I've tested the new version now. Wasn't quite what I expected. MOD SPOILER
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The first sight I got of him was the entire party, demon and golem included, massed in a big group hug in the middle of the lit corridor. I thought they would be patrolling in a much looser pattern, and not try to keep their formation at all times
Never the less, I went in with Yoshi first, cloaked of course. It seems that the entire party tries to follow the Glabrezu wherever he goes, which does make sense. It's both realistic, and makes it exceptionally difficult to use invisibility to your advantage.
While this change certainly will make most old strategies obsolete, including the one I described in the No-rest story, the change does give you new options. I imagine that using snares and skull traps should be even easier in this version, since they will pretty much trip on them all by themselves [img]smile.gif[/img] Apart from that though, forget about any of the old strats that involved
Divide and Conquer. Making
Hit'n'Run'n'Hides on the entire party is now more than viable though, since no one will ever stray too far from the Glabrezu, who in turn is a fairly inactive and slow creature who usually stops pursuing you if you get out of his visual range. I can imagine an Assassin having a field day with Ilyich in this new version
A direct assault is probably impossible now, since you have to face his non-humanoid allies as well, and you won't have the luxary of placing yourself in strategic positions or making any big preparations.
In the end, I went with the easy* way and simply hasted and strengtened Yoshi and set him off on a Hit'n'Run'n'Hide spree that took me 50 minutes, about 10 quicksaves, and 15-20 reloads to complete. Started off by killing Karamazov, then Rasputin, Zhivago**, and finally the golem. Getting Ilyich's party into the library will give you an advantage when doing this strat, due to the many walls (bookshelves) you can hide behind. Finally, when only Ilyich and the demon remained, I somehow*** got Ilyich into the central room and picked him off with Minsc and Imoen****, while using the still hasted Yoshi as the decoy. Then I decked out my PC with all the best stuff I had, including the +3 Club and +2 Hammer, and sent him off alone to take care of the demon.
* Some *easy* way huh?
** Did you know that you can easily disrupt his Fallen Deva casting by going invisible with the character he targetted the Deva summoning at? I sure didn't until this evening! [img]smile.gif[/img]
*** Sometimes, for really no reason at all, Ilyich would briefly separate himself from the rest of the group and run off to my cloaked PC I had guarding the back of the library, and then run back when he didn't see anything he could kill. It was during one of these strange occasions I led him away from his Demon friend.
**** Can you believe the lucky gal got off a Lightning Bolt that not only missed Minsc by
this much when it bounced the first time, but also hit Ilyich a
2nd time on the second bounce, when he was chasing Yoshi. It alone zapped 70 of his hitpoints [img]smile.gif[/img]