Icewind Dale I

[Dorkenstein]

Who here plays with the full 6 party members? Is it better to have say, 4 characters that level faster or 6 characters that level slower but offer more diversity? Thanks for any help.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

There is a lot of combat in the IWD games. You might not have enough firepower to win some of the tougher battles if you have fewer characters.

 

[styrafoam]

Its been forever since i played it, but I used a full party of 6. I belive it was a fighter, barbarian, thief, ranger, mage and cleric. Thief is a must for find traps, and you need some sort of healing to get by in most of the bigger fights. It maybe could be done with 4, but i think there would be a lot of akward situations where it became unnecesarily difficult to handle a situation because of either not enough raw damage output, or lack of some specific ability to handle various monsters.

As far a leveling goes, the game is pretty much designed around a 6 person party. Following the pathline from one area to the next will never leave you characters behind the curve from a level standpoint.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Thanks for the replies. Can pretty much any balanced party get through it ok?

 

[AmberClad]

The very first time I played through it to the end, I did it with a 5 person party. I'm not sure it's really worth it to try using fewer, higher-level characters though - if you look at the experience tables, the amount of XP for each successive level increases by a pretty large amount towards the higher levels.

So you might end up with a party of 5 with average of level 12, or a party of 6 with level 10-11 (just a hypothetical example) -- in that case, it might not be worthwhile just for the marginally higher level.

Mages are kind of weak in this game, especially compared to BG2, but I'd still bring one along anyway - Haste is very useful towards the end.

 

[Bateluer]

I always played with a 6 person party. Mages don't become powerful until they reach higher levels anyway. BG2 is slanted because you start at level 7/8. In IWD, you started at 1, so your mages could only have a couple spells.