Baldur's Gate 2 Soloed

I think I'm finally done with Baldur's Gates. I've completed the games with all of the races and classes, and now as solo as well. I'm quite sure I've seen most (if not all) the games have to offer. Time to let them be.

Soloing is the not the proper way to play Baldur's Gate 2, by the way. I often missed the banter of party members. But at least there's the challenge of being a party of one. Which actually wasn't that big of a challenge. Plenty of reloads were seen, however. So little needs to go wrong for everything to fail when you have only one character.

Power Word: Stun became my new mortal enemy. The spell allows no saving throw and only targets above 90 hit points are unaffected. Even one round of stun is very lethal when surrounded by enemies. Once I found Spell Immunity spell scroll and could protect myself from Conjuration, things became easier.

I reached the High Level Abilities before Spellhold as expected. Use Any Item was the first one I picked so I could start using Carsomyr the Holy Avenger on my Chaotic Neutral character. Even though you can equip any item, it doesn't allow you to cast spells while in (non-elven chain) armor. For a while I continued doing the "cast buffs, re-equip armor" thing but it became too much of a chore as I had done enough of it in BG already.

So I went to one of the Collector's Edition vendors -- yes, they did those CE bonuses already back in 2000 -- and bought the Robe of Vecna, which is pretty much like the archmage robes found throughout the game with the exception of increasing cast speed by 5 (which is huge). (The CE vendors can be downloaded as a mod by anyone and they come included in the popular bugfix compilations.)

The one really powerful item the vendors have, however, is the Shield of Balduran, which makes the wearer immune to beholder rays and renders all beholder fights trivial, with the exception of the rare few with spellcasting ones. The shield's -1 penalty to strength isn't even close to balancing its power. I don't even know how you're s'posed to clear the beholder hive in the Underdark if you don't have the shield. The area is optional but the shield comes in handy outside it as well, though.

I usually have the Stuff of the Magi mod installed but I thought I should skip it this time. It adds a handful of mage items in various places of the game. They all are pretty good but the best one are the boots (at least, I think it was the boots) that remove the delay before you can cast a new spell. I thought that might just be too good.

I never play with many mods anyway. Bugfixes and convenience (such as widescreen resolution and infinite arrow and potion stacking) are the ones I require. You need to be careful with mods that attempt to rebalance or change game rules to those they were originally in the AD&D books. They can easily make the game too easy. Then again, there are mods that make fights much harder by giving the enemies tricks the vanilla game offers (but don't use itself). (Like Improved Invisibility combined with Spell Immunity: Abjuration and Divination.)

However, after I discovered that F/M/T doesn't get the mage HLAs since the level cap is met before the character would get level nine spells, I ended up removing the level cap and enabling the mage abilities for the character. I didn't really end up using them much anyway, since they require a spell slot each and the F/M/T doesn't get many of them. Instead, what ended up happening -- thanks to removing the level cap -- was that I got plenty of the fighter and thief abilities, namely Greater Whirlwind Attack and Spike Trap.

Nothing in Shadows of Amn part of the game can survive against 10 attacks per round with the Carsomyr. Nothing. In Throne of Bhaal, enemies get tougher, however, and the ability is more of a must have than a cheesy cookie cutter. Spike traps are more situational but they do make many difficult fights easy. Or rather remove them completely. If an enemy is not hostile before you speak or attack it, or they spawn after you trigger something, you can lay down a handful of traps, which then trigger when a hostile monster appears. And kill it instantly.

This works on the final boss as well. I'm not sure if I could've even beaten Melissan without just cheesing her up with the traps each time she appears when closing one of the Bhaal essence pools. She and her summons ripped through my defenses way too fast. If her summons weren't random in the first fight, I might have had some real trouble even getting to the latter encounters. If her first summon was a beholder, it would remove all my buffs and I couldn't bring her down to low health before she would rip be me apart.

Other hard fights in the game were Seidan and the Ravager. Seidan's area becomes so cramped with the adds and fighting her copies drains your resources fast. And then she herself finally seemed to have undispellable buffs (at least by Carsomyr's on-hit Dispel Magic). The Ravager's difficulty came more from his high damage reduction and melee damage. I noticed that he doesn't follow in melee but switches to ranged attack when you move away from him. While powerful too, it wasn't as deadly and I could heal up with potions, before going back in.

At the end of Shadows of Amn, in the test of selfishness, one of your party members is kidnapped and to save him/her, you have to go through three doors, which drain your HP, Dexterity, and experience. Or you can go the other way but that kills the party member permanently. The former solution rewards you with +10% magic resistance and the selfish way with +2 AC. If you go there alone -- like I did, playing solo and stuff -- the demon finds a random peasant to capture instead. Thus I decided to be selfish and took the armor class bonus.

There's a way to cheese this up as well if you don't want to go evil (and aren't soloing). The party member captured is random but I've found it often to be one of my mages. And if the mage has Contingency'd Dispel Magic set to cast on self when the mage becomes helpless, the kidnap effect is removed and you can move the party member to open the last door on the unselfish path. This causes your character to lose some experience but the HP and Dex penalties are skipped and the blessed Tear of Bhaal is gained.

Due to me optimizing the Tear of Bhaal bonuses, my character's alignment changed from Neutral to Evil, and stayed that way till the end. The only thing it affected, however, was the priestess in Saradush not giving me the key to get to Gromnir's castle via the vampire tombs. I tried to pickpocket her, but evidently it required a silly high pick pocket skill (mine was over 100). So I killed her instead, which resulted in reputation loss. I could've gone through the sewers, but I thought the vampires were easier (Amulet of Power was giving me immunity to level drain with Negative Plane Protection) and less numerous than all the orcs and orogs and whatnots in the sewers.

I bought my reputation back up in Amkethran's temple afterwards anyway. And maybe because that I got the "good" story during the end movie when I chose to become a deity. I've always thought it depended on your alignment as all my ascended evil characters failed in their career as a god. Or maybe it's decided by your answers in the discussions with the Solar in your pocket plane. I don't know.

Funny that, given how much I know about this game. But that's it. No more shiny ones, oh well. Back to cleaning, I guesses.