How useful are Enchanters in IWD?

SharGuidesMyHand

I've never been much of a fan of enchanters, since they don't get access to some of the best damage spells in the game. However, I'm looking to try something new for my next IWD playthrough, and I found a portrait that would be ideal for an enchantress IMO. Still, given the volumes of undead and various monster-types in the game, I'm skeptical of how far their charm/sleep spells will take them. Plus it seems that the sleep spell has been somewhat nerfed in IWD (now opponents awaken upon being hit).

Any feedback and advice would be appreciated.

lolien

Sleep is not as badass as in BG1, but i used it on early levels. Friends is not a battle spell, but it's useful throughout the game nontheless. Charm is useful all way along, domination can change the turn of the battle even at the end of the game. The 4. level emotion spells are perfect for buffing and disabling enemy. However after 5. level there are no charm spell, wich is slightly dissapointing. In case of undeads only the buffing emotion spells are useful. With evocation you lose the majority of the damaging spells and the contigency spells too.

So, if you are soloing there are better schools, than enchanter, but it's certainly doable. In a party an enchanter can be quite useful and it gives you an interesting game experience. It's nice to have a pet giant with domination, and emotion courage/hope are excellent buff spells with decent duration.

JuliusBorisov

I would like to pay attention to the thing that as an Enchanter in IWDEE you lose Invocation/Evocation spells. There're interesting spells from these scholls of magic in IWDEE that deserve to be tried at least once. They are not in BG and can only be used in IWDEE:

Snilloc’s Snowball Swarm
Icelance
Lance of Disruption
Mordenkainen’s Force Missiles
Shout and Great Shout
Shroud of Flame
Acid Storm
Malavon’s Rage

One should try the Lance of Disruption and see it in action. I got unbelievable emotions when first saw it.

DJKajuru

Actually, I have used an enchanter for several times on my IWD playthroughs. (You know that charming half elf chick on a black dress portrait? She's always my Enchantress).

I never use her alone , though. Spell tactics work in IWD just as well as they do in BG2, and having a backup mage (bard, dual or multiclass) along with your mage is a great help.

So here's the deal, suppose you have an enchanter and a backup mage, a good selection of spells from 1-5 would be:

Enchanter : (1) sleep (at early levels) , burning hands (trolls...) , friends (so you can buy those ridiculously expensive weapons conlan's)
(2) melf's acid arrow, mirror image, invisibility, strength or cat's grace
(3) haste, slow, monster summoning, fire arrow
(4) symbol courage and symbol hope (+2 bonus on thac0, damage, saves and ac, cummulative with each other!!!), confusion (there are many groups of monsters in the game that can suffer from confusion or chaos)
(5) hold monster, domination, feeblemind

As you can see , they aren't weak. But it helps a lot to have a backup mage memorize those evocation spells such as magic missile, fireball, icelance etc.