Can someone help me understand this battle?

FQVBSina

After dying to Kahrk and then learned he is actually level 12, I followed the guide on wiki to defeat him: have someone with boots of speed trigger the whole scene then run to party, and have party go inside the ruin to drop aggro. I then rested to expire Kahrk's defensive abilities.

See the following image for the progression of the (essentially) ambush.



I pre-casted hold person, miscast magic, and lighting bolt. Had my archer use an arrow of biting and an arrow of frost while my PC goes up behind him in shadows for a backstab.

What I don't understand are these:

1. Kahrk seemed to have saved versus both the lighting bolt and miscast magic, so how did he managed to fail casting the first spell?
2. Kahrk's save versus hold person quite a few lines after it was cast, does that mean at that point he saved against hold and became free?
3. Kahrk managed to cast a lighting bolt but it missed, is it because he died before the spell landed?

Thanks!

Flashburn

1. Taking damage while casting a spell will almost always interrupt the caster.
2. The projectile for Hold Person is rather slow so it takes some time to travel. He was only forced to save against it once it impacted. You can use this against enemies by outrunning a spell projectile with Haste and/or Boots of Speed and then going into an area transition to negate it entirely.
3. Karkh probably died very shortly before his Lightning Bolt actually fired. This margin is probably a frame or two.

Grond0

The way lightning bolts seem to work in the EE is to generate the line of lightning with a projectile on the end. If a character is already in close melee with the caster, the projectile will be generated behind the character - thus if you suspect an enemy is casting lightning bolt your best protection is to snuggle in close to him so you don't get hit (by the initial attack, there's still a danger of getting hit by a ricochet).

gorgonzola

probably @Grond0 is right about the reason the lighting bolt was not effective.
afaik if a spell is disrupted by taking damage or a caster is killed as he is casting the spell fizzles, but as long as the cast is completed the spell is on his way, no matter what happens to the caster, even if you can outrun it and save yourself going to an other area or for some aoe ones running away from the aoe before the spell hits.