Sarevok is CE for the same reasons Korgan is CE. Firstly, they are volatile and prone to act on impulse. Secondly they also put a high value on their personal freedom, only accepting to take orders from someone they recognize as more powerful than them. These are definite Chaotic traits.
Sarevok is chaotic evil. I consider him the archetype of high intelligence chaotic evil. Chaotic evil doesn't have to equal chaotic stupid, although sometimes it works out that way with the low intelligence version.
For me he has always been NE. He does what he does for his own personal gain, not to sow chaos for chaos sake. Personally I think CE is used on way, way to many characters and creatures where NE would be more applicable.
For me, Sarevok skirts a VERY fine line between NE and CE. I think he dips into CE more for one simple reason. He abandons plans easily. He had everything set up to perfectly to become a Grand Duke. You were the only wrench in the plans. When you claim to have evidence at his crowning, he loses it. He still had enough influence that he could have turned it around with a little diplomacy, he still had the advanage. But instead, he immediately flips out and demands to be crowned. When he isn't immediately satiated, he defaults to "Screw it, everyone dies." He is smart and ca make plans, even in the long term. But as soon as something doesn't go his way, he drops it all to vent his rage at the problem.
Sarevok is CE for the same reasons Korgan is CE. Firstly, they are volatile and prone to act on impulse. Secondly they also put a high value on their personal freedom, only accepting to take orders from someone they recognize as more powerful than them. These are definite Chaotic traits.
Now Shar-Teel... this is a questionable CE.
What do you mean ?Shar Teel is abusive,violent and psychotic.
@Arvia if you install Ascension, you can get Balthazar to side with you against Melissan if you have the right stats and/ or alignment. But Ascension also makes certain fights distinctly harder than in vanilla, so it might not be right for you.
@semiticgod My favourite character is an Undead Hunter, I think the alignment and stats should fit.
I don't want to try too many mods at once. I have to start my current playthrough from scratch again and will use the opportunity to try the Alternatives mod, but I think Ascension makes the "next time" list.
Thank you for the idea. I only had it in mind as the "fights in ToB are a LOT tougher" mod.
@Arvia Most of the toughr fights in ToB are optional components, you don't need to install them at all. The final fight, however, is not, and its a doozy.
The final fight is wildly different from vanilla. You start out fighting Bodhi and Irenicus (though Bodhi can be won over by an evil character), Imoen will transform into the Slayer and go hostile (if you wait until she turns back to normal, she rejoins the party), and on the higher difficulties, you'll also have to fight two Fallen Solars, which have vorpal and dispelling attacks, at least in SCS.
Then you get a free period in which to activate the pools, each of which spawn a bunch of demons, including Cambion fighters whose attacks penalize THAC0 by 2 on each hit with no saving throw. Once you've beaten a pool, you can activate it against to get a free rest, and once you've activated all three, the next phase begins: you have to fight Sendai, Abazigal, Illasera, Yaga-Shura, Balthazar (or Gromnir if Balthazar's on your side), and Sarevok (unless Sarevok is in your party and has been converted to Chaotic Good by Ascension banters), all simultaneously. The moment any one of them dies, Melissan will join the fight, and she will gleefully use a Time Stop->Teleport Without Error->Greater Whirlwind Attack that will be fatal for almost anyone without high damage resistances or PFMW. For characters who have neither, they'll need to use the Focus ability to gain 30 seconds of immunity to Time Stop effects (you learn Focus by activating the energy pools), but Focus can only be used once every 60 seconds.
If you do install Ascension, you'll want to save a Protection from Magic scroll to use on Abazigal on the first round of the main fight, and ideally also Sendai if you have a spare scroll. It's a good idea to bring several of the Five to Near Death or at least Badly Injured before you kill any of them, since you'll then be able to bump them off very soon after Melissan arrives, and you won't have to fight quite so many enemies at the same time.
Well, the vanilla final fight did underwhelm me a bit, comparing to other fights, but though I do like a good story and a decent challenge, I'm not THAT crazy about reloading 500 times for the toughest fight I can imagine.
Has anyone ever thought about making Saemon Havarian a Bhaalspawn? I would like a perfectly justified reason to kill him. Or a helmet that gives constant immunity to cheating liars like him.
First up: A minor quibble, but why do you all keep calling her "Melissan"? That's not her actual name. He name is Amellysan the Blackhearted. Melissan was just a dumb alias.
Second: I would much prefer if Throne of Bhaal was a primarily story-based campaign, no Watcher's Keep, with Gromnir and each of the Five having properly fleshed-out backstories and motivations. I'm sure that's not too unpopular, but I want to say it anyway. Much less emphasis on spectacle, much more emphasis on character work.
First up: A minor quibble, but why do you all keep calling her "Melissan"? That's not her actual name. He name is Amellysan the Blackhearted. Melissan was just a dumb alias.
Second: I would much prefer if Throne of Bhaal was a primarily story-based campaign, no Watcher's Keep, with Gromnir and each of the Five having properly fleshed-out backstories and motivations. I'm sure that's not too unpopular, but I want to say it anyway. Much less emphasis on spectacle, much more emphasis on character work.
i believe the problem ToB had was tight time constraints, i almost want to think that ToB was supposed to be "bg 3" but they just didn't have enough time to make it as polished as SoA was, hence the reason why it feels a bit rushed and not to the quality standards that SoA has
but with that being said, i actually don't mind ToB, one thing i find it does well is the pacing, unlike other DnD type games that go epic ( NWN 1 & 2, and kind of HoW; although the pacing is good in HoW, it is just a notoriously short campaign, seriously, i can go from beginning to end in like 2 hours ) i still think ToB is the best "epic" campaign so far, with NWN 1 being in second place
@Arvia It's definitely challengeing, but it sounds worse on paper than it is. If you make the right decisions, you can get allies to assist, and the free rests between each pool helps a lot. Its fairly manageable if you think of each phase as separate encounter, rather than a single marathon fight.
To be fair, Melissan's name is listed as Melissan even after her real plans are exposed. In fact, I think that one dialog was the only time her original name, Amelyssan, was ever mentioned.
LOL, "I swear, travelling with you is never dull...", err, I mean, sometimes you guys strike me as borderline insane. The one time I ever played BG long enough to go all the way to Melissan, I couldn't deal with the Elder Orbs and constant demons she was summoning on core rules, and I had to slide the difficulty slider all the way down to "easy" before I could beat her. Respect to you all, but good grief. You beat vanilla Melisan on, I would assume, the maximum slider setting, and then, you want to make it *harder*? Hookay.
LOL, "I swear, travelling with you is never dull...", err, I mean, sometimes you guys strike me as borderline insane. The one time I ever played BG long enough to go all the way to Melissan, I couldn't deal with the Elder Orbs and constant demons she was summoning on core rules, and I had to slide the difficulty slider all the way down to "easy" before I could beat her. Respect to you all, but good grief. You beat vanilla Melisan on, I would assume, the maximum slider setting, and then, you want to make it *harder*? Hookay.
and see, here i am in the middle, i always play the game on insane difficulty, and i dont even find the mellisan fight all that hard ( never saw elder orbs, perhaps i "kill" her to quick? )
but with that being said, this ascension load of shenanigans sounds way too tedious for me, because i play very lazily and if i can't win with buffs and start having to use exploits to win, in my opinion that is just poor scripting and making things difficult for the sake of difficult ( like the abizigal fight for example, which is impossible to win on insane difficulty without exploiting the AI a bit, and when i say "win" i mean have no one die/get chunked )
Huh, if that's where you can rest between pools I think I played the ascension mod once, back in 2000 and something. I had played on my roommate's computer then and assumed it was the normal game. So that's why I hated ToB and was surprised in the EE that there were some really annoying tough fights (core rules, no cheating) but not nearly as difficult as I remember. And there was
another dragon with Abazigal, right?
And I had Weimer's Solaufein with me which already made SoA harder than necessary.
If that was Ascension, I don't think I need it again,ever ?
But since I have to start my current lawful good no stealing no shady quests run AGAIN because my notebook died of exhaustion in the middle of chapter 3, I will try the Alternatives Mod and see if it works for my paladin. I'm curious if it's possible to get enough money and useful items by perfectly legal means. Probably with a smaller party ( I usually take a full party of 6). Challenge enough for the moment. I don't think I will ever get bored enough to kill MORE people in ToB.
Edited: In case nobody noticed, I tend to repeat myself. A lot. Bad habit. I would apologise if I thought I could ever change it.
Change of subject. This IS the unpopular opinions thread, after all.
So, I have to confess, I actually LIKE Anomen and always have him in my party.
He's very credible and has a great character development. I mean, honestly, with his family background, you really have to appreciate how hard he struggles to be good (and successfully, if you support him a bit) and doesn't just turn into a crazy murdering psycho.
Sure, he is very arrogant in the beginning, but he is also very young and probably desperate to prove himself. And he is a great cleric once he passes his test, and a decent fighter (even without Crom Faeyr, which I don't assemble, for various reasons)
I only wish there was a friendly option (for a female character) to support him without getting ninjamanced. I would like friendly dialogue options to turn him down without saying something mean. I want him to be my little adoptive brother ?
Unpopular Opinon: The Ascension final battle is EASIER than vanilla. For a few reasons.
1. This is the big one. You get fully healed and refreshed after each pool. So you can bring far more weight to bear on each phase of the fight, and you don't need to rathion spells and abilities as much.
2. You get special abilities for each pool you release. In fact, these abilites exist pretty much solely to counter the extra shenanigans Melissan pulls, making her easier to deal with if you pay attention.
3. You can get allies for the fight, depending onyour alignment and choices. Even just getting one person to help takes a noticeable amount of pressure off your party.
I have NEVER managed to clear the vanilla fight on anything higher than easy. To compare, I can clear Ascension on normal AND keep everyone alive. There are more ways to very quickly die if you aren't prepared, but you also have more resources and ways to counter the enemy.
Unpopular Opinon: The Ascension final battle is EASIER than vanilla. For a few reasons.
1. This is the big one. You get fully healed and refreshed after each pool. So you can bring far more weight to bear on each phase of the fight, and you don't need to rathion spells and abilities as much.
2. You get special abilities for each pool you release. In fact, these abilites exist pretty much solely to counter the extra shenanigans Melissan pulls, making her easier to deal with if you pay attention.
3. You can get allies for the fight, depending onyour alignment and choices. Even just getting one person to help takes a noticeable amount of pressure off your party.
I have NEVER managed to clear the vanilla fight on anything higher than easy. To compare, I can clear Ascension on normal AND keep everyone alive. There are more ways to very quickly die if you aren't prepared, but you also have more resources and ways to counter the enemy.
i no knows...... ascension seems like a mico managing nightmare mess, and what if you fail to get those extra team mates? now you are fighting against everyone, especially if you had sarevok and imoen on your team and now they both work for the dark side? now your team of six is down to 4 and plus all the other shenanigans you have to deal with
in all honesty the only "hard" part of the mellisan fight in vanilla is her third stage where the 4 slayer shadows come in and surround you and she will cast time stop in front of your face and just whack you all silly like and kill you, but even with that all you have to do is get anyone who has arcane spells cast PfMW right in front of her before she gets the timestop off, and that character will be immune to her damage, and have everyone else retreat to a better position before timestop goes off so then the slayer shadows aren't in such a bad spot, and then once timestop is done, just greater whirlwind mellisan and she is down in like 2 rounds
@sarevok57 Its about your prep. You can make it both easier or harder for yourself. I don't find the micro to be that bad honestly. I'll have half my team (usually the weaon guys) distract a couple of the annoying but not immediately party wrecking enemies on auto, then use the other half to burst down the 2 or 3 priority targets. A lot of people like to whittle guys down evenly to take them out at once, but that strat never really worked for me. If you have a druid, Nature's Beauty is a WONDERFUL disabler for this fight.
well we never refer to jon by his real name either.
Granted, but by his and Ellesime's admissions, there's no Joneleth anymore, only Irenicus. Melissan meanwhile is someone who never existed but Amellysan always has. It's just something that bugs me.
I wasn't impressed by ToB that much. It felt far, far too rushed and you barely get to know one of the main characters before immediately killing them. However, the real kicker for me is that I felt like there should have been a better way to handle some of the fights diplomatically.
Gromnir, for instance, should have been reachable through diplomacy. I mean, he would still get killed during the sacking, but at least your hands are clean. However, far worse than Gromnir was Bhaltazar.
I feel like it was a crime that he couldn't be persuaded, though I did like the dialog options when you finally accept the inevitable. Talk about a bittersweet conversation. That was probably one of the few fights in all of BG I had deeply mixed feelings about, because I really didn't want to fight him.
The whole thing soured me on doing ToB again, though I guess with the EE's you are going whether you like it or not.
Comments
Now Shar-Teel... this is a questionable CE.
For me, Sarevok skirts a VERY fine line between NE and CE. I think he dips into CE more for one simple reason. He abandons plans easily. He had everything set up to perfectly to become a Grand Duke. You were the only wrench in the plans. When you claim to have evidence at his crowning, he loses it. He still had enough influence that he could have turned it around with a little diplomacy, he still had the advanage. But instead, he immediately flips out and demands to be crowned. When he isn't immediately satiated, he defaults to "Screw it, everyone dies." He is smart and ca make plans, even in the long term. But as soon as something doesn't go his way, he drops it all to vent his rage at the problem.
What do you mean ?Shar Teel is abusive,violent and psychotic.
It's just a bio and a handful of voice dialogues. How they correspond to their alignments feels up to debate for me.
Jan Jansen is extremely annoying, I never use him.
I never have the heart to leave Jaheira behind but if Charname is male, she's downright creepy, from
I hate that I have to kill Balthazar because what he wants to do is very courageous and absolutely right.
I don't want to try too many mods at once. I have to start my current playthrough from scratch again and will use the opportunity to try the Alternatives mod, but I think Ascension makes the "next time" list.
Thank you for the idea. I only had it in mind as the "fights in ToB are a LOT tougher" mod.
Then you get a free period in which to activate the pools, each of which spawn a bunch of demons, including Cambion fighters whose attacks penalize THAC0 by 2 on each hit with no saving throw. Once you've beaten a pool, you can activate it against to get a free rest, and once you've activated all three, the next phase begins: you have to fight Sendai, Abazigal, Illasera, Yaga-Shura, Balthazar (or Gromnir if Balthazar's on your side), and Sarevok (unless Sarevok is in your party and has been converted to Chaotic Good by Ascension banters), all simultaneously. The moment any one of them dies, Melissan will join the fight, and she will gleefully use a Time Stop->Teleport Without Error->Greater Whirlwind Attack that will be fatal for almost anyone without high damage resistances or PFMW. For characters who have neither, they'll need to use the Focus ability to gain 30 seconds of immunity to Time Stop effects (you learn Focus by activating the energy pools), but Focus can only be used once every 60 seconds.
If you do install Ascension, you'll want to save a Protection from Magic scroll to use on Abazigal on the first round of the main fight, and ideally also Sendai if you have a spare scroll. It's a good idea to bring several of the Five to Near Death or at least Badly Injured before you kill any of them, since you'll then be able to bump them off very soon after Melissan arrives, and you won't have to fight quite so many enemies at the same time.
Has anyone ever thought about making Saemon Havarian a Bhaalspawn? I would like a perfectly justified reason to kill him. Or a helmet that gives constant immunity to cheating liars like him.
Second: I would much prefer if Throne of Bhaal was a primarily story-based campaign, no Watcher's Keep, with Gromnir and each of the Five having properly fleshed-out backstories and motivations. I'm sure that's not too unpopular, but I want to say it anyway. Much less emphasis on spectacle, much more emphasis on character work.
i believe the problem ToB had was tight time constraints, i almost want to think that ToB was supposed to be "bg 3" but they just didn't have enough time to make it as polished as SoA was, hence the reason why it feels a bit rushed and not to the quality standards that SoA has
but with that being said, i actually don't mind ToB, one thing i find it does well is the pacing, unlike other DnD type games that go epic ( NWN 1 & 2, and kind of HoW; although the pacing is good in HoW, it is just a notoriously short campaign, seriously, i can go from beginning to end in like 2 hours ) i still think ToB is the best "epic" campaign so far, with NWN 1 being in second place
and see, here i am in the middle, i always play the game on insane difficulty, and i dont even find the mellisan fight all that hard ( never saw elder orbs, perhaps i "kill" her to quick? )
but with that being said, this ascension load of shenanigans sounds way too tedious for me, because i play very lazily and if i can't win with buffs and start having to use exploits to win, in my opinion that is just poor scripting and making things difficult for the sake of difficult ( like the abizigal fight for example, which is impossible to win on insane difficulty without exploiting the AI a bit, and when i say "win" i mean have no one die/get chunked )
If that was Ascension, I don't think I need it again,ever ?
But since I have to start my current lawful good no stealing no shady quests run AGAIN because my notebook died of exhaustion in the middle of chapter 3, I will try the Alternatives Mod and see if it works for my paladin. I'm curious if it's possible to get enough money and useful items by perfectly legal means. Probably with a smaller party ( I usually take a full party of 6). Challenge enough for the moment. I don't think I will ever get bored enough to kill MORE people in ToB.
Edited: In case nobody noticed, I tend to repeat myself. A lot. Bad habit. I would apologise if I thought I could ever change it.
So, I have to confess, I actually LIKE Anomen and always have him in my party.
He's very credible and has a great character development. I mean, honestly, with his family background, you really have to appreciate how hard he struggles to be good (and successfully, if you support him a bit) and doesn't just turn into a crazy murdering psycho.
Sure, he is very arrogant in the beginning, but he is also very young and probably desperate to prove himself. And he is a great cleric once he passes his test, and a decent fighter (even without Crom Faeyr, which I don't assemble, for various reasons)
I only wish there was a friendly option (for a female character) to support him without getting ninjamanced. I would like friendly dialogue options to turn him down without saying something mean. I want him to be my little adoptive brother ?
1. This is the big one. You get fully healed and refreshed after each pool. So you can bring far more weight to bear on each phase of the fight, and you don't need to rathion spells and abilities as much.
2. You get special abilities for each pool you release. In fact, these abilites exist pretty much solely to counter the extra shenanigans Melissan pulls, making her easier to deal with if you pay attention.
3. You can get allies for the fight, depending onyour alignment and choices. Even just getting one person to help takes a noticeable amount of pressure off your party.
I have NEVER managed to clear the vanilla fight on anything higher than easy. To compare, I can clear Ascension on normal AND keep everyone alive. There are more ways to very quickly die if you aren't prepared, but you also have more resources and ways to counter the enemy.
i no knows...... ascension seems like a mico managing nightmare mess, and what if you fail to get those extra team mates? now you are fighting against everyone, especially if you had sarevok and imoen on your team and now they both work for the dark side? now your team of six is down to 4 and plus all the other shenanigans you have to deal with
in all honesty the only "hard" part of the mellisan fight in vanilla is her third stage where the 4 slayer shadows come in and surround you and she will cast time stop in front of your face and just whack you all silly like and kill you, but even with that all you have to do is get anyone who has arcane spells cast PfMW right in front of her before she gets the timestop off, and that character will be immune to her damage, and have everyone else retreat to a better position before timestop goes off so then the slayer shadows aren't in such a bad spot, and then once timestop is done, just greater whirlwind mellisan and she is down in like 2 rounds
Granted, but by his and Ellesime's admissions, there's no Joneleth anymore, only Irenicus. Melissan meanwhile is someone who never existed but Amellysan always has. It's just something that bugs me.
The whole thing soured me on doing ToB again, though I guess with the EE's you are going whether you like it or not.