Lockdown in France it is, I'm in for another IA v6.52 run after a Vagrant one where I patheticaly failed at downing the Ancient Dragon. Finished the run anyway, but it left me frustrated so I'm feeling like I'm on a vengeful killing spree when it comes to old wyrms. Hence a Necro run.

Installation :
- Ease-of-Use recommended components but no drow avatar and gathering party voice.
- Tower of Deception (long time I didnt play it, installed improved shard guardian).
- Dungeon-Be-Gone
- IA obviously
- IAtweaks : all components but enable harder battles early on (which I might have misunderstood : are the battles automaticaly on, or still XP-dependent ?). As for tweaked NPC classes, I made Minsc a Berserker, and Korgan a barbarian for one simple reason : Improved Human Flesh Armor. Their proficiencies and stats will remain unchanged.
- Some cool voices pack for protagonist. I like him or her to sound like Hannah, Morte or Fall-From-Grace from Planescape : Torment.

Will play on core, toning down to easy for spell scribing and early level up max HP, using exclusively Bioware NPC. I'm not against the IA kits, on the contrary, but I really find Riskbreakers way too strong, so I never play them.

As I plan it, team should look like (melee heavy) :

Necro
Cernd
Valygar
Korgan (barbarian)
Minsc (berserker)
Keldorn

Mazzy still might get Minsc or Keldorn's room at some point. With the new XP implementation for joining party members, I have until Spellhold to make up my mind. But I do... love... Mazzy's kit �“ such a good work on that critto or whoever had the idea. And it would fit the only 1 divine caster team pretty well with Valygar.
For the early-mid game, the only fight I foresee as extremely challenging this run is the kobolds' shard ambers. I might, just might, get Imoen for that fight just to have a third skinned character, then kicking her.




Spoilers ahead, will update as it goes





Protagonist had some very nice rolls, and read BG1 tomes, here is how she looks like :

Laïrae, Lawful Good, Necromancer, 161 000 XP (TotSC it is)
10 �“ 12 �“ 16 �“ 19 �“ 20 - 19

Start, join Minsc, bye Jaheira, Dungeon-Be-Gone.


Chapter 2 :

Circus (we keep +1 reputation for later), we head to slums , meet with Gaelan Bayle then join Korgan.
We then did Kangaxx' minotaurs (Korgan claims two axes), officer Dirth (decent armor for Minsc), Prebek in the dock, and did several Athktla quests (ore for temple �“ we keep Ned's head for later +1 rep - fallen paladins, Mae'var necklace quest, cleaned Saerk mansion...) before heading to Umar Hills.
Cleaned mimic lair from all its inhibitants, turned in blood (didn't kill the wizard), visited the cabin, before heading to Trademeet.
There, join Cernd right away, and start Druids Grove. We arrive at Day 4 Hour 21
Cernd's Death spell cleans up pretty much everything there as needed.
Faldorn : 4xMagic Missile and... dead. Nithiri fell to death spell, Ithafer & friends were no problem either. Minsc with Chaos Blade and Korgan 2 x Battleaxes +2.

Back to Trademeet, we turn in the head of Ithafer and spend 4500gp to raise our reputation by 2 points in the temple. We turn in quests to the mayor, reputation is 16 now and we are sitting on 50k gold already thanks to simplified economy ! We then buy martial staff + 3 under friends for hardly 6k.
Since we're in Trademeet, we join our monk « friend ». To be honest Rasaad, if it wasn't for experience, I'd never do your quest, it's terribly boring and I couldn't care less about your fate. Anyway, since we do not care, we kill everything we can. Only end fight can be tricky with that sharran mage. We got lucky here, Cernd's double emotion hit pretty much all melees but 3, so Korgan and Minsc use their respective rages to take down said mage. Switching to normal weapons at need. Few potions of healing used here, 2xADHW hurt at this point.
Bye Rasaad, you're boring.

Back to the city, head to temple district. Buy cleric's staff and girdle of the hills from talos' temple (only 7490 for both.). Join Dorn, do his first quest. Realize we got that bug in which the Radiant Heart map remains Dorn's quest one forever after it preventing usual NPCs from spawning there (unless it changes at some point which I'm not aware of), so reload and join Keldorn instead.
We head to the Wild Forest and join Neera.

Interesting wild effect in the wild forest. A shaman kobold summoned a nabassu, then Kangaxx (demilich version) got summoned too by one of them. Needless to say we had to reload : )
Love the way beamdog took a crap on the lore of DnD, would it only be by the fact divine casting is affected by Wild Forest. Same goes for SLA as berserker or barbarian rage. I guess this is well known anyway. We also be careful when it comes to the « gold disappears » effect, we of course remove every shitty script they put on characters which make them cast in this place.

Neera's quest is fairly easy. Enclave is taken care of through Keldorn's dispel, followed by malison, emotion, chaos and several crowd control spells. Neera's voice is so annoying she makes me like Imoen's. Also made me mad enough to decide to slaughter everything that wouldnt drop our reputation in there.

We then head to the Graveyard District, kill some spiders and clean some tombs to make Korgan happy - or we thought he would be that is. Plan was to drop by Pai'Na next, but we got too much negative level, so let's head to the temple district for a GR and check on Pimlico's...

Midway... Suna Seni !
Well, the guys weren't much of a threat. Korgan and Minsc rage, necro hastes, Cernd emotion and Keldorn True Seeing. Neera is lvl 4 due to negative levels, she just mirror images herself and flees away. Necro flees to take chaos by herself, priest and melee slaver fall to emotion. Suna Seni easily disposed of after a cool crit from Keldorn, who dispels chaos on Necro who can then rehaste everyone. We hack 'n slash through everyone, mage even falls sooner than expected : made everyone focus her at the very moment she was casting some magic missile (and she had taken a dispel from Keldorn). No time to renew her protection, she falls.

We buy Greater Restoration at the temple of Helm, visit Pimlico and en route to meet Shagbag who falls fast enough with his friends. Going by Copper Coronet, we also bought Spear of Kuldahar for Minsc, now he has a +3 piercing weapon.
Time to finally check on Paï'Na.
Death's spell from Cernd cleans the Blade Spiders, Necro starts breaching as soon as we enter. Everyone but Neera is under haste/FA. Korgan takes the aggro of the remaining spiders so a well-timed heal from Cernd counters that. Necro keeps her aura cleansed just in case Pai'Na stoneskins herself, but she didnt, so she fell pretty fast. Just a matter of cleaning remaining trash next, and we can claim her goodies ! Minsc gets the ioun stone.

We need some xp, so we head for Docks to Mae'var, and do his questline. Nothing worth mentionning here.
Met Renfeld while moving around, so we could do Xzar's quest. We then headed to Temple District to do some Eye Cult cleaning.
Only thing I ever find possibly annoying while doing the Eyeless quest is the Yuan-Ti Mage. Here, no problem. Keldorn dispels (as lvl 14), then with all the malison/emotion/chaos we had cast, all Yuan-Ti were down by the time we started breaching the mage. Trivial.

We turn in quest, Minsc and Korgan hit 11, Necro is soon 12. So we head for the Copper Coronet hopefully getting the experience we need for Neera to get lvl 12, so we can do the Slaver Ship with Improved Haste on. Which should make it trivial (I always do it earlier, there, with 2 mages and Cernd, I don't see what could go wrong).
The plan is to keep Neera as long as Necro hasn't IH scribed. Once she has it, Valygar will join. Or maybe we'll check on every NPC to do their quests first. Can't tell yet.

Slavers & Lilarcor :

Copper Coronet wasn't a problem at this level, even though I wasn't careful enough with the Beastmaster. It went ok but it wasn't as smooth as I intended.
With Korgan and Minsc, sewers mists were easily taken care of. Sewers next step : Neera gets lvl 12 and chooses IH new spell right on the first rats challenge of Lilarcor. Shadow Lover wasn't such a piece of cake. He really put the light on the lack of grandmaster for any of my warriors. He's always a wee bit tough to hit, but there, I really thought we wouldn't make it even though I had Minsc, Keldorn, Korgan under IH and proper weapons (as in not crushing), with 5 decent summons (fire elementals). It makes me consider adding Anomen instead of another warrior to this party, for the THACO buffs a cleric would provide.

The Slaver Ship next wasn't much of a problem. We sent CC fest around the cleric while our warriors are pouding Haegan under IH. He fell fast, and pretty much all the trash mobs were CCed (web x3+, emotionx3+, stinking cloudx3+ including near the stairs so we could cc the mage asap too). Since we had blocked the stairs with said trash mobs being immobilized, mage decided to go all the way to the entrace of the ship (the one directly from the slums) so he would reach us. Which obviously didnt work. Just noticed his fireshield on the left of my screen in the war fog. He eventually came back but still had his full buffs so... fair enough. He used 1 scroll, wasn't the IH one. He falls to warriors (Minsc took his sequencer solo procing berserker rage to avoid effects) without casting anything defensive spell but stoneskin.
Necro scribes IH, we also got Blackblood from Haegan - we can actually forge Treefolk +3 right now if need be, the +1 strentgh on someone would not hurt at all !

Bye Neera, join Hexxat. After a little Cromwell time (forge Treefolk+3), we head for Cemetary, Dragomir's Tomb.
At least we got a bottomless bag now !
Join Anomen. I wish his quest was popping earlier, it's not...
I don't remember the average lvl expected for Tower of Deception, but we will give it a shot !
Bah, Keldorn can dispel everyone in there so... went rather straightforward.

I'd like Anomen's quest to pop up, but I have no idea of the timings... went to Trademeet to let some time go on. Did Reijek part 2 (reputation 19), and bought Dwarven Thrower for Korgan. Actually quite a good +3 crushing, and might come in very handy in some situations (golem engine room in sphere comes right away to my mind !). What about an upgrade for a Korgan(dwarven)-specific item someday ? The item by itself is quite unique.


Chapter 3 :


Windspear and Shadow Thieves Tasks :

We still had the 15k to give Gaelan, so might as well do Aran 1st and 2nd quests. PC is at 1 100 000 XP. And we didnt touch De'Arnise nor Windspear yet.
We head for windspear. Mists were annoying, but with Korgan, Minsc and Anomen, we came out victorious eventually. Ruhk looked harder, until I realized Keldorn could dispel his PFMW... Piece of cake then.
Everyone got +3 crushing at need, we got two +3 piercing (shadow blade and spear of kuldahar), seems like we can totally make the full dungeon !
So far, having 2 skinned characters (PC necro and Cernd) is far enough to take care of those golems. We had the 2 usual spawns (1 coin, 1 gem, 1 bone, 1 clay). Having 2 two-handers helps positionning too. A lot ! Both group went super smooth, no one was even scratched. Anomen was still a good backup (as ranger/cleric) for aggro switches, but unecesseray.
Vampires groups were a joke with Minsc & Korgan raging + Anomen with amulet of power + shield of harmony. Means Bodhi is totally doable at this point, especially with Keldorn who will dispel Tanova with ease.
Paladin Stronghold 1, Anomen leaves for Valygar, who claims Treefolk + 3 right away.

Wanna try Bodhi's lair, such juicy xp to grab there, so we head to Graveyard and give Wellyn his bear back.
Only tricky fight be Tanova's one. Keldorn dispelled her, she was dead in a round. We did Crypt King and Queen on our way out of Cemetary.


De'Arnise Keep :

To De'Arnise we go. Trash taken care of with death's spell.
Greater Yuan-Ti : Rage for Minsc/Korgie, shield of harmony for Valygar, insane saves for Keldorn already (-7 bonus atm, unbuffed) who start with a True Seeing. We just dispatch the spider real fast, while Necro spams breach on the Yuan-Ti. Went as smooth as it can possibly go. Cernd tried to emotion of few times but it didn't work. Didn't need it anyway.
Yuan-Ti mage : Keldorn goes in first, dispels, pound, breach, pound, dead.
Glaicas : Pound, breach, dead.
Golem room : Keep Viper can be long to kill, but we had Cernd backing up with heal whoever needed. We got extra mass heal with Valygar too, nothing scary.
Forge FoA : goes to Valygar. Korgan claims Frostreaver.
TorGal :2 giant trolls, 1 Noble Troll, 1 gem, Torgal. We do not use summons, easier for positionning. We start lauching all 4 warriors to dps TorGal, Necro breaches him right away, Cernd positions himself so he can get golem aggro. Cernd casts death's spell which takes care of the two lower trolls very quickly, easier positionning even for everyone. TorGal manages to land a Vengeance Storm, but he's almost dead so we keep on him. He dies soon after, but right before he does, he turns Keldorn instead of dispelling us. We'll take it.
Warriors drag Noble Troll bottom side out of the storm, while Cernd drags his golem top side. Noble Troll falls soon enough (while Keldorn is still running around like a chicken but heh, he did so much good stuff so far this run, can't blame him), but Valygar dies in the process (all fighters were slowed, had Necro renew their haste. Nevermind, Korgan and Minsc are more than enough to take care of golem with careful positionning. Before they go in, Necro switches aggro with Cernd who was almost out of iron skins. It goes smooth, no aggro switch, and Keldorn even joins in in the end, the fear had went out.

So far, it's a no reload run - Kangaxx spawn in Wild Forest excepted, and another for Dorn's first quest bug.

Shadow Temple (no Thax, no Master) :

We decide to go for Umar Temple. Party is too high level : we got liches spawn. Nevermind, we just exhausted them of spells trying to seperate them from their melees helpers. Took some time, on the first group, Valygar and Korgan died, so we had to go to Trademeet to resurect them. We were more careful on the second group, we made sure the debuff would hit 1 character at once. Some summons tanked lich a bit (these basic liches don't use death spell by the way), and we were good eventually.
Thax will be too harsh without a second caster to take the initial silence, so we head to the Hidden Camp, join Neera who takes Keldorn's room. He'll join back soon after.
Well, he's a bit too strong for now, I'll be back later for him. Getting him to use all his PFMW and go full melee mode is not a problem, but 3 warriors can't outdamage him - no grandmastery, meh THAC0... could do it but would be just on a lucky shot. 2 reloads convinced me.
And I got a bunch of easy content to clean (Pirates, Mencar, Sewers party...) with decent items.

Mencar & Sewers party :

Mencar : a walk in the park. In this order : Dispel from Keldorn, Malison from Necro, Emotion From Cernd. Everything hit both mage and his familiar, so we all good pounding the rest of the party. We then kill familiar, prepare the mage with melee for about half of his HP then summon bears to finish him. No point takin 3xCL (if not ADHW !) for free if we can avoid it.
Sleeper acquired in nearby chest.

Sewers party : Dispel, Malison, Emotion again. Tarnor and his other dwarven friend fall to it. Priests taken care of first, then party focus Galchobair (Keldorn had to run a bit here, he took full focus after the initial dispel he had to cast prior to anything else). Meanwhile, Necro goes debuff on Gaïus (1xRRoR + breach at will). Gaïus falls without unleashing his usual sequencer 3xCL (he had to renew defenses every round). We then just clean the sleeping dwarves.
On the loot : Harmonium halberd (perfect ! goes to Keldorn), Fortress Shield, Wyvern's Tail.

Since we have at least 3 capable warriors when it comes to vampires, might as well give a shot to the Screaming Statue. I don't intend to keep Minsc actually, I want Mazzy, so let's make the best us of him we can.

Screaming Statue :

Our resources are a bit scarce here. We got 3xIH, 4 rages for both Minsc and Korgan, 5 skeletons to keep mists busy... that's all. Ain't much BUT we'll always have 3 warriors totally immune to level drain and confusion stuff.

Round 1 : Minsc raging, Korgan raging, Valygar (amulet of power + shield of harmony) under basic haste + 5 skeletons
Round 2 : Same + the remaining of the skeletons (no more summons)
Round 3 : Same but with IH, no skeletons at all. Keldorn joins too in order to maximize early damage on on the vampires. Cernd and Necro stand by to refresh PFNE once on Keldorn if possible, and also possibly grab aggro of a few mists and drag them away so that positionning is easier for warriors, AND to avoid that annoying slow. We really need that Master Vampire down asap or he'll keep spawning brides. Keldorn got PFNE refreshed once and then he dies. We focus both eminents first (both dead in a round), then went full dmg on Master. The point was to have as few vampires as possible so that Keldorn PFNE lasts as long as possible.
Korgan falls to Master, but he's almost dead so we keep pounding him with Valygar and Minsc. Valygar had switched to dual-fighting to maximize damage. He switches back to shield of harmony as soon as master falls.
Cernd grabs the attention of a bride at some point, so rather than wasting our precious IH time chasing her, we leave him to die. Once all vampires are dead, it's just a matter of Minsc and Valygar finishing the mists, while drinking quite a lot of potions, but they were needed.
3 dead guys, but we're victorious !

Pirate Hideout :

We then head to the docks, we heard there were some goodies to be found in a secret cavern by the Sea's Bounty.
Tactic here is quite simple : buff well, including prot. from fire against the coordinator's comets and dragon breath. We first kill all the pirates, then the captain. After that, we scatter around the cave and leave Valygar with shield of harmony and Keldorn with (-8 bonus) great saves quite near the coordinator so that if he wanna casts something, both should be able to save. They both got a potion of magic shield in case a ADHW sounds like too much. Valygar will use it.
We keep summoning (slowly) bears and animals thanks to Cernd, so that the coordinator uses his PFMW. They die fairly fast, but it's easy to scatter the bears when a necromantic spell is cast. It's probably a death spell, he wont use ADHW on summoned creatures. Scattering the summons when he does so avoids them to all die at once, obviously.
Once his SI : Divination runs out, Keldorn goes True Sight then goes for final pounding with Minsc. A few breaches later, coordinator falls. Sequencer 3xCL unleashed, but no real danger here.
On the loot : Crimson Chainmail, goes to Korgan. Gnasher, Red Coral Gem, Memory Boosting, Books of infinite spells and a bottomless bag, yay !

We empty our bags and forge some stuff :
Master of the High Forest - Cernd
Ring +2
Cloak +2 - Keldorn (I want his saves to be as high as possible so that he's a reliable dispeler all the time).

We still have roughly 130k gp

Planar Prison :

We finally head to the sewers to have a chat with Mekrath. We agree to his task. Found some Yuan-Tis in a room, with Keldorn, they're all easily dispeled, then the usual malison/emotion thing put half of them at rest, and the mages are easy to destroy given that Keldorn dispels them just fine. Minsc, Korgan, Valygar (shield of harmony) are great at just killing the trash without worrying about confusion-like spells.
Mephit : Doom before he is invisible (cheesy), malison, emotion and he goes to sleep. Easy then.
We killed Mekrath once we got back in his lair, free Haer-Dalis, bring the gem to Raelis.
As for planar prison itself, EBH took 2 scrolls of RoRR to take down, we still have 5 of them for Warden. Rest of the trash was easily cut through by our warriors under IH.
The usual opening Keldorn dispel + malison/emotion worked wonder on the 2 groups of yuan-tis and minotaurs. Nothing new to mention, but that Keldorn rules, it never was that easy to get rid of them.
Now, unless we get an improved warden fight with more spawns, I don't see what could go wrong here.
Cernd memorizes 3 chaotic commands, Valygar has 3 mental equilibrium, we got deathwards ready... As long as we can deal with possible havok because of hounds, there should be no problem - and we intend to fight bravely, everyone hugging the warden.
Warden went to us with 2 planar hounds, which we dispatched first. Then, I'm not even sure the Warden even used a single weapon protection spell... he was so busy renewing his S:Abjuration he probably forgot to do it. Anyway, he fell really fast, not a single chaos on any of us. Only thing the warden did good is that he managed to attack whoever was trying to cast something near him (valygar mass heal, keldorn true seeing). But he was no match for us.
Ring of Air Control on the loot and the usual - we might get our improved djinni summon fairly fast this game !

Lvl 14 for Necro, nothing to worry about RRoR scrolls anymore, 14 for Minsc, 13 for Valygar and Keldorn. Extremely good level for Keldie, he dispels as level 18 now !
It might be time to say hello to Mazzy, and bye to Minsc !
Hi Mazzy it is, we also take Neera instead of Keldorn, our goal is to take down Thaxll'ssyllia !

Thaxll'ssyllia & Shade Lord :

We prebuff as much as we can, deathwards, PFNE (Cernd keeps some to refresh) IH and such. Neera will take the initial silence so she uses her IH so that Necro can rebuff in case the dragon dispels us.
We summon 4 fire elementals, expecting them to deal some damage even though their main role is to keep the dragon busy casting death spells. While he'll do that, if we manage to predict it we can move the targeted summon away so that the others remain.
Fight was tedious, extremely long from what I'm use to (felt like he got buffed, but maybe I just miss grandmastery on someone).
As soon as Thaxll started his first death spell (long incantation), Neera goes in for a RRoR from scroll. She then backs off.
Anytime someone is targeted by a death fog/a dispel, etc... he moves away from the others to take the debuff on his own.
At the first opportunity, Neera goes in for a first breach and actually just has time to cast it before she gets silenced. She saves on 3 FoD. Wasn't the plan, she's useless anyway now.
Now that we got some relief from silence, Necro can spam breaches so that Thaxll enventually runs out of PFMW. He does quite fast, his contengency procs, and then starts the annoying pouding part where he hits much harder than we do...
Thaxll healed 3 times overall, more than on my usual run, but we eventually got him. He went hard focus on Mazzy who got affraid of a chunk, so she backed off a bit, while Korgie and Valygar kept hitting. Quite a few potions used, including oils of speeds, but Valygar got the killing blow !
Nothing particular on the loot, nevermind. But at least we got enough to make Phosphorus !
Bye Neera, rejoin Keldorn.

So we forged Phosphorus, gold is now roughly 100k. We feel comfident about Shade Lord, even though two casters make it real easier in my opinion.
We gamble on the fact that we can dps the Shade Lord fast enough to not be dispeled. We go for heavy buffs, IH on all dual-wielders, and PFME from scroll on them too. I assume Keldorn soaks magic damage pretty well (and I don't have any scroll left so...).
Once we enter, all warriors go on Shadow Patrick to take him down asap. Necro starts RRoR on Lord, Cernd positions himself so that he'll tank Skeletons Lords a bit. Shade Lords breaches him in the first round, he renews ironskins.
Cernd did tank a bit, but one good hit from a skelie made him vulnerable to PW : Kill from the Lord. No chunk, no problem, he did what he had to do.
Warriors go for first skely, then second. We make sure whoever is tanking the Lord will do it for the whole fight so that we don't have our fighters with low strength for the final pounding. Meanwhile, Necro managed to RRoR a second time, and her first breach on the Lord times perfectly with the second skely being taken down.
Lord PFMW three times during the fight, but we were fast enough : he didn't dispel us ! His contengency ADHWx3 is launched, but Necro had retreated a bit to avoid it, everyone but Keldorn had their PFME still. So only our Paladin took some damage, but with his top notch saves (he's basically at -4 average on everything) and his magic damage resistance (from armor), he was hardly hurt.
Lord falls, noice XP, Korgan gets level 14.

Then went to druid grove, killed some trolls (noble ones), started chaos quest, and since we were in Trademeet, gave a shot at Founder.
It was easier than ever, 4 warriors under oil of speed, all using crushing, destroyed founder easily. No problem at all.
Rhynn on the loot ! With it and Phosphorus, Mazzy and Keldorn might try to melee Chaos a bit ! We'll see about that.
We finally went for a safe we with Anomen extra Call Lightnings. Apart from Necro being eaten by Chaos' Creeping Doom thing, was the classical kiting session. Mazzy asked for a day anyway to let her sister recover (we did her quest), so it was fitting even though she lost 20k xp.

Now that we're here, might be time for... Planar Sphere !

Planar Sphere

The only thing that scares me, but it really does, in there, is the engine room. Only 2 characters able to tank golems through skins, very short range on my dps... hopefully with proper buff we can work something out but heh... it's scary. Just like Umar Temple end fight, I don't like the room environement layout, even if it's meant to be annoying as such. Positionning is easily fucked up in there, not even mentionning the hideous laughes from bone golems who tend to stay well behind every other golems. We got Dwarven Thrower for this purpose, wonder if it can take Bones down from afar easily.

Anyway, to the sphere it is ! The rest of the dungeon doesn't look scary.

Well, halflings, nothing specificaly difficult. Nice loot that is ! Keldon claims Ogre's gauntlet, now, every fighter in team got a decent strength !

First golem ambush was something else ! 2 gems, 2 coins, 1 bone. While I usually fight in furnaces room, I had to fight them where they spawn here (time machine), only way to have a bit of control on their aggro. The most difficult part is to make sure both Necro and Cernd grab 2 each, so we can destroy bone asap. Thing is, 2 golems hitting a character at this point destroys skins really fast, so we took out both gems first (1 on each), and focused Cernd's coin because he was running out of skins. Positioning is crucial, I can't stress it enough - Mazzy, Korgan and Valygar have a truly short range. Keldorn is ok, on both Rhynn or Harmonium Halberd, he was always safe. We still had to AC tank Cernd's coin at some point, luckily Mazzy got aggro and her -20 AC vs. crushing did wonder !
Took 2 reloads to get it right, I was basically reloading if aggro wasn't properly shared at start. Once we got it fine, went ok. Was still... on the edge.
I don't see though how engine room will be any manageable without a little bit of cheese (I mean, I don't see us taking down 1 full group before resting - which I force myself to usually do to be fair). If passageways are locked with my skinned characters, only Keldorn can reach them from there. Maybe I'll toss a two-hander to everyone, but no masteries...

Lavok wasn't too hard. Only thing I didnt expect was for the 2 gems and 3 skeleton lords to pop so late. Usually they spawn right after the dialogue, here, it took a round or 2. Anyway, we had Cernd loaded with summons to keep Lavok busy. We expect golems to arrive right on top of Necro, so she's a bit away from the group who will destroy the skelies asap, Necro can tank/kite a bit golems with skins.
That's what happened, roughly. Got a bit of a "omg" moment when I didnt pay attention and we got a full dispel on party while on the golem pounding, but again, Mazzy AC saved the day. We used quite a lot of potions, and Necro had time to rehaste everyone while keeping her aura cleansed for the next needed stoneskin. It was messy, but without a strong summon to truly keep a mage busy such as Clan Hunter or Swanmay, this kind of fight tend to be messier. Midfight, I realized I had NO scroll of resurection, and without a cleric in the party, I can't afford to loose anyone. Hence me going full retards on the potions.
Anyway, once golems were down, we scattered the party, and Necro went on a debuff spree. I'm glad I had 6 RRoR scrolls left, Lavok rebuffs himself fast. Once he was really out of everything, sent Korgan on top of his 190HP to finish the wizard off. He drank a "security" potion of magic shielding, got dispelled, so he drank another one. I shouldn't need any until dracolich so, might as well use them now.
When Lavok's contengency got out, all fighters went in, he finaly fell.

Lea'liyl was annoying, but nothing we couldn't overcome. 4 bears + Joloon with us to maximize damage, skely lords to take down first. 2 were down on the first dispel, which Mazzy managed to take away from party. Clean Skelies, Maurhezis next. Another dispel hits us all this time, Necro still had 1 haste to go, Maurhezis are down. Third dispel (i canceled an haste, nevermind), but our damage just overwhelms the demon anyway (I was pretty surprised by how much damage we could deal without haste).

Tolgerias, nothing spectacular, we just healed (mass cures from Cernd, Valygar) through his damage. No contengency ADHWx3, so no problem. Does he have one usually by the way ?

Time for the dreadful engine room...
We enter through right side (fire room). 3 golems on spot : 1 gem 2 coins.
Cernd fully tanked 1 coin and alternatively the gem. Eventually, warriors face tanked the gem, switching their places when it was getting too dangerous.
Necro tanked a coin comin from the west, Keldorn going full halberd dps on him under IH.
Korgan really hurt just went ranged with dwarven thrower at some point : it works very well ! Even if the damage is "missile", he was hitting as hard as Keldorn ! Weird animation though. Character sheet announced 5APR, animation showed 1. Anyway, that's three golems out of the way. We get out and rest.
We take the group on the right first, locking them on the right turn of the corridor they're on with Necro. Buffs include ofc FA and protection vs. fear. Keldorn IH and harmonium, Mazzy Spear of Kuldahar IH, strength. Managed to take 3 of them down + Bone Golem thanks to Dwarven Thrower (which is a wonder into coin, missile = piercing). Had to cheese our way out, Necro was out of skins. Still, since they were locked, I could have just used one of my many scrolls of PFMW, and call it a day without going out.
That's how we did the second group, using the far right angle (last turn before the loot thing) and the same tactic. It was doable !
1 gem and the bone remained stuck though, a bug where sometimes, two characters get locked on the exact same spot. Made it easier, but still had 10+ PFMW scrolls so... The last group included 3 gems, 2 coins, 1 bone, so one more than the usual, and we had FA/prot. from fear anyway, Korgan could've killed the Bone ranged.
We get back to Lavok and Mazzy, Keldorn, Valygar and Korgan get level !

Remaining things before Spellhold :

Since we were in the slums, we payed Borinall a visit. While I used to be scared by ambers, patience is the key for a good time with them. Party surrounds Borinall, while Necro is a bit away so he can take aggro of amber on spawn. Pound Borinall, True Seeing Keldorn, clean the trash and position well for a simple time on amber, with slashing damage ofc. He still does hurt, but we had a few resistance electricity left on Cernd, we just renewed them at need (just one actually).

Next will probably be Samia's and party. So much good loot on them, and a shot at Vecna !
They were easier than I remember... We go for max buffs, giant strength potion on warriors, preventive True Seeing... Necro blocking warlords door with PFMW opens with sequencer Malison/Emotion/Slow, follow by lvl 5 insect spell from Cernd - which preventend any annoying early spell such as Creeping Doom or Planetar. Would've focused Kaol in a round if we had had scrolls of PFME, but it wasn't the case. We focused in this order (can't remember all the names) : fighter/druid, then cleric, then melees as they come. Mazzy got killed by Samia but heh, they were all dead beside her and Kaol, so we keep going. Necro then opens the way for 2 warlords to come in, and blocks the last one. They're fairly easily dispatched (dwarven thrower, treefolk +3, Rhynn...), last one comes in, same story.
We then exhausted Kaol with alternatively summons and warriors under oil of resurgence and protection from fire (he has like 4 or 5 comets, they do hurt). Keldorn died to some spell, but no chunk. Korgan got the killing blow.
No Vecna, nevermind. Nor any decent named loot apart from the usual.
Cleaned Tomb Guardians while we were here. Didn't bother much. IH and protection from fire on warriors. Keldorn couldn't dispel them effectively, they must be real high level.

Quickly did squirreled away, the 3 assassins were annoying. 4 heals on Cernd were necessary to avoid casualties. We had prebuffed in an nearby house, can't cast outside in Athkatla.

Sold some stuff, we're getting ready for Spellhold soon.
Bought 80ish oils of resurgence. We basically visited every temple in Amn 100k gp worth, but they're so useful (ambers, mithril, Jon's fight, dracolich... low-key regeneration somehow) ! Forged 2 rings +2, 2 cloaks +2, good saves and AC seem more important than actual items. Just had enough to make nature's gift, so that Cernd get his lvl 7 slots asap.

The goal here is to always have someone able to save the day if we fail an important save. Valygar immunity to confusion (solemn duty) and 4xMental equilibrium. Mazzy -16 unbuffed AC (actually -20 with bonuses) and great life saving buffs/heals. Korgan unstoppable damage soaker. Keldorn elite dispel and best saves achievable with any character at this point in the game thanks to his armor (-9).

A look at the party pre-Spellhold :


Laïrae Necro (15) 2152331 XP, 77 HP, AC 3 -Cleric Staff +3

Korgan (15) 2107190 XP, 190 HP, AC - 6 -Dwarven Thrower+3, Frostreaver

Mazzy (15) 2084990 XP, 131 HP, AC - 16 -Flail of Ages, Shadow Sword +3, Phosphorus +4, Shield of Arvoreen

Valygar (14) 2112090 XP, 132 HP, AC - 9, Solemn Duty, Treefolk +3, Pixie's Prick +3

Keldorn (14) 2103202 XP, 141 HP, AC -6 -Lilarcor +3, Harmonium Halberd +3, Staff of Rhynn +4

Cernd (13) 2113653 XP, 68 HP, AC 3- Staff of Arundel +3


Did some stronghold quests (De'Arnise 1, Bard 1, Mage 1 : asked for ring of protection, ranger 2...) and Cernd's quest for the 50k xp on him. Also cleaned easy stuff on WK1, had totally forgotten it.

We're possibly a little bit ahead of "legit" xp to avoid improved Spellhold, but not that much, and I deactivated it thanks to IAtweaks.
But I won't abuse of it, and anyway, I dont want too much XP to be sure we have the Dracolich no HLA version for better rewards.

Restocked a bit on potions (notably electricity resistance ones) and we sail !


Chapter 4 :

We arrive to Spellhold day 84, hour 4, with 2 190 568 XP on PC. 4 reloads so far. 2 on Thaxll'ssyllia, 2 on first golem room in Sphere (Time Machine room).

Did Galena festhall, no problem. Had to take Vanek down real fast though, I do not have any RRoR scroll left anymore, and only 2 lvl 7 slots.
This made the mad cowled wizard and his golems pretty tough. No means to dispel his SI : Abjuration, and he has quite a lot of comets. Fortunately, he has no contengency ADHW, but it took us a few pots (oils of resurgence, healing in general and fire resistance) to get out of it alive. Needless to say we went through his 3 golems. And now that I think of it, simply using the amulet for Necromancer from Lavok couldve done the trick... +1 lvl 7 spell IIRC. Nevermind.
Went to Spellhold through Desharik.
Dream, sacrifice 1 dexterity.

Spellhold maze :

Yuan-Ti groups are a joke with Keldorn (and they supposedly are with any party anyway at this point), nothing specific to mention.
North golem room (portal room with Rakshasa) : Only 2 skinned characters, so they hold the door. Necro can't PFMW otherwise Cernd gets full aggro and his aura isn't cleansed to renew skins in time (2-3 golems hitting him at once). Keldorn with Rhynn or Harmonium deals what he can from a distance, Mazzy gets a +3 two-hander too even if her dmg is neglictible. Korgan ruled though thanks to Dwarven Thrower (again !). Coins and Rakshasa were destroyed from a distance thanks to him, so team mostly had to focus gems. Only annoying thing was the GBG who would dispel FoM from Necro on hit, so as soon as he reached her, we dragged him out so melees could pound him. Valygar watched the fight.
On the last golem (gem), Necro and Cernd were running out of skins, so to avoid a runny runny episode, we just surrounded him with +3 crushing on everyone. He mostly focused Necro and died fast enough anyway.

Instead of the usual Yuan-Tis minotaurs group near the exit of the level, we met quite a bunch of high-level spiders. Was a tough fight, tougher than expected. Had a reload here since were weren't properly buffed for this... unexpectation. IH/FoM on all warriors who go full ham. Valygar died but as long as we were able to stay out of the popping webs, it was ok. One of the spider was extra-tanky, probably the strongest kind (can't find her name back, fight was so long the feedback got erased).
Mazzy went full tank mode at some point, and she did great at it. She could hold 5 or 6 spiders all by herself for about 5 rounds or so, while hardly being scratched. She looks more and more like my future Dracolich tank, even though I might go Korgan + barbarian essences for that. Anyway, we're not there yet, and I'm worried that the extra XP I gathered might have improved Spellhold a bit, even though it's not the extra retarded tough version so far (didn't find an elemental golem in the portal room !).

Shade Lich and Skeleton Lords : used medium summons as a meat shield to mitigate damage early on. The room and the corridor are fairly small, so positionning decently is out of question. Mass heals and potions to compensate that. Once every lord is dead, we take care of the Planetar the Shade Lich had summoned, and temporize said lich with stronger summons we keep sending at him so that he uses his PFMW.
Lich falls to our endless tide of summons - this might be a bit cheesy, but I often take care of liches that way. I'd love to hear other ways to take care of them in a braver manner.
We kill Dace, then Vampire Lord. Korgan raging, Valygar with amulet of power and Anacondas x 3. Necro breaches Lord right away. He's solid, but he finally falls (Anacondas tank well, we were careful on the positioning of our fighters here).

Cat O' Nine Lives : We enter with a simple haste, and make sure Valygar starts the cat so he'll keep the aggro through the nine phases of pounding. Necro tanks coin which falls fast. We then slightly buff our way to the ninth life, so that we can unleash real power on the librarian spawn. Who actually dispelled us on the spot... every fighter drank an oil of speed (nvm) and took care of trash asap. Then we used the summoning tide cheesy tactic again against the Librarian, who didn't drop the nice cloak I was expecting. Maybe we cheesed too hard !
Edit : Tried the fight today from an earlier save, just to see if the cloak would drop if Necro was in sight of the Librarian. It did ! And since I was counting on the dispel anyway, still had some spells to turn well onto the lich. CLUAed the cloak in Underdark (back to main game) since we got it here.

Book of monster summoning : Now that was something !
Prepare spellbooks with all we need (IH, FoM, sequencer 3xRoF...). We don't buff AT ALL before the first golem.
Coin, simple haste, Necro tanks, 1 skin and 2 hits (on next skin) used.
Gem, same haste, Necro tanks, 1 skin and 1 hit used.
Spiders, we have to use another haste, because Cernd needs 4 rounds to give FoM to all. Could've been done better with buffing while fighting Gem.
Spiders haste, FoM on all fighters. Valygar falls, Korgan almost falls. We wait for all buffs to wear off to fully rebuff for our next fight !
Necro has 4 skins left. IH on Mazzy, Keldorn, Korgan, haste for others (no haste left). Necro drinks 4 oils of resurgence (takes 4 extra rounds since she has to IH and haste everyone. We had one unsucessful try where Necro only drank 2. Doesn't cut her with her bad AC vs. the elemental damage.). Valygar equips staff or Rhynn, Korgan equips Lilarcor. We need them to use two-handers for perfect positionning, otherwise, it can turn into madness in less than a second, and weed need to leave the north spot free for Cernd to take aggro of golems spawns. Our dps is greatly reduced, but there is no room for another good positionning (actually there might be "south-west", near the left wall, if I was to make Necro drag elemental closer to the book.). One gem spawned mid fight, Cernd grabbed aggro.
It was extremely close. When elemental fell, Necro had 1 or 2 hit remaining on his skins, no more oil of resurgence going, and hardly 30HP. Half a round before elemental died, he spawned a coin which Cernd took on him too. Taking the coin out was easy, Korgan Dwarven Thrower makes it fine to make room for Mazzy/Valygar on a good spot. For the remaining gem, all fighters drank an oil of resurgence (security it was. Not needed, but better be safe than sorry) and surrounded the gem. If positioning doesnt matter and we can just go full ham, our dps is good. Korgan used Cat figurine just to be safe, again, but victory was ours !

Closest and hardest fight I had this run so far ! I really feel the AC difference from my last run, where Nalia wearing Robe of the Apprenti was tanking with a -10AC. The damage mitigation hardly required 1 oil. I could have (should have) buffed Necro AC somehow before the fight. Definitely perfectible, but I'm glad we made it. I will take that into account for Kobolds shard fight !

Kobold's shard fight, aka WTF IS THIS DAMAGE ??? :
As I mentionned in my introduction to this run, I need another character with stoneskins for this fight. Well, that is, for the only tactic I know which implies 1 tank for each amber while we take them down 1 by 1 being extra patient and cautious. Maybe a ranger/cleric could tank 2 of them with a high enough AC ? Since Mazzy has no mastery in any slashing weapon, she'll give her room to Imoen for that fight. Imoen will obviously choose her spells specificaly for this fight.
Well... while most if not all characters are meant to stay in the maze if you kick them here, Mazzy would return to Trademeet if I was to remove her from party. Nevermind, Valygar will give his room to Imoen. With the extra THAC0 from Phosphorus, Mazzy reaches some decent value on her main hand with a katana, and even if we loose some APR, it's not a problem against Ambers, we don't want to hit them too fast.
After some checks around, I can reach a decent -10 AC at the very least for Necro, Imoen and Cernd. Maybe more if invisibility bonus applies vs. golems.
Spellbooks loaded with resistance from electricity. Everyone has a few oils of resurgence in quickslots. Every fighter has a potion of insulation in quickslot (faster than having someone rebuffing). Plan is to have Cernd's golem killed first. He has the least skins, and the most useful buffs for midfight (including Regeneration). Then we will see whom of Necro or Imoen wants hers dead the most.

Meh, was harder than expected. Mostly due to the fact that buffed kobold warriors remove skins at the speed of light. I guess next time I do this fight, I'll take them down as soon as possible instead of focusing the shaman. Well, I had Mazzy going for them at the start, but she didnt go fast enough. Pretty much half the skins of my tanks were gone by the time kobolds were all dead, which is not optimal.
Another problem was the casting speed of Imoen which kinda scared me. Stoneskin could possibly be interrupted (by the way, I recommend not to cast anything even if casting time is 0 when a damage animation still goes on : blood, electricity... it cancels the casting. I assume u guys know it but well... found myself going for double tap on my space bar to be as accurate as possible).
So our main problem was that in comparison to my usual runs, skins were dropping way too fast for me to feel comfortable. Imoen had none remaining while she was the first one to find her golem focused by our warriors. Cernd had none either for his, and we speeded up the process throwing our sequencer 3xRoF (Imoen and Necro) so he would survive. During the rebuffing part, Necro had to kite her own amber (bit cheesy, I don't like that) but otherwise she'd have been left naked. We tried to temporize as much as possible, warriors quaffing oils of resurgence while Cernd gave them regeneration, prot. from electricity under alacrity.
For the last golem, we positionned Imoen (who still had a skin going, but none left apart from a contengency 50% HP which I didnt trust given the damage output) and Necro so that golem would switch aggro between them. We made the best use of our remaining skins between her, forcing an aggro switch with PFMW on Imoen when her contengency skin ran out. When Necro's skin depleted, she PFMW herself and we pray for our warriors not to be chunked. At this stage, golem was between badly hurt and near death. Mazzy tanks first, quaffes a potion of superior healing expecting to tank ONE extra hit, which she does. She backs off then, Korgan grabs aggro, soak as much damage as possible and at 30% HP, goes cat figurine while Cernd is refreshing his prot. electricity. Meanwhile, both Imoen and Necro were loading a vampric touch. Korgan superior HP pool did the trick (he has 200 HP under rage), he even got the killing blow.
Wow, what a fight ! Didnt expect it to be so harsh !

To put it in a nutshell, note to myself for next time : kill the freaky kobolds warriors first, not the mage ! Unless I could dispel him with Keldorn which I didnt try. Could've been a friendly fire, dangerous that one.
And potions of insulation don't work on Ambers debuff. Good to know.

We go down, clean maze lvl 3, and get to the only really dangerous enemy there : Mithril Golem.

Mithril Golem :
Took a few reloads (3) to get it right because of chunks, but the tactic was good. Actually, we could have won on first try but I didn't notice golem was immune to piercing damage, and we had Keldorn on Halberd and Mazzy on Short Sword main hand... We still managed to get him to near death with such a gimped dps. The two other tries were failed because of someone running in fear then someone getting chunked. However, we always had Korgan tanking under 5 oils of resurgence + regeneration. And he did an amazing job at it !
The sequence was as follow : we all rush into golem room under best buffs including FoM, Korgan ahead so he grabs aggro, he goes and hugs the golem to make sure aggro won't switch too much. As long as the bleeding doesn't hurt him to much, we temporize (about a round and a half), then Cernd starts alacrity and rains mass cure on him with amulet of power/circlet for -4 casting time. Then, Cernd has time to put an heal on him, we try to make it worth so that Korgan is really badly hurt when the heal hits him, and still, he'll have the cat figurine for another tempo.
He eventually died, but at that point, golem was near death, so we just prayed and fully dps him while Cernd was renewing summons, and Necro was ready to cast remove fear if need be.
Mazzy almost died there, but golem fell right before she did. I'd have been glad to make it on our first try, but heh, that wasn't too bad. Scary fight that is though.

We get out of the maze through the "good" sequence of answers, and get ready to face Irenicus with his asylum friends.

Irenicus Asylum Fight (very cheesy) : God, this fight was such a pain. Countless reloads (I mean that), golems hit like freaky trucks, and only 2 characters can be stoneskinned.
Only way I found to do something was to have Mazzy and Valygar using a shield and getting their AC buffed to a max, Korgan having damage resistance and enough HP to tank a bit, and Keldorn being supposedly fighting from higher range. They both (Mazzy, Valygar) had around - 25 vs. crushing at least for the whole fight, 10% resistance with armor of faith, 4 oils of resurgence going (all warriors had such)... they could still be chunked from full HP in a second. Out of despair, I did something extremely cheesy. I've been trying to use ring of ram on Irenicus (trick from Dequ's journal, thanks to him !) so he would be propelled into the glass tank, and wouldnt join the fight - as long as we stay on the very bottom wall of the room (which makes positionning utterly irrelevant). Since the ring was hitting Irenicus 10% of the time (magic resistance I guess), it wasn't working very well anyway.
Then I tried something else. Had a trigger with 3xLower Resistance, threw it at Irenicus right before he gets his autobuffs at the start and it actually hit him. - 78% magic resistance. Ring worked this time, even though the initial goal was to check if he could be damaged by the inmates Abi-Dalzims. Anyway, we tried what we could. Avoided his dispel magic targeted at one of the inmates (they remain in sight of him even in glass tank), which was actually a mistake 'cause most of the mirrored party wasn't dead, and they made the battlefield EXTREMELY messy. We managed to take 2 golems down, and then Valygar got locked in an corner with 37 HP. It was the first time we had gotten this far, feared the chunk, and toned done the difficulty until I could unlock him from his dangerous spot. His regeneration was so high, same for his AC (he had -27 vs. crushing there) that he might have survived anyway, but I went chicken style here... : / Toned it back to core then, could finish this part of the fight flawlessly once we could position properly.
Many summons and Korgan with paws of Cheetah and his 200 HP go for Irenicus pounding, he fell to him after his contengency ADHW and his spell trigger...
I'm not proud of this fight at all, but it's really one I always struggle with real hard. Managed to do it legit back in the days (as in no Ram thing), but I had a much more balanced party.
Colossal amount of potions used for this fight, we're pretty much depleted of Superior Healing, and we hardly got 20 resurgence left (we had 87 when we got to Brynnlaw).
I'll keep a save to try this fight another way sometimes.
Edit : we did it today, reloading earlier save, applying overall the same tactic. Though, we relied on a Creeping Doom from Cernd to give us some early respite. Indeed, no risk for the inmates nor us to be dispelled early on, so inmates would tank harder for us, it was definitely easier to 1) clean of the mirrored party 2) drag golems by smaller groups. Still took us a few reloads, but we made it without lowering the difficulty this time.
Note for myself next run : USE CREEPING DOOM FOR GOD'S SAKE !!! - might be even easier to spam with an additional R/C, and with Necro guaranteeing it not being countered by magic resist thanks to 3xLower Resist.

While going for the horn so we can depart from Spellhold, we're summoned to Ustain's Lair (Tower of Deception). Quite a lot of great loot for such an easy fight. Includes a ring giving lvl 5/6/7 spells, staff of power.

Sahuagin city :Bah, even the fight vs. the Prince was easy in comparison to Irenicus in the Asylum. We didn't even try that hard, Cernd under alacrity heals so well, Valygar has too much AC now that I make him use Darksteel, so he is quite never hit, and his mass cure is really powerful. He got 2 of them now. Same goes for Mazzy. We lost Keldorn in that fight because we were quite surrounded, but since three of our fighters were extremely resilient, we prevailed.


Chapter 5 :

I have to be real careful here, I dunno if dracolich HLA version procs on anyone or just PC, but I wanna do it fast, so we give a check on XP really often. Still, we need a scroll of ADHW for Deep Shadows, so to get to Vithal and steal his stuff, we need to do at least Drow Ambush 1 to have access to his spellbook. Bought Sunfire (scribed it) at the duergars, Freedom, we clean all elemental spawns and cast freedom.

First drow ambush :
It was actually easy, I still have that Irenicus fight in mind, everything looks easier in comparison for now. Having 4 high saves warriors helps tremendously here too. We have IH/FoM on all fighters, FoM on everyone, Necro drinks clarity potion and casts a 3xsunfire trigger on the ambush spawn, while Cernd throws a firestorm in there. Necro has all those webs on him but he can retreat. An anaconda tanks the whole bunch a bit in the little corridor south of where drows spawn. We got time to position properly, and send fighters to ham. Korgan was protected from chaos-like things thanks to rage, so did Mazzy, but at some point (after 3-4 spiders killed, the strongest so all good), Keldorn and Valygar get confused. It's actually ok, Mazzy has top notch AC, and Korgan uses cat figurine at some point. Cernd spams mass heal from behind, Necro breaches priest. We kill pretty much everything this way but 1 drow warrior and the two mages who eventually came from the right side (we fight south of the big rock separating us from the initial spawn. The corridor like thing avoids being overwhelmed). Necro gets stunned at some point, we had Valygar and Cernd taking care of her while mages tried to take her down. She survived tanks to their heals, and one of the mages destroyed her spell turning so she could be FoMed again. She backs off, we send Mazzy under chaotic commands to distract the mages, we summon from figurines to keep busy a second mage, and fighter take care of the Mordekainen's swords that were summoned (we didn't have death spell... nvm). At this point, we sill had a lot of healing if it was needed, and potions were here anyway. No dangerous damage since we scattered the squishies away from mages. When situation feels fully under control, Necro RRoR the mages SI (only thing remaining on them), and we send warriors to the slaughter.

Seems like everything is going according to the plan so far.

Vithal's quest was done real fast... We killed him of course, simply having Korgan with belt of inertial barrier hitting him with Necro debuffing. His contengency didnt even go off.
We scribe ADHW !

Now, even though I could possibly grab a bit more xp and have 5% more physical resistance on Korgan tanking the dracolich, I'll take no risk. Cernd is 200k away from HLA, and I don't want the reduced rewards.
Maybe it's PC xp dependant, but one level won't make that much of a difference anyway difficultywise.

The Maze :

Elder Orb got RRoRx4 by Cernd and Necro, warriors surrounding it. We gamble on surviving the 3ADHW, we did, but Mazzy didnt survive the subsequent PW : Kill. It's ok, Orb falls soon after.
We tried to find a way killing as little enemies as possible, we're getting a lot of xp here, don't want HLAs on Cernd yet !
We enter the Maze.

Ghost Guardian :
Cernd casts a Creeping Doom on Korgan who drags Deep Shadows on him. Party joins him and we try to put all of them midlife while Necro breaches Ghost Guardian. Once Creeping Doom hit, party destroys the Deva summoned by the Ghost Guardian. Necro ADHW on shadows, two fall, 1 remains near death Cernd had cast aura cleansing meanwhile as second spell. Party switches to guardian, position so Korgan (who took all strength dmg) tanks. Cernd's aura cleansing hits, he goes Unleash Energy on the last shadow (who dies to that), then spam all his mass heals to put party back in full health, but Korgan. Korgan cat figurines while Cernd goes behind it, and use healx3 on him for the rest of the fight.
Keldorn got turned midfight, was ok, Korgan made it easy to temporize.

Whisper Spiders Ambush
IH/FoM on all fighters, rage for Korgie, Solemn duty for Valygar, Watchfullness from Mazzy for herself and Keldorn. As simple as that, nothing bad happened, we just slashed through. Great AC from Mazzy and Valygar avoids them getting stats penalty and they were tanking.

Deep Shadow Room :
Main Dps here will be from Cernd's Creeping Doom and Necro ADHW. Necro has contengency on sight Malison to maximize damage (to bad it can only be on him). Mazzy and Valygar high AC rush in asap so they take aggro. Worked wonder, no one had strength under 17 for the fighters in the end, and we couldn't afford casualties anyway, we only have 1 scroll of raise dead left, and no other way to raise anyone.
IIRC, Dracolich has some on him, and even if it wasn't the case, we can always do drow city content without casualties, get out of Underdark and buy scrolls somewhere. But I believe there are some too on skelies at Deirex's anyway.
Anyway, time to meet the master below !

The Mighty One :
Ok... the planning was perfect, the micromanaging was perfect, the execution and luck weren't, but we made it. (1 reload due to misscalculation on Korgan's battle rounds, as soon as his magic shielding wear off, he got comboed greater doom + wail, but nvm).
Korgan was tanking, with the best AC gear he could have : - 16 AC standing, -19 vs. piercing, 3 potions of barbarian essence (75% resistance total).
He was deathwarded right away, so he would get first remove magic for that. Then drinks magic shield, dispelled again, 2nd magic shielding does the trick and lasts half the fight.
He uses full AC gear including shield and Peridan +3 so he'd be immune to fear. We exhaust dracolich's death fogs first. Then we send weak summons 1 by 1 so he'd use his deaths spell. Once this is all exhausted, we send 5 good summons to proc his first PFMW. He has 4 total I believe.
We renew deathward for all midfight (Cernd uses 2 wondrous recall when he can, rest of the time he is casting zone of sweet air). Necro protects herself with SI : Necromancy. Anytime the dragon is out of PFMW, Korgan switches to dual-wielding phosphorus to proc the next one asap. During the whole fight, Korgan drank oils of resurgence (a dozen in total).
When dracolich is on his last PFMW, Necro buffs everyone, we summon our best guys (I canceled Cernd only Anaconda... could've made a difference there) and as soon as dracolich is getting hit by Korgan, we rush in.
Necro stands by at entrance for 3 reasons :
1) No immunity to silence yet.
2) He can keep summoning at will this way
3) Don't want a triple finger of death greater doomed and call the last 30 min of micromanaging a day
Then the final pounding was... messy as fuck. Like... really. Usually my fighter's THAC0 is much better and tbh, we had a shitload of critical misses, especially on the first 3 rounds.
Valygar dies first, no chunk okay. We keep pounding but his health bar hardly moves... Mazzy dies too, ach.
I'm not mentionning all the goodies the dracolich still had. 2 breathes, chaos, emotion... We managed to avoid the most of it, but anytime we were blinded, we ran around, no point hitting something we can't even see.
At this point, I'm like... okay, I'm in for reloading, but Korgan had gotten the aggro quite relyingly, Keldorn was well positionned and summons (mostly skelies) well... summons can crit sometimes... Since Korgan was still under regeneration, his tanking was real decent, and dracolich wouldnt switch. After a round or 2 (where we hardly hit him, he even regenerated to 80% of his hp bar), since the Mighty One wasn't casting anything, figured we had fully exhausted him. I used my ONLY raise dead scroll on Mazzy, who gets Necro last IH right away. She heals herself a bit, come close to the drake and grabs her gear. Keldorn drank he Frost Giant strength pot (and miracle ! he starts hitting a bit more, should've done that wayyy earlier) and Korgan goes full tank mode under shield.

The Mighty One finally fell to Keldorn, perfect best kill for an Inquisitor !

Now, what couldve been done better... No Jaheira (which tags along in most of my runs), and only 1 arcane caster, Giant Strength spells I can't afford for now, need IH too badly. I should've relied on potions, especially since I was lacking any good strength belt. That's probably why the pounding was so horrid.
With a proper tank, we could AC-Tank the Mighty one and not rely that much on potions of all kind. By the way, I'd find quite fitting that the Cavalier Kit would be dedicated to AC tanking with bonuses on shield or something. Just my feeling after this epic fight, and we all know about the allmighty R/C already ; )
Anyway, we end up with a dead Valygar we cant raise, so we gonna have to do the drow city and get to Deirex asap ! Unless we find a scroll elsewhere.
Kundane, periapt of proof against poison and flame of the north on the loot. Nothing spectacular.
Necro scribes Hand of Undoing and Limited Wish though.

We head right for Svirnerbelin village. The demon was no problem (we baited his dispel with Korgan hasted, he put boots back and gets renewed IH right after anyway - Necro had deathward and SI : Abjuration).
We clean the imprisonement machine.

Drow Ambush 2 :
We were short-mened, Valygar being dead, and more melee power wouldnt have hurt. Anyway, it was planned and went as such :
We have 2 anacondas, 2 bears (bears are meant to bait death spell staying near the mage, anacondas proc the fight going straight to the platform and keeping the 2 fighters busy).
Necro is away from the group, PFMW on spiders spawn, drinks potion of Freedom asap.
Cernd goes alacrity, FoM and Chaotic Commands (well, Keldorn, Mazzy got watchfullness and Korgie be raging) on all fighters once they haste themselves by some way (oil for Keldorn, innate spell for Mazzy, Korgan reequips boots).
We max AC and buff through Cernd with alacrity, then all fighters go for the spiders. Cernd remains with summons to tank the drows under Contact with Nature.
Spiders fairly easily dispatched, 1 drow fighter came by, sliced. Mazzy got her FoM dispelled by spiders, so she can go IH thanks to Necro. Rest remain with classic haste. We then head for the priestess and fighters, we got a cat figurine for Keldorn, potions, Mazzy's Lay on Hands. We basically heal through the damage. Cernd cleans the field from summons thanks to Death's spell from Vithal's helm. Keldorn True Seeing when cleric goes invisible. Meanwhile, Necro debuffed the casters. They finally fall. Once the spiders were dead, situation was under control, basically.

Onto Drow City it is !

Ust Nasha :

Nothing really difficult here, but loads of xp ! We should all get some HLAs by the end of it, making rest of Underdark even easier (but Mind Flayers... 2 skinned again might be harsh) Might write something about Deirex, Greater Djinni (well I know I'll go normal weapons into this one) and house Jaella't. But nothing we can't do here. Hopefully We'll be able to raise Valygar at some point !

Actually, only interesting thing was that we killed Djinni with both normal weapon and cones of cold under alacrity, with Cernd healing over it with mass heal under alacrity. No one was ever under 75% HP, real short fight.
Oh, of course, Valygar is about 150k xp behind because we could only raise him at Deirex's, and still, only 1 scroll of raise dead dropped.

We then went out to clear Kuo-Toan caverns, so we can easily kill Adalon on the spot when we will have xp from her quest. We mostly cleaned the Kuo-Toan groups thanks to Creeping Doom (for easy mage, no need to fully debuff him). They're annoying when they run around, they tend to attract other groups but well...

A bit more reloads than usual overall, not that I couldn't make the fight, it's just that without scrolls of raise dead, no casualties can be afforded. Gives another perspective to many fights ! Speaking of another perspective, here come two interesting fights to be done without casualties :

Kuo-Toan Prince :
Should be a walk in the park with everyone having at least 1 HLA (but Valygar !), and Valygar not having hardiness (all warriors took 1) made him very focused by pretty much... everyone. Kuo-Toan tended to drop their aggro on whoever they were to go for him even when he was far away from them and even though the fight itself wasnt much of a threat (creeping doom is a wonder here too), Valygar (or Keldorn, shitty AC) got killed a couple times. So we had to reload but fight would've been won otherwise.

Demogorgon's followers room :
Now, THAT is a tough one without casualties ! I don't think I had ever managed before to make it without anyone dying.
We said goodbye to improved haste this time, seems like they're real eager to dispel us if they spot it.
Buffs included regenerations of all kind and above all PFME. Everyone went botside, but Mazzy who tanked the "chief" the whole fight, and Necro who was refreshing his buffs under alacrity (first thing he casts when fight starts) to keep the top left one busy.
Rest of the team supported by Cernd focuses the other demon knights one by one, trying to keep em grouped so Cernd can mass heal decently (even though it wasnt really needed). He went for a Natural Restoral on Mazzy at some point, who was having a hard time even if we can't blame her for her tanking.
First dispel hits when only 1 of the knight remains botside, Mazzy had killed the "chief" by herself under the only IH Necro had memorized for this fight. She had kept it until "chief" had used a dispel on Mazzy. Mazzy and Necro switch the aggro on the knight Necro had kept busy, while rest of the party botside use all the heal they have : they just took a contengency 3ADHW after the dispel. Last but one knight (bottom) falls to the team. Only 1 remain, but he still potentialy has a contengency 3ADHW, so we play it safe. Korgan used bracers from Kuo-Toan Prince to give himself IH (rest of the party was re-hasted by Necro just in case), and under 200HP + belt of inertial barrier, he goes for last knight, trying to give Mazzy some relief.
Last one was the hardest to kill actually, he wouldnt attack Korgan and kept on Mazzy, so Cernd healed her twice. Got scared when Mazzy took his trigger 3CL right in the face, but she survived. He eventually fell after his contengency ADHW/Bigby's/Symbol of fear.
Well, no one died, had some closish calls but this fight is so intense, it's meant to be so I guess.

Finally, a strength belt ! And a great armor for Mazzy ! Korgie claims the sword, he has proficiencies for it !

Dunno if we want to go for the Illithids now. We should, I usually love the end fight, but the "only 2 skinned characters" scares me.
Oh well, we got hardiness, if we manage to avoid a major purge, we should be fine. I also wonder if Soul Reaver debuff applies on Elemental golem.

Master Brain :
Hmm... wasn't that hard. Goal was to maximize dps at all cost. 4 mordenkainen swords 1 smilodon before we enter.
All party but Necro gather on left side, Necro hugs the brain from the left with all summons going for the left Ulitaridh.
First purge hits Necro and summons, party untouched, Cernd alacrity while everyone go for hardiness (but Valygar, contact with nature) and rush Elemental. Cernd gives regeneration to everyone but Valygar (CWN) and supports the party. We fight near the brain, elemental spawned there (obviously). Necro goes AI right on the purge, then casts alacrity asap. Once alacrity is up on necro, he goes trigger 3xRof, sequencer 3xRof, 5 Rof, 5 Vampiric touches, 6 Larloch's. Elemental spawns 1 gem before he falls. Mordenkainens tank well, they prevent us from being absoluteley overwhelmed. Everyone equip crushing and we aim for the brain : dead before second purge !
Party goes on gem that Valygar had kited a bit away (he had a close call on his life) bringing a brain golem with them, while Cernd tanks 1 brain and Necro 2. Once gem is dead, party collapses on Cernd's golem (thought he had no skins left, he had 4 actually... Necro had none and tanked 2 : p). Brains fall fast - I wonder if it would be worth to focus them in some situation instead of elemental. I guess not but well...
Cernd go hugs the golems on Necro, he tanks them, party collapses, done.
Took us 2 reloads, things can easily get messy with the purge !

Since we're in the Underdark, might as well give a shot to the Ancient Golem. GEG kinda scares me but he's kinda meant to be done by now so... let's go !

Ancient Golem :
4 Mordenkainens, 1 Smilodon
IH/regeneration on all fighters, haste for all. All fighters proc hardiness pre fight.
Vampiric touches and Larloch's at will under alacrity from Necro
All that matters is to find a good angle in the room so that the golem won't propel people to infinity and beyond.
Dead before second purge, Necro took the first one then AI right away.

Chapter 6 :

Time for some easy chapter 6 fights, so we can gather as much xp as possible before facing Kruin (even though we might be able to take on him with a proper Necro spellbook...).
We head straight to Umar Hills, get Umar witch quest and start forging human flesh armor +5.
We then head to the temple, fight itself was rather straightforward at this point, alacrity on caster, debuff while fighters under hardiness and regeneration kill all they can. 2 minotaurs spawned, 4 skely lords, 2 coin golems. XP is decent, could've milked more but heh, that'll do.
Necro levels to 19 and takes Comet. Very noice "I need room pls" spell !

Next steps to be considered are : Troll Mound (we could use an extra +4 one-handed for Valygar there, could also go full spellcasting style though), Firkraag (would like to have critical hit for him, but it won't be before 2 levels so we might as well try him now - and Carsomyr !), Undead Town (this one's usually easy, hardiness is enough), and we always have WK lvl 1 & 2 to milk some easy xp.

Firkraag was very simple actually. Everyone has hardiness and great healing so we would overcome any damage we would take. Regeneration on start for fighters. Necro didnt join the fight, he stood away summoning stuff as needed.
He came in on last round just so Firkraag would silence him and loose a few seconds while everyone was pounding him with normal weapons.
Keldorn got the kill, this guy is a true dragon slayer (had the one on dracolich already too). Claims well-deserved Carsomyr.

Windmaster was done too. Not enough nuking power from mages to kill him in a second, we had two rounds of his storm/wind attack, but fighters eventually got him.

Undead Town next, I dont foresee any problem here.
Didnt bother much buffing or anything, maybe overconfident. IH, regen, 4 mordenkainen 1 smilodon. We go straight for Teshal, Necro breaches him. Fighters on the platform with Cernd healing them, Necro comets trash and lich coming from North. She uses ring of ram on lich to buy us some time. Keldorn almost died 'cause he got turned by Teshal, but managed to retreat. Then it was just a matter of pouding everything. We kept lich busy with smilodon and Korgan. Keldorn and Korgan were both sent to finish her off (high magic resist and magic damage resistance for both). ADHW weren't much of a threat. Keldorn finally reaches a half-decent AC with the brawling gloves we found there.

Troll Mound should be easy with Necro and Cernd. As I foresee it, they'll RRoR Queen x 3 under alacrity, trigger 3xLower Resistance and nuke her. Mazzy's watchefullness should do great vs. the King's stun, and we'll have Cernd loaded with FoM anyway as a back up. High AC and ADHW + Creeping Doom on the vengeance trolls. Well, that's the plan, let's see how it goes.
As +4 weapons go, we got Rhynn, Carsomyr, Phosphorus, Treefolk +3(+5 vs. unnatural) and Soul Reaver.

Indeed went just like that. Canceled a Creeping Doom on Cernd midfight but heh... was still okay. Mazzy had the aggro of the king tho whole fight, just got bounced all over the place. At some point, she figured she might as well kite him around. I mean, what's the point being bounced over and over if it's to move around anyway ? She joined in at the end, team destroyed the king in 2 rounds (only Korgan had strength dmg amongst our warriors).
Oh, by the way, seems like high level dispel magic removes strength drain. Just tried it so Cernd could move out of the mound, and it dispelled everyone's drain. Noice, didn't know.

Onto Watcher's Keep now !

WK1

Golems/Skelys Lords (Hearthfire room) was done... quite in a retarded way. Didnt expect skeletons lords, but vampires/mists, so I had Necro loaded with sunfires... heh, wasn't that useful here.
Anyway, we tanked near the door with 4 Mordenkainens, and dealt with skelies first, I feel like they hit harder, at least more often. All fighters had hardiness/regeneration. Once these buffs went out, Necro and Cernd used their skins to soak as much dmg as possible. Had to kite a bit to replace everyone, but overall was doable. Loads of xp too, can't complain !

Spider Queen, we buff with IH, FoM, Mordenkainen x4 (they are +4, and slashing !) we are careful though not to be stupid regarding positionning.
Fight lasted a round and a half. Weapons used : Soul Reaver, Carsomyr, Phosphorus, Treefolk +3(it is +5 here). Necro and Cernd start alacrity as soon as we see Spider Queen's dimension door. We tried a debuff trigger 3lower resistance but it didnt work, so both used all their offensive spellbook on the other spiders, including ADHWx4 with malison applied... Spiders were cleaned true and fast. Keldorn gets the killing blow, again ! No one will ever have a decent most powerful vanquished if he always gets the killing blow. Heh, he's a paladin, he needs some tales to tell I guess.

We do the ringing bell, reading stuff, open the portal and proceed to WK2...

WK2

Most fights aren't too hard since we got hardiness and regeneration at will as long as we rest. We got into sticky situations (such as having to buff in the poison room where 1 character is always being attacked by an melf's acid arrow-like effect, since we couldnt get out of the room without the key (couldve forced the door with "remove all locks and traps" quality of life IAtweak, but wouldn't be fair), and a group of 2 GBG, 2 coins, 2 gems were waiting for us on the other side. Still, as long as we can buff, we can just face tank everything, and Cernd can always alacrity into mass heal/Natural Restoral (he's got 3 so far) if things start to look bad. And we got a cat figurine !
Special mention to the Steam Elemental Prince, even through hardiness/regeneration, he deals a lot, and we pretty much fought him with another group of 2 GBG, 2 coins, 2 gems (we had moved to ice room for a check). They weren't exactly "together", but we had the same buffs running. Harder to facetank without regeneration : p We made it anyway, great XP everywhere. Everyone got a level in there !
We got so much gold and items, we can probably forge a few things (would it only be rings and cloaks +2) but we need to take Kruin out of the way for that !

Let's head for Forest of Thetyr, my favourite battleground for this battle ! (who fights him in Athkatla with Cowled Wizards spawning anyway ? : p)


A look at the party before Kruin's fight :

Necro (20) 4307870 XP, 92 HP, AC -3, Staff of Power +2 (Ustrain's), Sling of Everard +5. HLAs : Alacrity, Comet, Planetar. MPV : Adalon.
KC : 10%, KG : 4%

Korgan (22) 4232718 XP, 207 HP, AC, 3 -Dwarven Thrower+3, Frostreaver +3, Soul Reaver +4. HLAs : 3 Hardiness. MPV : Cat o' Nine Lives
KC : 18%, KG : 30%

Mazzy (22) 4215814 XP, 147 HP, AC, 16 - Shadow Sword +3, Phosphorus +4, Shield of Arvoreen. HLAs : 1 Hardiness, Power Attack, 1 Critical Hit. MPV : Ancient Golem
KC : 21%, KP : 19%

Valygar (19) 4065706 XP, 152 HP, AC, 18, Solemn Duty, Treefolk +3, Pixie's Prick +3. HLAs : Contact w/ nature, 1 Hardiness. MPV : Elemental Golem
KC : 17%, KP : 15%

Keldorn (20) 4227618 XP, 159 HP, AC -9, Dragon's Breath +4, Carsomyr +5 Staff of Rhynn +4. HLAs : 1 Hardiness, Power Attack, 1 Critical Hit
MPV : Dracolich (and Spider Queen, and Firkraag...)
KC : 19%, KP : 18%

Cernd (20) 4548732 XP, 82 HP, AC -2, Staff of Arundel +3. HLAs : 3 Natural Restoral, 1 Smilodon. MPV : Chaos. KC : 10%, KP : 4%
KC : 12%, KP : 10% (probably thanks to Death's Spell abuse !).

Kruin :

My party is of higher level than on my usual runs for this fight. One thing I especially wonder is if Keldorn as level 20 (so lvl 26 dispel magic) can actually remove Kruins defenses right on the start of the fight, which would make it... much easier.
We will see about this. I intend to rely on Creeping Doom early on to avoid too much debuffs, but if Kruin's defenses are removed right as the fight starts, it shouldn't be much harder than a WK2 encounter.

Poor Kruin could be dispelled by Keldorn... he didn't last a round...
Cernd and Necro under alacrity cleaned the Giths, party under IH/regen/hardiness made short work of the elemental golems. 1 gem 1 coin spawned, cause not enough Critical Hits HLAs, but Necro and Cernd grabbed them while skinned. We didnt use any resource on the fight. Fighters still had regeneration going at the end of the fight.
Not a tale worth telling that one !

I might be wrong, but Keldorn could open very nice perspectives into Demogorgon's fight thanks to his dispel.

Time to sell some stuff, and hello Cromwell !

We sold for 200k gp worth of items, gold is now 428k.

We forge :
- Indigo Ioun Stone > Korgan
- Corthala Family True Blade
- Gauntlets of Blessed Might > Mazzy (might switch to Keldorn sometimes)
- Cloak of Protection +2
- Ring of Greater Djinni Summoning
- Golden Spider Figurine

Gold is now 129k, we want some xp to make our next steps easier (as in Illithids compound, WK3, Guarded Compound, and Bodhi's too - I'd like not to forge Charon's to have 1 extra PFNE with amulet of power on Keldorn).
So we go for :
- Marella's first and second quests. (will wait for Mazzy's sword to go for "Why is it so cold ?").
- Ancient Priest.

We then went for Bodhi's, for we want the amulet of Hades !

Bodhi's Hideout II wasn't too much for us, apart from end fight we took us 2 reloads due to me wanting to preserve our scrolls of protection from level drain. It went ok when we used 1 on Mazzy.
First floor was done thanks to Valygar (Racial Combat), Korgan(Rage), Keldorn(Amulet of Power). Necro came in for the mage so he would debuff, otherwise, was pretty staightforward. We made sure helpers would die on vampires so we could loot them ! I'm not killing goodies this run.

Bodhi's confrontation was harder than on my usual runs for two reasons :
Less means of protection vs. level drains, and since Necro wasn't wearing amulet of power AND has no other mean of reducing his casting speed, his role was truly limited here (2 comets to clear a path to Bodhi... that's it.).
Anyway, warriors manage to down Bodhi in about 2 rounds (okay, Necro helped a bit here on trash with trigger sunfirex3). We take down all vampires asap so Necro can get his Amulet back, and it's skelies warlords time. They do hit hard, but we had kept an alacrity on Cernd so he could rain mass heal. Worked out eventually, few potions quaffed and a lot of micromanaging for positioning.
Noice XP, especially once we turned Lanthor in !

Illithids' Compound next !
First room, Necro runs in with contengency 3ADHW on sight (he just bought chain contengency at Ribald's), it almost kills the mage !
Then it was messy but with our buffs, warriors and summons could contain skelies and golems at the entrance of the corridor to the very first room. Vengeful storm hits us, but it's ok. Necro killed mage with spams of ADHW, Mazzy died due to me underestimating skelies damage, but Korgan soaks damage too well, we prevailed without much issues. (Didnt bother much about tactics here, went full retard tbh).
No Vecna on the loot (crap... I so hope I'll get it on Layenne), but we get Wish which Necro scribes. Boneblade and Blade of Roses acquired here. too.

Last room wasn't too hard actually. Well, not as hard as I usually remember (I usually do it earlier, often before Kruin). Necro rushes in for initial purge, he has CC:3ADHW on sight, but it only killed 1 Umber Hulk. While I usually barely kill trash not to waste time then rush golem asap, I truly focused on cleaning everything (not Ahloon ofc) but the golem this time, basically ignoring him. We then went full ham, 1 coin, 1 gem spawned, he died on the exact timing of his second purge. Korgan died there, but he tanked well !
Keldorn has intelligence drain, so does Valygar, so they back off while Mazzy (she has noice AC) and summons go for Alhoon. Necro debuffs, and Keldorn dispels the several PFMW Alhoon had. Mazzy drinks a potion of magic shielding right before the final pounding. Alhoon dead, raise Korgan, loot !
Apart from Hammer of Thunderbolts, no real cool loot for this party, but we can forge Crom Fayer right away, which Korgie claims !
He's been using Dwarven Thrower +3 for crushing purpose since chapter 2 (since day 10 kind of !), so it should be an incredible boost to his damage !
We got some money, also forged Amulet of Hades and Oak of the High Forst +4. Green Wyrm coming soon, but before...

Guarded Compound

Should be ok, I like always do it right after Illithids compound. If I can take care of the Mind Flayer's lair, Guarded Compound should look easy in comparison !
First floor is plain and simple hack n' slash.

For second floor, Necro has CC:3ADHW on sight, and all the needed sequencers to nuke Cleric or Sion with the help of Cernd... even though we didnt use these. We got canceled on our casting by Vengeful Storm, so we rather buffed everyone under alacrity with low casting time spells, and mass heals from Cernd. We clean everything that is easy to kill, especially those orog and minotaur really hurt by the 3ADHW, and Cernd keeps healing at need, Mazzy Lays on Hand at need, Valygar mass heals at need. This is the first fight where the party I intended to have perfectly works in synchronicity. We could perfectly heal any damage thanks to everyone's function, and we just soaked it all while absolutely ignoring their casters. Well, Necro moved out of storm at some point and started a debuff on Sion, but we really kept it him for the very end anyway.
Korgan, then Mazzy, then Valygar join in for the final pounding on casters, but at this point they were depleted.

A great battle ! We truly stood our ground : except in the end when we had to move to hit casters, everyone spent the fight near the stairs. Cernd didnt even move at all. Can't wait to see if we can do the Ultra Golem fight from ranger quest 2 without relying only on Cernd mass heals and wish for rest.

Anyway, GEG next. Question is not "how do we beat him ?" but rather "how many ambers can we milk out of him ?". And we should get Aeger's Hide here, last piece missing to forge Valygar's armor.
Necro goes in for initial purge, loaded with trigger RoF for ambers.
1 coin, 1 amber, 1 gem spawned, GEG died right on last spawn without second purge. Didnt even bother going for electrical resistance (even though Korgie started on amber without me asking and got quite damage > cat figurine here).
Was trivial enough at this point. Aeger's (yeah !), Holy Scabbard (yeah !), Johr the bleeder, Senses of the Cat on the loot !

While we are here, let's do Ancient Lich !
Went kinda smooth, but I still have such a hard time with liches when it comes to use "Disrupt Undead". Does the caster has to perform a successful touch (hit ?) ? I always make sure SI : Necromancy is out when I do that, but if the lich is PFMWed, does that prevent the "touch" from applying ? I dunno, seems like it hits 1 times over 5, which it's the main lich killing tool in IA. I'd like to hear about how it's supposed to work.
Anyway, Ancient Lich fell to Korgan final assault, he hardly felt the 3ADHW.

We prolly go for Cromwell now, and see what can be done for Valygar garments !
Sold some stuff, gold back to 233k.
We forge :
Improved Corthala Family armor. Now, Valygar has 18 unbuffed AC duel-wielding !
Improved Human Flesh for Korgan. Decent 4HP/round standish regeneration.

I really would like to check on the Twisted Rune here... A shot at Vecna would be such a powerspike for poor Necro slacking behind a bit.
But heh, there are many means to grab easy XP, such as The Shimmering Light, Squirrels second quest (with ruby) and WK3 !

The Shimmering Light 1 : Apart from Delon's spawning time being annoying as fuck to match with our travels (could something be done to make the time window wider for his spawns outside ?), no real problem here.
Enchanter is simple SI : Abjuration mage. Alacrity, debuff, kill. Party took ADHWx3 right in the face but all survived.
Illusionnist simple too thanks to Keldorn. His dispels does hit the mage so he's defenseless, and I believe his True Seeing destroys the Illusion, so all good.
Greater Doppleganger : Bah, if party could take on a Mithril Golem back in Spellhold, he's no match for our melee power here !

Also did the avater down in Kuo-Toan caverns. Prot. from electricity and pouding under regeneration. No problem.

Let's hit dat Green Wyrm down in WK3 now !

Green Wyrm

Classical 2 rounds fight with Necro/Cernd. 3RRoR on Wyrm, Breach, 3xLower Resistance under alacrity. Then breach at will (just once or twice extra). Meanwhile Cernd had sent Creeping Doom, it hits wyrm when he is already badly hurt. Warriors under IH/regeneration go for Critical Strike when the last breach is about to hit... boom dead. Necro tried to steal kill with PW : Kill, but at this point wyrm had more than 69 Hp probably.
Anyway, Korgan gets the kill.
Short Sword of Mask on the loot ! Mazzy likes while she waits for her sword ! And the root effect on it actually is a wonder in some situation (I remember it carried my Yaga-Shura fight once, for instance.)

WK3

Will only review the notable fights in here. Ain't like the demon groups are hard at this point (even though the no buffs policy could make them interesting, as in entropic field and such).

Tiefling Party
Focusing the mage seems like the best tactic in here. Wait for her to cast a first spell, then all warriors under critical hit focus her. We took the nasty ADHWx3 but could easily heal over it. Rest of the fight was messy due to the entropic field, and couldnt rely on Valygar to cure confusions, but once again, we soaked damage through our insane healing power and came out victorious. Belt of inertial barrier on the loot (2nd one, had one on Ustrain - Tower of Deception mod - too, used it to forge Keldorn's improved armor).

Demon Knights at the tree
We cant properly buff everyone here, and we will probably get dispelled anyway. So we just send Keldorn and Korgan with belt of inertial barrier, whom are our best magic damage soaker, while Cernd has a Natural Restoral ready if need be. It worked well, the two of them could kill a demon pretty fast. Power Attack is really good in here too : stunned caster can't cast heh ! Once only 2 demons remain, and they had both used their dangerous AoE spells, Valygar Mazzy join in.

Demon Wraith Battle
I never found this battle very hard, maybe because Cernd makes it remotely trivial in my opinion. He goes alacrity as soon as we enter the room, PFNE for anyone who could need it and he summons some stuff. Same for Necro, buffs party (notably IH) and starts debuffing the Demon Wraith.
Warrior dont use any HLA on first wave of enemies, they're fairly weak. They go for hardiness one skelies pop, and we just destroy them real fast. With all the heal we have, regeneration wasnt needed, and warriors HLA makes short work of these undead.
We back off a bit while Necro finishes a full debuff on Demon Wraith that Greater Djinni is tanking. We send Korgan in and he took the unfamous 3ADHW. Was quite a lot of damage. He hardly gets hurt for more than 25% of his huge health bar, but here, he almost died from it. Anyway, Natural Restoral, send everyone to finish the Wraith.

We win scroll of Wish and Spectral Brand from Aesgareth. And kill him next. Because we want to, and we're stupid lawful good people killing a demon anyway.

Marvella last quests

I really feel like we should give a shot at Twisted Rune for Vecna, but I need more casting speed reduction.
We head for the Planar Sphere, we gonna try Marvella quests 3 and 4.

Why is it so cold down here ?
We buffed outside, Cernd took initial purge and we just downed the ice golem before second purge.
Since we had regeneration going, Cernd had all his spells to support us for the - easy - remaining elemental. No problem, loot da gold !

Meeting Pasha
Another fight where the party tenacity can shine actually. My plan was to take down Noble Rashkassa asap after his first spell, but we had so many summons and enemy on the screen that we couldnt see him, and we had a lot of buff to do under alacrity. So warrior focused "by defaut"elemental golem so we wouldnt proc to much PFMW. If someone doesnt proc it we can down whoever it is with a breach anytime in less than a round... that was the plan but heh... only worked for Noble Marilith, and yet, we propelled her away at some point with Smite. Thought she'd resist it as a "big" creature. Anyway, just made the fight longer, but with a wish for rest, we were good to go again and without golem this time !
So we just endured them, we were never really in danger tbh. Anytime someone took a bit of a big hit, we had a Natural Restoral coming his way right away. When Noble Marilith came back on the field, we just breach/downed her in the round. Then we try to hit everyone a bit to see what was killable. Eventually it came down to Noble Rashkassa. Less than 1 round too. Boom, done, and we got that most wanted Foreknowledge we can scribe !

Twisted Rune time ! I do not know how that'll go, but I believe the party can make it if we don't try to rush things.
We don't overbuff (as in no regeneration, simple IH will do), our saves are great as they are. Mostly summon and magic defenses for Necro.
Mazzy and Valygar on Vampire with their AC tanking, while Cernd Alacrity to give them PFNE and general buff for all.
Keldorn tries a dispel on Vaxall, but fails (maybe it could work somehow but we didnt give it much try), he instead goes right on Layenne after a True Sight.
All Summon + Korgan go on the fighter, making sure we drag Shangalar into the room so he doesn't spawn those kinky golem, we want him in sight the whole fight !
Ignore Vaxall for now.
Necro goes alacrity, his goal is 1) to debuff vampire so Mazzy and Valygar can take her down fast. 2) debuff layenne and nuke her with Cernd.
Worked wonder, the timing was perfect. Warrior was first to fall to summons/Korgan (they probably interupted his hardiness, or maybe he went for whirlwind while we attacked Shangalar to drag him, so no hardiness either way). Soon followed by vampire, Mazzy and Valygar went critical strike right after breach hit. They fall onto Layenne who is being nuked, so she wishes for rest, but nuke aint done ye, so we double nuke her, but she doesn't double die. Once is fine by us.
We're roughly in the middle of the second round here. Mazzy, Valygar, Keldorn benefit of Cernd's last seconds of alacrity to be buffed, while Korgan is fine on his own with the summons.
Everyone fall onto Vaxall, and we dps him... well forever. Meanwhile, Shangalar is being kept busy by Greater Djinni.
Party took a full ADHW but no one died : that's the point of the full warrior thing, no squishie-like Jaheira to get chunked by such things. Cernd was ready, he alacrities again to mass heal them while warriors tempo with potions/cat figurine and regeneration.
Vaxall ends up dying a bit faster than expect (we used all on him pretty much, just keeping 1 critical strike on Valygar and Keldorn for Shangalar ending). Took a long time to exhaust Shangalar's PFMW. He tried to FoD Necro twice (who has -14 bonus on saves vs. death so...). Im real careful here, dont wanna have someone chunked, so anytime someone is on Shangalar, we make sure he has some means to always remain above 90% HP. Anyone getting his magic resistance lowered backs off and gives his room to someone else. We had potions of magic shielding ready for use to. When his 3ADHW was triggered, Keldorn, Valygar and Korgan took it. Actually Keldorn and Valygar fully resisted it (lucky I guess, but impressive), while Korgan who was supposed to be the best tank for that had 40 HP left. Backs off at barbarian speed, get healed by Cernd, and Shangalar falls (to KELDORN ! Again, this guy always gets the best kills !).

Wonderful loot ! Including VECNA !!! And Warblade so Korgie can forge his 10% resistance great sword. And levels on Korgan (25) Mazzy (25) and Cernd (24).
This calls for a celebration, we go try this new robe on Dracandros party, they're Twisted Rune's too after all !
Fight lasted less than 2 rounds (still had alacrity running on both Cernd and Necro). Necro fully buffed (-4 casting speed immune to everything) goes nukefest. He just left 1 prime assassinator for party to destroy. Some great loot there too.
Time to forge something, and to hit Guildmaster in Firkraag's lair !

We forge Warlord's Blade for Korgan, now he can have 30% standish physical resistance at will.
Improved Cat Figurine, can't hurt to have that for sure !

We can make the Memory of the Apprenti too (went by sphere on the way to Cromwell, grabbed robe), but need to deal with Zallanora first so that we're not annoyed when we'll meet Limak.

Cowled Wizards Coven
I was in for a long fight but... Keldorn could dispel Zallanora... so... breach, she's dead. Took 2 or 3 dispels, so I guess she's level 30 (31 ?).
Could definitely have milked many of the coins coming out, but I didn't feel like I needed to. I mean, didnt feel like it.

Anyway, let's forge Memory of the Apprenti and head to Firkraag's !

Guildmaster's (huge party) was quite okay... we didnt milk anything, we went straight for the kill on him with Necro fully buffed, alacrity, -4 casting speed, CC:3ADHW on sight... trash was dead in half a round, Guildmaster breached in the process, critical hit to death in no time, all golems (3) dies with the same critical hit that killed him... Only the 2 coordinators remain at the end of alacrity. So Keldorn dispels, works on both. We send summons and Keldorn goes in to help finish them. Quite easy with Necro/Cernd tbh. I even canceled Cernd Creeping Doom by mistake, but it didnt change a thing.

Went back to Radiant Heart to collect reward, game crashed when we entered it : steam was downloading a patch without me knowing. Thought I had deactivated that. Oh gosh, I hope reinstaling my mods by safety will do the trick not to get my game fucked up...
Ok, fixed steam's shite... we good.

The Mastermind
On our way to Cromwell we met Limak. First time we didnt expect him, so we weren't ready at all, but we manage to exhaust his invisibility thanks to Korgan great tankiness (70% dmg reduction and regeneration from Cernd), but we used so much resources taking down the ambers asap we eventually had to reload, Limak is still a great fighter if you can't really go for a decent pounding on him.
Second time, Necro was loaded with anti golem stuff, took almost the 2 of them by himself (good call btw adding them to the encounter), and this time, instead of being turned, Keldorn managed to dispel Limak on second try ! Then it was... much easier !
True pounding from warriors with Necro raining debuff under alacrity (actually, just breaches, Limak seems immune to anything else). We took CC:3ADHW ST:3CL all at once, but we all survived !

Went to Cromwell, forged his brain, Necro drinks, and :
- True Sword of Arvoreen
- Buckler +3 (will soon make Mazzy's shield. Need Sentinel though, dunno where it could have been randomized)
- Green Wyrm Plate (for Viper Queen, Grandfather's and to be given away for Shimering Light 2)

Since Mazzy switches her sword, Korgan now main hands Sword of Mask, Crom Fayer off-hand. I think I made the perfect tank out of him. He can lock targets with Mask, has a huge pool of HP, 70% physical resistance at will... only as a dwarven defender would he be better. AC it is. Might try him as such sometimes.

Viper Queen was down in no time (I'm even writing this as I'm about to do her), melee power is too much for such an easy fight at this point.

Forge Holy Avenger, Keldorn be happy !

Grandfather of Assassins was even easier than Guildmaster : less mages if we kill him fast, and smaller map so AoE spells hit everyone. CC:3ADHW on sight, 6 comets, 2 alacrities, 8 ADHW, loads of malison... And fighters going straight for Grandfather made the fight real easy. Nothing particular on the loot, but loads of gold ofc !

Forge Amulet of Greater Resistance.

Let's hit some Kangaxx now, I want that ring ! (just forgot about him tbh... could've been done much, much earlier).
Well, at this level, he aint a problem at all. Keldorn can dispel him, he hardly can dispel us... We just pound and profit.
Bug with Mazzy being imprisoned, I had to reload there. See bug section.

Might be time to check if we can proc the Old Ones fight anytime soon, I believe PC can handle it now.
And he could ! Managed to kill 2 out of Grave Liches, but got bodyblocked by Old One at some point lost a second and got interupted so I couldn't give a shot at killing last one.

Go to Morul, forge RvE (we sleep for 3 days...), we head to Cromwell, forge Cloak of Arcane Immortality, Cloak +2, Tireless Rage +5 (Korgan is no berserker here, but +5 slashing, looks good, nice on hit effect, +2 con... I'll take it).

Cleaned WK4 but the Githyankis.
Some Strongholds are left unfinished, fighter's, bard's, gonna check that around and sleep a bit, I wonder if procing chap 7 by going to Sulda will cancel them so might as well do them now, and maybe Orcus too since we're at it. Shouldn't be too much of a problem with this party.

Slept a lot (50ish days or so) to finish Bard's and Fighter's Stronghold. We get Sentinel +4 from Lord Roenall : forge Mazzy's Shield !

In the process, Necro leveled to 24, Cernd to 26 and Keldorn to 24. For the latter, 24 means lvl 31 dispel magic (24+7), which means that we will 100 dispel the Supreme Leader of the WK4 Githyankis, and bring a totally new tactic to the table thanks to Keldorn.
I'm gonna give it a shot to that. Loads of loot if we can take him down that early (to me, it's early, while it's probably not, but this fight always scares me.).
> Bah, he goes SI : Abjuration, and ofc can't be killed unless the summoners or the anti-inquisitors are dead (otherwise killing him in a round is more than doable). Doesn't mean Necro can't debuff him insta, but he's immune to breach (well, not all the time, I dunno how he works. Once I got him breached, another time not. Maybe it was a dispel that hit him). Just spent an hour and a half micro-managing to loose in the end cause depleted of everything. Nevermind, will come back later. Tbh my spell selection was shit but heh. Don't wanna go in again for now.
I believe going for golem destroying so Necro clears the room for the anti-inquisitors coming might do good. Always annoying to loose a round or two killing the remaining golems.

Gonna go Sulda instead.

Suldanessalar

Only two fights really worth mentionning here, they both were blasted in no time.

GEG and 3 greater rashkasas
We buff before we go in.
As soon as we enter, Korgan rushes in to take the purge on himself (cheesy ?). Once he's taken it, party joins in and wait for Rashkasas to start their ADHW casting, so we have a round to pound all 3. Critical hit on all, they're dead. Positionning is tricky here, it's easy to lock a character out of range of one of them. Anyway, we had Cernd ready to cast Fist of Nature under alacrity if one wasnt dead, but his main goal here was to spam mass heal to cover up the huge dmg of GEG.
Meanwhile, Necro under alacrity had rebuffed Korgan. First golem spawns : coin. Necro unleashes full spellbook on him so that party has room to surround GEG and maximize damage, goal being to avoid a second purge. Two more golems spawn before GEG falls : amber (8th for Hammer of Thor !) and gem. Party just pound them regardless, regeneration still going, and Cernd had proced his second alacrity to mass heal over the electricity damage.

Nizi'
The big guy didn't last a round. Warriors go in first and attack him right away so we proc his contengencies and sequencers. Necro under -5 casting speed goes RRoRx4 (just in case), and breaches insta at need. Party was all under smite so we would have 2 rounds of critical hits.
Hardwoods are ok too. We gather up, and Cernd procs his alacrity to mass heal over the damage. When they're are 3, damage is huge, but when the first one falls it was mitigeable. Necro gambles on a Wish for Rest, which she gets ! Refreshed party with 8 renewed mass heals and warriors HLA made short work of them.
We actually had 1 reload here 'cause I wanted to try to nuke Nizi with spells, trying to time a decent contengency ADHWx3 from Necro on a debuffed Nizi (Lower Resistance x... a lot). He's immune to the damage anyway. Since our spellbooks weren't fitting here, we remade them and see above for how it went.

Back to WK3, Githyankis Hideout

First of all, thanks to SparrowJacek who gave me the tip I needed to take on that fight from another angle. It always has scared me, not anymore, its grindiness put aside (went all whiny page 2 about it).
So well, we buffed outisde, but not that much. Mostly for Necro casting speed -5, and Necro alacrities right away before we enter (and IH everyone). The goal here was to rush the summoners obviously, but also to debuff Supreme Leader while doing so AND to leave busy with our Greater Djinni.
This part worked wonder. It was flawless.
As soon as Supreme has spoken to us, Necro 1xComet on doorway, 4xRRoR 1xbreach on Supreme and we time it so Keldorn can throw a dispel in. Meanwhile, Cernd summons Great Djinni. For some reason, Supreme decided to take on Djinni, and we could safely run to the summoners. Golems spawned while we were on our way so the place was clean of them : easy to position, they're dead in one round.
Thing is, Djinni did an amazing job : he basically tanked ALL the giths but 2, Supreme and 2 anti-inquisitors (he positionned himself in an angle actually). So we were free to totally destroy the 2 anti-inquisitors (melee raw power but mostly CLs from Necro) and the gem golem remaining, basically with the Smite that our fighters used for the summoners. So we still have all HLAs but Smite ! At this point I was like "heh, where are they all" ? So we took a round to rebuff properly, and went in for a check. They were so well grouped that it remained perfectly clean.
Cernd goes alacrity, Vengeful Storm on the whole pack, Necro dispels and malisons them all, Cernd rains Chain Lightnings. Fighters use 1 Critical Hit to finish off the remaining anti-inquisitor, so we can take on trash real fast.
We had some un-deathspellabe summons at our sides, we surrounded the leader, and Keldorn started to dispel him on a regular basis.
We still had all our HLAs (so basically 2 or 3 Critical Hits remaining per fighters), so we figured that in such a good shape, with so many summons (Supreme Leader focused a Mordenkainen's, he did !), we could go in for the kill.
Heh, no we couldn't. He proced his regeneration-like thing, cleaned the field with a comet and at this point, figured I'd rather endure him as long as possible with summons (we had 7 Mordenkainen's ready to be summoned) and wait for an opportunity to strike.

Took forever, I dunno this fight well, I dunno how many of each HLAs he has and such, and 1 check on him to see what he has left always costed us a critical hit each time just to see how much dmg we would do/if he had skins left and so on.
So we waited, kept summoning. Necro tried to Wish for Rest unsuccesfully (got TS and double alacrity twice, figured it'd temporize Supreme's buffs.). Meh, it was long, it was tedious, and we were never really in danger thanks to Korgan and his Natural 30% physical resistance and 244HP pool. He just tanked him for a tremendous amount of rounds (all his hardiness...). He had the potions for it, he kited a bit from time to time. 3 potions of barbarian essence could've done it too, and I could've let the game going on while I would have done something else.
Anyway, when I felt like "hm, it's been a long time since his last hardiness" and Korgan could hit him without him using stoneskin, used my last haste on the team, fighters used their last critical hit and we went for the kill.

The thing is, we had no extra IH, so our APR was kinda shit hence maybe why he was harsh to pound to death before. And at some point I missclicked a retreat on Mazzy and Valygar (early on, right after the first part of the fight once Anti-Inqui were dead), and they got dispelled by Keldorn.

Many things to improve here, but I'll know for next time ! And would love to hear how you guys deal with the Supreme in general !

Did the Demilich next, was truly easy as she could hardly dispel Cernd lvl 27 DW (1/4 average), and under alacrity he had time to renew them. Azuredge, Gesen's shaft on the loot.
Then Saladrex, we had too much fighters HLAs for him, we go normal weapons, IH, giant strength, regen and a lucky 50% HP while buffing outside. Staff of Ram and Defender of Easthaven on the loot !

We also went for some buffing on Lum's machine. +1 STR +1 CON for Valygar, +1 DEX for Korgan (only one getting AC bonus from it), +1 INT, WIS, CHA for Necro.
Also used Deck of Many things (had forgotten). +1 INT Necro (22 now), +10 HP Mazzy.

Back to Crowmell's, we forge Flail of Defending and Wounding for Valygar and Cloud Giant Belt

WK4

We start with imp riddle, easy xp.
Cleaned the huge golem group NE. No Wish for rest so we went safe and made sure we would clean coin/gems after 2 elementals were down so we wouldn't get surrounded. Cernd and Sunnis killed 2 gems by themselves.

3 Grave Liches and Skelies Grandlords. Loads of summons, we clean Grandlords with Necro booked with minor disruption, he also goes 2xRRoR - 5 casting speed on each lich and gets a lucky Time Stop Double Alacrity from Wish. He finishes Lords while in TS, and prepare all liches with Disrupt Undead (about 1/3 HP each). Necro resets alacrity with one of his own while in TS, and once it wears off, Keldorn dispels the 3 liches, Necro IH everyone back and kill them all in a second.
Gotta say that final was quite satisfying, especially since unplanned !

Globes Machine

Did Blue Globes (mages), Green Globes (Spiders) without needing a rest after the liches.
Purple Globes next (undead). Warriors take on the 2 first waves, then Necro have some Vulgar Display of Power kind of fun with vampires : she soloed them with quite lucky RvE (he was loaded with them) magical rest and loads of Disrupt Undead on Lords (rest was sunfired away in a round). Then we had some Old One-like fun with the 4 Graves Liches. Necro played as if playing the Old Ones encounter, though with -5 casting speed (so insta RRoR) and with a 80% chance debuff Keldorn, with 4 melees waiting for a critical hit on liches. Was real fun, and we threw so much RvE in that I couldn't help myself but choosing 50%HP on party anytime I could. Korgan ended up with a HUGE HP Pool. One or two more 50%HP and he could reach 1K HP ! Necro Int and Wisdom are at 22, so she has usually pretty nice choices, and hardly 1/10 failures. Won't abuse of it, but god, it was fun !

Red Globes now. First 2 globes no problem ofc. 3rd was tougher than I remembered. Maybe I didnt memorize enough IH (probably, had only 5).
First Ice Golem down in less than a round thanks to Necro (roughly 15 RoF, 9 Larloch's, 6 VT, 3 HoU). Korgan had grabbed initial aggro and equips Warblade 10% physical resistance. Cernd alacrity rains mass heals and Natural Restoral at need on Korgie.
Once first ice is dead, we drag everyone but Korgan and Necro a little bit down so we can kill the elemental without taking the purge. It hit us a bit, but not everyone, so Necro could rebuff, Cernd goes FA from cat figurine and Korgan drags Ice Golem out of his storm to the elemental who is almost dead. Korgan joins in on elemental and it is downed a few seconds later. Then we gamble on a Leroy Jenkins onto the Ice Golem. Anyone being hit and left with less than 50% HP retreats a little bit so he or she can get a healing of some kind (we got loads of these). It turned out well, Ice fell without casualties. No Wish for Rest nor Magical Rest here. With one, would've been a piece of cake, aka Necro nuke.

Ultra and GEG were quite tough. We made it without problem in itself, but it seemed much longer and harder than it usually feels like. Somehow we were quite slow at downing the Ultra Golem, he could purge three times total. I'm suprised because I have 4 warriors under HLAs pounding him, and basically 3 of them are dual wielders, that should make a lot of damage... Maybe it was due to the bouncy bouncy things that were going on and making them go for the other side of the room. Better positionning at start might help. Loads of ambers were spawned (5 total) and with that, we had 2 coins and 3 gems... the room is so small we almost got surrounded a few times, and Keldorn almost died twice, saved by Necro unleashing spellbook of anti-golem things on his attacker. Necro got several Magical Rests from RVE, allowing him to nuke 1 golem each time and avoiding too much things on the field. So well, Ultra fell after his third purge, and party migrated to GEG on the left side of the room (ultra was on right side) that had punched Valygar away in an angle. GEG fell fast in comparison but oh god... so much spawns. It was scary. When GEG was down, realized Cernd had aggro of the 2 ambers remaining, so he tanked them a bit (he still had a Alacrity going so he could buff himself a bit) while party took care real fast of the lesser golems. Then we pounded 1 amber (they still hurt, gosh Didnt protect ourselves from electricity though !), and Necro sent an army of summon to keep the second one busy while we rebuffed - especailly prot. electricity, just to be safe. Didnt want a chunk at this point.
Needless to say we made sure Necro was perma under alacrity to prevent any unbuffed situation, and casting speed -4 (5 sometimes, wasn't so important here, most spells we used got a casting time of less than 5, apart from HoU).
Usuno's Blade on the loot (sounds like a Hammer of Thor coming, and we got 13 chunks of amber anyway !), and Foebane.

Let's hit Cromwell's and see if we can make the hammer !
Hm, seems like I'm one permanency scroll short of it.

Since we're in Athkatla, let's try Time Machine.

Back to Demon Plane

We did sleep x9 for each key, aint got much else to do here and did it already for strongholds so...
The Grandlords fight is not a problem with alacrity to buff fast.

We head to demon plane again.
First wave of skelies easily dispatched.
For Balor, we relied on casting speed -5, and made sure we would use SI : Necromancy at a timing where many FoD would be flying to us, so that they waste them, and instacast SI is fine. Allowed Necro to only have 2 SI, and rest of level 5 spells in breaches, so we can insta RRoR>breach any of them, with party under Smite since they can't be repelled by the effect. Went fine, no problem.
Necro uses second alacrity right when Grandlords spawn, for an easy rebuff again. Korgan could tank 4 of them (!) with warblade 10% PR, for like the whole fight, only needing 2xNatural Restoral from Cernd, no regeneration on party here.

Force fight itself was quite annoying, and I really wish we had 1 wish for rest of magical rest of any kind so we could renew cat figurine, but it wasn't needed as overall, only Valygar ever got stunned, and Necro was always ready to protect vs. fear anyone. That was also the point of this party : everyone has great saves and a lot of immunities, and even if someone gets a incapacitating effect, everyone else has some means of removing it. That's what I was after with this party, and it does work real well, I can tell the difference with my other runs.
Force really dispels often, and the lack of Wish for rest made it longer, but not that hard. We had a lot of healing from the party and even though all enemies hit pretty hard, everyone could have hardiness renewed in time of needs. We had some "run for your life" moments, but for no more than 2 or 3 seconds, just time to cleanse aura and get HP back to full.
Last wave of GBG was done without IH nor regeneration, but again : great healing party.

I keep speaking of such a "great healing party" while we don't even have a single Greater Restoration ahah ! Yet I'm much more into 1 target specifics than using a 6 men spell just to heal one person.

I feel like it was more of an "annoying fight" than a hard one, but maybe party is extremely high level here (7 millions xp getting close). With that, it's not a fight I've done very often (3-4 times max) and since it has never taken me countless reloads, I don't remember it well so I always fear the worse, but it's usually not a problem.

We aint got much stuff left to be done in SoA. Gate Lich (should be cakewalk with necro) and Orcus. Though I wonder if I wanna keep some protection from level drain scrolls for Demogorgon... but I can always do him in ToB, while Orcus needs to be done now.
With unsilencable casters, and the way we dispatched waves of enemies such as the one we'll face with Orcus, I feel pretty comfident. I even wonder if I can save some PFNP scrolls... I really wanna.
Let's see :
Necro immune
Korgan can rage
Cernd can archons
Valygar can prepare for vampires
And I got 4 scrolls...
Bah... that'll do ! Used 1 on Mazzy, 1 on Keldorn.


Orcus it is !
Did Grave Lich at gates real fast, Necro soloed.
Well, was no problem as expected. First big wave of vampire was mostly destroyed by Necro with alacrity/sunfire.
We have so many critical hits... and everything falls so fast.
Oh and... guess who could dispel Orcus ? : ) Keldorn shining again, once big waves were down, we just retreated, dispel, pound with a lot of summons at our side. It was not as grindy as I remember it, because I could dispel ?
I didnt remember Vampire Lord + 2 brides to spawn on a regular basis once the 4 (or is it 5) big waves are done ? Was this changed to make it less grindy, but with additionnal enemies to keep the challenge on ?
Was so not expecting them to spawn that once Orcus died to Valygar, a last spaw of Vampires appeared and almost destroyed Keldorn with negative levels : the immunity to level drain scroll had just went out. So fight lasted roughly 3 turns I guess. Felt like a bit more though.

We forge Lord of the Underworld and we head for Umar Hills so we can start Good, Bad, Ugly !

Good, Bad, Ugly end fight

I had quite the souvenir of this one from my last vagrant run, and this fight only is the reason why I picked Cernd.
Had quite a lot of reloads, always because Auriel died, or because Ultra had just died and we were depleted of healing (couldn't rely on Mazzy or Valygar to heal Auriel when surrounded with 7+ golems...).
The thing is, Auriel pops close to a wall, 1 elemental and the Ultra pop right on her, so you got little room to manoeuver here. On top of that, all golems (including lesser spawns) prioritize a focus on Auriel somehow. It's not "absolute", but I've seen some golems trying to find a way through 12+ people (warriors + summons) and go back and forth several times just so he could attack Auriel while she's unreachable. So you can have an idea of what I mean.
Applies of course to Ultra and Elemental spawning on her, even though they sometimes hit your party once or twice for the lulz, then go back to her. Aaaand, they're so close to each others (Auriel and Ultra + Elemental) that you don't have room to cover her.
Not mentionning the 2 other elementals spawning a little south (a VERY little south) that require a shitload of summons just to hold them for 2 rounds, and even surrounded with summons, they very often litteraly leave the fight they're on to try to focus Auriel.
Last run, I managed it with Cernd mass healing under alacrity the whole fight, he had amulet of power, and we got 1 or 2 wishes for rest on Neera I had back then. Tried the same here, but golem desire to go for Auriel was even worse than I remembered.

I had to face 2 main issues :
- Auriel is not squishie, but she drags so much aggro and she can't be really buffed. Hence her making me spam mass heal ONLY for her, and being depleted (if we don't heal her, she dies in less than a round, hardiness or not - Ultra does huge electrical dmg too).
- The 2 elementals south tend to come back to us when Ultra is about Badly Hurt/Near Death, which is the critical point of the fight. It usually just follows a purge, so warriors have a choice to make : kill Ultra asap, go critical hit. Tank a bit they hurt a lot, go hardiness*. If an elemental from south decides to come toward us, they'll soon proc an extra coin or gem, which will make at least 5 golems of the field assuming Ultra is dead. And they'll want Auriel's skin above all.

That's why Necro decided to use Ring of the Ram ! Allowed us to push Auriel in a corner, surround her and even if she'll face an elemental the whole fight (couldn't prevent it if we were to down Ultra asap), it's much, much more manageable than Ultra hitting her too.
For the 2 remaining elementals, we went full retard on summons. As in, full retard (2 Skeleton Lords, 6 Mordenkainen's, 2 Greater Djinnis, Noble Spider just for starters...), up to the point where Cernd kept summoning stuff the whole fight just to keep the 2 bottom busy - and still while mass healing.
With endless summons and the ring of ram trick, we finally managed to save Auriel on the second try (failed the first one gambling on a spell with Necro, she got interupted, Alacrity ran out and... heh... surrounded cause she couldn't insta cast anymore. Being under alacrity the whole fight for both Cernd and Necro is mandatory. Or at least after the first purge).
* That being said, just thought of a better sequence for their HLAs, assuming they prebuffed hardiness : Round 1 Critical Hit, Round 2 Smite - round 2 ends : PURGE- round 3 Hardiness (with smite still going until round 4). Didnt think of it, but would've helped tremendously. I just start Smite by reflex on golems.

As for details themselves, Ultra summoned an amber at the end of round 2, Necro takes it down with spellbook insta (the amber bitch was going straight for Auriel, obviously). Ultra died roughly in the middle of round 3 and summons managed to hold their ground on south until round 5 or so.
While the field was pretty clear (just 1 elemental + a coin which spawned), Cernd managed to throw a regeneration on Auriel, which worked wonder as south elementals and their spawns were coming for us.
Might sound counterintuitive, but in this fight I find it important to take care of lesser golems first to avoid the overwhelming part. With critical hit and proper weapons, we could down 2 per round, which let us access Auriel in case she would be in bad shape. Anyway, once she was under renegeration, she could tank her elemental on her own, so we kept covering her while clearing the rest of the enemies, finishing with the elemental she was tanking.
I'm not sure this all was really clear, but heh, ring of the ram does the trick for sure !

Gold is back to 235k, and we gave Green Wyrm Plate to Diviner. That is, something bothers me. Didn't find the girdle of hill giant strength this run, and it's a component I need. Maybe it's in WK4 somewhere, I have to give a shot to Ancient Dragon I guess.
Could also say hello to Demon Lord from Judgement Day pre-quest.

Demon Lord (Judgement Day pre-quest)
The guy was cute enough. Party didnt bother using HLAs but for the 2 last waves of shade lords, and still... we were never in any danger.
Holy Avenger was a wonder here, dispelling protections without Necro to have to bother. So was Keldorn in the end, ofc his dispel works on the demon, so we had Mazzy tanking him, pound, PFMW, dispel, repeat. Demon Lord didn't even go for his uber flamish attack. He was dead too fast. We killed all shade lords though ofc to be comfortable.

Now, we feel like giving a shot to Ancient Dragon. What else can we do anyway ?
CLUAed Girlde of Hill Giant strength, it didn't pop on locations it is supposed to be - rechecked them all. Forge Girdly of Lordly Strength.

Ancient Dragon
Oh gosh, the guy's still strong, even with Necro.
Didnt manage to beat him yet, not without getting someone chunked that is.
Trying some new tactics, went on a "find fire resistance potion" tour in Amn, managed to gather 15, with our spells, it should do.
Something I don't get about the dragon is that he seems immune to magic damage at start, no matter how I debuff him.
However, in some tries, I manage to deal like 70% of magic damage to him thanks to even magic missile. Maybe he has two "forms", the second one he procs after his heal/regen things is not immune to magic damage anymore (as long as he got debuffed first).
I dunno, gonna give it some shots but this guy is a beast.
More healing such as a cleric standing on top of stairs loaded with GR wouldn't hurt neither. Team depletes fast on such a long fight, and relying on Wish for rest doesn't seem to be quite a good way to go. It comes so rarely.
So far, stuff I noticed that works kinda good :
- AI on Necro at start prevent Nishruu from being too annoying (which he still is)
- Constant rebuff of magical protections on Necro keeps the dragon busy quite a long time, a decent way to tempo at start
- Party's saves are great, most annoying effects (emotion, command...) are avoided without having to care for them
- Keldorn can dispel at need with insane success rate
- Korgan can tank forever with regeneration - but he needs his fire resist to be enhanced on a regular basis

Okay, we made it without having to care for fire resist actually !
Fighters on salamander then nishruu (tanked by Cernd), Necro goes RRoR, Lower Resistance x3 trigger on Djinni, then 13xAA with sequencers.
Using Necro under alacrity to permanently renew her own protections (ST, GoI, SI : Abjuration...) kept the dragon busy for the whole fight.
Necro was breaching him anytime he was renewing his own weapon protections.
Being agressive actually pays, he was so busy debuffing Necro, he didn't debuff anyone from fire resistance. At all.
So his fireballs were basically useless against the regeneration we had on us.
Once nishruu was down, all fighters went for him, his last PFMW used. He was downed in 4 rounds since we started pounding. He healed midway, but fighting power overcame that, and 1 critical strike + 1 round of Smite later, Valygar got him !
Much easier than I expected it to be, was just so scared of his fireballs that I've been trying to temporize him while renewing resistances... keeping him busy worked better for us !
We went next for the ghost warrior minigame (free xp), did the horde pacific way (could have used even more Crowd Control spells here, and lower resistance for mages, to make it really smooth. Wasn't smooth, but wasn't close either, only Valygar had died).
Cleaned the key fights but Azamantes (I'm too tired to deal with him now, gotta think of a way to protect casters from fear. Probably having them stay away).

We got a permanency scroll with dragon, here comes a hard choice SoA-wise. Do we forge Hammer of Thor, Dragon Lord or Judgement Day ?
Sold some stuff and we went for Judgement Day, Valygar claims it for now, he's almost as strong as a Vagrant PC with all the access to ranger items thanks to IATweaks.
Mazzy remains a solid candidate as a wielder, so does Keldorn, who might go sword and shield with JD at some point. Best wisdom I got, and with the bracers of dexterity, he might reach a decent AC and tanking potential. Anyway, it's stronger on Valygar for the next encounter :

Judgement Day battle : The Demon Prince

It's the first time I take on this fight, I pretty much know what to expect, but I never made it.
Went for some tries to get use to it and see what could be done.
It wasn't THAT hard, once we went for Demon Prince straight instead of trying to counter his overhelming helpers.
Necro and Cernd position behind the team. Necro started alacrity so he goes for a decent buffing session right away (he had CC:foreknowledge/GoI/ST on sight).
We didnt use a single wish for rest or magical rest, we just surrounded the Prince with endless summons and fighters under HLAs. Surronding the Prince prevents him from chasing targets he blew away, so we can max out our dps. Since we had a regeneration going, we never were in any danger. Anytime someone was a bit low, a Natural Restoral flew right to him instantly.
Was kinda weird the Demon Prince woudln't AI or PFMW himself, but it makes the fight more doable tbh. Would be too harsh to have to tempo him forever with all his spawns. Overall, just 1 extra death knight was summoned, so we weren't in too much trouble if you remove the perma poison from marilith.
So feels like this fight can be a nightmare, but with just pure agressivity, it works out. The harder the fights get (for me that is), the better going full retard works.
Anyway, guess who got the kill : our favourite Inquisitor again ! He actually tanked quite a lot this fight, or maybe he just can't handle physical damage as well as the rest of the team.
We cleaned the trash, Necro had anticipated the Demon Prince Death, she went for alacrity at the right time, RRoR/breach on Mariliths (they're the first to go down), then death lords (x2), then elemental golem (who spawned only 1 coin).
So, I guess the best weapon in the game is ours for good !

Definitely wanna try Demogorgon now, we just got Azamantes to do here, and we can give it a shot. Even though I feel like we could postpone that after a couple of extra levels from ToB. As far as demogorgon helpers go, I wonder if wielding JD would prevent Keldorn from being turned. If it doesn't, I'll have to throw that dispel on Rozvankhee asap.

We did Azamantes and his minions next. Had a Planetar summoned so he could remove fear from Necro once it popped. Then Necro under alacrity debuffs Azamantes, Keldorn dispels the whole pack (including us), Necro rebuffs everyone under alacrity, pound, Azamantes dead.

Well, Necro just turned 28. We could give a shot at Demogorgon, really, but what's the point if we can do it in early ToB, and until then, no fights should be extremely difficult. And we might be able to have Hammer of Thor/Dragon Lord by then.
I mean, if we can do Demon Prince that easy, what could be harder than that until maybe Yaga-Shura ?
We head to Suldanessalar, we got an elven city to save !

SoA ending

Irenicus fight on the tree of life wasn't much of a big deal. Hardly prebuffed, apart from IH and army of summons.
Summons tanked the hardwood well, they were taken down 1 by 1, no real danger her.
Debuff on Irenicus and final pounding, his CC:ADHWx3 is not much of a threat at this point.

Hell Challenges, no problem, good path obviously.

Finale in Hell vs. Irenicus seemed like a very, very light version of the Demon Prince fight. We took Noble Marilith down first, then Abyssal Escorts, Death Lord, Demon, golem and finally Irenicus. We had regeneration on all and -5 casting speed... Went as simply as it can go.


Throne of Bhaal


Finally we got to Throne of Bhaal, with only Demogorgon left in WK.
Here is a look at the party. I'm still considering dropping Mazzy for Sarevok at some if money allows it, just to have more dps (Mazzy is not that of a good tank, and another user for these great endgame two-handers wouldn't hurt.).

Necro (28) 7668770 XP, 143 HP, AC -17, Staff of Power +2 (Ustrain's), Sling of Everard +5.
HLAs : All
MPV : Ice Golem, KC : 8%, KG : 6%

Korgan (31) 7530775 XP, 231 HP, AC - 9, Crom Fayer + 5, Tireless Rage +5, Short Sword of Mask +4.
HLAs : 3 Hardiness, Power Attack, 7 Critical Hit, Smite
MPV : Cat o' Nine Lives, KC : 30%, KG : 30%

Mazzy (31) 7530941 XP, 211 HP, AC, -16, True Sword of Arvoreen +5, Flail of Ages +4, Jugement Day +5, Shield of Arvoreen.
HLAs : 3 Hardiness, Power Attack, 5 Critical Hit, Smite, 1 Whirldwind, 1 Greater Whirlwind.
MPV : Limak the Mastermind, KC : 14%, KP : 18%

Valygar (28) 7412314 XP, 221 HP, AC -24, Corthala Family True Blade +5, Flail of Defending and Wounding +5, Yamato+4
HLAs : Contact w/ nature, 3 Hardiness, Power Attack, 5 Critical Hit, Smite
MPV : Ancient Dragon, KC : 24%, KP : 17%

Keldorn (28) 7571357 XP, 193 HP, AC -10, Holy Avenger +5, Staff of the Ram +4, Wave+4.
HLAs : 3 Hardiness, Power Attack, 5 Critical Hit, Smite, Summon Deva
MPV : Demon Prince, KC : 18%, KP : 17%

Cernd (31) 7906132 XP, 114 HP, AC -3, Enhanced Oak of the High Forest +4.
HLAs : 3 Natural Restoral, 5 Fists of Nature and All.
MPV : Chaos. KC : 2%, KP : 8%

As fighters go, Valygar is starting to shine dpswise, Korgan still on top of the chart thanks to the perma Crom Fayer use and his ability to stay indefinitely in the middle of the fights. Keldorn still always there, even if his utility is quite the reason why he's so great. Mazzy slacking behind a bit, while not being as tanky as Valygar or Korgan, and not quite as useful as Keldorn - even though stellar saves on the whole team makes her redundant. As I mentionned it above, if I got enough money to allow it, Sarevok will definitely join instead of Mazzy so we can maximize our dps output. Valygar and Korgan are both a wonder frontline, while some two-handed reachers would do wonder to the team.

Anyway, into ToB we go ! Illasera it is !

Illasera, well, she wasn't quick enough. Necro under alacrity debuffs every casters, fighters critical hit them to death. All Illasera's party was dead when Grandlords appeared. We killed them one by one.
We did pocket challenge 1, no problem here.
Cleaned Saradush of everything we could find, did all mini quests.

Gromnir was a bit tougher, but nothing we couldn't overcome. Kinda underestimated him early on, but we had a regeneration on for all and no one was dispelling our hardinesses...
One notable thing though : Keldorn couldn't dispel Karun the Black's SI : Divination. Kinda weird, he dispels as level 36 now. We just endured him with a bit of summons. When Gromnir died, he was out of spells anyway so it was just a matter of time.
His CC:ADHWx3 + ST:CLx3 kinda hurt us, but in 2 seconds, we had Cernds and Valygar mass heals flying, + Mazzy LoH going for the most hurt. We were full life in a second without Natural Restoral or Greater Restoration of any kind.
We got 2 permanency scrolls in there, they'll be put to good use !

We got quite a decent bunch of money.
Now the plan is to kick Mazzy for a time so we can do Neera, Dorn and Rasaad's final quests. Mostly for extra money and experience.
We got enough to forge Hammer of Thor. Will do, as we want to forge everything that will be of use before considering adding Sarevok instead of Mazzy.
We forge Hammer of Thor, also Staff of the Ram +6, Ixil's Spike +6.
We did said Neera, Dorn, Rasaad's quests. Quite a lot of gold we got again once we did some clean bad emptying session.
Could forge Improved Ring of Gaxx (!) and Great Wyrm Armor. Gold is back under 100k.
Next forge goal : Dragon Lord (but we'll need a manual of elaboration we don't have).

Yaga-Shura Temple was not really difficult. Only annoying enemies in here are EFG. We notice here that after a dispel, they're vulnerable to all forms of magic and elemental damage (but fire ofc). They must drink a potion at the start of the fight. We take that into account for when we'll face Yaga and his army. We also got a bit careless when it came to Berenn and his friends. Not like we couldn't make it, but we made sure we would grab everyone at once, and the room being big, EFG did what they're good at and we got the party spread everywhere. Cernd died here, but we could raise him so no problem.

Not problem with Nyalee either, Necro under alacrity cleans everything. We also endured the skeleton lords hord. Was boring, and almost thought I remembered wrong about some end to it. Glad we waited, reward's worth it !

Onto the (very) big brother next !

Yaga-Shura Battle

Okay, here's the battle plan before we start it.
1) We want to take down EFGs as soon as possible. As I remember my last runs, they're the one making the fight a nightmare. Also remember only 3 should spawn, roughly. We can find one and kill it before Yaga comes back in, then we'll have Necro and Cernd ready to go alacrity nuke mode on them after a dispel.
2) Mages elite bodyguards are to be taken out quickly too. They're the only ones able to dispel our buffs. We should be high enough levels to not be bothered by their dispels, but we want our fighters to have hardinesses on, and not get breached too much.
3) Yaga-Shura is annoying if he starts moving toward a target he propels with his smite-thing ability. So we'll make sure to find a nice spot for him, east of the map, either before the bridge, or south down the bridge. Then, we'll have Korgan using Short Sword of Mask+4 main hand. The rooting ability is priceless ! Might even have him fight the whole battle this way. Rooting a EFG would be great too !

We also have 3 Pierce Shield memorized on Necro in case everything goes as planned, and we want to try to deal some magic damage to Yaga-Shura.

Well... It did go as planned. We rushed in fully buffed, killed the first EFG we saw in the west. Yaga appeared, their lieutenants were destroyed on the spot. Second EFG comes to us : we vaporize him with AAs and Chromatic Orbs. We temporize, everything goes smooth.
Only thing that fucked us up, and that's REALLY the thing that made the whole fight messy, is that when the third EFG spawned, he wouldn't be dispelled no matter what we did (3xRemove Magic from Necro, 1x Dispel Magic from Keldorn). So we couldn't burst him with spells as planned, while Cernd and Necro still unleased the rest of their spellbook on him. This happened on right on the second wave of lieutenants.
We then got surrounded because Yaga + 1EFG wreck chaos on the battlefield + a lot of lieutenants everywhere. Keldorn fell (it was a tough fight for him. Loads of physical damage, he didn't like it). Thought it was the end, but somehow, Yaga and/or his remaining EFG propelled Necro north, she ended up behind the edge/planks thing near the river. Since she had a lot of aggro on her, she got focused, and she managed to PFMW from a scroll. This cleaned the battlefield a bit, as our fighters came from behind once they could down the mage elite bodyguard Necro had time to debuff, and hacked n' slashed their way to Necro. Since the map is pretty narrow there, all the enemies couldn't fit in, so we engaged a serie of ADHW, CL and Creeping Doom from Cernd and PC that destroyed them all with the help of fighters. Only Yaga and EFG remaining, we try to take EFG down, then we go for pinball simulator again, Mazzy and Korgan end up on top north/west side of the map, cornered by the river. Another group of Yaga's lesser troups spawn, we kill them on the spot allowing Valyar to proc some good effects from JD.
We eventually took the EFG down sacrificing a critical hit on everyone.
We were pretty much depleted at this point. Necro still threw her Pierce Shield on Yaga so the root from Short Sword of Mask would proc, and it did ! Once Yaga had no magic resistance, he was rooted all the time - which makes him an easy target when his script meant to annoy us and walk to the target he propels make him not able to act for a few seconds. Still, he regens so fast and we were almost out of HLAs.
Necro gambles on her remaining scroll of Wish (we don't need anymore for crafting), so she casts it and... Wish for Rest !
We take it, and with the setup we had, nothing was scary anymore.
Yaga fell fast after 2 more spawns of extra troups appeared (5 total not counting the lieuntenants bodyguards ones). Necro unleashes ADHW under alacrity at will, she even got the kill !

Since we had our third blood of a greater bhaalspawn, we felt like making Sarevok's his enhanced sword and recruit him but... even with the ingredients Cespenar won't forge it... So we're in to keep Mazzy for now.

Oasis being extremely scary, might be a good time to give a shot to Demogorgon who should be even harder, but there isn't much we can add to the team for this fight. Only maybe, lvl 31 on Keldorn making him dispel at lvl 39.

If we're to go for Demogorgon, Valygar will play a crucial role here, so we make Boots of the Ranger Lord for him.

Demogorgon...

(This fight is awesome. But I need to whine a little about it.)
Dunno how much reloads. Probably 40+
This fight is... ridiculously hard. I spent the night on it, finally made it but... luck it was.
The lack of cleric, hence GR, was a pain in the arse. Truly. Everyone being somehow "poisoned" or "diseased" prevented us to use Mazzy's LoH or even Cernd's Restoral... Honestly, it was a matter of great luck on Wishes and RvE.
The lack of grandmastery fighters hurt too, everyone relies on HLAs to hit, so we had no one to send while being able to reliably hit. So Wish for Rest were necesseray as every single enemy required Critical Hit to be downed efficiently.
And the spawns. Oh god. I mean, I can hear that Demogorgon summons escorts, he's the prince. But Vargouilles ? Nah, seriously, it's too much. And Rozvankhee cannot be downed fast anyway.
On the bright side, Keldorn could dispel 100% each time he tried. So did Necro with escort, relying on remove magic.
Dispelwise we were good, but would have needed a cleric to make it... smoother. Anything would have been smoother anyway.
Vagrant would definitely shine here being immune to disease.

As for the fight itself, we started with uber buffs from RvE mostly. Everyone drinks BE, x2 for warriors (even x3 for Keldorn) : 11 total
Necro had CC:3RRoR, but since Belcheresk who was spawning near him would pop his initial buffs after CC was triggered, it was wasted on most of the tries. Worked out good on the winning one though.
Necro starts alacrity. All summons go left side so that they keep busy some guys, team but Necro gathers around Archpriest. Necro -5 casting speed goes 3RRoR on Archpriest, Saint Kargoth, Belcheresk. Then breach on Archpriest followed by Critical Hit from all warriors who could down Archpriest right away most of the time (otherwise it's a RRoR vs. SI renewal battle, which makes waste spells a lot). Then Necro goes breach, ST:3LR, S:3AA, MS:2AA + 10 AA + 10 MM on Saint Kargoth who falls to that. Meanwhile team goes on Belcheresk with the same Critical hit that killed Archpriest. Necro breaches Belcheresk, demon down.
Worst 3 remain...
Exarch is pure and simple annoyance with his smite effect, which tend to lock every single characters in a corner with enemies swarming to him. Most reloads were done at this point, so easy to fuck it up with that pinball simulator.
On the winning attempt, Exarch could be downed at the end of the second round of battle, roughly, just because he went hardiness instead of smite, and Necro still had alacrity going to breach him.
At this point, 2nd wave of Vargouilles is about to pop, and we'll have escorts coming soon enough too.
Korgan grabbed Demogorgon aggro and dragged him south east in the alcove-like thing. He equipped talisman of greater protection so that poison ticks from disease wouldn't destroy him too fast (doesn't matter if the damage is 0, it still interrupts everything anyway by the way).
Then it was a matter of cleaning trash (takes forever), dispel Rozvankhee and try to down her asap (she went for Korgan too, so we had to drag her out, was quite painful). She still managed to summon 3 waves of Vargouilles overall, but at some point, she used a PFMW right when Keldorn had a dispel flying at her, so we had 1 round to kill her, and it actually worked, she didn't renew her PFMW.
Still had 5+ Vargouilles to clean, Korgan still tanking drinking oils of resurgence as he can since regeneration will soon wear off.
We got to this point several times, but were unlucky on wishes/RvE and ended up overwhelmed by escorts.
There, we got 2 Wish for Rest and 1 magical rest for Necro, so we had enough HlAs for the whole fight. With nicely timed regenerations from RvE with that.
Truly, it was only luck.
Even when he's alone Demogorgon is still a threat, and I had some "runny runny" moments just to avoid a chunk (lowered difficulty to avoid a chunk at some point, even though Mazzy actually dodged the hit with AC. Demogorgon was badly hurt and didnt want to go again. Kinda stupid since I don't necesseraly intend to keep her 'til the end. Nvm).
When Demogorgon fell, everyone was in rather good shape, but a few moments earlier it almost went to nightmare mode because of escorts.
I'll definitely try this fight again someday, but with a team somehow dedicated to it. The lack of plain dps a riskbreaker would bring on the table is not to be underestimated. And gosh, I'll have a cleric. Having someone with 10+ GR in the back would help tremendously.

Anyway, they're dead, wonderful loot, wonderful buffs !

The Oasis

Meet Tombelthen and his friends on our way to Amkhetram. We did it legit, as in no pocket plane to prebuff at start.
Every fighter go hardiness and rush Tombelthen right away. Cernd and Necro go alacrity. Necro has CC:foreknowledge/GoI/ST.
Necro buffs fighters under alacrity and full debuff on enemy mages. Cernd gets near our fighters and goes implosion on Tombelthen (trick from bulian's speed run journal, nice one ! Always kept Tombelthen for the end, didnt expect him to be taken down that fast).
Fighter Critical Hit, Tombelthen falls at the middle of the second round. We got lucky Tombelthen's smite propelled Valygar toward Necro and Cernd, so everyone could stay grouped. Even though I don't think Valygar wielding JD and FoDW was in any danger at all...
Necro got a lucky RvE regeneration on party, so we clean the first wave focusing casters down first. Apart from Keldorn who takes a lot from physical damage (all Cernd's Restoral were for our favourite Inquisitor), we're not really in danger.
Repeat the process with the wave staying behind. Our regeneration went out mid fight there, but Cernd still had a lot of Mass Cures, and with Demogorgon buff, he casts them insta. Loads of great loot and gold !
After Demogorgon, this fight looked easy, no reload needed. Might be another story playing on insane, the physical damage output is real high here.
Necro levels to 31, Valygar 31, Korgan 35.
Just for the record, Keldorn has a hard time taking a gem golem all by himself even now under hardiness and wielding Staff of the Ram +6 !

Getting to Amkhetram, we did all minor quests there, emptied bags and back to pocket plane to forge Dragon Lord, goes to Keldorn. Tried to recruit Sarevok instead of Mazzy here, but he doesn't get the XP up to us like he would in Saradush. So if he remain lvl 18, might as well keep Mazzy. Too bad, I wanted a grandmastery in halberd for that tasty Dragon Lord !

Probably gonna do Abazigal next, he's easier than Sendaï, especially with Necro PC !

Abazigal's Lair

Draconis was hardly a threat. Necro has CC:foreknowledge(and w/e), goes alacrity right when the fight starts, lucky mental agility. -5 casting speed we don't need more.
Necro perma debuff both forms (dragon form resets PFMW quite often, loads of breaches used), party dpsing under smite. Keldorn gets the kill, as usual on big targets !

Nothing particular to mention while cleaning the lair...

Abazigal wasn't much of a threat either... didnt feel like milking an ultra + a ice golem when I could just go alacrity nuke mode with Necro and Cernd, even with -4 casting speed.
Keldorn simply dispeled human form, plain pouding.
Alacrity, RRoR x3, Lower Resistance x3 then full spellbook from Cernd and Necro. He was dead before we could empty half of it, and he still had 5 comets coming for him...
Could probably make him unkillable as long as his helpers are alive, but it would then be a hell of a hard fight...

We forge Hindo's Doom +4 (yay, GR clickie !) and Flail of Ages +5.

Sendaï's Enclave

A little regeneration was needed for the barracks, but raw power just overcame the drows.
We cleaned both routes obviously, slaves and spiders. No problem here, just random hack n' slash (gosh, mutated spiders STILL take forever to down).
Odamaron was well... dispelled by Keldorn as usual (he's like dispelling at lvl 40ish now so...). Still he couldnt be taken down that easy since Keldorn was being turned very frequently, so we kept killing lords and bones. At this point they're not strong enemies anymore.
Ogremoch has been nicely enhanced I must say. The perma-stoneskin thing is a great idea. He could maybe spawn greater earth elementals every round or so to make it funnier ? Not difficult anyhow though.
No problem with the priestess party either.
Alacrity, lower resistance x3 does the trick on drow captain.

Sendai, though, was something else ! Several reloads were needed
Every run, I find this fight extremely hard. I might be doing something wrong, but oh god, are these web golems annoying, to say the least !
We had a LOT of summons to tempo them a bit while we took the pet down, it was well-timed (by the way, Mazzy's sword still doesnt protect her against web) but even if we are patient and so, the fact they lower crushing resistance on a regular basis is... heh... barbarian essence intensive (2 were drunk here) ?
I mean, making Korgan tank wasn't the best possible call given his AC (-10ish at best), but somehow, he was holding his ground better than Valygar with JD, Flail of DaW, and like -30AC vs. crushing. Necro did her best to tank one too, but even with top notch AC, she was taking too much of a hit + I needed her able to cast stuff, and webies apply spell failure... meh.
And Sendai herself is not at rest ! She hits like a truck for such a caster, reminds me of Limak (maybe they're basically the same ?), and kept turning Keldorn ofc.
Only my opinion, but I feel like 2 web golems are a bit much. One would still be challenging, or said one could be replaced by another monster of some kind ? Again, I might be doing something wrong here, so I'm all in for tips guys !
On some attempts, I tried to take Sendai down asap, or after her pet only : Keldorn dispel, Necro full debuff (including Pierce Shield which applies on Sendai. Though, she's immune to everything and even 10 ADHW wouldn't take her down given her regen) : anyway, every single add needs to be killed for her to proc her death dialogue. And to be honest, even trying to cheese it, it wasn't easy !!
Might sound weird, but I find Demogorgon fight more... fair than this one (fairer ?). The golems apply too much debuff, Sendai is quite strong by herself. At least, she doesn't go full comet or dragon breath while we're on golems (but she applies poison to everyone...).
Was this kind of fight where I went as deep as I could into my bags to find some forgotten scrolls of Wish. Found 3, one of them was Wish for Rest, so we could make it.
That is, I can but only notice that we lacked healing big time here. Missing a cleric again, Restoral and Lay on Hands can't cut everything : )

Time to kill some monks, and to truly empty our bags !

We fully cleaned Amkethram of Mercenaries and Monk, made over 100k gold with simplified economy. Cool !

Balthazar was... ahem... dead in a round. Maybe two seconds more due to the animation of his "second wind".

EDE

Here we are, finally. After bags were emptied, gold back at 470k.
Forge :
Boots of Speed x3
Improved Boots of the Ranger Lord (Valygar -25 standing AC)
Poseïdon's Wrath (for Korgan, he has the worst magic dmg resistance of the team, 25%. A good way to prevent some ADHW rushing for him).
Circlet of Golden Flowers (didn't bother making it early on, had enough spells).

Party items didnt change much since last time. We have roughly 10 millions XP on everyone.
Necro lvl 33
Korgan lvl 37
Valygar lvl 33
Keldorn lvl 34 (dispel 42, I wonder what he'll be able to pull here !)
Mazzy lvl 37
Cernd lvl lvl 39

For EDE we have :
22 Barbarian essences
15 Magic Shielding
65 Oils of resurgence
468 Superior Healing

Most important memorized spells are for Necro : bunch of RvE and Wishes, protection from elements of all kinds, loads of summons, and sequencers/triggers RoF (+some in spellbook) to speed up amber cleaning process.
Cernd has 50% regeneration 50% aura cleansing for lvl 7 spells, rest is healing and protection.

All barbarian essences drunk so that everyone reaches 100 resistance (but Necro and Cernd but they don't intend to melee much, need them ready to jump on anyone needing a buff. Cernd has amulet of Cheetah speed and boots of speed so he can go red cross speeder style - looking for a better analogy here but it doesnt come).

It was one of my first times, if not the first, going seriously for EDE. I'm not sure I'll ever do that again, I really don't find this fight appealing.
Too long, too repetitive, and the feeling of "you gonna go for ten times of that, can you do it without mistakes ?".
It didn't even feel challenging, just extremely long. Not saying it's easy of course, but I'd go for Demogorgon ten times over this one.
So well, had to go for some "attempts" first, so I'd get familiar with the fight, the frequency of purge, of spawns and so on.
Also, had to figure how to make the best possible use of Pasha, who is actually stronger than any of my warriors by a huge margin (both defensively - obviously - and offensively).
Letting him handle an Ultra by itself works, but if he gets more than that on him, he'll die, so might as well use his extra dps on Supreme ; we make sure he follows us and that'll take care of trash spawns. Cernd kept a caring eye on him the whole fight, giving him regeneration, restorals at need.
Supreme down in roughly 2 rounds (a bit more than a Smite duration), 1 elemental spawned which Pasha dealt with.
We have everything on us, so Cernd and Necro's job are to renew electrical resistance on whoever has aggroed an Ultra.
Fought almost the whole fight on the Supreme spawning point, due to the big statue it was quite hard to see everything, and since all of my attempts didn't bring me to all golems down, the next phase was somehow full of unexpectations. I just knew about "waves" "purges" and "prince AIs". And still, it was so messy I had a hard time keeping track of said AIs, nor did I expect the Prince to really be "near death" to proc one. Learning process it is.
Anyway, once we could handle relyingly the golem phase, it was a matter of timing well our assaults on Raskhassas. As in "go for your initial ADHW bitches, we gonna CS you to death right after that". Pasha did a great job at tanking the first two waves (2 yeah, I believe) under Cernd's care, while we made sure golems would be taken down asap. At these wave spawning point, we made sure to check out was was the target for the ADHW (spreading party a bit helps), so the target could go for Magic Shielding potion or so instead of CS if it was a warrior. We had +50% HP on a good part of the fight, so ADHW weren't that scary with a team having a decent magic damage resistance basically. Dragon's Breaths were scarier since Prince reduces fire resistance I believe, but easier to dodge if we scatter.
Then it was... long. We were so lucky to have regeneration on RvE at any time of need, we got the Wish for Rest we needed (after a few try) basically after golems + 2 waves of Rashkassas.
Surround Prince, CS him, he goes AI, wave spawns, wave starts casting ADHW, CS them to death before their aura is cleansed, back on Prince if regeneration is on, or look for one and send someone tank the Prince while we rebuff (cause Pasha was a little bitch here, he wouldn't go tank him if he is under AI ! Kinky you Pasha ! But can't blame you, you did a good job getting such stats and immunities when you got coded). Prince repulse Mazzy up to the first pocket plane challenge area after 3rd or 4th AI, so we keep fighting there - actually a nice spot, wave take longer to come to us.
At some point, can't tell when, we hit Prince for like ever while he's near death and I'm like "oh, that may be the end", but he recasts another AI (and I was running somehow low on CS, still had a smite from our Wish for Rest but didn't know if he'd get bumped which I didn't want), so we're a bit on the nerve like "wow, srsly, we killed him right there he should be dead ten times !". But we got his dialog right after that, "I'll be back blablabla" yeah sure, bye Prince.

Didn't tell Pasha he was a great warrior, 'cause anyone would be with such stats, but thanked him anyway.

Still had buffs going, so rushed in for the god wannabe harpy and thought she would totally be doable pre-Spellhold.
Claim godhood, because Korgan advised me so. And I like Korgan.



Some (very) fresh feedback on the party :

General

Just wanted to provide some feedback on this team, as they're all Bioware NPC (but Korgan I tweaked to Barbarian). I know Cernd and Valygar are popular, but Mazzy and Keldorn not as much.
So it's mostly about those two, in regards of the overall team utility I was aiming for.

So my point has to have a party that would not rely on clerical buffs nor Greater Restoration to stand its ground. For this purpose we had Cernd and his insane sustained healing through alacrity, but also Valygar's protector healing abilites, Mazzy Lay on Hands, and supposedly a team with overall higher saves/immunities than usual parties get.

The party truly shined from post-Underdark to WK4/ToB. The enemies damage output/debuffs at this point wasn't too much for the party to handle : on the contrary, our superior melee power (in terms of quantity, say APR �“ but definitely not quality) could really be pulled out here, as everyone could have anyone's back. I really remember the Guarded Compound 2nd floor fight, where it started terribly and looked like a reload by many standards, but party could overcome that and simply stand its ground without moving at all.

When it came to late, late game, as in ToB, the lack of a Kensaï/RB THAC0 for any of our fighters could really be felt as CS was mandatory to hit relyingly. Not mentionning the lack of on-hit effects a RB would bring, and that they can heal themselves by themselves.
I probably try to impersonate that feeling from a party-cohesion point of view, but it was not, and couldn't be as strong as RBs.

Overall, our limited healing for longer fights in the late game, combined with our reliance on CS to hit targets made us totally dependant on Wish for Rests for many, many fights.

As for fighting capabilities of the team, Korgan was reliable as always as a barbarian. Crom Fayer and 25 STR made him do what he was made to do, but nothing new here.


Mazzy

I played her once in a team composed of Necro, Korgan (vanilla berserker), Rasaad, Jaheira, Cernd. This team fighting power was similar to the one I just played, however, Mazzy as a support character could truly shine. Rasaad was doing all the damage anyway...
In this last run though, I expected her to deal actual damage, and she wasn't there for it. I remember loving her kit and items, here, it felt like goodies at best. Her lack of proficiency with anything useful but shortsword really limitates her possibilities, and her Lay on Hands still has some buggy limitations.
What I noticed here that really made me find her suboptimal :
- Her Lay on Hand doesn't cure poison/disease, it only removes the icon of said effect from the character portrait, the damage ticks remain.
- The Free Action effect of her sword doesn't apply to many web spells ; what makes her so attractive as an unstoppable support was out of order in times of most need (Sendaï's fight notably).

To be on par with other kits, she'd need some fixes, and maybe �“ I do say maybe �“ a little buff to either her survivability or her damage output.
I indeed couldn't manage to make her reach competitive AC, although her shield is extremely well thought. Yet, on this particular point, the crushing damage proc is still behind what a Riskbreaker naturally gets, among many other effects.
I'd say she needs a way to have 10% extra damage resistance �“ which could only come from JD here, and what's the point of making her wield it if you have a better warrior at your disposal ?

Several suggestions come to my mind - they'd be fairly mutually exclusive :
- Pump up her wisdom to 17 or so to make her viable with wish spell, then she'd be a good JD candidate. And it'd fit the paladin-like thing she's meant to be.
- Add a secondary upgrade for a shield, granting additional perma « Shield of the Archon », while her upgraded shield could give it as a clickie. I don't find that overpowered on a character like her and it's mostly for the +4 AC she terribly needs. Could be a Throne of Bhaal thing so she won't abuse of it.
- Could add some +5 magic damage on hit to her upgraded sword, or something of the kind, or, even better, immunity to greater malison spell to have her saves specifically boosted.

One thing has truly to be taken into account though : I had Keldorn wear these new paladin gloves. They're REALLY powerful (imo), and not giving them to Mazzy might have gimped her while they're truly meant for her, even more than Keldorn (but heh, +1/2 APR on a Holy Avenger wielder, I'll take that anyday!).
Originaly, when I started this run, I had Minsc in mind instead of her (for the gauntlets reason), as a berserker. I should've sticked to that.

Keldorn

Gosh, this guy was so great every step of the way. He has his weaknesses, but he's so good at what he does (and what he does is actually pretty).
Given the power his dispel can bring to a party (I think my run proves it given how simply we dispatched supposedly harder encounters) I think his weakness to physical damage is well justified. I could feel it in fight based on such kind of damage, Oasis being the best example (he was the only character in danger, ever.).
If he's the only 2-hander of a team, he remotely saves 150k gold for being able to pass up on Poseidon's immunity to ADHW. His magic resistance is truly there, and his armor upgrade is fine, even though SparrowJacek told me of a possibly upgrade in the future. If I got it right, given that Keldorn can't afford to go too harsh in the frontlane, it sounds balanced to me !

As for fighting abilities, I can't tell if it's the use of these new great paladin gauntlets, or the raw power of Holy Avenger, but Keldorn does pack a punch. I truly can't tell how, but if you read the whole run, you probably noticed how many times he grabbed the last hit on bigger enemies.
I'd naturally think it's because of his high saves, that he's always there until the end, never incapacitated, but everyone was as such in the team somehow. Maybe the simple fact of being a two-hander brings more damage on killing blow. I think it's common to have a big guy barbarian stealing kills from everyone. Yet, Keldorn melee power kept growing chapter after chapter, so that his kills per chapter were always higher than kills for the game.

What Keldorn makes me rather think of, is how to make other paladins kits on par with what I feel to be the « allmighty » inquisitor. His weakness is physical damage and it should remain so.
However, should it be so for Cavalier ?
I feel like the Cavalier could be something closer to Mazzy, while having incentives to go for AC and saves �“ especially shield. I mean, the Holy Avenger has a « inquisitor » profile in its on-hit ability, so I'd love to see variety on what paladins can bring to the table while not being two-hander bound with Carsomyr.
As for Undead Hunter, what about a Paladin able to specialize more efficiently into crushing weapons ? Of course, we kill vampires, mummies, liches the whole game, but 80% of the undeads we kill are skeletons, so it'd make sense IAwise to me.


Tricking around with Sarevok

Kind of a side note, but I had fun taking an earlier save post Yaga-Shura and kicking Mazzy for Sarevok. Had to CLUA his sword 'cause the forging option doesn't work (it's in the "bug section" of the run). So I had some fun with him around Abazigal's and Sendaï's, and he is GREAT ! I mean, his sword is great !
The 10% chance to proc CS HLA offers a unique way to play him in comparison to other warriors (he can invest in Whirlwind much more). It fits him, the sword is well-thought, and yet he's not too strong by himself being a plain warrior without other kind of immunities. IAtweaked to a kensai he could be a monster with proper weapon switching (still made of paper, but well).
For the sake of cheese, I'd love to see his armor reforged too, giving him his original armored sprite back, but that's not lore friendly as IIRC, he says at some point it was fueled by his essence and so on.



Of "supportive" characters

Ain't got much to add about Valygar and Cernd, you guys know them well already. Never understood the hype about Valygar (Sikret's legacy maybe ? Maybe there is just no hype and I make it all up), apart from being a ranger and having access to great items this runs thanks to IATweaks, he wasn't « strong » until he got his core items. The only reason why he's strong is his items, kinda. Wanted him to be useful vs. Confusion too, but team's saves were so great I think I used mental equilibrium... twice this game ?
So he was good being a ranger, but I'd have taken a Vagrant over him any day of the week if I didn't bind myself to Bioware NPCs.

Cernd's still great, anytime I go for an IA run I tend to have him along, I feel so comfortable with him around, the alacrity heals, the great casting speed, his flexibility overall (he protec, but he also attac). Not much to add there, he's the only character I'd really trust to solo heal an IA run.


What bothers me, if anything, is that Valygar and Mazzy here felt like supportive characters, for they suffer the comparison with RB or Vagrant in my mind. But there, they had no one to « support » so they had to act as damage dealers on their own, which they're disapointing at.
That is, Korgan and Keldorn were not ! So here we are, God of Murder, thanks to them.
Until I reroll again. On hard ? Maybe Insane ? I need an excuse to play a custom party, self-unexeplainable limitation !

Bugs and random (annoying/not supposed to be) stuff I run into this playthrough:

- Using IAtweaks to make Minsc a Berserker, he keeps the base HP of the barb class for the levels he has when joining party.

- Using IAtweaks to make Anomen a Ranger->Cleric, he has 6 extra proficiencies extra points, give or take. Not taking into account the +2 to dual-wielding with ranger class.

- When doing Dorn's first quest (Radiant Heart wedding), the map of the Radiant Heart doesn't update back to normal once I leave it. Tried sleeping a few days in the Copper Coronet, still no change. Maybe it eventually reverses, but I dont remember as such. It's not the first time it happens to me.
> checked around a little, it's EE related, nothing to do with IA ofc.

- No divine casting nor spell-like abilities (rages...) in Wild Forest. Ain't like it's game breaking, it's just annoying and not fitting the lore about wild magic. Beamdog did that for sure, just pointing it out even if well-known. Got a Kangaxx the demilich spawn here too by the way, thanks Beamdog.

- Bone Golem stun icon (tanner's fight) appears on Minsc while he's under berserker rage. He's still controlable though.
Same happens for Minsc again and Valygar (shield of harmony) on Tanova's fight, she had cast a symbol : stun.

- If used in Athkatla outside, belt of minor invulnerability proc and cast summons cowled wizards

- Hallowed Redeemer damages whoever poisons Keldorn with each tick of poison. The assassin who had poisoned him (Slaver Ship) was in melee range though, so it might be intended.

- Sometimes, two or more characters get stuck on the same spot, and can't move for a round or so unless you order them to move 1 by 1 away from said spot. Happens especially around the entrance (inside) of Planar Sphere, but in some other places as well. Surely not IA related, but still quite annoying. Happens to enemies sometimes (golems AFAIK), especially in Planar Sphere (engine room) and WK1.

- During Kruin's fight (and maybe during Giths' Lair in WK4 IIRC), some random giths stand idle after a negative effect affecting their behaviour has worn off.

- Valygar and Mazzy banters don't happen, but they sometimes turn to each other as if to speak, which overwrites the player command to make them walk to clicked location (annoying when crossing maps, fixed by resting though). Dunno if IA related.

- Unless they've been randomized, Beljurils in Windspear Dungeon and Umar Hills locations are replaced by gold with "simplified economy", preventing the forging of Improved Firecam Armor. The third Beljuril correctly spawns though (can't remember where, but I got it. Maybe Pirate Hideout ?). Besides, feels kinda weird to have to kill an animal (umar hills one) to get one if the forging setup requires 20 reputation - especially on a mod where u run errands for squirrels.

- Improved Firecam Armor cannot be used by Keldorn due to "inadequate wisdom". He has 14 while in vanilla his wisdom is 16. CLUAing 2 tomes of understanding, he could wear the armor with 16 wisdom.

- Why are Ice Golems immune to piercing when IRL, piercing dmg is the best you can have into ice ? I'd rather make them immune to slashing. (but I know, "it's magic" right : p !)

- How is "Disrupt Undead" spell supposed to work regarding liches ? I always take their SI : Necromancy down before casting it, but it rarely hits them. Dunno if intended, but if it's a touch, does PFMW protects them from being "hit", hence from the spell ? Not the first time I meet that thing, I'd like to know how the spell supposedly work, 'cause I very rarely use it due to that while it's the main lich destroying tool in IA.

- During Guildmaster's fight, noticed that Mazzy lay on hand (lvl 25) removes poison icon, but poisoned character still takes poison damage.
Happened on several other fights too. Including Demogorgon (diseasewise).

- Gauntlets of Blessed Might healing clickie has the same problem as Mazzy's Lay on Hand.

- Mazzy dialogs/recruit seems kinda bugged overall. Cf. the thing with Valygar banter above + if she gets imprisoned, cant speak to her so she cant rejoin once she's freed. From another run, I remember a time she got chunked, BUT, her portrait didnt disapear, but raising her would make her have a chunk icon exploding above her all the time, and she wouldn't speak anymore.
It seems to have something to do with moment where she "disapears" instantly from party (portraitwise, as in chunk, imprisonment).

- In WK4, Mazzy got webbed at the 4th green globe encounter even though she was wielding her improved sword, hence having Free Action.
Happened again in several other places. Seems to be buggy regarding webs, even though I wonder if she didn't get slowed during EDE.

- Even with all the ingredients, Sarevok's improved Sword of Chaos cannot be forged. (happened in my previous run too. Wonder if Vials of Bhaalspawn are not taken into account when it comes from Illasera and Gromnir.).

- When PC declines a recipe from the latest items (introduced in 6.5) to Cespenar, he goes through all his "vanilla recipes" instead of going back to the IA recipes menu.

Nice stuff I never - or hardly - notice usually but that I'd love to see more :

- Robe of Goodman Hayes overall colors and glowing over stoneskin looks real good in my opinion. Would love to have these colors/design applied to some better stuff.

- Dwarven Thrower is quite a unique weapon. Its restriction to dwarven make it quite nichy for Korgan. What about a new item upgrade for it one day ? Doesn't need to be endgame overpowering, maybe something like a better enhancement against biggies, and a knockdown effect, including ring of ram, kneecaper ? On the power scale of treefolk +3 for instance. Gonna try the vanilla out anyway, maybe the "missile" part of it sucks in IA. Interesting item nevertheless.

- Viper Queen's fight has so much potential. Here are some ideas that popped to my mind, simple ones. She could dispel some buffs on hit (as in mithril golem or greater doppleganger). She could have an "immortality" thing like Kuo-Toan and Shahuagin Princes. She could have stronger adds (such as the ones in the Ancient Secret of Suldanessalar. The feel of overwhelmingness is great there). Maybe it's already a WIP as of v7 : )

Swapping the kits of korgan and minsc is a nice idea.

I am considering to use Viconia for the next run with some useful kit and see if I can make that work for stacking resists.

Interesting way to get the axes for korgan as well

I regret that an evil half-orc barbarian would've covered everything I wanted with these spots, opening another one for say... Mazzy. Especially for 20% physical resistance + 10% with that nice sword. But heh, not an NPC so I'll deal with it. And if I REALLY want it, Korgie can do it (even though I have Crom Fayer plans for him).
But as Keldorn told him, "Alas, blades be far too lengthy for the vertically challenged, I hazard a guess."

Regarding Minsc, I find the berserker kit fairly disapointing for a two-hander. I mean, I feel like the +2THAC0/+2dmg is worth much more on a dual-wielder. He's still litteraly on par when it comes to kills with Korgie, both 33% (Keldorn joined much later).
That said, I'm really considering Mazzy instead of him for endgame utility. Which would totally negate the need of extra clerical utility with her, valygar and Cernd.

Minsc's new sword remains tempting though, but last run I got the main ingredient extremely late in the game, and by that time, that +1 critical range was far beyond obsolete with the 5 critical strikes HLA he had.



I think her stats are suboptimal for anything tanky oriented, unless she can get stoneskins of some sort. It's not that she can't reach top notch AC (and decent thaco with buffs), it's that she'll get one-shotted, if not chunked right away, by any decent mid/end-game enemy.
I believe she deserves some love kitwise, and she'd make a true evil run viable with that (not considering druids for an evil party, even though TN.).


That's what I rush right after meeting Gaelan every single Vagrant run : p

Don't underestimate dwarven saving through advantage in IA. Once you get the strength items going in mid-game, you'll be glad you have the dwarf.

Good luck with the run. I'll probably read through the whole journal whenever it's finished. The same goes for bugs, unless it's something game-breaking. I already have a huge stack after the last two journals posted here on the forum. But I'll get to them eventually, so thanks for the reports.

Many original items are replaced by their before-EE versions because IA is very dated. I have a slow-going project to fix that, without any ETA whatsoever.


I think I've made a feature a few years ago that allows to use all thrown axes/hammers as melee weapons, so that they can be used with shields, second weapons, etc. I don't think many are aware of this feature. As for the item upgrade, feel free to offer the recipe, we'll discuss and if it seems solid, it's not too hard to implement.

I think two handed weapons are overrated as a whole. The loss of 2 Apr (when improved hasted) is quite significant. It is in part made balanced by some of the IA two handers but in all I try to avoid them.
At least with Mazzy you can go sword and shield and not miss out on attacks because every 1 in 5 attacks she does extra damage which basically simulates the missing hits that you would have with an off hand.
Similarly, jaheira has gloves to improve the apr.

So yes, I understand Minsc concerns.

Thought of a tank-oriented hammer for dwarves. Something like :

Rock Solid +3 (Warhammer)

Dwarven Thrower
The Kneecaper
Ring of the Ram
Horn of blasting
3 potions of fortitude
1 Permanency Scroll (or Manual)
75 000 gp

+3 to hit
2D5+5 crushing + 10 vs. giant humanoïds (and golems ? would just be +1 dmg overall with the resistances of greater golems)
+20 HP (or +2 con ? but I believe it's exploitable to unequip/equip to heal, cf. Axe of the Unyielding)
5% chance on hit : Sonic Wave (Damage: 2d10 crushing (Save vs. Death for half) Special: Stun for 2 rounds (Save vs. Paralysis negates) - either single target or AoE enemies only. Bit strong second on) OR Immunity to knockdown effects

Usable only by :
Dwarves
Warriors single class

And for late game :

Heart of the Mountain +5 (warhammer)

Rock Solid +3
Volcano +5
Axe of the Unyielding +5
Horns of Roranach
Manual of Elaboration
150 000gp

+5 to hit
3D5+10 crushing
+40 HP
+5% resistance slashing, piercing
+10% resistance crushing
5% chance on hit : Earthquake (AoE enemies-only) OR Immunity to knockdown effects
10% Chance (per hit) to inflict 8D10 fire damage
25% resistance to fire

Usable only by :
Dwarves
Warriors single class
Requires 19 constitution

+HP bonus opcode has a variation that prevents the exploit. Overall, the recipe looks ok, but I'll let the others chime in on whether the numbers are reasonable.

Another idea I had regarding Keldorn's sword. Redundant because Carsomyr already rules, but heh, his weapon is unique. Recipe would include holy scabbard to make it an alternative. I didn't really think it through, just putting random ideas here to not forget them.


Hand of Torm +5 (Two Handed-Sword)

Hallowed Redeemer +2
Warblade +4
Purifier +5
Blade of Roses +3
Holy Scabbard
Holy Symbol of Torm (new crafting item introduced as late watcher keep loot - using holy symbol of helm picture with color change ?)
Scroll of Fireshield (red)
Manual of Elaboration
75 000 gp

1D12 + 5 + 10 vs. chaotic evil
+5 to hit
+4 Charisma
Wearer under permanent effect of Draw Upon Holy Might
Wearer under permanent effect of Aura of Flaming Death (or a nerfed version, what matters is the backlash damage so it's improved from original hallowed redeemer. Could just be an improved fire shield (red), or a holy fire shield with good or holy damage using white sprite)
5% chance on hit Holy Smite
+ 2 on the caster level of Inquisitor Dispel Magic

Only Usable By :
Paladin (inquisitor ?)
Human
Keldorn

Hello Badgerlad,

In IAv7 Keldorn's sword will become an ingredient for improving his armor. The sword has some nice magical properties and Cromwell can use some of his tricks to transfer "the soul" of the sword to the armor, thus making it an amazing tool to both protect Keldorn and punish those, who dare to stand against him and Torm!

That's actually an even better call than improving his sword ! Glad to hear it, great idea : )

Had the Delon thing where I miss him while he meant to talk to me, which cancels the ranger questline.
Anyone knows the variable I should fix to get it back ? (I guess it can be done post Spellhold anyway).

Gonna try some stuff around myself, but I don't like to play with EE Keeper to much.

Which talk do you mean exactly?

PS: use the latest version of Near Infinity, not EE Keeper.

The one where Delon asks us to come back to Imnesvale 'cause it's under assault by Ogrons.
Ranger stronghold second quest.

Didn't meet Delon, but when I checked with the minister because I'm aware of that possible bug, it was "too late".

So I'm just trying to reset the variable that assumes this quest is done, so I can do it by CluaConsoling Delon.

I'll download NI right away.

Actually, simply using console to summon Delon seems to have fixed it. At least, dialogues are updated. Just gotta see if Umar plot will pop soon or not.

Edit : yeah, it worked. I slept for 10 days or so, Delon repops again with Umar quest. So all good.

Yet another question.
As I remember, the Librarian in Spellhold was dropping a Necro-specific cloak. Just killed him, and can't find anything of the kind on him nor in the room. Is that normal ?

I think it drops only when the protagonist has Necromancer kit.

My protagonist is a necromancer - I might have cheesed the fight a bit hard (mostly using summons), could it be that ?

Maybe. Depending on what you mean. He should see the protagonist for the cloak to spawn.

There it is ! Fair enough : ) I wish I knew though.

Is the Underdark Maze boss HLA version determined by PC XP, or any party member XP (as in, Cernd drinking nature's gift) ?

There is some dependency on the protagonist's XP, but I did not inspect what happens exactly.

Pretty fast pace you play. You playing in 1day same progress I played for 1month.

Well, lockdown it is, ain't got much else to do. Been playing the whole night (GMT+1), will keep going. I update every 30 min or so ; every fight kind of.

However, I'm not playing with hardest battles enabled like you did on your journal (IIRC), so I might go a little bit faster indeed.

About to get out of Underdark right now, I'll give a shot at Ancient Golem, should be doable. Can't say no to extra XP before Kruin.

Checked your progression. Just to note: Mirror Image deflect Disrupt undead. Good luck for Green Wyrm.
Are you planning to beat supreme leader after wyrm?

Green Wyrm was a joke (the kind of 2 rounds fights which made him look like a random wyvern). As for Disrupt Undead, I always have Keldorn True Seeing going on when fighting mages, so it shouldn't deflect it.

Supreme Leader, I wont do it now. This fight scares me a lot (on my top 3 hardest fight in the mod - I'd be interested in what you noticed on your run regarding buffs procing the anti-inquisitors debuff. The demonic flames-like one.), so I'll milk everything I can in SoA before giving it a shot.
Just did Guildmaster 15 min ago, then steam started a download for a patch... dunno how it'll affect IA, will reinstall stuff, but if everything works fine, next step is Grandfather, Limak, Golems milking in WK4 main floor, Suldanessalar, Shimmering Light 2 and Old Ones ++ (up to time machine, the Force should be quite easy with my party, Mazzy/Valygar combo is great in there).
Then, maybe, maybe, I'll check on the Giths : p

Main reason why I delay the giths so long is that since I'll rely a lot on my fighters, I need to gather as much HLAs as I can for final pounding.
Now that I think of it though... Maybe Keldorn can dispel Supreme Leader !

Oh forgot Kangaxx ! Cherry on the cake, gonna go get that noice ring.

See my comment here http://forums.blackwyrmlair.net/index.php?showtopic=5487 about the new patch.

Does anyone have a reliable tactic againt the Gith Anti-Inquisitors, apart from critical hit/pounding ?
Seems like lightning hit them a little, but would need to cast a hundred of CL to actually do decent damage to them, or I miss something there (when I go CL on them, they took lower resistance x3 first).

If I remember correctly, they gulp an insulation potion right after they're summoned. If you cast remove magic, then you can dispel it. Also don't forget that casters can have energy blades (that HLA), it deals lightning damage too.

Ooooh, that's why I found an insulation potion on one of them !!! Weird he didn't drink it.
Well, thanks, that should do the trick indeed. Cernd/Necro will check on their spellbooks ; )

Yeah that works very well ! Anti-Inquisitor phase was simpler than ever, funny how just a little potion makes a difference !

Supreme Leader is still a pain, managed him but he's too perfectly defensive as an enemy. I mean, his AC is one of the highest in the game, his stoneskins can't be dispelled, he has insane regeneration and his like perma hardiness (how does he have ? Like 12 ??) that can't be breached neither.
Not mentionning he probably can't be interupted anyway...

I'd like to see a way to make him less grindy, doesn't mean less powerful ofc... I dunno. I mean, I must do something wrong but anytime I beat the guy, it's more than a 1 hour fight IRL.
And still, I managed to keep most of my HLAs for him, all were wasted cause I have no idea of how much defenses he has left, and if I throw all in without being able to kill him, I'm done.

This being said, a mage could load his spellbook with Wish and gamble on a Wish for Rest in the end but meh. Didnt use Wish for Rest here (cause didn't get it heh).

On the other hand, I might have forgotten to give Mazzy a strength boost in the end, and she was the only one with grandmastery so... maybe.

Anyway, I must be frustrated right now by how long it took me, but this fight is great.
Just... meh... grindy.

Sorry for being all whiny whiny.

And most of all : thanks for the tip ! Anti-Inquisitors won't scare me anymore now !

Supreme Leader is being slightly toned down in the next release.

Seems like Keldorn’s dispels are really strong and he is your MVP - how is his fighting power?

Disrupt undead is a spell I have really only ever used in two places - old one fight and gate lich, both under alacrity. Otherwise it’s always seemed risky to me to be in CC range with a low HP caster.

Great, seems fair, and earlier access to WK4 opens some nice possibilites.



Yes he is ! Purely statwise since I started Sulda, he's on 20% of the chapter kills, 32% for Korgan (obviously, he has perma Crom Fayer and I don't always buff up STR), while Valygar and Mazzy are both slacking behind on 16%.

Carsomyr obtained asap after Underdark wasn't he powerspike I was hoping for. However, Holy Avenger is extremely strong - Supreme Leader was a good example, since it can fully dispel him, notably his hardiness I believe (it removes Garock's hardiness so I guess on Supreme leader two. On one of my first tries before going lightning on Anti-Inquisitors, we "killed" Leader in less than a round thanks to that, even before any golem spawned - too bad he couldn't be killed). And given what the weapon does, it fits Keldorn wonderfuly.

His resistance to magic damage (thanks to armor and high saves) is well balanced, doesn't feel like too much power even though he's definitely the one you wanna send as a finisher if you're out of PFME. I didnt even bother making Poseïdon's this run, he doesn't need it. (made Wave's though, blue looks good with his armor : p).

In practice, he is made to be a two-hander user : he needs the range. Each time I wasn't careful enough with positioning, and he was grabbing aggro, I'd be like "crap, gotta run, the guy doesn't tank physical". So keeping his dexterity low is mandatory so he can remain remotely balanced, and unable to tank heavy physical damage.
For instance, Mazzy, Valygar or Korgan could take on their own a coin or a gem and survive without issue. Keldorn can't, and that's fair. I noticed it particularly in big elemental golems fights (3+), where while I usually just don't care in my other runs, and regeneration/hardiness does the trick, there I had to be careful with being surrounded, he can't afford loosing his safe spot.

Being turned wasn't a problem for now. Can't say when it'll come to Rozvankee.

In a nutshell : he does exactly what you expect from an inquisitor, from all points of view, including the weaknesses he should have. He's still an extremely strong asset in IA for any party, and actualy brings a whole lot of new tactics to the table.

Random idea about his kit : Since he cannot cast spells, the Deva Summoning HLA seems out of place imo. What about a "Remove Magic" HLA which applies at his Dispel level ? Can only pick 1 (as for Contact with Nature for Rangers).

Is there any kind of "no rest policy = reward" in the WK4 globes machine ?

I wonder what the possible location for the girdle of hill giant strength are, I didnt find it in SoA this run.
Unless it's on SPOILER!
but I doubt it.

Been on 5 reloads or so on Good Bad Ugly end fight.
Already noticed it was harsh on my last run with Vagrant, but I got some numbers : )
Takes 4 seconds (4/6 of a round - would've happened 4 times over 5, I just tempo my Natural Restoral to not waste it) for Auriel to die no matter what if you don't heal her, and she gets aggro of golems no matter what if they can access her (unless they're uber far away, and still) - which is a bit too much imo, they could be interested on someone else. On the other hand, they're sent to kill HER. : )
I'll eventually make it, but I need a Wish for Rest, been unsuccessful so far at getting one.

Edit : managed it without Wish for Rest, I was wrong ! Tactic included SPOILER!
!

More details on the journal !

Possible locations include
SPOILER!

Thanks critto.
Then it didn't spawn on my run.
Had to CLUA it, since I killed all of them guys, could forge the girlde of lordly might then.

Badgerlad, congratulation on defeating Demogorgon! It's the hardest and probably most intense fight in IA (Twisted rune comes to my mind as a lower-level equivalent) at the moment. It's really hard and that's why it's optional, as it could be too frustrating for some people. If you have any suggestions regarding some fights, then feel free to share them I'm personally thinking, that vargouilles were far too powerful in terms of AC and regeneration, but don't remember if that's been changed already.

As for Abazigal fight, it's a bit underwhelming to me. aWhy does he have immortal golems? And yes - necro can deal with him in seconds, which on the one hand show how far the child of Bhaal has come, but on the other hand it might decrease the pleasure. Who knows, maybe this fight will get improved a bit in the future, though my biggest concern is Balthazar fight. He's supposed to be the strongest out of the 5 but I don't think that IA has done anything to improve him. If I'll have anything to say about changes in this fight, then we'll see him reaching the potential of a Super Saiyan

Thanks mate ! I can't wait to try this fight again with a Vagrant protagonist, the immunity to disease/poison would be so great in there, tankingwise.
To be honest I never ever had any real trouble with Twisted Rune. Maybe I always do it late assuming it's extremely hard, but good positioning helps so much in there, and you don't have perma spawns or perma debuffs from everywhere.
'cause indeed, I find vargouilles to be the main issue here. As kind of "random" spawns, it shouldn't take critical hits from 3+ fighters to take one down. Even without them, the fight would still be a true challenge, yet I can only love the fact you guys (critto ?) went so hard on the lore, it's amazing, to put these fearsome guys alltogether - Rozvankhee being the "mother" of vargouilles if I remember correctly.
This being said, I love the "timebomb" feeling the perma spawn brings to the fight, but maybe I'd remove Vargouilles regen ? or simply make them so that 1 fighter with 1 round of critical hit can take one down. 1 critical hit is precious (well, it was for me) in this fight, so if they still spawn the way they do, they'd take a lot of resources anyway. In a nutshell I agree with you on vargouilles, either change their ac so they don't make fighters use critical hits or lower (cancel) their regen so they can be done in several times. They could also be more numerous in each spawn to go for the "swarm" feeling, but much easier to kill overall (they'd still make the field very messy).

Here are some thoughts I had during my countless tries :

- Exarch "smite" effect makes the fight totaly relying on luck (well, the start of it, anyway), since being pushed into a wall locks you 4 times over 5 to a corner where vargouilles surround you. Since killing 2 of them would take more than a round, you pretty much know you're fucked if this happens. Well, I assumed so, reloading anytime it would happen as every second counts in this fight. If vargouilles were easier kills, then it could be ok. Or maybe remove the "smite" thing from exarch and make him a stronger fighter (as in more APR, why not more HP and so on). On the other hand, the smite thing really gives a nice feeling to the arena-like fighting pit.
The "cornered" thing wouldn't happen with a riskbreaker I guess. I should play them more !

- I'd remove the Marilith top of the stairs, for the same reason as above. Pinballed up to the exit portal, a fighter is locked behind it with a PFMWed Marilith > reload. I mean, the fight is hard enough as it is not to just try to get around that.

- Nuroga, Belcheresk and Kargoth, I didn't get to see much of them as they're burst right away 90% of the time. And if they're not > reload.

- Rozvanhkee... heh, she's fine as she is I guess. Her Vargouilles are the problem, not her, and I find her very well crafted in her own way anyway.

- Demogorgon's disease ticks shouldn't "tick" when they don't do damage if you're protected from poison imo. Prevents spell casting, but for no damage. How many reloads did I have on Korgie tanking who just got his hardiness cast canceled because of such a tick.
It's a matter of disease vs. poison I guess - maybe an item protecting from disease could be introduced ? (would be extremely nichy - or a potion, or a spell ?).



I'm not a big fan of the "Tactics" (or was it "Ascension ?) mod, seems like kindergarten compared to IA, but played it a bit back in the days, and they managed to have a nice feeling for Balthazar fight, giving him a lot of new abilities. He'd still be no match for an IA party, but as I remember, they emphasized a lot his mobility. So he could move like that halfling archer in Planar Sphere, or like the Sendaï's archer version.
Just some thoughts I had today, but it could be fun to have Balthazar abuse of the smite effect I complained so much about, making him virtually unreachable as he'll always kick you away. Given how strong a monk character can get in IA, I don't see how Balthazar as such wouldn't be able to deal tremendous amounts of damage. As in 10APR, hitting like a golem and resistant like one, the kind of "endure me if you dare" fight, just like Supreme Leader
Or he could like... divide himself at the start of the fight, so party has to face 2 versions of him that have to be dead for Balthazar himself to be killed, but every 10 rounds or so, they'd respawn. Kind of Il-khan ancestor, but respawning on a regular basis.

Very impressive run! Just one piece of info for you - Demogorgon fight has slightly fewer vargouilles and bombers (IIRC) if fought in SoA. Generally the party is lower level so can’t dispel as well as a TOB party but on the other hand you have Keldorn so...

Good luck with EDE!

Hm, I should have done it right before Irenicus then. If the spawn difference is substential, I could have had a much, much easier time there.



Thanks !Just did it ! Didn't like it, won't do it again probably, but finally it's over.


Gonna make a review of the different Bioware characters I used regarding the party composition (especially Mazzy/Keldorn), Korgan excepted since I made him a barbarian, and he was a plain - but useful - barbarian.

Our biggest problem is the fact, that only Critto (and Bulian but only part-time) is skillful with modding and Druid stronghold is the main priority right now, so I can't promise anything, but let me share my thoughts on some of your ideas Badgerlad.

For this fight the original lore helped us greatly, as we needed to read about all those followers and just implement them. Critto did really fantastic job with the enemies' behavior which allowed for it to me so memorable. I really like the idea of Vargouilles being more numerous, but less durable and I'll gladly test the fight again if critto decides to apply such a change.


It's the fight against Demon Prince and his poewrful ancient followers, you can't expect the fight to go smoothly :> Good positioning is just another thing you have to take into acccount while dealing with him, I wouldn't change anything here.

Yup, disease works differently than poison. Are there any spells that heal it completely? (Haven't played in years, and I don't remember now...) If not, then maybe you're right, that something should be introduced to deal with this.


He already has some interesting skills, but they haven't been changed to fit IA really. Improving them should be the first step and then... we have whole lore about monks, their abilities and orders

Regarding Mazzy:
I think that's a bug and it should be fixed.


Another bug, as far as I remember, her sword should protect from ALL effects that could slow/bind her

I have a more general approach in mind and already talked with Critto about it. My idea is to make "single weapon" and "sword and shield" skills more interesting and since Mazzy uses shield, she should benefit from it. This approach however needs a lot of modifications (if I remember correctly all item or creature files have to be patched for that), so it will have low priority for sure.

Regarding Keldorn and paladins:

His armor will be a bit better in v7, but it won't make him tougher, so everything you wrote here about the balance aspect of this kit should still be true.

To me Cavalier is the most stereotypical Paladin, so he should have a shiny armor, a sword and a shield to protect. If we rebalance "sword and shield" then he should benefit from this by default. But maybe an interesting "holy shield" item could be introduced?

Regarding Cernd:

Let me just say this, as a small teaser for the upcoming v7:

@SparrowJacek : no point answering it all, seems like you got my points, I feel like I got yours. Especially on Exarch : Dragon Lord makes sense then !

Rebalancing sword & board and single weapon seems like a great idea ! I wish I could code a bit an help you guys out on that.
I'd love to go and check out some lore things that you guys intend to work on at some point. I'll do that with Balthazar already, can't say I saw much of his abilities this run !

And obviously, can't wait for that v7 release ! ! !

Cure Disease should do it, no?


I'll add it to the list.

I remember that too. I'll make a note to re-check it.


I don't remember the exact details of that discussion, but I think there's a limit to what could be sanely done to weapon proficiencies. I know that there are mods that include some pretty significant overhauls in order to achieve new mechanics, but they are usually very tricky in nature, and therefore would be hard to implement within the mod of IA's magnitude.

Wouldn't a buff on some shields add an alternative for now with more... simplicity ?
I don't feel like a little % of damage resistance on top tiers shields would be out of place.
Won't help with the single weapon proficiency of course.

Sure, it's easy enough to slap some extra stuff on a shield. Balance would still be a consideration to a certain degree.