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Third Playthrough: Torment


Kelandon

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Following on http://spiderwebforu...ough-reactions/, I've now nearly finished my third playthrough of Avadon, this time on Torment, with a main character Shadowwalker.

 

After reading Strategy Central topics, I decided to pump Dexterity and just keep pumping it. Every single level, on every single character except Nathalie, I increased Dexterity. (For Nathalie, I increased Intelligence.) I also pushed ranged weapon skills (bows for Sevilin, razordisks for Shima) as soon as I could get them and then pushed the middle column for every single level thereafter. For Jennell and Nathalie, I went to the middle column immediately, trying to get critical hit skills as soon as I could for Nathalie and then boosting the rest of the middle column.

 

It turns out, if you do this without exception, that this provides a complete path all the way up to about level 20 (sooner for Nathalie and Jennell, later for Sevilin and Shima, because of the bows/razordisks). It also turns out that this makes the game remarkably easy, even on Torment.

 

The fundamental difference I'm finding between this playthrough and the last two (which were on Normal and Hard) is that nothing can hit me. Sure, two or three hits from bosses would kill my characters, but even bosses only hit every now and then. For the most part, everyone misses pretty much all the time. The extra turns that enemies get on Torment no longer seem like cheating (as they did on my last playthrough on Hard), because they can't do anything useful with them. They just miss again.

 

I've alternated between my main SW, Sevilin, and Nathalie as my three and my main SW, Sevilin and Shima as my three, and I seem to be doing slightly better with the latter (mostly because Nathalie, having pumped Int, can still be hit, so I have to be careful about where I put her). I'm also doing just fine when my main SW has to venture off alone, because, again, he rarely gets hit.

 

My combat tactics basically involve falling back as much as possible (attack from just far enough away that the enemy can't reach me in the next turn, then fall back 7 steps and attack again). When I can't fall back much, I just place my three characters in an equilateral triangle surrounding whoever I'm attacking (that is, as far apart as possible), and I just fire off ranged attacks until I win.

 

Nathalie has the healing scarab and the teleporting scarab, and if things get really bad, I have her run 7 steps, teleport to as far away as she can get, and then (when everyone else is knocked out) end combat to revive everyone else. A few fights have required this or postponing until later, but for the most part, I'm getting through everything with only one or two reloads at boss battles and almost no reloads anywhere else.

 

I just hit the level cap and am approaching the endgame, and again, everything has been remarkably easier than when I had a bad build but was playing on Normal. My bad build consisted of trying to balance out my traits and get new skills (so I'd keep a balance among Str, Dex, Int, and End, and I'd try to get lots of abilities even if they were only at level 1), and it turns out that this approach is deathly awful. In Avadon, you want to pump one thing over and over and over again. And that one thing is Dex.

 

I think it's not particularly obvious that this is the way to go until you play the game a few times and read the forums, which is sort of annoying. But there are plain, straightforward reasons for it. Dex has the advantage of both helping you attack (missile attacks) and be attacked (avoid getting hit), whereas the other traits mostly help you with one (attack: Str, Int) or the other (be attacked: End). Also, whereas enemies can block or reflect hand-to-hand attacks (Spine Shield, riposte) or magical attacks (immunity to fire or energy, Reflection), ranged physical attacks don't seem to have anything comparable: almost no enemies are immune to physical damage, and there is no status that reflects ranged physical damage back.

 

The other thing that I'm noticing is that the game balance is surprisingly ragged, given how much Jeff works on that sort of thing. I mentioned in my last playthrough that the minions you fight at the beginning of a dungeon give you absolutely no sense as to how hard the boss is going to be, and you find leaps in difficulty all over the game from one moment to the next, both leaping up and down. But then, the difficulty looks different when you have a good build. I was expecting the first fight with Zhossa Mindtaker to mark a great jump up in difficulty, because it did on my last two playthroughs, but it really didn't. It was a little bit of a speedbump, but the game has played at a reasonably bumpy but even keel all the way through.

 

I'll report back again after I've finished.

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Your definitely going to face a few challenges but I think you'll make it out alright. Critical hits seem to boost damage moreso then anything else, save backstab for certain ranged abilities. When Avadon's sequel comes out Im going for an all middle column shadowwalker, all specializations in middle to get a deadly ranged fighter. Its only too bad I didnt do that for my blademaster who specialized in the left column. Its not bad, but just not as many perks.

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Jeff said he was going to rebalance Avadon 2 to reduce the effectiveness of dexterity.

 

I saw in a solo Sorceress game and one with a Shadowwalker that those few extra points in dexterity (about 4) instead of intelligence was the difference in fighting through the giants to reach Titan's Keep without needing the soldiers help

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The original beta version of Avadon let you assign all stat points which lead to even more build abuses. I think there will be more attack types that can't be evaded with dexterity or he reduces the percent per point from 5%.

 

He did the same thing with parry in the old games and Avadon after he saw me abuse parry with my Blademaster build. :)

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Completed Avadon on Torment, and yeah, it was pretty much the same all the way through. I was struck by how Viscount Varoche, who was the bane of my existence on my last playthrough, turned into a fairly tame encounter because, well, like everyone else, he couldn't hit me.

 

I didn't try to kill Zephyrine (well, I tried, once, and gave up because it was absurd) or Redbeard on Torment, so I went back and killed Zephyrine on Casual, saw that I didn't get a medal for it, and killed Redbeard (for the first time on any playthrough) on Normal.

 

Not only is the game balance pretty ragged, but also the two hardest fights are kind of terrible. I don't mean that they're hard (though they are), but that they're really unrewarding and boring. On Casual, I sat there for maybe 20 or 30 minutes clicking on Zephyrine's guardians, one after another, and occasionally healing as Zephyrine wore me down. But nothing ever substantially changed... I just kept clicking. Redbeard was similar, although not quite as bad, because I had to figure out how to get enough characters over by the soul jars to kill them while still having enough out by Redbeard to do damage to him, and at least that was interesting.

 

So... Avadon. Great game. Really great game. I think only A1 and A2 were compelling enough for me to play them three times, and Avadon now joins that club. But what the hell, man. Why is the game balance is all over the place?

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Jeff repeatedly misjudged character building in development. Some fixes appeared in Avernum: Escape from the Pit and will probably appear in Acadon 2. I think that's part of the reason he is behind on the next games.

 

Characters gained experience faster than anticipated was the easiest fix by increasing experience per level. Even then it was way too easy to reach the level cap before the last quest.

 

The original plan to let players assign two stat points per level really lead to absurd dexterity builds avoiding damage. Jeff eventually decided a fixed level up stat point was good enough in order to get the game released.

 

Item abuse was the worst and easiest to fix. To many Blademaster items for high parry was fixed by reassigning bonuses to other abilities. Zombie Bones as a joke item wasn't funny when undead were 100% resistant to cold and placing one next to Zephyrine meant 90% of her attacks on it were useless.

 

Expert fights were toughen for Zephyrine because initially you could do it at level 24 on normal. It is tedious and if you stun her you can find when she recovers that 3 of her sentinels are now active.

 

Redbeard was designed to make you take the easy way out.

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The Zephyrine fight is arguably more fun on Torment because you are in fact going to be fighting for your life constantly regardless of your build, which means you'll be scrambling to stay alive while trying not to burn up too many resources that you'll need for later in the fight. Of course, that's still only an improvement if that's your idea of fun.

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The Zephyrine fight is arguably more fun on Torment because you are in fact going to be fighting for your life constantly regardless of your build, which means you'll be scrambling to stay alive while trying not to burn up too many resources that you'll need for later in the fight. Of course, that's still only an improvement if that's your idea of fun.

Huh. You have a point. Torment is probably not for me, but the Zephyrine fight on, say, Normal might be more interesting than the same fight on Casual, because it would be just challenging enough to keep entertained throughout without getting monotonous/absurdly hard.

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