I haven't tested the limits of it. The practical reality is that Rogues need to be landing sneak attacks on most of their attacks in order to deal comparable damage to other melee classes, and being unable to do that makes them horribly irrelevant in melee combat.

How does one sneak attack? Are there certain weapons that can not be used? I just started playing this game, and haven't quite got the hang of it. I have just started playing this game, so others are far more qualified than I... The Cleric seems to be a very balanced character thus far. The cleric can wear decent armor, and although somewhat restricted on weapons, it does not render them useless, so they are skilled at fighting. The spells seem to be split for defensive and offensive for a good balance too.

Any melee weapon works. You can hide your thief on shadows, sneak behind your unsuspecting enemy and hit him in the back.
For sneak attacking in mass combat long range weapons are better than short range weapons since enemies usually attack the closest target and someone wielding a dagger has to get closer than someone with a greatsword. You can only sneak attack monsters which face in the opposite direction.

I once soloed a character in this game back in the days before enhanced edition, and I used a multi cleric/thief/wizard. It was a weird combination that actually rocked ! As you come across many undead through the game, getting to ward them off was quite useful, and became more and more powerful as the game progresses. Of course, Thief allowed to detect traps, wizard was obviously powerful too.

But as it seems they changed the ruleset for the EE, I suppose it wouldn't the same to play out. Don't know actually, reading all this tread sparked the desire to try that challenge again =D Even though I don't know all those new classes, it might be an interesting discovery.

Although the title doesn't say so, we're talking about Icewind Dale 2 and not Icewind Dale 1. The rules set was changed to the 3rd edition ruleset, which dramatically nerfed most multi-class combinations. Wizard/Cleric, and any variant thereof, is so incredibly terrible in 3rd edition it's not even worth discussing.

IWD1, though, multi-class casters are the way to build a 1-man party.

Thanks!!!! I will try it tonight!!

I'm feeling terribly ashamed for not actually noticing, even though I read most of the thread ^^'

Even though I loved the new interface and some of the ideas during the game, I was never as fully immersed and invested in ID2 as in ID (mostly due to, I thought, less breathtaking environments)... so I painfully managed to finish it, and never looked back at it again. But, strangely enough, the solo challenge might get me to play it once more.

Yeah Paladin was a bad choice. I was thinking the first IWD not IWD2 which uses 3e. For that - yeah - cleric is the best to solo. In fact, Cleric is the *only* class I could play NWN with considering that whole game forces you to solo.

I like how Clerics have weapon restrictions but they're restricted to arguably the best overall weapon in the game (morningstars). 3e spell list for Clerics is as offensive as it is defensive and very robust. And since they can wear armor without restriction they make for more than adequate fighters.

Yup, 3E buffed the Cleric through the roof. They're basically good at everything you might want them to do.

I've read that this was an honest attempt by the designers of 3E to reward people for taking the "team player" class, but in practice it was so absurdly overpowered that it left classes like Paladin and Fighter functionally obsolete since the Cleric could do their jobs just fine plus have full spellcasting progression on the side.