Hello,

I am playing BG1 thorugh BGT and I can't figure what is happening in the fight with Sarevok. It has happened 4 times in a row, if I recall correctly: 4/5 members of my party are instakilled at the beginning of the fight when Sarevok reaches my party (but I suspect that maybe the reason is a spell cast by one of his allies). Since the main character dies, I can't see what has happened in the log. I do not see any spell visual effect either.

Party is properly leveled, buffed and equiped, and two carachters have over 100HP.

Anyone knows what is killing me?

thanks

maybe the traps? I remember there are traps you can't disable. You can left the party in the entrance and make a hasted character go to Sarevok and force him to follow him (or at least let him die to see the log)

It's Semaj casting Death Spell. He will only use this spell once at the beginning of the battle in BGT (in vanilla, Tutu or BG:EE he doesn't use this particular spell).

Party members of level higher than 8 are immune, but the others will die (there is no saving throw), HP are irrelevant. You can protect your low level party members (e.g. multiclass characters) with the cleric spell Death Ward. Alternatively, sends towards Semaj only your high level party members and/or summons and try to keep the rest of your party outside the area of effect of the spell (50 feet) for the first seconds of the battle.

That should be it. I have no character above 8th level, so all of them are affected. I have no cleric either.

I had already won the fight because the last time I tried only Sarevok and the Ogre became hostile. The rest of the enemies did not attack.

Thank you very much!

What you are experiencing is one of the pitfalls of playing BG in an overpowered setting; abilities, spells, items etc. that simply should not be there, that the game was simply not designed for.

Just when you enter the temple, have your thief turn invisible, and detect traps. Walk slowly and carefully, as to avoid activating any. A few of them can be disarmed. Most of them, no. Especially those in the middle of the room, on the skull, are both deadly, and unable to be disarmed. To the left and right from bottom temple, and to the middle, and to the near middle left and right from upper temple, is full of traps. Upper temple traps summon powerful melee undead/demons, very strong. Also, near Sarevok, are a fighter/mage (this has to be the most powerful class combo in the entire saga), and a powerful melee character. If you somehow manage to have them all attack you together, instadeath is easy.

1) Send your thief for scouting ahead, detect traps, disarm those you can.
2) Keep your party far away from the skull in the middle.
3) Sometimes, the enemies trigger traps (but are usually resisting/immune to them). So, take care the party member who agros them, to be in a line of sight that no traps pass through.
4) Try to pull only Sarevok.
5) In the original version, summoning friendly creatures, results into large numbers of them. Cast many of them, have Sarevok caught inbetween them, pinned down to a small area and unable to move.
6) Have your mage cast on him the 4 level spell, greater malison; then, proceed by nuking him with damaging spells, ranged attacks, or even hardened melee characters.
7) A very easy fight. He dies quickly and easily. If you avoid traps.

Holy shit, that's hard.
Just saw that I do have death ward. But can only use it on one of my party members. And then apparently they also use a petrification spell.



Man, the werevoles and the demon in Ulgoth's Beard were easier.

Oh lol.
My whole party was deep in the red, 4 out of 6 affected by Chaos and walking into traps.
Obvious, that they'll all be dead soon.
But: finally strike against Sarevok, he dies - finished.

That's ... a bit unsatisfying now.

I was hit by this Death spell bollony too, and it's a tough one. I got past it by using a potion that gave Kagain (my tank) 50% magic protection, and he was lucky that the coin landed on the right side so he didn't die. Maybe sending up some summons will help too, as long as Semaj hits them with it. They will die of course, but then the spell is used and you should be safe.

A tough fight, but a lot of fun too, at least without the instadeath idiocy. I like to engage the whole lot, though, because taking them on one by one just feels cheesy and unrealistic.

It's the last fight in the game, so buff with everything you've got, including potions. Strength potions on your fighters is very handy, as they will kill stuff much faster with so much extra damage and thac0. Use haste too. Protect yourself against fire and electricity if you can. You're likely to be hit with arrows of detonation (fireball) and lightning bolt. That hurts. A lot.

Why did the BGT developers give that character that spell anyway? Maybe they thought the game was too fair (even with an enemy capable of casting Improved Invisibility that a 1st level party could reasonably encounter), so they decided to make it less fair.

In any case, if you want to get revenge on the game, you could cheat the Greater Deathblow skill onto a character and fire Arrows of Detonation with that skill active; that kills everything level 12 or under in the affected area. That ability is generally considered underpowered in Throne of Bhaal, where it originates; it is ludicrously overpowered in Baldur's Gate 1, which was certainly *not* designed with that skill in mind. (You might want to remove the skill afterward or just not use that character or save file.)

As a side note, the tutorial guy in the Baldur's Gate 2 tutorial (which might not be playable in a BGT installation; I haven't tried BGT myself), who is clearly meant to be unkillable, can be killed with Greater Deathblow. (This will, of course, softlock the game because there's no way to continue with him dead.)

I was just playing around and experimenting a bit. Gave my main character (Paladin) potion against petrification and that death ward thingie, blessing - and then ran up to Saverok, then back to my main party.

Then all hell broke loose - and despite me being just about to lose the fight, it all ended because I managed to kill off Sarevok. Grmpf. I just feel like having accidentally cheated, lol.

But well, yeah. If I had prepared my party additionally against "Chaos" I might have had a chance to win fairly.

You can always replay it if you want :)

Protection from Evil and Bless are two spells I almost always use to buff the party, and they should help a little. Defensive Harmony is short-lasting, but it helps. Then you have potions that increase saving throws by five, and many other things. For the really big fights, usually some of my character mini-pictures (to the right) are just about filled up with buffing icons :D
Don't understand why you keep mentioning different ways to cheat, but whatever floats your boat. If people want to cheat they may as well just use Ctrl-Y (or whatever it is) to insta-kill enemies. Makes everything pointless, but if you want to cheat, may as well go the whole nine yards.

Think it was a mistake to put Death Spell into the BGT final fight. Very few characters will be able to withstand that as they're unlikely to be level 9 or above. The fight itself is difficult enough without hitting you with almost impossible to defend against instadeath.

Unlike in the Tutu playthrough, where everybody got engaged when Sarevok did, this didn't appear to happen in BGT, so it would have been better to fix that rather than throw Death Spell at us.

The problem with cheating is that it's so hard to stop, once you begin with it.
I've already ruined a couple of games all by myself with beginning to cheat - and then to cheat more and more and more, up to a point where I was just pretty much invulnerable and then, of course, got bored and stopped playing at all, lol.

The way I deal with this problem is to use a separate file for my cheating. In other words, if I want to cheat, I leave my non-cheat save file intact and go back to it when I am done playing around.

Occasionally, I might make exceptions to this rule, like in the following cases:

1. Maybe I want to try playing with abilities that you can't normally get or that wouldn't normally be available at this point. One example might be playing Baldur's Gate 2 (SoA) with the Scribe Scroll ability. (That ability is weak in ToB when you normally get it, but is likely overpowered in BG1.) It might not be a good idea to do this on your first playthrough, at least not before you get a feel about how the game is balanced.

2. To work around a bug or design flaw. In this case, it is probably best to minimize your cheating to just working around the problem. In the case of the BGT final battle, I consider Semaj being able to cast Death Spell to be a rather serious design flaw. Ctrl-Y on Semaj would probably be the easiest way to cheat past this; it makes the battle easier, but does not have any lasting effect (like cheating Greater Deathblow would). Alternatively, figure out how to edit Semaj's script so that he doesn't cast that spell, or (if the script uses CastSpell and not ForceSpell or ReallyForceSpell) remove that spell from his memory.

By the way, what enemies in the original Baldur's Gate can survive Death Spell?

I checked the script - he has a few 'ReallyForceSpell' items for his contingency and the opening barrage, then he goes to a routine and casts fairly from his memorised spells.
With Near Infinity, it's an easy matter to remove the death spell from the script if you want to.