Six's Review of the Tactics MOD (Tactics Spoilers Galore)

[Link]

Especially for you, my friend Hank Parsons:

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Welcome to the board!

[teardropmina]

Originally posted by Dundee Slaytern: quote: Originally posted by Rataxes: The Shadow Thieves's wands don't have infinite uses. The thieves can only use it twice, and that's it. I do share your frustration over the wands's effects. The Demon Paralyze might be the most powerful, but at least you can avoid/resist/save against it. What really gets me is that the Wand of Fear ignores both saves and MR, making it the only truly unavoidable weapon the thieves possess. The one and only defense against it is immunity to fear.

You can save against the Wand of Fear. I have had party members succeed. I mean sure, 4 out of 5 fail their saves, but it does not ignore Saving Throws. However, at least panicked members can move. The AoE Hold Bomb is what causes me to reload, because it is autohit for the enemy... ... [/QUOTE]I'm not as much bothered by those two as wand of frost! Most of the time, there'll at least one or two save successfully against paralyze and fear (with resist fear spell, fear is no fear); wand of frost however, if suddenly hit, most in my party will lose almost half of their HP with one charge!

[teardropmina]

about the Improved de'Arnise Keep...yesterday I tried it for the first time in one of my current games. We went to the Keep at the 10th game day (prior to that we cleared the Slave thing in the Slum and went to Temple Ruin to get Mazzy). Thought since we got by Improved Ilyich without much trouble, the imporved Keep should be managable, boy was I wrong [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img]
Actually, with the unlimited fire arrows, and Mazzy on our side, it's not very tough finishing off those Spirt Trolls (and umar hulks, giant throlls...) on our way to the final showdown with TorGal. The TorGal battle is *unbelievable*; I don't really know how many goons he actually has since my PC never survived long enough for me to tell. The first one rushing to us seem to be the Elder Hulk; probably there are two Yung-Ti mages with Stoneskin and spell-turning on, and bunch of Spirit trolls.
Not only TorGal becomes immesely powerful and has powerful goons, there's no *close the door* cheese allowed. Soon I found out that with or without the open door cheese doesn't matter since my party of five (PC-lvl 10 Kensai, Mazzy, Jaheria, Aerie and Nalia) cannot even survive facing TorGal alone.
Referring to Six's review, we only have Nalia, whose setting trap ability is pathetic, and so we couldn't even reduce ourselves to use the rest/unlimited traps cheese. We did manage to separate TorGal from all his goons except for one Yung-Ti mage, but we never get TorGal to be more than *barely injured* as his regeneration and constant gulping healing potions. And one by one our haste ran out, all people in my party went fatigue, and I just let TorGal to kill my Kensai with three hits to end our misery [img]graemlins/1dizzy.gif[/img]

Now, I have to forget about the whole thing, and let Nalia go her own way, since our party needs to do some leveling up first. Check the readme file, there's one person whose tactic suggestion is based on a party with the ability to cast time stop and summon Planetar; my thought was "ehh...if my party is ToB level powerful, do I need your tactic advice???? [img]graemlins/1disgust.gif[/img] "

[ 03-01-2004, 04:38 PM: Message edited by: teardropmina ]

[Xen]

So when can we download the new Tactics Mod version?

[teardropmina]

We finally got past the Improved de'Arnise Keep, BIG thanks to JrKASperov

one spell makes the difference = Oracle [img]graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[JrKASperov]

And than ks to those bandits that strike at night in cities, there is this certain access to them as well! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[weimer]

New Tactics should be up today if all goes according to plan. Yes, I realize that I haven't actually send that email.

Wing Buffet Targeting: Mods can't change the effects of "projectiles" or have creatures aim at anything other than hard-wired coordinates (like [500.123]) or creatures (hence the brief experimentation with "rats" by some modders). I don't actually forsee any solution that will respect physics in all cases.

Doors: If you guys come up with some improvements to Imp Ilyich, I'll be happy to incorporate them or put them in as an option. I'd be wary of the currently reported massive respawns and huge amounts of potion-based loot. I also believe that it is realistic to shout and be heard from one side of CI1 to the other -- compare the total size of the place to that of a football field. "Sight range" in BG2 is nothing like "sight range" in real life.

[teardropmina]

So I tried the imp. Ilyich and Ch3 Bodhi. The new Duergar warriors and wizards are much easier to handle than those shadow thieves. Ilyich's own group is still tough. however, I thought the CI level 1 means Irenicus Dungeon first level? no? because we can still close the door. That's still how I beat them (divide and conquer [img]tongue.gif[/img] ). Also, there's a problem with the Fallen Deva. She won't join the fight if her view is blocked by the book shelf in the library (therefore cannot see us even though we were killing Zhivago on the other side of the shelf). When we've done, we walked away. Then I decide to try to fight her, she just dropped a Fire Storm spell immediately when she saw any enemy...at that stage, the whole party was almost killed running slowly...
I never fight Fallen Deva in this battle: I always disrrupt Zhivago casting it. This time, I fail to disrupt it successfully, but Fallen Deva didn't come after us aggressively That should be a bug right?

as for CH3 Bodhi...she used less spells, but her melee skill still can kill the whole party in few seconds. we run away like always, and after we finished off her goons, she soon stopped. The point is still to survive to me~~

[teardropmina]

Has anyone tried the latest version of tactics mod yet? as I noticed that Fallen Deva was a bit messed up in the imp. Ilyich. Today I found that OUR Fallen Deva is screw up as well. In the middle of a fight, she would just cast Fire Storm, hurting my party, and turning our Selekton Warriors hostile. This has never happen before. Maybe the new tactics screws up the Fallen Deva script?