Starting Over Again

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As happens so frequently, I get a character through BG1, start playing BG2, only to decide that I want to play a different character.

So I restarted BG1 and have finished the game with a HE Fighter-Thief. I'm not above using SK, and so I'm definitely going to kit this guy. My question is what to kit him with. I'm thinking that the three most obvious choices would be berserker-thief, kensai-thief, or fighter-assassin - although I'm willing to consider other options. The only ones that seem like they wouldn't work well is a fighter-swashbuckler and a mage slayer-thief.

 

Depends what kind of thief you're playing.

Berserker/Thief= Do you like missile weapons? Otherwise he's good.
Kensai/Thief= Backstabber, doesn't last in long fights. No missiles.
Fighter/Assassin= Backstabber, lasts in long battles. Gets less thieving abilities, so you'll need a real thief in your party.
Fighter/Swashy= Meatshield. No stabby. Basically a fighter and you don't need another thief in your party.
Wizard Slayer/Thief= Meh.

 

I think the fighter-swashbuckler would be a better fighter than the kensai-thief. You would have a main fighting tank with the ability to disarm traps, etc..

I'm a fan of the fighter-assassin. In the original AD&D half-orcs could multiclass as assassins with either fighter or cleric -- those were fun to play. I just think it might be overpowering, especially if you use the dagger that gives +1 to backstab multiplier.

 

Fighter/Assassin would offer the most fun in my opinion but only because I LOVE backstabbing (because a thief was the 1st character I ever used )

I GUESS since you're using sk you could increase some of your thief skills, but that would make him massively overpowered and thus decrease the fun factor.

Fighter/Swashies have always seemed like a nice idea to me, as you could tank pretty much anything, deal out some considerable damage and have all the thief skills you need. Alas, no backstab

 

Wizard Slayer/Thief - UAI will override the slayer's magic item restriction - He'll be very powerful later in the game, but somewhat less so early on.

Fighter/Swashbuckler - you give up backstabbing, but the AC bonuses will make you one of the most difficult to hit classes in the game. Marceror took a DC F/swashie through IA and found it pretty powerful (his post).

Kensai/Thief - I took one through IA a few months back, the damage output is huge (incredible THAC0+Kai+Improved Haste=win) but he tended to die a lot (though IA enemies do tend to stick around for a while - most enemies would be dead by this stage in the vanilla game). You can't use full plate on thieves anyway, so the armour restriction isn't quite as bad as it is on a single class fighter and UIA will eventually override this restriction.

Fighter/Assasain- you need to like backstabbing a lot to justify this imho. Otherwise pretty standard, unlike Trellheim I still think you'll have enough thief skills to get you through.

I guess it really comes down to how you want to play the game - my pick would be either a mc Kensai/Thief or a dc fighter/swashbuckler, but that's largely because I never backstab more than once per fight.

 

Exactly how good does your AC become if you become a fighter/swashie??

 

Depends on what level you are. Take a Fighter with 18 Dex, equip him with the best protective equiptment that you can and then add Swashbuckler AC bonuses on top of that. The more Swashbuckler levels, the better your AC (funnily enough).

 

Silvershield,

I think the bonus is -1 AC for every five levels of experience. So by late in the game you are talking about a significant boost, even with a MC character who will advance considerably slower than a single class.

I'm inclined to disagree with Trellheim on the lack of thief skill points with an assassin. While it is certainly true that you would get 15 as opposed to 25, this would appear to only be a big deal early on. There are so many items you can get that increase your thief skills that you don't need to get all the way up to 100 in most of your skills. I'm just thinking off the top of my head, and there are boots of stealth, shadow armor, and gloves of pickpocketing that could be equipped at all times, and then on top of that you could pick any two of Ring of Danger Sense, Ring of Lockpicks, and Mercikiller Ring. So it doesn't appear to be THAT bad. About the only area where you'll not be able to spend points (at least until late) is detect illusion, but that can be covered with a variety of spells.

That having been said, I'm leaning more towards a berserker-thief than I am a fighter-assassin. Since I'm primarily going to be using this character is melee anyway, the lack of missile weapons is no big deal (and unless they changed this in a patch, I was under the impression that things like throwing daggers and throwing axes were not considered missile weapons for some reason - that it was limited to weapons that used some type of launcher (bow/crossbow/sling).

The other reason I'm resitant of taking the fighter-assassin is I'm not sure going from a x5 backstab modifier up to a x7 backstab modifier is going to make that big of a difference. Heck, I have had stalkers who only had x3 modifiers that would one-hit kill a lot of things in a backstab, so I can't see how a x5 modifier wouldn't be a big improvement upon that. Yes, more is always more, but when attacking something with 70 hitpoints, it doesn't matter if you do 70 or 170 - they are still dead.

 

Well sure, I'm not disagreeing with you, but you'll need some money to get those rings and most people prefer to wear the Shadow Dragon Scale (which doesn't give any thieving bonus), so you'll still need more time to be even a competent thief.

The thing with Assasins is that not only do they get the x7 backstab modifier, but their poison does pretty impressive damage. A single class Assassin's problem is that their THAC0 sucks, so they'll have a small chance of poisoning anyone. A F/A fixes that, plus he'll be able to poison his weapon even when he's wearing heavy armor.

 

Maybe people are put off of playing an assassin for not only the lack in thieving skills and a poor thaco score but also because of a misunderstanding of the poison. I've played with an assassin throughout the game around 10 times and I STILL don't know how it works and to be honest I don't really care.. All I know is it does a hell of a lot of damage in the first few rounds and pretty much means if the backstab didnt kill the spellcaster, the poison would pretty much do the job for me

Missle weapons can take the effect too..

 

The assassins poison is great at stopping spellcaster for several rounds -- it disrupts their casting. It's much like Gnasher, but can be used on missile weapons.

I would think the swashbuckler's bonuses would outweight the berserkers toward's the end os SoA. Berserker immunitiies are great, but you can find items that grant those.

 

If you're going to be using the character mostly in melee, then the Barbarian/Thief does make sense, but a pure Barbarian would be better

Did you multiclass because you intend to have no other thieves in the party?

 

I multiclass for numerous reasons, but certainly there is no need to have more than one thief in the party. Of course, the only competent thief in the whole game (barring mods) is Jan. But the main reason to multiclass is the obvious one: Two sets of HLA in ToB.

 

Barbarian/Thief ... Fafhrd? That might be fun.

 

I generally always prefer multis over duals, but I will say my barb/thief dual run was a lot of fun, as was my wild mage/fighter. One of the very nice advantages for the barbarian is the speed bonus--you can backstab and get out of there quickly without the need for boots of speed (and the extra HPs help when you can't).

 

Hmmm... If I use SK, would the barbarian qualify as a fighter kit? If so that is clearly the surperior option, as the berserk bonus are better than a berserker, and the limitation (not being able to wear plate mail) is a complete non-factor, as thieves can't wear plate anyway.

 

Yes, Barbarian is a fighter kit that can be sk'ed in.

Be sure to give him red hair, and name him Fafhrd....

 

Yep.

True, but to get the scale you need to kill a dragon so by the time you get it, your thief will be of higher level.

 

WTF? My only knowledge of Fafhrd is the password to get you into the Thieves' Guild in BG1. I wasn't aware that it was the name of a person, and certainly not something as specific as a barbarian with red hair.

That was my thinking too. Conversely, the only thing you need to do to get the shadow armor is kill Mae'Var, and that quest can be done as soon as you leave Irencius' Dungeon. I can't argue that the leather armor you get from the shadow dragon scales is a better armor, but that's a tough kill if you do it as your first quest of the game.