Some questions about mages and thieves.
Riderat
Member Posts: 136
Ok, to start off with, i have finished all the BG games - BG1/2/TOB. It was mainly because I set the difficulty to the easiest, used cheesy tactics and had a lot of luck.
Now I want to try to do the game the proper way. But I have a problem with casters. I don't quite understand how they work and how do you play them. It does not matter whether it is a cleric, druid or sorcerer.
My play style with them goes like this, memorize spells, use them in one fight and then rest to make them active again. Sure it works and all, but somehow it gets annoying to take a nap after each fight. Wizards i would understand, but my clerics are there to boost my team and to heal. It is super hard to rely only on health potions. And if my clerics bar is full of healing spells, I cant use any of those party wide buffs or anything. What am I doing wrong? Or is everything more or less fine and normal players also tend to rest after fights? Or do you simply avoid buffing your party members until it is crucial?
Please let me know, I am really curious about what am I doing wrong with casters.
Also, on a side note, is it possible to keep my thief in shadows and searching for traps at the same time? So far whenever i set him to search for traps he starts to leave shadows.
Let me know!
Riderat
Ps. huh, it could be that I should have placed this in the newcomers section. Can mods move this, if necessary please!
Now I want to try to do the game the proper way. But I have a problem with casters. I don't quite understand how they work and how do you play them. It does not matter whether it is a cleric, druid or sorcerer.
My play style with them goes like this, memorize spells, use them in one fight and then rest to make them active again. Sure it works and all, but somehow it gets annoying to take a nap after each fight. Wizards i would understand, but my clerics are there to boost my team and to heal. It is super hard to rely only on health potions. And if my clerics bar is full of healing spells, I cant use any of those party wide buffs or anything. What am I doing wrong? Or is everything more or less fine and normal players also tend to rest after fights? Or do you simply avoid buffing your party members until it is crucial?
Please let me know, I am really curious about what am I doing wrong with casters.
Also, on a side note, is it possible to keep my thief in shadows and searching for traps at the same time? So far whenever i set him to search for traps he starts to leave shadows.
Let me know!
Riderat
Ps. huh, it could be that I should have placed this in the newcomers section. Can mods move this, if necessary please!
1
Comments
What's your party composition like? A couple of characters with high HP and AC that can tie up enemies work wonders for extending your party's resources. It might be worth making a trip to the Gnoll Fortress relatively early to get the Gauntlets of Dexterity, as most of the warrior-type NPCs in BGEE have either less than stellar Dex or an incentive to wear lighter than plate armor, both of which reduce their potential AC.
I tend to try to finish an entire wilderness area or dungeon crawl without resting, but I also tend to favor parties with a lot of plate-wearing melee fighters. That said, it's not like the game penalizes you for resting a lot aside from the inconvenience, so if that's a playstyle that works for you, you don't necessarily need to change it.
And no, it's not possible to hide and search for traps at the same time, sadly.
Now on my 2nd run I have an
-Undead Hunter (superior stats 19/19/17/14/15/17 took me hour to roll) wearing Full Plate mail and Spidersbane
-Branwen with Ankheg plate mail and some other goodies, mainly using hammer/shield. Skills I use bless(x2), command, armor of faith(x2), summons, barkskin(x2), chant(x2) and some dispels.
-Coran dual wielding some Kondar, Harrower, Varscona and Sword of Balduran with Chain mail +3
-Garrick with crossbow
-Neera with couple of her wild mage spells, web, fireball, summons and horror
-Imoen detecting traps and backstabbing or using a short bow.
Party members are ranging levels from 7-8 atm. And I am trying to clear Durlags Tower. It goes all right, with a lot of reloads and sleeping. But somehow I think that I'm doing something wrong. Especially when my party gets confused, paralyzed or in any other way controlled. It really gets me frustrated, because I know that it should be doable on normal difficulty without much sweating.
Also, somehow I feel that 6 party members is a crowd
Riderat
Healing pots are there for a reason. They are quicker to use than healing spells with no chance of failure (unless you die before the character can drink it). There is no point in hoarding them, if you run short or out, then you can replace some of your cleric spells with Cure Light Wounds and what not.
Same with offensive spells. Use them if you see your fighters having a hard time bringing down an enemy or to interrupt enemy spellcasters. Spells like sleep, colour spray, and spook are better than magic missile in the early game so have them memorized instead for crowd control and have mages equip a missile weapon to keep them from charging the enemy when you dont need theor spell casting.
It is possible to still search for traps while in shadows, however you only have a very small window (3-6 seconds) to do so. Moving half of your sightline at a time, you should be able to safely navigate a thief in shadows and detecting traps, but it is very tedious to do so. Cast invisibility (or use a potion) to keep the thief hidden is easier and less hassle for detecting traps.
If Neera has Spirit Armor (or even Improved Invisibility, since not many enemies in the first game can dispel the effect), that can also be used to buff a character's Save vs. Spell to ward off controlling effects. Also, if you have Neera use Wands of Fire, then you don't need to prepare Fireball as much, opening up slots for Haste, Slow, or Hold Person. Haste can really help you get through tough fights, although it does shorten your day by adding fatigue. Garrick should be able to get in on that action as well.
I mean, you don't want them to engage melee combat and they are kinda useless in that.
And one more question, do you ever set your mages/clerics on scripted modes to automate their spell-casting?
Riderat
I never use spellcasting scripts. I don't trust them to use spells in an intelligent manner. If you're having trouble keeping up with spell usage, setting the game to auto-pause after you cast a spell is a good way to make sure your casters aren't standing around doing nothing.
I'd even try to make a case that a 5 person oarty without a healer or trapper is better than adding a cleric/thief.
I never let any script use spells. I haven't even tried any of those scripts, but based upon what I've read, all of them pretty much suck equally bad. I put my mages on either standard attack or no script at all.
All right, made it trough the tower and finished expansion in Urlags Beard. Only issues I had later was with Demon Knight, because he simply strips me out of all the buffs and pretty much kills all my summons/npcs with the fire balls. And the 2nd issue I had with the summoned demon. As he cursed my bhaalspawn with dying and I couldn't figure out why am I turning into a ghoul. As none of the magics worked against this condition (bug?) I had to reload previous save and kill the Demon Knight again
However, after all of this I still think I am under-using the mages here. I mean I was doing good only when I left Neera in the back. All right, she helped me occasionally with some fireballs and other offensive spells, but I believe that I could do it easily without her.
Also, after completing the expansion, one more question arose - how to properly use Turn Undead skill? As I understand it should be something like a passive skill. But whenever i click on it, my clerics/paladins are all on the next target and are canceling my command. Is it a script issue or is it how it's supposed to be?
And as for Garrick - he is the main guy for identifying stuff and singing songs (not sure how effective these are, but for me they work as a placebo at least) for the party. Additionally he adds some to the average dps as well.
Riderat
Clerics and druids have wonderous recall as well, and plenty of summons that last awhile(skeletons for clerics comes to mind). Plus a druud can shapeshift, so you don't have to be casting spells and sleeping all the time.
For future reference, the ghoulifying attack from the demon is a gaze attack, so you can block it with a potion of Mirrored Eyes. The Gamebanshee walkthrough says that you can Dispel the ghoul curse while it is latent on the character, but I haven't tried that and don't know how reliable it is.
As far as under-using mages goes, when I'm playing a balanced party with two or three solid warriors in the front, I find that I can get through most fights without using magic, but having all those spells on hand is handy for those tough encounters or ones that involve lots of enemies. On the other hand, my current BG2EE playthrough right now consists of a Cleric/Mage, Jaheira, Hexxat, and Haer'Dalis, so I find myself leaning on spellcasting a lot more to make it through fights
Mage/Thieves are great for trap detection and removal. Once invisible go about and detect and disarm every trap you find on the map (ensure the script for this PC is (None) so that he/she doesn't auto attack enemies and break their invisibility while scouting/ searching/ disarming traps away from party. (Detecting and disarming traps does not break invisibility.) Wand use can dominate any encounter.
Mages are great for battling disrupting other spell casters, party buff and at least determine the outcome of one major encounter every sleep cycle. Wands, spells and scrolls with magic for being the true power in any D&D based game.
One thing I like doing is adding variety to my game is pick a theme for all my spell casters and change it from day to day so I'm playing encounters differently.
Blaster day = Fireballs, Skull Traps, Lightning bolts, Scorchers, Flamestrikes, Call Lightnings, Summon Insects.
Illusion day, make entire part invisible and creep up on encounter and place them all in position before striking, cast invisibility on thief after he backstabs so he can do it again!
Beguiler day + Confusions, Charms, Dominates, Hold spells, Chaos, feeblemind, Greater Malison have the enemy fight for you , fight each other or wander about muttering to themselves while you whack em!
Buffer Day=Hastes, Chants, Bless, Dooms, Slows, Malisons, Champions Strength, etc I think one the most powerful themes in practice, hard encounters can end really quickly in the opposition becoming gibbets and red spray !
Summoner Day= Animate Dead, Summon Monster spells, Spider Spawn, Cacofiend, summon elemental, Call woodland being, etc send waves of summoned into the enemy and when they have fallen summon the next wave!
Shapechanging= Druid Shapechange, polymorph self, Items that allow tranformations, Shapechange spell etc (I personally love being a Spider as a fighter/mage or a Mage/thief with spell sequencers and potions and some exploits you can totally munch through encounters.)
Necromancy Day= Larlochs Minor drain, vampiric touch, Fear, (It's kind of fun to feed upon the enemy!)
If you enjoy casting spells, you're going to have to take naps. This is not a big problem and you should just go ahead and experiment with different spell sets and enjoy the wide variety of options that spell casting brings to the game! (Lower Resistance and Greater Malisons are always your friend.)
Save scrolls, don't grind them for XP unless they're genuinely worthless, like Infravision (always useless) or Clairvoyance once you'll fully revealed all outdoor maps. (in BG1 spells cast from scrolls cast at lvl 6, in BG2 they cast at lvl 10.)
I prefer to use memorized spells for general purpose buffs/debuffs/crowd controls. While using scrolls or wands for offense direct damage or summons.
Party members that can save spell slots are also a plus. A bard is nice for their song blocking/removing fear effects, and thieves with a decent amount of Detect illusion (50+) can fully replace all illusion remover spells.
And get a feel for when spells are actually needed to fight a battle and when they're a waste.
NEVER use clerics for healing. If you use druids, sure, since druids are EXTREMELY lacking in good low level spells and you'll probably end up taking more damage as a result, but clerics get so many OP crowd control spells and buffs, you should almost never be taking damage at all, especially if you're using your mages properly as well.
It's not until you get the Heal spell (6th) that memorizing healing spells is worthwhile since it's a relatively fast-casting Full Heal, where as most healing spells are extremely slow and barely heal an attack or two worth of health.
Always scout, especially if it's an unfamiliar area. A backstabbing thief or a ranger can serve this job well and lets you plan your order of attacks more carefully, since a lot of otherwise hard encounters can be rendered trivial by simply annihilating/removing the threat of 1 enemy before they're alerted to your presence.
Weigh the strengths of the enemies and determine ahead of time which spells you NEED to end them efficiently and which enemies aren't really a threat and can be simply gunned down with ranged fire, and if you have trapper whether or not you'll want to lure a hardy enemy into a trap to soften them up.
Just read you spells carefully and try them out.
Just a word of advice though....the clerics Command (1st) spell might sound underwhelming, but it is AMAZING once you learn how to properly use it. Can utterly trivialize a lot of otherwise hard fights with only a single well-timed cast.
While yeah you can use a decent number of weapons with Cleric/Thief, you can only backstab with two of them and you only get one ranged option. And unless you're a Half-Orc with 19 Strength, you don't get the benefit of an 18/XX warrior Strength table. Other multi-class combos or dual classing seems the better option from what I've seen than Cleric/Thief, though someone that has deep knowledge of the game they're playing will be able to play around with the class more.
There are a number of factors why I don't go for Cleric/Thief, but part of it has to do with the fact they seem more a pure utility character who can cast a few spells but don't get the option of any of the beneficial class kits that would provide nice bonuses for a 6 character party, where roles of the other half of the multiclass could be filled by someone else. That and thieving skills from what I understand top out in terms of usefulness at a certain skill level that can be obtained somewhat early, at least for the Baldur's Gate games. The advantages don't stack as well to me as other combos do, cus within a party of 4-6 characters other combinations seem to balance out better with their abilities. Though that's just my opinion. Fighter/Cleric or Mage/Cleric seem like the better combos for Cleric, and Fighter/Thief or Mage/Thief seem like the better combos for a Thief, not including Gnome multiclass advantages. Then have single class Cleric or Thief (possibly with a kit) for a second party member, and it seems to add up better.
I do agree with the points about party makeup, you won't need to cast spells for most of the regular encounters and mainly for the tough ones, unless you need some healing on someone who just took some hits. If you have at least one warrior with a fair amount of hit points then spellcasters can just go with ranged weapons for the occasional extra damage, and some spellcaster NPCs in the game have nice Dexterity scores to use something like slings decently. In fact most of the time any Druid, Mage, or Cleric not multiclassed into Fighter should be equipped with a sling as their primary weapon, as ammo is cheap and it keeps them out of harm's way. Spell slots should be reserved for spells that would help out in hard fights instead of dealing with the usual cronies that your frontliners should be able to deal with without much trouble.