BGII EE solo no-reload "roleplay" vanilla playthrough

sffrrrom

So I'm doing a solo no-reload "roleplay" vanilla playthrough. I've done solo before but never no-reload. By roleplay, I mean that I like to generally make decisions staying within character, and I like to approach gameplay and dungeons a certain way. I won't rush to Nalia's Keep just because she says we need to hurry, for instance, but I will try to approach dungeons as if I had no or limited meta-gaming knowledge (i.e., if it's not obvious a big fight is coming up, I shouldn't be super-buffing for it, and if there's a reason I need to complete a dungeon without or with limited resting, e.g., Firkraag has kidnapped someone's daughter, I'll do so). I also try to avoid cheesy tactics, even if they don't necessarily break IE, such as certain Cloudkill strategies, mass summon cheese, mass skulltrap cheese, etc.


Given all of those constraints, I have been trying to decide what class to play. I originally thought Cleric/Mage for maximum survivability, but the problem I have found is that the melee skills aren't good enough (melee is important when you are trying to conserve spell resources) and the cleric buff spells are considerably worse when you don't have metagame knowledge which lets you prepare the "perfect" spells ahead of time and you aren't rest-spamming. I'm thinking I need to go fighter/mage - I could go fighter/thief/mage, but the slow progression really kills it for me, although the benefits are pretty nice (detect illusions, hide, find traps, backstab, traps).

EDIT: Ah, nevermind - I can use animate dead to help compensate for my long-term melee dungeon needs. They last 8 hours and are totally RP friendly. Ok, cleric/mage it is. Wish me luck.

Mantis37

Whatever class you choose get ready to roleplay a safety first type- lead from the front heroic types don't usually last that long .

sffrrrom

Mantis37 said:

Whatever class you choose get ready to roleplay a safety first type- lead from the front heroic types don't usually last that long .

Yeah that's why I thought cleric/mage would be a good choice - they have lots of spells like free action, death ward, chaotic commands, that help prevent game over type save fails. Of course, you can compensate for most of those with various items, but...we shall see how it goes. Since I'm going to stick with my cleric/mage, I'm through the Mae'Var quest, which was surprisingly easy - cleric/mages make good mage killers - and the skinner quest, which was HORRIBLE. Even though I thought pre-buffing was roleplay justified, the bone golem that spawned nearly killed me. Had to use haste to deal enough damage to kill it, and while I did, the rune assassins wore down my stoneskin, and they can't be dealt with by sanctuary or invisibility, so I had to sunfire them and then pray I deal enough damage before they killed me, which I did, just barely. Glad I bought the robe of vec-cheese before that fight.

sffrrrom

Clearly I had forgotten how insane the level scaling can be. If I didn't have the shield of cheese, there's no way I'd ever be able to clear the Unseeing Eye quest. Doing it at M12/C12, about 2 million xp, which isn't all that far into a solo game, really, and, man, there's a lich in the undead section, and about a million beholders in the beholder lair. The lich was ok, but the beholders - not too many legitimate ways for a solo character to deal with 7-8 beholders all firing rays.

sffrrrom

It's a good thing the vanilla AI for liches, even in EE, is not all that overwhelming, because I had to kill two of them in the damn shadow temple ruins. Thank god for the MoD, and thankfully C/M is an excellent lich killer, but seriously, maybe a little too liberal with the random lich generation, game?