Oh God, you mean the quest to clean out the Brewery (there are like half a dozen levels to that place!) while trying to save Dranor? They keep inflicting poison on everyone and horribly raping my party. I'm at the fourth level, I believe, and they keep rushing toward Gladys and gang banging her and now the rest of my party. I need to head back to town and get some of those items to treat poison. Does anyone know what shop sells those teas?
Yeah, that's the one. As mentioned before, instead of buying tons of cure pots or what have you, just buy the spell from Aurelia... she shows up near the Citadel after you open up that area (lots of new vendors show up there, it's worth checking out!).
But not every rat in that zone has the 'beeline to gangrape the caster!' AI.. I'm replaying that zone again (I restarted as a Spellweaver as well!), and am currently chopping through the first couple levels... the grey wolf rats are happy to munch on whomever smacks them the most while I whittle them down. It's the black ones that go straight for casters. This was particularly infuriating because it doesn't even matter WHERE my caster is... I have both of them (my char and Gladys) as far back as the game lets me position people, with the dwarf and the amazon in the area where the rats appear. The fucking rats completely ignore the only targets in the room with them to run aaalll the way down the hall, around a corner, and into a different room to kill my character (or, occasionally, Gladys. But usually my char). It makes me want to kick a programmer in the nuts.
Similar to Mumbly, I have been trying to play mages in this game because melee fighters, despite being supremely powerful in the early game, do not seem as fun or varied. I restarted as a Spellweaver because he had a TON of different spells to cast, which seemed way more interesting. As I go along, however, I'm finding that it's actually the fighter types who have more cool stuff to do... like AoE attacks on everything around them, different fighting styles, etc... my mage has one attack spell and he can heal and cure poison. Oh yeah and he can summon an animal that I can't control and who makes pulling enemies back (to keep from aggroing whole rooms) impossible. Most of the fun I'm having with him is, in fact, with his bow; I've been spending points on getting him the Marksman combat stuff, which I may regret later but it seems a far superior offensive tool since he has that endurance bar just sitting around doing nothing, and he can then save his mana for summoning and healing. :P
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
On the rat nest quest: Yeah, that rat AI thing got annoying, but it only happened to me a few times. Gladys is my only caster, and my main is a Thief that I've tweaked to become more of a fighter.
On Mages as mains: Who cares if melee characters are boring to play? You have your main for maybe 5 minutes before you meet your first party member, and then the fact that your main is your main means absolutely nothing. You could control your party using the Amazon the entire game, if you really wanted to.
My party consists of my main Thief, the dwarf, the amazon, and Gladys. Gladys is maxed out in Bows and can do some hefty damage with them, especially with the fire arrows I often make. She also knows about 20 spells, the most used include: Thunderbolt (mid 20s damage), Heal, Cure Poison, Summon animal (It's a bear now), and her armour buff and strength buff. I add about 4-5 STR on each character with it. She's easily my most versatile/powerful character.
During combat she's mostly my "main" if you want to use that word, since I put her on defensive and actively control her through each battle. The other guys, I pop some abilities and with my thief I put up Wall of Blades often, but Gladys takes the most active controlling to be most effective.
So, what I'm saying is, don't worry if you pick a melee character as your main, because your "main" doesn't mean anything in this game. Gladys has become the character I use as my "main" for fights anyway.
On the rat boss: Easily the hardest encounter so far, and I'm miles past that. I've even killed a
If you pick a class that does not start with any Astral Energy, you can not learn any spells, period.
There are spells that can only be learned by humans.
There are spells that can only be learned by elves.
And on top of that, there are spells that can only be learned by the highly educated archetypes. For example, the Charlatan's bio says that he dropped out of studying magic, so he can't learn any of the spells that are "educated only".
I'm enjoying this game a lot more since I restarted as a Spellweaver. My first character was a dwarven mercenary. He hit things with axes.
As a mage, I'm having trouble surviving even in the tutorial area. My dwarf, by comparison, wiped everything out on his own and rarely dropped below half health. However, as a mage I start with half a dozen combat abilities worth using, whereas my dwarf just autoattacked everything to death, and would use his sole combat ability twice per encounter.
So, as with Dungeons and Dragons games, it seems melee characters are exceptionally strong and take one hell of a beating before going down, but they're terribly dull to play as. I'd rather get my arse handed to me as a prancing elvish girl than watch the game play itself for me as a fighter.
I just rerolled the necromancer and found the same thing. I used to be a human fighter. What I figured out is, don't move with your spell caster selected, they seem to go after that person REAL quick. What I do is run around with teh Amazon selected, this way she takes most of the beating. So far, I use her as the "tank". This tactic works well for me.
That rat boss fight was really hard. They do like to gang up on gladys for some reason. I had another mage but they always take out gladys. The wild wolf rats also do wounds like crazy and have a really high chance to lucky hit. I only won by reloading over and over again and trying to take out the wolf rats before they took out gladys. I had my mage main with healing treat wounds whoever the big rat was munching on while gladys debuffed the rat boss with that lightning thing. It was pretty brutal.
Whats the cap on people in your party? I'm at 4, and wondering what will happen when / if I get
Dranor
to come back.
So far I've set up a mage as my character, then I've got two warriors, and I'm using a charlatan I found as a thief, since I'm the mage damn it. Ducats seem tight, but I've been doing a lot of training and buying every crafting formula I come across, which would make more sense if anyone in my group had crafting skills. I was sort of hoping to hold out until I got more party members than I had room in my traveling group so I could turn some of them into craftsmen.
How do you guys handle the huge fights where there are like 8-10 rats? I've not found an AoE spell yet, and by the time I get anything cast, my fighters chew through whatever I happened to be targeting.
You can only have 4 people in your party and a guest. That means when the event you mentioned occurs "it" does not join your party and in fact goes "somewhere else". I had to fight the AI a lot when I was doing those rat groups since your party wants to target all different stuff and the rats all target the same thing. I just set everyone on the same rat with a flame spout from my mage, two heavy attacks from the warriors I have currently and lightning find you from gladys. Usually no rat can survive that. If they don't have enough endurance or mana then it takes longer. Gladys usually has enough mana for lightning every time though.
vhzod on
0
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
For the rat boss fight, he will keep calling rats if you keep killing all the rats. I could never manage to prevent the second wave, but after that I kept one rat alive and he didn't call anymore.
So you have to fight 2 waves of rats no matter what, but don't kill the last one and you should be OK.
Remember, if you keep getting wounded you should work on that. You can only gain a wound if the damage dealt exceeds your CON, and even then you get to roll for a save based on your Willpower.
I put my tank characters at 15 Willpower, and their CON is around 16. You roll Willpower +10 to save for a wound.
I take back that you don't find area of effect spells, I found plenty of them later on for sale. Only for trained mages, as always.
And the merchants in Ferlok update their stuff ever so often, check then out from time to time because they offer good items to buy for your next adventures.
Renegen on
---Yeah
0
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
So I finally found a decent dagger for my Thief Best part? I pick pocketed it.
There are basically 3 AI types for the enemies,
"smart" fighters - these gangrape the weakest character in the party first
"normal" fighters - these have a kinda normal aggro system, i think they attack the enemy that deals the most damage to them
"stupid" fighters - they attack the first target they get
It helps to throw every defensive spell you have at your weakest character.
Regarding wounds - There are some enemies that have abilities which cause automatic wounds. Especially during the rat bossfight it helps to focus all characters on these enemies before resuming the normal fighting tactic.
Katana-sr on
0
FandyienBut Otto, what about us? Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
How, uh, do you actually choose new moves? I've got nothing but mighty blow and I seem to able to highlight lots of moves, but not actually 'buy' any.
How, uh, do you actually choose new moves? I've got nothing but mighty blow and I seem to able to highlight lots of moves, but not actually 'buy' any.
You have to buy them from trainers. In the first city, you can buy a lot of them from two guardsman (one in the Square and the other with more advanced moves in the Citadel barracks).
Dashui on
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
I take back that you don't find area of effect spells, I found plenty of them later on for sale. Only for trained mages, as always.
And the merchants in Ferlok update their stuff ever so often, check then out from time to time because they offer good items to buy for your next adventures.
I haven't found any AoE spells, though I did just find my first 'trained' mage companion and so I suspect perhaps the emrchants in Ferdok might update when I get back there after my current woodland jaunt is completed. That is kinda disappointing about only trained mages being able to use AoE though, because I'm really liking my current party setup.
My 'main' right now is a Burglar (though I used a character editor to change her appearance into a rogue, I think. The blonde. I liked that char model way better). I like this because it lets me control my main as my main most of the time, picking chests and disarming traps when necessary. As Figgy mentioned above, you can control any character so it doesn't matter so much what your main is, but for me I develop a real attachment to whichever character represents 'me' and want to control that character.
My burglar is a skilled archer, and so hangs back when the fighting starts, allowing the Dwarf and Amazon to charge in and handle tanking. I've really found that many of the big fights in this game require two tanks; either because there are just too many dudes to fight and one will get overwhelmed even with a good shield, or else the enemies use lots of knockdowns, after which they'll change targets and so I need a back-up. My 4th right now is the Spellweaver I picked up... she's pretty cool and also good with a bow, and I even got some spells for her that allow her to buff both her and my main's archery abilities. Two rounds of Rain of Arrows takes huge chunks of life out of any enemy.
But the annoying part of course is that if I want to get some AoE magic, I'm gonna have to sacrifice my lovely little Spellweaver. Ahh well, I guess it's one way to differentiate the various characters who can join the group.
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
You won't get the AOE spells for a long while, and they're not from Ferdok. You'll just suddenly come across an NPC with tons of god damned spells for sale. Same with a melee trainer.. same area. So save points. I had about 1500-2000 XP saved on each char and ran out of points buying skills and stuff.
I'm sticking with the spellweaver too, and I'm not that disappointed I won't have a kick-ass spell caster. She's a great party member because of her bow, and I've got the last skill for it that inflicts several wounds at once. My thunderbolt is becoming a favourite as well and works as a nice "Fuck you see ya" to any caster-type mob that might try to pester my tanks while they're working.
So, I went down into a dungeon, I won't spoiler that, because as far as I can tell this is how every quest works. I'm looking for bits of a statue. I've got a pair of wings, and can't for the life of me find the rest. What have I missed?
So, I went down into a dungeon, I won't spoiler that, because as far as I can tell this is how every quest works. I'm looking for bits of a statue. I've got a pair of wings, and can't for the life of me find the rest. What have I missed?
If you're talking about a certain dungeon under a certain temple you need to go down further into a cave like place and face some spiders. That's where you will find the 3rd part. Check the map, and make sure you always go down.
So, I went down into a dungeon, I won't spoiler that, because as far as I can tell this is how every quest works. I'm looking for bits of a statue. I've got a pair of wings, and can't for the life of me find the rest. What have I missed?
If you're talking about a certain dungeon under a certain temple you need to go down further into a cave like place and face some spiders. That's where you will find the 3rd part. Check the map, and make sure you always go down.
Also, I'll mention this because I missed it the first time, you don't loot that third part from a mob. Search on the ground next to a corpse.
Edit: Now for my question. Is there a merchant in Ferdok that sells Tindermold? I wanna make some flamin' arrows but I've done absolutely no herbin'.
Now that I've figured out how to create my own classes - since the defaults are all rather ho-hum - I'm enjoying combat a lot more. Taking no small amount of inspiration (copying, basically) from a German mod, I'm playing a quarter-mage dancer who excels in social skills, staves, has +2 endurance regeneration, and a few naturally learned spells to help her survive melee... you know, since two-handed users are pretty much fucked in Drakensang, and having a party of four shieldbearers is dull. Since no build would be complete without hideous downsides, she has horrifically low maximum VP and AE, -2 AE regeneration, and as a quarter-mage she can't learn any new spells.
In the tabletop game, and in the pretty faithful mod that I blatantly stole from, quarter-mages also have an additional penalty where all their spells are reduced by six levels. This means that your level one spells are actually level seven, and therefore cost 40+ experience per level to start. Accuse me of powergaming, but I decided not to be so faithful to the tabletop version and left that out, since fuck me if that doesn't render quarter-mages completely useless.
Edit: Also, holy shit, travel is bearable when you double your running speed.
Actually that does sound pretty cool. I keep seeing 'fighting staves' on merchants and such, and it made me want to create a character who revolves around that because it sounds really badass... but of course, like you said, being a melee-type without a shield in this game is pretty much doomed. I tried to have the Amazon go 2-hander for awhile, figuring that with the dwarf carrying a shield he could be the main 'tank', but was quickly shown the error of my ways.
So what spells make melee possible without a shield? I assume the self-armor spell and the firefly one that Gladys uses... anything else in particular?
It is a fairly dull concept to have four people with weapon+shield, but that's what my party consists of right now. Sure, two of them are not melee normally, and use bows for great ranged pummelling, but as soon as any enemies get close to either one of them, they quickly whip out the shield to avoid suffering insta-gib.
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
Since you're going to have 4 party members, creating a true hybrid is great for the first bit of the game, but you'll begin to feel useless later on.
To be blunt, it's totally worthless to have one character geared "kind of" toward spell casting. Spells are expensive to train up, and you're going to be handicapping yourself drastically in your melee skills in order to keep any sort of usefullness with your spells. Either that, or you'll end up ignoring leveling up your spells so you can keep up your melee skills so they're useful.
You'll find very kick ass spell casting party members early on, and they'll quickly take over any spell-related role (Healing, buffing, debuffing (although it's kind of worthless because of the casting time vs how long the mob would last anyway) and nuking). Having another character with some spell use will seem even more useless at that point. Why buff with your hybrid when he'll only get SP*0-5 on his buffs? Your pure casters will reach double digits.
I'd rather have each character in the party specialize heavy in one area or a few.
So what spells make melee possible without a shield? I assume the self-armor spell and the firefly one that Gladys uses... anything else in particular?
The self armour is critical, since casters can't use metal armour. There is also a dodge buff, which would be very useful since you'll be relying on that anyway.
Edit: But really, I've found the game to be pretty damn easy so far.. so it's not like you've got to have the perfect build to be effective in any regard.
I agree that most of this game is pretty easy... even boss fights tend not to be too difficult (The rat mother being a notable exception, but even she wasn't *too* bad when my party was the appropriate level).
On that note, however, I've found that there are weird, random encounters in this game where the difficulty just ratchets up to exceptional levels. These encounters come out of nowhere and usually aren't part of the climactic fight in any given area. The most notable example of this, is in Black Mountain (I think that's the name of the area):
I sided with the witches, and to get their trust I had to do various tasks for them. One of them wanted me to fetch her talking toad, which seemed a pretty easy and straight-forward mission (in the dialogue my character even commented that it sounded easy). It was anything but.
Guarding that damned toad was a veritable army of soldiers, many of whom were wielding two-handed swords that could easily one-shot my squishy characters, and would make short work of even my fighters if they didn't manage to parry enough. The difficulty of this was made insane by the sheer number of them, meaning that even with 2 shield-bearing fighters, I couldn't keep them all at bay. I used traps to knock some of them out, but they had so much health and armor that my guys couldn't kill the standing ones before the trapped ones were back on their feet. I ended up having to run away with my main char when the other 3 died, regrouping and returning to finish off the remaining soldiers.
There's also another example I noticed in the castle, fighting all the Orcs... some of them hit so fucking hard that my tanks just drop like nothing... including the Amazon who's wearing all that golden armor she got.
The weirdest thing about encounters like this is that, previous to them, I feel like maybe I've out-levelled the area or something, because I'm stampeding through everything else, only to hit a brick wall that requires some meta-gaming to get past.
Do the stat-buff spells ever last longer? Re-casting every 5mins is kind of annoying. 10-15mins would be less of a pain in the ass. Same goes with summoning, but it looks like the spell does have a duration roll built in, so I *think* as my stats get better, the cast lasts longer.
So far I am very happy with this game, I'm not far at all. I'm in the first main city, investigating murders. Been too busy to REALLY sink my teeth into it.
DrunkMc on
0
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
When you came across those guys in the woods being attacked by spirit bears, you didn't help them. I sided with the witches too, but when I came across the bears I said to myself, "Ok no.. this is too much you fucking witches..." and I killed the bears.
I was still sided with the witches, and the Ray of Lights were still hostile to me, but when I got to that toad section, the priest was there with a few henchmen and basically said, "We have not forgotten your aid," and he told me how he has lost respect for the grand-whatever-his-name-is. So yeah, I didn't have to fight those fellas.
But you're right. Sometimes a regular mob ends up being hard and it throws you completely off, because you don't notice until a party member is dead. It helps to use the spacebar often whenever you see health getting low, and open up your bag and pop a potion/juice.
You know what? That information makes me happier about this game... that something I did had consequences. I did indeed do exactly what you put into spoilers, and at the time I felt kinda bad about it, but I've been playing my char as something of a (not entirely) ruthless mercenary rather than a traditionally good hero. Based on that and combined with both some resentment over a certain nobleman escaping and a deal made with the witches, I decided she would go 'all in' for this war.
Very cool.
I also am liking that there are a few spots where you can choose to side with one group or another, which changes up the quests and storyline just a bit. I had worried that this game would be too linear, but thus far it has given me just enough leeway that I do feel like I'm having some effect on how things progress.
So what spells make melee possible without a shield? I assume the self-armor spell and the firefly one that Gladys uses... anything else in particular?
The self armour is critical, since casters can't use metal armour. There is also a dodge buff, which would be very useful since you'll be relying on that anyway.
My Sharisad currently knows Fastness of Body, Duplicitus and Sleep of a Thousand Sheep. I had initially given the class Fastness of Body, Duplicitus, Fandango of Fireflies and Move as Lightning. That did make the character a very reliable dodger, but it unfortunately meant that a supporting mage would offer very little. Also, giving the Sharisad too many buffs meant that it spent too much time casting for what is essentially a tanking class. Two self-only buffs and a supporting spell that plays off the Sharisad's absurdly high Charisma plays pretty well, though Sleep appears to be too hard to land for its cast time.
Honestly, simply using a stave is causing more pain than being a hybrid. Two-handed users are just so utterly fucked that I think I'll have to resort to making some very overpowered character traits. Damage output is pretty low, so Offensive Stance needs to be up all the time just to make a dent. Roundhouse requires a whopping 15 Strength, which makes it very hard to attain for a class whose gimmick is to be a frail tank. And Wall of Blades needs to be maintained permanently just to survive the weakest crowds, since with low maximum VP and Constitution a single hit getting through typically causes a wound.
I'm going to play through the game a little further before I decide that two-handed users need to get a couple of ridiculous traits just to keep up. Though I am leaning toward a trait that quadruples Endurance regeneration (1/sec) just to make maintaining Wall of Blades possible, while still providing enough regeneration to actually use some other skills. Also, perhaps, a passive trait that further increases dodge, since even with Dodge III it's never more than 2 points higher than a normal parry.
I agree that most of this game is pretty easy... even boss fights tend not to be too difficult (The rat mother being a notable exception, but even she wasn't *too* bad when my party was the appropriate level).
On that note, however, I've found that there are weird, random encounters in this game where the difficulty just ratchets up to exceptional levels. These encounters come out of nowhere and usually aren't part of the climactic fight in any given area. The most notable example of this, is in Black Mountain (I think that's the name of the area):
I sided with the witches, and to get their trust I had to do various tasks for them. One of them wanted me to fetch her talking toad, which seemed a pretty easy and straight-forward mission (in the dialogue my character even commented that it sounded easy). It was anything but.
Guarding that damned toad was a veritable army of soldiers, many of whom were wielding two-handed swords that could easily one-shot my squishy characters, and would make short work of even my fighters if they didn't manage to parry enough. The difficulty of this was made insane by the sheer number of them, meaning that even with 2 shield-bearing fighters, I couldn't keep them all at bay. I used traps to knock some of them out, but they had so much health and armor that my guys couldn't kill the standing ones before the trapped ones were back on their feet. I ended up having to run away with my main char when the other 3 died, regrouping and returning to finish off the remaining soldiers.
There's also another example I noticed in the castle, fighting all the Orcs... some of them hit so fucking hard that my tanks just drop like nothing... including the Amazon who's wearing all that golden armor she got.
The weirdest thing about encounters like this is that, previous to them, I feel like maybe I've out-levelled the area or something, because I'm stampeding through everything else, only to hit a brick wall that requires some meta-gaming to get past.
I remember that part, You had 6 swordmen against you. Very tough. What I did was run around like a little girl while my archer was picking them off one by one.
I don't remember any terrible fight against orcs. Overall, the difficulty is there most of the time and sometimes extreme.
Also do any of you use potions? To beat the 2 hard big bosses in Tallon I had to use potions. Since I don't have anyone who is good at alchemy, I was burning through a limited supply, but I imagine that investing in alchemy would provide a really big boost to battles. It's all about how you manage your party. I've decided that in my 2nd game I will use a completely different cast than my first game.
In fact, a really hard battle for me was in Tallon
Mumbly, your build may not be viable in the game... it sounds like you're having to resort to cheating levels of over-powering in a character editor to make it work at all. I admire your trying something different though, it really does sound like a cool character idea. I don't know if the pnp system this game is based off is so unforgiving to 2-handers or if it's just something that creeped into the game itself, but yeah I can't see how it's at all possible to make one work given the sheer number of mobs that get thrown your way.
I remember that part, You had 6 swordmen against you. Very tough. What I did was run around like a little girl while my archer was picking them off one by one.
I don't remember any terrible fight against orcs. Overall, the difficulty is there most of the time and sometimes extreme.
Also do any of you use potions? To beat the 2 hard big bosses in Tallon I had to use potions. Since I don't have anyone who is good at alchemy, I was burning through a limited supply, but I imagine that investing in alchemy would provide a really big boost to battles. It's all about how you manage your party. I've decided that in my 2nd game I will use a completely different cast than my first game.
That's pretty much how I handled the fight against those soldiers... they were way too freaking tough for a toe-to-toe fight... at least until I had whittled down their numbers a bit. But I recall trying to finish just a couple of them off, and they still nearly killed one of my tanks.
As for the Orcs, I recall one fairly close call I had being an Ogre who was surrounded by... it must have been 5-6 Orcs, and they all attack at once. Then there was a fight where it looked like there was just one Orc on the other side of a door... I shot him with my bow, only to get stampeded by a giant mob of them. For some reason they seemed to be hitting exceptionally hard, though it may have just been bad luck- I only got to try the fight once before I had to quit the game for the evening.
I do have potions, and make use of them quite often, but I don't have an alchemist for a couple reasons: First, I don't want to waste all the talent points on a main character, and having an 'off' character back at the house to do it just seems tedious. Second, picking all those damn plants just slows down adventuring to a fucking crawl... I gave up doing that after the intro area. :P
Mumbly, your build may not be viable in the game... it sounds like you're having to resort to cheating levels of over-powering in a character editor to make it work at all. I admire your trying something different though, it really does sound like a cool character idea. I don't know if the pnp system this game is based off is so unforgiving to 2-handers or if it's just something that creeped into the game itself, but yeah I can't see how it's at all possible to make one work given the sheer number of mobs that get thrown your way.
Oh, I make no bones about me overpowering a character class for the sake of making a novelty build workable. But, even though it is gaming the system, so far it provides a unique player character that offers unique challenges and interesting gameplay. I'll probably put the effort into balancing it - as much as one can balance a two-handed tank in this game - and put it out as a public mod.
Hey, well let me know how it works out for ya. I do find it a bit lame that every character in this game, no matter what their role, requires a shield.
On that note, I was kinda thinking about this, reading back to what I was posting about the Orcs. I'm in that stage of the dragon quest where I go into the castle, and I'm wondering... should I have any advanced combat techniques yet? I'm talking things like Offensive/Defensive Fighting 2 or higher, as well as any of the more advanced abilities. I'm wondering if I missed a trainer somewhere, or if the most advanced technique my warriors should have at this point in the game is still 'Roundhouse'.
Two handed characters are not that bad. Taldor is two handed sword and he's descent. I also used a spear for Rhulana for a while and I didn't see any difference between that and a sabre. The soldier class is specialized with 2 handed swords, while one of the elf classes is specialized with the spear.
Renegen on
---Yeah
0
FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
In fact, a really hard battle for me was in Tallon
against the necromancer in the crypt
You don't have to fight him either!
Collect all of the pieces of his diary in the side-rooms before you fight him and you'll have dialogue options that end up convincing him to leave the kid alone.. and he just goes away.. minions and all.
Toxic:
You don't get the advanced melee techniques until awhile later, in Tallon.
Don't mind Mumbly talkin bout all those fancy moves... he cheated to get em. You're not supposed to have any of the moves past roundhouse/knockdown till halfway through the game. They're insanely powerful.
You don't get the advanced melee techniques until awhile later, in Tallon.
Don't mind Mumbly talkin bout all those fancy moves... he cheated to get em. You're not supposed to have any of the moves past roundhouse/knockdown till halfway through the game. They're insanely powerful.
Oh, I know that he used an editor to get the moves because he's trying stuff out for his build, but it just reminded me that I had played through quite a chunk of the game without upgrading my fighters' moves at all. Turns out I did miss one of the trainers... there's a guy standing next to Captain whatshername in the Citadel Barracks who had some moves to teach.
Anyhow, I just got to Tallon last night. I found the mage guy with all the spells that's making me think I should be switching the mage guy who'd joined me awhile back into my party, but I didn't find a warrior trainer in that first town. Is he there, or further on? I don't wanna go past him because I'm already seeing that I'm gonna need some battle skills to take on the hordes in this land. :P
I find it hard to know when to use my XP points. You never know when you will need a boost in certain stats or if you will find a trainer you will need to save them for. I've been trying to be frugal with the points, only up the certain necessary skills for that class and leave everything else alone.
Posts
Yeah, that's the one. As mentioned before, instead of buying tons of cure pots or what have you, just buy the spell from Aurelia... she shows up near the Citadel after you open up that area (lots of new vendors show up there, it's worth checking out!).
But not every rat in that zone has the 'beeline to gangrape the caster!' AI.. I'm replaying that zone again (I restarted as a Spellweaver as well!), and am currently chopping through the first couple levels... the grey wolf rats are happy to munch on whomever smacks them the most while I whittle them down. It's the black ones that go straight for casters. This was particularly infuriating because it doesn't even matter WHERE my caster is... I have both of them (my char and Gladys) as far back as the game lets me position people, with the dwarf and the amazon in the area where the rats appear. The fucking rats completely ignore the only targets in the room with them to run aaalll the way down the hall, around a corner, and into a different room to kill my character (or, occasionally, Gladys. But usually my char). It makes me want to kick a programmer in the nuts.
Similar to Mumbly, I have been trying to play mages in this game because melee fighters, despite being supremely powerful in the early game, do not seem as fun or varied. I restarted as a Spellweaver because he had a TON of different spells to cast, which seemed way more interesting. As I go along, however, I'm finding that it's actually the fighter types who have more cool stuff to do... like AoE attacks on everything around them, different fighting styles, etc... my mage has one attack spell and he can heal and cure poison. Oh yeah and he can summon an animal that I can't control and who makes pulling enemies back (to keep from aggroing whole rooms) impossible. Most of the fun I'm having with him is, in fact, with his bow; I've been spending points on getting him the Marksman combat stuff, which I may regret later but it seems a far superior offensive tool since he has that endurance bar just sitting around doing nothing, and he can then save his mana for summoning and healing. :P
On Mages as mains: Who cares if melee characters are boring to play? You have your main for maybe 5 minutes before you meet your first party member, and then the fact that your main is your main means absolutely nothing. You could control your party using the Amazon the entire game, if you really wanted to.
My party consists of my main Thief, the dwarf, the amazon, and Gladys. Gladys is maxed out in Bows and can do some hefty damage with them, especially with the fire arrows I often make. She also knows about 20 spells, the most used include: Thunderbolt (mid 20s damage), Heal, Cure Poison, Summon animal (It's a bear now), and her armour buff and strength buff. I add about 4-5 STR on each character with it. She's easily my most versatile/powerful character.
During combat she's mostly my "main" if you want to use that word, since I put her on defensive and actively control her through each battle. The other guys, I pop some abilities and with my thief I put up Wall of Blades often, but Gladys takes the most active controlling to be most effective.
So, what I'm saying is, don't worry if you pick a melee character as your main, because your "main" doesn't mean anything in this game. Gladys has become the character I use as my "main" for fights anyway.
On the rat boss: Easily the hardest encounter so far, and I'm miles past that. I've even killed a
There are spells that can only be learned by humans.
There are spells that can only be learned by elves.
And on top of that, there are spells that can only be learned by the highly educated archetypes. For example, the Charlatan's bio says that he dropped out of studying magic, so he can't learn any of the spells that are "educated only".
I just rerolled the necromancer and found the same thing. I used to be a human fighter. What I figured out is, don't move with your spell caster selected, they seem to go after that person REAL quick. What I do is run around with teh Amazon selected, this way she takes most of the beating. So far, I use her as the "tank". This tactic works well for me.
So far I've set up a mage as my character, then I've got two warriors, and I'm using a charlatan I found as a thief, since I'm the mage damn it. Ducats seem tight, but I've been doing a lot of training and buying every crafting formula I come across, which would make more sense if anyone in my group had crafting skills. I was sort of hoping to hold out until I got more party members than I had room in my traveling group so I could turn some of them into craftsmen.
How do you guys handle the huge fights where there are like 8-10 rats? I've not found an AoE spell yet, and by the time I get anything cast, my fighters chew through whatever I happened to be targeting.
So you have to fight 2 waves of rats no matter what, but don't kill the last one and you should be OK.
Remember, if you keep getting wounded you should work on that. You can only gain a wound if the damage dealt exceeds your CON, and even then you get to roll for a save based on your Willpower.
I put my tank characters at 15 Willpower, and their CON is around 16. You roll Willpower +10 to save for a wound.
I don't know, but it's on other digital distribution services.
And the merchants in Ferlok update their stuff ever so often, check then out from time to time because they offer good items to buy for your next adventures.
There are basically 3 AI types for the enemies,
"smart" fighters - these gangrape the weakest character in the party first
"normal" fighters - these have a kinda normal aggro system, i think they attack the enemy that deals the most damage to them
"stupid" fighters - they attack the first target they get
It helps to throw every defensive spell you have at your weakest character.
Regarding wounds - There are some enemies that have abilities which cause automatic wounds. Especially during the rat bossfight it helps to focus all characters on these enemies before resuming the normal fighting tactic.
You have to buy them from trainers. In the first city, you can buy a lot of them from two guardsman (one in the Square and the other with more advanced moves in the Citadel barracks).
I haven't found any AoE spells, though I did just find my first 'trained' mage companion and so I suspect perhaps the emrchants in Ferdok might update when I get back there after my current woodland jaunt is completed. That is kinda disappointing about only trained mages being able to use AoE though, because I'm really liking my current party setup.
My 'main' right now is a Burglar (though I used a character editor to change her appearance into a rogue, I think. The blonde. I liked that char model way better). I like this because it lets me control my main as my main most of the time, picking chests and disarming traps when necessary. As Figgy mentioned above, you can control any character so it doesn't matter so much what your main is, but for me I develop a real attachment to whichever character represents 'me' and want to control that character.
My burglar is a skilled archer, and so hangs back when the fighting starts, allowing the Dwarf and Amazon to charge in and handle tanking. I've really found that many of the big fights in this game require two tanks; either because there are just too many dudes to fight and one will get overwhelmed even with a good shield, or else the enemies use lots of knockdowns, after which they'll change targets and so I need a back-up. My 4th right now is the Spellweaver I picked up... she's pretty cool and also good with a bow, and I even got some spells for her that allow her to buff both her and my main's archery abilities. Two rounds of Rain of Arrows takes huge chunks of life out of any enemy.
But the annoying part of course is that if I want to get some AoE magic, I'm gonna have to sacrifice my lovely little Spellweaver. Ahh well, I guess it's one way to differentiate the various characters who can join the group.
I'm sticking with the spellweaver too, and I'm not that disappointed I won't have a kick-ass spell caster. She's a great party member because of her bow, and I've got the last skill for it that inflicts several wounds at once. My thunderbolt is becoming a favourite as well and works as a nice "Fuck you see ya" to any caster-type mob that might try to pester my tanks while they're working.
If you're talking about a certain dungeon under a certain temple you need to go down further into a cave like place and face some spiders. That's where you will find the 3rd part. Check the map, and make sure you always go down.
Also, I'll mention this because I missed it the first time, you don't loot that third part from a mob. Search on the ground next to a corpse.
Edit: Now for my question. Is there a merchant in Ferdok that sells Tindermold? I wanna make some flamin' arrows but I've done absolutely no herbin'.
In the tabletop game, and in the pretty faithful mod that I blatantly stole from, quarter-mages also have an additional penalty where all their spells are reduced by six levels. This means that your level one spells are actually level seven, and therefore cost 40+ experience per level to start. Accuse me of powergaming, but I decided not to be so faithful to the tabletop version and left that out, since fuck me if that doesn't render quarter-mages completely useless.
Edit: Also, holy shit, travel is bearable when you double your running speed.
Actually that does sound pretty cool. I keep seeing 'fighting staves' on merchants and such, and it made me want to create a character who revolves around that because it sounds really badass... but of course, like you said, being a melee-type without a shield in this game is pretty much doomed. I tried to have the Amazon go 2-hander for awhile, figuring that with the dwarf carrying a shield he could be the main 'tank', but was quickly shown the error of my ways.
So what spells make melee possible without a shield? I assume the self-armor spell and the firefly one that Gladys uses... anything else in particular?
It is a fairly dull concept to have four people with weapon+shield, but that's what my party consists of right now. Sure, two of them are not melee normally, and use bows for great ranged pummelling, but as soon as any enemies get close to either one of them, they quickly whip out the shield to avoid suffering insta-gib.
To be blunt, it's totally worthless to have one character geared "kind of" toward spell casting. Spells are expensive to train up, and you're going to be handicapping yourself drastically in your melee skills in order to keep any sort of usefullness with your spells. Either that, or you'll end up ignoring leveling up your spells so you can keep up your melee skills so they're useful.
You'll find very kick ass spell casting party members early on, and they'll quickly take over any spell-related role (Healing, buffing, debuffing (although it's kind of worthless because of the casting time vs how long the mob would last anyway) and nuking). Having another character with some spell use will seem even more useless at that point. Why buff with your hybrid when he'll only get SP*0-5 on his buffs? Your pure casters will reach double digits.
I'd rather have each character in the party specialize heavy in one area or a few.
The self armour is critical, since casters can't use metal armour. There is also a dodge buff, which would be very useful since you'll be relying on that anyway.
Edit: But really, I've found the game to be pretty damn easy so far.. so it's not like you've got to have the perfect build to be effective in any regard.
On that note, however, I've found that there are weird, random encounters in this game where the difficulty just ratchets up to exceptional levels. These encounters come out of nowhere and usually aren't part of the climactic fight in any given area. The most notable example of this, is in Black Mountain (I think that's the name of the area):
Guarding that damned toad was a veritable army of soldiers, many of whom were wielding two-handed swords that could easily one-shot my squishy characters, and would make short work of even my fighters if they didn't manage to parry enough. The difficulty of this was made insane by the sheer number of them, meaning that even with 2 shield-bearing fighters, I couldn't keep them all at bay. I used traps to knock some of them out, but they had so much health and armor that my guys couldn't kill the standing ones before the trapped ones were back on their feet. I ended up having to run away with my main char when the other 3 died, regrouping and returning to finish off the remaining soldiers.
There's also another example I noticed in the castle, fighting all the Orcs... some of them hit so fucking hard that my tanks just drop like nothing... including the Amazon who's wearing all that golden armor she got.
The weirdest thing about encounters like this is that, previous to them, I feel like maybe I've out-levelled the area or something, because I'm stampeding through everything else, only to hit a brick wall that requires some meta-gaming to get past.
So far I am very happy with this game, I'm not far at all. I'm in the first main city, investigating murders. Been too busy to REALLY sink my teeth into it.
That's because you did this:
I was still sided with the witches, and the Ray of Lights were still hostile to me, but when I got to that toad section, the priest was there with a few henchmen and basically said, "We have not forgotten your aid," and he told me how he has lost respect for the grand-whatever-his-name-is. So yeah, I didn't have to fight those fellas.
But you're right. Sometimes a regular mob ends up being hard and it throws you completely off, because you don't notice until a party member is dead. It helps to use the spacebar often whenever you see health getting low, and open up your bag and pop a potion/juice.
Yes.
You know what? That information makes me happier about this game... that something I did had consequences. I did indeed do exactly what you put into spoilers, and at the time I felt kinda bad about it, but I've been playing my char as something of a (not entirely) ruthless mercenary rather than a traditionally good hero. Based on that and combined with both some resentment over a certain nobleman escaping and a deal made with the witches, I decided she would go 'all in' for this war.
Very cool.
I also am liking that there are a few spots where you can choose to side with one group or another, which changes up the quests and storyline just a bit. I had worried that this game would be too linear, but thus far it has given me just enough leeway that I do feel like I'm having some effect on how things progress.
Before the forest, most "choices" only really affect the given quest, and that's lame.
Honestly, simply using a stave is causing more pain than being a hybrid. Two-handed users are just so utterly fucked that I think I'll have to resort to making some very overpowered character traits. Damage output is pretty low, so Offensive Stance needs to be up all the time just to make a dent. Roundhouse requires a whopping 15 Strength, which makes it very hard to attain for a class whose gimmick is to be a frail tank. And Wall of Blades needs to be maintained permanently just to survive the weakest crowds, since with low maximum VP and Constitution a single hit getting through typically causes a wound.
I'm going to play through the game a little further before I decide that two-handed users need to get a couple of ridiculous traits just to keep up. Though I am leaning toward a trait that quadruples Endurance regeneration (1/sec) just to make maintaining Wall of Blades possible, while still providing enough regeneration to actually use some other skills. Also, perhaps, a passive trait that further increases dodge, since even with Dodge III it's never more than 2 points higher than a normal parry.
I remember that part, You had 6 swordmen against you. Very tough. What I did was run around like a little girl while my archer was picking them off one by one.
I don't remember any terrible fight against orcs. Overall, the difficulty is there most of the time and sometimes extreme.
Also do any of you use potions? To beat the 2 hard big bosses in Tallon I had to use potions. Since I don't have anyone who is good at alchemy, I was burning through a limited supply, but I imagine that investing in alchemy would provide a really big boost to battles. It's all about how you manage your party. I've decided that in my 2nd game I will use a completely different cast than my first game.
In fact, a really hard battle for me was in Tallon
That's pretty much how I handled the fight against those soldiers... they were way too freaking tough for a toe-to-toe fight... at least until I had whittled down their numbers a bit. But I recall trying to finish just a couple of them off, and they still nearly killed one of my tanks.
As for the Orcs, I recall one fairly close call I had being an Ogre who was surrounded by... it must have been 5-6 Orcs, and they all attack at once. Then there was a fight where it looked like there was just one Orc on the other side of a door... I shot him with my bow, only to get stampeded by a giant mob of them. For some reason they seemed to be hitting exceptionally hard, though it may have just been bad luck- I only got to try the fight once before I had to quit the game for the evening.
I do have potions, and make use of them quite often, but I don't have an alchemist for a couple reasons: First, I don't want to waste all the talent points on a main character, and having an 'off' character back at the house to do it just seems tedious. Second, picking all those damn plants just slows down adventuring to a fucking crawl... I gave up doing that after the intro area. :P
On that note, I was kinda thinking about this, reading back to what I was posting about the Orcs. I'm in that stage of the dragon quest where I go into the castle, and I'm wondering... should I have any advanced combat techniques yet? I'm talking things like Offensive/Defensive Fighting 2 or higher, as well as any of the more advanced abilities. I'm wondering if I missed a trainer somewhere, or if the most advanced technique my warriors should have at this point in the game is still 'Roundhouse'.
You don't have to fight him either!
Toxic:
You don't get the advanced melee techniques until awhile later, in Tallon.
Don't mind Mumbly talkin bout all those fancy moves... he cheated to get em. You're not supposed to have any of the moves past roundhouse/knockdown till halfway through the game. They're insanely powerful.
Oh, I know that he used an editor to get the moves because he's trying stuff out for his build, but it just reminded me that I had played through quite a chunk of the game without upgrading my fighters' moves at all. Turns out I did miss one of the trainers... there's a guy standing next to Captain whatshername in the Citadel Barracks who had some moves to teach.
Anyhow, I just got to Tallon last night. I found the mage guy with all the spells that's making me think I should be switching the mage guy who'd joined me awhile back into my party, but I didn't find a warrior trainer in that first town. Is he there, or further on? I don't wanna go past him because I'm already seeing that I'm gonna need some battle skills to take on the hordes in this land. :P
What are some of your thoughts on this?