party members you always use
megamike15
Member Posts: 2,666
so i noticed when pre planning parties for future runs i always have the same four in my party. Imoen, jaheira, yoshimo, and aerie.
i tend to not feel right not having Imoen with me the whole saga and aerie just happens to be my mage of choice for some reason as she is the earliest character you get in 2. corwin and glient fall into this role in sod so far but i've only played that twice.
so which characters do you tend to have in every runthrough you do even if your trying out new people?
i tend to not feel right not having Imoen with me the whole saga and aerie just happens to be my mage of choice for some reason as she is the earliest character you get in 2. corwin and glient fall into this role in sod so far but i've only played that twice.
so which characters do you tend to have in every runthrough you do even if your trying out new people?
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BG2 Anomen, Yoshimo and Aerie always makes their way into my party over any others.
In BG2 i use often Anomen, but just for Turn Undead because i love to make undead to explode
BG2: Minsc and Imoen. Anomen too unless I'm romancing Viconia
Jaheira tends to be in most of my parties as well. In BG1 I keep intending to try Faldorn, but still haven't got around to recruiting her yet. In BG2 I find Jaheira's romance to be the most challenging & fulfilling, plus she can be a great tank, so I almost always have her in my party all of the way through. I keep planning to try out Cernd instead, but it just never seems to happen. But in SoD, I really do like M'Khiin, so Jaheira is quite often on the sidelines.
In BG1, I tend to use Neera as my default mage in the EE era, replacing my old reliable Dynaheir. Making the gnoll stronghold run to recruit Dyna before tacking the Nashkel Mines was a hallmark of the old days. Now I am more likely to rush main questline of the mines, the bandit camp, & the Cloakwood instead, so Neera - who is recruitable right along the way - is ideal. Plus she makes me laugh.
In BG2 I have finally broken the habit of always recruiting Keldorn & Anomen for my good parties. Now that I have tried out Mazzy, Valygar, Rasaad, & Aerie more extensively, I will be using them more often.
in bg2 I think my favourite team setup is: keldorn, mazzy, anomen, imoen and nalia, but the problem with that team setup is I rush to spell hold right away so imoen's XP will be closer to my group ( and even with the 2.xx patch it's still not perfect when they bump them up) but then the consequence is that when I get back to the main land and finish off Bodhi's quest my characters are around 2 million XP each, and I haven't done any of the side quests, so im doing things like the copper cohornet quest with level 14 characters just laying waste and destruction and I quickly start getting bored of my team for how good it is, so now I do all the quests I can before spellhold so I will substitute jan in, and sometimes even jaheira for the lulz, maybe even minsc or valygar every once in a while to freshen things up, or the odd time bring aerie along
If I only count my party-of-six games, though, I almost always have Korgan, Mazzy, or (most frequently) both. Edwin is next on the "most-used" list.
My least-used NPCs are Aerie, Jan, Minsc, and (for some reason) Valygar. I actually really like Valygar, he just never seems to fit; mechanically he works well with Korgan, thematically he works well with Mazzy, but three fighter-types is a lot for me, and I typically prefer to pair Mazzy with someone more tankish in the early game while she arches, (Korgan, Keldorn, Anomen, Viconia).
BG and BG2, I don't want to play mage myself so having the mage who you have least to worry about suits me.
Plus he has traits in common with my husband.
Which I only kind of realised quite recently, foreign outlook on life very different to mine, dependable when it comes to doing what he knows to do, extravagent accent and a strong sense of who they are.
Viconia,
though I swap her out sometimes, don't really want to. I like her voice acting more than anybody elses, I like her attitude. She's my girl.
Jan Jansen and Yoshimo are also very often in my BG2 runs.
As for SoD, I've played it only once, but I predict Corwin will always be in my party.
But have to ask "how" people live with Jaheira, she talks to charname like a recalcitrant 6 year old all the time.
Don't you ever get fed up with it?
That kind of, you think of a plan but she takes ownership of it, and without her approval, it's worthless. The tone of voice...
Maybe it's being female I pick up on it more, can only be one alpha female and all that (shrugs).
when I play games these days, I don't play for the immersion I play for the numeric stimulation of ones and zeros ( although ironically I can't play games like WoW because the boredom meter hits full power within a couple of minutes)
Me, I really like the character, I enjoy her company. She's reliable, if somewhat lacking in social skills, she's suited to the adventuring life and she's someone you can trust. I also share her love of nature.
But why do you trust her?
Of all the NPC she seems to be the one far more involved with an organisation that pulls her away from the Bhaalspawn being the first priority.
From the start, she drags Charname and Imoen into danger in Nashkel Mines for her job.
Then in BG2 you get the Harper attacks because of Jaheira, you don't even get that quest without her in party.
Gorion?
Gorion lied to you throughout your life and didn't prepare you for the life you have to end up living.
What did he think was going to happen to Charname?
What was the plan had Sarevok not intervened?
Jeez Louise, he even had a book of prophecies on hand to give him a hint and still left Charname as level 1 wolf fodder...at 20 years old.
Jan, always, always, always. BG1 it usually ends up being Xan, but I haven't played through it in so long to be sure.
I trust her at first because I trust Gorion; yes, he kept things from me (I don't know exactly what, when I meet Jaheira), but he's still the only father I knew, I want to believe he had good intentions, even if he made mistakes that cost him his life and almost had me killed, even if he was overconfident and/or lacked the foresight to prepare me for what was coming. No family is perfect.
When I meet Jaheira I'm in need of friends, and she seems like someone who is both willing and able to help me figure out why Gorion was killed and why are they trying to kill me.
Taking Imoen and I into the mines is perhaps a way to train us for what is to come... it's not like she's forcing us, I can postpone the investigation until whenever I feel I'm ready.
By the time the Harpers get involved in BG2 I've traveled long enough with Jaheira to have no doubt about her friendship, she has proved her loyalty over and over again, even when being in my company keeps getting her in trouble and into dangerous places/situations. I don't mind if I get attacked once in a while for having her in my party, she's been attacked hundreds of times because of me, and worse, Khalid was murdered only because he was traveling with me.
Yeah, I have really hard time NOT including him in my group. He makes a great duo (in terms of power and banter) with Edwin
What character development is there when you get the "I gave up everything for you" speech if you dare to drop her?
She gave up nothing far as I can see. Khalid and her were going on fighting, undercover missions for the Harpers long before Charname appeared on the scene. Did she actually believe they were immortal?
They traveled with you no differently from any of the other NPC's.
You can't take the fact that they and D/M appear in CI as anything other than the developers understandable need to restrict the game parameters. And they needed to break the pairings after the mistake of linking them in BG (by "mistake", I mean unpopular, they are in the business of selling after all).
When you visit the Harper's at her request, what other course of action could she have taken unless she is irredeemably evil?
I mean talking Irenicus levels of evil.
To then throw that mess and her involvement with a very shady group, in your face?
No self reflection, no taking responsibility for decisions made, just finger pointing and blame.
(Yes, she later learns that it wasn't the organization as a whole, but rather just a rogue offshoot. Key word being "later".)
So yeah, she's kind of sort of racked by doubt. In fact, being racked by doubt as to whether she did the right thing is the underlying theme of her entire story arc in BG2, and the ultimate resolution is that Elminster appears and if your reputation is high enough, he reaffirms she did the right thing. And if your reputation is not high enough, he explicitly leaves her to her doubts. That's her punishment for her decisions, the burden she'll have to bear for the rest of her days.
Her friends, her mentors, the organization she felt was most worthy in all of the realms told her that you were a monster incapable of feeling human emotion, and she told them they were wrong, that you were friends, (or more if you were romancing her), and she killed her former allies to save you.
And then afterwards you said "thanks for the help, now see you". Which doesn't really seem like the course of action that would be taken entirely unprompted by a friend with human emotions, so doubt-prone Jahiera is naturally going to begin second-guessing herself. Wondering if she didn't just kill the closest thing she had to a family since her parents were killed in a peasant uprising for the sake of someone who was every bit the monster they said he was.
And yeah, she's kind of pissed about that. Since she met you, she's lost her husband, betrayed her friends, and been abandoned on the side of the road without so much as a "thanks for your help" by the last person she was willing to devote her life to. She made choices that led to that, for sure... but so did you.
It's also worth noting that no companion, with the possible exception of Imoen, sacrificed more to aid you in your quest. There's no one whose assistance came at such great personal cost. People balk at good-aligned Charnames pushing Keldorn to make a bare fraction of the sacrifice Jahiera made without asking.
Imagine Amoen or Keldorn being asked to betray the Order of the Radiant Heart, and more, to kill all members of the local branch. Cernd being asked the reject his society and join with the Shadow Druids for the sake of your quest. Viconia being pushed to abandon Shar. Imagine Haer'Dalis being put in a position where he must reject chaos and devote himself to order. Or Minsc being asked to forsake Boo. Do any of them do that as quickly as Jahiera turned against the Harpers for you?
Jahiera's problem is not an unwillingness to take blame. If anything, she places too much blame upon herself. She's never at peace with herself, constantly second-guessing every choice she makes. The question is whether Charname can see the blame he deserves in all of this, or will there be no self reflection, no taking responsibility for decisions made.
You can't have it both ways.
Either Jaheira had made her own mind up about Charname, (time traveling together is about 2 years?) or she was instructed to do so.
If it's the first, just the same as all the other NPC, then it's a no brainer that she doesn't allow any organisation to kill you for nothing.
All the examples you give are about betrayal, this was about murder.
In fact, now in BGEE, Edwin faces down the RWof T in Beregost when you help Neera.
Viconia doesn't betray you in Ust Nathar when the advantages she could gain are huge.
If it's the second, well she's been lying for a long time.
The Harper's are not the good guys are they?
Wasn't there something about not thinking of the organisation as some sort of "justice league"?
How can you compare not wanting to travel with somebody to eternal imprisonment underground in a small box?
Because that's what was on offer from the Harper's.
As I said, she would have to be irredeemibly evil to go along with that, and even more evil simply to do it because she was just "following orders".
She has nothing to say should you take the view that she is no longer trustworthy because she put you in that situation in the first place. Yes, she made a mistake, well own it, Charname is the one who was nearly killed.
You cannot call her out on the organisation she is associated with and give her an ultimatum. Instead you have to put up with her carrying on with them or she accuses you of this, that or the other.
It doesn't matter in the slightest that the group in Athkatla was rogue, it reflects very badly on the Harpers that anybody ever thought they weren't.
Not forgetting this happens after they have assasinated a possible former traveling companion in front of you, used you to deliver the hit.
Jaheira is no martyr though she is incredibly passive/aggressive. Charname has done nothing to deserve being accused of anything by her. Charname didn't ask Gorion to send them to her and K, didn't ask Irenicus to kill K, and certainly didn't ask the Harpers to start interfering with their life.