Yeah it would feel incomplete to me, too that's why I never went through with it and progressed further after SoD starting dungeon. I played BG2 on Insane SCS so many times so starting it again with a pure warrior but no SCS and LoB instead, I know both DD and Monk just would break the game since BG2s main challenges are Liches with precast defensive spells and without SCS they only have contingencies. Also Beholders are monsters on SCS only, their rays take away your protections and shield of Balduran can get grabbed from you pretty quickly. Also I'm not quite sure if SCS and LoB are doable I think ToB is almost not soloable with LoB AND SCS.
There are several bottlenecks awaiting. While BG1 should be no problem for any Warrior Class, SoD will clear the floor a bit. For instance: The late-game-god aka Monk will get destroyed in SoD unless we can find a way through the Crusader Attacks & Belhifet. I lack huge xp in BG2 but it should be doable for most Warriors - or not? ToB is another story - and one that might put an end to this challenge - even without SCS. I played ToB only a couple of times so i lack metagame knowledge.
Xorn, the vanilla Ranger is going for Durlags Tower to grab some final items before facing Sarevok. Should be fun!
SoD is very hard on LoB but ToB no ScS is very easy trust me. Just look at Monk with 100% MR and huge damage who can stop him? Same goes for DD with almost 100% physical defense (might even be stronger than Monk due to LoB no SCS) You can totally tell by the enemy types in SoD that they didn't screw around.
So I decided to test out ToB without SCS but with LoB today. I totally forgot, that SCS also added additional dangerous enemies to the base game. Ambush with Ilasera is an utter disappointment without SCS. She is alone has no Time Stop and no precast spells. Against me she just managed to cast mirror image and summon an Ogrillon before she died. With SCS she is surrounded by dangerous mercenaries 2 of them mages, they have precast protections and are basically immune to damage until you either dispel (just dispel magic doesn't work, they also have Immunity Abjuration) all their buffs or wait them out on top of that both Ilasera and the mercenary mages have timestop and Ilasera basically kills any unprotected player during that timestop. If you have protections up she will instead remove those.
So yeah I stand by what I say SoD is much harder than BG 2 due to unique enemy types and also the fact that the pc is very underleveled in comparison.
Hhmmmm... if BG 2 is so easy than we could claim that any Warrior Class that can beat SoD has won the whole challenge.
Saves very much time!
Anyway: I am having so much fun with SoD atm that i cant motivate myself in playing BG 2. Some ideas especially for the last maps are growing in my mind... we will see!
P.S. Xorn will be ready for SoD soon. His Racial Enemy? Demons! Belhifet will suffer!!!!!
Well if we talk non SCS than yes, any warrior class which beats SoD will laugh at BG2. SCS is entirely different because there are many mages in BG2 and I don't know if the mages in SOD would be that much harder with SCS, since they wouldn't have high level spells and abilities.
Well if we talk non SCS than yes, any warrior class which beats SoD will laugh at BG2.
That rather depends how you play . I would agree that any warrior class that beats SoD will be capable of beating BG2, but that doesn't mean it would be easy at all. Even if you're prepared to reload constantly until you finally get the right result I think you will find some considerable challenges ahead, even without SCS!
Well if we talk non SCS than yes, any warrior class which beats SoD will laugh at BG2.
That rather depends how you play . I would agree that any warrior class that beats SoD will be capable of beating BG2, but that doesn't mean it would be easy at all. Even if you're prepared to reload constantly until you finally get the right result I think you will find some considerable challenges ahead, even without SCS!
Give me an example. What fight do you consider hard without SCS?
Is early SoA not going to be hard in LoB for any solo warrior without stealth? Note that in SoD you're fully equipped, but not so in early SoA. It's been a while since I've last played non-SCS, but without stealth, without good armor and almost without healing potions even chateau Irenicus can easily require a couple of reloads no? Getting surrounded by Goblins and not being fast enough to finish them, and those Mephits can be trouble as well. To me any portion of the game that requires reloads is hard.
I do believe that the late game with hopefully negative saves, with scrolls/potions/items for elemental protections, and with 80-85% physical resistance (for Barbarians and Paladins/Rangers respectively) solo warriors have good potential.
@Victor_Creed_SFV, you're quite outspoken on the difficulty (or lack thereof) of this challenge, would you be willing to do a playthrough and report? I find @Harpargonis' reports quite insightful, and I'm sure yours would be as well.
Is early SoA not going to be hard in LoB for any solo warrior without stealth? Note that in SoD you're fully equipped, but not so in early SoA. It's been a while since I've last played non-SCS, but without stealth, without good armor and almost without healing potions even chateau Irenicus can easily require a couple of reloads no? Getting surrounded by Goblins and not being fast enough to finish them, and those Mephits can be trouble as well. To me any portion of the game that requires reloads is hard.
I do believe that the late game with hopefully negative saves, with scrolls/potions/items for elemental protections, and with 80-85% physical resistance (for Barbarians and Paladins/Rangers respectively) solo warriors have good potential.
The dungeon will be hard, but without SCS you can rest as much as you like, so I don't think the goblins and duergar should be too difficult. I agree though that a character without stealth could easily find the mephits troublesome - I recommend managing reputation in BG1 to get Bhaal horror to help with those.
In the late game there are a number of enemies with special attacks that could cause problems, e.g. ranged maze from Abazigal, timestop from Melissan. Most scrolls and potions will be of limited value in the most difficult encounters as protections are normally stripped by remove magic or equivalent very quickly. I don't find getting past all the LoB encounters without reloads simple even on Core for a solo and I suspect that LoB will be significantly harder as you're likely to need to survive for a considerably longer time against each opponent.
@Victor_Creed_SFV, you're quite outspoken on the difficulty (or lack thereof) of this challenge, would you be willing to do a playthrough and report? I find @Harpargonis' reports quite insightful, and I'm sure yours would be as well.
You misunderstand me I'm afraid. I said several times that SoD is very hard and Harpargonis achievements amaze me, I never could motivate myself enough to go through with a full SoD LoB solo pt, I started 2 separate ones and stopped after the first map that follows Baldur City (Coastal Crossway?).
I'm strictly talking about BG2 because I played that game to death with Solo SCS insane and to be frank without SCS the game is a laugh. I tried the SoA starting dungeon today and instead of Duregar there were goblins (SCS gives you Duregar whenever there are goblins) Now those goblins might have boosted stats but they are still a joke compared to Duregar. The mephites are super weak on LoB no SCS I don't know why, but even with DD who has no magic protection they were not hard at all, which is very different on SCS. I then as stated above went to TOB (gave my DD full XP, with EE Keeper, since you can get that by Underdark if you play SoA and use SCS option so rescuing Imoen costs 120k (96) instead of only 20k.) And yeah just the fact that the starting fight in ToB is extremely tuned down as described above jsut makes me doubt that ToB is a problem, but if you want prove I could give you a ToB only playthrough on video, as said before I don't have time for the whole challenge, most I could bring myself to is start in SoA, but BG1 AND SoD is too time consuming for me, also as stated before I think SoD is very hard so I don't even know if I had Harpargonis patience to beat that in the 1st place.
I was referring in my post to BG2 as well, not to BG1 or SoD. I had read your previous comments, and I was impressed by the ease with which you dealt with chateau Irenicus (less so with Ilasera who I agree is very easy in vanilla ToB and should be doable in LoB as well). It seems you're a very skilled player so I thought it would be interesting to see how you handle a solo warrior in BG2 in LoB mode. You don't have to "prove" anything to me though. I didn't challenge you, I invited you...
But that's the point Ilasera was a complete joke she wasn't just weaker than the SCS content, it was like fighting an unnamed Mage from chapter 1 BG1. Ofc I don't expect every fight to be as easy, but with SCS Ilasera is a huge obstacle for any solo char and obviously the following enemies are not weaker than her, but stronger. LoB doesn't really do anything for mages they are squishy and if they don't have precast spells to be invulnerable at combat start, then they have nothing.
Do Mages even use Time Stop outside of SCS?
If it is interesting enough for you just to see ToB then I wouldn't mind giving it a go. Do you prefer DD or Monk?
In original BG2 I think Illasera was deliberately made easy in order to not be off-putting to people starting in ToB for the first time (SCS as a mod for experienced players upgraded her to something more like you would expect for a Bhaalspawn). I suggest you don't judge the difficulty of later enemies in ToB by her .
Alright I recorded a vid for you. I went to the next fight I knew was incredibly hard on SCS, fighting Irenicus, Bodhi and Sarevok at the same time in the Pocket Plane. Sadly Irenicus has 0 protections and just spams the same spell over and over, in SCS he is not only incredibly hard to kill but also has dangerous disabling spells where DD needs to roll a save or die. Here's the vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wp-6AYD8I
@Victor_Creed_SFV, wow that looked pretty straightforward indeed! I guess you're right. I mean I think there will still be potentially problematic encounters in vanilla LoB (like the ones @Grond0 mentioned), but with SCS/LoB otherwise trivial battles become very hard as well.
I've started an SCS/LoB playthrough myself, but I want to play with a party and Charname is a caster, so I won't post about it here. I expect lots of trouble...
Well among other fights he mentioned Draconis and Abazigal. Now the thing about dragons is SCS increases their hp. So if you don't have SC but LoB instead, guess what HP ends up being about the same than insane SCS. LoB also increases dragons ThacO, but guess what you can't tank dragon's ThacO with AC anyway you either negate the damage (hello DD) or you use spells like Stoneskin and Mirror Image. (You can even combine all three on DD with mirror Image sword and Stoneskin boots). Now in SCS Dragons have precast stoneskin, contingencies and spam Remove magic. Even tho I haven't gotten to Abazigal yet, I strongly assume without SCS they just straight up attack me. But I'll keep you posted.
@Blackraven Yes SCS and LoB is quite tough, but I thinky any mage variant should still be able to do it. I don't really see how a monk is gonna do it, since his AC is completely worthless on LoB.
Oh dear! I havent played BG2 + ToB for so long - but was the AI really that bad? Maybe i should reinstall SCS as soon as possible because there - like Victor described - was at least the glimmer of some intelligence. ANother question: Will SCS work with SoD?
I think it's a mixture of bad AI and there only being a lot of tough humans unlike SoD where a lot of new creature types got introduced. Now if human mages don't even use PfmW (or in case of Irenicus not even mirror Image just stoneskin, that's bad enough, but if their offensive spells are pure damage spells no disables it gets worse. I've got to add two points tho: In Gromnir's castle the mages finally cast Time Stop, but they had no Alacrity and only cast two spells Symbol Stun and Fear. Now these are disables, but not very deeadly ones, since you can counter them beforehand via potions. BUT I totally underestimated the power of saving throws a dwarven defender has. I have not seen him fail a single save yet and I didn't even use potions of invulnerability yet which enhance his saves by 5 more points. So DD might actually laugh at SCS LoB, gotta admit I never tried him on SCS Insane, since I thought they can't counter magic due to lacking MR or def spells.
I dn't know if SCS works properly with SoD I've seen people who installed it, but idk how good it actually works with the new creature types that are SoD only.
BUT I totally underestimated the power of saving throws a dwarven defender has. I have not seen him fail a single save yet and I didn't even use potions of invulnerability yet which enhance his saves by 5 more points. So DD might actually laugh at SCS LoB, gotta admit I never tried him on SCS Insane, since I thought they can't counter magic due to lacking MR or def spells.
I agree that saving throws will be sufficient against most disabling attacks - though not all. Malison can be thrown at you and there are a number of specific attacks in ToB which either ignore saves entirely or apply huge penalties.
Thats a real pity - SoD would be even cooler with SCS!
I am reinstalling SCS. Which settings are "standard" for Solo-Runs? Improved AI for sure. What else?
I don't think SCS would make much difference to SoD as the AI there was largely inspired by SCS anyway. If you're playing solo then the AI changes SCS introduces won't make LoB ToB harder - probably the reverse in fact - though you may still wish to do it if you want to see things act more 'intelligently'. The improved encounters components SCS offers will make things harder though. Personally I would have thought you would be better off trying to defeat LoB first without introducing SCS - I'm not sure you will find it as easy as Victor_Creed_SFV suggests.
I personally always avoid the settings that would make the game easier. (Some item and spell tweaks for example) Depending on my characterchoice I banish cloak of mirroring and shield of Balduran into ToB (wouldn't do that with a warrior tho, except it's a monk ) The most important choices for SCS are: precast spells improved random encounters (max difficulty for everything but liches, tho I played with improved for everything once, but I had a blade back then) improved chapter 1,2 and so forth encounters, those are one of the best choices because those improve weakling fights like Ilasera into crazy fights you won't forget. Improved creatures dragons, beholders, mindflayers and so forth, always go for max settings on mind flayers and beholders because trust me you won't forget some of those fights For HLA settings I always go for some casters in SoA and all in ToB have HLAs cuz I'm to pussy to give all in SoA HLAs. And for me almost unthinkable not to have the options to make the fees to shadow thieves and Cowled wizards a lot more expensive 120k for shadow thieves (turns into 96k once you gathered that much) and I think 50k for free spellcasting in Atkhala.
BUT I totally underestimated the power of saving throws a dwarven defender has. I have not seen him fail a single save yet and I didn't even use potions of invulnerability yet which enhance his saves by 5 more points. So DD might actually laugh at SCS LoB, gotta admit I never tried him on SCS Insane, since I thought they can't counter magic due to lacking MR or def spells.
I agree that saving throws will be sufficient against most disabling attacks - though not all. Malison can be thrown at you and there are a number of specific attacks in ToB which either ignore saves entirely or apply huge penalties.
Thats a real pity - SoD would be even cooler with SCS!
I am reinstalling SCS. Which settings are "standard" for Solo-Runs? Improved AI for sure. What else?
I don't think SCS would make much difference to SoD as the AI there was largely inspired by SCS anyway. If you're playing solo then the AI changes SCS introduces won't make LoB ToB harder - probably the reverse in fact - though you may still wish to do it if you want to see things act more 'intelligently'. The improved encounters components SCS offers will make things harder though. Personally I would have thought you would be better off trying to defeat LoB first without introducing SCS - I'm not sure you will find it as easy as Victor_Creed_SFV suggests.
I haven't seen Malison outside of SCS yet, I am in Amekthran and there is not that much gameplay left. I never suggested SoD is easy with SCS I wrote several times it's harder than BG2
LOL. I always wondered why the AI is so much better in BG1 than in my memories: SCS was already installed. LOL. Even though only the AI improvements not the improved Chapter Fights. BtW: Xorn is now ready for SoD and will start his adventure in the next days!
Haha nice one. Btw Draconis is quite good without SCS, even tho he doesn't have prebuffs his first sequencer is quite like SCS prebuffed dragon with Stoneskin and remove magic. Also since he does acid instead of fire damage I had to reload and he also uses malison, even tho I don't quite see why.
Also since he does acid instead of fire damage I had to reload and he also uses malison, even tho I don't quite see why.
Malison makes the acid more dangerous as well as the chance of being rendered unconscious by wing buffets. Against a party malison + chaos can be potentially dangerous, though it's less of an issue for solo.
Comments
You can buy 60 Arrows of Detonation in BG1 - not sure how many you can find from Angelo.
Sure you can skip SoD even though its part of this challenge. But you can play your own way any day.
Personally i would not skip SoD because there are some real challenging fights waiting there. Your choice!
Xorn is growing rapidly - level 7 is near!
I played BG2 on Insane SCS so many times so starting it again with a pure warrior but no SCS and LoB instead, I know both DD and Monk just would break the game since BG2s main challenges are Liches with precast defensive spells and without SCS they only have contingencies.
Also Beholders are monsters on SCS only, their rays take away your protections and shield of Balduran can get grabbed from you pretty quickly.
Also I'm not quite sure if SCS and LoB are doable I think ToB is almost not soloable with LoB AND SCS.
Xorn, the vanilla Ranger is going for Durlags Tower to grab some final items before facing Sarevok. Should be fun!
Just look at Monk with 100% MR and huge damage who can stop him?
Same goes for DD with almost 100% physical defense (might even be stronger than Monk due to LoB no SCS)
You can totally tell by the enemy types in SoD that they didn't screw around.
I totally forgot, that SCS also added additional dangerous enemies to the base game.
Ambush with Ilasera is an utter disappointment without SCS.
She is alone has no Time Stop and no precast spells.
Against me she just managed to cast mirror image and summon an Ogrillon before she died.
With SCS she is surrounded by dangerous mercenaries 2 of them mages, they have precast protections and are basically immune to damage until you either dispel (just dispel magic doesn't work, they also have Immunity Abjuration) all their buffs or wait them out on top of that both Ilasera and the mercenary mages have timestop and Ilasera basically kills any unprotected player during that timestop.
If you have protections up she will instead remove those.
So yeah I stand by what I say SoD is much harder than BG 2 due to unique enemy types and also the fact that the pc is very underleveled in comparison.
Saves very much time!
Anyway: I am having so much fun with SoD atm that i cant motivate myself in playing BG 2.
Some ideas especially for the last maps are growing in my mind... we will see!
P.S. Xorn will be ready for SoD soon. His Racial Enemy? Demons! Belhifet will suffer!!!!!
SCS is entirely different because there are many mages in BG2 and I don't know if the mages in SOD would be that much harder with SCS, since they wouldn't have high level spells and abilities.
What fight do you consider hard without SCS?
I do believe that the late game with hopefully negative saves, with scrolls/potions/items for elemental protections, and with 80-85% physical resistance (for Barbarians and Paladins/Rangers respectively) solo warriors have good potential.
@Victor_Creed_SFV, you're quite outspoken on the difficulty (or lack thereof) of this challenge, would you be willing to do a playthrough and report? I find @Harpargonis' reports quite insightful, and I'm sure yours would be as well.
In the late game there are a number of enemies with special attacks that could cause problems, e.g. ranged maze from Abazigal, timestop from Melissan. Most scrolls and potions will be of limited value in the most difficult encounters as protections are normally stripped by remove magic or equivalent very quickly. I don't find getting past all the LoB encounters without reloads simple even on Core for a solo and I suspect that LoB will be significantly harder as you're likely to need to survive for a considerably longer time against each opponent.
I said several times that SoD is very hard and Harpargonis achievements amaze me, I never could motivate myself enough to go through with a full SoD LoB solo pt, I started 2 separate ones and stopped after the first map that follows Baldur City (Coastal Crossway?).
I'm strictly talking about BG2 because I played that game to death with Solo SCS insane and to be frank without SCS the game is a laugh.
I tried the SoA starting dungeon today and instead of Duregar there were goblins (SCS gives you Duregar whenever there are goblins)
Now those goblins might have boosted stats but they are still a joke compared to Duregar.
The mephites are super weak on LoB no SCS I don't know why, but even with DD who has no magic protection they were not hard at all, which is very different on SCS.
I then as stated above went to TOB (gave my DD full XP, with EE Keeper, since you can get that by Underdark if you play SoA and use SCS option so rescuing Imoen costs 120k (96) instead of only 20k.)
And yeah just the fact that the starting fight in ToB is extremely tuned down as described above jsut makes me doubt that ToB is a problem, but if you want prove I could give you a ToB only playthrough on video, as said before I don't have time for the whole challenge, most I could bring myself to is start in SoA, but BG1 AND SoD is too time consuming for me, also as stated before I think SoD is very hard so I don't even know if I had Harpargonis patience to beat that in the 1st place.
Ofc I don't expect every fight to be as easy, but with SCS Ilasera is a huge obstacle for any solo char and obviously the following enemies are not weaker than her, but stronger.
LoB doesn't really do anything for mages they are squishy and if they don't have precast spells to be invulnerable at combat start, then they have nothing.
Do Mages even use Time Stop outside of SCS?
If it is interesting enough for you just to see ToB then I wouldn't mind giving it a go.
Do you prefer DD or Monk?
Sadly Irenicus has 0 protections and just spams the same spell over and over, in SCS he is not only incredibly hard to kill but also has dangerous disabling spells where DD needs to roll a save or die.
Here's the vid:
I guess you're right. I mean I think there will still be potentially problematic encounters in vanilla LoB (like the ones @Grond0 mentioned), but with SCS/LoB otherwise trivial battles become very hard as well.
I've started an SCS/LoB playthrough myself, but I want to play with a party and Charname is a caster, so I won't post about it here. I expect lots of trouble...
Now the thing about dragons is SCS increases their hp. So if you don't have SC but LoB instead, guess what HP ends up being about the same than insane SCS. LoB also increases dragons ThacO, but guess what you can't tank dragon's ThacO with AC anyway you either negate the damage (hello DD) or you use spells like Stoneskin and Mirror Image. (You can even combine all three on DD with mirror Image sword and Stoneskin boots).
Now in SCS Dragons have precast stoneskin, contingencies and spam Remove magic.
Even tho I haven't gotten to Abazigal yet, I strongly assume without SCS they just straight up attack me.
But I'll keep you posted.
@Blackraven
Yes SCS and LoB is quite tough, but I thinky any mage variant should still be able to do it.
I don't really see how a monk is gonna do it, since his AC is completely worthless on LoB.
Keep up the work @Victor_Creed_SFV or better: The Slaughter!
Now if human mages don't even use PfmW (or in case of Irenicus not even mirror Image just stoneskin, that's bad enough, but if their offensive spells are pure damage spells no disables it gets worse.
I've got to add two points tho:
In Gromnir's castle the mages finally cast Time Stop, but they had no Alacrity and only cast two spells Symbol Stun and Fear. Now these are disables, but not very deeadly ones, since you can counter them beforehand via potions.
BUT I totally underestimated the power of saving throws a dwarven defender has.
I have not seen him fail a single save yet and I didn't even use potions of invulnerability yet which enhance his saves by 5 more points.
So DD might actually laugh at SCS LoB, gotta admit I never tried him on SCS Insane, since I thought they can't counter magic due to lacking MR or def spells.
I dn't know if SCS works properly with SoD I've seen people who installed it, but idk how good it actually works with the new creature types that are SoD only.
I am reinstalling SCS. Which settings are "standard" for Solo-Runs? Improved AI for sure. What else?
I don't think SCS would make much difference to SoD as the AI there was largely inspired by SCS anyway. If you're playing solo then the AI changes SCS introduces won't make LoB ToB harder - probably the reverse in fact - though you may still wish to do it if you want to see things act more 'intelligently'. The improved encounters components SCS offers will make things harder though. Personally I would have thought you would be better off trying to defeat LoB first without introducing SCS - I'm not sure you will find it as easy as Victor_Creed_SFV suggests.
(Some item and spell tweaks for example)
Depending on my characterchoice I banish cloak of mirroring and shield of Balduran into ToB (wouldn't do that with a warrior tho, except it's a monk
The most important choices for SCS are:
precast spells
improved random encounters (max difficulty for everything but liches, tho I played with improved for everything once, but I had a blade back then)
improved chapter 1,2 and so forth encounters, those are one of the best choices because those improve weakling fights like Ilasera into crazy fights you won't forget.
Improved creatures dragons, beholders, mindflayers and so forth, always go for max settings on mind flayers and beholders because trust me you won't forget some of those fights
For HLA settings I always go for some casters in SoA and all in ToB have HLAs cuz I'm to pussy to give all in SoA HLAs.
And for me almost unthinkable not to have the options to make the fees to shadow thieves and Cowled wizards a lot more expensive 120k for shadow thieves (turns into 96k once you gathered that much) and I think 50k for free spellcasting in Atkhala.
I never suggested SoD is easy with SCS I wrote several times it's harder than BG2
Btw Draconis is quite good without SCS, even tho he doesn't have prebuffs his first sequencer is quite like SCS prebuffed dragon with Stoneskin and remove magic.
Also since he does acid instead of fire damage I had to reload and he also uses malison, even tho I don't quite see why.