Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,175
I do love duel. But no save at all seems like practically an exploit. Like dueling an unprotected mage at the back of the enemy group, seems like they should decline that duel.I'll add some of my random thoughts. Personally I do like most of the new spell additions (eg. Duel is an iconic spell for a paladin).
What difficulty did you play on? Unlike the other IE games the difficulty slider in IWD2 actually massively buffs enemy AB/stats. Which is part of why stacking AC/dips/unarmored/deep gnome is the only way to really survive on very hard or HoW. Or spamming summons lmao (though I took the EE option to nerf them so we'll see).I haven't played the original but I found the overall game difficulty to be really high. Especially named enemies are buffed like hell (I wasn't able to kill Xvim, my melee just couldn't scratch him with their +5 weapons). I compare boss stats with their original values and they are substantially higher in EE, for example: Xvim's HP 482 vs 1020 , AC 35 vs 51). They are also immune to pretty much everything - when I searched for ways people dealt with Izbelah or Xvim, I read stuff like "I just finger of death him" which plainly won't work here. From what I saw they also have very high SR.
I will be trying to play a "normal" party with no cheese aside from 1 fighter who I'll be running with 1 monk and Kensai just to compare. Rest of the group will be barb (wearing armor and trying to rely on damage reduction), rogue (test sneak attacking), Cleric of Bane, Sorcerer and Wizard. Managed the prologue on Very Hard without too much trouble. My melee game is pretty weak. The goblin bosses at the palisade had like +19 attack which is pretty standard I think, but my sorcerer had a pretty good chance to charm anything and color spray handled the rest. The spell focus feats look quite powerful now, giving +2 instead of +1 and covering two schools.
AoOs are really kind of obnoxious though, I think I'm gonna hate them going forward. Pathing is not great in the infinity engine and RTwP games have never been a great thing for controllability of the party. Characters chasing after an enemy running around and eating AoOs of every other enemy around are commonplace, and if an enemy gets on your mage its a chore to deal with. It'd be way better if the AI of both players and enemies was more anchored to whatever was in melee range. Clerics casting in battle sucks hard too, 3rd ed is supposed to have a defensive casting check to avoid AoOs but that's not a thing here. It wouldn't be a problem if enemy AB wasn't so inflated and I had a decent chance of dodging these AoOs but that's not the case. This is a mobility and combat casting feat to help alleviate these issues that I'll need to pick up at some point.
Also, sadly, being a small race doesn't help at all with being enlarged, your footprint on the map is still huge and unwieldy.
Also also, I really like the extra options in stores. I'm pretty sure I'll never have enough gold to get all I want.
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