So, it's been quite some time since I've played an Infinity Engine game, and this is actually my first time with Icewind Dale 1. I've made it, at last, to level 2 of Kresselack's Tomb on the default difficulty setting, but my party keeps getting crushed. It's reached the point now where resurrecting fallen party members is prohibitively expensive (700 gold for each, I believe?), but I also am simply unable to proceed without characters dying. This game's tough!

That in mind, I'm wondering if I should just... start the whole thing over? Or is there a way to move forward you would recommend? My party is as follows—they all have optimal stats according to a guide linked in another thread on this forum.

- Ranger
- Paladin
- Cleric/Fighter
- Thief/Fighter
- Mage/Thief
- Fighter

The cleric cannot raise dead yet. What to do?

Thanks. I think I went wrong with weapon proficiencies—I have a ton of slashing/piercing but next to no blunt weapons. (Cleric is pretty much the only one.) I have been using bless and not turn undead, but yeah, I think I'm having problems in large part due to my weaponry not being optimized.

My mage/thief is also just horribly useless. (In retrospect, I don't really know why I rolled this.) I can replace her mid-game, right? I wonder if doing so with a character proficient in blunt weapons could be helpful. Might have to grind out some fights by repeatedly resting in unsafe territory--does that work?

Set the game difficulty to very easy, this way monsters do only half damage and you get double XP from quests and combat. This will even out the slower leveling of your multiclass casters.

You can also rest in dangerous places (near or in the yeti cave) until you get surprised by yetis and repeat this until you gained a level.

At mediocre levels buying raise dead scrolls at the temple and having your cleric use them is cheaper than paying directly for resurrecting.

I don't really WANT to play through on very easy, though :) Seems like cheating.

Didn't realize raise dead scrolls where a thing though. (I'm rusty!) Thank you for the tip.

Glad we found the problem :). In this game you definately want blunt weapon damage, it can handle any enemy in the game except for the 5 or so shamblers in TOTLM (they are totally immune to blunt damage).

Except for your thief / mage (definately replace this one), your characters have 4 proficiency points to spend on character creation. What I do is drop 2 into a ranged weapon right off the bat. Low level characters are too squishy to handle much toe to toe combat. After that, I put 1 in a blunt damage weapon and the last in another damage type. This gives me a balanced weapon loadout with emphasis on ranged weapons for higher low level survivability. I then increase the other two as I level up. For single class fighters, I do the same thing until they have two points each in a missile / blunt / other damage type, then I max their ranged weapons (3 for bows/xbows, 5 for slings) then max their main melee weapon, the rest of the points go in the other weapon.

Just a few tips on choosing weapons, be careful about taking quarterstaff proficiency as there are barely any good staves in the game, in fact, the staff Conlan sells will be the best one. In the original game, you will probably only be able to find two, one only a druid can use, the other only a cleric can use. If you have a fighter with quarterstaff proficiency and you don't buy the staff from Conlan, they'll be carrying that piece of firewood well into the TOTLM areas and it will be for a quarterstaff +1, lame!!!!!! Halberds have the same problem, one of my fighters wth halbard proficeincy kept his ordinary halberd the he got in Easthaven until he met the blind dwarf in the HOW areas. Before there, you have a chance at finding 2 halberds but they are both random drops, one was in Kresslacks tombs in a small room containing a mummy, in that room, you have a chance at getting a diseased halberd, I forget there the second was could be found though. Clubs are also a problem, the spidercrusher from Conlan will be the only club you find until you start HOW where some great clubs come available.

Yup, you can replace characters mid game and you can always use the cheat console to bring their XP up to par with your party so no problems there. The fighter multiclasses are great choices for characters because of the higher hitpoints and better weapon proficiencies over their single classes counterparts. To me, sacrifing a few thieving skill points or a few spells for better combat viability is a good trade off. May I also suggest taking a ranger/cleric instead of a fighter/cleric? At higher levels, they get both cleric and druid spells (except for level 7 druid spells). :). IMO. ranger/clerics make fighter/clerics redundant. The only thing a fighter/cleric has over the ranger/cleric
is more alignment choices which really only amounts to a few crappy cleric spells. The cause X wounds spells are garbage anyway. Long spell casting time, crappy damage and a chance of a saving throw makes those spells useless, using the spell slot for a buff and swinging your mace instead is far more effective.

I actually always play at the highest difficulty setting, because while the monsters are somewhat harder, you get 2x the experience when they die, so in the end you will level up much faster over the whole adventure. Also make sure to arm all your party members with slings for Kresslak's Tomb. Slings count as blunt weapons for damage to skeletal undead.

Every turn or so of game time, 2 Shadows respawn just outside the entrance to Kresslaks Tomb (I think they only respawn if you are not standing within sight-range of the respawn point). This will happen till you finally clear the tomb and get to the final chamber. On highest difficulty they award 750+ exp each iirc and can be taken down fairly easily by a party of 6 armed with slings. So you can farm experience to gain a few levels that way.

If you rest outside just about anywhere on Shadowvale, you will encounter wandering Yetis. They also give about 600 exp each and are not too hard to kill from long range. Plus the dead Yeti has a pelt you can sell for gold. So this is also a possibility to farm both gold and exp. When you run out of ammo, just go back to town and refill your inventory by selling dead Yeti pelts.

It shouldn't be too much grind to get all your party members up to level 5 this way before tackling the Tomb. Alternatively, you can export all your characters, kick most of them out of the party and have just one or two characters solo the experience farming, so they level up faster. Once they are at level 6 or 7, import he other party members back in to clear the Tomb, now lead by a level 7 cleric or paladin. At level 7+ turning undead becomes a viable tactic against the weaker skelly types. I was able to solo the Tomb this way with a Dwarven fighter/cleric multiclass on hardest difficulty. By the time I was finished he was level 9/10.

Also try casting Sanctuary on a cleric, then have the cleric move freely around the Tomb using Turn Undead to corral the skellys towards the killing zone of the rest of your party, where they can safely dispatch them one by one. Alternatively, you can have a Sanctuaried cleric "pin" a group of turned undead against a wall while the rest of your party finishes them off safely from a distance with missile fire. In IWD, once you get a cleric to level 20, they will obliterate undead mummies and things automatically just by walking near them. Use the Sanctuary tactic mentioned and the undead levels are no longer a problem.

That's IWD2 that happens, IWD1 lumps bows,xbows,slings and darts into missile weapon damage.

Nope. Slings count as blunt and bows count as piercing in IWD1. It makes a big difference when fighting skellys and those mushroom guys in Upper Dorns Deep. Don't take my word for it, just try it ;)

I just checked and you are indeed either thinking of IWD2 or you have used mods for IWD1. I just reinstalled IWD (no mods) and made 2 identical fighters (named bow and sling) and tested their damage again a sketeton archer dude. Both the bow and sling damage are indeed lumped together as missle damage and both weapons only do half damage to skeletal undead. Slings do not do bludgeon damage like they do in IWD2. Check screenie for proof.

As IwubCheeze pointed out, in unmodded IWD1, despite what may seem logical, slings do piercing damage.

Here's mine: Led is a using a +1 sling, while Bellona is using a +1 bow. Led is a fighter11/cleric11 while Bellona is a fighter13. They both have 18/91 and 18/93 strength respectively. Led has Dex 17 while Bellona has Dex 18. Led has 2 pips in "Missile Weapon" proficiency, while Bellona has 3 pips in "Bow" proficiency. Notwithstanding Bellona gets off more shots with her bow, Led consistently does 5-7 hp of damage with his sling while Bellona does 3-5 hp with her bow. This over a combat vs. 4 Temple Guardians.

I use GoG's vanilla IWD Complete, which auto-installs HoW and TotLM. Don't know if that changed something with the way bows work.

This isn't just my imagination. I soloed that dungeon twice, once using a bow wielder and once using a sling wielder. The bow wielder had to go back to town to re-equip ammo much more often, because her arrows weren't doing as much damage overall as the sling. So averaged over hundreds of shots, from what I have seen in the game, slings do more damage against skellys than bows.

EDIT: In this old thread Coelocanth points out that slings add Str modifiers to damage (about 2/3 down first page), which might be what is going on, or possibly an undocumented weakness hardcoded into skeletons by the devs.

I decided to try this again. I took 2 level 7 (90000XP) fighters. Their stats for str / dex / con respectively were 17 /18 / 18. One had 3 pips in bow (using a normal short bow), the other 3 pips in sling (using a normal non magical sling) with 40 ammo each. Each fighter also had plate mail armour and no other gear. I had a level 30 fighter disignated "Bait" to draw all enemy fire while the missile weapon users did their test. After the battle, the short bow did 57 total damage while the sling did 38. Keep in mind a short bow gets no bonuses while the long bow and composite bow get bonuses to THAC0 and damage so I was actually somewhat gimping the bow user. The bow user gets an extra attack per round so while more ammo was getting used, more damage was still getting delivered

Edit: It is in fact your strength being added to your sling users attack rolls. I just tried the same battle again with 2 18/00 str fighters and the sling user was getting similar damage numbers in your screenie

We were also thinking of different things here too. Your screenie still shows enemies resisting damage which means that your sling isn't dealing blunt damage that deals full damage to skeletal undead (the original point I was making). If you used a mace there, you wouldn't be getting an X amount of damage resisted message at all, the skelly would be taking full damage.

OK, my bad. I always assumed the damage difference from slings was due to blunt vs piercing issues. I see now that is not the case and it is due to Str bonus. But otherwise my advice to the OP still stands.

I can agree with you. With 5 pips in slings, they will have the same number of attacks per round as bow users and with str getting added to bullet damage, they will do more damage than bow users in the long term. Also sling users can equip shields, yoink!!!!! :)

With 5 pips getting added to slings, that means a fighter will only be able to max one melee weapon. A bow using fighter will be able to max out their bow and 2 melee weapons. I find it a little annoying that a level 30 single class fighter has a total of 14 pips to use (grrrrrrrr, why not 15 pips damn you!!!?!?!?!!)