Character Building in Bahssikava

[Jerakeen]

Thuryl said in a recent thread:

 

Quote:

Bahssikava is a perfect example: everything up to the final boss is quite beatable for a level-50 party, but if you didn't build your party right, the final boss will be just plain impossible to hit.

 

Clearly I'm one of the players who doesn't build my party right. The only way I've ever been able to kill that critter is with Cloud of Blades, and then only by using my own allies as additional targets.

 

Just how high do you need to get your meat shield's Dex, weapon skill, and Blademaster in order to have a decent (better than 5%) chance of hitting the dragon? Anybody know?

[Enraged Slith]

No I'm sorry. I never completed Bahssikava (that demon fight is just too much at once) and every time I try again, I'm always turned off by the shear amount of HP enemies have and the huge blocks of dialog text. The only advice I can give is to take in a party that you're used to playing with.

 

I would not feel bad about having to use Cloud of Blades to win some of the fights in this scenario.

[nikki.]

I beat this fight using Cloud of Blades, and lots of potions, I believe, though it's been a while. My party is not optimized at all, but a Heroic Brew will make even the worst fighter half-decent.

[Niemand]

The main problem, in my opinion, that scenarios like Bahs (and Exodus far moreso) suffer from is that Jeff didn't balance spells well at high levels. What this means is that while your spells will keep growing more powerful, they do so less quickly than enemies gain HP and magic resistance. The only skill set that can really keep up is melee/pole weapons, so I find that the only effective way to win these fights is simply to have the melee character(s) pummel the enemies until they finally die, while the mage(s) and priest(s) have virtually nothing to do except simple buffing and healing.

 

Cloud of Blades is a very special case, as it is the only weapon in the party's arsenal which deals damage based on the target's level, so as the enemies get harder to kill, CoB gets better at killing them. I don't use it often because it either makes fights too easy or too dangerous for my own characters (since it will do level based damage to them too), but I very much disagree with the viewpoint that the spell is broken and shouldn't be allowed at all.

 

As to skills to beat the final fight, in the party I have that just finished Bahs the fighter is level 72 with 16 STR, 13 DEX, 15 END, 18 POL, and 8 Blademaster.

[Jerakeen]

Originally Posted By: Niemand

As to skills to beat the final fight, in the party I have that just finished Bahs the fighter is level 72 with 16 STR, 13 DEX, 15 END, 18 POL, and 8 Blademaster.

And how often were you able to hit the dragon? Whose name escapes me at the moment.

It's mainly NPCs that I have to be careful of slicing and dicing. I try to keep Phaedra out of line of sight of anything I plan to Moulinex.

[Ephesos]

Whew... I can't remember that fight, only that it was pretty much miserable with all the stat-draining that went on.

[Niemand]

I just replayed the fight with my saved party, and this is how it went:

The fight has three phases that really matter for injuring the dragon. In the first phase, you have all of your skills and buffs, and I was able to hit the dragon with every attack. In the second phase you lose all of your buffs and get cursed and slowed, but nothing stops you from applying new buffs. In this stage I wasn't much affected because I just reapplied most of my spells. In the third phase you get massively dread cursed, which made me able to hit only about one time in three.

However, although the removal of buffs is supposed to happen when the dragon is at 75% health and the dread curse at 50%, they actually happen the next time the dragon gets a turn when its health is below those levels. Since I was able to do a lot of damage at the outset, the actual points when these happened were more like 55% and 30%.

There is also a fourth stage in which Galthrax fills the room with perpetual anti-magic fields, but this only lasted for one turn before I finished him off, so it didn't make much of a difference.

 

Looking more closely at it, I think that my party was somewhat over the level that Kelandon expected, starting from when it entered the scenario. This meant that I had it a bit easier than it was intended to be.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Turtle

Just how high do you need to get your meat shield's Dex, weapon skill, and Blademaster in order to have a decent (better than 5%) chance of hitting the dragon? Anybody know?

Blademaster is key; pump it and your chosen weapon skill about equally, and avoid wasting skill points on expensive special skills like Riposte and Lethal Blow. Don't bother with Dexterity, nor with Strength beyond the bare minimum you need to qualify for special skills. Spreading your stats too thin is a recipe for disaster, thanks to his dread curse.

In general, archers will find it easier to hit him than melee fighters do, so if you have one of those it'll help.

[Jerakeen]

Originally Posted By: Thuryl

Blademaster is key; pump it and your chosen weapon skill about equally, and avoid wasting skill points on expensive special skills like Riposte and Lethal Blow. Don't bother with Dexterity, nor with Strength beyond the bare minimum you need to qualify for special skills. Spreading your stats too thin is a recipe for disaster, thanks to his dread curse.

In general, archers will find it easier to hit him than melee fighters do, so if you have one of those it'll help.

Ok, thanks. I've got a couple of sliths I'm planning to take into Bahs after they finish MoC. I'll try that and see how it goes. Not the archery--I didn't bother with that for these two, though the warrior does have a little invested in thrown weapons. The damage for ranged weapons just doesn't seem to keep up at higher levels.

[Aran]

I think I mostly did "Advance, CoB, CoB, Retreat from LoS" in the later battles of Bahs, and trained at least two of my characters up as mages (possibly giving all of them enough levels to Haste).

 

But it's been years since I did that, so I may have the details wrong.

[Lilith]

I've beaten the whole of Bahssikava without Cloud of Blades. Nothing but the final boss was really that hard. I wouldn't try the same for Exodus, though.

[Jerakeen]

CoB is kind of the nuclear option.

 

Because most damage-dealing spells don't keep up, the tendency is to shift more towards charming and summoning, for a spellcaster. Which is all very well, but you still need someone to step up and do some actual mayhem. Which is the point of my original question.

 

Exodus keeps coming up. Kel pretty much got around the problem by including the special spells, I thought.

[Lilith]

Some of the special spells in Exodus are pretty good, but good old Cloud of Blades still sees a lot of use. (And considering that two of the special spells are Fire Field and Ice Field, which have the same damage-dependent-on-target's-HP properties as CoB, I'd say Kel is pretty much acknowledging that you're expected to use it.)

[Jerakeen]

Originally Posted By: Thuryl

...Fire Field and Ice Field, which have the same damage-dependent-on-target's-HP properties as CoB...)

Did not know that! I had pretty much ignored these in favor of flashier-sounding options like Death Knell and Cloudkill. Capture/Recall Soul is another favorite. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

[Lilith]

The one bad thing about the special field spells is that they don't do immediate damage like CoB; it takes until the end of the round to kick in. So you can't spam them multiple times per round like you can with Cloud of Blades, but they're still good against physical-immune enemies.