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A2:CS - First look at balance updates


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Torment is insanely hard in avernum 2. Once I arrived at the mage tower I don't know if my party can deal with battles with dozens of opponents with resistance piercing attacks. Especially considering my 2 melee fighters are not cutting it because melee has been nerfed in this avernum. Odd choice nerfing melee considering how magic is very powerful in this series. You need a very cookie cutter build consisting mostly of all mages for torment with one tank. Which is dissapointing because I remember avadon 2 there was a lot more viability when it came to the classes on torment difficulty.

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On torment you can do several different party builds that will work. The key is making sure you increase the attack attribute so you can still hit even with all those armor to hit chance penalties.

 

Once you make it back to the Tower of Magi, do the easy quests to gain a few levels over what a normal difficulty party can do. Go north through Mertis, Silvar, Fort Duvno, and back to the area where you started talking to people to gather quests. Or go west to the Great Cave and turn in item collection quests and visit all those towns and forts for experience.

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Well I decided to cave in and lower the difficulty. While perhaps I can get through the game by grinding and picking fights in the right places I decided to say screw it. Didn't want to deal with what I feel is a bogus biased rule set that turns the game into korean grinder mmorpg which is more nuisance then fun. Especially remembering how much more fun I had in original avernum because I played on normal difficulty. I'll stick to black gaurds 2 for my tactical gaming cravings and avernum for exploration and fun.

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I also don't play on Torment anymore. I like the challenging battles, but I don't like that many battles are very long despite not being challenging at all. I'd play Torment without the "piles of HP for generic enemies" syndrome.

 

SW games are better balanced and have less exploitable systems than they used to. I always played on Torment back in the days of G3 and A4 simply because the best builds made the game a complete pushover otherwise. A6 and Avadon were less exploitable, and by A:EFTP and Avadon 2 things had really shifted. A2:CS is harder than A:EFTP because, between the chapter system and the clearance system and other travel restrictions, you can't just rush for the strongest abilities quite the way you could in A:EFTP. This is a good thing.

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There's some nice treasure in that section, but nothing important that you can't get elsewhere -- no spells or anything like that. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

I left those poor Vahnatai to die, tho.

 

Beyond that and optimizing my party though, the dialogue is getting too me. Too many characters just absolutely [censored] on the lizards and cats and the only change in dialogue is the guy saying "uhhh no offense" to the ones you have in your party.

 

It just seems like it was written to have a group of humans in it.

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It kills the roleplay and immersion factor forcing yourself making a optimal group. Because you'll be skipping out on stuff like cave lore and lock picking. I feel the game was made for normal or hard. Torments more like a challenge mode of like "hey your not supposed to win kind of deal" unless you optimize and cheese your way through battles through daze and aoe spell spamming.

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If you switch to a lower difficulty level, then you can't get a medal for the higher one even if it was just one combat.

 

Torment, as Slarty said, has long boring battles punctuated by some truly terrifying one like watching Sulfras get even more frenzied and moving past 4 attacks a round. :)

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It kills the roleplay and immersion factor forcing yourself making a optimal group. Because you'll be skipping out on stuff like cave lore and lock picking. I feel the game was made for normal or hard. Torments more like a challenge mode of like "hey your not supposed to win kind of deal" unless you optimize and cheese your way through battles through daze and aoe spell spamming.

 

I don't think that's true. The penalty for getting cave lore is a few hundred gold. And tool use is totally worth it on Torment. I typically finish Jeff's games with a party that can access all caches, open all doors, read all spellbooks, etc.

 

Now, it does mean that you need to build your characters optimally in terms of role and point distribution. Daze mostly doesn't work at higher levels anyway, but in any case using the available spells in strategic ways isn't really "cheesing". Cheesing would be going back to town after every fight, or ducking in an out of a level to kill one enemy at a time, whittling away a group, etc.

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If you switch to a lower difficulty level, then you can't get a medal for the higher one even if it was just one combat.

 

Torment, as Slarty said, has long boring battles punctuated by some truly terrifying one like watching Sulfras get even more frenzied and moving past 4 attacks a round. :)

 

Eugh, Not only that, but her fire breath starts doing around 1,500 fire damage (before mitigation, of course). And all the guys she summons... that fight is hands down the toughest one in Avernum.

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I don't think that's true. The penalty for getting cave lore is a few hundred gold. And tool use is totally worth it on Torment. I typically finish Jeff's games with a party that can access all caches, open all doors, read all spellbooks, etc.

 

Now, it does mean that you need to build your characters optimally in terms of role and point distribution. Daze mostly doesn't work at higher levels anyway, but in any case using the available spells in strategic ways isn't really "cheesing". Cheesing would be going back to town after every fight, or ducking in an out of a level to kill one enemy at a time, whittling away a group, etc.

This is torment in a nutshell

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