It's been a whole three days since I last asked for help here, so here I am again. Now, I'm at Lower Dorn at the entrance to a mine. Inside are salamanders and tarnished sentries who kill my people with one or two blows.

One walkthrough recommended missile attacks, and there was even a video showing it, but when I try that, my weapons are ineffective, even with missiles that do extra damage. One place said the chromatic orb and hopelessness spells worked great, but the baddies arrive too soon for that, and even so, often the spells don't work. A Resistance from Fire spell was suggested, but I don't have one.

Just running through the place gets four people killed. Blinding darts and the Web spell worked not.

So I'm groveling for help once more. Who will save me?

The entrance to Lower Dorn's is brutal. Best advice I can give is to grab some Fire Resistance potions (you should be able to go back to Kuldahar and buy some from Oswald) fr your melee fighters. This will help mitigate the fire damage from the Salamanders. The worst opponent, though, are the Tarnished Sentries. As you've seen, they'll chew your party to pieces with their bloody throwing axes.

Don't immediately move forward or you'll quickly be outnumbered and outgunned. Keep your party right near the entrance and the mobs will find you. Use summoned creatures to distract the Sentries (summon something first thing before even taking a step forward. Consider using your Rogue to scout out where the mobs are (either with Stealth or an Invisibility potion/spell). Keep as many summoning spells handy as you can memorize and as soon as you're down to one or two summons, start casting the next spell. Eventually the Sentries will run out of throwing axes and then they're a lot easier to deal with (although still tough). Use spells like Grease, Web, and Entangle. If you have it available, Spike Growth can also help (you want to be careful not to kill any gnomes though). Another handy spell to have in reserve is Otiluke's Resilient Sphere. Cast it on one of your front liners (possibly even a summoned creature) and many times the mooks will keep attacking even thought they can't do any damage. This gives you a chance to clobber them with ranged weapons.

Make sure you have plenty of healing potions and use them when you're at about half health (no lower or you'll just run out of HPs too quickly for the potion to be any use). Consider putting your priest in Sanctuary and acting as a heal-bot, constantly casting healing spells on your primary tank to keep him alive. Buff with whatever you have available (Haste or Oils of Speed are especially good, as well as Strength enhancing potions for the melee fighters) Check your inventory for whatever useful buffing potions you may have as well and use them. Give your front line tanks the best armor you have available and make sure the primary has as low an AC as he can get.

You wont come out of this unscathed, but you'll have a good chance of no one dying if you buff and prepare well. If someone dies, it's not a big deal, as you can raise them with a scroll or (at worst) head back to a temple to have it done there.

Salamanders are immune to normal weapons, so you'll need magic arrows.

Phew! Done it! Using Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on someone and letting the enemy fixate upon him was a fantabulous idea that I can see myself using often from now on. I don't have Grease or Entangle spells. The most effective spell was the Cone of Cold, while Acid Arrow and Icelance did some good.

I have Arrows and Bullets of Fire and Bolts of Lightning, but these didn't work. Don't they count as magical?

I always make sure I have at least one Otiluke's available at any given time. For a long time I overlooked it, but I now find it invaluable to use as you did or to isolate either a particularly troublesome mob to deal with later after the spell runs out, or to keep a party member from taking a dirt nap. No, I don't believe they're considered magical. The ammo with fire damage wouldn't affect the fire Salamanders anyway (they're immune to fire damage). You'd need bullets or arrows +1 or +2.

Oops. I really ought to have worked out that Arrows and Bullets of Fire wouldn't work on fire salamanders.

General strategies that have worked for me on tough fights:

1) Web. If you liberated a couple of rings of free action from two residents in Kuldahar, then web is one of the best crowd control spells available. Throw a party friendly Slow on top of it and most hard fights become a breeze.

2) Otiluke's decoy. Send a single fighter into the thick with an Otiluke's. Let everyone swarm him/her. Start casting fireball, ice storm, skull traps, cloudkill, even snilloc's snowballs. Cloudkill can be dicey though. If you use that, you might be better off casting it first and using a summoned skeleton for a decoy. Keep in mind, you only have 7 rounds to unload spells.

3) Choke points. There are plenty of places in the game where you can have one fighter block a door so only one or two enemies can take you on at a time. Put everyone behind the blocker with missile weapons. Protection from normal missiles comes in handy if there is a strong archer presence. Also, AoE spells can work if you can land them just right.