Bane of the Living - neat optional boss and item!

[Tennmuerti]

As some of you may know, the Storyteller artifact item Cloak of Sold Souls is cursed and in order to remove it after wearing, you need to try to decurse it to try and unequip it.

In the description it states that if you fail, the wearer dies and a hostile Thanadaemon is summoned. That one however seems to be a bit bugged and is not in fact hostile.
(and at lvl 20 an Astradaemon is summoned instead)

The fun part is what's not in the description. If you fail to remove the cloak a second time straight after (i was using Jaethal since she doesnt really die anyway). A second Thanadaemon spawns as usual, this one properly hostile.

BUT what is ALSO summoned at the same time is the - Bane of the Living - named demon! And this guy hurts, a lot. His base AC starts at 60, he is permanently in total concealment, many many ouchie attacks per round each of them draining levels obv. And the fight also starts with you getting hit instantly with Finger of Death and a seperate -5-7 level drain too. Hard to judge its HP probably close to 1k. It's a hell of a fun fight, (espeically if you try for two in a row at lvl 15 heh). It's attack bonus is 50 (-8 from power strike)

I used cheatengine for fun after the fight to see it's raw base stats:
level: 31
str: 39
dex: 35
con: 36
int: 27
wis: 33
chr: 41
Bab: 31
speed: 90


Upon death it's worth 11520 xp
It drops a +5 elven curven blade also called Bane of the Living
Living Bane property, basically it's Bane vs. everything except constructs and undead
on crit casts Harm dc 22

You can summon him and fight him as many times as you want by repeatedly failing the decurse.

Have fun!

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

How did you kill it? :)

[Tennmuerti]

I had a mostly fully buffed party right after killing Ilthuliak (who is a harmless kitten by comparison) when i remembered wanting to give it another go (lvl 15); so a lot of standard buffs: bard buffs, greater heroism, prot from evil, stoneskin, blurs/greater invis, etc; death wards on the front line were a must, True Strike right before fight starts to get innitial hits in, damage dealers and sorcerer got True Seeing; workhorse was my main sylvan sorcerer with several metamagic rods firing off several Enervations quickened and/or empowered/maximised (as his saves are too high to try to CC with anything that can be saved gainst) a few evervates managed to hit; and that kind of equalised him down to the levels where my melee (mostly giant Amiri) was able to hit him and get hit back less, which with her high DR was managable to heal.
The most dangerous part of the fight is the very start, if you can stabilise after that, it's all good. He is mostly a giant stat stick and just tries to whail on you, no super shenannigans after the initial burst of spells. Just don't forget to pop the regular puny Thanatodaemon after initial truestrike hits on Bane itself, to get it out of the way.
I didn't have access to nor used greater shout cheese, which i think could have made it significantly easier.