I was wondering about this cos those flame strikes in the 8th chamber are nasty. Gaining 2 levels in the monastary though, with a full party of six you barely get anything. I'm assuming the "How to be an adventurer" book helped with your level up? :)

Edit: for melee, you're not using two handed weapons?

Yeah that book gives a huge amount of exp, cost a lot of gold but as I don't get much exp from killing enemies it seemed like a lot of exp to turn down.

Not using two handed weapons, if there was a feat that allowed two handed weapons to be used with a shield I'd get that. I like playing RPG's with a shield wielding warrior type.

Yup, those static XP gain amounts would be massively beneficial for a solo character. Going from level 20 to level 22 requires 41000 XP, but if you divide that by 6 party members that's only about 7000 XP each. Even accounting for the fact that some of it is being reduced on account of the solo barbarian being over-leveled, that still puts him at a massive experience advantage over a 6-man party.

I thought with the way exp works in this game that playing solo might have been problematic, but with the quest exp and events and stronger enemies you do still receive a good amount of exp.

Fair enough. It's just with 2 handed weapons, characters using them gain a +50% increase from their strength modifier. At high str levels, two handed weapons can do insane amounts of damage. However, because you are going solo, using a shield might be the better option (though there are two handed weapons with a deflection bonus)

The problem with shields has more to do with party mechanics. What you really care about is the weakest link in the party durability-wise, and with d12 hit dice the Barbarian is practically assured to be "not it". Further investment in AC is nice to have, but explicitly secondary to your primary role within the party. For the barbarian that role is dealing copious sums of damage, which is why two handed weapons are almost universally preferred to shields.

Without other party members this calculus no longer applies. There's no longer the concept of a more fragile party member that needs protecting, and you're free to bolster your own AC at the expense of damage output.

In a 6 man party, yes, solo, I'm afraid this logic doesn't apply.

In IWD2, the enemy more often than not goes for the squishiest characters like mages. With 6 potential targets (up to 12 with summons) and a lower probability of being targeted by the AI, front liners can afford to forgo a shield.

A solo character or course is taking all the heat as as far as I can remember, the only chance a non caster has to use summons is the wolf charm you can bet for in the targos tavern. A solo character is probably better off with the shield for survivabilty and use the terrain to control enemy movement

Guess you rather skipped reading the last paragraph.

No, I read it, it just didn't register until it was too late........

Currently working my way through the zhinda citadel.

The drider lair has probably been the more challenging part of this chapter so far.

Really? I didn't think that part of the game would cause much of a problem considering what you've been through already. The enemies shouldn't be a problem. Is the trouble coming from lighting traps and the few mind flayers by any chance?

The zhinda citadel was pretty easy, the drider lair was the challenging part of this chapter so far, but overall chapter 4 has been fairly straightforward.

On to chapter 5.

The fight outside the zhinda citadel looked like it was going to be a tough one, but ended up not taking any damage. Went to the top left corner where it narrows a bit, the harpies got to me first but couldn't hit me nor effect me with their spell, so used my sling to take out the earth elementals who couldn't get to me because the harpies were in the way. After the elementals were down I switched to melee and killed everything else, the two mages seemed like they were going to be a handful during the initial cutscene but fell after trying to fight me in melee for some reason, must have been out of spells to cast.

This fight looks much harder than it actually is. The monsters here are a lot weaker than the ones you fought in the previous area, and the wizards have a poor spell selection and can be dispatched easily or even just ignored.

Hardest enemy in the game, in my opinion.