I used to play Basic D&D 20+ years ago, and in the last year I've been playing alot of D&D 4E. I understand the roles of Striker, Defender, Leader, and Controller because of my 4E experience, but does 3.5 follow the same basic guidelines?

I'm open to suggestions, but I'm thinking I'd like a (mostly) traditional, generally "Good" party...

Dwarven Fighter (tank)
Halfling Rogue (damage/skill-monkey)
Human Cleric (healer)
Elven Wizard (spellcaster)
Half-Elf Paladin (back-up healer & "face" of the party)

...other classes that do intrigue me (but I'll probably wait for my 2nd run-through of the game) include Sorcerer & Monk. The Bard doesn't seem to interest me much, but I could just be biased against fat guys who sing for food & beer.

Should work mostly fine. The main piece of advice I have is to remember that this game is very, very heavy on combat once you get out of the first town. I wouldn't trade off too much fighting power trying to get all the skills, especially the dialogue skills.

I just beat the game recently and my own party really tore through very nicely. The basic strategy driving the party was to keep three very good melee fighters well buffed, well armed, and healed and let them carve through anything silly enough to stand in the way. With the Co8 mod, I was using a 6 person party of:

Three dwarf fighters - each specialized in a reach weapon (glaive, guisarme, ranseur [sp])
Human Cleric
Elf Rogue/Ranger (even split); focused on melee support, but had traps, locks, and stealth covered.

Dwarf wizard (20 con and reasonable dex makes for suprisingly good durability with the right buff spells. And I just like dwarves.)

I'd further suggest picking up certain crafting feats, especially craft wonderous items and craft magic arms and armor. Craft wand came in handy for often repeated spells too: things like enlarge person, shield of faith, and cure light wounds for example.

Of course, the beauty of the game is the sheer number of options and viable party mixes available.

Oh, and if you're running Co8, but decide to stick with a 5 person group, there's a recruitable fighter npc in the first town with excellent stats. I won't spoil it by naming the character unless you ask, though. If you're not running Co8, I'd probably avoid the recruitable npcs, but that's just me.

That looks like a good starter party, Chauncey. The only tweak that I would suggest is making the dwarven fighter a barbarian. Also, I would strongly recommend that you hire the fighter to which Nomad_Soul refers.

I've got Co8 installed, thanks.

I wanted this party to be about as standard as it gets, going with the "classic" lineup of Fighter, Cleric, Thief/Rogue, Mage/Wizard, and then just decided on a Paladin as a back-up Fighter/Healer...good way just to get used to the whole ToEE gaming system. Next time around, I'm gonna have me some serious fun mixing up the races/classes.

Couple quick questions...

Any way to add my own icons to the game? I saw quite a few "blanks". And there were 2 in there that looked like Chris Jericho & Ric Flair, respectively, and I found the notion of dungeoncrawling with a bunch of "pro rasslers" to be hysterically funny.

Also, can the Fighter "mark" an opponent in 3.5/ToEE like he does in 4E? In case you don't know, "marking" an opponent makes him attack the Fighter (or else he suffers a -2 penalty to-hit). Its a very useful tactic in 4E which pretty much guarantees that the striker (such as a flanking Rogue) can do his extra damage without retaliation from the target, while the higher-HP Fighter soaks up the opponent's attacks.

[EDIT] Interesting thing, when you have a Paladin with high Charisma & high Diplomacy, but low Intelligence....he utters neanderthal-like sentences & people love him anyway.

No marking of opponents in 3.5.

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I started with a party much like yours and seemed to be doing ok
(but then the savegames got corrupted and I had to start over, don't use auto- or quicksave if you want to avoid this).


On a second (successful) attempt I took

Half orc fighter5/barbarian5 (spiked chain)
Human thief5/fighter5 (voulge)
Human fighter1/cleric9 (just 1 level of fighter to get all proficiencies, but that was probably still a mistake)
Elven fighter2/wizard8 (bow, greatsword)
Human sorceress (bow)
Human Druid (club, and there's a very fine one not far along the plotline)

There were a few things worth noting that made this party a whole lot more effective.

- Voulge and spiked chain have a long range -> more attacks of opportunity for you and less for enemies with a long reach (voulge was the better choice). Ranseur and longspear would also have been fine. This really makes a world of difference in this game, greatswords and greataxes are not nearly as effective. Didn't see any easy way to see what weapons can hit far, other than trying.

- Thief/fighter with decent stats all over made a fantastic backstabber, pure rogue would have had much more difficulty landing the hits. (Also had enough skill points to handle traps&locks and diplomacy).

- Elven fighter/wizard, 2 characters casting fireballs makes for a whole lot more fireballs, also plain magic missiles work wonders all through the game (especially with spell penetration + empowered). Further, there are very nice light elven armors with very light spell disturbances, made for a pretty decent backup fighter.

Sorceress was just for variety, in the end I liked her rather better than a wizard though.

6th character, Druid (and animal companion) was very helpful in lower and mid levels (call lightning is great),
not so great towards the end though, still worked as a backup healer.

I've only tinkered with combat so far, haven't actual tried to progress the storyline, so I am still open to changing my party. The multi-classing of 3.5 is much different from 4E, but I can adapt.

I didn't see anything in the manual about weapons with Reach, but knowing that there are Reach weapons is helpful.

Maybe I should look up ToEE at GameFaqs for some more extended info on weapons, armor, etc., since the manual doesn't seem to offer it.

Me gustaría aprender a hacer un server, también necesito un mod futurista para el minecraft. Recomiendenme, besos.