Just won Staff of the Magi
Veristek
Member Posts: 114
I was checking out the houses in the Bridge District, trying to find the red clothed guy for the graveyard district quest with the buried guy. One of the houses near Red Guy had two trapped doors, so Jan untrapped and opened these doors. The eastern door sent me into a pocket dimension or something.
At first, I thought the guy in the circle in the dimension was full of it, but then he wasted my party with his minions helping. I reloaded, and started devising a strategy after a few tries with trial and error.
I sent my party to the very back of the area, behind where the big doors are. The next room is empty and where the Shag guy teleports to after his obligatory evil speech. I turned party AI off because I didn't want my guys rushing after anyone.
Sent in Rasaad to trigger Shag to pop up, and sent Rasaad straight back to my guys, Shag teleported, but his minions did not follow. I had my party far enough away not to lure these guys in, and they stayed by that circle/ Shag ended up fighting my party alone. I tossed Breach, Keldorn's Dispel Magic, and Jan dispelled Shag's illusion spells with Detect Illusion passive thief skill (another reason I kept Party AI off). Shag's Mislead was dispelled, and I wore him down.
Once Shag was finally dead, he dropped about 3000 gold. His minions still didn't come into that room.
I then equipped Mazzy with the Shield of Balduran, and tossed a fireball into the fog of war to pull out one or two of the minions. The Beholder and the fighter chased me back into that entrance room. The Behdolder was a joke, Mazzy just tore it apart while its eyes fired rapid machine gun laser stuff at Mazzy. These lasers bounced off and hurt the eyeball instead. The fighter died pretty easily.
That left the mage and vampire for last. I tossed another fireball to the left of the circle, tagged the mage, drew the mage in, and then pounced on her the same way I did to Shag. Jan dispelled illusions while everybody else whacked on her.
Vampire was last. Sent in Mazzy with helm of charm protection. Vampire wasted her turns on Mazzy while everyone else hit her with ranged weapons, magic, or melee attacks.
The key here was to draw out the group 1 by 1. Made things so much easier and manageable. Plus knowing when to turn off Party AI.
After all that, I picked up the loot. Shag's 3000 gold, the Beholder's eye, a few extra gold, and the Staff of the Magi. I checked out the staff, and I'm like "Hot damn, this looks good!" with invisibility and +5 to hit and other goodies.
Should I put this baby on Jan? Since Jan can backstab with the staff, plus invisibility, plus the +5 to hit? What other good strategies can I use with the staff?
At first, I thought the guy in the circle in the dimension was full of it, but then he wasted my party with his minions helping. I reloaded, and started devising a strategy after a few tries with trial and error.
I sent my party to the very back of the area, behind where the big doors are. The next room is empty and where the Shag guy teleports to after his obligatory evil speech. I turned party AI off because I didn't want my guys rushing after anyone.
Sent in Rasaad to trigger Shag to pop up, and sent Rasaad straight back to my guys, Shag teleported, but his minions did not follow. I had my party far enough away not to lure these guys in, and they stayed by that circle/ Shag ended up fighting my party alone. I tossed Breach, Keldorn's Dispel Magic, and Jan dispelled Shag's illusion spells with Detect Illusion passive thief skill (another reason I kept Party AI off). Shag's Mislead was dispelled, and I wore him down.
Once Shag was finally dead, he dropped about 3000 gold. His minions still didn't come into that room.
I then equipped Mazzy with the Shield of Balduran, and tossed a fireball into the fog of war to pull out one or two of the minions. The Beholder and the fighter chased me back into that entrance room. The Behdolder was a joke, Mazzy just tore it apart while its eyes fired rapid machine gun laser stuff at Mazzy. These lasers bounced off and hurt the eyeball instead. The fighter died pretty easily.
That left the mage and vampire for last. I tossed another fireball to the left of the circle, tagged the mage, drew the mage in, and then pounced on her the same way I did to Shag. Jan dispelled illusions while everybody else whacked on her.
Vampire was last. Sent in Mazzy with helm of charm protection. Vampire wasted her turns on Mazzy while everyone else hit her with ranged weapons, magic, or melee attacks.
The key here was to draw out the group 1 by 1. Made things so much easier and manageable. Plus knowing when to turn off Party AI.
After all that, I picked up the loot. Shag's 3000 gold, the Beholder's eye, a few extra gold, and the Staff of the Magi. I checked out the staff, and I'm like "Hot damn, this looks good!" with invisibility and +5 to hit and other goodies.
Should I put this baby on Jan? Since Jan can backstab with the staff, plus invisibility, plus the +5 to hit? What other good strategies can I use with the staff?
4
Comments
Because the upper limit to its power is so ridiculous, I personally do not use it very much.
it is still useful for a thief with uai or for jan as can be equipped immediately after the stab to have your thief become invisible to run away and hide to backstab again without retaliation, just remember to equip the stabbing weapon before you hide or doing it after will interrupt your hide status.
other super powerful tactics can be used with that staff, like order to the toon welding it to attack after each previous attack, it resets the invisibility, so a toon can keep attacking without retaliation every enemy that don't see naturally trough invisibility.
if to use such powerful but lame tactic is up to you...
you have discovered the twisted rune encounter, one of the most difficult battles of soa, and whit some reloads you did beat it, even if with some tricks that make it easier.
i personally never use that shield and never launch fireballs in the fog of war if i have not spotted the enemy with a rogue, stalker or invisible toon, are things that make really the things too easy.
there are tricks to beat easily almost every vanilla battle, the key for having fun is to avoid them.
about disabling the AI i almost always have it disabled, i want my mages use the spells i want, not waste the round to use a spell chosen by the ai, i want my fighters focus on the enemy i want to kill first, not on the nearest one, and i want my thief do the right thing for the situation, like in your case jan dispelling an illusion or in other cases stab a mage, but only at the exact moment keldorn or a mage has killed his protections, before he has a chance to put on new ones.
by the way shag is a lich so is immune to breach and all the low level spells.
OP is clearly having fun.
but avoiding to use some items that make some battles too easy, the shield for beholders, some green scrolls for undeads and so on, and avoiding to bomb from the fog of war enemies that the party is not supposed to know are there bring even more fun.
i post a video about how the shield and meta knowledge can be completely avoided by a player, and is not a super player, is not something that a beginner can not do. see how easily the behoders of the unseeing eye quest are defeated, without the shield and/or any metagame knowledge or trick like bombing from the fog.
i really think that avoiding such things lead to a better improvement in playing the game and brings more fun as to solve a particular situation the player has to think about the best tactic that can work in that particular case, not just equip/use the item that basically grant a victory or abuse of a knowledge the party should not have.
for the purpose is possible to start to watch the video directly from min 2:30
It can be fun using unorthodox tactics to win high level battles with a low level party. Thinking out of the box and strategically.
I don't try killing outright with fireballs. I fire one to "confuse" an enemy in a powerful enemy group, to peel them away one or two at a time. I could do the same thing with hiding a thief and firing a bow, then run away with Boots of Speed and hiding again to lure one or two enemies away from their group over to my main party. Think sniper.
When I was doing the Unseeing Eye quest and ran into Beholders for the first time, I tried fighting them without using the Shield of Balduran. I was simply overwhelmed with their machine gun spells and gazes. I haven't encountered any other enemy that can throw 5 - 10 spells or gazes in a few seconds like these eyeballs. Dominate, Death Gaze, Petrification, Cause Wounds, etc. Using the Shield of Balduran on these eyeballs would be similar tactic to casting Keldorn's or high level dispel on enemy mages then cutting them up fast with fighters.
I found another strategy for dealing with mages and illusions. Spam AoE spells in their area. These spells will hit everyone, including invisible or "real version in Mislead" creatures.
Another strategy is to have a thief like Jan with Party AI off, have them Detect Illusion, will blow past those invisibility and Mislead and the like with a 100% in Detect Illusion. My Jan has Detect Illusion at 100%. With the Party AI off, Jan will stay put and use the skill passively. If AI is on, he would enter combat with closest enemy, which would break Jan's passive use of the Detect Illusion skill.
If you first attack and then select Detect Traps/Illusions, you can do both simultaneously.
dispel and remove magic kill all the clones and there is no check between the caster level and the enemy level, is the only case afaik where dispel magic always work (on foe not immune to it), even cast by a low level mage against the pi of a high level enemy the clone is dispelled, it works also to kill the simulacrum clone that is not touched by true sight.
i like your way to use the fireball to lure enemies one by one, also i try often to divide them, the only difference is that i want to spot them before, so i would probably have sent an hidden jan to do it.
with the staff that you now have is even more easy, no need to hide, and if jan wears also the cloak of not detection, if you have found it, is protected against true sight both using the invisibility form the staff and when he is hidden in shadows.
if you don't have the cloak, really useful for thieves and mages with the staff of the magi, look
I personally never use it, i find that it takes away much of the fun from the battles against beholders.
There are so many other effective ways to deal with them, some of which make the battle quite easy.
Some summons work very well against them, the skeletal warriors with their high MR and the fire elementals are probably the best ones, if you have a thief to spot them, prepare traps and lure them there is an easy task, also send a summon to draw the fire and take them out one by one with a well placed party and ranged weapons is effective, if ammo that can poison is used even better. And i am only at the top of the barrel, not scratching its bottom, depending on the party composition many tactics work really well.
I probably would suggest to a new player that has really problems dealing with behoders to use the shield, but i would also suggest him to try without it at least against single enemies, a group of beholders and gauths can be too much for a new player.
the other big problem using the shield and other items that make some battles very easy, like the protection from undead scrolls is that not only you loose challenge so loose fun, but you never learn how to play properly.
Those items are like crutches, help you to walk as you are handicapped, you are learning how to walk properly, but like with the crutches there is a moment that you have to throw them away or you will never learn how to run...
After one petrified an NPC during the final fight, thus causing that bloody NPC to not even be in my party when the game ended (so I had to replay that whole fight to see that NPC's ending blurb. I hate Beholders very much!
They have their own magic and they use it...
About petrification it is one of the most annoying things that they do, but sending a toon with good ST, maybe if needed making them even better trough potions and items, and having the beholder targeting him is part of the correct way to handle with them. As well as to have a couple of stone to flash scrolls and a couple of toons able to sue them, so you don't risk to have the only one that can turn back people to flash petrified, with a proper tactic is not even needed to memorize the spell, and the "statue" can be turned to flash while the battle is running, is wise to do it anyway as is so easy to loose him forever while he is in stone form, a single damage taken and he is chunked.
I like the way you think
Both enemies have a powerful instant win ability, and then the game gives you the tools to protect yourself from it, rendering the enemy defenseless.
Sure, you could summon skeletons to draw the basilisk's fire or something, but that just seems like a needlessly roundabout way of accomplishing the same thing.
1. You face a melee heavy group? Magic Mirror, Protection from Magic Weapons, Protection from Normal Weapons, Blur, Mislead, etc.
2. Face a magic heavy group? Silence 10' Radius, Insect Swarm, Spell Turning, Spellstrike, lots of ranged attacks to disrupt spellcasting, etc.
3. Powerful single enemy? Backstabs, Whirlwind, Hasted melee / ranged, kite the enemy around (if boss is melee heavy), thief traps, etc.
4. Big enemy groups? Horrid Wilting, Fireballs, Cloudkill, Cone of Cold, other AoE magic, Hasted archers / melee, etc.
So how is using the Shield of Balduran any different from these counters? If we take out the Shield of Balduran, you might as well take out all these other counter spells or tactics listed above. Besides, if you want a real counter to Beholders, why wouldn't a Blind spell stop all their eye-beam stuff if all their eyes can't see anything to aim at?
And I remember running into groups of 3 - 5 Beholders / Gauths in the Unseeing Eye quest. That's easily 20 - 30 or more eye-beam attacks every few seconds with multiple status effects. They fire like machine guns.
but as you need to do damage you have to send your fighters to mlee, and they are not protected.
the rest of your points are proper tactics against different types of enemies.
but to backstab or to set traps and lure the enemies into them some skill has to be used.
the same is true to face a powerful mage or a group of mages, like the ones you find if you don't pay for the licence and cast spells in the open while in town. if you use well your anti mage tactics you win, but if you don't they destroy you in a very short time...
against undeads using the scroll that make them ignore you or against beholders using a shield that reflects their better attacks is different, using/equipping a single item you make the battle a lot more easier, no skill involved at all.
There is a clear difference between using the proper tactics and using an item that grants you an easy victory against enemies that without the item would have been really hard to beat.
i often play with tactics mod and there the same unseeing eye dungeon is much harder, you find a hive mother and other very high level beholders and they are smarter then in vanilla. still i fight them without the shield.
the vanilla beholders seem to be really hard, borderline to impossible, but in reality are really easy to beat once the player learn the proper tactics. they are hard because of wrong tactics, you can not go face to face and try to mlee them if they are in a group, not if you want to survive.
Players should have the freedom to use, or not use, these items (or spells, or classes) as befits their own preferred playstyle and difficulty setting.
Did he plan from the beginning to mysteriously disappear and thus make a legend of himself? Then it would be highly ironic that he ended up on an island filled with creatures vulnerable to gold, and not on an island of beholders.
He had his butterknife as well.
The shield is somewhat pricey. It has a nerfing effect. It's perfectly fine and not cheesy, imo. Maybe you could argue that it should have been a tad pricier, but that's true of a lot of the game's purchasable gear.
what you say here is simply not true.
i am the only one here that suggested anti beholder tactics such as using summons here, and i did it in a post that was beginning with please if you find in the thread a single time i called the shield cheesy quote it, or if some other person had named the summons quote him.
i really don't like that you put in my mouth words i never used, it is not correct, not respectful and not appropriate.
also the tactics i proposed, that are not the only ones effective, need some knowledge and some skill to work, while with the shield you basically pay (in game money) to win. if you can not see the difference for me is not a problem, play as you like and in the way that give you fun.
but the fact that so many players have told in this and in other threads in this and in other forums that they find very difficult to deal with the beholders without the shield proves that to use the appropriate tactics to deal with them or to buy the shield and make the beholder rays no more effective are not similar things.
to use the shield is completely legittimate, so not cheesy, and if a player want to use him is his own choice, i surely don't judge what he does in his own game.
but i wish that who makes that choice is true with himself and with the other forum users and admit that the effect of using the shield is to make those enemies much more easy.
the problem is that facing a group of beholders and gauths it is one of the most difficult tactics to use.
at least until your mage can cast power word, blind, that is a no save aoe blindness lasting 6 rounds, long enough to take down the beholders with skull traps, MMM, fireballs and ranged attacks from the fighters.
it has casting time of 1 so is unlikely that the mage is disrupted if he cast while invisible.
If i am not wrong MR can block the spell so it is not a 100% sure tactic if you don't have some form of redundancy and don't use good positioning (if only a beholder manage to avoid to be blinded a well positioned party, ready to hit and with a high hp toon that draw his fire, to focus on him and take him down is not a problem for every party that has casting and ranged capability).
to use the tactic with the low level spell that blind, single target and save or else, is still possible, but requires more redundancy and finesse.
Still the sense of what i wrote is true for me, even if i should have used a more gentle way to tell it.
I felt misunderstood and misinterpreted by you not only because i never used cheesy, that in that context would had a negative connotation, about the use of the shield, but because i am a firm believer about the freedom of each player to do what he wants in his game as long as he has fun.
And also i regard the use of the cheese in gaming as a form of art, cheese intended as to research on exploits and other things that make non conventional and non originally intended by the developers tactics possible. So i never use the word cheese or cheesy in a negative way.
For me there is a clear distinction between cheese and cheating or using tactics that make the battles too easy.
But also this mean only that i like in my gaming to research on cheese and i also like to try the non conventional tactics involving exploits discovered by other players, don't mean in any way that i am judgmental on who cheat or use tactics that make some battles very easy.
About the shield i already told that was created with that very purpose so is not cheating to use it, but that it makes the beholders much easier is a fact. And the fact remains a fact also if the (vanilla) beholders can be easy, even if not so easy, with other tactics, like the one used in the video i posted.
That party had not much challenge using a wizard eye and summons that resist to the beholders rays, but to scout a dungeon and to choose the right summon for the right situation are good ways to play the game and it need a little more skill and much more knowledge then to find a shield that is the magic solution to the beholder problem. And probably some players lack of that skill and that knowledge as often i read that without the shield the beholders are border line to impossible.
That is the reason i choose that particular video, to prove a point, knowledge and skill are more important then powerful items in this game. I never fight them in that way for the same reason i don't use the shield, i like to be challenged by the game, a too easy victory for me has little taste. And that is my way to play, if an other player has more fun using the shield why should he play in a different way?
I find much more fun in using traps, with the smart and powerful beholders of tactics mod is not so easy to do it, probably i will try the tactic that @Veristek has proposed, to blind them with a low level party seems to be a good challenge even in vanilla, or i use other tactics where if i make errors i pay for them, where i have to plan and adapt to the situation dynamically as it evolves. Not because it is the way the game has to be played, but because is the way i like to play it.
or maybe the name came from the fact that it is the perfect staff for a mage.
invisibility at will (ie as an enemy caster is casting a spell at you, as you disappear before he has time to complete the action his spell is wasted), dispel on hit to disable the protections of every mage not protected by PFMW, at level 30, a spell trap that last much longer then the one from the spell, 8 hours, +2 to ac and more important at st, and some bonus damaging spell are really useful things for a "magi"...
a mage that equip the staff, the +3 ring from the deck of many things and the ring of gaxx get a +7 bonus at st
if you play with tactics mod layene actually uses the invisibility from the staff and to take her down is much more difficult if you don't use aoe spells, it is really difficult to target her with spells on target.
So it is a staff for mages.