Any suggestions against the Balor? --SPOILER--

Actually, I found that MAGIC CIRCLE vs. Evil etc seemed to be bugged and doesn't stop the fear effect, but the PROTECTION FROM EVIL spell certainly has in my game and stops all positive mind affecting buffs as well including Bless and Good Hope.

 

There's nothing in there about protecting from Fear or other mind-affecting effects. It prevents possession and mental control. That's it.

 

Hmm, you're right but I know what happens when I use it so Bless (morale affecting), Good Hope (morale affecting) and Fear (morale affecting) must count under "enchantment (compulsion) effects or enchantment (charm) effects" in this game's intrepretation, which I think is fine. For sure it in this game the circle and the single person version of the spell operate a bit differently against these same spells in practice, which I think is not fine.

 

yes, in its current form in ToEE Co8 5.0.0 protection from evil seems to prevent fear, charm and bless from affecting your party members.

Now depending upon what the fear is actually classified as; this may or may not be in contrast to the actual 3.5e rules.

"Second, the barrier blocks any attempt to possess the warded creature (by a magic jar attack, for example) or to exercise mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects and enchantment (compulsion) effects that grant the caster ongoing control over the subject, such as dominate person). "

this seems open to interpretation. Can the Balor's fear be classified as one of these? i'll fish around and see if i can find the balor description.

The charm spells he casts certainly can, but fear doesnt specifically grant the enemy 'ongoing control' over the person, more intermittent loss of control on behalf of the player.

bug? house rule? ambiguity in the rules?

Negating bless seems a bit off either way.

On a related note; does anyone else experience a problem when feared that the characters who take part of their turn running in fear only can access the radial menu/inventory of the current party leader (ie. person on the very left down the bottom of the screen)?

Is this a known bug?

 

You don't even need to look at a Balor to see this kind of thing. A Werewolf had DR 15/Silver. You could have any weapon on earth, but if it isn't silver it's taking a 15 point hit in damage.

In the game I've played once a weapon turns epic it can penetrate anything, but we were almost level 25 before we even got our hands on ONE epic weapon (after questing from level 22 on for the material component!)

Regardless, epic weapons aren't an issue in this game. Thankfully neither are werewolves or else I think things would play out very differently!

FR

 

Well there are jackalweres

 

Uhm, I hate to break it to you, but there are werewolves in ToEE.

 

I know... I meant to imply that they were so rare in the scheme of things that they weren't much of an issue. Although the DR does make a cakewalk fight rather interesting.

FR

 

I doubt anyone is still reading this for tips on how to beat the balor, but I just beat him (after like the 6th try) and had a great time doing it, and wanted to post the overly complicated strategy that worked for me.

My limitations:

• fragarach would cause the game to hang, so I couldn't use it
• didn't have scather yet
• didn't have any useful wands, but i know this wouldda simplified things a great deal
• other odd bugs like afraid characters having the wrong character's radial menu
• haven't installed any co8 stuff of any sort, so i'm not sure what i'm missing out on there
• cloudkill didn't seem to do a thing, and I couldn't get any of the other offensive spells to do much harm either (except ray of enfeeblement)

what worked for me was:

• used only one tank attacker in order to focus all buffs and heals in one place
• killed efreeti and quasit summons as quickly as possible. that way the balor wasted at least two or three rounds summoning when he could have been totally killing my tank.
• my druid had a black bear animal companion that always wanted to jump in and get himself killed. but i preferred him alive, so I set oti's resilient sphere on him. Coincidentally, the balor focused all his summons on the bear. The quasits would sit there trying so hard to attack him while i killed them off with all my non-tanks.
• sent in an animal summon right away to absorb the balor's one or two suggestion/charm spells (causing the spell to fizzle "target not human"). I needed to keep my tank far away until I knew the charms were used up.
• always kept at least one summon of any kind right in front of the balor to distract him from my tank. used my druid's spontaneous summon casting for most of these.
• Unlike my other characters, my 10th level cleric seemed impervious to fear or seemed to always save or something so i...
• sent my tank in and the sanctuaried cleric right behind him. This prevented the tank from running away while afraid (he was also boxed in by my summons), forcing him to fight. This (sanctuary) also gave the cleric a safe way to rebuff/heal the tank as his buffs were dispelled by the balor.
• equipped the tank with a holy/cold/keen weapon, ring of fire resistance, and the usual armor, nothing too special.
• buffed tank first with spell resistance, stoneskin, and deathward and then all the other junk like bull's strength. I'm not certain, but it seemed like the balor could only dispel the most recent buff, and i didn't want to lose spell res, stoneskin or deathward.
• and of course, having everyone (except the tank) run for it when the balor got down to about 240ish

The end result:

• one dead balor
• none of my characters dead (a couple unscathed), including the black bear
• my obsession with this bugged-out, broken game finally quenched

 

Scather wouldn't help you any, because it has the same flaws as Fragarach in this instance. Infinite loop; don't use it!