Baeloth Spell Choice

HaHaCharade

I'm torn

I always take Blind as Baeloth's level 1 spell when he goes from level 6 to 7 because... it's a good 1st level spell! However, you can also get him a 25 Charisma easily with the Friends spell. How? One of the two +2 Charisma Cloaks, +1 Charisma Tome (if you don't care about your main having it, which I don't) and then a Friends spell. This helps with purchases but is useless in the field/

Do you take Friends instead of Blind? Or a diff 1st level spell entirely?

What I've been doing is keeping all my Friends scrolls (you get about 20+ sometimes) and you can put them in a quick slot and cast.... so that works too! Just save them when you are dropping a lot of coin. I like this, but still wonder if I should just take Friends instead.

sarevok57

also to note about friends and market prices, once your charisma hits 20, you will gain no further discount on buying goods, the only reason why you would want higher charisma would be if your REP is super low, so then the higher charisma can offset it so you still get the "better" reward options from quests and dialogue choices

so even if your caster's charisma is as low as 14 friends basically gives you the maximum benefit you will ever need from charisma as long as your REP is higher than 4 for "positive" dialogue choices and 20 charisma is the max discount you can get from stores ( although if your REP is below 10, stores prices will increase quite drastically )

jmerry

Also, briefly removing Baeloth from your party is a good way to temporarily increase your reputation in order to improve shopping prices. My run with Dorn as protagonist played "hide the drow" many times.
Naturally, using this prevents you from having him be your "face" for shopping purposes. So much for the utility of Friends.
The other party mage (Xzar) didn't use Friends either, as he only has 10 charisma. Instead, I had Dorn play face - 16 charisma to start, plus tome, cloak and helm for 20.

In that run, I took Sleep as his final level 1 spell; there are a lot of monsters worth using that on, and he has enough single-target level 1 spells already.

HaHaCharade

sarevok57 wrote: »

also to note about friends and market prices, once your charisma hits 20, you will gain no further discount on buying goods, the only reason why you would want higher charisma would be if your REP is super low, so then the higher charisma can offset it so you still get the "better" reward options from quests and dialogue choices

so even if your caster's charisma is as low as 14 friends basically gives you the maximum benefit you will ever need from charisma as long as your REP is higher than 4 for "positive" dialogue choices and 20 charisma is the max discount you can get from stores ( although if your REP is below 10, stores prices will increase quite drastically )

I'm often off-setting less than desirable charisma with an evil party.

HaHaCharade

jmerry wrote: »

Also, briefly removing Baeloth from your party is a good way to temporarily increase your reputation in order to improve shopping prices. My run with Dorn as protagonist played "hide the drow" many times.
Naturally, using this prevents you from having him be your "face" for shopping purposes. So much for the utility of Friends.
The other party mage (Xzar) didn't use Friends either, as he only has 10 charisma. Instead, I had Dorn play face - 16 charisma to start, plus tome, cloak and helm for 20.

In that run, I took Sleep as his final level 1 spell; there are a lot of monsters worth using that on, and he has enough single-target level 1 spells already.

Only problem with hide the drow is you have to go back to FAI everytime and grab him since he doesn't stay in place.

Sleep is another good choice. I take it with Edwin for sure.

jmerry

Baeloth doesn't run away instantly; he comes up to talk to you and confirm "stay or go". You just have to do your shopping while he walks.

This doesn't work with Dorn, as you don't get the reputation back in his case until he talks to you. Still, 4 rep for hiding Baeloth and Viconia was usually enough to get my party up to neutral. Running around with less than that is usually a bad idea due to guard triggers.

Each point of reputation is worth at least 10% on store prices when you're below 10, and each point of charisma is worth at most 5%. Hiding the drow is pretty much always better than using their high charisma.