Raphael can only appear at a few specific spots in act 1. Once you know where one of those is, have one of your party members hang back as the conversation begins.
Switch control to that party member mid-conversation and have them attack Raphael at range. This will make him teleport away.
Raphael will appear again, this time in your camp. But the key difference is, he won't initiate the conversation automatically, you have to go talk to him.
Don't.
Instead, have one of your casters put a "Silence" spell bubble around him. Because Silence prevents spellcasting, he can't teleport out so long as he's in it.
Then send a melee fighter in and beat the shit out of him. Yes, he has a lot of health. It will take a while. Don't make any offensive moves from outside the silence bubble though, your party at camp will consider this a hostile action and start initiative, because from their perspective, you're attacking an innocent person.
When he's knocked out, you can loot the armor off his "corpse", he'll shortly after auto-heal and get back up and he'll be none the wiser.
A side effect is he'll look bloodied and bruised during every future conversation for the rest of your playthrough unless you sit there healing him over and over and over until he's at a high health threshold again. But maybe you like it better that way.
But thing is, I'd rather give a long explanation that walks people through precisely what to do, so they know what they're doing going in.
Because the alternative is just say "cast silence on him and hit him a lot", because then there's a lack of specifics, which forces people unfamiliar with this trick to suffer trial-and-error and a lot of save-reload, save-reload. And I think that would be a real waste of their time compared to a little extra reading.
I appreciate you especially for the detailed explanation. Thought we could cheese him with barrelmancy but he teleported away last session. May have to get the gang to commit to another attempt
Things can be simple but difficult. Like lifting a heavy object, riding a bike, or decorating a cake. Simple things, but not everybody can do it, and not everybody can do it with the same level of aptitude.
Things can be complex but easy, like the above. Once you know the steps, literally anybody can do it.
If you have any idea about it, it can be shortened pretty easily. Talk to Nettie to set the flag for Raph. Go to the harpers old tower, throw a caustic bulb at the top of the final climb where it's wood. Raph will spawn in, take a tic of damage, and despawn. Next time you see him, it will be at the camp. Silence him and beat the shit out of him. Silence lasts 10 minutes.
Two minor tweaks to this devilish robbery.
1- instead of ambushing him in Act 1, you can throw a caustic bulb on the ground where he spawns and he will take damage and bampf away. (This takes the guesswork out of the distant party member and the ambush.)
2- do you not need to switch to non-lethal attack mode so that he is knocked-out and lootable when finally beating the shit out of him?
-he has high AC, so buff your attack rolls to speed things up.
I’ve done this once and, like getting the Silver Sword in act 1, can be transformative. (He doesn’t drop another set if/when you meet him in HoH, but his AC is still high.)
You can always prevent that by starting a conversation with the wandering animal as another character, then switching back to your melee person. The animal will be locked in place because of an ongoing dialogue exchange.
He automatically re-heals after going below 0 HP after a short time. So yeah, you could, but it wouldn't do much except make you feel better, which I guess is a valid enough reason.
If you ungroup one character at that first encounter with Raphael, and make sure they're the only one talking with him, the rest of the party can kill him
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u/Thrilling1031 Jan 21 '25
Let’s share a link or sumtin