Ambushed again by 10 bandits but this time the Revenge of the Cleric/Mage Multiclass L1

Soido

This happens with my character only 746 XP into the game on the way out of Nashkel and to Beregost. Ambushed by the Dreaded Ten ! And I was waiting for that as I had some matters to sort with them. Below in screenshots what happened.




Full utilization of the powers of Cleric/Mage Multiclass.

I opened the encounter with a Sleep but unfortunately only 2 Bandits got affected. Jaheira almost died in the very first round and you can see she is casting Heal on herself while Montaron and Khalid are heading for the two sleeping bandits.



I cast a second Sleep but again unfortunately only 2 bandits were affected. Imoen helped a lot to shoot at them from distance, while I was preparing to cast Blind on one of the shooters at the very top. At this point I was approached by 3 sword bandits in the lower right corner but Khalid flanked them to engage them in melee combat. This allowed me to succeed at blinding my target. Jaheira in the mean time healed Imoen.



While Khalid was braving single-handedly the three bandits I decided to move away from them and start preparing a second Blind at one bandit who was chasing Xzar. At this time Montaron and Imoen were fighting one of the blind bandits.



At this point the bandits around Khalid frustrated that Khalid is holding them down decided to split up. One of them went straight for me and the rest went for Montaron towards the central area. The poor bandit thought I must be easy prey only to find himself lying on his back by my Command. Poor fella couldn't do anything against my mace.




Out of anymore spellpower I decided to join the fray at the center where the last standing bandit was getting surrounded by all sides. I shouted at him "How does it feel being surrounded you knave"



And it was all over. Oh yes I looted them good.

Skatan

Feels good, doesn't it?

Balrog99

You really got unlucky with the sleep spells. They usually go down like 10-pins when I'm able to get one off. Congrats on ad-libbing a sweet victory!

Humanoid_Taifun

Happy hunting.
Next up: The Wyvern ambush.

Zaxares

One of my biggest regrets is that you usually don't run into this encounter as a level 5 Mage, when you could launch a couple of Fireballs and turn all the bandits into piles of ash. :P (You do get some satisfaction turning the Bandit Camp into piles of ash though!)

Maurvir

Nice work on ambushing that ambush! Bandit ambushes are actually pretty well scripted, as they keep the bandits spaced and focus on keeping the archers in the back once they melee. A challenging group of enemies for a PC straight out of CK.

Thus, I will point out that sleep is an AoA spell (30ft radius), and in the first couple of screenshots, the bandits are spaced pretty far apart. That is probably why you only got two at a time - only one would need to save vs spell assuming you cast at one of the middle bandits.

It is often better to let them close in just a touch or use a summons to draw them in before casting sleep. That gives you a much better shot at downing more at once. If you manage to pull off just the right balance, it is deeply satisfying to watch the whole field of enemies drop at once. You then have five rounds to pick them off like fish in a barrel. (You do have to be able to survive that initial onslaught of arrows, though...)

Unfortunately, sleep rapidly runs out of steam, even in BG1. By the time you can reliably cast Fireball, you are quickly running out of bad guys that you can sleep/incinerate.

Soido

I was also very surprised that 2 separate instances of Sleep caught only 2 bandits. Provided I am with a gnome Illusionist.

Speaking of saves, I was just fighting Zordral solo with my Cleric3/Mage3 . The crazy mage has impressive saves against magic. I was experimenting different spells on him and he saves 90% of my spells if not more. Probably did 20 reloads to find out what was going on with him. And then I just opened the wiki to see his stats and holy moly his Saves vs Spells is unbelievably low, only 3. That explains it all. Very difficult fight solo Cleric/Mage due to his iron saves. Of course a full party or even a solo fighter will have no problems. I beat him up recently with a barbarian solo and it was a breeze but wow didn't know he was so resistant to magic, ridiculously so.

Yes I figured out a way to beat him even with Cleric/Mage but took me a while to do it. And it is surprisingly simple. Let him deplete his spells, just chug potions and heal. When he is done, you have two options to beat him - either the old-fashioned way with a mace and self-buffs or my turn to cast some spells (which he resists but just for fun). Either way at the end it will be death by a mace.