a lot of questions, god i suck at this game

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Hi everyone,

First of all, I have to say that I am new here. I have been having trouble with the game play and items in Icewind Dale, plz help me out, thanx!

1. Are the books u find important, can u sell them? Wat about Gems?

2. There are fake potions, just sell them right?

3. Cloud Kill is cheap, any way around it?

4. This game is not like any other RPG. When u level up wat does change? And wat do they mean? (I dont get a word from the game manual)

5. Can paladin learn cleric spells? Wat about Ranger? (because they have cleric spell menu but with no spells)

6. Wat does text output mean in the character data screen?

Thats all, hope someone helps, thanx a lot!

Also, forgive me if i have spelling errors, my grammar sucks

 

Hi Han,

1) MOST books are not important. You can sell them, but they are only worth a gold or so. I usually just drop them. The exceptions are "tomes", such as "tome of constitution", "tome of wisdom", etc, which can raise your stats. Also, a few (very few) books are used for quest items, such as the "Mythal Theory" book that you get from Custhanatos. (he's in Labelas Tower level 3, from the Severed Hand, and you take the book to the mage in Kuldahar, who has been babbling about elven ruins or something ).

2) I sell MOST of my potions, not just the fake ones. I just don't use potions that much. There are some exceptions, I usually hang onto the healing potions, antidotes, mummy's tea, a few enchancer potions.

3) Not really. IF a cloudkill is cast I usually try to stay out of it and let the enemy come to me. Stay on the edge of the cloud and hopefully the enemies will stand in the cloud and whack at you (they're kind of stupid that way). All of your characters have ranged weapons, right?

4) Leveling up increases your hit points, the number of spells you can memorize (mage and cleric), gives you new spells to memorize (cleric types only), and occasionally gives you points to add to your weapon specialization and thief abilities. There's an option to get the max hp at level gain instead of a random amount, make sure you have this turned on.

5) Yes, but not until later in the game. Anyone with Cleric spells learns spells automatically, unlike mages where you have to scribe your spells from scrolls. When a cleric or mage gains a level, check to see if the number they can memorize went up (you will have empty slots).

6) It creates a text file that lists all the stats, items and spells for that character.
How useful this is is up to you. I printed mine out and make notes on paper when anything changes (redoing it when it gets too hard to read. That way, if I need to know, say, who has the best open doors abitlity I can look it up right away. Of course you can get all this from the inventory or the character record, but I like having the info on paper.

7) (your question in your other post) You can "stack" spells by telling your caster to cast a new spell before they have finished casting the old one (I mostly do this with clerics so I'm not 100% that it works with mage spells). Different spells do have different casting times, but yeah they are all a little slow. If attacked while casting a spell, your character will most likely be disrupted and not cast it (but they will lose the spell from memory ).
What I do to get around this is keep the mages back a little until everyone else is engaged. That way the enemies target everyone else. After a few seconds I move the mages/clerics in and cast spells. Works pretty well.

Also, remember that the main benefit of clerics is NOT healing spells. You can rest almost anywhere in this game (provided you have cleared the mosters of course)
The main benefit of a cleric is thier "buff" spells. Casting bless, recitation, prayer, chant, etc, etc, saw me through a lot of tough battles. In some of the tougher ones, I have had so many buff icons that you could barely see the character portraits!

Haste should your magician's #1 spell.

If your part is bunched together and you cast haste on 1 character, ALL of your characters will be hasted. This also works with a lot of cleric spells that are only supposed to affect 1 character or a small area.

If you have a bard, always use bard song. Every little advantage you gain helps!

Well, hope this helps you!


[This message has been edited by Lord Balduran (edited August 05, 2000).]