F1ach: But surely with such a small party at lv 2 or 3 the moathouse would be incredibly difficult? I would love to have a smaller party to make negotiating the corridor combat less annoying.
Jarmo: With double the xp, you can level up just by doing the busywork at Hommlet. Then probably another level clearing the moathouse ground floor.
With couple of extra levels, most undead are destroyed or turned just like that, making many encounters real easy.
Party selection is way difficult though. Cleric is a must (or maybe a druid), I like combat wizards, 1 level of fighter and the rest wizard. Harder early on, but later elven chains are pretty neat.
You can get the elven chain armors really early if you have a character with a decent sneak skill. The ogre or his bear doesn't seem to have much rank in the detection skills, so you can just sneak around him and take all the loot you'd normally get by killing him.
Personally, I'd say the most effective duo to use is a cleric with a reach weapon, and a wizard with 1 or 2 level of rogue for crowd control and thief skills. You can add characters to that as needed, just don't take more than 1 wizard, because scrolls are rather hard to come by.
Also, keep in mind that you can add and remove characters to your party while playing by going to the inn and using the guestbook, so you can use that to adjust party size on the fly if you feel you need more people in your group. Just keep in mind any addtional PCs will start at level 1, so they won't be effectuive for a while.
It's also useful in cities if you feel you need someone with decent conversation skills for quest. Just create a bard with 18 charisma, do the quest you need diplomacy to solve, then remove him when you're done.
