Good and bad special abilities

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I've just finished playing BG2 again and was wondering about which class / kit abilities people like the most and least. Here are my thoughts:

Good abilities

• Inquisitor's Dispel Magic. This is so good as to be almost unbalanced. The one disadvantage is friendly fire - the dispel magic blast removes your own buffs as well as the enemies'.
• Blade's Offensive Spin. Adds attacks and appears to do maximum damage. Lasts a lot longer than kai.
• True Sight. Instantaneous casting time and an essential ability.

Not-so-good abilities

• Bounty Hunter's Special Traps. The Resilient Sphere and Maze abilities are terrible. You use traps for an ambush and you want to kill things, not make them invulnerable, albeit harmless (Resilient Sphere) or make them disappear for a little while.
• Druid's shapechanging. Generally a lot less effective than the druid him / herself.
• Barbarian's Damage Resistance. Not enough to be useful, but effectively free, I suppose.
• Ranger's Charm Animal. Spectacularly useless. There's only one place in the game you can use it (the Copper Coronet) and I find that it generally just gives the animal a free whack. Whenever I see the words "Minsc has gained special ability: Charm Animal" I think "Why?".

 

other good abilites ->
neutral and good (not evil) cleric's turn undead
chunk them up without breaking a sweat - liches, vampires, bone golems - nothing stands a chance

thief's hide in shadows
scout around and stay hidden with the cloak of non detection!

not so good ->
evil cleric's turn undead
not good, undead get turned, but then they get hit again and turn red

 

Good: Avenger's Mage spell abilities. Chromatic orb is an excellent derivative from the regular druid spells.

Not so good: Paladin's Detect Evil. When do you ever need this?

 

Evil cleric's turning are good actually. I often use it against the skeletons casted by enemies clerics, so that they have to waste their precious spells on their own undead.

 

I agree taht the Paladin's Detect Evil is spectacularly useless, and seeing enemy mages/clerics being bludgeoned to death by their own summons would be comical.

In my opinion the best abilities are the Inquisitor's Dispel magic, and alot of the abilities associated with the various fighter, paladin, and ranger kits.

Useless ones are the Bounty Hunter's traps (especially with ToB but thats for a different forum) and on the whole I think Turn Undead is useless. Sure its nice to blast them into oblivion, or turn them on each other, however by the time Turn Undead affects creatures worth turning, its much easier to hack them to pieces with the ultimate unti undead combo your Mace of Disruption and Azuredge(and maybe Daystar).

 

I dunno about that, I have to admit that I found the Turn Undead (read, obliterate undead) ability pretty useful. It was really the only ability I consistently used.

It's hard to comment on the other abilities because I never used them, or never had a character that even had them, but from my limited experience I would still tend to agree with everything that's allready been said (shame this isn't a ToB forum or I could go on and on about High Level Abilities and Level 10 spells).

 

Good / neutral cleric undead turning is much better than evil cleric undead rebuking, IMO, since you generally need to kill them eventually, anyway and blasting them into chunks with the power of your righteousness is a neat way to do it.

Also, evil clerics turn paladins (note: I don't know whether this is the case when you haven't installed the add-on pack that must-not-be-named). You don't meet any enemy paladins, but if your PC is a paladin, or you have Keldorn, and Viconia does her undead turning thing, the paladin character can end up running around like a big scared idiot.

When you need Paladin's Detect Evil ability:

SPOILER
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One of the Paladin stronghold quests is to protect a teenage girl until her uncle turns up to collect her. The man who comes could be her uncle or could be an impostor. You use the Detect Evil ability to help you make the decision whether to let him take the girl or whether to refuse him and fight.

Also, it's quite nice to cast as you walk around the place. For example, it interested me to learn that while all the Shadow Thieves are evil, Aran Linvail is not.

 

Usefull:
Paladins' Protection from Evil. It's always nice to improve saves (and hit rolls IIRC) and PfE can be cast very quickly.

True Sight. Both the Inquisitor and Priests of Helm has this awesome ability. Need I say more?

Priests of Helm's Seeking Sword. A great way to counter the low attack/round of a priest. Buff up with other spells before casting and you're set.

Totemic Druids' Summon Spirit Animal. In early- and maybe midgame this ability is very useful. The spirit animals are immune to normal weapons so used properly they won't even take damage.

Bardic Lore. Tired of wasting spell slots?

Bard Song. Never used it but it can be quite useful (there are several threads discussing this).

Assassins' Poison Weapon. Extra damage. Spell disruption. Use it with Tuigan Bow (or darts) and see your enemies fall.

Can't think of anything else right now.
Oh, and I agree on your thoughts...

 

I really like the Kai ability, though maybe it's simply because I love the Kensai class.

But the assassin's poison and the inquisitor's dispel magic/true sight are truly powerful.

 

Detect evil is worthless without the Oversight mod. So many creatures have badly coded alignments and classes--there are neutral paladins and evil Lathander priests, for example, which are both not allowed.

 

Monk, quivering palm. Two dragons dead first hit. Need I say more.