Overall, it's much more of a challenge but eased somewhat as you can start building fists and assassins right off the bat (Earthquake Aura and and Rune of Blood are insanely overpowered in the early areas of the game as soon as you learn them, and are classed as non-elemental magic damage making the early parts of act 2 much easier).

Oh - and if you remember your reagent recipes, you can use those as well. You don't need to have a reagent recipe in your journal to be able to use it (take the reagents and base item to any enchanter and the game engine will create the desired item for you whether the character officially knows the recipe or not), so you can create some pretty decent gear, and stock up on all the lower level reagents you need for recipes you want to use later.

True, the terrain/site locations are the same but the adversary placement and type differ making BW more challenging after the tutorial sequence which is generic for the demo, DS2 core and BW.

I had to rethink my strategies in dealing with the changed encounter makeup. Treasure(gold and items) seem to be less forthcoming in BW which adds to the challenge. Nothing prevents you from saving, exiting and reloading several times to level-up the characters by going through the easier sections a couple times.

For my part, I plan on playing DS2 core to get an idea of the terrain/quests/etc and then follow up with a BW party. Its my opinion that you should have a try at playing both DS2 core and BW versions of the Mercenary level. Heck, I'm confident that Veteran and Elite levels will be worth replaying in BW. I expect to be playing the games for a long time, $40 well spent on the deluxe edition.

[This message has been edited by shaun1 (edited 01-08-2007 @ 11:06 PM).]

Quoted from QuickDraw:

I had played the vanilla DS2 a year or so ago, but I don't recall them being this powerful. Was this an intentional change in BW?

Sofar no fixes for the issue...
(Note there are several other new issues (and oddities) with BW too; but compared to DS2 the bugs are lessened severly)

The only beef I have with BW version 2.3 is it's computer resource hungry attitude. My system barely runs it, lags & sputters every now and then, version 2.2 runs without any problems.
This is what I have learned about the differences in maps/games.

Microsoft Games DS2 Version 2.2
'Dungeon Siege 2/DungeonSiege2.exe'
World.ds2map 'vanilla map' 217MB

2K Games DS2 version 2.3
Dungeon Siege 2 Broken World/DungeonSiege2.exe'
xDS2World.ds2map 'BW altered version of original map' 4MB
xDS2World.ds2map 'new BW map' 69MB

Nothing in the 2K Games install changes the Microsoft Games files. I suspect that some data is being being pulled by 2K Games from the MS Games resources, reasoning being its classed as an expansion. Note that there are two ds2maps under the BW install. I am under the impression that the smaller file is calling the MS Games World.ds2map and 'tuning' the encounter makeup which is making the BW version more difficult.
I am not sure that the DS2 Tool Kit editor v1.1 is able to load the BW files, as I havn't tried.

PS: My point, with the BW version of the original map, is familiarity but with a new twist making it worthwhile to replay. In my newbish state, its worth playing both.

[This message has been edited by shaun1 (edited 01-14-2007 @ 05:45 AM).]

The alterations to the difficulty of the original DS2 map is done through Xlogic.ds2res, not the xMap... don't really sure what is included; but should not hard to find considering you indeed can open X-pack files with the 1.0/1.1 DS2-Toolkit...

Chanced upon some other formula and rules folder that is of interest to me. Dang, I love learning how things work.

PS: If anyone has played only the version 2.2 please check your beastiary book and post the stats for these two monsters. Act 2 chapter 5.
Thanks

[This message has been edited by shaun1 (edited 01-14-2007 @ 11:37 AM).]

GPG should have created new leaf templates for the undead archers, leaving the old templates alone. It would have been a thirty second task during development, but it appears that someone got lazy (or simply didn't know to check for this type of conflict).

Fixing it would be a simple thing for inclusion in a patch, but after so long I doubt there will be one for BW. It's possible that a modder might be able to fix it, GPG has provided instructions on regenerating the respawn grids for a region (which would be necessary if a monster template name was changed), but I don't know of anyone who's successfully done it...