Do you buff your party before a battle? Answer honestly :P

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As the topic implies, do you buff your party before a battle? Or do you buff them during the battle? Most of the time i knew that players tend to know what to come ahead and usually they will quicksave and scout or did a test battle against the battle to get information on what to come ahead and reload .

Then just before the battle, buff all the party characters with the necessary spells and hack, hack, hack

So answer honestly do you buff your party before a hard battle or during the course of the battle? I know i do buff my party before engaging due that often you wouldn't want to get level drained before you are able to cast it

 

I always buff before a battle but then I usually plan with quite a few difficulty-enhancing mods so skimping the buffs is rather suicidal. In the normal game, it's resist fear, stoneskin, protection from evil and go.

 

I hate short-term buffs, and any that I do use I use in the heat of battle only if it's getting too hot. Long-term buffs like Stoneskin, OTOH, I use all the time. I stick mostly to damage (or spell-piercing) and healing spells anyway, so...meh.

 

Buff before. Then again, I know when all the fights are. Unless I feel like saving that stupid thief who begs for protection from the 4 vamps...

 

I am like Felinoid. My characters always have the long lasting always-on buffs but never apply the shortlived ones until the battle starts (so usually they never get around to applying the short-lived ones unless someone else applies it to them). I never use what I know about what is coming up to influence what my characters don't know (unless someone has actually scouted ahead to find out).

 

I only buff up if I can't get get through after a couple of tries, then I will use protection from whatever I need to. I.E. potions of mirror eyes or such. I will heal everybody up if I know a tough fight is coming though.

 

I'm like Brallock. My buffs tend to be if I can't get through something. Then if I can get away with it I also use the particular buff I need at the start of battle. But sometimes I will go in with it on. Specially if it's like the old BG1 battles and the first thing done is fear or something.

 

I'm very generous with buffs in a solo game, I'll happily use them preemptively if I feel the need. Not so much if I have a party tagging along.

 

I always buff before any fight.

 

Totally depends on what the fight will be. I usually scout things out though, especially if I have a thief. Normal unmodded game, I hardly even bother to buff for anything including dragons. Tactics improved battles ... ummm, long-ass buff cycle for those AND buffing midfight most times too with all the dispelling going on.

 

I do this only before serious battle which should give me some problems. But I permanently have such things as Contingency or Stoneskin / Mirror Image. In heavy-modded game danger can come everywhere, everytime.

 

I tend play somewhat realistic, hence I don't buff before any fight I couldn't possible know about. There are lots of fight which it's realistic to buff up before the battle. Any casket you recognize as a liche's casket, it's "ok" to buff. If you enter a dragons lair, you know there's a possible chance of a fight. If you enter an unknown territory or another plane, I buff. Heck, I'd buff if it was me who was gonna enter the plane-portal in the Five Flagon's Inn. Or if I found myself trapped inside the pocket-plane(?) in the Bridge District. Where you must use a Rogue Stone to enter. etc.

 

I tend to charge straight into a fight, without caring to cast anything beforehand. I tend to fill up all my priest slots with healing spells anyway, for afterwards. The amount of times I throw Dispel Magic around would probably make aiding the party a bit of a wasted effort anyway.

 

Most battles I don't buff at all my mages or druids will always cast iron skins or stoneskin when they wake and once the spell effects wear off re-cast. otherwise I use potions in the battle and as we close. If on the rare occassions I've successfully scouted out a group that needs attacking (for instance usually the mercenaries in the sewers) then I seriously buff to prepare.

 

In a party I never bothered about any buffs at all (not even stone skin). In my current game (a f/m/t and a sorcerer) the only buffs I bother with are stoneskin (when I wake up) and mirror image (usually after launching a few spells, followed by the image, then a backstab, a summon, or more spells).

 

I buff like crazy as my game is the heaviest modded around here. Stoneskin, pro from evil 10' are allways active. Pro from fire, acid, lightning, cold etc. are depended upon the nature of the encounter. Mirror image is generally casted right at the start of any battle, unless the enemys have a method to dispel it.

I have party auto-buff and self-auto buff scripts. These are cool, all of my party (except Vİccy ofcourse) casts Stomeskins when needed, resist fear, and with a single command from my keyboard, they repeatedly cast their pro from X spells on themselves and others so it is not that tiring.

Ofcourse, after heavily buffing, the smarter mage/lich will just release a remove magic via scripted sequencer so I question the logic of heavy buffing vs mages unless I can have SI:Abjuration. Meh.

 

Once my party is pretty good I don't buff all that often. I go through as many battles as I can then heal and buff, then fight some more then sleep.

 

Generally speaking, I don't buff except for long lasting spells such as iron skin and stone skin. Since those spells last something like 8 hours, it's silly not to cast them and have them active at all times. So those are always on.

Other than that, I only buff if I know I'm going into a battle that will give me severe problems if I don't buff. For example, if I'm fighting a dragon, I'm going to cast resist fear. There's no point in trying to do the fight without it, having my party scatter from dragon fear and have everyone die. Then I'd just reload anyway.

The only other time I make pre-battle preparations is if I know someone can be relatively permanently damaged during a fight, like with the shadow dragon who drains levels. Not only don't I want my characters running around scared, I also don't want them level-drained to death, so yeah, negative plane protection on as many as I can get. But for the very next battle against the shade lord, I won't buff. The worst that can happen there is you get your strength drained, but that comes back relatively quickly. Same thing with a mummy or a otyug (sp?) that causes disease - the effects aren't permanent and they wear off quickly, so I don't care.

I guess it comes down to the question - if I don't buff is there a significant chance that I will have to cast PW: Reload?

 

^Then should we all be hard-core, never allow ourselves a load chance, if a NPC is killed permanently (this happens so frequently on insane), too pity, get another, new NPC.

This is so heartless and personally speaking I always reload when a NPC is frozen solid, burned/electrocuted to ash, smashed into tiny pieces, drained into nothingness, disintegrated into dust, or petrified and then shattered etc.

 

No, of course we shouldn't all be like that, and I'm not like that either. In fact, I don't consider myself a hard-core player at all. I'm saying that I don't buff if I think I can win the battle without buffs, which I'm confident I won't need in most cases. I also reload whenever someone dies - and I usually do so even if the death isn't a permanent death. Even if someone just dies (picture grayed out) and can be resurrected, I still normally reload, because unless there's a temple handy somewhere I'm not lugging all the guy's stuff around and be down a party member to boot.

For example, say I'm going through Firkraag's dungeon, and one of my characters gets killed by a golem. I'll be damned if I'm hauling that guy's ass all the way back to town to get him resurrected. I'm much more like to just reload the game. So I'm not really hard core, I'm just of the belief that I can survive most battles without buffs.