The Unpopulars
uberduberdad
Member Posts: 53
Hi All,
It's been quite a while since I have been on the forums, glad to see they are still as active as ever.
I am going to do a run through BGEE as the unpopular team. That is, I will fill it with those NPC's that are often overlooked, either because they are considered boring, useless, odd, annoying etc. My theory is that all NPCs have a place in the game and we just need to find out what.
Who are your most unused/unloved/downright despised NPCs?
And for my char, I will used what ever is considered to be the most useless/disliked class or kit and even race.
Love to hear your thoughts.
Uberduberdad
It's been quite a while since I have been on the forums, glad to see they are still as active as ever.
I am going to do a run through BGEE as the unpopular team. That is, I will fill it with those NPC's that are often overlooked, either because they are considered boring, useless, odd, annoying etc. My theory is that all NPCs have a place in the game and we just need to find out what.
Who are your most unused/unloved/downright despised NPCs?
And for my char, I will used what ever is considered to be the most useless/disliked class or kit and even race.
Love to hear your thoughts.
Uberduberdad
3
Comments
Anyway, my personal picks for the first game would have to be
Montaron
Kagain
Eldoth (and Skie, if you don't want Montaron anymore)
Tiax and/or Quayle (I use them so little, and they're so similarly annoying, I think of them as interchangeable)
Faldorn
As for your character, I've never been a Wizard Slayer but I've heard it sucks.
Quayle,
Faldorn,
Jaheira,
Eldoth or Garrick (not sure who's the least popular of the two; I think Eldoth).
These aren't my personal picks, but the NPCs I think are least liked. The only personal pick I made was Jaheira, most annoying NPC imo, but many people like her.
Rasaad is also quite unpopular I think (though more for his underpoweredness than his personality.
So basically you have no group until cloakwood
But as Elminster points out, you can't really put your party together until chapter four.
Maybe you could go with NPCs that are either unpopular or who don't seem to get much love even if they are fairly well respected for their skills. Like the ones you might occasionally hear a good word about now and then, but overall they don't seem to get much mention on the forums...
If you do that then maybe
Kagain
Rasaad
Safana
Shar-Teel
Faldorn
and for the PC maybe a Transmuter who must commit to filling more than half of his his spell slots with Alteration spells:
Burning Hands
Color Spray
Shocking Grasp
Knock
Strength
Haste
Melf's Minute Meteors
Slow
Fireshield
Otiluke's Resilient Sphere
Polymorph Other
Polymorph Self
Stoneskin
Teleport Field
Wizard Eye
Lower Resistance
I guess if you want to go a little easier on yourself you could make him a Fighter/Transmuter (you'll have to use EE Keeper but you'll simply assign the kit after dualing to Mage).
You can go straight to Beregost to get Kagain. Just stay off the road. I think I would get Shar-Teel next.
That's if you use the party I pulled out of the air there. The same principle applies if you assemble a party mostly with characters available in chapters 4 and 5.
As you clearly realize, as a Transmuter starting out the rule of thumb would be to avoid fights until you have assembled enough a party. Stay off the main road early on!
If you make the Transmuter's alignment CN and you pick Find Familiar as one of your memorized spells at character creation, you'll get a cat familiar which has 99 stealth and 50 magic resistance. So you could use the cat to scout ahead. Actually, CN would fit pretty nicely for a wizard that is committed to using touch spells early on (if you do go with the self-imposed roleplaying rule to use Alteration school spells for more than half of your slots)--i.e., at least in the sense of risk-taking, living dangerously, etc.
If this is just a BG run (versus entire saga), and if you decide to dual a Fighter to Transmuter* I would dual at Fighter 3 just to give the character a bit of hardiness and some weapons profs (you can pour profs into a ranged weapon if you like; darts are powerful in BGEE). You can get your Fighter skills back pretty quickly then.
A tip to achieve the dual-classing as described within the first hour of play if you don't mind using meta-game knowledge/powergaming:
You need a total of 14,000 XP to get the Fighter skills back at Fighter 3/Transmuter 4. The Fighter duals at level 3 which is 4000 XP. Then after gaining 10,000 more XP as a Transmuter you'll reach level 4 and you'll get the Fighter class skills back.
The Greater bassilisks are worth 7000 XP and lessers are worth 1400 XP. You'll be splitting the XP with Kagain, so your PC is getting half of the total. But if there are four greater bassilisks then you're good to go. I forget how many of each type there are. IIRC there's at least three greater bassilisks there. And I'm pretty sure there's around 5 lesser bassilisks.
So start by killing one greater bassilisk and one lesser bassilisk. That gets you to Fighter 3. Then dual to Transmuter. Then kill the rest of the bassilisks.
* Use EE Keeper to assign the Transmuter kit after dualing to Mage.
On the other hand, you could use EE Keeper to change Shar-Teel's weapons profs back to something closer to vanilla, which is
Large Swords ++
Small Swords ++
Missile Weapons ++
I always enjoyed using her with a greatsword in the vanilla game, so I'd probably go with
Two-handed Sword ++
Two-handed Weapon Style ++
Crossbow ++
And by the same token, since you can get by with one Thief, you could take Safana; and instead of taking Shar-Teel, you could opt for a chapter 5 NPC.
Edit: I think I really do want to do this.
However, in testing it out I realized that I had forgotten that you can't dual to a Mage kit from Fighter. So I'll be using EE Keeper to assign the Transmuter kit after dualing to Mage.
Even more fun would be a totally illegal Barbarian/Transmuter but I'm not sure if that can be done via EE Keeper. As far as I know you can't dual-class from a Barbarian to start, and you can only assign one kit via EE Keeper, not two.
I guess a Berserker/Transmuter might be possible. But the more I think about it, either Berserker or Barbarian/Transmuter is overkill anyway.
I would also apply a few under-used kits to more-or-less appropriate characters.
My Charname for that will be a gnome or halfling jester.
@Lemernis you could start as berserker or barbarian, then dual to mage, and use EEKeeper to change the kit to the desired one (e.g. transmuter). Be advised that every single time you level up, you have to add the extra bonus spell you get from the kit, because iirc it is hardcoded that you can't dual TO a specialist mage. Multiclass specialists do not have this problem, likely because of gnomes.
Now for some reason, I do clearly recall though that you can dual from Berserker however, as I have done so with a Berserker/Cleric.