The final ToB battle - Ascension/SCS2

[czacki]

I have to admit, it was frustrating Took me like two hours. I wasn't aware that you can get Balthazar to join you and I've been forced to face all of them...

 

I summoned a planetar and four fire elementals to act as meatshields for illaseera and her dispelling arrows.Also, I put a wall of spike traps first. I decided not to use the supreme cheese: I wasn't wishresting to cover the entire map with those to blow all of the five to the moon instantly.

 

The traps, unfortunately, always picked Abazigal as the target. I wanted them to blow up Ilaseera, but well, at least Abazigal was killed instantly.

 

I cast focus with my F/M/T and stopped time with my Berserker/Mage while casting breach on Balthazar with my wildmage. For some reason this removes his immunity to time stop & makes him take more damage. He had to go down first - his aoe stun/knockdown is just too much and screws up the whole tactic, plus, he constantly heals himself, making it nearly impossible to kill him outside the timestop bubble. As he went down, I breached Ilaseera. When Melissan joined the fight, I had to do a tricky stunt that took me loads of reloads: My F/M/T and B/M moved to mop the floor with Ilaseera, my planetar moved with my Wild mage to cast insect plague on Sendai, while my Ranger/Cleric cast insect plague on Mellisan herself to stop her from using Timestop. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. I'm not sure why - sometimes i.e. the plague would reach Sendai but not affect her, and sometimes, she could just cast normally under the plague. Not sure.

 

Either way, it worked after like 10 reloads and both Mellisan and Sendai couldn't stop time anymore. This was important because under Time stop, Mellisan could easily kill one of my party members and hoping she would get drawn to my wall of summons instead of my party members was a lottery.

 

The next stop was easy. My wildmage used greater alacrity and with a combo of Spellthrust+spellstrike+Breach, Sendai was exposed and vulnerable. Took me three seconds to remove her from my sight. I also got rid of that annoying celestial next to her.

 

Yaga shura was formality. At this moment Mellisan succeded in destroying stoneskins of most of my party, so I had to manouver a bit and draw her to my summon so that my guys can recast their buffs. Unfortunately, for some reason, Melissan insta-killed my Ranger-Cleric when he was tanking her. Oh well, pity. I still could raise him through my next Planetar, but decided he wasn't really needed now that just Melissan remained.

 

Well, both my damage dealers (F/M/T and B/M) had high APR (10 and 9.5, respectively), and 24/25 str, plus F/M/T used assassinate and critical strike, with Wildmage constantly breaching any attempts of using PfMW, so... it took only like 20 seconds to finish the battle. My poor R/C got revived by the Solar.

 

Frustrating (especially that insect plague part - bug?), but it worked. Thanks for the mod, I managed to successfully beat it, without too much frustration. Good job and great work Yup I used a custom team but just because I consider the original NPCs very weak and inapriopriate for a high difficulty mod.

 

Thoughts:

 

-Abazigal too weak. Shouldn't he transform to his dragon form? He's a dragon, after all. makes little sense he sticks to his weaker human form & dies in it.

-Yaga-Shura too weak. He does nothing, pretty much, and dies even to fire elementals attacking him... Some limited ability usage, maybe?

-Sendai too strong. Again, she uses the cheesy wish that ALWAYS allows her to get rid of all spell protections. There is no counter against this except for power word: reload. I'd suggest getting rid of that component: it's not fair (it always gives them the destroy spell protections wish, even though it SHOULD be a random choice between 5 options if SCS2 is meant to play fair).

-Breach removes timestop invulnerability, not sure if that was intended?

-Also, without breach, Balthazar/Ilassera refuse to die at times. They stay at "almost dead" and take damage but don't die. Scripted? This is especially tiresome with Balthazar who can heal himself.

-Balthazar can get hasted. Being a monk, he shouldn't be able to.

-Insect plague aka the only way not to go insane in this fight behaves very randomly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I didn't have the "fire shield destroys insect plague" component on because imho it nerfs the spell too hard and makes it utterly useless but neither Sendai, nor Mellisan cast fireshields, so...

[Reverendratbastard]

-Balthazar can get hasted. Being a monk, he shouldn't be able to.

 

applied to bhaalspawn, shouldn't class restrictions have 'wiggle room'? maybe consider it a HLA.

[czacki]

Well, in that case PC should also have "wiggle room" and he doesn't and iirc SCS2 is meant to be fair and true to rules.

[DavidW]

SCS2 doesn't touch Balthazar, so you're seeing either the Ascension, or the vanilla ToB, power set.

 

I sometimes revert really blatant breaches of the rules, but this doesn't feel like one: it's not clear to me that Balthazar (being a very high-level Bhaalspawn) can't have powers that transcend the standard ruleset. After all, the PC does by this stage.