Icewind Dale 2 - protect againtst stun?
 

I've been replaying IWD2 (almosrt done) and every bloody enemy cleric now drops a symbol of stun on my party as an opening spell. Nothing seems to protect against it, or remove it (except maybe heal? )? I have tried sacrificing summons by sending them in first, but the cleric seems smart enough to wait for us to come into view ;-) Now I hold back some PCs and send in a few to trigger it…but still , would be nice to counter it? Any known counter?

By the time this spell is available and in great use most of your team should have quite strong HP figures. The spell only effects one character and with the HP factor this should be a back-line character and not your front-line defenders. Some people think things like The Ring of Free Action and the spell Free Action (and possibly Chaotic Commands) prevent effects as well.

IWD2 can be a tough combat game, but I don't remember too many catastrophic results from my team being stunned aside from the odd battle. In those odd battles where it really annoyed me, what I would do was go into the battle with as many of my team invisible as possible, get my tanks next to the casters and take it from there.

Which specific battle/s is/are preventing your progress?

This is probably the one you're talking about, so my bad. But the advice is similar in that it shouldn't really be effecting high level melee characters. The useful equipment will be the Cloak of Displacement (+2 Fort save) etc. The invisibility trick will be less useful as it has an area of effect, but can still work, especially if a finger of death etc pays off or to cast the Symbol yourself first.

Is your team an unusual team in make-up with, unluckily, no high Fortitude characters and no spellcasters?

I'm surprised it affects my party so badly: everyone has over 100 hp (esp when the battle starts) So at most 2 people should be affected…but seems to hit 4 on average. Maybe its bugged? I have rogue, fighter, ranger, druid, mage, cleric. Saves for the party are quite good (I thought). I haven't really been stopped in progress, but it has meant that I've been quite badly battered by peripheral fights when (I think) I shouldn't have been. Just seems overpowered since everything else seems to have a counter (deathward negates 9th level power word kill etc). The clerics are hatemasters etc in The Hand. My party is level 15.

Well, since fortitude bonuses come from Constitution your party looks ok there, at least the Druid, Fighter, Cleric and Ranger should have decent to very high Con (maybe not the Ranger? if its a Str/Dex Ranger). So maybe it's the same 3 plus one random very unlucky dice roll combined with some kind of glitch re: the 250 (which is highly possible, IWD2 is known for many micro-bugs).

What I do in 3.5ed is normally start with an Assimar Paladin as my every-time character and build around that with character variants. The Assimar Paladin is my Saves guy and it's quite easy to max him to well over 20 in all saves by specialising him with feats and from his level-up bonuses and by prioritising saves gear to him first. That way I know that if anything happens to him I've been incredibly unlucky.

If it's not game-stopping then that's fine, the battles in IWD2 are supposed to bring you to the edge, so all is as it should be. The final end-boss is a doozy though and requires some really particular cheese as one of the end-bosses is an extremely, extremely powerful Cleric (mwhahahaha etc).

Edit: Dwarves are also great Fort save characters. A front-line of a saves Paladin and a Dwarf (of the most effective class/race sub-set) should prevent any but the most unlucky front-line stunning.

There's so much info required for saves I forgot to ask probably the most important aspect:

Are you pre-buffing your party efficiently enough?

These Cleric buffs all add universal bonuses to saving throws and all of them have a decent duration:

Level 1 - Protection From Evil (+2 to all saves)
Level 2 - Aid (+1 to all saves)
Level 3 - Prayer (+1 to all saves)
Level 4 - Recitation (+2 to all saves)

So even characters with relatively low saves can be boosted when needed to around the 20 mark. Could this be the key you're looking for?

is the spell "chaotic commands" available in iw2? I forget… on a semi-related note, Gamebanshee has really gone down the tubes :(

@lackblogger - I used the first two, but I could certainly benefit from doing more pre-buffing. I'm just confused as to how I had 4 people (with > 400hp in total) being stunned by one symbol…even the dwarven fighter failed his fortitude save. Anyway, I was OK in the end - just have to be more careful I guess.

@drithius - I couldn't find chaotic commands, I loved that in BG2…and I'm pretty sure it does protect against stun. sigh.

According to various on-line lists, Chaotic Commands is in the game as a level 5 cleric spell. As for my own memory, it's hard to say as I've only ever played it twice as well, which sounds like a lot, but over a 13 year time frame, that leaves an awful lot of room for severe memory gaps.

@Drith - I stopped posting there, what do you expect ;) but seriously, It had a major overhaul a year or two back which closed the forums for literally months verging on a full year (or felt like it) which gutted most regular users aside from news commentors.