Increase difficulty vs. HoF

[probe53]

does increasing difficulty get you more exp, or does ONLY HoF mode does that?

my second question is, though HoF increases damage of monsters and HP, cant you still have Hof and change the setting in the icewind.ini so the Damage is lowered or hp is lowered?

wont that work?

i like the toughness of hof but cant figure out why barrels, cats, dogs become hard to kill too.........

those things i say should be a few wacks and gone, not some pre-tank major...

[MasterDarkNinja]

I'm pretty sure only playing in HOF or nonHOF effects how much XP you get from monsters, I could be wrong though.

I think HOF might be made for you to have to start with imported characters to stand a chance, so that could be why simple things are so hard to kill. I could be wrong about to though since I've never played in HOF difficulty before.

[Jelaweb]

Bumping up the difficulty indirectly affects your XP - you won't get more XP per kill, but you will get more monsters (therefore more XP depending on party level).

HoF mode seems to use an algorithm in the IWD2.exe file (or binkw32.dll), with a flag in the save game file, so you cannot change HoF mode so the monsters are easier to kill. If you save a game in HoF mode and remove it from the config.exe, the save game will still be in HoF mode.
It is this algorithm that makes basic things like barrels and cats a lot tougher, because it is applied to every CRE file.