Balanced difficulty setting for importing from SoD?
Nerva
Member Posts: 133
I finished BG1 and figured I would pass on SoD because I didn't want to level-up too quickly in my first play-through of BG2 and throw off the game's design. But, I ended up buying the entire Infinity Engine collection on Steam, which included SoD... so I'm tempted to play it. The question is whether to import my BG1 character into SoD and then import from SoD into BG2, or to import from BG1 into SoD and then import from BG1 into BG2 as if SoD never happened. In the case of the former, I was wondering what people's thoughts are on using tougher rules to offset the higher starting level? I normally am a Core Rules purist, but it looks like there's a way to pair the Hard/Very-Hard/Insane difficulties for number and level of enemies with the Core Rules ruleset, so I am kicking around the idea of using a harder difficulty with the standard ruleset to re-balance BG2 if I'm importing from SoD.
It seems to me that such an approach would have the negative effect of increasing the rate of XP gain because I'd be killing more and higher-level enemies earlier in the game, and then I'd "crash" when I hit the XP cap and stop growing in strength but the enemies are still more numerous and higher-level late in the game. What are people's thoughts on this?
It seems to me that such an approach would have the negative effect of increasing the rate of XP gain because I'd be killing more and higher-level enemies earlier in the game, and then I'd "crash" when I hit the XP cap and stop growing in strength but the enemies are still more numerous and higher-level late in the game. What are people's thoughts on this?
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Comments
If you want to play SoD then play SoD. BG2 start will be easier with the extra levels of course. Comparing the 89k from OG to 500k with SoD is of course a substantial difference. In the long run, however, it matters little since you'll end up around 3 mil EXP and the starting point therefore won't change the overall balance through the course of the game too much.
If this is your first time playing, I'd recommend to stick to core rules throughout even though you COULD play on hard or higher and deal with it. Mainly this is, just like you say, to keep EXP influx down and therefore keep character progression active for a longer time before capping.
SCS is pretty tough but cool. Everyone you fight uses their potions like crazy. You will need Detect Illusions maxed on your thief or multiple copies of detect invisibility. Thief's backstab you like crazy while invisible. I tried one Lich to see what it was like, and it was laughable. I would like to uninstall that one if I could. It cast about 10 spells before I could do anything. I haven't tried a dragon yet, but I imagine it will be very tough. Trolls and normal encounters are tougher, but still fun. The Lich so far was the only one that wasn't fun.
SCS gets quite more brutal in BG2 than in BG1, so playing it blind may prove too much for the first time. Especially since it doesn't really notice the difficulty slider - i.e. if you hit a wall, you'd have to drop difficulty all the way to the story mode (read - cheat mode) to get through the encounter.