Thoughts about party strength, composition and relative powers (from Vanilla game to modified ones)
shevy123456
Member Posts: 282
I recently played an "all mages party", where the requirement was to have one mage class per character (e. g. fighter/mage is fine, or first berserker then mage dual class is fine too; although I broke my aim here when I let the Dusk NPC remain. I thought I needed at the least one solid fighter class to dish out enough damage.)
In earlier play-throughs I may have e. g. Korgan, Dusk and the main character a Kenzai - or something like that in combination. So three warrior classes. Usually I'd have at the least two solid ones, Korgan and Dusk.
I tend to play on insane level, so it is to be expected that things are hard. And Tactics Remix mod - while the mod is IMO a bit broken, it is still good to test relative strengths nonetheless. (Except that improved Irenicus thing; that dragon is annoying. When you are stronger than Irenicus, you also break game-lore with these modifications, but that's an aside.)
Looking at NPCs such as Tyris flare (mage/fighter), her performance is consistently underwhelming compared to, say Korgan. Even Korgan vanilla. So it does not seem to be worth it to have a mage/fighter combination, as opposed to having a dedicated warrior and a dedicated mage (say, Edwin).
Then there is Jan. Jan is kind of cool, mage/thief illusionist is a lot of fun, but he also is the one who tends to die early on. Similar problem with Aerie, though I think Jan is more fun (and that strange mod where Aerie tries to regenerate her wings but fails, is also very weird ...)
Jaheira is somewhat ok, as fighter, but she underperforms compared to pure fighters such as Korgan. Being able to summon elementals is neat, but in melee she tends to get BBQed quite easily still, so I tend to not include her in late game runs.
Viconia is solid and a great NPC overall. I can't stand Anomen, but Viconia is usually the one tasked with cleric duties.
For my main character I tend to first get berserker, then switch to mage, largely because the magic system is one of the best parts of BG2EE, in my opinion. But having the main character a berserker or kensai as one class only, is probably more efficient.
Dual-classes or triple classes are nice because of their flexibility, but power-wise they seem to really perform badly compared to single class characters.
Not everything has to be min-max powergamed, and many mods are at the least semi-broken (some item drops are just too insane), but I feel as if the warrior class is the strongest and simplest in many ways, especially for berserkers. Of course mages and clerics can do unique things warriors can not do, but if I look back at all fights, the warriors performed so much better overall compared to weaker characters. There are add-ons, such as Crucible, where the fight dynamics totally changed when I was able to kill the boss quickly - using warriors. So whirlwind spin onto the primary target. Whereas, if I did not have these warriors, I simply could not win the fight at all. (This also has to do with resistances; some mods seem to really wing it here. Vanilla BG2EE has less of these issues, but the underlying problem of warriors simply being so much stronger than the other classes, still prevail.)
Now a lot depends on strategy and setups, such as thief using traps, and backstab, but it seems so much more work compared to just sending in the big warrior boys to get the job done.
I may test this one day in the future with some warrior-heavy group, e. g. 4 warriors or so, and then support (aerie perhaps or just dvaradime as he is triple class). I think it will probably simplify many fights too.
In earlier play-throughs I may have e. g. Korgan, Dusk and the main character a Kenzai - or something like that in combination. So three warrior classes. Usually I'd have at the least two solid ones, Korgan and Dusk.
I tend to play on insane level, so it is to be expected that things are hard. And Tactics Remix mod - while the mod is IMO a bit broken, it is still good to test relative strengths nonetheless. (Except that improved Irenicus thing; that dragon is annoying. When you are stronger than Irenicus, you also break game-lore with these modifications, but that's an aside.)
Looking at NPCs such as Tyris flare (mage/fighter), her performance is consistently underwhelming compared to, say Korgan. Even Korgan vanilla. So it does not seem to be worth it to have a mage/fighter combination, as opposed to having a dedicated warrior and a dedicated mage (say, Edwin).
Then there is Jan. Jan is kind of cool, mage/thief illusionist is a lot of fun, but he also is the one who tends to die early on. Similar problem with Aerie, though I think Jan is more fun (and that strange mod where Aerie tries to regenerate her wings but fails, is also very weird ...)
Jaheira is somewhat ok, as fighter, but she underperforms compared to pure fighters such as Korgan. Being able to summon elementals is neat, but in melee she tends to get BBQed quite easily still, so I tend to not include her in late game runs.
Viconia is solid and a great NPC overall. I can't stand Anomen, but Viconia is usually the one tasked with cleric duties.
For my main character I tend to first get berserker, then switch to mage, largely because the magic system is one of the best parts of BG2EE, in my opinion. But having the main character a berserker or kensai as one class only, is probably more efficient.
Dual-classes or triple classes are nice because of their flexibility, but power-wise they seem to really perform badly compared to single class characters.
Not everything has to be min-max powergamed, and many mods are at the least semi-broken (some item drops are just too insane), but I feel as if the warrior class is the strongest and simplest in many ways, especially for berserkers. Of course mages and clerics can do unique things warriors can not do, but if I look back at all fights, the warriors performed so much better overall compared to weaker characters. There are add-ons, such as Crucible, where the fight dynamics totally changed when I was able to kill the boss quickly - using warriors. So whirlwind spin onto the primary target. Whereas, if I did not have these warriors, I simply could not win the fight at all. (This also has to do with resistances; some mods seem to really wing it here. Vanilla BG2EE has less of these issues, but the underlying problem of warriors simply being so much stronger than the other classes, still prevail.)
Now a lot depends on strategy and setups, such as thief using traps, and backstab, but it seems so much more work compared to just sending in the big warrior boys to get the job done.
I may test this one day in the future with some warrior-heavy group, e. g. 4 warriors or so, and then support (aerie perhaps or just dvaradime as he is triple class). I think it will probably simplify many fights too.
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