I'm thinking of starting a HoF game from lvl 1 characters. Anyone got any advice? BTW, I have played before, and know that doing this is A) stupid and B) probably involve me putting a whole through something.

I don't know how you're going to do it (I expect a whole lot of running back to that dwarf in the prologue), but I wish you the best of luck, and please update us on your progress!

May I suggest one of those JUPP deep gnome monk decoys?

1] Many, many, many summons
2] Many Sorcerers and a couple of Clerics
3] Not many fighters (summons take the frontline)
4] Powergame your stats

That's pretty much my suggestion. Summons will be your bread-and-butter for quite a while, as they scale up in HoF. Once you get some Fireballs, you can mass-Fireball an area while your summons take the heat. Quite honestly, it's pathetic. I've tried it myself, but I grew bored of merely doing the same thing over and over every battle.

<font color = lightgreen>Starting HoF from level 1 characters got much easier with that ease-of-use mod that converts armor into damage reduction. Right now, my tank (half-orc barbarian, of course) has 10/- damage reduction so the goblins nick him for only 1 to 4 points at a time. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img] </font>

<font color = lightgreen>Update on my HoF from level 1 characters: they're dealing with the orcs on their way to the Shaengarne bridge. Average character level is about 12 or 13; only one character is not multiclassing (the barbarian). I'm starting to wish I had more scroll access for my mage, but otherwise everything is progressing smoothly. I have been making everyone take all the "bonus to save" feats (great fortitude, etc) first.

They're crawling, but making steady progress. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img] </font>

Atta boy, do you think you could have done it w/o the mod? I'd have started already, but for some reason text/typing is buggered to hell on my laptop.

<font color = lightgreen>Absolutely not. Starting at level 1, the goblins attacking the docks do far too much damage to have any hope of surviving long enough to get to a point where you can effectively fight back. Yes, you can get the goblins to go near the dwarf (I forget his name at the moment) or Reig and his fellow soldier and they will fight the goblins for you, but you don't get any xp for this. The quests that don't involve fighting don't give enough because HoF doesn't multiply the quest xp in IWD2.

HoF from scratch is so close to impossible that I wouldn't want to spend the time to try and accomplish it without the "armor gives damage resistance" mod. </font>

It's been done without the mod. The trick is summons. They get powered up by HOF too. I think somewhere in town there is a HOF book that summon an elemental. You should get that.

I've done it without the mod. As Luvian said, go with summons, ignore using tanks (your summons are your tanks), use Sorcerers so you don't have to rely on finding random scrolls, and be prepared for a long slog of summoning -> mass Fireball/Ice Storm/whatever to kill off the opposition. You don't really need the elemental book either... Just pick Summon Monster I on the majority of your spell choices, and have around five summoners in the same area. [img]tongue.gif[/img] After that, it's Animate Dead spam.

So I guess you need a lot of Sorcerers, Druids and Clerics!

What Cleric order is best for summons?