Just a thought: for those playing through BGEE for SoD, a good choice would be to take Safana
JuliusBorisov
Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,758
Currently I'm on a BGEE run with a party that I plan to import into SoD once it's released. For my first playthough of SoD, I'm thinking about taking exactly the party that has defeated Sarevok, was victorious in the Durlag's Tower and the Werewolves' Island, with all items and abilities on the party's NPCs as I want them.
The latest Dragon+ interview about SoD includes a new screenshot, with what was confirmed to be a neutral party for SoD: Khalid, Dorn, Jaheira, Safana, Neera (https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/656010/#Comment_656010). So Safana is a thief in the neutral SoD party.
Other screenshots, avalable at http://www.siegeofdragonspear.com/, also have Safana. We still don't know which BG1 NPCs will be available in SoD, and what good or evil party for SoD will be, but on this forum an idea has been shared that Imoen won't be available as an NPC in SoD (or, at least, for a major part of SoD), becoming a quest figure instead.
And it has struck me that my party (the canon BG1 party of Jaheira, Khalid, Imoen, Minsc and Dynaheir) actually has a thief (who also is dualled into a mage, with precise planning of thieving skills, and lots of learned spells) that presumable won't be available in SoD, so that I will have to take another thief, with Safana the most likely option). Glint Gardnersonson will also be an option, but you can't influence his skill distribution in BG1EE.
In my case, if Imoen really won't be available, I will lose all that has been put into her, instead getting another NPC with thieving skills I didn't distribute and without a wizard part (because it requires the INT tome).
Of course, it won't be a BIG deal, but still it is needed to be considered.
So, if anyone else has the same concerns, maybe it's better to include Safana into your pre-SoD BG1EE party which you're planning to import into SoD (you could even dualclass the moment you exactly want), so that in SoD you had a thief with that skill distribution you consider the best (maybe you like setting traps, for example, and like to put 100 into ST).
As a bonus for Imoen, though, I'm awaiting for those dialogues and events explaining why she can't continue with Charname in SoD.
The latest Dragon+ interview about SoD includes a new screenshot, with what was confirmed to be a neutral party for SoD: Khalid, Dorn, Jaheira, Safana, Neera (https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/656010/#Comment_656010). So Safana is a thief in the neutral SoD party.
Other screenshots, avalable at http://www.siegeofdragonspear.com/, also have Safana. We still don't know which BG1 NPCs will be available in SoD, and what good or evil party for SoD will be, but on this forum an idea has been shared that Imoen won't be available as an NPC in SoD (or, at least, for a major part of SoD), becoming a quest figure instead.
And it has struck me that my party (the canon BG1 party of Jaheira, Khalid, Imoen, Minsc and Dynaheir) actually has a thief (who also is dualled into a mage, with precise planning of thieving skills, and lots of learned spells) that presumable won't be available in SoD, so that I will have to take another thief, with Safana the most likely option). Glint Gardnersonson will also be an option, but you can't influence his skill distribution in BG1EE.
In my case, if Imoen really won't be available, I will lose all that has been put into her, instead getting another NPC with thieving skills I didn't distribute and without a wizard part (because it requires the INT tome).
Of course, it won't be a BIG deal, but still it is needed to be considered.
So, if anyone else has the same concerns, maybe it's better to include Safana into your pre-SoD BG1EE party which you're planning to import into SoD (you could even dualclass the moment you exactly want), so that in SoD you had a thief with that skill distribution you consider the best (maybe you like setting traps, for example, and like to put 100 into ST).
As a bonus for Imoen, though, I'm awaiting for those dialogues and events explaining why she can't continue with Charname in SoD.
7
Comments
It's not like we don't like playing these games
I certainly take the point that it could be pretty frustrating to have to replace carefully-developed characters with characters whose proficiencies and skills are pre-assigned (and inevitably won't be quite what you want!) This will be especially relevant for Thieves, since we may have only a couple of Thief levels-up to re-balance the Thieving skills to the pattern we want, which might not be enough even by the end of the game (let alone at the start!)
A way around (or at least partly around) this difficulty would be for those continuing characters who aren't imported at the start to be recruited ToB-style, i.e. with a bunch of XP but not yet fully levelled up, so that we can immediately allocate a couple of levels-worth of their skills and proficiencies ourselves at the time of recruitment.
Remember that I'm talking about doing this only for those characters which we didn't bring with us in the party at the start of SoD (but which will nevertheless be available in SoD).
Since SoD is running as an expansion of BG1ee, it knows where you left or rejected those characters in BG1ee and what XP/proficiencies/skills the character had at that time (or if you play SoD as a new game, then it knows what the starting setup of each BG1ee character would have been). Therefore it can easily copy the same set of proficiencies and skills to those same characters when you meet them (wherever that turns out to be) in SoD, and increase their XP to a suitable amount (which would be 161K if we meet them right at the start of SoD, but more like 200K if we meet them a little later, and so on) but without actually levelling them up (so that you can immediately level them up yourself and allocate any skills etc.)
Come to think of it, with this mechanism of copying the recruitable characters from their last state in (the main campaign of) BG1ee, it'd be equally simple to copy across whatever equipment (if any) we left them carrying ... hmmm, that might be popular ...
This mechanism would also mean that if a character permanently died in the main campaign, then they'll likewise be unavailable in SoD, which seems sensible (except perhaps for members of the BG2ee canon starting party, who might need to be forcibly plot-resurrected even if they got chunked earlier, but we'll have to wait to see how the SoD plot handles this).
In fact, this mechanism tidily solves so many problems that I reckon I may have stumbled across what the devs are actually going to do!
So I actually expect higher level pregenerated npc levels which are advancements of their personalities.
For tob itself, the npcs are near epic levels, there is not much story there. The most important character development is in the lowest levels.
LP, DT. She is the best choice as a roleplaying consideration as she is your childhood friend. She works with a party of any alignment and becomes more interesting from a role playing perspective in an evil party. Also, there is rumor that she maybe allowed to import stats to BG2 in the future. I wish there was more info about how NPC stats might transfer from BGEE to SoD and possible on to BG2EE. I am sitting on tomes of int and wis in my Dwarven Defender playthrough. Not sure where they should go.
However, since some (but not all) of the recurring characters have better stats in BG2 than they did in BG1, I suppose it's possible that they'll use the BG2 stats on import into SoD instead of the end-BG1 stats, or otherwise they might have some story-event during SoD to explain how some characters improve their stats. (I reckon the latter would make more sense, but of course I've no idea what they actually intend.)
Transferring from SoD to BG2ee will probably continue to work exactly as it currently does. The NPCs will all have the same stats as in the existing version of BG2ee, because Beamdog aren't supposed to change existing content (at least, not for the old Bioware characters, although they might adjust their own-brand characters).
Many sections of the original games can be played without a thief. You certainly can beat both BGEE and BG2EE with no thief in your team.
Back to Imoen and SoD... I like to dual Imoen to a mage anyway, SoD may simply have no impact on many of our favorite strategies. (evil team or not so evil team can dual class Shar-Teel to a thief IRCC, good team can rely on Alora, everyone can get Safana on board, multi-class PC thieves are amongst the most enjoyable classes to play, who knows: perhaps turnip-fanatic shorties also make an appearance in SoD etc...)
It would be really really really nice, if we cannot change the party members in BG2 starting out, to at least let them import with the applicable stats and such from BG1/Tales/SoD. Even if Imoen needs to be Thief/Mage, at least let her be appropriately leveled.
So, in fact, I expect a lot of dangerous traps in SoD.
I don't see it as Durlag's tower, an optional dungeon.
Thinking on it further last night, I'm just going to run through with characters you cannot pick up again in BG2, its the only 'consistent' way to make it work out to me.
I often use Coran that way, and it's viable, but don't rush to tackle Durlag's Tower until Imoen's presumably-superior trap-finding is again available. Collect Coran quite early, so that you can get his first Thief level-up by (or even before) the time to dual-class Imoen, and then you'll be fine.
The real question is timing. Do you use imoen or safana early on as pure thieves with all customizable skills, take a slower option in montaron, rush for a later npc (coran needs to learn traps, as does alora, skie needs specialization, tiax needs a lot of guidance), or go for some dual classing early game (shar-teel, branwen)... or be the thief yourself.
(might have missed an npc)
Anything will work but what is acceptable to you as continuity is probably most important.