beholders anti-magic ray???

[Guest Mad Wizzzard]

How do the beholders anti-magic ray work in SCS?

How do one counter the anti-magic ray so you can fight them legit and not fucking chees them.

I am all for difficult fights, and the ability to prepare for them to.

 

You cast spell immunity, abjuration for a reason.

You cast spell turning for a reason.

You cast spell deflection for a reason.

You cast spell  shield for a reason.

You cast spell trap for a reason.

 

If this is not the way the fuck you. If they have a special way to attack one's defenses then there should be one way to counter it?

 

Or am i missing something?

Am i the asshoul here?

 

//Thank you for your time

[jmerry]

The anti-magic ray, like the base game, has type MAGICATTACK. That means it ignores most spell defenses, and only Spell Shield works against it.

Spell Shield not only blocks the ray, but also sticks around to block the next one. And the next after that, and so on ad infinitum. The interaction is so overpowered and cheesy that I wrote a tweak to fix it, changing things so that the shield goes away after blocking one ray.

2 hours ago, Guest Mad Wizzzard said:

...so you can fight them legit and not fucking chees them.

A pipe dream. Groups of beholders are so inherently cheesy that there's no way to fight them without some sort of cheese. Either you have some trick that trivializes the fight or you get destroyed by the constant flood of eye rays. Beholders are meant to be solitary boss monsters, but the game just doesn't use them that way.

Here's one trick that SCS adds: the improved beholder AI only uses its antimagic ray if the target is a spellcaster or if the target has one of a certain collection of buffs. Give a pure warrior some potions of magic protection for 100% magic resistance, and they have nothing to fear from eye rays. The attack rays can't get past the immunity, and the antimagic rays won't be used to dispel it.

[subtledoctor]

You should use jmerry’s mod. 

Alternatively, you could use my Magic Battles Revised mod (“MBR”), which is a top-down overhaul of how Spell Deflections and Magic Attacks work. In particular, with Spell Revisions and MBR, you can gird a mage with Spell Shield + Dispelling Screen + Spell Deflection + Globe of Invulnerability. Even against groups of 2-4 beholders, this combo gave me 3-4 rounds of invulnerability, which let me 1) cast some attack spells; 2) throw some summons in their faces; and 3) shore up my own defenses with more of the above spells. The fights did not feel cheesy, they felt really dangerous, but they were still surmountable challenges with a lot of effort and some white-knuckle moments. Maybe worth a look. 

[Guest Mad Wizzzard]

4 hours ago, jmerry said:

A pipe dream. Groups of beholders are so inherently cheesy that there's no way to fight them without some sort of cheese. Either you have some trick that trivializes the fight or you get destroyed by the constant flood of eye rays. Beholders are meant to be solitary boss monsters, but the game just doesn't use them that way.

Then perhaps you should revisit the tweak you did so they fit how the game uses them, ass it is now it is just shit.

 

4 hours ago, jmerry said:

Give a pure warrior some potions of magic protection for 100% magic resistance, and they have nothing to fear from eye rays. The attack rays can't get past the immunity, and the antimagic rays won't be used to dispel it.

I will use this then. If the fight cant be hard but rewarding, i just get it over with...

 

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

You should use jmerry’s mod. 

Alternatively, you could use my Magic Battles Revised mod (“MBR”), which is a top-down overhaul of how Spell Deflections and Magic Attacks work. In particular, with Spell Revisions and MBR, you can gird a mage with Spell Shield + Dispelling Screen + Spell Deflection + Globe of Invulnerability. Even against groups of 2-4 beholders, this combo gave me 3-4 rounds of invulnerability, which let me 1) cast some attack spells; 2) throw some summons in their faces; and 3) shore up my own defenses with more of the above spells. The fights did not feel cheesy, they felt really dangerous, but they were still surmountable challenges with a lot of effort and some white-knuckle moments. Maybe worth a look. 

Thax for the tip, but i got enough mods already.

[polytope]

Define cheese?

Let's say some summons are sent one at a time against the beholders, just to briefly delay them, while your mages throw a malison + chaos at them (confused beholders can't use their rays), still have to keep your mages slightly out of LoS, to avoid coming under anti-magic ray effect, and they'll try to remove confusion from each other with AMR. Or an invisible mage can walk up to a group (unless with elder orbs/hive mothers!) with pre-set Spell Trigger:3xSunfire & Contingency - on hit:Sunfire - 4x sunfires usually fries a group but it's possible one will survive. Since these tactics involve a bit of risk, some wouldn't call it cheesy.

Otherwise, if you can get save vs spells and death to zero, only damage from their wounding ray (wear girdle of inertial barrier) and bite becomes an issue, besides paralyzation/domination which you can get undispellable immunity to from either rages or Adjatha/Arbane's etc. Delver's plate is useful if fighting them like so. Spells like Spirit Armour and (with IWD spells component) Emotion: Hope may also help, I don't think those are specifically targeted for removal by anti-magic ray but might be incidentally if the beholder is trying to remove your haste for example.

Iirc, with SCS beholder death rays no longer ignore magic resistance (unlike vanilla) and can't kill undead anymore (also contrary to vanilla), not sure whether this was intentional and you want to exploit it by sending them nishruu's (which can't fight but are 100% MR and will tie them up for a while) or skeleton warriors.

Edited November 28, 2022 by polytope

[jmerry]

The changes regarding instant-death effects for beholders against summons with the SCS beholder component:

- Beholders no longer get an instance of Death Spell. That's a no-save, no-MR kill, but each vanilla beholder can only use the power once.

- Beholders get a summon-only variant of their death rays. Unlike the standard version, it has no save. But since it's a Slay effect, it doesn't work on skeletons. Standard death rays were Kill effects (works on skeletons) in 2.5, but became Slay effects in 2.6.

In order to kill summoned skeletons, an SCS beholder has to use other rays like Disintegrate or Flesh to Stone, and also get lucky beating saves and MR. Certainly possible, but rare because the anti-summon death ray is such a high priority.

[polytope]

1 hour ago, jmerry said:

In order to kill summoned skeletons, an SCS beholder has to use other rays like Disintegrate or Flesh to Stone, and also get lucky beating saves and MR. Certainly possible, but rare because the anti-summon death ray is such a high priority.

Can skellies be petrified in your game?

The change of death rays from opcode #13 -> opcode #55 was probably so Death Ward could block it for PCs (makes little difference with SCS because protections like DW get targetted with AMR), but no summon by default has immunity to #13 - edit; except for Ras the dancing sword, and the spectral blades summoned from spectral brand.

Edited November 28, 2022 by polytope

[jmerry]

Death Ward does protect against opcode 13. It's literally the first effect in the spell. That's not an issue.

As for petrification ... my bad. RING95 has a ton of stuff on it, and petrification immunity is one of the pieces. Of all the beholder rays, only the damage rays, slow, disintegration, and antimagic have any chance of affecting skeletons. (And of course, there's usually nothing there for antimagic rays to dispel)

[polytope]

1 minute ago, jmerry said:

Death Ward does protect against opcode 13. It's literally the first effect in the spell. That's not an issue.

Not in my build, it would protect from vanilla game vorpals too then, no? I wonder why they bothered to change from kill target to slay at all, if that's going to be the new default.

[jmerry]

What game version are you looking at? I'm looking at vanilla BG2EE 2.6 and 2.5 here.

Also, there's one way for a vorpal effect to beat Death Ward. Planetar swords have a dispel effect with the same probabilities as the vorpal effect, and the dispel is the first thing in the stack. If the dispel succeeds on its level check and the victim fails the save, they get dispelled and killed in one blow despite Death Ward. Snicker-snack.

Beholder death rays previously just had the opcode 13 and a sound effect. Weirdly, the kill effect was level zero and the sound effect was level 5. 2.6 changed things up to be more like Finger of Death - same opcode 55, same visual effects, even the same power level of 7.

It looks like the developers decided the old version of the death ray was kind of a mess, and chose to rebuild it from scratch based on FoD.