While we are waiting Options

[Shaitan]

So I've made ready my line up for a game with ver. 4,3 installed. Rather I've two lineups:

The first will be with a party consisting of:
Me T->C dual hammer/maces or hammer or flail
Jaheira (romance) dual scimitar/club
Keldorn two handed
Valygar dual katanas?
Nalia->Immy Shortbow
Xan ?

The second will be:
me F/M dual long swords / flail or hammer?
Ariella (custommade T->C) Slings
Jaheira (romance - what a surprise) dual scimitar/club
Valygar dual katanas?
Kivan Longbow
Nalia->Immy Shortbow

Don't know yet wich to choose... thus I would like some opinions.

I'll have the following mods:
Kelsey SoA+ToB
Allison
Kivan
Xan
Auren
Enhanced BG2
Dungeon Crawl
Tower of Deception
BanterPacks
something from EoU
and ofcourse IA

What say you?

[lroumen]

Well to be honest, I've played enough wizards in the game so I don't feel like replaying another one of them again anytime soon.

I have taken a look at the Vagrant kit and at first glance it looked quite good and I was thinking of replaying a ranger. On second glance I find it much too powerful for my first run through IA since v2. It has many more bonuses than any other class except the monk, but the monk has many cons which the vagrant doesn't really seem to have.
- melee capabilities of a warrior (2 stars or 5 stars is not a shocking difference in the game)
- elemental immunities of a druid (even better than a druid and much earlier than a druid too)
- some other immunities and save bonuses (that's quite okay, comes at the same time for monks for instance)
- very powerful summoning as innates rather than spells (i.e. no spellbook slots need to be sacrificed, this is really too good)

The cons are not really cons.
- charisma minimum is not a restriction (for instance, a roll of 5 is increased to 12, winning 7 points on the whole roll. It's for instance easy to roll a 90+ stats paladin due to his many minimum requirements and it's much harder to roll an 85+ fighter)
- no dualclassing... since clerics can only use blunt weapons this means you can only use hammers, maces, flails and the likes of it. The problem however, is that the main feature of Ia v4/5 is the forging of Judgement Day for good aligned single class protagonist warriors, so if you're ranger primary who is best built around melee.... there is not really a reason to dual-class and it's quite smart to keep it a normal ranger so you can use Judgement Day yourself. Of course you can give it to Mazzy or Keldorn, but it's still the protagonist that you'll want to keep an eye out, so the bonuses of the sword will probably best suit the vagrant.
- restriction to studded leather... this is how I always played rangers, since with armor higher than studded you cannot use thieving skills and rangers excel in stealth already very early on in the game. There are some nice ranger stealth armors out there anyway, so that's not really a bad thing.


I think I will play IAv5 as a Vagrant, but only after my first run through with an avenger. If I play Vagrant I think I might even try it soloing or with only one mage party member (Aerie -> Imoen for instance). I've never played a primary druid before and I'd like to try out the Avenger now and see how well it functions. I've played with Cernd as a werewolf of course and I know the strength of the melee capabilities of druid spells using Jaheira a bunch of times. I think I am forced to allow it to get proficiencies faster though so I can get 1 star in all primary weapons so I can try them all out once I find them.

I know that exporting a multiplayer game to singleplayer only renders 2 characters speechless. I just like having my characters with something to say, even if I've seen it plenty of times before. There's also some combinations I haven't used yet, so that may give me some fun talks in between the adventuring and in between the difficult battles. I don't play BG solely for the strategic fights, I like the whole storyline and interjections very much (and for such reason I've helped with some NPC projects). I could always make an Avenger NPC mod though.