Ability Drain - worthwhile

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I have been using old Haer d'pain in the butt. He is a really useful character if you can get him to shut the hell up for a few minutes.

However one thing I have wondered is the effectiveness of his weapons. Especially the Chaos Blade.

The Chaos Blade is said to drain 2 dex points per successful hit (for 30 secs). Sounds good right?

But does everything in the game have an alloted dex rating? Is the max any critter can have 25?

Or is this weapon completely ineffective against non humanoids? Such as a Dragon or Slime?

I have looked around for ages tonight and can not seem to find the answer anywhere.

Any thoughts?


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EDIT -
Oh I should add...

Does the same apply for level drain?
Does everything have a set Hit Dice/Level?

Can you (for instance) drain Joneleth or Demogorgan to death via level drain or dex drain as Mind Flayers do with Intelligence drain?

 

Any ability drained to 0 will kill someone. 0 STR, dead. 0 DEX, dead. 0 CON...you get the idea. But, if you drain to -1 instead of 0, it'll wrap back around to 25 instead. So with 2 points drained per hit, you can only kill people with an even DEX score this way.

Ability drain should affect all creatures. But whether having their DEX drained will have any effect is questionable. For example, any DEX score between 6 & 14 means no bonuses and no penalties. And up near 25, the bonuses come less frequently, getting a bonus only every 2 or 3 points of DEX.

Every NPC and every monster have ability scores. however, a lot of them are set to 9 as a neutral value. Any that are not 9 are deliberately set that way, like how dragons have 25 STR (which is the max, yes).

Every NPC and monster also has a level, though it may not necessarily be in agreement with their hit point total. Level drain down to zero means death for anybody just as it would for your characters (though in PnP, level zero is commoner status and you'd have to be drained once more to die). I do not know, however, whether you can experience a similar wrap effect with levels as you would with stats.

 

Judging by the lack of bug reports about it in Weimer's Valen forum, I'd have to say that level drain doesn't wrap around.

 

If you kill Melissan via stat drains, she will die, but nothing else will happen and you will either have to walk around that throne place for ages or just quit or reload the game. (I have tested this.)

The point is that some of the creatures are such that you will need to kill them only through normal ways available in the game and anticipated by the designers, otherwise the story will not proceed.

 

Some interesting insights, especially the warning by Sikret. Cheers.

It clearly needs further thought.

 

Thie reminds me of people dying from using that club of terror or whatever it's called.

 

Draining a stat to zero can kill almost anything, but it can cause bugs as stated by Sikret.

And yes, Staff of Terror CAN kill you if you use it too much, and in case of NPCs, they will be perma-dead, no res. is possible.

That is, you can use the ring of human inf. trick to get 25 CHA!

 

Haer's Chaos Blade should work and kill the opponents who're drained of all dex.

I once tried with Kachiko's Wakizashi to get a wisdom of 25, but of course it doesn't work. Ability draining items with temporary effects don't wrap around to 25, they just kill you. That's why you can't get to int 25 with mind flayers either.

For further notice, you can't get to con 25 with constantly summoning & killing your familiars either. Familiars dying seem to have an effect of a permanent negative value for your con, instead of just reducing it permanently by one.

You can however get dex & int into 25 by reduction using the Machine of Lum the Mad. Just remember to protect yourself for the other ill effects!

 

Hmm, so Chaos Blade while greater Whirlwinded = 2x10 = 20 dex drained. Which would kill most things. If not as long as you have 3 attacks the next round (and you are able to hit) you knock off another 6 dex...therefore as long as you have a greater whirlwind handy and chaos blade wielded to a good level of proficiency...you should be able to kill anything in two rounds!

I really can see no reason why not!
Although by the sound of it, you would really need to keep it away from certain "name" monsters.

Hmmm...

 

Mind you, ability drain killing does not give any exp., but in ToB there's plenty of exp. to go around, so no worries.

 

Silverstar said:

Ya know, I once saw a thread about a guy who started BG1 with a human fighter and all 18's, except a 3 CHA. His goal was to make him a Kensai, dual to Mage, and get every stat as high as possible, including wrapping his CHA around to 25.

I don't know if it was successful, but it's kinda cool from a powergamery perspective!