Hi, fellow travellers: If you play or have played BG, or the second installement for that matter, and want to share your experience, character, views or gold, I thought this would be the place to do it.

I'm currently playing a fighter (I believe that is the best choise for a main character, since there are bus-loads of mages, clerics, thieves and all, around for you to have in your party). Currently he's a level 5 (chaotic good), with nice attributes, and I mean game attributes, mastering sword and long bow. I ditched Jaheira and Khalid in Nashgel to make room for Minsk and Dynaheir. Reason: Minsk has better carrying capacity and is a better fighter, and Dynaheir is a better mage. Now I also have Garrick, Imoen and Branwen. Garrick has turned out to be a rather useful mage as well as bard (his song saved the party some pretty brutal beatings), Imoen is a very good scout and trap disarmer, and Branwen is the party's doc, mainly. I think this party will be allowed to keep going for quite some time.

A side note: In the wizzard's tower west of Beregost, there is a claw for sale. It's a rather annoying artifact in many ways, but does anyone know what benefits there are that outweights the draw-backs?

I just have to say that BG series is the best RPG series ever (ok Fallout comes close). That is all for now.

One thing good about Baldurs Gate is its one of the few Windows 95 games that is compatible with Xp.

good choise is also paladin or cleric as main char, who are good fighters with some spells and blessings. i personaly played for paladin-cavalier as main char in both BG1 and BG2

The problem I have with dual classes, is that they can't level up as far as a single class, due to the XP "ceiling". Having a main character with lots of HPs is essential, and with only say, 6 level-ups, the character won't get that many HPs, even with a constitution at 18.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mighty Midget @ Dec 1 2006, 04:52 PM) [snapback]269683[/snapback]</div>Agreed. That's especially true for spellcasters in BG1. With a low experience cap and little exp to gain at any one time, melee and ranged are emphasized more in the game than spells, usually. It takes a lot of effort to work a spellcaster up to the point where they can really help.

BG2 with ToB is another matter. A multiclassing spellcaster like Aerie (mage/cleric) rises slowly, but receives so much experience, so quickly, that they turn into a powerhouse. Just think of all those contingencies she can make using not just mage, but clerical spells, as well!

Ranged weapons in BG1 were way too effective as I see it. As soon as you got some of them magic/poisonous/whatever arrows, and a longbow or better, you rarely needed to go into close combat. Add a scout to spot s single enemy at a time, and you could take out pretty much anything with bow and arrows. Also, because the spell casting would fail if the caster was hit, facing mages was too easy. Of course, you can choose not to use ranged weapons, but still...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mighty Midget @ Dec 4 2006, 03:03 PM) [snapback]270232[/snapback]</div>
I agree. Second time I finished the game, I hardly had to break a sweat over it. The main character was a halfling fighter/thief weilding a short bow and an assortment of poisonous/explosive projectiles.

You don't even need your main char to be skilled with missile weapons. In BG1 take Coran equip him with some nice magic longbow and some bracer with bonus for missile weapons (bracers of archery, if I remember right) and you've got a sniper killing machine. Give Imoen some magic short bow and use her as mage/thief archer and get another power mage like Xan to complement it and the game can be won like a cakewalk.

In BG2 its a tad different, because I haven't found so many good suitable chars for the job, maybe Yoshimo in the first part and Vaygar later, but the later has some really nice sword, which only he can use, it would be a pity not to use it. But with 2 Mages (Imoen and Aerie) you can still cause havoc on great distance with some nice destructive spells. Also there is a problem in the game with the huge ACs and low THAC0s of some enemies, you won't hit some of them with missiles, because I don't think there are better than +3 arrows in the game, and even they are incredibly rare. Swords come on the other hand as good as +5 and are much more common, that you find some really cool melee weapons.

Does anyone have any news about BG3 or is it officially dead?