xerex

Well Gladwell pisses me off since he lied about the effects of the Geas, so Im not getting his damn scrolls. Hell, I would have not killed the drake either, but it was physically impossible to proceed in the game without killing the drake. I guess I better saddle up. Its gonna be a long fight through the howling depths.

Ok, yeah..I don't know what the exact percent is, but it looks like its about 50% miss chance..which is a lot, but since I am mostly running and the darkside loyalists are pretty weak compared to what I have been facing so far, it isn't too terribly difficult. I am only about half-way through though. As for Moref, the AI is apparently too smart on my machine. I try sticking my tank in the middle (cleverly named TANK) and a majority of the mobs go after my archer/priest (cleverly named PRIEST). When I stack my priest with armor and fire resistance, they go after my assasin instead. I am glad they do this because it makes the game more challenging, but it does make moref very difficult...especially since I can't use any chokepoints and action point system is so bad, I can't actually block with my TANK. They just walk right around him to get to my softer, fleshier characters that are better for the pounding. For now, I am killing spiny larvae in the chitrach nest repeatedly to get a much needed level..3 characters within 100 xp of a level. Once I run out of mana, I will probably go annoy solberg a little by looting his tower. I wonder if the two sentinels in front of his tower count towards the number needed to make the town hostile.

So, I have killed the chitrach queen and killed everything in Khorra Vyss except the horror and I have killed everything that is killable before going into the howling depths except for the shade moref. I can't beat his unstable sentinels. I run out of mana before I have "angered" him twice because I have to spend it all healing. So because I haven't killed moref yet, I don't have the mindwarp chitrach quest and I can't anger the anama by stealing their scrolls because I still need to talk to kingsley. If I go into the howling depths to find more xp so I can kill Moref, I am told I will grow sick. Now I can just go in and see what it does, but it will just show a little icon probably and I will have some sort of penalty doing things exactly. I am wondering, how much is the penalty associated with the sickness exactly. Is it a death curse? poison? curse? something completely different? On a side note, will solberg get angry if I loot his tower in the north east if I sneak by all the sentinels? I am not sure I could take the cheeseballs anyway, but it might be worth trying to get some more xp somewhere so I can kill moref.

ok...static bands all around then I guess...Why isn't it just called energy damage...or why isn't the resistance type called magical? Grrrr. Wish I had known that when fighting the pit crawler.

How do I reduce it? Monsters that do magic damage (pit crawler, unstable mass, chitrach queen, etc) are a LOT harder for me than any other creature in the game because I seem to take uber amounts of damage from them. There is no %magic resistance in my list of resistance and I haven't found any items that specifically reduce "magical" damage type. So how do I reduce the damage I am recieving from these monsters?

well, I finally managed to do it. Once I managed to survive the first two rounds, the rest of the fight was easy. His burst damage in that first round took my tankiest hero down to 20 hp, but I managed to heal him up enough that he survived the second round with 2hp. By then all my healers (3) were properly positioned and hasted, so I was able to keep him alive (he has level 1 priest spells too!) while my mage converted one of the statues. Once I got one converted, the rest of the fight was all downhill. However, I couldn't do this on torment until I went and leveled a bit in the anama lands murdering poor defenseless chitrachs. Oh well, I'm sure solberg won't miss those golems that were watching the exit

I used stealth to avoid the patrols and used the secret door in the south to kill the ones blocking the passage south, I only had to kill 8, so I think I am ok for now. As for buffs, I have steel skin, enduring shield, and augmentation on everybody. I arranged it so my caster's leveled while in the work shop giving me all my buffs and caster's with full mana with no need for potions. @ ephesos..what do you mean run your fighter into the room? The prime sentinel locks the gate behind me, so ALL my characters are in the room. The unstable servants always rush whoever has the lowest armor rating (who is within reach anyway. . .currently my guy with a sniper vest on). I will check for an update, but I thought the update was for the mac version. I will check for the windows one. UPDATE: just checked...no updates for windows version

Um, the helper A.I....you mean the unstable servants? They appear as the very start of the fight, and they spawn in different corners of the room, so aoe spells wont help much. Also in the very first round, the dialogue comes up saying that the sentinel realizes it might actually be in danger and the room grows very warm, hitting all my characters with a fireblast. I haven't even hit it yet, and it thinks it is danger? It has that impenetrable shield up still. I am guessing I have to take down the unstable servants before I can hurt the thing, but that requires letting the damn thing shoot lightning bolts at me for 8 rounds while I take down the unstable servants. take who over? I haven't survived the first round yet. I manage to hit one of the unstable servants a few times. How does taking over this thing reduces the number of lightning sprays? The prime sentinel is casting the lightning sprays at me (2 per round + the fireblast when he "realizes he might be in danger"). I am starting to think there might be some sort of bug here in the windows version. Should the very first round of the fight, have 4 unstable servants and the prime sentinel all attacking me AND have an extra free fireblast come out of the prime sentinel? I don't see how any character could possibly survive that initial onslaught except maybe the lucky one who didnt get hit by the lightning sprays.

Ok, so yeah, I am playing on torment, but it seems to me that the prime sentinel is MUCH harder than is entirely reasonable. I eventually had to kill the sentinels blocking the way to anama lands because there was nothing else I could do except kill the prime sentinel or move on. So now I am in anama lands gleefully killing chitrachs with ease. Is it intended that the prime sentinel be so hard that if you can beat him, you can just waltz through the chitrachs in the next area with ease? Is there an obvious trick I am missing that makes him manageable? The reason I can't beat the prime sentinel by the way is because he one shots 3 members of my party in the first round. Lightning spary, his fireblast, and then another lightning spray, all before I can do anything at all. At this point, all my characters have 8 endurance, 8 hardiness, and as much resistance as money can buy, but it doesn't seem to help at all. Anyway, I'm just wondering if this strange level disparity is intended, if I am missing something, or what.

the golem has several phases.. Each time she resets his health, he is vulnerable to a different set of damage types Stage 1: Physical..just beat on him Stage 2: Fire, firebolt ftw! Stage 3: poison, acid, and repel spirit all hurt him during this stage. Do enough damage of any one of those types to move to the next stage stage 4: lightning and cold. I still haven't finished this stage because I run out of mana on my mage and my priests don't have smite (Buying spells is for pussys!).

I don't suppose we could get a list of the cheapest places to purchase spells in this section could we? I have money to burn, but don't want to waste it on some overpriced spell peddler if I don't need the spell upgrade right now.

Quote: Originally written by bret: If torment level isn't hard enough for you, take all frail characters through Torment level. I'm still working on getting through it once on normal level. I'm playing a frail/brittle bones singleton in A5 on Torment. By exploiting the current AP system, it is hard, but not very hard. I am not done yet, but once I get lethal blow, I expect things will get easier rather than harder. I am curious to see if I can one-hit dorikas with a lethal blow. haste before a fight, summon two critters before a fight, acid to start the fight, then run away and summon as necessary to keep two critters on the battlefield and nuke from max range. It takes a LOT of mana, but 8 int takes care of that pretty well. Granted A4 had door-fu or corner-fu that you could exploit that this game doesn't, but now summoning a critter to slow my pursuit down takes only 1 AP, whereas in A4, it took 5.

If you attempt to pay off dirty desiree with 500 coins, but don't actually have 500 coins, the text box says she lunges at you when she realizes you don't have the money, but then when the text box goes away, she is gone anyway. Seems like a bug to me.

but trinity, thats how the game is. I can always just have one guy run away at the beginning of the fight and let the other 3 die. Then, I get back to town and they are all magically there, even though I left their bodies to rot in the ground while I ran away like Sir Robin. Personally, I think unconcious allies should become items that you have to pick up (and are ridiculously heavy) and carry around until you can revive them, but I also agree that if they are, in fact, just "unconcious" it should be relatively easy to bring them back. IMO, there should be 3 states of below zero hp. Incapacitated: a dazed-type effect that lasts until you are in positive hp again. This effect happens when a player drops below zero hp but is still above -max_hp/2. When incapacitated, the character has "effectively" no "active abilities" dex=0, defense=0, parry=0, riposte=0, etc., but also becomes a lower priority target for most mobs. (Some particularly ravenous mobs might continue to attack incapacitated characters just because they are so bloodthirsty they dont' realize there are other opponents to fight.). If a character goes below -max_hp/2 but is still above -max_hp, he or she is "dying" and will lose some small percentage of their max_hp every round until they are healed back above -max_hp/2. Otherwise, the dying state is the same as the incapacitated state. Below -max_hp, the character is dead and can only be revived via the return life spell. Some sort of system like that would make sense to me and retain the idea that avernum is dangerous. Currently, there are few encounters that I can't just run away from with a group of 4...singleton is freaking dangerous though.

Are these two skills basically the same once you unlock magery?. If not, how are they different? And do they stack multiplicatively or additively? like 25% increase from spellcraft and 25% increase from magery = +56.25% (1.25*1.25) or +50% (25%+25%)