Montaron AND Shar-Teel

shaldon

My Evil party has both Monty and Shar-Teel due to my extreme love for both those characters. They are one of the reasons I am playing BG not Pillars of Eternity or something 'new'. "What part of 'I'm a loner' do ye NOT UNDERSTAND!" cracks me up every time. Every. Time.

The question is, should I dual class Shar-Teel to a thief when I already have Monty? I can't decide. What does a fighter lose by dual-classing? Just some proficiency pips and hit points?

SionIV

You will lose out on HP, Thac0 and APR.

You're trading Survivability (Full Plate, HP) and Offensive power (Thac0, APR), for thief skills and backstab. She will be less powerful in combat, but you're getting a second character that have thief skills.

Wowo

I think having 2 thieves in bg1 is amazing as you can cover all thief skills and still have points left over for decent hide/ms on both characters allowing a scout team with double backstabs!

Seriously, it's just awesome fun to have 2 hidden thieves coordinating their backstabs.

2 characters setting traps is sweet as too.

Gallowglass

SionIV said:

You will lose out on HP, Thac0 and APR.

You're trading Survivability (Full Plate, HP) and Offensive power (Thac0, APR), for thief skills and backstab. She will be less powerful in combat, but you're getting a second character that have thief skills.

On the assumption that we're talking about early dualling (typically at Fighter 3), then yes, that's so.

However, when I take along Shar-Teel, I'm much more inclined to go for the late dual, at Fighter 7 (thus getting the extra 1/2 APR). That makes for a longish down-time, but when she gets her Fighter levels back, then she's an excellent dual-wielding warrior ... if you've planned your proficiency allocations carefully, then some might even argue that she's the best NPC dual-wielder in the game. For example, with *** 2WS/** Lswd/** Dggr, wielding Varscona main-hand and Dagger of Venom off-hand, she's really deadly! And as well as that, she can have * Xbow in case she needs range and * Club in case she needs blunt and * 1WS for back-stabbing, so she's versatile. Of course in this case you're mainly using her as a warrior rather than a Thief, so you keep her in Full Plate except when she changes it for a specific thieving task.

With the late-dualling strategy, it makes sense to have some other Thief in the party (Montaron being an obvious candidate) to take care of the essential Thief skills (i.e. traps and locks), but Shar-Teel's skill points can then be devoted to other Thief skills which there usually isn't time to develop with only one Thief in BG1, such as Set Traps. That's not only a powerful synergy, but also fun.

Hudzy

Can you set traps in heavy armor? I don't remember.

elminster

Hudzy said:

Can you set traps in heavy armor? I don't remember.

Yes

shaldon

Thanks for the perspectives. I've already gone past level three (my latest hardcore lesson is in the timing of meeting each character to maximise levels and XPs ) and she is now dual wielding Varscona and the Dagger of Venom already muahaha. Definitely going to run through with this one, it's too much fun and I've got reputation high enough for a 'free' murder!! Monty has been raised from dead twice and keeps rolling 1s for hitpoints, but still. I even reloaded once - I blamed pathfinding as Dorn kept walking into someone rather than avoiding the ravening bear that was killing him. Hopefully that's the only reload until much later.