In the last part we did Marvella's second task. Her third task is extremely difficult, however, and we will not be able to do it for a long time, if ever.
In this part, we're going to be taking on Samia and her party. The party consists of:
Samia, a level 25 Fighter
Akae, a level 29 Fighter
Ferric Ironblade, a level 20/23 Fighter/Thief
Legdoril, a level 20 Cleric
Chak, a level 20/17 Fighter/Druid
Kaol, a level 25 Mage
Samia and party only appear if we unpause while holding the looted equipment. We use the same trick we did in Pai'Na's lair to pick up the equipment while to the southwest of the room Samia appears in.
We buff up (including PFME, ProFire, ProAcid, II and SI:Ab, with a contingent PFMW on enemy seen) and stand at the bottom corner of this room so we can see Kaol (and Kaol can see us). Once Kaol starts casting a divination spell (TS), we run in to the room.
Samia's conversation forces Kaol's prebuffs to fire, interrupting his TS. We stand between Chak and Legdoril, who both start to cast TS of their own. We fire critical strike as soon as we are in position.
We can interrupt Chak by hitting him with flame tongue, and we can interrupt Legdoril by hitting him with anything. We will want to spend the rest of our attacks on Akae, who is vulnerable to critical hits.
Akae chugs a potion before going in, and so does not have a free action for activating hardiness. Since our average hit is for a bit over 30 damage and Akae has 132 HP, we should be able to take out Akae and interrupt the two divine casters in the first round. Since we are using critical strike, we don't even need to worry about natural 1s.
Our second target is Samia. We spend our second action breaching her once she activates her hardiness.
A bunch of skeleton warlords appear from the treasure room. The skeletons being summoned is a one-off, and we do not need to keep any enemies alive to keep the skeletons coming.
Samia takes a bit over a round to take out. Ferric has four hardinesses, and so will be a lot more annoying to take out. We instead focus on Legdoril, Chak, the summons and the skeletons. We keep our action free for casting PFMW if something unfortunate happens. None of the remaining enemies are weak to critical strike unfortunately.
As we are between PFMWs (or AIs) we may see Ferric activate a whirlwind attack of some sort. This is good for us, as it means that his action is spent for a round and cannot be used to activate hardiness. We activate our own PFMW and start attacking him.
After ten rounds, Kaol will get another true sight off. We can't do much to stop this, but the rest of the party members should be down.
Kaol likes to protect himself with scrolsl of AI if we are too close to him. Our starting position, however, is not considered too close. We can take advantage of this. Once we see him cast a spell (so his action is empty), we can activate Power Attack (The HLA that is required for Critical Strike) and start attacking him.
Power attack forces the enemy to save vs death at -4 penalty or be stunned for two rounds. Kaol has a base save vs death of 8, and so has a 55% chance of failing each save. We can get in about nine attacks, so he has a chance of passing all the saves of approximately 0.08%, which makes this strategy pretty reload safe. Once he is stunned for two rounds, we can stary to lay into him with critical strikes, and the two rounds he is defenceless for will be more then enough to take him out.
We can also main hand the FOA to slow him as well,
This is a major fight, and it comes with some major loot. The msot notable parts are:
Magical Blossoms
Sentinel Shield
Girdle of Hill GIant Strength
Boots that can be used to forge boots of speed
Circlet of the woods (headheat that gives +1 casting speed)
Ninjato of the Scarlet Brotherhood
A scroll of Spell Trigger
Several scrolls of AI
We hit Fighter 20. Not much exciting this level, but next level we get our final proficiency in flails and go up to 10 APR under IHaste. The HLA is our seventh critical strike.
The belt of hill giant strength is the last belt we needed to forge the Girdle of Lordly Might, the girdle we will be using for the rest of the game. It means we no longer have to match our belts to our foes, and combined with Phosphorus we have a static 25 strength.
We also forge the boots of speed. In theory, we could upgrade the circlet as well, but that uses a valuable scroll of memory boosting and only boosts divine spells known, which is of no use to us.
We may swap to the Helm of Balduran again if we want the saving throw bonus or the THAC0 bonus.
The power attack strategy is more powerful than I had expected, and it feels like something that I am underutilizing.
We'er almost to Thief 23. We can get over the line by doing a fight which should be quite a bit easier than the Samia fight we did in the last part.
We prebuff with PFME, ProFire, ProCold, ProElectricity, II, SI:Ab and a PFMW contingent on being hit. Our 5th level spells include more Spell Immunities.
We run up to the Pirate Captian, who spends his first action drinking a potion, so we activate critical strike and kill him in less than a round. The pirate coordinate casts TS and we cannot attack him just yet.
We can pop a second critical strike and take out the rest of the pirates while the coordinator casts Greater Malison.
The pirate coordinator likes to protect himself with scrolls of AI, but one of the conditions for him to use those is us being in melee range (range 5). We can get round that by using the Dwarvern Thrower. He can cast Finger of Death and other save or else spells, but even under the Malison we are guaranteed to pass the saving throws.
We can wear him down with just the dwarvern thrower, though it may take a while. When we have gotten through his mirror images and stoneskins (including contingency) spends his action casting a non-defensive spell, we can rush forward into melee range and take him out that way. That is faster, but if we mistime then he might use one of the AI scrolls.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
Book of Infinite Spells
Scroll of Memory Boosting (our third)
Scroll of Tenser's Partial Transformation (new IA spell)
Pink bag of holding (the same as the one we currently have, we will leave the new one behind)
Sleeper mace
Red Coral Gem
Crimson Chain
We have also hit Thief level 23, picking up our eigth critical strike.
Breaking down each of the remaining pre-spellhold fights and our ability to do them:
Kangaxx: We will need to get the maze sigil from the underdark so we can upgrade and steal Cernd's cloak for imprisonment protection.
Cowled Wizards: We are probably able to do the first five waves. The final wave may be beyond us.
Crooked Crane Lich: We probably need the Amulet of Hades for this, which will require taking out Firkraag for the scroll of Vocalize
Marvella's third task: If we steal Mazzy's sword, we can get immunity to the slow, but it will purge magic on us every four rounds. We might need to improved ranger boots to be able to beat it.
Guarded Compound: May be possible, with some cheese. The dispel trap on the upper level is nasty.
Twisted Rune: Mega late game. This is one of those fights where I don't know if it's even possible for us.
Gong quest: Probably the easiest thing remaining. We will probably do that next.
Roenall fight: We can do it, but we have trouble getting maximum XP from it. Ir might be possible now that we have spell trigger.
Umar: Same as Roenall fight
Chaos: I'm not sure this is possible without a druid. Chaos is weak to electrical damage, but is explicity immune to the mage spell lightning bolt and chain lightning. A strategy involving wands or the Hammer of Thor might be possible.
Firkraag: This is a super important fight. I'm not aware of anything we can get that would make it much easier (at least, not among the things that don't require is beating Firkraag to get to), but it still feels a bit beyond us.
Troll Mound: Same as Firkraag, but to a lesser extent
No more levels until we get around a million XP, then three at once.
We head to the bridge district and start the quest from Vittorio. Killing Captain Denis and his crew earns us 26.5k XP and no significant loot, sowe do the quest instead.
Grae is unimproved.
Inside is a ghost spider. Just killing a ghost spider is easy for us, but we want todrain all the spider summons first. It takes 24 rounds for them all to be summoned. Previously we had waied them out by kiting (a tactic that isn't possible in the tower), but let's do a bit of maths here:
We have four sixth level spell slots that can be used for PFMW
We have a ninth level spell slot that can be used for AI
We have a contingency that can be used for PFMW
We have a spell trigger that can contain PFMW (and IH too)
This gives us a total of 28 rounds of protection, which is enough to drain the ghost spider of summons.
We equip Phosphorus and the SOH to protect us from the improved web. We have a very nice AC here - whisper spiders are missing on a 15, which means that our protectino spells go even further than we need.
Our damage output isn't massive as we are single-wielding under regular haste for 4 APR. We don't really need any more DPS however, as we will spend a lot of the time with just the ghost spider around waiting for it to summon more. We will save the spell trigger (with the IHaste) until near the end when we want to finish off the ghost spider after the last round of summons.
We give Drush the wand for 12250 XP, then kill him for another 650. We also pick up Belm from its hiding spot.
If we hand over the gong, we get 16.5k XP and Denis and gang disappear. If we instead kill Denis, we get 26.5k XP. We kill Denis.
Part 079: Spider Queen:
In the last part, we did a faily uneventful quest, but in the process I realized that we have 28 rounds of PFMW or equivalent available to us.
Let's look at the Spider Queen's summoning scripts. She has two - the ghost spiders, which take ten rounds to full summon, and the whisper/killer spiders, which take 20 rounds to fully summon. Since both summon scripts can't go in the same round, she will need 22 rounds to fully exhaust her summon scripts. She will also summon a few extra spiders with her Improved Web, but we will not try to drain those.
She can also cast remove magic, but no other spells. She won't cast remove magic until she sees an illusionary type enemy (eg the mislead family, but I'm not sure if any of that family are still in the game), so we don't need to worry about it.
Looking at the area script, the area transitions will be disabled when the Spider Queen appears, but will be re-enabled as soon as she is dead.
Since we put the spider figurine into the container, it has not despawned and we can pick it up.
If we use two of Blur, Helm of Balduran and Protector amuley, we can get our saves vs death and spell to good enough that we will guarantee passing ever saving throw even on a 1. We will want to swap in the amulet of power as we recast our defence spells. We can also equip the sentinel shield (from Samia's group) for the best AC.
The Spider Queen has AC-10, compared to the -12 of a ghost and the -6 of a whisper. Similarly, the Queen has a THAC0 of -17, compared to -4 and -2. The Queen's THAC0 is so good that she will hit us most times, no matter what we do. If we single-wield we get 4 APR, and ghosts/whispers will need a 18/20 to hit us. If we dual-wield, we get 5 APR and ghosts/whispers will need 13/15 to hit us. Therefore, I will be single wielding as the extra longevity is worth the 20% decrease in DPS.
We stand on the location where the exit trigger will be when it reappears and wait for the spider queen to appear.
We quickly get surrounded by spiders. We start attacking the non-ghost/queen spiders that are adjaced to us so we do not leave the exit spot. I like to prioritize whispers, then killers, then spirits, then lesser spirits.
We don't have to refresh PFMW as soon as the old one wears off, I like to take a few rounds between to be safe. With Stoneskin up, the onyl damage we take is a bit of magic damage from ghost spiders.
Look at all these spiders. When tanking with stoneskin between PFMWs, I like to turn on auto-pause on hit to make sure I can refresh PFMW just as the last stoneskin goes down, and turn it off when we have PFMW up. I may also take an oil of resurgence for safety.
When we have used the memorized PFMWs and the contingency one, it is time to go on the offensive. We fire our spell trigger (with just that and the AI as the remaining non-scroll PFMWs) and start hitting the spider queen, dual wielding Phosphorus and Belm (as we need +4 weapons to hit her).
In two critical strikes, we can get the Queen down to near-death status. We don't finish her off. What we do instead is continue to take out the other nearby spiders, but if we notice her health bar has regained a portion we hit her again a couple times to get her back down to one portion.
When to actually finish off the Queen depends on how brave you are. I like to wait until I have fired my last PFMW, then two rounds in turn the critical strikes back on and take out the queen. Reload safety may involve taking her out sooner.
The spider queen dies for 90k XP, and becomes our new most powerful vanquished. We make sure to grab her eggs via the quickloot menu, and take out a few more lesser spiders on our last PFMW while the exits reopen.
We can rest up, rebuff and head back in. We will take out everything except the ghosts.
To make certain that we have drained the spiders, we can exit again to rest up and rebuff. When we enter, if the ghosts do not summon any more spiders, then we have fully drained them and can finally take them out.
In total, this fight is worth a touch under half a million XP.
We do have the ingredients to forge the improved spider figurine, but I'm not sure I want to, as it would require us to do another sell off. In order to be efficient I want to have these sell offs be large and infrequent, and I'm not sure the figurine would help much against any of the fights we have coming up. We do technically have infinite money from selling the scrolls from the mage and ranger strongholds, but for the sake of ease of playing I don't want to waste large amounts of in-game time doing this.
Speaking of in-game time, for those who are curious, it is currently day 250 hour 13.
I'm having a bit of a dilemma that I could do with a sense of perspective on. Critto, the maintainer of IA, has an official mod that can go on top if IA called IATweaks (https://github.com/critto-bg/ImprovedAnvilTweaks). Particularly of interest are Bulian's tweaks within that mod, but they don't do as much as I would have liked.
The tweaks claim to:
The Gypsy questline and the Limak encounter are available for non-mage protagonists
The Shimmering Light and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly quest lines are available for non-ranger protagonists
Non-essential class- and kit-based drops are available to all protagonists
Mage- and ranger-specific rewards and crafted items are available for all protagonists
Enable the hardest versions of XP-based encounters in Chapters 2&3
What these actually do behind the scenes:
Remove the requirement that the player is a mage for the Limak encounter
Remove the requirement that the player is a single class mage for Marvella's quests
Remove the ranger requirement for the Shimmering light quest and the Good, Bad and the Ugly Quest
Remove class and kit restrictions for certain item drops (mostly scrolls and potions)
Remove ranger and mage class restrictions on what items can be forged, and if the ingredients for those recipes drop
Enable the hard mode of all fights that are controlled by IAHARDMODE
What it does not do that I would expect it to do to match the description:
Make the old one quest (and subsequent quests) available to players other than a single class necromancer
Make the Ancient Secret of Suldanesselar quest available to non-vagrants
Remove the class and kit restrictions from all drops (most notably the scroll of vocalize from the shadow dragon and the scroll of spell immunity from the pirate coordinator)
Make all XP based encounters (such as the random spawns) use their hardest version
This has two major impacts on us. The first is that it means we won't be able to see some late game content, and as a completionist that irks me. The second is the scroll of vocalize - given that we have an option to make kit-based drops available to everyone, and an option to make mage specific rewards available to everyone, the scroll of vocalize feels like it should be included in one if not both of those categories.
How would everyone feel if I were to tweak the game further so the tweaks did what I expected? I'm confident that we will be able to beat the game with or without additional tweaks, but we will probably have to skip some of the harder fights, either due to inaccessibility (eg old ones) or insufficient resources (eg dracolich).
Hi @ed_boy
Great run so far, and thanks for the insight behind the scenes of the encounters. I havent played the IA that much, so it has been fun and educational so far.
I am a super completionist my self - not letting role play or other “setbacks” hinder squeezing everything out of the game. So imo you should install the tweaks - they are there for a reason .
I'm right at the end of SoA playing IA 6.52 + IATweaks + Hardmode.
Regarding the final quest for Vagrant protagonist, Ancient Secret of Suldanesselar:
The whole storyline is about being a Vagrant and on top of that there is a mechanic implemented that you need to be able to summon a Swanmay (which has some negative side effects) to weaken specific enemies.
I can fully understand that the decision was not to open it for other classes.
Regarding the final quest for Necro protagonist, The Old One:
Again, the story and the encounters are specifically designed for a Necro.
Hi @ed_boy
I am a super completionist my self - not letting role play or other “setbacks” hinder squeezing everything out of the game. So imo you should install the tweaks - they are there for a reason .
I've already installed the tweaks, but the problem is that they don't do as much as I would expect them to. My big debate is whether to take the tweaks further to make this run even more completionist.
I'm right at the end of SoA playing IA 6.52 + IATweaks + Hardmode.
The whole storyline is about being a Vagrant and on top of that there is a mechanic implemented that you need to be able to summon a Swanmay (which has some negative side effects) to weaken specific enemies.
I can fully understand that the decision was not to open it for other classes.
Some of the mirrored enemies in the ancient secret quests do require summoning swanmays to remove their invulnerability. For these enemies, I would probably us EE keeper to give myself the ability to summon swanmays as if I were a vagrant, but only use these summons for the duration of the quest, and only for the fights where it is necessary.
I'm right at the end of SoA playing IA 6.52 + IATweaks + Hardmode.
Regarding the final quest for Necro protagonist, The Old One:
Again, the story and the encounters are specifically designed for a Necro.
Are they necro specific? Ive done the old ones a while ago and it was definitely heavy on the mage, but I don't recall it using any necro specific mechanics.
I have compiled a list of IA class/kit checks that remain in the game. I have not counted the vanilla ones, or the ones that that only affect attack logic of enemies. These would be the further tweaks I would consider doing (or a subset of these).
AR0411 (Planar Sphere): Single class necromancer is needed for all the old one scripts, and robe of the apprenti forging chance depends on our class
AR0516 (Planar Prison): Elven Ancestor's Legacy needs us to be a FMC.
AR0602 (Irenicus's Dungeon): Robe of Vecna location may be in location 1 if the player is a class other than a single class mage. Robe of vecna may be in location 2 if not a necromancer. All possible robe locations (1,2,3,4) are Firkraag, Layene, Illithid hideout mage and Kaol. Of these, Layene is the hardest and the easiest is probably Kaol. Reload safety may need reattempting until Kaol has it. The short sword of mask location also changes based on if we are a ranger
AR0809 (Bodhi's Lair chapter 6): An item for the time machine quest (after old ones) needs the player to be a pure class necromancer
AR1610 (Brynlaw Brothel): A check for if the party contains a single class swashbuckler that sets some minor stuff later
AR2209 (Jae'llat House): Permanency scroll appears if we are a single class swashbuckler
AR2800 (Sundanesselar): Ancient secret starts if we are a vagrant
A2802 (Suldanesselar house): An item for the time machine quest appears if t we a pure class necromancer
AR2806 (Tree of Life): Another check for ancient secret of Suldanesselar
AR2811 (Suldanesselar house): Scroll of time stop only appears if we are a single class necromancer
AR3014 (one of the WK levels): An item for the time machine quest needs us to be a single class necromancer
AR4500 (Pocket Plane): EDE backup from Wedlander spawns if we are a single class vagrant. Also backup from Pasha Mahmoud can spawn if we are a single class mage
S!BOLICH (Librarian lich): Drops the scholastic cloak if we are a necromancer
S!MORID (New assistant after old ones): Disappears if we are not a single class mage
S!ORCUS (Orcus): Summons more difficult minions if we are a necromancer or druid
S!PIRCOO (Pirate Coordinator): Drop a scroll of Soul Armour if we are a single class necromancer (new IA spell, like ghost armour but two points of AC better)
S!RAKP (Rakshasa Prince): Summons vary slightly depending on our class
S!ROZVAN (Demogorgon fight): Summons different minions if we are a necromancer or auromaster
S!SPY4 (Force of vitality, few new wish-like spell Recast Vital Energy): Will only appear if we are a single class mage, and we only get the best options if we are a single class necromancer
S!SPY6 (Dummy creature used in suldanesselar): Sets some variables for the ancient secret quest if we are a single class necromancer
SEVPAT04 (Smaeluv Orcslicer): Drops blood of a barbarian warrior if we are a single class necromancer (used after old ones quest)
SHADRA01 (Shadow Dragon): Drops a scroll of vocalize if we are a single class necromancer
SHCRYSTA (Interactable in Suldanesselar house): Has a few checks that we are a vagrant
TRANIA28 (Area transition in Suldanesselar): Require us to be a single class vagrant
Last part was a big pile of XP, culminating in 90k XP for the Queen herself. I am only aware of two enemies that are worth more XP - Mellisan (91k) and Supreme Golems (114k).
The Chromatic Demon is blocking us getting to the rest of Watcher's Keep. It has 95% physical damage resisistance. It shifts between four different elemental forms, each corresponding to one of the elements featured on this level. Every five rounds, it changes to a random shape, opening up a weakness to a new element, where it only has 50% resistance. Although we can see it changing shape at the start, once the fight starts it will change to its red form, where it is weak to cold damage.
Cold is a bit of an awkward damage type - this would be much easier if it was fire. Our spells prepared include:
9: Alacrity
8: PFE
7: Limited Wish
6: IHaste, 3*PFMW
5: SI, Lower Resistance, 3*Cone of Cold
3: ProFire, ProCold
We stand to the right and release the demon.
The demon appears and turns into red form. Its summons take some time to gate in, which traps the demon in place for a bit - enough time for us to cast limited wish.
We choose one-time wish and control over time to get a timestop. This gives us three rounds to play with. We will spend our first action casting lower resistance from scroll, and then with out second cast alacrity.
With the amulet and the circlet, our casting time is reduced by 2 per spell, and we have a total of 20 casting time, of which the first 10 will be under TS. Our cast order will therefore be:
Lower Resistance [3]
Cone of Cold [3] * 3
Spell Sequencer [0]
Spell Trigger [0]
Critical Strike [0]
We will then move in to start attacking the chromatic demon in melee, ignoring the summons (though some will likely die in the crossfire).
Critical strike doesn't increase our DPS much as the demon is immune to critical hits, but it does at least protect us from natural 1s. The cold spells tend to do about 125 total damage to the demon.
Once every five rounds, the demon can polymorph into a new form. Once per polymorph it can use Lower XXX Resistance, where XXX is the damage type in question. We may want to chug an oil or resurgence for regeneration (our action isn't being used for much else).
Within the contingent PFMW, we can get the chromatic demon down to its last pip on the health bar.
It tends to die completely in the second or third PFMW that we naturally cast. Its summons disappear once the chromatic demon is dead, but since they are not worth any XP or loot, we don't care. The demon itself is with 55k XP.
We get some good loot here:
Key to the next level
Blood of a greater demon (used for Dorn's unique upgrade)
Circlet of Netheril
Ixil's Spike
Poison flail head
Tuigan bow
Blade of The Truth
Returning to the keep, we can use the forge to upgrade the flail and get 7450 XP. Our new default setup will be mainhanding the FOA and offhanding Phosphorus.
Part 081: Watcher's Keep Maze Level:
The last part wasn't worth much XP, but it does unlock the third level of Watcher's Keep, which has a lot of XP in it.
We land in AR3003, and if we follow Yakman we go through to AR3011 to see Helm's Supreme Golem.
The golem tells us that we are not experienced enough - we will want to have at least 4.2 million XP and be in chapter 6 or later for the golem to think that we are experienced enough. We say that we will come back later when we are more experienced.
In order to cure Yakman we will need to heal him using specifically the cleric spell Heal. Unfortunately, we canot do this, as all of the items that cast Heal are on Self or Party, so he will unfortunately be left mad.
The area with the Golem is AR3011, and it only leads us back to the landing area (AR3003) or to the outside. Our path to clear the area will be:
Start in AR3011 (compass level)
Head NE to AR3008
Head NE to AR3012
Head SE (the only other exit) to AR3004
Head SE to AR3006
Head SE to AR3013
Head SE to AR3010
Head SW to AR3005
Head NW to AR3007
Head NW to AR3014
Head NW ro AR3015
Most of these areas are straightforward, and I will only go over the tricky ones.
AR3008 is a dead magic zone that dispels us on entering. Fortunately, its contents are vanilla. If we were Lawful Good, we could get the Purifier sword from the stone in the middle, but the best we could do at character creation was Neutral Good.
AR3012 has Tahazzar. If we were neutral or evil we could do our part in the blood war, but instead we just get into a fight straight away with both Tahazzar and Ka'rashur. This fight is a bit tricky because we are still under spell failure from the dead magic zone, so we will want to kite for a few rounds until it wears off, at which point we can PFMW and take them out.
AR3004 is another dead magic zone with vanilla enemies. The cornugons have a nasty saveless poison on hit, so I like to get maximal AC by eqipping full plate mail and the sentinel shield.
In AR3006, we say no to the succubi. They are mostly straightforward, as long as we use the SOH to protect ourselves from the charm effects.
AR3013 is like Tahazzar, but trickier. We don't have to worry about coming from a dead magic zone, so we can use standard buffs (plus ProFire) and it will be easy.
AR3010 has fire and ice glabrezu. They each summon five minions, so we drain them of summons before killing them.
The next area (AR3005) is more difficult. It is a wild magic zone, so we will not want to cast any spells while we are in there. It also features the following enemies:
2*Elite planar hound, who have saveless confusion on hit and also dispel illusions on hit
Aranthis, an uninteresting moon dog
2*Level 20 Berserker
1*Level 23 Assassin
1*Hybrid Tiefling, a level 31/25 Fighter/Mage
Furthermore, the hybrid tiefling summons two more elite planar hounds every four rounds for a total of ten additional hounds. She is also immune to normal weapons and protects herself with five PFMWs.
Unfortunately, the hybrid tiefling is probably beyond us. I'll do some other stuff and come back later when we are hopefully a high enough level.
We have at least managed to break the 12 million XP mark, getting us a level in all three of our classes. We get our fifth proficiency point in flails, meaning we can hit 10 APR if we are mainhanding Phosphorus or the FOA. We pick up two more critical strikes (up to 10) and our first hardiness.
I'm holding off on any further tweaks until I find myself completely stuck. The biggest concern is the Dracolich - to handle it safely we will probably need either the Amulet of Hades or mage level 26 (so we cannot be dispelled). Getting the scroll of vocalize isn't strictly necessary if we can gain enough XP.
We also get our first view of timestop. I looked at the TS related scripts in details, and it looks like IA has changed it so that under timestop enemies are immune to all damage. Scripts that populate enemies and areas with loot are set to not run while we are under TS, so any valuable enemy will want to be at least partially fought not under TS.
We have also now used all of the one-time limited wishes except for shapechange. I'm not sure if we will have opportunity to use it.
Mage level 26 is starting to become a major milestone - there are a lot of IA enemies that are mage level 25, such as Firkraag, most liches, and the Hybrid Tiefling. When we hit mage 26, we can start to use II and SI:Div against these enemies.
So, I've done some more delving into the IA scripts and I made a good discovery - One of the changes in version 6.5 of IA is that the dracolich can be fought after leaving the underdark, but it has reduced rewards. Specificially, it will no longer drop:
5000 gold
A potion of Barbarian Essence
A scroll of Limited Wish
A scroll of Hand of Undoing
A scroll of Bless
A scroll of Protection from Level Drain
None of these are acutally critical items. The potion is kinda important, but we have other sources.
One of the reasons that I had been so worried about the dracolich specifically is that it was the most significant bit of missable content, so I wanted to do as much as possible pre-spellhold. With this in mind now, I wonder how possible it would be to to to spellhold before the 2.3 million XP mark to get the additional rewards from going earlier, run through the easy parts of the underdark, and then return later.
My current plan of action for how completionist I will want to be:
I will not add any of the missing loot such as the scroll of vocalize
I will enable the old one quests
I will enable all the extended ranger quests
I will give myself access to the speak with animals spell and the summon swanmay ability when I start the relevant quests, but I will not use them outside those quests
Feel free to let me know if you have any concerns/suggestions to change the plan.
I don't remember the old ones very well but it is all about necromancy spells, spell immunity to necromancy and spell turning. I just forgot what exactly gives the win condition.
Tweaks are okay but the extra fights should not be that meaningful to you.
I don't remember the old ones very well but it is all about necromancy spells, spell immunity to necromancy and spell turning. I just forgot what exactly gives the win condition.
I don't think that's an old one specific aspect - most it not all IA liches use SI:Nec - since they are all immune to breach and tend to have a high enough caster level that they don't have to worry about dispels, the biggest threat to them is the disrupt undead line of spells, which SI:Nec protects against.
In the last part, we hit Fighter 21. This is a big level in two ways. It gave us our fifth proficiency point in flails, so we will reach 10 APR under improved haste. It also gave us our last improvement in base THAC0. Since our remaining item upgrades are going to be pretty much all defensive, and our ten critical strikes are plenty for any fight we will not be deliberately extending, we are at pretty much the peak of our offensive output. Barring the occassional gimmick enemy, pretty much every one of our upcoming fight will be a question of how long we can keep up Improved Haste and Arcane Defences.
We are going to be taking out the cowled wizards who interrupt us if we try to cast arcane spells within city boundaries. We're going to be taking advantage of our mage levels and defending ourselves with II and SI:Div.
The mage groups each consist of four members. They are:
COWENF2, the grey male at the bottom, a 20th level Mage
COWENF1, the green male at the top left, a 14th level Conjurer
COWENF4, the green female at the top centre, a 17th level Conjurer
COWENF3, the green female at the top right, a 17th level Conjurer
Although the CREs created each time are the same, the starting buffs of each CRE is random. Our prebuffs include ProFire, ProCold, PFME, II and SI:Div. We do most of our buffing inside, then haed outside before casting the last arcane buff.
The grey wizard is the only one who can threaten us under SI:Div. Our strategy is to wait for his prebuffs to fire (normally disrupting his initial divination spell), then activate power attack and hit him, as he is weak to stunning.
He has a save vs death of 9, and so will need to roll a 13 or above on each hit. Although he can protect himself with Improved Mantle, he will only do so if he is out of stoneskins. He reliably gets stunned in the first round of attacking, and goes down shortly thereafter.
The rest of the cowled wizards are also weak to power attack, and we can stun them in the same initial two rounds.
With the gray one down, the rest go down easily.
We fight five identical groups. We only get 21k XP for each group, but we do get some sellables.
If something goes wrong, we can always retreat to another part of the city to rest up and rebuff. I like to use the Graveyard, as there are no cowled enforcers that spawn there. I find that sometimes one of the wizards cheats and is able to cast Pierce Magic through II, dispelling our SI:Div, but we can refresh it and be safe (or run away).
The last part was a bit of easy XP, but not much. The remaining cowled wizards would be very difficult in a straight up fight, but fortunately we have access to some cheesy strategies.
We perform our standard buffs, this time using SI:Ab and triggering the fight with PFMW. The enemies that we fight are:
COWENF2, the same gray cowled wizard from before
MAGE18A, top centre, a 20th level Conjurer
Khollynnus Paac, top left, a 25th level mage
Zallanora, top right, a 31st level mage
Both Khollynuus Paac and Zallanora summon reinforcements every few rounds - coin golems and maybe some lower level cowled wizards. These summons are not worth any XP however, so we will not bother trying to draw them out.
Our initial goal is to kill the two unnamed wizards from the initial spawn group. Power attack is very helpful here. Since our starting bufffs include II, the enemies will all waste their turns casting divination spells (a bit redundant since there are so many of them), and subsequent turns will need them to rub ray us before they can dispel/breach us. The PFMW we opened with will protect us from the coin golems.
Once this is done, we run away to the graveyeard to rest up (making sure we loot via the quick loot button first). Although most of the wizards will refresh their buffs as soon as we return to the fight, the two named ones will not.
Our next biggest priority is Khollynnus Paac. She likes to protect herself with scrolls of AI, which we want to preserve.
Our plan is to take her out under alacrity. Four lower resistances (one cast, three from spell trigger) will take her MR to 0. Although she has lots of elemental resistance, she only has 70 hitpoints and can be overwhelmed.
We buff up (again including II and SI:Ab to give the enemy mages something to do). We make sure we are standing on the edge of the area transition, cast alacrity, and move to the gates to continue the fight.
Using the AOP and the circlet, our casting time is reduced by 2. This means that under alacrity, we can cast:
Spell Trigger[0]
Lower Resistance[3]
Spell Sequencer[0]
Minor Spell Sequencer[0]
Magic Missile[0] * 5
Acid Arrow[1] * 5
Flame Arrow[1] * 5
Chain Lightning[3] * 2
Although the description of acid arrow says it has a base casting time of 2, I have noticed that it still seems to have a casting time of 1 under the AOP and circlet, which indicates that its actual base casting time is 3. This is enough to take her out in a single round easily. As always, if things start to look hairy, we can run away.
Zallanora can be taken care of in exactly the same way - she just has an additional 5 HP and is immune to pure magic damage spells like Magic Missile. With both Kholynnus Paac and Zallanora, make sure to loot using the quick menu before leaving.
Zallanora likes to chug a potion to heal up, and this can put her out range of our damage. If we run to melee range of her, the logic to cast PFMW takes precedence over the potion logic, which gives us enough time. If things look really bad, we can breach her near the end of the alacrity (instead of the chain lightnings) and take her out with weapons.
As always, if things look dangerous, we can run away.
With the two named mages down, we can mop up the remainnig summons at our own leisure. The coin golems go down in about a round under critical strike. The mages are all level 16, so should not be able to get us while we're under II and SI:Div (but we will want to be careful of the golems dispelling illusions on hit). For ultimate reload safety, we can try to take down one enemy between each resting and buffing session.
The loot is only notable for monetary reasons. Although we get a scoll of Bigby's Clenched Fist, in IA this has been nerfed so it just does 3d6 crushing damage without saving throw or resistance, no other effects.
Oh wait, I think it may be about dispelling with Ruby Ray and then doing larlochs interrupter on them, hence they were protected from necromancy. (? Maybe)
In the last part, we cleared out the cowled wizards. We didn't gain any significant loot or a huge amount of XP, it's mostly to make two later fights (Kruin and Limak) easier. We used some cheesy strategies, but if someone finds that too cheesy this is a fight that could easily be postponed for later.
We also got a first glimpse of the "empty the spellbook of damaging spells under alacrity" plan. That is a strategy that is powerful when it is an option, but is unfortunately rarely an option.
The guarded compound has an ambush that fires when we enter the red area. It consists of:
Nishruu
2 * Djinni
Monster Summoning 3 trigger
2 * Skeleton Lord
4 * Assassin
2 * Coin Golem
2 * Gem Golem
It's a bit of an odd collection of monsters - monster summoning 3 isn't even a distraction for us, and seems very out of place compared to the golems.
At this stage of the game, the fight is not very difficult. We use standard buffs, and prioritize the Assassins, then the skeletons, then the golems. PFMW and the like prove to be very useful.
Although we can rest up in the guarded compound entrance, we cannot leave until we clear out the upper floor.
The upper floor is difficult. It has four regular traps - the inner two are slime traps that inflict a saveless hold and a load of acid damage, and the outer two will true sight us. There is also the area script that will dispel us when we enter - although it has the message "Trap Sprung", it is not a conventional trap.
The main enemies that we have to fight are:
Sion, a 22nd level Conjurer that protects himself with scrolls of AI
Stalman, a 25th level Cleric
Ketta, a 19th level Thief
Olaf Rassmusen, a 20th level fighter
Maferan, a 20th level Fighter
Koshi, a 20th level Kensai
In addition we will have to deal with:
Exits that are closed until all six main enemies are dead
Nine assassins, one spawned every three rounds as long as the exit is closed
An initial summon of a gem golem, a coin golem and two skeleton lords
We have access to two undispellable buffs - Giatn Strength (not very useful for us) and Improved Alacrity (very useful for us). We can also store spells in sequencers/triggers/contingencies. The contingency is one that some might find surprising - it is stinking cloud on ourselves on enemy seen. This is because the AI prioritizes zone of sweet air extremely highly, so this will hopefully give us a turn of distraction.
We go in with four PFMW, four RROR and three Improved Mantle prepared in our level 6, 7 and 8 spell slots.
We want to stand on the stairs up and cast Improved Alacrity. I like to also activate Critical Stike because it will run out exactly halfway through the Alacrity.
We run to stand in Melee range of Sion. We don't cast any spells just yet. We make sure to run around the pillar so we avoid the slime trap.
As soon as the dispel hits (about half a round in), we start to buff ourselves. We do the following (all instacast with circlet and AOP):
Spell Trigger (Improved Haste, PFMW, TS
Spell Sequencer (II, Stoneskin, ProFire)
Hardiness
DUHM
Ghost Armour
Mirror Image
Blur
After that is done, we start to take out Stalman with triple RROR and Breach (all with effective casting time of 3, so total casting time of 12).
When the breach is launched, our alacrity should still be up. We will activate critical strike and start swinging at Sion. He should go down in two or three hits.
From this point, our priorities for taking out the rest of the enemies are:
Stalman
Skeletons
Golems
Summons
Olaf/Maferan/Koshi
Kettta
Assassins
We might take a bit of damage from storm of vengeance, but as long as we are vigilant at refreshing PFMW, we will be in no major danger. Sion had access to power word kill, but since he was taken out first we are not in danger.
Once the skeletons and golems are down, it means that we can start using Improved Mantle as additional PFMWs.
The assassins will carry on being spawned as long as at least one of the remaining named enemies is alive. Although we could farm the assassins, we get no XP and only mundane leather armour from each of the assassins, so there is no real point. We might as well kill Ketta instead of waiting.
We get quite a lot of loot from this. In addition to a bunch of monetary stuff, we gain:
Scrolls of PFMW
Celestial Fury
Scroll of PW:Kill
Helmet of Charm Protection (crafting ingredient)
K'Logarth Axe (an upgrade on the Dwarvern Thrower for us)
We have also hit Fighter 22 and Thief 25, picking up our eleventh critical strike and second hardiness.
Part 085: Ancient Lich:
In the last part we took out a major IA improved fight, the guarded compound. This has opened up two more encounters in the upper level of the guarded compound, though. We will be taking on the Ancient Lich.
The ancient lich is a 25th level lich that is notable for two reasons - It comes with a vampire lord initially, and every two rounds it summons two skeleton grandlords (for a total of twelve grandlords after six rounds of summoning).
Importantly, it only has four ruby rays of reversal, so we can use five SI:Abs to be safe.
We buff up, including ProFire, ProEnergy and SI:Ab. The lich as a CC of triple ADHW and a spell trigger of triple Chain Lightning, that ProEnergy should protect us from. We also have memorized four more SIs, a safety ProEnergy, three PFMWs and an AI. We also have two more PFMW hiding out in a a contingency and a spell trigger.
The vampire can dispel our elemental protections on hit, so we will want to take it out first. It leads with Hardiness, but it only has one and is weak to breach. We may want to use a scroll of breach here, they aren't that valuable and it helps us keep up all our SIs.
With the vampire down, we stand next to the lich so it uses its PFMWs as we take out the skeletons. We will want to take a breif break from skeleton killing to take out the Planetar as soon as it is summoned, and we can ignore the rest of the lich's spells.
The skeletons come out at approximately the same rate that we kill them, maybe slightly faster. We may take some incidental damage from the Lich, but we can use our potions to keep our health topped up (making sure we don't spend our action around when PFMW needs refreshing).
When our third PFMW expires, it means that the Lich has summoned all its skeletons and should be attacked. The Lich itself only has three PFMW, so as long as we stand text to it from the start it should be vulnerable from this time. If our ProEnergy has worn off, we can use refresh it or use PFME from scroll (we should have a few left in our bag of holding). Similarly, we can keep ProElectricity in our spell trigger for safety.
Unlike most liches, this one is weak to the slow from the FOA as well as critical strikes, which is nice.
Loot from this fight includes a scroll of memory boosting (our fourth) and a scroll of summon monster 6. This is a new IA 8th level arcane spell that summons an Elite Troll.
We got a total of 270k XP from this (240k of which was from the skeletons), which is enough for us to hit Mage 20. This is a nice level, as we gain extra slots of our two most important spell levels - 6 and 9. We also get a twelfth PFMW.
My big dilemma now is what to do with the scrolls of memory boosting. We currently have four, and there is only one more available pre-spellhold (the Hybrid Tiefling). I was planning on saving them to forge the Memory of the Apprenti (which requires three), but that might not be possible pre spellhold anyway. The other potential candidate to forge would be Nalia's ring upgrade, which requires two scrolls (and also requires Nalia extremely briefly joining the party so her ring can be taken).
EDIT: Looking at the data, it appears we won't be able to (meaningfully) use the scrolls of memory boosting anyway. Breaking down the items individually:
Memory of the Apprenti: Needs Robe of Vecna
Eternal Melody: Needs Jester's Chain from Spellhold
Circlet of Golden Flowers: Only gives additional divine spells
Jansen Adventure wear: Needs Robe of the Neutral Archmagi, from Hybrid Tiefling
Master of the High Forest: Only gives additional divine spells
De'Arnise Signet Ring: Needs Ring of Fire Resistance from Firkraag
Greater Robe of Invocation: Needs Maze Sigil from Underdark
Harper's Ward: Only gives additional divine spells
Githzerai Blade: Requires Silver Sword, only obtainiable after Underdark
Noble Staff of Earth: Only gives additional divine spells
Last time, we cleared out the guarded compound. This is another of the potential locations for the robe of vecna, but unfortunately we did not find it. The remaining two locations are Firkraag and the Twisted Rune. I really hope it's not the Twisted Rune.
Umar is accompanied by a Wondrous Imp. The imp is a level 15/15 fighter/mage, but the only spell of note that it can cast is a spell trigger of triple chain lightning. The important part is that every two rounds, it summons more enemies, in this order:
2 * Minotaur
2 * Whisper Spider
2 * Coin Golem
2 * Gem Golem
Umar herself is a 25th level mage who likes to protect herself with scrolls of PFMW. Normally taking her out wouldn't be much of an issue, but we want to gain the maximum XP. Every five rounds, she summons a group of skeletons (two lords and a warlord), for a total of eight rounds of summoning over fourty rounds. That is a very long time to extend this fight. We will also be unable to exit until both Umar and the Wondrous Imp are dead.
We start by clearing out the non-Umar parts of the level. The level has been repopulated since we were last here, and the new monsters are worth a bit of XP. We have to be careful to to engage the monsters too close to Umar, since they may get pulled into the battle early.
We buff up (including ProCold, PFME, ProEnergy, SI:Ab) and head in. We have a safety spell trigger of PFMW, PFME and IHaste.
We prioritize the Planetar, then the IA summons. We try to keep out of range of Umar, so she does not use her PFMW scrolls. We spend our action on refreshing PFMW or SI:Ab. For additional damage output (though potentially a bit less reload safety) we can also spend it on critical strikes for the non-undead enemies.
For safety against Umar's spells, we can equip the Protector Amulet+Helm of Balduran for the saving throw bonuses, or use the SOH. Similarly, a higher risk strategy we can use is that under circlet and AOP our SI casts a fair bit faster than Umar's Breach, so we can wait for her to ruby ray us, wait for her to start casting an abjuration, then refresh SI in response. No-reloaders will not want to be this greedy.
We may find ourselves surrounded, but that is because the imp summons fast. Once the imp's summons are down we can star to take out the skeletons faster than they are summoned. We can go in with three PFMW and two AI prepared, plus one in our safety trigger, plus potentially another in our contingency.
During our PFMWs, we may want to refresh things like ProEnergy.
Once the imp and its summons are dead, we can start to take advantage of our greater speed compared to the skeletons and Umar and run away. It might be tempting to try to take out a few skeleton lords before leaving, but it is safest not to - we don't want our ProEnergy running out by surprise. We can be a bit safer by using ProElectricity, but that will add some competition for our spell slots.
Don't forget to use the quick loot menu before running away.
We can run to the other side of the map and rest up, casting a few things (like stoneskin) along the way. If we run to the other corner of the map, we can rest up and have two or three rounds before the skeletons arrive. Saving the spell trigger for now is likely a good strategy.
Umar follows, but slower. Her spells are refreshed, but not her scrolls, meaning she has very limited castings of Ruby Ray.
Once the skeletons are dead, we again run to the other side of the map instead of waiting here to draw out mroe summons. We try to time it for when she is casting a spell so we do not prompt her to use a PFMW scroll.
Sometimes not all the enemies track us when we rest up. This is good, it allows us to comfortably reset all our spell triggers and contingencies before rebuffing and reengaging.
When we have drawn out all the skeletons, it's time to take out Umar herself. We buff up with ProEnergy, ProFire, ProCold, II, SI:Ab and PFME.
Our goal at this point is maximizing the PFMW scrolls we can obtain from her. We wait outside of melee range and wait for her to use her action while launching RRORs at her.
Once we have ruby rayed her until her SI:Ab is down (the visual indicator of SI is the one we have active), we wait for her to use her action. We will then breach her and run into melee range to take her out.
Notable loot from this fight includes five scrolls of PFMW (if all goes well), and a scroll of ProElements. This scroll is rare in IA. Although it is an ingredient in crafting an important robe, we will also need boots from the Spellhold machine, so we can scribe this.
Finishing the mission gives us 26.75k XP.
We hit Thief level 26, which earns us our 13th critical strike, and means that we have all of our thief skills at at least 100, with pickpocket at 200.
Another breakdown of the remaining encounters (I find making these lists helpful):
We've cleared out Umar, so we will now take on something that I thought until very recently was part of the expanded ranger stronghold.
IA adds a new divine spell, Speak with Animals. It is only used for the squirreled away quest, though we can see some dummied out content about a grand druid quest that should be coming in IAv7.
I have changed it to be an arcane spell, and assigned it to Othala as a known spell.
We run around the map for a bit:
The Squirrel in the cage at the promenade asks us to check in on its brother, a Melancholic Squirrel in the Umar Hills
The Melancholic Squirrel asks us to bring some nuts to his uncle, who lives near the water in the bridge district of Athkatla
The Old Squirrel in the bridge district takes the nuts for 15.5k XP and tells us about assassins that are going after Lord Acton Balthis
As we heap up the staits, we run into three Prime Assassinators. They are level 27/26 Fighter/Thieves. They each have 40% physical resistance, two hardinesses, and potions of healing and invisibility. Fortunately, they cannot do anything to combat us if we use PFMW, and we have already taken out the Cowled Enforcers.
Our goal in this fight is to try to preserve as many potions from the enemies as possible. They aer worth a pretty nice 25k XP each.
Heading into the house, we meet Lord Acton Balthis. If we ask for a reward, we get 10k XP and some potions. If we do not ask for a reward, we get 15.5k XP and better potions.
He directs us towards the Pitre fight. Unfortunately, the door is warded and needs adamantine dust, so we will be unable to carry on until after the underdark.
Part 088: Shimmering Light:
The last quest had to get cut a bit short because of lack of adamantine dust, and wasn't really a ranger quest (though it does require use of a druid/ranger spell). Time to do one that is both an expanded ranger stronghold spell and we will be able to do a bit more on.
When we head back to the cabin in the Umar Hills, we run into Delon who tells us about a shimmering light in the hills. He tells us that he saw a monster eating a child, but there is nothing we can find right away.
Three days later, Delon appears for a second time, but we have missed the shimmering light. Another three days later, Delon appears for the third time, and this time we can check out the light.
Heading up near Valygar's Cabin, we run into a girl and her father, Roshan. Roshan is on the run for murder, and is arrested shortly after we arrive. He says that he has been framed, and it is our job to prove his innocence. Chief Inspector Auriel is the person we will be coordinating with.
After two days of waiting, she appears. The murdered man was called Delver, and he was on a secret mission but was killed before he could report his findings.
We are given two leads - an enchanter in the Druid Grove, and an illusionist in the Athkatla Sewers.
The enchanter fight is mostly straightforward, so we only need standard buffs. He protects himself with PFMW, but is weak to normal weapons. He has some dominated minions, but we ignore them - killing them costs us a chunk of reputation and doesn't earn any XP.
Notable loot from this fight is a few scrolls of PFMW (attacking with normal weapons will be enough to take him out before he uses any scrolls).
Heading to the temple sewers, we find the illusionist. Instead of dominated minions, the illusionist summons two illusionary vampires and two illusionary golems. We want to be a bit careful - the vampires can dispel ProCold on hit, and we want to keep up ProCold so we can hit through the fireshield safely.
We will want to head to the west as soon as we enter the sewers. The vampires and golems are dispelled by TS, so we can cast that before heading down and kite for a round to take them out.
We also run into a Phantasmal Killer. Since we have at least 15 INT, we can disbelieve it for 12.5k XP. It is instead better to kill it the old fashioned way for 25k XP.
When the phantasmal killer attacks it will dispel us, so we will likely want to have a spell trigger with Improved Haste, ProCold and PFMW in it. Setting up a ProFire or ProElements to protect from her spells will also make things safe.
The illusionist share a weakness for normal weapons, but takes a lot longer to take down, as she has multiple stoneskins. She may summon more golems and vampires, but they aften go away by themselves in a round or so - I think the illusionist's TS is disrupting them.
The exits from the sewers get re-enabled when the illusionist goes down, even if we are still in combat with the phantasmal killer.
The killer has 90% physical resistance, immunity to critical hits, and good regeneration - it is very similar to the fanatic spirits. At this point, we should have enough AI and PFMW to take it out completely in the same attacking session, though for reload safety we may want to retreat, rest up and rebuff before taking out the phantasmal killer.
Returning to Auriel, we are told to talk to Delon. We get told that the shimmering light is back, but this time from Umar Cave.
Heading into the cave, we find the Elire Doppleganger. This is quite a nasty foe.
The doppleganger has to be taken out with physical damage, which he is 75% resistant to. His weapon is particularly nasty - it dispels all protections and buffs (including combat protections and IHaste) on hit, it requires us to make saves vs death at -6 (which we can consistently make), slays summons and regenerates 3 HP/second. It has two of them - one main hand which hits as a +4 weapon, and one offhand which hits as a mundane weapon. PFMW will only protect us for half a round (until the offhand weapon hits us), so we will rely on AI for protection.
We have two AIs, which we can use for protection for eight rounds. We will will want to spend our action time using critical strike so we dont have to worry about its massive AC.
Since AI and PFMW last for slightly under four rounds, we will want to only use two critical strikes on the first AI. We will also want to be extremely vigilant on the last half-round the first AI to refresh the second before we can get hit.
We can also use a slightly higer risk strategy to squeeze out a bit more damage:
Turn on auto-pause: End of Round
Cast AI and attack for a round with some misses due to AC
Activate critical strike and attack for a round with guaranteed hits
Repeat the above two more times
On the last half-round of the third critical strike turn off auto-pause: End of Round
Start pausing and unpausing extremely quickly to catch the moment that AI runs out, or after our fourth attack in the last half-round (depending on how brave we are)
If Critical strike is still running, run away and carry on pausing until the critical strike runs out
Once critical strike runs out, our action is free so we can recast AI and start again
Critial strikes make this very consistent, and the doppleganger will consistently be near death but not quite dead by the end of the second AI. Our strategies vary a bit here depending on how reload safe we want to be.
For maximum reload safely, we want to use a scroll of AI to finish the job. Since timing when scrollcasting is a bit tricky, we will probably want to start with a single scrollcast AI and then the second and third will be memorized. We will want to make sure it never hits us, as that will also dispel our IHaste.
The slightly less safe strategy is to load a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Wraithform. This will give us another four rounds of safety, and since we have static 25 STR we will be at peak DPS with a single buff. The wraithform puts us at risk of missing enough of the remaining hits to not take out the Doppleganger. Furthermore, it also disables our casting so we cannot cast subsequent protections, and it stops us from being able to use more critical strikes or other innate abilities.
The doppleganger is only worth 22k XP, which seems quite low when compared to other enemies like the Prime Assassinators. It drops 5k gold and this letter.
Auriel congratulates us, but has no reward. The knight of the order gives us 100k XP, and half of a ciphered note. The other half we will encounter later on.
Roshan gives us this ring. The extra spells are divine only, so don't matter to us. We would get an extra 10 maximum HP over our ROP+2, but we would not get the saving throw bonus of a ROP, so we will not be using it.
We have hit Fighter 23, which earns us another hitpoint and another HLA.
Our next level will be Mage 21. We will be able to put 7th level spells in our contingency, which doesnt' matter a huge amount to us. It's mostly good as a rung we have to climb on the way to Mage 26.
We'll be finishing off the remaining parts of the de'Arnise keep this part.
Roenall is an enemy with a gimmick - he can only be damaged be weapons, has 75% physical resistances, has access to one hardiness, and is immune to Breach. We will need to trigger his hardiness, wait the 13 rounds necessary for it to run out, and then take him out.
We also want to take out Roenall last - when he goes down the batle will be over, and we want to kill everything else first to maximize our XP.
We have a few more minor problems at the keep first. The actions we take are:
Exeute the Moneylenders, it's not worth spending the money
Payoff the debts of the peasants for 1000 gold to get 15.5k XP
Pay the full 5000 for rebuilding the farms at the first opportunity
Do not pay the 2000 to rebuild the Dikes
When the keep messenger appears, we have a few in-game days to respond and beat Roenall. We will want to do our resting up and pre-rest casting before we talk to the Majordomo, as once we talk to the Majordomo our timer before the battle becomes worthless.
We set up a contingency of PFMW on enemy seen and a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin.
This spot on the bridge is the best point for prebuffing. We want out buffs to include ProCold, ProFire, ProElectricity, PFME (scrollcast), SI:Ab and IHaste. We have left memorized three Breach, four PFMW, three Improved Mantle and two AI.
The enemies we have to fight are:
Roenall Guard, a 22nd level Mage
2 * Gem Golem
5 * Roenall Soldier, 15th level Fighters
4 * Roenall Guard, 20th Levle Fighters
As our PFMW triggers, the enemies ignore us and chop down our soldiers. We hit Roenall enough times to trigger his Hardiness. If we go in with II up, the mage will spend his first action casting TS.
We move in to take out the mage. He may protect himself with PFMW, but we can swap to normal weapons. Of all the enemies, only the mage and golems are weak to critical hits.
With the mage down, we take out the Golems. Once the golems are down we can use our improved mantles as additional PFMWs.
We spend the next few rounds taking out the remaining guards and soldiers. The guards each have a Hardiness, so we will want to focus on them when we have an action free to actiate hardiness, and focus on the soldiers when we are ancitipating refreshing PFMW.
Finally, it comes down to us and Roenall. His hardiness will have worn off by now, and he does not have another, but he does have 15 potions that each heal 40 health. Combined with his regeneration, large health pool and physical resistances, he will take a long time to take out.
Our buffs may start to run out, which is why we put an extra IHaste in our spell trigger. We prioritze the PFMW first and then the AI, but we save the Improved Mantle to the end - the mordy sword hits as a +4. It's unlikely to cause us issues, but for safety we try to leave the IMantles for when it is gone.
We make use of the quickloot menu throughout the battle. Roenall's mage drops a few nice scrolls, Roenall himself drop a generic +3 longsword, and the rest of the loot is merchant fodder (but some very nice merchant fodder).
We have successfully defended our keep. Since it stops producing money after the 20th week, we celebrate our victory by:
Collecting all 20 weeks worth of taxes
Moving Nalia outside so we can get her ring upgrade later
Raise emergency taxes until we cannot raise them anymore
This lets us hit Mage 21. The additional level 7 and 8 spells are better than nothing, but not that notable to us.
It looks like the next step will be Spellhold. Pretty much all the remaining content either requires loot from Spellhold (either directly or as a crafting ingredient), requires mage level 26, requires the ranger boots (which need us to have finished chapter 5), or some combination of those.
The good news is that we are quite overleveled - IA expects you to be just under 2.4 million XP before going to spellhold (that is the tougher spellhold threshold), and we are at approximately 14 million XP. It should be pretty smooth sailing for us.
It would be nice if we could take out the Dracolich, but since we can come back later it is not disastrous if we do so. The only content that I think we might have to skip is the mithril golem.
Last time we hit 14 million XP. It's finally time to go along with the plot of the game.
We have a sell-off to Ikert, earning us about 350k gold. We drop it on upgrading our ring setup to a +4 and a +2, the upgreded spider figurine, and The Truth longsword, our first +5 weapon. Our optimal weapon setup is now mainhanding Phosphorus and offhanding The Truth.
We say hello to Aran, and he introduces us to Saemon, and we are off.
The vampire encounter here is vanilla.
We call the dwarf here crazy so he fights us. The fight is slightly improved, but IHaste and PFMW make it simple.
Chremy is also vanilla. We kill him and give Ginia money to escape for a bit of XP.
Sanik and his assassin are vanilla.
Perth is improved. He is a 25th level mage that has backup of three coin golems, summoned with gaps of 5 rounds each. We buff up with ProFire, ProElectricity, ProEnergy and PFME. We take out the golems as they get spawned, and protect ourselves with SI:Ab when he tries to dispel us. We make sure to keep our distance so he does not use his scrolls of AI, and use our action each round to ruby ray him until he is breachable.
When the third golem is summoned, we breach him and go in for the kill. We may need to breach more than once.
With Perth's wardstone, we head to the Asylum Exterior. We clear out all the enemies (including notably a group of noble Trolls), but do not actually enter the asylum.
We don't have the charisma to do the sleeping potion plot, as that needs 15 charisma. It's only worth 1k XP anyway. We instead rush in and chop all the guards into pieces.
Galvena is a level 20 fighter. She is accompanied by Vadek, a level 22 Conjurer. Vadek has scrolls of AI that we want to preserve. Galvena has some potions that would be nice to preserve, but it's not as important as Vadek's scrolls. Until both of them are dead, we cannot leave the area and one guard a round gets spawned, up to nine guards. The guards aren't worth any XP, but they do drop sellables.
We buff up with II, IHaste and Profire, then cast alacrity and head in.
Under alacrity, we cast the defensive buffs with a casting time of 2 or less, fire three ruby rays at Vadek, and breach him. Ideally he will spend his first action casting TS and go down before he uses a scroll, but the close proximity of this map means he may use a scroll, in which cast we may need to breach him again. Once breached, we can activate critical strike and power attack and take him out. He does have a contingency on stoneskin, so we can either use two breaches to take out that as well or use power attack to stun him (with 10 APR, it's pretty certain to affect him).
With Vadek down, we take down the guards - there are nine of them, and they spawn one per round. They're not worth any XP, but they are worth a bit of money in sellables. We can easily tank the nine rounds with PFMW, IMantly and AI.
Freeeing Claire is worth a total of 12k XP, which is just enough for us to hit Thief level 27.
Chapter 4 is definitely a step down in terms of difficulty comapred to the earlier parts of the game.
We need at least 16 charisma to convince Desharik to send us to the Asylum, which we do not have and cannot buff to. We can still loot his house, including picking his locks and disarming his traps for a bit more XP. Fortunately, we do not miss out on any XP for going in the direct way.
The intial scenes where we get our soul stolen is straightforward and all vanilla. We lose access to our bhaalspawn powers, but fortunately we have access to 25 STR without DUHM.
Fun fact - it turns out there are only two creatures named "Demon" in the entire game, I expected there to be a lot more.
The options we can choose are:
Give up skill, costing us 50k XP (this option is disabled in IA)
Give up health, costing us 1 constitution
Give up mind, costing us 1 intelligence
Give up wits, costing us 1 wisdom
Give up youth, costing us 1 dexterity
We choose to give up the point of wisdom.
We tell Imoen to go back to the Copper Coronet by herself. I always feel really bad in this conversation.
In this map, every time we rest three XP-less whisper spiders appear as we are over the XP threshold. They are not much of an obstacle for us at this point, however.
This room contains an improved spider group. It's dangerous only if it takes us by surprise. Reload safety will want resting up and buffs before heading in.
The riddle room and the puzzle room are straightforward. We will want to grab the boots from the puzzle room after completing it in case we want to forge another pair of boots of speed.
Heading into the southwest room, we run into a spider group including a ghost spider. We do what at this point is a pretty standard process of drawing out all the summons. We have a static save vs spells of -5, so we do not need the SOH to protect ourselves against improved web.
We make sure we only clear our these parts of the map and no more - the portal room in the top left corner includes a nasty golem encounter we will want to especially prep for.
In the last part, we did the easy parts of the first asylum level. There are quite a few parts left to do, some of which are quite challenging.
This area is safe to rest in, as long as we never activate the book. We will want to beat all parts of the book challenge without resting to get the best rewards.
We will occasionally run into Asylum Scouts. They are just like Gem Golems, except they are worth no XP and drop no gold.
Outside the library is another shade lich plus skeletons group. We've taken this kind of thing out before, so it we properly prep as before it is no major challenge.
Dace is vanilla and easily dispatched.
Once Dace is dead, a Vampire Lord appears. We can breach to get rid of its hardiness, then it goes down easily. It drops a bag of holding, but we already have teh bags of holding we need.
Beating Dace and the Vampire Master also opens up the area transitions back to the previous part of the Asylum.
This allows us to hit Fighter 24, which means we can start to rank up our proficiency in Longswords.
Part 093: Asylum (Librarian):
We've done the main parts of the first two spellhold areas, but we have a few tricky encoutners left in each of them.
Running into the library, we find a coin golem and the Cat O' Nine Lives. We start by taking out the coin golem first, then the cat. Although neither of these enemies are casters, we buff up with ProEnergy, SI:Ab and PFME.
As the name suggests, the cat cames in nine iterations of increasting difficulty. The weakest has 55% physical resistance and makes us save on hit at a +4 bonus. The strongest has 95% physical resistance and makes us save on hit at a -4 penalty. Fortunately, each iteration is weak to critical strikes. We are not in much threat of being killed by it, this is just a very long fight. We may want to keep a second Improved Haste in a spell trigger for safety.
Once the cat and the golem are down, the librarian appears.
The librarian summons a number of bookworks and students. They are worth no XP and can transfer their hitpoints to the librarian.
The exit remains enabled, so we can run back to the first area to rest up and rebuff.
The librarian will be where we left it, though it will repeat its buffing procedure when we return. It has three PFMW memorized, one in its prebuffs and one in a contingency, so we will need to wait twenty rounds to deal with it. Similar to other Liches, we will need to protect ourself with PFME and elemental resistance spells, protect our protections with SI:Ab, and stand close enough to trigger the PFMW.
We attack the students and bookworms. Not only does this give us something to do, but when damaged they transform into Greater Wolfweres and Skeleton Lords, who are worth XP.
Loot from this fight includes:
A scroll of Permanency
Golden Cat Figurine (fully heals the wielder once per day)
Manual of Elaboration
Two Mithral Tokens
Monster Summoning 4 (new IA spell, summons a friendly minotaur)
A bunch of flavourful items that have no purpose except being sold
Part 094: Asylum (Kurtulmak):
In the last part, we finally tipped over 15 million XP. We did do a cheesy strategy of resting up in the middle of a fight, but we could probably find less cheesy strategies as an alternative.
We get ready for the Kurtulmak fight. We use ProElecticity, ProElements and ProEnergy for a total of 250% electrical resistance. We mainhand the Truth as it deals slashing damage.
We have to deal with three amber golems, three guardian spirits, and three kobold shamans.
It takes two critical strikes to take out a golem - we attack until the discharge damage gets too high, then we back off. We spend the two rounds between refreshing PFMW or healing with potions or the golden cat figurine. Using an oil of resurgence is recommended.
We can also take down the non-golem enemies with our weapon attacks while waiting for the electrical discharge to die down. Safely taking down all the golems will require six golem attacking sessions with gaps of two or three rounds apart, and so will be possible if we get maximal PFMW and AI from our 6th and 9th level spell slots. As before, having a safety spell trigger that includes PFMW is a good idea for reload safety.
To make tihngs reload safe, we can always run back to the first part of spellhold.
I like to rest and rebuff after taking out each golem. The amber golems are so difficult for a solo character, I don't know if this fight is possible without cheese.
And additional bit of good news is that mirror images can block the electrical discharge damage. We will need to be under PFMW to stop the golems dispelling illusion on hit, but we can get a full round of critical strikes in if we mirror image first.
I've played through BG1 probably between ten and twenty times, played through BG2 seven or eight times, and played through TOB once or twice.
As for IA, I have four ot five partial playthroughs. The furthest I've gotten is clearing the main story to just before the tree of life, and clear the JD fight at WK.
Near Infinity is an incredibly important tool for analysing the game, and I wouldn't be able to get into this amount of detail without it. I don't have any of the details memorized from previous playthroughs (other than very high level stuff that I rememver from years ago). Whenever I encounter a significant new enemy, my process is to look up the enemies in Near Infinity, look at their scripts and equipment to see what's going on.
For most enemies the biggest concerns are:
What elemental protections should we use?
Do we want to extend the fight to draw out more enemies, and if so for how long?
Which weapon should we be hitting them with?
Which protection spells can we use on them (Stoneskin, Wraithform, PFMW, IMantle, AI)?
Do we need to get our saves to a certain level, or do we need immunity to a debuff?
Do they have any ways of dispelling or negating our buffs?
Once I have done this, I try the fight a couple times until I feel safe in the strategy.
Last time we took out three Amber Golems. That fight is exceptionally nasty for a solo character, and we would need to burn some valuable PFMW scrolls if we were not able to cheese it and rest in the middle. Forthunately, although there are a few IA enemeis that can lower elemental resistance, only Amber Golems can lower the resistances on hit.
Next up is the book challenge. This is a long grindy fight and we will want to preserve how long our buffs last for. There are eleven rounds of enemies, and we will have four in-game hours to beat them all to collect the best rewards.
The enemies that we will have to face are:
Kobold Captain
Sword Spider
Umber Hulk
Mind Flayer
Beholder
Neo-Otyugh
Skeleton Lord
Coin Golem
Gem Golem
Ghost Spider
Elemental Golem
Only the last two are ones that we will want to draw out the summons of.
Fortunately, we do not have to wait for one of the enemies to be defeated before we can spawn the next one. The first four rounds we all summon at once and let our summons take out the enemies.
We start with IHaste for the beholder, and only need to use long lasting buffs for the foes from Beholder through to Gem Golem. The otyugh has poison, but if it poisons us we can drink an elixier of health.
We summon the ghost spider and the elemental golem at the same time, so we can wait out their summons. The ghost spider needs 24 rounds to drain all summons, and the elemental golem needs thirty six.
We will want to PFMW up here and take out the whisper spiders as their web lariat is annoying. We can also take out some of the other summons while under PFMW, as they can clog up our movement.
Once we have thinned out the enemies, we kite the ghost spider and elemental golem around the map. we may need to pop another PFMW to allow us to take out summoned minions if we get caught in the corridoors. Make sure to use quickloot to get the drops off the floor.
Once we have drawn the enemies to the far side of the map, we can activate the book to get our rewards.
Our rewards most notable include another scroll of memory boosting and our first potion of barbarian essence. These potions provide undispellable stacking 20% physical damage resistance, which means that they will be extremely important in the late game.
Once we have the book rewards, we can go to the other room, rest up, and reengage as many times as we want. The ghost spider and elemental golem will reset to the book room, while the summons they previous generated will be scattered around the map where they were before. We can therefore enter via the other entrace to take out any remaining summons before engaging the main foes and triggering the next wave.
Reloaders will want to make sure that the elemeental golem only summons gem golems, not coin, as those are worth more XP and loot.
An interesting discovery that I made during this - golems (including the elemental golem) and skeleton lords are vulnerable to web effects like improved web. I'm not sure if this can be utilized to make any fights easier, but if someone is finding these enemies difficult then this is an avenue that can be looked into. Fortunately, our save vs spells is -5, which means that we are guaranteed to save.
I found that sometimes the ghost spider's initial summons would be reset on rest, leading to fight more spider summons than normal. Since these are worth XP, this means that we generate more XP than normal, and could in theory use this as an infinite XP source. I will stick to the rule of six that IA establishes with most summons.
This is worth a nice chunk of XP, and we manage to get a level up in all three of our classes. We go up to 19 critical strikes, getting close to the limit of 20. Getting the extra spell slots at level 6 and 9 is also fantastic, those are our favourite spell levels.
Part 096: Asylum (Portal Room):
In the last part we got a triple level up, our third or fourth of the entire playthough. Those are always pretty nice. We also got a big pwoer boost in extra level 6 and 9 spells, meaning that we can top out at six PFMW and three AI, plus contingency and spell trigger for another two for a total of 44 rounds of protection.
We left this room alone earler, and here we see why. The room contains:
2 Memphits (smoke and ice)
1 Ruhk
2 Coin Golems
2 Gem Golems
1 Elemental Golem
1 Ice Golem
We trigger the fight and immediately run away. The Ice Golem is the first enemy we will be fighting that has access to the purge magic ability. This ability dispells everything on us, which we cannot protect against in any way. The ice golem can fire it every four rounds, with no limit. It splashes in a small area, which means that in parties an important strategy is managing who gets purged, but for us we have no way of avoiding it.
This ability will becomes more common the more powerful the enemy we face is. It is for this reason that our late game will rely on equipment that gives us abilities, as those persist through purge magic.
We can retreat to the other area, rest up and rebuff. The non-ice golems will pursue us to here, so we can repeat the process of drawing out the summons. The ice golem does not pursue us to here, so we can fight safe from purge magic.
This elemental golem and its summons are not worth money or XP, so there is no need to draw out all the summons.
The reason why this works is because the ice golem is too large to fit through this gap.
We could fight the ice golem, but it would be very difficult, and we would get no reward - it is considered part of the punishment for going to spellhold at such a high level, and gives no XP.
Our goal is to go around through the crushing trap.
We can detect the trap, but any attempt to disarm it sets it off. Fortunatly, each part of the traps is only triggerable once, and we can trigger it with our summons. Therefore, we will detect the trap to know where to stand, use the Horn of Valhalla or similar to summon a minion to trigger the trap, go past, and repeat for the other part of the trap.
Despite the visual appearance that we are crushed, we are in fact quite safe.
Just past is a group of yuan-ti, which is not a problem for us at this point.
The portal encounters are not very threatening:
Greater Wolfwere
Pit Fiend
We will also want to take out the Ruhk and memphits for a bit more XP, leaving just the ice golem.
With this done, we talk to the statue and finally carry on into the next part of the Asylum.
Part 097: Asylum (Slayer Level):
Last part was a bit anticlimactic - I was spending ages trying to find a way to beat ice golems with our equipment, but it turns out that one wasn't worth any XP and was skippable. This part should cover some more of interest.
Note that in the next part we will still have to deal with the XP-less asylum spawns from earlier, but they are no different so I won' be covering them in detail.
We have a few minotaurs to fight in this level. They have the IA abilities like saveless holding on hit, but PFMW will protect us.
The bodhi fight is unimproved.
The room with the paintings contains another yuan-ti group but is otherwise unimproved.
Just beyond is a group of four skeleton warlords.
This room has three coin golems. If we loot the chest, the door locks us in as the three golems attack us.
When we beat that room, we have the Cloak of Magic Shielding and a Scroll of Memory Boosting appear in our inventory.
The one remaining enemy here is the Mithril Golem, which I'm quite worried about. It has immunity to all damage, except 5% immunity to slashing and crushing. It needs +3 or better weapons to hit it. It regenerate 1 HP per round, and ifw e run away for 18 minutes it fully heals.
The real nastiness its its weapon. It insta-slays all summoned creatures, and dispels illusionary, combat, specific and spell protections. It inflicts save-less bleeding of five damage per round for five rounds. In addition to that, its script lets it remove our protections once per round.
This is the script that removes our protections every round. Our plan is to be quick enough with the pause that we can cast a protection spell as soon as that fires.
The way that auto-pause works is that it will pause every six seconds after we first give an attack command while in range to attack an enemy. We want to not attack the golem until its protection removal script fires, at which point we will insta-cast PFMW and start engaging it in combat. This ensures that our end of round will fire immediately after the golem's combat protection removal fires, allowing us to insta-cast another PFMW to keep ourselves safe. It does not give us any window to activate critical strikes, unfortunately.
We maximize our PFMWs by putting one in a contingency on enemy seen and having a spell trigger with PFMW and IH. We also have six PFMW memorized and three AI, for a total of 11.
The optimal setup is to mainhand phosprohus and offhand The Truth. We buff with IHaste and MGOI, as that dissuades the golem from using its slow ability.
We summon some creatures (up to the limit of 5) and send them in. They aren't here to last a long time, they are just here to get a bit of damage in and potentially soak up the Golem Slow.
I like to keep the horn of valhalla unused for this. The exits backwards is disabled and the exit forwards is still enabled, so if things look hairy we can summon the warrior as distraction and the run away far enough to rest.
This is a pretty grindy fight, but it is pretty predictable. Taking into account critical hits and misses, we deal the golem 20 damage per round. It regenerates 1 hitpoint per round. It has 240 hitpoints, so the fight will last 12-13 rounds.
We will be able to grand for 10 rounds with just our memorized PFMWs and AIs. After that, we will need to start scrollcasting to keep going. Fortunately, we have a lot of scrolls at this point.
This is an area where we are suffering for the robe of vecna location. Two of the four locations we were able to clear beforehand, and if we were able to pick up the robe at one of those two then we would be able to get an extra six rounds of stalling here and not need to restort to scrollcasting.
The mithril golem goes down for 50k XP, and drops ten tokens to bring us up to a total of 35. We want to hold onto ten of them for forging a flail later on, so we effectively have 25 to spend.
We have the following options:
5 tokens - Boots of the North (used in forging the Robe of Elemental Resistance)
10 tokens - Boots of Grounding (used in forging the Robe of Elemental Resistance)
15 tokens - Boots of Speed (used in forging the Boots of the Ranger Lord)
20 tokens - Jester's Chain (used in forging Eternal Melody)
The Robe of Elemental Resistance is a nice to have, whereas the Boots of the Ranger Lord is one of the most important bits of equipment. However, we already have one pair of boots of speed and only need one more, the only real cost of which is a scroll of Permanency, which we from this point in the game we will not find ourselves constrainted on. There are no other sources for the boots needed for the Robe of Elemental Resistance, so I will get those.
Eternal Melody isn't very good in version 6 of IA (It was great in version 5 where it offered permenant alacrity). I am not sure if the Robe of Elemental Resistance is a required item for us - I can think of a few fights where it would be useful, but those probably have workarounds that don't requrie it.
We have covered the Mithril Golem. I have tried to come up with a reload safe strategy, but I found myself running against engine limitations - for instance, the one round that we wait between spells is slightly different than the one round that the golem pauses between getting rid of our protections, we have slight delays in our protection spells due to animation, etc. I am probably going to have to declare this fight not reload safe unless the Robe of Vecna is on Kaol or Sion and the Memory of the Apprenti can be forged before this fight. Fortunately, the items that it blocks are not necessary. There are no more fights from now until chapter six that I am really worried about (since we can delay the Dracolich).
On the topic of reload safety, I am unsure how to handle some aspects of randomness. I consider the core part of reload safety to be having a reliable strategy in fights, where I can take choices to influence the outcome. There are other things (like the deck of many things) where it is random, and there is nothing I can do to influence the outcome or repeat the process. I don't consider that to be "fair" randomness, and outside the scope of finding a reload-safe strategy.
There are also some things that are in the middle - when an elemental golem summons a minor golem as a minion, there is a 50/50 chance that it will be a gem or a coin golem. We can beat the minor golem no matter what it is, but we could be missing out on 2k XP for each coin golem. I am on the fence as to whether I consider this "fair" randomness or not, as there is nothing I can do to influence the outcome.
In the last part, we took out the Mithril Golem. That was a rather awkward fight, where we found ourselves impacted by game engine limitations. It is probably the first or second least reload safe part of this run since we have not been able to obtain the Robe of Vecna before coming here.
This part of the asylum is mostly straightforward. We can use the quickloot menu here to pick up the items we can't normally get to.
We will want to give the apparition the most hostile response at every opportunity so we fight the hardest challenges which means the most XP.
Lonk the Sane isn't a major threat to us - he protects himself with PFMW, but we can go under with mundane weapons. We will want to protect ourself against his Fireshield Red and triple ADHW Chain Contingency. A SI:Ab will be enough to keep him busy while we hack him to bits.
Right after the Lonk fight, we are thrown into the Irenicus fight. Irenicus (this one is PPIRENI2.CRE) is a 30th level mage. He protects himself from spells with II and SI:Ab. His prebuffs also include elemental protection buffs, and AI to protect himself from weapons. He has five more scrolls of AI and we cannot really bait him into using them in another way.
He has 96 hitpoints, and our goal is to get him below 20%. We will have to wait him out for 24 rounds. During that time we will protect oursevles with SI:Ab. Irenicus has a total of six RRoRs, so we will want to supplement our SI:Abs with spell turning (7) and GOI (6).
As for what Irenicus can do to us, we have to watch out for:
Power Word:Kill if we ever fall under 60 HP
Spell Trigger of triple Chain Lightning
Contingency of triple ADHW when he gets to 75% HP
TS our illusions
Death spell our summons
Remove magic/Breach/Spellstrike if our SI is let down
Finger of Death (1)
Horrid Wilting (6)
Bigby's Crushing Hand (3)
Chain Lightning (2)
Magic Missile (7)
A bunch of saves that we will make
Attacking us with MMM
We buff ourselves going into Lonk with:
Stoneskin (Pre-rest)
Contingency of PFME on enemy seen
Spell Trigger of GOI, IHaste and PFMW
II
IHaste
ProFire
ProElectricity
GOI
Spell Turning
SI:Ab
In addition to this, we have prepared:
3 * AI
4 * Spell Turning
4 * PFMW
3 * SI:Ab
Although Irenicus himself isn't a major offensive threat, he summons a lot of minions. Every round, he summons a group of six Asylum Scouts, up to three rounds (18 golems). Since we cannot attack Irenicus, we will spend our time waiting for his AIs to wear off to take out these golems.
The other minions (the clone and murderers) are ignorable. It is probably safest to keep them around as extra spacing for the very brief windows between PFMW. We will want to be careful to only use two actions while under PFMW, as we will want to refresh it before the end of the fourth round.
Irenicus will cast other spells mixed in with the Ruby Rays, so we do not have to spend every action refreshing our protections. One thing to look out for is that our SI (or other protections) may expire due to duration, so we will need to refresh them.
The spell trigger refreshing our IHaste is very useful, as that can run out over time, as well as refreshing our GOI. Irenicus will likely use Shadow Door and hide while we take out the last of the Asylum Scouts.
I find that the scouts get finished off around when we start our last PFMW/AI, though we have scrolls for safety. We want to make sure that PFME is still up before engaging Irenicus to protect against his contingency, and refresh it from scroll if it is not. We can also use The Truth's TS ability to get through his illusions.
Irenicus himself has 75% physical resistance, but is weak to critical strikes. He never refreshes his SI:Div, so if we have TS up he will waste his actions casting illusions.
We decide to take Saemon's ship back to the mainland.
The rest of Brynnlaw is mostly uneventful. I discover that you can kill of Desharik for 11k XP and some nice sellables.
During the ship fight, we cannot kill all the enemies. We want to prioritize the Gith over the Sauagin,
The intro fight is against a Yuan-Ti Mage. We have a major level advantage, so a single remove magic will blow it away.
This is enough for us to hit Thief 29 and get our 20th critical strike.
Part 099: City-of-Caverns:
In the last part, we finally finished up in Spellhold. This time we're doing an area that is easily missable, and it feels like a bit of a dodgy game design, to be honest - it's very easy for a casual player to completely miss this area on their first play through.
We can pickpocket the king. This not only gives us the robe to go down, it also gives us the treasury key. Notably, the treasury contains a scroll of ProElements, which is a rare scroll in IA.
We should watch out - an improved spider group spawns here.
Solving the imp's puzzle gives a scroll of Permanency and the Boots of Etherealness.
The Spectator Beholder, one of my favourite characters in the entire BG saga, acn be talked into letting us take the treasure since we have over 12 wisdom.
As we head through the city, we run into some hostile rebels. The non-casters are negligible. The casters have enough arcane buffs to be annoying, but they are only caster level 17 (compared to our 22), so we can go in under II and SI:Div to protect ourselves, and hack them to pieces. They can PFMW, but are weak to normal weapons. In terms of elemental resistance, we only really want ProElectricity or ProEnergy, as they have the IA staple of spell triggers of triple Chain Lightning.
We have a choice at this point - side with the King, or side with the Prince. Siding with the Prince gives about 15k XP from the fighting, and 60.5k XP as quest reward. Siding with the King gives no quest reward XP, but the Prince fight gives more total XP. Fortunately, we can get both sides.
We start by siding with the prince and taking out the king. He is unimproved, and goes down easily.
We then buff up and attack the prince. He is immune to all damage, and every few rounds he will summon a group of four Sea Snakes. The Sea Snakes only have 50% physical resistance and are weak to critical strikes. PFMW blocks both the Prince and the Sea Snakes.
There are a total of three groups of snakes, which are summoned four rounds apart. Once all of them have been summoned, the Prince is vulnerable and can be taken out, again being vulnerable to critical strikes.
Notable loot from these fights includes the Impaler spear, the Wave blade, a scroll of Soul Armour and a scroll of Mordenkainen's Sword (the first we have gotten so far).
Clearing out the city is enough experience for us to get two level ups - Fighter 26 and Mage 23. We cannot get another Critical Strike, but we can pick up a single Smite, which is a Critical Stike with some extra fanciness, and another Hardiness to go with it.
Int he last part we hit Mage 23 - the big threshold of level 26 is getting closer and closer. Now it's time for us to go to finally go to the Underdark.
We clear out the elemental portals. Each portal has ten elemental guardians for a nice bit of easy XP - 90k, to be precise.
We free Vithal and agree to help him out. Although we can buy a scroll of freedom here, they are extortionately expensive, so we are better off learning the spell before leaving Athkatla.
Continuing on, there is a group of Drow and two ghost spiders. The only defensive buffs needed are II, SI:Div and a series of PFMWs. We will want to draw out all the summons of the ghost spiders.
There are a few uses of adamantine dust in IA. For us, we will want two units - one for forging, one to access the Pitre fight. We will make sure to sell the rest of it before leaving the UD.
To the west is a group of spore colonies and a myconid king. We don't even need to buff for this fight, just be patient to draw out all the summons.
We prep for the Balor with ProFire, ProCold and PFME. We are of a high enough level that its Remove Magic does nothing. It has high physical resistance, but only protects itself with two stoneskins and a single PFMW and is weak to Critical Strike. Note that it is innately immune to mundane weapons, so waiting out its single PFMW is necessary. It may lower our fire resistance, but we can drink potions to keep that topped up, or tank the fireballs that it casts.
Returning to Vithal, we obtain 20k XP no matter what we choose at the end, and see what I believe is our second typo of the game (after Elite Doppleganger. We gain no XP reward for being nice, so we will attack him to take the full loot and an extra 20k XP.
Prebuffs for this fight are IHaste, ProFire, PFME, II and SI:Div, as he is level 22. Our reputation gets decreased by 2, but we will increase it up to 20 again before we leave the underdark. He can protect himself with PFMW but is weak to normal weapons.
In the southeast corner are Kuo-Toans. They are not massively dangerous (II, SI:Div and PFMW are all the protection we need), but they are annoyingly durable.
There's a lot to do in this area, and our next visit will be to the soul gem machine, which we will activate from left to right.
The first person inside is Madman Aganalo, who is an uninteresting fight.
The second is Raevilin Strathi. We could get 15k XP for casting Heal on him, but we do not have the spell. Fortunately, the 15k XP for killing him is just as nice. ProFire and PFME are the important protections here.
Riti is another unimproved fight.
Alchra is a level 25 mage lich, so we cannot use II and SI:Div. Fortunately, we only have to deal with three RRoRs, which is easy. We will also want to have up ProFire, ProElectricity and PFME. There are a total of five PFMWs we need to wait out - one from the prebuffs, and four cast later on.
Bedlen Daglefodd is next, giving us a break from the fights. Returning his father is worth 10k XP.
The final trapped soul is Gont of Riatavin. Being nice is worth nothing, killing him is worth 7k XP.
As we cross the bridge, we run into something we haven't seen for a while - an IA ambush, where we get dispelled before the fighting happens. Fortunately, we have loads of options to use here. The only thing to watch out for is that the auto-pause on enemy seen will not go as the enemies appear during the cutscene, so we will have to be quick with the spacebar.
We want to go in with a spell trigger loaded with PFMW, IHaste and II. We can fire that first thing, then make use of how SI has a mini-alacrity effect and set up SI:Div. Once that's done, it's a pretty much arepeat of the earlier drow war party, but with only one ghost spider instead of two. We will again want to draw out all rounds of minions.
All of this is enough for us to hit Thief 30. We can't get any more offensive HLAs, so we will be picking up Hardinesses up to 20 of them. This level gives us our fifth.
As a part 100 special, let's talk about the item randomizer.
When in the opening area of the game (AR0602), a bunch of varaibles are set that control where various IA items will spawn later on. The idea of this is that it adds a bunch of variety to the game and makes subsequent playthroughs a bit different to earlier playthroughs. It's a very nice feature, and has caused other modders to subsequently write mods to do similar randomizing without having to install the rest of IA.
We'll break down each of the randomized items. Note that each of these bullet points is parsed in order, so once one condition is fufilled the rest will be ignored.
IAVECNAPLACE, controllilng the Robe of Vecna:
If the player is not a single class mage, place it at location 1 (Ancient Dragon) with 2/3 chance
If the player is not a necromancer, place it at location 2 (Layene) with 3/7 chance
Place it at location 3 (Mage in Illithid Hideout) with 3/5 chance
Place it at location 4 (Kaol)
IARYNNPLACE, controlling the Staff of Rynn:
Place it at location 1(Founder of Trademeet), 2 (Theshal), 3 (Dracolich) or 4 (Greater Elemental Golem in Guarded Compound) with equal probability
IAHILLPLACE, controlling the Girdle of Hill Giant Strength:
Place it at location 1 (Ferric Ironblade), 2 (Fighter in Illithid Hideout), 3 (Guildmaster in post-Firkraag adventures) or 4 (Troll King) with equal probability
IAMASKPLACE, controlling the Short Sword of Mask:
If the player is a ranger, it is not set, as the sword is found during the expanded ranger stronghold quests
Otherwise, place it at location 1 (Green Wyrm) or 2 (Ancient Dragon) with equal probability
IABOWPLACE, controlling Tansheron's Bow:
Place it location 1 (Troll Mound), 2 (Illithid Hideout) or 3 (Sea's Bounty Pirates) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IASLINGPLACE, controlling the Sling of Everard:
Place it location 1 (Ancient Dragon), 2 (Troll Mound) or 3 (Elemetal Golem in Underdark Illithid Camp) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IAFLAILPLACE, controlling the Defender of Easthaven:
Place it at location 1 (Saladrex) or 2 (WK Demilich) with equal probability
IABELTPLACE, controlling the Belt of Inertial Barrier:
Place it at location 1 (Illithid Hideout), 2 (Samia's Party), 3 (Sea's Bounty Pirates) or 4 (Hybrid Tiefling) with equal probability
IAROSESPLACE, controlling the Blade of Roses:
Place it at location 1 (Shadow Dragon) or 2 (Illithid Hideout) with equal probability
IAAXEPLACE, controlling Azuredge:
Place it location 1 (Shadow Dragon), 2 (Dracolich) or 3 (WK Demilich) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IASHAFTPLACE, controlling the Gesen Bow Shaft:
Place it at location 1 (Troll Mound), 2 (Illithid Hideout), 3 (WK Gith) or 4 (WK Demilich) with equal probability
IAMANAPLACE, controlling the Mana Bow:
Place it at location 1 (WK Demilich) or 2 (Dracolich) with equal probability
IARING30PLACE, controlling the Ring of Human Influence:
Place it location 1 (Firkraag), 2 (Illithid Hideout) or 3 (Troll Mound) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IALEAT03PLACE, controlling the Protector of the Second:
Place it at location 1 (Troll Mound) or 2 (Illithid Hideout) with equal probability
IAKUNDANEPLACE, controlling Kundane:
Place it location 1 (Elemental Golem in WK level 2), 2 (Elemental Golem in Underdark Illithid Base) or 3 (Dracolich) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IAFORTITPLACE, controlling the Girdle of Fortitude:
Place it location 1 (Elemental Golem in WK level 2), 2 (Theshal) or 3 (Saladrex) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IARING28PLACE, controlling the Ring of Air Control:
Place it at location 1 (Green Wyrm), 2 (Elemental Golem in WK level 2), 3 (Planar Warden) or 4 (Illithid Hideout) with equal probability
IABLUN24PLACE, controlling Gnasher:
Place it location 1 (Troll Mound), 2 (Green Wyrm) or 3 (Sea's Bounty Pirates) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IAAVOIDPLACE, controlling the Boots of Avoidance:
Place it at location 1 (Greater Elemental Golem in Guarded Compound), 2 (Elemental Golem in WK level 2), 3 (Elemental Golem in Underdark Illithid Base) or 4 (Troll Mound) with equal probability
IAPERIAPTPLACE, controlling the Periapt of Proof Against Poison:
Place it location 1 (Green Wyrm), 2 (Illithid Hideout) or 3 (Dracolice) with weighting 1, 1, 2
IARING35PLACE, controlling the RIng of Lock Picks:
Place it at location 1 (Firkraag), 2 (Borinall), 3 (Illithid Hideout) or 4 (Greater Elemental Golem in Guarded Compound) with equal probability
IAAEGERPLACE, controlling Aeger's Hide:
Place it at location 1 (Greater Elemental Golem in Guarded Compound) or 2 (Bodhi's Lair Chapter 6) with equal probability
IAMALAKPLACE, controlling Malakar:
Place it at location 1 (Elemental Golem in WK level 2 (Illithid Hideout), 3 (Dracolich) or 4 (Troll Mound) with equal probability
IAFOTNPLACE, controlling the Flame of the North:
Place it at location 1 (Elemental Golem in Underdark Illithid Base) or 2 (Dracolich) with equal probability
IAUSUNOPLACE, controlling Usuno's Blade:
Place it at location 1 (WK Demilich) or 2 (Greater Elemental Golem in WK Last Seals Level) with equal probability
IAFBANEPLACE, controlling Foebane:
Place it location 1 (Green Wyrm), 2 (Greater Elemental Golem in WK Last Seals Level) or 3 (Saladrex) with weighting 2, 2, 1
IAWHICHBOOK, controlling the Book of Infinite Spells:
Place it at location 1 (Conster in Windspear Hills) or 2 (Pirates in Sea's Bounty) with weighting 3, 1
IAHELM04PLACE, controlling the Gift of Peace:
Place it location 1 (Shadow Dragon), 2 (Firkraag) or 3 (Saladrex) with weighting 2, 2, 1
IASLEEPPLACE, controlling the Sleeper:
Place it at location 1 (Pirates in Sea's Bounty) or 2 (Den of the Seven Vales) with weighting 3, 1
IASHLD23PLACE, controlling the Fortress Shield:
Place it location 1 (Tarnor the Hatchetman), 2 (Shade Lich) or 3 (Dwarf Warrior from Underdark Illithid Lair) with weighting 2, 2, 1
IASW1H52PLACE, controlling Water's Edge:
Place it location 1 (Borinall), 2 (Torgal) or 3 (Firkraag) with weighting 6, 3, 1
IASW1H66PLACE, controlling the Yamato:
Place it at location 1 (Bodhi's Lair Chapter 6) or 2 (Noble Rakshasa in Suldanesselar) with weighting 3, 1
IABLACKBLOODPLACE, controlling Blackblood:
Place it location 1 (Gaal), 2 (Torgal) or 3 (Priest in Slaver's Ship) with weighting 33,33,34
IAHARMONIUMPLACE, controlling the Harmonium Halberd:
Place it location 1 (Tarnor the Hatchetman fight), 2 (Planar Prison) or 3 (Samia) with weighting 33,33,34
IAARUNDELPLACE, controlling the Staff of Arundel:
Place it location 1 (Chaos), 2 (Chak from Samia's party) or 3 (Chandrilla in the underdark) with weighting 33,33,34
IARODSMITEPLACE, controlling the Rod of Smiting:
Place it location 1 (Lavok), 2 (Conster) or 3 (Master Brain) with weighting 33,33,34
IASENTINELPLACE, controlling Sentinel:
Place it location 1 (Roenall), 2 (Legdoril) or 3 (Pitre) with weighting 33,33,34
IAWARBLADEPLACE, controlling the Warblade:
Place it location 1 (Kruin), 2 (Demon Wraith in WK) or 3 (Revanek in Twisted Rune) with weighting 33,33,34
IADRAGONBLADEPLACE, controlling the Dragon Blade:
Place it location 1 (Shadow Dragon), 2 (Firkraag) or 3 (Saladrex) with weighting 33,33,34
We're getting close to mage 26. I have a good feeling about this.
We'll be dealing with the Illithids in this part. Having done the item randomizer breakdown, there's a lot of potential loot here.
The arena fights are unchanged.
We can get a bit extra XP by taking out the spectating illithids before leaving the arena.
The doors state that they require either a powerful mind or godly strength to open. This means we need to either dominate one of the mind flayers or turn into the slayer.
Fortunately, there are only two such rooms with doors on the map. This one, and the one on the way to the Master Brain.
The mind flayer in this room respawns but is not worth any loot or XP, so there is no point trying to farm.
The rest of the illithid base is mostly unimproved. We can pop an AI if we get worried about INT drain.
One of the cells contains the Insane Dwarf Warrior, who is a high level fighter. For optimal tempo, we want to wait from him to activate GWW before we PFMW, then we can breach as soon as his hardiness fires.
He drops the Ring of Fire Control and the Rifthome Axe.
We prepare ourself for the master brain fight by setting up a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin.
The Master Brain is a dangerous fight. It summons a Brain Golem every four rounds, which acts as a mini Gem Golem. The really dangerous part is that every six rounds, it uses Purge Magic.
We would be able to burst it down between purges, but that would mean that we don't get to draw out all the summons of the Elemental Golem. The Elemental Golem summons a Coin/Gem golem every six rounds to a total of six golems, so we will want to extend the fight to at least 36 rounds.
Our solution is to run around the back of the Master Brain, where it cannot see us and it cannot purge us. Here we will draw out the fight to take out all the golems.
Note that the elemental golem can only be semi-tanked with stoneskin - it does 2d4 damage of four different elements when it hits us, so it chips at us through stoneskin. It's not a massive amount, though, and we can still tank it for a bit. Stoneskins are fairly cheap at this point in the game, so it's good for tanking before the initial purge hits.
We want to use one of our 6th level spell slots to refreshing IHaste when the intial one runs out, which leaves us with six PFMW (includig the spell trigger one) and one AI memorized, for a total of 36 rounds of protection. Since PFMW and AI last slightly under four rounds, we will likely want to spend our action using potions to heal up the elemental damage that gets through between rounds. Fortunately, the first golem summon happens after three rounds, not six, so we only have to wait 33 rounds to take out the elemental golem.
A safety strategy is to, while we are waiting, hit the Elemental Golem down to Near Death, but not kill it. Once the last minor golem is summoned, we can then finish off the Elemental Golem before the minor golem, as the minor golem can be more easily tanked with stoneskins.
From the golem, we pick up the Flame of the North, the Sling of Everard, a scroll of Spell Immunity and a scroll of Ray of Fragmentation.
With the golem down, we can rest up, then prepare another spell trigger. We move to engage the brain, firing our spell trigger after we get purged, and take it out easily. Notable loot from this fight is the sellables and the blood needed for the Ust Natha quest later on.
Freeing the slaves is worth 45k XP and one of our missing points of reputation.
We have earned enough XP for another triple level up, reaching F/M/T 27/24/31. We get our fourth pip in Long Swords, three more Hardinesses, and another 9th level spell slot.
In the last part, we cleared out the illithid area for a very nice chunk of XP. It is also an area that has the potential to hold a lot of loot, but we did not find anything of significancein the loot drop.
We should watch out for this area - there is an area where we take a whole bunch of fire damage with no way to disarm it like a trap. ProFire is enough for us, though.
We buff up, including ProCold, ProFire, PFME, II and SI:Div, then use the Horn of Valhalla on the Demogorgon statue to trigger the Demon Knight fight.
We have fight five Demon Knights. They are each level 22/20 Fighter/Mages. Their buffs are random, and can be either using SI:Ab or II and SI:Div. Fortunately, they cannot do anything to us with our buffs.
Defensively, they each have a Hardiness, which stacks with their 40% physical resistances. Fortunately, we do not have to deal with any PFMW or AI, so after 11 rounds their hardinesses wear off and we can kill them easily. We have more than enough PFMWs and AIs to outlast them, though we will want to look into refreshing SI:Div as it has a two turn duration.
We can use our action to cast Remove Magic. Since we have a four level advantage, it has a 90% chance of dispelling them if they did not have SI:Ab in their starting buffs, and they will be easy to take out from that point. If we can get them to use their action on something nondefensive, then a single round of combat is enough to take them out.
They have access to lower fire resistance, but it is a relatively low priority action. We will ideally want to kill them before can use it, but if not then we can run out of range of the Incentiary Clouds to avoid taking too much damage. Using ProEnergy as an aditional buff can make this reload safe.
Notable loot from this fight includes the Belt of Frost Giant Strength, Armour of the Hart and Soul Reaver.
We will encounter a few Kuo-Toa groups in this area. They are not a threat for us when we are buffed with II and SI:Div.
There are a total of three such groups - one in the corrupted tadpole room, and two on the way to the altar room. When fighting this group, more may be drawn in from the surrounding areas.
The wizards may cast PFMW, but they are weak to mundane weapons.
This altar is blocked until we are doing an extended ranger stronghold quest in chapter 6 or 7.
If we move slowly into the room we can contaminate the tadpoles without triggering the next fight. Although these fights are close together and we will end each fight with buffs still active, we will want to rest up between each fight to ensure that we do not have buffs run out partway through.
The Kuo Toa Prince is a level 22/22 Fighter/Cleric. He summons a group of other Kuo-Toa, including Kuo-Toa Dukes, who are high level fighters that we have not seen before. Fortunately, everything here is straightforward to take out, being weak to weapons. The Prince is initially invincivble, but once we take out the minions he is vulnerable. There are no additional summons, so we do not need to extend the fight.
We will want to include ProFire in our buffs, as the Prince has an Aura of Flaming Death. Unfortunately, the Prince's dispel magic has a chance of dispelling us, so we will need to use SI:Ab instead of SI:Div. We will want to focus down the wizard, as the will pose the biggest threat, being able to Ruby Ray us. For additional safety, we can stun the wizard with Power Attack. The biggest threats after the wizard are the Deva and the Priest.
Notable loot from this fight includes a scroll of Permanency and the Bracers of Blinding Strike.
The drow guarding the door are pretty straightforward, only slightly improved.
There is a group of two gauths and a beholder in this room. They are always a massive pain to deal with, but in this case I like to cast ProFire and PFME on the Noble Spider, keep the spider in front to distract the beasties, and cast incendiary cloud over and over.
We have cleared out two of the secondary Underdark areas. Unfortunately, the third one is probably too difficult for us to take on until Chapter 6 or later, as it would feature our first real fight against a Purge Magic using enemy.
We talk to Adalon, and agree to go undercover.
There are a few merchants here. The only unique items for sale are the Spear of Withering, Darkened Glory and the Robe of the Evil Archmagi, which we are not interested in. There are also some potions of giant strength that a party may be interested in.
We have an opportunity to turn money into XP by buying these monstrous slaves and killing them. It's not a fantastic exchange rate, but given that money is unlimited due to the Mage and Ranger strongholds, we want to do this.
These Gith can be killed for a bit of XP with no downside.
We can kill Dola Fadoon, but it is best not to - we will get better XP from killing the drow torturing it during the final city fight.
We go to the tavern and fight the monsters. We have to fight:
An Umber Hulk
A Nabassu
A Sahuagin Prince
A Beholder
The onyl one of those that can pose any kind of threat to us is the Beholder. IHaste and Critical strikes will see it off easily, though.
We start the Amariel quest.
We make sure to learn Ammar's name.
We meet up with Solaufein. He tells us to meet him at the entrance, and when we do we are told to recue Phaere.
As we leave the city, we run into an ambush group. The mage N'ashtar is level 20, so II and SI:Div makes him easy to take out. The cleric Chandrilla is only level 17, and is also ignorable.
N'ashtar has scrolls of PFMW that we want to preserve. Unfortunately, he is not weak to Power Attack. We will want to launch at least three RRoRs, wait for him to use his action casting a spell, then Breach him. Note that he has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, so we will want to cast PFMW or ProEnergy before going in. He has access to Hardiness (and prefers it to PFMW), but is weak to Critical Strikes. Two breaches should be prepared.
Notable loot from this fight includes the Dragon's Breath.
Further on, we run into Simyaz. We don't hand over the silver sword and instead kill the Gith.
The fight to rescue Phaere is unimproved and easy. Our only concern is to make sure we get all the killing blows, but critical strikes help with that. We do have a twelve hour timer from when we got this mission, so we want to make sure we don't violate that with resting around N'ashtar's group.
We get our second quest from Phaere - take out a beholder. This is an unimproved fight, but beholders are nasty to begin with. For maximum safety, use IHaste and Critical strike to take it out ASAP.
We are given the Aboleth quest at this point.
Qilue's house contains only low level foes. For maximum reload safety we can go in with IHaste and SI:Div, but the enemies here should be beatable without any major buffing.
Phaere's next quest is to take out the Svirfneblin. Being nice to them isn't worth any XP, but killing them is, so we butcher them all.
We are given the mission to kill Solaufein.
This is something that we'll handle in the next part, however. This might not be the most natural breaking point, but I didn't want to do the entirety of Ust Natha in a single part, and this is a decent enough stopping point, and it is just before some big decisions about how to handle Drow politics.
We have earned enough expereince to level up in all three of our classes, hitting F/M/T level 28/25/32. We dump our three HLAs into Hardinesses.
Comments
In the last part we did Marvella's second task. Her third task is extremely difficult, however, and we will not be able to do it for a long time, if ever.
In this part, we're going to be taking on Samia and her party. The party consists of:
Samia and party only appear if we unpause while holding the looted equipment. We use the same trick we did in Pai'Na's lair to pick up the equipment while to the southwest of the room Samia appears in.
We buff up (including PFME, ProFire, ProAcid, II and SI:Ab, with a contingent PFMW on enemy seen) and stand at the bottom corner of this room so we can see Kaol (and Kaol can see us). Once Kaol starts casting a divination spell (TS), we run in to the room.
Samia's conversation forces Kaol's prebuffs to fire, interrupting his TS. We stand between Chak and Legdoril, who both start to cast TS of their own. We fire critical strike as soon as we are in position.
We can interrupt Chak by hitting him with flame tongue, and we can interrupt Legdoril by hitting him with anything. We will want to spend the rest of our attacks on Akae, who is vulnerable to critical hits.
Akae chugs a potion before going in, and so does not have a free action for activating hardiness. Since our average hit is for a bit over 30 damage and Akae has 132 HP, we should be able to take out Akae and interrupt the two divine casters in the first round. Since we are using critical strike, we don't even need to worry about natural 1s.
Our second target is Samia. We spend our second action breaching her once she activates her hardiness.
A bunch of skeleton warlords appear from the treasure room. The skeletons being summoned is a one-off, and we do not need to keep any enemies alive to keep the skeletons coming.
Samia takes a bit over a round to take out. Ferric has four hardinesses, and so will be a lot more annoying to take out. We instead focus on Legdoril, Chak, the summons and the skeletons. We keep our action free for casting PFMW if something unfortunate happens. None of the remaining enemies are weak to critical strike unfortunately.
As we are between PFMWs (or AIs) we may see Ferric activate a whirlwind attack of some sort. This is good for us, as it means that his action is spent for a round and cannot be used to activate hardiness. We activate our own PFMW and start attacking him.
After ten rounds, Kaol will get another true sight off. We can't do much to stop this, but the rest of the party members should be down.
Kaol likes to protect himself with scrolsl of AI if we are too close to him. Our starting position, however, is not considered too close. We can take advantage of this. Once we see him cast a spell (so his action is empty), we can activate Power Attack (The HLA that is required for Critical Strike) and start attacking him.
Power attack forces the enemy to save vs death at -4 penalty or be stunned for two rounds. Kaol has a base save vs death of 8, and so has a 55% chance of failing each save. We can get in about nine attacks, so he has a chance of passing all the saves of approximately 0.08%, which makes this strategy pretty reload safe. Once he is stunned for two rounds, we can stary to lay into him with critical strikes, and the two rounds he is defenceless for will be more then enough to take him out.
We can also main hand the FOA to slow him as well,
This is a major fight, and it comes with some major loot. The msot notable parts are:
We hit Fighter 20. Not much exciting this level, but next level we get our final proficiency in flails and go up to 10 APR under IHaste. The HLA is our seventh critical strike.
The belt of hill giant strength is the last belt we needed to forge the Girdle of Lordly Might, the girdle we will be using for the rest of the game. It means we no longer have to match our belts to our foes, and combined with Phosphorus we have a static 25 strength.
We also forge the boots of speed. In theory, we could upgrade the circlet as well, but that uses a valuable scroll of memory boosting and only boosts divine spells known, which is of no use to us.
We may swap to the Helm of Balduran again if we want the saving throw bonus or the THAC0 bonus.
The power attack strategy is more powerful than I had expected, and it feels like something that I am underutilizing.
We'er almost to Thief 23. We can get over the line by doing a fight which should be quite a bit easier than the Samia fight we did in the last part.
We prebuff with PFME, ProFire, ProCold, ProElectricity, II, SI:Ab and a PFMW contingent on being hit. Our 5th level spells include more Spell Immunities.
We run up to the Pirate Captian, who spends his first action drinking a potion, so we activate critical strike and kill him in less than a round. The pirate coordinate casts TS and we cannot attack him just yet.
We can pop a second critical strike and take out the rest of the pirates while the coordinator casts Greater Malison.
The pirate coordinator likes to protect himself with scrolls of AI, but one of the conditions for him to use those is us being in melee range (range 5). We can get round that by using the Dwarvern Thrower. He can cast Finger of Death and other save or else spells, but even under the Malison we are guaranteed to pass the saving throws.
We can wear him down with just the dwarvern thrower, though it may take a while. When we have gotten through his mirror images and stoneskins (including contingency) spends his action casting a non-defensive spell, we can rush forward into melee range and take him out that way. That is faster, but if we mistime then he might use one of the AI scrolls.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
We have also hit Thief level 23, picking up our eigth critical strike.
Breaking down each of the remaining pre-spellhold fights and our ability to do them:
No more levels until we get around a million XP, then three at once.
We head to the bridge district and start the quest from Vittorio. Killing Captain Denis and his crew earns us 26.5k XP and no significant loot, sowe do the quest instead.
Grae is unimproved.
Inside is a ghost spider. Just killing a ghost spider is easy for us, but we want todrain all the spider summons first. It takes 24 rounds for them all to be summoned. Previously we had waied them out by kiting (a tactic that isn't possible in the tower), but let's do a bit of maths here:
This gives us a total of 28 rounds of protection, which is enough to drain the ghost spider of summons.
We equip Phosphorus and the SOH to protect us from the improved web. We have a very nice AC here - whisper spiders are missing on a 15, which means that our protectino spells go even further than we need.
Our damage output isn't massive as we are single-wielding under regular haste for 4 APR. We don't really need any more DPS however, as we will spend a lot of the time with just the ghost spider around waiting for it to summon more. We will save the spell trigger (with the IHaste) until near the end when we want to finish off the ghost spider after the last round of summons.
We give Drush the wand for 12250 XP, then kill him for another 650. We also pick up Belm from its hiding spot.
If we hand over the gong, we get 16.5k XP and Denis and gang disappear. If we instead kill Denis, we get 26.5k XP. We kill Denis.
Part 079: Spider Queen:
In the last part, we did a faily uneventful quest, but in the process I realized that we have 28 rounds of PFMW or equivalent available to us.
Let's look at the Spider Queen's summoning scripts. She has two - the ghost spiders, which take ten rounds to full summon, and the whisper/killer spiders, which take 20 rounds to fully summon. Since both summon scripts can't go in the same round, she will need 22 rounds to fully exhaust her summon scripts. She will also summon a few extra spiders with her Improved Web, but we will not try to drain those.
She can also cast remove magic, but no other spells. She won't cast remove magic until she sees an illusionary type enemy (eg the mislead family, but I'm not sure if any of that family are still in the game), so we don't need to worry about it.
Looking at the area script, the area transitions will be disabled when the Spider Queen appears, but will be re-enabled as soon as she is dead.
Since we put the spider figurine into the container, it has not despawned and we can pick it up.
If we use two of Blur, Helm of Balduran and Protector amuley, we can get our saves vs death and spell to good enough that we will guarantee passing ever saving throw even on a 1. We will want to swap in the amulet of power as we recast our defence spells. We can also equip the sentinel shield (from Samia's group) for the best AC.
The Spider Queen has AC-10, compared to the -12 of a ghost and the -6 of a whisper. Similarly, the Queen has a THAC0 of -17, compared to -4 and -2. The Queen's THAC0 is so good that she will hit us most times, no matter what we do. If we single-wield we get 4 APR, and ghosts/whispers will need a 18/20 to hit us. If we dual-wield, we get 5 APR and ghosts/whispers will need 13/15 to hit us. Therefore, I will be single wielding as the extra longevity is worth the 20% decrease in DPS.
We stand on the location where the exit trigger will be when it reappears and wait for the spider queen to appear.
We quickly get surrounded by spiders. We start attacking the non-ghost/queen spiders that are adjaced to us so we do not leave the exit spot. I like to prioritize whispers, then killers, then spirits, then lesser spirits.
We don't have to refresh PFMW as soon as the old one wears off, I like to take a few rounds between to be safe. With Stoneskin up, the onyl damage we take is a bit of magic damage from ghost spiders.
Look at all these spiders. When tanking with stoneskin between PFMWs, I like to turn on auto-pause on hit to make sure I can refresh PFMW just as the last stoneskin goes down, and turn it off when we have PFMW up. I may also take an oil of resurgence for safety.
When we have used the memorized PFMWs and the contingency one, it is time to go on the offensive. We fire our spell trigger (with just that and the AI as the remaining non-scroll PFMWs) and start hitting the spider queen, dual wielding Phosphorus and Belm (as we need +4 weapons to hit her).
In two critical strikes, we can get the Queen down to near-death status. We don't finish her off. What we do instead is continue to take out the other nearby spiders, but if we notice her health bar has regained a portion we hit her again a couple times to get her back down to one portion.
When to actually finish off the Queen depends on how brave you are. I like to wait until I have fired my last PFMW, then two rounds in turn the critical strikes back on and take out the queen. Reload safety may involve taking her out sooner.
The spider queen dies for 90k XP, and becomes our new most powerful vanquished. We make sure to grab her eggs via the quickloot menu, and take out a few more lesser spiders on our last PFMW while the exits reopen.
We can rest up, rebuff and head back in. We will take out everything except the ghosts.
To make certain that we have drained the spiders, we can exit again to rest up and rebuff. When we enter, if the ghosts do not summon any more spiders, then we have fully drained them and can finally take them out.
In total, this fight is worth a touch under half a million XP.
We do have the ingredients to forge the improved spider figurine, but I'm not sure I want to, as it would require us to do another sell off. In order to be efficient I want to have these sell offs be large and infrequent, and I'm not sure the figurine would help much against any of the fights we have coming up. We do technically have infinite money from selling the scrolls from the mage and ranger strongholds, but for the sake of ease of playing I don't want to waste large amounts of in-game time doing this.
Speaking of in-game time, for those who are curious, it is currently day 250 hour 13.
The tweaks claim to:
What these actually do behind the scenes:
What it does not do that I would expect it to do to match the description:
This has two major impacts on us. The first is that it means we won't be able to see some late game content, and as a completionist that irks me. The second is the scroll of vocalize - given that we have an option to make kit-based drops available to everyone, and an option to make mage specific rewards available to everyone, the scroll of vocalize feels like it should be included in one if not both of those categories.
How would everyone feel if I were to tweak the game further so the tweaks did what I expected? I'm confident that we will be able to beat the game with or without additional tweaks, but we will probably have to skip some of the harder fights, either due to inaccessibility (eg old ones) or insufficient resources (eg dracolich).
Great run so far, and thanks for the insight behind the scenes of the encounters. I havent played the IA that much, so it has been fun and educational so far.
I am a super completionist my self - not letting role play or other “setbacks” hinder squeezing everything out of the game. So imo you should install the tweaks - they are there for a reason
Regarding the final quest for Vagrant protagonist, Ancient Secret of Suldanesselar:
The whole storyline is about being a Vagrant and on top of that there is a mechanic implemented that you need to be able to summon a Swanmay (which has some negative side effects) to weaken specific enemies.
I can fully understand that the decision was not to open it for other classes.
Regarding the final quest for Necro protagonist, The Old One:
Again, the story and the encounters are specifically designed for a Necro.
Some of the mirrored enemies in the ancient secret quests do require summoning swanmays to remove their invulnerability. For these enemies, I would probably us EE keeper to give myself the ability to summon swanmays as if I were a vagrant, but only use these summons for the duration of the quest, and only for the fights where it is necessary.
Are they necro specific? Ive done the old ones a while ago and it was definitely heavy on the mage, but I don't recall it using any necro specific mechanics.
Last part was a big pile of XP, culminating in 90k XP for the Queen herself. I am only aware of two enemies that are worth more XP - Mellisan (91k) and Supreme Golems (114k).
The Chromatic Demon is blocking us getting to the rest of Watcher's Keep. It has 95% physical damage resisistance. It shifts between four different elemental forms, each corresponding to one of the elements featured on this level. Every five rounds, it changes to a random shape, opening up a weakness to a new element, where it only has 50% resistance. Although we can see it changing shape at the start, once the fight starts it will change to its red form, where it is weak to cold damage.
Cold is a bit of an awkward damage type - this would be much easier if it was fire. Our spells prepared include:
We stand to the right and release the demon.
The demon appears and turns into red form. Its summons take some time to gate in, which traps the demon in place for a bit - enough time for us to cast limited wish.
We choose one-time wish and control over time to get a timestop. This gives us three rounds to play with. We will spend our first action casting lower resistance from scroll, and then with out second cast alacrity.
With the amulet and the circlet, our casting time is reduced by 2 per spell, and we have a total of 20 casting time, of which the first 10 will be under TS. Our cast order will therefore be:
We will then move in to start attacking the chromatic demon in melee, ignoring the summons (though some will likely die in the crossfire).
Critical strike doesn't increase our DPS much as the demon is immune to critical hits, but it does at least protect us from natural 1s. The cold spells tend to do about 125 total damage to the demon.
Once every five rounds, the demon can polymorph into a new form. Once per polymorph it can use Lower XXX Resistance, where XXX is the damage type in question. We may want to chug an oil or resurgence for regeneration (our action isn't being used for much else).
Within the contingent PFMW, we can get the chromatic demon down to its last pip on the health bar.
It tends to die completely in the second or third PFMW that we naturally cast. Its summons disappear once the chromatic demon is dead, but since they are not worth any XP or loot, we don't care. The demon itself is with 55k XP.
We get some good loot here:
Returning to the keep, we can use the forge to upgrade the flail and get 7450 XP. Our new default setup will be mainhanding the FOA and offhanding Phosphorus.
Part 081: Watcher's Keep Maze Level:
The last part wasn't worth much XP, but it does unlock the third level of Watcher's Keep, which has a lot of XP in it.
We land in AR3003, and if we follow Yakman we go through to AR3011 to see Helm's Supreme Golem.
The golem tells us that we are not experienced enough - we will want to have at least 4.2 million XP and be in chapter 6 or later for the golem to think that we are experienced enough. We say that we will come back later when we are more experienced.
In order to cure Yakman we will need to heal him using specifically the cleric spell Heal. Unfortunately, we canot do this, as all of the items that cast Heal are on Self or Party, so he will unfortunately be left mad.
The area with the Golem is AR3011, and it only leads us back to the landing area (AR3003) or to the outside. Our path to clear the area will be:
Most of these areas are straightforward, and I will only go over the tricky ones.
AR3008 is a dead magic zone that dispels us on entering. Fortunately, its contents are vanilla. If we were Lawful Good, we could get the Purifier sword from the stone in the middle, but the best we could do at character creation was Neutral Good.
AR3012 has Tahazzar. If we were neutral or evil we could do our part in the blood war, but instead we just get into a fight straight away with both Tahazzar and Ka'rashur. This fight is a bit tricky because we are still under spell failure from the dead magic zone, so we will want to kite for a few rounds until it wears off, at which point we can PFMW and take them out.
AR3004 is another dead magic zone with vanilla enemies. The cornugons have a nasty saveless poison on hit, so I like to get maximal AC by eqipping full plate mail and the sentinel shield.
In AR3006, we say no to the succubi. They are mostly straightforward, as long as we use the SOH to protect ourselves from the charm effects.
AR3013 is like Tahazzar, but trickier. We don't have to worry about coming from a dead magic zone, so we can use standard buffs (plus ProFire) and it will be easy.
AR3010 has fire and ice glabrezu. They each summon five minions, so we drain them of summons before killing them.
The next area (AR3005) is more difficult. It is a wild magic zone, so we will not want to cast any spells while we are in there. It also features the following enemies:
Furthermore, the hybrid tiefling summons two more elite planar hounds every four rounds for a total of ten additional hounds. She is also immune to normal weapons and protects herself with five PFMWs.
Unfortunately, the hybrid tiefling is probably beyond us. I'll do some other stuff and come back later when we are hopefully a high enough level.
We have at least managed to break the 12 million XP mark, getting us a level in all three of our classes. We get our fifth proficiency point in flails, meaning we can hit 10 APR if we are mainhanding Phosphorus or the FOA. We pick up two more critical strikes (up to 10) and our first hardiness.
I'm holding off on any further tweaks until I find myself completely stuck. The biggest concern is the Dracolich - to handle it safely we will probably need either the Amulet of Hades or mage level 26 (so we cannot be dispelled). Getting the scroll of vocalize isn't strictly necessary if we can gain enough XP.
We also get our first view of timestop. I looked at the TS related scripts in details, and it looks like IA has changed it so that under timestop enemies are immune to all damage. Scripts that populate enemies and areas with loot are set to not run while we are under TS, so any valuable enemy will want to be at least partially fought not under TS.
We have also now used all of the one-time limited wishes except for shapechange. I'm not sure if we will have opportunity to use it.
Mage level 26 is starting to become a major milestone - there are a lot of IA enemies that are mage level 25, such as Firkraag, most liches, and the Hybrid Tiefling. When we hit mage 26, we can start to use II and SI:Div against these enemies.
- 5000 gold
- A potion of Barbarian Essence
- A scroll of Limited Wish
- A scroll of Hand of Undoing
- A scroll of Bless
- A scroll of Protection from Level Drain
None of these are acutally critical items. The potion is kinda important, but we have other sources.One of the reasons that I had been so worried about the dracolich specifically is that it was the most significant bit of missable content, so I wanted to do as much as possible pre-spellhold. With this in mind now, I wonder how possible it would be to to to spellhold before the 2.3 million XP mark to get the additional rewards from going earlier, run through the easy parts of the underdark, and then return later.
My current plan of action for how completionist I will want to be:
Feel free to let me know if you have any concerns/suggestions to change the plan.
Tweaks are okay but the extra fights should not be that meaningful to you.
In the last part, we hit Fighter 21. This is a big level in two ways. It gave us our fifth proficiency point in flails, so we will reach 10 APR under improved haste. It also gave us our last improvement in base THAC0. Since our remaining item upgrades are going to be pretty much all defensive, and our ten critical strikes are plenty for any fight we will not be deliberately extending, we are at pretty much the peak of our offensive output. Barring the occassional gimmick enemy, pretty much every one of our upcoming fight will be a question of how long we can keep up Improved Haste and Arcane Defences.
We are going to be taking out the cowled wizards who interrupt us if we try to cast arcane spells within city boundaries. We're going to be taking advantage of our mage levels and defending ourselves with II and SI:Div.
The mage groups each consist of four members. They are:
Although the CREs created each time are the same, the starting buffs of each CRE is random. Our prebuffs include ProFire, ProCold, PFME, II and SI:Div. We do most of our buffing inside, then haed outside before casting the last arcane buff.
The grey wizard is the only one who can threaten us under SI:Div. Our strategy is to wait for his prebuffs to fire (normally disrupting his initial divination spell), then activate power attack and hit him, as he is weak to stunning.
He has a save vs death of 9, and so will need to roll a 13 or above on each hit. Although he can protect himself with Improved Mantle, he will only do so if he is out of stoneskins. He reliably gets stunned in the first round of attacking, and goes down shortly thereafter.
The rest of the cowled wizards are also weak to power attack, and we can stun them in the same initial two rounds.
With the gray one down, the rest go down easily.
We fight five identical groups. We only get 21k XP for each group, but we do get some sellables.
If something goes wrong, we can always retreat to another part of the city to rest up and rebuff. I like to use the Graveyard, as there are no cowled enforcers that spawn there. I find that sometimes one of the wizards cheats and is able to cast Pierce Magic through II, dispelling our SI:Div, but we can refresh it and be safe (or run away).
The last part was a bit of easy XP, but not much. The remaining cowled wizards would be very difficult in a straight up fight, but fortunately we have access to some cheesy strategies.
We perform our standard buffs, this time using SI:Ab and triggering the fight with PFMW. The enemies that we fight are:
Both Khollynuus Paac and Zallanora summon reinforcements every few rounds - coin golems and maybe some lower level cowled wizards. These summons are not worth any XP however, so we will not bother trying to draw them out.
Our initial goal is to kill the two unnamed wizards from the initial spawn group. Power attack is very helpful here. Since our starting bufffs include II, the enemies will all waste their turns casting divination spells (a bit redundant since there are so many of them), and subsequent turns will need them to rub ray us before they can dispel/breach us. The PFMW we opened with will protect us from the coin golems.
Once this is done, we run away to the graveyeard to rest up (making sure we loot via the quick loot button first). Although most of the wizards will refresh their buffs as soon as we return to the fight, the two named ones will not.
Our next biggest priority is Khollynnus Paac. She likes to protect herself with scrolls of AI, which we want to preserve.
Our plan is to take her out under alacrity. Four lower resistances (one cast, three from spell trigger) will take her MR to 0. Although she has lots of elemental resistance, she only has 70 hitpoints and can be overwhelmed.
We buff up (again including II and SI:Ab to give the enemy mages something to do). We make sure we are standing on the edge of the area transition, cast alacrity, and move to the gates to continue the fight.
Using the AOP and the circlet, our casting time is reduced by 2. This means that under alacrity, we can cast:
Although the description of acid arrow says it has a base casting time of 2, I have noticed that it still seems to have a casting time of 1 under the AOP and circlet, which indicates that its actual base casting time is 3. This is enough to take her out in a single round easily. As always, if things start to look hairy, we can run away.
Zallanora can be taken care of in exactly the same way - she just has an additional 5 HP and is immune to pure magic damage spells like Magic Missile. With both Kholynnus Paac and Zallanora, make sure to loot using the quick menu before leaving.
Zallanora likes to chug a potion to heal up, and this can put her out range of our damage. If we run to melee range of her, the logic to cast PFMW takes precedence over the potion logic, which gives us enough time. If things look really bad, we can breach her near the end of the alacrity (instead of the chain lightnings) and take her out with weapons.
As always, if things look dangerous, we can run away.
With the two named mages down, we can mop up the remainnig summons at our own leisure. The coin golems go down in about a round under critical strike. The mages are all level 16, so should not be able to get us while we're under II and SI:Div (but we will want to be careful of the golems dispelling illusions on hit). For ultimate reload safety, we can try to take down one enemy between each resting and buffing session.
The loot is only notable for monetary reasons. Although we get a scoll of Bigby's Clenched Fist, in IA this has been nerfed so it just does 3d6 crushing damage without saving throw or resistance, no other effects.
In the last part, we cleared out the cowled wizards. We didn't gain any significant loot or a huge amount of XP, it's mostly to make two later fights (Kruin and Limak) easier. We used some cheesy strategies, but if someone finds that too cheesy this is a fight that could easily be postponed for later.
We also got a first glimpse of the "empty the spellbook of damaging spells under alacrity" plan. That is a strategy that is powerful when it is an option, but is unfortunately rarely an option.
The guarded compound has an ambush that fires when we enter the red area. It consists of:
It's a bit of an odd collection of monsters - monster summoning 3 isn't even a distraction for us, and seems very out of place compared to the golems.
At this stage of the game, the fight is not very difficult. We use standard buffs, and prioritize the Assassins, then the skeletons, then the golems. PFMW and the like prove to be very useful.
Although we can rest up in the guarded compound entrance, we cannot leave until we clear out the upper floor.
The upper floor is difficult. It has four regular traps - the inner two are slime traps that inflict a saveless hold and a load of acid damage, and the outer two will true sight us. There is also the area script that will dispel us when we enter - although it has the message "Trap Sprung", it is not a conventional trap.
The main enemies that we have to fight are:
In addition we will have to deal with:
We have access to two undispellable buffs - Giatn Strength (not very useful for us) and Improved Alacrity (very useful for us). We can also store spells in sequencers/triggers/contingencies. The contingency is one that some might find surprising - it is stinking cloud on ourselves on enemy seen. This is because the AI prioritizes zone of sweet air extremely highly, so this will hopefully give us a turn of distraction.
We go in with four PFMW, four RROR and three Improved Mantle prepared in our level 6, 7 and 8 spell slots.
We want to stand on the stairs up and cast Improved Alacrity. I like to also activate Critical Stike because it will run out exactly halfway through the Alacrity.
We run to stand in Melee range of Sion. We don't cast any spells just yet. We make sure to run around the pillar so we avoid the slime trap.
As soon as the dispel hits (about half a round in), we start to buff ourselves. We do the following (all instacast with circlet and AOP):
After that is done, we start to take out Stalman with triple RROR and Breach (all with effective casting time of 3, so total casting time of 12).
When the breach is launched, our alacrity should still be up. We will activate critical strike and start swinging at Sion. He should go down in two or three hits.
From this point, our priorities for taking out the rest of the enemies are:
We might take a bit of damage from storm of vengeance, but as long as we are vigilant at refreshing PFMW, we will be in no major danger. Sion had access to power word kill, but since he was taken out first we are not in danger.
Once the skeletons and golems are down, it means that we can start using Improved Mantle as additional PFMWs.
The assassins will carry on being spawned as long as at least one of the remaining named enemies is alive. Although we could farm the assassins, we get no XP and only mundane leather armour from each of the assassins, so there is no real point. We might as well kill Ketta instead of waiting.
We get quite a lot of loot from this. In addition to a bunch of monetary stuff, we gain:
We have also hit Fighter 22 and Thief 25, picking up our eleventh critical strike and second hardiness.
Part 085: Ancient Lich:
In the last part we took out a major IA improved fight, the guarded compound. This has opened up two more encounters in the upper level of the guarded compound, though. We will be taking on the Ancient Lich.
The ancient lich is a 25th level lich that is notable for two reasons - It comes with a vampire lord initially, and every two rounds it summons two skeleton grandlords (for a total of twelve grandlords after six rounds of summoning).
Importantly, it only has four ruby rays of reversal, so we can use five SI:Abs to be safe.
We buff up, including ProFire, ProEnergy and SI:Ab. The lich as a CC of triple ADHW and a spell trigger of triple Chain Lightning, that ProEnergy should protect us from. We also have memorized four more SIs, a safety ProEnergy, three PFMWs and an AI. We also have two more PFMW hiding out in a a contingency and a spell trigger.
The vampire can dispel our elemental protections on hit, so we will want to take it out first. It leads with Hardiness, but it only has one and is weak to breach. We may want to use a scroll of breach here, they aren't that valuable and it helps us keep up all our SIs.
With the vampire down, we stand next to the lich so it uses its PFMWs as we take out the skeletons. We will want to take a breif break from skeleton killing to take out the Planetar as soon as it is summoned, and we can ignore the rest of the lich's spells.
The skeletons come out at approximately the same rate that we kill them, maybe slightly faster. We may take some incidental damage from the Lich, but we can use our potions to keep our health topped up (making sure we don't spend our action around when PFMW needs refreshing).
When our third PFMW expires, it means that the Lich has summoned all its skeletons and should be attacked. The Lich itself only has three PFMW, so as long as we stand text to it from the start it should be vulnerable from this time. If our ProEnergy has worn off, we can use refresh it or use PFME from scroll (we should have a few left in our bag of holding). Similarly, we can keep ProElectricity in our spell trigger for safety.
Unlike most liches, this one is weak to the slow from the FOA as well as critical strikes, which is nice.
Loot from this fight includes a scroll of memory boosting (our fourth) and a scroll of summon monster 6. This is a new IA 8th level arcane spell that summons an Elite Troll.
We got a total of 270k XP from this (240k of which was from the skeletons), which is enough for us to hit Mage 20. This is a nice level, as we gain extra slots of our two most important spell levels - 6 and 9. We also get a twelfth PFMW.
My big dilemma now is what to do with the scrolls of memory boosting. We currently have four, and there is only one more available pre-spellhold (the Hybrid Tiefling). I was planning on saving them to forge the Memory of the Apprenti (which requires three), but that might not be possible pre spellhold anyway. The other potential candidate to forge would be Nalia's ring upgrade, which requires two scrolls (and also requires Nalia extremely briefly joining the party so her ring can be taken).
EDIT: Looking at the data, it appears we won't be able to (meaningfully) use the scrolls of memory boosting anyway. Breaking down the items individually:
Last time, we cleared out the guarded compound. This is another of the potential locations for the robe of vecna, but unfortunately we did not find it. The remaining two locations are Firkraag and the Twisted Rune. I really hope it's not the Twisted Rune.
Umar is accompanied by a Wondrous Imp. The imp is a level 15/15 fighter/mage, but the only spell of note that it can cast is a spell trigger of triple chain lightning. The important part is that every two rounds, it summons more enemies, in this order:
Umar herself is a 25th level mage who likes to protect herself with scrolls of PFMW. Normally taking her out wouldn't be much of an issue, but we want to gain the maximum XP. Every five rounds, she summons a group of skeletons (two lords and a warlord), for a total of eight rounds of summoning over fourty rounds. That is a very long time to extend this fight. We will also be unable to exit until both Umar and the Wondrous Imp are dead.
We start by clearing out the non-Umar parts of the level. The level has been repopulated since we were last here, and the new monsters are worth a bit of XP. We have to be careful to to engage the monsters too close to Umar, since they may get pulled into the battle early.
We buff up (including ProCold, PFME, ProEnergy, SI:Ab) and head in. We have a safety spell trigger of PFMW, PFME and IHaste.
We prioritize the Planetar, then the IA summons. We try to keep out of range of Umar, so she does not use her PFMW scrolls. We spend our action on refreshing PFMW or SI:Ab. For additional damage output (though potentially a bit less reload safety) we can also spend it on critical strikes for the non-undead enemies.
For safety against Umar's spells, we can equip the Protector Amulet+Helm of Balduran for the saving throw bonuses, or use the SOH. Similarly, a higher risk strategy we can use is that under circlet and AOP our SI casts a fair bit faster than Umar's Breach, so we can wait for her to ruby ray us, wait for her to start casting an abjuration, then refresh SI in response. No-reloaders will not want to be this greedy.
We may find ourselves surrounded, but that is because the imp summons fast. Once the imp's summons are down we can star to take out the skeletons faster than they are summoned. We can go in with three PFMW and two AI prepared, plus one in our safety trigger, plus potentially another in our contingency.
During our PFMWs, we may want to refresh things like ProEnergy.
Once the imp and its summons are dead, we can start to take advantage of our greater speed compared to the skeletons and Umar and run away. It might be tempting to try to take out a few skeleton lords before leaving, but it is safest not to - we don't want our ProEnergy running out by surprise. We can be a bit safer by using ProElectricity, but that will add some competition for our spell slots.
Don't forget to use the quick loot menu before running away.
We can run to the other side of the map and rest up, casting a few things (like stoneskin) along the way. If we run to the other corner of the map, we can rest up and have two or three rounds before the skeletons arrive. Saving the spell trigger for now is likely a good strategy.
Umar follows, but slower. Her spells are refreshed, but not her scrolls, meaning she has very limited castings of Ruby Ray.
Once the skeletons are dead, we again run to the other side of the map instead of waiting here to draw out mroe summons. We try to time it for when she is casting a spell so we do not prompt her to use a PFMW scroll.
Sometimes not all the enemies track us when we rest up. This is good, it allows us to comfortably reset all our spell triggers and contingencies before rebuffing and reengaging.
When we have drawn out all the skeletons, it's time to take out Umar herself. We buff up with ProEnergy, ProFire, ProCold, II, SI:Ab and PFME.
Our goal at this point is maximizing the PFMW scrolls we can obtain from her. We wait outside of melee range and wait for her to use her action while launching RRORs at her.
Once we have ruby rayed her until her SI:Ab is down (the visual indicator of SI is the one we have active), we wait for her to use her action. We will then breach her and run into melee range to take her out.
Notable loot from this fight includes five scrolls of PFMW (if all goes well), and a scroll of ProElements. This scroll is rare in IA. Although it is an ingredient in crafting an important robe, we will also need boots from the Spellhold machine, so we can scribe this.
Finishing the mission gives us 26.75k XP.
We hit Thief level 26, which earns us our 13th critical strike, and means that we have all of our thief skills at at least 100, with pickpocket at 200.
Another breakdown of the remaining encounters (I find making these lists helpful):
We've cleared out Umar, so we will now take on something that I thought until very recently was part of the expanded ranger stronghold.
IA adds a new divine spell, Speak with Animals. It is only used for the squirreled away quest, though we can see some dummied out content about a grand druid quest that should be coming in IAv7.
I have changed it to be an arcane spell, and assigned it to Othala as a known spell.
We run around the map for a bit:
As we heap up the staits, we run into three Prime Assassinators. They are level 27/26 Fighter/Thieves. They each have 40% physical resistance, two hardinesses, and potions of healing and invisibility. Fortunately, they cannot do anything to combat us if we use PFMW, and we have already taken out the Cowled Enforcers.
Our goal in this fight is to try to preserve as many potions from the enemies as possible. They aer worth a pretty nice 25k XP each.
Heading into the house, we meet Lord Acton Balthis. If we ask for a reward, we get 10k XP and some potions. If we do not ask for a reward, we get 15.5k XP and better potions.
He directs us towards the Pitre fight. Unfortunately, the door is warded and needs adamantine dust, so we will be unable to carry on until after the underdark.
Part 088: Shimmering Light:
The last quest had to get cut a bit short because of lack of adamantine dust, and wasn't really a ranger quest (though it does require use of a druid/ranger spell). Time to do one that is both an expanded ranger stronghold spell and we will be able to do a bit more on.
When we head back to the cabin in the Umar Hills, we run into Delon who tells us about a shimmering light in the hills. He tells us that he saw a monster eating a child, but there is nothing we can find right away.
Three days later, Delon appears for a second time, but we have missed the shimmering light. Another three days later, Delon appears for the third time, and this time we can check out the light.
Heading up near Valygar's Cabin, we run into a girl and her father, Roshan. Roshan is on the run for murder, and is arrested shortly after we arrive. He says that he has been framed, and it is our job to prove his innocence. Chief Inspector Auriel is the person we will be coordinating with.
After two days of waiting, she appears. The murdered man was called Delver, and he was on a secret mission but was killed before he could report his findings.
We are given two leads - an enchanter in the Druid Grove, and an illusionist in the Athkatla Sewers.
The enchanter fight is mostly straightforward, so we only need standard buffs. He protects himself with PFMW, but is weak to normal weapons. He has some dominated minions, but we ignore them - killing them costs us a chunk of reputation and doesn't earn any XP.
Notable loot from this fight is a few scrolls of PFMW (attacking with normal weapons will be enough to take him out before he uses any scrolls).
Heading to the temple sewers, we find the illusionist. Instead of dominated minions, the illusionist summons two illusionary vampires and two illusionary golems. We want to be a bit careful - the vampires can dispel ProCold on hit, and we want to keep up ProCold so we can hit through the fireshield safely.
We will want to head to the west as soon as we enter the sewers. The vampires and golems are dispelled by TS, so we can cast that before heading down and kite for a round to take them out.
We also run into a Phantasmal Killer. Since we have at least 15 INT, we can disbelieve it for 12.5k XP. It is instead better to kill it the old fashioned way for 25k XP.
When the phantasmal killer attacks it will dispel us, so we will likely want to have a spell trigger with Improved Haste, ProCold and PFMW in it. Setting up a ProFire or ProElements to protect from her spells will also make things safe.
The illusionist share a weakness for normal weapons, but takes a lot longer to take down, as she has multiple stoneskins. She may summon more golems and vampires, but they aften go away by themselves in a round or so - I think the illusionist's TS is disrupting them.
The exits from the sewers get re-enabled when the illusionist goes down, even if we are still in combat with the phantasmal killer.
The killer has 90% physical resistance, immunity to critical hits, and good regeneration - it is very similar to the fanatic spirits. At this point, we should have enough AI and PFMW to take it out completely in the same attacking session, though for reload safety we may want to retreat, rest up and rebuff before taking out the phantasmal killer.
Returning to Auriel, we are told to talk to Delon. We get told that the shimmering light is back, but this time from Umar Cave.
Heading into the cave, we find the Elire Doppleganger. This is quite a nasty foe.
The doppleganger has to be taken out with physical damage, which he is 75% resistant to. His weapon is particularly nasty - it dispels all protections and buffs (including combat protections and IHaste) on hit, it requires us to make saves vs death at -6 (which we can consistently make), slays summons and regenerates 3 HP/second. It has two of them - one main hand which hits as a +4 weapon, and one offhand which hits as a mundane weapon. PFMW will only protect us for half a round (until the offhand weapon hits us), so we will rely on AI for protection.
We have two AIs, which we can use for protection for eight rounds. We will will want to spend our action time using critical strike so we dont have to worry about its massive AC.
Since AI and PFMW last for slightly under four rounds, we will want to only use two critical strikes on the first AI. We will also want to be extremely vigilant on the last half-round the first AI to refresh the second before we can get hit.
We can also use a slightly higer risk strategy to squeeze out a bit more damage:
Critial strikes make this very consistent, and the doppleganger will consistently be near death but not quite dead by the end of the second AI. Our strategies vary a bit here depending on how reload safe we want to be.
For maximum reload safely, we want to use a scroll of AI to finish the job. Since timing when scrollcasting is a bit tricky, we will probably want to start with a single scrollcast AI and then the second and third will be memorized. We will want to make sure it never hits us, as that will also dispel our IHaste.
The slightly less safe strategy is to load a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Wraithform. This will give us another four rounds of safety, and since we have static 25 STR we will be at peak DPS with a single buff. The wraithform puts us at risk of missing enough of the remaining hits to not take out the Doppleganger. Furthermore, it also disables our casting so we cannot cast subsequent protections, and it stops us from being able to use more critical strikes or other innate abilities.
The doppleganger is only worth 22k XP, which seems quite low when compared to other enemies like the Prime Assassinators. It drops 5k gold and this letter.
Auriel congratulates us, but has no reward. The knight of the order gives us 100k XP, and half of a ciphered note. The other half we will encounter later on.
Roshan gives us this ring. The extra spells are divine only, so don't matter to us. We would get an extra 10 maximum HP over our ROP+2, but we would not get the saving throw bonus of a ROP, so we will not be using it.
We have hit Fighter 23, which earns us another hitpoint and another HLA.
Our next level will be Mage 21. We will be able to put 7th level spells in our contingency, which doesnt' matter a huge amount to us. It's mostly good as a rung we have to climb on the way to Mage 26.
We'll be finishing off the remaining parts of the de'Arnise keep this part.
Roenall is an enemy with a gimmick - he can only be damaged be weapons, has 75% physical resistances, has access to one hardiness, and is immune to Breach. We will need to trigger his hardiness, wait the 13 rounds necessary for it to run out, and then take him out.
We also want to take out Roenall last - when he goes down the batle will be over, and we want to kill everything else first to maximize our XP.
We have a few more minor problems at the keep first. The actions we take are:
When the keep messenger appears, we have a few in-game days to respond and beat Roenall. We will want to do our resting up and pre-rest casting before we talk to the Majordomo, as once we talk to the Majordomo our timer before the battle becomes worthless.
We set up a contingency of PFMW on enemy seen and a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin.
This spot on the bridge is the best point for prebuffing. We want out buffs to include ProCold, ProFire, ProElectricity, PFME (scrollcast), SI:Ab and IHaste. We have left memorized three Breach, four PFMW, three Improved Mantle and two AI.
The enemies we have to fight are:
As our PFMW triggers, the enemies ignore us and chop down our soldiers. We hit Roenall enough times to trigger his Hardiness. If we go in with II up, the mage will spend his first action casting TS.
We move in to take out the mage. He may protect himself with PFMW, but we can swap to normal weapons. Of all the enemies, only the mage and golems are weak to critical hits.
With the mage down, we take out the Golems. Once the golems are down we can use our improved mantles as additional PFMWs.
We spend the next few rounds taking out the remaining guards and soldiers. The guards each have a Hardiness, so we will want to focus on them when we have an action free to actiate hardiness, and focus on the soldiers when we are ancitipating refreshing PFMW.
Finally, it comes down to us and Roenall. His hardiness will have worn off by now, and he does not have another, but he does have 15 potions that each heal 40 health. Combined with his regeneration, large health pool and physical resistances, he will take a long time to take out.
Our buffs may start to run out, which is why we put an extra IHaste in our spell trigger. We prioritze the PFMW first and then the AI, but we save the Improved Mantle to the end - the mordy sword hits as a +4. It's unlikely to cause us issues, but for safety we try to leave the IMantles for when it is gone.
We make use of the quickloot menu throughout the battle. Roenall's mage drops a few nice scrolls, Roenall himself drop a generic +3 longsword, and the rest of the loot is merchant fodder (but some very nice merchant fodder).
We have successfully defended our keep. Since it stops producing money after the 20th week, we celebrate our victory by:
This lets us hit Mage 21. The additional level 7 and 8 spells are better than nothing, but not that notable to us.
It looks like the next step will be Spellhold. Pretty much all the remaining content either requires loot from Spellhold (either directly or as a crafting ingredient), requires mage level 26, requires the ranger boots (which need us to have finished chapter 5), or some combination of those.
The good news is that we are quite overleveled - IA expects you to be just under 2.4 million XP before going to spellhold (that is the tougher spellhold threshold), and we are at approximately 14 million XP. It should be pretty smooth sailing for us.
It would be nice if we could take out the Dracolich, but since we can come back later it is not disastrous if we do so. The only content that I think we might have to skip is the mithril golem.
Last time we hit 14 million XP. It's finally time to go along with the plot of the game.
We have a sell-off to Ikert, earning us about 350k gold. We drop it on upgrading our ring setup to a +4 and a +2, the upgreded spider figurine, and The Truth longsword, our first +5 weapon. Our optimal weapon setup is now mainhanding Phosphorus and offhanding The Truth.
We say hello to Aran, and he introduces us to Saemon, and we are off.
The vampire encounter here is vanilla.
We call the dwarf here crazy so he fights us. The fight is slightly improved, but IHaste and PFMW make it simple.
Chremy is also vanilla. We kill him and give Ginia money to escape for a bit of XP.
Sanik and his assassin are vanilla.
Perth is improved. He is a 25th level mage that has backup of three coin golems, summoned with gaps of 5 rounds each. We buff up with ProFire, ProElectricity, ProEnergy and PFME. We take out the golems as they get spawned, and protect ourselves with SI:Ab when he tries to dispel us. We make sure to keep our distance so he does not use his scrolls of AI, and use our action each round to ruby ray him until he is breachable.
When the third golem is summoned, we breach him and go in for the kill. We may need to breach more than once.
With Perth's wardstone, we head to the Asylum Exterior. We clear out all the enemies (including notably a group of noble Trolls), but do not actually enter the asylum.
We don't have the charisma to do the sleeping potion plot, as that needs 15 charisma. It's only worth 1k XP anyway. We instead rush in and chop all the guards into pieces.
Galvena is a level 20 fighter. She is accompanied by Vadek, a level 22 Conjurer. Vadek has scrolls of AI that we want to preserve. Galvena has some potions that would be nice to preserve, but it's not as important as Vadek's scrolls. Until both of them are dead, we cannot leave the area and one guard a round gets spawned, up to nine guards. The guards aren't worth any XP, but they do drop sellables.
We buff up with II, IHaste and Profire, then cast alacrity and head in.
Under alacrity, we cast the defensive buffs with a casting time of 2 or less, fire three ruby rays at Vadek, and breach him. Ideally he will spend his first action casting TS and go down before he uses a scroll, but the close proximity of this map means he may use a scroll, in which cast we may need to breach him again. Once breached, we can activate critical strike and power attack and take him out. He does have a contingency on stoneskin, so we can either use two breaches to take out that as well or use power attack to stun him (with 10 APR, it's pretty certain to affect him).
With Vadek down, we take down the guards - there are nine of them, and they spawn one per round. They're not worth any XP, but they are worth a bit of money in sellables. We can easily tank the nine rounds with PFMW, IMantly and AI.
Freeeing Claire is worth a total of 12k XP, which is just enough for us to hit Thief level 27.
Chapter 4 is definitely a step down in terms of difficulty comapred to the earlier parts of the game.
We need at least 16 charisma to convince Desharik to send us to the Asylum, which we do not have and cannot buff to. We can still loot his house, including picking his locks and disarming his traps for a bit more XP. Fortunately, we do not miss out on any XP for going in the direct way.
The intial scenes where we get our soul stolen is straightforward and all vanilla. We lose access to our bhaalspawn powers, but fortunately we have access to 25 STR without DUHM.
Fun fact - it turns out there are only two creatures named "Demon" in the entire game, I expected there to be a lot more.
The options we can choose are:
- Give up skill, costing us 50k XP (this option is disabled in IA)
- Give up health, costing us 1 constitution
- Give up mind, costing us 1 intelligence
- Give up wits, costing us 1 wisdom
- Give up youth, costing us 1 dexterity
We choose to give up the point of wisdom.We tell Imoen to go back to the Copper Coronet by herself. I always feel really bad in this conversation.
In this map, every time we rest three XP-less whisper spiders appear as we are over the XP threshold. They are not much of an obstacle for us at this point, however.
This room contains an improved spider group. It's dangerous only if it takes us by surprise. Reload safety will want resting up and buffs before heading in.
The riddle room and the puzzle room are straightforward. We will want to grab the boots from the puzzle room after completing it in case we want to forge another pair of boots of speed.
Heading into the southwest room, we run into a spider group including a ghost spider. We do what at this point is a pretty standard process of drawing out all the summons. We have a static save vs spells of -5, so we do not need the SOH to protect ourselves against improved web.
We make sure we only clear our these parts of the map and no more - the portal room in the top left corner includes a nasty golem encounter we will want to especially prep for.
In the last part, we did the easy parts of the first asylum level. There are quite a few parts left to do, some of which are quite challenging.
This area is safe to rest in, as long as we never activate the book. We will want to beat all parts of the book challenge without resting to get the best rewards.
We will occasionally run into Asylum Scouts. They are just like Gem Golems, except they are worth no XP and drop no gold.
Outside the library is another shade lich plus skeletons group. We've taken this kind of thing out before, so it we properly prep as before it is no major challenge.
Dace is vanilla and easily dispatched.
Once Dace is dead, a Vampire Lord appears. We can breach to get rid of its hardiness, then it goes down easily. It drops a bag of holding, but we already have teh bags of holding we need.
Beating Dace and the Vampire Master also opens up the area transitions back to the previous part of the Asylum.
This allows us to hit Fighter 24, which means we can start to rank up our proficiency in Longswords.
Part 093: Asylum (Librarian):
We've done the main parts of the first two spellhold areas, but we have a few tricky encoutners left in each of them.
Running into the library, we find a coin golem and the Cat O' Nine Lives. We start by taking out the coin golem first, then the cat. Although neither of these enemies are casters, we buff up with ProEnergy, SI:Ab and PFME.
As the name suggests, the cat cames in nine iterations of increasting difficulty. The weakest has 55% physical resistance and makes us save on hit at a +4 bonus. The strongest has 95% physical resistance and makes us save on hit at a -4 penalty. Fortunately, each iteration is weak to critical strikes. We are not in much threat of being killed by it, this is just a very long fight. We may want to keep a second Improved Haste in a spell trigger for safety.
Once the cat and the golem are down, the librarian appears.
The librarian summons a number of bookworks and students. They are worth no XP and can transfer their hitpoints to the librarian.
The exit remains enabled, so we can run back to the first area to rest up and rebuff.
The librarian will be where we left it, though it will repeat its buffing procedure when we return. It has three PFMW memorized, one in its prebuffs and one in a contingency, so we will need to wait twenty rounds to deal with it. Similar to other Liches, we will need to protect ourself with PFME and elemental resistance spells, protect our protections with SI:Ab, and stand close enough to trigger the PFMW.
We attack the students and bookworms. Not only does this give us something to do, but when damaged they transform into Greater Wolfweres and Skeleton Lords, who are worth XP.
Loot from this fight includes:
Part 094: Asylum (Kurtulmak):
In the last part, we finally tipped over 15 million XP. We did do a cheesy strategy of resting up in the middle of a fight, but we could probably find less cheesy strategies as an alternative.
We get ready for the Kurtulmak fight. We use ProElecticity, ProElements and ProEnergy for a total of 250% electrical resistance. We mainhand the Truth as it deals slashing damage.
We have to deal with three amber golems, three guardian spirits, and three kobold shamans.
It takes two critical strikes to take out a golem - we attack until the discharge damage gets too high, then we back off. We spend the two rounds between refreshing PFMW or healing with potions or the golden cat figurine. Using an oil of resurgence is recommended.
We can also take down the non-golem enemies with our weapon attacks while waiting for the electrical discharge to die down. Safely taking down all the golems will require six golem attacking sessions with gaps of two or three rounds apart, and so will be possible if we get maximal PFMW and AI from our 6th and 9th level spell slots. As before, having a safety spell trigger that includes PFMW is a good idea for reload safety.
To make tihngs reload safe, we can always run back to the first part of spellhold.
I like to rest and rebuff after taking out each golem. The amber golems are so difficult for a solo character, I don't know if this fight is possible without cheese.
And additional bit of good news is that mirror images can block the electrical discharge damage. We will need to be under PFMW to stop the golems dispelling illusion on hit, but we can get a full round of critical strikes in if we mirror image first.
You seem to know this game and IA inside and out, how many times have you played it through?
As for IA, I have four ot five partial playthroughs. The furthest I've gotten is clearing the main story to just before the tree of life, and clear the JD fight at WK.
Near Infinity is an incredibly important tool for analysing the game, and I wouldn't be able to get into this amount of detail without it. I don't have any of the details memorized from previous playthroughs (other than very high level stuff that I rememver from years ago). Whenever I encounter a significant new enemy, my process is to look up the enemies in Near Infinity, look at their scripts and equipment to see what's going on.
For most enemies the biggest concerns are:
Once I have done this, I try the fight a couple times until I feel safe in the strategy.
Last time we took out three Amber Golems. That fight is exceptionally nasty for a solo character, and we would need to burn some valuable PFMW scrolls if we were not able to cheese it and rest in the middle. Forthunately, although there are a few IA enemeis that can lower elemental resistance, only Amber Golems can lower the resistances on hit.
Next up is the book challenge. This is a long grindy fight and we will want to preserve how long our buffs last for. There are eleven rounds of enemies, and we will have four in-game hours to beat them all to collect the best rewards.
The enemies that we will have to face are:
Only the last two are ones that we will want to draw out the summons of.
Fortunately, we do not have to wait for one of the enemies to be defeated before we can spawn the next one. The first four rounds we all summon at once and let our summons take out the enemies.
We start with IHaste for the beholder, and only need to use long lasting buffs for the foes from Beholder through to Gem Golem. The otyugh has poison, but if it poisons us we can drink an elixier of health.
We summon the ghost spider and the elemental golem at the same time, so we can wait out their summons. The ghost spider needs 24 rounds to drain all summons, and the elemental golem needs thirty six.
We will want to PFMW up here and take out the whisper spiders as their web lariat is annoying. We can also take out some of the other summons while under PFMW, as they can clog up our movement.
Once we have thinned out the enemies, we kite the ghost spider and elemental golem around the map. we may need to pop another PFMW to allow us to take out summoned minions if we get caught in the corridoors. Make sure to use quickloot to get the drops off the floor.
Once we have drawn the enemies to the far side of the map, we can activate the book to get our rewards.
Our rewards most notable include another scroll of memory boosting and our first potion of barbarian essence. These potions provide undispellable stacking 20% physical damage resistance, which means that they will be extremely important in the late game.
Once we have the book rewards, we can go to the other room, rest up, and reengage as many times as we want. The ghost spider and elemental golem will reset to the book room, while the summons they previous generated will be scattered around the map where they were before. We can therefore enter via the other entrace to take out any remaining summons before engaging the main foes and triggering the next wave.
Reloaders will want to make sure that the elemeental golem only summons gem golems, not coin, as those are worth more XP and loot.
An interesting discovery that I made during this - golems (including the elemental golem) and skeleton lords are vulnerable to web effects like improved web. I'm not sure if this can be utilized to make any fights easier, but if someone is finding these enemies difficult then this is an avenue that can be looked into. Fortunately, our save vs spells is -5, which means that we are guaranteed to save.
I found that sometimes the ghost spider's initial summons would be reset on rest, leading to fight more spider summons than normal. Since these are worth XP, this means that we generate more XP than normal, and could in theory use this as an infinite XP source. I will stick to the rule of six that IA establishes with most summons.
This is worth a nice chunk of XP, and we manage to get a level up in all three of our classes. We go up to 19 critical strikes, getting close to the limit of 20. Getting the extra spell slots at level 6 and 9 is also fantastic, those are our favourite spell levels.
Part 096: Asylum (Portal Room):
In the last part we got a triple level up, our third or fourth of the entire playthough. Those are always pretty nice. We also got a big pwoer boost in extra level 6 and 9 spells, meaning that we can top out at six PFMW and three AI, plus contingency and spell trigger for another two for a total of 44 rounds of protection.
We left this room alone earler, and here we see why. The room contains:
We trigger the fight and immediately run away. The Ice Golem is the first enemy we will be fighting that has access to the purge magic ability. This ability dispells everything on us, which we cannot protect against in any way. The ice golem can fire it every four rounds, with no limit. It splashes in a small area, which means that in parties an important strategy is managing who gets purged, but for us we have no way of avoiding it.
This ability will becomes more common the more powerful the enemy we face is. It is for this reason that our late game will rely on equipment that gives us abilities, as those persist through purge magic.
We can retreat to the other area, rest up and rebuff. The non-ice golems will pursue us to here, so we can repeat the process of drawing out the summons. The ice golem does not pursue us to here, so we can fight safe from purge magic.
This elemental golem and its summons are not worth money or XP, so there is no need to draw out all the summons.
The reason why this works is because the ice golem is too large to fit through this gap.
We could fight the ice golem, but it would be very difficult, and we would get no reward - it is considered part of the punishment for going to spellhold at such a high level, and gives no XP.
Our goal is to go around through the crushing trap.
We can detect the trap, but any attempt to disarm it sets it off. Fortunatly, each part of the traps is only triggerable once, and we can trigger it with our summons. Therefore, we will detect the trap to know where to stand, use the Horn of Valhalla or similar to summon a minion to trigger the trap, go past, and repeat for the other part of the trap.
Despite the visual appearance that we are crushed, we are in fact quite safe.
Just past is a group of yuan-ti, which is not a problem for us at this point.
The portal encounters are not very threatening:
We will also want to take out the Ruhk and memphits for a bit more XP, leaving just the ice golem.
With this done, we talk to the statue and finally carry on into the next part of the Asylum.
Part 097: Asylum (Slayer Level):
Last part was a bit anticlimactic - I was spending ages trying to find a way to beat ice golems with our equipment, but it turns out that one wasn't worth any XP and was skippable. This part should cover some more of interest.
Note that in the next part we will still have to deal with the XP-less asylum spawns from earlier, but they are no different so I won' be covering them in detail.
We have a few minotaurs to fight in this level. They have the IA abilities like saveless holding on hit, but PFMW will protect us.
The bodhi fight is unimproved.
The room with the paintings contains another yuan-ti group but is otherwise unimproved.
Just beyond is a group of four skeleton warlords.
This room has three coin golems. If we loot the chest, the door locks us in as the three golems attack us.
When we beat that room, we have the Cloak of Magic Shielding and a Scroll of Memory Boosting appear in our inventory.
The one remaining enemy here is the Mithril Golem, which I'm quite worried about. It has immunity to all damage, except 5% immunity to slashing and crushing. It needs +3 or better weapons to hit it. It regenerate 1 HP per round, and ifw e run away for 18 minutes it fully heals.
The real nastiness its its weapon. It insta-slays all summoned creatures, and dispels illusionary, combat, specific and spell protections. It inflicts save-less bleeding of five damage per round for five rounds. In addition to that, its script lets it remove our protections once per round.
This is the script that removes our protections every round. Our plan is to be quick enough with the pause that we can cast a protection spell as soon as that fires.
The way that auto-pause works is that it will pause every six seconds after we first give an attack command while in range to attack an enemy. We want to not attack the golem until its protection removal script fires, at which point we will insta-cast PFMW and start engaging it in combat. This ensures that our end of round will fire immediately after the golem's combat protection removal fires, allowing us to insta-cast another PFMW to keep ourselves safe. It does not give us any window to activate critical strikes, unfortunately.
We maximize our PFMWs by putting one in a contingency on enemy seen and having a spell trigger with PFMW and IH. We also have six PFMW memorized and three AI, for a total of 11.
The optimal setup is to mainhand phosprohus and offhand The Truth. We buff with IHaste and MGOI, as that dissuades the golem from using its slow ability.
We summon some creatures (up to the limit of 5) and send them in. They aren't here to last a long time, they are just here to get a bit of damage in and potentially soak up the Golem Slow.
I like to keep the horn of valhalla unused for this. The exits backwards is disabled and the exit forwards is still enabled, so if things look hairy we can summon the warrior as distraction and the run away far enough to rest.
This is a pretty grindy fight, but it is pretty predictable. Taking into account critical hits and misses, we deal the golem 20 damage per round. It regenerates 1 hitpoint per round. It has 240 hitpoints, so the fight will last 12-13 rounds.
We will be able to grand for 10 rounds with just our memorized PFMWs and AIs. After that, we will need to start scrollcasting to keep going. Fortunately, we have a lot of scrolls at this point.
This is an area where we are suffering for the robe of vecna location. Two of the four locations we were able to clear beforehand, and if we were able to pick up the robe at one of those two then we would be able to get an extra six rounds of stalling here and not need to restort to scrollcasting.
The mithril golem goes down for 50k XP, and drops ten tokens to bring us up to a total of 35. We want to hold onto ten of them for forging a flail later on, so we effectively have 25 to spend.
We have the following options:
The Robe of Elemental Resistance is a nice to have, whereas the Boots of the Ranger Lord is one of the most important bits of equipment. However, we already have one pair of boots of speed and only need one more, the only real cost of which is a scroll of Permanency, which we from this point in the game we will not find ourselves constrainted on. There are no other sources for the boots needed for the Robe of Elemental Resistance, so I will get those.
Eternal Melody isn't very good in version 6 of IA (It was great in version 5 where it offered permenant alacrity). I am not sure if the Robe of Elemental Resistance is a required item for us - I can think of a few fights where it would be useful, but those probably have workarounds that don't requrie it.
We have covered the Mithril Golem. I have tried to come up with a reload safe strategy, but I found myself running against engine limitations - for instance, the one round that we wait between spells is slightly different than the one round that the golem pauses between getting rid of our protections, we have slight delays in our protection spells due to animation, etc. I am probably going to have to declare this fight not reload safe unless the Robe of Vecna is on Kaol or Sion and the Memory of the Apprenti can be forged before this fight. Fortunately, the items that it blocks are not necessary. There are no more fights from now until chapter six that I am really worried about (since we can delay the Dracolich).
On the topic of reload safety, I am unsure how to handle some aspects of randomness. I consider the core part of reload safety to be having a reliable strategy in fights, where I can take choices to influence the outcome. There are other things (like the deck of many things) where it is random, and there is nothing I can do to influence the outcome or repeat the process. I don't consider that to be "fair" randomness, and outside the scope of finding a reload-safe strategy.
There are also some things that are in the middle - when an elemental golem summons a minor golem as a minion, there is a 50/50 chance that it will be a gem or a coin golem. We can beat the minor golem no matter what it is, but we could be missing out on 2k XP for each coin golem. I am on the fence as to whether I consider this "fair" randomness or not, as there is nothing I can do to influence the outcome.
In the last part, we took out the Mithril Golem. That was a rather awkward fight, where we found ourselves impacted by game engine limitations. It is probably the first or second least reload safe part of this run since we have not been able to obtain the Robe of Vecna before coming here.
This part of the asylum is mostly straightforward. We can use the quickloot menu here to pick up the items we can't normally get to.
We will want to give the apparition the most hostile response at every opportunity so we fight the hardest challenges which means the most XP.
Lonk the Sane isn't a major threat to us - he protects himself with PFMW, but we can go under with mundane weapons. We will want to protect ourself against his Fireshield Red and triple ADHW Chain Contingency. A SI:Ab will be enough to keep him busy while we hack him to bits.
Right after the Lonk fight, we are thrown into the Irenicus fight. Irenicus (this one is PPIRENI2.CRE) is a 30th level mage. He protects himself from spells with II and SI:Ab. His prebuffs also include elemental protection buffs, and AI to protect himself from weapons. He has five more scrolls of AI and we cannot really bait him into using them in another way.
He has 96 hitpoints, and our goal is to get him below 20%. We will have to wait him out for 24 rounds. During that time we will protect oursevles with SI:Ab. Irenicus has a total of six RRoRs, so we will want to supplement our SI:Abs with spell turning (7) and GOI (6).
As for what Irenicus can do to us, we have to watch out for:
We buff ourselves going into Lonk with:
In addition to this, we have prepared:
Although Irenicus himself isn't a major offensive threat, he summons a lot of minions. Every round, he summons a group of six Asylum Scouts, up to three rounds (18 golems). Since we cannot attack Irenicus, we will spend our time waiting for his AIs to wear off to take out these golems.
The other minions (the clone and murderers) are ignorable. It is probably safest to keep them around as extra spacing for the very brief windows between PFMW. We will want to be careful to only use two actions while under PFMW, as we will want to refresh it before the end of the fourth round.
Irenicus will cast other spells mixed in with the Ruby Rays, so we do not have to spend every action refreshing our protections. One thing to look out for is that our SI (or other protections) may expire due to duration, so we will need to refresh them.
The spell trigger refreshing our IHaste is very useful, as that can run out over time, as well as refreshing our GOI. Irenicus will likely use Shadow Door and hide while we take out the last of the Asylum Scouts.
I find that the scouts get finished off around when we start our last PFMW/AI, though we have scrolls for safety. We want to make sure that PFME is still up before engaging Irenicus to protect against his contingency, and refresh it from scroll if it is not. We can also use The Truth's TS ability to get through his illusions.
Irenicus himself has 75% physical resistance, but is weak to critical strikes. He never refreshes his SI:Div, so if we have TS up he will waste his actions casting illusions.
We decide to take Saemon's ship back to the mainland.
The rest of Brynnlaw is mostly uneventful. I discover that you can kill of Desharik for 11k XP and some nice sellables.
During the ship fight, we cannot kill all the enemies. We want to prioritize the Gith over the Sauagin,
The intro fight is against a Yuan-Ti Mage. We have a major level advantage, so a single remove magic will blow it away.
This is enough for us to hit Thief 29 and get our 20th critical strike.
Part 099: City-of-Caverns:
In the last part, we finally finished up in Spellhold. This time we're doing an area that is easily missable, and it feels like a bit of a dodgy game design, to be honest - it's very easy for a casual player to completely miss this area on their first play through.
We can pickpocket the king. This not only gives us the robe to go down, it also gives us the treasury key. Notably, the treasury contains a scroll of ProElements, which is a rare scroll in IA.
We should watch out - an improved spider group spawns here.
Solving the imp's puzzle gives a scroll of Permanency and the Boots of Etherealness.
The Spectator Beholder, one of my favourite characters in the entire BG saga, acn be talked into letting us take the treasure since we have over 12 wisdom.
As we head through the city, we run into some hostile rebels. The non-casters are negligible. The casters have enough arcane buffs to be annoying, but they are only caster level 17 (compared to our 22), so we can go in under II and SI:Div to protect ourselves, and hack them to pieces. They can PFMW, but are weak to normal weapons. In terms of elemental resistance, we only really want ProElectricity or ProEnergy, as they have the IA staple of spell triggers of triple Chain Lightning.
We have a choice at this point - side with the King, or side with the Prince. Siding with the Prince gives about 15k XP from the fighting, and 60.5k XP as quest reward. Siding with the King gives no quest reward XP, but the Prince fight gives more total XP. Fortunately, we can get both sides.
We start by siding with the prince and taking out the king. He is unimproved, and goes down easily.
We then buff up and attack the prince. He is immune to all damage, and every few rounds he will summon a group of four Sea Snakes. The Sea Snakes only have 50% physical resistance and are weak to critical strikes. PFMW blocks both the Prince and the Sea Snakes.
There are a total of three groups of snakes, which are summoned four rounds apart. Once all of them have been summoned, the Prince is vulnerable and can be taken out, again being vulnerable to critical strikes.
Notable loot from these fights includes the Impaler spear, the Wave blade, a scroll of Soul Armour and a scroll of Mordenkainen's Sword (the first we have gotten so far).
Clearing out the city is enough experience for us to get two level ups - Fighter 26 and Mage 23. We cannot get another Critical Strike, but we can pick up a single Smite, which is a Critical Stike with some extra fanciness, and another Hardiness to go with it.
Int he last part we hit Mage 23 - the big threshold of level 26 is getting closer and closer. Now it's time for us to go to finally go to the Underdark.
We clear out the elemental portals. Each portal has ten elemental guardians for a nice bit of easy XP - 90k, to be precise.
We free Vithal and agree to help him out. Although we can buy a scroll of freedom here, they are extortionately expensive, so we are better off learning the spell before leaving Athkatla.
Continuing on, there is a group of Drow and two ghost spiders. The only defensive buffs needed are II, SI:Div and a series of PFMWs. We will want to draw out all the summons of the ghost spiders.
There are a few uses of adamantine dust in IA. For us, we will want two units - one for forging, one to access the Pitre fight. We will make sure to sell the rest of it before leaving the UD.
To the west is a group of spore colonies and a myconid king. We don't even need to buff for this fight, just be patient to draw out all the summons.
We prep for the Balor with ProFire, ProCold and PFME. We are of a high enough level that its Remove Magic does nothing. It has high physical resistance, but only protects itself with two stoneskins and a single PFMW and is weak to Critical Strike. Note that it is innately immune to mundane weapons, so waiting out its single PFMW is necessary. It may lower our fire resistance, but we can drink potions to keep that topped up, or tank the fireballs that it casts.
Returning to Vithal, we obtain 20k XP no matter what we choose at the end, and see what I believe is our second typo of the game (after Elite Doppleganger. We gain no XP reward for being nice, so we will attack him to take the full loot and an extra 20k XP.
Prebuffs for this fight are IHaste, ProFire, PFME, II and SI:Div, as he is level 22. Our reputation gets decreased by 2, but we will increase it up to 20 again before we leave the underdark. He can protect himself with PFMW but is weak to normal weapons.
In the southeast corner are Kuo-Toans. They are not massively dangerous (II, SI:Div and PFMW are all the protection we need), but they are annoyingly durable.
There's a lot to do in this area, and our next visit will be to the soul gem machine, which we will activate from left to right.
The first person inside is Madman Aganalo, who is an uninteresting fight.
The second is Raevilin Strathi. We could get 15k XP for casting Heal on him, but we do not have the spell. Fortunately, the 15k XP for killing him is just as nice. ProFire and PFME are the important protections here.
Riti is another unimproved fight.
Alchra is a level 25 mage lich, so we cannot use II and SI:Div. Fortunately, we only have to deal with three RRoRs, which is easy. We will also want to have up ProFire, ProElectricity and PFME. There are a total of five PFMWs we need to wait out - one from the prebuffs, and four cast later on.
Bedlen Daglefodd is next, giving us a break from the fights. Returning his father is worth 10k XP.
The final trapped soul is Gont of Riatavin. Being nice is worth nothing, killing him is worth 7k XP.
As we cross the bridge, we run into something we haven't seen for a while - an IA ambush, where we get dispelled before the fighting happens. Fortunately, we have loads of options to use here. The only thing to watch out for is that the auto-pause on enemy seen will not go as the enemies appear during the cutscene, so we will have to be quick with the spacebar.
We want to go in with a spell trigger loaded with PFMW, IHaste and II. We can fire that first thing, then make use of how SI has a mini-alacrity effect and set up SI:Div. Once that's done, it's a pretty much arepeat of the earlier drow war party, but with only one ghost spider instead of two. We will again want to draw out all rounds of minions.
All of this is enough for us to hit Thief 30. We can't get any more offensive HLAs, so we will be picking up Hardinesses up to 20 of them. This level gives us our fifth.
As a part 100 special, let's talk about the item randomizer.
When in the opening area of the game (AR0602), a bunch of varaibles are set that control where various IA items will spawn later on. The idea of this is that it adds a bunch of variety to the game and makes subsequent playthroughs a bit different to earlier playthroughs. It's a very nice feature, and has caused other modders to subsequently write mods to do similar randomizing without having to install the rest of IA.
We'll break down each of the randomized items. Note that each of these bullet points is parsed in order, so once one condition is fufilled the rest will be ignored.
IARYNNPLACE, controlling the Staff of Rynn:
IAHILLPLACE, controlling the Girdle of Hill Giant Strength:
IAMASKPLACE, controlling the Short Sword of Mask:
IABOWPLACE, controlling Tansheron's Bow:
IASLINGPLACE, controlling the Sling of Everard:
IAFLAILPLACE, controlling the Defender of Easthaven:
IABELTPLACE, controlling the Belt of Inertial Barrier:
IAROSESPLACE, controlling the Blade of Roses:
IAAXEPLACE, controlling Azuredge:
IASHAFTPLACE, controlling the Gesen Bow Shaft:
IAMANAPLACE, controlling the Mana Bow:
IARING30PLACE, controlling the Ring of Human Influence:
IALEAT03PLACE, controlling the Protector of the Second:
IAKUNDANEPLACE, controlling Kundane:
IAFORTITPLACE, controlling the Girdle of Fortitude:
IARING28PLACE, controlling the Ring of Air Control:
IABLUN24PLACE, controlling Gnasher:
IAAVOIDPLACE, controlling the Boots of Avoidance:
IAPERIAPTPLACE, controlling the Periapt of Proof Against Poison:
IARING35PLACE, controlling the RIng of Lock Picks:
IAAEGERPLACE, controlling Aeger's Hide:
IAMALAKPLACE, controlling Malakar:
IAFOTNPLACE, controlling the Flame of the North:
IAUSUNOPLACE, controlling Usuno's Blade:
IAFBANEPLACE, controlling Foebane:
IAWHICHBOOK, controlling the Book of Infinite Spells:
IAHELM04PLACE, controlling the Gift of Peace:
IASLEEPPLACE, controlling the Sleeper:
IASHLD23PLACE, controlling the Fortress Shield:
IASW1H52PLACE, controlling Water's Edge:
IASW1H66PLACE, controlling the Yamato:
IABLACKBLOODPLACE, controlling Blackblood:
IAHARMONIUMPLACE, controlling the Harmonium Halberd:
IAARUNDELPLACE, controlling the Staff of Arundel:
IARODSMITEPLACE, controlling the Rod of Smiting:
IASENTINELPLACE, controlling Sentinel:
IAWARBLADEPLACE, controlling the Warblade:
IADRAGONBLADEPLACE, controlling the Dragon Blade:
We're getting close to mage 26. I have a good feeling about this.
We'll be dealing with the Illithids in this part. Having done the item randomizer breakdown, there's a lot of potential loot here.
The arena fights are unchanged.
We can get a bit extra XP by taking out the spectating illithids before leaving the arena.
The doors state that they require either a powerful mind or godly strength to open. This means we need to either dominate one of the mind flayers or turn into the slayer.
Fortunately, there are only two such rooms with doors on the map. This one, and the one on the way to the Master Brain.
The mind flayer in this room respawns but is not worth any loot or XP, so there is no point trying to farm.
The rest of the illithid base is mostly unimproved. We can pop an AI if we get worried about INT drain.
One of the cells contains the Insane Dwarf Warrior, who is a high level fighter. For optimal tempo, we want to wait from him to activate GWW before we PFMW, then we can breach as soon as his hardiness fires.
He drops the Ring of Fire Control and the Rifthome Axe.
We prepare ourself for the master brain fight by setting up a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin.
The Master Brain is a dangerous fight. It summons a Brain Golem every four rounds, which acts as a mini Gem Golem. The really dangerous part is that every six rounds, it uses Purge Magic.
We would be able to burst it down between purges, but that would mean that we don't get to draw out all the summons of the Elemental Golem. The Elemental Golem summons a Coin/Gem golem every six rounds to a total of six golems, so we will want to extend the fight to at least 36 rounds.
Our solution is to run around the back of the Master Brain, where it cannot see us and it cannot purge us. Here we will draw out the fight to take out all the golems.
Note that the elemental golem can only be semi-tanked with stoneskin - it does 2d4 damage of four different elements when it hits us, so it chips at us through stoneskin. It's not a massive amount, though, and we can still tank it for a bit. Stoneskins are fairly cheap at this point in the game, so it's good for tanking before the initial purge hits.
We want to use one of our 6th level spell slots to refreshing IHaste when the intial one runs out, which leaves us with six PFMW (includig the spell trigger one) and one AI memorized, for a total of 36 rounds of protection. Since PFMW and AI last slightly under four rounds, we will likely want to spend our action using potions to heal up the elemental damage that gets through between rounds. Fortunately, the first golem summon happens after three rounds, not six, so we only have to wait 33 rounds to take out the elemental golem.
A safety strategy is to, while we are waiting, hit the Elemental Golem down to Near Death, but not kill it. Once the last minor golem is summoned, we can then finish off the Elemental Golem before the minor golem, as the minor golem can be more easily tanked with stoneskins.
From the golem, we pick up the Flame of the North, the Sling of Everard, a scroll of Spell Immunity and a scroll of Ray of Fragmentation.
With the golem down, we can rest up, then prepare another spell trigger. We move to engage the brain, firing our spell trigger after we get purged, and take it out easily. Notable loot from this fight is the sellables and the blood needed for the Ust Natha quest later on.
Freeing the slaves is worth 45k XP and one of our missing points of reputation.
We have earned enough XP for another triple level up, reaching F/M/T 27/24/31. We get our fourth pip in Long Swords, three more Hardinesses, and another 9th level spell slot.
In the last part, we cleared out the illithid area for a very nice chunk of XP. It is also an area that has the potential to hold a lot of loot, but we did not find anything of significancein the loot drop.
We should watch out for this area - there is an area where we take a whole bunch of fire damage with no way to disarm it like a trap. ProFire is enough for us, though.
We buff up, including ProCold, ProFire, PFME, II and SI:Div, then use the Horn of Valhalla on the Demogorgon statue to trigger the Demon Knight fight.
We have fight five Demon Knights. They are each level 22/20 Fighter/Mages. Their buffs are random, and can be either using SI:Ab or II and SI:Div. Fortunately, they cannot do anything to us with our buffs.
Defensively, they each have a Hardiness, which stacks with their 40% physical resistances. Fortunately, we do not have to deal with any PFMW or AI, so after 11 rounds their hardinesses wear off and we can kill them easily. We have more than enough PFMWs and AIs to outlast them, though we will want to look into refreshing SI:Div as it has a two turn duration.
We can use our action to cast Remove Magic. Since we have a four level advantage, it has a 90% chance of dispelling them if they did not have SI:Ab in their starting buffs, and they will be easy to take out from that point. If we can get them to use their action on something nondefensive, then a single round of combat is enough to take them out.
They have access to lower fire resistance, but it is a relatively low priority action. We will ideally want to kill them before can use it, but if not then we can run out of range of the Incentiary Clouds to avoid taking too much damage. Using ProEnergy as an aditional buff can make this reload safe.
Notable loot from this fight includes the Belt of Frost Giant Strength, Armour of the Hart and Soul Reaver.
We will encounter a few Kuo-Toa groups in this area. They are not a threat for us when we are buffed with II and SI:Div.
There are a total of three such groups - one in the corrupted tadpole room, and two on the way to the altar room. When fighting this group, more may be drawn in from the surrounding areas.
The wizards may cast PFMW, but they are weak to mundane weapons.
This altar is blocked until we are doing an extended ranger stronghold quest in chapter 6 or 7.
If we move slowly into the room we can contaminate the tadpoles without triggering the next fight. Although these fights are close together and we will end each fight with buffs still active, we will want to rest up between each fight to ensure that we do not have buffs run out partway through.
The Kuo Toa Prince is a level 22/22 Fighter/Cleric. He summons a group of other Kuo-Toa, including Kuo-Toa Dukes, who are high level fighters that we have not seen before. Fortunately, everything here is straightforward to take out, being weak to weapons. The Prince is initially invincivble, but once we take out the minions he is vulnerable. There are no additional summons, so we do not need to extend the fight.
We will want to include ProFire in our buffs, as the Prince has an Aura of Flaming Death. Unfortunately, the Prince's dispel magic has a chance of dispelling us, so we will need to use SI:Ab instead of SI:Div. We will want to focus down the wizard, as the will pose the biggest threat, being able to Ruby Ray us. For additional safety, we can stun the wizard with Power Attack. The biggest threats after the wizard are the Deva and the Priest.
Notable loot from this fight includes a scroll of Permanency and the Bracers of Blinding Strike.
The drow guarding the door are pretty straightforward, only slightly improved.
There is a group of two gauths and a beholder in this room. They are always a massive pain to deal with, but in this case I like to cast ProFire and PFME on the Noble Spider, keep the spider in front to distract the beasties, and cast incendiary cloud over and over.
We have cleared out two of the secondary Underdark areas. Unfortunately, the third one is probably too difficult for us to take on until Chapter 6 or later, as it would feature our first real fight against a Purge Magic using enemy.
We talk to Adalon, and agree to go undercover.
There are a few merchants here. The only unique items for sale are the Spear of Withering, Darkened Glory and the Robe of the Evil Archmagi, which we are not interested in. There are also some potions of giant strength that a party may be interested in.
We have an opportunity to turn money into XP by buying these monstrous slaves and killing them. It's not a fantastic exchange rate, but given that money is unlimited due to the Mage and Ranger strongholds, we want to do this.
These Gith can be killed for a bit of XP with no downside.
We can kill Dola Fadoon, but it is best not to - we will get better XP from killing the drow torturing it during the final city fight.
We go to the tavern and fight the monsters. We have to fight:
The onyl one of those that can pose any kind of threat to us is the Beholder. IHaste and Critical strikes will see it off easily, though.
We start the Amariel quest.
We make sure to learn Ammar's name.
We meet up with Solaufein. He tells us to meet him at the entrance, and when we do we are told to recue Phaere.
As we leave the city, we run into an ambush group. The mage N'ashtar is level 20, so II and SI:Div makes him easy to take out. The cleric Chandrilla is only level 17, and is also ignorable.
N'ashtar has scrolls of PFMW that we want to preserve. Unfortunately, he is not weak to Power Attack. We will want to launch at least three RRoRs, wait for him to use his action casting a spell, then Breach him. Note that he has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, so we will want to cast PFMW or ProEnergy before going in. He has access to Hardiness (and prefers it to PFMW), but is weak to Critical Strikes. Two breaches should be prepared.
Notable loot from this fight includes the Dragon's Breath.
Further on, we run into Simyaz. We don't hand over the silver sword and instead kill the Gith.
The fight to rescue Phaere is unimproved and easy. Our only concern is to make sure we get all the killing blows, but critical strikes help with that. We do have a twelve hour timer from when we got this mission, so we want to make sure we don't violate that with resting around N'ashtar's group.
We get our second quest from Phaere - take out a beholder. This is an unimproved fight, but beholders are nasty to begin with. For maximum safety, use IHaste and Critical strike to take it out ASAP.
We are given the Aboleth quest at this point.
Qilue's house contains only low level foes. For maximum reload safety we can go in with IHaste and SI:Div, but the enemies here should be beatable without any major buffing.
Phaere's next quest is to take out the Svirfneblin. Being nice to them isn't worth any XP, but killing them is, so we butcher them all.
We are given the mission to kill Solaufein.
This is something that we'll handle in the next part, however. This might not be the most natural breaking point, but I didn't want to do the entirety of Ust Natha in a single part, and this is a decent enough stopping point, and it is just before some big decisions about how to handle Drow politics.
We have earned enough expereince to level up in all three of our classes, hitting F/M/T level 28/25/32. We dump our three HLAs into Hardinesses.