Is It Just Me?

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@cernak

i couldn't agree more. i found my pure spellcasters completely useless in my first walk through iwd. the only thing my mage did was cast haste now and then.
i was also pretty po'ed that my mage was barely able to get 7th lvl spells in the game - where the manual promised 9th lvl.

 

@nightwood

I'm still only in Ch. 5, but my guess is you have to play through the HoW expansion in Heart of Fury mode to get 9th level spells.

 

It's not just you: When I first got IWD (after playing BG1), I was *severely* disappointed.

That said, the reason I'm on this board right now is because I've recently been replaying it and found it to be genuinely fun. I agree with your initial assessment that it was just a pointless hack-and-slash nightmare. I also agree with the comments here that say how fun it is on a tactical level. Even though the story is not as deep or as cohesive as the one from the BG games, it's definitely there... your character just isn't at the center of the universe in this one.

I guess the key is learning how not to get beaten to a pulp in every encounter. And your characters really do have to be exceptional in their core abilities -- the extra strength for hand-to-handers, the extra dex for archers, the extra int/wis for spellcasters really make a big difference. And druids and bards are much more useful than you might be used to from BG.

[ January 30, 2007, 04:42: Message edited by: Otis ]

 

i'm really not sure about my feelings towards iwd. yes, it was fun even though it's only hack 'n slash, but for a hack 'n slash game it was dissapointingly easy. i remember i didn't encounter the slightest problems in first run , except for Yxunomei (had to change from 'core' to 'easy')

second time through i played on the most difficult - and no challenge again. that was somehow - well, disappointing.

 

I found IWD to be a senseless hack-n-slash game with absolutely no story. Sure doing alot of fighting can be fun but after a few hours you start to wonder if it will ever have a story or if the timeline is written by the sword.
Also, I found the mages to be way to under powered. Compared to BG2 where mages owned you. You knew to respect high level mage encounters. I guess it just feels a little empty to me.

 

Ditto about mages. I was sorely disappointed with my spellcasting abilities in IWD. Some spells were way more interesting than in BG, though. I loved the IWD version of Oracle, and Burning Hands now makes sense.

I find that IWD has a very good storyline, even more complex than Baldur's Gate in many aspects. The races and classes are better implemented in IWD. NPCs react to your class and race, you get different dialog and options depending on your character.

The game is more like a traditional dungeon crawler, like the Eye of the Beholder series: no party interaction, loads of underground locations, and plenty of battles. When you think about it, the BG series is also full of battles. In fact, you find trouble in every single location of the BG games... and let's not talk about Throne of Bhaal. Perhaps you won't face as many enemies together as in IWD (although this is arguable), but big bands of enemies is what makes IWD feel more "real". The main difference I find is that you can find more NPCs and more towns to rest in the BG series. But you are in the wild, inhospitable North now...

Lack of party interaction and poor spell selection, is what I would give out about IWD. But IMO, the rest was there and in some aspects, I think it was better than BG.

 

All this talking about IWD is making me yearn for more. I know it's flawed but it's just too fun to give up. Time to kill some Yun'ti!!!

 

Seeing the general opinions about mage here, i have to anoy you all with my views

I had a pure class human mage in my team first time through the game, and he was absolutelly useless (save identify) untill i got to the Dragons Eye. Before Dragons eye he had 1% kills becose of random slinging. However at the end of Dragons Eye he had 40% of kills, alot becose of fire vs trolls... Every chapter after that, my wizard was between 40 and 50% of all team kills. Fighter + Ranger worked mostly as shielding the mage :-/

It is very depending upon how you play and your prefered play style.

I ended up becoming so confident in my wizards skills at handling any sort of enemy, that last boss completelly devastated me.

 

single class mages in IWD1 will only pay off if you play with four or less characters... then they get enough xp to reach the higher levels and, the better scrolls ofcourse... In finding scrolls I never encountered problems, on the contrary, I didn't have enough money to buy all the scrolls I liked...!

 

What drives me nuts about wizards is you can't learn spells from each other's spellbooks... a staple in my games with pen and paper.

However, I've played most of the way through with a solo bard... that can get frightening. It's amazing what a wizard can do when he doesn't have to worry about collateral damage.

 

As already said, I've never had any problems getting scrolls as there are plenty in the shops and you can find quite a few around ... 1 thing to note is that when you kill a monster and an item drops, it is often 1 of several possible items so if you were to reload and try again you might find a better item or scroll from that monster next time

As to Bards, well ... IWD and the expansions are great for Bards as there are lots of items that have been introduced just for the Bard and their pick-pocket ability is very useful as well

 

Another great point, Bard; one nice thing about having a Bard is that you have someone who DOES have pickpocket, without putting points into it.

 

IWD stands out because it makes your traditionally underused classes like bards and druids and makes them excellent choices. Using water elemental transformation and resistance items I could turn my druid invulnerible to all physical attacks for a good long time and with spells added his elemental resistances except for electricity were all really high. Compare to BG2 and you will see why Druids are amazing in IWD and not so much in BG2

I found the encounters in IWD more challenging as well. With heart of fury mode on some places like the burial mound area are campaigns rather than just battles. Some may hate that but the sheer number of tactics you need to use to survive is staggering. Mages (I prefer mixed with fighter) are needed to provide tacticle area spells like death fog and the like. To me the tactics to BG2 just isn't quite as grand heck killing a higher level mage just requiers true sight, ruby ray, breach, and then swarm to kill about 90% of the mages.

 

That's quite correct. IWD is an excellent field to try out any combo and all classes have their place.

 

You know what I really miss? The conversation about how spells got messed up brought this to mind.

I miss Shattered Lands, the Dark Sun game. It was a bit more primitive than Baldur's Gate, but it had a really nice feature... when you cast a spell, you could see its area of effect. No catching your party in a fireball, you knew just where that bugger was gonna hit.