Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

I'm partial to casting a bunch of crowd control spells on top of one another - Web, Cloudkill/Stinking Cloud, Entangle etc. Most enemies will fail their save for at least one of the spells and then you can just either clean up with AoE spells or pick them off with ranged weapons.

 

Wow, I must have forgotten how bad encounter design is in IWD, 'cause I'm currently re-playing IWD2 for felipe's book, and I must say, sometimes encounter design is rather horrible. There are many areas, that you're put directly into combat on entry, difficulty is most often achieved by large enemy numbers and, worst of all, there are a lot of those encounters, where throngs of enemies are just spawned around you out of nowhere. I wouldn't exactly call that good design.

 

In that fight I used AoE spells plus summons. For me, it's one of the reasons why you should take a druid and a cleric. The results are amazing.

 

Hi all! can anyone suggest some good mods for IWD?

 

The only really noteworthy (as in actually adding stuff) mod is Auril's Bane. I wouldn't play in on a virgin voyage through IWD, but definitely try it on a replay.
Unfinished Business is also nice, but adds very little.
The IWD NPC mod is probably nice if you like writing targeted at juvenile girls. Voice acting is pretty bad, IMO.

 

Try the Enhanced Edition.

 

Thanks!

 

Dunno if you got past here yet but if you're stuck I recently did an LP for you to reference.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/video-sensukis-lets-play-icewind-dale.94660/

This is the video you're after:

 

That was just fast, you played twice or three times as fast as I remember playing it. Great video.

 

I am running the game at 40FPS though, which is about 33% faster than normal. Fuck playing the IE games at 30 fps lol

 

I wasn't talking about framerates. You just played fast, I just kept going slowly. Looking for traps and all that I think, also pausing for 10-20 seconds planning during fights.

 

http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?showtopic=24870

 

Yeah I know, but because the game is running faster, it appears like I'm playing faster as well. I also have played the game many times, and can remember where most of the traps are.

 

No, he means that you just plie-drive with your attacks. You don't carefully position 2 tanks and then have a back-ring of missiles and a couple of spellcasters and then carefully select which ammo to use, which spells to use and then heal-up after the fight. You're like bash-bash-bash and if something goes wrong think "what else can I do" now that everything's gone a bit Pete Tong. It's a bit Scrappy-Doo. I thought it was because you were hurrying because Youtube play-throughs can't be boring, but if that's the way you play, then it's a just a bit more Scrappy-Doo than many will likely play it like.


On a side note, you're playing the Heart of Winter version rather than Vanilla. If you want a more 'interesting' IWD experience I recommend to everyone to try IWD vanilla (not first release, but the one where you can hit the Lizard Queen with +2 weapons) and try this grouping:

Fighter
Fighter
Ranger
Cleric
Druid
Thief

No mixed classes. Firstly, in Vanilla there is much smaller spell-pool and Druids/Mages/Bards are a lot less OP and secondly, trying the game without the Mage removes most of the most offensive cheese, such as Haste, Fireball and Improved Invisibility. By playing Vanilla the encounters will also be slightly easier to compensate, not in monster strength, but because monsters wont trigger if they're in darkness, so you can pick your battles easier.

 

I like the way you think, Sensuki. You as a party leader and then just go with 5 women for the rest of the party.

 

In IWD:HoW with whatever mods I have installed (One of them I think is called Harder Yxunomei), she can only be hit with +3 weapons. I only had one +3 weapon in my entire party, so I had to be pretty resourceful when taking her on.

That fight doesn't require tactical positioning if your tanks have a good AC. I made all the moves I needed to: Interrupt first round of Priest spells, one of them got one off, so I cast the counterspell for it, and then assigned one melee character per Priest to aggro them off spellcasting.

Some of the other fights later on require a bit more planning, you'll notice when I take on Joril I carefully position my party members.

 

I noticed you quit and reloaded a fight at the end of the vid and you 'nearly' did a couple of times before that. But anyway... the +3 mod is designed to put IWD back to it's original Vanilla where Yxun can only be hit by +3 weapons (but +2 missiles or something). I'm not a fan of that version, I think that makes it a bit too rough and very dependent on chance rather than skill:

The original idea was that you'd get Conlon's Hammer (hit any creature) as the point of then facing Yxun - like the main plot having use and meaning - but, as you noted in the vid, it's extremely possible to completely miss the child-rescue bit, leaving many people somewhat flummoxed with what seem like odd choices to make in that fight, which are then even more dependent on your group and you're lucky drops from the random loot drops (such as in the Temple).

It made much more sense to +2 as the barrier and forget the whole Conlon's Hammer thing and make use of Erevain's sword and that other one in the cave.

 

The main thing I was trying to do in that playthrough is rest as little as possible, I think I managed to cut 10-15 days off my usual finish date in game time. So yeah, a lot of encounters I attempted with characters on low health. I did however forget to buy arrows before entering Dragon's Eye, woulda been a lot easier if I had.

But yeah I don't mind the +3 thing, I ended up throwing the Mace over to my Fighter to finish her off even though he wasn't proficient.

 

That's why I don't do Let's Plays, you have to play to the crowd. IWD, and especially Dragon's Eye is an awful lot of going back to Kuldahar if you're being properly proficient. You were also leaving 100s of gold all over the floor for the same reason. But you're right, who wants to watcha vid of someone going back and forth to Kuldahar!

 

I actually didn't do anything different than I normally would. It was my first Let's Play and I just played the game how I normally play it. I haven't had to go back to Kuldahar since probably my first playthrough of IWD1.

 

So how do you sell stuff and buy stuff?

 

After you've beat Yxunomei ?

 

I mean, yeah, I get that some things in games are 'possible' and 'do-able', but Icewind Dale is kind-of a loot game. It's about the whole jamming your inventory with loot then going back to restock your arrows and bullets while selling all your loot kind-of thing. I mean, is there a special bonus for leaving all the loot on the floor and getting as far as you can without arrows?

 

I always leave non-magical shit on the ground unless it's actually worth some money (like Plate Mail etc). Fuck picking up every non-magical mace and shield and carting it back and selling it, in the end you have a surplus of gold anyway, so it's not like it's necessary. Most of the good items you find in the game world anyway.

I like to "go back to town" when it makes sense. IWD is a linear game, so I usually only go back to town at the end/beginning of chapters. In the BG games it's a bit different. In BG1 it ends up being when I run out of inventory space (not picking up trash items) and in BG2 you have plenty of opportunities to buy/sell loot.