Distance from civilization is no excuse for a lack of spell scrolls when +3 weapons are widely available for purchase in Kuldahar. It isn't a rural backwater--magic is very prevalent in IWD.
Distance from civilization is no excuse for a lack of spell scrolls when +3 weapons are widely available for purchase in Kuldahar. It isn't a rural backwater--magic is very prevalent in IWD.
This is a good point, actually.
I would wish IWD was a low magic World -- few enough non-magic items that you ache to use Flame Blade, Shilelagh etc. to hit some enemies for half the game. And that the game perhaps *suggests* strongly to only use magic users with great rarity.
... perhaps even that the party is just given to you: a rag tag group of non-optimal strangers:
a drunken ex-Dwarf and some Gnomish traders following a Halfing Cleric; they are joined by a drop-out from a wizzard academy named Rincewind with a familiar that looks like luggage (he *says* he can cast spells, but can't seem to actually learn any) etc.
Wait. I think, I'm on to something here. Anyone wanna run a Rincewind challenge through the IWD?
Distance from civilization is no excuse for a lack of spell scrolls when +3 weapons are widely available for purchase in Kuldahar. It isn't a rural backwater--magic is very prevalent in IWD.
Well I guess we can assume that those few mages in the North are more willing to spend arcane resources on crafting gear rather than on scribing scrolls. Even Orrick the Gray moonlights as an armor crafter/enchanter.
We are ready to enter Lower Dorn's Deep with our no-reload status intact. Nothing up to this point can make us even break a sweat. I'm hoping things take a turn to at least moderately challenging in Lower Dorn's Deep.
I think my run is a case-in-point of BG2 kits breaking this game. Minsc as a berserker, Khalid as an archer, both buffed with my skald song, are trivializing almost every encounter. I'm starting to think that in order to have any no-reload "forum cred" at all, I'm going to have to eventually come back to this without using any BG2 kits, and giving my BG characters the exact same stats as they have in BG. (Does 18 DEX and 16-18 CON really make *that* much difference?)
I'm not convinced that 18 STR is that telling, since, as long as it's at least 15 for each melee party member, I can raise it to 18 pretty easily with a Strength spell, or two, or three. And, as long as the spell has a high enough roll to bring a STR score to 18, fighters also get a randomly rolled exceptional STR roll in IWD:EE.
My current theory is that giving most of my characters 18 DEX, plus BG2 kits, are what is "breaking" my game. But even without the 18 DEX, I could still use the Cat's Grace spell to raise it to 18 with any character who has at least a 15.
Victory shots for Upper Dorn's Deep:
Here are shots of what is supposed to be a boss-level encounter in the Frost Giant caves. Not with this party and these settings! They could barely scratch us, and I had more spells being cast when the "big bad" fell.
Joril falls, and we receive the second of six sigils:
EDIT: You could maybe argue that it's the "max hitpoints on level up" that is making this so easy. But, what's the difference between 80hp and 120hp when the enemy can't damage you significantly *at all*?
2nd EDIT: Btw, I discovered that Insect Plague in IWD:EE is *not* party friendly. Since the insects attack friend and foe alike, that renders this spell pretty much useless in IWD:EE, just as Horrid Wilting.
So. Reasons for highly enchanted equipment in the frozen norths: (And I'll concede that it's preposterous, but I'm playing devil's advocate)
Going back to my point that not many people know how to use magic: What does this mean for salesmen like Orrick who use their magical abilities to supply the money they need to fund their research or even allow them simply to keep living in the north? It means that when it comes to the magic they supply to the rest of society, it needs to be something that everyone else can actually use. While magically talented individuals are scarce, the ability to swing a blade is not limited. A mage could make an excellent profit (albeit perhaps a lesser one than if he were to live further south) by selling magical equipment to a society that would highly benefit from their use. Not to mention, a fair number of the highly enchanted pieces of equipment we see in IWD are relics of a bygone era, likely discovered by adventurers or part of a mages' collection that was sold off due to disuse or a need for money to fund other pursuits. After all, how many times have we, while playing BG or IWD have found a bastard sword of +infinity, but simply sold it off because who the heck uses bastard swords? It makes perfect sense that other adventurers would do the same.
I am mysteriously missing screenshots, but I can re-construct recent progress by memory.
We continue with our basic strategy, and it works fairly well. Valos, our Avenger, or Poppy or Espellier, our sorcerers, absorb enemy attacks while our sorcerers chain-cast Fireball. Spiders are immune to Chromatic Orb as well as Web (I have no idea why), but combining Malison with Slow helps decrease enemy pressure enough for our Mirror Image and Stoneskin/Ironskin spells to hold for the duration of the fight. I add in other little optimizations, like paralyzing high-HP Trolls with Chromatic Orb and disabling priests of Talona with Hold Person and Fobie's level 11 Special Snares. The second level of Dragon's Eye is complete.
We enter Presio's lair. Cold Wights can deal lots of cold damage in short order, so I use Valos, who is resistant to cold damage thanks to Entropy Shield, as our tank. Fireballs, as always, are my favorite way of dealing with Cold Wights. I use an Improved Alacrity belt to clear up the other Cold Wight hordes to save time; I don't like replaying the same battle multiple times.
Instead of confronting Presio directly and allowing her Apprentice to wander down south to flank us, I take the party to the far northeast corner of the room and paralyze the Apprentice with a Chromatic Orb from behind. Valos, as the only party member that's immune to poison, tanks the Poison Zombies, and his Entropy Shield also blocks Magic Missile when Presio's Imbued Wights come up to the north to join the fight. Hold Undead has a limited impact on the skirmish.
Presio doesn't come to rescue her Apprentice the way her Apprentice comes to rescue her, so we go down to confront Presio in her lab. Web shuts down her spellcasting and Fireball takes her out, along with her warrior buddy and zombie goons.
The Eldathyn lair is often a pain due to the very large area and multiple intense fights, especially since the High Summoner likes to call out new summons from afar. I stick with my standard formula: Web the hallway just past Albion, then focus on Albion and the librarian with Chromatic Orbs and missile fire while the Eldathyns are on the way.
It works well, but to my dismay, I find that Emotion has no effect on anybody. After casting it four or five times in heavily crowded areas, I see only a single message indicating a successful save. I've seen Chromatic Orbs and Hold Person spells mysteriously fail to have any impact, not even showing a saving throw, but Emotion appears to be especially unlikely to take effect--over 90% of the time, Emotion does not even force a save, nor does it show any "Unaffected by the Effects of Emotion" message. It uses a special projectile, which must be bugged. The spell is useless.
I run out to rest, but summoned Lizard Men from the other room teleport outside to greet us shortly after. Poppy casts Invisibility on Espellier so Espellier can get Invisibility 10' Radius, with its lengthy 9 casting time, off the ground safely. We then rest while invisible.
The Lizard Men sniff us out--a fluke of the AI--and try to corner us. Our sorcerers, buffed with Shield and Mirror Image and Stoneskin, break invisibility to draw the enemy's attention. Malison and Slow keep them from boxing us in.
In IWD:EE enemies apparently do not change targets. As long as their first target is visible, they will pursue it even if somebody else is attacking them nearby. This can make things very frustrating if you want to get somebody out of the way, but it also opens up opportunities. Because our sorcerers broke their invisibility first, Valos can cast Protection from Fire on both sorcerers without getting mobbed.
Now that Poppy has the Robe of Fire Resistance from Presio's Apprentice, and Espellier has the Mantle of the Coming Storm, both of them are immune to fire after being buffed with Protection from Fire (which normally only grants 80% resistance to fire). They safely torch the Lizard Men. Only two Lizard Men veer off to attack the rest of the party, but Chromatic Orb stops them in their tracks.
We very slowly make our way through the Eldathyn lair. Web and Chromatic Orb aren't as effective as they used to be, since enemy HP is increasing while our weapons do the same damage. A pair of Webs is no longer sufficient to take down a group of enemies, or even kill half of a normal group, even if Valos uses spider form. Fireball remains our one reliable source of damage. Chromatic Orb, Web, and Fireball do most of the work, as usual.
Our sorcerers are now level 11. We can cast Minor Sequencer and therefore deal twice as much damage with the scorcher loop, although there's little need for it given the success of Fireball. More importantly, we can cast Lower Resistance and Feeblemind, which I picked for the sole reason that they could help us bring down Yxunomei.
Without summons, enemy pressure is crippling, and AC, Mirror Image, Stoneskin, and invisibility become far, far more important. Immunity to poison is another huge factor in Dragon's Eye, as spiders can easily kill a fully buffed sorcerer at our level. But our druid has poor AC normally, and Barkskin is short-lived. However, by combining Marilyn Blueapple's newfound Spirit Armor spell with Entropy Shield, Valos can stay below -10 AC just long enough for our sorcerers to exhaust their Fireball spells.
Want to share a close shave moment and illustrate the challenge of a take-the-first-roll party:
First, the party (IWD; Insane without extra XP or dmg) - Dauntless Nahael, a barbarian returnin to the North on a family quest, helped by a mysterious sage known simply as... - The Mother (C/M) - Barakh the Shield, a clueless Paladin (rolled an INT of 5) - Khial Neverbetter - Halfling C/T (She answers "neverbetter" whenever someone asks how things are going) - Vitra the Storm - an Avenger - Bahamut Diresong - he... errr.... sings
Almost no one has exceptional DEX; the The Mother has the highest INT of 15. At this point no one has memorized any Spells yet, because potions of +INT are rare and I can't afford the scrolls anyway.
The Mother rolled a sequence of 1HP level ups and is sitting at 13HP as a 4/4 C/M.
[picture]
Visiting the Temple of the Forgotten God. Second level, end of the corridor, you are faced with about 4 Verbeegs and 3 acolytes. Hardly an epic encounter. But it almost wiped my party.
At this point in the game I have basically no money left (earlier Resurrections were costly; and I bought a few necessities, including Belt of Dong -- wait, is Dong the Dog of Arfitice?).
My Avenger's mage spells prove decisive as I Web the Acolytes (Web is useless against Verbeegs) and throw a Spike Growth at them. But they manage to Hold Person Nahael. Barakh the Shield holds of the Verbeegs for a few precious seconds and is down to 1HP; Khial off-tanks.
This is all carefully micromanaged and at the moment of the screenshot I am almost about to lose two characters as the Verbeegs dash past my lines. A lucky roll with a Chromatic Orb (Avenger again) buys enough time for Nahael, while Barakh finds the better part of valor.
Experiments with EEKeeper and Near Infinity indicate that it's impossible to stop chunking in IWD:EE. Both the "disable permanent death" opcode and the minimum HP opcode fail to prevent chunking.
On to Yxunomei's lair. To simplify buffing and avoid having to run someplace to rest, I create a custom spell that rests the party and grants improved alacrity and +30 to casting time for 6 seconds. This greatly speeds up the game.
The Yuan-ti here are very vulnerable to Web, Chromatic Orb, and Fireball. They warrant no additional strategy. But Yxunomei herself is another story.
When you speak to Yxunomei, three Yuan-ti Mages teleport in behind you while Yxunomei and her various archers and priests approach from the front. Yxunomei casts Animate Dead and Cloudkill, both of which could be devastating. Yxunomei's skeletons would complicate the battle and add pressure to our most vulnerable party members, while Cloudkill would bypass our defenses and deal heavy damage while disrupting our spells. Also, there are potentially fatal traps right before Yxunomei. Worst of all, the enemy mages have Dispel Magic. Since we can't summon anything per the rules of this game, our buffs are our ONLY defense, and Dispel Magic, even in EE, automatically dispels.
This requires a careful setup. We have to neutralize multiple threats.
First, Fobie wanders around while invisible and disarms the traps. Yxunomei cannot see through invisibility, at least not before she transforms. Then, he lays a set of traps in the previous room, where the Yuan-ti Mages are going to teleport in. Next, we cast four Web spells at the doorway to hold off Yxunomei and her other goons. Finally, fully buffed, I send Espellier, one of our sorcerers, out to greet Yxunomei, while the rest of the party waits in the previous room to take on the Yuan-ti Mages. Espellier waits for Yxunomei to transform. The other enemies attack.
Right after Espellier begins casting Lower Resistance on Yxunomei, one of the Yuan-ti begins casting Dispel Magic. Espellier is about to lose all her buffs, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. For some reason, though, the Free Action effect from the Mantle of the Coming Storm does not get dispelled. Instead of having Fobie or Valos toss her a Potion of Invisibility to save her life, she can simply run into the previous room to escape Yxunomei and the archers. She still, however, is unbuffed and vulnerable.
The Yuan-ti Mages trigger the traps, but all they suffer is some minor damage. They cast Stoneskin, followed by Protection from Normal Missiles, and I am faced with a problem. I have three separate mages with Stoneskin to deal with, in a party with terribly low APR. Worse yet, we have few ways of disrupting spells through Stoneskin, as our fastest spells are Chromatic Orbs--which neither paralyze nor even deal damage if the enemy makes its save.
We paralyze one of them with a Chromatic Orb, then switch our attention to another one to get through its Stoneskins faster. But we can't stop the third one from casting Feeblemind on Espellier. Espellier fails a save.
Luckily for us, I decided to have Snowy Tae memorize Heal instead of Wondrous Recall. Heal cures Feeblemind, and soon Espellier is active.
We paralyze another Yuan-ti Mages with a Chromatic Orb and hold off the Yuan-ti archers with Web spells, but Yxunomei makes her saves, and gets close enough to summon skeletons right next to us. They target Fobie, who has to drink a Potion of Invisibility to survive. He drinks healing potions while he's safe. Yxunomei slithers over to join the fight.
Feeblemind fails against her magic resistance. Espellier re-casts Lower Resistance once she has Stoneskin to protect herself from disruption. After multiple failures to stop Yxunomei with Chromatic Orb, Poppy finally manages to Feeblemind Yxunomei, neutralizing the strongest enemy.
We still have to deal with Yuan-ti spellcasters, including a priest, as well as three skeletons right on top of us and a large group of Yuan-ti archers still struggling to break free of our Web spells. The mages prove difficult to damage--those Stoneskins are still holding out--but they don't get any spells off the ground. I decide that our sorcerers should dedicate their time to the archers. I chain-cast Fireball on the webbed Yuan-ti Elites, Slow the skeletons and the Yuan-ti spellcasters, and pull back Snowy Tae so she can use Hold Undead without being disrupted. Two castings only paralyze one skeleton.
The Yuan-ti spellcasters wear down our defenses. After so many rounds, their melee attacks build up. Marilyn Blueapple, our bard, Valos, our druid, and Snowy Tae, our cleric have all taken a beating. Their AC just isn't strong enough; we can only maintain strong AC for short times, and this battle has been going on for a while.
The few spells that the Yuan-ti spellcasters get off the ground have little effect. We make our saves against Dire Charm. But then a new spell comes out, and nearly slays Poppy in one hit: Vitriolic Sphere.
Although IWD is very much a game of AC and THAC0, in Heart of Fury mode, enemy spell damage can make a huge impact. Most parties are structured around tanking physical damage, and are not well-protected against things like Static Charge and Vitriolic Sphere.
Poppy barely survives the 52-damage spell, and retreats to heal herself. The same mage follows up with Melf's Acid Arrow, bringing Poppy closer to death. I've used almost no potions in this run, since our auras are better spent on spells, but Poppy has to spend many rounds drinking potion after potion, with Marilyn singing the War Chant of the Sith to heal her, just to survive. Snowy Tae does have Raise Dead memorized in case someone dies, but her Heal spell is already exhausted, and we have no other healing spells on hand.
We very slowly wear down the mages and skeletons. Badly hurt and low on spells, we finally turn to Yxunomei. We whittle her down. The Heartstone Gem is ours.
The party 's levels: Valos: Avenger 13 Espellier: Sorcerer 11 Poppy: Sorcerer 11 Snowy Tae: Cleric of Lathander 11 Fobie: Bounty Hunter 13 Marilyn Blueapple: Bard 12
I planned on removing Fobie from the party and replacing him with something else, but I've reconsidered. After Dragon's Eye, traps become less important, and Fobie has been contributing very little in combat. But further testing has found that the blind thief trick does in fact work in IWD:EE, even with traps. Fobie will therefore be able to Maze groups of enemies in-combat as long as Poppy blinds him beforehand. Our only difficulty with that is that, by the time Fobie gets Maze traps at level 21, his base save vs. spell will be 0. A Doom spell would be necessary to blind him, and even then it would take many castings. I might grant him permanent blindness via EEKeeper or a custom item to simplify things.
I got half way through Lower Dorn's Deep, and decided to restart my "BG canon party in IWD" run to make it more challenging.
First, I am turning off "maximum hit points at level up". (Gulp!)
Second, I am giving each party member the exact stats they have in BG. Minsc and Jaheira will have their BG2 stats. (Except it turns out Minsc is a ranger illegally in BG. He has to have 14 wisdom to play the class in IWD.)
My main character will be a Cleric of Lathander (the only kit in the party). He has less than ideal stats, somewhat resembling my own real life strengths and weaknesses, although I've exaggerated his strong stats over my own by a few points each. (Child of Bhaal enhancement, or what have you.)
Third, no kits (except my cleric kit). Minsc will be a pure ranger, and Khalid will be a pure fighter. I will dual Imoen to mage as soon as she hits level 8, which will leave me without a thief and a possible end to my no-reload by way of traps. I've replaced Aerie with Dynaheir, and as an invoker in IWD, she is barred from both divination and conjuration/summoning (Yikes!). That means no identification, meaning we have pay to identify *everything*, and we will have no mage summons until Imoen levels up as a mage.
I am staying on core rules, because I think this setup will be hard enough.
Here's a party picture and character screens. (See how I put my rainbow foot circles in rainbow-correct, ROYGBIV order?)
I'm just starting this now. I'll post later today and let everybody know how far I get, but it won't be very far, because of the restarting and all. That's assuming I don't need to make a "final update". I'm wondering if I'll even get past the first goblins, orcs, and ogre.
EDIT: I just realized that I changed Jaheira's portrait after I took the party picture. I thought the second one represented her BG1 portrait a little better than the first, which shows her with a scimitar. I'll probably give her pips in scimitar as soon as she levels up, since IWD is very stingy with magical clubs and staves, but I started her with clubs, staves, and slings to make her more like her early BG self.
Well, this is exciting. Without skald song, we hit less than half the time, and the enemy hits us at least half the time and maybe more. Also, there was not enough money to even get scale mail armor for Khalid and Minsc. Jaheira has a "mere" AC 0 with both scale mail and a shield, and because of my lousy dexterity, I have only AC 4 with the same. There have already been a lot of close calls, and it is taking all my wits and experience with the game to keep us alive, right from the start.
Uh oh! Dynaheir gets hit by an arrow and dies. I will have to start leaving her at the entrances to areas and dungeons, because right now, her 6 hit points are a huge liability. Everybody else can take at least one arrow hit. This is why low-level D&D players consider mages to be a worthless waste of space, and Dynaheir can't even cast Sleep. (Actually, she can in IWD, but I'm trying to keep her away from enchantment/charm spells to make her match up with her BG self.) I know that supporting a mage in a party is an investment in the future. I hope we *make* it to having a future for Dynaheir. It cost us everything we have made so far in gold to get her raised.
Oh Lathander help us! We are forced to retreat from the ogre boss and his army of orcs, as they have the advantage of position and army strength. After we retreat as far as we can from the dungeon, Khalid is hit by an orc archer arrow and is almost dead. We must flee back to town. It's a humiliating rout.
At the exit of the pass that leads back to town, we cast Cure Light Wounds on Khalid. What a blessing from the gods! Cure Light Wounds is the sweetest, most valuable divine spell, saving our lives again and again, and Jaheira and I won't be praying for any other spell for some time. After gaining enough distance from the enemy to heal Khalid safely, we rally, turn around, and charge the enemy. Dynaheir brings the ogre to near death with two Magic Missiles (maybe she's not *that* useless), and the big bully flees combat. We turn our attention to dispatching the now more dangerous lone remaining orc archer, and then pick off the fleeing ogre with ranged weapons. We have our first major victory as a party!
I gain enough xp to level up to level two cleric. I roll a 5 on my hp roll. Not bad.
Coming up: Can we survive the goblin armies in the pass to Kuldahar?
We made it to Kuldahar, and went through the first two easy caves of the Vale of Shadows. We found our first Potion of Genius, so I decided that we should go back to Kuldahar and let Dynaheir try to do some scribing.
First, here's a shot of a close call where Minsc got held and almost killed by the carrion crawler. I managed to get my favorite spell, Cure Light Wounds, cast on him before the carrion crawler was able to finish him.
Dynaheir, with 17 INT and a Potion of Genius, has 97% chance to scribe scrolls. But it's actually quite a bit less than that with the crazy, absolutely *not* random RNG of the scribe scrolls implementation in this game. I went for the important spells of second level first, and then the useless ones (Horror and Luck). By the blessing of Lathander, Dynaheir succeeded to scribe all the good second level spells she could cast before the wonky RNG made her fail both Horror and Luck, with two "3% chance" failures in a row. Here's her spellbook now:
And, here's a party shot showing our total hit point rolls so far. No rolls of "1" yet, thank Lathander.
The game is exciting, full of suspense, and reasonably challenging without being ridiculously overwhelming for me now. (And I may eat those words in Dragon's Eye and the end of this no-reload, which I will continue in my thread in the IWD forum as a minimal reload if that happens.)
What @Ygramul has called "the game as it is meant to be played" is a critical factor for me here. I've let myself be far too influenced over the years by powergamers who break the game using min-maxing, metaknowledge, BG2 kits, sorcerers, and "convenience" modding, and then complain that the game is too easy without SCS or other difficulty enhancement. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's just that that mindset has been taking a lot of the fun out of BG and IWD *for me*, without my even realizing it over all these years.)
I've always played BG and IWD because they remind me of my tabletop gaming days when I was in high school and college, using 1st edition AD&D, with a dungeon master who had very draconian character rolling rules, and these are some of the best and most fun memories of my life, that I try to recreate by playing BG and IWD.
There was no such thing as a sorcerer. There were no bards, unless you wanted to start as a fighter, dual class to druid, and then to thief. You either scribed a randomly rolled arcane scroll from treasure found, or you had a bad roll and you didn't, and you played a mage with whatever you were so fortunate as to be able to scribe into your spell book. (I think dungeon masters used to use this mechanic to secretly balance mages into their campaigns however they pleased, just as vanilla IWD does.)
There was no such thing as a kit. You played a fighter, paladin, cleric, druid, thief, or mage, or a racially legal multi-class of two of those. There were level limits to multi-classes. (I remember that half-elves were the only race that could play a cleric-mage, and they were level-limited to level 7 cleric/level 5 mage. Since we rarely ever played campaigns up higher than those levels, that didn't bother me. Actually making level 7/5 cleric-mage never happened, over four years of playing with this group.)
So, my self-revelation here is that I think I will go back to AD&D "as it is meant to be played" in these games. I will play EE unmodded on core rules, with no-reload or minimal-reload, I will not min-max my Charname, I will not be a sorcerer or bard, and I will not use kits (except for cleric kits, as I don't think those unbalance the game as other kits arguably do.)
@BelgarathMTH: As somebody I don't remember once pointed out, the reason why a 97% chance of scribing fails so often is because specialty mages get a +15% chance to scribe spells from their specialty school, but a -15% penalty when scribing spells outside their specialty. Dynaheir would therefore have a 100% chance of scribing an evocation spell, but only an 83% chance of scribing any other spell.
If you're avoiding the use of non-vanilla kits, are you going to avoid using non-vanilla spells and items? They likely won't unbalance the game too much.
@semiticgod , I haven't decided yet. I'm thinking about limiting myself to BG1 spells for challenge's sake, but that means no Cure Moderate Wounds, and no IWD druid spells. And that would make Jaheira be restricted to the weak BG level two druid spells, without even Slow Poison in IWD. So, her only semi-useful level 2 spells would be Flame Blade for troll killing, creating a stock of Goodberries for slow hp top-offs in between combats, and Find Traps during Imoen's thief down time.
As for mage spells, I think I'll allow Cat's Grace for Dynaheir, especially since she's restricted in IWD from both divination and conjuration/summoning. I haven't seen any non-BG mage spells other than that that look interesting. I'll probably let Dynaheir cast whatever she can scribe, given her strict IWD restrictions. She can't have a Familiar. I may let Imoen get one in the far distant future when she duals to mage.
That's a good point about Dynaheir's invocation specialty affecting her scribe scroll chances. I didn't think of that. Is that bonus/penalty rule for specialist mages implemented correctly in all the EE's?
That's a good point about Dynaheir's invocation specialty affecting her scribe scroll chances. I didn't think of that. Is that bonus/penalty rule for specialist mages implemented correctly in all the EE's?
I think it is. Note also that specialist mages have a -2 modifier to spells cast from their specialist class. That can be a pain if you're playing solo and relying on saving throws, but can also make your specialist mages significantly more effective.
Also, it seems that IWDEE doesn't check how many points you have in PP. In order to fix that, I used the @elminster 's excellent mod - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/36405/thieving-mod-for-iwdee . Take a note, though, that if you fail to pickpocket, you'll ruin your no-reload game - if you fail to pickpocket the Archdruid, for example, the whole town of Kuldahar including the Archdruid himself will start attacking you, thus meaning an end to quests.
Experiments with EEKeeper and Near Infinity indicate that it's impossible to stop chunking in IWD:EE. Both the "disable permanent death" opcode and the minimum HP opcode fail to prevent chunking.
I lost a run to this once: my *Thief* got chunked half way into IWD (months ago). I could have continued with a new Lvl 1 Thief, but decided to abandon the run.
I actually kinda like having such a perma-death possibility. No encounter is to be taken for granted as it can permanently cost you a whole character!
@Ygramul: Meh. I got chunked six times (maybe more) in my last no-reload BG2 run, and the hassle wasn't worth the added suspense. That's not the only no-reload game I've had where chunking played a major role, either. After seeing it happen so many times, eventually it loses the shock and the novelty, and just becomes obnoxious and boring.
Auto-pause. Looks like my druid is down 100,000 XP. Just like my bard and my cleric/mage. Wow. How exciting.
@semiticgod I think chunking becomes a very fun element of gameplay if you don't create another character afterward. It adds a lot of tension to the run and force you to invent new strategies on the way.
That's how I felt when I lost Viconia in my Blackguard's run.
We run into trouble on the first level. When we boxed in by a group of undead orcs I thought would go down easily with a few Fireballs, Poppy suddenly runs out of Stoneskins and Mirror Image spells, and her Invisibility spell gets disrupted. Poppy falls.
Snowy Tae, having thought ahead, casts Repulse Undead to push away the enemies while Espellier covers the party with Invisibility 10' Radius. But when we go outside, the enemies teleport after us and appear outside, preventing us from resting in a safe place and recovering from the loss.
I go back inside and try to escape them. To my endless frustration, the enemies continue following me long, long after the party already vanished. We should have escaped their reach moments after turning invisible, but the enemies can practically see through invisibility. Round after round after round after round, they follow us from area to area. I can see why the AI would follow after you for a moment, but eventually, <i>invisibility should allow you to avoid notice</i>.
I consider reloading just to get them off my back--there's no reason they should be able to follow us when they can't see us--but I keep going. I prefer to work within the system, whether or not it's realistic or makes sense.
Marilyn Blueapple Hastes the party, breaking his invisibility, in the hopes that the enemy will chase after him and the rest of the party can escape with the boosted movement rate. Marilyn dies, as planned, but when we go downstairs, TEN orcs teleport in front of Snowy Tae and Fobie, preventing them from following Valos and Espellier outside. Espellier breaks her invisibility and draws the enemies aside, paying for it with her life. But with the path finally clear, our last three party members can run outside and escape to Kuldahar.
We raise the fallen party members and return to the Severed Hand. The enemies catch up to us mere moments after we arrive, but not before we can turn invisible again and buff ourselves. We then disable the enemy with Hold Undead until it's safe enough to cast Protection from Fire on each other. We then Fireball the enemies to death.
The rest of the Severed Hand proceeds with little incident. Poppy and Espellier pick Acid Fog and Contingency as their level 6 spell picks when they hit level 12 (I'm hoping Contingency will work well with the scorcher loop once we can put Minor Spell Turning in a contingency). Death Fog and Web absolutely destroy the enemy, although, unlike Fireball, we can't cast it on the party without dissolving. Valos uses Entropy Shield to block the many arrows of the dungeon, which otherwise would quickly cut through our sorcerers' Mirror Image and Stoneskin spells. When Fireball runs out, we resort to Hold Undead. We add in lots of little optimizations like Malison, Recitation, Prayer, Curse, bard songs, Slow, and Sunscorch when we need them, but most of the enemies die to Fireball.
We get the Great Shield as a random drop, but unfortunately we can't make much use of it. Normally, my party druid (I basically always have one) has fighter levels, allowing it to use the shield, but only Snowy Tae, our Cleric of Lathander, can hold it. Snowy Tae can't shapeshift, so her physical damage resistances won't be as strong as a Fighter/Druid's could be.
We purchase Protection from Acid for Marilyn Blueapple, our bard, so that we can cast Acid Fog on Valos, our druid tank. Acid Fog does 16 damage per round after the second round, so Valos could regenerate rather quickly if he's buffed with Protection from Acid and Entropy Shield. Fireball has been starting to weaken, but now we have an alternative.
That's a weird thing about IWD, aggroed enemies will follow you across an area boundary instantly no matter where they are on the level. I once had a crowd of monsters teleport out of locked cells to appear amongst my party in ToL. I wasn't even trying to run away, I was just heading back to Hobart's to rest.
Yes, I agree it is quite
annoying. It is also a reason why I quit trying to make a stealth based
party consisting of rangers, rouges and cleric/thiefs. Hit and run tactics with stalker, shadowdancer or assasin are just not viable. I hope the next patch will fix it
First, let me say I HATE the new forum image uploading system. It won't take the default bmp's, meaning everything has to be converted to jpg. This may discourage me from posting any more runs here. This is really, really awful.
Okay, I'll TRY to post what I wanted to post, for which I had a bunch of images.
You know what. It's late, and the "update" to the forum has killed my desire to post. I'll just summarize it and try to let the pictures tell the story.
The yeti cave put us in an indefensible position. Running out of the cave switched us to a good position where it was easy to win. [spoiler]
[/spoiler]
The next pictures show two minor boss battles on the first level of Kresselack's Tomb. I tried to Silence Mytos three times before he finally failed his save, but Dynaheir's Web caught him, too. Khalid has the most kills in the party, including the mummy. I think people really underrate what Khalid can do. I have screenshots comparing Khalid's kill percentage with Minsc's, who comes in second. No one else in the party is even close to Khalid's and Minsc's kill rates. Jaheira's Shillelah helped against the mummy. Goodberries now heal 5 hp each instead of only 1 in IWD. I really wish that improved Goodberry spell would get implemented in BG.
I'm still having a lot of fun with this run. The canon BG party is pretty awesome.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Next up, level two of Kresselak's Tomb. I will have to get more stingy with screenshots, unfortunately. It still won't be too much trouble to post a few shots of boss killings, but posting as many as I would like is going to be far too inconvenient now, what with having to convert the file format of every screen shot in paint.net.
@BillyYank has just reminded me that I have Irfanview and can easily convert the .bmp screenshots of my IWD run. Time to post some.
This is Espellier, our first sorcerer. The name came to mind when poking around deviantart.com and I thought it sounded nice. [spoiler] [/spoiler] Then an old name, Valos, our Avenger. The portrait is from an alternate rendering of the paintings from Ocarina of Time's Shadow Temple. [spoiler] [/spoiler] Another recurring name, Snowy Tae, this time with her original IWD portrait, instead of her normal one. [spoiler] [/spoiler] And another familiar name, Marilyn Blueapple. He used to be a dwarf back in the day, but I needed a bard. I know that portrait is made for a mage, so I've made a point of creating non-mage characters with that portrait. [spoiler] [/spoiler] And Fobie, the original, a halfling thief with the 5th male fighter soundset. All of these people are True Neutral so Snowy Tae can properly bless them with Righteous Wrath of the Faithful... which I still haven't used a single time. [spoiler] [/spoiler] And my most common portrait and name. Poppy, our second sorcerer. [spoiler]
[/spoiler] A party of single-classed characters with no fighter levels allowed. No summons. Heart of Fury. Level 1. Minimal reload.
At the beginning, we used Entangle to hold back enemies and Charm Person to turn our enemies into temporary tanks.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
When we couldn't prepare the area with Entangle first, Snowy Tae, with her 0 AC, served as our tank. She's not nearly tough enough to handle HoF enemies for long.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
This is me realizing Web and Entangle won't be enough against the most important enemies in Easthaven.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Snowy Tae served as a decoy, saving the party. But Web paralyzed her and the enemy boxed her in while her Sanctuary ran out.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Still not happy with IWD AI's ability to see through invisibility.
Kuldahar Valley has almost guaranteed rest interruptions. Makes you wonder why that guy you meet at the start hasn't been found yet. And why you can't just rest in the cave where he's presumably been perfectly safe this whole time.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]We can only turn four characters invisible. Predictably enough, the other two characters, both at level 5, do not survive the trek to Kuldahar.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]Less predictably, enemies attack you even when under the effects of Horror.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]If my characters got hit by fear, they wouldn't keep fighting. Not really fair. But hey, it only cost us another 1000 gold.
We come back and barely get out of the place alive. Invisibility was a good idea.[spoiler]
Comments
I would wish IWD was a low magic World -- few enough non-magic items that you ache to use Flame Blade, Shilelagh etc. to hit some enemies for half the game. And that the game perhaps *suggests* strongly to only use magic users with great rarity.
... perhaps even that the party is just given to you: a rag tag group of non-optimal strangers:
a drunken ex-Dwarf and some Gnomish traders following a Halfing Cleric; they are joined by a drop-out from a wizzard academy named Rincewind with a familiar that looks like luggage (he *says* he can cast spells, but can't seem to actually learn any) etc.
Wait. I think, I'm on to something here. Anyone wanna run a Rincewind challenge through the IWD?
Even Orrick the Gray moonlights as an armor crafter/enchanter.
We are ready to enter Lower Dorn's Deep with our no-reload status intact. Nothing up to this point can make us even break a sweat. I'm hoping things take a turn to at least moderately challenging in Lower Dorn's Deep.
I think my run is a case-in-point of BG2 kits breaking this game. Minsc as a berserker, Khalid as an archer, both buffed with my skald song, are trivializing almost every encounter. I'm starting to think that in order to have any no-reload "forum cred" at all, I'm going to have to eventually come back to this without using any BG2 kits, and giving my BG characters the exact same stats as they have in BG. (Does 18 DEX and 16-18 CON really make *that* much difference?)
I'm not convinced that 18 STR is that telling, since, as long as it's at least 15 for each melee party member, I can raise it to 18 pretty easily with a Strength spell, or two, or three. And, as long as the spell has a high enough roll to bring a STR score to 18, fighters also get a randomly rolled exceptional STR roll in IWD:EE.
My current theory is that giving most of my characters 18 DEX, plus BG2 kits, are what is "breaking" my game. But even without the 18 DEX, I could still use the Cat's Grace spell to raise it to 18 with any character who has at least a 15.
Victory shots for Upper Dorn's Deep:
Here are shots of what is supposed to be a boss-level encounter in the Frost Giant caves. Not with this party and these settings! They could barely scratch us, and I had more spells being cast when the "big bad" fell.
Joril falls, and we receive the second of six sigils:
EDIT: You could maybe argue that it's the "max hitpoints on level up" that is making this so easy. But, what's the difference between 80hp and 120hp when the enemy can't damage you significantly *at all*?
2nd EDIT: Btw, I discovered that Insect Plague in IWD:EE is *not* party friendly. Since the insects attack friend and foe alike, that renders this spell pretty much useless in IWD:EE, just as Horrid Wilting.
Going back to my point that not many people know how to use magic: What does this mean for salesmen like Orrick who use their magical abilities to supply the money they need to fund their research or even allow them simply to keep living in the north? It means that when it comes to the magic they supply to the rest of society, it needs to be something that everyone else can actually use. While magically talented individuals are scarce, the ability to swing a blade is not limited. A mage could make an excellent profit (albeit perhaps a lesser one than if he were to live further south) by selling magical equipment to a society that would highly benefit from their use. Not to mention, a fair number of the highly enchanted pieces of equipment we see in IWD are relics of a bygone era, likely discovered by adventurers or part of a mages' collection that was sold off due to disuse or a need for money to fund other pursuits. After all, how many times have we, while playing BG or IWD have found a bastard sword of +infinity, but simply sold it off because who the heck uses bastard swords? It makes perfect sense that other adventurers would do the same.
We continue with our basic strategy, and it works fairly well. Valos, our Avenger, or Poppy or Espellier, our sorcerers, absorb enemy attacks while our sorcerers chain-cast Fireball. Spiders are immune to Chromatic Orb as well as Web (I have no idea why), but combining Malison with Slow helps decrease enemy pressure enough for our Mirror Image and Stoneskin/Ironskin spells to hold for the duration of the fight. I add in other little optimizations, like paralyzing high-HP Trolls with Chromatic Orb and disabling priests of Talona with Hold Person and Fobie's level 11 Special Snares. The second level of Dragon's Eye is complete.
We enter Presio's lair. Cold Wights can deal lots of cold damage in short order, so I use Valos, who is resistant to cold damage thanks to Entropy Shield, as our tank. Fireballs, as always, are my favorite way of dealing with Cold Wights. I use an Improved Alacrity belt to clear up the other Cold Wight hordes to save time; I don't like replaying the same battle multiple times.
Instead of confronting Presio directly and allowing her Apprentice to wander down south to flank us, I take the party to the far northeast corner of the room and paralyze the Apprentice with a Chromatic Orb from behind. Valos, as the only party member that's immune to poison, tanks the Poison Zombies, and his Entropy Shield also blocks Magic Missile when Presio's Imbued Wights come up to the north to join the fight. Hold Undead has a limited impact on the skirmish.
Presio doesn't come to rescue her Apprentice the way her Apprentice comes to rescue her, so we go down to confront Presio in her lab. Web shuts down her spellcasting and Fireball takes her out, along with her warrior buddy and zombie goons.
The Eldathyn lair is often a pain due to the very large area and multiple intense fights, especially since the High Summoner likes to call out new summons from afar. I stick with my standard formula: Web the hallway just past Albion, then focus on Albion and the librarian with Chromatic Orbs and missile fire while the Eldathyns are on the way.
It works well, but to my dismay, I find that Emotion has no effect on anybody. After casting it four or five times in heavily crowded areas, I see only a single message indicating a successful save. I've seen Chromatic Orbs and Hold Person spells mysteriously fail to have any impact, not even showing a saving throw, but Emotion appears to be especially unlikely to take effect--over 90% of the time, Emotion does not even force a save, nor does it show any "Unaffected by the Effects of Emotion" message. It uses a special projectile, which must be bugged. The spell is useless.
I run out to rest, but summoned Lizard Men from the other room teleport outside to greet us shortly after. Poppy casts Invisibility on Espellier so Espellier can get Invisibility 10' Radius, with its lengthy 9 casting time, off the ground safely. We then rest while invisible.
The Lizard Men sniff us out--a fluke of the AI--and try to corner us. Our sorcerers, buffed with Shield and Mirror Image and Stoneskin, break invisibility to draw the enemy's attention. Malison and Slow keep them from boxing us in.
In IWD:EE enemies apparently do not change targets. As long as their first target is visible, they will pursue it even if somebody else is attacking them nearby. This can make things very frustrating if you want to get somebody out of the way, but it also opens up opportunities. Because our sorcerers broke their invisibility first, Valos can cast Protection from Fire on both sorcerers without getting mobbed.
Now that Poppy has the Robe of Fire Resistance from Presio's Apprentice, and Espellier has the Mantle of the Coming Storm, both of them are immune to fire after being buffed with Protection from Fire (which normally only grants 80% resistance to fire). They safely torch the Lizard Men. Only two Lizard Men veer off to attack the rest of the party, but Chromatic Orb stops them in their tracks.
We very slowly make our way through the Eldathyn lair. Web and Chromatic Orb aren't as effective as they used to be, since enemy HP is increasing while our weapons do the same damage. A pair of Webs is no longer sufficient to take down a group of enemies, or even kill half of a normal group, even if Valos uses spider form. Fireball remains our one reliable source of damage. Chromatic Orb, Web, and Fireball do most of the work, as usual.
Our sorcerers are now level 11. We can cast Minor Sequencer and therefore deal twice as much damage with the scorcher loop, although there's little need for it given the success of Fireball. More importantly, we can cast Lower Resistance and Feeblemind, which I picked for the sole reason that they could help us bring down Yxunomei.
Without summons, enemy pressure is crippling, and AC, Mirror Image, Stoneskin, and invisibility become far, far more important. Immunity to poison is another huge factor in Dragon's Eye, as spiders can easily kill a fully buffed sorcerer at our level. But our druid has poor AC normally, and Barkskin is short-lived. However, by combining Marilyn Blueapple's newfound Spirit Armor spell with Entropy Shield, Valos can stay below -10 AC just long enough for our sorcerers to exhaust their Fireball spells.
First, the party (IWD; Insane without extra XP or dmg)
- Dauntless Nahael, a barbarian returnin to the North on a family quest, helped by a mysterious sage known simply as...
- The Mother (C/M)
- Barakh the Shield, a clueless Paladin (rolled an INT of 5)
- Khial Neverbetter - Halfling C/T (She answers "neverbetter" whenever someone asks how things are going)
- Vitra the Storm - an Avenger
- Bahamut Diresong - he... errr.... sings
Almost no one has exceptional DEX; the The Mother has the highest INT of 15. At this point no one has memorized any Spells yet, because potions of +INT are rare and I can't afford the scrolls anyway.
The Mother rolled a sequence of 1HP level ups and is sitting at 13HP as a 4/4 C/M.
[picture]
Visiting the Temple of the Forgotten God. Second level, end of the corridor, you are faced with about 4 Verbeegs and 3 acolytes. Hardly an epic encounter. But it almost wiped my party.
At this point in the game I have basically no money left (earlier Resurrections were costly; and I bought a few necessities, including Belt of Dong -- wait, is Dong the Dog of Arfitice?).
My Avenger's mage spells prove decisive as I Web the Acolytes (Web is useless against Verbeegs) and throw a Spike Growth at them. But they manage to Hold Person Nahael. Barakh the Shield holds of the Verbeegs for a few precious seconds and is down to 1HP; Khial off-tanks.
This is all carefully micromanaged and at the moment of the screenshot I am almost about to lose two characters as the Verbeegs dash past my lines. A lucky roll with a Chromatic Orb (Avenger again) buys enough time for Nahael, while Barakh finds the better part of valor.
I return to Kuldahar beaten but not broken.
On to Yxunomei's lair. To simplify buffing and avoid having to run someplace to rest, I create a custom spell that rests the party and grants improved alacrity and +30 to casting time for 6 seconds. This greatly speeds up the game.
The Yuan-ti here are very vulnerable to Web, Chromatic Orb, and Fireball. They warrant no additional strategy. But Yxunomei herself is another story.
When you speak to Yxunomei, three Yuan-ti Mages teleport in behind you while Yxunomei and her various archers and priests approach from the front. Yxunomei casts Animate Dead and Cloudkill, both of which could be devastating. Yxunomei's skeletons would complicate the battle and add pressure to our most vulnerable party members, while Cloudkill would bypass our defenses and deal heavy damage while disrupting our spells. Also, there are potentially fatal traps right before Yxunomei. Worst of all, the enemy mages have Dispel Magic. Since we can't summon anything per the rules of this game, our buffs are our ONLY defense, and Dispel Magic, even in EE, automatically dispels.
This requires a careful setup. We have to neutralize multiple threats.
First, Fobie wanders around while invisible and disarms the traps. Yxunomei cannot see through invisibility, at least not before she transforms. Then, he lays a set of traps in the previous room, where the Yuan-ti Mages are going to teleport in. Next, we cast four Web spells at the doorway to hold off Yxunomei and her other goons. Finally, fully buffed, I send Espellier, one of our sorcerers, out to greet Yxunomei, while the rest of the party waits in the previous room to take on the Yuan-ti Mages. Espellier waits for Yxunomei to transform. The other enemies attack.
Right after Espellier begins casting Lower Resistance on Yxunomei, one of the Yuan-ti begins casting Dispel Magic. Espellier is about to lose all her buffs, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. For some reason, though, the Free Action effect from the Mantle of the Coming Storm does not get dispelled. Instead of having Fobie or Valos toss her a Potion of Invisibility to save her life, she can simply run into the previous room to escape Yxunomei and the archers. She still, however, is unbuffed and vulnerable.
The Yuan-ti Mages trigger the traps, but all they suffer is some minor damage. They cast Stoneskin, followed by Protection from Normal Missiles, and I am faced with a problem. I have three separate mages with Stoneskin to deal with, in a party with terribly low APR. Worse yet, we have few ways of disrupting spells through Stoneskin, as our fastest spells are Chromatic Orbs--which neither paralyze nor even deal damage if the enemy makes its save.
We paralyze one of them with a Chromatic Orb, then switch our attention to another one to get through its Stoneskins faster. But we can't stop the third one from casting Feeblemind on Espellier. Espellier fails a save.
Luckily for us, I decided to have Snowy Tae memorize Heal instead of Wondrous Recall. Heal cures Feeblemind, and soon Espellier is active.
We paralyze another Yuan-ti Mages with a Chromatic Orb and hold off the Yuan-ti archers with Web spells, but Yxunomei makes her saves, and gets close enough to summon skeletons right next to us. They target Fobie, who has to drink a Potion of Invisibility to survive. He drinks healing potions while he's safe. Yxunomei slithers over to join the fight.
Feeblemind fails against her magic resistance. Espellier re-casts Lower Resistance once she has Stoneskin to protect herself from disruption. After multiple failures to stop Yxunomei with Chromatic Orb, Poppy finally manages to Feeblemind Yxunomei, neutralizing the strongest enemy.
We still have to deal with Yuan-ti spellcasters, including a priest, as well as three skeletons right on top of us and a large group of Yuan-ti archers still struggling to break free of our Web spells. The mages prove difficult to damage--those Stoneskins are still holding out--but they don't get any spells off the ground. I decide that our sorcerers should dedicate their time to the archers. I chain-cast Fireball on the webbed Yuan-ti Elites, Slow the skeletons and the Yuan-ti spellcasters, and pull back Snowy Tae so she can use Hold Undead without being disrupted. Two castings only paralyze one skeleton.
The Yuan-ti spellcasters wear down our defenses. After so many rounds, their melee attacks build up. Marilyn Blueapple, our bard, Valos, our druid, and Snowy Tae, our cleric have all taken a beating. Their AC just isn't strong enough; we can only maintain strong AC for short times, and this battle has been going on for a while.
The few spells that the Yuan-ti spellcasters get off the ground have little effect. We make our saves against Dire Charm. But then a new spell comes out, and nearly slays Poppy in one hit: Vitriolic Sphere.
Although IWD is very much a game of AC and THAC0, in Heart of Fury mode, enemy spell damage can make a huge impact. Most parties are structured around tanking physical damage, and are not well-protected against things like Static Charge and Vitriolic Sphere.
Poppy barely survives the 52-damage spell, and retreats to heal herself. The same mage follows up with Melf's Acid Arrow, bringing Poppy closer to death. I've used almost no potions in this run, since our auras are better spent on spells, but Poppy has to spend many rounds drinking potion after potion, with Marilyn singing the War Chant of the Sith to heal her, just to survive. Snowy Tae does have Raise Dead memorized in case someone dies, but her Heal spell is already exhausted, and we have no other healing spells on hand.
We very slowly wear down the mages and skeletons. Badly hurt and low on spells, we finally turn to Yxunomei. We whittle her down. The Heartstone Gem is ours.
The party 's levels:
Valos: Avenger 13
Espellier: Sorcerer 11
Poppy: Sorcerer 11
Snowy Tae: Cleric of Lathander 11
Fobie: Bounty Hunter 13
Marilyn Blueapple: Bard 12
I planned on removing Fobie from the party and replacing him with something else, but I've reconsidered. After Dragon's Eye, traps become less important, and Fobie has been contributing very little in combat. But further testing has found that the blind thief trick does in fact work in IWD:EE, even with traps. Fobie will therefore be able to Maze groups of enemies in-combat as long as Poppy blinds him beforehand. Our only difficulty with that is that, by the time Fobie gets Maze traps at level 21, his base save vs. spell will be 0. A Doom spell would be necessary to blind him, and even then it would take many castings. I might grant him permanent blindness via EEKeeper or a custom item to simplify things.
First, I am turning off "maximum hit points at level up". (Gulp!)
Second, I am giving each party member the exact stats they have in BG. Minsc and Jaheira will have their BG2 stats. (Except it turns out Minsc is a ranger illegally in BG. He has to have 14 wisdom to play the class in IWD.)
My main character will be a Cleric of Lathander (the only kit in the party). He has less than ideal stats, somewhat resembling my own real life strengths and weaknesses, although I've exaggerated his strong stats over my own by a few points each. (Child of Bhaal enhancement, or what have you.)
Third, no kits (except my cleric kit). Minsc will be a pure ranger, and Khalid will be a pure fighter. I will dual Imoen to mage as soon as she hits level 8, which will leave me without a thief and a possible end to my no-reload by way of traps. I've replaced Aerie with Dynaheir, and as an invoker in IWD, she is barred from both divination and conjuration/summoning (Yikes!). That means no identification, meaning we have pay to identify *everything*, and we will have no mage summons until Imoen levels up as a mage.
I am staying on core rules, because I think this setup will be hard enough.
Here's a party picture and character screens. (See how I put my rainbow foot circles in rainbow-correct, ROYGBIV order?)
I'm just starting this now. I'll post later today and let everybody know how far I get, but it won't be very far, because of the restarting and all. That's assuming I don't need to make a "final update". I'm wondering if I'll even get past the first goblins, orcs, and ogre.
EDIT: I just realized that I changed Jaheira's portrait after I took the party picture. I thought the second one represented her BG1 portrait a little better than the first, which shows her with a scimitar. I'll probably give her pips in scimitar as soon as she levels up, since IWD is very stingy with magical clubs and staves, but I started her with clubs, staves, and slings to make her more like her early BG self.
Question: I couldn't help but notice that my Bard is acquiring a lot of Pickpocket skill (and can perhaps improve it further with a potion).
Rumor has it that some people in Kuldahar carry interesting items on their persons.
How much pickpocket would reliably permit me to Pickpocket, say, oh, a certain Druid, a town Wizard, or a potionous Gnome?
(How does the success formula work?)
Naturally, I don't wanna ruin a plausible game with a botched attempt...
Well, this is exciting. Without skald song, we hit less than half the time, and the enemy hits us at least half the time and maybe more. Also, there was not enough money to even get scale mail armor for Khalid and Minsc. Jaheira has a "mere" AC 0 with both scale mail and a shield, and because of my lousy dexterity, I have only AC 4 with the same. There have already been a lot of close calls, and it is taking all my wits and experience with the game to keep us alive, right from the start.
Uh oh! Dynaheir gets hit by an arrow and dies. I will have to start leaving her at the entrances to areas and dungeons, because right now, her 6 hit points are a huge liability. Everybody else can take at least one arrow hit. This is why low-level D&D players consider mages to be a worthless waste of space, and Dynaheir can't even cast Sleep. (Actually, she can in IWD, but I'm trying to keep her away from enchantment/charm spells to make her match up with her BG self.) I know that supporting a mage in a party is an investment in the future. I hope we *make* it to having a future for Dynaheir. It cost us everything we have made so far in gold to get her raised.
Oh Lathander help us! We are forced to retreat from the ogre boss and his army of orcs, as they have the advantage of position and army strength. After we retreat as far as we can from the dungeon, Khalid is hit by an orc archer arrow and is almost dead. We must flee back to town. It's a humiliating rout.
At the exit of the pass that leads back to town, we cast Cure Light Wounds on Khalid. What a blessing from the gods! Cure Light Wounds is the sweetest, most valuable divine spell, saving our lives again and again, and Jaheira and I won't be praying for any other spell for some time. After gaining enough distance from the enemy to heal Khalid safely, we rally, turn around, and charge the enemy. Dynaheir brings the ogre to near death with two Magic Missiles (maybe she's not *that* useless), and the big bully flees combat. We turn our attention to dispatching the now more dangerous lone remaining orc archer, and then pick off the fleeing ogre with ranged weapons. We have our first major victory as a party!
I gain enough xp to level up to level two cleric. I roll a 5 on my hp roll. Not bad.
Coming up: Can we survive the goblin armies in the pass to Kuldahar?
We made it to Kuldahar, and went through the first two easy caves of the Vale of Shadows. We found our first Potion of Genius, so I decided that we should go back to Kuldahar and let Dynaheir try to do some scribing.
First, here's a shot of a close call where Minsc got held and almost killed by the carrion crawler. I managed to get my favorite spell, Cure Light Wounds, cast on him before the carrion crawler was able to finish him.
Dynaheir, with 17 INT and a Potion of Genius, has 97% chance to scribe scrolls. But it's actually quite a bit less than that with the crazy, absolutely *not* random RNG of the scribe scrolls implementation in this game. I went for the important spells of second level first, and then the useless ones (Horror and Luck). By the blessing of Lathander, Dynaheir succeeded to scribe all the good second level spells she could cast before the wonky RNG made her fail both Horror and Luck, with two "3% chance" failures in a row. Here's her spellbook now:
And, here's a party shot showing our total hit point rolls so far. No rolls of "1" yet, thank Lathander.
The game is exciting, full of suspense, and reasonably challenging without being ridiculously overwhelming for me now. (And I may eat those words in Dragon's Eye and the end of this no-reload, which I will continue in my thread in the IWD forum as a minimal reload if that happens.)
What @Ygramul has called "the game as it is meant to be played" is a critical factor for me here. I've let myself be far too influenced over the years by powergamers who break the game using min-maxing, metaknowledge, BG2 kits, sorcerers, and "convenience" modding, and then complain that the game is too easy without SCS or other difficulty enhancement. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's just that that mindset has been taking a lot of the fun out of BG and IWD *for me*, without my even realizing it over all these years.)
I've always played BG and IWD because they remind me of my tabletop gaming days when I was in high school and college, using 1st edition AD&D, with a dungeon master who had very draconian character rolling rules, and these are some of the best and most fun memories of my life, that I try to recreate by playing BG and IWD.
There was no such thing as a sorcerer. There were no bards, unless you wanted to start as a fighter, dual class to druid, and then to thief. You either scribed a randomly rolled arcane scroll from treasure found, or you had a bad roll and you didn't, and you played a mage with whatever you were so fortunate as to be able to scribe into your spell book. (I think dungeon masters used to use this mechanic to secretly balance mages into their campaigns however they pleased, just as vanilla IWD does.)
There was no such thing as a kit. You played a fighter, paladin, cleric, druid, thief, or mage, or a racially legal multi-class of two of those. There were level limits to multi-classes. (I remember that half-elves were the only race that could play a cleric-mage, and they were level-limited to level 7 cleric/level 5 mage. Since we rarely ever played campaigns up higher than those levels, that didn't bother me. Actually making level 7/5 cleric-mage never happened, over four years of playing with this group.)
So, my self-revelation here is that I think I will go back to AD&D "as it is meant to be played" in these games. I will play EE unmodded on core rules, with no-reload or minimal-reload, I will not min-max my Charname, I will not be a sorcerer or bard, and I will not use kits (except for cleric kits, as I don't think those unbalance the game as other kits arguably do.)
If you're avoiding the use of non-vanilla kits, are you going to avoid using non-vanilla spells and items? They likely won't unbalance the game too much.
As for mage spells, I think I'll allow Cat's Grace for Dynaheir, especially since she's restricted in IWD from both divination and conjuration/summoning. I haven't seen any non-BG mage spells other than that that look interesting. I'll probably let Dynaheir cast whatever she can scribe, given her strict IWD restrictions. She can't have a Familiar. I may let Imoen get one in the far distant future when she duals to mage.
That's a good point about Dynaheir's invocation specialty affecting her scribe scroll chances. I didn't think of that. Is that bonus/penalty rule for specialist mages implemented correctly in all the EE's?
Also, it seems that IWDEE doesn't check how many points you have in PP. In order to fix that, I used the @elminster 's excellent mod - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/36405/thieving-mod-for-iwdee . Take a note, though, that if you fail to pickpocket, you'll ruin your no-reload game - if you fail to pickpocket the Archdruid, for example, the whole town of Kuldahar including the Archdruid himself will start attacking you, thus meaning an end to quests.
I lost a run to this once: my *Thief* got chunked half way into IWD (months ago). I could have continued with a new Lvl 1 Thief, but decided to abandon the run.
I actually kinda like having such a perma-death possibility. No encounter is to be taken for granted as it can permanently cost you a whole character!
Auto-pause. Looks like my druid is down 100,000 XP. Just like my bard and my cleric/mage. Wow. How exciting.
Thanks, @bengoshi
I kinda anticipated this and am keeping separate BG1EE/BG2EE installs with SCS/Tweaks etc..
As I mentioned in another thread, I'll buy SoD upon release just on principle, but expect that it will be a year before I can actually play it.
That's how I felt when I lost Viconia in my Blackguard's run.
We run into trouble on the first level. When we boxed in by a group of undead orcs I thought would go down easily with a few Fireballs, Poppy suddenly runs out of Stoneskins and Mirror Image spells, and her Invisibility spell gets disrupted. Poppy falls.
Snowy Tae, having thought ahead, casts Repulse Undead to push away the enemies while Espellier covers the party with Invisibility 10' Radius. But when we go outside, the enemies teleport after us and appear outside, preventing us from resting in a safe place and recovering from the loss.
I go back inside and try to escape them. To my endless frustration, the enemies continue following me long, long after the party already vanished. We should have escaped their reach moments after turning invisible, but the enemies can practically see through invisibility. Round after round after round after round, they follow us from area to area. I can see why the AI would follow after you for a moment, but eventually, <i>invisibility should allow you to avoid notice</i>.
I consider reloading just to get them off my back--there's no reason they should be able to follow us when they can't see us--but I keep going. I prefer to work within the system, whether or not it's realistic or makes sense.
Marilyn Blueapple Hastes the party, breaking his invisibility, in the hopes that the enemy will chase after him and the rest of the party can escape with the boosted movement rate. Marilyn dies, as planned, but when we go downstairs, TEN orcs teleport in front of Snowy Tae and Fobie, preventing them from following Valos and Espellier outside. Espellier breaks her invisibility and draws the enemies aside, paying for it with her life. But with the path finally clear, our last three party members can run outside and escape to Kuldahar.
We raise the fallen party members and return to the Severed Hand. The enemies catch up to us mere moments after we arrive, but not before we can turn invisible again and buff ourselves. We then disable the enemy with Hold Undead until it's safe enough to cast Protection from Fire on each other. We then Fireball the enemies to death.
The rest of the Severed Hand proceeds with little incident. Poppy and Espellier pick Acid Fog and Contingency as their level 6 spell picks when they hit level 12 (I'm hoping Contingency will work well with the scorcher loop once we can put Minor Spell Turning in a contingency). Death Fog and Web absolutely destroy the enemy, although, unlike Fireball, we can't cast it on the party without dissolving. Valos uses Entropy Shield to block the many arrows of the dungeon, which otherwise would quickly cut through our sorcerers' Mirror Image and Stoneskin spells. When Fireball runs out, we resort to Hold Undead. We add in lots of little optimizations like Malison, Recitation, Prayer, Curse, bard songs, Slow, and Sunscorch when we need them, but most of the enemies die to Fireball.
We get the Great Shield as a random drop, but unfortunately we can't make much use of it. Normally, my party druid (I basically always have one) has fighter levels, allowing it to use the shield, but only Snowy Tae, our Cleric of Lathander, can hold it. Snowy Tae can't shapeshift, so her physical damage resistances won't be as strong as a Fighter/Druid's could be.
We purchase Protection from Acid for Marilyn Blueapple, our bard, so that we can cast Acid Fog on Valos, our druid tank. Acid Fog does 16 damage per round after the second round, so Valos could regenerate rather quickly if he's buffed with Protection from Acid and Entropy Shield. Fireball has been starting to weaken, but now we have an alternative.
Yes, I agree it is quite annoying. It is also a reason why I quit trying to make a stealth based party consisting of rangers, rouges and cleric/thiefs. Hit and run tactics with stalker, shadowdancer or assasin are just not viable. I hope the next patch will fix it
Okay, I'll TRY to post what I wanted to post, for which I had a bunch of images.
You know what. It's late, and the "update" to the forum has killed my desire to post. I'll just summarize it and try to let the pictures tell the story.
The yeti cave put us in an indefensible position. Running out of the cave switched us to a good position where it was easy to win.
[spoiler]
The next pictures show two minor boss battles on the first level of Kresselack's Tomb. I tried to Silence Mytos three times before he finally failed his save, but Dynaheir's Web caught him, too. Khalid has the most kills in the party, including the mummy. I think people really underrate what Khalid can do. I have screenshots comparing Khalid's kill percentage with Minsc's, who comes in second. No one else in the party is even close to Khalid's and Minsc's kill rates. Jaheira's Shillelah helped against the mummy. Goodberries now heal 5 hp each instead of only 1 in IWD. I really wish that improved Goodberry spell would get implemented in BG.
I'm still having a lot of fun with this run. The canon BG party is pretty awesome.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]Next up, level two of Kresselak's Tomb. I will have to get more stingy with screenshots, unfortunately. It still won't be too much trouble to post a few shots of boss killings, but posting as many as I would like is going to be far too inconvenient now, what with having to convert the file format of every screen shot in paint.net.
This is Espellier, our first sorcerer. The name came to mind when poking around deviantart.com and I thought it sounded nice.
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Then an old name, Valos, our Avenger. The portrait is from an alternate rendering of the paintings from Ocarina of Time's Shadow Temple.
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Another recurring name, Snowy Tae, this time with her original IWD portrait, instead of her normal one.
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And another familiar name, Marilyn Blueapple. He used to be a dwarf back in the day, but I needed a bard. I know that portrait is made for a mage, so I've made a point of creating non-mage characters with that portrait.
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And Fobie, the original, a halfling thief with the 5th male fighter soundset. All of these people are True Neutral so Snowy Tae can properly bless them with Righteous Wrath of the Faithful... which I still haven't used a single time.
[spoiler]
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And my most common portrait and name. Poppy, our second sorcerer.
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[/spoiler]A party of single-classed characters with no fighter levels allowed. No summons. Heart of Fury. Level 1. Minimal reload.
[/spoiler] When we couldn't prepare the area with Entangle first, Snowy Tae, with her 0 AC, served as our tank. She's not nearly tough enough to handle HoF enemies for long.[spoiler]
[/spoiler] This is me realizing Web and Entangle won't be enough against the most important enemies in Easthaven.[spoiler]
[/spoiler] Snowy Tae served as a decoy, saving the party. But Web paralyzed her and the enemy boxed her in while her Sanctuary ran out.[spoiler][/spoiler] Still not happy with IWD AI's ability to see through invisibility.
Kuldahar Valley has almost guaranteed rest interruptions. Makes you wonder why that guy you meet at the start hasn't been found yet. And why you can't just rest in the cave where he's presumably been perfectly safe this whole time.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]We can only turn four characters invisible. Predictably enough, the other two characters, both at level 5, do not survive the trek to Kuldahar.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]Less predictably, enemies attack you even when under the effects of Horror.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]If my characters got hit by fear, they wouldn't keep fighting. Not really fair. But hey, it only cost us another 1000 gold.
We come back and barely get out of the place alive. Invisibility was a good idea.[spoiler]
[/spoiler]