Tactical advice for Tarnor in the Sewers Options

[sturmvogel]

Having struggled mightily with Mencar Pebblecrusher's party (none of Keldorn's 3 Dispel Magics dropped Sorcerous Amon's protections (thank ghod for Emotion!)) I'm a bit concerned about trying to deal with Tarnor's crowd, which has always been more of a struggle for me in the regular game since I've never been a very tactically elegant player.
I gather than my normal tactic of invisibly sneaking up and letting off a double cloudkill has been deprecated by Sikret and would like some advice for my 1.2 million XP party consisting of:

Me R/C
Keldorn
Jahiera
Yoshio
Xan F/M
Kelsey

[sturmvogel]

I missed the fact that Theshal had been improved, but I managed to avoid triggering him simultaneously with the group of monsters further west so he was merely a real pain in the ass. I was surprised to see how well I survived his Storm of Vengeance, but the Greater Bearwares saved the day as usual. Very tiresome for my PC to act as the target dummy, but somebody had to do it. And since he had the best AC, -9, guess who was nominated.
Focused on all the "normal" undead first even though Theshal brought in a bone devil, who was surprisingly ineffective, and 3-4 Skeleton Warriors. Figured it was more important to get rid of all the melee monsters first while his protections wore off. Took quite a long time for my entire party to beat him down.

Keldon wielding the +2 MoD only took out one Greater Mummy during the entire battle in the Undead City. Much lower percentage than I'm used to.

Jahiera's pets took care of the Beholders without any problems although two of the cultists were unattackable (which I've never seen before) and then I got a CTD when the Unseeing Eye appeared. I'll have to wait until later to see if this is a reproducible problem or not.
There were a lot fewer Beholders than I remember from earlier games. I wonder if it was because of my relatively low level this time through or if was related somehow to the CTD. I think I've got the max spawns installed from Tactics so I'd expect more.

This post has been edited by sturmvogel: May 15 2007, 01:35 PM

[rbeverjr]

Keldon wielding the +2 MoD only took out one Greater Mummy during the entire battle in the Undead City. Much lower percentage than I'm used to.

My experience with MOD +2 in IA 4.2 is it is good for negative plane protection (off-hand use) and only in my main hand if I don't have a better +4 weapon to beat on demiliches with. (Of course, this is in a small way prejudiced as none of my main melee guys are specialized in the mace.) In the regular game, it was very good for smashing undead.

There were a lot fewer Beholders than I remember from earlier games. I wonder if it was because of my relatively low level this time through or if was related somehow to the CTD. I think I've got the max spawns installed from Tactics so I'd expect more.

I was pleasantly surprised at how few beholders I encountered. I always had played with Toughest Random Dungeon Encounters from Tactics in the past, but skipped it for IA. That mod certainly adds more beholders.