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2. The Party's Development
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As we started building the "Ultimate Powergaming Party", we went through many changes.  Many times we said, "That's it!  We aren't going to do any better than that!".   After about 10 revisions and countless hours of play testing, we said that statement few times too many :)

The party is ideal for good or neutral alignment players and is meant to be taken into HoF mode - the ultimate challenge that the game has to offer.  It is a six person party that is heavily based on spell casting over melee, which we found produced the best results.

Others have mentioned soloing as evil Sorcerers or Clerics of Bane were more powerful than what you will see here, but we wanted to focus on building a 'party' rather than a single character because that's too boring for our tastes.  You could take any one of these characters and adapt them to solo play if you really wanted to.

The idea was to create a powerful 'party' that was meant for skilled players who especially wanted to have fun, have a good variety and be able to win every fight without reloading ever :P

The 4 items that we are going to talk about in this section are:

* Ensuring a nice balance of party abilities
* An analysis of the Human race and why they rock
* A list of various tradeoffs that were made to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
* Another analysis comparing Human and Aasimar Sorcerers and the reasons why both races were chosen (as opposed to one or the other).

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2.1 - Striking Perfection & Balance
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As we built the party, we paid careful attention to how each character was designed, to ensure they worked synergistically with the others that we had in mind.  By doing this, we believed that we created a party with a perfect balance of melee (which is just a splash), divine and arcane spells as well as the necessary rogue skills to complete the game.

We also made sure that each character was very powerful in the party and uses multiclassing and races to good effect.  Thus, you'll notice that we choose many Humans over other races and did not make heavy use of ECL races either.

Another thing you'll notice is that you'll have a more fighter-centric party at the beginning of the game but have a more magic-based party as the game goes on.  This serves both environments rather well, so you don't have build your guys up 20 levels just to get the effect you want (like those BG2 days).  A large part of the thanks goes to the 3e rule set.

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2.2 - Enter The Humans
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As good players should already know, many of the ECL races don't exactly add up to the efficiency of an ordinary Human.  This is quite different than any of the previous Infinity Engine games (such as Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 and
Icewind Dale) since Humans were regarded as 'underpowered' and not practical for powergaming goodness when min-maxing various attributes.  In these previous installments, Humans were typically good for playing Paladins and
Monks as these classes really had no choice but to be Human.  Obviously, this has now been changed in Icewind Dale II using the 3rd edition rule set.

Now, Humans are actually one of the more efficient races to use in the game.
With no inherit disadvantages such as leveling or attribute penalties, they are best used for classes that don't require 20 Strength, Dexterity or
Constitution, as these are the attributes that Half-Orcs, Elves and Dwarves specialize in, respectively.  Thus, Humans are well suited for a variety of classes such as Rogues, Monks, Clerics, Druids, Bards, Sorcerers, etc.

Looking beyond pure classes, Humans are excellent when trying some very daring multiclass combinations that would otherwise yield experience penalties.  In a game like Icewind Dale II where the power of your character is proportional to your current level, you can't afford to simply give up experience.  For instance, in the UPP (Ultimate Powergaming Party), we had an interesting build for a Paladin/Fighter/Sorcerer that does not receive any XP penalty throughout the game.  I suppose a Wild Elf would achieve the same thing, but it misses out on a lot as well.  Let's look into the bonuses of the Human race:

* Humans receive 1 extra feat at level 1
* Humans receive 2 extra skill points at level 1
* Humans receive 1 extra skill point every level after Level 1

Any and all of these extra racial traits remain solid from the beginning to the very end of the game.  As you are probably aware, you still get these benefits even if your Intelligence is at a minimum of 3.  That means that you can receive 6 skill points (1*4+2=6) at level 1 and 2 skill points each additional level with 3 intelligence, leaving you with 7 ability points to allocate to more important stats.  This works out for characters that do not need intelligence - namely everything except Wizards, Bards and Rogues.
If I recall, even Deep Gnomes only receive 6 extra ability points and they have an ECL of 3.  Humans still lack the ability to have 20 in any ability score, but this is still a fairly significant advantage.

When looking at all these benefits, many of the ECL races and even standard races simply don't match up in most cases.  There are a few notable exceptions, like an Aasimar Paladin/Fighter, but the UPP only uses one
Aasimar character.  That is not to say they are not effective, but after careful analysis and consideration, they often don't make the cut.

I'm sure all this information is pretty straightforward and well-known to most players, but I thought I would mention it nonetheless.  From my experiences from being a leader, I learned that it is never wise to assume that your audience knows everything, even if it really is obvious (which I'm not stating that these facts are; I'm just making a point).  Thus, expect a lot of explanations in this FAQ to ensure this document is understood by everyone.

What was the point about this small section?  I simply wanted to let you know the reason why there are a few humans in the party as well as the alternate character considerations.  This ensures that a lot of people don't put the effort into emailing us saying that Duergar and Drow make the best 'whatever' and so on.  I can think of only a few times in the game where those extra levels in spell casting would go unnoticed.  Seeing as 5 of the 6 characters in the UPP possess some type of spell casting ability, you should probably see how these ECL races could become a major problem as well.  Anyway, I'm glad we are on the same page :)

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2.3 - Tradeoffs & Stuff
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Whenever deciding the abilities of a character or even the attributes of the entire party, it's important to make various tradeoffs.  In order do that effectively, you need to "know what you want".  In our case, we wanted the ultimate party, meaning every decision should contribute somehow to that final goal.

Conversation Skills:
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When we were first constructing the party, we decided that negotiation skills were unimportant (and they really are for the most part).  We constructed several parties that allowed us to build characters that weren't very good at striking effective conversations and this allowed us to push the limits.
However, after deciding to include two sorcerers in the final version of the
UPP, it made a lot of sense for one of them to maximize conversation skills as it didn't produce any negative consequences.  So in the end, it finally went in there although it very well could have been left out just as easily.
This is the ultimate party after all and we managed to get it in =)

If you want to build a party with fewer Sorcerers, don't be afraid to neglect
Diplomacy, Bluff or Intimidate skills.  Who cares what BIS recommends in those messages as you are loading a new area - you will never "die from not being able to communicate" or lose any special items.  If anything really bad happens, it was probably be your own damn fault =)

Another interesting advantage to ignoring your conversation skills is that some are class and race specific (which makes it hard to control or predict) and many of the dialogs are forced.  Even with the ultimate negotiator, you'll never get to use them 50-75% of the time in these situations anyway.
I also noticed that there is nothing to gain from these forced conversations to begin with.  It's purely a role-playing thing - and who cares about that in a hack'n'slash game =) [okay, that might have pissed a few people off :)]

Intelligence & Skills:
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Another tradeoff to get added power was to lower the Intelligence scores of many characters.  This didn't exactly produce many negative results and you could even build a strong case that moving Intelligence up or down doesn't 'balance' anything.  The only negative consequence to this is that you will only get 1 skill point/level for any non-human character and 2 skill points/level for human characters.  Thus, we had to keep several of the character's skill selections to the bare essentials.  In reality, these are all the skill points that a character would ever need anyway unless you were diluting the character with useless conversation skills (see above) or chaff like Animal Empathy.

Thievery:
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One thing that was essential in most IE games was to have an adequate thief to disarm traps, open locks and pick someone's pocket on occasion.  Anything more would be considered a specialized thief character (like single-classed swashbuckler or backstabbing thief).  In Baldur's Gate 2, it was possible to get by with a character named Imoen (she was a Level 6 Thief I believe) without any major difficulties, although she did require many thief enhancing equipment.  In Icewind Dale 1, you could easily get by using a
Fighter/Thief or Cleric/Thief as many people did, so you never had to take a single-classed thief.

In Icewind Dale 2, the thief has become even less important; you can now actually play the game with no 'Rogue' class at all because of the way 3E skills work.  If you played the game already, you'll notice there are very few opportunities to pick pocket and the number of traps is really low in comparison to Baldur's Gate 2.  This allows you to make sacrifices considerably when it comes to constructing a party.  Thus, is was a conscious decision to avoid a full or half thief and accept the fact that sneak attacks weren't going to be one of the features in the UPP.  In other words, we focused on two things when it came to thievery:  Open Locks and
Disarm Traps.

We constructed a Drow with 1 Rogue level that also had 20 Intelligence.
This allowed us to max out all the appropriate thief skills and 'then some' easily.  Now which class works with 18 Intelligence? - A Wizard :)
Essentially, we created our Rogue class while enjoying an almost pure class
Wizard in the process.  As you will soon find out, this character could max out his arcane skills, pick up some misc. skills and continue to raise Open
Locks and Disarm Traps throughout the game, only being a few points behind a single-classed Rogue.

Alchemy & Knowledge (Arcana):
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Since many of our characters had low intelligence, we either had to neglect these skills entirely or give them to a high Intelligence character (the
Rogue/Wizard).  Incidentally, both these skills fit the role of this character perfectly.  We originally made no promises to put them in, but somehow the game's rules made it quite easy for us.  That is, during the transition of becoming a Wizard from a Rogue, there were times were you could not increase certain stats because they were maxed out and you didn't have enough cross-class skill points.  We took these opportunities to increase Alchemy a bit (since you need it to complete a quest in the
Underdark anyway).  As the character gained more Intelligence through leveling, it didn't take too long to max out Knowledge (Arcana) either.  I guess it turned out that no tradeoffs really had to be made, however you won't get the full benefits of Alchemy this way (and who really cares).

So as you can see, these tradeoffs or at least conscious decisions allowed us to engineer a very effective and cohesive group that plays well to being an ultimate powergaming party that it is.

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2.4 - A Note About Sorcerers
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The only race choices that make the cut in the UPP are Humans and Aasimars, but it's difficult to tell for sure which of the two races is more powerful.  At one point in the game (sometime through HoF mode) the Human
Sorcerer's advantages (the extra skill points and the bonus feat) will not be as noticeable, although there is still something to be said for having these things from the beginning.

It really comes down to a few things.  First, the Aasimar can put up to 20 points into Charisma to start off, thus he'll get 2 extra spells when compared to the Human Sorcerer.  These spells will be in levels 3 and 6 at the beginning of the game and this will only get better as the Charisma increases when the Aasimar levels up.  The thing to remember, however, is that both characters will gain Charisma throughout the game, so the Aasimar will, at most, have 2 extra spells at all times due to their Charisma advantage.

Although the Human Sorcerer doesn't have this extended Charisma bonus, he makes up for it by leveling faster.  Thus, when the Human Sorcerer reaches an odd level, he will have 1 more spell than the Aasimar version, and this spell is always a higher level one than either of the extra spells the Aasimar receives.  So the tradeoff is this:

1 More powerful spell vs. 2 Lesser spells