Misc. Questions on Difficulty, Party Composition, and Spell Selection Options

[nataben1314]

It seems as though, judging from another and not having actually played the mod yet (waiting for v4), that mages are now in a situation where they are used almost totally for dispelling, immuning other characters, and creating summons. Would those in the know (esp. sikret/thetruth) agree with that? I'm not trying to imply that this is necessarily a negative if true, I'm just interested for the sake of future spell and party selection

Speaking of party selection, do you think I'd be making things too hard for myself to make a party of single-class characters? I've always disliked multiclasses unless soloing, and am not too keen on having a party full of five fighter/x's and one ranger/cleric.

And on difficulty, I wonder if it would be possible to make a rough difficulty guide for the quests of chapters 2 and/or 6? What I envision is something like e.g. "windspear hills: level 9-13 minimum" or whatever. With all the new content its difficult for me to know which are the easier quests and which are the ones best left to chapter 6. And for a player of my (low) skill level, it is difficult to determine if you are losing a fight due to wrong tactics, or due to the fact that you're simply too low of a level for that fight. So a general quest difficulty guide (at least for chapters 2/6 where the game is not very linear, and maybe a minimum avg. level before going off to spellhold) would likely save me much frustration and/or lots of me making HELP threads

thanks, and I can't wait until v4.

[nataben1314]

Update: I've started! Unfortunately, my progress is going to be excruciatingly slow until I can either figure out what's wrong with my computer, or reformat, because the game gets unplayably choppy after about 15 minutes (this has nothing to do with IA as it's been happening for a couple months now).

After playing for a bit with that six char party, I came to the realization that I absolutely despise micromanaging six characters (all my BG2 runs up until now have been solos, but I know solo is impossible on IA). So I've decided to try a four player party, and am having much more fun:

1. protagonist halfelf ranger/cleric, dual-wielding hammers/flails/maces
2. Cernd
3. Gnome Fighter/Illusionist, dual-wielding longswords and eventually maybe scimitars for belm, if I ever sum up the courage to visit its now guarded location.
4. Human Berserker dual-classed to mage at level 9, will get grand-mastery in axes and dual-wielding, and maybe pick up points in short-sword for kundane if I need extra ApR.

I'm still working on the untouched portion of the game, so we'll see how it goes once I get to the IA stuff, to see if I am tactically good enough to pull off a four player party. Hopefully the fact that the chars will be of a higher level, and there will be more gold available will help make up for the lack of two characters.