15/16 or 16/17 ??? NPC count - is it correct?

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I've been playing BG:EE and BGII:EE repeatedly for some time now. And I love your walk through on both but I have a silly question about BGII:EE that I cannot figure out the solution to no matter where I go online.

Rassad is the monk NPC, and he will join the party with his quest to settle the Shar issue with the Sun Monks that have gone astray. But in your walk through for BGII:EE he's not even listed as an NPC, and there are no references to his quest that I can find. It's probably the game, not your walk through but I'm way confused, since his quest is the only one I haven't completed even once, unlike all the others that I have done repeatedly.

So ... is the NPC count correct? is it only 15/16 with Sarvak in ToB or is it 16 all the way through, with Sar being number 17?

I have one more question but I'll start a thread on that next time.

 

Thank you, I will follow the link .

Maybe they will offer an answer to my Saving Clara question there as well?!

 

@DamagedDad - I think it's fair warning to mention that Haeravon's walkthrough on GameFAQs (as linked by Taluntain) is not as high-quality as Montresor's BG2 walkthrough here at SP. Haeravon's guide is rather a rush job, with numerous questionable or half-baked opinions, annoying formatting and punctuation errors, and a few downright bad recommendations and missed alternatives (sometimes better choices than those he mentions). Nevertheless, it's still the most comprehensive all-in-one-place guide for the EE version which I've yet seen, so it's still valuable if you want a guide to the EE content.

As for the NPC count in the EE version ... the original version of BG2 gave us 15 SoA companions who all carry forwrd into ToB (plus Yoshimo as a temporary option, only for the first half of SoA), plus 1 more (Sarevok) available only in ToB (so I guess that's how you count it as "15/16"), but in the EE there are all of those plus 5 more SoA companions (Rasaad, Neera, Dorn, Hexxat, Wilson) who all carry forward into ToB (plus Clara temporarily, only until her own quest is done), plus the existing 1 extra in ToB only, so you can count that as "20/21".

If you're playing on Windows/Mac/Linux, then you get all of the extra companions built-in when you buy BG2ee. If you're playing a console/phone version, then the extra companions are add-on DLC.

As for Rasaad's quest, well, you haven't explained how far you managed to get on your own, so it's difficult to explain what you need to do next. You can probably find most of what you'll need to know in Haeravon's guide, but feel free to ask again here for more specific guidance. It's a quest-series with more than one possible ending, so it can be a little complex! How it goes depends upon your responses in conversations, so there's some choice-and-consequence in there.

 

Thank you again. That makes a LOT more sense, even if poor Clara is a doomed NPC from the get-go.

As for Rassad’s quest, I get him in the party, separating my Cleric/Fighter Dwarf to make room for him. But he never procs a quest, no matter what zone I take him into?!

I play on my old Linux tower (laptop doesn’t have the oomph to push the Steam version of the game, even offline, and I think they gave me all the quests when I bought both BG EE and BGII EE, because I’ve been played my them both for years now.

I’ve done all the Stronghold quests, and stuff, but never really tried any of the side quests like romancing - Rassad being an aside and an NPC Monk, I skipped his quest before because he would start at 13th Level - in old D&D that was a Grandmaster monk of whatever alignment (LE,LN,LG) and they couldn’t advance beyound that level.

But now you mentioned it, I hav to admit, after years of playing without cheats, spoilers or even assists of walkthroughs, I’m curious about all the stuff I missed out on.

For example - Wilson the Bear. I’ve never found him or it. Wandered over the wild mage forest and camp for hours, day, night, dusk and dawn - no Wilson.

Was starting to think he was a myth, to be honest. The stinger wild mage my get have had a few too many mushrooms and imagined him.

But now you mentioned it/him as transferable to TOS, so he’s got to be somewhere! Tracker is gonna get busy and find him!

No spoilers, please!

 

The stoner wild mage - may have had - sorry for the typos. LoL

 

Hi again, @DamagedDad.

Ah, I see. To trigger Rasaad's SoA questline, you must take him into the City Gates district of Athkatla. It's an area which you might have very little cause to visit after the first time you went there, so it's fairly easy to miss this! But as soon as you go there with Rasaad in the party, a new messenger will spawn and approach you to trigger his quest.

Ah, Wilson. No, he's not a myth, although he's somewhat of an Easter Egg. Even though it is in Neera's quest-series that Zaviak asks to see him, it's actually in Rasaad's quest that you'll find him! (So he's what TV producers would call a "crossover" character, where the same character appears in two different TV dramas.)

Get started on Rasaad's quest, and keep following it, and eventually you'll find Wilson. To save you wasting time, he's *not* in the first new area to which Rasaad's quest will take you, but keep following Rasaad's quest and eventually you'll find Wilson. When you're in the right area, you can't miss him, he'll be very obvious. However, it's not immediately obvious that he's recruitable, and indeed he isn't recruitable unless you play your first encounter with Wilson correctly, and he won't join you (whatever you do) at that first encounter, instead he'll walk away (so you might think you've lost him). But keep going with Rasaad's business, and then right at the very end of Rasaad's SoA quest (when you try to leave the area where you completed Rasaad's quest), you'll see Wilson again, and that's when you finally have a chance to recruit him.

If you recruit him, and if you haven't yet done Neera's quest (or at least haven't yet taken Neera's quest-series to the point where you meet Daxus), then you can indeed take Wilson to go and meet Zaviak (as Zaviak requested), for which there's a minor reward. For this reason, if you're trying to complete as much of the story as possible, then always complete Rasaad's questline before tackling Neera's questline.

Wilson does have some amusing banter, but not a lot, and it's fair to say that he's not a very fully-developed chracter, and he has no quest of his own (other than his role in Zaviak's sub-quest). He's also a pretty restricted character in terms of what you can use him for in the party ... he's a fairly hard-hitting melee DPS fighter but can't do anything else, and he can be tricky to keep alive because he's unarmoured - your casters need to cast magical protections on him (this is a good use for Spirit Armor, plus the usual elemental protections, etc.) Think of him as somewhat like a Kensai, hard-hitting but fragile, except that Wilson is not quite that hard-hitting and is even more fragile. He does get better as he levels up, though. I did once complete a run to the end of ToB with Wilson in the permanent party throughout, and he did a reasonable amount of damage and accrued a fair number of kills, but he's not really a very useful party member because he's not at all versatile - just melee DPS and no other contribution. Nevertheless, it was fun to take him along to see how it worked out, and I'm considering taking him along again in my next run (because Beamdog have somewhat changed the way he develops since I last included him in the permanent party, which was under an earlier patch of BG2ee, and because my next run will probably be with an Avenger for whom I reckon Wilson will be a nice role-playing fit).

 

Wow! Wilson is gonna be found, next round. Plus, I might start with my Ranger as the lead character - a boy and his bear.

 

Ty, missed that. Cataracts are a pain, in the eye!