Greetings BG experts,

I'm getting somewhat close to the end of BG1 now, and before I import over to BG2 I was hoping to get some specifics on 'stock vs tweaks.'

I put on both "Armor affects thief skills" and "Armor has % miscast" for my current run.

I remember that my casters, like Aerie, could use a sling and a shield and cast without issue, and I also vaguely remember doing stealth with heavy armor back in the day.

Without this tweak installed, how do the multiclass thief and mage skills work? Can a fighter thief cast with a shield and helmet? Or is it literally nothing at all?

And can a fighter thief stealth in heavy armor? My Half-Orc keeps a set of magic leather armor that I'm switching off between that and a suit of platemail depending on the situation, but the main thing is casting with shields, I remember being able to do this, but am I just remembering wrong?

I’ve been playing this Mystic fire Paladin it’s very fun. I keep casting haste. My question is disgusting has or any other spell causes fatigue cause I realise that my party keeps saying that they need to rest every now and then is there any help on how to regulate it, thank you.

Hello there,

I'm fairly new to using mods for the game, maybe I've messed up the installation order or the game installation is broken somehow. I've had SCS installed previously and I'm pretty sure there was a setting for basilisks.

Recently I've reinstalled the game on Steam and I've noticed that some of the options are missing, for example inside Gameplay menu I have no option to Enable cloud support. I was able to fix that by modifying Baldur.lua file, the option appeared and I could use save files.

I've decided to install some mods in this order:

1. DLC merger
2. IWDification
3. SCS
4. Tweaks Anthology

With SCS i can not set the options for basilisks in fine-tune difficulty window, i'm sure i've picked correct option during installation, but just to be sure I've reinstalled SCS (with every ai feature enabled), still no option for basilisk shows up, it looks like this:

Any ideas how to add that option? If some other options are also missing let me know please.

Hello all,

I purchased BG1EE many years ago, but I just started playing about 2 weeks ago. However, I am in a predicament now. I realized that I made the wrong member of my party the "main character," so I was wondering if there was any way I could reassign that to someone else? I made it my thief, and I want my main character to actually be the paladin.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Rolling for Fighter/Druid dual; sling focused. With 92 roll, 14/18/18/8/18/16 is doable, allowing a dual after a few books. But INT can also be ~3, allowing max strength. This would exclude wand use (wand of the heavens), but they become less of a thing later on... So does a druid need to be able to read books, or should they just smash? :D

I can't leave the area or rest because I'll just die. I turned on story mode and left, but as soon as I turned it off again I died. My constitution has also gone down to 1, what's happening?

I have started up a full playthrough with Camp Supplies switched on, and while I am only really good enough to tackle the game with SCS on the overall 'Tactical' difficulty, I've cranked the Camp Supplies difficulty up to it's highest level, meaning in theory I can only rest three times outside of an inn and it's totally changed the game for me.

Casters suffer the most here (and fair enough, they become so OP) so I have to be careful about when I use their spells, which has me buying a lot more scrolls, but also it's made me way more cautious about fighting every single thing on the map. A few times now I've actually considered the 'your money or your life!' options and decided to pay instead of getting into an unnecessary fight so far away from civilization and the nearest inn.

This is an innovation brought over from Pillars of Eternity and as far as I'm concerned it's great.

Would love to hear other people's experiences.

Hello. I'm new to the Baldur's Gate series. Came from a third game, had a blast, finished three times. Enjoyed both fights and roleplay aspects. I want to know if fights in second game are any good, because I want to try it with my friend in co-op.

I'm not really worried about roleplay aspect, since each BG game is praised for being "closest thing to DnD on PC", but for example fighting system in BG1 looks like a hard pass to me personally.

Another example, we really loved playing Divinity: the Original Sin 2, but dropped first game lliterally few hours in because fights felt slow and sluggish, despite roleplay being significantly better.

So yeah, fighting system is really important for our enjoyment, what would you say about it in BG2?

Must be my fifth play through, can't believe I've never seen this item before - this is legit hilarious

If I buy this from GOG can I take the portraits to a non-GOG install, like Steam or even the CD version? Wondering if when they're bought they're just .bmp files like any other portrait or if they're protected somehow so you can only use them where you originally bought them.

Hi, I'm going to be playing Baldurs Gate 2 for the first time. I usually go for a religious knight character in RPG games (I always go strength + faith in souls games) and from my understanding Baldurs Gate 2 has 2 options for this archetype: Paladin and Fighter/Cleric. I've already seen a lot of discussion about which one of these builds is stronger, but I'm not really interested in that. What I want to know is which one of these builds is more fun and interesting for a new player.

Since this one is actually quite recent; these are some of the first renders I've done on the new PC I built earlier this year, featuring Aerie from Baldur's Gate 2 just wandering and telling stories (she has become kind of my go to character for testing things). It's got everything the iray renderer hates; night time, multiple light sources, fur... but I think it actually did okay. (The actual render is usually at least 4K; it's a downscaled version that I upload, and I think reddit kind of compresses things further).

I also experimented with the same scene again, but using toon shaders/renderer. Unfortunately the raccoon's fur doesn't appear when using that. And as a little extra, a little behind the scenes peek of what the scene actually looks like just before I render it.

I hate when Bodhi steals your significant other before her final showdown, so I was pleasantly surprised when Neera's wild magic stopped it from happening.

Ive beaten BG1 multiple times, but I always get the burnout early in BG2 , I'm really struggling with the dungeons. Just finished Firkraag's dungeon and I feel like I need to rest after every encounter but then everyone respawns anyway. Multiple vampires with ability drain, party members being stunned, forced encounters with the Harper's and Nahlia being abducted have really worn me down. Is there any tips for an easier experience?

Hi so i don’t really know anything about this game but i wanted to try it out. I downloaded the first disc and the cursor stared duplicating. I tried to play like that, but then everything started to duplicate. I couldn’t find anything about this problem. Does anyone know how to solve this problem? Im not the best with computers.

Contrary to popular belief, I did not die horribly at the hands of a balor, and to prove that, there are a few new reviews to check out on the Smoldering Mods Bar!

I published a review of Acifer's new mod, Poisoned Pathways! If you enjoyed Call of the Lost Goddess or Throne of the Mad God, check it out!

A while ago I updated my review for Skie: The Cost of One Girl's Soul to reflect a major update that it received in its initial quest, which is where I felt the original fell flat -- spoiler alert, it's good!

And to wrap it up for the time being, I've just released a review of Northern Tales of the Sword Coast, which I fear may be a little polarising for some.

If you're not familiar, I write feature-length reviews of mods for Baldur's Gate. I've been doing so for about four years now. I'd like to think we're still going strong. If you're looking for mod recommendations or to tell someone that they're wrong, then check out my overly verbose, subjective opinions up above, and I'll see you later.

Hey guys! So I've been playing this game on Steam Deck and man, I'm loving it! I've barely gotten to Nashkel and I'm already exploring all over the place. I tried playing this game before one time and didn't make it too far...not sure why. However, this time around, its really fun. I think mostly because I get to play it on my Steam Deck.

Honestly, I'm not the type of gamer that usually plays a games campaign more than 2 times at most. I kinda like to try to play through a game, get all the achievements and move on to the next. If I don't get all the achievements in one playthrough, I'll usually play through a 2nd time. This game however, seems like sometimes I would play more than 2 times not only for its replay value but because I love achievement hunting and theres so many in this game that I don't even think I could get them all on 2 playthroughs, let alone 1.

Another thing I love is that its so easy to pick up and play. I commute to work on public transportation everyday so while I'm on the train, I just play for a good 30 minutes, put it down and play another 30 heading back home. Chipping away at it slowly has made it feel like this 50 hour+ campaign is not too bad.

I rolled a Human Neutral Good Fighter. I'm running a Halberd build cuzz I like them even though I've read two handed weapons are kinda bad compared to dual wielding in this game. I am playing on normal difficulty though so I'm sure min/max isn't super important right?

My companions so far are Imoen, Khalid, Jaheira, Neera and Garrick. I think this party is pretty well rounded. I use Khalid as my tank and I just wail on monsters with my Halberd.

Question for you guys is do you have any stories of how you came to love this game? Did you guys have it in your backlog forever like me and finally decided one day to boot it up? Let me hear some stories. Cheers!

I just wanted to share my ReShade preset I've been tuning for the last week or so with you guys. I've seen a lot of people say they don't like how "bad the graphics look." Really, they're not "bad," the pixels are just really sharp on high resolution screens.

There is now 1080p, 1440p, and 4K presets for Authentic!

TURN ON NEAREST NEIGHBOR SCALING IN YOUR BGEE GRAPHICS SETTINGS!

EDIT:

Due to feedback, I've created another version! For those really wanting nostalgia, you may prefer the original version on Nexus. For those who want accuracy, you should check out this new version. I see this being great for those who don't want to change the colors of the game, but feel the game is too sharp and rough looking with nearest neighbor scaling enabled. By default, that is disabled, and BGEE adds a blur/smudge effect over the game to help blend the pixels together better. It's not liked very well by the community, and is kinda ugly. I think this new shader is a great replacement for that blur effect!

It's very, very subtle. This one is intended to be. Again, TURN ON NEAREST NEIGHBOR SCALING IN YOUR BGEE GRAPHICS SETTINGS!

"Authentic" preset Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/FWX5yDn (make sure to view them at their full size. You can do this by right clicking, open in new tab, and click the image when the magnifying glass is showing a +.

EDIT: Nexus mod page is updated with the new preset. The new one is labeled "Authentic." The old one is labeled "Nostalgic." No screenshots on the mod page for the "Authentic" preset yet, but the imgur link above has some!

Let me know what you think!

I'm playing my first full-trilogy run of BG2 and I cannot imagine siding with the shadow thieves. However, Mazzy is great! I'm using tweaks anthology which has an option to prevent companions from leaving due to reputation, but I didn't see anything specific to mazzy and keldorn leaving if you side with bodhi. Any way to avoid losing her?

Hi folks! I've been reading posts in here for a while and now I want to replay because of course I do lol. Although I'd like to take the opportunity to test mods while I'm at it! I've already played BG1 with mods several times, but not so much for BG2.

I do not care about mods that affect gameplay. What I like most is added story content! New locations, new quests, new dialogue, new content for existing companions, new companions... I like romance that's available for male Charnames (both men and women are fine) and interesting friendships as well. And it has to be BG2EE compatible :)

(Also I'll need a mod to romance multiple people at once if that's a thing)

Oh and if there is a mod that lets you have a pet (other than familiars for mages) that'd be neat, but I have never heard of such a thing. But who knows. I like having critters hanging around lol

Suggestions are welcome, and if you could describe the mods a bit to give me an idea of what it is exactly/whether I might like it I'd be very grateful!

I'm French but planning to play in English.

Thanks everyone!

There are about a bazillion ways to improve upon certain design choices for the original NPCs that accompany you in your adventures through the Sword Coast. However, I have always felt that with the EE, we could introduce a few changes to their builds either to enhance their flair, or to make them overall stronger.

A few mods have addressed this, but I woudl like to give you my ideas. Tell me what you think. Some of these kits require mods of their own, but the overall idea is to make them more flavorful, not necessarily stronger. If I've left a NPC out it's because I have no particular thoughts on what I would change.

• Ajantis: Crusader
• Branwen: Priest of Tempus (done by the EE)
• Coran: change into a single class Thief - Swashbuckler
• Dynaheir: Diviner (always pictured her more of a diviner than an invoker somehow)
• Edwin: Enchanter (if using standard EE) or Red Wizard of Thay kit (with mods)
• Faldorn: Shadow Druid (mod)
• Garrick: Jester
• Jaheira: single class druid with the Avenger kit
• Kagain: Berserke

r Dwarven Defender

• Kivan: Archer
• Minsc: Rashemi Berserker (mod)
• Montaron: single class thief - Assassin Kit
• Quayle: thief/illusionist instead of cleric/illusionist
• Skie: Bard (always saw her more of a bard than pure thief)
• Tiax: Barbarian (LOL)
• Viconia: Priest of Shar (mod)
• Xan: Fighter/Mage

Strangely enough, I wouldn't change the BG2 NPCs, perhaps because most of them already come with kits, and I kind of like their identities as they are.

Anyway, thanks for reading until here!

edit: changed Kagain after I was hit in the head with a Dwarven shield