High Lord Golath fight (spoilers)

[utelektr]

So... you're permanently immobilized, acid will engulf you after a few turns, and you have to fight two drakes who can summon and have AOE attacks.

 

This fight seems impossible, honestly. I can't even kill the 6 guard titans before I die. My character is a shadowwalker, I brought Khalida and Silena with me. I feel like even blowing all my Group Heal scrolls wouldn't save me on this fight.

[Randomizer]

There are exploits:

 

Translucent scarab for teleporting and shadowwalker sidestep can let you jump to the acid free area in the north part of the room. Leave a summoned pet behind to keep the titans attacking it in the acid area.

 

Use your own area attacks with wands and scrolls to wear down the titans and drakes especially if you combine with searing scarab. You can sometimes hit up to five of them.

 

You need to use consumables for this fight, Battle frenzy from speed burst scroll or speed potions to get extra attacks. Potion of battle to regenerate especially since you can get stunned.

[Seph]

As soon as the initial speech ends, you can just... walk backwards without initiating the fight. I love to find this sort of exploit, there's similar stuff in pretty much every Spiderweb game. You can then drop some tinkermage constructs and fight the enemies very sparingly, to the points where you can close the battle mode and save between fights. I stayed in the poisoned ground and tanked the damage, which ended up working better than trying to face a bazillion titans head-on.

[Alberich]

My method, which I finished a few minutes ago, was slower but simpler:

 

I had a shaman with a summoned creature specialty (he's my main character). If you send a drake or other "pet" inside, that doesn't trigger the dialogue or the closing of the gates. Furthermore, all the enemies are already "enemies"...i.e., you can attack them without waiting for the dialogue to turn them hostile.

　

So, I go into combat mode. I have the drake walk up while my characters stay outside the room. The drake alternates fire blasts and attacks on the bodyguards. When he fades away, I summon another. I just keep doing it 'til all the bodyguards and side drakes are dead (occasionally I exit combat mode to quicksave in case I accidentally walk a main character in). They don't even fight back, because the dialogue that "triggers" them hasn't happened yet. Or they're all stoned or something. My personal theory is that Dheless made them take a sacred vow that they would stay right where they were and not budge "until the Hand of Avadon arrives." And since no Hand had made an appearance, only this endless line of drakes, they had no choice but to sit there and get eaten one by one. A tribute to that famous Titan discipline. I like the image, anyway.

　

I suppose I could have killed Golath himself the same way, but I chose not to...I wanted the dialogue to happen. But he was a lot less impressive by himself, even on Torment. It's not Davd vs. Golath anymore.

 

With hard fights, I've noticed that this game and all of Jeff's games reward you for seeing how much you can get away with before the fight begins...in terms of character placement, opening and closing doors, summoning things, killing things, etc. This was just an extreme case.

 

Maybe this thread should be linked in Strategy Central?

[Owenmoz]

I find that teleportarion and shittone of pets work great. Everyone should have one. Potions of recovery are important. Health pods as well. Around two speed bursts and expect your main tank to die. Get rid of the drakes first. If inconvenient though take care to remove the titan mob. Though really. Drakes are trouble. If you can. Try summoning in and waiting for the beat to disappear until you get corrupted hound. Good health and imune to acid. As well as great attack.(the scarab does randomly get it. Idk bout wand of calling)

[Bonam]

There are a number of fights where you seem to be permanently or almost permanently immobilized in the later part of the game. Definitely annoying! Getting 2-3 summons plus 1-2 turrets and spacing them all out helps to keep the damage off your main characters though and buy you enough time to kill things. Teleport scarab and other teleportation abilities can help for positioning too.

[Kelandon]

My method, which I finished a few minutes ago, was slower but simpler:

 

I had a shaman with a summoned creature specialty (he's my main character). If you send a drake or other "pet" inside, that doesn't trigger the dialogue or the closing of the gates. Furthermore, all the enemies are already "enemies"...i.e., you can attack them without waiting for the dialogue to turn them hostile.

　

So, I go into combat mode. I have the drake walk up while my characters stay outside the room. The drake alternates fire blasts and attacks on the bodyguards. When he fades away, I summon another. I just keep doing it 'til all the bodyguards and side drakes are dead (occasionally I exit combat mode to quicksave in case I accidentally walk a main character in). They don't even fight back, because the dialogue that "triggers" them hasn't happened yet. Or they're all stoned or something. My personal theory is that Dheless made them take a sacred vow that they would stay right where they were and not budge "until the Hand of Avadon arrives." And since no Hand had made an appearance, only this endless line of drakes, they had no choice but to sit there and get eaten one by one. A tribute to that famous Titan discipline. I like the image, anyway.

　

I suppose I could have killed Golath himself the same way, but I chose not to...I wanted the dialogue to happen. But he was a lot less impressive by himself, even on Torment. It's not Davd vs. Golath anymore.

 

With hard fights, I've noticed that this game and all of Jeff's games reward you for seeing how much you can get away with before the fight begins...in terms of character placement, opening and closing doors, summoning things, killing things, etc. This was just an extreme case.

 

Maybe this thread should be linked in Strategy Central?

Just hit a wall with this very fight and ended up using this exploit to kill off the two drakes before the combat started. Handy, if a bit cheap.

[Spidweb]

The "Send Summons Ahead" exploit will be fixed in 1.0.2. Don't know how, but I'll find a way.

 

The other techniques are fine with me. If you're ok tanking the acid damage, do that. Otherwise, just blow a ton of consumables. Except for the exploit above, this fight was meant to make people go "Huh, I need to find something different this time." It seems to be doing that.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Alberich]

But it was funny that way! (And given what Golath is trying to do to the PC, I daresay he deserves "cheap.")

 

 

I can tell you, too, that this particular exploit didn't work anywhere else in the game (at least not anywhere that I remembered...and as a Shaman on Torment, you can bet I tried it out elsewhere). Bosses who heal themselves when "you're not close enough to stop them" don't count summoned creatures when deciding if you're too far off, and many others will not go into combat mode at all unless you first bring the PC's up for a dialogue...since this game doesn't have the "force attack" button, that cuts you off from the unresisted drake chew. Only in just this one place was I able to win a major fight on this exploit. And since you saved the really "tormentous" torment parts for the boss fights, I had no real motive to try it on lesser fights.

 

 

So unless you want to make that one fight harder, there's no real need to fix it. If you do want to, I think the simplest way would be to do what you did in other fights...don't recognize the enemy forces as "hostile" until after the dialogue; that way the PC's are forced into the "tractor beam."

 

 

Fantastic game, btw, and a very satisfying finale to the series.

[Owenmoz]

I wouldn't mind the fix, it doesn't affect almost any other fight. And this fight is one of my favourite battles in all games. The writing was so in sync with the battle and mechanics. Everything was heavy and challenging while being fair. It really is the crown jewel of this game in my opinion. You could actually panic for a sec on the encroaching acid and your inability to run. I really take my hat off on that. Really fun and rewarding.

 

On top of my head other tips i can give is divide the potions and scrolls through the players. Since if the player that has them dies they go for good. If you don't want or have gotten already the neverressurect achievement make sure all have resurrection scrolls on each player.

 

[Alberich]

On reflection, I do remember one other place where I was able to do something like this.

Unless I'm mistaken, it was with the drake who guards the secret below Velusa's temple.

[Owenmoz]

On reflection, I do remember one other place where I was able to do something like this.

Unless I'm mistaken, it was with the drake who guards the secret below Velusa's temple.

 

But was it "*needed*" ?

[Kelandon]

Except for the exploit above, this fight was meant to make people go "Huh, I need to find something different this time." It seems to be doing that.

Some of the dialogue in the area makes it sound as though you can't leave, and I find that combat puzzles work best — especially at the end of long dungeons — if you have all options available to you (restocking from shops, getting a different set of characters, retrieving stored items, etc.). Forcing the player to do something different is good, but forcing them to do something different when they don't have many alternatives available to them is a recipe for disaster. In my case, I really wanted to get a different set of characters, equip different scarabs, and grab some consumables that I hadn't brought with me.

 

Now, I didn't actually try to leave because there were a number of dialogues suggesting that I couldn't. I think those dialogues appear to be wrong, though; when I finished the Golath fight, I just opened the front gate and ran out. If you do tweak things in that area, I'd suggest making much more explicit that you can exit through the front gate — probably in the talk node tagged 27, which says that if you head toward the front gate, "the worst of their forces will see you." I'd suggest changing that to something that much more plainly indicates that you can escape and come back if you need to.

[Randomizer]

Instead of facing Golath, you can go up the stairs before his area and fight the never ending titans to leave by the front gate.

 

10 experience points per titan.

[Alberich]

But was it "*needed*" ?

 

 

Made things a heck of a lot easier, as I remember.

 

 

Edit: Replaying on Normal, I just found another way to win this one.

 

Have a Tinkermage with you. Before you enter the room, enter combat mode and have the Tinkermage stand south of the doorway and build a turret. As long as you have a turret in the doorway, the gate will not close.

 

I used a shadowwalker's teleport ability and the "teleport" scarab (which I had on the tinkermage) to move the characters towards the door. I left a blademaster behind to draw attacks while those two characters fled towards the door and out to the south. (Of course I could resurrect the blademaster by going around the corner and exiting-reentering combat mode). I sent pets (summoned by scarab) to draw the enemy to the south, and of course they took lots of damage from the goo as well as my attacks.

 

My original plan involved letting the door close so I could shoot Golath through the gate while he couldn't touch me (there's another place in the game where a similar tactic is very helpful). But the fight was easy enough that I didn't need that. It took a few recovery potions (to recover the "group heal" ability from a scarab) plus a few group heal scrolls, mostly to keep the turrets alive.

 

Subsequent edit: May be just as well as the gate did not reopen when Golath died.