what level should your party members be?

Sarevok24

Hi,
i was just wondering what levels your party members should be when you arrive at Baldur's gate city Baldur's gate city in the enhanced edition.This is my party lineup:

CHARNAME: Stalker level 5
Dorn: Blackgaurd level 5
Viconia: Cleric level 5
Rasaad: Monk Level 5
Neera: Wild Mage level 5
Imoen: thief level 4/ Mage level 4 (i am thinking of dropping her for Alora because i don't have a good thief and i hear Alora is a better thief in the EE than in BG1)

i am only wondering because most people say that you are likely to reach the exp cap in BG:EE but the xp cap is 161k XP IIRC and my party members only have about 25K XP each so i cant see them getting anywhere near there

and also, does anyone else a bug where alt+tabbing into Baldur's Gate:EE from the desktop causes a BSOD.

P.S. sorry for the noob question i don't have much experience with BG1

atcDave

You will gain experience more quickly as the game goes, actually quite a lot of it after you've first been to the city.
But I would say your about one level lower than I normally am when I hit the city. It's purely a matter of preference, but I would go back and explore the southern part of the map first. You'll probably gain another level for each character and find many useful magic items. In short, you'll be quite a bit tougher than you are now.
Of course, the city is perfectly doable for a lower level party. Although some fights may be tougher than if you'd explored the south more thoroughly.

EnterHaerDalis

Fun fact

Neera doesn't level up outside your party. She always comes at level 2

Just picked her up with a level 4 PC

Riolathel

Fun fact. Neera isn't worth it unless you really hate dynaheir and xan (i do).

She is a laugh riot though.. I tried to put a group of gnolls to sleep and she killed charname with a lightning bolt.

Edwin is still the best mage if you can stand his attitude

EnterHaerDalis

Riolathel said:

Fun fact. Neera isn't worth it unless you really hate dynaheir and xan (i do).

She is a laugh riot though.. I tried to put a group of gnolls to sleep and she killed charname with a lightning bolt.

Edwin is still the best mage if you can stand his attitude

Yeah I traded her out for Dynaheir on my initial play through. She's just so annoying and in comparison to other spell casters she isn't very good. Also you are basically forced to take her Chaos Shield and Dwoemers spell which are essentially circus acts. I really want to play her all the way through but it's so damn hard to keep her around..................

Alsn

@EnterHaerDalis, you are incorrect. As long as you don't explore that area of beregost she will level up without you. I've picked up both a level 1 Neera with 20something XP(went straight there) and a level 4 Neera with 10k XP when I first met her much later(didn't know where to find her so I did the gnoll stronghold, nashkel mines and some other stuff down in the south before returning to beregost.

Edit: Wrong name at first, sorry.

rdarken

I don't know for sure, but level 5 seems a little low to me. Maybe 6-7 is about right for reaching BG. I've gotten my part to about level 3-4 by the end of the Nashkel mines. That is why I think 5 may be a tad low. But I could be way off on that.

Sarevok24

rdarken said:

I don't know for sure, but level 5 seems a little low to me. Maybe 6-7 is about right for reaching BG. I've gotten my part to about level 3-4 by the end of the Nashkel mines. That is why I think 5 may be a tad low. But I could be way off on that.

my party members were level 2-3 when i started nashkel mines and level 3 with maybe one or two fours by the end

i didn't really do many side quests after that though i pretty much headed to beregost to meet tranzig then went to cloakwood mines and baldurs gate

Sarevok24

atcDave said:

You will gain experience more quickly as the game goes, actually quite a lot of it after you've first been to the city.
But I would say your about one level lower than I normally am when I hit the city. It's purely a matter of preference, but I would go back and explore the southern part of the map first. You'll probably gain another level for each character and find many useful magic items. In short, you'll be quite a bit tougher than you are now.
Of course, the city is perfectly doable for a lower level party. Although some fights may be tougher than if you'd explored the south more thoroughly.

does that include firewine bride and durlags tower?

elminster

I would say I normally hit the city at around 50,000 experience points. But I typically do all the areas I can (non-totsc) before going into Cloakwood forest. That is just a guess though, I could be off on it.

totto

I've been at Level 5-6 in the city,too.There are about 32 Sidequest in the city of Baldurs Gate, so you can easily reach the next Levels with your group....

Pantalion

I believe I was level 5, but multiclassed, so you're maybe a level or two behind someone who did most of the content. I wouldn't worry about it, BG isn't much more dangerous than Cloakwood, and offers a lot of opportunities for Exp.

rdarken

@Sarevok24
Sir, you are evil and dead and try to kill CHARNAME multiple times. You are clearly under-reporting levels to try to trick CHARNAME into bringing a weak party to confront you so that you can kill them easily.

Nic_Mercy

For npc's with disparate xp compared to the rest of my party I simply CLUA that specific npc's xp up to match the average or slightly less of the rest of the party so they are on par. It might be cheating but seriously, you'd never be able to close the gap without at least your CHARNAME getting crazy amounts of xp too. The console method just makes more sense and keeps the party levels even. With that said, I only do this the first time I recruit a new member and only if their level is excessively lower than my party. In BGT using mods that put Alora in Gullykin, I bumped her up from level 4 to level 6 when I was deep into the game and had just dualed a lvl 7 thief Imoen to mage and needed a temp thief replacement until Imoen caught up.

atcDave

Saravok I would do Firewine Bridge before the city, but save Durlag's Tower for last (either last thing before the city, or when you head back to Candlekeep). Actually, after I explore the Bridge surface map (two good battles with loot), I would skip the tunnels and head up to Gullykin. There's another entrance to the tunnels there, it's sort of a back door right to the good parts of the tunnel system. Unless you really like fighting Kobolds...

Nic I sure would call that cheating. If you recruit or add a lower level character late in the game they WILL gain experience fairly quickly and won't be a burden for long. I kind of enjoy getting a rookie up to speed.

doomdoomdoom

You're very unlikely to hit the 161k cap without doing ToSC areas (mostly Durlag's Tower) or going solo. Which isn't a surprise, considering that such cap was introduced with ToSC. Vanilla BG1 had a cap of 89k.

I'm looking at the gamesave from my latest run, saved at BG bridge, with all the outside areas and quests done (except Durlag's and Ulgoth's) - PC/Dorn/Neera all have slightly over 70k XP. Which is a bit more than anyone else (the next highest, Viconia has 65k) because I did the basilisk area with that trio to level up my dual class a bit faster. The rest of the playthrough was with 5-6 people party.
So ~60k per member is about what you can get with a full party outside of BG city without going to expansion areas.

Madhax

And remember, many (most?) classes or class combinations will reach maximum level well before they reach the xp cap. A single-class Cleric, for example, reaches level 8 at 110,000 xp and needs 220,000 to hit level 9, meaning that their BGEE cap is 51,000 xp short of the cap.

In my most recent run, doing a fair amount of BG1 content and all of the TotSC content, and not grinding at all, I ended the game about 10,000-20,000 xp short of the cap, and all of my party was maxed out in levels.

moopy

@Riolathel

If you know where to pick up the scroll of cloudkill she can be casting cloudkills several times from level 2 (the level you get her at)

Of course one time I did that and it wild surge changed the target of the spell to a member of my party and everyone died horribly.

Oh, I see your point...

Nic_Mercy

atcDave said:

Saravok I would do Firewine Bridge before the city, but save Durlag's Tower for last (either last thing before the city, or when you head back to Candlekeep). Actually, after I explore the Bridge surface map (two good battles with loot), I would skip the tunnels and head up to Gullykin. There's another entrance to the tunnels there, it's sort of a back door right to the good parts of the tunnel system. Unless you really like fighting Kobolds...

Nic I sure would call that cheating. If you recruit or add a lower level character late in the game they WILL gain experience fairly quickly and won't be a burden for long. I kind of enjoy getting a rookie up to speed.

Just to nitpick here... I did acknowledge that it was cheating. But I must also point out that bringing a lowbie along in a high level group allows them to leech high lvl xp while the highbies do all the work/take all the risks. To me that seems like cheating too. Especially if you abuse dropping all other party members and/or resting in the golem cave ad naseum. I much prefer mitigating that disparity with the CLUA and letting everyone in the party pull their own weight against level appropriate challenges. Then I can actually play and advance the story instead of "grinding" to play catch up for one character (especially if its a character I only plan to have temporarily).

With that said I rarely have to do this. My BG1 party is largely the cannon party. Occasionally Dynaheir's death is a "slightly premature" from cannon so I can take Viconia instead. I usually just leave Imoen a pure thief in BG1 and let her get her "free" dual class upgrade in BG2

atcDave

I was just agreeing with you...


I figure the newbies learn faster by being mentored by higher level characters on their adventure. But yeah, I hardly ever do it either. I remember an early play through deciding I didn't like any of the cleric options, so I created one of my own to add to the party (in Durlag's Tower). By the end, my party was all around 7th level, and she was 6th. But it's been years since I've done anything like that, I normally have my party locked in pretty early.