Contents
Leveling, combat difficulty & tips
As has been briefly described before, as this is role-playing game, your characters evolve over time. This is achieved through experience points. As usually, you get experience points for completing main quests and subquests (more about that later) and of course also for killing enemies. The leveling speed also depends on your character class. Some classes evolve faster (for example clerics), some slower. On each level you always get increase of hitpoints and depending on your class something new: wizards get new spells, fighters get more weapon slot points (others too but usually much slower), thieves can increase their abilities (and learn to make better traps etc.).
Each couple of levels your saving throws or THAC0 decrease, you gain attack speed (which is not really that important in the game though). Originaly there was a level cap in the game, which was increased each time a new expansion came. Now it is possible to gain some initial advantage by exporting your characters, unfortunately only your main character can be exported/imported. So the suggested way is to first play the Black Pits expansion, level high enough and then import your charater to the main campaign. In such case you should remove the level/experience cap as you will run into it sooner or later. There are some fan modifications available, besides removing the level cap there are also others giving you back functionality previously available but removed by Beamdog (for example the effect of the Boots of haste). Modding has been made much easier, basically you just copy the wanted game files into the Override folder.
Somebody could see this character buffing and exporting as cheating, my opinion is that for example mages are way too vulnerable through out the game (and in the beginning you could be killed by a single hit). Also when dual- or multiclassing with certain types of classes, you may not reach high enough level even in future games (BG II) so it makes sense to get highly evolved character it is fun to play. Last but not least, if you want to play with higher difficulty, you absolutely must use any advantage you can get. It is so hardcore that even I have never played on higher settings than maybe medium. I think I will try next time with my first main multi-class character (ever; I used single-class or dual-class characters so far) buffed from Black Pits…
Regarding advantages in combat, always try to think of all possible ways of combating, especially in an open environment. You may somewhat end in playing save/load style, on the other hand getting slaughtered every two minutes is no fun either. You can have your characters resurrected (if they are not slaughtered to pieces), but your main character must not die. And last 5+ years I tend to try to win all battles without a single party member dying. If you are careful and think about it, you can choose where and how the combat happenes. You can buff yourself with potions and spells before combat (increase resistance, armor class, cast haste etc.) and cast creatures which you can control (besides your 6-member party, you can also control up to five casted creatures). You may even send the creatures first to take the first couple of waves of deadly magic and then jump on your enemies yourself.
You can prepare ambush (traps, other characters with long-range weapons waiting in distance etc.). Here it is good to mention that most likely (I do not really remember) enemies have been improved in Enhanced Edition and now they follow you outside from buildings and dungeons or to other levels. While it is not pleasant on the first look, on the second one you can again use this knowledge to set ambush in safe location. You can often lure powerful enemies one-by-one and slaughter them in group. In BGEE where most enemies are not on so high level, you can greatly make use of paralyzing and weakening spells (later you will mostly just meet enemies with so high level that their saving throws make no use of such spells, or they have high magic resistance) or spells with wide area of effect (the famous fireball etc.).
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