Icewind Dale 2 Complete
Finally got to finish this. It was in a limbo for me for many months at around chapters 4 and 5 (out of 6 chapters), but yesterday I finished it finally, on the highest, not "Heart of Fury", difficulty level.
It was overall ok, pretty standard Infinity Engine RPG stuff. I didn't like much how the enemies would yield less or even no experience points if you were "too powerful" (and more experience points if you were lower level), and the way this rewarded the tactic that you try to postpone levelling up your party members as long as you can, as then they will get more experience points out of enemies.
And because the way the game calculates that, you just have to make sure that you don't level up all your party members, as the game makes those decisions (how much XP you get) based on the average level of your party, always rounded down.
So, if your party members are currently at level 5 and ready to level up to 6, you can level up all but one, because if five of your party members are at level 6 and one is at level 5, the game apparently calculates that your overall party level average is 5, because the actual average is a bit below 6.
Also I didn't care much of the final battle. Why do the RPG makers insist on making final battles divided into two or several parts, without ability to save or even sleep between the encounters? Does that make it seem more epic or what?
Also, I didn't like how there were a couple of tricks you needed to do and had to know to make the end fight more manageable. There is a certain subquest you must finish in chapter 6 to prevent the end bosses from being able to heal themselves for the second round of the end battle, and you must concentrate on trying to kill only one, and apparently certain one, of the bosses (when his health goes to critical level, the battle ends).
At least when I tried to fight the other boss instead, it seemed they were able to heal themselves from near-critical to full health without a problem. I took that as a hint that that particular boss is in practice invincible, and it is the other boss you should only concentrate to. Trial and error.
Oh and one complaint also about Infinity engine RPGs, or is it mainly for their AD&D system? In higher level encounters like these bosses, it increasingly feels that most if not all combat magic against the bosses is useless. They never harm the bosses in any way, either to their stats or health. I can try the highest combat spells I have, and they still seem totally useless against bosses.
The only way to harm e.g. the end boss(es) in IWD2 was to buff up your party with high level protective spells, and attack the bosses with melee, or high-end ranged, combat. That was really the only way to deal damage to them.
So that just meant that my cleric and druid, as spellcasters, were only good for summoning monsters to distract the bosses a bit and heal the party members, while the wizard was only good for summoning monsters (as he has no healing spells, some protective spells though).
No matter what high-level attack spells I used, the bosses just brushed it off, even in the second part of the end fight where most of their protective spells had worn off.
That just makes the magic in these Infinity Engine games less interesting and less useful... Magic doesn't appear to be a viable way to fight the bosses in these games, the best way is melee tanks with high-end +4 and +5 melee weapons. Attack spells are mainly useful against generic hoards of generic monsters, especially the area of effect spells.
Post edited June 10, 2021 by timppu