about dualing class....

[TruMan]

Hi, yeah im new here. I've been reading some msgs and i heard u guys saying something about'kits'. Could someone exactly tell me what is it and how it will affect my character(s). I am using a thief as my main character and he is lvl7 and planned to dual to a mage, can anyone of u give me some advice on when should i dual, lvlwise, before or after completion of BG1/ToTSC. I don't know if any of u remember Branwen(CLeric/Human) in BG1, but i have her in my party and i wanna dual class her too, could i also have some advise on when i should dual class her, shes lvl6 at the moment.

Also, how do i customize my portrait for my main charater, or should i ask, where do i get the portraits from?

[Micah Foehammer]

How and when to dual a character will get a LOT of varied opinions on this board. Usually, when playing in BG1 with TotSC installed, people tend to dual class thieves fairly early in order to maximize the xp avaiable to their mage, and are very selective about where they put the points for their thief skills as well. Since you can import that character to BG2, I also know people who have played their main character as a thief all the way thru BG1, imported it to BG2 and converted it to a swashbuckler kit, and then dualled it to another class (either mage or cleric) at 13th level.

Kits are special subclasses of the main classes (fighter, thief, cleric etc.) but they are not available in BG1 .. only BG2. They all have some form of special abilities, but also have some restrictions. All of them are fairly intersting - some more so than others. In addition to the "kits", BG2 also offers new classes such as the Barbarian and Monk, among others.

[Lemernis]

Heya, and welcome to IW!

Re: kits, see the links I provided in response to your post in the "suggestions for an evil party" thread.

It is easy to change the portrait. In BG1 they did not provide a Portaits folder, so you have to make it yourself (create it inside in the BG folder). Then simply put your custom bitmap large and small portraits in there and they will show up in the "custom" section for 'appearance' when either creating the character of customizing the appearance once in the game (you can do that from the character record screen).

As for where to get good custom portraits, there is a section for them here on the Ironworks main page. You could also try Mithril Hall, as I think there should be a link to an excellent and extensive selection there:

http://www.xsorbit.com/users2/Whisper/index.cgi

If you're really hungry for them, you could check out some of the portrait packages from Fileplanet, although you can't see what the portraits look like until you dl and unzip them. But you can find some pretty good ones there too.

http://www.fileplanet.com

and just run a search for: baldur's gate, portraits

And then you could also search google.