how do you deal with those freaking dread mares they keep turning up in the swamp and turncoating almost all my party members and bingo I'm dead.
my party consists of 3 fighters= dracons/1 ranger= elf/1 priest= canus/and 1 mage= felpurr.
the fighters are lv. 11 the rest are lv. 10 maybe my levels are too low for these bastages just yet.
i don't seem to be having any problems with any other enemies.
i also have vi and miles with me.

You'll want to have magic screen running as high as you can before combat. Then cast Soul Shield ASAP in the first combat round. If a party member turns on you, you can try locking in a ranged weapon like a bow and removing the arrows (also works for insanity). Dracons do have a negative resistance to mental spells (not as bad as Lizardmen, tho'), so anything you can do to boost the resistance will help.

What I found with unicorns was that after casting ll of their spells they would run away so if you can handle the turncoated party members the combat should end by itself after some time.

I do not fight them, I always run ( I hate them: hard to catch, they mostly run after the first turn and I don't have the patience to follow them) . If you run, a turncoated party member can't do anything, so it doesn't matter.

[img]graemlins/monster5.gif[/img]

And then again Turncoat/rear is thrown range, so if you're desperate, you can take them out from long (against eye2eye&iceball though)

This should work, but they didn't implement spell range restrictions for monsters. This is odd, since the monsters manage other ranged attack forms. Perhaps it was a balance issue.

So Dreadmares can hit you with turncoat from long range.

Horp

Did you patch to 1.2.4? I know all my enemy spellcasters are restricted to long range spells at long range (after all, they only hit you in short/extended range as well ;) )

The only thing buggy there i have is spells which hit all enemies (Freeze all as an easy example) will hit me always, even if i can't target the same mobs when i cast the same spell. But long/thrown works fine here. When i ran into diamond unicorns very first time i stormed them together with 2 elemental lords (they were accompanied by 3 enlightened spirits). the next round of those ten pc's/allies 1 fell to a quicksand, and 8(!) were turncoated. So i decided, that storming them is bad, and took them from long range. Took an age or two, so the next were stormed again (with more luck [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

Dread Mares.... if you're not powerful enough to nullify their turncoat magic, walk around in a tight circle every turn until they run off like the scaredy-mares that they are. Find some later when you're lvl 20+, bombared them with disabling spells, slice 'em up nice and thin, pour yourself a nice drink, and mumble "ba$tards" under your breath - like I do. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I see the problem in 1.2.4. The spell I'll use as a case in point is Terror. Sorceresses cast it from long range at me all the time. It may be that Group targetted spells are bugged, and the rest work. That seems to jive with the anecdotal evidence we have.

Horpo Marx

I don't know if this apply to what you guys are talking about, but if an enemy is in long range with my party, I can always respond with long range attacks with characters IN THE FRONT ROW. Spellcasters in the middle, either have to move to the front row, or make the whole party walk up.