Underrated Kits + Stuff people not use or try.
Vithar
Member Posts: 70
So , how many of you guys play what your heart wants and not what is considered OP or popular?
I'm speaking about ''Insane'' difficulty and also , do you take or at least give a try to every companion and form different party setups?
I'm speaking about ''Insane'' difficulty and also , do you take or at least give a try to every companion and form different party setups?
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I have tried most of the classes and kits, but many i got bored with and didn't finish the game. I may well try a custom party with 2 or 3 pre-made characters so that i can play some of the more exotic classes without overcapping their XP too early or forcing a particular way of playing the entire game due to specific cheesing requirements to overcome class flaws
Interesting combos would be:
Wizard Slayer late dual class to Thief (just so annoying w/o potions and most jewelry/utility items not allowed) - Tried this solo, ended up with massive XP overcap and only way to even try was to dual at level 39 lmao, which means thief forever before suddenly being borderline omnipotent
Dark Moon Monk, mainly to see what Rasaad says differently, if anything haha. Tried before, but class is weak until 20+ level, but Monks level so damn fast that XP overcap is a massive issue and resulted in boredom and shelving, needs the group to slow it down and cover up the early squishiness.
Various Paladin Kits, all strong and fun, but again XP over cap solo, as a rule i prefer evil parties but exceptions can be made.
Druid Kits, i tried Shapeshifter but GWW form was obscene early on before being useless for a lot of later fights and very 1 dimensional, would be nice to pair up with a couple of other characters so it could be played much more as a support caster rather than a tank. Other druid kits look interesting too.
As a rule i do not play divine casters very much, they always feel somewhat lacking compared to Wizardy types, but i think a 2 character Multi or dual class group deliberately avoiding a Mage class would be challenging and force me to think outside the box a lot more. A 3 character single class group w/o a wizard would also be a nice challenge using.
I've finished the game years ago with a Jester as (Charname/Main) and at the end of ToB i was like - Damn i can do so much stuff but in the same time i'm useless compared to any Companion i had in the party ...
It's like i see the low rated kits not as bad , but as illogical.Some of them are really fun , till you hit the wall.
@Borek I get you about the XP Cap dude , but remember that when you play solo - you get the whole XP for your 1 character.
Meaning that you can get faster to the godhood with stuff like Mordekainen and Horrid Wilting that can be accessed really early in BG2 if you solo.
I do think that there's a lot to say for a Druid kit with some negatives that make him squishier in melee, but who is essentially just a back-line spellslinger who comes equipped with a kickass combat transformation to help him preserve his spells in the early game.
The problem for the Shapeshifter is that Druid kit is the Avenger.
Let's take a basic dart, humblest of all weapons with its 1d3 damage. Ordinarily, with no bonuses, you can roll a 1, 2, or a 3. Each outcome is equally likely, so the long-term average is 2.00 damage per hit.
If you add +1 luck, those three rolls become a 2, 3, or a 3. Again, each is equally likely, so the new average per hit is 2.67 damage.
If you bump that to +2 luck, the three possible rolls become a 3, a 3, and a 3. Obviously the average is 3.00 damage per hit.
So the first point of luck added 0.67 average damage, the second point added 0.33 average damage, and each subsequent point added absolutely nothing. It also should be obvious by now: when it comes to attack and damage, +X luck is *never* as good as a straight +X to hit and +X to damage. (So the +2 Luck a vanilla bard gives at level 15 is in absolutely every scenario inferior to the +2 hit / +2 damage of a level 1 Skald when it comes to physical attacks, to say absolutely nothing about the +4/+4 version of his level 15 equivalent.)
The bigger the die is, the closer in value a +1 luck bonus will be to a straight +1 bonus. The formula for an N-sided die is (N-1)/(N). So for d3, the first point of luck gives you +2/3s. For d4 (e.g. daggers), it's +3/4s, for d6 (e.g. short swords), it's +5/6s, for d8 (e.g. long swords), it's +7/8s, and for d10 (e.g. katanas), it's +9/10s.
But that's the first point of luck. The second point of luck instead returns an (n-2)/n bonus, and the third point of luck adds an (n-3)/n bonus, and so on down the line until you finally reach a value of luck equal to n, at which point you cease to gain any bonus at all.
Putting this together, two points of luck cumulatively gives you a (2n-3)/(n) bonus, three points gives you (3n-6)/(n), four points gives you (4n-10)/(n), five points gives you (5n-15)/(n), and six points gives you (6n-21)/(n). (I don't know what sources of luck stack and what sources don't, but the maximum you could get in BG2 would be +5, anyway: +3 from Bard Song, +1 from Chant, and +1 from Luck spell. Again, provided they even stack in the first place.)
Let's run through that with some real-world examples. Here's the average damage gain with each weapon type. Marginal gain (over the previous luck value) first, followed in parentheses by total progressive gain.
d3
+1: 0.67 (0.67)
+2: 0.33 (1.00)
+3: 0.00 (1.00)
d4
+1: 0.75 (0.75)
+2: 0.50 (1.25)
+3: 0.25 (1.50)
+4: 0.00 (1.50)
d6
+1: 0.83 (0.83)
+2: 0.67 (1.50)
+3: 0.50 (2.00)
+4: 0.33 (2.33)
+5: 0.17 (2.50)
+6: 0.00 (2.50)
d8
+1: 0.88 (0.88)
+2: 0.75 (1.63)
+3: 0.63 (2.25)
+4: 0.50 (2.75)
+5: 0.38 (3.13)
+6: 0.25 (3.38)
+7: 0.13 (3.50)
+8: 0.00 (3.50)
d10
+1: 0.90 (0.90)
+2: 0.80 (1.70)
+3: 0.70 (2.40)
+4: 0.60 (3.00)
+5: 0.50 (3.50)
+6: 0.40 (3.90)
+7: 0.30 (4.20)
+8: 0.20 (4.40)
+9: 0.10 (4.50)
+10: 0.00 (4.50)
d20 (to-hit rolls)
+1: 0.95 (0.95)
+2: 0.90 (1.85)
+3: 0.85 (2.70)
+4: 0.80 (3.50)
etc.
So let's put all of this together. With a level 20 Vanilla Bard, his luck bonus will increase your damage output by:
1 (darts)
1.5 (daggers, war hammers, slings)
2 (short swords, flails, maces, clubs, quarterstaffs, spears, throwing axes, short bows, long bows, composite bows)
2.25 (long swords, scimitars/wakizashis/ninja-tos, crossbows)
2.4 (katana, 2-handed sword, halberd)
3 (bastard sword, morning star, boomerang dagger / Fire Tooth / Dwarven Thrower)
For all weapon types, he'll provide a flat THACO boost of 2.7.
Luck is also unique in that it reduces incoming magic damage, too. The formula is exactly the same as increasing weapon damage, so for something like Fireball that deals d6 damage, each point of luck reduces damage by 0.83 points per die, (e.g. 8.3 points for a 10d6 fireball). Again, with diminishing returns.
Here's a quick rundown of how much damage one point of Luck might save you against some of the more common damaging spells I find get cast against me. It assumes all spells are at max level, (caster level 20), which obviously won't be the case.
Magic Missile: 3.75
Melf's Acid Arrow: 1.5 per round for 7 rounds, (10.5 total)
Fireball: 8.3 (no save) or 4.2 (save)
Skull Trap: 16.7 (no save) or 8.3 (save)
Flame Arrow: 16.7 (no save) or 10 (save)
Cloudkill: 0.9 per round for 10 rounds (9 total)
ADHW, Flame Strike: 17.5 (no save) or 8.8 (save)
Certainly a handy bonus that you can't really get from any other source, and that's just for one point. But remember that each additional point suffers from diminishing returns, e.g. it will protect you from less damage than the point before.
Also remember that from level 1 to level 14, the Blade has the same song as the Bard. At level 15 (1.1m experience) and level 20 (2.2m experience) the bard gets an upgrade, but by level 24/25 (3.08m / 3.5m experience) it's moot again, as most bards who like singing will take the HLA song with their first or second pick. And that 1.1-3.0m experience range is right around the time when AC is most effective, while spellcasting enemies largely won't be high enough level to max out the bard's luck bonus. Your characters should also be hitting their saving throw caps around there and making almost all of their saves vs. spells by that point, meaning the +1 luck is saving you 10 damage or less against everything.
It's up to the reader to decide whether that spell damage reduction would be more or less useful than a Skald's +2/+4 AC bonus, but I will say that AC actually benefits from the opposite of diminishing returns: the more of it you have, the more valuable it becomes. If your AC is so high that an enemy only hits you on a 19 or a 20, adding one additional point of AC will effectively double your survivability in physical confrontations. (Meanwhile, losing two points of AC will cut it in half.)
(I also usually find the greatest threats to my characters to be physical damage and magical debuffs, the latter of which is dangerous because it stops me from protecting myself against the former. Magical damage is usually a much smaller concern. There's a reason why Stoneskin, which is strictly a physical protection that does next to nothing against enemy spells, is nearly universally considered the strongest protective spell in the game, with the only challenger being something like Protection from Magic Weapons. Also worth noting that Luck's protection from spells is rendered completely irrelevant for one character anyway by the Cloak of Reflection, or for multiple characters with various Protection From Relevant Element spells/scrolls. Great AC is enhanced by Stoneskin, not superseded-- the better your AC is, the better Stoneskin becomes.)
Which is all just a really long way of saying that I glad they fixed the Bard so that his song actually does something now, but (A) he's still just a gimped blade with better Lore from level 1-14 and 24-40, and (B) his level 20 bard song is much more comparable to the level 1 Skald song than it is to the level 20 Skald song, making the Vanilla Bard really just a crappy Skald for people whose favorite part of the game is the pickpocketing, (and who don't like Potions of Master Thievery).
Oh, and (C) IWD Vanilla Bards are amazing. War Chant of Sith lets him Battle Buff almost as well as a Skald, Siren's Yearning lets him Crowd Control almost as well as a Jester, and if you really love yourself some Luck, Tymora's Melody has you covered with not just a +1 luck bonus, but also a +3 saving throw bonus that, if present in BG2, would pretty much dominate the first half of the game until you get down to automatic-save levels. (IWD itself features far fewer SoE effects, so that saving throw bonus is more nice and less stupidly overpowered.)
Bard progression is actually pretty solid, imo. All bards can defend the party from fear spells (and lots of BG1 casters love those), all of them can steal, they make excellent back row archers, they can use most items and they give you extra castings of spells like Sleep. Also, bards (along with thieves and druids) have the fastest level progression from early-mid game, which allows them to force higher level versions of NPCs to spawn earlier. Free higher level party mates.
Personally, I think a bard's life starts to get really good once they get Melf's Minute Meteors. The one place they don't really scale well is the BG1 Black Pits, because that section uses a different meta that heavily favors multiclasses.
Bards can be considered overpowered because there's just too many advantages to being one. In particular, all bards have access unique abilities that scale off everyone else (to non-Jesters, this means they get stronger as everyone else gets stronger - it's that line of thinking that can land them in "most broken class" arguments). Jesters may not be as powerful as other bards but even they have surprising utility in high difficulty/modded content because their song bypasses spell protections, and is only blocked by successful saves/immunity.
The most underrated classes for the PC are definitely the plain class ones, especially the ones you normally don't dual from. Plain cleric, plain thief, plain mage, plain druid...
At the risk of getting into an argument over the meaning of words, (the worst kind of argument to stumble into!), "underrated" to me suggests (1) People think they're pretty much directly inferior to XXXXX, and (2) people are wrong.
As a "for instance", for a long time I underrated Avengers. I thought they were basically gimped Druids with a couple extra spell choices that didn't come close to changing the class. I mean, how good is Chromatic Orb really if every mage on the planet is stuffing his spellbook with Magic Missiles, instead? Lightning Bolt is just a hard-to-aim fireball.
I was wrong: they may only get one extra spell per level, but those spells totally change the class. Vanilla druids are stuck with a bunch of garbage level 1, 2, 3 and 4 spell slots with nothing really worth casting from them. My druids basically wound up memorizing a bazillion Cure Light Wounds and Cure Medium Wounds just so I could rest until healed more conventiently, and Call Woodland Beings is amazing, but really, how many times do you need to cast it? And I can't even remember the last time I used a level 2 spell slot from a non-Avenger Druid.
So the Avenger isn't just getting one extra second-rate Mage spell per level. He's taking useless spell slots and turning them into usable spell slots. It's a dramatic difference. (I also underrated debuffs in general; Web and Chaos are some of the strongest spells in the entire saga, though for an Avenger Chaos is competing with Iron Skins and Insect Plague.)
Now imagine Beamdog invented a Sorceror kit called the Bore-ceror. It's exactly like the Sorceror, except he gains all new spells one level later, gets a -2 penalty to all stats on character creation, and he only rolls d3 for hit points. Two things would be true about that kit. (1) It would be a total garbage kit that is across-the-board worse than a vanilla sorceror, and (2) it'd still be one of maybe the six easiest classes to solo the entire trilogy with.
Does that mean it'd be underrated? I'd say no, because all of the complaints in (1) are still 100% true and the point in (2) doesn't invalidate them in any way. I'd say it's probably pretty accurately rated.
Which I guess is a long way of saying that for me, in order to be underrated, it's not enough for a class/kit to still be playable or even powerful, it's more that the common criticisms everyone has of that class/kit are actually wrong. I mean, people say that there's literally no reason to play a Kitless Cleric, since Kitted Clerics offer you exactly the same thing with extra abilities and no negatives whatsoever. And the fact that Kitless Clerics are still pretty darn good doesn't change the fact that people are right and there's literally no (non-RP) reason to ever pick one. Ever.
Vanilla Bard can be a pretty powerful character if you're not adverse to some heavy micromanagement, but at the end of the day he's still just a crappy Skald with no real advantages that a couple Potions of Master Thievery can't rectify. Or else he's basically just a hobbled Blade with absolutely no advantages, (except for Lore, I guess), for 100% of BG1, 50% of SoA, and 100% of ToB.
or it could be because some people are set on the ways that they play the game,
for example: if you always had a cleric in the party every time and did that for years straight and then try out a druid, you may think a druid is crap, because they are different, and if you play a druid like a cleric, you will probably be disappointed
and this pretty much goes with any class, some people will try out a class they never played before and think its garbage because they aren't using the abilities of the new class to their full potential, like if you played a fighter or berserker for 10 years and then try switching over to a mage slayer, its going to be a very different play through and you are going to do things differently
and this could also be the problem as well, people don't like being put out of their comfort zone, some people are used to the classes that they have used for years, know how they work and expect all classes to work the same way, but the classes don't, hence the reason why classes exist, they are there for their own certain roles, not every class is suppose to be able to do everything
and then when it comes time to say that classes are OP I think that more because people have been playing the same classes for years and years and years, and they know it so well, and they meta game so hard, they could run that character in their sleep, and when you get to that point, then yeah, it looks like it is OP, for example a half-orc berserker using a two handed sword with 19 str/con 18 dex in BG1 could be considered OP for veterans of the series, but what about people who have never played that class or race before? what about the people who don't know how to use that class effectively? a class that isn't being used effectively no matte how strong the combination really starts to diminish in power
so I guess when it comes down to how OP a class is, its determined by how effectively you are using that class, if you are using a classes strengths as effectively as possible, then that class will start becoming OP, if you aren't using the strengths of the class effectively then it starts to look underrated
so now adays when I play the game, I try and make some very unconventional or interesting parties and then experiment with new weapons and tactics to see what their strengths are, and when you do things like that, you find out things you've never thought were good but are and so on
for example: I've been playing a crap load of bg1 lately ( a full run only takes me like 16 hours, and that is uncovering every piece of black on the map, and doing every quest) and one of the parties I had was 6 swashbucklers, that's right, count 'em, 6, one dude went in melee, while the other 5 went ranged, and let me tell you something; you learn a lot when you do silly things like that, like:
- human swashbucklers have a very hard time to hit in melee even with drizzt's scimitars at level 1
- critical hits on insane difficulty pretty much kill you in one hit for the first half of the game ( that was very annoying)
- if your thac0 is crap, then crossbows kind of suck, yes they do more damage, but bows come with an extra attack per round, so when it comes to the point of rolling 20s, bows will do it more often ( I've heard crossbows can be great, but perhaps they are only great if used by warrior types, since they actually have some thac0 and can game some proficiency in them)
- potions of explosions/firery burning are great, they are basically wands of fireballs that can be used by anyone, and on that note, necklace of missiles, gets MVI ( most valuable item) award in bg1, first of all, again a wand of fireballs that can be used by anyone basically, it is cheap as hell to buy ( relatively speaking) it takes up a necklace slot ( which there aren't too many necklaces in bg1 to begin with anyway) and then if you run low on charges, sell it and buy it back and it comes with 25 charges, when you hit bg the city, you can have up to 3 of those necklaces, oh the lols are out of control, when you are flining 18d6 worth of fireballs at enemies
- nymph cloak/algerons cloak, are simply amazing, charm spells are just SO good in bg, my favourite thing to do it charm a baddie, and if they are using a weapon, I switch 'em over to fist, so then they get a sweet to hit penalty and an awesome AC penalty, and those cloaks make enemies save vs breath weapon at a -1 penalty, which is devastating for bg1 baddies, and to top it all off, the nymph cloak comes with 40 charges, and if you run low, sell it, buy it back for a piddly price and it comes with a crazy 100 charges, ( very useful against those flaming fist dummies in chapter 7 who go hostile like wads)
In BG2, Firetooth's bonuses used to stack when you had actual bolts equipped, (meaning it dealt 2d8 +2 +4 damage instead of 1d8 +2 +4). That was enough to make it a top contender, but it's been fixed by now, which means it's mostly just an inferior Gesen's when it comes to interrupting mages through Stoneskin. And LCoS loses its luster when shortbows answer back with Tuigan.
Regular Bards get +1 Luck bonus at 1, +2 at 15, and +3 at 20.
With the Bard Hat from SoD any Bard can fight and sing at the same time. I'm running a blade right now and just got Enhanced Bard Song. I can say that giving out that +1 Luck and fear immunity while still fighting with the bard hat is super fun.
Though I want to do a Jester after this run, equip the Pixie Prick and just sing to confuse and then stab people to sleep lol
Edit: Derp, missed the post going in depth about the luck bonuses somehow. Very insightful.