I have tried my wiz/red wiz from the oc, Barbarian, ranger, and honestly I give up. Spells are completely useless for offence in the expansion as my red wiz has to blow through half his nukes just to kill one thing if he lives long enough. Pure hit things and kill them classes are useless as they just get blinded or any other number of things and get nuked down. I thought maybe ranger would be great but the first fight in the theater proved that wrong. The expansion is too damn hard. The furthest I got was with the barbarian but that lasted until the 2 shadows that guard the death god thing......

What class do I need to make so can actually enjoy this thing or is it completely a lost cause? I have heard this is the greatest thing since sliced bread in the nwn serries and I want to experience the great story but if have to debug and dm_god my way through the combat I am not sure if its worth the effort.

Yeah, it's arguably the best installment in the nwn franchise.

First time I played it through with my favorite exotic, ultra-creative imba build, a human fighter with a long sword and shield. With melee characters it's crucial to have status protection, especially immunity to mind-affecting spells, so that your character isn't switched off. It sounds through your complaints like you go into fights with crappy gear, leave the saving throws to chance, and get switched off. Don't be that way. You should craft good gear no matter what build. You can use your companions to craft stuff in the OC and MotB.

Also if real-time is too difficult, use pause so that you can analyze and react to what's happening.

Another piece of consensus advice is that the cleric is the strongest class, since there is no situation in which it doesn't kick ass.

So what you are saying is I need to make a cleric, and it can't be from scratch. Odd that the stuff you find in the first part of the expansion isn't good enough. It seems like bad design to me. I will try the cleric route, not my favorite class to play but seeing as I can't do a mage or any kind of melee that doesn't have hugely powerful immunity items I will give it a shot. Thank you.

Edit I had a thought to try a monk. That works really well. in the expansion.

Air Genasi dual-wielder is strong enough:
http://lilura1.blogspot.com/2015/03/recounting-mask-of-betrayer-part-i.html

Owned end-boss:
https://youtu.be/BGhcvw87dDA

I've done MOtB as a caster (although one imported from the OC, so he was lvl 20 and had better gear) and I had absolutely no trouble winning any fights. Spells are definitely not useless, provided you remember to target weak saves (or use no save spells if you have low spell DCs), to get some spell penetration and metamagic feats, etc...

You just need to use your spells appropriately (use insta-kills on low-fortitude enemies like casters, use spells like undeath to death or sunburst on undead, try to target vulnerabilities like using cone of cold on fire elementals, etc...)

And when in doubt, just abuse the best nuke spell in the game by far, which is Isaac's major missile storm. I don't like using it because it's really cheap (it's force damage which almost nothing resists, it has no save and on a single target it can do 40d6 damage which is far more than any other nuke), but since you have trouble you should feel free to use it. Frankly, that spell plus the empower and maximize metamagic feats are pretty much all you need to win every fight in a few rounds.

Take a peek on http://nwn2db.com/ for some build ideas - there are some solo campaign builds and the like on there.

IMO NWN2 OC/MOTB are very much more about the gear you buy/craft than character. Which is kind of turn off for me.
As you craft more and more powerful gear your character details matter less and less.

By End game you build something like +8 Sword with +15 xD6 elemental damage. Fifteen freaking D6! Potentially with 10 attacks/round!

The Gear you build is so OP, your character doesn't matter that much.

OTOH, unless you build silly gear, you will probably have a harder time.

I remember two playthoughs. First I was a Frenzied Bezerker concentrating on doing the most damage possible with 2-handed weapon.

Next Playthough I was Rogue (1), SD 1(1), Ranger (everything else) with perfect two weapon fighting and Two OP weapons... It was quite easy like this.

Also since it is so gear based you will suffer creating a new character instead of importing a decently equipped one.
Coming in from the previous module you still get to keep what you are wearing (you lose weapons and everything in your inventory, but keep what you were wearing).

I started MOTB with nice crafted Mithral Armor that was immune to critical hits, a helm that provided mental Immunity, a ring for free action, and ring of immunity to level/ability drain, and AC of 37 + Giant strength belt and Armor bracers.

I started well equipped because I imported a decently equipped OC character. Start a new character in MOTB and you get junk IIRC.

That's a bit of an exaggeration I think. Frankly I'm pretty sure you could beat MotB even without any crafted gear, you can find good enough stuff during the campaign, both from the merchants and from drops/quest rewards. And of course, there are classes that need much less gear to be good, like casters.

Also while you can, in theory build ridiculously powerful weapons, you need to be almost 30 to do that. At the beginning when your character is around lvl 20, you'll be limited to "only" +5 weapons with 4d6 elemental damage or so. Still OP, but not enough to make your character build pointless.

Despite what the OP says MotB isn't *that* hard, unless you try to go the evil route and even then it's mostly because the souleater mechanic is horrible for evil PCs. Imo, Storm of Zehir is a harder campaign than MotB.

Yes, you only start out being able to make +5 OP weapons, which goes up from there. You can always make OP gear.

The other point I was making is that you start out kind of crippled for gear if you don't import your Character from the OC.

With an imported character my AC was 14 points higher and I had a pile of useful immunity gear, You get none with a new character. This is a massive difference as the original poster tries different characters. They are all kind of screwed by crapping starting gear.

Sure, new PCs start out much weaker than imports. However, you can find pretty good gear really early in the first dungeon, like a robe that gives 3 charges/rest of shadow shield (which gives +5 natural AC, immunity to death effects and a few other things). So, it's perfectly possible to beat MotU with a new character, although it's easier with a character that isn't too dependent on gear, like arcane or divine casters.

One of my most memorable playthroughs was with a solo character with no crafting. It was a Paladin/Blackguard/Cleric. Paladin/Blackguard gave me x2 charisma to saves, Cleric used the water domain to gain evasion, I took the epic resilience feat so I didn't fail saves on a natural 1... and then followed it up with a very high AC. I was pretty much impervious to attack, and just coasted through the campaign without issue. I can't remember the exact build, but I do remember my Cleric level never really matured by the end of the campaign and was mostly little bits of utility spells.

The Turn Undead probably didn't hurt either.

It probably didn't help either if he had few cleric levels. Every undead in MotB has really high hit dice,so to make turning even remotely worth using, you need a pure cleric that's pretty much built around turning undead. If you don't want to do that, the best use of turn undead is to use it to fuel divine might (if you're a high cha melee or archer build).

Personally, I've found that the most reliable way of dealing with high level undead in NWN 2 is to have a caster with high necromancy DC and use undeath to death.

Played through MotB.. maybe 3 times.

Easily the hardest run was a brand new Warlock (which I wanted to try).
Way underpowered spells. Sure, you can blast away as many times as you like, but that's pretty much the case with any magic user of 20+ levels.

By far the easiest was with a dual wielding fighter/thief.
Pile up those enchantments to both weapons and the enemies just go splat.

And like mentioned. The really, really important thing is to figure out soon how the curse works and grabbing essence from ghosts and whatever to smurf up a goodly pile of magic items and weapons.

The second thing, is maybe use a character developer module. Dont remember which one was good for NWN2.
Something that gives you required amount of XP and gold and has a good magic items shoppe.
So you can give yourself about the right amount of stuff, as if you'd just completed the OC.

I was using Epic Divine Might. The stat requirements are onerous, but once you have it the ability is amazing.