Correction to the Icewind Dale 2 Online Solution

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Been playing through the game in normal and noticed an error with the site's solution.

Chapter 5: Dragon's Eye
"You will be attacked by guards and prisoners alike once the gate is open"
The prisoners will *not* attack you unless you make one of them hostile (fireball or similar spell). If you were unable to open the chests on the other side of the map, tell the prisoners about them -- they will walk over and unlock and empty out them out (oddly enough the chests will still be trapped). *Now* kill the prisoners and recover the items.

There will be one prisoner left over (not counting the troll). He will complain about being injured, and you can suggest that he rest, and he will do so. After you meet the fake Nathaniel, you'll have the option of telling the prisoner to go down to Nathaniel for safety, but this is a bad idea, because the prisoner will "mysteriously" disappear (Nathaniel eats him). You'll do better to kill the prisoner yourself; he has a ring of regen and some scrolls.


Also a couple suggestions:


Chapter 4: The Underdark
Fairly abusive tactic: Leave one of your party in the drow camp while the rest go out to fight. If they get badly hurt, have the other guy buy lots of cure light wounds to instantly bring everybody back to full health. This tactic works in any large area with a healer.

Chapter 5: Kuldahar
It is pretty cheesy, but you can park your mules *inside* a building, where they will be totally safe, yet still count for XP calculations. Even if you aren't muling, you can use this tactic if the enemy goes after one of your spellcasters. The enemy will switch back to your tanks, and then you can bring the spellcaster out again to help. There are a few other places in the game where you can use this tactic.

 

The parking characters inside buildings doesn't seem that cheesy to me, though it would be nice if enemies could *follow* you into them.

However, if your character hides there starting from the beginning of the battle, the enemy wouldn't know he was there, and it makes logical sense that your character should be safe in there. Then he can come out Fireballs blazing if your front-line troops need some help.

 

I always think if you are going to use mule characters to gain experience, you may as well save yourself the trouble and use the console cheat. or do what I did, completely disable the challenge rating system.

 

Proteus_za: I am VERY curious to how you disabled the Challenge Rating System, and what impacts this had on the game. I have been anoyed at the games Autobalancing system for a long time and any ways of altering with this would be greatly apreciated!

 

To disable the Challenge Rating System you just have to edit the "moncrate.2da" (extract it yourself or download a mod where it's included) file in your "override" folder and set only one value for the XP gained in each column.
So fighting XP gained depends only on the monster level afterwards.
You have many choices what value to set in each column, for example that you'd get XP as if the monster was of the same level as your party.
This won't change the beginning but since the monsters you'll face later will be usually lower level than your party (I guess about 5 levels average) you'll have far more XP at the end. (It will be even far worse if you set the XP gain as if your party has a constant level.)
So it's probably wiser to take a XP value as if your party level was 1-5 levels higher.
Even if you take 5 levels you'll still gain nearly the same XP at the beginning.

I didn't try this out myself since I think the new system is better than the old one.

 

I've experimented with loads of tweaks to that moncrate table and I find it works best by evening out the XP between levels a bit more. The main reason is to make sure that parties of less than 6 members still get a reasonable amount of XP when they are a higher level than the monsters. But to balance this out, I have reduced the XP amounts at other levels so that overall you don't end up being too overpowered. And then every time I get a weird XP result (e.g. killing that Guardian was worth WAY more than 10XP), I will make a specific change.

 

Basically converting entire game back into a static XP system.

I agree that i like the new system kmonster, but i did not like the implementasion of the autobalance system.

Thanks, i will play with it, but i do not think it is what i was trying to accomplish.

 

I like the idea that all monsters give the same experience, but that each level requires more experience. A goblin can still kill you, and you can still learn things by killing goblins.

I wouldnt have a problem with the IWD2 solution if they threw higher level monsters at you. But instead they throw low level monsters that are still lethal (in packs) that will give you far less experience. Just to nerf you.

In theory the experience system is already perfectly balanced because you reach the required levels as and when needed, and if you adjust it either way you will end up under or over powered.

But I guess I dont like waiting ages for levels, or killing something and getting no xp, and I'm not adverse to being far more powerful than my opponents, so I disabled the system.

As kmonster has explained, the file moncrate.2da sets how much experience you get at a particular level for killing a monster at another level. The rows (down) are your level (or more accurately average party level) while the columns are monster levels.

So if a level 1 character somehow kills a level 30 monster, they will get boatloads of experience, enough to advance many levels. Starting a new HOF game with 1 level 30 character and 5 level 1 characters should be interesting, because the average level will be 5.

So... To disable the reduction in experience as you level up, copy one of the values in a row down. Example: Row 1 Column says that a level 1 party will get 25 experience for killing a level .25 monster. And a level 30 party will get 0. To make that constant, copy the 25 all the way down. Now the number wont change as you level up. You could copy the entire first row, like I did, but this will probably give you too much experience. I was level 15 when I entered the river caves. Copying the values across a column isnt recommended because it will mean killing a higher or lower level monster will give the same experience. So you will either get 100 xp for killing the guardian, or 4000 xp for killing a goblin (examples).

hope that helps.