You can find a quite good halberd early if you're lucky, but on the long run halberds aren't that great, you might not even find a +3 halberd to be able to hurt certain monsters, so other weapon choices aren't worse either.

So I created a character and used the NPC pack to create my party.

My character has like 14/90 strength, or something. Everything else is at least 10, with constitution about 15, I believe. She's a fighter, by the way. Is that good?

No, that's not a very good fighter. The optimal fighter build has maximized physical stats. int,wis and cha are useless. With a little patience you should be able to get 18/00 str, 18 dex and 18 con at rolling your character, if you don't like rerolling and want the useless mental stats high for personal reasons 18/76-99 str is ok.

How to know when a dice throw is good

Reduce all stats to 10 - then look at the max skill points you can assign, 28 and above is ok. 30+ is good, 32+ is rare, more than 34 is likely never gonna happen unless you dice like 3 hours.


What does STR/00 mean...

Unmodified 18: +1 to hit, +2 to damage
18/01-18/50: +1 to hit, +3 to damage
18/51-18/75: +2 to hit, +3 to damage
18/76-18/90: +2 to hit, +4 to damage
18/91-18/99: +2 to hit, +5 to damage
18/00: +3 to hit, +6 to damage
(A 19 gives +3/+7.)


Why you should not bother throwing more than a 18 on strength:

If you have, in games like BG2 for example an permanent stat bonus +1 on STR. It will automatically raise your str to 19 (which means it actually gives you +5 STR.) That does not apply to Items, only to permanent stat increases or very very rare spell functions.

In BG2 TOB theres 2 such ways. But as for IWD i don't know.

But again, don't bother dicing 18/00 , theres no great point to it. To Hit spirals out of control anyway and +2 or +5 damage does not make any large difference lategame. As most Monsters where it would make a difference, are immune to critical hits.

Its a long time ago, but IWD was IMO easier (or equal at its best) for me than BG. But I'll have to add that I already knew the AD&D ruleset since I played & DMd it a lot in pen & paper. IWD2 on the other hand was, again IMO, insanely hard compared to all other infinity engine D&D games.

I think it all dependso n your party. I started IWD and just clumped together a party of a couple of characters, didnt really bother to optimize their stats or anything. Then I moved out of the first village and got my ass handed to me to some goblins. I played for a couple of hours but kept dying all the time.

So I restarted and did another party with maxed out stats, that means 18 on all the main attributes, fithers with at least 18/90 strength and so on. you can reroll the stats as much as you like so its just a matter of patience. The beginning was still challenging some times but after a while my party was so powerfull I could pretty much waltz throughout the entire game. The final boss was laughably easy.