BGII: How to kill the fucking vampires and werewolves?

[Ozrat]

Damn, people are still responding to this thread?

I started doing Chapter 6 last time I played BGII (over a week ago at least) and I'm finding that the storyline is A LOT more interesting now. Just gotta finish up a couple of the final side quests (If there are any left, can't remember) before going on to beat the rest of the storymode of the game.

At this point (after cheating the hell out of my characters out of frustration), I've figured out which items and strategies work best for the battles. Cloak of Mirroring works wonders with Aerie.

IIRC, the part that I was last doing was trying to kill the demi-lich Kangaxx or whomever. Bloody annoying how he can just kill you just like that. Does turn-undead work on him, or is there some other sort of trick to beating him easily?

 

[Transcendent One]

Kangaxx basically casts a stronger version of imprisonment that has a casting time 1 and casts from a distance. There's no save, and to get the char back you need to cast freedom (so obviously this will not work with the main character). Also, if you have romance or crap like that with NPC's, when freed they aren't part of your party anymore and thus it messes up. To kill Kangaxx you can either use the improved mace of disruption, a protection from magic scroll, spell immunity : abjuration or simply keep your main char to the side and purchase a few dozen freedom scrolls to keep casting throughout the battle.

Yeah, rock paper scissors.

 

[DAG]

The Red Dragon

I need help with the Red Dragon. I am trying to kill him but he kills all my party members after doing some breaths.

 

[The Exar]

Use Protection from fire then. Keep your mages away from battle. Cast Pierce magic, Breach and other to break his protection. Use poison.
I feel sorry that I continue to post in this thread, but we're here to help each other, so don't get mad that BGII is on top again.

 

[DAG]

I already killed Kangaxx. Its easy if you have a mage with the inmunity spell.
First you cast Inmunity (Abjuration) with your mage and attack kangaxx. If you have a +4 weapon or better you can hit him. If you don´t have it then:
Use the Ring of Ram. You get this item when you defeat the Cowled Wizard in the Planar Sphere. This ring does 5-30 hit points of damage, generally it does 20, then use a Fire Elemental to kill him.

Note: The mage serve as a diversion while you kill Kangaxx.

 

[Limorkil]

Re: The Red Dragon

I need help with the Red Dragon. I am trying to kill him but he kills all my party members after doing some breaths.

With the dragons your just have to get lucky and kill them before they kill you. First you need a weapon or two that will hit them - I think its +3 or better. You also should have spells/potions that protect from magic and stoneskin/ironskin. With the red dragon, the tactic I used was to give a fighter than had the most HP all the fire protection items I had. I think I had some armor, a shield and a ring - he had 100% fire resistance so the dragon fire could not hurt him.

By the standards of many RPGs, particularly recent ones, the combat in BG2 is very hard and very tactical, especially early on. The game does not shield you from tough opponents: if you want to take on a dragon at level 8 it will let you. As with any traditional D&D campaign, the idea is that you know which fights you should retreat from and then come back later when you are higher level. The key to winning the tough fights is to buff up as much as possible. You will notice that the tough enemies buff up at the start of the fight, particularly the wizards. You need to do the same, and use your own wizards to dispel the enemy protections.

 

[Transcendent One]

Don't forget excessive use of magic missile, mordenkainen's force missiles (if you have the mod), melf's minute meteors and any other magical missiles your mage can make.

 

[DrattedTin]

IIRC, the part that I was last doing was trying to kill the demi-lich Kangaxx or whomever. Bloody annoying how he can just kill you just like that. Does turn-undead work on him, or is there some other sort of trick to beating him easily?

Hi. Can you read?

 

[DrattedTin]

With the dragons your just have to get lucky and kill them before they kill you. First you need a weapon or two that will hit them - I think its +3 or better. You also should have spells/potions that protect from magic and stoneskin/ironskin. With the red dragon, the tactic I used was to give a fighter than had the most HP all the fire protection items I had. I think I had some armor, a shield and a ring - he had 100% fire resistance so the dragon fire could not hurt him.

Ehh, I beat the lich & beholder & vampire & archmage group at level 9. Firkraag makes that look like a picnic. It just requires a tolerance for cheese.

 

[suibhne]

Ehh, I beat the lich & beholder & vampire & archmage group at level 9. Firkraag makes that look like a picnic. It just requires a tolerance for cheese.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is one reason I kinda liked parts of ToB: no matter how difficult the boss battles may have been, they were much better designed than the really nasty fights in BG2:SoA. You didn't need cheese - in fact, cheese was practically useless - against enemies like Abazigal, whereas it was the necessary main course going up against Kangaxx, that other lich fight (for the Staff of the Magi), etc. Sure, I won all of those SoA battles, and mostly without too much anguish, but victory generally involved exploiting the enemy's brick-stupid AI.

ToB was disappointing from a role-playing standpoint, but it did some things well enough.

 

[DrattedTin]

Well....

By cheese, I was referring to one issue that doesn't really have anything *directly* to do with the AI. However, it could have been fixed with something like

if(SomeoneLaidAFuckingTrapAgain() == TRUE && GetSomeoneLayingAnotherFuckingTrap() == PC)
KillThatBastard();

 

[Transcendent One]

You didn't need cheese or AI exploits for any SoA fights either. In fact, if anything, ToB was far far more exploitable, if that is a word.

 

[DrattedTin]

You didn't need cheese or AI exploits for any SoA fights either. In fact, if anything, ToB was far far more exploitable, if that is a word.

I can't agree with this. *Any* fight is exploitable. What makes it exceptionally so is if it's a tough fight early on that you're "not supposed to win". No such fights exist in ToB, while many such fights do exist in SoA.

 

[Transcendent One]

In ToB you get thieves backstabbing for 200+ damage, setting traps that can kill anything I mean anything, a whole bunch of cheesy multiclasses who basically make themselves immune to everything and then backstab for 2000 damage per round.

 

[Spazmo]

I think the cheesiest multiclass I heard was a fighter theif who used the Use Any Item thief high level ability and the Greater Whirlwind fighter HLA so he could use the Holy Avenger with 10 attacks per round. Was pretty effective, I should think.

 

[DrattedTin]

Unfortunately, wizards in ToB make every other class pretty much obsolete.

 

[suibhne]

In ToB you get thieves backstabbing for 200+ damage, setting traps that can kill anything I mean anything, a whole bunch of cheesy multiclasses who basically make themselves immune to everything and then backstab for 2000 damage per round.

Yeah, true. I guess by "cheese" I meant AI exploits. You don't need 'em in ToB, for a variety of reasons; in SoA, some of the battles are designed so piss-poorly that exploits are the only way to win.

Kangaxx is the star example: Bioware gave him an all-powerful Imprisonment special ability with a casting time slightly longer than a nanosecond, then saddled him with an autistic doggedness about using it repeatedly on a single character even when it's having no effect whatsoever (due to Immunity: Abjuration, Immunity to Magic, whatever) - with the result that, if you don't exploit the AI, you're shit out of luck. I don't recall any battles designed that poorly in ToB, though perhaps you can refresh my memory.

I never used the "fake talk" or trap-setting exploits, but there were plenty of other problems with the AI not being able to attack beyond a doorway, exhibiting total idiocy with ranged attacks, etc. And those problems were almost impossible not to exploit, by the very design of the encounters in SoA.

 

[Limorkil]

With the dragons your just have to get lucky and kill them before they kill you. First you need a weapon or two that will hit them - I think its +3 or better. You also should have spells/potions that protect from magic and stoneskin/ironskin. With the red dragon, the tactic I used was to give a fighter than had the most HP all the fire protection items I had. I think I had some armor, a shield and a ring - he had 100% fire resistance so the dragon fire could not hurt him.

Ehh, I beat the lich & beholder & vampire & archmage group at level 9. Firkraag makes that look like a picnic. It just requires a tolerance for cheese.

Not a cheese fan myself. One thing you will notice with the dragons in SOA is that you do not need to fight them, you get plenty of warning that you are about to face them and you get to initiate the fight rather than them. Sure you can exploit the AI, or exploit game features like traps to make things easier, but you don't really have to. All you need is some knowledge of D&D creatures. I would expect almost everyone to know that red dragons breath fire, and you can find a fire protection ring in the same dungeon, so its not hard to figure out that a bunch of fire protection items will come in handy. When I first met the red dragon I ignored him, then came back later when I had enough fire protection stuff to take him out. No cheese required.

I could say the same for vampires and beholders also. You need to read the spell descriptions to find those spells that provide protection from nasty vampire level drains, although you should have already encountered shadows that use drain attacks, albeit less deadly ones. Beholders are complete bastards if you've never played D&D and met one before, but there is a shield that says its useful against beholders in its description so if you happen to have bought it you can walk all over them. If you use your thief to scout ahead then you can spot the beholders before they spot you. And the first time you meet them you should have already guessed that you were going up against a beholder because there are enough clues. No cheese again.

But I have to admit that liches are bastards. You don't get many clues that you are going to meet one before your first encounter, and you have to be lucky and have a +4 weapon to hit it. +4 weapons are very rare in SOA, so the chance of you having one by your first encounter is slim. Which leaves you with magic. You can meet at least a couple of liches very early on, when your spell casting ability is pretty feeble. You won't have anything particularly useful to counter the liches spells or harm them. Then there's the time stop that the love, which unless you cheese it by running out of the room, will typically result in your party dying before you can do anything. Once I figured out where the liches were - by meeting one and getting killed by it - I steered clear of them until I had more hit points and some +4s.

BG2 is challenging and fun if you don't cheese it. Like any other game, cheesing your way to victory makes the whole thing rather easy and pointless.

 

[Elwro]

Dragons? I got (bought, I think) a 2-h sword that dealt 2x damage to dragons and gave it to Minsc. I had 4 fighter-chars (my PC, Minsc, Korghan and Jaheira) and I've always set them up before the fight so that they surrounded the dragon: he couldn't hit them all with special attacks. I casted many protective spells and Prayer etc, and after the dragon's Stoneskin began I casted protection-breaking spells. None of the dragons had any chance of survival.
And it was good that not one of those encounters was forced. E.g. the black dragon - you could wake him whenever you wanted to. One of the worst moments in NWN was when it gave my PC 2 dragons to fight and there was no other way to go...

 

[DrattedTin]

BG2 is challenging and fun if you don't cheese it. Like any other game, cheesing your way to victory makes the whole thing rather easy and pointless.

I dunno, I happen to think it can be fun. I do not consider Firkraag challenging with cheese, but taking out the lich & beholder & vampire & archmage group at level 9 even *with* traps can still be one hell of a fight. There's nothing like a level 9 mage with the staff of magi (oh, don't get me started on the whole invisibility-on-equip thing).

 

[suibhne]

BG2 is challenging and fun if you don't cheese it. Like any other game, cheesing your way to victory makes the whole thing rather easy and pointless.

My point was that some of the BG2 combat design actually necessitated AI exploits or other malfeasance. It's by no means ubiquitous, but I also think it's unquestionable. On the other hand, you may not agree with me. :wink:

 

[Seven]

BG2 is challenging and fun if you don't cheese it. Like any other game, cheesing your way to victory makes the whole thing rather easy and pointless.

I dunno, I happen to think it can be fun. I do not consider Firkraag challenging with cheese, but taking out the lich & beholder & vampire & archmage group at level 9 even *with* traps can still be one hell of a fight. There's nothing like a level 9 mage with the staff of magi (oh, don't get me started on the whole invisibility-on-equip thing).

That staff could literally allow any low level mage to solo the entire game. IMO, it was the single most overpowered item in the franchaise.

 

[DAG]

Well, thanks for your help. I already Kill the Red Dragon using the Cloud Kill spell and the Ring of Ram (It is powerful weapon when monsters are Near Dead).

Help me with this: What is the Mod?

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

I don't think this thread is ever going to die.

 

[Mendoza]

I don't think this thread is ever going to die.

It will, we just need the admin's +5 sword of thread deletion.