Kitthix, and high-level scrolls would be very reductive in normal mode, as I wouldn't require anything else to survive.
In order to learn the limits of the WoL trick, I need to test them in a high-stress environment.
I decided to make this a minimal reload run and promptly took a major risk. Turns out SCS liches come pre-buffed with Protection from Magical Energy, which means a WoL Daystar Sunray won't affect them at all (the instant death effect of Sunray never works on liches; their save vs. spell is too low). We'll have to do without Daystar for a while, since SCS also prevents you from snatching it and leaving. And Protection from Undead won't help us against a summoned Cornugon with Remove Magic when only one member of our party has Spell Immunity. I don't bother fighting the lich.
No problem. We've got plenty of other options besides Daystar.
Underneath all the juvenile controversy, it seems that SoD is a decent game. I hope someone will test it soon in no-reload. (And really looking forward to its SCS-ization.)
We briefly poke around the Unseeing Eye quest for reasons I don't remember. I finally re-create our Necromancer, Valos, because I realized that we really did need a Necromancer, and not just for Wail of the Banshee in Chapter 6. Hold Undead is going to be hugely important very soon.
Note that it's possible to avoid those nasty Vampiric Mists before Gaal. You can walk around the trigger. Here it is, highlighted in blue.
Nobody likes fighting them anyway.
Valos is a life saver right from the beginning. Hold Undead is one of the few disablers that work against undead, and since we're a very magic-heavy party (not normally very good in LoB mode, but it's my favorite), we really need those disablers to succeed in these minor encounters.
What about those awful Beholders on the other side of the riddle bridge? They have a bad habit of not following after you and standing their ground, making the most of their superior range. In the past, that's been terrible for me, but now, I'm going to use that pattern against them.
I conjure some skeletons, haste them, target them with a WoL-boosted Wand of Cloudkill, and send them off to fight the Beholders. They carry the six clouds far outside my field of vision, allowing me to strike the Beholders from a very safe distance. The damage is massive...
...and is even enough to take down the Beholders with only one charge, but what really charms me about this is that it not only takes advantage of the Wand of Lightning's duplication trick. It also takes advantage of the WoL's ability to target individual critters. If you use the Wand of Cloudkill on a skeleton and then move the skeleton, the cloud will hit the skeleton's original position. But if you prep it with a Wand of Lightning first, the clouds will travel after the skeleton.
If you really wanted to make the most out of the Wand of Cloudkill, you might actually target one of your own characters as a hasted suicide bomber, flinging multiple charges of the wand at them and having them run in circles, using their high movement rate to collect a trail of clouds behind them. Then you send them running into the enemy's midst and let the Cloudkill charges all converge on a single spot. If you dedicate 5 charges to this (50 charges in the wand cost roughly 10,000 gold), then you could deal 165 poison damage in a single round, obliterating most LoB groups before they have time to react. I might try this against Draug Fea and the sewer dwellers just for funsies, and to see if it works.
On another positive note, Beamdog corrected one of the typos I disliked in the original script.
It used to say "a millennia," confusing the singular and plural.
I consider progressing further in the Unseeing Eye quest, but I don't need the Gauntlets of Dexterity, so I decide to abandon it for the time being. Instead, we're going to head to the Temple Ruins.
Our Invoker, Espellier, tries out a WoL+Sunfire combo. It's quite silly.
Notice Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, is in the area of effect. He was there to distract the enemies from Espellier, whose AC is crap and STR is low enough to risk her dying of STR drain. He had to cast Protection from Fire before doing this, as Espellier is hurling out 60d6 fire damage with this attack. Like the scorcher loop, it has to be used very carefully, or else it can easily torch your own party.
Unfortunately for us, Sunfire in EE no longer bypasses magic resistance. This means both Shadow Fiends and Skeleton Warriors are effectively immune to our best attack. We have to resort to Flind form to damage them (ogre form would do more damage, but its attack strikes as nonmagical), which exposes us to a lot of danger. We succeed, but they crush us in the process.
I ignore the group of undead in the room with the Wyvern Call scroll, but I can't escape the southernmost gang. I try to lower the Skeleton Warrior's MR with Magic Resistance, but we only have 50% success.
I could protect them with Invisibility 10' Radius, but that would cancel their spells by turning the Skeleton Warriors invisible. I didn't consider using a plain level 2 Invisibility spell, but that would have worked. Anyway, the one Magic Resistance spell we managed to land was enough to paralyze one of the Skeleton Warriors with Hold Undead, making the other one fall more easily.
Before the Shade Lord, we get ambushed by a new gang of undead. Rather than use Invisibility 10' Radius to escape, re-group, and then kill them with the same tactics we just used, I decide not to bother.
I don't like fighting the same battle more than once.
The Shade Lord awaits. I have two strategies for dealing with him, but neither are guaranteed to work, as I've never used either of them before. We'll have to see.
We have two basic strategies for dealing with the Shade Lord. First is to lower his MR with Magic Resistance cover Espellier, our Invoker, with Negative Plane Protection, and then have her blast the Shade Lord with Sunfire.
Second, we can use Enchanted Weapon to kite him. The Shade Lord has no ranged weapons and moves terribly slowly, which means we can stay clear of him and his level draining Darkling Aura indefinitely. Normally you'd risk running out of magical bullets in LoB mode, but with Enchanted Weapon, we can make nonmagical bullets strike as +3 bullets for 50 rounds.
We enter his lair while invisible. Laosha pushes his THAC0 down as far as he possibly can and then hurls a Sunstone Bullet at the Shadow Altar.
I will be forever grateful to @Blackraven for letting me know Sunstone Bullets instantly destroy the Shadow Altar. Unfortunately, they can't do that to anything else in the game. The bullets kill critters with the race of "Plate," and the only such critters in existence besides the Shadow Altar are non-targetable and yield neither XP nor loot even if they could be killed--like the Machine of Lum the Mad.
Anyway, with the Shadow Altar gone, we don't have to worry about hordes of 100+ HP Shadows overwhelming us. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, has Boon of Lathander active and is therefore immune to Darkling Aura. She also has Death Ward and is therefore immune to the instant death effect of Black Blade of Disaster and Finger of Death, both of the which the Shade Lord loves to use.
But she cannot yet cast Magic Resistance on the Shade Lord. I forgot that he comes pre-buffed with Spell Turning. How do we deal with this?
I just scribed the Pierce Magic scroll I took from the previous dungeon, and we have no other debuffers prepared. Instead, I'm going to burn through the Spell Turning effect, which bounces 12 spell levels in total. I start out with Jan firing off a string of Charm Person spells with a Wand of Lightning and a scroll.
It's dangerous to do this, but with a Ring of Protection +1, Jan is guaranteed not to fail his save when those spells come back at him. I also have Sil use a scroll of Cure Serious Wounds, since it's uninterruptable like all scrolls and should take a big chunk out of the Shade Lord's Spell Turning buff.
Unfortunately, even after I throw out 12 spell levels, the Spell Turning effect persists. I'm fairly certain magic resistance won't take precedence over spell protections, so my only explanation is that Jan's WoL Charm Person scroll didn't work properly. The Shade Lord's MR will remain at 50% until we can take down that Spell Turning effect.
But 50% MR won't block everything, and Spell Turning won't block area-effect spells.
I divide my attention between trying to disable Shadow Patrick and trying to debuff the Shade Lord, while preserving my best options for when I can lower the Shade Lord's MR. Sil steers clear of the Shade Lord--Death Ward will stop BBoD's instant death effect, but not its huge base damage--while Jan pesters the Shade Lord from afar, using Chromatic Orb to keep weakening the Shade Lord's Spell Turning spell. Jan almost gets hit by a Finger of Death, but Espellier rescues him.
Notice Laosha summoning a Skeleton Warrior. Shadow Patrick has been causing problems with his arrows, and I want something to distract him.
Sil tries to help out with ranged spells, but the Shade Lord has fast-casting Chromatic Orbs.
Jan, desperate to take down that Spell Turning effect, casts Domination. With its -2 penalty to save, it could very well charm him when it bounces back, so I have him unequip Arbane's Sword and his flashers lest he turn them against the party. Luckily, he makes his save.
The gamble works! The Shade Lord's Spell Turning goes down! Sil hurries in to cast Magic Resistance on the Shade Lord. To keep his Blade Barrier from disrupting Sil's spell, I have the Shade Lord's current target, Laosha's Skeleton Warrior, take a couple steps south so that the Shade Lord will walk away from Sil, just far enough for her to escape the Blade Barrier's area of effect.
It works. But Shadow Patrick sees what's going on and puts a stop to it.
So much work to take down that Spell Turning effect, and then we lose our Magic Resistance spell. We have to proceed without it.
I start using my stronger options. Greater Malison manages to get past the Shade Lord's MR.
Sil and Valos, our Necromancer, fire off Hold Undead spells. The Shade Lord fails its save!
Now only Shadow Patrick remains intact. We focus on the Shade Lord first, bringing out Phantom Blade and Flind form to bypass his weapon immunities.
We snag the Cloak of Stars (WoL-compatible!) from Merella's body. Next up, Trademeet. Sunfire will do well against those Trolls.
Shadow fiends are not magic resistant, but they are immune to fire damage. They are very, very weak to lightning, though. Most shadows in general take double or even more damage from lightning attacks. Something with the lightning 'light'ing them up or something? Try it!
Now that we've got the Temple Ruins out of the way, we won't have to deal with undead for a while, whose immunities stymied some of our best options.
Unfortunately, Trolls still have inaccurately broad immunities due to engine limitations, but Sunfire will still work even if Emotion won't.
After buffing most of the party with Protection from Electricity to block Call Lightning, we approach Kyland Lind. We lose Valos early to a Charm Person or Mammal spell, but we have much stronger disablers than the enemy.
One druid resists basically everything we throw at him, so we haul out a group of Efreet to help us out.
Espellier burns her way through the mushroom bridge, only to die in a single round against some bears, since she only had one Stoneskin left.
Fighting Dalok was a mess, but it's not very enlightening. Basically we mobbed him with the Efreet brigade, an Insect Plague shut down most of our party member's spellcasting, Jan bailed us out with Invisibility 10' Radius to wait out the spell failure, and then we had to resort to spider form to kill the enemy druids when our Efreet faded away.
The Efreeti from the Efreeti Bottle is terribly strong, but it only lasts 10 rounds. Plus, its script prioritizes turning invisible over attacking, which costs us precious seconds it could be using to whomp on the enemy. It's a very strong but very unresponsive summons, much like Nymphs from Call Woodland Beings. Bring out six at once (it appears to bypass the summoning cap, like demon summoning, at least with the Wand of Lightning), and they're very difficult to control.
Cernd kills Faldorn, by which I mean I hit her with CTRL-Y. Back at Trademeet, we take all the credit in front of Lord Logan Coinpurse.
We blast the Trolls at the De'Arnise Keep with Sunfire, same as before. Espellier, however, fails to buff herself with SI: Abjuration when fighting the Yuan-ti Mage, and therefore gets debuffed and has to flee. To my surprise, the Yuan-ti Mage ends up getting locked in a Fire Shield feedback loop with one of our Efreet, disrupting its spells and then killing it.
I've seen feedback loops from Sanchuudoku and Item Revisions Yamato, but I've never actually seen two Fire Shields produce the feedback loop. I never understood why this was the case, because they all use the same opcode and the spell files never indicated there was a trigger to arrest the loop. Either it should happen every time or it should never happen.
Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, reaches level 11 and immediately dual-classes. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, was dead during some important battles and is therefore well behind him in terms of XP. I'm not sure we're ready to deal with the De'Arnise Hold with the party weakened like this, so I head back to Athkatla and re-start the Mae'Var questline. Efreet get us past the mephits and golems in Rayic Gethras' home, but the guy at the top will be a bit more complicated.
We start out with a single-target spell, taking advantage of his pre-pre-buff vulnerability. He fails an important save.
In vanilla this would basically doom him, but one stroke of luck isn't good enough for LoB mode. We start debuffing him.
Espellier fails once more to cast SI: Abjuration in time and gets debuffed. The rest of the party keeps up the pace, and Ray-Ray's defenses go down, but he downs a Potion of Invisibility before Valos can land a Breach spell on him.
For a moment I'm not sure what to do. Ray-Ray has no spell protections anymore, but his specific protections are still in place. Then I remember that I've got a gang of level 24 mages already on hand. We nail Ray-Ray with a volley of Flame Arrows.
We stop short of killing Mae'Var since I'm wary of fighting him. I no longer have aTweaks installed and am fairly certain that it's possible to flee from the fight with Mae'Var midway through (aTweaks locks you in with him until he's dead), but I'm not willing to risk it. Instead, I'm going to make a little more progress at the De'Arnise Hold, now that both Sil and Laosha have dual-classed to make and gained a few levels.
We get ambushed by Trolls the moment we arrive. Both of them die before Poppy, our Enchanter Charname, can rescue them.
We torch the Trolls with Sunfire, Feeblemind Glaicas, tear down the golems in ogre form bolstered by Enchanted Weapon (without which ogre form's nonmagical weapon couldn't hurt them), run to Watcher's Keep to cure the Clay Golem's Cursed Wound effect and raise Valos (with both clerics dual-classed, we can't do those things ourselves anymore), and return to find the Iron Golem mysteriously missing, while two other golems remain where they were, still neutral. I think it's because I used the console to reach WK and return, and that messed up with something, somehow.
It sneaks up on us later. Out of laziness, I remove it with CTRL-Y. I didn't feel like going invisible and resting up and buffing up the party and then very, very, very slowly whittling it down. It was worth losing the XP just to avoid the hassle.
When I get back to the hold, I also get ambushed by respawned Trolls. Had I not used CTRL-J to hop around the map, I'd have fought them one by one, but instead, I just get swarmed at odd intervals by the many Trolls wandering around. CTRL-Y removes the problem at the cost of tens of thousands of XP. It probably speaks to my attitude towards Trolls that I'd rather let my two dual-classed characters remain stagnant than spend time fighting Trolls to feed them XP.
What most bothers me is that even with CTRL-Y, Trolls routinely refuse to die. And Spirit Trolls remain untargetable even after they collapse.
In previous posts I've stressed just how much I hate Spirit Trolls and their persistent invisibility. Everything about them is aggravating: the STR drain that bypasses Stoneskin, the attack that heals themselves on every hit, their regeneration, their habit of vanishing and forcing you to wait until they come back, and their virtual immunity to single-target spells. Melf's Acid Arrow and Burning Hands are supposed to be our primary Troll-killing spells, and you can't target Spirit Trolls with them. Plus, they tend to arrive in groups, which means you can often spend several rounds attacking one Spirit Troll at full health while another injured one regenerates, because the injured one vanished and your party started targeting the stronger one instead. Spirit Trolls are worth gobs of XP, but it's not worth it. I don't want the XP; I just want to move on!
Out of sheer exasperation, I remove the invisibility effect from the TROLLSP.itm file, rendering all Spirit Trolls permanently visible. And out of sheer hatred, I create a custom +8 katana that sets your APR to 10, grants immunity to damage and immunity to level 0-10 and level 15 spells, increases THAC0 by 50, has a reach of 200, and deals 50d50 crushing, fire, acid, poison, and magic damage, with the slay opcode and a vorpal strike on top just so I don't have to wait for the Trolls to fall down before killing them. This was necessary because the last such sword I created only did 20d20 damage per hit.
I give it to Espellier, since she already has 70% of the party's kills thanks to Sunfire. I only use the sword in one fight--the pair of Spectral Trolls before the Umber Hulk room--but it will save time in the long run. I'll probably use it for kobolds and stuff.
Maybe I should just never play the De'Arnise Hold anymore, or at least wait until level 12 to kill everything instantly with Death Spell (note that the Death Spell won't kill Trolls in LoB mode due to the +12 enemy level bonus). I don't remember the last time I enjoyed that quest. It's nothing more than a source of gold and XP to me.
Eventually I remember that Jan is still waiting for me to visit his home. We do his quest (the Githyanki at the end get knocked out by Emotion and pummeled by Efreet) before returning to the De'Arnise Hold to fight the Umber Hulks (who get knocked out by Emotion and pummeled by Efreet). All that's left is TorGal.
I recruited Ajantis and Garrick (after killing the witch with repeated Minor Drains)
and I headed to Larswood with the intention of finding the bandit's camp. I still managed to survive this part, but at a great cost.
I love the roleplaying value of bards but Garrick had only been a scroll-wasting machine before he got himself killed. First he almost got eaten by a bear while the rest of the party was fighting a couple of Blacktalons. Then he panicked and wandered off. Good thing that I have a bard to restore morale... Oh, wait!
Of course, the fleeing bard went directly into a second group of Blacktalons with predictable consequences
I ventured north with Ajantis, Imoen and Xzar. Gods, would I miss having a cleric! Conor was getting tired of seeing companions die. Although Garrick had always seemed ill fit for adventure, Ajantis was proving to be a great addition to the team, so maybe things would go better.
Those Blacktalons sure were cold-hearted thugs, but one had to admire their effectiveness and style. With some ice arrows in his pack, Conor thought he was ready to defeat a bandit camp by himself.
Obviously he was not. Conor barely survived the fight in the bandit camp, and Ajantis died poisoned by a hobgoblin in the big tent. The group had used all the healing potions and nobody had thought of buying antidotes. Carrying the body of Ajantis, the party went back to the Friendly Arm Inn, where the paladin was resurrected. He was never too happy with the questionable way that Conor had led the party, and coming back from the dead did nothing for his general satisfaction. To placate him, and sincerely believing that the group could use better guidance, he stepped back and let Ajantis lead the party for a while. Conor also let the squire keep the magic gauntlets from the big tent. Now he had a magic longbow after all.
Before going to the Cloakwoods, the party is going to explore the areas surrounding Beregost and Naskhel. That problem with Brage, the captain of the guard, seemed important.
After reorganizing our spellbooks to prepare for the situation ahead--one of the most intense chores in no-reload runs, in my experience--Espellier summons a Wizard Eye. We'll need it for our first attack.
Notice the Worg in front of her. We use it as a target to carry a group of Cloudkill charges into the enemy group, which unfortunately slays our Wizard Eye.
It was only there to guide the Worg, but it would be nice if we could have kept spying on them. It seems Wizard Eyes are quite vulnerable in 2.1 EE.
One of TorGal's Yuan-ti Mage buddies comes over to debuff Espellier. For once, I remember to cast SI: Abjuration. But I don't do it fast enough, wasting the spell.
Valos, who already lost his invisibility by summoning that Worg, takes the Wand of Lightning and Efreeti Bottle and surrounds Espellier with a protective ring of Efreet, which hopefully won't get instantly killed by a hostile Death Spell.
A second Yuan-ti Mage comes along, but we don't see a Death Spell.
Now the whole party is debuffed. That's bad. At least the enemy doesn't use missile weapons. Those are especially nasty for debuffed parties of mages.
I use one of my favorite spell combinations: a fast-casting Invisibility spell on a character trying to cast the slow but powerful Invisibility 10' Radius spell.
Poppy therefore keeps Jan from getting disrupted when casting the spell he needs to rescue the party. We scatter to heal and rebuff, but we lose control of two party members thanks to TorGal's Cloak of Fear, and our Efreet begin to crumple.
TorGal can see through our invisibility and chooses to pursue Jan. For a moment, I'm not sure what to do, since Jan can't possibly survive long with TorGal on his tail. Then I have an idea.
I pull Jan back into the far southern hallway and have him fire off the Wand of Cloudkill into the Umber Hulk room, where all of TorGal's buddies are busy sparring with our Efreet. Jan runs in circles to minimize TorGal's effective APR while we wait for the Cloudkill charges to make their presence felt.
Jan re-casts Stoneskin the very second TorGal removes his last skin.
His STR has been drained so far that he can't even carry his crossbow and TorGal's awful claw attack has slowed him, but Jan escapes into the Umber Hulk room when the Cloudkill charges have cleared, and downs our very last Potion of Invisibility when the other Trolls break through his very last Stoneskin spell.
TorGal, oddly enough, fails to follow Jan. But for once, I want TorGal to be attacking us, because this next part requires his participation.
Espellier enters the room while invisible, casts PFMW, and breaks invisibility to draw the remaining Trolls towards her. Meanwhile, Jan lures TorGal from the southern hallway. With his last breath, despite massive damage, he casts one more spell, just to slightly weaken the Trolls.
Jan crumples in TorGal's claws, but he has done an impressive service to the party. Now Espellier is right next to TorGal, safely protected by PFMW. We are in luck: she makes an important saving throw and therefore does not lose the next few rounds to running away.
She'd have had to re-cast PFMW if she had failed. This way, we have a spare casting in case we ever need it.
Espellier chain-casts Sunfire. TorGal's high HP and MR lets him survive, but his friends aren't quite so tough.
PFMW doesn't last long enough. Espellier memorized 4 Sunfire spells, but given the delay when she entered the room, PFMW runs out before she can cast her last Sunfire spell. TorGal doesn't let her.
We return the favor. We nabbed a Wand of Fire earlier on (I forget from where), and combining it with the Wand of Lightning lets us deal some desperately-needed damage against TorGal while wiping out the last of his companions.
Now TorGal is in very bad shape, and he has several newly re-buffed mages to deal with. We use one of the few disablers that works against BG2 Trolls.
I check to see if Feeblemind works against TorGal. He fails his save! I see the yellow glow wash over him.
But then he keeps attacking. He's immune to the feeblemind effect. Notice Laosha in Flind form and Valos in spider form--their THAC0 is terrible, but they're out of spells.
Sil gets spooked by TorGal's Cloak of Fear. Dual-classing deprived us of our normal Remove Fear spells, so we neither have immunities nor any way of removing fear once a party member fails a save. To avoid losing control of our main character, I have Poppy drink a Potion of Magic Protection.
Combining it with the Wand of Lightning gives her 300% MR, capped at 127%, granting immunity to Cloak of Fear. This also makes her immune to TorGal's STR drain, which does not bypass MR.
We land a hit in spider form, and discover that TorGal is vulnerable to its powerful poison effect.
But looking at our attack rolls, we have no real hope of bringing him down with Polymorph Self. He's going to regenerate faster than we can harm him. Then Valos loses his last Stoneskin and gets hit for more than half his total HP. A WoL Potion of Healing brings him back up to full health.
I pull him back and let TorGal attack Laosha instead. Soon, Laosha is close to death, and I know drinking potions won't keep him alive for long. TorGal deals far more than 60 damage per round. I switch Laosha to Mustard Jelly form to gain immunity to piercing damage.
Then I realize jelly form also grants 100% MR, and therefore blocks TorGal's STR drain. Laosha could tank TorGal indefinitely in jelly form!
And then it runs out.
There is no saving Laosha anymore.
Shapeshifting is no longer an option. We have to try something else. Poppy drinks an Oil of Speed and gets TorGal to chase her. She punishes his pursuit with a Wand of Lightning and Wand of Frost.
It's not much to go on considering how few charges we have. But another realization strikes: Poppy's MR from the Potion of Magic Protection will also make her immune to the Wand of Fire. I hand the wand to Valos and have him bomb TorGal from afar.
A bad attack roll on TorGal's part spares Poppy a disrupted spell, but it makes little difference. Just as she's bringing out her last defense, TorGal collapses in front of her.
Valos switches to the Agannazar's Scorcher charge to save on Fireball charges, which can't be used with the WoL trick, and burns TorGal into the ground.
I didn't think we were going to survive that. We lost a lot of limited resources, plus 3000 gold to raise our fallen party members, but it was worth it to see TorGal die.
Hey everyone, Saoni is still alive. She's ready to take on the Bandit Camp. But I also bought SoD and now I want to do an SCS/LoB/Ascension run through the trilogy including SoD, with extra XP activated, the XP cap removed in BG2, and with BG2Tweaks' enhanced spell and Thac0 progression tables, to turn the entire adventure into more of a high level campaign.
I have a few questions: - LoB apparently increases enemy AI (not just enemy HPs, Thac0, APR etc). Is this AI enhancement significant? Does anyone know how it compars to SCS? - If I install SCS in BGEE, do its general components (spell tweaks, smarter general AI, smarter Mages etc) also apply to SoD? - @semiticgod, does your current install include Ascension? Is it possible to play Ascension in BG2EE v2.1?
Decided to give a solo, no-reload run a go for a change. I have played with all the npcs too much so I prefer soloing now. This thread is an excellent idea btw.
Everything about the character (gender, race, class, profs) were all based on a random number generator. Random dice rolls for stats taking best 3 rolls of 5 as suggested by OP. Rolled in order and not changed at all.
I hadn't tried LoB before but decided I'd give it a shot and try to get through of bgee, SoD and bg2ee.
Meet Valen female blade. 11 12 13 17 15 17 She was proficient in darts and halberds.
Valen decided to run around Candlekeep only buying a bolt of crossbow bolts for Fuller. Armed only with a dagger found in the bookshelf in the inn she ran into Carbos. He promptly used a potion of speed and then invisibility. Valen trying to run back outside got chunked from a backstab...
Rest in peace Valen.
Thanks for the idea guys. I think I'll be a no-reloader from now on. Much better way to stop restartitis.
This reminds me of the super-luckily rolled Dragon Disciple that I lost in Candlekeep not long ago. Carbos probably ended more no-reload runs then anyone -- even without Legacy of Bhaal.
I want to install aTweaks' scroll scribing component to permit broader use of the WoL trick, but I'm afraid of messing with my install. I'd rather use EEKeeper to add the scrolls and remove the gold. Does aTweaks-style scroll scribing cost the exact same amount as the scroll, or is there a standardized cost? I ask because there are two scrolls of Emotion and Sunfire with different prices, and Fireball and Dire Charm don't cost the same amount of money despite being the same level.
Dire news! I wanted to share that Conor the Arcane Archer died yesterday, poisoned by a phase spider in the second map of the Cloakwood.
I headed to the woods feeling quite confident. My party of 5 (Ajantis, Branwen, Imoen, Xzar and charname) had no problems in the areas surrounding Nashkel, and they had leveled up after basilics, sirenes, etc.
Now I see the mistakes that cost me the challenge:
-The cloakwood without a thief disarming traps can be a nightmare. Imoen was dualing to mage and she was about to recover the thieving skills so I went ahead anyway. Still, I could have handled the traps in a better way (invisibility potion or something) and I didn't. -I gave Ajantis the protection against poison scroll, and yet Conor couldn't stay in the backseat. Charname's survival should have been 1st priority! -Last, but not least, I panicked when the phase spider got me injured and I gulped a healing potion XD That didn't give me time to gulp an antidote. Wow, the phase spider poison kills fast!
I also see it as divine retribution for starting off evil. Although my reputation was 16 at the moment, I had gained horror instead of slow poison as a special ability after the bandit camp.
The worst was that I had almost died when I got held by a web with the group behind and an ettercap was coming for me. Xzar saved me in extremis using the summon monster wand in front of me. Should have taken the hint.
Now I don't know whether to keep Conor in a minimal reload walkthrough or to start a new no-reload with a pure thief kit. Darn, I really thought I could make it at least to SoD without dying.
If memory serves, @Alesia_BH had previously no-reloaded successfully a solo thief (among other classes). It is a fascinating challenge I have yet to dare myself.
I usually deal with the Cloakwood spider map by having a strong melee fighter drink a Potion of Freedom, and then have him or her run around right into the Webs. When he aggros spiders or ettercaps, he runs back to the rest of the party, which is waiting in ambush.
If I work fast, I can usually get all the Webs set off in one Potion of Freedom, but if things don't go smoothly enough, it can take two or even three. (I believe Thalantyr only has three, so it's never been more than that.)
If I work my way to the central lair and get the Spider's Bane sword, I can then continue the same strategy for the rest of the map, using the sword.
I don't know of any better use in BG1 for the Potions of Freedom that Thalantyr sells. They can make this otherwise terrifying map a piece of cake.
All right. We moved on to kill Mae'Var. Although everybody got debuffed early on, we overwhelmed the enemy with a flood of disablers, relying on our gang of Efreet to do the heavy lifting. As tough as MGOI is, it doesn't stop Greater Malison and Chaos, or an Efreeti's Flame Strike.
We sided with Bodhi because SCS vampires suck. I like to start the main quest immediately after killing Mae'Var, because siding with Bodhi cuts off the Mae'Var questline, but grants a lot of fast XP. Before proceeding to Aran Linvail, we first stopped by the Windspear Hills.
I did something to improve our chances which had a small impact but I feel was clever. Instead of traveling from Athkatla to the Windspear Hills, I first stopped by the Druid Grove. This way, both my Stoneskin and Invisibility 10' Radius spells would still be active when I arrived for the paladin ambush.
Most of Firkraag's lair wasn't actually all that enlightening. I relied heavily on the Efreet for almost everything. Some cute optimizations included (1) using Protection from Normal Weapons to block the attacks of Vampiric Mists, saving us hundreds or thousands of gold in Restoration spells from a temple, (2) using PFMW and double Fire Shields to damage golems (though the Efreet brigade still did most of the work), (3) slipping past the Ancient Vampire horde using Invisibility 10' Radius, (4) permanently disabling those awful Greater Wolfweres using Lower Resistance, Greater Malison, and Feeblemind, and (5) prebuffing the whole party with Protection from Fire and carefully timing WoL Sunfire spells, one from our Necromancer and two from our Invoker, to interrupt Kaol's and Legdoril's spells when fighting Samia and her entourage in close quarters.
Finally we meet Firkraag and have to fight Conster. The thing about our party is that we have mage levels on every character, but our scrolls are actually spread surprisingly thin. Three of our characters have Spell Immunity, another two have Spell Immunity: Abjuration, the SCS-exclusive spell that only provides SI: Abj, but no other SI spells, and one person, Laosha, has no immunity to dispel magic at all. Right off the bat, I know Laosha is going to be very weak in this fight.
We start out with a coordinated assault: multiple Spell Thrust spells to debuff Conster, alongside a Greater Malison from Jan and a Chaos spell from Poppy, our Enchanter Charname. Despite a combined -10 save penalty, Conster resists the spell.
The next round, however, we confuse him with a second Chaos spell.
One problem with my install is that the SCS strings are messed up, so I have to rely on the spell visuals to see which spell protections a mage has active. I have to dedicate extra time to debuffing because I have no way of knowing in advance how much pressure I need to debuff a mage. I have to wait several seconds to find out if a mage's defenses are down.
We break down Conster's defenses on the third round... and knock him out at the same time.
But somehow he wakes up, despite Emotion not allowing victims to wake up on being hit. The instant he does, he fires off a Spell Trigger.
This is bad news. Four of my characters are in spider form and have to spend another round returning to normal form before we can restart debuffing him. Sil, who never learned Polymorph Self and was already in human form, has no good spells to cast, and therefore brings out the Efreet brigade, which I had hoped not to use. The Efreet blast Conster with damage spells. The lingering poison damage from our spider attacks finishes him off.
Laosha and Sil are inches away from regaining their cleric levels. They will be absolute monsters once they do.
@Seraph, welcome to the club! By all means, bring on your next character @lurith, my condolences, you're doing well though. I'm glad you haven't been discouraged, and look forward to your straight Thief. As @Ygramul stated, @Alesia_BH has indeed once soloed a kitless Thief, an exact copy of Alora. I think she abandoned that run in the Underdark. @semiticgod, shame that strings are messed up in your install. I'm fearing the same for mine. Respect for not letting it compromise your current run (at least for now).
Thanks @bengoshi for the information. I installed a few mods: BG2Tweaks (parts), BG1 NPC Project, Rogue Rebalancing, SCS v30 (using @subtledoctor's hot fix), and JimFix (parts). Components that add or change dialog or descriptions tend not to work. RR items had wrong descriptions, BG2Tweaks' Revised weapon proficiency system, and SCS' Skip Candlekeep and NPC kick out banter all had nonsensical dialog or descriptions, so I uninstalled such components. Other components, such as BG2Tweaks' Reveal City Maps When Entering Area, Stores Sell Higher Stacks of Items, and Change Effect of Reputation on Store Prices -> Low Reputation Store Discount (Sabre), all seem to work fine. I'm not 100% sure about SCS yet. Greywolf quaffed a potion, but the white text that should say *quaffs a potion* said something completely different ("I can't in good conscience leave the girl behind" - which made me wonder about Greywolf's personal life.) Ctrl-q revealed that he had indeed quaffed a potion (stone giant strength), so this behavior seems to be working. I also found that antagonizing Tarnesh resulted in him instantly activating a Mirror Image and starting an incantation (Horror), which matches my expectation of SCS' full enemy prebuffs.
SoD and v2.1 have been very inspirational, especially LoB mode. I haven't had much time for playing, but I've come up with several characters that I think might rock in LoB mode. I considered putting them together in a custom party, but eventually decided against it because I didn't want to use up all that inspiration, and because the BG1 NPC Project mod and SoD wanted me to work with the game's NPCs. (However, as mentioned above, I ended up uninstalling BG1 NPC Project due to its dialogs being a mess.)
My current character is not one of the powerbuilds I had in mind for LoB mode. Instead, it was a beautiful BG-style portrait I chanced upon that decided who my new protagonist was going to be: Maeve, NE Human Kensai:
. I love it when a portrait fires my imagination. In my mind, Maeve is a typically neutral evil mercenary, callous, authoritarian and manipulative, who likes to take what she wants. I probably shouldn't invest too much in her backstory or in a role-played narrative though, because this is very much a test run. First of all because I wanted to try LoB and see if combined with SCS it can help turn BGEE into a mid/high level campaign and SoA into an epic level campaign. And secondly because I'm curious to see to what extent SCS is compatible with v2.1. If I run into serious issues, I might take her through my v1.3 install of the game.
Maeve's starting profs were ** Scimitars, * SWS, and * Daggers. I picked the latter proficiency for throwing daggers, counting on Kivan to help me to a returning throwing dagger through his personal BG1 NPC Project quest. Now that I uninstalled that mod, I kind of regret not having gone with Axes. I might try to forge a personal item for her, like Alesia often does, a returning throwing dagger with some kind of passive bonus for flavor.
I decided to activate LoB XP bonuses because I know I lack the patience for taking a few minutes to kill a single Gibberling or a Hobgoblin for 35 XP. What I didn't expect though was this:
As you can see Maeve was Hasted thanks to Deder's oil of speed, when she fought Shank and Carbos. That helped a great deal with maintaining a safe distance.
Everything is worth at least 1k XP! (Sorry if this is nothing new to people, but I was flabbergasted.) Maeve reached level 2 in Candlekeep, and level 3 on the Lion's Way. Btw
After this encouraging start, she traveled on to the crossroads, where she slew a Xvart and one or two more Gibberlings. From there she visited Beregost. Killing Landrin's Spiders taught us that XP values for kills do not increase exponentially with stronger enemies. Each Huge Spider was good for circa 1500 XP. Algernon added another 1030 when he refused to donate his cloak to Maeve's cause.
She dealt with Mirianne's Ogrillons and traveled to Nashkel, where she did little more than finding a suit of Ankheg plate armor and a pearl and talk to Bardolan. Near the Nashkel Mines she took out Greywolf with her throwing daggers. Thankfully he didn't apply an oil of speed.
Greywolf had 296 XP and a Thac0 of 1. He had *** in TWF and *** in Long Swords. And his damage range was 13-21 per hit. In other words, being unable to wear helmets, bracers, and armor, Maeve will have to remain a predominantly ranged character for the rest of the game, but then, so will many less restricted characters. She has enough DEX to dual into a Thief and with the INT tome she could dual into Mage, so there will be ways for her to become more versatile, should find her Kensai skills impractical for adventuring.
Maeve's level 6 now and wondering whether she should seek the company of fellow adventurers.
Since I've had some good fortune with this skald run, I think I'll enter it here until I die. I'm in the Cloakwood, so I may not be posting in here for long. Things could go badly rather quickly at this point.
This is my skald:
I have read the charisma tome to raise my charisma to 18.
Party is me, Ajantis, Branwen, Minsc, Dynaheir, and Imoen. Imoen and I are level 6, the rest are level 5.
Game setup is no mods, Core Rules, no max hit points, no automatic spell learning. It's interesting how luck can affect hit points without the max hit points cheat. RNG tends to even out all the hit dice of various character classes, leaving everyone in the party near a median hit point value. It doesn't matter though, because I learned a long time ago that hit points don't matter - it's not getting hit in the first place that matters, along with spell resistances and immunities.
We've completed the Cloakwood, Davaeorn, ankhegs, and BG City up through Marek's and Lothander's poison quest, and most associated side quests along the way.
I decided to go up to Ulgoth's Beard and start the Werewolf Island quest, which I think I'd like to do this run, because it's so much easy xp, as long as you're prepared to handle Karoug. (That basically means Dynaheir with Haste spells, my skald song, and Ajantis has two pips in bastard sword. Minsc can use the other sword non-proficiently if necessary.) The decision to go to Werewolf Island could end my no-reload, but, I've always kind of liked that module, a lot better than I like either Ice Island or Durlag's Tower, mostly because it's a straight up physical melee module with no mage or trap cheese against the party. I do love a straightforward fight with party magic supporting the fighters. I see that as fair and honorable. I see mage cheese as unfair and dishonorable.
After returning to BG City to get the sea charts, we're going to pursue the main questline and convenient side quests up through exiting the Candlekeep Catacombs to the south, doing the siren map along the way, and only then actually going to Werewolf Island as a last module before finishing up with Sarevok and BG1, and transitioning into SoD.
I'm not planning on going to Ice Island or Durlag's Tower, because, mage, trap, and maze Limburger - yuck. No thank you.
Lots of excitement and close calls today, but, really, just the same old same old BG1 to all the no-reload veterans who've played a thousand times, so, I didn't really think making battle-by-battle screen shots and writing description for them was worth it.
Here are a couple of screen shots showing my place in the game with my current journal:
Aran Linvail awaits. We throw a Skeleton Warrior into his room and fire off six charges of the Wand of Cloudkill after it.
Aran Linvail escapes the clouds to attack us, but get debuffed and disabled.
He could have been a big problem, as his backstabs would have dealt crazy damage and he has multiple debuffers on hand. His mage friend, the other key wild card, lingers in the cloud, and to keep her from escaping when we go to check on her, we knock her out with Emotion.
Before we head to Brynnlaw, I want to scrounge up some more XP. In the Graveyard crypts, I discover that there is a good reason to cover Espellier with Protection from Fire even when she's the one casting Sunfire.
Sunfire in EE no longer grants the caster temporary immunity to fire damage like it did in vanilla; it just uses a different projectile from Fireball to protect the caster from the blast. This means our Efreet's Fire Shields spells can seriously injure or even instantly kill her if they are nearby when she casts Sunfire.
Finally, finally Laosha hits level 12 and recovers his Cleric of Tyr levels. He can now combine the WoL with Divine Favor for a massive boost in damage and THAC0. We try it out on a Skeleton Warrior using spider form, and slay it in two rounds.
Then I realize this build isn't nearly as strong as I thought. Killing a critter in two rounds in LoB mode without Greater Whirlwind attack is pretty impressive, but Divine Favor only lasts two rounds. That's not all that big of a jump in damage output.
Fortunately, Laosha still has a power jump left when he hits level 18. With Enchanted Weapon and a WoL Divine Favor, he can have below -10 THAC0 in Mind Flayer form and strike with a +3 weapon. He has yet to peak.
I want to take on Firkraag once Sil hits level 12 and recovers her cleric of levels like Laosha did (WoL Boon of Lathander is much stronger than WoL Divine Favor), so we need a bit more XP. First, we go to fight Mencar Pennypincher. Both sides haul out our respective debuffers and disablers.
I want to strike at the weakened Sorcerous Amon, but Brennan Risling is blocking the way. I blast him with Sunfire, but it's not enough.
Notice Laosha standing to the far right. He got debuffed and therefore had no immunity to fire damage; that Sunfire would have killed him if I hadn't moved him aside.
Since we can't attack Amon, he casts Chaos without risk of disruption. Everyone in the area of effect fails their save; only Laosha remains intact. Worse yet, Sil has suddenly lost her defenses and is about to die.
Laosha uses Divine Favor in spider form and absolutely crushes the enemy. Without his allies to get in the way, Amon is defenseless against spider poison.
Next on the chopping block is Draug Fea et al, because I can't find the Rakshasa that holds the Cloak of the Sewers. The whole fight is best summarized in three screenshots.
Looks like SCS enemies will prioritize attacking summoned skeletons even if it puts them in the middle of a cloud.
Comments
I proceed with my normal strategy. I bring out some cheap summons, send them southwest and then hurl disablers at the enemy. But our disablers don't arrive fast enough to keep us safe.
The enemy mage, untroubled by our Invoker's Stinking Cloud spell thanks to her own MGOI pre-buff, gets a Chaos spell off the ground, and the enemy cleric lands a Hold Person. Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, gets paralyzed. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, Valos, our Necromancer, and Espellier, our Invoker, all get confused. Only Jan and Poppy, our Enchanter and Charname, retain their faculties.
Then, the enemy cleric fires off an Unholy Blight. Only Jan and Valos, our two Chaotic Neutral characters, remain unharmed. Poppy, Espellier, and Laosha get crushed, and Sil dies from the impact.
Laosha approaches death, but Jan hides him with Invisibility 10' Radius. Poppy brings out the Wand of Lightning to heal herself, making a Potion of Healing restore 60 HP in an instant.
Espellier has neither invisibility nor the ability to use potions, and shortly dies. Emotion knocks out several bandits... but fails to take down the cleric that's quickly breaking down our confused Necromancer's Stoneskins.
We fail to stop a hostile enchantment spell. Poppy and Jan scatter so it will only affect one of them. Despite her enchantment specialization, Poppy fails her save. Only Jan remains under my control.
Jan is forced to manage on his own, but has few options besides his flashers. Valos recovers from Chaos and ventures out to check on the remaining bandits--we've barely made a dent in the enemy--only to fail his save against another Chaos spell.
Valos, confused and distant from his fellows, runs out of Stoneskins. Meanwhile, Laosha recovers from Hold Person, but has to spend some time drinking potions before he's ready to engage the enemy. We send out Jan in spider form to poison the enemy mage, but he gets charmed a moment later.
That could have been immensely helpful for us. Spider form is our only truly reliable source of damage, and it's excellent for spellcasters, though damage in 2.1 no longer guarantees spell disruption even for non-scripted spells.
Valos is cornered, confused, and beyond our help. A bandit sword chunks our Necromancer. It wasn't even a critical hit.
Without Jan's poison to trouble her, the enemy mage can easily land a Flame Arrow on our poor spider gnome. It kills him instantly.
We've placed far too little importance on our defenses against spell damage. Normally I think of defenses in terms of Stoneskin and Chaotic Commands; I give too little thought to Flame Arrow and Skull Trap.
Poppy fails a save against Rigid Thinking and I almost panic, but our surviving cleric has the Tyr kit and thus can cast Acclamation, removing the confusion in an instant.
Notice the charm icon on Laosha. He's not actually charmed; the Helm of Charm Protection blocked the charm effect but not the icon.
I forgot that I had already picked up Renfeld earlier, so I thought I had to beat these bandits before exiting the area. But with four characters dead and the remaining two low on spells and defenses, I wasn't sure how to proceed.
Eventually I went for broke and combined the Wand of Lightning with a scroll of Invisible Stalker before downing a Potion of Invisibility. Our Invisible Stalkers broke the strength of the enemy single-handedly.
When I figured out that Renfeld was nowhere to be found, I gathered all the equipment our remaining two characters could carry and scribed a bunch of scrolls to free up space before leaving the area. A miserable end to a brutal fight.
CONOR, THE ARCANE ARCHER
With only Xzar and Imoen to back me up, I was really scared of the half-orc in the mines, so I lured him to the north part of the cave to have more room to fight the summons. A bit cheesy, I know, but I wasn't too confident. My plan B was an ice wand, but I didn't want to froze my loot! This should be interesting.The fight with Mulahey was tough but Conor fought well and even resisted a melee with skeletons and kobolds.
Conor knew enough about magic to be scared of it so he was not in a hurry to face more spell-casters. It wouldn't be long until a guy called Nimbul tried to end him and apparently everyone else in Nashkel. Enough Larloch's minor drains and at least he didn't quite succeed at conjuring more magic missiles for Conor. That baldy monk actually helped.
After that, a wizard tried really hard to kill Conor and, what's worse, his pet rabbit! If his magic resistance hadn't saved him, Conor would have been a very sad adventurer for the rest of the story. The blasted mage even scared Conor off with a horror spell. Not very heroic of him. Luckily, Imoen and her magic missile wand did their job. And look, another magic wand!
Conor had been wanting to buy some magic now that he had a little gold. The wizard in High Hedge sells a lot of cool stuff, but Conor could not help himself and bought five (really expensive!) acid arrows. Maybe that wasn't the best investment, but Conor did feel like an arcane archer when he made short work of a assassin mage at the Friendly Arm Inn. One arrow and he was down!
I was planning on asking Khalid and Jaheira for help, but I got to the FAI only to learn that they are gone for good after you clean the mines. Noob move... Since I am up here, I will try to have Ajantis join me (if he doen't mind my ehem questionable reputation). I am not going anywhere with this three-member party without a tank.
Come to think of it, maybe I should make this a minimal reload run. Because starting over would be especially unpleasant considering how slow LoB normally moves.
The only reason, honestly, why I'm using LoB mode is because it's the only way to abuse the Wand of Lightning as thoroughly as I want to without destroying the challenge. Duplicating the effects of Potions of Healing, Sunfire, Divine Favor, Boon of Lathander, Wands of Cloudkill, Wail of the Banshee, Kitthix, and high-level scrolls would be very reductive in normal mode, as I wouldn't require anything else to survive.
In order to learn the limits of the WoL trick, I need to test them in a high-stress environment.
No problem. We've got plenty of other options besides Daystar.
Underneath all the juvenile controversy, it seems that SoD is a decent game. I hope someone will test it soon in no-reload. (And really looking forward to its SCS-ization.)
Note that it's possible to avoid those nasty Vampiric Mists before Gaal. You can walk around the trigger. Here it is, highlighted in blue.
Nobody likes fighting them anyway.
Valos is a life saver right from the beginning. Hold Undead is one of the few disablers that work against undead, and since we're a very magic-heavy party (not normally very good in LoB mode, but it's my favorite), we really need those disablers to succeed in these minor encounters.
What about those awful Beholders on the other side of the riddle bridge? They have a bad habit of not following after you and standing their ground, making the most of their superior range. In the past, that's been terrible for me, but now, I'm going to use that pattern against them.
I conjure some skeletons, haste them, target them with a WoL-boosted Wand of Cloudkill, and send them off to fight the Beholders. They carry the six clouds far outside my field of vision, allowing me to strike the Beholders from a very safe distance. The damage is massive...
...and is even enough to take down the Beholders with only one charge, but what really charms me about this is that it not only takes advantage of the Wand of Lightning's duplication trick. It also takes advantage of the WoL's ability to target individual critters. If you use the Wand of Cloudkill on a skeleton and then move the skeleton, the cloud will hit the skeleton's original position. But if you prep it with a Wand of Lightning first, the clouds will travel after the skeleton.
If you really wanted to make the most out of the Wand of Cloudkill, you might actually target one of your own characters as a hasted suicide bomber, flinging multiple charges of the wand at them and having them run in circles, using their high movement rate to collect a trail of clouds behind them. Then you send them running into the enemy's midst and let the Cloudkill charges all converge on a single spot. If you dedicate 5 charges to this (50 charges in the wand cost roughly 10,000 gold), then you could deal 165 poison damage in a single round, obliterating most LoB groups before they have time to react. I might try this against Draug Fea and the sewer dwellers just for funsies, and to see if it works.
On another positive note, Beamdog corrected one of the typos I disliked in the original script.
It used to say "a millennia," confusing the singular and plural.
I consider progressing further in the Unseeing Eye quest, but I don't need the Gauntlets of Dexterity, so I decide to abandon it for the time being. Instead, we're going to head to the Temple Ruins.
Our Invoker, Espellier, tries out a WoL+Sunfire combo. It's quite silly.
Notice Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, is in the area of effect. He was there to distract the enemies from Espellier, whose AC is crap and STR is low enough to risk her dying of STR drain. He had to cast Protection from Fire before doing this, as Espellier is hurling out 60d6 fire damage with this attack. Like the scorcher loop, it has to be used very carefully, or else it can easily torch your own party.
Unfortunately for us, Sunfire in EE no longer bypasses magic resistance. This means both Shadow Fiends and Skeleton Warriors are effectively immune to our best attack. We have to resort to Flind form to damage them (ogre form would do more damage, but its attack strikes as nonmagical), which exposes us to a lot of danger. We succeed, but they crush us in the process.
I ignore the group of undead in the room with the Wyvern Call scroll, but I can't escape the southernmost gang. I try to lower the Skeleton Warrior's MR with Magic Resistance, but we only have 50% success.
I could protect them with Invisibility 10' Radius, but that would cancel their spells by turning the Skeleton Warriors invisible. I didn't consider using a plain level 2 Invisibility spell, but that would have worked. Anyway, the one Magic Resistance spell we managed to land was enough to paralyze one of the Skeleton Warriors with Hold Undead, making the other one fall more easily.
Before the Shade Lord, we get ambushed by a new gang of undead. Rather than use Invisibility 10' Radius to escape, re-group, and then kill them with the same tactics we just used, I decide not to bother.
I don't like fighting the same battle more than once.
The Shade Lord awaits. I have two strategies for dealing with him, but neither are guaranteed to work, as I've never used either of them before. We'll have to see.
Second, we can use Enchanted Weapon to kite him. The Shade Lord has no ranged weapons and moves terribly slowly, which means we can stay clear of him and his level draining Darkling Aura indefinitely. Normally you'd risk running out of magical bullets in LoB mode, but with Enchanted Weapon, we can make nonmagical bullets strike as +3 bullets for 50 rounds.
We enter his lair while invisible. Laosha pushes his THAC0 down as far as he possibly can and then hurls a Sunstone Bullet at the Shadow Altar.
I will be forever grateful to @Blackraven for letting me know Sunstone Bullets instantly destroy the Shadow Altar. Unfortunately, they can't do that to anything else in the game. The bullets kill critters with the race of "Plate," and the only such critters in existence besides the Shadow Altar are non-targetable and yield neither XP nor loot even if they could be killed--like the Machine of Lum the Mad.
Anyway, with the Shadow Altar gone, we don't have to worry about hordes of 100+ HP Shadows overwhelming us. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, has Boon of Lathander active and is therefore immune to Darkling Aura. She also has Death Ward and is therefore immune to the instant death effect of Black Blade of Disaster and Finger of Death, both of the which the Shade Lord loves to use.
But she cannot yet cast Magic Resistance on the Shade Lord. I forgot that he comes pre-buffed with Spell Turning. How do we deal with this?
I just scribed the Pierce Magic scroll I took from the previous dungeon, and we have no other debuffers prepared. Instead, I'm going to burn through the Spell Turning effect, which bounces 12 spell levels in total. I start out with Jan firing off a string of Charm Person spells with a Wand of Lightning and a scroll.
It's dangerous to do this, but with a Ring of Protection +1, Jan is guaranteed not to fail his save when those spells come back at him. I also have Sil use a scroll of Cure Serious Wounds, since it's uninterruptable like all scrolls and should take a big chunk out of the Shade Lord's Spell Turning buff.
Unfortunately, even after I throw out 12 spell levels, the Spell Turning effect persists. I'm fairly certain magic resistance won't take precedence over spell protections, so my only explanation is that Jan's WoL Charm Person scroll didn't work properly. The Shade Lord's MR will remain at 50% until we can take down that Spell Turning effect.
But 50% MR won't block everything, and Spell Turning won't block area-effect spells.
I divide my attention between trying to disable Shadow Patrick and trying to debuff the Shade Lord, while preserving my best options for when I can lower the Shade Lord's MR. Sil steers clear of the Shade Lord--Death Ward will stop BBoD's instant death effect, but not its huge base damage--while Jan pesters the Shade Lord from afar, using Chromatic Orb to keep weakening the Shade Lord's Spell Turning spell. Jan almost gets hit by a Finger of Death, but Espellier rescues him.
Notice Laosha summoning a Skeleton Warrior. Shadow Patrick has been causing problems with his arrows, and I want something to distract him.
Sil tries to help out with ranged spells, but the Shade Lord has fast-casting Chromatic Orbs.
Jan, desperate to take down that Spell Turning effect, casts Domination. With its -2 penalty to save, it could very well charm him when it bounces back, so I have him unequip Arbane's Sword and his flashers lest he turn them against the party. Luckily, he makes his save.
The gamble works! The Shade Lord's Spell Turning goes down! Sil hurries in to cast Magic Resistance on the Shade Lord. To keep his Blade Barrier from disrupting Sil's spell, I have the Shade Lord's current target, Laosha's Skeleton Warrior, take a couple steps south so that the Shade Lord will walk away from Sil, just far enough for her to escape the Blade Barrier's area of effect.
It works. But Shadow Patrick sees what's going on and puts a stop to it.
So much work to take down that Spell Turning effect, and then we lose our Magic Resistance spell. We have to proceed without it.
I start using my stronger options. Greater Malison manages to get past the Shade Lord's MR.
Sil and Valos, our Necromancer, fire off Hold Undead spells. The Shade Lord fails its save!
Now only Shadow Patrick remains intact. We focus on the Shade Lord first, bringing out Phantom Blade and Flind form to bypass his weapon immunities.
We snag the Cloak of Stars (WoL-compatible!) from Merella's body. Next up, Trademeet. Sunfire will do well against those Trolls.
Unfortunately, Trolls still have inaccurately broad immunities due to engine limitations, but Sunfire will still work even if Emotion won't.
After buffing most of the party with Protection from Electricity to block Call Lightning, we approach Kyland Lind. We lose Valos early to a Charm Person or Mammal spell, but we have much stronger disablers than the enemy.
One druid resists basically everything we throw at him, so we haul out a group of Efreet to help us out.
Espellier burns her way through the mushroom bridge, only to die in a single round against some bears, since she only had one Stoneskin left.
Fighting Dalok was a mess, but it's not very enlightening. Basically we mobbed him with the Efreet brigade, an Insect Plague shut down most of our party member's spellcasting, Jan bailed us out with Invisibility 10' Radius to wait out the spell failure, and then we had to resort to spider form to kill the enemy druids when our Efreet faded away.
The Efreeti from the Efreeti Bottle is terribly strong, but it only lasts 10 rounds. Plus, its script prioritizes turning invisible over attacking, which costs us precious seconds it could be using to whomp on the enemy. It's a very strong but very unresponsive summons, much like Nymphs from Call Woodland Beings. Bring out six at once (it appears to bypass the summoning cap, like demon summoning, at least with the Wand of Lightning), and they're very difficult to control.
Cernd kills Faldorn, by which I mean I hit her with CTRL-Y. Back at Trademeet, we take all the credit in front of Lord Logan Coinpurse.
Next up, the De'Arnise Hold.
I've seen feedback loops from Sanchuudoku and Item Revisions Yamato, but I've never actually seen two Fire Shields produce the feedback loop. I never understood why this was the case, because they all use the same opcode and the spell files never indicated there was a trigger to arrest the loop. Either it should happen every time or it should never happen.
Laosha, our Cleric of Tyr, reaches level 11 and immediately dual-classes. Sil, our Cleric of Lathander, was dead during some important battles and is therefore well behind him in terms of XP. I'm not sure we're ready to deal with the De'Arnise Hold with the party weakened like this, so I head back to Athkatla and re-start the Mae'Var questline. Efreet get us past the mephits and golems in Rayic Gethras' home, but the guy at the top will be a bit more complicated.
We start out with a single-target spell, taking advantage of his pre-pre-buff vulnerability. He fails an important save.
In vanilla this would basically doom him, but one stroke of luck isn't good enough for LoB mode. We start debuffing him.
Espellier fails once more to cast SI: Abjuration in time and gets debuffed. The rest of the party keeps up the pace, and Ray-Ray's defenses go down, but he downs a Potion of Invisibility before Valos can land a Breach spell on him.
For a moment I'm not sure what to do. Ray-Ray has no spell protections anymore, but his specific protections are still in place. Then I remember that I've got a gang of level 24 mages already on hand. We nail Ray-Ray with a volley of Flame Arrows.
We stop short of killing Mae'Var since I'm wary of fighting him. I no longer have aTweaks installed and am fairly certain that it's possible to flee from the fight with Mae'Var midway through (aTweaks locks you in with him until he's dead), but I'm not willing to risk it. Instead, I'm going to make a little more progress at the De'Arnise Hold, now that both Sil and Laosha have dual-classed to make and gained a few levels.
We get ambushed by Trolls the moment we arrive. Both of them die before Poppy, our Enchanter Charname, can rescue them.
We torch the Trolls with Sunfire, Feeblemind Glaicas, tear down the golems in ogre form bolstered by Enchanted Weapon (without which ogre form's nonmagical weapon couldn't hurt them), run to Watcher's Keep to cure the Clay Golem's Cursed Wound effect and raise Valos (with both clerics dual-classed, we can't do those things ourselves anymore), and return to find the Iron Golem mysteriously missing, while two other golems remain where they were, still neutral. I think it's because I used the console to reach WK and return, and that messed up with something, somehow.
It sneaks up on us later. Out of laziness, I remove it with CTRL-Y. I didn't feel like going invisible and resting up and buffing up the party and then very, very, very slowly whittling it down. It was worth losing the XP just to avoid the hassle.
When I get back to the hold, I also get ambushed by respawned Trolls. Had I not used CTRL-J to hop around the map, I'd have fought them one by one, but instead, I just get swarmed at odd intervals by the many Trolls wandering around. CTRL-Y removes the problem at the cost of tens of thousands of XP. It probably speaks to my attitude towards Trolls that I'd rather let my two dual-classed characters remain stagnant than spend time fighting Trolls to feed them XP.
What most bothers me is that even with CTRL-Y, Trolls routinely refuse to die. And Spirit Trolls remain untargetable even after they collapse.
In previous posts I've stressed just how much I hate Spirit Trolls and their persistent invisibility. Everything about them is aggravating: the STR drain that bypasses Stoneskin, the attack that heals themselves on every hit, their regeneration, their habit of vanishing and forcing you to wait until they come back, and their virtual immunity to single-target spells. Melf's Acid Arrow and Burning Hands are supposed to be our primary Troll-killing spells, and you can't target Spirit Trolls with them. Plus, they tend to arrive in groups, which means you can often spend several rounds attacking one Spirit Troll at full health while another injured one regenerates, because the injured one vanished and your party started targeting the stronger one instead. Spirit Trolls are worth gobs of XP, but it's not worth it. I don't want the XP; I just want to move on!
Out of sheer exasperation, I remove the invisibility effect from the TROLLSP.itm file, rendering all Spirit Trolls permanently visible. And out of sheer hatred, I create a custom +8 katana that sets your APR to 10, grants immunity to damage and immunity to level 0-10 and level 15 spells, increases THAC0 by 50, has a reach of 200, and deals 50d50 crushing, fire, acid, poison, and magic damage, with the slay opcode and a vorpal strike on top just so I don't have to wait for the Trolls to fall down before killing them. This was necessary because the last such sword I created only did 20d20 damage per hit.
I give it to Espellier, since she already has 70% of the party's kills thanks to Sunfire. I only use the sword in one fight--the pair of Spectral Trolls before the Umber Hulk room--but it will save time in the long run. I'll probably use it for kobolds and stuff.
Maybe I should just never play the De'Arnise Hold anymore, or at least wait until level 12 to kill everything instantly with Death Spell (note that the Death Spell won't kill Trolls in LoB mode due to the +12 enemy level bonus). I don't remember the last time I enjoyed that quest. It's nothing more than a source of gold and XP to me.
Eventually I remember that Jan is still waiting for me to visit his home. We do his quest (the Githyanki at the end get knocked out by Emotion and pummeled by Efreet) before returning to the De'Arnise Hold to fight the Umber Hulks (who get knocked out by Emotion and pummeled by Efreet). All that's left is TorGal.
and I headed to Larswood with the intention of finding the bandit's camp. I still managed to survive this part, but at a great cost.
I love the roleplaying value of bards but Garrick had only been a scroll-wasting machine before he got himself killed.
First he almost got eaten by a bear while the rest of the party was fighting a couple of Blacktalons. Then he panicked and wandered off. Good thing that I have a bard to restore morale... Oh, wait!
Of course, the fleeing bard went directly into a second group of Blacktalons with predictable consequences
I ventured north with Ajantis, Imoen and Xzar. Gods, would I miss having a cleric!
Conor was getting tired of seeing companions die. Although Garrick had always seemed ill fit for adventure, Ajantis was proving to be a great addition to the team, so maybe things would go better.
Those Blacktalons sure were cold-hearted thugs, but one had to admire their effectiveness and style. With some ice arrows in his pack, Conor thought he was ready to defeat a bandit camp by himself.
Obviously he was not. Conor barely survived the fight in the bandit camp, and Ajantis died poisoned by a hobgoblin in the big tent. The group had used all the healing potions and nobody had thought of buying antidotes. Carrying the body of Ajantis, the party went back to the Friendly Arm Inn, where the paladin was resurrected. He was never too happy with the questionable way that Conor had led the party, and coming back from the dead did nothing for his general satisfaction. To placate him, and sincerely believing that the group could use better guidance, he stepped back and let Ajantis lead the party for a while. Conor also let the squire keep the magic gauntlets from the big tent. Now he had a magic longbow after all.
Before going to the Cloakwoods, the party is going to explore the areas surrounding Beregost and Naskhel. That problem with Brage, the captain of the guard, seemed important.
Notice the Worg in front of her. We use it as a target to carry a group of Cloudkill charges into the enemy group, which unfortunately slays our Wizard Eye.
It was only there to guide the Worg, but it would be nice if we could have kept spying on them. It seems Wizard Eyes are quite vulnerable in 2.1 EE.
One of TorGal's Yuan-ti Mage buddies comes over to debuff Espellier. For once, I remember to cast SI: Abjuration. But I don't do it fast enough, wasting the spell.
Valos, who already lost his invisibility by summoning that Worg, takes the Wand of Lightning and Efreeti Bottle and surrounds Espellier with a protective ring of Efreet, which hopefully won't get instantly killed by a hostile Death Spell.
A second Yuan-ti Mage comes along, but we don't see a Death Spell.
Now the whole party is debuffed. That's bad. At least the enemy doesn't use missile weapons. Those are especially nasty for debuffed parties of mages.
I use one of my favorite spell combinations: a fast-casting Invisibility spell on a character trying to cast the slow but powerful Invisibility 10' Radius spell.
Poppy therefore keeps Jan from getting disrupted when casting the spell he needs to rescue the party. We scatter to heal and rebuff, but we lose control of two party members thanks to TorGal's Cloak of Fear, and our Efreet begin to crumple.
TorGal can see through our invisibility and chooses to pursue Jan. For a moment, I'm not sure what to do, since Jan can't possibly survive long with TorGal on his tail. Then I have an idea.
I pull Jan back into the far southern hallway and have him fire off the Wand of Cloudkill into the Umber Hulk room, where all of TorGal's buddies are busy sparring with our Efreet. Jan runs in circles to minimize TorGal's effective APR while we wait for the Cloudkill charges to make their presence felt.
Jan re-casts Stoneskin the very second TorGal removes his last skin.
His STR has been drained so far that he can't even carry his crossbow and TorGal's awful claw attack has slowed him, but Jan escapes into the Umber Hulk room when the Cloudkill charges have cleared, and downs our very last Potion of Invisibility when the other Trolls break through his very last Stoneskin spell.
TorGal, oddly enough, fails to follow Jan. But for once, I want TorGal to be attacking us, because this next part requires his participation.
Espellier enters the room while invisible, casts PFMW, and breaks invisibility to draw the remaining Trolls towards her. Meanwhile, Jan lures TorGal from the southern hallway. With his last breath, despite massive damage, he casts one more spell, just to slightly weaken the Trolls.
Jan crumples in TorGal's claws, but he has done an impressive service to the party. Now Espellier is right next to TorGal, safely protected by PFMW. We are in luck: she makes an important saving throw and therefore does not lose the next few rounds to running away.
She'd have had to re-cast PFMW if she had failed. This way, we have a spare casting in case we ever need it.
Espellier chain-casts Sunfire. TorGal's high HP and MR lets him survive, but his friends aren't quite so tough.
PFMW doesn't last long enough. Espellier memorized 4 Sunfire spells, but given the delay when she entered the room, PFMW runs out before she can cast her last Sunfire spell. TorGal doesn't let her.
We return the favor. We nabbed a Wand of Fire earlier on (I forget from where), and combining it with the Wand of Lightning lets us deal some desperately-needed damage against TorGal while wiping out the last of his companions.
Now TorGal is in very bad shape, and he has several newly re-buffed mages to deal with. We use one of the few disablers that works against BG2 Trolls.
I check to see if Feeblemind works against TorGal. He fails his save! I see the yellow glow wash over him.
But then he keeps attacking. He's immune to the feeblemind effect. Notice Laosha in Flind form and Valos in spider form--their THAC0 is terrible, but they're out of spells.
Sil gets spooked by TorGal's Cloak of Fear. Dual-classing deprived us of our normal Remove Fear spells, so we neither have immunities nor any way of removing fear once a party member fails a save. To avoid losing control of our main character, I have Poppy drink a Potion of Magic Protection.
Combining it with the Wand of Lightning gives her 300% MR, capped at 127%, granting immunity to Cloak of Fear. This also makes her immune to TorGal's STR drain, which does not bypass MR.
We land a hit in spider form, and discover that TorGal is vulnerable to its powerful poison effect.
But looking at our attack rolls, we have no real hope of bringing him down with Polymorph Self. He's going to regenerate faster than we can harm him. Then Valos loses his last Stoneskin and gets hit for more than half his total HP. A WoL Potion of Healing brings him back up to full health.
I pull him back and let TorGal attack Laosha instead. Soon, Laosha is close to death, and I know drinking potions won't keep him alive for long. TorGal deals far more than 60 damage per round. I switch Laosha to Mustard Jelly form to gain immunity to piercing damage.
Then I realize jelly form also grants 100% MR, and therefore blocks TorGal's STR drain. Laosha could tank TorGal indefinitely in jelly form!
And then it runs out.
There is no saving Laosha anymore.
Shapeshifting is no longer an option. We have to try something else. Poppy drinks an Oil of Speed and gets TorGal to chase her. She punishes his pursuit with a Wand of Lightning and Wand of Frost.
It's not much to go on considering how few charges we have. But another realization strikes: Poppy's MR from the Potion of Magic Protection will also make her immune to the Wand of Fire. I hand the wand to Valos and have him bomb TorGal from afar.
A bad attack roll on TorGal's part spares Poppy a disrupted spell, but it makes little difference. Just as she's bringing out her last defense, TorGal collapses in front of her.
Valos switches to the Agannazar's Scorcher charge to save on Fireball charges, which can't be used with the WoL trick, and burns TorGal into the ground.
I didn't think we were going to survive that. We lost a lot of limited resources, plus 3000 gold to raise our fallen party members, but it was worth it to see TorGal die.
I have a few questions:
- LoB apparently increases enemy AI (not just enemy HPs, Thac0, APR etc). Is this AI enhancement significant? Does anyone know how it compars to SCS?
- If I install SCS in BGEE, do its general components (spell tweaks, smarter general AI, smarter Mages etc) also apply to SoD?
- @semiticgod, does your current install include Ascension? Is it possible to play Ascension in BG2EE v2.1?
player summons get *2+20 hp
max rest encounters increases by 1
+75 gold per pickup
creature levels are treated as level + 12 for some checks
non controlled sprites cannot fail morale checks
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/717207/#Comment_717207
The AI is enhanced in SoD, however. And I actually think that the AI in SoD is very good, with enemies using backstabbing and special abilities. No, they don't. They only apply to BGEE before you go into SoD. It works - check https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/745347/#Comment_745347
Everything about the character (gender, race, class, profs) were all based on a random number generator.
Random dice rolls for stats taking best 3 rolls of 5 as suggested by OP. Rolled in order and not changed at all.
I hadn't tried LoB before but decided I'd give it a shot and try to get through of bgee, SoD and bg2ee.
Meet Valen female blade.
11 12 13 17 15 17
She was proficient in darts and halberds.
Valen decided to run around Candlekeep only buying a bolt of crossbow bolts for Fuller. Armed only with a dagger found in the bookshelf in the inn she ran into Carbos. He promptly used a potion of speed and then invisibility. Valen trying to run back outside got chunked from a backstab...
Rest in peace Valen.
Thanks for the idea guys. I think I'll be a no-reloader from now on. Much better way to stop restartitis.
This reminds me of the super-luckily rolled Dragon Disciple that I lost in Candlekeep not long ago. Carbos probably ended more no-reload runs then anyone -- even without Legacy of Bhaal.
I headed to the woods feeling quite confident. My party of 5 (Ajantis, Branwen, Imoen, Xzar and charname) had no problems in the areas surrounding Nashkel, and they had leveled up after basilics, sirenes, etc.
Now I see the mistakes that cost me the challenge:
-The cloakwood without a thief disarming traps can be a nightmare. Imoen was dualing to mage and she was about to recover the thieving skills so I went ahead anyway. Still, I could have handled the traps in a better way (invisibility potion or something) and I didn't.
-I gave Ajantis the protection against poison scroll, and yet Conor couldn't stay in the backseat. Charname's survival should have been 1st priority!
-Last, but not least, I panicked when the phase spider got me injured and I gulped a healing potion XD That didn't give me time to gulp an antidote. Wow, the phase spider poison kills fast!
I also see it as divine retribution for starting off evil. Although my reputation was 16 at the moment, I had gained horror instead of slow poison as a special ability after the bandit camp.
The worst was that I had almost died when I got held by a web with the group behind and an ettercap was coming for me. Xzar saved me in extremis using the summon monster wand in front of me. Should have taken the hint.
Now I don't know whether to keep Conor in a minimal reload walkthrough or to start a new no-reload with a pure thief kit. Darn, I really thought I could make it at least to SoD without dying.
If memory serves, @Alesia_BH had previously no-reloaded successfully a solo thief (among other classes). It is a fascinating challenge I have yet to dare myself.
If I work fast, I can usually get all the Webs set off in one Potion of Freedom, but if things don't go smoothly enough, it can take two or even three. (I believe Thalantyr only has three, so it's never been more than that.)
If I work my way to the central lair and get the Spider's Bane sword, I can then continue the same strategy for the rest of the map, using the sword.
I don't know of any better use in BG1 for the Potions of Freedom that Thalantyr sells. They can make this otherwise terrifying map a piece of cake.
We sided with Bodhi because SCS vampires suck. I like to start the main quest immediately after killing Mae'Var, because siding with Bodhi cuts off the Mae'Var questline, but grants a lot of fast XP. Before proceeding to Aran Linvail, we first stopped by the Windspear Hills.
I did something to improve our chances which had a small impact but I feel was clever. Instead of traveling from Athkatla to the Windspear Hills, I first stopped by the Druid Grove. This way, both my Stoneskin and Invisibility 10' Radius spells would still be active when I arrived for the paladin ambush.
Most of Firkraag's lair wasn't actually all that enlightening. I relied heavily on the Efreet for almost everything. Some cute optimizations included (1) using Protection from Normal Weapons to block the attacks of Vampiric Mists, saving us hundreds or thousands of gold in Restoration spells from a temple, (2) using PFMW and double Fire Shields to damage golems (though the Efreet brigade still did most of the work), (3) slipping past the Ancient Vampire horde using Invisibility 10' Radius, (4) permanently disabling those awful Greater Wolfweres using Lower Resistance, Greater Malison, and Feeblemind, and (5) prebuffing the whole party with Protection from Fire and carefully timing WoL Sunfire spells, one from our Necromancer and two from our Invoker, to interrupt Kaol's and Legdoril's spells when fighting Samia and her entourage in close quarters.
Finally we meet Firkraag and have to fight Conster. The thing about our party is that we have mage levels on every character, but our scrolls are actually spread surprisingly thin. Three of our characters have Spell Immunity, another two have Spell Immunity: Abjuration, the SCS-exclusive spell that only provides SI: Abj, but no other SI spells, and one person, Laosha, has no immunity to dispel magic at all. Right off the bat, I know Laosha is going to be very weak in this fight.
We start out with a coordinated assault: multiple Spell Thrust spells to debuff Conster, alongside a Greater Malison from Jan and a Chaos spell from Poppy, our Enchanter Charname. Despite a combined -10 save penalty, Conster resists the spell.
The next round, however, we confuse him with a second Chaos spell.
One problem with my install is that the SCS strings are messed up, so I have to rely on the spell visuals to see which spell protections a mage has active. I have to dedicate extra time to debuffing because I have no way of knowing in advance how much pressure I need to debuff a mage. I have to wait several seconds to find out if a mage's defenses are down.
We break down Conster's defenses on the third round... and knock him out at the same time.
But somehow he wakes up, despite Emotion not allowing victims to wake up on being hit. The instant he does, he fires off a Spell Trigger.
This is bad news. Four of my characters are in spider form and have to spend another round returning to normal form before we can restart debuffing him. Sil, who never learned Polymorph Self and was already in human form, has no good spells to cast, and therefore brings out the Efreet brigade, which I had hoped not to use. The Efreet blast Conster with damage spells. The lingering poison damage from our spider attacks finishes him off.
Laosha and Sil are inches away from regaining their cleric levels. They will be absolute monsters once they do.
@lurith, my condolences, you're doing well though. I'm glad you haven't been discouraged, and look forward to your straight Thief.
As @Ygramul stated, @Alesia_BH has indeed once soloed a kitless Thief, an exact copy of Alora. I think she abandoned that run in the Underdark.
@semiticgod, shame that strings are messed up in your install. I'm fearing the same for mine. Respect for not letting it compromise your current run (at least for now).
Thanks @bengoshi for the information. I installed a few mods: BG2Tweaks (parts), BG1 NPC Project, Rogue Rebalancing, SCS v30 (using @subtledoctor's hot fix), and JimFix (parts). Components that add or change dialog or descriptions tend not to work. RR items had wrong descriptions, BG2Tweaks' Revised weapon proficiency system, and SCS' Skip Candlekeep and NPC kick out banter all had nonsensical dialog or descriptions, so I uninstalled such components.
Other components, such as BG2Tweaks' Reveal City Maps When Entering Area, Stores Sell Higher Stacks of Items, and Change Effect of Reputation on Store Prices -> Low Reputation Store Discount (Sabre), all seem to work fine. I'm not 100% sure about SCS yet. Greywolf quaffed a potion, but the white text that should say *quaffs a potion* said something completely different ("I can't in good conscience leave the girl behind" - which made me wonder about Greywolf's personal life.) Ctrl-q revealed that he had indeed quaffed a potion (stone giant strength), so this behavior seems to be working. I also found that antagonizing Tarnesh resulted in him instantly activating a Mirror Image and starting an incantation (Horror), which matches my expectation of SCS' full enemy prebuffs.
SoD and v2.1 have been very inspirational, especially LoB mode. I haven't had much time for playing, but I've come up with several characters that I think might rock in LoB mode. I considered putting them together in a custom party, but eventually decided against it because I didn't want to use up all that inspiration, and because the BG1 NPC Project mod and SoD wanted me to work with the game's NPCs. (However, as mentioned above, I ended up uninstalling BG1 NPC Project due to its dialogs being a mess.)
My current character is not one of the powerbuilds I had in mind for LoB mode. Instead, it was a beautiful BG-style portrait I chanced upon that decided who my new protagonist was going to be: Maeve, NE Human Kensai:
Maeve's starting profs were ** Scimitars, * SWS, and * Daggers. I picked the latter proficiency for throwing daggers, counting on Kivan to help me to a returning throwing dagger through his personal BG1 NPC Project quest. Now that I uninstalled that mod, I kind of regret not having gone with Axes. I might try to forge a personal item for her, like Alesia often does, a returning throwing dagger with some kind of passive bonus for flavor.
I decided to activate LoB XP bonuses because I know I lack the patience for taking a few minutes to kill a single Gibberling or a Hobgoblin for 35 XP. What I didn't expect though was this:
Btw
After this encouraging start, she traveled on to the crossroads, where she slew a Xvart and one or two more Gibberlings. From there she visited Beregost. Killing Landrin's Spiders taught us that XP values for kills do not increase exponentially with stronger enemies. Each Huge Spider was good for circa 1500 XP. Algernon added another 1030 when he refused to donate his cloak to Maeve's cause.
Near the Nashkel Mines she took out Greywolf with her throwing daggers. Thankfully he didn't apply an oil of speed.
Maeve's level 6 now and wondering whether she should seek the company of fellow adventurers.
This is my skald:
I have read the charisma tome to raise my charisma to 18.
Party is me, Ajantis, Branwen, Minsc, Dynaheir, and Imoen. Imoen and I are level 6, the rest are level 5.
Game setup is no mods, Core Rules, no max hit points, no automatic spell learning. It's interesting how luck can affect hit points without the max hit points cheat. RNG tends to even out all the hit dice of various character classes, leaving everyone in the party near a median hit point value. It doesn't matter though, because I learned a long time ago that hit points don't matter - it's not getting hit in the first place that matters, along with spell resistances and immunities.
Here's our completed quests as of now:
We've completed the Cloakwood, Davaeorn, ankhegs, and BG City up through Marek's and Lothander's poison quest, and most associated side quests along the way.
I decided to go up to Ulgoth's Beard and start the Werewolf Island quest, which I think I'd like to do this run, because it's so much easy xp, as long as you're prepared to handle Karoug. (That basically means Dynaheir with Haste spells, my skald song, and Ajantis has two pips in bastard sword. Minsc can use the other sword non-proficiently if necessary.) The decision to go to Werewolf Island could end my no-reload, but, I've always kind of liked that module, a lot better than I like either Ice Island or Durlag's Tower, mostly because it's a straight up physical melee module with no mage or trap cheese against the party. I do love a straightforward fight with party magic supporting the fighters. I see that as fair and honorable. I see mage cheese as unfair and dishonorable.
After returning to BG City to get the sea charts, we're going to pursue the main questline and convenient side quests up through exiting the Candlekeep Catacombs to the south, doing the siren map along the way, and only then actually going to Werewolf Island as a last module before finishing up with Sarevok and BG1, and transitioning into SoD.
I'm not planning on going to Ice Island or Durlag's Tower, because, mage, trap, and maze Limburger - yuck. No thank you.
Lots of excitement and close calls today, but, really, just the same old same old BG1 to all the no-reload veterans who've played a thousand times, so, I didn't really think making battle-by-battle screen shots and writing description for them was worth it.
Here are a couple of screen shots showing my place in the game with my current journal:
Aran Linvail escapes the clouds to attack us, but get debuffed and disabled.
He could have been a big problem, as his backstabs would have dealt crazy damage and he has multiple debuffers on hand. His mage friend, the other key wild card, lingers in the cloud, and to keep her from escaping when we go to check on her, we knock her out with Emotion.
Before we head to Brynnlaw, I want to scrounge up some more XP. In the Graveyard crypts, I discover that there is a good reason to cover Espellier with Protection from Fire even when she's the one casting Sunfire.
Sunfire in EE no longer grants the caster temporary immunity to fire damage like it did in vanilla; it just uses a different projectile from Fireball to protect the caster from the blast. This means our Efreet's Fire Shields spells can seriously injure or even instantly kill her if they are nearby when she casts Sunfire.
Finally, finally Laosha hits level 12 and recovers his Cleric of Tyr levels. He can now combine the WoL with Divine Favor for a massive boost in damage and THAC0. We try it out on a Skeleton Warrior using spider form, and slay it in two rounds.
Then I realize this build isn't nearly as strong as I thought. Killing a critter in two rounds in LoB mode without Greater Whirlwind attack is pretty impressive, but Divine Favor only lasts two rounds. That's not all that big of a jump in damage output.
Fortunately, Laosha still has a power jump left when he hits level 18. With Enchanted Weapon and a WoL Divine Favor, he can have below -10 THAC0 in Mind Flayer form and strike with a +3 weapon. He has yet to peak.
I want to strike at the weakened Sorcerous Amon, but Brennan Risling is blocking the way. I blast him with Sunfire, but it's not enough.
Notice Laosha standing to the far right. He got debuffed and therefore had no immunity to fire damage; that Sunfire would have killed him if I hadn't moved him aside.
Since we can't attack Amon, he casts Chaos without risk of disruption. Everyone in the area of effect fails their save; only Laosha remains intact. Worse yet, Sil has suddenly lost her defenses and is about to die.
Laosha uses Divine Favor in spider form and absolutely crushes the enemy. Without his allies to get in the way, Amon is defenseless against spider poison.
Next on the chopping block is Draug Fea et al, because I can't find the Rakshasa that holds the Cloak of the Sewers. The whole fight is best summarized in three screenshots.
Looks like SCS enemies will prioritize attacking summoned skeletons even if it puts them in the middle of a cloud.