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Rascyc posted:[e]Honestly Valygar gets a bad rap but he is perfectly playable (doesn't his weapon inflict poison/bleeds too? This should ignore stoneskin IIRC so yeah). For most hated NPC in the game I reserve that for Cernd, the Shapeshifter. Back in the say before everything was documented as solved as it is now, on the old Black Isle message boards Valygar users were present but regarded as weird. By pure instinct everyone avoided Cernd. I think someone asked about his NPC quest once and noone was really sure about it.
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Dec 1, 2013 05:57
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Furism posted:Just wanted to say, last night I finished going through Dragon's Eye in IWD. People who complain about Dragon Age's Deep Roads being a drag don't know what they're talking about. I try to rest as little as possible but not being able to rest at all in the last two levels, now that was something else. The dungeon delving only gets deeper (or taller for a moment) from there.
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Dec 6, 2013 02:24
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MegaGatts posted:Depending the room you're trying to attack there's a nasty dude in one that has a killer bow. Tossing out a web can severely reduce their murdering. Toss a web, load up with bows yourselves and start plinking away. Your reward for this is an awesome bow. By the time stuff is hardly affected by web you can cast Death Fog and Spike Stones at a chokepoint if there's ever a battle you just want to skip entirely. Furism posted:Yep that's where I've been resting (it's on the third level out of four). But they are pretty much at the end of the level, unless you already know they're there, so I didn't find them until late. The real problem is the 4th level with all the Elite Whatstheirname and their freaking +2 arrows.
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Dec 6, 2013 23:35
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As much as I love IWD I never made it through IWD2 and I am thinking of starting up again. All the character creation guides are huge treatises on 3e rules. Is it possible for anyone just to describe what to or not to do for the various member archetypes in general terms so I don't feel like the character guide is playing my game for me? vvvvvvvvvvv e. I've got the general idea down, just wondering about major non negotiables like hardiness is a trap and spell casters should take X meta magic and spell pens but not even think about y. I guess that's slightly different for everyone but in the internet guides its all hidden in detailed character builds instead of summary broad strokes. zedprime fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Dec 8, 2013 |
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Dec 8, 2013 00:07
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A fighter hitting for 15 3 times every turn is a monster force you will never notice cause its happening so fast with little effort on the players part. A thief backstabbing for 45 once per round looks super impressive and takes the players attention making it somehow more interesting even though its a fraction of what a front line tank can do.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:17
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Dillbag posted:A thief with a good staff that gibs the opposition spellcaster for 150+ damage before the fight even starts beats your fighter who can't connect because of the mage's protections every time. At that point anyone can gib anyone given the right build, and that mage will either have 3 more mage friends whose contingencies just fired, or is actually a dragon with 500hp. I'm on your side though more or less. Thieves are another tool in your kit if you have the patience and I've never been able to bring myself to play without one no matter what the numbers say.
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Dec 9, 2013 22:06
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Is it Mislead that gives you the body double that gives you invisibility until your illusion is dead? So a mage/thief can back stab repeatedly during it? Mages make everything better in BG2.
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Dec 9, 2013 22:15
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The trick to IWD is a majority of party members being a flavor of fighter, plus one or two people who can cast area denial spells like grease, web, entangle, spike stones, so on. Throw a bard in if you don't mind waiting for regen instead of casting cleric spells. Everybody is an archer because its infinite rerolls until everyone has 18 dex for AC if not attack. The biggest reason not to have 4 fighters, a druid, and a mage is there isn't enough good loot for all those fighters.
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Dec 13, 2013 23:59
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SheepNameKiller posted:IWD2 has the best mechanics of any of the infinity engine games and I'm actually sad that they couldn't just port both BG games directly into the IWD2 engine for the enhanced editions. IWD1's mechanics are not as well aged but the game is good. Still, if IWDEE comes out and isn't using IWD2's character mechanics it'll be a huge waste of time. DeathChicken posted:Yeah, I *really* don't like how IWD1 keeps throwing enemies at you that are basically immune to specific things. You can't go anywhere in the second dungeon without enchanted poo poo to deal with all the Ghasts. Having a melee party will gently caress you trying to fight the Ice Salamanders and their passive chill crap. It tends to railroad you into one specific course of action. If you spread your weapons out right if you have a melee heavy party nothing lives long enough for a salamander aura to be a problem by the time you reach Dorn's. Fruits of the sea posted:People keep on bringing up the Icewind Dale as having great combat and I don't agree entirely. The encounters are crafted really well, but that's largely because the game is linear and can be balanced around XP progression. You lose a lot of flexibility in terms of party composition and character builds compared to BG1 and 2. I've never actually finished Icewind Dale because I always end up bored of the standard party and experimenting with goofy tactics is punishing.
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Dec 17, 2013 18:06
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I think its a case of 2e being a lot of half baked house rules they expected folks to tweak to their own tabletops but ended up being absolute because it is what is written in the books.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:54
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Cythereal posted:It's the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. Making sense to modern eyes was rarely on their agenda. See also: banning use of the crossbow against Catholics because it was inhumane (read: allowed peasants with a week of training to kill wealthy knights with decades of training). Dungeons and Dragons picked it up and ran with it for clerics.
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Dec 23, 2013 15:45
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TehGherkin posted:I'm thinking maybe I should've taken a ranger, at least he'd be better at shooting stuff, my bard can't even cast spells, he has the slots, and he can memorize them, he just can't cast them.
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Dec 23, 2013 17:40
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oswald ownenstein posted:In one of those medieval weapons shows they found that the flail was pretty worthless in most situations and not at all a good combat weapon
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Dec 24, 2013 00:46
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Depends how many side quests you save until after Spellhold. IIRC not only are most of the contingencies after that point illegal in the base rules, you can't even cast them in your party. Its not a huge complaint since its balanced in a way but returning to the original conversation starter its a taste thing on either end of the conversation since wizard duels take about as much thinking as the horde and crowd control battles in IWD1&2, but on different wavelengths.
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Dec 25, 2013 07:49
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voltron lion force posted:There's a text size option baked into the widescreen mod iirc. But I've always been partial to windowed mode because there isn't much more than 1024x768 pixels worth of things happening in vision at once and I've always been the sort to not maximize if I don't need to.
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Dec 29, 2013 00:04
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fong posted:Once you get Summon Planetar you just need to sick them on any dragon in SoA and the dragon will be dead in 5-10 seconds because of their vorpal effect. They didnt bother making anything immune to vorpal effects in SoA~ I think it is you can stack Malison and Greater Malison and then it will statistically connect more often than not.
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Dec 30, 2013 14:50
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MUMMYMTN posted:In BG2, apart from a few timed quests and random chance of monster encounters, there's absolutely no penalty for resting, right? I could rest for days at a time in a dungeon with no drawbacks?
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Jan 6, 2014 00:38
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At the lower range I think the games cheat via minimum stats required for a class but at its base its the popular 4d6 drop the lowest stat gen. I forget all the math to do anything rigorous but an Excel simulation says its about a 1 in 1 trillion chance to get all 18s. e. if its just 3d6 then as below even less chance vvvvvvv zedprime fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Jan 18, 2014 |
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Jan 18, 2014 06:49
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JustJeff88 posted:I was referring to 1, thanks... I worded my question ambiguously. Fair enough - I don't think that I'll go that route, then. I want to have access to the full druid spellbook and the full cleric spellbook, but pure druids still aren't great in Icewind Dale, so I think that I'm going to pull a Jaheira and go F/D, or possibly dual-class. So with that said, pure druids are better mages than mages are with the expansion - spell casters are really there to cast movement impedance area of effects and druids get the ones that do damage as well as slow stuff a lot earlier than mages. I've always been a fan of the druid and mage working in concert to just stop everything in their tracks a few times a day. A thief is almost entirely replaced by a cleric casting detect traps. A fighter/thief is solid enough if you want to check off the trap removal checkbox and remove any doubt, there's places that will have you tap dancing to avoid or blowing healing spells early if you don't have removal but nothing game stopping.
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Jan 18, 2014 19:28
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Wolfsheim posted:[...]True neutral human druid with a dot in large swords (scimitars) and missile weapons. Not sure what to do with her yet but every time someone mentions IWD they say druids are OP so what the hell. Mages have Sleep which can also help out with these early encounters. If you don't have the encounters memorized scouting ahead with that fighter/thief will also be really useful to judge exactly what you're about to pull and decide whether you need those crowd control spells or can save them for another fight, since the opportune time and place for the AOE ones like entangle are at the edge of the fog of war right after or even during the pull.
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Jan 19, 2014 15:31
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Furism posted:Cool, thanks! JustJeff88 posted:Speaking of IWD1, that's the one Infinity game that I know very little about. Assuming normal difficulty and a party of 6 single-class characters, and being aware that character advancement is uneven in 2nd edition rules, about what level can I expect my sextet to be after doing a completionist run of the whole GOG version of the game (base + HoW & TotL)? My last save shows 2.5m, which translates to level 16-20 ish for most classes. Expansion content is accessible before the base game end boss by talking to a dude in town, or by importing a save of a completed game. Expansion monsters are pretty beefy so especially if its your first time its probably a good idea to do it after the final boss of the base game.
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Jan 25, 2014 20:53
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If you aren't afraid of a bit of cheese, Chromatic Orb for a level 1 spell is potentially overpowered against single target big bosses. At a certain point it turns into a single target instant death spell with the downside of a +6 bonus to the targets save. Combined with Greater Malison and the sheer volume of orbs you can throw being a level 1 spell, it isn't really a downside and if it isn't immune to death its probably going to die before you run out
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Jan 28, 2014 17:27
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BAILOUT MCQUACK! posted:Good to know. A few companion quests are. None of the larger quests are except I think Nalia will leave your party to meet you at her keep if you wait a super long time. I think Chapter 4 pauses the quest real time timer so even if you have one open they won't leave your party or fail in the middle of the story portion of the game.
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Jan 31, 2014 15:19
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John McCain posted:The widescreen mod can run at essentially any resolution and has an option for windowed or fullscreen. Unless GoG fixed it the PST renderer is hacked enough that you need a wrapper as the normal wide screen mod can't force windowed. There should be records of which people used to use because prior to GoG you needed a wrapper just so spell effects wouldnt crash the game.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:17
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Lemon Curdistan posted:There was no Cha-based Sorcerer casting from 3.0 to port over. 3.0 came out out in August/September 2000; BG2 came out in September 2000. Int doesn't really do anything for mages either beyond scribe chance and spell book size (I don't think level restrictions were ever implemented for low int?) so the more likely story is that sorc spells were as well represented as mage spells.
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Feb 23, 2014 16:40
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Furism posted:What's the deal with False Ponab at the end of IWD? First I thought I needed to have one of the skeletons down in order to kill one of his images, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Now I'm done to one image left that just keeps teleporting and regenerating back to full life. The skeletons don't stay down, and don't seem to change target - no matter how many time my rogues put them down, once they get back up they go back to my mage. One of the images is actual Pomab and killing him ends the whole encounter. If you hadn't yet take all the DPS off the crystal constructs to target him. If that wasn't working, sounds like scripting broke or something.
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Mar 12, 2014 11:00
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Vigilance posted:Iirc the first thing that happens when that fight starts is Belhifet casts a dispel on you. As soon as that dispel has finished hitting you, pause and do some buffing. At the very least haste your party. Try to distract one or both of the iron golems with summons. Focus fire Belhifet down, or focus fire the golems down one at a time and then Belhifet. IIRC iron golems fart cloudkill which kills low level summons so use undead. You can potentially kite whatever you aren't focusing down to save on some damage.
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Mar 29, 2014 22:48
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Base game Shadows of Amn, the hardest part about mages is Improved Invisibility so some source of see invisible is the key. Best NPC for this is Keldorn since he casts his True Seeing innate at twice his level. Second best is Haer Dalis once he gets high enough to cast True Sight since bard spell caster levels make their removal spells super awesome, if a little late coming. Once Improved Invisiblity is gone, any npc spellcaster can cast breach to remove any spells that will prevent you from doing damage to the enemy mage. TOB gets slightly more ridiculous with spell protections that you need to take care of in addition to Improved Invisibility to make vulnerable to breach. The overkill method is to make an npc mages first level 9 spell Spellstrike. The alternative is tactical applications of True Sight and Khelben's Warding Whip/Ruby Ray of Reversal to make them vulnerable to breach.
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May 18, 2014 13:09
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CrusherEAGLE posted:I just feel like the fact that you can rest after pretty much every encounter makes any spell management/health management kind of useless as one can simply heal up after every battle. Stopping that is a more rewarding difficulty boost than the slider can offer you. The game seems balanced around a minimum of resting while allowing it everywhere to not frustrate DnD novices.
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May 23, 2014 13:59
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KingKapalone posted:How am I supposed to know in BG2 that I have to use acid or fire to kill a troll on the ground? There's no monster info sheet or anything. I just had to look it up. Suspicious posted:The loading screen, that thing that appears for only a split second on a modern computer, will randomly inform you about how to finish trolls off.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:53
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Arivia posted:Speaking of Icewind Dale, I'm running through it for the first time. Do I need to go and do the Heart of Winter stuff at some point during presumably Chapter 7 like ToTSC, or is there some way to do it after completing the main campaign like with ToB? The expansion can be done during the main game at any point before the point of no return involving turning in a full set of badges. It can also be started with the end of game save. I like the latter so as to not make the original end boss a joke. Related note, Luremaster must be done before the point of no return involving storming an island hideout. There's no preset way to load directly in but in a pinch you can load your party into a new HoW game with your end of game save and go directly to the Luremaster if you miss it. I think its even tough to level cap in a HoF game but you have the right idea.
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Jun 26, 2014 12:05
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Once you get the basics down of IWD, the mid to late game difficulty is dependent on the RNG giving you the good loot. Not that the bad loot makes the game hard, but the good loot can make it a lot easier.JustJeff88 posted:Without any outside mods, WCotS only works during combat for the obvious reason that infinite out-of-combat healing is broken as gently caress. There are mods that make it work all the time, but the tradeoff for free 3HP per round group regeneration is that your bard can't do anything else and you have to be in combat, so presumably taking damage or in peril in some way.
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Jul 9, 2014 02:07
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Skippy McPants posted:How to make IWD (or any IE game, really) easier. IWD1 is kind of unique in that with all the best drops, an all fighter party is hard to argue against. But in normal circumstances there aren't enough weapons. And anyway that's super boring.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:29
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Taear posted:In other news I played IWD1 through recently, installing from my original disks. The game was vaguely sped up because it was running on a PC that didn't really exist when it was out and it was pretty amazing. Then I tried IWD2 and it essentially didn't work. For some reason at random times it chugs and it makes it impossibly annoying to play. I don't see why the first game would run so well and the second so badly!
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Jul 16, 2014 03:19
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Wolfsheim posted:Having played through a good chunk of IWD: throwing web, entangle, then that Druid spell that causes spikes to come out of the ground for tiny amounts of ongoing damage while you just pepper enemies with arrows and have your tank melee anything that makes it through was the best option in at least 80% of the game's encounters.
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Jul 18, 2014 02:18
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In like Zinn posted:1. Missile weapons on everyone.
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Jul 21, 2014 22:44
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:2nd edition really is terrible.
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Jul 28, 2014 00:32
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IWD was one of the quicker introductions to action of an era known for rat bashing, on par with BG2 in spite of being low level AD&D instead of midlevel. IWD2 then decides both of those are way to slow and sticks you in the middle of a siege.
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Aug 2, 2014 02:55
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Jastiger posted:I've already beat IWD and the expansion. Which weapon might you be talking about? Go ahead and spoiler tag it for me. If you solve the mermaid quest in the prologue in a way that gives her shattered blade to Jhonen, he restores it to a +5 long sword in time for the Easthaven finale. If you bring it with you to the seer's ice blacksmith, he reawakens the enchantment increasing resistances and giving several spell casts per day of utility/buff spells
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Aug 3, 2014 20:55
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My favorite power gamed character was the fighter 9/cleric X with grandmastery I had in my last IWD game. A druid can cover heals till the fighter hits 9 and the items and experience by the time you get there means you are a bad rear end even while your cleric levels back up. Then you get grandmastery with cleric buffs and rip everything apart. All of the posts so far also don't touch on IWD2 with its concept of "dipping" from 3e rules. Basically since IWD2 doesn't have prestige classes, the most worthwhile multiclassing consists of taking 1-4 levels of a class with cool low level bonuses like fighter or paladin, before or concurrent to your "real" class.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:58
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