Party too weak? Bugs?

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Please shed some light on this.

To clarify, I'm not big on resting. Resting between encounters in a "hostile area" is out of the question for me, and when a quest sounds like "someone's been kidnapped and we need to rescue them", I'll generally be on my way ASAP (luckily, NWN2 allows you to rest on the move, which is quite an improvement if you ask me; because seriously, are you going on a 24h march without setting up camp once or twice for a couple of hours?). My reasons for this should be self-explanatory.


I recently arrived in Neverwinter, and am now a part of the watch. After raiding the warehouse, I went straight back to the Captain and was sent to Fihelis' (or what his name was) estate to escort him back for a debriefing.


As you probably remember, his estate is swarming with thugs. My party's composed of the tiefling, the dwarven fighter, the druid and my PC's a dwarven monk, and we're all level 8. We received healing at the temple of Tyr, but as we didn't rest, the druid's completely out of spells, making this a pure melee encounter. We're getting backstabbed left and right, and those two-bit thugs hit harder than even my monk and the fighter (not to mention that we can't seem to hit them for ****), plus they seem to have beyond 100 HP each. Pretty much my only option is luring and ambushing one or two of them at a time, and that goes wrong more often than it goes right.

The challenge rating for them is "effortless", which seems to be an error. Effortless means that an enemy is 5 or 6 HD short of the character viewing them, right? If that is so, then those thugs have no right to be so strong.


I humbly ask for your advice on this matter. Was this to be expected? Should I just ignore realism and rest whenever possible, in order to be able to spam spells at them? Or is this some bug, were the locations difficulty level got screwed up? The discrepancy between stated "challenge rating" and the thugs' real abilities seems to hint at this.

 

I also found this to be the hardest part in the whole game. These thugs are really strong, especially if they are invisible/hiding.

My advice: rest before you go into the building and prepare buff spells. Or go buy potions.

 

Some fights are very tough at low levels. Even raiding the camp in the beginning can be hard. It can be especially hard if you play "realistic" as you are. A druid without spells isn't really worth jack.

I generally try to play without resting when it conflicts with the realistic aspect and on the hardest difficulty, but some fights are just too hard, which means resting or lowering the difficulty level.

The only advice I can give you is drink every available potion, scrolls, special abilities etc.

 

Thanks for the advice, but resting is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. There's hardly any way around it this time, so I'll probably just load an earlier save and rest before taking the quest.

I asked about this, because the ridiculous way these thugs are overpowered smelled like a bug to me, but apparently this was to be expected.

Hell, I can even justify that, realism- and roleplaying-wise. I reckon my crew has earned some R&R before reporting back to the brass, don't you think? And as I said, resting inside the mansion (or most other "hostile" areas) is out of the question, since I can't let the poor man and his guards wait another 8 hrs for their reinforcements.


I think I might even leave the druid at the inn, and take the sorceress instead. I'm less than impressed by her performance so far.

 

Update:

Tried it again with a fully rested posse and after having ditched the druid for the sorceress. Still can't fight them for ****.

The sorceress isn't helping at all. This, of course, is understandable as fireballs are hardly going to do you much good when surrounded by goddamn rogues.

I'm thinking about throwing in the towel and starting the OC with an MOTB-level character, because I'm sure as hell not gonna change the difficulty to anything other than D&D rules. What I'm about to do is technically cheating, but as my PC gets stronger, so do my enemies, and now I'll at least have some abilities.


Any thoughts on this? Anyone played the OC starting at lvl 18? Because if that would be way too easy, then I'd be willing to look into other possibilities.


If it were only about this quest, then I'd be willing to buckle down and get through it by constant quick-saving and loading. However the way the difficulty has been rising, I'd expect this trend to continue, thus sucking out all the enjoyment of the game.

 

I don't know if the monsters get equally tough with a MotB character - if not, I would not start with a level 18 character by any chance. That would be over-overpower. I'd recommend a melee based party if neither the Sorceress or Druid are doing you any good. Stacking up on potions, scrolls and what-nots is my best advide otherwise.

Loading up the druid with healing and summoning spells only is also advisable.

Changing difficulty for a single encouter isn't that bad imo. The game is fairly easy for the most part, except a few fights - one in particular.

As I said, a MotB character in the OC with the monsters at normal toughness (if that's indeed the case, never tried it) would be cheese heaven, whilst changing the difficulty slightly for one fight isn't - in my book that is ofc.

 

I think I get where you're coming from with that suggestion. Thing is, I already played through NWN 1 like that (IIRC the character created in the second expansion was level 15) and the challenge rating was scaled so well, that I still got my ass handed to me a couple of times, before I got my **** together.


I played through all three campaigns in the Platinum Edition with one character, so by the middle or late part of the third campaign, my char's level wasn't that much higher than would be expected. Plus, I soloed most of the game, save for parts of the second and third campaign.


The reason I asked was, that perhaps some folks here had experience with that sort of thing in NWN 2 and could tell me if it was similar to the first game. Hopefully the CR does scale, and then I reckon I won't have a cheesy game at all, just one that isn't a pain in the ass.



Also, to give you an example of how it worked in NWN 1. If your PC was level 1, you fought against mostly "regular" zombies in one of the Neverwinter districts. On level 15 however, most of them were zombie lords with fancy auras and whatnot.



I should be able to try this "sploit" out tomorrow, and will let you know how it went. Specifically, if there's any CR scaling at all.

 

Unfortunately, there seem to be some enemies who can nearly kill you while qualifying for Easy - and some Effortless ones who can give you real trouble as well. Fihelis Estate was one of the toughest areas for me as well.

Note: Perhaps a couple of rogues all qualify for Effortless each but their combined sneak attacks can give you a serious headache.

 

You know that you can take control over the other party members? That way, you can coordinate your attacks.

Also, the game is balanced around the fact that you can rest everywhere for a few seconds. If you don't use that, you will have a tough time.

 

It's not only their backstabbing that's a pain in the ass. They all seem to have rather high AC and HP as well. If CR normally only takes HD into account, then I'd guess that the lowest challenge rating should go to NPCs at least 5 or 6 levels lower than my party. And there's no way in hell those rogues are only level 2 or 3.

I normally let my party decide who to bash, but in this case I actually had them gang up on individuals. As I said earlier, those thugs are eerily hard to hit, so while there's an improvement, my crew still gets its ass handed to it. That would probably work if I were able to isolate them (like I did in the warehouse), but seeing how they are sneaking around, it's actually them who are doing the ambushing this time around.

 

Dude, chill! This is one of the hardest parts of the entire game mainly because Obsidian had the balls to actually allow enemies to use stealth (try the NWN OC for a nice change of pace -- not a single stealther; zero need for Spot or Listen skills).

The key is to keep your party in one spot -- say right by the front door -- issue the command "stay here!" and run down the hallway, luring some rouges to follow you back to where your party is. It helps if you've got some area spells set up to catch them (your monk should have decent Reflex to avoid things like Grease or Web, for example). Option B is to send Qara in there with stoneskin and Mirror Image and just let her absorb the sneak attacks while the rest of the party kills the rogues.

My advice is enjoy the challenge of this particular mission cuz it becomes a walk in the park from here on out.

 

Thanks for the advice, but you see... it's not so much about the sneaking. Those rogues seem to have double hitpoints and AC compared to what I've been up against.

My monk and the fighter NPC in my party were able to take on everyone 1 on 1, until now, but those rogues take forever to kill even when we're lucky to catch one separated from his group and gang up on him.

 

i've beat this area with my pc sorcerer, elanee, qara and khelgar and i didn't have any problems whatsoever

protect everyone with mirrored image and put stoneskin on khelgar and elanee as well, and bomb the thugs with ice storms and when they're up close, use call lightning from elanee which works pretty well
remember, they can be hit with area spells even when they are in stealth

you may also want to use confusion-type spells on them, if you have them

 

The important question is: did you rest a lot, even during encounters in a hostile environment? Because the only resting I did so far, was the "automatic" type, were you rest on the move.

It's hard to imagine you didn't, because around level 8 your sorcerer will have like what? 20, 25 spells per day? That hardly makes sustained skirmishing possible, I'd wager.


Perhaps I'm giving up too easily, and was expecting the game to be too much of a cakewalk. Thing is though, I don't like my gaming to be a pain in the ass either, which it momentarily is.


Thus I went for the solution some might consider cheesy. Namely, I created a character in MotB, exported him and started a game in the OC. I expected it to be the same as in the prequel, where enemies' CR stayed the same (relative to your party's level), and consequently the game didn't become ridiculously easy. In NWN2 however, the monsters seem to stay at their original level. This makes the game pointless, because it's effectively as easy as with some sort of "god-mode" turned on.


I don't understand the reasoning behind this. In NWN1 you could (as far as I could tell, at least) import characters of any level and have the game scale your enemies' strength according. If anything, some modules I've checked out were effectively made harder that way, because if you had fight some bad-ass creatures before acquiring any similarly bad-ass gear, your 15th or higher level didn't quite cut it.


As it is, I'm back at square one. One way's like having god-mode, another's too much of a pain. I'd rather have the second option here, so perhaps I'll give those rogues another shot tomorrow.

 

The game is pretty easy, atleast if you're into D&D (which I assume you are), but as mentioned - there are some really tough fights, including those rogues.

 

I would go under you character behavior tab for your spellcasters and change their spellcasting from reservered to "overpowered' and rest a few times. I know you don't like resting but it's almost impossible to not rest that area a couple of times. especially on the 2nd level. There are just too many enemies. You might also try upgrading your equipment...that +1 or +2 can make a bigger difference than you would think.