Once you go Cloudkill you never go back
RedWizard
Member Posts: 242
I mean just wow... could there possibly be a better spell in BG series?
The fact you can get this from a wand as soon as chapter 1 is just icing on the cake.
Cloudkill can be used without fail to absolutely destroy any non lich mage encounter be it SCSII or not. The fact is, mages CANNOT make themselves immune to its effect and the poison damage no matter if they are level 20+ with one million prebuffs. This ensures they will get disrupted forever. And it can be stacked. Doesn't matter if they have enough AI to know when to move out of the cloudkills of doom, you can just fill the entire area with more and more and MORE Cloudkills from wands! No need to rest, take that Vance! And they can be recharged too.
It's a reason I don't even bother with dispels. Dispeling a spellcaster in SCSII is far too annoying and time consuming. They know when to cast improved invis, many might start with protections of a level you can't even dispel when you meet them at the first time, you have to deal with their prebuffed/contingecy/sequencer simulacra and projected images and SI:Abjuration and SI:Divination and gods know what else and usually by the time you actually get to dispel them they have already cast a lot of high powered spells, like the damned first round Time Stop.
SO much easier and satisfying to just watch them melt away from poison as their spells fumble and fumble.
And don't forget its secondary uses! Instantly killing a lot of enemies including some trolls and umber hulks? Yes, please!
The fact you can get this from a wand as soon as chapter 1 is just icing on the cake.
Cloudkill can be used without fail to absolutely destroy any non lich mage encounter be it SCSII or not. The fact is, mages CANNOT make themselves immune to its effect and the poison damage no matter if they are level 20+ with one million prebuffs. This ensures they will get disrupted forever. And it can be stacked. Doesn't matter if they have enough AI to know when to move out of the cloudkills of doom, you can just fill the entire area with more and more and MORE Cloudkills from wands! No need to rest, take that Vance! And they can be recharged too.
It's a reason I don't even bother with dispels. Dispeling a spellcaster in SCSII is far too annoying and time consuming. They know when to cast improved invis, many might start with protections of a level you can't even dispel when you meet them at the first time, you have to deal with their prebuffed/contingecy/sequencer simulacra and projected images and SI:Abjuration and SI:Divination and gods know what else and usually by the time you actually get to dispel them they have already cast a lot of high powered spells, like the damned first round Time Stop.
SO much easier and satisfying to just watch them melt away from poison as their spells fumble and fumble.
And don't forget its secondary uses! Instantly killing a lot of enemies including some trolls and umber hulks? Yes, please!
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Comments
SR definitely does a lot to address this, as does Nightmare Mode, to a degree (fights lasting longer than cloud duration), but I still exercise a lot of caution when using these types of spells.
That's all just personal preference, though. Using clouds to interrupt is a powerful, valid strategy. It also works with spells like Meteor Swarm, Firestorm, or Storm of Vengeance (some of which actually ignore MR, too). Note however that with SCS (and other mods) you regularly come across scripted spells that you cannot interrupt with damage in the first place, making this tactic a bit less of a big deal.
The game went from 30 to like 5 FPS (no FPS skipping though, simply slower than normal with rounds lasting forever etc...)
It does more damage and you can easily make your own characters immune to it.
If you want to see how destructive it can be, I advice you to take a look at my "Children of Fire" playthrough to see me kill almost everything in the game with that spell, including Adalon, Kargaax, Twisted Rune and even Irenicus.
Base reciepe:
- Make your party members immune to fire (I have 5 permanently immune)
- Prepare a Chain Contingency with 3 Incendiary Clouds
- Summon some Mordenkanein's Swords for the lulz
- Grab some pop corn and let the automated IA do the rest
Add just some spice for the hardest foes, like some Lower Resistances on Irenicus
I do love a nice Firestorm against beholders, mindflayers or drow though.
Can't remember 100% but I think it was involved in me finally beating Eclipse for the first time, back in the day (of course that was partly also because you could not cast cloud spells in the area).
The only threats that exist once you start to abuse "cloud" spells are:
- magic resistant spellcasters (they don't get interrupted if they resist the spell... but this is solved by a Spell Trigger with Lower Resistance x3 or a Fire Storm)
- physical opponents that can withstand the cloud long enough to prove to be a threat
And this is on this last kind of threat that Incendiary Cloud is vastly superior to Cloudkill, because it's quite easy to render all your companions permanently immune to fire, and thus, allow them to fight under the cloud without taking a single damage.
So, yes, it comes later than Cloudkill, but the OP asked us : "could there possibly be a better spell?"
My answer is "There is. It's called Incendiary Cloud"
And Firestorm is better too, just not as good as IC
Find myself in real life muttering about "cloud kill" when in a large crowd or queue for something.
Anyways there is always a chance they'll cast the spell despite how many hits they take, so pretty sure there was already some sort of check in place.
Web + Cloudkill.
Cloudkill exploits is one of the reasons why SCS has become essential; without it too many foes/fights are a joke.
Spellcasting Failure (16669)
The way that spellcasters fail after taking damage has
been externalized to CONCENTR.2da. By default, any
damage a spellcaster takes will cause them to fail their
spellcasting.
CHECK_MODE
0 Any damage
1 (1d20 + luck) vs. (spell level + damage taken)
2 (1d20 + Concentration ) vs. (15 + spell level)
So, it means:
- in an unmodded game (CHECK_MODE=0) nothing will change compared to the current behavior
- in a moded game with (CHECK_MODE=1) you will still have chance to get interrupted if you take 0 damage, just less chances
- in a modded game with (CHECK_MODE=2) you will be as much interrupted by taking 0 damage than taking 100 damage
=> Conclusion: stacking clouds of any kind will still be a powerful way to disable opponents spellcasters in 2.0
There are also situations where enemies have so much health that stacking Cloudkill doesn't work, or takes a long time to take effect, where other approaches would be faster and easier (like just storming the gates with a few buffed melee fighters).
Of course, relying on any one spell constantly is pretty cheesy no matter what it is. You can do it, but it's often not that much fun. You might as well play on easy mode if you want that approach. The Infinity Engine games are great at player-driven difficulty - you can always fall back to the cheese if you need to, but it's probably not the most enjoyable way to play.
You make it sound like filling the place with cloudkills is instantaneous; if you're willing to take the time (several rounds) to fill the entire say, 2nd floor of the guarded compound in the Temple District with cloudkills, then by all means. Definitely cheesy vs vanilla ai, but vs SCS ai, chances are good that'll mean a few spells go off (some via contingencies and triggers) while what's his name at least tries to walk out of a cloud and cast Zone of Sweet Air; who're you going to target with the additional clouds, the cleric or the mage? With SCS all that's needed for a high level mage like Sion to do some nasty business is a round or two, it's still no guaranteed win if you're relying solely on this as your tactic, not to mention quite a few foes are immune to cloudkill.
Incendiary Cloud is an entirely different matter; if you have the means to coat the room with lvl 8 spells while being immune to it then chances of a win are pretty good no matter what; nothing remarkable about that.
Cloudkill from wands is pretty much instantaneous. And you can have about what, 3-4 wands?
So yeah, you can already fill the entire room just by having 3-4 characters capable of using the wand. And considering how mage parties are already favored in BG2...
It's especially easy in the guarded compouded because you can immediately spam the wands as soon as you go up the stairs.
The contingencies and triggers and stuff aren't exactly a problem during the very first rounds of combat because they usually are protective spells(none of which block poison) or Horrid Wilting which is centered at the caster so easy to avoid as the mages start far away. What's REALLY a problem is the mages getting a time stop off as their first cast, the cloudkill wands have 99% of preventing that.
The cleric that can dispel the clouds cannot protect himself against physical blows so all you have to do is send a poison immune and hasted fighter after him.
You may call it cheese but then again I also find it rather cheesy that enemy mages are ALWAYS ridiculously overleveled compared to your party when you first meet them in BG2. Many also have absurd stats like Tolgerias in the Planar Sphere having about 100+ HP for a MAGE. The Prison Warden? Has class levels of XP worth of what you can only get in ToB by being a multi fighter/mage. Even Yuan ti mages having sequencers despite the fact you meet them super duper early. Basically you spent the entire game fighting level 15-19+ mages while your party is still 12-14 or so unless you delay most quests for the final chapter after you get back from UD.
This wasn't exactly a problem in default BG2 because while they were overleveled they didn't have their their entire spellbook filled with literally all buffs you can imagine, many of which are prebuffed or stacked into contingencies, not to mention being able to perfectly chain a Contingency to get PFMW the moment the first wears off while you cannot do the same. That is the case with SCSII.