Sarevok underpowered
Rooksx
Member Posts: 57
Sarevok is typically regarded as one of the better NPCs both for RP reasons and his excellent stats. But I seriously think he's a liability in combat.
The problem is that as a pure Fighter, he can't cast Stone/IronSkins. As getting hit is unavoidable in ToB, particularly with SCS, I have sometimes found it a struggle to keep him alive. Yes, he can dish out a lot of damage and has plenty of HP but his survivability is still limited. You could pick Hardiness a lot but that means less GWWs, which are useful for a 2h character.
I'm currently playing through ToB on Insanity with SCS and Item Revisions (among other mods). For this playthough, I Keepered Sarevok at the beginning to turn him into a Zerker/Mage. Having Stoneskin has made such a big difference. I'm really not sure how I would have kept him in one piece during the battles against SCS-improved demons dealing double damage if he was just a Fighter.
This has made me think that generally speaking, melee in ToB is suicidal for any build that can't cast Stone/IronSkins, with the possible exception of a Monk as their AC can become very low. I've read that the Zerker/Cleric is thought of as a good build but my experience with Sarevok makes me skeptical, particularly as that build won't even be getting Hardiness.
Or am I just doing it wrong?
The problem is that as a pure Fighter, he can't cast Stone/IronSkins. As getting hit is unavoidable in ToB, particularly with SCS, I have sometimes found it a struggle to keep him alive. Yes, he can dish out a lot of damage and has plenty of HP but his survivability is still limited. You could pick Hardiness a lot but that means less GWWs, which are useful for a 2h character.
I'm currently playing through ToB on Insanity with SCS and Item Revisions (among other mods). For this playthough, I Keepered Sarevok at the beginning to turn him into a Zerker/Mage. Having Stoneskin has made such a big difference. I'm really not sure how I would have kept him in one piece during the battles against SCS-improved demons dealing double damage if he was just a Fighter.
This has made me think that generally speaking, melee in ToB is suicidal for any build that can't cast Stone/IronSkins, with the possible exception of a Monk as their AC can become very low. I've read that the Zerker/Cleric is thought of as a good build but my experience with Sarevok makes me skeptical, particularly as that build won't even be getting Hardiness.
Or am I just doing it wrong?
Post edited by Rooksx on
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In practice, that means that you want to engage with the more "tanky" characters, mages with skins for example. Of course in SCS you can't just tank stupidly like in IWD where mobs will stick to you like gum to a ponytail. You'll need to switch targets frequently, and keep moving and repositioning.
Luckily, actual AC-based damage isn't all that common, and when you do face it, it's usually from fairly weak mobs (random soldiers or whatever). The big, hard-hitting enemies like bosses etc. you can usually maneuver properly and get them to hit who you want them to hit.
If you do all this right, then Sarevok becomes a huge asset. His Deathbringer Assault is LUDICROUSLY powerful, albeit a bit random. With some luck you can completely take some dangerous enemies off the table, and make hard fights a cakewalk.
That being said, I agree that a pure fighter is not the best thing you could have. I personally do enjoy Keepering the NPCs to whatever I want them to be, but Sarevok is almost too good if you make him a power class
Play the normal NPCs in the non-modded game, or if you like the mods, play all powergaming character classes.
AD&D 2nd edition character classes really were never intended to reach level 20 PCs so the power level becomes unbalanced even with the addition of HLAs. Even then the game developers did the best they could to keep all classes playable through the whole trilogy, but the power levels of none of the classes were considered in the original games, much less by people who modded to make a "challenge" for their 20/20/20 FMT with all 18+ stats and all the best equipment.
IIRC it was suggested in the original DM Guide and Players Handbook that characters at a certain point would simply retire or manage a stronghold where they could become NPCs in later campaigns, but would largely be just so busy with administrative duties that their adventuring days would be over.
In the Deities and Demigods book Zeus, Ra, and Cthulu only had 400hp, minor gods had 200-300. The Demogorgon of Monster Manual 1 had a mere 200hp. The intent of AD&D was fight kobolds, orcs, bugbears, slimes, ogres, etc. etc. until you can take down a dragon, pillage it's hoard then retire. Super high level PCs become silly because there simply is no challenge written into the game for them. They either slaughter everything in their path, or you have to make more and more ridiculous enemies for them to face which are still easily slaughtered with the absurd powers PCs will get, either way the game ceases to be fun.... but to each their own.
Tansheron makes some interesting points. I micromanage quite a bit but I expect my melee NPCs to be able to handle themselves without too much interference. I don't switch targets as much as Tansheron suggests.
The great thing about BG is that with mods etc. you have so many customization options, you really can play EXACTLY the way you like it best.
What is the point of making things harder then?
Like so often, it's not about absolutes; you want the game to be harder, but harder the way you like. There's a gazillion of degrees out there, and finding the one you're most comfortable with can take some fiddling.
So basically you modded the game and adjusted the difficulty slider to make it ultra difficult and now you wonder why only the cheesiest builds work...
@hispls gives a good insight on the system itself, I'll add that Bioware/Black Isle never intended the enemies to behave like they do in SCS, so they didnt adjust high level Fighters and other classes because there was no need for it, they knew the AI was limited and that the player would not have that many problems defeating it, even with an underpowered class.
However, it's not entirely useless. Having everything deal extra damage forces you to actually avoid stuff that you can avoid. Yes it sucks that tanking focuses too much on complete avoidance, but it also means you can't simply take any random fireball or stand in a cloud or whatever. On Core you can, it's easy to ignore a lot of stuff and just take it to the face.
Of course Insane isn't perfect, but it's something. I find that between difficulty setting and mod options, you can configure the overall challenge quite well. Certainly TONS better than in most other games, people tend to forget that :P
Can I ask you what do you mean by basic scs? It seems to me that you either go hardcore or not. There is no "middle" . You either get:
> better ai
or
> improved fights
or
> both
So..?
These days, SCS v32, the new update, will have difficulty components scale with the difficulty slider, so there won't be such radical differences between SCS installs. The thing we call "basic SCS" would just be SCS on Normal mode or maybe Core difficulty.
I really didn't design it that way. I didn't design it for Insane at all (I don't like the hardcoded damage multiplier, mostly because it breaks the symmetry between party and enemy abilities - SCS ignored the difficulty setting until it became possible to disable the hardcoded effects). And my most recent test party was: PC Undead Hunter; Haer'dalis; Aerie; Minsc; Anomen; Imoen, and was chosen as much on RP grounds as anything else (though I was paying attention to party balance, which does matter in SCS - just as in AD&D).
That's only half true. The "tactical challenge" components of SCS basically ignore the difficulty slider. It mostly replaces install-time fine-tuning of the AI components, e.g. which mages get HLAs, how much prebuffing there is, whether illithids can see through invisibility (albeit that last one is broken on RC10).
tob level mages can lower the high MR easily, even the crazy one of tactics fire giants, and have all the redundancy they need to be sure that the enemy does not save, as a tob mage can cast so many spells in the same round. with the vanilla settings a mage can still in tob turn an enemy into stone, feeblemind him, kill him with a barrage of low level damaging spells that don't have save or win in many other ways, it depends on what the enemy is not immune to.
in my (not scs) experience a tob mace can be both the real engine of the party, improved hasting and protecting the fighters in a really short time, thing that is important as a fighter, even at high level, has only a very limited number of GWW, so of 10 apr rounds, at disposal or can win many battles alone, using his spells in an offensive way.
now if scs change this or it is only due to different styles in using a mage it is something i surely can not tell as i lack of knowledge about scs.
i agree that the fighters can be very effective in tob, if you have enough of them to kill the enemy before he kill them and if you micromanage them in the right way and use at the best the items at your disposal.
in a hard difficulty setting, does not matter what mods are used, point and click does not work, good tactics, quickly reacting to the conditions as they change (a fighter that start to loose too much hp, or that focuses his attack on a protected enemy before the protection is disabled instead of use that time to kill helpers and so on) and good positioning are the keys.