Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[Average Manatee]

I'll add some of my random thoughts. Personally I do like most of the new spell additions (eg. Duel is an iconic spell for a paladin).

I do love duel. But no save at all seems like practically an exploit. Like dueling an unprotected mage at the back of the enemy group, seems like they should decline that duel.

I haven't played the original but I found the overall game difficulty to be really high. Especially named enemies are buffed like hell (I wasn't able to kill Xvim, my melee just couldn't scratch him with their +5 weapons). I compare boss stats with their original values and they are substantially higher in EE, for example: Xvim's HP 482 vs 1020 , AC 35 vs 51). They are also immune to pretty much everything - when I searched for ways people dealt with Izbelah or Xvim, I read stuff like "I just finger of death him" which plainly won't work here. From what I saw they also have very high SR.

What difficulty did you play on? Unlike the other IE games the difficulty slider in IWD2 actually massively buffs enemy AB/stats. Which is part of why stacking AC/dips/unarmored/deep gnome is the only way to really survive on very hard or HoW. Or spamming summons lmao (though I took the EE option to nerf them so we'll see).

I will be trying to play a "normal" party with no cheese aside from 1 fighter who I'll be running with 1 monk and Kensai just to compare. Rest of the group will be barb (wearing armor and trying to rely on damage reduction), rogue (test sneak attacking), Cleric of Bane, Sorcerer and Wizard. Managed the prologue on Very Hard without too much trouble. My melee game is pretty weak. The goblin bosses at the palisade had like +19 attack which is pretty standard I think, but my sorcerer had a pretty good chance to charm anything and color spray handled the rest. The spell focus feats look quite powerful now, giving +2 instead of +1 and covering two schools.

AoOs are really kind of obnoxious though, I think I'm gonna hate them going forward. Pathing is not great in the infinity engine and RTwP games have never been a great thing for controllability of the party. Characters chasing after an enemy running around and eating AoOs of every other enemy around are commonplace, and if an enemy gets on your mage its a chore to deal with. It'd be way better if the AI of both players and enemies was more anchored to whatever was in melee range. Clerics casting in battle sucks hard too, 3rd ed is supposed to have a defensive casting check to avoid AoOs but that's not a thing here. It wouldn't be a problem if enemy AB wasn't so inflated and I had a decent chance of dodging these AoOs but that's not the case. This is a mobility and combat casting feat to help alleviate these issues that I'll need to pick up at some point.

Also, sadly, being a small race doesn't help at all with being enlarged, your footprint on the map is still huge and unwieldy.

Also also, I really like the extra options in stores. I'm pretty sure I'll never have enough gold to get all I want.

 

[Snufkin]

I'll add some of my random thoughts. Personally I do like most of the new spell additions (eg. Duel is an iconic spell for a paladin).

I do love duel. But no save at all seems like practically an exploit. Like dueling an unprotected mage at the back of the enemy group, seems like they should decline that duel.

I haven't played the original but I found the overall game difficulty to be really high. Especially named enemies are buffed like hell (I wasn't able to kill Xvim, my melee just couldn't scratch him with their +5 weapons). I compare boss stats with their original values and they are substantially higher in EE, for example: Xvim's HP 482 vs 1020 , AC 35 vs 51). They are also immune to pretty much everything - when I searched for ways people dealt with Izbelah or Xvim, I read stuff like "I just finger of death him" which plainly won't work here. From what I saw they also have very high SR.

What difficulty did you play on? Unlike the other IE games the difficulty slider in IWD2 actually massively buffs enemy AB/stats. Which is part of why stacking AC/dips/unarmored/deep gnome is the only way to really survive on very hard or HoW. Or spamming summons lmao (though I took the EE option to nerf them so we'll see).

I will be trying to play a "normal" party with no cheese aside from 1 fighter who I'll be running with 1 monk and Kensai just to compare. Rest of the group will be barb (wearing armor and trying to rely on damage reduction), rogue (test sneak attacking), Cleric of Bane, Sorcerer and Wizard. Managed the prologue on Very Hard without too much trouble. My melee game is pretty weak. The goblin bosses at the palisade had like +19 attack which is pretty standard I think, but my sorcerer had a pretty good chance to charm anything and color spray handled the rest. The spell focus feats look quite powerful now, giving +2 instead of +1 and covering two schools.

AoOs are really kind of obnoxious though, I think I'm gonna hate them going forward. Pathing is not great in the infinity engine and RTwP games have never been a great thing for controllability of the party. Characters chasing after an enemy running around and eating AoOs of every other enemy around are commonplace, and if an enemy gets on your mage its a chore to deal with. It'd be way better if the AI of both players and enemies was more anchored to whatever was in melee range. Clerics casting in battle sucks hard too, 3rd ed is supposed to have a defensive casting check to avoid AoOs but that's not a thing here. It wouldn't be a problem if enemy AB wasn't so inflated and I had a decent chance of dodging these AoOs but that's not the case. This is a mobility and combat casting feat to help alleviate these issues that I'll need to pick up at some point.

Also, sadly, being a small race doesn't help at all with being enlarged, your footprint on the map is still huge and unwieldy.

Also also, I really like the extra options in stores. I'm pretty sure I'll never have enough gold to get all I want.

Well I gave up at Guthma fortress. Idk, I play normal difficulty but I chose those reworked encounters during install. Im playing powergaming party but cant win this battle.

Once you get to Guthma report back here and tell me how it went.

EDIT: I beat Guthma by exploring with my rogue and clearing what I could, then engaging him and his bodyguards. Strangly enough Sleep spell worked on Guthma hmm.. I also started convo with him with my rogue who is also diplomat and was able to get 4k+ exp but he still attacked me. It seems this option only works If you sneak by other entrance .. I dont know. :/

 

[Average Manatee]

Well I gave up at Guthma fortress. Idk, I play normal difficulty but I chose those reworked encounters during install. Im playing powergaming party but cant win this battle.

Once you get to Guthma report back here and tell me how it went.

Took a while and I rested every 2 or so battles but I finished it. Which IIRC is fairly standard for IWD2 on the highest difficulty, you can't cruise control through entire dungeons (at least, not without a super powergamed group). What place specifically did you have issues with?

 

[Naraya]

I do love duel. But no save at all seems like practically an exploit. Like dueling an unprotected mage at the back of the enemy group, seems like they should decline that duel.

Oh wow, a possibility to decline a duel would be interesting But overall I'd say that for me it wasn't an exploit as I tried not to use it too much, and frankly at times I felt it was the only way to get an upper hand in a sticky situation. I think that the time constraint (10 rounds) makes it feel right.

What difficulty did you play on? Unlike the other IE games the difficulty slider in IWD2 actually massively buffs enemy AB/stats. Which is part of why stacking AC/dips/unarmored/deep gnome is the only way to really survive on very hard or HoW. Or spamming summons lmao (though I took the EE option to nerf them so we'll see).

Oh, I see myself as a noob enough in DnD systems (and not a powergamer) to play this game only on CORE rules. You sound like a more experienced person and frankly I'm really curious about what your experience will be. Please do share!

 

[Snufkin]

Well I gave up at Guthma fortress. Idk, I play normal difficulty but I chose those reworked encounters during install. Im playing powergaming party but cant win this battle.

Once you get to Guthma report back here and tell me how it went.

Took a while and I rested every 2 or so battles but I finished it. Which IIRC is fairly standard for IWD2 on the highest difficulty, you can't cruise control through entire dungeons (at least, not without a super powergamed group). What place specifically did you have issues with?

I beat him!

EDIT: I beat Guthma by exploring with my rogue and clearing what I could, then engaging him and his bodyguards. Strangly enough Sleep spell worked on Guthma hmm.. I also started convo with him with my rogue who is also diplomat and was able to get 4k+ exp but he still attacked me. It seems this option only works If you sneak by other entrance .. I dont know. :/

 

[Average Manatee]

Regarding spells, the big thing is to understand saves. Save DC is casting stat + spell level. Enemy stats tend to follow player classes, so fighters have great fort saves, bad reflex saves, and awful will saves (low wisdom). So for example charm person works great against orc warriors and archers and carried me through the early game. On the other hand a fort saves spell will destroy spellcasters. Make sure to double spell focus, +4 DC is huge

There's also save less spells, power word blind and silence are great and there's some symbols with good effects. If all that fails, spamming magic missiles with the ring that lets you do more (they can stack) can take down strong single targets without spell resistance.

I found robes that gives allies +5 saves to spells my sorcerer/wizard casts along with improved evasion (half damage on failed save, non on save). These are very powerful and basically let me spam fireball on everyone and they take no damage, and spells like web or stinking cloud are somewhat safe to be in for a short time. One was on the bridge iirc, another in the ice fortress

As far as the rest of the party goes, the fighter has ac enough to tank against non bosses for a while (hits around 48 ac atm), barb has 14 DR which is good against chaff but does little for bosses. Thief is pretty shit, BAB is just too low to hit a lot and enemies seem to focus them hard after a crit.

If a built a full dedicated tank I expect I could reach about 65 AC which could probably tank everything. There's an item which doubles the effect of expertise which I don't have

 

[Snufkin]

If a built a full dedicated tank I expect I could reach about 65 AC which could probably tank everything. There's an item which doubles the effect of expertise which I don't have

Yea, 10 AC + 4 from deep gnome would be ultimate tank. But he couldnt be able to hit anything.

 

[Average Manatee]

So, talking about defense/frontline builds.

The one I went with was Monk 1/Fighter x Kensai. This gets

10
+4 dex
+4 wis
+2 kensai
for a base of 20. From there we add:
+2 dex AC from +4 dex spell
+4 AC from haste
+7/+8 AC from ghost/spirit armor
+2 AC from magic circle against evil
Which gets us to 36. There's a bunch of items giving generic bonuses, I have +8 atm which gets me to 44.
From there you want your cleric doing the chant/prayer/recitation mix in battle for -4 enemy attack which equates to +4 AC. Symbol of Pain applies -6 attack with no save. I *think* symbols applied before blind work fine, hard to say, but then you can blind them for 50% miss chance. Defensive harmony for another +4, which is very quick to cast.
That leaves us with 58 effective AC. Which still gets hit fairly often by the bosses, but remember that they have iterative attacks at -5/-10/-15 to hit rather than all attacks being at full AB, and you'll dodge a lot of those later attacks easily. So it's not completely an all-or-nothing affair unlike IWD1/BG2 where enemies have 5-10 attacks all at the same AB.

The only big thing I'm missing is expertise for up to +10 AC with that item.

In retrospect another build that would work is pure fighter with a shield. There are some good shields eventually and shield focus adds +4 AC with two feats. I found a tower shield +2 which gives 6 AC, so that'd be 10 AC total vs. 6 AC from the monk level. Downside is that you're forced into using a single handed weapon (no 1.5x str bonus), don't get kensai for huge attack/damage bonuses, and will have to suffer with a much lower will save.

The other true min-max build (assuming you don't want multiclassing XP penalties) would be Illusionist 1/Fighter x deep gnome kensai. This would give you +4 AC from shield, +1 AC from dex, and +4 from deep gnome while also getting you mirror image once per day. Downside is 3 ECL. But with expertise you'd be actually unhittable.

Straight Barb works for damage reduction. You start with 20 CON, improve CON every time possible, take extra damage reduction feats, wear the best medium armor you can (barb gets double DR from medium armor). Take some toughness feats when you can which for some reason gives 3(!) HP per level for barb, or the equivalent of +6 con. End the game with like 20 DR and 600 HP.

In retrospect a straight monk (of the dark moon) might have been a better sneak attacker than rogue (not that you need sneak attacking at all but its fun to play with). They only get half sneak attack progression but attack incredibly fast and actually get full BAB. The lower BAB classes like rogue and cleric are unfortunately kind of useless in EE combat past the early levels, they just don't keep up with barbarian or fighter who hit faster, more often and harder. And it doesn't look like Paladin or Ranger have a similar way to keep up with fighter or barbarian, but I'm not playing them.

 

[Cael]

I was going to ask where are all that shit coming from. IWD2 don't have them. And then I realise that it is a mod. Oh well, carry on.

 

[Naraya]

I found robes that gives allies +5 saves to spells my sorcerer/wizard casts along with improved evasion (half damage on failed save, non on save). These are very powerful and basically let me spam fireball on everyone and they take no damage, and spells like web or stinking cloud are somewhat safe to be in for a short time.

There is another nice set of robes that makes Arcane Spells last 25% longer. I switched between these 2 in my playthrough. Always funny to imagine your Sorceress raising her hand and shouting "HOLD IT! I need to change!" mid-battle

 

[Snufkin]

So, talking about defense/frontline builds.

The one I went with was Monk 1/Fighter x Kensai. This gets

10
+4 dex
+4 wis
+2 kensai
for a base of 20. From there we add:
+2 dex AC from +4 dex spell
+4 AC from haste
+7/+8 AC from ghost/spirit armor
+2 AC from magic circle against evil
Which gets us to 36. There's a bunch of items giving generic bonuses, I have +8 atm which gets me to 44.
From there you want your cleric doing the chant/prayer/recitation mix in battle for -4 enemy attack which equates to +4 AC. Symbol of Pain applies -6 attack with no save. I *think* symbols applied before blind work fine, hard to say, but then you can blind them for 50% miss chance. Defensive harmony for another +4, which is very quick to cast.
That leaves us with 58 effective AC. Which still gets hit fairly often by the bosses, but remember that they have iterative attacks at -5/-10/-15 to hit rather than all attacks being at full AB, and you'll dodge a lot of those later attacks easily. So it's not completely an all-or-nothing affair unlike IWD1/BG2 where enemies have 5-10 attacks all at the same AB.

The only big thing I'm missing is expertise for up to +10 AC with that item.

In retrospect another build that would work is pure fighter with a shield. There are some good shields eventually and shield focus adds +4 AC with two feats. I found a tower shield +2 which gives 6 AC, so that'd be 10 AC total vs. 6 AC from the monk level. Downside is that you're forced into using a single handed weapon (no 1.5x str bonus), don't get kensai for huge attack/damage bonuses, and will have to suffer with a much lower will save.

The other true min-max build (assuming you don't want multiclassing XP penalties) would be Illusionist 1/Fighter x deep gnome kensai. This would give you +4 AC from shield, +1 AC from dex, and +4 from deep gnome while also getting you mirror image once per day. Downside is 3 ECL. But with expertise you'd be actually unhittable.

Straight Barb works for damage reduction. You start with 20 CON, improve CON every time possible, take extra damage reduction feats, wear the best medium armor you can (barb gets double DR from medium armor). Take some toughness feats when you can which for some reason gives 3(!) HP per level for barb, or the equivalent of +6 con. End the game with like 20 DR and 600 HP.

In retrospect a straight monk (of the dark moon) might have been a better sneak attacker than rogue (not that you need sneak attacking at all but its fun to play with). They only get half sneak attack progression but attack incredibly fast and actually get full BAB. The lower BAB classes like rogue and cleric are unfortunately kind of useless in EE combat past the early levels, they just don't keep up with barbarian or fighter who hit faster, more often and harder. And it doesn't look like Paladin or Ranger have a similar way to keep up with fighter or barbarian, but I'm not playing them.

I actually ran long time ago party with two of deep gnomes - one was based on cleric and other on illusionist. Rest party was druid, bard, sorcerer and another cleric. I think deep gnomes had 70+ AC at the every end of HoF mode. I didnt build those myself, I did read a very detailed guide found on sorcerers.net.

 

[Average Manatee]

I was going to ask where are all that shit coming from. IWD2 don't have them. And then I realise that it is a mod. Oh well, carry on.

This is the codex, I assume we all have every aspect of these games memorized. No reason to write a long detailed mechanics post about that stuff.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finished Kuldahar. Difficulty is kind of going down fast, due to a combination of OP spells/DCs and the Barb being tanky enough to hold the line.

Omnipresence (lvl 7 cleric) is kind of a silly spell that lets you perform actions at any range as long as its within sight, but the same can be done to the character this is cast on. This includes melee sneak attacks with a rogue, so my rogue is actually able to contribute meaningfully now. Just walk the fighter/barb past the enemies so they turn around and the rogue gets lots of sneaks from the safety of the backline. The ability of enemies to melee back isn't a big deal since you can just run back out of sight range. Also applies to melee touch attacks so cleric can spam save or die on casters.

Power Word: Heal (also lvl 7 cleric) is broken, basically being heal but at range and with 0 cast time. Both getting rid of the cast time of heal and making it ranged should be more than a +1 level penalty imo, but this becomes an easy lifesaver.

Also been experimenting with the metamagic. It's... weird to work with but still feels good. My Sorcerer loves Widen Spell which works on long lasting AoEs to give +50% radius for only +1 spell level. Of course using it on fire ball and delayed blast fireball also works (remember its like my whole party has improved evasion). Mass Spell is an interesting metamagic, +5 levels to make any single target spell into an AoE. There's not many good options for that, except Mirror Imagine which is amazing to give to everyone. I guess mass true strike could also help but I haven't had reason to use it yet.

Aside from the really OP robes that give improved evasion to everyone the itemization feels pretty good. I'm pretty sure by this point in vanilla you'd have half your inventory slots still empty. You do get a decent amount of generic AC bonuses to at least get non-powergamed characters to not be hit every time by trash. Though this is also a commentary on how enemy AB starts really high on VH and doesn't really increase that fast... those prologue bosses had +19 AB but now at level 17 common enemies have around +25-30. My non-AC characters have around 35 AC while buffed which is pretty good.

There is another nice set of robes that makes Arcane Spells last 25% longer. I switched between these 2 in my playthrough. Always funny to imagine your Sorceress raising her hand and shouting "HOLD IT! I need to change!" mid-battle

Yep, same. Well, I don't switch mid battle, it's for pre buffing. Also have a pendant for another +25% spell length, and cleric has a +20% divine spell length staff.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finished the game. Everything quite easy except the final battle which is 150% bullshit now because there's a scripted unavoidable dispel along with far, far more enemies to fight (though the latter might be my fault using the "always fight high level version of encounter).

just fucking murder them strategy

It turns out that a spell sequencer of 3x Mordenkainen's Force Missiles with +2 missiles shot per cast from rings and +40% magic damage can one-shot Isair after his protections are gone and his spell resistance is lowered. That's (2d4 + 20) * 7 missiles * 3 casts. Do it once with each of my casters (or I suppose you can do it with the same one, its easy to load up another spell sequencer when the twins retreat), and its game over for them. You can also obviously do Horrid Wilting spam, ideally under timestop, but this is simpler and quicker.

lmao potions abuse strategy

So crafting potions is pretty cool. One gives improved alacrity. Another gives -1 casting time for spells, a great combo. Other potions exist to give +20 resistance to various non-physical forms of damage. These are all good reasons to have that feat by the midgame

Now let's talk about cheesing. There's a potion that gives Vipergout, which summons a 128 HP snake summon every round for 6 rounds. Normally this is a 7th level spell, and while its active your mage has a 50% spell casting failure rate. We can buy vipergout potions by the hundreds with potion crafting and have our non-casters imbibe them, giving us a near infinite supply of summons to tank with. Unfortunately you are still limited to 6 total summons out at once, but as soon as one dies it will be replaced. Doesn't completely remove the difficulty but it definitely makes things much simpler

hit me more mommy strategy

Alternatively, there's a potion called magnetic fluid that causes enemies to take 10d4 crushing damage when they hit you. Have your barb tank with no AC eat this along with some resistance potions/spells and have a healer ready every few turns. There's also potions for fireshield red/blue, which probably won't pierce their resistances unless you use one of the spells/wands that increase elemental damage (I had a +50% spell and a +30% breach wand) but regardless they will reduce your damage taken by those elements by 50% and clear out chaff so get them anyway.

Honestly find all of these pretty cheesy but I couldn't find another way to do it thanks to the fucking dispel. Everyone's in danger of getting CCed every second and if you don't take down the boss's buffs and then one shot them inside a round or two they're gonna have new buffs up or some random AoE is gonna hit your mage and either disrupt their spell or inflict some condition. And your melee can't really go toe to toe with anything without at least a full minute of buffing.

btw, there's an exploit with Wish. Everyone who can cast wish can get 3 one time wishes they can use to boost an ability point by 1. Normally you can't use it multiple times on the same stat. But if you talk with the genie with someone else, they get their own 3 wishes, and those wishes *apply on the one who cast the spell*. So my sorcerer casts wish 6 times and each time a different person talks to the genie and asks them to increase Cha by +1 for +6 Cha. Then my Wizard does the same for +6 int. Cool. Was destroying a lot of DC checks post dragon's eye.

In retrospect, Rogue is kind of OK. Eventually they get enough luck that their chance to roll a nat 20 is pretty high which means automatic hit even on low AB attacks that would have no chance normally, and the luck is a hidden boost to AB that doesn't show up on the record screen. With no cooldown on backstab option they can take a lot of things down when dual wielding. There's just a significant midgame slump when their AB is bad but they haven't gotten much luck yet. I only found 1 from equipment +2 from rogue luck + 2 from potion + 2 from luck spell. There's also "bracers of blinding strike" I bought which adds +10 attacks per round for 3 rounds. Normally this is actually pretty fucking useless because these are additional iterative attacks, meaning they go like +10/+5/+0/-5/-10/-15/-20/-25/-30/-35 (yes that low). But when you have a 8/20 chance to roll a nat 20 and hit anyway, and your sneaks deal 12d4 damage, you're pretty well off. This might have been a way to kill isair in melee one time, don't feel like going back and checking.

extra special gamebreaking trick with rogue

There's a crossbow that fires in the form of a shout and always hits. It can still score a sneak attack from behind. You see where this is going when we use those bracers...

 

[The Great Deceiver]

 

[0sacred]

Anyone else having trouble running IWD2 on Win11?

If I start in fullscreen the game loads in a window in the top left of the screen and parts of the screen are black. If I launch it in windowed mode it works better, but the window is tiny and can't be resized.

plz no EE or similar

 

[Gargaune]

Anyone else having trouble running IWD2 on Win11?

If I start in fullscreen the game loads in a window in the top left of the screen and parts of the screen are black. If I launch it in windowed mode it works better, but the window is tiny and can't be resized.

plz no EE or similar

You probably need a DirectDraw wrapper, try Aqrit's or Narzoul's. There is no IDW2 EE, unfortunately.

 

[Renfri]

If you feel lazy you could try installing Icewind Dale 2 EE modpack (it has fixes, widescreen and then some), just dont install all things, just yes to first option and say no to rest. If only Beamdog itself had done something similar with their editions...

 

[0sacred]

The widescreen mod seems to have fixed it.

 

[0sacred]

So I'd like to finish this game for once, last attempt was about 15 years ago and I gave up late in the game out of boredom or because the constant pre-buffing got on my nerves.

I ran an evil party last time so I want to play a good party. I'm pretty sure I want a paladin for RP reasons although I know paladins suck in IWD2 and 3E.

I put a few hours in the game and came to the conclusion that it's too tedious to play without any cheese. I've heard of Deep Gnome monk cheese where you can fireball your own guy, but I want an Aasimar for the paladin and with the Deep Gnome that would put me at +4 effective level. Now back when the game was released I heard that these levels count towards effective encounter level. My memory of how ECL works in 3E is very hazy so please enlighten me if this would result in my party counting as a higher level and receiving less XP.

I thought about maybe doing a Drow cleric of Selune as a decoy, would she get roasted if I fireball here despite her spell resistance? Does it make a difference if the fireball is cast by a pure class wizard of higher level than a multiclassed one?

 

[Jigby]

Animate Dead boneguards is all you need. You should be starting to get them after the Shaengarne bridge fight. They're going to last much longer, than some deep gnome cheese. Have 2xclerics for more Animate Dead.

Before Animate dead have one decoy buffed with protection from arrows. Use the decoy, the AI targetting is atrocious. Everyone else focus fires with slings + Rapid Shot.

 

[0sacred]

Animate Dead boneguards is all you need. You should be starting to get them after the Shaengarne bridge fight. They're going to last much longer, than some deep gnome cheese. Have 2xclerics for more Animate Dead.

Before Animate dead have one decoy buffed with protection from arrows. Use the decoy, the AI targetting is atrocious. Everyone else focus fires with slings + Rapid Shot.

aren't summons random? do you always get boneguards when you cast Animate Dead beyond a certain level?

Also I feel always using the same summons to do my dirty work (or at least tanking work) would be more boring than pelting a decoy with different spells. I also vaguely remember using Animate Dead a lot on my last run so I'll pass on that.

 

[Jigby]

Animate Dead boneguards is all you need. You should be starting to get them after the Shaengarne bridge fight. They're going to last much longer, than some deep gnome cheese. Have 2xclerics for more Animate Dead.

Before Animate dead have one decoy buffed with protection from arrows. Use the decoy, the AI targetting is atrocious. Everyone else focus fires with slings + Rapid Shot.

aren't summons random? do you always get boneguards when you cast Animate Dead beyond a certain level?

Yes, summons are random - that's why you want 2xclerics, so you get more tries. But Animate deads specifically last a long time, much longer than Summon Monster X. They have much more staying power than spamming fireballs. Zombies are weak, except vs. the Ice Golems in the Ice Temple in Chapter 2 - it's probably possible in vanilla to kill all Ice Golems with a single zombie summon, provided they are not getting hit from other enemies. (they have 20/- resistance to crushing and they deal bonus damage to the Ice Golems... the AB is atrocious though, but eventually they do hit)

 

[0sacred]

Yeah I cheesed summoning spells on my last run. Time for something new.

 

[Jigby]

The last run that was 15 years ago?... fair enough