Given that IA has really improved the difficulty of BGII ,I'd be very interested to know posters revised top ten fights. You may include encounters from any mod and feel to add comments on why , or simply just give a list. I haven't formulated my own yet as the more thought I give it the more tricky it is. I would imagine that IA encounters will dominate the rankings but I think that there some other famous ones that might stand the test of time.

TOB and WK included (or just SOA)?

I think we'd have to include TOB though feel free to include fights based on any criteria you see fit. There are a couple of fights that just don't ring true in BGII (ie stupidly overpowered IMO) : the improved asylum party and the arch villain in planar sphere but if people want to include them - fine.
I think a good criterion for me is how many reloads (pulling of hair , gnashing of teeth) they required before success and how steep a learning curve was needed. Ask yourself which battles did you dread the onset of? I would be surprised if your EDE wasn,t the consensus #1 but you never know.

Firkrag's wing buffets made party management and spellcasting rather difficult. Weakness to archers was his bane, though.

The Demon Prince in WK was pretty hard with tactics mod and Longer Road since it was immune to time stop and could summon an infinite number of marileths and other little guards.

The fights that I got the most enjoyment out of was actually trying to run away from mages in Athkatla, setting traps inside buildings, and leading them in to slaughter them with spell and ambush. The use of the environment and the various different rooms in the city you could escape to, really added an entirely new dimension to the battle than if you just kept fighting the same bunch of people in the same territory over and over again.

Just to clarify it for third party readers, Frazurblu is not talking about IA in the quoted lines. He is referring to two fights in two other mods (Improved Asylum mod and Planar Sphere mod).

I had a surprisingly difficult time with the Hybrid-Tiefling fight in WK lvl 3. The regular tieflings and elite planar hounds aren't too tough but the random wild surges (because of the room) made bringing down the Hybrid Tiefling's spell protections difficult. It's still a fun and slightly different fight.

other personal favorites (not necessarily the most difficult)
IA's Samia & party fight in Firkraag's domain
IA's Troll King and Queen fight in troll mound (it was quite a challenge beating it before leaving for spellhold with my ~lvl 15 characters)


For hard fights, I'd probably mention the Oasis fight in TOB & the fight with Yaga Shura (if you don't take him down quickly and your party gets badly split up by the fire giant's knockback). Both should be somewhere in the top 10.

I think it goes without saying that Epic Divine Encounter is the hardest BG2 fight across all mods(I'm not including the cheesy battle from planar sphere mod though even so EDE is probably harder) closely followed by Imp. Yaga Shura. Third is probably Orcus followed by the new drow encounters in the underdark due to the reasonably low level one has to tackle them at. After that in no particular order the other toughest fights in my opinion are Ancient dragon, Judgement day 2, Kruin (especially if you havent dealt with the cowled wizards), Orc Horde, Twisted Rune and Tactics Improved Irenicus.

I think that the Eclipse fight (from the Solaufein mod.) and Improved Sendai (from the Oversight mod.) are worth a mention. IMO the Ascension battle is surely tougher than the Imp. Irenicus (from Tactics).

Yes, interestingly, the wild surge in that room petrified my protagonist and forced an additional reload to me as well (see my v5 walkthrough).



Yes, but as mentioned before, the first drow ambush in underdark is toned down for v6.

Wow, the co-occurrence of Imp. Kruin and Imp. Zallanora simultaneously will indeed be fatal for any normal post-underdark party. Have you experienced such an incident in your game, Clown?

By the way, The final battle with the Grandfather of Rune Assassins is also improved a lot further in IA v6 and will be one of the most difficult battles in SOA portion of the game (though not sure if it will stand among the top ten compared to the tough battles in TOB and WK).



The Imp. Sendai from Oversight is not even properly coded. She casts even "Touch-requiring" spells from distance (due to incompetent use of ForceSpell() commands inside the script).

Edited for grammar and typo

I haven't played any other tactical mod then IA, so EDE is the hardest for me. My 2nd hardest is the Twisted Rune, surely hardest then Orcus, since I did Orcus within 2-3 reloads, but I have spent a couple with the rune and still it is not finished. However I stopped to play for a while. In 4.2 Oasis was very hard also...

In no particular order these are the 10 battles that spring to mind from the SOA/WK portion of IA, taking into account party level/resources when they are encountered:

Suna Seni (especially if you try it right at the beginning of the game)
Judgement Day II
Twisted Rune (pretty sure you need HLA's to win this)
Orcus
Ancient Dragon
Dracolich
Underdark Demon Knights
Grandfather of Rune Assassins
Final battle of 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly'
Githyanki battle in WK 4 (very, very hard without HLA's)

Other battles can be very difficult as well. If you take into account the whole series of battles in the Guarded Compound then they are also possibly worthy of being on the list (pretty difficult if you attempt them before getting HLA's). But since it's not just one battle I didn't include it.

Overall though the EDE is I'm pretty sure the hardest battle in any mod, even though you have access to all the resources in the game by that stage.

Yes this did occur during my game and as you can guess the ensuing battle was imposible without the use of considerable cheese. I had to reload and then deal with them seperatly but kruin was still tough.

What mod is Epic Divine Encounters from?

Improved Irenicus was not too difficult once I got rid of the dragon with traps. With the dragon, there's not enough control to reliably win most of the time. Even with that, at the end I had completely run out of spells and was just wailing on Irenicus. I think I got him without using normal weapons since I hadn't thought about that yet.

Instead of using unenchanted weapons to bypass pro from magic weapons, I stationed my melee fighters in advance of where Irenicus was going to teleport, since I had memorized his pattern after seeing it for awhile. Eventually after a couple of revolutions around the Hells, Irenicus' health was so low he didn't make it to the next teleport.

Improved Anvil Read the readmes

I took the warning to heart and didn't read that document, which included the mention about EDE.

It wouldn't have told me how difficult the fights were anyways, which is what I wanted to know in the first place and to which Sikret's walkthrough was more useful.

just moped up the floor with yaga... RIP you big ugly piece of "censored". my top fights would be : note - i haven't met imp sendai, abazigal or epic divine
- improved crystal shard, at levels you usually do it, very painful
- those demons in underdark with soul reaver (if you don' t run) - they're just killers. Maybe this should be the hardest, but I did't reload as much as with those ambers
-yaga - not because he is so hard to kill (he is, but doable) but because of the slowdown due to so many fighting
-in that maze, there is an area with a lot of "special" shadows rushing as soon as you enter and they drain your strenght qute fast. Painful to me.
- Orcus. He was unbeatable for me until I found the right way on not getting Anomen attacked. (by unbeatable I mean not getting anybody of my party killed - imo once your'dead, you can be raised only as a rotting corpse so I dunno raise dead, but reload)

-that battle in wk level 4 to get arungavadal.....uuuuh. without good fighters, undoable imo.
- same area, one door to your left..... took about 16 reloads... so hard to keep everybody alive. without a certain 9th level spell undoable. Ancient wyrm took me 1 reload so them orcs are probably the hardest fight i fought so far

I dont know about others, but my favorite fight was the Dracolich because for me it was really insane and hard fight

I just finished the Maze and I agree with you Vik. I love very much the whole adventure and the final fight was really a beautiful end. And not only the fight was fun but the conversation with DracoLich is really funny - it was heroic from my side and Dracolich was really nasty. Perfect. The web lariat effect of spiders was really amusing and I watched that battle with wide open eyes.

I have only one comment about it: I think the final XP that the party get (not for Dracolich but for the whole adventure) could be higher. It worths at least the same XP than the stronghold quests (so, ~40-50k could be nice). Of course it could happen that XP depends on how you go through the maze and you can get more if you move less time in the maze. Then it is ok - I lost sometimes my way because I misread my own map alot of time.

Sikret, congratulation for the quest!

Agree with you for the map, I dropped arrows on the ground to mark areas.. Dracolich is fun, cause forces you to defend against him rather than removing his protections. The loot was good for me, too.

I am in Underdark and I would like to delay a bit the first drow ambush (do other battles before it). Is it true that the diffculty of this battle depends only on my protagonist level at the moment when she/he entered Spellhold? Is it true for the other battles here also?

I don't think this applies to drow ambush fight, but I'm not sure. It does for "random encounters" in dungeons, For example, that dungeon for umar hills quest you''ll probably meet skeleton lords and liches. If you are high level, you'll meet skeleton granlords and some other type of lich.

A note for eclipse party: they are loosers and solaufein is so overpowered he can solo them. You can turn invisible all of your characters via potions as soon cleric casts true sight, equip sol with sotm and dispel true sight from cleric. after that hit everybody once with sotm (to dispel them) then CC 3xadhw enemy sighted, if you don't have it use skull traps. . Kills them, and then use sola to kill fighters with imp.haste and pfmw. It's actually very doable as soon as you get sotm and sola. This tactic would be undoable in IA .

@Vik, Vuki & Kerkes

I'm glad that you have liked the Deeperdark dungeons and the encounter with Dracolich so much and have also enjoyed the dialogue with him.

Apart from the battles, my own favourite dialogue in IA is probably the final dialogue with "The Bad" in 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' quest. What's your favourite dialogue in IA? (This question will probably deserve creating a poll in the forum once IA v6 is released, because we will have several more new quests in v6).

I'd say it's the dialogue between protagonist and Pasha in exp.mage stronghold, really great work.

Agree, when I played 4.2 I really enjoyed those dialogs with the pasa...

I forgot about that little guy...."How dare ya insult me!? I'll kill ya for that !"
This is, for me, the best dialogue, and a very nice surprise.