Level Up Pointless

Among my other included mods, I have the level up mod that allows characters to advance to 20th level. Currently playing through and I cannot justify why it is of any benefit. My conclusions are as follows:

(1) you can get extra feats, but for a wizard, you can get craft ring, but no rings show up to craft.
(2) hit points do go up, but by the time you get to level 10 extra hp would be nice but not necessary.
(3) experience needed to level up gets harder. Where does the experience come from and of what use is it? You would have to find every wandering encounter for hours to get the experience needed to face Hedrack as an above level 10 party. This of course assumes you are not spending any experience on item creation. I tried, in vain, to get as much experience before facing Hedrack, but to no avail. To me, the only way to get the experience to level 20 is to travel back and forth from the world map and engaging every monster possible. This, to me, is not fun.

I would much prefer a mod that makes the random encounters much more fun, rather than a bore. How about a Dragon, demons, strong parties; something to challenge a party rather than the endless drivvle of monsters you already see over and over. If I had the skills to mod I would love to do it.

 

Well, I don't disagree with you that getting to go above level ten doesn't help all that much and is hardly necessary, it does do a few things (like let wizards use more meta-magicked spells). The forge ring option was inserted to make it easy for people with the skills to write code for the items, so that they could be created. There is certainly no point in going up to level 20, and no real way to do it (unless you just use the command line to alter your experience), but it was relatively easy to do, and the point was really to let you go up to levels 12 or 13, not 20 per se. A mod with a dragon or something would, I certainly agree, be incredible, but all these mods make use of graphics that are already present in the game (adding scorching ray required borrowing the graphic from searing light, for example). While a mod could (and some have, I believe) create more powerful enemies, they have to be in the form of something already there. Usually, this just takes the form of NPCs that are humanoid but high-level. It's a challenge for a higher-level party, but not terribly interesting in terms of a "new" experience. Good luck creating a dragon graphic for use in this game, though. I don't think there are many people out there who could do that on a home PC, and they're probably all working for Blizzard.

 

Personally I loved the mod that raised the level cap to 20! I really like playing smaller parties or even soloing, so it is possible (and very helpful) to exceed 10th level during the course of normal combat. For example, when I played the game solo, I made it to level 16 clearing out the elemental nodes. The increases in hps, tohit, saving throw, and level-dependent spell damage (I like to solo with a druid) were really helpful!

The increased level cap is also really helpful for multiclassing -- you can add a couple levels of fighter or rouge to your spellcasters without losing out on 5th level spells.

On the other hand, since I favor smaller parties (and enjoy the witty, though sadly infrequent, banter of nps), I personally have no use for the mod that allows 8pcs, though I take my hat off to the creator just for the sheer programming accomplishment!