The Hardest Dragon

The first one Which happened to be Thaxll'ssilya.

 

I'd definitely say it was Adalon, for the exact reason you mentioned. She basically is a ToB difficulty dragon found in SoA.

However, if you are suicidal, I suppose you can go after the Shadow Dragon (won't both trying to spell the name) as your first major quest in Chapter 2, and that would prove challenging.

Neither have I, but by the time I get to ToB, dragons aren't that tough. I don't have problems with Abazigal, so I have a hard time believing this one would be tougher.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Rags.

 

As Rags said, the first dragon you run into, the first time you play the game. No party is prepared to take on the dragon initially. Although with the rune you can nearly kill the shadow dragon before it goes hostile and you can prepare for battle with Firkraag while he's watching -- but still....

 

As a long time player of RPG/action/puizzle games I didn't have much of a problem killing my first dragon in BG2. None of the dragons in early-mid SoA are hostile as soon as you meet them, which meant I had plenty of time to study them and then come up with traditional ways of killing them.

The first smart dragon I encountered though was a different story. Draconis caught me completely off guard, and I had to make do with studying him while he repeatedly wiped the floor with my party. As I mentioned in other threads a lot of my parties are synergistic instead of traditional, so while my guys can bring Draconis down easily and with minimal damage with the right tactic they are not particularly powerful individually, and without the right strategy everything just falls apart.

"Fire"-krag is powerful, 'cept he falls for the classic and-now-I-shall-reveal-all-my-greatest-strengths-to-the-protagonist trope. The black dragons appear much too late in the game.

 

I'm with Paracelsi on this one. The first few dragons you encounter in SoA are not hostile as soon as you see them and so are quite easy to prepare for. Draconis, on the other hand, was almost a show stopper when I first encountered him. Granted, this was with a solo R/C when I was still pretty new to BG2 and D&D in general (don't know why I tried to solo the game almost straight out of the box), but he was and still is one of the hardest fights in BG2 for me.

More so than Abizigail, who is mostly just annoying to kill because he apparently has an infinite amount of heal spells so you have to deal enough damage to kill him fast, but at least you don't have to go look for him all the time.

 

Who is Fil'Yissitat? The dragon guarding entrance to Abazigal? Overweight fly, nothing more.
For me the hardest were chronologically:
First, Firkraag because he was the 1st that I met.
Second Draconis, because the usual tactics totally fail against him.

I don't know which one caused me more troubles. I think Firkraag, but I'm not sure.

 

Firkraak was my first dragon. I wasn't able to beat him until much later in chapter 6 on my first playthrough.
But overall I'd say Draconis is the hardest with his guerilla tactics .

 

Personally I'd say it's Abazigal. I've only fought Adalon I think about 2 times or so, and she did completely destroy my party. But for some reason I've always felt like Abazigal was in his own league. I think it's because he always wing buffets my party into a corner and then just spams his lightning breath. Which does a crazy amount of damage on the higher difficulties. I actually find Draconis to be really fun. Mostly because he just plays differently. It's just a shame that there are no white dragons in the game. I mean we get black, red, silver, blue, brown, and green but no whites.

 

I agree. I would of liked to have seen more of the "Good" dragons as well. They used Silver as they are the most inclined ot deal with humanoids.

 

Definitely. I personally would have loved to meet with a Gold dragon at some point in the game. I could see why they chose silver since like you said they are the most inclined to deal with humanoids. But either way Adalon's story is pretty dark so they could have just as easily put in a Gold dragon with the same story.

Actually we do fight white dragons in IWD1 and IWD2 but they really don't compare to the BG2 dragons in any way.

 

I voted Thaxll'ssillyia just because I remember struggling a lot with him back when I first started playing this game. Its been a while since I made it to TOB, so I cant comment on those dragons.

Does anyone else think its amazing that, in BG2, they went to the trouble of making detailed character models (or sprites anyway!) for important boss characters that a lot of people would never see? I mean unless you do the Ranger and Paladin strongholds, you would never see them. Thats a lot of work to put into something that players might not even know is there.

From what I can remember of TOB, dragons are not as much of a challenge because of how overpowered the party usually gets. And no dragon is immune to timestop.

 

And yet, there are white dragon scales to be found in the game...

What characters are unique to the paladin stronghold quests? (I mean unique in character model - they all have unique names, but I don't recall any of them looking that much differently than other characters. The Ranger definitely - the forest sprite and the Umar witch are unique.

 

I was going to say Ankhegs, but they were from BG1. Um only Firkraag himself I guess, who I presume was the first and only user of the red dragon sprites before they were reused in TOB.

I was really referring to the dragons themselves - unique and highly detailed characters that a lot of people would never see.

 

Dont rain on my parade here!

Yeah...I guess so. They do hint rather strongly at the Fighter and Paladin stronghold quests.

Is Delon in the Government district the only way to start the ranger stronghold quest?

That being said, I do think there is a ton of optional content in BG2, a ton of completely optional quests. I would be interested to see the minimum number of quests that you had to do to finish the game - ie be powerful enough to beat Irenicus. With the number of skilled soloers out there, that number is probably not high.

 

No, but the other means is also in the Government district, and I doubt you could do it without encountering Delon anyway. Tolgeris in the Government district will give you the Valygar quest, which opens the Umar Hills, which would also allow you start the ranger quest.

 

That depends on how much you want to cheese it. If you watch this speedrun, you may notice that the PC is a lvl 8 transmuter by the end. I'm not sure, but I think he doesn't level up once (even though he has xp enough to level up some levels by the end). He has help only from Yoshimo to defeat Irenicus. Don't ask why Yoshimo is still there - the road there is convoluted and cheesy.

 

Yeah...somehow I hate how cheesy are the latest BG1 speedruns, yet I kinda like the BG2 ones.

 

The latest BG1 speedrun is hilarious. Or at least that's what I thought. I don't think it's that cheesy, actually. It's just running around for the required items for a while, using some bugs to duplicate them, then breaking the game quite fundamentally to skip everything. Taking down Sarevok was kind of cheesy, but how else to do it with such a low level character?