Pools of Darkness: The Final Battle

The problem with the final battles in one animated GIF.

    

The famous final series of battles in Pools of Darkness begins when Gothmenes returns from his expedition to Limbo, a tied and subdued Elminster in tow. The party has had about an hour to run around Gothmenes' palace, scavenging what weapons they can and getting hold of the Crystal of Bane, which I guess is the source of his power. Once Gothmenes starts the clock, there's no escaping the palace--even if you could get very far before the countdown ends, you end up fighting endless battles against Minions of Bane as you get to the palace exit (or so I'm told--I didn't try).
    

The extra "g" really bothers me.

   

One or two steps before Gothmenes returns, the game gives you some kind of warning--I forgot exactly what it says--that basically alerts you that it's time to cast your buffing spells. Because the moment he gets back, you go directly to combat.
    

That just seems so undignified for Elminster.

   

Buffing at this level takes a while, and a few spells must be cast in a precise order. For instance, if you cast "Globe of Invulnerability" on your spellcasters too soon, they won't get the effects of "Haste" and other beneficial spells. Some of the low-level buffing spells make only extremely minor adjustments at this level, but for the final battle, you need every advantage you can get. So you scatter a few "Protection from Evil, 10' Radius" around the party to improve AC by 2. The mages all cast "Mirror Image" and the ranger can toss a couple of "Barkskins" on the highest AC characters. A cleric casts "Bless" and "Prayer." Everyone gets "Enlarge," "Resist Fire," and "Resist Cold." One "Haste." Mages give themselves "Fire Shield" and "Iron Skin" and cast a few "Fire Touches" on the melee characters (the spell makes melee fighters do extra fire damage) [Ed. I guess it also works on ranged weapons]. Then you try to cover as many characters as possible with "Mind Blank" to protect against psychic attacks.
    

This wasn't a hard choice. I don't even really like Elminster.

     

Once the mages have all the early level spells active, they can cast "Globe of Invulnerability." I used to finish off with a "Mass Invisibility" (you have to cast this last, or the very act of casting dispels it, I think), but I haven't had a lot of luck with invisibility working in this game.

If you're not an idiot like me, buffing also includes the use of potions (Potion of Speed and Potion of Giant Strength, maybe, though "Enlarge" and "Haste" duplicate their effects and don't really stack) and scrolls. In particular, you want to give someone the Scroll of Protection from Dragon's Breath, which also protects against the breath of Minions of Bane and maybe some other creatures. Because I didn't bring any of this stuff through the pool, I didn't have any of these items. As we'll talk about later, I'm not sure it wouldn't be cheating even if I did have them.
     

That's fine. "Resist Fire" is a thing. Just don't tell me I'll run out into a lightning storm to escape your wrath.

    

When Gothmenes gets back, there's a series of cut scenes. He notes that you have the Crystal and then shows the party Elminster, bound in Gothmenes' whip. He offers to trade the wizard for his Crystal. I don't think what you do here matters, because if you say yes, Elminster just shouts "no," frees himself, and instigates the final battle. If you say no, Elminster gets tortured a little and the final battles begin anyway.
   

Is it a flail or a whip? Get it together, Pools of Darkness.

    

Gothmenes summons allies from a Pool of Darkness. The party gets one choice: whether to try to use the Crystal to "countermand the summons." If you do, whoever has the crystal suffers a near-total loss of hit points, but I guess you face fewer monsters in the final combats. I unfortunately didn't see what happened when I didn't use the crystal.
    

That's not nice. I haven't even met them.

   

I love how "Bane minions" is an afterthought here, like they're not about to be the biggest pains in the neck in RPG history.

   

It is a word; that's just not what it means.

   

Elminster escapes his bonds and keeps Gothmenes occupied while his beholder ally, Xoham, spurs the summoned minions to attack. It all begins. You have to fight a sequence of three battles with no opportunity to save or rest in between. You cannot lose a single character within the first two battles and have much hope of defeating the third one, so no one can die, get stoned, or get disintegrated. There's no recovering if that happens.
     

Guys, note that he did not say, "Breathe lightning at them."

    

The first battle consists of a large group of Blue Minions of Bane, dracoliches, Pets of Kalistes, and Bits o Moander. The first time I played, I swear they weren't too hard. Blue Minions and dracoliches both breathe lightning, against which you have no defense (save the ring, which I didn't bring through, or scroll, which I didn't bring through), so you have to kill them quickly. Blue Minions fall easily to "Delayed Blast Fireball" but dracoliches don't. My mages went early in the round and destroyed most of the Blue Minions and Pets of Kalistes with fireballs. My hastened fighters pounded away at the dracoliches. I didn't kill them all in one round, but I reduced them enough that by the second round, the few stray lightning breaths that got through didn't really matter.
     

Preparing to take out the first batch of enemies.

    

Suspecting I was about to go into a second battle, I didn't end the combat when the enemies were dead, but kept playing long enough to restore everyone to full health. Easy peasy. 

Second battle: About 8 beholders. No magic helps here. I rushed to engage them in melee combat. This happened my first time through:
    

      
In subsequent tries, the beholder battle was trivially simple, because I used the exploit by which my characters would run up to the beholders and then run a step away, causing them to attack their backsides and ensuring they therefore wouldn't use their special eyestalk attacks that round (the same strategy that keeps dragons from breathing). I'm sorry if anyone thinks this is cheating, but once you know it works, you can't not do it, particularly in a battle this hard. It would take more willpower than I possess to stand there and watch characters get stoned and disintegrated because they failed random rolls than to use a quick and simple exploit.

But the first time, I was doing it honestly and paid for it with 3 character deaths. I killed the game to restart, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I could have used my doomed party to explore an option coming up.

Reloading, I started the first battle again, and you know what? It was harder than the first time. I had to review the videos to see what was different, but it appears that my first attempt had lots of Blue Minions (which are vulnerable to "Delayed Blast Fireball") but only a few dracoliches. The second and subsequent attempts reversed that ratio, so that I was able to clear fewer enemies with spells and had to resort to individual battles with the dracoliches. (I think there were a couple extra total enemies, too.) Trying the same strategy that had won the combat the first time, my party was wiped out within 2 rounds from the lightning breaths.

So I had to switch up my tactics. North of where the battle starts is a hallway with a 2-square entrance. I figured if I could get all my characters up there, I could lead the enemies to me in smaller groups and try strategies like delaying my spellcasters' actions until the end of the round, popping up to the entrance, firing off fireballs and lightning bolts, and then retreating around the corner at the beginning of the next round.
    

My party hunkers in the hallway while the enemies come around the corner one-by-one (the Black Minion of Bane is mine).

    

The first time I tried the tactic, one of my mages got the first initiative. I had her run up through the opening and into the hallway, then cast "Monster Summoning." A couple of Black Minions of Bane appeared around my lead character. I hoped they'd serve as fodder for the enemies' attacks while my other characters all got to safety. It almost worked. 5 of my 6 characters got up around the corner, but last, my paladin, suffered a poor initiative roll, apparently. Since all my other characters were in hiding, he suffered the brunt of every breath attack and soon died.

I reloaded. This time, I got luckier with the initiative rolls and everyone was able to get around the corner. After that, it was trivially simple, if long, to wait for each creature to wander into the hallway and kill him individually.
     

Keep fighting that single enemy, Elminster.

    

The second battle began. As I mentioned, I used the exploit and managed to kill the beholders with very minor injuries. I healed up, refreshed "Haste" and a few other spells, and moved on.
     

I was even able to get the beholders to damage themselves on my "Fire Shield."

   

Another series of cut screens. Gothmenes manages to throw Elminster into the dark pool. He surveys the damage I've already done and looks doubtful. "Perhaps you have earned the use of my gem," he says. "With it, you can rule the Realms!" He offers to teach me the "word to command it."
    

I just know this is going to be a bad choice, but I frankly would like to rule the Realms.

    

I silently curse. Of course I have to explore this option, even though I suspect it will end in ruin and I'll have to fight the first two battles all over again. I say "Yes." Gothmenes gives me a code word, and fortunately I screen-shot it, because it's only up for a second. I type it in when prompted.

Elminster lurches out of the pool, twisted and dying, screaming "no!" Gothmenes says, "Fools! You have opened the crystal! Welcome your new master!" I don't know exactly what that means, but all my party members instantly die and the game is over.
    

What if we'd been evil?

    

It takes 2 or 3 more reloads to repeat my success with the first and second battles. This time, I say "no" to Gothmenes' offer. "Minions! To me!" he cries, "but only a few lumber forward." He screams, "Bane! Protect your chosen one," and at first it seems like Bane doesn't answer. And then it happens: a light comes from the Pool of Darkness and wipes my spellcasters' memories. The final battle begins, and my party members don't have access to a single spell. (My buffing spells are still active, though.)
   

Aw, come on. This is bull#%#&.

   

The enemies: Gothmenes, 2 Bits o Moander, 2 green dragons, and 7 Blue Minions of Bane.

At this point, the full force of the mistakes I made last time comes crashing down. Gothmenes, for all his status as the "big bad" of the game, is just a balor. SSI's adaptation of AD&D rules doesn't allow for individual, named enemies to be notably more powerful than generic enemies of the same type. So though he has some special attacks and defenses and whatever, he goes down in a single attack from a hastened fighter (who gets 4 blows per round).
    

What should be the hardest villain dies right away.

    

Similarly, the green dragons don't last long against melee weapons. The Bits o Moander are tough, but there's only 2 of them, and they can be avoided until later. None of these enemies is trivial, I hasten to add--the green dragons and their poison breath are particularly vexing--but none of them is the real problem.

The real problem is the 7 Blue Minions of Bane. Not only are they blasting everyone with lightning bolts every round, but they've got this electric field that does double damage to anyone making a melee attack against them. If one of my hastened fighters runs up to one and hits him for 16, 18, 20, 14, he gets hit for 32, 36, 40, 28 in return, and probably immediately dies. In previous combats, spells made it easy enough to kill them at a distance, but I don't have any here. I also don't have any healing spells to at least restore hit points to wounded characters.

Nor do I have any wands, nor any scrolls, because I didn't bother to try to bring them through the Pool of Darkness, not even to see if it would have worked.

So my only recourse is missile weapons--which I've been ignoring the entire game.

I check my inventories. One mage has a staff sling, the other a regular sling. My thief has a short bow with 10 arrows. This is not enough, not even with my non-missile-equipped fighters sacrificing themselves to take down a couple of minions.

For a little while, it seems like I'm going to be able to win after a really long fight. My two mages have Rings of Blinking (you get one for fighting with Vala early in the game, but I repeated this area twice). This causes them to "blink out" after they make their attacks every round, and no enemy can target them. Because both mages have 18 dexterity, they almost always act first. (They have 18 dexterity because I kept re-rolling until I got it, not because I edited them to it.) They're horrible shots with their missile weapons, but I assume that given enough time, they can whittle everyone down and kill them.
    

My mages try to hold the line. (This from attempt #3 when I didn't kill Gothmenes first, for some reason.)

   

But "almost always act first" doesn't mean always, and they lose the initiative enough times that soon even they're dead.

After I lost this battle the first time, I knew I was in serious trouble. I hadn't even made a dent in the Minions. I looked through my paltry inventories and mentally reviewed all my tactics, and I couldn't come up with a single path to victory.

I did try. In two subsequent attempts (it took me 6 total reloads to get there because I had to win the first two combats first), I tried moving my characters around corners, keeping them at a distance, and so forth, but the enemies all have movement totals in the 20s and 30s, so they were able to close the gap and swarm me within a couple of rounds. And the Minions don't seem to have any distance restrictions on their breath attacks anyway. I tried giving the staff sling, sling, and Rings of Blinking to my fighters, and I managed to kill about half of the final enemies but it still wasn't enough.

As we reviewed last time, I had at this point exactly 2 saves. One was about 2 steps before Gothemenes started the final battles--just enough time to buff. The other was 40 hours ago, just after I defeated Thorne. As I write this, my previous post hasn't been published yet, but I'm going to assume you've already beaten me up pretty bad for that dumb mistake, so let's try not to do it again.

I honestly couldn't see any recourse, barring cheating, except to export all my party members, re-import them into a new party, and start the game over, not making the same mistakes. I'd also earn a few more levels, I reasoned.

But then I reflected how long it would take me to do that, even skipping the optional areas, and I decided to adopt a compromise--one that remedied one of my many mistakes and only left me with an advantage comparable to what I'd have had if I hadn't been stupid in the first place.

It really is an odd fact of the Gold Box games that when you load up a saved game, until you actually hit the "begin" option, you have a full menu of party options. This allows you to create, delete, and swap out party members even in an active party. An unscrupulous player could use this advantage to smuggle over all their equipment from the other side of Limbo by stuffing it into the hands of a throw-away character, removing him from the party, and then adding him back to the party while in Gothmenes' realm.

I couldn't even do that, since I didn't have a save state from prior to entering Dark Phlan. All my stuff was in storage in Limbo and wouldn't be available again until the end of the game. I suppose I could have done it with whatever equipment my party was carrying after the battle with Thorne, but I didn't want to cheat that badly.

What I did instead was to load my game in Gothmenes' realm, remove one character, and create a new fighter. New fighters start with, among other things, a Composite Long Bow +2 and 50 Arrows +2. I gave those items to one of my fighters, removed the new character, and repeated with my other two fighters. I finished by adding my original character back to the party. Yes, it's technically a cheat, but it's a cheat that gave me roughly the same equipment that I would have had if I'd been picking up missile weapons from the moment I entered New Phlan.

It still didn't make things easy. I had to reload 3 more times to get through the first battle again, then my party was wiped out in the final. But I came close enough that it was encouraging. I slowly developed a strategy by which my best fighters would first take out Gothemenes and the dragons in melee combat, then switch to missile weapons and pick away at the Minions of Bane. They were capable of firing enough missile shots to kill the Minions in two rounds; they just had to survive that long.

I didn't stop making mistakes. I totally forgot the option to switch the Rings of Blinking from my mages to my fighters--who with their bows, were much more important. If I'd remembered that, I might have won in a single try instead of 4. (That's 4 for the last battle; it took me 7 total reloads to get to the final battle 4 times, owing to problems in the first battle.)

On my 16th time entering the final battles, with adequate ammunition and missile weapons in the hands of my paladin and ranger, I was victorious. This time, I had my paladin and ranger kill only Gothmenes in the first round before switching to missile weapons and shooting at the Minions of Bane. I had everyone else attack the green dragons and Bits o Moander with melee weapons. Taking out the Minions so much faster made a big difference, and I finished the battle with only two characters dead.
   

My status at the end of the victorious battle. I have no idea why everyone left Dromio alone.

    

Whew.

The third of the three battles strikes me as just fundamentally, obnoxiously unfair. Spellcasting is such a huge part of the game that to remove it for the final battle betrays a lot of what you've built your characters to do. On the other hand, no matter how much you all warned me about the final battles, I couldn't imagine ahead of time what the game could possible do to pull the rug out from under me--and this was definitely it.

I'll cover what happened after the victory next time, but lets talk a little more about that final series of battles. It strikes me that a  player who's willing to cheat and bring all his equipment "around" the pool would have a trivially easy time with it. No, I couldn't verify this myself, but I'm 90% sure that if my characters had their best armor and weapons, their Girdles of Giant Strength, their rings of protection and Scrolls of Protection Against Dragon's Breath, maybe cleric scrolls with "Heal" and mage scrolls with "Delayed Blast Fireball," I would have won on the first try, maybe with a couple of character deaths. Heck, even a single dragon's breath scroll (which has more than 6 castings) would have rendered moot the difficulty posed by the Blue Minions and dracoliches. (Though it turned out to be good that I saved it--see the next entry.)

So it's cute that someone online, playing the game with a single magic-user/paladin at "champion" level, managed to win the final battles taking hardly any damage, but he did so by editing his character to max statistics and bringing over equipment that he wasn't meant to have. At least my cheat only gave me stuff that I would have found in the final area anyway.

On the other hand, I wonder if even having my Vorpal Blade and two Rings of Blinking wasn't a bit of a cheat. Elminster warns you that all magic items will be destroyed when you go through the pools. I think that's what was supposed to happen. The fact that some items aren't destroyed seems like a bug rather than a deliberate feature to give the party a slight advantage.

Winning the game took me literally all day. When I went to sleep that night, I had dreams about the final battle--dreams in which I found all kinds of loopholes that don't exist in the game, such as my party leading the enemies to favorable terrain (like a long narrow hallway with multiple 90-degree bends) before the battles begin. I kept waking up and whispering angrily to myself, "The game brings you to the final battle, not the other way around. There's no way to control the terrain!" Then I'd fall asleep and dream that there was some secret way to rest and save before the third battle.

Having spent so much time defeating the battle, I was curious what different spoiler sites had to say. Here's GameBanshee's summary:

The final trio of battles required for defeating Gothmenes is stupidly difficult. There are just way too many one-shot things that can go wrong, including stoning, poison, death, and disintegration--none of which can be corrected while you're in battle--that your odds of finishing the battles successfully is exceedingly low. After failing dozens of times to complete the battles, we finally got frustrated enough to switch the game difficulty to "novice," where we were finally able to succeed (but even that took a few tries).

It sounds like they were most afflicted by the second battle against the beholders, not knowing about the "run up, run away" trick. I don't know why I didn't consider lowering the difficulty level. I don't consider that a "cheat," exactly; it just feels a little lame.

The "Spoiler Centre" walkthrough encourages players to set the difficulty to "novice," too, and it recommends my strategy of having everyone run up into the northern hallway for the first battle. It also suggests that the mages' "Globe of Invulnerability" should have protected against the breath lightning of dracoliches and Blue Minions. Is it wrong, or did it not work for me simply because the spell ran out before the third battle? Maybe I should have memorized a few of those. Come to think of it, it didn't really occur to me to re-cast any buffing spells (except "Haste," which I lost because one of the Pets of Kalistes cast "Slow") between the combats. I assumed once was enough. I should have checked the time-outs on them.

I tried to watch some YouTube videos to see what tactics others have used, and the answer seems to be "cheating." I haven't found one in which the party members didn't have equipment they weren't supposed to have (including obvious item-duplication exploits), weren't cheated to at least 18 (sometimes 25!) in all their stats, and didn't have more hit points than should be plausible for party members of their level. 

So now I'm tempted to re-play the final battle at the intended game difficulty, using only the equipment I think I'm supposed to have, and record it for posterity. I'm not going to do it right away because I know it will take a full day or more, but perhaps sometime before I finish 1991. The only problem is, I don't have a saved game from before the final battle anymore (except the one that's way back at Thorne's). If someone sent me a saved game from, say, Arcam's fortress, would I be able to load it and then swap in my own characters? If not, or if no one has one, I suppose I can just replay the necessary areas after Thorne. It's not like I need to do a lot of leveling. I just hate the thought of going through the Moander dimension again.

Next up: the denouement.

Time so far: 60 hours
Reload count: 70