K/M, Jaheira, Haer'dalis, Viconia, Imoen and Edwin Continue their No-Reload Run through SoA
In the prior to entry to this series, the party was preparing to face House Jaelet, and we were a bit worried about HLA's from the cleric. It was a pretty interesting fight, in which Jaheira basically murdered everbody (for some reason the mages weren't casting stone skin). Jaheira with a bunch of potions buffs is ~25 damage a hit hitting every swing at 8apr so enough to kill about 2 drow a round. The fight was over pretty quickly, and Jaheira killed most of the named drow before they could do anything. 
. Anyhow, I'm not going to spend more space on that fight because what happened next was we accidentally made all of Ust Natha hostile. Oops.
Here's where the problem starts. Apparently, you have about a round or two to kill the hostile egg guards or they sound the alarm. I thought party members auto-hit / auto-killed the guards in melee, but actually what they do is auto-kill on hit.... i.e. you still have to hit. So Haer'dalis proceeded to roll a bunch of 3's and 5's and not take out the second guard, who sounded the alarm. A buffed up Jaheira could have avoided all this, but lessons learned I suppose.
Now, normally when you swap the eggs and kill the matron + phaere in the ritual, the party has a limited time to get out of Ust Natha before the city goes hostile. It's important to get out quickly in SCS, because a hostile city rapidly spawns large parties of increasingly high-level drow, under the theory that it should be impossible for the party to defeat an entire city. When the eggs are properly retrieved, the party has about enough time to haste, mass invisible and run to the exit after picking up the matron's stuff and will see the city go hostile when they are right by the exit. When the egg guards raise the alarm, the city is immediately hostile, and packs of drow start not only attacking the party but also clogging up the narrow streets throughout the city. In addition, the party needs to kill the matron before the city gates will open, as she has (presumably magically) sealed them. The only saving grace is that the drow can't see invisible, although they can and will dispel invisible if you are nearby, even if they can't see anyone (thanks SCS!).
The party's first order of business was to completely forget about the sealed gate and sneak with relative ease to the exit. "Wow it's disappointing that we not only lose out on the experience but also the matron's items, including the ring of spell deflection that Viconia had her eye on," the party thought. And then the gate was blocked and we realized, with some non-trivial level of terror, that we had to go all the way back through the city and kill the matron before we could leave.
Sneaking back to the matron wasn't too bad, because there weren't enough packs of drow to block the streets yet. So we got back to the temple with a minimum of fuss to take on the matron. The Matron also has HLA's, including apparently Storm of Vengeance, although we didn't see a Deva or Energy Blades. Fortunately, Jaheira continued her MVP streak and killed numerous drow, including the matron (somehow not being breached until the very end of the fight). Firestorm from Viconia was extremely helpful as usual against the drow, as it ignores magic resistance and does a ton of fire damage, which the party is (when buffed) immune to. Charname also slayer changed and overall we killed somewhere between 15-25 drow. It's hard to see in the screen shot but its shoulder to shoulder drow beneath the autoloot window.
Now we just had to get out of the city. We resurrected Haerdalis (who had died when his skins ran out - we really need to be more careful with his buff management), picked up his stuff, and had everyone quaff invisibility potions and head for the temple door.
The first problem was that the drow from inside the temple had received reinforcements (SCS spawn of 6-8 drow) and had followed us out of the temple. Several party members were trapped by the drow coming out of the temple, and we knew there were more drow just out of sight to the southwest, who could show up at any moment. Haerdalis did not have any buffs (critically, stone skin), and was very vulnerable. Jaheira broke invisiblility to the southwest to get the drow to move and we started running.
A careful viewer of the above shot will notice a party member (Haerdalis) to the north east, stuck behind a pack of drow. He had some pathing issue when I wasn't paying full attention and fell behind. At this point, we decided that he probably wasn't going to make it and transfered his important items (could have been all his items, but we felt some loss was appropriate) and left him for dead. I don't like abandoning bodies + resurrecting, because it feels cheesy, but I'm going to give Haer'dalis a pass here because we didn't have much of a choice and also because it was only a pathing issue that got him left behind in the first place.
We continued making progress through the city, leaving behind the big pack of drow by Deirex's tower. Unfortunately a single drow fighter was blocking the street, and we were unable to pass without engaging him. I'm not sure if this is a fixed spawn, but I presume just bad luck. We broke invisibility to kill him. A lnumber of drow from the west came to attack after we broke invisibility, but we very able to get past them once we could reset our invisibility with potions.
Finally, the exit is in sight. We had been dealing with the frequent invisibility dispels by keeping our aura's clear and re-quaffing invisibility potions immediately after dispel. We were a bit worried about getting stuck again between the drow we had drawn killing the fighter, now to the north east, and the half dozen or so drow camping by the exit, but made it through successfuly.
Even when the Ust Natha is completed properly, a handful of drow follow the party out of the city.
When it is not completed properly, considerably more drow follow. I estimate that this is most of the drow by the exit and by the drow fighter we killed in the city, but does not include the addition 20 or so drow we left by Deirex's tower, or the other maybe dozen we snuck by that never saw us, or the other drow in parts of the city we didn't walk past.
Jaheira, again playing the role of clear MVP, took a blocking position up on the bridge while Imoen and Edwin threw acid fog and cloudkill from behind her. Whenever Jaheira got dispelled, she drank a potion of magic shielding, which protected her from anything she could save against. At one instance, she got hit by a finger of death shortly after drinking the potion, so this was an important strategy. There were a lot of drow with crossbows, so we gave her the boots with +5 to missile to give her -20+ AC vs. missile including all the bonuses. Eventually, the clouds wore through the drow and we finished the stragglers (firestorm would have made this much easier).
The aftermath.
Retour en haut
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