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Baldur's Gate The Baldur's Gate Series Thread

sser

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My friend and I have this discussion all the time. He goes with Sorcerers as the most powerful but I lean more toward the mage. I think the sorcerer is way easier to use and all, but it's hard for me to discount how the mage can be a swiss army knife with everything from a bottle opener on one side to a nuclear warhead on the other.
 

DragoFireheart

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My friend and I have this discussion all the time. He goes with Sorcerers as the most powerful but I lean more toward the mage. I think the sorcerer is way easier to use and all, but it's hard for me to discount how the mage can be a swiss army knife with everything from a bottle opener on one side to a nuclear warhead on the other.

Mages in general or Wild Mages?
 

sser

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I preferred mages in general. Wild Mage was like a middle ground between the two, yeah? Don't think I ever used one.
 

Zed

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Codex USB, 2014
mage pros:
aryan standard issue mage
copying scrolls is p cool
can multi-class into cool stuff
mage cons:
failing copy process

sorc pro:
doesn't have to copy scrolls
sorc con:
barely has any viable multiclassing options

bottom line for me is whether I want the character to fuck around with scrolls or not
 

Greatness

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Wild Mage might be the strongest single class (if you don't mind occasional reloading), but regular mages can dualclass/multiclass so they have a significant advantage. A Cleric/Mage multiclass with Robe of Vecna+Amulet of Power is pretty absurd, especially since they will get a lot more HLA than single classed characters. Kensai/Mage dualclass is also stupid as most everyone knows by now.

I have a hard time justifying single classed characters unless I want to purposely gimp myself for more of a challenge. The exceptions being Inquisitors/Blades and sometimes Wild Mages for lulz
 

hell bovine

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Sorcerers are more powerful than mages in BG2, because there aren't that many spells to choose; a lot of the arcane spells are useless "variety for flavour". And then the are spells like Wish, which can be insanely overpowered, but require spamming to guarantee success, and spamming is what sorcerers excel at. Project image cheese is basically the arcane equivalent of an army of trolling spammers. :D
I like wild mages more, though. Because: moo!

In the end, every single class has been soloed through Ascension, so it doesn't matter much. ;) (but the most cheesy fight in BG2 that I can recall was the final battle from the Solaufein mod)
 

Erebus

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Never tried a Wild Mage. I was always afraid that wild surges would mess up things at the worst possible moments.

How harmful can they be, exactly ?
 

Greatness

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How harmful can they be, exactly ?

Well, there are some really bad wild surges IIRC. Things like deleting all of your gold, petrifying your enemy so they can't drop items, crowdcontrolling yourself, nuking your own party, use up the charges on your magical items, doubling the HP of your enemy, etc.
 
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DragoFireheart

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Currently playing a solo wild mage.

Some note worthy things:

- Getting the Conjure Air Elemental and being able to summon it for the swarms of mephits made those fights piss easy in the intro dungeon.

- Not having a party helps negate some of the harmful wild surges.

- Buffing yourself with civilians nearby is hazardous as random fireballs and cows may appear out of nowhere to blow them up. Small price to pay until level 23 where you can guarantee normal surges.

A Sorcerer is admittingly superior if you're doing something like a No Reload challenge. However, if you're doing a Let's Play like MicoSelva where reloads are allowed it's pretty hilarious. I'd recommend not using the Nahals to buff yourself as many of the effects will be based on what the spell is targeting. Once you get Chain Contingency you'll break the game.

Chain Contingency (3 Improved Chaos Shields) 75+ bonus to surge roll + level 18 for first level 9 spell slot + minimum roll of 1 on wild surge roll = 94% chance of normally cast spell.
 
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Greatness

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Stacking things like that feels like cheating to me. If the spells cast normally don't stack then why should they in a sequencer or contingency. Might as well just erroneously stack mass Armor of Faiths and be immune to damage.
 

hell bovine

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Not that different from project image stacking via contingency. Never used it in ToB (with Ascension), to keep the fights "fair". But with my solo sorceress against Tactics it was a "free for all"; I didn't care about fairness, it was more about trying to find the limits of arcane spellcasting. Both playthroughs were a lot of fun - it's a single player game, so I honestly don't care about cheating. :P
PS
I think some mod(s) remove chaos shield stacking (though it still stack with the lesser version). I've never bothered with them at all, because part of the wild mage's charm was in the unpredictable effects. :D
 

Tigranes

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Korgan, Sarevok, Jan, Edwin are the way to go, yes.

I will never use Aerie no matter how OP. There are limits.

SCS is a must, though I'd leave out some of the cheesier options.

As for Wild Mage / Sorcerer, in terms of maximum munchkin it has to be the wild mage. It's also nice, after several playthroughs, to introduce some randomness to screw you up when you know every spell effect like the back of your hand. I still remember cowdropping people.
 
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hell bovine

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I kept Sarevok for story reasons in Tob, but with Ascension, he was probably the most often resurrected character in the party. And then the final battle events happened. :lol: (I've screwed up the dialogues before, ah well, seemed a fitting end)
I don't actually recall who was on the team apart from PC sorceress, Sarevok and Imoen. :o
 

DragoFireheart

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I've never bothered with them at all, because part of the wild mage's charm was in the unpredictable effects. :D

Oh you get plenty of this early game. I'm ok with it later game because you essentially have mastered the chaos and suffered the trials and cow droppings.

And it'll still happen whenever you don't triple stack Improved Chaos Shield.
 

DragoFireheart

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So I watched this video:



And I thought "Hey, I could get the Staff early too!"

But I saw the level of cheese this guy had (and he doesn't even kill everything either, goes against my cRPG creed of kill it all dead). Scroll of Magic AND Undead? pssh, I don't need that fuckin shit, I got Wild Magic!

Magic%20Gone%20Wildx-large.jpg



Ah yeah baby. So I used the following (mostly)

- Skull trap
- Nishruu
- Skeleton Warrior
- Nahal's Reckless Dweomer
- Melf's Minute Meteors
- Pierce Magic
- Sunfire
- Chaos Shield
- Limited Wish
- Level 13
- A shit ton of reloads (to account for luck).

Whenever I am low on spells, I do the following cycle:

1: Cast Nahal's Reckless Dweomer
2: Select Limited Wish
3: If the attempt fails, go back to step 1. If a "game ending" surge happens (charm, dizzy preventing spell casting, Polymorph into a wolf, etc) or you run out of NRDs, reload game.
4: If attempt succeeds, cast 2-3 more NRD and cast whatever you want.
5: Genie will give you the option to rest so you may cast spells again. Choose this option (2nd choice with 18 wisdom)
6: A number of spells level 1-4 will be restored.

First, I set a bunch of skull traps near the beholder, refreshing until I stacked about 10 or so. Then, I summon some fodder to eat a Death Spell. I then engage the lich. He teleports over, Beholder dies, I cast a invisibility spell, Lich should cast Death Spell to kill fodder. I then cast Nishruus and Skeleton Warriors out of sight of Lich, swarming him. Rakesk will eventually come over to harass me, Sunfire can kill him. I continue to refresh and spam summons until the lich is out of spells. Then I pierce magic his spell turning and hurl Minute Meteors until he dies (meteors will get reflected if you don't).

Hard part is now over. I lure the vampire over, dies to meteors and skellies. Then I send some fodder to the mage who'll use a Death Spell. After she uses her death spell I send in more summons. Pierce Magic and then meteors. Done.

Took about a half an hour, but I killed all those fuckers.
 
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Erebus

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So I tried the beginning of BG2 with a Wild Mage and it went approximately as I expected : I paralyzed myself, I turned myself into a wolf twice (how do you even undo that ??), I fireballed my entire party...

It is certainly a different experience, but I'm not sure I have enough chaos in me to play the entire game like that.
 

Tigranes

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Dispel magic or time should solve the wolf problem, from memory. The craziness gets better as you get Chaos Shield and Improved Chaos Shield. It's also sensible not to try and cast NRD spells on top of your own party...
 

DragoFireheart

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So I tried the beginning of BG2 with a Wild Mage and it went approximately as I expected : I paralyzed myself, I turned myself into a wolf twice (how do you even undo that ??), I fireballed my entire party...

It is certainly a different experience, but I'm not sure I have enough chaos in me to play the entire game like that.

Some tips for Wild Mage:

- I prefer a solo mage as it helps negate some of the more nasty surges.

- Avoid using the NRD for buffing as roughly (IIRC) half of the bad surges are target based.

- Always have at least the basic Chaos Shield up before casting NRD. If you wanted you could cast a Chaos Shield before any buffing coming from your Wild Mage.

- Never cast typically harmless spells around civilians.

- Always have some way of giving your party protection from evil handy in the rare event a demon is summoned.


I did some math looking at the effects of wild surges. Assuming you are just rolling a D100:

53% of bad failure (replacing the spell or harming you)
32% chance of neutral failure (visual effects, almost never harmful)
6% chance of re-targeting or re-rolling effect
9% chance of spell casting successfully (usually with some modifier)

If you're level seven, it looks more like this:

51% of bad failure
27% chance of neutral failure
6% chance of re-targeting or re-rolling effect
16% chance of spell casting successfully

Chaos Shield and Improved Chaos Shield add 15+ and +25 respectively. A level 7 Wild Mage with Chaos Shield active looks like this:

(Note that All the party's gold is destroyed effect is removed and only the target based roll is left)

39% of bad failure
24% chance of neutral failure
6% chance of re-targeting or re-rolling effect
31% chance of spell casting successfully

Already things are looking much better for the wild mage. Lets look at level 14 with Improved Chaos Shield:

33% of bad failure
16% chance of neutral failure
4% chance of re-targeting or re-rolling effect
46% chance of spell casting successfully

We're now at the point where you have almost a 50% chance of your NRD working. For a solo player this is basically some misc quests within the city.

At level 31 with Improved Chaos Shield it looks like this:

26% of bad failure
10% chance of neutral failure
2% chance of re-targeting or re-rolling effect
62% chance of spell casting successfully

If you aren't adverse to abusing the game, level 18 with Chain Contingency and triple Improved Chaos shield will push your chances to 97% chance of success. Level 23 puts it at 100%. Some mods will remove this "exploit" however.

EDIT: Keep in mind that everything I just spoke about is strictly in regards to Nahal's Reckless Dweomer: you are otherwise a specialist mage with no spell school restrictions with a D20 roll on spells casts to check for a Wild Surge.

Note that the chances for a level 7 mage to have a regular spell end in any failure is 3.8%.
 
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Wyrmlord

Arcane
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Feb 3, 2008
Messages
28,886
For those of us who have the BGT mod, it seems that the lack of level cap would make a cleric/mage extremely potent, no?

The problem of cleric/mages is that with vanilla BG1, they can not cast 4th or 5th level spells of clerics or mages, but with the level cap removed in BGT, they could max out both abilities to a ridiculous extent.

It would also save the need to have a thief in the party, since Find Traps and Mirror Image can take care of traps and Open Locks can take care of locks. Can't pickpocket, but one can have a bard in the party instead, if that matters.

So you pretty much get three functions in one class. Saving two party member slots.
 

hoverdog

dog that is hovering, Wastelands Interactive
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For those of us who have the BGT mod, it seems that the lack of level cap would make a cleric/mage extremely potent, no?

The problem of cleric/mages is that with vanilla BG1, they can not cast 4th or 5th level spells of clerics or mages, but with the level cap removed in BGT, they could max out both abilities to a ridiculous extent.

It would also save the need to have a thief in the party, since Find Traps and Mirror Image can take care of traps and Open Locks can take care of locks. Can't pickpocket, but one can have a bard in the party instead, if that matters.

So you pretty much get three functions in one class. Saving two party member slots.
Install the XP cap mod or, better, a XP-reducing one. I'm using the latter with only 75% experience earned and the game poses more challenge (Hell without lvl 8 spells!). Problem solved.
 

DragoFireheart

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So I just had a Wild Surge crash my game (GoG patch, Baldurdash installed).

Specifically, I was in the bridge district doing the tanner quest. Encountered a Bone Golem, casted Pierce Magic using NRD (I didn't have Lower Resistance). Wild Surge: Sex Change, projectile makes it half way across the screen, game crashes.

Managed to recreate this a second time. Crash again.

Did a quick look and didn't see anyone mentioning wild surges crashing their game. Must have found a very obscure bug because I've had the sex change happen on myself just fine. Also, I had Chaos Shield up so the caster version wasn't possible: The target surge is. The only thing I can think of is changing the gender of a Bone Golem via Wild Surge crashes the game as it doesn't have a gender programmed, hence the crash.

So yes, Wild Surges can crash your game. :lol:
 

Elwro

Arcane
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Dec 29, 2002
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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2
So guys, I wanted to play BG1 (just 1) under linux and install some mods. I have no idea how to do this. I installed the GOG version of BG 1 which created some kind of additional wine folder wih BG inside. I moved my weidu executables to a $PATH folder, but it seemingly cannot find the proper files (I'm trying 'weinstall widescreen'). I trying running 'tolower' first to make all names lowercase but it didn't work with the helpful message "Fatal error: exception Not_found".

Since the log files seem to indicate weinstall is looking inside the .wine folder, I created a symlink to GOG's BG installation there. No luck.

Any help?
 

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