Battling shades

[tjharwood]

Trying to stay spoiler free--think I may have gone into the Eothas temple too soon, as the shades on the 2nd level swarmed me with summons and I couldn't deal. Phantoms like to teleport and engage my wizard in the back. Other higher-level enemies in other areas, though, I'm handling well. Any tips on how to battle back against shades, phantoms, and their teleporting?

[Mormacil]

Put heavy armor on your caster for those fights, buff his health, leave casters at your stronghold. THat temple is hard before level 4.

[Gregorovitch]

Obviously ther secret is to kill the shades asap then their shadows are dismissed, but early game the main problem is the shade's very high DR (for thet stage of the game) making it very difficult to kill them therefore the shadows get a lot of time to mess up your back line.

There is a 3rd tier (IIRC) wizard spell that significantly reduces enemy DR Aloth use to make the shades a lot faster to kill - this spell is very effective at this stage of the game for anythihng with higher than everage DR, although it gets less so as the game progresses.

The other big one is having a couple of characters (at least) with guns as these do a *lot* of damage per hit thus cutting through the high DR monsters.

[Init]

also remember raw dmg(ciphers) bypasses dr. fire arms bypass dr with 5 dmg I think and do a lot of dmg to boot though their slow, there is estocs too.

[tjharwood]

Thanks, guys! I will go back and try some more with some new stuff.

[Lyle]

Never had much trouble with the Eothas temple. The haunted Lighthouse on the other hand... :/
A priest is always useful, throwing out buffs, heals, stuns and whatnot. I never venture anywhere without one. Besides, I find Durance really cool.

[IlluminaZero]

Shades have wildly inappropriate DR and Deflection for the time you are able to fight them.

The best bet is to use fire spells. That is all there is to it really. Keep Althos out of LOS and let the Shades waste their first teleport before nuking them with Fan of Flames with extreme prejudice.

If you have a Druid even better.

[White Knight]

For me, I only did a few rooms in that place before I realized I wasn't ready for it. The next time I came through town, it was a breeze.

As for ghosts, etc. jumping past your front lines, I found that they only ever do this for very short jumps. So I try to stagger my support guys. Have them find your priest instead or something like that.

My party is basically two separate parties: Two frontline tanks and the rest using ranged weapons. When an enemy gets past the tanks, everyone focuses fire upon the threat while the tanks hold their position. As long as the tanks do their job, the others can deal with anything that might slip through. When everything goes to ♥♥♥♥♥ and people start acting like individuals...it's pretty much over at that point.

Of course, the ideal way to oppose summoners is to kill the one doing the summoning. All of the summoned creatures disappear when the summoner is dead. Sometimes it makes sense to just abandon your well-laid plans and rush the quarterback.