jsidhu762: Hello everyone!

I just killed Icasaracht in HoF...and it was easier than anything I've faced up to that point. I was a little intimidated by the HoF difficulty, but all that was in my head.

Here's how to do it easy as pie:

Before entering her lair, cast prayer, recitation, emotion: hope and courage, and haste. Have your magi cast armour, stoneskin, and mirror image. Have your priests/paladins cast draw upon holy might. After the dialogue, have your mages cast 2 lower resist on her, and then follow up with a power word blindness.

After that, cast greater malison, death fog, web, slow, and hold monster. Now just spam fireballs and other aoe attacks and you're done. You can use power word: kill to clean up any hired goons. Just make sure you see a few of them with the "almost dead" status. Because of her massive HP, your damage spells won't be enough to finish her off, but when you've exhausted your damage spells you can just zerg her with your melee. Before you do that make sure to get a refresh on the lower resist and slow spells.

The Infinite Engine A.I. can be unpredictable, so have your melee on standby in case any sahuagin get through.

Edit: You might need to refresh your buffs, but with Icasaracht virtually motionless, this shouldn't be a problem.

Rortie: "Easy as pie..." No, that's normal. All that micromanagement...

Togurito: You're still here, jsidhu762, from four years! It was the classic or EE edition?

I think yes, she was never that hard on normal mode, HoF mode at that point is balanced for the high level of the party. It would have been nice a difficult mode without extra experience. Icasaracht stats are:

400 HP, 4 THACO, 3 attacks per round, -6 AC, 16 DEX, 24 STR, 50% physical resistance, 100% cold, 25% fire, electricity and acid and only 25% magic resistance, immune to poison, death spells, hold, stun and some more. But not immune to normal weapons and her normal attacks do 2d8 slashing (non magical).

How much hit points in HoF, I think 1280? It's a lot, Dragon breath will do good damage, but cold resistance is easy to get. Ac is too high, Firkraag has like -12 AC, magic resistance is low as well.

Pre-buffing is simply to strong in these games, and haste is in my opinion, imbalanced, very powerful for the level. I read somewhere that in PnP, haste ages anyone who use it in two years or something like this. Here, only gives 4 fatigue points.

There are some difficult enhanced mods for the EE, but I see them so "ToBesque" with high level abilities, triggers and whatnot, very far from the original game were magic was scarce.

For anyone interested, there will be a mod available in a couple of months for classic IWD (1.42) more akin to the original experience with a lot of new things and much harder, with very little "trash mobs".