Question about my party and fighter-mage

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Hi
I'm playing iwd now after bg 1 and 2 abd I really like it a lot so far, the combat is nice.
I recently completed bg and bg 2 and I remember that it was pretty hard in the beginning with my pure mage character.
However IWD seems really easy with all the knowledge about d&d I got from playing bg.

I created a party that would be strong as well as easy to maintain.
I have 4 characters: fighter-druid, fighter-cleric, fighter-mage and thief dualed to mage at 8 level.

I find it rather interesting how strong my fighter-mage is. I mean I have played only for some several hours and I'm in the 2nd dungeon (dragon's eye) and my fighter mage thac0 is at 5 and AC is at 1 without any spells.

My question is why my thac0 is so good? It's even better than my fighter-druid and fighter-cleric thac0 even though they are at the same level.
My fighter-druid/cleric base thac0s are 15 which i got down to 11 with +2weapons but my fighter-mage base thac0 is 13 which I got down to 5 which is crazy good for her level I think.
I really wonder whytheir base thac0s are different since they all have almost same stats (18 dex and str for fighter-druid/cleric, and 18/57 str and 19 dex figher-mage) and all are multi classed fighters of the same level. Is it because of 1 point of dex difference?
Btw fighter-mage uses crossbow and spear.

Oh and low level spells seem to work much better than in bg except sleep, I used to rely on sleep at low levels the most in bg1 and don't use it all now in iwd. But other low level spells seem to work better and casting time seems shorter which I like and makes it more useful in real-time when everybody moves at the same time instead of waiting for their turn. And druid spell selection is much better. Druid and mage combos like Grease+entangle+web+spike growth totally owns in difficult encounters and party could just shoot at helpless monsters with slings and bows.
And for easy encounters I just use fighter-druid and fighter-cleric as tanks while my fighter mage shoots her crossbow with her crazy thac0.

This all is much easier experience compared to bg1 where my pure mage was almost useless after he casted his sleep spell which could also fail a lot and Imoen was getting owned by everything once it got close lol

I feel really powerful at low levels in IWD.

---------- Added 3 hours, 55 minutes and 42 seconds later... ----------

hmmm, I've checked and the casting time of low level spells is exactly the same in bg and iwd, I guess it was a combo of mage+druid which made the casting look faster.
Grease is almost instant to cast (casting time 1), then web is pretty fast too (casting time 2) however you have to wait for the end of round to cast it if grease is casted before it, so having a mage cast grease and then druid cast entangle works really well even though entangle takes the longest to cast (casting time 4)

 

I've compeleted IWD and Heart of Winter with Trials of the Luremaster with this party. Most fightes were easy, I could easialy get AC of my tanks to -21 and even final bosses were defeated on the first try (even though it's the first time I played this game), except for Trials of the Luremaster which took some reloading. Overall really powerfull party and fun to play

 

IWD was probably easier for you for three reasons:
- You create your whole party of uber characters, not relying on those pansies that you get to pickup in BG
- You know the rules a lot better now
- You only had 4 characters so you leveled up faster
If you think it was too easy, you can raise the difficulty, or even try the heart of fury mode.