IA v6 Final

[mikel123]

Interesting, did not realize it was actually treated as 200 for lowering purposes.

 

The battle was weird... I definitely "accidentally" killed him on one attempt in which I'm pretty sure his Hardiness never triggered.

 

As for HLAs, I just used Hardiness on my PC vagrant, and I suppose a Smilodon. I've seen people talking about using Critical Strike in many battles, but I've not activated it once yet, in any battle. Losing the ability to use the cat figurine, or a potion, for 6 seconds, is suicide in this game. I tend to maneuver my fighters aggressively, keeping them in the thick of things and not retreating, but I try to keep their spell/item usage for defensive purposes. I also hate the oil of resurgence... that's the 6 HP per round for 10 rounds, right? Just doesn't seem like enough to be worthwhile. My deaths in this game tend to come from 3 or 4 hits in a row, not 3 or 4 hits over the course of a few rounds. Although as the resistances begin to pile up, maybe the oil will be more useful, who knows.

 

Forged the belt and the 20k ioun stone upgrade (the upgraded stone has protection from critical hits, which is not mentioned in the docs - if not for that, I would not have forged it). With the Crimson ioun stone I just gained, I now have all 6 characters with protection from critical hits (this is something I didn't pay attention to until now, to my detriment, because you typically have this for your entire party early in Ch. 2 in vanilla). Indigo ioun went to the riskbreaker.

 

Party is at about 5.15M exp. Still well below where it seems most people recommend Supreme Leader and/or Orcus, so possible next steps:

 

- Bodhi

- the golem group in WK4 (I think it's two bones and three elemental golems?)

- Assassin hideout at Firkraag's lair

- Ranger expanded stronghold

- Twisted Rune rogue stone doorway

[lynx]

all iuon stones offer protection from critical hits. It's a silly engine feature - anything you put in the head slot will do, also that mask of king Strohm. You'd need a tiny item mod and tobex installed to avoid that.

[Saros]

Interesting, did not realize it was actually treated as 200 for lowering purposes.

 

The battle was weird... I definitely "accidentally" killed him on one attempt in which I'm pretty sure his Hardiness never triggered.

 

As for HLAs, I just used Hardiness on my PC vagrant, and I suppose a Smilodon. I've seen people talking about using Critical Strike in many battles, but I've not activated it once yet, in any battle. Losing the ability to use the cat figurine, or a potion, for 6 seconds, is suicide in this game. I tend to maneuver my fighters aggressively, keeping them in the thick of things and not retreating, but I try to keep their spell/item usage for defensive purposes. I also hate the oil of resurgence... that's the 6 HP per round for 10 rounds, right? Just doesn't seem like enough to be worthwhile. My deaths in this game tend to come from 3 or 4 hits in a row, not 3 or 4 hits over the course of a few rounds. Although as the resistances begin to pile up, maybe the oil will be more useful, who knows.

 

Forged the belt and the 20k ioun stone upgrade (the upgraded stone has protection from critical hits, which is not mentioned in the docs - if not for that, I would not have forged it). With the Crimson ioun stone I just gained, I now have all 6 characters with protection from critical hits (this is something I didn't pay attention to until now, to my detriment, because you typically have this for your entire party early in Ch. 2 in vanilla). Indigo ioun went to the riskbreaker.

 

Party is at about 5.15M exp. Still well below where it seems most people recommend Supreme Leader and/or Orcus, so possible next steps:

 

- Bodhi

- the golem group in WK4 (I think it's two bones and three elemental golems?)

- Assassin hideout at Firkraag's lair

- Ranger expanded stronghold

- Twisted Rune rogue stone doorway

 

As for Lord Roenall - it's completely possible to kill him without him activating his Hardiness, by simply not hitting him first, waiting for him to activate another HLA (like GWW) and then hit him with everything you've got, killing him in less than a round. Works vs other powerful fighters with undislellable Hardinesses as well, and you're gonna meet a lot of them eventually (Supreme Gith leader being one, Captain Tombelten in the Oasis fight being another, and these have a lot more than 1 lousy Hardiness).

 

Crticical strike is a very important IA HLA. Your fighters basically need only two types of HLAs - Critical Strike and Hardiness. The correct splitting of these two is all that matters. I think for a 40-th level fighter they should be something like 7-13 or 8-12. At first, you should keep them of equal number (i.e. picking 1 Hardiness, then a second, then Power Attack, then a couple Criticals, then keep an even number Hardiness/Criticals up until you reach 5-6 Hardinesses). In the game, there are enemies with astounding AC, which are very hard to hit without Criticals, and you really need to score as many hits as possible vs them. Sendai, Abazigal, the Supreme Leader, the Ancient Dragon are all such enemies. Plus, criticals usually help you eliminate the lesser minions in an important fight and turn to the more serious enemies on time, or simply to prevent the lesser minions to activate some of their scary abilities. Critical strikes are also very important vs dragons - a calculated Critical Strike assault can kill Firkraag extremely fast, for example. But also vs Saladrex (who wears a helmet), criticals are very important, since you have to score hits with normal weapons (i.e. at -5 THAC0) vs his excellent AC.

 

The Oil of Resurgence is OK on Core, don't forget you can stack the effect of 3 oils and get the effect of a priest's Regeneration spell for 8 rounds. On Core, they're sound. Of course, they just are too tempting to sell for 450 gp/piece, because they really aren't that extraordinary.

 

BTW, if you haven't noticed, in this game certain quest items cost a lot of money. Mask of King Strohm for example is worth 2 400 if sold. It also protects vs Critical hits and can be worn by anyone. You can also sell things like Elder Orb's eyestalk or Elder Brain's blood (or Kuo-toan blood), the books in bodhi's lair (2nd floor, trapped chest previously with Ashen Scales armor, chapter 6), Brine potions, etc, etc. Before throwing anything away, first check if it could be sold...

[mikel123]

Ah - for some reason I thought I read that the critical hit protection was removed from a bunch of these headgears in IA, I guess I'm wrong on that.

 

Your explanation of the hardiness thing makes sense, I should have thought of that.

 

Sounds like my battles are lasting longer than some of these critical-strike-fests you mention. I'll try that out when I get a few more castings of them (right now, I have no more than one per character, or two I guess with Smite). For now I've just settled into using the item/spell each round as a defensive move.

 

Good point about the oils stacking, though IIRC there is an .exe game engine bug that makes non-similar regen rates unstackable, so I can't combine the oil with the RVE regeneration, the ranger regeneration, etc. I think I'd rather have the gold though, agreed.

 

Yes, I know about the mask and already sold it (I actually figured if the critical hit protection was removed from a bunch of items, it was on that one as well, I'm not sure I even read the description) but did not know about those books being worth selling. What a weird quirk of the game.

[mikel123]

Bodhi was easy, first try no issues. Forgot to even activate Hardiness, Contact with Nature, etc. Dragon Breath was surprisingly effective against the vampires, Limited Wish helped avoid Bodhi's level drain for a bit (though she did get protag down to level 12 before I ran him away), so it was basically a fight against I think 6 or 7 skeleton grandlords, which is not difficult at this point.

 

No issues with the Elemental and Bone golems in WK4. Elemental Golems seem pretty paltry at this point after dealing with their greater counterparts. Across the three of them, they were only able to summon 4 Coins to help them out.

 

Really starting to feel good about this party. The late dual class was slowing me down for a while, but now I have two legitimate frontliners that are near impervious, two other frontliners (vagrant/riskbreaker) who are getting there, and Imoen handles 90% of spellcasting while Cernd just sits along for the ride.

[Saros]

Bodhi was easy, first try no issues. Forgot to even activate Hardiness, Contact with Nature, etc. Dragon Breath was surprisingly effective against the vampires, Limited Wish helped avoid Bodhi's level drain for a bit (though she did get protag down to level 12 before I ran him away), so it was basically a fight against I think 6 or 7 skeleton grandlords, which is not difficult at this point.

 

No issues with the Elemental and Bone golems in WK4. Elemental Golems seem pretty paltry at this point after dealing with their greater counterparts. Across the three of them, they were only able to summon 4 Coins to help them out.

 

Really starting to feel good about this party. The late dual class was slowing me down for a while, but now I have two legitimate frontliners that are near impervious, two other frontliners (vagrant/riskbreaker) who are getting there, and Imoen handles 90% of spellcasting while Cernd just sits along for the ride.

 

Bodhi's Grandlords depend on your PC experience. She can have up to 8.

 

The golem spawn on WK lvl 4 is a random spawn (not a fixed group). So if you go there at lower levels (somehow) you will encounter far less powerful golems. But the thing is not to slaughter the golems fast (that's easy). The real idea of this fight is finding the tactic with which to slay all 18 minor golems that can be gated by the 3 Elemental Golems. Figure it out. Use the portal as a way out if need be, golems can't follow. Elemenal golems at this point are cash+xp machines, and you're really hoping for more Gem Golems...

[mikel123]

Yeah, I might give it another shot and go for that... I guess with the portal it's pretty easy since you can essentially have all of your buffs fresh for the entire fight that way (and can save mid-battle). The elemental golems actually summoned slower than I thought, so it would be a pretty prolonged battle to wait for all of their summons.

 

Interesting that in some ways the XP is cumulative - i.e. if you fight these battles with more XP, you'll get more XP out of them too. If you're maximizing all of these battles, do you hit the level cap before the end of the game? Or is all of this maximizing "assumed" by the mod to be done and even with it, you'll only hit the cap at the very end?

[Saros]

Interesting that in some ways the XP is cumulative - i.e. if you fight these battles with more XP, you'll get more XP out of them too. If you're maximizing all of these battles, do you hit the level cap before the end of the game? Or is all of this maximizing "assumed" by the mod to be done and even with it, you'll only hit the cap at the very end?

 

Yes indeed, it's interesting, that's why it's best to trigger certain random summons at certain high-levels, and try to collect as much xp as possible to reach that higher levels from mostly static encounters.

 

Probably, the "maximization" is somewhat assumed by the mod, since after collecting almost every bit of xp in SoA with a 5-person party (prior to Irenicus on the tree) and WK (without the Ancient dragon, the seal fights or Demogorgon), my party was still 3 million xp short of the xp cap. And experience in ToB is not that much!

 

IMHO it's possible for a 6-person party to hit the cap before the last fight, but only if 70% of the tougher enemies met during the run are "drained out" of minor summons.

 

There are other tricks for gaining experience, like you don't have to reach lvl 40 with your fighters, since that means about 2 million xp difference between lvl 39 and 40 - you may temporarily kill them whenever possible for the other party members to assemble more xp. Same true about a R-C when hitting clerical level 38-39.

[mikel123]

Hmmm... I think you're in better shape than you think you are, then. I'm pretty sure vanilla ToB (without WK) has more than 3 million exp for a party of six (EDIT: probably 2.5 million, actually). I'll try to record where I am when ToB begins and ends and see how much is there in IA.

 

Also, good tip about killing the guys. I suppose it's mostly relevant to get the guys with extra spell slots or spell levels (for Dispel/Remove Magic purposes), rather than the one single HLA for the fighters.

 

EDIT: looks like around 300k quest experience in TOB, plus around 150k in quest experience in WK 5 and Demogorgon, not to mention the monsters themselves and such. I'm sure with the more hefty IA enemies and experiences, you'd have no problem capping before fighting Balthazar.

[mikel123]

Assassin stronghold, not too bad. Kind of blew my load with Dragon's Breath and ADHW right away, which in hindsight was a bad idea because assassins just kept coming (I thought they were already all right there).

 

Managed to do it on the first try, but if I had to do it over again, I'd probably spend round 1 summoning a top-level summon from each character, something like a Smilodon, Noble Efreet, Greater Swanmay, and a Planetar once the Alacrity on the sorceror was cast. The battle lasted longer than I expected, and would have been nice to have them in the fray. As it was, I just kind of ran into it with my 6 characters.

 

The mages were a little annoying, seemed like quite a few Remove Magics, and of course the Invisibility/Divination immunity combo. I saved them until the end, which in hindsight also may have been a bad idea. Probably should have gone after them immediately and just killed them quickly since they were vulnerable to normal weapons once you broke a couple stoneskins.

 

One of the few battles where I've used limited quantity consumables. Used two green scrolls of protection from poison, plus the Periapt, plus Gaxx, plus Vagrant immunity, which got 5 characters immune to poison and just left my Sorceror who was well back from the fray.

 

Realized I also have the new Chapter 6 areas to explore too (Forest of Tethyr, etc.), so could check that out before trying Orcus or the remainder of the Vagrant/Paladin stronghold.

[Saros]

Initial rune and elite rune assassins are indeed to be blown away by such spells (I use an opening of two Chain Contingencies on two different mages, with triple ADHW each, prepared a day early so I could use another set of those in the midst of the battle). However:

 

Guildmaster (while alive) gates in additional enemies - usually Master Assassins, but I've seen him gate an additional Golem, or even Assassin Coordinator

Master Assassins (while alive) gate a new set of Elite and regular Rune assassins each 5-6 rounds.

This battle I leave for when I have mages of level 26+, so they effectively dispel Coordinators' buffs with Remove magic, while party's own buffs are intact vs enemy Remove Magic.

 

Enemy mages here are immune to Slashing damage, keep that in mind.

 

The remainer of the Paladin stronghold isn't that much xp rewarding.

 

The new areas will give you a good, but not very notable amount of XP. Monsters are mostly vanilla, some even have their items rearranged (no Time Stop scroll on the mage in the North Forest, for example). BTW, you may want to increase your XP you gain from vanilla trolls a bit, by killing them with Death spell first, and then killing them again (either with a second Death spell, or the usual way).

 

BTW you probably went through those battles already, but Tahazaar and Ka'rashur can also gate additional summons for some time. Some of their summons are fixed not to give xp, but other do, so it's best to drain them out of minions before finally killing them. There's lots of xp like this one, and especially with a 6-person party, you should collect it all.

[mikel123]

Grandfather of Rune Assassins was pretty tough. Had to reload once, and the second try was really down to the wire. The Coordinators had a well-timed Remove Magic, and I didn't use any protection from poison scrolls so I had some issues there. My Fighter/Mage was entangled and killed around the midpoint in the battle. My only Recast Vital Energy casting pulled up a Grandlord, so my sorceror was occupied running from that for a while. Grandfather had a ton of Absolute Immunities, Hardiness, etc., and my Berserker Mage ran out of Breach spells (3 spells, 2 scrolls on hand). Finally I returned with the sorc for a final breach, my sorc died to the grandlord (who I promptly killed), and it looked like I was finally head up with the Grandfather. Used a bunch of superior healing potions but was able to take him down. Great place for the SS of Mask.

 

Biggest issue here was babysitting the characters and summons to go after the Master Assassins. On my first try, I just let them retarged mostly at will, which worked horribly of course. They were well dispersed though, showing up all over the place, and tough to keep up with.

 

Will probably try the Swanmay quest or Vanya's follow-up next.

[Saros]

Again, thing with levels. In my own attempt, my mages were level 27, so they had no problem with enemy Remove Magic. Also, my tactic included splitting forces in two battlegrounds: one to the S-E, where were the fighters + all summons, one to the N-W, where were the B-M and R-C vs the Grandfather + most of his minions + the two Coordinators. This way my own summons were focused on helping the Vagrant and RB to survive. Sorceress stood between them like a connection, but then again, her Remove Magicks were high-enough leveled for the Coordinators to die in the 2nd round of the fight.

 

BTW, if you have the proper characters and spells, you don't need ProPoison scrolls vs these enemies. Vagrant is immune to poison, RB should wear Gaxx, R-C, B-M and Sorceress under Stoneskins the whole time (watch them carefully, especially those unfer attack).

 

The Short Sword of Mask is usually located in Watcher's keep (Green Wyrm). However for parties that can trigger the Grandfather of Assassins fight, the sword obviously in his hands. But this fight is very xp and gold rewarding (even more if you can stand those Master Assassins to gate in all their minion Rune Assassins, but I can't risk it in my types of games).

[mikel123]

I can't have level 27 mages for this fight in my types of games.

[mikel123]

Heck of a fight to finish this quest... the 3 Elemental Golems and one Ultra Golem. Took me a couple of tries to notice it was the Ultra Golem summoning those Ambers.

 

Indeed used the Maze trick on Auriel. I don't have the slightest idea how this is possible without it, one Elemental Golem and the Ultra go right after her and she's at Injured by the time I even reach her to Maze.

 

It was the fourth try that I ended up beating it. Strategy was to send the Swanmays, Mord Swords, Noble Efreet, and Cernd up to the Ultra and hang back with the rest of the party and a couple of Greater Swanmays and Smilodon. Two Elemental Golems spawn near where Cernd *was* (which is now where my party is). I'm able to drop one of them quickly, and the purge magic hits Cernd because he's the only one within view. Next I go for the Ultra, while leaving a Greater Swanmay or two to deal with the remaining elemental golem I'm leaving behind. Beat on the Ultra for a while, guessed right on the purge and only had two guys purged, and killed it before he managed to purge again. Two elemental golems remained, as well as two ambers and two coins. By the time I killed the elementals, there were 4 more coin/gem golems in the fray. Ended up using all of my sorceror's level 9 (alacrity and planetar), 7 (animal summoning), 6 (improved haste), 5 (animate dead), and 4 (ray of fragmentation) spells. And probably 25 potions of superior healing. Yeesh. This might take the crown of "hardest fight" from the Kobold Crystal fight in spellhold.

 

Sitting on a TON of cash and decided to blow some on a pair of Boots of Speed, so now I have two of those and the ranger boots of speed. From the looks of things in Near Infinity, I can get a helm of Defense in Forests of Tethyr, to craft the dragon helm upgrade. So that's on my short to-do list, which looks like:

 

- finish expanded Paladin quest (#2)

- Tethyr area

- forge dragon helm

- supreme leader

- Orcus

 

Currently sitting on about 500k gold and 5.8M experience for protagonist.