Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

So you need to rely on inv. potions to be a successful backstabber in IWD2?
Asking for a friend.

 

How is stealth broken in IWD2? It's been awhile. I remember improved invisibility being broken, in that it did not remove your invisibility after you performed a hostile action. As far as sneak attacks go, I remember being able to do it 2E or 3E style.

 

I think stealth works just fine. Lilura said invisibility is better that investing into the stealth skill and it was certainly true in ToE.

In this game however, as far as I know, you can only sneak attack every 4 rounds. So I don't think it matters either way.

 

Oh my god don’t ask him about stealth. He already derailed the thread for like 5 pages about it once.

 

Thief is a waste. Your wizard should be able to do most things the thief does, assuming you are actually detecting traps and such (Disable Device is Int based; just cross class it). The modal method that IWD2 uses for traps detection is a pain in the ass as you really have to micro the guy when he is doing it or he is going to wander into a group of bad guys and get murdered. Unless you can cast Invis, of course.

In the early game, the explosive potions are a godsend. They will be your primary AoE attack until you get to level 3 and the orc area, where you can buy the level 2 Snowball for your wizard.

To make things easier, I'd run with a wizard and a sorcerer (because scrolls are hard to come by, and gated by progress, while the sorcerer doesn't care). I'd also replace the warrior with a second cleric spec'd for physical combat. They can tank as well as a fighter, and become combat monsters when they get level 4 spells (to a lesser extent, level 2 spells).

As IWD2 is based on the Infinity Engine, ranged weapons are overpowered for what they are. Not as bad as IE, but still noticeably better than they should be. Make sure everyone is equipped with one and start combats with them before switching to melee. You will cut down on the pain.

 

Multiple times, actually. Guy's a cunt.

 

Cael Massive butthurt detected.

In short: stealth only works for 1 round when you are within the visual radius of an enemy. At the end of the round it will fail. Move outside of the visual radius and it works as normal.

This was eventually verified by Lilura. I consider it a crowning achievement to my IQ that I'm pretty much the only gamer anywhere that has discovered this. And I challenge anyone to post a video of stealth working for more than 1 round when they're adjacent to an enemy in IWD2.

It's quite funny really.

 

There is no point arguing with a cunt who uses a mainlander as a source of his "facts". Just ignore the fool so as to not derail the thread again.

 

My point has been made, and I see no point in driving it in further.
You might want to use a potion of invisibility for your butt in the future though

 

my IWD2 ideas are pretty limited, e.g. one of every god's cleric (multi-classed as appropriate), and i always wanted to make that alluring paladin of mystra to work but it's a wash... and given the pain of not being able to skip the dozens of banal/shit/boring UIless cut-scenes they littered the game with - meh, cba

 

Anyone knows why does my monk get cheaper Raise Dead than anyone else in my party at the tample (in Targos)? It's four times cheaper, only 100g, and 200 for Ressurection.

His charisma is 3.
EDIT: Oh, it might be because he's lvl1, while others are lvl 3.

 

Maybe it's too late to reply, but monks and rogues are close to useless in IWD2. Pure rogues are completely useless, because you can easily cover their out-of-combat role with other characters: you can "force" doors and containers instead of picking their locks, and you can easily tank traps' damage due to how few traps you find in the game. The best solution are to give a single rogue level to your wizard or just ignore the class altogether. Monks are just underwhelming, and serve no real purpose in a party.

Once you have a fighter, a cleric, and a wizard in your party, you can add whatever you want and it will probably work. I would add a druid (to experiment with an entirely different spell list), a sorcerer (so that you will always have the spells you really want), and a melee cleric (with a single fighter level at most). Alternatively, you can add a deep gnome wizard as the ultimate tank, but I don't think it's a very fun character to play, since you have to over-buff him for every single encounter.

 

I'm done with playing with two arcane spellcasters for now. I want to try to make things harder.

I know monks get bad rep, but I've heard they can work and I've never played one so why not.

As for the rouge I'll give her some combat levels for sure.

I'm back to playing on hard. Core is too easy and even the hard battles are pretty ok since I've accepted that some characters will die and I'll have to pay for their ressurection.

 

Get a paladin for Cera Sumat.

 

Give one of your your Clerics one level of Paladin.

 

Beware. The time is now. Turn back to avoid the tidal pull.

i've checked Yxunomei's creature files, items, and AI scripts in the following versions:

• v1.00 from 2000-06-22 - source: my old CDs (i could only find CD1 for setup, the CD2 play disc has been lost...)
• v1.01Beta (aka "IWD Patch Beta v1.3.053018", or 1.03 from the Interplay website) from 2000-06-30 - source: dug up on the internet
  
• v1.05 from 2000-07-21 - source: internet
  
• v1.06 from 2000-07-28 - source: internet
  
• v1.061 from 2000-08-16 - source: my 3-in-1 Icewind Dale DVD boxset
  
• v1.42 from 2001-06-15 - source: GOG

i've skipped v1.40 (original HoW release) and v1.41 (its first patch); i have them lying around but they're not too interesting for this topic i would say

i've attached the files if anybody wants to take a look

the interesting bit is that Yxunomei has always had "IMMUNE2" equipped as a ring - granting protection from non-magical and +1 weapons:

• Protection: from Melee Weapons [120] Type 2 - Non-Magical weapons
• Protection: from Melee Weapons [120] Type 0 - Magical weapons ('Enchantment' and below), Enchantment 1

and this has not changed in any of the above updates

the other un-lootable ring equipped ("YXURESI") grants immunity to poison and cloudkill (and later, confusion), and 50% resistance to fire and cold (+magical fire and magical cold); what's funny is the creature definition grants 100% fire and lightning resistance and 70% magic resistance?

the "S2-16" sword (SKULL) deals 2D8 slashing damage

so, either those old claims of immunity to +2 weapons (requiring +3 to hit) are mistaken, or possibly some of the early versions of IWD had an off-by-one bug in the opcode 120 implementation? since my v1.00 play-disc is missing, i have no way of checking directly

the only Yxunomei-related changes i can detect in the patches are:

• v1.05: added immunity to opcode 128 (Confusion) to "YXURESI", AI updates (as per patch notes: Adjusted location of Yxunomei when leaving the level, resting, and coming back.)
• v1.42: added "POTN14" (Oil of Speed) to inventory, some AI updates (movement, door locking/unlocking?)

other stats since i'm already here:

CE tanari cleric 13 / mage 13
91 HP, AC -4
THACO 7, 5 attacks / round
STR 19 INT 17 WIS 17 DEX 14 CON 14 CHA 14
3 level 5 wizard spell slots
known spells: cloudkill, animate dead

never mind immunity to +2 weapons, what stands out is how Black Isle didn't bother to add other spells - considering level and attributes, there should be ~25 wizard and ~30 cleric spell slots to fill, both up to level 6 - now that would be a fun enemy

 

I believe there's an option in one of the mods to make Yxunomel harder and it adds +2 immunity to weapons.

 

CappenVarra Well done sir!

I half-expect BI didn't add the rest of the spells because they had a very set idea of how the fight would play out - principally using those spells. The stock AI was pretty poor at spell selection, such that if you add all the other spells, the default AI routine wouldn't even know what to do with them.

There's probably something to learn from SCS on that front.

 

IWD2 on hardest is not very interesting, the +10 bonus to hit that they get just means that for the meantime you'll be exploiting their targeting system which sucks big time. If you want difficulty it's better to either play Heart of Fury which is difficult in the sense that it's a mass exploitfest that at least provides a different kind of experience. You'll be having uber loot and uber experience for the price of goblins having 60 AB and 400 HP. So not "truly difficult" but let's say "weirdly difficult". HOF gets a bad rep but it's not bad at all, just strange. Another thing you can do is to install Tactics4IWD2 which provides a more "truly difficult" experience. Same loot, same exp but better monster spawns and monsters have more challenging spelllists. If you're experienced with 3.0 DnD I would consider installing Tactics, since the game becomes a cakewalk somewhere after chapter 2 (literal cakewalk where you just attackmove through the mobs). Besides you can uninstall Tactics anytime so no harm done.

 

Hard is fine. The 338 gold for throwing fire potions quickly get affordable. And they're not a gamechanger, just a nice supporting utility.

I had one of those 3rd edition moments. I got the 20% EXP penalty for my Rouge3/Ranger1 Halfling. As opposed to the ToEE 3.5 moment when my halfling couldnt finesse with short swords, only daggers, this one wasn't cool, just annoying and I had to use Dale Keeper to change her subrace from the one with Barbarian as a favoured class to the one with Rouge as one. She is fun so far, and the backstab is noticable. I think.

The monk does very little other than being a good tank with his exceptional AC, despite having very little HP (level adjustment).

I'm having fun. Not a lot, it's not as mindblowing as ToEE (which is actually shit, but it's a long story), but I'm still at the very beginning of the game and have only been playing in short chunks. The all-nighter could get me more into it.

 

IWD2 difficulty is fine. You have to keep in mind the fundamental difference between multiple attacks in 3rd ed and 2nd ed where in 3rd ed extra attacks suffer a progressive -5 penalty while this doesn't exist at all in 2nd ed. So yes, enemies will regularly hit your best AC characters, but only on the first 1 or 2 attacks. The early levels are a pain in the ass, especially since you arrive in Targos with literally no equipment, but past then it smooths out to be just fine. Its not like you can run early level Insane in IWD1 without either exploiting save/load/rest spam or ranged weapons and endless kiting either. And IWD1 and other games have the high enemy strength "bug" which causes certain enemies to have massively inflated THAC0 and damage stats to begin with, which is far, far worse under 2nd ed since it actually makes armor entirely useless where in 3rd ed its always working to prevent successive attacks from hitting.

EDIT: And looking at the stats of the monsters in IWD2, it looks like a lot of them have fairly nerfed base attack bonus to begin with. Not sure why that is, but there are plenty of monsters with e.g. 10 fighters levels who than have only 5 BAB (Sword Spider) or 15 fighter/4 bard but only 11 BAB (Half-Dragon). It looks to primarily be a mid-late game thing for most "common" enemies. I'm guessing it was done by Black Isle so that they could up the ante and throw increasing hordes of enemies at the player but remain balanced?

 

Also on the subject of interesting things to do in IWD2 a fun playthrough to do is a solo deep gnome vampiric monk. The main star being the strongest weapon in normal. Not greatsword of the soulless, not massive halberd of hate mind you, but a poor random drop +0 Vampiric Longsword that you can get in the prologue. Yes, a +0 longsword . Vampiricism is probably is the strongest property you can have on a weapon (ok, together with persistent haste) but the key to a succesful vampire is to enjoy the moment, to drain the blood patiently. Massive Halberd of Hate does massive damage and consequently you get no bonus HP from vampiricism since it doesn't have the time to stack. A shitty +0 longsword takes forever to kill your victim allowing you to get 1000+HP in normal nonHOF play. The vampiric longsword is only a random drop and its drop chance is horrible (in the neighbourhood of 1/500), but see, its drop chance is so bad not because to balance it out. It's bad because the devs thought "this weapon is trash, lets put it together with other 500 assorted garbage and call it a day" . But it's easily the best weapon of the game. That said, instead of sperging over the random chance just CLUAconsole it in. You can probably even solo HOF with, I did solo HOF monk/rogue/druid/cleric/wizard and I got to chapter 5 fairly easily, vampiric longsword in the main hand and the persistent haste sword in offhand. Then I abandoned the game, but I think it should be possible to complete it.

 

Not really on topic, but anyone read that new whatever Icewind Dale adventure for 5e and could give any insight of how close to the crpgs games it is thematically, as in locations and lore wise? I saw that it is a sandbox campaign, has its flaws but it is good, but all of that came from a person that likes 5e. I want to know from somebody that like the crpgs.

 

makes sense

to continue the Yxunomei immunity story:

in the last episode (open) in the last episode (close)

it turns out you can install IWD1 using v1.00 CD1 and v1.06 CD2, so i actually got to test this directly

first attempt was using Turodahel (+2) and was effective, so everything seemed to check out
second attempt was using Erevain's Broad Sword (also +2) - and imagine my surprise: "Weapon Ineffective"

then i've tested every melee weapon that should have +2 enchantment going by the description, and most work - with two notable exceptions: Erevain's Broad Sword and Presio's Dagger

since those two are guaranteed drops leading up to the fight, it's quite possible those 20 year old complaints about Yxunomei's immunity to +2 enchantment were from players using them without trying alternative +2 weapons?

game files explain the problem:

• In v1.00, Erevain's Broad Sword has a Magic Level of 1 and Presio's Dagger has a Magic Level of 0
• In v1.05, Erevain's was fixed to have a Magic Level of 2 - and can hurt Yxunomei as expected
• Presio's Dagger remains ineffective in v1.05 and v1.06, but finally has the correct Magic Level in v1.42

so i'd say it's clear Yxunomei was only meant to be immune to +1 weapons by Black Isle design, but oversights in marking a few individual weapon enchantment levels in early game versions made it seem a higher immunity (as per P&P rules) is involved

simple (and perhaps a bit disappointing), but there you have it

 

I am little bored with BB and decided to take a break from it. And I am going to use that break to play IWD for the very first time.

I have played none of these DnD-related, so-called great games from late 90s and early 00s so no Baldurs, no Icewind and no Torment, I played first NWN though and it was more shitty than good so maybe that's why I never played all these other games. I also played ToEE and remember it being good game but that's maybe due to TB combat instead of RTwP as I don't much like the latter or maybe I just don't know game with RTwP and some tactical layer.

Anyway, I was looking for cRPG to play and Icewind Dale looked appealing even if it is RTwP - some quests to do, but not much story or reading, and a lot of combat. And there is so little interesting RPGs nowadays (seriously, maybe it's me getting older or sth but almost everything seems being more or less shit to me).

So we are getting to the point. I need to create a team. I don't want multiclassing, I want 6 different races and 6 different classes so after some brief reading I decided that the team will be:
Half-Orc Fighter-Berserker
Human Paladin-Cavalier
Elf Ranger-Archer
Dwarf Cleric-Lsomething
Halfling Thief-Swashbuckler
Half-Elf Bard-Blade

Will this be ok or do I need mage/sorc (I remember watching my brothers playing it long time ago and every fight was like started by fireball or sth like that)?
Which stats can I dump for which classes (like wis/int/cha for fighter) and how to recognize which stats are important for which class (I know a little about DnD 5E but this is different edition and computer, not pnp, game)?
Does gender or alignment matter (characters quarrel or leave a party or kill one another)?
Any other tips for IWD beginner?

I have game version from GOG (IWD EE) and game asks me if I want start Icewind Dale or Heart of Winter. It's just little confusing and I need clarification because I thought at the beginning that either, I play the whole IWD without expansion, or I play IWD with HoW, but I checked both and it does not seem to be the case and it's like the whole new beginning in HoW and characters are like 20 lvl. So, probably I have to choose Icewind Dale first, finish it and then start HoW and the obvious question comes to mind - if that's the case, will it be possible to start HoW with a team I finished IWD with? Also, can I play IWD2 with a team I finished IWD1 with (IIRC e.g. in Realms of Arkania you could export/import the party through all three games)?

Sorry for dumb questions but I am a beginner here and there is so much party customization options that one can feel overwhelmed.