Solo Blade: A Report

Part 9: The Shadow Temple

Having killed most ugly things except another dragon, I figured I could strip his scales for the shadow armor or so before entering Spellhold and the underdark. All surface-quests (the ones that mattered) would be done after that.
As you may know, the Shadow Temple crawls with undead. Therefore, it’s best to come fully prepared: all anti-undead gear you can get your hands on, the most useful being Daystar thanks to it’s innate ability. A few vampires take within range +1000 damage and drop dead immediately (haha, dead, yeah well…). Too bad you can’t use it more than 1 time a day without an upgrade (items upgrade mod, requires Holy Water after underdark, I think).

The Shadows and Elder Shadows proved to be very annoying because of their “glare” attacks. A stunned/held blade is usually a dead blade, even with buffs, it only takes a few rounds to knock all protection off your skin. Once stunned, you’ll be surrounded immediately, so it won’t be as easy as it looks. Thankfully, I now have a skeleton warrior to my disposal myself and he’s pretty much immune to all those status effects. Let him lead the way and support using mid- to high range spells.

Daystar rocks this world.	Bye bye little dragon.

After whacking my way through the maze and solving all the puzzle quests (the ritual, the passage, the sunstone, etc), I’m ready to head to the shadow dragon himself. Most BG2 Guides tag Firkraag to be more powerful than this dragon, but do not be fooled, wing buffet still pretty much screws with all your tactics, even the “jamming spacebar” one. The slightly smarter dragons mod in SoA actually make Thaxll’ssillyia a much more potent spellcaster: he has several protection spells pre-cast instead of at the beginning of the battle. There goes your run & gun tactic. Keeping the beast busy, using/casting Breach and magic missile plus some whacking usually still works though. Thankfully…

Last problem: the “shadow lord” awaiting outside at the temple. After the dragon’s death, I levelled up and could finally pick a few more level 6 spells! Woohoo. Time to learn Death Spell and see if their Hit Die/dice are high enough to resits this one. Fully blurred, stoneskinned, hasted and offensive spinned, I pop up and the lord starts his speach. the End Conversation button results in the shadow patrick and other guys attacking me, but I squeeze out a death spell just before they reach me. Everybody dies. Wow! That was a good show… Guess everyone threw a very very bad save, right.

Death Spell - Death. Go figure.