Legacy of Bhaal was not meant for a first time playthrough. It's really more equivalent to New Game+ where you export characters that are geared up and 8th level already. Although they really should explain this to people when selecting that difficulty, otherwise its just an unbalanced shit-show.
I would say pass on that one but the 4 we need to have are Story Mode, Normal, Core Rules, and Hard.
It's no meant for any playthrough, it's just terrible.
Incidentally I think most New Game+ modes are garbage as well, because they suffer from the same exact design issue: they are just the same exact game with more bloated numbers on top... And everything unlocked from the get go, which kind of defeats the point.
To be clear I'd be perfectly fine with "extremely challenging extra modes" as long as that increase in difficulty is obtained playing inside the core rules (i.e. more enemies, enemy lieutenants higher in level, etc).
It's the "Everything does more damage and has 5X more health" that I absolutely despise in principle.
If you add more rules and want one to read "Core Rules" it should be the "Normal" setting. Unless you want a difficulty which basically says "We assumed you all are too bad for the real rules". I mean, the main difference is saving, to be honest.
Even the rest-abuse is possible in real P&P, you just need to spend most of your day reading a book or something like that.
I honestly dislike the Story Mode difficulty as well. It is immortality + max strength, that is not a difficulty setting that is an inbuild godmode.
Well, most of these games right now pretty much by deafault put "core rules" as the intermediate-hard-mode and "normal" is usually the mode where everything is weaker than it should be. It was the same with BG2, Pathfinder, etc.
I dislike for these modes is just as pronounced as the one for the super-hardcore modes made just bloating numbers, for the record.
