but having acension and tactics installed.. right now im in TOB continuing where i left off with my bard and wild mage plus viconia (lover), keldorn, jan, jaheria.

anyway.. i never realised how cheesy the giants in TOB are. I mean my fully buffed character protected with so many elements and weapons get killed instantly with one giant who regenerates so quickly like a greater werewolf because for every HIT, he lowers your fire resistance and includes a fireball to boot. that its so unfair. resorting to cheesy tactics i discovered with a mild surprise, a legal way to kill those giants.

putting 4 wildmage lvl 1 spell with chaos shield active

so wildmage
cast level 1 wildmage spell to cast summon planatar
then cast anohter wildmage spell to cast limited wish
then tell the bloody genie to restore your spells
so lvl 1 spells restored, and so on [img]smile.gif[/img]

so i have a horde of planatars attacking two giants.

now to tell you how cheesy those bloody giants , two giants defeated 4 celestials. they are bloody strong i tell ya

ToB forum perchance?

;)

<---- feeling very stupid at the moment :( [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Yes, it is a TOB subject, but might I enlighten you that summoning more than one planetar is cheating, but not actually enforced by the game.

A somewhat less cheesy approach to the problem makes the fire giants greatest ability its liability. The fireshield it has on is easily used against it by another fireshield, but this time blue.

The trick:
Equip your mage with some stoneskins (the firegiants have 9 attacks per round you know)
Get all the protection items possible (gaxx, rop +2/3, seldarine). Thats +5 already to saves. You will want to have an automatic save, so at these levels, +5 will pretty much guarantee it.
Get over 100% resist fire.
Cast fireshield (blue).
Go up to a firegiant and hit it (or let it hit you), watch your framerate go bye-bye, and then catch up with a dead firegiant and a fully healed mage.

The trick is to keep your fire resistance up so the fireshield does not hurt you, as an insane -127 resist fireshield can do upwards of 50 damage.

This bit of cheese is very very cheesy in my opinion, but frankly is the only way to destroy these things safely. 9 freaking attacks per round and the regeneration ability of a hasted greater wolfwere is not exactly fair. Not to mention 22 strength. You can load up all you want on all your missile weapons and still not damage these guys. I had 20 cloudkills going at one point, and they were barely injured whenever I checked.

Another way to kill them is with a kensai->thief. Kai first with a katana (hindo has the most damage), then backstab. I'm pretty sure that along with a good strength bonus (dual with crom), fire giants do not have enough life to survive that.

i actually saw my framerate go bye bye :D when i had my blade bard with stoneskin, fire protection, spell turning, haste, improved invis, offense spin, fireshield.

plus equipped with the best uber weapons in the game.. i found it pretty funny heh.

i do hope someone can move this to TOB forum btw.. i feel really stupid putting it in the wrong forum [img]tongue.gif[/img]

The crux of the issue is, of course, by how much do they lower your Fire Resistance with each hit. Considering the author, I'd estimate it to be 25%, which doesn't leave much room for error if your maximum Fire Resist is 127%. And even then, you can only take them one at a time, and of course you're dead if any one of them manages to get in two hits.

There's also the issue of whether or not they're required to hit you at all. I messed with an Improved Fire Giant once, and it seemed to get off two area-of-effect Lower Fire Resistances before it was even in melee range.

Easier way to beat them: Don't install them.

CTRL-Q reveals an Ac of -4, which should be easy for... well, anyone of your characters to hit at ToB level, especially with Energy Blades/Ranged. So ranged seems to be important, especially with the Fireshield. 190 HP isn't that bad for a good Thief to do, though I guess not every party has a ready-made Assassin.

But here's the kicker; No Magic Resistance, and their saves are low, at least for ToB! Slow those suckers down. 6 save for spells (the save for Slow). GM + Slow + Slow may just be what the doctor ordered. Slap on a GM, and Finger of Death suddenly becomes viable. No MR means that you don't have to bother with LR and the like, which means that it's realistic to use mass-death spells like triple ADHW on them (BTW, with a Greater Malison [which will hit, with no MR] on them, they'll have a save versus spells of 10. Triple ADHW means 20d8 * 3. Average roll of 80 damage per ADHW. A triple ADHW CC seems to be good to kill at least half of a group. Load up another CC with another Wizard, and that's the rest) Of course, this might be just speculation, and there might be a reason for why it doesn't work. Against groups, that should be fine. Against solo ones, tank with a mage with PfMW/Mirror Image, cast GM, and Finger of Death under he keels over. If they're immune to insta-death spells, then GM + Slow + Slow + ranged weapons could work, and abuse their large size.

Don't depend on just melee warriors in ToB. [img]tongue.gif[/img] Imp Fire Giants seem, without actually fighting them yet, to be exceptional melee warriors, but pussycats against magic.

Now, there's something I've been wondering: The correlation between Imp Haste and Regenerationis doubletime regen. What's the relationship between Slow and Regeneration? And what if the person already has Imp Haste on? The reason why the Fire Giants regen so quickly is because they seem to have 5 HP/second (I believe that's it; could someone else check the modded item that they use?) regeneration and Imp Haste, making them regen 10 HP/second.

[ 03-28-2005, 10:35 PM: Message edited by: Assassin ]

If you have a fighter/mage (dual or multi) he can whoop their asses very quickly.

Stoneskin, Prot. from Fire, saves vs spells. well below 0 (Potion of Invulnerabilty), PFMW

Now have some bad dualwilding combos and improve haste your char and he eats them for breakfast.

Solaufein with FOA and Angurvadal beat the whole bunch of them alone. The rest of the party were just chatting meanwhile. :D

Emotion:Hopelessness

It's not the question of whether or not they can be beaten (especially by another big hunk of Weimer cheese) that I find amusing, but rather the fact that any one of these bozos would take Improved Yaga-Shura to the flippin' cleaners six times before breakfast.

It's understandable to make one think twice before doing a kamikaze charge into a group of those improved Fire Giants, but what's odd about them is since when did Fire Giants have the innate ability to bring forth a Firestorm?

Interestingly enough i experimented with Sola equipped with FOA and Answerer using stoneskin, scroll of fire resist, potion of invulnerability and PfMW; sometimes we can cut down two of them, but other times we get hammered. Their lower fire resistance along with fireball like damage every freaking hit are mean. Timestops, GWW with the aformentioned buffs then cutting them down with Ravager worked pretty efficiently too.

[ 03-31-2005, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: savuti ]

oo, I forgot about insta-kills. Frankly, I never use them. I like thieves way too much I suppose.

And yes, I think it is VERY funny that Yaga-Shura is weaker than his fire giant lackeys. Though, one of Yaga-Shura's powers is that he is unkillable, so what happens then? I think it really would be a draw, because Yaga-Shura can't dish out damage fast enough to counter Fire Giant regeneration, but that's just me. Oh my, I just had a horrible thought--what if Yaga-Shura was as powerful as his buddies AND practically invulnerable. Sounds like something weimer would do...

Everything hinges on whether or not BioWare put a MINHP1 item on pre-Nyalee Yaga-Shura. Before you remove his invulnerability, he's simply immune to everything you can do, so a MINHP1 item would have been superfluous. But Weimer's Fire Giants can and will Lower Fire Resistance, and therefore constitute a very real threat to the guy who's supposed to be invincible.
Imagine what could happen if you Charmed one or two of them?

Can you? I mean, they're not immune to that or something?

Mm... Does MINHP1 protect against INT drain? Because I distinctly recall killing him with that despite the so-called invulnerability.

Never mind that a mind flayer would never be able to reach the head of a fire giant that didn't want to be brain drained. I'm not one to quibble over technicalities.

Never had problems with the giants.. :S

Infact, I killed demogorgon in 10-15 seconds of combat and my entire party hat lost maybe 10 HP each.

Are you certain that you are fighting the right giants? This is the Tactics version of the giants who shoot Fire Storms out of their arse...

A MINHP1 item prevents that creature from ever losing its last hitpoint--Imoen's Belt is an example. The only way to kill a creature wearing such an item is through stat (and possibly level) drain, so yes, a Mind Flayer would have no problems killing the 'invulnerable' Yaga-Shura, although that's a dandy way to screw up the plot.

quite. Also note that you get no exp for stat killing.

Hah, I hadn't realized that Yaga-Shura didn't have on a minhp. Thats kind of funny.

quite. Also note that you get no exp for stat killing.
</font>[/QUOTE]In my defense, this was not a legit run. This was during a period of "Let me go through the game and see how much I can screw around with things. This includes killing Arkanis Gath and other fun things.

In the end we get back to the discussion how to improve the whole Tactics mod to a more 'realistic' mod.

I thought Yaga-Shura was immune to INT drain? Or at least the final Ascension version was...

You appoint somebody like me to 'soften' it, and somehow get Weimer to accept other people tinkering with his mods. I once Emailed him a whole folder on the Sahuagin city (I'd completely revamped every Sahuagin creature in the game, making them more consistent and more in line with P&P), but received no reply.

You should host it Six - an alternative tactics mod. I, for one, would use it!

What is the Tactics Mod? Like Ascension?

Are you saying to cast that?

Are you saying to cast that? </font>[/QUOTE]Yes. Very underated spell.

Some specific enemies get beefed up a lot (think Ilyich in Irenicus' dungeon, Final Irenicus, second time Bodhi), some new enemies and encounters, and some improvements in enemy scripting. All in all it changed the game to a much harder version, so it's not advisable to start with it your first couple of time through. You really need to know the game thoroughly, and exploit every flaw in your enemies preparations in order to get things done.

haha, very true.

Tactics essentially improves a few creatures, raising their difficulty levels dramatically. Liches, beholders, pit fiends, mind flayers, mages, vampires and undead are all beefed up with better AI and move closer to their pnp counterparts, or just cheat plainly. Liches are accopmanied by pit fiends, and cast much better spells than before. Pit fiends are, in my opinion, 10x worse than any lich. 6 attacks and guaranteed kill if you aren't immune to disease or fail your save. Also improved invisibility and other scary stuff, especially the innate ability to gate in another pit fiend. If you are good, you can summon one, it summons another, that summons another, and again. Beholders become masters of melee if someone is wearing the shield/cloak of cheese. Mind flayers are much more intellegent and use ballistic attacks (ive seen it do 96 damage once on insane) and the supreme tactic of retreating. Mages and vampires no longer try to dominate someone immune to charm, and undead gain generic low level abilities which completely rock low level parties. Plus they are forcespelled, so your undead do not get that advantage. And invisibility does not cancel the spell.

It also includes improved battles, like improved bodhi, irenicus, ilyich, twisted rune, guarded compound, etc... Stuff that should be difficult is made nigh on impossible, especially with the case of irenicus, ilyich, and faldorn (shudders).

Even though I enjoy challenges, I don't enjoy them when they involve more than five opponents, all of whom have incredible thac0 and can destroy you with ease at any level without careful consideration. A group of all level 15 or so adventurers with mediocre stuff should not be able to take out a level 40 fighter who isn't wearing a certain shield. That's why I think I would agree to such a thing. I like the new powers of the fire giants, but I'd also like to keep it real. Keep the fireshield, but no lower fire resistance or CTC firestorm or elementals, and a much slower regeneration rate, like 1 per 2 rounds doubled to one per 6 seconds.

Which component of Tactics are you talking about?