Teach me to Mage

[TheBlueFox]

So I'm taking control of Neera in my game and I've come across a bit of an issue...

Alot of the good spells I want to use, Fireball, Lightning bolt, Web, Etc. Are not very party friendly. As a result, all the melee characters that get to the fight first tend to become... collateral damage. Now, Normally that wouldn't be a problem if I were controlling everyone, but I'm playing with some friends, and they aren't the type to really...let me blow them up.

How can I be effective while not screwing over the party?

[Sigma]

Unfortunately that's how aoe spells work. If you want to play effectively you'll need to play slow and coordinate with your teamates and tell them you're casting whatever at wherever. The best way to say, cast fireball, would be to scout ahead for enemies. Use a thief and hide in shadows, or quaff a potion of invisibilty and have that person temporarily don't attack or similarly cast invisibility and likewise dont' attack.
Once you know the placement of your enemies just have that said mage cast fireball at a few centimeters before they can spot your mage, if you cast it at exactly the enemy and/or past the enemy they'll see you and they'll start charging at said character, possibly the spell missing entirely.
If you don't have invisibility spell/potions you can go to options and feedback and turn on pause at enemy encounter. At the sight of an enemy the game pauses. Usually when you spot an enemy there's groups behind it. Most likely whatever enemies you spot will go after the unit nearest them, this is the time to back off, don't go forward. This way you might not lure the pack of enemies to you. Sometimes they won't chase you if you're quick enough to withdraw your unit. You now have the upper advantage, cast a fireball watch the free damage. Unfortunately this method can't guarantee there are packs behind enemies. This is why i prefer a thief or a person with invisiblity to go scouting than risk a blind fireball and hit only 1 or 2 enemies.
The last method is to just take the hit. Send in 1 of your tougher units and make him the guinea pig of fireballs. You can mitigate the damage by quaffing potion of fire resistance that you may find and/or buy throughout your adventure. You can quaff more than 1 to increase the fire resistance. You can go past 100, and once you do you actually start absorbing fire damage, actually healing you instead. There are also items you can wear that give you resistance, look out for them.

Small tip: lightning bolt may have high damage but is somewhat erratic. I highly don't recommend you even touch this spell even if you quaff potions of absorptions/insulations.

Casting a fireball at the center of your party because you're surrounded is just asking to die or severely injure your party. Instead cast crowd control spells like sleep, confusion, and whatever spells that can disable your opponents without hurting your party. Most of them only affect enemies anyway so all the better to consider those spells. Use web the same way you would a fireball.

You should save often because you're playing with a wild mage. It's possible that their wild mage rolls can change targets or cast sunfire and effectively killing your party. Doesn't happen often but one of these days you won't realize what happened and you're forced to load the game.

[TheBlueFox]

My favorite was when I tried to cast magic missile, and instead summoned a pit fiend that murdered everyone. That was a fun time.

But what crowd control spells, aside from sleep, would you recommend?

Glitterdust has the text "Enemies" so I assume it's party friendly, blind seems to be a decent debuff as well as reveal invisible creatures like mages.

Entangle and web seem out, since they totally entrap my allies, except for the one weilding the Spiderbane.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Well, if you cast web, you need to tell your team mates, and afterwards they must not run into the web but used ranged weapons or let you summon spiders or use AOE spells.

Greater Malison + Slow is very helpful area control when your team mates like rushing into battle with no much coordination.

[Sigma]

I've give you a play by play up to level 3 spells.
-Sleep is good for about 50% of the game, works on like almost all enemies up to when you get to baldur's gate. You have a 100% chance to hit an enemy affected by sleep.
-Glitterdust is great. Once an enemy is blinded, just move away from them and start targeting the ones that do follow you. Once you take them down start sniping the others with ranged attacks. A preemptive cast allows you to start with ranged as well.
-Horror is... kinda op. The chase down is kinda annoying and is why i don't use it as much. Trust me, it's good if you don't have any alternatives.
-Web is as good as sleep if managed correctly. Affects lots of enemies even past baldur's gate. Like sleep, you have a 100% chance to hit an enemy affected by web, likewise if you are affected by web.
-Stinking cloud is the option to go to if web doesn't work. Like web, you can hit an unconcious enemy 100% of the time.
-Slow is great cuz you can just run away and snipe the ones affected. Can turn the tide of battle if none of the above work.
-Entangle is like web, but it's a level 1 spell so you have a great advantage at the start of the game. It's bigger than web too but you might have those spell slots already occupied with cure light wounds, which is the problem. But nonetheless, even though your allies may be affected, you can still use ranged attacks to attack and switch to melee once an enemy gets near. This isn't web though so hit rolls still apply when attacking entangled creatures.
-Hold person is kinda icky... Any non-undead enemies that can walk on two legs and are smaller than an ogre can be affected. Unfortunately the aoe is small so don't expect to hit more than one unless they are bunched up. But once held, that enemy is as good as dead as it's 100% chance to hit them.
-Haste. Why wouldn't you like attacking one more time a round and move at twice the speed? Watch for fatigue, it stacks.
-Strength of one is mediocre but is better if you have less than 18 str. Otherwise just skip it.
-Dispel magic is usually just used to take out pesty mages that like to cast mirror image at the start of battle. Once dispelled, said enemy mage can be taken out with ease. Careful, affects allies too, can dispel own haste but dispelling own haste can prevent fatigue as a result of haste ending. I prefer the spell below instead.
-Remove magic is dispel magic but only affects enemies.
-Fireball is most likely your first damaging aoe spell. self explanatory.
-Avoid lightning bolt at all costs.
-Agannazar's Scorcher is technically not aoe BUT if situated correctly you can move after the first round, damaging any enemies up to twice. The wand version is pretty op and can take out even the end game enemies with 1 cast.
That's all the level 3 and lower spells I can recall. Anything not listed can be safely ignored as they either don't do much or just suck in general.

They all have their uses at specific situations. Stinking cloud can be ignored as web can do its job 90% of the time. And when you realize sleep won't affect anything you can switch it out for something like magic missile. Basically sleep and web are all you need. Fireball for when you dont want to fight a specific group of enemies or the other 2 spells don't work. It's all about that preemptive strike through scouting, otherwise stick to non-damaging aoe spells.

Lastly, nothing is preventing you from casting the spell more than 1 time. Ex: 2 webs in one place means the unit requires two rolls to avoid the web. Same with entangle. 2 fireballs usually takes out most groups until baldur's gate.

[Silvaren]

Focus on crowd control more than dealing damage. One of the most OP spell in first BG is Sleep (level 1 spell). Hold person (level 3), Slow (level 3) and other spells.

For dealing damage use some aimed spells like Magic Missile, Melf's Acid Arrow, Flame Arrow. You can easly took position to cast Aganazzar's Scorcher or Lightning Bolt (straight line, but LB can bounce between walls).

Most of AoE spells which hit enemies hard can be cast from great distance. You don't need to sea enemies, you can just cast fireball to the edge of fog of war if you know where monsters are.

One of the best tactics in BG 1 is just cast web/stinking cloud and kill everything with ranged weapons.

There is no such thing like friendly fire. Teach party some good behavior ;p

[Marksthecylon]

If your party has equipment that makes them immune to it's effect then web can be a VERY party friendly spell.

Also summons can turn just about any fight around by providing extra targets for enemies to waste their attacks against.

[wendigo211]

Defensively, it's Mirror Image and Stoneskin in BG. Stoneskin absorbs all physical damage (If you get hit by a Doom Guard you'll still take fire damage from the attack, but no physical damage) from an attack a certain number of times (dependent on your level). If you cast Mirror Image an opponent has a 1/(number of images +1) chance to hit you, but a miss causes an image to be removed. It's a very useful combo for tanking tough enemies like golems or the final boss who can do a lot of damage per hit. Fighter/Mage characters can get good use out of Wraithform, since most enemies in BG do not use magic weapons, but it does disable your spells.

Offensively the big ones have been covered, CC is your best bet as a mage in BG D&D.

Sleep is good. On Core Rules or lower Chromatic Orb is a good level 1 option once the enemies get tough enough to resist Sleep. It has some nasty effects if the opponents fail their save, but enemies get a bonus to that save (this can be remedied by using Greater Malison first or choosing enemies with poor saves vs. spells). Spook might be your best option for a level 1, but I hate chasing enemies around the map so I don't use it. However, since you're using Neera, Reckless Dweomer will probably be your first level of choice.

Glitterdust is a good debuff, it also has the bonus of making invisible enemies visible which is handy in a couple of places. Ray of Enfeeblement is good against a few tough enemies (It really works well on Doom Guards), it's too situation to keep in your everyday grimoire, but handy to pull out when the situation demands it.

I rarely use Fireball, Skull Trap is better, it does magic damage instead of fire damage, is capped at a higher level (which is really a BG 2 issue) and has a smaller AoE making it easier to aim. You can even set them before battle and lead the enemy into them. Dire Charm is another handy spell at this level particularly if the enemy groups have a couple big bruisers in them (Ogre Berserkers are good candidates for this one).

Emotion: Hopelessness is your best level 4 debuff, but my 4th level is typically filled with Stoneskins.

At 5th level I like Domination, Hold Monster and Cloudkill.

[Quietman]

Rings of fire resistance are your friend.

And remember... don't feel bad!
(In a foxhole, nobody likes that jerk who drops a grenade either...)

;-)

[ÄmJii]

One 1st level spell I don't often see mentioned is Blindness, which I've had great success with.
Compared to Glitterdust, Blindness has duration of 10 TURNS (10 minutes) whereas Glitterdust only lasts 4 Rounds (24 seconds). Blindness does great job at debilitating single powerful opponents, letting you pin-cushion them without retaliation.

Just remember to toss 1st level Priest spell Doom on the target pre-emptively, this will make them Save at -2 penalty.
This combo is shockingly effective even in Baldur's Gate 2, especially if you place 2x Blindness in Minor Spell Sequencer and add Greater Malison to the mix... imagine my surprised look when I realized Dragons are vulnerable to this :P

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

Blindness is a very popular choice for many a solo sorcerer.

[Soteria]

Sleep and Horror are also great party-friendly spells. At higher levels, Hold Person.

[TheBlueFox]

Doom has a LUDICROUSLY long cast time though. I mean it's like, a round and a half it almost seems...

[ÄmJii]

Originally posted by TheBlueFox:

Doom has a LUDICROUSLY long cast time though. I mean it's like, a round and a half it almost seems...

That's true, but ideally you should start casting Doom the moment you spot a tough foe. Remember that once you start casting a targeted spell, it doesn't matter where your target moves -> you can lure him/her into following your frontliner while waiting for Doom to fire off.
It takes a bit of practice to time Doom + Blindness properly, but once you get used to it it's not too clunky.

Should Blindness fail, you can try to follow up with Hold Person (Priests gain this as 2nd level spell).