Soon after settling in at Eamon's estate, a handmaiden of Queen Anora - Loghain's daughter and widow of King Cailan, arrives asking us to free her from her imprisonment at Arl Howe's estate. I agree to it but get side tracked in robbing someone else's mansion first - only that whole job is a trap forcing a pretty big fight against the ambushing guardsmen to escape. Of course I make sure to kill -all- guardsmen before escaping just to make a point.
After the warm up round we go to Arl Howe's estate and initially are very cautious about killing anyone, using guard disguises and everything. Unfortunately Queen Anora's room is sealed magically which means having to kill Howe's magician who is currently with him in the dungeons below. The guards there see right through the ruse too, and put up a decent fight but are ultimately all killed like the scum they are. It helps that Morrigan's AOE blizzard hits through walls. Their boss, Arl Howe, dies as unceremoniously as the rest which leaves my thirst for vengeance quite strong.
Blood lust activated!
There are a few prisoners down there too, most with political ties so I free all but one who seems like a scum anyway. That one I execute on the spot. Before freeing Anora I also meticulously go through the top floor, not just raiding Howe's treasury but killing ALL the guards who worked for him (apart from the 2 non combat ones) both inside and outside the mansion before freeing the Queen.
Loghain's female bodyguard, Ser Cauthrien, shows up with a good number of soldiers at that point and tries to arrest me. Stupid bitch, only pussies surrender! She and all her minions are easily torn to pieces with good tactics that exploit their flawed "stand here and guard, no matter what" AI. Rescue complete.
You can escape from Ser Cauthriens attempt at imprisoning the grey warden?!?
ReplyDeleteThat is pretty interesting. I was never able to do it myself. Probably because the few times I tried, I was with some morally-challenged characters and I think the rest of my party wasn't so good either... Or something like that. I guess I will give it a try next time!
Yup! It actually took me a few goes to get to the "easily torn them to pieces" part before I realized that only Ser Cauthrien and three or so of her lackeys (basically the non-archers) would actually give chase. I used Waking Nightmare as my first move on said group to buy some time and cover while the rest of my team backed out down the long corridor, all the way down to Captain BJ's room.
DeleteThen, ala Kenshin, those few bad guys came in single file for easy pickings. Ser Cauthrien has high damage and high HP but not enough for the amount of health poultices I made after getting previously annoyed by the Brood Mother.
The remaining 75% of the guards are healer wizards and archers don't move, so I used Blizzard (with a stealthed spotter for targeting purposes) to clean them up from a safe distance. :P
Huh. With normal fights I would usually think of trying a strategy like that. But in that fight it never occurred to try that! I always thought it was a scripted fight where you would lose no matter what because Bioware wanted to tell their story.
ReplyDeleteNow I *really* need to try it the next time I get to that part!