How to kill SCS Kangaxx in 2 easy steps
johntyl
Member Posts: 397
I'm amazed it worked. I reloaded again to make sure it wasn't a fluke and damn hell it wasn't. You don't even need to buff up your party. For this to work you basically need 2 things:
1) 2 Spike traps
2) The priest spell: Sunray
So before I engaged Kangaxx, I got Jan to cast just 2 spike traps - that's more than enough as you can see here:
Now as the demilich emerges, get Anomen to start casting Sunray. Sure enough, after the poor demilich had his first taste of freedom after so long, he died almost instantly. I even felt a small tinge of sadness for him/her/it. Powerful as a lich/demi-lich is, afterall it is still an Undead, and that is its ultimate weakness. The whole thing lasted less than a minute.
Now, I know some of you might think, that's so cheese because you already pre-empted everything. To be fair, I had another rematch where I let Kangaxx put up his buffs and spells. Anomen's spell False Dawn did the trick: False Dawn's confuses it and it merely stands there and a consequent Sunray ultimately destroyed him.
If you guys want to see it, I can redo the match and do a recording of it
1) 2 Spike traps
2) The priest spell: Sunray
So before I engaged Kangaxx, I got Jan to cast just 2 spike traps - that's more than enough as you can see here:
Now as the demilich emerges, get Anomen to start casting Sunray. Sure enough, after the poor demilich had his first taste of freedom after so long, he died almost instantly. I even felt a small tinge of sadness for him/her/it. Powerful as a lich/demi-lich is, afterall it is still an Undead, and that is its ultimate weakness. The whole thing lasted less than a minute.
Now, I know some of you might think, that's so cheese because you already pre-empted everything. To be fair, I had another rematch where I let Kangaxx put up his buffs and spells. Anomen's spell False Dawn did the trick: False Dawn's confuses it and it merely stands there and a consequent Sunray ultimately destroyed him.
If you guys want to see it, I can redo the match and do a recording of it
Post edited by johntyl on
5
Comments
Sunray is fair game, though.
And speaking of which, I wonder if SCS thieves are coded to set HLA traps too.
That does seem like the first sort of thing SCS would nerf. On the other hand, so does Spike Trap...
Protection from Udead is protection from undead. How people can think it's cheat or cheese is utterly beyond me. You aren't going to hack and slash your way out without any magic or healing, you may just do it right.
And "the time you first get them" is pretty early, and they don't get any better as the game goes on. Clerics eventually get HLAs to try to refresh the pool, but with one exception, (Deva), in my opinion the HLAs are roughly on par with the top level 7 spells, anyway. So it's not really a power boost.
By the way, I likewise don't think anyone thinks PFU scrolls are a "cheat". But they are unequivocally cheese of the highest order. I could literally take a level 1 kitless thief with 5 strength, 9 dex, and 3 con, give her a few thousand gold, and go defeat Kangaxx with her.
Think about this. This is basically the weakest, most inept, most useless character class I could possibly create. A level 1 vanilla Thief with 5 strength and 5 HP. Taking down one of the most powerful demiliches in history, a being so terrifying and immensely powerful that its body was broken into pieces and *other liches* were set to guard those pieces.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of cheese.
I won't call it a "textbook definition of cheese", but an amusing way to play this game as it offers us so much freedom, same goes for PFU
But there's one thing I don't understand. How did Sunray kill Kangaxx's demilich form?
Demiliches are immune to level 1-9 spells. Sunray is level 7. It shouldn't hit Kangaxx at all.
And SCS is supposed to grant Kangaxx's demilich form 100% magic resistance on top of those spell level immunities. Sunray shouldn't have been able to bypass that, either.
Except Sunray, that is. I think Dragon's Breath works as well.
However Sunray should not do either in its base state so I guess SCS does something to that end, as stated. I wonder what SR does to Sunray? It's been a while since I played...
Even if it's an oversight it's less cheesy than the Improved Mace of Disruption, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Killing a demilich with a single spell smells of god-like power. Not of any random higher level cleric.
Mages gain the least from low levels and the most from high levels. Hitting level 9 and gaining Time Stop / Improved Alacrity is *MUCH* more potent than hitting level 3 and gaining fireball. Clerics, on the other hand, see some of the biggest power increases at low levels, and much lesser power increases at higher levels. Warriors tend to be relatively linear-- other than spikes at level 7 and level 13 you're mostly just grinding out HP / Saves / THACO, and then once you stop gaining those you're mostly just grinding out HLAs, which are of the single-use variety instead of the global-benefit variety and therefore also grant linear power gains.
The most interesting comparison to Clerics, in my opinion, is Druids. Clerics are *much* better at low levels. They dominate Druids in spell selection at levels 1, 2, and 3. Around level 4, they reach parity. And then once they hit level 5, Druids start leaving Clerics in the dust. Are Druids better than Clerics? It depends on where you're sampling. At 500k XP? Hell no. At 5m XP? Hell yes.
This is why I don't say that Clerics are a "bad class", though. They're not. They're just the class that gains the least from higher levels, because most of their power gains are distributed earlier in the curve.
With that said, yes, anything that lets a level 1 adventurer defeat one of the greatest and most powerful creatures the realms have ever seen with literally zero risk is "cheesy". This means PFU scrolls against Kangaxx, and it also means spamming Feeblemind against Firkraag while his circle is still blue. (It also means using invisibility to activate the gnolls and letting them kill Drizzt. Which is another thing I have definitely done.)
Feeblemind cheese is one of my favorite flavors of cheese. I love that spell. I'll cast it on random NPCs before pickpocketing when doing minimal-reload runs, I frequently use it to take down Mencar and Tarnor and their respective goon squads. I'll usually feeblemind Ployer in the Sea's Bounty rather than dealing with his quest.
My favorite is at the end of Thieves Guild, after gaining the incriminating information but before turning it over to Renal, I'll feeblemind all of the thieves except for Mae'var. Then when I come back, he threatens me and ends with something to the effect of "at them, boys!", but all of his crew just stands around dumbly while I hack him to bits, which always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Edit: Forgot to add that you can Feeblemind Renal after completing that quest and kill him for his Boots of Speed without triggering Arkanis Gath.
Basically, Feeblemind on blue-circle NPCs is insanely fun, and it's no exaggeration to say that I'll frequently have 8-10 casts memorized across my entire party as I'm wandering around various towns. But... yeah, it's textbook cheese. Tasty, tasty, tasty cheese.
I don't see how sunlight can be ignored as a devestating effect on undead without rewriting the whole cultural background.
Which of course happens in "Twilight" with the sparkly vampires if I understand correctly?
And how popular is that?
The magic is in harnessing the power, not the power unleashed.
And yes it does bring into question why there are so many powerful undead wandering around when all anybody has to do is open the curtains.
But then that's maybe why there aren't so many undead wandering around in RL.
So perhaps the the way of looking at it is that only a few ultra powerful undead manage to gain the ability to resist sunlight and we don't actually come across any of them in BG.
Basically Kangaax is full of shite.
I don't see any cultural/stereotypical reason why a Lich would have a weakness to natural sunlight. In which case, Sunray is so damaging precisely because it's not natural sunlight, it's "magical" sunlight. In which case it'd make sense for magical resistances to mitigate the harm.
Or for them not to mitigate the harm. The thing about magic is that it gets to be as arbitrary as it wants, because magic. Why does Firestorm bypass magic resistances while Fireball doesn't? Because magic!
Personally, I prefer the SR version, does 6d6 to anything, undead take a ton more damage (1d6/level, which for a Sunray is going to be 14d6+), but instant death only applies to vampires and shadow-type creatures.
Kangaxx has a pretty reasonable chance of barely living through a L14 Sunray, but not a very good chance at all of a L20 Sunray.
It only seems that the mages most powerful spells are in the higher levels because you're fighting enemies that are also that powerful. I think it would be pretty terrifying to face even a 5th level mage. Think about the arsenal of spells: Fireball, lightning bolt, skull trap, Melf's minute meteors, monster summoning, slow, haste, hold person, dire charm, acid arrow, invisibility, horror, mirror image, charm person, sleep, magic missile, color spray, spook, blindness. You could wipe out an entire town without batting an eyelash!
EDIT: And it has already happened. Feeblemind is not a worthless spell. Thanks, @Somesort!