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Druidism or Intelligence? (Original Nethergate)


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Which is better: the Druid's Bracelet, or the Intelligence Bracelet? Both say that they increase "the power of your spells", but do they do so equally? As far as I remember DRU and INT both increase the effectiveness of your spells equally, and they both count as one extra MP per point trained.

 

Unfortunately, Nethergate doesn't show bonuses from equipped items on your stat screen, so there's no help there. Any thoughts?

 

Edit: fixed some typos.

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DRU does not increase the effectiveness of your spells whatsoever. The spell circle skills do, however.

 

My best suggestion for testing it is to use the summoning spells. Call Spirits is possibly the best one -- although it doesn't list its formula I suspect the number of wights summoned = 1 + Bonus/3. Call Beast is 1 + Bonus/5, if that doesn't work. If these spells have caps on the max number to summon, I haven't encountered them.

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Okay, will do. The Druid's bracelet does say that it increases the effectiveness of your spells, though, so I wonder if it's increasing the bonus for all circles by one or two? If that's the case, it's much better that the Intelligence Bracelet.

 

Edit: here are some numbers. My bonus in the Beast circle is 31 (23 INT, plus 8 BEA). This means I should summon 7.2 critters with Call Aid (1 + 31/5).

 

Next, I know I only need to summon once to get a true reading because of the nature of the spell, but I still summoned 10 times each, just because I wanted to be 100% certain.

 

Now, the figures:

 

With the Int bracelet, in 10 castings, I got 8 every time.

With the Druids's bracelet, in 10 castings, I got 7 every time.

With no bracelet, in 10 castings, I also got 7 every time.

 

So...

 

Obviously we know the Intelligence Bracelet increases INT by 1 for the purposes of spell power. The Druid's bracelet? Not so clear. It didn't add anything, but that might mean it just adds to certain circles, and not Beast.

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Well, it's not really clear what either does. It's entirely possible that one (or both) provides just a flat bonus, or a bonus proportional to Int, or a bonus proportional to circle skills, or some combination of the above. What we DO know is that when Int is a lot higher than circle skills, the Int bracelet provides a higher bonus. In your test the Int bracelet provided at least +4 to the bonus (it rounds down), while the Druid bracelet provided less than +4. And that's probably adequate information, since for a serious caster Int is always likely to be higher than circle skills.

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More numbers:

 

I tried casting Wind Warriors, which should summon 5 warriors with my basic spell bonus. Here's the sum: (1 + 35/8 == 5.375).

 

With Intelligence bracelet, after 10 casts: 7 warriors.

With Druid bracelet, after 10 casts: 7 warriors

With nothing, after 10 casts: 6 warriors.

 

I was a little surprised to see that the Intelligence gives and extra 2, until wearing nothing gave me 6 warriors. I'm guessing there's something funky going on with rounding, or the fact that it's a Nether Arts spell, or else my maths is bad. Either way, the Druid's bracelet gave +1 to War Circle bonuses.

 

Next, I tried Mild Healing. The healing range is 2/8 + bonus (which is 15 in this case, because the 31 I have from INT + HEA is divided by 2). This gives a range of 17/23.

 

Again, in 10 tests;

 

With no bracelet, I got an average of 19.6 health returned to me.

With the Druid bracelet, I got an average of 20.9 health returned to me.

 

Ideally, I'd like to do more tests on the Mild Healing, but in the short run I did it seemed to increase by about a point, so I think it's safe to say that it adds +1 to Health Circle bonuses.

 

Finally, I tried testing Soul Lance. This spell gives 1 + bonus/7 lances to fire at enemies. I only tested this once, because I was getting bored, and it seemed fairly inflexible due to rounding. Anyway:

 

With no bracelet, I got 6 lances to fire at enemies.

With the Druid Bracelet, I got 6 lances to fire at enemies.

With the Intelligence Bracelet, I got 7 lances to fire at enemies.

 

After these fairly casual tests, I think it's clear that the Intelligence bracelet is the better option most of the time - the +1 to INT applies to all spell bonuses, so you're getting the most for the inventory slot. On the other hand, the +1 to War and Health Circle bonuses are still probably useful to a Roman, who will only be able to cast those spells anyway (at least until Hagfen (or Vanarium if they get the druid PC there)).

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Also, since Slarty replied whilst I was doing this (and he's right):

 

I also edited my INT and all circles down to 8, and tried again. Call Aid still gave 1 more critter with the Intelligence Bracelet then when testing with the Druid/no bracelet.

 

Wind Warriors gave me the exact same result - 1 more warrior with either bracelet (4 as opposed to 3), so that backs up my War bonus results.

 

Soul Lance also acted the same as it did before - 1 more lance with the Intelligence bracelet, but nothing extra with the Druid Bracelet.

 

These seem to point to what I was saying earlier (where did you get the 4 from, by the way, Slarty?), but I'm prepared to let somebody more at home with spading to tell me I'm wrong.

 

Edit: Ah, I see where you got it. My bad. I guess my analysis is way off then, but the numbers still stack up. Int is better cus it provides the bonus to all spell circles.

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