I always TO'd or otherwise avoided those two,even with Taunting. Not worth the risk, in my opinion.

Honestly, the Blackguard doesn't really change the calculus of which monsters are worth fighting and which aren't. The only monsters that I found worth fighting as a Blackguard that weren't worth fighting with other characters, was Greater Titans since they don't resist poison.

Well, and I did kill more uniques than I usually do. Normally I skip Ancalagon the Black, but this time I killed him (and would have died if I hadn't gotten my Con up so high, so probably still not worth fighting).

I'm still seeking my first win with a BG. My latest attempt was a Half-Troll. Pretty resilient, tho the low INT obviously presents some issues. Birth buy was 6/6/0/4/3 to hit important levels plus 1 point I can't recall where.

What I wanted to post about was the unique list of detectable monsters. It really makes a big difference, I think, and I want to look at the list of non-detectables a bit more closely in the future. In this Troll run I was in DL 40s and CL 31. I was using Seek Battle a ton, as you might expect, and found myself face-to-face with Huan!!! (native depth 90, SB will not detect) Bit of a tense moment there that I luckily survived. For the record, I later died at DL 57 and CL 33 due to reckless resistance gaps.

Short of ESP, is anyone using additional detection beyond Seek Battle, or are you just doing what I am and hoping to avoid any major mishaps with monsters left undetected?

I'm really glad Nick implemented this change (I had Seek Battle as a clone of Detect Life b/c I didn't know how to program Detect Fear). So much better thematic fit and really interesting imo to have a detectable list that is different from other classes.

I agree that Detect Fear is an incredibly good detection spell. Probably the best detection spell available to non-mage-bookers (though I haven't played either Druid or Ranger, so I don't know how it compares to Detect Life, I expect Detect Life to be the inverse of Detect Evil though, great early but not so great later). However, I did still use Rods of Detection to find nasties like Quthylugs (I always avoid Quthylugs, way to easy for things to go sideways fighting them), vortices, and the like.

Man, I hate vortices. Almost died a couple of times when I wasn't paying close enough attention and got chaos breathed on by that stationary vortex unique.

Edit: I honestly found High Elf to be the best Blackguard (though perhaps that's not a surprise, since High Elf is effectively "easy" mode for most classes). The high stealth helped keep my stealth from being *too* terrible, the high devices gave me a (often) better ranged option than bows, which Blackguards kind of suck at, and of course High Elves get stat bonuses to all the stats Blackguards care about.

Dunadan would probably be really good too, but I always miss intrinsic See Invisible (or even Infravision!) when I play them.

Once I find rods of Detection, I always carry and use them.