Would you mind carbon-copying me those PM's too, LZJ?

It would be great to send all PMs and replies to all of us then (LZJ, Iroumen, Raven, me). In don't know if it is possible to send PMs to multiple recipients.

You just have to add the others to the CC (carbon copy) field. However I don't think there is a 'reply all' option so for each message you write you may have to add the cc recipients manually.

note that my name is lroumen with an L, rather than an I. Everybody gets that one wrong . Understandable though. You wouldn't expect anyone to use their initial+last name as a login for a forum.


On topic: Marceror, how is your party progressing?

Very well, thanks for asking. I am just about done with all of the Shadows of Amn content and Watcher's Keep. I'm currently trying to get past the Judgement Day fight (as noted in a separate post), which I'm determined to do. Once that's done I'll work on finishing the Good, Bad, and Ugly quest, the Orcus encounter (I almost forgot about this one), then I think it will be onto the Tree of Life.

I'm quite happy with my party, and even though watching Jaheira level is like watching grass grow, I don't regret the F/M/C option. She is serving her purpose as a backup mage and healer, and is a pretty decent fighter when I need her to be. A cleric/mage probably would have been a little more practical, but I wanted to try something I never had tried before.

Have you done Twisted Rune, Marceror? How did you handled it? Personally it gave me a much bigged headache than JD sword fight.

Yes, I would think that Jaheira levels really slowly. Maybe a triple character is more something for a 5-man party. I'm happy to hear that she's still doing well as a fighter. That would have been my main concern since she has to be a mage and a cleric as well.

Shadan, yes, I did Twisted Rune shortly before forging Judgement Day. I did one reload on that fight, and nailed it on the second attempt (I probably didn't need to reload, but I had forgotten to protect my guys from level drain, and they got all jacked up as a result).

On the second attempt, I had my guys well buffed and had plenty of summons. I had Nalia do a timestop and imp. alacrity where I pretty much relieved the lich of his buffs and got some damage spells out too. The lich went down pretty quickly with some focused strikes. It wasn't too hard to get the vampire and the warrior/kensai guy from there.

Most of Layenne's timestop was targetted against a summon, and I got lucky on my saves. Once it was over, I pulverized the Beholder, and then finally, gave Layenne her well deserved beating. It was a challenging fight, but I found that the required tactics to get through it were fairly straight forward for me, so I didn't struggle much with it.

The tactics that I used with JD in 4.2 just aren't working for me this time around, though. I'm off to try that battle again....

It's interesting that you killed most of the other enemies first and then the beholder last. I'm coming to the conclusion that this is the better order to do things in (rather than the beholder first) because of how much time the beholder takes to kill.

I agree, very interesting tactic. I usually can not do it, since I usually play with 3 mages and Vax is a mage-killer.

My kill order was same: Shangalar, vampire, warrior, beholder, Layenne.

I generally keep my mages out of the beholder's line of sight. They stay as far to the left of the map as possible, in the foyer. Because the beholder and Layene tend to stay out in the main room, my mages usually manage to stay out of aggro (although this isn't always the case, certainly).

This post has been edited by Marceror: Aug 14 2008, 01:08 PM

Unless you have some incompatible mods installed or have tampered with things in the game which you shouldn't have had, what you wrote is absolutely impossible. Layene never waste even one single spell on a summoned creature during her timestop. So, it seems that you have the same problem in your game LZJ had in his 2-men party game. That is to say, one of the game's resource files is corrupted in your game which has also broken IA's scripts leading to suboptimal behavior of the enemies.

The only mods I have installed are those that are part of IA's recommended installation. And generally speaking, I'm pretty sure I'm seeing IA's optimized AI, so I don't believe my installation is bugged in any way.

It may not have been that Layenne was technically "targetting" a summon. She may have actually been targetting a party member (I don't really remember at this point). But it seemed like my aerial servant, which was the farthest out of the foyer, was most impacted by the spells. I'm more inclined to think this is an issue of me not articulating well, than it is an issue of a bugged game. I've played IA before, and if anything, it's more challenging in 5.0 than it was in 4.2, so things would appear to be working well. It would seem odd that a single enounter is broken... so I'm more inclined to think my memory of the battle is a little bit skewed, than the conclusion that you're drawing Sikret. Sorry, this is largely why I haven't been posting much about my game... too much on my mind in real life to take the time to give reports that are detailed and accurate enough to meet Sikret's standards.