You should be hitting for 1d4+1 damage with the daggers, which isn’t that much, to be sure. Worse in this case, since I think zombies have damage reduction against piercing.
In general, rogues are going to have a hard time doing a lot of damage against opponents who are immune to sneak attack. However, I don’t think an extra point or two of damage (from Str 12 or 14) would really change that. I think your 10 Str halfling rogue is fine, he just won’t be that dangerous against undead. Though if he has high Use Magic Devices, maybe he can bust out some cleric scrolls on them.
I just beat the game OC as a cleric, and will probably try a melee prestiege build for the second go through. Clerics are pretty versatile characters. The biggest advantage may be their ability to wear heavy armor with no spell casting penalty. Furthermore, they have numerous spells that can enhance that fighting ability, such as righteous might. While their direct damage spells aren’t nearly as powerful as a wizard’s or sorcer’s, they are more likely to be divine damage, which is far less likely to be shielded then say fire or ice. Plus, obviously, healing spells. The down side is they will never be able to fight quite as well as a pure melee character and never be able to do as much damage with their spells as sorcerer.
A friend of mine told me about this from NWN.
He found out in the first game that a cleric could summon a demon-type pet and then fight it to the death and get XP for doing so.
Level 20 before you leave your hometown anyone?
(he hasn’t reported whether or not this works in NWN2 yet though)
youc an summon an untamed demon using the gate spell, but a wizard cant cast the Gate spell until level 17. You’re practically 90% through the game at that point. The last few levels, from 17 to 20, go by very quickly.
John, go get this game and play it already. You know you want to.
ugh… I think a ran into a bug. After I got the shard, none of my characters will follow each other. I have the move them manual. Even though I have follow near by sellected, they just don’t move. AI isn’t turn of though because they will fight properly. However have to move each character across the map is a big pain. :(
Did you somehow issue the command, Stand Your Ground or whatever it is? Right click and hold (for a second or so) on the ground, then release it. You’ll see party commands. Try setting them back to Follow Me or whatever it is.
Seriously I love the game, as single player RPGs go there arent a whole lot of options you know, but goddamn the state of the AI is a Troika-like customer fuck-you.
The behavior tabs make the system seem solid at first. Among them all they cover a lot of ground. Except about half do not work. What in the fuck? The casting one is fucked. Off works, the rest of the settings are the same. Effectively, unload like you know its bedtime and your spells are coming back soon or dont cast at all. Nice. Use Items? Fucked. They drink potions period if they are hurt and they have them in inventory. Abilities? Also fucked. My Barbarian Rages at the drop of a hat with this off and the very first NPC you get outside of West Harbor uses Knockdown all the time. Combat modes? Also fucked. Set a mode and watch them change it! About the only one they heed is search mode…lol. I refuse to believe no tester caught any of this. So why werent they fixed?
Beyond stuff that, in theory, the tabs should address, they still fumbled. The problem you describe happens a lot and you probably didnt accidentally hit stand your ground. Sometimes dudes just stop. And if you are running for any decent length of time you are virtually guaranteed that your party gets separated somehow. I know pathfinding must suck because every game fails at it, but goddamn can we at least make progress? This is no better than the infinity engine games of forever ago.
My guys will also change targets like they have ADHD. Some of this can be attributed to the one tab that seems to work, Defend Master. But turn that off and your guys still will change targets for no good reason often with bad results. Like wasting a round or two of combat on movement towards a new target when there was a target with 5 hp in swinging distance. Or choosing a route to said fucked up target that nets the maximum possible number of Attacks of Opportunity.
Finally, and I guess this issue is a mix of a lot of ‘features’ and omissions that come together in the worst way, but my god do I hate it when my dudes will charge through a trap to get to an enemy WAY the fuck out there. This happened in NWN and they dont seem to have addressed it all. If you could hotbar/shortcut ‘follow me’ and ‘stand your ground’ it would go a long way towards alleviating the issue of tedium vs the occasional poison gas/dart/blades from the floor accident.
Or if they just had leashes in the game I could put one on each party member to keep him from running. I agree though, hot buttons for hold or attack would be welcome.
I did find one trick. I had an issue with a certain quest NPC who joins your party so you can escort them back. The NPC kept getting killed. Even though you can’t select them and issue commands you CAN right click on them and issue commands. Right click->Stand your ground. Problem solved. I went all the way back, cleaning the way then issued the “Follow me” broadcast and went to get coffee while the NPC caught back up.
The AI is useless, particularly if you play the “actual D&D” setting. But party-based AI in RPGs is always useless, so it was hard to hold it too much against the game.
What RPG do you think does it better? Some action/RPGs have AI that functions better independently, but options in those games are generally limited to attack/shot/drink potion. The AI in other D&D games, like TOEE and the BG series, was just as retarded.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t expect better - I almost don’t see the point in including a feature that works so poorly - I’d almost rather they required you to control all the characters by default and said that if you want to try to automate some behaviour you can, but warned you that it wouldn’t work well except for straight-forward melee characters.
Rob: I had the same bug happen to Bevil. He just stopped following me after I told him I wasn’t ready to go back, I wanted to explore a little first. Back then, I didn’t know about the right-click menu, so I didn’t try “Follow me” from Broadcast command.
What I did at the time was to switch to Bevil instead of my main character, and the other two followed him just fine.
That hasn’t happened to me again in the game yet, thankfully. But if it does, this time I’ll try “Follow me”.
Better? BG2…I remember it better than it was maybe. I know that game had pathfinding problems like crazy and you did have to micromanage on tough fights, and your guys would go chasing enemies beyond visual range sometimes. But even though I hated ‘real time’ just as passionately, or even moreso, back then, I dont recall fighting the AI/UI/Interface as much as I am here.
I dont know what game convincingly does it better, but we deserve better at this point. If your game is realtime and has tactical combat and braindead AI…what the fuck? Those three do not mix.
The situation brings to mind the Fallout NPCs. Why not let the player control them? It made no sense to me. They knew the AI was fucking stupid, to the point of frustrating. Why include that? Same type of shit here IMO, but different. You can control them completely but you get zero help from the UI in terms of managing an entire party at the micro level. I am stunned they took out the autopause on whatever feature that was included in all the infinity engine games and even the KOTOR games.
I care deeply about class specific story/quest content, and not at all about combat effectiveness. It looks like the base campaign has no class specific content. What about Mask of the Betrayer?
I played as a bard in NWN2 and I definitely did a class specific quest that was really fun for me. My second favorite moment in the game, in fact, after the end of Act 1.
So I’m sure the other classes have specific content too. I doubt they’d do one just for bards and no one else.
Can’t remember any class specific quests myself. Of course, I played a multiclass fighter/bard/weapon master/ red dragon disciple so I guess it might be hard to say in my case.
