Icewind Dale I really would appreciate class help

Looking for opinions on this build for party in IWD2
Half orc fighter4/barbarianX, power attack, cleave, specialization axes
drow bard -pure caster- master of diplomacy
human druid- monk or no monk?
aasimar cleric of bane- honestly I would change this to duergar or deep gnome cleric, but that penalty to cha, ouch
paladin/sorceress, aasimar of course
halfling with +1 feat rogue1/wizard - do I really need rogue?


other than that, I was thinking about following:
add unknown levels of druid to half orc, his stats should be str20, dex18, con18, wis16, int1,cha1
add monk either to cleric of bane or to druid (lawful neutral approach)
do not skip rogue, do not skip open lock and disable device - I would really hate seeing breakable equipment to break and traps are obviously unknown-variable-to-disarm-without-a-rogue to me.





Little backstory: a year or two I played IWD2 till Ice Temple. I play all my games on easiest possible difficulty, but that doesn't mean every class combo works. I want to cleave and cast and have a good time and don't want to ruin that by non-optimized class combo and I might consider higher difficulties, but not HOF, yet.

 

No party could be perfect without at least one dwarf.

 

then it is.

 

Please, elaborate.

 

You don't need a rogue, just have the wizard (with high int and high dex I assume) trained in disable device and search. You can eat 99% of traps in the game, but there's one that's annoying. The paladin sorceress combo is only good in solo, of if you go into HOF. In normal play you'll just severely delay your spell progression for not much benefit. Monk/Cleric and Monk/Druid are both fine. It's just a matter of timing it. I would probably dip into Monk with Cleric on lvl 12 (so you have access to heal spell ASAP) and with druid on lvl 10. Druid's spellist is underpowered from lvl 6 onward, consider installing weimer's ease of use mod. It thas a component that improves druid's spelllist. Also the custom dll from sorcerers.net gives druids ability to spontaneously summon animals. Also for multiclassing with Monk, the Cleric cannot be Aasimar.

 

I played a non minmaxed party of 5 few months ago, however I got bored around the end of chapter 5. human Barb, h.elf rogue, dwarf cleric, h.elf sorc, ft/sorc. Only barb and rogue had 18s initially. Only barb had a stat < 10. IIRC it was on normal. Never ran into trouble, at least I don't remember anything challenging or frustrating. So at least on normal there's really no need to optimize THAT much.

 

Unless you plan on playing on HoF, there is no point to creating "a brick could outsmart me" characters. IWD2 doesn't require min-maxing on the normal difficulties and is actually pretty flexible when it comes to party composition, same as the other IE games. My last party was a paladin, a sorcerer and a bard, for example.

 

As a Sorcerer, you already gain spells at a really slow pace. If you further gimp your spell progression with Paladin levels, you are never going to have the arcane spells you need at your disposal. For example, you won't be able to cast Fireball or Haste while clearing the Horde Fortress. You should have at least a pure Sorcerer. If you feel comfortable with a Wizard as your sole "pure" arcane caster, then good for you, but I really don't like relying on scrolls to get the spells I want.

You don't need a Rogue. A Rogue 1/Wizard X is more than enough, and I say "more" because I usually skip the Rogue level altogether. There aren't dangerous traps in IWD 2 and you can force all locks through Strength checks without risking anything.

I don't really like having a Bard around in IWD 2, since I've never found songs that useful and their spells progression is too slow. I always prefer another Sorcerer over a Bard.