@Enuhal Oooh... that's harsh. Yeah, you usually at least get a fairly decent setup class-wise, but a reason I went with best-of-three for stats is that otherwise this happens: No stat bonuses (or very nearly none) all around.
I suppose Madalena and Leda will be spending their L2 slots, at least for BG1, on Strength / Cat's Grace.
Strength of One isn't such a terrible choice for this setup either, though with a single Cleric with low Wisdom spell slots will already be tight...
On the upside, the fighters (yes, even the Wizard Slayer) will be fairly potent with BG2 equipment. And your protagonist is the best (in my mind) Mage kit. Looking forward to it!
The early game (which I'm still in) has so far been very eventful, as expected - even without SCS there would've been many challenges with this party, but the improved targeting especially of ranged opponents certainly doesn't help. With every run-in with those, there is a chance of death - my first encounter with two lowly bandits resulted in an immediate one-hit kill on one of my characters (btw, what's going on with level 1 protection here?):
Luckily, resurrections are cheap at level 1. This encounter taught me an important lesson: Unless we're talking about slow-moving melee foes in small groups, we're only going after enemies we can disable with sleep or command, for now. Tarnesh is commandable, though he is a risky target because of the danger of sleep - I decide that I can propably command him before he can sleep us, and before the spells are exchanged we lower his hitpoints with an opening backstab - pretty good damage roll:
Command and sleep both hit. Elven resistance to sleep effects helps us out here, and I add in a wand of missles charge to ensure the kill:
This grants us access to a few quests and the Dorn encounter, and we return to the crossroads to take down the belt ogre:
Entering Beregost, we help out Neera, once again using sleep and command with some success - exactly as planned, and luckily Neera doesn't screw us over with some kind of color spray or wild surge:
After a quick rest, we do the same thing for Landrin's spiders:
We're able to do everything in Beregost except for Karlat and Silke, and we quickly pick up Mirianne's letter. However, on our way back we get the unlucky and potentially game-ending bandit ambush, considering our terrible AC scores. All we can do is run and hope that as few characters as possible die - we're still all at level 1:
And here's the result - only our cleric goes down, we're able to save his equipment and move to FAI for another resurrection - that's two already at the very first level:
We return south again, pick up the family amulet (using sleep to deal with the ranged hobgoblins) and move to Nashkel, where we pick up the ever-important ankheg plate. A quick move south to trigger the Dorn encounter - we just move southwards on the ambush map, and since Dorn can't die in this encounter and these guys don't use the SCS AI, this is an easy one, providing us with some nice gear (one of the main reasons I took the risk of taking on Tarnesh early on):
Since we're pretty far to the south already, we soon explore the Nashkel mines map, minus Prism (if Greywolf happens to carry an oil of speed, which I've seen before in SCS, we would likely be dead). I was kind of hoping to encounter a winter wolf here, but no luck - another chance for that further east, as we enter the Samuel area, but once again no winter wolves here (though the ring is nice). We pick up Samuel and return him to FAI, after which we take a stab at the remaining Beregost quests - Perdue's sword, Zhurlong's boots, Bjornin's ogres. Sleep mostly does the job here, though there are some close calls:
We also end up taking down Karlat during all of that after checking his level (he's level 5, so command should always work) - sadly he is able to drink his potion of defense before going down:
Also, we encounter yet another bandit ambush - but instead of 10 bandits, this one only has 4, and everyone ends up surviving:
Another trip to Nashkel to get the free experience from the Brage quest, and once we're back we take down Neira, another level 5 opponent, so once again command does the job:
Ankhegs are also pretty low level, and they have a bad speed factor (generally, a quick spell such as command/sleep will hit them before they use their ranged attack) - making them a promising source of experience, and the second ankheg armor would be very welcome (especially since only one of our fighters has the strength to equip full plate). Also, I would like to pick up a wand of the heavens early on to have a reliable source of damage against enemies that can't be dealt with via our crowd control effects (we have the wand of frost, but that alone doesn't do too much), so we need to clear our way to the north anyway pretty soon. This requires a few more rests because we need command and/or sleep for every single ankheg kill:
After all that (we end up clearing out the entire cave after two rests), we also get a wand of fire from the ankheg nest as a nice bonus, deal with Tenya's quest and help out the farmer to the north. The wand is purchased, the armor picked up (the only other earlier purchase being a sling +1). The single class party members have reached around level 3 (the cleric is at 4, having picked up a point in slings) - our wizard slayer picks up a second point in crossbows - I've decided to go all in on that for now, possibly all the way to grandmastery. The kensai instead goes for a new proficiency, axes; The reason being that this offers a ranged option with throwing axes (meleeing will be suicide for a long time for this one, he's only hitting sleeping opponents for now), and since he's good-aligned Azuredge will become an option in SoA, which is the reason we're not picking daggers instead. I'm currently thinking about picking up some type of bow profiencies on my multi-classed fighters once they reach level 3, though I'm not sure on the F/M/T.
We're still incredibly vulnerable, though the additional proficiencies and items will help. Now I will need to decide at which point I dish out the gold for potions of genius and a few spellscrolls for Madalena. Getting the strength spell would be incredibly valuable, but I certainly don't have the gold to learn all the early game spells I want right now, so I might delay for a bit... though learning protection from petrification is tempting as well as the basilisks would be a huge XP boost.
I've also noticed Level 1 protection seemingly not working at all... is it even a thing on Insane?
Still, good progress, and the upside to two kitted Fighters is that Grandmastery is undeniably very powerful.
With this setup, and in particular since you now have three wands available (Frost/Fire/Heavens), I'd consider going for Bassilus: The 5k gold will let you go ham on spell scrolls, and from what I've seen he rarely buffs with PfFire (and if he does, the Wand of Frost/Magic Missiles will still interrupt him).
As for proficiencies, my choice for Leda would be a melee build: She's essentially a discount Fighter/Mage with traps, and come BG2, belongs on the frontlines imo. She already has a point in Bastard Swords, which is an excellent choice post-Underdark and into ToB.
All the above are just unwarranted opinions, of course
@aldain Searching for answers regarding level 1 protection, this is from a post I found on reddit, credit to bubb-13:
Peeking at the engine internals, as of EE v2.6.6.0, the exact conditions are:
The creature has a portrait, (i.e. is one of the 6 primary party members).
"No Difficulty-Based Damage Increase" is off.
The damage hasn't been flagged to bypass the difficulty modifier scaling, (very few things do this, so not really important).
The damage is greater than the creature's max hp, (notice how damage for exactly max hp can still kill you).
The creature's max hp is less than 14, (while this is common at level 1, you don't have to be level 1, as long as your max hp is low this checks out).
If all of the above is true, the damage is transformed into max hp - 1.
And, importantly, this check happens every time a damage feedback line is displayed in the combat log, so if a character takes damage from multiple sources at once they can still be oneshotted.
So, in our current runs, since "no difficulty-based damage is" on, we won't get level 1 protection at all (and even if it was active, it would be somewhat flawed).
I've decided to take your advice regarding Bassilus (more on that in the next update); Regarding Leda, I agree that she will eventually be a frontliner, but for a triple class, it will take a long time to get the required spellslots, so I'm going to put a point in slings (she already has one via the randomization process; while bows would be better, triple classes don't get too many profiency points, so I'm working with what I'm already given) before going for more melee weapon skills. Delia will be forced into bows, I guess - not too happy with that, but she has our highest base dexterity and we need someone to use some of the powerful special arrows - as Ninisima is already locked into crossbows, she's the only remaining option. Note that, unlike in my last couple of runs, I currently intend to play SoD with this party if I don't die before that, so the investment in ranged weapon skills is worth quite a bit more.
No Trio today, which provided an opportunity for a little bit more progress with this MP run.
We'd defeated Sarevok last time, so were in the opening dungeon for SoD. Progress through that was generally smooth, with skeletons helping out against the tougher enemies. Korlasz was hit by a couple of dispelling arrows and surrendered, but that didn't help her make a safe getaway.
We didn't bother with any of the quests in the City, but just sold our accumulated junk before heading out into the wilderness. We continued to take a minimalist approach there, moving through the Coast Way Crossing and Troll Claw Woods without any combat.
At the Forest of Wyrms we fought our way through to the temple. The intention was to leave the dragon guarding the entrance asleep, but Cria made the mistake of singing before moving into the bugbear ambush and that woke Morentherene. We continued on anyway though and had no trouble with the first lot of encounters. However, trouble found us when we attempted to kill a group of guards to ensure they wouldn't intervene when we tackled Ziatar. Brog's armor is good stuff by leather standards, but proved insufficient for the quality of the archers we were faced with and he was rapidly reduced to dangerously low HPs. He tried to retreat, but one final fatal arrow was released just before a scorcher from Cria killed the attacker.
After returning to Troll Claw Woods to find Mizhena to raise Brog we returned to the temple. With Morentherene now active we decided we would tackle her and did a few basic buffs before entering the cave. Brog was briefly stunned though by a wing buffet and immediately taken low on HPs. He tried to run, but the haste cast outside the cave had been negated by the ring of free action he was wearing and the dragon took the opportunity to pounce for a final time.
Cria stayed in the fight, targeting the dragon and supporting wyverns with scorchers. Morentherene has relatively low magic resistance, but that still kicked in several times, giving her the chance to take a couple of painful bites out of Cria before eventually being scorched once too often.
Cria returned to Mizhena to complain about the poor quality of the earlier raise dead spell, but failed to get a discount for the repeat and we decided to save the game there.
No-Frills Necromancer: A Random Run, Part 4
Previous part found here
So, going by the screenshots, we were seated at the Vulgar Monkey, preparing to descend into the bowels of Spellhold. Onward!
With SCS at Insane, you get all your equipment taken in the Spellhold Maze, so we start by gathering some essentials: A single Quarterstaff is sufficient to deal with the Gibberlings guarding a weapons cache, and a rare occurrence of Web (which we haven't really used since BG1) makes it easy dealing with the Orogs and Minotaurs guarding the exit; weapons and armor secured.
Clearing the northern part of the first level goes alright; I try to play it fair by engaging the Ruhk with all its buffs up, but that Improved Haste is just too much to deal with when we're lacking proper gear, and so we have to wait it out.
The southern part, as always, turns into a nightmare: We get a Lich (apparently a Conjurer) in the library, and we simply have no dependable means with which to fight it. The whole thing thus becomes a running battle, complicated when additional enemies spawn behind us and to the west, joining the fight.
Having spent more resources than I'd like, it seems like the Lich is on its last legs, resorting to Melf's Acid Arrow against our summons... but then, it inexplicably disappears. I've no explanation for this, it just went poof, no Invisibility or anything; we swept the map and couldn't find it. This has happened to me before in the Underdark when we've taken too long fighting Alchra Diagott, and I sincerely hope it's not some SCS behavior, because it's immensely unfair (we get no experience, after all).
Anyway, we abscond with Dace's hand and proceed. Bodhi retreats in swift fashion, and we run into the second of many oddities this session: One of her attendant Vampires does not despawn, in fact, it attacks us.
Good thing we had an extra NPP handy. Still, I suppose the extra experience somewhat makes up for the Lich in absentia.
We exit the maze, bribe Lonk, and engage Irenicus. Barbarian is not so happy about spending time in an Incendiary Cloud, but we have sufficient spellworks to strip Irenicus of his defenses, and the ensuing Murderers pose no threat to us. Spellhold, cleared.
We opt to go with Saemon, pick up a few choice scrolls in Brynnlaw before departing, and finally, Cleric/Illusionist manages to scribe Breach. Good!
The Githyanki ambush is, as always, one of the most dangerous encounters in the entire game: This could really do with a slight rebalancing in SCS. You can't even prepare a simple Contingency on enemy sighted, since you have to fight the (by now completely pointless...) pirate ship guards just before. Hmph.
I am very much not fond of ambushes where you're forced to start completely unbuffed against a fully buffed opponent; yet, we survive, and are bundled off to Fish City.
Here, we sell off a large amount of spoils, chiefly gems which we've been hoarding throughout the game.
With a good deal of gold, we set off to deal with rebels and loyalists alike. Chaotic Commands (neutralizing the stun bolts) means Sauhagin aren't much of a threat; we side with the Prince, and easily dispose of the King. The Underdark awaits.
I really like the Underdark prior to Ust Natha: You can take your time to explore and deal with the quite large, quite rich in both experience and interesting items areas down here.
Here's oddity number three: The Myconid King sprints off to the east (?) immediately upon us entering the area, and somehow he triggers the Drow War Party teleporting onto the bridge. We later found him roaming the Swirfneblin village.
Fully buffed and hasted Skeleton Warriors, along with the party, make short work of the Drow guarding the contraption with lost souls.
We do the easy ones (free the Swirfneblin and the human Thief, deal with Madman Aganalo and Ritti), but leave the Drow Wizard and the Lich for the moment. Instead, we head north and engage the Balor: It's quite nasty even when we're fully buffed and prepared, but we prevail absent deaths.
A rest later, we do return south to tackle Alchra Diagott. There's ample room here, so we can distract the Lich with summons, and swiftly dispatch him: His summoned Dark Planetar is a major pain since we don't dare engage it in melee, but eventually it kills off our summons while we retreat out of line-of-sight, and is then content to just sit in place until unsummoned.
Raevilin Strathi goes down much easier, of course: All lost souls dealt with.
Next, we help out Vithal. The various Elementals are a nuisance, but at the end of the day are just melee brutes, and so can be overcome. We do not press Vithal overly much for an extra reward, but as he is teleporting away, Cleric/Thief surreptiously helps herself to some (in fact, all) of his possessions, aided by several Potions of Master Thievery. To my delight, Necromancer successfully scribes all scrolls: Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Incendiary Cloud, Wail of the Banshee, Time Stop. Good stuff.
We also took the time here to deal with the Drow War Party on the bridge (they're quite weak), as well as the Kuo-Toans to the southeast. Time for the three major lairs.
The Kuo-Toans are by far the weakest: We just rush at them with some basic buffs (Chaotic Commands to negate the stun bolts, just like with Sauhagin), and they don't last long, including the Prince.
The Demon Knights are quite a bit tougher, but while they have great offensive abilities, their defense leaves something to be desired: Barbarian takes a severe beating, but everyone survives, and Fighter/Cleric can finally stop relying on the Strength spell to remain mobile or even be able to wear his armor.
Alright, so it's about time for the first serious scrap this update: The Drow guarding the exit.
Now, you can leave them to Adalon to deal with as she teleports you in. I prefer not too, since a) you get no experience, and b) she doesn't actually instantly kill them: There's ample time for them to hurt/horribly slaughter party members while Adalon is doing her thing.
Let's not leave things to chance.
Perhaps Adalon wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.
There's just too many spell effects, too many Demons, too many Golems, and too many layers of protections to peel off the Drow for us to make much headway. We eventually manage to kill off the highest-level enemy Wizard, but end up doing a running battle where we just barely scrape by... we literally retreated all the way to the entrance at one point, fought off two Demons that followed us, then returned to the bridge. By the end, no one had anything left beyond I think a single Remove Fear.
Let's plan better next time, I say.
And that was the easiest lair.
Beholder City is next: I forgot that SCS no longer puts an Elder Orb at the entrance, so rather than waste our massive initial buffs, we rush north and clear the Drow, then have the frontliners head south and deal with the Mind Flayers.
I only know of three ways to deal with Beholders in semi-safety: Summons (preferably Skeleton Warriors, but others will do in a pinch even though they die very quickly), massive ranged spell damage bombardment (and I do mean massive), or frontliners immune to everything (Rage, unbuffed saving throws).
We opt for Skeleton Warriors, and though it takes a very long time, we eventually clear the whole thing, though we're down to our last two summons.
OK, the worst of the lot remains: Illithids.
Learning from previous errors of judgement, this time we'll refrain from Chaotic Commands (except on Necromancer, who simply cannot be allowed to be Held).
Instead, we'll boost saving throws with Chant/Prayer/Recitation/Emotion: Hope and Potions of Invulnerability, then let the frontliners go to town: Illithids will tend to favor Psionic Blast/Domination if the targets aren't outright immune, even when they are effectively immune due to saving throws.
Still, even with full buffs and the odd Improved Haste, this is quite painful, but we push through.
Eventually, our last slew of buffs is just enough to handle the Elder Brain, and we go free. Huzzah!
Dealing with Simyaz on the way out is basically an afterthought.
We pick up some more scrolls from Carlig and Therndle, rest up, and enter Ust Natha under the guise of Adalon's illusion.
It's time for oddity four.
Occasionally, Giant Spiders in Ust Natha will attack Wild Dogs. This happens as we're passing by, but the Wild Dog runs off into a nook where the Giant Spider can't see it. So, the Giant Spider starts attacking our party instead.
It doesn't turn red, but it keeps going after the weakest characters, and it even follows us as we change areas.
I tried leaving Ust Natha and killing it, but then the city goes hostile. You could argue I should roll with it, but it seems very clear this is not intended, and it's not as if the party was actually in danger... so I just reload a slightly earlier save and this time it doesn't happen. Odd.
Anyway, we start the questline, and on our way to meet Soulafein, forget that there's now a party of adventurers guarding the bridge. So, we just trample roughshod all over them: The only real threat here is N'ashtar, but his meager spell protections are not nearly enough to keep him safe from Spell Thrust + Breach.
Carlig actually has some extra scrolls if you visit him in Drow disguise: We pick up Limited Wish, Mordenkainen's Sword and Khelben's Warding Whip (only failing to scribe the last one).
So, oddity five: Soulafein never managed to exit Ust Natha after talking to us, so he never arrived to the south where you're supposed to rescue Phaere. We spend a little time doing pit fights and the duels, but he just never pops.
I end up having to spawn a new version of him using the console, which works (and allows us to rescue Phaere), but now there's an extra Soulafein in Ust Natha. Hope this won't cause problems down the line...
On that note, oddity six: the Beholder in the pit fights used Telekinesis on Barbarian, which literally pushed him out of the pit! The door locks so he couldn't get back in, but apparently if you speak to the Drow overseeing the fights, he thinks you turned him down the first time and want to fight now, so he'll unlock the door for you. Whereupon the Beholder is waiting just beyond the gate and attacks the entire party. Fortunate it didn't just Death Ray Necromancer.
By now the Duergar Slave has spawned, so we take care of Qilue. Her Mage servants are very annoying, but they seem to lack offensive punch, so we just slowly strip their defenses, and that's it.
Proceeding with the main quest, it's oddity seven: The extra Soulafein somehow showed up when we fought the Beholder to the south. Now when we accidentally pass him, he talks to us and hands over fake Dragon Eggs, even though we've technically no knowledge of Phaere's plot yet. Eh... again, hopefully that won't break anything.
Alright, so we talk to Matron Ardulace, and are tasked with retrieving some blood.
It's time for the final showdown: Deirex, and immediately afterwards, House Jae'llat.
It is also time for a fatal error of judgement.
Every single time I've fought him before, Deirex leads with a Time Stop. This has led me to adopt a simple strategy: Enter hasted, run past Deirex as he's chanting, drop a few instant-cast summons (Kitthix, Berserk Warrior) next to him, then retreat out of his line-of-sight and watch him waste the Time Stop killing junk. Then wait out his buffs, apply your own, and charge in. Victory! At least in theory.
This time, Deirex did not oblige. Instead, he leads with a Remove Magic. We attempt to counter by having affected characters quaff Oils of Speed, dropping a few instant summons to hopefully distract Deirex, and moving the entire party to the northeast.
Scoffing heartily at this insult, the (very hasted) Lich comes shuffling after us, pointedly ignoring our summons, and all hell literally breaks loose.
... I thought SCS Revised Death effects would prevent chunkings, but I guess vorpal effects still mean permanent death. I'll make a mental note of that.
There's no room to manevuer in here, so we have to engage the Dark Planetar basically absent buffs.
Meanwhile, Deirex is to the south, gating in brutal amounts of Demons. We somehow manage to deal with the Planetar, but things are looking grim.
With the number of Demons on the field increasing, there are Lightning Bolts, Fireballs and Cones of Cold flying around everywhere. Can we really turn this around? We make an attempt at Ruby Ray'ing Deirex to tear down his Spell Trap, but a wayward Fireball interrupts it. We have no other way of dealing with that Spell Trap, so our only remaining choice is somehow hacking through Deirex's protections while simultaneously dealing with, at my count, four Demons. The last nail in the coffin is Deirex's Spell Trigger, bringing in three Greater Elementals.
In the end, we fail, but also suffer oddity 8. Fighter/Cleric was carrying the Rope needed to get access to Deirex's Tower: When he gets chunked (I don't recall by what but wager it was the Greater Earth Elemental delivering a vicious blow, which again... why did a chunking occur?), we're suddenly locked out of the tower... but our remaining two party members stay inside?
I can't access the characters; they're nowhere on the map. The game even allows quicksaving, so we're no longer considered in combat, but we can't resurrect the (two non-chunked) characters. So it's basically game over, since we can no longer do anything.
Which is fine, given that we were maybe 1 - 2 rounds from a total party wipe anyway, but still odd.
The bitter sting of defeat aside, that was a suitably heroic, and suitably moronic, way to end a run.
In hindsight, the reason I tried to get away with minimal initial buffs was because I had House Jae'llat in mind: I can't recall how long you have to raid them after killing Deirex, so wanted to go there straight after, and with the number of enemies there, I wanted to preserve buffs and spell slots.
If we had buffed up completely, including Spell Immunity / Entropy Shield, I'm quite confident we would've won this without breaking a sweat; as shown, we were still able to hold on for some time, even dispatching a Dark Planetar, with next to no buffs.
If anyone wants to have a go at a Necromancer, feel free. If no one picks up the gauntlet, I'll give it another go soon.
@aldain That's a rough and very unusual way to go out. Deirex sounds really dangerous in this SCS version.
I don't think there's a timer for clearing out House Jae'llat btw. There might be one mentioned in dialogue, but it doesn't actually apply in terms of gameplay.
@Enuhal That's good to know. I can't recall ever having been locked out of raiding them, but I wasn't sure.
And yes, Deirex is quite dangerous (he had at least 2 HLA's, Dark Planetar and Improved Alacrity), but to be fair, the danger is exacerbated because there's literally no space available.
Add the grand stupidity of charging in nearly buffless...
My next goals for Madalena: Get some gold via Bassilus, get our reputation up to 20 and get the charisma tome. After that, buy/learn all available spellscrolls. Next, get the XP boost from the basilisk area, travel around for easy encounters with powerful item rewards, and, once we get another thief level on Delia for enough "find traps", get the next big XP boost from the greater basilisks at Durlag's.
So, how did we do? First of all, Bassilus - who didn't start with a pre-summoned aerial servant (which I've seen in an earlier SCS version) or protection from fire - did indeed die to my three wands (needed two charges from the frost one) - as his skeletons are slow to crumble, they did hit Leda twice with their bolts, and she almost died - luckily, the wands also interrupted all spellcasting attempts from the enemy cleric:
We also took the opportunity to use our trusty sleep and command spells to obtain the +2 short sword for our kensai:
And since we're in the area, we also try to help Melicamp. I'm not above using a wand of fire charge to take down a group of skeletons - they are, for us, hard to kill and a few lucky ranged crits can easily take down a party member:
Now we travel around the various wilderness areas with open reputation quests - avoiding most dangerous battles if possible. Hold person is rarely needed as most opponents are still sleepable, but it delivers whenever we use it:
During these southern reputation quests, we get lucky and encounter a winter wolf. Gorion's belt prevents any possible damage:
As you can imagine, traveling from area to area for reputation-boosting quest (reputation gain is reduced to 2/3 in this SCS installation, so we end up needing every single available early quest that can deliver a point) has the chance of triggering some ambushes... and once again we get hit by another mass bandit waylay. This one almost ends the run right there: Madalena herself ends up being the primary target, and her boosted anti-missle AC doesn't do enough to keep her safe - it can't protect against critical hits. Two of them, and she ends up at 2 hitpoints, barely making it to FAI where we immediately rest - but you can still see the danger in the combat log:
Since we have the reputation and the charisma tome now, we will delay no longer: Another level up, which the basilisks are sure to deliver, will increase Madalena's hitpoints, and more hitpoints is evidently something she desparately needs. We end up having easily enough money for the spellscrolls we want, and I even end up being able to afford the Army Scythe. Now, we travel to the basilisks and buff everyone with PfP for the big basilisk hunt. Corax delivers with a paralyze on the one dangerous enemy here, Mutamin - meanwhile, not knowing that Corax would end up winning the battle for us by himself, we hit the gnome with true sight, blindness and glitterdust - glitterdust is particularily strong for us since Madalena gets to use her conjurer bonus for this one - well, Mutamin actually makes both saving throws, but since he failed against paralyze, he's toast:
We avoid the adventuring party in the middle for now and only take down the various basilisks. A quick visit to Durlag's for more easy high experience targets: The two battle horrors, easy targets for our wands:
However, we don't go further quite yet - we need more find traps for the chromatic orb trap leading to the tower roof.
Now, we have tools for a few slighty tougher battles - cat's grace can turn our fighters into genuinely good ranged weapon users, and strength of one allows for a big short-term boost in melee damage and thac0. One of the more risky choices here is facing Greywolf due to the chance of him having an oil of speed - he ends up having two buffing potions on him, but they are freedom and power, not speed, so we can kite and kill:
We clear a few more wilderness areas, but mostly target very specific powerful items (such as Meilum's bracers). Spellcasters are avoided, with the exception of Jemby, because she can be commanded (being only level 5) - not needed, two projectiles hit her before her pre-buffs even activate:
All right, we have dealt with the easier wilderness encounters - mostly avoiding hobgoblin elites and ogre berserkers plus any and all spellcasters, but with the help of cat's grace, we have enough find traps to invade the upper levels of Durlag's Tower (skipping the deadly ghost, of course). Wands do most of the work on the outside walls:
Inside, we mostly have to deal with ghasts - now, in theory this should be easy as they are quite slow, but the very cramped spaces and bad pathfinding can lead to some trouble - as you can see here. Luckily, the wand of the heavens is a way to quickly take down a ghast when needed:
We get the wisdom tome for our cleric, take down the basilisks and even face Riggilo - this one's risky because of backstab danger and his tendency to carry around a bunch of invisbility potions in SCS. We surround him and cast strength of one. Glitterdust breaks his first potion:
True sight works for the next one, and his third and final one - while he gets in one hit, it isn't a backstab, as he was revealed shortly before that. Madalena rests now at level 5, which means we're protected from enemy sleep spells, making the task of facing enemy spellcasters a little less scary.
Well, my last words about enemy spellcasters being "less scary" don't seem to have aged very well, considering what happened right after that, when I decided to fight Zodral. Thinking to myself: "We are immune to sleep by now, we have remove fear, so the only mass disable crowd control spells he could throw at us would be slow and maybe a hold person that hits multiple people - but what are the chances he has both of these spells memorized? He's most likely just trying to throw damage at us" - we buffed up with remove fear, bless, prayer, strength of one, true sight and shield, entering the tent. However, true sight was slow to work, and we got unlucky with our to-hit rolls. Immediately, Zodral opened with slow - the worst case scenario, and we didn't get an interrupt. He followed up, still without being hit, with hold person, which hit two of us, including Madalena. He should have easily have been dead at this point (and I should have started using wand charges right away, propably). But he got to cast a thid spell, monster summoning I, and the summoned goblins started hitting the held characters. Now I finally used a wand of heavens charge to help in killing Zodral:
However, Madalena, being hit by a goblin and held, was in serious danger of death. I threw command spells at these foes and was barely able to save everyone:
That was way too close. Very poorly played by me, though - I thought of the possible scenario that occured but didn't prepare any actual counterplay, instead just not expecting it to happen.
Things didn't go much better when I finished exploring the area further north. Encountering a huge group of kobolds, I set them to sleep - everything seemed fine, but the game decided to mess with me: The lightning weather effect hit an already wounded Leda, killing her outright. This is possibly the worst feature in BG1:
At this point, we had to pay 600 gp to resurrect her. Ouch. We continued some more wilderness explorations, and decided to test our anti-spellcaster setup once again, facing Silke. In recent SCS versions, the bard doesn't get pre-buffs anymore (propably because she is, in theory, a super early enemy and seems way out of proportion with her power level if given her full prebuffs) - Leda had just maxed out "set traps" and put down her first one here, before the battle, and it ended up interrupting Silke's opening spell (either MI or II):
This pretty much ended the fight right here, as we could just shoot the defenseless Silke down. We bought some +2 projectiles and moved east, towards the wolves. Usually I like to web these, but Madalena didn't have a web scroll yet during her first scroll learning session (I have one now, but want to wait a bit before spending my last 2 potions of mind focusing). Glitterdust, with the conjurer bonus, does a pretty good job here as well:
Now we move back to the basilisk area, for the enemy adventurers here. The party throws in silence, glitterdust, wand of fire and necklace of missles, and the battle is pretty much ours:
Very well. Now we move west, to Laurel's area. The games once again randomly punishes me with lightning, this time on Madalena. Not wanting to risk resting in the middle of the map (some interruptions can be very nasty), I have her drink two healing potions instead:
Laurel gets mostly help from our sleep spells:
Further south, we run into our first group of sirens. Glitterdust is once again a good choice here, and so are our wand charges and the necklace of missles - we avoid any charm effects:
Droth, being an ogre mage, has a great weakness - he's only level 5, so command always works - so we just spam three commands in quick succession, which grants us enough time to win:
More sirens - this time we have two skeletons to help out, though until our cleric reaches level 7, these are rather weak:
And we return to the lighthouse area - this time, silence does a great job with the final group of sirens:
The last area we want to explore for now is the mine exit area, with Narcillicus being being the main threat. He starts out with all kinds of pre-buffs. I decide that his magical defenses (being mostly only minor spell deflection) are weaker than his physical ones - we don't have spell thrust yet, but we can go with a brute force approach: 2 wand charges end the MSD, two more get us the kill (his only counterplay is a slow spell, which is poorly aimed):
Meanwhile, Delia is the only party member who can actually use a magical non-piercing weapon they are proficient in, so she gets to drink a hill giant strength potion, taking on the two mustard jellies basically by herself (others approach from time to time to take one or two hits and retreat, avoiding damage on Delia):
We now have a wand of paralyzation and monster summoning added to our arsenal, and we bought a new wand of frost in Ulgoth's Beard (amongst other things) - these will propably remain our most powerful tools for a long time.
What we've left open now are the Ulcaster Ruins + Icharyd, the Firewine Ruins + Kahrk, the entire red wizard area, and the bandit regions, plus the Doomsayer (who we could kill with wands by now, but I forgot about him). Since all these things seem incredibly scary at this point, we're going into the Nashkel mines instead. This means the Amazon + Gullykin ambushes are possible encounters after that, so we need to make sure to rest before we travel whenever possible. Luckily, true sight should help with some of the greatest risks involved in those battles, but there's still quite a lot of danger.
In the Nashkel Mines, we mostly use sleep spells to help out with big groups of goblins - sometimes, though, we have to resort to wands:
It was especially important with the kobold shaman, because I'm quite sure he opened with the lightning spell, which could have devastated the party, and we barely hit him with our wands just in time.
In Mulahey's cave, we clear out most if it with another necklace of missles charge:
We get our short-duration buffs going and take down Mulahey:
Not too difficult at this point. We return to Nashkel to take on Nimbul, who has stoneskins, but no protection from normal missles - true sight greatly hinders his defenses as well:
A quick visit to the doomsayer:
Tranzig is lured downstairs and taken down:
We make our way to Larswood and peldvale. The black talons are pretty tough opponents at this point, and we've bought the wand of fire from the merchant at Durlag's (which, interestingly enough, has 20 fireball charges, but only 1 scorcher charge) to help us in taking them down. Luckily, we are able to interrupt the spellcasting attempts of the druids here:
On our way to the bandit camp, we encounter the Gullykin ambush:
Command on the wizard (he's, as a multiclass, below level 6, so it propably always works), wand of paralyzation on the cleric (which works - we also hit him with icelance as a backup, and that one works as well):
One of the enemy fighters uses an oil of speed - after taking down the commanded wizard, we cast hold person as a potential counter, which luckily works out as well:
On to the bandit camp: Once we have activated their defenses, we steadily retreat and throw sleep spells and fireballs at our opponents - Taugosz, after a failed paralyzation charge, succumbs to a second hold person attempt via the cleric spell:
Venkt appears, and we throw in two fireballs in his direction. He casts slow, but Delia is able to retreat to reduce the impact and even makes her own saving throw:
Once true sight removes the mirror image (meanwhile, the wizard summons some monsters close to us, which we use sleep against), we shoot at Venkt again, Madalena casts icelance to kill him, though Delia takes him down even before it hits:
Now we only have to take down the remaining physical fighters:
The battle was not easy and did take a toll on our resources, but wand/necklace charges still look okay (we're also substituting with oils of fire/potions of explosion). Now, onto Cloakwood. In general, high level druids can't be allowed to finish their initial spells (insect plague or call lightning could easily kill us), so we tackle them with wand charges:
Giant spiders are a bit of a problem with their web ability. Nechtan gets webbed when standing close to a few spiders at Centeol's lair, but a skeleton provides an additional target and we use command to take down the one spider attacking him:
Phase spiders are also weak against command. Now, more druids - for Amarande, we have to run outside to deal with him due to the limited space:
On our way to the wyvern area, the amazon ambush occurs. True sight to avoid backstabs... and Madalena, who has just gotten to level 7, casts greater malison for follow-up crowd control:
After that, we throw out hold person and wand of paralyzation against the spellcasters:
The malison does its job. Very nice. On to the hamadryad - she is able to charm Delia, but no one else:
Things have been going well - too well. Nechtan suffers the consequences of our hybris when getting hit by a baby wyvern. This poison seems to double-tick, effectively 10 points of damage per tick. My attempt to save an antidote and cast the bhaalspawn slow poison power costs him his life, as I don't realize how incredibly quickly the damage piles up:
On our way back for a resurrection, we encounter a triple giant spider ambush. Web is very dangerous for us, we don't really have too much counterplay at this point. I settle on a monster summoning charge to provide the spiders with additional targets in order to get enough time to take them down:
After spending 800 gold on the resurrection, we finally make it to the mines. We've now gone for a second scroll learning session for Madalena, mostly to learn web and spell thrust. Notably, our cleric is now level 7 as well, meaning we have even more buffs available (our full routine now involves remove fear, bless, prayer/strength of one (not available if we have 3 skeletons memorized), recitation, PfE 10' radius, true sight, shield, minor spell deflection and emotion: hope - and we always have 4 cat's grace active), and 3 powerful skeletons. Madalena has minor sequencer with double web - this, we use against Drasus (not from off-screen, though, so the wizards have their pre-buffs, and one of them has MGOI - but both fighters get webbed):
The MGOI-mage does have stonekins, but no protection from normal missles, so we can work on shooting him down. He summons monsters directly on Madalena, who is almost surrounded and killed. Damn, that was close:
The other wizard, btw, has walked back out of the web instead of forward, and is dealing with our third skeleton (or trying to). We're able to sleep the monsters and take down their summoner:
The second wizard, at this point, is isolated and already wounded:
All right... we rest, get our web sequencer back and even prepare a spell thrust for downstairs. The iron mines will be a big challenge, but if we get through them, things should get easier with the available spellscrolls and wands in the big city (though our funds are somewhat lacking).
So, we enter the iron mines and make it to level 2, where Hareishan awaits. Our plan is to pull her back a bit, throwing an oil of fiery burning into her room to also deal some damage to her mercenaries - at the entrance, we made our stand. Hareishan immediately started casting an enchantment spell, and we threw two more fireballs at her. However, she was, somehow, able to finish her spell before fiery death engulfed her - and her spell was... chaos. Not good:
Madalena and Delia made their saving throws, the others did not. Fighting each other wasn't the problem here, and Delia was easily able to clear up the remaining mercenaries - the trouble was that one of the guards rolled a lucky 20 to take down Leda, with a 16 damage hit (how these guards are even able to deal 16 damage in one hit, considering their stats, is beyond me - I'm pretty sure their max damage should be 11, since Leda's helmet blocked the crit):
After the clearup, I had a decision to make:
Either go for a resurrection immediately, or continue further to at least make use of my spellslots in an attempt to take on Natasha and the ogre mage. I decided to do the latter - I had prepared my spellbooks so I could do everything except for Davaeorn in one go, and resting here is potentially dangerous, so I didn't want to let my spells go wo waste.
For Natasha, I had my 3 skeletons prepared, who got busy drawing out her spells and getting rid of her defenses:
After a while, we go in, Madalena casts spell thrust, Madhava follows up with silence:
She did cast vocalize before her death, but all that took her far too long, allowing me to take her down in the meantime.
For the ogre mage, we had our second true sight and command - pretty easy with those options at the ready:
We need Leda back and our spells ready again for Davaeorn, so we travel to the FAI - hoping not to get a giant spider ambush (we can just run away from all others, but web tangle makes that potentially difficult with the spiders) - of course, we immediately get one:
Once again we make use of a wand of monster summoning charge right away to block the spiders in the east and south with more warm bodies, while commanding the one to the north - that worked out as planned:
Okay, we get back Leda, sell and rest, return to the mines, rest again (because of exhaustion) and take on Davaeorn. An invisible Delia disarms the traps, the battle horrors approach us, Davaeorn does not (Delia ran out of the range of his detection spell) - we use wands and magic missles against them:
Davaeorn still doesn't approach, but his first group of guards spawns in - our skeletons help in taking care with those, and Nechtan activates a PfM scroll, followed up by a potion of stone giant strength, before going after Davaeorn:
Davaeorn teleports to the party, but that turns out to be a mistake for him, as we quickly punch through his stoneskins - he teleports away again without accomplishing much, and now Nechtan has free reign to hit him:
A second group of guards spawns in, but soon after that, the wizard falls:
Time to get to Baldur's Gate. Here, we go for another big scroll learning session for both of our mages before travelling around to get some of the powerful items and free experience here - most battles in the city aren't super dangerous for us at this point. Here's the sewer ogre mage:
Using true sight to get the valuable gauntlets of ogre might:
Helm of Glory:
Second Evermemory ring:
Here was an unexpeceted bit of danger: In the western sewers, one of the sewerfolk is a thief and got a critical backstab on our bhaalspawn - luckily, still not enough damage to kill her:
Lothander is surrounded and killed for a second pair of boots of speed:
Marek dies soon after that:
For another necklace of missles, we take down Shandalar's daughters, making use of the stairs:
Degrodel's house might be dangerous, but we're now rearranging our spellbooks: Everyone who isn't at 18 strength or dexterity already gets cat's grace and strength, so, aside from our constitution, unless we get dispelled, we feel like a "real" party now (well, the proficiencies are still a bit bad, but that's fine). Also, greater malison + slow does a ton of work, as does spamming magic missles thanks to Evermemory:
After resting for new short-term buffs, the same thing is done inside again:
And now, for the battle at the Iron Throne. I decide to go for the fireball approach (I have spare wands of fire by now), casting fire protection on Madalena in case I miscalculate the radius. It's 5 fireballs each for the first salvo (our wizard slayer has no way to make use of them):
However, most enemies actually survive this onslaught, and an enemy thief gets a backstab on Madalena before true sight even ticks. She retreats, we focus down the thief and throw more fireballs into the room - meanwhile, remove magic hits some of the party:
However, that won't stop us - only two fighter-types survive on the side of the Iron Throne, and a lot our our fighters are still buffed up, so we simply rush them down:
We're done with the city. Now I have to decide where to go next. Candlekeep, the Ice Island (for the stoneskin scroll) or the remaining wilderness areas (Ulcaster, Firewine, Red Wizards) are the most promising options.
I decided to move to Ulcaster first. Since this party relies heavily on buffs: A new tactic for Icharyd - takes some time, but a lot safer: Get him to trigger his second phase and immediately leave the map (as getting into the phase makes you lose all your buffs). Travel back to the area, rest and rebuff - now phase 2 can be done with buffs and summons - also, he seems to target the first enemy that he sees with his call lightning ability, so having a summoned skeleton in front helps a lot:
We move downstairs, fighting our way to the Wolf of Ulcaster. After summoning our skeletons and buffing up, we still have a second round of buffs (especially remove fear) at the ready in case the wolf dispels us, which he does sometimes depending on how long the battle lasts - we engage our foe:
Our damage output is pretty good - while the wolf calls in more wolves and ghouls, the only bad thing that happens to us is a paralyzation attack on Leda, but the wolf dies and we are easily able to save our F/MT from its allies:
Now, on the the Firewine dungeon. Kobold commandos are easy enough to take care off by now. Lendarn is the real challenge - once again we call in skeletons (we have 4 of them by now) and buff up everything. Our cleric gets close enough to hit with true sight, and the summons do a great job:
The ogre mage has already started joining the battle, but our buffed-up skeletons are so powerful that we don't even get to use command - just skeletons and a bolt from Ninisina is enough:
Now, for the red wizard area. The spiders are easily dealt with after disarming their traps. I should have fireballed or webbed the red wizards from off screen, but since I haven't really used these methods so far in this run, I decided to give those guys more of a fighting chance as well. Skeletons go in, we follow up with silence:
However, they all have vocalize, and our skeletons begin to crumble. We equip magical projectiles and move in, avoiding two confusion spells by separating the target from the party in time (both make their saving throw anyway) - we make some good progress, but one of the wizards lands polymorph: other on Nechtan, who has no defense against that (I didn't notice the spell in time to hand him a potion that would defend against it):
The summoned monsters kill Nechtan before we can sleep them, though at least after that, the wizards offer very little in terms of resistance against our bullets, bolts and arrows:
Another resurrection at the FAI temple, and we move to Ulgoth's Beard, making a visit to Ice Island. Both Delia and Nechtan use a PfM scroll (now we only have one left), following up with fire giant strength, agility (for Nechtan), heroism and speed. Together, they first run past a few of the wizards to trigger their defenses, so the non-stoneskin-ones start ticking down. After that, they go after the ones that don't constantly summon monsters or elementals on their faces first:
Andris teleports around and goes invisible, so they can't quite get to him (he seems to have tried to teleport to Madalena, but she wasn't even in the dungeon, instead staying outside). The one who's throwing darts seems to have the highest level spells available, not only summoning elementals, but also being smart enough to cast dispel magic, which actually dispels our potions through the PfM scrolls, greatly reducing the power of our fighter pair - also, we have to get rid of these elementals, as they tend to block the path - luckily, this spot they can not cross due to their size, so magical ammo does the job:
The dart guy and Dezkiel are engaged again by Delia, while we slowly move the others inside and along, thinking that we might need true sight to track down Andris - they also help Nechtan to kill another elemental:
Tellan (the dart guy) suddenly does a ton of damage to our fighter pair, and we realize that PfM has run out:
They are able to avoid a follow-up spell thanks to their boots of speed, and we call in the skeletons - they do the job - Tell actually even has death spell (now that I think of it, giving him death spell seems a bit broken - that would kill the entire party instantly at this point, as they are all below 9 hit dice - luckily he only seemed to use it as a response to our first summon, and no one else was nearby to get hit), but in the end the remaining three skeletons only get hit by minor level 1-2 damage spells:
Near the exit, we find Andris again - and our skeletons fairly easily take him down, without us having to do much at all:
The stoneskin scroll isn't learned quite yet - I want to wait until after Candlekeep, since there are a few unique scrolls there as well that we can include in the learning session, and I don't expect to need stoneskin there. Since our F/M/T needs so many potions to actually reliably learn scrolls, we have to keep our learning sessions at a minimum.
We make a quick visit to Durlag's again to fight the ghost - now that we have 4 level 7+ skeletons that one should be doable, as long as we avoid its high level spells hitting the entire party. Well... teleport field results in our skeletons getting in weird positions and the ghost following them, so he does get to cast a spell at a party before we can flee downstairs - a pretty devastating fireball... but no one dies:
(Madalena is uninjured, because she had wisely cast protection from fire on herself).
Well, one of the least injured of us, Ninisina, moves back upstairs to direct the skeletons, and they eventually do end up getting the kill:
Now, for Kahrk. Maybe a bit early to take on this enemy, but I think we have the tools - those being skeletons, spell thrust and wands. Maybe I should have learned secret word as well in case he uses a sixth level slot for a spell protection, but luckily he didn't end up doing so. We also place 2 traps beforehand. So, our skeletons fight him (and start dying pretty early), Madalena moves in for spell thrust and gets hit with remove magic in return, but that trade's worth it:
Madalena retreats, the others move in and start using magical ammo and wand charges:
Haste has run out, which results in us suffering a few hits from the big ogre mage, so we're forced to burn one more wand charge to quickly end the battle.
Finally, we travel to Candlekeep - I just wanted to get the ogre mage ambush out of the way. Usually we have everyone go invisible here via potions, but our wizard slayer can't use those, so we give her boots of speed so she can at least run and build some distance while getting pelted with spells - the others, being invisible, move north a bit, but I realize that I can't get away from the ogres and buff up - instead, we go for true sight and the malison + slow combo:
The ogres are quite vulnerable without their illusion buffs, and since none of their crowd control spells were successfull against Ninisima, they only have minor damage spells, so we end up with a fairly convincing victory.
We make our way into the crypts, disarming traps, looting treasure and fighting relatively easy battles. Successfully, we avoid any greater doppelgangers being able to finish a haste spell:
For Prat's party, we call in our summons and full buffs. Throwing in malison, slow and silence as well, Prat himself quickly falls, though not before hitting Leda with an almost lethal icelance - luckily, she resists the stun effect:
Leda retreats, the others finish the fight:
We move back to the big city and learn stoneskin on Madalena. Fighting our way into the flaming fist HQ is surprisingly easy, these cleric mercenaries don't last long. Cythandria has her two golems, but they aren't very strong against magical ranged weapon assaults with full buffs:
Delia is targeted by remove magic and retreats, the others continue on against the wizard, quickly getting through her stoneskins thanks to true sight:
However, next up we make a big mistake, propably the biggest gameplay failure on my part in this run so far since it was entirely avoidable: I was getting impatient and didn't want to buff up again, so I went to Slythe and Krystin before resting. This was foolish, because a) this would mean I wouldn't have any skeletons, b) no short-duration buffs and c) haste would run out - in fact, it ran out the second I started combat, and resulted in exhaustion as well. Well, Slythe still died immediately:
But Krystin did not. In fact, we were now lacking the neccessarry tools to deal with Krystin quickly, or at all. No true sight anymore, most importantly. A single cone of cold took down Nechtan, and Ninisima nearly fell to her minor sequencer:
She drinks healing potions, meanwhile keeping up her attacks - because it's purely her wizard slayer inflicted spell failure chance that's still keeping us alive - most of Krystin's spell just end up not working anymore, aside from 2 chromatic orbs (the wizard slayer attacks don't need to actually deal damage, they just need to hit, so stoneskin isn't enough to protect Krystin here):
Finally, we get through her defenses:
Very bad choice not to rest here. Also, the first time one of the wizard slayer abilities actually had an impact.
We resurrect our kensai and rest up. For the ducal palace, we get our summons and buffs ready, plus a scroll of malison + chaos each. The wizards make sure to get the timing just right, and they follow up with a second chaos and spell thrust on the doppelganger mage, while true sight reveals the assassin for us to kill:
After all that, victory is convincing and total:
Time to rest again and move downstairs into the thieve's maze. Getting to the undercity is not too tough - we use one of our PfU scrolls for the skeleton warriors. For the undercity party, we finally use our web sequencer again, which works against the fighter-types, but not neccessarily the spellcasters - Chaos, however, removes one of them from the battle for now, and our skeletons do fairly well until chaos ends, and the wizard, once again, has death spell. This is pretty mad - if one of my party members had been in melee combat, they would have instantly died here as well:
Spell thrust grants us the ability to finish the wizard with wand charges:
And the cleric is stunned with a paralyzation wand and shot down:
Now, we only have to deal with Tamoko. Her initial prebuffs are quite powerful, and she takes down my skeletons pretty easily - I don't dare to attack with the full party right away because I've seen her use finger of death before in insane SCS. In the end, we kite her around for a bit until most of her buffs are gone and finish the battle with magic missles, having to fight more skeleton warriors at the same time (the ones from the north joined the battle):
Now we turn around. Balduran's Island should be our next target.
@Enuhal Hehe, yep, Death Spell means.. well.. death at this stage.
Though I think there's only six BG1EE casters that get 6th level arcane slots under SCS: Krystin, the Ghost, Tellan (dart guy), Semaj, Shaldrissa and Kahrk. Out of these, I've seen Krystin, Tellan, Shaldrissa and the Ghost actually use Death Spell; Kahrk usually goes for Improved Haste + PfMW, and Semaj seems to like PfMW as well.
Also in my experience, Andris always teleports to the protagonist. I guess his script goes wonky if he can't...
Still, a few close shaves are part and parcel of SCS Insane runs; Excellent progress so far. I have some time to play this weekend so will probably roll up a new Necromancer then and join in, though again, if anyone feels the call, don't let me stop you.
@aldain At least they don't seem to be using death spell actively against the party, only against summons - but the party could easily be collateral damage. I think for BG1, death fog would be a more appropriate anti-summon tool as it doesn't instantly kill the entire party if the player moves together with their summons, but then again, that would propably require for them to include protection from acid into their pre-buffs or risk hurting themselves (though SCS wizards are usually pretty good at getting out of fog effects or not hurting themselves with their own AoE. The only exception I've seen in my run so far was one of the wizards upstairs in sorcerous sundries, who roasted himself and his own allies by pointing a wand of fire on one of my very close skeletons).
I haven't done Balduran's Island or Durlag's Tower in ages, as all of my recent runs have skipped these two areas (and SoD as well). However, Balduran's Island still went fairly well - I also learned that the SCS supply system (limiting you to 4 rests until you rest at an inn) lets you resupply on your ship for this part of the game, but I only needed to rest once on the island anyways (the only time I've had trouble with this system was after leaving Saradush to go after Yaga Shura - as there is no inn available after Saradush gets destroyed and before you get to Amkethran).
Once we're in the northern area, we summon our skeletons and activate some long-duration buffs. We part peacefully with the sirens, and taking down the wolfweres is fairly easy at range. Now for a venture into the shipwreck. My earlier strategies would often involve luring the wolfweres outside, even those from upper levels, but they currently don't seem to want to switch areas at all. So instead I went in with Delia first (who has the best AC), often equipping a ring of freedom in case of vampire wolves - she lures the enemies away from the entrance so the others don't end up surrounded by foes when they follow. In this way, we dealt with the first 3 floors and decided to rest just before the last one. After rebuffing, Delia moves up again - Daese, the wizard here, fails with her minor sequencer, and now that she's used her action for this turn, the others follow upstairs:
Btw, Daese has no buffs except for MI here, because I went upstairs before resting and went downstairs again just to see if at least some enemies could be lured downstairs - she used her prebuffs here but didn't follow, and for some reason it seems like she didn't get her prebuffs again after I returned following my rest. I thought SCS enemies usually can just pre-buff again in that situation. Strange.
Well, the others follow Delia upstairs and shoot down Daese - with her lack of defenses, that's easy enough. Now we aim our wands of paralyzation on the greater wolfwere, and they work right away:
Since our random proficiencies at the start gave us dagger profiency on our wizard slayer, she can use the silver dagger quite well - the same is true for our F/M/T with bastard swords. Well, paralyzed targets are easy to hit in any case:
After turning in all of the quests, we make our way to the coast and talk our way out of a fight with Kaishas. Back in Ulgoth's Beard, Mendas is lacking in magical defenses and has armor instead of shield, making his human for an easy target for magic missle. Once he turns, we paralyze him with the wand:
His ally didn't follow - we went back inside to take him down, though after 4 wand charges he still wasn't stunned - in the meantime, our gold/silver weapon users had already killed him with just regular attacks, though.
All right. Now, only Durlag's Tower (and the return to Ulgloth's Beard) remain before Sarevok. Before that, we need to go shopping for some important potions and scrolls.
Durlag's Tower went very well, mostly because I decided to be patient instead of pushing through the entire dungeon in one go. Our skeletons did a great job tanking for us in the first level - we used our first round of buffs for the three doppelganger fight in the east, the second round for the dwarven warders. For those, we also placed down all of our 4 traps near "love", hoping to kill this most dangerous warder outright - instead, it was "fear" who died immediately:
As per usual, I made sure to stay far away from from the initial enemy cloudkill, shooting down the enemy thief and fighter right away (thanks to true sight):
Now we only had to take down "love", who was able to reflect our missle attacks, so we went into melee combat and killed them just before their next spell would've hit us:
A quick rest upstairs, and onwards to level 2. Once again we summon our skeletons to help out with the first few greater doppelgangers, disarm a ton of traps and lose access to our summons once we teleport across the chasm. However, on the other side we activate our buffs for the doppelgangers at the bridge and are able to shoot down the only dangerous one, an Islanne doppelganger, right away:
Since this battle is over so quickly, we still have enough short duration buffs to take on the dwarven doom guards - also using a bunch of wand charges (frost and heavens) here. Since we still have a second round of buffs available, we move downstairs to level 3 and go to the western path, activating the temporary allies and buffing up again, clearing out the wyverns and the ice room as well, as it is basically free with the belt of the antipode, since, even with SCS, most animals aren't smart enough to switch targets. After that, with our second haste running out, we are exhausted, and our inventory is full. We've also rested upon arrival (because the journey was long enough that exhaustion would've become a problem very soon), so we're down to a camping supply count of one - I decide to travel all the way outside, go to an inn, sell our stuff (while I don't need the money, really, I will recharge a bunch of wands before going to fight Sarevok, so it can still be useful) and return, resting once again for exhaustion reasons. With 3 camping supplies still left, we should be totally fine.
All right, back to level 3. A PfU scroll is used for the middle path, and Delia carefully scouts ahead for the eastern maze. Now we clear the elemental rooms, buffing up before entering the slime room. We include absorption here for lightning immunity, so we can move on the chessboard if needed. Our wizard slayer can't drink this potion - the best we can do here is give her the helm of defense and boots of grounding for 70% resistance.
Once we enter the board, we throw 5 fireballs into the middle:
We shoot down the few enemies that have reached us and throw two more fireballs to finish the fight:
On to level 4. The first two wardstones are easy enough to get, after that we move to the southern area with the secret doors and call in our skeletons, which we haven't used yet in level 3:
Now we can rest again, for the last time down here. We enter the demon knight room, lay down traps, call in skeletons and buff up. We send our buffed skeletons in first, expecting a dispel, but the demon throws a fireball first. Delia (who has an elixir of fortitude going in case of a big fireball hit - everyone also has a fire resistance potion active) moves in a bit, but the demon is still not casting another spell, so we all approach to shoot a salvo with our ranged weapons - and get the kill pretty much right away:
Once more, we rest up, sell items and prepare for Ulgoth's Beard. My usual approach for the opening ambush is to drink 6 invisibility potions immediately and move northwards to summon and buff up. Our wizard slayer can't do that, but unlike the potions, the wizard spell invisibility lasts a full 24 hours, and the journey to Ulgoth's Beard from Baldur's Gate is 16 hours, so our solution is to cast the spell on Ninisima, while all the others drink. They also have to drop some of the gear they're carrying around immediately as they don't start with their strength buffs active, so they can't carry everything they usually do by now (though I have made sure that their actual equipment is stuff they can wear with their natural strength, in case of ambushes or dispels):
Now we move north, as planned, and call in skeletons and buffs. These are some of the most dangerous foes in the game, so go in with some potions (such as heroism, invulnerability/defense, frost giant strength). True sight prevents the dangerous assassins from getting in backstabs. The fight goes very well for us:
In the end, you might see the party surrounding our cleric here - the enemy wizard was able to cast a chaos spell before his death, and I ran Madhava (the target) away from the others so they wouldn't get hit (maybe I should've also had him drink a potion of clarity, but I decided against that). Anyway, after that I realized that there are innocents around, and in order to make sure he wouldn't kill any of them I simply surrounded him, so he could only hit party members.
Well, we buff up with our second round (though we do have some exhaustions now, but since we have a bunch of expensive potions going I decided to move on without a rest at this point) and clear the cultists near their hideout, using our own chaos spell:
We were able to lure some of them out of the first floor of their house, into our waiting and buffed up party:
But the final few wouldn't come out, so I decided to send in two fighters with Madhava (for true sight):
Now, we took the time to rest. For Aec'Letec, we used cloud giant strength, heroism, even a potion of power, but most importantly potions of magic shielding (and mirrored eyes just for extra safety). Notably, once again, our wizard slayer can't use these methods and had no way to push her saving throws to safe levels against the death gaze, so I had to make sure she stayed away from the group and the demon at all times. There's also the enemy wizard to take care off: She loves to cast remove magic as her opening (at least she did so in previous versions I've played), but there is a short window before she goes hostile an activates her pre-buffs, so for our opening, we equip ranged weapons and hope that we can take her out with one salvo - and indeed, we can (otherwise I would've had to flee upstairs).
Now I make sure to move Ninisima away into a corner (she can still use her crossbow from there) and take down the cultists. We have magic shielding, so essentially Aec'Letec can't do anything too dangerous to us. It's a fairly easy battle thanks to our heavy investment in potions:
Now, we recharge our wands (2*frost, 2*fire, 2*paralyzation, 2*monster summoning, 2*magic missle, 1*of the heavens) and necklaces of missles (5 in total), bringing us down to around 40k gold, which is still enough to buy a bunch of stuff from the cleric in Korlasz's tomb, and we also have left a ton of valuable gems in our gem bag to sell once we lose all our cash in SoD (I've started collecting those since entering the Candlekeep crypts). The preparation is looking quite good - we only have to get past Sarevok.
After buffing up for the final battle of BG1 (with every type of useful potion we have access too), Delia and the skeletons went forward, with the mission of shooting the big guy with a dispelling arrow (they are banned from stores in my installation, so they are quite rare - I've found 29 throughout the entire game) - Semaj starts out invisible and, indeed, opens with PFMW:
Delia retreats, and Diarmid appears from the west, but attacking him would put us too close to Semaj and Angelo - we're trying to have our skeletons distract them for now. In the end, Tazok, who moves forward towards us is our target, and we send some skeletons after Diarmir instead. Tazok is shot down very quickly. Some more dispelling arrows get rid of Angelo's defenses, and we shoot him down as well before he can do much to hurt us (one remove magic, aimed at Delia, is the exception - Delia separates from the group in time, but she doesn't even get dispelled). However, Semaj, protected by his PFMW and various spell protections, is able to cast a few spells. Somehow, I convinced myself that the enchantment spell he was aiming at us was greater malison. However, it turned out to be chaos instead - we had already been hit by malison, and I somehow failed to notice it during the entire battle, only seeing it now on the screenshots - and chaos affected Madhava, and, worst of all, Madalena herself - I just didn't see the spell in time, otherwise I could've countered it with a potion of clarity or magic shielding:
The skeletons are forcing Diarmid into melee mode - he's really no threat at this point. Semaj is able to cast another chaos, this time on Delia, but she is still separated from the others and makes her saving throw, having the best ones in the group. Meanwhile, Ninisima is forced to melee Sarevok and a skeleton for now, because the confued Madalena is too close to those for comfort - they might switch targets to her if Ninisima runs away instead. In any case, Semaj's PFMW drops, so Delia shoots a dispelling arrow at him and we can finally start interruping his spells:
Semaj goes invisible via minor sequencer, and we take the time to shoot down Diarmid. Meanwhile, Madalena is finally running away, so Ninisima can kite a bit to avoid taking too much damage. Madhava, while confused, is still useful to us due to true sight, revealing Semaj again. We shoot down the wizard, and are only left with skeletons and Sarevok as our foes:
After the skeletons are taken down, chaos finally ends - Sarevok by himself stands no chance:
Not a very clean battle and badly done by myself for not protecting against chaos in time, but we got through it without a death.
We buy everything that seems useful from the flaming fist healer (being left with 10k gold after that) and are ready to start SoD.
Now that we're in SoD, our wands of fire and necklaces of missles take center stage:
After throwing fireballs at this first group of humanoids, we go downstairs and give Nechtan a PfU scroll + fire giant strength + heroism and speed, and he starts clearing out the undead. Once we make it to the shadows, we send in a single skeleton to draw out the four invisible enemies that are here on insane difficulty. The second group of mercenaries suffers death via fireballs as well, though PfU runs out and we need to use a second scroll (now we have 2 left, which should be enough for the repository of undeath, but not for the undead in Kanaglym) for the other group to the east.
After that, there's basically only Korlasz left - she herself is of course resistant to fire, but the same is not true for her followers:
With full buffs on our side, we're able to shoot her down without giving her a chance for any counterplay:
Thereafter follows a long inventory management session in Baldur's Gate. We do the various small sidequests and buy scrolls from Sorcerous Sundries again, and later on from Belegarm - important results here are breach for Madalena and stoneskin for Leda.
Now our inventory is sorted, and we're ready to take on the Coast Way Crossing/Forest.
We call in our skeletons and start clearing the main area, with Teleria being our first potential challenge, though with our buffs, both she and her golem die before being able to harm us:
After that, we make it to the bridge and throw five fireballs at the enemy group. Three foes survive, but they're near death and quickly taken down:
Since we do have it now, I tend to add chaotic commands on Madalena to our buffs - confusion effects are not that rare, after all. It also helps against the vampire in the Coast Way Forest, our next target, though he mostly targets the NPCs. On our way back, we run into the ambush site, where we have to fight without skeletons or fireballs for once - still, with full buffs we can take on most foes in direct combat by now, even if we take some damage as a result:
As we make our way to the Repository of Undeath, we get in some summoned monsters via wand charges to save on fireball charges, which we would usually use down here as well:
There's no particular reason for this - I pretty much never run out of charges until we make it to the third camp, where we cheaply recharge wands and necklaces via the genie merchant. It's just for the sake of variety.
The actual repository is done with my last two protection from undead scrolls and our kensai mostly by himself:
Skeletons are called in to help with the bronze sentinel and to draw out invisible opponents. Aside from that, the party really only has to fight once we face the Coldhearth lich, though The Secret Revealed removing his buffs kind of trivializes that battle:
We're done with everything around here, so we move on to the Troll Claw Woods.
Exploring the Troll Claw woods starts out pretty well - the northern half of the map is cleared out (we use our buffs for the troll cave) and we move to the south, using fireballs for the dangerous ogre group:
However, an orc group to the southeast brings us our first bit of trouble in SoD: While most of them are destroyed by our fireballs, a few turn out to be out of the explosive radius, including an orc shaman - he hits Nechtan with Call Lightning:
While we quickly kill the shaman, call lightning keeps triggering, faster than we can drink healing potions. For some reason, in the moment I completely forgot about the existence of potions of absorption or at least swapping over some boots of grounding, and so the lightning hits eventually ended up killing our kensai after a few rounds:
I decided to pay for raise dead instead of taking the time to learn the spell, rest, cast it and rest again after changing the spellbook again - we have enough money for everything we might need.
After all that, we move to the Forest of Wyrms. For the spider caves, we make sure to use potions of freedom and some summoned monsters:
The party rests just before reaching the dravon cave. We add green protection from poison scrolls to our buffs, and prepare five firebreath potions for a direct assault:
As you can see, the second tick of the potions did the job. Clearing out the wyverns after that was easy enough:
With our buffs still going, we fight our way through the bugbear caves to Ziatar - it's important that we still have our green scrolls going before challenging this foe. The cultist mages are easy enough to take down, their defenses are still lacking, and Ziatar dies after disrupting her own sanctuary spell:
Now we call in our skeletons, sending one towards the neothelid to tank the domination spell. Luckily, the beast appears very quickly at the surface, and we shoot it down immediately.
Akanna, the blind priestess, is the last target we plan to hit before going for a second rest (the SCS resting restrictions don't seem to apply to SoD, by the way). Luckily, I knew from my last visit here that the new SCS elemental abilites get applied to her aerial servants, so we have to make sure to stay far away from their whirlwinds, which deal tons of damage and can stun on hit. Some running and kiting, and we get the job done:
Now we go for a rest (which works out on the second attempt). We prepare some traps for Darkshelin's group to the south, throw in five fireballs and take out the remaining foes (the traps work out very well, taking down Darkshelin himself):
Now for the shadow aspect. Famously, on insane, this one uses the broken mislead backstab mechanic, making it extremely dangerous:
We're able to get rid of the first mislead before it gets in another hit (true sight helps here), though being fully blinded by the darkness spell doesn't help in our attempts to actually kill the shadow aspect. It ends up casting another mislead - true sight destroys it - and calls in four shadowed souls, which we take down. Wizard slayer spell failure apparently stops another spellcasting attempt, and soon the creature is near death and falls:
A dangerous fight for sure, but the fractal blade is very useful for our Kensai.
Now we move to Boaresky Bridge, where we first deal with the various sidequests. Once all of them are done, we start invading the enemy camp:
The first group is easily destroyed, even with minimal fireball use. The second one is traditionally a bit tougher, but we are very successful with throwing chaos and slow spells at them:
For the two named wizards here, we carefully get rid of their buffs with dispelling arrows before shooting them down:
Eventually, only a very confused Barghest is left:
A final arrow of dispelling to prevent the mage at the bridge from summoning any fire creatures:
And the battle is ours - we still have a bunch of these arrows left, and we can freely use the remaining ones for any upcoming wizard encounters. The party moves to the coalition camp, does the camp-only sidequests and is now ready for the next chapter. Updates might need to wait for a while, as I am busy with a few other things until next week, but maybe I'll find some time to play in spite of that.
Turns out I am still finding some time to play, so here we go: We start at Bloodbark Grove. Since we're overflowing on potions (our gold is essentially infinite at this point, so we can just randomly buy every useful potion that comes up), we randomly add stuff like clarity, just to avoid any potential charm spells by the fledgling vampire in the basement:
We move on to Dead Man's Pass. The outside area ist mostly cleared out with the help of either skeletons or fireballs, and we buff up for the basement full of shadows - some level drain effects hit us, so we have to retreat to the camp after our victory:
After that we return for the spider cave, using potions of freedom and a scroll to cast freedom of movement on Ninisima:
On to the outside of the Underground River. We clear the western part of the map, call in skeletons and buff up and deal with the crusaders in the center:
With Caelar's Seal in our posession, we do the various sidequests at the Dragonspear courtyard before returning to the river. The northern part went quite well - we quietly assassinated the mage, used fireballs for the shadow cave and protection from acid for the wyrmlings - though in the south, we got into some trouble facing the druid. Madhava got webbed by a gargantuan spider while being attacked by shambling mounds. The only way to save him at this point would propably have been to immediately cast invisibilty on him, but I thought about that only when he was already near death, so Madalena wasn't quick enough:
With the druid and spiders dead, we decided to run away and kite the remaining enemies, which was easy enough to do - I forgot that I had bought a bunch of raise dead scrolls earlier, so I went back to camp to raise the cleric. Back to the river, and into Kanaglym. Fireballs for the undead and centered upon the wizards, a few ranged attacks after that:
Now, we move to the castle basement. Things got a bit messy here, as they often do on insane settings with all the crusaders constantly teleporting in. Usually I just poison both supplies at the same time and immediately run away, which is the safest play. This time I got ambitious (because I had so many extra potions ready and going) and decided to try and do everything, including looting Hephernaan's room.
Everything started out just fine, after clearing out the initial crusader group. However, I forgot that attacking the second group of crusaders in the other room would trigger the Hephernaan encounter right away, so I was immediately put under pressure, though I was able to get a quick takedown on one of Hephernaan's named wizard friends:
However, things got much worse when two more wizards approached and Hephernaan started casting his spells. What I didn't do was thoroughly check Hephernaan's pre-buffs, so I didn't realize that he had Physical Mirror up. This resulted in Delia trying to shoot down his defenses with a dispelling arrow, but hitting herself instead, removing all of her buffs. At the same time, Madalena got breached, losing her stoneskins. Even worse, Madhava was hit by a stun effect (potions of clarity protected us from most other things), maybe via a wand of paralyzation? Not quite sure:
We quickly shot down the wizard to the north and let Delia use another oil of speed. However, with so many crusaders spawning in and attacking, we found no way to save Madhava:
So we picked up his gear and decided to flee. One party member each was sent to the food and water supply after distracting the crusaders with a wand of monster summoning charge. This worked surprisingly well - all this went down very quickly, and the crusaders just got rid of the monsters when we were already basically out:
We freed the ogres, placed the explosive barrel, used invisibility 10' radius, assassinating the wizard and cleric trying to reveal us to the east and using potions of invisibility to disappear again. Once again I forgot about my raise dead scrolls, and we went back to camp for a resurrection. Now we're ready for the camp attack.
Starting: In BG1EE.
Mods: Full SCS 35.21.
Difficulty: Insane with no difficulty-dependent damage increase; maximum HP on level-up.
Protagonist: Necromancer the Necromancer.
Special rules: Random party run, as dictated by the spoiler.
1. Generate six characters entirely at random, one of which must be a Necromancer.
2. I may optionally regenerate a single character; if I do, I must use the newly generated character in place of the old one.
3. Level-up results are not random, but I will strive to largely abide by initial proficiencies as much as possible when doing so will not excessively handicap a character.
Our party:
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Class: Necromancer
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Stats:
STR 9 DEX 11 CON 12 INT 17 WIS 16 CHA 13
Proficiencies:
Sling *
Starting spells:
Armor, Find Familiar, Larloch's Minor Drain
Gender: Female
Race: Half-Elf
Class: Fighter / Druid
Alignment: True Neutral
Stats:
STR 13 DEX 9 CON 15 INT 12 WIS 12 CHA 15
Proficiencies:
Sling ** Dagger * Quarterstaff *
Gender: Male
Race: Elf
Class: Fighter / Mage
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Stats:
STR 9 DEX 13 CON 12 INT 11 WIS 17 CHA 16
Proficiencies:
Crossbow * Sword and Shield Style * Two-Handed Weapon Style * Bastard Sword *
Starting spells:
Expeditious Retreat, Find Familiar
Gender: Male
Race: Gnome
Class: Cleric / Illusionist
Alignment: True Neutral
Stats:
STR 15 DEX 16 CON 15 INT 13 WIS 15 CHA 10
Proficiencies:
Two-Weapon Style * Mace *
Starting spells:
Charm Person, Shocking Grasp, Spook
Gender: Female
Race: Elf
Class: Fighter / Mage / Thief
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Stats:
STR 11 DEX 18 CON 13 INT 13 WIS 7 CHA 14
Proficiencies:
Sling * Longbow * War Hammer * Flail / Morning Star *
Thieving skills:
Find Traps +10 Move Silently +5 Set Traps +5 Pick Pockets +5 Hide in Shadows +15
Starting spells:
Expeditious Retreat, Reflected Image
Gender: Female
Race: Half-Elf
Class: Cleric / Ranger
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Stats:
STR 14 DEX 15 CON 17 INT 7 WIS 14 CHA 13
Proficiencies:
Two-Weapon Style *** Mace * Club * Single-Weapon Style *
Racial enemy: Kobold
And you thought Jaheira had unimpressive stats.
So, there will be competition for scrolls. We'll also be massively starved for Potions of Genius, I imagine, to the point that we probably won't be able to hit 100% scribing success for every scribing session (at least not when scribing non-essential scrolls).
The upside is that every single character can protect their buffs, we have 4 (!) warriors, and will be able to shield the entire party from pretty much any type of damage... eventually.
We just have to get to the point where our massive number of spell slots can run roughshod over any enemy, so let's hop to it.
No-mercy Necromancer: A Random Run, Part 1
Next part found here
Two (half-)Clerics means plenty of Commands, simplifying the early game: We head north from the Friendly Arm Inn, helping Tenya, killing Zombies and ultimately clearing a whole lot of Ankhegs out, gaining us several crucial early levels.
The northern parts exhausted, we journey south. This time, Neera refrains from trying to kill us, and is relieved of her Gem Bag as way of thanks; we clear Beregost apart from Silke and head further south, then loop back around, dealing with Teyngan and Zargal, but leave Bassilus alone for the moment.
Fighter/Mage/Thief manages to pilfer Algernon's Cloak, and we take the first real risk in deciding to engage Silke: Our plentiful damage spells and Commands should give us excellent odds of winning, and win we do.
Flush with our victory, we haul our woefully weak party back towards Bassilus.
He fails his save against Silence, fails his save against Command, and then succumbs to the only use I've found for Darts of Stunning when no one has Dart proficiency: Pelt an unconscious enemy until they fail their save.
This party is actually surprisingly powerful. We went with Crossbow and Longbow specialization on Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief respectively, reasoning that it's all for nothing if we fall in BG1 due to hoarding our proficiencies for extreme late game use, and it's really paying off.
Back to Nashkel, and we knock off Greywolf easy enough. The Mines are mostly uneventful, except for a bit of my stubbornness causing issues.
We haven't visited High Hedge yet, since I want to kill the Flesh Golems for experience, and we still lack enough magical ammunition (that's why we went to the Mines, for the plentiful Arrows of Fire).
This means no one has scribed Identify yet, and since we're damnably cheap, I haven't identified anything in stores (and steadfastly won't use unidentified items)... long story short, we have no Wand of Fire, nor do we know the Sleep spell.
So, we try to deal with the Chieftain, his Shaman and their minions using essentially brute force.
Yeah, a requirement for using brute force is that you're actually capable of applying some force.
Fighter/Mage took a melee swipe, got poisoned and just dropped straight away.
Necromancer ate a Minor Lightning bolt, which could've easily killed him (but didn't).
Fortunately the Shaman failed its save against Hold Person, else this run might've been cut dreadfully short...
Anyway, we proceed to Mulahey where we loot his chest under Sanctuary, and call it a day.
Into the western wilds next, where I find an unexpected use for Charm Animal (Cleric/Ranger, remember?).
I'll use this trick from time to time when I notice some form of bear around us; they hit hard and fast, and especially this early they're quite helpful as damage sponges.
We basically make a clean sweep of all the areas here, and eventually manage to scribe an Identify scroll dropped by I think a Gnoll, so we can at long last start using magical equipment.
Beyond Fighter/Druid dying once to Delgod (one of Sendai's archer goons who is surprisingly tough in melee), nothing untoward occurs.
There's no really obvious candidate for the Charisma tome, so Fighter / Mage goes from 16 to 17 CHA. Eh.
Alright, we've amassed enough magical ammunition to take out the Flesh Golems at High Hedge, so do just that.
By now the experience is neglible.. but we also swing by the Wolf Pack at Beregost Temple. I've found that you can, if you want, literally take these guys out at level 1 if you have the Wand of Fire: Lead with a Fireball to thin out the ranks, retreat immediately, then use Scorcher once or twice. Works every time.
Now that we've got some levels, we clear a lot of lower-level areas, then set out for the Basilisks. Mutamin fails his save against Korax's Paralyzing Touch, and that's about it.
Since our lack of real spellworks is becoming an issue, we buy a bunch of scrolls at High Hedge and scribe away.
Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief only get to go up to about 95% scribing success chance in an effort to conserve potions, but in the end we only fail a couple of non-essential scrolls. Good, that expanded our capabilities by quite a bit.
I'd like to boost Find Traps a bit more before heading to Durlag's, so we'll advance the plot. Mulahey stands no chance whatsoever at this point, and the same can be said for Nimbul (though he takes out a charmed Oublek before succumbing, netting us an extra 3000 gold).
Tranzig gives us the biggest scare we've had since the ill-fated encounter with the Kobolds, when he disables 2/3 of the party, leaving Necromancer and Fighter/Mage/Thief to seal the deal. Sleep indeed.
En route to Larswood, we get the bearded ambush: Command on Halacan and whatever you want on the Cleric (we went with Spook), and the battle's over before it started.
Osmadi and Corsone both succumb to Silence, and we prepare to take on the Bandit Camp.
Same tactic as always: Huddle in the southeast corner and create a massive kill zone of Web, Entangle, Spike Growth and Fireballs.
The only potential danger here is Venkt, but once he goes down, so does the hope of victory for the Bandits.
We're at a decent level now, so decide to clear the western seaboard before entering the Cloakwood.
Droth is still completely undone by Command, and we have a handful of Skeleton Warriors so can safely engage the three Sirenes to the south.
A combination of Silence and Skeleton Warriors also spell the doom of Sil in the Lighthouse area, and Fighter/Mage/Thief easily dispatches the local Flesh Golems at range.
I wound up giving the CON tome to Fighter / Druid, preferring two reasonably sturdy frontliners to one very sturdy and one slightly dainty... we'll see if I regret it.
On our way back, we finally get the Amazon ambush: Quickly melee the two Thieves (who we reveal with Detect Invisibility), and use our multitude of fast-casting arcane damage spells to interrupt the Clerics, and we're golden.
More experience is needed! Off to Durlag's, since we've got enough Find Traps to at least handle the upper levels.
Ghasts aren't much of an issue by now, nor are the Basilisks outside.
Cleric/Illusionist will be getting all three WIS tomes, but the boost is quite marginal regardless, since all our divine casters range from very poor to middling WIS.
We haven't enough Skeleton Warriors to destroy the Ghost in complete safety, so try a different approach: The Ghost does not approve of our rudeness, and shows Necromancer the error of his ways.
I think my intent was to bomb the Ghost with wands, but unfortunately, he seems immune to Fire, Cold and Electricity all...
we eventually ganged up on him as he was long since out of big spells, but still, that was an unnecessary risk.
With that, we conclude our Durlag's meanderings for now, and instead go after Narcillicus... who does not use any spell protections, and so is duly fried by Fighter/Druid.
OK, OK, enough's enough: Move to Cloakwood already.
Seniyaad and his fellow druids are helpless before Silence, Centeol and her attendant Spiders suffer the full brunt of several Wands of Fire with Potions of Freedom on the frontliners, and we even engage Amarande at point-blank range.
He doesn't seem to be an Avenger in my installation, but everyone had Protection from Fire up just in case he would turn Salamander; a particularly vicious crit from Cleric/Ranger ends the Archdruid.
Alright, time for I would say the worst fight, purely because I never manage to do it properly: Drasus and friends.
This go around was no different.
Necromancer got hit by a Lightning Bolt, but I saw it coming and had him equip Talos's Gift; that Lightning Bolt promptly rebounded and hit Rezdan for 48 (!) damage, which amazingly wasn't enough to kill him.
It took a Call Lightning dealing another 35 damage to drop Rezdan; by now we had managed to deal with both Drasus and Genthore, with just Kysus left running around.
Kysus wasn't going down without a fight, so summoned two Phase Spiders... which the by now unfortunately confused Necromancer charged into melee against. We scrambled desperately to kill the Spiders before they turned around and put Necromancer out of his misery, and somehow pulled it off (still not sure how).
Kysus kept causing trouble, Holding Cleric/Ranger with a Chromatic Orb, then summoning a Lesser Fire Elemental (!) on top of her.
With our absolute last Ice Lance and Magic Missile, we were somehow able to take down both Kysus and his Elemental without loosing anyone. Phew.
Into the depths, I suppose. Hareishan doesn't buff with MGoI and so is simply Fireballed into oblivion.
Deeper down, I actually find a use for Mold Touch: It interrupts Natasha after we wait out her buffs. Eh. Unimpressive damage, but sure, I'll take it.
As for Dave, he as per his usual modus operandi couldn't care less about the major engagement occurring in his anteroom, and leaves us to dismantle his Battle Horrors and five waves of Guards uninterrupted.
We try to bait out his spells with Skeleton Warriors, but he spots us, and swiftly and decisively takes out Fighter/Mage/Thief with his Melf's Minute Meteors. Didn't even need an offensive spell.
Most of the party really is immensely fragile, and it shows in situations where we can't entice enemies to attack our two frontliners.
We head back out of the forest and raise Fighter/Mage/Thief, return to flood (after looting!) the Mines, and that's it: Baldur's Gate is now available.
Before entering the city, we decide to clean up some loose ends, among them Ulcaster's. Unfortunately, a Dread Wolf spots us as we're moving into position, and we end up having to fight with no summons or buffs up.
Looks pretty hairy, right? Frontliners quaffed Potions of Freedom though, so they can't be held, Necromancer goes invisible for safety, and though it takes a while, we grind through the enemy and make it out in one piece (only the Wolf of Ulcaster is truly dangerous here).
Fighter/Druid isn't too happy by the end, though.
And so we can finally get to work on the big city.
The immediately available DEX tome goes to Cleric / Ranger: True, she will already have 18+ DEX for most major fights due to DUHM, but that can be dispelled, and it's not like she has the spell slots to keep DUHM up for EVERY fight.
I'd do a detailed exposition of our city-wide adventures, but really, we're high enough level by now that nothing can mount effective resistance; not even Sunin can do much, and that's without us having scribed Spell Thrust yet.
We just pumped everyone's Fire/Cold/Lightning resistance up as much as possible (two Clerics, one Druid, so it's doable even this early), and that effectively restricted Sunin to Enchantment spells.. which you can counter by splitting up.
And that's it for the city, barring the Iron Throne fight; the INT tome went to Fighter/Mage.
With INT scores this crappy, I won't be risking much scribing when not under Potions of Genius / Mind Focusing, and with Fighter / Mage bumped to 12 INT, at least now he only needs three Potions of Genius to hit 24 INT. Heh. Only three.
There aren't many areas left, but we've avoided the Red Wizards until now. I find a better way to approach this: Move in from the east, not the south. Denak has too good defenses to kill quickly, so we go after his cronies first.
Two of them don't even put up MGoI and so drop to a few Skull Traps straight away; the third gets shot down by Mage Slayers (Acid Arrows/Bolts of Lightning), and Denak can't hold us off on his own.
Now it's time for the second worst fight: The Dwarven Warders of Durlag's. The rest of the level is no problem to clear, but these guys certainly are.
For safety, the plan was for Necromancer to stay invisible until there's only Pride left, but no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. I am a fraction of a second too late in ordering Cleric/Ranger to activate her Greenstone Amulet, and as a result, our biggest bruiser is Dire Charmed by Love.
Now Fighter/Druid has to tank Love, Avarice and Fear, since every summon is needed to hold Pride at bay.
Somehow she survives long enough for us to focus down Avarice and Fear both; Necromancer had no choice but to come out of hiding to lend every single Magic Missile and Ice Lance he had available.
By now, our Skeletons are pulverized, so we resort to Wands of Monster Summoning to stave off Pride, while both Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief join the melee against Love (who periodically and automatically renews Physical Mirror).
Finally, Cleric/Ranger snaps out of her stupor, just as we pummel Love into the ground.
Pride isn't done, however. We can barely hit him, and he chews through our summons like nobody's business.
After three attempts, Cleric/Illusionist lands a Blind, and we can bring this unfortunate fight to a close.
That was harsh, but it usually is. The remainder of the tower actually goes very smoothly: We use Skeleton Warriors to help with the Greater Ghouls both in the Maze and the acid area, and beyond taking some damage in the chessboard fight (we didn't clear out all enemies in the initial Fireball barrage and I wanted the experience so left the King alive for last), we're never in any danger.
As is customary, we bug out just prior to facing the Demon Knight, and that's as far as we'll be going with Durlag's.
It's been a long trek, but we're nearing the end: Ice Island is important though, as I'd like Stoneskin on Necromancer as insurance for the last few big fights.
There are two major threats here: Andris and Tellan. The moment he takes a bit of damage, Andris teleports out and leaves his cronies to their doom. Once he's recuperated a bit, he'll always teleport back in on top of the protagonist, and seemingly always lead with Remove Magic, even when there's literally no buffs running.
He manages to get a Lesser Air Elemental up and running, but that's it for Andris' not-so-triumphant return.
I also found a fun new way to wreck Garan (Ankheg guy): Cleric/Ranger charmed the Polar Bear to the south, and it completely destroyed him. Chewed through his Stoneskins in no time flat, he never even got a spell off.
As said, normally Tellan is a big concern.. but it seems he's an Enchanter in my current installation.
And he spent his L6 slots on PfMW and True Sight (!). Basically, he's helpless against Skeleton Warriors, and Dezkiel doesn't fare much better. Ice Island, cleared.
I would like the Cloudkill scroll too... so it's Firewine next.
Of course, even enormous amounts of Kobold Commandos aren't a threat anymore, so we easily move through here; the Ogre Mage is tremendously weak (seems to be Mage level 5? Like I guess all of them), and can't really do anything.
Lendarn has no answer to Skeleton Warriors, and that's about it. We clear a few random spawns around Gullykin for a tiny bit of experience, which pushes Cleric/Ranger onto her (and the party's at large) final BG1 level.
There's one last thing to do around here: Kahrk.
Normally he's a real problem even if you wait out his buffs (his Improved Haste never seems to expire for me), but we luck out: A Bombardier Beetle moves in close, and Kahrk fails his save! The power of IWDEE spells...
This is a very long update, so I'll cut off here for now, and probably, if all goes well, include some early SoA stuff in the next one.
All that remains is clearing the top of the Iron Throne, then Candlekeep and the very end of the game: We won't bother with Balduran's Island.
Abysmal stats aside, the classes we've got to work with are very potent. There's four warrior-types, four arcanists, three priests.
If we can survive early BG2, this party has excellent chances... we just need to not become complacent, since no one but the frontliners (and barely even they) have the hitpoints to survive a miscalculation.
For now, we're at the level cap, and soon the XP cap; see spoilers for the party's final BG1 proficiencies.
I've tried to be a bit thematic/keeping with the random L1 proficiency picks; frontliners will be dualwielding, but Fighter/Mage will be rocking Crossbows and Quarterstaves, and Fighter/Mage/Thief will be using Longbows/Slings, with a single Long Sword for backstabbing.
Necromancer
L9 Human Necromancer, 36 HP
Sling * Quarterstaff *
Fighter/Druid
L7/L8 Fighter/Druid, 82 HP
Dagger ** Quarterstaff * Sling ** Two-Weapon Style *
Fighter/Mage
L7/L7 Fighter/Mage, 49 HP
Bastard Sword * Quarterstaff * Crossbow ** Two-Handed Weapon Style * Sword and Shield Style *
Cleric/Illusionist
L7/L7 Cleric/Illusionist, 49 HP
Mace * Sling * Two-Weapon Style *
Fighter/Mage/Thief
L6/L6/L7 Fighter/Mage/Thief, 38 HP
Long Sword * War Hammer * Flail/Morning Star * Longbow ** Sling *
OL 85 FT 90 PP 35 MS 30 HiS 40 DI 0 ST 25
Cleric/Ranger
L7/L7 Cleric/Ranger, 84 HP
Club * Flail/Morning Star * Mace ** Single-Weapon Style * Two-Weapon Style ***
On the INT potions ... yes, they're a pretty serious bottleneck in BG1. They get much more common in BG2, though, and even SoD has a decent supply. Thankfully, only one of your characters suffers the -15% penalty for having a kit; the two elf multiclasses are TRUECLASS and actually get the listed chance (+1%, because off-by-one bugs are a thing).
The necromancer can reach 100% scribing at INT 24 (+7, a potion of genius and a potion of mind focusing). Anything less, and he's taking at least 15% failure chance on non-necromancy spells.
The fighter/mage can reach 100% scribing at INT 23 (+12, which is only possible by stacking multiple instances of the same potion). But 19 INT is a 96% success chance and no cap on total spells, so two potions is good enough for routine scribing. Apply the INT tome, and that can be one potion of each type.
The fighter/mage/thief can reach 100% scribing at INT 23 (+10). Still three potions. But two potions gets you to 19-21 INT, which is good enough for anything but super-rare scrolls.
So, based on those breakpoints, I'd definitely give the INT tome to the INT 11 fighter/mage. That stat distribution ... wow. Also, hold off on filling out the higher-level spells in those multiclass spellbooks - the fighter/mage doesn't need 5th level spells in the first campaign, and the triple-class doesn't need 4th level spells.
The camp attack is fairly routine - we recharge our necklaces/wands one last time and just fireball everything, drinking potions and casting buffs inbetween the battles - there's a backstab on Ninisima as we face the final group, but it's not particularily dangerous, and our allied coalition spies return the favor on the remaining opponents:
For the attack on Dragonspear Castle, we pull out our arrows of detonation - Delia drinks an oil of speed and just goes to town with them. We don't really have the time to active all of our buffs, but we're constantly drinking potions to buff our stats. Everything goes well, though Nechtan gets hit by a chaos effect - luckily he doesn't walk to the western traps or tries to kill a party member - and friendly fire doesn't turn soldiers hostile during this battle:
Eventually our detonation arrows clear the way to the gate - the others shoot necklace/wand charges from time to time or just attack at range:
Next, we double-bomb Ashatiel's party and fight our way to the west, making sure to stay away from the southern path, which is heavily trapped. There's one more trap to disarm before dealing with the final group of named enemies, and Delia is able to go for it without being noticed:
We activate true sight and move in, throwing more fireballs in the process. Soon, victory is ours, and we are able to enter the castle after a quick rest.
Inside Avernus, we buff up again, making sure to include whatever extra potions we have flying around in our bags (which is a ton of them). Buffed up with all of that, it's fairly easy to fight our way towards Belhifet. Here, we prepare with the full array of immunities against everything that the enemies in this battle can even use, so only physical damage, or the initial dispel (for which we have Madalena with SI:A as the one to absorb it), can hurt us. We have our +3 ammo at the ready. Madalena catches the dispel magic, just as planned, and the others move in:
Nechtan is using his two +3 short swords, the others have acceptable ranged options. We go directly after Big B, since the devil groups he calls in on insane are pretty big, so we just want to take him out asap. Madhava has to quickly cast remove fear to save Ninisima - I was using potions of clarity for anti-fear protection and forgot that, as a wizard slayer, she obviously didn't have one of those active as she can't use them:
Caelar tanks for us for a while, even the other demons focus their attention on the chief crusader. Meanwhile, Belhifet is soon near death:
And here we go, Leda gets the final hit in - the devils disappear, only Hephernaan remains, and he's easily shot down:
We play through the outro and make sure to get the import save just right, mostly by resting with a good spellbook for the opening SoA dungeon - the item imports will barely matter, most of them just aren't very good for this party.
A quick introduction to SoA with the opening dungeon and updated screenshots of our unbuffed party members, so you can see their stats post-BG1/SoD, including proficiencies:
Madalena, the Conjurer and Bhaalspawn:
Delia, the Fighter/Thief:
Nechtan, the Kensai:
Madhava, the Priest of Helm:
Leda, the F/M/T:
Ninisina, the Wizard Slayer:
The initial ogre mage is already a potential threat, but since his prebuffs are lacking MSD, breach and true sight do the job:
We have our summoned skeletons at the ready to take some of the heat from our weak frontliners, also using fireballs and magic missles to soften up groups of enemies. The first duergar mage has strong spell protections but weak physical ones, and while we go for the spell thrust, he dies before we can even use a follow-up spell:
Our plan is to use the one rest we get with SCS upon reaching the second level, so we use most of our first round of buffs against the big group of mephits:
MMMs allow us to get the kill against the vampire on level 2:
True sight, a fireball and some ranged hits are enough to take down the second duergar mage:
And with that, we can use all of our remaining buffs and summons to easily take down the shadow thieves and move to the exit. For now, we are absolutely reliant on our strength and cat's grace spells, but the party will be a lot stronger once we get some good gear again. We just need to make sure not to tackle any challenges that are out of proportion with our relatively low power level early on, and since I've been playing without SCS for a while, I hope I don't underestimate any of the potential encounters.
We start our Athkatla journey with all of the non-stronghold quests and encounters, beginning at the circus tent - true sight and breach against Kalah do the job:
Notably, he is able to cast confusion just before his death, and Nechtan is affected. If he attacks a random passerby, this could ruin our reputation and even turn Waukeen's Promenade hostile. We try to surround him so he's forced to attack party members instead of civilians - while he breaks out from our blocking attempt, he luckily doesn't end up attacking anymore before the confusion effect runs out.
Next, we move to the Copper Coronet, where we free Hendak and venture into the sewers - the kobold shaman interestingly spawns on the wrong side of the wall, or so it seems:
We use our buffs to deal with the slavers. The two wizards have pretty weak prebuffs, much to my relief:
After that, we complete the two government district encounters and buy a magic license. Moving back to the promenade, we call in summons and buff up again for Mencar - both spellcasters die immediately, so this battle is fairly easy to win:
We make sure to acquire Azuredge, which makes it much easier to clear out the graveyard - even the crypt king dies instantly it, despite being immune to missle damage:
Fireball and breach help us deal with Pai'Na:
And on our way to the docks, we get the Suna Seni ambush - however, we're travelling under invisibility 10' radius whenever possible, so we just get to walk to the northern part of the area and buff up / summon allies in peace, turning this into a one-sided battle:
For the wizard hideout there, the female apprentice is immediately destroyed, and Prebek, who gets to activate his buffs, is hit by wizard slayer spell failure through his stoneskins:
However, we soon suffer our first setback, in the pirate hideout: The wizard there is a lot more powerful than I imagined, being high level enough to dispel most of our party (luckily not Madalena), which was unexpected. A "beltyn's burning blood" spell deals pretty good damage to us, with Leda getting through some of the duration with a healing potion, but it just won't stop, and she goes into berserk mode (part of the spell on a failed save), meaning she can't drink healing potions anymore. Sadly, despite us having won the battle already, she ends up dying:
At least Madhava can quickly resurrect her. On our way out of the docks, the second ambush awaits:
After the harper quest, we move to the bridge district, where we deal with the skinner murders:
True sight helps a lot here. However, we suffer another setback against the bridge district party in the house - this if the first wizard we face who has a sequencer... triple flame arrow. Luckily, I keep fire resistance active on Madalena, so she wasn't the target. However, Delia instantly died, though we did win the battle fairly convincingly after that:
Another resurrection by Madhava, and after resting again and clearing out the remainder of the bridge district (minus liches and the like, of course) we move to the temple, getting into another ambush - this time, however, the party wasn't invisible, so we do have a serious battle on our hands. Chaos helps us in getting rid of some threats, and as we take down the enemy spellcasters, Madalena does get hit with another burning blood spell - we actually use that one to our advantage by hitting the orogs, kiting them around in the north:
We end up victorious and explore the temple district. I also like to loot the lower level of the Guarded Compound at this point, but this one ended up being very weird in this run. First of all, only the nishruu and efreeti spawned, none of the other usual monsters. The efreeti was surprisingly dangerous and his flamestrike was able to oneshot a barely injured Leda - her low hp really are a bit of a problem:
I kind of forgot how vicious these types of enemies get with SCS. Once again, Madhava goes for another resurrection. This time I didn't have fire resistance active on Madalena, so she could've been the target as well. Going forward, I was more careful about that and eventually started to also memorize minor spell deflection to block other direct damage spells as well (such as acid, electricity or cold-based sequencers). Considering that all three deaths we had in SoA so far have been due to fire damage, I ended up learning a second instance of fire protection on Leda herself to protect her low hp score soon after that as well.
Well, we continue with our temple quests - the fallen paladins are destroyed, Neb easily dies to true sight:
After the Lathander quest, down in the sewers, Gaius gets backstabbed:
The party moves in to clean up the other enemies:
We move south and take down the rakshasa. Luckily, there are still some skeleton warriors left, because they kind of save us when two gauths and a beholder suddenly teleport on top of the party in the south-western sewers. I forgot that insane SCS will activate all of these high-level random encounters. The party gets away just in time:
We're now done in the city with non-stronghold quests that are doable at this level, so we move to WK for level 1 minus the statues. Another ambush on the way, entirely won by double chaos spells from our arcane spellcasters which end up hitting everyone:
Our skeleton summons get into a great position to block the entrance towards the dangerous vampiric wraiths, allowing us to safely take them down at range:
After clearing the level, I decide that maybe we can take on the first group of statues - no arcane spellcasters there, after all, and Foebane would be a nice upgrade for Leda. There are two warriors and two clerics to face here, and I did NOT remember how high level they were (in fact, the warriors are into HLA levels - the first one using war cry (countered by remove fear), the second one later on would use power attack). While I was running back towards the exit, unsure if I could take on two high level clerics, the power attack foe ended up stunning Leda, but her stoneskins held up for long enough to get the kill - as a result of our position, the two clerics moved into a cloud effect that sometimes damaged, but rarely interrupted them - I honestly got quite lucky that their spells never amounted to anything substantial right away - I resisted a full greater command, for example. Still, I had to outlast them while Leda was stunned:
The stun wore off, and I was able to leave just as a charm effect hit Nechtan:
Luckily, the others could just move down to the entrance and wait that one out (he didn't attack any NPCs). After all that we rested and returned with full buffs, now only having to face the two clerics, and ended up getting the victory:
I propably should not have done that encounter this early on, though the reward is certainly nice. The second round of statues will have to wait until much, much later.
Finally, some minor things - before starting with stronghold quests, I travelled to Trademeet, Umar Hills and Windspear Hills for sidequests/looting/exploration (without touching the respective main questlines). I got really lucky in Trademeet when one of the guards, killed by an attacking animal, dropped a spell shield scroll:
In the Windspear HIlls, where I mainly wanted to drop of the acorns, the cleric during the attack on Garren's home was surprisingly high level. When she was casting an enchantment spell on Madalana, I expected some kind of charm or confusion, separated her from the party and activated chaotic commands as a response - however, SCS has now turned symbol spells into enchantment spells as well to give the school some higher level options, and this turned out to be the unusual symbol: death - luckily, this one can't even affect Madalena with her current hit point count:
Still, I was quite shocked to see it during this encounter. Well, I decided to go a tiny step further in the hills as I had all my summon spells left and explored the first cave towards Firkraag, in an attempt to get the fire resistance ring (all the fire damage has been pretty deadly to the party, and item-based resistance that can be swapped around instantly seems very valuable). I was sending waves of summons towards the dangerous rukh transmuter. They mostly got cleared up pretty fast. In the end, Ninisina was able to guarantee our victory, because I had the feeling that the transmuter still had some high level spells left, so I didn't dare to go for a full assault right away - that is, until I snuck Ninisina close to him and got in a few hits (that was after 2 PFMWs had worn off) to apply spell failure:
We wisely turned around with our new ring as the reward, made it to Imnesvale, did the sidequests there and took Valygar on a walk to open the planar sphere. I was kind of getting the feeling we might encounter an ambush soon (it had been a while) and was travelling under invisibility again, which turned out to be a good choice - this is one of the more dangerous ambush parties in SCS, so I was happy to summon and buff up for them:
After we picked up our wizard slayer again, we were done with non-stronghold sidequests. There are propably liches (I think) in the temple ruins, otherwise those would be an obvious early choice. Instead, we're most likely going towards the druid grove first, where Delia, who is still walking around with a non-magical scimitar, might find a new weapon.
@Enuhal Good stuff! You're in a solid position now. And yes, those Spell Sequencers are nasty: I always (well, nowadays...) keep MSD up on protagonist in BG2 when dealing with enemy mages, precisely since it's a cheap insurance against nastiness such as this.
Also a good idea to keep PfFire up, again, it's just one third level slot, and potentially life-saving.
Comments
I suppose Madalena and Leda will be spending their L2 slots, at least for BG1, on Strength / Cat's Grace.
Strength of One isn't such a terrible choice for this setup either, though with a single Cleric with low Wisdom spell slots will already be tight...
On the upside, the fighters (yes, even the Wizard Slayer) will be fairly potent with BG2 equipment. And your protagonist is the best (in my mind) Mage kit. Looking forward to it!
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
The early game (which I'm still in) has so far been very eventful, as expected - even without SCS there would've been many challenges with this party, but the improved targeting especially of ranged opponents certainly doesn't help. With every run-in with those, there is a chance of death - my first encounter with two lowly bandits resulted in an immediate one-hit kill on one of my characters (btw, what's going on with level 1 protection here?):
We're still incredibly vulnerable, though the additional proficiencies and items will help. Now I will need to decide at which point I dish out the gold for potions of genius and a few spellscrolls for Madalena. Getting the strength spell would be incredibly valuable, but I certainly don't have the gold to learn all the early game spells I want right now, so I might delay for a bit... though learning protection from petrification is tempting as well as the basilisks would be a huge XP boost.
Still, good progress, and the upside to two kitted Fighters is that Grandmastery is undeniably very powerful.
With this setup, and in particular since you now have three wands available (Frost/Fire/Heavens), I'd consider going for Bassilus: The 5k gold will let you go ham on spell scrolls, and from what I've seen he rarely buffs with PfFire (and if he does, the Wand of Frost/Magic Missiles will still interrupt him).
As for proficiencies, my choice for Leda would be a melee build: She's essentially a discount Fighter/Mage with traps, and come BG2, belongs on the frontlines imo. She already has a point in Bastard Swords, which is an excellent choice post-Underdark and into ToB.
All the above are just unwarranted opinions, of course
So, in our current runs, since "no difficulty-based damage is" on, we won't get level 1 protection at all (and even if it was active, it would be somewhat flawed).
I've decided to take your advice regarding Bassilus (more on that in the next update); Regarding Leda, I agree that she will eventually be a frontliner, but for a triple class, it will take a long time to get the required spellslots, so I'm going to put a point in slings (she already has one via the randomization process; while bows would be better, triple classes don't get too many profiency points, so I'm working with what I'm already given) before going for more melee weapon skills. Delia will be forced into bows, I guess - not too happy with that, but she has our highest base dexterity and we need someone to use some of the powerful special arrows - as Ninisima is already locked into crossbows, she's the only remaining option. Note that, unlike in my last couple of runs, I currently intend to play SoD with this party if I don't die before that, so the investment in ranged weapon skills is worth quite a bit more.
Cria (female half-elf bard, Grond0); Brog (male half-orc cleric/thief, Gate70)
Previous updates
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1212127/#Comment_1212127
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1213450/#Comment_1213450
No Trio today, which provided an opportunity for a little bit more progress with this MP run.
We'd defeated Sarevok last time, so were in the opening dungeon for SoD. Progress through that was generally smooth, with skeletons helping out against the tougher enemies. Korlasz was hit by a couple of dispelling arrows and surrendered, but that didn't help her make a safe getaway.
At the Forest of Wyrms we fought our way through to the temple. The intention was to leave the dragon guarding the entrance asleep, but Cria made the mistake of singing before moving into the bugbear ambush and that woke Morentherene. We continued on anyway though and had no trouble with the first lot of encounters. However, trouble found us when we attempted to kill a group of guards to ensure they wouldn't intervene when we tackled Ziatar. Brog's armor is good stuff by leather standards, but proved insufficient for the quality of the archers we were faced with and he was rapidly reduced to dangerously low HPs. He tried to retreat, but one final fatal arrow was released just before a scorcher from Cria killed the attacker.
Bard 11, 80 HPs, 231 kills
Cleric 8 / thief 9, 66 HPs, 237 kills, 4 deaths
Previous part found here
With SCS at Insane, you get all your equipment taken in the Spellhold Maze, so we start by gathering some essentials: A single Quarterstaff is sufficient to deal with the Gibberlings guarding a weapons cache, and a rare occurrence of Web (which we haven't really used since BG1) makes it easy dealing with the Orogs and Minotaurs guarding the exit; weapons and armor secured.
Clearing the northern part of the first level goes alright; I try to play it fair by engaging the Ruhk with all its buffs up, but that Improved Haste is just too much to deal with when we're lacking proper gear, and so we have to wait it out.
The southern part, as always, turns into a nightmare: We get a Lich (apparently a Conjurer) in the library, and we simply have no dependable means with which to fight it. The whole thing thus becomes a running battle, complicated when additional enemies spawn behind us and to the west, joining the fight.
Having spent more resources than I'd like, it seems like the Lich is on its last legs, resorting to Melf's Acid Arrow against our summons... but then, it inexplicably disappears. I've no explanation for this, it just went poof, no Invisibility or anything; we swept the map and couldn't find it. This has happened to me before in the Underdark when we've taken too long fighting Alchra Diagott, and I sincerely hope it's not some SCS behavior, because it's immensely unfair (we get no experience, after all).
Anyway, we abscond with Dace's hand and proceed. Bodhi retreats in swift fashion, and we run into the second of many oddities this session: One of her attendant Vampires does not despawn, in fact, it attacks us.
Good thing we had an extra NPP handy. Still, I suppose the extra experience somewhat makes up for the Lich in absentia.
We exit the maze, bribe Lonk, and engage Irenicus. Barbarian is not so happy about spending time in an Incendiary Cloud, but we have sufficient spellworks to strip Irenicus of his defenses, and the ensuing Murderers pose no threat to us. Spellhold, cleared.
We opt to go with Saemon, pick up a few choice scrolls in Brynnlaw before departing, and finally, Cleric/Illusionist manages to scribe Breach. Good!
The Githyanki ambush is, as always, one of the most dangerous encounters in the entire game: This could really do with a slight rebalancing in SCS. You can't even prepare a simple Contingency on enemy sighted, since you have to fight the (by now completely pointless...) pirate ship guards just before. Hmph.
I am very much not fond of ambushes where you're forced to start completely unbuffed against a fully buffed opponent; yet, we survive, and are bundled off to Fish City.
Here, we sell off a large amount of spoils, chiefly gems which we've been hoarding throughout the game.
With a good deal of gold, we set off to deal with rebels and loyalists alike. Chaotic Commands (neutralizing the stun bolts) means Sauhagin aren't much of a threat; we side with the Prince, and easily dispose of the King. The Underdark awaits.
I really like the Underdark prior to Ust Natha: You can take your time to explore and deal with the quite large, quite rich in both experience and interesting items areas down here.
Here's oddity number three: The Myconid King sprints off to the east (?) immediately upon us entering the area, and somehow he triggers the Drow War Party teleporting onto the bridge. We later found him roaming the Swirfneblin village.
Fully buffed and hasted Skeleton Warriors, along with the party, make short work of the Drow guarding the contraption with lost souls.
We do the easy ones (free the Swirfneblin and the human Thief, deal with Madman Aganalo and Ritti), but leave the Drow Wizard and the Lich for the moment. Instead, we head north and engage the Balor: It's quite nasty even when we're fully buffed and prepared, but we prevail absent deaths.
A rest later, we do return south to tackle Alchra Diagott. There's ample room here, so we can distract the Lich with summons, and swiftly dispatch him: His summoned Dark Planetar is a major pain since we don't dare engage it in melee, but eventually it kills off our summons while we retreat out of line-of-sight, and is then content to just sit in place until unsummoned.
Raevilin Strathi goes down much easier, of course: All lost souls dealt with.
Next, we help out Vithal. The various Elementals are a nuisance, but at the end of the day are just melee brutes, and so can be overcome. We do not press Vithal overly much for an extra reward, but as he is teleporting away, Cleric/Thief surreptiously helps herself to some (in fact, all) of his possessions, aided by several Potions of Master Thievery. To my delight, Necromancer successfully scribes all scrolls: Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, Incendiary Cloud, Wail of the Banshee, Time Stop. Good stuff.
We also took the time here to deal with the Drow War Party on the bridge (they're quite weak), as well as the Kuo-Toans to the southeast. Time for the three major lairs.
The Kuo-Toans are by far the weakest: We just rush at them with some basic buffs (Chaotic Commands to negate the stun bolts, just like with Sauhagin), and they don't last long, including the Prince.
The Demon Knights are quite a bit tougher, but while they have great offensive abilities, their defense leaves something to be desired: Barbarian takes a severe beating, but everyone survives, and Fighter/Cleric can finally stop relying on the Strength spell to remain mobile or even be able to wear his armor.
Alright, so it's about time for the first serious scrap this update: The Drow guarding the exit.
Now, you can leave them to Adalon to deal with as she teleports you in. I prefer not too, since a) you get no experience, and b) she doesn't actually instantly kill them: There's ample time for them to hurt/horribly slaughter party members while Adalon is doing her thing.
Let's not leave things to chance.
Perhaps Adalon wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.
There's just too many spell effects, too many Demons, too many Golems, and too many layers of protections to peel off the Drow for us to make much headway. We eventually manage to kill off the highest-level enemy Wizard, but end up doing a running battle where we just barely scrape by... we literally retreated all the way to the entrance at one point, fought off two Demons that followed us, then returned to the bridge. By the end, no one had anything left beyond I think a single Remove Fear.
Let's plan better next time, I say.
And that was the easiest lair.
Beholder City is next: I forgot that SCS no longer puts an Elder Orb at the entrance, so rather than waste our massive initial buffs, we rush north and clear the Drow, then have the frontliners head south and deal with the Mind Flayers.
I only know of three ways to deal with Beholders in semi-safety: Summons (preferably Skeleton Warriors, but others will do in a pinch even though they die very quickly), massive ranged spell damage bombardment (and I do mean massive), or frontliners immune to everything (Rage, unbuffed saving throws).
We opt for Skeleton Warriors, and though it takes a very long time, we eventually clear the whole thing, though we're down to our last two summons.
OK, the worst of the lot remains: Illithids.
Learning from previous errors of judgement, this time we'll refrain from Chaotic Commands (except on Necromancer, who simply cannot be allowed to be Held).
Instead, we'll boost saving throws with Chant/Prayer/Recitation/Emotion: Hope and Potions of Invulnerability, then let the frontliners go to town: Illithids will tend to favor Psionic Blast/Domination if the targets aren't outright immune, even when they are effectively immune due to saving throws.
Still, even with full buffs and the odd Improved Haste, this is quite painful, but we push through.
Eventually, our last slew of buffs is just enough to handle the Elder Brain, and we go free. Huzzah!
Dealing with Simyaz on the way out is basically an afterthought.
We pick up some more scrolls from Carlig and Therndle, rest up, and enter Ust Natha under the guise of Adalon's illusion.
It's time for oddity four.
Occasionally, Giant Spiders in Ust Natha will attack Wild Dogs. This happens as we're passing by, but the Wild Dog runs off into a nook where the Giant Spider can't see it. So, the Giant Spider starts attacking our party instead.
It doesn't turn red, but it keeps going after the weakest characters, and it even follows us as we change areas.
I tried leaving Ust Natha and killing it, but then the city goes hostile. You could argue I should roll with it, but it seems very clear this is not intended, and it's not as if the party was actually in danger... so I just reload a slightly earlier save and this time it doesn't happen. Odd.
Anyway, we start the questline, and on our way to meet Soulafein, forget that there's now a party of adventurers guarding the bridge. So, we just trample roughshod all over them: The only real threat here is N'ashtar, but his meager spell protections are not nearly enough to keep him safe from Spell Thrust + Breach.
Carlig actually has some extra scrolls if you visit him in Drow disguise: We pick up Limited Wish, Mordenkainen's Sword and Khelben's Warding Whip (only failing to scribe the last one).
So, oddity five: Soulafein never managed to exit Ust Natha after talking to us, so he never arrived to the south where you're supposed to rescue Phaere. We spend a little time doing pit fights and the duels, but he just never pops.
I end up having to spawn a new version of him using the console, which works (and allows us to rescue Phaere), but now there's an extra Soulafein in Ust Natha. Hope this won't cause problems down the line...
On that note, oddity six: the Beholder in the pit fights used Telekinesis on Barbarian, which literally pushed him out of the pit! The door locks so he couldn't get back in, but apparently if you speak to the Drow overseeing the fights, he thinks you turned him down the first time and want to fight now, so he'll unlock the door for you. Whereupon the Beholder is waiting just beyond the gate and attacks the entire party. Fortunate it didn't just Death Ray Necromancer.
By now the Duergar Slave has spawned, so we take care of Qilue. Her Mage servants are very annoying, but they seem to lack offensive punch, so we just slowly strip their defenses, and that's it.
Proceeding with the main quest, it's oddity seven: The extra Soulafein somehow showed up when we fought the Beholder to the south. Now when we accidentally pass him, he talks to us and hands over fake Dragon Eggs, even though we've technically no knowledge of Phaere's plot yet. Eh... again, hopefully that won't break anything.
Alright, so we talk to Matron Ardulace, and are tasked with retrieving some blood.
It's time for the final showdown: Deirex, and immediately afterwards, House Jae'llat.
It is also time for a fatal error of judgement.
Every single time I've fought him before, Deirex leads with a Time Stop. This has led me to adopt a simple strategy: Enter hasted, run past Deirex as he's chanting, drop a few instant-cast summons (Kitthix, Berserk Warrior) next to him, then retreat out of his line-of-sight and watch him waste the Time Stop killing junk. Then wait out his buffs, apply your own, and charge in. Victory! At least in theory.
This time, Deirex did not oblige. Instead, he leads with a Remove Magic. We attempt to counter by having affected characters quaff Oils of Speed, dropping a few instant summons to hopefully distract Deirex, and moving the entire party to the northeast.
Scoffing heartily at this insult, the (very hasted) Lich comes shuffling after us, pointedly ignoring our summons, and all hell literally breaks loose.
... I thought SCS Revised Death effects would prevent chunkings, but I guess vorpal effects still mean permanent death. I'll make a mental note of that.
There's no room to manevuer in here, so we have to engage the Dark Planetar basically absent buffs.
Meanwhile, Deirex is to the south, gating in brutal amounts of Demons. We somehow manage to deal with the Planetar, but things are looking grim.
With the number of Demons on the field increasing, there are Lightning Bolts, Fireballs and Cones of Cold flying around everywhere. Can we really turn this around? We make an attempt at Ruby Ray'ing Deirex to tear down his Spell Trap, but a wayward Fireball interrupts it. We have no other way of dealing with that Spell Trap, so our only remaining choice is somehow hacking through Deirex's protections while simultaneously dealing with, at my count, four Demons. The last nail in the coffin is Deirex's Spell Trigger, bringing in three Greater Elementals.
In the end, we fail, but also suffer oddity 8. Fighter/Cleric was carrying the Rope needed to get access to Deirex's Tower: When he gets chunked (I don't recall by what but wager it was the Greater Earth Elemental delivering a vicious blow, which again... why did a chunking occur?), we're suddenly locked out of the tower... but our remaining two party members stay inside?
I can't access the characters; they're nowhere on the map. The game even allows quicksaving, so we're no longer considered in combat, but we can't resurrect the (two non-chunked) characters. So it's basically game over, since we can no longer do anything.
Which is fine, given that we were maybe 1 - 2 rounds from a total party wipe anyway, but still odd.
The bitter sting of defeat aside, that was a suitably heroic, and suitably moronic, way to end a run.
In hindsight, the reason I tried to get away with minimal initial buffs was because I had House Jae'llat in mind: I can't recall how long you have to raid them after killing Deirex, so wanted to go there straight after, and with the number of enemies there, I wanted to preserve buffs and spell slots.
If we had buffed up completely, including Spell Immunity / Entropy Shield, I'm quite confident we would've won this without breaking a sweat; as shown, we were still able to hold on for some time, even dispatching a Dark Planetar, with next to no buffs.
If anyone wants to have a go at a Necromancer, feel free. If no one picks up the gauntlet, I'll give it another go soon.
I don't think there's a timer for clearing out House Jae'llat btw. There might be one mentioned in dialogue, but it doesn't actually apply in terms of gameplay.
And yes, Deirex is quite dangerous (he had at least 2 HLA's, Dark Planetar and Improved Alacrity), but to be fair, the danger is exacerbated because there's literally no space available.
Add the grand stupidity of charging in nearly buffless...
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
My next goals for Madalena: Get some gold via Bassilus, get our reputation up to 20 and get the charisma tome. After that, buy/learn all available spellscrolls. Next, get the XP boost from the basilisk area, travel around for easy encounters with powerful item rewards, and, once we get another thief level on Delia for enough "find traps", get the next big XP boost from the greater basilisks at Durlag's.
So, how did we do? First of all, Bassilus - who didn't start with a pre-summoned aerial servant (which I've seen in an earlier SCS version) or protection from fire - did indeed die to my three wands (needed two charges from the frost one) - as his skeletons are slow to crumble, they did hit Leda twice with their bolts, and she almost died - luckily, the wands also interrupted all spellcasting attempts from the enemy cleric:
Now, we have tools for a few slighty tougher battles - cat's grace can turn our fighters into genuinely good ranged weapon users, and strength of one allows for a big short-term boost in melee damage and thac0. One of the more risky choices here is facing Greywolf due to the chance of him having an oil of speed - he ends up having two buffing potions on him, but they are freedom and power, not speed, so we can kite and kill:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Well, my last words about enemy spellcasters being "less scary" don't seem to have aged very well, considering what happened right after that, when I decided to fight Zodral. Thinking to myself: "We are immune to sleep by now, we have remove fear, so the only mass disable crowd control spells he could throw at us would be slow and maybe a hold person that hits multiple people - but what are the chances he has both of these spells memorized? He's most likely just trying to throw damage at us" - we buffed up with remove fear, bless, prayer, strength of one, true sight and shield, entering the tent. However, true sight was slow to work, and we got unlucky with our to-hit rolls. Immediately, Zodral opened with slow - the worst case scenario, and we didn't get an interrupt. He followed up, still without being hit, with hold person, which hit two of us, including Madalena. He should have easily have been dead at this point (and I should have started using wand charges right away, propably). But he got to cast a thid spell, monster summoning I, and the summoned goblins started hitting the held characters. Now I finally used a wand of heavens charge to help in killing Zodral:
Things didn't go much better when I finished exploring the area further north. Encountering a huge group of kobolds, I set them to sleep - everything seemed fine, but the game decided to mess with me: The lightning weather effect hit an already wounded Leda, killing her outright. This is possibly the worst feature in BG1:
What we've left open now are the Ulcaster Ruins + Icharyd, the Firewine Ruins + Kahrk, the entire red wizard area, and the bandit regions, plus the Doomsayer (who we could kill with wands by now, but I forgot about him). Since all these things seem incredibly scary at this point, we're going into the Nashkel mines instead. This means the Amazon + Gullykin ambushes are possible encounters after that, so we need to make sure to rest before we travel whenever possible. Luckily, true sight should help with some of the greatest risks involved in those battles, but there's still quite a lot of danger.
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
In the Nashkel Mines, we mostly use sleep spells to help out with big groups of goblins - sometimes, though, we have to resort to wands:
In Mulahey's cave, we clear out most if it with another necklace of missles charge:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
So, we enter the iron mines and make it to level 2, where Hareishan awaits. Our plan is to pull her back a bit, throwing an oil of fiery burning into her room to also deal some damage to her mercenaries - at the entrance, we made our stand. Hareishan immediately started casting an enchantment spell, and we threw two more fireballs at her. However, she was, somehow, able to finish her spell before fiery death engulfed her - and her spell was... chaos. Not good:
For Natasha, I had my 3 skeletons prepared, who got busy drawing out her spells and getting rid of her defenses:
For the ogre mage, we had our second true sight and command - pretty easy with those options at the ready:
Time to get to Baldur's Gate. Here, we go for another big scroll learning session for both of our mages before travelling around to get some of the powerful items and free experience here - most battles in the city aren't super dangerous for us at this point. Here's the sewer ogre mage:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
I decided to move to Ulcaster first. Since this party relies heavily on buffs: A new tactic for Icharyd - takes some time, but a lot safer: Get him to trigger his second phase and immediately leave the map (as getting into the phase makes you lose all your buffs). Travel back to the area, rest and rebuff - now phase 2 can be done with buffs and summons - also, he seems to target the first enemy that he sees with his call lightning ability, so having a summoned skeleton in front helps a lot:
The stoneskin scroll isn't learned quite yet - I want to wait until after Candlekeep, since there are a few unique scrolls there as well that we can include in the learning session, and I don't expect to need stoneskin there. Since our F/M/T needs so many potions to actually reliably learn scrolls, we have to keep our learning sessions at a minimum.
We make a quick visit to Durlag's again to fight the ghost - now that we have 4 level 7+ skeletons that one should be doable, as long as we avoid its high level spells hitting the entire party. Well... teleport field results in our skeletons getting in weird positions and the ghost following them, so he does get to cast a spell at a party before we can flee downstairs - a pretty devastating fireball... but no one dies:
Well, one of the least injured of us, Ninisina, moves back upstairs to direct the skeletons, and they eventually do end up getting the kill:
Next up, the Candlekeep crypts.
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
We make our way into the crypts, disarming traps, looting treasure and fighting relatively easy battles. Successfully, we avoid any greater doppelgangers being able to finish a haste spell:
We resurrect our kensai and rest up. For the ducal palace, we get our summons and buffs ready, plus a scroll of malison + chaos each. The wizards make sure to get the timing just right, and they follow up with a second chaos and spell thrust on the doppelganger mage, while true sight reveals the assassin for us to kill:
Though I think there's only six BG1EE casters that get 6th level arcane slots under SCS: Krystin, the Ghost, Tellan (dart guy), Semaj, Shaldrissa and Kahrk. Out of these, I've seen Krystin, Tellan, Shaldrissa and the Ghost actually use Death Spell; Kahrk usually goes for Improved Haste + PfMW, and Semaj seems to like PfMW as well.
Also in my experience, Andris always teleports to the protagonist. I guess his script goes wonky if he can't...
Still, a few close shaves are part and parcel of SCS Insane runs; Excellent progress so far. I have some time to play this weekend so will probably roll up a new Necromancer then and join in, though again, if anyone feels the call, don't let me stop you.
Looking forward to your new run!
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
I haven't done Balduran's Island or Durlag's Tower in ages, as all of my recent runs have skipped these two areas (and SoD as well). However, Balduran's Island still went fairly well - I also learned that the SCS supply system (limiting you to 4 rests until you rest at an inn) lets you resupply on your ship for this part of the game, but I only needed to rest once on the island anyways (the only time I've had trouble with this system was after leaving Saradush to go after Yaga Shura - as there is no inn available after Saradush gets destroyed and before you get to Amkethran).
Once we're in the northern area, we summon our skeletons and activate some long-duration buffs. We part peacefully with the sirens, and taking down the wolfweres is fairly easy at range. Now for a venture into the shipwreck. My earlier strategies would often involve luring the wolfweres outside, even those from upper levels, but they currently don't seem to want to switch areas at all. So instead I went in with Delia first (who has the best AC), often equipping a ring of freedom in case of vampire wolves - she lures the enemies away from the entrance so the others don't end up surrounded by foes when they follow. In this way, we dealt with the first 3 floors and decided to rest just before the last one. After rebuffing, Delia moves up again - Daese, the wizard here, fails with her minor sequencer, and now that she's used her action for this turn, the others follow upstairs:
Well, the others follow Delia upstairs and shoot down Daese - with her lack of defenses, that's easy enough. Now we aim our wands of paralyzation on the greater wolfwere, and they work right away:
All right. Now, only Durlag's Tower (and the return to Ulgloth's Beard) remain before Sarevok. Before that, we need to go shopping for some important potions and scrolls.
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Durlag's Tower went very well, mostly because I decided to be patient instead of pushing through the entire dungeon in one go. Our skeletons did a great job tanking for us in the first level - we used our first round of buffs for the three doppelganger fight in the east, the second round for the dwarven warders. For those, we also placed down all of our 4 traps near "love", hoping to kill this most dangerous warder outright - instead, it was "fear" who died immediately:
All right, back to level 3. A PfU scroll is used for the middle path, and Delia carefully scouts ahead for the eastern maze. Now we clear the elemental rooms, buffing up before entering the slime room. We include absorption here for lightning immunity, so we can move on the chessboard if needed. Our wizard slayer can't drink this potion - the best we can do here is give her the helm of defense and boots of grounding for 70% resistance.
Once we enter the board, we throw 5 fireballs into the middle:
Once more, we rest up, sell items and prepare for Ulgoth's Beard. My usual approach for the opening ambush is to drink 6 invisibility potions immediately and move northwards to summon and buff up. Our wizard slayer can't do that, but unlike the potions, the wizard spell invisibility lasts a full 24 hours, and the journey to Ulgoth's Beard from Baldur's Gate is 16 hours, so our solution is to cast the spell on Ninisima, while all the others drink. They also have to drop some of the gear they're carrying around immediately as they don't start with their strength buffs active, so they can't carry everything they usually do by now (though I have made sure that their actual equipment is stuff they can wear with their natural strength, in case of ambushes or dispels):
Well, we buff up with our second round (though we do have some exhaustions now, but since we have a bunch of expensive potions going I decided to move on without a rest at this point) and clear the cultists near their hideout, using our own chaos spell:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
After buffing up for the final battle of BG1 (with every type of useful potion we have access too), Delia and the skeletons went forward, with the mission of shooting the big guy with a dispelling arrow (they are banned from stores in my installation, so they are quite rare - I've found 29 throughout the entire game) - Semaj starts out invisible and, indeed, opens with PFMW:
We buy everything that seems useful from the flaming fist healer (being left with 10k gold after that) and are ready to start SoD.
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Now that we're in SoD, our wands of fire and necklaces of missles take center stage:
After that, there's basically only Korlasz left - she herself is of course resistant to fire, but the same is not true for her followers:
Now our inventory is sorted, and we're ready to take on the Coast Way Crossing/Forest.
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
We call in our skeletons and start clearing the main area, with Teleria being our first potential challenge, though with our buffs, both she and her golem die before being able to harm us:
The actual repository is done with my last two protection from undead scrolls and our kensai mostly by himself:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Exploring the Troll Claw woods starts out pretty well - the northern half of the map is cleared out (we use our buffs for the troll cave) and we move to the south, using fireballs for the dangerous ogre group:
After all that, we move to the Forest of Wyrms. For the spider caves, we make sure to use potions of freedom and some summoned monsters:
Now we move to Boaresky Bridge, where we first deal with the various sidequests. Once all of them are done, we start invading the enemy camp:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Turns out I am still finding some time to play, so here we go: We start at Bloodbark Grove. Since we're overflowing on potions (our gold is essentially infinite at this point, so we can just randomly buy every useful potion that comes up), we randomly add stuff like clarity, just to avoid any potential charm spells by the fledgling vampire in the basement:
Everything started out just fine, after clearing out the initial crusader group. However, I forgot that attacking the second group of crusaders in the other room would trigger the Hephernaan encounter right away, so I was immediately put under pressure, though I was able to get a quick takedown on one of Hephernaan's named wizard friends:
Mods: Full SCS 35.21.
Difficulty: Insane with no difficulty-dependent damage increase; maximum HP on level-up.
Protagonist: Necromancer the Necromancer.
Special rules: Random party run, as dictated by the spoiler.
2. I may optionally regenerate a single character; if I do, I must use the newly generated character in place of the old one.
3. Level-up results are not random, but I will strive to largely abide by initial proficiencies as much as possible when doing so will not excessively handicap a character.
Our party:
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Class: Necromancer
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Stats:
STR 9 DEX 11 CON 12 INT 17 WIS 16 CHA 13
Proficiencies:
Sling *
Starting spells:
Armor, Find Familiar, Larloch's Minor Drain
Gender: Female
Race: Half-Elf
Class: Fighter / Druid
Alignment: True Neutral
Stats:
STR 13 DEX 9 CON 15 INT 12 WIS 12 CHA 15
Proficiencies:
Sling ** Dagger * Quarterstaff *
Gender: Male
Race: Elf
Class: Fighter / Mage
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Stats:
STR 9 DEX 13 CON 12 INT 11 WIS 17 CHA 16
Proficiencies:
Crossbow * Sword and Shield Style * Two-Handed Weapon Style * Bastard Sword *
Starting spells:
Expeditious Retreat, Find Familiar
Gender: Male
Race: Gnome
Class: Cleric / Illusionist
Alignment: True Neutral
Stats:
STR 15 DEX 16 CON 15 INT 13 WIS 15 CHA 10
Proficiencies:
Two-Weapon Style * Mace *
Starting spells:
Charm Person, Shocking Grasp, Spook
Gender: Female
Race: Elf
Class: Fighter / Mage / Thief
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Stats:
STR 11 DEX 18 CON 13 INT 13 WIS 7 CHA 14
Proficiencies:
Sling * Longbow * War Hammer * Flail / Morning Star *
Thieving skills:
Find Traps +10 Move Silently +5 Set Traps +5 Pick Pockets +5 Hide in Shadows +15
Starting spells:
Expeditious Retreat, Reflected Image
Gender: Female
Race: Half-Elf
Class: Cleric / Ranger
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Stats:
STR 14 DEX 15 CON 17 INT 7 WIS 14 CHA 13
Proficiencies:
Two-Weapon Style *** Mace * Club * Single-Weapon Style *
Racial enemy: Kobold
And you thought Jaheira had unimpressive stats.
So, there will be competition for scrolls. We'll also be massively starved for Potions of Genius, I imagine, to the point that we probably won't be able to hit 100% scribing success for every scribing session (at least not when scribing non-essential scrolls).
The upside is that every single character can protect their buffs, we have 4 (!) warriors, and will be able to shield the entire party from pretty much any type of damage... eventually.
We just have to get to the point where our massive number of spell slots can run roughshod over any enemy, so let's hop to it.
No-mercy Necromancer: A Random Run, Part 1
Next part found here
The northern parts exhausted, we journey south. This time, Neera refrains from trying to kill us, and is relieved of her Gem Bag as way of thanks; we clear Beregost apart from Silke and head further south, then loop back around, dealing with Teyngan and Zargal, but leave Bassilus alone for the moment.
Fighter/Mage/Thief manages to pilfer Algernon's Cloak, and we take the first real risk in deciding to engage Silke: Our plentiful damage spells and Commands should give us excellent odds of winning, and win we do.
Flush with our victory, we haul our woefully weak party back towards Bassilus.
He fails his save against Silence, fails his save against Command, and then succumbs to the only use I've found for Darts of Stunning when no one has Dart proficiency: Pelt an unconscious enemy until they fail their save.
This party is actually surprisingly powerful. We went with Crossbow and Longbow specialization on Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief respectively, reasoning that it's all for nothing if we fall in BG1 due to hoarding our proficiencies for extreme late game use, and it's really paying off.
Back to Nashkel, and we knock off Greywolf easy enough. The Mines are mostly uneventful, except for a bit of my stubbornness causing issues.
We haven't visited High Hedge yet, since I want to kill the Flesh Golems for experience, and we still lack enough magical ammunition (that's why we went to the Mines, for the plentiful Arrows of Fire).
This means no one has scribed Identify yet, and since we're damnably cheap, I haven't identified anything in stores (and steadfastly won't use unidentified items)... long story short, we have no Wand of Fire, nor do we know the Sleep spell.
So, we try to deal with the Chieftain, his Shaman and their minions using essentially brute force.
Yeah, a requirement for using brute force is that you're actually capable of applying some force.
Fighter/Mage took a melee swipe, got poisoned and just dropped straight away.
Necromancer ate a Minor Lightning bolt, which could've easily killed him (but didn't).
Fortunately the Shaman failed its save against Hold Person, else this run might've been cut dreadfully short...
Anyway, we proceed to Mulahey where we loot his chest under Sanctuary, and call it a day.
Into the western wilds next, where I find an unexpected use for Charm Animal (Cleric/Ranger, remember?).
I'll use this trick from time to time when I notice some form of bear around us; they hit hard and fast, and especially this early they're quite helpful as damage sponges.
We basically make a clean sweep of all the areas here, and eventually manage to scribe an Identify scroll dropped by I think a Gnoll, so we can at long last start using magical equipment.
Beyond Fighter/Druid dying once to Delgod (one of Sendai's archer goons who is surprisingly tough in melee), nothing untoward occurs.
There's no really obvious candidate for the Charisma tome, so Fighter / Mage goes from 16 to 17 CHA. Eh.
Alright, we've amassed enough magical ammunition to take out the Flesh Golems at High Hedge, so do just that.
By now the experience is neglible.. but we also swing by the Wolf Pack at Beregost Temple. I've found that you can, if you want, literally take these guys out at level 1 if you have the Wand of Fire: Lead with a Fireball to thin out the ranks, retreat immediately, then use Scorcher once or twice. Works every time.
Now that we've got some levels, we clear a lot of lower-level areas, then set out for the Basilisks. Mutamin fails his save against Korax's Paralyzing Touch, and that's about it.
Since our lack of real spellworks is becoming an issue, we buy a bunch of scrolls at High Hedge and scribe away.
Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief only get to go up to about 95% scribing success chance in an effort to conserve potions, but in the end we only fail a couple of non-essential scrolls. Good, that expanded our capabilities by quite a bit.
I'd like to boost Find Traps a bit more before heading to Durlag's, so we'll advance the plot. Mulahey stands no chance whatsoever at this point, and the same can be said for Nimbul (though he takes out a charmed Oublek before succumbing, netting us an extra 3000 gold).
Tranzig gives us the biggest scare we've had since the ill-fated encounter with the Kobolds, when he disables 2/3 of the party, leaving Necromancer and Fighter/Mage/Thief to seal the deal. Sleep indeed.
En route to Larswood, we get the bearded ambush: Command on Halacan and whatever you want on the Cleric (we went with Spook), and the battle's over before it started.
Osmadi and Corsone both succumb to Silence, and we prepare to take on the Bandit Camp.
Same tactic as always: Huddle in the southeast corner and create a massive kill zone of Web, Entangle, Spike Growth and Fireballs.
The only potential danger here is Venkt, but once he goes down, so does the hope of victory for the Bandits.
We're at a decent level now, so decide to clear the western seaboard before entering the Cloakwood.
Droth is still completely undone by Command, and we have a handful of Skeleton Warriors so can safely engage the three Sirenes to the south.
A combination of Silence and Skeleton Warriors also spell the doom of Sil in the Lighthouse area, and Fighter/Mage/Thief easily dispatches the local Flesh Golems at range.
I wound up giving the CON tome to Fighter / Druid, preferring two reasonably sturdy frontliners to one very sturdy and one slightly dainty... we'll see if I regret it.
On our way back, we finally get the Amazon ambush: Quickly melee the two Thieves (who we reveal with Detect Invisibility), and use our multitude of fast-casting arcane damage spells to interrupt the Clerics, and we're golden.
More experience is needed! Off to Durlag's, since we've got enough Find Traps to at least handle the upper levels.
Ghasts aren't much of an issue by now, nor are the Basilisks outside.
Cleric/Illusionist will be getting all three WIS tomes, but the boost is quite marginal regardless, since all our divine casters range from very poor to middling WIS.
We haven't enough Skeleton Warriors to destroy the Ghost in complete safety, so try a different approach: The Ghost does not approve of our rudeness, and shows Necromancer the error of his ways.
I think my intent was to bomb the Ghost with wands, but unfortunately, he seems immune to Fire, Cold and Electricity all...
we eventually ganged up on him as he was long since out of big spells, but still, that was an unnecessary risk.
With that, we conclude our Durlag's meanderings for now, and instead go after Narcillicus... who does not use any spell protections, and so is duly fried by Fighter/Druid.
OK, OK, enough's enough: Move to Cloakwood already.
Seniyaad and his fellow druids are helpless before Silence, Centeol and her attendant Spiders suffer the full brunt of several Wands of Fire with Potions of Freedom on the frontliners, and we even engage Amarande at point-blank range.
He doesn't seem to be an Avenger in my installation, but everyone had Protection from Fire up just in case he would turn Salamander; a particularly vicious crit from Cleric/Ranger ends the Archdruid.
Alright, time for I would say the worst fight, purely because I never manage to do it properly: Drasus and friends.
This go around was no different.
Necromancer got hit by a Lightning Bolt, but I saw it coming and had him equip Talos's Gift; that Lightning Bolt promptly rebounded and hit Rezdan for 48 (!) damage, which amazingly wasn't enough to kill him.
It took a Call Lightning dealing another 35 damage to drop Rezdan; by now we had managed to deal with both Drasus and Genthore, with just Kysus left running around.
Kysus wasn't going down without a fight, so summoned two Phase Spiders... which the by now unfortunately confused Necromancer charged into melee against. We scrambled desperately to kill the Spiders before they turned around and put Necromancer out of his misery, and somehow pulled it off (still not sure how).
Kysus kept causing trouble, Holding Cleric/Ranger with a Chromatic Orb, then summoning a Lesser Fire Elemental (!) on top of her.
With our absolute last Ice Lance and Magic Missile, we were somehow able to take down both Kysus and his Elemental without loosing anyone. Phew.
Into the depths, I suppose. Hareishan doesn't buff with MGoI and so is simply Fireballed into oblivion.
Deeper down, I actually find a use for Mold Touch: It interrupts Natasha after we wait out her buffs. Eh. Unimpressive damage, but sure, I'll take it.
As for Dave, he as per his usual modus operandi couldn't care less about the major engagement occurring in his anteroom, and leaves us to dismantle his Battle Horrors and five waves of Guards uninterrupted.
We try to bait out his spells with Skeleton Warriors, but he spots us, and swiftly and decisively takes out Fighter/Mage/Thief with his Melf's Minute Meteors. Didn't even need an offensive spell.
Most of the party really is immensely fragile, and it shows in situations where we can't entice enemies to attack our two frontliners.
We head back out of the forest and raise Fighter/Mage/Thief, return to flood (after looting!) the Mines, and that's it: Baldur's Gate is now available.
Before entering the city, we decide to clean up some loose ends, among them Ulcaster's. Unfortunately, a Dread Wolf spots us as we're moving into position, and we end up having to fight with no summons or buffs up.
Looks pretty hairy, right? Frontliners quaffed Potions of Freedom though, so they can't be held, Necromancer goes invisible for safety, and though it takes a while, we grind through the enemy and make it out in one piece (only the Wolf of Ulcaster is truly dangerous here).
Fighter/Druid isn't too happy by the end, though.
And so we can finally get to work on the big city.
The immediately available DEX tome goes to Cleric / Ranger: True, she will already have 18+ DEX for most major fights due to DUHM, but that can be dispelled, and it's not like she has the spell slots to keep DUHM up for EVERY fight.
I'd do a detailed exposition of our city-wide adventures, but really, we're high enough level by now that nothing can mount effective resistance; not even Sunin can do much, and that's without us having scribed Spell Thrust yet.
We just pumped everyone's Fire/Cold/Lightning resistance up as much as possible (two Clerics, one Druid, so it's doable even this early), and that effectively restricted Sunin to Enchantment spells.. which you can counter by splitting up.
And that's it for the city, barring the Iron Throne fight; the INT tome went to Fighter/Mage.
With INT scores this crappy, I won't be risking much scribing when not under Potions of Genius / Mind Focusing, and with Fighter / Mage bumped to 12 INT, at least now he only needs three Potions of Genius to hit 24 INT. Heh. Only three.
There aren't many areas left, but we've avoided the Red Wizards until now. I find a better way to approach this: Move in from the east, not the south. Denak has too good defenses to kill quickly, so we go after his cronies first.
Two of them don't even put up MGoI and so drop to a few Skull Traps straight away; the third gets shot down by Mage Slayers (Acid Arrows/Bolts of Lightning), and Denak can't hold us off on his own.
Now it's time for the second worst fight: The Dwarven Warders of Durlag's. The rest of the level is no problem to clear, but these guys certainly are.
For safety, the plan was for Necromancer to stay invisible until there's only Pride left, but no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. I am a fraction of a second too late in ordering Cleric/Ranger to activate her Greenstone Amulet, and as a result, our biggest bruiser is Dire Charmed by Love.
Now Fighter/Druid has to tank Love, Avarice and Fear, since every summon is needed to hold Pride at bay.
Somehow she survives long enough for us to focus down Avarice and Fear both; Necromancer had no choice but to come out of hiding to lend every single Magic Missile and Ice Lance he had available.
By now, our Skeletons are pulverized, so we resort to Wands of Monster Summoning to stave off Pride, while both Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Mage/Thief join the melee against Love (who periodically and automatically renews Physical Mirror).
Finally, Cleric/Ranger snaps out of her stupor, just as we pummel Love into the ground.
Pride isn't done, however. We can barely hit him, and he chews through our summons like nobody's business.
After three attempts, Cleric/Illusionist lands a Blind, and we can bring this unfortunate fight to a close.
That was harsh, but it usually is. The remainder of the tower actually goes very smoothly: We use Skeleton Warriors to help with the Greater Ghouls both in the Maze and the acid area, and beyond taking some damage in the chessboard fight (we didn't clear out all enemies in the initial Fireball barrage and I wanted the experience so left the King alive for last), we're never in any danger.
As is customary, we bug out just prior to facing the Demon Knight, and that's as far as we'll be going with Durlag's.
It's been a long trek, but we're nearing the end: Ice Island is important though, as I'd like Stoneskin on Necromancer as insurance for the last few big fights.
There are two major threats here: Andris and Tellan. The moment he takes a bit of damage, Andris teleports out and leaves his cronies to their doom. Once he's recuperated a bit, he'll always teleport back in on top of the protagonist, and seemingly always lead with Remove Magic, even when there's literally no buffs running.
He manages to get a Lesser Air Elemental up and running, but that's it for Andris' not-so-triumphant return.
I also found a fun new way to wreck Garan (Ankheg guy): Cleric/Ranger charmed the Polar Bear to the south, and it completely destroyed him. Chewed through his Stoneskins in no time flat, he never even got a spell off.
As said, normally Tellan is a big concern.. but it seems he's an Enchanter in my current installation.
And he spent his L6 slots on PfMW and True Sight (!). Basically, he's helpless against Skeleton Warriors, and Dezkiel doesn't fare much better. Ice Island, cleared.
I would like the Cloudkill scroll too... so it's Firewine next.
Of course, even enormous amounts of Kobold Commandos aren't a threat anymore, so we easily move through here; the Ogre Mage is tremendously weak (seems to be Mage level 5? Like I guess all of them), and can't really do anything.
Lendarn has no answer to Skeleton Warriors, and that's about it. We clear a few random spawns around Gullykin for a tiny bit of experience, which pushes Cleric/Ranger onto her (and the party's at large) final BG1 level.
There's one last thing to do around here: Kahrk.
Normally he's a real problem even if you wait out his buffs (his Improved Haste never seems to expire for me), but we luck out: A Bombardier Beetle moves in close, and Kahrk fails his save! The power of IWDEE spells...
This is a very long update, so I'll cut off here for now, and probably, if all goes well, include some early SoA stuff in the next one.
All that remains is clearing the top of the Iron Throne, then Candlekeep and the very end of the game: We won't bother with Balduran's Island.
Abysmal stats aside, the classes we've got to work with are very potent. There's four warrior-types, four arcanists, three priests.
If we can survive early BG2, this party has excellent chances... we just need to not become complacent, since no one but the frontliners (and barely even they) have the hitpoints to survive a miscalculation.
For now, we're at the level cap, and soon the XP cap; see spoilers for the party's final BG1 proficiencies.
I've tried to be a bit thematic/keeping with the random L1 proficiency picks; frontliners will be dualwielding, but Fighter/Mage will be rocking Crossbows and Quarterstaves, and Fighter/Mage/Thief will be using Longbows/Slings, with a single Long Sword for backstabbing.
Necromancer
L9 Human Necromancer, 36 HP
Sling * Quarterstaff *
Fighter/Druid
L7/L8 Fighter/Druid, 82 HP
Dagger ** Quarterstaff * Sling ** Two-Weapon Style *
Fighter/Mage
L7/L7 Fighter/Mage, 49 HP
Bastard Sword * Quarterstaff * Crossbow ** Two-Handed Weapon Style * Sword and Shield Style *
Cleric/Illusionist
L7/L7 Cleric/Illusionist, 49 HP
Mace * Sling * Two-Weapon Style *
Fighter/Mage/Thief
L6/L6/L7 Fighter/Mage/Thief, 38 HP
Long Sword * War Hammer * Flail/Morning Star * Longbow ** Sling *
OL 85 FT 90 PP 35 MS 30 HiS 40 DI 0 ST 25
Cleric/Ranger
L7/L7 Cleric/Ranger, 84 HP
Club * Flail/Morning Star * Mace ** Single-Weapon Style * Two-Weapon Style ***
The necromancer can reach 100% scribing at INT 24 (+7, a potion of genius and a potion of mind focusing). Anything less, and he's taking at least 15% failure chance on non-necromancy spells.
The fighter/mage can reach 100% scribing at INT 23 (+12, which is only possible by stacking multiple instances of the same potion). But 19 INT is a 96% success chance and no cap on total spells, so two potions is good enough for routine scribing. Apply the INT tome, and that can be one potion of each type.
The fighter/mage/thief can reach 100% scribing at INT 23 (+10). Still three potions. But two potions gets you to 19-21 INT, which is good enough for anything but super-rare scrolls.
So, based on those breakpoints, I'd definitely give the INT tome to the INT 11 fighter/mage. That stat distribution ... wow. Also, hold off on filling out the higher-level spells in those multiclass spellbooks - the fighter/mage doesn't need 5th level spells in the first campaign, and the triple-class doesn't need 4th level spells.
Madalena the Conjurer, Update 15
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
The camp attack is fairly routine - we recharge our necklaces/wands one last time and just fireball everything, drinking potions and casting buffs inbetween the battles - there's a backstab on Ninisima as we face the final group, but it's not particularily dangerous, and our allied coalition spies return the favor on the remaining opponents:
Inside Avernus, we buff up again, making sure to include whatever extra potions we have flying around in our bags (which is a ton of them). Buffed up with all of that, it's fairly easy to fight our way towards Belhifet. Here, we prepare with the full array of immunities against everything that the enemies in this battle can even use, so only physical damage, or the initial dispel (for which we have Madalena with SI:A as the one to absorb it), can hurt us. We have our +3 ammo at the ready. Madalena catches the dispel magic, just as planned, and the others move in:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
A quick introduction to SoA with the opening dungeon and updated screenshots of our unbuffed party members, so you can see their stats post-BG1/SoD, including proficiencies:
Madalena, the Conjurer and Bhaalspawn:
The initial ogre mage is already a potential threat, but since his prebuffs are lacking MSD, breach and true sight do the job:
Randomly created party, full insane SCS
Introductory post here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1214615/#Comment_1214615
Updated party stats at the beginning of BG2: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1215137/#Comment_1215137
We start our Athkatla journey with all of the non-stronghold quests and encounters, beginning at the circus tent - true sight and breach against Kalah do the job:
Next, we move to the Copper Coronet, where we free Hendak and venture into the sewers - the kobold shaman interestingly spawns on the wrong side of the wall, or so it seems:
Well, we continue with our temple quests - the fallen paladins are destroyed, Neb easily dies to true sight:
Finally, some minor things - before starting with stronghold quests, I travelled to Trademeet, Umar Hills and Windspear Hills for sidequests/looting/exploration (without touching the respective main questlines). I got really lucky in Trademeet when one of the guards, killed by an attacking animal, dropped a spell shield scroll:
Also a good idea to keep PfFire up, again, it's just one third level slot, and potentially life-saving.