Legacy of Baal ?
DevardKrown
Member Posts: 421
is this mode even enjoy-/do-able for a Normal Level 1 CHARNAME ?
started it , needed 10 ingame hours just to kill the rats in Candlekeep , every kobold one shots my slowly growing party, mini combat events seem to be impossible (recruiting vic with a 5 man lvl 1 party , good luck that soldier wrecks them all) mages suddenly have like 5 apr crushing your party with their walking stick... its somewhat frustrating to get going.
on the bright side i never took the time to walk into every house of bergeost to get the lockpick xp ...that was a blast.
started it , needed 10 ingame hours just to kill the rats in Candlekeep , every kobold one shots my slowly growing party, mini combat events seem to be impossible (recruiting vic with a 5 man lvl 1 party , good luck that soldier wrecks them all) mages suddenly have like 5 apr crushing your party with their walking stick... its somewhat frustrating to get going.
on the bright side i never took the time to walk into every house of bergeost to get the lockpick xp ...that was a blast.
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Comments
Yes, there are people able to do it.
Having opponents somewhat equal to my party, but with the change that they use their spells, abilities and equipment far smarter in combat than vanilla feels more like a good duel.
If i misuse Heart-of-Winter- / Legacy-of-Bhaal-Mode with a low level party, the opponents are just far higher level than my party is when i meet them ... can be done with experience, tactics and patience, but is no fun to me.
there is nothing about tactic and experience if a 6 man party of level 2's walks into 3 Basic Kobolds , your Main character gets instantly Sniped and one shoot , and the other 5 die before the Death Screen comes in.
Sleep/Charms/Blind all gets resisted and that 5 dmg magic missile is a joke on a 100HP+ Kobold
this mode is not doable with your run of the mill LVL1 CHARNAME and the BG NPCS ..i know this now and will treat it like that.
if you make a youtube lets play showing me how you solo LoB mode with a Single lvl1 Character freshly created from start to finish unmodded and every bloody fight there is, then i will climb the heavens and Kick "Ao" out myself and to make room for you.
Until then i see this as Empty boosting trying to make me mad.
Yes, it's about things like this to increase asap your level. There are even more op tricks
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/48843/legacy-of-bhaal-solo-insane-just-a-taste?new=1
but i stay with "there is nothing about tactic and experience" that's just plain cheese ! and it wasn't every Possible fight there is ....but i see if you just trap/zone-switch-cheese them all there is no point in showing them, so for that i don't go to AO in person but i send a Vacation Order , lets see if he responds
also i didn't know that you can slaughter elminster for 26k xp that's good to know. Only thing left to do here is to do it Bumbur (The Hobbit) style and eat them by the Wheel
tackled the achievement as what it is , silly , thrown 4 max level Rangers with shortbows at it, a Fighter/cleric halforc with sling and heals and a Thief6/Mage for haste and 10meter invisibility , just steamrolled through running past everything aside the enemy's i HAD to kill. no sidequests no extras just the bare minimum.
This of course makes much less sense to me in baldurs gate to me...
The hardest part of the game is essentially the struggle from 1st to 2nd, and the struggle from 2nd to 3rd is not much better if you are still liable to be one-shotted by many of the foes. At 3rd, you get start to get 2nd level spells, your thief skills are becoming reliable, your fighters have a decent number of hit points and potentially a 3rd pip in their favorite weapon, and so the game starts to become fun as you have options, rather than worrying about dying at every turn.
That part of the game is what is being insanely extended by the LoB mode - and I agree that it does not sound fun without the xp bonus. It sounds more interesting if played as a second play through, where the xp bonus is much less relevant (likely the main char has already maxed xp).
The other thing with HoF mode, of course, is that the xp/level cap of IWD is so much higher than BG, so you can continue leveling to meet the challenge head-on. Not so in BG, and I don't think anyone is going to consider changing that (for all there are players who disable the xp cap, even for regular play).
I realize the extra xp vs no extra xp is a bit of a polarizing subject. Although I am firmly on the side of "no extra xp" I must admit the first game would be a lot more difficult, perhaps to absurd levels - but I am confident that SoA and ToB will be really great without the experience that basically ruined nightmare modes difficulty.
For those that prefer not to have the extra difficulty, they can always play the other settings. The intention of nightmare or LoB as I understand it wis to be a very difficult game mode, and the added experience definitely removed that intended difficulty by overleveling your party in the first couple hours of play.
For what it is worth, it is a lot easier to add a bit of experience to your party if you feel you aren't being compensated properly, than it is for me to remove xp or levels from my party.
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When I first started playing Nightmare I loved the extra experience it provided and got to watch my party get really strong at a really fast pace. I had iron skins on my ranger cleric by the time i was done with the slavers and even HLAs were popping up very early on in SOA. At some point I realized the mode I was playing was in many ways easier than the normal "insane" difficulty setting simply due to the extraordinary amount of experience available. The enemies were certainly tougher but because I was encountering them with so many more levels, my saves/hitpoints/thaco and spells were so much better that it negated the difficulty setting and then some.
If the point of LoB or Nightmare was to create a more perilous and challenging environment to play in, introducing extra experience seems to contradict that intention quite clearly. This doesn't mean that a second look should be taken at perhaps BG1 if the LoB setup is too extreme, but it does mean that I agree with the developers choice to "fix" what I consider an unintentional bug in their initial implementation of nightmare mode.