Skull trap + Protection from magical energy

borntodie

This is a combo I learned very recently and I was shocked how effective it is, especially for a sorcerer.

Skull trap has a damage cap of 20d6, compared to 10d6 for Fireball.
PfME will protect your party members from your own skull traps. It has a very long duration, long enough that a sorcerer can easily keep it up on a small party 24/7, without excessive resting.

Combined it wrecks the game. I mean, there are many cheesy tactics, but afaik none of them are so easy to use and require so little preparation. And can be used so early in the game. And I haven't even got Spell Sequencer yet.. oh boy.

Myrag

This is the reason people love this game. There are so many cool tactics to discover.

For instance in my current LOB/SCS/Ascension rerun I realized that you can Limited Wish (7) Minor Globe of Invulnerability on entire party then Wish (9) for Intoxication on everyone in the area to get -12 luck on all enemies. This means they will take max damage from spells and have really bad physical damage and thac0.

In your case they would take instead of 20d6 which averages at 70 damage (35 on save), they would always get 120 (60 on save). In sequencer this could mean 360 damage combo. Dragons breath 200 (100 on save), ADHW 160 (80 on save).

This combo is so strong you basically don't need it unless you play on LOB. And even then you wipe out bosses using AOE spells.

Borek

Myrag said:

This is the reason people love this game. There are so many cool tactics to discover.

For instance in my current LOB/SCS/Ascension rerun I realized that you can Limited Wish (7) Minor Globe of Invulnerability on entire party then Wish (9) for Intoxication on everyone in the area to get -12 luck on all enemies. This means they will take max damage from spells and have really bad physical damage and thac0.

In your case they would take instead of 20d6 which averages at 70 damage (35 on save), they would always get 120 (60 on save). In sequencer this could mean 360 damage combo. Dragons breath 200 (100 on save), ADHW 160 (80 on save).

This combo is so strong you basically don't need it unless you play on LOB. And even then you wipe out bosses using AOE spells.

Yeah, so many combo's and Sorcerer can often gain access to them (especially solo) way before otherwise due to no scroll requirements. The drawback of Wish is unreliable results, but Prot.Magical Energy also works a treat for the ADHW on everyone in the area option, which can do THOUSANDS in damage if you have a large cluster of enemies and a decent sized party, hehe.

Also worth noting that people often overlook the 1 time only options from Limited Wish, there's a Timestop and a Shapechange available from it in a pinch, you can also severely abuse the spell if you have a low wisdom caster like Neera and spawn Vampires with an invisible party, then use a high level cleric such as Anomen to explode them

Joan_Daro

You don't even need pfme after you get the cloak of mirroring.
Or use a PI which you don't mind getting killed.

borntodie

Joan_Daro said:

You don't even need pfme after you get the cloak of mirroring.

Well the cloak will help as it permanently covers one character, but the great thing about pfme is that it protects an entire party without much hassle (because of the long duration).

Borek

dammit, gonna have to start up a solo Dragon Disciple LOB run haha

Rik_Kirtaniya

This combo is even more powerful in Icewind Dale, since Skull Trap's damage scales all the way up to level 30 there, and you can actually reach level 30 as a Sorcerer in IWD (and quite early if you're soloing). Combined with a Spell Sequencer, that amounts to 90d6 magic damage (max: 540), which is more than enough to kill almost anything in that game. I used this tactic often (generally without the Sequencer, cause a single level 30 Skull Trap kills most enemies there) in my solo Dragon Disciple playthrough of IWD. It was great!

brazenheart

There I was thinking skulltrap was capped at 15d6, maybe that was in the old version

Joan_Daro

brazenheart said:

There I was thinking skulltrap was capped at 15d6, maybe that was in the old version

Nope it was always 20d6 even in vanilla.
But SCS skull traps caps at 12d6.
In some other mods it was 20d4.

Reliant

In the third fight with Amellisan in TOB, I place 30 skull traps at the location she teleports away to before I cut off the stream ov Bhaal Essence to trigger the fight.  It breaks the script and she returns immediately to the Bhaal Essence chamber.