Hello all. Just wanted to share a moment of great relief. I have started a new game today in IWD2 with the intention of going through HoF mode upon completion of normal difficulty.

Everything was going great until my fighter leveled and i tried multiclassing to barbarian.

To my horror i realized i had messed up in his creation and made him -lawful- neutral, thus making a barbarian multiclass impossible.

Some hasty googlefu later i discovered the Dale Keeper 2 mod program that allows some pretty extensive char/item/monster/spell editing. A quick load of my save file and an alignment swap later and my fighter is primed for some barbarian action on his next level. Huzzah indeed!

Anyone who botches a char like I did and needs a second chance should look this tool up. Or for anyone wanting to tweak the game out to their hearts content.

And Dalekeeper was a lifesaver for me in Icewind Dale.

I did not add any rogue in my party (Due experience of its uselessness in Baldur's Gate). Everything was happy until I got to the final cave of the Dragon's eye, which is full of traps. Everywere. It has more traps than real walls. And full of locked chests. And you can't rest there, so my mage was nearly useless to open everything.

Deleted my ranger character, created a lvl 1 rogue, assigned ranger's experience points and we were set!

The game has a really strong problem with the party creation (Its giving you freedom to do wathever you want, but it punishes you if you don't make a proper party, and it doesn't tells you how to make it).

It's quite obvious what's essential for a balanced party when looking at the manual, a character with bard or mage levels who can cast arcane spells, a character with cleric or druid levels who can cast divine spells, someone with fighter/ranger/paladin levels for physical attack power and someone with thief levels to handle locks and traps.
For those 4 important options you have a party of 6 characters who can even be multiclassed to handle up to 3 of them, there are so many options.


It was predictable that if you don't have a character who can handle locks and traps (any single or multiclass thief can do) you'll have trouble with locks and traps.
But even without thief you could have finished the game. You can just return to the level above and rest safely there to replenish your knock spells if you rescued the prisoners, else you can also go outside or try resting until you succeed.
Locks can also be bashed if you're strong enough, natural strength can be raised with spells, potions or druid shapeshift.


Instead of dalekeeper you could also have used the cheat console to set up the current XP. Another option is just leaving the character at level 1 (he'll gain level fast) or start a new HoW game with him alone and export him after he has gained the quick and easy dialogue XP in the beginning.

The problem its the alternatives to handle locks without a thief are just a joke. The end of the Dragon's Eye (Where I had my rogue problem) is specifically designed to punish you if you don't have a thief in your party: Traps everywhere (I haven't found bigger amount of traps in the whole gameplay), "loot" chests tightly locked (three warriors, each one with 18 strength, did nothing) with "you-open-you-are-dead" traps, unavailability to rest in the whole map...
I can't predict there's gonna be a level so bad designed towards "general" game. I can't remember any part of Baldur's Gate 1, for example, where I would say "phew! Thanks to Imoen the whole party is saved!").

And yeah, I tried every single legal option, believe me. Just, using Dalekeeper was easier and more straight forward than messing with cheat codes. (Besides, I was using it already to rename some of the members of my party xD).

Maybe the real problem it's I haven't read the manual. I did a quick overview (Specially the character creating section) and find nothing about party creation advices. I took for granted the thief importance where about the same as in Baldur's Gate, so screw it xD.

I've soloed the game with a fighter so I know that traps and locks can be handled even with less options. But it's nice that the game is better balanced and thieves are not as useless as in other games.

Traps are supposed to be annoying or even worse for unwary adventures.
18 strength is not 18/00 strength which you can reach with a strength spell and allows bashing more stuff open. Oswald sells 3 potions of frost giant strength (21 str), you'll find more potions during the adventure and when the cleric gets champion's strength almost everything can be bashed.
Traps can be located and almost all can be avoided with a find traps priest spell.

It is indeed helpful to have around, although I find modifying the spells on sorcerers (perhaps wizards too) crashes the game.

Yeah DK2 isn't very good for spells. It will try to automatically remove any spells that it doesn't like from all your characters, even if they're legitimate spells that can be easily modded back into the game (like Produce Fire for druids). It also tends to do weird things when directly editing the spells as Ad_Hoc mentioned. I like to use it at the start of the game to add a couple of bonus feats, but for everything else I use Near Infinity.

You always need a Thief on this series, if you dont like Thief proffesion try to make a Thief/Mage or Thief/FIgther. He/She will still be able to do other things even in dual profession and do the job to rid off out of traps.

First time i played Icewind Dale 1 one of my characters was a Fighter/Thief, actually i´m playing the game for second time and I choose a pure Thief for the party.