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[corey_russell]

Tough break there Gorthaur. A free action ring could have been quite handy in that situation...I usually fireball (2 or 3 at once) out-of-sight and then pick off any survivors with the party myself.

[Gorthaur X]

The sad thing is, everyone in my party had fireball capacity, including Mal himself - that's why he was wearing two rings of fire resistance instead of the Ring of Free Action. However, the first Ghast got a lucky shot in before Mal could use his, Elvira's blast wasn't enough to kill them, and the rest of the party were too far away. The only problem here was my overconfidence.

[Grond0]

corey_russell wrote...

That looks like a pretty decent roll there Grond0, how long you take to get that? But in any case, good luck with your fighter/bounty hunter. Do you have the TotSC experience cap? Will you be able to get to level 8 thief with it on if so? Or intend to regain fighter levels in BG 2?

Rolling took about a minute.  Actually for this character wisdom is 99.9% useless and charisma not of much importance so rolling was always going to be easy.  Probably took me more than 10 minutes last night to roll a decent character for my speed challenge bard where charisma is a requirement.

I have got the TotSC cap.  That's why I am intending to dual at 7 - will max out at level 8 thief.  Normally I would wait until BG2 to dual a character, but thought I could perhaps do with the practice in BG1 with the bounty hunter before venturing into the more hostile world of BG2!.

[Grond0]

Quick update for Keeps. He's just reached level 7 courtesy of a bunch of ankhegs having previously done the bandit camp. Will go now on to Ulgoth's Beard and dual there and get ring of free action and green amulet. Then get more experience before heading for the Cloakwood.

Thus far the only spell Keeps has had to save against was a command - which I let him take as it wouldn't have caused him any problem to fail against it anyway - and has never been at all short of hits. As level 7 fighter with 18 constitution Keeps has got 85 HPs, so he has been very lucky with those rolls - hope that's a good omen for his future progress.

[The Fred]

Grond0 wrote...
Rolling took about a minute.  Actually for this character wisdom is 99.9% useless and charisma not of much importance so rolling was always going to be easy.

I get more and more sick of rolling each time, so though I feel bad about playing a guy with 7 Int, I'm happy to take it, especially given I need all the help I can get in TuTu with SCS. I haven't even lasted long enough to fight a spellcaster yet. The story is the guy is an uneducated and somewhat surly Beast Master who is guided by a mysterious intelligence (he is very wise, after all).

Wierdly, Sidarus also has 20 health, which I think is rather more than he should (Ranger 10 + Con 4 = 14?)...

[Grond0]

Has he summoned an animal companion? That would give him more HPs.

[The Fred]

I thought that. His familiar was just smashed by the Coast Way Ogre (through Mirror Image, damnit) which dropped him to 13 hp, so I imagine he's getting +6 from having it about. Is there *any* way to restore his Con, by the way? It's red, which would imply the effect isn't permanent, but the description says it is.

We also ran into some bandits who I didn't even know existed, whilst being chased by an ogre. Luckily, they didn't seem to pursue us when we fled so we killed the ogre and took its belts.

Marl, the Dudleys and Firebead had already given Imoen a level-up, and Sidarus is not far behind. I'm noticing the lack of Sleep, but having two characters with decent THAC0s is nice. I'll just feel a bit better then they have a few more HP under their belts.

[AnonymousHero]

Grond0 wrote...
The plan is to dual him to a bounty hunter at level 7.

Hang on... I thought you couldn't dual to a kit? Or are you going to use some sort of Shadow Keeper/NI fu?

[Grond0]

The Fred wrote...

I thought that. His familiar was just smashed by the Coast Way Ogre (through Mirror Image, damnit) which dropped him to 13 hp, so I imagine he's getting +6 from having it about. Is there *any* way to restore his Con, by the way? It's red, which would imply the effect isn't permanent, but the description says it is.

We also ran into some bandits who I didn't even know existed, whilst being chased by an ogre. Luckily, they didn't seem to pursue us when we fled so we killed the ogre and took its belts.

As far as I know there is no legal way to restore constitution lost in this way.  Partly for this reason when I generate a character that can use a familiar I try and give him a spare point or two of constitution, although 99% of the time my familiars nestle cosily in my backpack anyway.

Sounds like you ran into the caravan bandits - their leader is pretty good with ranged weapons so watch out for him if you're low level.

@AnonymousHero.  You are of course right that the BG2 game engine won't allow dualling to a kit, so Shadowkeeper will be used.  I don't feel too bad about that - dualling to a kit was allowed in the BG1 engine and so long as you only have one kit I don't think it distorts the game too much.  Dualling to a kit is more powerful than dualling from a kit as you will end up at a higher level and it gives you the opportunity to add fighter HPs to kitted classes.  However, I don't think the difference in power is great enough to be game-changing (less than some of the mods I have installed anyway).

[The Fred]

Yeah, I miss dualing to a specialist mage.

Losing the Con permanently kind of sucks if I can lose more points from losing the familiar again. Looking at 3rd Ed PnP, they seem to have changed this to losing 200 xp/level (saving throw halves), probably for these reasons. It's not such a big deal, since I plan on dualing to Cleric at which point the 17th and 18th points of Con will make little difference - this means I lose like 3 hp overall, and I'm getting 6 from having the familiar anyway. A bit annoying, though, especially given I'd had him Mirror Imaged to protect him as well.

[The Fred]

Sidarus' progress.

Retrieved Joia's Flamedance ring and Gurke's cloak (Invisibility protected the party from Ettercaps nicely). Sidarus got to L2 and Imoen to L3 killing some things en route. We then headed down to Nashkel where we did Noober and the babysitting, then back up to Beregost to deliver Mirianne's letter. Tried to pickpocket Algernon previously but failed; should have just killed him when I was on 15 rep then gone and got the boost from Oulbek (sp?).

I decided the next thing to do was Melicamp. A bunch of skellies got in our way, but they seemed to have pretty wonky AI scripts (a lot of guys seem to - most mobs incessantly attack the first enemy they see, and some just stand around doing nothing until attacked in melee). Basically, they wouldn't attack the Fairy Dragon at range, so the little guy could go up and take them on one by one. They did start throwing daggers at Sidarus and Imoen (I think their script must look for PCs) but I think they only got about one hit off, luckily.

A ghast who interrupted our rest gave Sidarus his 3rd level, and I dualed to Cleric. Points in S&S style and Missile Weapons (will be wasted, but I don't think I will be able to use Spiked Weapons anyway). The wolf chasing Melicamp was easily tanked by the Fairy Dragon with help from Command, and restoring the unfortunate chicken gave Imoen her L4.

The party now:
Sidarus, Chaotic Good Human Male Beastmaster 3 -> Cleric 1
HP: 38, AC: 1
Profs: Missile: *, S&S Style: *

Imoen, Neutral Good Human Female Swashbuckler 4
HP: 25, AC: 2
Profs: Missile: *, S&S Style: **
Skills: Open Locks: 70, Find Traps: 80

Sidarus is now basically back to L1, but he has great HP and a familiar (though he can't get it back if it dies again - hopefully it won't, but it's kind of the party tank at the moment). My plan is to pick up maybe Ajantis (a Cavalier, thanks to L1NPCs) and probably eventually Xan (a Sorcerer) for extra arcane power.

[The Fred]

Ack. A clumsy incident with some Cave Bears (and SCS Faster Bears) left the poor Fairy Dragon dead. Again. Damn. Sidarus now has only 16 Con, and no familiar until L4. This is extra annoying because I was contemplating using its Invisibility to go get the Con and Wis tomes.

We also spent many in-game days trying to conquer the Lonely Peaks (east of the Beregost-Nashkel road), but there were too many Ogre Beserkers and things. We also failed to save poor Hulric's cow. Sad.

Sidarus did reach L2 Cleric, but the Ghast which disturbed our rest at High Hedge and should have given him L3 got a lucky hit off on Imoen (I was busy having Sidarus flee from Skellies) and Held her, so a diversion to the Temple was in order. That hit the bank balance too - 600 of our 1200ish gold. Ouch!

So, long story short, not a good session by any measure, but at least Sidarus is not far off L3 and those valueable 2nd-level Cleric spells.

[The Fred]

Sidarus got his L3 (yay Hold Person!) coutesy of some skelletons around High Hedge. I then remembered about Brage, so got a few more XP from taking him back to Nashkel (actually, I think killing him is better in XP terms, but I always feel bad about doing that). I spent a while longer taking on other small game (my main achievement was killing a bunch of DH kobolds, even if it did take me a couple of shots - but it's worth diddly squat as far as XP goes) and running from slightly bigger game. Imoen is not far from her 5th level (and dualing - hooray for Sleep and Blindness!) and Sidarus' L4 and the return of his BM abilities will follow very quickly behind. However, I'm kind of at a loss as to where to go now to get any significant XP, given that TuTu and SCS have made a lot of my typical haunts significantly more dangerous.

[Grond0]

Have you nabbed the naiad on the coast? If you don't want the helm of defense she's worth lots of XP and is trivial to kill with ranged weapons. If you have magic arrows then flesh golems are also good XP - but don't kill the ones in High Hedge if you've already talked to Thalantyr as that will make him hostile. The vampiric wolves in Beregost temple are another nice source of pretty easy XP if you've got a few magic arrows to spare.

[Grond0]

After the rigours of my run with Skippy, I've been taking it easy with Keeps.  He dualled at fighter level 7 having finished the bandit camp and has been taking no risks while working up his thief skills.  Most of the time I've just taken things down from range with a sling, only using thief traps / backstabs on things that might possibly be dangerous.  He vacuumed the southern mountain areas that I tend not to do nowadays - both the gnoll stronghold and the xvart village were a lot easier without the quest mods I normally play with, but I did note that the number of gibberlings chasing the paladin was at the normal level - this was just a small selection, so it took a while to sling them all to death.   Keeps has now nearly finished working up the coast and is at thief level 7 - he should be regaining his fighter abilities soon, at which time he'll continue on the main quest line.

[corey_russell]

Grond0 wrote...

...but don't kill the ones in High Hedge if you've already talked to Thalantyr as that will make him hostile.....

This advice doesn't apply to Vanilla BG 1. I talk to Thalantyr and kill his golems afterwards every run nowadays, and it never makes him hostile, as long as I don't let him see me do it, which is pretty easy thanks to that circle wall of his.

[Grond0]

Keeps is into the final furlong now.  Killed Basillus to get a bit of cash and then finished off the coastal areas.  Had a bit of hiding & backstabbing practice with an ogre clan and then the Nereid provided Keeps' last level.  He zipped through the Cloakwood and used scroll of magic protection in killing Drasus (and Genthorne, who got in the way). 

The only potential problem in the mine was that Hareishan's guards managed to surround Keeps while he was invisible.  He fireballed himself and quickly smashed a route out with his staff.  Still with his scroll up Daveorn never stood much chance, but any little hope faded almost entirely when he tried a sunfire and made the battle horrors hostile.  With 3 of us attacking he went down quickly.

Keeps has now arrived in the city.

[Grond0]

Final update for Keeps.  In the city he acquired the tomes, helm and cloak of Balduran and eagle bow.  Sneaked through the Iron Throne before reporting to the duke and departing for Candlekeep (on the way he detoured to Durlag's Tower to get the last wisdom tome).  Avoided almost all combat in Candlekeep as usual apart from the small amount needed to rob the tombs and came back to Baldur's Gate.

Mindful of not taking any risks Cythandria got an arrow of dispelling in her before being finished off with a critical.  Slythe got a couple of backstabs in and I was just starting to think I might have to retreat and heal when he also got criticalled.  Krystin was never likely to cause any trouble, but she also fell with ... you guessed it.  The palace fight went OK, though I had hoped to catch more than 1 doppleganger in the traps set - obviously weren't spread out quite far enough - and Liia was killed. 

Hurried invisibly down to the temple to confront Sarevok.  This was actually a bit more difficult than I expected.  Early on dispelled Sarevok's haste successfully, but Diarmid hit with several nasty arrows and Keeps needed to swig a potion of invisibility to go and recover.  Then I didn't notice that his potion of magic shielding had run out and Keeps was blinded by Angelo, so he had to kill Angelo, Diarmid, Tazok and their skeleton warrior successors while racing back and forth in the temple making space to hide (which he was poor at).  Eventually Keeps recovered and faced Sarevok on his own.  He showed no mercy - shooting him down from distance.

In total Keeps had 815 kills.  That's far more than I would normally have with a solo run, but reflects all those gnolls, xvarts and gibberlings taken down with a sling while he was slowly working up his thief levels after dualling.

One slight oddity I noticed was that the tome of strength only improved Keeps strength from 18(89) to 18(91).  I do seem to remember reading about an updated version of a mod that does this with the intention of reducing the benefit of the tome.  However, it seems a bit ridiculous that a warrior gets a tiny improvement, when a non-warrior will go from 18 to 19 (which is what I saw with my blade a couple of days ago using the same installation).  As a result I've used shadow keeper to put his strength to 19 for BG2 - let me know if anyone thinks that is inappropriate. 

[corey_russell]

Grats on taking down Sarevok, Grond0. I do not think any action that would mimic vanilla behavior (STR/xx going to STR 19) should be a problem. I don't think that's inappropriate, except please only install mods you actually want so you don't have to do this in the future:)...

[Grond0]

corey_russell wrote...

Grats on taking down Sarevok, Grond0. I do not think any action that would mimic vanilla behavior (STR/xx going to STR 19) should be a problem. I don't think that's inappropriate, except please only install mods you actually want so you don't have to do this in the future:)...

Eventually tracked down which mod is responsible - it is Tobex, which ships in the background when you install SCS (so I didn't exactly choose to install it).  The changes are not shown in the Weidu information and there is no readme associated with the mod, so changes made by it are not at all obvious - though I have disabled this one in my installation now.  I think the intention of the change was more associated with limiting the effect of spells increasing strength than tomes, but I don't particularly want that anyway.

[Gorthaur X]

I haven't been able to give up on the idea of playing a no reload game with my favorite class yet, so I decided to try again with the would-be Mage Swashbuckler. Meet Hador - he's pretty much exactly like Mal, except with one less point in Charisma. Here's what has happened so far:

Ditched Imoen, went to Beregost via High Hedge. Calmed Marl, helped out Firebead, killed some spiders and ogrillons (-> Level 2). Burgled the mansion for an invisibility potion, with which it was safe to sneak to Nashkel. At the carnival, sold the Ankheg Plate Mail and used all my money to buy a Necklace of Missiles and a scroll of Protection From Petrification. Fortunately, the armor, the star sapphire from Candlekeep and a couple of diamonds I "found" got me just enough.

Then it was on to Mutamin's garden. Fireballs killed the gnolls and other mobs, Korax helped kill the basilisks and Mutamin.


"I love you, Korax the Friendly Ghoul."

Now at level 6 and 35k exp, I tried to get a little bit more before gathering up my posse, by saving Melicamp. Sadly, he did not survive the Antichickenator. So, I picked up Kivan, Viconia and Imoen and went back south.


"Greywolf, hah, more like Tamewolf.."

Picked up Minsc and went to save Dynaheir.







After powering through the gnoll stronghold,  we saved a dryad, killed the fastest gun dart in the west, slaughtered three arrogant Amnish fops: magical scimitars and armor for Hador, the Bracers of Archery for Kivan.


"Also, met the cutest widdle demonic hellhound ever."

Back to Nashkel, where we replaced the infinitely annoying Dynaheir with Edwin. Then to Beregost, Kagain's shop and Feldepost's Inn:


"Being Chaotic Good is so nice."

Her pickpocketing having fulfilled its primary purpose, Imoen dual-classed at level 5.

Time to actually tackle the plot. We went to the Nashkel mines, where the nasty little kobolds immediately almost killed poor Eddy. He decided to give them a taste of their own medicine:


"Fighting kobolds with kobolds"

Mulahey was surprisingly tough, utterly refusing to have his spellcasting interrupted by any amount of arrows or magic missiles. He almost got that spell off, too:


"Sadly, almost doesn't count."

Then we killed Bassilus.


"Sorry, dude, but do you know how much they're paying for your head?"

And some hobblergobblers:


"Oooh, a +2 sword."

And some wolves:




"Vampiric wolves: are they with Team Edward or Team Jacob? We may never know."

Finally, we spent our hard-earned money at Thunderhammer's. Hello, Shadow Armor:



Now at level seven and decently equipped, it's starting to look like we just might make it. Then again, I did think Mal would make it, too...

Modifié par Gorthaur X, 23 septembre 2011 - 02:06 .

[Grond0]

Gorthaur X wrote...
Now at level seven and decently equipped, it's starting to look like we just might make it. Then again, I did think Mal would make it, too...

My money's on you!

[Grond0]

I feel slightly like a little boy stuck in a revolving door at the moment.  However, here's my next attempt to break the cycle.  Boffin the wizard slayer will try BG1 by herself, but if successful will recruit some friends in Athkatla.  She's just completed Candlekeep, killing Firebead in the process.

[The Fred]

Grond0 wrote...
Have you nabbed the naiad on the coast? If you don't want the helm of defense she's worth lots of XP and is trivial to kill with ranged weapons. If you have magic arrows then flesh golems are also good XP - but don't kill the ones in High Hedge if you've already talked to Thalantyr as that will make him hostile. The vampiric wolves in Beregost temple are another nice source of pretty easy XP if you've got a few magic arrows to spare.

I kind of fancy having the Helm, to be honest. You can get it and then kill Naiad, I think, which is worth it in XP terms, but I don't think I can deal with Droth at this point. I also don't have any magical weapons. Sidarus is using a sling now that he's dualed to Cleric (no more darts, sad) whilst Imoen is using Darts, and I can't really afford to buy magical ammo for either of them.

I was tempted to try Mutamin's Garden (with Korax) or the Lighthouse (PfE > Dire Charm), but with SCS installed these might be too dangerous. Anyway, we only need another 1k XP each and then Imoen will dual to mage, at which point she'll suck even more, but will at least be able to cast things like Sleep and Blindness, which should open up a few options.

[Gorthaur X]

Grond0, good luck with your Wizard Slayer.

The Fred, you might want to do Mutamin's Garden once you dual Imoen. Protection From Petrification is a first level spell, and even with SCS, that (and Korax) is all you need for the basilisks. Provided that you can handle the gnolls, that is - they'll kill Korax all too fast, and without Korax's paralyzing touch, the basilisks might be too much for a low level character once they notice their gaze isn't working and go into melee.