Still waiting for this ...

IWD was created and balanced for playing a party of 6. A party of 4 is harder at the beginning. 2 additional warriors specialized in bows would add 5 extra attacks per round for 5-10 damage each with normal composite bows and ammo which would easily double your party's damage output early in the game.

If you think the game is too hard to be fun you can set the difficulty to easy. Enemies will do less damage and you'll get 50 percent extra XP.

I consider thief/illusionist superior to thief/mage. The extra spell per level and day does make a difference, the forbidden spells won't unless you want to set lots of traps with the skull trap spell or cast protection from evil for extra AC.

What I did with my party (listed above) is that I would park my party at a bottleneck (a door, usually) in the map, then sent my ma/th ahead to scout and disarm traps. I would send her halfway across the map, in some cases, because it was more tactically sound to leave the bulk of my party at a certain spot.

Since the ma/th would make contact first, and have to run back to the party for safety, I gave her haste boots (Boots of the Fox, specifically). If she found a caster, she would hit him/her with a Magic Missile and/or a melf's acid arrow, then hightail it back to the group. Sometimes, I would cast Skull Traps, stinking could, or Death Fog along the way. In this way she would spread out and soften up the incoming forces and make the battle easier.

I never bothered to backstab; I just never play a thief like that in IE games, for some reason. Heck, I don't think I've even stealthed her at all (sucks that you can't sneak and detect traps concurrently). I would just mana dump on harder enemies and plink at the easier ones with my bow. I had enough characters in my party to do the tanking, after all.

Anyway, my party from above (Paladin, Fighter, Ranger/Cleric, Cleric/Illusionist, and Mage/Thief) rolled through the main game pretty easily on Normal difficulty. I only had one really difficult battle, and that is ONLY because I played my paladin party leader straight. There are several places where the 'peaceful' dialogue ends up getting you surrounded and badly outnumbered later on; this was one of them. Using meta-game knowledge would have made this particular fight much easier (a drow warrior chick was involved, 'nuff said), but I refused to do that.

I just finished the main game today. I'll be starting Heart of Winter later tonight or, more probably, tomorrow. In case anyone wondered, I finished the main game with ~1.35 million experience per party member (five man party). This translates to a level 13 fighter, a level 12 paladin, and all the multi-classes at least double digits in both classes.

Haven't done my bios yet although I think on them while I am playing. I tend towards goody-goody parties.

Ransom, Human male Paladin
Brash, Dwarf Fighter, Lawful Good,
Anselm, Half-elf Cleric Neutral good (completely useless except for healing spells)
Twilla, Human Chaoctic good Thief
Shara, Elf True Neutral Druid
Gwen, Human, Chaotic Neutral Mage (Invoker)

I didn't roll for much more than 30 minutes but I am happy with the party. I love party based single player RPGs!

Very similar to my party; it should do very well in the game. If you want to make the cleric a little more 'useful', you could always multi-class him to cl/ma. Two mages and a druid will put some sever hurting on enemies (thinking entangle/web and AoE DoTs).

I always multi-class my clerics in IE games, even if it is a game that allows for cleric kits (e.g. BG2). The gains far outweigh the losses, imho. If you multi-class to fighter, you get a better THAC0, more hitpoints, and exceptional Strength. If you multi-class to a mage, you get arcane spells, which ups the character's damage potential and overall utility greatly. If you keep the cleric as a single class, you just get a heal-bot/meat-shield with one or two more levels.

I would probably multi-class to ranger/cleric over fighter/cleric though. I don't believe that multi-class fighters can train beyond specialized in any weapon (so, only 2 +, instead of the 5 + a single class fighter can attain), and if you are a cl/ra, the ranger's druid spells share the same spell pool as the cleric spells. The later could be seen as an exploit but the former leaves little reason to choose fighter (unless you don't want to be good aligned, in which case fighter is all you are left with).

Hah, nice. I stumbled into the best cleric/(fighter-style) multi-class :p

Anyway, here are my party's stats:

(Again, I realized they aren't the best allocations. Also, bonuses from equipment may be contributing to these stats.)

Paladin
16 Str
15 Dex
16 Con
3 Int
13 Wis
17 Cha

Druid/Fighter
16 Str
16 Dex
16 Con
4 Int
17 Wis
15 Cha

Cleric/Ranger
18/20 Str
18 Dex
18 Con
4 Int
18 Wis
6 Cha

Thief/Mage

18 Str
18 Dex
18 Con
19 Int
3 Wis
4 Cha

Pretty much the same party I have, just with one fewer character. I have a fighter and a cleric/illusionist, and you combined those into a fighter/druid. What you may lose in raw arcane magic power, I think you will make up with faster leveling. While I found having two mages made things a little easier for me, it is far from necessary.

In other words, I like your party composition, have fun! :)

Well, my team finished the original campaign and I must say they rocked! The final battle went extremely well (but that's to be expected since they all went over what the original level cap would have been). At the end of it all, they finished at the following levels:

Daenna - RGR 3/CLC 18
Wenda - FTR 3/Druid 18
Malaga - Thief 15/Mage 13

Thinking of taking this crew into HoW and adding a Bard and maybe a Pally to the mix as well.

@scyld
Your party's stats are not the best (rolling better ones wouldn't take much time and if you have bad rolls it's better to dump one to get the others to 18), but they're OK, you could do worse.

With mediocre stats the game will be a little harder than with 18/00 strength, 18 dex and 18 con for everyone, but you'll benefit more from things like strength raising potions, spells and druidic shapeshifting, so you might even have more strategic depth and fun.

Decided to go with an all-new party of 5 for HoW. I have the following team, which is just starting into the campaign. I rolled them up and leveled them using the console. Figured out how many XPs my three-member crew got and totaled them up, then divided by 5. Went with that for total XP for each character.

1) Euterpe Aulos: Female 1/2 Elf Bard. Starting level of 16.
2) Gil-Garen the Wise: Male Human FTR dual classed to Druid. Starting level of FTR 9/Druid 13.
3) Ariadne Glaive: Female Human RGR dual classed to Cleric. Starting level of RGR 12/CLC 8.
4) Bellurea Tellryn: Female Elf FTR-Thief. Starting level of FTR 10/Thief 13.
5) Kertij Bhryndl: Female Gnome Cleric-Illusionist. Starting level of CLC 11/Illusionist 11.

Likely these will turn out to be higher level than they should be for the start of the campaign, but they do only have the XPs they'd have gotten if I'd played them through the main campaign first.

I transferred the gear from the original party of three to these new characters, so they're all kitted out quite well. Played through the beginning of the original campaign to Kuldahar so I could rip off a couple rings of Free Action for the crew as well. Then started HoW through the house in Kuldahar where the Windwalker lives. My only concern is that my Bard has almost no spells to cast (I bought a few scrolls in the mage tower in Kuldahar) and my Gnome has very few spells for the mage side as well. I'm hoping I can rectify that fairly early on. If not, I may break down and spawn some scrolls in so my arcane casters have some spells to toss about.

Now that would have been good. And I should have made my druid human and dual classed her to fighter. Ah well, we are struggling along. Yxunomei is mopping the floor with my party!

Yxunomei is one of the top 3 hardest encounters in the game. Possibly THE hardest, depending on party make-up. Since your party at that point hasn't had time to get many of the more powerful spells and items, it can be tricky. The way I beat her is I ran away and fought her forces through the smaller door off the main hallway. Then I just mana-dumped on her (holy smites, stinking cloud, magic missile, fire arrow, melf's acid arrow, fireball, you name it). She still ginsu'ed up my paladin and fighter pretty badly (lay on hands and the bigger healing potions were very handy here).

Yxonumei is the hardest encounter in the game since your party is low level when you meet her. So don't hesitate to spend potions, magical arrows or other limited stuff on her, if you don't need it now, you won't need it later either.
She has about 50 percent spell resistance, she's totally immune to electricity and weapons with less than +2 enchantment can't hurt her. She's tough if you're unprepared, but there are many different tactics you can try to beat her.
Before you enter her lair so far that the door closes you might want to go back to Kuldahar, sell loot and buy equipment, Orrick's shop changes at the start of chapter 2 and 4, if you freed Conlan's son on level 2 look if he returned safely.

I think I managed it on the 4th try (nearly on the third but there were too many minions left). I did go back to Kuldahar and get Conlan's hammer. The best part is that my dwarf fighter bit the dust but my wimpy cleric, Anselm, got the killing blow!

These games just flat out rock and getting my butt kicked is half the fun.

cheers,

ransom