Character

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Should I play this character I rolled last night?

Race: Human
Class: Swashbuckler
Str: 17
Dex: 18
Con: 16
Int: 18
Wis: 18
Cha: 10

I might dual class him into a mage when he reaches level 15/16. But I am not sure if I even want to play this character.

 

It's an awesome roll, although I probably would have distributed the points a bit differently. For example, I would definitely have placed one more in strength, and one less in wisdom. Unless you were looking ahead to when you'd be using a wish spell, there's no need to have a wisdom of 18. In fact, given that the results from a wish spell aren't THAT much different in having a wisdom of 17 vs. 18, I definitely would have gone with 18. Sure, 17 vs. 18 strength isn't that much (only one more point of damage) but Lum's Machine will raise it to 19, and there is a huge difference between 18 and 19 (+2 more to hit, and +5 more to damage). I'd also considering pumping Cha is lieu of wisdom (potions of insight are cheap and plentiful). Then I can give the Ring of Human Influence to someone else.

 

Aldeth the Foppish Idiot – I have decided to recreate this character in BG1. Abdel is going to start off with the following Stats instead of what I rolled previously.

Str: 18
Dex 18
Con: 15
Int: 18
Wis: 11
Cha: 17

After collecting the tomes his stats would be as followed:

Str: 19
Dex: 19
Con: 16
Int: 19
Wis: 14
Cha: 18

In BG2 Abdel is going to be a Swashbuckler and is going to support the tanks (Jaheria and Minsc) in melee and use stealth and his bow to snipe the weaker enemies. His main thieving skills are going to be setting traps, detecting illusions, and stealth to help him give the upper hand on his enemies. He will be the leader and his preferred melee weapon is the long sword/katana (not sure which one I want him to know just yet). Once he duels to a mage he will be more up front with his ability to protect (buff) himself from others. This along with his fighting skills will make him a formable foe.

I am not sure if I want to have this character to gain one HLA and if I do can the first HLA be UAI? If UAI can be one of the first HLA and if you duel to another class and the HLA stay active, that would mean my Mage should be able to UAI which would make it interesting in ToB, imagine a mage using the Casymor? I can. Hmmm… Has anyone ever try this before?

 

Unfortunately you can't take a thief HLA and dual to a mage. You need at least three million experience in a class before you start getting HLAs, which means getting to at least level 24 as a swashbuckler... if you dualled to a mage after that, you'd hit the XP cap before you reactivated your thief levels.

 

Yep, if you want both mage and thief HLAs you need to be a F/M multi-class, possibly an elf. Then you can edit your kit via SK to swashbuckler if you are really inclined.

 

I joined some unnamed Swashbuckler to my party and he turned out to be totally broken despite his average stats. In ToB he has 8 attacks per round , hit -14/-12 and over 30 damage for each of them. Not to mention AC -22, but that's because of powerfull mod items. An he's still a thief!

I'm not sure there is need to change him into mage. You can also take FMT if want to have access to all options.

Yes, my FMT does so.

 

Theoretically possible, but not overly practical. With an XP cap disabler, you will (eventually) get your thief skills back. However, this is completely impractical if you are playing with a party, as you will not gain sufficient XPs to reactivate your old class before you finish the game.

EDIT: Thieves are popular dual class characters when you dual them early. Even though you still face the problem of requiring much more XPs in your second class to re-activate the skills in your first class, many people will make that sacrifice if they only need the thief to gain sufficient XPs to do the most basic thief skills, like disarming traps and picking locks. Thieves are also popular multi-class characters for the same XP based reasons.

The killer part here is, obviously, that thieves require the least XPs to level, and therefore, they are popular characters to dual TO, but very unpopular to dual FROM. While I would never do this, it requires a LOT less experience to take a wizard up to 3 million XPs, dual class him to a thief and then get his wizard skills back. I believe the first Wizard HLA is when he hits level 19, meaning you'd need level 20 to get your wizard skills back, but a level 20 thief has about 2 million XPs. That's 5 million total, and certainly doable when considering the expansion set.

Playing through BG1 first is an excellent decision, and you will not regret having that 19 in strength. It allows for a good to hit and damage bonus, and it also allows you to give strength enhancing items to other characters. Granted, by the end of ToB, pretty much everybody has strength enhancing equipment, so this is mostly a help early on when strength enhancing equipment is in limited supply.