Blovski

I've done Skaen and Hylea's endings. Skaen is far and away my favourite 'evil' concept in vidyagames for a long time (probably since Torment) and his attitude about the necessity of the illusion of divine justice to keep the upper classes in line really appeals to the medievalist in me. Hylea's seemed like the nicest option. Well, I say nicest, but I kind of also think there's a lot of Old Testament justice in showing up the parents who abandoned their hollowborn kids and coming through for those who didn't. It has the value of being a lesson in a way that none of the other options really are.

Yeah, extra weapon slot usefulness is either the gunner build which switches between three or four arquebuses to start the fight or Estoc + Pollaxe + Ranged, which is very useful for anyone with adventurer weapon group. At least, that's how I did it as a Barb. Meaningful differences in damage having different slaying options as well.

I most definitely brokered a truce there on my second runthrough.

Eh, beats the Bioware approach where every game has a ton of racism and has you beating up the bad mean racists but doesn't really engage with it in any meaningful way. Godlikes should probably be played up because they're A) weird, B) rare and C) sterile.

One of my favourite things running through the game a second time is looking for the various bonuses you can get along the way, does anyone have a comprehensive list. I'll stick down the ones I know of and polish them up with the stats later. Gift From The Machine (Teir Nowneth, +1 Might, x1.05 Endurance) Resentment (Sacrifices during Skaenite cult quest, Hiravias is +1 Dex, +1 Pierce/Slash DR IIRC) Doemenals/Dozens/Crusader (x0.3 Crit/+5 acc vs enemy targeted by ally/ some DR thing) Fang Training (Rescue from Rymrgand's temple) Song of the Heavens (Songbird Quest, +1 Per, +1 Lightning DR I think) Dungeon Delver (Rescuing the adventurers from the Fangs in Northweald) Various promises to the gods bonuses. Any major things?

Baldur's Gate 2 is much better than BG 1, which is delightful in its own little way nonetheless. Pillars is rather different to either of them - more text heavy, different combat system, more modern approach to frustrating the player and so on. For my money, BG 2 is the best game of its kind ever released. Brilliant mix of items, loads of replayability, beautiful environments, fitting story and writing.

Just curious, but could you elaborate? I havent played the game yet but its disappointing hearing some of the stuff about the stronghold, but as I remember in BG2 all the stronghold did was give out quests (enjoyable quests as I remember), but after just became a building where you could store items? At least I remember my rangers hut being used largely for just RP and storage after id done the quests. Well, BG 2's big pluses on that were that the strongholds were customised to your character class, which was really cool (although I think that it was probably far less useful from an objective standpoint than the TOB/KOTOR style hub you have in this game). Didn't have any of the beautiful dynamic environment etc stuff that PoE has either.

Pfff, don't obsess about it. If you're on normal you'll have no trouble just going with your heart. If you're on hard you don't need your characters to be built perfectly to get through.

There are a lot of really great Wizard spells. Confusion is monstrous when you hit level 7. Slicken and Chill Fog are both rather good early even after the nerfs. There's a reduce DR Foe AOE spell that helps a lot. Eldritch Aim is surprisingly good because it gives you more hits and crits. There's also a 3rd level AOE one that reduces enemy attack speed. One of the big advantages wizards have is that they can deal a lot of different damage types (compared to Priests, Druids might be a little stronger as damage casters). Out of interest, what are people going for at 2nd level? I've been using the combustible wounds one, which is nice but still kind of limited.

My experience from gameplay is that Wizards are reasonably strong. They certainly don't feel lackluster compared to priests for me. Their CCs are great (I mean, Confusion is just ridiculous), their debuffs are substantial, they have a ton of solid long-range (certainly feels like they outrange Priests) damage spells with a lot of different damage types and a few very effective buffs (Eldritch Aim, etc.). The Grimoire issue has just never been a problem or really felt limiting for me and I run a buy-everything-on-a-whim party with arbitrary self-imposed looting restrictions. Some of the self-buffs and other spells that I want to like really make no sense in a full party (so, when would a wizard cast Endure Elements? When is Minor Grimoire Imprint EVER going to be useful?). I have issues with a few of the spells being underpowered but I don't really think the Wizard is.

Isn't the accuracy contingent on the target being attacked by allies IIRC? An extra 30% crit damage/duration doesn't seem bad at all in contrast.

To be entirely honest, this game is both kind of not a DS game and exactly what the series needed. Fun story and writing, defined character classes. Much better multiplayer compatibility. Less of DS 1's most obtuse mechanics and it still has the whole world in one screen thing that was the real signature of Chris Taylor's series imo. I'm more likely to play this again than either of the original DS games.

Ugh man the base NWN game was terrible. The bit of Mask of the Betrayer I played was pretty fun though.

Actually, if you did all the Athkatla quests in Chapter 2 you'd end up severely overleveled, able to throw around 6th level spells, before doing Bohdi - never mind Spellhold and the Sahuagin City. It's impossible to achieve 'full balance' of the XP so that everyone reaches max level just at the end, unless you have a game with no optional content. That's an obvious, obvious truth. Right now players can rush the main path and skip what, half of the optional content and still hope to reach a reasonable quantity of XP. The problem is that Defiance Bay and Od Nua open up in Chapter 2, encouraging others to really overfeed on XP. Again, I think the solution here is a simple XP mod. True enough but doing all the Athakatla quests involved some really endgamey content and tough fights (Firkraag, Kangaxx, Twisted Rune) in a way that Defiance Bay doesn't seem to.

it wasnt really a max lvl but a max xp, since not all classes level at the same rate in d&d 2nd edition. but in baldurs gate 1 you will never hit the lvl cap just by doing all quest and sidequest. it was needed intencional xp grinding. For example, spaming rest in the werewolf area, were your rest was interrupted by 6-7 werewolfs worth 3ks xp each. (and even then you need to spam kill for 3-4 hours with a full party) In BG 1 You would *easily* hit the XP threshold by just doing quests + sidequests. I think I was at 250,000XP at the end of BG 1 + TOTSC on my most recent trilogy run with a full party of 6. I think in BG 2 without TOB you would reliably hit the XP cap if you did everything IIRC.

There's a little nice detail in there - so, companion comments on restoring Brighthollow, I got a couple of things from the Doemenals as well

Main issue is Defiance Bay being such a massive splatter of XP, really. Even if you do just a little of that city's content (which is almost all available as soon as you enter rather than gated by map progress) you'll be waaay above a level that's balanced for the Cliaban Rilag, the Sanitarium and the massive tower. By contrast in BG 2 you'd often end up overlevelled for the last couple of quests you fill out before you go to Suldenessellar but you didn't really peak that early. I don't have a problem at all with the overall XP thing of the game but I think it gets out of whack with the main quest. @The poster above: I think the issue is more that the level cap is currently rather low pre-expansion and there aren't that many difficult endgame fights to justify it being any higher, instead of the problem being that people should have to do all of the game's content mechanically to hit level 12.

Priest. Circle of healing or whatever it's called. Use draining weapons or such. Fighters have a constant endurance regen that is great. Never have trouble with it on the frontline. Have a lot of trouble on everyone else whenever there are archers or such.

Eh, I like having the stupid tough boss at the end of the Endless Paths. The breath attack probably does too much damage given that you've not really got any conceivable way of buffing against it (cf the Shadow Dragon and Firkraag fights in BG 2).

Really interesting balance problem here. Did anyone shapeshift a lot in the original I.E. games? (I tried to make a shifter in NWN but the nature of it was that because I didn't build for it from the getgo I was literally always two levels behind when my shapeshifting would have been useful).

The patch also doubled the XP bonus from playing solo from 25% to 50% (as I understand it), so that probably compensates somewhat for it.

Durance has a phenomenal arc. Eder's really likeable with his obsession with petting all the animals. I really like Sagani (and just having female characters who aren't in the Bioware singles club mould is great). I like Kana. Found Pellagina a bit dull. Aloth and Hiravias have potential but I just don't feel that *interested* in them.

Also, @OP: 'Raised the bonus for having fewer than six party members from 5% per character under the limit to 10% per character under the limit.' How exactly do you think this patch is the devs trying to screw solo play?

This is the first time an RPG has really made me feel the attrition of multiple encounters, which is a much better approach imo than instant magic total restoration on encounter end. On normal I don't think I was ever pushed for camping supplies. Now I've moved up to hard I'm really enjoying the tighter limitations, drive to pick up stuff from the environment and keep my spells for the tough battles. Wizards would have to be a whole lot worse to balance out all their spells being per-encounter. I'd love to see the bitching on the forums after that change.

Really, another thread by you with 'devs' in the title? Nothing wrong with some balance changes. @Delicieuxz Balance in single player is more a matter of pruning dominant strategies to allow other options to shine. XCOM's Long War mod and especially Desktop Dungeons' beta have been the two best examples of that I've seen. Things like Baldur's Gate II's magic invisibility staff (because equipping and unequipping it circumvented True Sight effects) or the high-end ToB Thief traps were balance flaws in a single player game that probably stopped me from having more fun working out alternative strategies because they were too easy. On the other hand, say, Backstab just didn't work on most major targets in ToB because of magic defenses and arbitrary immunities, which is really frustrating.