Oooh, I wonder how playing a druid affects the first chapter of the game. Don't feel bad... I completely missed the portal on my game. Poor guy is probably still stuck there.

I couldn't miss out on talking to the animals. Mind you, I suck at it! Fail so many rolls

I picked a ranger mostly because I wanted to shoot bows, but the innate animal speaking skill came in extremely useful. Bows didn't become amazing until chapter 2, but then they were pretty awesome as well.

Oh yeah, I was absolutely killing it on my second run with bows too...rogue/ranger (gloomstalker) plus some great bow feats and you're doing insane critting damage, especially with some of those arrows that do double damage against certain types of enemies. It honestly felt a bit OP towards the end. Astarion was also pretty insane towards the end of my first run, especially in combination with a Dark Urge item.

Pev, you'll love the cats you meet. Larian got them exactly right. That is to say: they're all predatory monsters with delusions of grandeur who treat everyone else as their ape servants.

Got any updates on your run? Did you get the warg shit off your face? Who's in your party and who do you like/dislike so far?

Also, half-elf? UGH.

haha those cats do sound right!

Yeah half-elf, I know, but Pev will be a dwarf (of course) and I'd like to do an evil/dark urge run through at some point. Just seemed to fit. At least I'm not a full elf, ugh. My party right now is Wyll, Shadowheart and Astarion, with Laezel waiting at camp. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about any of them right now but it's a bit early on I guess. I had Laezel in the party until I headed to the goblin camp but she disapproves of most of my choices Shadowheart seems to agree all the time.

Not much to update as there's a double exp event on until Tues in one of my MMOs so I've been doing that. I did however get utterly destroyed multiple times the other day. I am still covered in warg shit. I'd left off while in the goblin camp having just freed Halsin. He mentions you can take him with you but that will probably cause fights, or he can stay behind and wait for you to neutralise the 3 leaders. Well that's where my destruction came in. I left him there and went to talk to the priestess. She took me off to her little hidey room, we had a chat, we didn't see eye to eye and she tried to murder me. I killed her but was half dead and surrounded by at least 8 goblins including some named ones. We died. Tried again, did the conversation slightly differently which led to only my character being in the room with her and the other 3 locked outside. She still disliked me, I still killed her but by the time the door opened and we were reunited, 2 of the 3 outside were dead and again at least 8 goblins were still after me. Third time I headed off to the back and found the main leader (forgot his name). Once again we ended up in a fight. I thought I was clever and got us all up on the beams intending to rain arrows and magic down on them and shove any who came up after us off the beam. Nope. I couldn't get past my own party members half the time, the boss followed me up, shoved my character off into the middle of the others, then decimated my party. I think Astarion got shoved off through a broken bit of wall so he flew almost back out into the main area!

Next time I load it up I may go back to Halsin; we found a hole that someone had tried to escape through and got crushed so that's got to be worth a try, right?

That's more or less where I'm at now, Pev. Trying to kill the 3 leaders. I've taken down 2 so far, the drow with the scrying eye and the priestess. If you get her to her private little room, just gang up on her. Not heroic, but effective.

The drow was a tough fight as well, learned the hard way that enemies will knock you off a bridge in a chasm. Good luck.

Yea, I remember a fight in there where I thought I was being slick and went up on beams, but a caster from below used some sort of force-pull and threw several of my party to the ground floor. I ended up winning, but probably just because I was over-levelled for that area by the time I did it. I think I'd cleared most of the rest of the first map by then. It is a cool dungeon though... lots of nooks and crannies and interesting opportunities.

I kinda messed up now, but also I didn't. Let me clarify

Close to where the priestess is, there are stairs down to a closed off pit (there's a lever) with 2 (big) spiders. You can convince them to not attack you and let them free, then they'll start attacking the goblins out there. I thought it was a nice opportunity with those extra allies, so cleared the room where the priestess was.

Turns out everyone is hostile now (oops, that's where i messed up). So didn't have a chance to speak to the third guy you're supposed to kill anymore. Ah well, with the help of my little spiderfriends, i managed to turn the tides of the battle in my favor. So i managed to kill everyone inside.

Next step is getting out, since if i recall correctly, there's a ton of goblins outside and they probably won't be happy seeing me with all that goblin blood on my face.

Yeah, that won't be the last time the enemy fucks you up trying to push you off or something. It's frustrating at times when your full health tank gets pushed into a bottomless shaft and instantly dies, but at least the game allows you to do exactly the same to your enemies.

There are a few Act 1 fights which are really hard, like the ones you're talking about in the temple, or the gnolls outside that cave. The hobgoblin in the cave is a particularly nasty bugger. He pretty much one shots every one of your party members if you're not careful.

So you're not doing badly if you're struggling with some of these fights, Act 1 just isn't easy.

@ J what class and race are you playing as?

Yea, that hobgoblin cave Ox was talking about kicked my ass numerous times. I ended up leaving it for last... in fact, I think I was in Act 2 before back-tracking to take it on. As for the goblin camp, I ended up aggroing the entire outside encampment for some reason... probably stole something. It wasn't an easy fight, but it did make for a place to back out to and rest while working on the inside.

Yeah still in act1. My gaming time is very limited, i thought i was about ready to move on, just had a to wrap things up in the Underdark. Nobody warned me it was this big though.