My latest creation - Two casters duo HOF :D

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I'm at the bridge fight right now, trying to just man mode it and rush straight to the bridge.

But I'm dealing with a really low sustained damage output, and the mob I have to cut down is colossal. I went back to town and bought some new scrolls for the wizard (haste!) but the duration of the heavy hitting buffs is still really low.

currently at 31k XP each, character lvl 6. Right before the Battle of the Bridge. Up until this fight, it's been smooth sailing with both of them able to maintain ~25 AC with just mage armor and cats grace. I was able to take on the entire map at once. It was a tough fight, but they made it. Used several potions.

37k/lvl 7, just set foot on the area around the fortress map.

60.5k/lvl 9, finished with warrens, about to see moonlight again. I've missed out on quite a bit of quest XP due to having no CHA and no diplomatic skills. The Yquog that I killed was very powerful, +15 BaB, but yielded a rather disappointing 450 XP. Tons of monsters, little XP.

 

Are you starting on normal or on HoF?

 

Based on the exp tally, that is normal mode. You DO know that it is a bad idea to kill Yquog now when you could have earned over 2000 quest exp for him later?

 

Yes, but I thought there was a good chance I wouldn't be given the dialogue options because my dialogue stats suck. For instance I didn't get to pry anything out of Kruntur, and normally you can get him to tell you some valuable information.

And yes, normal.

 

I leave him alive not because of the experience, but because when you kill him later, you get a chance at a really good item, such as a Tymora's Loop.

 

you can still kill him again if you are fast enough to attack him before the script kicks in and removes him again as he is supposedly dead already. ..

 

That is a bit too much cheese, even for me!

 

Speaking of cheese - you mentioned that if you kill him in chp 6, he has a random drop table. I guess I should go ahead and mention that I do plan on reloading the random drop fights to get some items I want. I also plan on adding the MGoF +5 (Yes I made an acronym for that) to the random drop table.

Nothing stupid like getting a tymora's loop from every random drop fight, but I do plan on getting the axe and the ring. I'll get the ring in normal mode and the axe in HOF.

And about the XP... I'm not too bothered either way. I'm not doing this to compete with Rechet, I just want to duo HOF, since I've never done it before. I'm not trying very hard to optimize XP with quest reward timing, and I'm not adding in lvl 1s at any point, so my overall XP won't be very good. But as long as I hit 30 before chp 5 or so HOF, I'm happy.

 

I've reloaded until I got two Tymora's Loops before (not in one battle, two separate battles), so I'm no stranger to reload cheese. I'll be doing the same this time round. I'll probably go for another Every God Ring and 1-2 Tymora's Loops.

Off the top of my head, the places where the Tymora's loop can drop are:
Saablic Tan
Tyrannar Brutai Mar
Iyachtu Xvim
Captain Pudu
Yquoq (Chapter 6 of course)

Might be one or two of the other major battles too.

Protip for getting Ned's Lucky Knucky in HoF mode - don't bother with pickpocketing. Just use Finger of Death on him - it kills him instantly and the town will not turn hostile.

"Oh dear, our colleague just dropped dead, and that stranger is removing something from his pocket. How odd. Anyway, back to business."

 

That last clause describes the AI in modern, AAA titles that are supposed to have stunningly next gen, super intelligent AI.

That's why I repeatadly go back to this game lol.

And yeah, I never planned on actually pick-pocketing item from Ned.

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Just finished chapter 1. The fortress upper area had ridiculous number of spawns, the inside I didn't think was that much different, at least not compared to the upper level.

Anyways, ended at 70k xp each. Pretty low :/ I missed out on a fair amount of quest XP, and kill XP towards the end was getting laughably bad. Not looking forward to getting about 0 kill XP for the entirety of chp 3 >.>

 

70 k each including what they started with? Hey, at least you're doing better exp-wise compared to a soloer. And yes, while you're going to get used to zero exp kills a lot from now on, at least Iron Golems are good for something all the way to level 20, and major bosses all the way to level 24 so all is not lost.

 

If you really want to cheese it, you can add temporary mules while battling enemies such as golems. Just delete them from your party afterwards.

You could easily drop from APL 12 to APL 7 or so.

I'm still not quite how I feel about the subject of level squatting. I suppose it irritates me that, say I were to levelup in the middle of combat, I could suddenly start getting less experience from the very same enemies. I prefer experience systems where the gaps between levels takes longer and longer (ala BG2 and IWD:EE).

 

IMHO the monster Challenge Rating vs party level solves the ages old exp farming problem. It is just plain easier to plow through literal thousands of easily killed mobs rather than taking on something with actual challenge. With the CR system, even powergamers have an incentive to fight level appropriate mobs. Squatting should never have been possible to begin with.

 

Agreed - but how do you deal with getting punished by the system for playing with fewer guys? I'd prefer if the dynamic spawns actually resulted in higher APL groups getting higher CR monsters to compensate. For instance instead of having 50 orc archers on the upper level of the fortress, could we get 20-30 souped up orc archers with +2 CR?

Basically I think dynamic spawns could do a lot better job of adding difficulty to compensate for higher APL.



Oh, and wizard scrolls >.< I've got four 4th level and 2 5th level slots, but no spells. I think the soonest I can get them is from Oswald once we crash? But if I remember correctly he just has a bunch of summons - something I'm not using. I hope the werewolf guy has some useful stuff. Emotion: Hope, Spirit Armor, and Stoneskin namely. 5th level is pretty useless because I can't use evocation and having only 18 INT and no spell focuses the DC of offensive spells sucks, and I'm not using summons.

 

If the devs actually WANTED to make sure that smaller parties wont reach too high levels to keep gaining exp, they could have just put a division to exp awarded. For right now it is rather backwards that you can get a more powerful party by leaving a few members out completely to begin with.

 

I don't think they actually expected you to try that. They figured that having more guys would be more firepower.
The having fewer people was intended for multiplayer when somebody had to leave and it was just easier to leave the common code alone rather than differentiating from single player.

 

Yeah, that's a simpler/better option. But We need to be careful not to simplify the system too much. Part of the reason we've gotten so much mileage out of IWD2 is because of it's relatively complex and "game-able" rules. You can't just nail down a "most powerful party".

Damn we really need a 2015 successor to the IWD/BG/PS/TOEE type games. done with an adaptation of IWD2's ruleset.

 

I don't know if the experience farming is really a problem. I've never done it before - I would imagine it being incredibly boring.

I think the reason I don't like it is more psychological than powergaming related. Let us say I kill a Mind Golem and get 3300 experience. I level up, and suddenly I get 2100 experience for killing another mind golem. That is why I feel cheated - I guess, for a difficult monster such as a mind golem, I expect a high experience reward. Levelling up can in some cases drastically reduce the experience reward for a tough fight, and that makes it psychologically less satisfying for me.

Whereas, in BG2, because the gap between levels gets longer, the 64000 experience that you get for killing Firkraag means a lot more at level 9 than it would at say level 12. However, the figure remains the same and relatively high, and that makes it feel satisfying, even if 64000 experience has less of an impact at level 12.

Although mathematically I realise that the CR rating is compensated by the fact that each level requires only 1000 more experience than the last level, the CR rating leads to me feeling cheated by the game.

Not to mention that some of the CR ratings assigned to monsters are completely out of wack. Guthma is too high, and Yuan Ti and Hook Horrors are too low.

That being said, I realise that level squatting more or less boils down to shifting experience from one place to another. My goals are to obtain level 9 spells early in HoF, and to reach around level 28-30 by the end of HoF. Because I have a 6 man party, I hear this will require squatting.

I'm squatting right now actually. My human characters are level 12, and could level up to 14. My Drow characters are 11, and could level up to 12. I've just finished the Zhinda citadel. The problem is, if I level up, I will substantially reduce the experience I get from both the Guardian and the Lost Followers. I would like my humans to reach level 17 by the end of normal difficulty.

 

There's nothing wrong with squatting. It's a game, do what you want. I still plan on squatting my duo for the last 11/12 levels so that I can dodge the XP penalty. I don't feel like it's a big deal because I wouldn't get much useful out of those 11 bard/12 druid levels until I actually get all 11/12 of them. I'd get some, but the big goodies are the +5 AC from level 12 barkskin and WCoTS at bard 11.

We're debating why squatting shouldn't be possible or even required. Or I was, can't speak for Retchet.

And I totally agree on the psychological deal. feels like you're getting shafted for succeeding.

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So I got there, stepped outside and started killing boring beetles. I thought that there were only about 20 total, and after that they stopped coming. Well they didn't, there would be 2 out at a time. As soon as I killed one, another one popped out. Anyways got bored (hehe...) and went inside. There were only 2 beetles alive, but the moment I went in the airship, all these just appear out of nowhere. Since I hadn't rested since clearing out the fortress and had literally zero spells, I'm going to have to reload, which means I lose those ~30 or so that I killed. RIP got bored.




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The formorian giants were actually worth 375xp at APL 10, wish I got more then 5 of them + their verbeeg. Also, Esri with the composite longbow +2 and some fire arrows from the ork archers with literally every single shot and does ~45 damage/crit, her BaB is higher than Zenatis right now because she's primarily cleric, while he is a wizard, he's critting up to mid 70s tho.

All in all my duo is having a pretty easy time of combat, being able to both get to 31+ AC easily with haste, and the buff durations are sooo much better than they used to be. I have reached the point where I don't use mage armor for Zenatis any more, because the shield duration is good enough that 3-4 casts is enough to literally never run out. I still use mage armor for Esri, although for short duration she can use the chainmail obtained from Kruntur for 2 casts of shield/day. It's worth keeping around, and she can get at least 35 AC with it.

Still ZERO 5th level scrolls and only Emotion:Hope, Spider Spawn, and Malison at 4th. Not the worst 3 spells to be sure. Hope and Malison and permanently memorized forever, and I have one cast of spider spawn ready. I'm not banning myself from summons this playthrough, but they are never a primary or even secondary plan of action.

Just some random thoughts

 

Is it the widescreen mod in action that let you have such a gargantuan screen shot?

Can the mod be used at lower resolutions to increase the text size on my old 98SE/XP system that maxes out at 1280x1024 (that I keep at 1024x768 because for some reason the CRT makes a high pitched sound at that resolution that gives me a headache, and I get eyestrain)?