I've finally made it to the Elven city of Sulandessar (sp?) and I'm trying to kill the dragon and get the goblet. I need a proper strategy for killing the critter, because it's almost impossible to kill.

<font color="cadetblue">Welcome to Ironworks! [img]graemlins/wavey.gif[/img] Could you give some info on your party (npcs, levels etc.)?</font>

if your using all the slots (5 npcs) then its an easy kill.

heres a good tactic.

when you reached the place dont attack yet (try to stay in a place where the dragon cant see you). if you have jaheira with you , let her summon 4 bears and cast haste spell on them. send then to the dragon and spread your pc and npcs around the dragon.while the dragon is busy playing with the bears cast all offensive magic youve got. pierce magic and the such are very handy. cast summon insect. and the most important is... cast fire protection or youll end up a burt ham in the battle field. enjoy

u should be hi enuf level to cast mordekainens sword, which is cool cos it's immune to magical damage so it just keeps saying:
"(Dragons name) Magical Sword was immune to my damage."
I found this dragon a piece of cake, he was down in three turns of reloading. I kept summoning loads of animals, skeletons etc and wot i did, was end them and my main char in. Then i talked to her. My main char then ran backto the steps leaving the summons to fight. i then summoned skeleton warriors with anomen while jaheira aerie and imoen walked up to the dragon. Jaheira called lightning, and imoen and aerie used their wands of lightning. Then Aerie and Jaheira summoned more creatures and stuff, while imoen cast pierce magic, breach and finger of death. For the first time in my life, i felt sorry for some thing i killed outright.
if u havent got breach etc. Summons keep him busy while calling lightning and lightning bolts. I managed to get him down to injured with just summons.

That's physical damage.

I'm genuinely surprised you're having that much trouble killing the Black Dragon when you've gone through the Red and Shadow ones. o.0 Have you tried summoning a few monsters (Bears, Elementals would be great)? You should send your melee classes in first to draw its attention, then send in the monsters afterwards. Hit it with debuff spells (Breach, Pierce, whatever). The only thing really annoying about the dragon is its area tangleroot spell but at that point you should have high enough saves to ignore it.

My party consists of: Minsc, Keldorn, Aerie, Vinconia, and Edwin. I have tried summoning critters galore. I've tried the melee parties too, as we've got +3 weapons to the max.

I think most of my party are about 12-14 level (including myself).

Haven't yet tried to kill any dragons, though.

[ 11-17-2002, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: Ghost of Tinky ]

okkkkkkkkkkkk, go to windspear hills and kill firkraag. (use search engines to find firkraag posts there r tonnes) and kill the shadow dragon as well (temple ruins).

I know what you are thinking. "How did she get so far in the game?" I am not sure myself.

You must have not done alot of subquests to have those levels. In my previous game I was over level twenty(with TOB installed) when I fought that dragon. I'd done all the subquests in chapter two and watchers keep the dungeon that comes with TOB in chapter six. As you can Imagine at those levels the dragon was fairly easy. You do know you don't have to fight the dragon do you? You can chose to give it all your items for the goblet so drop all your items on the ground and talk to the dragon chosing that option then pick up your items again. At those levels though I think you will struggle with the final fights in the game so it may be advisable to use an old save game and finish alot of subquests in chapter six then return to the elven city.EDIT: Oh and BTW welcome to Ironworks forums!

[ 11-17-2002, 05:34 PM: Message edited by: Zarr ]

You can leave the elven city without reloading a saved game, y'know.

I didn't know that, thanks for telling!

Have a couple of mages/clerics summon area spells (Cloudkill, Death fog, Fireball, Ice storm, Holy Smite, etc.). Xast them just out of range of the dragon. After he casts heal rest and repeat. If you do this enough times the dragon should be dead. (Around 60% of the time the dragon should be resistant. Just be persitant)
Is this worth spoiler tags? Probably not... [img]graemlins/ninja.gif[/img]

Levels 12-14? Heh, you sure have skipped literally most of the sub-quests then. This time around I am trying to do as much as possible of those and already in Chapter 2 my party levels are mostly 15-17, main char is lvl 17 [img]smile.gif[/img] Didn't even need any special strategy to take Firkraag down, was mostly just a brute force beat-up.

You can do it with those levels as well, though it will not be easy. There should be few examples on the topic posted, search should help you nicely to find these topics. Generally, get many summons up, send these in first, use debuffing magic to debuff the dragon and then whack at it with all you got. Keep adding summons as you can, these are mainly for cannon fodder, so that the dragon will be busy with them while you plink away at it.

Im assuming you dont have baldurdash installed ( http://members.rogers.com )?

Baldurdash is a fixpack that fixes many problems with the game. Among them is an AI exploit that makes dragons fairly easy. If you dont have it installed, stand all your mages outside whats-is-names vision, and liberally throw cloudkill at him. About 6 or 7 should do it. I havent tried this exploit with this dragon, but it should work. He will cast Heal at some point, which will bring him back to full health. Either fire off more cloudkills (youll likely need wands for that) or hit him with offensive magic just before he gets Near Death.

Other than that, there are 2 other dragons you should have killed by this point, and a load more side-quests you can do to get more levels.