24 réponses à ce sujet

[Metelesku]

Hey all,

I decided to try the BGT and chose to play with the Half-Orc F/BH (I will add kit in ShadowKeeper).

Now the question is what stats, skills and proficiencies (also in which order) should I aim for becouse I never played a thief before.

On this class combo I decided due to have a tactical fighter rather than the super-smasher which would kensai/thief be.

Thanks for any advice.

PS: I will not solo. I plan on taking full party of NPCs that can go with me through the whole trilogy with happy party mod (Imoen, Edwin, Jaheira, Minsc and Viconia). Also am considering giving kits to them as well so any advice in this respect is welcome.

Modifié par Metelesku, 25 août 2010 - 08:55 .

[Flamedance]

Two weapon style, of course. You might want to start out with long swords, since they're cheap and easy to come by. Flails (for the FoA),one point in maces for the Mace of Disruption, later on at least one point,possibly two in warhammers (you'll have plenty of proficiency points, no need to be stingy). That way you can use the CF in your offhand to set your strength to 25. That's just my preference, others might want weapons that grant you more attacks per round.

Immy: any specialized mage you like. I prefer Conjurors.

Edwin: sorceror......for limitless cheese.

Jaheira is fine as she is. She's a powerhouse once you get to ToB. Ranger/cleric is another option, of course.

Minsc: berserker. Obvious choice.

Vicky: fantastic cleric. Don't much like the Cleric of Talos kit, but it's an obvious choice. Cleric of Lathander is a better choice, but you'll have to change her alignment through SK (which from a roleplaying perspective is rather dubious:p). Another option is to make her a cleric/mage.

Hint: get the Longer Road mod. This will allow you to recruit Jon Irenicus in ToB. Don't take both Edwin and Irenicus if you want some sort of challenge, though.

[Humanoid_Taifun]

(general warning that Edwin and Minsc really don't like each other)

Now, in my opinion an FT should go for two-handed weapons. The bigger the weapon, the bigger the backstab, right? This way, in the end, you can swing Carsomyr +6 for combat and the Staff of the Ram for backstabs (with the Staff of the Magi in your inventory in case you want to apply a second backstab).

Of course, Carsomyr +6 is not the best damaging option, but it rips through stoneskins, Mirror Images and everything in a charming fashion. And with strength 25 you shouldn't be short of damage anyway.

Yes, a halforc warrior starting in BG1 can reach that level of strength, unfortunately only by going evil during the hell trials. If you don't want an alignment shift, you could try installing a certain component from QuestPack (but then there is no need any more for Crom Faeyr ).
www.pocketplane.net/mambo/index.php

Even without the trials, you can still reach strength 22 or even strength 23 (by stealing Viconia her holy symbol).
So, if you want to dualwield, instead of Crom Faeyr, I'd personally go with Kundane or the Scarlet Ninja-To in the left hand, depending on whether or not you're currently assassinating somebody. Why not Belm? Because it's such a great weapon for Jaheira.

The great thing about changing Minsc into a barbarian (or possibly also a berserker - haven't tried that yet as I think he's more of a barbarian) is that if you activate his new rage first - and then his personal rage, you will not lose control over him.

Edit: No I do not always simply try to contradict what other advice has been given!

Modifié par Humanoid_Taifun, 25 août 2010 - 10:21 .

[Metelesku]

Heh, choices choices, that didn't help too much H_T Now I'm unsure even more. I'm starting in BG1 so maybe to have 2APR is better than bigger backstab that can miss early on.



How about the thieving skills? I assume lay traps should be maxed first what's next?

[Humanoid_Taifun]

In BG1 you'll have Imoen with you really fast, so you can assign one character to trap disarming and lockpicking, while the other one studies hiding.

Lockpicking in particular should be raised fast, you will probably not run into many traps until the Nashkell mines. I suggest Imoen does this, while you focus on backstabbing. Hide in Shadows and Move Silently are mostly the same, you can put your points into whatever you like more (so long as you pay attention that neither of them goes above 255 - this is vital!). There is a rumor that if you have a low Move Silently enemies will follow you even if they cannot see (or attack) you, but there is no evidence on this.

Don't worry about missing, you get a 4 point bonus (-4) on your THAC0 when you are invisible. Dualwielding on the other hand will give you penalties, depending on how many points you have in the two-weapon-style. In BG2 your THAC0 should be low enough already to go with 2 weapons, especially if you get there with strength 20, but it'll be difficult to study the new weapons (+ style) in a hurry as a multiclass, so I'd still stick to the two-handed weapons.

Edit: As for Lay (Set) Traps, for me it's generally an afterthought, which I don't use very often. My advice to you: Have your PC learn it after he's put about 200 points into stealth.

Modifié par Humanoid_Taifun, 25 août 2010 - 12:44 .

[jaxsbudgie]

Don't underestimate detect Illusions either, frees up True Sight spell slots for Viconia/Imoen and Edwin. Plus it takes as long to detect an illusion as it does to cast it (mind you, Edwin or Imoen with items that speed up spell casting would detect illusions faster).

I'd say keep Imoen a pure thief (they're severely lacking in BG2), maybe kit her to Adventurer, Burglar or Sharpshooter (do you have Song and Silence installed?). This way you can make her a detect trap/pick locks/detect illusions and set traps thief because she'll have lots of points to distribute.

Edwin, like Flamedance said, make a sorcerer. My last play through I had both Edwin and Nalia as sorcerers, and they tore everything apart within their sight. Enough said.

Minsc, I like the idea of him being a Barbarian, I do think it fits him. So maybe try it out? If not then a Berserker is a much better choice than a standard Ranger in my opinion ... well, maybe early on.

Jaheira, I had as as Ranger/Cleric in my last play through too, and she held her own and rarely died (was usually the last standing). As you've probably read, Ranger/Clerics are an amazing build. So she'd have access to all divine spells and would be the best mage slayer.

Viconia, don't give her a Cleric kit, the very idea of choosing from the standard three kits sends a shiver down my spine. She worships Shar, let's leave it that way. Either make her a Fighter/Cleric and watch her dominate when dual wielding. Or a Mage/Cleric with the Robe of Vecna, I say this because divine spells have much longer spell casting times than arcane spells. She gets quite good lore too from high wisdom and intelligence. Are you having her with 15 or 18 wisdom? I'd give her the three tomes of Wisdom to buff her up as the predominant divine caster.

As for your PC. Well, I usually always play fighter/thief, but I'm no powergamer. I usually invest in Two Weapon Fighting with shortswords and longswords. I have Rogue Rebalancing installed too, so you get a penalty for having a weapon that isn't small in your off hand. I'd also invest all your points into stealth and move silently, with maybe set traps as an after thought. Remember, two items in the game boost your stealthing abilities quite sufficiently.

[Humanoid_Taifun]

Take note that for Detect Illusions to work, the thief has to be relatively close to whatever illusions he's trying to see through. It also works only once every six seconds (like True Sight). It's possible to fight and detect illusions at the same time if you wait until your thief is engaged before you order them to Find Traps (that button that does both).

I also forgot about archery. While next to useless in BG2 (1D6 damage is just enough to get a dragon's attention) in BG1 it rules supreme. So with that in mind, maybe your starting weapons should be two handed sword and short bow, whith the next 2 points going into staves (so you'll learn your backstabbing weapon while you're learning how to hide).

Why the short bow? Because there is no difference damage-wise between the two sizes, and the best bow, the only bow worth using at all in BG2, is a short bow.

An alternative to bows would be throwing axes. Since your character will have a high strength score as a half orc, they will deal a whole lot more damage that way - but throwing axes have a shorter reach, meaning you'll have to let the opponents come closer to you.

[Slyx]

Humanoid_Taifun wrote...
It's possible to fight and detect illusions at the same time if you wait until your thief is engaged before you order them to Find Traps (that button that does both).

I was going to mention this, but you beat me to it =)  Just tell your thief to attack something, and as long as he/she is making a bee line for his/her target, or actively swinging on the target, you can turn on find traps and it will continually detect/dispell illusions.  As long as you activate find traps/detect illusions AFTER you give your thief an attack command it will stay on until the target is gone, etc.

Would you consider this an exploit of a bug?  I'm not sure if this is working as intended or not.

I would guess that detect illusions has about the same radius as find traps, though I'm not certain on this one.

[Metelesku]

Now all this info just turned to diamonds

Jax, you made my party perfect. To leave Imoen true thief is great idea. I always considered her a mage who can open locks and disarm traps but she IS a thief in the first place and I can keep her as thief with BGT. Genious.

So my party will be:
Me: Half-Orc Kensai/Thief - the super-smasher
Imoen: Bounty Hunter - the ranged crowd controller
Jaheira: Ranger/Cleric - the last woman standing
Edwin: Sorcerer - the death-to-you-all guy
Minsk: Barbarian - the angry man
Viconia: Cleric with her own deity - the yes-it's-the-crom-faeyr-in-your-ass domina

Just perfect

Thank you all

Modifié par Metelesku, 26 août 2010 - 07:08 .

[jaxsbudgie]

Metelesku wrote...

Now all this info just turned to diamonds

Jax, you made my party perfect. To leave Imoen true thief is great idea. I always considered her a mage who can open locks and disarm traps but she IS a thief in the first place and I can keep her as thief with BGT. Genious.

So my party will be:
Me: Half-Orc Kensai/Thief - the super-smasher
Imoen: Bounty Hunter - the ranged crowd controller
Jaheira: Ranger/Cleric - the last woman standing
Edwin: Sorcerer - the death-to-you-all guy
Minsk: Barbarian - the angry man
Viconia: Cleric with her own deity - the yes-it's-the-crom-faeyr-in-your-ass domina

Just perfect

Thank you all

Looks pretty awesome, I've had Jaheira as a Cleric/Ranger, Edwin as a Sorcerer and Viconia albeit a cleric/mage together, and they were solid as nails.

I'd still recommend looking at Song and Silence, some of the thief kits are really interesting:
Song and Silence
Plus it adds new thief and bard items into the game.

Edit: Maybe make Imoen a mage to then dual over to thief? Just an idea ....

Modifié par jaxsbudgie, 26 août 2010 - 09:45 .

[Humanoid_Taifun]

I hope you know how weak kensai are in BG1. Throwing axes are now a must and have Jaheira memorize a lot of Barkskins.

[Metelesku]

@Jax Hm, making Viconia cleric/mage is tempting as well. Also can try the SNS for the new items but I really want a bounty hunter in my team. And what use would be to make Imoen to wizard and than at what level dual her to thief?

@H_T No I didn't know that. Would throwing daggers do the same job as axes? Putting *s to axes was not in my plan. In fact I'm not sure how many proficiency points will I have in the end. Have to test it.

Modifié par Metelesku, 26 août 2010 - 11:26 .

[Metelesku]

@H_T Btw how did you manage to change your portrait to that one?

[Humanoid_Taifun]

Metelesku wrote...
And what use would be to make Imoen to wizard and than at what level dual her to thief?

Less use than having her as a Mage/Bounty Hunter multiclass.
A lowlevel mage is really not very useful IMO. What she'd get is a few low level spells (when she's not wearing armor) and the ability to use scrolls.

@H_T No I didn't know that. Would throwing daggers do the same job as axes? Putting *s to axes was not in my plan. In fact I'm not sure how many proficiency points will I have in the end. Have to test it.

I've never used throwing daggers and I don't know whether they get the strength damage bonus (which, as I said, should be impressive with your character), but apart from that, sure, that'd work.
Why do you want daggers though? For backstabbing?
There are much better backstabbing choices.

Edit:
My portrait is the one you get when you didn't select a portrait, though I guess you'd also be able to recreate it in place of a DA:O face. I don't like the new choices, and as long as I don't get my old portrait back, I'm gonna remain '_' .

Modifié par Humanoid_Taifun, 26 août 2010 - 11:40 .

[jaxsbudgie]

Having too many multi-class characters in your team sort of waters them down.
I suggested to make Imoen a mage first because you have such little arcane power, you need a backup mage to have the flexibility of multiple spells Edwin won't have. Also, I don't know about you or anyone else, but I manage to collect so many wands in BG1 I don't know what to do with them all, having another character use wands would be useful. I play with Item Revisions too, so arcane spell casters can cast in armour with a casting time penalty.

How comes you want a Bounty Hunter so much? Are you using Rogue Rebalancing, I'd recommend it if you're going to have two thieves on your team. It also adjusts the Bounty Hunter class, for the better or not, that's for you to decide:
Rogue Rebalancing Readme

Maybe Viconia as a cleric/mage might be a good idea. You could make her a specialist mage, Conjurer tends to be the favourite, she'll have high enough lore anyway to not need identify (provided you give her all 3 wisdom tomes and the 1 intelligence tome) ... although i'm not sure if raising your wisdom and intelligence after character creation raises your lore?
In terms of role playing, i'm not sure what Viconia would be, Necromancer maybe? Enchanter?

Modifié par jaxsbudgie, 26 août 2010 - 12:22 .

[Metelesku]

@H_T I was considering daggers for the Dagger of venom. On the other hand with that strenght and kai maybe i'll be able to kill mages with one backstab with some better weapon (katana comes to mind)? I know there are no katanas in BG1 but I have no problem to console cheat a pair of katanas right in Candlekeep where I should actually learn to fight with them (when I choose the proficiency for it). So that would be the training katanas Is there any other reason why is kensai weak in BG1 beside the armor?



@Jax I was looking at the rebalancing mod and will certainly try it in next run but not now.



I will leave Imoen as pure bounty hunter and change Viconia to cleric/mage (with tomes as you suggest) so she can be the support arcane caster and wand user. With necromancy she would lose some decent spells so conjurer may be a better choise.



I want a bounty hunter becouse I've read good things about the class and want to see how good they really are.

[Humanoid_Taifun]

jaxsbudgie wrote...
Having too many multi-class characters in your team sort of waters them down.

In BG1 it doesn't really, where a multiclass is usually 1 level behind the single class at the most.

I suggested to make Imoen a mage first because you have such little arcane power, you need a backup mage to have the flexibility of multiple spells Edwin won't have.

But that'd make her mage talents pretty useless later on.

Metelesku wrote...
@H_T I was considering daggers for the
Dagger of venom. On the other hand with that strenght and kai maybe i'll
be able to kill mages with one backstab with some better weapon (katana
comes to mind)? I know there are no katanas in BG1 but I have no
problem to console cheat a pair of katanas right in Candlekeep where I
should actually learn to fight with them (when I choose the proficiency
for it). So that would be the training katanas Is there any other
reason why is kensai weak in BG1 beside the armor?

In my opinion the best BG1 melee weapon against mages is the long sword +2, which deals cold damage through any and all mirror images that they can put up. Of course, if you have ranged weapons, usually the mages won't even get the mirror images up.
Katanas are pretty nice, unfortunately there are very no high end ones when you finally get to Throne of Bhaal (but until then you should be able to study something else, so no problem there).
Oh and yes, with Kai that long sword + 2 can easily instakill mages (and probably most other opponents as well). Of course, the Staff of Striking deals even more damage, but I digress.
Kensai are so weak in BG1 because they are supposed to go toe to toe with everybody, that includes wyverns, demons, demigods... Everybody. I just had a short game through BG1 (with some minor cheats) and a level 24 kensai got about as many kills as a level 7 archer.
Their damage per hit was fundamentally different, but didn't matter very much, because BG1 enemies don't have that many HP to begin with.

[Metelesku]

Just checked the weapons in BG1 and Staff of Striking is pretty sweet Never played ToSC before so what level is it advised to start the ToSC area?



Also how to steal from Drizzt? Last time as I remember I wasn't able steal from him. Any advice on PP skill level?

[jaxsbudgie]

Out of interest, how is the game going with your immense party?

[Metelesku]

Hey, I'm back



I was on vacation so did not even start the game. For BGT I tried to install latest patches to BG1 but it was insisting that I don't have it installed so tried to reinstall with no success again. The BGT is installed without latest patches so I hope it will be ok. Also installed the g3 fixes, tweaks and Level1NPC mod. Tried to convert Jan to bounty hunter as well when Imoen will be away but did not succeed for unknown reason.



Today I'm planning to start to play but I can't shake off the feeling I am bit too overpowered. Oh, well

[Humanoid_Taifun]

Maybe you used the wrong patch. There is one for BG1 pure and another one for BG1 - Tales of the Sword Coast.

[Metelesku]

I have TOSC installed so I tried to use the TOSC patch. Seemed logical to me.

[jaxsbudgie]

It did that to me once, and I don't know why. So I uninstalled it and reinstalled it, and the patch worked.

[Metelesku]

Now that would be the last thing I would like to do - to spend another day or two with reinstalling. For now just I hope there will be no major issues without the patch. Or is it granted that I will have to apply the patch anyway?

[jaxsbudgie]

I've never played without the official patch ... the very idea scares me. I don't know if playing without the patch with mods on top would be wise?

I'd say the reinstalling might be worth it in the long run, would be horrible if you got into your game and then it started to fail on you.

Besides, things like BGT and Tutu always recommend they be installed on patched versions of BG1 and BG2 don't they?