Enuhal said:@Wise_Grimwald You can still split up duos by going to a place you never intend to return to and boot one of the duo out of the party, then leave before the "do you really want me to go?"-conversation triggers. Just send the party member you want to leave behind away from your party leader, so you have enough time to leave before they can get to you to start the conversation, and then exit the area forever. I just tested this with Minsc and Dynaheir.
Beastmasters are awesome even in LoB+SCS no-reload runs and with all the tactics we he have formulated in the LoB+SCS challenge thread they should be more than capable reaching Melissan at the Throne of Bhaal. I stopped mine in SoA as i got a bit bored. However: As i described earlier Beastmasters can also beat SoD without any troubles - especially with racial enemy demonic/fell to smack Big B into the ground. The only class that really needs more effort is so far the Wizard Slayer. His limitations abandons a lot of cheese so we have created another sub-challenge called the "Bane of the Wizard Slayer". @Alesia_BH would be most welcome - as well others.
(I spent some time with the LoB+SCS thread. It's amazing how much you can learn when you embed yourself in a community and grow together. Y'all have made excellent progress. I have a lot of reading to do to catch up! Looking forward to it!)
I'm glad you've had an opportunity to dip into that thread @Alesia_BH - I had been thinking of steering you to it myself. It's a good example of the sort of supportive, sharing environment you advocate in order to inspire participants to reach new heights. There's also a lot of creative thinking that's gone on in there, as well as identifying various new techniques (of varying degrees of cheesiness ) to break the game. Who knew for instance until recently just how powerful the Wand of Wonder was .
I've decided to use this thread to share my experience with the remainder of my recently failed SCS/Ascension no-reload run with Ucurian, the cleric of helm, and his party. As this was my first venture into BG2/ToB with SCS and Ascension, my observations might not be very useful to veterans concerning these mods, but here's how things went after I decided to reload when the city gate lich chunked two of my party members:
The remainder of SoA was actually relatively easy. I only reloaded one additional time, after fighting improved Bodhi back from the Underdark - a low hp Saldor didn't expect to suddenly get hit by a cold-based AHW and got chunked, and as I didn't feel like replacing any party members with NPCs, I decided to reload. Still, the battle against Bodhi wasn't very difficult overall, mainly thanks to Ucurian's high level turn undead allowing him to turn every non-Bodhi vampire in the room.
No further difficulties in the remaining SoA endgame:
ToB started off easier than I imagined. Ilasera and Gromnir didn't provide much of a challenge, and I decided to go to Watcher's Keep after that. The toughest encounter here turned out to be the new and improved glabrezu room in WK level 3. Extremely tough, as I was unprepared for the sheer number of enemies (and had no death fog memorized). Still, I made it through with no deaths. Level 4 wasn't worth mentioning, but in level 5, I did reload for my third time (due to lazyness on my part: I neglected to counter a greater malison, resulting in Ayla getting hit by chaos and chunking Ismene Santal - a death caused by the orc mages of all things). Still, not anything resembling a truly difficult encounter for my party.
The battle with Yaga-Shuras was certainly a bit more challenging, but not overly so. No deaths here, and it seems like he isn't immune to Ravager +6 vorpal hits for some reason. Sendai was similiar - the fight was much more hectic, but not really all that difficult. Abazigal's enclave provided me with the opportunity to fight many more dragons, but they didn't really prove to be too much of a challenge. The quadruple dragon ambush turned out to be easier than the glabrezu room, for example. The most annoying thing about all these dragons was that, in this installation, I kept encountering a bug where dragons would constantly trigger spell deflection, causing endless amounts of lag and sometimes crashing the game:
However, this isn't to say that I might have succeeded with this run on my first attempt if I had decided to replace chunked party members instead of reloading, no: Amelyssan destroyed me. What a difficulty spike, even with all the improved SCS battles as a comparison. Irenicus, Bodhi, Imoen and two fallen solars were easy enough, and so were the pools. However, the final battle turned out to be quite painful. It took me three attempts to win, but it was most certainly not a clean victory, as Ismene Santal still got chunked.
I knew some strategy regarding this fight (having read about it in the no-reload thread a couple of times), so I used my two PfM scrolls on Abazgal and Sendai and tried to kill the five at about the same time, but failed to do so - many of them kept healing up, some seemed just too dangerous to keep them around. During my first try, I did manage to eventually kill all of them, but Amelyssan gated in so, so many demons, completely overhwelming my party. Second attempt, and I failed to get even past the five, because I underestimated Ilasera and lost too many of my buffs. Two of my party got chunked and I gave up and reloaded.
For the third try, I had identified the most dangerous foes for my party - Sendai did basically nothing, Abazigal had to be kited, Gromnir was quite harmless, Sarevok was mind controlled - but Yaga Shura did quite a lot of damage with his fire spells and had tons of hp, and Ilasera was very dangerous if I got too close to her with the wrong party members. I had Ayla going for Ilasera on her own with the Reflex, while the others started to get the remaining opponents to lower hp, especially Yaga-Shura. I wasn't close to getting the timing right, but I did kill Ilasera and Yaga-Shura in quick succession and Sendai soon after that. It took me while to get through Gromnir's hp pool, and Abazigal eventually went down as well.
Now, Amelyssan had summoned two fallen solars at this point. Camalan was keeping her busy, and I thought he had the attention of both fallen solars as well - however, one of them ran to the north and managed to land a vorpal hit on Ismene Santal - I hadn't even noticed he was there. Ayla took him down, and for a very short moment, my party was alone with the final boss:
However, Amelyssan quickly summoned a ton of mariliths (I think six or seven). I used wands of spell striking to get through their PFMW's while dealing damage to Mel inbetween. I had to use some RoR charges and healing potions, but after the mariliths were down, Mel failed to gate in more demons. Ayla was able to pretty much instantly remove a divine mantle thanks to getting very lucky with the nerfed Carsomyr +6:
This pretty much spelled Mel's doom, and she fell under the GWWs of Camalan and Ayla.
Some general thoughts: - Full SCS basically increases the already existing divide between the power level of some classes. Arcane spellcasters gain even more power, due to their ability to remove spell protections and protect their own buffs, while divine spellcasters lose even more ground due to their buffs often just getting dispelled - I found myself using my thief quite a bit - lots of backstabs in SoA, lots of traps in ToB. Detect illusions is amazing, being the ultimate counter to SI:D - Some people say that SCS thieves give them more trouble than SCS mages. I had the opposite experience (though, with my main character being a priest of helm, I always had access to true sight). I still haven't figured out how to quickly get rid of certain combinations of buffs in the late game. Often, I just ended up waiting out PFMWs - The Ravager +6 is amazing. This is already well established, but I got it quite early thanks to item randomizer throwing me a bone, so I had a lot of time to get excited about well-timed vorpal hits - I love the SCS feature making HLAs into innate abilities. I highly recommend it. It resulted in me using lots of level 7/level 9 spells and HLAs that I normally wouldn't use at all, giving me quite a diverse experience (and I discovered that mass raise dead is actually a decent spell, as it can heal the entire party and doesn't take very long to cast at all) - Planetars are a bit over the top. On the other hand, some demons are almost as dangerous - Low saving throws are much more important if you can't protect your buffs. I generally ended up not even casting my usual array of cleric buffs, as they would get dispelled all the time anyway, and my frontliners had good enough saving throws to basically resist anything the enemy would throw at them.
Overall, I think that, if I do a couple of additional test attempts with the final battle, I could propably complete a SCS/Ascension no-reload run after 2 or 3 more attempts, especially with some luck and better class selection. However, I don't like the balance and difficulty spread of my current installation - BG1 and SoD aren't challening enough for my tastes, SoA should be not much of an issue now that I somewhat know the new encounters, but ToB really raises the difficulty, and I don't want to breeze through most of the game just to get beaten down by Amelyssan multiple times in a row.
So, to restore class balance, I plan to install SR/IR, as these mods are often recommended as the next step after SCS (though I have never used them). To increase difficulty for BG1/SoD, I plan to go back to the randomized party challenge, which I have already completed in vanilla. Still, that leaves me with an incredibly tough final battle, but other people regularily solo Mel with Ascension, so I should propably just read up on recommended tactics and practice this fight for a bit.
One question: Does the number of demons spawned by Amelyssan change if you play on core rules? (I played on insane with turned off extra-damage for much of ToB). I remember reading something about this, but I can't exactly remember where.
Thanks for the notes, a few words. The IR/ SR installation is really interesting but I would suggest caution with the new & improved demons Aasim has added to SR. Their improved stats & abilities simply shredded my mid-level party- e.g. no save death by holy word!
I didn't like the HLAs as innates component as I found all opposing mages started to do the same things each battle, in general I find HLAs to be unbalancing though. I would prefer to reduce enemy levels & item drops as well as the absurd quest xp rewards so the challenge is more linear over the game and players ascend in the low-mid 20s.
I remember reading the same about Ascension Mel's demon summoning, it should vary by difficulty...?
Yeah, I concur that IR/SR demons are nasty beings. I tried to tackle Irenicus in Hell with a team without hla (well, I add two among my six characters, but nothing gamechanging like a Planetar) and it didn't go too well. The demons vorpaled 3 of my characters after having stripped them of their buffs with a volley of Dispels. There's no Spell Immunity in SR, there's only Dispelling Screen, which absorbs 1 Dispel before vanishing. Tactically, it's super interesting, but it's also really dangerous. It's a winnable fight obviously, but you'll need careful preparation. Going blind in this setup is really dangerous !
SR's Dispelling Screen is all but useless against a gang of demons casting Remove Magic simultaneously, and in the Hell fight, they cast it too early for you to simply move your mages out of the way before the Remove Magic spells hit. The only way to make sure your mages don't get crushed is to use Moment of Prescience to get an undispellable +20 to AC and saving throws. As for other characters, they'll need to use IR potions to stay fit, since IR potions are also undispellable. It's definitely a good idea to keep spell protections on your mages, since they're undispellable and will be your only defense against the Glabrezus' PW: Stun spells.
The Balors' vorpal attacks technically are just "slay" effects, but like the vorpal strikes of a planetar, they have a 25% chance of triggering and force a save vs. death at -2 to resist. A Potion of Magic Shielding will keep any character safe from them, if only for 10 rounds; a Potion of Invulnerability will only keep a warrior safe if they have an item-based save vs. death of 1 or lower.
Don't forget that Irenicus in Hell cannot see through invisibility, so if you see him casting Time Stop, you might drink Potions of Invisibility and scatter.
At the Carnival Master Mehmel wanted some material to make more artistic items so I took him an ivory tooth from the sirene area. He was happy with that. However I am wondering if there are other materials that we wants, and if so where from. I think that this is from a mod but don't know which. There is nothing in the journal to give a title to look up on the web. I have already done a search using "Master Mehmel" and was unsuccessful.
@Wise_Grimwald: I usually look up stuff in Near Infinity when I get stuck. The search function will let you find Mehmel's .cre file, which will have his dialogue file listed. Go through his dialogue file and there should be triggers and actions listed beneath every dialogue line. So, one of the "triggers" might say that the player needs to have item X in order to choose that dialogue option, and one of Mehmel's response lines would include an action that says to create item Y in the player's inventory.
I was looking at the video of arriving at the bandit camp and wondered what this creature is supposed to be. I've wondered for a long time and only just thought to ask. To me it looks half-hyena and half-human.
To me it looks like the artist got lazy with the shading on its leg.
Justified, though, since the viewer's eye goes straight to the heavily detailed head. I just think it's interesting to see the individual strokes behind the creation of a work of art.
What bugs me in the video is that the original one never suggested who was being led into the camp. Captives? New recruits? The party? You had imagination to fill in the blanks. But in the EE it is less open to various interpretation.
What bugs me in the video is that the original one never suggested who was being led into the camp. Captives? New recruits? The party? You had imagination to fill in the blanks. But in the EE it is less open to various interpretation.
I have a major problem. My PC has been polymorphed into a squirrel. I have tried dispell magic and remove curse. Neither of them work. I therefore went to the temple of Helm in Nashkel but don't seem to be able to solve the problem. I also tried resting a few times. Any ideas anyone?
@Wise_Grimwald: It might depend on the source of the polymorph, but enabling the console and holding CTRL-T will rapidly advance time, which should be enough to cycle through several days and force it to expire.
Alternatively, you can hit your character with CTRL-R, which removes all temporary effects and dispels magically created weapons.
If all else fails, use the Cloak of the Wolf to polymorph into a wolf, which will override the squirrel polymorph and give you the "Shapeshift Natural Form" ability as an innate spell.
@Wise_Grimwald: It might depend on the source of the polymorph, but enabling the console and holding CTRL-T will rapidly advance time, which should be enough to cycle through several days and force it to expire.
Alternatively, you can hit your character with CTRL-R, which removes all temporary effects and dispels magically created weapons.
If all else fails, use the Cloak of the Wolf to polymorph into a wolf, which will override the squirrel polymorph and give you the "Shapeshift Natural Form" ability as an innate spell.
The source of the polymorph was a spell from a mage in the Stone of Askavar mod. The Cloak of the wolf which in my install is Rieltar's Mistake does nothing. She is still a squirrel. However the revert to natural form did work. Thanks. I was beginning to think that it was game over. What I can't understand is why "Dispell Magic" and the "Change form to wolf" didn't work. Fortunately, I still had the cloak. It's the first time that I have found any use for it.
I believe it's theoretically possible for a mod-introduced polymorph spell to be truly permanent if it's improperly coded. It definitely possible to make it permanent if you went out of your way to prevent the player from reverting to normal. But if you ever do get in that situation, EEKeeper can allow you to manually remove both temporary and permanent effects from any character, no matter their type or their source.
Gate70 and I came across this in a MP run not long ago Wise. We tried a number of methods to cure it and used the Cloak of the Sewers in the same way as you used the Cloak of the Wolf to successfully get human form back. There seemed no way to cure the loss of strength, but that could be overcome by using items or spells. Before we had decided whether we wanted to do that for a whole run, however, the effect ended - so it does seem to be temporary.
Grond0 said:Gate70 and I came across this in a MP run not long ago Wise. We tried a number of methods to cure it and used the Cloak of the Sewers in the same way as you used the Cloak of the Wolf to successfully get human form back. There seemed no way to cure the loss of strength, but that could be overcome by using items or spells. Before we had decided whether we wanted to do that for a whole run, however, the effect ended - so it does seem to be temporary.
I'm glad to hear it. I'm beginning to wonder if it works on real time as my party had slept several times before resorting to EE Keeper.
Had some fun this week messing around with the Valen NPC (a pity she hasn't been updated) and playing evil in vanilla. It really gives the game a unique feel when you are perpetually rep 1 and being hounded by the guards, can't even rely on temples (they don't like vampires!), and all the shopkeepers are going hostile. While Valen is rather overpowered as an NPC in some respects, in other respects the way she forces you to be an outcast changes the game in ways which few other npcs ever do. The main purpose of my mini-run was to get in some more practice vs. Kreso's SCS with SR build and this was certainly achieved! I never really go that evil so much of the dialogue was new to me as well. At one point my sorcerer character simply bashed the brains in of a commoner to get to safety from some chasing guards... I made the mistake of going too evil too early and not relying on invisibility sphere to get around, but I think it will make for an interesting rpg challenge in the future to go rep 1 the whole way in a no-reload and unleash demons on the unsuspecting populace at every opportunity... Anyone done anything similar and had success while using SCS etc.?
Comments
Thanks. I'll try it.
If you have specific questions, just let me know.
Enjoy!
Best,
A.
I'll definitely check out your thread, though. Thanks for the link!
Cheers,
A.
Happy travels.
Great work, everyone!
Best,
A.
I've decided to use this thread to share my experience with the remainder of my recently failed SCS/Ascension no-reload run with Ucurian, the cleric of helm, and his party. As this was my first venture into BG2/ToB with SCS and Ascension, my observations might not be very useful to veterans concerning these mods, but here's how things went after I decided to reload when the city gate lich chunked two of my party members:
The remainder of SoA was actually relatively easy. I only reloaded one additional time, after fighting improved Bodhi back from the Underdark - a low hp Saldor didn't expect to suddenly get hit by a cold-based AHW and got chunked, and as I didn't feel like replacing any party members with NPCs, I decided to reload. Still, the battle against Bodhi wasn't very difficult overall, mainly thanks to Ucurian's high level turn undead allowing him to turn every non-Bodhi vampire in the room.
No further difficulties in the remaining SoA endgame:
ToB started off easier than I imagined. Ilasera and Gromnir didn't provide much of a challenge, and I decided to go to Watcher's Keep after that. The toughest encounter here turned out to be the new and improved glabrezu room in WK level 3. Extremely tough, as I was unprepared for the sheer number of enemies (and had no death fog memorized). Still, I made it through with no deaths. Level 4 wasn't worth mentioning, but in level 5, I did reload for my third time (due to lazyness on my part: I neglected to counter a greater malison, resulting in Ayla getting hit by chaos and chunking Ismene Santal - a death caused by the orc mages of all things). Still, not anything resembling a truly difficult encounter for my party.
The battle with Yaga-Shuras was certainly a bit more challenging, but not overly so. No deaths here, and it seems like he isn't immune to Ravager +6 vorpal hits for some reason. Sendai was similiar - the fight was much more hectic, but not really all that difficult. Abazigal's enclave provided me with the opportunity to fight many more dragons, but they didn't really prove to be too much of a challenge. The quadruple dragon ambush turned out to be easier than the glabrezu room, for example. The most annoying thing about all these dragons was that, in this installation, I kept encountering a bug where dragons would constantly trigger spell deflection, causing endless amounts of lag and sometimes crashing the game:
However, this isn't to say that I might have succeeded with this run on my first attempt if I had decided to replace chunked party members instead of reloading, no: Amelyssan destroyed me. What a difficulty spike, even with all the improved SCS battles as a comparison. Irenicus, Bodhi, Imoen and two fallen solars were easy enough, and so were the pools. However, the final battle turned out to be quite painful. It took me three attempts to win, but it was most certainly not a clean victory, as Ismene Santal still got chunked.
I knew some strategy regarding this fight (having read about it in the no-reload thread a couple of times), so I used my two PfM scrolls on Abazgal and Sendai and tried to kill the five at about the same time, but failed to do so - many of them kept healing up, some seemed just too dangerous to keep them around. During my first try, I did manage to eventually kill all of them, but Amelyssan gated in so, so many demons, completely overhwelming my party. Second attempt, and I failed to get even past the five, because I underestimated Ilasera and lost too many of my buffs. Two of my party got chunked and I gave up and reloaded.
For the third try, I had identified the most dangerous foes for my party - Sendai did basically nothing, Abazigal had to be kited, Gromnir was quite harmless, Sarevok was mind controlled - but Yaga Shura did quite a lot of damage with his fire spells and had tons of hp, and Ilasera was very dangerous if I got too close to her with the wrong party members. I had Ayla going for Ilasera on her own with the Reflex, while the others started to get the remaining opponents to lower hp, especially Yaga-Shura. I wasn't close to getting the timing right, but I did kill Ilasera and Yaga-Shura in quick succession and Sendai soon after that. It took me while to get through Gromnir's hp pool, and Abazigal eventually went down as well.
Now, Amelyssan had summoned two fallen solars at this point. Camalan was keeping her busy, and I thought he had the attention of both fallen solars as well - however, one of them ran to the north and managed to land a vorpal hit on Ismene Santal - I hadn't even noticed he was there. Ayla took him down, and for a very short moment, my party was alone with the final boss:
However, Amelyssan quickly summoned a ton of mariliths (I think six or seven). I used wands of spell striking to get through their PFMW's while dealing damage to Mel inbetween. I had to use some RoR charges and healing potions, but after the mariliths were down, Mel failed to gate in more demons. Ayla was able to pretty much instantly remove a divine mantle thanks to getting very lucky with the nerfed Carsomyr +6:
This pretty much spelled Mel's doom, and she fell under the GWWs of Camalan and Ayla.
Some general thoughts:
- Full SCS basically increases the already existing divide between the power level of some classes. Arcane spellcasters gain even more power, due to their ability to remove spell protections and protect their own buffs, while divine spellcasters lose even more ground due to their buffs often just getting dispelled
- I found myself using my thief quite a bit - lots of backstabs in SoA, lots of traps in ToB. Detect illusions is amazing, being the ultimate counter to SI:D
- Some people say that SCS thieves give them more trouble than SCS mages. I had the opposite experience (though, with my main character being a priest of helm, I always had access to true sight). I still haven't figured out how to quickly get rid of certain combinations of buffs in the late game. Often, I just ended up waiting out PFMWs
- The Ravager +6 is amazing. This is already well established, but I got it quite early thanks to item randomizer throwing me a bone, so I had a lot of time to get excited about well-timed vorpal hits
- I love the SCS feature making HLAs into innate abilities. I highly recommend it. It resulted in me using lots of level 7/level 9 spells and HLAs that I normally wouldn't use at all, giving me quite a diverse experience (and I discovered that mass raise dead is actually a decent spell, as it can heal the entire party and doesn't take very long to cast at all)
- Planetars are a bit over the top. On the other hand, some demons are almost as dangerous
- Low saving throws are much more important if you can't protect your buffs. I generally ended up not even casting my usual array of cleric buffs, as they would get dispelled all the time anyway, and my frontliners had good enough saving throws to basically resist anything the enemy would throw at them.
Overall, I think that, if I do a couple of additional test attempts with the final battle, I could propably complete a SCS/Ascension no-reload run after 2 or 3 more attempts, especially with some luck and better class selection. However, I don't like the balance and difficulty spread of my current installation - BG1 and SoD aren't challening enough for my tastes, SoA should be not much of an issue now that I somewhat know the new encounters, but ToB really raises the difficulty, and I don't want to breeze through most of the game just to get beaten down by Amelyssan multiple times in a row.
So, to restore class balance, I plan to install SR/IR, as these mods are often recommended as the next step after SCS (though I have never used them). To increase difficulty for BG1/SoD, I plan to go back to the randomized party challenge, which I have already completed in vanilla. Still, that leaves me with an incredibly tough final battle, but other people regularily solo Mel with Ascension, so I should propably just read up on recommended tactics and practice this fight for a bit.
One question: Does the number of demons spawned by Amelyssan change if you play on core rules? (I played on insane with turned off extra-damage for much of ToB). I remember reading something about this, but I can't exactly remember where.
Enuhal
I didn't like the HLAs as innates component as I found all opposing mages started to do the same things each battle, in general I find HLAs to be unbalancing though. I would prefer to reduce enemy levels & item drops as well as the absurd quest xp rewards so the challenge is more linear over the game and players ascend in the low-mid 20s.
I remember reading the same about Ascension Mel's demon summoning, it should vary by difficulty...?
The Balors' vorpal attacks technically are just "slay" effects, but like the vorpal strikes of a planetar, they have a 25% chance of triggering and force a save vs. death at -2 to resist. A Potion of Magic Shielding will keep any character safe from them, if only for 10 rounds; a Potion of Invulnerability will only keep a warrior safe if they have an item-based save vs. death of 1 or lower.
Don't forget that Irenicus in Hell cannot see through invisibility, so if you see him casting Time Stop, you might drink Potions of Invisibility and scatter.
Justified, though, since the viewer's eye goes straight to the heavily detailed head. I just think it's interesting to see the individual strokes behind the creation of a work of art.
What bugs me in the video is that the original one never suggested who was being led into the camp. Captives? New recruits? The party? You had imagination to fill in the blanks. But in the EE it is less open to various interpretation.
the guy in the boss tent who was caught as a spy
I thought it was
But anyway, I'm off topic so I'll drop it
Alternatively, you can hit your character with CTRL-R, which removes all temporary effects and dispels magically created weapons.
If all else fails, use the Cloak of the Wolf to polymorph into a wolf, which will override the squirrel polymorph and give you the "Shapeshift Natural Form" ability as an innate spell.
Seems like a job for EE Keeper. It worked!
I'm glad to hear it. I'm beginning to wonder if it works on real time as my party had slept several times before resorting to EE Keeper.