Just another question, is F/M/T the only viable way to solo improved anvil?
I broke it down in the fourth spoiler of the original post, but I think so. Defensive arcane buffs are a must, which demands Bard, Mage or a combination that includes Mage. The other major plusses of a F/M/T are fighter proficiencies and HLAs like UAI and Critical Strike.
A Bard or a F/M will have a much easier early game, and may be able to complete the game, but late game fights will be trickier and some optional areas like WK may be impossible.
We jump back to the end of part 136 for this part, though we will use the console to set IAMIRRORJOB to 6, so the game thinks that we have finished the Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar quest. This has a minor effect in the final fight, so I am doing it for completionist reasons.
THe key to beating the Ancient Dragon is Remove Magic. The Dragon has a higher caster level than us for Divine spells, but a lower caster level for Arcane spells. The works out for us in two ways - the dragon's Remove Magics are all arcane and so we will win, and the dragon's most important protection spells are all arcane/ We will want to dispel the dragon a total of eight times - three stoneskins (one from initial buffs) then five PFMW (once at 80% hitpoints).
Once we cast our first spell in the arena, the Dragon starts to head towards us. We prebuff before entering the arena with II, SI:Div and ProEnergy. Once in, we position ourself in the top corner, summon our minions (these are items and do not trigger the dragon), then cast Foreknowledge and Alacrity. The dragon should arrive at around the time that Alacrity finishes.
When the Alacrity hits, we insta-cast Hardiness, AI, Critical Strike and move in to start attacking. I also like to turn off all auto-pauses here except for spell cast. Othala and the team attack the dragon, ignoring the minions.
Under foreknowledge, we can instacast Remove Magic. We therefore cast it every time the dragon puts up a defensive spell. The way the AI works out, we will in practice make the dragon use a (instacase) defensive spell in between casting other spells.
It may be possible to ancitipate when the spells are cast and try to time the Remove Magics to land as soon after the defensive buffs as possible.
When we are near the end of our first Alacrity, we start casting the second. We will want to equip the Ring of Fire Protection for the duration of this to ensure we are not interrupted. Alacrity lasts for two rounds and we have 10APR, so a good way to know when we are approaching the end is to cast Critical Strike at the start of the Alacrity casts, then count seven or eight attacks after the first CS runs out to start to cast the second Alacrity.
I have ntoiced that sometimes we get our illusions dispelled during or shortly after casting this. I'm not sure of the source, but we can just refresh II as soon as it happens and the Alacrity is up without too much trouble.
It might hit us with one or two Greater Dooms, but Critical Strike will ensure that we hit. Similarly, it might hit us with one or two Lower Fire Resistances, but we should be able to tank a Fire Breath or two.
The dragon goes down for 136k XP, taking the record of the Most Powerful Vanquished.
The Salamander Prince and Noble Efreeti disappear when the Dragon goes down, but the Elite Nishruu does not. I recommend kiting under Greater Dooms wear off, then re-engaging with the Elite Nishruu under AI.
There is loads of loot from this fight:
Robe of Vecna
Short Sword of Mask
Great Wyrm Scales
Judgement Day Essence (Mage Half)
Dragon's Bane Halberd
Hindo's Doom
Scrolls of Spell Shield, Time Stop, Monster Summoning VII, BBoB, Wish and Permanency
Part 139: Limak the Mastermind:
Last time we did probably the hardest single fight of the entire run, and I'm not happy with our strategy, but I couldn't find better.
We finally forge one of the most powerful items in IA - the Memory of the Apprenti.
Our foe of interest for this part is Limak the Mastermind. He has the same caster levels as the Ancient Dragon, but with an important difference - he does not have the permanent Alacrity.
Three days after the forging the MotA, we return to the docks district under II and SI:Div. We are greeted by Limak, who us to hand over our nice new robe. We can hand the robe over, we can bribe him to go away with 100k gold, or we can kill him. Let's do that last one.
He summons two Amber Golems as the fight starts, but no further creatures during the battle. He protects himself with II and SI:Div. We can protect ourself with PFMW, then cast Alacrity.
Under Alacrity, we can spam Remove Magics, each with 90% dispel chance. Once he has been dispelled, he is pretty weak and should go down in a couple rounds of attacking. We can dispel him again if he tries to PFMW, though we should be careful to keep up our own PFMW for the Amber Golems. He has a CC of triple ADHW, but it will not fire since it only fires at enemies with less than 50% MR, and we have 55%.
He dies for a rather unwarranted 100k XP, and we then take out the Amber Golems, which is straightforward at this point for us.
Notable loot from this fight is a bunch of generic powerful equipment, plus scrolls of Wish and Chain contingency.
He also drops Limak's Brain. In three days it will rot and be worthless, but until then we can use it to forge the Potion of Superior Mentality. It gives a permenant +1 to INT and WIS (which doesn't do anything really for us), but it only consumes gold and a Manual of Elaboration (which we are not constrained on), so we forge it.
One of the items that Limak drops is a generic +3 flail. We use a Permanency Scroll to forge a second, then construct one of our two final weapons in the game - the Flail of Defending and Wounding. This will be our new mainhand weapon, and once we forge Judgement Day we will swap between the two main hand and offhand. This leaves us with one Permanency scroll leftover.
We also gain more XP from the Limak fight than the Ancient Dragon fight, allowing us to hit Mage 38.
Part 140: The Old Ones:
We have done a major upgrade to our equipment, but we are still plowing through the stuff that the Memory of the Apprenti unlocked.
I tweak the script constraints so that we can do this quest and head to the Planar Sphere. After a few days of resting, an Archmage appears. We get told the following:
Four centries ago, there was a group of three single class mages and five fighter/mages
They clashed over what kind of mage is better
The three single class mages found a magic potion that extended their lifespan for 500 years
The three single class mages decided to just hide from the fighter/mages until they outlived them and became knows as the Old Ones
The fighter/mages didn't want to be outlived, so they turned themselves into liches
Since they were fighter/mages that became liches, they turned into Grave Liches
The Old Ones spent the next 400 years on the run, trying and failing to train apprentices and recreate the longevity potion
The Grave Liches recently found and attacked the Old Ones
Two of the Old Ones died, as did two of the Grave Liches
This just leaves three of the Grave Liches and the last Old One, who is the Archmage we're talking to right now
The Grave Liches kidnapped the Old One's apprentice to force a confrontation so they can eliminate all single class mages everywhere
We need to team up to fight the Grave Liches
We get dispelled and teleported to the Old One's hideout. The auto-pause gives us time to set up II and SI:Div before the conversation starts.
We kite them and cast AI (beign sure they don't hit us and dispel our II), then cast Alacrity.
We start by casting ProFire and Mirror Image (to protect us from Stellar Gravestone, a comet variant that is one of the few things they can do to us under our protections), Ruby Ray each of the Grave Liches twice, and cast Remove Magic to blow away their protections.
We activate our offensive HLAs and start to take them out, as they are weak to Critical Strike. They may PFMW, but Under Alacrity we can instacast Remove Magic with 99% dispel chance. They go down easily from here.
The Old One congratulates us and tells us that his apprentice, Morid, will join us in our stronghold. As a reward, we gain the Cloak of the Old Ones, which gives +5 max HP and 3 HP/round regeneration.
Morid says that he can help our researches, and talking to him enables the pool that contains a Barbarian Essence potion.
We drop a large pile of gold to combine two +2 cloaks to make a +3 one, then we combine it with the Cloak of the Old Ones and the Scholastic Cloak (a necromancer-only drop from the librarian lich in Spellhold) to forge the Cloak of Arcane Immortality. Fortunately the IA rules get bent a bit here - normally we are only allowed to wear at most one protection item of strength +3 or better, but we are allowed to wear this with the Ring of Gaxx.
Part 141: Mage Stronghold Finale:
We have saved Morid, which means that it is time to put him to good use. This will be a lot longer than the last few parts.
This will involve some items that would have spawned earlier in the game if we were a Necromancer. I will be consoling them as they are needed.
Morid has lots of things he can do for us. They are:
Start the Time Machine: More on this in a bit
Start researching a new spell: Give a book called "The History of the Chosen of Mystra" (found in WK if the protagonist is a Necromancer) and a Manual of Elaboration to get a scroll of Recast Vital Energy
Brew potions of Barbarian Essence: Provide a Bottle of Old Wine (obtainable later on) and Blood of a Barbarian Warrior (from Smaeluv Orcslicer)
Brew powerful potions: Give some money, no rare ingredients
Each of these is doable once. The spell Recast Vital Energy is a stronger version of Wish, though the protagonist needs to be a Necromancer to get the best results. Each of the options can only be done once, and they each take three days.
Activating the Time Machine needs a few ingredients, an important one is the Scroll of Time Stop. The Ancient Dragon has one, and the easiest other place to find one is inthe House of the Harpist in Suldanessellar if the plater is a single class necromancer with reputation 20.
The Time Machine is similar to the mirror in Suldanessellar. We need a few keys (Morid can create them), each each key will unlock a one-off encounter.
In Bodhi's coffin, we can find a Piece of Sandalwood, which can be turned into the Wooden Key (while preserving the Sandalwood). Using this on the Time Machine means we go back in time to Suldanessellar and meed a young Bodhi. We give her the Sandalwood (creating a bit of a time paradox) and get her to leave a bottle of wine in a house in Suldanessellar, which Morid can use to create Barbarian Essence potions.
The Golden Key costs 1000 gold to forge. We will have to fight six Skeleton Grandlords, which at this point in the game is a pretty trivial fight. One of them drops a scroll of Larloch's Interrupter and Bones of a Skeleton Grandlord.
The Ruby Key consumes three Bloodstone Gems, and needs the Crimson Ioun Stone (from the squirrel job) as a catalyst. Using it brings us face to face with Lavok in his youth. This version of Lavok has already met the force that posessed him in our time. He agreed to let the force enter the sphere to leave the Demonic plane, as long as the force never possesses him or tries to enter the Prime Material plane. Lavok asks us to return to the Demonic plane to destroy the force's main avatar. He tells us that we can use the Amber Key in the time machine to travel to the Demonic plane and the Bone Key to return.
Forging the Amber Key requires a Chunk of Amber, and Forging the Bone Key requires teh Bones of the Skeleton Grandlord that we picked up in the Grandlord fight earlier. Morid has nothing more he can do for us, and so he wishes us good luck.
We return to the Demonic plane and encounter the Lesser Force.
The fight has three warm-up rounds - six Skeleton Lords, six Balors, and six Skeleton Grandlords.
The skeletons are trivial with PFMW. The Balors are scarier - they have access to Lower Fire Resistance and Greater Doom (if we are visible). I like to use Alacrity to set up defenses and Remove Magics on them, then hack them to bits under Critical Strike, II, SI:Div and PFMW. One of the drops the Carmine Ioun Stone.
After the Granlords, we get healed and rested to our spells are restored. Certain debuffs will stick around, including Greater Doom from the Balors. It is best to kite the last Skeleton Grandlord until the debuffs wear off. Buffs don't matter, as we will get hard dispelled as the start of the Lesser Force fight.
The Lesser Force has surprisingly weak physical resistances. In combat, it doesn't cast any spells. When it gets to less than 10% health, it will summon five Greater Bone Golems and heal itself (it does this twice). It will use Purge Magic every three rounds until we take out the last wave of the Greater Bone Golems.
Its weapon's only effect is that it slays summons on hit. The most dangerous part is that when we cast it it will use Field of Dark Magic. This gives a cumulative -2 penalty to THAC0 and saves, inflict cumulative -10% magic damage resistance unless we save vs spell at -2, and inflict a bit of magic damage. It's like an Amber Golem, but less severe. The debuffs last for 5 rounds.
The fight is made even easier by the fact that the Lesser Force is weak to critical hits. We spend the first PFMW getting the Lesser Force down to 1/3-1/4 health, then the next PFMW healing up and waiting for the debuffs to expire, then the third PFMW beating the Lesser Force down to the range to summon the Golems.
When the force heals, it will debuff us. We will want to be quick with the pauses to check our save vs death and spell at this point, as the GBGs can inflict Stun/Panic unless we can make these saves at -4. If our saves are too low (from the field of dark magic), we will want to equip protective gear or drink a relevant potion while kiting while the save debuff wears off.
Once the first five GBGs are down, we repeat the process. We can swap our Magic Damage gear on and off depending on if we are hitting the Lesser Force or the GBGs. When the second wave of GBGs goes down, it still purges, though not as often.
The second round of GBGs drop Potions of Magic Shielding, which is a nice bonus.
The Lesser Force is straightforward to beat. Since we have destroyed this form, and it does not have another avatar to hand, it is forced to disperse itself it is will be at least a millenium before it reforms. We get 45k XP points for this.
We return to Cromwell. We combine the Carmine Ious Stone, the Crimson Ioun Stone and the Ruby of the Gods to forge this, the Scarlet Ioun Stone. We have started to assemble a pretty impressive set of equipment - with the Scarlet Ioun Stone, the FoDaW, the Lord of the Underworld and Jan's Armour, we have a static 65% physical resistance. We can use Hardiness for (dispellable) physical immunity, or two Barbarian Essence potions for undispellable physical immunity.
I'm not happy with how the Ancient Dragon fight went. I tried it a few times, and I only got about 2/3 success rate, at that was the best strategy I could find. For a no-reloader, I would suggest just skipping the Ancient Dragon.
In theory the Ancient Dragon only block access to the rest of WK, but the Old Ones fight does require the Memory of the Apprenti to be forged, which requires the Robe of Vecna. The Robe of Vecna is randomized to one of four places, (one of which is the Ancient Dragon), but the randomizer scripts do favour certain classes - a single class mage cannot have it be with the Ancient Dragon, and a Necromancer cannot have it be with Layene. Personally, I'm not a fan of this kind of randomization, so I would encourage anybody who is playing this through to check the value of IAVECNAPLACE at game start time, restart if it is set to 1 (Ancient Dragon) or 2 (Layene).
In the last few parts, we have gotten some pretty major equipment upgrades. It's finally time to get the best equipment upgrade in the game.
We head up the eastern part of the WK exterior map, and we find the Demon Lord. We make sure we have prebuffed with Hardiness Foreknowledge, II, SI:Div, ProEnergy and ProFire. The Demon Lord wants Angurvadal, we want its blood. Let's see who will win this disagreement.
The Demon Lord is a level 29/25/31 F/M/C, and is not much of a threat. The biggest part of it is that it summons a series of Death Lords. Death Lords are threatening as they can cast Lower Fire Resistance and use some nasty fire spells. In theory we could maximize XP by drawing out the Death Lords, but we are beyond the point where we want to farm XP. Annoyingly, the Demon Lord heals whenever a wave of Death Lords is summoned, and we cannot focus it down in the time between rounds. We will therefore focus on taking out the Death Lords first.
Every time a round of Death Lords is summoned, we fire a Remove Magic. This has a side effect of buring through the Demon Lord's PFMWs and Remove Magics early.
The summons are not strictly necessary, but we might as well summon them. The only on-hit effect we worry about is that the Death Lords give us a -2 to THAC0 that can add up, but by the time it is relevant the Demon Lord will be out of PFMWs and we can use Critical Strike.
Even if we get our fire resistance lowered, we have a static magic resistance of 90% with Jan's armour, and we can take that to 100% with the Delryn Family Legacy. The Demon Lord is the only one who can lower our resistance, and only if we are seen, so we can tank this extremely well. Not all of the fire spells can be negated with MR, but most of them can.
If things look hairy, we have two retreat options - the first is to the edge of the map, where we can run away to another map entirely. The second is inside WK - the stairway to the top is closed, but the side doors remain open. Although the inner levels do have resting encounters, they are not threating for us at this point in the game. I dont know where the rest encounters are defined, but I find the Machine of Lum the Mad level to be the best.
It is a very slow but very safe strategy to keep ducking in and out of the side doors of WK, taking out one or two Death Lords at a time. Under Hardiness, II and SI:Div we are in no real danger. We will take a lot of hits, lowering our THAC0 a lot, but Critical Strikes will ensure that we hit.
The fight is long and grindy, with the only loot being the Blood of the Demon Lord. This is the last ingredient we need to forge the Judgement Day sword.
Judgment Day is potentially the most powerful bit of equipment in IA, and it has the price tag to go with it. For comparison, the next highest gold price in the mod is 150k.
As we forge the sword, it talks to us and starts a seven day timer. If this timer runs out, we will lose the JD sword, but can carry on our adventure.
This is what the sword has to offer us. It's a lot of bonuses. The biggest parts are the 20% physical damage resistance and the +2 strength (which lets us retire Phosphorus). The on-hit abilities are nice, but nothing we will rely on.
These are the spells it can cast. Most of them are useless to us, with tbe most relevant ones being PFMW and Wish.
This is the enemy that we will have to take out. Notable things about it are:
On hit it does a big of magical damage
On hit it has a 46% chance of inflicting saveless sleep and wing buffet
Its initial summons are a Death Lord, an Elemental Golem and a Noble Marilith
Every five rounds, it will summon an additional Death Lord, Elemental Golem or Noble Marilith
It has a chain contingency of triple Finger of Death
It protects itself with 5 Stoneskins and 7 AIs (plus one Stoneskin in the prebuffs)
It likes to use True Sight/ RRoR, Breach and Remove Magic under regular conditions
It uses Greater Doom ever two hours (blocked if we have Mirror Image up or Resist Magic over 50
It uses Lower Resistance if we have a magic resistance of at least 25
It can use Lower Fire Resistance up to eight times
It can use Magic Damage Spells or Fire spells
Crucially, every one of its abilities makes it use its action, and it considers them in that order. We have a plan - force it to spend its action using Stoneskin or AI, dispel it each time with our 99% dispel chance, and take it out before it does something nasty.
We return to the WK outside area. We prepare ourself with:
Equip Memory of the Apprenti to instacast Remove Magic
Spell Sequencer and Spell Trigger of triple PFMW
Congintency of PFMW on enemy seen
Chain Contingency of triple Remove Magic on hit
Profire
Two Barbarian Essence potions drunk for physical immunity
II and SI:Div
The key to hand this safely is to head to this area that is very hard to take a full screen screenshot of as it is so close to the bottom of the map.
This picture shows what we are trying to achieve - the Demon Prince is body blocking the enemies it, and we can only be attacked by one enemy from behind us. This isn't strictly necessary, but it makes things a bit more forgiving about when PFMW runs out. We can do this consistently if we initally run to the north of the enemies, as the Death Lord is a lot quicker off the bat than the others.
We follow a pattern - on each PFMW, we spend up to two actions casting Remove Magic if the Demon Prince casts Stoneskin or AI. We then save our action for refreshing PFMW as it gets close to running out. We want to keep our II and SI:Div up - We won't immediately get killed if they go down, but it will make things a lot harder for us.
A bonus that can make our maths tricky is Judgement Day. It has a 5% chance to cast PFMW on hit, which means that if we hit every attack, we will be casting PFMW every 2.5 rounds. In practice, these enemies have good AC, so we will not get infinite PFMW, but it is a nice bonus when it happens. We also have to watch out for Wish - when it randomly gets cast, we will lose our attacking order and will have to re-issue it.
We may get a bit of fire damage coming in from the Death Lord - we will want to keep potions of healing and oils of resurgence in reserve for this.
Whe the Demon Prince goes down, we get almost 200k XP and no loot (we get to keep the JD sword, that's loot enough). Our II and SI:Div will be almost running out, however, and we will retreat to rest and rebuff.
Since IA enemies prefer a non-PFMW target over a PFMW target, we can summon a minion away from us to create enough of an opening for us to reach the edge of the map or the WK entrances.
All the XP from this fight is enough for us to hit F/M/T level 40/39/41. There are no more Thief levels left, and we spent our last skill points on rounding out our skills - every skill around 130, except for Pickpocket, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows, which are 100 points higher to allow for the penalties the game can impose on these checks (if we could perform them, our thieving button has been permanently disabled).
We have finished JD, one of the toughest fights in the game. This one is tricky, and very mentally taxing. We could probably consider it an optional fight - in previous versions of IA it could be only forged by Cromwell, but in 6.5 it can also be forged by Cespenar. Therefore, it is possible to forge it just before some big TOB fights like the EDE and just finish the game before the JD sword times out.
We cannot upgrade our equipment any further, and the remaining level ups we will get will only offer us a few extra hitpoints. At this point in the game we are just being completionist.
Next up is the Orc Horde. We have to survive sixty rounds before the helmite spirit appears and the orcs stop spawning. Any time there are less than 10 orcs in the room, another one spawns:
50% regular Orc who attacks in Melee
40% Orc Archer who attacks with +3 bows and arrows
30% Orc Mage, level 13/15 Fighter/Mages who can be a bit annoying but no major threat
You may notice that this adds up to 120%. That is how the script is coded behind the scenes - there are 12 options which are listed as 10% chance. I don't know if this gets normalized, or if the last two options are ignored.
In theroy we could maximize XP by killing as many as possible, but we don't care. Instead, we just take out the mages (any any more that spawn as those go down), and spend the next sixty rounds (six minutes) waiting out the timer under Hardiness-induced physical immunity.
Reward for this includes a Barbarian Essence potion.
It's time to open the final seals. We start with the northwest lock. Out only prebuff is Hardiness, as the Hive Mother will use Anti-Magic ray if it sees us under any other buffs. We will also want to equip Mage Damage resistance equipment.
The only danger is that the Judgement Day sword may proc buffs that draw out the Anti-Magic ray, which will dispel our Hardiness, so we want to keep our action free to refresh it until the Hive Mother is dead. Once it is dead, we can take them out, prioritizing the Cleric first, then the Archer, then the Fighters, and Nalmissra last. If we did get hit with Anti-Magic ray we will have spell failure that we will have to wait for it to wear off before we can dispel Nalmissra.
Notable loot is Ixil's Nail, Gauntlets of Extraordinary Specialization, Taralash and a Scroll of Wish.
The southernmost lock is Guarded by Azamantes (33/28 Fighter/Mage) and some flaming skulls. We prebuff with ProFire, II and SI:Div, then keep ourselves protected from Azamantes with PFMW while we RRoR and Remove Magic before taking Azamantes out like any other grave lich. Alacrity makes this easy.
Notable loot includes the Serpent Shaft and Erinne Sling.
The final guardians are a group of Rilmani. They cannot do anything if we protect ourself with Hardiness.
Loot from this includes the Club of Detonation. We unlock the final seal, but do not go through - I rather suspect that Demogorgon may be beyond us.
This is enough for us to level up to Fighter 41. We are not level 41/39/41.
Part 144: Chaos:
Chaos is normally a gimmick fight - it has colossal damage resistance, except against lighning damage, and it is immune to the arcane spells Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. It is intended that we beat it by using Druids or other divine casters to cast Call Lightning, and we cannot beat it that way.
There are two nasty problems. The first is that it can inflict saveless creeping doom, which means that we cannot cast spells during the fight and will take a lot of damage that we will need full physical immunity to negate. The second is that whenever we hit it, it will dispel our combat protections and deal us magical damage.
We equip our magic damage negation gear and drink one of our 17 Barbarian Essence potions, and pon on Jan's armour to get undispellably physical and magical damage immunity.
There is very little to say about this fight. We use Critical Strike every round, as Chaos is weak to it. We will need a lot of Critical Strikes as Chaos is weak to them. The fight takes a long time, as Chaos has a lot of HP, very high resistances, and decent regeneration.
We will probably want to use Giant Strength as well, as it is undispellable and with our Magic Damage gear up our static strength is 22. The on-hit effect of JD does nothing for us, whereas the on-hit effect of the FoDaW gives us a nice bit of DPS increase, so we will want to main hand the FoDaW.
The fight finishes, and we have effectively traded one Barbarian Essence for some XP, the Golden Lion Figurine, and the Essence of Chaos (crafting ingredient). In absolute terms it's a bad trade, but we are just finishing of all the SOA encounters.
This is where we will end SOA, it looks like. There is only one encounter left in SOA, and it is Twisted Rune. I've done some probing, and I'm afraid I don't think it is reliably possible as a soloer:
Of the five enemies we face in the Twisted Rune, the two that are most problematic are Vaxall and Layene.
Vaxall is a beholder. It has access to Anti-Magic Ray, which it will use if we every have magical defences up. It dispels us and gives us miscast magic with no way to prevent, other than never having magical defences, relying on undispellablse and equipment instead. Vaxall also has access to Soften Target, an ability which gives us -25 to all damage type resistances (both physical and nonphysical) Vaxall has 240 HP, and can only be hurt by physical damage (through a 90% resistance). He also can use Wondrous Strike, which does 1d6 damage of each type, which needs us to spend quite a few of our actions using potions to heal up.
Layene cannot be killed until she uses her Wish, which will always hit double length time stop and improved alacrity. Under this, she will unload her spellbook on us. With my best attempts I can survive this most of the time, but we will be left firmly in PW:Kill range, which she will use on us. If we ever use II, Layene will start summoning Twisted Golems, and if we ever move out of Layene's field of vision (which is really easy to do unintentionally), she starts summoning Greater Twisted Golems. These golems we could take out if we could use magical defenses, but we cannot.
The best I can do is to whittle down the enemies to just Layene and Vaxall, survive most of Layene's wish attacks, and die the round after the wish.
I have found a bit of a bug - it appears that when Fighter level 40 or 41 is obtained, we lose the extra attacks from fighter levels as well as losing the extra attacks from proficiencies. This means that the last few parts have been done with 6 APR instead of 10. This has been a massive difference, and fixing this will almost double the damage output that we have been working with for the last couple parts.
I'm not sure why this has happened, so I have used EEKeeper to up our base APR to 3. This workaround would only be questionable if we were to use a weapon other than one we have five proficiency pips in, but I doubt that will happen.
Part 145: Twisted Rune:
We've cleared every encounter in SOA except for three. One of them is Demogorgon, who probably isn't possible. Another is the Tree of Life, which will commit us to going into TOB. The third is Twisted Rune, which we will take on now.
We prepare our spells. The spell trigger is there to counter Layene's Wish.
Our prebuffs are just Foreknowledge and Giant Strength. We wear the MotA and drink two Barbarian Essences for physical immunity, as well as wearing our magic damage immunity gear. There is a small gap between when Shangalar appears and when his dialogue starts that we can start to cast Alacrity.
We equip the circlet for a total of -5 to casting times, and tell the summons to attack Shyressa while we start to cast:
Lower Magic Resistance on Revanek * 2
Remove Magic on Revanek (when potion is drunk)
Remove Magic on Vaxall (when defences fire)
Breach on Shyressa (when Hardiness fires)
Magic Missile on Revanek * 11
Acid Arrow on Revanek * 12
Minor Sequencer on Revanek
RRoR on Shangalar * 2
Remove Magic on Shangalar
Remove Magic on Vaxall (if defences refreshed)
Critical Strike
After doing all this, we equip the Ioun stone back and take out Shangalar in less than a round under Critical Strikes.
In less than a round, we will have taken out two of the Twisted Rune members and negated the defenses of two of the others. We will probably have taken a Soften from Vaxall and a bit of melee damage from Shangalar, but not too much. We fire another Remove Magic at Vaxall to keep the defenses low and join the minions in taking out Shyressa. We want to make sure our route around the room keeps us in view of Layene. We will also probably need to send another Breach at Shyessa.
With Shyressa down, we circle round the table and start to attack Vaxall. After the intial buffs, Vaxall has one Stoneskin and one AI, which we should have dispelled under the Alacrity. Our primary goal is to keep our health high and keep our action open to respond to Layene's Wish. We keep our action open until we see Layene cast a non-wish spell, then we drink a potion to heal. We can also swap Judgment day to the main hand as it has a chance to restore health. The danger is that JD will trigger a spell defence that makes Vaxall use Anti Magic Ray, but that is nto the end of the world right now as we will not be casting spells for a short bit, and miscast magic does not affect spell triggers. We can also swap into the Cloak of Arcane Immortality for additional HP and regeneration, but we will want to be careful to put the magic damage resistance cloak back on when Vaxall is getting close to 50% HP to play around the Chain Contingency.
Layene fires her wish when we are taking down Vaxall. The wish heals all Twisted Rune members, and under the it she casts these spells multiple times:
Magic Missile
Flame Arrow
Acid Arrow
Chain Lightning
Finger of Death
ADHW
Energy Blades (and attacks with the blades)
The good news is that Vaxall's soften ticks down during the Time Stop, so as long we we have the Ioun Stone equipped we have our physical immunity and magic damage immunity up. Because we have kept our action free, we can fire the spell trigger. The GOI protects us from the arrow spells and magic missile. The PFMW protects us from ADHW and Finger of Death. The ProElectricity protects us from the Chain Lightnings.
These protections will cause Vaxall to want to Anti-Magic Ray us, but he will not fire it until we have already negated the wish spells.
With the wish out of the way, Layene is very unthreatening for the rest of the fight. We make sure to keep our health up with potions and hack Vaxall down with Critical Strikes if we have an opening. He will probably use Anti-Magic Ray on us, but that is not a concern at this point in the fight.
Once it is down we will want to wait out the miscast effect, which lasts five rounds.
After the Wish, Layene can cast five breaches (even if we have nothing worth breaching), each of which comes with a Twisted Golem. The Twisted Golem is 90% resistant to Slashing and Piercing damage, and on hit it dispels Specific, Illusionary and Combination protections. It is easily tanked with our physical immunity.
There is a nice upside - after the wish has fired, we no longer have to worry about moving out of Layene's field of vision.
When the miscast magic wears off, we cast Alacrity, a couple RRoRs, then we dispel Layene and go in for the kill. In theory we could maximize XP and draw out all the Twisted Golems, but we don't really care at this point.
Loot from this fight features:
Blue Dragon Plate
Gloves of Missile Snaring
Staff of the Magi
Scroll of Memory Boosting
Scroll of Permanency
Manual of Elaboration
We reach Mage 40 and get a minor upgrade to our boots. The +3 dexterity won't have any real benefit, but I like to have it anyway.
Part 146: SOA Finale:
Let's finally have our showdown with Irenicus. We've given him months of in-game time to absorb the Tree of Life, let's see how much progress he's made.
Our last level up has also given us a nice and neat 300 HP with all our equipment.
The parasite guardians are unimproved, and we take them down without ceremony.
When the third goes down, we are teleported to fight Irenicus. This version of Irenicus (SUJON) is a 30th level mage who protects himself with SI:Ab.
Irenicus summons four Hardwood Golems that must be killed before he can. The golems are weakest to crushing damage, so we mainhand the FoDaW and offhand Phosphorus. The safe strategy is to run to the left edge of the map. Jon's slower moving speed means that we can set up AI and II:SI:Div before he can start breaching us. Again to be safe, we attack for seven half-rounds and kite for the eigth, using AI instead of PFMW.
Irenicus's defensive buffs only fire when the Golems go down. We can use a fairly standard combination of Alacrity, RRoR and Remove Magic.
We need to watch out for his triple ADHW CC, but he goes down quickly to Critical Strikes. Make sure to use quick loot to grab Irenicus's scrolls before being dragged to hell.
This is hell, and we have five trials to face. I will take them in anticlockwise order, starting from the top left, choosing the good option each time.
Beating Sarevok the nice way earns us +1 Wisdom and Charisma.
Not being tempted by a weapon that is far worse than the ones we already have earns us a bonus of 2 to all our Saving Throws.
This one is awkward. Doing the evil path sets our alignment to Evil, which will probably mess with content later on. Doing the good path will cost us two maximum hitpoints and a point of dexterity (plus some XP that we don't really care about). The evil tear reward is 2 AC which we don't care about, the good reward is 10 magic resistance, which is very nice.
In previous versions of the game it was possible to use Spell Immunity to negate the downsides, or to use polymorph effects into a larger creature to clip through the door. Unfortunately we cannot do that, and so we have to do it the hard way. 1 DEX and 2 HP for 10 MR is a good deal any day, but it's not as sweet as we could otherwise make it.
We turn down the cloak in the test of fear. Right now our static save vs spell is -14, we have very little to fear. We become immune to +1 weapons or less.
Finally, we choose to be nice to the dragon for 20 Fire, Cold and Electrical Resistance.
We summon our minions and set up a CC of II, PFMW and ProFire on ourself on enemy seen. Let's do the final battle.
Slayer Irenicus (HELLJON who turns into HELLSLAY) is a level 36/30 Fighter/Mage. He has 75% physical immunity and protects himself with SI:Ab and Spell Turning. He also has a CC of triple ADHW to watch out for.
He has four minions - a Death Lord, a Noble Marilith, a Balor and an Elemental Golem. Fortunately, none of them need to be dead to take him out. Our CC fires at the start of the combat, so we fire Remove Magic and SI:Div to ensure we are fully protected. We will want to have circlet equipped and have prebuffed with Foreknowledge to ensure the insta-cast of SI:Div. If we do not, then it is safer to wait for the initial prebuffs of the enemies to fire (including TS from the Death Lord) before using II and SI:Div.
We will need to take out each minion before taking out Slayer Jon.
The second action is to cast Alacrity. Under alacrity we can:
RRoR Slayer Jon Twice
RRoR the Death Lord if necessary
Remove Magic once or twice
Lower Resistance the Death Lord two or three times
Unload Macic Missiles and Acid Arrows at the Death Lord until it dies
Activate offensive HLAs and take out the Noble Marilith and Balor, using Remove Magic as necessary
Slay Irenicus likes to jump around the map a lot, which is convenient for us as it means that we do not have to worry about him casting an annoying spell at an awkward time.
The Death Lord is the target with highest ratio of threat to squishiness, followed by the Balor. THe Noble Marilith and Abyssal Escorts are next, as they can launch a Breach at an awkward time if we let our illusions drop, and they have strong arcane protections. The Elemental Golem is the least threatening of the minions, as there is nothing that any of the golems can do to us if we choose to hide behind a Hardiness.
When the Alacrity Fades we will have to be careful about a golem hit dispelling our illusions. We will likely find ourselves prioritizing the Elemental Golem and minor golems just after the Noble Marilith and just before the Abyssal Escorts.
When it's just us and Slayer Irenicus left, it's a matter of countering his Stoneskins and PFMWs with our Breaches and Remove Magics. There's little he can do to harm us (other than his ADHW Chain Contingency), so we can relax a bit on our own defences.
Also, be sure to pick up the loot from the minions via the quick loot menu.
He has five PFMW and 4 stoneskins, not counting his initial buffs. Once the are all down, he is weak to Critical Strike.
It can take a while for Irenicus's death cutscene to fire - his HP needs to be on exactly 1 when his checks, and his rapid regeneration means that it the script checking may happen to miss it a lot.
When Irenicus goes down, Ellesime congratulates us and we are officialyl done with SOA.
We are in TOB now, and we are heading into uncharted territory for me - my previous IA playthroughts have gotten to late SOA, but have never done TOB.
The next few parts are going to be extremely linear. The fights that I anticipate will be problematic are:
Oasis fight (I have heard other players mention it as a very difficult fight)
Abazigal's Lair (Dragons tend to have Lower Fire Resistance or whatever the appropriate element for the dragon type is)
EDE (It's the new final boss of the game, from what I have heard it doesn't have a high peak of difficulty so much as it is an extremely long fight that can be mentally taxing)
We rest up, talk to the Spirit Heads, and are told that someone nasty is coming. We prebuff with II and SI:Div.
Our enemies appear. We have to deal with:
Illasera, a level 26/27 Fighter/Thief
ZILFGT01, a level 23 Fighter
ZILFFGT02, a level 20/22 Fighter/Druid
ZILMAG01, a level 25 Mage
ZILARC01, a level 21/24 Fighter/Thief
We also get up to nine Skeleton Grandlords that appear in nine second intervals b the area script.
Our first action is to cast PFMW, and our second is to cast Alacrity. Under Alacrity, we RRoR the mage twice, dispel everyone, and use our instacast damaging spells to take out the Druid. Each of them needs two Lower Resistances before we start launching the spells.
With the casters down, the fight is trivial - we can sit on our hardiness immunity, and take no physical damage from the enemies. Illasera has defensive scrolls, but nothing offsensive. She has stoneskins and AI scrolls, and her initial protections cannot be remvoed by Breach and Remove Magic (though refreshes can), so actually taking her out may be a long process, but not a dangerous one.
Unique loot from this fight:
Sylvan Chain
Blood of a Greater Bhaalspawn
Boots of Speed
With the battle over, we are teleported to the Pocket Plane and greeted by the Solar. We revive Sarevok and choose not to have him join the party.
The first Pocket Plane challenge is similarly trivial with us under Hardiness-induced physical immunity.
Part 148: Saradush:
We leave the Pocket Plane and make our way to Saradush. The initial fight when we land is unimproved.
We agree to confront Gromnir.
We confront the soldiers who are harassing the elves, then talk to the priestess in the temple to arrange for refuge for them. We also get the key to the prison from her.
Lazarus wants hsi spellbook. We talk to Squip, then have a bit of back and forth between Lazarus and Hectan until we have access to Lazarus's shop.
The only unique item he sells is the Golden Ioun Stone.
We run into Viekag again. Casting Spook on him gives a bit of XP and teleports him away, hopefully to safety.
We head to the Militia Headquarters and watch a trial going on.
The captain tells us to talk to Mateo. Mateo tells us to talk to the countess. The countess tells us to talk to Kiser. Kiser tells us to confront Errard. Errard sends us back to Kiser. Kiser and his goons are unimproved.
Notable loot includes the Starfall Ore and the Shakti Figurine.
We head into the prison. There are a few minor vampirse, but they are barely a speedbump. We make sure we have Elven Holy Water (purchaseable from the temple) to finish the spirit's mini quest and get the Bronze Ioun Stone.
Further in, behind a door that needs Knock, we meet Phlydian. She has a name, and summons a large number of other vampires, but has no way to hurt us or to resist being hacked apart.
We storm the castle, facing enemies who can do nothing to us. In theory they drop a huge amount of sellables, but we are beyond the pont where we care about gold. We do find Fflar's scabbard.
Once again, we storm the main castle level. The mages here are like all the other ones in Saradush, and are blown apart by a single remove magic.
Gromir has some crazy theories about Melissan that are definitely crackpot and false. Our prebuffs before heading up the stairs are II, SI:Div and PFMW (cast just before going up the stairs). We will have to fight:
Gromnir, a level 30 Fighter
Karun the Black, a level 31 Mage
Il-Khan Battle Mage, a level 28 Mage
Eler Had, a level 21/24 Fighter/Thief
Il-Khan's Ancestor, a level 30 Fighter
Karun can be dealt with by a single Remove Magic. The Ancestor we have to be a bit careful about, as it dispels illusions on hit. The Ancestor has 90% physical damage resistance and Gromnir has 55 (95 with Hardiness, which he has three of). The other foes don't matter.
Our first action is to cast Alacrity. The PFMW we cast before going up the stairs should still be active, which will protect us from weapons. Under the alacrity we:
Refresh PFMW
RRoR the Battle Mage a couple times
Remove Battle Mage
LMR the Battle Mage twice
If the dispel has not hit, wait a couple ticks so it does hit while moving towards Karun
Blast away the Battle Mage with Acid Arrows (Karun is immune to non-physical damage, and 75% resistant to physical damage)
Activate HLA
Take out the Il-Khan Ancestor
Karun's prebuffs include Alacrity which means he can output a large number of spells but cannot hurt us with any of them. Karun is also immune to Remove Magic, which means we have no way of getting past hsi defences. He likes to cast ADHW, but we can negate that with gear.
The Il-khan ancestor takes couple PFMWs to take out, but once it is down then we are completely safe from Karun and we can take out the other minor foes. Although we can get physical immunity with Hardiness, that won'y be enough for this fight - Gromnir does large amounts of Cold Damage and can sometimes stun us on hit (I think due to his HLAs).
Even if we the Ancestor does hit us and dispel our illusions, that is not a major problem. WIth the battle mage, the only foe that can get rid of a PFMW is Karun using Breach. Karun only has seven breaches, and after his initial Alacrity (which he refreshes once) he sticks to one spell per round, so we can just refresh PFMW every time he breaches us and he will run out.
When it is just Gromnir and Karun left, we put up a ProCold or ProEnergy and start hitting Karun. If he puts up PFMW or AI, we entertain ourselves by hitting Gromnir instead.
Our SI:Div may run out, which will promp Karun to start casting a Divination spell (TS), but we can just recast SI:Div in response using our faster cast time.
Under Hardiness, Gromnir has 95% physical damage resistance and is immune to Breach. The most effective way of damaging him is to mainhand the FoDaW, as the extra damage ticks work favourable with damage rounding.
Melissan appears when the fight is over, and sets us off on our quest to kill Yaga-Shura.
Notable loot includes:
Grandmaster's Armour
Blod of a Greater Bhaalspawn
Roranach's Horn
Lavender Ioun Stone
Permanency Scroll
The Ice Star morning star
I've decided to stop leading each part with a character record update. My primary motivation was so people who are using this playthrough as a guide can see if they are keeping on track with me for XP, and to know how much XP is available in each part. Since we're at the point where XP doesn't matter anymore, I'll save one picture per part.
Great progress again, a lot of fights you had doubts on you've done.
Some of these are more reload safe then the others. At the end I will give an overview of what I consider reload safe and what I do not. A few of the encountersI was doubting were possible would be posssible in a completionist playthrough but not in a no-reload playthrough (most notable Ancient Dragon and Mithril Golem).
I have prioritized completionism over reload safety so far, because I figure that a no-reloader can easily ignore the content that I consider not reload safe, and the completionist will appreciate the presence of the extra material.
Will we get a break down on IA Demogorgon? Regardless if you do it or not.
I'll probably do a bit of probing just before the EDE, but don't get your hopes up. Solo play forces us into a slower, tankier approach to encounters than party play does, and the "Lower Fire Resistance" (and similar elemental debuffs) are a pretty hard counter to that - our conterplay is either to burst the enemy down (in the case of the Ancient Dragon, which wasn't a very consistent fight) or to try to outlast (in the case of Firkraag, which only works for a specific subset of those fights).
The Demogorgon fight is against half a dozen significant enemies, and at least three of those are very fast and loose with Lower Fire Resistance. For a party where the lowered resistances are spread out and vulnerable targets can be removed from attention that might be possible, but as a solo character that is a very nasty situation to try to get out of. I might do a scenario of "What if we could save against Lower Fire Resistance", which given the saves we are working with is essentailly "What if we didn't worry about Lower Fire Resistance", but it wouldn't be particularly useful for players unless they are willing to do the same changes on their end.
I'll definitely give a breakdown of some sorts, at least to say why it is impossible if nothing else.
I may also give a breakdown of the item upgrades available in the game. There is an unfortunate pattern in IA - major items are only available when they are useless. For example, the Dragon Lord halberd gives immunity to dragon abiliies (in particular red dragon abilities), but we cannot obtain it until we have beaten the most tricky dragon in the game (including every red dragon other than Saladrex). IA item upgrades are a trade off between how difficult are the fights that provide material and how many fights the resulting item will be useful for.
We use the Pocket Plane to head to the North Forest.
The only foes here are non-threatening warriors.
The merchant Karthis is the first merchant in the game who sells generic +3 items. These are a big deal in IA, as many upgraded items require generic +3 weapons, which consume Scrolls of Permanency.
Heading to the Forest of Mire, we run into an apparation of Gorion. The resulting fight is against some mist enemies - previously we would be careful to use AI instead of PFMW here,but since the Helltrials that is not a worry for us.
Heading into the temple, we meet some skeletons that pose no real threat.
Within the temple, we find Nyalee. She sends us to find both hearts.
In the Marching Mountains, we want to watch out for a triple Elemental Golem group. As long we we have enough PFMWs available these are an easy encounter. We also want to use the FoDaW for the bleed triggers (though the concept of a golem bleeding doesn't quite pan out in my head). They are not worth any XP or loot.
In this map we can also find some unusual enemies. These guys are apparently bhaalspawn as well.
The lair is mostly filled with Fire Giants, who are not a major threat, but there are a couple Elite Fire Giants. We fought one of these ages ago i the WK Chromatic Demon level. As long as we have a few PFMWs available, it is not a major threat.
Notable loot from this map includes the Belt of Fire Giant Strength and the Psion's Blade.
In the next level, we run into Berenn. He summons an elemental golem as backup and we need to watch out for his Implosion, which inflicts saveless hold for a round. He drops a Scroll of Permanency and the Balor's Claw.
Berenn and some Elite Fire Giants are the guards for Yaga-Shura's heart.
Imix needs to be killed as well as Berenn for us to be able to leave this map. Imix can use Lower Fire Resistance, so we will take a bit of damage from the undispellable fireshield, but with only 75% physical damage resistance, Imix will die before we do.
Alternatively, Imix can be taken out with damaging spells like Acid Arrow once we have used LMR enough to get over the 100% MR. Imix drops the Amulet of the Master Harper and the Ravager.
Nearby chests give us a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, a Scroll of Memory Boosting, a Bag of Plenty and Nyalee's Heart.
Returning to the Forest of Mir, we have to fight a horde of skeletons. We have twenty waves to fight that get summoned at three round intervals. The first nineteen waves are Skeleton Lords, and the last is four Skeleton Grandlords. We can do nothing to us while we are under Hardiness, however. There is no XP or Items from the skeleton horde, but there is a bit of a reward for beating the whole thing - some XP, four potions of Barbarian Essence and four potions of Magic Shielding.
Nyalee is a level 28 Druid. Every three rounds she summons a Whisper Spider, a Killer Spider and a Spirit Spider, as well as some minor initial summons.
Fortunately, we can just dispel her and kill her as she only has 60% physical resistance, and under Hardiness the enemies do nothing to us. She drops the Druid's Ring and the Cleric's Staff.
Part 150: Yaga-Shura:
We head to the siege camp and start to take out Yaga-Shura's men. Some of the army will start spawning when we cross the bridge but before we see Yaga-Shura, I like to take the time to clear them out. There are 35 total that can spawn, controlled by MAXSPAWN in AR5203
We make sure we have set up PFMW, II, SI:Div with out action free before we first hurt Yaga-Shura. We also equip the Ring of Fire Resistance and the Helm of Brilliance for fire damage immunity, and we can optionally drink two of our eighteen Barbarian Essence for physical immunity, but we will want to still have PFMWs up to protect against the unconciousness and knockback that the fire giants inflict.
The scripts indicate that Yaga-Shura should be back in three minutes, but in practice it is much less. In the mean time, we will have to deal with a number of Elite Fire Giants, Elite Bodyguards (lever 31/25 Fighter/Mages), and a a bunch of ignorables. In total there are three Elite Bodyguards and four Elite Fire Giants (though I often find that two of the Elite Fire Giants spawn away from the fight and don't join in).
In theory we can take out Yaga-Shura to stop the reinforcements early, but in practice he is too sturdy for that.
When all three Elite Bodyguards have appeared, we take them out with Alacrity. They each need three RRoRs before being dispelled, but we are not using out 7th level spells for anything else in this fight. Once dispelled, they are very weak to damaging spells.
Yaga-Shura has 340HP, 90% slashing and piercing resistance, and 95% crushing resistance. He uses his only Hardiness at 75% hitpoints and has quite a few healing potions. His attacks has no way of getting damage past our defences immunity, but Yaga-Shura and the Elite Fire Giants all have a 30% chance to knock us unconcious for half a round on hit, so we will want to protect with PFMW.
The Elite Fire Giants have 65% physical immunityand 270HP, and also have a lot of potions. We don't need to take them out before Yaga-Shura, but I like to do it for safety.
The Assassins don't pose much of a threat, but they have Hardinesses that make them annoying to take out. Since they use the Hardinesses as soon as they are on less than 100% hitpoints, I like to tap them a few times over the course of the entire fight to make them use it, then attack them later on when the Hardiness has worn off.
The final showdown with Yaga-Shura is long but not difficult. Although he is more resistant to crushing damage than the others, the best weapon is the FoDaW, as he will have to roll a 9 or better to save vs the bleed, and the rounding works favourably for us.
With Yaga-Shura down, we are brought into the pocket plane to finally meet our mother.
We return to the battlefield and loot the place, retrieving the Runehammer, Shuruppak's Plate, the Shield of the Order, Blood of a Greater Bhaalspawn, a Scroll of Permanency, and three Barbarian Essences.
Melissan makes an appearance, tells us about Saradush, and gives us the map marker for Amekthran.
We do the second pocket plane challenge. We fight Othala, Semaj, Angelo and Tamoko in a very easy fight.
Part 151: Oasis and Amkethran
In order to go to Amekthran, we first need to get to the Oasis. This is an area with a pretty big fight. in it. We have to fight:
Jamis Tombelthen
Tethyrian Battlepriests * 2
Tethyrian Battlemages * 2
Tethyrian Captain * 3
Tethyrian Pikeman * 8
Gem Golem * 14
We prepare our spells. We put II and PFMW in a Spell Trigger, and Foreknowledge in a CC on enemy seen. When we arrive we spend our first action using the Spell Trigger and backing it up with SI:Div, we stand next to one of the battlemages, and we spend our second action casting Alacrity.
Under Alacrity, we cast Triple RRoR and a Remove Magic at each of the battlemages. We then LMR the far battlemage three times, wait for the projectiles to hit the far mage (as we are instacasting), and unload our spellbook of damaging spells on the far one, and take out the near one in melee.
With the mages down, there is now no way for the enemies to get around our hardiness-induced phsical immunity. We start the long but safe process of taking out enough Gem Golems to be able to move around a bit, then take out the priests, then take out the rest of the golems. The only way this can go wrong is if we have spent our actions on Critical Strikes when Hardiness runs out and we cannot refresh it or get interrupted when refreshing.
Jamis is an enemy that is not threatening, but is exceptionally hardy. He is immune to Breach, and has six Hardinesses that he wil use at 90% hitpoints. While under Hardiness, he has 95% resistance to slashing, and complete immunity to all other damage types. He also has four potions of healing and heals 3 hitpoints per second (doubled to 6 per second since he is under permanent Improved Haste), which means that we cannot outpace his regeneration while he is under Hardiness. We therefore have to just keep hitting him to wait out all six Hardinesses while not being in any significant danger.
The notable loot is The Answerer and a Scroll of Permanency.
We have finally made it to Amkethran, the final settlement of the game.
We ask Captain Erelon some annoying questions to start a fight that we loot the Darkfire Bow from.
We protect the Priest of Waukeen from a monk and donate some gold to get the Oaken Ring.
There is one quest in Amkethran. Marlowe tells us that he has been hunted by the mage Vongoethe, who has stolen the soul of his daughter Malla.
Vongoethe reveals that he made a deal with Marlowe. The best result is to bring Marlowe along, get the soul stone from the lich, and at the last minute go back on our deal and kill the lich. It's a pretty easy fight for us.
The keen-eyed among you may notice that I have the symbol for a level up that I have not taken yet. This would be bringing us to level 41 Mage. Similarly to how level 41 Fighter removes the APR from proficiencies and fighter levels, hitting mage 41 removes our spellcasting, so I am not going to be hitting that level up button.
We have a choice here - Sendai or Abazigal. We'll start with Sendai.
The fight that in the clearing is with a Hive Mother, but we fought one of those in WK and we know how to beat them.
The first level is easy - the most dangerous enemies are a few mutated spiders.
The drow barracks contains Thelynn'ss, a ghost spider, and a bunch of draw. This fight is easy - the only way they can get round our PFMW or Hardiness is a single mage with limited breaches.
We get the Amulet of Cheetah Speed and a Permanency Scroll.
The North Tunnels are full of slaves. The slaves are unimproved and ignoreable. The slavemaster has 75% physical resistance and summons some slave spirits, but there is no foe on the map that can get past our PFMW or hardinnesses. We can lot a Manual of Elaboration.
The south tunnels contain a very large number of mutated spiders.
Lashar'ra is the boss of this area. She summons Ghost Spiders and uses a few minor defensive spells, but is very fragile and cannot negate our protections. She inflicts a saveless poison of 16 damage per second for 4 seconds, but the Ring of Gaxx gives us immunity. She drops a Permanency scroll.
The next area contains minor spider and drow encounters. These were doable without trouble when we were in the Underdark.
For the Odamaron fight, we protect ourselves with II, SI:Div and PFMW. We have to deal with Skeleton Grandlords and Bone Devils as well as the lich. We get the Eye of Tyr and the Heart of the Damned.
Diaytha challenges us to kill Ogremoch. Ogremoch is an Earth Elemental with five stoneskins and, 95% resistance to Crushing and Piercing, and slashing immunity. Ogremoch removes specific and illusionary protections on hit, so we can just use Hardiness and the FoDaW.
The actual Diaytha fight is very much about the Hive Mother and not the rest of the foes.
Egeissag is alongside my favourite beholder. We agree to single combat and have a straightforward fight of triple RRoR into breach. We get rewarded with the Bowstring of Gond.
The illithid area is unimproved, and the last fight before Sendai herself.
We rest up, prebuff with II and SI:Div, and start the Sendai fight. We will have to face, in order:
SENDAI2, Cleric 20
SENDAI7, Mage 25
SENDAI6, Fighter/Thief 20/20
SENDAI5, Mage 20
SENDAI8, Cleric/Mage 20/1 (this feels like a bug)
SENDAI3, Fighter 20
SENDAI4, Thief 20
Once all of these are dead, we have five foes that appear at once that we have to beat:
SENDAI, a level 39/32/39 FMC
Sendai's Pet, a pather with 95% physical protections that dispels specific protections on hit and can use "Earthshaking Roar" every five rounds that inflicts unsaveable deafness for five rounds
A Ghost Spider
Web Golem * 2 - 95% resistant to slashing damage, immune to all other damage, dispels Specific, Illusionary and Combination protections on hit
Sendai herself has 50% physical resistance. We need to kill all the other enemies before we can take her out. Her weapon inflicts a saveless poison (that we don't care about), and gives us -1 THAC0 and -10 crushing damage resistance for ten rounds.
We go around killing the statues. The second and the fourth are the only ones that can slow us down, as they have arcane protections. Each time we destroy a statue two drow appear, but they are not threatening enough to be worth taking out.
When the last statue is down, the final wave of foes gets summoned.
The most worrying of the foes is Sendai, who can lower our crushing damage resistance. We position ourselves on the stairs of one of the status platforms, so we do not get surrounded and we are only being attacked by one or two enemies at the same time, preferably not Sendai. We can use items, Barbarian Essences and Hardiness to gain immunity to Fire, Magic and Crushing damage, and take out the non-Sendai Enemies. The unnamed drow we will want to keep alive if possible, as they body block the big foes from getting to us.
We main hand the FoDaW for Sendai's pet, and the JD sword for all other foes. This is a very long battle, and over the duration of it we will exhaust all the enemy caster spells (inclduing breaches as the JD sword casts Stoneskin and PFMW). Even if the Barbarian Essences start to run out due to the long fight time, we can swap into Hardinesses without any worries.
Once the golems and the pet are down, we clear out the arena and take on Sendai. She has five Stoneskins (one contingency) and five PFMWs that she protects herself with. Under our own PFMWs, she cannot hurt us. If she does start to hurt us, we can always kite her around the map for ten rounds waiting for the crushing damage debuff to wear off.
Sendai dies and we pick up the Ring of Free Action, Wong Fei's Ioun Stone, an the Studded Leather of Thorns.
The Solar tells us that we will try to stop Aluando's prophecy from coming true.
We fight our slayer reflection in an unimproved fight.
Part 153: Abazigal's Lair:
As we arrive at Abazigal's Lair, we are immediately forced next to Draconis and into a conversation with him.
Draconis is a level 39/31 Fighter/Mage. He is immune to Remove Magic and Dispel Magic, so we need to use Breach to negate his defences. He starts with one PFMW and will refresh it five times, so we just kite him around until we have waited out all six PFMWs.
While kiting, we want to make sure that we have equipped our Magic Damage immunity equipment.
He casts spells in the following order:
Larloch's Interrupter
Remove Magic
Spell trigger of triple LMR
Remove Magic
Spell Sequencer of ignoreable spells
Wish combo of Magic, Acid Fire and Lightning damage
Our counterplay is to put in our own spell triger ProFire, ProAcid and ProElectricity. We fire it after he fires his Spell Sequencer.
When we have waited out all the PFMWs, we set up II, SI:Ab and PFMW then start taking out Draconis.
When Draconis gets to 1HP, he starts a conversation and transforms into Dragon form. Annoyingly, he retails his immunity to Remove Magic.
We will probably want to run to the edge of the map, rest up at Amkethran, and return. He has access to Lower Acid Resistance, which he can use up to nine times. He also has access to Greater Doom (usable every two rounds) and a CC of triple ADHW.
His starting buffs include a stoneskin and he will refresh it three times by itself (controlled by IADRAC13 going up to 3). He also has four PFMWs that he uses when not on full health and out of stoneskins (controlled by IADRAC13 going up to 7) and a spell trigger of Stoneskin and PFMW that he fires as the end.
As part of our Amekthran preparation, we set up a CC of Foreknowledge, PFMW and ProAcid on enemy seen. We also prepare a load of breaches in our 5th level spell slots.
We cast II and SI:Div when we first enter the map, and Alacrity when we see Draconis. With Foreknowledge and all our casting time gear, we can instacast all our important spells. We fire three of four RRoRs to get rid of his spell shields and the like, then breach, activate HLAs and start to go in.
As a dragon, Draconis has permanent Alacrity, which means that he will refresh his Stoneskins and PFMWs as soon as he gets breached. We respond with Breaching as soon as the defenses are set up. In the span of the Alacrity, we will breach him nine times (we will probably want to put another breach in a Spell Trigger), and then we can hack him to bits under Critical Strike without him being able to do anything.
Draconis goes down quickly once he has been fully breached. He may get in a Lower Acid Resistance and a breath in that time, but it is not enough damage to be threatening.
He drops a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, and Tzu-Zan's Bracers.
All the monsters we fight inside are unimproved.
We use the leftmost pool to get the breath potion, then the rightmost pool to get the rope from the monk.
We free some junior adventurers and outsource some adventuring.
Abazigal's lair is a lot shorter then Sendai's Enclave. Let's do the big Abazigal fight.
We can be careful and circle round the map to take out the Frost Salamanders to clear up the arena before Abazigal. To make sure we don't trigger Abazigal we will want to get them just in vision, then wait for them to come to us to kill them.
We summon the team, prebuff with II, ProCold, SI:Div and Foreknowledge, and head in to Abazigal.
Human Abazigal's prebuffs are based around SI:Div. Since he is a level 29/30 Fighter/Mage, we wait for him to use his action, then blow away his defences, and pile on with the minions. In less then a round he will be taken down to his transformation zone, 25% health.
When he transforms, he will throw everyone back, including his own minions. We will run back in and cast Alacrity.
We have Othala hang out just outside the vision of Abazigal, and command the minions to head towards him.
Abazigal has a script that says when he first seens an enemy after transforming into dragon form, he will fire his prebuffs, do a map-wide spell protection removal (which interrupts casting, quite annoyingly), and summon an Ultra Golem and an Ice Golem. Once we see this happens, we get Othala to cast Alacrity while the minions run to the other side of the map to try to draw away the golems.
With Alacrity up, we do a similar process for Abazigal that we did for Draconis - three or four RRoRs (might as well err on the side of caution, we can instacast them), then Breach/Remove Magic (5 PFMW, 4 Stoneskin), then activate HLAs and go in for the kill.
We can also use LMR and Acid Arrow or flame spells to get more instacast damage in, but we want to avoid Flame Arrow as it competes for spell slots with Remove Magic.
Abazigal goes down in two or three rounds of combat. He drops the last Flail Head, the Blue Dragon Scales, a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, a Scroll of Spell Shield and Gram the Sword of Grief. The golems disappear when Abazigal goes down.
We have another meeting with the Solar. Yaga-Shura's spirit tells us that we still need to take out Balthazar.
We have a cameo from Elminster. He points us towards Saemon Havarian.
Returning to the pocket plane, we have a divine encounter with Cyric. The Favoured of Cyric are very easy to take out.
The keen-eyed among you may notice that I have the symbol for a level up that I have not taken yet. This would be bringing us to level 41 Mage. Similarly to how level 41 Fighter removes the APR from proficiencies and fighter levels, hitting mage 41 removes our spellcasting, so I am not going to be hitting that level up button.
What you have here is a poorly implemented experience cap remover. Most class abilities are read from tables which only go up to level 40 by default. If you go off the tables, things break and get read as zeros. Zero base AC, since you're not on THAC0.2da anymore. Zero base saves, since you're not on SAVE*.2da anymore. Zero spell slots, since you're not on MXSPL*.2da anymore.
The only table that goes to "level 41" is the "experience to next level", to provide the illusion that there's still something out there. If you tweak the numbers so you can actually take that level, the illusion breaks.
Bonus attacks from proficiencies and warrior levels are a bit more mysterious, but experimentation (and looking up the code for the cdtweaks cap remover component) tells me that depends on WSPATCK.2da. I added a column to test, and suddenly that worked at level 41.
All of these .2da files are easy to edit; they're in a human-readable plain-text format, so any old text editor can mess with them if they've already been extracted. If they're still biffed up, you need something like NI to open them up and make changes.
Tables that need to be extended if you want to work with characters over level 40:
BACKSTAB.2da, CRIPPSTR.2da, SNEAKATT.2da - backstabs and their sneak attack replacements.
CLAB*.2da - kit abilities. Not essential; if you don't do anything here, it just means you don't get anything new for those levels like more uses of Set Snare.
HP*.2da (* = BARB, DD, MONK, PRS, ROG, WAR, WIZ, CM, CT, FC, FM, FMT, FT, MT) - hit point rolls, flat bonuses, and whether to grant a CON bonus. The multiclass tables are only relevant for that last part, as they defer to the single-class tables for the first two.
LAYHANDS.2da - Lay on Hands, for paladins and monks.
LVLMODWM.2da - random level adjustments for wild mage spells.
MONKFIST.2da - monk unarmed attacks.
MXSPL*.2da (* = BRD, DD, DRU, PAL, PRS, RAN, SHM, SRC, WIZ) - base spell slots.
RAISDEAD.2da - temple Raise Dead prices.
SPL*KN.2da (* = SRC, SHM) - spells known for sorcerers and shamans. Like the CLABs, not extending this just means you don't get anything new.
SAVE*.2da (* = MONK, PRS, ROG, WAR, WIZ) - base saves.
THAC0.2da - base THAC0.
XPBONUS.2da - bonus XP for thieving abilities. Scroll XP is also on this table, but that runs on spell level rather than character level.
XPLEVEL.2da - required XP to reach any given level.
WSPATCK.2da - Apparently, warrior bonus attacks. Not that I understand how this one works, but just copying existing columns is easy.
So, what does being a level 41 fighter and thief do to you? Base THAC0 zero instead of zero - no change. Base saves 0/0/0/0/0 instead of 3/3/4/4/4 - a substantial undeserved bonus. No bonus attacks from warrior levels or specialization - a serious drawback. No backstabs - a drawback, though not one that seems to be relevant to the encounters you're focusing on.
Some parts will automatically change if you load a save after modifying those .2da files. Others are only checked after a level-up. You may have to de-level and re-level to fully correct your character's stats.
The keen-eyed among you may notice that I have the symbol for a level up that I have not taken yet. This would be bringing us to level 41 Mage. Similarly to how level 41 Fighter removes the APR from proficiencies and fighter levels, hitting mage 41 removes our spellcasting, so I am not going to be hitting that level up button.
What you have here is a poorly implemented experience cap remover.
Ah, that's on me. When I was setting up the mods, I had a bit of a conflict with Tweaks Anthology and IA - If I installed IA second then I would not have the XP cap remover, and if I installed Tweaks Anthology second then it would not use the IA level up tables (which are at a slower pace than the base game). I ended up doing IA second and trying to implement the XP cap remover on its own by myself, but as we can see I didn't do it right.
If I wasn't so close to the end of the game I would delevel and relevel, but since it's just one encounter left I'll leave it as it is. I've already tweaked for the APR, and the save bonus doesn't have any overall effect, as we are in the position where we are comfortably making any save we encounter, even with the bonus.
Part 154: Balthazar:
We return to Amkethran. We can fight some minor enemies outside the monastery front gates, but cannot get in.
We run into Saemon in the smuggler's cave. He agrees to smuggle us in.
True to form, Saemon is a betrayer, but this time it's betraying someone else.
We head in and have our showdown with the one other Bhaalspawn left alive.
Balthazar is a 30th level monk with no physical damage resistances, no on-hit effects, and no way to respond to our physical immunity under Hardiness. This is a short and brutal fight. He doesn't even drop any significant loot.
We are drawn into the pocket plane, and the big twist villain is revealed.
We are careful not to take on the Ravager, however, as that will lock us into the Epic Divine Encounter.
Demogorgon Analysis:
Demogorgon has five minions. Let's consider each of them in clockwise order, starting from the top right.
Belcheresk is a level 35 Mage. It can use Greater Doom every two rounds and Lower Fire Resistance every round.
Archpriest Nulonga is a level 36 Sorcerer. It has no on-hit abilities. It has a spell trigger of triple Improved Fireball for a total of 36d6 damage with no save.
Saint Kargoth is a level 32/30 Fighter/Mage. His weapon inflicts an unsaveable cumulative -2 to THAC0. He can use Lower Fire Resistance every round.
Rozvankee is a level 37/31/38 FMT. It disables specific protections and illusionary protections on hit. Every five rounds, he summons three Vargouilles, which deal acid damage and fire acid arrows.
Exarch Kazuul is a level 30 Fighter. His weapon inflicts saveless stun and saveless -10 fire damage resistance. He has an aura that inflicts Greater Malison on the whole party.
Finally, Demogorgon. Demogorgon is a level 40 Tanar'ri. Its weapon inflicts saveless disease. It summons Abyssal Escorts every six rounds. It uses Lower Fire Resistance every round. All the others need to be killed before Demogorgon is killed.
I've tried it a few times, and with no success - we just cannot take out the enemies before our fire resistance gets completely destroyed and we get bombarded with fire spells. Even if we could, Belcheresk using Greater Doom means that we cannot survive a long fight.
Epic Divine Encounter Analysis:
I'm also having a lot of trouble with the EDE. The major problems that we have with the EDE are:
The Rakshasa Prince can dispel our combat protections every second round, like the Mithri Golem but at half the speed
Using the PFMW scroll stock to try to survive is very tricky, as the engine introduces the pre-scroll delay that is really hard to work with
In the mid to late portion of the fight we need to kite the Rakshasa Prince. The other Rakshasa are not a major offensive threat, but they are really good at getting in the way and body blocking, making the fight inconsistent
The Rakshasa Prince's sword undermines our physical immunity and makes tanking extremely difficult
The Rakshasa Prince has four AIs that he fires at 75%, 75%, 50% and 25% health, which means that we need to effectively beat him five times, so any bursty methods will not work.
I've done some analysis, trying to figure out a way to beat the EDE. In a bit of a surprise, I think I have found a way, and as a bit of a surprise it involves beating Saladrex.
Saladrex is a red dragon, which is already not an easy target, but he has a particularly annoying gimmick - three seconds after we enter his arena, we are hit with Dead Magic, and are unable to cast any spells.
The most notable part of his defences are that he has six stoneskins and four PFMW. Unlike other dragons, he has offensive uses for his contingency (triple ADHW) and spell trigger (Lower Resistance).
While under Dead Magic, our arcane spell fail, but we can still use innate abilities. We set up our prepared spells and make sure to rest three times afterwards so twenty four in-game hours have passed. The minor sequencer is there so we can trigger the contingency when we want.
We prebuff before heading into Saladrex's arena with Giant Strength, ProFire, II, SI:Div, Foreknowledge and Alacrity. We also equip the Amulet of Cheetah Speed. We make sure that Foreknowledge is cast as close to the area change as possible.
When we see Saladrex, we swap our amulet back. Dead magic will have probably hit at this point, but if not we can try to fire our memorized Remove Magics in a short area around him, preferably at a range of distances so they will splash onto him over a range of times.
His prebuffs include one Stoneskin, so we will need to dispel him five times. This is why we waited - Chain Contingency is not cast like other spells, so we can activate it under Dead Magic to get more Remove Magics out. After each dispel he will refresh both Stoneskin and PFMW in quick succession, so we should be able to get rid of one of each with each dispel.
He is quite squishy, especially when compared with the other dragons we have fought. Loot from him includes:
The Dragon Blade
Red Dragon Scales
Permanency Scroll
Staff of the Ram
Robe of Fire Resistance
Part 156: Epic Divine Encounter
Between us and the victory screen, there are two vanilla encounters - the Ravager and Mellisan. However, IA has added a third encounter between them - the Rakshasa Prince.
On paper his stats don't look too difficult, however let's consider his script:
At the start of the battle, summon two Ultra Golems and a Supreme Golem
When out of AIs, on less than 10% health, and the two Ultra Golems and the Supreme Golem are dead, give up and end the battle
Use four AIs at 75%, 75%, 50% and 25% health
Summon two Noble Rakshasa five rounds into the battle
When the three big golems are dead, summon another three Noble Rakshasa in rounds of 1 at eighteen minute gaps
Use Universal Purge Magic, at an interval that ranges from twelve rounds to fourteen rounds (this interrupt's the players action, which is a bit annoying)
Use Remove Magic every six rounds
Use Greater Malison once, reset by Remove Magic
Use Slow once, reset by Remove Magic
If a party member is seen that has over 75% fire resistance and is not wielding the Dragon Lord Halberd, use Lower Fire Resistance (limited to once per four rounds)
If an enemy is seen that has less then 90% fire resistance, use Dragon's Breath (limited to once per four rounds)
If an enemy is seen that has less than 90% magic damage resistance and less than 50% magic ressitance and is not wielding Poseidon's Wrath, use ADHW (limited to once per three rounds)
If an enemy is seen that is under PFMW and is within a range of 5, use "Your pathetic magic will not stop me!" and dispel that enemy's combat protections (limited to once per two rounds)
The really dangerous part about him is his weapon. It does:
Regenerate 5 HP/Second (which is effectively 10 HP/second with innate IHaste)
When hit, use "Field of Repulse" which does a large chunk of magic damage and wing buffets unless we save vs spells at -4
On hit, remove Spell, Specific, Combat and Illusionary protections
On hit, lower all saves by 1 for 6 rounds
On hit, lower all physical damage resistances by 5 for 6 rounds
On hit, lower Fire and Magic damage resistances by 25 for 6 rounds
On hit, penalize AC by 1 for 6 rounds
On hit, slow for 5 rounds unless we save vs wands at -6
The Supreme Golem is like an Elemental Golem turned up to 11. It has slow (for IA) regeneration, and when we hit it it hits back with "Elemental Backlash" that does a bti of Acid, Cold, Fire and Electricity damage. When it hits us, it htis us with those same four damage types as well as lowering our resistance against those four damage types by 10 for ten rounds. Ultra Golems we have seen before.
The Supreme Golem summons up to nine Elemental Golems, while the Ultra Golems each summon up to six Amber Golems. However, the golem summoning comes with an important condition that we have not worked with much before - they need a PC to be visible before any summoning can be done. They also have another notable aspect - unlike other golems of their kind, these do not use Purge Magic (presumeably the Universal Purge Magic of the Rakshasa Prince is considered enough for this fight).
This gives us the following ways of having our elemental damage reduced:
Being hit by the Rakshasa Prince (avoidable by kiting or body blocking)
Being hit by the Supreme Golem (avoidable by kiting or body blocking)
Rakshasa Prince using Lower Fire Resistance (avoidable by keeping Dragon Lord equipped)
Being hit by an Ultra Golem (avoidable by kiting or body blocking)
Being hit by an Amber Golem (avoidable by kiting or body blocking)
Backlash from hitting an Amber Golem (avoidable by stopping them from spawning in the first place)
Let's break down each of the items that we have equipped and why:
Robe of Elemental Resistace: Permanent 75% resistant to Fire, Cold and Electricity
Paws of the Furious Cat: +1 APR
Helm of the Rock: 25% Fire, Cold, Acid and Electricity damage resistance
Lord of the Underworld: 30% Magic Damage Resistance
Dragon Lord: Prevents Lower Fire Resistance
Improved Ring of Gaxx: Best generic ring, provides regeneration
Ring of Protection + 2: The best ring that can be worn with the Ring of Gaxx
Cloak of Magic Shielding: 50% Magic Damage Resistance
Improved Boots of the Ranger Lord: Improved Haste
Best of Inertial Barrier: 25% Magic Damage Resistance
This means that when we have drunk five Barbarian Essence potions, we will be immune to all forms of damage except for the bits of Acid Damage from the Supreme Golems's elemental backlash. We can use ProAcid or ProEnergy to protect from that as well. We could also wear the Memory of the Apprenti and only engage the Supreme Golem with ProEnergy up.
I have had to do a retcon with proficiency points - I have removed 3 points from each of Long Swords and Short Swords, and instead put five in Halberds and one in Two-Handed weapons. This will not have significantly affected our previous battles, as Flails and Morning Stars have been our primary weapon type for pretty much the entire game.
We load up our fourth level spell slots with Wizard Eye, our fifth level spell slots with ProAcid, our sixth level spell slots with Giant Strength, our eigth level spell slots with ProEnergy and our ninth level spell slots with Alacrity.
We take out the Ravager. It is unimproved, but I believe it holds the record for the most HP of a single enemy, at 534. Beating the Ravager also locks us out of leaving the pocket plane until after the EDE.
We summon the minions and leave them in the bottom right corner of the map under the watchful gaze of a Wizard Eye. We prebuff Othala with ProAcid and Giant Strength.
As we approach the exit, we are greeted by a familiar face - Pasha Mahmoud. He got a warning from a divine creature that we were in grave danger, and that we were going to face an immensely powerful enemy in our pocket plane. He tells us that the our enemy will summon three powerful allies that must be killed before the enemy can be defeated.
Shortly afterwards, the aforementioned enemy appears - the Rakshasa Prince. He is a deity of old mythos and is worried that one of use or Melissan will become a new god. He is keen to stop this, and so has decided to kill us first, then Melissan.
The Rakshasa Prince summons his minions - an Ultra Golem in the top left, an Ultar Golem in the bottom right, and the Supreme Golem in the bottom left. We want to draw the Rakshasa Prince (and preferably the Supreme Golem) away from the others.
Lord Wetlander also makes an appearance. He offers his help in the form of four Swanmay Elders for each of the big golems.
Pasha will engage the Ultra Golem in the top left corner. By himself, he can approximately take out an Ultra Golem, but the Swanmay Elders make it pretty sure. Similarly, our minions plus four swanmay elders can take out the Ultra Golem in the bottom right. Since neither of them will ever see Othala, we do not have to worry about Amber Golems. The Supreme Golem unfortunately tends to be too sticky for that.
The Rakshasa Prince doesn't summon the Noble Rakshasas until a while into the battle, so we can easily kite him around this thing in the middle of the map.
After our minions have taken down the first Ultra Golem, we use the Wizard Eye to guide them over to help Pasha. Taking out the Supreme Golem will end up being too much for our supporters to do, however.
When the Noble Rakshasas do spawn (and summon the Horrid Rakshasas with them), we want to position ourself so only Noble and Horrid Rakshasa can hit us. Once we have done this, we are locked in for a very long, slow, but safe fight.
The trick we use here is one that has been in the back pocket since the very first part, but an opportunity has not come up yet. In Baldur's Gate, every weapon has a range, not just ranged weapons. Every single-handed melee weapon has a range of 1, whereas two-handed melee weapons have a range of 2. Pretty much every creature weapon is considered behind the scenes to be single-handed. This means that we can set ourselves in a position where the Rakshasa Prince cannot reach us (due to the minor Rakshasa in the way), but we can reach him. If there are so many minor Rakshasa the he is still beyond our reach, we can start to pick off the second row so he can take their place.
We have to be careful here - it is a small gap to be working with, and if he hits us then we're in a bad way - every nearby Rakshasa will immediately start to cast ADHW on us, and this will probably need a reload.
When the Supreme Golem arrives, taking it out will be our first priority. Our ProAcid/ProElements will likely be dispelled whenever we cast it, so we can instead just drink a potion - we have 8 APR, the backlash does 4-8 damage to us, and our potions heal 40 damage. We can use some Critical Strikes, but I like to save them for the prince.
Our Giant Strength may run out, in which case we will want to refresh it. We will also get the occassional Dragon's Breach proc, which soften up the Elemental Golems a bit and will eventually take them out.
Taking out the Supreme Golem is an extremely long and grindy fight. To err on the side of caution, I like to drink another five Barbarian Essence potions when it gets to Near Death, just in case our earlier potions run out (it's not as if we need to use them for anything else after this fight).
Once the Supreme Golem is down, we repeat the process for the Rakshasa Prince. We don't need to worry about the Elemental Backlash, which is nice. The Prince has extremely good AC, so we will likely want to save our Critical Strikes for this fight, and make sure we are under Giant Strength. We can combine GWW and CS using Alacrity for a drop more DPS. The Prince does not take the double damage from CS, but it is nice to guarantee the hit.
Unfortunately, this is as close as we can get to beating the game. It's painful to come so far and be unable to do it, but the math just doesn't pan out.
We get eight attacks per round with the Halberd. Under Giant Strength we deal 24-33 damage per hit. Factoring the Rakshasa Prince's damage resistances into play, and considering how the rounding works, we therefore deal 7.5 damage per hit. If we land every hit on the Rakshasa Prince (for instance, if we are using Critical Strike), we deal on average 60 damage every round.
The Rakshasa Prince heals for 60 hitpoints every round.
We cannot use any other weapons that might have a higher damage output. We have no way of increasing our damage output with this weapon. If we ever stop using Critical Strike, we need a 12 to hit, bringing our damage output to 27 per round, less than half of what he heals for. We cannot start swapping between the Dragon Lord Halberd and other weapons with higher damage output as being hit by Lower Fire Resistance even once will set our SCRIPTINGSTATE12 to 1, which will lower all our elemental damage resistances to below 100 and make us vulnerable to the Field of Repulse (plus a million ADHWs from the other Rakshasa), and our highest damage output weapon (the FoDaW, which the Rakshasa Prince needs to roll a 6 to avoid the bleeding) does an expected 9.5 damage per hit with 1 better THAC0.
I'll be typing up a big retrospective over the next few days. If there are any questions you have, any choices/game aspects you'd like me to explain, or anything that you would like me to talk about in the retrospective, let me know.
1) I don't understand for which people this mod is aimed. Who is the target of this mod ?
2) Why would I play Improved Anvil over the "vanilla" game with SCS, if I wanted a harder experience ?
3) Am I wrong, or the mod assumes you to play with Nearinfinity open? I don't get how you are supposed to get informations about what you are gonna face if you don't.
4) Are you planning to play the older versions of Improved Anvil?
5) Does Demogorgon drop any loot?
Beside this, these are the impressions I got from the mod:
- There are too many encounters that consists of Golems. Golems, Golems and more Golems.
- It seems like the mod author has felt like he should actually remove exploits (e.g the Nalia fortress) rather than having the player enjoy the game. This has a very limting effect on the choices the player has to do even when playing the stronghold sections.
- The fact that it seems like the author never intended for the mod to be played Solo makes me hesitant to play it - like if the player has to play in the way the author intended rather than the one that is supposed to be most fun (for the player)
- There doesn't seem to be any roleplay options that I would personally like given that there are many new encounters added. An example? No way to ask EdE for a temporary alliance against Amelyssan.. If you think about it, there is no reason he would enter your pocket plane uninvited, given that the Pocket plane is your dominion and you could probably crush him with your thoughts if you wanted.
Thanks for your playthrough. I look forward to reading your thoughts.
1. So is it actually impossible for a solo to complete Improved Anvil?
2. Would even a secondary party member have helped in any way now that you have got up to this stage? (I know you touched on it earlier that it may be more of a burden)
3. What would the smallest party size in your opinion in order to complete improved anvil and what would the classes be etc.
1) I don't understand for which people this mod is aimed. Who is the target of this mod ?
2) Why would I play Improved Anvil over the "vanilla" game with SCS, if I wanted a harder experience ?
A bit of a disclaimer that my SCS experience is limited, but there are three big reasons as I understand it. The first is that in SCS, there are still a bunch of major battles can still be trivialized by a single spell or ability (eg Mislead backstabs, anything involving Project Image). The second is that arcane casters are still far more supreme than any other class. The third is that there are certain strategies (eg Sorcerer with Robe of Vecna + Time Stop + Improved Alacrity) that can be applied to pretty much enemy in the game, which leads to a very samey experience.
IA certainly succeeds in limiting caster supremacy, though many would probably say that it goes too far the other way. Is also succeeds in making major fights nontrivial and requiring a variety of approaches.
3) Am I wrong, or the mod assumes you to play with Nearinfinity open? I don't get how you are supposed to get informations about what you are gonna face if you don't.
No, but there is a bit of trial and error involved if you do not. I refer to NearInfinity a lot for two reasons. The first is that I like to start with NearInfinity to form my plans, and the second is that I want to have this LP be useable as a guide, so I want to be as informative as possible about what to watch out for.
Demorgorgon itself does not drop any loot. The minions drop some rare items (eg Boots of Speed), but nothing completely unique. When Demogorgon is beaten, we are rewarded with a Ring of Protection + 4, and each party member gets a bonus based on their class:
Necromancers and Vagrants get nothing (they are considered to be powerful enough already)
FMCs and FMTs get 1.2 million XP
Other multi/duals get 900k XP
Riskbreakers get 5% physical damage resistance
Bards/Thieves/Paladins get 0.5 additional APR
Rangers/Fighters/Monks get an expanded criticial hit range
Mages/Druids/Clerics/Sorcerers get an increase of 1 to their casting speed
- There are too many encounters that consists of Golems. Golems, Golems and more Golems.
The number of golems is indeed ridiculous. Part of it is that they are intended to be an enemy that spellcasters cannot magic away, part of it is that they are a common minion for other enemies, and part of it is that golems really like to summon other golems.
- It seems like the mod author has felt like he should actually remove exploits (e.g the Nalia fortress) rather than having the player enjoy the game. This has a very limting effect on the choices the player has to do even when playing the stronghold sections.
- The fact that it seems like the author never intended for the mod to be played Solo makes me hesitant to play it - like if the player has to play in the way the author intended rather than the one that is supposed to be most fun (for the player)
It has mellowed a bit since 6.0, but the range of expected and supported ways of playing the mod is very much reduced compared to vanilla BG2 or other mods. There are pros and cons to this - the obvious con is that the remaining ways of playing might not be appealing to the person playing the game (in which case, don't force yourself), but the biggest pro is that is allows for a much smoother level of challenge for the entire game.
- There doesn't seem to be any roleplay options that I would personally like given that there are many new encounters added. An example? No way to ask EdE for a temporary alliance against Amelyssan.. If you think about it, there is no reason he would enter your pocket plane uninvited, given that the Pocket plane is your dominion and you could probably crush him with your thoughts if you wanted.
These are some roleplay options, but I glossed over them, and they tend to follow the pattern of "Give up a big item or have a big fight". For example, the Spider Queen appears and will only fight us if we do not hand over the Black Spider Figurine. Similarly, Limak can be avoided by giving up the Memory of the Apprenti or 100k gold.
The Rakshasa Prince at the end explains that he wants to stop the creation of a new god to prove that the Rakshasa pantheon is a legitimate divine pantheon. He also explains that if he kills us outside the pocket plane Melissan will be able to absorb our essence, which is what he wants to avoid.
1. So is it actually impossible for a solo to complete Improved Anvil?
2. Would even a secondary party member have helped in any way now that you have got up to this stage? (I know you touched on it earlier that it may be more of a burden)
3. What would the smallest party size in your opinion in order to complete improved anvil and what would the classes be etc.
Solo is mathematically possible, but unviable. We effectively have to deal 1100 damage over 150 rounds, which means that we need to hit with every one of our attacks (about 0.17% chance), then need to deal a least 8.4 damage per hit (we deal 8 with 40% probability and 9 with 10% probability for an overall probability of 0.018% that we will do enough damage), which means that each round of combat has about a 1 in 136k chance of doing enough damage. We will need 150 consecutive such rounds, which means that any given attempt has approximately 1 in 1.18*10^770 chance of succeeding.
For the EDE, I think there would have to be a minimum party size of three - two warriors (who can outpace the regeneration with Critical Strikes) and a mage (to refresh arcane buffs), though going up to three warriors might be needed to make it practical. It's hard to say if a party of three or four would be viable for the whole game, or other encounters might force us up to five or six.
I had thought of trying a solo run for myself but sounds like it is practically/mathematically impossible might have to give that a miss. Perhaps I'll try a party of 3 (6 sounds like too much work)
I had thought of trying a solo run for myself but sounds like it is practically/mathematically impossible might have to give that a miss. Perhaps I'll try a party of 3 (6 sounds like too much work)
Will you be trying again to beat IA completely?
I'm probably going to retire from IA after this, at least for a while. I might come back for version 7.
If you can find a version of v5, then I would recommend that over v6 for solo play.
A (fairly big but probably not complete) list if changes between v5 and v6.5 that makes solo play more difficult:
Changes since v5 that make this harder (not a comprehensive list):
Amber Golem's Electrical Discharge no longer allows save vs wands to negate
Greater Silence no longer allows a save to avoid (it was at -9)
Greater Silence not disables quick use items and innate abilities
Farsight has been removed from the game and so we cannot effectively control minions from offscreen
Spell trap has been removed (it could absorb things like Electrical Discharge)
Greater Doom was added in version 6
Lower XXX Resistance now has additional lowering to ensure that all resistances are below 100
Bards no longer gain access to 6th level spells, their highest level spells are level 5
IMoD no longer gives protection from level drain
Pickpocket loot no longer contains rare scrolls, valuable sellables, or rare items
Polymorph abilities (both spell and items) have been limited so the powerful forms have been removed
I'm not sure how the stats screen calculates favourite spell, but I'm skeptical of DUHM being number one - I would expect DUHM to be two or three (since it is used a lot in the early game) and PFMW to be number one. The favourite weapon of Long Sword is probably because I have had two mundane Long Swords equipped in my third and fourth weapon slots since Chateau Irenicus, and it is probably that which is making them count as the favourite weapon, even though they were rarely used. In hindsight they probably should have been mundane flails instead, since there were a few fights where we used mundane weapons when we had more pips in flails than long swords.
The Chapter stats seem to be messed up - just before the final hell fight we had 1122 chapter kills, so I think all of TOB is being grouped with Chapter 7 of SoA. Our average XP per kill is a bit over 8k, which is a bit lower than what I would expect from the sheer number of golems that were fought.
Ways that I could have done this better:
Although there were a few major fights in the game, there were only two or three fights that had the dual properties of being very difficult to do and giving us major power boosts afterwards. These would be the biggest candidates for further refinements for a subsequent playthrough. The elephant in the room is the EDE, but I'll cover that later.
The first is the slaver ship fight, which gives us access to Improved Haste. We could probably make this one better if we were to gain more XP and more levels before taking it on. The biggest way we could gain this needed XP would be to do Pai'na's fight first to gain SI, which will open up Firkraag's Maze and probably some other areas as well where we can get big piles of XP.
The second is Firkraag. There are two big potential ways for improvement - the first is to find a way to reliably trigger Improved Fireball with minions, and the second is to see if it is possible to take him out entirely with summons - I find that the last summons would often get through all the PFMWs and stoneskins. Additional summons spells might help, as more Mordy Swords could better clear the way for the bigger summons. Wish resting is unfortunately not an option for us.
Wish has been changed in IA, and the biggest difference is wishing for rest. It is only available to single class mages, with lowered probability if it has been used in the last 24 in-game hours. When it is used, the user is completely dispelled, and there is a chance that an xp-less Fallen Planetar and Elemental Golem appear (increasing as the number of wish rests in the last 24 hours increases). It therefore cannot be reliably used in the middle of a battle, though it does have a use (that I couldn't use, but someone else might be able to) to summon minions and then use wish rest as part of battle prebuffs (if it fails, we can just try again).
One strategy that I definitely underutilized was blasting under Alacrity. I could have started many fights under Alacrity, emptied the spellbook of things like Magic Missile and Acid Arrow, and then carried on. Even though there are very few encounters that can be completely blown away this way, we can still soften up some big enemies or take out one enemy in a multi-enemy encounter. Similarly for Time Stop, but we gain access to that a lot later.
For item randomizer locations, the only significant one is the Robe of Vecna. Having it on the Ancient Dragon or Layene means that is will end up being one of the last things that are possible in SoA. Having it in the Illithid Hideous means that it will be doable, but almost certainly post-spellhold. Having it on Kaol makes is so much easier, and it means that we will have it available going into spellhold, which is a major boost - not only would the underdark and the challenges within be much easier, it triggers the Limak fight, which gives early access to our first Scroll of Wish.
IA 6.0 is definitely harder than both v6.5 and v5, as the anti-solo scripts in 6.0 make it impossible for a character to solo it, even with infinite XP and money. Although v6.5 has been scaled down from v6.0, it is definitely harder than v5. The biggest difference is in the "Lower Elemental Resistnace" abilities, which is why the Demogorgon fight cannot be done solo in v6.5 and the Ancient Dragon fight is not reliable.
On the whole, I found this run quite enjoyable. The level of variance in the challenge that I faced was quite low variance (especially when compared vanilla BG or mods). Furthermore, IA is very good at making encounters that you cannot autopilot and reuse the same strategies for (they still exist, but to a much lesser degree than vanilla BG2 or with other mods).
Unfortunately, the very last battle was not possible. I personally am fairly satisfied with what went on in this fight - although we were ultimately unable to get over the regeneration, to get to that point where that is the only blocker was already a tricky thing to do, and it required us to lean on two strategies (weapon reach and using minions to prevent enemy minion summoning) that the other fights had not required.
The EDE:
I have gone through the IA changelogs and original discussions when 6.0 was released, and I have only found one mention (page 66 of https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/21181-ia-v6-final/#comments) of the prince's regeneration, where the he is confirmed to have 5hp/second regeneration, doubled to 10 with the permanent haste ability. These comments are from July 2013, three years after the initial release of 6.0, but would definitely be still on 6.0 on the old engine (BG2EE was released November 2013, and although I don't have the exact release date of IA v6.1, it included support for BG2EE, so must have been after). The BG wiki confirms that the regeneration effect would have been doubled in this case (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Haste_effect).
The prince was confirmed to have the same regeneration running version 6.0 as he curently has today. The IA changelogs for version 6.0 don't explicitly list the EDE as an area that changes were made, but they do have a non-specific bullet points that could easily include EDE changes for higher regeneration ("The existing tactical challenges are refined and improved further"). The mentions from July 2013 don't frame this as a major feature/change (though it was long after discussions of solo viability had been discarded, everything was being considered from a party context), so either it was the same in v5 or it is a v6 change that was not considered worth making a big deal of.
We have another source of information: The Black Wyrm's Lair forums. The battle reports there are a lot sparser, but we have a lot of them.
We have one thread (http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showtopic=2838) where the prince was described as having a regeneration rate of "4 or 5 hp every second" by panama. We have thetruth and clown having some success with solo strategies. Sikret confirms that the EDE gets harder in v5 (he originally says 4.3, but 4.3 would become 5.0 before it got released), but the golems as described in fight are the same (as least as far as they are described), which does suggest that the regeneration was increased between v4.2 and v5.
Another BWL thread (http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showtopic=5252) from May 2015 describes the prince as having 30HP/round regeneration in May 2015. This run makes reference to items from "The Four mod", which maens that this was with version 6.4 or earlier.
In total, we have four data points (Saros's v5 solo runs, the G3 thread, the two BWL threads) that leads me to conclude that at least one of the following is true:
The BG wiki is wrong and there are some situations where the regeneration will not get doubled with the Rakshasa Prince's innate haste
The regeneration was increased in version 5.0 or 6.0, decreased again sometime between 6.1 and 6.4, and increased again by the time 6.5 came around
At least one of the data points tweaked their game or lied about how the EDE was in their game
There's not the completionist in you that wants to try and beat IA (including the EDE) ??
Or would doing it all again be that draining since I assume it wouldn't be solo, regardless its been fun to follow along and the detail/break downs have added a lot to that.
I'm happy with how I did in the EDE - I was able to negate all the threats and danger in the encounter, and I am confident that there is no alternative strategy to beat it. If the EDE was not the very last IA encounter in the game I would do a bonus episode(s) of the suff after it (similar to Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar), but there is nothing more to be shown off.
If I could find version 5 of IA, I might do the Demogorgon encounter and the EDE (if the regeneration is only 30/round), but I wouldn't do any other encounters.
I also don't think I would do IA with a party - I prefer solo play as it has fewer moving parts. This solo run has been a three month commitment, and I would be unwilling to commit a similar amount of time to run it as a party for an experience that is not that much different. I'd be happy to follow someone else's playthrough, though.
You did a commendable job in this run. The detailing of the encounters and resistances/immunities/protections are very insightful.
Having played IA for many years I must admit that I lost interest around Conster where you started to become overleveled compared to a party run, and I get more excitement with a lower level party in this mod. Then at the end you really were overleveled, except for the few fights that you cannot do confidently solo.
I have to check if I still have v5 on my pc somewhere but I kind of doubt it. Demogorgon is much much easier there, but I think EDE is still the same as now.
In v5 you will lose out on some useful gear and spells. Would it really be valuable to do this? I'd rather think it would be more value for you if you copy your character as an npc and try to do it with a 2 character party. Enough dps, same tactics, see how it holds up?
I'm not sure when exactly the improved Demogorgon fight came in - it might have been with v6, in which case I expect that v5 Demogorgon would be effectively vanilla and not really worth bothering with.
Although v5 is missing out on some equipment, the old equipment is definitely an upgrade over v6 - "The Four" items are very strong, Eternal Melody has permanent Alacrity, and rare items (like scrolls of Vocalise) are easier to obtain. I can't think of any challenge that v5 offers that v6 doesn't if the EDE is unchanged.
I might try a party run of IA at some point in the future, but probably nor for a few months at least. There is still active work being done on v7, so when that comes out I will definitely give it a go.
What I recall as the only change in EDE was v6.4 where the creatures are now spawned by script rather than randomly on the party. The difficulty is not affected though.
Demogorgon was around v6.3 upgraded. Before that it was also improved beyond vanilla, but I rarely did that fight so I cannot actually recall it anymore. The current version is really really tough.
I am also waiting for v7 to drop because I want to try out either the druid or the shaman kits in IA.
The four was never part of IA, hence I did not consider that, but yes, those items are good. The bard armor with permanent alacrity is also one of these amazing items as well as the grandfather dagger with permanent improved haste. I loved adding thieves and bards in v5 (or actually was v5 where they were patched out?, hmmm). Sadly, no more.
Comments
I broke it down in the fourth spoiler of the original post, but I think so. Defensive arcane buffs are a must, which demands Bard, Mage or a combination that includes Mage. The other major plusses of a F/M/T are fighter proficiencies and HLAs like UAI and Critical Strike.
A Bard or a F/M will have a much easier early game, and may be able to complete the game, but late game fights will be trickier and some optional areas like WK may be impossible.
We jump back to the end of part 136 for this part, though we will use the console to set IAMIRRORJOB to 6, so the game thinks that we have finished the Ancient Secret of Suldanessellar quest. This has a minor effect in the final fight, so I am doing it for completionist reasons.
THe key to beating the Ancient Dragon is Remove Magic. The Dragon has a higher caster level than us for Divine spells, but a lower caster level for Arcane spells. The works out for us in two ways - the dragon's Remove Magics are all arcane and so we will win, and the dragon's most important protection spells are all arcane/ We will want to dispel the dragon a total of eight times - three stoneskins (one from initial buffs) then five PFMW (once at 80% hitpoints).
Once we cast our first spell in the arena, the Dragon starts to head towards us. We prebuff before entering the arena with II, SI:Div and ProEnergy. Once in, we position ourself in the top corner, summon our minions (these are items and do not trigger the dragon), then cast Foreknowledge and Alacrity. The dragon should arrive at around the time that Alacrity finishes.
When the Alacrity hits, we insta-cast Hardiness, AI, Critical Strike and move in to start attacking. I also like to turn off all auto-pauses here except for spell cast. Othala and the team attack the dragon, ignoring the minions.
Under foreknowledge, we can instacast Remove Magic. We therefore cast it every time the dragon puts up a defensive spell. The way the AI works out, we will in practice make the dragon use a (instacase) defensive spell in between casting other spells.
It may be possible to ancitipate when the spells are cast and try to time the Remove Magics to land as soon after the defensive buffs as possible.
When we are near the end of our first Alacrity, we start casting the second. We will want to equip the Ring of Fire Protection for the duration of this to ensure we are not interrupted. Alacrity lasts for two rounds and we have 10APR, so a good way to know when we are approaching the end is to cast Critical Strike at the start of the Alacrity casts, then count seven or eight attacks after the first CS runs out to start to cast the second Alacrity.
I have ntoiced that sometimes we get our illusions dispelled during or shortly after casting this. I'm not sure of the source, but we can just refresh II as soon as it happens and the Alacrity is up without too much trouble.
It might hit us with one or two Greater Dooms, but Critical Strike will ensure that we hit. Similarly, it might hit us with one or two Lower Fire Resistances, but we should be able to tank a Fire Breath or two.
The dragon goes down for 136k XP, taking the record of the Most Powerful Vanquished.
The Salamander Prince and Noble Efreeti disappear when the Dragon goes down, but the Elite Nishruu does not. I recommend kiting under Greater Dooms wear off, then re-engaging with the Elite Nishruu under AI.
There is loads of loot from this fight:
Part 139: Limak the Mastermind:
Last time we did probably the hardest single fight of the entire run, and I'm not happy with our strategy, but I couldn't find better.
We finally forge one of the most powerful items in IA - the Memory of the Apprenti.
Our foe of interest for this part is Limak the Mastermind. He has the same caster levels as the Ancient Dragon, but with an important difference - he does not have the permanent Alacrity.
Three days after the forging the MotA, we return to the docks district under II and SI:Div. We are greeted by Limak, who us to hand over our nice new robe. We can hand the robe over, we can bribe him to go away with 100k gold, or we can kill him. Let's do that last one.
He summons two Amber Golems as the fight starts, but no further creatures during the battle. He protects himself with II and SI:Div. We can protect ourself with PFMW, then cast Alacrity.
Under Alacrity, we can spam Remove Magics, each with 90% dispel chance. Once he has been dispelled, he is pretty weak and should go down in a couple rounds of attacking. We can dispel him again if he tries to PFMW, though we should be careful to keep up our own PFMW for the Amber Golems. He has a CC of triple ADHW, but it will not fire since it only fires at enemies with less than 50% MR, and we have 55%.
He dies for a rather unwarranted 100k XP, and we then take out the Amber Golems, which is straightforward at this point for us.
Notable loot from this fight is a bunch of generic powerful equipment, plus scrolls of Wish and Chain contingency.
He also drops Limak's Brain. In three days it will rot and be worthless, but until then we can use it to forge the Potion of Superior Mentality. It gives a permenant +1 to INT and WIS (which doesn't do anything really for us), but it only consumes gold and a Manual of Elaboration (which we are not constrained on), so we forge it.
One of the items that Limak drops is a generic +3 flail. We use a Permanency Scroll to forge a second, then construct one of our two final weapons in the game - the Flail of Defending and Wounding. This will be our new mainhand weapon, and once we forge Judgement Day we will swap between the two main hand and offhand. This leaves us with one Permanency scroll leftover.
We also gain more XP from the Limak fight than the Ancient Dragon fight, allowing us to hit Mage 38.
Part 140: The Old Ones:
We have done a major upgrade to our equipment, but we are still plowing through the stuff that the Memory of the Apprenti unlocked.
I tweak the script constraints so that we can do this quest and head to the Planar Sphere. After a few days of resting, an Archmage appears. We get told the following:
We get dispelled and teleported to the Old One's hideout. The auto-pause gives us time to set up II and SI:Div before the conversation starts.
We kite them and cast AI (beign sure they don't hit us and dispel our II), then cast Alacrity.
We start by casting ProFire and Mirror Image (to protect us from Stellar Gravestone, a comet variant that is one of the few things they can do to us under our protections), Ruby Ray each of the Grave Liches twice, and cast Remove Magic to blow away their protections.
We activate our offensive HLAs and start to take them out, as they are weak to Critical Strike. They may PFMW, but Under Alacrity we can instacast Remove Magic with 99% dispel chance. They go down easily from here.
The Old One congratulates us and tells us that his apprentice, Morid, will join us in our stronghold. As a reward, we gain the Cloak of the Old Ones, which gives +5 max HP and 3 HP/round regeneration.
Morid says that he can help our researches, and talking to him enables the pool that contains a Barbarian Essence potion.
We drop a large pile of gold to combine two +2 cloaks to make a +3 one, then we combine it with the Cloak of the Old Ones and the Scholastic Cloak (a necromancer-only drop from the librarian lich in Spellhold) to forge the Cloak of Arcane Immortality. Fortunately the IA rules get bent a bit here - normally we are only allowed to wear at most one protection item of strength +3 or better, but we are allowed to wear this with the Ring of Gaxx.
Part 141: Mage Stronghold Finale:
We have saved Morid, which means that it is time to put him to good use. This will be a lot longer than the last few parts.
This will involve some items that would have spawned earlier in the game if we were a Necromancer. I will be consoling them as they are needed.
Morid has lots of things he can do for us. They are:
Each of these is doable once. The spell Recast Vital Energy is a stronger version of Wish, though the protagonist needs to be a Necromancer to get the best results. Each of the options can only be done once, and they each take three days.
Activating the Time Machine needs a few ingredients, an important one is the Scroll of Time Stop. The Ancient Dragon has one, and the easiest other place to find one is inthe House of the Harpist in Suldanessellar if the plater is a single class necromancer with reputation 20.
The Time Machine is similar to the mirror in Suldanessellar. We need a few keys (Morid can create them), each each key will unlock a one-off encounter.
In Bodhi's coffin, we can find a Piece of Sandalwood, which can be turned into the Wooden Key (while preserving the Sandalwood). Using this on the Time Machine means we go back in time to Suldanessellar and meed a young Bodhi. We give her the Sandalwood (creating a bit of a time paradox) and get her to leave a bottle of wine in a house in Suldanessellar, which Morid can use to create Barbarian Essence potions.
The Golden Key costs 1000 gold to forge. We will have to fight six Skeleton Grandlords, which at this point in the game is a pretty trivial fight. One of them drops a scroll of Larloch's Interrupter and Bones of a Skeleton Grandlord.
The Ruby Key consumes three Bloodstone Gems, and needs the Crimson Ioun Stone (from the squirrel job) as a catalyst. Using it brings us face to face with Lavok in his youth. This version of Lavok has already met the force that posessed him in our time. He agreed to let the force enter the sphere to leave the Demonic plane, as long as the force never possesses him or tries to enter the Prime Material plane. Lavok asks us to return to the Demonic plane to destroy the force's main avatar. He tells us that we can use the Amber Key in the time machine to travel to the Demonic plane and the Bone Key to return.
Forging the Amber Key requires a Chunk of Amber, and Forging the Bone Key requires teh Bones of the Skeleton Grandlord that we picked up in the Grandlord fight earlier. Morid has nothing more he can do for us, and so he wishes us good luck.
We return to the Demonic plane and encounter the Lesser Force.
The fight has three warm-up rounds - six Skeleton Lords, six Balors, and six Skeleton Grandlords.
The skeletons are trivial with PFMW. The Balors are scarier - they have access to Lower Fire Resistance and Greater Doom (if we are visible). I like to use Alacrity to set up defenses and Remove Magics on them, then hack them to bits under Critical Strike, II, SI:Div and PFMW. One of the drops the Carmine Ioun Stone.
After the Granlords, we get healed and rested to our spells are restored. Certain debuffs will stick around, including Greater Doom from the Balors. It is best to kite the last Skeleton Grandlord until the debuffs wear off. Buffs don't matter, as we will get hard dispelled as the start of the Lesser Force fight.
The Lesser Force has surprisingly weak physical resistances. In combat, it doesn't cast any spells. When it gets to less than 10% health, it will summon five Greater Bone Golems and heal itself (it does this twice). It will use Purge Magic every three rounds until we take out the last wave of the Greater Bone Golems.
Its weapon's only effect is that it slays summons on hit. The most dangerous part is that when we cast it it will use Field of Dark Magic. This gives a cumulative -2 penalty to THAC0 and saves, inflict cumulative -10% magic damage resistance unless we save vs spell at -2, and inflict a bit of magic damage. It's like an Amber Golem, but less severe. The debuffs last for 5 rounds.
The fight is made even easier by the fact that the Lesser Force is weak to critical hits. We spend the first PFMW getting the Lesser Force down to 1/3-1/4 health, then the next PFMW healing up and waiting for the debuffs to expire, then the third PFMW beating the Lesser Force down to the range to summon the Golems.
When the force heals, it will debuff us. We will want to be quick with the pauses to check our save vs death and spell at this point, as the GBGs can inflict Stun/Panic unless we can make these saves at -4. If our saves are too low (from the field of dark magic), we will want to equip protective gear or drink a relevant potion while kiting while the save debuff wears off.
Once the first five GBGs are down, we repeat the process. We can swap our Magic Damage gear on and off depending on if we are hitting the Lesser Force or the GBGs. When the second wave of GBGs goes down, it still purges, though not as often.
The second round of GBGs drop Potions of Magic Shielding, which is a nice bonus.
The Lesser Force is straightforward to beat. Since we have destroyed this form, and it does not have another avatar to hand, it is forced to disperse itself it is will be at least a millenium before it reforms. We get 45k XP points for this.
We return to Cromwell. We combine the Carmine Ious Stone, the Crimson Ioun Stone and the Ruby of the Gods to forge this, the Scarlet Ioun Stone. We have started to assemble a pretty impressive set of equipment - with the Scarlet Ioun Stone, the FoDaW, the Lord of the Underworld and Jan's Armour, we have a static 65% physical resistance. We can use Hardiness for (dispellable) physical immunity, or two Barbarian Essence potions for undispellable physical immunity.
I'm not happy with how the Ancient Dragon fight went. I tried it a few times, and I only got about 2/3 success rate, at that was the best strategy I could find. For a no-reloader, I would suggest just skipping the Ancient Dragon.
In theory the Ancient Dragon only block access to the rest of WK, but the Old Ones fight does require the Memory of the Apprenti to be forged, which requires the Robe of Vecna. The Robe of Vecna is randomized to one of four places, (one of which is the Ancient Dragon), but the randomizer scripts do favour certain classes - a single class mage cannot have it be with the Ancient Dragon, and a Necromancer cannot have it be with Layene. Personally, I'm not a fan of this kind of randomization, so I would encourage anybody who is playing this through to check the value of IAVECNAPLACE at game start time, restart if it is set to 1 (Ancient Dragon) or 2 (Layene).
In the last few parts, we have gotten some pretty major equipment upgrades. It's finally time to get the best equipment upgrade in the game.
We head up the eastern part of the WK exterior map, and we find the Demon Lord. We make sure we have prebuffed with Hardiness Foreknowledge, II, SI:Div, ProEnergy and ProFire. The Demon Lord wants Angurvadal, we want its blood. Let's see who will win this disagreement.
The Demon Lord is a level 29/25/31 F/M/C, and is not much of a threat. The biggest part of it is that it summons a series of Death Lords. Death Lords are threatening as they can cast Lower Fire Resistance and use some nasty fire spells. In theory we could maximize XP by drawing out the Death Lords, but we are beyond the point where we want to farm XP. Annoyingly, the Demon Lord heals whenever a wave of Death Lords is summoned, and we cannot focus it down in the time between rounds. We will therefore focus on taking out the Death Lords first.
Every time a round of Death Lords is summoned, we fire a Remove Magic. This has a side effect of buring through the Demon Lord's PFMWs and Remove Magics early.
The summons are not strictly necessary, but we might as well summon them. The only on-hit effect we worry about is that the Death Lords give us a -2 to THAC0 that can add up, but by the time it is relevant the Demon Lord will be out of PFMWs and we can use Critical Strike.
Even if we get our fire resistance lowered, we have a static magic resistance of 90% with Jan's armour, and we can take that to 100% with the Delryn Family Legacy. The Demon Lord is the only one who can lower our resistance, and only if we are seen, so we can tank this extremely well. Not all of the fire spells can be negated with MR, but most of them can.
If things look hairy, we have two retreat options - the first is to the edge of the map, where we can run away to another map entirely. The second is inside WK - the stairway to the top is closed, but the side doors remain open. Although the inner levels do have resting encounters, they are not threating for us at this point in the game. I dont know where the rest encounters are defined, but I find the Machine of Lum the Mad level to be the best.
It is a very slow but very safe strategy to keep ducking in and out of the side doors of WK, taking out one or two Death Lords at a time. Under Hardiness, II and SI:Div we are in no real danger. We will take a lot of hits, lowering our THAC0 a lot, but Critical Strikes will ensure that we hit.
The fight is long and grindy, with the only loot being the Blood of the Demon Lord. This is the last ingredient we need to forge the Judgement Day sword.
Judgment Day is potentially the most powerful bit of equipment in IA, and it has the price tag to go with it. For comparison, the next highest gold price in the mod is 150k.
As we forge the sword, it talks to us and starts a seven day timer. If this timer runs out, we will lose the JD sword, but can carry on our adventure.
This is what the sword has to offer us. It's a lot of bonuses. The biggest parts are the 20% physical damage resistance and the +2 strength (which lets us retire Phosphorus). The on-hit abilities are nice, but nothing we will rely on.
These are the spells it can cast. Most of them are useless to us, with tbe most relevant ones being PFMW and Wish.
This is the enemy that we will have to take out. Notable things about it are:
- On hit it does a big of magical damage
- On hit it has a 46% chance of inflicting saveless sleep and wing buffet
- Its initial summons are a Death Lord, an Elemental Golem and a Noble Marilith
- Every five rounds, it will summon an additional Death Lord, Elemental Golem or Noble Marilith
- It has a chain contingency of triple Finger of Death
- It protects itself with 5 Stoneskins and 7 AIs (plus one Stoneskin in the prebuffs)
- It likes to use True Sight/ RRoR, Breach and Remove Magic under regular conditions
- It uses Greater Doom ever two hours (blocked if we have Mirror Image up or Resist Magic over 50
- It uses Lower Resistance if we have a magic resistance of at least 25
- It can use Lower Fire Resistance up to eight times
- It can use Magic Damage Spells or Fire spells
Crucially, every one of its abilities makes it use its action, and it considers them in that order. We have a plan - force it to spend its action using Stoneskin or AI, dispel it each time with our 99% dispel chance, and take it out before it does something nasty.We return to the WK outside area. We prepare ourself with:
The key to hand this safely is to head to this area that is very hard to take a full screen screenshot of as it is so close to the bottom of the map.
This picture shows what we are trying to achieve - the Demon Prince is body blocking the enemies it, and we can only be attacked by one enemy from behind us. This isn't strictly necessary, but it makes things a bit more forgiving about when PFMW runs out. We can do this consistently if we initally run to the north of the enemies, as the Death Lord is a lot quicker off the bat than the others.
We follow a pattern - on each PFMW, we spend up to two actions casting Remove Magic if the Demon Prince casts Stoneskin or AI. We then save our action for refreshing PFMW as it gets close to running out. We want to keep our II and SI:Div up - We won't immediately get killed if they go down, but it will make things a lot harder for us.
A bonus that can make our maths tricky is Judgement Day. It has a 5% chance to cast PFMW on hit, which means that if we hit every attack, we will be casting PFMW every 2.5 rounds. In practice, these enemies have good AC, so we will not get infinite PFMW, but it is a nice bonus when it happens. We also have to watch out for Wish - when it randomly gets cast, we will lose our attacking order and will have to re-issue it.
We may get a bit of fire damage coming in from the Death Lord - we will want to keep potions of healing and oils of resurgence in reserve for this.
Whe the Demon Prince goes down, we get almost 200k XP and no loot (we get to keep the JD sword, that's loot enough). Our II and SI:Div will be almost running out, however, and we will retreat to rest and rebuff.
Since IA enemies prefer a non-PFMW target over a PFMW target, we can summon a minion away from us to create enough of an opening for us to reach the edge of the map or the WK entrances.
All the XP from this fight is enough for us to hit F/M/T level 40/39/41. There are no more Thief levels left, and we spent our last skill points on rounding out our skills - every skill around 130, except for Pickpocket, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows, which are 100 points higher to allow for the penalties the game can impose on these checks (if we could perform them, our thieving button has been permanently disabled).
We have finished JD, one of the toughest fights in the game. This one is tricky, and very mentally taxing. We could probably consider it an optional fight - in previous versions of IA it could be only forged by Cromwell, but in 6.5 it can also be forged by Cespenar. Therefore, it is possible to forge it just before some big TOB fights like the EDE and just finish the game before the JD sword times out.
We cannot upgrade our equipment any further, and the remaining level ups we will get will only offer us a few extra hitpoints. At this point in the game we are just being completionist.
We got the required skull from the dragon, so we do the Spirit Wariror segment. This is vanilla, and the correct course of action in IA is the same as vanilla (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Watcher's_Keep_Final_Seal)
Next up is the Orc Horde. We have to survive sixty rounds before the helmite spirit appears and the orcs stop spawning. Any time there are less than 10 orcs in the room, another one spawns:
You may notice that this adds up to 120%. That is how the script is coded behind the scenes - there are 12 options which are listed as 10% chance. I don't know if this gets normalized, or if the last two options are ignored.
In theroy we could maximize XP by killing as many as possible, but we don't care. Instead, we just take out the mages (any any more that spawn as those go down), and spend the next sixty rounds (six minutes) waiting out the timer under Hardiness-induced physical immunity.
Reward for this includes a Barbarian Essence potion.
It's time to open the final seals. We start with the northwest lock. Out only prebuff is Hardiness, as the Hive Mother will use Anti-Magic ray if it sees us under any other buffs. We will also want to equip Mage Damage resistance equipment.
The only danger is that the Judgement Day sword may proc buffs that draw out the Anti-Magic ray, which will dispel our Hardiness, so we want to keep our action free to refresh it until the Hive Mother is dead. Once it is dead, we can take them out, prioritizing the Cleric first, then the Archer, then the Fighters, and Nalmissra last. If we did get hit with Anti-Magic ray we will have spell failure that we will have to wait for it to wear off before we can dispel Nalmissra.
Notable loot is Ixil's Nail, Gauntlets of Extraordinary Specialization, Taralash and a Scroll of Wish.
The southernmost lock is Guarded by Azamantes (33/28 Fighter/Mage) and some flaming skulls. We prebuff with ProFire, II and SI:Div, then keep ourselves protected from Azamantes with PFMW while we RRoR and Remove Magic before taking Azamantes out like any other grave lich. Alacrity makes this easy.
Notable loot includes the Serpent Shaft and Erinne Sling.
The final guardians are a group of Rilmani. They cannot do anything if we protect ourself with Hardiness.
Loot from this includes the Club of Detonation. We unlock the final seal, but do not go through - I rather suspect that Demogorgon may be beyond us.
This is enough for us to level up to Fighter 41. We are not level 41/39/41.
Part 144: Chaos:
Chaos is normally a gimmick fight - it has colossal damage resistance, except against lighning damage, and it is immune to the arcane spells Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. It is intended that we beat it by using Druids or other divine casters to cast Call Lightning, and we cannot beat it that way.
There are two nasty problems. The first is that it can inflict saveless creeping doom, which means that we cannot cast spells during the fight and will take a lot of damage that we will need full physical immunity to negate. The second is that whenever we hit it, it will dispel our combat protections and deal us magical damage.
We equip our magic damage negation gear and drink one of our 17 Barbarian Essence potions, and pon on Jan's armour to get undispellably physical and magical damage immunity.
There is very little to say about this fight. We use Critical Strike every round, as Chaos is weak to it. We will need a lot of Critical Strikes as Chaos is weak to them. The fight takes a long time, as Chaos has a lot of HP, very high resistances, and decent regeneration.
We will probably want to use Giant Strength as well, as it is undispellable and with our Magic Damage gear up our static strength is 22. The on-hit effect of JD does nothing for us, whereas the on-hit effect of the FoDaW gives us a nice bit of DPS increase, so we will want to main hand the FoDaW.
The fight finishes, and we have effectively traded one Barbarian Essence for some XP, the Golden Lion Figurine, and the Essence of Chaos (crafting ingredient). In absolute terms it's a bad trade, but we are just finishing of all the SOA encounters.
This is where we will end SOA, it looks like. There is only one encounter left in SOA, and it is Twisted Rune. I've done some probing, and I'm afraid I don't think it is reliably possible as a soloer:
Vaxall is a beholder. It has access to Anti-Magic Ray, which it will use if we every have magical defences up. It dispels us and gives us miscast magic with no way to prevent, other than never having magical defences, relying on undispellablse and equipment instead. Vaxall also has access to Soften Target, an ability which gives us -25 to all damage type resistances (both physical and nonphysical) Vaxall has 240 HP, and can only be hurt by physical damage (through a 90% resistance). He also can use Wondrous Strike, which does 1d6 damage of each type, which needs us to spend quite a few of our actions using potions to heal up.
Layene cannot be killed until she uses her Wish, which will always hit double length time stop and improved alacrity. Under this, she will unload her spellbook on us. With my best attempts I can survive this most of the time, but we will be left firmly in PW:Kill range, which she will use on us. If we ever use II, Layene will start summoning Twisted Golems, and if we ever move out of Layene's field of vision (which is really easy to do unintentionally), she starts summoning Greater Twisted Golems. These golems we could take out if we could use magical defenses, but we cannot.
The best I can do is to whittle down the enemies to just Layene and Vaxall, survive most of Layene's wish attacks, and die the round after the wish.
I'm not sure why this has happened, so I have used EEKeeper to up our base APR to 3. This workaround would only be questionable if we were to use a weapon other than one we have five proficiency pips in, but I doubt that will happen.
Part 145: Twisted Rune:
We've cleared every encounter in SOA except for three. One of them is Demogorgon, who probably isn't possible. Another is the Tree of Life, which will commit us to going into TOB. The third is Twisted Rune, which we will take on now.
We prepare our spells. The spell trigger is there to counter Layene's Wish.
Our prebuffs are just Foreknowledge and Giant Strength. We wear the MotA and drink two Barbarian Essences for physical immunity, as well as wearing our magic damage immunity gear. There is a small gap between when Shangalar appears and when his dialogue starts that we can start to cast Alacrity.
We equip the circlet for a total of -5 to casting times, and tell the summons to attack Shyressa while we start to cast:
- Lower Magic Resistance on Revanek * 2
- Remove Magic on Revanek (when potion is drunk)
- Remove Magic on Vaxall (when defences fire)
- Breach on Shyressa (when Hardiness fires)
- Magic Missile on Revanek * 11
- Acid Arrow on Revanek * 12
- Minor Sequencer on Revanek
- RRoR on Shangalar * 2
- Remove Magic on Shangalar
- Remove Magic on Vaxall (if defences refreshed)
- Critical Strike
After doing all this, we equip the Ioun stone back and take out Shangalar in less than a round under Critical Strikes.In less than a round, we will have taken out two of the Twisted Rune members and negated the defenses of two of the others. We will probably have taken a Soften from Vaxall and a bit of melee damage from Shangalar, but not too much. We fire another Remove Magic at Vaxall to keep the defenses low and join the minions in taking out Shyressa. We want to make sure our route around the room keeps us in view of Layene. We will also probably need to send another Breach at Shyessa.
With Shyressa down, we circle round the table and start to attack Vaxall. After the intial buffs, Vaxall has one Stoneskin and one AI, which we should have dispelled under the Alacrity. Our primary goal is to keep our health high and keep our action open to respond to Layene's Wish. We keep our action open until we see Layene cast a non-wish spell, then we drink a potion to heal. We can also swap Judgment day to the main hand as it has a chance to restore health. The danger is that JD will trigger a spell defence that makes Vaxall use Anti Magic Ray, but that is nto the end of the world right now as we will not be casting spells for a short bit, and miscast magic does not affect spell triggers. We can also swap into the Cloak of Arcane Immortality for additional HP and regeneration, but we will want to be careful to put the magic damage resistance cloak back on when Vaxall is getting close to 50% HP to play around the Chain Contingency.
Layene fires her wish when we are taking down Vaxall. The wish heals all Twisted Rune members, and under the it she casts these spells multiple times:
The good news is that Vaxall's soften ticks down during the Time Stop, so as long we we have the Ioun Stone equipped we have our physical immunity and magic damage immunity up. Because we have kept our action free, we can fire the spell trigger. The GOI protects us from the arrow spells and magic missile. The PFMW protects us from ADHW and Finger of Death. The ProElectricity protects us from the Chain Lightnings.
These protections will cause Vaxall to want to Anti-Magic Ray us, but he will not fire it until we have already negated the wish spells.
With the wish out of the way, Layene is very unthreatening for the rest of the fight. We make sure to keep our health up with potions and hack Vaxall down with Critical Strikes if we have an opening. He will probably use Anti-Magic Ray on us, but that is not a concern at this point in the fight.
Once it is down we will want to wait out the miscast effect, which lasts five rounds.
After the Wish, Layene can cast five breaches (even if we have nothing worth breaching), each of which comes with a Twisted Golem. The Twisted Golem is 90% resistant to Slashing and Piercing damage, and on hit it dispels Specific, Illusionary and Combination protections. It is easily tanked with our physical immunity.
There is a nice upside - after the wish has fired, we no longer have to worry about moving out of Layene's field of vision.
When the miscast magic wears off, we cast Alacrity, a couple RRoRs, then we dispel Layene and go in for the kill. In theory we could maximize XP and draw out all the Twisted Golems, but we don't really care at this point.
Loot from this fight features:
We reach Mage 40 and get a minor upgrade to our boots. The +3 dexterity won't have any real benefit, but I like to have it anyway.
Part 146: SOA Finale:
Let's finally have our showdown with Irenicus. We've given him months of in-game time to absorb the Tree of Life, let's see how much progress he's made.
Our last level up has also given us a nice and neat 300 HP with all our equipment.
The parasite guardians are unimproved, and we take them down without ceremony.
When the third goes down, we are teleported to fight Irenicus. This version of Irenicus (SUJON) is a 30th level mage who protects himself with SI:Ab.
Irenicus summons four Hardwood Golems that must be killed before he can. The golems are weakest to crushing damage, so we mainhand the FoDaW and offhand Phosphorus. The safe strategy is to run to the left edge of the map. Jon's slower moving speed means that we can set up AI and II:SI:Div before he can start breaching us. Again to be safe, we attack for seven half-rounds and kite for the eigth, using AI instead of PFMW.
Irenicus's defensive buffs only fire when the Golems go down. We can use a fairly standard combination of Alacrity, RRoR and Remove Magic.
We need to watch out for his triple ADHW CC, but he goes down quickly to Critical Strikes. Make sure to use quick loot to grab Irenicus's scrolls before being dragged to hell.
This is hell, and we have five trials to face. I will take them in anticlockwise order, starting from the top left, choosing the good option each time.
Beating Sarevok the nice way earns us +1 Wisdom and Charisma.
Not being tempted by a weapon that is far worse than the ones we already have earns us a bonus of 2 to all our Saving Throws.
This one is awkward. Doing the evil path sets our alignment to Evil, which will probably mess with content later on. Doing the good path will cost us two maximum hitpoints and a point of dexterity (plus some XP that we don't really care about). The evil tear reward is 2 AC which we don't care about, the good reward is 10 magic resistance, which is very nice.
In previous versions of the game it was possible to use Spell Immunity to negate the downsides, or to use polymorph effects into a larger creature to clip through the door. Unfortunately we cannot do that, and so we have to do it the hard way. 1 DEX and 2 HP for 10 MR is a good deal any day, but it's not as sweet as we could otherwise make it.
We turn down the cloak in the test of fear. Right now our static save vs spell is -14, we have very little to fear. We become immune to +1 weapons or less.
Finally, we choose to be nice to the dragon for 20 Fire, Cold and Electrical Resistance.
We summon our minions and set up a CC of II, PFMW and ProFire on ourself on enemy seen. Let's do the final battle.
Slayer Irenicus (HELLJON who turns into HELLSLAY) is a level 36/30 Fighter/Mage. He has 75% physical immunity and protects himself with SI:Ab and Spell Turning. He also has a CC of triple ADHW to watch out for.
He has four minions - a Death Lord, a Noble Marilith, a Balor and an Elemental Golem. Fortunately, none of them need to be dead to take him out. Our CC fires at the start of the combat, so we fire Remove Magic and SI:Div to ensure we are fully protected. We will want to have circlet equipped and have prebuffed with Foreknowledge to ensure the insta-cast of SI:Div. If we do not, then it is safer to wait for the initial prebuffs of the enemies to fire (including TS from the Death Lord) before using II and SI:Div.
We will need to take out each minion before taking out Slayer Jon.
The second action is to cast Alacrity. Under alacrity we can:
Slay Irenicus likes to jump around the map a lot, which is convenient for us as it means that we do not have to worry about him casting an annoying spell at an awkward time.
The Death Lord is the target with highest ratio of threat to squishiness, followed by the Balor. THe Noble Marilith and Abyssal Escorts are next, as they can launch a Breach at an awkward time if we let our illusions drop, and they have strong arcane protections. The Elemental Golem is the least threatening of the minions, as there is nothing that any of the golems can do to us if we choose to hide behind a Hardiness.
When the Alacrity Fades we will have to be careful about a golem hit dispelling our illusions. We will likely find ourselves prioritizing the Elemental Golem and minor golems just after the Noble Marilith and just before the Abyssal Escorts.
When it's just us and Slayer Irenicus left, it's a matter of countering his Stoneskins and PFMWs with our Breaches and Remove Magics. There's little he can do to harm us (other than his ADHW Chain Contingency), so we can relax a bit on our own defences.
Also, be sure to pick up the loot from the minions via the quick loot menu.
He has five PFMW and 4 stoneskins, not counting his initial buffs. Once the are all down, he is weak to Critical Strike.
It can take a while for Irenicus's death cutscene to fire - his HP needs to be on exactly 1 when his checks, and his rapid regeneration means that it the script checking may happen to miss it a lot.
When Irenicus goes down, Ellesime congratulates us and we are officialyl done with SOA.
We are in TOB now, and we are heading into uncharted territory for me - my previous IA playthroughts have gotten to late SOA, but have never done TOB.
The next few parts are going to be extremely linear. The fights that I anticipate will be problematic are:
We rest up, talk to the Spirit Heads, and are told that someone nasty is coming. We prebuff with II and SI:Div.
Our enemies appear. We have to deal with:
We also get up to nine Skeleton Grandlords that appear in nine second intervals b the area script.
Our first action is to cast PFMW, and our second is to cast Alacrity. Under Alacrity, we RRoR the mage twice, dispel everyone, and use our instacast damaging spells to take out the Druid. Each of them needs two Lower Resistances before we start launching the spells.
With the casters down, the fight is trivial - we can sit on our hardiness immunity, and take no physical damage from the enemies. Illasera has defensive scrolls, but nothing offsensive. She has stoneskins and AI scrolls, and her initial protections cannot be remvoed by Breach and Remove Magic (though refreshes can), so actually taking her out may be a long process, but not a dangerous one.
Unique loot from this fight:
With the battle over, we are teleported to the Pocket Plane and greeted by the Solar. We revive Sarevok and choose not to have him join the party.
The first Pocket Plane challenge is similarly trivial with us under Hardiness-induced physical immunity.
Part 148: Saradush:
We leave the Pocket Plane and make our way to Saradush. The initial fight when we land is unimproved.
We agree to confront Gromnir.
We confront the soldiers who are harassing the elves, then talk to the priestess in the temple to arrange for refuge for them. We also get the key to the prison from her.
Lazarus wants hsi spellbook. We talk to Squip, then have a bit of back and forth between Lazarus and Hectan until we have access to Lazarus's shop.
The only unique item he sells is the Golden Ioun Stone.
We run into Viekag again. Casting Spook on him gives a bit of XP and teleports him away, hopefully to safety.
We head to the Militia Headquarters and watch a trial going on.
The captain tells us to talk to Mateo. Mateo tells us to talk to the countess. The countess tells us to talk to Kiser. Kiser tells us to confront Errard. Errard sends us back to Kiser. Kiser and his goons are unimproved.
Notable loot includes the Starfall Ore and the Shakti Figurine.
We head into the prison. There are a few minor vampirse, but they are barely a speedbump. We make sure we have Elven Holy Water (purchaseable from the temple) to finish the spirit's mini quest and get the Bronze Ioun Stone.
Further in, behind a door that needs Knock, we meet Phlydian. She has a name, and summons a large number of other vampires, but has no way to hurt us or to resist being hacked apart.
We storm the castle, facing enemies who can do nothing to us. In theory they drop a huge amount of sellables, but we are beyond the pont where we care about gold. We do find Fflar's scabbard.
Once again, we storm the main castle level. The mages here are like all the other ones in Saradush, and are blown apart by a single remove magic.
Gromir has some crazy theories about Melissan that are definitely crackpot and false. Our prebuffs before heading up the stairs are II, SI:Div and PFMW (cast just before going up the stairs). We will have to fight:
Karun can be dealt with by a single Remove Magic. The Ancestor we have to be a bit careful about, as it dispels illusions on hit. The Ancestor has 90% physical damage resistance and Gromnir has 55 (95 with Hardiness, which he has three of). The other foes don't matter.
Our first action is to cast Alacrity. The PFMW we cast before going up the stairs should still be active, which will protect us from weapons. Under the alacrity we:
- Refresh PFMW
- RRoR the Battle Mage a couple times
- Remove Battle Mage
- LMR the Battle Mage twice
- If the dispel has not hit, wait a couple ticks so it does hit while moving towards Karun
- Blast away the Battle Mage with Acid Arrows (Karun is immune to non-physical damage, and 75% resistant to physical damage)
- Activate HLA
- Take out the Il-Khan Ancestor
Karun's prebuffs include Alacrity which means he can output a large number of spells but cannot hurt us with any of them. Karun is also immune to Remove Magic, which means we have no way of getting past hsi defences. He likes to cast ADHW, but we can negate that with gear.The Il-khan ancestor takes couple PFMWs to take out, but once it is down then we are completely safe from Karun and we can take out the other minor foes. Although we can get physical immunity with Hardiness, that won'y be enough for this fight - Gromnir does large amounts of Cold Damage and can sometimes stun us on hit (I think due to his HLAs).
Even if we the Ancestor does hit us and dispel our illusions, that is not a major problem. WIth the battle mage, the only foe that can get rid of a PFMW is Karun using Breach. Karun only has seven breaches, and after his initial Alacrity (which he refreshes once) he sticks to one spell per round, so we can just refresh PFMW every time he breaches us and he will run out.
When it is just Gromnir and Karun left, we put up a ProCold or ProEnergy and start hitting Karun. If he puts up PFMW or AI, we entertain ourselves by hitting Gromnir instead.
Our SI:Div may run out, which will promp Karun to start casting a Divination spell (TS), but we can just recast SI:Div in response using our faster cast time.
Under Hardiness, Gromnir has 95% physical damage resistance and is immune to Breach. The most effective way of damaging him is to mainhand the FoDaW, as the extra damage ticks work favourable with damage rounding.
Melissan appears when the fight is over, and sets us off on our quest to kill Yaga-Shura.
Notable loot includes:
I've decided to stop leading each part with a character record update. My primary motivation was so people who are using this playthrough as a guide can see if they are keeping on track with me for XP, and to know how much XP is available in each part. Since we're at the point where XP doesn't matter anymore, I'll save one picture per part.
Will we get a break down on IA Demogorgon? Regardless if you do it or not.
I have prioritized completionism over reload safety so far, because I figure that a no-reloader can easily ignore the content that I consider not reload safe, and the completionist will appreciate the presence of the extra material.
I'll probably do a bit of probing just before the EDE, but don't get your hopes up. Solo play forces us into a slower, tankier approach to encounters than party play does, and the "Lower Fire Resistance" (and similar elemental debuffs) are a pretty hard counter to that - our conterplay is either to burst the enemy down (in the case of the Ancient Dragon, which wasn't a very consistent fight) or to try to outlast (in the case of Firkraag, which only works for a specific subset of those fights).
The Demogorgon fight is against half a dozen significant enemies, and at least three of those are very fast and loose with Lower Fire Resistance. For a party where the lowered resistances are spread out and vulnerable targets can be removed from attention that might be possible, but as a solo character that is a very nasty situation to try to get out of. I might do a scenario of "What if we could save against Lower Fire Resistance", which given the saves we are working with is essentailly "What if we didn't worry about Lower Fire Resistance", but it wouldn't be particularly useful for players unless they are willing to do the same changes on their end.
I'll definitely give a breakdown of some sorts, at least to say why it is impossible if nothing else.
I may also give a breakdown of the item upgrades available in the game. There is an unfortunate pattern in IA - major items are only available when they are useless. For example, the Dragon Lord halberd gives immunity to dragon abiliies (in particular red dragon abilities), but we cannot obtain it until we have beaten the most tricky dragon in the game (including every red dragon other than Saladrex). IA item upgrades are a trade off between how difficult are the fights that provide material and how many fights the resulting item will be useful for.
We use the Pocket Plane to head to the North Forest.
The only foes here are non-threatening warriors.
The merchant Karthis is the first merchant in the game who sells generic +3 items. These are a big deal in IA, as many upgraded items require generic +3 weapons, which consume Scrolls of Permanency.
Heading to the Forest of Mire, we run into an apparation of Gorion. The resulting fight is against some mist enemies - previously we would be careful to use AI instead of PFMW here,but since the Helltrials that is not a worry for us.
Heading into the temple, we meet some skeletons that pose no real threat.
Within the temple, we find Nyalee. She sends us to find both hearts.
In the Marching Mountains, we want to watch out for a triple Elemental Golem group. As long we we have enough PFMWs available these are an easy encounter. We also want to use the FoDaW for the bleed triggers (though the concept of a golem bleeding doesn't quite pan out in my head). They are not worth any XP or loot.
In this map we can also find some unusual enemies. These guys are apparently bhaalspawn as well.
The lair is mostly filled with Fire Giants, who are not a major threat, but there are a couple Elite Fire Giants. We fought one of these ages ago i the WK Chromatic Demon level. As long as we have a few PFMWs available, it is not a major threat.
Notable loot from this map includes the Belt of Fire Giant Strength and the Psion's Blade.
In the next level, we run into Berenn. He summons an elemental golem as backup and we need to watch out for his Implosion, which inflicts saveless hold for a round. He drops a Scroll of Permanency and the Balor's Claw.
Berenn and some Elite Fire Giants are the guards for Yaga-Shura's heart.
Imix needs to be killed as well as Berenn for us to be able to leave this map. Imix can use Lower Fire Resistance, so we will take a bit of damage from the undispellable fireshield, but with only 75% physical damage resistance, Imix will die before we do.
Alternatively, Imix can be taken out with damaging spells like Acid Arrow once we have used LMR enough to get over the 100% MR. Imix drops the Amulet of the Master Harper and the Ravager.
Nearby chests give us a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, a Scroll of Memory Boosting, a Bag of Plenty and Nyalee's Heart.
Returning to the Forest of Mir, we have to fight a horde of skeletons. We have twenty waves to fight that get summoned at three round intervals. The first nineteen waves are Skeleton Lords, and the last is four Skeleton Grandlords. We can do nothing to us while we are under Hardiness, however. There is no XP or Items from the skeleton horde, but there is a bit of a reward for beating the whole thing - some XP, four potions of Barbarian Essence and four potions of Magic Shielding.
Nyalee is a level 28 Druid. Every three rounds she summons a Whisper Spider, a Killer Spider and a Spirit Spider, as well as some minor initial summons.
Fortunately, we can just dispel her and kill her as she only has 60% physical resistance, and under Hardiness the enemies do nothing to us. She drops the Druid's Ring and the Cleric's Staff.
Part 150: Yaga-Shura:
We head to the siege camp and start to take out Yaga-Shura's men. Some of the army will start spawning when we cross the bridge but before we see Yaga-Shura, I like to take the time to clear them out. There are 35 total that can spawn, controlled by MAXSPAWN in AR5203
We make sure we have set up PFMW, II, SI:Div with out action free before we first hurt Yaga-Shura. We also equip the Ring of Fire Resistance and the Helm of Brilliance for fire damage immunity, and we can optionally drink two of our eighteen Barbarian Essence for physical immunity, but we will want to still have PFMWs up to protect against the unconciousness and knockback that the fire giants inflict.
The scripts indicate that Yaga-Shura should be back in three minutes, but in practice it is much less. In the mean time, we will have to deal with a number of Elite Fire Giants, Elite Bodyguards (lever 31/25 Fighter/Mages), and a a bunch of ignorables. In total there are three Elite Bodyguards and four Elite Fire Giants (though I often find that two of the Elite Fire Giants spawn away from the fight and don't join in).
In theory we can take out Yaga-Shura to stop the reinforcements early, but in practice he is too sturdy for that.
When all three Elite Bodyguards have appeared, we take them out with Alacrity. They each need three RRoRs before being dispelled, but we are not using out 7th level spells for anything else in this fight. Once dispelled, they are very weak to damaging spells.
Yaga-Shura has 340HP, 90% slashing and piercing resistance, and 95% crushing resistance. He uses his only Hardiness at 75% hitpoints and has quite a few healing potions. His attacks has no way of getting damage past our defences immunity, but Yaga-Shura and the Elite Fire Giants all have a 30% chance to knock us unconcious for half a round on hit, so we will want to protect with PFMW.
The Elite Fire Giants have 65% physical immunityand 270HP, and also have a lot of potions. We don't need to take them out before Yaga-Shura, but I like to do it for safety.
The Assassins don't pose much of a threat, but they have Hardinesses that make them annoying to take out. Since they use the Hardinesses as soon as they are on less than 100% hitpoints, I like to tap them a few times over the course of the entire fight to make them use it, then attack them later on when the Hardiness has worn off.
The final showdown with Yaga-Shura is long but not difficult. Although he is more resistant to crushing damage than the others, the best weapon is the FoDaW, as he will have to roll a 9 or better to save vs the bleed, and the rounding works favourably for us.
With Yaga-Shura down, we are brought into the pocket plane to finally meet our mother.
We return to the battlefield and loot the place, retrieving the Runehammer, Shuruppak's Plate, the Shield of the Order, Blood of a Greater Bhaalspawn, a Scroll of Permanency, and three Barbarian Essences.
Melissan makes an appearance, tells us about Saradush, and gives us the map marker for Amekthran.
We do the second pocket plane challenge. We fight Othala, Semaj, Angelo and Tamoko in a very easy fight.
Part 151: Oasis and Amkethran
In order to go to Amekthran, we first need to get to the Oasis. This is an area with a pretty big fight. in it. We have to fight:
We prepare our spells. We put II and PFMW in a Spell Trigger, and Foreknowledge in a CC on enemy seen. When we arrive we spend our first action using the Spell Trigger and backing it up with SI:Div, we stand next to one of the battlemages, and we spend our second action casting Alacrity.
Under Alacrity, we cast Triple RRoR and a Remove Magic at each of the battlemages. We then LMR the far battlemage three times, wait for the projectiles to hit the far mage (as we are instacasting), and unload our spellbook of damaging spells on the far one, and take out the near one in melee.
With the mages down, there is now no way for the enemies to get around our hardiness-induced phsical immunity. We start the long but safe process of taking out enough Gem Golems to be able to move around a bit, then take out the priests, then take out the rest of the golems. The only way this can go wrong is if we have spent our actions on Critical Strikes when Hardiness runs out and we cannot refresh it or get interrupted when refreshing.
Jamis is an enemy that is not threatening, but is exceptionally hardy. He is immune to Breach, and has six Hardinesses that he wil use at 90% hitpoints. While under Hardiness, he has 95% resistance to slashing, and complete immunity to all other damage types. He also has four potions of healing and heals 3 hitpoints per second (doubled to 6 per second since he is under permanent Improved Haste), which means that we cannot outpace his regeneration while he is under Hardiness. We therefore have to just keep hitting him to wait out all six Hardinesses while not being in any significant danger.
The notable loot is The Answerer and a Scroll of Permanency.
We have finally made it to Amkethran, the final settlement of the game.
We ask Captain Erelon some annoying questions to start a fight that we loot the Darkfire Bow from.
We protect the Priest of Waukeen from a monk and donate some gold to get the Oaken Ring.
There is one quest in Amkethran. Marlowe tells us that he has been hunted by the mage Vongoethe, who has stolen the soul of his daughter Malla.
Vongoethe reveals that he made a deal with Marlowe. The best result is to bring Marlowe along, get the soul stone from the lich, and at the last minute go back on our deal and kill the lich. It's a pretty easy fight for us.
The keen-eyed among you may notice that I have the symbol for a level up that I have not taken yet. This would be bringing us to level 41 Mage. Similarly to how level 41 Fighter removes the APR from proficiencies and fighter levels, hitting mage 41 removes our spellcasting, so I am not going to be hitting that level up button.
We have a choice here - Sendai or Abazigal. We'll start with Sendai.
The fight that in the clearing is with a Hive Mother, but we fought one of those in WK and we know how to beat them.
The first level is easy - the most dangerous enemies are a few mutated spiders.
The drow barracks contains Thelynn'ss, a ghost spider, and a bunch of draw. This fight is easy - the only way they can get round our PFMW or Hardiness is a single mage with limited breaches.
We get the Amulet of Cheetah Speed and a Permanency Scroll.
The North Tunnels are full of slaves. The slaves are unimproved and ignoreable. The slavemaster has 75% physical resistance and summons some slave spirits, but there is no foe on the map that can get past our PFMW or hardinnesses. We can lot a Manual of Elaboration.
The south tunnels contain a very large number of mutated spiders.
Lashar'ra is the boss of this area. She summons Ghost Spiders and uses a few minor defensive spells, but is very fragile and cannot negate our protections. She inflicts a saveless poison of 16 damage per second for 4 seconds, but the Ring of Gaxx gives us immunity. She drops a Permanency scroll.
The next area contains minor spider and drow encounters. These were doable without trouble when we were in the Underdark.
For the Odamaron fight, we protect ourselves with II, SI:Div and PFMW. We have to deal with Skeleton Grandlords and Bone Devils as well as the lich. We get the Eye of Tyr and the Heart of the Damned.
Diaytha challenges us to kill Ogremoch. Ogremoch is an Earth Elemental with five stoneskins and, 95% resistance to Crushing and Piercing, and slashing immunity. Ogremoch removes specific and illusionary protections on hit, so we can just use Hardiness and the FoDaW.
The actual Diaytha fight is very much about the Hive Mother and not the rest of the foes.
Egeissag is alongside my favourite beholder. We agree to single combat and have a straightforward fight of triple RRoR into breach. We get rewarded with the Bowstring of Gond.
The illithid area is unimproved, and the last fight before Sendai herself.
We rest up, prebuff with II and SI:Div, and start the Sendai fight. We will have to face, in order:
Once all of these are dead, we have five foes that appear at once that we have to beat:
Sendai herself has 50% physical resistance. We need to kill all the other enemies before we can take her out. Her weapon inflicts a saveless poison (that we don't care about), and gives us -1 THAC0 and -10 crushing damage resistance for ten rounds.
We go around killing the statues. The second and the fourth are the only ones that can slow us down, as they have arcane protections. Each time we destroy a statue two drow appear, but they are not threatening enough to be worth taking out.
When the last statue is down, the final wave of foes gets summoned.
The most worrying of the foes is Sendai, who can lower our crushing damage resistance. We position ourselves on the stairs of one of the status platforms, so we do not get surrounded and we are only being attacked by one or two enemies at the same time, preferably not Sendai. We can use items, Barbarian Essences and Hardiness to gain immunity to Fire, Magic and Crushing damage, and take out the non-Sendai Enemies. The unnamed drow we will want to keep alive if possible, as they body block the big foes from getting to us.
We main hand the FoDaW for Sendai's pet, and the JD sword for all other foes. This is a very long battle, and over the duration of it we will exhaust all the enemy caster spells (inclduing breaches as the JD sword casts Stoneskin and PFMW). Even if the Barbarian Essences start to run out due to the long fight time, we can swap into Hardinesses without any worries.
Once the golems and the pet are down, we clear out the arena and take on Sendai. She has five Stoneskins (one contingency) and five PFMWs that she protects herself with. Under our own PFMWs, she cannot hurt us. If she does start to hurt us, we can always kite her around the map for ten rounds waiting for the crushing damage debuff to wear off.
Sendai dies and we pick up the Ring of Free Action, Wong Fei's Ioun Stone, an the Studded Leather of Thorns.
The Solar tells us that we will try to stop Aluando's prophecy from coming true.
We fight our slayer reflection in an unimproved fight.
Part 153: Abazigal's Lair:
As we arrive at Abazigal's Lair, we are immediately forced next to Draconis and into a conversation with him.
Draconis is a level 39/31 Fighter/Mage. He is immune to Remove Magic and Dispel Magic, so we need to use Breach to negate his defences. He starts with one PFMW and will refresh it five times, so we just kite him around until we have waited out all six PFMWs.
While kiting, we want to make sure that we have equipped our Magic Damage immunity equipment.
He casts spells in the following order:
- Larloch's Interrupter
- Remove Magic
- Spell trigger of triple LMR
- Remove Magic
- Spell Sequencer of ignoreable spells
- Wish combo of Magic, Acid Fire and Lightning damage
Our counterplay is to put in our own spell triger ProFire, ProAcid and ProElectricity. We fire it after he fires his Spell Sequencer.When we have waited out all the PFMWs, we set up II, SI:Ab and PFMW then start taking out Draconis.
When Draconis gets to 1HP, he starts a conversation and transforms into Dragon form. Annoyingly, he retails his immunity to Remove Magic.
We will probably want to run to the edge of the map, rest up at Amkethran, and return. He has access to Lower Acid Resistance, which he can use up to nine times. He also has access to Greater Doom (usable every two rounds) and a CC of triple ADHW.
His starting buffs include a stoneskin and he will refresh it three times by itself (controlled by IADRAC13 going up to 3). He also has four PFMWs that he uses when not on full health and out of stoneskins (controlled by IADRAC13 going up to 7) and a spell trigger of Stoneskin and PFMW that he fires as the end.
As part of our Amekthran preparation, we set up a CC of Foreknowledge, PFMW and ProAcid on enemy seen. We also prepare a load of breaches in our 5th level spell slots.
We cast II and SI:Div when we first enter the map, and Alacrity when we see Draconis. With Foreknowledge and all our casting time gear, we can instacast all our important spells. We fire three of four RRoRs to get rid of his spell shields and the like, then breach, activate HLAs and start to go in.
As a dragon, Draconis has permanent Alacrity, which means that he will refresh his Stoneskins and PFMWs as soon as he gets breached. We respond with Breaching as soon as the defenses are set up. In the span of the Alacrity, we will breach him nine times (we will probably want to put another breach in a Spell Trigger), and then we can hack him to bits under Critical Strike without him being able to do anything.
Draconis goes down quickly once he has been fully breached. He may get in a Lower Acid Resistance and a breath in that time, but it is not enough damage to be threatening.
He drops a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, and Tzu-Zan's Bracers.
All the monsters we fight inside are unimproved.
We use the leftmost pool to get the breath potion, then the rightmost pool to get the rope from the monk.
We free some junior adventurers and outsource some adventuring.
Abazigal's lair is a lot shorter then Sendai's Enclave. Let's do the big Abazigal fight.
We can be careful and circle round the map to take out the Frost Salamanders to clear up the arena before Abazigal. To make sure we don't trigger Abazigal we will want to get them just in vision, then wait for them to come to us to kill them.
We summon the team, prebuff with II, ProCold, SI:Div and Foreknowledge, and head in to Abazigal.
Human Abazigal's prebuffs are based around SI:Div. Since he is a level 29/30 Fighter/Mage, we wait for him to use his action, then blow away his defences, and pile on with the minions. In less then a round he will be taken down to his transformation zone, 25% health.
When he transforms, he will throw everyone back, including his own minions. We will run back in and cast Alacrity.
We have Othala hang out just outside the vision of Abazigal, and command the minions to head towards him.
Abazigal has a script that says when he first seens an enemy after transforming into dragon form, he will fire his prebuffs, do a map-wide spell protection removal (which interrupts casting, quite annoyingly), and summon an Ultra Golem and an Ice Golem. Once we see this happens, we get Othala to cast Alacrity while the minions run to the other side of the map to try to draw away the golems.
With Alacrity up, we do a similar process for Abazigal that we did for Draconis - three or four RRoRs (might as well err on the side of caution, we can instacast them), then Breach/Remove Magic (5 PFMW, 4 Stoneskin), then activate HLAs and go in for the kill.
We can also use LMR and Acid Arrow or flame spells to get more instacast damage in, but we want to avoid Flame Arrow as it competes for spell slots with Remove Magic.
Abazigal goes down in two or three rounds of combat. He drops the last Flail Head, the Blue Dragon Scales, a Manual of Elaboration, a Permanency Scroll, a Scroll of Spell Shield and Gram the Sword of Grief. The golems disappear when Abazigal goes down.
We have another meeting with the Solar. Yaga-Shura's spirit tells us that we still need to take out Balthazar.
We have a cameo from Elminster. He points us towards Saemon Havarian.
Returning to the pocket plane, we have a divine encounter with Cyric. The Favoured of Cyric are very easy to take out.
The only table that goes to "level 41" is the "experience to next level", to provide the illusion that there's still something out there. If you tweak the numbers so you can actually take that level, the illusion breaks.
Bonus attacks from proficiencies and warrior levels are a bit more mysterious, but experimentation (and looking up the code for the cdtweaks cap remover component) tells me that depends on WSPATCK.2da. I added a column to test, and suddenly that worked at level 41.
All of these .2da files are easy to edit; they're in a human-readable plain-text format, so any old text editor can mess with them if they've already been extracted. If they're still biffed up, you need something like NI to open them up and make changes.
Tables that need to be extended if you want to work with characters over level 40:
BACKSTAB.2da, CRIPPSTR.2da, SNEAKATT.2da - backstabs and their sneak attack replacements.
CLAB*.2da - kit abilities. Not essential; if you don't do anything here, it just means you don't get anything new for those levels like more uses of Set Snare.
HP*.2da (* = BARB, DD, MONK, PRS, ROG, WAR, WIZ, CM, CT, FC, FM, FMT, FT, MT) - hit point rolls, flat bonuses, and whether to grant a CON bonus. The multiclass tables are only relevant for that last part, as they defer to the single-class tables for the first two.
LAYHANDS.2da - Lay on Hands, for paladins and monks.
LVLMODWM.2da - random level adjustments for wild mage spells.
MONKFIST.2da - monk unarmed attacks.
MXSPL*.2da (* = BRD, DD, DRU, PAL, PRS, RAN, SHM, SRC, WIZ) - base spell slots.
RAISDEAD.2da - temple Raise Dead prices.
SPL*KN.2da (* = SRC, SHM) - spells known for sorcerers and shamans. Like the CLABs, not extending this just means you don't get anything new.
SAVE*.2da (* = MONK, PRS, ROG, WAR, WIZ) - base saves.
THAC0.2da - base THAC0.
XPBONUS.2da - bonus XP for thieving abilities. Scroll XP is also on this table, but that runs on spell level rather than character level.
XPLEVEL.2da - required XP to reach any given level.
WSPATCK.2da - Apparently, warrior bonus attacks. Not that I understand how this one works, but just copying existing columns is easy.
So, what does being a level 41 fighter and thief do to you? Base THAC0 zero instead of zero - no change. Base saves 0/0/0/0/0 instead of 3/3/4/4/4 - a substantial undeserved bonus. No bonus attacks from warrior levels or specialization - a serious drawback. No backstabs - a drawback, though not one that seems to be relevant to the encounters you're focusing on.
Some parts will automatically change if you load a save after modifying those .2da files. Others are only checked after a level-up. You may have to de-level and re-level to fully correct your character's stats.
If I wasn't so close to the end of the game I would delevel and relevel, but since it's just one encounter left I'll leave it as it is. I've already tweaked for the APR, and the save bonus doesn't have any overall effect, as we are in the position where we are comfortably making any save we encounter, even with the bonus.
Part 154: Balthazar:
We return to Amkethran. We can fight some minor enemies outside the monastery front gates, but cannot get in.
We run into Saemon in the smuggler's cave. He agrees to smuggle us in.
True to form, Saemon is a betrayer, but this time it's betraying someone else.
We head in and have our showdown with the one other Bhaalspawn left alive.
Balthazar is a 30th level monk with no physical damage resistances, no on-hit effects, and no way to respond to our physical immunity under Hardiness. This is a short and brutal fight. He doesn't even drop any significant loot.
We are drawn into the pocket plane, and the big twist villain is revealed.
We are careful not to take on the Ravager, however, as that will lock us into the Epic Divine Encounter.
Demogorgon Analysis:
Demogorgon has five minions. Let's consider each of them in clockwise order, starting from the top right.
Belcheresk is a level 35 Mage. It can use Greater Doom every two rounds and Lower Fire Resistance every round.
Archpriest Nulonga is a level 36 Sorcerer. It has no on-hit abilities. It has a spell trigger of triple Improved Fireball for a total of 36d6 damage with no save.
Saint Kargoth is a level 32/30 Fighter/Mage. His weapon inflicts an unsaveable cumulative -2 to THAC0. He can use Lower Fire Resistance every round.
Rozvankee is a level 37/31/38 FMT. It disables specific protections and illusionary protections on hit. Every five rounds, he summons three Vargouilles, which deal acid damage and fire acid arrows.
Exarch Kazuul is a level 30 Fighter. His weapon inflicts saveless stun and saveless -10 fire damage resistance. He has an aura that inflicts Greater Malison on the whole party.
Finally, Demogorgon. Demogorgon is a level 40 Tanar'ri. Its weapon inflicts saveless disease. It summons Abyssal Escorts every six rounds. It uses Lower Fire Resistance every round. All the others need to be killed before Demogorgon is killed.
I've tried it a few times, and with no success - we just cannot take out the enemies before our fire resistance gets completely destroyed and we get bombarded with fire spells. Even if we could, Belcheresk using Greater Doom means that we cannot survive a long fight.
Epic Divine Encounter Analysis:
I've done some analysis, trying to figure out a way to beat the EDE. In a bit of a surprise, I think I have found a way, and as a bit of a surprise it involves beating Saladrex.
Saladrex is a red dragon, which is already not an easy target, but he has a particularly annoying gimmick - three seconds after we enter his arena, we are hit with Dead Magic, and are unable to cast any spells.
The most notable part of his defences are that he has six stoneskins and four PFMW. Unlike other dragons, he has offensive uses for his contingency (triple ADHW) and spell trigger (Lower Resistance).
While under Dead Magic, our arcane spell fail, but we can still use innate abilities. We set up our prepared spells and make sure to rest three times afterwards so twenty four in-game hours have passed. The minor sequencer is there so we can trigger the contingency when we want.
We prebuff before heading into Saladrex's arena with Giant Strength, ProFire, II, SI:Div, Foreknowledge and Alacrity. We also equip the Amulet of Cheetah Speed. We make sure that Foreknowledge is cast as close to the area change as possible.
When we see Saladrex, we swap our amulet back. Dead magic will have probably hit at this point, but if not we can try to fire our memorized Remove Magics in a short area around him, preferably at a range of distances so they will splash onto him over a range of times.
His prebuffs include one Stoneskin, so we will need to dispel him five times. This is why we waited - Chain Contingency is not cast like other spells, so we can activate it under Dead Magic to get more Remove Magics out. After each dispel he will refresh both Stoneskin and PFMW in quick succession, so we should be able to get rid of one of each with each dispel.
He is quite squishy, especially when compared with the other dragons we have fought. Loot from him includes:
Part 156: Epic Divine Encounter
Between us and the victory screen, there are two vanilla encounters - the Ravager and Mellisan. However, IA has added a third encounter between them - the Rakshasa Prince.
On paper his stats don't look too difficult, however let's consider his script:
The really dangerous part about him is his weapon. It does:
The Supreme Golem is like an Elemental Golem turned up to 11. It has slow (for IA) regeneration, and when we hit it it hits back with "Elemental Backlash" that does a bti of Acid, Cold, Fire and Electricity damage. When it hits us, it htis us with those same four damage types as well as lowering our resistance against those four damage types by 10 for ten rounds. Ultra Golems we have seen before.
The Supreme Golem summons up to nine Elemental Golems, while the Ultra Golems each summon up to six Amber Golems. However, the golem summoning comes with an important condition that we have not worked with much before - they need a PC to be visible before any summoning can be done. They also have another notable aspect - unlike other golems of their kind, these do not use Purge Magic (presumeably the Universal Purge Magic of the Rakshasa Prince is considered enough for this fight).
This gives us the following ways of having our elemental damage reduced:
Let's break down each of the items that we have equipped and why:
- Robe of Elemental Resistace: Permanent 75% resistant to Fire, Cold and Electricity
- Paws of the Furious Cat: +1 APR
- Helm of the Rock: 25% Fire, Cold, Acid and Electricity damage resistance
- Lord of the Underworld: 30% Magic Damage Resistance
- Dragon Lord: Prevents Lower Fire Resistance
- Improved Ring of Gaxx: Best generic ring, provides regeneration
- Ring of Protection + 2: The best ring that can be worn with the Ring of Gaxx
- Cloak of Magic Shielding: 50% Magic Damage Resistance
- Improved Boots of the Ranger Lord: Improved Haste
- Best of Inertial Barrier: 25% Magic Damage Resistance
This means that when we have drunk five Barbarian Essence potions, we will be immune to all forms of damage except for the bits of Acid Damage from the Supreme Golems's elemental backlash. We can use ProAcid or ProEnergy to protect from that as well. We could also wear the Memory of the Apprenti and only engage the Supreme Golem with ProEnergy up.I have had to do a retcon with proficiency points - I have removed 3 points from each of Long Swords and Short Swords, and instead put five in Halberds and one in Two-Handed weapons. This will not have significantly affected our previous battles, as Flails and Morning Stars have been our primary weapon type for pretty much the entire game.
We load up our fourth level spell slots with Wizard Eye, our fifth level spell slots with ProAcid, our sixth level spell slots with Giant Strength, our eigth level spell slots with ProEnergy and our ninth level spell slots with Alacrity.
We take out the Ravager. It is unimproved, but I believe it holds the record for the most HP of a single enemy, at 534. Beating the Ravager also locks us out of leaving the pocket plane until after the EDE.
We summon the minions and leave them in the bottom right corner of the map under the watchful gaze of a Wizard Eye. We prebuff Othala with ProAcid and Giant Strength.
As we approach the exit, we are greeted by a familiar face - Pasha Mahmoud. He got a warning from a divine creature that we were in grave danger, and that we were going to face an immensely powerful enemy in our pocket plane. He tells us that the our enemy will summon three powerful allies that must be killed before the enemy can be defeated.
Shortly afterwards, the aforementioned enemy appears - the Rakshasa Prince. He is a deity of old mythos and is worried that one of use or Melissan will become a new god. He is keen to stop this, and so has decided to kill us first, then Melissan.
The Rakshasa Prince summons his minions - an Ultra Golem in the top left, an Ultar Golem in the bottom right, and the Supreme Golem in the bottom left. We want to draw the Rakshasa Prince (and preferably the Supreme Golem) away from the others.
Lord Wetlander also makes an appearance. He offers his help in the form of four Swanmay Elders for each of the big golems.
Pasha will engage the Ultra Golem in the top left corner. By himself, he can approximately take out an Ultra Golem, but the Swanmay Elders make it pretty sure. Similarly, our minions plus four swanmay elders can take out the Ultra Golem in the bottom right. Since neither of them will ever see Othala, we do not have to worry about Amber Golems. The Supreme Golem unfortunately tends to be too sticky for that.
The Rakshasa Prince doesn't summon the Noble Rakshasas until a while into the battle, so we can easily kite him around this thing in the middle of the map.
After our minions have taken down the first Ultra Golem, we use the Wizard Eye to guide them over to help Pasha. Taking out the Supreme Golem will end up being too much for our supporters to do, however.
When the Noble Rakshasas do spawn (and summon the Horrid Rakshasas with them), we want to position ourself so only Noble and Horrid Rakshasa can hit us. Once we have done this, we are locked in for a very long, slow, but safe fight.
The trick we use here is one that has been in the back pocket since the very first part, but an opportunity has not come up yet. In Baldur's Gate, every weapon has a range, not just ranged weapons. Every single-handed melee weapon has a range of 1, whereas two-handed melee weapons have a range of 2. Pretty much every creature weapon is considered behind the scenes to be single-handed. This means that we can set ourselves in a position where the Rakshasa Prince cannot reach us (due to the minor Rakshasa in the way), but we can reach him. If there are so many minor Rakshasa the he is still beyond our reach, we can start to pick off the second row so he can take their place.
We have to be careful here - it is a small gap to be working with, and if he hits us then we're in a bad way - every nearby Rakshasa will immediately start to cast ADHW on us, and this will probably need a reload.
When the Supreme Golem arrives, taking it out will be our first priority. Our ProAcid/ProElements will likely be dispelled whenever we cast it, so we can instead just drink a potion - we have 8 APR, the backlash does 4-8 damage to us, and our potions heal 40 damage. We can use some Critical Strikes, but I like to save them for the prince.
Our Giant Strength may run out, in which case we will want to refresh it. We will also get the occassional Dragon's Breach proc, which soften up the Elemental Golems a bit and will eventually take them out.
Taking out the Supreme Golem is an extremely long and grindy fight. To err on the side of caution, I like to drink another five Barbarian Essence potions when it gets to Near Death, just in case our earlier potions run out (it's not as if we need to use them for anything else after this fight).
Once the Supreme Golem is down, we repeat the process for the Rakshasa Prince. We don't need to worry about the Elemental Backlash, which is nice. The Prince has extremely good AC, so we will likely want to save our Critical Strikes for this fight, and make sure we are under Giant Strength. We can combine GWW and CS using Alacrity for a drop more DPS. The Prince does not take the double damage from CS, but it is nice to guarantee the hit.
Unfortunately, this is as close as we can get to beating the game. It's painful to come so far and be unable to do it, but the math just doesn't pan out.
We get eight attacks per round with the Halberd. Under Giant Strength we deal 24-33 damage per hit. Factoring the Rakshasa Prince's damage resistances into play, and considering how the rounding works, we therefore deal 7.5 damage per hit. If we land every hit on the Rakshasa Prince (for instance, if we are using Critical Strike), we deal on average 60 damage every round.
The Rakshasa Prince heals for 60 hitpoints every round.
We cannot use any other weapons that might have a higher damage output. We have no way of increasing our damage output with this weapon. If we ever stop using Critical Strike, we need a 12 to hit, bringing our damage output to 27 per round, less than half of what he heals for. We cannot start swapping between the Dragon Lord Halberd and other weapons with higher damage output as being hit by Lower Fire Resistance even once will set our SCRIPTINGSTATE12 to 1, which will lower all our elemental damage resistances to below 100 and make us vulnerable to the Field of Repulse (plus a million ADHWs from the other Rakshasa), and our highest damage output weapon (the FoDaW, which the Rakshasa Prince needs to roll a 6 to avoid the bleeding) does an expected 9.5 damage per hit with 1 better THAC0.
I'll be typing up a big retrospective over the next few days. If there are any questions you have, any choices/game aspects you'd like me to explain, or anything that you would like me to talk about in the retrospective, let me know.
1) I don't understand for which people this mod is aimed. Who is the target of this mod ?
2) Why would I play Improved Anvil over the "vanilla" game with SCS, if I wanted a harder experience ?
3) Am I wrong, or the mod assumes you to play with Nearinfinity open? I don't get how you are supposed to get informations about what you are gonna face if you don't.
4) Are you planning to play the older versions of Improved Anvil?
5) Does Demogorgon drop any loot?
Beside this, these are the impressions I got from the mod:
- There are too many encounters that consists of Golems. Golems, Golems and more Golems.
- It seems like the mod author has felt like he should actually remove exploits (e.g the Nalia fortress) rather than having the player enjoy the game. This has a very limting effect on the choices the player has to do even when playing the stronghold sections.
- The author seems to have a (too strong) preference for Necromancer and Vagrant. I actually share your opinion on the new choices that should be added to the player here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1172292/#Comment_1172292
- The fact that it seems like the author never intended for the mod to be played Solo makes me hesitant to play it - like if the player has to play in the way the author intended rather than the one that is supposed to be most fun (for the player)
- There doesn't seem to be any roleplay options that I would personally like given that there are many new encounters added. An example? No way to ask EdE for a temporary alliance against Amelyssan.. If you think about it, there is no reason he would enter your pocket plane uninvited, given that the Pocket plane is your dominion and you could probably crush him with your thoughts if you wanted.
Thanks for your playthrough. I look forward to reading your thoughts.
2. Would even a secondary party member have helped in any way now that you have got up to this stage? (I know you touched on it earlier that it may be more of a burden)
3. What would the smallest party size in your opinion in order to complete improved anvil and what would the classes be etc.
IA certainly succeeds in limiting caster supremacy, though many would probably say that it goes too far the other way. Is also succeeds in making major fights nontrivial and requiring a variety of approaches.
No, but there is a bit of trial and error involved if you do not. I refer to NearInfinity a lot for two reasons. The first is that I like to start with NearInfinity to form my plans, and the second is that I want to have this LP be useable as a guide, so I want to be as informative as possible about what to watch out for.
I'm not planning to. I'm not sure where you can even get the older versions of IA right now.
Demorgorgon itself does not drop any loot. The minions drop some rare items (eg Boots of Speed), but nothing completely unique. When Demogorgon is beaten, we are rewarded with a Ring of Protection + 4, and each party member gets a bonus based on their class:
- Necromancers and Vagrants get nothing (they are considered to be powerful enough already)
- FMCs and FMTs get 1.2 million XP
- Other multi/duals get 900k XP
- Riskbreakers get 5% physical damage resistance
- Bards/Thieves/Paladins get 0.5 additional APR
- Rangers/Fighters/Monks get an expanded criticial hit range
- Mages/Druids/Clerics/Sorcerers get an increase of 1 to their casting speed
The number of golems is indeed ridiculous. Part of it is that they are intended to be an enemy that spellcasters cannot magic away, part of it is that they are a common minion for other enemies, and part of it is that golems really like to summon other golems.It has mellowed a bit since 6.0, but the range of expected and supported ways of playing the mod is very much reduced compared to vanilla BG2 or other mods. There are pros and cons to this - the obvious con is that the remaining ways of playing might not be appealing to the person playing the game (in which case, don't force yourself), but the biggest pro is that is allows for a much smoother level of challenge for the entire game.
These are some roleplay options, but I glossed over them, and they tend to follow the pattern of "Give up a big item or have a big fight". For example, the Spider Queen appears and will only fight us if we do not hand over the Black Spider Figurine. Similarly, Limak can be avoided by giving up the Memory of the Apprenti or 100k gold.
The Rakshasa Prince at the end explains that he wants to stop the creation of a new god to prove that the Rakshasa pantheon is a legitimate divine pantheon. He also explains that if he kills us outside the pocket plane Melissan will be able to absorb our essence, which is what he wants to avoid.
Solo is mathematically possible, but unviable. We effectively have to deal 1100 damage over 150 rounds, which means that we need to hit with every one of our attacks (about 0.17% chance), then need to deal a least 8.4 damage per hit (we deal 8 with 40% probability and 9 with 10% probability for an overall probability of 0.018% that we will do enough damage), which means that each round of combat has about a 1 in 136k chance of doing enough damage. We will need 150 consecutive such rounds, which means that any given attempt has approximately 1 in 1.18*10^770 chance of succeeding.
For the EDE, I think there would have to be a minimum party size of three - two warriors (who can outpace the regeneration with Critical Strikes) and a mage (to refresh arcane buffs), though going up to three warriors might be needed to make it practical. It's hard to say if a party of three or four would be viable for the whole game, or other encounters might force us up to five or six.
Will you be trying again to beat IA completely?
If you can find a version of v5, then I would recommend that over v6 for solo play.
A (fairly big but probably not complete) list if changes between v5 and v6.5 that makes solo play more difficult:
Final character stats before the EDE:
I'm not sure how the stats screen calculates favourite spell, but I'm skeptical of DUHM being number one - I would expect DUHM to be two or three (since it is used a lot in the early game) and PFMW to be number one. The favourite weapon of Long Sword is probably because I have had two mundane Long Swords equipped in my third and fourth weapon slots since Chateau Irenicus, and it is probably that which is making them count as the favourite weapon, even though they were rarely used. In hindsight they probably should have been mundane flails instead, since there were a few fights where we used mundane weapons when we had more pips in flails than long swords.
The Chapter stats seem to be messed up - just before the final hell fight we had 1122 chapter kills, so I think all of TOB is being grouped with Chapter 7 of SoA. Our average XP per kill is a bit over 8k, which is a bit lower than what I would expect from the sheer number of golems that were fought.
Ways that I could have done this better:
The first is the slaver ship fight, which gives us access to Improved Haste. We could probably make this one better if we were to gain more XP and more levels before taking it on. The biggest way we could gain this needed XP would be to do Pai'na's fight first to gain SI, which will open up Firkraag's Maze and probably some other areas as well where we can get big piles of XP.
The second is Firkraag. There are two big potential ways for improvement - the first is to find a way to reliably trigger Improved Fireball with minions, and the second is to see if it is possible to take him out entirely with summons - I find that the last summons would often get through all the PFMWs and stoneskins. Additional summons spells might help, as more Mordy Swords could better clear the way for the bigger summons. Wish resting is unfortunately not an option for us.
Wish has been changed in IA, and the biggest difference is wishing for rest. It is only available to single class mages, with lowered probability if it has been used in the last 24 in-game hours. When it is used, the user is completely dispelled, and there is a chance that an xp-less Fallen Planetar and Elemental Golem appear (increasing as the number of wish rests in the last 24 hours increases). It therefore cannot be reliably used in the middle of a battle, though it does have a use (that I couldn't use, but someone else might be able to) to summon minions and then use wish rest as part of battle prebuffs (if it fails, we can just try again).
One strategy that I definitely underutilized was blasting under Alacrity. I could have started many fights under Alacrity, emptied the spellbook of things like Magic Missile and Acid Arrow, and then carried on. Even though there are very few encounters that can be completely blown away this way, we can still soften up some big enemies or take out one enemy in a multi-enemy encounter. Similarly for Time Stop, but we gain access to that a lot later.
For item randomizer locations, the only significant one is the Robe of Vecna. Having it on the Ancient Dragon or Layene means that is will end up being one of the last things that are possible in SoA. Having it in the Illithid Hideous means that it will be doable, but almost certainly post-spellhold. Having it on Kaol makes is so much easier, and it means that we will have it available going into spellhold, which is a major boost - not only would the underdark and the challenges within be much easier, it triggers the Limak fight, which gives early access to our first Scroll of Wish.
Solo IAv6 runs in general:
IA 6.0 is definitely harder than both v6.5 and v5, as the anti-solo scripts in 6.0 make it impossible for a character to solo it, even with infinite XP and money. Although v6.5 has been scaled down from v6.0, it is definitely harder than v5. The biggest difference is in the "Lower Elemental Resistnace" abilities, which is why the Demogorgon fight cannot be done solo in v6.5 and the Ancient Dragon fight is not reliable.
On the whole, I found this run quite enjoyable. The level of variance in the challenge that I faced was quite low variance (especially when compared vanilla BG or mods). Furthermore, IA is very good at making encounters that you cannot autopilot and reuse the same strategies for (they still exist, but to a much lesser degree than vanilla BG2 or with other mods).
Unfortunately, the very last battle was not possible. I personally am fairly satisfied with what went on in this fight - although we were ultimately unable to get over the regeneration, to get to that point where that is the only blocker was already a tricky thing to do, and it required us to lean on two strategies (weapon reach and using minions to prevent enemy minion summoning) that the other fights had not required.
The EDE:
The prince was confirmed to have the same regeneration running version 6.0 as he curently has today. The IA changelogs for version 6.0 don't explicitly list the EDE as an area that changes were made, but they do have a non-specific bullet points that could easily include EDE changes for higher regeneration ("The existing tactical challenges are refined and improved further"). The mentions from July 2013 don't frame this as a major feature/change (though it was long after discussions of solo viability had been discarded, everything was being considered from a party context), so either it was the same in v5 or it is a v6 change that was not considered worth making a big deal of.
We have another source of information: The Black Wyrm's Lair forums. The battle reports there are a lot sparser, but we have a lot of them.
We have one thread (http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showtopic=2838) where the prince was described as having a regeneration rate of "4 or 5 hp every second" by panama. We have thetruth and clown having some success with solo strategies. Sikret confirms that the EDE gets harder in v5 (he originally says 4.3, but 4.3 would become 5.0 before it got released), but the golems as described in fight are the same (as least as far as they are described), which does suggest that the regeneration was increased between v4.2 and v5.
Another BWL thread (http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showtopic=5252) from May 2015 describes the prince as having 30HP/round regeneration in May 2015. This run makes reference to items from "The Four mod", which maens that this was with version 6.4 or earlier.
The item that gives the Rakshasa Prince his regeneration has been unchanged since it was first added on version control since it was first added on June 2016 (https://github.com/critto-bg/ImprovedAnvil/blob/master/ImprovedAnvil/resources/items/new/S!rakp.itm).
In total, we have four data points (Saros's v5 solo runs, the G3 thread, the two BWL threads) that leads me to conclude that at least one of the following is true:
Or would doing it all again be that draining since I assume it wouldn't be solo, regardless its been fun to follow along and the detail/break downs have added a lot to that.
If I could find version 5 of IA, I might do the Demogorgon encounter and the EDE (if the regeneration is only 30/round), but I wouldn't do any other encounters.
I also don't think I would do IA with a party - I prefer solo play as it has fewer moving parts. This solo run has been a three month commitment, and I would be unwilling to commit a similar amount of time to run it as a party for an experience that is not that much different. I'd be happy to follow someone else's playthrough, though.
Having played IA for many years I must admit that I lost interest around Conster where you started to become overleveled compared to a party run, and I get more excitement with a lower level party in this mod. Then at the end you really were overleveled, except for the few fights that you cannot do confidently solo.
I have to check if I still have v5 on my pc somewhere but I kind of doubt it. Demogorgon is much much easier there, but I think EDE is still the same as now.
In v5 you will lose out on some useful gear and spells. Would it really be valuable to do this? I'd rather think it would be more value for you if you copy your character as an npc and try to do it with a 2 character party. Enough dps, same tactics, see how it holds up?
Although v5 is missing out on some equipment, the old equipment is definitely an upgrade over v6 - "The Four" items are very strong, Eternal Melody has permanent Alacrity, and rare items (like scrolls of Vocalise) are easier to obtain. I can't think of any challenge that v5 offers that v6 doesn't if the EDE is unchanged.
I might try a party run of IA at some point in the future, but probably nor for a few months at least. There is still active work being done on v7, so when that comes out I will definitely give it a go.
Demogorgon was around v6.3 upgraded. Before that it was also improved beyond vanilla, but I rarely did that fight so I cannot actually recall it anymore. The current version is really really tough.
I am also waiting for v7 to drop because I want to try out either the druid or the shaman kits in IA.
The four was never part of IA, hence I did not consider that, but yes, those items are good. The bard armor with permanent alacrity is also one of these amazing items as well as the grandfather dagger with permanent improved haste. I loved adding thieves and bards in v5 (or actually was v5 where they were patched out?, hmmm). Sadly, no more.