Hello everyone!

I remember a while ago looking at a HoF guide. It was on Gamefaqs if I remember correctly. The guy who wrote it said that most damage spells are useless in HoF and control spells are the way to go. He straight up calls you a noob for thinking fireball is a decent spell.

Do people actually believe this? I'm doing TotLM in HoF and I just cleared the main floor of Malrudek's Castle. I wouldn't have made it this far if it weren't for fireball. I know you can't one-shot a group of monsters like you did in normal mode, but it's a great way to spread damage.

Think about it - your melee has to chop through each individual monster, while a fireball deals about the same damage to all of them at once. I've tried his method with no success. Blind, hold monster, and a few others. Even with greater malison and curse, monster saving throws in HoF are absolutely uncanny. With a fireball, even if the monster makes it's saving throw, SOME damage gets through. Most control spells would have no effect if a successful saving throw is made.

I'm not saying that control effects are useless. They certainly have their place. I dealt with the spectral guards by having them chase around my paladin, launching several fireballs into the group and then use turning to make them split. After that I finished the guards off one by one. Turning isn't really a spell but it still has a control effect that the person I mentioned was referring to.

The Wizard is a very powerful class (arguably the most powerful class) in 3rd edition D&D, so you can absolutely afford to use a suboptimal strategy and still be awesome. And to be clear, fireballs and direct-damage spells in general are sub-optimal in the 3rd edition ruleset. Sure, if you encounter a swarm of very weak foes it works fine, but there are lots of ways to easily trounce encounters like those. When compared to battlefield control spells, though, they just don't shape up too well.

The problem with a fireball is that it's here and then it's gone. You deal damage, but there's no lasting effect; if you didn't kill the enemy, he's still casting spells or smacking you with damage. On the other hand, a spell like stinking cloud forces enemies in the area of effect to keep making saving throws and become incapacitated should they ever fail. Every time an enemy is incapacitated, that's less damage and pressure being put on your team so your real damage dealers can clean things up. Some spells, like acid fog, don't even allow a saving throw and enemies who try to move through it are slowed no matter what.

Save or suck spells like blindness are unreliable for the reasons you mention. You generally need to figure out what the enemy's weak save is then hit them with a spell that targets that save for these spells to be effective. If you want damage, dropping buff spells on a barbarian is generally better value than fireballs.

Considering that this information is not available in the game itself, that's probably a much higher level of metagaming than most players are looking for. Also, it looks like this post and the OP are talking about different games with different rules, as IWD1 is not 3rd edition and doesn't have a barbarian.

That said, based on my experiences with IWD1, the points made above all seem valid. It's true for the Baldur's Gate games as well -- the best spells seem to be those that do both damage and debuffing/control and last for a few turns, such as Acid Fog (or whatever the exact name is in IWD1), Spike Growth, and Cloudkill. Incapacitation spells like Horror tend to feel too unreliable to me, at least once you get far enough in the game to actually need them. Pure AoE damage spells like Fireball are tough to use well because you have to aim them properly and generally can't see far enough to do so. That said, I've still gotten a lot of good use out of Fireball, and it's a fun spell.

Bottom line, as always: Do whatever works, and whatever is the most fun.

Web + Fireball in a game with many undead and cold climate animals = win.

Stealth rogue scout + Fireball = soften em' up without retaliation.