GameBanshee Forums

Hi all. Happy New Year to everyone.

I may take up BG2 (both SoA and ToB) again soon, so I'm pondering whether to make Nalia my party's thief in the pre-Imoen stages. I know her lock picking abilities don't cut it but I don't know if her trap finding/disarming skills are effective enough. Will I have to constantly feed her thieving potions and/or make a beeline for the ring of danger sense? Can she (or any thief, for that matter) disarm all traps revealed by priest spell Find Traps? Can all locks that don't require a quest-related key be bashed?

I'd rather not pick up Yoshimo or Jan this time around, and I'd rather not have my protagonist be a thief of any kind. I don't want to lose the experience points that Yoshimo would get. As for Jan: he's hilarious, fun, and one of my favorite game characters ever. But he's also a bit frustrating. In most of SoA he's a decent mage, but a mediocre backstabber and scout because of his low starting stealth, long leveling-up times, and low strength. By the time ToB rolls around he'll be a sufficiently well-rounded thief... but he'll have degenerated into a subpar mage. To make matters worse, thieving skills, including backstabbing, are less useful in ToB than they are in SoA. (I could be wrong about that last point. I've only played ToB once because I found it boring. I'm willing to give it another try though!)

I'd love any advice and thoughts! Thanks!

Your reasons for not picking Jan over Nalia are a bit contradictory. Nalia will never improve as a Thief, where as Jan certainly will, and not so slow either, since he's still a thief, despite being multiclass. I'd go with Jan, from a practical point of view.
I think it's certainly do-able with Nala, especially if you go for the Ring of Danger Sense you mentioned.

Also remember the ring of lockpicks you can pick up in the thieves guild once you get access to Aran.

If you are wiling to try mods though there are a few thief options available. Amber or Fade are my favourites in that regard.

Alternatively you could use shadow keeper to make Nalia a decent thief, increase her find traps and lockpicking skills for example.

I suspect the devs wanted to make Nalia less efficient than Imoen as a thief to encourage you to dump her in favour of Imoen. The problm with that is that by the time you find Imowimp, Nalia is a far superior spellcaster, so not worth it anyway.

Jan isn't a weak mage. In ToB he can cast spells of the highest level and he can even reach mage level 20 where spell effects are capped.
His HLA choice is great, he gains access both to mage and thief HLAs, at the end of ToB he's surely more powerful than Nalia.
Backstabbing shouldn't be a problem for Jan, he can even cast invisibility on himself if you don't want to put points into stealth.


Nalia's skills are sufficient if you want to take her as only thief, many have taken her. You can even play a game without thief, all locks can be opened with spells or force and all traps can be triggered or avoided.
80 traps skill should be enough for all disarmable traps before spellhold, if you do Valgyars quest and get the ring it will be over 100, that's perfect.
If you plan siding with the shadow thieves try to pay the gold fast, so you can get the ring with +25 to lockpick.
In ToB you'll also find an amulett which gives +20 both to locks and traps skill, but you can even play the game without thieving skill boosters.

First of all, I think that Jan is the best thief in the game (having the most room for thief skills, ignoring open looks (not that you have to due to the amount of skillpoints) due to Knock, you have room to put points into the other thief skills.

As for backstabbing, he's the most damaging NPC there is (with or without it), due to the ability to buff himself with mage spells. He can play multiple roles, such as being a thief a mage, a priest (planetar) or being the best fighter (or tank) out there.

In SoA, he's a great backstabber too. You just need to make sure that he wields a weapon with a high THAC0 bonus (Short Sword of the Mask +4 is easy to obtain early on) and has high strength (through the spell "Strength" or the Girdle of Hill Giant Strength). As kmonster already said, you can substitute stealth with invisibility while you add more points to the ability.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

To Gawain: Yeah, I'm aware of Nalia's limitations. I didn't mean to suggest that Nali's a better thief than Jan, but I understand how you could interpret my post this way- my fault for being unclear/confusing. If I were to choose Nali, I would just forget about backstabbing entirely and adjust my strategies accordingly. My frustration with Jan is really more my fault than his. In most of SoA you've got to buff him up in order to use his backstabbing abilities effectively- and I can lose patience with having to deal with the buffs or I'll sometimes forget to use them altogether. So Nali may better suit my sometimes short attention span .

To Galraen: Those mods don't unbalance the game too much do they? If not, I'll test them out because a new spin would be nice. Relatedly, do you know of any cleric HLA mods? I've never liked the cleric HLA pool because IMO, if taken as a whole, it's both of limited usefulness and somewhat inappropriate to the class. For example, Implosion sounds like a fantastic weapon against enemies out of reach of your warriors until you realize that Comet does the job much better because it can scatter several individuals out of a fight, giving your party a divide-and-conquer ability. IMO the cleric would have been much more potent in ToB if their HLA's included more powerful versions of their protection, healing and buffing spells. Like, say, a mass heal, or an improved miscast magic, or a mass draw upon holy might. Such spells wouldn't have unbalanced the game if they were tweaked right. And they would've reinforced the cleric's unique place in a party.
As for the devs' intentions with Nali and Imoen- I have a theory that Nali's weak thieving abilities were a ruse to get you to take Yoshimo at the Copper Coronet if you had chosen not to take him in Irenicus's dungeon. I somehow doubt that it's an accident that both Nali and Yoshi are in the Coronet, which is most likely one of your earliest destinations in Athkatla. You would compare the only two thieves available there and decide that maybe you should take Yoshi after all. I think Jan was designed to be part of this ruse as well because Yoshi starts off as a better thief than him.

In my opinion Fade and Amber don't unballance the game, something I tend to be wary of. CoM have made some very good mods that many people rate very highly; but I found some of them unballancing, joinable NPCs that are too powerful, Valen and Solafein are two of those, or a profusion of too powerful items (CoM Encounters). That is not what I found with Fade or Amber. Others may disagree, if they do I hope they say so, so you can have a balanced view.

There are mods that change Clerics, but I have no experience with them, and don't know how or if they change the HLAs. Again hopefully someone who can shed light on that will chime in.

To kmonster: The one time I played ToB, I got access to Jan's level 10 spells only just before arriving at Abazigal's lair (I did Sendai first) so the game was nearly over for me. And throughout ToB, he couldn't cast my most-used spell, Abi-Dalzhim's Horrid Wilting, unless it was from a scroll. I tend to use the necromancy spells a lot in general and he can't cast those of course. So for most of ToB I played him as a thief. Maybe I'll do things differently in a future game.

To Crenshinibon: I know what you're talking about. See my above comments to Gawain about my lack of patience with buffs . Jan has a LOT of potential and he's very exciting in theory. But I never felt the need to utilize his full range of skills because ToB was already easy enough without them. I mean, I had Jaheira who could deal out 68 points of damage on a critical hit with the Staff of the Ram +6. When combined with her Iron Skins, Aura of Flaming Death, whirlwind attacks, improved haste she was the Terminator reincarnated, for Christ's sake. Really, I think almost everyone in my party could've taken on a mob by themselves and come out okay. I really wish they made ToB a bit more difficult.

If you count ToB, I believe Jan to be the most powerful NPC in the game!