is BG2 more challenging than 1?
doctordog
Member Posts: 44
aside from the first half of the game, i'm finding BG1 too easy on my second playthrough to be honest .. it isn't anything to do with enemy HP or damage-dealing, I just wish there were more strategy-intensive battles with groups of difficult enemies (like the house of Ogre mages in Baldur's Gate City, near the docks .. or the mage protected by a group of Horrors).
Is BG2 better in that respect?
Is BG2 better in that respect?
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Beholders are pretty rough, especially if you don't get Balduran's shield, but it's stupidly easy to get so.......hmmm.... they're rough without it since they spam out a lot of nasty crap every round, but they're do-able, have to use a screen of summons while you gun them down with ranged or send in a hasted melee or have several wand/magic users to blast them the instant you spot them), for a long time only people who pre-ordered the game or downloaded the files could get the shield, but they added the merchant that sells officially in a patch, so everyone can get it now).
(if you want to keep the game challenging, don't use ANY Deidre or Joluv's stuff and don't go to the Watcher's Keep before ToB...though on the other hand Watcher's Keep can be very challenging if you attempt it at low levels. Though it will utterly trivialize the rest of SoA if you clear it before ToB).
Mind Flayers are also pretty tough since nothing can protect from their int drain on melee (kills, if the character reaches 0 int), but can be easily ranged down without issue or just having 1 strong melee character with a heavily buffed AC.
Drow can be pretty tough due to having stupidly good armor scores and high spell resistance, but you don't really encounter them much relative to other challenges.
Level draining enemies are much more common, but on the other hand, there's several ways to completely trivialize them without cheese (and several more with) those encounters so...not a big challenge.
The Shadow dragon and Draconis are the only really tough dragons in the game. The former because of an AoE level drain breath that hits a huge area, and the latter for a being a invisbility spamming mother$%#^er who also is a high level mage (he's much easier if you have a thief with 100 detect illusion or slightly less effectively someone to cast true-sight. (DI ticks twice per round, TS only ticks once). The rest are pretty much the same, just with a different elemental immunity/breath weapon, if you take down one, you can kill the rest the exact same way (all dragons are also vulnerable instant death effects, even when they're a chapter boss (only when in dragon form though) and should normally be immune to that sort of thing).
Most mage battles can simply be battered down with elemental damage weapons once their PfMW runs out.
Demi-liches are strong, but can be trivialized with 1 spell or certain abilities since they only have 1 trick to play.
There's a few genuinely tough battles though, mostly due to a large group of high level adventurers in close quarters, but a few basic techniques mastered in BG1 can utterly trivialize them. (Two of these groups in particular are the bane of noobs, since it's easy to run into them on accident when exploring if they didn't get used to the idea of having a scout move slightly ahead of the party or for some reason didn't memorize any debuff spells.
I really can't think of any. Anyone who played BG1 and developed good group strategies can take everything vanilla BG2 throws out in stride easily. It's just people who didn't that might have trouble. Especially truth of a power-gamed PC character who can roflstomp the vanilla game effortlessly.
I didn't create the 75 stat no reload challenge for nothing you know
However, the problem lies in that once you know HOW to defeat those foes, you never un-know. After that point, unless you put special restrictions on yourself(like not using the Shield of Balduran againt beholders) the game becomes a lot easier.
Off the top of my head I can only think of a handful of fights that require legitimate strategy, while the rest just require a knowledge of enemy abilities.
1) Play at higher difficulty and install difficulty enhancing mods. Keep upping the challenge but continue to use every cheesy trick you know in the book to beat it.
2) Set yourself rules and restraints in how you play. Like abstaining from using metagame knowlege and not min/max character stats.
A few things I do:
No short duration pre buffs.
'Realistic' character stats with meaningful weaknesses, none of the 'oh but my barbarian's weakness is that he is stupid and ugly!'
In my second run I will also abstain from finding the obscure Easter eggs like Ring of Magery.
No reloading except for character death and romance partner death.
Of course all decisions based on RP, not metagame.
BG2 presents some really challenging fights though, mind flayers and beholders definately come to mind. Vampires and that level steal can really ruin your day, not to mention the annoying spellbook forgetting (EVERY time I rest then realise I havent re-entered my spellbooks, UUGH! I Acutally just made a request thread to fix this!). Boss fights are fun, Irenicus is challenging and the Watchers Keep is always a blast. This sums it up perfectly for me. And I'm not a fan of just turning up the difficulty so monsters start dealing stupid amounts of damage, whilst nerfing my character HP development. Has anyone done some work on monster AI modding that takes advantage of more monster abilities / spells? Having enemies actually use things like traps and stealth and more spells would be an interesting expirement in increasing combat difficulty.
For experienced players there's still no real solution to advantages you can get through cheese and metagaming, but my advice would be to install SCS (and Spell Revisions) when you feel things are getting too easy, or like you say, want more strategy-requiring encounters.
After that it depends a bit on how you like to play. If you can adapt to using a laundry list of restrictions like @Heindrich1988 mentions, you'll get far on that mod. If you prefer to rack your brain and use every tool and trick available inside the game to prevail, you might want to try the tactics mod. It assumes a detailed knowledge of the game and that a player will attempt to cheese encounters, and can be quite punishing to someone who just wants slightly more realistic enemy behaviour.
If you find yourself insufficiently challenged, I STRONGLY recommend checking out some of the more difficult mods, in particular SCS/SCSII, and for BG2 Tactics and Ascension. They add tremendous amounts of depth and complexity, and can be quite challenging even for seasoned players. I also recommend playing them on Insane difficulty for the optimal experience. If that too is not enough, there are several more mods that go even further, adding extra challenges to specific locations (like Improved Asylum, or Planar Sphere Mod).
It is completely understandable that the original game cannot be designed in a way that caters to the abilities of every possible target audience. By today's standards, it's already fairly difficult because of its somewhat steep learning curve (no hand-holding), but it can be "solved" pretty easily and becomes fairly trivial after that. The community has done an excellent job remedying that with mods, each of which has many, many individual settings to create the experience suitable for YOU. Do not miss out on it! After more than a decade, I still enjoy playing it, and even with all the knowledge and information I've collected, it's still a challenge.
But to the original question of BG2 being harder than 1? It's like how people have put before, make restrictions to yourself and allow yourself to be "driven by the story" than by the person who is holding the mouse and keyboard. It was absolutely agonizing going through the game in complete ignorance at first but now that I'm getting the hang of it I'm finding ways to overcome obstacles I never thought I could get away before...
You'll spend a great deal of time casting buffing spells and offensive spells just to get rid of their spellcasters first before they do the very same thing against you. Nothing is more annoying than going against a well armed enemy party who happens to have a spellcaster at the ready armed with an improved haste spell. Personally I still find BG2 quite difficult even on normal since I'm not used to all these new effects and graphics including all the "new" spells that weren't in BG1 originally. Hehe... took me a long time to get used to the vampires and all that glistening magical gear in the stores.
you also don't have much of a choice in most battles as low level characters have few abilities and you can determine the best for any occasion on sight most of the time
as for the player made challenges i simply see no point in them...what's the point of voluntarily crippling your char to make the game challenging? also the no reload is pointless as sometimes you can die due to sheer luck (you rest weary,enemies spawn ontop of let's say your thief protagonist 1 crits your thief-i picked thief due to no acces to helm/stoneskin- there you go dead.
soloing is no good either,the whole point of D&D is the interaction/relationships between the group,otherwise play diablo...if the game can be soloed(ofc it can) then it's too easy
BGI needed alot more to make combat interesting, BGII is interesting but still needs something more challenging
and let's be honest BG is in every aspect inferior to BG2 the means of the time it was created were very limited
I find the games difficult because I don't memorize stuff. My forgetfulness makes every run feel almost like a new game. I still feel plenty of fear when I face the hardest monsters and bosses.
I kind of like it my way, because I don't get jaded with the game.
The battles and situations are more complex, but not necessarily harder. The game is predicated almost entirely on casting and dispelling magic. You'll come up against a lot more powerful spells, but you'll also have a lot more spells at your own disposal. After coming straight off BG1, the game may seem like a shock to the system at first, but if you're handy with magic (or develop a handiness with magic) it will likely get a lot easier.
I will also add that I consider BG2's bias toward magic to be one of, if not THE most negative aspects of the game. In BG1, you could succeed using just about any approach if you simply did it well enough, which allowed you a lot more leeway as to which NPCs you could include in your party. BG2 basically forces you to have a magic-oriented party full of spellcasting NPCs.
BG 2 is a cakewalk...and kinda boring ,battle wise ,due to this fact. ( Even upping difficulty )
Only a few fights are memorable.
But the story is good.
BG 1 was fun because it was harder.
Remove or make it harder to find some OPed items in BG2. I never use MR gear in BG2 for any party member, same with Mirror Robe etc. Too easy.
Too much stuff to list.
Basically if you want the game to be challenging you'll have to set some restrictions for your self. No modifying stats at creation, just taking rolls as they are and going with it. Self-enforced restrictions to keep spell-casting/ability use sort of in check. Avoiding any cheese or exploits.
Or even modding the game yourself. I've made several modifications of my own to my game to try and make it closer to 2nd edition's level of power (removing immunity to level drain from all items/class abilities, tweaking the berserker/barbarian's immunity list, adding proper opposed schools for each specialist (Conjuerers though have a work-around since you can't partial deny a school directly. Evo is their main opposed school, and I simply denied them the ability to use scrolls of all divination spells 5th level and above as per PnP. As some examples, several more though), with mixed success...I know enough to change some things, but others are beyond my knowledge or hard-coded (adding proper benefits to specialists if beyond my knowledge).
So there.
BG1's bows are not as strong in BG2. We'll see if BG2EE changes that at all.
Vampires and Mind Flayers are bad news. Demi-Liches are worse news (though you can avoid them).
But I'm probably the wrong person to ask, I don't need either game to be more challenging than they are.
The original seems harder now because there are less ways to overcome the difficulty of the beginning part other than being lucky due to being able to die from a single hit.
In BG2 you start off with good hit points and spells/abilities so you can hold your own against common threats. However there are nasty creatures that can level drain and can insta-kill with spells. If you are unprepared against them you will have a very hard time. When I first encountered vampires I was scarred for life, it was a horrible experience to watch my characters being drained of life.
So, in BG1 the difficulty is your abilities and hit points are limited, whereas in BG2 the difficulty stems from the enemy creature's deadly abilities. In both cases, experience and familiarity with the game and engine rules will ensure your success.
I heartily suggest SCS mod to spice things up, it really enhances the enemy intelligence to human-like levels, and makes the game a lot more realistic and challenging.
Basically..if you kill the sewer group or the guarded compound group with no issues, nothing in vanilla BG2 will ever give you trouble...well except for Demi-liches, but they're pure cheese and require cheese to beat (about the only thing a player can do to a Demi-lich that isn't cheese is the Slayer, spell-trap (most likely from the SotM) or SoA).
PfU scrolls are just broken, the rages shouldn't protect against it, and spell immunity is either supposed to be a 5th spell level cleric equivalent of MGoI (except only 1 school at time), or if it's Serten's spell immunity, 8th level and just gives +10 to saves vs spells).
Though if it was implemented properly, Death ward would stop it.