Balor... hoo boy

So I've been grinding up so that the game isn't so challenging. I'm circa 13th level in my party. Got a paladin, a barbarian, Nitak (fighter), a ranger, a thief, cleric, and wizard.

The Balor is trouncing me. Hard. Nothing is hurting the guy much, and the spells that actually DO get through his MR (which isnt many), he saves every time and gets minimal damage. Not helping matters is he can gate in a bunch of hezrous, which I have a hard time taking down alone.

I've heard it said that if you are consistently losing a battle in CRPG there's either two reasons: either you arent strong enough, or your tactics need revisiting.

I'm pretty sure the former isn't the case, since the game originally had a level 10 cap (though I can't imagine this battle being easier when im 3 levels under).... but the latter, can anyone give me pointers?

 

Holy weapons.
Cold Weapons.
They both get thru his DR of 15.
Just cast haste on all your muscle guys, circle around him and pound away with above mentioned weapons.

At least that's how I do it.

 

holy ranged weapons with speed/haste help to cut down his hp.

 

You have the opportunity to pre-buff before starting the conversation with the Balor.
Potection from Evil to counter his fear spells is key.
I always do another node before the fire one, so that you have a chance to clear out the fire monsters, then leave and rest up so you are fully charged when fighting the Balor.

Are you creating your own magic items? They tend to be stronger than found ones.

Make sure your thief is flanking (or greater invisible) to get the sneak attack.
It sounds daft, but magic missile is effective against him. You get 5 tries to beat SR, usually something goes through.
There are spells that ignore SR. Off the top of my head I can only think of acid splash, which isn't too impressive, but I'm sure there are others

Hope this help some, best of luck smacking that big boss

 

Huh. Have to add that to my list of things to fix in Temple+.

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Also the stuff in the post after this one.

 

My favorite thing in this fight is counterspelling Balor so he couldn't cast anything (or almost anything).
Idk why DC to counterspell any Balor's spell is 16, it doesn't feel right. But it works.

 

Question about counterspell... legit how do you use it? Do you need to have the spell the target is going to cast known? Its based on spellcraft I assume but i dont know much else.

 

What is really the rough thing about these fights is that the sucker can GATE other demons in at will.

Of course what's even rougher is that is how they've always worked in D&D. The demons are powerful enough on their own but what makes them a headache is they can call backup, endlessly.

 

You ready an action to counterspell. When an enemy casts a spell, the game automatically does a spellcraft check to see if you recognize the spell. If you do, then it also automatically picks a spell to use to counterspell it, assuming you have one.

I don't remember if this is how it works in the game, but in 3.5 the demons that get summoned are supposed to not be able to use their own summon abilities. So it's not supposed to be able to cause a chain reaction.

I think another thing the game gets wrong is that the AI is set up to use the power immediately, while they're supposed to consider it as a last resort (because they owe favors to the fellows they summon). Might be a little more manageable if the summon only happened when you're already doing well in the fight.

 

I'm not sure about modern D&D, but that does make sense -- in the old 1st and 2nd they could do it endlessly, which is why wars between devils and fiends tended to (literally) last forever. And it would depend on what was being summoned -- a pit fiend can summon lemures and manes any time they wanted, but to summon a peer probably did require conditions... dont recall if it did but it makes sense.

And yes that instant summon was the worst part. When I kept losing to Balor I bum rushed him and hoped he'd use that first attack to swing at my warriors or something. Nope. Every single time, he gates in a peer. Every. Time. Made the battle much more frustrating than fun.

 

Yeah. That's the sort of thing I actually like about the older editions, honestly. It's an unpredictable power that's hard to gauge the exact strength of, which makes it hard to give a definite challenge rating to a creature with it (hence the 3.5 behavior). But it makes demons and such really dangerous and interesting.

Also, unfortunately, I think it's pretty hard to write interesting AI using what ToEE has available. I think it just goes through a list of possible actions in order each round, which is why you always get the summon first. It's the first in the list, and is only skipped if it's unavailable. To get more interesting behavior you have to have triggers for other scripts to switch out the lists and so on. And I suspect most critters don't have that level of effort put into them.

So, instead you get the balor immediately summoning reinforcements, because if it were lower on the list, it'd never trigger or something.

 

Dismissal works wonders for me , regarding those pesky summoned demons... Of course, sometimes the spell doesn't succeed but I always memorise as many Dismissal spells as I can for this fight. Holy Word and Holy Smite are a must ( assuming you're alignment allows such spells and you have a Cleric of high enough level ) Greater Invisibility on a Rogue works well and like others said, buff buff buff ( Haste, Heroism, Inspire Courage, Greater Invisibility what have you... ) A high initiative is very advantageous as well ( I ALWAYS take the improved initiative feat for almost all of my party at lower levels )

 

From the ToEE manual:

So in case of Balor, you have to prepare Dispel Magic spell. Dispel Magic scrolls won't work, you need to be able to cast it yourself and have the spell prepared.
One counterspell usage results in one Dispel Magic spell spent.

Option #4 requires Improved Counterspell feat and can work too, but it's not worth it.

 

Good to know. Never tried counterspell before. Nice to know how it works.