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Return to the Frozen North - Stories of Icewind Dale 
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Post Return to the Frozen North - Stories of Icewind Dale
IceWind Dale 2.

Well Rinox gave me the idea in one of his posts so i decided to dig up the IWD2 discs and install it.

This time around though i decided try something different than pure classes.

So i decided im gonne take 4 levels of fighter for every character and then take the class intended. So the party is gonna be like this:

1. Fighter/Rogue
2. Fighter/Ranger
3. Fighter/Sorcerer
4. Fighter/Bard
5. Fighter/Cleric
6. Fighter

Now the last Fighter (which is named Fury) is gonne be mad dps with two hander, the weapon really depends on whats available.

As for battles to come i expect some trouble against mage classes but i hope it gets easier later on. Ill let you know how it goes.

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Mon Sep 18, 2006 3:28 pm
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Update

Heh suffered first setback at the horde fortress. Apparently the worg riders have somekind of ultra high to hit roll because they cut down my fighters with AC 21 super fast.

Party is currently:

1. Fighter4/Rogue1
2. Fighter4/Ranger1
3. Fighter4/Sorcerer2
4. Fighter4/Bard1
5. Fighter4/Cleric1
6. Fighter?

So i used the bridge to my advantage to divide their ranks. And for a moment its ok but then everything goes back to hell. Worg rider captain hits for 35 damage and he hits often. So i just move around the target while picking off the others. but by that time, the Shaman shows up and immediatly casts hold which is almost non resistable, out of 6 tries maybe once resisted it. And ofcourse the drum which summons support riders is in-accessible because there are two more casters there. Basically its one sick fight and its crazy tough for my current levels

Edit:

Gonna try and buy some entangle/web spells

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Tue Sep 19, 2006 10:21 am
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Haha, good stuff Peltz!! :) I actually started IWD2 again as well...created my party but didn't have much time to play it yet! I'll post the party in a bit.

I also installed BG1 again...that's a looooong time. The funny thing is, BG1 comes out better in the crappy resolution than IWD2 does at a high one, because the dialogue texts are so small in the latter....but then I forced the resolution so I might just switch to a lower one.

But man, the epicness, the adventure...it's all still there. The only 'weird' thing is starting at level 1. ;)

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Wed Sep 20, 2006 4:14 am
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I made some progress but didnt have time to post so I'm going to fix that now.

Ok so i got my butt handed to me as mentioned in my previous post. So i went back to town and bought all the Web spells i could find and also bought a Grease spell which was vital in the next battle.

So what i did was cast the two web spells real close to each other which delayed the incoming attackers enough for me to dispatch the summoned guards. For those who dont remember, in the area around goblin fortress there are war drums which summon 1-3 worg riders. Why did i cast two webs? because they might save the first one.

I did have some luck in the battle. By the time the shaman showed up the few lasting worg riders were either stuck in web or attacking the fury(pure fighter) so i quickly switched to arrows/bolts/stones and literally annoyed it to death :D. The fury has some 70hp and it can take quite a beating before going down. So once the troll and giant were down, for who i used a decoy, my rogue just ran around while others nuked with ranged weapons i ran to the shaman playing the drum and nuked him to oblivion too and as a gift i sent him his drum also.

Did have some trouble with the traps on the bridges, since i didnt have and still dont have anyone with high search skill, highest is 3+1=4.

So once those were clear i killed ghark or something inside the gate which was locked before, he was easy no problems there. Inside i had another surprise, some gazillion little goblins with one named. Now that grease spell came in very handy. I backstabbed one of the goblins to death and ran back to my strategically placed party and cast grease with my mage. It delayed the first wave of attackers enough for the last of them to arrive and then two fireballs cleaned some 15 to 20 goblins very quickly, those who dared to survive had a bolt driven in their back a few seconds later. They were all running in fear anyway so they weren't a threat anymore.

Last thing i managed to do, was a secondary quest of fetching some orders for trolllike animal who had eaten one of the goblin brothers. So im currently in dilemma wether to give the bracers and take the shield or keep the bracers and kill em all...

The story continues...

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Thu Sep 21, 2006 1:44 am
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Man you make me want to install IWD 2 again.

Only things that hold me back are

- CD's are with my brother
- i have absolutely no time whatsoever to play games

Oh yeah .. i still have this crappy laptop, i convinced my gf i need a better pc but i don't have time to buy a new one.

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Thu Sep 21, 2006 9:35 am
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Hehe, I could send you my cd's if you want J...as long as you give them back ;) Can't give you time. :(

Thanks for the story Peltz, keep it going. :)

I installed the Weidu "improved Thargos battles" mod and I sure am feeling the pain. :/ I lost half my party in the upgraded warehouse battle, so i was left with my fighter, pally and cleric. In the end it wasn't too bad, because my cleric and fighters were by far the most effective characters against these enemies anyway. (lots of undead) Turn undead saved my ass numerous times. :)

I had almost forgotten how much humor there is in this game, it got me laughing a few times already. Screenshot about a conversation with some dudes after I found a dead cat somewhere :P


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Thu Sep 21, 2006 3:58 pm
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My party:

Shield Dwarf Fighter (me! primary tank)
Human Bard (spokeswoman, secondary caster, lore expert, bardsongs)
Deep Gnome Illusionist (primary caster)
Aasimar Paladin of Helm (secondary fighter, gonna wield holy avenger)
Half-elf Morninglord of Lathander (Cleric, undead pwnz0r)
Wild Elf Monk of the Dark Moon (for now ballast, but monks turn into total badasses at higher levels)

I know, you wouldn't expect me to pick a paladin and a lathander worshipper....but there are a lot of undead in IWD2 and they will come in very handy. The cleric's improved Turn Undead (Lathander) has saved my ass multiple times already.

The monk might multiclass into a sorceress later on (favoured class). The only true weakness in this party is that the gnome can't cast necromancy spells as an illusionist...not sure how I'm gonna counter that yet. Maybe the monk multiclassing to a sorcerer will solve that, we'll see. :)

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Fri Sep 22, 2006 2:24 pm
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hehehe yeah that cat rocks, when you talk to the cat lady in the docks and hint that it was used to clear the warehouse there is an option of saying something like "Hey atleast the cat died with a smile on its face" :D

And i guess its only normal you install some crazy addon which cranks up the fights, lol im having my share of problems at normal difficulty level so I guess my fights are girly slaping fights compared to yours :D

But then again, near impossible fights with 4 goblins is not my kind of fun :D Lol i hope this justification doesnt make me look like a sissy lol :D

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Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:24 pm
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Hehehe, yeah, I hate it that I was getting owned by bands of freaking goblins too, but I've come to cruising speed now and my party (especially my melee guys) are ripping through ogres, hobgoblins and bugbears. I think the party is about level 5-7 atm.

As for the difficulty mod....I think it made it harder, but it also increased the xp I got early on. I did have to cheat to beat it, though...but for good reason. Remember how I said I was left with only 3 living party members?

So, I had one of the goblin captains to go (the targos palisade siege), a goblin shaman. Easily cut down his goblins and zombies etc, but the dude had summoned THREE greater boneguards. :? Iirc, Greater boneguards are the highest-but-one monster summon undead/monster result. They got my paladin to half max HP with one hit, and I could barely hit them. So yeah, fuck that. I ctrl-y'd them to death and owned the shaman (wasn't easy either that). But because you don't get xp for ctrl-y'ing I didn't feel like I really cheated. ;)

Not, but seriously...I guess that I could have owned them with EXTREME patience and luck, but it's still ridiculous. :p Tactics mod in BG2 was hard too, but not that insane.

I just beat the goblin fortress and I just crashed with Oswald's airship. IWD2 is fun. :) Like most of Bioware's Infinity Engine games it has this feel I miss in modern games...

P.S. Peltz, you might want to multiclass someone into a paladin...they have a personal permanent aura with a bonus to characters near him, perfect for your melee band.

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Sat Sep 23, 2006 5:48 am
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I was thinking i should multiclass my fury but his charisma and wisdom are 9 only.

Anyway, i cleared the ice temple and now making my way through fellwood. Final fight was with the hunters at the wandering village when they turn zombies.

My party is around level 11 now. Maybe in a few levels gonna try and finish the game room in icetemple. After rank 6 it gets really hard. Even with to hit +18 70% hits miss and it wouldnt be a problem if it wasnt for the stupid 60 second time limit.

I think i missed some experience for not fixing Oswalds airship. Was so busy pulverizing the temple guardians so forgot all about it. My ranger is quite good now that he shoots three arrows at +22/22/18 or something.

Oh and dont forget the exptertise feat. My rogue has 29 AC with expertise and a shield. there is a cleric spell that increases AC by 4 and if you cast haste thats another 4 plus extral attack. Come to think of it, Rogue/mage combo truly does rock :D

By the way, buy the knowledge ring from that bedeowen or whatever on the same map with oswalds ship.

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Sun Sep 24, 2006 1:34 pm
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lol, I just killed him figuring I could take his loot afterwards. Big mistake. :)

My party is just about where you're at, they just got out of the Ice Temple and are on the way to the next village.

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Mon Sep 25, 2006 5:49 am
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Anyway, i made it into the underdark with the uglies called hook horrors, and again web spells are invaluable help here. I cast 3 webs when fighting the mother of hook horrors so they were pretty much stuck while my badass melee power ripped them to pieces :D

On a little side note, Rinox, how does your computer handle IWD2. When three webs are active for me its like watching a slide show. I mean its really bad, the game slows to a crawl speed. Now i tried to turn off some the effects from graphics options but it didnt make any difference. Any suggestion how to improve the gameplay?

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Tue Sep 26, 2006 4:07 am
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you know your computer sucks when:

it gets lagged to hell by a game that's 5 years old.

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Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:31 pm
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But i also know that my computer wont lag on games that are released 5 years from now :D

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Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:23 am
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hehehe, touché Peltz. :)

And yeah, I experience slight lag when a lot of spells are being cast at the same time too - it's not just you. IWD2 probably isn't making great use of the available horsepower. But I never had it slow down to slideshow speed either...and I'm playing at max settings too (but 800x600 cos the forced higher resolutions made it hard to read dialogues without squinting :P )

Unfortunately I have no idea how to get rid of it...maybe check the .ini file and see if you can mod a stat or two there? That's how I get rid of brightness issues etc. (monitor is rather dark)

As for the progress:

We fought our way through the underdark part with the hook horrors and befriended the duergar outpost. We kinda promised them we'd kill the monks in their monastery too. So we get to the monastery and I chose to play it smooth at first, instead of running in and killing everything - the plan was to kill them later on, however. :twisted: But we do some short quests in the monastery, restock (got my mage some much-needed killer high-level spells) and beat the 8 chambers test. So we get to access the 'actual' underdark through their mausoleum, but there we run into the Duergar warband...they were kinda pissed off I didn't kill the monks yet and they attacked me. :P

It looked like it would become VERY painful (a band of 10 duergar warriors/crossbowmen/cleric in front, a complete ARMY of about 20 peeps behind us including orc slaves and all the 'named' chars from the outpost), but it turned out to be a tactically brilliant battle - if I maye say so myself.

I immediately summoned a greater boneguard :twisted: with my cleric to block the stone archway the duergar behind me used to close me in. That was a SUPER succes; they were held up and as you may know a greater boneguard doesn't fuck around. He killed a few frontlines on his own while making sure no one passed. Meanwhile my tank and paladin took care of the duergar wars in front of us with my cleric buffing the party/cursing the enemies, my bard singing Warchant of the Sith (pwn!) and my wizard unleasing cloudkills and whatnot on their back line. Monk was firing arrows at the cleric. :P

We quickly decimated the front group and turned our attention to the back group again, where the boneguard was still easily holding out. :o I kept my wars out of the thick of battle and let the ranged chars and the wizard to their work. First summoned a greater fire elemental behind the group with my wizard. I used their own "hammer and anvil" duergar tactic on them. :twisted: Then my bard used domination to charm the leader of the duergar who was in the middle of the pack...so, the boneguard was holding the front, the duergar leader hacking away in the middle and the greater fire elemantal laying down pain on the backline. The fight last about a minute longer, after which I let the fire elemental and boneguard gangbang the duergar leader. :) Fire elemental went a little crazy in the end and attacked the boneguard, so we put it down.

But good loot, no deaths, not even stretching myself in terms of spells. Boneguards so very ftw! :) I ventured further into the underdark after that and atm I'm in the rebel drow's war camp.

My tanks are doing what they have to do, but I think they're in need of some new basic equipment (armors and weapons). The monk is still pretty useless in offense because of her crap strength, but is steadily becoming immune to just about anything. As you may know, high-level IWD2 monks are almost impossible to hit. Cleric is crucial in every fight, and the bard is a heck of a leader: maxing almost every conversation/lore/spellcraft skill, high charisma, useful spell selection and kick-ass bard songs. The wizard was a bit of the party gimp of late, but now I revised her spell selection and bought 30k worth of scrolls she's becoming a mass murderer.

IWD2 is fun. :)

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Wed Sep 27, 2006 8:34 am
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