(Very) New Player, a Few Questions for the Pros

I haven't had a fighter who can only hit the Balor on a 20 since Co8 fixed crafting (and raised level cap). But I suppose that's a decent example.

Still, for every major boss fight with a single big bad, the game offers three against a strong group. Be it the 5 temples (2 fights in the Fire temple, actually), Imeryds Run, Senshok fight, bugbear rooms on levels 2 and 4, etc etc. Heck, even the final Zuggy confrontation would greatly benefit from a fighter with GC, since someone has to remove the 100s of shrooms she keeps summoning, and my mages keep running out of AoEs for that fight...

(and that's without mentioning all the new fights from NC)

 

lol true, GC would be useful against the dozens of mushrooms.

It's probably true that TOEE has more fights like the dozens of shrooms/mooks than the one or two really tough big bads/Balor, so in the context of this game, GC does shine a fair bit (and WW can too). If buffed enough and loaded with crafted goodies, the GC/WW guy can stand in the middle of a swarm of mooks and not get scratched while becoming a living explosion of death. It can be fun, and make some fights less of a hassle (the goblin room in the earth temple lvl comes to mind) without using up say, a fireball.

But in a real tough fight, yeah, I'll still go with the notion other feats are much more useful, and by extension, in a tougher campaign as well. Maybe TOEE with say 28 point buy and no crafting, lvl cap at 10, no NC? Although eventually even with those limitations the game's fairly easy once someone learns how to utilize spellcasters efficiently. The enemy AI simply isn't very smart, is the main problem... I'd love it if Co8 could figure out a way to make at least enemy casters more consistently dangerous... maybe get Spell Resistance (the cleric spell) cast on the main casters for tough battles before the fight starts.

 

I believe that has already been done... Maybe it's been too long since you played vanilla to remember. Casters now behave smarter, cast buffs before the fight, and some of them got SR items as well.