Is Book II Easy or Hard??

[IJBall]

That said, I wonder what the most efficient merchant build is? You've got a choice of forage, create food, repair, or alchemy to create value, plus the option of investing in the merchant skill to maximize your returns.

When I did this in Book I, I "played" the Merchant as an Agnostic Healer.

But in Book II, I think I'd be inclined to go the Virtuous Ranger route, for the free Divination up front, and go with a mixed ranged-Bow/Divination character-build for "Merchant". Ditto for a "Cartographer" build. (I'm playing the Virtuous Ranger build right now, and it's working pretty well, though of course I've been putting 15-20 Levels into Bows, and not into Mercantile! )

[Oshkell]

I think that the difficulty is just about right. Mind you, the first character I rolled up got his bum-bum kicked, and hard. But, the second one had no problems. It was a bit slow, before I got my Bow skill up to 10, but after that it was smooooth sailing. (Except for that one time in Westwillow that I ran out of arrows. D'oh!)

[smeghead]

I think that overall it is just slightly too easy. Collecting money was the biggest hurdle for me as I never seemed to have enough to buy the good stuff and had to make it myself with the imbue armour spells.

Monsters overall were weak, especially the dwarves. Even the Taurax by the end were not really that challenging for my level 19 fighter.

For book 3 I suggest keeping the rules (or adding more) but also having a difficulty slider which you can set at the beginning of a game. This would alter things such as :

1. Amount of money needed for items
2. Frequency of good items collected from dead bodies
3. Frequency of being disturbed during camping
4. Adding additional resistances/hitpoints to monsters

But in return for making the game harder, you could increase the end game score to match, this would give people more of an incentive to replay at a harder setting.

[ampoliros]

There aren't enough poll choices. The game is def too hard to go hard core. Some parts are way too easy, but then you run out of easy stuff and your next logical place to go is to kill Trolls or Giant Beetles which takes a day or more for each monster (because of resting). And I'm not concerned with final score. I use default plus fixed seeds for the better items drops.

I'd rather not have to deal with food, but since Foraging is necessary for Alchemy and Alchemy is necessary to not be forever penniless - I deal with it.

I learned most of the nuances of the game playing a Mage. Even with poor skill choices the Mage was relatively easy (Mages are usually difficult - at least to get started).
I'm playing a Ranger now and am taking advantage of the skill trainers and skill books. I think I'm making good choices this time. When I am able to put the bow to use the Ranger is quite powerful; however buying enough arrows is too expensive. I find myself purposely waiting to finish monsters off with the mace, or using thrown weapons I find to conserve arrows. Mages do not have this penalty.
A fighter will probably be quite powerful at melee it he ignores ANY ancillary skill and dumps all skill points into weapon/armor skills. But this robs him of all the lock picking experience, etc...

A little more class balancing would have been nice. Maybe just having 5 skill points and 5 ability points per level instead of 3 would fix things.