How long do you wait for the "premium" equipment?
Rik_Kirtaniya
Member Posts: 1,742
Well, well, so this has been a singularly bothersome question that haunts me everytime I'm starting a new playthrough of Baldur's Gate 2. You know, there are a number of "quality items" that you get access to immediately after you escape from Irenicus' Dungeon, mainly all the stuff at Adventurers' Mart and the Copper Coronet, and a few other places here and there. A little later you also get access to stores in Trademeet. All together, that's a pretty large stock of quality equipment, and some of them are highly overpowering (Robe of Vecna and Vhailor's Helm, and so on). Now all you need is money, and money is very easy to get in-game.
I mostly get tempted to take Jan, give him a few potions of master thievery, and then sell-steal-repeat at any fence, generally the Black Market Thief in the Shadow Thieves guildhouse, to generate a huge sum of gold, and then, buy everything off every place. (I don't steal from honest merchants.) Well, whether you call this cheating or cheese or some silly bug or anything, it can be done in the game. And since it can be done, one may do it. And so, effectively, you have all the money you need to buy anything and everything you find in the stores.
This is where my question comes. There are several things in the balance. Ethics, challenge, enjoying the game, and balance itself. (Maybe there are more things as well which have escaped my notice.) You can either get all the things you can buy and start the game with a Robe of Vecna, Sling of Everard, Azuredge, Vhailor's Helm, and so on, or you can restrict yourself so as to avoid those until a certain (??) point.
So I want to ask you all frankly, what do you do? Get or wait? Or maybe, what do you get and for what do you wait (and for how long, if yes)? Or something else?
I mostly get tempted to take Jan, give him a few potions of master thievery, and then sell-steal-repeat at any fence, generally the Black Market Thief in the Shadow Thieves guildhouse, to generate a huge sum of gold, and then, buy everything off every place. (I don't steal from honest merchants.) Well, whether you call this cheating or cheese or some silly bug or anything, it can be done in the game. And since it can be done, one may do it. And so, effectively, you have all the money you need to buy anything and everything you find in the stores.
This is where my question comes. There are several things in the balance. Ethics, challenge, enjoying the game, and balance itself. (Maybe there are more things as well which have escaped my notice.) You can either get all the things you can buy and start the game with a Robe of Vecna, Sling of Everard, Azuredge, Vhailor's Helm, and so on, or you can restrict yourself so as to avoid those until a certain (??) point.
So I want to ask you all frankly, what do you do? Get or wait? Or maybe, what do you get and for what do you wait (and for how long, if yes)? Or something else?
2
Comments
I don't remember the exact skill value required for the Black Market Thief, but something above 200 (or maybe it's even less, I don't remember) is completely safe. Completely.
Of course the availability of so many "premium" items right at the start, with the simultaneously existing restriction of not being able to buy them all at once due to insufficient monetary budget, is a game balancing mechanism. You might have one OP-hero in your party, but not a party of OP-heroes from the start.
Option 1: Stay faithful to roleplay, earn the money you do need for story-advancement, and only then start to go shopping – those items that are still useful at that point of time.
Option 2: Fulfill all your wishes … and cheat the money you need, or even the items themselves. Why bothering with exploit mechanisms if there's a savegame editor or a console?
Those are the two I decide between.
By the way, Rogue Rebalancing – IIRC – disables this exploit.
Exploit: a deliberate action that was not intended by game play mechanics and reproduces an unintentional result that rewards the player in a way that was not designed
aka: fighting kangaxx the demi lich and pick pocketing the ring of gaxx in lich form, and then killing him in demi lich form for a 2nd ring of gaxx
giving the statue the kobold shard and the hand of dace ( in the spell hold dungeon) and clicking on it multiple times before it disappeared to gain multiple piles of 29500 XP per character, essentially gaining 100s of 1000s of XP per character
Strategy: a deliberate action that was intended by game play mechanics and reproduces an intentional result that rewards the player in a way that was designed
aka: stealing from stores to get items for free ( based on the fact you had enough pick pocket skill ) and then selling stolen items back to stores who buy stolen items - there is nothing in this example that goes against the mechanics of the game hence this is a 100% legitimate way of doing things - it may be considered straight class cheese, but legitimate none the less
using a scroll of protection from magic on yourself when fighting kangaxx the lich/demilich to help win the battle - there is absolutely nothing in the game that says this is illegal by any means, and the protection from magic scroll is a legitimate item and can be used however the player sees fit
But from normal shops that don't buy stolen goods, go hog wild, steal them blind.
There's a difference between and (Fist time I try quoting here and it isn't shown correctly in the preview, so no idea how this will look like …)
If there's only one ring of Gaxx in the world, for example, finding a clever way to loot it twice doesn't carry with it an in-game reason for why a second ring would be there. It just means BioWare or Beamdog made a coding mistake, so I'd view that as an exploit.
Similarly, while there's an in-game mechanic for pickpocketing merchant items, selling them back crosses a line because a reasonable NPC would surely notice the purchased items are identical to what he believes he currently has in stock, which would then cause him to see he no longer has those items, which would then cause him to go hostile. For that reason, I don't consider the pickpocket-sell-repeat technique to be "earning" gold but rather exploiting the game's primitive AI for NPCs.
I'm not sure this is a very common approach, though. Some other players I know tend to see the game mainly as a test of their own ability to maximize gold/XP/whatever under the code provided by BioWare/Beamdog. In that way of thinking, if you as a player solve the "puzzle" of how to obtain two rings of Gaxx or infinite merchant gold, then the in-game rewards for those actions are rightfully yours and if the devs have any objection to that, then they should have done a better job coding the game. (Some would even say the devs are validating those strategies by not issuing a patch to block them, though it seems more likely to me that the devs simply want to accommodate varying playstyles.)