ToEE: Defeating Iuz - (Update: Iuz defeated!)

[Li Shenron]

Some doubts of mine here:

Half-orc Monk with Improved Two Weapon Fighting, Flurry of Blows, Improved Trip and 28 str.
The rods enchanted into +3 holy, frost, flame, axiomatic with Keen Edge cast on them.
So he does: +13 damage from strength, +16 damage from power attack, +1d6+3 from weapon, +2d6 holy, +2d6 law, +1d6 fire, +1d6 cold, +1 from prayer, +2 from good hope, 6 times a round with haste (at a 19-20 crit range); and as trip attacks they ignore armor.

Assuming he starts with Str 18 + 2 (HOrc) + 2 (level increase), where does he get the missing +6? I may be wrong but I only remember +4 items in the game, and they don't stack with Bull's Strength.

Six attacks? At level 10 the Monk has 2 attacks from BAB or 3 with Flurry. I don't know if it allowed by ToEE, but if he also use 2WF it could go up to 4 attacks, and 5 with Haste. Where's the sixth attack? If he uses a rod, he should not be able to flurry anyway.

+13 damage with Str 28 is only if you wield a weapon with 2 hands. He's using 2 weapons, so he should get +9 on his primary attacks and +4 on the secondary attack, but not +13 to each attack.

He cannot power attack for +16. At level 10 he has BAB 7 so at best he could power attack for +7 (or with a +10 if he used a weapon with 2 hands, in which case no extra attack).

A +3 holy, flame, frost & axiomatic weapon is effectively a +9 weapon which costs 81000gp to make. While it may be possible to gather this amount in ToEE, it's still very huge, he must have sold a lot to raise it (and twice, for two weapons!). It also takes at least two casters with the IC feat to cast all the required spells.

That monk would have a bonus to hit of 7 (bab) + 9 (str) +3 (weapon) + 3 (spells) = +22. You can boost it more with other spells, and I don't remember which is Iuz's AC, but what I know is that in 4 battles I never managed to hit it once except with Fragarach (which just always hits, no matter the AC). Even at +22 I have serious doubts you can hit him often. Not to mention the extra -7 from power attack and -2 from TWF. The monk needs to deal about 300hp damage in "one round" to kill Iuz.

Lots of doubts here, you see my problems? Probably it is theoretically possible, if one assumes you roll all natural 20s, and either near-to-max damage always or many criticals, but chances are IMHO very few to actually see this happen in practice. Better ask your friend if he hasn't cracked the game with some cheat code, just to be sure. Maybe he just calculated that it was possible in theory...

 

[jonesy]

Well, the pythons are considered large weapons so the monk would get 1.5x str and 2x power attack when using them with trip, and as trip attacks they only miss on a 1, and you'd also get a free attack from using improved trip.

But he might be playing an unpatched version and employing some loophole (intentionally or unknowingly).

I'm going to try it out and see if it really works.

Edit: the game treats the rod as a quarterstaff so flurry should work.

 

[Li Shenron]

Killed!

BTW, I tried again this weekend and this time I did it on the first attempt (fifth overall)! I am going to post the details later tonight. I have to say that there were quite a few bugs in the whole thing however...

 

[Li Shenron]

The successful battle took 3 rounds. Here's a description of how each character contributed the the cause

Prince Thrommel
Basically PT killed Iuz by himself. With Fragarach he was the only one able to hit the demigod, because the sword has the property of automatically always hit. Luckily PT has Power Attack, so Iset it to max since the penalty didn't have any effect. Each hit (2 attacks/round) did about 32-38 damage, and Iuz had around 400 HP IIRC. I also had drunk a Bull's Strength potion, but no other buff.
The problem before was that I didn't have enough time to kill Iuz because St.Cuthbert appeared too soon. This time I succeeded only because Iuz always attacked PT, and Fragarach has another special ability: every time someone hits PT, he gets an AoO against the attacker, which also is an automatic hit. I was therefore taking advantage that every time Iuz hit PT, he also received ~35 more damage

Druid 9
He was useful with casting an Ice Storm and a Flame Strike, but only had those 2 at this level. IS was better because there was no ST and it did cold damage, while Iuz is immune to half damage of FS (the fire part of dmg). I should have cast 2 IS instead. The Druid also cast one Poison which beated the SR and Iuz failed the ST, however I think it had no effect because Iuz remained "badly damaged", and I was expecting the label to change (even if damage total would have remained the same).

Sorceress 9
I had tried before to have her cast Magic Missile, but with Iuz's SR 25 it usually dealt less than 10 dmg each round. In the successful battle I tried instead to cast Grease on Iuz, so that the Prince would have got an AoO for +35 dmg. However I realized later this was a mistake, because it also makes Iuz do only 1 attack/round, and instead the more Iuz hits the Prince, the more damage he takes himself

Barbarian 9, Paladin 9 and Ranger 9
Completely useless. They had some chance of hitting (not with anything less than an 18 or 19 IIRC) but not of beating Iuz's DR 25/cold or holy. Eventually they could have probably damaged Iuz only on a critical, but I suspect that only the Barbarian could have, so I let them power attack the max and be ready to heal the Prince with potions later.

Anyway the weird thing happened on the third round. Iuz was not dead yet, he was 1 hit close to death (I didn't know it of course, I found out later) and St.Cuthbert appeared to save him. For some reason I didn't understand, as soon as St.C. appeared, Prince Thrommel got an AoO on Iuz with which he dropped him down!

As the previous poster wrote, St.Cuthbert was stuck on the scene! I looted Iuz only to find completely mundane and worthless black cloak+gloves+boots. And by the way, I think I didn't receive any Xp at all for killing him! At this point, with St.C. hanging there, I tried to speak with him, but he was only able to shout "IUUUUUUZ!" every time Therefore I thought, next best thing........ you know

Well I tried to take over St.C. as well. He would have been impossible: +52 natural armor, total AC 70, and over 1600 Hp. Only that he had no fire resistance at all, so I did the very lame Produce Flame trick and dropped him dead. Again, no Xp and nothing worthy in his equipment (mundane full plate with gloves and boots), however I took him his mace. I admit I was fool enough to hope during the battle that it could have been something close to the DMG Mace of St.Cuthbert... no way, it's called "Spiritual weapon heavy mace" but seems to work like a normal non-magical heavy mace.

Ok, I just wanted to share this As I said before, it was lame to win by cheating but what the hell, I had finished the whole game before and I just wanted to try what happened. Now I'll go on and hopefully I will see the ending vignette with something about Iuz's "death", tho I'm pretty sure that there'll be nothing about St.C., as the programmers very unlikely thought it could have been killed.