Can't defeat Grimgnaw and his goons, please help!

[Herodotus]

Hey, so I've been playing through Neverwinter Nights for the first time, been an absolute hoot, enjoyed everything from the Original Campaign, to the expansion content such as Tyrants of the Moonsea and Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.

But I am stuck, on the very last expansion, Hordes of the Underdark.

You see, my character is, due to a decision I now thoroughly regret, a ranger with two levels into wizard (she's at about level 22 in ranger and 2 in wizard, making her level 24 in total). I did this seeing as I always played a fighter before and wanted to try something different. However, it seems literally IMPOSSIBLE to defeat the group of enemies (Grimgnaw, Balpheron, Koth Uth-Kalin, Maugrim and Crimson) in the "Abandoned Entryway." I've tried several times, must be around my twentieth attempt, and, while I am able to get Grimgnaw down to near death, he quickly heals back to full health, when my entire party gets wiped. I don't even get to make a dent in his friends.

So, what I am wondering is, have I doomed myself to failure due to my class choice? Am I too low level? Are there any pointers on how to finally vanquish this most vile of foes? Should I be focusing on anyone in particular? Am I even SUPPOSED to be fighting them? Please, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

PS: As far as my party composition, it is my character, Aribeth and Deekin. Deekin is mostly a bard, and I didn't change anything about Aribeth either.

[Rodia]

What do you mean by archer? Arcan archer class? If you do, try to summom with a scroll as high level monster as you can. Your int is a limit. Then buff your party with speed potions. Focus on the easiet target. And yes, your level is quite low.

[DrLoboto]

Can you even choose Arcane Archer at level 3? Doesn't look like it. Maybe it's a fighter with high DEX and skilled in long range weapons and feats?

[id795078477]

Risolvir cheese? To be honest, I never tried it in EE - but I think it still works?

What you can do is to cheese the entire game using the Risolvir enchantment "feature". At some point he will refuse to enchant your weapons telling they are too powerful, so you "circumvent" that restriction with doing the following thing:

1. Pick up some mundane weak weapon (basic sword +5 or something)
2. Go to Risolvir and tell him you want to enchant it. Go all the way till the last moment when you exit the dialogue and the thing gets enchanted. But you do NOT press continue at that point
3. Open inventory, equip your super-weapon you want to enchant instead
4. Now press the final "continue" in the dialogue
5. Your super-weapon will get enchanted as you would expect

Do note that the gold costs spiral very quickly out of control past +10 enchant. But you can in theory get the +20 weapon with 1d6 electric, fire, acid and sonic enchant on it with all the other goodies too (like regeneration or whatnot)

If you struggle to find gold for this then there's another cheese to go about. You need to find the ring of the sleeping man (I mean the one you repair) and also finish the quest for the miner pit boss devil to get him to show you his shop. This shop is important because it's limit is 50k gold on buying stuff.

Now:
1. You equip the sleeping man ring near a hidden chest that contains something expensive
2. You pick up the item from it but do not close the container and do not move
3. You unequip the sleeping man ring causing the container to disappear. It's important that you DO NOT close or interact with container anyhow else before unequipping the ring.
4. Now equip the ring. The container will appear and the item in it will still be there. You can pick it up and repeat 1..4 to dupe the item indefinitely
5. Well, pick up your "fairly acquired items" and sell them to the shop of that devil.

So you now have infinite gold to use for your enchantment. Well, I think you need several million to get it up to +20 and fully upgraded.

P.S. It is of course the cheese to use if you're completely desperate about some fights.

[Herodotus]

Sorry for the misunderstanding guys, by archer I meant ranger, for me these two words are basically interchangeable and I couldn't remember the term ranger at the time of writing. It has been edited.

[Herodotus]

Originally posted by Rodia:

What do you mean by archer? Arcan archer class? If you do, try to summom with a scroll as high level monster as you can. Your int is a limit. Then buff your party with speed potions. Focus on the easiet target. And yes, your level is quite low.

Sorry about that, I meant Ranger. I use the term archer to refer to rangers sometimes since...well they both use bows XD

[Herodotus]

Originally posted by DrLoboto:

Can you even choose Arcane Archer at level 3? Doesn't look like it. Maybe it's a fighter with high DEX and skilled in long range weapons and feats?

Nope, its the ranger class. Sorry :/

[Herodotus]

Originally posted by Dellecross:

Risolvir cheese? To be honest, I never tried it in EE - but I think it still works?

What you can do is to cheese the entire game using the Risolvir enchantment "feature". At some point he will refuse to enchant your weapons telling they are too powerful, so you "circumvent" that restriction with doing the following thing:

1. Pick up some mundane weak weapon (basic sword +5 or something)
2. Go to Risolvir and tell him you want to enchant it. Go all the way till the last moment when you exit the dialogue and the thing gets enchanted. But you do NOT press continue at that point
3. Open inventory, equip your super-weapon you want to enchant instead
4. Now press the final "continue" in the dialogue
5. Your super-weapon will get enchanted as you would expect

Do note that the gold costs spiral very quickly out of control past +10 enchant. But you can in theory get the +20 weapon with 1d6 electric, fire, acid and sonic enchant on it with all the other goodies too (like regeneration or whatnot)

If you struggle to find gold for this then there's another cheese to go about. You need to find the ring of the sleeping man (I mean the one you repair) and also finish the quest for the miner pit boss devil to get him to show you his shop. This shop is important because it's limit is 50k gold on buying stuff.

Now:
1. You equip the sleeping man ring near a hidden chest that contains something expensive
2. You pick up the item from it but do not close the container and do not move
3. You unequip the sleeping man ring causing the container to disappear. It's important that you DO NOT close or interact with container anyhow else before unequipping the ring.
4. Now equip the ring. The container will appear and the item in it will still be there. You can pick it up and repeat 1..4 to dupe the item indefinitely
5. Well, pick up your "fairly acquired items" and sell them to the shop of that devil.

So you now have infinite gold to use for your enchantment. Well, I think you need several million to get it up to +20 and fully upgraded.

P.S. It is of course the cheese to use if you're completely desperate about some fights.

Honestly, I just may give this a try. I just hope I have a save that old. Thanks!

[DrLoboto]

Originally posted by Herodotus:

Nope, its the ranger class. Sorry :/

Of course! That makes more sense. :)

I'm not an expert on the official campaign at all. If your level is low for that fight, like Rodia said, can you still do other things and give that fight another try later on, or do you have to do it now because there's nothing else to do anymore?

I wonder if it would also be possible for anyone to join your savegame in multiplayer with a melee character and help you out? But I suppose they would land somewhere else in the module and would have to be teleported to your party somehow ...

[Slapstick]

Hard to advise without knowing anything about your build. Are you dex or str? two-weapon or sword/shield? Do you have expertise/improved expertise? Not beating that party is probably both the build and the play style but so far you haven't really told us what the problem is rather than "I die".

I recently played through as a ranger myself. I was a pure ranger dual-wielding scimitars with a str. build. I was solo and beat them without much difficulty, so I'm wondering what your build is

[DrLoboto]

As a character with wizard levels, you should also be able to use scrolls and wands to your advantage, right? Is anything preventing a lvl 2 wizard from casting high level spells from scrolls or wands? Provided you have enough money to acquire them?

[id795078477]

Originally posted by DrLoboto:

As a character with wizard levels, you should also be able to use scrolls and wands to your advantage, right? Is anything preventing a lvl 2 wizard from casting high level spells from scrolls or wands? Provided you have enough money to acquire them?

No, if one can use a scroll - they can. For that reason someone with wizard levels will be able to use any arcane scroll. You won't be able to learn a high level spell from it if you're not on that spell level but you will be able to do a single-time spell usage.

This means that any fight can be trivialized through spamming a "Time Stop" scroll reading because Time Stop does not care about the caster level. So unlike, say, offense spell scrolls which will be near useless due to low class level, Time Stop will always do a 9 seconds freeze on enemies. Do it 3-4 times and it's almost guaranteed that you can burst down 1-2 enemies from that Grimgnaw band without them even moving once.

Anyways, HotU provides for a wide variety of cheeses with different "conscience damage" levels:

- Time Stop scrolls cheese (or Time Stop spell cheese) to get through just about any fight
- Risolvir cheese to grab them OP weapons and obliterate everything in sight
- Infinite gold sleeping man ring items duping cheese to fix the premature bankruptcy
- Leveling cheese in the Vikstra temple for some extra "umf" on the character. It's also doable in the Island Of Maker on those golems but they admittedly yield less XP and are harder to kill.

I'd say the Vikstra one is probably the "least cheesy" because it's just wasting a lot of time waiting for the vampires to respawn. One can reasonably get to level 27..28 there and then by the time they will face any serious enemies from chapter 3 they will be well past level 30 so feat-wise they will be way stronger than those encounter.

[Slapstick]

You shouldn't need cheese at all to beat that fight. Just, like... buff up, dps, drink heal when necessary. with wizard levels your access to buffs should be more than enough to kill these guys, unless you put all you points in wisdom for a zen archery ranger build or something stupid. It's admittedly one of the very few tough fights but it's not that bad. Do you even have greater brawlers belt?

[Herodotus]

Originally posted by Slapstick:

You shouldn't need cheese at all to beat that fight. Just, like... buff up, dps, drink heal when necessary. with wizard levels your access to buffs should be more than enough to kill these guys, unless you put all you points in wisdom for a zen archery ranger build or something stupid. It's admittedly one of the very few tough fights but it's not that bad. Do you even have greater brawlers belt?

It's very possible that I did something wrong, seeing as I've literally never played anything other than a default fighter.

[Herodotus]

Originally posted by DrLoboto:

Originally posted by Herodotus:

Nope, its the ranger class. Sorry :/

Of course! That makes more sense. :)

I'm not an expert on the official campaign at all. If your level is low for that fight, like Rodia said, can you still do other things and give that fight another try later on, or do you have to do it now because there's nothing else to do anymore?

I wonder if it would also be possible for anyone to join your savegame in multiplayer with a melee character and help you out? But I suppose they would land somewhere else in the module and would have to be teleported to your party somehow ...

I could probably reload a save to earlier in the game, otherwise, yeah I need to do that fight. As for the multiplayer thing...never thought about it, may try it if things get extremely desperate XD

[Ronanfalcon]

Originally posted by Herodotus:

Sorry for the misunderstanding guys, by archer I meant ranger, for me these two words are basically interchangeable (...)

I hope, based in this situation, that you learn to not do that anymore (to reset your mind about these words).
I understand what you did, because I did it too in the past. Don't know how much time has passed for you, but we already live in an era where we must refine our knowledge to stop language (and other types of) addictions, given that all the knowledge is within everyone's reach.