sorophx

I stopped leveling up my party at lv 7 just to see how far I could take them, went all the way to the Underdark and beyond the first serious battle there (the group of adventurers or something that guard an exit). if you had trouble, I suspect it was because of you choosing weird classes or combinations of classes and to a lesser extent your decisions on every level up. I find IWD2 to be the best because its party system is so complicated, I love micromanaging all 6 characters. I even played through BG2 with a custom party (had to "cheat" somewhat and play the singleplayer campaign in LAN mode for that to happen)

that's cuz you can't strategy

I had been playing Football Manager games since 1998, used to spend all free time in school playing them with a friend in hot-seat mode. I don't play them anymore. no time for that unfortunately

I prefer playing for a weak team without any big names in it for the challenge. no fun taking an acting champion with a gigantic budget and an all-star team

looks like Mr.Sawyer is trying to erase all trace of it

oh no

oh? the russian edition didn't. only the CD-key required

doesn't Hunted come out in 2011 too?

I told you so

I still don't think that DRM is going to make even the small percentage of hardcore pirates buy the game. they'd rather spend months on their message boards begging for a crack, playing other games in the meantime, than buy the game. and the percentage of people who casually pirate games and decide to make an exception for DA2 because of DRM, will be very close to people who'd buy the game otherwise but won't with DRM, imho

yeah, but pirates are going to crack the game anyway, so what's the point in alienating some of your otherwise guaranteed customers? the publisher loses either way. they should be thinking of other ways to sell their games, not applying something that already has been proven ineffective

we're now one update away from finishing the game. there are some things left to do in Hommlet, but since I'll lose both prince Thrommel and Darley if I teleport there, I'm not doing them. I will show you what can be accomplished by going to Hommlet at this point though I'll let Burne do the talking, take it away, Burne! The skull is pure evil, no good can ever come from that cursed thing. I know that it must be destroyed! To destroy it you must find some place of strong winds, cast a powerful fire spell upon it, and then strike it with a granite maul. Quickly then, you must throw it into a place of water. That is the only way to destroy it. My assistant will help you with that. That will shatter the skull and do considerable damage to whoever or whatever created that thing. Its destruction would certainly mean the end of the Temple and its evil. No matter how hard it may sound, you must try. That thing cannot be allowed to exist! all in all, it's a giant fetch quest (well, not really THAT big, because 3 of the 4 ingredients can be found in Hommlet. for example Burne will suggest scribing the Scroll of Fireball for you if you give him 300 gold (or if you agree to answer a couple of riddles) seriosuly, what was Troika thinking? 300 gold? riddles? this is the end-game for heaven's sake! you can of course scribe them yourself if your mage has the proper trait. I just used the console to generate the items and show you the next leg of the quest. so you give the Orb and all the ingredients to Pishella. Zuggtmoy, the creator of the orb, will be severely weakened for four days. Iuz will even suffer for his assistance in its creation. After four days, Zuggtmoy will be banished to her Abyssal Plane, but only for a short time. You have four days to kill her! so join me next time to see how this campaign for complete destruction of evil ends. and don't forget to leave comments to help get this thread to page 11 P.S: remember the electrical trap in the Greater Temple? I accidentally found the password to turn it off! whenever you knock down a troll in the Greater Temple, it will initiate dialogue. you then have to pass a sense motive or intimidate check to get the troll to give you the password. easy! now all that's left to do is to figure out what those scarabs were for.

it's finally time for THE SUCK the Fire Node, that is it starts off rather well, two Efreeti, nothing fancy. then a group of snakes and elementals. nothing we haven't seen before. but then... Noble Salamanders. if you remember the fight with Bassanio in the Fire Temple you know these. they always use their first turn for tossing a Fireball in Tigranes, always. that means in two turns the party will probably lose Tig and then the salamanders will turn to Fruella. this is also the point where my game stopped responding because of the Scather/Fragarach bug. so I had to reload and think of a strategy that didn't involve using these swords. and in the meantime try and keep Tig alive for as long as possible. here's what I did. first I buffed Tig with everything I had to help him survive the initial onslaught (silly me, putting up a Lesser Globe of Invulnerability would've been enough since Fireball is only a level 3 spell). then I positioned him right on top of salamanders to be able to spam Cone of Cold without hurting the whole party with it. I then sent Monte to cover the flank. then I made sure the combat would start with Tig and Monte on top of the initiative queue. Tig would begin with a Cone of Cold, then Monte would sneak attack the bottom salamander killing it. scratch one grunt. once they were done I sent the whole party in. with a couple of lucky saving throws they were able to clear the area without losing anyone. and it only took me 3 hours! seriously, the game kept freezing for no apparent reason. took me a while to understand Fragarach was what had caused it. and then it took me some time to finish the fight with acceptable results because something kept going wrong, like Chain Lightning causing the game to crash. oddly enough I seem to be the only one to have trouble with this fight. most people don't even bother to mention it in their walkthroughs. oh well, we've gotten through it after all. here we have Bodaks. they're hard to spot on the screen. I think they're undead. and they have got this nasty death gaze move they kept spamming. other than that nothing special. and here's a very interesting NPC. Meet Darley. DARLEY: Um, hello there. Can you help me? I seem to be lost. TIGRANES: Lost? You mean you have no idea what this place is? DARLEY: Oh, I know I'm inside some kind of pocket dimension that Zuggtmoy made. But as for exactly where that is, I haven't a clue. (She shakes her head) Heavens, where are my manners? My name is Darley. I am a sorceress. TIGRANES: And my name is Tigranes. I am wandering through this elemental node too. how did you get here, Darley? DARLEY: I was part of a group that tried to destroy the temple a few years ago. We failed, and I was thrown in here. TIGRANES: What happened to the rest of your group? DARLEY: I don't know what happened to them. Maybe they were sent to other places, or maybe they were killed. I haven't seen them, or anyone else for that matter. it's terribly lonely here. MONTE: You expect us to believe that a lone sorceress has survived in here for YEARS? Darley glares at Monte for a moment and then her form shifts and wavers. Horns appear on her head and small bat-like wings sprout from her shoulders. ELMO: By all that is holy! What the devil are you? DARLEY (lifts her head proudly): I, Darley, am an alu-demon! My mother was a succubus, and my father was a lowly human. (She looks at the group as if expecting a response) MONTE: A-what, now? TIGRANES: What are you waiting for us to say, Darley? ELMO: Maybe that she is a a-bum-nation! LADY CRIMSON: Oh, be quiet, Elmo. GROMNIR: And it's "abomination", nitwit. DARLEY: My being a demon doesn not bother you? You do not run in terror, or attack me out of fear? MONTE: Lady, with everything else I have seen lately, I really don't care WHO your parents were. GROMNIR: I do not flee. LADY CRIMSON: And I do not attack, but I also don't want to talk to you. TIGRANES: Live and let live, I say. DARLEY: I will never cease to be amazed by mortals. MONTE: SO how did you get in the nodes? LADY CRIMSON: Monte! I suggest we live Darley to herself and go on on our own business. TIGRANES: Wait, C, this could be useful. Please continue, Darley. DARLEY: A group of us assaulted the Greater Temple. Not every demon agrees with Iuz or his plans for domination of the Prime Material Plane. (she shakes her head) We were defeated, utterly, and I was banished to the nodes. MONTE: Demons fighting demons. I love it! TIGRANES: We have clashed with Iuz, too. anyway, Darley is a joinable NPC as you might have guessed. she's not a very good sorcerer because despite being level 10 she doesn't have level 5 spells and her spell selection is very disappointing. but I did end up picking her up. why? for one thing Elmo has become useless. he can't damage anything with his Masterwork Battleaxe. for some reason I never bothered to shift him to a more common weapon (like a longsword, which are in abundance in this game or a greataxe, anything, really) I also never bothered with crafting. seemed pointless to me, a waste of time. and then I've always intended to replace Elmo, with Zaxis. but since I'd never actually had a chance to, taking Darley seemed like a good idea. I used the console to give her a level-up and picked a couple of more useful spells like Cone of Cold and Energy Resistance. it was about time I had a dedicated sorcerer for buffs and a supporting damage dealer. to ease Tig's work. so, with their new member the party pressed on. Elmo couldn't stand Darley so refused to walk with them. Tig promised to teleport him back to Hommlet as soon as they were done with the Fire Node. Fire Toads. nothing too dangerous. there was also a group of Noble Salamanders right before the guardian. this time only four. but with the Lesser Globe of Invulnerability on Tig, and Darley to help with Cone of Cold it came out rather well. not a single hit point lost. after resting for a couple of hours it was time to meet the last guardian demon. a Balor. typical. that didn't look good. this is considered to be the toughest obligatory fight in the game. and believe me it can be a major pain if you let it. on his first turn he will summon two Efreeti and a demon. worst case scenario - a glabrezu. if you get lucky - a swarm of quasits. on my first serious attempt I got the former. in this pic you can see: a dead glabrezu, an alive glabrezu, a dead hezrou, a vrock and one dominated Fruella. what a mess. the glabrezu, hezrou and vrock were summoned by our party with the Orb of Golden Death. once you insert a Gem into it you get the option to summon it's guardian demon. so, on his second turn, balor will enable his aura of fear (which will hold for 5 rounds if I'm not mistaken) rendering most of your party useless (save for characters that have got Protection from Evil or Magic Circle against Evil up). on his next 5 turns balor will be spamming Slay Living (or Power Word: Kill, I'm not sure since it kills everything including summoned demons) again, only the person protected from Evil will be able to resist. once he's out of spells and auras he will engage the closest character in melee combat. he attacks 4 times per round and deals around 70 damage with each hit. needless to say Stoneskin is a must-have. so, the usual tactic is to surround him with summons, stand back and wait for him to be done with those, all the while dealing with his summons. you should also have one tank buffed and ready to hold balor off until his aura wears off. on my first attempt I used prince Thrommel as the tank so he could chop balor up with his attacks of opportunity. one thing I didn't take into consideration was balor had a permanent fire shield up. so, again, the Fragarach bug kicked in. so I reloaded, gave him and Pidesco new weapons (long swords which they were not proficient with) and changed my tactic a little, switching to Lady C as the main tank. on this second attempt I lost Fruella (and i mean lost, balor charmed her and then mind controlled her so she disappeared from the party list and became a hostile character he then killed her with one attack of opportunity), balor summoned a glabrezu (who's not exactly a gift himself), killed all 3 of our summons with death spells and then came for more. at first I thought we were in the clear now, I could've lived without Fru. but as luck would have it balor's AC is impenetrable without Scather or Fragarach (seriously, Gromnir with 27 Strength and a +3 weapon managed to land 1 out of 10 hits, ONE). coupled with balor's insanely high spell resistance there was no way we could even scratch him. so I decided to cheat. you can kill any outsider with the Dismiss spell. I've read reports that it works on balor if you manage to pass his spell resistance (of 28) and then his usually high saving throw. well, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get Dismiss through. I must have reloaded at least 40 times. things looked really grim. and then I finally decided to google "toee fragarach bug". and what do you know, I found a solution see that big encircled figure to balor's left? that's prince Thrommel. and balor will be dead in one round. turns out you can work around the Fragarach bug, forcing the game to end the character's turn through the inventory window. I also found another bug. if you send an NPC to balor, the demon won't initiate combat. so I placed Thrommel behind him, started combat and chopped the bastard to pieces. that has been the easiest boss this game had. and now the party could summon a balor!

one last creature on this level before going against the guardian. what a funny guy. he thought our heroes were demons and did his best to try and bargain with them for his life. Lady C almost cried after listening to his mad ramblings. don't worry, Sargen, we're almost done here and then you can go home. oh, how nice, a Glabrezu. as you can see talking to him is of no use. even though Tig was able to pass the speech checks it didn't help. the demon was so bent on eating the whole party that attacked first. after summoning two elementals he put up Mirror Image and engaged the party in close combat. as any gigantic creature he's got quite a reach and makes it very hard to approach him. he also uses Slay Living. but our heroes were able to resist his foul magic this time around. no casualties, second guardian down, second Gem retrieved. next stop is the Water Node. the Water Node is considered to be the hardest area of the four. for a couple of reasons. first, you are thrown into the fight as soon as you enter it. the entry point is surrounded by enemies. the big creatures in the pic are two Vodyanoi (which means "water dweller" in Russian). they're essentially Umber Hulks with area-of-effect Confusion instead of a gaze attack. they start the battle with it so buffing up before entering is a good idea. I wasn't prepared for this fight so the party barely made it through. as you can see the beasts were supported by a pack of lizard men and a small number of ghouls. which are actually the low-level creatures and don't pose any threat whatsoever. to the south we found a camp occupied bu bandits. they're relatively weak. after his troops had been slayed their leader tried talking sense into Lady C and the gang. so this is what happened to Grank. poor bastard, he had lost it already by the time our heroes arrived, like pretty much everyone else in this place. he literally jumped Pidesco's sword. oh well, at least he wasn't suffering anymore. and now it's time to show you the toughest battle of this area (the reason why everybody hate this place so much). meet the Eyes of the Deep! originally they used to be a weaker version of beholders with a bunch of mildly dangerous spells. but. then came the Co8 modders and decided this battle wasn't tough enough. so they renamed the creatures and added a couple of charges of Cone of Cold to each of them. now, in ToEE Cone of Cold is almost like Fireball, it has a very wide area of effect and hits for 40-50 points of damage if it passes the resistance and saving throws. as you can see there are four of them. which means around 150 points of damage to every party member on every turn. fighting them head-on is as productive as putting yourself on fire. we needed a strategy. see that huge figure in red with a cleaver? that's Lady C. what I did was put the Spell Resistance robe on her, buff her with Protection from Energy: Ice, buff her with Spell Resistance (adds 20), plus Aid, Prayer and Bless to help with saving throws in case the resistances don't hold. Lady Crimson then tanked the bastards while Tig bombarded them with fireballs. took the party five turns to dispatch the damned eyes. I believe this is the only way to kill them with no casualties. as a reward the party looted the chest the beholders were guarding. it contained a Holy Greataxe. oh goody. this swarm of ogres is the only thing standing between us and the guardian. sorry guys, you should've stepped aside, because we're on FIRE! the last guardian is a Hezrou. I hate this type of lesser demons the most. the one from NWN2 comes to mind it summons a smaller hezrou to its aid. what I hate about them the most is they have this aura that damages Strength. very, VERY annoying. and then they have massive HP, the guardian has around 450. and he summons Large Water Elementals, too. if it weren't for Pidesco and Thrommel I don't know what I would do.

and I did, turns out it's a very common issue and there a pretty easy way to fix it. but let me tell you how it all began. The party is approaching the Temple. Suddenly Monte spots something, a human figure in the distance, sitting near the Temple's doors. He brings it to everyone's attention. MONTE: Hey, there's someone there at the gates! LADY CRIMSON: Where? MONTE: Right there, see? This could be a trap. GROMNIR: Ha! Somebody is actually stupid enough to try an' ambush us? Good fun! LADY CRIMSON: No, Monte, don't even think about going there alone to scout. Everybody stay close. Once the party is at the gates, the unidentified person gets up on it's feet and turns to the heroes, then waves at them. PIDESCO: Prince! MONTE: Huh? What prince? You mean that guy we saved? TIGRANES: That certainly looks like him. Maybe it's a shape-shifter... ELMO: It is! It is Prince Thrommel! Oh goody goody! The biggest bestest hero with us again! LADY CRIMSON: Well, I don't know about that, Elmo. Just be on your guard. Prince gets up and walk up to the party, making a greeting jesture. THROMMEL: Hello again, my friends! LADY CRIMSON: Prince! What are you doing here? THROMMEL: My dear lady, why, the same thing you are! I couldn't just let you face the biggest evil in the land on your own. And I had to finish what I started. Me and the demon queen have a score to settle. LADY CRIMSON: But what about your wedding? THROMMEL: You should not worry about lady Jolene. She had waited for my return for 6 years. It was she who insisted on my coming here. Milady knows what's best for our land is best for her. Lady Jolene of Veluna can wait for a little more. And I see you already have Scather! Good to know Lord Grundwell had little trouble finding you. TIGRANES: Well, Prince Thrommel, it's certainly good to have you with us. I am sure with your help we will be able to banish Zuggtmoy from this plane. THROMMEL: Oh no, banishing the queen just won't do, I intend to destroy her once and for all! LADY CRIMSON: Then let's not waste any more time. Onward to victory! yeah, I reloaded the game to the point where Thrommel was still in the party and went straight for the Nodes without visiting Hommlet. I actually intend to never go there. I have enough potions and scrolls in the Extraplanar Chest for 3 parties, so the supplies question is out of the way. and there are no more quests there (almost). I thought it would be cool to reenact the Battle of Emridy Meadows sa for Scather, I used the console to generate it for the party anyway, the nodes. the nodes are small pocket-planes which can be accessed via the main hall of the Greater Temple now that Hedrack is dead. there are four entrances, air, earth, water and fire. we'll tackle them in that order. the Air Node is the easiest of the four. they're all very small, but this one has almost no enemies except for a few lost souls. that's Vortexes (you can see their eyes glowing), there also were a couple of Large Air Elementals but they look exactly the same. just admire the scenery. we also met one friendly human, Taki. he's nothing special except his Masterwork Composite Bow, and besides the party didn't have any more room. Let's pretend Tig teleported him out of there after they had defeated the guardian. same goes for this guy: he clearly had lost his marbles long ago. but he was pleased to hear Alrrem was dead. these are called Ildrisses. I have no idea what they're supposed to be. they have very little health and couldn't penetrate my warriors' AC. they were the last obstacle on the way to the guardian demon. oh, it's only a Vrock, this should be easy. this fight is so uninspiring that I'm not even going to show pictures of it. the only thing vrock has got going are two summoned air elementals, Sound Burst-esque scream attack and mirror image. downing him was very easy. on his body Monte found an Air Gem that fitted the socket on the Orb. one down, three to go. much to Monte's pleasure the Earth Node turned out to be a set of tunnels with monsters (read: a lot of fighting). but there still were interesting encounters. this is an interesting fellow actually. he's rather weak but has a supply of hand-crafted "fireballs". they are woven balls filled with fire (duh). he will even give the rest of his stock to the party after they save him from that mini-plane. but at this point a couple of extra fireballs definitely aren't anything to write home about. most of this area is swarming with these guys: can you see them? the mini-earth elementals. these are called Galeb Duhrs. I've read a lot about this part of the game. for some reason people have trouble with these things. I wasn't bold enough to charge at them all at once (they stay underground and only pop up when your party gets close), I used Monte to scout ahead and lure Galeb Duhrs to the party one-two at a time. they did have some kind of damage resistance but not a whole lot of health. and since everyone in my party seem to be able to attack 3-4 times per round these encounters were a breeze. Chaggrins. again, no idea what these are. they go down in one good hit and can't do any harm to our party. it was almost like slaughtering little kids. Lady Crimson felt very bad about it. and that's a Gorgon. you can see it on the picture, half of my party is petrified. now, I remember in BG2 (at least I think so) if you didn't have Stone To Flesh in the party, a successful petrification would always result in a "load game" (correct me if I'm wrong). in ToEE though it only means that these characters can't fight for a number of rounds. big deal.

he's from the internet-land. the average connection speed in Japan is 80 MB/s and it's almost free there, too, according to some reports.

haha, that's a big plus

bleh, IWD is the ultimate dungeon crawler. I'd say ToEE is somewhat close if it wasn't for the awful bugs. if we talking infinity games, IWD2>IWD>Torment>BG2 for me (never finished BG1 and Throne of Bhaal was somewhat disappointing). by the way, anyone know a good source of information on the "black hound project"? (or w/e it's called) I tried asking Josh Sawyer but he never replied

no, I'm too close to completing the game and I have loads of back-up saves. I just want to figure out how to avoid it in the future. it's definitely linked to the swords. I'll try using other weapons.

I've encountered another very serious bug during combat if the character with Fragarach or Scather attacks the enemy and kills it but at the same time the enemy has an elemental shield up, that damages the Fragarach/Scather wielder, an attack of opportunity will kick in (it always does with these swords when being damaged) and your character will attempt to hit a dead body, which is impossible. needless to say combat breaks at this point an you have to force shut the game and restart. I couldn't understand what had caused it at first and spent two hours trying to win one particularly hard fight. only being forced to reboot again and again... this is getting very tiresome

yeah, playing the game for the first time in Ironman mode is a very bad idea. there are some fights that can't be just beaten without some serious preparations. and there's no way to know about the enemy behavior beforehand, (for example the Co8 modpack adds some extra creatures to the more challenging encounters, I didn't know about it and had been unpleasantly surprised on a couple of occasions). I wiped yesterday to a couple of mobs in one of the Nodes, would have sucked to lose all that progress

wow, 58 pages in less than 24 hours. I find it somewhat disturbing

that's what i meant. Brian said Interplay had had to pay royalties to Bio off BG sales. I didn't know Interplay actually owned BG

that's exactly what he liked about IWD one of the things, that is. what confuses me is that nobody here brought Torment up yet on a side note, I only just now realized BioWare didn't publish BG/BG2, I had no idea Interplay was such a big part of the development of Infinity games. I actually thought they only did IWD and Torment. how could I have missed that?

as far as I know, yes and I think for the most part Troika has managed to stay very close to the original oh, and there was only one instance in the game where I was really close to wiping out (Lareth fight in the moathouse where he engaged the party along with the rest of his minions, that was brutal). since then I'd reload only if more than one character died (which also happened only once). the latter reloads were due to the fact that I didn't want to suffer the 10000 xp penalty after Raise Dead.