Yeah, I agree, entangle tends to suck. Its biggest issue honestly is the casting time. Unless you're cheesing enemies with off-screen casts, they're often able to close the distance during the cast.
As others have said, I find priests to be great casters. They can often win BG1 fights that you have no business of winning at low level. The perfect example is taking Branwen to command Greywolf to death. The great thing is that they have awesome spells at pretty much every single level. And a great early item in the holy ring. Command, hold person, silence 15 radius, summon undead. Secondary option for dispelling invisibility or magic. Even slow poison can be clutch in the early game. Remove paralysis too. Chant is great too for fighting large mobs. I tend to find priests more critical in early BG1 than mages even, as mages tend to be so squishy that their combat role is limited. Priests tend to especially shine in the fights against bandit or bounty hunter groups -- some of the biggest challenges in early BG1.
Why dont you try Tiax ? Hes still a thief with lots useful tools even if you dont use cleric spells, try different stuff.
On paper, Cleric/Thieves work just fine, especially now that BG1EE provides a decent selection of Clubs to Backwhack with. What I find annoying about them is a game mechanic: Because they have so many abilities (Stealth, Turn Undead, Cast Spell, Find Traps), the game screen actually runs out of bottom-row buttons and their actual Thieving button has to be stuck behind the Special Abilities tab. So every single time you want to open a lock, disarm a trap, or pick somebody's pocket, you have to click once for Special Abilities (all the way over on the right), and then Thieving (all the way over on the left). I mean, sure, Thieves were always rather micromanagement-intensive, but that's just plain irritating, IMO. Why couldn't they have made, say, Turn Undead the odd button out, as TU isn't that useful at low levels (especially for multiclasses)?
And that's if you're playing on a desktop/laptop, I have no idea if the mobile version has the same number of bottom-row buttons or not.
Why couldn't they have made, say, Turn Undead the odd button out, as TU isn't that useful at low levels (especially for multiclasses)?
I know this is just a gripe, but it has a real answer. Turn Undead, like Find Traps/Detect Illusion and Hide In Shadows, is a modal ability. Those have to have buttons on the main bar in order to function properly; you activate the ability and then it does its thing once per round until you deactivate it.
"Thieving", by contrast, is a one-shot effect. You use it on an object, the game rolls the dice, and you either succeed or fail. Moving it to the special abilities list adds extra clicks, but it doesn't break anything.
Why dont you try Tiax ? Hes still a thief with lots useful tools even if you dont use cleric spells, try different stuff.
On paper, Cleric/Thieves work just fine, especially now that BG1EE provides a decent selection of Clubs to Backwhack with. What I find annoying about them is a game mechanic: Because they have so many abilities (Stealth, Turn Undead, Cast Spell, Find Traps), the game screen actually runs out of bottom-row buttons and their actual Thieving button has to be stuck behind the Special Abilities tab. So every single time you want to open a lock, disarm a trap, or pick somebody's pocket, you have to click once for Special Abilities (all the way over on the right), and then Thieving (all the way over on the left). I mean, sure, Thieves were always rather micromanagement-intensive, but that's just plain irritating, IMO. Why couldn't they have made, say, Turn Undead the odd button out, as TU isn't that useful at low levels (especially for multiclasses)?
And that's if you're playing on a desktop/laptop, I have no idea if the mobile version has the same number of bottom-row buttons or not.
Yeah this is a great point, I hadn't realized until playing SoD honestly, with the cleric/thief. It really is unfortunate and kind of sucks the fun out this particular class. As jmerry says, the solution isn't to put the turn undead button on the second row. But still, it's crappy and always makes me want to, unfairly, avoid this class.
Does roleplaying factor into the selection at all? Here's how I broke it down for a good-aligned party.
Personally, I couldn't justify leaving my sister behind, especially after she backed me up right after Gorion got murdered. The days in the wilderness fighting wolves and bears as a level 1 were difficult. It also helps that she's a very flexible character. I chose to dual her to a mage, but I would have been fine with keeping her as a pure thief as well. Your original plan calls for switching her out to Coran. On paper, he's chaotic good, but he really stretches the meaning of good to its limits; Coran is a thief and a womanizer. He's not someone I would want to be fighting battles with and trusting my life to.
As for Garrick, the reason I don't take him is quite simple: He tried to trap me into getting murdered by Silke (or shedding innocent blood). The moment that witch died, Garrick should have felt lucky I didn't gut him as well. I let him live, but declined to take him into my party.
Branwen is a more complicated choice for non-roleplaying reasons. Because you can pick her up much earlier than you can Yeslick, I imagine a fair number of people stick with her because of the experience they've already split with her by the time they get to the mines. I took a different approach. After saving Branwen from being a statue for eternity, I declined her offer to join the party. She didn't take it well. I ended up taking the shortest possible path to the mines just to pick up Yeslick asap. I'll admit it wasn't the easiest path through the story though. I relied on numerous rests with puny healing skills to recover hp. But since your requirement was that your party have no evil members rather than only good members, I think it would be fine to keep Branwen as well. If you don't, I'm curious to know how much sharing "wasted" experience with her ended up hurting Yeslick's final level at the end of BG1.
As for Garrick, the reason I don't take him is quite simple: He tried to trap me into getting murdered by Silke (or shedding innocent blood). The moment that witch died, Garrick should have felt lucky I didn't gut him as well. I let him live, but declined to take him into my party.
The way I read Garrick, he's been duped by Silke. Folly, not complicity. After all, if you go through with Silke's dastardly plan, Garrick refuses to join you: "You're no better than Ms. Silke! It will catch up to you someday, mark my words." (And then he leaves forever)
With the EE's catch-up mechanics, there's very little waste involved in sharing XP with your companions. Companions get a trigger that adds XP when they join, up to a maximum of 32K if the protagonist has at least that much. Yeah, Yeslick comes late and might end up a bit behind ... but he only needs 128K total XP to reach his maximum (7/7) level under the BG1 cap. As long as you go there reasonably promptly and don't clear out the entire wilderness, you shouldn't have a problem maxing out Yeslick's levels.
The way I read Garrick, he's been duped by Silke. Folly, not complicity. After all, if you go through with Silke's dastardly plan, Garrick refuses to join you: "You're no better than Ms. Silke! It will catch up to you someday, mark my words." (And then he leaves forever)
Interesting. I didn't know this; I always ended up getting attacked by Silke for refusing to go along with her plan. The conversation prior to that point made it look like Garrick was her accomplice.
With the EE's catch-up mechanics, there's very little waste involved in sharing XP with your companions. Companions get a trigger that adds XP when they join, up to a maximum of 32K if the protagonist has at least that much. Yeah, Yeslick comes late and might end up a bit behind ... but he only needs 128K total XP to reach his maximum (7/7) level under the BG1 cap. As long as you go there reasonably promptly and don't clear out the entire wilderness, you shouldn't have a problem maxing out Yeslick's levels
32k experience is quite easy to reach if the protagonist is used to measure the experience gain. The other problem is that I already have nearly a full party (Yeslick is the last to join), so I rushed to the mines asap. Ironically, having a full party might actually help slow down the protagonist's XP gain a bit to help a bit with reaching Yeslick, but I think it hurts in the long run because Yeslick himself gains XP slower. Is there an optimal way to manage experience? For example, which of these paths would be the best?:
1. Recruit only absolutely required characters until Yeslick joins. Because you have a smaller party, the protagonist goes over the 32k a bit faster, but there are also more quests left to level up party members who join later.
2. Recruit as many members of your final party as possible, asap. You reach the 32k cap a bit later because all quest experience has to be split with them. Yeslick joins as close to 32k as possible.
3. Assuming you don't want a full party, recruit dummy characters you don't intend to keep, just to slow down your experience gain. As soon as you get Yeslick, boot them all so the remaining experience gets split more evenly. But maybe without a full party you don't need to do this at all?
A bit off topic:
There are some tough fights in the mines, and it doesn't help my strategy of constant resting that Yeslick insists on clearing the mines within 14 days. (Another reason I struggle with this deadline is that I try to sell every piece of loot possible, but given that gold isn't as big a problem as I once believed, I will probably just toss all but the most important loot). I probably loaded Yeslick's spell slots with nothing but healing until he was out of the mines. But it could be worse. I don't even know how many quests I'd have to defer to ensure Alora didn't lose out on too much XP.
I think I may have a bigger experience problem because I don't do the werewolf isle for roleplaying reasons. The only way to get to that isle is to steal or trick the guy who holds the map. A shame there's no way around this. I always end up refusing to help Mendas because what he's doing is clearly shady. An evil party wouldn't have this problem.
The deadlines are among the less enjoyable parts of the run, especially if I rushed to get to an area and am therefore less prepared for the fights. From a story perspective, I'm not sure I understand the rush. The enemies in the game are extremely dangerous foes. You're being hunted relentlessly by bounty hunters at every step. It makes sense to do at least some planning/preparation before jumping into a potentially deadly fight.
Interesting. I didn't know this; I always ended up getting attacked by Silke for refusing to go along with her plan.
There's something to be said for doing at least one evil run; for me, that was my "Dorn It" run in which I made Dorn the protagonist through debug console trickery; remove player 1 from the party while paused, save, load, murder that poor Sod or Patsy.
The last step there isn't strictly required, but ... well, Dorn.
Having that evil run lets you indulge in those obviously evil options the game occasionally provides. And reap the consequences, like fighting the law.
On the XP-counting ... when I really optimize things, like pushing to 32K solo and then recruiting my entire party, a completionist run brings that whole 6-person party to more than 250K XP each. I'll typically hit the cap around the end of chapter 5, and everything after that - the return to Candlekeep, Durlag's Tower, the werewolf island, and the chapter 7 plot - gets erased down to the cap if I ever load a save. (Which becomes inevitable due to a crash issue when the game runs out of object slots in memory)
If I'm going to recruit Yeslick, that probably means speeding through the chapter 3 plot with minimal side trips, skipping almost all the fights when entering the Cloakwood, and only clearing out the place properly on the way back.
The werewolf island ... that's worth about 20K XP each in a full six-member party. A decent chunk, but leaving it out isn't going to break things. Especially since the experience needed for leveling is exponential. Double your total XP, gain one level.
Yeah, that would cause trouble with the timed character quests. I've never gone for that myself; my parties pretty much always press on until fatigue starts to become an issue. Yeslick might get one rest so has at least some spells to work with, but not more than that until I'm heading back out.
And then there's the extreme - I've done a run in which I never rest at all, and win the game in under two weeks of in-game time.
There's something to be said for doing at least one evil run
Perhaps getting a tad off-topic, but just wanted to reinforce this. If you've played through the game several times but have never done an authentically evil run, it really is worth your time to explore what the saga offers on this front. It requires some advanced play with managing reputation, but can be good. The evil solution to the Silke quest arguably gives you a better reward, if you don't mind the reputation hit, for one example.
And the EE versions of the games help big time with the opportunity for a fully evil party in BG2 if you want now. You may even see some cool interactions between multiple evil companions if you go this way. And personally I found Dorn to be a very well written evil companion.
Dorn being a fag makes him less cool...but that was Beamdog sjw´ing, i think Korgan is the coolest evil npc, unashamedly asshole, short, smelly and bloodthirsty.
Guy skins with axes, brootal.
I enjoy playing evil, theres lots benefits, specially bg2, bg1 i cant remember anything you get from it though...
The way I read Garrick, he's been duped by Silke. Folly, not complicity. After all, if you go through with Silke's dastardly plan, Garrick refuses to join you: "You're no better than Ms. Silke! It will catch up to you someday, mark my words." (And then he leaves forever)
Interesting. I didn't know this; I always ended up getting attacked by Silke for refusing to go along with her plan. The conversation prior to that point made it look like Garrick was her accomplice.
And if you take the other path and turn against Silke, Garrick acts surprised at her deception and denounces her as evil. But even so, acting like Garrick was Silke's knowing accomplice all along is well within the bounds of roleplaying.
The biggest thing to watch for ... when you get Coran, he's initially quite poor at trapfinding. He starts with a skill level of 20, and you need 50 to detect the web traps in the very next area.
Correct, but I'd downplay the importance of the "very next area" bit, as all traps set by Ettercaps are Web traps, and therefore all you need to do is Detect them, not necessarily Disarm. Either stand right next to them & bait the enemies to come to you, or deliberately spring them with a character with high Stealth (such as *ahem* Coran) and just wait them out.
Of course, you definitely do still need a high Traps score by the time you reach the end of the Cloakwood, though.
I think I may have a bigger experience problem because I don't do the werewolf isle for roleplaying reasons. The only way to get to that isle is to steal or trick the guy who holds the map. A shame there's no way around this. I always end up refusing to help Mendas because what he's doing is clearly shady. An evil party wouldn't have this problem.
The trickery involved in getting the Sea Charts for Isle of Balduran is fairly minor. As I recall, you enter the sailors' office building (pick the lock), tell the guy at the door who confronts you to mind his own business (may require high charisma to keep him from turning hostile), then you go upstairs to ask the captain if he needs anything. He wants his grog, so you go the Blushing Mermaid and pay off his debt (980 gold) to get the foul swill. Then take it to the captain and he just gives you the sea charts.
It's closer to bribery than genuine trickery - at least you can roleplay as the captain being in on it. Now you could of course also kill all the sailors, or pickpocket people, but assuming you don't do that then acquiring the Sea Charts isn't too unethical. Besides, I assume you can go back to the office after the Isle of Balduran and return the charts (leave them in a desk or something), although I haven't tried that as I always just sell them afterwards.
There's no call for posting homophobic stuff on here. I don't care if you want to slam Beamdog or a particular character. But this kind of stuff is not cool.
The trickery involved in getting the Sea Charts for Isle of Balduran is fairly minor. As I recall, you enter the sailors' office building (pick the lock), tell the guy at the door who confronts you to mind his own business (may require high charisma to keep him from turning hostile), then you go upstairs to ask the captain if he needs anything. He wants his grog, so you go the Blushing Mermaid and pay off his debt (980 gold) to get the foul swill. Then take it to the captain and he just gives you the sea charts.
It's closer to bribery than genuine trickery - at least you can roleplay as the captain being in on it. Now you could of course also kill all the sailors, or pickpocket people, but assuming you don't do that then acquiring the Sea Charts isn't too unethical. Besides, I assume you can go back to the office after the Isle of Balduran and return the charts (leave them in a desk or something), although I haven't tried that as I always just sell them afterwards.
I would have stopped at picking the lock. I generally don't enter buildings with locked doors without a good reason. For example, if I'm investigating an area such as the mines, I have a legitimate reason to be there because I'm investigating crime in the area (or just defending myself from the assassins that are clearly being sent out from the area).
In most cases, not randomly wandering into locked buildings hasn't had major adverse effects in BG1 or BG2. There are only a few minor exceptions. I never manage to return the ring of a widow's deceased husband to her in Nashkel because the only way into her home is through a locked door. You already know about being unable to go to werewolf island in BG1. The biggest problem in BG2 is missing out on Celestial Fury in the Guarded Compound area. I just accept it as part of the cost of role alignment. Can one truly claim to run a good party but then choose to break rules when doing so is to our advantage?
If you want to roleplay a reason for going to the Guarded Compound (which doesn't actually have a locked door), the documents in Nalia's quest (when she gets arrested and you have to accuse her accuser) mention an "outpost of slave lords located in the Temple District". Whatever quest content the compound might have had planned, it was all cut before the game released - but that document clearly references the Guarded Compound. Definitely enough there for a bunch of do-gooders to investigate.
The Merchant's League Counting House is less justifiable; if you go there when you don't have the quest, you meet a guard who attacks you for trespassing and brings in a pack of blink dogs. You definitely don't have a good reason to be there.
On the widow's husband's ring ... you find it next to the corpse of someone who was obviously a miner. Presumably, you could ask around town for where to go to return it to his family.
(And I have a component in my tweak mod that adds map markers for the random houses that come up in BG1 quests, once you have the key item or have spoken to the key NPC. In this case, a marker would appear for the house once you picked up the ring and returned to town.)
Comments
As others have said, I find priests to be great casters. They can often win BG1 fights that you have no business of winning at low level. The perfect example is taking Branwen to command Greywolf to death. The great thing is that they have awesome spells at pretty much every single level. And a great early item in the holy ring. Command, hold person, silence 15 radius, summon undead. Secondary option for dispelling invisibility or magic. Even slow poison can be clutch in the early game. Remove paralysis too. Chant is great too for fighting large mobs. I tend to find priests more critical in early BG1 than mages even, as mages tend to be so squishy that their combat role is limited. Priests tend to especially shine in the fights against bandit or bounty hunter groups -- some of the biggest challenges in early BG1.
And that's if you're playing on a desktop/laptop, I have no idea if the mobile version has the same number of bottom-row buttons or not.
I know this is just a gripe, but it has a real answer. Turn Undead, like Find Traps/Detect Illusion and Hide In Shadows, is a modal ability. Those have to have buttons on the main bar in order to function properly; you activate the ability and then it does its thing once per round until you deactivate it.
"Thieving", by contrast, is a one-shot effect. You use it on an object, the game rolls the dice, and you either succeed or fail. Moving it to the special abilities list adds extra clicks, but it doesn't break anything.
Yeah this is a great point, I hadn't realized until playing SoD honestly, with the cleric/thief. It really is unfortunate and kind of sucks the fun out this particular class. As jmerry says, the solution isn't to put the turn undead button on the second row. But still, it's crappy and always makes me want to, unfairly, avoid this class.
Personally, I couldn't justify leaving my sister behind, especially after she backed me up right after Gorion got murdered. The days in the wilderness fighting wolves and bears as a level 1 were difficult. It also helps that she's a very flexible character. I chose to dual her to a mage, but I would have been fine with keeping her as a pure thief as well. Your original plan calls for switching her out to Coran. On paper, he's chaotic good, but he really stretches the meaning of good to its limits; Coran is a thief and a womanizer. He's not someone I would want to be fighting battles with and trusting my life to.
As for Garrick, the reason I don't take him is quite simple: He tried to trap me into getting murdered by Silke (or shedding innocent blood). The moment that witch died, Garrick should have felt lucky I didn't gut him as well. I let him live, but declined to take him into my party.
Branwen is a more complicated choice for non-roleplaying reasons. Because you can pick her up much earlier than you can Yeslick, I imagine a fair number of people stick with her because of the experience they've already split with her by the time they get to the mines. I took a different approach. After saving Branwen from being a statue for eternity, I declined her offer to join the party. She didn't take it well. I ended up taking the shortest possible path to the mines just to pick up Yeslick asap. I'll admit it wasn't the easiest path through the story though. I relied on numerous rests with puny healing skills to recover hp. But since your requirement was that your party have no evil members rather than only good members, I think it would be fine to keep Branwen as well. If you don't, I'm curious to know how much sharing "wasted" experience with her ended up hurting Yeslick's final level at the end of BG1.
The way I read Garrick, he's been duped by Silke. Folly, not complicity. After all, if you go through with Silke's dastardly plan, Garrick refuses to join you: "You're no better than Ms. Silke! It will catch up to you someday, mark my words." (And then he leaves forever)
With the EE's catch-up mechanics, there's very little waste involved in sharing XP with your companions. Companions get a trigger that adds XP when they join, up to a maximum of 32K if the protagonist has at least that much. Yeah, Yeslick comes late and might end up a bit behind ... but he only needs 128K total XP to reach his maximum (7/7) level under the BG1 cap. As long as you go there reasonably promptly and don't clear out the entire wilderness, you shouldn't have a problem maxing out Yeslick's levels.
Interesting. I didn't know this; I always ended up getting attacked by Silke for refusing to go along with her plan. The conversation prior to that point made it look like Garrick was her accomplice.
32k experience is quite easy to reach if the protagonist is used to measure the experience gain. The other problem is that I already have nearly a full party (Yeslick is the last to join), so I rushed to the mines asap. Ironically, having a full party might actually help slow down the protagonist's XP gain a bit to help a bit with reaching Yeslick, but I think it hurts in the long run because Yeslick himself gains XP slower. Is there an optimal way to manage experience? For example, which of these paths would be the best?:
1. Recruit only absolutely required characters until Yeslick joins. Because you have a smaller party, the protagonist goes over the 32k a bit faster, but there are also more quests left to level up party members who join later.
2. Recruit as many members of your final party as possible, asap. You reach the 32k cap a bit later because all quest experience has to be split with them. Yeslick joins as close to 32k as possible.
3. Assuming you don't want a full party, recruit dummy characters you don't intend to keep, just to slow down your experience gain. As soon as you get Yeslick, boot them all so the remaining experience gets split more evenly. But maybe without a full party you don't need to do this at all?
A bit off topic:
There are some tough fights in the mines, and it doesn't help my strategy of constant resting that Yeslick insists on clearing the mines within 14 days. (Another reason I struggle with this deadline is that I try to sell every piece of loot possible, but given that gold isn't as big a problem as I once believed, I will probably just toss all but the most important loot). I probably loaded Yeslick's spell slots with nothing but healing until he was out of the mines. But it could be worse. I don't even know how many quests I'd have to defer to ensure Alora didn't lose out on too much XP.
I think I may have a bigger experience problem because I don't do the werewolf isle for roleplaying reasons. The only way to get to that isle is to steal or trick the guy who holds the map. A shame there's no way around this. I always end up refusing to help Mendas because what he's doing is clearly shady. An evil party wouldn't have this problem.
The deadlines are among the less enjoyable parts of the run, especially if I rushed to get to an area and am therefore less prepared for the fights. From a story perspective, I'm not sure I understand the rush. The enemies in the game are extremely dangerous foes. You're being hunted relentlessly by bounty hunters at every step. It makes sense to do at least some planning/preparation before jumping into a potentially deadly fight.
The last step there isn't strictly required, but ... well, Dorn.
Having that evil run lets you indulge in those obviously evil options the game occasionally provides. And reap the consequences, like fighting the law.
On the XP-counting ... when I really optimize things, like pushing to 32K solo and then recruiting my entire party, a completionist run brings that whole 6-person party to more than 250K XP each. I'll typically hit the cap around the end of chapter 5, and everything after that - the return to Candlekeep, Durlag's Tower, the werewolf island, and the chapter 7 plot - gets erased down to the cap if I ever load a save. (Which becomes inevitable due to a crash issue when the game runs out of object slots in memory)
If I'm going to recruit Yeslick, that probably means speeding through the chapter 3 plot with minimal side trips, skipping almost all the fights when entering the Cloakwood, and only clearing out the place properly on the way back.
The werewolf island ... that's worth about 20K XP each in a full six-member party. A decent chunk, but leaving it out isn't going to break things. Especially since the experience needed for leveling is exponential. Double your total XP, gain one level.
Yeah, that would cause trouble with the timed character quests. I've never gone for that myself; my parties pretty much always press on until fatigue starts to become an issue. Yeslick might get one rest so has at least some spells to work with, but not more than that until I'm heading back out.
And then there's the extreme - I've done a run in which I never rest at all, and win the game in under two weeks of in-game time.
Perhaps getting a tad off-topic, but just wanted to reinforce this. If you've played through the game several times but have never done an authentically evil run, it really is worth your time to explore what the saga offers on this front. It requires some advanced play with managing reputation, but can be good. The evil solution to the Silke quest arguably gives you a better reward, if you don't mind the reputation hit, for one example.
And the EE versions of the games help big time with the opportunity for a fully evil party in BG2 if you want now. You may even see some cool interactions between multiple evil companions if you go this way. And personally I found Dorn to be a very well written evil companion.
Guy skins with axes, brootal.
I enjoy playing evil, theres lots benefits, specially bg2, bg1 i cant remember anything you get from it though...
Correct, but I'd downplay the importance of the "very next area" bit, as all traps set by Ettercaps are Web traps, and therefore all you need to do is Detect them, not necessarily Disarm. Either stand right next to them & bait the enemies to come to you, or deliberately spring them with a character with high Stealth (such as *ahem* Coran) and just wait them out.
Of course, you definitely do still need a high Traps score by the time you reach the end of the Cloakwood, though.
It's closer to bribery than genuine trickery - at least you can roleplay as the captain being in on it. Now you could of course also kill all the sailors, or pickpocket people, but assuming you don't do that then acquiring the Sea Charts isn't too unethical. Besides, I assume you can go back to the office after the Isle of Balduran and return the charts (leave them in a desk or something), although I haven't tried that as I always just sell them afterwards.
There's no call for posting homophobic stuff on here. I don't care if you want to slam Beamdog or a particular character. But this kind of stuff is not cool.
I would have stopped at picking the lock. I generally don't enter buildings with locked doors without a good reason. For example, if I'm investigating an area such as the mines, I have a legitimate reason to be there because I'm investigating crime in the area (or just defending myself from the assassins that are clearly being sent out from the area).
In most cases, not randomly wandering into locked buildings hasn't had major adverse effects in BG1 or BG2. There are only a few minor exceptions. I never manage to return the ring of a widow's deceased husband to her in Nashkel because the only way into her home is through a locked door. You already know about being unable to go to werewolf island in BG1. The biggest problem in BG2 is missing out on Celestial Fury in the Guarded Compound area. I just accept it as part of the cost of role alignment. Can one truly claim to run a good party but then choose to break rules when doing so is to our advantage?
The Merchant's League Counting House is less justifiable; if you go there when you don't have the quest, you meet a guard who attacks you for trespassing and brings in a pack of blink dogs. You definitely don't have a good reason to be there.
On the widow's husband's ring ... you find it next to the corpse of someone who was obviously a miner. Presumably, you could ask around town for where to go to return it to his family.
(And I have a component in my tweak mod that adds map markers for the random houses that come up in BG1 quests, once you have the key item or have spoken to the key NPC. In this case, a marker would appear for the house once you picked up the ring and returned to town.)