I think this is the best BG party I've ever done....
ScytheKnight
Member Posts: 220
OK so after a few false starts of trying to play evil parties (sorry, the whole rep system just kills the joy out of evil parties for me) I've settled into playing the hero... and to my surprise I found I could even setup my 'ideal' party with only one Dual Class with a good/neutral party... something I couldn't come close to doing playing evil.
OK, guess I better talk about what my ideal party is...
2-3 melee
1-2 ranged (not really counting mages at the back with sling/dart here)
2 divine casters
2 arcane casters
1+ thief for traps/locks
So to linchpin all this I decided to do a fighter/cleric, originally looked at a dwarf, but then I wondered if half-orc could do it in this...
...OMG....
A child of Bhaal indeed, 19 Str/Con 18Dex/Wis and this without abysmal Int/Cha (7 and 9 respectively), flail/sling/shield skills... Just, downright insane... with only Imoen, Xzar and Monteron managed to kill a Dreadwolf outside candlekeep. At lvl 3/3 -2 AC in splint armour and a large shield, 32 HP, 14 THAC0 and 11-16 damage with a standard flail. All this unbuffed.
OK, so the party...
Ajantis - Party leader (17 Char) and been trained for 2-handed sword.
Domara Dawnbreaker - PC
Branwen - Primary healer, wielding Ashideena +2
Kivan - Primary archer until I can get Coran who will then also handle thief duties for a while
Imoen - Primary thief for much of the game, will be dualed to a mage at lvl 7 once I pick up Coran, also trained her in crossbows so she can use The Army Scythe when I can afford it.
Neera - Primary arcane caster, and wild magic hilarity.
So I've 2 1/2 melee (wouldn't really count Branwen as a full melee character with her stats but a solid half point, maybe a full with GoOS) 2 ranged (if Coran hasn't been altered he'd almost be a 1 1/2 on his own) 2 1/4 divine casters (Ajantis may get a spell or two) 1 solid arcane caster throughout joined by a second once Imoen starts stacking on the mage levels at the same time will have one thief throughout then 2 at late game.
Honestly it's the BGEE changes that make this party so awesome... a dwarf fighter/cleric would be a solid character, but the half-orc takes it to a whole new level and Neera gives good parties a pure arcane caster NPC who doesn't suck, AND is available early.
OK, guess I better talk about what my ideal party is...
2-3 melee
1-2 ranged (not really counting mages at the back with sling/dart here)
2 divine casters
2 arcane casters
1+ thief for traps/locks
So to linchpin all this I decided to do a fighter/cleric, originally looked at a dwarf, but then I wondered if half-orc could do it in this...
...OMG....
A child of Bhaal indeed, 19 Str/Con 18Dex/Wis and this without abysmal Int/Cha (7 and 9 respectively), flail/sling/shield skills... Just, downright insane... with only Imoen, Xzar and Monteron managed to kill a Dreadwolf outside candlekeep. At lvl 3/3 -2 AC in splint armour and a large shield, 32 HP, 14 THAC0 and 11-16 damage with a standard flail. All this unbuffed.
OK, so the party...
Ajantis - Party leader (17 Char) and been trained for 2-handed sword.
Domara Dawnbreaker - PC
Branwen - Primary healer, wielding Ashideena +2
Kivan - Primary archer until I can get Coran who will then also handle thief duties for a while
Imoen - Primary thief for much of the game, will be dualed to a mage at lvl 7 once I pick up Coran, also trained her in crossbows so she can use The Army Scythe when I can afford it.
Neera - Primary arcane caster, and wild magic hilarity.
So I've 2 1/2 melee (wouldn't really count Branwen as a full melee character with her stats but a solid half point, maybe a full with GoOS) 2 ranged (if Coran hasn't been altered he'd almost be a 1 1/2 on his own) 2 1/4 divine casters (Ajantis may get a spell or two) 1 solid arcane caster throughout joined by a second once Imoen starts stacking on the mage levels at the same time will have one thief throughout then 2 at late game.
Honestly it's the BGEE changes that make this party so awesome... a dwarf fighter/cleric would be a solid character, but the half-orc takes it to a whole new level and Neera gives good parties a pure arcane caster NPC who doesn't suck, AND is available early.
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I hear what you're saying about the half-orc race option and Neera making a major difference.
But OMFG I am sooo Fing tired of having to go back to Bergost to buy more Fing flails!!! had two break in 3 zones of Cloakwood, one of them just sitting in my freaken pack as a spare! And right now I can't really go trawling through zones trying to find a +1 flail 'cos I need to kill these damned wyverns before Coran gets pissy.
drools
I just played through the xvart village area yesterday and I think there was a flail+1 in the bear cave next to it.
I just put together an evil party for the first time since EE came out and it is ridiculously awesome.
CHARNAME, Albruin, helm and cloak, large shield +2, Guard's Ring, Full plate
Edwin - RoW, robe of the EA
Dorn - Dex gaunts, Spider's Bane/World's Edge, full plate, Claw of Kaz.
Shar-Teel (dualed to thief at 3)
Viconia - Ogre Power, Full Plate, Ashideena, many fortitude potions
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
Baeloth - RoW, robe of the EA
I basically made a list of what I thought were very powerful evil NPCs, and made a CHARNAME to suit.
I went half-orc berserker, kitted out as a tank since the party otherwise lacks. Half-Orc because berserk largely supplants saves, except for petrification/polymorph, and I wouldn't rely on saves for that even as a dwarf.
Dorn has -6 AC and Viccy has -7, so both can tank in a pinch, while CHARNAME is at -10 as main tank. Shar-Teel has GM in longswords, 80 in traps and locks, and passable stealth, as well as sandthief for backstabby goodness.
I used Dorn to kill Ghost Knights in Firewine and grabbed an extra full plate that way, as well as helms of charm protection, always nice.
Albruin is awesome: 2d4+3 damage, flagged as silver, immune to poison, detect invisibility
It's just always jarring to me that Reputation for an evil party always feels like managing an arbitrary game mechanic then roleplaying an evil party. Been nutting through an alternate system that I'm starting to feel happy with, may post about it soon.
Coran's locks and traps skills are pretty lousy when you get him, but I guess you can make do.
Also, I thought that the metal weapons would stop breaking after you solved the Iron Crisis. Did BG:EE change that to breaks on critical misses through the whole game? There's a +1 flail out in the southwest Cloudpeaks area in a cave somewhere. You need that - it will solve your breaking problems. Have you gotten high enough as either cleric or fighter to get another weapon proficiency? If you do, take warhammer and use the +2 you got from Bassilus. Just some suggestions, ignore at will.
You get that sword in Dorn's questline correct?
Well having played a bit more.... I really have to say that I'm pretty abysmally underwhelmed by mid-game dual classes. I will say that I have done a dual class before, but this was a BGII Kensai/Mage which was a very early change over, I've never before got a character to the middle of a game and then changed their class....
and all I can keep thinking is "Why would you DO this?". So before Imoen was a good enough thief to handle most any lock or trap, and now for a decent chunk of the game I've got Coran who couldn't detect a rope across the road connected to a frikken deadfall trap. This, I did know about, and accepted it... before the change Imoen was a helpful addition at long range with The Army Scythe... now? She plinks away with a crappy sling having somehow forgotten how to reload a crossbow and doesn't have enough magic skills to make her at all useful at the game stage I'm at now. So basically for the promise of having a moderately more useful character at the end game I turn one of my more useful party members into a useless git who basically can't offer me much of anything for most of the mid game AND I've just changed said character from the fastest to slowest progression...
Why? WHY would you DO this?
So yeah... really thinking of abandoning this game, words really can not express how crap I find dual classing, I could live with the loss of secondary abilities but can ANYONE explain to me how learning to cast spells makes you forget how to reload a crossbow?
And before anyone gets any ideas, no I'm not in any way shape or form blaming Overhaul or saying "Fix this!!!" I know that it's the D&D 2nd Edition Rules... but honestly coming back to them after so long on 3rd and 3.5 I can understand why they pretty much reinvented the wheel and got rid of 2/3 of the rules and rebuilt the rest from the ground up.
Having already finished SoA at least 2 out of my 3 times as a mage (I know I've finished it 3 times, I know 2 where mage... and suspect the 3rd was as well) I really, REALLY don't want to do another CHARNAME mage... and for a good party? That's just downright depressing. Dynaheir being about the best of the selection, even though she loses two of the best spells schools, at least she's bonded to a reasonable character in Minsc, great two pure mages (you want a multi class mage before reaching Baldur's Gate? HAHAHA! *trollface*). Branwen for one divine caster, not sure I wanna roll another divine caster myself... so that means carrying someone or doing a 5 man until the Cloakwod mine (meh) or Jahira (eh) who's bonded with Khalid (just shoot me now)...
Honestly Bioware what the ****! "Hey, lets have reasonably good characters be permanently bonded to some of the worst characters in the game!!! It's hilarious!" And they all are... Monteron is a pretty good fighter/thief, Xzar? Just don't scowl at him too hard. Jahira, a reasonably good fighter/druid, Khalid not a good archer, not a good damage dealer not a good tank... WHY is he a fighter again? Minsc A strong character, in fact the only non CHARNAME good character with 18+ STR, Dynaheir? Not one, but TWO prohibited schools, the ONLY mage specialization to be saddled with this, and two of the best schools at that.
As much as I love BG for resurrecting the then dying RPG genre... Looking back now I can't help but feel the NPCs are a MASSIVE trolling effort on Bioware's part... And don't get me started on how crap most of the good characters are compared to Evil, who then get saddled with that half backed monstrosity called 'Reputation'. Although Overhaul, why the HELL did you continue this?! Dorn seems to be a great character... but Raasad? The weakest low level class and then you give him middling to crappy stats on top of that?!
Thinking up parties for BG:II was always fun, you had such a wide diversity of classes in the characters and most of them didn't outright suck like many BG characters do. Putting together a party for BG on the other hand is a game of dodging the abysmal, wondering if the compromise of taking decent character X is worth being saddled with terrible character Y is worth it and deciding if you're going to have to carry an extra random warm body or go a party member or so short for later game characters who may be useful but utterly inaccessible...
... I think I'm gonna to take a look at Black Pits for a bit....
The only thing worse than that are people claiming how "great" a cleric/mage is in bg2.
Dual-classing for humans belongs the 2nd Edition AD&D ruleset that BG1/EE uses, as you noted. Bioware was simply being faithful to the ruleset there...
Dual-classing is something that I do little of because of the so-called 'downtime' of waiting to get the original class skills back (i.e., when you reach one level higher in the new class than the original class). In some cases a really good pay-off can come very quickly, such as Shar-Teel dualing to Thief at Fighter 3. But otherwise I kind of have to agree that you only enjoy both class skills together for too little of the game--at least for my taste, personally. I agree that with Imoen that I would not want to wait until level 6 or 7 to dual her. But then again, I rarely dual-class her anyway. I prefer keeping her a pure class Thief. (If I'm going to do something different with Imoen other than Thief, I convert her to Bard using the Level 1 NPC mod via BGT).
Xzar is actually a very competent wizard and generally regarded as one of the most entertaining characters in the game.
Similarly, Khalid is actually a pretty formidable warrior. He is in fact one of the best archers in the game, if you wish to use him that way. And he is, IIRC, the only NPC that can achieve grandmastery (in his case with Bastard Swords).
Dynaheir is generally regarded as the weakest NPC mage available because of her specialization (she is restricted from scribing both the Enchantment and Conjuration school spells). (That said, personally, I still like her.)
Here's a tip to undo the NPC pairing: You can break up NPC pairs by taking one of them into a building and removing that member of the pair from the party. The other pair member can't be there at the time--leave that one parked outside for the goodbye! The pair member that you dropped from the party in the building will remain there. Just make sure that you use a building or floor of a building that you don't have to frequent. Because when you reenter with the other NPC pair member, the one you dropped will try to rejoin.
Khalid is one of two that can GM (Kagain being the other) but yeah... I guess throw him the gauntlets of ogre power and he'll be reasonably good with a blade.
The only reason (IMO) people like Dynaheir is that Xan is even worse! Ohh and, well, Minsc of course. Honestly Dynaheir is the best of a very, very bad bunch for good aligned mages.
@Roller12 Yes, in BG, not BGII or ToB.
Some folks also like to have an unwanted pair member petrified by a bassilisk.