Harder Drizzt

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Anyone remember Drizzt in the original BG? He was craziiiiiii! You needed a nice little tactic to defeat him, but most people would call it, a tactic to hold him at bay, because if you went toe to toe with the famous drow, you wouldn't stand a chance.

Is there a mod or something out there that enables him to regain this level of feriocity because it isn't really that entertaining that you can easily defeat one of the most known charcters along the Sword Coast in a few seconds

 

One of the mods I have says that it improves Drizzt an his co, it is Tactics or Improved Battles (more likely) I am away from my personal computer right now so I can not check, sorry.

 

The reason you can defeat him now is that when you met him in BG1 he was about lvl 12 and you were about lvl 6.

When you meet him after the underdark you and your party are all lvl 16-18, he is not...bang one dead Drow-boy.

Wouldn't it be great though if there was a plot involving helping the D man though? Especially if it involved Dridders. I miss Dridders!

 

Could someone (ie. fel) clarify what exactly is the deal with drizzt in bg1? If he's just lvl 12, how come only critical hits hit him...

 

He's level 16, IIRC, and his toughness is because BioWare gave him monster stats. For starters, he has a Base AC of -10!!! That's the lowest AC actually possible in-game, and most characters start with a Base AC of +10. Couple that with 98% MR, and it's obvious that the devs didn't really want you to kill him. Which is why I take great pleasure in doing so...

 

In addition to what Mags said about Drizzt having an extreme AC and uber MR, critical hits *always* hit. He wasn't intended to be killable, but did Bioware think players wouldn't lower the path finding nodes, surround him with dropped-from-the-party NPCs and use someone with the boots 'o speed as bait?

 

Oi but in BG he was INSANE. Don't take levels into account here, just look at the damage he does and the way he acts in BG compared to BGII. He's ALOT crazier in the original. C'mon, you've gotta notice ...

 

Exuse my inability to calculate this myself, but what's his AC with all items equiped?
Or maybe a more direct question, is it possible (fully buffed, +3 weapon, grandmastery yada yada yada) to hit him without a critical.

 

It is a bit pointless not taking levels into account when comparing BG and BGII- the difference in power is obviously far greater than you seem to believe. Through use of NI, it appears that Drizzt is the same in both games. In other words, he hase a base AC of -10 and 98% magic resistance when you meet him the second time as well. You just didn't find him nearly as powerful as (if you play anything like me) you have an entire party higher level than him, your own ACs and THAC0s are much lower than in BG and you have rather powerful magical back-up. Chances are, you'll even have HLAs.

He only has a strength of 13 and 92 hit points, but his base THAC0 is a reasonable 0 (hence why he hit you all the time in BG), he has 30% resistance to physical attacks and he is blessed with 10 attacks!

 

I seem to recall (memory of about 6 years back...) killing him by shooting him from across a lake, took a while but no real biggy!

 

@ Chelsea: like this?

 

Actually, there are a few pretty big differences between BG1 Drizzt and BG2 Drizzt. In BG1, Drizzt got 10 attacks a round and had a 30 point damage bonus. Neither of those bonuses exist in BG2's Drizzt.

 

Yes, it's ridiculous. But they didn't want players wasting their time trying to kill him, since he was supposed to be unkillable. So to quash all hope of that, they made him uber to the point that he could rip through an actual Drizzt in two seconds. Now me, if I came across someone who could destroy my best tanks like that, I would keep a wide berth. But apparently, some just took it as a challenge in figuring out how to exploit the game engine to kill him. Given that, and how many players latched onto those strategies to get his items, I'm not surprised they made him more killable in BG2.

 

And still makers wanted it to be so that you had killed him in BG1, judging from the fact that Drizzt says so...

 

If they really wanted to make him unkillable in bg1, then they could've done that, just like Gorion in Candlekeep. They could've just give him a 100% damage resistance or something.

You can kill Drizzt with a lvl 2 character.

Since you need a lot of cheese to beat him, the only quoestion is which one is the most cheesiest way: setting up the pathnodes, summoning huge amounts of monsters, or going on an all-night long backstabbing spree.

Either way I'm always having great fun backstabbing him to death right in the beginning, with a low-lvl character.

IMO they just wanted to make his killing as hard as it could be without being impossible. There is always the option to play a murderous psychopath, or an uncurable drow/Drizzt-hater, so it was nice of them to implement him in the game as a killable npc.

 

He only says that if you import a character with Drizzt equipment on them. I've only very rarely had him say that to me.

@I-T:
I suspect they just didn't want to make it as cheesy as Gorion et al. Those are put in because they're absolutely necessary to continuing the game. Gorion gets you out of Candlekeep (no other way), and you have to go to jail in Chapter 6 to get out again (Gatewarden). Drizzt isn't necessary to the plot, and thus they didn't use the insta-kill. But I do believe they meant to make him unbeatable. Because even with a character with a THAC0 of 9 or less, you still cannot hit him on anything less than a critical, despite having an AC of only -10. (I tried to go melee against him with my uber-killer, a dualled Thief15/Fighter17, with unfortunate results.) There's no way to legitimately kill him, and I'll bet they just didn't count on people finding other ways to do so. Programmers aren't omniscient.

 

you mean ur "uber killer" couldnt even hit him? cuz if his base ac is -10, shouldnt his ac with equipment be -21?

 

Well, his chainmail wouldn't do squat with an already lower base AC. The lowest it could possibly go would be -18 with the Defender and a DEX of 25; more likely -16 or worse with a DEX of 18 or less. My character had a base THAC0 of 4, with bonuses from items like Drizzt's other scimitar (picked off of him) and the Gauntlets of Extraordinary Expertise. Even given a -18 AC, she still should have been able to hit him on a 19. She couldn't.

 

Drew ... EXACTLY!!! The number of attacks per round plus the extra damage! That's what I was talking about! Can you get that exact thing back in BGII?

 

It should be, but based on Fel's response, evidently not. If his AC is -10, any character with a THAC0 of 9 or less should be able to hit him without rolling a critical.

This certainly makes it look like his AC is significantly lower than -10. (How many times did you go through the game to get a T15/F17? I've never done the math, but given how late a 6-member party reaches the 161,000 XP cap, I'd say there's only a little over 1 million XP available in the whole game.)

There must be some other game mechanic other than a straight THAC0 calculation at work here. Taking your example above, your character would have a really low THAC0. As a level 17 fighter, that means his base THAC0 was 4. Presumably, he was at least speciailized in large swords, so that would take it to 3. The +3 on Drizzit's weapons would take it to 0. And the gauntlets of weapons expertise would take it to -1 (and it's even lower if you got grandmastery in large swords).

Still, with a conservative estimate of a -1 THAC0, that would mean that his AC would have to be -21 or lower to require a critical hit to hit him. Since that should be impossible, there must be something else the programmers are doing than calculating your chance to hit based on your THAC0. That or -10 is not the lowest AC that occurs in the game.