My playthru of TOEE/Co8

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I should probably note right out front that there will be spoilers in here?

Ok, so this wasn't the first time I started the game. I picked it up for the first time a bit after release with all the horrid bugs. I ran into Zaxis the bard on my first run up to Emridy Meadows and he picked up ALL of the skeleton trash and complained and complained about it. I GAVE him items like a bow so he'd have ranged capability and he sold that, but the trash he STOLE from me he wouldn't sell. I eventually got so frustrated I quit playing.

So recently I got a wild bug in my bum and wanted to play again. I'd collected a new copy of the game through GoG along with a large package D&D deal they did a few years ago. So I was really hoping somebody had done some updates, which eventually lead me here. And again I have to say thank you so much for all this work.

So after starting a new party I was chasing some of the micro-quests in Hommlet and reading through the GameBanshee walkthru when I discovered that Meleny is a marriageable character. And she's a druid, which irregardless of how the game might mess them up a bit is a favorite class. And I was totally captivated by her voice and her spunky attitude so I really wanted to marry her and add her to my party, but with my 8 charisma on my single male character it wasn't happening any time soon. I had used the point-buy system to reproduce the standard array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 because that's the way I prefer to play. And my male MC was a ranger. I could have Console Commanded his Cha to 16, but I hadn't quite figured that out and my party was now 4th level after a lot of goofing around and adding an L1 druid when I already had an L4 Druid wasn't very useful. So I decided to create a new party.

So the first thing was thinking about my new male lead MC. What class? If I was going to build him with a 16+ charisma so I could marry Meleny asap the best choices would be Bard, Paladin or Sorcerer. I love bards but Zaxis is hard to turn down for me so that was covered once I found him. Paladin marrying a druid would be interesting, but I've read that there are quite a few problems with having a Pali in the party. And I didn't want my male lead MC being a Sorcerer with their lousy hp, though I might actually try that next time and keep Meleny close by to protect me.

I sometimes like to pretend I'm going to be a writer and come up with plot ideas. One of my recent ideas is about a young male half-elf who ends up being picked up and trained by a professional monster hunter sort of like the Witcher's. He ends up building this odd little crew of adventurer girls he's rescued who decide to join his team as a thank-you for their rescue. One is an elf Pathfinder-style fey-blooded Sorceress, one is a tiefling sohei-styled eastern cleric, and the third is a 4E-styled fox hengeyokai rogue. I couldn't reproduce those in this game, but I could come up with other ideas. So I was going to adapt my base character to TOEE. And he's basically a ranger with some ninja tricks up his sleeve from his Monster Hunter training. So Ranger. . . And with a high charisma. . . Obviously the standard array wasn't going to work well for this. So I decided to "cheat" my standard build and roll the MC, and make sure he could start with a 16 charisma without being utterly gimped.

If I remember right in the original game the max party size was seven, so I decided to drop the PC druid from my original party lineup and let Meleny fill that slot. Then I rebuilt a couple of the characters from my last group. I kept my elf sorceress because there was nothing really wrong with her as is. I had decided to try a monk/cleric multi with my previous run and determined to take 4 levels of monk before switching to get the full monk BAB and as many monk combat specials as I could - the idea was to have a FAST character that could tumble around the field dishing out flurries and healing as needed. But this time I decided to start with a level of cleric, then multi into monk for four levels before going back to cleric, that way I'd have some healing in the party until I got Meleny - who I planned to keep mainly as party healer. I also rebuilt my halfling rogue mainly so I could change out her portrait. Though to be honest there could be some better spunky halfling/rogue sorts of portraits in the new pack.

So my rolled up MC ranger ended up being
Str15
Dex17
Con13
Int12
Wis14
Cha16

Obviously the second highest roll being in Cha is a waste for a ranger, but it allowed me to do what I wanted with marrying Meleny early on so I was good with it. Also, I intended him to mainly be a melee guy, so the high dex could have been swapped with str and perhaps been slightly better, but the higher dex with the lighter armor is more survivable, especially at the lower levels, and I figured there would be +str items later.

So my starting party is:

Garret: half-elf ranger melee specialist
Eshu: halfling rogue - and party face with decent Cha and high levels of appraise and diplomacy
Kuanyin: half-elf cleric/monk
Tylwyth Teg: Elf Sorceress. She's kind of the back up face with her high Cha, bluff, and +5 intimidate with her Arcane Tattoo.

So after reaching Hommlet I chased around local quests including all the ones I needed to resolve to marry Meleny and managed to complete that just as my main party reached L2, with Meleny around 990xp behind the rest, not too bad. I decided to grab Elmo because being a character light and with two wimpy healers I'd need a tank. I actually picked him up somewhere in the midst of all the pre-quests, just before talking to his papa about letting the tailor into the militia which helped that immensely and got me the tailors masterwork repeating crossbow - which I still have no idea what to do with. I don't have anybody who is a designated archer who has a feat to spare for an exotic weapon. Maybe I'll have Zaxis pick it up later since I think he starts with Point Blank and Precise shot. I believe the mod overrides his auto-leveling so I can keep him pure bard and make him the archer/bard/arcanist utility character. I am also beginning to contemplate if I want to have my Sorceress start taking the magic-item crafting feats, but I need to read up on how that works.

So with Meleny and Elmo in tow I did a few runs to the Moathouse and Emridy Meadows to clear some low-level trash and hopefully find Zaxis - which I did. Time for a full-on assault of the Moathouse. My MC ranger is going dual weapon using the +1 holy sword and swapping between shortsword and light mace depending on enemies. I managed to get the Elven chain from under the hill giant and bear at Emridy with my halfling rogue so he's pretty well geared up. And of course Elmo and all his magic gear and 4 levels of Fighter (and ranger?) is a beast. It's just a matter of my three-person healing team to keep them alive long enough to put down our foes. And yes, we cannot forget, that Elmo has cleave. I make best use of that I can.

It took a few runs, and one bad attempt at the gnolls, before I reached the bottom and the fight with Lareth. Lesson learned on the Gnolls is it's best to come in through the southern entrance because you can hand-pick each characters position before getting a PC close enough to the gnoll captain to trigger the convo and the fight if you chose to fight them. I did, because paying a bunch of ornery battle-hungry gnolls to go out and massacre innocents seems to be just wrong.

So the Lareth battle. I tried to use my rogue to lure some of Lareth's group down into the hallway instead of letting them bottle me in the entrance to their area, that kind of half-arsed worked until Meleny's wolf got excited and being unwilling to just sacrifice it I followed it along and managed to pull part of the room into the hallway where we were more or less evenly bottled up in a small area and things generally went in my favor with no major injuries. This let us clean up nearly all of their melee troops so the room itself had Lareth and the various archers who now had no bodyguards left. Despite this the battle still got dicey with all of Lareth's disabling spells and I came close to losing a few people including Elmo but Zaxis managed to avoid getting disabled and kept key people alive until Meleny and my cleric/monk could take over the healing. I had Meleny take Produce Flame and Heat Metal (and Point Blank for her touch attacks) during her level-ups on the way (and she reached L3 just before this fight), so she spent an early part of the fight tossing out her spells. Heat Metal on the archer Lt and her wolf harassing him worked nicely - was slowly cooking alive and being chased all around the room by the wolf - which I believe prevented him from using his ranger multi-shot - then she started using Produce Flame to kill off the minor archers and she honestly contributed to our success very nicely. Good job Meleny!

Her daddy's Holy Sword also made short work of Lareth's summoned Demonic Giant Spiders when I refused his surrender.

I should also mention that I got Elmo in Lareth's face early on and Lareth's every attempt to disable him pretty much failed. Meanwhile the rest of the party focused on all those unprotected archers. The spiders came close to killing my halfling rogue but I managed to save her. Finishing the fight leveled up Elmo. We did have to burn some scrolls and potions to keep people alive as healing was getting in short supply by the end, but we didn't lose anyone so that was ok.

My poor rogue had been paralyzed by Lareth so thanks to Meleny's Lesser Restorations we got her back up and running - paralyze reduces your strength to -8 it seems - so LOTS of Lesser Restorations were in order.

Afterwards I grabbed all the loot, tossed it into the Extraplanar Chest, and went off to the Giant Crayfish lair to rest since I read that this was a fairly safe room to rest in inside the dungeon itself. My previous run kind of ended when I made the mistake of walking back out the front door nearly dead after the Lareth battle and ran into the ambush, so I knew that I had two choices: sneak out the back door, or find a place to rest where I could hopefully handle one last fight - and more importantly - more loot! So we brazenly went right out the front and had fun with that fight.

Entertainingly I'd done the drinking contest earlier so I'd already stolen Kobort's gear once, and although I sold it to the blacksmith to keep it out of the hands of the traitorous traders, he had it all back again so I got to loot him again.

And finishing that fight leveled my MCs to L4, not bad.

So now my ranger MC is using the Holy Sword and Lareth's Club of Striking.

We went back to town and sold loot, but before reporting on the completion of the Moathouse I decided to go back to Emridy and collect the Terjon loot. The skeleton priest and his three longspear bodyguards came as a major surprise the first time they sprung, but the new party was ready for them.

Now just mopping up a few last town quests before moving on to Nulb.

 

If you want to put something in spoilers to avoid giving away clues and story to people who haven’t done that quest yet, you can use the [ Spoiler ] [ / spoiler ] tags to mark that text, e.g.

Spoiler

blalblabla

 

I'm afraid that pretty much my entire "story" is going to be pretty much spoilers of one sort or another. This isn't intended as a GameBanshee "here's how you do this part of the game" kind of walkthru, it's going to be more of a "here's my story about it" kind of thing. But I can also see that story-wise it's not very detailed. I need to work on that. Thanks for the heads up though.

 

Hmmm, well I've finished the Imeryds Run quest where you pretty much simultaneously have to fight a giant frog and his KING FROG partner while also fighting a Sea Hag and her lizard man cohorts attacking from the opposite side. Frogs appear to love the taste of druid, because they insisted over every single attempt to fight them on them going after Meleny with single-minded purpose. So after doing a bit of running around taking on random encounters and a bar-fight in Nulb and managing to convince a guard at the TOEE guardhouse that I'm friends with so-and-so and then chat with the Earth Priest who sends me off to kill a giant ogre-cook-eating snake and cleaning some trash mobs along the way - and leveling everybody up one level - I went back. Since the enemy archers are all set on "attack the casters" I decided to turn the tables and have all of my casters and their missile weapons and other guys with missile weapons and poor melee skills focus on doing the same to their casters via "ready vs spellcasting" while my main melee guys work on killing the nearby melee troops. I set up some defensive casts in advance and Bardic Courage, should have done more though. Sadly and maddeningly my druid's attempt to summon an additional wolf who would not have too much trouble fighting in the close quarters compared to her L2 or L3 summon - doesn't go through transits it seems. Things started off well but then one of the enemy casters got off a fireball that auto-killed my Sorceress and Zaxis and my ranger and druid wolves and screwed everybody else up.

So on the reset, I'm back in Nulb, and on the way to the TOEE I run into a group of adventurers who think we're bandits. And they explain they are heading towards a dungeon they heard about that includes a giant demon statue with huge gems for eyes: which is the picture on the cover of the original DMG. And I'm contemplating fighting them for their gear, even though their casters are all buffed up during the convo - why can't I cheat like that? I think to myself. But I'm playing a NG base party and robbing fellow adventurers would be just wrong. So as much as I really really want to loot these guys, I'm going to pass. I think. . .

 

Ok, so somewhere along the line that last post lost all coherence. I started talking about the Imeryds Run fishing quest and then slipped into the Temple Guardhouse fight.

So after the level up of my full crew, I went back to Imeryds Run. When the giant frogs went after Meleny she summoned a Thoqqua - which turned out to be some kind of giant snake - and a black bear to provide some interference for her, and they along with most of the rest of my crew managed to kill off the two giant frogs before Meleny could be killed. Meanwhile, Serena the gypsy slave I gave a level of Sorcerer on her last level up and she kept charm person going on lizard men, which kept the Sea Hag busy killing her own minions until I could turn and deal with her. With that part of the fight won it was time to go giant gar hunting, where I discovered one last lizard man who had decided to stay home when everybody else ran off to fight, so he didn't last long, and nor did the gar.

After that I decided to try taking on the Temple Guard House, but the fight is an unbelievable whore. First off you start off in convo with the captain while his casters cast all their defensive spells. Then, while you are trying to organize your party order and get your front-line troops into the front lines and your rear-line troops into the rear lines, you get all sorts of screwed over. The room is L shaped, with a "Witch" and three crossbowmen to your right, and a similar group to the front. Also in front are a trio of infantry where one will try to flank you to the left and another infantry on your near right just inside the door. Additionally there are stairs leading upwards in the back of the room with a Lt guarding the bottom and several bowmen at the top, and the Captain and another Lt and a mage towards the back just behind the first rank of infantry. The "witches" seem to be evil clerics based on their spells. Or perhaps they are an NPC class with several necromantic/cleric type spells - they kept raising dead infantry as zombies amongst other necromantic-type attacks. The crossbowmen and archers are all set on "ready for spellcasting" and then they destroy your casters one at a time.

So after trying it several times I decided to go in loaded for bear. I cast all my buffs before going in, trying to find ways to mitigate the destructiveness of the enemies. My plan was to let my two wolves and Elmo and Garret do most of the melee fighting and having Zaxis with his new +2 longsword and elven shield take on the guy to the immediate right. This worked out fairly well at first but then a fireball killed off several party members and the wolves and left the rest of the party nearly dead as well - so game reset. I tried it a few more times but was just getting hammered, especially when somebody managed to get some mojo on Elmo that left him totally paralyzed and being mauled by the zombie of the guard he'd killed JUST before being paralyzed. I had nothing that could break him free which pretty much sucked. I did manage to have a small team consisting mainly of Zaxis and Kaunyin with a little help from others clear the right side of the room out, but with Elmo permanently out of the fight I was in really bad shape and eventually all my PCs and Elmo and the wolves were out cold, dead, or dying and the three remaining people were not going to be able to pull it off - so reset. Time to go try to farm some more xp. After making more of a nuisance of myself running around the Earth Temple and clearing various mobs I need around 3k experience to level up my mains again. But I was pretty beat up by this point, and running low on spells, so it was time to run away and do some RnR.

And as much as I REALLY wanted to see what loot was on the fellow adventuring party, I decided to follow my NG alignment and let them pass on to their adventure.

My MCs are all L5 with Elmo and Zaxis at L6 and Meleny and Serena at L5 with Serena lagging the most.

 

I decided to do some leveling up before going back and Improved Initiative for several characters like my rogues was in the game plan. I also realized that you can break the enemy buffing by quick-ending the convo, which I haven't tried yet. I did buff the crap out of my party before going in last time, but it wasn't quite enough. I had far too many attack-roll misses. I couldn't tell what was going on with the "ready vs cast" when I tried it, I think I have a better handle on it now. So my basic plan is buff like mad before going in, shut down the convo as fast as possible, then set everybody who isn't melee-based on "ready vs cast" and destroy THEIR casters before they get to do so much damage and while they are trying to cast all of their buffs. I figure I'll try to level everybody up to L6 and try that. What was also frustrating is that I had the druid do a summon before going in, and the summon didn't come in with us, so spell wasted. My last run I opted to have her replace most of her summons with buffs like barkskin and magic fang and wind wall.

--

I am about to level Meleny to L6, thinking I'll have her take Craft Wondrous Items because she has access to all the physical buffs AND Owl's Wisdom. Then I have to wonder if waiting to L9 to have Zaxis take the same feat so he can craft Charisma-buff items is a good idea. Do I have my Sorceress take Magic Arms and Armor at L9 and enchant some weapons and armor for the harder to work classes like the Druid? Having Elmo in the party got me a Masterwork Repeating Crossbow which I have Zaxis using, so is it worth a feat and a Sorcerer's spell slot to have that enchanted?

 

I think what your groups needs are persistent effect crowd control spells like Stinking Cloud, which helps you to control the battlefield.

You should leave the crafting to Meleny and other Vancian casters, and you should take Craft Magical Arms and Armor first.

 

I know you can upgrade a fair amount of already-present weapons and armor thanks to a glitch, but is that more useful than the ability buffs like the strength and dex and wisdom boost items? I had her pump out Gauntlets of Ogre Power for my ranger and several sets of +2 dex gloves and a couple +2 wisdom amulets. And a gloves of healing for herself as an additional CLW - I can imagine perhaps making several of those for her and just having her swap them out as they are used up. I figured out and then forgot how to have the Monk/Cleric swap spells for cures. How do I do that again? I've been missing some of the radial menu choices because of inattention mainly. Also having her pump out Natural Armor amulets for those who most need them. And looking at other items she can craft.

--

Emrydy Meadows is now cleared. I had Meleny summon a bunch of critters including a constrictor and a black bear, they took the initial brunt of the brown bear and died, my ranger's hound was the next target and nearly died but not quite. We pelted the bear with ranged attacks at first, but then the giant appeared and I staged a fighting retreat while the giant focused on chasing Elmo, who came out with minimal damage after the beating I was able to give the giant with all of my ranged attacks. I tried to use Entangle in the hopes of containing them both, though I probably should have layered it better as the giant escaped. But it went well enough as the giant fell long before Elmo was any real danger. And the various summons and the ranger and druid companions killed the brown bear. Now to see what the Hommlet Smythe has to say.

--

Hm, I'm considering going backwards to an earlier save before people reached L6 so I can redo the feats I took: giving Zaxis Wondrous Items so he can make charisma cloaks for himself and for my two sorceresses would be a decent help - especially since he gets L5 spells before his Cha reaches 15 so he gets Haste and can't cast it. Having my Sorceress take Craft Magic arms and armor may help too if it lets me upgrade some weapons and stuff. I was considering having Serena take it at L6 even though she's got 3 levels of rogue to slow down her effective caster level. I'm not seeing the feat that lets a multiclassed caster recover some of their lost power by giving them a slight increase in caster level for the spells they can cast. Is it in there?

 

I'd definitely consider it. I wouldn't recommend giving your sorceresses Craft Magical Arms and Armor since Meleny can do everything they can without forcing you to take specific spells. Since we're looking at a soft cap of level 10 (for the main campaign), your sorceresses will need to choose their spells very carefully.

As for Craft Wondrous Items, if you plan to continue doing Co8 content you can leave that for 9 I guess. Note that as your caster level increases you get to make more powerful items. You can make +6 dex/str/etc items at around caster level 8, for example. Sadly, you can't upgrade your old +2s to +6s.

I don't think ToEE has Practiced Spellcaster (the feat you mentioned that raises caster level).

 

Is it really better to have the Craft Arms and Armor rather than Wondrous Items right away? I know I'm debating with Zaxis on it because at L7 he gets a chance at Haste but he can't cast it because his charisma is too low or something. He got 2 new spells and couldn't cast any of them because he had no slots. I just did a quick test. I gave him a cloak of charisma+2 and he gained a spell slot for the level where he gets Haste, so his Charisma is too low without the cloak to boost it. Of course he could probably get away with casting Eagle's Splendor on himself instead for the time being and hoping he gets a found cloak pretty soon.

 

Generally yes. Think about it this way, Craft Magical Arms and Armor increases your base performance (by significantly increasing your base damage output and survivability). On the other hand, the gear you get from Craft Wondrous Items act more like multipliers. The higher the base damage, the stronger the multiplier.

In your particular case though, I don't think getting Craft Wondrous Items on Meleny would help Zaxis since druids can't cast Eagle's Splendor anyway. I also wouldn't give Craft Magical Arms and Armor to Zaxis and your sorceresses since they likely lack many of the spells required for several of the better enhancements. Craft Wondrous Items on your non-Meleny casters seems like an OK investment though, given your situation with Zaxis.

 

That actually seems backwards, Meleny can craft the ability boosting items for everything except Int and Cha (so no help for Zaxis and the Sorcs on Cha, but it helps everybody else in my party, gloves of dex for instance with the Sorcs and their touch spells) as well and things like Amulets of Nat armor and so on. I looked at it with her and her ability to craft Wondrous Items looked very strong, where-as I'm guessing she doesn't have many of the spells needed for the specialty damage bonuses and stuff - beyond maybe fire. My Monk4/Cleric1+ isn't going to be an effective crafter because she'll probably never get the most important spells or have the crafter level needed - but maybe I'm entirely wrong about that? With Zaxis I was wondering if I should have him take Wondrous Items solely so he can make Cha cloaks for himself and my two sorceresses (I'm converting Serena into Rogue/Sorc since she has a charisma of 15, which is actually higher than Zaxis' 14.) Zaxis NEEDS the cloak in order to progress past L6 as a bard-caster - if he doesn't take it I HAVE to console command give him one or he won't be able to cast Haste for instance for a very long time. Right now I'm more wondering if the ability boosts that will increase my casters performance and increase my warriors chance to hit and so on aren't the better choice over increasing a Masterwork weapon to a +1, which is about all I can afford or otherwise do. For instance the Gauntlets of Ogre Power are a better choice for my (two weapon) ranger than increasing his +1 holy sword to +2 - it will cost less and allow him to hit more often and do more damage with BOTH weapons. I understand that there was a cheat that would allow me to turn the +1 holy sword into a +3 for free or something but does that work? And how? Not that I'm really into cheating, but cash is incredibly scarce so most of this expensive crafting stuff is entirely beyond my groups capability anyways. At my last update I was able to craft several gloves of dex+2, two broach of wis+2, an Ogre Gauntlet and I was pretty much broke. I am assuming when you talk about increased base damage output you mean by adding fire damage and stuff to the Crafted Weapons, and I can see how that can help because I've been seeing how massive a bonus the +1 holy sword is. But I'm wondering if any of my casters will be able to cast those damage enhancements. I am sorry if it sounds like I'm arguing, I'm just trying to get a feeling for why AnA makes more sense than WonItem and I'm not quite there yet.

 

I don't have a party wizard at all, my main arcane caster is a sorc and I thought I'd turn Serena into a rogue/sorc as well since her Int is 8 and her cha is 15 which you can raise to 16 on her first level up make her much more useful as a rogue/sorc hybrid - and it kind of fits with her gypsy heritage. I had her take Charm Person and Magic Missile as her first spells and being able to turn peon enemies into allies can really help mess up an enemy force - though if the charmed ally doesn't get killed you don't seem to get to kill or loot them - the one time I tried it Elmo tossed a fit - any idea what the duration is? I suppose I could try to rest on that map until it wears off tho, hadn't thought of that yet. Is crafting with a Monk4/Cleric2+ going to be worth it? You haven't really answered that for me yet.

 

There's a full list of enhancements you can add to weapons/armors around here somewhere, but anyway what makes Craft Magical Arms and Armor special are the weapon enhancements - holy, axiomatic, and the flame/frost/shock burst. Each of those enhancement can give you 1-6 extra physical/appropriate elemental damage (with burst giving an extra 1-10 on a crit IIRC). Meleny has access to all three elemental enhancements with her spells.

That's certainly worth more than an extra +2 to an attribute in most situations.

As I also pointed out, those +2 items are going to be a one-shot deal - you won't be able to upgrade them to a their highest level versions (+6 at around caster level 8) unlike weapons and armor and ultimately you'll have to sell those for a significant loss.

Like I said though, your case is unique because your caster actually needs the stat boost to cast spells, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider your options carefully. At the very least, you should try to minimize the number of lower tier stuff you create (only craft essentials) and save your gold/XP for the stronger stuff. Zaxis will need a charisma-boosting item to cast his spells for example (pre-buffing won't give him extra casts), but for everyone else you could simply pre-buff Eagle's Splendor in combat.

 

I tried Eagles Splender on Zaxis, it does actually let him get the extra spell slots. But it won't let him learn spells higher than his base cha.

So you are suggesting I take AnA now and then WonItem at L9 with Meleny and get the most bang for my buck. I had read that if you have a good Appraise specialist you can actually make money on crafted items, is that not so?

 

With Zaxis being the highest level toon on my entire party it would make some sense to have him waste some of that excess XP on crafting. Or maybe I should just kick his arse out and have Serena go Rogue/Bard? Then I could try for a Wizard NPC.

 

I know you can do that with Scribe Scroll, but I don't think I've ever done that with Craft Magical Arms and Armor/Craft Wondrous Items.

 

So maybe it would make sense to have a sorce take scribe scroll to generate cash?

I could probably take out my last party for a test run on the attribute items to see if you make or lose money by making them and selling them.

Ok so I did a quick test run. After buffing my Appraise specialists Cha with Eagles Splender and the bard Inspire Competence I was getting about 75% of the cost as a sale offer, so no earning there.