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Hi guys, I played this game a while back and never finished it. So I wanted to start it up again but since I'm not used to D&D, I have some questions hopefully someone here can answer for me. I understand that some weapons get strength bonus but I can't seem to find what weapons get what. For example, in one of the earlier threads, someone mentioned slings were better than bows because they can strength bonuses. I looked through the manual, but I couldn't find it in there. What other weapons get strength bonus? And are there other types of bonus? For example, high dexterity get you bonus on damage too?

for melee weapons strength always gives more damage. It also is the to hit bonus stat although if you are using a small weapon and you have the weapon finesse feat you may use dexterity for the to hit bonus but NOT damage.

For missile weapons dexterity is always the to hit bonus. Dexterity does NOT do more damage on missile weapons. For slings and throwing weapons such as throwing axes strength does more missile damage, but just bows and crossbows do not have this feature.

2 handed weapons do strength bonus x 1.5 in extra damage. Single handed weapons do strength bonus x 1 in extra damage and for dual wield the off hand does strength bonus x .5 in damage.

Thank you for the quick reply. I think I understand which weapons get bonus now.

This is unrelated but is it suppose to be this hard to pickpocket? I have a bard who never seems to successfully pickpocket ever. So I went to dalekeeper and gave her 43 in pickpocket and tried again. Still, I didn't manage to successfully steal a single gold piece. So I tried again with 80 in pickpocket and I still fail consistently. Is this normal or is my game broken somehow? I installed the Tweak Pack and Ease of Use. I didn't think they would conflict but I think pickpocket is permanently broken in my game.

EDIT: Okay after setting my bard's pickpocket to 43 again, I did about 50 test tries in the Targo Dock with Hedron and his assistants. I pickpocketed Hedron over 30 times without a single success. His assistants I managed to pickpocket after 10-20 tries. It seems like some characters are just un-pickpocketable. Does this sound right to you guys?

If you have HoF mode enabled pickpocketing is much harder than on normal mode.

Some characters are just not meant to be pickpocket. Outside Deidre's weapon shop and the healing tent in Targos there's no real benefit for it.
But even this is not worth the trouble and spending many skill points.

hmm doesnt pick pocketing totally ruin your reputation and make people attack you and stuff?

Only if you get caught.

Ah that explains it. I wish they had done something better with pickpocketing. I really regret putting 12 points in pickpocketing on my bard if I had known it would be useless.

Thank you everyone for such quick help. I'm very glad to know IWD2 community is still very much alive and as helpful as ever.

Pretty much pickpocketing is worth a few items and by HOF the skill check is too hard. Maybe on a rogue with high intelligence its worth putting 4 pts in at level 1 then cats gracing and go through the save/reloads hassle for a few items and some gold.

Another unrelated question:

I understand ranger's aren't too popular in IWD2 but since I love rangers I wanted to get the most out of the pure ranger I have. I chose hook horrors and trolls as my favored enemies. I read somewhere here that goblins might be better for HoF mode. Should I just go ahead and keep my favored enemies or change that? My ranger needs all the help he can get. What about salamander or Yuan-ti thingies?

I am not familiar with HOF mode. However in normal the reason I would choose goblin or orc early (or both) is that in a party by the time your arcane and divine casters get high level they can pretty much win any encounter. Orcs and goblins are the main enemies when the game is actually challenging.

Hook horror's are only encountered once, but its actually a challenging set of encounters!

Trolls are one of your tough early battles and they also appear later on as well.

I am not sure what the optimal choices are but goblin 1 orc 5 hookhorror/undead/ilithid..is that aberration 10 might be good. If isaer and medae are considered outsiders then take that at 15??? Its been awhile since I played and forever since I ran a ranger.

If I rolled with a ranger I would consider 3 levels of rogue to open more skills + sneak dice and 2 levels of fighter for feats which would clip off a favoured enemy.

Yeah I did consider multiclassing my poor ranger but I thought I would enjoy the role playing thing and decided to go pure class even though he might not be as strong as many other builds. This will be my run through the HoF with all single class characters. I'll probably have to reload tons of times, but what the hell.

Anyway I checked the available favor enemy choice and Ilithids/outsiders/aberrations weren't an option... which is unfortunate. I decided that I would rather go with enemies that I will battle constantly over ones that I only see occasionally.

Which favored enemies you choose doesn't matter much on the long run. When monsters have have several hundred HP +1 to hit and damage to damage won't change much and all favored enemy choices only apply to a little part of the monsters.
Goblin is the best choice since there are so many of them in the beginning and the favored enemy bonus does matter more when enemies have low HP and your characters don't do as much damage as in later levels.

JerryShaw wrote:Yeah I did consider multiclassing my poor ranger but I thought I would enjoy the role playing thing and decided to go pure class even though he might not be as strong as many other builds. This will be my run through the HoF with all single class characters. I'll probably have to reload tons of times, but what the hell.

Anyway I checked the available favor enemy choice and Ilithids/outsiders/aberrations weren't an option... which is unfortunate. I decided that I would rather go with enemies that I will battle constantly over ones that I only see occasionally.

Well, I would make a Ranger 1/Druid 29. The thing about Rangers is that most of their class features are handed to then at lvl 1. And beyond that it´s not really worth it. There are no higher lvl features in that class worth considering. A Druid complements the Ranger well. Give it a bow and dual-wield two weapons (free dual-wielding related feats, goodie), and you´ll be set. In my mind it´s pretty much a 2 for 1 deal.

kmonster wrote:Which favored enemies you choose doesn't matter much on the long run. When monsters have have several hundred HP +1 to hit and damage to damage won't change much and all favored enemy choices only apply to a little part of the monsters.
Goblin is the best choice since there are so many of them in the beginning and the favored enemy bonus does matter more when enemies have low HP and your characters don't do as much damage as in later levels.

I second that.

First of all, the Ranger/Druid combo can't use bows. It's restricted to whatever the druid actually can use, so you might as well specialize in scimitars and slings.

Second of all, unless you plan to use the forms, you should become a cleric instead of a druid as ANY ranger/cleric combination can use Druid AND Cleric spells.

Crenshinibon wrote:First of all, the Ranger/Druid combo can't use bows. It's restricted to whatever the druid actually can use, so you might as well specialize in scimitars and slings.

Haha, WRONG! A Ranger/Druid CAN use bows in IWD II. They don´t conform to most of the 2nd Edition restrictions. Clerics can use axes and swords. And so on.

Crenshinibon wrote:Second of all, unless you plan to use the forms, you should become a cleric instead of a druid as ANY ranger/cleric combination can use Druid AND Cleric spells.

Spells are managed separately for each class. There are two tabs in the spell tab for each caster class. One named Ranger, and another named Druid, or Cleric, if that´s the way you wanna go. Meaning that the spells are appointed to the classtab they belong to, as you level up in each class. A Ranger 1/Cleric 29 gets 29 levels of Clerical spells in the Cleric tab, and no Nature spells in the Ranger Tab.

My bad. I didn't notice that this was this was Icewind Dale II. I thought I was posting for the first one. xD

And in that case, still, I did make a mistake as the ranger would need to be able to cast spells first, up to a certain level however. That, and in the original a Ranger can't dual class to a druid.

I'm too used to the Baldur's Gate mechanics. xD

Crenshinibon wrote:My bad. I didn't notice that this was this was Icewind Dale II. I thought I was posting for the first one. xD

And in that case, still, I did make a mistake as the ranger would need to be able to cast spells first, up to a certain level however. That, and in the original a Ranger can't dual class to a druid.

I'm too used to the Baldur's Gate mechanics. xD

I hear ya. I just always wanted to say that. "HAHA, WRONG!":mischief: