So, what are some ways to defeat sarevok WITHOUT pulling his minions individually? (because I feel abusing the AI in such a manner is cheating)

What I diid, was use a green scroll of protection from magic on my two main tanks, I ran them in and slaughtered his mage, My main tank had to retreat at this point with 10%HP (with sarevok hot on his tail) while secondary tank (minsk) finished off the archer. Then I ran off of the zone of total death (all those AoE spells) and towards the bottom left corner of the temple where the rest of the party waited. I focused fire on his melee minion, finally it was 6v1. At that point minsk had to retreat and a lone summon monster 3 started tanking. (with jehira and minsk flanking and charname using a sling +1). Monster 3 died and jehira was tanking when he finally dropped

Took a lot of trial and error to realize that:
1. without protection from magic his mage minion insta gibs me in opening round (sequencer with multiple instant death effects which bypass protection from death... I think I saw petrify in there once too & web, & and stinking cloud). And like all mages slings horrific spells at me (damn mind control spells!)
2. the archer minion has freaking arrows of detonation (each arrow shot comes with a free 6d6 fireball and hits the entire party...).
3. Took me about 7 attempts to win :(. Oh, and I had completed EVERYTHING in the game prior to that.

There is a reason that several NPCs throughout your travels (the Dwarf in the Gibberling Mountains, and the Surgeon for example) give you protection from magic items. That battle is, like all game boss battles, a cheat in and of itself. I can never understand why people say that 'this strategy' or 'that strategy' is cheating: it's war, for pity's sake! There are no holds barred when you are fighting for your life; this is not a medieval tourney where chivalry rules. Stealth, trickery, you name it... it's ALL valid strategy. Sheesh!

A 'cloudkill' scroll is the best opening ime because you can start the battle without their getting line of sight.

Example cast a 'farsight' so that you can see them and then target the cloud onto the floor just in front of bro... he will charge forward to the centre of the room and the others will take up to ten rounds to get their shit together.

Pulling individual enemies from a group is "exploiting a bug" (in the AI), thus it is "cheating exploit" rather than a strategy. If this was actual war then the exploit wouldn't work!

Stealth is valid
Trickery is valid
shooting first is valid
laying traps is valid
splitting the enemies up using a spell that restricts their movements is valid.
summoning an army of monsters to fight for you is valid
Retreating half way through battle and coming back to finish the remaining enemies is valid

But exploiting bugs is a pointless and hollow challange less victory, an exploit isn't a "tactic", and if I wanted to cheat that badly I would use the console that sounds awesome, I gotta try it out sometime.

PS. another example of underhanded tactics which are not an exploit, bravo.

The best strategy against Sarevok, is to cast a lot of summons, mostly animate dead. He can only kill 3 skellies per round, so surrounding him with 20 or so will slow him and Tazok down long enough for you to take care of the mage, then the archer.

Also, with summons, the mage and archer are likely to waste their spells/arrows of detonation against them, allowing your characters to kill them from range without taking damage.

I try to save my wand of summonings for this fight, and have lots of summoning spells on my casters and cleric, since Sarevok has such a high magic resistance offensive spells are useless against him anyway.


Do note that the "lots of summons"' strategy only works well if you're playing vanilla BG, where there isn't a hard limit on the number of summons you could have at once, and animate dead summons lots of weak skeletons instead of one or two.

If you're playing BG with the BG 2 engine, then keeping some arrows of detonation and having everyone firiing those arrows, casting fireball or using wands of fire will probably kill the mage before he can do anything. The archer will be badly hurt and just needs another round of this, while Tazok and Sarevok will charge towards your closest character, who should probably kite them around until Tazok and the archer are dead.

Nonsense. Every single thing you do in any electronic game is 'exploiting a bug in the AI'. Why? Because artificial AI is pre-scripted nonsense. There is no 'strategy' against a computer except in your own imagination. Give me a concrete example of a non-bugged AI segment, in ANY game. Your argument is as flawed as the supposed AI bugs you are not specifically mentioning.

AI's are stupid and inflexible, and there's no distinct line between a smart strategy and abusing a programming oversight.

When you get down to it, there is no "war" here. The other side doesn't really exist; it's just a bunch of game pieces that play to pre-determined formula. For many people, exploiting the inflexibility of their behavior and exposing the simplistic reality that underlies the presentation breaks immersion, and its disingenuous to suggest that they're somehow "doing it wrong" when they seek to win within the narrative confines of the game rather than the mechanical confines.

'War' was not meant literally. It was used for want of a better term/analogy.

The stupidity of AI, I have already outlined above. I never suggested that anybody is 'doing it wrong' in any way, shape or form... quite the opposite.

This is how I interpreted your earlier comments with respect to not understanding why people call it cheating. In a mechanical sense, no it's not cheating. It's absolutely not cheating in a mechanical sense to go and aggro Sarevok's minions, kill them, walk outside and sleep for eight hours, then walk in and fight Sarevok (who has been politely waiting for you the entire time). In a narrative sense, however, this is blatant cheating.

I never got a chance to fight Sarevok due to a bug ending my game every time I entered the conversation. But I remember my strategy I was going to use -- it just didn't work. I remember I had perhaps 100 undead following me (I can't remember how I got them all, but maybe Algernon's Cloak -- I remember I used that cloak heavily). But as soon as I entered his chambers, the undead didn't come with me through the area load screen. Very sad day.

You misinterpreted them. I also have a line, a very strict line, when it comes to cheating. The problem is, where does Joe Bloggs draw that line?

Well, what is cheating? You're breaking a rule, whether explicit or implicit, in order to win. In a multiplayer situation it's fair to say that all players must agree upon those rules, so a very literal and mechanical definition prevails. This still leaves grey zones (does a programmable mouse count?) but usually you can get some pretty crisp guidelines on what is and isn't acceptable.

In singleplayer, however, the rules are entirely what you the player make of them. It's not cheating to change the rules of solitaire, but it is if you change them mid-game. You're the only one who decides whether using debug codes is cheating, whether modifying the game is cheating, whether changing the difficulty is cheating. If I want to use a specific point buy in character creation and use debug codes to do it, it's not cheating; I set my own expectations and am holding to them. If I decide to use a point buy and then roll for a higher score, that is cheating because I'm breaking the rules I laid down.

The mechanical construct of the game is irrelevant; we humans exist outside of its scope. The concept of "rules" and "cheating" exist outside of its scope. In a competitive sense, those rules are by necessity minimalist and explicit. We most commonly think of cheating in this context. In singleplayer, the rules we place upon ourselves, it can be as abstract or implicit as we like.

So yeah, I think we have a fundamental difference in the concept of cheating.

No we don't. You monumentally missed my point in your wall of text.

Sarevok has this really funny taunt that I could never forget,

"I'm not afraid to die, are you?"

:D

Open your inventory on a paused game and drink a potion… then put a summon familiar scroll into the slot that the potion was in and return to the play map to un-pause your game.

The result will be that your character will summon the familiar… even if s/he is a class that can't have one eg. Fighter.

I consider this to be a exploit because it is using a scripting bug of the game engine to allow something that is against the rules however asking Viconia to 'Turn' some vampires which my low wisdom mage has just wished into play over to my side is imo smart tactics… a bit left field certainly but not illegal under the rules.

To be clear, this is just my opinion and I'm not saying that people whom run with self-imposed restrictions on themselves for role playing reasons are playing the game wrong.