That and ankheg farming. The quest giver is on the northern end of the road, but you can (and probably will) kill more than she tells you. Getting the quest is just a little extra reward.
[Spoiler]A mage with either Fireball or Lightning Bold helps a lot there![/Spoiler]
Uh, I wouldn't consider this the best place to farm. Groups of kobold commandos can actually be pretty deadly and you've got a decent chance of ending up with heavily wounded or dead characters, especially if a group spawns behind your party (as they're wont to do) and opens fire on your squishy characters. Not to mention the actual xp you get from killing them is pretty small, even factoring in how many there are. Overall I consider the Firewine ruins to be somewhat a pain in the ass, and clear it more for the sake of being a completionist than anything, as the risk/reward ratio is pretty bad.
Kobolds are not worth the trouble, unless you are in desperate need of fire arrows and have no gold to buy them.
The wolves on the eastern edge of the Beregost Temple probably give you around the same XP as all the Firewine kobolds and they aren't harder to fight than ankhegs, sirines or basilisks.
There's a trap on the second basement of Durlag's tower, some false stairs. When you click on them, a Stinking Cloud spell is cast on the centre of the room, and three skeleton warriors spawn, two with only melee weapons, and one with a bow as well.
What you want to do is take an invisible character, have them set off the trap, and run them out of the room. Then, pull the skeleton warriors one at a time out of the cloud-room and to whichever direction your party is. Rinse and repeat.
You get 12,000xp per encounter with this method. Granted, skeleton warriors aren't easy pickings for a low-level party, but if you can get down to that level of the dungeon, it's the best way in the game to get experience.
The flesh golems on the Lighthouse map do not re-spawn anymore, resting only gets Carrion Crawlers for 420 XP each. However, the wyvern cave I had dismissed earlier for only spawning baby wyverns... now spawned 10 normal wyverns in a row. This is only available after Bandit Camp, but it's great to get levels back if you dualed around that time - plus it gives your new found cleric a chance to practise Slow Poison. (I had dualed Xzar to cleric before going to Cloakwood, so it fit the situation perfectly and got his levels back to be ready for the mines. What a pleasant surprise!)
I have a query regarding experience, myself. It pertains as to whether there is enough experience to go around. Taking into account the ability to swap NPC's in and out, and being able to dual-class, etc.
Would a standard playthrough with a party of five to six see enough experience for everyone to reach their maximum level? Or would it be advised to keep a repeatable instance in mind where XP can be garnered numerous times?
I have a query regarding experience, myself. It pertains as to whether there is enough experience to go around. Taking into account the ability to swap NPC's in and out, and being able to dual-class, etc.
Would a standard playthrough with a party of five to six see enough experience for everyone to reach their maximum level? Or would it be advised to keep a repeatable instance in mind where XP can be garnered numerous times?
I'm pretty sure someone on these forums posted that a 100% completion playthrough, including TotSC, not including farming respawners, yielded a total of 1.2 million XP, or 200k per party member in a group of six, a little over the XP cap and certainly enough to max out everybody. I haven't tested it myself, but the number seems about right to me.
Of course, a lot of that XP is towards the end of the game, such as in the TotSC content which you can't really handle until later anyway.
Go to the ankheg cave that the farmer sends you to to find his missing son. You can just rest farm inside if there for ankhegs. 500g per shell if your low on money and 975xp per kill. They're also really easy to let your auto attackers kill once their about lvl6.
Step 1) Rescue Mellicamp. Buy a potion of Mirrored Eyes Step 2) Do the book fetch quest in Beregost Step 3) Kill Algernon for his cloak Step 4) Go to the Temple. Charm/kill the Sirines Step 5) Go East, kill Basilisks
Step 1) Rescue Mellicamp. Buy a potion of Mirrored Eyes Step 2) Do the book fetch quest in Beregost Step 3) Kill Algernon for his cloak Step 4) Go to the Temple. Charm/kill the Sirines Step 5) Go East, kill Basilisks
After that, you should have 12k xp
Though the Mellicamp quest fails 50% of the time, unless you cheat and reload.
Also, you can pickpocket Melicamp for his cloak, instead of killing him, if you have a character with a decent pockpockets score, which can be boosted with Potions of Master Thievery, before you can enter Baldur's Gate City, they're available here:
You can get one by killing Vitaire before he escapes in one of the tents in the Carnival area, though you need to be quick.
You can also buy them from the wandering merchant before Durlag's Tower - don't worry, you don't have to go near the tower and all it's dangers to do this
A very easy way to get some quick experience from the start is ->
1.) Move up to the ankheg map, kill the three fishers there for a flail + 1 and the bowl. You don't lose any reputation from doing this. 2.) Go up to the priestess and tell her that you're going to kill her, shoot her once with a range weapon to trigger her second dialogue and give her the bowl for 2500 experience. 3.) Move past the ankheg and up to the north farm, clear the zombies and give in the quest for another easy 1500-1800 experience. If you're a thief then steal the cloak of protection from his house. 4.) (Thief only) Go to ulgoth's beard, steal the ring of free action from the gnome lady at start (One if not the best item in the game) go to the house on top right after you go into map and open a chest for a bastard sword + 1. Go into the Inn and go to the back room and open the chest for a war hammer + 1. Now go to the house with the werewolf guy and you can open his chest without him getting angry and taking the 900 gold there.
1.) Sirenes. Bring someone that is immune to charm (Barbarian, Cavalier, Inquisitor, Berserk, helm of charm protection) and it's easy experience. Just make sure you go into melee it them as their Arrows of Biting hurts.
2.) Ankhegs. Same goes for theese as with sirenes, you want to get into melee combat with them OR use belt of piercing / boots of avoidance. The best and most effective way of farming them is using the Wand of Sleep or the sleep spell (Mage level). You can put down anything from 1 to 4 ankeghs at once with this spell.
3.) Basilisks. This is a once upon game trick, but get Korax the ghoul to tank the basilisks (Immune to stone) or the more reliable get a scroll of protection from petrify from Carnival vendor and put it on a fighter with oil of speed and he can run through the whole map and collect those 20K+ experience.
Neither basilisks nor sirenes hit very hard. And you can farm them safely even at level 1 with charm protection / Korax / protection from petrification. You can get a helm with immune to charm from the Inn at beregost where marl is (Can't remember the name right now).
Ankhegs are a little bit trickier, but if you get a wand of sleep or use a mage/sorcerer with the sleep spell and the Ring of wizardry from Friendly Arm Inn then you can sleep them without much trouble. A mage with a sling and a sleep spell on level 1 can kill an ankheg easily. The sleep spell isn't 100% to hit as they can save vs it, so if you want to be safe have a fighter standing first with a large shield and any + missile (Belt of piercing, boots of avoidance) to soak up the ranged hits while you sleep it.
I normally do :
1.) Priestess, farm to the north and Ulgoths. 2.) Basilisk farm 3.) Ankheg farm.
And then i'm in the high levels with around 50K+ experience. This does break the difficulty at the start, so unless you're running in a no reload or SCS i would advice from doing it as it can get boring pretty quickly once you're too powerful. But if you run in a party with 5-6 it's 10K experience a person.
philly2silly
Member Posts: 2
Comments
[Spoiler]A mage with either Fireball or Lightning Bold helps a lot there![/Spoiler]
The wolves on the eastern edge of the Beregost Temple probably give you around the same XP as all the Firewine kobolds and they aren't harder to fight than ankhegs, sirines or basilisks.
What you want to do is take an invisible character, have them set off the trap, and run them out of the room. Then, pull the skeleton warriors one at a time out of the cloud-room and to whichever direction your party is. Rinse and repeat.
You get 12,000xp per encounter with this method. Granted, skeleton warriors aren't easy pickings for a low-level party, but if you can get down to that level of the dungeon, it's the best way in the game to get experience.
Would a standard playthrough with a party of five to six see enough experience for everyone to reach their maximum level? Or would it be advised to keep a repeatable instance in mind where XP can be garnered numerous times?
Of course, a lot of that XP is towards the end of the game, such as in the TotSC content which you can't really handle until later anyway.
Step 2) Do the book fetch quest in Beregost
Step 3) Kill Algernon for his cloak
Step 4) Go to the Temple. Charm/kill the Sirines
Step 5) Go East, kill Basilisks
After that, you should have 12k xp
Also, you can pickpocket Melicamp for his cloak, instead of killing him, if you have a character with a decent pockpockets score, which can be boosted with Potions of Master Thievery, before you can enter Baldur's Gate City, they're available here:
You can get one by killing Vitaire before he escapes in one of the tents in the Carnival area, though you need to be quick.
You can also buy them from the wandering merchant before Durlag's Tower - don't worry, you don't have to go near the tower and all it's dangers to do this
1.) Move up to the ankheg map, kill the three fishers there for a flail + 1 and the bowl. You don't lose any reputation from doing this.
2.) Go up to the priestess and tell her that you're going to kill her, shoot her once with a range weapon to trigger her second dialogue and give her the bowl for 2500 experience.
3.) Move past the ankheg and up to the north farm, clear the zombies and give in the quest for another easy 1500-1800 experience. If you're a thief then steal the cloak of protection from his house.
4.) (Thief only) Go to ulgoth's beard, steal the ring of free action from the gnome lady at start (One if not the best item in the game) go to the house on top right after you go into map and open a chest for a bastard sword + 1. Go into the Inn and go to the back room and open the chest for a war hammer + 1. Now go to the house with the werewolf guy and you can open his chest without him getting angry and taking the 900 gold there.
4300 experience.
Flail + 1
Hammer + 1
Bastard sword + 1
Cloak + 1
Ring of Free Action
1300 gold.
Right from the start.
Some more places to farm that are quite easy.
1.) Sirenes. Bring someone that is immune to charm (Barbarian, Cavalier, Inquisitor, Berserk, helm of charm protection) and it's easy experience. Just make sure you go into melee it them as their Arrows of Biting hurts.
2.) Ankhegs. Same goes for theese as with sirenes, you want to get into melee combat with them OR use belt of piercing / boots of avoidance. The best and most effective way of farming them is using the Wand of Sleep or the sleep spell (Mage level). You can put down anything from 1 to 4 ankeghs at once with this spell.
3.) Basilisks. This is a once upon game trick, but get Korax the ghoul to tank the basilisks (Immune to stone) or the more reliable get a scroll of protection from petrify from Carnival vendor and put it on a fighter with oil of speed and he can run through the whole map and collect those 20K+ experience.
Neither basilisks nor sirenes hit very hard. And you can farm them safely even at level 1 with charm protection / Korax / protection from petrification. You can get a helm with immune to charm from the Inn at beregost where marl is (Can't remember the name right now).
Ankhegs are a little bit trickier, but if you get a wand of sleep or use a mage/sorcerer with the sleep spell and the Ring of wizardry from Friendly Arm Inn then you can sleep them without much trouble. A mage with a sling and a sleep spell on level 1 can kill an ankheg easily. The sleep spell isn't 100% to hit as they can save vs it, so if you want to be safe have a fighter standing first with a large shield and any + missile (Belt of piercing, boots of avoidance) to soak up the ranged hits while you sleep it.
I normally do :
1.) Priestess, farm to the north and Ulgoths.
2.) Basilisk farm
3.) Ankheg farm.
And then i'm in the high levels with around 50K+ experience. This does break the difficulty at the start, so unless you're running in a no reload or SCS i would advice from doing it as it can get boring pretty quickly once you're too powerful. But if you run in a party with 5-6 it's 10K experience a person.