Completed all of BG:EE + TOSC with SCS mod on insane difficulty with 2 thief party, my thoughts
randomhero890
Member Posts: 86
Final group was:
1. Main char, Half-orc Fighter (lv 9) / Thief (lv 11)
2. custom-made Elf Mage (lv 10) / Thief (lv 11)
The F/T I had put all his thieving pts into move silently, hide in shadows. He dual wielded Varscona and the +2 scimitar fairly early on, with his ranged being composite longbow+1 when I could get it. I wish thieves could backstab with blunt weapons, as blunt weapons are much much better than slashing due to the resistances enemies have (skeletons resist slashing like crazy). An important item which is make-or-break is the sandthief's ring, which has 8 charges of instant-invis you can re-buy (for 25,000g so you have to use sparingly). As soon as he took too much damage (which didn't take much considering he wore shadow armor studded leather for 70% of the game) he could fall back behind the summoned monsters and do great damage with a bow and magical arrows. His backstabs at the end of the game were doing like 50-80ish hits with 20 str, and 130+ damage crits (they very very rarely crit though, I think only like 3 times total the whole game...)
The M/T used the army scythe crossbow and staff-spear +2 quarterstaff when I could get them. He put his thieving pts mostly into open locks, find traps, and relied on spell invis and improved invis for stealth quite a lot of the time. He was also the wand-master, having gathered quite a lot of wands during the course of the game...
...the most important of which being my favorite item and absolute requirement for this group: the wand of monster summoning. I think about 3 appear total in the game, one you can pick up very early on. This is much better than even Monster Summoning III, which being a level 5 mage spell, you can't use most of the game. It is random what it summons, but it will often summon 2 ogres, which on insane mode can hit for 35ish damage. I didn't use the necklace of fireball to spam fireballs from range cheese, but I did re-charge the wand of monster summoning by doing the sell and re-buy trick. It still cost about 25,000g to re-buy, which I considered a fair price for a wand re-charge. In this regard, I had to use it sparingly, basically really only for the "big" fights
You would think that being able to lay 4+ traps at once would trivialize too much, and they could make some encounters trivial. However, most of the hardest fights in the game were set up in a way where traps weren't really possible at all to use, which I found nice for the challenge
The hardest spots for this group with SCS mod+insane mode were:
1. Durlag's Tower chessboard (not even close, nothing else compares to how hard this is) - I think I re-loaded this fight 15? 20? times, I don't even remember. First off, ALL the opponents come racing at you with haste up the second you step in, and zoning in cancels your stealth, not like there is time to lay traps anyway. I couldn't figure out where I was allowed to run, which left us running back and forth stuck to the bottom row, it was the only way we wouldn't get electrocuted. You have to get a dispel off immediately to cancel the enemies' haste, since cloudkill, web, none of that stuff seems to land on them anyway. From there it was summoning monsters, giving us haste, and moving back and forth along the bottom using invis and sandthief's ring as a necessary reset many, many times. Basically each "invis-reset" started with my mage coming out of stealth to use wand of monster summoning, while my main char backstabbed another opponent into flying bits. From there we would have about 15 seconds until all our summons were dead again.....
2. The Bosses of the werewolf island - Bastard swords are not a part of long sword proficiency, and my main char had 0 proficiency pts in bastard sword and dagger. And the only items I had at the time which would hurt those bosses were a bastard sword and a dagger which did +damage to shadeshifters. Other weapons, even my +2 swords, would not work. I found out later that there's a long sword in durlag's I could have used, but I did the werewolf island before durlag's, so /shrug. The bosses were exceptionally hard due to my main char not being able to hit them unless he got great rolls. Had to retry a lot and yell "come on hit him" at the screen. You would get him low and then miss, miss, miss, miss while he regenerated 6hp/round back to full
3. The top of the iron throne fight - This can be either the easiest or the hardest fight, depending on how much you want to cheese the stairs. The big upside to thief-classes is that you can stealth immediately when you go down stairs. Even with me being able to re-stealth at will, the fight was still hard because the mages you couldn't backstab, even after a dispel they would re-apply their stoneskins and mirror images. And the archers were wearing full plate mail and had lots of HP, so a backstab would not kill them. But if you give me infinite opportunities to go downstairs, re-stealth or invis, and re-open with backstab and aoe spells, I will win. I do not think this group could have won if you made the rule: no going down the stairs. Not possible to win with this group with that rule
4. The bandit camp - This fight was just bananas. They all call each other and you have like 30 enemies chasing you, all archers, all with arrows of fire and cold. And the named guys here have oodles of hp and can pretty much one-shot you if they ever get a single swing off. And even though we are running through trees and re-stealthing, even using invis, the SCS mod gave these guys some kind of ridiculous see-invis sort of senses, they would all keep chasing us even when I know they could not possibly see us. This one took a lot of reloads
What fights were surprisingly not hard:
1. The demonknight. What a joke! Just use summons to distract him and plink him down with enchanted arrows and crossbow bolts. He dropped a fireball on his own head and wiped my summons at the start of the fight, and he has a ***100%*** hit-rate, so at first I was like "oh crap this is going to be hard!". But that was it, that was the last fireball he used. The rest of the fight he just kept swinging at summons and being shot in the face. And my mage had multiple casts of monster summoning III and his wand, so we were not going to run out of summons on this one. I didn't even bother with the mirror
2. Sarevok. Once again, he has 100% hitrate and will basically kill my 110hp main character in about 2 swings. But once again, summons and arrows. This one you could also trap the hell out of the screen but the traps didn't hurt sarevok. They would, however, hurt his buddies, so I used them for those guys
Overall, I Loved the game, loved the storyline. Looking forward to doing Siege of Dragonspear with these chars. I won't have my wand though, so I plan to recruit some NPC's. After that I'll be doing BG2:EE, although not sure with these chars or not
1. Main char, Half-orc Fighter (lv 9) / Thief (lv 11)
2. custom-made Elf Mage (lv 10) / Thief (lv 11)
The F/T I had put all his thieving pts into move silently, hide in shadows. He dual wielded Varscona and the +2 scimitar fairly early on, with his ranged being composite longbow+1 when I could get it. I wish thieves could backstab with blunt weapons, as blunt weapons are much much better than slashing due to the resistances enemies have (skeletons resist slashing like crazy). An important item which is make-or-break is the sandthief's ring, which has 8 charges of instant-invis you can re-buy (for 25,000g so you have to use sparingly). As soon as he took too much damage (which didn't take much considering he wore shadow armor studded leather for 70% of the game) he could fall back behind the summoned monsters and do great damage with a bow and magical arrows. His backstabs at the end of the game were doing like 50-80ish hits with 20 str, and 130+ damage crits (they very very rarely crit though, I think only like 3 times total the whole game...)
The M/T used the army scythe crossbow and staff-spear +2 quarterstaff when I could get them. He put his thieving pts mostly into open locks, find traps, and relied on spell invis and improved invis for stealth quite a lot of the time. He was also the wand-master, having gathered quite a lot of wands during the course of the game...
...the most important of which being my favorite item and absolute requirement for this group: the wand of monster summoning. I think about 3 appear total in the game, one you can pick up very early on. This is much better than even Monster Summoning III, which being a level 5 mage spell, you can't use most of the game. It is random what it summons, but it will often summon 2 ogres, which on insane mode can hit for 35ish damage. I didn't use the necklace of fireball to spam fireballs from range cheese, but I did re-charge the wand of monster summoning by doing the sell and re-buy trick. It still cost about 25,000g to re-buy, which I considered a fair price for a wand re-charge. In this regard, I had to use it sparingly, basically really only for the "big" fights
You would think that being able to lay 4+ traps at once would trivialize too much, and they could make some encounters trivial. However, most of the hardest fights in the game were set up in a way where traps weren't really possible at all to use, which I found nice for the challenge
The hardest spots for this group with SCS mod+insane mode were:
1. Durlag's Tower chessboard (not even close, nothing else compares to how hard this is) - I think I re-loaded this fight 15? 20? times, I don't even remember. First off, ALL the opponents come racing at you with haste up the second you step in, and zoning in cancels your stealth, not like there is time to lay traps anyway. I couldn't figure out where I was allowed to run, which left us running back and forth stuck to the bottom row, it was the only way we wouldn't get electrocuted. You have to get a dispel off immediately to cancel the enemies' haste, since cloudkill, web, none of that stuff seems to land on them anyway. From there it was summoning monsters, giving us haste, and moving back and forth along the bottom using invis and sandthief's ring as a necessary reset many, many times. Basically each "invis-reset" started with my mage coming out of stealth to use wand of monster summoning, while my main char backstabbed another opponent into flying bits. From there we would have about 15 seconds until all our summons were dead again.....
2. The Bosses of the werewolf island - Bastard swords are not a part of long sword proficiency, and my main char had 0 proficiency pts in bastard sword and dagger. And the only items I had at the time which would hurt those bosses were a bastard sword and a dagger which did +damage to shadeshifters. Other weapons, even my +2 swords, would not work. I found out later that there's a long sword in durlag's I could have used, but I did the werewolf island before durlag's, so /shrug. The bosses were exceptionally hard due to my main char not being able to hit them unless he got great rolls. Had to retry a lot and yell "come on hit him" at the screen. You would get him low and then miss, miss, miss, miss while he regenerated 6hp/round back to full
3. The top of the iron throne fight - This can be either the easiest or the hardest fight, depending on how much you want to cheese the stairs. The big upside to thief-classes is that you can stealth immediately when you go down stairs. Even with me being able to re-stealth at will, the fight was still hard because the mages you couldn't backstab, even after a dispel they would re-apply their stoneskins and mirror images. And the archers were wearing full plate mail and had lots of HP, so a backstab would not kill them. But if you give me infinite opportunities to go downstairs, re-stealth or invis, and re-open with backstab and aoe spells, I will win. I do not think this group could have won if you made the rule: no going down the stairs. Not possible to win with this group with that rule
4. The bandit camp - This fight was just bananas. They all call each other and you have like 30 enemies chasing you, all archers, all with arrows of fire and cold. And the named guys here have oodles of hp and can pretty much one-shot you if they ever get a single swing off. And even though we are running through trees and re-stealthing, even using invis, the SCS mod gave these guys some kind of ridiculous see-invis sort of senses, they would all keep chasing us even when I know they could not possibly see us. This one took a lot of reloads
What fights were surprisingly not hard:
1. The demonknight. What a joke! Just use summons to distract him and plink him down with enchanted arrows and crossbow bolts. He dropped a fireball on his own head and wiped my summons at the start of the fight, and he has a ***100%*** hit-rate, so at first I was like "oh crap this is going to be hard!". But that was it, that was the last fireball he used. The rest of the fight he just kept swinging at summons and being shot in the face. And my mage had multiple casts of monster summoning III and his wand, so we were not going to run out of summons on this one. I didn't even bother with the mirror
2. Sarevok. Once again, he has 100% hitrate and will basically kill my 110hp main character in about 2 swings. But once again, summons and arrows. This one you could also trap the hell out of the screen but the traps didn't hurt sarevok. They would, however, hurt his buddies, so I used them for those guys
Overall, I Loved the game, loved the storyline. Looking forward to doing Siege of Dragonspear with these chars. I won't have my wand though, so I plan to recruit some NPC's. After that I'll be doing BG2:EE, although not sure with these chars or not
4
Comments
So far I have been combining things like bless/defensive harmony with glitterdust and just mowing through them with hasted melee attacks. Spell attacks are ok, but not all that great with how much HP. And we are really going through lots of arrows. But overall, not hard. The last time I tried LoB, I tried with level 3-4 character imports. Big difference between max level and those
I do not think it is possible to beat legacy of bhaal with SCS mod, certainly the chessboard would have to be impossible. But I wonder how far I can get with these maxed chars...
I was wondering why I kept hearing the same phrase and every time I did, I knew things were about to get real. And by real, I mean really hard. Turns out it is a script for an instant cast aoe haste, but actually I don't think it can be dispelled. Because it is not a spell, technically. But I do remember appearing to remove haste and other effects with dispel, partly because of the high mage level
Backstab with single weapon style or two handed weapon style for improved crit chances. Dual wield after you backstab
I also tried the stinking cloud + undead summons trick but the entire cloud might have dropped 1 or 2 enemy pawns and nothing else, it was a waste of a cast for me. See, with only 1 Mage and being bum rushed, that 6 second pause in between rounds, in between casts...that pause is life or death. That first cast really matters because it might be all you get before you die, so I discovered that wand of monster summoning put bodies between them and me, enough time to get off an invis, which is the only thing that keeps me from dying...
Anyway, long story short, I tried to kill ALL the attackers in the chessboard fight. After almost all were dead, randomly the fight ended and the rest poofed and i said to myself "oh I must have killed the king there"