Chosen of Cyric - getting killed repeatedly!

[fncruz]

Wow! This battle at the end of Chapter 6 is insane. The enemies all start invisible and hasted and come right up to you immediately and do septuple damage killing many characters in 1 hit.

 

I do manage to get Stoneskin up quickly but nothing else. I cannot get rid of their invisibility quickly.

I have tried turning my entire party invisible but the enemies can apparently see through that.

What strategies have people used successfully?

[jmerry]

Chapter 6 of what, and what are the circumstances of the encounter? The only "Chosen of Cyric" I'm aware of are one of the ToB pocket plane challenges, which are rather easy since you can buff in advance and even have some time to lay a few traps, plus it's super late and you have all the epic tools.

In any case, standard anti-thief tactics can only help. Mitigate backstab damage with stoneskins and equipping melee weapons, move around so they can't get in their swings, remove invisibility as soon as possible, see if you can blindly hit them with AoE effects.

[polytope]

This isn't SCS content, it's Rogue Rebalancing.

Anyway, I've played with the Chosen of Cyric before, you'll probably want Spell Trigger/Sequencer or Chain Contingency (from Limited Wish if you don't have it) to get buffs up quickly enough and remove their advantage of a full prepped ambush vs your unbuffed party. The main enemy has a ring granting immunity to divination, so you can't remove his Improved Invisibility with True Seeing etc. you'll need Remove Magic for that (you can collect his ring, but I wouldn't use it, it's a game breaker). None except the barbarian are immune to disabling effects, but they all have good saves, so you can use disabling weapons that don't allow saves (Flail of Ages, Soul Reaver etc.).

Also, not to bash SCS but it says a lot that in the current version the CoC are so much harder relative to other late SoA content. I remember around version 15 (with max settings) and this encounter didn't stand out as a major leap in difficulty.

[Lilaina]

Fighters should pop hardiness and have items that protect from confusion. Divine spell casters have sanctuary. A dispel from Keldorn, a bard, or a pure cleric should work wonders.

After spending the first round on protections I just timestop/improved alacrity cheese and dump a spellbook on them.

[subtledoctor]

8 hours ago, polytope said:

Also, not to bash SCS but it says a lot that in the current version the CoC are so much harder relative to other late SoA content. I remember around version 15 (with max settings) and this encounter didn't stand out as a major leap in difficulty.

Does SCS change this encounter? I thought RR used its own custom scripts etc. And that encounter was designed from the get-go to be a huge leap in difficulty compared to the rest of SoA - putting the party in the position of unprepped enemy stooges jumped by a fully buffed, coordinated party.

I always liked the encounter, but eventually I stopped installing it, because it relies on certain tools and tactics to overcome - as mentioned above, high-level Remove Magic, early access to HLAs, certain OP items, etc. With the game tweaks I install these days (SR, IR, Randomizer, a bunch of other stuff), those tools don't work the same way. So the enemies become much less vulnerable. It would be nice if the encounter weren't so dependent on particular "correct" tools and strategies (reminds me a bit of Tactics and similar old mods)... but if it were more adaptable to different rules, it wouldn't be as hard and that would frustrate the design intent. The tension there kind of highlights the limits of the game engine...

[polytope]

On 1/18/2023 at 11:37 PM, subtledoctor said:

Does SCS change this encounter? I thought RR used its own custom scripts etc. And that encounter was designed from the get-go to be a huge leap in difficulty compared to the rest of SoA - putting the party in the position of unprepped enemy stooges jumped by a fully buffed, coordinated party.

In recent versions SCS's modifications to e.g. fighters may alter the enemies' proficiencies (haven't checked, but they did touch other mod added fighters), my point was more that it didn't feel like a vastly greater challenge than the major SCS - an outdated version! - battles before then.

Btw. If any modder wants to avoid these global proficiency changes to an introduced fighter/ranger/paladin etc., it can be done through in game script by creating/equiping their weapon GiveItemCreate() ... FillSlot() and also applying proficiencies through a .spl, there are other ways, but even more awkward.

About being unprepped, that became expected after enemy mages got the Wish:Breach option, although they rarely have allies with the same melee/backstabbing power as the chosen.

Edited January 20, 2023 by polytope