[rebel3_6_1]

I agree that Irenicus had an excellent voiceset. He was deeper than Sarevok in the sense that you learned more about his past and the reasons he is nothing more than a shell of a man, but Sarevok had a mysteriousness around him that made it wonderfully delightful to slowly learn who he was while discovering who you were in the process. I like the fact that Sarevok's ambitions had a better backdrop. He was the son of the Lord of Murder and intended to gain enough power to become the second Lord of Murder. Irenicus, on the other hand, had a weak backdrop in my opinion. He planned to drain a tree of it's energy to become a god. I just think that's kinda lame.

Irenicus did not frighten me at all, while I was deathly afraid of facing Sarevok. Before the fights with Irenicus my thought process was something along the lines of "Ok, I'm gonna go in and kill this moron and get it over with" while my thought process before the final showdown with Sarevok was more like "Oh crap! What do I do now?! I'm gonna go in there and he's gonna beat the hell out of me!" And that's basically what happened in both instances. It took me several tries to defeat Sarevok & company while Irenicus was a walk in the park. I think the main reasons for this were:
A) I wasn't afraid of Irenicus because of the meeting at Spellhold where I beat him like a rag doll.
B) Sarevok had several of his strongest allies aiding him while Irenicus was foolish enough to try to fight me by himself.

After just completing Shadows of Amn for the first time in over a year, I must admit that Irenicus himself is a good villian. If they made the fights against him MUCH tougher and gave him a better evil plan to try to carry out, he might've been a great villian.

Back to BG3, writing this has led me to the belief that fighting the main antagonist before the final showdown is a bad thing. I think that in BG3 if you are too fight the cheif villian in the middle of the game, it should be an unwinnable fight. Realizing you could easily kick the hell out of your foe in the middle of the game just takes something away from it.