AlphaDuck

Ya I realize it's still beatable, and even with not blocking anything he can survive ok just because of high endurance. It's still weird. Also if you had 90% resistances then that should be about 60% resist on torment after the 30% penalty, so blocking 2/3 of the damage seems right.

Shouldn't I still be blocking more than? So 50% armor = 20% on torment, then I should be blocking about 10 damage on 50 damage attacks. I don't think I've blocked 10 damage ever. Not even 5.

This is bothering me. I have a character with 50% armor (level 4) and at most he blocks 1 or 2 damage of a 50 damage attack, generally he blocks 0 damage. Is it just a display error? Because although I haven't tested it, it feels like he gets hit for less than the other 3 characters (he is the "tank" of the group).

you forgot about the strength allowing more weight without being encumbered.

About armor and resistances: I feel like the best way to do armor is the way wc3 did it, where armor came in armor points instead of a straight percentage, and each point increases your damage reduction % by a little less than the previous point did. So for example the first 10 points of armor might give you 20% resistance, but then the next 10 points after that only increase your resistance to 30%. This way you can never reach unkillable levels of resistance, and even going from say 70% to 75% resistance takes a huge amount of armor. From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), in Avadon each armor piece that you were wearing reduced incoming damage seperately, so if you just had two pieces of 50% resistance armor and you took 100 damage, the first piece would reduce it to 50 damage, then the next piece would reduce it to 25 damage. This is nice in that you can't ever reach too high of resistance levels, but it also makes it really difficult to understand what going from a 20% armor item to a 30% armor item is actually going to do for you. And I'm not too sure how the other resistances/parry/dodge stacking worked, but it seemed like stacking dex/dodge definitely lacked some sort of mechanism to keep it from getting really close to, if not equal to 100% dodge. Then there are systems like skyrim used, where armor just goes up linearly until a certain point where it is hardcapped. This is stupid because it becomes a game of getting up to that cap but not going over it, cuz that's just wasted armor. Also the lower levels of armor do less work, and the higher levels of armor as you get closer to the cap do a lot more. You could half the incoming physical damage by going from 0% armor to 50% or by just going from 80% to 90% (I believe armor was capped at 90% in skyrim). Going back to wc3 armor now: here is how the actual math of it worked: damage reduction =((armor)*0.06)/(1+0.06*(armor)) damage increase = 2-0.94^(-armor) <- this would happen if you had negative armor Now here's the cool thing - That's an ugly formula to figure how much armor is going to do for you (actually not too bad compared to some others). But each point of armor increased you effective hit points (EHP) by 6%, assuming you were only being hit by phsyical damage. So if you had 1000 hit points and you buffed yourself to get 10 extra armor, that means it takes an extra 600 damage to kill you from full with only physical damage.

Originally Posted By: Othar Trygvassen: Gentleman 1. Magic damage bonus means all damage from spells and magic attacks (i.e. nearly all sorceress and shaman attacks, and various scarabs). I didn't test it extensively, but I seemed to notice that my dex based SW did more damage with scarabs like cone of fire/ice as compared to my shaman. I would expect shaman to do more because nature mastery and +magic dmg gear. The SW had similar dex compared to shaman's int, and I wasn't getting the backstab bonus (which is pretty sick actually for the dark bolt scarab). Any reasons this would be the case other than me just not testing it well enough?

Just played around with that a bit, it doesn't seem to make any difference towards the speed of combat.

One more thing to add: there were times where I really wish i could set the game speed to faster. Like having to walk somewhere through an empty area that you already cleared and you just sit there watching your guys walk across the map. Also I would definitely not mind turning off spell animations if it made combat move a lot quicker. I kinda remember this sort of thing being in older spiderweb games.

Nice review. I especially agree with #2 about enchanting. I also horded my runestones the whole game for fear of making a mistake. Even then there was a few items that I had enchanted with that +1% protection that I wished I could enchant over them. Somewhat unforgiving system, and it just made me afraid to use it at all until the very end. Also agree a lot with #4. Also to add to this, the buffs were pretty useless too. Well not useless, but there was no reason to get them for your abilities since you could just use items to always have them for the difficult fights. It would be cool if the + %increase to blessings/curses did something other than increase the duration (I assume it increased the duration, didn't really test it but it seemed that it wasnt increasing the strength of the blessing). That would give you a reason to have a support character. I really wanted to make my support blademaster work, but giving my other 2 characters like 10% extra damage each was hard to justify having a weaker bm. One thing I really liked in this game was that it seems to be designed so that you dont feel like you want to start over and build your party differently. You could respec at the trainer, and the only real permanent choice was which class your main character is. Compared to avernum where you choose your classes as well as races as well as traits at the start and then you are stuck with it. With that said, I also feel like there was not enough customizability in this game. I realize it's a balancing act with my previous point, but the skill trees were very limiting. If you wanted to get one of the highest level abilities like call drake, then that pretty much completely decided your skill tree completely. Also it was annoying having to level up skills like daze knowing that you would almost never use them.

Just finished this fight, thought I would share my experience with you guys. I played on torment difficulty, shadowwalker main character. I had read this thread before I started the fight, and before any of my secondary character side quests had came along yet, which helped a lot. I sided with my companions in all their quests so I had 5 for this fight. If I hadn't read this thread I'm sure I would have gone against them in those quests since they are all a bunch of whiners. Especially Shima. But anyways, I had mostly been preparing for this fight all game, which is maybe why it was way easier than I had anticipated after reading this thread. The fight from start to finish took about one hour, and that includes having to restart once about 10 minutes in because he killed 2 of my guys in one turn and they were the only ones with res scrolls. My setup was: Sevilin specced into full dexterity build, middle and left skill trees. All of the best ranged gear I gave to him, all enchanted with dexterity. I sent him into one room by himself to poke away at jars. All he really needs is about 5 speed potions so he can attack twice a turn. He outranges the soul jars so they cant retaliate. Rest of the party went into other room and lured Big Red in there with them. Both shadowwalkers specced into ranged dexterity builds, with the casters having middle and right support style builds, mostly since aoe spells are pretty useless for this fight. Janels call of wind was really nice, but I think I got that from a staff or something. Everyone (except Jannel) would hit the jars if there were any in that room, and when there wasnt they'd all focus on redbeard. Usually there was about 1 jar alive in sevilins room and any that popped up in the other room went down quick. Janel's job was mostly heals, dispells, summons, and buffing everyone. Important thing is to keep redbeard in a corner. Wand of attraction as well as shamans call of wind are useful for putting him where you want him. His aoe's usually never hit more than one of my guys. Everyone had a summoning wand or something like it, so I had a constant stream of meatshields to keep him in his corner. Once you get him where you want him the fight becomes a breeze. He leaps out sometimes but then you can just use knockback to put him back in his place.