BGT: late-game farming in BG1

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Hi

Since I have BGT (hence I get to export Imoen, Minsc, Jaheira and their BG1 experience to BG2) I always dualclass Imoen to Mage after 9 levels of thief. This time, I decided to dualclass her at lvl13.

She's currently is a lvl13 Thief (inactive)/lvl11 Mage, so I still need over a million of experience points before unblocking her Thief levels back.
I can't postpone it to BG2 because I still need to explore the lower levels of Durlag's Tower, and I cannot do that without a thief (of course, I could have done it before dualclassing but I always felt that Durlag's Tower should be the last part of the game, Undercity notwithstanding).

These are the farming arenas that I know:
1)Ankhegs: worth 974xp a pop, but they're way nastier than winter wolves.
2)The Wyvern that always respawns in the big Wyvern cave: 1400xp a pop, but the number of spawning wyverns seems to be indifferent to my level/experience.
3)Winter Wolves in the Nashkel Mines area, which is what I'm doing now.
974xp a pop, but they are sensible to my level/experience, because they respawn in pack of 5 (and they respawned in groups of 3 when I started -by the way, does anyone know the formula?).

----
I hope the number of spawning winter wolves will eventually increase, because if it doesn't, I'll have to kill about 1.2K packs of Winter Wolves before reaching my goal.

The question was: does anyone know a more efficient way to farm BG1?
I was thinking of rolling a Kensai/Mage or a Kensai/Thief in my next run, and dualclassing them at level13 will apparently give me an extra half-attack compared to dualclassing them at level 9, so I'm worried about the future :/
I'm not willing to temporarily dump my companions. It feels wrong (and yeah, I know that killing 12K winter wolves isn't exactly a cool thing to do).

 

You've far exceeded the expected level for characters in the game, and shouldn't have too much trouble taking down anything.

I'd just leave her inactive, kick Saravok's butt, then worry about it in BG2. You should be able to get through by having a cleric waste a 2nd level spell on find traps, and Imoen can waste a second level spell slot on knock.
You'll just have to violate #31 of "Things Mr. Welch Cannot Do in an RPG"

 

Thanks for answering!

The problem, though, is that while Knock obviously solves the open locks issue, the 2nd lvl cleric spells "Find Traps" merely detects said traps and does not disarm them.

 

If you could set them off with summons, I'd recommend that, but IIRC summons just walk over the traps without triggering them.

Don't you have another thief that you're using to fill in until Imoen gets her thief levels back? Doing Durlag's Tower without somebody to find traps is virtually impossible.

Worst case scenario, you can cheat, use the console to level her up, then use the console to remove the excess XP. She won't de-level, but you'll have to earn back the XP before she can level again.
It's got to be better than grinding, which will cease to be fun.

Look at Imoen's current XP, and write it down. Then put her in the top spot, select her as the active character (I forgot if it did the top character or the active one as I only use it on the PC for tests), and type this command:
Simply select Imoen, bring up the console, and use this command:
CLUAConsole:SetCurrentXP(1500000)
That should give her JUST enough XP to get to level 14 and reactivate her thief levels.
Then level Imoen up, and bring up the console again, and use the same command with her original XP level in parenthesis. It will NOT de-level her, but she'll have to get to 1875000 before reaching level 15.

If you can't bring up the console, double check that it is enabled in the .INI file. If you are using Windows Vista, 7, or 8, it might be in a "virtual store" file as well since Microsoft now considers .ini files depreciated and are "encouraging" developers to phase them out by making the settings files no longer universal since Vista.

---------- Added 0 hours, 9 minutes and 11 seconds later... ----------

Guide to enabling the console
http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/cheats.php

 

Nah, that's the kind of cheating I don't have it in me to resort to

One thing I could probably do is to walk over the traps with my main character, who has 144HP and can probably survive them, though I don't know if all the traps disarm after being sprung.
But I was hoping there were more effective farming options than winter wolves :/

 

144HP? What are you still doing in BG1?! You could take Sarevok with your bare hands at this point. Move on already.

 

147HP now! And yeah, I know, but I (probably?) cannot do the lower levels of Durlag's tower. Which sucks.

Anyway, I probably won't try to level Imoen to 14/13 in my next playthrough. Giving a x5 backstab to Imoen isn't worth the massive grind.

 

Actually, you should have just foregone dual classing her in BG1, done the damn tower, and dueled her in BG2 at a lower level.
Heck, without serious grinding, I've yet to get much past level 12 with the XP cap removed, but that's playing on the original game when I had my PC as a C/F/M and everyone else was at 12.

 

Yeah, that's a good idea, might try it in a later playthrough if I somehow decide to dualclass Imoen at lvl13 again.

Though I have to say that dualclassing her in BG2 also has its downsides: I obviously will not be able to get her thief levels before getting separated from her, and IIRC there are a lot of traps in Spellhold that she won't be able to disarm once I get her back.

That would leave me with the choice of recruiting Jan Jansen or Nalia.
Nalia is a decent mage but has 4 thief levels (which is... less than ideal).
Jan is just an horrible NPC (he cannot cast Death Spell, Finger of Death or Horrid Wilting, and he's a multiclassed thief).

I tried farming Flesh Golems (2000xp) from the cave close to the Lighthouse, but like the wyverns, they only spawn one at a time
So for lack of better options, I'm still stuck with winter wolves atm (but I "only" have 608k xp left to go).
I take it no one knows monsters that are worth more than 974xp that spawn more than one at a time?

 

If you haven't already done so, I recommend that you temporarily remove everyone but Imoen from the party to speed up the process. By the sound of it the two of you ought to be more than powerful enough to handle whatever comes your way on your own .

 

Unfortunately, that's not an option, because for some reason, Khalid and Jaheira disappear forever (i.e. they can't be found at the Friendly Arm Inn) if I dump them.

My reputation is 20, so that's not the problem.

 

The quickest way to do power level is to go to BG2. Seriously, upon exiting chateau Irenicus you'll get nearly 40k xp for every member in your party. You'd have to grind significantly for that amount in BG1. Even a solo monk that I let do most of the stuff I could do in BG1, he still hadn't reached the 1 mln xp mark.

Barring that, if you have a spot in your party, add one of the thief NPCs you can find in BG1. That should help significantly.

Alternatively, I've noticed that in BGTutu you can warp to BG2 and ToB maps. I don't know how BGT handles the BG1 part, but going to a ToB map and kiting around a few Fire Giants will net you a lot of xp. Note that this may or may not break your BG1 game (I've had some chapter transitions break on me, though I don't know if it was from the warping around or not).

 

I seem to recall that if you put the NPCs in a house before removing them (ensuring, of course, that your main character is not in said house), then they cannot initiate the goodbye dialogue, and thus will stay put, and you can come back to collect them again later.

Can't promise they won't disappear eventually, but it is worth a shot though, if you are dead-set upon grinding those levels and doing Durlags Tower before proceeding to BG 2.

I recommend that you do a backup save before attempting this, and checking back periodically to make sure they are still there.

 

Thanks for the replies, I decided to speed things up by temporarily removing Minsc and Dynaheir and I finally hit level 14 today. Roughly 11.5K winter wolves killed, wouldn't do this again or recommend it to anyone else

 

Well congrats. And no worries, I would never dream of doing this myself .

 

Don't feel like opening a new thread for a minor question.

My party right now consists of:

Cavalier (PC)
Imoen
Khalid
Jaheira
Minsc
Dynaheir

My initial intention was to replace Khalid and Dynaheir with either Valygar/Viconia or Nalia/Viconia.
However, it has just occurred to me that I could recruit Viconia, try to beat SoA with a party of 5 (picking up a sixth companion and then dumping him after SoA sounds like a jerk move) and then grab Sarevok in ToB.

Questions:
1) I have never chosen a fresh NPC in ToB so I'm oblivious to the level situation. Roughly, how much Sarevok is going to lag behind my other characters (considering the fact that I'm going to level very fast with a party of 5)?
2) How do I equip Minsc? His to-go weapon in ToB (Ravager) would obviously go to Sarevok. Do I give him Gram? Do I have him wear Montolio's Cloak and let him dualwield from The Equalizer/Hindo's Doom/Celestial Fury? 'm a bit worried about the dual-wielding, his dexterity is a bit meh.

 

DEX has no influence on dual wielding in BG, as far as I'm aware. You could always keep Ravager for Minsc and some two-handed short for Sarevok. There's plenty of high level weapons to go around for everybody.

Sarevok normally starts at lvl 21, as far as I can recall, so he'll be lagging quite a bit.

In BG2, I'd normally limit the base party to 5, then rotate the last slot so you can do all the NPC's personal quests.

 

Correct, but I was referring to the fact that a melee character with less than ideal dexterity would be better off wielding a weapon with reach (i.e. a two-handed weapon) or equip a shield.

 

I suppose it's true that his AC would be a bit higher with his lower DEX, but on the other hand, AC is fairly useless by the time you reach ToB everybody and their grandmother will be able to hit you. Your best defense in ToB is a a good offense.