Hey there Y'all

[mynameismudd]

I just picked this second trilogy up as it was recommended through friend. They said I would like it as I liked Baldur's Gate series. I want to know what is a fun party to use for a beginner. I usually use parties of 2 and 3 as they are easier to manage and get faster levels than a party of 6. I am also gung-ho on fighting characters.

[Alorael at Large]

Avernum is easier with a full party of four. You gain experience faster with fewer characters, but the experience you gain scales with level. As you level up more, you get less experience. Overall a full roster only ends up a few levels behind even a single character, and four characters can do four times as many things in a round. It's a huge advantage.

 

Fighting characters are good and even necessary, especially as tanks, playing without mages and priests is also an extremely difficult challenge. You'll miss out on the area of effect spells, buffs and debuffs, and most especially healing.

 

My standard party is two fighters for the front lines and two casters, both with mage and priest training, to take care of magic. That's a fairly standard build, although most people have a dedicated mage and a dedicated priest with less overlap. I train my fighters with bows, and often my casters with bows too later in the game when the skill points can be purchased for gold from trainers. You can experiment yourself, though, because characters are classless and you decide what to improve with each level.

 

—Alorael, whose major recommendation is not to rely on the premade "classes" and make all custom characters. A few classes, like Berserker, are all right, but most waste skill points in suboptimal skills. They're not awful and you can certainly use them to get a sense of how the game works, but definitely once you have a feel for it you can do much better by allocating the skills yourself.

[Randomizer]

You don't see it much in the beginning but some monsters are highly resistant to a damage type so an all fighter party has a harder time fighting monsters that only take 5% of the massive damage you inflicted.

 

Welcome to Spiderweb Software. Please leave your sanity at the door. Otherwise you will lose it the first time you attack a monster and see no damage.