SoD needs a good aligned tank early on
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Anybody else have a problem of desperately needing a good aligned tank for the first two or so chapters? There is Minsc, but I had him set up as 2-handed DPS so his AC was quite bad and Khalid as my main tank (AC -8) and club and shield Jaheira as a light back up tank. I am playing a good aligned mage so my initial party was utterly squishy - two mages (Dynaheir and me), archer Corwin, rogue Safana (who I didn't want but she was the only "extra" NPC who even kind of made sense for my charname early game) and then finally I shoehorned in Glint. Before I got Glint, I didn't even have anybody who could cast healing spells so the squishiness was compounded. Minsc was routinely beaten to a bloody pulp after every moderate fight and I had to either rest spam or carry around tons of extra healing potions. Once I got Jaheira, it improved a little because she can be an okay tank, but before that I was actually starting to get genuinely peeved at the game.
Nothing to be done in patches at this point, but the devs might want to bear it in mind in future games. It's a problem I see a lot in RPGs that devs just sort of assume you are playing a big brawny guy and thus won't need a tank.
Nothing to be done in patches at this point, but the devs might want to bear it in mind in future games. It's a problem I see a lot in RPGs that devs just sort of assume you are playing a big brawny guy and thus won't need a tank.
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when I play the bg/iwd series, I like having 3 melee guys, 1 cleric ranged, 1 thief ranged, and 1 mage ranged,
but if you are playing a single player game of SoD that can be near impossible in the early parts
I found that when I played, I was kind of low on the melee characters in the beginning as well, and my guys was a melee guy to boot,
I think another problem as well is alignment clashing, especially for evil teams, how many melee characters do evil team options have? dorn? is that it? kind of really lack luster
I would have been happy with the idea that ANYONE from bg1 could be transferred over to SoD, that would really help with party composition, and I almost don't know why they didn't do something like that anyhow, is it because they couldn't get the original voice actors for them? nay, jaheira has the exact same sound set as her bg1 counterpart so, i doubt that is the reason, its quite unfortunate really,
but oh well, sometimes i guess that is just the way she goes boys
The game doesn't make deadly necessary to have a tank anyway early on, ayway you have minsc early on so...? Full plate on him and done.
Evil parties have a hard time relying on Vicônia dex + full plate, but few on HP points. while not very balanced, it's pretty doable.
The better course now is to make a multiplayer game and make a 2° character for tank pruposes, at least until they make a proper evil character to fit the role.
My suggestion for the future? An alu-fiend or Half-Fiend more than happy to fuck a very well plotted Devil plans (not that main char should knew the entire background from the begin). After all, the blood war has to be carried on.
I'm talking about an imported game here and not going in vanilla.
I blame it on MMOs: "ahh! we can't move anywhere without a dedicated tank".
I had enough trouble with it that it was annoying. Rest spamming and health potion spamming is neither efficient nor fun. It wasn't really just the lack of a tank but the lack of a tank + good healer at the beginning. These two problems exacerbated each other.
Minsc works. He's not perfect but he'll do until you get back Khalid and Jaheira. Add M'Khiin who can summon spirits at will to lighten his load and you'll be all set.
If you aren't playing on core rules, it seems a bit contradictory to turn up the difficulty then complain the game is too difficult.
For the other posters. I'm playing on default rules. I have not upped the difficulty. The main game only gives me issues in spots that were supposed to give me issues (Aec'Letec, wolfwere boss in Balduran's ship, being unprepared and getting attacked by a pack of basilisks or sirens, etc.) The whole reason I'm posting this is because I know the beginning of SOD is not supposed to be hard or tedious, but it became so. It only reaffirms my point that as soon as I got Khalid and Jaheira back, I immediately stopped having any trouble.
For the person essentially saying evil parties have it even worse, I really fail to see how that undermines my point. If anything that just reinforces it. You can just amend it to "lack of a decent tank *period* at the beginning of the game."
Another approach that would work just as well is just to give me access to all my equipment, even that which happened to be equipped on party members during the fight with Sarevok. If I had the really nice shields and plate and such that they had, I would have had no issues getting Minsc to a good armor class. I had assorted hit point boosting equipment as well.
How often do you guys rest? Maybe I'm stingy with resting or something, but it seems broken to me if the expectation is I'm going to rest after every single fight.
I haven't tried M'Khiin but I will in future playthroughs. Reason I skipped her is because I didn't realize frankly she was a shaman and not just a cleric and I already had a healer at that point so I didn't really need another. I haven't used a shaman yet so how does her summoning work? If it's summon, rest, summon, rest like all other spells, it doesn't seem to improve the monotony or rest spamming problem.
That said you still have options. You have Minsc, have you tired giving him a shield instead of a two handed sword? What about potions, a potion of defense will set his AC to 0 which will make him much harder to hit, it lasts 10 minutes and is fairly easy to procure. You should have the gauntlets of dexterity, that will reduce his AC as well.
There's another option. Drop Minsc and Dynaheir and grab Viconia and someone else. Give her the helm of opposite alignment, the gauntlets of ogre power, full plate and a shield. She'll not have much health but she should have pretty close to -10 AC and she can heal.
Edit: Another thought. You have two mages, I don't know what school you are but I'll assume it's not divination, so you have two people that can cast summon monsters. So why not summon up a few monsters, let them take the heat. Grab some scrolls or wands if you don't want to waste spell slots.
Though obviously more fleshed out characters is always nice to have as well.
SOD good party:
Gorion's Ward (Paladin) - 2 Handed Sword
Minsc - 2 Handed Sword OR Khalid - Long Sword and Shield
Corwin - Archer....she's a ranger, she likes to range
Glint - Sling OR Safana - Archer
Dynaheir OR Jahiera - both using slings
Neera - Sling
In BG1 I had both pairs of M&D (I got D killed because I wanted Neera) and J&K but I wanted Corwin around at all times. She gets really good stats as the game progresses due to items that I had or find that she can use as an archer.
SOD Evil Party:
Gorion's Ward (Berserker) - 2 Handed Sword
Dorn - 2 Handed Sword
Viconia - Sling
Safana - Archer
Edwin - Sling
Baeloth - Darts
My party was charname (Enchanter), Dynaheir, Minsc, Glint, Corwin and Viconia.
I really can't understand why he can't fit this role on your run.
The presence of more evil or neutral melee warriors would have been appreciated though. Nothing game breaking, just a preference.
@semiticgod also encountered the problem in his no-reload run after he lost both Minsc and Rasaad to chunking. He was playing a magic heavy party, and he immediately noticed the lack of recruitable tanks, and commented on it. He did power on through and succeed at his no-reload, though.
Anyway, I mostly agree with you. I've learned, though, that there's little sense banging your head against a wall trying to make people around this forum see the flaws in SoD, some of which are pretty big in my opinion.
The problem is not that there are few tanks in SOD. You can use Jaheira, Khalid, Dorn, Minsc, and Viconia. That's five in total, or three for a good-aligned party (I used Rasaad as a tank late-game, but that's really not what he's good at).
The problem is that the need for tanks is so much higher. Siege of Dragonspear is crammed with large hordes of melee enemies--in fact, most fights have at least 6 foes. It looks like Icewind Dale! But instead of trash monsters like in IWD, SOD has rather well-equipped fighter types, including Black Talon-grade archers and high-level tanks, not to mention pre-buffed, wand-using mages.
As @BelgarathMTH said, I did a no-reload run of SOD and encountered this problem. Even with all the right equipment on Minsc, he would get hit very often, and many SOD enemies hit very hard. We ran low on potions very early in the game. Like @Outrang, I found that Minsc could die in four or five hits when dealing with moderately strong enemies. In fact, when Minsc got chunked, he had only taken six hits! And that was with a strong potion to help him out.
He was taking over 20 damage per hit from four enemies at once. He had less than 80 HP. You can say the early game isn't that hard, but this is just simple math. A 73-HP tank will get chunked if takes over 100 damage, as Minsc did.
How'd they get past his AC?
Well, AC and potions don't mean much if an enemy archer stuns you on hit.
There are lots of enemies with abilities like that in SOD. Tanking in SOD requires good saving throws as well as low AC and high HP, and none of the SOD tanks have particularly strong saves.