Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[Xeon]

I think its the same in BGs and IWD1, The nearest character is always the one talking.

 

[aleph]

Is there anyway to prevent my paladin from being in front when I enter an area? I put her in the 3rd, 4th and 6th slot but it doesn't seem to matter, she is still up front and the one talking when I first enter the Severed Hand.

You just get what you deserve for having a paladin in your group in the first place.

 

[Xeon]

Yea, the paladin was somewhat useless for me, she is not that great even after getting her Avenger. Still tho, its probably my fault for not building her better.

I finally managed to beat the game, Last 2 bosses were kinda easy but I barely did any damage to them and took very long time to beat them, All the monks were killed except for their leader, Magic didn't seem to work on them but Finger of Death was amazing on killing off all their minions.

One of the guides mentioned that during a playthough I can get 3 Every God Rings but I only managed to find 1, bought from Nathaniel, couldn't find others. Might be randomized loot or something.

Game was really fun overall, long and really diverse locations, and there were a lot of gimmick in some areas to spice them up. Hardest fight was probably against the Guardian, hardest place was chapter 1 because of the low levels, as soon as my mages got some decent spells, the game became a little easier.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamestm.co.uk/features/behind-the-scenes-of-icewind-dale/

Behind the scenes of Icewind Dale
The story of Icewind Dale begins in 1998, two years before it appeared on the shelves of your valiant local games shop. Released to critical acclaim and massive sales figures, Baldur’s Gate turned the RPG genre on its head, its five discs encompassing an expansive and involving story, spattered with swords and sorcery action and an advanced engine called Infinity running the show beneath its vibrant world. The success of Baldur’s Gate meant a sequel was inevitable, yet with a workable and adaptable engine in place, it was clear further games in the Forgotten Realms could prove popular.

However, first came Planescape Torment. A superb mix of macabre RPG, the Infinity engine and a heavily-altered version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition ruleset, the game was a hit with critics, but not so with gamers. Lead designer on Planescape was Chris Avellone. “Planescape at that point had largely broken me and my health,” he grimaces. “Although it didn’t help, I was working on Fallout 2 at the same time.”

Fortunately, Interplay’s vice president, Trish Wright, instructed Avellone to take it easy and stop working so late. “I was grateful that she was compassionate enough to swing by,” notes Avellone. Soon he would be lending his talents to miscellaneous areas within Icewind Dale, a project that would prove to be a relatively calmer experience for the young designer.

The nature of Icewind Dale’s development meant that, for once, the technical side remained an easier ride for those involved, as opposed to design. Working at parent company Interplay was coder David Ray.

“I’d been in the VR Sports department, working on Interplay Baseball 2000 when I was moved over to Black Isle and Fallout 3,” he remembers. When the sequel in the post-apocalyptic franchise was ultimately cancelled, Ray remained at Black Isle and was put to work on Icewind Dale instead. “I was a huge R.A. Salvatore fan and had read the Icewind Trilogy back in the early nineties,” he continues. “I’d also been GMing a D&D campaign set in the Forgotten Realms for several years, so the idea of being involved in making the digital version made me kind of giddy.”

Several ideas had been brainstormed prior to Black Isle settling on the backdrop of the realm’s harshest region.

“I’d worked on a number of projects at Interplay in a limited capacity,” says Avellone, “and a variety of cancelled and shelved Forgotten Realms titles – of which there were many and in some of the weirdest parts of the Realms too.” Another designer on Icewind was Stephen Bokkes and he recalls how the initial concept came about.

“At the time, Black Isle Studios was close to wrapping up Planescape: Torment. Our next project was Fallout 3, but it was decided that we had the budget and resources for an interim project of smaller scope and scale that would allow us to transition team members between projects more effectively.” Given the long-standing relationship with Wizards Of The Coast, it made sense to utilise another of its properties. “A number of us were avid D&D fans, so another Forgotten Realms campaign seemed like perfect sense,” continues Bokkes. “After a few days, sleepless nights and preliminary concept work, the Dragon Spear project was born.”

The original title for the project was Dragonspear Castle, its name derived from an obscure location within the Forgotten Realms. “We were told to expect a small team and a short development cycle of less than twelve months,” Bokkes explains, “and as such, the initial game concept was pretty much a straightforward dungeon crawler, heavy on combat encounters and light on story and dialogue.” Yet while this concept changed little during development, many of its team felt the scope of the game was too narrow and the setting too little known.

Bokkes continues, “After a bit of hair-pulling, arguing and convincing – [in other words,] collaboration – between us, the management and Wizards Of The Coast, we agreed to revisit the concept. I came up with a list of settings and locations that I considered more interesting and worthy of an adventure of the Forgotten Realms. The Moonshae Isles and Icewind Dale were the team’s top two choices on the list, and being an unapologetic fanboy of Salvatore’s novels, I rejoiced when we ultimately went with Icewind Dale.”

For those not familiar with the Forgotten Realms, Icewind Dale takes place in Faerun, a continent to the north of a world called Abeir-Toril, or Toril. Known also as the Barbaric North or the Savage Frontier, Icewind Dale contains numerous large caverns of former dwarfish strongholds and ruins of long-dead cultures, separated from the rest of Faerun by a wall of jagged peaks known as the Spine of the World.

Peppered by a steady stream of brave souls looking to explore, or simply those wishing to escape the rigid laws and taxes of the temperate southern lands, it is a place where nature rules, in the form of huge mountains and elongated lengths of alpine forests. Yet settlements exist despite the desolateness; linking the towns of Easthaven and Kuldahar is Kuldahar Pass, the main route throughout the north, and Icewind Dale’s tale takes place here, and on the plains of the Dale itself.

Groupshot: Stephen Bokkes, Josh Sawyer, Scott Warner, Chris Avellone, John Deiley, Reg Arnedo

Centuries ago, barbarian tribes such as the Uthgardt and Reghedmen lived on Icewind’s expanses and forged a difficult yet independent existence. When an archmage known as Arakon arrived, complete with a mercenary army and intent on conquering the northern wastes, a fierce battle ensued that initially favoured the wizard’s forces.

However, the tide turned decisively when the barbarian tribes, united by a shaman known as Jerrod, drove back the mercenaries, forcing Arakon into one last desperate act.

As the barbarian army surrounded the archmage, he summoned all of his power and tore open the planar boundaries, opening up a portal to the lower planes. Materialising from this conduit came forth a horde of hideous demons, intent on slaying any creature they set their devilish eyes upon. Struck by a vision from his God, Tempus, Jerrod forced his way through the demons and into the portal itself – his blood combining with its energy to fuse the gateway shut. However, as the introduction to Icewind Dale portentously states, this is not the end of the story, but merely the beginning.

To this backdrop enters a party of warriors, created completely by the player. Each character can be designed from race to colour, class, alignment and skills. “The idea of building every single party member was new,” remembers Avellone, “and while it bogged down the opening of the game, it was still fun to build everyone from scratch. I enjoyed it, anyway!”

The initial storyline was put together by Bokkes and Josh Sawyer, who also generated the game’s preproduction design documentation. As production began in earnest, Bokkes focused primarily on the design of the major quest hubs (Easthaven and Kuldahar) and the level design for several encounter areas. Despite using an existing engine, Icewind Dale’s purpose restricted what could be achieved in terms of design.

Avellone recalls that, “Much of the game was not motivated by what was essential, but more by what we could do with the time (not much of it) and resources (much less than Baldur’s Gate in terms of personnel and budget) and yet still feel compelling. Icewind Dale was designed to get product out fast and keep Interplay afloat during difficult times.”

David Ray was the lead programmer and responsible for the adaptations to the infinity engine. “We were using what we called Baldur’s Gate 1.5,” he reveals. “It was the latest engine and had many of Baldur’s Gate II’s features, but not all of them. A lot of our engineering time was spent working out the kinks in the new features and massaging them to work without complications. One of the notable things we did was in the rendering engine. They had implemented OpenGL to support faster rendering when you had a 3D card, but we wanted to support some of the new features without requiring a 3D graphics card.”

3D cards were fast becoming commonplace but were still expensive. Icewind Dale’s separate software renderer ensured everybody could experience the game’s new magical spell effects.

Other additions and amendments were plentiful, if minor. As Ray explains, “We created a few new animation sequences that weren’t in Baldur’s Gate and many of the spells required updated code paths, but it was mostly the same engine, we just added a few whistles and bells.” By creating the type of game that the Infinity engine was essentially designed for and coupled with Black Isle’s experience on Planescape: Torment the project moved forwards smoothly from this point of view, save the odd ambitious design element that the system could not handle.

“I’m a huge dragon nerd,” smiles Ray, “and there was a lot of talk about putting this huge dragon in the game. But I was the one that killed the idea because I felt like we couldn’t do it justice with the technical limitations and time constraints. I was a little sad about it, but I still feel it was the right decision to make at the time.” A collection of screen-enveloping dragons would eventually appear in both Baldur’s Gate II and Icewind Dale II.

Design proved even more troublesome, with enthusiastic ideas often drowned out by the restrictions of the Infinity engine.

“Most of the issues were over time,” says Avellone, “and we had arguments about aspects of the style guide. Even though it was a dungeon crawler, I didn’t have much tolerance for goofiness in the game, which chafed a bit, especially if it got in the way of an otherwise well-scripted dramatic moment. We kind of gave up on this stance as it vanished during the chaos of Icewind Dale II, where it did get kind of goofy.”

Another aspect Avellone regrets is that a time-saving tokenised system was only employed later on. “It meant the game could read the spell and item data files associated with the spell [or] item and automatically assign the designer-set properties such as duration, damage and class usage,” he explains. “It would then import it into the outward-facing text descriptions. [This] made it so much easier, eliminating the need to enter and finalise data by hand and helping reduce bugs.”

Avellone also contributed a number of elements to several major characters, he helped compose the narrative style guide, tweaked dialogue and proofed script implementation and checklists.

“I had about a 30-row long checklist table for every dialogue in the game to run through for fixes,” he recalls, “and although that may sound boring, I love that stuff when I’m not writing – or not in the mood to write [anyway]. I also wrote the manual, which everyone should do for a game at least once because doing that during the last months of a game is a hellish obstacle course of tracking spell and item information to make sure everything is correct. And a lot of systems can change and be rebalanced during that timeframe.”

Upon release, Icewind Dale was not without its critics. Many decried its simplicity after the plot-heavy and character-focused Baldur’s Gate, others highlighted some of the technical deficiencies of the infinity engine, such as its sometimes dubious pathfinding, that had irritatingly re-appeared from its forebear.

The development team, perhaps sensing that Icewind Dale lacked depth, made the game extremely tough, another fact that was noted at the time. There’s no doubt that charging full-on into many of the tricky battles would soon see several darkened portraits. Sneaking a thief forward and drawing out enemies one by one was a tactic many players picked up on, but this was not one anticipated by the development team.

“I personally liked emergent behaviour in games,” declares David Ray, “and I can appreciate it when players can do things that the developers didn’t think of. I don’t recall if any of us thought of that specifically, but I’m kind of glad it worked.”

Avellone notes of this method, “It may not be realistic, but [such] challenges that force you to re-examine ’charge!‘ strategies really make a designer’s day. One of the most fun aspects of the Icewind Dale series was layering new ways of undermining these challenges.

For example, once it became clear that a number of testers and players were using animal and elemental summon mobs to be their front line tanks, it wasn’t hard adjusting the key spellcasters and enemy mages so they would dispel first and ask questions later.”

Despite the criticisms, Icewind Dale scored well and proved there was a market hungry for its wide breadth of free-roaming adventuring. The game even survived a similar release date to another highly-anticipated RPG in Diablo II, with some remarking that maybe this assisted sales in a perverse way, with many gamers eagerly picking up both titles.

“Diablo II was gonna slaughter us in the action RPG arena,” says Avellone, “and it was almost something you expected, not dreaded.” Nevertheless, the game sold credibly, assisted by the public’s familiarity with its gameplay style and engine. In all, there is little that those involved would change about Icewind Dale itself.

“It was what it was,” says Avellone, “and for that, it was pretty well sized and scoped, except for the system changes. I probably would have left some of those alone in hindsight, so the programmers weren’t on the verge of divorce from the long hours.”

David Ray cites the user interface as something that could have been modernised. “Updating the UI was something we had wanted to do while we were working on it,” he recalls, “but we did a cost/benefit on it and decided it was something we couldn’t fit into the schedule.” For the development team, Icewind Dale represents a variable point in their careers. Avellone laments the role the game played as a bridge to other projects, when perhaps making a start on further Baldur’s Gate games, or even Fallout: Van Buren may have seen those franchises flourish at Interplay.

“We had tons of fun with it, but honestly it wasn’t a ground-breaking game – just fun. But lest I sound like Debbie Downer, fun’s the thing and not every game has to set out to change the world. Players enjoyed it, we had fun making it and that’s what counts,” Avellone remembers fondly.

For programmer David Ray, having been cornered into developing sports games, working on Icewind Dale was a breath of (icy) fresh air and sparked a career of development on similar titles, including the phenomenally successful World Of Warcraft.

Interplay followed Icewind Dale with the expansion Heart Of Winter which was, incredibly, even tougher than the original game, if a little on the brief side. After another (free) expansion entitled Trials Of The Luremaster, a proper sequel was released in 2002. Essentially more of the same, it sold steadily, but not enough to save Black Isle Studios, before publisher Interplay itself became quite the story over the remainder of the decade. But that, brave adventurer, is a tale for another time.

 

[Excidium II]

Wow look at that team pic. Josh before terminal cancer, MCA before steroids.

 

[Infinitron]

The Fat Avellone era of Black Isle, followed closely by the Fat Sawyer era. Who's the fat one today?

 

[Cosmo]

The Fat Avellone era of Black Isle, followed closely by the Fat Sawyer era. Who's the fat one today?

Fat or skinny, all were ultimately brought down by the horror of the 90's jeans...

 

[Infinitron]

The original title for the project was Dragonspear Castle

aVENGER Is this a coincidence?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To this backdrop enters a party of warriors, created completely by the player. Each character can be designed from race to colour, class, alignment and skills. “The idea of building every single party member was new,” remembers Avellone, “and while it bogged down the opening of the game, it was still fun to build everyone from scratch. I enjoyed it, anyway!”

That quote is BADLY in need of a [To me] at either end of "The idea of building every single party member was new." While straws can be pulled and many games can be dismissed where the party is mostly built and then NPCs fill out the remaining slots, games such as Might & Magic 4 & 5 (just to name an example) still did this, years before 'Dragonspear Castle' was even a thing.

This sheds light on something that has bothered me about game developers/designers for far too many years: They make statements that sound like they're inventing the wheel when they're only re-inventing it. A few years back some AAA-shooter dev claimed that they had created revolutionary AI "for the first time" that showed fish in water react to the player's presence and move away from him, only for someone to point to Super Mario 64 to prove the dev to be full of shit.

These statements are often just slips of the tongue or quoted out of context (which seems to be what's happening with Avellone's quote) but far too often it's either a deliberate lie or deliberate ignorance on behalf of the dev.

“I had about a 30-row long checklist table for every dialogue in the game to run through for fixes,” he recalls, “and although that may sound boring, I love that stuff when I’m not writing – or not in the mood to write [anyway]. I also wrote the manual, which everyone should do for a game at least once because doing that during the last months of a game is a hellish obstacle course of tracking spell and item information to make sure everything is correct. And a lot of systems can change and be rebalanced during that timeframe.”

Proofreading is a art.

 

[Infinitron]

Unkillable Cat Chris probably means that it was new to the Infinity Engine. The man was a Bard's Tale and Wasteland fanatic in high school after all.

 

[aVENGER]

The original title for the project was Dragonspear Castle

aVENGER Is this a coincidence?

Back when we started developing IWD:EE, we got access to the original Icewind Dale design documents, so we were aware of this.

However, Siege of Dragonspear was actually conceived before we got those (and before we even started working on BGII:EE) so the shared title was a coincidence.

 

[vortex]

Would you recommend Icewind dale 2 to spend some fun time in it?

 

[Revenant]

Just skim through the thread for an answer to your question:

The budget/time constraints are old news (as is anything written in this thread now), and while it's nice to know the reasons behind the disappointing aspects of IWD2, it doesn't make them any less disappointing. And when adding it all up, I find IWD1 a vastly superior game (even with its own numerous shortcomings).

First, the 3rd edition implementation is... well, there is no fitting expression other than "half-assed". A whole new, high-resolution action economy underlying the combat system? Sorry, no time to implement it, we'll just use the standard IE stuff - who cares about attacks of opportunity, 5-foot steps, move actions... Oh, a significant number of combat feats are based on those elements? Uhm, let's just cut them out and implement a hack based on the IE weapon proficiency system or something instead. Gee, there seems to be a very small number of feats in the game now, kind of makes gaining them or playing a class with high feat progression pointless... Is it some exotic, little-played class we can ignore? Shit, it's the fighter. Uhm, let's pad it out with flavor feats from the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, surely that makes up for it! So, skills... Even with the explosion of similar skills (who takes Hide but not Move Silently?), if we give classes the number of skill points the PHB says they get, they won't have a way to spend them... Better cut it down to 1/2 the normal rate for everybody but the rogues. Etc. - it's all understandable and very reasonable given the constraints - and it's all so disappointingly half-assed.

But hey, 3rd edition multi-classing is shiny and interesting, and we managed to implement that! Players can now mix and match levels from different classes, and create a huge variety of builds - and given that a variety of character builds is so important in RPGs, at least something works well! And it does... Well, there's this small detail of the 3rd ed multi-classing they kinda overlooked... Namely, while "mundane" class combinations are quite interesting and work well, caster multi-classing is something completely different. Casters scale in power with caster level, so non-trivial (cherry picking a level or two) multi-classing of a caster is (in terms of simple, uninteresting power) a horrible gimp. I personally don't mind horrible gimps (if they're intended by the player and interesting to play), but in a combat-centric game it kinda limits things... I'm still not sure did Wizards intentionally design the system so caster multi-classing is only viable with prestige classes that mix the exact caster level progression and non-casting features your build uses (resulting in a huge number of lazy combinatorial prestige classes filling up splatbooks that need to be bought). However, since IWD2 implements exactly 0 (zero) prestige classes, the point is moot - and the number of viable builds is severely reduced in the game (compared to the expected 3rd ed possibility space). Still larger than 2nd ed implemented in IWD1, don't get me wrong, but - disappointing again. (aside: to fix this in NWN2, they had to add prestige classes AND the Practiced Caster cheat - can you imagine a feat that gives you +4 BAB in the same circumstances? Or 4 levels worth of any other character progression element from any class? Epic feats like Gain:Attribute excluded because they are, well, epic).

Shall I tell you about encounter design? Actually, IWD2 has better (more challenging) encounter design, throwing mixes of melee/archer/multi-caster enemies at the player much earlier than IWD1, and giving them new tricks at a steady rate. Also, since in 3rd ed even regular fighters have a number of active abilities to use, things get more interesting on paper. Ironically, instead of making the game much better, for me this only served to highlight the inadequacies of RTwP for games with consistently interesting combat encounters. Much has been made of the "boredom" of playing a fighter in IE games, who doesn't have many buttons/abilities to choose from round-to-round, but "only" selects which enemies to attack with which weapon. And there has been near-universal clamor for giving all classes more buttons to press to make them more interesting to play. On the other side, there is a train of thought (last expressed by Infinitron, I think in some BG thread or other) that RTwP just "plays different", and relies less on micro-managing every party member and more on just letting them do their thing.

And, based on the IWD2 experience, I'm tempted to think that acceptable RTwP combat can only (even theoretically) exist if a minority of classes is "micro-heavy", while most can work as "micro-light". If you're "playing it wrong" by pausing every round or two in an RTwP game, then does making all classes more "micro-heavy" make it impossible to "play it right" after a point? Of course, different people have different preferences and tolerances, and in 2nd ed era of IE games, you could adjust the "micro-intensity" of your party by using more or less casters etc. - personally, I find playing a 6-caster party tedious (in RTwP games, not turn-based ones!). And again, somewhat ironically, if P:E "fixes" the "boredom" of playing a non-caster by giving all classes lots of buttons to press, won't it make it harder for players to adjust the "micro-intensity" of their party? I mean, if fighters have a choice of active abilities rivaling the wizards (or even just the bards), won't playing them right require choosing the right ability at the right time, like it does with casters? How does such a "micro-heavy" approach work in an RTwP game, without requiring constant pausing, to the point of matching the decision resolution of turn-based games (without the turn scaffolding that makes it possible)? (again, I love "micro-heavy" parties - in turn-based games; too bad this isn't one of them) Perhaps they'll shift the "micro-intensity" slider from class choice to build choice (i.e. each class will have "passive" builds and "active" builds), but if so, I don't think they have mentioned it yet.

But back to IWD2: the game is also hugely annoyified (yes, that's a word) by the proliferation of shitty scripted sequences. Gee, thank you for disabling the UI and pausing the game so I can watch the orc chieftain slowly walk from point A to point B, speak an inane (voiced!) one-liner, than slowly walk away. Unskippable, of course. And then repeat it several times on the same map. Thank you, BG2 engine/influence, for making this cinematic experience possible (and the shitty character models, while we're at it). Yes, IWD1 was also linear, but IWD2 really tries hard to rub the linearity in your face constantly, lest you manage to forget that you're playing the cutting edge of interactive storytelling (in my dungeon crawler). Shitcock.

In conclusion, IWD1 >>>>>>>> IWD2, and they would do well to make Dullsville more like the first one.

 

[bloodlover]

I am very close to finishing BG2 and I since I am on a D&D spree I might as well give IWD2 a shot (this or HOTU, I'll see). I am planning to run the full party on normal difficulty. 1 tank, one offtank, healer, thief and two DPS chars (one of them sorc ofc). With this mind, I have a couple of questions:

1) How are bards in this game? I usually avoid them since they tend to be jack of all trades and master of none but maybe they are worth a damn here. I am not sure how he will fit with my party but I might consider giving him a slot if he's worth anything.

2) I will be playing my CD version of the game so any patches/widescreen mods that I should be aware of? I assume there is a "widescreen mod" like there is for BG but I feel that it stretches the image too much and makes the writing too small.

Thank you.

 

[roshan]

I am very close to finishing BG2 and I since I am on a D&D spree I might as well give IWD2 a shot (this or HOTU, I'll see). I am planning to run the full party on normal difficulty. 1 tank, one offtank, healer, thief and two DPS chars (one of them sorc ofc). With this mind, I have a couple of questions:

1) How are bards in this game? I usually avoid them since they tend to be jack of all trades and master of none but maybe they are worth a damn here. I am not sure how he will fit with my party but I might consider giving him a slot if he's worth anything.

2) I will be playing my CD version of the game so any patches/widescreen mods that I should be aware of? I assume there is a "widescreen mod" like there is for BG but I feel that it stretches the image too much and makes the writing too small.

Thank you.

Bards are basically complete shit. Crappy spell selection, casted at low levels, shitty skill selection, no bonus feats, no natural lore bonus, need too many attributes, essentially a useless character.

Some of the multiclasses that rule IWD2: paladin1/clericX, fighter4/clericX, fighter4/thiefX, thief1/mageX, paladin1/sorcererX, etc.

 

[pippin]

You get some bard exclusive items in the game but I think that onl reinforces the point of them being shitty.

 

[Average Manatee]

I am very close to finishing BG2 and I since I am on a D&D spree I might as well give IWD2 a shot (this or HOTU, I'll see). I am planning to run the full party on normal difficulty. 1 tank, one offtank, healer, thief and two DPS chars (one of them sorc ofc). With this mind, I have a couple of questions:

>using degenerate MMO nomenclature

1) How are bards in this game? I usually avoid them since they tend to be jack of all trades and master of none but maybe they are worth a damn here. I am not sure how he will fit with my party but I might consider giving him a slot if he's worth anything.

In general bards are best with physical-heavy parties. Bards are sort of like Clerics in that they are medium BAB but can buff to become about as good as a straight fighter while also buffing the rest of the fighters to be uber-fighters and having some debuff abilities on enemies. But of course they aren't nearly as good as Clerics are, not having full casting powers or domains and such, and in particular a bunch of the best low-level spells in the game in 3rd ed that keeps low-level spell slots relevant is nerfed in the infinity games (Grease being the one I most remember, I think glitterdust as well). I think their songs are also worse in IWD2 than in 3rd ed. Basically if you want to make a bard as your 4th physical after a fighter/cleric/thief, it's not a bad idea, but if you really aren't big on the bard idea then wait for ToEE where they'll be much better (and can use wands that the wizard crafts to effectively emulate full casters).

 

[pippin]

>using degenerate MMO nomenclature

Every time anyone uses the DPS bullshit to describe party building in rpgs I cringe so hard men

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Even though they mean exactly the same?

Damage dealer is 4 syllables, DPS is 3. Guess which one will win out in the end?
Tank is tank.
Healer is healer.
Buffer is buffer.
Etc.

Like it or not, this is here to stay. Deal with it.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

If I want to OP IWD2 I go with:

Fighter - Longsword/Board - Human Pladin
Fighter - Handaxe/Board - Dwarf
On the front line, then
Cleric - Mace/Board - Half Elf
Cleric - Flail/Board - Any
in the middle line, then
Ranger - Arrows - Elf
Thief - Crossbow/Bullets - Halfling
on the back line.

There's about 8 different kinds of Cleric, and I used to know which ones gave the best additional mage spell tree, but I've forgotten, I think the War one and the healer one, I could be wrong though (Templar/Tempest(?) and Moon/Moonlord(?) ).

What no mage I hear you cry? Indeed. I find that early on, while the mage is squishy, he's a burden, as per usual, not entirely, but there are moments when I just wished I had someone I didn't have to 'worry' about, and then, later, when they start to get gud, the Priests are actually more OP, especially as Clerics in IWD2 can use specialist mage spells - the one with Haste being pretty much better than choosing a Mage. For example, one can cast Prayer while the other casts Recitation (or whatever the combo was) and you've just increased your attack by three while reducing the opponent's attack by three, that's like a win button right there. In IE games people mainly just go with the Mages for Haste anyway. At the late game, about 75% in and having two Clerics casting Power Word Stun, either in tandem or apart, is just hilariously tasty and makes the end-game feel like it should, OP steaming. They also have great natural saves.

I've heard it said that while AD&D was all about the mages, 3rd ed is all about the Clerics, and I'm inclined to agree, I use them extensively for both IWD2 and any NWN games, though Paladins are close due to their exceptional natural saves across all three categories.

 

[Average Manatee]

Even though they mean exactly the same?

Damage dealer is 4 syllables, DPS is 3. Guess which one will win out in the end?
Tank is tank.
Healer is healer.
Buffer is buffer.
Etc.

Like it or not, this is here to stay. Deal with it.

Except D&D isn't like this.

Warriors put out huge damage and in PnP they are also able to grapple and trip and generally fuck up anything. Nothing in D&D 'tanks', which is a retarded concept only for MMO retards.

"healers" are stronger than warriors in both durability and damage eventually, along with being able to nuke and protect the party. Healing is actually often a waste of time for them while in a battle.

Arcane casters are generally better at buffs/debuffs than damage. Loading up on 5 copies of fireball is generally considered to be a noob mistake.

It's just stupid to use degenerate MMO terminology to describe things out of the MMO-space.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

It's just stupid to use degenerate MMO terminology to describe things out of the MMO-space.

Ah. The problem is that you assume that IWD is outside of the MMO-space, at least in terms of gameplay elements. Some classes are clearly outside of it, but not all.

Don't worry, there are more 'classic' RPGs that these terms apply to than you think. The Eye of the Beholder series is a prime example.

 

[Average Manatee]

Some classes are clearly outside of it, but not all.

Don't worry, there are more 'classic' RPGs that these terms apply to than you think. The Eye of the Beholder series is a prime example.

Uhh, no. Every class in D&D and most non-retarded games falls outside the retarded tank/heal/dps MMO trinity. No one would play a game system that was so dumbed down.

 

[pippin]

That's why nobody liked 4th edition actually. The problem could be that IWD is largely focused on combat and nothing else, so most people could still apply the DPS logic into it. But neocrpg fans are applying the DPS logic into fucking everything. This might be the turning point, where the crpgs finally lose everything they had when it came to their identity.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Uhh, no. Every class in D&D and most non-retarded games falls outside the retarded tank/heal/dps MMO trinity. No one would play a game system that was so dumbed down.

The problem could be that IWD is largely focused on combat and nothing else, so most people could still apply the DPS logic into it. But neocrpg fans are applying the DPS logic into fucking everything. This might be the turning point, where the crpgs finally lose everything they had when it came to their identity.

What pippin is saying. IWD uses very little of the true abilities of the D&D classes, therefore I say that these terms can apply to it - IWD just happens to possess additional classes that fall outside of the MMO terminology.

The MMO terminology does apply fully to EOB - it only has six classes, of which one (Thief) is utterly useless, leaving five classes - 3 DPS classes with minor differences, 1 Magic DPS and finally a Healer/Buffer class.