In the last part, we did the first part of the unseeing eye quest. The fight against the yuan-ti mage was tricky, but ultimately we can retreat for safety. We also had a beholder fight which I'm still quite chuffed about being able to solve with a Nishruu.
We got a lot of experience for that, and are just over 2.2 million. Let's get some more.
There is a little known about night-time encounter here - we can kill the two slaver guards to free the slave for a nice XP reward. I should have done that earlier, but we'll do it now.
While we're here, we kill this guy. If we open the door he runs inside, but if we kill him before opening the door nothing bad happens. The actual contents of the slave ship we will cover later.
We ignored this spider group earlier, so let's clear it out.
This group consists of:
3 * Sword spider
Killer spider
Spirit spider
Lesser spirit spider
There are also some trolls from the druid quest that are close enough to get drawn into the fight.
Fortunately, there are no mutated spiders here, they are all sufficiently squishy. We focus on the spirit, killer and lesser spirit in that order. The trolls need fire to kill, but we have the Flame Tongue sword to finish them off.
Nilthiri starts off neutral, so she does not get drawn into the earlier fight.
She goes down easy, and as she dies she spawns a bunch of diseased rats.
The rats are very hard to kill with physical damage, and they can inflict a nasty disease when they hit. Fortunately, they are very weak to elemental damage, so fireballs (or a wand of fire) are extremely useful here. They also move slow enough that we can easily outrun them.
Once the rats are dead, the spirit congratulates us.
The next quest will start after at least ten days delay, but it we aren't ready for it, it's quite a tricky one.
I played around in v6 solo a bit, I can remember playing some v5, or perhaps earlier once upon a time - basically exactly the same install as you plus with a tweakpack-enabled illegal dwarven F/M/C.
Anyway some info about how I did some things.
Not sure if IA is supposed to get rid of it but as per regular EE with the right pips Ashideena was in Irenicus's Dungeon which, along with Skeleton Warriors made the Lesser Spirit Spiders melee possible with DUHM, Aid, and Chant.
Trademeet Genies using your strategy of PfP and hitting, but with true sight as well. (this took a couple of attempts)
Easy Troll Groups - PfF + melee buffs then Sunfire + fireballs
Druid Grove Spider Group - PfF + Melee buffs, Sunfire and fireballs and lots of direct damage and kiting.
Druid Groups were Protection from Lighting and usual buffs then send in 5x Skeleton Warriors and then 2x Cloudkill from afar. The last group (Dalok) were tougher but 2x cloudkill got everyone down to Near Death before they were finished in melee + Direct Damage magic
Suna Seni - I avoided this fight like the plague... but, with shield of harmony equipped: start with an invisibility potion, kite, remove magic, kite, oil of speed, kite, stoneskin, kite, improved invisibility, kite, free action, kite, minor sequencer with 2x web then melee was enough, refreshing melee protections as we went - their weak saves vs spell meant they were reliably webbed, but it took a few attempts to get the first 3 rounds right.
Mutated spiders in the tombs - omg these were nasty and took a while to work out what to do. Maximum buffs then 2x Sunfire and 3x fireball with hitting in between to clear out most of the weaker stuff, then took them down 1 by 1 with resting in between. Buffs to an effective AC-20 vs Piercing + stoneskin, MI, haste and DUHM and refresh with 1x minor sequencer with MI and Aid, and then 3x MI was enough to kill 1 dual wielding Dwarven Thrower and Ashideena. Ouch. Retreat, rest and repeat. Hitting reliably was tough, even with 5 pips in hammers. Reloaded a lot until I could work out what was going on.
Done a few other things which were either vanilla or similar in difficulty to SCS such as the thief questline. Also tried out some stuff that was waaay out of my league --- Noble Trolls... - Outputting enough damage solo is tough.
Also, Bridge District Cutpurse merchant sold PfMW on my install but I have no idea if that is a tweakpack issue?
Very interesting @ed_boy 10/10 posts.
I played around in v6 solo a bit, I can remember playing some v5, or perhaps earlier once upon a time - basically exactly the same install as you plus with a tweakpack-enabled illegal dwarven F/M/C.
I've also played around a lot with a FMC, but my one was tweaked to have UAI so I could deal slashing and piercing damage.
Not sure if IA is supposed to get rid of it but as per regular EE with the right pips Ashideena was in Irenicus's Dungeon which, along with Skeleton Warriors made the Lesser Spirit Spiders melee possible with DUHM, Aid, and Chant.
This was the case in previous versions of IA, but since it would trigger the ghost spider in the sewers temple level I think it was cut. I found Varscona, but I suspected it was there due to the tweakpack and not the mods, so I haven't used it.
Suna Seni - I avoided this fight like the plague... but, with shield of harmony equipped: start with an invisibility potion, kite, remove magic, kite, oil of speed, kite, stoneskin, kite, improved invisibility, kite, free action, kite, minor sequencer with 2x web then melee was enough, refreshing melee protections as we went - their weak saves vs spell meant they were reliably webbed, but it took a few attempts to get the first 3 rounds right.
I definitely empathize with wanting to avoid it for as long as possible. I spent a while trying a strategy similar to this, but I couldn't get it reload-safe - remove magic is a bit too random for my liking.
Mutated spiders in the tombs - omg these were nasty and took a while to work out what to do. Maximum buffs then 2x Sunfire and 3x fireball with hitting in between to clear out most of the weaker stuff, then took them down 1 by 1 with resting in between. Buffs to an effective AC-20 vs Piercing + stoneskin, MI, haste and DUHM and refresh with 1x minor sequencer with MI and Aid, and then 3x MI was enough to kill 1 dual wielding Dwarven Thrower and Ashideena. Ouch. Retreat, rest and repeat. Hitting reliably was tough, even with 5 pips in hammers. Reloaded a lot until I could work out what was going on.
Yeah, they are super annoying - the complete magical/elemental immunity means there isn't much to do other than pile of buffs and click attack.
Done a few other things which were either vanilla or similar in difficulty to SCS such as the thief questline. Also tried out some stuff that was waaay out of my league --- Noble Trolls... - Outputting enough damage solo is tough.
Noble trolls are also something that I'm testing the waters with every few parts - If we can deal with a few noble trolls then we can do most of the first part of Watcher's Keep, which is worth massive amounts of XP.
Also, Bridge District Cutpurse merchant sold PfMW on my install but I have no idea if that is a tweakpack issue?
I've just checked, and he does sell PFMW (two scrolls), as well as minor sequencer (which is useful) - thanks for pointing this out. It also turns out that the merchant in the red tent in trademeet has two scrolls for sale.
This gives access to three scrolls for scrollcasting, though we will want to stockpile as many as possible - in the late game I'm expecting several fights where we will want more PFMW protection than pure memorization can offer (e.g. EDE or JD fight), so will likely need to scrollcast in the late game.
The problem with solo is the amount of melee damage you can effectively do. If you have 6 skeleton lords or the new golems around and a mage opponent then the battle becomes quite a slow pick them off one by one while at the same time you have to keep rebuffing yourself.
You need the high end summons a lot, so it becomes important to try to find those sooner rather than later.
I was able to clear up to the JD fight with the UAI'd FMC, but the TOB content is completely new to me.
DPS is only a problem for enemies like the elite doppelganger that have massive regeneration (currently Quallo's friend is a blocker for this stage of the game for that reason). We will be able to hit 10APR (1 base, 1 from warrior levels, 1 from dual wielding, 1 from grandmastery, 1 from gloves, doubled with improved haste) with 25 strength (19 starting, 1 from machine, 2 from JD sword, 3 from girdle).
The good news is that in IA fights, the threat is normally mostly physical - there is typically at most one magical enemy and the rest just deal boatloads of physical damage. When fully kitted out with out endgame equipment, we will have 60% base physical resistance (15% ioun stone, 10% amulet, 15% flail, 20% JD sword), which means that a single hardiness or two barbarian essence potions will give us physical immunity.
The good news is that in IA fights, the threat is normally mostly physical - there is typically at most one magical enemy and the rest just deal boatloads of physical damage. When fully kitted out with out endgame equipment, we will have 60% base physical resistance (15% ioun stone, 10% amulet, 15% flail, 20% JD sword), which means that a single hardiness or two barbarian essence potions will give us physical immunity.
I haven't played Improved Anvil that much, but I noticed in NearInfinity that the mod has scripts that give you a resistance penalty if you reach 100% damage resistance. Would that prevent you from reaching 100% damage resistance, or is this penalty not actually applied? I haven't tested it.
The good news is that in IA fights, the threat is normally mostly physical - there is typically at most one magical enemy and the rest just deal boatloads of physical damage. When fully kitted out with out endgame equipment, we will have 60% base physical resistance (15% ioun stone, 10% amulet, 15% flail, 20% JD sword), which means that a single hardiness or two barbarian essence potions will give us physical immunity.
I haven't played Improved Anvil that much, but I noticed in NearInfinity that the mod has scripts that give you a resistance penalty if you reach 100% damage resistance. Would that prevent you from reaching 100% damage resistance, or is this penalty not actually applied? I haven't tested it.
Do you know where those scripts live? In BALDUR.BCS and BALDUR25.BCS there are scripts that do that for elemental resistance, but I haven't found any for physical resistance. It's also common for enemies to check that their targets are weak to their damage type before attacking, but it doesn't penalize the player for having too much damage resistance.
Do you know where those scripts live? In BALDUR.BCS and BALDUR25.BCS there are scripts that do that for elemental resistance, but I haven't found any for physical resistance. It's also common for enemies to check that their targets are weak to their damage type before attacking, but it doesn't penalize the player for having too much damage resistance.
I was looking at BALDUR.BCS, so I was probably thinking of those scripts limiting elemental resistance. I didn't remember there wasn't one for physical damage resistance.
In the last part we cleared out the first of the two druid grove quests. It's not worth a huge amount of experience, but it's still nice to have that box ticked.
As mentioned on the forum posts, there are four scrolls of PFMW that can be bought - two in this tent in trademeet and two from the cutpurse at night in the bridge district. We will scribe one and keep the other three for scrollcasting. Over the course of the game we will want to preserve as many scrolls as possible for scrollcasting.
We also pick up a scroll of minor sequencer, which is a nice pickup. Our typical minor sequencer will probably be blur and mirror image. In addition to all this, we grab protection from cold.
Our destiation will be back to the de'Arnise keep. Ideally for the first time, but in our case for the second time.
I noticed the troll group in the central ground floor respawning - could this be another XP loop left in the game?
We buff up and head outside. We have a Neo-Otyugh here, accompanied by a regular Otyugh.
It has 3 APR, THAC0 1 (crushing), 1 AC, 119 hitpoints, 1 HP/second regeneration. Its damage isn't much, but on hit it has two diseases - save at -4 vs slow, and damage without a save. It resists piercing damage and is vulnerable to slashing or crushing.
We attack it. It has a hard time hitting us, as it is missing on a 14. If it does hit, we should have plenty of elixirs of health to negate the disease. Fully buffed, it should go down in less than 3 rounds. We can also enhance our DPS by using our action on magic missile.
This also allows acces to the door so we can go to the roof of the keep and clear off the vanilla enemies up there for a few drops more XP.
We head to the upper level. We buff up outside the door, including protection from fire and equipping the girdle of AC against piercing. We make sure our 5th level spell slots are filled with sunfire.
We run in and have a look at our enemies. We have, in descending order of threat:
Yuan-ti mage (level 13/13/ fighter/mage)
Killer Spider
Troll
Ice Troll
This yuan-ti mage is different to the one we encountered earlier. If we have up improved invisibility, it casts true seeing, which we will want to interrupt with a magic missile.
We start by magic missiling the yuan-ti mage to interrupt the true sight and engage the spider in melee. The mage's buffs include fireshield ref, which gives it 80% fire resistance, so sunfire can still interrupt.
The mage can cast a spell sequencer at us while we are improved invisible, which it probably shouldn't be able to. Fortunately, we can make all these saving throws even on a natural 1. This at least means we don't need to sped our action defensively and can instead enhance our DPS with a magic missile.
We can also cast sunfire to interrupt the mage when it starts to cast a spell with a normal casting time, and get a bit of extra damage onto the spider.
The spider should go down in 2-3 rounds, at which point we engage the mage. It has stoneskins up for protection, which we will get through the hard way, and we will be protected from the fireshield damage. The mage has PFMW, which we can respond to by equipping normal weapons. We want to count down the rounds that PFMW is active for, and swap to magical weapons when the four rounds are over.
The mage has some impressive AC, so this fight may take a while, as neither side can really hit the other. Refreshing buffs may be necessary, but fortunately the stairs down are still active and can be used.
When the improved invisibility runs off, the mage may cast breach. Fortunately, sunfire can interrupt (if cast quickly), or the stairs can be taken.
The mage's buffs only last a couple rounds longer than ours, at which point the fight starts to become a lot more in our favour. It casts spells that can either be safely saved against or negated with the shield of harmony. When the II and the MGOI go down, we can also cast magic missiles for additional DPS and interruption.
The final enemy is the troll, which is more dangerous that it appears. It is recommended to retreat and rest up before taking this one on.
It dies into two vengeance trolls, which drain strength on hit.
With the keep key in our possession, we can open this door. We make sure to draw the guard all the way down the corridor before he talks to us, at which point we choose the aggressive response and kill him for an extra 975 experience.
We make our way to the golem room. There are three containers on the far end of the room. If we loot the containers, we will have to fight IA-added guardians in addition to the golems.
Attacking the golems early aggros them all at once, but we can stand in the doorway to make sure we don't have to deal with all them at once. All the golems at once is still easier then the golems plus the guardians.
The iron golem is the most difficult (needing +3 weapons to hit and having big damage resistance), but it is completely blocked by the door and can be dealt with at leisure.
The left alcove contains the fire flail head and the kneecapper warhammer. It spawns a killer and a spirit spider, which are not much concern for us when we're buffed up.
The middle alcove contains the elven court bow which has no guardians.
The right alcove contains the frostreaver battleaxe and is guarded by a keep viper, which we cannot beat yet.
Looking at the elemental resistance scripts in near infinity:
Does anyone know how scripting states work? It looks as though whenever an elemental resistance is over 100, it is lowered in chunks of 25 until it is under 100, as long as the value of SCRIPTINGSTATE12 for that character is 1 (wearing off after 100 rounds). I can see it in STATS.IDS with ID 167. I can see checks for it in various BCSs, but I can't see where it is set. I've even done a text search on all of the IA download and cannot find where it is set, where suggests to me that it is part of the vanilla game mechanics.
In the last part, we cleared out the yuan-ti fight - it played out similar to the Rayic Gethras fight, except the non-mage enemies were super tough. We cannot proceed any further into the keep safely, so it is time to leave.
Also, we are effectively at 2.4 million XP, which means that we can now safely go to new areas like Mekrath's lab.
We picked up one of the flail heads. Checking the scripts, it looks like we get XP reward when we assemble the complete flail, no matter how it is assembled. Since it is the same no matter how it is forged, we are safe to make the flail +1 with the head that we have now and do the others later.
First, though, we need to leave. In IA, opening the drawbridge is a tricky scenario, as we will be immediately attacked by a whisper spider, then half a round later by a greater yuan-ti. We would be able to deal with the spider in a vacuum, but the yuan-ti is too much.
As the yuan-ti spawns in, all the entrances to the keep are disabled, but the exits to the overworld are still active. We can run away to the overworld and come back later when we have the proper tools to deal with the mage.
We activate the drawbridge. The spider immediately spawns, and the yuan-ti is half a round later.
There is a script that makes the yuan-ti teleport here if we try to run away. Fortunately, we can still run around it. It might say "Uses a scroll", but that will just be true sight - we buffed with improved invisibility to buy a round in this scenario. We can also summon the berserk warrior as additional distraction.
Heading down, there are two trolls we can kill for a drop more XP.
With all that done, it's time to run away.
We can draw them to the opposite corner of the map, but it's probably not worth it. When we return, they will both return to the starting position by the gates and the yuan-ti will try to hunt us down immediately.
This is enough for us to hit fighter level 10. As well as a point of HP and a point of THAC0, the reduced saving throw vs death is nice.
We can buff up and head into Mekrath's lab. The buffs shouldn't be massively necessary, we will be avoiding the difficult part of the lab.
The central part of the lab contains just a few memphits. We very deliberately avoid the right hand side of the lab, as that contains some fights we're saving for later. The buffs are just so we don't have to waste any potions against the memphits.
Killing Mekrath is worth 8500 experience and no significant loot. Doing his quest is worth more experience, so we agree to do his quest.
Heading to the sewers, we very carefully inch forward until we can see the lesser earth elemental and not the imp.
Mundane arrows do nothing to it in terms of damage, but it does make the elemental angry enough to come towards us. We can use this to safely take it out before the main imp fight.
For the actual imp fight itself, we stay out of sight and send in three skeletons. The imp's buffs fire and it summons a greater earth elemental, which will attack one of the skeletons.
Our goal is to draw the greater elemental into a fight with Othala, while the skeletons run around the imp to get it to use all its spells on them. The greater elemental can only be hit by weapons that are +2 or greater, and massively resists slashing and piercing damage. The kneecapper hammer from the keep is good to use here, despite the lack of proficiencies.
Since the skeletons are offscreen, our method of kiting is:
Hit the "Select all party members button in the bottom right hand corner of the window
CTRL+clith Othala to deselect her
Click on an area in the fog of war around where the imp is
Wait a few second, then repeat, clicking somewhere else nearby
While the imp can only see the skeletons, it will cast:
Mordenkainen's Sword * 2
Animate Dead * 2
Flame Arrow * 3
Magic Missile * 5
Melf's Acid Arrow * 3
After casting all these, it will try to engage the skeletons in melee.
The skeletons will probably start going down about now. The horn of valhalla can be used for some more distraction, as Othala rebuffs, including protection from cold and improved invisibility.
The imp may cast death spell, which is bad news, as it will also take out the skeletons. This is part of why we save the horn for last when the skeletons don't have much longer left anyway.
Once the greater earth elemental is dead, Othala can start to take out the other of the imp's summons. Preferably the skeletons - the swords are harder to kill and have a much shorter lifespan.
We can kite the imp a bit to get some more buff time. Watch out for this sequencer. If we have improved invisibility and blur up, we will always save. If we just have improved invisibility, we are weak to the slow. If we don't have it, we will need to use a potion of magic shielding, or run upstairs to avoid the spell effects. In the worst case scenario, we can equip the shield of harmony, so we have 85% chance of making the emotion save and immunity to the confusion.
At this point, the imp's II should be running out, so we can safely interrupt any of its spells with instacast magic missiles.
This is a long grindy fight, but we always have the option of retreating to make it safe if we ever feel uneasy. The remote kiting does take a bit of getting used to.
This fight was enough for us to hit thief level 13. We carry on dumping our points into detect illusion.
We buff up in the corridor leading up to Mekrath, inclduing protection from cold, ending with improved invisibility. We send in the skeleteons to have them standing next to Mekrath before we arrive.
As we head in, Mekrath starts casting true seeing (his buffs have not kicked in yet). We talk to him in a way that gets the optimal XP reward (hand over the mirror, then demand better payment). Although technically this talking breaks his spellcasting and could be considered cheesy, I alleviate my guilt by also casting magic missile to represent what would have happened if we did not want to talk to him.
Since we are II and his TS has been disrupted, he can't do much to us, mostly summoning mordy swords and skeletons. We hit him with our swords, being protected from his fireshield blue with our protection from cold. The skeletons don't do a huge amount here, but they're still the best use of our 5th level spell slots.
Mekrath's summons tend to prefer to target our skeletons. Once Mekrath goes down, there's not much point in killing them as they grant no XP, so we can just head downstairs and rest up instead, and end this part.
Tried out some of your tactics with the f/m/c, and some alternate ones.
For the de'Arnise library I had repeated success with II then sunfire disruption to prevent illusions being dispelled as you did (and killing the spider in around 2 rounds), but followed up with a Minor Sequencer 2x web, then, when possible 2x more web from spellbook. The Yuan-ti mage reliably gets held, as do the others. With protection from fire the mage goes down reasonably quick with held auto-hitting. Some attempts Greater Command cast repeatedly (3x) will take it out though not an option for F/M/T. Once it was down running away and closing a door before dealing with the vengeance troll spawning troll.
I found vengeance trolls to be hard tbh due to the strength drain, but running away, resting, and throwing Fireshield(red) into the mix fully buffed with 5x (level 9 cleric cast) skeleton warriors was enough to take them both down in one sitting.
The Golems and the Flail Guardian Spiders were "simple" as you said - Tried out the keep viper and could reliably get down to badly injured but no further due to thac0 buffs wearing off.
Also did copper coronet beastmaster. Interestingly, if you keep spamming Stinking cloud every turn, beastmaster will waste every action on casting zone of sweet air, meaning if you can fit 1x breach in it is reliably doable I found - with minor sequencer I could get 4x stinking clouds and still have 1 mirror image
---
Also, there are plenty of tedious XP loops in the EE content if you need them but this would probably breach your definition of "solo" since you need to take on companions for a short while (non combat) to unlock stuff.
Re: your point on Remove Magic, I found it was reliable in removing haste buffs but nothing else. For the Suna fight it was a case of once enemy haste was dispelled via remove magic and f/m/c drank an oil of speed it was reliably over.
Re: F/M/C - there is a tweakpack addition that relaxes F/M/C (and F/C) weapon restrictions, without giving full UAI. I do suspect that the f/m/c will come up against a hard wall at some point but it's still fun, and for now Righteous Magic + DUHM and Aid minor sequencer allows for considerable hammer smashing, on top of all the mage defenses.
We are getting very close to mage level 6 - only about 80k more XP to go.
We are starting to run very low on fights we can safely take without PFMW.
It's time for us to tackle a fight that's been looming over us for a very long time - the beastmaster. There are three major components to the beastmaster fight:
A minotaur, that with IA improvements can hold us without a save
The beastmaster, a level 17/14 fighter/druid
Tabitha, who has immunity to all elemental damage, 50% resistance to physical damage, fast regeneration, and cannot be killed while the beastmaster is still alive.
We prebuff with:
Stoneskin (pre-rest)
Enchanted weapon (pre-rest)
Minor sequencer (2* magic missile) (pre-rest)
Animate dead * 2
Ghost Armor
Blur
Mirror Image
Improved invisibility
Horn of valhalla
Haste
In addition to this, we have ready to cast:
Breach
Stoneskin * 2
Flame Arrow
Haste
Mirror Image * 2
Magic Missile * 4
As we head in, the beastmaster starts to cast true seeing. We interrupt by casting the flame arrow.
The beastmaster's buffs fire. We queue up a breach. We also watch out for the summon that Tabitha is attacking and tell it to run to the other side of the map (and drag Tabitha with it).
The breach takes down the beastmaster's defences. Tabiha runs off to the rooms in the top corner of the map. The minotaur attacks us, so we equip Arbane's sword to protect against its hold effect.
We can use our magic missiles to interrupt the beastmaster's spellcasting, though it's better if we can interrupt by hitting him, as we want to save the magic missiles for Tabitha. If we do interrupt him with weapons, it opens up a window to DUHM.
Tabitha tends to return around the time that the beastmaster goes down. Once the beastmaster is down, we focus on Tabitha.
We sometimes get a bit knocked around, which is annoying, but not the end of the world. If we're lucky, we can get the doorways set up so the minotaur is no able to hit us.
Tabitha is weak to magic missile. We will want to spend ever round either refreshing mirror image/stoneskin or blasting Tabitha with magic missile.
The magic missiles tend to be the biggest part of the DPS. Tabitha should go down before the buffs wear off - if the buffs start wearing off before Tabitha goes down, then we can always run away out of the coronet.
With the beastmaster and Tabitha down, we focus on the minotaur. It shouldn't be that difficult, as long as we remember to use Arbane's sword or the shield of harmony to avoid being held.
Tabitha drops Tabitha's hide, an important crafting ingredient.
The beastmaster drops magical flower seeds. We can forge these into a potion that gives 250k experience points, but permanently disables our thieving skills button. This is probably the right move in terms of total XP, but I want to see how far we can get before it becomes less necessary.
We rest up to refresh our buffs, and start to free Hendak. We make sure to free the two children in the adjacent cells first, for a touch more experience.
As we run through the copper coronet, we make sure to steal the kills on the guards and Lehtinan.
The experience we get from all this is enough to send us over the threshold to mage level 12, where we finally gain access to level 6 spells and end this part.
Tried out some of your tactics with the f/m/c, and some alternate ones.
For the de'Arnise library I had repeated success with II then sunfire disruption to prevent illusions being dispelled as you did (and killing the spider in around 2 rounds), but followed up with a Minor Sequencer 2x web, then, when possible 2x more web from spellbook. The Yuan-ti mage reliably gets held, as do the others. With protection from fire the mage goes down reasonably quick with held auto-hitting. Some attempts Greater Command cast repeatedly (3x) will take it out though not an option for F/M/T. Once it was down running away and closing a door before dealing with the vengeance troll spawning troll.
Presumably you used Arbane/SOH to stop being webbed yourself? That sounds like a good idea - I find attack rolls very inconsistent, so the auto-hit on a held enemy would be super useful.
The Golems and the Flail Guardian Spiders were "simple" as you said - Tried out the keep viper and could reliably get down to badly injured but no further due to thac0 buffs wearing off.
The combination of the viper's AC and regeneration means that I think this fight needs improved haste to be possible.
Also did copper coronet beastmaster. Interestingly, if you keep spamming Stinking cloud every turn, beastmaster will waste every action on casting zone of sweet air, meaning if you can fit 1x breach in it is reliably doable I found - with minor sequencer I could get 4x stinking clouds and still have 1 mirror image
I messed around a bit with cloudkill, but I found my spells to constrained to be able to do much on that front - especially when the minor sequencer has to be saved for double magic missile against Tabitha.
Also, there are plenty of tedious XP loops in the EE content if you need them but this would probably breach your definition of "solo" since you need to take on companions for a short while (non combat) to unlock stuff.
It's something that I'm considering doing - for instance, I could see myself using Nalia's improved ring, which would mean picking up Nalia just to head to the docks district.
Re: your point on Remove Magic, I found it was reliable in removing haste buffs but nothing else. For the Suna fight it was a case of once enemy haste was dispelled via remove magic and f/m/c drank an oil of speed it was reliably over.
One thing I found in my FMC runs is that the cleric levels tend to be a bit higher than mage levels, and so the cleric dispel magic is stronger than the mage remove magic. It's not party friendly, however, so position is a concern.
In the last part, we finally hit mage level 12, gaining access to 6th level spells. 6th level spells means a lot of things, most importantly to us Contingency and Stoneskin.
Our next level will also be a big one - Thief level 14 means we will gain our first HLA, which will be UAI. There is an item that we will try to forge early so we can have it available as soon as we gain UAI, and in order to do that we need to revisit the tanner's house, this time heading into the lowest level of the basement.
The beastmaster dropped a cloak of protection, which means we finally get to use our cloak slot. This means that we not have a base save vs death of 0 and a base save vs spells of 1.
We buff up and get ready to head down. We expand our standard buff setup to include minor sequencer of 2*magic missile and a contingency of stoneskin on hitting 50% health. The first one is for offensive purposes, the second is for reload safety.
The fight we're about to do has four enemies.
The ghast is vanilla and not very interesting.
The rune assassin will wait for our stoneskin to drop, and then he will try to land a big backstab.
The grotesque creature is another melee enemy. It is weakest to slashing (40% resistance) and regenerates at a fair lick. On it it slows us unless we make a save vs death at -2.
There is a bone golem that will shortly appear. It has a "Hideous Laugh" ability that can panic/stun us unless we make saves with no penalties. Worryingly, it dispels illusions and specific protections on hit.
We head towards the rune assassin and attack him as first priority, as we want to be safe against sudden backstabs when we're vulnerable.
The bone golem spawns in and heads towards us.
We cast PFMW as soon as the golem gets into range.
It tends to take around five rounds to kill the bone golem, it often gets a hit in to dispel our illusions.
Our save vs death is 0 base, so recasting blur will restore our immunity to the grotesque creature's slow. Although we technically are vulnerable here, we're not very vulnerable - the creature needs to hit us (which is a less than 50% chance), we need to roll a natural 1 on our saving throw, and even then we can just recast haste or use an oil of speed.
The grotesque creature is weak to magic missiles, so we spam MM to make it go down quicker.
It goes down in 3-4 rounds of attacking and casting magic missile.
The creature drops Thistledown cloth, a required ingredient for our gloves.
In the last part. we cleaned up the tanner encounter and got the unique ingredients required for our gloves. However, we are missing a permanency scroll. None of the possible permanency locations are going to be easy to get to, so it's time to so something incredibly cheesy.
Our destination is watcher's keep. It's well known for having massive piles of experience.
There's a lot going on in the watcher's keep altar level. The part that we are most concerned with circles with question marks - these are random encounters (only one of each pair of circles will be active at any time). The first one triggered is always noble trolls, the second one is always vampires and mists, the third is always golems, and the fourth is always skeletons.
Watcher's keep is different to most other areas - when attempting to travel between areas, we do not have conventional travel triggers. Instead, we have mini cutscenes. There is an important consequence to this - normally, enemies are perfectly happy to follow us through doors, so are ability to retreat out of any nasty encounter will see the enemies pursuing. Because the WK transitions are done with cutscenes, the enemies are not able to follow us. Therefore, we will be able to duck in and out of the level over and over without any enemies pursuing us.
We have a different buff routine - just Minor Sequencer, Stoneskin, Haste, Fireshield and DUHM. There's a reason for this - we want to go maximum offense. In addition to the weapon attacks, we can get extra damage by triggering fireshield. In order to do that, we want to get hit as often as possible while under PFMW, which is why why have no defensive buffs.
We instantly run through the door. It takes a second or two for the trolls to spawn in.
We run towards the the exit trigger and cast PFMW as we turn and fight.
Noble trolls are nasty enemies at this stage in the game. They have 25% physical resistance, 75% elemental resistance, immunity to weapons that are +2 or less, 126HP, and 1 HP/second regeneration. Fortunately, unlike regular trolls, they do not need to be finished off with fire or acid and they are worth 12.5k XP each.
It takes about four rounds of combat to take out a noble troll. We use our action in each of those rounds to cast magic missile (either conventionally or via sequencer).
When we reenter, the trolls have reset to their original position. We draw them back towards us and repeat the process.
I find that it is possible to take out a troll in four rounds about 60% of the time. For reload safety, if the troll is not dead at the end of the PFMW, we should retreat. Additional reload safety can be had by adding defensive buffs like ghost armour, making the small gap at the end of PFMW safer and making the small damage output from fireshield a bit smaller.
After the last noble troll goes down, there are two more spirit trolls to deal with. They are pretty easy, but we need finish those ones off with fire or acid.
Once the troll group is cleared out, we head to the door on the right for the next group.
The areas on the the right hand side of the map offer more experience than the areas on the left, so we want to have the right hand spawn be the earlier, easier group.
We open it up, and it's a spider group, not the vampire/mist group we expected. We take it out without much issue due to PFMW, the rest up and rebuff.
The spellhaunt is not much of a danger.
It looks like the spawn point on the right is having trouble triggering, so we head to the back left room instead. It contains the mists and vampires we were expecting. They like to spam domination, so we equip the shield of harmony for safety (we would have to make saves vs spell at -2 otherwise, which we can do safely with II or spirit armour).
The group consists of two mist horrors, two vampiric mists, and two eminent vampires. magic missile returns as a big DPS enhancement.
A single eminent vampire goes down easier than a noble troll, but we don't get ambitious and keep on retreating and resting up.
We take out the guardian golems before opening the sarcophagus.
We can give the priest his slippers for 20k experience. Alternatively, we can so no and kill the priest for 22k experience and keep the slippers. The slippers give 25% cold resistance, which isn't much, but we've got no other footwear going on.
Behind the scenes, the priest is implemented as an 11th level cleric, though with lich immunities and a few druid spells. We summon four skeleton warriors and buff with haste and improved invisibility.
He buffs himself with iron skins, and his lich immunities mean that he cannot be breached. We instead position ourself where the lich cannot see us (and therefore cannot target us), and we can direct our skeletons to attach his skeletons. We make sure that three of them are tackling the left skeleton, and one of them is standing next tot he lich on the right, so we can manage which one is the target of the lich's spells.
The lich casts a bunch of summon spells, which we can help with by casting magic missile. We are mostly just waiting until the lich's spellbook is exhausted - with a caster level of 11, that shouldn't last too long.
Once the lich has run out of spells, we go outside, rest up, summon a team of skeletons, haste them up, and send them in.
He only has one insta-cast spell - iron skins. Once that is cast, we will be able to interrupt the rest of his spells with attacks. The flame tongue sword is good to use here.
It's a grindy fight, but ultimately not a risky one. He only has two spells that are really dangerous to us - finger of death and creeping doom - and he likes to cast them early. Fighting him after resting means he has no starting buffs and no skeletons to distract us. As long as we have seen the two spells that we're worried about, we can run in and retreat if things look hairy.
Picking up the book from the altar triggers the two nearest statues to come to life and attack us. They are pretty uninteresting, though.
Exploring the rest of the map, I'm having a hard time figuring out why the golem and skeleton random spawn aren't spawning. I'll end this part here, though - we've cleared out a lot of the map and gotten a lot of experience from this.
Noble trolls are nasty enemies at this stage in the game. They have 25% physical resistance, 75% elemental resistance, immunity to weapons that are +2 or less, 126HP, and 1 HP/second regeneration. Fortunately, unlike regular trolls, they do not need to be finished off with fire or acid and they are worth 12.5k XP each.
A troll that's more resistant to fire and acid than to physical attacks? And that doesn't regenerate any faster than the other IA enemies? That's not very troll-like.
Noble trolls are nasty enemies at this stage in the game. They have 25% physical resistance, 75% elemental resistance, immunity to weapons that are +2 or less, 126HP, and 1 HP/second regeneration. Fortunately, unlike regular trolls, they do not need to be finished off with fire or acid and they are worth 12.5k XP each.
A troll that's more resistant to fire and acid than to physical attacks? And that doesn't regenerate any faster than the other IA enemies? That's not very troll-like.
Yeah, they're a bit out of place compared to the vanilla trolls.
Noble trolls are the only IA improved "regular" trolls. There are three "boss" trolls (Torgal, Troll King, Troll Queen) that all have the same pattern of being weakest to physical damage and not needing elemental damage to kill.
In the last part, we cleared most of the first level of Watcher's Keep and earned a large chunk of XP - around a quarter of a million.
We'll have a smaller part here, where we do a simple bit of cleanup of an old area.
We head to the entrance of Firkraag's lair. For the first part we will only need light buffs.
Our light buffs will be enough to easily take us through this initial group of hobgoblins safely.
Once we have dealt with the greeting party, we rest up, fully buff and head it.
Six vampiric mists and four mist horrors. We prioritize the vampiric mists. PFMW is important here. We also gear up with the shield of harmony for safety.
Continuing round the corner, there are more mists in this area. It is safest to rest up and rebuff.
This is where we will end this rather small part - there is a Ruhk Conjurer up ahead that is too difficult for us right now.
I like to hold monster on the grotesk creature. Last time I played that worked very well. I also usually hold off on the mists because they are annoying if you have to prep the whole party. I see you have it a lot easier going in solo.
You are also planning the encounters very well taking saves and ac into account. I must admit I rarely do that, I just go with what feels good, and I have a lot to improve there.
I figure that for a strategy to be reload safe, a natural 1 needs to not be the end of the run, so pretty much every saving throw that removes control of the character (e.g. confusion) needs us to pass it even if we roll a 1.
Gaining access to PFMW didn't open up as many options as I would have hoped, our damage output is still a bit weak. Given that we currently have no access to items that need UAI, I'm heavily considering going for Assassination, extra level 6 spell or critical strike as earlier HLAs.
It's also looking like we have to tackle the planar prison or Tor'gal before we do the slaver ship.
EDIT: It looks as though IA has upped the XP threshold for HLAs to be a bit under 6m experience, it'll be a while before we can reach that.
Having done some research, it looks like the next big hurdle for us will be the planar prison. The planar prison offers a lot of loot for us - boots of haste, a scroll of permanency, and most crucially, a scroll of improved haste. We want to prepare for that, however, and we will prepare by scrounging up as much remaining XP as possible.
We have beaten noble trolls before, at watcher's keep. We perform our normal buffing routine.
The troll group here is a lot bigger than before. It consists of five noble trolls, two giant trolls, two spectral trolls, and one normal troll.
As before, we cast PFMW. This protects us from all of the trolls while we focus on one of the nobles and try to take it out in the four round time. We can use magic missile again to enhance our damage output.
With one troll down, it's time to run away.
We can safely retreat to the druid grove. The trolls here do not pursue into the grove (at least, they did not in my game). An alternative would be to retreat to the edge of the map.
A no-reloader would probably want to draw the trolls to a safe exit point first before engaging, to prevent a surround on the original engagement from preventing retreat.
While here we get another stronghold mission, which we will be ignoring for now.
Although the trolls surrounding us on exit is a bit scary, the location we exit to is in the range of the entrance transition, so we can safely escape back inside the grove.
Once the noble trolls are taken care of, the rest of the trolls are vanilla and straightforward. They can be taken out in a single sortie.
We'll end this part here - the contents of the troll mound are too much for us.
Part 031: Ihtafeer:
In the last part, we took care of more noble trolls using door cheese. In this part, we will take care of a fight that we bypassed the first time round - Ihtafeer.
We summon skeletons to the upper level, buff up (including protection from cold and mirror image), and attack Adratha to make her hostile.
She summons two friends - Saadat and Jalaal. They are all rakshasa, which means immunity to spells that are level 7 or below.
Spell-wise, they all have a single copy of absolute immunity, plus a single cloud spell (chosen randomly from Death Fog, Cloudkill and Ice Storm). In addition to this, Ihtafeer can throw out the occasional chain lightning if we are not under II, but while we are under II she has no way to target us.
When we see them casting the cloud spells (purple spell animation), we immediately run to the left corner of the map. If it's ice storm then our protection from cold will negate it, but otherwise we want to spend the rest of the fight outside the cloud area.
If the randomly chosen cloud spell is death cloud, then it will kill off the skeletons, but at least the cloud will be on the upper level, out of the way.
As we damage them in melee, they will cast absolute immunity. We have no way of getting through it, so we will have to wait out the four round duration.
Once they have cast their spells, they engage us in melee.
Ihtafeer only has a THAC0 of 7, and the others only have a THAC0 of 8. With ghost armour up, our AC is -11, so by using any one of DUHM/Shield of Harmony/Blur/Improved invisibility we can make it so they only hit us on a natural 20. We can also use PFMW for extra protection.
Once the absolute immunity wears off, they go down in melee fairly easily. Ihtafeer is worth 15k XP and the two others are worth 3k XP each.
Part 032: De'Arnise Gate Guardians
In the last part, we killed of Ihtafeer, though we have nobody to hand her head over to. We are also getting very close to the 3m XP mark, though it looks as though IA has changed the HLA level to be further along than this.
When we left the de'Arnise keep, we ran away from the Greater Yuan-ti and the Whisper Spider.
When we enter, the Yuan-ti resets to its spawn point and immediately tracks to us. We have a hair over three rounds before it gets to us, though this time is extremely consistent.
The first time we encountered the Yuan-ti, we were under improved invisibility and so it had to spend a round using a scroll of true seeing to see us. When we return, we can use the three round intro to set up improved invisibility.
The Yuan-ti will use a scroll of True Sight again to see us. It only started with a single such scroll, so this one being used up means that we can retreat and come back again, and it won't have any more castings of TS.
When we return, as long as we are fully invisible, the Yuan-ti fires its buffs but does nothing.
We can wait out its buffs here while fully invisible. We should wait out while under the effects of a potion of invisibility (12 hours) or the second level spell (24 hours), as that way we are guaranteed to wait out the buffs of the Yuan-ti.
It is a 19th level caster, and its prebuffs include spell turning which lasts 3 rounds per level, so we will want to wait at least six minutes before doing anything.
If we move out of its sight, it will track towards us, and refresh its buffs when it gets back within sight (though it will continue to wait around while we are fully invisible). We therefore lead it to near the whisper spider before starting the wait.
Six minutes of waiting later, its buffs have run out. We could try to take it out now, but we need to kill off the whisper spider first if we want the cold flail head.
We buff up - buff spells can be cast without breaking invisibility.
Out objective at this point is to take out the whisper spider without leaving the sight of the Yuan-ti. Preferably, we want to keep our actions free for disrupting the Yuan-ti as well.
We engage it in melee. The first thing it does is start to cast remove magic, which we will interrupt with magic missile.
We then run forward and engage the spider. The Yuan-ti has a sequencer of save-or-else spells, but our save vs spells is -4 right now, which gives us immunity to the yuan-ti's spells as well as the spider's vexing whisper. This also give us a window to PFMW.
The Yuan-ti has nothing more it can do to us magically. The spider should go down in three or four rounds, at which point we should be able to beat the Yuan-ti in melee, though we should keep the action free for casting more magic missiles to disrupt future remove magics.
With the yuan-ti down, we can head inside to kill another vanilla troll and upgrade our flail to +2, and end this part.
I'm considering trying to go for Belm. It's fantastic as an offhand weapon. It is guarded by a ghost spider (and the area it is in disables the exit as long as the ghost spider is alive). Normally we would want to drain the ghost spider of its summons, but that takes 24 rounds, and we would not be able to string it along for that long in such an enclosed area. We could try to focus down the ghost spider so we can grab belm and run, but that would cost us some XP (and even then, it might be a bit too tricky for us).
In the last part, we cleared out the de'Arnise gate guardians and upgraded our flail to +3. We still have two challenges left in the keep, however, and we're not ready for either of them.
We are less than 1k experience short of the big 3 million. Although we don't have HLAs to look forward to, we do #, we do have some areas that are soft-gated by an XP cap of 3.05 million, and being able to access those is a plus. We just need to scrounge together another 50k experience.
I haven't done an inventory update in a while, so here we go. In addition to this, we have a base save vs spell of 1 and save vs death of 0.
I have spent a while probing Quallo's friend, and unfortunately it is beyond our abilities - it is immune to magical damage, and it regenerates far too fast for us to be able to take it out. We can at least scrape together a bit of XP by taking out the rest of the guardians.
We start by placing the hand. This summons five noisome rats.
As we can see, crushing damage would be the way to deal with them, but due to how haste works with partial APR and our proficiencies, we get best damage output if we wield the sword of flame and the shield of harmony. Even though they have high elemental resistances, they have low hitpoints, so it's still worth casting spells like magic missile.
They also have a nasty weapon that inflicts disease without save as well as gives them 1hp/3 seconds regenration, so PFMW will be necessary. Thankfully, skeletons are immune to this damage, so they make very good summons here.
One casting of PFMW should be enough to take out a rat. In a fairly common pattern at this point, we can retreat after killing one to rest up and take the rest on.
Minor sequencer on magic missile can help here, as can the wand of lightning.
Two things to watch out for is that the rats will track across this map, but will not change level, and they will attack the nearest enemy. Therefore, it is important to alternate between the copper coroner main room and the myconid room for resting, and the first spells cast should be animate dead in a position where the rats will see and attack the skeletons first.
Once the skeletons have been summoned, we can use the horn, cast haste, DUHM and PFMW, then join the fight.
The next one is the shadow lover, which is too strong for us, so we will have to end this part here.
Part 034: Unseeing Eye Conclusion
In the last part we finally crossed the 3m threshold, but we are still short of 3.05. Let's squeeze out a bit more XP.
We'll carry on with a bit more of the unseeing eye quest. The actual unseeing eye fight will be later on, though.
Heading down, we find some groups of unimproved undead. We make sure to not go into the undead city, however - that area is very improved.
Around the first corner is a gauth. We use the same nishruu plus cloudkill strategy from earlier, except this time we can summon the nishruu the normal way.
Continuing around the northern edge of the map, we find this room with a solitary beholder in it. We can summon all our skeletons and horn warrior and haste them up and send them in - the damage output of a single beholder is not enough to take down our swarm of summons. We can also safely help the DPS by ducking in and out and casting the occasional magic missile.
The center of the map contains six blind priests. Only one of them has access to TS, so if we go in under improved invisibility and disrupt the one with TS, we can hack them all to pieces without much trouble.
We make sure we open up the back entrance here as well.
We summon our skeletons and warrior and buff up while at the back entrance, before heading down.
Just to the west of the back entrance is another group of beholders and gauths. Unlike the first one we encountered, we have no narrow tunnels to filter them out.
We get their attention by firing a magic missile, then run back upstairs.
This allows us to draw them up one at a time, where they get outnumbered and hacked to pieces.
We can repeat this process over and over. Solitary beholders and gauths are easily dealt with in this scenario.
For reload safety, resting and resummoning should be done between enemies. It is also possible to retreat to the temple district if things get hairy.
The skeletons like to track to Othala, which means they track to her when she takes the stairs down, which means they perform a transition we do not want them to. To prevent this happennig, we want to give the summons an order to move around a bit as we give Othala the order to move downstairs.
The southwest corner has another solitary beholder. Four hasted skeletons do their thing.
Similarly, there is a gauth in the southeast corner.
We have explored the whole map, but we do not take the rift device just yet.
We start by dropping off the rift device next to Gaal.
We then take the unseeing eye's part of the rift device. Since we do not have both parts, we do not reforge it and we do not fight the unseeing eye.
We pick up the other piece in Gaal's room. The script to reforge the rift device only fires in AR0205 (the beholder lair), so we will just have to rift device parts until we go there.
This is the script for AR0205. Note that we only gain the experience of the unseeing eye is not dead.
Also note that there are two unseeing eye creatures - BHEYE and UNSEE. However, the only one that is actually used in the game is BHEYE.
We therefore have a plan:
Tell Gaal that we have the first part of the rift device, so he gives us a whooping 75k XP and turns hostile
Rush to the beholder's lair to forge the rift device and gain XP
Kill the unseeing eye for even more juicy XP
Clean up the cultists and do the priest stronghold
We buff up (including improved invisibility) and hand over the rift device for lots of experience.
As we are still under II, the unseeing eye casts TS, allowing us to run away. We can also distract it with skeletons.
We can run away and head down the back entrance, then head back up again to engage the unseeing eye. I have found that the unseeing eye does not reliably appear here immediately, but on our second visit it reliably appears. My best guess is that the game recognizes that the unseeing eye is following us into the lair, does some maths of what delay should be expected for it to travel to the transition, removes it from the upper level and places it in the lower level after the delay, at which point we have already moved away.
This has an upside that the cultists stay and fight us - if we killed the unseeing eye first (which most playthroughs do), they run away which can deny us the XP. The only dangerous thing to watch out for here is the elite guards, who can cast greater command, so we want to keep II up to be safe.
We rest up, summon skeletons, buff up, make sure our action is clear, and head downstairs (trying to draw our summons down with us).
The unseeing eyedoes have an insta-cast TS, but unlike most beholders, he sticks to one action per round. This lets us rift device him.
He has hefty damage resistance, but the rift device does a guaranteed 150 of his 160 hitpoints. He likes to follow up the TS with ADHW, but that can be interrupted with magic missile, and he should go down shortly afterwards. It drops the amulet of 5% magical resistance, which is used in an IA recipe we probably don't care about.
Incidentally, the unseeing eye is worth 25k XP, and is therefore our new most powerful foe vanquished (dethroning the priest lich from WK).
From here, we have an XP parade with no challenge:
47.25k for returning spend rift device to Amaunator temple
47.75k for returning to Arval
20k for first Priest advice
20k for second Priest advice
20k for third Priest advice
20k for avoiding a fight with Cotirso
13650 from killing Talos church members
35k for final reporting back to Lara
This is enough for us to hit Fighter level 12 and Thief level 14. We gain our second proficiency point in flails, and we will probably put our next three in flails as well, as flails/morning stars should be our primary weapons for the rest of the game (more things are weak to crushing damage than other damage types). We also raise detect illusion to 75, though I am unsure if that will do any good.
It's been a very long part, and we will end things here.
I found while doing this part that when Arbane's sword says it protects from hold that does not include web effects, but the shield of harmony does could web as a hold effect. Therefore, in order to be protected from improved web safely, we cannot use Arbane's sword.
Web and hold are different entities indeed. You can use mgoi vs Web, but I am uncertain whether abilities like web lariat also protect from it (since I rarely use mages for taking hits).
I knew that the SOH protected from web, and the description lists immunity to Charm, Confusion, Domination and Hold, so I interpreted that as web being considered a form of hold (as it fits better under that immunity than the others). Arbane's sword is therefore a lot less useful in this run than I initially thought.
Web lariat doesn't actually have a web effect, despite the name. It inflicts a save-less sleep for 3 second and draws the target towards the user, but being properly stoneskinned/mirror imaged should prevent any disasters from happening while asleep.
We're likely to be coming up against ghost spiders soon (one of them is in Mekrath's lab and is a soft blocker for the planar prison). The improved web there requires saves vs spell at a -6 penalty (against web and paralyze), so that could be the first time that we see spirit armour being used. The ghost spider itself probably regenerates too fast for us to be able to take it out, so we will probably end up draining its summons and then filtering out the spider itself in the area transitions.
I also want to look into trying to use backstabs against the ghost spiders. Our backstab multiplier is x5 and under haste we have 4 APR, so if we spend our action each turn casting invisibility or drinking potions of invisibility, we can mimic improved haste by getting 8x attack damage per round. It could be expensive in terms of potions, however, and I like keeping a stash of potions for additional reload safety.
In the last part, we gained a large chunk of XP from finishing the unseeing eye quest as well as the priest stronghold. Although in theory out next fighter level will be big, giving us an extra half APR, due to the way that haste rounding works it won't be useful until we get improved haste or get grandmastery in a weapon (at fighter level 21). Our next mage level will be big, though, doubling the number of 6th level spells we can cast.
We want to retrieve the planar get from Mekrath's lab. The problem is, there is potentially a spider spawn between us and the gem, featuring a ghost spider that we are not ready to beat just yet.
We can tell if the spiders have spawned by using audio clues. If we walk to the east side of this room and hear a rustling noise, it means that the spiders have spawned. If we hear nothing, the way is clear.
If we do hear something, it means that the spiders have spawned. As this is meant to be reload-safe, I will consider the case that the spiders have spawned. We will want to buff up, equip the shield of harmony, get the spider's attention, then run back downstairs.
The spiders will pursue us. Most of the spiders are not that dangerous, but we should watch out for the whisper spiders (one is straightforward, two at once is tricky, and definitely not two with other spiders) and the ghost spider (too much regeneration for us to take on).
Fortunately, it is fairly easy to seperate those two spiders from the rest of the group - upon seeing us their first action is to use vexing whisper/improved web instead of attacking us, so if we give the command to area transition as soon as the autopause hits, we can consistently separate them out.
Our goal is to separate the spiders so we are only fighting one or two at once, then take them out without much trouble under PFMW.
At some point, when we have Mekrath's lair to ourselves, we can pick up the planar gem and put it in our bag of holding for later.
We also have access to Mekrath's balcony, which is another zone that we can go to to lose the spiders. It is also the safest place to sleep - we can sleep in Mekrath's lair or in the sewers, but the balcony is the only one of these places without hostile rest interruptions.
We can also summon some minions for additional backup or to give the spiders a new target so they do not pursue us. We will want to be careful that the skeletons do not follow us when changing area, so we will have to give them a seperate move order as Othala changes area.
When only the ghost spider is left, it is time to drain the ghost spider of summons. We equip the SOH and wait a fraction of a second, so the spider will shoots its improved web and summon its minions, then immediately change area again.
This is the ghost spider's summon script. It waits six rounds between summoning each reinforcement, but since we will be resting up and tackling each wave of reinforcements separately, we will easily meet this waiting period.
When we have drained the ghost spider of summons and are ready to move on, we summon some skeletons in Mekrath's lab, draw the ghost spider up there, make sure the ghost spider is attacking the skeletons, and head downstairs and leave.
With the gem in hand, we return to the five flagons to get some more XP.
We take out the planar creatures. By themselves they are not difficult, but we want to make sure that Haer'Dalis does not steal our kills. Fully buffing and summoning minions will help ensure this.
The bounty hunters arrive to take away the acting troupe, and we will end this part here.
In the last part we cleared out everything leading into the planar prison, though my initial probing indicates that it is far too difficult for us to handle right now.
It's finally time to handle the slaver ship.
There are four major aspects to the slaver ship:
Captain Haegan
Slave Golem
Priest of Cyric
Slaver Wizard
While Captain Haegan and the Slave Golem are alive, we cannot leave the area. Furthermore, an assassin will spawn every seven rounds (and drop no loot or XP we we will not want to farm) as long as we cannot leave.
We are going to be taking advantage of Haegan's save vs spells of 7. Web forces a save at -2, so he needs to roll a 9 or better. If we lay down three webs, then he has a 21.6% chance of not being webbed each round. If we lay down the maximum of 6 webs, then he has a 4.7% chance of not being webbed each round.
The slave golem is meant to be an introduction to IA golems that are resistant to one form of physical damage. It initiates conversation, tells us that it can only be harmed by piercing damage and gives us a +1 halberd. We will be using short swords instead.
The priest of cyric is mostly notable because his prebuffs include TS, which is a large part of the reason why we will not be using illusions.
Finally, the slaver wizard. Our biggest objective here is to not have him use the scroll of improved invisibility.
His initial buffs are:
Stoneskin
Mirror image
Fireshield Red
PFNM
MGOI
Spell Turning
SI:Ab
When he sees, us, he will do the following actions, in this order of preference:
If he is silenced, cast Vocalize
If we are invisible, case Oracle
If he has taken damage and does not have any stoneskins, cast stoneskin
If we have buffs that are worth breaching, cast breach
If we have buffs that are worth dispelling, cast remove magic
Fire a spell sequencer of greater malison, confusion and slow
Use a scroll of emotion
Cast spider spawn
Cast chain lightning
Use a scroll of improved haste
Cast flame arrow
Cast melf's acid arrow
Cast chromatic orb
Attack us with darts
We will deliberately not try to have improved invisibility up when we see him, as it will make him shortcut some of the earlier steps and use the scroll of improved haste.
Our plan will therefore be:
Come in through the sewers and kill Haegan under a lot of webs
Run through the slaver ship and kill the slave golem
Exit, rest up, rebuff and reengage
Kill the slaver wizard before he can use the scroll.
Pre-rest, we set up Stoneskin, Enchanted Weapon (Shortsword), Minor sequencer (2*web) and contingency (web on self on enemy seen). Post-rest, we buff with PFNM, Spirit Armour, Haste, and DUHM. Crucially, we are using Spirit Armour instead of Ghost armour for the buff to saves vs spells.
Our prepared spells are:
1 * PFMW
4 * Sunfire
3 * Stoneskin
1 * Ghost Armour
1 * PFNM
2 * Web
2 * Mirror Image
4 * Magic Missile
We head in and the auto-pause fires. We start by running over the Haegan so he is caught in the range of our contingency web.
We engage the captain and start stabbing him. We will spend our initial action firing our sequencer with web.
Optimal positioning is to stand just southeast of the captain, and fire the sequence to the northwest of him to capture as much of the room as possible.
On subsequent rounds, we instead cast sunfire. The captain has no fire resistance and take a lot of damage from this.
The slaver wizard pretty reliably arrives after about four rounds. The cleric mostly doesn't matter - apart from casting a flame strike (which we can tank), each one of the cleric's spells can be saved and ignored.
Within a round or so from the Wizard making an appearance, Haegan should go down. The wizard will first cast breach, then remove magic. We can respond to the breach with PFNM or stoneskin, and the remove magic with haste or an oil of speed. If he breaches us, we will want to equip the SOH as additional protection from our own webs.
There is a trap to watch out for - it deals 14d6, though thankfully under insane difficulty that damage is not doubled. It holds without save for one second, and the SOH will not resist it. Hopefully, under haste, we will be fast enough to "skip over" the trap trigger, circling round the boxes and approaching it from a steeper angle will make that more likely. Since we will potentially spend a second with enemies auto-hitting us, We will want to make sure we have PFNM up (as the wizard may have brought it down). Casting protection from acid is a possibility, but that would take away a sunfire.
We unequip the SOH and run through the area with the other slaver wizard and the slave golem. The other slaver wizard will see that we are vulnerable to hold person, and will start casting it, at which point we will requip it. We carry on running straight through (hopefully skipping over another trap) to near the front door, the slave golem will follow us.
We draw the golem just outside this room and engage it. When we first hit it it retreats a bit, and there is an unfortunate possibility where if we engage it too close to the door out, it will run away out that door, but we will not be allowed to follow and will be trapped in the slaver ship.
The slave golem hits hard, so we will want to make sure that we have up stoneskin or PFMW. Once it's down, we can leave through the front door.
Sometimes the wizard does not move to the sewer entrance to engage us. In that case,we will engage the slave golem and kill it here. It should go down in two rounds, so we should be able to beat it before the wizard is a big problem, though we will need to hold onto our action for refreshing stoneskin.
Some enemies may pursue us outside, but we ignore them and head straight to move to the city gates.
We rest twice at the crooked crane, setting up our buffs (including minor sequencer with double magic missile and a safety contingency with stoneskin), and head to the slums.
Any tracking enemies that followed us outside will pursue us into indoors areas, where we can better fight them. The closest indoor area is the copper coronet, so we will move there and wait a minute for the enemies to follow us in.
The slaver wizard is one of the enemies that can follow us. If he does, he will be our largest priority. Fortunately, since we rested twice, all of his buffs (including stoneskin) will have gone down, so we can take him down quickly. We will also want to try disrupt the cleric from casting TS. We can use the sequencer on magic missile or casting flame arrow to maximize our DPS.
The wizard is surprisingly tanky, so it may be worth keeping a potion of magic shielding in reserve, or going in with II up so the wizard has to cast oracle instead. He is also vulnerable to backstab, so that may be an option to burst him down quicker.
With the wizard down, the cleric will be our next priority. The assassins can be annoying, but stoneskin and mirror image will protect us from the worst of it. If we do get unlucky and get poisoned, we have a stock of elixirs of health.
With these enemies down, we can claim our loot. As well as the scroll of improved haste, we have a robe of protection + 1 and the robe of electric resistance. The three elemental resistance robes are rare (if not unique) items under IA, and they are used in a powerful IA recipe (thought I'm not sure if it's one that we will be using).
Once we get rid of all the tracking enemies, we head back into the slaver ship to clean up.
On the cleanup, we find our first scroll of permanency.
If we find three of these before we get UAI, we will forge Phosphorus. If we get UAI first, we will forge the paws of the furious cat.
We should be careful going out the front door, as there may be a large group waiting for us. Probably all low lever and uninteresting, however.
With that done, we return to Hendak. We get 38k XP, some valuable potions, and Kondar.
We will finally end this part.
This was an extremely difficult fight, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being in the top three most difficult fights. It is the only fight so far where saving throws are relevant on either side, and so it isn't as completely reload safe as I would like. I tried putting it off for as long as possible to be as prepared as possible, and it still feels a bit uneasy.
The good news is that now we can cast IH, this opens up a massive amount of content for us - there are lots of enemies that we cannot beat due to them having too high regeneration, and now we can take them on. This may be the biggest individual power spike we encounter all game.
Incidentally, you may have notice me not worrying about the sequencer with greater malison. A lot of mages have spell sequencers of two save-or-else spells plus greater malison, but the greater malison projectile travels slightly slower than the other spells, so we will have made our saves before the malison hits us. We still have to worry about the malison affecting us for subsequent spells, however.
The last part was potentially one of the most important parts of the run. We finally got access to improved haste. Unbuffed we have 3 APR, under normal haste we would have 4 and under IH, 6. At fighter level 13 that will change to 3.5/4/7. We will still be casting regular haste a few times in the future - level 3 spells are a lot cheaper than level 6, and the movement speed bonus is the same for both regular and improved haste.
It's time to finally do Aran's second task. We summon a bunch of skeletons, buff with regular haste, and head in.
This fight is unimproved, and so not very notable.
We make sure the skeletons are clear of the room before Othala leaves it.
Gracen will run into the room and initiate conversation. However, since we have all moved to the back of the five flagons, he will not attack us until we come to him.
While gracen is alive, every three rounds a vampire bride will spawn, to a total of three. The vampire briders will track us, so we want to hang around at the back of the level until all three are dead. They should be easy to take out with four skeletons and everyone under haste.
With all three vampire bridesdead, we buff up for real and engage gracen.
He has healing potions, but only a finite number. We can also magic missile to enhance our DPS.
He tends to go down in around eight rounds. We can be a bit safer by prepping a minor sequencer with double magic missile. He doens't drop any notable loot, but does drop a lot of money.
We return to Aran to get 28.5k XP, which is enough to tip us over a level. We also get given his third quest - to go to the graveyard district and destroy Bodhi's lair.
This is enough for us to hit mage 13, getting us another juicy level 6 spell slot, allowing us to have PMFW and IH up at the same time.
Part 038: Bodhi's Lair:
Levels are start getting a bit less exciting now, at least until we get to HLA territory.
It's time to kill some vampires. We summon some skeletons and do moderate buffing for the grimwarder fight - we want to make sure the flesh golem doesn't steal any kills.
We don't have to worry about drawing out any summons, and the vampires on the west side of the lair are unimproved, so we clear out the west hand side of the map without any trouble.
We have a fight here that with buffing will not be too difficult. After this fight we will want to rest up and rebuff, Tanova is next. We will also want to keep the SOH up to protect ourselves from the vampire domination.
Down here we have a +3 katana, the first +3 slashing weapon we have found. Hopefully we will find a better slashing weapon before we need it, but having this is a good option.
We rest up and buff up. Our buffs include improved invisibility and protection from cold, and we make sure to save one of the fifth level spell slots for cone of cold.
Tanova is a 17th level conjurer. Her initial scripts summon two fledgling vampires and a bunch of buffs. She protects herself from fire and electricity, but she is only 50% resistant to cold after buffs, so we can interrupt her with a cone of cold.
We listed out for the spells that Tanova casts. She normally casts a conjuration spell, and if she does that gives us time to cast PFMW and take out the vampire brides. They appear to dispel some of our protections on hit, and it is messing with out protection from cold. If we hear her casting a divination spell, we will want to interrupt that with cone of cold.
We distract the summons with our skeletons, while Othala swing away, again watching out for a divination spell. If one of the vampire brides does hit us, we will want to cast another protection from cold.
In addition to her starting stoneskin, she has a contingency and casts one more, for a total of 24 layers that we have to get through. We have 6 APR and are hitting quite often (5 main hand hits, 2 misses), so she should go down in five rounds of attacking her (around 8 or 9 rounds total).
We rest up and rebuff. Lassal himself isn't that impressive, but he spawns one vampire bride a round, up to four brides, so we want to take out all the brides first.
We stake the vampires and have the bodhi fight. She is unimproved and this is an easy fight. We will want to watch out for her domination, so II or SOH are necessary for reload safety. We get 18.75k XP from this.
Returning to Aran, we get another 50k XP and tell him that we're not ready to go to spellhold just yet.
This is enough to hit thief level 15, rounding off our detect illusion at 100. and ending this part.
We got a nice chunk of XP in the last part. We are almost at fighter level 13, where we will get out next APR buff. After that, our damage output will remain somewhat constant for a while. The remaining upgrades to our damage output will be:
Getting the extra 1/2 APR at fighter level 13
Reaching average level 15 at 5.1m XP so DUHM gives us +5 to physical stats
Getting UAI at approximately 7 million XP and being able to use better equipment
Getting critical strike HLAs at about 8 million XP
It's now time to fight Glaicus. He has a hardiness that he uses at 80% health, as well as lots of potions.
If we charm him, we get 22.5k experience. If we kill him, we get 18k experience and some loot that has only monetary value. Therefore, charming would be better. However, IA gives him immunities to a lot of effects that would trivialize the fight, including charm. Therefore, there is no way to get the charm dialogue under IA.
As long as Glaicus is alive, a spirit spider will be spawned every round, for a total of eight rounds. For maximum XP, we will want to spawn all these spiders.
We prebuff with regular haste and ghost armour, then proceed to engage in the noble art of running away.
By the time we finish a loop of the upper floor, we are ready to turn and fight. Still running around, we set up our offensive buffs (IH and DUHM).
We can take advantage of the doorways to have one enemy block the others. We want to try to make Glaicus pathfind the long way round.
Through a combination of PFMW, stoneskin and mirror image, we should have enough defensive buffs to be able to take out most if not all of the spirit spiders.
If we take the stairs down, the spiders and Glaicus will follow us. It is easy to get surrounded and have our path blocked here, which is why we want to kill off as many of the spiders as possible.
Neither Glaicus or the spiders will follow us outside, so we can safely rest up and rebuff outside.
Once he activate hardiness, we breach him. I like to go in with a fireshield here - he has 6 APR, so getting him to trigger fireshield often is a nice plus.
He likes to quaff potions at around half health. Ideally we will outdamage him so he dies before he drinks them all. If not, then we can always go outside and rest up again, and try again when Glaicus has already drunk his potions.
Once he's dead, we do not immediately loot the body. We need to first head up the stairs, wait a second or two, then run downstairs before looting the body. This is so the scripts will properly register that Glaicus is dead. If we do not do this, then the flail head will be destroyed before we can use it.
Forging the flail of ages is enough experience for us to level up.
The flail will be our primary weapon for a long time. We may swap to flame tongue if we want to disrupt over stoneskin, or we may change when we want to target a specific damage type. The chance to slow is a nice to have, but most enemies will either make the save or be immune to the effect.
The level up screen tells us about the saving throw improvements (which is very nice), but does not tell us about the extra APR. Under improved haste, we now have 7 APR (5 main hand, 2 off hand).
Comments
In the last part, we did the first part of the unseeing eye quest. The fight against the yuan-ti mage was tricky, but ultimately we can retreat for safety. We also had a beholder fight which I'm still quite chuffed about being able to solve with a Nishruu.
We got a lot of experience for that, and are just over 2.2 million. Let's get some more.
There is a little known about night-time encounter here - we can kill the two slaver guards to free the slave for a nice XP reward. I should have done that earlier, but we'll do it now.
While we're here, we kill this guy. If we open the door he runs inside, but if we kill him before opening the door nothing bad happens. The actual contents of the slave ship we will cover later.
We ignored this spider group earlier, so let's clear it out.
This group consists of:
- 3 * Sword spider
- Killer spider
- Spirit spider
- Lesser spirit spider
There are also some trolls from the druid quest that are close enough to get drawn into the fight.Fortunately, there are no mutated spiders here, they are all sufficiently squishy. We focus on the spirit, killer and lesser spirit in that order. The trolls need fire to kill, but we have the Flame Tongue sword to finish them off.
Nilthiri starts off neutral, so she does not get drawn into the earlier fight.
She goes down easy, and as she dies she spawns a bunch of diseased rats.
The rats are very hard to kill with physical damage, and they can inflict a nasty disease when they hit. Fortunately, they are very weak to elemental damage, so fireballs (or a wand of fire) are extremely useful here. They also move slow enough that we can easily outrun them.
Once the rats are dead, the spirit congratulates us.
The next quest will start after at least ten days delay, but it we aren't ready for it, it's quite a tricky one.
I played around in v6 solo a bit, I can remember playing some v5, or perhaps earlier once upon a time - basically exactly the same install as you plus with a tweakpack-enabled illegal dwarven F/M/C.
Anyway some info about how I did some things.
Not sure if IA is supposed to get rid of it but as per regular EE with the right pips Ashideena was in Irenicus's Dungeon which, along with Skeleton Warriors made the Lesser Spirit Spiders melee possible with DUHM, Aid, and Chant.
Trademeet Genies using your strategy of PfP and hitting, but with true sight as well. (this took a couple of attempts)
Easy Troll Groups - PfF + melee buffs then Sunfire + fireballs
Druid Grove Spider Group - PfF + Melee buffs, Sunfire and fireballs and lots of direct damage and kiting.
Druid Groups were Protection from Lighting and usual buffs then send in 5x Skeleton Warriors and then 2x Cloudkill from afar. The last group (Dalok) were tougher but 2x cloudkill got everyone down to Near Death before they were finished in melee + Direct Damage magic
Suna Seni - I avoided this fight like the plague... but, with shield of harmony equipped: start with an invisibility potion, kite, remove magic, kite, oil of speed, kite, stoneskin, kite, improved invisibility, kite, free action, kite, minor sequencer with 2x web then melee was enough, refreshing melee protections as we went - their weak saves vs spell meant they were reliably webbed, but it took a few attempts to get the first 3 rounds right.
Mutated spiders in the tombs - omg these were nasty and took a while to work out what to do. Maximum buffs then 2x Sunfire and 3x fireball with hitting in between to clear out most of the weaker stuff, then took them down 1 by 1 with resting in between. Buffs to an effective AC-20 vs Piercing + stoneskin, MI, haste and DUHM and refresh with 1x minor sequencer with MI and Aid, and then 3x MI was enough to kill 1 dual wielding Dwarven Thrower and Ashideena. Ouch. Retreat, rest and repeat. Hitting reliably was tough, even with 5 pips in hammers. Reloaded a lot until I could work out what was going on.
Done a few other things which were either vanilla or similar in difficulty to SCS such as the thief questline. Also tried out some stuff that was waaay out of my league --- Noble Trolls... - Outputting enough damage solo is tough.
Also, Bridge District Cutpurse merchant sold PfMW on my install but I have no idea if that is a tweakpack issue?
This was the case in previous versions of IA, but since it would trigger the ghost spider in the sewers temple level I think it was cut. I found Varscona, but I suspected it was there due to the tweakpack and not the mods, so I haven't used it.
I definitely empathize with wanting to avoid it for as long as possible. I spent a while trying a strategy similar to this, but I couldn't get it reload-safe - remove magic is a bit too random for my liking.
Yeah, they are super annoying - the complete magical/elemental immunity means there isn't much to do other than pile of buffs and click attack.
Noble trolls are also something that I'm testing the waters with every few parts - If we can deal with a few noble trolls then we can do most of the first part of Watcher's Keep, which is worth massive amounts of XP.
I've just checked, and he does sell PFMW (two scrolls), as well as minor sequencer (which is useful) - thanks for pointing this out. It also turns out that the merchant in the red tent in trademeet has two scrolls for sale.
This gives access to three scrolls for scrollcasting, though we will want to stockpile as many as possible - in the late game I'm expecting several fights where we will want more PFMW protection than pure memorization can offer (e.g. EDE or JD fight), so will likely need to scrollcast in the late game.
You need the high end summons a lot, so it becomes important to try to find those sooner rather than later.
EDE is probably a nightmare on your own.
DPS is only a problem for enemies like the elite doppelganger that have massive regeneration (currently Quallo's friend is a blocker for this stage of the game for that reason). We will be able to hit 10APR (1 base, 1 from warrior levels, 1 from dual wielding, 1 from grandmastery, 1 from gloves, doubled with improved haste) with 25 strength (19 starting, 1 from machine, 2 from JD sword, 3 from girdle).
The good news is that in IA fights, the threat is normally mostly physical - there is typically at most one magical enemy and the rest just deal boatloads of physical damage. When fully kitted out with out endgame equipment, we will have 60% base physical resistance (15% ioun stone, 10% amulet, 15% flail, 20% JD sword), which means that a single hardiness or two barbarian essence potions will give us physical immunity.
I haven't played Improved Anvil that much, but I noticed in NearInfinity that the mod has scripts that give you a resistance penalty if you reach 100% damage resistance. Would that prevent you from reaching 100% damage resistance, or is this penalty not actually applied? I haven't tested it.
Do you know where those scripts live? In BALDUR.BCS and BALDUR25.BCS there are scripts that do that for elemental resistance, but I haven't found any for physical resistance. It's also common for enemies to check that their targets are weak to their damage type before attacking, but it doesn't penalize the player for having too much damage resistance.
I was looking at BALDUR.BCS, so I was probably thinking of those scripts limiting elemental resistance. I didn't remember there wasn't one for physical damage resistance.
In the last part we cleared out the first of the two druid grove quests. It's not worth a huge amount of experience, but it's still nice to have that box ticked.
As mentioned on the forum posts, there are four scrolls of PFMW that can be bought - two in this tent in trademeet and two from the cutpurse at night in the bridge district. We will scribe one and keep the other three for scrollcasting. Over the course of the game we will want to preserve as many scrolls as possible for scrollcasting.
We also pick up a scroll of minor sequencer, which is a nice pickup. Our typical minor sequencer will probably be blur and mirror image. In addition to all this, we grab protection from cold.
Our destiation will be back to the de'Arnise keep. Ideally for the first time, but in our case for the second time.
I noticed the troll group in the central ground floor respawning - could this be another XP loop left in the game?
We buff up and head outside. We have a Neo-Otyugh here, accompanied by a regular Otyugh.
It has 3 APR, THAC0 1 (crushing), 1 AC, 119 hitpoints, 1 HP/second regeneration. Its damage isn't much, but on hit it has two diseases - save at -4 vs slow, and damage without a save. It resists piercing damage and is vulnerable to slashing or crushing.
We attack it. It has a hard time hitting us, as it is missing on a 14. If it does hit, we should have plenty of elixirs of health to negate the disease. Fully buffed, it should go down in less than 3 rounds. We can also enhance our DPS by using our action on magic missile.
This also allows acces to the door so we can go to the roof of the keep and clear off the vanilla enemies up there for a few drops more XP.
We head to the upper level. We buff up outside the door, including protection from fire and equipping the girdle of AC against piercing. We make sure our 5th level spell slots are filled with sunfire.
We run in and have a look at our enemies. We have, in descending order of threat:
- Yuan-ti mage (level 13/13/ fighter/mage)
- Killer Spider
- Troll
- Ice Troll
This yuan-ti mage is different to the one we encountered earlier. If we have up improved invisibility, it casts true seeing, which we will want to interrupt with a magic missile.We start by magic missiling the yuan-ti mage to interrupt the true sight and engage the spider in melee. The mage's buffs include fireshield ref, which gives it 80% fire resistance, so sunfire can still interrupt.
The mage can cast a spell sequencer at us while we are improved invisible, which it probably shouldn't be able to. Fortunately, we can make all these saving throws even on a natural 1. This at least means we don't need to sped our action defensively and can instead enhance our DPS with a magic missile.
We can also cast sunfire to interrupt the mage when it starts to cast a spell with a normal casting time, and get a bit of extra damage onto the spider.
The spider should go down in 2-3 rounds, at which point we engage the mage. It has stoneskins up for protection, which we will get through the hard way, and we will be protected from the fireshield damage. The mage has PFMW, which we can respond to by equipping normal weapons. We want to count down the rounds that PFMW is active for, and swap to magical weapons when the four rounds are over.
The mage has some impressive AC, so this fight may take a while, as neither side can really hit the other. Refreshing buffs may be necessary, but fortunately the stairs down are still active and can be used.
When the improved invisibility runs off, the mage may cast breach. Fortunately, sunfire can interrupt (if cast quickly), or the stairs can be taken.
The mage's buffs only last a couple rounds longer than ours, at which point the fight starts to become a lot more in our favour. It casts spells that can either be safely saved against or negated with the shield of harmony. When the II and the MGOI go down, we can also cast magic missiles for additional DPS and interruption.
The final enemy is the troll, which is more dangerous that it appears. It is recommended to retreat and rest up before taking this one on.
It dies into two vengeance trolls, which drain strength on hit.
With the keep key in our possession, we can open this door. We make sure to draw the guard all the way down the corridor before he talks to us, at which point we choose the aggressive response and kill him for an extra 975 experience.
We make our way to the golem room. There are three containers on the far end of the room. If we loot the containers, we will have to fight IA-added guardians in addition to the golems.
Attacking the golems early aggros them all at once, but we can stand in the doorway to make sure we don't have to deal with all them at once. All the golems at once is still easier then the golems plus the guardians.
The iron golem is the most difficult (needing +3 weapons to hit and having big damage resistance), but it is completely blocked by the door and can be dealt with at leisure.
The left alcove contains the fire flail head and the kneecapper warhammer. It spawns a killer and a spirit spider, which are not much concern for us when we're buffed up.
The middle alcove contains the elven court bow which has no guardians.
The right alcove contains the frostreaver battleaxe and is guarded by a keep viper, which we cannot beat yet.
We will end this part here.
In the last part, we cleared out the yuan-ti fight - it played out similar to the Rayic Gethras fight, except the non-mage enemies were super tough. We cannot proceed any further into the keep safely, so it is time to leave.
Also, we are effectively at 2.4 million XP, which means that we can now safely go to new areas like Mekrath's lab.
We picked up one of the flail heads. Checking the scripts, it looks like we get XP reward when we assemble the complete flail, no matter how it is assembled. Since it is the same no matter how it is forged, we are safe to make the flail +1 with the head that we have now and do the others later.
First, though, we need to leave. In IA, opening the drawbridge is a tricky scenario, as we will be immediately attacked by a whisper spider, then half a round later by a greater yuan-ti. We would be able to deal with the spider in a vacuum, but the yuan-ti is too much.
As the yuan-ti spawns in, all the entrances to the keep are disabled, but the exits to the overworld are still active. We can run away to the overworld and come back later when we have the proper tools to deal with the mage.
We activate the drawbridge. The spider immediately spawns, and the yuan-ti is half a round later.
There is a script that makes the yuan-ti teleport here if we try to run away. Fortunately, we can still run around it. It might say "Uses a scroll", but that will just be true sight - we buffed with improved invisibility to buy a round in this scenario. We can also summon the berserk warrior as additional distraction.
Heading down, there are two trolls we can kill for a drop more XP.
With all that done, it's time to run away.
We can draw them to the opposite corner of the map, but it's probably not worth it. When we return, they will both return to the starting position by the gates and the yuan-ti will try to hunt us down immediately.
This is enough for us to hit fighter level 10. As well as a point of HP and a point of THAC0, the reduced saving throw vs death is nice.
We can buff up and head into Mekrath's lab. The buffs shouldn't be massively necessary, we will be avoiding the difficult part of the lab.
The central part of the lab contains just a few memphits. We very deliberately avoid the right hand side of the lab, as that contains some fights we're saving for later. The buffs are just so we don't have to waste any potions against the memphits.
Killing Mekrath is worth 8500 experience and no significant loot. Doing his quest is worth more experience, so we agree to do his quest.
Heading to the sewers, we very carefully inch forward until we can see the lesser earth elemental and not the imp.
Mundane arrows do nothing to it in terms of damage, but it does make the elemental angry enough to come towards us. We can use this to safely take it out before the main imp fight.
For the actual imp fight itself, we stay out of sight and send in three skeletons. The imp's buffs fire and it summons a greater earth elemental, which will attack one of the skeletons.
Our goal is to draw the greater elemental into a fight with Othala, while the skeletons run around the imp to get it to use all its spells on them. The greater elemental can only be hit by weapons that are +2 or greater, and massively resists slashing and piercing damage. The kneecapper hammer from the keep is good to use here, despite the lack of proficiencies.
Since the skeletons are offscreen, our method of kiting is:
While the imp can only see the skeletons, it will cast:
- Mordenkainen's Sword * 2
- Animate Dead * 2
- Flame Arrow * 3
- Magic Missile * 5
- Melf's Acid Arrow * 3
After casting all these, it will try to engage the skeletons in melee.The skeletons will probably start going down about now. The horn of valhalla can be used for some more distraction, as Othala rebuffs, including protection from cold and improved invisibility.
The imp may cast death spell, which is bad news, as it will also take out the skeletons. This is part of why we save the horn for last when the skeletons don't have much longer left anyway.
Once the greater earth elemental is dead, Othala can start to take out the other of the imp's summons. Preferably the skeletons - the swords are harder to kill and have a much shorter lifespan.
We can kite the imp a bit to get some more buff time. Watch out for this sequencer. If we have improved invisibility and blur up, we will always save. If we just have improved invisibility, we are weak to the slow. If we don't have it, we will need to use a potion of magic shielding, or run upstairs to avoid the spell effects. In the worst case scenario, we can equip the shield of harmony, so we have 85% chance of making the emotion save and immunity to the confusion.
At this point, the imp's II should be running out, so we can safely interrupt any of its spells with instacast magic missiles.
This is a long grindy fight, but we always have the option of retreating to make it safe if we ever feel uneasy. The remote kiting does take a bit of getting used to.
This fight was enough for us to hit thief level 13. We carry on dumping our points into detect illusion.
We buff up in the corridor leading up to Mekrath, inclduing protection from cold, ending with improved invisibility. We send in the skeleteons to have them standing next to Mekrath before we arrive.
As we head in, Mekrath starts casting true seeing (his buffs have not kicked in yet). We talk to him in a way that gets the optimal XP reward (hand over the mirror, then demand better payment). Although technically this talking breaks his spellcasting and could be considered cheesy, I alleviate my guilt by also casting magic missile to represent what would have happened if we did not want to talk to him.
Since we are II and his TS has been disrupted, he can't do much to us, mostly summoning mordy swords and skeletons. We hit him with our swords, being protected from his fireshield blue with our protection from cold. The skeletons don't do a huge amount here, but they're still the best use of our 5th level spell slots.
Mekrath's summons tend to prefer to target our skeletons. Once Mekrath goes down, there's not much point in killing them as they grant no XP, so we can just head downstairs and rest up instead, and end this part.
For the de'Arnise library I had repeated success with II then sunfire disruption to prevent illusions being dispelled as you did (and killing the spider in around 2 rounds), but followed up with a Minor Sequencer 2x web, then, when possible 2x more web from spellbook. The Yuan-ti mage reliably gets held, as do the others. With protection from fire the mage goes down reasonably quick with held auto-hitting. Some attempts Greater Command cast repeatedly (3x) will take it out though not an option for F/M/T. Once it was down running away and closing a door before dealing with the vengeance troll spawning troll.
I found vengeance trolls to be hard tbh due to the strength drain, but running away, resting, and throwing Fireshield(red) into the mix fully buffed with 5x (level 9 cleric cast) skeleton warriors was enough to take them both down in one sitting.
The Golems and the Flail Guardian Spiders were "simple" as you said - Tried out the keep viper and could reliably get down to badly injured but no further due to thac0 buffs wearing off.
Also did copper coronet beastmaster. Interestingly, if you keep spamming Stinking cloud every turn, beastmaster will waste every action on casting zone of sweet air, meaning if you can fit 1x breach in it is reliably doable I found - with minor sequencer I could get 4x stinking clouds and still have 1 mirror image
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Also, there are plenty of tedious XP loops in the EE content if you need them but this would probably breach your definition of "solo" since you need to take on companions for a short while (non combat) to unlock stuff.
Re: your point on Remove Magic, I found it was reliable in removing haste buffs but nothing else. For the Suna fight it was a case of once enemy haste was dispelled via remove magic and f/m/c drank an oil of speed it was reliably over.
Re: F/M/C - there is a tweakpack addition that relaxes F/M/C (and F/C) weapon restrictions, without giving full UAI. I do suspect that the f/m/c will come up against a hard wall at some point but it's still fun, and for now Righteous Magic + DUHM and Aid minor sequencer allows for considerable hammer smashing, on top of all the mage defenses.
We are getting very close to mage level 6 - only about 80k more XP to go.
We are starting to run very low on fights we can safely take without PFMW.
It's time for us to tackle a fight that's been looming over us for a very long time - the beastmaster. There are three major components to the beastmaster fight:
We prebuff with:
In addition to this, we have ready to cast:
As we head in, the beastmaster starts to cast true seeing. We interrupt by casting the flame arrow.
The beastmaster's buffs fire. We queue up a breach. We also watch out for the summon that Tabitha is attacking and tell it to run to the other side of the map (and drag Tabitha with it).
The breach takes down the beastmaster's defences. Tabiha runs off to the rooms in the top corner of the map. The minotaur attacks us, so we equip Arbane's sword to protect against its hold effect.
We can use our magic missiles to interrupt the beastmaster's spellcasting, though it's better if we can interrupt by hitting him, as we want to save the magic missiles for Tabitha. If we do interrupt him with weapons, it opens up a window to DUHM.
Tabitha tends to return around the time that the beastmaster goes down. Once the beastmaster is down, we focus on Tabitha.
We sometimes get a bit knocked around, which is annoying, but not the end of the world. If we're lucky, we can get the doorways set up so the minotaur is no able to hit us.
Tabitha is weak to magic missile. We will want to spend ever round either refreshing mirror image/stoneskin or blasting Tabitha with magic missile.
The magic missiles tend to be the biggest part of the DPS. Tabitha should go down before the buffs wear off - if the buffs start wearing off before Tabitha goes down, then we can always run away out of the coronet.
With the beastmaster and Tabitha down, we focus on the minotaur. It shouldn't be that difficult, as long as we remember to use Arbane's sword or the shield of harmony to avoid being held.
Tabitha drops Tabitha's hide, an important crafting ingredient.
The beastmaster drops magical flower seeds. We can forge these into a potion that gives 250k experience points, but permanently disables our thieving skills button. This is probably the right move in terms of total XP, but I want to see how far we can get before it becomes less necessary.
We rest up to refresh our buffs, and start to free Hendak. We make sure to free the two children in the adjacent cells first, for a touch more experience.
As we run through the copper coronet, we make sure to steal the kills on the guards and Lehtinan.
The experience we get from all this is enough to send us over the threshold to mage level 12, where we finally gain access to level 6 spells and end this part.
The combination of the viper's AC and regeneration means that I think this fight needs improved haste to be possible.
I messed around a bit with cloudkill, but I found my spells to constrained to be able to do much on that front - especially when the minor sequencer has to be saved for double magic missile against Tabitha.
It's something that I'm considering doing - for instance, I could see myself using Nalia's improved ring, which would mean picking up Nalia just to head to the docks district.
One thing I found in my FMC runs is that the cleric levels tend to be a bit higher than mage levels, and so the cleric dispel magic is stronger than the mage remove magic. It's not party friendly, however, so position is a concern.
In the last part, we finally hit mage level 12, gaining access to 6th level spells. 6th level spells means a lot of things, most importantly to us Contingency and Stoneskin.
Our next level will also be a big one - Thief level 14 means we will gain our first HLA, which will be UAI. There is an item that we will try to forge early so we can have it available as soon as we gain UAI, and in order to do that we need to revisit the tanner's house, this time heading into the lowest level of the basement.
The beastmaster dropped a cloak of protection, which means we finally get to use our cloak slot. This means that we not have a base save vs death of 0 and a base save vs spells of 1.
We buff up and get ready to head down. We expand our standard buff setup to include minor sequencer of 2*magic missile and a contingency of stoneskin on hitting 50% health. The first one is for offensive purposes, the second is for reload safety.
The fight we're about to do has four enemies.
The ghast is vanilla and not very interesting.
The rune assassin will wait for our stoneskin to drop, and then he will try to land a big backstab.
The grotesque creature is another melee enemy. It is weakest to slashing (40% resistance) and regenerates at a fair lick. On it it slows us unless we make a save vs death at -2.
There is a bone golem that will shortly appear. It has a "Hideous Laugh" ability that can panic/stun us unless we make saves with no penalties. Worryingly, it dispels illusions and specific protections on hit.
We head towards the rune assassin and attack him as first priority, as we want to be safe against sudden backstabs when we're vulnerable.
The bone golem spawns in and heads towards us.
We cast PFMW as soon as the golem gets into range.
It tends to take around five rounds to kill the bone golem, it often gets a hit in to dispel our illusions.
Our save vs death is 0 base, so recasting blur will restore our immunity to the grotesque creature's slow. Although we technically are vulnerable here, we're not very vulnerable - the creature needs to hit us (which is a less than 50% chance), we need to roll a natural 1 on our saving throw, and even then we can just recast haste or use an oil of speed.
The grotesque creature is weak to magic missiles, so we spam MM to make it go down quicker.
It goes down in 3-4 rounds of attacking and casting magic missile.
The creature drops Thistledown cloth, a required ingredient for our gloves.
We'll end this (short) part here.
In the last part. we cleaned up the tanner encounter and got the unique ingredients required for our gloves. However, we are missing a permanency scroll. None of the possible permanency locations are going to be easy to get to, so it's time to so something incredibly cheesy.
Our destination is watcher's keep. It's well known for having massive piles of experience.
There's a lot going on in the watcher's keep altar level. The part that we are most concerned with circles with question marks - these are random encounters (only one of each pair of circles will be active at any time). The first one triggered is always noble trolls, the second one is always vampires and mists, the third is always golems, and the fourth is always skeletons.
Watcher's keep is different to most other areas - when attempting to travel between areas, we do not have conventional travel triggers. Instead, we have mini cutscenes. There is an important consequence to this - normally, enemies are perfectly happy to follow us through doors, so are ability to retreat out of any nasty encounter will see the enemies pursuing. Because the WK transitions are done with cutscenes, the enemies are not able to follow us. Therefore, we will be able to duck in and out of the level over and over without any enemies pursuing us.
We have a different buff routine - just Minor Sequencer, Stoneskin, Haste, Fireshield and DUHM. There's a reason for this - we want to go maximum offense. In addition to the weapon attacks, we can get extra damage by triggering fireshield. In order to do that, we want to get hit as often as possible while under PFMW, which is why why have no defensive buffs.
We instantly run through the door. It takes a second or two for the trolls to spawn in.
We run towards the the exit trigger and cast PFMW as we turn and fight.
Noble trolls are nasty enemies at this stage in the game. They have 25% physical resistance, 75% elemental resistance, immunity to weapons that are +2 or less, 126HP, and 1 HP/second regeneration. Fortunately, unlike regular trolls, they do not need to be finished off with fire or acid and they are worth 12.5k XP each.
It takes about four rounds of combat to take out a noble troll. We use our action in each of those rounds to cast magic missile (either conventionally or via sequencer).
When we reenter, the trolls have reset to their original position. We draw them back towards us and repeat the process.
I find that it is possible to take out a troll in four rounds about 60% of the time. For reload safety, if the troll is not dead at the end of the PFMW, we should retreat. Additional reload safety can be had by adding defensive buffs like ghost armour, making the small gap at the end of PFMW safer and making the small damage output from fireshield a bit smaller.
After the last noble troll goes down, there are two more spirit trolls to deal with. They are pretty easy, but we need finish those ones off with fire or acid.
Once the troll group is cleared out, we head to the door on the right for the next group.
The areas on the the right hand side of the map offer more experience than the areas on the left, so we want to have the right hand spawn be the earlier, easier group.
We open it up, and it's a spider group, not the vampire/mist group we expected. We take it out without much issue due to PFMW, the rest up and rebuff.
The spellhaunt is not much of a danger.
It looks like the spawn point on the right is having trouble triggering, so we head to the back left room instead. It contains the mists and vampires we were expecting. They like to spam domination, so we equip the shield of harmony for safety (we would have to make saves vs spell at -2 otherwise, which we can do safely with II or spirit armour).
The group consists of two mist horrors, two vampiric mists, and two eminent vampires. magic missile returns as a big DPS enhancement.
A single eminent vampire goes down easier than a noble troll, but we don't get ambitious and keep on retreating and resting up.
We take out the guardian golems before opening the sarcophagus.
We can give the priest his slippers for 20k experience. Alternatively, we can so no and kill the priest for 22k experience and keep the slippers. The slippers give 25% cold resistance, which isn't much, but we've got no other footwear going on.
Behind the scenes, the priest is implemented as an 11th level cleric, though with lich immunities and a few druid spells. We summon four skeleton warriors and buff with haste and improved invisibility.
He buffs himself with iron skins, and his lich immunities mean that he cannot be breached. We instead position ourself where the lich cannot see us (and therefore cannot target us), and we can direct our skeletons to attach his skeletons. We make sure that three of them are tackling the left skeleton, and one of them is standing next tot he lich on the right, so we can manage which one is the target of the lich's spells.
The lich casts a bunch of summon spells, which we can help with by casting magic missile. We are mostly just waiting until the lich's spellbook is exhausted - with a caster level of 11, that shouldn't last too long.
Once the lich has run out of spells, we go outside, rest up, summon a team of skeletons, haste them up, and send them in.
He only has one insta-cast spell - iron skins. Once that is cast, we will be able to interrupt the rest of his spells with attacks. The flame tongue sword is good to use here.
It's a grindy fight, but ultimately not a risky one. He only has two spells that are really dangerous to us - finger of death and creeping doom - and he likes to cast them early. Fighting him after resting means he has no starting buffs and no skeletons to distract us. As long as we have seen the two spells that we're worried about, we can run in and retreat if things look hairy.
Picking up the book from the altar triggers the two nearest statues to come to life and attack us. They are pretty uninteresting, though.
Exploring the rest of the map, I'm having a hard time figuring out why the golem and skeleton random spawn aren't spawning. I'll end this part here, though - we've cleared out a lot of the map and gotten a lot of experience from this.
A troll that's more resistant to fire and acid than to physical attacks? And that doesn't regenerate any faster than the other IA enemies? That's not very troll-like.
Yeah, they're a bit out of place compared to the vanilla trolls.
Noble trolls are the only IA improved "regular" trolls. There are three "boss" trolls (Torgal, Troll King, Troll Queen) that all have the same pattern of being weakest to physical damage and not needing elemental damage to kill.
In the last part, we cleared most of the first level of Watcher's Keep and earned a large chunk of XP - around a quarter of a million.
We'll have a smaller part here, where we do a simple bit of cleanup of an old area.
We head to the entrance of Firkraag's lair. For the first part we will only need light buffs.
Our light buffs will be enough to easily take us through this initial group of hobgoblins safely.
Once we have dealt with the greeting party, we rest up, fully buff and head it.
Six vampiric mists and four mist horrors. We prioritize the vampiric mists. PFMW is important here. We also gear up with the shield of harmony for safety.
Continuing round the corner, there are more mists in this area. It is safest to rest up and rebuff.
This is where we will end this rather small part - there is a Ruhk Conjurer up ahead that is too difficult for us right now.
I like to hold monster on the grotesk creature. Last time I played that worked very well. I also usually hold off on the mists because they are annoying if you have to prep the whole party. I see you have it a lot easier going in solo.
You are also planning the encounters very well taking saves and ac into account. I must admit I rarely do that, I just go with what feels good, and I have a lot to improve there.
Gaining access to PFMW didn't open up as many options as I would have hoped, our damage output is still a bit weak. Given that we currently have no access to items that need UAI, I'm heavily considering going for Assassination, extra level 6 spell or critical strike as earlier HLAs.
It's also looking like we have to tackle the planar prison or Tor'gal before we do the slaver ship.
EDIT: It looks as though IA has upped the XP threshold for HLAs to be a bit under 6m experience, it'll be a while before we can reach that.
Having done some research, it looks like the next big hurdle for us will be the planar prison. The planar prison offers a lot of loot for us - boots of haste, a scroll of permanency, and most crucially, a scroll of improved haste. We want to prepare for that, however, and we will prepare by scrounging up as much remaining XP as possible.
We have beaten noble trolls before, at watcher's keep. We perform our normal buffing routine.
The troll group here is a lot bigger than before. It consists of five noble trolls, two giant trolls, two spectral trolls, and one normal troll.
As before, we cast PFMW. This protects us from all of the trolls while we focus on one of the nobles and try to take it out in the four round time. We can use magic missile again to enhance our damage output.
With one troll down, it's time to run away.
We can safely retreat to the druid grove. The trolls here do not pursue into the grove (at least, they did not in my game). An alternative would be to retreat to the edge of the map.
A no-reloader would probably want to draw the trolls to a safe exit point first before engaging, to prevent a surround on the original engagement from preventing retreat.
While here we get another stronghold mission, which we will be ignoring for now.
Although the trolls surrounding us on exit is a bit scary, the location we exit to is in the range of the entrance transition, so we can safely escape back inside the grove.
Once the noble trolls are taken care of, the rest of the trolls are vanilla and straightforward. They can be taken out in a single sortie.
We'll end this part here - the contents of the troll mound are too much for us.
Part 031: Ihtafeer:
In the last part, we took care of more noble trolls using door cheese. In this part, we will take care of a fight that we bypassed the first time round - Ihtafeer.
We summon skeletons to the upper level, buff up (including protection from cold and mirror image), and attack Adratha to make her hostile.
She summons two friends - Saadat and Jalaal. They are all rakshasa, which means immunity to spells that are level 7 or below.
Spell-wise, they all have a single copy of absolute immunity, plus a single cloud spell (chosen randomly from Death Fog, Cloudkill and Ice Storm). In addition to this, Ihtafeer can throw out the occasional chain lightning if we are not under II, but while we are under II she has no way to target us.
When we see them casting the cloud spells (purple spell animation), we immediately run to the left corner of the map. If it's ice storm then our protection from cold will negate it, but otherwise we want to spend the rest of the fight outside the cloud area.
If the randomly chosen cloud spell is death cloud, then it will kill off the skeletons, but at least the cloud will be on the upper level, out of the way.
As we damage them in melee, they will cast absolute immunity. We have no way of getting through it, so we will have to wait out the four round duration.
Once they have cast their spells, they engage us in melee.
Ihtafeer only has a THAC0 of 7, and the others only have a THAC0 of 8. With ghost armour up, our AC is -11, so by using any one of DUHM/Shield of Harmony/Blur/Improved invisibility we can make it so they only hit us on a natural 20. We can also use PFMW for extra protection.
Once the absolute immunity wears off, they go down in melee fairly easily. Ihtafeer is worth 15k XP and the two others are worth 3k XP each.
Part 032: De'Arnise Gate Guardians
In the last part, we killed of Ihtafeer, though we have nobody to hand her head over to. We are also getting very close to the 3m XP mark, though it looks as though IA has changed the HLA level to be further along than this.
When we left the de'Arnise keep, we ran away from the Greater Yuan-ti and the Whisper Spider.
When we enter, the Yuan-ti resets to its spawn point and immediately tracks to us. We have a hair over three rounds before it gets to us, though this time is extremely consistent.
The first time we encountered the Yuan-ti, we were under improved invisibility and so it had to spend a round using a scroll of true seeing to see us. When we return, we can use the three round intro to set up improved invisibility.
The Yuan-ti will use a scroll of True Sight again to see us. It only started with a single such scroll, so this one being used up means that we can retreat and come back again, and it won't have any more castings of TS.
When we return, as long as we are fully invisible, the Yuan-ti fires its buffs but does nothing.
We can wait out its buffs here while fully invisible. We should wait out while under the effects of a potion of invisibility (12 hours) or the second level spell (24 hours), as that way we are guaranteed to wait out the buffs of the Yuan-ti.
It is a 19th level caster, and its prebuffs include spell turning which lasts 3 rounds per level, so we will want to wait at least six minutes before doing anything.
If we move out of its sight, it will track towards us, and refresh its buffs when it gets back within sight (though it will continue to wait around while we are fully invisible). We therefore lead it to near the whisper spider before starting the wait.
Six minutes of waiting later, its buffs have run out. We could try to take it out now, but we need to kill off the whisper spider first if we want the cold flail head.
We buff up - buff spells can be cast without breaking invisibility.
Out objective at this point is to take out the whisper spider without leaving the sight of the Yuan-ti. Preferably, we want to keep our actions free for disrupting the Yuan-ti as well.
We engage it in melee. The first thing it does is start to cast remove magic, which we will interrupt with magic missile.
We then run forward and engage the spider. The Yuan-ti has a sequencer of save-or-else spells, but our save vs spells is -4 right now, which gives us immunity to the yuan-ti's spells as well as the spider's vexing whisper. This also give us a window to PFMW.
The Yuan-ti has nothing more it can do to us magically. The spider should go down in three or four rounds, at which point we should be able to beat the Yuan-ti in melee, though we should keep the action free for casting more magic missiles to disrupt future remove magics.
With the yuan-ti down, we can head inside to kill another vanilla troll and upgrade our flail to +2, and end this part.
I'm considering trying to go for Belm. It's fantastic as an offhand weapon. It is guarded by a ghost spider (and the area it is in disables the exit as long as the ghost spider is alive). Normally we would want to drain the ghost spider of its summons, but that takes 24 rounds, and we would not be able to string it along for that long in such an enclosed area. We could try to focus down the ghost spider so we can grab belm and run, but that would cost us some XP (and even then, it might be a bit too tricky for us).
In the last part, we cleared out the de'Arnise gate guardians and upgraded our flail to +3. We still have two challenges left in the keep, however, and we're not ready for either of them.
We are less than 1k experience short of the big 3 million. Although we don't have HLAs to look forward to, we do #, we do have some areas that are soft-gated by an XP cap of 3.05 million, and being able to access those is a plus. We just need to scrounge together another 50k experience.
I haven't done an inventory update in a while, so here we go. In addition to this, we have a base save vs spell of 1 and save vs death of 0.
I have spent a while probing Quallo's friend, and unfortunately it is beyond our abilities - it is immune to magical damage, and it regenerates far too fast for us to be able to take it out. We can at least scrape together a bit of XP by taking out the rest of the guardians.
We start by placing the hand. This summons five noisome rats.
As we can see, crushing damage would be the way to deal with them, but due to how haste works with partial APR and our proficiencies, we get best damage output if we wield the sword of flame and the shield of harmony. Even though they have high elemental resistances, they have low hitpoints, so it's still worth casting spells like magic missile.
They also have a nasty weapon that inflicts disease without save as well as gives them 1hp/3 seconds regenration, so PFMW will be necessary. Thankfully, skeletons are immune to this damage, so they make very good summons here.
One casting of PFMW should be enough to take out a rat. In a fairly common pattern at this point, we can retreat after killing one to rest up and take the rest on.
Minor sequencer on magic missile can help here, as can the wand of lightning.
Two things to watch out for is that the rats will track across this map, but will not change level, and they will attack the nearest enemy. Therefore, it is important to alternate between the copper coroner main room and the myconid room for resting, and the first spells cast should be animate dead in a position where the rats will see and attack the skeletons first.
Once the skeletons have been summoned, we can use the horn, cast haste, DUHM and PFMW, then join the fight.
The next one is the shadow lover, which is too strong for us, so we will have to end this part here.
Part 034: Unseeing Eye Conclusion
In the last part we finally crossed the 3m threshold, but we are still short of 3.05. Let's squeeze out a bit more XP.
We'll carry on with a bit more of the unseeing eye quest. The actual unseeing eye fight will be later on, though.
Heading down, we find some groups of unimproved undead. We make sure to not go into the undead city, however - that area is very improved.
Around the first corner is a gauth. We use the same nishruu plus cloudkill strategy from earlier, except this time we can summon the nishruu the normal way.
Continuing around the northern edge of the map, we find this room with a solitary beholder in it. We can summon all our skeletons and horn warrior and haste them up and send them in - the damage output of a single beholder is not enough to take down our swarm of summons. We can also safely help the DPS by ducking in and out and casting the occasional magic missile.
The center of the map contains six blind priests. Only one of them has access to TS, so if we go in under improved invisibility and disrupt the one with TS, we can hack them all to pieces without much trouble.
We make sure we open up the back entrance here as well.
We summon our skeletons and warrior and buff up while at the back entrance, before heading down.
Just to the west of the back entrance is another group of beholders and gauths. Unlike the first one we encountered, we have no narrow tunnels to filter them out.
We get their attention by firing a magic missile, then run back upstairs.
This allows us to draw them up one at a time, where they get outnumbered and hacked to pieces.
We can repeat this process over and over. Solitary beholders and gauths are easily dealt with in this scenario.
For reload safety, resting and resummoning should be done between enemies. It is also possible to retreat to the temple district if things get hairy.
The skeletons like to track to Othala, which means they track to her when she takes the stairs down, which means they perform a transition we do not want them to. To prevent this happennig, we want to give the summons an order to move around a bit as we give Othala the order to move downstairs.
The southwest corner has another solitary beholder. Four hasted skeletons do their thing.
Similarly, there is a gauth in the southeast corner.
We have explored the whole map, but we do not take the rift device just yet.
We start by dropping off the rift device next to Gaal.
We then take the unseeing eye's part of the rift device. Since we do not have both parts, we do not reforge it and we do not fight the unseeing eye.
We pick up the other piece in Gaal's room. The script to reforge the rift device only fires in AR0205 (the beholder lair), so we will just have to rift device parts until we go there.
This is the script for AR0205. Note that we only gain the experience of the unseeing eye is not dead.
Also note that there are two unseeing eye creatures - BHEYE and UNSEE. However, the only one that is actually used in the game is BHEYE.
We therefore have a plan:
We buff up (including improved invisibility) and hand over the rift device for lots of experience.
As we are still under II, the unseeing eye casts TS, allowing us to run away. We can also distract it with skeletons.
We can run away and head down the back entrance, then head back up again to engage the unseeing eye. I have found that the unseeing eye does not reliably appear here immediately, but on our second visit it reliably appears. My best guess is that the game recognizes that the unseeing eye is following us into the lair, does some maths of what delay should be expected for it to travel to the transition, removes it from the upper level and places it in the lower level after the delay, at which point we have already moved away.
This has an upside that the cultists stay and fight us - if we killed the unseeing eye first (which most playthroughs do), they run away which can deny us the XP. The only dangerous thing to watch out for here is the elite guards, who can cast greater command, so we want to keep II up to be safe.
We rest up, summon skeletons, buff up, make sure our action is clear, and head downstairs (trying to draw our summons down with us).
The unseeing eyedoes have an insta-cast TS, but unlike most beholders, he sticks to one action per round. This lets us rift device him.
He has hefty damage resistance, but the rift device does a guaranteed 150 of his 160 hitpoints. He likes to follow up the TS with ADHW, but that can be interrupted with magic missile, and he should go down shortly afterwards. It drops the amulet of 5% magical resistance, which is used in an IA recipe we probably don't care about.
Incidentally, the unseeing eye is worth 25k XP, and is therefore our new most powerful foe vanquished (dethroning the priest lich from WK).
From here, we have an XP parade with no challenge:
This is enough for us to hit Fighter level 12 and Thief level 14. We gain our second proficiency point in flails, and we will probably put our next three in flails as well, as flails/morning stars should be our primary weapons for the rest of the game (more things are weak to crushing damage than other damage types). We also raise detect illusion to 75, though I am unsure if that will do any good.
It's been a very long part, and we will end things here.
I found while doing this part that when Arbane's sword says it protects from hold that does not include web effects, but the shield of harmony does could web as a hold effect. Therefore, in order to be protected from improved web safely, we cannot use Arbane's sword.
Web lariat doesn't actually have a web effect, despite the name. It inflicts a save-less sleep for 3 second and draws the target towards the user, but being properly stoneskinned/mirror imaged should prevent any disasters from happening while asleep.
We're likely to be coming up against ghost spiders soon (one of them is in Mekrath's lab and is a soft blocker for the planar prison). The improved web there requires saves vs spell at a -6 penalty (against web and paralyze), so that could be the first time that we see spirit armour being used. The ghost spider itself probably regenerates too fast for us to be able to take it out, so we will probably end up draining its summons and then filtering out the spider itself in the area transitions.
I also want to look into trying to use backstabs against the ghost spiders. Our backstab multiplier is x5 and under haste we have 4 APR, so if we spend our action each turn casting invisibility or drinking potions of invisibility, we can mimic improved haste by getting 8x attack damage per round. It could be expensive in terms of potions, however, and I like keeping a stash of potions for additional reload safety.
For backstab I recommend normal Invisibility spells instead of potions. They cost less but you have a chance on interruption
In the last part, we gained a large chunk of XP from finishing the unseeing eye quest as well as the priest stronghold. Although in theory out next fighter level will be big, giving us an extra half APR, due to the way that haste rounding works it won't be useful until we get improved haste or get grandmastery in a weapon (at fighter level 21). Our next mage level will be big, though, doubling the number of 6th level spells we can cast.
We want to retrieve the planar get from Mekrath's lab. The problem is, there is potentially a spider spawn between us and the gem, featuring a ghost spider that we are not ready to beat just yet.
We can tell if the spiders have spawned by using audio clues. If we walk to the east side of this room and hear a rustling noise, it means that the spiders have spawned. If we hear nothing, the way is clear.
If we do hear something, it means that the spiders have spawned. As this is meant to be reload-safe, I will consider the case that the spiders have spawned. We will want to buff up, equip the shield of harmony, get the spider's attention, then run back downstairs.
The spiders will pursue us. Most of the spiders are not that dangerous, but we should watch out for the whisper spiders (one is straightforward, two at once is tricky, and definitely not two with other spiders) and the ghost spider (too much regeneration for us to take on).
Fortunately, it is fairly easy to seperate those two spiders from the rest of the group - upon seeing us their first action is to use vexing whisper/improved web instead of attacking us, so if we give the command to area transition as soon as the autopause hits, we can consistently separate them out.
Our goal is to separate the spiders so we are only fighting one or two at once, then take them out without much trouble under PFMW.
At some point, when we have Mekrath's lair to ourselves, we can pick up the planar gem and put it in our bag of holding for later.
We also have access to Mekrath's balcony, which is another zone that we can go to to lose the spiders. It is also the safest place to sleep - we can sleep in Mekrath's lair or in the sewers, but the balcony is the only one of these places without hostile rest interruptions.
We can also summon some minions for additional backup or to give the spiders a new target so they do not pursue us. We will want to be careful that the skeletons do not follow us when changing area, so we will have to give them a seperate move order as Othala changes area.
When only the ghost spider is left, it is time to drain the ghost spider of summons. We equip the SOH and wait a fraction of a second, so the spider will shoots its improved web and summon its minions, then immediately change area again.
This is the ghost spider's summon script. It waits six rounds between summoning each reinforcement, but since we will be resting up and tackling each wave of reinforcements separately, we will easily meet this waiting period.
When we have drained the ghost spider of summons and are ready to move on, we summon some skeletons in Mekrath's lab, draw the ghost spider up there, make sure the ghost spider is attacking the skeletons, and head downstairs and leave.
With the gem in hand, we return to the five flagons to get some more XP.
We take out the planar creatures. By themselves they are not difficult, but we want to make sure that Haer'Dalis does not steal our kills. Fully buffing and summoning minions will help ensure this.
The bounty hunters arrive to take away the acting troupe, and we will end this part here.
In the last part we cleared out everything leading into the planar prison, though my initial probing indicates that it is far too difficult for us to handle right now.
It's finally time to handle the slaver ship.
There are four major aspects to the slaver ship:
While Captain Haegan and the Slave Golem are alive, we cannot leave the area. Furthermore, an assassin will spawn every seven rounds (and drop no loot or XP we we will not want to farm) as long as we cannot leave.
We are going to be taking advantage of Haegan's save vs spells of 7. Web forces a save at -2, so he needs to roll a 9 or better. If we lay down three webs, then he has a 21.6% chance of not being webbed each round. If we lay down the maximum of 6 webs, then he has a 4.7% chance of not being webbed each round.
The slave golem is meant to be an introduction to IA golems that are resistant to one form of physical damage. It initiates conversation, tells us that it can only be harmed by piercing damage and gives us a +1 halberd. We will be using short swords instead.
The priest of cyric is mostly notable because his prebuffs include TS, which is a large part of the reason why we will not be using illusions.
Finally, the slaver wizard. Our biggest objective here is to not have him use the scroll of improved invisibility.
His initial buffs are:
When he sees, us, he will do the following actions, in this order of preference:
We will deliberately not try to have improved invisibility up when we see him, as it will make him shortcut some of the earlier steps and use the scroll of improved haste.
Our plan will therefore be:
Pre-rest, we set up Stoneskin, Enchanted Weapon (Shortsword), Minor sequencer (2*web) and contingency (web on self on enemy seen). Post-rest, we buff with PFNM, Spirit Armour, Haste, and DUHM. Crucially, we are using Spirit Armour instead of Ghost armour for the buff to saves vs spells.
Our prepared spells are:
We head in and the auto-pause fires. We start by running over the Haegan so he is caught in the range of our contingency web.
We engage the captain and start stabbing him. We will spend our initial action firing our sequencer with web.
Optimal positioning is to stand just southeast of the captain, and fire the sequence to the northwest of him to capture as much of the room as possible.
On subsequent rounds, we instead cast sunfire. The captain has no fire resistance and take a lot of damage from this.
The slaver wizard pretty reliably arrives after about four rounds. The cleric mostly doesn't matter - apart from casting a flame strike (which we can tank), each one of the cleric's spells can be saved and ignored.
Within a round or so from the Wizard making an appearance, Haegan should go down. The wizard will first cast breach, then remove magic. We can respond to the breach with PFNM or stoneskin, and the remove magic with haste or an oil of speed. If he breaches us, we will want to equip the SOH as additional protection from our own webs.
There is a trap to watch out for - it deals 14d6, though thankfully under insane difficulty that damage is not doubled. It holds without save for one second, and the SOH will not resist it. Hopefully, under haste, we will be fast enough to "skip over" the trap trigger, circling round the boxes and approaching it from a steeper angle will make that more likely. Since we will potentially spend a second with enemies auto-hitting us, We will want to make sure we have PFNM up (as the wizard may have brought it down). Casting protection from acid is a possibility, but that would take away a sunfire.
We unequip the SOH and run through the area with the other slaver wizard and the slave golem. The other slaver wizard will see that we are vulnerable to hold person, and will start casting it, at which point we will requip it. We carry on running straight through (hopefully skipping over another trap) to near the front door, the slave golem will follow us.
We draw the golem just outside this room and engage it. When we first hit it it retreats a bit, and there is an unfortunate possibility where if we engage it too close to the door out, it will run away out that door, but we will not be allowed to follow and will be trapped in the slaver ship.
The slave golem hits hard, so we will want to make sure that we have up stoneskin or PFMW. Once it's down, we can leave through the front door.
Sometimes the wizard does not move to the sewer entrance to engage us. In that case,we will engage the slave golem and kill it here. It should go down in two rounds, so we should be able to beat it before the wizard is a big problem, though we will need to hold onto our action for refreshing stoneskin.
Some enemies may pursue us outside, but we ignore them and head straight to move to the city gates.
We rest twice at the crooked crane, setting up our buffs (including minor sequencer with double magic missile and a safety contingency with stoneskin), and head to the slums.
Any tracking enemies that followed us outside will pursue us into indoors areas, where we can better fight them. The closest indoor area is the copper coronet, so we will move there and wait a minute for the enemies to follow us in.
The slaver wizard is one of the enemies that can follow us. If he does, he will be our largest priority. Fortunately, since we rested twice, all of his buffs (including stoneskin) will have gone down, so we can take him down quickly. We will also want to try disrupt the cleric from casting TS. We can use the sequencer on magic missile or casting flame arrow to maximize our DPS.
The wizard is surprisingly tanky, so it may be worth keeping a potion of magic shielding in reserve, or going in with II up so the wizard has to cast oracle instead. He is also vulnerable to backstab, so that may be an option to burst him down quicker.
With the wizard down, the cleric will be our next priority. The assassins can be annoying, but stoneskin and mirror image will protect us from the worst of it. If we do get unlucky and get poisoned, we have a stock of elixirs of health.
With these enemies down, we can claim our loot. As well as the scroll of improved haste, we have a robe of protection + 1 and the robe of electric resistance. The three elemental resistance robes are rare (if not unique) items under IA, and they are used in a powerful IA recipe (thought I'm not sure if it's one that we will be using).
Once we get rid of all the tracking enemies, we head back into the slaver ship to clean up.
On the cleanup, we find our first scroll of permanency.
If we find three of these before we get UAI, we will forge Phosphorus. If we get UAI first, we will forge the paws of the furious cat.
We should be careful going out the front door, as there may be a large group waiting for us. Probably all low lever and uninteresting, however.
With that done, we return to Hendak. We get 38k XP, some valuable potions, and Kondar.
We will finally end this part.
This was an extremely difficult fight, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being in the top three most difficult fights. It is the only fight so far where saving throws are relevant on either side, and so it isn't as completely reload safe as I would like. I tried putting it off for as long as possible to be as prepared as possible, and it still feels a bit uneasy.
The good news is that now we can cast IH, this opens up a massive amount of content for us - there are lots of enemies that we cannot beat due to them having too high regeneration, and now we can take them on. This may be the biggest individual power spike we encounter all game.
Incidentally, you may have notice me not worrying about the sequencer with greater malison. A lot of mages have spell sequencers of two save-or-else spells plus greater malison, but the greater malison projectile travels slightly slower than the other spells, so we will have made our saves before the malison hits us. We still have to worry about the malison affecting us for subsequent spells, however.
The last part was potentially one of the most important parts of the run. We finally got access to improved haste. Unbuffed we have 3 APR, under normal haste we would have 4 and under IH, 6. At fighter level 13 that will change to 3.5/4/7. We will still be casting regular haste a few times in the future - level 3 spells are a lot cheaper than level 6, and the movement speed bonus is the same for both regular and improved haste.
It's time to finally do Aran's second task. We summon a bunch of skeletons, buff with regular haste, and head in.
This fight is unimproved, and so not very notable.
We make sure the skeletons are clear of the room before Othala leaves it.
Gracen will run into the room and initiate conversation. However, since we have all moved to the back of the five flagons, he will not attack us until we come to him.
While gracen is alive, every three rounds a vampire bride will spawn, to a total of three. The vampire briders will track us, so we want to hang around at the back of the level until all three are dead. They should be easy to take out with four skeletons and everyone under haste.
With all three vampire bridesdead, we buff up for real and engage gracen.
He has healing potions, but only a finite number. We can also magic missile to enhance our DPS.
He tends to go down in around eight rounds. We can be a bit safer by prepping a minor sequencer with double magic missile. He doens't drop any notable loot, but does drop a lot of money.
We return to Aran to get 28.5k XP, which is enough to tip us over a level. We also get given his third quest - to go to the graveyard district and destroy Bodhi's lair.
This is enough for us to hit mage 13, getting us another juicy level 6 spell slot, allowing us to have PMFW and IH up at the same time.
Part 038: Bodhi's Lair:
Levels are start getting a bit less exciting now, at least until we get to HLA territory.
It's time to kill some vampires. We summon some skeletons and do moderate buffing for the grimwarder fight - we want to make sure the flesh golem doesn't steal any kills.
We don't have to worry about drawing out any summons, and the vampires on the west side of the lair are unimproved, so we clear out the west hand side of the map without any trouble.
We have a fight here that with buffing will not be too difficult. After this fight we will want to rest up and rebuff, Tanova is next. We will also want to keep the SOH up to protect ourselves from the vampire domination.
Down here we have a +3 katana, the first +3 slashing weapon we have found. Hopefully we will find a better slashing weapon before we need it, but having this is a good option.
We rest up and buff up. Our buffs include improved invisibility and protection from cold, and we make sure to save one of the fifth level spell slots for cone of cold.
Tanova is a 17th level conjurer. Her initial scripts summon two fledgling vampires and a bunch of buffs. She protects herself from fire and electricity, but she is only 50% resistant to cold after buffs, so we can interrupt her with a cone of cold.
We listed out for the spells that Tanova casts. She normally casts a conjuration spell, and if she does that gives us time to cast PFMW and take out the vampire brides. They appear to dispel some of our protections on hit, and it is messing with out protection from cold. If we hear her casting a divination spell, we will want to interrupt that with cone of cold.
We distract the summons with our skeletons, while Othala swing away, again watching out for a divination spell. If one of the vampire brides does hit us, we will want to cast another protection from cold.
In addition to her starting stoneskin, she has a contingency and casts one more, for a total of 24 layers that we have to get through. We have 6 APR and are hitting quite often (5 main hand hits, 2 misses), so she should go down in five rounds of attacking her (around 8 or 9 rounds total).
We rest up and rebuff. Lassal himself isn't that impressive, but he spawns one vampire bride a round, up to four brides, so we want to take out all the brides first.
We stake the vampires and have the bodhi fight. She is unimproved and this is an easy fight. We will want to watch out for her domination, so II or SOH are necessary for reload safety. We get 18.75k XP from this.
Returning to Aran, we get another 50k XP and tell him that we're not ready to go to spellhold just yet.
This is enough to hit thief level 15, rounding off our detect illusion at 100. and ending this part.
We got a nice chunk of XP in the last part. We are almost at fighter level 13, where we will get out next APR buff. After that, our damage output will remain somewhat constant for a while. The remaining upgrades to our damage output will be:
It's now time to fight Glaicus. He has a hardiness that he uses at 80% health, as well as lots of potions.
If we charm him, we get 22.5k experience. If we kill him, we get 18k experience and some loot that has only monetary value. Therefore, charming would be better. However, IA gives him immunities to a lot of effects that would trivialize the fight, including charm. Therefore, there is no way to get the charm dialogue under IA.
As long as Glaicus is alive, a spirit spider will be spawned every round, for a total of eight rounds. For maximum XP, we will want to spawn all these spiders.
We prebuff with regular haste and ghost armour, then proceed to engage in the noble art of running away.
By the time we finish a loop of the upper floor, we are ready to turn and fight. Still running around, we set up our offensive buffs (IH and DUHM).
We can take advantage of the doorways to have one enemy block the others. We want to try to make Glaicus pathfind the long way round.
Through a combination of PFMW, stoneskin and mirror image, we should have enough defensive buffs to be able to take out most if not all of the spirit spiders.
If we take the stairs down, the spiders and Glaicus will follow us. It is easy to get surrounded and have our path blocked here, which is why we want to kill off as many of the spiders as possible.
Neither Glaicus or the spiders will follow us outside, so we can safely rest up and rebuff outside.
Once he activate hardiness, we breach him. I like to go in with a fireshield here - he has 6 APR, so getting him to trigger fireshield often is a nice plus.
He likes to quaff potions at around half health. Ideally we will outdamage him so he dies before he drinks them all. If not, then we can always go outside and rest up again, and try again when Glaicus has already drunk his potions.
Once he's dead, we do not immediately loot the body. We need to first head up the stairs, wait a second or two, then run downstairs before looting the body. This is so the scripts will properly register that Glaicus is dead. If we do not do this, then the flail head will be destroyed before we can use it.
Forging the flail of ages is enough experience for us to level up.
The flail will be our primary weapon for a long time. We may swap to flame tongue if we want to disrupt over stoneskin, or we may change when we want to target a specific damage type. The chance to slow is a nice to have, but most enemies will either make the save or be immune to the effect.
The level up screen tells us about the saving throw improvements (which is very nice), but does not tell us about the extra APR. Under improved haste, we now have 7 APR (5 main hand, 2 off hand).