Thrasher the solo human cleric/thief - FINAL Update!
I was doing really good, I dualed to thief at level 9 cleric, and even unlocked my cleric abilities. I even defeated Mencar Pebblecrusher's gang. However, when I went to de-trap a chest, my character failed and instead triggered the petrification trap.
Thrasher the human cleric - FINAL BG 1 Update! Traveling with: Minsc, (Kagain), Ajantis, Kivan, Imoen, Dynaheir
I made some great progress with Thrasher. The party is a very solid team. I made a mistake and got my reputation too high and lost Kagain, so recruited Ajantis to replace him. I searched high and low for a magical bastard sword, but couldn't find one. Sashanstar refused to give us our reward even though all the dopplegangers were dead, but didn't want to lose rep killing him. I tried charming him to have his captain kill him for no rep loss, but that didn't work he has really high magic resistance.
You don't lose reputation for killing him. ???
Probably. But the plan was for his own captain to kill him, not me. E.g., if I can charm Sashenstar and tell Sashentar to attack, then the captain would have killed him, not me. But his magic resistance foiled that idea.
Druid Power - Update 1 Entering no-reload challenge with: Corenature - half-elf fighter/druid (protagonist) SETUP: BG 1 EE, no mods, core rules at all times RESTRICTIONS: Only druids or multi-class druids may join party for entire trilogy
Got a new party rolled up. I've tried an all druid party before, but it's been a while so decided to give it another go. Always wondered what the party would be like in ToB, but didn't make it that far last time. Here's my new character:
The party has just made it out of Candlekeep. We kicked out Imoen, slaughtered Xzar and Montaron, and will make our way to Shoal next session.
I was doing really good, I dualed to thief at level 9 cleric, and even unlocked my cleric abilities. I even defeated Mencar Pebblecrusher's gang. However, when I went to de-trap a chest, my character failed and instead triggered the petrification trap.
Doesn't it give you a warm, fuzzy feeling though to die to a trap for a change . Best of luck with the druid onslaught.
This is where the run starts to get more challenging. Next up is the Gate of Villager, where we can catch some very useful creatures for later on. Gibi the GoHopper isn't one of them, however; I just got him by chance. GoHoppers belong to the Bug family, and Bugs grow incredibly quickly and have pretty decent defense stats. However, their base stat growth is actually pretty lousy, and there are other fast-growing critters with better stats.
Case in point: the Picky, a member of the Bird family. We give it a piece of BeefJerky (notice that many names in DWM have no spaces between them) to make it more tame. However, the Picky doesn't join us. Again, DWM is very much luck-based, and if we don't get a Picky while we're wandering around the Gate of Villager, the no-grinding rule means we can't go back and try again.
Why is a Picky so useful? Well, the creature itself has some decent attack stats for the early game, but the important thing is that it's a member of the Bird family.
Why are Birds so important? As it happens, they grow remarkably fast, and several of the absolute most useful monsters in the game happen to be birds. Dirk the Dracky, one of our current party members, is also a Bird type, but we want more--birds have fantastic potential, especially in a low-grinding or no-grinding run.
Not getting that Picky is a bit of a setback. While it's possible to get more BeefJerkys just by picking them off the ground... ...we only have so many chances to get a Picky. I have better luck with a Stubsuck, however. Saly the Stubsuck takes Slib's place in the party and Slib heads back to the farm.
Saly knows the Sleep spell, and we could really use that spell for the boss fight. More importantly, it's good for us to level up Saly because she's a member of the Plant family. One of the best monsters in the game is a Floraman, a fast-growing mage type monster that you can get simply by breeding a Plant with a Beast.
The Plant family has good growth rates and lots of MP, which makes them rather lovely healers. And healing is very important in DWM because the strongest healing spell, HealAll, heals the target's HP to 100% for only 7 MP. Any monster that learns Heal can eventually upgrade it to HealAll.
If all of your party members know HealAll, you have massive recovery abilities across the board. It's a must-have skill for all monsters in the party; it's by far the best skill in the game.
Speaking of the Heal spell, one of the monsters in this gate just so happens to know Heal. We only have a narrow opportunity for getting it... ...but the Gremlin joins our team! Hale, our previous healer, heads to the farm; Grin the Gremlin can provide our healing from now on.
Anyway, Gremlins belong to the Devil family.
Devils are terrible.
They have nice resistances, but their stats are uniformly poor (except for intelligence, but intelligence is easy to grow and maxes out very early) and they grow extremely slowly. With almost no exceptions, Devils require lots of investment in experience and give very little in return. The only reason Grin is useful at all is because he knows Heal and because Devils have some limited use in breeding combinations.
We keep marching through DWM's low-quality (by modern standards) randomly-generated maps and run into one of the least useful items in this run. WarpWings instantly send you back to GreatTree. They're a spectacular rescue option, but since our rules prevent us from re-entering a gate, using one could actually cripple the run--or even make it impossible to beat the game, if we used it in a plot-critical gate that needs to be completed.
Grin's MP is best reserved for healing spells because even Heal and HealMore give lots of HP for a very low cost. But Grin also knows Firebal, an area-effect attack spell, and while it looks modestly cool... ...and does decent damage that's sometimes harder to resist than physical attacks, Grin has very little MP due to being a crummy Devil monster, and he really can't afford to waste MP on attack spells.
Dirk hits level 7 and learns the Sleep spell shortly before we finally run out of maps to explore. The final boss of the Gate of Villager is quietly snoozing in the corner. While we're around, we offer to rescue a princess who's trapped there. But we're not quite strong enough to lift her off her feet, so she'd rather wait for a stronger hero to come rescue her. The boss is a Dragon, a monster with very high stats and an area-effect breath weapon, FireAir. We deploy Sleep to try to knock him out, as he's highly vulnerable to it, but he resists both Dirk's and Saly's Sleep spells, and he does heavy damage when he retaliates. He can kill any of our party members in two hits! I make sure to use our ample supply of Herbs to make sure everyone is healthy; we have no means of raising dead monsters right now. After multiple attempts, we finally disable the Dragon. But he wakes up right afterward, and Saly is down to 1 MP; she can't cast any more Sleep spells. Saly can do nothing but attack, and as a plant--and literally just a tree stump--she's not exactly a melee bruiser. I keep everyone alive with Herbs, but Dirk runs out of MP without putting the Dragon to sleep even once more. We're not doing nearly as well as we normally would. But we have lots of Herbs, and eventually, we grind the Dragon down. Better still, he joins the party! Our new Dragon, Dran, belongs to the... Dragon family. Dragons have excellent stats, especially attack and HP, but they grow extremely slowly, which means they have very little use in this run except as breeding fodder. Speaking of which, we can get the egg of a SkyDragon by standing under a SkyDragon flying over the farm until it plops an egg on our head. Only one gate left before we have to win another match at the arena: the Gate of Talisman. We sell off our useless WarpWing and buy some more BeefJerkys before heading over to the gate. Our team is Grin the Gremlin, Dran the Dragon, and Dirky the Dracky. We're still a ways short of level 10, but the closer we get these monsters to level 10, the better off we'll be.
One of the first enemies we run into in the Gate of Talisman is a Spooky, which we saw in the previous arena match. By sheer luck, we get it with a single BeefJerky. It's not very strong, so we won't be taking it with us through this gate. A Spooky is a Zombie monster. Zombies have lots of nice resistances, high HP, and surprisingly high attack. Not all of them are that great, but Shadows and Reapers are very powerful monsters indeed, and it's not too hard to breed for them.
We also attempt to get a MiniDrak... ...but our bribe is ineffective. MiniDraks aren't great monsters, but they do know SandStorm, which can dramatically reduce enemy hit chances if it works.
While wandering around, we run into an extremely valuable find this early in the game. There are four types of meat treats in the game: BeefJerky, PorkChop, Rib, and Sirloin, and each one is exponentially more effective and expensive than the last. This Rib is best saved for a special monster.
These early-game gates only have a few levels (the Gate of Talisman has 5), so it's not long before we arrive at the hole to the boss. Here's our party before the fight. Notice how much stronger Dirk is than Grin. Birds gain levels so fast that their stat growth is much stronger than you'd think. In fact, Dirk is about as strong as Dran, even though Dran has far more experience.
The boss here is a Golem. The Golem is slow, but has very high defense and hits pretty hard. Fortunately, we manage to land a Sleep spell and get in some free hits. With all the Sleep spells, the Golem can't touch us. He joins us our newest party member, Golm, replacing Grin. Grin's healing is very valuable, but Golm just has spectacular stats, and we could really use a sturdy character in this next arena match.
The first fight is a trio of SpotSlimes. Normally, they're nothing special, but they can use Imitate despite being very low-level, which means they can mirror our own attacks! The second fight is an Almiraj flanked by two MudDolls. Offensively, they're not too dangerous, but the MudDolls' OddDance skill can do terrible things to our MP. Fortunately, we bring them down quickly and don't lose too much MP in the process.
The last fight is a Putrepup, a MadRaven, and a Skullroo. All of them are very sturdy, the MadRaven can use HighJump to evade attacks, and the Skullroo can use the PaniDance, a dance skill that can confuse our party members. We spend the first round trading disablers. By the end of the next round, our entire party is confused! Mercifully, Dran and Golm recover, but the enemy has made substantial progress in the meantime. We're taking heavy damage, but so are the enemies. We lose Dran, but take down the Skullroo and prevent further confusion effects. Dirk puts the MadRaven to sleep, and soon it goes down. The last remaining enemy, the Putrepup, chews up Dirk, leaving only Golm standing. But Golm holds strong, and we just barely manage to win the fight. The lack of grinding makes these early-game area fights rather dicey.
We now have access to the Starry Night Chamber, which means we can finally breed monsters. We don't have any level 10 critters yet, but we can finally hatch that SkyDragon egg.
First, though, we want to make sure it's the right gender so it's more useful for breeding when it grows up. As it happens, there's a goofy lady who can tell the gender of monsters (and other, more vague information) just by holding the egg. She can even change the gender by singing. Her prices can be very high depending on the strength of the egg, but she's quite fun to listen to. We hatch the egg and Sky the SkyDragon takes Dran's place as our party dragon. SkyDragons aren't particularly special, but monsters gain experience and therefore levels much faster if they join us on trips through the gates (they only gain a little experience if you leave them on the farm). For the same reasons, we trade out Golm and Dirk for Saly and Grin--we want these critters to hit level 10 fast. Next up: the Gates of Memories and Bewilder.
Playing on impossible difficulty and with the requirement that I take no losses in battles means I need to work on a couple of things: - being as strong as possible prior to fighting - finding a way to revive creatures that die in battle as, at least in the early game, it's impossible to avoid some casualties.
Gaining strength can be done by exploring, looting and completing quests before undertaking battles. As you progress around the adventure map most creatures can be lured into chasing you - providing the opportunity to drag them out of position while you grab the treasure they are guarding. This approach can greatly increase your strength without doing any significant fighting.
I've got into the habit of doing one particular quest - to rescue a cage of frogs - very early. That's because when I first tried to do it without fighting it was extremely difficult, so I didn't want to get too far into a run before taking the risk. With so much practice it's now pretty routine, but I still do it early. Initially Earl Argus asks you to find a frog princess for him. When you find a frog in Marshan Swamp though she complains that the Earl has already taken lots of her sisters and asks you to rescue them. Going back to the Earl he suggests that you get him a love potion instead - and some pulling of stacks around later you can get into a nearby cave to get such a potion from a friendly witch. The Earl then allows you into his dungeons, where there's an obstacle in the way of getting to the cage of frogs.
That can be overcome by: 1) Pulling one of the necromancer stacks back to the dungeon entrance.
2) Dodging round it and running back to the second stack. It can be pulled back just a little way until there's room to run round it and proceed onwards to the cage. 3) Running back to the second stack, it needs to be pulled back to where the cage was (as there's not enough space anywhere else to dodge round it - one of the problems of the game is that some visible terrain is actually impassable, so care is needed when planning movement).
4) That gets you back to where the 2 stacks were originally, just in time to dodge round the first stack as it arrives back from the entrance.
The frog princess is so glad to see her sisters she offers to become your wife. She's not the ideal partner for my purposes, but is the best choice for now. A quick conversation with her about family means that she will have a child after 10 battles (though that will take a while).
In the meantime there's more looting to be done in Marshan Swamp. That includes diving into a series of tombs for Furious Paladin. There are 5 of those, of which 4 can be fully looted by running the enemies inside around - although the Paladin advises activating altars in each tomb that will destroy them. For a long time I used to dodge the enemies, with the idea of saving the XP from them for the time when I could kill them safely. However, by that time the enemies being faced are so much stronger that the XP gain from these ones is insignificant - so more recently I've just been destroying them using the altars.
In one of the tombs there's a really important find to help with the problem of needing to revive lost creatures. That's a few ancient vampires, who have significantly higher HPs than standard vampires and, like the standard ones, can drain life from enemies to restore their losses.
The biggest reason for sticking with the same starting position for so long is the presence of these relatively rare creatures.
Another tomb in the Swamp is the Chronicles Crypt. Sprinkled in different places across areas are enemy heroes, who add spells and stats to the armies they control. One of those in the form of a bat (which moves quickly) is patrolling outside that crypt and is far too tough to even think about fighting - but it is just possible to sneak up behind him at one end of his patrol and get into the crypt.
Inside that you can find the Chronicles of the Lost Town, which is needed for a quest. I only recently discovered (on about my 260th attempt at this ), that this scroll has a Necro Call spell scroll tucked inside it.
Given there is a resurrection spell for live units in the game, you would have thought this would provide a way to revive dead units. Unfortunately though, it doesn't. It can bring units killed in combat back as undead, but they don't persist after the battle - so the spell is of limited use to me as I'm not allowed to take any losses in battle. However, a bit more dodging round enemies allows me to find places to buy ghosts and their more powerful cousins, cursed ghosts. Both of those have the ability to create new versions of themselves from enemies they kill. Unlike vampires though they can create more than they started with - which can be a real problem. The amount of creatures you can control depends on your leadership and, once a stack increases beyond the size you can control with your leadership, it turns hostile (at least it does on impossible difficulty). That means it's necessary to pay really close attention to initiative and placement in battles where you are using ghosts, to avoid the situation where they go out of your control by retaliating against an attacker and immediately attack your other units.
There are also 4 vampires in one of the tombs. In other starts it's possible to find standard vampires for sale, but there are none in this case. However, every start always has a few cursed coffins lying around which will provide a minimum of 3 vampires anyway.
That's not enough to fight with, but I will eventually find a means to produce new ones during battles ...
With the ancient vampires in the army I'm now ready for my first combat ...
Back in Greenwort the ancient vampires had their first battle against Robber. He's a weak hero with only a slow spell available and the ancient vampires are far too strong for his army.
His death opens up a new quest line to get the Chest of Rage from Verlon Forest. King's Bounty provides the ability to cast spells using mana - which regenerates over time on the adventure screen. In addition to that you can also use the 4 rage spirits which live in the chest and have spell-like abilities fuelled by rage. Rage is basically generated by damage taken in battles (both yours and enemies), though there are some special abilities that affect it as well. Rage dissipates over time on the adventure screen, so it's helpful to plan to do battles in a continuous stream rather than the odd one now and then, in order to always start a battle with rage at a high level.
While in Verlon Forest I looted everything in the area. Possibly the hardest bit of that is the Old Castle where you can find an ancient treasure chest for a quest. That has a guardian in quite a small room, but it's still possible to get just enough distance to activate a teleportation portrait before the chasing enemy can grab you.
There's also quite a complex sequence of pulling a chasing griffon away in order to allow looting of one area. There's not much space to dodge him without running into other stacks, but I found it was possible here to run through a line of bushes - trying that sort of thing is not a good idea if you haven't checked it out in advance though.
The king had asked you to get the Chest of Rage for him, but you've grown attached to it and are unwilling to give it up. The king agrees to let you keep it if you do some more questing for him.
To make it useful though you need to activate the rage spirits inside. The easiest one to activate is Sleem, who only wants to eat something poisonous - a bunch of snakes soon fill his gap.
The next spirit available is Zerock, but he requires you to do a fight. The ancient vampires are not up to that on their own, but with Sleem's help they can get it done. The first thing to do is to carefully park 3 of the 4 ancient vampires in the King's castle (units can be stored at any of the castles in the game). The amount of rage generated is partly dependent on the relative strength of forces, so making your army weaker will allow more rage to be produced - thus allowing Sleem to use more abilities and gain experience quicker. The single ancient vampire then leads a carefully chosen stack back to the castle (in order to be able to add the other ancient vampires to the army before rage has a chance to dissipate).
In man shape the ancient vampire doesn't drain health from living things (which don't include plants for this purpose), but it does fully regenerate its own health at the start of each combat round. Hence if enemies are weak enough they will never kill it. Sleem only starts with a poison ball that does pretty limited damage, but he uses that enough in the contest with the plants to learn a new skill.
One of the nice things about the ancient vampires is they have a high initiative, so will normally go first in battles. That allows me to use Sleem's new Evil Shoal ability on enemies at the start of the battle to activate Zerock.
It then takes 3 rounds before he can use it again and in the meantime the enemies have killed one of the ancient vampires (if they were lucky, they could have killed 2).
That's not a problem though as the remaining ancient vampires can switch to bat form and suck some blood to revive their fallen comrade.
The experience gained from that battle allows Sleem to learn another new ability (each rage spirit has 4 of those).
After looting most of the remainder of Greenwort I returned to Marshan Swamp to do another quest for Furious Paladin and buy a few things with some of the money looted in explorations to date. Particular prizes are the Spear of Rage, which gives you a 20% bonus to the amount of rage generated in battles and the Well of Mana belt.
The latter is a pretty common item, but is another thing I checked the starting position for to ensure it was easily available. In battles you regenerate some mana during the first 20 turns of combat - allowing you to stretch out what you can do with your starting mana. The belt increases that regeneration, making it easier to keep casting spells. That makes little difference at this stage, but later on mana availability will be crucial against some types of enemies.
There are 4 areas you have access to initially, Greenwort, Marshan Swamp, Verlon Forest and Arlania. The latter is where the Earl with a penchant for frogs lives, but most of that area has not yet been looted. There's lots more running round required there to grab all the treasure, but nothing as difficult as in the Earl's dungeon and the work doesn't take too long. There is though still one final lot of looting to do. There are some coastal areas in Greenwort, Verlon Forest and Arlania that are only accessible by ship and you can get a ship in Arlania by completing a quest. You can pull enemies out of position by disembarking near them and then hopping back onto the ship as they run at you. That does take practice though and sometimes your horse will shy when you try to get back on - so you really need to click multiple times when attempting the move. It also helps to lay the ship broadside to the land.
In this instance everything is done safely and I'm ready to try and open up access to some new areas.
A new run of a fighter/cleric dwarven Watcher of Helm details as below. Currently at the Bandit Camp which so far is relatively peaceful. After the death of Gorion, Firehelm helped Joia and killed Tarnesh. After that, heading south of Beregost two ogrillon were killed quite easily.
he then helped Mellicamp, but upon trying to help the werewolf the guril berry antidote didn't work.
He then returned Jumper the rabbit to Kessy who had lost him.
Killing Hobgoblins on the way Firehelm reached Nashkel where he gained some better armour before killing Oompah at the Carnival.
He then fought against Zordral where he fought a fierce battle.
He then took Littl-little Ugh to Ugh after finding a ring of fire protection.
He then returned the Colquetle Amulet.
Karlat was then killed and after buying some magical bolts he killed the werewolf. The bolts were not quite sufficient to kill the werewolf so he cast sword of seeking which he was relieved to find was sufficient. After buying the bolts he was virtually without gold. He was given a decent sword as a reward for the body of the werewolf.
Heading south he helped Fufie and killed Vax and Zal.
Heading west he helped a dryad before killing wolves and returning 'Drienne's cat.
Firehelm then went xvart-hunting to the north.
He then returned to Zordral and this time was a bit more successful.
The ankheg farm was the next on the agenda.
Firehelm then killed Zargal but had to flee from Bassilus due to his Aerial Servant being so powerful. By then his reputation had reached 19.
Just north of Beregost he killed an ogre with a belt fetish and in transit wiped out a horde of bandits.
He then returned to fight Bassilus and after doing his utmost to avoid the Aerial Servant was finally victorious.
Firehelm then killed the spiders in Beregost before going to the Friendly Arms Inn where he killed 3 Caravan guards. He then went to help Charleston Nib and found himself in a surprisingly difficult battle.
He then headed to the Nashkel Mines where he fought and defeated Zargos Flintblade before going on to kill Greywolf also..
Heading west to the Gnoll Stronghold, he began to wonder if he would survive, but he did.
East of Beregost he investigated a cave and killed some powerful spiders before deciding that the cave was too dangerous to be handled without help.
With the help of Rose, (A bard) Firehelm took on some thespians and won.
He got Thorengrim to upgrade a belt before enlisting Tenya who needed the belt upgrading in order to carry anything of note.
Firehelm then started enlisting helpers before returning to the dangerous cave to the east of Beregost.
He then helped Sil before heading for the Basilisk Area. On the way there he was ambushed by Lindid et al and defeated them.
Mutamin, the basilisks and the medusae were no problem.
Firebead then helped Gavin finish his last quest before dropping him in favour of Thorin.
It was then time to investigate the nashkel Mines.
SETUP: BG 1 EE, no mods, core rules at at all times RESTRICTIONS: Only druid or multi-class druid NPCs allowed to join party
So one of the early tasks was to recruit Jaheira. But since we only had one slot and Khalid has to join at first, we had to be a bit sneaky. We first did Joaia's quest to clear her house of her. Then we parked Druidpower in the temple (with the rest of the party outside) and removed them from the party. We then recruited Jaheira and Khalid. We then parked Khalid in Joaia's house (with the rest of the party outside) and removed Khalid from the party. We then recruited Druidpower and then we had our all druid party ready to go.
The early going was quite dicey, as it took a long time (clearing 4 maps) before we got to level 2 for the fighter/druids. A number of times would have been certain death but believe the level 1 protection kicked in.
Early tasks: * Get club for April from Krum and Kaldo. No sweat. * Get Dexterity tome for Jaheira. We eventually put her in the front lines with her staff since she had more AC then Natureswrath. * We killed the bear for that citizen asking for help (the one that gives frost boots reward). However, Naturesfury suffered the 1st death to the bear. * While clearing out High Hedge, a bear once again killed Naturesfury. * Bassiluss held and killed Naturesfury but he did not survive our assault. * Using a protection from undead scroll, we cleared out the undead in the 3 tombs area - this got our fighter/druids to level 2 druid/fighter which finally gives us a little buffer, though bears are still plenty dangerous. * Melicamp failed to survive the anti-chickenator spell. * Natursfury is the only dual-wielder in the group, using two +2 daggers, one being the dagger of venom.
We will keep at it. Once the party all has access to call lightnings, then at that point we will brave the basilisks.
So, we're now heading to Cloakwood. On our way to the mines, I took the time to pick up Faldorn. I think that's the first time I ever had her with me and, with Spell Revisions, she's rocking; there are lots of good druid spells with this mod.
On the fight against Drasus, Valalsia opened hostilities with a one-shot backstab on Kysus. Neeto.
We then started to focus fire on Drasus himself. With a good dose of solid melee, Flame Arrows and Call Lightning, he went down fast. Genthore was chunked by Minsc, which left only Rezdan to deal with. Faldorn casted Poison on him, because, being a level 4 spell, it bypassed MGOI. Dynaheir then stripped him of his MGOI and he went down fast after melee pressure.
We then decided to go straight to Davaeorn, but not after having switched Branwen for Yeslick. I think Branwen is slightly superior at this point, but Valalsia couldn't refuse to fight alongside a fellow dwarf. However, because Hareishan proved to be a nuisance while we were trying to go down, we had to dispatch her, again with the help of Faldorn and Poison. SCS mages really like their MGOI, so all the thanks to Faldorn !
Davaeorn himself was dealt the usual way : a Prot from Magic scroll on Valalsia and potions of Strength to make her immune to Davey's spells and the rest of the crew manning the door against the Black Talon Elites pouring into the room. Minsc and Valalsia started by dispatching the Battle Horrors, where she took some damage. However, after the were cleared, she kept bugging Davey while he was wasting all his most powerful spells on her. Valalsia got Davey to Badly Injured before asking for a bit of help to finish the fight.
Then, Coran gave the coup de grâce.
On our way to Baldur's Gate, we stopped by Ulcaster to kill the aptly named Wolf of Ulcaster. The fight was straight forward : a few traps and a backstab to soften him up and then plenty of melee to take him down. Minsc slained the beast at the same moment the Wolf held Valalsia. Could have been dangerous, actually.
Then, another detour by the Firewine Bridge. With plenty of potions of healing, the place is not too bad. However, you can't go out and sleep after taking out a few kobolds, because new ones will be right back in the maze. Thus, the need of potions. So, after making our way just before the Ogre-mage fight, we started to prebuff. But then, Lendarn the mage decided to show up early, so we had to take him down. Faldorn couldn't target him with Poison, because he was invisible. Welp, a mixture of Spell Thrust, melee and wand charges sealed the deal. Faldorn cracked him skull with a crit.
The Ogre-mage fight was super smooth. Valalsia opened with a backtab and Coran with arrows of biting. He never could cast a single spell. Boo hoo. Valalsia ended up chunking him with a crit.
We then finally reached Baldur's Gate. We quested a bit before going into the Iron Throne fight. That fight can always be complicated, because there are a lot of high level mages with solid fighters to deal with. Add in two backtabbing thieves and you got yourself a dangerous combination.
We opened up the fight with a salve of Fireballs from potions, wand charges and arrows of explosion. It softened them up, but didn't put much of a dent in them.
Then the backstabbing thieves did their jobs and Coran bit the dust.
However, our defense was stout, so, after much meleeing, healing potions and wand charges, we finally prevailed.
The Spider's area proved no difficulty to our elite team formed by Ajantis (who was temporarily granted the Ring of Free Action) and Coran. Jaheira joined them in the fight against Centeol, and the rest of the party also helped with some ranged attacks on the group of spiders that we lured out of Centeol's lair. I forgot to return Chelak his brother's body, hopefully I'll remember to after writing this.
In the Druids area, because Jaheira was with us, we had to fight against almost all of the Druids. This isn't much or a problem; until they used the aTweaks version of Call Woodland Beings. Dryads are very annoying to fight under aTweaks, because they constatly throw out Charm spells (which luckily are unable to end our run unless Ajantis is killed, as he is naturally immune to Charm), together with Entagle spells. The result? Long, ardous fights of Ajantis running around and not running around because of Entagle, while trying to kill the Dryads on his own. If I saw anyone had gotten the spell casted on them I just sent them away, since the AI of charmed creatures does not activate if they are charmed with no player-allied creatures in sight, and if you don't go in their sight, they will remain on their position. The Druids were slaughtered as quickly as possible, but one of them got one Call Woodland Beings out since I, again, wasn't able to properly time my attacks to disrupt it.
When we faced Amarande, only Jaheira got charmed, and that was after Amarande and his comrades were long dead. The Nymph suddenly went downstairs, after the fight had already ended, and almost makes Branwen (who, as it can be seen in the screenshot below, had been in another almost-death situation very recently) get killed by Jaheira. We exited the building and ran from Jaheira until she calmed down. The fight against the Druid Leader himself contained a very high amount cheese in the form of going up and down the stairs, first, to clean up the snakes and cheetahs he had summoned, and second, to lure him out of the topmost room so that we wouldn't have to fight him at the same time as the Dryads, which Ajantis dealt with on his own later. Coran had gotten charmed in one of the early blitzkrieg attacks to lure out the summoned animals. Yvralline saved Branwen from the Poison with her newely acquired Bhaalpower. We again let Edwin get the kill, although not entirely voluntarily this time.
After clearing out the remaining attractions, we re-supplied at Beregost, and are ready to finally take on the Wyverns, but not without thanking Coran for his (unusually long) patience first (I edited the value of the global timer on my save so that he wouldn't leave, since it's impossible to keep him in the party otherwise, and I don't really like recruiting party members when you're high-level.
On the Wyverns' area, I send Ajantis forward to deal with the Hamadryad, but she teleports right over our party, which was a very bad choice from her side, and she gets pelted down in a single round. Ajantis and Jaheira kill the remaining animals with ranged support from the rest of the party. After this, we encountered a single bear, that would've gone without mention had not it bugged out after dying, and constantly screeched out as if it was continously dying every second, until I fixed this by quicksaving and loading that save. It's not a game-breaking bug, but I don't know any other methods to remove it, and it does not affect anything at all in the run. I am uncertain whether travelling removes it, but I honestly wanted it gone fast, because I am not particularly fond of listening to a bear die every step I take.
The Wyverns can't do anything against Slow, a double Holy Smite and our formidable physical damage output put together, although that charge from the Wand of Fear I used for some reason was completely wasted and failed to affect them in any way. Coran reminded us we should take one of the creatures' head to Beregost, so we did that, sold a couple of Ankheg shells for some reason we still had on us, bought ammo, not from Taerom but from Thalantyr, as our stupidly high amount of gold allows us to use magical ammo as if it was rainwater. We're back to the Cloakwoods, were we finally give Chelak the body of his dead brother, and without doing anything else we head into the Mines.
I try to scout ahead with Coran, but he fails his check and I also fail to move him in time, which means our chances to cheese got instantly demolished in this very instant. Nevertheless, a warm greeting in the form of a Fireball (another mistake, I could have casted at least three, using the wands I have instead, which later I could not make use of because of the proximity of the enemies and my party) from Edwin, which was quickly followed by a Slow spell. Jaheira and Ajantis held the enemy fighters, at the cost of all my Extra-healing potions, since they were affected by an SR Emotion spell which I asume lets enemies make good damage rolls on you, or, as usual, I just have bad luck and this is simply another result of that. Anyway, while moving onto the fourth round of combat, one of the two wizards decides to show up. He casts Dispel Magic, but it only affects Jaheira, as it somehow, miraculously, it fails to affect Ajantis, and the rest of the party was too far away for it to be of any effect towards them. Genthore is the first to fall, so I switch Ajantis to focus on Drasus as well, whom dies in the following round, but not after leaving both Ajantis and Jaheira without any potions of Extra-healing. Redzan wastes a Domination spell on Jaheira, and walks up to the party, where he is indiscriminately beaten to death by all the members of our group. I am unsure what made him walk into our party (I believe he was trying to reach Edwin with his spells, but Edwin instantly retreated (although he did join the rest of the party to pelt down the wizard), and he ended up getting his path blocked by Branwen, Yvralline and Coran.
Right after his groupmate died, Kysus came out of hiding. He did more damage to us, and made the fight harder, than the rest of his group together. A formidable fellow. He summoned Ogre 'zerkers, made us retreat, but when we did so, the Ogres acted out their suicide pact: Both the Ogre and Kysus were out of our line of sight. I send Ajantis to look for Kysus, because he is nowhere to be seen. I found him after triggering spawn-points for two Wolves, one Tasloi and one group of guards. He mysteriously teleports to the party (by running away under the effects of Haste outside of my line of sight), by whom he is quickly killed. The fight against all the creatures Ajantis brought towards us was hard, since we were low on everything, but thanks to Jaheira having Hold Animals memorized we won without using much more than three healing potions, one charge from the Wand of Fear and all of our Hold spells, together with a scroll of Hold and another one of Magic Missiles. I turned rest until fully healed on, and let my party have a well-earned, 24 hours rest. Then I turned it back off and saved.
I will probably play the rest of the Mines this weekend, report will come soon after that, hopefully.
Monsters in DWM have personalities that impact their behavior in combat. Basically, they're a sum of four traits: their motivation, their bravery, their intelligence, and their compassion. Motivated monsters use more skills and are more likely to land critical hits, brave monsters are more likely to land critical hits as well, intelligence monsters are more effective at using disablers, and compassionate monsters can sometimes save MP when using healing spells.
The only way to change a monster's personality is to give it orders in combat. "Charge" makes them braver but less smart, "Mixed" makes them smarter but less compassionate, and "Cautious" makes them more compassionate but less brave. Encouraging our monsters to use skills will cost us precious MP when traveling through the wilderness, but it's important to improve their personalities for big fights. Sky might be a dragon, but dragons do get strong attack growth, so even at low levels, Sky is improving quickly from all the new experience. I repeatedly fail to catch the monsters I want--PillowRats, Catapilas, DragonKids, and Pickies--but eventually I manage to nab a FairyRat by giving it our precious Rib. The FairyRat is also a female, which means we can breed it with a certain FangSlime later to get a Unicorn--a very precious find.
I also grab a SpotSlime, but Slimes aren't very useful, either as party members or even breeding fodder.
We make a little progress in strengthening our party before the boss of the Gate of Memories, but Grin and Saly are still just shy of the ever-important level 10 mark. Notice Sky's incredible 70 attack. High attack is very important in DWM because it scales so well and attacks cost no MP--which saves MP for disablers and healing spells.
The boss here is a MadCat, a fast-moving, high-impact bruiser. But the MadCat is highly vulnerable to Sleep, and we keep it disabled for most of the fight. The MadCat, Gig, is already level 12 and ready to breed. But unless I'm willing to sacrifice Dran, our Dragon, to open up a new gate (and I'm not), we don't have any more opportunities to breed monsters or grind for experience.
It's time to take on the next arena fight. And this one is very, very difficult.
Since we'll need elemental resistances to survive this fight, I bring Golm the Golem back into the party. We have a healer and two solid damage dealers on hand. The first fight is against a Crestpent, a TreeSlime, and a PoisonGon, a very poison-heavy team that we'll want to take out fast. We make it out okay, but at the cost of a lot of MP. Unfortunately, the next fight is also very dangerous: a DrakSlime, a Dragon, and a FairyDrak. The first one is the most dangerous, as it knows a skill called SuckAir. This means it will do double damage with breath weapons on the second round. We can't take it out in time, though we manage to beat the FairyDrak, but Grin can heal himself up, Golm is pretty resistant to fire, and Sky is flat-out immune to the DrakSlime's FireAir breath weapon. Here's where things get really ugly. The final fight is against Teto. Teto has an Armorpede and two Snailys.
The Armorpede can deal high damage with Twinslash at the cost of some damage to itself, but it's usually not too dangerous. The Snailys, however, are absolutely brutal. They both cast IceBolt, an area-effect cold spell that deals remarkable damage at low levels like ours.
We take massive damage on the first round. Grin can recover, and Golm can resist, but Grin is running out of MP and Sky is approaching death. Golm is struggling to slay the Snailys, and Sky is struggling to stay alive. Grin uses his last Heal spell trying to protect Sky. We take down a single Snaily, but with only 1 MP left (and we need 2 MP to cast Heal), Grin is now useless, and the rest of the team is suffering. The enemy brings down Grin. We beat the remaining Snaily, but lose Sky in the process.
Soon, it's down to just Golm and the Armorpede. But Golm took a lot of damage attempting to beat the Snailys, while the Armorpede has suffered little. In the end, the Armorpede wins out. We were so close to winning. That was one of the biggest obstacles in the game, and if we had made it, we could start breeding monsters and building up our power, instead of constantly working on a power deficit. It's very frustrating.
Then, eventually, I realize I was wrong about the lack of gates.
I beat the Gate of Memories, but never moved on to the Gate of Bewilder. I could have had some slightly stronger monsters if I had remembered to enter that gate, and the extra numbers would probably have let us beat Teto.
Back to the start of the game. This time, though, I won't forget to use the Gate of Bewilder--and I might just sacrifice Dran or Sky in order to open the gate in the bazaar.
If we manage to breed some monsters before that gate, we can take in one or two level 1 monsters and emerge with one or two very, very strong creatures that could mop the floor with Teto.
The start of the game plays out much like the previous one did: get a Dracky and take Hale and Slib to win the first arena fight, catch a Stubsuck, GoHopper, and Gremlin, and beat the Dragon at the Gate of Villager with Sleep spells (much more effective this time around). We even manage to grab a Picky!
But after just a few gates, I realize that we simply don't have the resources to survive the coming fights. We lost all of our meat treats failing to get a Spooky, and we have almost no monsters to work with. Of the monsters we do have, practically all of them are male, which means our opportunities to breed monsters are going to be severely restricted well into the future.
In the end, I decide to start over. Early game luck in catching monsters can play a huge role in a no-grinding run, and our current set of monsters just isn't workable.
This time, get a little better luck. We manage to catch a Gremlin and (after spending lots of gold on meat treats) even a Spooky. Most fights played out similarly to the previous couple runs.
The Spooky, Pike, is an important breeding option, so I take it along with us to the Gate of Memories to level it up. We want it to reach level 10 before we unlock the gate in the bazaar. On the way, I spot a brilliant opportunity. That guy in the blue robes is a priest. They're not too uncommon in the wilderness, but if you fight his monsters and win, he'll heal your whole party, both HP and MP, and even revive fallen monsters and cure status ailments.
But I don't know how strong his monsters are. For wandering priests and other monster trainers, their monsters are leveled, and at low levels, I'm concerned that he's going to have much stronger monsters than ours.
We keep moving and manage to catch a FairyRat. It's not a very special monster, but it's a Beast, which we'll want for breeding later. This time around, we don't have Sleep for the MadCat, but I have lots of Herbs on hand to keep the party safe. Before I head into the Gate of Bewilder, I go ahead and unlock the bazaar gate. Basically, the locals can't turn on their grill, and they want you to permanently give up a monster with a fire skill to help them out--except the grill explodes and becomes a gate. Dran is a valuable monster, but not as valuable as an extra gate before the fight with Teto. It's time to proceed to the Gate of Bewilder. If we can get our Spooky, Pike, up to level 10, the fight with Teto will be a cinch--or at least a lot easier than before. Through great luck, we manage to catch a BigRoost on the way. BigRoosts look stupid and aren't very special aside from their SandStorm skill, but since they're Bird monsters, we'll be able to breed this one for some very powerful monsters soon enough.
I run into another priest, and this time, I decide to take him on for the extra experience points. The enemy has an intimidating lineup--a FireWeed, Wyvern, and Shadow--but we deal much more damage than them, largely because of Sky the SkyDragon. Grin falls, but we get a lucky critical hit on the FireWeed, and the fight gets Pike up to level 10! We've got some important monsters to catch in the lower levels of the Gate of Bewilder, and we just so happen to find a Rib midway through the area. With two Ribs in hand, we trade them for another two valuable monsters for breeding: a Hork and a Demonite. I switch out Pike for our new Hork, since Pike is already at level 10. As members of the Zombie and Devil families, the Hork and Demonite open up more breeding opportunities.
We even catch an EvilSeed (a Plant monster) and a SpotSlime on the way. I think this is the golden run: we're getting essentially all the early-game resources I've been hoping for! The boss of this gate is a FaceTree, a... tree with a face. It's guarded by a simple maze puzzle with some Stubsucks who block the way. However... the shortest route to the FaceTree is also the fastest, because the Stubsuck there just moves out of your way. The game designers apparently tried to make this into a puzzle, but it's actually like a maze with only three paths, the first of which is the easiest.
We still attack the optional Stubsucks, as they don't do much besides cast Sleep and give lots of experience. The Stubsucks get everyone in the party all the way up to level 10! This is a spectacular piece of good news; we have even more monsters available for breeding.
The FaceTree has strong stats and can cast Curse (which has random negative status effects) and StopSpell. It deals some impressive damage, and Grin only gets a single Heal spell off the ground before the FaceTree shuts down his spellcasting. We break out some Herb spells to heal the party, and in the end, the FaceTree never casts Curse. We get a new high-level Plant, Face the FaceTree, to add to the farm.
We can breed multiple monsters now, but unfortunately, our Anteater still hasn't quite reached level 10, which means we can't yet get a Grizzly. In the end, I decide to only breed for a single monster before entering the last gate available to us. By breeding our Hork with Grin the Gremlin, we can get a Reaper. Our new Reaper, Star, joins the party, and as a future investment, I bring our male Demonite to the bazaar gate to raise it to level 10 so we can breed it with our Anteater for a Grizzly. Sky the SkyDragon doesn't need any more experience, but she'll help us get through the next gate. Star has lousy stats and because her parents had low-grade personalities, her personality starts out as "Lazy." But because Star's father, Grin the Gremlin, knew the Heal spell, she'll be able to learn it as well. On top of that, Reapers have incredibly high stat growth across the board, especially for the attack stat. Most critters get less than +5 to any given stat when they level up, but when we beat the first SpotSlime in the bazaar gate, Star gets +8 bonuses right from level 2! She then lands a +6 and a +9. She's already level 4 and growing fast.
Most of the levels on each gate are randomized wilderness areas, but sometimes you'll get some pre-set locations, including a room that's loaded with treasure chests. However, there's always a chance that a treasure chest is actually a Mimic, and aside from their massive stats, Mimics have two spells that could prove quickly fatal: BlazeMost, a high-damage single-target fire spell that could easily kill anyone except for (maybe) Sky, and Defeat, an area-effect instant death spell that low-end monsters like ours would struggle to resist.
I ignore the chests and move on. I don't need the loot.
This gate has some nice monsters in it. We find more Catapilas and DragonKids, but there's another very special monster to be found: a BeanMan. BeanMen can cast Twinhits, a cheap, 2-MP spell that doubles a party member's attack power for an entire fight. It's incredibly strong and belongs to a useful Plant monster, so we give it our rarest treat, a Rib.
Unfortunately, the attempt fails. The BeanMan doesn't join the party.
Still, we're in excellent shape. Star is getting massive bonuses with every level. Even at level 6, her stats are sky-high considering how early in the game we are. Star even learns StopSpell at level 9. When we run into another priest, I don't hesitate to tackle them. Star shuts down all of the enemies' spellcasting in a single round. The priest heals us back to full HP and MP... ...and we arrive at the final area in peak condition. Here's our party. Star the Reaper has much less experience than our SkyDragon, and yet she completely outclasses Sky in almost every dimension. Even her attack score is incredibly high; it's only 8 points lower than Sky's. On top of that, Star has a deep MP pool to cast HealMore spells.
I am not the least bit worried about this boss fight. The MadKnight deals heavy damage, but it's nothing we can't easily heal. To speed things up, we have Dane the Demonite blast the MadKnight with some spells. BlazeMore does well over 30 damage per hit, and that's against a MadKnight with resistances. Demonites have terrible MP and can't cast many spells, though, so Dane is still a pretty terrible character.
The MadKnight, Pash, joins the team, replacing Dane as our third party member. Pash has awesome stats, so we are very, very well-equipped for the fight in E class. The fight match goes smoothly. We just crush them with sheer attack power; we have three heavy hitters in the team. The DrakSlime doesn't even get a chance to blast us with FireAir. Now we just need to deal with Teto. I'm still concerned about this fight, so I give the "Mixed" order to Star, expecting her to use StopSpell to block the Snailys' IceBolt spells. Instead, she wastes her time using LushLicks to disable a Snaily for a single round. We can't give direct, specific orders in arena matches; we have to rely on our monsters' AI to get them to make smart use of their skills.
The Armorpede does some heavy damage with Twinslash, but between our SkyDragon, Reaper, and MadKnight, we can stomp on the first Snaily early in the fight. And with HealMore, Sky is back up to full health within a round. Teto's team is designed for blitzkrieg combat, but by picking just the right monsters at just the right times, we had the sheer numbers to survive the assault and crush the enemy. With E class won, we can now enter the Gates of Peace and Bravery. But first, we have another monster to breed.
We breed Dirk the Dracky with Sky the SkyDragon to create a Wyvern--which is actually a Bird monster in DWM; not a Dragon. We have the egg lady change the gender to male to aid in a future breeding plan. Our newest level 1 monster joins the party, Wave the Wyvern. Like Star, Wave starts with pretty poor stats, since a monster's level 1 stats are equal to half the average of their parents' stats. But this ugly little abomination is one of the best monsters in the game, despite the fact that you can get it just by breeding a Bird with a Dragon. Wyverns gain levels extremely fast like most birds, and it has excellent stats, to boot. It's a very high-powered and very balanced character, just like the Reaper, with the HP to survive in combat, the attack to deal heavy damage, and the MP to cast healing spells.
Neither of Wave's parents could cast Heal, so Wave has inherited no healing skills, but as a Wyvern, Wave can innately learn Heal, FrigidAir, and Sleep just by virtue of his own species. It won't take long to level up Wave, and once we do, we'll have a fast-growing Bird monster that's equally capable of dealing damage, casting disablers, and healing the party.
With everything possible looted without doing more fighting I was ready to face the first boss monster - Geya, the giant turtle. All the preparation done to date makes that easier, although in fact it's possible to kill it with a single ancient vampire with minimum stats.
An air ship takes you to a remote island where you face Geya. You're likely to discover early on in the fight that rage spirits don't work in fights with boss monsters - I imagine that the game designers had a few chuckles over penning that message to gamers .
However, while Geya can do considerable damage to units next to him, if there aren’t any of those he jumps in the air and causes shock damage of 40-80 to all units. The ancient vampires have 110 HPs in man form and recover lost HPs each turn. They also have the better initiative, so can wait to attack at the end of each round and then move away from Geya at the start of the next round before he attacks. It takes quite a while to wear Geya’s 4,000 HPs down, but the job is eventually done without mistakes.
At the end of the battle Geya realizes that an evil shaman had been controlling him and offers to help you if you eventually come across the shaman again (I wonder what the chance of that are …).
After reporting to the king you can access a new location in the Freedom Islands. Though I’ve avoided any unnecessary fights thus far, 4 ancient vampires could have defeated quite a few of the inhabitants of the original areas. The enemies in the Freedom Islands are far tougher though and virtually all unintended encounters would end in a quick death. However, although fighting opportunities are limited, there’s the same chance as before to do plenty of looting while dodging enemies.
The reason the king has sent you to this place is to get some maps showing the way to yet another series of areas. Lucky James has those and can be found in his own personal mines. Those include some dwarf slaves as well, who offer you the chance to buy some roasted rats. You can get up to 7 of those – eating them gives you a small bonus to mana and rage, though at the expense of leadership.
For a no-reload run that’s a pretty good trade-off and I scoff the lot. Lucky James offers you the maps if you kill another pirate called Redbeard for him.
For now though Redbeard is too tough and I just carry on looting the rest of the Freedom Islands.
After all the practice I’ve had most of the looting is pretty easy. However, as usual I can’t resist the temptation to try and pick some shrubs for one quest in the Secret Underground cave. The problem with that is that it’s a relatively small area, with a beholder guarding the shrubs.
There are a couple of places at each end of the cave where there’s enough space to dodge the beholder, so it can’t catch me unless I make a mistake. However, it’s not possible to get far enough away from it to make it lose lock on me or to allow me to grab the shrubs in the middle of the cave. In principle that’s a stalemate, but chasing stacks do sometimes lose lock for no apparent reason, so the question is if I can keep dodging for long enough to allow that to happen (which takes perhaps a dozen circuits of the cave on average). I probably get caught about 20-25% of the time I try doing this, as constant dodging gets tiring after a while. That makes it an extremely poor gamble for a no-reload, but I keep trying anyway . On this occasion I have the added problem that I was trying to take screenshots to show the method of dodging in detail.
I’ve never done screenshots before this run, but (combined with using pause) they do result in a slight hesitation in movement. There's not much tolerance available here though and that hesitation proves fatal after only a couple of circuits - landing the ancient vampires in combat with a vastly superior foe.
Firehelm took on the bandits at their camp and was vicorious but for the fact that both Tenya and Imoen were slain. There may be some more left there however, but certainly there is no need to fear a return. After raising their fallen Firehelm went to the area north of Beregost and killed Nicardian et al, Teven et al and the caravan bandits. Upon returning to Beregost they easily slew Tranzig.
Whilst there, they went to Magnus thinking that better equipment was in order. The weird thing was that some dwarven armour that should have been wearable by Firehelm or Thorin wasn't and that same armour should not have been wearable by Sirene and yet it was. Clearly somebody got their coding wrong.
It doesn't matter at present as the party only has 10,000 gp and it costs 30,000 gp.
For me it is not worth it to limit yourself because it is too much RNG
RNG plays a huge role, but with the right data, the player can adapt to bad luck when it comes to getting monsters. Even if you get a bad hand at catching monsters early on, there are some decent breeding possibilities for almost any batch of monsters. The important thing is getting a bird and a plant.
As it happens, I've run the numbers and identified the highest-growth monsters in the game by pulling growth tables from the old Tiger Marmalade site (which has since vanished, but once had great data on the DWM games) and calculating each monster's stat growth for levels 2-30. Among many discoveries, I found that some of the critters with the highest stat growths in important areas were actually monsters that were very easy to get, while conventional wisdom held that the best monsters were the hardest to get:
These are all primary monsters, by which I mean they only require basic combinations to breed for. Attached is an Excel sheet with stat growth values for each monster, organized by family. While I'm at it, also attached are Word files containing breeding combinations for all monsters.
Congratulations on everybody's Runs! its always a pleasure to watch. @semiticgod your dragon warrior monster run is really interesting to watch, as is @Grond0's run as well in kings bounty.
I have time to run one more attempt at a no reload before school hits back full swing. So I have decided to role up a pre made party to assist with the no reload challenges missing contestants. Looking at @Enuhal list he provided of uncompleted no reload runs.
Dwarven Defender Ranger Stalker Undead Hunter Cleric Priest of Helm Priest of Talos Priest of Tempus Priest of Tyr Shapeshifter Avenger All Specialist Mages (except Wild Mage and Enchanter) Thief Bounty Hunter Shadow Dancer Bard Dark Moon Monk Shaman Fighter/Druid Cleric/Ranger Fighter/Mage/Cleric
My party will be: plain thief fighter/druid cleric/ranger undead hunter conjuration specialist Ranger
This looks like a fairly balanced party to me with a possible chance to make it through ascension/scs. Any thoughts or suggestions before I load up this party tomorrow night? Any thoughts on proficiencies or strategies that I may need for implementation?
When we arrived in Candlekeep, we were greeted by the ogre-mages fight. It went super smooth. Valalsia drank a potion of invisibility and placed herself out of harm way. Minsc's Berserk ability gave him a blanket protection from many disablers and I think that Dynaheir saved against charm. Other than that, Summon Insect, Detect Invisibility, wand charges and melee damage did them in. Minimal damage taken.
We chose to kill Rieltar and his gang, but no special item was found on them. Good stuff to sell but nothing I needed. That happens with Item Randomizer : sometimes, nothing good comes up !
We had no problem whatsoever going through the catacombs. Since Valalsia specialize in axes and short swords, I decided that we should kill Prat for that sweet, sweet returning axe +1. So we did. His toons were dispatched without troubles, but Prat himself is a bit of a pain in the butt, because he just always moves so damn much. However, when we did find him, we surrounded him quickly; under the pressure of four meleers, his defenses didn't last long.
Now, freshly out of Candlekeep and wanted for murder in Baldur's Gate, we had to lay low. We were all a good full level under the xp cap (even though it's disabled in my install) and wanted to find good gear for myself and my allies. I already had a Ring of Freedom from the Iron Throne fight, but I hadn't found the Greenstone Amulet, which is just too great to pass up.
So, we started with the Ice Island. The intial fight against the three mages was complicated. My strategy was to hit them with two Ice Storm after an initial backstab. It worked on one of the mages who died fast, but the other two disappeared quickly.
Andris then appeared out of nowhere and starched Coran with a Cone of Cold for his exact amount of life : 44 hp. That's a bit of a pain, because there are nasty traps in this place and I was counting on him to take them out. Find Traps and tanking damage were used instead.
Andris died soon after from a Detect Invisibility/Poison combination (his MGOI was already stripped) and the other mage (can't remember his name and I'm too lazy to check it up, even though it would have taken me less time than to write this ), was simply paralyzed by the corresponding wand charge.
Since we didn't have Coran anymore, we went straight to the exit. Tellan was in our way, but again, Spell Thurst --> Detect Invisibility --> any damaging spell (I prefer Poison in this run) make quick work of any BG1 mage. That's how Tellan fell. Oh, and Dezkiel too.
After that, we rejoined Ulgoth's Beard. The xp was decent, but no Greenstone Amulet. Really, it is the last item I care about before finishing the game.
Off to the Wolfie Island we went. I never had any difficulty with this place before, but I guess a bit of complacency kicked in because, yet again, Coran bit the dust in the first few fights on the Island. And again, I have no way to bring him back. Wolfies overwelmed our first line and made a break toward Dynaheir, Coran and Faldorn. Coran, with his shield up, courageously met with them. Two quick hit (one crit) was enough to take him down.
Again, the Find Traps spell and tanking damage (thanks Minsc !!) was in order in the wrecked ship. On the highest floor of the ship, we started by luring the mage downstairs where we killed it. After that, we buffed up and we went back up. It was super easy. The regular wolfies were slained by my magically-enhanced-to-the-gills party while Karoug himself was paralyzed from a wand charge. Just too easy. Minsc and Valalsia did the work with the Balduran sword and the Werebane dagger.
When we got back on homeland, Mendas and his acolyte were served with the same treatment : paralyzation. These wands are truly overpowered. However, I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but Mendas as a Loup Garou was completely immune to the Balduran Sword and Werebane. I had no melee weapon that could hurt him. In NearInfinity, Balduran Sword and Werebane are not flagged as Cold-Iron, which is the only type of weapon that can harm Mendas. Maybe that's a voluntary change by IR, I don't know. Anyway, we just poured wand charges (of Magic Missiles, of Lightning and of the Heaven mostly) and spell damage until we overcame his MR enough to kill it. Not pretty, but it worked.
The loot was much better in this sidequest, but still, the Greenstone Amulet was nowhere to be seen.
My party will be: plain thief fighter/druid cleric/ranger undead hunter conjuration specialist Ranger
This looks like a fairly balanced party to me with a possible chance to make it through ascension/scs. Any thoughts or suggestions before I load up this party tomorrow night? Any thoughts on proficiencies or strategies that I may need for implementation?
Of course this party could succeed, but it seems slightly unbalanced to me - you have 4 characters which can use divine magic in it and are also quite heavy on fighting skills (though in SCS I agree that can be preferable to a 'traditional' balanced party). If you haven't unlocked druid spells for the cleric/ranger then a fighter/cleric would be better, if you want the melee power. Alternatively you could put in a sorcerer in place of the ranger to give you an arcane boost or, if you want to stick with the idea of druids, you could use a totemic one.
With SCS, (if you're running with full prebuffs for NPC mages etc.) I would try to have more than one arcane spellcaster in my party, since getting rid of spell protections might take a long time otherwise. Otherwise, a specialized anti-mage character might also do the job. Just a personal preference, though - it's certainly possible to do well with your party combination.
I should mention that only the Bhaalspawn is counted for the list of completed challenges (otherwise, a lot of these classes would be off the list thanks to being NPC classes for official NPCs); Still, running a party only with uncompleted classes is a fun idea (I've attempted to do this myself in my last SCS run, but failed the run during a lich battle in SoA) - but if you're mostly interested in adding another class to the hall, you could give the rest of your party more power by switching out some classes.
so @Grond0@Enuhal looking at the list (also thank you for the clarification enuhal on the bhaalspawn only qualifying) I think I will review it as such. I will keep with the theme of only using unsuccessful non reload classes as this sounds like a fun add to the challenge anyways.
I think I will revise as such: Bounty hunter Bard(bhaalspawn) Conjuration specialist Fighter/druid Undead Hunter priest of tyr
@RVNS Looking at that list of classes who haven't done the Trilogy, my Lotan did a no-reload Trilogy and he was a fighter/druid, although he was by dualing to druid from fighter at level 7, he was human. Still once he unlocked his fighter skills he was fighter/druid.
While I originally intended for our Anteater to become our new Grizzly, Gig, our MadCat, is already at level 12 and is a solid option. I breed Gig with a Devil to get the egg of our first Grizzly, Lash, who joins the team at level 1. We've lost a fair amount of gold by paying for the blessing of eggs (the only way to change their gender), but I still pay 80 gold for a PorkChop, since there's a special monster I want to get from the next gate: a CoilBird (a Material monster rather than a Bird, despite the name). Breed a Bird with a CoilBird and you'll get a MadCondor, a very fast-growing, high-attack monster.
With a Reaper in the party to keep our level 1 Wyvern and Grizzly safe, we crush the first couple enemies, a BigRoost and SpotSlime. Wave the Wyvern and Lash the Grizzly quickly show off their impressive growth rates: Wave gets high stats across the board, while Lash gets strong HP and insane bonuses to her attack. A Grizzly's attack growth slows down dramatically after level 20 or 30 or something, but we'll probably never have a monster above level 40. Grizzlies have terrible MP and mediocre stats, which makes them lousy healers and therefore not remotely as useful as a more balanced creature like a Wyvern, but having such incredibly high attack means that our Grizzly will be able to kill most enemies in a single hit.
The mechanics behind physical damage are not well understood. Damage is an opposed roll between attack and defense (ATK and DEF), but the output appears to operate on thresholds: if your attack is high enough to break a certain threshold, damage output will increase exponentially for a brief range, then linearly. Against a high-defense enemy, attack needs to be a certain value to deal meaningful damage.
These are just random numbers for the sake of argument. The point is that ATK needs to break a certain threshold, at which point it scales linearly.
We soon run into a couple of CoilBirds along with a Crestpent. We knock out the CrestPent, give two PorkChops to the CoilBirds, and once Wave and Lash gain some more levels, we get our CoilBird on the first try. By the time we complete a single map in the 7-map Gate of Peace, Wave is already about as strong as Star, and Lash has sky-high attack. Wave doesn't have nearly as much experience as Star, but Birds level so fast that Wave is only a single level behind.
Shortly after, we find a WindStaff! Staffs in DWM let you cast low-damage spells several times before they break. Offensively, they're pretty much crap, but they're very expensive, and if you sell one to one of the very rare merchants you'll find in the wild (as opposed to the less profitable ones back home at GreatTree), you can sell them for full price--thousands of gold, where the most we've ever had so far is only 500. We'll hold onto this staff until we run into one of the merchants midway through a gate.
We fail to catch a BoneSlave, a nice new Zombie monster, but successfully catch a DragonKid and Wave learns TakeMagic, a very under-appreciated skill for late-game boss fights. TakeMagic lasts a whole fight, only costs 2 MP, and lets you absorb MP from enemy spells and skills. It's especially valuable against certain bosses: if you get hit by a high-MP spell, you might get enough MP to fuel an entire HealAll spell!
Better still, we find a LavaStaff, which I think yields even more gold than a WindStaff when sold, and run into a priest to heal up our monsters. As before, the enemy trainer's monsters fare poorly against three +1 monsters. StopSpell lets us block most enemy skills, and Radiant imposes heavy penalties to hit chances. Normally, these monsters would be fairly challenging, but thanks to number-crunching I did many years ago to find out the best monsters, we have extremely high-end monsters despite only being able to breed each monster a single time. Normally, it takes two generations of breeding to get monsters as strong as Star, Wave, and Lash.
We catch a Crestpent on the way to the boss and Wave's HealMore becomes HealAll. Thanks to his fast leveling, he got the upgrade faster than Star despite Star being older. For the price of only 7 MP, we can heal any monster from 1 HP to maximum.
The boss here is a FangSlime, struggling to make money at a posh casino. He's jealous of our success at the slots... ...but Lash the Grizzly does crazy damage, especially on a critical hit. Fang the FangSlime heads to the farm. We'll be able to breed any Beast monster with Fang to get a Unicorn. Not only will that give us another monster with Heal; it'll also give us Vivify, a resurrection spell: 10 MP for a 50% chance of raising a dead monster up to 50% HP. At high levels, it upgrades to Revive: 20 MP for a 100% chance of raising a dead monster up to full HP.
We still haven't entered the Gate of Bravery. However, we don't need to get any more experience or breed any more monsters to win the next fight at the arena. Our +1 monsters (+1 means they've been bred only once; higher pluses come from more generations) are already more than strong enough to handle D class. Everyone in the party has extremely high attack. Star the Reaper has the highest stats overall, though his personality indicates low compassion, which means he's a little likely to use healing spells effectively. Wave the Wyvern is a little more fragile, but this early in the game, he's still a fabulous tank. Lash the Grizzly has no healing spells or the MP to cast them, but her attack is just... crazy. Note the weird graphical glitch that turned her golden in the screenshot. The first match in D class at the arena is nothing special. The enemies, a Saccer, Florajay, and MadPlant, all have low stats, and the Florajay wastes time casting SlowAll spells. There's some minimal tactical benefit in a SlowAll spell in the sense that it lets you attack before the enemy, but that's only relevant in extremely short fights--and while this fight is extremely short, it poses no threat to us.
The next fight is a pair of MedusaEyes and a MadGopher. The MedusaEyes probably have some nice spells, but StopSpell neutralizes them. The MadGopher has ZombieCut, which deals 50% more damage (or maybe just strikes as though the user's attack was 50% higher, which doesn't necessarily mean 50% more damage) to Zombie monsters like Star. But the MadGopher doesn't live long enough to use it.
The last fight is with Mick, who has no idea how outclassed he is. He has two MadCats and a RogueNite. The MadCats have SquallHit, which means they can strike first in combat, and the RogueNite can cast Heal, but the MadCats aren't strong enough to deal serious damage, the RogueNite's heal spells can be blocked with StopSpell, and all of them are vulnerable to SleepAll and Radiant. GreatTree has a problem, however. Monsters are pouring out of the Gate of Anger, and we need to go in and figure out what's going on (which is to say, just go in and stomp the boss). It should be no trouble. First, though, we have some monsters to breed.
Since our old Anteater, Ares, is female, we can breed her with Fang the FangSlime for a Unicorn--a powerful addition to our team. Then I realize something very special: I have the ingredients for a KingLeo!
A KingLeo is basically the strongest monster of the Beast family, which strong resistances and high, well-rounded stats. It might not have the sheer offensive power of the Grizzly, but it'll make an excellent healer--especially because it'll get to inherit our Unicorn's Vivify spell.
First, we need to get a Roboster. We can get one by breeding Lash the Grizzly with our Golem, but we can't do that quite yet--Golm is just shy of level 10. I've long thought of KingLeos as very difficult to breed for, but in retrospect, they're actually pretty simple. Without factoring in convenient shortcuts like our FangSlime, you can get a KingLeo just from 8 primary monsters, breeding for only two generations:
All we have to do is wait for Golm to reach level 10, then raise a Unicorn and a Roboster to level 10. Then we'll have a level 1 KingLeo that will be a powerful party member for the rest of the run!
We can't do that just yet, but we can improve our bird. By breeding Wave with a Hork, we can get a MadGoose! A MadGoose is another high-powered, fast-growing bird, with an additional benefit: a MadGoose can inherently learn LureDance, the best disabler in the game. LureDance is an area-effect, single-round disabler that almost no enemy in the game can resist.
We also breed our BigRoost with a CoilBird for a cheap and easy MadCondor, whose egg I bless to make sure it can breed with our new MadGoose. We now have a Unicorn that can learn Heal and Vivify and a MadCondor that can learn HealUs, a party-wide healing spell that can upgrade to HealUsAll, which can heal the entire party to maximum HP. While I'm at it, I breed for a GiantSlug and a Floraman, just in case I need them later. You can only have so many monsters on the farm at a time, so it's good to breed them to free up room for more monsters.
We buy some PorkChops head into the Gate of Bravery (the Gate of Anger can be done later) with our new MadGoose in hand. She's inherited some decent stats from her parents, especially Wave, but her stats will get really high once she gains a little experience. We're already on our way to get some brilliant late-game critters. By the end, we should have a well-rounded KingLeo and a nearly invincible WhipBird healer with over 400 HP.
As for the third monster, we'll just have to see what monsters we can catch.
Firehelm cleared the bandit camp without problems and returned to the FAI where he was attacked once more but was victorious. The party then went to Firewine Bridge where they were victorious against Melium. The battle against Khark was much more of a problem as half the party were killed and Firehelm himself was on the point of death as a result of confusion. Khark went invisible and the party did somehow survive, rested and then slew Khark. They then went to fight Lethe and as a result Tenya can now control elementals.
The battle against Khark was indeed very touch and go.
Durlag's Tower is next on the agenda, but Firehelm does not expect to defeat it all in one go.
The sum total of their wealth is now 39 gp after buying a wand of fire and two potions to help with locks and traps.
Scarcity of gold has become a real problem.
It took a while to scrape up enough gold for the fellow adventurer in Durlag's, and having given 300gp to him Firehelm was once more very poor.
However together they successfully raided the upper levels of Durlag's.
The ghost however proved to be a major problem . Daital killed three party members and there is no gold to raise them. I just hope that selling some of the items from Durlag's will relieve the situation somewhat.
The ghost will be avoided in future runs for obvious reasons!! However the relief when I started selling uneeded items from Durlag's. Firehelm is wealthy again. Next on the agenda is a lower level of Durlag's and then Cloakwood.
EDIT
The rest of Durlag's Tower was easy. Firehelm solved three of the warden's quests and left the bottle of wine nearby to give to Love later. The party are now in the vicinity of "Tristan und Isolde"
Urgh. Valalsia got through BG1 without a problem, but she got killed in the Dwarves of Dumathoin quest. Just before meeting with the lich, she was meleeing some undeads with Minsc, which was going good, but then, while she had 72 hp, she got hit by two crits and two Shadowed Souls targeted her with their range draining hp attack. Bam, you're out. It was just so sudden. I believe it's one of those really low percentage death possibility that I couldn't have done much against, except keeping her at full hp at all time. From 72 hp to zero in one round. Wow. Everything was going super, super smooth. Seriously, no close call 'til then.
Welp, I don't know what I'll come back with. I'll make a new install today and then, I'll see what I'll do. Probably not a melee class just to play things a bit safer.
Comments
I was doing really good, I dualed to thief at level 9 cleric, and even unlocked my cleric abilities. I even defeated Mencar Pebblecrusher's gang. However, when I went to de-trap a chest, my character failed and instead triggered the petrification trap.
Not sure what is next.
Entering no-reload challenge with: Corenature - half-elf fighter/druid (protagonist)
SETUP: BG 1 EE, no mods, core rules at all times
RESTRICTIONS: Only druids or multi-class druids may join party for entire trilogy
Got a new party rolled up. I've tried an all druid party before, but it's been a while so decided to give it another go. Always wondered what the party would be like in ToB, but didn't make it that far last time. Here's my new character:
The party has just made it out of Candlekeep. We kicked out Imoen, slaughtered Xzar and Montaron, and will make our way to Shoal next session.
Here are his group-mates, if interested:
semi: No-Reload Dragon Warrior Monsters Run
Part 2
This is where the run starts to get more challenging. Next up is the Gate of Villager, where we can catch some very useful creatures for later on.Gibi the GoHopper isn't one of them, however; I just got him by chance. GoHoppers belong to the Bug family, and Bugs grow incredibly quickly and have pretty decent defense stats. However, their base stat growth is actually pretty lousy, and there are other fast-growing critters with better stats.
Case in point: the Picky, a member of the Bird family. We give it a piece of BeefJerky (notice that many names in DWM have no spaces between them) to make it more tame.
However, the Picky doesn't join us. Again, DWM is very much luck-based, and if we don't get a Picky while we're wandering around the Gate of Villager, the no-grinding rule means we can't go back and try again.
Why is a Picky so useful? Well, the creature itself has some decent attack stats for the early game, but the important thing is that it's a member of the Bird family.
Why are Birds so important? As it happens, they grow remarkably fast, and several of the absolute most useful monsters in the game happen to be birds. Dirk the Dracky, one of our current party members, is also a Bird type, but we want more--birds have fantastic potential, especially in a low-grinding or no-grinding run.
Not getting that Picky is a bit of a setback. While it's possible to get more BeefJerkys just by picking them off the ground...
...we only have so many chances to get a Picky. I have better luck with a Stubsuck, however.
Saly the Stubsuck takes Slib's place in the party and Slib heads back to the farm.
Saly knows the Sleep spell, and we could really use that spell for the boss fight. More importantly, it's good for us to level up Saly because she's a member of the Plant family. One of the best monsters in the game is a Floraman, a fast-growing mage type monster that you can get simply by breeding a Plant with a Beast.
The Plant family has good growth rates and lots of MP, which makes them rather lovely healers. And healing is very important in DWM because the strongest healing spell, HealAll, heals the target's HP to 100% for only 7 MP. Any monster that learns Heal can eventually upgrade it to HealAll.
If all of your party members know HealAll, you have massive recovery abilities across the board. It's a must-have skill for all monsters in the party; it's by far the best skill in the game.
Speaking of the Heal spell, one of the monsters in this gate just so happens to know Heal. We only have a narrow opportunity for getting it...
...but the Gremlin joins our team! Hale, our previous healer, heads to the farm; Grin the Gremlin can provide our healing from now on.
Anyway, Gremlins belong to the Devil family.
Devils are terrible.
They have nice resistances, but their stats are uniformly poor (except for intelligence, but intelligence is easy to grow and maxes out very early) and they grow extremely slowly. With almost no exceptions, Devils require lots of investment in experience and give very little in return. The only reason Grin is useful at all is because he knows Heal and because Devils have some limited use in breeding combinations.
We keep marching through DWM's low-quality (by modern standards) randomly-generated maps and run into one of the least useful items in this run.
WarpWings instantly send you back to GreatTree. They're a spectacular rescue option, but since our rules prevent us from re-entering a gate, using one could actually cripple the run--or even make it impossible to beat the game, if we used it in a plot-critical gate that needs to be completed.
Grin's MP is best reserved for healing spells because even Heal and HealMore give lots of HP for a very low cost. But Grin also knows Firebal, an area-effect attack spell, and while it looks modestly cool...
...and does decent damage that's sometimes harder to resist than physical attacks, Grin has very little MP due to being a crummy Devil monster, and he really can't afford to waste MP on attack spells.
Dirk hits level 7 and learns the Sleep spell shortly before we finally run out of maps to explore. The final boss of the Gate of Villager is quietly snoozing in the corner. While we're around, we offer to rescue a princess who's trapped there.
But we're not quite strong enough to lift her off her feet, so she'd rather wait for a stronger hero to come rescue her.
The boss is a Dragon, a monster with very high stats and an area-effect breath weapon, FireAir.
We deploy Sleep to try to knock him out, as he's highly vulnerable to it, but he resists both Dirk's and Saly's Sleep spells, and he does heavy damage when he retaliates.
He can kill any of our party members in two hits! I make sure to use our ample supply of Herbs to make sure everyone is healthy; we have no means of raising dead monsters right now. After multiple attempts, we finally disable the Dragon.
But he wakes up right afterward, and Saly is down to 1 MP; she can't cast any more Sleep spells. Saly can do nothing but attack, and as a plant--and literally just a tree stump--she's not exactly a melee bruiser.
I keep everyone alive with Herbs, but Dirk runs out of MP without putting the Dragon to sleep even once more. We're not doing nearly as well as we normally would.
But we have lots of Herbs, and eventually, we grind the Dragon down. Better still, he joins the party!
Our new Dragon, Dran, belongs to the... Dragon family. Dragons have excellent stats, especially attack and HP, but they grow extremely slowly, which means they have very little use in this run except as breeding fodder. Speaking of which, we can get the egg of a SkyDragon by standing under a SkyDragon flying over the farm until it plops an egg on our head.
Only one gate left before we have to win another match at the arena: the Gate of Talisman. We sell off our useless WarpWing and buy some more BeefJerkys before heading over to the gate. Our team is Grin the Gremlin, Dran the Dragon, and Dirky the Dracky.
We're still a ways short of level 10, but the closer we get these monsters to level 10, the better off we'll be.
One of the first enemies we run into in the Gate of Talisman is a Spooky, which we saw in the previous arena match. By sheer luck, we get it with a single BeefJerky. It's not very strong, so we won't be taking it with us through this gate.
A Spooky is a Zombie monster. Zombies have lots of nice resistances, high HP, and surprisingly high attack. Not all of them are that great, but Shadows and Reapers are very powerful monsters indeed, and it's not too hard to breed for them.
We also attempt to get a MiniDrak...
...but our bribe is ineffective. MiniDraks aren't great monsters, but they do know SandStorm, which can dramatically reduce enemy hit chances if it works.
While wandering around, we run into an extremely valuable find this early in the game.
There are four types of meat treats in the game: BeefJerky, PorkChop, Rib, and Sirloin, and each one is exponentially more effective and expensive than the last. This Rib is best saved for a special monster.
These early-game gates only have a few levels (the Gate of Talisman has 5), so it's not long before we arrive at the hole to the boss. Here's our party before the fight.
Notice how much stronger Dirk is than Grin. Birds gain levels so fast that their stat growth is much stronger than you'd think. In fact, Dirk is about as strong as Dran, even though Dran has far more experience.
The boss here is a Golem.
The Golem is slow, but has very high defense and hits pretty hard. Fortunately, we manage to land a Sleep spell and get in some free hits.
With all the Sleep spells, the Golem can't touch us. He joins us our newest party member, Golm, replacing Grin.
Grin's healing is very valuable, but Golm just has spectacular stats, and we could really use a sturdy character in this next arena match.
The first fight is a trio of SpotSlimes. Normally, they're nothing special, but they can use Imitate despite being very low-level, which means they can mirror our own attacks!
The second fight is an Almiraj flanked by two MudDolls. Offensively, they're not too dangerous, but the MudDolls' OddDance skill can do terrible things to our MP.
Fortunately, we bring them down quickly and don't lose too much MP in the process.
The last fight is a Putrepup, a MadRaven, and a Skullroo. All of them are very sturdy, the MadRaven can use HighJump to evade attacks, and the Skullroo can use the PaniDance, a dance skill that can confuse our party members. We spend the first round trading disablers.
By the end of the next round, our entire party is confused! Mercifully, Dran and Golm recover, but the enemy has made substantial progress in the meantime.
We're taking heavy damage, but so are the enemies. We lose Dran, but take down the Skullroo and prevent further confusion effects.
Dirk puts the MadRaven to sleep, and soon it goes down.
The last remaining enemy, the Putrepup, chews up Dirk, leaving only Golm standing.
But Golm holds strong, and we just barely manage to win the fight. The lack of grinding makes these early-game area fights rather dicey.
We now have access to the Starry Night Chamber, which means we can finally breed monsters. We don't have any level 10 critters yet, but we can finally hatch that SkyDragon egg.
First, though, we want to make sure it's the right gender so it's more useful for breeding when it grows up. As it happens, there's a goofy lady who can tell the gender of monsters (and other, more vague information) just by holding the egg. She can even change the gender by singing. Her prices can be very high depending on the strength of the egg, but she's quite fun to listen to.
We hatch the egg and Sky the SkyDragon takes Dran's place as our party dragon. SkyDragons aren't particularly special, but monsters gain experience and therefore levels much faster if they join us on trips through the gates (they only gain a little experience if you leave them on the farm). For the same reasons, we trade out Golm and Dirk for Saly and Grin--we want these critters to hit level 10 fast.
Next up: the Gates of Memories and Bewilder.
Previous updates
Playing on impossible difficulty and with the requirement that I take no losses in battles means I need to work on a couple of things:
- being as strong as possible prior to fighting
- finding a way to revive creatures that die in battle as, at least in the early game, it's impossible to avoid some casualties.
Gaining strength can be done by exploring, looting and completing quests before undertaking battles. As you progress around the adventure map most creatures can be lured into chasing you - providing the opportunity to drag them out of position while you grab the treasure they are guarding. This approach can greatly increase your strength without doing any significant fighting.
I've got into the habit of doing one particular quest - to rescue a cage of frogs - very early. That's because when I first tried to do it without fighting it was extremely difficult, so I didn't want to get too far into a run before taking the risk. With so much practice it's now pretty routine, but I still do it early. Initially Earl Argus asks you to find a frog princess for him. When you find a frog in Marshan Swamp though she complains that the Earl has already taken lots of her sisters and asks you to rescue them. Going back to the Earl he suggests that you get him a love potion instead - and some pulling of stacks around later you can get into a nearby cave to get such a potion from a friendly witch. The Earl then allows you into his dungeons, where there's an obstacle in the way of getting to the cage of frogs.
1) Pulling one of the necromancer stacks back to the dungeon entrance.
3) Running back to the second stack, it needs to be pulled back to where the cage was (as there's not enough space anywhere else to dodge round it - one of the problems of the game is that some visible terrain is actually impassable, so care is needed when planning movement).
The frog princess is so glad to see her sisters she offers to become your wife. She's not the ideal partner for my purposes, but is the best choice for now. A quick conversation with her about family means that she will have a child after 10 battles (though that will take a while).
In the meantime there's more looting to be done in Marshan Swamp. That includes diving into a series of tombs for Furious Paladin. There are 5 of those, of which 4 can be fully looted by running the enemies inside around - although the Paladin advises activating altars in each tomb that will destroy them. For a long time I used to dodge the enemies, with the idea of saving the XP from them for the time when I could kill them safely. However, by that time the enemies being faced are so much stronger that the XP gain from these ones is insignificant - so more recently I've just been destroying them using the altars.
In one of the tombs there's a really important find to help with the problem of needing to revive lost creatures. That's a few ancient vampires, who have significantly higher HPs than standard vampires and, like the standard ones, can drain life from enemies to restore their losses.
Another tomb in the Swamp is the Chronicles Crypt. Sprinkled in different places across areas are enemy heroes, who add spells and stats to the armies they control. One of those in the form of a bat (which moves quickly) is patrolling outside that crypt and is far too tough to even think about fighting - but it is just possible to sneak up behind him at one end of his patrol and get into the crypt.
There are also 4 vampires in one of the tombs. In other starts it's possible to find standard vampires for sale, but there are none in this case. However, every start always has a few cursed coffins lying around which will provide a minimum of 3 vampires anyway.
With the ancient vampires in the army I'm now ready for my first combat ...
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1001507/#Comment_1001507
Back in Greenwort the ancient vampires had their first battle against Robber. He's a weak hero with only a slow spell available and the ancient vampires are far too strong for his army.
While in Verlon Forest I looted everything in the area. Possibly the hardest bit of that is the Old Castle where you can find an ancient treasure chest for a quest. That has a guardian in quite a small room, but it's still possible to get just enough distance to activate a teleportation portrait before the chasing enemy can grab you.
The king had asked you to get the Chest of Rage for him, but you've grown attached to it and are unwilling to give it up. The king agrees to let you keep it if you do some more questing for him.
One of the nice things about the ancient vampires is they have a high initiative, so will normally go first in battles. That allows me to use Sleem's new Evil Shoal ability on enemies at the start of the battle to activate Zerock.
After looting most of the remainder of Greenwort I returned to Marshan Swamp to do another quest for Furious Paladin and buy a few things with some of the money looted in explorations to date. Particular prizes are the Spear of Rage, which gives you a 20% bonus to the amount of rage generated in battles and the Well of Mana belt.
There are 4 areas you have access to initially, Greenwort, Marshan Swamp, Verlon Forest and Arlania. The latter is where the Earl with a penchant for frogs lives, but most of that area has not yet been looted. There's lots more running round required there to grab all the treasure, but nothing as difficult as in the Earl's dungeon and the work doesn't take too long. There is though still one final lot of looting to do. There are some coastal areas in Greenwort, Verlon Forest and Arlania that are only accessible by ship and you can get a ship in Arlania by completing a quest. You can pull enemies out of position by disembarking near them and then hopping back onto the ship as they run at you. That does take practice though and sometimes your horse will shy when you try to get back on - so you really need to click multiple times when attempting the move. It also helps to lay the ship broadside to the land.
After the death of Gorion, Firehelm helped Joia and killed Tarnesh. After that, heading south of Beregost two ogrillon were killed quite easily.
he then helped Mellicamp, but upon trying to help the werewolf the guril berry antidote didn't work.
He then returned Jumper the rabbit to Kessy who had lost him.
Killing Hobgoblins on the way Firehelm reached Nashkel where he gained some better armour before killing Oompah at the Carnival.
He then fought against Zordral where he fought a fierce battle.
He then took Littl-little Ugh to Ugh after finding a ring of fire protection.
He then returned the Colquetle Amulet.
Karlat was then killed and after buying some magical bolts he killed the werewolf. The bolts were not quite sufficient to kill the werewolf so he cast sword of seeking which he was relieved to find was sufficient. After buying the bolts he was virtually without gold. He was given a decent sword as a reward for the body of the werewolf.
Heading south he helped Fufie and killed Vax and Zal.
Heading west he helped a dryad before killing wolves and returning 'Drienne's cat.
Firehelm then went xvart-hunting to the north.
He then returned to Zordral and this time was a bit more successful.
The ankheg farm was the next on the agenda.
Firehelm then killed Zargal but had to flee from Bassilus due to his Aerial Servant being so powerful. By then his reputation had reached 19.
Just north of Beregost he killed an ogre with a belt fetish and in transit wiped out a horde of bandits.
He then returned to fight Bassilus and after doing his utmost to avoid the Aerial Servant was finally victorious.
He then went to help Charleston Nib and found himself in a surprisingly difficult battle.
He then headed to the Nashkel Mines where he fought and defeated Zargos Flintblade before going on to kill Greywolf also..
Heading west to the Gnoll Stronghold, he began to wonder if he would survive, but he did.
East of Beregost he investigated a cave and killed some powerful spiders before deciding that the cave was too dangerous to be handled without help.
With the help of Rose, (A bard) Firehelm took on some thespians and won.
He got Thorengrim to upgrade a belt before enlisting Tenya who needed the belt upgrading in order to carry anything of note.
Firehelm then started enlisting helpers before returning to the dangerous cave to the east of Beregost.
Firebead then helped Gavin finish his last quest before dropping him in favour of Thorin.
It was then time to investigate the nashkel Mines.
Party Stats
Naturesfury - half-elf, fighter/druid - 43 kills (4 deaths)
April - half-elf, fighter/druid - 36 kills
Jaheira - half-elf, fighter/druid - 7 kills
Natureswrath - half-elf, fighter/druid - 35 kills
Druidpower - half-elf, totemic druid - 15 kills
SETUP: BG 1 EE, no mods, core rules at at all times
RESTRICTIONS: Only druid or multi-class druid NPCs allowed to join party
So one of the early tasks was to recruit Jaheira. But since we only had one slot and Khalid has to join at first, we had to be a bit sneaky. We first did Joaia's quest to clear her house of her. Then we parked Druidpower in the temple (with the rest of the party outside) and removed them from the party. We then recruited Jaheira and Khalid. We then parked Khalid in Joaia's house (with the rest of the party outside) and removed Khalid from the party. We then recruited Druidpower and then we had our all druid party ready to go.
The early going was quite dicey, as it took a long time (clearing 4 maps) before we got to level 2 for the fighter/druids. A number of times would have been certain death but believe the level 1 protection kicked in.
Early tasks:
* Get club for April from Krum and Kaldo. No sweat.
* Get Dexterity tome for Jaheira. We eventually put her in the front lines with her staff since she had more AC then Natureswrath.
* We killed the bear for that citizen asking for help (the one that gives frost boots reward). However, Naturesfury suffered the 1st death to the bear.
* While clearing out High Hedge, a bear once again killed Naturesfury.
* Bassiluss held and killed Naturesfury but he did not survive our assault.
* Using a protection from undead scroll, we cleared out the undead in the 3 tombs area - this got our fighter/druids to level 2 druid/fighter which finally gives us a little buffer, though bears are still plenty dangerous.
* Melicamp failed to survive the anti-chickenator spell.
* Natursfury is the only dual-wielder in the group, using two +2 daggers, one being the dagger of venom.
We will keep at it. Once the party all has access to call lightnings, then at that point we will brave the basilisks.
Valalsia Ironheart, the dwarven Stalker
Posts : 1, 2Notable mods
- SCS (full prebuffs, full tactical challenge)
- Item Revisions
- Spell Revisions
- Rogue Rebalancing
- Tweak Anthology
- Item Randomizer
- plenty of npc mods
So, we're now heading to Cloakwood. On our way to the mines, I took the time to pick up Faldorn. I think that's the first time I ever had her with me and, with Spell Revisions, she's rocking; there are lots of good druid spells with this mod.
On the fight against Drasus, Valalsia opened hostilities with a one-shot backstab on Kysus. Neeto.
We then started to focus fire on Drasus himself. With a good dose of solid melee, Flame Arrows and Call Lightning, he went down fast. Genthore was chunked by Minsc, which left only Rezdan to deal with. Faldorn casted Poison on him, because, being a level 4 spell, it bypassed MGOI. Dynaheir then stripped him of his MGOI and he went down fast after melee pressure.
We then decided to go straight to Davaeorn, but not after having switched Branwen for Yeslick. I think Branwen is slightly superior at this point, but Valalsia couldn't refuse to fight alongside a fellow dwarf. However, because Hareishan proved to be a nuisance while we were trying to go down, we had to dispatch her, again with the help of Faldorn and Poison. SCS mages really like their MGOI, so all the thanks to Faldorn !
Davaeorn himself was dealt the usual way : a Prot from Magic scroll on Valalsia and potions of Strength to make her immune to Davey's spells and the rest of the crew manning the door against the Black Talon Elites pouring into the room. Minsc and Valalsia started by dispatching the Battle Horrors, where she took some damage. However, after the were cleared, she kept bugging Davey while he was wasting all his most powerful spells on her. Valalsia got Davey to Badly Injured before asking for a bit of help to finish the fight.
Then, Coran gave the coup de grâce.
On our way to Baldur's Gate, we stopped by Ulcaster to kill the aptly named Wolf of Ulcaster. The fight was straight forward : a few traps and a backstab to soften him up and then plenty of melee to take him down. Minsc slained the beast at the same moment the Wolf held Valalsia. Could have been dangerous, actually.
Then, another detour by the Firewine Bridge. With plenty of potions of healing, the place is not too bad. However, you can't go out and sleep after taking out a few kobolds, because new ones will be right back in the maze. Thus, the need of potions. So, after making our way just before the Ogre-mage fight, we started to prebuff. But then, Lendarn the mage decided to show up early, so we had to take him down. Faldorn couldn't target him with Poison, because he was invisible. Welp, a mixture of Spell Thrust, melee and wand charges sealed the deal. Faldorn cracked him skull with a crit.
The Ogre-mage fight was super smooth. Valalsia opened with a backtab and Coran with arrows of biting. He never could cast a single spell. Boo hoo. Valalsia ended up chunking him with a crit.
We then finally reached Baldur's Gate. We quested a bit before going into the Iron Throne fight. That fight can always be complicated, because there are a lot of high level mages with solid fighters to deal with. Add in two backtabbing thieves and you got yourself a dangerous combination.
We opened up the fight with a salve of Fireballs from potions, wand charges and arrows of explosion. It softened them up, but didn't put much of a dent in them.
Then the backstabbing thieves did their jobs and Coran bit the dust.
However, our defense was stout, so, after much meleeing, healing potions and wand charges, we finally prevailed.
It was time to go back to Candlekeep.
In the Druids area, because Jaheira was with us, we had to fight against almost all of the Druids. This isn't much or a problem; until they used the aTweaks version of Call Woodland Beings. Dryads are very annoying to fight under aTweaks, because they constatly throw out Charm spells (which luckily are unable to end our run unless Ajantis is killed, as he is naturally immune to Charm), together with Entagle spells. The result? Long, ardous fights of Ajantis running around and not running around because of Entagle, while trying to kill the Dryads on his own. If I saw anyone had gotten the spell casted on them I just sent them away, since the AI of charmed creatures does not activate if they are charmed with no player-allied creatures in sight, and if you don't go in their sight, they will remain on their position. The Druids were slaughtered as quickly as possible, but one of them got one Call Woodland Beings out since I, again, wasn't able to properly time my attacks to disrupt it.
When we faced Amarande, only Jaheira got charmed, and that was after Amarande and his comrades were long dead. The Nymph suddenly went downstairs, after the fight had already ended, and almost makes Branwen (who, as it can be seen in the screenshot below, had been in another almost-death situation very recently) get killed by Jaheira. We exited the building and ran from Jaheira until she calmed down. The fight against the Druid Leader himself contained a very high amount cheese in the form of going up and down the stairs, first, to clean up the snakes and cheetahs he had summoned, and second, to lure him out of the topmost room so that we wouldn't have to fight him at the same time as the Dryads, which Ajantis dealt with on his own later. Coran had gotten charmed in one of the early blitzkrieg attacks to lure out the summoned animals. Yvralline saved Branwen from the Poison with her newely acquired Bhaalpower.
We again let Edwin get the kill, although not entirely voluntarily this time.
After clearing out the remaining attractions, we re-supplied at Beregost, and are ready to finally take on the Wyverns, but not without thanking Coran for his (unusually long) patience first (I edited the value of the global timer on my save so that he wouldn't leave, since it's impossible to keep him in the party otherwise, and I don't really like recruiting party members when you're high-level.
On the Wyverns' area, I send Ajantis forward to deal with the Hamadryad, but she teleports right over our party, which was a very bad choice from her side, and she gets pelted down in a single round. Ajantis and Jaheira kill the remaining animals with ranged support from the rest of the party. After this, we encountered a single bear, that would've gone without mention had not it bugged out after dying, and constantly screeched out as if it was continously dying every second, until I fixed this by quicksaving and loading that save. It's not a game-breaking bug, but I don't know any other methods to remove it, and it does not affect anything at all in the run. I am uncertain whether travelling removes it, but I honestly wanted it gone fast, because I am not particularly fond of listening to a bear die every step I take.
The Wyverns can't do anything against Slow, a double Holy Smite and our formidable physical damage output put together, although that charge from the Wand of Fear I used for some reason was completely wasted and failed to affect them in any way. Coran reminded us we should take one of the creatures' head to Beregost, so we did that, sold a couple of Ankheg shells for some reason we still had on us, bought ammo, not from Taerom but from Thalantyr, as our stupidly high amount of gold allows us to use magical ammo as if it was rainwater. We're back to the Cloakwoods, were we finally give Chelak the body of his dead brother, and without doing anything else we head into the Mines.
I try to scout ahead with Coran, but he fails his check and I also fail to move him in time, which means our chances to cheese got instantly demolished in this very instant. Nevertheless, a warm greeting in the form of a Fireball (another mistake, I could have casted at least three, using the wands I have instead, which later I could not make use of because of the proximity of the enemies and my party) from Edwin, which was quickly followed by a Slow spell. Jaheira and Ajantis held the enemy fighters, at the cost of all my Extra-healing potions, since they were affected by an SR Emotion spell which I asume lets enemies make good damage rolls on you, or, as usual, I just have bad luck and this is simply another result of that. Anyway, while moving onto the fourth round of combat, one of the two wizards decides to show up. He casts Dispel Magic, but it only affects Jaheira, as it somehow, miraculously, it fails to affect Ajantis, and the rest of the party was too far away for it to be of any effect towards them. Genthore is the first to fall, so I switch Ajantis to focus on Drasus as well, whom dies in the following round, but not after leaving both Ajantis and Jaheira without any potions of Extra-healing. Redzan wastes a Domination spell on Jaheira, and walks up to the party, where he is indiscriminately beaten to death by all the members of our group. I am unsure what made him walk into our party (I believe he was trying to reach Edwin with his spells, but Edwin instantly retreated (although he did join the rest of the party to pelt down the wizard), and he ended up getting his path blocked by Branwen, Yvralline and Coran.
Right after his groupmate died, Kysus came out of hiding. He did more damage to us, and made the fight harder, than the rest of his group together. A formidable fellow. He summoned Ogre 'zerkers, made us retreat, but when we did so, the Ogres acted out their suicide pact:
Both the Ogre and Kysus were out of our line of sight. I send Ajantis to look for Kysus, because he is nowhere to be seen. I found him after triggering spawn-points for two Wolves, one Tasloi and one group of guards. He mysteriously teleports to the party (by running away under the effects of Haste outside of my line of sight), by whom he is quickly killed. The fight against all the creatures Ajantis brought towards us was hard, since we were low on everything, but thanks to Jaheira having Hold Animals memorized we won without using much more than three healing potions, one charge from the Wand of Fear and all of our Hold spells, together with a scroll of Hold and another one of Magic Missiles. I turned rest until fully healed on, and let my party have a well-earned, 24 hours rest. Then I turned it back off and saved.
I will probably play the rest of the Mines this weekend, report will come soon after that, hopefully.
Upon leaving they were able to kill the Revenant.
They then killed two assassins in Nashkel.
Oublek was then charmed and he joined in the fight against a baby dragon, however, sadly he died.
semi: No-Reload Dragon Warrior Monsters Run
Part 3
Monsters in DWM have personalities that impact their behavior in combat. Basically, they're a sum of four traits: their motivation, their bravery, their intelligence, and their compassion. Motivated monsters use more skills and are more likely to land critical hits, brave monsters are more likely to land critical hits as well, intelligence monsters are more effective at using disablers, and compassionate monsters can sometimes save MP when using healing spells.The only way to change a monster's personality is to give it orders in combat. "Charge" makes them braver but less smart, "Mixed" makes them smarter but less compassionate, and "Cautious" makes them more compassionate but less brave. Encouraging our monsters to use skills will cost us precious MP when traveling through the wilderness, but it's important to improve their personalities for big fights.
Sky might be a dragon, but dragons do get strong attack growth, so even at low levels, Sky is improving quickly from all the new experience.
I repeatedly fail to catch the monsters I want--PillowRats, Catapilas, DragonKids, and Pickies--but eventually I manage to nab a FairyRat by giving it our precious Rib.
The FairyRat is also a female, which means we can breed it with a certain FangSlime later to get a Unicorn--a very precious find.
I also grab a SpotSlime, but Slimes aren't very useful, either as party members or even breeding fodder.
We make a little progress in strengthening our party before the boss of the Gate of Memories, but Grin and Saly are still just shy of the ever-important level 10 mark.
Notice Sky's incredible 70 attack. High attack is very important in DWM because it scales so well and attacks cost no MP--which saves MP for disablers and healing spells.
The boss here is a MadCat, a fast-moving, high-impact bruiser.
But the MadCat is highly vulnerable to Sleep, and we keep it disabled for most of the fight.
The MadCat, Gig, is already level 12 and ready to breed. But unless I'm willing to sacrifice Dran, our Dragon, to open up a new gate (and I'm not), we don't have any more opportunities to breed monsters or grind for experience.
It's time to take on the next arena fight. And this one is very, very difficult.
Since we'll need elemental resistances to survive this fight, I bring Golm the Golem back into the party. We have a healer and two solid damage dealers on hand.
The first fight is against a Crestpent, a TreeSlime, and a PoisonGon, a very poison-heavy team that we'll want to take out fast.
We make it out okay, but at the cost of a lot of MP. Unfortunately, the next fight is also very dangerous: a DrakSlime, a Dragon, and a FairyDrak. The first one is the most dangerous, as it knows a skill called SuckAir.
This means it will do double damage with breath weapons on the second round. We can't take it out in time, though we manage to beat the FairyDrak, but Grin can heal himself up, Golm is pretty resistant to fire, and Sky is flat-out immune to the DrakSlime's FireAir breath weapon.
Here's where things get really ugly. The final fight is against Teto. Teto has an Armorpede and two Snailys.
The Armorpede can deal high damage with Twinslash at the cost of some damage to itself, but it's usually not too dangerous. The Snailys, however, are absolutely brutal. They both cast IceBolt, an area-effect cold spell that deals remarkable damage at low levels like ours.
We take massive damage on the first round. Grin can recover, and Golm can resist, but Grin is running out of MP and Sky is approaching death.
Golm is struggling to slay the Snailys, and Sky is struggling to stay alive. Grin uses his last Heal spell trying to protect Sky.
We take down a single Snaily, but with only 1 MP left (and we need 2 MP to cast Heal), Grin is now useless, and the rest of the team is suffering.
The enemy brings down Grin. We beat the remaining Snaily, but lose Sky in the process.
Soon, it's down to just Golm and the Armorpede. But Golm took a lot of damage attempting to beat the Snailys, while the Armorpede has suffered little. In the end, the Armorpede wins out.
We were so close to winning. That was one of the biggest obstacles in the game, and if we had made it, we could start breeding monsters and building up our power, instead of constantly working on a power deficit. It's very frustrating.
Then, eventually, I realize I was wrong about the lack of gates.
I beat the Gate of Memories, but never moved on to the Gate of Bewilder. I could have had some slightly stronger monsters if I had remembered to enter that gate, and the extra numbers would probably have let us beat Teto.
Back to the start of the game. This time, though, I won't forget to use the Gate of Bewilder--and I might just sacrifice Dran or Sky in order to open the gate in the bazaar.
If we manage to breed some monsters before that gate, we can take in one or two level 1 monsters and emerge with one or two very, very strong creatures that could mop the floor with Teto.
semi: No-Reload Dragon Warrior Monsters Run
Part 4
The start of the game plays out much like the previous one did: get a Dracky and take Hale and Slib to win the first arena fight, catch a Stubsuck, GoHopper, and Gremlin, and beat the Dragon at the Gate of Villager with Sleep spells (much more effective this time around). We even manage to grab a Picky!But after just a few gates, I realize that we simply don't have the resources to survive the coming fights. We lost all of our meat treats failing to get a Spooky, and we have almost no monsters to work with. Of the monsters we do have, practically all of them are male, which means our opportunities to breed monsters are going to be severely restricted well into the future.
In the end, I decide to start over. Early game luck in catching monsters can play a huge role in a no-grinding run, and our current set of monsters just isn't workable.
semi: No-Reload Dragon Warrior Monsters Run
Part 5
This time, get a little better luck. We manage to catch a Gremlin and (after spending lots of gold on meat treats) even a Spooky. Most fights played out similarly to the previous couple runs.The Spooky, Pike, is an important breeding option, so I take it along with us to the Gate of Memories to level it up. We want it to reach level 10 before we unlock the gate in the bazaar. On the way, I spot a brilliant opportunity.
That guy in the blue robes is a priest. They're not too uncommon in the wilderness, but if you fight his monsters and win, he'll heal your whole party, both HP and MP, and even revive fallen monsters and cure status ailments.
But I don't know how strong his monsters are. For wandering priests and other monster trainers, their monsters are leveled, and at low levels, I'm concerned that he's going to have much stronger monsters than ours.
We keep moving and manage to catch a FairyRat. It's not a very special monster, but it's a Beast, which we'll want for breeding later. This time around, we don't have Sleep for the MadCat, but I have lots of Herbs on hand to keep the party safe.
Before I head into the Gate of Bewilder, I go ahead and unlock the bazaar gate. Basically, the locals can't turn on their grill, and they want you to permanently give up a monster with a fire skill to help them out--except the grill explodes and becomes a gate. Dran is a valuable monster, but not as valuable as an extra gate before the fight with Teto.
It's time to proceed to the Gate of Bewilder. If we can get our Spooky, Pike, up to level 10, the fight with Teto will be a cinch--or at least a lot easier than before. Through great luck, we manage to catch a BigRoost on the way.
BigRoosts look stupid and aren't very special aside from their SandStorm skill, but since they're Bird monsters, we'll be able to breed this one for some very powerful monsters soon enough.
I run into another priest, and this time, I decide to take him on for the extra experience points. The enemy has an intimidating lineup--a FireWeed, Wyvern, and Shadow--but we deal much more damage than them, largely because of Sky the SkyDragon.
Grin falls, but we get a lucky critical hit on the FireWeed, and the fight gets Pike up to level 10!
We've got some important monsters to catch in the lower levels of the Gate of Bewilder, and we just so happen to find a Rib midway through the area. With two Ribs in hand, we trade them for another two valuable monsters for breeding: a Hork and a Demonite. I switch out Pike for our new Hork, since Pike is already at level 10.
As members of the Zombie and Devil families, the Hork and Demonite open up more breeding opportunities.
We even catch an EvilSeed (a Plant monster) and a SpotSlime on the way. I think this is the golden run: we're getting essentially all the early-game resources I've been hoping for!
The boss of this gate is a FaceTree, a... tree with a face. It's guarded by a simple maze puzzle with some Stubsucks who block the way.
However... the shortest route to the FaceTree is also the fastest, because the Stubsuck there just moves out of your way. The game designers apparently tried to make this into a puzzle, but it's actually like a maze with only three paths, the first of which is the easiest.
We still attack the optional Stubsucks, as they don't do much besides cast Sleep and give lots of experience.
The Stubsucks get everyone in the party all the way up to level 10! This is a spectacular piece of good news; we have even more monsters available for breeding.
The FaceTree has strong stats and can cast Curse (which has random negative status effects) and StopSpell. It deals some impressive damage, and Grin only gets a single Heal spell off the ground before the FaceTree shuts down his spellcasting.
We break out some Herb spells to heal the party, and in the end, the FaceTree never casts Curse. We get a new high-level Plant, Face the FaceTree, to add to the farm.
We can breed multiple monsters now, but unfortunately, our Anteater still hasn't quite reached level 10, which means we can't yet get a Grizzly.
In the end, I decide to only breed for a single monster before entering the last gate available to us. By breeding our Hork with Grin the Gremlin, we can get a Reaper.
Our new Reaper, Star, joins the party, and as a future investment, I bring our male Demonite to the bazaar gate to raise it to level 10 so we can breed it with our Anteater for a Grizzly. Sky the SkyDragon doesn't need any more experience, but she'll help us get through the next gate.
Star has lousy stats and because her parents had low-grade personalities, her personality starts out as "Lazy."
But because Star's father, Grin the Gremlin, knew the Heal spell, she'll be able to learn it as well. On top of that, Reapers have incredibly high stat growth across the board, especially for the attack stat. Most critters get less than +5 to any given stat when they level up, but when we beat the first SpotSlime in the bazaar gate, Star gets +8 bonuses right from level 2!
She then lands a +6 and a +9. She's already level 4 and growing fast.
Most of the levels on each gate are randomized wilderness areas, but sometimes you'll get some pre-set locations, including a room that's loaded with treasure chests.
However, there's always a chance that a treasure chest is actually a Mimic, and aside from their massive stats, Mimics have two spells that could prove quickly fatal: BlazeMost, a high-damage single-target fire spell that could easily kill anyone except for (maybe) Sky, and Defeat, an area-effect instant death spell that low-end monsters like ours would struggle to resist.
I ignore the chests and move on. I don't need the loot.
This gate has some nice monsters in it. We find more Catapilas and DragonKids, but there's another very special monster to be found: a BeanMan.
BeanMen can cast Twinhits, a cheap, 2-MP spell that doubles a party member's attack power for an entire fight. It's incredibly strong and belongs to a useful Plant monster, so we give it our rarest treat, a Rib.
Unfortunately, the attempt fails. The BeanMan doesn't join the party.
Still, we're in excellent shape. Star is getting massive bonuses with every level. Even at level 6, her stats are sky-high considering how early in the game we are.
Star even learns StopSpell at level 9. When we run into another priest, I don't hesitate to tackle them. Star shuts down all of the enemies' spellcasting in a single round.
The priest heals us back to full HP and MP...
...and we arrive at the final area in peak condition. Here's our party.
Star the Reaper has much less experience than our SkyDragon, and yet she completely outclasses Sky in almost every dimension. Even her attack score is incredibly high; it's only 8 points lower than Sky's. On top of that, Star has a deep MP pool to cast HealMore spells.
I am not the least bit worried about this boss fight. The MadKnight deals heavy damage, but it's nothing we can't easily heal.
To speed things up, we have Dane the Demonite blast the MadKnight with some spells. BlazeMore does well over 30 damage per hit, and that's against a MadKnight with resistances.
Demonites have terrible MP and can't cast many spells, though, so Dane is still a pretty terrible character.
The MadKnight, Pash, joins the team, replacing Dane as our third party member. Pash has awesome stats, so we are very, very well-equipped for the fight in E class.
The fight match goes smoothly. We just crush them with sheer attack power; we have three heavy hitters in the team.
The DrakSlime doesn't even get a chance to blast us with FireAir.
Now we just need to deal with Teto. I'm still concerned about this fight, so I give the "Mixed" order to Star, expecting her to use StopSpell to block the Snailys' IceBolt spells. Instead, she wastes her time using LushLicks to disable a Snaily for a single round.
We can't give direct, specific orders in arena matches; we have to rely on our monsters' AI to get them to make smart use of their skills.
The Armorpede does some heavy damage with Twinslash, but between our SkyDragon, Reaper, and MadKnight, we can stomp on the first Snaily early in the fight.
And with HealMore, Sky is back up to full health within a round. Teto's team is designed for blitzkrieg combat, but by picking just the right monsters at just the right times, we had the sheer numbers to survive the assault and crush the enemy.
With E class won, we can now enter the Gates of Peace and Bravery. But first, we have another monster to breed.
We breed Dirk the Dracky with Sky the SkyDragon to create a Wyvern--which is actually a Bird monster in DWM; not a Dragon. We have the egg lady change the gender to male to aid in a future breeding plan.
Our newest level 1 monster joins the party, Wave the Wyvern. Like Star, Wave starts with pretty poor stats, since a monster's level 1 stats are equal to half the average of their parents' stats.
But this ugly little abomination is one of the best monsters in the game, despite the fact that you can get it just by breeding a Bird with a Dragon. Wyverns gain levels extremely fast like most birds, and it has excellent stats, to boot. It's a very high-powered and very balanced character, just like the Reaper, with the HP to survive in combat, the attack to deal heavy damage, and the MP to cast healing spells.
Neither of Wave's parents could cast Heal, so Wave has inherited no healing skills, but as a Wyvern, Wave can innately learn Heal, FrigidAir, and Sleep just by virtue of his own species. It won't take long to level up Wave, and once we do, we'll have a fast-growing Bird monster that's equally capable of dealing damage, casting disablers, and healing the party.
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With everything possible looted without doing more fighting I was ready to face the first boss monster - Geya, the giant turtle. All the preparation done to date makes that easier, although in fact it's possible to kill it with a single ancient vampire with minimum stats.
An air ship takes you to a remote island where you face Geya. You're likely to discover early on in the fight that rage spirits don't work in fights with boss monsters - I imagine that the game designers had a few chuckles over penning that message to gamers
After reporting to the king you can access a new location in the Freedom Islands. Though I’ve avoided any unnecessary fights thus far, 4 ancient vampires could have defeated quite a few of the inhabitants of the original areas. The enemies in the Freedom Islands are far tougher though and virtually all unintended encounters would end in a quick death. However, although fighting opportunities are limited, there’s the same chance as before to do plenty of looting while dodging enemies.
The reason the king has sent you to this place is to get some maps showing the way to yet another series of areas. Lucky James has those and can be found in his own personal mines. Those include some dwarf slaves as well, who offer you the chance to buy some roasted rats. You can get up to 7 of those – eating them gives you a small bonus to mana and rage, though at the expense of leadership.
After all the practice I’ve had most of the looting is pretty easy. However, as usual I can’t resist the temptation to try and pick some shrubs for one quest in the Secret Underground cave. The problem with that is that it’s a relatively small area, with a beholder guarding the shrubs.
There may be some more left there however, but certainly there is no need to fear a return.
After raising their fallen Firehelm went to the area north of Beregost and killed Nicardian et al, Teven et al and the caravan bandits. Upon returning to Beregost they easily slew Tranzig.
Whilst there, they went to Magnus thinking that better equipment was in order. The weird thing was that some dwarven armour that should have been wearable by Firehelm or Thorin wasn't and that same armour should not have been wearable by Sirene and yet it was. Clearly somebody got their coding wrong.
It doesn't matter at present as the party only has 10,000 gp and it costs 30,000 gp.
As it happens, I've run the numbers and identified the highest-growth monsters in the game by pulling growth tables from the old Tiger Marmalade site (which has since vanished, but once had great data on the DWM games) and calculating each monster's stat growth for levels 2-30. Among many discoveries, I found that some of the critters with the highest stat growths in important areas were actually monsters that were very easy to get, while conventional wisdom held that the best monsters were the hardest to get:
Grizzly
Wyvern
MadPecker
Florajay
Floraman
WingTree
CactiBall
Lipsy
Shadow
RogueNite
Moray (Water type; DWM2 only)
RayGigas (Water type; DWM2 only)
These are all primary monsters, by which I mean they only require basic combinations to breed for. Attached is an Excel sheet with stat growth values for each monster, organized by family. While I'm at it, also attached are Word files containing breeding combinations for all monsters.
I have time to run one more attempt at a no reload before school hits back full swing. So I have decided to role up a pre made party to assist with the no reload challenges missing contestants. Looking at @Enuhal list he provided of uncompleted no reload runs.
Dwarven Defender
Ranger
Stalker
Undead Hunter
Cleric
Priest of Helm
Priest of Talos
Priest of Tempus
Priest of Tyr
Shapeshifter
Avenger
All Specialist Mages (except Wild Mage and Enchanter)
Thief
Bounty Hunter
Shadow Dancer
Bard
Dark Moon Monk
Shaman
Fighter/Druid
Cleric/Ranger
Fighter/Mage/Cleric
My party will be:
plain thief
fighter/druid
cleric/ranger
undead hunter
conjuration specialist
Ranger
This looks like a fairly balanced party to me with a possible chance to make it through ascension/scs. Any thoughts or suggestions before I load up this party tomorrow night? Any thoughts on proficiencies or strategies that I may need for implementation?
Valalsia Ironheart, the dwarven Stalker
Posts : 1, 2, 3Notable mods
- SCS (full prebuffs, full tactical challenge)
- Item Revisions
- Spell Revisions
- Rogue Rebalancing
- Tweak Anthology
- Item Randomizer
- plenty of npc mods
When we arrived in Candlekeep, we were greeted by the ogre-mages fight. It went super smooth. Valalsia drank a potion of invisibility and placed herself out of harm way. Minsc's Berserk ability gave him a blanket protection from many disablers and I think that Dynaheir saved against charm. Other than that, Summon Insect, Detect Invisibility, wand charges and melee damage did them in. Minimal damage taken.
We chose to kill Rieltar and his gang, but no special item was found on them. Good stuff to sell but nothing I needed. That happens with Item Randomizer : sometimes, nothing good comes up !
We had no problem whatsoever going through the catacombs. Since Valalsia specialize in axes and short swords, I decided that we should kill Prat for that sweet, sweet returning axe +1. So we did. His toons were dispatched without troubles, but Prat himself is a bit of a pain in the butt, because he just always moves so damn much. However, when we did find him, we surrounded him quickly; under the pressure of four meleers, his defenses didn't last long.
Now, freshly out of Candlekeep and wanted for murder in Baldur's Gate, we had to lay low. We were all a good full level under the xp cap (even though it's disabled in my install) and wanted to find good gear for myself and my allies. I already had a Ring of Freedom from the Iron Throne fight, but I hadn't found the Greenstone Amulet, which is just too great to pass up.
So, we started with the Ice Island. The intial fight against the three mages was complicated. My strategy was to hit them with two Ice Storm after an initial backstab. It worked on one of the mages who died fast, but the other two disappeared quickly.
Andris then appeared out of nowhere and starched Coran with a Cone of Cold for his exact amount of life : 44 hp. That's a bit of a pain, because there are nasty traps in this place and I was counting on him to take them out. Find Traps and tanking damage were used instead.
Andris died soon after from a Detect Invisibility/Poison combination (his MGOI was already stripped) and the other mage (can't remember his name and I'm too lazy to check it up, even though it would have taken me less time than to write this
Since we didn't have Coran anymore, we went straight to the exit. Tellan was in our way, but again, Spell Thurst --> Detect Invisibility --> any damaging spell (I prefer Poison in this run) make quick work of any BG1 mage. That's how Tellan fell. Oh, and Dezkiel too.
After that, we rejoined Ulgoth's Beard. The xp was decent, but no Greenstone Amulet. Really, it is the last item I care about before finishing the game.
Off to the Wolfie Island we went. I never had any difficulty with this place before, but I guess a bit of complacency kicked in because, yet again, Coran bit the dust in the first few fights on the Island. And again, I have no way to bring him back. Wolfies overwelmed our first line and made a break toward Dynaheir, Coran and Faldorn. Coran, with his shield up, courageously met with them. Two quick hit (one crit) was enough to take him down.
Again, the Find Traps spell and tanking damage (thanks Minsc !!) was in order in the wrecked ship. On the highest floor of the ship, we started by luring the mage downstairs where we killed it. After that, we buffed up and we went back up. It was super easy. The regular wolfies were slained by my magically-enhanced-to-the-gills party while Karoug himself was paralyzed from a wand charge. Just too easy. Minsc and Valalsia did the work with the Balduran sword and the Werebane dagger.
When we got back on homeland, Mendas and his acolyte were served with the same treatment : paralyzation. These wands are truly overpowered. However, I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but Mendas as a Loup Garou was completely immune to the Balduran Sword and Werebane. I had no melee weapon that could hurt him. In NearInfinity, Balduran Sword and Werebane are not flagged as Cold-Iron, which is the only type of weapon that can harm Mendas. Maybe that's a voluntary change by IR, I don't know. Anyway, we just poured wand charges (of Magic Missiles, of Lightning and of the Heaven mostly) and spell damage until we overcame his MR enough to kill it. Not pretty, but it worked.
The loot was much better in this sidequest, but still, the Greenstone Amulet was nowhere to be seen.
No choice : Durlag's Tower, here we come.
With SCS, (if you're running with full prebuffs for NPC mages etc.) I would try to have more than one arcane spellcaster in my party, since getting rid of spell protections might take a long time otherwise. Otherwise, a specialized anti-mage character might also do the job. Just a personal preference, though - it's certainly possible to do well with your party combination.
I should mention that only the Bhaalspawn is counted for the list of completed challenges (otherwise, a lot of these classes would be off the list thanks to being NPC classes for official NPCs); Still, running a party only with uncompleted classes is a fun idea (I've attempted to do this myself in my last SCS run, but failed the run during a lich battle in SoA) - but if you're mostly interested in adding another class to the hall, you could give the rest of your party more power by switching out some classes.
I think I will revise as such:
Bounty hunter
Bard(bhaalspawn)
Conjuration specialist
Fighter/druid
Undead Hunter
priest of tyr
Thoughts or revisions for this group?
semi: No-Reload Dragon Warrior Monsters Run
Part 6
While I originally intended for our Anteater to become our new Grizzly, Gig, our MadCat, is already at level 12 and is a solid option. I breed Gig with a Devil to get the egg of our first Grizzly, Lash, who joins the team at level 1.We've lost a fair amount of gold by paying for the blessing of eggs (the only way to change their gender), but I still pay 80 gold for a PorkChop, since there's a special monster I want to get from the next gate: a CoilBird (a Material monster rather than a Bird, despite the name). Breed a Bird with a CoilBird and you'll get a MadCondor, a very fast-growing, high-attack monster.
With a Reaper in the party to keep our level 1 Wyvern and Grizzly safe, we crush the first couple enemies, a BigRoost and SpotSlime. Wave the Wyvern and Lash the Grizzly quickly show off their impressive growth rates: Wave gets high stats across the board, while Lash gets strong HP and insane bonuses to her attack.
A Grizzly's attack growth slows down dramatically after level 20 or 30 or something, but we'll probably never have a monster above level 40. Grizzlies have terrible MP and mediocre stats, which makes them lousy healers and therefore not remotely as useful as a more balanced creature like a Wyvern, but having such incredibly high attack means that our Grizzly will be able to kill most enemies in a single hit.
The mechanics behind physical damage are not well understood. Damage is an opposed roll between attack and defense (ATK and DEF), but the output appears to operate on thresholds: if your attack is high enough to break a certain threshold, damage output will increase exponentially for a brief range, then linearly. Against a high-defense enemy, attack needs to be a certain value to deal meaningful damage.
40 ATK: 1 damage
80 ATK: 5 damage
120 ATK: 50 damage
160 ATK: 100 damage
These are just random numbers for the sake of argument. The point is that ATK needs to break a certain threshold, at which point it scales linearly.
We soon run into a couple of CoilBirds along with a Crestpent. We knock out the CrestPent, give two PorkChops to the CoilBirds, and once Wave and Lash gain some more levels, we get our CoilBird on the first try.
By the time we complete a single map in the 7-map Gate of Peace, Wave is already about as strong as Star, and Lash has sky-high attack.
Wave doesn't have nearly as much experience as Star, but Birds level so fast that Wave is only a single level behind.
Shortly after, we find a WindStaff!
Staffs in DWM let you cast low-damage spells several times before they break. Offensively, they're pretty much crap, but they're very expensive, and if you sell one to one of the very rare merchants you'll find in the wild (as opposed to the less profitable ones back home at GreatTree), you can sell them for full price--thousands of gold, where the most we've ever had so far is only 500. We'll hold onto this staff until we run into one of the merchants midway through a gate.
We fail to catch a BoneSlave, a nice new Zombie monster, but successfully catch a DragonKid and Wave learns TakeMagic, a very under-appreciated skill for late-game boss fights.
TakeMagic lasts a whole fight, only costs 2 MP, and lets you absorb MP from enemy spells and skills. It's especially valuable against certain bosses: if you get hit by a high-MP spell, you might get enough MP to fuel an entire HealAll spell!
Better still, we find a LavaStaff, which I think yields even more gold than a WindStaff when sold, and run into a priest to heal up our monsters. As before, the enemy trainer's monsters fare poorly against three +1 monsters. StopSpell lets us block most enemy skills, and Radiant imposes heavy penalties to hit chances.
Normally, these monsters would be fairly challenging, but thanks to number-crunching I did many years ago to find out the best monsters, we have extremely high-end monsters despite only being able to breed each monster a single time. Normally, it takes two generations of breeding to get monsters as strong as Star, Wave, and Lash.
We catch a Crestpent on the way to the boss and Wave's HealMore becomes HealAll. Thanks to his fast leveling, he got the upgrade faster than Star despite Star being older. For the price of only 7 MP, we can heal any monster from 1 HP to maximum.
The boss here is a FangSlime, struggling to make money at a posh casino. He's jealous of our success at the slots...
...but Lash the Grizzly does crazy damage, especially on a critical hit.
Fang the FangSlime heads to the farm. We'll be able to breed any Beast monster with Fang to get a Unicorn. Not only will that give us another monster with Heal; it'll also give us Vivify, a resurrection spell: 10 MP for a 50% chance of raising a dead monster up to 50% HP. At high levels, it upgrades to Revive: 20 MP for a 100% chance of raising a dead monster up to full HP.
We still haven't entered the Gate of Bravery. However, we don't need to get any more experience or breed any more monsters to win the next fight at the arena. Our +1 monsters (+1 means they've been bred only once; higher pluses come from more generations) are already more than strong enough to handle D class. Everyone in the party has extremely high attack. Star the Reaper has the highest stats overall, though his personality indicates low compassion, which means he's a little likely to use healing spells effectively.
Wave the Wyvern is a little more fragile, but this early in the game, he's still a fabulous tank.
Lash the Grizzly has no healing spells or the MP to cast them, but her attack is just... crazy. Note the weird graphical glitch that turned her golden in the screenshot.
The first match in D class at the arena is nothing special. The enemies, a Saccer, Florajay, and MadPlant, all have low stats, and the Florajay wastes time casting SlowAll spells.
There's some minimal tactical benefit in a SlowAll spell in the sense that it lets you attack before the enemy, but that's only relevant in extremely short fights--and while this fight is extremely short, it poses no threat to us.
The next fight is a pair of MedusaEyes and a MadGopher. The MedusaEyes probably have some nice spells, but StopSpell neutralizes them.
The MadGopher has ZombieCut, which deals 50% more damage (or maybe just strikes as though the user's attack was 50% higher, which doesn't necessarily mean 50% more damage) to Zombie monsters like Star. But the MadGopher doesn't live long enough to use it.
The last fight is with Mick, who has no idea how outclassed he is.
He has two MadCats and a RogueNite. The MadCats have SquallHit, which means they can strike first in combat, and the RogueNite can cast Heal, but the MadCats aren't strong enough to deal serious damage, the RogueNite's heal spells can be blocked with StopSpell, and all of them are vulnerable to SleepAll and Radiant.
GreatTree has a problem, however. Monsters are pouring out of the Gate of Anger, and we need to go in and figure out what's going on (which is to say, just go in and stomp the boss).
It should be no trouble. First, though, we have some monsters to breed.
Since our old Anteater, Ares, is female, we can breed her with Fang the FangSlime for a Unicorn--a powerful addition to our team.
Then I realize something very special: I have the ingredients for a KingLeo!
A KingLeo is basically the strongest monster of the Beast family, which strong resistances and high, well-rounded stats. It might not have the sheer offensive power of the Grizzly, but it'll make an excellent healer--especially because it'll get to inherit our Unicorn's Vivify spell.
First, we need to get a Roboster. We can get one by breeding Lash the Grizzly with our Golem, but we can't do that quite yet--Golm is just shy of level 10.
I've long thought of KingLeos as very difficult to breed for, but in retrospect, they're actually pretty simple. Without factoring in convenient shortcuts like our FangSlime, you can get a KingLeo just from 8 primary monsters, breeding for only two generations:
Beast+Slime=Tonguella (grandparent)
Beast+Devil=Grizzly (grandparent)
Tonguella+Slime=Unicorn (parent)
Material+Grizzly=Roboster (parent)
Roboster+Unicorn=KingLeo
All we have to do is wait for Golm to reach level 10, then raise a Unicorn and a Roboster to level 10. Then we'll have a level 1 KingLeo that will be a powerful party member for the rest of the run!
We can't do that just yet, but we can improve our bird. By breeding Wave with a Hork, we can get a MadGoose!
A MadGoose is another high-powered, fast-growing bird, with an additional benefit: a MadGoose can inherently learn LureDance, the best disabler in the game. LureDance is an area-effect, single-round disabler that almost no enemy in the game can resist.
We also breed our BigRoost with a CoilBird for a cheap and easy MadCondor, whose egg I bless to make sure it can breed with our new MadGoose. We now have a Unicorn that can learn Heal and Vivify and a MadCondor that can learn HealUs, a party-wide healing spell that can upgrade to HealUsAll, which can heal the entire party to maximum HP.
While I'm at it, I breed for a GiantSlug and a Floraman, just in case I need them later. You can only have so many monsters on the farm at a time, so it's good to breed them to free up room for more monsters.
We buy some PorkChops head into the Gate of Bravery (the Gate of Anger can be done later) with our new MadGoose in hand. She's inherited some decent stats from her parents, especially Wave, but her stats will get really high once she gains a little experience.
We're already on our way to get some brilliant late-game critters. By the end, we should have a well-rounded KingLeo and a nearly invincible WhipBird healer with over 400 HP.
As for the third monster, we'll just have to see what monsters we can catch.
The party then went to Firewine Bridge where they were victorious against Melium.
The battle against Khark was much more of a problem as half the party were killed and Firehelm himself was on the point of death as a result of confusion.
Khark went invisible and the party did somehow survive, rested and then slew Khark.
They then went to fight Lethe and as a result Tenya can now control elementals.
The battle against Khark was indeed very touch and go.
Durlag's Tower is next on the agenda, but Firehelm does not expect to defeat it all in one go.
The sum total of their wealth is now 39 gp after buying a wand of fire and two potions to help with locks and traps.
Scarcity of gold has become a real problem.
It took a while to scrape up enough gold for the fellow adventurer in Durlag's, and having given 300gp to him Firehelm was once more very poor.
However together they successfully raided the upper levels of Durlag's.
The ghost however proved to be a major problem . Daital killed three party members and there is no gold to raise them.
Next on the agenda is a lower level of Durlag's and then Cloakwood.
EDITThe ghost will be avoided in future runs for obvious reasons!! However the relief when I started selling uneeded items from Durlag's. Firehelm is wealthy again.
The rest of Durlag's Tower was easy. Firehelm solved three of the warden's quests and left the bottle of wine nearby to give to Love later. The party are now in the vicinity of "Tristan und Isolde"
Valalsia Ironheart, the dwarven Stalker
Posts : 1, 2, 3, 4 : FINAL POSTNotable mods
- SCS (full prebuffs, full tactical challenge)
- Item Revisions
- Spell Revisions
- Rogue Rebalancing
- Tweak Anthology
- Item Randomizer
- plenty of npc mods
Urgh. Valalsia got through BG1 without a problem, but she got killed in the Dwarves of Dumathoin quest. Just before meeting with the lich, she was meleeing some undeads with Minsc, which was going good, but then, while she had 72 hp, she got hit by two crits and two Shadowed Souls targeted her with their range draining hp attack. Bam, you're out. It was just so sudden. I believe it's one of those really low percentage death possibility that I couldn't have done much against, except keeping her at full hp at all time. From 72 hp to zero in one round. Wow. Everything was going super, super smooth. Seriously, no close call 'til then.
Welp, I don't know what I'll come back with. I'll make a new install today and then, I'll see what I'll do. Probably not a melee class just to play things a bit safer.