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armor and shield feats as a freebie) for any non-warrior class is a level that was sacrificed from spell casting abilities. However, once the required levels of spell caster levels for buffing are reached, opting for warrior levels doesn't really hurt that much either, especially if the point is to go bashing enemies with some melee weapon. Spell casting just doesn't go too well while swinging a weapon, you know. =)

Cleric/Mage (Wizard/Sorcerer):
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Three classes, of which two are basically the same thing. Ever since the beginning of the RPG history, a party without one strong divine caster plus one strong arcane caster has been a party that is severely limited in its abilities to tackle the various problems that arise during the journey. IWD2 is no exception to this rule. Leave either one of these home and prepare for considerably tougher adventure.

By this very reason, these three classes also make for the most powerful choices for sinking new character levels in. In fact, the JUPP Melee party has only 29% of its total levels in other classes, and only 10% if druid/bard levels are considered to be a part of this category. Even more strikingly, the Arcane party has only 3% of its total levels devoted to other classes!

Biggest woe with these three classes is that one needs a LOT of levels in them before they start to pay off. Therefore, if a character wishes to become a formidable spell slinger, there's not much room for sidestepping. Pick a class and stick to it, unless you have a VERY good reason for doing otherwise.

Druid:
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The final remaining class is one that tries to be a Cleric and a Mage at the same time. Too bad it fails rather miserably at it. No Raise Dead or
Resurrection means that one needs to bring in a Cleric anyway, and missing
Mirror Image, Mass Haste, Delayed Blast Fireball and Wail of the Banshee makes everyone wish they had picked a real mage class instead. A pity, really, as Druids have so many possibilities and they have a truly original set of spells to choose from.

There's one redeeming thing to Druids, however. It's called the Barkskin spell, which neither the Cleric nor the mage classes have. In search for the ultimate Armor Class levels, this spell alone provides +5 generic AC at caster level 12. It's a bonus that is very hard to come by via any other means and would most likely necessitate the use of rather extreme methods for keeping the high-AC characters protected from harm.

Take a look at the descriptions of other characters in the JUPP for similar ideas as to how one can make the base classes better.

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2.3 - Various party roles
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In order to be successful in life, an adventuring party is well advised to have specialized characters that handle one role well instead of having everyone being relatively bad at everything. Here's a list of roles that a party is well advised to have in their ranks. Note that some roles can be combined, while some are mutually exclusive.

TANK : This character protects other members of the party, working as a meat shield to allow other, more fragile characters to have the time they need in order to pull their trick. A tank has respectable melee capability as well. Fighters, Barbarians and Rangers make good tanks, but
Clerics, Monks and even Rogues are workable. Quite surprisingly, any arcane caster with lots of Mirror Images works as a tank as well, but only for a very limited time. High AC or magical protections are very useful for a tank.

BERSERKER : An optional role that concentrates more on the offense, especially in melee. A very high damage with hand-held weapons guarantees a steady damage output even after the spell casters have depleted their spell reserves. Most tanks are also good berserkers, but the tradeoff between high damage and high AC might sometimes have to be done.

DECOY : In contrast to a tank, a decoy is a meat shield without much of melee capability, which means that it is a much more specialized build.
However, instead of relying on melee, this character relies on other team members to deliver the actual damage. A decoy usually has strong offensive spells or other, more indirect methods of making the life of the enemies miserable. Opting to leave melee combat out of the equation makes it considerably easier to reach necessary levels of AC and other types of protection.

ASSASSIN : Even more optional role than the berserker, this is the fantasy realm's equivalent of a stealth bomber. Taking out key members of the enemy by surprise is the trademark of an assassin. High-level rogues with their sneak attack ability make excellent assassins, but Monks with their stunning attacks might be even better. Any character under Invisibility effect works as well.

HEALER : No matter what you do, you WILL get hit by the monsters in IWD2.
Therefore, unless you intend to carry around hundreds and hundreds of healing potions and make regular visits to the town to raise party members that have met an untimely death, a healer is a must. Clerics make by far the best healers, but Bards, Druids, and even high-level Paladins have some utility here. However, only Cleric can bring back the dead.

DIPLOMAT : Anyone with high Charisma and corresponding skill levels can work just fine as a Diplomat. However, as they need both high CHA and INT, those kind of characters tend to be physically weaker. A party can surely play through IWD2 without one, but would miss out on a lot of quest EXP.
Sorcerers and bards with their naturally high CHA make excellent diplomats, if they can spare the stat points to INT. Plus, they don't refuse quest rewards as Paladins and Monks do.

UTILITY INFIELDER : Anyone with the required INT to have lots of skill points to spare on miscellaneous skills not covered by other team members.
Rogues, Bards and Wizards make good utility infielders since they have quite a few skills as class skills.

BUFFER : Any character with lots of spells to buff up the party. Usually any spell caster can work as a buffer when needed, but sometimes a certain spell level just has too many good spells to choose from, and having two (or even three) casters with slots at this particular spell level eases up on the shortage.

DEBUFFER : Just as a buffer, but instead of casting party-enhancing buffs, the role is to make the life of enemies miserable. One important difference between these two roles is that while buffing doesn't require saving throws, many debuffing spells have saving throws. Thus the debuffer needs to have much higher spell DC modifier from their casting stat to be effective.

THIEF : Not just the ordinary pick-pocket stereotype, this role covers all the miscellaneous skills that make adventuring less dangerous or easier, such as picking locks and disarming traps. Rogues are the obvious choice number one, but Bards and Rogue/Wizard multiclasses aren't bad either.

BOMBARDIER : The heavy artillery. While tanks and decoys keep the enemies concentrated on other things, bombardiers toss around mass destruction spells. Arcane spell casters make by far the best bombardiers with their offensive spells, but high-level Clerics (especially of Lathander type) are nothing to sneeze at. Just make sure that you don't kill your own.

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2.4 - Armor Class: Useless or not?
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Armor Class, amongst other things in IWD2 is a take it or leave it decision. Either you boost AC to insane levels or just neglect it pretty much completely, increasing AC only when you don't have to sacrifice anything for it, such as wearing the newly found armor if it is better than the one that you're wearing currently.

Normal mode can be fairly safely played through without thinking about AC that much - just wear whatever happens to be the best armor available at the moment and use various buff spells such as Defensive Harmony in tight spots.
Getting the combined effect from just a couple of the more mundane buff spells is more than enough to make it almost impossible for the enemy to hit.

However, as the party is transferred to HOF, the term "high AC" has to be completely redefined. Whereas something like 30 would be a rather impressive
AC in normal mode play, in HOF you might as well have AC of zero as even those lousy Targos goblins have a BAB of +26, meaning that they only need to roll a natural four (on a d20, which gives numbers between 1-20) to hit AC
30. In other words, they'd hit 85% of the time, and they do hit HARD.

In order to be protected from damage, one could of course devise alternate plans such as using spells like Mirror Image, Blur and Blink to avoid being hit completely, but this is both cumbersome and very unreliable, as there is just too many monsters coming at you. Various damage resistance spells such as Stoneskin do help a bit, but later on monsters do such high damage per hit that even those take only mere fractions of the damage away - and they also would need to be recast all the time.

It has been noted that apart from a mere few more or less unique monsters such as the Guardian and Chimeras, monster BABs in HOF mode seem to be capped at +52. In other words, we'll need at least AC of 72 (!!!) in order to get hit only when monsters roll natural 20's, which would hit even if we had an
AC of 2,000. This seems to be hopelessly far away from those 30's you see normally.

To reach AC 72, one has to rely a bit on the game mechanics and a few select key spells and items that are within IWD2. Most notably, as the only
AC bonus that is stackable is 'generic', one needs to search for spells and items that give generic AC bonuses. For your convenience, here's a list of such spells and items. Almost all of them are used in JUPP's two parties.

- Brazen Bands (normal)/Indomitable Bands (HOF) give +5
- Fire Dance Talisman (normal)/Sunfire Talisman (HOF) give +1/+3
- Swing From the Masts (normal)/Crow's Nest (HOF) give +1/+3
- Deep Gnome racial ability gives +4
- Dodge feat gives +1
- Expertise feat gives +5 max when activated
- Every 5th Monk level gives +1 (not used in these parties)
- Barkskin druid spell gives +3 to +5, max bonus at druid level 12
- Haste spell (or Mass Haste) gives +4
- Tenser's Transformation spell gives +4 (on top of higher DEX bonuses)
- Bard song War Chant of Sith gives +2
- Cleric of Helm's "Helm's Shield" special ability gives +2 (not used here)
- Some weapons give +1 (none of those used here)

Note that while Monks add their WIS score into their AC, this ability only works when they don't wear ANY kind of armor or shield. This includes robes as well, not to be confused with cloaks that don't use the body armor slot.
Those are OK to wear. However, no one denies a Monk from having someone cast a magical armor on him - best of such armors being the Spirit armor which gives +6 armor bonus on top of all the other bonuses for a monk. Similarly,
Ghost armor (+5 deflection) works in tandem with armors & shields, adding up with other Monk bonuses as well.

What this means in practice is that if high AC is desired, it places severe limitations on what other things that character can and cannot do. Going the high-DEX route and using body armors and shields relieves the pressure on WIS, but the maximum attainable AC takes a hit plus might create problems with poor Will saving throws, and arcane casters need also take the Armored
Arcana feats or suffer spell casting penalties. Going with high WIS & DEX and utilizing the monk's innate AC bonuses makes the character more dependant on various buff spells and creates a problem with multiclassing EXP penalties because Monk is not a favored class for any of the playable races. It also makes the stat point shortage dire with two maxed stats.

For an example as to how to make these kinds of characters workable characters, take a look at the tanks and decoys on these parties.

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2.5 - Spell Resistance: Useless or not?
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Two races in IWD2 have spell resistance - Drows and Deep Gnomes. This ability is one of the very best ones in the game - we can cast spells to hurt others but they can't cast spells on us, more or less.

However, even if we have spell resistance, it's not at all certain that it is high enough to repel the spells thrown at us. The way it works, a d20 is rolled and enemy caster level added to the roll. If the figure is lower than your spell resistance, the spell is resisted, otherwise not. Noting that both
DG and Drow start at SR 12, a first-level caster would have to roll at least twelve on a d20, giving us 55% chance to resist. Quite conveniently, enemy spell caster levels will be mostly similar to ours, meaning that during the course of the game, about 50% of the spells thrown at us will be resisted completely. Finally, when party's Cleric reaches a high enough level to cast the spell "Holy Aura", it gives a flat +25 increase on to everyone's SR - raising the effective SR to well beyond what could be needed to resist almost any spell.

There's one catch to SR, though. It won't work against some area effect spells. (I still don't know why.) Most notably, Horrid Wilting is not resistible, nor is Meteor Shower or Cone of Cold. However, all the fire-based spells I've tried seemed to be resistible. This is especially important to know if we're ever going to consider the possibility of blasting our own group as a last ditch attempt to kill monsters that have surrounded us - use a fireball or some such. Even more so when considering the use of a dedicated decoy that will be bombarded by everyone else.

So, even if we could technically get "better" characters by choosing some other race besides these two, the benefits of having spell resistance on
ALL characters are by far larger than having spell resistance on only some of them. Of course we could use the Clerical spell Spell Resistance, but since the 5th level already contains Champion's Strength, Flame Strike AND