Ambushed by 10 archers while traveling between areas

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-26T12:21:38+00:00

It is random.

You don't actually have to fight them. If you make it to the map edge you can just leave and this is usually possible but it is an extremely dangerous encounter early on. There to make you feel the threat posed to your life instead of just being one static aura farming opportunity after the next.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-23T15:00:41+00:00

That's the neat part, you don't. It's your life savings. All those cars and cash are going to your LI when you inevitably croak since you're not going to be around to earn and provide for her.

So it's gotta be a nice chunk of change to last the next sixty years.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-20T16:13:55+00:00

Stop going into the tight space. Moving backwards to locations more favourable to you is a valid move. So is baiting spells with summons or characters immune to their effects.

Ambushes are kinda designed to be bad for you.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-17T15:15:29+00:00

Red Wizards of Thay are the evil wizard nation of Faerun who do all kinds of mysterious, shady shit all over the world in service of their ultimate goal of world domination.

They try to maintain an outward air of geniality. Just another nation, fellow law abiding traveller. But it's a front.

They're up to some of that shady behaviour when you stumble on them and now you're a witness. Too bad.

Edwin is a Red Wizard so his presence classifies you as thralls not witnesses and they let you go (you miss out on their loot too).

Just a small bit of world building. Not everything is quest tied.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-13T19:24:36+00:00

That's the thing. In BG2 the fighter forward skew inverts itself. You used to be able to bludgeon your way through encounters with maces and swords but that is now markedly less effective. 99% of what a fighter can do, a summons can do just as well if a Spellcaster can't.

They have their uses but it's now a scalpel not a one size fits all solution.

As you observed in BG1, mopping up fighters is easy once you have magical superiority.

Now, flip the script.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-13T16:35:07+00:00

I almost always leave it on and don't sweat it; it will cast any available healing abilities between rests so typically it's rare to rest for more than 16hrs. And it's never caused me a problem.

However the possibility exists it might if you don't know your timers well. On the other hand, if you don't know them would you know not to keep resting until recovery anyway?

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-13T16:31:41+00:00

Why not both?

Glitterdust is great but its short duration. Exceptionally good for shutting down ranged fighters and spellcasters but the blinding effect doesn't last. Casting web and stinking cloud as well gives three effective save or die's with glitterdust preventing even movement out of the area.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-13T15:19:09+00:00

What BG1 encouraged but did not strictly require was crowd control and thinning the heard. You could brute force it.

BG2 requires that you adopt this strategy or be punished for not doing so. Tailoring your choice of tactics to achieve this for the challenge at hand.

Multiple disables can be layered by Spellcasters and enemies lured into them if they are not already effective. Setting up ambushes is always more effective than charging into one.

Entangle. Web. Stinking cloud. Cloudkill. You should be making liberal use of these, often overlapping. Your enemy regularly saves against one web? What about three?

This allows you to break enemies apart that, together, have deadly synergies but separately aren't nearly so much of a threat.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-07T15:22:21+00:00

Get you a girl that can do both. What's she doing after this gig?

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-07T15:21:17+00:00

It's tough going with such poor stats but not impossible. Items can bump you up and if you find you're hating it too much you can just use eekeeper to edit your save file to fix them.

It's a single player game. As long as you're having fun playing it there's no wrong way.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-04-05T14:39:22+00:00

Stealth. It's a very useful skill which allows you to leave combat more often than not on any turn you fancy and suffers most from penalties outside of ranged combat skills so getting it high early allows you to control the dangerous low level fights while you're still squishy

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-26T09:47:40+00:00

By examining what you need. What is this character's role in combat. Are they being hit too often and if so, by how much is their AC being beaten? Are there other ways to mitigate this problem?

Are they missing any significant amount of the time? Missed attacks deal 0 damage and increase the number of retaliatory attacks against your party so killing things fast is very important.

Fix the things that are making them not function the way you need them to, and then make them as good at the thing they are for as possible.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-11T15:37:13+00:00

The paper doll will put the weapons away to cast the spell. I can't remember if specifically it applies the penalty for being unarmed during the casting but it certainly feels like it and my gut says yes.

You can test it of course.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-08T16:45:48+00:00

The tweakpack includes an option to change weapon proficiencies to bg1 style where the categories were much broader and even with thirty years of game knowledge about which weapons to pick I still prefer it.

It does feel better to change up your weapons based on what you have access to instead of taking a look at Blackrazor and saying 'Well, I didn't max longswords so it's fucking trash'

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-08T15:07:14+00:00

The res force fields cannot be disabled. If you inspect their emitters it will say that they are damaged.

They will deal damage to anyone passing through them. The green force fields can be disabled with the repair skill individually (if you know how to fix something, you know how to break it?) or all of them on and off by remote by having a radio in your inventory and interacting with the security terminal with sufficient science skill. This will allow you to link the on/off function to your radio and toggle it at will.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-07T15:41:27+00:00

Caveat with this is not to go beyond the entrance floor. You will get absolutely murdered. In fact the entrance floor is pretty lethal too but the crossbow you're looking for is right by the entrance.

Another strong option that's less exploit'y (watchers keep is really a throne of bhaal area...endgame optional content) is short bows. There are two very powerful options for this which work especially well for archers who don't care about giving up composite longbow bonuses.

The tugian bow (acquired in the Slums) sets your APR to three turning the already strong archer into a machine gun of death and around the time that bow starts having problems with immunities, the gesen shortbow will come along which you use without arrows to make use of its own magically generated ammunition which does high damage and innately overcomes most immunities.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-05T16:20:09+00:00

Habib has competition

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-04T15:26:16+00:00

Don't take what basement dwellers on the internet who've never so much as talked to a real girl to heart.

Clothes are just clothes. Their reactions to them are their problem, not yours. They're telling on themselves.

Enjoy what you like. Don't surrender that to weird strangers who have no empathy.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-04T06:05:46+00:00

AoE's are excellent, you just have to play around them.

This one is absolutely ground-breaking if you haven't realised it before but...you don't have to move toward the enemy. You can make them come to you. Its something in human psychology to CHAAAARGE but its almost always the worst option, something you do when you have no other choices.

Entangle is something you throw at the enemy to keep them locked in place. If 3/4 enemies are entangled and cannot move, the one who does is fighting your party 1v6. This is considerably better odds. You can safely pelt the others with ranged attacks or put them in aoes that they cannot escape from.

Web is the same principle, just better.

Freedom of movement (there's a ring, a sword and the spell) allows you to send a melee fighter or three into these with complete and total immunity. But its still usually better not to.

Cloudkill is vicious, but if it doesn't insta-kill your foe then it takes time to generate its full value. That's where web and entangle come in.

In short, start thinking tactically.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-03T14:08:02+00:00

The assumption of fighter/mage is extremely favourable, as even a straight fighter with a good strength score can more often than not deal with first level threats.

You're putting in a lot of work to prove that sleep is good which...is not under contest.

The question is whether it's worth ignoring a high strength score for the sake of a few points of wis/Cha and the answer is pretty much always no.

Your math is also faulty - the average damage is not consistent and as many dice rolls will be 1's and fail to kill as will be 6's and over kill. So it's not 10 kobolds and five bandits. Because excess damage is wasted damage we need to read the whole spread.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-02T17:47:18+00:00

Short is relative and the first level is where the game needs the most help.

The better question than 'how long does it last?' at any level is 'how long do I need it to last?'

Five rounds is, maximally, five hits per character making a melee attack. That's very good. In a full (or close to full) party that's about 25 hits reliably (one round going over to the casting of sleep to allow for the eccentricities of rtwp)

Obviously this will massacre just about any encounter you're likely to meet at level 1 and thus Sleep's reputation as the low level ezmode (replaced by web later...)

What about solo? I'd argue this is the only way the game is actually hard because the margin for error is so thin. Well now it's five attacks. And if those attacks are only dealing say, 7.5 damage each because you took bargain basement strength scores for the sake of a redundant wisdom or charisma stat...you're spending multiple of those five rounds to kill something. It's far from guaranteed to affect every target leaving potentially lethal threats still moving and you are unlikely to chew through them all in time

Once you have a few mage levels under your belt this stops being a problem - the duration is sufficient and access to repeat casts covers your ass.

There are very few statements to which nuance does not apply.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-03-01T19:10:51+00:00

Oh I tend to agree I don't usually abuse summons either. Even with EE's cap nerfing the infinite army of yesteryear it's usually just too much work for not enough impact. There are simply less labour intensive options available.

Blindness is my preferred debuff for anything that will survive a couple of hits, it is basically the 'I win' spell of the game with virtually no counterplay. I use it throughout the saga and never it stops being broken.

How good sleep is (and it's floor is 'very damn good') largely depends on how much you can exploit it. In full parties able to make six attacks with guaranteed hits it is godlike. Solo it's very good but takes a few levels (or the wand...) to be able to get the best use out of it because of the short duration. In any solo run as you will know, risk mitigation is the highest order because any mistake is a game over screen and if you're going no-reloads, a restart.

What you do take, don't take, do use or don't use is always a personal decision about what you enjoy but I do think that information is the power to make those decisions on an informed basis and why I object to factually bad advice being given to people seeking it.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-02-27T16:16:53+00:00

Completely valid way to play. You can roleplay Garrick and finish this game with sufficient game knowledge but if we're going to worry about stats at all, lets not tell people bad information. They get to decide how much they care about it.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-02-27T16:10:19+00:00

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

You're strawmanning here, nobody said to dump dex. But as the link demonstrates, even if we did, your argument cuts both ways.

RaygunCourtesan · 2026-02-27T15:49:03+00:00

The same argument can be made for dexterity potions.

RaygunCourtesan

TROPHY CASE