I didn't realize that Tanar'ri didn't get the "enemy of my enemy" philosophy, that made the downstairs fight much easier. In fact, even though all of my characters were a few levels below what my good party was at, the entire "guarded compound" was much easier. Put my party into one of the side rooms well away from the trap triggering point, then had my barbarian run up and trip the summons, then run back to my party. I then watch the text output as the Tanar'ri takes out the Nishruu and the ettercaps, and does in the efreeti until it turns into a gaseous form. By himself, the tanar'ri was easy pickings, but the efreeti was still a pain and I just ended up parking it somewhere in the lower floor then sleeping in the streets of the temple district (cheesy trick to sleep in city streets: go to the character sheet screen, enter the information screen, then exit it. You'll be back at the character screen. With that screen still up, you can rest without being disturbed by city guards).
The fight upstairs was actually rather easy with two druids. Sorceror breached the mage, both druids cast the contagious insect swarm at the two spellcasters, the barbarian activated the sun ray on Daystar, my halfling managed to detect and disarm the traps at the top of the stairs before being stunned and smashed by the minotaur (thankfully not chunked), and Jan did various little things throughout the fight.
The insect swarms were invaluable; The priest was unable to get off ANY spells and the Mage only got his first round of protections and a symbol: stun off before he got shut off. The protections were breached off immediately but the stun indirectly did in my dear halfling fighter/thief for the rest of the fight. The swarms also marked where the invisible thieves were even if I couldn't attack them while invisible. Some phase spiders, grizzly bears, a djinni, and a fire elemental were summoned throughout the fight to beat down the rest of the crew.
Despite lasting all of about five seconds in that tough fight, my halfling has typically been my most useful character. He is decent (if not stellar) in toe-to-toe melee with a 0 armor class and Celestial Fury. He's also the designated arrow-shooter (and tends to survive with fewer wounds when he fills that role, but with only one pure fighter he can't fill that one as often as i'd prefer). If the fight is serious, he can go invisible (and stay that way with the cloak of non-detection) and backstab for sick amounts of damage. Plus when money gets lean (like when I needed to fund my mageling apprentices in the stronghold quest right after burning my whole stash on buying the sling of Everard), he can generate endless amounts of money by selling the same rogue stone dozens of times to black market merchants and taking it back. He also single-handedly cleaned out Mae'var's guildhouse entirely of riches except for the stuff in Gorch's store inventory and that one dresser that's magically warded against lockpicking. Yes, including the riches carried by Mae'var himself. He's like the
thief in 8-bit theater: robbing and stealing through way through the game, then selling the plunder back to the victims so he can steal it away again.
I'm currently in the middle of the Mae'var's guildhall quests, and I was sorting through Gorch's inventory when I found another nice trinket: The nymph's cloak. It's like Algernon's Cloak from BG1, the effects are basically the same: +2 cha, charm person once per day. My barbarian didn't happen to be wearing a cloak at the time, so I bought it for her. She's now at an impressive 22 Charisma between the ring, the sword, and now the cloak. Not bad for a natural 9, eh?
-CC