I'm going to do a no-reloads solo mage run through the entire game. I need advice.
Hi, I'm planning to do an ironman solo run with a mage and I desperately need advice to make it successful.
Conditions:
1. core rule. random hp per level ups.
2. no sorcerer. I've already done it once. I'm going to pick a human race.
3. delete a save when MC dies and retry from Candlekeep. Even if MC dies in BG2 part, I will start back in BG1.
4. no cheese tactics. I did that with sorc(3 skull traps in contingency spell to kill boss even before they get their defenses up) and the game was extremely easy and unfun.
Questions:
1. Specialist mage, wild mage, or pure mage? If specialist mage, which specialization?
2. Conjurer is probably the best among specialist mage. However, how do I detect invisible and hidden foes with solo conjurer? Dispel won't work on an invisible enemy mage if his spell shields are up. I should to be able to fight against boos enemies without dying.
3. Does chaos shield affect 5% surge? I will probably have to avoid using spells on myself as a dispel can cause surge by 5% and turn my character into a stone. Is wild mage, although the second most powerful mage next to sorcerer, worth all the trouble when ironman soloing?
4. How do I deal with traps? I don't remember their locations.
I would appreciate any advice besides answers to my question and your experience with a mage solo run as a class other than a sorc.
Conditions:
1. core rule. random hp per level ups.
2. no sorcerer. I've already done it once. I'm going to pick a human race.
3. delete a save when MC dies and retry from Candlekeep. Even if MC dies in BG2 part, I will start back in BG1.
4. no cheese tactics. I did that with sorc(3 skull traps in contingency spell to kill boss even before they get their defenses up) and the game was extremely easy and unfun.
Questions:
1. Specialist mage, wild mage, or pure mage? If specialist mage, which specialization?
2. Conjurer is probably the best among specialist mage. However, how do I detect invisible and hidden foes with solo conjurer? Dispel won't work on an invisible enemy mage if his spell shields are up. I should to be able to fight against boos enemies without dying.
3. Does chaos shield affect 5% surge? I will probably have to avoid using spells on myself as a dispel can cause surge by 5% and turn my character into a stone. Is wild mage, although the second most powerful mage next to sorcerer, worth all the trouble when ironman soloing?
4. How do I deal with traps? I don't remember their locations.
I would appreciate any advice besides answers to my question and your experience with a mage solo run as a class other than a sorc.
Post edited by IntoTheDarkness on
3
Comments
2: You won't be able to until BG2, I believe. The Book of Infinite Spells can cast True Seeing if you're on the right page, and there's a trick to get duplicate copies to avoid getting stuck on the Burning Hands page.
3: Chaos Shield affects all wild surges, regardless of their origin. Most would not recommend doing a no-reload with a Wild Mage, not simply because you can petrify yourself, but because even a safe wild surge can cost you a spell and screw up your plans.
4: Mirror Image should protect you from most traps.
As for further advice... we might need to hear what your definition of "cheese" is. There are a lot of tricks you can pull in BG1 and BG2, and basically everything in the game has been described as cheesy.
If you're accustomed to playing a sorcerer, don't forget to drink Potions of Genius before you scribe spells. A human mage is stuck with 18 INT until you get the right tome, and even at 19, you can still fail to scribe scrolls sometimes, and you can't afford to lose a good spell in a no-reload run.
I agree with @semiticgod that Conjurer is a good option. You'd only miss True Sight, which is quite a big loss imo, as you point out yourself in your second question. The Book of Infinite Spells will take a long time to get...
Invoker is another good option. The only spell you'd lose which, depending your play style, may remain useful throughout the trilogy is Greater Malison. Chaos/Emotion/Confusion are fairly nice crowd control spells in late BG1 and the first half of BG2, but you'll have other spells that can serve the same purpose (Web, Cloudkill, Slow, Teleport Field for example).
I wouldn't recommend Wild Mage, but it has been pulled off by Grond0 over at the Bioware forums (solo, core rules, no mods), so apparently it's doable. Not sure if part of his tactics are cheesy in your book though.
4:
Research. Mirror Image and Spell Deflection spells will help against some but not all traps, and besides you'll need to know when to cast such spells...
You could consider going True Neutral for the Rabbit Familiar (as I've done with my current Cleric/illusionist). In EE it has 40% Find/Disarm Traps in BG1, 50% in SoA, and 85% in ToB. You can cast Luck on it (once or more than once because the spell's effects stack) to increase the likelihood of successful trap removals.
I'd recommend you to read up on other (solo) no-reload runs: @semiticgod, @bengoshi, @gotural, @bbear, @CharlestonianTemplar, @Ygramul, myself, and probably others I'm forgetting atm have undertaken various attempts, documented here on the forums. The Bioware No-Reload Challenge contains a wealth of well-documented runs as well, including plenty of no-reload runs that ended due to traps...
Would you consider posting your progress here? It's a new thread with only three posters so far. Your run would be a welcome addition there
(Last is for Wild Mage analysis; some deal with party dynamics, not relevant for solo runs)
1. Do not fight wounded. -- If a Gibberling could kill you with a
critical hit with 5% chance, you WILL die after many many encounters.
Similarly, do not melee with Charname if you don't have enough HP to
survive a worst case blow (non-helmet classes need twice the HP
buffer).
2. Scout. -- Obvious. If not metagaming, an encounter with a hostile
party can go south easily if unbuffed, but become a cake walk if
buffed. Especially at BGEE levels, you don't have enough spells to
remain buffed to the hilt all the time. So, scout.
3. Spells: Melee Defense. -- Especially, if charname is a frontliner.
If charname is a F/M or Blade almost all spells should be defensive.
Load up on: Shield, Mirror Image, Blur, Wraithform, Stoneskin etc. BUT
also on mage defense spells such as Minor Globe, Remove Magic etc.
4. Spells: Mage Fights. -- Most dangerous encounters by far; will end
most no-reload games. In BGEE, status effects (sleep, hold, horror,
web) WILL kill you. Worse yet, some mages will do clever things like:
Minor Globe -> Web -> Fireball. (SCS mage AI is fantastic! -- and
without breaking game rules; it plays close to how *you* should be
playing a mage.)
So, you need to:
- scatter the party (so that not everyone is disabled/burned by a
single AoE spell)
- carry anti-magic spells (Spell Thrust is a must in BGEE -- even
necessary in BG2 because it removes Spell Immunity that SCS mages love
to use)
- Scout! and Buff! (That Web and Fireball will just tickle you, if
you are buffed with Protection from Fire and Free Action)
- strike first (since I do not allow myself to metagame, I only do
this if I legitimately scouted)
5. Defense over Offense. -- Some risky strategies that let you win 1/3
times are just fine if you reload, but in a no-reload run, for every
round you need to make sure that you are 0.9999 (*) likely to survive
that particular round.
(*) Yes, that number is more or less accurate:
Say, in a typical BGEE/BG2EE run you remain in combat for something
like 20 hours (not including pauses), then you are in combat for a
little over 10,000 rounds. With the average survival rate given above,
your chances of finishing a BGEE/BG2EE no-reload run is a mere 37%.
(0.9999^10000)
6. Use consumables like your life depends on them. It does.
7. Wild Mages [theoretical] -- DO. NOT. CAST. IN. PUBLIC. Really,
what are you gonna do if you get a Gate in Beregost, or a
Fireball:self amid Flaming Fist headcourters. Cast only at the enemies
(and do not ever buff the charname with a wild mage!)
This is just with Neera, by the way. I doubt anyone ever finished a
no-reload run with a Wild Mage charname:
Here are the odds:
there are about ~10/100 wild surges that act as "kill the caster" at
low levels (even at high levels, "Petrify:self" will usually kill you,
even if you might survive a fireball to the face then)
If you cast 1000 spells through a no-reload run, you will have about
50 surges and your survival chance throughout the run comes to about
0.5% -- yep, just half a percent, even if you play an otherwise
perfect game.
(0.1 chance of death per surge -> 0.9^50 = 0.0052 chance of surviving 50 surges)
SCS no reload run LP would be just irresistible.
But also a no-reload trilogy run is a several hundred hour affair for me. It takes months to get through (with real life) and I never completed one... yet.
Hence the threads right: some of us will!
Consider yourself invited to post your no-reload adventures here:
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/40393/maybe-this-time-ee-scs-trilogy-no-reload-runs-featuring-enter-kathlen-the-illusive-cleric/p1
If we have a 0.1% chance, or 1/1000 chance, of dying from a wild surge, then the chance of surviving after 50 surges is not 0.9^50, or ~0%. It is 0.999^50, or ~95% chance of survival. It would be 0.9^50 only if the chance of death was 10%, not 0.1%.
If we were to say a wild surge is riskier--say, a 1% chance of death per surge--then 50 surges would give a 0.99^50=60% chance of survival. I think that 1% death chance might be a little more accurate, not because you'd get petrified, but because you might lose your spell, or get hit by a Fireball, etc.
[10/100 maybe a bit of an overestimate at killer surges, but, e.g., "Summon Demon" is bad enough or "Cow Explosion".]
Again, if ~10/100 surges will likely kill the caster (at low levels) then having 50 surges (estimated through a full run of BG with Wild Mage) will lead to a 0.9^50 = 0.005 chance of NOT dying.
i.e. a Wild Mage no-reloader that does, in fact, cast spells is very unlikely to ever reach Sarevok.
(I'd love to be proven wrong on this by someone's no-reload run. My own run (Khael) did emply Neera, but NEVER had her cast buff spells at charname or the party.)
To be honest it would have been tremendously difficult as a single class Mage, because you rely so much on your spells. I had a few surges during the game, including a "the caster becomes the target" which made me lose about 40 HP.
A very important thing to know is that Wild Surges can occur when you cast a spell from a scroll ! So you can't even rely on them.
I would advice you to pick a Conjurer, an Invoker or even an Illusionist. Like @Blackraven said, chosing True Neutral as your alignment would be a very wise decision for the familiar. You can look up on the internet for traps, or you can ask here and we will also answer
Most of the times, you can protect yourself from them with Stoneskin / Mirror Image for physical ones, and Shield (for the Magic Missile immunity) / Minor Spell Deflection / Minor Globe of Invulnerability for the magical ones.
Concerning strategies, I think one of the easiest way to solo BG1 is to rush the Wand of Fire and proceed to pewpewpew your way from there, recharge it when needed. It will make short work of everyone until you get the city, then it will still be useful.
Also, be creative. For instance, in the battle vs Rayic Gethras, I simply used dominate on him, which he isn't immune to even with his protections. I then used his own spells to strip his protections, summon creatures, and stun him. He was then killed by his own summons before he had a chance to recover. He was defeated by a single spell, yet could easily destroy an entire party with his firepower and protections.
The Nymph Cloak, available from Gorch in Mae'var's guild hall, has no save penalty, but it uses a save vs. breath, which works more often on mages. But either way, as always, you'll need a backup plan.
edit: Cloudkill also interrupts his spells, works like a charm.