a few suggestions for IA Options

[katage]

I'm new to the forums and IA, but I have a few ideas that might work. First, I should start with the things I think should probably be added, in keeping with the spirit of the mod.

Since Sikret has expressed distaste for commonly used cheats, a cheat being defined as an exploit of the game's engine that a DM would not allow in PnP, I want to call attention to the "cast-and-attack" trick. This is illegal in PnP and makes little sense from the perspective of realism. Fighting and casting spells both require extensive time to perform under the pressure of combat. It also works to the distinct benefit of fighter dual- and multi-classes, at the relative expense of single-classes, though I've gotten the impression that single-classes in IA are more viable overall, at least compared to multi-classes. Casting spells and attacking should therefore be disabled in IA if possible, and if it is not possible, a simple reminder to the player in the readme or one of the in-game hints would call attention to the matter.
I realize that the trick is popular, and I myself am very fond of it, but it makes sense in the context of IA.

Second, I'd like to criticize PFMW as a tanking spell. Many creatures in IA appear to lack normal weapons and hence have few options when dealing with characters with PFMW. The only way to counteract it is Breach and RRoR if necessary, which not all enemies should probably have and which seems a tad monotonous. The spell effectively makes the caster the perfect tank against any enemy fighter type for four rounds, giving the caster a great deal of time to cast spells in safety. Preventing the caster from casting it more than once every few rounds (maybe 2 turns, so it could not be chained) would make it less overpowered. Absolute Immunity has a similar problem, though arguably it is less overpowered, being a 9th level spell.
Other spells also would be better balanced by weakening them. Reducing the strength of some resistance spells (Protection from Fire, Protection from Magical Energy) would make item or Vagrant resistances less redundant, and give the player a reason to memorize Protection from Fire rather than, for example, Flame Arrow. Lightning Bolt also seems rather overpowered, though few seem to use it. Many areas in IA have close quarters and it is easy to get lightning bolts to bounce correctly and hit an enemy four or five times: the player can just fire the bolt directly north or south. In the vanilla game, I've found Wands of Lightning and Lightning Bolt spells to be more than capable of dealing with almost any enemy, and they still enjoy an advantage over Flame Arrow in many situations in IA, even if they are not as strong. Mirror Image and Stoneskin also are considerably more valuable than most spells: there is little reason to memorize Blur or Teleport Field instead. Feeblemind is another example, effectively being a low-level Finger of Death that bypasses Death Ward. Making the duration temporary and/or tweaking its effects (IWD2 just removed spellcasting for 2 turns) would make Hold Monster a more viable alternative. Offering a higher- or lower-level Breach equivalent would make other 5th-level spells more worth memorizing (how often does anyone use Shadow Door or Domination?). Emotion's excessively high duration also gives it a great advantage over other disablers. There is little reason to use Hold Monster or even Chaos when one has access to Emotion.
At the same time, other spells receive nerfs that make them nearly useless for many important encounters in IA. With enemy MR and its save bonus and low duration, Glitterdust has few uses in IA. Generally, I think a broader variety of useful spells would be suited to a tactical mod.

I think we should consider re-introducing (Minor) Spell Deflection and Minor Spell Turning. Currently the player has few spell protections at his or her disposal. Creating some Transmutation spells to replace them would also work, and have the additional benefit of balancing mages, since transmuters miss out on so many excellent abjuration spells. Arguably, these spells give the player an unacceptably strong defense against enemy spells, requiring fewer spell slots than Improved Invisibility+SI, but the enemy would also be able to counter them with spells aside from RRoR, if we also included some lower-level debuffers that IA overwrites. Making Pierce Magic and even Secret Word or Spell Thrust more practical would balance mages versus sorcerors by making a broader variety of spells more valuable.
I think it is important that we make a broad variety of spells useful. A tactician would naturally want to be familiar with many different methods, and I understand that the tactician ideal is a big thing for IA players here. Extra options can help give more color to the game and make some battles less monotonous. I have found it unfortunate that the strategy for dealing with mages in IA usually boiled down to RRoR, True Seeing, Breach, and Chain Lightning. In IA, Wizard Slayers, Insect Plague, Silence 15' Radius, Miscast Magic, backstabs, or even simply using a Fireball to interrupt a spell, are all of very little value. Such strategies are just not worth pursuing in IA considering the strength of RRoR, True Seeing, Breach, and Chain Lightning, and I think it would be nice if those tactics were useful at least in some situations.
Other times, I've found spells to be useful only in very specific, unique circumstances. I was delighted to find that Animate Dead was useful before level 15 in dealing with the rats in the Lilarcor quest, but unfortunately, that spell had little use elsewhere, and so I never bothered to memorize it.

There are other spells that IA overwrites that could be reintroduced without damaging game balance or weakening difficulty. Otiluke's Resilient Sphere could be weakened by offering a saving throw bonus and lasting several rounds less than the vanilla version, which would give the player another tool to deal with enemies that was not overly powerful. In vanilla BG2, ORI was much like a Maze spell with a saving throw. Project Image could be modified to either prevent the image from casting spells or drain the caster's spells when the image did cast spells. This might be difficult to implement, however.
One might argue that reintroducing these spells would either require increasing the number of spells overall--preventing the sorceror from picking all of them--or require overwriting useful new IA spells. This could be avoided by replacing less-commonly used spells such as contagion, which few players (I assume) bother using anyway.

Moving on to IA-specific changes, I would call attention to IA kits' hefty advantages to other builds. The Auramaster has essentially every advantage over other druids. It suffers in melee power and HP, but then, druids aren't there for dealing melee damage anyway (none of them are very good at it), and the Auramaster's Mirror Image and extra castings of Wondrous Recall, Ironskin, and other buffs make it a much better tank than the other classes. Its disadvantages are much smaller than its advantages. A druid is there for spellcasting, and the Auramaster is simply better at spellcasting. Its access to RRoR even makes it a strong alternative to a mage--a significant leap for a divine spellcaster. There is therefore little reason, from a tactical perspective, to pick an Avenger or Shapeshifter over an Auramaster.
Much the same holds for the Vagrant and Riskbreaker, along with vanilla kits such as the Swashbuckler and Necromancer. Their advantages appear to more than outweigh their disadvantages relative to other kits, making other kits more or less pointless. There is a reason why IA players tend to use IA kits or classes which have access to IA-only items. If we are to even keep the other kits, it would make sense to strengthen them or replace them with more sensible alternatives to the Vagrant et al.
Much the same holds for IA-modified and IA-introduced items. It seems that much of IA character advancement is focused on, or even dependent on, the player collecting ingredients for Cromwell. They give the player something to go after, but they are so strong that it punishes players who want to stick with vanilla weapons. I realize that IA is very much a new game, but making IA items less overwhelmingly superior to vanilla items would open up some new opportunities for players, which fits the point of a tactical mod.
IA also lets SI block the thief's detect illusions ability. As I understand it, the rationale is twofold: first, the ability in vanilla BG2 is overpowered, as it gives a low-level the ability to dispel any mage's illusion spells, no matter how skilled that mage may be. Second, SI's blocking the ability is justified because it blocks divination "tools" and not simply spells. I have two objections. First, detect illusions can be nerfed without rendering it incapable of helping the party deal with mages using SI:Divination, and all mages in IA who use Improved Invisibility--the most troublesome illusion spell in IA, I think--always use it with SI:Divination, which makes the detect illusions ability mostly useless against important IA enemies. To weaken it without rendering it more or less useless, we could edit the 2da file for racial thief bonuses to give all races a -150 penalty to detect illusions. So, in order to get detect illusions to work well, the player would have to expend 10 thief levels, 250 points, on detect illusions, which I think would be an acceptable sacrifice. We also might give the detect illusions ability a certain chance to fail, even if the thief's skill is 100.
The ban on traps is also limiting. The objection, as I understand it, is that the enemy cannot set traps to harm the player, since the player already knows where all the traps are and can disable all of them, though I believe the dispel magic trap in the drow ambush is an exception. I would advocate instead that the enemy gain spell-like abilities that would mimic player traps. That way, the enemy could have thieves do something besides backstabbing, adding some variety, and it could justify giving the player another tool without giving the player a simultaneous and unreasonable advantage against all enemies. Traps can be fun, and they are one of the reasons thieves are actually useful in BG2. With many enemies in IA immune to backstabbing, the thief often has little utility in combat unless it is a Swashbuckler. Time Traps might still be better off being disabled, or at least weakened, for the sake of balance.
Adding some content for protagonists besides Vagrants, good fighters, Necromancers, Swashbucklers etc. would also balance the classes. I realize that this might require a lot of extra work, but it also might be helpful just to expand protagonist-specific bonuses to other kits: for example, letting non-Necromancer mages get access to their own version of an Amulet of Hades. Adding some content for certain NPCs would also make them more viable. While Edwin had essentially every advantage over Nalia in vanilla BG2, the trend is reversed and is equally unbalanced. Adding an upgrade for Edwin's amulet would help. Much the same holds for Minsc vs. Valygar; Valygar is by and large the superior character, given his IA bonuses. Given Minsc's popularity, I would actually have assumed that Minsc would enjoy the extra attention.
I have found the early game fairly frustrating, and I have gotten the impression that players have gotten alienated from IA when they find its battles too difficult. The fact that many battles that were easy in vanilla BG2 are incredibly hard in IA should only exacerbate that problem and deprive IA of the attention it deserves. I struggled through many encounters before realizing there was a recommended order of quests list. I ended up doing the quests in much the same order as other people have, but only after much time was spent. Including the recommended quest order list in the readme instead of the forums would help new players adjust. Goodness knows the work of Sikret and IA testers isn't appreciated much if few people play the mod all the way through. Adjusting the difficulty would help bring in a bigger audience. I have gotten the impression that most people find that the late game is actually noticeably easier than the early game, and that some party builds just aren't very good at handling IA's new challenges. That probably scares off a lot of prospective players, and nobody benefits from that. I would recommend that the difficulty of early encounters be tweaked a little, such that the challenges would keep pace with the player's levels and access to weapons. Perhaps the enemies could get stronger as the player collects Cromwell's new items.

After wading through many criticisms and complaints about IA, and hearing Sikret's defenses against most all of them, I think there might be some genuine problems that are driving prospective players away. Sikret has made it fairly clear that he wants people to play IA "the way it was meant to be played," to avoid the three C's (cheap, cheesy, and cheating), and learn new tactics for harder challenges. I think Sikret wants to learn to be more like a true "tactician," to get more skilled at playing the game, rather than relying on shortcuts as a means of overcoming the challenges that Sikret has spent so much time trying to make difficult. Sikret wants to make the player think if they are to succeed. His analysis of many criticisms of IA is that they are motivated by ignorance of the mod and frustration at their own lack of tactical skill rather than any real problem with the mod.
I do not think this is right, and I don't think it's helping the problem. I'll grant that a lot of people could stand to show IA more of the respect it deserves, but I don't think IA's critics reliance on "cheesy" tactics is the problem. It often isn't clear what tactics ARE considered acceptable in IA. Sikret has stressed that IA requires more tactical skill, but when stage manipulation, game engine tricks, hit-and-run strategies, attacking from beyond the enemy's field of vision, traps, and many standard D&D spells are removed from the game, it's not clear what Sikret expects beyond using IA kits and items and spells. I have often wondered how Sikret and other players manage typical encounters in IA. What spells do they use? What items? What did they sell? What did they hoard? How did they position their characters? Who do they target? How do they know which tactics work and which are doomed to fail? I think much of the frustration at IA is because the game is indeed fundamentally different from BG2, and they are left with almost no clues as to how to play this very new and very difficult game. I was bewildered by IA when I first started playing it. The enemy's new immunities and abilities appeared to come out of nowhere. Seeing a dragon in the Copper Coronet sewers, and getting killed by some mysterious spell just seconds after I entered the area, made IA appear nearly impossible. I have no doubt that surprises like that have done more to confuse and scare away players than to surprise and interest them. Merely repositioning the encounters so the easier fights are in familiar places would probably draw in many more people.
One might resist this idea on the grounds that it is counter to the spirit of IA, which is to provide a serious challenge for serious players. I like the idea of a strong challenge to the player's skills, but there is a great deal of marvelous content that many players appear to be losing out on. I stopped playing IA multiple times out of frustration with reloads or boredom from the somewhat standardized enemies of IA: the mages have SI and PFMW, plus immunity to area-effect spells by virtue of pre-cast spells that my Remove Magic spells could never dispel, and the fighters have damage resistances and regenerate. Invariably, the fights would become highly simplified. I would focus on surviving the enemy's spells and then gradually, slowly, eventually whittle down the monster after 5 minutes of fighting, not counting the initial period of tanking. I tried many methods and cheating and actually found them more satisfying than playing by the rules. Sikret has stressed the sense of satisfaction at overcoming a stronger enemy, and I've often felt that, but the seemingly endless stream of amazingly powerful minibosses--not just bosses, but even the Shadow Jailer and Vengeance Trolls shortly into a quest--made the fights feel more tiring and slow than challenging and epic. Having played the game for 10 years, I don't think it was lack of skill or experience that was holding me back, and having played many different parties and having tried many different mods and new tactics--I even did an Insane Solo Poverty with a Conjurer/Cleric and Kensai/Druid, instead of the usual sorceror--I don't think it was a reliance on cheesy methods that was holding me back, either. IA is hard. Hard enough to discourage people from taking the time to enjoy all the new content that IA introduces.
Making the early game easier would likely invite many more people to stick it through to the end, and I've gotten the impression that Sikret really does want people to play and enjoy this mod. One could argue I'm trying to make IA something it's not or defeat its purpose by weakening it, but there's much to enjoy in IA, and those Improved Crawlers and Noble Trolls and regenerating enemies of all stripes are probably the main reason why people don't finish IA, and walk away without appreciating what it has to offer.

[critto]

Hey, katage!

Welcome to the board. Great to see some well thought-out feedback from a long-term player. I am such a player myself, and also have been a tester and developer of IA for some time as well. Wanted to comment on a few things from my perspective. Just keep in mind that the thoughts are my own and do not necessarily express Sikret's or the team's and our vision of IA.

Since Sikret has expressed distaste for commonly used cheats, a cheat being defined as an exploit of the game's engine that a DM would not allow in PnP, I want to call attention to the "cast-and-attack" trick. This is illegal in PnP and makes little sense from the perspective of realism. Fighting and casting spells both require extensive time to perform under the pressure of combat. It also works to the distinct benefit of fighter dual- and multi-classes, at the relative expense of single-classes, though I've gotten the impression that single-classes in IA are more viable overall, at least compared to multi-classes. Casting spells and attacking should therefore be disabled in IA if possible, and if it is not possible, a simple reminder to the player in the readme or one of the in-game hints would call attention to the matter.
I realize that the trick is popular, and I myself am very fond of it, but it makes sense in the context of IA.

While I personally never considered this to be a cheat, unlike firing a bow and running away for instance, Vuki is indeed right in saying that this is a core mechanic of BG's engine which cannot be adjusted without some serious hacking of the executable, and even then it's a hell of job. So there is no practical solution to that problem, unfortunately.

Second, I'd like to criticize PFMW as a tanking spell. Many creatures in IA appear to lack normal weapons and hence have few options when dealing with characters with PFMW. The only way to counteract it is Breach and RRoR if necessary, which not all enemies should probably have and which seems a tad monotonous. The spell effectively makes the caster the perfect tank against any enemy fighter type for four rounds, giving the caster a great deal of time to cast spells in safety. Preventing the caster from casting it more than once every few rounds (maybe 2 turns, so it could not be chained) would make it less overpowered. Absolute Immunity has a similar problem, though arguably it is less overpowered, being a 9th level spell.

You may have a point here, however whenever we can, we try to make monsters' AIs more intelligent and they will try to attack characters that are not protected by PfMW so that simple tanking with a F/M, for instance, is not such a simple option. However, there are limits to what we can do with AI and if a player leaves all his party somewhere far away and tanks the whole lot of enemies with one B->M dual-class, the enemies will have no choice but to continue their futile attempts. This is, however, what we consider a cheesy tactic and not an honest approach to the encounter.

Other spells also would be better balanced by weakening them. Reducing the strength of some resistance spells (Protection from Fire, Protection from Magical Energy) would make item or Vagrant resistances less redundant, and give the player a reason to memorize Protection from Fire rather than, for example, Flame Arrow. Lightning Bolt also seems rather overpowered, though few seem to use it. Many areas in IA have close quarters and it is easy to get lightning bolts to bounce correctly and hit an enemy four or five times: the player can just fire the bolt directly north or south. In the vanilla game, I've found Wands of Lightning and Lightning Bolt spells to be more than capable of dealing with almost any enemy, and they still enjoy an advantage over Flame Arrow in many situations in IA, even if they are not as strong.

Vagrant is only one character with such resistances, and I can't really say that his usefulness is diminished by effectiveness of Protection from Fire. This is simply an advantage of having a resistant character that indeed frees up a bit of spell book for other choices. However, this is a single case of having a Vagrant character. There are still five more chars that need to be protected and I fail to see how having a less effective Protection from Fire would free up more slots? You'd need to memorise more of those in order to have characters protected, wouldn't you? And there are encounters where having your characters protected from fire is crucial (Firkraag and Ancient Dragon, to name a few). As for the Fire Arrow, I cannot completely agree that it is less useful simply because Lightning Bolt has a chance of friendly fire and thus can hurt your own party members. Fire Arrow does not have this disadvantage and is perfectly suitable in numerous situations with enemies that possess a weakness to fire (vampires, to name one).

Mirror Image and Stoneskin also are considerably more valuable than most spells: there is little reason to memorize Blur or Teleport Field instead. Feeblemind is another example, effectively being a low-level Finger of Death that bypasses Death Ward. Making the duration temporary and/or tweaking its effects (IWD2 just removed spellcasting for 2 turns) would make Hold Monster a more viable alternative. Offering a higher- or lower-level Breach equivalent would make other 5th-level spells more worth memorizing (how often does anyone use Shadow Door or Domination?). Emotion's excessively high duration also gives it a great advantage over other disablers. There is little reason to use Hold Monster or even Chaos when one has access to Emotion.
At the same time, other spells receive nerfs that make them nearly useless for many important encounters in IA. With enemy MR and its save bonus and low duration, Glitterdust has few uses in IA. Generally, I think a broader variety of useful spells would be suited to a tactical mod.

Blur and Mirror Image have different abilities and therefore I once again fail to see how one diminishes other's effectiveness? Mirror Image is a decent option for tanking or avoiding area-effect spells such as ADHW (which might also be considered a questionable tactic, since it's kind of senseless when you think about it). Blur gives extra bonuses to AC and such, increasing your character's durability in melee. They have different applications and usually a mage have enough slots on second level to fit both, in my experience.

I think we should consider re-introducing (Minor) Spell Deflection and Minor Spell Turning. Currently the player has few spell protections at his or her disposal. Creating some Transmutation spells to replace them would also work, and have the additional benefit of balancing mages, since transmuters miss out on so many excellent abjuration spells. Arguably, these spells give the player an unacceptably strong defense against enemy spells, requiring fewer spell slots than Improved Invisibility+SI, but the enemy would also be able to counter them with spells aside from RRoR, if we also included some lower-level debuffers that IA overwrites. Making Pierce Magic and even Secret Word or Spell Thrust more practical would balance mages versus sorcerors by making a broader variety of spells more valuable.

The main issue with broader variety of spells is that it's harder to balance their usage and make sure that all spells are appropriately powerful or not. Simply re-introducing the spells would cause issues with balance of some other kind. The spells we have now are tested in many versions of IA with many different party compositions. This is the main issue. For each version of IA, we try to introduce new spells or re-balance existing ones. But we put them through the gruesome process of testing. We unfortunately do not have the manpower to do this on a wide scale. IA was always precision work. In this we differ from other similar mods such as SCS or Spell Revisions which offer great deal of variety at expense of less thorough testing which usually happens during players' runs where they experience bugs or problems and work together on it. It's a great and valid way to work on a mod, just not in our case

I think it is important that we make a broad variety of spells useful. A tactician would naturally want to be familiar with many different methods, and I understand that the tactician ideal is a big thing for IA players here. Extra options can help give more color to the game and make some battles less monotonous. I have found it unfortunate that the strategy for dealing with mages in IA usually boiled down to RRoR, True Seeing, Breach, and Chain Lightning. In IA, Wizard Slayers, Insect Plague, Silence 15' Radius, Miscast Magic, backstabs, or even simply using a Fireball to interrupt a spell, are all of very little value. Such strategies are just not worth pursuing in IA considering the strength of RRoR, True Seeing, Breach, and Chain Lightning, and I think it would be nice if those tactics were useful at least in some situations.
Other times, I've found spells to be useful only in very specific, unique circumstances. I was delighted to find that Animate Dead was useful before level 15 in dealing with the rats in the Lilarcor quest, but unfortunately, that spell had little use elsewhere, and so I never bothered to memorize it.

Some spell are indeed less effective, I agree. Some, however, are simply not effective for you The great example you provided is Animated Dead. Skeleton Warriors are great summons and remain strong for quite a while. Many players use them on par with other summons.

One might argue that reintroducing these spells would either require increasing the number of spells overall--preventing the sorceror from picking all of them--or require overwriting useful new IA spells. This could be avoided by replacing less-commonly used spells such as contagion, which few players (I assume) bother using anyway.

This is the dilemma. We need to make choices on spells. Which to improve, which to remove and so on. It's hard to say which are used and which are not by players. If we do add or re-balance a spell, we try to make it generally useful. However, one size does not fit all and, as indeed Sikret has said, we cannot satisfy everybody.

Moving on to IA-specific changes, I would call attention to IA kits' hefty advantages to other builds. …. I realize that IA is very much a new game, but making IA items less overwhelmingly superior to vanilla items would open up some new opportunities for players, which fits the point of a tactical mod.

About the kits. Yes, our new additions and re-balancing of classes is a core part of IA. We do indeed intend to work on balancing out the classes in the future releases. New IA kits and classes are a great way for new players to get into the game because these kits are substantially more powerful and thus provide an easier learning curve. However, there were more than plenty of runs with experimental and not well-balanced parties. The same goes for items. Indeed, custom quests and items are part of the brand-new content and, as with the tactical encounters, we spend a lot of time to test everything thoroughly. Simply piling up additions to classes and dishing out untested, buggy quests is not something we are willing to do. That said, I would never agree that the game is only playable with brand-new IA classes. Many of kits, characters and NPCs are useful and effective in IA (fighter kits, paladins, rangers, dual-classes such as R->C or F->C, the same kind of dual into a mage and so on). The improved equipment is a necessary part of a tactical mod, because we need to give the party equally powerful means of defeating the enemies. Some items are class- or kit-specific and serve as a part of the reward for new quests. But these items constitute perhaps only 20% of all the items on the list. The rest is available to wide range of characters, including personalised items for some of the NPCs.

IA also lets SI block the thief's detect illusions ability. As I understand it, the rationale is twofold: first, the ability in vanilla BG2 is overpowered, as it gives a low-level the ability to dispel any mage's illusion spells, no matter how skilled that mage may be. Second, SI's blocking the ability is justified because it blocks divination "tools" and not simply spells. I have two objections. First, detect illusions can be nerfed without rendering it incapable of helping the party deal with mages using SI:Divination, and all mages in IA who use Improved Invisibility--the most troublesome illusion spell in IA, I think--always use it with SI:Divination, which makes the detect illusions ability mostly useless against important IA enemies. To weaken it without rendering it more or less useless, we could edit the 2da file for racial thief bonuses to give all races a -150 penalty to detect illusions. So, in order to get detect illusions to work well, the player would have to expend 10 thief levels, 250 points, on detect illusions, which I think would be an acceptable sacrifice. We also might give the detect illusions ability a certain chance to fail, even if the thief's skill is 100.

The general motivation about rebalancing of Detect Illusions was based on the fact that a thief's ability is more of a skill and used to detect enemy thieves, who use "natural" means of hiding. They shouldn't be able to dispel magic, it is never implied that thieves' invisibility detection is a spell or some kind of divination. You might not agree with this reasoning, but this what we went with and doubtfully change in the future. We will find ways to make rogue classes fun and interesting to play. We already did it in the upcoming IAv7 with Swashbuckler and it shows nice results. Hopefully, the players will like it too. As for the traps, the decisions were made about them before my time with IA, so it is not for me to judge the decision. I personally not a big fan of traps and therefore do not miss them.

Adding some content for protagonists besides Vagrants, good fighters, Necromancers, Swashbucklers etc. would also balance the classes. I realize that this might require a lot of extra work, but it also might be helpful just to expand protagonist-specific bonuses to other kits: for example, letting non-Necromancer mages get access to their own version of an Amulet of Hades. Adding some content for certain NPCs would also make them more viable. While Edwin had essentially every advantage over Nalia in vanilla BG2, the trend is reversed and is equally unbalanced. Adding an upgrade for Edwin's amulet would help. Much the same holds for Minsc vs. Valygar; Valygar is by and large the superior character, given his IA bonuses. Given Minsc's popularity, I would actually have assumed that Minsc would enjoy the extra attention.

As I said, adding new content or even rebalancing an existing NPC is a lot of work. We will never just throw in some stuff without doing a full run to test it (in case of a NPC). That is why this process is slow-going. But we're getting there.

I have found the early game fairly frustrating, and I have gotten the impression that players have gotten alienated from IA when they find its battles too difficult. ... That probably scares off a lot of prospective players, and nobody benefits from that. I would recommend that the difficulty of early encounters be tweaked a little, such that the challenges would keep pace with the player's levels and access to weapons. Perhaps the enemies could get stronger as the player collects Cromwell's new items.

The recommended quest order is just that. A good way for a new player to get into the game doing encounters in an approved way in terms of increasing difficulty. This is definitely not a single way to do it, and more experienced players go about the game in a different manner. Some attempt more challenging tasks such as Mencar's party or De'Arnise stronghold shortly out of the dungeon. There is no one size fits all and the recommended order is definitely not the only one.

I do not think this is right, and I don't think it's helping the problem. I'll grant that a lot of people could stand to show IA more of the respect it deserves, but I don't think IA's critics reliance on "cheesy" tactics is the problem. It often isn't clear what tactics ARE considered acceptable in IA. Sikret has stressed that IA requires more tactical skill, but when stage manipulation, game engine tricks, hit-and-run strategies, attacking from beyond the enemy's field of vision, traps, and many standard D&D spells are removed from the game, it's not clear what Sikret expects beyond using IA kits and items and spells. I have often wondered how Sikret and other players manage typical encounters in IA. What spells do they use? What items? What did they sell? What did they hoard? How did they position their characters? Who do they target? How do they know which tactics work and which are doomed to fail?

This is usually a position of a player who comes to IA and doesn't want to spend time learning better tactics. Pretty much everything you noted are cheap tricks and nothing more. it is also hard to interpret your phrase about Sikret's expectations. Yes, we do indeed expect the player to use his characters' strengths, items, spells and powers in order to find an honest approach towards defeating the enemies Get to know your foe, turn on those auto pause settings, think on your actions during each round as if you're playing a turn-based game and you'll prevail. The exception is using only IA kits. I explained the motivation above. You can read through Sikret's own run of v5 where he used only one IA kit, the Vagrant protagonist, and that's it. The rest of the party were Bioware NPCs, except for a custom fighter (not an IA kit, I point out). Perhaps, one day we will do a full run, with screenshots and such, to show how we go about it in a way that interests you.

Well, people already replied about the dragon This is simply stupid, ridiculous and definitely added by some strange mod.

One might resist this idea on the grounds that it is counter to the spirit of IA, which is to provide a serious challenge for serious players. I like the idea of a strong challenge to the player's skills, but there is a great deal of marvelous content that many players appear to be losing out on. I stopped playing IA multiple times out of frustration with reloads or boredom from the somewhat standardized enemies of IA: the mages have SI and PFMW, plus immunity to area-effect spells by virtue of pre-cast spells that my Remove Magic spells could never dispel, and the fighters have damage resistances and regenerate. ... Hard enough to discourage people from taking the time to enjoy all the new content that IA introduces.

Yes, you are right that IA is hard. And enemies require some thinking and finding a right approach to at different stages. If you meet a Yuan-ti mage early on, you can't dispel its defences. I daresay you couldn't even in vanilla BG2 (although I might be wrong since I haven't played vanilla for a long time) and have to find a different approach. There is one and a simple at that (Chaotic Commands and Protection from Fire, basically), you just have to look for it. At higher levels, starting from level 15, your mages are perfectly capable of dispelling the protections. One thing to note about IA is that many fights and encounters are custom-made. We deliberately give enemies strengths and weaknesses which are for a player to discover and exploit in order to defeat the foe. This is what keeps up the need to think on each encounter. The general increase in difficulty is simply there to keep up the pace and do not throw player from fighting a vanilla puny monsters in one room to grinding his teeth against a powerful one in the next. This has a side effect, of course. Sometimes we create encounters that might be tad easy or, vice-versa, a bit overpowered. When we do, we tone it down as requested by players. This happened with the Drow Ambush in the Underdark in v5, or with the Drowned Soul in v6. In both cases we have re-balanced the fights. And the new content always have a custom-made tactical component which is the part of the attraction, in my opinion. So decreasing the difficulty for a player simply to get crushed in the tough fights that are present in all new quests is simply merciless

When I was a beginning player, I simply used to lower difficulty of the game. It gave my characters more staying power and a bit of advantage over the enemies. It has allowed me to do runs through the game with sub-optimal parties. This was a part of the learning process which was what made it such fun.

Finally, the odd suggestion. Has anyone ever tried playing IA, or any version of BG2, using randomized characters? I sometimes use an Excel document to generate characters with entirely random stats, classes, and resistances, hoping to find new ways of playing the game by using characters with unusual strengths and weaknesses. I briefly tried an IA run in which I picked the top 6 of 60 randomly generated characters to use in the run, only to find them too inflexible to work correctly. For example, the protagonist had the following stats:

This is something new, I have to admit. I have never seen such an approach to the game and it's kind of refreshing to see that they people still play and experiment at that. It is nice indeed I would point out, however, that we never even considered testing the game under such extreme conditions and it would be basically impossible to balance the game to fit such parties. I'd say that there is a great chance to stop at some impassable encounter with such a party and no one would tell for you sure when it will happen. But the idea is indeed quite refreshing and curious.

This post has been edited by critto: Jul 10 2013, 06:58 PM

[Vuki]

Some spell are indeed less effective, I agree. Some, however, are simply not effective for you The great example you provided is Animated Dead. Skeleton Warriors are great summons and remain strong for quite a while. Many players use them on par with other summons.

Lol, he mentioned the normal skeletons and not the improved ones:

Other times, I've found spells to be useful only in very specific, unique circumstances. I was delighted to find that Animate Dead was useful before level 15 in dealing with the rats in the Lilarcor quest, but unfortunately, that spell had little use elsewhere, and so I never bothered to memorize it.

Btw, this spell is absolutely not needed and it does not give real advantage in that fight. All you need is an arcane caster or an auramaster who is able to cast level 4th spells.

This post has been edited by Vuki: Jul 10 2013, 07:42 PM