Originally posted by Mister Popo
Haha, how did you experiment, and what were the results.
I would love to see a barbarian kick Firkraags ass with 5 female skalds singing on the background...
Well, I don't know if better Armor Class and THAC0 would help all that much against Firkraag, who has magical protections and special attacks that render such advantages moot. Dealing out extra damage helps, though, as long as you hit your target, and the immunity to Fear helps against dragons.
In any case, my experiment went like this. At the time, I was playing with a party of Bards, one of whom was a Skald. (Yes, I enjoyed playing Bards.) They were in the Underdark at the time. Some people on a popular message board which is now defunct wanted to know if the Skald song is stackable, so I decided to have a bit of fun.
I took my saved Multiplayer game and deleted all of the characters except for the Skald, and then created four more Skalds. When I opened the game, I created Boo (yes, Boo) from the console and equipped him with three items that I already had in my inventory: the Ring of Gaxx, the Helm of Balduran, and the Cloak of Mirroring. Then I had him attack the beholder lair all by himself while the Skalds were singing.
Boo did very well for a 0 Level character with only 7 hit points.
His attacks and defenses were phenomenal. The Skald song is kind of weird because the bonuses are constantly re-calculated, so Boo's Armor Class constantly fluctuated between -11 (his natural AC with the items he was wearing) and -31 (each Skald could give him a -4 AC bonus) and everything in between. Boo can be killed with one good hit (he has 2 Hit Points, and the Helm of Balduran gave him an extra 5 Hit Points), but he only got hit a couple of times for a couple points of damage, which were healed the next round by the Ring of Gaxx. When I did the experiment, the Cloak of Mirroring hadn't been fixed, so it reflected all of the Beholder's attacks and they injured themselves quite a bit. Boo did get imprisoned by the Elder Orbs a couple of times, but I had four scrolls of Freedom, so all it did was slow him down (and make him angry).
The Beholders didn't stand a chance.
I should point out that in Shadows of Amn, the combat tables have an effective AC limit of -10. Your AC can be lower than that, but in effect, AC -20 is treated the same as AC -10. This was corrected in Throne of Bhaal, where the effective limit is AC -20.
After I laid waste of the Beholder lair a couple of times (hey, it was fun), I created a Kensai dualled to a Thief and tried it again (with the five Skalds). I quit halfway through because the Kensai/Thief didn't need the Skalds' help. Cheesy characters like that just aren't any fun.