creating my first team : Icewind dale
Crawler
Member Posts: 12
I just got icewind dale, just wandering what kind of characters I should have in a team. Right now this is what I was thinking-
Dwarven Defender
Half-Elf - Fighter/Druid
Inquisitor
Half-Ork - Priest of Tempus
Elf - Sorcerer
Half-Elf - Skald
So wada ya reckon, decent group or will I just get killed strait away again ( never played a game like this before so don't mock me too much ).
Dwarven Defender
Half-Elf - Fighter/Druid
Inquisitor
Half-Ork - Priest of Tempus
Elf - Sorcerer
Half-Elf - Skald
So wada ya reckon, decent group or will I just get killed strait away again ( never played a game like this before so don't mock me too much ).
Post edited by Crawler on
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You should have a good time with that party..Dwarven Defender and Fighter/Druid are the 2 best tanks in the game and with the rest of your choices as backup you should be able to show the evil monsters who the boss is in Faerun.
Edit: Congratulations on picking up this awesome game!
I'd go for the Undead Hunter kit instead. You have to fight a ton of those in the game, and they show up in the expansion as well.
I also agree with the general sentiment that Fighter/Thief is the best bet, (the more fighter types you have in IWD, the better). And I'd recommend making it either a Halfling or a Gnome because there's a sweet piece of gear only those races can wear.
Regarding the Skald: I think it's an excellent choice to take a bard in Icewind Dale. They fit the campaign really well, and there's even additional content and dialogue choices available just to them.
One of the key differentiators between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate is that the latter is more a collection of setpiece battles. You've got a big battle against a Dragon. You've got a big battle against a party of adventurers in the sewers. They're big, they're rare, they're hard, they're memorable... and there's not a ton between them.
Icewind Dale, on the other hand, is very much a war of attrition. The huge setpiece battles are much less common, (though holy hell does it still have some phenomenal setpieces!), and most of the challenge in the game comes from hacking your way through waves and waves and waves of mid-level mobs. Individually they'd be a pushover, but they spawn in great numbers and inconvenient combinations and difficult formations and from all angles and they slowly whittle you down.
There aren't always a lot of places to rest between battles, and fatigue can be a major, major issue. It's not uncommon to reach a point where your mage is out of spells and slinging stones, your fighters are all below 50% HP, your potions are gone, your healers only have one cure spell left, and you need to push through one last group to reach safety.
In that war of attrition, the power of a bard cannot be underestimated. A Skald's AC bonus will reduce the number of hits your fighters take and help you push on a little bit farther between rests. On the other hand, the vanilla bard gets a variety of different situationally useful songs, and will eventually get a song called the War Chant of Sith.
War Chant of Sith is an amazing, amazing, amazing song. It causes all of your characters to regenerate HP, which lets you top up between battles. It makes a big, big difference in the attrition-based combat of Icewind Dale, even if it isn't impacting your combat effectiveness as the Skald's song would.
I go back and forth on which is better, the vanilla bard or the Skald, (they're pretty comparable power-wise), but for a first run-through I might recommend going with the vanilla bard so you can see the song variety, (they get multiple songs, the Skald only gets one), and because eventually the War Chant of Sith will make your life a lot easier.
With two healer-types, this isn't a huge thing. You'll have lots of heal spells, and a Skald will still be fantastic. (Though the War Chant frees your druid and your priest to devote their spell slots to offensive spells, instead.) Just something to think about.
Regarding Sorcerers: Icewind Dale was designed as a low-magic environment. This means that, while some scrolls are common, others are incredibly rare. For some spells, there might only be one scroll in the entire game. There will be points where you've leveled up enough to unlock level 5 spells, for instance, but you only have two level 5 spells in your book, and neither is that amazing.
Again, this is *by design*. The biggest advantage Baldur's Gate has over Icewind Dale is how much personality it has. But the biggest advantage Icewind Dale has over Baldur's Gate is how incredibly tightly designed it is. The developers built it so your mage's power will grow at a very specific, very precise rate, with frustrating lulls and exhilarating peaks. It's super-annoying at times, but it's also a really cool experience.
Sorcerers did not exist in Icewind Dale, they were ported in by the Enhanced Edition. The problem is that since Sorcerers learn new spells automatically instead of scribing them from scrolls, they completely bypass this magic scarcity. They will always have access to the best spells of every level whenever they want.
This makes Sorcerers super, super powerful in IWD, arguably the most broken class in the game. But it also completely subverts the original designed experience. Which is fine, I'm all for some carefully considered subversion from time to time. But I'd strongly, strongly recommend against using one on your first run.
Experience the game how it was meant to be experienced first, IMO, because you only get one first playthrough. And then after you've seen how the low-magic environment works, feel free to take a Sorcerer on your second run and smash it to bits.
Otherwise, congratulations on your purchase, and I hope you enjoy the game as much as I have over the years!
So, first thing, that " War Chant Of Sith " sounds like it would be great for a grinder-defensive style group and I was already thinking of changing the Skald since they only get their second song upgrade at level 15, so I decided to just go with a standard bard. I was a bit stung when I found out that Inquisitors were underpowered ( I spent like 45 minutes in the ability section getting him good stats ) so I switched him with a normal Paladin because I wanted to get the benefit of all the Paladins other abilities. lastly I decided to switch the Half-Ork Priest to a Cleric/Thief instead.
So here's the group I came up with, I think it should still serve its purpose as a tough grinder team.
-Paladin
-Dwarven Defender
-Half-Elf - Fighter/Druid
-Half-Ork - Cleric/Thief
-Elf - Sorcerer
-Half-Elf - Bard
( I decided to keep the sorcerer because im afraid I'd just end up scribing crappy spells and then not be able to go back and get the spells I should've memorized )
You shouldn't pick the Sorcerer for the exact reason you just explained (you probably have things mixed up there). All available scrolls you can scribe with the mage and you can choose your active spells from everything you scribed at any time. With the Sorcerer you pick 1 spell at your lvlup (later on you pick a bit more) and can cast that multiple times. So if you make a bad spell choice with the Sorcerer it's irreversible.
My other gripe about your party is the cleric/thief multi... that is a real rough class combo. This won't be a popular opinion, but I'd drop the sorcerer (a bard is plenty of arcane for IWD) and go fighter/thief (multi) and fighter/cleric (multi or dual at 7) with those 2 slots.
Think of it this way: Traps are nasty. They deal a lot of damage, and many of them will poison you. If you don't have an antidote handy, poison will eat a huge chunk of your HP. And the only way to stop this damage from hitting you is to disarm the trap with a thief. Thieves are damage prevention.
(With a high pickpocket score, Thieves can also net you a pair of Rings of Free Action, one of the most valuable pieces of defensive gear because it renders you immune to a lot of disabling effects. And they can net you a Ring of Protection +2, again a very valuable piece of defensive equipment.)
Thieves make great scouts, too. Really, any invisible character can scout, but Thieves can find and disarm traps while they're scouting without breaking invisibility. Knowing what's ahead and coming up with a plan is a great way to control the flow of the battle and keep your characters healthy long-term.
I agree that I think you've got Sorcerers and Mages backwards. Mages can learn every single spell in the game, provided they have a scroll for it. Then they can memorize whichever spells they like, and if they decide they don't like a spell, they can just stop memorizing it and memorize something else instead. A mage can have 24 different level four spells and just switch between them at will with no cost other than having to rest.
A sorcerer doesn't pick spells like that. He can't learn new spells whenever he finds a scroll. He picks a spell when he levels up, and that's it. That's his spell for that level. Eventually he can learn as many as five different spells at each level. If he decides he doesn't like those spells... he can't really do anything about it. He's stuck. Those are his spells.
Now, many levels really only have five spells usually worth casting, (and maybe a handful of others with some fringe use-cases). If you know which five spells matter, Sorcerers are great. But if you don't have experience with the spells and you don't know for sure, it's easy to wind up with a spellbook that only has two or three decent spells at any given level.
I also tend to agree that even a first-timer can muddle through a totally playable sorcerer. The fact that he's already on the forums means it should be pretty easy to find a spell list, and even if most of them are geared for BG2, they'll have all the basics a sorcerer needs to pull his weight.
I'm just saying, the OP himself has said his biggest fear is not being able to go back and get the spells he should have gotten. And if that's his fear, the sorcerer is exactly the wrong arcane caster to take. Yes, IWD is not as rest-friendly as BG2. But the ability to reorganize your entire spellbook for the cost of one rest-cycle is still dramatically cheaper than the ability to not ever reorganize your spellbook for any reason ever forever and ever amen.
If you make a bad choice with a mage, you're stuck with it until the next time you sleep. If you make a bad choice with a sorcerer, you're stuck with it until you die. (It also gives you less chance to experiment with spells like Teleport Field that are fun and situationally useful and which some people absolutely swear by and others absolutely hate.)
I'm in Khuldahar at the moment waiting to see what the Vale of Shadows can throw at me. Cheers for all the helpful advice!
- Crawler.
You need 2 characters who can heal. One mage mainly to identify magical items. One thief to find/disarm trips and pick locks. They are many ways to have this combination depending on whether you go with 3 or 4 fighters. My personal favorite is 4 fighters, a gnome illusionist/cleric and a gnome cleric/thief. The reason is there are some voices for the gnomes that struck me as being perfect for them.
The reason is because halflings along with dwarves have the best saving throws in the game, but halflings on top of dwarves have one extra point in AC due to higher Dexterity and can use an helm sold in kuldahar that gives +3 AC.
Neutral neutral so they can use two objects in the game that are really good, one is a shield that gives +3 AC and the other is a + 3 morning star sold in Kuldahar that have 10% chance per hit of casting Cure Light Wounds on the user.
Basically you send the tank in the front and take all the aggro from monsters, while the rest of the party attack with ranged weapons. I play on insane and is terribly easy.
Everything other people said is true, make sure you have a thief, a cleric, a mage etc..
I strongly advise not to have a shadowdancer.
To be used effctively takes a LOT of micromanagement and one single mistake can get him killed. You basically get the same damage output with no micromanagement with a dual classed figther/something.
Also if you like me find the game speed incredibly slow and tedious, you can make it as fast as you want by going into your documents/icewind dale folder and edit the "max frame rate" value in the baldur.ini file.
By default is 30, i put 60 and the game run twice faster.
Enjoy.
There are a lot of weapons as good or better than The Giving Star, but there are arguably no belts in the game as good or better than the Shimmering Sash, especially for a party tank. And given that the more AC you have, the more valuable additional points become, (and that the biggest advantage of the Halfling is the extra AC he or she can get from the helm slot), it seems like the belt is more important.
Also note that Gnomes can also use the +3 AC Helm, and they also get +1 dex (and therefore +1 AC) relative to their dwarven counterparts, but unlike Halflings they can still get 18 strength, which means +1 THACO and +3 damage relative to a 17-strength Halfling with a roll of 18/76 or better. (For a single-class fighter, there's really no reason not to go for a roll of 18/91 or better.) Gnomes have worse saves vs. death, but otherwise they're basically superior across the board to halflings as fighters.
And Dwarves have worse AC thanks to missing out on the best helm in the game and only getting 17 dex on character creation, (although a lot of items grant +1 dex, which helps fix that), but they can get the Dwarven Defender, which kind of breaks the game since IWD was never balanced for that level of damage reduction. And Dwarves can equip an axe that gives +1 constitution to unlock innate regeneration, which lets them heal to full every time you travel to a new area or rest.
Also, not sure which shield you're referring to, but there are at least six shields I can think of that give +3 AC or better. One is unusable by lawful characters, one is unusable by chaotic characters, one is only usable by elves or half-elves, and the other three have no notable race/alignment restrictions. Although arguably the "tankiest" shield in the game-- a +4 AC shield with an additional +1 vs. missile and 15% damage reduction, (plus a -2 THACO penalty)-- requires 18 strength, which is a de facto usage restriction by halflings, who are limited to 17 strength on character creation.
At the end of the day, though, there are tons of great shields and you'll eventually find a good one for your tank regardless of his race or alignment.
TL;DR: Any of the "shorty" races can make an excellent tank.
Honestly I don't know the game that well, i just got to half chapter 5 and probably missed a lot of items and stuff.
I felt like i could still give advice since at this point in the game i can tell i won't have any issue finishing it.
From what you say there was still a lot of room for improvement, good to know!
My big regret though is the Shadowdancer for the reasons stated above.
As an example, I'm assuming the +3 shield you found is The Bitch Queen's Envoy, a shield in Dragon's Eye that gives you +3 AC and immunity to Water Elementals and is not usable by Lawful characters. The chest that you found that in actually has a 50/50 chance of giving you a different shield, the Red Knight's Shield, which gives +4 AC and is not usable by Chaotic characters.
That chest is one of the lesser offenders on the "random loot" scale. You know no matter what you're going to be getting a really good shield out of it, (unless you built a tank of the wrong alignment and you can't actually use it, but Neutral Good and True Neutral are both safe alignments that can use either one).
Some chests have much, much greater variance. For example, you've already passed two other +3 AC or better shields. There's a chest in the Severed Hand that either gives you the Shield of the Hand, which is a +3 AC shield with an additional +1 vs. missiles, or else it gives you the Great Shield +3, which gives +4 AC, +1 AC vs. missiles, 15% physical damage resists, -2 THACO. The problem? In the same chest, it's possible to get a Small Shield +1 instead, so you've got a 33% chance of missing both of those great shields for essentially garbage.
To some extent, it pays to be flexible in terms of character types and proficiencies, because you never know what a run is going to give you. This also makes the guaranteed drops, (including stuff sold in stores, like the Helm of the Trusted Defender, Shimmering Sash, Lucky Scimitar, etc), that much more important, because they're the few things you can definitely build around.
But you're right on the money that a top-notch tank will make your life substantially easier in IWD, and that high-micromanagement characters like the Shadowdancer can be a bit of a pain. Baldur's Gate is built around a few rare-but-epic setpiece battles, which makes micromanaging less of a chore because you're not doing as much of it. IWD instead relies on wave after wave after wave after wave of mid-level mobs to grind you to dust, so if a character needs a lot of attention to shine, you're going to be micromanaging him or her *constantly*.
One suggestion would be to look and see if anyone has made a custom script for Shadowdancers that you can put her on to let the game manage her for you. It won't do as well as you do, but if it can do 80% as well with 0% of the effort, that's a big win.
halfling barbarian
human berserker 7 dual cleric
half-elf fighter/mage
half-orc thief/cleric
elf archer
elf sorcerer
The first time I played IWD I manage to complete it with a paladin, elf ranger, dwarf fighter, elf mage, half elf cleric and halfling thief. The fast leveling up with single classes helps a lot.
Whoever you decide to go with, it is important to spend the time to get a good character. That usually means a total dice roll in the 90's except for the fighters where you can get away with high 80's.
Also he can wear the hood sold by the mage in kuldahar.
The AI of this is really basic, mobs only attacks the one they see in first. So if you place the blade in second or third line, he will be safe and very usefull (spin dance, tenser transfo etc...)