No matter which character i make it dies in seconds i have an AC of 30 and the enemy CAN NOT MISS ME. Literally the seventh character build i have tried i get to the shadow theater and everything ANNIHILATES me. I'll kill a red wizard and attack a succubus in literally three seconds my character is dead. is there some kind of bug stuff going on here? I have no gold to buy equipment that is better nor has selling the loot from the start cave been even marginally sufficient.

Makes sense. I didn't want to play the OC as the characters annoy me but i bet i can find a nice Module that'll allow me to outfit myself.

30 AC is very low for MotB. You really need to get into the 40's or preferably the 50's to make it effective. With very few exceptions, this is going to come from your gear. It's one of the problems with the campaign just starting in the epic levels, most character classes are extremely gear dependent at this point and most players just don't have the game experience to outfit a character properly at these levels. In that other thread the guy was asking for builds that were easy to play. Of course people were going to talk about builds that let them beat the game easily. It's what the poster was asking for!

Honestly, it isn't hard to do it without imported and crafted gear, but it definitely is easier to just start with the stuff you want. The shop merchants do have decent items and the loot drops are pretty good. The problem isn't that it's hard to bolster your AC, it's that it takes a lot of system knowledge to know what you're looking for and what kind of numbers you need. It's something that isn't directly explained and wouldn't be immediately apparent to a player who just sits down to play. Combined with the fact that MotB doesn't pull its punches with that theater and you have a recipe for frustration. That said, I do think this was a necessary if crass decision on the part of the designers: it lets you know right away that there's a problem with your character and without changes you'll struggle with this adventure. Once you do have your character decked out with decent items a high-AC build is very smooth and easy to play. It's just not self-apparent what you need to be doing to get there. Only in terms of crafted gear. If you aren't crafting, it's pretty close to D&D guidelines. Or at least as close as you'll get with the warped video-game economics they tacked on. You do generally fight more battles (and thus get more item drops) in NWN2, but the quality of that gear isn't any better than what you'd be getting in pen and paper and the merchants pay you way less for the excess so it about evens out.

In D&D there's a wealth by level guideline as to how much stuff players should have at any level. "Monte Haul" generally refers to games where players amass more than double this guideline of wealth. For a 20th level character, the guideline is 760,000 gp. So given MotB has a party of 5 you'd expect to have around 3.8 million gp worth of equipment by the 20th level. A campaign would only be considered Monte Haul if you were closer to 8 million by that point. Also that's the market value, not the ridiculous marked up video game merchant price. As an example, a +10 equivalent longsword has a market value of only 200k gp (far below what a NWN2 merchant would charge for it). You'd have a very hard time reaching "Monte Haul" level gear without grinding or crafting.

Main problem with both OC and MotB is its hate for "critical hits", while several character classes either designed to work on or has standart kits build in really REALLY suboptimal way. So new player who don't know motb specific can just take dex rogue who would progress to assassin. Or my favourite "I'm screwd build" - Swash/Duelist. No damage, and no ac. SO yeah, I understand why people can be pretty frustrated about it. The same way why they can be frustrated about third act of OC

I think actually SoZ is most "balanced" for different classes in this way. Both assassin and duelist can find some place there

Yes, they definitely went overboard with the undead. Thematically it made sense, but gameplay-wise... undead cause problems for certain common builds. The fact that such a ubiquitous creature type is outright immune to such a common game mechanic is a flaw with 3.5 in general (a lesson learned in later editions, where critical hit immunity is rarely seen).

It woudn't be such problem if they took some stuff from supplementary books and kinda tweaked base class accordingly. Like pooling rogue variant from Unearthed Arcana which let him trade sneak dice for bonus fighter feat with choise menu in the start of module(similar to how wizard choose spell specialisation) and forcing player in OC to choose this variant over standart while using standart rogue class for enemies(in I remember correctly all bandits in game are rogue/fighter, rogue/cleric or rogue/mage proper dualclasses.



Or Neval at the start of undead fest could just bring few "specially enchanted" amulets that would let crit and sneak undead while they are in partymember inventory

I'm not even sure it makes sense thematically; I think the developers were just afraid of critical hits. (Consider the fact that, in 3.5, the developers made Keen and Improved Critical not stack, even though it seems logical that they should.) Then again, I grew up with JRPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, in which anything could be critically hit (except for the PC in DQ1).

In Dragon Quest, not only could anything be critically hit (including Metal Slimes), but critical hits ignore defense, allowing them to easily kill Metal Slimes and their cousins. (For anyone not familiar with the DQ series, Metal Slimes have absurdly high defense (to the point where your physical attacks do only 0 or 1 damage), are immune to pretty much everything that isn't a physical attack, and tend to run away; however, they only have 3 or 4 HP (though their cousins in later games may have a few more), and give a lot of XP when defeated.)

In the original Final Fantasy, critical damage is added after defense is applied, and after the game sets the damage to the minimum of 1. As a result, even flans (enemies that look something like slimes) can be killed by critical hits, and later in the game, most attacks from fighter-types (especially Monks, which are *really* powerful at higher levels in FF1) will critical at least once. (Normally, you are supposed to use magic against Flans, but critical hits can also kill them.) Or, alternatively, not include a mechanic that makes certain character builds useless against certain enemy types. (There are other problematic mechanics, like magic immunity, that should also be avoided for similar reasons.)

Or, as yet another alternative, use a system that allows one to change their setup at any time. For instance, if fighting undead, the player could just switch out the thief build for a cleric build that's focused on killing undead, and then switch back to a thief build when fighting enemies that critical hits work well against.

Its not problematic mechanics. They only problematic whem this become "go replay game with knowledge" moment. If done right its good shake for player. You compiled your party from 4 fighters? Welcome your lord "ghostly bastard" who immune to physical attacks.You compioled your party of 4 caster? Magic immune golem! assuming that player still can tweak party and thats rare occurance - its fun and challanging.

Problem is not that mechanics exist. Its that it overused. Just making army of King of Shadow consisting mostly from insane twisted cultists and twisted animals with dash of undead would be better. Same with motb where you cant crit neither spirits, nor elementals, nor undead, making sertain build useless for about 80% of companion

I didn't mean to say that it's thematic that undead have critical hit immunity, I meant that it's thematic that MotB contains a lot of undead.

Critical threat range not stacking was a necessary change in the 3.0 -> 3.5 conversion. Pen and paper had more content than NWN. Maybe you're okay with having Improved Critical, Keen, and Weapon Master all stack. But what if it was six or seven effects that were stackable? Eight? Nine? Things were already problematic a few years in, and were only going to get worse as more products were released. The only long-term solution was just to ban stacking of critical threat range expansion effects. It's more problematic in NWN than it is in pen and paper. In pen and paper you can do something like create a pit underneath a magic-immune enemy then seal them in, so plenty of creative ways a wizard could get around it. This sort of "out of the box thinking" meant wizards could get around pretty much any immunity with ease.

This 3 would have been more then enough, IC still stack with WM and with scimitar it come to 13-20 crit range, So almost HALF of attack rolls are critical. If it would have stuck with keen it would have reached that 50% chance with 10-20(assuming it would work by addindg up and not by multiplication. Elso it would have been 7-20 range or even 6-20 depending on which would have worked earlie - WM or Keen) . Pretty damn insane

Notw think about Swashbuckler 10/Wm7/F2/Cl1. With Weakening and wounding critical feats. And PTWF. And permahaste scimitar in one hand(it exist in MotB or OC!)

In tabletop role-playing, a good DM could just choose not to have the PCs face enemies that would not be fair to the player; the DM can adjust her adventure to suit the PCs. If the party has ho thieves, the DM could just avoid using traps, for example, while if the party is thief heavy, the DM could have adventures that allow for more stealthy solutions to problems.

I've played video games where critical hit rates get higher than that, and I haven't found that, alone, to be geme-breaking. Sure, your attacks will critical more often than not, but that doesn't necessarily break the game (especially when you compare it to what spellcasters can do). Also, you need to actually hit in order for the threat range to matter, and you essentially need to hit again for the attack to actually count as a critical. (This is unlike FF1, where criticals take priority over misses, so having a high critical rate would guarantee a minimum accuracy.)

(Then again, I consider the AC mechanic to not be scalable (it breaks badly when you try to scale the system to very high levels), but that's a different issue.)

Also, I don't think it's fair to rebalance core material just because of non-core material; core material will affect any campaign (except when the DM houserules some of it away), while non-core material will only affect campaigns where it's allowed (and someone can get ahold of the books in question).

Only when your critical threat is so insanely high it means that against enemy which you hit on ten and up every single successful strike would become crit threatened. And, to be fair, game has more then enough ways to deliver successful attack. Just look at expose weakness. I'm pretty sure that even mage can deliever 6 successful atack with that in melee xD

Yeah, there is such problem xD I personally found that my favouritest modules in NWN1 and Two are all early to mid teen(tnding somewhere around 13-15 lvl max). WHen you come to epic, insanity ensues xD

Its canon for this game and its modules. Noncanon material would be for example K-Pack inserted into Baldur Gates remake, or pistols in Dark Water xD