[andrewas]

im repeating myself here, but go with a party, its a lot easier and a lot more fun. soloings come in when you want to challenge yourself and have explored all party options.

sorcerors must be one of the hardest classes to start soloing with although they get a lot easier later on. this is true of all magic users.

proficiencies? staff, two handed weapons and slings.

staff for hjtting things with - you cang get some ace staff later on, but you'll have to fight some top-class opposition for the best on of them all - the staff of the magi. the adventurers mart has a fairly good combat staff though.

two handed weapons - if sorcerors can get this one, which i think they can, you'll find that staff are two handed weapons. so naturaly youll want to be as good as possible with them.

slings. melee with a mage sucks. you have crap attacks, horrendous armour, massive thaco (thats a bad thing, if you were wondering). shooting things at range will be essential. there is a lack of ammo to be found for slings throughout the entire game, so make sure to take plenty with you.

stats? everyone need DEX, it improves your armour and it increases your missile damage.

CON is also helpful. some people will say that it dosent matter since youll have so much magic protection up that you cant even be hit, much less killed. these people are wrong, IMHO.

STR is less useful for a mage - your not going to be hitting that much anyway.

INT is essential for a mage, useless to a sorceror. except on a few occasion when it can improve your conversation option, but you can survive with INT 3. just carry potions of genius when you go illithid-hunting.

WIS is useless for a mage/sorceror, except when dealing with the limited wish and wish spells. carry a few potions of insight when you need these.

CHA is useless to everyone. you can get a ring of human influence before you even go near a shop (you may want to go to an inn first though). the ring sets CHA to 18 as long as you wear it. paladins however need to have 17 natural charisma. poor paladins.

abilities depend on class and alignment. throughout the first game you gained special abilites depending on your actions - unless you import a character these are approximated to what someone role-playing that alignment would have gotten.

going for Lawful Evil nets you several decent offensive spells, Lawful Good nets you some crappy healing spells. Chaotic Evil would net you pure offensive, but monks have to be lawful, so i cant yet tell you till i play a Chaotic Evil mage. other alignments fall in between, so True Neutral should have an even mix.

you will also get class abilites - sorcerors dont get any. theives get
set traps, minsc gets a rather nice berserk ability, and so on.

and i know most of these will be posted by the time this shows up, because i get distraced half-way through.