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There was a thread I made a year ago when I was new to the forums that explained my situation. [url="http://www.gamebanshee.com/forums/baldurs-gate-ii-shadows-of-amn-9/dragon-help-64902.html?highlight=dragon"]Here it is[/url]. I believe my Assassin was at 13 (which is relatively low considering the Thieve's quick leveling) when I first killed Firky. I lost all but Keldorn in the fight though, and even then, Keldorn was just deadweight because he couldn't hit. Jeez, I was lacking in knowledge of proper English on the forums back when I made that thread .

Oh, and steve_III, you said your Undead Hunter was solo, then you told your party's level...a character is not solo if you have fellow party members.

Firkraag (Spoiler)

There is a very easy way to kill him based on his slow reaction time. Spoiler)
Put most of your party behind him. Then speak to him with the party member facing him. Say that you are leaving. After talking to him attack with the rest of the party. Use Breach and any buffing up first to speed things up. Immediately aftehe has been hit, talk to him again. Repeat until he dies. He won't even get one hit one your party. Of course not the sort of thing a Paladin would do.

I thought Firkragg and the other Red in WK were pushovers. I killed Firkragg with just my Paladin dual wielding Blade of Roses and the Dragon Killer sword-thingy you find in his place and Minsc dual wielding Frostreaver and Stonefire. The rest of the party just plinked at him with ranged attacks to minimal effect every time they tried to cast a spell it was interrupted somehow. The Shadow Dragon gave me a much more difficult time for some reason...

Dragon bane

Firekraag was a bit of a shock first time - the wing buffets really messed up my game plan. then I decided to play clever.
some call anything clever 'cheese', but I think the following solutions are both within the spirit of the game
soluton 1.send a magic eye to find him, move it back to mark the range. lay down a blanket of area effects - if you are lucky, FK fails saving throws and when he tries to heal, it fails.
a bit more 'cheesy' is not to take the chance and to lay down 10-15 cloudkills from the wand - eventually even a healing dragon succumbs.
solution 2.have a thief/thieves lay as many traps as possible a bit in front of the dragon AND a few skull traps. it takes a lot of patience to get enough arranged so as to be lethal, but when you are satisfied - have a missile user or a summoned creature provoke the dragon - the dragon was comes forward and suffers massive damage - often keeling over. if using a summoned creature - use a wizard eye to keep tabs and position the creature - preferably a skeleton (last longer) between the dragon and the traps - you don't want the provoker blowing up.
save/load is a wise precaution.

The Shadow dragon at the temple ruin seems tougher than FK, but traps/wand of cloudkill/uber-buffed PC can finish it off. in a direct fight, you are likely to lose some party members.

Black dragon TOB seemed easier - I used other area of effect spells and web/entangle type stuff to avoid direct confrontation.

I do think that the bug of increasing MR to a lower figure is truly 'cheese' and don't use it. I can't see how one could role-play a situation like that. it's bad enough that the dragons don't notice you setting a massive trap or run from area effects, but that expoit is as unrealistic as the sell-steal money-maker.

Celacena wrote:I do think that the bug of increasing MR to a lower figure is truly 'cheese' and don't use it. I can't see how one could role-play a situation like that. it's bad enough that the dragons don't notice you setting a massive trap or run from area effects, but that expoit is as unrealistic as the sell-steal money-maker.

But considering that it's in the spell description I don't really consider it cheese. In fact some of your suggestions are more cheesy if you ask me. There's just something about the short-sightedness of everything in this game. It's practical, maybe, but is it realistic that a dragon can't see to the end of the room it's in? Magic Resistance should just be considered an attack and require an attack-roll if you ask me. It's overpowered as is, but the fact that it can be used to lower MR is within the rules. Personally, I don't use it until combat has been initiated.

Onkel Bob wrote:But considering that it's in the spell description I don't really consider it cheese. In fact some of your suggestions are more cheesy if you ask me. There's just something about the short-sightedness of everything in this game. It's practical, maybe, but is it realistic that a dragon can't see to the end of the room it's in? Magic Resistance should just be considered an attack and require an attack-roll if you ask me. It's overpowered as is, but the fact that it can be used to lower MR is within the rules. Personally, I don't use it until combat has been initiated.

I didn't notice that the wrap-over was documented - I thought it was a bug that became well-known - if it is in the description, then fair enough - it's not cheese.

there are lots of RPG probs in all computer versions - in PnP you can come up with lots of verbal exchanges that a high CHA should allow you to use to get out of fights etc - and stealing equipment when NPCs are resting springs to mind - round a table, arguments ensue about whether somebody wears their boots of speed when asleep... in computer versions, people never seem in awe despite a CHA of over 20 and a rep of 20. at least the autograph hunters are few and far between.

in defending the dragon in its den solutions - in PnP, one character could sneak in do something lethal and run away - and the dragon would take time to heal so cumulative sneak attacks could drive it away from its horde, which you could plunder without killing it. in fiction, dragons have the option of taking wing if hurt (and revenge on the surrounding countryside!)
you could negotiate with a dragon if your CHA was high enough - such solutions are not possible in BG, so smoking it out like a rat is one way that is left. multiple CKs are the game's rentokil.
I'm not sure that the thief's multiple trap idea is too unfair - but you'd think a dragon would spot somebody setting them.
as for the game - there are so many restrictions that the player faces that I

another 'realism' difficulty is that once you've played the game, unlike PnP you know what's coming - in the old days, walk into a dragon's lair and you get one chance or your character is ash. it is always going to be a compromise unless the computer randomises a bit more. imagine if you got to FK and found he was not in - so you looted his cavern - no reason why the PC shouldn't be allowed to wait until people went off - and why can't thieves remain hidden when they are being naughty? In Thief and Splinter Cell, the sneaky main characters don't usually need to break cover.

I find it difficult deciding what restraints to place on my PC, so I'm a bit of a cheese merchant TBH. I may now add raising MR to acceptable strategies!

I think that a mage being cheesy is fair. A mage (or anything with above a 5-7 INT) would use their abilities the most effective way they could think up. And mages are super intelligent so they would be very dirty players in my opinion. When I played P'n'P I played a mage for years...same one and he was NE and VERY dirty. He wasn't overly evil to the point of being a murderer but was a VERY dirty opportunistic @*$#! On more than one occasion I remember doing some quite unsportsman-like things with my spellcasting. Therefore I don't view laying down a couple of CK as being cheese.

in PnP days my main character was my posting name on here - a CN half-elf multiclassed by the end Mage/Cleric - perhaps with /Thief - most of it was back in 1983-85 and most characters survived by the skin of their teeth - I also had a dwarven level 9 fighter who got blown up from time to time. the party almost didn't bring his body home for raising after we stumbled into a very bad dragon's lair when we were depleted/weakened from various drow encounters.
I think that I re-used the name for a character in the late 80s/early 90s when some friends started up RPG.
being CN was an excuse for whatever selfish behaviour my character wanted to indulge in - I seem to recall that we had a party-member of undiscoverable alignment, who we suspected of being evil, but couldn't pin anything on either. notes to the GM/DM and his 'sucessful'/'failed' responses used to make us suspicious. just as the player wanted.
stealing other member's items was commonplace at that time - "YOUR +2 dagger? rubbish! I bought that off a peasant in the last village - he was using it to clean the hooves of his mule." etc etc

we had a scam going, whenever the party was short of cash - we'd cast a conditional spell on an item of jewellery - such as a ring - the enchantment was that when somebody said, say, 'the wildebeeste are flying past the orange moon' the ring would light up. that was the extent of such enchantments - we'd then sell them saying that we knew they were magic and not cursed, but couldn't guarantee more.
there was a risk that a high level 'identify' could reveal the exact nature, but it was not our fault if our "magic rings" weren't terribly useful, was it?

CN characters were natural flim-flam merchants and their clerics served mischief and misrule. there was no reason not to cause disruption by assassination for such characters, but as a party, we didn't go in for wickedness towards good people, even if we lightened their purses.

after the roastings I have suffered, dragons are fair game, even for cheesy solutions. there is a natural justice to smoking out a dragon from its lair.

Firkraag

In view of the previous comments on cheese, I was wondering if other gamers consider my method of attacking him, talking to him, attacking him, talking to him is cheesy, after all it is only taking advantage of one of his weaknesses. However, I must admit that it makes him rather easy.

wise grimwald wrote:In view of the previous comments on cheese, I was wondering if other gamers consider my method of attacking him, talking to him, attacking him, talking to him is cheesy, after all it is only taking advantage of one of his weaknesses. However, I must admit that it makes him rather easy.

Ummm, that's not really his weakness but a weakness of the game design - the exploiting of which is basically the very definition of cheese. Sure, you can make it look like you're going to leave and then turn and ambush him instead, but, no: to get the game design to interrupt him immediately frying your ass for doing that by making him repeat some dialogue I'd actually say is closer to outright cheating (as opposed to, say, the cheese of making a simulacrum of equal class to the original through restoration). It's easily on par with the notorious feeblemind and cloudkill cheese tactics (@celacena: the cloudkill cheese isn't cheesy because you're being out of sight but because the dragon (who is supposed to be very intelligent) just sits there dying instead of at least stepping away from the cloud - it isn't exactly being 'smoked out' - it's not reacting at all). Basically, if you have no intention of fighting him even when what you're doing, without the game designers' oversight, would certainly have him attack, why not just ctrl-y instead?

Yes, it's clearly very ripe cheese, as it exploits a clear glitch in the game. However, well done on discovering it! At least Firkraag died happy...

It IS hard to make a game which is "realistic" and yet still challenging for people who know what's coming.

In some sense, BG2 achieves this by making some encounters too difficult to complete without reloading or having prior knowledge. (Has anyone ever played the game right through, with no reloads, without having played it before?) So, the game requires that the player explore different options to try to solve the particular situation. In that sense, cheese is the product of an enquiring mind and is to be celebrated.

That said, it's all the more reason not to use cheese! If you find one way of dealing with Firkraag, cheesy or not, try doing it another way, with spells, combat, whatever. You will, I think, get a lot more out of the game.

DaveyCow wrote:this brings up a very ignorant quesiton i have - where can i find Lower Resistance? I'm sure I'm just being unobservant...

thx

You can get one for free in one of the chests behind the friendly old guy that's no longer a member of the unseeing eye cult. (The locked chests inside the eye cult hold a lot of other level 5 spells as well.)

Ian Kognitow wrote:celacena: the cloudkill cheese isn't cheesy because you're being out of sight but because the dragon (who is supposed to be very intelligent) just sits there dying instead of at least stepping away from the cloud - it isn't exactly being 'smoked out' - it's not reacting at all). Basically, if you have no intention of fighting him even when what you're doing, without the game designers' oversight, would certainly have him attack, why not just ctrl-y instead?

if the party are out of the sight-range of the dragon and the dragon is enveloped in a poisonous fog, would it run towards an internal entrance that is too big to afford egress, or would it escape up the chimney? the latter is much more likely. it could wait until the smog had cleared THEN fly back down to look for who was responsible - that would be the dragon being 'intelligent' - not pushing towards the humans' door. a PC with protection from magic could nip an and raid the hoard, as dragons cannot take their hoard with them in flight. staying put IS daft, but perhaps greed - protecting its hoard - over-rides its intelligence? if it goes looking for the source of the fog, it might expose its hoard, as incidentaly, it did when going to the inn to recruit the PC. where is conservation of matter when it does that? even in magic realms, the norm is for mass to be conserved and a dragon becoming a human would lose 95% or more of its mass - unless dragons were primarily an energy field, in which case the appearance is only a manifestation of energy rather than 'mass' as such. anon. if the dragon did fly up out of the fog, a hidden thief could then nip in and grab some choice items and leg it. either way, a party should have been given another alternative to a mano-y-mano knife-fight with a beast bigger than t-rex and way smarter.

IMO, the dragon having multiple 'heal' is unfair in open combat terms - he goes from almost dead back to full strength - and at that stage of the game, there is no chance for a PC or party-member to equal that. and why couldn't it just have flown off when badly hurt? if the dragon was configured better, the players would not generally resort to exploits - it is evening up the contest to some degree.

In the above fashion I can defend a gas attack on the brute as being within the spirit of a RPG.

Another 'cheese' must surely be thieves backstabbing characters who are still blue - because they are not red, you can disappear under their noses and reappear behind them for the back-stab even though they have cause to be suspicious?
with boots of speed, my fighter-thief using a +2 longsword can hit-run-hide repeat and get rid of pretty powerful opponents.
But what about computer cheese that goes against the PC - there are plenty of occasions where the PC doesn't get a chance. SPOILER
in Spellhold - the auto-crush area near the bag of holding?


with only so many reactions in the reaction matrix, a game is not going to be as flexible as PnP or stimulate the imagination. for the moment, I think some cheesy tactics are OK - if they are not, we can only be said to be ruining the game for ourselves.

Celacena wrote:if the party are out of the sight-range of the dragon and the dragon is enveloped in a poisonous fog, would it run towards an internal entrance that is too big to afford egress, or would it escape up the chimney? the latter is much more likely. it could wait until the smog had cleared THEN fly back down to look for who was responsible - that would be the dragon being 'intelligent' - not pushing towards the humans' door. a PC with protection from magic could nip an and raid the hoard, as dragons cannot take their hoard with them in flight.

All the dragon lairs in the game are pretty big - certainly bigger than the area of a cloud kill. In the same way that the party would just be 'out of sight' and not dying from the gas, the dragon can just move out of the cloud - or, indeed, better secure his loot, protect itself, smoke *you* out by huffing some fire around the place, etc.

Dragons are very intelligent up to and even passing the level of genius. Whilst being greedy, I'm not so sure they would be stupid enough to stay in a choking, burning cloud and sit there like an idiot. Dragons are nasty if played right, back in my DM days I killed an entire party (6) of 18-20 level characters with a relatively young dragon and he didn't even have to use his breath weapon... Whilst a mage would be smart enough to use his spells to maximum effect, a dragon would be smart enough to do something about the little roach bomb thrown at him...:laugh:

I thought battle was fricken crazy. everyone was like lvl. 16 except jaheira which is gay she was like 12 lol. but anywho it was insane less than a minute battles. my mages cast magic missle to piss him off, then quickly spell breach, some minute meteors, finally full attack heard on. it was awesome.

Ian Kognitow wrote:All the dragon lairs in the game are pretty big - certainly bigger than the area of a cloud kill. In the same way that the party would just be 'out of sight' and not dying from the gas, the dragon can just move out of the cloud - or, indeed, better secure his loot, protect itself, smoke *you* out by huffing some fire around the place, etc.

Assuming the dragon didn't just think that it was their own fart that had ignited...

the caverns are generally fairly big and the dragons could retreat - FK for instance has a massive 'chimney' behind him, hence my suggestion that the dragon would fly up it, if it was thinking straight. I don't think it would naturally run forward through the CK to see if there happened to be anybody there - were it not for the game's limitations, the PC could have descended the chimney in some way e.g. featherfall and could arrive from behind the dragon. featherfall has been omitted because of the 2-D structure, but playing PnP, it is quite likely that the party would have investigated the hole rather than risk leaving something nasty behind them. In realism terms, it is the game's limitations that limit the options of the party and not attacking somebody it can't see is perhaps a balancing limitation on the dragon. it is unfair to suggest that the player should impose extra limitations when the game prevents many PnP-style options - there is no high CHA solution to get a benefit - it is hack, zap and slay because the designers only have so much time. I thus still feel that CK is a valid response.

Imagine if a party member had attacked FK in the pub - turns back to dragon or dies? either way, not anticipated in game design and either way, no FK to deal with in the hills. I assume that FK is invulnerable or it is an auto-kill of PC. fair?

Celacena wrote:Imagine if a party member had attacked FK in the pub - turns back to dragon or dies? either way, not anticipated in game design and either way, no FK to deal with in the hills. I assume that FK is invulnerable or it is an auto-kill of PC. fair?

Since you mention that. No way it's fair. It's the equivalent of group of Pn'P players coming up with a plan and the gamemaster saying, you can't do that. If a gamemaster ever did that to me I'd leave and never look back. BTW I just tested what happens if you attack FK in the Copper Coronet. He teleports out. Now that's actually a solution I can live with. However the guy that shows up to claim Drizz't's gear or the guy that auto-kills you if you go against Aran without siding with Bodhi: Pure cheese IMO.

Onkel Bob wrote:Since you mention that. No way it's fair. It's the equivalent of group of Pn'P players coming up with a plan and the gamemaster saying, you can't do that. If a gamemaster ever did that to me I'd leave and never look back. BTW I just tested what happens if you attack FK in the Copper Coronet. He teleports out. Now that's actually a solution I can live with. However the guy that shows up to claim Drizz't's gear or the guy that auto-kills you if you go against Aran without siding with Bodhi: Pure cheese IMO.

But since some clever people have found ways to kill those two, does anyone know what happens if Firkraag is actually killed before he can teleport away? Unless you're playing a paladin it doesn't seem like it would necessarily muck up the game (like killing Linvail might).

Ian Kognitow wrote:does anyone know what happens if Firkraag is actually killed before he can teleport away?

If you kill Lord Jierden (FIRKRA01) before you talk to him, you probably won't be able to go to Windspear Hills because it won't appear on the map. But if you talk to him first and then kill him, I doubt it would make any difference. I figure Firkraag (FIRKRA02) would still be waiting for you. That's my hypothesis. Here's the easy way to test it: Start the game, go to the Copper Coronet and talk to Lord Jierden, then CTRL-Y Lord Jierden (or CTRL-J him just for fun), and then jump to Firkraag's lair (CLUAConsole:MoveToArea("AR1203") and see if Firkraag is waiting for you. I doubt the game will skip a beat. You can even have Lord Jierden fight Firkraag--I actually did that shortly after I discovered the magic of CTRL-J (EDIT: I mean CTRL-Q). But don't take my word for it; try it yourself. There's no reason why I should have all of the fun.