Someone explain me this dual-class thing
Silverstar
Member Posts: 2,207
This isn't spesific to EE but more the Baldur's Gates (and Icewind Dale I guess) in general.
I keep seeing people during their munchkin powergaming debates throwing up this and that dual-class example on what is good or bad etc. etc. Which leaves me quite puzzled because I always found dual-class to be a horrible mechanic in these CRPGs. You can't use your first class again until your new class is better (right?) and in the first BG the xp cap is considerably lower so you'd have to do it early and you'll still play most the game "catching up" unless you run a minimal size party? And in the second one it will still take some time catching up but it's less of an issue I guess.
So what's the magic trick I'm missing to make dual-classing not tedious and frustrating? I quite like playing pure classes so it's not a big deal, but it's always nice having more options and knowing the secret of dual-classing would certainly add more options.
I keep seeing people during their munchkin powergaming debates throwing up this and that dual-class example on what is good or bad etc. etc. Which leaves me quite puzzled because I always found dual-class to be a horrible mechanic in these CRPGs. You can't use your first class again until your new class is better (right?) and in the first BG the xp cap is considerably lower so you'd have to do it early and you'll still play most the game "catching up" unless you run a minimal size party? And in the second one it will still take some time catching up but it's less of an issue I guess.
So what's the magic trick I'm missing to make dual-classing not tedious and frustrating? I quite like playing pure classes so it's not a big deal, but it's always nice having more options and knowing the secret of dual-classing would certainly add more options.
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You can also do stuff like taking a cleric up to level 5, then dualling over to mage. You now have a nearly pure mage with minor healing and who can cast silence on other mages for the cost of a few thousand XP.
Let's suppose that you aim for a 5/9 fighter/mage. You dual-classed at fighter level 5 and are a level 1 mage... running around in a level 5 party! That party will be fighting higher level monsters and complete higher level quests. Leeching off that, your mage will reach level 2, 3 in no time. Level 4 will come soon after and then you're only really 1 level behind, and can make meaningful contributions to the party.
EDIT: Huh. That's interesting. Now you mention it the first couple levels are just a few K each aren't they and that doesn't take too long later on. Thanks to you too. Dual-classing just got a lot more viable.
The price? A few hitpoints that are regained (and more) by the familiar and you can't reach level 40. You obviously also have to have 15+ in int, 17+ in wis and be a human. A more irritating thing is the fact that the game tend to make the npcs join you at a low level.
A mage can go from level 1 to level 5 with 20K xp. So when your other party members hit level 6, you'll be at the end of level 4 going on level 5.
So while your dual class character will feel gimped at first, you just have to keep him safe while the rest of the party does the lions share of the work. After a few quests, you'll be near the same level as the rest of the party.
It doesn't feel realistic (yes I used that word, in a discussion of a crpg). That my genius intelligent lvl.9 fighter finds out, that he would look so much better in a robe
Your character might think when starting out, 'I'd love to be a Fighter/Mage, but seeing that I'm human, I'm going to have to pick one class first.' Your character then might think, 'I'll train as a Fighter first and get Grand Mastery in a weapon that I like and then I'll go back and start training as a Mage'. It only sounds powergaming from a metagaming perspective. If you're roleplaying your character, then I don't see it as powergaming. Unless you're using OP builds and min/maxing to the extreme. :P
I usually turn Shar-teel into a fighter/thief, focusing her skillset mainly towards stealth hit-and-run attacks. Thieves advance in levels quite rapidly so there's not a large period of her being useless. It also allowed you the choice of whether to increase her attacks per round or increase her backstab abilities (lvl 6/9 or 7/8). I usually went for 6/9, making her in my opinion a better fighter/thief than Monty - better str, more hp, greater proficiencies and greater backstab.
For PCs in BG1 I wouldn't bother dualclassing. For fighter dualclasses in BG2 I usually dual at lvl 13 and use the aforementioned deck of many things. Though I've seen some unusual options here to be considered.
For BG1 proper without considering what you want to do with them in BG2, dual-classing around level 5 or 6 for most classes allows you to hit the level cap and just regain your first classes' abilities. Essentially it's better multiclassing that only focuses on one class at a time, and allows you to have kit abilities for your first class.
A common powergamer strategy in IWD (and I suppose BG if you do a multiplayer game) is to create a party of six human fighters, then have most of them dual over at one point or another. You're left with a group of Clerics, Mages and Thieves with four pips or more in weapon specialization, a ton of hp, and very nice attacks per round and thac0.
Part of the reason why dual-classing is so much better than multiclassing is that extra levels for fighters and thieves stop being useful at around the point where extra levels for mages and clerics become incredibly important.
Think about it: Raising up Disarm Traps and Open Locks to its most useful point only takes a few levels, and those are the skills that you really need a thief for. If you're a multiclass M/T or C/T, then every level you gain as a thief after that is siphoning away a significant amount of experience from your spellcasting for very little benefit. But if you start as a thief, reach the point where you've got the skills you need a dual over, then you'll be a much more powerful spellcaster while still having all the thieving skills you need.
It's even worse for fighters. A fighter has basically reached his peak at level 9. That's when a fighter's got most of his hp, he's got GM in something, and his thac0's around as low as it can get, due to annoying caps. And here's the kicker: A multiclassed fighter can't even put more than 2 pips in a weapon slot. So this means that if you take a level 9 fighter a dual him over to a mage, then give him the same amount of experience as, say, a level 16 F/M, not only is the F->M gonna be a substantially better spellcaster, but he will actually also be a better fighter, despite being a lower level, thanks to the broken specialization mechanic.
Now, that doesn't mean that pureclass fighters or thieves are worthless. I've done a playthrough as a pure fighter, and more than one as a pure thief. It can be a lot of fun, and once hlas become available things start to get interesting again. But in terms of pure powergaming, neither pureclass nor multiclass can even come close to approaching the power of dualclass.
Load up ToB, and have the Pocket Plane warp in Imoen and Jan. The latter will be a marginally more useful thief, while being a significantly less powerful spellcaster, likely two levels behind (casting level 6 while Immy's at level 8... even with the specialist bonus he still doesn't match her).
If I dual over to thief from fighter, will my lowered thac0 from both classes be added together? Or will the lowest value just take over when I reactivate the fighter levels? Also consider the same question in regards to saving throws.
After I complete my stalled Black Pits game, my next EE game will be with all dual-classed NPCs, just to see what it's like to have a different experience of those characters.
Also, having a redundant backup of your base and end class in the party avoids problems.
E.g.: "Oh noes! Our main tank has decided that he wants to sneak around and pick pockets! But he's not very good. At least we have Ajantis and Imoen to do those things properly until he gets back on track".
Thief->Mage is a very popular dual, even your kid sister does it. It is annoying though to go from a quick-levelling utility character to a slow-levelling, weak-at-low-levels, can't sling-for-toffee mage. I've just got through dualling Imoen at 5 in my fighter/mage playthough and it was painful. The end result not needing another thief is useful though.
NB - Apart from Fighter/Druids who suffer enormously from the level 14 druid "cap" in SOA I prefer multiclasses in almost all situations. They do miss on the min-max elements of dualling but are always useful and always advance in both. Jan Jansen may not be the best spellcaster but he's a stone cold trap-setting illusion detecting machine. 2 sets of HLAs is gravy.
Another popular reason for dual-classing is the fact that you gain CON bonuses to your HP as a fighter, but only from lvl 1-9. So if you dual after that, you make full use of the HP bonuses and lower THAC0, while gaining the utility of whatever class you dual into. Generally fighter levels don't add too many impressive things past lvl13 (where you gain an extra attack), making it more attractive to be another class for higher levels (e.g. a caster, who continues to get new/more spells almost to the end).
Keep in mind though that all these things are very much contingent on your respective XP caps and available XP. With a small party in a no-XP-cap modded game, you may even want to go dual-class instead because you can just max out both.
With a cap, dual-class usually becomes quite powerful, as the highly non-linear scaling of XP-requirements means that at max XP, you are usually only very slightly below the single-class level-cap even as a dual-class. Say for example your XP cap allows for lvl 20 as cleric, and you roll fighter, then dual to cleric - at max XP you may very well end up a lvl 19 or so cleric, meaning you are almost as high as a pure class, but with the fighter HP/THAC0/Proficiency bonuses (the numbers are just an example, actual values vary).
As for when to dual, it also depends on your XP caps. In BG1 there are several possibilities, but in BG2/ToB it's almost universally recommended to get to 13 as a Fighter before dualing, for the extra APR. Fighter is in fact the most popular class to dual from, for the reasons mentioned above. Me personally, I also like Thieves as a base, since you so often end up not needing the extra thieving skills after getting the relevant ones to 100 (lvl 13 also caps your backstab-modifier, unless you are an Assassin).
I personally like a lot playing a dual classed CHARNAME or dual classing NPCs. I normally also tend to dual as late as possible.
In fact I don't regard the downtime period as a boring chore or something frustrating. For me it is one of the portions of the game that I usually enjoy more. It makes the game challenging and interesting as, for example, it forces you to plan more carefully every move or to rely more on other party members.
When the levels are back, you feel like you are being rewarded for all you went through
I don't mind if by then the game is almost done. On the bright side, if you ended up being too overpowered, you will not be able to abuse your new found power for too long
Dual classing makes for a fun overall experience, everyone should try at least once.
5 pips in a weapon creates some very very satisfying pawnage and the only way to get there is via dual classing. Pure class characters cap at 4 pips.
I'm tending to play my games "no-reload" (or almost no-reload) so I don't buy this argument that BG is "easy" and there's no need for metagaming or powergaming. Core rules+no-reload gives variable HP, non-guaranteed spell learning, permanently dead NPCs ...
Regarding XP, one option is to not pick up any NPCs until you dual class and do so immediately after. You'll end up with a party of level 1 characters but with a bunch of extra HP for charname and some cool abilities waiting on the other end of your leveling.
Also, the 5th pip, while definitely nice, is not THAT big of a gain. The most important pip imo is the 2nd one.
The only trick is, you cannot put pips into the weapon before you have unlocked your Fighter pips--doing so will overwrite your original pips, causing you to have basically nothing.
You can also dual-class at Fighter 3, in which case you still have to wait till Thief 8 to get grand mastery, but you won't have to worry about your Thief pips aside from the original ones you get at level 1, since you will have your Fighter abilities back at Thief 4.
These issues aside, you mentioned some interesting, and often underlooked, aspects of dual-classing.
Thief -> Fighter: I personally favor this one now as the party's Rogue. Once you have put some points into thieving skills, it's just not really useful to raise them any further. Essentially, what you want at high level is a fighter who can pick locks and disarm traps, with the odd backstab thrown in for good measure. Swashbuckler -> Fighter is definitely fun if you can live without BS (and tbh most hard enemies are immune to it anyway), if not try Assassin -> Fighter. Poison Weapon is actually quite good! Note: while you do lose the bonus HP for not being a fighter from levels 1-9, you can make up for it towards the end, as fighters gain +3 HP/level after bonus-levels while thieves only gain +1.
Mage 2/3 -> Fighter: This used to be a bit of a hidden gem in BG1, essentially being a pure fighter with a little less HP, but able to Identify and use scrolls/wands. Not really useful in BG2/ToB though.
I think a lot of dual-classing's bad rep comes from Kensais and how stupidly powerful they are, exacerbated by the fact that RP-wise they are supposed to be SINGULARILY devoted individuals. It seems that "cannot dual-class" was missed in the kit penalties somewhere...
Outside of Kensais, though, I don't see too much of a problem with kits dual-classing, even RP-wise. So I'm a hammer-swinging berserker with blood on my lips - but I also have 17 INT and really only got into the whole head-bashing business because my village was too poor to afford books. Now that I've been to the city, it's time to put the inside of my exceptionally tough skull to use for a change - and become a mage. But I've slept with a hammer next to my pillow all my life, and robes-and-scrolls be damned, I'll keep that proud tradition alive!
Of course it's semantics a lot of the time, and grasping-for-excuses. I think that given that this is a single-player game (don't listen to those who say otherwise!), we can safely leave it to the players to decide for themselves how far they are willing to stretch things. And that's a good thing; a game is inherently limited by its engine capabilities, but players can complicate things almost ad infinitum with every decision they make, every limitation they impose on themselves, every preference they have.