In the last part, we got partway through the Ust Natha questline, stopping just after we got the quest to kill Solaufein. We've got a lot of options to tackle here, so let's look at the total XP breakdown:
Killing Solaufein: 6k XP
Reporting back to Phaere: 30k XP (either way of resolving the quest)
Returning blood samples to Ardulace: 50k XP(28 + 22) (no matter how many samples we have or what combination)
Betraying Phaere to Ardulace: 0 XP
Killing Ardulace: 16k XP
Killing Phaere: 12k XP
Killing the Lesser Demon Lord: 26k XP
Giving Phaere the real eggs: 10k XP
Giving Phaere the fake eggs: 20k XP
Telling the Lesser Demon Lord to go away once it is summoned: 25k XP
Therefore, we have a solution: Set up the double betrayal, interrupt the casting by killing Phaere and Ardulace, then slaughter the drow city on our way out.
Once we have gotten the mission to find the blood samples, Visaj appears. Threatening him for the rope has no downside and saves us money, so we do that.
Deirex is level 20, lower than most liches. Since we are 5 levels above, we can dispel with 99% probability. We protect ourself with ProFire and PFME, along with II and SI:Div.
Further in, we have a fight against five skeleton lords. This should be easy for us at this point.
We run into Ammar. Because we specifically asked about the name earlier, we can solve this quest the good way. This quest has some very nice rewards - as well as increasing our reputation back up to 20, our loot includes scrolls of Permanency and Improved Haste. Unfortunately, Rir's scroll is undroppable, so this is only our second spare scroll (third total).
Being nice to Jarlaxle is worth 10k XP. Fighting him and Visaj is worth a total of 26k XP. We want to use the quickloot menu and autopause on enemy dead to pick up the loot before we get teleported out. Visaj is only level 16, so we will be safe from him.
Although we could go to the upper level, there is a fight there against a Noble Efreeti that we're not ready for just yet.
The fight against the Ghaunadaur worshippers is unimproved. We don't return to Taso Kala afterwards - there is no return, and she disappears before we slaughter the city.
Now that we are on the mission for Ardulace, we can buy the slaves. We buy them with their equipment and set them free for 7500 XP.
Now is our last chance to use the drow merchants. I do a big sell of all our non-potion sellables to the potion merchant.
We start the ritual, but don't interrupt straight away. As soon as we see the animation for the demon summoning appear, we activate Critcal Strike and take out Ardulace and Phaere under IHaste. This lets us tell the demon to go away. We are missing out on 1k XP for not killing the demon, but I've not been able to work our a way to reliably kill all three.
Notable loot from this fight is the Gorgon Plate and a bunch of sellables.
We kill everyone in the city. None of them are improved, they all go down easily.
We ignore Adalon, and head straight to the Underdark Exit, which is open at this point. We will want to try to both turn in Adalon's quest reward and kill her, which we will want some more casting time equipment for.
We clear the underdark exit. Before we actually leave, we head to the svirfneblin and sell all the adamantine equipment, except for two items that we will hold onto (as we will want two piles of adamantine dust).
We'll want to be sure that we get all the XP for the drow kills here, and we will leave the surface for the next part.
Part 105: Pitre:
In the last part, we cleared out Ust Natha. We still have a couple encounters left in the underdark, but they are all ones that we can come back to at a later date.
We have entered chapter six.
As we leave, we encounter Drizzt and friends. We kill them. There is a lot of unique loot, but nothing of great importance to us. We do get a nice chunk of XP, though.
We want to avoid the Kruin fight for now - he is a 25th level mage, the same as us, so each of us has a 50% chance of dispelling the other. If we fight him one level later, we will be immune to his dispels and have a 60% chance of dispelling him. The easiest way to avoid him for now is to go to the city gates, leave the Silver Blade on the ground, and then go to the area that we want to head to that would cuase Kruin to spawn.
Kruin always spawns in the docks, whether or not we have the blade. He also spawns in the Bridge district if we have the blade, so temporarily leaving it behind will allow us to go to the bridge district safely.
We buff up, including ProCold, ProFire, ProEnergy (or ProElements), PFME, SI:Ab and Spell Turning. We are facing:
Pitre, a level 25 Cleric
Dracandros, a level 25 Mage
Valeria, a level 22 Fighter
Falahar, a level 22 Fighter
Exterminator, a level 24 Fighter
2 * Prime Assassinators, level 27/26 Fighter/Thieves
Each of the enemies is unkillable as long as Pitre is protected. Pitre is invulnerable until he uses greater restoration. Pitre will use greater restoration when one of the other enemies goes below 10% hitpoints. We therefore wait for the Prime Assassinators to use their action, we activate PFMW, then start attacking the enemy that used their action.
A single round of combat should be enough to take down one of the foes to Greater Restoration range. We can also take out the Planetar, as it is not protected by Pitre, and it is high priority as it can deafen us, giving is spell failure.
Once the Greater Restoration hits, we take out Pitre if the Planetar is already dead. There is no point trying to finish off the one we were attacking earlier, as all foes will be completely healed as part of the Greater Restoration. Although Pitre is not weak to critical hits, Critical Strike means we auto-hit and that makes this consistent - he should take ten hits to take down.
Dracandros is next. She has some scrolls that we want to preserve - PFMW and RRoR. Fortunately, she is not protected against normal weapons, and so so can take her out that way. We will want to be ready to refresh PFMW when taking her out.
We may take some damage from the Storm of Vengeance, but as long as we stay about 90 HP (Power Word: Kill range) we should be fine. All that's left from this point are fighters, which we can deal with.
From this point, I like to take down first Exterminator, then Valeria, then Falahar, then the Prime Assassinators, though the order is not critically important. We want to make sure we keep tempo by breaching as soom as the enemy hardinesses are activated. We will probably need to use scrolls of breach to keep up.
We can also gain good tempo by letting our PFMW lapse for long enough for the enemy to spend their action on Whirlwind (or similar), then responding with instacast PFMW and taking them out with a full round of attacking them without hardinesses.
Loot from this fight includes:
Heavy Crossbow of Accuracy
Crossbow of Affliction
Lots of sellables
This container at the back of the room contains a set of documents on the Twisted Rune. Picking them up triggers an undetectable fireball trap script.
Returning to Acton Balthis, we get rewarded with 28k XP, some sellables, two Potions of Barbarian Essence and the Crimson Ioun Stone.
We hit Fighter 29. Although it's quite a boring level, Fighter 30 will be a more exciting one.
Part 106: Wilderness Areas:
In the last part, we finally finished up the squirrel quest. In this part, we'll be quickly clearing through the outside areas, as they're not big enough to be worth doing on their own.
We start by going to the North Forest. In the upper right corner, we run into some Efreeti and a group of Yuan-ti, including a mage, who at this point are very much a non-challenge for us.
In the bottom right corner, we run into some Noble Trolls and Sprit Trolls.
In the bottom left corner, we find a party of Cyric. I'm not sure why they're here, but they're hostile and worth XP. They are not a significant threat to us.
Heading onto Small Teeth Pass, we a mist encounter group, the rest is vanilla.
This is enough for us to hit Thief level 33. We won't be doing the Forest of Tethir, as it's a Kruin spawn location.
The next level up will be the big one. Let's go back and do an encounter that we left earlier. For this part we will want to resist fire damage as much as possible. Let's look at the options we have available to us:
Darkmail (20%, static, disables arcane spells)
Helm of the Rock (25%, static)
Dragon Scale Shield (25%, static)
ProEnergy (75%, 1 round/ level)
ProElements (75%, 1 round/level)
Fire Shield (Red) (50%, 3 rounds + 1 round/level)
ProFire (100%, 50 rounds)
Potion of Protection from Fire (50%, 2 hours)
Protection from Fire (Green Scroll) (50%, 12 hours)
We return to Ust Natha and loot the treasure trove. It has a lot of money and sellables, plus the Efreeti Bottle. We have a few rounds before the Noble Efreeti appears, and we use that to cast the long casting time protection spells (ProEnergy and ProElements) for a total of 150% fire resistance.
The Noble Efreeti is a 28th level mage, so we cannot rely on II and SI:Div. We instead use SI:Ab - fortunately, the Efreeti has no RRoRs, so we do not need to protect the SI:Ab.
The Noble Efreeti has access to the Lower Fire Resistance ability. It is a saveless unblockable ability that lowers our fire resistance by 50%. It can use this ability a total of four times as its action, for a total of 200% lowered resistance.
The really nasty bit is that Lower Fire Resistance sets up a scripting state so that the for the next 100 rounds, our elemental resistances cannot go over 99% - we get a 100 round penalty of 25% every time BALDUR.BCS runs, meaning that a single Lower Fire Resistance prevents us gaining immuity.
Our solution, therefore, is to set up our lower level spells to be damaging spells. We will try to blast down the Noble Efreeti under Alacrity.
We start casting Alacrity as soon as we see the Noble Efreeti animation start. It should finish approximately when the Efreeti goes hostile. We will want to equip the circlet and the AOP for maximim casting speed increase.
We instacast a PFMW, then use Pierce Magic to get rid of spell turning and fire the spell trigger with double Lower Resistance.
Melf's Acid Arrow and Lightning Bolt are really effective against the Noble Efreeti, and emptying our spellbook should take it down in short order. We only get 18k XP, which seems like a low amount given how potentially nasty it is.
Part 108: Kruin:
It's time to take out Kruin, he's being a bit annoying by blocking off a lot of areas.
Kruin himself is a level 30/25 Fighter/Mage. He protects himself with II and SI:Div. He summons two Elemental Golems, who will each summon up to six lesser golems. It is best for us for those lesser golems to all be Gem Golems.
There is a very easy reload safe strategy here. We can run away, buff up, come back, take out a single golem, then run away and repeat until we have killed all twelve lesser golems and the two elemental golems, then take out Kruin once he's by himself. I'm going to show off another strategy instead.
The less cheesy strategy is to use Remove Magic. Since we are the same caster level, we each have a 50% chance to dispel the other. The six remove magics we have stored up plus the three we have memorized means that our chances to fail are 1 in 512.
The contingency of IHaste is just to make things slightly easier.
We cast Alacrity as we arrive and head to Kruin. We want to prebuff with PFME, ProEnergy and SI:Ab before we enter the area.
Kruin also starts with a Hardiness that we will need to get rid of with Breach after the Remove Magics land. He is vulnerable to Critical Strike, which we can activate as part of Alacrity.
Kruin goes down in six critical hits. This method has the advantage of preserving Kruin's scrolls. If we do get the 1 in 512 miss, we can always leave the area and go for the safe strategy. We will probably want to do it anyway at this point, to make sure that we get Gem Golems instead of Coin Golems.
Kruin does not have any more summons after the initial ones, so we are fine to kill him early. Notable loot here is the Warblade, the scrolls, and sellables.
Resting up and rebuffing, we can come back to the docks in a series of visits. We can use the visits to take out the remaining gith and lesser golems, and once the lesser golems are fully exhausted we can take out the elemental golems.
This big fight is enough for us to finally hit Mage level 26. We get a few additional spells per day, and crucially now outlevel most IA mages and will win any dispel wars.
As celebration, we go to Ribald and learn a scroll of Chain Contingency.
Part 109: Bodhi Showdown:
In the last part, we finally got to Mage 26. Let's now take on a fairly easy challenge.
We tell Aran that we need some help fighting against Bodhi, and he agrees to send some men.
Similarly, we go to Prelate Wessalen and ask for help. Since we have taken out Drizzt, this is all the additional characters we can sort out.
We head to the Graveyard District. The in-game clock advances to midnight, and we have our first meeting with Bodhi. She summons four Eminent Vampires, who are easily taken care of under PFMW.
As we enter Bodhi's lair, the paladins also appear.
We let the paladins die to the vampires. Once Eric Vanstraaten dies or is attacked, the paladins will all leave, leaving their XP and loot behind. For maximum XP, we activate Critical Strike to take out as many of the paladins as possible. The vampires are in no danger of being killed by the paladins.
There is a vampire that only has the name of "Guard". He is a level 20/18 Fighter/Mage, so II and SI:Div make him easy to take care of. He has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, so watch out for that. He summons four vampire brides, but only does this once.
There is a big pile on in the blood room, but AI and PFMW keep us safe. We can put the holy water in the pool to weaken some of the vampires later on.
Heading into the central room, we see the Shadow Thieves. Similar to the Paladins, we want to take them out. After this encounter, we can stake all the coffins.
Before heading down, we can clear out the rest of this map. There are some encounters that are somewhat improved, but nothing massive. The secondary areas (like Pai'Na's lair) are the same as before, though the spider surprise at the entrance to Pai'Na's lair has been reset. We cannot leave to the surface, but we can rest up in this area.
Having rested up, we descend into Bodhi's lair. This fight is entirely physical, we do not need to worry about spells or elemental damage.
There are two waves of three Skeleton Grandlords that summon from the entrace, no matter how many combatants are dead. There is a master vampire, who summons waves of vampire brides seven rounds apart, but only the first four waves are worth any XP. Bodhi herself is a 30th level fighter who does not summon any support after the initial summons. She is a massive tank, however, having 50% physical damage resistance, resistance to critical hits and 240HP.
Our strategy for this fight is simple. We kill off all the enemies other than the Master Vampire first, the order doesn't really matter. Then, we kite the Master Vampire until the Vampire Brides stop giving us any XP, then we kill the Master Vampire.
We get a bunch of loot from Bodhi's lair. Most notable are Yamato, Cutthroat (which replaces the Short Sword of Backstabbing for us) and a Potion of Barbarian Essence. Staking Bodhi is worth 55k XP.
There's good XP here, which is enough for us to hit Fighter 30 and Thief 34. We finally get our fifth proficiency point in Long Swords. Next will be Short Swords, but the are definitely the least important of our three weapon types. We are also up to 16 Hardinesses.
I realized after finishing part 106 that Ust Natha gets closed off after chapter 5. I had to use the console to get back in to do the Noble Efreeti fight. Although this is technically doing things out of order (this should have been done between parts 104 and 105), I personally don't consider this a significant cheat - the items and XP obtained between these parts do not affect my ability to do this encounter. If this is being taken as a guide for future players, then part 107 should be done between parts 104 and 105.
In the last part, we did a large chunk of the main plot. Now let's do a large chunk more.
There is no immediate quest reward, but when we get transported to the Forest of Tethir, we get 74.5k XP.
We clear our the Forest map before going in. There are a couple spider groups and a couple mist groups, but they are not really a problem for us at this point.
We do Coran's quest. It's not improved, but it's nice to see a BG1 face make an appearance here.
We head into Suldanessellar itself and start Chapter Seven. Chapter Six was quick, Chapter Seven we'll spend a while in.
Near the entrance is an improved golem group. We haven't seen one of those for a while.
Outside the temple is a big group of Horrid Rakshasa. We will want PFME for this. Alternatively, we should be able to force Poseidon's Wrath, which gives immunity to ADHW. They may try to dispel us, we but are too high level for them.
The most efficient way to take them out is to hit them all a couple times each to trigger the AI, then wait out the four rounds and finish them off. The maharajas cast damaging spells, so we may want to use ProElements or ProEnergy.
The Rakshasa dispel PFME and ProEnergy on hit, so we will want to be very vigilant about keeping PFMW up. It may be safest to start kiting when we are on the last half-round of PFMW.
Heading inside the temple is Suneer, a 20th level mage. We will be safe from him under SI:Ab and II, but we can also use critical strikes to take him out before his buffs even fire.
In the lower left part of the city, we run into Raamilat. He is a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage, so we outlevel him. He has scrolls of PFMW that we want to preserve. We buff up, including Alacrity, just before engaging him.
He summons two Ghost Spiders, but those are both at the start of the fight. We will want to take him out as quickly as possible, then draw out the summons from the Ghost Spiders. The best way to take him out is to use Alacrity to triple RRoR him, then breach. He may use one scroll, but he is weak to normal weapons.
Entering Demin's house, the three Rakshasa attack Demin. The best way to take them out efficiently is to go in under IA, wait for them to spend their action casting a spell, then take them out under Critical Strike. One of them drops the Girdle of Stone Giant Strength.
In the southern edge of the map, outside the House of the Talisman, we run into a Noble Rakshasa. This thing has three AIs, and it is too low level to dispel us. It summons three rounds of two Horrid Rakshasas, each six rounds apart. Since there is no delay to the first summons, it is effectively twelve rounds of total delay, which conveniently is the same amount of time as it takes to wait out all of the AIs.
Inside the house of the Talisman, we do the puzzle. The correct order is Corellon, Rillifane, Water, Tree, Suldanessellar. There is no XP reward for this, unfortunately.
We have cleared out most of the map. We have left three things in Suldanessellar - the Dragon (since dragons are scary), the House of the Harpist (since it contains a Greater Elemental Golem) and the Sealed House (Since it is part of the last ranger quest).
We have gotten enough XP from this for a triple level up. Getting the extra level 6 mage spell is nice here. We have gotten our 19th Hardiness, and hit F/M/T level 31/27/35.
Part 111: Troll Mound:
Last time we got a view of the third expanded ranger stronghold task. We won't be able to handle that one for a while, unfortunately. The second task requires us to kill Firkraag, and the third requires us to get to the Tree of Life. We can do them in any order we want, however.
We buff up outside the troll mound and head in, heading straight for the troll royalty. The Troll Queen is a level 26/22 Cleric/Mage. Although we have the level advantage, divine dispels can dispel a higher level caster, so we go in with SI:Ab and Spell Turning. We also go in with PFME, ProElements and ProEnergy to protect ourself from her spells and her contingency of triple ADHW.
The troll king is a level 30 fighter whose attacks have a wing buffet effect on hit. We stand next to him, wait for his to use his action on an offensive HLA, then pop PFMW and start attacking him. He has six hardinesses, but we can breach him as soon as he activates them then attack him while he is vulnerable. He goes down during the third or fourth round of attacks.
We want to take out the queen, but there tend to be too many lesser trolls in the way. We will want to spend a round or two refreshing PFMW and taking out some of the noble trolls so we can stand in melee range of the Troll Queen.
Once we are in melee range of the Troll Queen, we cast Alacrity. We put on the circlet for the faster casting, and launch three RRoRs at her before breaching.
The Troll Queen goes down in eleven or twelve hits. She is not vulnerable to critical hits, but we use Critical Strike anyway to guarantee the hits. If she gets another PFMW up, we can breach her.
From this point, the rest of the fight is straightforward. There are a lot of lesser trolls to kill, so we will likely want to break out the Flame Tongue sword for some of them. There are a lot of lesser trolls that spawn on the battle starting or the troll royalty dying, but none that spawn during the battle, so there is no need to extend the battle.
There are loads of veneance trolls. Fortunately, the Vengeance and Noble trolls don't need fire damage to finish off, and the Vengeance trolls are vulnerable to Critical Strike.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
Blood of a Royal Troll
Spear of the Unicorn
Bracers of Archery
Protector of the Second
Green Leaves Armour
Potion of Barbarian Essence
Ring of Human Influence
Some of this loot spawns a few rounds after the fight is over, so we want to make sure not to leave too early.
One week later, we have an Ancient Mage that spawns in the Troll Mound. He is a level 34/27 Fighter/Mage, the same caster level as us, so we will be using SI:Ab and Spell Turning against him. We will also use ProEnergy, ProElements and PFME to protect ourself from his damaging spells. He also has illusions up, so we will want to have TS active, but we can get that from The Truth sword.
We start casting Alacrity as soon as we enter the Troll Mound. He will approach us, and start the conversation shortly before the Alacrity finishes.
He protects himself with SI;Ab and Spell Turning. We set up a chain contingency of triple RRoR on enemy seen, but just in case it doesn't fire properly we have our Alacrity up to fire another two.
He summons two Greater Bone Golems as part of his script, and the area script summons two Elemental Golems. As long as we don't move from the entrance area, however, the Ancient Mage and the Greater Bone Golems will come to us, but not the Elemental Golems.
It will take two or three rounds of combat, and we will probably need to breach the Ancient Mage a couple more times to take him out, but once he is down the Greater Bone Golem will be easy.
Notable loot from the Ancient Mage includes:
Lots of scrolls of AI
Scroll of Monster Summoning VII (9th level spell, summons a Greater Yuan-ti)
The exits close when the we first enter, and they re-enable when the Ancient Mage is dead and we are no longer in combat, and the exit stays enabled. This enables us to rest and rebuff before taking on the Elemental Golems, and potentially rest up mid fight.
If things don't go to plan, then we have a safety spell trigger of PFMW and IHaste, so we can kite the golems to draw out the summons, then once all the summons have been generated we pop the spell triggers and take out the golems.
We get another triple level up, hitting F/M/T level 32/28/36. We get our 20th critical strike, and also pick up Assassination and Avoid Death.
Part 112: Kangaxx:
We have now hit Mage level 28. This means that we are now a higher level than Kangaxx, who is level 27 in both Lich and Demilich forms.
Kangaxx starts his buffs with SI:Ab, but nothing to protect it. Fortunately, the projectile for Ruby Ray moves faster than the projectile for Remove Magic. Between our eight prepared Remove Magics and our six memorized, we have a likelihood of failing to dispel him of apprximately 1 in 50,000.
We prebuff with ProEnergy, ProElements, PFME, IHaste, II and SI:Div. We summon Kangaxx and start casting Alacrity.
Kangaxx's first half is weak to critical strikes and will go down in less than a round of attacking. He likes to use his action to cast PFMW, so we will want to save some of our dispels for that.
Kangaxx is unusual in IA enemies in that he has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, but he fires it whether or not we are weak to magical damage. If something goes wrong with the dispelling, we can wait out the PFMWs - it doesn't make this fight more dangerous, as long as we make sure to keep up II and SI:Div.
In Demilich form, Kangaxx has no protections behind a large HP pool, large physical resistances, and immunity to weapons below +4 enchantment. He can cast two spell per round and is uninterruptiable, but cannot do anything dangerous as long as we are under II, and cannot get round our II and SI:Div combo. He is weak to critical strikes.
Two or three critical strike should take down Kangaxx without him being able to do anything notable.
The only notable loot from this fight is the Ring of Gaxx. We cannot upgrade it, as we will need to beat the WK demilich as well for that. Instead, it takes the place of our secondary protection ring - under IA, we can have any number of +2 protection items plus at most one item of greater than +2 protection, and the Ring of Gaxx counts as a +2 protection item with a slight upside. Although the item description says that it regenerates one hitpoint every three seconds, since we are under perma haste, we regenerate at twice that rate.
Part 113: Wind Master:
Kangaxx wasn't worth a huge amount of XP, but it is clearing out an encounter that has been around for a while. Time to do another of these.
The Wind Master is a nasty enemy, having 95% physical resistance, strong regeneration, and a big HP pool. Even worse, every two rounds (starting one round in) it uses True Whirlwind. True Whirlwind does lightning damage, buffs the Wind Master's attacks, knocks back everything like a wing buffet, and removes specific, illusionary and combat protections.
We get cromwell to forge a Ring of Djinni Summoning, then upgrade it to a Ring of Greater Djinni summoning. The regular ring we can normally only find if we sided with Bodhi and attacked Aran Linvail. In total, we spend 75k gold, a Scroll of Permanency, a Manual of Elaboration and a bunch of minor ingredients.
We get our equipment ready. We can use the Robe of Electrical Resistance, Helm of the Rock and Boots of Grounding to get 95% static electrical resistance that cannot be dispelled by the Wind Master. We can also use the Dragon Scale Shield for a bit of extra resistance or while we are casting spells using the circlet.
We set up our prepared spells. We also memorize as many Acid Arrows and Magic Missiles as possible.
We set up some summons - the Noble Spider, Greater Djinni and three Greater Yuan-Tis. The only buffs we cast before bring up the Wind Master are Improved Haste and Alacrity. We fire the spell trigger of triple Lower Resistance immediately, before the Chain Contingency of ADHW kicks in.
We run out of range of the True Whirlwind and start unloading our spellbook of Spell Sequencers, Magic Missiles and Acid Arrows.
Clearing our those is enough to get the Wind Master down to Near Death. We start casting ADHW until it uses True Whirlwind, which will be one round in.
Once the whirlwind hits, the Alacrity will last enough time for us to insta-activate our combat protections and buffs. The Wind Master is weak to critical hits, but not backstabs. We have two rounds of combat before the next True Whirlwind. We should be doing 120 damage across these two rounds (minus regeneration, with refreshing Critical Strike), which should be enough. If not, we re-engage with mroe Critical Strikes.
This is a fight that we can always retreat from if things look wonky. The reward is the Dragon Helm.
Part 114: Hybrid Tiefling:
We've finished off the Wind Master. Firkraag is still a bit beyond us, so let's take care of some other stuff first. The next one should have some better rewards.
The Hybrid Tiefline is a level 31/25 Fighter/Mage. This fight is made difficult in two ways - it takes place in a wild magic zone (which makes conventional spellcasting unsafe), and there are six rounds of Elite Planar Hounds being summoned (two per round). The Elite Planar Hounds.
The Elite Planar Hounds have a wing buffet ability on hit (that needs a save at -6 to prevent), and dispels illusions and specific protections on hit.
We have two ways of safely casting in the wild magic zone - innate spells and spells that have been prepared beforehand. Even scrolls cannot be safely used. Fortunately, with our level advantage, we have a 80% chance on each of the Remove Magics to dispel. The Hybrid Tiefling uses SI:Ab and Spell Turning, so we need two Ruby Rays to get through.
We buff to the gills (including AI) and head in. We make sure that the last buff we cast before going in is Alacrity. We want to be quick to pause during the face-in of this map before the interface is fully visible.
We take advantage of the fact that triggering a fireshield triggers contingencies. By running towards the Hybried Tiefling and hitting her with our weapon, we ensure that our contingency triggers and that she is the nearest enemy and so gets ruby rayed. Alacrity is still running, so we can fire our sequencers and trigger, then active our innate HLAs.
The Hybrid Tiefling is not vulnerable to backstabs, but is vulneravle to critical hits. She goes down in seven hits. From here we then take out the Elite Planar Hounds, then the rest of the enemies, who are unimproved.
This fight has a lot of loot, including:
Scroll of Black Blade of Disaster (also available from Ribald)
Robe of the Neutral Archmagi
Scroll of Memory Boosting
Sling of Seeking
Belt of Inertial Barrier
Cleric's Staff
We can combine the Robe of the Neutral Archmagi with Jan's Adventure Wear to forge this Armour, which is our new standard armour. The extra spell per level is nice, and the base AC of 0 means we can retire Ghost Armour and similar spells, but the biggest part is 25% physical damage resistance. We can combine that with Hardiness for 65% physical damage resistance, and so two potions of Barbarian Essence give us physical damage immunity.
The big obstacle for now is looking to be Firkraag. He's a really big hurdle, and we have a lot of content that is hidden behind him.
In a previous part, we tackled Pitre's group and finished the squirrel quest - at least, we thought we finished the quest.
We return to the Old Squirrel. Since we gave him the nuts, he gives us the Old Stone.
We return to the Kuo-Toa lair. The Old Stone lets us use the altar, and an Avatar spawns. It is 95% resistant to crushing and piercing and 90% resistant to slashing, immune to everything else. It is not vulnerable to critical hits, but it is a straightforward fight for us - hit it with under IHaste and while we are protected with PFMW. Its weapon inflicts chain lightning and lowers lightning resistance, so we will want to be careful about keeping up PFMW. It goes down in about two PFMWs.
It drops some sellables and the Magical Pull.
Returning to the Shadow Temple, we can use the Magical Pull to get the Ruby of the Gods. This has value as both a quest token and as a crafting ingredient, we will want to make sure we do the quest token stuff before the crafting.
Remaining available encounters:
Marvella's third task (Need to kill Green Wyrm)
Twisted Rune (Need to be much higher level)
Guarded Compound GEG (May need to kill Green Wyrm)
Illithid Hideout (includes a GEG)
Crooked Crane Lich (Need to kill Firkraag or gain a level)
Firkraag (Trying to plan how to kill)
Chaos (Not sure if we can kill)
Underdark Beholder Caverns (Can do, though will need to consider Ancient Golem)
Dracolich (See below)
Ancient Golem (Similar threat level to GEGs)
Suldanessellar GEG (Backed up by a Noble Rakshasa)
Suldanessellar Dragon (See below)
Supreme Golem (Not sure if possible since we will not be able to forge boots before fighting)
Green Wyrm (See below)
Current plan for Firkraag:
Firkraag is a nasty foe. Although he is a lower caster level then us, he has a few major abilities will cause us problems:
He can use Greater Silence up to four times. This is a form of silence that offers no save and cannot be blocked by vocalize. It also blocks innate abilities and quick slots and it lasts for 12 rounds.
He can use Improved Fireball up to three times, and if our fire resistance is greater than 0 he will launch a Lower Fire Resistance first. Improved Fireball does 12d6 fire damage, and dispels illusions.
He can use Dragon Fear once, which forces us to save vs spell at -6 or be hit with fear
He can use Red Dragon Breath once every three rounds, which does 24d10 fire damage (save vs breath for 12d10)
He can use Lower Fire Resistance up to three times if he sees us with a positive fire resistance. This lowers our fire resistance by 50 points for 100 rounds, and prevents us raising it above 99% for that duration. This is counted seperately to the Improved Fireball above.
He has a few castings of nasty Save or Else spells, and damage spells like ADHW
If he sees us with a save vs breath or save vs spell better than 8, he will use Greater Doom. This applies a penalty of 6 to THAC0 and all saves, and lasts for 20 rounds. He can do this every two rounds, with no limit on how many times, and it stacks with itself.
He is under permanent Alacrity, though some of his abilities have individual cooldowns
It looks like he will not use Greater Doom on us if the value of our SCRIPTINGSTATE3 is equal to 2. I've been looking for how we can achieve this, and it looks like we have a couple options:
Casting Speak with Animals achieves this for 12 seconds
Drinking a Potion of Magic Shielding achieves this for 180 seconds
There is similar logic where we can avoid being silenced by using SCRIPTINGSTATE20, but I can't find anything that manipulates that.
Therefore, we have a plan:
Start the Firkraag fight with minions
Bait Firkraag to use all of his Lower Fire Resistances on minions
Kite Firkraag around for at least 48 rounds, enough for him to use all of his Greater Silences
While kiting, keep up Potions of Magic Shielding. Firkraag will try dispelling it, so we will need multiple potions to keep it active
He may damage us with Fire Breath or ADHW, we can heal through this with potions
Once he has been baited into using all his Greater Silences, we can move in and start attacking him
Other dragons:
The Green Wyrm is a level 33/28/35 Fighter/Mage/Cleric. It has Greater Silence and Greater Doom similar to Firkraag. It does not have an equivalent to Lower Fire Resistance, but it has a much higher caster level and so will probably be able to dispel us, and it has plenty of ruby rays to get through SI:Ab.
The Dracolich only a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage, but it shares a lot of difficulty with the other dragons, but doesn't offer much in the way of reward right now - it does have some loot, but nothing that would enable us to take on other challenges.
The Suldanesselar Dragon is a level 30 mage. It attacks from a druidic angle, with things like saveless Summon Insects.
All of the dragons have Greater Silence, and the only way I have of combating that is to kill Firkraag for the scroll of vocalize, so I suspect that Firkraag will have to be the first to go down. Firkraag also opens up the post-Firkraag challenges, which includes the next Ranger quest, which is worth a lot of XP.
It looks like we'll have to be taking on our first Purge Magic encounters soon. I've done probing and Merella's third task is definitely not consistent enough for me to be happy. Similarly, I have the beginnings of a Firkraag plan, but it's not consistent enough just yet. We've got three or four GEG encounters available to us. They are probably the easiest Purge Magic encounters in the game, and they are worth a lot of XP - fully drained, a GEG is worth 309K XP, plus the one in the Illithid hideout will give us access to a lot of nice loot.
Barbarian Essence potions are starting to be a thing in this run, and we'll be using them for some of the harder physical based fights. There's only a limited number in the entire game, and we can find them in the following locations:
Screaming Statue Challenge - 1
Illithid Hideout - 1
Bodhi's Lair (Chapter 6) - 1
Spellhold if player is not too high level - 1
Troll Mound - 1
WK Orc Hodre - 1
WK Demi Lich - 1
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - 1
The Old Ones - 1
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar (Anti-Ranger fight) - 1
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar (Wooden Mirror fight) - 1
Squirrel Job - 2
Rune Assassin questline - 3
Lady Vanya quests - 4
Morid (Expanded Mage Stronghold) - 5
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar (pond) - 2 to 5 depending on when we use it
Spellhold Book Challenge - 1
Dracolich - 1 (if fought during Chapter 5)
Draco Ferrous - 1 (Not available, this is the partially implemented expanded Druid stronghold quest)
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar (Mirrored Golem) - 1
Grave Lich (WK Final Seals) - 1
Demogorgon Fight (Saint Kargoth and Exarch Kazuul) - 6
Orcus - 6 (3 if player is not a necromancer)
Nyalee's Hideout (Skeleton Grandlords) - 4
Yaga-Shura - 3
Although there are 54 such potions in the game, we will probably be able to have access to only 41 of them.
About using them:
The potions provide stacking undispellable 20% physical damage resistance and immunity to backstab. With the Jansen Adventurewear, we need four potions (two with hardiness) to achieve physical immunity. Other items that give physical resistance are:
Master of Disciplines - IA-added monk amulet that gives 5% resistance that can be upgraded to 10% - Illithid Hideout
Carmine Ioun Stone - IA-added ioun stone that gives 10% physical resistance that can be upgraded to 15% - End of expanded mage stronghold
Defender of Easthaven - Vanilla flail that gives 10% physical damage resistance that can be upgraded to 15% - Randomized betwen Saladrex and the WK Demilich
Judgement Day - IA-added sword that gives 20% physical damage resistance - Requires us to beat the WK Gith fight
Red Coral Armour - IA-added armour for vagrants that gives 10% physical damage resistance - Forgable now if we want, but it's worse than Jan's armour
Armour of Stamina - IA-added armour for swashbucklers that gives 20% resistance to crushing and 10% to all other types - Worse than Jan's armour, so we won't forge it
Helm of Clarity - IA-added helmet that gives 5% resistance to physical damage - It uses up the Crimson Ioun Stone which is an ingredient for the Scarlet Ioun Stone, so we won't forge it
Lord of the Underworld - IA-added amulet that gives 10% resistance to physical damage - Gives the same resistance as Master of Disciplines with other plusses but is available a lot later
Improvised Blend - IA-added sword that gives 10% chance per hit that we get 5% physical damage resistance for two rounds - We will be forging it, but not factoring it in as a physical damage resistance weapon
Warlord's Blade - IA-added sword that has the option to have 10% physical damage resistance - No use to us as it is a two-handed weapon
Golem Slayer - IA-added staff that gives 25% resistance to crushing damage - No use to us as it is a two-handed weapon
Enhanced Oak of the High Forest - IA-added staff that gives 20% resistance to physical damage - No use to us as it is a two-handed weapon that can only be forged by Cespenar
Sword of the Rashemi - IA-added sword that gives 10% physical damage resistance - No use to us as it is a two-handed weapon
Mazzy's Shield - Can be used to cast Armour of Faith, which gives 10% physical damage resistance - Minor use to us
Barbarian Essence potions are not good against fights that deal us a lot of elemental damage, so against foes like Firkraag they will not be good at protecting us. We do not always want to hit 100% physical resistance - we have a large HP pool and some regeneration, so we may want to stop at a high physical resistance level (eg 90%) and relying on our regeneration or using our action on healing/regeneration potions to power through the chip damage.
It is also a possible strategy to alternate between protecting ourself with PFMW and protecting ourself just physical resistances. That way we will slowly take chip damage over the non-PFMW rounds and heal it up during the PFMW rounds. This allows us to "extend" our PFMW rounds. Since Barbarian Essence potions are rarer than scrolls of PFMW we are unlikely to use this strategy until the late game when we have obtained large static physical resistances.
The fights that I anticipate that we will potentially want to use these potions for are:
Supreme Golem
WK Gith
WK Horde
JD fight
Saladrex
Expanded Ranger Stronghold
Rune assassins
Grandfather of Assassins
Also notable option is that we can combine the Cloak of Magic Shielding (an IA-added cloak that was obtained in Spellhold) with the belt of inertial barrier to get 100% resistance to magical damage. This means that we can use this combination of equipment to have permanent undispellable PFME, though the downside is that we lose a point of effective strength and lose the +2 saving throw bonus from the cloak. I personally like the extra saving throw bonus, though in theory optimal play would involve swapping between them whenever we see a spell being cast. I will likely end up using this combination if we run into any fights that involve both magic damage Purge Magic, such as the Suldanessellar GEG.
It's time to finally take on a Purge Magic encounter. We've managed to get to over 23m total XP without doing it so far, so we will want to give it a go now.
We briefly saw Purge Magic during the Underdark Illithids, but we were able to avoid it. Greater Elemental Golems will use it every four rounds like clockwork. There is no way to block it, and the only buffs which are unaffected are undispellables ones (such as Giant Strength and stored spells).
Greater Elemental Golems have the same summoning of coin/gem golems as Elemental Golems, though it only takes thirteen rounds for them all to be summoned (the first summon is on a delay of 1 round). In addition to this, they summon Amber Golems. The exact number of Amber Golems varies, but it is typically 3.
We head to the Guarded Compound and encounter the GEG. We have a spell trigger of IHaste and PFMW, plus a contingency of IHaste on hit.
Our plan is to kite around the golems for thirteen rounds, until the summons are fully drawn out.
Kiting so many golems at once can be tricky, so we may want to pop a PFMW and fight them. It is best to do this right after a Purge Magic lands. We can safely take out Coin/Gem golems this way. If all goes well, our contingency of IHaste will trigger at the start of this, giving us increased damage output.
For safety, we want to run away after the seventh half-round of PFMW. We want to make sure there are not so many golems that we cannot slip through a gap between them. Although we can use Critical Strikes to speed this along, we may want to save them for later instead.
When it is just the GEG and Amber Golems left, we start to take out the GEG. It has 90% resistance to all physical weapons, so we just pick the best DPS (which for us is The Truth mainhand and Phosphorus offhand). has 325 hitpoints and is weak to critical strikes,but it also regenerates.
We follow the same pattern of spending seven half-rounds attacking (four half-rounds under critical strike) and one half-round kiting while the Purge Magic is launched. We should do approximately 100 damage per PFMW (9-12 per half round not under CS, 18-21 per half round uder CS).
When the GEG purges magic while on a single bar of health, we can be greedy and fire our Spell Trigger instead of just casting a PFMW. From here we can take out the Amber Golems. We may also want to include ProElectricity or similar in the Spell Trigger, or have it on a Chain Contingency (to fire when the Electrical Discharge brings us below half).
Taking out multiple Amber Golems is always a bit tricky as a solo character, but we have more options available to us now than we did during Spellhold - we have access to more 6th and 9th level spell slots, which means more PFMWs. We also have access to better elemental resistance equipment. It should take slightly under two Critical Strikes/PFMWs per Amber Golem.
For Amber Golems, Mirror Image is very important as it protects us against the lightning damage of the Electrical Discharge, and we will want to have a Mirror Image up before we start each Critical Strike against the Golems.. We will also likely want to use some potions while kiting the Amber Golems, and to keep an extra IHaste prepared, as the first one may run out while waiting for Electrical Discharge to wear off.
Notable loot from the GEG is:
Staff of Shynn
Aeger's Hide
Holy Scabbard (Carsomyr Upgrade)
Scroll of Hand of Undoing (7th level anti-golem spell)
Jhor the Bleeder
We were able to beat this GEG, but that's because it was alone and it was very much pushing the limits of what we could do. The other GEGs are accomanied annoying enemies (Noble Rakshasa and Alhoon), which makes my uneasy to try to beat them as well. It looks like Firkraag may be the only way forward from here.
I've been doing a lot of probing of encounters, and I think I have a plan for going forward:
All the expanded mage stronghold material is hidden behind Marvella's third task
In order to reliably beat the Ice Golem, we will need to beat the Green Wyrm or forge Mazzy's sword upgrade
For some reason, Mazzy's sword upgrade requires the Dracolich to be dead, even though we have the items used in the upgrade
In order to fight the Dracolich, we have to go through the Underdark Maze
In order to go through the Underdark Maze, we have to go through the Beholder Caverns
All this together is something that will be easier than Firkraag or the Green Wyrm
We buff up, including II, SI:Div, ProEnergy and ProElements. We are facing a Beholder and an Elder Orb. The Elder Orb is a 25th level mage that can dispel our protections on hit with its weapon. The beholder is not as dangerous.
The beholder goes down quickly. We will want to RRoR the Elder Orb a couple times before we can dispel it. We want to make sure we keep up PFMW to protect our protections. Alacrity can help in this fight to spam out the RRoRs as fast as possible.
The Elder Orb drops the Blade of the Equalizer, a Manual of Elaboration, the Amulet of Spell Warding, and some minor treasures. Killing it also re-enables the exit into the main part of the Underdark.
Continuing one, we see the drow fighting a beholder. We want to make sure we steal all the kills here. Critical Strike makes this fairly easy.
A nearby container contains the Sling of Arvoreen.
We hug the left wall and head down to find Illithids fighting Gauths. We repeat the process.
Hugging the bottom wall, we find more Beholders and Gauths, with nothing to use as distraction. I like to use the Greater Djinni and Noble Spider as distraction and cast Incendiary Clouds (The IA summon items are immune to the instant ddeath effects, including the beholder death ray)
Circling around, the bottom right corner contains an elder orb and two beholders. Our approach is the same, except we can set up summons first. If this fight goes wonky, we can retreat to the underdark.
We have gotten through most of the map. We are standing near the Maze Entrance in the top right, but you can see that we have deliberately avoided the middle of the map, we have been hugging the sides. That is because the middle of the map contains the Ancient Golem.
We prepare a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin and apprach. We make sure to approach from the fight - there is a beholder group to the left of the golem, and we don't want to fight both at the same time.
The Ancient Golem purges pagic every five rounds, which is a bit annoying as it doesn't line up nicely with our PFMWs. It also summons five rounds of minions, each four rounds apart (with an initial delay of two rounds), and each round consisting of both a Coin Golem and a Gem Golem.
Defensively, the Ancient Golem is the same as a GEG, with 325 HP and 90% physical resistance.
Since this area isn't massive and it's easy for the minor golems to clog up the paths, we will want to be fairly proactive about taking out the minor golems. It will take 22 rounds for all the minor golems to be summoned, which will be four purges fromt he Ancient Golem (not counting the initial purge). I like to PFMW after each of the purges and take out the minor golems for seven half-rounds, then run away for three until the next Purge.
For additional safety, we can set up stoneskin for the kiting rounds. We can tank one hit from the Ancient Golem, but not two.
When all five rounds of minor golems are summoned, we turn our attention to the Ancient Golem. We can follow a pattern of PFMW, Critical Strike, Critical Strike, Stoneskin, Kite for each of its Purge Magics. If we run our of stoneskins, we can use Hardinesses or for extra safety, additional PFMW/AI.
Although it is possible to take out the Acnient Golem at this point, reload safety may want us to clear out a few more minor golems to ensure that we are not surrounded. For reload safety, I recommend pruning down to three minor golems.
As with the GEG, once it purges on one bar of health, we can fire our spell trigger. That combined with critical strikes will take it down easily. The rest of the minor golems will be easy from this point.
It drops a Manual of Elaboration and a Permanency Scroll.
We clear out the rest of the area (i.e. the beholder group in the middle), and this is enough for another triple level up, hitting F/M/T 33/29/37. For the HLAs, we have already maxed Critical Strikes and Hardinesses, and there is not much use in the other HLAs, so we pick up the extra 8th level spell slot and start to pump Avoid Death (in case the Death Ward ability becomes useful).
Part 118: Deepdark Maze:
I
It's time to head into the Deepdark Maze. At least I think it's called that - I've heard it referred to as many things, and I don't know if it has a consistent name.
This is the official map. I'll be going through it in a completionist order. I'll start by following the route in the top part of the map to go through the rooms listed there. I'll then do the second part of the map, though I won't be able to get into the Maze Sigil room at first. I'll to the third part of the map, leaving the Spirit Guardian. Finally, I'll do the Spirit Guardian, the Maze Sigil room, and end this part before doing the final room.
Each room (apart from a couple) have a west exit and an east exit, and use the same map.
As we arrive in ARIA01, we are greeted by a cursed ghost, who tells us that we are trapped in the maze. We can only leave by defeating "The Mighty One".
Heading to the west, we arrive in the empty room, ARIA07. Each room contains one of these containers that typcialy contains minor potions or treasure, and as the name suggests, this one is empty. It is suggested to leave items in here to help navigate, but we have a map.
Heading east from the empty room, we come to ARIA08, the deep shadow room. Every time we enter, it spawns a Deep Shadow. It's not threatening, but it's not worth any XP and not worth farming.
From the Deep Shadow room, we head east to ARIA13, Empty Room 2, then head east again to ARIA01, the starting room.
We head to the east from the starting room, and find ourself in ARIA02, the Bone Devil room. This contains a single non-respawning Bone Devil that is worth XP.
Bone devils have a 50% chance of spawning another bone devil, which in theory can go infinite. We should watch out for their weapon, as it inflicts a saveless hold.
We head east to ARIA03, Empty Room 4, then west to ARIA10, the Whisper Spider Ambush. There are three Whisper Spiders initially, and one more spawns every four seconds to eight additional Whis Spiders (11 total).
We head east to ARIA09. Empty Room 5, then east again to ARIA04, the Skeleton Lord room. This is a respawning XP-less Skeleton Lord, like the Deep Shadow.
Heading west from there, we get to ARIA06, the Ghost Spider room. The ghost spider is pretty standard, we will want to draw out its initial round of summons and all four subsequent rounds, for a total of 24 rounds of waiting.
From there, we head East, East, West to get to the Skeleton Lord doom again, then East to get to the Whisper Spider room, ARIA05. This is anoth respawning XP-less encounter.
West from there is the Neo-Otyugh room, ARIA12. There are six of these, they do not respawn, and they are worth XP.
We head west to ARIA15, Empty Room 3, and west again to the ARIA16, the Spirit Guardian room.
The Guardian Ghost is a level 24/25 Fighter/Cleric. It is not a significant threat to us, and our remove magics dispel its buffs with 90% probability. It drops the Maze Key. Upon beating it the pool spawns more potions.
We head West, East, West, East, East, West, East, West to get to ARIA11, the Maze Sigil room. There are nine Deep Shadows here, who are not a significant threat as long as we use PFMW to protect ourself and IHaste to take them out. They are weak to Critical Strikes, which lets us tear through them with ease.
Beating this fight gives us the Maze Sigil, which is required to get to The Mighty One. From here we go West, East, East, West to get to the Neo-Otyugh room, rest up to prepare, then head East a final time to get to the final room.
About the Dracolich:
The Dracolich is a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage. As a Lich and a Dragon, it has the abilities of both. Compared to Firkraag, there are a few significant differences:
The Dracolich only has a 3 Greater Silences instead of 4
The Dracolich does not have access to Lower Fire Resistance or anything similar
The Dracolich's breath weapon is Black Dragon Breath, which inflicts levle drain. As we have the Amulet of Power, it will not use this.
The Dracolich has access to a Wail of the Dracolich, an ability that it can use up to 5 times that makes us save vs death at -4 or die. Fortunately, it can be blocked by SI:Necromancy.
There are some notable results of this:
The Dracolich has a finite amount of ranged damage it can do, and that is not very high. We should comfortably be able to kite it.
The Dracolich has unlimited Remove Magics if it sees us under Invisibility, Improved Invisibility or Mirror Image. Although it can't dispel our regular buffs, that can dispel our potions.
On top of this, The Dracolich has access to five additional Remove Magics, controlled by the varaibles IASHADRA12 (1) REMOVEMAGIC (1) REMOVEMAGIC2(1), REMOVEMAGIC3(1), IANOWARD(1). Fortunately, the AI likes to cast multiple remove magics in sequence.
In the last part, we went through the Deepdark caverns, and we found it a fairly minor threat - definitely easier than the Beholder caverns we had to go through first. We're about to have a rather more difficult encounter, however.
In the last post I reviewed our strategy and brought up SI:Nec - unfortunately, the Dracolich removes that with RRoR instead of Remove Magic, and so we cannot rely on its protection since we cannot refresh protections under Greater Silence
We get dispelled of all buffs when we enter the boss arena. We get to keep our Spell trigger (IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin).
It has access to five Remove Magics, and our goal is to use the fewest Potions of Magic Shielding. If we break down the remove magics it isues:
ISDHADRA12 is used whenever it sees us and SCRIPTINGSTATE7 does not have a value of 1 (which would indicate SI:Ab)
REMOVEMAGIC is used whenever we are not helpless and SCRIPTINGSTATE3 has a value of 2 (which indicates that we have up a Potion of Magic Shielding)
REMOVEMAGIC2 is the same as REMOVEMAGIC
REMOVEMAGIC3 will never be used because we will keep the AOP equipped
IANOWARD is the same as REMOVEMAGIC, but it is also triggered by SCRIPTINGSTATE2 has a value of 0 (I'm not sure what that represents)
There is a bit of a quirk - the scripting state flag that determines if we have up a potion of Magic Shielding is also used to determine if we have cast Speak with Animals on an animal. Although Remove Magic can dispel potions, it cannot dispel our Speak with Animals, since we are a higher caster level. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a way to abuse this - it only works on creatures in the ANIMAL category, and there is no arcane spell that reliably summons those.
The Dracolich will always lead with Greater Silence, which is instacast. If we start casting Speak with Animals as soon as the autopause fires, we will be able to get it off before we are silenced.
The strategy for the first few rounds of the fight is:
Dracolich uses Greater Silence
Dracolich dispels us
Dracolich uses Lower Resistance
After the first dispel hits, while the Lower Resistance is being cast, we drink our first potion
The Dracolich uses another Remove Magic
We start kiting the dispel projectile, since the Dracolich has alacrity it will start to cast another dispel while the first is in the air, effectively wasing two of the dispels
Repeat the Potion, Lower Resistance and Remove Magic combo
The Dracolich will run out of Remove Magics at some point
The Dracolich has a limited set of ways that it can damage us at a range - its primary spell is Death Fog, which deals exactly 8 points of damage. It may get a few hits in on the corners, but we have rings of regeneration and can drink potions.
During the third Greater Silence, the Potion of Magic Shielding will wear off, and we will need to refresh it. We will get very brief windows between Greater Silences that we can use to cast spells, but I have not been able to determine what is good during these windows.
Once all three greater silences have worn off, we will want to exhaust the Dracolich of breaches. It has four of them, so it will take us four rounds to draw out all the breaches.
With the breaches down, we can start hitting it with our weapons. Once we break through the starting Stoneskin and it starts taking damage, it fires a defensive Spell Trigger that includes PFMW and stoneskin.
From here, we enter the PFMW stage of the fight. The Dracolich has access to six PFMW after the spell trigger, and it will use them as long as the following conditions are met:
It has already fired the spell trigger
It has no layers of stoneskin remaining
It does not have a PFMW active
It uses stoneskin in three situations:
Once, as part of its opening buffs
Once, during its spell triggers
Once, as a contingency whenit reaches half health
Our Remove Magics dispel both Stoneskin and PFMW with 90% success rate. We have access to eight 3rd level spells, plus we can stick Remove Magics in a spell sequencer, so on average we will be able to easily get through all these protections. Even if none of the Remove Magics work, we can always wait out the PFMWs the hard way, though that may require another Potion of Magic Shielding.
When the Dracolich is out of PFMWs and we can hit it with our weapon, we fire the spell trigger and go in for the kill. The only speedbump is the contingent Stoneskin. We can either use another Remove Magic, or hit through it the old fashioned way. We may want to activiate Critical Strike - we don't get the double damage, but we do get the guaranteed hit, and if we were nailed with a Greater Doom between potions we will have a -6 on our to-hit rolls.
The Dracolich going down is worth 80k XP, and it drops some good loot, including:
Mana Bow
Kundane
Golden Star Garnet (a new crafting ingredient, the third and final one in the game)
Powdered Body of Dracolich (crafting ingredient)
Shorty after the Dracolich goes down, the Ghost congratulates us and rewards us with another 15.5k XP points. We leave to the Beholder Caverns, and cannot re-enter the maze.
We've done it - it's a long and grindy fight, but it's possible, and more importantly, reliable. The major thing that made this possible is the lack of ranged attack - we were able to kite the Dracolich without taking any significant damage.
A big factor in this fight is the Potions of Magic Shielding. I have naturally found 7 in my adventuring so far, and this fight consumes 4-5. The Drow potion merchant sells 3, which I made the mistake of not buying (and I may have to retcon), while Roger the Fence sells another 3. Hopefully the other Dragon fights won't be so bad - if all goes well, Firkraag will be the only other dragon we have to take such a grindy approach to.
So, assessing where we are right now, there are three main fights - Marvella's Third Task, Firkraag, and the Green Wyrm. There is also an unexpected barrier of Reputation.
The Green Wyrm is a fight that will give us access to one of the most important items of the run, the Boots of the Ranger Lord. It is a level 33/28/35 F/M/C, so we will not be protected from its dispels. It has 5 Greater Silences, its breath does poison damage (that we are immune to thanks to the Ring of Gaxx), and it does not have access to anything like Lower Fire Resistance. We could probably take it on using a process similar to the Dracolich, but with more kiting.
An unfortunate aspect of the Green Wyrm fight is that immediately after the fight we catch up with the Supreme Golem, before we get the opportunity to visit Cromwell, and we have to make the decision whether to fight it or not. This is a fight that has some massive upside if we can do it - it itself is worth 114k XP, it gates in up to six Elemental Golems (each worth 60k XP) which in turn gate in up to 36 minor golems (worth 22k-24k XP) for a total XP payout of 1.266m-1.338m. Even if we don't fully draw out all the summons, if we try to take the Supreme Golem out ASAP we will likely end up with two or three Elemental Golems that we can properly take out for 300k-500k XP. It would be a long, grindy fight but we have a very large stock of PFMW and AI scrolls that we can use for this.
There are downsides to doing the Supreme Golem fight. The only non-XP reward for this fight is the golem manual, which is useless in IA. The XP reward might not be that significant - we are currently on 24.7m total XP, with a caster level of 29. The highest level arcane casters that I am aware of are level 31, are we will be able to have the level advantage on them at level 32, which will happen at 28m XP, and we will reach the level cap in all our classes at 38m XP, so we might not need this XP reward in the long term. The other downside is that we take a reputation hit of 2, and we have at this point very limited ways to raise our reputation. Some of the later content requires us to have a reputation of 20. If taking this as a guide, we will likely want to save some reputation rewards (such as the circus tent).
Beating the Green Wyrm and dealing with the Supreme Golem (either nicely or not) unlocks the lower levels of WK. The next level down includes the Supreme Leader fight (a very nasty fight where we will have to break out the Barbarian Essence), which in turn opens up a lot of valuable loot. The next hard block in WK would be on the final seals level, where we would have to deal with things like the Ancient Dragon.
The second major fight is Marvella's Third Task. In this, we have to fight an Ice Golem and and Elemental Golem, which a script runs every thirteen seconds that indlicts a slow effect that has no save. Our only way of avoiding the slow effect is to offhand Mazzy's sword. I wanted to take out the Dracolich so we could upgrade Mazzy's sword (since in vanilla it is +2 enchantment which isn't high enough to hurt it), but it turns out that it's also immune to piercing weapons, so I took out the Dracolich early for no real benefit. The impact of this is that I have used more potions of Magic Shielding than we would ideally have used, but I am happy to accept this as a reload safety tax to represent potions that a no-reloader may have used in other fights.
The best strategy I have been able to find so far involves over 30 rounds of some quite precise micro that involves managing at least four asynchrous timers every half-round, and there's too much room for things to go wrong. I would only feel comfortable calling this fight reload safe if we had the Boots of the Ranger Lord, which would drop this fight down to around 10 rounds, and would be more forgiving on the micro.
After the Ice Golem, we have the Pasha fight, where we fight an Elemental Golem, Noble Rakshasa and Noble Marilith, which should be fairly easy, and it earns us a point of reputation. Following up from that is the Old One fight, which needs a reputation of 20. It features Grave Liches, which have Grave Silence, similar to Greater Silence. Following that is the Time Machine and Lesser Force content, which should be relatively easy and give some very nice loot.
The third major foe is Firkraag. Firkraag I have gone over before. For beating Firkraag, we can access to the Lady Vanya missions (which requires 20 reputation), which are about destroying the Rune Assassins and will be very nice XP. This in turn unlocks the second expanded ranger stronghold quest. (The third ranger quest needs us to get to the Tree of Life). The most significant part of this fight is that we get the Vocalize scroll, which gives us immunity to Grave Silence and Greater Silence, making other fights so much easier.
Breaking down each of the dragon fights in the game:
Firkraag is notable because he has Lower Fire Resistance, which makes him very difficult to kite to wait out the Greater Silences
The Dracolich is easiest as we are immune to its breath weapon and it does not have a way to interfere with that
The Green Wyrm is very similar to the Dracolich, as its breath weapon is poison and we have the immunity from Gaxx that it cannot intergere with
The Suldanesselar dragon has acid breath and access to Lower Acid Resistance. It is slightly stronger than Firkraag, but with less benefit to killing it
The Shadow Dragon is easily cheesed, as seen earlier. If it wasn't cheesable, we would deal with it as a slightly easier version of the Dracolich
The Ancient Dragon is the strongest individual enemy in the game (136k XP), and I'm not sure if it's possible for us to beat it solo
My updated plan is:
Carry on Probing Firkraag to find a way around Lower Fire Resistance
Do Vanya's tasks
Do the second ranger quest
Probe the ice golem some more
If ice golem isn't possible, beat the Green Wyrm and restore reputation to 19
Do Marvella and subsequent material
Do WK material and Suldanesselar material
I have also discovered something - UAI doesn't get around minimum attribute requirements. There are a few items that have a charisma requirement of 9, which is annoyingly close since our charisma is 8 - if taking this as a guide, having a starting charisma of 9 is important, and I would sacrifice wisdom to achieve this. We can use the spell Friends to equip these items, and they stay equipped after Friends wears off, but it prevents from swapping these items in a battle. When we unlock Lum, then we can get our static charisma that high.
The total script is 2120 lines long, but a lot of the logic is repeated to handle multiple enemies or multiple conditions for performing the same action. Breaking it down for a solo character, this is the script. The earlier bullet points are higher priority than the later bullet points.
Firkraag also have mini alacrity, having to wait only a second or two after each action before another can be used.
Prebuffs are Spell Turning, GOI, ProEnergy and Spell Shield
Summon a trio of Skeleton Warlords
Summon a second trio and a third trio when under 30% hitpoints. Cast Stoneskin immediately before the second trio and Heal immediately afterwards. Once the third trio has been summoned, Firkraag becomes killable
If a mage is seen that is vulnerable to Greater Silence, use Greater silence. Limit of four times (controlled by IAGSILENCE), limit of once per round
If under 25% hitpoints and without any stoneskins, fire a Contingency that has both Stoneskin and Heal
If Stoneskin has been cast (controlled by IAFIRKRA04 being 1), Stoneskin is not active and not under PFMW, cast PFMW (up to four times, controlled by IAFIRGRA03)
If without stoneskins, cast stoneskin (up to once, controlled by IAFIRKRA04)
If we are under Improved Invisibility, Invisibiliy or Mirror Image, use True Sight (no limit, every ten rounds)
If we are under Improved Invisibility, Invisibility or Mirror Image, use Remove Magic (no limit, every four rounds)
If an enemy of the type SUMMONED is seen, and it is Over level 8/has 95% piercing resist/has over 89% magic resist, cast Death Spell (limit 3 times, every 3 rounds, controlled by IAFIRKRA09)
If an enemy is seen within Wing Buffet range, use Wing Buffet (up to once, controlled by IAFIRKRA05)
Attack the nearest enemy in melee for one round (finished when IAATTACK is 2)
Cast Ruby Ray on us, up to the number of Spell Turnings, GOIs, MGOIs, Spell Shields, or Spell Immunity[Ab, Nc, Evo, Ench, Conj] we have active (Limit 5 times, controlled by IAREVERSAL)
Cast Breach on us if we have something worth breaching, are visible and are not under SI:Ab (up to 5 times, controlled by IACASTBREACH)
If a non-helpless enemy is seen, cast Remove Magic (up to once, controlled by REMOVEMAGIC)
If a non-helpless enemy is seen and has a Potion of Magic Shielding up, case Remove Magic (up to once, controlled by REMOVEMAGIC2)
If an enemy with the type ILLUSIONARY is seen, cast True Sight (no limit, every 10 rounds)
If an enemy with the type ILLUSIONARY is seen, case Remove Magic (up to once, controlled by IAREMOVE)
If an enemy is seen with at least 30 magic resistance, cast Lower Resistance (up to 3 times, controlled by IALOWERMR)
If an enemy is seen that is vulnerable to Greater Malison, cast Greater Malison (up to once, controlled by IAFIRKRA02)
If an enemy is seen that is not under a Potion of Magic Protection and has a save vs breath/spell of 7 or better, cast Greater Doom (no limit, every 2 rounds)
Use Wing Buffet a second time (IAFIRKRA05 will go from 1 to 2)
If Firkraag's own Magic Resistance is below 40, use Magic Resistance (up to once, controlled by IAFIRKRA14)
If a non-helpless enemy is seen not in a range of 15, cast Improved Fireball. If that enemy has a fire resistance greater than zero, use Lower Fire Resistance first. Reset IAATTACK, prompting melee attacks. Usable up to three times, controlled by IAFIRKRA16, five rounds between
If at lower than 90% hitpoints, use Cure Critical Wounds (up to once, controlled by IACURE)
If a nonhelpless enemy is seen with less than 75% magic resistance, fire a Spell Trigger containing Slow, Hopelessness and Chaos
If an enemy is seen that is weak to ADHW, cast ADHW (up to once, controlled by IAFIRKRA07)
If Dragon Fear and Lower Fire Resistance at the nearest enemy (Up to once, controlled by DRAGONFEAR)
Use Wing Buffer (Up to Once, conttrolled by WINGBUFFET)
Use Red Dragon Breath and reset WINGBUFFET (no limit, every three rounds)
Cast Improved Haste and reset IAATTACK (up to once, controlled by HASTE)
If an enemy has a Fire Resistance greater than zero, use Lower Fire Resistance (up to three times, controlled by IAFIRKRA17)
Attack the nearest enemy
Part 120: Firkraag:
We have beaten one dragon, with less benefit than I would have liked. It's time to beat a second.
We steal Anomen's shield, and upgrade it by combining it with the Shield of Harmony (from Trademeet) and the Shield of the Lost (from Madulf), using the Powdered Body of Dracolich. There are two other recipies that are competing for the Powdered Body of Dracolich, but neither of them are any use, while this is some. Unfortunately, we cannot do any of the other item upgrades that grant fire resistance. This shield is good, but it has a charisma requirement which is a bit awkward.
We also stop by the Adventurer Mart and pick up the Helm of Brilliance from the special stock.
We set up a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin, and a spell sequencer of triple Remove Magic (if we are feeling a bit bold) or something that includes ProFire (if we want to be completely reload safe). Our equipment is carefully chosen:
The belt and the cloak protect us from ADHW, once we see one of those we can swap them out
The Dragonslayer sword is to protect us from Dragon Fear, once we see one of those we can swap it out
The Ring of Human Influence is so we can swap out the Delryn shield without worrying about charisma issues
We do not equip any fire resistance equipment, as we are careful about Lower Fire Resistance. Firkraag can get off extra Lower Fire Resistances if we have positive fire resistance at the time of an Improved Fireball. Once all three have been used, we can start to buff our fire resistance, though we want to be careful not to go over 100%. The Helm and the Shield are worth 40 each, the Potion of Magic Shielding is worth 50 and the Potion of Fire Resistance is worth another 50.
We fill our 7th level spell slots with Mordy Swords, summon four of them, haste them up (using regular haste) and get them to surround Firkraag. We also summon a Wizard Eye so we can direct the battle without getting in range of Greater Silence.
Mordy swords are good here because they are extremely tanky, and have enough Fire Resistance to prompt Lower Fire Resistances.
If we see Firkraag turn to a sword and start casting a Necromancy spell, it is Death Spell. We have the targeted sword run to the other side of the map so no others are caught in the radius, and prepare to start summoning a new one.
We want to keep Othala near the entrance of the room, and the Wizard Eye near the other end. We will rely on audio cues a lot here. If Firkraag gets too close to the Wizard Eye, he will cast True Sight, which kills off the Wizard Eye, which is annoying.
We can try to get a few hits with the swords in - we won't improved longevity much by kiting, and getting through a few stoneskin layers is always nice.
It may be worth keeping one Mordy Sword near Othala. That way, if an awkward Death Spell lands and takes out the team, we have an additional body we can send in right away.
The Greater Djinni can be used here as a great Tank and Bait, and we can similarly use the Noble Spider if we buff it with ProFire.
When the log shows the full range of Improved Fireballs and Lower Fire Resistances, it is safe for Othala to go in. It is still good practice to wait as long as possible, though - Firkraag's buffs have limited duration, and our kiting is easier and safer when he is unbuffed.
We do not need all them to be spent to be safe. The Lower Fire Resistances are very easy to draw out, as Firkraag will use them whenever he reaches the end of his script with nothing better to do. The Improved Fireballs require the target to be at least sixteen units of distance away at the time that the check happens, which can be difficult, especially when blind kiting. We can reliably get away with three Lower Fire Resistances/Improved Fireballs unspent, though fewer is obviously better.
When the last summon goes down, it's time to show ourselves and start kiting. Ideally our summons will have chewed through all of Firkraag's stoneskins and started his PFMW chain. If that's not the case, we will want to have checked the combat logs to see if Firkraag has cast stoneskin on its own. If so, we can fire our sequencer of triple remove magic to start his PFMW chain, but we can do that at any point in the kiting process betwen Greater Silences.
It is very likely that Firkraag will have two or three Improved Fireballs left, though his regular Lower Fire Resistances should reliably be burned through. Since these come with Lower Fire Resistance, there is an efficient way to get through these:
Cast ProEnergy or ProElements while the last summon is active for 75% resistance
The Potion of Magic Shielding should add another 50%
The first Lower Fire Resistance will bring us down to 75%, which is safe
There is a gap between each Lower Fire Resistance and each Improved Fireball, we can use that to drink a Potion of Fire Resistance or equip one of our fire resistance items
Repeat for the third Improved Fireball
The ProEnergy won't last for the whole kiting process. We can take advantage of one of gaps to cast ProFire (as we outspeed Firkraag we can run to the other side of the arena) or for reload safety we can put it in a sequencer or contingency (or both). We will want to be careful with how we do this - we will want to remove our fire protection items before the spell finishes resolving, since if we every go over 99% resistance after the first Lower Fire Resistance has hit we will get penalized until we are under 100%.
Firkraag has one Remove Magic, that he always uses at the start (after silencing us). We wait until that has hit us, then we drink our potion. He will remove that one, but all subsequent potions of magic shielding should be safe.
We can spend our action between silences refershing our Stoneskins (to burn through his Breaches), or casting Remove Magic (to start his PFMW chain if he has not already).
We will want to be generous with our healing potions while kiting - we don't want a surprise Dragon Breach or Improved Fireball to hit just as our fire protection buffs expire. Ideally we should be pausing frequently, so we can catch the gap between each attack being announced and hitting us and checking what our fire resistance is.
The kiting is rather easy, as we are much quicker. We will want to be careful not to get into melee range with him (which might happen accidentally in the corners), as that will cause him to spawn his skeletons, which will make kiting more difficult (though not by much, we outspeed the skeletons too).
When Firkraag runs out of Greater Silences (4 in total), we kite him while refreshing Stoneskin to get through his Breaches (5 in total), then activate our spell trigger and go in for the kill.
Whenever we bring Firkraag below 30% hitpoints, he will cast stoneskin, summon three skeletons, and cast heal.
Although the message you are given is that Firkraag cannot be killed while his undead minions are alive, he can indeed be killed as soon as the last wave spawns. It is recommended to kill them first, however - they are far more of a threat than Firkraag is at this point.
Firkraag himself is worth 64k XP, while the nine skeletons are worth 16750 each.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
Red Dragon Scales
Ring of Fire Resistance
Blood of a Red Dragon
Scroll of Vocalize
Cloak of the Shield
Carsomyr
Returning to the MNORH, we get congratulated with a reward of 35k XP. This is enough for us to hit Thief 38, and we invest our HLA into Whirlwind Attack (in hindsight, I should have been investing a few more into WW instead of Avoid Death or getting Hardiness to 20).
Well, that's a major fight down. Similar to the Dracolich, it is a long and grindy fight, though it ends up being less costly on rare potions due to having to deal with fewer Remove Magics.
The battle plan is reliable, though it is definitely a mentally taxing one. We have to be very alert to watch out for the sources of fire damage and be ready to check our resistances and act appropriately. During the initial summon stage, we need to pay very close attention to how many times each ability is used, and count the important ones. I would recommend taking notes, or using the console to check the values of the variables involved.
There are two ways that I feel this fight could be improved.
The first is to check if we actually care about Greater Doom, or if we can save our rare potions. There are two occassions where we have to pass a save or else - the Spell Trigger, and the Dragon Fear. We can negate the Spell Trigger with a single potion, and we can negate the Dragon Fear with the Dragonslayer sword, though often those both fire in the summon stage of the fight where we don't care about them. Being greater doomed does mean we will often fail our half damage save against the Greater Fireball and Dragon Breath and take double damage. As long as we keep our resistance high even double damage should be manageable, but I worry that a combination of buffs expiring plus fire damage at the wrong time would lead to a lack of reload safety.
The second is to find a way to reliably trigger the Improved Fireball during the summon stage. I ran the full fight three times through (with the screenshots coming from the third full run) plus another five or six partial attempts while I was determining the best strategy. I was able to get a single early Improved Fireball in a bit under half of the attempts, and it felt very luck dependant. I would feel much safer if there was a way to reliably trigger it, preferably more than once.
Although I have been talking for an enormous amount of time about wanting the Amulet of Hades, and how encounters will be so much easier once we have it, I have not forged it just yet, despite being able to. This is because it has one of the IA anti-UAI features - it disables the thieving skills button permanently when we equip it. This is a bit annoying, as it means we lose out on lock/trap XP, but we will be able to tank any trap and knock any lock so it will not lock us out of content. I will put it off as long as possible before forging it.
I am also starting to formulate a strategy to take out the Ice Golem without beating the Green Wyrm - it may be possible to get enough DPS under the purge magics by using Whirlwinds and Greater Whirlwinds. I will hopefully gain enough XP and levels from the Vanya content that we get enough WWs, though I may need to investigate if we retcon some of our HLA choices - I picked a bunch of Hardinesses because they will be useful in the very late game, but none of the fights so far have had them be important - the only time I have activated the Hardiness HLA has been while I've had Alacrity up, because at that point I might as well.
Still following along, I didn't think improved anvil was beatable as a solo but looks like you are making nice progress.
Will there be any one fight that will be too much at any stage?
So far, there have been three fights that I have been uneasy about:
Slaver Ship - It is the only time in the run that we are relying on our opponent to fail their saving throws. It is also a long fight with lots of moving parts and stages. I found that the variation in the first parts meant that I had to develop a couple strategies for the later parts, which I don't like - I find it a sign that the first part needs more work to be consistent.
Mithril Golem - I have a strategy that works in theory, and the autopause should make it consistent, but engine limitations means that it cannot be reliably executed. If it is skipped, the only content we miss is the token machine, which effectively just means the Robe of Elemental Resistance. I'm not sure if that is a big one to miss, however - The window of enemies that use a lot of elemental damage and can purge/dispel our PFME but do not use the Lower Resistance line of abilities is very small, and I'm not sure there are any.
Lavok - There is a strategy that is consistent, but it is using rare resources and not fully exploiting the available XP. That tends to be a sign that we should be leaving this for later.
The fights that I am worried about for the future are the ones that kill us in a way that doesn't involve hitting us with weapons. Major ones are:
Ancient Dragon - It's a level 39/32/39 F/M/C. Its breath does 32d10 damage (save for half). It has unlimited Lower Fire Resistances. It's a required fight to forge the Judgment Day sword.
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - We fight a bunch of golems alongside an NPC. We can protect ourselves from the golems easily, but not the NPC. If the NPC dies, we lose the game.
Demogorgon - We have to fight six enemy characters, who have levels in the 35-40 range. About half of them have Lower Fire Resistance, and the rest will spam fire spells that we will not be able to save ourselves from.
In the last part, we had a very major fight, and took down Firkraag, which has just opened up a whole bunch of content for us.
A week after Firkraag is killed, Lady Vanya appears at the MNORH as long as we have 20 reputation. She gives us the mission of returning to Firkraag's lair and taking out an army of Rune Assassins.
There is a Watchman out the front. He goes in to warn the others before we can attack him.
As we pass through the maze level, we get seven Elite Rune Assassins appearing to fight us. Unlike previous IA ambush encounters, we do not get dispelled going in. These are worth XP and loot, which is nice. The are level 15/17 Fighter/Thieves, which are no threat to us.
There are new enemies waiting for us in Firkraag's lair:
8 * Rune Assassin, level 13/15 Fighter/Thieves
2 * Master Assassin, level 21/24 Fighter/Thieves
2 * Assassin Coordinator, level 25 Mages
1 * Guildmaster
The Master Assassins summon six waves of backup each, consisting of a Rune Assassin and an Elite Rune Assassin. The waves are three rounds apart.
The Guildmaster summons a Gem and a Coin golem immediately. Every four rounds, the Guildmaster will summon either a Master Assassin, a Gem Golem or a Coin Golem as backup. We will know that we have drawn out all the Guildmaster's summons when the total number of Golems plus Master Assassins is twelve (2 in area, 2 from initial spawn, 8 from subsequent sommons), which will happen after 32 rounds.
Our prebuffs include II, SI:Div and PFME. We have a four level advantage over the coordinators, and they try to protect themselves with SI:Div, so we can dispel them with 90% efficiency and cannot be dispelled by them. They have chain contingencies of triple ADHW, which is what we want the PFME for.
They each have four scrolls of PFMW, and so they are the only enemy that we want to prioritize the killing of. We can either dispel them in response to PFMW, or use normal weapons (though not slashing weapons, they are immune to those). We may find ourselves bogged down in enemies, but we can take out everything except the Master Assassins and Guildmaster without being penalized.
We should have more than enough PFMW and AI to keep us safe, but apart from the Golems we can also use Improved Mantle as additional protections. The Guildmaster has scrolls of AI, but we prioritize drawing out his summons for XP instead of preserving his scrolls. He will likely burn through all of them while we as prioritizing other enemies. Although Guildmaster inflicts saveless poison on hit, the Ring of Gaxx gives us immunity.
We will likely be able to get close enough to one coordinator initually to get in attacking range, but the sheer number of bodies will block us from easily getting to the others. Fortunately, each of the killables minions is vulnerable to Critical Strike, and we can mow them down with that.
For reload safety, we want to use two actions per PFMW, and be very vigilant in the last half-round about refreshing it if it ends early. We will also want to prioritize killing off the Golems over the others - if one of them hits us in the gaps between PFMWs, that dispels our illusions, which makes us breachable by the coordinators. Once the Coordinators are down this danger goes away.
One thing to watch out for is our SI:Div running out, so we want to have it cast as the last of our buffs and refresh it at the start of our fifth PFMW (if we reach the 10th PFMW without taking out the coordinator something has likely gone wrong, but we have lots of slots and so should probably prepare at least three).
The best way to get to the Coordinator is to attack the enemies that are between us and the coordinator, when our autopause on enemy dead fires we run forward a couple feet where they were, until we get blocked, then repeat the process.
This is such a long and grindy fight that we will likely need more than one IHaste, as the first one will run out. Our II also has the same duration, so we will want to potentially refresh that if the coordinators are not dead at that point. Since the II is a lot harder to tell when it runs out, I like to cast my IHaste first when prebuffing, and take that running out as a sign to refresh first the II then the IHaste.
Although it takes 32 rounds for the Guldmaster to summon all minions, the last minion could be a Master Assassin, which takes another 18 rounds to summon all minions, for a total of 50 rounds to reliably wait out all the summons. I have memorized 12 AI/PFMW, along with eight IMantle, which should be enough, though it will be a long grindy fight. All the Master Assassins have 3 Hardinesses and the Guildmaster has 3, which is more Breaches than we easily have access to. They fire Hardiness when their HP is less than 90%, so we may need to do a lot of kiting to wait out a lot of Hardinesses.
An alternative strategy to use is that as soon as we get within melee range of one of them without PFMW up, they will use Whirlwind before attacking, and so we can respond with PFMW to protect ourself then take them out as they cannot Hardiness as their action is spent.
Having a third IHaste in our Spell trigger is also useful here.
Loot from this fight includes:
An enourmous amout of sellabes (eg over 500 potions of invisibility)
Kaligun's Amulet of Magic Resistance
The other half of the Halved Note from the Greater Doppelganger fight
When we get both halves of the note, they get replaced with the full form of the note.
We return to Lady Vanya. We get rewarded with 10k gold, 60k XP, and two potions of Barbarian Essence.
We get another triple level up from all we have done in this part, reaching level 34/30/39. The extra sixth level spell slot is nice, as are the three GWWs we pick up.
Part 122: Lady Vanya's Second Task:
In the last part, we get a big chunk of XP and hit the soft cap for Thief levels. Our level up rate (and HLA rate) will slow down quite a bit as a result of this.
A week after we killed the Guildmaster, we get given another quest from Vanya. We need to return to the Windspear Hills again and kill the viper queen.
As we return to the Windspear hills, we have a surprise - every three rounds, a Giant Cobra appears. In theory it can hold/poison us, but we will make our saves every time. They are not worth any XP, so we ignore them and run in.
Outside are Giant Cobras, and inside we also find Mutated Cobras. The Mutated Cobras are a bit stronger, but again are worth not XP and we ignore them.
We run to the well, and activate it to summon the Viper Queen. At this stage, she is fairly easy for us:
She only attacks with her natural weapon, which is +5 and is completely blocked by PFMW and AI
Her weapon can Hold/Poison us, but that requries us to fail saves at -2 and -6, which we can do
Every ten rounds, she casts Cloudkill or Death fog (equal chance). Cloudkill does poison damage that we are immune to because of the Ring of Gaxx, and Death Fog does 8 points of Acid Damage per round, which we can easily ignore as we have a massive HP pool and regenerate, though we could also use ProAcid for complete safety.
She is 95% resistant to Slashing and Piercing weapons, and 90% resistant to Crushing, so we use Crushing. She is weak to critical hits, and under Critical Strike we will deal 50-60 damage per round. She has 200 HP and regenerates 6 HP per round, so goes down in two PFMWs. There is no benefit to extending this fight, so we take her out as quickly as possible, then whatever minor snakes were summoned during the fight.
When her health gets low, she summons more minor snakes, but they are no concern to us as long as we keep up PFMW. She dies for an extremely generous 75k XP. Using the well again gives us 30k more XP and the 48 sided garnet, a crafting ingredient for recipes that we don't care about.
Returning to Vanya, she gives us a very brief congratulations and runs away. We gain 25k XP, 10k gold and another two Potions of Barbarian Essence.
Part 123: Grandfather of Rune Assassins:
The last part was very little challenge for a surprisingly large chunk of XP and some important potions. This is going to be much bigger.
This is the Cyphered note that we got after Vanya's first task. I'm not sure if there's a better way of working it out, but but using likely guesses we can determine the key:
1-T
2-A
3-E
4-N
5-S
6-R
7-H
Which corresponds to TABLE IN SEWERS BENEATH THE TAVERN.
We head to the Copper Coronet, and find this note in the sewers below.
We head to Small Teeth Pass where we meet the Grandfather of Rune Assassins. In our Conversation with him, we discover:
Delver was killed because he was uncovering too much about the Rune Assassins
Roshan ws a passer-by whose identity the Elite Doppelganger happened to steal
They were planning to to turn Firkraag's lair into a stronghold after we cleared out the dragon
Vanya was a divine being who set us on the path to find the Rune Assassins
The Grandfather is a level 30/27 Fighter/Thief. His weapon negate our movement for 24 seconds without save, and has a saveless poison (that again we don't care about due to the Ring of Gaxx). He protects himself with five scrolls of AI.
Between the area script and the Grandfather's script, we fight one Assassin Coordinator and nine Master Assassins. One round later, the Grandfather will summon another Assassin Coordinator, and from that point the only remaining summons are the minor assassins summoned by the Master Assassins. Therefore, we will first prioritize the Grandfather (as AI scrolls are better than PFMW scrolls), then the Coordinators, then we will stall out the Master Assassin's summons, then take out the rest of them. Since there are no Master Assassins summoned partway through the battle, all of the minor assassins will be summoned after the first 18 rounds.
Forunately, there are no golems in this fight, so we do not have to worry about our II getting dispelled in the gaps between PFMWs.
We stand next to the Grandfather, wait for him to use an action, then activate our PFMW and start attacking him. When he spends the action of his second round, it will be on something defensive, so we can breach in response and kill him during the second round.
Our prebuffs for this fight are II, PFMW, ProFire, IHaste and SI:Div. We have a safety trigger or IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin, and a Chain Contingency of triple Incendiary Cloud when hit.
Each of the major assassins has fire immunity, and each of the minor assassins has none. Our triple Incendiary Cloud will therefore prevent the minor assassins from getting in our way. They only last ten rounds, so slightly over half of the time that they will be spawning for, but it's nice and help us take out the coordinators easier.
It has a slight downside of making the combat log a lot busier, so we will want to be a lot more vigilant with our pauses to be able to react to what the grandfather does.
With the Grandfather down, we focus on the coordinators next.
We may find ourself penned in by the Master Assassins, who we do not want to kill just yet. the IA logic will prefer attacking any non-PFMW target over any PFMW target, so we can summon a creature while we are under PFMW to give us a bit of breathing room. This will reduce the value of the sellables a bit, as they will use Potions of Invisibility to try to get backstabs, but that is not a major concern.
For reload safety, we can use this breathing room to leave the map and come back later, taking out the remaining Master Assassins one by one. We will want to make sure to loot using the quick loot menu first if we choose to leave the map.
When our SI wears off, it means that it is 20 rounds since we cast it, so the 18 round wait for the Master Assassins has probably expired. We will likely want to have two or three more Incendiary clouds prepared that we start casting at this point.
Again, this will reduce our sellable value as they will drink potions, but that is not a major concern.
The strategy of drawing out a WW and then PFMWing and counterattacking is much easier when we can kite - we will not be "wasting" any of the enemy WWs if only one is in melee range (and therefore uses WW) when our PFMW runs out.
This fight gives us enough XP to level up in Fighter twice and Mage once, for an overall level of 36/31/39. Mage level 31 is very nice, as it gives us an additional spell of every level.
Loot from this fight is just another massive pile of sellabes (to compare to the last one, this is over 600 Potions of Invisibility).
Part 123 is I think the most XP we have gotten from any one single part - over 1.1 million. It is also the first time that we have leveled up twice in the same class in the same part, except maybe in the very early parts.
The Incendiary Cloud strategy is something that in hindisght should have been applied in part 121 as well. Part 121 ended up being more difficult than the final showdown, for two major reasons - we have to be careful about the golems dispelling our II, and to fully draw out all the summons makes for a much more drawn out fight (I believe the longest fight in any part).
The major encounters left from this point are:
Twisted Rune
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Marvella's Third Task (and Old Ones)
Green Wyrm (and WK next level)
Suldanessellar Dragon (and Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar)
It's looking quite likely that we will hit the max level of 40 in all classes (this happens at 12.2m or 12.75m for all classes, regardless of previous level gain, which is why the gap between Thief 39 and 40 is so high). This means that I will may start to veer away from strategies that maximize the XP, especially if these involve increasing risk. It also means that no-reloaders may feel more comfortable skipping some of the tricky encounters (such as Mithril Golem).
Part 124: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (First Parts):
The last part was a major payout in terms of XP. There is also going to be a big monetary payout, but for efficiency we don't sell unless we need to, and we are currently sitting on 300k in cash.
We head to our cabin in the Umar Hills and encounter a swanmay waiting for us. The swanmay tells us that a valuable treasure has been stolen (we are told that it is a jewel, but no more detail).
The swanmay tells us that we can get more information by talking to a Diviner in one of the Athkatla taverns. We find him in the upstairs of the Five Flagons.
This is the list of the items that the diviner wants as payment. These are all pretty major items. Almost all, at least.
We decide to forge the Supreme Shelter. We already have the Delryn family shield, which is just a better shield - the only advantage the Supreme Shelter has is AC, but that doesn't really matter.
The ingredients for this are four different magical shields that we don't really care about, plus 90k gold. None of the ingredients used in this would be usable in other recipes (other than the gold).
We have over the Supreme Shelter and are told to wait a bit.
I know that in an earlier part I said that we could hand over The Truth here. We probably could without being significantly set back, but I hand over the Supreme Shelter instead for safety.
Leaving the tavern, we run into Auriel, who tells us that we have been fleeced. Auriel tells us to head to the Temple Sewers to find the thief.
We head through the sewers and run through Mekrath's lair to meet Malbar.
He gives us the Ugly Stone, and 15.5k XP if we spare him. Unfortuntately, he only tells us that he already gave the treasure to his employer, and he cannot tell us the identity of his employer.
In Mekrath's lair there is another staircase that has previously been closed off to us. The Ugly Stone acts as a wardstone that lets us enter it and meet the Diviner again.
Talking to him, we learn:
He was the one who sent Auriel to find us after we paid him
His main goal was to get us to forge a powerful artifact for him
He chose Malbar to steal the jewel because he was so recognizable, and wanted to get rid of Malbar after
Auriel has been foiling his plots and he wants to get rid of her
She is on her way to the Umar Hills and will be attacked by four enemies once she is there
The Diviner is actually the deity of Divination and Conspiracy
If Auriel dies, we will also die
A timer is set for three days, and if we do not rescue Auriel in that time we will die. This timer is set during the conversation, so we can waste as much time.
Unfortunately, this fight is just not possible. We have to fight three Elemental Golems, and an Ultra Golem. They prioritize Auriel over all other targets. She protects herself with Hardiness, but even with that she goes down in two rounds. We cannot give her any more damage resistance or attack negation, and we cannot extend the fight by mazing her.
Unless I make a major discovery, we are going to have to skip the rest of this fight, I am afraid. The loot from this (125k gold, Axe of the Lakesider) is something that we can live without.
Part 125: Marvella's Third Task
The last part was a bit disappointing - overall, we had a small and very inefficient conversion of gold to XP.
We return to Marvella, and get her third task - go further within this sphere and fight the enemies that lie within. We will be facing an Ice Golem and an Elemental Golem, and we will be locked in until those two are dead (though the minor golems can still be alive).
We prepare (Chain) Contingency so that when we get hit, we will IHaste ourself and triple Ray of Fragmentation the nearest enemy. I would like to use Hand of Undoing instead, but that spell seems to dislike being put in a Chain Contingency. We have a spell sequencer with three more RoF, and a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin.
There is a very annoying feature to this fight - every thirteen seconds, we get the message "Why is it so cold in here?" and we get hit with an unsaveable slow. In addition to this, the Ice Golem has an ability called Freezing Wind that fire once every four rounds that also inflicts an unsaveable slow. The only way around this is to use Mazzy's sword. Freezing wind has an initial four turn cooldown that starts when we see it, though we will be err on the side of caution and treat it as a three turn cooldown.
The thirteen second tick is also notable because it interrupts our action, including attacking, and this can cause our auto-pauses to mess up. We will also have to be careful about spells that have a nonzero casting time.
The Ice Golem has 200HP, and regenerates 1 every second. It is 90% resistance to slashing and crushing damage, and is immune to piercing. It is not weak to critical hits, though we may use Critical Strike for the guaranteed hit. Even if we were to upgrade Mazzy's sword, we cannot hurt it, which means that we wouly be restricted to just our main hand attacks to deal it any damage. Normally we will be wielding Phosphorus main-handed and Mazzy's sword offhand, but we can swap to The Truth main hand and Phosphorus offhand if we are confident that we will not get slowed.
The Ice Golem also fires a Purge Magic once every four rounds. Unlike GEGs, it will not fire this unless it sees that we have something worth purging, which includes Stoneskins and Mirror images (which is what we will be using). It also dispels combat protections on hit. Our strategy will therefore to be engage it for seven half-rounds (refreshing Stoneskin or Mirror Image during those seven rounds), run away for half a round to bait a Purge Magic. Since we want to be safe with PFMW, we will want to spend only two actions per PFMW - one refreshing stoneskin, and a second using WW or CS.
We summon the Noble Spider and Greater Djinni, but we will be leaving them behind. The reason is that IA enemies prefer non-PFMW targets over PFMW targets, and we want our contingencies to fire immediately, so we will not introduce our summons until after the contingencies have fired.
We run in, stand next to the Ice Golem, fire our first PFMW and start attacking it. We keep the summons running around off-screen until we have been hit once and our contingencies fire.
We want to frontload as much damage as possible. The Noble Djinni is a good summon here, as it has access to PFMW, and that PFMW is enough to draw out a purge magic at the end of half-round 8, so we can squeeze in a bit more damage in that half-round and not need to refresh stoneskin.
Having IHaste is very important. Without it, we are doing 3 or 4 damage per half round. With it, we are doing triple that. The Ice Golem may spend its action using various cold-related abilities, but we have a high magic resistance, plus an large HP pool and can regenerate. The Ice Golem has access to Lower Cold Resistance, so we won't want to keep any protection items active by default, but we can try being responsive enough to swap into them.
When the Ice Golem goes down, we have have removed the Freezing Winds and the Purge Magics, but not the "Why so cold" ticks. Fortunately, the room is easy to kite around, and we can draw out all six of the minor golems from the elemental golem before finishing it off. We will want to keep Mazzy's sword equipped.
There is a bug in the script - the Elemental Golem that we fight here is S!elego1, and the script checks that it is dead before it lets us leave or before it stops the "Why is it so cold" ticks.
This is a spreadsheet that I constructed to help with the fight. A ! indicates that an ability may be usable, and a X indicated that an ability was used that half-round. As we can see, the non-IHaste/GWW rounds we are doing effectively zero damage, while the others we can get a good damage output in. However, S!elego1 is also the Elemental Golems that we fight in the Troll Mount Ancient Mage fight. Since we have already beaten that fight, the game counts that kill in this area script.
Our reward for this is a big pile of gold, and the XP from killing the golems.
Part 126: Pasha Mahmoud:
In the last part, we finally beat an extremely annoying fight. We could potentially have tackled it earlier if we had picked up GWWs earlier, but I'm just happy to have it done.
We return to Marvella, and she tells us about an incoming enemy -Pasha Mahmoud. She gives us a scrolls of Foreknowledge and Limited Wish.
Pasha appears and tells us the real story. Marvella took his money and used it as the loot that we found. She told him to come here and kill us, but we decide not to fight each other and instead confront Marvella. We get 30k XP and a point of reputation for agreeing to not fight.
Marvella appears in a different form and spills the means. She is a deity who had made a bet with another deity, a bet that she just lost.
There is a dispel that hits us before the enemies appear. We perform our summon before our first talk to Marvella(Noble Spider, Noble Djinni, 3 Greater Yuan-Ti), and want to cast our Alacrity so it resolves just as the dispel hits. I find the best time to start casting is halfway through the animation for Marvella in her second form to appear (when the third of the internal lines has formed).
We have the following spells stored:
Sequencer of ProCold, ProFire and II
Contingency of TS on enemy seen
Spell Trigger of IHaste, PFME and PFMW
Chain Contingency of triple ADHW on enemy seen
Once the Alacrity resolves, we want to start buffing up, using our defensive stored spells plus Stoneskin and SI:Div.
We have to face three enemies - A Noble Rakshasa, a Noble Marilith and an Elemental Golem. We will kill them as quickly as possible instead of trying to draw out their minions. We will prioritize first the Noble Rakshasa, then the Noble Marilith, then the Elemental Golem.
We use a Remove Magic or two first, as that will blow away the Rakshasa and Marilith protections. We then spam our Magic Missiles at the Noble Marilith, activate our offensive HLAs, cast another Remove Magic if the enemies have refreshed any AIs.
After the Noble Rakshasa is the Noble Marilith. It and the Escort will likely have used PFMW or fired a contingency Stoneskin, so we fire another Remove Magic first.
Afterwards, we repeat the process for the Abyssal Escorts and Horrid Rakshasa. Fortunately, both the Noble Rakshasa and the Noble Marilith are weak to Power Attack.
The Elemental Golem and Lesser Golems do not have the annoyance of PFMW and AI, so we can just hit them with our weapons. We will prioritize whichever of them is targeting Pasha Mahmoud.
It may be necessary to deliberately not use PFMW and instead tank with Stoneskins, as if we use PFMW it will make the Golems attack other targets, such as Pasha.
Finally, when all the enemies are dead, Pasha congratulates us. We get 60k XP, a scroll of Monster Summoning V (another IA summoning spell), and a point of reputation.
This is the scroll that Marvella gave us. It is an 8th level spell, so there is not much competition for those spell slots. It is mostly useful as a way to increase our spell casting speed.
Crucially, if something goes wrong and Pasha dies, then it is not the end of the run. These rewards are nice, but we will be able to gte Foreknowledge from elsewhere.
In previous parts I have referred to one of the locations of the Robe of Vecna under the randomizer being Firkraag. It turns out I got my dragons mixed up, and it's actually the ancient dragon instead, which is quite annoying.
I don't know if I'm missing something, but I don't see how The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is possible without an Auramaster, even if we are not solo. The Ultra Golem alone is enough to take out Auriel in 4 rounds, and in that time I can deal about a quarter of its health in damage. Looking at the BWL forums, the only strategies that I can see are either pre-6.5 (when mazing was a strategy), or require an Auramaster (new IA druid kit) using auramaster specific spells and abilities to spam a new IA spell that can heal her, often with a wish for rest to restore castings. I'm tempted to treat this like the various upcoming mirrorred quests that require swanmay summons and consider this a fight that requires Auramaster specific class abilities.
In the last part, we finished with Marvella. Normally the next part would be the Old One encounter, but unfortunately we need the Memory of the Apprenti to be forged, which is a while away.
Our remaining encounters involve either Grave Silence or Greater Silene, so we finally forge the Amulet of Hades. It disables our Thieving button, but that is unavoidable at this point.
We buff up with ProFire, PFME/ProEnergy, IHaste, II and SI:Div. We find ourselves trapped in a very small room with a Grave Lich. It is a level 33/28 Fighter/Mage, and we have a three caster level advantage on it, so it cannot dispel us.
We need two RRoRs before we can dispel it, and Alacrity can speed this up. We dispel with 80% probability, and we have eight Remove Magics, which is pretty safe. In the unlikely case that this goes badly, we can always outlast its buffs with multiple IIs and SI:Divs.
It is weak to critical strikes, so using Alacrity to follow up with CS to Remove Magic is a nice combo. We should watch out for a Contingency of PFMW and a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW.
Loot from this fight includes Daystar, the Rod of Terror, and a Manual of Elaboration.
Obtaining Daystar means that we have unlocked the Orcus fight. Orcus is a level 31/27 Fighter/Mage, so it is actually a lower level than the Grave Lich we just beat.
He has the following logic:
If a Mage is seen that is weak to Finger of Death and has a save vs death of 8 or worse, fire a Chain Contingency of triple Finger of Death (once, controlled by IADEMON13)
If an enemy is seen that can be Grave Silenced, use Grave Silence (once, controlled by IAGSILENCE)
Summon five Eminent Vampires (four Eminent Vampires and two Master Vampirs if CHARNAME is a Necromancer or Druid). Once, controlled by IAORVAMS going to 1
Summon five Skeleton Lords (Three times, three rounds between, controlled by IAORVAMS going to 4)
If under 90% hitpoints, use PFMW (up to six times, controlled by IADEMON02)
If without Stoneskins, cast Stoneskin (up to five times, controlled by IASKINS)
If an enemy is seen that can be Power Word Stunned, use Power Word Stun
If a summoned creature is seen, use Death Spell (up to twice, controlled by IADEMON16)
If a Necromancer is seen, create three additional potions of Barbarian Essence (once, controlled by IATREASURE)
If an enemy is seen that is under II, Invisibility or Mirror Image, use True Sight (unlimited times, ten rounds between)
If an enemy is still under the illusions above, use Remove Magic (unlimited times, four rounds between)
Use RRoR if appropriate (up to eight times, controlled by IAREVERSAL)
Use Breach if appropriate (up to six times, controlled by IACASTBREACH)
Fire a Remove Magic at the nearest enemy (once, controlled by IADISPEL)
If an enemy has a potion of Magic Shielding, cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by IADISPELPOT)
If an illusionary enem is seen, cast TS or Remove Magic (up to four times, controlled by IAREMOVE)
Cast Greater Malison (once, controlled by IADEMON03)
Cast Lower Resistance (Up to twice, controlled by IADEMON05)
If the enemy is a mage with protections up (including Potions of Magic Shielding), use Remove Magic (up to twice, controlled by IANOWARD)
If the enem has the above protections up, cast Remove Magic (unlimited, once every four rounds)
If the Chain Contingency has not fired, If the enemy has magic resistance of 50 or lower, if the player is not Mirror Imaged, if the player has a save vs death of 7 or better, use Greater Doom (unlimited, once every two rounds)
If the enemy can be paralyzed, use Paralyze (up to three times, controlled by IADEMON06)
Attack the enemy
His weapon removes specific protections and slays summons on hit, but has no other special abilities.
We also have the area script, which summons eight Skeleton Grandlords. Orcus cannot be killed while they are alive.
We have a strategy - we will use II and SI:Div to keep up II. This will prevent Orcus from using Lower Resistance. This therefore prevents Greater Doom and the Chain Contingency. From that point, it will be a straightforward combat fest. There are no enemies that we want to draw out the summons from other than Orcus, and that will be done after twelve rounds.
If something does go wrong and he does use Greater Doom and try to kill us, we can fire Avoid Death in response.
We buff up with IHaste, II and SI:Div and head in.
For maximum safety, we run to the corner in the entrance before firing PFMW and engaging. This is so the small gap between PFMWs is a bit safer.
We don't have a huge amount to do with our action during the PFMWs. We will want to refresh Stoneskin every now and then, as the small gap between PFMWs will mean the skeletons can get a few hits in. The vampires are weak to Critical Strike, but not the skeletons.
Around the end of the fifth PFMW, we should refresh II and SI:Div.
We will want to have a second IHaste prepared, as our first can run out. I like to have three or four (including one in the spell trigger).
When it is just us and Orcus left, we want to get through stoneskins and PFMWs. Remove Magic is great, as it dispels both with 90% probability.
A second refresh of II and SI:Div may be necessary. Orcus only has one spell per round, so even if it does fall for a second it's not the end of the world.
If/when we run out of remove magics, we can summon the minions. They can't do much about the PFMWs, but can help with the stoneskins.
Killing Orcus gives us 90k XP, four Potions of Barbarian Essence, and the Black Blood of Orcus, a crafting ingredient. The skeletons also give us a large number of sellables.
We hand over 90k gold, the Black Blood of Orcus and a Manual of Elaboration to upgrade our amulet even further. In addition to all the benefits listed, it allows us to summon a Skeleton Lord.
While the Amulet of Hades disabled our thieving skils button, the Lord of the Underword also disables our stealth button, but apart from one time in the prologue the only time we have clicked that button is by accident beause it's next to the spellcasting button.
We also get another double level up, hitting Fighter 37 and Mage 32. We get no additional spell slots with this, though.
Part 128: Green Wyrm:
In the last part, we got a major equipment upgrade. Let's get another.
The Green Wyrm is a level 33/28/35 F/M/C. Those Cleric levels mean that we do not have the dispel advantage that we are used to, butwe can at least dispel any arcane buffs the dragon has.
Breaking down the logic in a similar way:
Initial buffs include Spell Turning, Armor of Faith, Stoneskin and Spell Shield, controlled by IADRAGGR01
Chain Contingency of triple Finger of Death, conditions just like Orcus
If under 100% hitpoints and out of stoneskins, fire a Spell Trigger of PFMW, Stoneskin and PFME (once, controlled by IADRAGGR10)
Greater Silence with the same conditions as Orcus (up to five times, controlled by IAGSILENCE)
If under 50% hitpoints and without stoneskins, use Stoneskin (once, controlled by IAHEAL)
If without stoneskins, not under PFMW, and the Spell Trigger has fired, cast PFMW (up to three times, controlled by IADRAGGR09)
Use Greater Doom under the same conditions as Orcus
If less than 61% slashing resistance, use Armor of Faith (up to four times, using IAARMOR)
Use Horrible Cloud [acid damage] (up to nine times, controlled by MYFOG)
Use TS or Remove magic if Illusionary buffs are active, under the same conditions as Orcus
Use Storm of Vengeance (up to ine times, controlled by IAVENGEANCE)
Use RROR if appropraite (up to six times, controlled by IAREVERSAL)
Use Breach if appropriate (up to four times, controlled by IACASTBREACH)
Cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by IADRAGGR12)
Cast Remove Magic if a potion of Magic Shielding is active (Once, constrolled by REMOVEMAGIC)
If the enemy has at least 25 magic resistance, use Lower Resistance (up to twice, controlled by IALOWERMR)
Fire a Spell Sequencer of Greater Malison, Slow and Confusion (once, controlled by IADRAGGR02)
If the enemy has a save vs Breath or Spell of 7 or better, use Greater Doom (unlimited times, every two rounds)
Use Green Dragon Breath (Poison Damage, Ring of Gaxx protects us)
Use Greater Command (up to nine times, controlled by IAGCOMMAND)
Use Chaos (once, controlled by OFFENSIVE)
Use Emotion (once, controlled by IADRAGGR03)
Use Dragon Fear (once, controlled by DRAGONFEAR)
Attack the nearest enemy
Notably, have a high magic resistance does not block the Greater Doom.
The strategy that we will use is:
Go in with a Potion of Magic Shielding and SI:Ab active
Use spell protections to protect the SI:Ab, and by extension the Potion of Magic Shielding
Use Remove Magics to get through the three PFMWs
Hit the Dragon to death with our weapons
Casting spells in the Dragon's Lair will trigger the aggression early, so we prebuff before entering the lair with ProAcid, ProEnergy, IHaste, GOI. SI:Ab and Spell Turning.
Setting up our summons from items does not trigger the aggression just yet, which is nice.
We head in and quaff our potions as soon as the wyrm comes in range.
We spend a couple rounds drawing out the Storm of Vengeance and Horrible cloud (at least, the inital ones). This is because refreshing SI:Ab has a nonzero castingtime, and we don't want to be interrupted by an annoying tick. I like to fire a sequencer of triple Remove Magic here as it is instacast and will get rid of the Dragon's buffs.
Since SI doesn't adhere to normal rules of spellcasting, we can be quite aggressive with casting Remove Magic.
The Wyrm only has four effective PFMW, and dispelling them is easy. It likes to throw other spells in between the RRoRs, such as Horrible Cloud, which is just fine for us.
We will probably want to be safe and start casting our SI:Ab as the RRoR cast animation is being played, instead of waiting for it to be launched.
We will want to keep the physical pressure on. It is not weak to critical hits, but its physical resistances are low by IA standards.
It dies for 90k experience and a bunch of loot, including:
Gnasher club
Periapt of Proof Against Poison
Foebane
Boots of the Woodland
Scroll of Wish (will not be scribed as it is a crafting ingredient)
Green Wyrm Scales
Scroll of Bigby's Crushing Hand
We return to the Supreme Golem. We decide not to fight him - partially to preserve our reputation, and partially because we're already approaching the max effective level.
We perform a major selloff to Jahaboam, getting us to almost 1 million gold.
We spend a very large chunk of money to finally forge the Boots of the Ranger Lord, giving us permanent Improved Haste.
Orcus and the Green Wyrm have a surprising amount of overlap in their scripts. Doing this a second time I would probably do Orcus a while later, as the number of minions and inreased fight length opens up more opportunity for error. I also think that a Barbarian Essence strategy may be optimal in a noreload game for Orcus.
If you were to tackle this with even a 2 man party how would it differ and what classes would you choose?
A two person party is probably the most difficult way to do it - you don't have the action economy of a full party, and you don't have the defensive options of a solo (at least, not without using just a single character for a fight and treating it as a soloer with half the XP). The easiest ways are either solo or in a party of six, and I prefer the fewer moving parts and less mental tax of soloing.
This is going to come with a disclaimer that over 90% of my IA experience has beeen soloing, so I may not be the best judge of this. There are quite a few fights where I am extremely confident with solo strategies but have no idea how to handle them as part of a party because of a lack of defensive items. Similarly, in a party drawing out all the summons of an enemy may be a lot harder, so the XP will be tighter on two fronts.
Breaking down each of the classes in IA:
Fighter (Berserker): The Enrage is mostly useful as a defensive option, not offensive. Probably best if dualed to a mage, as that can help this character be extremely tanky, as many of the immunities that Enrage gives are ones that mages can struggle with (level drain, hold, etc).
Fighter (Wizard Slayer): Pretty useless against non-casters. Against casters, it relies on them not having PFMW or similar up. There are probably one or two fights where this is useful, but if a caster is being hit by your fighters, they're gonna be dead soon one way or another.
Fighter (Kensai): The new IA class Riskbreaker is essentially a better version of the Kensai.
Fighter (Barbarian): A worse version of the Berserker.
Fighter (Dwarvern Defender): Defensive Stance doesn't add a huge amount compared to Hardiness. There are better options.
Fighter (Riskbreaker): A better version of a Kensai. The most significant downside is the lack of dual classing, but they keep getting valuable abilities into the high levels, so this doesn't hurt as much as with other kits.
Fighter (Champion of Arvoreen): A new kit for Mazzy taht can be taken. It's like a cross between a Fighter and a Paladin, but without significant upside
Ranger (Archer): Most if not all significant enemies in IA are immune to missile weapons.
Ranger (Stalker): Most if not all significant enemies in IA are immune to backstabs.
Ranger (Beastmaster): Probably the worst kit in the unmodded game, nothing has been gained in IA.
Ranger (Vagrant): New IA class. A lot of powerful loot is available for Vagrants, especially if one is a protagonist.
Ranger (Protector): Most of its abilities are trying to turn a Ranger into a support caster, which doesn't work out. Racial Combat will be useful in Dragon fights, not sure about other fights.
Paladin (Any): All can be turned by high levle enemy clerics, which is a massive pain. The best kit (Inquisitor) has been nerfed, so it dispels at a much smaller level bonus.
Cleric (any): Useful for their buffs. Will probably want to make into a multi/dual with a warrior class so they are useful in combat. If the appropriate ini setting is turned on, comboing with a ranger for the druid spells will be beneficial.
Druid (Auramaster): The only druid kit worth talking about. It gets a bonus of 2 to casting speed, is immune to all variations of Silence, and gains additional spells per level. It also gains access to spells some very useful spells: RRoR, Aura Cleansing (Alacrity), and Perfect Camouflage (II + SI:Div). Potentially a great anti-mage character, but a bit risky, as dispel instead of remove magic will have to be used.
Monk (any): Uselss in IA
Shaman: A worse Druid
Mage: A single class good aligned Necromancer is a good protagonist choice - not because it is a strong option, but because it makes the game so much easier. Otherwise, a Mage should probably be dualed to.
Sorcerer: A very strong option, as it gains early access to spells like IHaste and can preserve rare scrolls as crafting ingredients.
Thief: Only useful so solos can get UAI. The only good way to use a Thief is to have an extra party member that joins whenever a trap/lock is encounterd, deals with it for XP that gets shared with the rest of the party, and then goes away before sucking up and more XP.
Bard: A worse F/M that has access to UAI. In a well-rounded party UAI will be unnecessary as the items will have users anyway. In a small party to solo, worse than a F/M.
If possible, take Dwarf as a race. Otherwise, take another of the shorty races for the ST bonus.
Multiple arcane casters provide diminishing returns, so going for more than two is probably not worth it. Divine casters provide extremely diminishing returns, so one (or even half of one) should be enough for the entire party, and may be skipped entirely in smaller parties (as items can replicate divine caster buffs). Auramasters can be treated as a full divine caster plus half an arcane caster. Having too many half casters can be quite bad as it can make caster level wars extremely difficult to win.
Additional warriors provide diminishing returns a lot slower than the other classes, so once the party's Arcane and Divine abilitiesare covered, any additional party members should be warriors. Try to wrangle it so that the protagonist is either a Vagrant or pure class Necromancer - even if it involves weaking the party in absolute terms, the benefit from having a protagonist of those types is worth it.
Hmm I thought it might make it a little easier with 2 but you might be right, would take double the survival resources. I will have to give improved anvil a try in the near distant future and looks like it might be solo.
In the most recent save, Othala has about 28.5m XP (9.5 in each class), and the stats screen shows a total XP of all kills of about 23m. Therefore, there was about 5.5m party XP from quest rewards and the like. If we were to instead have had a party, the XP per party membout be:
Party of 2: 17m (Level 40 for all classes)
Party of 3: 13.17m (Level 40 for all classes)
Party of 4: 11.25m (Mage 36, Fighter 39)
Party of 5: 10.1m (Mage 33, Fighter 38)
Party of 6: 9.33m (Mage 31, Fighter 36)
The level advantage of being solo isn't actually that high - as a triple class solo I only have XP in each class that is a few percentage points higher than a party of 6 single classed characters would, and I am actually behind a party of 5. It is also worth noting that multiclass characters get delayd HLAs, single class characters will get them a lot earlier than we did.
If we do the same math, comparing the XP that Othata we have in each of our three classes vs what XP a party of six single class characters would each have at various major milestones:
Part 026, when we got our first level 6 spell slots: 854k XP vs 1.6m
Part 036, when we did the Slaver Ship fight: 1.26m vs 2.28m
Part 053, just before the Lavok fight: 2.08m vs 3.27m
Part 080, the Chromatic Demon: 3.77mvs 4.81m
Part 100, the Underdark: 5.92m vs 6.55m
Part 120, Firkraag: 8.32m vs 8.36m
As we can see, up until quite recently a party of six single class characters would be higher level in each of their classes than our solo triple class character. The difference is at its most extreme in the early game, which makes sense - since so many fights are more difficult in IA, we deliberately picked up as much quest XP as possible in the early game.
Comparing a solo triple class to a party of six single classes, the six single classes have an XP advantage for the majority of the game, plus an action advantage throughout. The advantages that a soloer has are defensive - being able to have item-based immunity to Hold, Confusion, etc on the whole party means that we don't have to worry about dispels on our buffs.
I mentioned earlier that there are some fights that I have no idea how to handle without solo defenses. An example of this is the Hybrid Tiefling fight - the Elite Planar Hounds inflicts saveless confusion, dispel the confusion protection buffs on hit, and the wild magic makes reapplying them unreliable. There probably is a reload safe way to handle this fight for a six person party that could be found with sufficient probing (and risky approaches definitely exist), but I don't know what it is right now and don't see an obvious starting point. These fights are very few and far between, however, and there are equivalent fights that a full party could handle but a soloer could not.
Some six person party combinations that I would recommend:
Protagonist Necro
Auramaster
Berserker/Mage Dual (Halberds, 2h swords)
Vagrant (Axes, Clubs)
Riskbreaker (Shortswords, Warhammers)
Vagrant (Flails, Longswords)
This good damage type coverage, and strong summons from the two Vagrants. The Auramaster provides divine support, and counts as half an arcane caster (alongside the Berserker/Mage). the Berserker/Mage could also be a multiclass instead of a dual class, I'm not sure which is better. Candidate levels to dual are 13 (1.4m XP, the extra APR boost), 17 (2.6m XP, the best possible saving throws), or 20 (3.5m XP, best possible THAC0).
Protagonist Vagrant (axes, clubs)
Sorcerer
Berserker/Mage
Berserker/Mage
Riskbreaker
Ranger/Cleric (flails)
A sorcerer is an upgrade over a non-protagonist mage. The two berserkers could again be multis. This one has more arcane casters and is generally a more defensive composition than the first one.
Don't give up on this. I admit I check it daily to see if you made any progress.
I'm still going, it's just that I tend to not have much play time available midweek. Friday/Saturday/Sunday are my main days, so there tends to be a bit of a weekly pulse to how often I can upload parts. This weekend I've got a lot of time available to play, and I'm going to try to get a lot of WK content done, hopefully making it to the final seals level.
This has been an incredible thread and I really like your writing style and ultra-informative breakdowns.
Thanks - I'm trying to give a breakdown of the IA challenges in a way that you don't need to have played the mod to understand (at least the first time an enemy is encountered, I'm not going to give a detailed Ghost Spider breakdown every time we encounter one).
I hope it can also be taken as a kind of guide for new IA players - although most players are not solo, the detail of the encounters is hopefully useful, and especially some early roadblocks like Suna Seni can be turn people off the whole mod. The game engine does mean some of the abilities (such as the Minotaur's 15% chance to inflice saveless paralysis for a round) are extremely hard to figure out for players who aren't willing to look up every enemy in Near Infinity. The BWL forums contain some detail, but not as much as I would like, and any other forum discussions tend to be ten or more years old. Although I don't like actually performing noreload runs, I want this guide to be usable by someone who is more up to the task.
In the last part, we finally got the Boots of the Ranger Lord. It's an upgrade that is important for Purge Magic fights, and is mostly conveniece otherwise, as it means that we don't need to buff with IHaste, and we don't need to worry about refreshing it in extremely long fights.
We return to the WK maze, following our standard route. On the room before the room that contained the Hybried Tiefling (AR3010), we buff up with ProFire, ProCold, PFME, II and SI:Ab. We will also want a contingency of PFMW on enemy seen, and maybe a contingency of Remove Magic on hit. I also like to put Remove Magic in spell sequencer/trigger.
We head SW into the now empty Hybrid Tiefling room, and NW into this room (AR3007). Initially, we have to fight one Demon Knight, but shortly afterwards, four more will spawn in. This room is a Wild Magic room, which means that we cannot use any magic and be reload safe. Fortunately, we can still use Contingencies and Sequencers.
Each Demon Knight has an even chance of protecting themselves with SI:Ab or SI:Div. If they use SI:Div, then we can blast away their protections with a Spell Sequencer/Trigger of triple Remove Magic. We are protected from their spells with our own, and so the only way they can hurt us is by hitting us with their swords. PFMW on contingency will give us four rounds of protection.
Each Demon Knight takes about a round and a half to take down if they have Hardiness up, meaning that we can take down about three of them before our PFMW runs out. Our precast stoneskin should be enough to last the rest of the fight, but for safety we can use another PFMW in our Spell Trigger, or use Hardiness and potions of Healing (as we have 75% resistance under Hardiness).
The next room contains a Demon Wraith (level 31/25 Fighter/Mage). It summons five Slave Wraiths at the start of the battle, and five Skeleton Grandlords will join the fight later on. Both the Demon and Slave wraiths drain levels on hit, which we don't care about.
We get dispelled as we enter this room. We want to start casting Alacrity as soon as the auto-pause fires, and it will finish before we can get interrupted. Under Alacrity, we will want to set up our buffs:
Use our Spell Trigger with PFMW, PFME and ProElectricity
Use our Spell Sequencer with ProCold, ProFire and II
Set up SI:Div
Insta-cast buffs (such as Stoneskin)
Use RRoR on the Demon Wraith
Remove Magic the Demon Wraith (99% probability)
Activate Offensive buffs
The Slave Wraiths give 5k XP if we leave them alive and kill the Demon Wraith, and 10k XP if we kill them. We kill them, then the Demon Wraith. From this point the fight is pretty straightforward, even when the Grandlords join in. The Demon Wraith has three PFMW and some Stoneskins, and so may need several Remove Magics. The Slave Wraiths and Demon Wraith are weak to Critical Strikes, but we will need to be safe about keeping our action free to refresh PFMW.
Loot from this fight includes:
Red Star Garnet (crafting ingredient)
White Dragon Scales
Sellables
Finally, heading NW brings us to the last room of the level, Aesgareth's room. I'll go into more detail on the Deck of Many Things below, but the take away is that we will win each bet with Aesgareth, then do some fights and 5% fire resistance from the Deck.
Aesgareth will fight some soldies when Strife is drawn. They are worth no XP, so there is no point trying to steal kills. In the second round we will get inflicted with a saveless curse of 6 strength, and Sister Garlena is the closest person who can remove it.
Before talking to Aesgareth the final time, we buff up with ProCold, Profire, PFME/ProEnergy, II and SI:Ab. None of them are a high enough caster level to bother us, and they are all weak to our Remove Magics.
We gain 20k XP from agreeing to play, 20k for being nice in defeat, and 25k from restoring the scepter after Aesgareth is done with it. Aesgareth will always draw Wheel and win in the last round, and for optimal XP we want to refuse to hand over the way out after this happens. Aside from the DOMT, this fight gives us A bunch of sellables and generic +3 equipment.
Our first DOMT draw is Flames, which puts us against a few Fire Elementals and a Balor, which are not threatening at all. Some things to note are that we get dispelled between activating the DOMT, and that using the DOMT uses our action so we cannot instantly respond to what happens.
The second one is quite a bit more dangerous. We use the fact that Alacrity cannot be dispelled. We cast Alacrity and activate the DOMT. We set up a protective Spell Trigger and Spell Sequencer just like the Demon Wraith. When the Demon Knights appear, we instacast and take them out the normal way.
The third draw, Comet, is uneventful.
Part 130: WK Machine Level and Illithids:
In the last part, we had what is hopefully our final encounter with wild magic zones - those are extremely annoying for a no-reloader. In vanilla there Illithids and the Gith are not too different in difficulty, but in IA that is very much not the case. We will therefore be doing the Illithids and the central area together, and handling the Gith as their own part (they will need their own part).
We emerge into the next level of WK, with the Machine of Lum the Mad. Choosing the right dialogue options gives us some Illithids to fight for a shot of XP.
Near the Entrace to the Illithid Encampment is a group of Yuan-Ti, easy for us as this point.
Similarly, the NE part of the map has an improved spider group.
Magic Golems are just beyond. They are easy, as we have been holding onto mundane swords since Chateau Irenicus.
Southwest from the main room are two Greater Bone Golems and three Elemental Golems. The portal to exit the level to the outside remains active, so we can easily take this fight bit by bit. We can draw out all 18 lesser golems (and if we're not worried about reloads, make sure they are Gems) for a massive pile of XP.
Heading into the Illithid part of the level, we run into a bunch of enemies that are completely nonthreatening.
All this (mostly the triple Elemental Golem fight) is enough for a double level up, allowing us to hit Fighter 38/Mage 33.
I've done some probing, and I think I've got to conclude that the Chaos fight is technically possible without divine sources of electricity damage, but probably not worth it for us right now:
Chaos is very similar to the Mithril Golem (including the combat protection removal every round), but with a few extra features, the most notable of it is that every time we hit it, it uses Chaotic Revenge. Chaotic revenge does the following:
We get confused unless we make a save vs breath at -4
We take 4d4 magic damage (save vs breath at -4 for half)
Our combat protections and spell protections are removed
Our save vs breath is unresistably cumulatively lowered by 1 for 20 rounds
Our save vs spells and save vs wand are cumulatively lowered by 1 for 20 rounds unless we make a save vs breath at -4
In addition to this, it has some features that the Mithril Golem does not:
It can cast True Sight if we have illusions up
It can cast Remove Magic (which would remove our potion buffs)
It regenerates
It can cast Killer Insects, which gives 100% spell failure and does 4 piercing damage per second for 60 seconds
If we were to be able to beat it, we would want to get 90% or 100% piercing resistance (without hardiness), get immunity to magic damage and confusion via equipment, and beat him that way. We could do this, but it would require a lot of potions of Barbarian Essence, and we wouldn't get much from it. We might do it later (post JD fight), but that's a while away.
About the Deck of Many Things:
I have talked a bit in previous posts about what I consider to be "fair" and "unfair" RNG - essentially, I consider RNG to be fair if a random event is a function of something that I can control as well as random chance. The Deck of Many things is an example of unfair RNG, and as such I am happy to break my reload safe rule when it comes to it.
There are two ways to interact with the Deck of Many Things - during our conversations with Aesgareth, and when using the deck later on. When using it with Aesgareth, each round we can draw one of two cards and Aesgareth can draw one of two cards, with there effectively being a 25% chance of us winning the round. There isn't much choice here.
For the other way to interact, after we have obtained the DoMT as an item, we can draw up to three cards from it. The full list of effects is quite varied (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Deck_of_Many_Things#Gameplay) and has had IA changes, the best one in each category is:
1st draw, good: Jester (5k XP)
1st draw, bad: Donjon (Imprisonment, Avoid Death can negate)
2nd draw, bad, if 1st good: Void (Disintegrate, Avoid Death can negate)
2nd draw, good, if 1st bad: Sun (15k XP)
2nd draw, bad, if 1st bad: Void (Disintegrate, Avoid Death can negate)
3rd draw, if all previous good: Comet (5% fire resistance)
3rd draw, if any previous bad: Comet (5% fire resistance)
Some might disagree on my analysis. The most likely points of disagreement are:
Jester vs Flames: Jester gives 50k XP in the base game, 5k in IA. We gain more from the monsters in Flames.
Sun vs Knight: Sun gives 300k XP in the base game, 15k in IA. We gain more from the Demon Knights
Sun vs Star: Star gives us +1 to one of our ability scores, based on our class. The Thief class is checked first, and will give us +1 DEX. If we look at the chart (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Dexterity), we will gain no benefit going from 19 to 20. We have DEX modifiers coming up of the Machine of Lum (+1), Hell Trials (-1), and the Improved Ranger Boots (+3), which means that although we could get an AC boost of 1, it is only temporary. I would rather get some XP and some earlier caster levels than a temporary AC boost.
Comet vs Moon: Comet is 5% fire resistance, Moon is +10 hit points. We are currently on 226 hitpoints, and with 12 more level ups we will reach 238 (268 with JD sword, 283 if we get the Cloak of Arcane Immortality). Therefore, the Moon offers a 3.5% to 4.4% increase to HP. However, we have several other sources of fire resistance, which the comet will play very nicely with, and ultimately I believe the Comet is better, as fire is a common source of damage.
Comet vs Throne - In vanilla, the Throne gives us 30k XP points, much less than the 1m in vanilla. XP points don't have have much use for us right now - firstly, we are already a higher level than most if not all of the enemies that we are fighting, and secondly we will reach max level in every class in about 9m XP, which is a mater of when instead of if.
The Supreme Leader is indeed a very tricky fight. We have the following problems:
The Supreme Leader does fire damage on hit, and the Anti-Paladins do magical damage on hit. These make Barbarian Essense potions not enough to tank the starting gith with, we will need to use PFMW instead
The Anti-Inquisitors make it so we cannot use PFMW once the golem makers area dead
The golem makers mean that we cannot spend a very long time in this fight, or we will get overwhelmed with golems
The presence of Stone Golems means that we need Mazzy's sword handy to counteract Golem Slow
The Supreme Leader cannot be killed until the Anti-Inquisitors have been summoned (though they do not need to be dead)
We cannot leave the map until the Supreme Leader and all the Anti-Inquisitors are dead
Part 131: WK Gith:
In the last part, we finally broke the 30m XP mark. We're close to hitting the soft cap on fighter levels, and our last proficiency point.
The fight coming up is known as one of the hardest in IA. We will have to face the following enemies:
Supreme Leader, a level 34/27 Fighter/Mage
Mlar and Hr'a'cknir who summon XP and lootless Coin/Gem Golems every three rounds, with no limit (and share the damage resistances with the golems they summon), who must both be killed for the Supreme Leader to be killed. Mlar also summons Stone Golems and Hr'a'cknir also summons Clay golems. Only the Stone Golem is notable as it uses Golem Slow, which can by blocked with MGOI and GOI.
4 Anti-Inquisitors, who get summoned two at a time when Mlar and Hr'a'cknir are killed. They can use Torturous Inquisition every two rounds, which does a large chunk of Fire damage, gives -50 Fire Resistance and dispels illusionary/specific/combat protections. Torturous Inquisition is used if we have up Stoneskin, have PFMW/AI active (SCRIPTINGSTATE6 being 3 or more), or another condition I cannot determine (SCRIPTINGSTATE11 being 1)
A large number of starting Gith, including Anti-Paladins that on hit dispel us
We buff up with TS (The Truth), ProEnergy, II and SI:Div before heading un. In a change from the norm, we do not have a pre-rest Stoneskin. We also have a Spell Sequencer and a Spell Trigger each with triple Remove Magic. We also make sure we keep the Ring of Human Influence equipped so we can swap into Mazzy's sword.
As we enter, the Gith approach us. There are a total of five Anti-Paladins that we want to take out. Since they can dispel on hit, we want to be careful about when our PFMWs run out. Fortunately, all the gith are weak to Critical Strikes.
We should be able finish off the Anti-Paladins during the second PFMW, as well as most of the regular gith. We will be safe and use two CS per PFMW.
We will be jonied by some golems. When the Stone Golem is around we want to keep Mazzy's sword offhand for protection against Golem Slow. We also want to make sure the Coin/Gem golems do not hit us and dispel our illusions. Remember that we need Crushing weapons for the Clay Golems.
Our target priority for this part of the fight is:
Anti-Paladins
Stone Golems
Regular Gith
Clay Golems
Coin/Gem Golems
Once the anti-paladins are down, we run to the centre of the map and stand within Melee distance of Mlar and Hr'a'cknir. Our goal at this stage is to kill them while we drink four Potions of Barbarian Essence (out of nine total that we have).
We do not want either of them to die before we have drunk the full four potions, as we will want our undispellable physical immunity before the next stage of the fight.
Once we have the Barbarian Essence potions drunk, we don't mind if a Coin/Gem golem hits us and dispels our illusions. This will cause the surviving Gith to start to cast some damaging spells at us, but we have lots of HP and magic resistance and our action will be free to heal.
With Mlar and Hr'a'cknir down, we enter the third stage of the fight. Our goal is to kill the Inquisitors, but we have some Golems that are obstrucing our movement. We take down the Golems (preferring first Stone, the Clay, then Gem), using Phosphorus main hand and Mazzy's sword offhand until we get within melee range of one of the inquisitors, then attack them.
We are quite flexible with our action in this phase of the fight. The Anti-inquisitors all have 90% physical resistance , 150HP and immunity to critical hits, so this may take a while, but it's an uneventful phase of the fight. The Supreme Leader has damaging spells, but we can use Potions or Magic Items to protect ourselves from the damage (e.g. Ring of Fire Resistance vs Comet, Cloak of Magic Shielding/Belt of Inertial Barrier vs ADHW).
Having the large number of Golems and Gith around are useful for keeping the Supreme Leader from attacking us - even though he cannot deal physical damage, his sword does a bit of Fire damage on each hit, which can be annoying. It's also worth noting that the Anti-Inquisitors wield two-handed weapons that have a range of 2, compared to the range of 1 that everybody else has.
It can be worth trimming down the mob of Stone Golems, which means we no longer need to use Mazzy's sword. We will want to keep the Ring of Human Influence equipped, however, as it is needed to swap into our ADHW protection items.
With all four Anti-Inquisitors down, it is time to enter the fourth and final stage of the fight. The Supreme Leader's buffs will have all worn off, so it's time to take him out. I like to spend a few rounds and a few Critical Strikes taking out the other enemies so we can kite without getting bogged down.
The Supreme Leader's sword does fire damage to us slightly faster than the Ring of Gaxx regenerates us. We can protect ourselves from it with PFMW, but he has breach. Fortunately, he only has five breaches, and we have many more than five PFMWs, so we can just exhaust him of those.
Although he will have has most of his buffs expire, he will have some long-lasting ones remaining, such as Stoneskin. We can use Remove Magic (including from Sequencer and Spell Trigger) to get rid of his remaining buffs. He has five Stoneskins, plus the one he starts with, and we will want to dispel them all. He is immune to Breach, which is quite annoying.
The supreme leader has a monstrously good AC, which means that we can only hit on a critical hit. He has ten Hardinesses which we will likely have to wait out. The total wait duration of the Hardinesses is about the same as the Barbarian Essence duration, however, so we will need to kite him and return to PFMW at the end.
Once he is no longer Hardinessed, he should go down in a round or two of Critical Strikes, though we will want to keep spare Critical Strikes in case we mis-judge the Hardiness duration.
He dies for an overall underwhelming 40k XP.
Loot from this fight is:
Angurvadal
Lock of a Cloud Giant's Beard
Lots of Sellables
Montolio's Clasp
Part 132: WK Demilich
The last part was the first fight we've ever had to break out the Barbarian Essence potions for. It's a fight which isn't difficult in an absolute sense, but it extremely long and can be mentally taxing. The good news is that it unlocks a large amount of content afterwards, and some very nice loot. The final guardian of some of the loot is coming up - the Demilich.
We have already fought Kangaxx, and this unnamed Demilich is very similar. It only has a caster level of 31, which we beat it on.
We head in under ProEnergy, II and SI:Div. Unlike Kangaxx, there is a Gem and a Coin golem in here. The Demilich is invulnerable while the golem are alive.
With the golems down, we fight the Demilich. There's not much it can do to us, especially with the ProEnergy up.
It can lower our elemental resistances (particularly Fire Resistance), so we can be safe by sticking ProFire in a spell sequencer.
This fight has a lot of notable loot, including:
Dagger of the Star
Scroll of Protection from Magic (modified to be crafting ingredient only)
Case of Plenty +1
Potion of Barbarian Essence
Defender of Easthaven
We hit Fighter 39 and get our fifth proficiency point in Short Swords.
Part 133: Machine of Lum the Mad
We have beaten the Demilich, though Saladrex is probably a bit to tricky for us to handle right now. We can at least get some easy XP in the rest of this part.
We light the torches for 10k extremely easy XP.
We run into Rock and Garock, along with four Ice Salamanders. Garock is annoying, teleporting around whenever we hit him, and Rock is annoying being immune to physical damage when Hardiness is up and being unbreachable. Fortunately, neither of them can do anything to us under AI, and Rock only has one Hardiness. Despite being Minotaurs, they do not have the IA on-hit abilities.
Loot from this fight and the nearby chests is:
Axe of the Unyielding
Golden Girdle of Urnst
Volcanic Ore
Killing Carston is worth 6k XP, and being nice is worth 10k XP. We then activate every bonus of the machine for +1 to all stats, the Storm Star, 5% magic resistance, and opening up the way down.
We return to Cromwell and forge the Improved Ring of Gaxx. This means that our magic resistance has jumped up to 90%. Unfortunately, we cannot forge the Flail of Defending and Wounding - we would need +3 flails, and we don't have the Scrolls of Permanency for that right now.
In the last part, we got some stat increases, which is pretty swish. Let's head back for some more WK content.
Carrying onto the NE part of the Final Seals level, we run into two Grave Liches and four Skeleton Grandlords. We can protect ourselves from the liches with II and SI:Div, and take out them by throwing out two RRoR before using Remove Magic. We can also be safe by running outside and resting up.
Watch out for the CC of triple ADHW.
In the room to the west are two Greater Bone Golems and four Elemental Golems. Like the previous level, we can go outside for safety, and drain them all of summons for a big chunk of XP.
We stat to interact with the sphere machine. We start with the red spheres, the first of which is a fight against four Coin golems.
The second red sphere fight is four Gem Golems. Much like the previous fight, this is pretty trivial a this point.
The third red sphere fight is two Ice Golems and an Elemental Golem. This Ice Golems purge magic every four rounds, and are smart enough not to purge us unless we have something worth purging.
The two Ice Golems have their Purge Magics two rounds offset, so we will be getting purged every two rounds. We need to watch out for the Freeze Mortals, which can inflict saveless slow, so we will mainhand Phosphorus and offhand Mazzy's sword.
Fortunately, the portals do not get disabled for this fight, so we can retreat to rest up. If we do, the Elemental Golem and Ice Golems get their position reset, but the minor summon golems reset to where try spawned. We can use this to carefully draw out all the summons of the Elemental Golem. The Ice/Elemental Golems may come along as the fighting starts, but we should have enough time to take out a single minor golem under Critical Strike, or wait for the purge magic then PFMW to take out a minor golem.
We have some good fortune - when we enter the level from the outside portal, the Elemental Golem and only one of the Ice Golems pursues us. From this point we can take the same strategy that we took in the Planar Sphere, but it's easier as we don't have to worry about the 13 second tick and we have undispellable Improved Haste. Also unlike the Planar Sphere, we have safety by being able to run away.
The Ice Golem should go down in the Third PFMW, at which point taking out the Elemental Golem is trivial. After then, we can rest up and take on the second Ice Golem in the same fashion.
The final red sphere fight is an Ultra Golem and a Greater Elemental Golem, which will require a bit of a janky strategy to take out.
This fight is unlike the previous fights. When the GEG spawns, it disables the exits from the map, and they will enable at least four rounds later, when we are not in combat. The GEG will pursue us form offscreen, though the Ultra Golem will not.
Our plan is to hug the west/south walls of this room so we do not activate the Ultra Golem, and take out the GEG and its summons. Once we have done that, we can verify that the exit has reactivated (by seeing if we have the cursor change in the fog of war) and take on the Ultra Golem under easier circumstances.
The GEG summons six minor golems over 13 rounds and three Amber Golems over 8 rounds. We will want to do our normal thing under PFMW of attacking for seven half rounds and kiting one for safety. We will also want to spend our time attacking but not killing the GEG until all of its summons have been drawn out, so we can get rid of it and the Purge Magics as soon as possible.
With the GEG down, we can set up our buffs for the Amber Golems and take them out. We have loads of PFMWs, so taking down the Amber Golems safely should not be a major issue. Don't forget that Mirror Image works against Electrical Discharge.
This GEG drops Usuno's Blade.
We verify that the portal is open and run past the Ultra Golem to rest up outside. In theory we could rest up in this level, but it is not reload safe as we may have random encounters.
The Ultra Golems summons up to six Amber Golems. When we rest up and reenter, the Ultra Golem will reset to its spawn point, and the Amber Golems will reset to their pre-rest places.
The Ultra Golem will not pursue us unless we are in a fight nearby it. It will not spawn an Amber Golem if it sees a summon, but it will spawn an Amber Golem if it sees Othata. Therefore we have a strategy:
Have Othala go to the top right room
Have a summon draw the Ultra Golem to the top right room
Get the Ultra Golem to summon the Amber Golem as far to the top right as possible
Run away to rest and buff for an Amber Golem fight
Take on the Amber Golem that is all alone in the top right room
Repeat until all six Amber Golems are taken care of
I recommend using the Noble Spider instead of the Horn of Valhalla for this - I got completely consistent results with the Noble Spider, but not with the Horn of Valhalla.
With the Amber Golems taken care of, the Ultra Golem is straightforward. It has 90% crushing resistance, 95% slashing resistance and 100% piercing resistance. It deal lightning damage on hit, but fortunately does not have the Electrical Discharge of the Amber Golems. It uses Purge Magic every four rounds exactly.
it is not weak to critical hits, but it has an AC that we struggle with, so we follow the pattern of each PFMW consisting of two half rounds of regular attacks, four half rounds of Critical Strike, one half round of regular attacks and one half round of kiting until Purge Magic hits. It should go down in the fifth PFMW for 80k XP and no loot.
The four blue orbs give us straightforward fights against mages. They are level 14, 16, 20 and 25. II and SI:Div give us protection from their spells. The last two have Chain Contingencies of triple ADHW to watch out for.
The green spheres are spider fights. Each fight is four spiders, and we go through Killer, Spirit, Whisper and Ghost Spiders. Each of these are straightforward fights for us, though we will want to be sure to drain the Ghost Spiders of summons.
The purple spheres are undead, always four each. The first two rounds are Skeleton Lords and Skeleton Grandlords, which are easy for us.
The third round is Master Vampires. They summon an unlimited number of rounds of Vampire Brides seven rounds apart, but only the first four rounds are worth XP. We clear out the Vampire Brides until they stop becoming worth XP, at which people we take out the Master Vampires.
The final purple fight (and final sphere fight) is four grave liches. They are level 33/28 Fighter/Mages, so we can be safe with II and SI:Div, though we should also throw in PFME for protection from the ADHW Chain Contingencies and ProFire so they don't use Stellar Gravestone.
They protect themselves with SI:Ab and Spell Turning, so we will need to spend two RRoRs on each before using Remove Magic, for a total of 8 RRoR. We have 12 such spell slots, which is enough. The portals to leave are turned off for the duration of this fight, so we will want to prepare appropriately. Using Alacrity to speed up the RRoRs may be a good idea, we can get off six or seven in a single Alacrity.
They like to hit us in melee and dispel our protections, so we will want to protect ourselves with PFMW We move faster, so kiting is easy. Notable loot from this fight includes a single Potion of Barbarian Essence.
We head to the south door and meet the Helmite Ghost. He guards three doors. The left door is the Horde, which is an improved fight in IA. The middle door is the Ancient Dragon, a fight that will be very major in terms of both loot and difficulty. We instead head through the right door.
Inside, we find an Imp. The answer to the riddle is Seven. For the coin game, we start by taking two coins, then always take 4-X coins, where X is what the Imp took on its last go. This ensures that the game always passes to the Imp with one over a multiple of 4 coins, which guarantees our win.
This part has been our biggest haul in XP yet, at 3.3 million XP, bringing us to Mage 36. Maybe this should have been split into multiple parts, but there was no real natural stopping point.
Remaining Encounters:
Chaos (need some more equipment first)
Twisted Rune (might need some more caster levels to make it consistent)
The last part was a massive XP haul, and we're quickly reaching the level cap in all our classes. We can start to ignore drawing out summons of some of the nastier enemies we face.
We head to the Illithid Hideout. This is an area that we could probably have done a lot earlier on, and since it is a major loot source that is a likely good course of action. It is an area that we cannot retreat from until we have fully cleared the enemies.
We enter this room, where we fight some high level adventurers, two Gem Golems and some Skeleton Warlords. We buff up with II, SI:Div and ProEnergy, At this point, the Gem Golems are the biggest threat, as they can dispel our II on hit.
The mage has scrolls of PFMW, so the second priority should be taking out the mage to preserve as many of those as possible. The other unique loot from this fight is the Boneblade dagger and a Scroll of Wish. This is our third such scroll, so we can memorize it (we only need one as a crafting ingredient).
The next room is unimproved and easy. We may want to rest up in here before going to the final room.
The final room contains some vanilla creatures, an Alhoon (Illithid lich) and a Greater Elemental Golem. The Alhoon is only a level 19 caster, much less than us. It protects itself with SI:Ab, which make it a bit more annoying to take out.
Once the initial purge magic hits, we fire a PFMW, then an Alacrity. Under the Alacrity, we fire three RRoRs at the Alhoon, then start removing magic.
One thing that can trip us up here is that we get fireshield backlash when we RRoR the Alhoon from melee range. After casting one RRoR we will want to briefly advance the game long enough to take the backlash before casting the next one.
The Alhoon has no contingencies we need to worry about, so we can use the remaining Alacrity time to activate our offensive HLAs and take it out. From this point, we can kill the GEG after it has spawned all its minor golems. It spawns nine such golems, and no Amber Golems, but it should be straightforward for us at this point.
After the GEG goes down, it takes a few seconds for the loot to appear. We find:
Hammer of Thunderbolts
Wand of Wonder
Permanency Scroll
Manual of Elaboration
Portion of Barbarian Essence
Robe of Cold Resistance
Master of Disciplines
We also get enough XP to hit Mage 37. We've got plenty of Avoid Deaths already, so some additional Power Atttacks are the choice.
About the Twisted Rune
The Twisted Rune a dangerous party, consisting of:
Shangalar, a level 33/28 Fighter/Mage that is protected with SI:Ab and Spell Turning that dispels specific/illusionary protections on hit
Revanek, a 25th level Fighter that is protected with 50% resistance to all damage and Hardiness
Shyressa, a 30th level Vampire Fighter that dispels specific protections on hit and is protected with 50% physical damage resistance and Hardiness
Layene, a 31st level Mage that is protected with SI:Ab
Vaxall, a 31st level Beholder Mage that is protected with II and SI:Ab.
Vaxall is the biggest threat since it has access to Improved Anti-Magic Ray, which will be able to get past our II and SI:Ab.
Layene is the second biggest threat. She can summon Twisted Golems and indirectly summon Greater Twisted Golems. She also has access to Wish, which will always hit "Time stop and Improved Alacrity" while fully healing the other Twisted Rune foes. She cannot be killed until she has fired her wish.
Shangalar is the third biggest threat, as we do not want our II to be dispelled by a hit.
The big varaible to look out for is IAP1HIDDEN. Layene sets this to 1 when we are detected but not seen (I'm not sure how that works with II), and sets it to 2 when she uses Wish.
I have not been able to find a way of taking out Vaxall before we get hit with the Improved Anti-Magic ray. I can consistently do about one third to one half ot Vaxall's health in damage, but we get rayed in response. We could probably use a strategy of Barbarian Essence potions to protect from the fighters and equipment to protect from magical damage, but that will consume a lot of the potions, and it may not be worth it (at least, until we get some equipment that reduces our need for potions).
The Permanency scrolls have ended up being a bit of an unexpected constraint:
When we finished part 134, we found ourselves in a position that I did not expect - having run out of Permanency scrolls. We have four available for us in the rest of SOA:
Illithid Hideout
Layene
Ancient Dragon
Saladrex
Belcheresk (Demogorgon)
We also have two items that we want to craft that require Permanency scrolls:
Memory of the Apprenti
Judgement Day
We have some problems with this, though. First is that the Demogorgon fight is something that we likely will not be able to do, and the second is that the Saladrex fight is something that I am struggling with. This gives us the relatively easy fight of the Illithid Hideout, and the difficult but probably necessary fight with the Ancient Dragon, for two permanency scrolls.
The Flail of Defending and Wounding does not require a permanency scroll directly, but it requires two vanilla +3 flails. There is only one such flail available in SOA, so we if want to forge it before TOB we will need to use a permanency scroll. Similarly, Cuththroat requires a vanilla long sword +4. Once we enter TOB these will be much easier to forge, as we will get a lot more Scrolls of Permanency, as well as being able to buy generic +3 equipment in shops.
Therefore, we will deliberately hold off forging the FoDaW until we have beaten either Saladrex or Demogorgon, we have forged the Memory of the Apprenti (and gotten the one SOA +3 flail from Limak), or until we are in TOB. Cuththroat is lower priority, so we will not forge that until we are firmly in TOB.
In the last part, we did a GEG fight that we've been putting off for a while. Let's do another.
Returning to Suldanessellar, we find a couple golem groups that we somehow missed earlier.
Heading into the House of the Harpist, we see a Noble Rakshasa and a GEG. The Noble Rakshasa summons six Horrid Rakshasas, and the GE summons six minor golems and an Amber Golem. We make sure that we have our anti-ADHW equipment equipped. The Noble Rakshasa can cast some Dragon Breaths, so we are also ready to swap into Fire resistance gear.
The closed area of this fight means that we will want to be extremely vigilant about refreshing PFMW after Purge Magics. Clearing out Minor Golems and Horrid Rakshasa will be a priority so we can move about. We can use a pattern of hitting the Horrid Rakshasa enough when they first appear to trigger AI, then taking them out four rounds later. Alternatively, if we can get it to use its action befoe using AI, we can take it out in just under a round of Critical Strikes.
Loot from this fight includes the Staff of Earth, the Stone Harp, and if we wave a ranger around, a scroll of Improved Haste.
We rest up and head on into the Forest Clearing. We prebuff with II and SI:Div.
The notable parts about this dragon fight are:
It is a 30th level caster
It can use Lower Acid Resistance an unlimited amount of times, every three rounds
It has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW
Its breath does acid damage
It has a one-off summon of three Hardwood Golems. These things have a mainhand weapon that removes protections and an offhand mundane weapon that removes protections and inflicts casting failure. We will need to use AI instead of PFMW against them.
It has four PFMW that it will use from the start of the fight
With II and SI:Div up, the Dragon will waste a lot of time casting spells that do nothing to us. It will not summon the Hardwood Golems until we get within wing buffet range, so we stand at the edge of its vision and cast Remove Magic until we have gotten through all four of its PFMWs and all three of its Stoneskins.
We can use Spell Sequencer and Spell Trigger for additional Remove Magics.
We can use the IA improved summons to start to deal some damage to it. The Greater Djinni especially is extremely effective. It has a Contingency of Stoneskin that fires at 50% hitpoints.
The Hardwood Golems appear when we get within melee range of the dragon. We protect ourselves from them with AI, but we focus down the Dragon instead of taking them out.
A reload-safe strategy may want to try to take out the dragon without spawning the Hardwood Golems at all.
The dragon dies for 70k XP. Notable loot includes:
The Goblet of Life
The Gift of Peace
Scroll of Permanency (I forgot about this one when doing the analysis earlier)
Bladesinger Chain
We cannot leave this area until the Dragon is dead and we are not in combat. We may have taken a couple Greater Dooms which give us a big THAC0 penalty, so it will likely be worth kiting the Hardwood golems for 20 rounds while that wears off after the dragon is dead.
When we turn and fight, we use Crushing Weapons, as that is what they are weakest to (at 90% resistance). We follow the standard pattern of fighting for seven half-rounds.
We summon the Avatar of Rillifane for 15k XP and the Staff of the Woodlands.
We head into the Tree of Life Area. We take out all the enemies there (unimproved), but do not kill the parasites just yet.
About the Ancient Dragon:
The Ancient Dragon is a level 39/32/39 Fighter/Mage/Cleric. We beat it on the Arcane caster level front, but not the Divine caster level front.
Its fight logic is:
Summon minions (once, controlled be IACREATURE in GLOBAL)
If the Elite Nishruu is dead, remove an item that gives immunity to acid/cold/electricity/fire/magic/poison damage
When an enemy is seen or the player casts a spell, use buffs of Armour of Faith, Spell Shild, GOI and Spell Turning, and attack (once, controlled by IAFSDRA01)
Gain the allegience of any Fire Elementals or Efreeti
Fire a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW if under 25% health as long as IACURE is 1 (once, controlled by IAFSDRA10)
Greater Silence if there is a vulnerable target visible (up to 7 times, controlled by IAGSILENCE)
If the initial buffs have fired and no stoneskins are active, cast Stoneskin (twice, controlled by IAFSDRA13)
If under 80% hitpoints, out of stoneskins, IAFSDRA13 is 2, and not under PFMW, cast PFMW (up to five times, controlled by IAFSDRA06)
If a summon is seen, cast Death Spell (up to 4 times, controlled by IAFSDRA17)
If slashing resistance is under 66%, case Armour of Faith (up to 5 times, controlled by IAARMOR)
If it sees us under II, Invisibility, Mirror Image, cast TS (unlimited times, ten rounds apart)
If it sees us under II, Invisibility, Mirror Image, cast Remove Magic (unlimited times, four rounds apart)
If below 80% HP, cast Cure Critical Wounds (once, controlled by IAFSDRA09)
If below 25% HP, cast Heal (once, controlled by IACURE)
If below 70% HP, cast Regeneration (once, controlled by IAFSDRA08)
If below 40% magic resistance, use Magic Resistance (once, controlled by IAFSDRA15)
If within range, use Wing Buffet (resets very often, controlled by IAONEWING)
Attack the nearest enemy
If a RRoR target is visible, use RRoR (8 times, controlled by IAREVERSAL)
If the nearest target is Breachable, cast Breach (6 times, controlled by IACASTBREACH)
Cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by IADISPEL)
If a potion of Magic Shielding is up, cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by REMOVEMAGIC2)
If an illusionary enemy is seen, us TS (unlimited times, ten rounds apart)
If an enemy has a Magic Resistance of 30 or greater, cast Lower Resistance
Fire a Spell Sequencer of Greater Malison, Emotion and Slow (once, controlled by IAFSDRA02)
If the enemy is not under a Potion of Magic Shielding, if the save vs Breath/Spell is better than 8, use Greater Doom (unlimited times, two rounds apart)
If an enemy is seen that is weak to fire damage, use Fire Storm (unlimited times, ten rounds apart)
If an enemy is seen that is not mirror images, use Improved Fireball, using Lower Fire Resistance first if the Fire Resistance is over 0 (up to six times, controlled by IAFSDRA20, five rounds apart)
Fire a spell trigger of Chaos, Chaos and Emotion (once, controlled by IAFSDRA02 going from 1 to 2)
If a potion of Magic Shielding is up, cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by REMOVEMAGIC)
If an enemy is seen that has a fire resistance greater than zero, use Lower Fire Resistance (unlimited times, six rounds apart)
Use Greater Command (7 times, controlled by IAGCOMMAND)
Use Dragon Fear (once, controlled by IAFSDRA03)
Use Red Dragon Breath (unlimited times, every three rounds)
The minions that are summoned at the start of the fight are the Elite Nishruu, a Salamander Prince and a Noble Efreeti. The Elite Nishruu is the most annoying minion, as it is extremely sticky and it has a nasty weapon. The weapon drains two spells on hit and inflicts 20% spell failure for five rounds, as well as removing Specific and Illusionary protections.
In the last part, we cleared our way to the Tree of Life. We could fight Irenicus in hell, but that would close off access to rest of the SOA only content.
Crucially, we can do the Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar quest. This will require a bit of modding - I have taken out the remaining check for a pure class Vagrant, and added the Swanmay innate abilities, which I will not use after this part.
The XP and Loot from this are not any concern to us, this is purely for completionist reasons.
We head to Suldanessellar, and check out the Sealed House, which has a mysterious message when we try to open it.
The Tree of Life area has this new set of stairs. We can enter it if we have the Ruby of the Gods, we are a single class Vagrant, we have finished the Squirrel Job, and we have finished the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I have relaxed these conditions.
Inside is the Favored Swanmay. We are given the Mirror of the Lakesider, and told to go to the Sealed House in Suldanessellar.
Inside the Sealed House, we find the ghost of Lord Wetlander, who tells us about our mission:
Lord Wetlander is a legendary elven Vagrant who once commanded a large army of Swanmays
He faced a great evil a millenium ago who we will have to face again
We will be facing an immortal demigod called the Master of Mirrors
His mother was an elven sorceress who used mirror-based deception to seduce an elven god
His mother told him about his father's abandonment, and he swore revenge on the elven race
He attacked, and the elven gods needed to intervene to stop him
Since he was immortal, the gods could not kill him and instead all they could do was to curse him to stop him coming from the prime material plane more than once every millenium
A corollary of the curse is that the elven gods would not be able to obstruct his plans any more than that
The gods decided that every time the Master of Mirrors appeared, they would arrange for a Chosen Ranger to apear to combat him
The Master of Mirrors has an allergy to Swanmays
This is because he killed two Swanmays out of grief when his mother died and was cursed for it
Whenever he arrives on the Prime Material Place, he curses all Swanmays so that whenever they are summoned, one of the Master of Mirror's minions appears to fight it
Wetlander retreated into the house and the Master of Mirrors was able to follow him in alone through mirror magic
Wetlander drapped the Master of Mirrors in the house and he eventually gave up and left until the next millenium]
We are the next chosen ranger and will have to face the Master of Mirrors
Since we are also a Vagrant, if we beat him again he will be permanently banished from the Prime Material plane
We have to fight him before his army gets to strong
In order to fight him, we will have to find three mirrors: The Blazing Mirror, The Bloodstained Mirror and The Wooden Mirror
We have secretly lost the Ruby of the Gods, we should try to find it again
We return to the tree of life and use Speak with Animals to talk to the squirrel that has appeared. We need to make sure that we pick up the blessed nuts from a container in the main Tree of Life area before we talk to the squirrel. We dropped the Ruby of the Gods, and some vipers took it. We can get the vipers to appear again by using pennyroyal oil.
We can get the oil from Mrs. Cragmoon for 1k gold.
We return to the Tree of Life and summon a Swanmay Queen. An Elemental Golem appears shortly afterwards. It is worth no XP or loot, so there is no pont trying to draw out its summons.
We are joined by a large number of Mirrored Vipers. These things have 90% physical resistance, strong regeneration, and cast Mirror Image every two rounds, which cannot be removed or dispelled. The presence of the Swanmay weakens them, giving them a bunch of penalties, including critically -15 to all physical resistances. Normally they would ignore us under PFMW and take out the Swanmay Queen, but the careful positioning in the map means that they cannot get to the Swanmay Queen.
We will want to make sure that the Swanmay is pressed right up against the corner of the walkable area of the map and that we are pressed right up against the Swanmay. This will ensure that the minor golems summoned by the Elemental Golem will not spawn behind us.
The Swanmay will be around for 20 rounds, and the vipers will take 14 rounds to spawn them all once the process starts. There will be four vipers per wave for the first six wave (two round interval), plus just one that is holding the Ruby) in the last wave. We can get through about one per round under critical strike and the weakening lasts for three rounds, so we might not be able to get through all of the mirrored vipers on the first round. For that reason, it is safest to take out the first Elemental Golem, take out as many Mirrored Vipers as possible before the Swanmay unsummons, then summon another Swanmay and repeat the process.
The biggest danger is that we might go forward (either naturally or be pushed forward by the Swanmay) whenever we take out a Mirrored Viper.
We want to make sure that when we resummon the Swanmay, the Elemental Golem is forced to spawn on the other side of the vipers.
We don't have to get rid of every Mirrored Viper before the Swanmays go away, but the more the better. We can beat the Mirrored Vipers without Swanmays, but it's a very long process that may require us to use a number of our PFMW scrolls.
With the Ruby of the Gods, we can repair the mirror in the sealed house, and it causes a Mirrored Grandlord to spawn. We could summon a swanmay to help, but it's easier if we don't.
There's an annoying pattern where the Mirrored Grandlord, as with most mirrored monsters, do not give any XP or loot.
The next time we interact with the mirror, it spawns a Mirrored Wind Master. This one is immune to all forms of damage unless we have a Swanmay. We do our summons (Swanmay last), take out the Elemental Golem that appears, and then activate the mirror. With the golem around, the Mirrored Wind Master goes to 90% physical resistance.
Taking out the Elemental Golem takes three or four Critical Strikes, as does the Mirrored Wind Master.
Third is a Mirrored Ghost Spider. This has 60% physical resistance even before it is weakened from the Swanmay and is therefore easy.
We need to do all three fights without resting, or our progress resets and we have to do them again.
We now need to find the three mirrors. We will start with the Blazing Mirror. We are told that we first need to find a way to breath underwater.
The Magic Pond tells us to bring the Ancient Holy Water, and just tells us that the Ruby of the Gods will guide us.
We return to the Shadow Temple. In theory we could beat it without help, as it has 95% slashing/piercing resistance, but it is much easier to summon a swanmay (and friends), deal with the Elemental Golem, then take on the Mirrored Shadow with a 10% penalty to all its damage resistances.
It summons Deep Shadows (who are relatively easy with 50% physical resistances and 108HP), and is weak to critical hits. The Mirrored Shadow goes down in less than two rounds of Critical Strikes, though we should watch out for its saveless stun on hit.
Interacting with the crystal again gives us the Ancient Holy Water. Returning to the Magic Pool gives us and our Swanmays the ability to breath underwater.
Going after the Blazing Mirror, we find ourselves in an underwater fight. Our summons either suffocate here, or get insta-killed by the Mirrored Golem, so we don't bother.
We have to fight a Mirrored Golem. It has 325 HP, 100% damage resistance (90% with a Swanmay out) and purges magic every four rounds. We are also under an unsaveable slow effect, so we main hand Phosphorus and offhand Mazzy's sword. The slow timer ticks every round, so in theory we could swap back and forth frequently, but it's not worth the risk.
This is not a fight that can consistently be done solo, I'm afraid. It has a similar problem to the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - we cannot protect the Swanmay from being taken out by the golems and we need it alive to take out the Mirrored Golem. I will have to edit the Mirrored Golem to be more vulnerable to proceed, as we are being completionist in this part.
It drops the Blazing Mirror and a Potion of Barbarian Essence.
The Bloodstained mirror fight is against the Anti-Ranger. It has 100% physical resistance unless we summon a Swanmay.
Similar to the Tree of Life fight, we block the enemies from getting to the Swanmay. This can be a tricky spot to find, so we will want to:
Move to the coordinate 217,909 (using the X key helps)
Summon the Swanmay in the cavity behind us near the northern part
Wait for the Elemental Golem to appear to the North of Othala
Retreat the Swanmay to the southern part of the cavity out of range of the enemies
Keep the Swanmay busy so it doesn't try to be helpful and wander into range of the enemies
Focus on the Elemental Golem first, (using critical strikes), then the Anti-Ranger (who is not weak to critical strikes)
The Swanmay is only preferred when we are under PFMW, otherwise the nearest target is preferred. We can get a bit more DPF by getting the Swanmay to attack too while Othala tanks with Stoneskin.
When the Anti-Ranger gets below 20% HP, it summons a Mirrored Warrior and heals. The Anti-Ranger is unkillable while the Mirrored Warrior is alive. The Mirrored Warrior has 90% physical resistance without the Swanmay, 80% with.
The Swanmay will unsummon while the Mirrored Warrior is being taken out. We finish taking it out, then resummon the Swanmay in the same manner as before. This time, we ignore the Elemental Golem and focus on the Anti-Ranger, only taking out the Elemental Golem when the Anti-Ranger is dead. Once the Anti-Ranger is dead, we no longer care about preserving the Swanmay. Loot from this fight includes a Potion of Barbarian Essence.
Finally, we go for the Wooden Mirror. We have to fight the Drowned Soul and four Mirrored Ghost Spiders.
We protect ourselves with PFMW and start to take out the spiders. We prioritize the Mirrored Ghost Spiders first.
The Drowned Souls is 95% resistant to physical damage, has 150 HP and is weak to critical hits. We take it out with Critical Strikes after the Mirrored Ghost Spiders.
After it goes down, we just have a large group of Mirrored Whisper Spiders to deal with that are more annoying than threatening. Like the Mirrored Viper fight, we will need to use our full range of PFMWs, potentially dipping into scrolls.
We may want to reposition to a location like this when we are tanking to get best use our of our Stoneskins.
Once again, our reward is the mirror we wanted plus a Barbarian Essence potion.
We can interact with the mirror in the sealed house one final time to have our final confrontation with the Master of Mirrors. In this conversation, we learn that the stakes are higher - Since we are the second Vagrant in a row to fight him, if we lose then he will gain dominion over the whole world, not just the elves.
The Master of Mirrors (MOM.CRE) casts Duplication to summon another Master of Mirrors (MOM2.CRE), so we have two to deal with. We can drink one Barbarian Essence potion before going in and two more when we arrive. We main hand Phosphorus and offhand the Defender of Easthaven. This gives us physical immunity.
MOM summons three Mirrored Ghost Spiders, who in turn like to summon Mirrored Whisper Spiders, for a maximum of six each. MOM2 likes to cast ADHW and Magic Missile at us, which we can negate with equipment.
We take out the Ghost Spiders first, then the Whisper Spiders. We will swap our magic damage equipment on before their spells land and take it off afterwards to draw them into spending their action casting spells. Both of them can attack with MMM, but that is not a major threat to us. We may want to use PFMW or similar if the INT drain of getting hit by the spiders is worrying us.
We want to be a bit careful - Improved Web needs a save vs spell at -6, so we will need to bring out the Helm of Balduran or Gift of Peace to ensure that we can pass our saving throws while we have the magic damage equipment equipped.
Getting rid of the spiders is not difficult in an absolute sense, but it does take a long time. Once they are done, it's just us, MOM and MOMD.
Both MOM and MOMD are level 36 Mages. We are level 37, so we will win a dispel war. Each of our Remove Magics has a 60% chance, and we can use Sequencers and Triggers full of tripple Remove Magic for about a 95% dispel chance.
Both MOM and MOMD are immune to damage right now. We have a bit of breathing room, so we summon our minions, ending with the Swanmay. We focus down the Elemental Golem ASAP as it comes in.
With the Swanmay around, MOMD has 10% physical damage weakness. He has a lot of stoneskins, which can be annoying, but that is what we have Breaches for. He has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW which we should watch out for.
When MOMD goes down, MOM fire prebuffs and starts casting spells. We will want to save several Remove Magics for now, plus potentially a Sequencer of them. We will probably want to delve into our scrolls of Breach too.
MOM is basically the same as MOMD, except that the Swanmays inflict 5% weakness instead of 10%. They both have 300HP, which makes these fights extremely grindy. We may need to resummon a Swanmay to take out MOM, but it is straightforward at this point.
The Master of Mirrors is banished to his own plane, and can never return to ours. He threatens to take his revenge if we ever leave our plane, but we suspect it's just empty words.
We only get 35k XP for this fight. We return to the Magic Pond and hand over the Ruby of the Gods and the Mirror of the Lakesider for another 25.5k XP. We then have the choice of getting 5 Barbarian Essence from the pool, or upgrading the Axe of the Lakesider (the reward from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly). The axe isn't particularly fantastic, even when upgraded.
This should be treated as a bonus episode. Part 138 will continue from part 136, though I will probably be setting the appropriate variable to make the game think we have done this mission so we get the appropriate cameo in the EDE.
My thoughts on the expanded ranger stronghold as a whole (including Squirreled Away and Rune Assassins):
Squirreled Away:
Overall, this mission is good. The fact that you have to speak to the first squirrel could do with some more signposting so casual players don't miss it - Speak with Animals can be cast on pretty much any animal that is encountered, though it normally has no purpose beyond minor flavour, and there is no indication that the starting squirrel is any different, so plauers will either need to have read a guide like this or break out the Near Infinity.
The fight against the Rune Assassins is a nice introduction to the Rune Assassin enemies. In our case it was easy because we had already done the Cowled Wizards, but in previous playthroughs I have done this without arcane magic, and that turns it into a fight that needs a bit of innovation to tackle.
The need for Adamantine Dust I'm not a fan of. It feels like a bit of an artificial blocker, as Adamantine does not come up at all in the rest of this fight or the rest of the Rune Assassin fight. There is already a large amount of content that cannot be done before the Underdark (implemented in varying amounts of clunkiness), this doesn't need to add to it.
The Pitre fight at the end I like. The Greater Restoration and Pitre invincibility means that we have to adapt our normal battle priorities.
Shimmering Light:
I quite like this. Other players have reported bugs with Delon spawning causing problems being able to start and continue it, but I have not encountered this.
I like the fights against the Illusionist and the Enchanter. The Enchanter has the gimmick of the dominated minions, which is nice but it doesn't provide much of an obstacle to our regular game plan, the dominated minions would ideally be more attention-grabbing. The Illusionist has two gimmicks - the illusionary minions and the Phantasmal Killer. We took a riskier approach by not disbelieving in the Phantasmal Killer, a noreloader would probably want to disbelieve it for the safety at the cost of only 12.5k XP.
The final fight against the Elite Doppleganger it is the first dangerous enemy where we need to use AI instead of PFMW for protection. We have a variety of strategies we can take for a range of reload safety.
Rune Assassins:
The Guildmaster fight is the first of the extremely long IA fights. Although it later on becomes not particularly notable for being so long, at the time that we take it it has a fair bit of novelty on that front. A lot of the long fights can be mentally draining, but as long as we don't get hit by the Golems we avoid the worst of it.
The Grandfather of Rune Assassins is actually an easier fight than the Guildmaster fight. There are two reasons - it takes less time for all the minions to be summoned, and we do not have to worry about golems dispelling our invisibility.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
This quest is definitely my least favourite. We spend a lot of time talking to different people, but there is only one challenge and it is the Auriel fight at the end. This is a fight that has exactly one way of tacking it, which is to have an Auramaster in the party. I don't like this, as this is meant to be a Ranger quest, not a Druid quest. I would be much happier with this if saving Auriel was an optional objective instead of being required, like Pasha.
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar:
This is a very long quest with lots of fights. There is a common challenge where each time we summon a Swanmay we have to fight an Elemental Golem. I would like it slightly better if different strength of Swanmays summoned different strength of enemies (so there is a reason to not just summon the best Swanmay each time), though they might also need to cause different weaknesses in that case.
Keeping Swanmays alive is quite difficult, especially as when we PFMW up the enemies will ignore us and focus on the Swanmays. Summoning the one often makes things more difficult than previously, as we will have to deal with the Elemental Golem and try to keep the Swanmay alive against both the Elemental Golem and the mirrored enemy. We go for a body blocking strategy, which is what any full party will have to do, but it is so much more difficult as a solo.
The first fight is the Mirrored Vipers fight. Although we can take out a mirrred viper without the Swanmay, we have to fight over two dozen of them, which will require us to burn a large number of our PFMW scrolls. We have to abuse the environment to block the access to the Swanmay.
The second fight is fixing the mirror, the major part of which is the Mirrored Wind Master. I like seeing the mirrored versions of previous enemies, though difficulty seems a bit askew, with the second enemy being so much harder than the first or third.
The third fight is the mirrored shade, which is relatively easy to do. We haven't seen an enemy with saveless on-hit disable for a while, which means we have to keep on our toes.
The fourth fight is the Blazing Mirror. This is one which we can't do solo, I spend several hours trying to see if there is a critical pixel we can stand on to body block the Golems from reaching the Swanmay without any success. This fight is frustrating because it is difficult, but we have so few options available to us to try out.
The fifth fight is the Bloodstained Mirror. In theory this should be the easiest, as it is meant to be a solo protagonist fight anyway. I found the area to stand on to body block to be quite precise, which is why I have the exact pixel that I used. This fight is also very mentally draining, as the Swanmay needs constant attention to not walk up to the enemies and get killed. I'm not sure how a singelclass Vagrant is meant to beat the Anti-Ranger - even if Barbarian Essences are used for physical immunity, the Elemental Golem will probably either kill the Swanmay or kill the protagonist with the elemental damage on hit.
The sixth fight is the Drowned Soul. The Drowned Soul itself is a very minor part of the fight, most of it is extremely grindy. The Mirrored Spiders do get weaker if a Swanmay is around. This fight may be easier if we summon a swanmay (especially if we can hide in one of the crannies of the map), I found the fight reliable (though grindy) enough without and didn't investigate.
The final fight isn't massively dangerous. We can gain physical immunity using Barbarian Essences, and gain immunity from magical damage with our equipment, which it turns out gives us complete immunity to all incoming damage, which means that the only way we can take lose is by stat drain from the spiders, which PFMW and the like protect us from.
We are lucky enough in the final fight that we win the dispel war. MOM and MOM2 are both level 36 casters, which is I believe the highest level arcane casters in the game. If we did not win the dispel war, we would have to run around long enough for the buffs to expire, which is an extremely long time.
The biggest danger against the MOMs is that we will softlock ourselves by running out of Scrolls of Breach, or running out of Swanmay summons and being unable to hurt the MOMs.
Our total XP reward for this entire mission is only 273k, which is extremely small for what we fight - a regular Elemental Golem is worth about 200k if drained of summons. In terms of item loot, we get five Barbarian Essence potions, but any conventional player will probably have to spend those potions anyway, especially on the Bloodstained Mirror fight. We can also upgrade the Axe of the Lakesider, but that just turns its enchantment from +4 to +5, turns its bonus HP from 20 to 30, and turns its magic damage chance from 5% to 10%, which is a very underhwelming reward.
Overall Ranking:
Shimmering Light > Squirreled Away >> Rune Assassins >>> Ancient Secret > The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Comments
In the last part, we got partway through the Ust Natha questline, stopping just after we got the quest to kill Solaufein. We've got a lot of options to tackle here, so let's look at the total XP breakdown:
Therefore, we have a solution: Set up the double betrayal, interrupt the casting by killing Phaere and Ardulace, then slaughter the drow city on our way out.
Once we have gotten the mission to find the blood samples, Visaj appears. Threatening him for the rope has no downside and saves us money, so we do that.
Deirex is level 20, lower than most liches. Since we are 5 levels above, we can dispel with 99% probability. We protect ourself with ProFire and PFME, along with II and SI:Div.
Further in, we have a fight against five skeleton lords. This should be easy for us at this point.
We run into Ammar. Because we specifically asked about the name earlier, we can solve this quest the good way. This quest has some very nice rewards - as well as increasing our reputation back up to 20, our loot includes scrolls of Permanency and Improved Haste. Unfortunately, Rir's scroll is undroppable, so this is only our second spare scroll (third total).
Being nice to Jarlaxle is worth 10k XP. Fighting him and Visaj is worth a total of 26k XP. We want to use the quickloot menu and autopause on enemy dead to pick up the loot before we get teleported out. Visaj is only level 16, so we will be safe from him.
Although we could go to the upper level, there is a fight there against a Noble Efreeti that we're not ready for just yet.
The fight against the Ghaunadaur worshippers is unimproved. We don't return to Taso Kala afterwards - there is no return, and she disappears before we slaughter the city.
Now that we are on the mission for Ardulace, we can buy the slaves. We buy them with their equipment and set them free for 7500 XP.
Now is our last chance to use the drow merchants. I do a big sell of all our non-potion sellables to the potion merchant.
We start the ritual, but don't interrupt straight away. As soon as we see the animation for the demon summoning appear, we activate Critcal Strike and take out Ardulace and Phaere under IHaste. This lets us tell the demon to go away. We are missing out on 1k XP for not killing the demon, but I've not been able to work our a way to reliably kill all three.
Notable loot from this fight is the Gorgon Plate and a bunch of sellables.
We kill everyone in the city. None of them are improved, they all go down easily.
We ignore Adalon, and head straight to the Underdark Exit, which is open at this point. We will want to try to both turn in Adalon's quest reward and kill her, which we will want some more casting time equipment for.
We clear the underdark exit. Before we actually leave, we head to the svirfneblin and sell all the adamantine equipment, except for two items that we will hold onto (as we will want two piles of adamantine dust).
We'll want to be sure that we get all the XP for the drow kills here, and we will leave the surface for the next part.
Part 105: Pitre:
In the last part, we cleared out Ust Natha. We still have a couple encounters left in the underdark, but they are all ones that we can come back to at a later date.
We have entered chapter six.
As we leave, we encounter Drizzt and friends. We kill them. There is a lot of unique loot, but nothing of great importance to us. We do get a nice chunk of XP, though.
We want to avoid the Kruin fight for now - he is a 25th level mage, the same as us, so each of us has a 50% chance of dispelling the other. If we fight him one level later, we will be immune to his dispels and have a 60% chance of dispelling him. The easiest way to avoid him for now is to go to the city gates, leave the Silver Blade on the ground, and then go to the area that we want to head to that would cuase Kruin to spawn.
Kruin always spawns in the docks, whether or not we have the blade. He also spawns in the Bridge district if we have the blade, so temporarily leaving it behind will allow us to go to the bridge district safely.
We buff up, including ProCold, ProFire, ProEnergy (or ProElements), PFME, SI:Ab and Spell Turning. We are facing:
Each of the enemies is unkillable as long as Pitre is protected. Pitre is invulnerable until he uses greater restoration. Pitre will use greater restoration when one of the other enemies goes below 10% hitpoints. We therefore wait for the Prime Assassinators to use their action, we activate PFMW, then start attacking the enemy that used their action.
A single round of combat should be enough to take down one of the foes to Greater Restoration range. We can also take out the Planetar, as it is not protected by Pitre, and it is high priority as it can deafen us, giving is spell failure.
Once the Greater Restoration hits, we take out Pitre if the Planetar is already dead. There is no point trying to finish off the one we were attacking earlier, as all foes will be completely healed as part of the Greater Restoration. Although Pitre is not weak to critical hits, Critical Strike means we auto-hit and that makes this consistent - he should take ten hits to take down.
Dracandros is next. She has some scrolls that we want to preserve - PFMW and RRoR. Fortunately, she is not protected against normal weapons, and so so can take her out that way. We will want to be ready to refresh PFMW when taking her out.
We may take some damage from the Storm of Vengeance, but as long as we stay about 90 HP (Power Word: Kill range) we should be fine. All that's left from this point are fighters, which we can deal with.
From this point, I like to take down first Exterminator, then Valeria, then Falahar, then the Prime Assassinators, though the order is not critically important. We want to make sure we keep tempo by breaching as soom as the enemy hardinesses are activated. We will probably need to use scrolls of breach to keep up.
We can also gain good tempo by letting our PFMW lapse for long enough for the enemy to spend their action on Whirlwind (or similar), then responding with instacast PFMW and taking them out with a full round of attacking them without hardinesses.
Loot from this fight includes:
This container at the back of the room contains a set of documents on the Twisted Rune. Picking them up triggers an undetectable fireball trap script.
Returning to Acton Balthis, we get rewarded with 28k XP, some sellables, two Potions of Barbarian Essence and the Crimson Ioun Stone.
We hit Fighter 29. Although it's quite a boring level, Fighter 30 will be a more exciting one.
Part 106: Wilderness Areas:
In the last part, we finally finished up the squirrel quest. In this part, we'll be quickly clearing through the outside areas, as they're not big enough to be worth doing on their own.
We start by going to the North Forest. In the upper right corner, we run into some Efreeti and a group of Yuan-ti, including a mage, who at this point are very much a non-challenge for us.
In the bottom right corner, we run into some Noble Trolls and Sprit Trolls.
In the bottom left corner, we find a party of Cyric. I'm not sure why they're here, but they're hostile and worth XP. They are not a significant threat to us.
Heading onto Small Teeth Pass, we a mist encounter group, the rest is vanilla.
This is enough for us to hit Thief level 33. We won't be doing the Forest of Tethir, as it's a Kruin spawn location.
The next level up will be the big one. Let's go back and do an encounter that we left earlier. For this part we will want to resist fire damage as much as possible. Let's look at the options we have available to us:
We return to Ust Natha and loot the treasure trove. It has a lot of money and sellables, plus the Efreeti Bottle. We have a few rounds before the Noble Efreeti appears, and we use that to cast the long casting time protection spells (ProEnergy and ProElements) for a total of 150% fire resistance.
The Noble Efreeti is a 28th level mage, so we cannot rely on II and SI:Div. We instead use SI:Ab - fortunately, the Efreeti has no RRoRs, so we do not need to protect the SI:Ab.
The Noble Efreeti has access to the Lower Fire Resistance ability. It is a saveless unblockable ability that lowers our fire resistance by 50%. It can use this ability a total of four times as its action, for a total of 200% lowered resistance.
The really nasty bit is that Lower Fire Resistance sets up a scripting state so that the for the next 100 rounds, our elemental resistances cannot go over 99% - we get a 100 round penalty of 25% every time BALDUR.BCS runs, meaning that a single Lower Fire Resistance prevents us gaining immuity.
Our solution, therefore, is to set up our lower level spells to be damaging spells. We will try to blast down the Noble Efreeti under Alacrity.
We start casting Alacrity as soon as we see the Noble Efreeti animation start. It should finish approximately when the Efreeti goes hostile. We will want to equip the circlet and the AOP for maximim casting speed increase.
We instacast a PFMW, then use Pierce Magic to get rid of spell turning and fire the spell trigger with double Lower Resistance.
Melf's Acid Arrow and Lightning Bolt are really effective against the Noble Efreeti, and emptying our spellbook should take it down in short order. We only get 18k XP, which seems like a low amount given how potentially nasty it is.
Part 108: Kruin:
It's time to take out Kruin, he's being a bit annoying by blocking off a lot of areas.
Kruin himself is a level 30/25 Fighter/Mage. He protects himself with II and SI:Div. He summons two Elemental Golems, who will each summon up to six lesser golems. It is best for us for those lesser golems to all be Gem Golems.
There is a very easy reload safe strategy here. We can run away, buff up, come back, take out a single golem, then run away and repeat until we have killed all twelve lesser golems and the two elemental golems, then take out Kruin once he's by himself. I'm going to show off another strategy instead.
The less cheesy strategy is to use Remove Magic. Since we are the same caster level, we each have a 50% chance to dispel the other. The six remove magics we have stored up plus the three we have memorized means that our chances to fail are 1 in 512.
The contingency of IHaste is just to make things slightly easier.
We cast Alacrity as we arrive and head to Kruin. We want to prebuff with PFME, ProEnergy and SI:Ab before we enter the area.
Kruin also starts with a Hardiness that we will need to get rid of with Breach after the Remove Magics land. He is vulnerable to Critical Strike, which we can activate as part of Alacrity.
Kruin goes down in six critical hits. This method has the advantage of preserving Kruin's scrolls. If we do get the 1 in 512 miss, we can always leave the area and go for the safe strategy. We will probably want to do it anyway at this point, to make sure that we get Gem Golems instead of Coin Golems.
Kruin does not have any more summons after the initial ones, so we are fine to kill him early. Notable loot here is the Warblade, the scrolls, and sellables.
Resting up and rebuffing, we can come back to the docks in a series of visits. We can use the visits to take out the remaining gith and lesser golems, and once the lesser golems are fully exhausted we can take out the elemental golems.
This big fight is enough for us to finally hit Mage level 26. We get a few additional spells per day, and crucially now outlevel most IA mages and will win any dispel wars.
As celebration, we go to Ribald and learn a scroll of Chain Contingency.
Part 109: Bodhi Showdown:
In the last part, we finally got to Mage 26. Let's now take on a fairly easy challenge.
We tell Aran that we need some help fighting against Bodhi, and he agrees to send some men.
Similarly, we go to Prelate Wessalen and ask for help. Since we have taken out Drizzt, this is all the additional characters we can sort out.
We head to the Graveyard District. The in-game clock advances to midnight, and we have our first meeting with Bodhi. She summons four Eminent Vampires, who are easily taken care of under PFMW.
As we enter Bodhi's lair, the paladins also appear.
We let the paladins die to the vampires. Once Eric Vanstraaten dies or is attacked, the paladins will all leave, leaving their XP and loot behind. For maximum XP, we activate Critical Strike to take out as many of the paladins as possible. The vampires are in no danger of being killed by the paladins.
There is a vampire that only has the name of "Guard". He is a level 20/18 Fighter/Mage, so II and SI:Div make him easy to take care of. He has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, so watch out for that. He summons four vampire brides, but only does this once.
There is a big pile on in the blood room, but AI and PFMW keep us safe. We can put the holy water in the pool to weaken some of the vampires later on.
Heading into the central room, we see the Shadow Thieves. Similar to the Paladins, we want to take them out. After this encounter, we can stake all the coffins.
Before heading down, we can clear out the rest of this map. There are some encounters that are somewhat improved, but nothing massive. The secondary areas (like Pai'Na's lair) are the same as before, though the spider surprise at the entrance to Pai'Na's lair has been reset. We cannot leave to the surface, but we can rest up in this area.
Having rested up, we descend into Bodhi's lair. This fight is entirely physical, we do not need to worry about spells or elemental damage.
There are two waves of three Skeleton Grandlords that summon from the entrace, no matter how many combatants are dead. There is a master vampire, who summons waves of vampire brides seven rounds apart, but only the first four waves are worth any XP. Bodhi herself is a 30th level fighter who does not summon any support after the initial summons. She is a massive tank, however, having 50% physical damage resistance, resistance to critical hits and 240HP.
Our strategy for this fight is simple. We kill off all the enemies other than the Master Vampire first, the order doesn't really matter. Then, we kite the Master Vampire until the Vampire Brides stop giving us any XP, then we kill the Master Vampire.
We get a bunch of loot from Bodhi's lair. Most notable are Yamato, Cutthroat (which replaces the Short Sword of Backstabbing for us) and a Potion of Barbarian Essence. Staking Bodhi is worth 55k XP.
There's good XP here, which is enough for us to hit Fighter 30 and Thief 34. We finally get our fifth proficiency point in Long Swords. Next will be Short Swords, but the are definitely the least important of our three weapon types. We are also up to 16 Hardinesses.
I realized after finishing part 106 that Ust Natha gets closed off after chapter 5. I had to use the console to get back in to do the Noble Efreeti fight. Although this is technically doing things out of order (this should have been done between parts 104 and 105), I personally don't consider this a significant cheat - the items and XP obtained between these parts do not affect my ability to do this encounter. If this is being taken as a guide for future players, then part 107 should be done between parts 104 and 105.
In the last part, we did a large chunk of the main plot. Now let's do a large chunk more.
There is no immediate quest reward, but when we get transported to the Forest of Tethir, we get 74.5k XP.
We clear our the Forest map before going in. There are a couple spider groups and a couple mist groups, but they are not really a problem for us at this point.
We do Coran's quest. It's not improved, but it's nice to see a BG1 face make an appearance here.
We head into Suldanessellar itself and start Chapter Seven. Chapter Six was quick, Chapter Seven we'll spend a while in.
Near the entrance is an improved golem group. We haven't seen one of those for a while.
Outside the temple is a big group of Horrid Rakshasa. We will want PFME for this. Alternatively, we should be able to force Poseidon's Wrath, which gives immunity to ADHW. They may try to dispel us, we but are too high level for them.
The most efficient way to take them out is to hit them all a couple times each to trigger the AI, then wait out the four rounds and finish them off. The maharajas cast damaging spells, so we may want to use ProElements or ProEnergy.
The Rakshasa dispel PFME and ProEnergy on hit, so we will want to be very vigilant about keeping PFMW up. It may be safest to start kiting when we are on the last half-round of PFMW.
Heading inside the temple is Suneer, a 20th level mage. We will be safe from him under SI:Ab and II, but we can also use critical strikes to take him out before his buffs even fire.
In the lower left part of the city, we run into Raamilat. He is a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage, so we outlevel him. He has scrolls of PFMW that we want to preserve. We buff up, including Alacrity, just before engaging him.
He summons two Ghost Spiders, but those are both at the start of the fight. We will want to take him out as quickly as possible, then draw out the summons from the Ghost Spiders. The best way to take him out is to use Alacrity to triple RRoR him, then breach. He may use one scroll, but he is weak to normal weapons.
Entering Demin's house, the three Rakshasa attack Demin. The best way to take them out efficiently is to go in under IA, wait for them to spend their action casting a spell, then take them out under Critical Strike. One of them drops the Girdle of Stone Giant Strength.
In the southern edge of the map, outside the House of the Talisman, we run into a Noble Rakshasa. This thing has three AIs, and it is too low level to dispel us. It summons three rounds of two Horrid Rakshasas, each six rounds apart. Since there is no delay to the first summons, it is effectively twelve rounds of total delay, which conveniently is the same amount of time as it takes to wait out all of the AIs.
Inside the house of the Talisman, we do the puzzle. The correct order is Corellon, Rillifane, Water, Tree, Suldanessellar. There is no XP reward for this, unfortunately.
We have cleared out most of the map. We have left three things in Suldanessellar - the Dragon (since dragons are scary), the House of the Harpist (since it contains a Greater Elemental Golem) and the Sealed House (Since it is part of the last ranger quest).
We have gotten enough XP from this for a triple level up. Getting the extra level 6 mage spell is nice here. We have gotten our 19th Hardiness, and hit F/M/T level 31/27/35.
Part 111: Troll Mound:
Last time we got a view of the third expanded ranger stronghold task. We won't be able to handle that one for a while, unfortunately. The second task requires us to kill Firkraag, and the third requires us to get to the Tree of Life. We can do them in any order we want, however.
We buff up outside the troll mound and head in, heading straight for the troll royalty. The Troll Queen is a level 26/22 Cleric/Mage. Although we have the level advantage, divine dispels can dispel a higher level caster, so we go in with SI:Ab and Spell Turning. We also go in with PFME, ProElements and ProEnergy to protect ourself from her spells and her contingency of triple ADHW.
The troll king is a level 30 fighter whose attacks have a wing buffet effect on hit. We stand next to him, wait for his to use his action on an offensive HLA, then pop PFMW and start attacking him. He has six hardinesses, but we can breach him as soon as he activates them then attack him while he is vulnerable. He goes down during the third or fourth round of attacks.
We want to take out the queen, but there tend to be too many lesser trolls in the way. We will want to spend a round or two refreshing PFMW and taking out some of the noble trolls so we can stand in melee range of the Troll Queen.
Once we are in melee range of the Troll Queen, we cast Alacrity. We put on the circlet for the faster casting, and launch three RRoRs at her before breaching.
The Troll Queen goes down in eleven or twelve hits. She is not vulnerable to critical hits, but we use Critical Strike anyway to guarantee the hits. If she gets another PFMW up, we can breach her.
From this point, the rest of the fight is straightforward. There are a lot of lesser trolls to kill, so we will likely want to break out the Flame Tongue sword for some of them. There are a lot of lesser trolls that spawn on the battle starting or the troll royalty dying, but none that spawn during the battle, so there is no need to extend the battle.
There are loads of veneance trolls. Fortunately, the Vengeance and Noble trolls don't need fire damage to finish off, and the Vengeance trolls are vulnerable to Critical Strike.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
Some of this loot spawns a few rounds after the fight is over, so we want to make sure not to leave too early.
One week later, we have an Ancient Mage that spawns in the Troll Mound. He is a level 34/27 Fighter/Mage, the same caster level as us, so we will be using SI:Ab and Spell Turning against him. We will also use ProEnergy, ProElements and PFME to protect ourself from his damaging spells. He also has illusions up, so we will want to have TS active, but we can get that from The Truth sword.
We start casting Alacrity as soon as we enter the Troll Mound. He will approach us, and start the conversation shortly before the Alacrity finishes.
He protects himself with SI;Ab and Spell Turning. We set up a chain contingency of triple RRoR on enemy seen, but just in case it doesn't fire properly we have our Alacrity up to fire another two.
He summons two Greater Bone Golems as part of his script, and the area script summons two Elemental Golems. As long as we don't move from the entrance area, however, the Ancient Mage and the Greater Bone Golems will come to us, but not the Elemental Golems.
It will take two or three rounds of combat, and we will probably need to breach the Ancient Mage a couple more times to take him out, but once he is down the Greater Bone Golem will be easy.
Notable loot from the Ancient Mage includes:
The exits close when the we first enter, and they re-enable when the Ancient Mage is dead and we are no longer in combat, and the exit stays enabled. This enables us to rest and rebuff before taking on the Elemental Golems, and potentially rest up mid fight.
If things don't go to plan, then we have a safety spell trigger of PFMW and IHaste, so we can kite the golems to draw out the summons, then once all the summons have been generated we pop the spell triggers and take out the golems.
We get another triple level up, hitting F/M/T level 32/28/36. We get our 20th critical strike, and also pick up Assassination and Avoid Death.
Part 112: Kangaxx:
We have now hit Mage level 28. This means that we are now a higher level than Kangaxx, who is level 27 in both Lich and Demilich forms.
Kangaxx starts his buffs with SI:Ab, but nothing to protect it. Fortunately, the projectile for Ruby Ray moves faster than the projectile for Remove Magic. Between our eight prepared Remove Magics and our six memorized, we have a likelihood of failing to dispel him of apprximately 1 in 50,000.
We prebuff with ProEnergy, ProElements, PFME, IHaste, II and SI:Div. We summon Kangaxx and start casting Alacrity.
Kangaxx's first half is weak to critical strikes and will go down in less than a round of attacking. He likes to use his action to cast PFMW, so we will want to save some of our dispels for that.
Kangaxx is unusual in IA enemies in that he has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW, but he fires it whether or not we are weak to magical damage. If something goes wrong with the dispelling, we can wait out the PFMWs - it doesn't make this fight more dangerous, as long as we make sure to keep up II and SI:Div.
In Demilich form, Kangaxx has no protections behind a large HP pool, large physical resistances, and immunity to weapons below +4 enchantment. He can cast two spell per round and is uninterruptiable, but cannot do anything dangerous as long as we are under II, and cannot get round our II and SI:Div combo. He is weak to critical strikes.
Two or three critical strike should take down Kangaxx without him being able to do anything notable.
The only notable loot from this fight is the Ring of Gaxx. We cannot upgrade it, as we will need to beat the WK demilich as well for that. Instead, it takes the place of our secondary protection ring - under IA, we can have any number of +2 protection items plus at most one item of greater than +2 protection, and the Ring of Gaxx counts as a +2 protection item with a slight upside. Although the item description says that it regenerates one hitpoint every three seconds, since we are under perma haste, we regenerate at twice that rate.
Part 113: Wind Master:
Kangaxx wasn't worth a huge amount of XP, but it is clearing out an encounter that has been around for a while. Time to do another of these.
The Wind Master is a nasty enemy, having 95% physical resistance, strong regeneration, and a big HP pool. Even worse, every two rounds (starting one round in) it uses True Whirlwind. True Whirlwind does lightning damage, buffs the Wind Master's attacks, knocks back everything like a wing buffet, and removes specific, illusionary and combat protections.
We get cromwell to forge a Ring of Djinni Summoning, then upgrade it to a Ring of Greater Djinni summoning. The regular ring we can normally only find if we sided with Bodhi and attacked Aran Linvail. In total, we spend 75k gold, a Scroll of Permanency, a Manual of Elaboration and a bunch of minor ingredients.
We get our equipment ready. We can use the Robe of Electrical Resistance, Helm of the Rock and Boots of Grounding to get 95% static electrical resistance that cannot be dispelled by the Wind Master. We can also use the Dragon Scale Shield for a bit of extra resistance or while we are casting spells using the circlet.
We set up our prepared spells. We also memorize as many Acid Arrows and Magic Missiles as possible.
We set up some summons - the Noble Spider, Greater Djinni and three Greater Yuan-Tis. The only buffs we cast before bring up the Wind Master are Improved Haste and Alacrity. We fire the spell trigger of triple Lower Resistance immediately, before the Chain Contingency of ADHW kicks in.
We run out of range of the True Whirlwind and start unloading our spellbook of Spell Sequencers, Magic Missiles and Acid Arrows.
Clearing our those is enough to get the Wind Master down to Near Death. We start casting ADHW until it uses True Whirlwind, which will be one round in.
Once the whirlwind hits, the Alacrity will last enough time for us to insta-activate our combat protections and buffs. The Wind Master is weak to critical hits, but not backstabs. We have two rounds of combat before the next True Whirlwind. We should be doing 120 damage across these two rounds (minus regeneration, with refreshing Critical Strike), which should be enough. If not, we re-engage with mroe Critical Strikes.
This is a fight that we can always retreat from if things look wonky. The reward is the Dragon Helm.
Part 114: Hybrid Tiefling:
We've finished off the Wind Master. Firkraag is still a bit beyond us, so let's take care of some other stuff first. The next one should have some better rewards.
The Hybrid Tiefline is a level 31/25 Fighter/Mage. This fight is made difficult in two ways - it takes place in a wild magic zone (which makes conventional spellcasting unsafe), and there are six rounds of Elite Planar Hounds being summoned (two per round). The Elite Planar Hounds.
The Elite Planar Hounds have a wing buffet ability on hit (that needs a save at -6 to prevent), and dispels illusions and specific protections on hit.
We have two ways of safely casting in the wild magic zone - innate spells and spells that have been prepared beforehand. Even scrolls cannot be safely used. Fortunately, with our level advantage, we have a 80% chance on each of the Remove Magics to dispel. The Hybrid Tiefling uses SI:Ab and Spell Turning, so we need two Ruby Rays to get through.
We buff to the gills (including AI) and head in. We make sure that the last buff we cast before going in is Alacrity. We want to be quick to pause during the face-in of this map before the interface is fully visible.
We take advantage of the fact that triggering a fireshield triggers contingencies. By running towards the Hybried Tiefling and hitting her with our weapon, we ensure that our contingency triggers and that she is the nearest enemy and so gets ruby rayed. Alacrity is still running, so we can fire our sequencers and trigger, then active our innate HLAs.
The Hybrid Tiefling is not vulnerable to backstabs, but is vulneravle to critical hits. She goes down in seven hits. From here we then take out the Elite Planar Hounds, then the rest of the enemies, who are unimproved.
This fight has a lot of loot, including:
We can combine the Robe of the Neutral Archmagi with Jan's Adventure Wear to forge this Armour, which is our new standard armour. The extra spell per level is nice, and the base AC of 0 means we can retire Ghost Armour and similar spells, but the biggest part is 25% physical damage resistance. We can combine that with Hardiness for 65% physical damage resistance, and so two potions of Barbarian Essence give us physical damage immunity.
The big obstacle for now is looking to be Firkraag. He's a really big hurdle, and we have a lot of content that is hidden behind him.
In a previous part, we tackled Pitre's group and finished the squirrel quest - at least, we thought we finished the quest.
We return to the Old Squirrel. Since we gave him the nuts, he gives us the Old Stone.
We return to the Kuo-Toa lair. The Old Stone lets us use the altar, and an Avatar spawns. It is 95% resistant to crushing and piercing and 90% resistant to slashing, immune to everything else. It is not vulnerable to critical hits, but it is a straightforward fight for us - hit it with under IHaste and while we are protected with PFMW. Its weapon inflicts chain lightning and lowers lightning resistance, so we will want to be careful about keeping up PFMW. It goes down in about two PFMWs.
It drops some sellables and the Magical Pull.
Returning to the Shadow Temple, we can use the Magical Pull to get the Ruby of the Gods. This has value as both a quest token and as a crafting ingredient, we will want to make sure we do the quest token stuff before the crafting.
Remaining available encounters:
Current plan for Firkraag:
Firkraag is a nasty foe. Although he is a lower caster level then us, he has a few major abilities will cause us problems:
It looks like he will not use Greater Doom on us if the value of our SCRIPTINGSTATE3 is equal to 2. I've been looking for how we can achieve this, and it looks like we have a couple options:
There is similar logic where we can avoid being silenced by using SCRIPTINGSTATE20, but I can't find anything that manipulates that.
Therefore, we have a plan:
Other dragons:
The Dracolich only a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage, but it shares a lot of difficulty with the other dragons, but doesn't offer much in the way of reward right now - it does have some loot, but nothing that would enable us to take on other challenges.
The Suldanesselar Dragon is a level 30 mage. It attacks from a druidic angle, with things like saveless Summon Insects.
All of the dragons have Greater Silence, and the only way I have of combating that is to kill Firkraag for the scroll of vocalize, so I suspect that Firkraag will have to be the first to go down. Firkraag also opens up the post-Firkraag challenges, which includes the next Ranger quest, which is worth a lot of XP.
It looks like we'll have to be taking on our first Purge Magic encounters soon. I've done probing and Merella's third task is definitely not consistent enough for me to be happy. Similarly, I have the beginnings of a Firkraag plan, but it's not consistent enough just yet. We've got three or four GEG encounters available to us. They are probably the easiest Purge Magic encounters in the game, and they are worth a lot of XP - fully drained, a GEG is worth 309K XP, plus the one in the Illithid hideout will give us access to a lot of nice loot.
Although there are 54 such potions in the game, we will probably be able to have access to only 41 of them.
About using them:
Barbarian Essence potions are not good against fights that deal us a lot of elemental damage, so against foes like Firkraag they will not be good at protecting us. We do not always want to hit 100% physical resistance - we have a large HP pool and some regeneration, so we may want to stop at a high physical resistance level (eg 90%) and relying on our regeneration or using our action on healing/regeneration potions to power through the chip damage.
It is also a possible strategy to alternate between protecting ourself with PFMW and protecting ourself just physical resistances. That way we will slowly take chip damage over the non-PFMW rounds and heal it up during the PFMW rounds. This allows us to "extend" our PFMW rounds. Since Barbarian Essence potions are rarer than scrolls of PFMW we are unlikely to use this strategy until the late game when we have obtained large static physical resistances.
The fights that I anticipate that we will potentially want to use these potions for are:
Also notable option is that we can combine the Cloak of Magic Shielding (an IA-added cloak that was obtained in Spellhold) with the belt of inertial barrier to get 100% resistance to magical damage. This means that we can use this combination of equipment to have permanent undispellable PFME, though the downside is that we lose a point of effective strength and lose the +2 saving throw bonus from the cloak. I personally like the extra saving throw bonus, though in theory optimal play would involve swapping between them whenever we see a spell being cast. I will likely end up using this combination if we run into any fights that involve both magic damage Purge Magic, such as the Suldanessellar GEG.
It's time to finally take on a Purge Magic encounter. We've managed to get to over 23m total XP without doing it so far, so we will want to give it a go now.
We briefly saw Purge Magic during the Underdark Illithids, but we were able to avoid it. Greater Elemental Golems will use it every four rounds like clockwork. There is no way to block it, and the only buffs which are unaffected are undispellables ones (such as Giant Strength and stored spells).
Greater Elemental Golems have the same summoning of coin/gem golems as Elemental Golems, though it only takes thirteen rounds for them all to be summoned (the first summon is on a delay of 1 round). In addition to this, they summon Amber Golems. The exact number of Amber Golems varies, but it is typically 3.
We head to the Guarded Compound and encounter the GEG. We have a spell trigger of IHaste and PFMW, plus a contingency of IHaste on hit.
Our plan is to kite around the golems for thirteen rounds, until the summons are fully drawn out.
Kiting so many golems at once can be tricky, so we may want to pop a PFMW and fight them. It is best to do this right after a Purge Magic lands. We can safely take out Coin/Gem golems this way. If all goes well, our contingency of IHaste will trigger at the start of this, giving us increased damage output.
For safety, we want to run away after the seventh half-round of PFMW. We want to make sure there are not so many golems that we cannot slip through a gap between them. Although we can use Critical Strikes to speed this along, we may want to save them for later instead.
When it is just the GEG and Amber Golems left, we start to take out the GEG. It has 90% resistance to all physical weapons, so we just pick the best DPS (which for us is The Truth mainhand and Phosphorus offhand). has 325 hitpoints and is weak to critical strikes,but it also regenerates.
We follow the same pattern of spending seven half-rounds attacking (four half-rounds under critical strike) and one half-round kiting while the Purge Magic is launched. We should do approximately 100 damage per PFMW (9-12 per half round not under CS, 18-21 per half round uder CS).
When the GEG purges magic while on a single bar of health, we can be greedy and fire our Spell Trigger instead of just casting a PFMW. From here we can take out the Amber Golems. We may also want to include ProElectricity or similar in the Spell Trigger, or have it on a Chain Contingency (to fire when the Electrical Discharge brings us below half).
Taking out multiple Amber Golems is always a bit tricky as a solo character, but we have more options available to us now than we did during Spellhold - we have access to more 6th and 9th level spell slots, which means more PFMWs. We also have access to better elemental resistance equipment. It should take slightly under two Critical Strikes/PFMWs per Amber Golem.
For Amber Golems, Mirror Image is very important as it protects us against the lightning damage of the Electrical Discharge, and we will want to have a Mirror Image up before we start each Critical Strike against the Golems.. We will also likely want to use some potions while kiting the Amber Golems, and to keep an extra IHaste prepared, as the first one may run out while waiting for Electrical Discharge to wear off.
Notable loot from the GEG is:
We were able to beat this GEG, but that's because it was alone and it was very much pushing the limits of what we could do. The other GEGs are accomanied annoying enemies (Noble Rakshasa and Alhoon), which makes my uneasy to try to beat them as well. It looks like Firkraag may be the only way forward from here.
I've been doing a lot of probing of encounters, and I think I have a plan for going forward:
We buff up, including II, SI:Div, ProEnergy and ProElements. We are facing a Beholder and an Elder Orb. The Elder Orb is a 25th level mage that can dispel our protections on hit with its weapon. The beholder is not as dangerous.
The beholder goes down quickly. We will want to RRoR the Elder Orb a couple times before we can dispel it. We want to make sure we keep up PFMW to protect our protections. Alacrity can help in this fight to spam out the RRoRs as fast as possible.
The Elder Orb drops the Blade of the Equalizer, a Manual of Elaboration, the Amulet of Spell Warding, and some minor treasures. Killing it also re-enables the exit into the main part of the Underdark.
Continuing one, we see the drow fighting a beholder. We want to make sure we steal all the kills here. Critical Strike makes this fairly easy.
A nearby container contains the Sling of Arvoreen.
We hug the left wall and head down to find Illithids fighting Gauths. We repeat the process.
Hugging the bottom wall, we find more Beholders and Gauths, with nothing to use as distraction. I like to use the Greater Djinni and Noble Spider as distraction and cast Incendiary Clouds (The IA summon items are immune to the instant ddeath effects, including the beholder death ray)
Circling around, the bottom right corner contains an elder orb and two beholders. Our approach is the same, except we can set up summons first. If this fight goes wonky, we can retreat to the underdark.
We have gotten through most of the map. We are standing near the Maze Entrance in the top right, but you can see that we have deliberately avoided the middle of the map, we have been hugging the sides. That is because the middle of the map contains the Ancient Golem.
We prepare a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin and apprach. We make sure to approach from the fight - there is a beholder group to the left of the golem, and we don't want to fight both at the same time.
The Ancient Golem purges pagic every five rounds, which is a bit annoying as it doesn't line up nicely with our PFMWs. It also summons five rounds of minions, each four rounds apart (with an initial delay of two rounds), and each round consisting of both a Coin Golem and a Gem Golem.
Defensively, the Ancient Golem is the same as a GEG, with 325 HP and 90% physical resistance.
Since this area isn't massive and it's easy for the minor golems to clog up the paths, we will want to be fairly proactive about taking out the minor golems. It will take 22 rounds for all the minor golems to be summoned, which will be four purges fromt he Ancient Golem (not counting the initial purge). I like to PFMW after each of the purges and take out the minor golems for seven half-rounds, then run away for three until the next Purge.
For additional safety, we can set up stoneskin for the kiting rounds. We can tank one hit from the Ancient Golem, but not two.
When all five rounds of minor golems are summoned, we turn our attention to the Ancient Golem. We can follow a pattern of PFMW, Critical Strike, Critical Strike, Stoneskin, Kite for each of its Purge Magics. If we run our of stoneskins, we can use Hardinesses or for extra safety, additional PFMW/AI.
Although it is possible to take out the Acnient Golem at this point, reload safety may want us to clear out a few more minor golems to ensure that we are not surrounded. For reload safety, I recommend pruning down to three minor golems.
As with the GEG, once it purges on one bar of health, we can fire our spell trigger. That combined with critical strikes will take it down easily. The rest of the minor golems will be easy from this point.
It drops a Manual of Elaboration and a Permanency Scroll.
We clear out the rest of the area (i.e. the beholder group in the middle), and this is enough for another triple level up, hitting F/M/T 33/29/37. For the HLAs, we have already maxed Critical Strikes and Hardinesses, and there is not much use in the other HLAs, so we pick up the extra 8th level spell slot and start to pump Avoid Death (in case the Death Ward ability becomes useful).
Part 118: Deepdark Maze:
It's time to head into the Deepdark Maze. At least I think it's called that - I've heard it referred to as many things, and I don't know if it has a consistent name.
This is the official map. I'll be going through it in a completionist order. I'll start by following the route in the top part of the map to go through the rooms listed there. I'll then do the second part of the map, though I won't be able to get into the Maze Sigil room at first. I'll to the third part of the map, leaving the Spirit Guardian. Finally, I'll do the Spirit Guardian, the Maze Sigil room, and end this part before doing the final room.
Each room (apart from a couple) have a west exit and an east exit, and use the same map.
As we arrive in ARIA01, we are greeted by a cursed ghost, who tells us that we are trapped in the maze. We can only leave by defeating "The Mighty One".
Heading to the west, we arrive in the empty room, ARIA07. Each room contains one of these containers that typcialy contains minor potions or treasure, and as the name suggests, this one is empty. It is suggested to leave items in here to help navigate, but we have a map.
Heading east from the empty room, we come to ARIA08, the deep shadow room. Every time we enter, it spawns a Deep Shadow. It's not threatening, but it's not worth any XP and not worth farming.
From the Deep Shadow room, we head east to ARIA13, Empty Room 2, then head east again to ARIA01, the starting room.
We head to the east from the starting room, and find ourself in ARIA02, the Bone Devil room. This contains a single non-respawning Bone Devil that is worth XP.
Bone devils have a 50% chance of spawning another bone devil, which in theory can go infinite. We should watch out for their weapon, as it inflicts a saveless hold.
We head east to ARIA03, Empty Room 4, then west to ARIA10, the Whisper Spider Ambush. There are three Whisper Spiders initially, and one more spawns every four seconds to eight additional Whis Spiders (11 total).
We head east to ARIA09. Empty Room 5, then east again to ARIA04, the Skeleton Lord room. This is a respawning XP-less Skeleton Lord, like the Deep Shadow.
Heading west from there, we get to ARIA06, the Ghost Spider room. The ghost spider is pretty standard, we will want to draw out its initial round of summons and all four subsequent rounds, for a total of 24 rounds of waiting.
From there, we head East, East, West to get to the Skeleton Lord doom again, then East to get to the Whisper Spider room, ARIA05. This is anoth respawning XP-less encounter.
West from there is the Neo-Otyugh room, ARIA12. There are six of these, they do not respawn, and they are worth XP.
We head west to ARIA15, Empty Room 3, and west again to the ARIA16, the Spirit Guardian room.
The Guardian Ghost is a level 24/25 Fighter/Cleric. It is not a significant threat to us, and our remove magics dispel its buffs with 90% probability. It drops the Maze Key. Upon beating it the pool spawns more potions.
We head West, East, West, East, East, West, East, West to get to ARIA11, the Maze Sigil room. There are nine Deep Shadows here, who are not a significant threat as long as we use PFMW to protect ourself and IHaste to take them out. They are weak to Critical Strikes, which lets us tear through them with ease.
Beating this fight gives us the Maze Sigil, which is required to get to The Mighty One. From here we go West, East, East, West to get to the Neo-Otyugh room, rest up to prepare, then head East a final time to get to the final room.
About the Dracolich:
The Dracolich is a level 29/25 Fighter/Mage. As a Lich and a Dragon, it has the abilities of both. Compared to Firkraag, there are a few significant differences:
There are some notable results of this:
In the last part, we went through the Deepdark caverns, and we found it a fairly minor threat - definitely easier than the Beholder caverns we had to go through first. We're about to have a rather more difficult encounter, however.
In the last post I reviewed our strategy and brought up SI:Nec - unfortunately, the Dracolich removes that with RRoR instead of Remove Magic, and so we cannot rely on its protection since we cannot refresh protections under Greater Silence
We get dispelled of all buffs when we enter the boss arena. We get to keep our Spell trigger (IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin).
It has access to five Remove Magics, and our goal is to use the fewest Potions of Magic Shielding. If we break down the remove magics it isues:
There is a bit of a quirk - the scripting state flag that determines if we have up a potion of Magic Shielding is also used to determine if we have cast Speak with Animals on an animal. Although Remove Magic can dispel potions, it cannot dispel our Speak with Animals, since we are a higher caster level. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a way to abuse this - it only works on creatures in the ANIMAL category, and there is no arcane spell that reliably summons those.
The Dracolich will always lead with Greater Silence, which is instacast. If we start casting Speak with Animals as soon as the autopause fires, we will be able to get it off before we are silenced.
The strategy for the first few rounds of the fight is:
The Dracolich has a limited set of ways that it can damage us at a range - its primary spell is Death Fog, which deals exactly 8 points of damage. It may get a few hits in on the corners, but we have rings of regeneration and can drink potions.
During the third Greater Silence, the Potion of Magic Shielding will wear off, and we will need to refresh it. We will get very brief windows between Greater Silences that we can use to cast spells, but I have not been able to determine what is good during these windows.
Once all three greater silences have worn off, we will want to exhaust the Dracolich of breaches. It has four of them, so it will take us four rounds to draw out all the breaches.
With the breaches down, we can start hitting it with our weapons. Once we break through the starting Stoneskin and it starts taking damage, it fires a defensive Spell Trigger that includes PFMW and stoneskin.
From here, we enter the PFMW stage of the fight. The Dracolich has access to six PFMW after the spell trigger, and it will use them as long as the following conditions are met:
- It has already fired the spell trigger
- It has no layers of stoneskin remaining
- It does not have a PFMW active
It uses stoneskin in three situations:Our Remove Magics dispel both Stoneskin and PFMW with 90% success rate. We have access to eight 3rd level spells, plus we can stick Remove Magics in a spell sequencer, so on average we will be able to easily get through all these protections. Even if none of the Remove Magics work, we can always wait out the PFMWs the hard way, though that may require another Potion of Magic Shielding.
When the Dracolich is out of PFMWs and we can hit it with our weapon, we fire the spell trigger and go in for the kill. The only speedbump is the contingent Stoneskin. We can either use another Remove Magic, or hit through it the old fashioned way. We may want to activiate Critical Strike - we don't get the double damage, but we do get the guaranteed hit, and if we were nailed with a Greater Doom between potions we will have a -6 on our to-hit rolls.
The Dracolich going down is worth 80k XP, and it drops some good loot, including:
Shorty after the Dracolich goes down, the Ghost congratulates us and rewards us with another 15.5k XP points. We leave to the Beholder Caverns, and cannot re-enter the maze.
We've done it - it's a long and grindy fight, but it's possible, and more importantly, reliable. The major thing that made this possible is the lack of ranged attack - we were able to kite the Dracolich without taking any significant damage.
A big factor in this fight is the Potions of Magic Shielding. I have naturally found 7 in my adventuring so far, and this fight consumes 4-5. The Drow potion merchant sells 3, which I made the mistake of not buying (and I may have to retcon), while Roger the Fence sells another 3. Hopefully the other Dragon fights won't be so bad - if all goes well, Firkraag will be the only other dragon we have to take such a grindy approach to.
The Green Wyrm is a fight that will give us access to one of the most important items of the run, the Boots of the Ranger Lord. It is a level 33/28/35 F/M/C, so we will not be protected from its dispels. It has 5 Greater Silences, its breath does poison damage (that we are immune to thanks to the Ring of Gaxx), and it does not have access to anything like Lower Fire Resistance. We could probably take it on using a process similar to the Dracolich, but with more kiting.
An unfortunate aspect of the Green Wyrm fight is that immediately after the fight we catch up with the Supreme Golem, before we get the opportunity to visit Cromwell, and we have to make the decision whether to fight it or not. This is a fight that has some massive upside if we can do it - it itself is worth 114k XP, it gates in up to six Elemental Golems (each worth 60k XP) which in turn gate in up to 36 minor golems (worth 22k-24k XP) for a total XP payout of 1.266m-1.338m. Even if we don't fully draw out all the summons, if we try to take the Supreme Golem out ASAP we will likely end up with two or three Elemental Golems that we can properly take out for 300k-500k XP. It would be a long, grindy fight but we have a very large stock of PFMW and AI scrolls that we can use for this.
There are downsides to doing the Supreme Golem fight. The only non-XP reward for this fight is the golem manual, which is useless in IA. The XP reward might not be that significant - we are currently on 24.7m total XP, with a caster level of 29. The highest level arcane casters that I am aware of are level 31, are we will be able to have the level advantage on them at level 32, which will happen at 28m XP, and we will reach the level cap in all our classes at 38m XP, so we might not need this XP reward in the long term. The other downside is that we take a reputation hit of 2, and we have at this point very limited ways to raise our reputation. Some of the later content requires us to have a reputation of 20. If taking this as a guide, we will likely want to save some reputation rewards (such as the circus tent).
Beating the Green Wyrm and dealing with the Supreme Golem (either nicely or not) unlocks the lower levels of WK. The next level down includes the Supreme Leader fight (a very nasty fight where we will have to break out the Barbarian Essence), which in turn opens up a lot of valuable loot. The next hard block in WK would be on the final seals level, where we would have to deal with things like the Ancient Dragon.
The second major fight is Marvella's Third Task. In this, we have to fight an Ice Golem and and Elemental Golem, which a script runs every thirteen seconds that indlicts a slow effect that has no save. Our only way of avoiding the slow effect is to offhand Mazzy's sword. I wanted to take out the Dracolich so we could upgrade Mazzy's sword (since in vanilla it is +2 enchantment which isn't high enough to hurt it), but it turns out that it's also immune to piercing weapons, so I took out the Dracolich early for no real benefit. The impact of this is that I have used more potions of Magic Shielding than we would ideally have used, but I am happy to accept this as a reload safety tax to represent potions that a no-reloader may have used in other fights.
The best strategy I have been able to find so far involves over 30 rounds of some quite precise micro that involves managing at least four asynchrous timers every half-round, and there's too much room for things to go wrong. I would only feel comfortable calling this fight reload safe if we had the Boots of the Ranger Lord, which would drop this fight down to around 10 rounds, and would be more forgiving on the micro.
After the Ice Golem, we have the Pasha fight, where we fight an Elemental Golem, Noble Rakshasa and Noble Marilith, which should be fairly easy, and it earns us a point of reputation. Following up from that is the Old One fight, which needs a reputation of 20. It features Grave Liches, which have Grave Silence, similar to Greater Silence. Following that is the Time Machine and Lesser Force content, which should be relatively easy and give some very nice loot.
The third major foe is Firkraag. Firkraag I have gone over before. For beating Firkraag, we can access to the Lady Vanya missions (which requires 20 reputation), which are about destroying the Rune Assassins and will be very nice XP. This in turn unlocks the second expanded ranger stronghold quest. (The third ranger quest needs us to get to the Tree of Life). The most significant part of this fight is that we get the Vocalize scroll, which gives us immunity to Grave Silence and Greater Silence, making other fights so much easier.
Breaking down each of the dragon fights in the game:
My updated plan is:
I have also discovered something - UAI doesn't get around minimum attribute requirements. There are a few items that have a charisma requirement of 9, which is annoyingly close since our charisma is 8 - if taking this as a guide, having a starting charisma of 9 is important, and I would sacrifice wisdom to achieve this. We can use the spell Friends to equip these items, and they stay equipped after Friends wears off, but it prevents from swapping these items in a battle. When we unlock Lum, then we can get our static charisma that high.
Will there be any one fight that will be too much at any stage?
Firkraag also have mini alacrity, having to wait only a second or two after each action before another can be used.
Part 120: Firkraag:
We have beaten one dragon, with less benefit than I would have liked. It's time to beat a second.
We steal Anomen's shield, and upgrade it by combining it with the Shield of Harmony (from Trademeet) and the Shield of the Lost (from Madulf), using the Powdered Body of Dracolich. There are two other recipies that are competing for the Powdered Body of Dracolich, but neither of them are any use, while this is some. Unfortunately, we cannot do any of the other item upgrades that grant fire resistance. This shield is good, but it has a charisma requirement which is a bit awkward.
We also stop by the Adventurer Mart and pick up the Helm of Brilliance from the special stock.
We set up a spell trigger of PFMW, IHaste and Stoneskin, and a spell sequencer of triple Remove Magic (if we are feeling a bit bold) or something that includes ProFire (if we want to be completely reload safe). Our equipment is carefully chosen:
We fill our 7th level spell slots with Mordy Swords, summon four of them, haste them up (using regular haste) and get them to surround Firkraag. We also summon a Wizard Eye so we can direct the battle without getting in range of Greater Silence.
Mordy swords are good here because they are extremely tanky, and have enough Fire Resistance to prompt Lower Fire Resistances.
If we see Firkraag turn to a sword and start casting a Necromancy spell, it is Death Spell. We have the targeted sword run to the other side of the map so no others are caught in the radius, and prepare to start summoning a new one.
We want to keep Othala near the entrance of the room, and the Wizard Eye near the other end. We will rely on audio cues a lot here. If Firkraag gets too close to the Wizard Eye, he will cast True Sight, which kills off the Wizard Eye, which is annoying.
We can try to get a few hits with the swords in - we won't improved longevity much by kiting, and getting through a few stoneskin layers is always nice.
It may be worth keeping one Mordy Sword near Othala. That way, if an awkward Death Spell lands and takes out the team, we have an additional body we can send in right away.
The Greater Djinni can be used here as a great Tank and Bait, and we can similarly use the Noble Spider if we buff it with ProFire.
When the log shows the full range of Improved Fireballs and Lower Fire Resistances, it is safe for Othala to go in. It is still good practice to wait as long as possible, though - Firkraag's buffs have limited duration, and our kiting is easier and safer when he is unbuffed.
We do not need all them to be spent to be safe. The Lower Fire Resistances are very easy to draw out, as Firkraag will use them whenever he reaches the end of his script with nothing better to do. The Improved Fireballs require the target to be at least sixteen units of distance away at the time that the check happens, which can be difficult, especially when blind kiting. We can reliably get away with three Lower Fire Resistances/Improved Fireballs unspent, though fewer is obviously better.
When the last summon goes down, it's time to show ourselves and start kiting. Ideally our summons will have chewed through all of Firkraag's stoneskins and started his PFMW chain. If that's not the case, we will want to have checked the combat logs to see if Firkraag has cast stoneskin on its own. If so, we can fire our sequencer of triple remove magic to start his PFMW chain, but we can do that at any point in the kiting process betwen Greater Silences.
It is very likely that Firkraag will have two or three Improved Fireballs left, though his regular Lower Fire Resistances should reliably be burned through. Since these come with Lower Fire Resistance, there is an efficient way to get through these:
- Cast ProEnergy or ProElements while the last summon is active for 75% resistance
- The Potion of Magic Shielding should add another 50%
- The first Lower Fire Resistance will bring us down to 75%, which is safe
- There is a gap between each Lower Fire Resistance and each Improved Fireball, we can use that to drink a Potion of Fire Resistance or equip one of our fire resistance items
- Repeat for the third Improved Fireball
The ProEnergy won't last for the whole kiting process. We can take advantage of one of gaps to cast ProFire (as we outspeed Firkraag we can run to the other side of the arena) or for reload safety we can put it in a sequencer or contingency (or both). We will want to be careful with how we do this - we will want to remove our fire protection items before the spell finishes resolving, since if we every go over 99% resistance after the first Lower Fire Resistance has hit we will get penalized until we are under 100%.Firkraag has one Remove Magic, that he always uses at the start (after silencing us). We wait until that has hit us, then we drink our potion. He will remove that one, but all subsequent potions of magic shielding should be safe.
We can spend our action between silences refershing our Stoneskins (to burn through his Breaches), or casting Remove Magic (to start his PFMW chain if he has not already).
We will want to be generous with our healing potions while kiting - we don't want a surprise Dragon Breach or Improved Fireball to hit just as our fire protection buffs expire. Ideally we should be pausing frequently, so we can catch the gap between each attack being announced and hitting us and checking what our fire resistance is.
The kiting is rather easy, as we are much quicker. We will want to be careful not to get into melee range with him (which might happen accidentally in the corners), as that will cause him to spawn his skeletons, which will make kiting more difficult (though not by much, we outspeed the skeletons too).
When Firkraag runs out of Greater Silences (4 in total), we kite him while refreshing Stoneskin to get through his Breaches (5 in total), then activate our spell trigger and go in for the kill.
Whenever we bring Firkraag below 30% hitpoints, he will cast stoneskin, summon three skeletons, and cast heal.
Although the message you are given is that Firkraag cannot be killed while his undead minions are alive, he can indeed be killed as soon as the last wave spawns. It is recommended to kill them first, however - they are far more of a threat than Firkraag is at this point.
Firkraag himself is worth 64k XP, while the nine skeletons are worth 16750 each.
Notable loot from this fight includes:
Returning to the MNORH, we get congratulated with a reward of 35k XP. This is enough for us to hit Thief 38, and we invest our HLA into Whirlwind Attack (in hindsight, I should have been investing a few more into WW instead of Avoid Death or getting Hardiness to 20).
Well, that's a major fight down. Similar to the Dracolich, it is a long and grindy fight, though it ends up being less costly on rare potions due to having to deal with fewer Remove Magics.
The battle plan is reliable, though it is definitely a mentally taxing one. We have to be very alert to watch out for the sources of fire damage and be ready to check our resistances and act appropriately. During the initial summon stage, we need to pay very close attention to how many times each ability is used, and count the important ones. I would recommend taking notes, or using the console to check the values of the variables involved.
There are two ways that I feel this fight could be improved.
The first is to check if we actually care about Greater Doom, or if we can save our rare potions. There are two occassions where we have to pass a save or else - the Spell Trigger, and the Dragon Fear. We can negate the Spell Trigger with a single potion, and we can negate the Dragon Fear with the Dragonslayer sword, though often those both fire in the summon stage of the fight where we don't care about them. Being greater doomed does mean we will often fail our half damage save against the Greater Fireball and Dragon Breath and take double damage. As long as we keep our resistance high even double damage should be manageable, but I worry that a combination of buffs expiring plus fire damage at the wrong time would lead to a lack of reload safety.
The second is to find a way to reliably trigger the Improved Fireball during the summon stage. I ran the full fight three times through (with the screenshots coming from the third full run) plus another five or six partial attempts while I was determining the best strategy. I was able to get a single early Improved Fireball in a bit under half of the attempts, and it felt very luck dependant. I would feel much safer if there was a way to reliably trigger it, preferably more than once.
Although I have been talking for an enormous amount of time about wanting the Amulet of Hades, and how encounters will be so much easier once we have it, I have not forged it just yet, despite being able to. This is because it has one of the IA anti-UAI features - it disables the thieving skills button permanently when we equip it. This is a bit annoying, as it means we lose out on lock/trap XP, but we will be able to tank any trap and knock any lock so it will not lock us out of content. I will put it off as long as possible before forging it.
I am also starting to formulate a strategy to take out the Ice Golem without beating the Green Wyrm - it may be possible to get enough DPS under the purge magics by using Whirlwinds and Greater Whirlwinds. I will hopefully gain enough XP and levels from the Vanya content that we get enough WWs, though I may need to investigate if we retcon some of our HLA choices - I picked a bunch of Hardinesses because they will be useful in the very late game, but none of the fights so far have had them be important - the only time I have activated the Hardiness HLA has been while I've had Alacrity up, because at that point I might as well.
The fights that I am worried about for the future are the ones that kill us in a way that doesn't involve hitting us with weapons. Major ones are:
In the last part, we had a very major fight, and took down Firkraag, which has just opened up a whole bunch of content for us.
A week after Firkraag is killed, Lady Vanya appears at the MNORH as long as we have 20 reputation. She gives us the mission of returning to Firkraag's lair and taking out an army of Rune Assassins.
There is a Watchman out the front. He goes in to warn the others before we can attack him.
As we pass through the maze level, we get seven Elite Rune Assassins appearing to fight us. Unlike previous IA ambush encounters, we do not get dispelled going in. These are worth XP and loot, which is nice. The are level 15/17 Fighter/Thieves, which are no threat to us.
There are new enemies waiting for us in Firkraag's lair:
The Master Assassins summon six waves of backup each, consisting of a Rune Assassin and an Elite Rune Assassin. The waves are three rounds apart.
The Guildmaster summons a Gem and a Coin golem immediately. Every four rounds, the Guildmaster will summon either a Master Assassin, a Gem Golem or a Coin Golem as backup. We will know that we have drawn out all the Guildmaster's summons when the total number of Golems plus Master Assassins is twelve (2 in area, 2 from initial spawn, 8 from subsequent sommons), which will happen after 32 rounds.
Our prebuffs include II, SI:Div and PFME. We have a four level advantage over the coordinators, and they try to protect themselves with SI:Div, so we can dispel them with 90% efficiency and cannot be dispelled by them. They have chain contingencies of triple ADHW, which is what we want the PFME for.
They each have four scrolls of PFMW, and so they are the only enemy that we want to prioritize the killing of. We can either dispel them in response to PFMW, or use normal weapons (though not slashing weapons, they are immune to those). We may find ourselves bogged down in enemies, but we can take out everything except the Master Assassins and Guildmaster without being penalized.
We should have more than enough PFMW and AI to keep us safe, but apart from the Golems we can also use Improved Mantle as additional protections. The Guildmaster has scrolls of AI, but we prioritize drawing out his summons for XP instead of preserving his scrolls. He will likely burn through all of them while we as prioritizing other enemies. Although Guildmaster inflicts saveless poison on hit, the Ring of Gaxx gives us immunity.
We will likely be able to get close enough to one coordinator initually to get in attacking range, but the sheer number of bodies will block us from easily getting to the others. Fortunately, each of the killables minions is vulnerable to Critical Strike, and we can mow them down with that.
For reload safety, we want to use two actions per PFMW, and be very vigilant in the last half-round about refreshing it if it ends early. We will also want to prioritize killing off the Golems over the others - if one of them hits us in the gaps between PFMWs, that dispels our illusions, which makes us breachable by the coordinators. Once the Coordinators are down this danger goes away.
One thing to watch out for is our SI:Div running out, so we want to have it cast as the last of our buffs and refresh it at the start of our fifth PFMW (if we reach the 10th PFMW without taking out the coordinator something has likely gone wrong, but we have lots of slots and so should probably prepare at least three).
The best way to get to the Coordinator is to attack the enemies that are between us and the coordinator, when our autopause on enemy dead fires we run forward a couple feet where they were, until we get blocked, then repeat the process.
This is such a long and grindy fight that we will likely need more than one IHaste, as the first one will run out. Our II also has the same duration, so we will want to potentially refresh that if the coordinators are not dead at that point. Since the II is a lot harder to tell when it runs out, I like to cast my IHaste first when prebuffing, and take that running out as a sign to refresh first the II then the IHaste.
Although it takes 32 rounds for the Guldmaster to summon all minions, the last minion could be a Master Assassin, which takes another 18 rounds to summon all minions, for a total of 50 rounds to reliably wait out all the summons. I have memorized 12 AI/PFMW, along with eight IMantle, which should be enough, though it will be a long grindy fight. All the Master Assassins have 3 Hardinesses and the Guildmaster has 3, which is more Breaches than we easily have access to. They fire Hardiness when their HP is less than 90%, so we may need to do a lot of kiting to wait out a lot of Hardinesses.
An alternative strategy to use is that as soon as we get within melee range of one of them without PFMW up, they will use Whirlwind before attacking, and so we can respond with PFMW to protect ourself then take them out as they cannot Hardiness as their action is spent.
Having a third IHaste in our Spell trigger is also useful here.
Loot from this fight includes:
When we get both halves of the note, they get replaced with the full form of the note.
We return to Lady Vanya. We get rewarded with 10k gold, 60k XP, and two potions of Barbarian Essence.
We get another triple level up from all we have done in this part, reaching level 34/30/39. The extra sixth level spell slot is nice, as are the three GWWs we pick up.
Part 122: Lady Vanya's Second Task:
In the last part, we get a big chunk of XP and hit the soft cap for Thief levels. Our level up rate (and HLA rate) will slow down quite a bit as a result of this.
A week after we killed the Guildmaster, we get given another quest from Vanya. We need to return to the Windspear Hills again and kill the viper queen.
As we return to the Windspear hills, we have a surprise - every three rounds, a Giant Cobra appears. In theory it can hold/poison us, but we will make our saves every time. They are not worth any XP, so we ignore them and run in.
Outside are Giant Cobras, and inside we also find Mutated Cobras. The Mutated Cobras are a bit stronger, but again are worth not XP and we ignore them.
We run to the well, and activate it to summon the Viper Queen. At this stage, she is fairly easy for us:
She is 95% resistant to Slashing and Piercing weapons, and 90% resistant to Crushing, so we use Crushing. She is weak to critical hits, and under Critical Strike we will deal 50-60 damage per round. She has 200 HP and regenerates 6 HP per round, so goes down in two PFMWs. There is no benefit to extending this fight, so we take her out as quickly as possible, then whatever minor snakes were summoned during the fight.
When her health gets low, she summons more minor snakes, but they are no concern to us as long as we keep up PFMW. She dies for an extremely generous 75k XP. Using the well again gives us 30k more XP and the 48 sided garnet, a crafting ingredient for recipes that we don't care about.
Returning to Vanya, she gives us a very brief congratulations and runs away. We gain 25k XP, 10k gold and another two Potions of Barbarian Essence.
Part 123: Grandfather of Rune Assassins:
The last part was very little challenge for a surprisingly large chunk of XP and some important potions. This is going to be much bigger.
This is the Cyphered note that we got after Vanya's first task. I'm not sure if there's a better way of working it out, but but using likely guesses we can determine the key:
1-T
2-A
3-E
4-N
5-S
6-R
7-H
Which corresponds to TABLE IN SEWERS BENEATH THE TAVERN.
We head to the Copper Coronet, and find this note in the sewers below.
We head to Small Teeth Pass where we meet the Grandfather of Rune Assassins. In our Conversation with him, we discover:
The Grandfather is a level 30/27 Fighter/Thief. His weapon negate our movement for 24 seconds without save, and has a saveless poison (that again we don't care about due to the Ring of Gaxx). He protects himself with five scrolls of AI.
Between the area script and the Grandfather's script, we fight one Assassin Coordinator and nine Master Assassins. One round later, the Grandfather will summon another Assassin Coordinator, and from that point the only remaining summons are the minor assassins summoned by the Master Assassins. Therefore, we will first prioritize the Grandfather (as AI scrolls are better than PFMW scrolls), then the Coordinators, then we will stall out the Master Assassin's summons, then take out the rest of them. Since there are no Master Assassins summoned partway through the battle, all of the minor assassins will be summoned after the first 18 rounds.
Forunately, there are no golems in this fight, so we do not have to worry about our II getting dispelled in the gaps between PFMWs.
We stand next to the Grandfather, wait for him to use an action, then activate our PFMW and start attacking him. When he spends the action of his second round, it will be on something defensive, so we can breach in response and kill him during the second round.
Our prebuffs for this fight are II, PFMW, ProFire, IHaste and SI:Div. We have a safety trigger or IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin, and a Chain Contingency of triple Incendiary Cloud when hit.
Each of the major assassins has fire immunity, and each of the minor assassins has none. Our triple Incendiary Cloud will therefore prevent the minor assassins from getting in our way. They only last ten rounds, so slightly over half of the time that they will be spawning for, but it's nice and help us take out the coordinators easier.
It has a slight downside of making the combat log a lot busier, so we will want to be a lot more vigilant with our pauses to be able to react to what the grandfather does.
With the Grandfather down, we focus on the coordinators next.
We may find ourself penned in by the Master Assassins, who we do not want to kill just yet. the IA logic will prefer attacking any non-PFMW target over any PFMW target, so we can summon a creature while we are under PFMW to give us a bit of breathing room. This will reduce the value of the sellables a bit, as they will use Potions of Invisibility to try to get backstabs, but that is not a major concern.
For reload safety, we can use this breathing room to leave the map and come back later, taking out the remaining Master Assassins one by one. We will want to make sure to loot using the quick loot menu first if we choose to leave the map.
When our SI wears off, it means that it is 20 rounds since we cast it, so the 18 round wait for the Master Assassins has probably expired. We will likely want to have two or three more Incendiary clouds prepared that we start casting at this point.
Again, this will reduce our sellable value as they will drink potions, but that is not a major concern.
The strategy of drawing out a WW and then PFMWing and counterattacking is much easier when we can kite - we will not be "wasting" any of the enemy WWs if only one is in melee range (and therefore uses WW) when our PFMW runs out.
This fight gives us enough XP to level up in Fighter twice and Mage once, for an overall level of 36/31/39. Mage level 31 is very nice, as it gives us an additional spell of every level.
Loot from this fight is just another massive pile of sellabes (to compare to the last one, this is over 600 Potions of Invisibility).
The Incendiary Cloud strategy is something that in hindisght should have been applied in part 121 as well. Part 121 ended up being more difficult than the final showdown, for two major reasons - we have to be careful about the golems dispelling our II, and to fully draw out all the summons makes for a much more drawn out fight (I believe the longest fight in any part).
The major encounters left from this point are:
It's looking quite likely that we will hit the max level of 40 in all classes (this happens at 12.2m or 12.75m for all classes, regardless of previous level gain, which is why the gap between Thief 39 and 40 is so high). This means that I will may start to veer away from strategies that maximize the XP, especially if these involve increasing risk. It also means that no-reloaders may feel more comfortable skipping some of the tricky encounters (such as Mithril Golem).
The last part was a major payout in terms of XP. There is also going to be a big monetary payout, but for efficiency we don't sell unless we need to, and we are currently sitting on 300k in cash.
We head to our cabin in the Umar Hills and encounter a swanmay waiting for us. The swanmay tells us that a valuable treasure has been stolen (we are told that it is a jewel, but no more detail).
The swanmay tells us that we can get more information by talking to a Diviner in one of the Athkatla taverns. We find him in the upstairs of the Five Flagons.
This is the list of the items that the diviner wants as payment. These are all pretty major items. Almost all, at least.
We decide to forge the Supreme Shelter. We already have the Delryn family shield, which is just a better shield - the only advantage the Supreme Shelter has is AC, but that doesn't really matter.
The ingredients for this are four different magical shields that we don't really care about, plus 90k gold. None of the ingredients used in this would be usable in other recipes (other than the gold).
We have over the Supreme Shelter and are told to wait a bit.
I know that in an earlier part I said that we could hand over The Truth here. We probably could without being significantly set back, but I hand over the Supreme Shelter instead for safety.
Leaving the tavern, we run into Auriel, who tells us that we have been fleeced. Auriel tells us to head to the Temple Sewers to find the thief.
We head through the sewers and run through Mekrath's lair to meet Malbar.
He gives us the Ugly Stone, and 15.5k XP if we spare him. Unfortuntately, he only tells us that he already gave the treasure to his employer, and he cannot tell us the identity of his employer.
In Mekrath's lair there is another staircase that has previously been closed off to us. The Ugly Stone acts as a wardstone that lets us enter it and meet the Diviner again.
Talking to him, we learn:
A timer is set for three days, and if we do not rescue Auriel in that time we will die. This timer is set during the conversation, so we can waste as much time.
Unfortunately, this fight is just not possible. We have to fight three Elemental Golems, and an Ultra Golem. They prioritize Auriel over all other targets. She protects herself with Hardiness, but even with that she goes down in two rounds. We cannot give her any more damage resistance or attack negation, and we cannot extend the fight by mazing her.
Unless I make a major discovery, we are going to have to skip the rest of this fight, I am afraid. The loot from this (125k gold, Axe of the Lakesider) is something that we can live without.
Part 125: Marvella's Third Task
The last part was a bit disappointing - overall, we had a small and very inefficient conversion of gold to XP.
We return to Marvella, and get her third task - go further within this sphere and fight the enemies that lie within. We will be facing an Ice Golem and an Elemental Golem, and we will be locked in until those two are dead (though the minor golems can still be alive).
We prepare (Chain) Contingency so that when we get hit, we will IHaste ourself and triple Ray of Fragmentation the nearest enemy. I would like to use Hand of Undoing instead, but that spell seems to dislike being put in a Chain Contingency. We have a spell sequencer with three more RoF, and a spell trigger with IHaste, PFMW and Stoneskin.
There is a very annoying feature to this fight - every thirteen seconds, we get the message "Why is it so cold in here?" and we get hit with an unsaveable slow. In addition to this, the Ice Golem has an ability called Freezing Wind that fire once every four rounds that also inflicts an unsaveable slow. The only way around this is to use Mazzy's sword. Freezing wind has an initial four turn cooldown that starts when we see it, though we will be err on the side of caution and treat it as a three turn cooldown.
The thirteen second tick is also notable because it interrupts our action, including attacking, and this can cause our auto-pauses to mess up. We will also have to be careful about spells that have a nonzero casting time.
The Ice Golem has 200HP, and regenerates 1 every second. It is 90% resistance to slashing and crushing damage, and is immune to piercing. It is not weak to critical hits, though we may use Critical Strike for the guaranteed hit. Even if we were to upgrade Mazzy's sword, we cannot hurt it, which means that we wouly be restricted to just our main hand attacks to deal it any damage. Normally we will be wielding Phosphorus main-handed and Mazzy's sword offhand, but we can swap to The Truth main hand and Phosphorus offhand if we are confident that we will not get slowed.
The Ice Golem also fires a Purge Magic once every four rounds. Unlike GEGs, it will not fire this unless it sees that we have something worth purging, which includes Stoneskins and Mirror images (which is what we will be using). It also dispels combat protections on hit. Our strategy will therefore to be engage it for seven half-rounds (refreshing Stoneskin or Mirror Image during those seven rounds), run away for half a round to bait a Purge Magic. Since we want to be safe with PFMW, we will want to spend only two actions per PFMW - one refreshing stoneskin, and a second using WW or CS.
We summon the Noble Spider and Greater Djinni, but we will be leaving them behind. The reason is that IA enemies prefer non-PFMW targets over PFMW targets, and we want our contingencies to fire immediately, so we will not introduce our summons until after the contingencies have fired.
We run in, stand next to the Ice Golem, fire our first PFMW and start attacking it. We keep the summons running around off-screen until we have been hit once and our contingencies fire.
We want to frontload as much damage as possible. The Noble Djinni is a good summon here, as it has access to PFMW, and that PFMW is enough to draw out a purge magic at the end of half-round 8, so we can squeeze in a bit more damage in that half-round and not need to refresh stoneskin.
Having IHaste is very important. Without it, we are doing 3 or 4 damage per half round. With it, we are doing triple that. The Ice Golem may spend its action using various cold-related abilities, but we have a high magic resistance, plus an large HP pool and can regenerate. The Ice Golem has access to Lower Cold Resistance, so we won't want to keep any protection items active by default, but we can try being responsive enough to swap into them.
When the Ice Golem goes down, we have have removed the Freezing Winds and the Purge Magics, but not the "Why so cold" ticks. Fortunately, the room is easy to kite around, and we can draw out all six of the minor golems from the elemental golem before finishing it off. We will want to keep Mazzy's sword equipped.
There is a bug in the script - the Elemental Golem that we fight here is S!elego1, and the script checks that it is dead before it lets us leave or before it stops the "Why is it so cold" ticks.
This is a spreadsheet that I constructed to help with the fight. A ! indicates that an ability may be usable, and a X indicated that an ability was used that half-round. As we can see, the non-IHaste/GWW rounds we are doing effectively zero damage, while the others we can get a good damage output in. However, S!elego1 is also the Elemental Golems that we fight in the Troll Mount Ancient Mage fight. Since we have already beaten that fight, the game counts that kill in this area script.
Our reward for this is a big pile of gold, and the XP from killing the golems.
Part 126: Pasha Mahmoud:
In the last part, we finally beat an extremely annoying fight. We could potentially have tackled it earlier if we had picked up GWWs earlier, but I'm just happy to have it done.
We return to Marvella, and she tells us about an incoming enemy -Pasha Mahmoud. She gives us a scrolls of Foreknowledge and Limited Wish.
Pasha appears and tells us the real story. Marvella took his money and used it as the loot that we found. She told him to come here and kill us, but we decide not to fight each other and instead confront Marvella. We get 30k XP and a point of reputation for agreeing to not fight.
Marvella appears in a different form and spills the means. She is a deity who had made a bet with another deity, a bet that she just lost.
There is a dispel that hits us before the enemies appear. We perform our summon before our first talk to Marvella(Noble Spider, Noble Djinni, 3 Greater Yuan-Ti), and want to cast our Alacrity so it resolves just as the dispel hits. I find the best time to start casting is halfway through the animation for Marvella in her second form to appear (when the third of the internal lines has formed).
We have the following spells stored:
Once the Alacrity resolves, we want to start buffing up, using our defensive stored spells plus Stoneskin and SI:Div.
We have to face three enemies - A Noble Rakshasa, a Noble Marilith and an Elemental Golem. We will kill them as quickly as possible instead of trying to draw out their minions. We will prioritize first the Noble Rakshasa, then the Noble Marilith, then the Elemental Golem.
We use a Remove Magic or two first, as that will blow away the Rakshasa and Marilith protections. We then spam our Magic Missiles at the Noble Marilith, activate our offensive HLAs, cast another Remove Magic if the enemies have refreshed any AIs.
After the Noble Rakshasa is the Noble Marilith. It and the Escort will likely have used PFMW or fired a contingency Stoneskin, so we fire another Remove Magic first.
Afterwards, we repeat the process for the Abyssal Escorts and Horrid Rakshasa. Fortunately, both the Noble Rakshasa and the Noble Marilith are weak to Power Attack.
The Elemental Golem and Lesser Golems do not have the annoyance of PFMW and AI, so we can just hit them with our weapons. We will prioritize whichever of them is targeting Pasha Mahmoud.
It may be necessary to deliberately not use PFMW and instead tank with Stoneskins, as if we use PFMW it will make the Golems attack other targets, such as Pasha.
Finally, when all the enemies are dead, Pasha congratulates us. We get 60k XP, a scroll of Monster Summoning V (another IA summoning spell), and a point of reputation.
This is the scroll that Marvella gave us. It is an 8th level spell, so there is not much competition for those spell slots. It is mostly useful as a way to increase our spell casting speed.
Crucially, if something goes wrong and Pasha dies, then it is not the end of the run. These rewards are nice, but we will be able to gte Foreknowledge from elsewhere.
In previous parts I have referred to one of the locations of the Robe of Vecna under the randomizer being Firkraag. It turns out I got my dragons mixed up, and it's actually the ancient dragon instead, which is quite annoying.
I don't know if I'm missing something, but I don't see how The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is possible without an Auramaster, even if we are not solo. The Ultra Golem alone is enough to take out Auriel in 4 rounds, and in that time I can deal about a quarter of its health in damage. Looking at the BWL forums, the only strategies that I can see are either pre-6.5 (when mazing was a strategy), or require an Auramaster (new IA druid kit) using auramaster specific spells and abilities to spam a new IA spell that can heal her, often with a wish for rest to restore castings. I'm tempted to treat this like the various upcoming mirrorred quests that require swanmay summons and consider this a fight that requires Auramaster specific class abilities.
In the last part, we finished with Marvella. Normally the next part would be the Old One encounter, but unfortunately we need the Memory of the Apprenti to be forged, which is a while away.
Our remaining encounters involve either Grave Silence or Greater Silene, so we finally forge the Amulet of Hades. It disables our Thieving button, but that is unavoidable at this point.
We buff up with ProFire, PFME/ProEnergy, IHaste, II and SI:Div. We find ourselves trapped in a very small room with a Grave Lich. It is a level 33/28 Fighter/Mage, and we have a three caster level advantage on it, so it cannot dispel us.
We need two RRoRs before we can dispel it, and Alacrity can speed this up. We dispel with 80% probability, and we have eight Remove Magics, which is pretty safe. In the unlikely case that this goes badly, we can always outlast its buffs with multiple IIs and SI:Divs.
It is weak to critical strikes, so using Alacrity to follow up with CS to Remove Magic is a nice combo. We should watch out for a Contingency of PFMW and a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW.
Loot from this fight includes Daystar, the Rod of Terror, and a Manual of Elaboration.
Obtaining Daystar means that we have unlocked the Orcus fight. Orcus is a level 31/27 Fighter/Mage, so it is actually a lower level than the Grave Lich we just beat.
He has the following logic:
His weapon removes specific protections and slays summons on hit, but has no other special abilities.
We also have the area script, which summons eight Skeleton Grandlords. Orcus cannot be killed while they are alive.
We have a strategy - we will use II and SI:Div to keep up II. This will prevent Orcus from using Lower Resistance. This therefore prevents Greater Doom and the Chain Contingency. From that point, it will be a straightforward combat fest. There are no enemies that we want to draw out the summons from other than Orcus, and that will be done after twelve rounds.
If something does go wrong and he does use Greater Doom and try to kill us, we can fire Avoid Death in response.
We buff up with IHaste, II and SI:Div and head in.
For maximum safety, we run to the corner in the entrance before firing PFMW and engaging. This is so the small gap between PFMWs is a bit safer.
We don't have a huge amount to do with our action during the PFMWs. We will want to refresh Stoneskin every now and then, as the small gap between PFMWs will mean the skeletons can get a few hits in. The vampires are weak to Critical Strike, but not the skeletons.
Around the end of the fifth PFMW, we should refresh II and SI:Div.
We will want to have a second IHaste prepared, as our first can run out. I like to have three or four (including one in the spell trigger).
When it is just us and Orcus left, we want to get through stoneskins and PFMWs. Remove Magic is great, as it dispels both with 90% probability.
A second refresh of II and SI:Div may be necessary. Orcus only has one spell per round, so even if it does fall for a second it's not the end of the world.
If/when we run out of remove magics, we can summon the minions. They can't do much about the PFMWs, but can help with the stoneskins.
Killing Orcus gives us 90k XP, four Potions of Barbarian Essence, and the Black Blood of Orcus, a crafting ingredient. The skeletons also give us a large number of sellables.
We hand over 90k gold, the Black Blood of Orcus and a Manual of Elaboration to upgrade our amulet even further. In addition to all the benefits listed, it allows us to summon a Skeleton Lord.
While the Amulet of Hades disabled our thieving skils button, the Lord of the Underword also disables our stealth button, but apart from one time in the prologue the only time we have clicked that button is by accident beause it's next to the spellcasting button.
We also get another double level up, hitting Fighter 37 and Mage 32. We get no additional spell slots with this, though.
Part 128: Green Wyrm:
In the last part, we got a major equipment upgrade. Let's get another.
The Green Wyrm is a level 33/28/35 F/M/C. Those Cleric levels mean that we do not have the dispel advantage that we are used to, butwe can at least dispel any arcane buffs the dragon has.
Breaking down the logic in a similar way:
- Initial buffs include Spell Turning, Armor of Faith, Stoneskin and Spell Shield, controlled by IADRAGGR01
- Chain Contingency of triple Finger of Death, conditions just like Orcus
- If under 100% hitpoints and out of stoneskins, fire a Spell Trigger of PFMW, Stoneskin and PFME (once, controlled by IADRAGGR10)
- Greater Silence with the same conditions as Orcus (up to five times, controlled by IAGSILENCE)
- If under 50% hitpoints and without stoneskins, use Stoneskin (once, controlled by IAHEAL)
- If without stoneskins, not under PFMW, and the Spell Trigger has fired, cast PFMW (up to three times, controlled by IADRAGGR09)
- Use Greater Doom under the same conditions as Orcus
- If less than 61% slashing resistance, use Armor of Faith (up to four times, using IAARMOR)
- Use Horrible Cloud [acid damage] (up to nine times, controlled by MYFOG)
- Use TS or Remove magic if Illusionary buffs are active, under the same conditions as Orcus
- Use Storm of Vengeance (up to ine times, controlled by IAVENGEANCE)
- Use RROR if appropraite (up to six times, controlled by IAREVERSAL)
- Use Breach if appropriate (up to four times, controlled by IACASTBREACH)
- Cast Remove Magic (once, controlled by IADRAGGR12)
- Cast Remove Magic if a potion of Magic Shielding is active (Once, constrolled by REMOVEMAGIC)
- If the enemy has at least 25 magic resistance, use Lower Resistance (up to twice, controlled by IALOWERMR)
- Fire a Spell Sequencer of Greater Malison, Slow and Confusion (once, controlled by IADRAGGR02)
- If the enemy has a save vs Breath or Spell of 7 or better, use Greater Doom (unlimited times, every two rounds)
- Use Green Dragon Breath (Poison Damage, Ring of Gaxx protects us)
- Use Greater Command (up to nine times, controlled by IAGCOMMAND)
- Use Chaos (once, controlled by OFFENSIVE)
- Use Emotion (once, controlled by IADRAGGR03)
- Use Dragon Fear (once, controlled by DRAGONFEAR)
- Attack the nearest enemy
Notably, have a high magic resistance does not block the Greater Doom.The strategy that we will use is:
Casting spells in the Dragon's Lair will trigger the aggression early, so we prebuff before entering the lair with ProAcid, ProEnergy, IHaste, GOI. SI:Ab and Spell Turning.
Setting up our summons from items does not trigger the aggression just yet, which is nice.
We head in and quaff our potions as soon as the wyrm comes in range.
We spend a couple rounds drawing out the Storm of Vengeance and Horrible cloud (at least, the inital ones). This is because refreshing SI:Ab has a nonzero castingtime, and we don't want to be interrupted by an annoying tick. I like to fire a sequencer of triple Remove Magic here as it is instacast and will get rid of the Dragon's buffs.
Since SI doesn't adhere to normal rules of spellcasting, we can be quite aggressive with casting Remove Magic.
The Wyrm only has four effective PFMW, and dispelling them is easy. It likes to throw other spells in between the RRoRs, such as Horrible Cloud, which is just fine for us.
We will probably want to be safe and start casting our SI:Ab as the RRoR cast animation is being played, instead of waiting for it to be launched.
We will want to keep the physical pressure on. It is not weak to critical hits, but its physical resistances are low by IA standards.
It dies for 90k experience and a bunch of loot, including:
We return to the Supreme Golem. We decide not to fight him - partially to preserve our reputation, and partially because we're already approaching the max effective level.
We perform a major selloff to Jahaboam, getting us to almost 1 million gold.
We spend a very large chunk of money to finally forge the Boots of the Ranger Lord, giving us permanent Improved Haste.
Orcus and the Green Wyrm have a surprising amount of overlap in their scripts. Doing this a second time I would probably do Orcus a while later, as the number of minions and inreased fight length opens up more opportunity for error. I also think that a Barbarian Essence strategy may be optimal in a noreload game for Orcus.
If you were to tackle this with even a 2 man party how would it differ and what classes would you choose?
This is going to come with a disclaimer that over 90% of my IA experience has beeen soloing, so I may not be the best judge of this. There are quite a few fights where I am extremely confident with solo strategies but have no idea how to handle them as part of a party because of a lack of defensive items. Similarly, in a party drawing out all the summons of an enemy may be a lot harder, so the XP will be tighter on two fronts.
Breaking down each of the classes in IA:
Fighter (Wizard Slayer): Pretty useless against non-casters. Against casters, it relies on them not having PFMW or similar up. There are probably one or two fights where this is useful, but if a caster is being hit by your fighters, they're gonna be dead soon one way or another.
Fighter (Kensai): The new IA class Riskbreaker is essentially a better version of the Kensai.
Fighter (Barbarian): A worse version of the Berserker.
Fighter (Dwarvern Defender): Defensive Stance doesn't add a huge amount compared to Hardiness. There are better options.
Fighter (Riskbreaker): A better version of a Kensai. The most significant downside is the lack of dual classing, but they keep getting valuable abilities into the high levels, so this doesn't hurt as much as with other kits.
Fighter (Champion of Arvoreen): A new kit for Mazzy taht can be taken. It's like a cross between a Fighter and a Paladin, but without significant upside
Ranger (Archer): Most if not all significant enemies in IA are immune to missile weapons.
Ranger (Stalker): Most if not all significant enemies in IA are immune to backstabs.
Ranger (Beastmaster): Probably the worst kit in the unmodded game, nothing has been gained in IA.
Ranger (Vagrant): New IA class. A lot of powerful loot is available for Vagrants, especially if one is a protagonist.
Ranger (Protector): Most of its abilities are trying to turn a Ranger into a support caster, which doesn't work out. Racial Combat will be useful in Dragon fights, not sure about other fights.
Paladin (Any): All can be turned by high levle enemy clerics, which is a massive pain. The best kit (Inquisitor) has been nerfed, so it dispels at a much smaller level bonus.
Cleric (any): Useful for their buffs. Will probably want to make into a multi/dual with a warrior class so they are useful in combat. If the appropriate ini setting is turned on, comboing with a ranger for the druid spells will be beneficial.
Druid (Auramaster): The only druid kit worth talking about. It gets a bonus of 2 to casting speed, is immune to all variations of Silence, and gains additional spells per level. It also gains access to spells some very useful spells: RRoR, Aura Cleansing (Alacrity), and Perfect Camouflage (II + SI:Div). Potentially a great anti-mage character, but a bit risky, as dispel instead of remove magic will have to be used.
Monk (any): Uselss in IA
Shaman: A worse Druid
Mage: A single class good aligned Necromancer is a good protagonist choice - not because it is a strong option, but because it makes the game so much easier. Otherwise, a Mage should probably be dualed to.
Sorcerer: A very strong option, as it gains early access to spells like IHaste and can preserve rare scrolls as crafting ingredients.
Thief: Only useful so solos can get UAI. The only good way to use a Thief is to have an extra party member that joins whenever a trap/lock is encounterd, deals with it for XP that gets shared with the rest of the party, and then goes away before sucking up and more XP.
Bard: A worse F/M that has access to UAI. In a well-rounded party UAI will be unnecessary as the items will have users anyway. In a small party to solo, worse than a F/M.
If possible, take Dwarf as a race. Otherwise, take another of the shorty races for the ST bonus.
Multiple arcane casters provide diminishing returns, so going for more than two is probably not worth it. Divine casters provide extremely diminishing returns, so one (or even half of one) should be enough for the entire party, and may be skipped entirely in smaller parties (as items can replicate divine caster buffs). Auramasters can be treated as a full divine caster plus half an arcane caster. Having too many half casters can be quite bad as it can make caster level wars extremely difficult to win.
Additional warriors provide diminishing returns a lot slower than the other classes, so once the party's Arcane and Divine abilitiesare covered, any additional party members should be warriors. Try to wrangle it so that the protagonist is either a Vagrant or pure class Necromancer - even if it involves weaking the party in absolute terms, the benefit from having a protagonist of those types is worth it.
Some suggested two person party compositions:
Protagonist Vagrant, Sorcerer
Protagonist Necromancer, Riskbreaker
Protagonist Necromancer, Vagrant
In the most recent save, Othala has about 28.5m XP (9.5 in each class), and the stats screen shows a total XP of all kills of about 23m. Therefore, there was about 5.5m party XP from quest rewards and the like. If we were to instead have had a party, the XP per party membout be:
The level advantage of being solo isn't actually that high - as a triple class solo I only have XP in each class that is a few percentage points higher than a party of 6 single classed characters would, and I am actually behind a party of 5. It is also worth noting that multiclass characters get delayd HLAs, single class characters will get them a lot earlier than we did.
If we do the same math, comparing the XP that Othata we have in each of our three classes vs what XP a party of six single class characters would each have at various major milestones:
As we can see, up until quite recently a party of six single class characters would be higher level in each of their classes than our solo triple class character. The difference is at its most extreme in the early game, which makes sense - since so many fights are more difficult in IA, we deliberately picked up as much quest XP as possible in the early game.
Comparing a solo triple class to a party of six single classes, the six single classes have an XP advantage for the majority of the game, plus an action advantage throughout. The advantages that a soloer has are defensive - being able to have item-based immunity to Hold, Confusion, etc on the whole party means that we don't have to worry about dispels on our buffs.
I mentioned earlier that there are some fights that I have no idea how to handle without solo defenses. An example of this is the Hybrid Tiefling fight - the Elite Planar Hounds inflicts saveless confusion, dispel the confusion protection buffs on hit, and the wild magic makes reapplying them unreliable. There probably is a reload safe way to handle this fight for a six person party that could be found with sufficient probing (and risky approaches definitely exist), but I don't know what it is right now and don't see an obvious starting point. These fights are very few and far between, however, and there are equivalent fights that a full party could handle but a soloer could not.
Some six person party combinations that I would recommend:
- Protagonist Necro
- Auramaster
- Berserker/Mage Dual (Halberds, 2h swords)
- Vagrant (Axes, Clubs)
- Riskbreaker (Shortswords, Warhammers)
- Vagrant (Flails, Longswords)
This good damage type coverage, and strong summons from the two Vagrants. The Auramaster provides divine support, and counts as half an arcane caster (alongside the Berserker/Mage). the Berserker/Mage could also be a multiclass instead of a dual class, I'm not sure which is better. Candidate levels to dual are 13 (1.4m XP, the extra APR boost), 17 (2.6m XP, the best possible saving throws), or 20 (3.5m XP, best possible THAC0).- Protagonist Vagrant (axes, clubs)
- Sorcerer
- Berserker/Mage
- Berserker/Mage
- Riskbreaker
- Ranger/Cleric (flails)
A sorcerer is an upgrade over a non-protagonist mage. The two berserkers could again be multis. This one has more arcane casters and is generally a more defensive composition than the first one.EDIT: For more information, you can find Saros's six person log of IA 6.0 no reload when it first came out (http://www.blackstrider.net/forum_bioware_arhiv/forum.bioware.com/topic/124277-baldurs-gate-2-no-reload-challenge/page-27.html), though you should note that Saros used XP exploits to guarantee reload safety of the fights. You can also check out the BWL forums (http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showforum=99), but the details tend to be sparser there - they are more concerned about spoilers over there.
I'm still going, it's just that I tend to not have much play time available midweek. Friday/Saturday/Sunday are my main days, so there tends to be a bit of a weekly pulse to how often I can upload parts. This weekend I've got a lot of time available to play, and I'm going to try to get a lot of WK content done, hopefully making it to the final seals level.
Thanks - I'm trying to give a breakdown of the IA challenges in a way that you don't need to have played the mod to understand (at least the first time an enemy is encountered, I'm not going to give a detailed Ghost Spider breakdown every time we encounter one).
I hope it can also be taken as a kind of guide for new IA players - although most players are not solo, the detail of the encounters is hopefully useful, and especially some early roadblocks like Suna Seni can be turn people off the whole mod. The game engine does mean some of the abilities (such as the Minotaur's 15% chance to inflice saveless paralysis for a round) are extremely hard to figure out for players who aren't willing to look up every enemy in Near Infinity. The BWL forums contain some detail, but not as much as I would like, and any other forum discussions tend to be ten or more years old. Although I don't like actually performing noreload runs, I want this guide to be usable by someone who is more up to the task.
In the last part, we finally got the Boots of the Ranger Lord. It's an upgrade that is important for Purge Magic fights, and is mostly conveniece otherwise, as it means that we don't need to buff with IHaste, and we don't need to worry about refreshing it in extremely long fights.
We return to the WK maze, following our standard route. On the room before the room that contained the Hybried Tiefling (AR3010), we buff up with ProFire, ProCold, PFME, II and SI:Ab. We will also want a contingency of PFMW on enemy seen, and maybe a contingency of Remove Magic on hit. I also like to put Remove Magic in spell sequencer/trigger.
We head SW into the now empty Hybrid Tiefling room, and NW into this room (AR3007). Initially, we have to fight one Demon Knight, but shortly afterwards, four more will spawn in. This room is a Wild Magic room, which means that we cannot use any magic and be reload safe. Fortunately, we can still use Contingencies and Sequencers.
Each Demon Knight has an even chance of protecting themselves with SI:Ab or SI:Div. If they use SI:Div, then we can blast away their protections with a Spell Sequencer/Trigger of triple Remove Magic. We are protected from their spells with our own, and so the only way they can hurt us is by hitting us with their swords. PFMW on contingency will give us four rounds of protection.
Each Demon Knight takes about a round and a half to take down if they have Hardiness up, meaning that we can take down about three of them before our PFMW runs out. Our precast stoneskin should be enough to last the rest of the fight, but for safety we can use another PFMW in our Spell Trigger, or use Hardiness and potions of Healing (as we have 75% resistance under Hardiness).
The next room contains a Demon Wraith (level 31/25 Fighter/Mage). It summons five Slave Wraiths at the start of the battle, and five Skeleton Grandlords will join the fight later on. Both the Demon and Slave wraiths drain levels on hit, which we don't care about.
We get dispelled as we enter this room. We want to start casting Alacrity as soon as the auto-pause fires, and it will finish before we can get interrupted. Under Alacrity, we will want to set up our buffs:
The Slave Wraiths give 5k XP if we leave them alive and kill the Demon Wraith, and 10k XP if we kill them. We kill them, then the Demon Wraith. From this point the fight is pretty straightforward, even when the Grandlords join in. The Demon Wraith has three PFMW and some Stoneskins, and so may need several Remove Magics. The Slave Wraiths and Demon Wraith are weak to Critical Strikes, but we will need to be safe about keeping our action free to refresh PFMW.
Loot from this fight includes:
Finally, heading NW brings us to the last room of the level, Aesgareth's room. I'll go into more detail on the Deck of Many Things below, but the take away is that we will win each bet with Aesgareth, then do some fights and 5% fire resistance from the Deck.
Aesgareth will fight some soldies when Strife is drawn. They are worth no XP, so there is no point trying to steal kills. In the second round we will get inflicted with a saveless curse of 6 strength, and Sister Garlena is the closest person who can remove it.
Before talking to Aesgareth the final time, we buff up with ProCold, Profire, PFME/ProEnergy, II and SI:Ab. None of them are a high enough caster level to bother us, and they are all weak to our Remove Magics.
We gain 20k XP from agreeing to play, 20k for being nice in defeat, and 25k from restoring the scepter after Aesgareth is done with it. Aesgareth will always draw Wheel and win in the last round, and for optimal XP we want to refuse to hand over the way out after this happens. Aside from the DOMT, this fight gives us A bunch of sellables and generic +3 equipment.
Our first DOMT draw is Flames, which puts us against a few Fire Elementals and a Balor, which are not threatening at all. Some things to note are that we get dispelled between activating the DOMT, and that using the DOMT uses our action so we cannot instantly respond to what happens.
The second one is quite a bit more dangerous. We use the fact that Alacrity cannot be dispelled. We cast Alacrity and activate the DOMT. We set up a protective Spell Trigger and Spell Sequencer just like the Demon Wraith. When the Demon Knights appear, we instacast and take them out the normal way.
The third draw, Comet, is uneventful.
Part 130: WK Machine Level and Illithids:
In the last part, we had what is hopefully our final encounter with wild magic zones - those are extremely annoying for a no-reloader. In vanilla there Illithids and the Gith are not too different in difficulty, but in IA that is very much not the case. We will therefore be doing the Illithids and the central area together, and handling the Gith as their own part (they will need their own part).
We emerge into the next level of WK, with the Machine of Lum the Mad. Choosing the right dialogue options gives us some Illithids to fight for a shot of XP.
Near the Entrace to the Illithid Encampment is a group of Yuan-Ti, easy for us as this point.
Similarly, the NE part of the map has an improved spider group.
Magic Golems are just beyond. They are easy, as we have been holding onto mundane swords since Chateau Irenicus.
Southwest from the main room are two Greater Bone Golems and three Elemental Golems. The portal to exit the level to the outside remains active, so we can easily take this fight bit by bit. We can draw out all 18 lesser golems (and if we're not worried about reloads, make sure they are Gems) for a massive pile of XP.
Heading into the Illithid part of the level, we run into a bunch of enemies that are completely nonthreatening.
All this (mostly the triple Elemental Golem fight) is enough for a double level up, allowing us to hit Fighter 38/Mage 33.
I've done some probing, and I think I've got to conclude that the Chaos fight is technically possible without divine sources of electricity damage, but probably not worth it for us right now:
Chaos is very similar to the Mithril Golem (including the combat protection removal every round), but with a few extra features, the most notable of it is that every time we hit it, it uses Chaotic Revenge. Chaotic revenge does the following:
In addition to this, it has some features that the Mithril Golem does not:
If we were to be able to beat it, we would want to get 90% or 100% piercing resistance (without hardiness), get immunity to magic damage and confusion via equipment, and beat him that way. We could do this, but it would require a lot of potions of Barbarian Essence, and we wouldn't get much from it. We might do it later (post JD fight), but that's a while away.
About the Deck of Many Things:
There are two ways to interact with the Deck of Many Things - during our conversations with Aesgareth, and when using the deck later on. When using it with Aesgareth, each round we can draw one of two cards and Aesgareth can draw one of two cards, with there effectively being a 25% chance of us winning the round. There isn't much choice here.
For the other way to interact, after we have obtained the DoMT as an item, we can draw up to three cards from it. The full list of effects is quite varied (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Deck_of_Many_Things#Gameplay) and has had IA changes, the best one in each category is:
Some might disagree on my analysis. The most likely points of disagreement are:
Part 131: WK Gith:
In the last part, we finally broke the 30m XP mark. We're close to hitting the soft cap on fighter levels, and our last proficiency point.
The fight coming up is known as one of the hardest in IA. We will have to face the following enemies:
We buff up with TS (The Truth), ProEnergy, II and SI:Div before heading un. In a change from the norm, we do not have a pre-rest Stoneskin. We also have a Spell Sequencer and a Spell Trigger each with triple Remove Magic. We also make sure we keep the Ring of Human Influence equipped so we can swap into Mazzy's sword.
As we enter, the Gith approach us. There are a total of five Anti-Paladins that we want to take out. Since they can dispel on hit, we want to be careful about when our PFMWs run out. Fortunately, all the gith are weak to Critical Strikes.
We should be able finish off the Anti-Paladins during the second PFMW, as well as most of the regular gith. We will be safe and use two CS per PFMW.
We will be jonied by some golems. When the Stone Golem is around we want to keep Mazzy's sword offhand for protection against Golem Slow. We also want to make sure the Coin/Gem golems do not hit us and dispel our illusions. Remember that we need Crushing weapons for the Clay Golems.
Our target priority for this part of the fight is:
Once the anti-paladins are down, we run to the centre of the map and stand within Melee distance of Mlar and Hr'a'cknir. Our goal at this stage is to kill them while we drink four Potions of Barbarian Essence (out of nine total that we have).
We do not want either of them to die before we have drunk the full four potions, as we will want our undispellable physical immunity before the next stage of the fight.
Once we have the Barbarian Essence potions drunk, we don't mind if a Coin/Gem golem hits us and dispels our illusions. This will cause the surviving Gith to start to cast some damaging spells at us, but we have lots of HP and magic resistance and our action will be free to heal.
With Mlar and Hr'a'cknir down, we enter the third stage of the fight. Our goal is to kill the Inquisitors, but we have some Golems that are obstrucing our movement. We take down the Golems (preferring first Stone, the Clay, then Gem), using Phosphorus main hand and Mazzy's sword offhand until we get within melee range of one of the inquisitors, then attack them.
We are quite flexible with our action in this phase of the fight. The Anti-inquisitors all have 90% physical resistance , 150HP and immunity to critical hits, so this may take a while, but it's an uneventful phase of the fight. The Supreme Leader has damaging spells, but we can use Potions or Magic Items to protect ourselves from the damage (e.g. Ring of Fire Resistance vs Comet, Cloak of Magic Shielding/Belt of Inertial Barrier vs ADHW).
Having the large number of Golems and Gith around are useful for keeping the Supreme Leader from attacking us - even though he cannot deal physical damage, his sword does a bit of Fire damage on each hit, which can be annoying. It's also worth noting that the Anti-Inquisitors wield two-handed weapons that have a range of 2, compared to the range of 1 that everybody else has.
It can be worth trimming down the mob of Stone Golems, which means we no longer need to use Mazzy's sword. We will want to keep the Ring of Human Influence equipped, however, as it is needed to swap into our ADHW protection items.
With all four Anti-Inquisitors down, it is time to enter the fourth and final stage of the fight. The Supreme Leader's buffs will have all worn off, so it's time to take him out. I like to spend a few rounds and a few Critical Strikes taking out the other enemies so we can kite without getting bogged down.
The Supreme Leader's sword does fire damage to us slightly faster than the Ring of Gaxx regenerates us. We can protect ourselves from it with PFMW, but he has breach. Fortunately, he only has five breaches, and we have many more than five PFMWs, so we can just exhaust him of those.
Although he will have has most of his buffs expire, he will have some long-lasting ones remaining, such as Stoneskin. We can use Remove Magic (including from Sequencer and Spell Trigger) to get rid of his remaining buffs. He has five Stoneskins, plus the one he starts with, and we will want to dispel them all. He is immune to Breach, which is quite annoying.
The supreme leader has a monstrously good AC, which means that we can only hit on a critical hit. He has ten Hardinesses which we will likely have to wait out. The total wait duration of the Hardinesses is about the same as the Barbarian Essence duration, however, so we will need to kite him and return to PFMW at the end.
Once he is no longer Hardinessed, he should go down in a round or two of Critical Strikes, though we will want to keep spare Critical Strikes in case we mis-judge the Hardiness duration.
He dies for an overall underwhelming 40k XP.
Loot from this fight is:
Part 132: WK Demilich
The last part was the first fight we've ever had to break out the Barbarian Essence potions for. It's a fight which isn't difficult in an absolute sense, but it extremely long and can be mentally taxing. The good news is that it unlocks a large amount of content afterwards, and some very nice loot. The final guardian of some of the loot is coming up - the Demilich.
We have already fought Kangaxx, and this unnamed Demilich is very similar. It only has a caster level of 31, which we beat it on.
We head in under ProEnergy, II and SI:Div. Unlike Kangaxx, there is a Gem and a Coin golem in here. The Demilich is invulnerable while the golem are alive.
With the golems down, we fight the Demilich. There's not much it can do to us, especially with the ProEnergy up.
It can lower our elemental resistances (particularly Fire Resistance), so we can be safe by sticking ProFire in a spell sequencer.
This fight has a lot of notable loot, including:
We hit Fighter 39 and get our fifth proficiency point in Short Swords.
Part 133: Machine of Lum the Mad
We have beaten the Demilich, though Saladrex is probably a bit to tricky for us to handle right now. We can at least get some easy XP in the rest of this part.
We light the torches for 10k extremely easy XP.
We run into Rock and Garock, along with four Ice Salamanders. Garock is annoying, teleporting around whenever we hit him, and Rock is annoying being immune to physical damage when Hardiness is up and being unbreachable. Fortunately, neither of them can do anything to us under AI, and Rock only has one Hardiness. Despite being Minotaurs, they do not have the IA on-hit abilities.
Loot from this fight and the nearby chests is:
Killing Carston is worth 6k XP, and being nice is worth 10k XP. We then activate every bonus of the machine for +1 to all stats, the Storm Star, 5% magic resistance, and opening up the way down.
We return to Cromwell and forge the Improved Ring of Gaxx. This means that our magic resistance has jumped up to 90%. Unfortunately, we cannot forge the Flail of Defending and Wounding - we would need +3 flails, and we don't have the Scrolls of Permanency for that right now.
In the last part, we got some stat increases, which is pretty swish. Let's head back for some more WK content.
Carrying onto the NE part of the Final Seals level, we run into two Grave Liches and four Skeleton Grandlords. We can protect ourselves from the liches with II and SI:Div, and take out them by throwing out two RRoR before using Remove Magic. We can also be safe by running outside and resting up.
Watch out for the CC of triple ADHW.
In the room to the west are two Greater Bone Golems and four Elemental Golems. Like the previous level, we can go outside for safety, and drain them all of summons for a big chunk of XP.
We stat to interact with the sphere machine. We start with the red spheres, the first of which is a fight against four Coin golems.
The second red sphere fight is four Gem Golems. Much like the previous fight, this is pretty trivial a this point.
The third red sphere fight is two Ice Golems and an Elemental Golem. This Ice Golems purge magic every four rounds, and are smart enough not to purge us unless we have something worth purging.
The two Ice Golems have their Purge Magics two rounds offset, so we will be getting purged every two rounds. We need to watch out for the Freeze Mortals, which can inflict saveless slow, so we will mainhand Phosphorus and offhand Mazzy's sword.
Fortunately, the portals do not get disabled for this fight, so we can retreat to rest up. If we do, the Elemental Golem and Ice Golems get their position reset, but the minor summon golems reset to where try spawned. We can use this to carefully draw out all the summons of the Elemental Golem. The Ice/Elemental Golems may come along as the fighting starts, but we should have enough time to take out a single minor golem under Critical Strike, or wait for the purge magic then PFMW to take out a minor golem.
We have some good fortune - when we enter the level from the outside portal, the Elemental Golem and only one of the Ice Golems pursues us. From this point we can take the same strategy that we took in the Planar Sphere, but it's easier as we don't have to worry about the 13 second tick and we have undispellable Improved Haste. Also unlike the Planar Sphere, we have safety by being able to run away.
The Ice Golem should go down in the Third PFMW, at which point taking out the Elemental Golem is trivial. After then, we can rest up and take on the second Ice Golem in the same fashion.
The final red sphere fight is an Ultra Golem and a Greater Elemental Golem, which will require a bit of a janky strategy to take out.
This fight is unlike the previous fights. When the GEG spawns, it disables the exits from the map, and they will enable at least four rounds later, when we are not in combat. The GEG will pursue us form offscreen, though the Ultra Golem will not.
Our plan is to hug the west/south walls of this room so we do not activate the Ultra Golem, and take out the GEG and its summons. Once we have done that, we can verify that the exit has reactivated (by seeing if we have the cursor change in the fog of war) and take on the Ultra Golem under easier circumstances.
The GEG summons six minor golems over 13 rounds and three Amber Golems over 8 rounds. We will want to do our normal thing under PFMW of attacking for seven half rounds and kiting one for safety. We will also want to spend our time attacking but not killing the GEG until all of its summons have been drawn out, so we can get rid of it and the Purge Magics as soon as possible.
With the GEG down, we can set up our buffs for the Amber Golems and take them out. We have loads of PFMWs, so taking down the Amber Golems safely should not be a major issue. Don't forget that Mirror Image works against Electrical Discharge.
This GEG drops Usuno's Blade.
We verify that the portal is open and run past the Ultra Golem to rest up outside. In theory we could rest up in this level, but it is not reload safe as we may have random encounters.
The Ultra Golems summons up to six Amber Golems. When we rest up and reenter, the Ultra Golem will reset to its spawn point, and the Amber Golems will reset to their pre-rest places.
The Ultra Golem will not pursue us unless we are in a fight nearby it. It will not spawn an Amber Golem if it sees a summon, but it will spawn an Amber Golem if it sees Othata. Therefore we have a strategy:
I recommend using the Noble Spider instead of the Horn of Valhalla for this - I got completely consistent results with the Noble Spider, but not with the Horn of Valhalla.
With the Amber Golems taken care of, the Ultra Golem is straightforward. It has 90% crushing resistance, 95% slashing resistance and 100% piercing resistance. It deal lightning damage on hit, but fortunately does not have the Electrical Discharge of the Amber Golems. It uses Purge Magic every four rounds exactly.
it is not weak to critical hits, but it has an AC that we struggle with, so we follow the pattern of each PFMW consisting of two half rounds of regular attacks, four half rounds of Critical Strike, one half round of regular attacks and one half round of kiting until Purge Magic hits. It should go down in the fifth PFMW for 80k XP and no loot.
The four blue orbs give us straightforward fights against mages. They are level 14, 16, 20 and 25. II and SI:Div give us protection from their spells. The last two have Chain Contingencies of triple ADHW to watch out for.
The green spheres are spider fights. Each fight is four spiders, and we go through Killer, Spirit, Whisper and Ghost Spiders. Each of these are straightforward fights for us, though we will want to be sure to drain the Ghost Spiders of summons.
The purple spheres are undead, always four each. The first two rounds are Skeleton Lords and Skeleton Grandlords, which are easy for us.
The third round is Master Vampires. They summon an unlimited number of rounds of Vampire Brides seven rounds apart, but only the first four rounds are worth XP. We clear out the Vampire Brides until they stop becoming worth XP, at which people we take out the Master Vampires.
The final purple fight (and final sphere fight) is four grave liches. They are level 33/28 Fighter/Mages, so we can be safe with II and SI:Div, though we should also throw in PFME for protection from the ADHW Chain Contingencies and ProFire so they don't use Stellar Gravestone.
They protect themselves with SI:Ab and Spell Turning, so we will need to spend two RRoRs on each before using Remove Magic, for a total of 8 RRoR. We have 12 such spell slots, which is enough. The portals to leave are turned off for the duration of this fight, so we will want to prepare appropriately. Using Alacrity to speed up the RRoRs may be a good idea, we can get off six or seven in a single Alacrity.
They like to hit us in melee and dispel our protections, so we will want to protect ourselves with PFMW We move faster, so kiting is easy. Notable loot from this fight includes a single Potion of Barbarian Essence.
We head to the south door and meet the Helmite Ghost. He guards three doors. The left door is the Horde, which is an improved fight in IA. The middle door is the Ancient Dragon, a fight that will be very major in terms of both loot and difficulty. We instead head through the right door.
Inside, we find an Imp. The answer to the riddle is Seven. For the coin game, we start by taking two coins, then always take 4-X coins, where X is what the Imp took on its last go. This ensures that the game always passes to the Imp with one over a multiple of 4 coins, which guarantees our win.
This part has been our biggest haul in XP yet, at 3.3 million XP, bringing us to Mage 36. Maybe this should have been split into multiple parts, but there was no real natural stopping point.
Remaining Encounters:
The last part was a massive XP haul, and we're quickly reaching the level cap in all our classes. We can start to ignore drawing out summons of some of the nastier enemies we face.
We head to the Illithid Hideout. This is an area that we could probably have done a lot earlier on, and since it is a major loot source that is a likely good course of action. It is an area that we cannot retreat from until we have fully cleared the enemies.
We enter this room, where we fight some high level adventurers, two Gem Golems and some Skeleton Warlords. We buff up with II, SI:Div and ProEnergy, At this point, the Gem Golems are the biggest threat, as they can dispel our II on hit.
The mage has scrolls of PFMW, so the second priority should be taking out the mage to preserve as many of those as possible. The other unique loot from this fight is the Boneblade dagger and a Scroll of Wish. This is our third such scroll, so we can memorize it (we only need one as a crafting ingredient).
The next room is unimproved and easy. We may want to rest up in here before going to the final room.
The final room contains some vanilla creatures, an Alhoon (Illithid lich) and a Greater Elemental Golem. The Alhoon is only a level 19 caster, much less than us. It protects itself with SI:Ab, which make it a bit more annoying to take out.
Once the initial purge magic hits, we fire a PFMW, then an Alacrity. Under the Alacrity, we fire three RRoRs at the Alhoon, then start removing magic.
One thing that can trip us up here is that we get fireshield backlash when we RRoR the Alhoon from melee range. After casting one RRoR we will want to briefly advance the game long enough to take the backlash before casting the next one.
The Alhoon has no contingencies we need to worry about, so we can use the remaining Alacrity time to activate our offensive HLAs and take it out. From this point, we can kill the GEG after it has spawned all its minor golems. It spawns nine such golems, and no Amber Golems, but it should be straightforward for us at this point.
After the GEG goes down, it takes a few seconds for the loot to appear. We find:
We also get enough XP to hit Mage 37. We've got plenty of Avoid Deaths already, so some additional Power Atttacks are the choice.
About the Twisted Rune
The Twisted Rune a dangerous party, consisting of:
Vaxall is the biggest threat since it has access to Improved Anti-Magic Ray, which will be able to get past our II and SI:Ab.
Layene is the second biggest threat. She can summon Twisted Golems and indirectly summon Greater Twisted Golems. She also has access to Wish, which will always hit "Time stop and Improved Alacrity" while fully healing the other Twisted Rune foes. She cannot be killed until she has fired her wish.
Shangalar is the third biggest threat, as we do not want our II to be dispelled by a hit.
The big varaible to look out for is IAP1HIDDEN. Layene sets this to 1 when we are detected but not seen (I'm not sure how that works with II), and sets it to 2 when she uses Wish.
I have not been able to find a way of taking out Vaxall before we get hit with the Improved Anti-Magic ray. I can consistently do about one third to one half ot Vaxall's health in damage, but we get rayed in response. We could probably use a strategy of Barbarian Essence potions to protect from the fighters and equipment to protect from magical damage, but that will consume a lot of the potions, and it may not be worth it (at least, until we get some equipment that reduces our need for potions).
The Permanency scrolls have ended up being a bit of an unexpected constraint:
- Illithid Hideout
- Layene
- Ancient Dragon
- Saladrex
- Belcheresk (Demogorgon)
We also have two items that we want to craft that require Permanency scrolls:We have some problems with this, though. First is that the Demogorgon fight is something that we likely will not be able to do, and the second is that the Saladrex fight is something that I am struggling with. This gives us the relatively easy fight of the Illithid Hideout, and the difficult but probably necessary fight with the Ancient Dragon, for two permanency scrolls.
The Flail of Defending and Wounding does not require a permanency scroll directly, but it requires two vanilla +3 flails. There is only one such flail available in SOA, so we if want to forge it before TOB we will need to use a permanency scroll. Similarly, Cuththroat requires a vanilla long sword +4. Once we enter TOB these will be much easier to forge, as we will get a lot more Scrolls of Permanency, as well as being able to buy generic +3 equipment in shops.
Therefore, we will deliberately hold off forging the FoDaW until we have beaten either Saladrex or Demogorgon, we have forged the Memory of the Apprenti (and gotten the one SOA +3 flail from Limak), or until we are in TOB. Cuththroat is lower priority, so we will not forge that until we are firmly in TOB.
In the last part, we did a GEG fight that we've been putting off for a while. Let's do another.
Returning to Suldanessellar, we find a couple golem groups that we somehow missed earlier.
Heading into the House of the Harpist, we see a Noble Rakshasa and a GEG. The Noble Rakshasa summons six Horrid Rakshasas, and the GE summons six minor golems and an Amber Golem. We make sure that we have our anti-ADHW equipment equipped. The Noble Rakshasa can cast some Dragon Breaths, so we are also ready to swap into Fire resistance gear.
The closed area of this fight means that we will want to be extremely vigilant about refreshing PFMW after Purge Magics. Clearing out Minor Golems and Horrid Rakshasa will be a priority so we can move about. We can use a pattern of hitting the Horrid Rakshasa enough when they first appear to trigger AI, then taking them out four rounds later. Alternatively, if we can get it to use its action befoe using AI, we can take it out in just under a round of Critical Strikes.
Loot from this fight includes the Staff of Earth, the Stone Harp, and if we wave a ranger around, a scroll of Improved Haste.
We rest up and head on into the Forest Clearing. We prebuff with II and SI:Div.
The notable parts about this dragon fight are:
With II and SI:Div up, the Dragon will waste a lot of time casting spells that do nothing to us. It will not summon the Hardwood Golems until we get within wing buffet range, so we stand at the edge of its vision and cast Remove Magic until we have gotten through all four of its PFMWs and all three of its Stoneskins.
We can use Spell Sequencer and Spell Trigger for additional Remove Magics.
We can use the IA improved summons to start to deal some damage to it. The Greater Djinni especially is extremely effective. It has a Contingency of Stoneskin that fires at 50% hitpoints.
The Hardwood Golems appear when we get within melee range of the dragon. We protect ourselves from them with AI, but we focus down the Dragon instead of taking them out.
A reload-safe strategy may want to try to take out the dragon without spawning the Hardwood Golems at all.
The dragon dies for 70k XP. Notable loot includes:
We cannot leave this area until the Dragon is dead and we are not in combat. We may have taken a couple Greater Dooms which give us a big THAC0 penalty, so it will likely be worth kiting the Hardwood golems for 20 rounds while that wears off after the dragon is dead.
When we turn and fight, we use Crushing Weapons, as that is what they are weakest to (at 90% resistance). We follow the standard pattern of fighting for seven half-rounds.
We summon the Avatar of Rillifane for 15k XP and the Staff of the Woodlands.
We head into the Tree of Life Area. We take out all the enemies there (unimproved), but do not kill the parasites just yet.
About the Ancient Dragon:
The Ancient Dragon is a level 39/32/39 Fighter/Mage/Cleric. We beat it on the Arcane caster level front, but not the Divine caster level front.
Its fight logic is:
The minions that are summoned at the start of the fight are the Elite Nishruu, a Salamander Prince and a Noble Efreeti. The Elite Nishruu is the most annoying minion, as it is extremely sticky and it has a nasty weapon. The weapon drains two spells on hit and inflicts 20% spell failure for five rounds, as well as removing Specific and Illusionary protections.
In the last part, we cleared our way to the Tree of Life. We could fight Irenicus in hell, but that would close off access to rest of the SOA only content.
Crucially, we can do the Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar quest. This will require a bit of modding - I have taken out the remaining check for a pure class Vagrant, and added the Swanmay innate abilities, which I will not use after this part.
The XP and Loot from this are not any concern to us, this is purely for completionist reasons.
We head to Suldanessellar, and check out the Sealed House, which has a mysterious message when we try to open it.
The Tree of Life area has this new set of stairs. We can enter it if we have the Ruby of the Gods, we are a single class Vagrant, we have finished the Squirrel Job, and we have finished the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I have relaxed these conditions.
Inside is the Favored Swanmay. We are given the Mirror of the Lakesider, and told to go to the Sealed House in Suldanessellar.
Inside the Sealed House, we find the ghost of Lord Wetlander, who tells us about our mission:
We return to the tree of life and use Speak with Animals to talk to the squirrel that has appeared. We need to make sure that we pick up the blessed nuts from a container in the main Tree of Life area before we talk to the squirrel. We dropped the Ruby of the Gods, and some vipers took it. We can get the vipers to appear again by using pennyroyal oil.
We can get the oil from Mrs. Cragmoon for 1k gold.
We return to the Tree of Life and summon a Swanmay Queen. An Elemental Golem appears shortly afterwards. It is worth no XP or loot, so there is no pont trying to draw out its summons.
We are joined by a large number of Mirrored Vipers. These things have 90% physical resistance, strong regeneration, and cast Mirror Image every two rounds, which cannot be removed or dispelled. The presence of the Swanmay weakens them, giving them a bunch of penalties, including critically -15 to all physical resistances. Normally they would ignore us under PFMW and take out the Swanmay Queen, but the careful positioning in the map means that they cannot get to the Swanmay Queen.
We will want to make sure that the Swanmay is pressed right up against the corner of the walkable area of the map and that we are pressed right up against the Swanmay. This will ensure that the minor golems summoned by the Elemental Golem will not spawn behind us.
The Swanmay will be around for 20 rounds, and the vipers will take 14 rounds to spawn them all once the process starts. There will be four vipers per wave for the first six wave (two round interval), plus just one that is holding the Ruby) in the last wave. We can get through about one per round under critical strike and the weakening lasts for three rounds, so we might not be able to get through all of the mirrored vipers on the first round. For that reason, it is safest to take out the first Elemental Golem, take out as many Mirrored Vipers as possible before the Swanmay unsummons, then summon another Swanmay and repeat the process.
The biggest danger is that we might go forward (either naturally or be pushed forward by the Swanmay) whenever we take out a Mirrored Viper.
We want to make sure that when we resummon the Swanmay, the Elemental Golem is forced to spawn on the other side of the vipers.
We don't have to get rid of every Mirrored Viper before the Swanmays go away, but the more the better. We can beat the Mirrored Vipers without Swanmays, but it's a very long process that may require us to use a number of our PFMW scrolls.
With the Ruby of the Gods, we can repair the mirror in the sealed house, and it causes a Mirrored Grandlord to spawn. We could summon a swanmay to help, but it's easier if we don't.
There's an annoying pattern where the Mirrored Grandlord, as with most mirrored monsters, do not give any XP or loot.
The next time we interact with the mirror, it spawns a Mirrored Wind Master. This one is immune to all forms of damage unless we have a Swanmay. We do our summons (Swanmay last), take out the Elemental Golem that appears, and then activate the mirror. With the golem around, the Mirrored Wind Master goes to 90% physical resistance.
Taking out the Elemental Golem takes three or four Critical Strikes, as does the Mirrored Wind Master.
Third is a Mirrored Ghost Spider. This has 60% physical resistance even before it is weakened from the Swanmay and is therefore easy.
We need to do all three fights without resting, or our progress resets and we have to do them again.
We now need to find the three mirrors. We will start with the Blazing Mirror. We are told that we first need to find a way to breath underwater.
The Magic Pond tells us to bring the Ancient Holy Water, and just tells us that the Ruby of the Gods will guide us.
We return to the Shadow Temple. In theory we could beat it without help, as it has 95% slashing/piercing resistance, but it is much easier to summon a swanmay (and friends), deal with the Elemental Golem, then take on the Mirrored Shadow with a 10% penalty to all its damage resistances.
It summons Deep Shadows (who are relatively easy with 50% physical resistances and 108HP), and is weak to critical hits. The Mirrored Shadow goes down in less than two rounds of Critical Strikes, though we should watch out for its saveless stun on hit.
Interacting with the crystal again gives us the Ancient Holy Water. Returning to the Magic Pool gives us and our Swanmays the ability to breath underwater.
Going after the Blazing Mirror, we find ourselves in an underwater fight. Our summons either suffocate here, or get insta-killed by the Mirrored Golem, so we don't bother.
We have to fight a Mirrored Golem. It has 325 HP, 100% damage resistance (90% with a Swanmay out) and purges magic every four rounds. We are also under an unsaveable slow effect, so we main hand Phosphorus and offhand Mazzy's sword. The slow timer ticks every round, so in theory we could swap back and forth frequently, but it's not worth the risk.
This is not a fight that can consistently be done solo, I'm afraid. It has a similar problem to the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - we cannot protect the Swanmay from being taken out by the golems and we need it alive to take out the Mirrored Golem. I will have to edit the Mirrored Golem to be more vulnerable to proceed, as we are being completionist in this part.
It drops the Blazing Mirror and a Potion of Barbarian Essence.
The Bloodstained mirror fight is against the Anti-Ranger. It has 100% physical resistance unless we summon a Swanmay.
Similar to the Tree of Life fight, we block the enemies from getting to the Swanmay. This can be a tricky spot to find, so we will want to:
The Swanmay is only preferred when we are under PFMW, otherwise the nearest target is preferred. We can get a bit more DPF by getting the Swanmay to attack too while Othala tanks with Stoneskin.
When the Anti-Ranger gets below 20% HP, it summons a Mirrored Warrior and heals. The Anti-Ranger is unkillable while the Mirrored Warrior is alive. The Mirrored Warrior has 90% physical resistance without the Swanmay, 80% with.
The Swanmay will unsummon while the Mirrored Warrior is being taken out. We finish taking it out, then resummon the Swanmay in the same manner as before. This time, we ignore the Elemental Golem and focus on the Anti-Ranger, only taking out the Elemental Golem when the Anti-Ranger is dead. Once the Anti-Ranger is dead, we no longer care about preserving the Swanmay. Loot from this fight includes a Potion of Barbarian Essence.
Finally, we go for the Wooden Mirror. We have to fight the Drowned Soul and four Mirrored Ghost Spiders.
We protect ourselves with PFMW and start to take out the spiders. We prioritize the Mirrored Ghost Spiders first.
The Drowned Souls is 95% resistant to physical damage, has 150 HP and is weak to critical hits. We take it out with Critical Strikes after the Mirrored Ghost Spiders.
After it goes down, we just have a large group of Mirrored Whisper Spiders to deal with that are more annoying than threatening. Like the Mirrored Viper fight, we will need to use our full range of PFMWs, potentially dipping into scrolls.
We may want to reposition to a location like this when we are tanking to get best use our of our Stoneskins.
Once again, our reward is the mirror we wanted plus a Barbarian Essence potion.
We can interact with the mirror in the sealed house one final time to have our final confrontation with the Master of Mirrors. In this conversation, we learn that the stakes are higher - Since we are the second Vagrant in a row to fight him, if we lose then he will gain dominion over the whole world, not just the elves.
The Master of Mirrors (MOM.CRE) casts Duplication to summon another Master of Mirrors (MOM2.CRE), so we have two to deal with. We can drink one Barbarian Essence potion before going in and two more when we arrive. We main hand Phosphorus and offhand the Defender of Easthaven. This gives us physical immunity.
MOM summons three Mirrored Ghost Spiders, who in turn like to summon Mirrored Whisper Spiders, for a maximum of six each. MOM2 likes to cast ADHW and Magic Missile at us, which we can negate with equipment.
We take out the Ghost Spiders first, then the Whisper Spiders. We will swap our magic damage equipment on before their spells land and take it off afterwards to draw them into spending their action casting spells. Both of them can attack with MMM, but that is not a major threat to us. We may want to use PFMW or similar if the INT drain of getting hit by the spiders is worrying us.
We want to be a bit careful - Improved Web needs a save vs spell at -6, so we will need to bring out the Helm of Balduran or Gift of Peace to ensure that we can pass our saving throws while we have the magic damage equipment equipped.
Getting rid of the spiders is not difficult in an absolute sense, but it does take a long time. Once they are done, it's just us, MOM and MOMD.
Both MOM and MOMD are level 36 Mages. We are level 37, so we will win a dispel war. Each of our Remove Magics has a 60% chance, and we can use Sequencers and Triggers full of tripple Remove Magic for about a 95% dispel chance.
Both MOM and MOMD are immune to damage right now. We have a bit of breathing room, so we summon our minions, ending with the Swanmay. We focus down the Elemental Golem ASAP as it comes in.
With the Swanmay around, MOMD has 10% physical damage weakness. He has a lot of stoneskins, which can be annoying, but that is what we have Breaches for. He has a Chain Contingency of triple ADHW which we should watch out for.
When MOMD goes down, MOM fire prebuffs and starts casting spells. We will want to save several Remove Magics for now, plus potentially a Sequencer of them. We will probably want to delve into our scrolls of Breach too.
MOM is basically the same as MOMD, except that the Swanmays inflict 5% weakness instead of 10%. They both have 300HP, which makes these fights extremely grindy. We may need to resummon a Swanmay to take out MOM, but it is straightforward at this point.
The Master of Mirrors is banished to his own plane, and can never return to ours. He threatens to take his revenge if we ever leave our plane, but we suspect it's just empty words.
We only get 35k XP for this fight. We return to the Magic Pond and hand over the Ruby of the Gods and the Mirror of the Lakesider for another 25.5k XP. We then have the choice of getting 5 Barbarian Essence from the pool, or upgrading the Axe of the Lakesider (the reward from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly). The axe isn't particularly fantastic, even when upgraded.
This should be treated as a bonus episode. Part 138 will continue from part 136, though I will probably be setting the appropriate variable to make the game think we have done this mission so we get the appropriate cameo in the EDE.
My thoughts on the expanded ranger stronghold as a whole (including Squirreled Away and Rune Assassins):
The fight against the Rune Assassins is a nice introduction to the Rune Assassin enemies. In our case it was easy because we had already done the Cowled Wizards, but in previous playthroughs I have done this without arcane magic, and that turns it into a fight that needs a bit of innovation to tackle.
The need for Adamantine Dust I'm not a fan of. It feels like a bit of an artificial blocker, as Adamantine does not come up at all in the rest of this fight or the rest of the Rune Assassin fight. There is already a large amount of content that cannot be done before the Underdark (implemented in varying amounts of clunkiness), this doesn't need to add to it.
The Pitre fight at the end I like. The Greater Restoration and Pitre invincibility means that we have to adapt our normal battle priorities.
Shimmering Light:
I like the fights against the Illusionist and the Enchanter. The Enchanter has the gimmick of the dominated minions, which is nice but it doesn't provide much of an obstacle to our regular game plan, the dominated minions would ideally be more attention-grabbing. The Illusionist has two gimmicks - the illusionary minions and the Phantasmal Killer. We took a riskier approach by not disbelieving in the Phantasmal Killer, a noreloader would probably want to disbelieve it for the safety at the cost of only 12.5k XP.
The final fight against the Elite Doppleganger it is the first dangerous enemy where we need to use AI instead of PFMW for protection. We have a variety of strategies we can take for a range of reload safety.
Rune Assassins:
The Grandfather of Rune Assassins is actually an easier fight than the Guildmaster fight. There are two reasons - it takes less time for all the minions to be summoned, and we do not have to worry about golems dispelling our invisibility.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar:
Keeping Swanmays alive is quite difficult, especially as when we PFMW up the enemies will ignore us and focus on the Swanmays. Summoning the one often makes things more difficult than previously, as we will have to deal with the Elemental Golem and try to keep the Swanmay alive against both the Elemental Golem and the mirrored enemy. We go for a body blocking strategy, which is what any full party will have to do, but it is so much more difficult as a solo.
The first fight is the Mirrored Vipers fight. Although we can take out a mirrred viper without the Swanmay, we have to fight over two dozen of them, which will require us to burn a large number of our PFMW scrolls. We have to abuse the environment to block the access to the Swanmay.
The second fight is fixing the mirror, the major part of which is the Mirrored Wind Master. I like seeing the mirrored versions of previous enemies, though difficulty seems a bit askew, with the second enemy being so much harder than the first or third.
The third fight is the mirrored shade, which is relatively easy to do. We haven't seen an enemy with saveless on-hit disable for a while, which means we have to keep on our toes.
The fourth fight is the Blazing Mirror. This is one which we can't do solo, I spend several hours trying to see if there is a critical pixel we can stand on to body block the Golems from reaching the Swanmay without any success. This fight is frustrating because it is difficult, but we have so few options available to us to try out.
The fifth fight is the Bloodstained Mirror. In theory this should be the easiest, as it is meant to be a solo protagonist fight anyway. I found the area to stand on to body block to be quite precise, which is why I have the exact pixel that I used. This fight is also very mentally draining, as the Swanmay needs constant attention to not walk up to the enemies and get killed. I'm not sure how a singelclass Vagrant is meant to beat the Anti-Ranger - even if Barbarian Essences are used for physical immunity, the Elemental Golem will probably either kill the Swanmay or kill the protagonist with the elemental damage on hit.
The sixth fight is the Drowned Soul. The Drowned Soul itself is a very minor part of the fight, most of it is extremely grindy. The Mirrored Spiders do get weaker if a Swanmay is around. This fight may be easier if we summon a swanmay (especially if we can hide in one of the crannies of the map), I found the fight reliable (though grindy) enough without and didn't investigate.
The final fight isn't massively dangerous. We can gain physical immunity using Barbarian Essences, and gain immunity from magical damage with our equipment, which it turns out gives us complete immunity to all incoming damage, which means that the only way we can take lose is by stat drain from the spiders, which PFMW and the like protect us from.
We are lucky enough in the final fight that we win the dispel war. MOM and MOM2 are both level 36 casters, which is I believe the highest level arcane casters in the game. If we did not win the dispel war, we would have to run around long enough for the buffs to expire, which is an extremely long time.
The biggest danger against the MOMs is that we will softlock ourselves by running out of Scrolls of Breach, or running out of Swanmay summons and being unable to hurt the MOMs.
Our total XP reward for this entire mission is only 273k, which is extremely small for what we fight - a regular Elemental Golem is worth about 200k if drained of summons. In terms of item loot, we get five Barbarian Essence potions, but any conventional player will probably have to spend those potions anyway, especially on the Bloodstained Mirror fight. We can also upgrade the Axe of the Lakesider, but that just turns its enchantment from +4 to +5, turns its bonus HP from 20 to 30, and turns its magic damage chance from 5% to 10%, which is a very underhwelming reward.
Overall Ranking:
Shimmering Light > Squirreled Away >> Rune Assassins >>> Ancient Secret > The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Just another question, is F/M/T the only viable way to solo improved anvil?