My playthru of TOEE/Co8

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Yeah I've noted that. It is supposed to though according to tabletop rules - AND grant the same benefits to anyone who stays inside the circle - I tried leap-frogging her and Elmo once but it didn't work and they both ran away. So essentially it's another useless high-level spell - kind of. After casting Remove Fear on the people who were the target of Circle they seemed to have ongoing protection. I could for instance slip them inside the fear aura to heal my Ranger. But I probably would have been better off finding or making a bunch of Protection from Evil scrolls - or memorized more Prot from Evil spells instead of Remove Fear and let Riana: rogue2/bard9 handle the Remove Fear casting since I gave that spell to her early on with the assumption that the cleric could Remove Fear the bard and then the bard could do anyone else who needed it. In the end though all I needed was my Ranger protected - and to remember to give him one of the minor Protection from Fire rings. After changing his alignment to NG he was able to destroy the Balor with Scather without worrying about the bug. I ended up keeping Elmo back to deal with the Summon he casts early on. I also gave the other Elemental gems to Serena rogue3/sorc8 so that she could use the demon summoning effects to help out. Though the demons summoned generally proved more of a danger to my own party than the enemy as the various summons seem more or less immune to each other. On my winning run the Balor summoned a cloud of Quasits and Elmo made short work of them, managing to kill three of them in a single round thanks to his Great Cleave feat. I had to run several casters out of the cloud though and a few took minor damage.

 

Well I did manage finally to defeat the Balor. I ended up waiting for Scather to show up thanks to the rescue of Prince Thrommel. I had to Console change Garret's alignment from CG to NG to avoid the bug I've heard happens with Scather combined with the Balor's Fire Shield retaliation. Greater Heroism potion on Garret, Heroism on Elmo, bard buffs, Protection from Evil on them both, and Circle of Protection from Evil on Meleny and Kuanyin reinforced with Remove Fear - kind of a dumb way to do that since it's basically two high level spells to get the effects of L1 Protection from Evil. Additionally armed them both with Lesser Rings of Fire Resistance. In the end Elmo ended up staying back to help deal with the Balor's summon and everybody else focused on the Fire Elementals and keeping the two warriors alive. It took a few tries but finally went off without a hitch.

I DID figure out that the reason I couldn't get the Console Command for changing alignment to work was because I was spelling part of the command wrong. Make sure to spell it right next time.

 

Ok, a quick test with Fruella now that I know how to actually spell the change alignment console command - and it seems that none of the commands work on NPCs. Reinforced since I've tried using different commands on them like trying to change their races. You can grant them XP and not much else. I was trying to find a companion who has a high Wis that I could multiclass into Cleric, specifically a female companion, but so far Meleny is the only one, and I don't think you want to gimp her by having her be Druid1/Cleric+ and still permanently locked into her Druid Armor limitation and probably her Druidic Weapon limitation. Because of her low strength you really don't want her anywhere near melee combat despite the fact that you'll never be able to get her any of the Point Blank and Precise Shot feats while pushing her into crafting everything. I haven't tried the supposed option of having a half-orc in the party to convince one of the St Cuthbert clerics into joining the party. So my next run looks like having a PC cleric along with what-ever PCs I really want as part of my team. Unsure if Fruella is worth taking instead of Elmo. She's cranky and her AI seems to insist on taking over nearly all NPC chatter lines. But her "cleaver" that is actually a dwarven war-axe with the increased crit range that counts as a hand-axe could make her pretty deadly, especially if you pushed her into two-weapon fighting and gave her the other cleaver you can get off a female bugbear. Especially since they all count as Masterwork and there-for can be enchanted. Imagine her with +3 holy cleavers with each one having an additional elemental enchantment? O.O That could be worth putting up with her strident voice. Oddly enough despite her stats and her supposed background as a St Cuthbert worshiper the only classes she cannot multiclass into are Cleric, Monk, and Paladin. Of course the latter two are because she is true neutral, but that should not prevent her from being a Cleric in 3.5. So I wonder what is buggered up on that. As they say "curiouser and curiouser." One could theoretically let her take 4 levels if Fighter to take weapon spec hand-axe then multiclass her into Ranger with her high physical stats and Wisdom - she'd get the two-weapon fighting feats slower, but once she got them she'd be deadly - of course the only real reason to do that is to get a Ranger into the group - you could get the two-weapon fighting feats faster as a Fighter. I was also contemplating transforming her into a Barbarian, I wonder how that would work with her.

Now that I've found the Gladiator armor I'm trying to imagine building a team around as many female characters wearing it as possible. Frustrating that there isn't something similar you could do with Meleny. Best I could find for her was the Barbarian Armor which pushes her strength limits to the max pretty much all by itself. Could put her in lighter armor but nothing nearly as cute/sexy. This BTW is my brand of crazy: I want to find new and interesting ways to build parties using the stock NPCs. Especially since they tend to give them much better ability scores than my traditional Point Buy PCs. I've never much liked the vagaries of the random roll method, I've almost always ended up with crappy characters - and often been forced to play characters that should never had made competent farmers let alone adventurers.

And of course meanwhile I have yet to actually FINISH the module with this current group. I now have the Golden Skull and all of the Elemental Gems AND the various items needed for Pishella to destroy the skull, just need to take them to her now, then race through the end-game.

 

Ok, finally got around to finishing it. I had to take a break to work on the game I am running and then couldn't quite convince myself to finish up. After clearing everything except Zuggtmoy I decided to try that fight. Without a large number of holy weapons though the fight proved far too difficult, even when most of my guys had weapons with at least one and sometimes two elemental damage types. So I thought I'd level my party one more time: up to L12 where we'd get new feats and I could have my Monk4/Cleric take craft arms and armor. After wasting a rather large amount of time trying to get normal XP from random encounters and barely getting dozens per when I needed something like 3K minimum, I decided to console give the XP. That's when I discovered another problem. I didn't know that you can only craft Holy weapons if you are a cleric of 7th level with the GOOD domain, and my PC did not have that domain. How frustrating. Time to come up with an alternate plan then. So I went back to Hommlet, kicked Elmo from the party, logged out, changed my party composition ratios to allow an additional PC, created a female dwarf Moradin cleric with the frigging Good domain, gave her tons of xp so she could get the crafting feats, and went to town crafting holy weapons for everybody. Then I logged out, changed the ratios again, picked up Elmo and Meleny who had been swapped around for room for the new cleric, and began my final run at Zuggtmoy.

Even with everybody having a Holy weapon it was still a rough fight. I finally had to go back to town and have the cleric memorize nothing but Prot from Evil for the entire level of spells it's on. That way I could cast protection on everybody but Tylwyth and Serena - my two sorcerers - and Circle of Protection on them just for the added defense.

With every buff I could think of, it was still a darned tough fight. I had to run it a few times. One time she summoned 3 Vrocks and they tore my group up badly before she started with her fungal summons. After about half a dozen tries I finally got her though. Zuggtmoy went down just and Tylwyth collapsed from the barrage of shrooms, but I got people over to heal her before she died - only casualty was Garret's dog. Game finally completed.

 

Yeah I can't see how that's an L10 fight. All the holy weapons you find in the game are two-handed except for the sword from Meleny's dad - with the couple that are one-handed with the proper Exotic Weapon feat. I still don't know if there even IS a feat for the Moradin's Soul heavy hammer as a one-hander - any ideas? So with my party of Dex-based characters it was nigh impossible without cheating. I mean going from a +7 or +8 dex bonus on a finesse weapon to a +0 to +2 bonus for a strength weapon is awful. I also figured out that I'd only had the base Co8 mod installed so I found and installed the Co8 New Content mod before coming back for this and the contents from my Extraplanar Box was lost again - seemingly permanently. I had that problem before but I was able to restore it by using a saved file from archives I was making, but I forgot what files you need exactly. And the box is where I was storing all the cool holy weapons nobody could use effectively. I could have console commanded them back, but if I gotta cheat to do that may as well just make a cleric and level her. I had to do the fight about six times even with this bit of cheating for the Holy Weapons. I suspect they basically expected people to take the easy way out and not fight her. You basically have to build a group of muscle-bound two-handed weapon-using brutes and make sure your casters take Spell Penetration and Greater Penetration in the hopes of getting something through sometimes. Her summoned demons all had higher SR than she did so there was never even a point to using my casters on them. Tylwyth and Serena just kept hitting her with Magic Missile over and over because at least one was certain to get through each time.

I've started a new group - with a properly set-up cleric who now uses hammers. I decided to nab Pishella to be the party Wizard/crafter but I'm wondering if there is a way to alter her sorcerer spells without leveling her in sorcerer again. I'm thinking of swapping Charm Person for Identify. Let her keep her singleton Magic Missile for backups. I picked up Meleny and Pishella - and Elmo just for the moathouse maybe - though I really need a tanky character. I am considering restarting and building some sort of tanky female fighter who can handle one of the huge holy weapons - and wear a scale armor bikini.