Getting the Difficulty right

Yamcha

IWD:EE offers a lot of difficulty options.
Normally I play something like core rules and SCS mod in the Baldurs Gate games.

I'm starting with a party of 6 lvl 1 characters, so no heart of ... mode (recommended for 13+)

I was thinking about going on insane, but no damage or XP bonuses for them and me.
Is this still somewhat balanced, or do I need the extra experience to beat the extra encounters?

How'd you enjoy the game the most?

SionIV

In my opinion, the combat in IWD:EE is harder than BG:EE, with a few exceptions (Beholders, Mages, Dragons). It's also more combat heavy and a lot of your experience will come from combat, unlike Baldur's Gate that give you a ton of experience from quests. So taking this into consideration, you might want to play on a little lower difficulty than what you would do in Baldur's Gate with SCS.

IWD:EE is also a power gamers dream, so if you're going to roleplay your characters instead of min/maxing, you should take that into consideration.

Yamcha

I'm not going to mod IWD:EE. But I'm unsure about the vanilla settings.

I've only beaten this game once on normal, and that was ages ago.

JuliusBorisov

@Yamcha I really advice to look here - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/36352/the-way-it-is-meant-to-be-played-tm-an-ocders-guide-to-making-iwdee-a-challenge/p1 and try to at least use some of things @Ygramul suggested

To me, the right difficulty in IWDEE comes when your characters are not min-maxed in the first place, so that each of them has strong and weak points.

I also agree with @Ygramul about the Core difficulty.

Yamcha

@bengoshi so you dont like the extra monsters from Insane ?
Deactivating damage and experience bonuses makes it the same as core, just new mobs if I read that correctly.

Maybe I should implement Rule 1, atm all my characters have 18 or 19 in their key stat