[twillight]

1) Monk, fighter, ranger, barbarian, paladin, bard, thief etc. rely way too heavily on company and/or items to be effective.
Yes, I think even monks are a no-go. Prove me otherwise. But monks lack the meat shields casters have, and I hold the belief based on evidence, they'd perish against things like Sharevok and other final bosses. I repeat: if you wanna debate this, do it in practice.


2) dualclass seems out of question, while multiclass might not. The main problem is, without items the bonuses extra classes can provide, are not that many. Extra points inweapon use? As summoned weapons don't use specifications, not worth a darn. Bonus AC? Sure,would be good to addition of armor, but poverty don't wear armor (aside the armor of faith, and necromantic armors of course).
Worthy additions might be ranger in the vanilla game for druidic spells (also stealth), and thief for various thief skills.


3) kits sounds as always the pure class way. But because of the circumstances their usefulnes changes.
Like priest of Lathender pretty much becomes useless, and priest of Thalos offers little. Helm on the other hand provides an easy solution to an obvious problem, namely the lack of enchanted attack source (holy hammer at best only rises to +3).
For druid, I'd probablypick Shapeshifter,as divine casters are slow casters anyway, so no direct battle spells I assume.



4) cleric alignment is better to not be evil, but given the very few (maybe only the first Forestof Tyr encounter) undeads in ToB, this playsno effect in the choice ofTears.


5) there's no bending the rules to get the Tomes with a divine caster.


6) druid dis/advantages:
- greater elemental summoning HLA
- slower and less variety in spells
- the extra useful-looking spells are: call lightning (outdoor only), summon insects, iron skins



7) cleric advantages:
- can multiclass, can pick race

- the extra useful-looking spells are: draw upon holy might (bashing locks, sleep-regeneration), spiritual hammer (that's +3 instead of the druid's +1, maybe +2 if shapeshifter form), animate dead (not that great, but comes sooner than animal summoning, which sucks either way right?), glyph of warding (it's not great, but still a trap), free action, restoration (devas can't do this!), false dawn (I know it is slow, so you need a meatshield to use, but still), gate (not a fan, but it exists)
- turn undead


8) cleric/mage won't be disucussed by me, asI think they are weak due to extremly slow leveling, and are mages anyway. One note though: evil alighment characters can create themselves an army of vampires through combining turn undead and limited wish.


9) only gnome and half-orc can be cleric/thief. Gnmes get -1 on wisdom what is bad (can compensate only in Watcher's Keep), but gain shorty-saves - but only to wands and spells. Half-orcs gain +2 max stat, but with Draw Upon Holy Might with minmaxed stats, that'll only mean +1 thac0 and +2 dmg,whilepoverty tries to avoid close combat.
Let's do proper math: 18 start (for gnome), +2 from Tear of Bhaal (evil path, vanilla game), +1 Machine of Lum +4 Draw Upon Holy Might => screw half-orcs by stat. Their advantage though is clear in mid-game for access to (more?) lvl 7 spells naturaly (info related to this is confusing, the restrictions might be eliminated by installing vanilla ToB, and in the enhanced edition of any kind).


10) cleric/thief still gains all the divine HLAs, so it's a pure bonus to multiclass.