Grand-mastery or no?

[Maggelaggen]

How important is getting five points in a weapon? Do you guys go for GM or rather put 2-4 points in several weapons? The best weapon-classes in BG EE are not the same as in BG 2, so it feels like kind of a waste to put all points in hammers, short-swords or daggers for a melee warrior, since those weapon-classes are underwhelming for a large part of BG 2.

Right now I am considering going for 2 points in Scimitars, 3 points in Two weapon fighting and then focus on katanas, so that I can dual-wield Celestial Fury/Belm come BG 2. I aim to have 2 points in Scimitars/katanas and 3 points in two weapon fighting at level 9 if my calculations aren't off.

Would love to get some feedback and hear what combos you go for and how many points you put in the different weapons/styles!

[AlexMBrennan]

Easiest way is to pick a weapon that works in both games (e.g. two handed swords).

Failing that, I would pick a weapon based on BG2 because none of the BG1 weapons are either boring or useable by other party members (e.g. the good +2 longsword goes to Khalid so there is no point in the PC taking longswords over any other weapon type).

Right now I am considering going for 2 points in Scimitars, 3 points in Two weapon fighting and then focus on katanas, so that I can dual-wield Celestial Fury/Belm come BG 2.

You don't use offhand weapons to hit enemies (belm is +2 and will stop working on enemies very soon) so you don't need to put points into scimitars unless you want to switch from katanas to scimitars in ToB.

Note that you get a +4 scimitar-proficiency weapon on the first floor of Watcher's Keep so I would probably skip katanas entirely if you want to go that route.

[The Final Doorman]

Grandmastery is very powerful. Not only do you get solid thac0 and damage bonuses, you get an extra 1/2 attack over specialization, which adds up to a lot of extra damage

You should aim for Grandmastery in your mainhand weapon before even putting your third point into Two Weapon Fighting (the third point only gives you 2 thac0 on your offhand weapon and doesn't benefit your mainhand weapon at all).

[wendigo211]

I generally go master (3 points in the weapon I'm using), then mastery in two-weapon fighting and finally grandmastery.

The reason is Haste. Haste rounds your number of attacks to the next highest integer. So at level 1 with specialization and 2 points in two-weapon fighting, you have 2.5 APR. At fifth level, your mages get Haste and casting that brings you to 3 APR. At 7th level you gain an extra 1/2 APR giving you 3 APR, 4 with Haste. If you get Grandmastery at level 9, you'll have 3.5 APR. That's is still 4 APR with Haste, so you'll won't see much benefit from that extra .5 APR until your Mages get Improved Haste (level 12) or you get the extra 0.5 APR at level 13. Of course Mages do hit level 12 when a Fighter hits level 11, but the Fighter gets that next proficiency point at level 12.

Anyway, apart from the extra 0.5 APR from Grandmastery, the only other significant bonus you get from High mastery and Grandmastery is a +1 to damage per proficiency point.

Having typed that, the difference between Grandmastery (5 points) and proficiency (1 point), without counting the extra attack you get, is the same as the difference between a 18:00 strength and a 16 strength (+5 to damage, +3 to hit). Specialization is a +2 to damage and +1 to hit, so the bonus from Grandmastery is a significant bonus on top of that as well.