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Lots of miscellaneous bugs & spelling errors fixed

0.03 - Reduced line length to 79 chars instead of 80
Added clarifications for selection between the two parties
Added role description for Decoy
Added option to choose builds without min-maxing
Replaced the second tank in Melee party with something more useful
Redistributed roles in the Melee party
Added option for Duo Melee party
Tweaked the Arcane Party
Added some notes for various spells
Updated the contributors list

0.02 - Added a second party option for a spell-heavy party

0.01 - Initial draft

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2. The Party's Development
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This section concentrates on many of the key issues that the reader needs to familiarize with before the deeper and more subtle points that will be tossed around describing the parties in JUPP can be understood correctly. Of course this guide could just list step-by-step instructions as to how to develop those characters, but that would be both boring and very uneducational.

The chapter five has a rather detailed guide on creating own UPPs. The author of this document is well aware that improvements on the party's overall design become successively smaller and smaller at each new iteration, to the point that personal preferences start to take over number-crunching facts. Theoretically optimal party can be a total pain to play due to the massive micromanagement needs, and opting for less micromanagement can, in fact, speed up & lighten the total gaming experience.

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2.1 - Two different parties? What the heck?
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Yes, you saw right. The JUPP consists of two totally separate parties that can be selected. Whereas the first party is a melee-heavy party designed to be able to melee through the whole game from Prologue normal mode all the way to the final battle in HOF mode, it can and does use spells to make the life easier in HOF mode, most notably after the Sorcerer learns Wail of the
Banshee. In a strict sense, the spells that become available later aren't meleeing, but I figured I'd save the frustration of having to beat on the enemies endlessly, as it becomes slow towards the end.

The second party, however, takes the opposite approach - avoiding melee as much as possible. It has only one character capable of doing high melee damage in order to deal with magic-immune monsters such as Golems and to help the party out in the difficult early parts of the game, when melee power is superior to spell casting in all ways, but otherwise it's just pure blasting away.

Please keep in mind that neither one of these parties is "better" than the other, they're just designed to cater for two different playing styles, one with lots of melee combat and the other with lots of mass-destruction mayhem.
Reading the chapter 5 should enable you, my dear reader, to design your very own UPPs, without the need for this FAQ taking into account the gazillions of different play styles and tastes.

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2.2 - Balancing things out
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At a first glance, it seems like the question as to what would be the most powerful party in IWD2 should be rather easy to answer, no? As has been noted in various IWD2 forums on the Internet, the question is actually much trickier than that.

However, there are many things that can be compared side by side, and by choosing always the best of the two does in fact lead to better groups eventually. This document is the end result of gathering all sorts of little tidbits of information from the boards, throwing it all into a blender and checking what comes out at the other end. The standard party with a rogue, fighter, mage and a cleric is a tried and true standard answer, but alas, it only denotes a party that is NOT TOTALLY AWFUL instead of being REALLY GOOD.
Mix'n'matching a whole group is an art form in itself, while as optimizing single characters is quite a bit easier. Here's some examples as how to make different base classes better via various multiclasses thrown in.

Rogue:
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A rogue all by itself is rather weak in combat, although it gets a lot of skill points. I think we agree that playing a character is rather boring if we're only going to use him like 5% of the actual gaming time, that is when searching for traps and such. Adding a couple of levels of fighter gives a hefty boost in hit points, better attack bonuses and the possibility to specialize in the rogue's weapon of choice. Even better, adding many levels in wizard (or any of the specialist classes) makes the rogue a potent spell caster as well. Adding points to the INT stat enhances both Rogue and
Wizard abilities, so its a win-win situation. So, how would a character that has only ONE level of rogue and everything else as a wizard fare at its main role, being a rogue, then?

Don't be worried about many of the crucial thieving skills being cross-class skills for the wizard class - with a very high INT score, there's plenty of points to spare, and even if we can't keep up with a pure-class rogue, there's one thing that we need to remember - we don't even need to.
Early locks can be bashed easily, and by the time the locks start to become harder, there will be plenty of Knock spells to spare. Also, with the exception of two traps (the one at the bridge to Black Raven Monastery and the one beside the Dragon's Eye level 3 entrance), the traps in IWD2 aren't much of a threat and can be just set off. By the time the party starts in
HOF mode, there will be enough skill levels to do anything. Gaining all the benefits from being almost pure-class wizard certainly is an improvement over the spell count of ZERO for the pure Rogue, isn't it?

By taking a look at the game manuals, it is noted that spell casters stop gaining new spells right after level 20. Okay, they do get a few, but not nearly as much as between levels 1-20. Especially noteworthy is that wizards do not gain ANY new spells between levels 21-25, leaving a large dead zone in the middle. So in fact, why not stop leveling the Rogue(1)/Wizard(x) after
20 wizard levels has been taken, and continue taking Rogue levels again?
Because, we just noted that we don't need any more rogue skills to be effective, so those extra levels would be wasted. Why not take levels as a
Fighter instead? That'll give our rather fragile character a lot of hit points, lots of extra feats and increased chances of being at least some use in combat when all the spells have been depleted. (Please note that having a lower caster level reduces the damage of some spells but this may not be such a high obstacle in some cases, especially if we're concentrating on melee combat instead of blasting with spells.)

The JUPP Melee party's Rogue build has opted to take this idea even further, stopping the wizard levels already at 17 as this gives an access to 9th level spells with two castings if a specialist class is chosen. Together with the one level in Rogue, this leaves 12 levels to be taken as some other class. Quite conveniently, by taking those levels as a Druid, the character gains one of the very important buff spells needed for the highest possible
AC, the Barkskin, without anyone else in the party having to worry about taking those Druid levels. This gives also access to quite wide selection of the Druid-specific spells for this character to use. Furthermore, by taking a number of levels as a Druid gives access to the Wilderness Lore skill, which may or may not be useful in the game, depending on if you already know your way through the Fell Wood maze or not. The late acquisition of high-level arcane spells isn't really a minus either, as the party has a main arcane caster to take care of all the buffing early on.

Monk:
  -----

Quite frankly, monks suck. Big time. There's only two real reasons why I'd ever play a full-time monk, and those are the spell resistance ability at 13th level and to even lesser extent, the 20/+1 damage resistance at level
20. The extra AC from higher levels is a joke, as replacing those levels with
11+ levels in either Cleric or Wizard/Sorcerer allows for Divine Shell and
Tenser's Transformation, respectively. Not to mention a whole bunch of more or less useful spells that far surpass the character's abilities as a pure monk. Unarmed damage has a lots of catching up to do with actual weapons, since fists can't carry magical damage enchantments plus they don't get the
1.5*STR bonus like two-handed weapons do.

However, the monk's AC bonus from high WIS stat is a sweet one to combine with any divine caster's naturally high WIS. Just one level of monk is more than enough, as it also provides the best the monk class has to offer - the
Evasion special ability and a solid +2 bonus to all saving throws. Added levels as a Cleric or Druid give this character lots more options in combat, being not limited to just beating enemies in melee. Alas, as Monk is not a favored class for any of the playable races, one has to be careful with multiclassing - any other non-favored class with more than 2 levels will result in EXP penalties. As a general rule of thumb, taking the monk level isn't worth it unless shooting for extreme AC values. Remember that reaching the critical AC of 72 is also possible via high DEX and various pieces of armor and a shield, albeit not as easy in terms of equipment needed, the monk class can be viewed as the "last straw solution".

Bard:
  -----

A sorcerer with really pathetic amount of spells from a rather inferior selection? A rogue with less skill points and fewer class skills? A fighter without extra feats, poor BAB development and very low hit points per level?
A cleric with next to non-existent selection of spells and even worse, tying up the already limited number of castings from the arcane spell pool?

A jack of all trades and a master of none. With a very strong emphasis on the latter part of the equation. This character class CAN do a lot of stuff, but I'd rather take the real counterparts as the performance of this class leaves a mile-long list of things that would still need to be covered by the classes the bard class tries to replace. The various bonuses from singing aren't cumulative (unless using the instant activation and unlimited stacking bug provided by the Lingering Song feat) and singing occupies character's all functions except for moving around. Sounds even worse than monks, eh?

Except that singing is actually a pretty solid ability! Granted, it requires the liberal use of the Lingering Song feat, but getting instant bonuses to many different areas while still having all the time in the world to take part into actual fighting is nothing to sneeze at. Just the 5th level song (Tymora's Melody) alone corresponds to an unlimited pool of Luck spells with instant casting time and mass effect on the whole party at once.
Finally, the last song at 11th level (War Chant of Sith) gives very good overall bonuses, of which the +2 AC is most important to both of the high-AC characters in the JUPP's Melee party. Refreshing the duration every 3 combat rounds is a certain nuisance, but can be lived with. In fact, one should make a habit of refreshing the various combat songs before selecting a next spell to cast or next enemy to beat on.

One nice aspect of bard's spell casting is the fact that it uses the CHA stat bonus for bonus spells, same as for Sorcerers. Combined with the fact that Sorcerers get only low-level spell castings beyond level 20 and a rather limited selection of extra spells, one can get more bang for the buck by taking levels as a bard. This way, the bonus spells from high CHA will be counted twice! However, due to the level cap of 30, it's not possible to get both 20 levels as a sorc and 11 levels as a bard, so one sorc level (and thus two castings at 9th level) needs to be sacrificed. Note also that the damage and duration of many spells is tied to the caster's level, so this kind of split build is NOT recommended if the goal is to get as much damage out of the spells as possible.

For those that like to play strictly by the rules (and thus disliking the abuse of the Lingering song feat) there's a rather unknown treat to take advantage of: A multiclassed bard/druid can sing even when shape shifted! By keeping in mind that shape shifting usually OVERRIDES character's own STR,
DEX and CON scores, those three stats can be minimized with little risk.

One very cool character I used in one of my test teams was a Tiefling
Rogue(2)/Druid(14)/Bard(14) with base stats of STR 7, DEX 5, CON 12, INT 20,
WIS 18 and CHA 16. Plenty of thieving skills, the crucial druid and bard levels all in one character freeing the other chars to mix'n'match as they like, plenty of spells to toss around and an actually useful use for shape shifting. DEX 5 doesn't mix too well with the various thieving skills, whereas DEX 19+ after a shape shift into some nimble animal form does. As a matter of fact, this character ended up being the three-man party's diplomat as well. Now that's some versatility and utility in fielding for you!

Fighter/Barbarian/Ranger:
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Three fighting classes, all with similar BAB development (ranger has slight edge with favored enemies), similar hit points (barb has slight edge) and an overabundance of feats to pick (especially the Fighter). IMHO these three are a bit too similar in the way they play, and as such rather redundant.

While the 'as is' combat prowess of any of these classes is unquestioned, the situation becomes much more complicated with the inclusion of spells.
Most notably, the Cleric class has several self-boost spells, not to mention the ones that affect a whole party. In a nutshell - while a fighter might get +2 damage to melee weapons via the weapon specialization feat, a decent level battle Cleric can cast DUHM and Holy Power (on top of Aid, Prayer and
Recitation plus some other buffs from party's main cleric) for +4 damage and theoretically up to +150 temporary hit points! Similarly, the fighter classes have nothing in comparison to stuff like Mirror Image, Blink and Fire shields that every mage and their cousins throw around. All this becomes available with a few points invested into INT (or CHA) and a few levels into the arcane classes.

In a nutshell, any level beyond the first (which gives the various weapon,