Corenature's gang. Walking through the house and this fight caught my eye. I love to watch Corey's big battles. I like to see how he does them. This was however a good example of his thought process as a fight goes wrong. Me personally, I fight to the death out of spite...which is why I have zero no-reloads completed. Corey however has been listening to Khalid, so he knows,discretion is the better part of valor. The druids looted and backed off.
For no-reloads, I really need to leave the dragons until after I get back from the Underdark. I THOUGHT I was well buffed, and I THOUGHT I had good summons (5 fire elementals), but Firkraag tore through us like we were unarmed.
Our problem was damage. We had no way to dispel his haste (we tried). We also tried our magic on him, but he resisted most of it (magic resistance), and we had no way to lower his magic resistance either. The end result was the high AC and our weak strength wasn't even close to enough.
Near the end of the Firkraag fight, where he was 60% health and I only had April with me, Druidpower and Natureswrath were chunked (their loss really hurts - they had 18 WIS), and also the death of Jaheira and Naturesfury, I worked really hard to loot anything important as well as try to escape.
We zoned out to the cell area and Firkraag followed! We had to get by him! Corenature was hasted, so gave April haste and we ran by him - as we passed him, Firkraag did a dragon breath and hit Corenature down to like 10% health! But we did get away from Firkraag.
Back at the Watcher's Promenade, we resurrected our friends and equipped them. Time to get the last druid, Cernd!
Turns out Cernd's lack of armor and back DEX really came back to bite him - a vampire ambush CHUNKED Cernd!!!
Down to 4 druids now...now that I can't do a full party of druids, I will allow Imoen to join on RP purposes - she is my sister and importantly she can use a shortbow to dispel the enemies. I want to this run to succeed, and I don't think my 4 druids can do it without Imoen.
Here I am with the occasional Yvralline-post. I played a lot today, but it was mostly running around, completing quests in Baldur's Gate. So, yes, Davaeron was soundly defeated.
The Mines went nearly without problem, as Edwin died to a quick barrage of arrows when I accidentally went for the 'Z' instead of the 'Q' before moving onto the next area. We just ran away after picking his belongings and came back well-rested, finished the second level and then rested outside so that we wouldn't have to fight a ridiculous amount of guards if we were to be unlucky at the time of sleeping. To deal with Hareshian and co., I quickly scouted out the area, removed all the traps and bombared the mage with Fireballs, successfully killing her. Her cohorts were dispatched by an attack on three fronts, Branwen on the south, Jaheira on the North and the Fireballers and an Invisible Ajantis on the middle (from the kitchen!).
The Ogre Mage was melee'd to death, and we left Natasha idle and throw some harmless spells at us until her MGoI wore off and her Stoneskins had already been moved out of the way by the entire party minus Edwin, who joined later to throw some Fire Arrows at her (a very solid spell against wizards).
I used Coran to disable the traps, and got a bit of Davaeron's health from a bunch of Fireballs, but since he started teleporting like crazy and almost nuked Edwin, I left him with Ajantis and Yvralline while the rest of the party was handling the guards. After most of the guards that had spawned were dead (only two, none with ranged weapons, remained), I also sent Coran to deal with Davaeron, and found that his MGoI had expired, so I began throwing Scorchers at him, just with Yvralline at first, but then Coran also joined her. Davaeron went down in no time. Ajantis has a rather high fire resistance, but several magic attacks to his face are a different topic, hence the potion (also he kept getting hit because we all were sitting on a Teleport Field so there was no safe way to control the Scorcher rays).
On Baldur's Gate, we investigated the Seven Suns, returned/gave a bunch of NPCs some items (Euric his necklace (as a reward, we got an Amulet of Health instead of an Amulet of Missiles, thanks to IR. It just gives +10 hitpoints, Coran is wearing it now), Quinn got his friend's dagger, Pheirkas got Algernon's Cloak, Tremain, his son's corpse, Brielbara got Yago's spellbook, Fergus got an Angel-skin ring, and G'Axir a Sphene gem), solved a bunch of other quests (Marek's Poison and the elf bogeyman one), killed a bunch of wizards (Ragefast and Sunin) and did a looted Ramazith's Tower, but he wasn't there. Maybe it's because I killed Ragefast before talking to him? This has been happening lately on my games, because I always do it in this particular order. Larze was disposed of, as were the something something of the Under-mountain. I made a mistake while picking the dialog options on the thieves stealing for a house, so we got 75gp instead of a chance of killing them. I got Balduran's Helm and Cloak, and a lot more assorted treasure that I am not going to go over. I, am going to mention, two oddities, which were finding the Full Plate+1 on Ragefast's corpse and the Ring of Holiness on a barrel in Sunin's house. Wealthy wizards.
The fight against Marek was the most eventful of all, and besides that, a very odd occurence also happened: I accidentally made use of the Wand of Polymorphing instead of the Wand of Paralyzation, because I thought I had switched them out, but I hadn't. I used it thinking it would reduce Marek to a less threatening foe, not that it would make him a laughable one in while also doing the former. Edwin and Branwen also got level ups, giving us access to level 4 spells. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Sewer Sweepers, hopefully next week!
Druid Power Weakness - Update 12 Corenature - fighter/druid (protagonist) Traveling with: Jaheira, Naturesfury and April all fighter/druids CHUNKED: Druidpower, Natureswrath, Cernd
The party got another major quest done, the Unseeing Eye. I tried a new idea against the Blind Priests and it was a terrible idea - I had Nymphs cast confusion - which meant it was dangerous to follow them as the rest of the beholders were still around.
April got charmed, but only because she had the shield of balduran, and so did Natures Fury and she was attacking Jaheira and Corenature! What to do?
Couldn't dispel, so thought now would be a good time to turn off AI and use some invis potions and wait the charms out. This was a good choice. Once my party members regained control of themsevles, we mopped all opposition in the Unseeing Eye Lair including the Unseeing Eye itself.
I had a lot of loot to identify, so we tried to travel to Umar Hills (for the free rests) but got the generic ambush. The mage was hit with insects 2x and so went into melee, so she couldn't cast any spells. And there were no melees by Corenature and he was full health, but that "bug" happened. It's easy to see the bug because of the black portraits. I died immediately after a DUHM, which was activated by the AI.
Note to any developer to this thread - I have the save before the bug, should I try the same steps I did before and see if I can recreate the bug? Would that help? It's been known for a long time, but apparently hasn't been tracked down yet.
We also tried our magic on him, but he resisted most of it (magic resistance), and we had no way to lower his magic resistance either.
Nice to see the mayhem continuing Corey. Good luck keeping the remainder of the party together .
It's not quite true you have no means of lowering magic resistance. The 5th level Magic Resistance spell is actually pretty efficient at this for a high MR creature. That replaces existing MR with 2% x level of the caster, so a 12th level druid for instance would immediately lower a target's MR to 24%. For an encounter like Firkraag using this spell at the start of the combat (immediately followed by Doom) would greatly increase your chances.
In relation to the bug, I think the developers now understand what causes it, but just haven't been able to come up with a fix (as trying that creates other problems).
@Corey_Russell I think it has been stated that the blacked-out portraits bug is propably caused by having a certain amount of projectiles in the air, though it's heavily inconsistent and can't really be prevented. As @Grond0 mentioned, the bug is known, but apparently unfixable, so there's not much point anymore in recreating it.
I also want to mention that using the Magic Resistance spell on Firkraag is a very dangerous thing to try - it's melee range and has a long casting time. I certainly wouldn't use the Bhaalspawn to do it
For anyone who is having problems with not being able to get to the chess board because of a bug: This works beautifully and simply.
Try this:
C:SetGlobal("DMWWFissionBurn","GLOBAL",1)
@Raduziel Thanks a lot. It worked fine and what's more I won easily by using web, fireballs, holy smite and the like. The game made it easier than usual as Imoen wasn't attacked by the knights. They went straight for Firehelm who was able to fight toe to toe with them. Neither the knights nor Firehelm were doing much damage to each other, but once all the pawns and other enemies were killed, the missiles and bolts from other party members soon killed the knights.
In the previous update Laraum had just gained the Ring of Gaxx. That did indeed make him significantly tougher and there were no problems going through the de'Arnise Hold.
Moving on to Trademeet there were more trolls at the Grove who proved more difficult. That was partly the result of Inspiro skull trapping Laraum (and some spiders) - he hadn't regenerated his health before confronting the trolls (including hard-hitting giant ones).
After surviving that Laraum wasn't tested by the odd insect plague while cutting down some druids
and he confidently attacked some myconids while protected by the Shield of Harmony. Inspiro wasn't so protected, but when one myconid confused him, he confidently waited for Laraum to rescue him with a dispel.
That was reasonable (at least by my standards), but the confusion cast on Inspiro had obviously affected me as well. With Laraum surrounded by a large group of myconids I decided to 'take the pressure off him' by drawing one of them away after Inspiro. Inevitably that one confused Inspiro
- and this time Laraum was too far away to help even if he wasn't surrounded. Inspiro kept shooting initially after being confused and took the myconid to near death - so it was something of a toss-up who went down first ...
'Long-life challenge' - cleric dualling to ranger (update 1)
I wasn't actually expecting to post on this run, but I enjoyed using a different method to cheese Sarevok in the final fight, so thought I would share that .
I decided to dual at level 7 in order to give the cleric a decent outing before the change. That meant that the ranger wouldn't recover cleric abilities before SoD, but that was fine. I'd forgotten though that HPs for constitution above 16 would be permanently lost for all cleric levels taken and might have dualled a level or 2 earlier if I'd thought about that.
To make myself pay more attention I was specifically trying to avoid taking any damage as a cleric - and succeeded in doing that.
I initially continued trying to avoid damage as a ranger, though that's not possible when going through the traps in the Nashkel Mine. Just before I was ready to go there though I made a slight movement error and allowed a Doom Guard to get a swipe in.
After picking up final equipment around the wilderness I quickly ran through the main quest on the way to Sarevok.
Inside the temple I applied a scroll of PfM initially thinking to use my standard tactic in unmodded games of encouraging Sarevok to come out just with Semaj. However, one thing that changed in v2.5 is lightning now behaves much more like it did in vanilla - and hence it seemed likely that I could use the continuous lightning trap to target the enemies - that worked a treat.
It's of course possible to use the central traps to kill everything, but with the lightning traps you don't even need to show yourself, so a potion of absorption or similar is all you need. With the others dead and Sarevok down to single-figure HPs I went to administer the coup de grace.
I've just arrived in the SoD dungeon and levelled up there.
Gate70/Grond0 multiplayer attempt 161 - 1st and final update Dunn (human skald, Gate70); Nel (half-elf ranger, Grond0)
Given our previous fail, we rolled two new randoms and made a start. We got about 16 days in and 21k xp each having finished off the basilisks and Mutamin. Kirian and her gang were next so Nel suggested recruiting Korax.
Nel took a rigid thinking against Peter as Korax was killed and when Dunn tried to help became difficult as Peter cast Hold Person. Dunn backed off far enough to break sight and after a long wait used his quickloot ability to grab all the dropped gear including that of Kirian and head for a temple.
We decided there was just time to return and end the fight before drawing the session to a close. Dunn dragged Lindin through several groups of gnolls while Nel disposed of Baerin. We looped past each other, but Lindin stayed close and a tree blockade allowed a line of sight attack on Dunn - taking him down to 2hp. Dunn reversed direction and ran away but just into the sight of Peter who cast another Hold Person.
Dunn looked in his containers and elected for an oil of speed (from Imoen) rather than the scroll of magic protection (from the gnome near Samuel). Three or four seconds of hasted movement saw him break clear from Lindin before the hold caught him. Nel tried to close the gap but from a long distance and Lindin had retained his target - moving in to chop the last couple of hitpoints away.
I'll make this one short: I continued through SoD without any problems for a while (I even managed to take out the insane-difficulty version of the Shadow Aspect without losing a party member, which I'm quite proud of), defeated the crusaders at Bridgefort and engaged the mage at the bridge. My plan, as usual, was taking the group down pretty much instantly with a bunch of fireballs. While this plan succeeded, it seems like the fireballs also blew up the bridge and instantly ended the game. This has never happened to me before - maybe I've always aimed far away enough from the barrels to avoid this outcome. Well, now I know to avoid this approach (it's certainly not needed, as this fight is relatively easy). Too bad - I simply didn't know this was a possibility. Oh, and it seems literally everything on the map dies if you do this, even random animals:
Lanil, the Not-So-Perfect Fighter vs. Baldur's Gate
Lanil is a fighter with 25 in all stats but also a -50 penalty to all saving throws.
I'm playing on Insane, with double experience.
Let's begin!
One of the advantages of having 25 in all stats is that you can do this:
So Lanil bought her equipment and set out with Gorion without doing any quests.
After Gorion's death, Imoen joined the party, and they traveled to the Friendly Arm Inn. There, Lanil chunked Tarnesh in a single hit before he could get his mirror image up.
Khalid and Jaheira did not join the party. In the inn, Lanil bought plate mail for herself and talked to Unshey and Landrin upstairs. She decided to look into Unshey's ogre business.
Back at the previous area, Lanil challenged the ogre to single combat. Here is the result:
Druid Power Weakness - FINAL Update Corenature - half-elf fighter/druid, protagonist Traveling with: Jaheira, Naturesfury, April - half-elf fighter druids
The party did pretty good in defeating the minor enemies in Bodhi's Lair. But Bodhi, on the other hand, was a killer. She tore through our AC like it didn't exist, and our AC ranged from -7 to -9. Most of the party had 100 HP, and she dropped people from full health to near death in single round. First April got hurt bad, and we were able to save her, but then Bodhi switched to Corenature and he dropped from full health to a sliver. And sure enough, next moment he was finished.
I would have thought this party would have had a chance against Bodhi with the high AC, but in apparently in EE that isn't the case.
So my next run will also be a MP party - going to have two berserker frontliners backed up with the hitting power of 3 Kensais.
I was using the AI a lot this run, but I think that was messing my play up, such as a number of times wanted the character to be melee or ranged, but AI would immediately undo my order. Will either have very basic AI next time (standard attack), or none at all.
In case anyone is interested, here is my plan for my next run:
Frontliners: Dwarven berserker - chaotic good ***** long sword *** two-weapon style
Gnomish berserker - chaotic good ***** Quarterstaff * Long Bow (so he can use arrows of detonation in BG 1, as well as dispelling arrows, which are critical for all 3 portions of the game) ** Two-hand weapon style
Damage Dealers: Gnomish Kensai - neutral evil (so he can use the +4 sword in the underdark) ***** Two-hand Sword ** Two-hand weapon style
Half-Orc Kensai (protagonist) - chaotic good (so he can use Azuredge) ***** Axes *** Two weapon style
Human Kensai - neutral evil (so he can use Neb's dagger) **** Daggers ** Two-weapon style Dual to thief at level 7 to help with traps in BG 2/ToB
1) From a pratical standpoint (I wasn't going to be spending 3 hours rolling on a single character), I couldn't make a character a really good fighter and really good druid, which meant most characters were either really good at one or weak at the other, or middle of the road in both. 2) Even though we were fairly high level (12 in druid), our saves stank - our save vs. spell was 10 for most of us. This meant any spell, even level 1 charm or level 2 horror had a 50/50 chance to work on us. 3) The summons were nice, and were overpowering in lots of encounters. But any boss encounters, the summons were immaterial. And we couldn't always have summons available. 4) So many of the good druid spells have huge casting times, which meant we often got interrupted, so these "powerful" spells ended up not helping us. 5) Our AC was great against trash enemies, but bosses didn't seem to care about AC. We really need some kind of burst damage against bosses, but we didn't have any yet. 6) In order to not have terrible DEX, our strength was 15 to be just strong enough to use full plate. Considering damage dealing was our problem, maybe going for high strength and sacrificing DEX or CON may have been better. 7) Most druid-usable weapons were pretty weak. Even at the end, the only really good weapons we had were the blackbood club, Belm and the Staff of Rhynn - they weren't enough. I did have sling of seeking, but of course Corenature didn't have high strength, so not as helpful it otherwise might have been... 8) Being unable to dispel enemies ended up being very costly.
Honestly, I think a party of fighters could and would do better - hey what do you know, that's what my next run is going to be...
Honestly, I think a party of fighters could and would do better - hey what do you know, that's what my next run is going to be...
Interesting thoughts @Corey_Russell. I agree a party of fighters might well do better, but I wonder whether you were falling between 2 stools with this run. While fighters can perform well with AI, druids can't and it sounds like you may have been trying to operate the party too much like fighters and not enough like druids to take full advantage of the spells available. I might be wrong though - perhaps I should try a party of single classed druids to see how they get on ...
@Corey_Russell did you consider using the Harm + whatever combo on bosses? With fighter THAC0, you should have a decent shot at killing anything without magic resistance.
@Neverused I believe you referring to the Harm + Critical Strike combo - that would be great, but of course that a TOB ability, and you don't get those until 3000000 experience, which we didn't have yet...
@Grond0 I'm not sure what you mean, I used ton of druid spells, buffs, insects, plague of insects, summons, doom, miscast magic, call lightning, charms, healing, etc.
Druids are not that great in melee. Fighter druids tend to be okay though. The summoned weapons are kind of fine if you need some bonus, but probably go for Strength of One, potions of heroism and hoping for good rolls.
From what I read you did really good, but you may want to delay certain tough encounters for later. If you cannot plan for a win in advance, then it is better to postpone.
@Grond0 I'm not sure what you mean, I used ton of druid spells, buffs, insects, plague of insects, summons, doom, miscast magic, call lightning, charms, healing, etc.
You were referring to the difficulties of AI over-riding your commands and that spells were being interrupted. If druids are not using AI and are fighting from the rear then long spell casting times are not so much of a problem.
I've just rolled up a party of druids - 1 shapeshifter as a tank, 1 pure class, 2 totemic and 2 avenger. I'll see how they get on ...
@Grond0 I'm not sure what you mean, I used ton of druid spells, buffs, insects, plague of insects, summons, doom, miscast magic, call lightning, charms, healing, etc.
You were referring to the difficulties of AI over-riding your commands and that spells were being interrupted. If druids are not using AI and are fighting from the rear then long spell casting times are not so much of a problem.
I've just rolled up a party of druids - 1 shapeshifter as a tank, 1 pure class, 2 totemic and 2 avenger. I'll see how they get on ...
Spells were being interrupted because they were being hit. Either there were many enemies to begin with so we are all in melee contact, or a party member was badly hurt and withdrew, which in turn let the one in back trying to cast get hit. I was referring specifically that I didn't want a range weapon equipped (or maybe I wanted them be in range), but the AI over-rode that which caused difficulty, e.g., if not in melee (but was trying to make them in melee), then someone else who was trying to cast in important spell gets hit, or taking big damage because a ranged weapon equipped.
This is the 1st time I have really used the advanced AI in EE, think I will from now on at most only auto-attack, I will retain full control of spells/abilities, which has worked well in vanilla for me.
@lroumen In vanilla BG, I have successfully used scripts in no-reload context, including no-reload of an entire trilogy. However, there are plenty of situations that scripts aren't up to to to task - the key is turning off AI anytime that is the case. With fighters, I know exactly when to turn off the scripts - I don't think I have the sense of that for scripts for druids.
Lanil, the Not-So-Perfect Fighter vs. Baldur's Gate: Round 2
Let's do this right this time!
A reminder: Lanil is a fighter with 25 in all stats but a -50 penalty to all saving throws. She wields two-handed swords only (no ranged weapon). I'm playing on Insane.
So the beginning of this game went exactly the same as in the previous game, until Lanil and Imoen reached the Friendly Arm Inn. Tarnesh cast Mirror Image before Lanil could get a hit on him, then he cast Horror. Lanil ran away but Imoen saved the day.
Once the party left the inn after talking to Unshey and Landrin, they went straight to Beregost. There, they convinced Marl that adventurers aren't so bad and got a lot of experience for it.
(I have the difficulty-based extra experience turned on)
The party got another 1800 experience for killing Silke. Then they went south and Lanil killed two ogrillions, which didn't put up as much of a fight as the ogre that had killed Lanil in the previous game. At about this point, Lanil reached level 2 and became much less squishy.
After returning to Beregost and finishing the Mirianne quest, the party then headed straight to Nashkel with no notable interruptions. There, they unpetrified Branwen, who joined the party.
Branwen is awesome now because she's a Priest of Tempus: she can cast Holy Power to increase her Strength all the way to 18/00 and deal lots of damage with bullets.
The party went through the Nashkel Mines. Lanil did most of the work, though Branwen and Imoen helped out by kiting the ghouls and the huge spiders. If those creatures had hit Lanil, she would've failed the save and been in big trouble.
The party reached Mulahey's lair, and Xan joined the party. Branwen cast Silence 15' Radius on Mulahey from outside his vision range (I had Imoen scout ahead in stealth so I knew exactly where Mulahey's vision began). The silenced Mulahey didn't turn hostile or summon minions; he just stood there. He turned hostile once Lanil started attacking him, but he still didn't summon minions. Lanil took a few swings at him until she got a critical hit, which killed him instantly.
Time for Chapter 3!
In a resting encounter after the party left the mines, Lanil broke her last two-handed-sword (that's what happens when she swings them so hard!). She had bought a sword from Winthrop and a sword for Feldepost's Inn, and I wasn't able to find any more two-handed swords (though they were probably plenty of them around). One rule of mine is that I don't let a character wield a weapon that they aren't proficient in, unless it's absolutely necessary (e.g. for fighting a clay golem). Lanil proceeded to go through the entirety of Chapter 3 unarmed.
Revenge! The ogre still put up a fight. At one point it did 38 damage to Lanil, so she had to run away and heal before she could come back and finish the ogre off.
In short, before going to the bandit camp, the party killed Molkar's gang, the villains of Firewine (Jenkal, Lendarn, and the ogre mage), Meilum, Tranzig, Greywolf, and the belt ogre. The belt ogre was the one that came the closest to killing Lanil; the others either got hit by Branwen's Hold Person spells or got killed before they could do anything (particularly in the cases of spellcasters).
When the party returned to Berrun Ghastkill for their reward, he directed them to Taerom to investigate the Vial of Mysterious Liquid. Taerom took the vials, and after a few days the party came back. Taerom now sold quality weapons (which presumably were like normal weapons except they don't break). The only problem was, he wasn't selling any quality two-handed swords! He didn't have any two-handed swords at all! Darn it!
The party joined the bandits through Raiken. Tazok showed up and the party fought him. I was too scared to have Lanil fight one of the main bosses of the game unarmed on Insane, so I had the rest of the party kite Tazok with wands and missile weapons until he admitted the party's skill and went away.
The first step in defeating the bandits was to get Taugosz out of the picture. Xan charmed Taugosz with Charm Person, and the party led Taugosz to an isolated area southeast of the camp. There, the party attacked him. He turned hostile and he put up a fight, at least he did until Branwen cast Hold Person on him. The party finished him off and got a suit of full plate armor, the best armor in the game! Lanil put it on and gave Branwen her ankheg armor. Branwen equipped Taugosz's hammer and Lanil equipped Taugosz shield. Now Lanil was fighting unarmed in one hand but with a shield in the other hand.
Lanil also had very good AC now, even with the AC penalty due to fighting unarmed. Branwen cast Protection from Evil on Lanil, and the party killed all the bandits, with Lanil taking the lead and Imoen and Branwen assisting with ranged attacks.
The party then went inside Tazok's tent. Once the bandits inside turned hostile, Xan cast Glitterdust on them and Branwen used her Wand of Terror on them. Then Xan cast Glitterdust again and Branwen used her wand again. By this point, the only bandit still in control was the mage, Venkt. Branwen cast Silence 15' Radius on Venkt, which silenced him but also silenced Lanil. The party then finished off all the bandits. Imoen disarmed the trap, and the party gained their second Gauntlets of Weapon Expertise!
Nice to see someone else struggling with the spelling of Taurgosz. After so many years of spelling it without the R, I still find it hard to get it right . When I first saw the change in the EE I thought they'd made the mistake, but when I Googled it I found the mistake was by Bioware originally ...
Comments
Corenature's gang. Walking through the house and this fight caught my eye. I love to watch Corey's big battles. I like to see how he does them. This was however a good example of his thought process as a fight goes wrong. Me personally, I fight to the death out of spite...which is why I have zero no-reloads completed. Corey however has been listening to Khalid, so he knows,discretion is the better part of valor. The druids looted and backed off.
PowerWeakness - Update 11Corenature - half-elf fighter/druid (protagonist)
Traveling with: Jaheira, Naturesfury, April - half-elf fighter druids
CHUNKED: Druidpower, Natureswrath, Cernd
For no-reloads, I really need to leave the dragons until after I get back from the Underdark. I THOUGHT I was well buffed, and I THOUGHT I had good summons (5 fire elementals), but Firkraag tore through us like we were unarmed.
Our problem was damage. We had no way to dispel his haste (we tried). We also tried our magic on him, but he resisted most of it (magic resistance), and we had no way to lower his magic resistance either. The end result was the high AC and our weak strength wasn't even close to enough.
Near the end of the Firkraag fight, where he was 60% health and I only had April with me, Druidpower and Natureswrath were chunked (their loss really hurts - they had 18 WIS), and also the death of Jaheira and Naturesfury, I worked really hard to loot anything important as well as try to escape.
We zoned out to the cell area and Firkraag followed! We had to get by him! Corenature was hasted, so gave April haste and we ran by him - as we passed him, Firkraag did a dragon breath and hit Corenature down to like 10% health! But we did get away from Firkraag.
Back at the Watcher's Promenade, we resurrected our friends and equipped them. Time to get the last druid, Cernd!
Turns out Cernd's lack of armor and back DEX really came back to bite him - a vampire ambush CHUNKED Cernd!!!
Down to 4 druids now...now that I can't do a full party of druids, I will allow Imoen to join on RP purposes - she is my sister and importantly she can use a shortbow to dispel the enemies. I want to this run to succeed, and I don't think my 4 druids can do it without Imoen.
The Mines went nearly without problem, as Edwin died to a quick barrage of arrows when I accidentally went for the 'Z' instead of the 'Q' before moving onto the next area. We just ran away after picking his belongings and came back well-rested, finished the second level and then rested outside so that we wouldn't have to fight a ridiculous amount of guards if we were to be unlucky at the time of sleeping. To deal with Hareshian and co., I quickly scouted out the area, removed all the traps and bombared the mage with Fireballs, successfully killing her. Her cohorts were dispatched by an attack on three fronts, Branwen on the south, Jaheira on the North and the Fireballers and an Invisible Ajantis on the middle (from the kitchen!).
The Ogre Mage was melee'd to death, and we left Natasha idle and throw some harmless spells at us until her MGoI wore off and her Stoneskins had already been moved out of the way by the entire party minus Edwin, who joined later to throw some Fire Arrows at her (a very solid spell against wizards).
I used Coran to disable the traps, and got a bit of Davaeron's health from a bunch of Fireballs, but since he started teleporting like crazy and almost nuked Edwin, I left him with Ajantis and Yvralline while the rest of the party was handling the guards. After most of the guards that had spawned were dead (only two, none with ranged weapons, remained), I also sent Coran to deal with Davaeron, and found that his MGoI had expired, so I began throwing Scorchers at him, just with Yvralline at first, but then Coran also joined her. Davaeron went down in no time.
Ajantis has a rather high fire resistance, but several magic attacks to his face are a different topic, hence the potion (also he kept getting hit because we all were sitting on a Teleport Field so there was no safe way to control the Scorcher rays).
On Baldur's Gate, we investigated the Seven Suns, returned/gave a bunch of NPCs some items (Euric his necklace (as a reward, we got an Amulet of Health instead of an Amulet of Missiles, thanks to IR. It just gives +10 hitpoints, Coran is wearing it now), Quinn got his friend's dagger, Pheirkas got Algernon's Cloak, Tremain, his son's corpse, Brielbara got Yago's spellbook, Fergus got an Angel-skin ring, and G'Axir a Sphene gem), solved a bunch of other quests (Marek's Poison and the elf bogeyman one), killed a bunch of wizards (Ragefast and Sunin) and did a looted Ramazith's Tower, but he wasn't there. Maybe it's because I killed Ragefast before talking to him? This has been happening lately on my games, because I always do it in this particular order. Larze was disposed of, as were the something something of the Under-mountain. I made a mistake while picking the dialog options on the thieves stealing for a house, so we got 75gp instead of a chance of killing them. I got Balduran's Helm and Cloak, and a lot more assorted treasure that I am not going to go over. I, am going to mention, two oddities, which were finding the Full Plate+1 on Ragefast's corpse and the Ring of Holiness on a barrel in Sunin's house. Wealthy wizards.
The fight against Marek was the most eventful of all, and besides that, a very odd occurence also happened: I accidentally made use of the Wand of Polymorphing instead of the Wand of Paralyzation, because I thought I had switched them out, but I hadn't. I used it thinking it would reduce Marek to a less threatening foe, not that it would make him a laughable one in while also doing the former.
Edwin and Branwen also got level ups, giving us access to level 4 spells. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Sewer Sweepers, hopefully next week!
PowerWeakness - Update 12Corenature - fighter/druid (protagonist)
Traveling with: Jaheira, Naturesfury and April all fighter/druids
CHUNKED: Druidpower, Natureswrath, Cernd
The party got another major quest done, the Unseeing Eye. I tried a new idea against the Blind Priests and it was a terrible idea - I had Nymphs cast confusion - which meant it was dangerous to follow them as the rest of the beholders were still around.
April got charmed, but only because she had the shield of balduran, and so did Natures Fury and she was attacking Jaheira and Corenature! What to do?
Couldn't dispel, so thought now would be a good time to turn off AI and use some invis potions and wait the charms out. This was a good choice. Once my party members regained control of themsevles, we mopped all opposition in the Unseeing Eye Lair including the Unseeing Eye itself.
I had a lot of loot to identify, so we tried to travel to Umar Hills (for the free rests) but got the generic ambush. The mage was hit with insects 2x and so went into melee, so she couldn't cast any spells. And there were no melees by Corenature and he was full health, but that "bug" happened. It's easy to see the bug because of the black portraits. I died immediately after a DUHM, which was activated by the AI.
Note to any developer to this thread - I have the save before the bug, should I try the same steps I did before and see if I can recreate the bug? Would that help? It's been known for a long time, but apparently hasn't been tracked down yet.
The adventure continues...
It's not quite true you have no means of lowering magic resistance. The 5th level Magic Resistance spell is actually pretty efficient at this for a high MR creature. That replaces existing MR with 2% x level of the caster, so a 12th level druid for instance would immediately lower a target's MR to 24%. For an encounter like Firkraag using this spell at the start of the combat (immediately followed by Doom) would greatly increase your chances.
In relation to the bug, I think the developers now understand what causes it, but just haven't been able to come up with a fix (as trying that creates other problems).
I also want to mention that using the Magic Resistance spell on Firkraag is a very dangerous thing to try - it's melee range and has a long casting time. I certainly wouldn't use the Bhaalspawn to do it
Try this:
C:SetGlobal("DMWWFissionBurn","GLOBAL",1)@Raduziel Thanks a lot. It worked fine and what's more I won easily by using web, fireballs, holy smite and the like.
Inspiro (human skald, Grond0); Laraum (human inquisitor, Gate70)
Previous updates:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/999191/#Comment_999191
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1000717/#Comment_1000717
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1001346/#Comment_1001346
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1002202/#Comment_1002202
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1003027/#Comment_1003027
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1004735/#Comment_1004735
In the previous update Laraum had just gained the Ring of Gaxx. That did indeed make him significantly tougher and there were no problems going through the de'Arnise Hold.
Moving on to Trademeet there were more trolls at the Grove who proved more difficult. That was partly the result of Inspiro skull trapping Laraum (and some spiders) - he hadn't regenerated his health before confronting the trolls (including hard-hitting giant ones).
After surviving that Laraum wasn't tested by the odd insect plague while cutting down some druids
That was reasonable (at least by my standards), but the confusion cast on Inspiro had obviously affected me as well. With Laraum surrounded by a large group of myconids I decided to 'take the pressure off him' by drawing one of them away after Inspiro. Inevitably that one confused Inspiro
I wasn't actually expecting to post on this run, but I enjoyed using a different method to cheese Sarevok in the final fight, so thought I would share that
I decided to dual at level 7 in order to give the cleric a decent outing before the change. That meant that the ranger wouldn't recover cleric abilities before SoD, but that was fine. I'd forgotten though that HPs for constitution above 16 would be permanently lost for all cleric levels taken and might have dualled a level or 2 earlier if I'd thought about that.
To make myself pay more attention I was specifically trying to avoid taking any damage as a cleric - and succeeded in doing that.
I initially continued trying to avoid damage as a ranger, though that's not possible when going through the traps in the Nashkel Mine. Just before I was ready to go there though I made a slight movement error and allowed a Doom Guard to get a swipe in.
After picking up final equipment around the wilderness I quickly ran through the main quest on the way to Sarevok.
Inside the temple I applied a scroll of PfM initially thinking to use my standard tactic in unmodded games of encouraging Sarevok to come out just with Semaj. However, one thing that changed in v2.5 is lightning now behaves much more like it did in vanilla - and hence it seemed likely that I could use the continuous lightning trap to target the enemies - that worked a treat.
It's of course possible to use the central traps to kill everything, but with the lightning traps you don't even need to show yourself, so a potion of absorption or similar is all you need. With the others dead and Sarevok down to single-figure HPs I went to administer the coup de grace.
I've just arrived in the SoD dungeon and levelled up there.
Dunn (human skald, Gate70); Nel (half-elf ranger, Grond0)
Given our previous fail, we rolled two new randoms and made a start. We got about 16 days in and 21k xp each having finished off the basilisks and Mutamin. Kirian and her gang were next so Nel suggested recruiting Korax.
Nel took a rigid thinking against Peter as Korax was killed and when Dunn tried to help became difficult as Peter cast Hold Person. Dunn backed off far enough to break sight and after a long wait used his quickloot ability to grab all the dropped gear including that of Kirian and head for a temple.
We decided there was just time to return and end the fight before drawing the session to a close. Dunn dragged Lindin through several groups of gnolls while Nel disposed of Baerin. We looped past each other, but Lindin stayed close and a tree blockade allowed a line of sight attack on Dunn - taking him down to 2hp. Dunn reversed direction and ran away but just into the sight of Peter who cast another Hold Person.
Dunn looked in his containers and elected for an oil of speed (from Imoen) rather than the scroll of magic protection (from the gnome near Samuel). Three or four seconds of hasted movement saw him break clear from Lindin before the hold caught him. Nel tried to close the gap but from a long distance and Lindin had retained his target - moving in to chop the last couple of hitpoints away.
I'll make this one short: I continued through SoD without any problems for a while (I even managed to take out the insane-difficulty version of the Shadow Aspect without losing a party member, which I'm quite proud of), defeated the crusaders at Bridgefort and engaged the mage at the bridge. My plan, as usual, was taking the group down pretty much instantly with a bunch of fireballs. While this plan succeeded, it seems like the fireballs also blew up the bridge and instantly ended the game. This has never happened to me before - maybe I've always aimed far away enough from the barrels to avoid this outcome. Well, now I know to avoid this approach (it's certainly not needed, as this fight is relatively easy). Too bad - I simply didn't know this was a possibility. Oh, and it seems literally everything on the map dies if you do this, even random animals:
My next game will be a modded installation!
Lanil, the Not-So-Perfect Fighter vs. Baldur's Gate
Lanil is a fighter with 25 in all stats but also a -50 penalty to all saving throws.I'm playing on Insane, with double experience.
Let's begin!
One of the advantages of having 25 in all stats is that you can do this:
So Lanil bought her equipment and set out with Gorion without doing any quests.
After Gorion's death, Imoen joined the party, and they traveled to the Friendly Arm Inn. There, Lanil chunked Tarnesh in a single hit before he could get his mirror image up.
Khalid and Jaheira did not join the party. In the inn, Lanil bought plate mail for herself and talked to Unshey and Landrin upstairs. She decided to look into Unshey's ogre business.
Back at the previous area, Lanil challenged the ogre to single combat. Here is the result:
PowerWeakness - FINAL UpdateCorenature - half-elf fighter/druid, protagonist
Traveling with: Jaheira, Naturesfury, April - half-elf fighter druids
The party did pretty good in defeating the minor enemies in Bodhi's Lair. But Bodhi, on the other hand, was a killer. She tore through our AC like it didn't exist, and our AC ranged from -7 to -9. Most of the party had 100 HP, and she dropped people from full health to near death in single round. First April got hurt bad, and we were able to save her, but then Bodhi switched to Corenature and he dropped from full health to a sliver. And sure enough, next moment he was finished.
I would have thought this party would have had a chance against Bodhi with the high AC, but in apparently in EE that isn't the case.
So my next run will also be a MP party - going to have two berserker frontliners backed up with the hitting power of 3 Kensais.
I was using the AI a lot this run, but I think that was messing my play up, such as a number of times wanted the character to be melee or ranged, but AI would immediately undo my order. Will either have very basic AI next time (standard attack), or none at all.
Dwarven berserker - chaotic good
***** long sword
*** two-weapon style
Gnomish berserker - chaotic good
***** Quarterstaff
* Long Bow (so he can use arrows of detonation in BG 1, as well as dispelling arrows, which are critical for all 3 portions of the game)
** Two-hand weapon style
Damage Dealers:
Gnomish Kensai - neutral evil (so he can use the +4 sword in the underdark)
***** Two-hand Sword
** Two-hand weapon style
Half-Orc Kensai (protagonist) - chaotic good (so he can use Azuredge)
***** Axes
*** Two weapon style
Human Kensai - neutral evil (so he can use Neb's dagger)
**** Daggers
** Two-weapon style
Dual to thief at level 7 to help with traps in BG 2/ToB
1) From a pratical standpoint (I wasn't going to be spending 3 hours rolling on a single character), I couldn't make a character a really good fighter and really good druid, which meant most characters were either really good at one or weak at the other, or middle of the road in both.
2) Even though we were fairly high level (12 in druid), our saves stank - our save vs. spell was 10 for most of us. This meant any spell, even level 1 charm or level 2 horror had a 50/50 chance to work on us.
3) The summons were nice, and were overpowering in lots of encounters. But any boss encounters, the summons were immaterial. And we couldn't always have summons available.
4) So many of the good druid spells have huge casting times, which meant we often got interrupted, so these "powerful" spells ended up not helping us.
5) Our AC was great against trash enemies, but bosses didn't seem to care about AC. We really need some kind of burst damage against bosses, but we didn't have any yet.
6) In order to not have terrible DEX, our strength was 15 to be just strong enough to use full plate. Considering damage dealing was our problem, maybe going for high strength and sacrificing DEX or CON may have been better.
7) Most druid-usable weapons were pretty weak. Even at the end, the only really good weapons we had were the blackbood club, Belm and the Staff of Rhynn - they weren't enough. I did have sling of seeking, but of course Corenature didn't have high strength, so not as helpful it otherwise might have been...
8) Being unable to dispel enemies ended up being very costly.
Honestly, I think a party of fighters could and would do better - hey what do you know, that's what my next run is going to be...
@Grond0 I'm not sure what you mean, I used ton of druid spells, buffs, insects, plague of insects, summons, doom, miscast magic, call lightning, charms, healing, etc.
From what I read you did really good, but you may want to delay certain tough encounters for later. If you cannot plan for a win in advance, then it is better to postpone.
I've just rolled up a party of druids - 1 shapeshifter as a tank, 1 pure class, 2 totemic and 2 avenger. I'll see how they get on ...
This is the 1st time I have really used the advanced AI in EE, think I will from now on at most only auto-attack, I will retain full control of spells/abilities, which has worked well in vanilla for me.
Outside noreload I think that may even also be the case.
Lanil, the Not-So-Perfect Fighter vs. Baldur's Gate: Round 2
Let's do this right this time!A reminder: Lanil is a fighter with 25 in all stats but a -50 penalty to all saving throws. She wields two-handed swords only (no ranged weapon). I'm playing on Insane.
So the beginning of this game went exactly the same as in the previous game, until Lanil and Imoen reached the Friendly Arm Inn. Tarnesh cast Mirror Image before Lanil could get a hit on him, then he cast Horror. Lanil ran away but Imoen saved the day.
Once the party left the inn after talking to Unshey and Landrin, they went straight to Beregost. There, they convinced Marl that adventurers aren't so bad and got a lot of experience for it.
(I have the difficulty-based extra experience turned on)
The party got another 1800 experience for killing Silke. Then they went south and Lanil killed two ogrillions, which didn't put up as much of a fight as the ogre that had killed Lanil in the previous game. At about this point, Lanil reached level 2 and became much less squishy.
After returning to Beregost and finishing the Mirianne quest, the party then headed straight to Nashkel with no notable interruptions. There, they unpetrified Branwen, who joined the party.
Branwen is awesome now because she's a Priest of Tempus: she can cast Holy Power to increase her Strength all the way to 18/00 and deal lots of damage with bullets.
The party went through the Nashkel Mines. Lanil did most of the work, though Branwen and Imoen helped out by kiting the ghouls and the huge spiders. If those creatures had hit Lanil, she would've failed the save and been in big trouble.
The party reached Mulahey's lair, and Xan joined the party. Branwen cast Silence 15' Radius on Mulahey from outside his vision range (I had Imoen scout ahead in stealth so I knew exactly where Mulahey's vision began). The silenced Mulahey didn't turn hostile or summon minions; he just stood there. He turned hostile once Lanil started attacking him, but he still didn't summon minions. Lanil took a few swings at him until she got a critical hit, which killed him instantly.
Time for Chapter 3!
In a resting encounter after the party left the mines, Lanil broke her last two-handed-sword (that's what happens when she swings them so hard!). She had bought a sword from Winthrop and a sword for Feldepost's Inn, and I wasn't able to find any more two-handed swords (though they were probably plenty of them around). One rule of mine is that I don't let a character wield a weapon that they aren't proficient in, unless it's absolutely necessary (e.g. for fighting a clay golem). Lanil proceeded to go through the entirety of Chapter 3 unarmed.
Revenge! The ogre still put up a fight. At one point it did 38 damage to Lanil, so she had to run away and heal before she could come back and finish the ogre off.
In short, before going to the bandit camp, the party killed Molkar's gang, the villains of Firewine (Jenkal, Lendarn, and the ogre mage), Meilum, Tranzig, Greywolf, and the belt ogre. The belt ogre was the one that came the closest to killing Lanil; the others either got hit by Branwen's Hold Person spells or got killed before they could do anything (particularly in the cases of spellcasters).
When the party returned to Berrun Ghastkill for their reward, he directed them to Taerom to investigate the Vial of Mysterious Liquid. Taerom took the vials, and after a few days the party came back. Taerom now sold quality weapons (which presumably were like normal weapons except they don't break). The only problem was, he wasn't selling any quality two-handed swords! He didn't have any two-handed swords at all! Darn it!
The party joined the bandits through Raiken. Tazok showed up and the party fought him. I was too scared to have Lanil fight one of the main bosses of the game unarmed on Insane, so I had the rest of the party kite Tazok with wands and missile weapons until he admitted the party's skill and went away.
The first step in defeating the bandits was to get Taugosz out of the picture. Xan charmed Taugosz with Charm Person, and the party led Taugosz to an isolated area southeast of the camp. There, the party attacked him. He turned hostile and he put up a fight, at least he did until Branwen cast Hold Person on him. The party finished him off and got a suit of full plate armor, the best armor in the game! Lanil put it on and gave Branwen her ankheg armor. Branwen equipped Taugosz's hammer and Lanil equipped Taugosz shield. Now Lanil was fighting unarmed in one hand but with a shield in the other hand.
Lanil also had very good AC now, even with the AC penalty due to fighting unarmed. Branwen cast Protection from Evil on Lanil, and the party killed all the bandits, with Lanil taking the lead and Imoen and Branwen assisting with ranged attacks.
The party then went inside Tazok's tent. Once the bandits inside turned hostile, Xan cast Glitterdust on them and Branwen used her Wand of Terror on them. Then Xan cast Glitterdust again and Branwen used her wand again. By this point, the only bandit still in control was the mage, Venkt. Branwen cast Silence 15' Radius on Venkt, which silenced him but also silenced Lanil. The party then finished off all the bandits. Imoen disarmed the trap, and the party gained their second Gauntlets of Weapon Expertise!
Next up is Chapter 4! Lanil is still unarmed...
Nice to see someone else struggling with the spelling of Taurgosz. After so many years of spelling it without the R, I still find it hard to get it right
I will try it again soon I think.