Baldur's Gate I & II - Gather your party before venturing forth

So my copy of baldurs gate 1 & 2 enhanced edition has finally arrived. Played a few hours and I'm enjoying the game so far but I have already restarted 3 times because I cant make up my mind.

Started off with a pure human fighter but then read that single builds aren't worth it and its better to go dual or multi build.

I then tried a dual build fighter/theif Elf but then realized I would have to level up my character as a fighter first then switch to my class to thief.

Next I have tried a multi class half elf, the problem this time is that I made a second character who was a thief then discovered the first character who joins ur party is a thief so a bit redundant...

Also finding the game to be a bit difficult even on easy mode. Those bloody basalisks keep 1-shot petrifying me.

Could do with a bit of advice,should I go single, dual or multi class? I want my first play-through to be good so I'm playing a neutral good character, it also seems like jaheria and Khalid who join you can be fairly tanky fighters so not sure if being a fighter is actually worth it?

I also want to take my characters over to baldurs gate expansions and eventually baldurs gate 2

This is nonsense. If you really want to min-max and powergame your way through and/or playing with mods that increase difficulty (or Legacy of Bhaal), then dual and multiclass characters are what many prefer, but even then they're far from necessary. If you're going to be playing through normally with a party and on a lower difficulty setting or at least up to core rules, any pure class is more than good enough. Fighters are very simple and don't really do much besides hit stuff until dead, but they will remain useful in almost all situations since you always want someone to bash your enemies' heads in. Just give them some STR, CON, a good set of armor and whatever weapons you want to go for and let them go to town, they'll do alright.

If you want to know what companions you can possibly get in BG1 to help decide on a class, here is a list without any names or other context, just the classes:

5 Mages
4 Thieves
3 Fighters
2 Fighter/Thieves
2 Clerics
2 Bards
2 Rangers
1 Paladin
1 Blackguard
1 Cleric/Thief
1 Fighter/Cleric
1 Cleric/Mage
1 Fighter/Druid
1 Druid
1 Sorcerer
1 Monk

Some of them are mutually exclusive and some always come in a pair with another character, like Khalid and Jaheira.

and the trick to basilisks is to have protection from petrification either cast from a scroll or on a mage (don't bother selecting this on a sorcerer on level up, it's way too rare to be worth using one of your precious few spell selections and you can still use scrolls as a sorcerer). Cast it on your strongest fighter and send them ahead of the party to solo the basilisks. Have some antidotes handy or a divine caster nearby (some flavor of Cleric or Druid at these levels, Rangers and Paladins do get low level spells like this eventually but that's later) with access to level 2 spells for Slow Poison in case the basilisks poison your fighter.

In my opinion multiclass characters are vastly superior to everything else, except maybe some really edgy dual classes.




I limited myself to one character per race though, to make things somewhat interesting

ALTBOULI  I feel like you're overcomplicating things a bit, man lol.

Don't worry about the katana in Candlekeep. There's nothing in the game that makes it mandatory to use only whatever weapon types you put points into, and AFAIK that katana would be at risk of breaking down in combat until you do the Nashkel mines since it's nonmagical. Just use whatever cheap shit you find until then and/or you start finding magical weapons. Side note: Imoen is the only thief you'll ever need if you just want someone to focus on lockpicking, just give her a level or two and pump her points into open locks. Nobody can unlock every lock immediately. If you're dead set on katanas being the only thing to use then there's a regular one that drops from a small encounter involving a Nereid in a wilderness area on the west coast, and a +1 katana can be found inside Cloakwood Mines, an area that you will go to during the main quest. There's very few katanas in BG1, you can find some nice ones in Siege of Dragonspear and BG2.

If you're planning on going all the way through to TOB as a fighter, you'll get more points to put into your weapon styles than you'll know what to do with anyways, you can become great at more than just katanas. And I don't really see an issue if you rolled a 90 with 18 in STR, DEX and CON, that's great! Anything beyond that is just a bonus.

If you want to dual class into a mage at some point you can do so from your character sheet, as long as you're human (unless modded so that everyone can dualclass) and meet the stat requirements to switch to that class, which you do if you have 18 INT and want to switch to a mage. When you dual class, you're essentially abandoning (temporarily) your first class and starting from scratch as a level 1 character in your new class. You get to keep whatever hitpoints you've gained up to that point, but all other features of your original class are locked away until your new class reaches the same level. So if you were to level your Kensai to 7 and then dual class into mage, you'd be without the Kensai stuff until you've leveled to 7 as a mage. You can never gain more levels in your original class after dual classing, only in your new class.

If I don't want to keep her I just let her die in some encounter after rescuing her. Since she has almost no hit points when she joins the party, it doesn't take much to put her out of commission.

Ended up creating a Ranger character because I really wanted to dual wield and they get +2 to dual wielding from the get go.

Kept my party the same throughout (Khalid, Jaheria, Imoen, Branwen and Neera). I had Minsc before Branwen and might have kept but didn't want to keep the Dynaheir...

I'm surprised about how many potential companions there are in the game (encountered so many).

I'm currently on chapter 5 (just got to Baldurs gate). Honestly I've been enjoying the random encounters with people/creatures even more so than the main quest, like doing one of Neera's quest which resulted in me following a chatty goblin to a cave to meet another wild mage. Or looking for a child's lost dog, which turned out to be a direwolf and once found and re-united the child turns into a demon.

I have amassed a great deal of gold but aside from the dagger of venom +2 I haven't really seen anything that is worth buying (seem to be getting better weapon and item drops just from exploring).

Romancing Neera who is by far the most vocal of the party (was expecting more party banter if im honest). Jaheria and Khalid haven't spoken much. Funnily enough Imoen who I thought was useless at the start of the game has become my most important companion.