Temple of Elemental Evil - Fire Node (SPOILERS!!)

[seclists]

I decided to start a new topic rather than take an existing one even further off-topic.

Yeah, I'm almost there, but I'm having a lot of trouble in one specific spot, i.e. the elemental fire node.


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Yeah, you guessed it. The ugly Balor. How the bl*dy h*ll is anyone supposed to beat this thing with a level 10 party?
My party: Human Paladin, Half-orc Barbarian, Human Cleric, Dwarf Thief(1)/Fighter(9), Human Wizard.

In my most "successful" attempt so far, I succeeded in taking out the Efreetis on the first round with a lucky Cone of Cold. Then, the Balor charmed my Barbarian. Then he summoned a bunch of quasits. He personally killed the Dwarf and the Paladin with death spells, while the Barbarian and the quasits killed the Cleric and Wizard. The combat ended with the charmed Barbarian unsuccessfully trying to kill the Mordenkainen's hound summoned by the Wizard before her death... (at which point I quit and reloaded)

Basically, my main problems can be summarized as follows:
1) My characters cannot hurt the Balor.
2) My characters cannot resist the spells the Balor keeps casting.

In more detail:
1) None of characters was able hurt the Balor in melee. Not that they got many attempts before they were charmed or killed. My best weapon is the Scather (for the CG Barbarian), but sadly, I cannot use it in this combat due to a bug that causes the game to hang if I attack a fire-based creature with the Scather (see the earlier Temple of Elemental Evil thread). The other weapons (even the magic ones) seemed to do a total of *0* points of damage against the Balor. The Cone of Cold did do some damage to the Balor, but not even nearly enough. When the combat was over, the Balor had lost 23 hit points and was merely "green" ("Hurt").
2) The Suggestion and the Slay Living (?) spell. I have never ever seen any of my characters resist either of these! Probably because the Balor is a higher-level creature and his spells are harder to resist? The Balor trivially wipes out my party and laughs at my best attacks.

I'm very open to suggestions here. I've been toying with two ideas, but maybe I'm missing something obvious? In any case, here's something that I'll probably try...
-I'll see if I can Craft something that will give better resistance to my front-line characters, and maybe try to Craft something that will help them hit/hurt the Balor.
-The classic Otiluke's Sphere trick from the Baldur's Gates. Send a non-critical character (probably the Dwarf in my case) to the frontline and surround him with the Otiluke's sphere. Let the enemy use their best offense against this (invulnerable) character while hitting the enemy from a distance. Once the Balor has used up its best spells (Suggestion, Slay Living), let the other warriors engage it in melee. I have not tried this technique in the ToEE yet, but I remember that it was a very good way to beat certain tough BG/IWD enemies...

[ 09-13-2004, 01:46 AM: Message edited by: seclists ]

[seclists]

Ok, I've found a couple of hints. Sadly, these were not of any use:
1) Use a Modrenkainen's Hound / Spiritual Weapon to lure the Balor into attacking them
->Problem: I have the patched version, and apparently the Balor is smarter here. It ignores the Spiritual Weapons and Hounds and charges at my party
2) Use Fragarach/Scather
->Problem: The game hangs when I use these against Salamanders or the Balor. (A new bug in the patched version?)
Also, the Balor's magic is distressingly powerful... it casts terror, suggestion, slay living and what not and my characters never save.

Oh well, this battle is probably not crucial for completing the game, but...

[seclists]

Just to wrap it up, I finally discovered a reasonable way of winning this combat. This is how I did it: (*MEGA* Spoilers, don't read if you haven't completed the game yet...)
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1) Kill the other guardians first so you can summon them with the Skull. Even if they can't hurt the Balor a lot, they make decent target dummies with their obscene amounts of hps.
2) Knock the Efreetis out with a Cone of Cold so you can concentrate on the main enemy.
3) It turns out that even though directly attacking the Balor with the Scather triggers the game hanging bug, the Scather's defensive attack of opportunity does not.
4) Eventually, the Balor killed the Hezrou. Then it started killing the Vrock. (The Glabezru was simply cowering in a corner, afraid.) Just when the Vrock was nearly dead, my wizard cast a Resilient Sphere on the Vrock. The Balor continued attacking the Vrock, and everybody else continued attacking the Balor (or was running away afraid). At one point, I actually canceled the Resilient Sphere (accidentally), but the Balor was nearly dead (red) by then. Scratch one Balor, no casualties for my party (except for the summoned Hezrou).

I went on to the final combat and completed the game. At first I avoided it (with Sense Motive), but I wanted to see the actual fight, so I reloaded and fought Zuggtmoy. She was a wimp compared to the Balor. The Balor is *definitely* the toughest battle in the whole game, bar none. Too bad that you could not really control it as an ally (it vanishes after 1 round, probably a game balance tweak).

Over and out.