Any reason to play Black Pits 1?
GreenWarlock
Member Posts: 1,354
I am finally getting around to playing The Gladiators of Thay, and having gone to all the effort of creating a party and beating BP1, I find the import process into BP2 to be frustrating and arcane - AFAICT there is no way to export/import a whole party, and no continuation for having done so.
It also seems quite pointless.
The opening of Gladiators of Thay immediately raises all characters XP to 600k, beyond the Black Pits 1 level cap for all but paladins and rangers. It also discards any equipment you may have brought along, and there are no permanent stat raises or other boosts in BP1, such as the Tomes in BG1.
It seems there is exactly zero benefit (other than role-play) for pushing characters through BP1 before starting BP2, and a fair bit of hassle arranging the export/import, so I'm thinking that any future play-throughs should just generate the team directly in BP2 and play through from there.
From the little I have seen so far (just finished Tier 1) BP2 has much more to explore than BP1, which was extremely light on the role-play (diminishing further the reason to play BP1 first) although greatly accelerates XP, significantly beyond my ability to equip a team. Thinking that a monks-and-sorceror/dragon-disciple play through may be in order next time, although there seems little kit to buy for those largely self-sustaining characters in the first place. Perhaps a single champion of another class to lavish all the riches on...
And for the terminally curious, my initial party is:
Swash -> Fighter dual at 10 (dual in BP1 - actually that is something I could not do in BP2 with too much xp!)
Paladin (undead hunter)
Fighter/Cleric (half orc with 2 19s)
Monk (dark moon)
Cleric/Illusionist
Dragon Disciple (when I thought 20-con regen might be useful)
It also seems quite pointless.
The opening of Gladiators of Thay immediately raises all characters XP to 600k, beyond the Black Pits 1 level cap for all but paladins and rangers. It also discards any equipment you may have brought along, and there are no permanent stat raises or other boosts in BP1, such as the Tomes in BG1.
It seems there is exactly zero benefit (other than role-play) for pushing characters through BP1 before starting BP2, and a fair bit of hassle arranging the export/import, so I'm thinking that any future play-throughs should just generate the team directly in BP2 and play through from there.
From the little I have seen so far (just finished Tier 1) BP2 has much more to explore than BP1, which was extremely light on the role-play (diminishing further the reason to play BP1 first) although greatly accelerates XP, significantly beyond my ability to equip a team. Thinking that a monks-and-sorceror/dragon-disciple play through may be in order next time, although there seems little kit to buy for those largely self-sustaining characters in the first place. Perhaps a single champion of another class to lavish all the riches on...
And for the terminally curious, my initial party is:
Swash -> Fighter dual at 10 (dual in BP1 - actually that is something I could not do in BP2 with too much xp!)
Paladin (undead hunter)
Fighter/Cleric (half orc with 2 19s)
Monk (dark moon)
Cleric/Illusionist
Dragon Disciple (when I thought 20-con regen might be useful)
0
Comments
The only advantage of playing bp1 is role playing, for the completeness of the adventure. And your arcane spell casters can scribe a lot more spells to their books than what bp2 starting spell selection gives to you. Just like in bg1 vs bg2. If you play bg1 throughly you may have most of the 4th and 5th level spells in your book. If you begin in bg2, you will grab only a few from the start screen.