Hello Cromwell, down in the Docks district, i got this two pieces to
the Gesen bow you see....
I like it. Unlimited shots and a +4 weapon.
Look what I found for sale at the Copper Cornet ! Another weapon that destroys vampires if they don't make a save at -4 ? And this one is a throwing axe that returns to your hand. I gave it to mazzy. I can just see her standing behind our level-drain-immune Anomen (thanks to an amulet I gave him) , letting him block the vampires and both of them destorying the little buggers.
I love ambushes, except when they're being pulled on me. I step one
foot into the grave yard and Bhodi is waiting for me with a wack of vampires.
You'd think she wanted to live forever or something ?
Notice Anomen (in the Green
Gorgon Plate) blocking the vampire from getting at anyone else ? And Mazzy
standing back with the Azureblade throwing axe in hand, taking her shot
at it too. Lot of vampires died down here.
Notice the doors ? (this is the second level of the vampire place under
the grave yard. ). We're using it to trick the vampires and other undead
to come in one at a time, and then slambing the door shut behind them.
Then we deal with them one by one. We tried rushing straight in by the
way, but got slaughtered rutlessly. Tehre were so many vampires.
Oh , the guy with the white circle is Dritzz, lending
a hand. He buggeres offf the moment Bhodi dies.
Oh, yes, one point. The stupid boat down here is Bhodi's
tomb. It took me forever to find it and put a stake through her heart.
Naturally she was immune to that save vs death at -4 or be destroyed buisiness,
so we had to take her down the hard way. And then restore two of my charactars
from being drained. She does 3 levels in one shot. Nasty.
After 2 days of resting and scouring the place for that stupid lantern
, I figured out where Bhodi's grave was , staked her , and Imoen got her
soul back. And I got the lantern.
Is this anything more than a trophy to show my friends ? I never actually found a use for it.
I walk into the Copper Cornet passing by Yoshima as I usually do ( I never did accept him into my party, I picked up Jan Jansen instead as quick as possible), and as I walk by this time, he takes a heart attack and dies. I didn't do anything ! I think maybe he died when Bhodi dies or some such.
This is a good shot
demonstrating my mage under a tensors transformation with his staff of
golem killing (blighting or some such , I think it's called.) The golem
didn't make his save, and promptly keeled over despite being only "Barely
Injured". I had to reload this because he smucked one of my party who ran
off and drew the attention of another band of golems.
We're in the elven city up in the tree's after having found the lantern. Their lantern thing apparnetly is the only thing to penetrate the illusion that Jon Irenicus used to hide it so he could swarm it under with his monsters.
Whilst running away from this iron golem , we noticed that it
couldn't come through this corner. It was too big to fit. So Imoen stood
there just behind mazzy (she looks all grey because she's got a stone skin
spell protecting her) with her Gesen bow and started plinking arrows at
it. The Gesen bow does two points of damage to the golem. Good thing it's
trapped and she has unlimited shots.
This was a nasty fight. Dead Iron Golem , a Balor , many summoned bought it, here in this temple of Rillifane. I was doing a full sweep and clear of the entire city. Every where I went , every street corner, every building I entered, there were monsters. I decided to clear it all out at this point.
Stone Golems we simply overwhelmed and destroyed . Adamintite golems were another matter. Run !
Oh dear. The Poor little Adamintite Golem can't make it into this narrow passage, so Imoen is plinking away at it with her gesen bow. Notice it's standing on the corpse of a previous Adamintite golem ? Yeah , this one she put on the boots of speed that normally mazzy wears and suckered it into this position. The Gesen Bow only does 1 pt of damage to Adamintite Golems , but that's ok, it can't touch her and she has unlimited ammo.
Notice Imoen's lovely green outfit as she shoots at this Adamintite Golem from the saftey of this stairway ? With all of us up higher were we're out of the way and safe ? That's because I thought she was safe, but really it was actually hitting her stone skin spell. And when it ran out, she took like 30 hp in one shot...RUN ! up the stairs. At which point the Golem can't be seen any more so you can't shoot at it...this was not part of the plan !
Kewl ! Since I already knew the Stone skill spell would protect me five
or six times before it wore off, it was time for the old Tensor's Transformation
and Staff of Smiting trick on this golem. We just wacked away at each other
with Imoen putting in her two cents worth with the gesen bow. Eventually
the Golem blew it's saving throw and that was that. Love that Rod of Smiting.
And yes, that is the remains of a stone golem on the stairs
we're walking all over. At this point a stone golem was little more than
target practice to this party, we were all 13-14th level charactars.
Do you mind ? I'm just trying to rest up here and get my spells back and this stuipd iron golem lumbers into our camp in the middle of the street. Some golems can be just so impolite. We took it down the hard way. With the lesser summoned monsters and hand to hand. Oh the stone golem died before we camped out and wasn't part of the fight.
Stupid Black Dragon. There I go to all the trouble of summoning a demon,
and while it's still a-summoning, the dragon rushes up and kills it, before
it can even get a shot off. That is really irritating.
Even worse, this dragon has some kind of holy cup or something
you need. And unlike the other three dragons in the game, this one is not
avoidable. It will not hand the cup over or be bargained with, and it looks
upon you as lunch , and you need that cup. (Actually , there are five dragons
in this game, FireKrag, the shadow dragon , this one , the silver dragon
, and the one in hell. Only this one is a required fight , and it's a real
toughy !)
After several reloads I determined that I had two rounds of combat to cast spells , after which he did something with a swarming insect spell and all my spell casters now had a 100% chance of casting failure and it was time to reload again. Considering the matter I abandonned my attempts to summon demons to do my dirty work (he was having them for lunch) and reverted to standard anti-Dragon tactics. Slightly modified to account for the fact that each mage could only cast two spells and then we were all toast.
Round one: Lower resists all around.
Round Two: Instant Kills. Flesh to Stones, Hold Monsters, Feeble minds.
anything that would take him out in one shot should he fail his save.
I found some shattered stone next time round. It took
me ten minutes to figure it out. He'd failed his save vs a flesh to stone
, and Imoen had used the gesen bow to shatter him . No treasure that time,
but I did get the cup. Good enough.
Irenicus's Battle
Ahh ! I didn't take any pics !
Oh well. There's a stone harp and a stone horn in the elven city (oddly
enough , in the house of the harp and the house of the horn , as marked
on your map).You need them to open the stairs and go down to battle Irenicus.
Kewl. Turned out he was in love with the Elven Queen ,
but he wanted the power of a god, and so he was willing to sacrifice everything
yadda yadda yadda....
There are three parasites on the trees. Attack them ,
elementals apear, kill the elementals , and the Parasites fall at your
first shot, being totally helpless otherwise. Kill all three, then get
to fight good old Jonny boy and hear all about this heart wrenching story
of his.
Then you get to kill him. Watch out for those time stop
spells , boys !
Good old Jonny dies, and we all go to hell. And we gotta fight him one last time. In this case , walking down one of the five flights of stars shows a demon rather like this, who is quick to explain that this isn't really hell , but a creation of the Bhaal Spawn (that would be you , by the way, or in this case , the Bhaal Spawn Soul , of which you have a tiny piece still and Jon Irenicus has a great big piece) and there is this quest you gotta complete. Collect the five Tears of Bhaal. This is a pretty typical example of the tears quests. A demon who's name is a clue ("Selfish" is his name) Gives you a choice of paths. One path is fairly evil , one path is fairly good. I always chose the good path, though I have to admit when a demon called Pride started talking about how great and powerful I was and how I could easily slaughter the creature in the next room I was tempted, I really was, especially when I found out it was another dragon. But I passed. All the walk throughs I'd read indicate you get converted to Evil if you choose the evil path even once.
Oh , you'll need a resist fear spell to beat the demon fear. Trivial point, but you might want to make sure one of your mages has it. Otherwise you're choices are a fight with a room full of beholders (one of which keeps imprisoning Jahiera and her shield of Balderon) or accepting the Cloak of Nymph's and being converted to evil.
Sarevok puts in an apearance. As a wraith. He's one of the tests and
wants me to use the Slayer Form to attack him. This test is iffy because
I had to resort to violence to get his Tear of Bhaal, but I did avoid the
need of the Slayer Form. I'm not sure whether I passed or failed , but
I was still Chaotic Good afterwards, and I got the Tear. He refused to
hand it over though.
The green thing is the shambling mound from the staff
that Jahiera is carrying. She got it from the Avatar of Rillifane after
we cleansed the Elven City. Nice staff, +4 weapon, about 25 charges to
summon this thing (actually listed the number of charges..nice...) This
is the only charge we ever used, due to everyone and the dog having sixth
, seventh , and even eight level summoning spells and that stupid limit
of only 5 summoned monsters at one time.
The Final Battle. After about the Third Reload.
Those skeletal warriors are mine by the way (mine and Anomen's actually).
There's an annoying dialogue scene , we're dragged into this really sucky
formation (I tried various things to change it , tighten it up , make my
mage less exposed...no luck , you always wind up arrayed like this).
We boast , we brag at each other , we taunt.
Irenicus summons four demons, two pit fiends and two Balor's,
and that's during that automatic scripted part so you don't get to interrupt
him. And then you fight it out, him , his four demons, and your party.
The above attempt to ambush him didn't really work , though.
When fighting started the skeletal warriors got in one or two hits on him
and the demons , and then a death spell got rid of them.
Oh , if you see a figure called "The Slayer" standing
around doing nothing , ignore it. It's just an illusion.
I'm still working on this battle. Damb Demons chasing
me around so I don't get a moments peace. Tried it six times. No luck so
far.
Oh well, it is the final battle, so that's pretty much
it for this walk through I think.
edited May 2002
Probably I should mention How I finally defeated Jon Irenicus. Basically I summoned up a scad of skeltal Warriors, watched the intro to the final battle, and as the demons and jonny boy attacked the skeletons we ran directly south.
It was my intention to come back up and lure the demons out one by one, and finally jonny boy himself , rather than fighting them all in one shot, but Jon Irenicus decided to be unusually cooperative.
Basically he cast that 7th level image spell , the one that leaves an exact copy of you standing there while it teleports you away ?
You guesssed it. He teleported south. directly into our laps. And the Demons stayed in the original start location because by the time they finished the skeletal warriors off we were out of sight, so they just stood around like idiots.
Everyone piled onto Jonny boy at that point. A short , nasty battle. True Sight definately helped by messing up all his illusions (cleric's get it as a 5th level spell , mages at 6th) and he wound up wasting half his time casting illusions that were promptly disrupted while the fighters did the old hack and slash thing on him.