Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, reading the changelog for various modules of the EE, it seems it mostly buffs the player characters and items, sometimes by a lot. Only concrete things I see for more challenge are a different point buy system and better AI and spells for enemies, but I think Creature Revisions buff enemies in general?

Enemies are definitely buffed to compensate and some other changes are made. It's hard to tell exactly how much easier or difficult the balance is without playing vanilla and the EE mod together which I haven't done. Notably though you get dispelled before the final battle like in IWD1, which makes it far, far more difficult and basically requires some form of cheese.

The argument for the buffs is that the game was barebones as fuck on release. In 3rd ed and every other 3rd ed based game your party ends with a tons of powerful magical items. In AD&D based infinity games you end up with a ton of awesome items. In vanilla IWD2 you end the game with literally half of your item slots empty and most of the rest are full of shit like +1 strength (and remember that odd numbers do literally nothing). Even BG1 has more powerful and impactful equipment than vanilla IWD2, by an order of magnitude. And the spell list of IWD2 was an absolute wasteland with there often only being one useful spell per level (or for a whole class, in the case of the partial casters).

The one option that looks to be very badly balanced to me is the XP-changing option. It does warn that installing it will result in extremely fast leveling though, so... definitely don't do that if you care about balance.

My other big criticisms are

- Full BAB characters are somewhat overbuffed and the 2/3rds BAB characters meant to compete with them can't really do so.
- While the new spells are cool, a lot of them just feel and look badly out of place.
- AoOs still feel really bad in an IE engine game.

- Of the new spells, I used Duel the most - it allows the caster to fight the target one-on-one until one of them dies. Fun spell and situationally useful, although it probably works better with a paladin rather than the cleric of Helm I was playing. There is also a high-level spell for making soul power gems to increase your stats permanently, but it was very conditional (need to have the right gems on you, deliver the final blow, and kill an enemy above a certain HD level which I couldn’t be bothered to check). Probably something better suited for HoF mode

Did you try the metamagic stuff? They are pretty fun, making low level buffs last forever or casting self only buffs as an AoE.

 

[Fatberg Slim]

Did you try the metamagic stuff? They are pretty fun, making low level buffs last forever or casting self only buffs as an AoE.

No, I've never been big on metamagic feats. This would have been worth playing around with on a sorceror though.

- AoOs still feel really bad in an IE engine game.

Agreed, I didn't pick any of those feats or options so I can't say how they worked out. I did pick the Grapple feat though - it was useful for casters in the early game (and amusing to drag enemies around the map or back to the frontline fighters), but ultimately it seemed like if you are able to grapple someone, you could just as easily kill them directly in most cases.