Your opinion means nothing to me, so save it.

I'm afraid I must have misunderstood your issue, then, sorry. Would you mind explaining it again more clearly?

I have already stated that I made myself plain. I don't repeat myself for the sake of it.

you should have your own twitch channel showing us the proper way to play BG.

Oh look, another lurking bug has crawled out of the woodwork.

There is good money in it. And crpgs are trendy now.

I'm not interested, and I certainly wouldn't presume to think there is a "proper" way to play BG.

I guess it would be one without the use of "exploits" according to you.

Oh good lord, please let's leave Hickory alone, I'm starting to feel sorry for him.

Back on topic, I also am interested in first play through advice. Other than for role playing reasons, are there any compelling reasons not to dual class, or are the benefits to the various combinations too much to overlook? Human berserker, atm.

One compelling reason not to dual class: When you first dual class, you will lose your first class's abilities. For instance, if you dual class your berserker to mage, she will, for a while, be nothing but a low level mage with lots of HP. This means she will be rather useless until her mage level surpasses her berserker level.

One more thing: if you dual-class too late, you may reach the XP cap (your old class XP counts toward it, so be careful) before you regain your old class's abilities. Be careful about that.

Dual-classes are much more viable in Pools of Darkness because that game caps by level rather than XP and (unlike the Baldur's Gate series) implements racial level limits, making multi-class characters essentially unusable.

Your feelings are misplaced. You should also not presume too much...

That's quite an interesting reading of last two pages, go on :)

On-topic: not really an exploit, you can start with 25 in all stats on all chars with help of trainers, as you can pretend you have finished game several times, re-importing chaarcters, getting permanent stat boosts along the way. 25 in all stats allow for quite an interesting ways to play the game, and is more approachable for newcomers.

Off-topic: Neverwinter Nights 1/2 has stat caps at 25 or at higher values? When I'll be replaying those, I am thinking to make character with 25 in all stats, but don't want to waste stat bonuses from level ups.

Actually, the 3rd edition rules don't specify a stat cap, so you could probably hack a character to have 110 strength, giving her a +50 bonus to attack and damage.

Of course, it is still not as extreme as Morrowind, in which my character briefly had over 2000 intelligence thanks to Alchemy. (The normal cap without magic assistance is 100.) Even Morrowind isn't as ridiculous as Skyrim can get with Fortify Restoration potions, but that game doesn't have ability scores. (Instead, you get like -73948933% bonus to Restoration, and the - sign isn't a typo, but rather is a sign that an integer overflow occurred.) (Disclaimer: I have not played Skyrim.)

I remember there were problems at 25+ in NWN, and for sure this game didn't want to work with stats at 100+ (at least in first NWN). I just want to be sure about getting stat bonuses on level up if you already have 25 in all stats.