Ascension battle problem. Help!! (spoliers)

Black_Paladin · Post by **Black_Paladin** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 3:19 am

For the first time, I went through the Ascension mod and took on Melissan. I was looking for a challange for my level 38 Kensai who could chop pretty much anything to pieces with improved haste and critical strike combined with a level 27 Kelsey wearing the Robe of Vecna and the amulet of power who could empty his spellbook on enemies with a time stop and improved alacrity. I also had Keldorn with Carsomyr +6, Seravok with Ravager+6, Jaheira with Impaler +4 and Imoen with Gesen's bow and Angurvadal +5.

These were the levels:

PC (Kensai): Level 38
Sarevok: Level 25
Keldorn: Level 22
Jaheira: Fighter level 22/druid level 18
Imoen: Level 22
Kelsey: Level 27

These guys first went into Balthazar's monastary to get him to join us and were attacked by the monks and merceneries at the gate. After buffing all my guys o the limit, I turned on the AI and watched my guys turn about 50 or so monks and mercenaries into sushi. The entire screen was littered with bodies and trying to collect the armors and weapons off of the bodies on the ground resulted in me exceeding the capacity of my two bags of holding (100 items each).

These guys then went into the pocket plane and took on the Ravager. After he was done, we went to take care of Melissan. That's where the trouble started. I was thinking that this battle should be tough but winnable for my party. After killing the guardians at each of the pools (which was insanely diffucult but possible), Melissan summoned the five and I found out rather quickly that the **only** thing I could kill was Gromnir. Gromnir never lasted too long but any other guy that I tried to take on would just not die.

After a couple reloads, at one time, I concentrated all firepower on Abazigal and managed to get him to near death. This was accomplished by me, Keldorn and Sarevok pounding Abazigal mercilessy with improved haste, critical strike and bunch of attribut increasing potions while Jaheira, Kelsey and Imoen emptied their spellbooks on the guy.

Kelsey kept casting breach while Imoen casted Spellstrike after Abazigal's contingencies kicked in and Jaheira kept casting stuff like Nature's beauty and Creeping Doom on him. My only hope here was to be able to kill one guy before dying to at least save some face.

It was not to be. Even though I managed to get Abazigal to near death by throwing EVERYTHING at my disposal on him, Sendai, Illisera and Yaga-Shura made short work of my whole party.

After being so brutaly beaten like this, disgusted, I decided to use cheese which I had *not* done up to this point at all!. Having read UserUnfriendly's guide of cheesy tactics, I used the Project Image exploit to get 4 images out of Kelsey. These images then kept casting Planetars until I got 20 (each image could cast up to 5 Planetars).

At this point, I saved the game and clicked on the last pool to get Melissan to appear. When she appeared and summoned the 5, I stood back casting some spells while watching the Planetars work. I told myself that if 20 Planetars could not win this battle, nothing could.

I WAS WRONG!!!!!!! To my utter digust, every single one of my Planetars got slaughtered mercilessly by the 5. After a reload, I set the auto-pause to after every round so that I would make sure that I used everything at my disposal and would not waste a single round. This being the case, I played extrememly carefully and used all tactics I could. Using the 20 Planetars spells as well as mine, I was able to somehow kill Illisera, Sendai and Abazigal (this took maybe 10 rounds or so with me and Sarevok luckily causing hundreds of points of damage to most people). Each enemy took about 500-1000 damage to die but in the end , Yaga-Shura would NOT die no matter what. Surrounded by no less than 10 Planetars and my melee guys while my spellcasters emptied their spellbook on him. No matter how hard I tried, he would not die and kept only taking 1 damage or so with every successful hit. After a while, Melissan appeared and she and Yaga-Shura killed us all.

After trying this a couple more times, I got sick of this battle and decided to cheat. To kill the people, I decided on using Ctrl-y and then was hopeful that I would finally be able to win. I Ctrl-Y'ed the everybody except Yaga-Shura and they died. I then smiled and Ctrl-Y'ed the bastard Yaga-Shura as well but taking about 600 damage, he just said "oooompphh!!" but kept hitting. I Ctrl-Y'ed the son of a ***** again and taking another 600 or so damage, he died!!! I then didn't even bother with fighting Melissan and Ctrl-Y'ed her too and it took about 2 Ctrl-Ys and 3000 damage to get her to say "Nooo, I must collect more essences" and then a whole bunch of Ctrl-Ys again (5 or 6) with 3000 or so damage earch to actually kill her.

Now, is this battle supposed to be this diffucult??????!!!!!!!! More importantly, what I am wondering about the most is how many hitpoints these enemies have? Melissan seems to have in excess of 10000 or so and how am I expected to kill something like this???

Sytze · Post by **Sytze** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:41 am

Huge Spoilers

Check the Ascension read-me. Not being able to kill Yaga is a bug.

You will need clua-console to fix this.

As for tactics, try this:

Buff everyone up to the max before "turning" the last pool. Move them to the place were Melissan appears (except 1 whom turns the pool)
Then summon a few monsters where Illisera, Abazigal and Gronmir are located.

When Melissan summons the five, point Saravok and Keldorn to wack at Yaga. Let Immy cast a ADHW at Abazigal and the bunch, let Jaheira attack Gronmir (do this during a pause)
Then give ureself immunity to timestop (you got it from one of the pools) and let Kelsey cast Timestop.

During this timestop, let your Kensai wack away at Illisera with improved Haste (her arrows are nasty). When shes dead, move on to Gronmir.
In the meantime, use Kelsey to lower everyones magic resitance. Tehn cast dispell magic, greater malison, etc in the middle of each group (you got Sendai and Yaga on one side and Illisera, Abazigal and Gronmir on the other). Then cast breach, Wharding Whip and the like on Abazigal. When you are feeling ure timestop is almost over, cast a few ABHW and dragonbreaths where both groups are.

When the timestop is over, Illsera and Gronmir should be dead. Let kelsey cast breach etc on Abazigal and let ure Kensai and Jaheira wack him. Combining this with some spells from Immie and the power of your summons, Abazigal should be dead fast.
Move youre Kensai and Jah to Sendai, while keldorn and Saravok lower Yaga's hitpoints. Let kelsey and Immie summon some monsters to keep melissan busy, who will show up very fast after you killed Gronmir etc.

Let the summons deal with melissan then.... and focus your own entire party on yaga and Sendai. DONT CAST TIMESTOP DURING THIS, SINCE MELISSAN IS IMMUNE TOO IT!!!

Hope this will helps.
And goodluck

Black_Paladin · Post by **Black_Paladin** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 5:12 am

First of all, I discovered that my game must have had some kind of a bug. After I restarted my computer and played again, the 5 lost their invincibility (well Gromnir was always dying pretty quick but he is not part of the real 5 anyway). This time, the 20 planetars actually kicked the crap out of everyone except Yaga-Shura. After all the others died, I thought that I should be able to kill Yaga-Shura too this time and concentrated all the firepower on him. It took a little while as he kept just taking 1 damage at a time but with all the confident planetars (20 planetars were all saying "I shall prevail!" , "I shall prevail" at the same time

) and my guys pounding on him, he eventually died. Melissan proved to be pretty tough as well but nowhere near as tough as Yaga-Shura. I kept breaching her, casting Spellstrike and lower resistance and my fighters with the planetars made short work of her.
After I won the battle, I wanted to find out what these creatures were made out of and what made them so tough.

I looked up Yaga-Shuras resistances and found out that he is almost immune to everything except cold.

Here are his resistances:

Acid: 99
Cold: 50
Electricity: 99
Fire: 127
Crushing: 99
Piercing: 99
Slashing: 99
Missile: 99
Magic: 0
Magic Fire: 127
Magic Cold: 50

I looked this up using the famous Shadowkeeper program.

No wonder he is only taking about 1 damage per hit! He is almost completely immune to all types of physical attack (and ironically, this is after performing the ritual on his heart to make him beatable).

One thing that Shadowkeeper does not show is that he also has 99% resistance to magic damage (adding him to your party by Ctrl-Q and then looking at his stats shows this). This means that Horrid Wiltings has no impact on him whatsoever and Dragon Breaths and other fire related spells actually *heal* him (this might have been why I never managed to injure him much as I kept doing timestops and casting fire based spells on him).

I *did* find an easy way to kill him though. I had Jaheira cast Hurt and a single hit from her took Yaga down to 1 hp. After seeing this, I thought to myself that the Harm spell must be the most under appreciated spell in the game. Just think about it. Dragon Breaths, Sunfires, Horrid Wiltings and every other highly praised area damage spell can be nullified completely by fire resistance, magic damage resistance and other reistances. On the other hand, there is **nothing** that stops Harm. If you manage to roll a successful hit, the battle is over. After realizing this, I decided to fill the spell book of any person that can cast this spell with this spell.

In Yaga-Shura's case, hitting him wasn't really the problem but since he kept taking only 1 damage at a time with his 99% physical resistances, beating him up normally would take a couple minutes (he has 406 hit points) but casting Harm took this time to 10 seconds or so. Truly a wonderful spell!!

In addition, after reading Xyx's spell guide, I had thought that Cone of Cold was a weak spell because of his comments. After looking at the creature resistances in ToB, I now strongly disagree with him. It turns out that Cone of Cold is yet another one of those seriously under appreciated spells because everyone and his uncle is extremely resistant or immune to fire and magic in ToB but I have yet to run into anything that is more than 50% resistant to cold. In this respect, I realized that casting Ice Storm and sending in some fighters with cold protection while casting Cones of Cold non-stop is a quick way to win battles in ToB. Especially putting 3 Cones of Cold or Ice Storms in a contingency deals out a major amount of damage to all members of the 5 (whereas 1000 Dragon Breaths, Horrid Wiltings or Sunfires do nothing at all). Illisera seems to be the exception here but then again no spells are necessary to hurt her. It is sufficient for one person to cast True Sight to dispel her constant invisibility and then beating her into a bloody pulp is no problem at all.

I also like your tactics. I hadn't thought of giving myself immunity to timestop and then casting timestop. Heck, I had even forgotten that I gained that ability from one of the pools. If you didn't remind me, I would have never used this and it would be wasting a very useful ability.

lompo · Post by **lompo** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 5:43 am

The spell harm is very powerful, and it gets awesome in a C/M: time stop -> harm -> another hit -> enemy dead; remember that during time-stop you always it with melee!!!
Think of little, weak Aerie cast time-stop and then harm and happily bash Yaga a coupple of time and the huge giants falls dead "fastest of Chitikka Fastpaws!!!".
Add Simulacrum and you have two enemies dead in a snap of finger.

Black_Paladin · Post by **Black_Paladin** » Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:15 pm

Originally posted by lompo
The spell harm is very powerful, and it gets awesome in a C/M: time stop -> harm -> another hit -> enemy dead; remember that during time-stop you always it with melee!!!
Think of little, weak Aerie cast time-stop and then harm and happily bash Yaga a coupple of time and the huge giants falls dead "fastest of Chitikka Fastpaws!!!".
Add Simulacrum and you have two enemies dead in a snap of finger.

WOW, that's a great technique! I can think of 4 projected images doing this in a time stop. Each projected image takes on one of the 5 and weak Gromnir is left to handle 4 pojected images and 5 party members after the time stop ends.

Poor Gromnir!!

lompo · Post by **lompo** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 1:40 am

Originally posted by Black_Paladin
WOW, that's a great technique! I can think of 4 projected images doing this in a time stop. Each projected image takes on one of the 5 and weak Gromnir is left to handle 4 pojected images and 5 party members after the time stop ends. Poor Gromnir!!

Unfortunatly P.I. can't hit because they can't fight, so you have to use Simulacrum; but with P.I. you can use another trick, if you saved the Rift device (SoA Unseeing eye quest) you can use it with the P.I., it actually has the same effect of the spell harm, but "ranged!!!!" and being equipped in the item slot can be used by P.I..
Another nice trick is with F/T: improved haste him, then he cast Time stop (with UAI) -> assassination -> 8-10 unavoidable backstabs -> enemy dead!!!
Use Simulacrum (and restore him) for a coupple of unstoppable backstabbers.

It is to be checked, but if your main char. is a F/T and gain the immunity from time-stop, if somebody else cast time-stop does still aplly on him the property of the "always hit during time-stop"?, if so well have some P.I.s cast all time stop (with just a slight delay between them, use pause/unpause immediatly) so that the first cast time stop and when is finished start the time stop of the second P.I. (have them cast from scroll, so is ininterruptable): you can have 2-3-4 chained time stops during wich you can happyly backstab multiple time everybody, and maybe set some spiked traps for Melissan too!!!!

Black_Paladin · Post by **Black_Paladin** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 5:25 am

Originally posted by lompo
Unfortunatly P.I. can't hit because they can't fight, so you have to use Simulacrum; but with P.I. you can use another trick, if you saved the Rift device (SoA Unseeing eye quest) you can use it with the P.I., it actually has the same effect of the spell harm, but "ranged!!!!" and being equipped in the item slot can be used by P.I..
Another nice trick is with F/T: improved haste him, then he cast Time stop (with UAI) -> assassination -> 8-10 unavoidable backstabs -> enemy dead!!!
Use Simulacrum (and restore him) for a coupple of unstoppable backstabbers.

Hmmm, I had forgotten that projected images can't fight so my idea goes out the window. Oh well, too bad. Or is it?? I just remembered after typing the above that either UserUnfriendly or Xyx had found out that a projected image could actually attack if you shapeshifted it. Imagine turning the projected images into Mindflayers and draining everybody intelligence. *That* would be pretty mean, wouldn't it?

Sadly, I didn't have the Shapeshift ability taught to any of my mages so maybe I'll try this with with my next party in a new game.

Your idea about the rift device is just way too cruel!!!!!

That item is so overpowered that the Ascension battle would be over before it started with the projected images using it. If I am not mistaken, you can only carry that item out of the sewers through a Familiar though, right? I was playing a Kensai in this game so I couldn't have done this but even if I could, I don't know if I would have used the rod in the Ascension battle (I guess I could have potioned switched with a Familiar scroll to actually cast Familiar but I would rather not do this). I always use that rod to kill the lich that gives the arms (or was it the torso) of Kangaxx down in the sewers.

For backstabbing in a Timestop, can you actually keep backstabbing without having to hide in the shadows or drinking a potion between each backstab? I never played a thief before and never actually got a high level thief in any of my games except this time (I took Yoshimo with me to every single quest before Spellhold including the Watcher's Keep. After Yoshimo came out the Watcher's Keep, he was level 22 and I was sad to lose him in Spellhold

) so I not even know what the Assasination ability does. How does it work?

When you say "Use Simulacrum (and restore him) for a coupple of unstoppable backstabbers", are you talking about using Restoration scrolls on the Simulacrum?

Originally posted by lompo
It is to be checked, but if your main char. is a F/T and gain the immunity from time-stop, if somebody else cast time-stop does still aplly on him the property of the "always hit during time-stop"?, if so well have some P.I.s cast all time stop (with just a slight delay between them, use pause/unpause immediatly) so that the first cast time stop and when is finished start the time stop of the second P.I. (have them cast from scroll, so is ininterruptable): you can have 2-3-4 chained time stops during wich you can happyly backstab multiple time everybody, and maybe set some spiked traps for Melissan too!!!!

OUCH!! That would sure hurt. I guess I have to test and see if I can always hit stuff when somebody else casts Timestop in my party like you say.

You know, the saddest thing about these mods is that they....corrupted me.

I have never cheated or cheesed my way in any way before in this game but after registering with Gamebanshee, having to use the CLUA Console to transport myself out of Spellhold because of the Saemon Havarian bug in the Unfinished Business Mod (this is now fixed in version 7) and then having to cheat to kill the unkillable Yaga-Shura in the Ascension mod, the cat got out of the hat.

I guess you could compare my situation now to that of Sarevok when he gets tired: "I no longer have the capability to resist the cheese presented to me in this game. I.......become corrupted".

lompo · Post by **lompo** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 6:09 am

Originally posted by Black_Paladin
If I am not mistaken, you can only carry that item out of the sewers through a Familiar though, right?

For backstabbing in a Timestop, can you actually keep backstabbing without having to hide in the shadows or drinking a potion between each backstab?

I not even know what the Assasination ability does. How does it work?

When you say "Use Simulacrum (and restore him) for a coupple of unstoppable backstabbers", are you talking about using Restoration scrolls on the Simulacrum?

You need the familiar of LN alignement.

You can continuously backstab also without time-stop if you cast Mislead with your thief, while the HLA assassination make all your hits in the following round act as backstab.
Those abilities work well with a F/T (or F dualled to T) because you have many attacks/rnd (doubbled with imp. haste) and good Thaco.

Yes cast restoration on the Sim., better if a Planetar cast it, so the caster doesn't get fatigued.

About the use of theese cheese tactics, I think that the use of the rift device and the shapeshifted P.I. that can attack areis really a cheesy exploit of bugs in the game, while the others are intelligent use of abilities (its not a bug a thief casting spells from scrolls with UAI, or use smartly his HLA).

In any case even if during a timestop casted by another char you don't automaticaly hit, a fighter with multiple attacks immune to timestop could attack without being harmed his enemies (I bet your kensai should be able to tear apart any enemy if given the chance to attack for 3-4 round without being interrupted).

Luther · Post by **Luther** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 3:12 pm

I just did the ascension battle and like most everyone else, the first time through I got slaughtered. The second time through was better though. Time traps + assasination=dead enemies. I killed Illasera quickly this way. Too bad that Sendai and Abazigal still get up PFMW even during a time stop so I couldn't wack them. Yaga is always the last one left. After many lower resistances and greater malisons I was able to hit him with all sorts of debilitating spells. Slow, emotion, silence, even a spook. I whirlwinded everybody and he finally went down under a hail of steel. At this point it seemed the tide had turned and Melissan was a lot weaker (when you kill Sendai this deals 100 dmge and weakens Melissan.) I surrounded her and breached her and just kept chopping. She finally went down.

This was definitely one of the coolest fights since you have the chance to use a lot of spells, abilities and tactics. Get Balthazar if you can because he rocks. He was bad ass in this fight. I'm guessing that since I didn't have Saravok in my party this is why I didn't face Gromnir.

Nightmare · Post by **Nightmare** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 9:48 pm

A great way to lower saving throws is Great Malison, AND the spell Doom (level one priest spell). IIRC, Doom is cumulative, and gives -2 each casting.

Black_Paladin · Post by **Black_Paladin** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 10:02 pm

[QUOTE=Nightmare]A great way to lower saving throws is Great Malison, AND the spell Doom (level one priest spell). IIRC, Doom is cumulative, and gives -2 each casting.[/QUOTE]

I don't believe that you can stack multiple Dooms if you have the Baldurdash fixpack installed.

Stacking 1 Doom 1 with Greater Malison is usally enough for most things to get through though.

Something · Post by **Something** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 11:57 am

I believe I have the latest Balderdash patch and dooms still stack(atleast they seem to for the improved undead). I love opening my character screen and seeing saving throws all at 20s becuase I was lazy and didn't thump all of the skellies right off the bat.