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Completed Let's Solo Icewind Dale EE on Insane + Heart of Fury + Ironman!
- Thread starter Kayerts
- Start date
Kayerts
Arcane
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- Jan 28, 2011
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- 883
It really depends. He can usually be stashed near the entrance of the area map. If it's a small level, or there are a lot of heavy-hitters nearby, you just have to keep him alive for one round, and then you can cast invisibility on the clone. :D
Nevill
Arcane
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That's just fucked up.
So it is basically IDDQD until you run into someone who can see invisible, and those creatures are few and far between.
How do you deal with extreme fatigue induced by Haste? By resting every two encounters? The penalties were really bad in IWD OG, you couldn't hit anything after two subsequent castings of Haste even on a roll of 19.
Kayerts
Arcane
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- 883
That's just fucked up.
So it is basically IDDQD until you run into someone who can see invisible, and those creatures are few and far between.
It's pretty fucked up; I was a little proud of myself when I thought it up. Things that can still screw me include: endurance fights, enemies who can see invisible, casters who use true sight spells (the Kraken Mages in the last update would cast Oracle), anyone who casts Dispel Magic, and the occasional effect-based script wigging out and targeting me through invisibility. If I cast a spell when it's nearing expiry, I can also be boned. If anyone wants to ban this tactic versus specific fights, I'll listen and probably comply.
My toolkit's big enough now that I have a few other options.Hm, really? I don't remember that. I may just not have noticed, but I thought it just lowered your "luck" by 1--so, anything that required rolling a die had a 1 subtracted from the result before being evaluated. So, rolling a natural 20 would not crit; rolling a 2 was a critical miss, etc. Fatigue stacks with itself. I thought it was a pretty significant malus, but not as bad as you're remembering.
In any case, Improved Haste is both more powerful (doubles number of attacks, as opposed to Haste just adding one) and lacks Haste's period of subsequent fatigue. It's 6th level instead of 3rd, and it's single target only, though obviously the latter isn't an issue for a soloist. I'm fairly sure Improved Haste is new in EE; I'd probably feel worse about using it if not for the 3 or so false starts I had, trying to clear the Easthaven orc cave.
At max level, you get 7 6th-level spell slots, so I've been clearing a level or two before resting, barring foes that require specific buffs.
Nevill
Arcane
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Well, I'd like you to try a fight against Jotuns or that room with Bone Golems in chapter 6 without it.
I mean, that's just stupid.
Kayerts
Arcane
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- Jan 28, 2011
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- 883
I think I have a viable plan for the jotuns. Probably for the room you're talking about (the fallen temple?), too, although the idol there is one of those spellcasting enemies that falls into the "unknown but probably scary" category. Whether I can or not, I'll try.
Nevill
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2009
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- 11,211
Is there anything in the game that prevents stun?
In the original there was no defence. Free Action did not prevent is, so being hit by some nasty effect from the mushrooms in chapter 4 and failing your save was an easy way to die even for a high-level char. Always stood clear of them on my Ironman attempts.
And the idol in the temple casts Symbol: Stun IIRC. Or is my memory failing me? Circumventing that might be tricky.
In the original there was no defence. Free Action did not prevent is, so being hit by some nasty effect from the mushrooms in chapter 4 and failing your save was an easy way to die even for a high-level char. Always stood clear of them on my Ironman attempts.
And the idol in the temple casts Symbol: Stun IIRC. Or is my memory failing me? Circumventing that might be tricky.
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
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- 883
In the original game, no, I don't think there was any antistun. There were relatively few creatures that had stun effects, though; I think the Ice Golems and the Myconids (blue and red) were the only ones, and all of those fall prey to the masterful strategy known as "do not engage."
I checked out the idol with a cheated-up character--looks like it casts hopelessness. I believe both that and Symbol: Stun allow a save at -4; the Darkener will be just low enough to neutralize that. It also seems to have a lot of casts of Power Word: Kill, which is normally irrelevant, but if you drop below 60 hp in the melee, look out.
I checked out the idol with a cheated-up character--looks like it casts hopelessness. I believe both that and Symbol: Stun allow a save at -4; the Darkener will be just low enough to neutralize that. It also seems to have a lot of casts of Power Word: Kill, which is normally irrelevant, but if you drop below 60 hp in the melee, look out.
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
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- 883
VIII. TRIAL BY ORDEAL
1. Final Fantasy
2. The Bard's Tale
3. The Great Underground Empire
4. Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
5. Dungeons and Dragons
SOUNDTRACK
The Darkener flips a coin. An act of chance, an act of fate. His whole existence has come to this, and he would have to be a dull man indeed to ascribe to the culmination of his whole fate neither will nor meaning. He places himself in fate's hands.
TAILS.
Fate has dropped him. He shall return to the desert castle to face death on its cursed stones.
The Darkener knows he may not be coming back from this mission. If the Seer's magic does not save him again, he will want to have set his affairs in order. The nature of IWD is that he doesn't have many interpersonal connections, but he should see about the few he has.
First he returns to Kuldahar, goes to Arundel's house, and carves "THIS GUY SUCKED" into the floor around his decaying corpse. As an afterthought, he adds "More like ArunDULL," realizes that his final legacy in this world might be a bad joke, and leaves.
Next he travels to Lonelywood. He finds Hailee , since she's the one person whose life he's conclusively improved. "Little girl," he says, "I think you'll be all right now." He then heads to the local cemetery.
Whereupon he begins delivering a funeral oration for himself. He ends with an assertion that the Darkener has not died in vain, then digs a grave and lies in it until sunset. Hailee throws pinecones at him.
Finally he goes to the Whistling Gallows and speaks to the Halfling Man: "I have come here to die."
The Darkener flips a coin. An act of chance, an act of fate. His whole existence has come to this, and he would have to be a dull man indeed to ascribe to the culmination of his whole fate neither will nor meaning. He places himself in fate's hands.
TAILS.
Fate has dropped him. He shall return to the desert castle to face death on its cursed stones.
The Darkener knows he may not be coming back from this mission. If the Seer's magic does not save him again, he will want to have set his affairs in order. The nature of IWD is that he doesn't have many interpersonal connections, but he should see about the few he has.
First he returns to Kuldahar, goes to Arundel's house, and carves "THIS GUY SUCKED" into the floor around his decaying corpse. As an afterthought, he adds "More like ArunDULL," realizes that his final legacy in this world might be a bad joke, and leaves.
Next he travels to Lonelywood. He finds Hailee , since she's the one person whose life he's conclusively improved. "Little girl," he says, "I think you'll be all right now." He then heads to the local cemetery.
Whereupon he begins delivering a funeral oration for himself. He ends with an assertion that the Darkener has not died in vain, then digs a grave and lies in it until sunset. Hailee throws pinecones at him.
Finally he goes to the Whistling Gallows and speaks to the Halfling Man: "I have come here to die."
2. The Bard's Tale
Hobart whisks us away to the castle.
Clearing the courtyard is easy, since the F/M/T really shines when his enemies are distracted.Things go a little easier than they did last time until I hit the crypt:
Killing lots of undead takes more time as a noncleric, but isn't actually much more complex. Three White Doves' 20% chance to instakill makes this mercifully swift.
We return to Hobart:
and prepare to storm the citadel.
Spectral Guards remain tanky and fearsome. My mislead spell runs out, and the second one I conjure doesn't last a full round.
I put some distance between the guards and myself, then try again. It works.
The first level is clear, except for the hated rakshasha, the slayers of the Sufferer. We ascend to the next level; revenge is a dish best served cold.
We meet only Spectral Guards for opposition, until:
This scene is actually kinda cool. You hear the music of a distant pipe organ and eventually find your way here, where the Luremaster plays it before a ghostly audience until another guest arrives.
This level has beholders. Beholders are scary--they have an antimagic ray which can dispel buffs, as well as instant death and domination effects, and while I don't think they can see the invisible, their scripts do occasionally cast spells on me.
But they die in the end.
The less-bitchy way to fight these guys would've been to cast Spell Shield (the only spell in the game that can counter antimagic rays) and then Spell Deflection (to bounce their other rays back on them). We move on to the castle library, where we find a ton of high-level scrolls, and two curious books:
The Darkener becomes marginally less ugly. Eventually we meet the lord of the castle:
Lord Maluradek is a motherfucker, both in lore and in combat. He's got something like 800 HP with 25% physical and 75% magical resistance, and is a high-level F/M/C, which, I remind you, is a better class than ours. His amazing battle-prowess is a little odd, given the infodump we're about to get, but that's not our problem right now. Our problem is that he has true sight and a ton of debilitating spells: Symbol of Pain, Symbol of Hopelessnes, Dispel Magic, Power Word: Blind, Power Word: Kill, and on and on. It's a little weird, actually; he's built as a controller, but he doesn't have any minions to capitalize on the effects, aside from weak zombies summoned through Animate Dead. The good news is that he needs to cast Dispel Magic + something else to actually fuck me up.
I fight him for a while; he dispels my buffs; I retreat, recast, reinforce, and rejoin:
Whereupon he blinds me, because he's a complete fucker.
And he dispels me again. Oh, one thing about this pic: Improved Invisibility is one of the best buffs in the game. -4 AC, +4 saves, and nominal nontargetability from spells (though good luck finding a caster whose script actually respects that) is fantastic. The thing is, the spell Improved Invisibility is a 4th level spell. The 4th and 6th levels of mage spells are probably the most useful in the game, with 2nd a distant third; level 4 contains spirit armor, stoneskin, improved invisibility, and dimension door. These are all really good spells, and you only have slots for 6 casts. Level 5 spells are comparatively weaker in IWD, so I use Shadow Door in lieu of Improved Invis. Same effect, just a 5th level spell.
Lord Maluradek has two interesting possessions. One is a useless sword with a cool name and lore:
And the other is a journal that explains the plot of Trials of the Luremaster:
Obscurity, eh? Seems like he knew the Darkener was coming for him for a while.
I think there are two main takeaways here:
1) The Luremaster was a bard.
2) As a corollary of the first point, bards are the worst things.
Beyond the Lord's chambers is a vault containing the key to the castle dungeons. But we're not going there yet; we've got some unfinished business.
I made three major mistakes last time:
1) I got debuffed.
2) I got surrounded.
3) I didn't fight like the biggest bitch in the world.
I'm going to try to avoid all three this time.
My minions start to tangle with the shapeshifters'. I summoned a simulacrum as part of my backup, but he goes down in the first round, I'm guessing to a death spell. The Darkener himself goes to work on the nearest rakshasha. They've got 300 HP and 50% damage reduction, so this takes a while:
But he goes down just as my last minions are dying. One down, two to go.
This is more or less how the last fight started; this time, I'm going to use their numbers against them:
Incendiary cloud's an 8th level spell that does large amounts of damage over time (~50 dmg/round for ten rounds, double in the unlikely event that someone fails a save) in a relatively small AOE. I have three casts memorized. I use them.
This ends one of the rakshasha. Only one left now, and he's weak.
And now he's nothing. As the last blow falls, the shadows swirling about the Darkener grow and take form before him: a familiar form, that of a young cleric with a terrible head injury.
"It seems you have endured."
"In enduring, I have grown strong."
The figure nodded, and the darkness swirled back into him, willingly this time. He felt stronger, more whole, no longer a shadowy revenant but truly alive again. In becoming whole, he knew what he had to do next.
He had to fight some trash mobs.
Clearing the courtyard is easy, since the F/M/T really shines when his enemies are distracted.Things go a little easier than they did last time until I hit the crypt:
Killing lots of undead takes more time as a noncleric, but isn't actually much more complex. Three White Doves' 20% chance to instakill makes this mercifully swift.
We return to Hobart:
and prepare to storm the citadel.
Spectral Guards remain tanky and fearsome. My mislead spell runs out, and the second one I conjure doesn't last a full round.
I put some distance between the guards and myself, then try again. It works.
The first level is clear, except for the hated rakshasha, the slayers of the Sufferer. We ascend to the next level; revenge is a dish best served cold.
We meet only Spectral Guards for opposition, until:
This scene is actually kinda cool. You hear the music of a distant pipe organ and eventually find your way here, where the Luremaster plays it before a ghostly audience until another guest arrives.
This level has beholders. Beholders are scary--they have an antimagic ray which can dispel buffs, as well as instant death and domination effects, and while I don't think they can see the invisible, their scripts do occasionally cast spells on me.
But they die in the end.
The less-bitchy way to fight these guys would've been to cast Spell Shield (the only spell in the game that can counter antimagic rays) and then Spell Deflection (to bounce their other rays back on them). We move on to the castle library, where we find a ton of high-level scrolls, and two curious books:
The Darkener becomes marginally less ugly. Eventually we meet the lord of the castle:
Lord Maluradek is a motherfucker, both in lore and in combat. He's got something like 800 HP with 25% physical and 75% magical resistance, and is a high-level F/M/C, which, I remind you, is a better class than ours. His amazing battle-prowess is a little odd, given the infodump we're about to get, but that's not our problem right now. Our problem is that he has true sight and a ton of debilitating spells: Symbol of Pain, Symbol of Hopelessnes, Dispel Magic, Power Word: Blind, Power Word: Kill, and on and on. It's a little weird, actually; he's built as a controller, but he doesn't have any minions to capitalize on the effects, aside from weak zombies summoned through Animate Dead. The good news is that he needs to cast Dispel Magic + something else to actually fuck me up.
I fight him for a while; he dispels my buffs; I retreat, recast, reinforce, and rejoin:
Whereupon he blinds me, because he's a complete fucker.
And he dispels me again. Oh, one thing about this pic: Improved Invisibility is one of the best buffs in the game. -4 AC, +4 saves, and nominal nontargetability from spells (though good luck finding a caster whose script actually respects that) is fantastic. The thing is, the spell Improved Invisibility is a 4th level spell. The 4th and 6th levels of mage spells are probably the most useful in the game, with 2nd a distant third; level 4 contains spirit armor, stoneskin, improved invisibility, and dimension door. These are all really good spells, and you only have slots for 6 casts. Level 5 spells are comparatively weaker in IWD, so I use Shadow Door in lieu of Improved Invis. Same effect, just a 5th level spell.
Lord Maluradek has two interesting possessions. One is a useless sword with a cool name and lore:
And the other is a journal that explains the plot of Trials of the Luremaster:
Obscurity, eh? Seems like he knew the Darkener was coming for him for a while.
I think there are two main takeaways here:
1) The Luremaster was a bard.
2) As a corollary of the first point, bards are the worst things.
Beyond the Lord's chambers is a vault containing the key to the castle dungeons. But we're not going there yet; we've got some unfinished business.
I made three major mistakes last time:
1) I got debuffed.
2) I got surrounded.
3) I didn't fight like the biggest bitch in the world.
I'm going to try to avoid all three this time.
My minions start to tangle with the shapeshifters'. I summoned a simulacrum as part of my backup, but he goes down in the first round, I'm guessing to a death spell. The Darkener himself goes to work on the nearest rakshasha. They've got 300 HP and 50% damage reduction, so this takes a while:
But he goes down just as my last minions are dying. One down, two to go.
This is more or less how the last fight started; this time, I'm going to use their numbers against them:
Incendiary cloud's an 8th level spell that does large amounts of damage over time (~50 dmg/round for ten rounds, double in the unlikely event that someone fails a save) in a relatively small AOE. I have three casts memorized. I use them.
This ends one of the rakshasha. Only one left now, and he's weak.
And now he's nothing. As the last blow falls, the shadows swirling about the Darkener grow and take form before him: a familiar form, that of a young cleric with a terrible head injury.
"It seems you have endured."
"In enduring, I have grown strong."
The figure nodded, and the darkness swirled back into him, willingly this time. He felt stronger, more whole, no longer a shadowy revenant but truly alive again. In becoming whole, he knew what he had to do next.
He had to fight some trash mobs.
3. The Great Underground Empire
I loot the books the rakshasas were guarding; there's actually one incredibly useful spell scroll there from BG2: spell immunity. This gives you immunity to an entire school of magic. In BG2, it was a mage's best friend against other mages. In IWD, it's great because it's the only defense against Dispel Magic you can get.
Moving on, there are five remaining levels of TotL. Here's the first:
As you can see, there's a big fight between the various mid-level chaff present here. "Be careful, guys," the Sufferer murmurs as he glides by. "Somebody could get hurt."
That is actually the only thing he needs to do to get to the exit, so, next level!
The gimmick with this one is that you need to retrieve two skulls at the end of two corridors to proceed. There are some more warring groups of monsters that you can walk past. Tactics!
Suffer not, indeed. The Luremaster then fills the room with physically immune slimes, because he's an annoying dick. We grab one very useful scroll that EE added here:
Protection From Magical Weapons is not quite as good as it was in BG2 (where basically every opponent exclusively used magical weapons), but it's still pretty great. Its main downside is that it's 6th level, i.e. it has to contend with Mislead and Improved Haste for slots.
I grab that and head down to the next level:
And a dozen slimes follow me. I try running back to flee:
And run into a jackalwere ambush. Looks like I'm going to have to fight.
The slimes fall to incendiary clouds, and the jackalweres fall to mislead shenanigans. I progress on and meet this bro:
So the plan here is basically to go to a bunch of caves, where there are a bunch of chests with a bunch of flawed gems. I'll then dump them all in another chest, which will make them flawless for some reason. Then I have to go collect them, and enter them in the correct order around a portal. If this sounds annoying, there's a reason for that. There are two primary points of tactical interest:
There's a huge fight in the southwest with some jackalweres, a flock of bats, and . . . glabrezus? Glabrezus are mid-high level demons, and as such have true sight. They're just melee mooks, but mislead tactics won't fool them. I slowly kill the bats, but as I do, more glabrezu come up to join:
There are a lot of these guys. The Sufferer calls for backup from the only reliable ally he has: himself.
His simulacrum can cast stoneskin, and as such, can tank pretty well. Mislead still gives me my absurd damage boosts, so I manage to carve my way through them quickly.
More of them keep coming.
The source is found: there are two dudes here, summoning endless numbers of demons who stay in our world until they're killed. That's weird, guys! I didn't know you could do that! If you could, you could probably summon to you an army of hellspawn that would bring doom upon all the world, without having to resort to, e.g., tiresome tactics involving building ANOTHER army to take control of an existing portal to Hell. Not sure why I chose that example, though!
Afterward, I meet a new and more annoying type of harpy, who's capable of frying me even while I'm invisible. There are also "stone nuisances," who can cast magic missile on me even through stealth. After I learn to cast Protection from Fire and Shield on myself to negate magic missiles, the rest of this follows easily. Not quickly, but easily.
Eventually I find and open the portal:
The Sufferer's been around long enough to know when a boss fight's coming. He buffs to the gills and walks through.
Moving on, there are five remaining levels of TotL. Here's the first:
As you can see, there's a big fight between the various mid-level chaff present here. "Be careful, guys," the Sufferer murmurs as he glides by. "Somebody could get hurt."
That is actually the only thing he needs to do to get to the exit, so, next level!
The gimmick with this one is that you need to retrieve two skulls at the end of two corridors to proceed. There are some more warring groups of monsters that you can walk past. Tactics!
Suffer not, indeed. The Luremaster then fills the room with physically immune slimes, because he's an annoying dick. We grab one very useful scroll that EE added here:
Protection From Magical Weapons is not quite as good as it was in BG2 (where basically every opponent exclusively used magical weapons), but it's still pretty great. Its main downside is that it's 6th level, i.e. it has to contend with Mislead and Improved Haste for slots.
I grab that and head down to the next level:
And a dozen slimes follow me. I try running back to flee:
And run into a jackalwere ambush. Looks like I'm going to have to fight.
The slimes fall to incendiary clouds, and the jackalweres fall to mislead shenanigans. I progress on and meet this bro:
So the plan here is basically to go to a bunch of caves, where there are a bunch of chests with a bunch of flawed gems. I'll then dump them all in another chest, which will make them flawless for some reason. Then I have to go collect them, and enter them in the correct order around a portal. If this sounds annoying, there's a reason for that. There are two primary points of tactical interest:
There's a huge fight in the southwest with some jackalweres, a flock of bats, and . . . glabrezus? Glabrezus are mid-high level demons, and as such have true sight. They're just melee mooks, but mislead tactics won't fool them. I slowly kill the bats, but as I do, more glabrezu come up to join:
There are a lot of these guys. The Sufferer calls for backup from the only reliable ally he has: himself.
His simulacrum can cast stoneskin, and as such, can tank pretty well. Mislead still gives me my absurd damage boosts, so I manage to carve my way through them quickly.
More of them keep coming.
The source is found: there are two dudes here, summoning endless numbers of demons who stay in our world until they're killed. That's weird, guys! I didn't know you could do that! If you could, you could probably summon to you an army of hellspawn that would bring doom upon all the world, without having to resort to, e.g., tiresome tactics involving building ANOTHER army to take control of an existing portal to Hell. Not sure why I chose that example, though!
Afterward, I meet a new and more annoying type of harpy, who's capable of frying me even while I'm invisible. There are also "stone nuisances," who can cast magic missile on me even through stealth. After I learn to cast Protection from Fire and Shield on myself to negate magic missiles, the rest of this follows easily. Not quickly, but easily.
Eventually I find and open the portal:
The Sufferer's been around long enough to know when a boss fight's coming. He buffs to the gills and walks through.
4. Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Hey, look, it's a bard. Who doesn't love bards?
The Luremaster praises us on our amazing ability to use the "walk past them" strategy for one of his mind-bending puzzles, and the cunning "bring the only two quest items to the quest target" maneuver for another.
He salutes us, as is proper. One of us is certainly about to die.
The fight begins. He teleports in spectral heroes, who, curiously, seem to be based on the named humanoids we've met in our stay here: Hobart, the Baneite cleric's gang in the southeast tower, and the suicidal paladin. I came pretty close to not recognizing them, because the ghosts are colorless and characterization in TotL is paper-thin, but I think that's who they're supposed to be.
One of them is scripted well enough to cast true sight, which fucks with my plan. Oh well, at least Spell Immunity: Abjuration is keeping their Dispel Magics off me!
Ha ha! Shit!
It appears that EE gave the mage spectral hero the ability to cast Ruby Ray of Reversal. I wasn't expecting it, because it's a Baldur's Gate 2 spell. It removes one spell-based protection; in this case, it took off my spell immunity. That leaves me open to the dispel magic immediately cast afterward. I try to rebuff, starting with Spell Immunity, but get hit in the process (because I'm unbuffed), interrupting my spell. I only had two castings of Spell Immunity, so my cunning plan appears to have failed.
Apparently the bros here have either infinite recasts of Dispel Magic, or a large finite number; I try to start rebuffing, but they just keep counterspelling me. I'm very vulnerable now; I haven't been drawing any effects with negative saving throw modifiers, but if I do, I'm boned. Ditto with direct damage spells. And the presence of three hard-hitting melee heroes means that I can't really engage. It's not looking good.
I'll admit that I paused for multiple minutes here, trying to figure out what my play was. They were rapidly running through my improved haste casts, and each of them seemed to have 300-400 HP. I couldn't realistically overcome that without buffs, and I was now trapped in this tiny room.
I eventually made two correct guesses:
Oil of Speed is a potion that boosts your movement like Haste does, but doesn't alert the AI that it needs to debuff you. I run up and--yes, sure enough, Three White Doves IS capable of disrupting the heroes; there are no scripted immunities to it. I exhale. New plan is to assassinate the casters, then cast my few remaining buffs to take down the melee heroes. I don't have any Misleads left, but given the 20% chance to kill on hit, I just need to be able to stand up to them for a few rounds.
I manage to take out one more, while losing another 20% of my health:
Two down, four to go, plus the Luremaster. Can I take out the Paladin?
I get mobbed. I'm now below 50% health. This is looking bad.
Wait. I'm below 50% health!
The chain contigency I set back in Dorn's Deep flares alive. Mirror Image, Shadow Door, and Stoneskin are all cast. I've got enough buffs to take out the final four!
I chug my precious potions of extra healing while I do; the battle's not over.
But the last spectral hero falls without doing any more harm to me. The only thing left is the Luremaster.
For some reason, I forgot the Luremaster was a ghost and switched to my sword. This was probably dumb since, on thinking about it, Three White Doves can probably disrupt him. Anyway, he does this massively annoying thing where he teleports to a different corner of the room every round after you manage to close with him in melee:
I hit for 10-20 damage per, 10-30 with Black Blade up. The Luremaster has 1400 HP, more than any other enemy in the game. Meanwhile, he has an infinite number of spells to fling at me, though they're all either save-or-else spells that I neutralize, or evaded damage spells. This is finally a use for that thief class ability; I'd probably have died here without it.
Even with my forgetfulness:
He falls. I get a ring from his throne room:
Which teleports me back to Lonelywood.
Vengeance is ours. The trials are complete. The Sufferer is whole again.
Commentary:
Doing the final battle blind was an overly ballsy move. EE's addition of Ruby Ray ruined my plans. If I could do it again, I'd start with layered Spell Immunity: Abjuration and SI: Alteration, while wearing a cloak of nondetection. SI:Abjuration protects against Dispel Magic, SI:Alteration protects against Ruby Ray of Reversal, in case some asshole decided to script enemy casters to use spells that don't exist in IWD OG, and I believe the cloak protects my misled decoy from true sight. This fight could have been very easy, basically.
In non-tactical news, it may be of interest to know that in IWD canon, your party gets owned by Luremaster. No, really:
We're now operating in noncanonical territory!
The Luremaster praises us on our amazing ability to use the "walk past them" strategy for one of his mind-bending puzzles, and the cunning "bring the only two quest items to the quest target" maneuver for another.
He salutes us, as is proper. One of us is certainly about to die.
The fight begins. He teleports in spectral heroes, who, curiously, seem to be based on the named humanoids we've met in our stay here: Hobart, the Baneite cleric's gang in the southeast tower, and the suicidal paladin. I came pretty close to not recognizing them, because the ghosts are colorless and characterization in TotL is paper-thin, but I think that's who they're supposed to be.
One of them is scripted well enough to cast true sight, which fucks with my plan. Oh well, at least Spell Immunity: Abjuration is keeping their Dispel Magics off me!
Ha ha! Shit!
It appears that EE gave the mage spectral hero the ability to cast Ruby Ray of Reversal. I wasn't expecting it, because it's a Baldur's Gate 2 spell. It removes one spell-based protection; in this case, it took off my spell immunity. That leaves me open to the dispel magic immediately cast afterward. I try to rebuff, starting with Spell Immunity, but get hit in the process (because I'm unbuffed), interrupting my spell. I only had two castings of Spell Immunity, so my cunning plan appears to have failed.
Apparently the bros here have either infinite recasts of Dispel Magic, or a large finite number; I try to start rebuffing, but they just keep counterspelling me. I'm very vulnerable now; I haven't been drawing any effects with negative saving throw modifiers, but if I do, I'm boned. Ditto with direct damage spells. And the presence of three hard-hitting melee heroes means that I can't really engage. It's not looking good.
I'll admit that I paused for multiple minutes here, trying to figure out what my play was. They were rapidly running through my improved haste casts, and each of them seemed to have 300-400 HP. I couldn't realistically overcome that without buffs, and I was now trapped in this tiny room.
I eventually made two correct guesses:
Oil of Speed is a potion that boosts your movement like Haste does, but doesn't alert the AI that it needs to debuff you. I run up and--yes, sure enough, Three White Doves IS capable of disrupting the heroes; there are no scripted immunities to it. I exhale. New plan is to assassinate the casters, then cast my few remaining buffs to take down the melee heroes. I don't have any Misleads left, but given the 20% chance to kill on hit, I just need to be able to stand up to them for a few rounds.
I manage to take out one more, while losing another 20% of my health:
Two down, four to go, plus the Luremaster. Can I take out the Paladin?
I get mobbed. I'm now below 50% health. This is looking bad.
Wait. I'm below 50% health!
The chain contigency I set back in Dorn's Deep flares alive. Mirror Image, Shadow Door, and Stoneskin are all cast. I've got enough buffs to take out the final four!
I chug my precious potions of extra healing while I do; the battle's not over.
But the last spectral hero falls without doing any more harm to me. The only thing left is the Luremaster.
For some reason, I forgot the Luremaster was a ghost and switched to my sword. This was probably dumb since, on thinking about it, Three White Doves can probably disrupt him. Anyway, he does this massively annoying thing where he teleports to a different corner of the room every round after you manage to close with him in melee:
I hit for 10-20 damage per, 10-30 with Black Blade up. The Luremaster has 1400 HP, more than any other enemy in the game. Meanwhile, he has an infinite number of spells to fling at me, though they're all either save-or-else spells that I neutralize, or evaded damage spells. This is finally a use for that thief class ability; I'd probably have died here without it.
Even with my forgetfulness:
He falls. I get a ring from his throne room:
Which teleports me back to Lonelywood.
Vengeance is ours. The trials are complete. The Sufferer is whole again.
Commentary:
Doing the final battle blind was an overly ballsy move. EE's addition of Ruby Ray ruined my plans. If I could do it again, I'd start with layered Spell Immunity: Abjuration and SI: Alteration, while wearing a cloak of nondetection. SI:Abjuration protects against Dispel Magic, SI:Alteration protects against Ruby Ray of Reversal, in case some asshole decided to script enemy casters to use spells that don't exist in IWD OG, and I believe the cloak protects my misled decoy from true sight. This fight could have been very easy, basically.
In non-tactical news, it may be of interest to know that in IWD canon, your party gets owned by Luremaster. No, really:
A book in IWD2 said:
We're now operating in noncanonical territory!
5. Dungeons and Dragons
SOUNDTRACK
With the Trials complete, there's nothing keeping us from finishing Heart of Winter, too, and the rewards for doing so are pretty good. To the Sea of Moving Ice!
So, reminder: Icasaracht's spirit fled Wylfdene's body. (A single tear is falling from my eye as I think about our fallen bro.) She flew to an iceberg in the middle of a sea of icebergs. Let's chase the enormous flying monster with deadly air-to-surface attacks there across a dangerous sea in tiny ship, I bet nothing bad will happen!
Miraculously, nothing bad does. However, the barbarians are pretty serious about their mission here; they won't let us leave until we've slain the mighty dragon.
Cool bit of atmosphere here. I like indications of opponents actually using powers like enormous size and flight, instead of them just being cosmetic.
Apparently, there's a large, well-built cave complex on this iceberg. I kill the golem guardians and hop inside. There's not a lot of interest in the caves, though it looks pretty cool:
With an enormous dead dragon making up part of the landscape. The enemies here are mostly annoying mid-level undead; I could kill them easily, but I don't have any incentive to, so for the most part I just pass on.
Things get more interesting on the penultimate level. You face a horde of sahaugin (shark-people), backed by a horde of vodyanoi (palette-swapped umber hulks) and water elementals, with three ice golems for added muscle. Also, the landscape has huge numbers of traps.
Water elementals inflict ranged cold damage, and a few of them are in the middle of pools of inexplicably unfrozen water (in the middle of this iceberg, in a room with ice golems . . . ); i.e., you need ranged attacks. Large numbers of the sahaugin have crossbows with bolts that stun on hit. It's a reasonably well-designed encounter; it's just that they have nothing to deal with stealth. I take out the wings of the small complex one by one, using Mordekainen's sword for the water elementals:
And notice that I may have been underusing it during this game. The sword hits at range, but counts as a melee weapon, and is apparently coded to be usable by thieves. So:
Backstabbing across the room is possible. None are beyond my reach; none are above my wrath.
The sahaugin prince and his court go down. There's an interesting design decision to put the dragon's hoard directly before her lair, as opposed to in it. This is probably because Heart of Winter was released a while after the main game; the expectation was that its last battle would in fact be the last battle the party fought. This seems like a reasonable concession to gameplay.
The loot here is all +4/+5 weapons that aren't as good as the Long Sword of Action +4. But then we find:
EE decided to dump the two most powerful spell scrolls in BG2 in this cave. These alone would be quite generous loot for defeating an epic-level dragon, but I guess HoF Icasaracht's raw combat abilities eclipse anything in BG2, so, why not? Pictured here:
1) Spellstrike (removes all antimage protections; not useful in the mage-packed BG2, let alone IWD)
2) Time Stop (does what it says! Projectiles and projectile spells freeze in the air, everyone but the caster is paralyzed for three rounds, and enemy spell contingencies stop firing. Widely considered the most powerful spell in BG2, because it gives the caster three rounds to do whatever he wants. Not quite as useful for a soloist (because its long casting time makes it pretty hard to get off), but still probably the best 9th level spell we've got.
3) Wish. Not even from BG2; this is Throne of Bhaal content. Summons a genie who will give you a set of randomly selected options, partially based on your wisdom score. Too many possibilities to be covered here; I'll show off some of its absurd potential later.
We rest, prepare some of our new tricks, and head downstairs for winter's last stand.
Icasaracht has a long dialogue before the fight; I don't like it enough to transcribe it, but here are screenshots:
Short version: Icasaracht is an ecoterrorist.
Slightly longer verison: She was killed a long time ago by a dude named Aihonen. Elissa back in Easthaven removed Aihonen's blade from Icasaracht's heart, freeing her spirit. Icasaracht's resurrection contingency involved having two soulless offspring and warding them to act as spare bodies in the event of her death. Her mate objected to this, and that's why there's a dead dragon on the previous map. This whole affair has left her with a major rageboner for civilization; hence, everything she's been doing.
Anyway, the fight:
... is pretty easily cheesed with Mislead. I seem to recall IWD OG Icasaracht being able to see through invisible, or at least, her scripts could. This one targets me with wind buffets and sometimes breath attacks, although irregularly enough that I get the impression it's unintentional. Her wind buffets are nowhere near as annoying as the BG2 variants, and her breath doesn't work against a character who's buffed to be immune to cold damage. I was planning for a climactic moment where I cast Time Stop and then killed her, but my Spirit Armor expired and interrupted the casting. Historical reenactment?
Anyway, the fight's simple. She's got 1200HP, which is more than anyone except the Luremaster, but that just means it takes a while. I then have to kill her Soul Gem, which is a pushover; I get 202k XP for that, then another million for completing Heart of Winter.
* * *
This battle was anticlimactic. Instead, let me talk about how it went in an earlier ironman attempt, in the beta IWD->BG2 engine conversion I tried years ago.
One interesting thing about the conversion was that the game converted all lump-sum quest XP rewards to BG2 “quest experience,” which is given to all members of the current party. So, said rewards were effectively divided by 6 for a soloist. I was doing HoW fairly early on this attempt, too—I think I made it partially through Dragon’s Eye before deciding to switch off. I had the ability to cast level 7 mage spells, but no actual good scrolls. My HoW questing proceeded much as it did here, except instead of going back to Kuldahar, I accidentally selected the wrong dialog option with Hjollder and got teleported to the Sea of Moving Ice. Once you hit the Sea, the barbarians refuse to take you back.
So, this was an interesting fuckup that left my mid-level ass going up against a 1200HP dragon with backup. I tried grinding up some levels against the respawning enemies in the caves, but it was slow going; I got a few hundred thousand XP this way before I realized that trying to reach a respectable level was going to take more time than just restarting the game would. So I had to come up with a plan. I didn’t have Mislead, so that was out, and beyond that, Icasaracht could see through invisibility back then. (Her scripts definitely could, at least.) What was a man to do?
What I decided was that, with an unavoidable frost-breathing motherfucker in the fight and no way to quickly get rid of it, having Dispel Magic cast on me was death. (Because my cold resistance came from buffs.) What I finally decided to do was to stack Oil of Speed and Haste on myself, which gives you the maximum movespeed. So the early battle consisted of a hasted, stealthed F/M/T swooping in from the sidelines, stabbing the high priestess, running out to hide, and then doing the same thing again. The risk of being surrounded by heat-seaking Sahaugin was constant. Keeping my distance from the dragon and her erratic script was also critical.
Once the ladies were down, the Sahaugin King (and his ability to stun) were my next priority. And then it was basically a dance with the dragon: run up, tag her, and then try to run away before her cumbersome claw could get off a swipe at me. The goal was to chop through her HP before my stoneskins/mirror images ran out, which I just barely managed.
* * *
This concludes Heart of Winter. These were the toughest fights the game had to throw at me, so my confidence in the completion of this ironman run is high. I'll tackle Joril's jotuns next; both he and Perdiem's temple will be handled without Mislead antics. (Unless I die; then they will fail to be handled without Mislead tactics.) If anyone's got additional requests, for those or for other remaining fights (Maiden Ilmadia? RBP? The salamander lords?), let me know!
With the Trials complete, there's nothing keeping us from finishing Heart of Winter, too, and the rewards for doing so are pretty good. To the Sea of Moving Ice!
So, reminder: Icasaracht's spirit fled Wylfdene's body. (A single tear is falling from my eye as I think about our fallen bro.) She flew to an iceberg in the middle of a sea of icebergs. Let's chase the enormous flying monster with deadly air-to-surface attacks there across a dangerous sea in tiny ship, I bet nothing bad will happen!
Miraculously, nothing bad does. However, the barbarians are pretty serious about their mission here; they won't let us leave until we've slain the mighty dragon.
Cool bit of atmosphere here. I like indications of opponents actually using powers like enormous size and flight, instead of them just being cosmetic.
Apparently, there's a large, well-built cave complex on this iceberg. I kill the golem guardians and hop inside. There's not a lot of interest in the caves, though it looks pretty cool:
With an enormous dead dragon making up part of the landscape. The enemies here are mostly annoying mid-level undead; I could kill them easily, but I don't have any incentive to, so for the most part I just pass on.
Things get more interesting on the penultimate level. You face a horde of sahaugin (shark-people), backed by a horde of vodyanoi (palette-swapped umber hulks) and water elementals, with three ice golems for added muscle. Also, the landscape has huge numbers of traps.
Water elementals inflict ranged cold damage, and a few of them are in the middle of pools of inexplicably unfrozen water (in the middle of this iceberg, in a room with ice golems . . . ); i.e., you need ranged attacks. Large numbers of the sahaugin have crossbows with bolts that stun on hit. It's a reasonably well-designed encounter; it's just that they have nothing to deal with stealth. I take out the wings of the small complex one by one, using Mordekainen's sword for the water elementals:
And notice that I may have been underusing it during this game. The sword hits at range, but counts as a melee weapon, and is apparently coded to be usable by thieves. So:
Backstabbing across the room is possible. None are beyond my reach; none are above my wrath.
The sahaugin prince and his court go down. There's an interesting design decision to put the dragon's hoard directly before her lair, as opposed to in it. This is probably because Heart of Winter was released a while after the main game; the expectation was that its last battle would in fact be the last battle the party fought. This seems like a reasonable concession to gameplay.
The loot here is all +4/+5 weapons that aren't as good as the Long Sword of Action +4. But then we find:
EE decided to dump the two most powerful spell scrolls in BG2 in this cave. These alone would be quite generous loot for defeating an epic-level dragon, but I guess HoF Icasaracht's raw combat abilities eclipse anything in BG2, so, why not? Pictured here:
1) Spellstrike (removes all antimage protections; not useful in the mage-packed BG2, let alone IWD)
2) Time Stop (does what it says! Projectiles and projectile spells freeze in the air, everyone but the caster is paralyzed for three rounds, and enemy spell contingencies stop firing. Widely considered the most powerful spell in BG2, because it gives the caster three rounds to do whatever he wants. Not quite as useful for a soloist (because its long casting time makes it pretty hard to get off), but still probably the best 9th level spell we've got.
3) Wish. Not even from BG2; this is Throne of Bhaal content. Summons a genie who will give you a set of randomly selected options, partially based on your wisdom score. Too many possibilities to be covered here; I'll show off some of its absurd potential later.
We rest, prepare some of our new tricks, and head downstairs for winter's last stand.
Icasaracht has a long dialogue before the fight; I don't like it enough to transcribe it, but here are screenshots:
Short version: Icasaracht is an ecoterrorist.
Slightly longer verison: She was killed a long time ago by a dude named Aihonen. Elissa back in Easthaven removed Aihonen's blade from Icasaracht's heart, freeing her spirit. Icasaracht's resurrection contingency involved having two soulless offspring and warding them to act as spare bodies in the event of her death. Her mate objected to this, and that's why there's a dead dragon on the previous map. This whole affair has left her with a major rageboner for civilization; hence, everything she's been doing.
Anyway, the fight:
... is pretty easily cheesed with Mislead. I seem to recall IWD OG Icasaracht being able to see through invisible, or at least, her scripts could. This one targets me with wind buffets and sometimes breath attacks, although irregularly enough that I get the impression it's unintentional. Her wind buffets are nowhere near as annoying as the BG2 variants, and her breath doesn't work against a character who's buffed to be immune to cold damage. I was planning for a climactic moment where I cast Time Stop and then killed her, but my Spirit Armor expired and interrupted the casting. Historical reenactment?
Anyway, the fight's simple. She's got 1200HP, which is more than anyone except the Luremaster, but that just means it takes a while. I then have to kill her Soul Gem, which is a pushover; I get 202k XP for that, then another million for completing Heart of Winter.
* * *
This battle was anticlimactic. Instead, let me talk about how it went in an earlier ironman attempt, in the beta IWD->BG2 engine conversion I tried years ago.
One interesting thing about the conversion was that the game converted all lump-sum quest XP rewards to BG2 “quest experience,” which is given to all members of the current party. So, said rewards were effectively divided by 6 for a soloist. I was doing HoW fairly early on this attempt, too—I think I made it partially through Dragon’s Eye before deciding to switch off. I had the ability to cast level 7 mage spells, but no actual good scrolls. My HoW questing proceeded much as it did here, except instead of going back to Kuldahar, I accidentally selected the wrong dialog option with Hjollder and got teleported to the Sea of Moving Ice. Once you hit the Sea, the barbarians refuse to take you back.
So, this was an interesting fuckup that left my mid-level ass going up against a 1200HP dragon with backup. I tried grinding up some levels against the respawning enemies in the caves, but it was slow going; I got a few hundred thousand XP this way before I realized that trying to reach a respectable level was going to take more time than just restarting the game would. So I had to come up with a plan. I didn’t have Mislead, so that was out, and beyond that, Icasaracht could see through invisibility back then. (Her scripts definitely could, at least.) What was a man to do?
What I decided was that, with an unavoidable frost-breathing motherfucker in the fight and no way to quickly get rid of it, having Dispel Magic cast on me was death. (Because my cold resistance came from buffs.) What I finally decided to do was to stack Oil of Speed and Haste on myself, which gives you the maximum movespeed. So the early battle consisted of a hasted, stealthed F/M/T swooping in from the sidelines, stabbing the high priestess, running out to hide, and then doing the same thing again. The risk of being surrounded by heat-seaking Sahaugin was constant. Keeping my distance from the dragon and her erratic script was also critical.
Once the ladies were down, the Sahaugin King (and his ability to stun) were my next priority. And then it was basically a dance with the dragon: run up, tag her, and then try to run away before her cumbersome claw could get off a swipe at me. The goal was to chop through her HP before my stoneskins/mirror images ran out, which I just barely managed.
* * *
This concludes Heart of Winter. These were the toughest fights the game had to throw at me, so my confidence in the completion of this ironman run is high. I'll tackle Joril's jotuns next; both he and Perdiem's temple will be handled without Mislead antics. (Unless I die; then they will fail to be handled without Mislead tactics.) If anyone's got additional requests, for those or for other remaining fights (Maiden Ilmadia? RBP? The salamander lords?), let me know!
Last edited:
It's an ironman run. It's not like the BG2 thread, where deaths are amusing. Here they are rather harsh.
Nevill
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2009
- Messages
- 11,211
He is also level 25 and has spells in his arsenal that IWD simply wasn't designed for. Hell, the spell contingencies alone can carry him through. HP below 50% -> Invisibility, run, heal, buff, rince, repeat.
The Fire Giants can probably be dealt with by a sngle-class mage, and a mage needs no equipment to nuke things.
I don't know what else in the game could pose a challenge even remotely.
The Fire Giants can probably be dealt with by a sngle-class mage, and a mage needs no equipment to nuke things.
I don't know what else in the game could pose a challenge even remotely.
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 883
I'd actually knocked off Ilmadia before you posted, but I will add a historical reenactment under your terms as part of my victory condition.
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 883
IX. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
This was originally going to be a single update, but it ran too long.
SOUNDTRACK
This was originally going to be a single update, but it ran too long.
SOUNDTRACK
1. Shades of Meaning
2. Shadow and Flame in the Houses of Iron and Ice
3. Suff'rer, Suff'rer, burning bright
4. When All You Have Is A Giant Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Naked Guy With A Spear
Then the Sufferer kills Maiden Ilmadia and her gang with Mislead. The end.
HISTORICAL REENACTMENT:
The Sufferer strips and prepares to deliver the final and most humiliating defeat of an enemy yet. He hefts the simple spear in his grip and kisses it, murmuring, "I dedicate this death to myself."
Then he journeys down past the fire salamanders to the lake of fire, populated by fire giants, and eventually meet their leader: Maiden Ilmadia.
Maiden Ilmadia's a hard-hitting surface elf fighter who's leading the fire giants against the local drow; this dialogue always ends with her starting the fight. Note that she mentions being a virgin. This is a strange detail to let slip, especially given that, according to canon, she'll eventually be resurrected by Mother Egenia (the Ilmater priestess we freed in Dragon's Eye) and will give birth to the two main antagonists of Icewind Dale II. I assume running the game at 60 FPS is keeping me from seeing the part where the father rushes in here, bangs the hell out her mid-fight, and then runs off, leaving her to die.
It's very hard to kill an endgame enemy in Heart of Fury using spells alone. Enemy spell saves are significantly improved, and direct damage spells are impractical for two reasons: first, your spell slots are both limited and scaled for non-HoF enemies, and more seriously, you're bound by one spell per round. The Sufferer's a level 30 mage, so the first issue is somewhat mitigated, but there's nothing he can do about the second. (Since even the questionable sensibilities of the Enhanced Edition bros balked at including Improved Alacrity in IWD.) It thus follows that he's going to need to find a way to outlast the Maiden's gang. Normal protections won't cut it; there are around twenty fire giants here, and they'll beat through his stoneskins in a round or two.
Ilmadia has two mage-priests as backup, but they don't seem to do anything but cast self-buffs and attack for like the first ten rounds. It actually turns out that Protection from Magic Weapons neutralizes everything Ilmadia can throw at us.
Still, plinking away at her with our spear isn't getting us very far.
One attack per round just isn't doing it. I'm going to need something better. As I'm observing this, they breach my stoneskins. I try to recast them, but, remember, I'm completely naked--I don't have the amulet that quickens my spells, and my stoneskin spell gets interrupted.
Fortunately, all I have to do is tank a few more blows, and my contingency kicks in--a contingency which includes invisibility. I'm surrounded, but that's no problem for a man who commands time and space:
I stop time and blink out. I could rest at this point--I've only got 32 HP--but I actually managed to get Ilmadia pretty low, so, fuck it. I cast Mordekainen's Sword and decloak from a distance:
Ilmadia drops; I recast Protection from Magic Weapons, run in, grab her stuff, and:
make my getaway.
ALTERNATE HISTORICAL REENACTMENT:
What's the best weapon against a leader of a bunch of fiery monsters who lives on a lake of fire and whose primary enemies are fire elementals? (Hint: Think like Poquelin, which for most of you will require repeatedly running headfirst into a wall.)
I start off hidden in the shadows and open with Time Stop. This turns out to be a bad move, since Ilmadia possesses something even greater than the ability to stop time: Plot Powers. She yanks me out of my time stop to deliver her evil rant, and time resumes as normal when she's done. It's an impressive trick, one that in BG2, only Demogorgon and a nascent god can pull off. Still, I counter by casting Protection from Magic Weapons. I already buffed with Protection from Fire and Protection from the Elements, so I just cast Incendiary Cloud three times, then recast Protection from Magic Weapons, cast another cloud, cast invisibility once more, and wait for Ilmadia to die.
She obliges. I can't take out her friends, so I lure them away, dimension door around them, grab her loot, and split. The end.
Next time: the end of the arc! One way or another!
When last we left our hero, he had ground both expansions beneath his boot. He had finally mastered the shadows of his nature, and in so doing, he found they no longer bound him. Indeed, he no longer needed them. He would face the remaining three rival generals of the underworld as a whole man, not as a creature who kept himself cloaked in illusions.
And then? Then, after he had his showdown with the rival prophet of suffering they served and broken the symbol of his former faith, what would be left to him? An eternity of killing trash mobs in this flavorless world? He had left off his hope of divinity, both in the pathetic reigning order of gods and in his own apotheosis. He had even lost faith in the common element of the infinite burning in all mankind. What was left to him, save for an astonishing capacity for violence, and contempt for all the world?
Well. He still had that. And there were still the monstrous tyrants who held sway over this wretched scrap of earth, weaklings who used what meagre strength they had to bring suffering to those even weaker than themselves. His lip curled at the thought that these scum thought they were doing any god's work with their posturing. If this was the word of God, God never spoke. He might have lost hope of divine service or divine purpose, but he could at least smite the wicked. For now, violence and contempt still had their uses.
And then? Then, after he had his showdown with the rival prophet of suffering they served and broken the symbol of his former faith, what would be left to him? An eternity of killing trash mobs in this flavorless world? He had left off his hope of divinity, both in the pathetic reigning order of gods and in his own apotheosis. He had even lost faith in the common element of the infinite burning in all mankind. What was left to him, save for an astonishing capacity for violence, and contempt for all the world?
Well. He still had that. And there were still the monstrous tyrants who held sway over this wretched scrap of earth, weaklings who used what meagre strength they had to bring suffering to those even weaker than themselves. His lip curled at the thought that these scum thought they were doing any god's work with their posturing. If this was the word of God, God never spoke. He might have lost hope of divine service or divine purpose, but he could at least smite the wicked. For now, violence and contempt still had their uses.
2. Shadow and Flame in the Houses of Iron and Ice
We return to the Wyrm's Tooth glacier. Our goal here is to take down Joril, lord of jotuns. His cave lies across a 7 meter-wide chasm spanned by a broken bridge. Our PC, who commands powers of time and space and can literally turn into a golem and uproot trees to make a bridge, is stumped by this. "Darn," he says, "I guess Poquelin wins!"
Oh well. Let's console ourselves in our defeat by checking the giant shrine-looking building occupying the middle third of the map!
You can't see, but the landscape here has two main features: the trashiest of trash mobs (i.e., those that contain trolls), and dead human bodies. The Sufferer is max level, so the only thing I'd be killing in a fight would be my time. I proceed inside the shrine, and to a small library on the second floor, filled with living humans.
It seems they are somewhat escaped slaves who've fled the larger part of the complex, which is a frozen aquarium ruled over by ice salamanders. The leader of the slave rebellion was this chick named Vera who caused an explosion and then disappeared. This level is now heated well enough that the ice salamanders can't bear to approach, but the slaves can't survive outside due to the severe cold and the hordes of trash mobs patrolling the glacier. There's another exit from the aquarium that leads to safer territory, but the salamander leader has the key. This guy wants us to get it for him. Moved to pity by the horrors of slavery these poor brave few have endured, the Sufferer accepts.
Also, we meet a slave who's been reading through the library and has found a book on bridge engineering. "That was quick," the Sufferer says. "Thanks, losers! Later!" AQUARIUM: COMPLETE.
Okay, okay: we go upstairs, convince salamander leader Kerish that we're a spy from Poquelin, and milk him for information. He isn't going to tell us anything useful, or give us anything that we could not more easily take for ourselves. We just do this so that he feels a sense of complicity in his own ruin when we inevitably bring his kingdom crashing down around him.
We find Vera, who asks us to free the slaves; since Kerish gave us the key to the way out of the glacier, we do that, then tell Vera about it. She rewards us by fucking off.
All the salamanders go hostile. They find themselves at the bottom of some cosmic hourglass and feel the first trickle of sand falling down to bury them; this is their way of beating their fists against the inner glass.
They rage against fate. It avails them not.
All fall, struck down by a creature of fury who light cannot touch.
Back to Joril's cave:
His blade flicks a few times, and the wolves--each of them fiercer than a frost dragon from any other part of this world--fall dead. He is about to fall back into the shadows and purge this cave with a whirlwind of unseen steel, when he senses something. His eyes begin glowing within the darkness of his form as the full magnitude of the evil done here comes to him. Slavery. Regicide. Patricide. Human sacrifice. Blasphemy.
A great injustice has been done, he knows.
On a whim--of the sort that the truly powerful call their chiefest drives, because they are not driven by need--he chooses not to restrict himself to the shadows in this battle. Let them look upon the face of their destroyer and see the fires of judgment burning in his eyes.
(dude, YOU try coming up with a valid narrative explanation for why I'm doing this without misleads)
First he encounters a wizard named Kontik. "Fie upon the murderers of Lysan!" she shouts.
"Who?" the Sufferer asks, puzzled. He looks over his shoulder, in case some Lysan-murderer is standing there. No one is.
"Lysan! Chosen of Auril!" she screams.
"Is Auril some particularly choosy person?" The Sufferer frowns.
"Goddess of Cold! You slew her priestess in the Vale of Shadows!"
"Oh. That Auril. That Lysan," he sighs. "Right. Gave her body to a fire elemental to play with, too, just in case there was some part of her that was left unburnt by my initial fireballing. Anyway, you're upset about this?"
"The curse of black ice falls upon the hands that touch Her chosen," Kontik hissed.
"Let me think about this," the Sufferer says. "Your goddess and fucking Arundel back in Kuldahar conspired to waste my time by sending your stupid low-level priestess to the Vale of Shadows, and then sending me to investigate said vale. I roll in and, based on the request of an evil ghost with a cool voice, kill her. Just utterly eradicate every trace she has ever been from the world. Not even a grease spot is left in the snow. We're agreed on this point?"
Kontik gives him a thumbs up.
"Great. So, that brings me to you, a mid-high mage with a variety of demonic knights of pure ice in her service. Instead of coming to Kuldahar and finishing the job, or just hunting me down, you instead elect to spend the next few months building snowmen in a corner of a cave. Presumably you do this in the hope that I will come to this cave and not just walk past you, which I could easily have done. Meanwhile, I decide that being able to strike down the chosen of your goddess is not enough, so I have been gathering to me spells and artifacts of myth and legend. I have acquired not only the ability to stop time, but a spell that lets me reshape reality in a manner compliant to my will. This was your plan?"
"Put that way, I do feel you've exposed one or two flaws," she frowns. "Maybe I should have brought six melee mooks instead of just five?"
"Speaking of which, you knew I was coming. Did you think about preparing beforehand? Any magical protections or traps of any sort?"
"I felt like I could probably wing it," she explains.
"Let's test that hypothesis," the Sufferer says.
Fireball so hard, motherfuckers wanna murk me.
The unbuffed Kontik falls quickly. Her Knights of Black Ice are reasonably tough, but they're not enough. The Sufferer's current form varies between -18 and -20 AC, which, while less ridiculous than his predecessor, is still pretty absurd. He also starts with 8 mirror images and ten stoneskins; blows will get through, but he can absorb 18 of them before he actually gets hurt. Granting that his average opponent at this level can absorb 15-25 of his own attacks before falling, he's still got the advantage--every Protection from Magic Weapons or Improved Mantle spell he casts gives him immunity to his foes' attacks for 4 rounds, with no attrition to his stoneskins or images. He casts an incendiary cloud on the collected corpses of his foes, and from their blackened bones fashions of them a monument to futility in death equal to the meaninglessness of their wretched lives.
He also burns some yetis to death because, ugh, yetis. We've been fighting these losers every other chapter since we arrived in Kuldahar.
Then he meets some more slaves. They're being sacrificed to a frost wyvern to ensure its continued loyalty to the jotuns; instead of just asking me to free them, they want to first ensure it dies. The Sufferer admires an uncompromising slave, so:
We kill them. They manage to pierce our stoneskins, but we quickly heal with the Black Blade. It turns out that we need not stick to the shadows when we wield the stuff of endless night in our hands. Back to the slaves:
They want us to kill the jotun guard without alerting any other jotuns. Sure, why not. In fact, I have just the trick to ensure that no one notices our fight.
In the space between instants, the guard is plucked from existence.
So, after all our elaborate efforts, the slaves are finally free from the jotuns! We then render all our skulking meaningless by going forth to challenge the king of the jotuns.
"TO ME, BROTHERS! WE ARE ATTACKED!" King Joril bellows.
"Hold that thought," says the Sufferer.
The echoes of heavy footsteps stretch out unnaturally long in this time beyond time. The lords of the glacier are coming to throw their strength at him, the Sufferer muses. They will struggle, they will fall. Yet it is still a better defense than he would have spared lives as worthless as theirs, these barbarians trading cruelties in their pathetic cave. Lost in thought, he barely notices his contempt seething forth, nor his lips working the words of the spell:
The Jotun King blinks, wondering where the dozen wounds scoring his chest came from. A cloud of flame roaring around him is the last thing he sees.
Creatures of fire erupt through the ice, clasping the jotuns in their arms and shattering their hearts. Life melts from them, and they fall to earth.
The jotuns shake their fists, for they have caught the dark one in the open, where they can bring their numbers to bear against him.
Clouds of flame again flow from the Sufferer's burning heart. Even the earth shall resonate our anguish. Suffering of the mind. Suffering of the body. Suffering of the soul. All will be made clear when the circle is drawn.
Long story short: protection from fire + incendiary cloud places you in the middle of a hideously strong inferno, while your flesh refuses to burn. You can also stack clouds on top of each other; I was using them two at a time in the jotun fights. The AI doesn't know how to deal with clouds, so this is pretty efficient at ending any melee opponents.
The Sufferer leaves, headed for Dorn's Deep. He intends to set the darkness ablaze.
Oh well. Let's console ourselves in our defeat by checking the giant shrine-looking building occupying the middle third of the map!
You can't see, but the landscape here has two main features: the trashiest of trash mobs (i.e., those that contain trolls), and dead human bodies. The Sufferer is max level, so the only thing I'd be killing in a fight would be my time. I proceed inside the shrine, and to a small library on the second floor, filled with living humans.
It seems they are somewhat escaped slaves who've fled the larger part of the complex, which is a frozen aquarium ruled over by ice salamanders. The leader of the slave rebellion was this chick named Vera who caused an explosion and then disappeared. This level is now heated well enough that the ice salamanders can't bear to approach, but the slaves can't survive outside due to the severe cold and the hordes of trash mobs patrolling the glacier. There's another exit from the aquarium that leads to safer territory, but the salamander leader has the key. This guy wants us to get it for him. Moved to pity by the horrors of slavery these poor brave few have endured, the Sufferer accepts.
Also, we meet a slave who's been reading through the library and has found a book on bridge engineering. "That was quick," the Sufferer says. "Thanks, losers! Later!" AQUARIUM: COMPLETE.
Okay, okay: we go upstairs, convince salamander leader Kerish that we're a spy from Poquelin, and milk him for information. He isn't going to tell us anything useful, or give us anything that we could not more easily take for ourselves. We just do this so that he feels a sense of complicity in his own ruin when we inevitably bring his kingdom crashing down around him.
We find Vera, who asks us to free the slaves; since Kerish gave us the key to the way out of the glacier, we do that, then tell Vera about it. She rewards us by fucking off.
All the salamanders go hostile. They find themselves at the bottom of some cosmic hourglass and feel the first trickle of sand falling down to bury them; this is their way of beating their fists against the inner glass.
They rage against fate. It avails them not.
All fall, struck down by a creature of fury who light cannot touch.
Back to Joril's cave:
His blade flicks a few times, and the wolves--each of them fiercer than a frost dragon from any other part of this world--fall dead. He is about to fall back into the shadows and purge this cave with a whirlwind of unseen steel, when he senses something. His eyes begin glowing within the darkness of his form as the full magnitude of the evil done here comes to him. Slavery. Regicide. Patricide. Human sacrifice. Blasphemy.
A great injustice has been done, he knows.
On a whim--of the sort that the truly powerful call their chiefest drives, because they are not driven by need--he chooses not to restrict himself to the shadows in this battle. Let them look upon the face of their destroyer and see the fires of judgment burning in his eyes.
(dude, YOU try coming up with a valid narrative explanation for why I'm doing this without misleads)
First he encounters a wizard named Kontik. "Fie upon the murderers of Lysan!" she shouts.
"Who?" the Sufferer asks, puzzled. He looks over his shoulder, in case some Lysan-murderer is standing there. No one is.
"Lysan! Chosen of Auril!" she screams.
"Is Auril some particularly choosy person?" The Sufferer frowns.
"Goddess of Cold! You slew her priestess in the Vale of Shadows!"
"Oh. That Auril. That Lysan," he sighs. "Right. Gave her body to a fire elemental to play with, too, just in case there was some part of her that was left unburnt by my initial fireballing. Anyway, you're upset about this?"
"The curse of black ice falls upon the hands that touch Her chosen," Kontik hissed.
"Let me think about this," the Sufferer says. "Your goddess and fucking Arundel back in Kuldahar conspired to waste my time by sending your stupid low-level priestess to the Vale of Shadows, and then sending me to investigate said vale. I roll in and, based on the request of an evil ghost with a cool voice, kill her. Just utterly eradicate every trace she has ever been from the world. Not even a grease spot is left in the snow. We're agreed on this point?"
Kontik gives him a thumbs up.
"Great. So, that brings me to you, a mid-high mage with a variety of demonic knights of pure ice in her service. Instead of coming to Kuldahar and finishing the job, or just hunting me down, you instead elect to spend the next few months building snowmen in a corner of a cave. Presumably you do this in the hope that I will come to this cave and not just walk past you, which I could easily have done. Meanwhile, I decide that being able to strike down the chosen of your goddess is not enough, so I have been gathering to me spells and artifacts of myth and legend. I have acquired not only the ability to stop time, but a spell that lets me reshape reality in a manner compliant to my will. This was your plan?"
"Put that way, I do feel you've exposed one or two flaws," she frowns. "Maybe I should have brought six melee mooks instead of just five?"
"Speaking of which, you knew I was coming. Did you think about preparing beforehand? Any magical protections or traps of any sort?"
"I felt like I could probably wing it," she explains.
"Let's test that hypothesis," the Sufferer says.
Fireball so hard, motherfuckers wanna murk me.
The unbuffed Kontik falls quickly. Her Knights of Black Ice are reasonably tough, but they're not enough. The Sufferer's current form varies between -18 and -20 AC, which, while less ridiculous than his predecessor, is still pretty absurd. He also starts with 8 mirror images and ten stoneskins; blows will get through, but he can absorb 18 of them before he actually gets hurt. Granting that his average opponent at this level can absorb 15-25 of his own attacks before falling, he's still got the advantage--every Protection from Magic Weapons or Improved Mantle spell he casts gives him immunity to his foes' attacks for 4 rounds, with no attrition to his stoneskins or images. He casts an incendiary cloud on the collected corpses of his foes, and from their blackened bones fashions of them a monument to futility in death equal to the meaninglessness of their wretched lives.
He also burns some yetis to death because, ugh, yetis. We've been fighting these losers every other chapter since we arrived in Kuldahar.
Then he meets some more slaves. They're being sacrificed to a frost wyvern to ensure its continued loyalty to the jotuns; instead of just asking me to free them, they want to first ensure it dies. The Sufferer admires an uncompromising slave, so:
We kill them. They manage to pierce our stoneskins, but we quickly heal with the Black Blade. It turns out that we need not stick to the shadows when we wield the stuff of endless night in our hands. Back to the slaves:
They want us to kill the jotun guard without alerting any other jotuns. Sure, why not. In fact, I have just the trick to ensure that no one notices our fight.
In the space between instants, the guard is plucked from existence.
So, after all our elaborate efforts, the slaves are finally free from the jotuns! We then render all our skulking meaningless by going forth to challenge the king of the jotuns.
"TO ME, BROTHERS! WE ARE ATTACKED!" King Joril bellows.
"Hold that thought," says the Sufferer.
The echoes of heavy footsteps stretch out unnaturally long in this time beyond time. The lords of the glacier are coming to throw their strength at him, the Sufferer muses. They will struggle, they will fall. Yet it is still a better defense than he would have spared lives as worthless as theirs, these barbarians trading cruelties in their pathetic cave. Lost in thought, he barely notices his contempt seething forth, nor his lips working the words of the spell:
The Jotun King blinks, wondering where the dozen wounds scoring his chest came from. A cloud of flame roaring around him is the last thing he sees.
Creatures of fire erupt through the ice, clasping the jotuns in their arms and shattering their hearts. Life melts from them, and they fall to earth.
The jotuns shake their fists, for they have caught the dark one in the open, where they can bring their numbers to bear against him.
Clouds of flame again flow from the Sufferer's burning heart. Even the earth shall resonate our anguish. Suffering of the mind. Suffering of the body. Suffering of the soul. All will be made clear when the circle is drawn.
Long story short: protection from fire + incendiary cloud places you in the middle of a hideously strong inferno, while your flesh refuses to burn. You can also stack clouds on top of each other; I was using them two at a time in the jotun fights. The AI doesn't know how to deal with clouds, so this is pretty efficient at ending any melee opponents.
The Sufferer leaves, headed for Dorn's Deep. He intends to set the darkness ablaze.
3. Suff'rer, Suff'rer, burning bright
SOUNDTRACK
First, we head down a well and meet some pugnacious little gnomes:
We feed them and take care of their umber hulk problem, because interspersing acts of horrific violence with acts of kindness is likelier to be taken for character depth than indifference. This leads us to the secret underground Gnome Home, hidden from their enemies' sight.
And here we meet a drow merchant. That's an oddity. Is this man important in any way?
Oh. He was apparently responsible for the missing weapons from the elven-dwarven alliance, causing its dissolution, the fall of two civilizations, and thousands of deaths. Fascinating. Nym, you said your name was? That's an interesting tidbit of information, Nym. Just making a note here is all.
The Gnome Leader sends us on a quest to find some gnome who is the missing messiah created from the geneseed of the God-Emperor of Gnomekind. Or something; between their tininess, whininess, and general unimportance, the gnomes are kind of hard to pay attention to. That's it for the Gnome Home, at least for now.
Now we go to a place marked on our map as the Fallen Temple.
This place is pretty fucked up! It's a temple of Ilmater where maddened priests perpetually chant prayers to suffering, their verses warped in service of a new master. It's also the single largest concentration of greater undead in the base game, raised from the ranks of the truly faithful.
See their fate, he tells himself. See what could have been yours, had you but stayed loyal to Ilmater. Would you be one of the dead, or one of the truly damned? These priests, these generals of the underworld such as Ilmater promised you'd be: would you reach these heights of glory? Had you bowed and prayed and bled for your god, this is what it would have bought you. Such are the heights that await those who serve higher powers. The Sufferer feels the shadows receding from him, fleeing from the light of indignation searing beneath his skin. He moves to speak with one of the fallen priests:
And then another, an inquisitor demanding answers.
Undead abominations lurch to attention as he reveals himself. He rises from the shadows and burns bright.
"The sins of the flesh must be purged! Purged on an altar of fire!" shouts the high priest. Well-said, brother, thinks the Sufferer.
The Sufferer has lost his power to order the undead back into oblivion, but his raw fury burns away the living and unliving alike. A great conflagration of hatred seeths from him.
Wrapped in tendrils of flame and oil, the Sufferer laughs and whirls, something approaching joy dancing across his face. He is one with the flame, and in its purifying light, he heals, wounds closing where fire licks over them. It is well that these priests are mad, else they would flee, and none would bear witness to my glory, he thinks.
A pyre of blacked bone for the Broken God, and a pyre of melted flesh for the Weeping God, but the priests must live--their regrets will be mine.
The priests here say interestingly fucked up things, which make perfect sense to the Sufferer in his current state. I will give you new hymns to sing presently.
When the whole temple is lit with the fires of the dead, the Sufferer goes to the idol at the center of it all to smash it. The corrupt sentience within reacts quickly: "Fuck! It's the guy who's been scouring my temple with flame! But is he prepared for . . . flame?"
"Oh. Right. I have got to start writing this stuff down."
With the idol smashed, the spell driving the priests to madness fades. The iconoclastic Sufferer goes to question the awakened priests on the tenets of their faith.
Good. Once priests of Ilmater, now devotees of a new sort of suffering.
Temple head Brother Perdiem tells the story. Essentially, Poquelin mindfucked a whole monastery and dragged them here as the initial core of his army.
I feel like it'd be an interesting twist if the lunacy these priests evinced on my entrance and now their regret were both feigned. "SHIT! It's the guy who took out the other lieutenants. Fuck fuck fuck. Okay, guys, I got a plan. Act crazy; I'm gonna dress up this flame turret to look like an idol, and when he smashes it, let's pretend to be 'freed' from its 'enchantment.'"
There are slots here for the six badges from each of Poquelin's lieutenants. We have one more, but, let's think about that. The supreme commander of this vast military undertaking including hundreds of supernatural monstrosities cannot meet with any of his underlings unless all six of his lieutenants meet up. Bear in mind that his lieutenants hate both each other and, in some cases, many of their own minions: Joril killed his father to gain his throne, Perdiem and Malavon were clearly insane, Marketh and Ilmadia hated each other, and Krilag led a coup against Saablic Tan. They're also spread over three chapters' worth of dwarven kingdom. This is the sort of command structure that does actually provide an explanation for why each of their vast armies sat around licking their own balls while the Sufferer slowly took down the others. Sort of a letdown to discover that the reason he had such success against his enemy is that he's the worst fucking commander in history, though. He thinks back on how proud he felt to purge the temple and cleanse the jotun cave and suddenly feels embarrassed.
In any case, Revered Brother Pokemon's brilliant communications strategy means he's still got one of 'em left to catch. He sets off for the Southeast to slay the last lieutenant and claim her badge.
First, we head down a well and meet some pugnacious little gnomes:
We feed them and take care of their umber hulk problem, because interspersing acts of horrific violence with acts of kindness is likelier to be taken for character depth than indifference. This leads us to the secret underground Gnome Home, hidden from their enemies' sight.
And here we meet a drow merchant. That's an oddity. Is this man important in any way?
Oh. He was apparently responsible for the missing weapons from the elven-dwarven alliance, causing its dissolution, the fall of two civilizations, and thousands of deaths. Fascinating. Nym, you said your name was? That's an interesting tidbit of information, Nym. Just making a note here is all.
The Gnome Leader sends us on a quest to find some gnome who is the missing messiah created from the geneseed of the God-Emperor of Gnomekind. Or something; between their tininess, whininess, and general unimportance, the gnomes are kind of hard to pay attention to. That's it for the Gnome Home, at least for now.
Now we go to a place marked on our map as the Fallen Temple.
This place is pretty fucked up! It's a temple of Ilmater where maddened priests perpetually chant prayers to suffering, their verses warped in service of a new master. It's also the single largest concentration of greater undead in the base game, raised from the ranks of the truly faithful.
See their fate, he tells himself. See what could have been yours, had you but stayed loyal to Ilmater. Would you be one of the dead, or one of the truly damned? These priests, these generals of the underworld such as Ilmater promised you'd be: would you reach these heights of glory? Had you bowed and prayed and bled for your god, this is what it would have bought you. Such are the heights that await those who serve higher powers. The Sufferer feels the shadows receding from him, fleeing from the light of indignation searing beneath his skin. He moves to speak with one of the fallen priests:
And then another, an inquisitor demanding answers.
Undead abominations lurch to attention as he reveals himself. He rises from the shadows and burns bright.
"The sins of the flesh must be purged! Purged on an altar of fire!" shouts the high priest. Well-said, brother, thinks the Sufferer.
The Sufferer has lost his power to order the undead back into oblivion, but his raw fury burns away the living and unliving alike. A great conflagration of hatred seeths from him.
Wrapped in tendrils of flame and oil, the Sufferer laughs and whirls, something approaching joy dancing across his face. He is one with the flame, and in its purifying light, he heals, wounds closing where fire licks over them. It is well that these priests are mad, else they would flee, and none would bear witness to my glory, he thinks.
A pyre of blacked bone for the Broken God, and a pyre of melted flesh for the Weeping God, but the priests must live--their regrets will be mine.
The priests here say interestingly fucked up things, which make perfect sense to the Sufferer in his current state. I will give you new hymns to sing presently.
When the whole temple is lit with the fires of the dead, the Sufferer goes to the idol at the center of it all to smash it. The corrupt sentience within reacts quickly: "Fuck! It's the guy who's been scouring my temple with flame! But is he prepared for . . . flame?"
"Oh. Right. I have got to start writing this stuff down."
With the idol smashed, the spell driving the priests to madness fades. The iconoclastic Sufferer goes to question the awakened priests on the tenets of their faith.
Good. Once priests of Ilmater, now devotees of a new sort of suffering.
Temple head Brother Perdiem tells the story. Essentially, Poquelin mindfucked a whole monastery and dragged them here as the initial core of his army.
I feel like it'd be an interesting twist if the lunacy these priests evinced on my entrance and now their regret were both feigned. "SHIT! It's the guy who took out the other lieutenants. Fuck fuck fuck. Okay, guys, I got a plan. Act crazy; I'm gonna dress up this flame turret to look like an idol, and when he smashes it, let's pretend to be 'freed' from its 'enchantment.'"
There are slots here for the six badges from each of Poquelin's lieutenants. We have one more, but, let's think about that. The supreme commander of this vast military undertaking including hundreds of supernatural monstrosities cannot meet with any of his underlings unless all six of his lieutenants meet up. Bear in mind that his lieutenants hate both each other and, in some cases, many of their own minions: Joril killed his father to gain his throne, Perdiem and Malavon were clearly insane, Marketh and Ilmadia hated each other, and Krilag led a coup against Saablic Tan. They're also spread over three chapters' worth of dwarven kingdom. This is the sort of command structure that does actually provide an explanation for why each of their vast armies sat around licking their own balls while the Sufferer slowly took down the others. Sort of a letdown to discover that the reason he had such success against his enemy is that he's the worst fucking commander in history, though. He thinks back on how proud he felt to purge the temple and cleanse the jotun cave and suddenly feels embarrassed.
In any case, Revered Brother Pokemon's brilliant communications strategy means he's still got one of 'em left to catch. He sets off for the Southeast to slay the last lieutenant and claim her badge.
4. When All You Have Is A Giant Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Naked Guy With A Spear
HISTORICAL REENACTMENT:
The Sufferer strips and prepares to deliver the final and most humiliating defeat of an enemy yet. He hefts the simple spear in his grip and kisses it, murmuring, "I dedicate this death to myself."
Then he journeys down past the fire salamanders to the lake of fire, populated by fire giants, and eventually meet their leader: Maiden Ilmadia.
Maiden Ilmadia's a hard-hitting surface elf fighter who's leading the fire giants against the local drow; this dialogue always ends with her starting the fight. Note that she mentions being a virgin. This is a strange detail to let slip, especially given that, according to canon, she'll eventually be resurrected by Mother Egenia (the Ilmater priestess we freed in Dragon's Eye) and will give birth to the two main antagonists of Icewind Dale II. I assume running the game at 60 FPS is keeping me from seeing the part where the father rushes in here, bangs the hell out her mid-fight, and then runs off, leaving her to die.
It's very hard to kill an endgame enemy in Heart of Fury using spells alone. Enemy spell saves are significantly improved, and direct damage spells are impractical for two reasons: first, your spell slots are both limited and scaled for non-HoF enemies, and more seriously, you're bound by one spell per round. The Sufferer's a level 30 mage, so the first issue is somewhat mitigated, but there's nothing he can do about the second. (Since even the questionable sensibilities of the Enhanced Edition bros balked at including Improved Alacrity in IWD.) It thus follows that he's going to need to find a way to outlast the Maiden's gang. Normal protections won't cut it; there are around twenty fire giants here, and they'll beat through his stoneskins in a round or two.
Ilmadia has two mage-priests as backup, but they don't seem to do anything but cast self-buffs and attack for like the first ten rounds. It actually turns out that Protection from Magic Weapons neutralizes everything Ilmadia can throw at us.
Still, plinking away at her with our spear isn't getting us very far.
One attack per round just isn't doing it. I'm going to need something better. As I'm observing this, they breach my stoneskins. I try to recast them, but, remember, I'm completely naked--I don't have the amulet that quickens my spells, and my stoneskin spell gets interrupted.
Fortunately, all I have to do is tank a few more blows, and my contingency kicks in--a contingency which includes invisibility. I'm surrounded, but that's no problem for a man who commands time and space:
I stop time and blink out. I could rest at this point--I've only got 32 HP--but I actually managed to get Ilmadia pretty low, so, fuck it. I cast Mordekainen's Sword and decloak from a distance:
Ilmadia drops; I recast Protection from Magic Weapons, run in, grab her stuff, and:
make my getaway.
ALTERNATE HISTORICAL REENACTMENT:
What's the best weapon against a leader of a bunch of fiery monsters who lives on a lake of fire and whose primary enemies are fire elementals? (Hint: Think like Poquelin, which for most of you will require repeatedly running headfirst into a wall.)
I start off hidden in the shadows and open with Time Stop. This turns out to be a bad move, since Ilmadia possesses something even greater than the ability to stop time: Plot Powers. She yanks me out of my time stop to deliver her evil rant, and time resumes as normal when she's done. It's an impressive trick, one that in BG2, only Demogorgon and a nascent god can pull off. Still, I counter by casting Protection from Magic Weapons. I already buffed with Protection from Fire and Protection from the Elements, so I just cast Incendiary Cloud three times, then recast Protection from Magic Weapons, cast another cloud, cast invisibility once more, and wait for Ilmadia to die.
She obliges. I can't take out her friends, so I lure them away, dimension door around them, grab her loot, and split. The end.
The Seer said:
Next time: the end of the arc! One way or another!
Last edited:
Kayerts
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 883
X. A TALE OF TWO SUFFERERS
SOUNDTRACK
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We'll just pass him there
why should we even care?
SOUNDTRACK
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We'll just pass him there
why should we even care?
1. Last Rites
2. I Will Teach You Much Of Pain
He stands before the Stairwell of Awesome Communication, glowing with arcane might. He has even remembered to put his pants back on, after the Ilmadia fight. He ascends.
He meets his rival, the strange blue-skinned priest. He is about to offer him thanks for offing Arundel when the gentleman begins to exposit:
It is now his time to demand answers of his enemy.
"So. I have a question that has been burning inside my mind every since I learned who you are. I want you to answer this one, very simple question, and I want you to answer it completely. No lying. No evasions. No bullshit. You ready?"
"Sure," Poquelin says, nonplussed by this reaction to his Evil Revelation.
"You're retarded, right?"
"What?"
"You got kicked out of Hell for being too stupid, yeah? That's it. That's my question."
"What?"
"Well, there's your terrible management structure, which requires all six of your squabbling lieutenants to cooperate in order to ask you to clarify an order, much less ask for help if some walking avatar of death started hunting them down."
"I don't believe in open offices."
"There's the fact that you've apparently been conscious of all my movements over my multi-month campaign to kill them, but you didn't bother to do anything about it. And it's not like this would have required effort on your part. You literally could have walked ten meters out your door and asked one of the priests to send out a 'stick together' order. That would have completely hamstrung my efforts. If you really wanted to throw a wrench in my plans, you could've asked them to cast True Sight if people around them suddenly started to die. But you didn't."
"I prefer to give my people autonomy."
"Let's move on to your high-level goals. You have--you had--legions of giants, salamanders, orogs, bandits, and mindfucked clerics. You had a full squad of high-level mages. In addition to your armies, I'm going to guess that you're able to open stable intraplanar portals."
"Good guess."
"For your victory condition, you need to make your way to a temple in an undefended town at the border of a loose confederacy of city states."
"What? I never mentioned that I'm trying to reach Jerrod's--"
"It's a portal to hell. You guys are always about the portals to hell," the Sufferer shrugs. "Besides, the entire introductory cinematic was about Jerrod's Stone, and it hasn't yet been mentioned since." He glares at Poquelin. Poquelin looks down sullenly.
"Okay, yes, it's about the portal to hell."
"So, while I was slowly trudging through this place for the better part of a year, why didn't you just . . . win? Was there something stopping you?"
"I was, uh, 'building up forces'--"
"I heard you the first time, and that's still ridiculous. You had forces. You had a diverse six-corps army of unholy destroyers, every soldier in it inexplicably four times as strong as he should be and thirty times stronger than me when I started this whole mess. Given that Hrothgar took everyone in Easthaven remotely resembling a warrior on his expedition, the entirety of Easthaven's defenses are one retired cleric. I'm sure he's one mean old man, but you could have stomped him flat with around 0.1% of your army."
Poquelin frowned. "Are you done?"
"Not even close. The mettle of a man can be judged by the worthiness of his rivals. Your archnemesis was Yxunomei. Think about that. This was the foe you spent untold eons struggling against. Presumably the two of you are intellectually well-matched. Leaving aside the part where she was a level 25/25 cleric/mage who prepared a grand total of two spells to defend herself against an anticipated assault, let's take a broader view. She was an apparently ancient demonic general whose forte was logistics and strategy. Her big plan for a campaign in a place called Icewind Dale was to recruit multiple armies of cold-blooded reptiles. And even though she had an artifact that gives powers of divination, she still refused to parlay with an enemy who ended up killing her and her personal guard without breaking a sweat."
"Yeah, about that. Can we fight yet?"
"You claim the two of you were cast out by your superiors because your personal vendetta was disruptive. Isn't it more likely that you were both exiled for gross incompetence?"
"Speaking of which, I know you've faced down armies of jotuns, eldjotuns, greater undead, sorcerers, demons, golems, and an enormous, ancient dragon, but can you handle . . . this? SQUIRRELS, ATTACK!" Poquelin shouts, beginning the battle.
There isn't a whole lot to this fight. Poquelin attempts to hit me with elemental effects I'm immune to; I cast mislead and smack him with the Black Blade. After a round or two of this, he gets upset and opens a portal to Easthaven--you know, like he should have done sometime during Chapter 3. The Sufferer follows.
Easthaven is overrun with cyclopes, which are nothing special, especially given that I had to wreck two maps full of jotuns to get here. There's also a crystal tower here, created from Crenshinibon, a powerful crystal artifact in Poquelin's possession. It will later go on to be the central plot device for the first of R.A. Salvatore's awful Forgotten Realms Drizzt books. Yes, we finally have a good reason to hate Poquelin: his actions here will set in play a series of terrible Lord of the Rings rip-off novels. (The second one is, no joke, going to center around a dwarven mine known for its mithril, which has been overtaken by orcs under the command of an ancient, shadowy monster.)
Eventually I free some townspeople, who reward me by giving me some plot:
Everard's going to help us. If you've forgotten, he was the guy we met at the beginning of the game who ranted about how Jerrod was dumb because dying to close the portal to hell was dumb. I sense an incoming noble sacrifice from a character we don't care enough about to mourn.
Jhonen comes by and hands me his reforged sword. "Hey, thanks again for giving me this thing! I hope nothing bad happened because of that!" he says cheerfully. The sword's +5 in the only sections of the game accessible after you receive it (so, here and in HoW). That's pretty good, but still nowhere near as good as the Longsword of Action.
We're done here, so we head to the tower.
Everard's here. "Bro, give me time to prepare my heroic death scene, k?" "K bro." We head upstairs.
And run into Pomab, who apparently masterminded the destruction of Hrothgar's expedition. Good to know that every mildly unpleasant person we came across in our trek was in league with the forces of hell; I guess having a guy who was merely rude but not evil would've been too much character complexity. Pomab conjures up a bunch of illusions and starts flinging lightning bolts around; it's all fun and games until we destroy his mind and burn his body. I didn't bother to screenshot this fight because it's trivial.
Okay, bros. This is it. I don't remember exactly how this next fight goes, so I cast a variety of buffs and ascend.
We find the crystal shard here but can't do anything about it. Bummer. Oh well, let's touch the mirror for some convenient teleportation antics:
Poquelin unseals the portal and conjures forth two cornugons (mid-level devils). Check out this alternative line from his dialogue tree, though:
"I think it is time you accepted the fact that it is not within your power to stop me. Have you not learned by now?"
"Where would I learn that? There was the time you attacked Kuldahar and I stopped you. And you tried to prevent me from using the Heartstone Gem, and that didn't work out for you, either. Then I slowly hunted down and slaughtered the entire army you had so painstakingly assembled. Then I found your private jerkoff closet and made you abandon that, too. Then I destroyed your last army, killed your stooge, and am in all likelihood going to kill you. But first, I think some otherwise irrelevant character has to make you look even stupider. Everard?"
Everard then throws himself into the portal, resealing it.
The Sufferer turns to Poquelin. "Congrats, bro. The single success you had in your entire campaign has just been reversed. I hope you enjoyed your three seconds of triumph. My one regret is that you aren't really a priest of Ilmater; your incompetence and his impotence are a perfect match."
This begins the final battle. Poquelin reveals his true form, and because that isn't cliche enough, he turns out to be an enormous pit fiend (the most powerful order of devils). His true name, visible only during this fight, is Belhifet. Belhifet is a powerhouse with the titanic strength of 25. (And an intellect of 20.) He's got 1130 HP, -12 AC, -12 THAC0, and hits 4 times per round for 50-68 damage per hit. Every successful hit has a chance to inflict poison and disease, either with no save or with a massive penalty to save. He can cast a variety of spells and will use Infernal Conveyance every other round, which teleports him short distances at random. He has a variety of resistances (immunity to fire, cold, and poison, 25% resistance to all melee weapons, 50% resistance to magic). His stats are significantly better than 2nd edition Asmodeus, the King of the Devils, or any of the other rulers of hell.
Historical reenactment footage
I didn't take many screenshots of the fight, which I now regret, because I made enough mistakes at the start and had forgotten the flow badly enough that it ended up being quite challenging, probably the best encounter in the game. I'll describe it:
My primary error was this: I remembered that Belhifet casts a dispel magic on you at the start of the fight, so I cast Spell Immunity: Abjuration beforehand. However, I forgot that the central floor of the temple was filled with traps that take >100% Find Traps skill to disarm, and each of these traps casts Dispel Magic. This effect is apparently a super special Dispel Magic which isn't blocked by by SI:Abj, so down went all my defenses. I stealthed and tried again, except that both cornugons and Belhifet can see the invisible. Still, once I got haste off, I could run around fast enough to rebuff.
My secondary error was getting cocky: I wanted to finish off all of Belhifet's allies as an extra humiliation before delivering the coup de grace on him. I will unmake all your works and bring ruin to all who stand by you. Only then shall you be granted the mercy of death. I made it through the cornugons without too much trouble, but the iron golems' poison clouds were pretty annoying. Wait! Wait! I'm feeling merciful! You can die now!
Around this time, both of the golems are sitting at injured status (50-75% HP), and I'm running low on magical immunity. Belhifet's annoying tendency to teleport around the room after a few seconds makes it hard to take off too much his HP is once, which is an issue, given that I rely on short-term weapons immunity spells to close with opponents. Belhifet can't really be tricked by Mislead spells. But casting Mislead and then Time Stop let me backstab him for three rounds, which at 7 attacks per round got him down to badly injured. (He has well over a thousand HP.)
I try to get off my other Time Stop spell, but he interrupts that with a damage spell--I'm immune, but I still go through the "hurt" animation, which breaks casting. I spend a stoneskin beating down another of his golems, but he's got one left, and I'm running pretty low on ways to close with the enemy.
I try hitting and running on Belhifet for a while. This yields slow progress, and usually costs me. Belhifet hits very hard and seems to either cause disease or poison on hit, with either no save or a very low one. Fortunately, I have stockpiled virtually every poison- or disease-curing potion in the game, as well as a few regeneration potions, so I can keep on this way for a while.
The bigger issue is haste--the golem's poison clouds force me to run through the middle of the map to kite him, and I occasionally trip one of the traps.
I have the brilliant idea of casting Mordekainen's Sword, only to be reminded that it's unenchanted in IWD, and all enemies in this encounter are immune to nonmagical weapons. I try to put aside the magic sword, but summoned weapons are not droppable; I have to wait for it expire.
Once my own sword is back, I slowly wear Belhifet down to "nearly dead," i.e., he only has 300-400 HP left. Given that I do less than 20 damage per hit, that's still not enough to go all-in against him. And it's then that he summons 8 shadow monsters. They're low-level melee fighters--mostly shadow lizardmen and shadow goblins--but if they surround me, I'm dead. I try a few strategies against them, but eventually resign myself to playing it cautious until they unsummon. It takes a while; I get caught up once and have to dimension door to escape.
So now I'm down to my last stoneskin (from a contingency), and there's still Belhifet and a golem on the board. Belhifet's flinging spells at me, and I'm dodging them all. On the other hand, I'm actually starting to run low on Elixirs of Health (which cure poison and disease), and the damage from Belhifet's direct attacks is pretty brutal on its own.
It's then that the Sufferer remembers he picked up Lover, a nasty returning throwing dagger, from Icasaracht's hoard. I don't have any skill with daggers, but my base THAC0 is ridiculous enough that I can do without. Melee is an overly risky option at this point. I start plinking away at ~12 damage per hit, twice per round, taking pot shots while the golem catches up to me. It's slow going, but the outcome is inevitable: after taking off his last 150 HP this way, Belhifet falls.
GG.
Fight analysis:
Like the Luremaster fight, this one would've been trivial if I'd remembered how it went. I had somehow forgotten all about Belhifet's poison/disease abilities (not sure if they added those in EE?). I think the ideal strategy here was probably to summon a mislead decoy and chain-cast Time Stop to set up backstabs on Belhifet, ignoring his minions. Avoiding the traps obviously would've been a good move. Also, given the sheer tankiness of enemies, preparing redundant protections for melee slugfests (extra stoneskins, extra mirror images, extra Protection from Weapons spells) would've been a better fallback.
I definitely thought I was boned at a few points, mostly due to reaching junctures where I thought I'd expended too many spells to pull off the win. Without my ridiculous potion packratting, I probably would have in fact been boned; I used something like 20 "cure"-type potions in this fight, tons of healing potions, multiple regeneration potions, and so forth. Falling back on the dagger was a desperation move; I might have been able to beat Belhifet anyway if I'd just zerged him, but I'd been trying to win a battle of attrition for a while, and I was starting to exhaust even my prodigious potion supply.
3. The Harrowing Crusade
4. Iron Within, Iron Without
It's now time to tie up all loose ends.
There's a brave little gnome in Dorn's Deep who needs our help.
We check inside the tower, which briefly is filled with a squad of archers, and in very short time is devoid of all enemy life.
Creepy little gnome! The other guy we have to help out down here is Guello, Lost Primarch and Firstborn of the God-Emperor of Gnomekind:
When he was but a boy, Guello ripped out the spinal columns of two fire salamanders and used them to strangle a fire giant, through the might of his superior master race gnomeiness. By the time he was sixteen, he had conquered the entire Plane of Fire by winning an arm-wrestling contest with the elemental princes.
But now he's fallen on hard times due to a life spent partying too hard with mushrooms. He wants us to kill a dude named Shitake as vengeance. This will take us a total of five seconds, so we oblige.
Because he's a filthy ingrate, Guello leaves for the Gnome Home immediately thereafter, without waiting for us to return to him. "Don't mention it, Guello," we are forced to say when we finally catch up to him. I don't think Guello needs to be told twice! Or at all!
That's the end of our gnome quests. "Goodbye, little gnomes," the Sufferer says. "I hope one day you rule these depths. I've done what I can for you. It still won't be easy. I believe in you, though." They raise their stubby little arms in a gnomey salute, which is weirdly more moving than it should be.
There's one last thing we have to do while we're in the Gnome Home. Do you recall Nym? Dark elf, short guy, kind of old, masterminded the downfall of two civilizations? Well, the Sufferer remembers him.
Nym is well-prepared for trouble, living the life that he has, and telling his story as freely as he does. He has a very good defense, taken from Mr. Miyagi's book, which is also the Sufferer's book:
If he's attacked, he has a non-interruptible dimension door effect that warps him to safety within the blink of an eye.
Of course, it does him no good against an enemy with power to stretch the blink of an eye into an eternity.
Shadows, to me. There is a creature who must die.
The devouring darkness of the Black Blade erases any trace that Nym has ever been, swallowing him into a silence beyond time. Two civilizations now stand avenged. We head off to the Severed Hand, in the hope that the news will bring the ghosts there peace.
Peace comes to some.
For others, to path to peace is a harder road. Larrel learns the fullness of his folly. He takes it pretty responsibly, owning up to his failures. The elven gods will not release him from their curse, though, because like all the other gods of Faerun, they're complete fuckers.
The Sufferer no longer hopes to join the gods' ranks, no longer believes they are truly gods at all. But this has only strengthened his resolve to overturn their edicts and disannul their judgment. A wave of his hand stops the passage of time. No false god will be able to stop him.
(I forgot to screenshot it, but then I turned into a mindflayer and ate Larrel's brain. He dropped the Heartstone Gem when he died, so I retrieved it.)
With all that done, it is time for the end. It is time for the Sufferer to meet his rival.
There's a brave little gnome in Dorn's Deep who needs our help.
We check inside the tower, which briefly is filled with a squad of archers, and in very short time is devoid of all enemy life.
Creepy little gnome! The other guy we have to help out down here is Guello, Lost Primarch and Firstborn of the God-Emperor of Gnomekind:
When he was but a boy, Guello ripped out the spinal columns of two fire salamanders and used them to strangle a fire giant, through the might of his superior master race gnomeiness. By the time he was sixteen, he had conquered the entire Plane of Fire by winning an arm-wrestling contest with the elemental princes.
But now he's fallen on hard times due to a life spent partying too hard with mushrooms. He wants us to kill a dude named Shitake as vengeance. This will take us a total of five seconds, so we oblige.
Because he's a filthy ingrate, Guello leaves for the Gnome Home immediately thereafter, without waiting for us to return to him. "Don't mention it, Guello," we are forced to say when we finally catch up to him. I don't think Guello needs to be told twice! Or at all!
That's the end of our gnome quests. "Goodbye, little gnomes," the Sufferer says. "I hope one day you rule these depths. I've done what I can for you. It still won't be easy. I believe in you, though." They raise their stubby little arms in a gnomey salute, which is weirdly more moving than it should be.
There's one last thing we have to do while we're in the Gnome Home. Do you recall Nym? Dark elf, short guy, kind of old, masterminded the downfall of two civilizations? Well, the Sufferer remembers him.
Nym is well-prepared for trouble, living the life that he has, and telling his story as freely as he does. He has a very good defense, taken from Mr. Miyagi's book, which is also the Sufferer's book:
If he's attacked, he has a non-interruptible dimension door effect that warps him to safety within the blink of an eye.
Of course, it does him no good against an enemy with power to stretch the blink of an eye into an eternity.
Shadows, to me. There is a creature who must die.
The devouring darkness of the Black Blade erases any trace that Nym has ever been, swallowing him into a silence beyond time. Two civilizations now stand avenged. We head off to the Severed Hand, in the hope that the news will bring the ghosts there peace.
Peace comes to some.
For others, to path to peace is a harder road. Larrel learns the fullness of his folly. He takes it pretty responsibly, owning up to his failures. The elven gods will not release him from their curse, though, because like all the other gods of Faerun, they're complete fuckers.
The Sufferer no longer hopes to join the gods' ranks, no longer believes they are truly gods at all. But this has only strengthened his resolve to overturn their edicts and disannul their judgment. A wave of his hand stops the passage of time. No false god will be able to stop him.
(I forgot to screenshot it, but then I turned into a mindflayer and ate Larrel's brain. He dropped the Heartstone Gem when he died, so I retrieved it.)
With all that done, it is time for the end. It is time for the Sufferer to meet his rival.
2. I Will Teach You Much Of Pain
He stands before the Stairwell of Awesome Communication, glowing with arcane might. He has even remembered to put his pants back on, after the Ilmadia fight. He ascends.
He meets his rival, the strange blue-skinned priest. He is about to offer him thanks for offing Arundel when the gentleman begins to exposit:
It is now his time to demand answers of his enemy.
"So. I have a question that has been burning inside my mind every since I learned who you are. I want you to answer this one, very simple question, and I want you to answer it completely. No lying. No evasions. No bullshit. You ready?"
"Sure," Poquelin says, nonplussed by this reaction to his Evil Revelation.
"You're retarded, right?"
"What?"
"You got kicked out of Hell for being too stupid, yeah? That's it. That's my question."
"What?"
"Well, there's your terrible management structure, which requires all six of your squabbling lieutenants to cooperate in order to ask you to clarify an order, much less ask for help if some walking avatar of death started hunting them down."
"I don't believe in open offices."
"There's the fact that you've apparently been conscious of all my movements over my multi-month campaign to kill them, but you didn't bother to do anything about it. And it's not like this would have required effort on your part. You literally could have walked ten meters out your door and asked one of the priests to send out a 'stick together' order. That would have completely hamstrung my efforts. If you really wanted to throw a wrench in my plans, you could've asked them to cast True Sight if people around them suddenly started to die. But you didn't."
"I prefer to give my people autonomy."
"Let's move on to your high-level goals. You have--you had--legions of giants, salamanders, orogs, bandits, and mindfucked clerics. You had a full squad of high-level mages. In addition to your armies, I'm going to guess that you're able to open stable intraplanar portals."
"Good guess."
"For your victory condition, you need to make your way to a temple in an undefended town at the border of a loose confederacy of city states."
"What? I never mentioned that I'm trying to reach Jerrod's--"
"It's a portal to hell. You guys are always about the portals to hell," the Sufferer shrugs. "Besides, the entire introductory cinematic was about Jerrod's Stone, and it hasn't yet been mentioned since." He glares at Poquelin. Poquelin looks down sullenly.
"Okay, yes, it's about the portal to hell."
"So, while I was slowly trudging through this place for the better part of a year, why didn't you just . . . win? Was there something stopping you?"
"I was, uh, 'building up forces'--"
"I heard you the first time, and that's still ridiculous. You had forces. You had a diverse six-corps army of unholy destroyers, every soldier in it inexplicably four times as strong as he should be and thirty times stronger than me when I started this whole mess. Given that Hrothgar took everyone in Easthaven remotely resembling a warrior on his expedition, the entirety of Easthaven's defenses are one retired cleric. I'm sure he's one mean old man, but you could have stomped him flat with around 0.1% of your army."
Poquelin frowned. "Are you done?"
"Not even close. The mettle of a man can be judged by the worthiness of his rivals. Your archnemesis was Yxunomei. Think about that. This was the foe you spent untold eons struggling against. Presumably the two of you are intellectually well-matched. Leaving aside the part where she was a level 25/25 cleric/mage who prepared a grand total of two spells to defend herself against an anticipated assault, let's take a broader view. She was an apparently ancient demonic general whose forte was logistics and strategy. Her big plan for a campaign in a place called Icewind Dale was to recruit multiple armies of cold-blooded reptiles. And even though she had an artifact that gives powers of divination, she still refused to parlay with an enemy who ended up killing her and her personal guard without breaking a sweat."
"Yeah, about that. Can we fight yet?"
"You claim the two of you were cast out by your superiors because your personal vendetta was disruptive. Isn't it more likely that you were both exiled for gross incompetence?"
"Speaking of which, I know you've faced down armies of jotuns, eldjotuns, greater undead, sorcerers, demons, golems, and an enormous, ancient dragon, but can you handle . . . this? SQUIRRELS, ATTACK!" Poquelin shouts, beginning the battle.
There isn't a whole lot to this fight. Poquelin attempts to hit me with elemental effects I'm immune to; I cast mislead and smack him with the Black Blade. After a round or two of this, he gets upset and opens a portal to Easthaven--you know, like he should have done sometime during Chapter 3. The Sufferer follows.
Easthaven is overrun with cyclopes, which are nothing special, especially given that I had to wreck two maps full of jotuns to get here. There's also a crystal tower here, created from Crenshinibon, a powerful crystal artifact in Poquelin's possession. It will later go on to be the central plot device for the first of R.A. Salvatore's awful Forgotten Realms Drizzt books. Yes, we finally have a good reason to hate Poquelin: his actions here will set in play a series of terrible Lord of the Rings rip-off novels. (The second one is, no joke, going to center around a dwarven mine known for its mithril, which has been overtaken by orcs under the command of an ancient, shadowy monster.)
Eventually I free some townspeople, who reward me by giving me some plot:
Everard's going to help us. If you've forgotten, he was the guy we met at the beginning of the game who ranted about how Jerrod was dumb because dying to close the portal to hell was dumb. I sense an incoming noble sacrifice from a character we don't care enough about to mourn.
Jhonen comes by and hands me his reforged sword. "Hey, thanks again for giving me this thing! I hope nothing bad happened because of that!" he says cheerfully. The sword's +5 in the only sections of the game accessible after you receive it (so, here and in HoW). That's pretty good, but still nowhere near as good as the Longsword of Action.
We're done here, so we head to the tower.
Everard's here. "Bro, give me time to prepare my heroic death scene, k?" "K bro." We head upstairs.
And run into Pomab, who apparently masterminded the destruction of Hrothgar's expedition. Good to know that every mildly unpleasant person we came across in our trek was in league with the forces of hell; I guess having a guy who was merely rude but not evil would've been too much character complexity. Pomab conjures up a bunch of illusions and starts flinging lightning bolts around; it's all fun and games until we destroy his mind and burn his body. I didn't bother to screenshot this fight because it's trivial.
Okay, bros. This is it. I don't remember exactly how this next fight goes, so I cast a variety of buffs and ascend.
We find the crystal shard here but can't do anything about it. Bummer. Oh well, let's touch the mirror for some convenient teleportation antics:
Poquelin unseals the portal and conjures forth two cornugons (mid-level devils). Check out this alternative line from his dialogue tree, though:
"I think it is time you accepted the fact that it is not within your power to stop me. Have you not learned by now?"
"Where would I learn that? There was the time you attacked Kuldahar and I stopped you. And you tried to prevent me from using the Heartstone Gem, and that didn't work out for you, either. Then I slowly hunted down and slaughtered the entire army you had so painstakingly assembled. Then I found your private jerkoff closet and made you abandon that, too. Then I destroyed your last army, killed your stooge, and am in all likelihood going to kill you. But first, I think some otherwise irrelevant character has to make you look even stupider. Everard?"
Everard then throws himself into the portal, resealing it.
The Sufferer turns to Poquelin. "Congrats, bro. The single success you had in your entire campaign has just been reversed. I hope you enjoyed your three seconds of triumph. My one regret is that you aren't really a priest of Ilmater; your incompetence and his impotence are a perfect match."
This begins the final battle. Poquelin reveals his true form, and because that isn't cliche enough, he turns out to be an enormous pit fiend (the most powerful order of devils). His true name, visible only during this fight, is Belhifet. Belhifet is a powerhouse with the titanic strength of 25. (And an intellect of 20.
) He's got 1130 HP, -12 AC, -12 THAC0, and hits 4 times per round for 50-68 damage per hit. Every successful hit has a chance to inflict poison and disease, either with no save or with a massive penalty to save. He can cast a variety of spells and will use Infernal Conveyance every other round, which teleports him short distances at random. He has a variety of resistances (immunity to fire, cold, and poison, 25% resistance to all melee weapons, 50% resistance to magic). His stats are significantly better than 2nd edition Asmodeus, the King of the Devils, or any of the other rulers of hell.
Historical reenactment footage
I didn't take many screenshots of the fight, which I now regret, because I made enough mistakes at the start and had forgotten the flow badly enough that it ended up being quite challenging, probably the best encounter in the game. I'll describe it:
My primary error was this: I remembered that Belhifet casts a dispel magic on you at the start of the fight, so I cast Spell Immunity: Abjuration beforehand. However, I forgot that the central floor of the temple was filled with traps that take >100% Find Traps skill to disarm, and each of these traps casts Dispel Magic. This effect is apparently a super special Dispel Magic which isn't blocked by by SI:Abj, so down went all my defenses. I stealthed and tried again, except that both cornugons and Belhifet can see the invisible. Still, once I got haste off, I could run around fast enough to rebuff.
My secondary error was getting cocky: I wanted to finish off all of Belhifet's allies as an extra humiliation before delivering the coup de grace on him. I will unmake all your works and bring ruin to all who stand by you. Only then shall you be granted the mercy of death. I made it through the cornugons without too much trouble, but the iron golems' poison clouds were pretty annoying. Wait! Wait! I'm feeling merciful! You can die now!
Around this time, both of the golems are sitting at injured status (50-75% HP), and I'm running low on magical immunity. Belhifet's annoying tendency to teleport around the room after a few seconds makes it hard to take off too much his HP is once, which is an issue, given that I rely on short-term weapons immunity spells to close with opponents. Belhifet can't really be tricked by Mislead spells. But casting Mislead and then Time Stop let me backstab him for three rounds, which at 7 attacks per round got him down to badly injured. (He has well over a thousand HP.)
I try to get off my other Time Stop spell, but he interrupts that with a damage spell--I'm immune, but I still go through the "hurt" animation, which breaks casting. I spend a stoneskin beating down another of his golems, but he's got one left, and I'm running pretty low on ways to close with the enemy.
I try hitting and running on Belhifet for a while. This yields slow progress, and usually costs me. Belhifet hits very hard and seems to either cause disease or poison on hit, with either no save or a very low one. Fortunately, I have stockpiled virtually every poison- or disease-curing potion in the game, as well as a few regeneration potions, so I can keep on this way for a while.
The bigger issue is haste--the golem's poison clouds force me to run through the middle of the map to kite him, and I occasionally trip one of the traps.
I have the brilliant idea of casting Mordekainen's Sword, only to be reminded that it's unenchanted in IWD, and all enemies in this encounter are immune to nonmagical weapons. I try to put aside the magic sword, but summoned weapons are not droppable; I have to wait for it expire.
Once my own sword is back, I slowly wear Belhifet down to "nearly dead," i.e., he only has 300-400 HP left. Given that I do less than 20 damage per hit, that's still not enough to go all-in against him. And it's then that he summons 8 shadow monsters. They're low-level melee fighters--mostly shadow lizardmen and shadow goblins--but if they surround me, I'm dead. I try a few strategies against them, but eventually resign myself to playing it cautious until they unsummon. It takes a while; I get caught up once and have to dimension door to escape.
So now I'm down to my last stoneskin (from a contingency), and there's still Belhifet and a golem on the board. Belhifet's flinging spells at me, and I'm dodging them all. On the other hand, I'm actually starting to run low on Elixirs of Health (which cure poison and disease), and the damage from Belhifet's direct attacks is pretty brutal on its own.
It's then that the Sufferer remembers he picked up Lover, a nasty returning throwing dagger, from Icasaracht's hoard. I don't have any skill with daggers, but my base THAC0 is ridiculous enough that I can do without. Melee is an overly risky option at this point. I start plinking away at ~12 damage per hit, twice per round, taking pot shots while the golem catches up to me. It's slow going, but the outcome is inevitable: after taking off his last 150 HP this way, Belhifet falls.
GG.
Fight analysis:
Like the Luremaster fight, this one would've been trivial if I'd remembered how it went. I had somehow forgotten all about Belhifet's poison/disease abilities (not sure if they added those in EE?). I think the ideal strategy here was probably to summon a mislead decoy and chain-cast Time Stop to set up backstabs on Belhifet, ignoring his minions. Avoiding the traps obviously would've been a good move. Also, given the sheer tankiness of enemies, preparing redundant protections for melee slugfests (extra stoneskins, extra mirror images, extra Protection from Weapons spells) would've been a better fallback.
I definitely thought I was boned at a few points, mostly due to reaching junctures where I thought I'd expended too many spells to pull off the win. Without my ridiculous potion packratting, I probably would have in fact been boned; I used something like 20 "cure"-type potions in this fight, tons of healing potions, multiple regeneration potions, and so forth. Falling back on the dagger was a desperation move; I might have been able to beat Belhifet anyway if I'd just zerged him, but I'd been trying to win a battle of attrition for a while, and I was starting to exhaust even my prodigious potion supply.
3. The Harrowing Crusade
After the fight, an ending cinematic reveals that Belhifet was the narrator of the game all along. That's a technically cool storytelling twist (maximally unreliable narrator!), but given that the narrator only narrates the dry chapter intros, and the player at no point has to make any decision based on said narration, it doesn't actually change my perspective on anything.
There's some nonsense about how the "companions" escaped the crumbling crystal tower, since Belhifet was, naturally, a load-bearing boss. I hope none of you think that's a satisfying ending, because I'm going to tell you what really happened.
* * *
Soundtrack
The Sufferer stood over the pit fiend's disintegrating mortal form. It was finally done. The region was at last purged of the sadistic, the incompetent, and the mad. He had met every mortal or divine source of suffering that Icewind Dale held, and he had ended them all. He had torn out the land's corrupt heart of fury and burned it in sacrifice to his own cause.
He did not know if good things would follow after, but now they had a chance, and that was the best any wandering hero could hope for. The hundred or so innocents he had left alive in the region would wake to a new dawn, one in which the heartbeat of whatever world would follow was not set by corrupt powers beyond their control.
He would not be partaking in that world. He had dedicated himself to war and experience, but he had learned all he could, bested everyone who dared stand against him. The Frozen North held no more mysteries for him; indeed, the architecture of the whole world now seemed no more than the snow forts of infantile gods. There was imagination in some places, but so many had fashioned their creations so tediously alike, committing the same mistakes again and again. The emergent result was a world lacking subtlety or complexity because of its emphasis on superficial breadth over meaningful depth, and it wearied the Sufferer. Did the world really need twenty races of sadistic humanoids who lived only to beat strangers to death? Did it need an endless parade of Lawful Stupid leaders to guide their peoples into damnation? Did it need Arundel? Arundel was the fucking worst.
He would not bow his head to the inevitable decline. (
) The bearer of the Black Blade would take his own stand against entropy. He would find the book where the rules of this awful universe were written and scour them out. In their place he would inscribe a new testament for the reigning gods to read and know fear.
His work was not done, but he could do no more here.
He would contend on another plane. If he was to raise war against the inadequacy of existence, he must do so in the realm of ideas. He would start by seeking the vilest creatures of the most wretched place in the universe, and when he was done, they would flee for fear of one more dread than they. He would go to the darkest places and bring an end to their suffering.
And . . . had he not shown himself mightier than Belhifet, who was mightier than the King of Hell? He raised his eyes to the portal and knew what he had to do.
* * *
Everard blinked. His last memory was charging into the portal. Why was the shadowy warrior smiling at him now, alone in the temple vault? His eyes narrowed as he saw the green scroll fading from the warrior's hands. "Why did you bring me back? The portal must remain closed!" he shouted.
"I needed to send something through," the Sufferer said. He slapped Everard on the back. "Very solid sacrifice last time, excellent work. I wouldn't have asked for an encore, but you probably owe me one."
"What?"
The tower rumbled overhead, its collapse beginning. "Gotta go. Remember to lock up after me," he said cheerfully, leaping through the portal and into Hell.
* * *
The scarred man grunted as the last devil fell, panting as he leaned on his blade of silver fire. When he had caught his breath, he gestured dismissively at his attending angels. "It is done. Begone," he groaned, dismissing the celestial host. The lords of the high heavens faded into nothingness at his word.
A terrible grinding behind him let him know that he had been premature, but with a wave of his hand, the grey man summoned endless blades to slash at whatever fiend had risen against him. He stood, cocking his head and listening, until whatever was behind him had stopped moving.
He rested. He sat in the trance that was the nearest thing to sleep he allowed himself for a full ten minutes, until the hissing around him grew too loud. He opened his eyes and beheld a ring of glabrezu leering down at him. He narrowed his eyes and touched a place on his shoulder, curiously unscarred. His other hand raced through the air, drawing the circle. Torment of the mind. Torment of the body. Torment of the soul.
He stopped. One by one, the flaming glabrezu fell to earth, like meteors foretelling the end of days. Each of their bodies exploded, torn apart by pitiless unseen blades. As the last one disappeared into a geyser of black blood, he glimpsed the faint outline of a man behind it, regarding him with glowing eyes. Something about the cloaked figure seemed very familiar. The expression on the man's face suggested the same uncertain recognition.
At length, he spoke. "You are no fiend."
It was not a question, and so the strange shadow did not answer. He continued to regard the scarred man curiously. Finally, he spoke. "The Seer's magicks. You were also born of them."
It took a moment, but the grey-skinned man understood. The brambled shadows writhing on the figure's arms, the look in his eyes of one who had found a very strange way back from death, the strange cloak he wore. Another of Ravel's creations. He put his own magicks into the next word, wrapping it with memories and bathing it in a context that would otherwise cost precious time to describe: "Brother."
The Sufferer narrowed his eyes as the Named One's memories flowed into him. In time he smiled and extended his arm. The Named One clasped it. Black thorns sprouted where their skin touched, causing the Sufferer to draw back quickly. In knowing the scarred man's history and purpose, he knew how it was aligned with his. And he knew that, if they were of a united will, there was very little that could stand against them.
Mind-to-mind communication left very few uncertainties, but some things needed to be said aloud. Green light flared around the Named, and great shadows gathered to the Sufferer.
There's some nonsense about how the "companions" escaped the crumbling crystal tower, since Belhifet was, naturally, a load-bearing boss. I hope none of you think that's a satisfying ending, because I'm going to tell you what really happened.
* * *
Soundtrack
The Sufferer stood over the pit fiend's disintegrating mortal form. It was finally done. The region was at last purged of the sadistic, the incompetent, and the mad. He had met every mortal or divine source of suffering that Icewind Dale held, and he had ended them all. He had torn out the land's corrupt heart of fury and burned it in sacrifice to his own cause.
He did not know if good things would follow after, but now they had a chance, and that was the best any wandering hero could hope for. The hundred or so innocents he had left alive in the region would wake to a new dawn, one in which the heartbeat of whatever world would follow was not set by corrupt powers beyond their control.
He would not be partaking in that world. He had dedicated himself to war and experience, but he had learned all he could, bested everyone who dared stand against him. The Frozen North held no more mysteries for him; indeed, the architecture of the whole world now seemed no more than the snow forts of infantile gods. There was imagination in some places, but so many had fashioned their creations so tediously alike, committing the same mistakes again and again. The emergent result was a world lacking subtlety or complexity because of its emphasis on superficial breadth over meaningful depth, and it wearied the Sufferer. Did the world really need twenty races of sadistic humanoids who lived only to beat strangers to death? Did it need an endless parade of Lawful Stupid leaders to guide their peoples into damnation? Did it need Arundel? Arundel was the fucking worst.
He would not bow his head to the inevitable decline. (
) The bearer of the Black Blade would take his own stand against entropy. He would find the book where the rules of this awful universe were written and scour them out. In their place he would inscribe a new testament for the reigning gods to read and know fear.His work was not done, but he could do no more here.
He would contend on another plane. If he was to raise war against the inadequacy of existence, he must do so in the realm of ideas. He would start by seeking the vilest creatures of the most wretched place in the universe, and when he was done, they would flee for fear of one more dread than they. He would go to the darkest places and bring an end to their suffering.
And . . . had he not shown himself mightier than Belhifet, who was mightier than the King of Hell? He raised his eyes to the portal and knew what he had to do.
* * *
Everard blinked. His last memory was charging into the portal. Why was the shadowy warrior smiling at him now, alone in the temple vault? His eyes narrowed as he saw the green scroll fading from the warrior's hands. "Why did you bring me back? The portal must remain closed!" he shouted.
"I needed to send something through," the Sufferer said. He slapped Everard on the back. "Very solid sacrifice last time, excellent work. I wouldn't have asked for an encore, but you probably owe me one."
"What?"
The tower rumbled overhead, its collapse beginning. "Gotta go. Remember to lock up after me," he said cheerfully, leaping through the portal and into Hell.
* * *
The scarred man grunted as the last devil fell, panting as he leaned on his blade of silver fire. When he had caught his breath, he gestured dismissively at his attending angels. "It is done. Begone," he groaned, dismissing the celestial host. The lords of the high heavens faded into nothingness at his word.
A terrible grinding behind him let him know that he had been premature, but with a wave of his hand, the grey man summoned endless blades to slash at whatever fiend had risen against him. He stood, cocking his head and listening, until whatever was behind him had stopped moving.
He rested. He sat in the trance that was the nearest thing to sleep he allowed himself for a full ten minutes, until the hissing around him grew too loud. He opened his eyes and beheld a ring of glabrezu leering down at him. He narrowed his eyes and touched a place on his shoulder, curiously unscarred. His other hand raced through the air, drawing the circle. Torment of the mind. Torment of the body. Torment of the soul.
He stopped. One by one, the flaming glabrezu fell to earth, like meteors foretelling the end of days. Each of their bodies exploded, torn apart by pitiless unseen blades. As the last one disappeared into a geyser of black blood, he glimpsed the faint outline of a man behind it, regarding him with glowing eyes. Something about the cloaked figure seemed very familiar. The expression on the man's face suggested the same uncertain recognition.
At length, he spoke. "You are no fiend."
It was not a question, and so the strange shadow did not answer. He continued to regard the scarred man curiously. Finally, he spoke. "The Seer's magicks. You were also born of them."
It took a moment, but the grey-skinned man understood. The brambled shadows writhing on the figure's arms, the look in his eyes of one who had found a very strange way back from death, the strange cloak he wore. Another of Ravel's creations. He put his own magicks into the next word, wrapping it with memories and bathing it in a context that would otherwise cost precious time to describe: "Brother."
The Sufferer narrowed his eyes as the Named One's memories flowed into him. In time he smiled and extended his arm. The Named One clasped it. Black thorns sprouted where their skin touched, causing the Sufferer to draw back quickly. In knowing the scarred man's history and purpose, he knew how it was aligned with his. And he knew that, if they were of a united will, there was very little that could stand against them.
Mind-to-mind communication left very few uncertainties, but some things needed to be said aloud. Green light flared around the Named, and great shadows gathered to the Sufferer.
4. Iron Within, Iron Without
This concludes our playthrough.
Icewind Dale's a pretty weird game. I think the Sufferer's extended conversation with Poquelin made my feelings about the overarching plot clear, so I'm not going to revisit them. Suffice to say, it has flaws. It also has consistently lovely atmosphere, and moments of brilliance (the Seer, Yxunomei) that still impress me, even if they don't have a place in anything larger. Overall, assigning some of the best game creatives of all time to a hack-and-slash slugfest resulted in some curious incongruities.
As a tactical challenge for a tactical LP, I'm not sure how great of a candidate it was. My strategy of jumping to HoW as soon as possible was probably optimal, insofar as the rewards were enormous. And, for a game as long as this, staying alert is a major issue for an ironman challenge. Quickly getting powerful enough that I could survive small mistakes was probably necessary. Still, it led to a weird difficulty curve. I'm not totally sure that this was what caused my occasionally-interrupted cakewalk through the majority of core IWD content; I'm more inclined to attribute that to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the enemy types are too boring for there to be interesting encounter design.
A smart ironmanner will prepare for as many eventualities as he can; this is how I survived a few fights that I didn't properly do my homework for. The only things that can really fuck up an ironmanner, then, are enemies who use too diverse a skillset to easily counter, or enemies that are truly uncounterable. (An example of the former is the modded Twisted Rune in BG2, where there are a ton of ways for the fight to go; an examples of the latter is Kangaxx, who's impossible without certain powers or gear but trivial with them.) This is an issue for IWD because the melee mooks that comprise >95% of the games' adversaries only do one thing, and only have two tactically meaningful states. ("Surrounding me" and "not surrounding me.") Ironmanning tactically modded versions of BG2 would've probably been a better challenge, but that's been done. (I think? I seem to recall that being a thing, and I'm sure people have done it with a full complement of the nastiest tactical mods.)
Still, this playthrough had interesting parts, and it was tense up to the very end. I hope I managed to convey some of that. I also hope you enjoyed the story of the Sufferer! It wasn't intended to get as dark or weird as it did, but putting oneself in the mind of a dude murdering hundreds of trash mobs will do that.
Thanks for reading, bros!
Icewind Dale's a pretty weird game. I think the Sufferer's extended conversation with Poquelin made my feelings about the overarching plot clear, so I'm not going to revisit them. Suffice to say, it has flaws. It also has consistently lovely atmosphere, and moments of brilliance (the Seer, Yxunomei) that still impress me, even if they don't have a place in anything larger. Overall, assigning some of the best game creatives of all time to a hack-and-slash slugfest resulted in some curious incongruities.
As a tactical challenge for a tactical LP, I'm not sure how great of a candidate it was. My strategy of jumping to HoW as soon as possible was probably optimal, insofar as the rewards were enormous. And, for a game as long as this, staying alert is a major issue for an ironman challenge. Quickly getting powerful enough that I could survive small mistakes was probably necessary. Still, it led to a weird difficulty curve. I'm not totally sure that this was what caused my occasionally-interrupted cakewalk through the majority of core IWD content; I'm more inclined to attribute that to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the enemy types are too boring for there to be interesting encounter design.
A smart ironmanner will prepare for as many eventualities as he can; this is how I survived a few fights that I didn't properly do my homework for. The only things that can really fuck up an ironmanner, then, are enemies who use too diverse a skillset to easily counter, or enemies that are truly uncounterable. (An example of the former is the modded Twisted Rune in BG2, where there are a ton of ways for the fight to go; an examples of the latter is Kangaxx, who's impossible without certain powers or gear but trivial with them.) This is an issue for IWD because the melee mooks that comprise >95% of the games' adversaries only do one thing, and only have two tactically meaningful states. ("Surrounding me" and "not surrounding me.") Ironmanning tactically modded versions of BG2 would've probably been a better challenge, but that's been done. (I think? I seem to recall that being a thing, and I'm sure people have done it with a full complement of the nastiest tactical mods.)
Still, this playthrough had interesting parts, and it was tense up to the very end. I hope I managed to convey some of that. I also hope you enjoyed the story of the Sufferer! It wasn't intended to get as dark or weird as it did, but putting oneself in the mind of a dude murdering hundreds of trash mobs will do that.
Thanks for reading, bros!
Alexis13
Novice
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2015
- Messages
- 2
Play this class, http://www.filedropper.com/warlockdruid_2 (you gotta be a human and its a druid kit because the creator had to use a druid kit to make it work right)
Its a the Warlock from Nwn1/2 but changed to the Pen and paper version latest edition one (so like 90% of a nwn1/2 warlock but the better PnP version) but changed slightly for the 2E (or is it 3E IWD?) rules.
I'm playing it and doing heart of fury somtimes and I can solo pretty damn well, you get really strong with Fiendish Resilience at level 8, but before that its exceptionally hard, use that sleep scroll you get at the start on the kobolds, after that keep summonign Earthen Hands innvocations to fight other stuff and just keep back to get yourself to level 8.
You get immunity to normal weapons at level 8. + some other benefits from Fiendish Resilience that gets stronger as you level, its good fun and I unique play style, but its complicated and different, Id say you should play for an hour on normal mode to get used to it unrecorded then restart on heart of fury.
Its a the Warlock from Nwn1/2 but changed to the Pen and paper version latest edition one (so like 90% of a nwn1/2 warlock but the better PnP version) but changed slightly for the 2E (or is it 3E IWD?) rules.
I'm playing it and doing heart of fury somtimes and I can solo pretty damn well, you get really strong with Fiendish Resilience at level 8, but before that its exceptionally hard, use that sleep scroll you get at the start on the kobolds, after that keep summonign Earthen Hands innvocations to fight other stuff and just keep back to get yourself to level 8.
You get immunity to normal weapons at level 8. + some other benefits from Fiendish Resilience that gets stronger as you level, its good fun and I unique play style, but its complicated and different, Id say you should play for an hour on normal mode to get used to it unrecorded then restart on heart of fury.
Edward_R_Murrow
Arcane
Same. I also don't remember him casting any spells besides Dispel Magic, Infernal Conveyance, and his own proprietary "Burning Blood" type of spell. Perhaps that was an addition from Heart of Winter, seeing as I've never actually fought him with the expansion installed (usually install right after beating him, and got bored of a Heart of Fury run after Dragon's Eye).
e-mailio estevez
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2012
- Messages
- 1,643
I'm always amazed at the kind of mastery people have over the Infinity Engine games. I couldn't imagine pulling off this kind of challenge run. Finishing Heart of Winter solo? Unbelievable.
Well done.
Well done.
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