Solo Cleric through Weimer Land

[Rataxes]

Time for part nine. Think I'll only cover the Beholder lair tonight, it's a mouthful of reading anyway

With the Mind Flayer city behind me, the dreaded Beholder lair awaited next. I say dreaded because luxuries such as the Shield of Balduran, Cloak of Mirroring, and Protection from Magic were, by choice, not available to me. The Beholderkin might very well be the single most deadly breed in the entire Baldur's Gate series when you can't hide behind the aforementioned items. I also say dreaded because this lair contains about four times as many Beholders as the Beholder lair light beneath the Temple district in Athkatla.

Lets start at the beginning, I was going to enter the lair. A Death Tyrant (sees the invisible) and a regular Beholder greeted me the moment I entered. Paused. Ok, so here are two Beholders, one is already in the process of slinging an Anti-Magic ray on me, so I can't take them down with spells. What the other one is casting doesn't matter, as I'm already screwed. Hey, what about that Mind Flayer Circlet I saved? Charms without a save. Ok, lets go for it. Unpaused. I first tried to charm the Death Tyrant, as he was the biggest threat. The Beholder slowed me, and the Death Tyrant turned me into stone before I had even reached him. Two more attempts ended in similar fashion - I was killed before I even had a chance to use the circlet. The fourth time I did get to use it, only to find out that the Death Tyrant is immune to charm. I tried one last time to charm the regular Beholder and have him attack the Death Tyrant with me. The attempt succeeded! I charmed the Beholder, and together we brought down the Tyrant, he only hit me with (relatively) harmless Cause Serious Wounds rays. How nice then that the Beholder's AI script should override the Charm effect and actually start slinging rays at me whenever I wasn't directly controlling it! I died to a Disintegrate ray when my back was turned to it.

Time to change tactics I thought, luring both Beholders to the outside was one step in the right direction. Once on the outside, I tried running away before they appeared and caught sight of me. Didn't work so well, but I did half a dozen times succeed in lobbing a Symbol Stun on their heads by retreating far enough to get a round of uninterrupted spellcasting. Half a dozen failures later I came to the conclusion that they were probably immune to Stun. Also tried the same thing with Fire Storm, but keeping the Beholders within the AoE for the four rounds it took to fully deliver the damage, proved to be an impossibility. Keeping myself alive while constantly being within the sight range of Both Beholders for four rounds that is.

In the end I did come up with a tactic that worked. Summoned a Deva (immune to death spell and 70% magic resistant) outside and used him to tank for me while I cast Holy Smites from afar. It worked brilliantly actually, now why didn't I think of that at first? Devas were overall my saviours in this lair, the one summon I had that could be depended on to stay alive for more than one round against heavy Beholder fire. So anyway, I was in, with no hostiles in sight, finally! I moved on and saw a bunch of drow picking a lone Beholder. Activated HRDS and joined the fray. Made sure I got the last hit on the Beholder, then kicked the jams out of the drow party.

That was it, the whole NW section of the lair was clear of hostiles, I was free to walk about as I pleased. To go on, I would have to seize control of the middle section. That section happened to be guarded by 3 Beholders and 2 Gauths, plain suicide to face at once in other words. Fortunately the corridor wall on one side goes out a bit into the middle area and and bends inwards slightly, so you can stand behind that wall and be blocked from the sight of those Beholders in the middle, while at the same time having a good deal of the middle ground in your sight. What does all of this mean? It means I can target spells to the ground practically right next to the Beholder pack, all the while being hidden from their view. The plan was to stun as many Beholderkin as possible with 3 consecutive Symbol Stuns, and then summon a Deva to tank while I did the brunt of the damage with Holy Smites cast from out of sight range. For some reason, these symbol spells do not "activate" them (in the case of activating Improved Beholders, they will always know the exact whereabouts of your location, no matter if they can see you or not, and hunt you down no matter where you go or how long you avoid detection). Worked like a charm!... on the third try. These Beholders weren't impressed by Symbol Stun either, though it did fortunately disable the Gauths. With supporting fire from me, the Deva just barely managed to take down the 3 Beholders, the 2 frozen Gauths, and another pair of Gauths who came from the south, before he died.

The pair of Mind Flayers left in the SW section were like feebleminded sheep compared to what I had so far encountered in this place, and quickly fell to HRDS + CC. One whole half of the lair was now cleared. With HRDS still active I went up to the NE section and killed the Gauths there without any assistance. They aren't even a fraction as lethal as their bigger brothers since they lack the Anti-Magic ray. The rest of that part of the lair was empty, and suddenly, only the SE section remained to be conquered! The by far most difficult one, of course.



Red blobs are Beholders, the bigger the scarier. Green squares are starting points for my assaults. At first I really hadn't a clue how to tackle this. My first tactic was the same that I had employed in the fight for the middle: Standing at the left starting point, I spammed Symbol Stun to disable the Gauths, Summoned a Deva, and then bombarded the area with Holy Smites till there was nothing left, or that was the plan. After trying this just once I was harshly reminded that activating just a single one of these remaining 11 Beholderkin will activate the rest as well. So within 3 rounds of summoning my Deva, Elder Orbs began to appear from the sides, and before long, the Hive Mother herself popped up from the south. The situation was FUBAR, to speak bluntly. Things didn't exactly improve for a good while. Somehow, a Beholder would always slip by the protective barrier that was my Deva and lob an Anti-Magic ray in my direction or something, basically screwing me over completely. I stubbornly tried the same tactic more than 10 times in a row with only minor alterations, before I did something drastic. The problem hadn't been the Deva's inability to tank, it commonly survived assaults from half a dozen Beholderkin at the same time for longer than it took a single lone Beholder to slip past to the back (me) and kill me with something silly like Flesh to Stone, or Domination. The problem certainly wasn't our inability to harm them, both the Deva's Mace of Disruption and my own Holy Smites were doing some good damage and we often had at least 3-4 beholder carcasses laying on the floor before I fell.

The drastic move consisted of having a rest and re-organizing my spellbook. More Holy Smites, what use were skeletons or Dispel Magic to me now? More Devas, how could one have enough? I removed all my Fire Storms and Implosions, they were no good in this place. I added quite a few Storms of Vengeance, remembering that they were party-friendly (unlike the Fire Storm, which would turn my Deva against me) and could probably cause quite the chaos among tightly packed Beholders. I also moved up to the right starting position. Began this time by casting the Deva right next to me, then threw my first Storm of Vengeance into the mix. Moved my Deva into the fray so that the storm and deva entered combat at about the same time. The Storm did cause some serious disturbances in the otherwise so quiet lair. Two Beholders were poisoned, and by the time I had thrown my second storm into the battle, the other 6 Beholders had also joined the fun. The two Beholders who were poisoned had actually already died, but the other 9 were all under the eye of the storm now, and I got about 2 screens of new battle text lines per second. It was beautiful! Right about that time my Deva was killed. No sweat, I had several others. I retreated at this point to the NE section, into the corridor leading up to the top-most "eye", and there cast another Deva and retreated further, almost into the eye itself. Waited for some battle text message to tell me that the Deva had engaged in combat, but what happens instead? Somehow, a bloody Elder Orb slipped past my Deva and had now entered the eye. I knew it was over, 1 vs 1 against a Beholder, I haven't the shadow of a chance. That was basically the whole issue, as soon as any of the Beholders turned their full attention to me, it was instantly game over, unless I could escape and block my escape path with a new Deva. The key to winning this battle was to make sure that they never did turn their attention to me, that it was always on the Deva.

Ok, new attempt. Same procedure: Summoned Deva, launched a storm, engaged Deva in battle, launched another storm, cast as many Holy Smites as possible before the Beholders started to overrun the place, or my Deva died. The next step in either of those two outcomes was the same - retreat back into the northern section, summon a new Deva, and rain holy hell on everything the Deva drew to itself. A thousand things could go wrong with this tactic against this kind of enemy, and a thousand things did go wrong before I finally got it right. Among many things that resulted in a reload, I got the finger of death, I was turned into stone, I was charmed, I was slowed and killed by Cause Serious Wounds, I got hit with so many Anti-Magic rays that I couldn't cast for several rounds and was consequencially overrun as soon as my Deva died, I was disintegrated, I even had my Deva mazed a few times so I was left without my tank and couldn't summon a new one.

Finally though, after some twenty reloads, it came. It was the very same tactic really. Deva, Storm, Storm, Holy Smite, Holy Smite. The 2 gauths and 3 regular Beholders were already dead before I spotted an Elder Orb coming in on the side and had to retreat back to the northern corridor. Summoned a Deva right by the southern exit of the corridor and moved further north. Nothing was gonna slip past the Deva this time. Got some battle text and knew the Deva had drawn some bad guys to him. Cast my third and final Storm of Vengeance and three more Holy Smites near my Deva. Things were pretty quiet down there now, had they all been killed off? The Deva seemed to have died at any rate. Retreated back into the eye and summoned a third Deva right by the nortern corridor end. All three Elder Orbs were still alive, so I cast my last two Holy Smites, and the Deva did the rest. Things weren't quite over though, the Hive Mother had been reluctant to join the fight with her fellow Beholders, and only now appeared from one of the southern corridors. Very well, Hive Mother, I have four dozen Energy Blades prepared just for you! The Deva was still fresh and tanked while I slung blades at her at a frightening rate. Once my blades were through, she was all out of stoneskins, and so I put Blackblood in the off-hand and cast the Seeking Sword to finish her off. One of the strange things about the Hive Mother is that she doesn't really like to use her Anti-Magic ray all that much, meaning I was free to buff up properly and thus be immune to most spells she flung at me and the Deva.


So you bit the dust in the end after all!

With the whole lair clean, I grabbed the blood and was out of there. It had taken me almost 2 hours to play through, and I was sort of anxious to get out.

Part nine ends here, what little remains of the Underdark now will be covered tomorrow.

[ 04-13-2005, 09:36 AM: Message edited by: Rataxes ]

[Xen]

I enjoy this story. Very much. Anyhow good luck! In Chapter six those Undead will sure be tough. They will just go "kaboom" by TU. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[ 02-06-2004, 05:00 PM: Message edited by: Xen ]

[Leslie]

Whoo, "perseverance" must be your middle name.

[drew_jarvie]

Good Job. Please include more screenshots, they make a better atmosphere [img]smile.gif[/img] This is such a great story keep it up!

[Rataxes]

Originally posted by drew_jarvie: Good Job. Please include more screenshots, they make a better atmosphere [img]smile.gif[/img] This is such a great story keep it up!

Thanks! I would post more screenshots if I could find a good and free image hosting site with a larger upload limit. I've been putting up my screens on two different hosting sites that only gives you 1 Mb, barely enough for 10 screens. If anyone knows of any good image hosting site I'd gladly show more screens.

[Odruith]

Not really sure. But I created a site at freewebs.com for my mush character,

I was able to upload several large picture files into one of the branches. Perhaps you could give it a try? It allows for you to create several different areas, so you could upload a few into each and lay it out in chapters.

[Dundee Slaytern]

One question.

Why no Globe of Blades on your Deva?

[wally p]

possibly the barrage of anti-magic rays? still, it might be worth it since the deva is so highly magic resistant

[Rataxes]

Good question, I guess it wouldn't have hurt to activate it, just didn't think of it. Anti-Magic rays ignore MR if I recall correctly though, and Beholders have quite good saves vs spell, so I don't think it would've made a world of difference really.

[Dundee Slaytern]

Don't have the .cre file available, but AFAIK, the saving throws of the Beholders are not fantastic (12-14 I think). One of the reasons why the Shield of Balduran works so well against them. They are vulnerable to their own spells.

In any case, if not against the Beholders, then against anything else. Globe of Blades has a saving throw penalty of -2 and deals 10d10 damage per round. Well worth the 1 round needed to cast it, especially in melee scrums (more so since the Deva will engage in melee anyway).