Sorsha, human bard: Part 42
Preparing for the showdown with Irenicus for the first time in my no-reloading career certainly got my hands sweaty. In fact, we could have had finished the whole thing (with whatever result that might be) in the same session as the Tree Jon, but I just lost the confidence and quit the game before collecting that last Tear of Bhaal.
When I returned to it the next evening, Sorsha was there, ready as ever. I was reminded of how I'd promised her that Five Flagons premiere, which she never got to see due to other commitments, and I knew that this was not the time to fail her. She had started her run on 12 April 2023 and today was 19 March 2024. That's quite a long journey and I wanted to make it worthwhile for her. Sorsha deserved it.
Okay, let's get this over with. The day before the battle, we prepared our Contingency (See Enemy -> SI: D) and summoned 4 invisible stalkers - with their 9 hour duration, they were the only summons capable of supporting us in the fight even after resting.
Normally, I wouldn't allow Sorsha to use more than a day's worth of traps for a single encounter, but knowing that these might behave quirky during the cutscene ahead, we wanted to have a backup. Therefore, she laid down one Time Trap directly at the gate and one in the SW section of the area prior to resting, allowing us to keep untapped our per-rest resources (4x Time Trap, 2x Spike Trap) for use during the fight.
Sorsha's buffs, more or less in the order of application, were: Stoneskin, SoM Spell Trap, ProFire, ProCold, ProAcid, Spirit Armor, Potion of Storm Giant Strength, Potion of Magic Protection, Shield, Resist Fear, Potion of Invulnerability, ProEvil, Spell Shield, Blur, MIs, GoI (via Magic Flute), IH and Tenser's.
Tenser was a difficult call, but we knew that Jon's Balors would need to be disposed of asap. And with our saves vs. death in the safe zone against their vorpal swords, we could afford doing this without access to our book, in particular to PfMW.
However, there were two mistakes - the first one being facepalmingly obvious, the other one being more of a lesson learned. As you might have noted, those potions of ours were not protected by SI: Ab. I've become so comfortable with ignoring the dispel threat to Sorsha's own spells on account of our level advantage that I keep forgetting about the vulnerability of our other buffs. The second flaw was wasting the potential of the SoM Spell Trap by incorporating it into our prebuffs, thus robbing Sorsha of the option to activate it while Tensered - instead of using it to refresh our spell protections after the initial abjuration attacks, we exposed it to them. Pre-buffing with Spell Deflection instead would have been a better call.
Here's Sorsha's inventory and character sheet (before taking up the +20% elemental resistance perk from the final Tear):
Hello Jon, long time no see. Let's rock!
As predicted, our Time Trap at the gate tripped during the cutscene and was wasted without triggering the time stop. Sorsha's and Jon's contingencies fired away - he certainly had more in store there, lol.
With our cannon fodder already at the front lines, we tried to catch the attention of one of the balors and lure him towards our second trap.
Jon mostly wasted his Time Stop, landed Sphere of Chaos and only then started to peel off our spell protections with KWW and RRR.
Sorsha reached her Time Trap and waited for that reassuring trigger sound. By alternating between SoM dispel hits and dual-wielding damage output, she was able to eliminate all the four demons before the (double duration) time stop expired.
When the time resumed, we saw Jon's Remove Magic projectile heading our way, just as Sorsha was trying to finish her True Seeing (via Book of Infinite Spells). That's precisely when we realized that the lack of SI: Ab had been a mistake. Consequently, we lost both our potions buffs as well as our fresh-from-of-the-oven divination cast, albeit it did at least remove Jon's current illusions including the Mislead clone in the split second before the dispel struck. By the way I'm not sure what caused that magic damage to Jon seen at one of the screenshots here.
Irenicus then started spamming PfMW, which left us with rather limited offensive options. We checked our current saves to see where we stand without the Potion of Invulnerability => vs. death -7 and vs. spell - 11, that should do (not taking into account ProEvil and SoM bonuses). Sorsha quaffed a Potion of Fire Giant Strength, equipped Reflex and called in Ras to create a distraction while we were waiting for those 4 rounds to lapse.
