Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

Two handed generally doesn't seem to give benefits strong enough to be worth it. It depends on exactly what gear you have though; at any given point in the game your "best" weapons might be a two-hander and there are edge situations where the damage boost from the two-hander is worth it (e.g, the first few boards of Avadon 2 the iron spear is worth it because it often makes the difference between one-shotting adn two-shotting enemies). Late game once you have lots of benefits from each piece of gear it's usually worth the shield, especially for boss fights where the defenses make a big difference over time and most of your damage is from abilities anyway.

It doesn't. e.g., https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1894354655341070811/13C78989B65016E3938E632462C4C3FC23F5D3DA/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false In the current live version of Avadon 2 on Steam, all items that give +evasion give five times the amount listed in the above FAQ. It's especially an issue for Deep Runestones since, like, adding them to an item is irrevocable, so it's a big choice, but it's consistent across all items, not just runestones. I'm *assuming*, based on the above, that the FAQ is correct and the game isn't, but it's not clear. edit: not all items, just all equipped gear. In-pack charms seem to list the smaller values, not large multiples. This leaves runestones really ambiguous.

Coming into this . . . Ten years later, the current steam version displays the much higher evasion values for items (e.g, 5% for a deep runestone not 1%). Which is currently correct in game? It makes a big difference!

I think there's a certain random element to the codes. I just did a replay of QW 1 and got two wildly different ending codes on different very similar saves: -> pfjfpjahbron (jabroni lol) Same as above, but also --> pfkfpaahbron

Yeah, the next game is either conquering a whole new territory or "conquering" haven out from under Sutter. I lean towards suspecting the latter since the first game was already "the conqueror."

Has anyone got a handy list or ("calendar") of the Queen's Wish month names and the number of days in each? I didn't see such on this sub already and it doesn't seem to be the same as per the other games.

I only have a few core tips as the game system overall is pretty flexible. Here's what I'd suggest: Unlock your first four forts as soon as you can (immediately after leaving the Gentle Coast). Party building: After you've unlocked all four forts, recruit three new party members, one from each district, and move your havenite recruit's gear over to them. You probably want, at first, one combat-focused "tank", one "support", and one "mage", while your PC puts his points into the Haven cultural skills (at first) (late game I like to make my Prince a warrior mage with arcane weapon, but that's a personal preference and works best at level 15+). You can build for two-handed weapons if you want but apart from a few very specific unique items you're generally best off with a one handed weapon and a defensive offhand item. Characters get 22 skill points maximum; reaching rank 4 in a tree gives benefits. Most characters will want to spend 6+ points in the Cultural category though, so practically speaking each character can only max-rank two trees, not three. Long term, I find it useful for every party member to have an AoE heal; this means everyone but my prince usually invests some in the Support tree (which also gives them generally-useful boosts to speed and evasion). For your forts, put your initial resources into building blacksmith, carpenter, alchemist, weaver. After that, you can buy Mills and Bakeries to bring costs down, but don't invest in Distilleries at first, as you will need that Quicksilver to upgrade your forts and expand later Once you have four of each shop, spend remaining quicksilver on upgrading forts. There are different strategies here and I'd suggest reading the forum further to get different opinions and figure out what will work for you. The big hidden decision here is that you upgrade will unlock different upgrades at the Tower of Erudico. my suggestion would be making your first unlock into Knowledge to unlock Energy Potions. Other useful unlocks are the "Mad Flurry" skill, which gives a good AoE ability and unlocks with two forts in Industry, and "Resolve of the Ro" which gives strong mental / stun resist and unlocks with three forts dedicated to the Ro. As to initial gear: buy Ro Sideblades (wherever you can find them, often from Rokaj vendors) and the best bows you can; that will be enough to carry your team through most of the first part of the game. You can also invest in Haste Augments (the 6% ones) and then move them to your better gear when you get it. You want most of your characters to have around 25% speed *before* Haste buff, so that you're always operating near the 65% speed cap. Move through and clear the first four zones. (it's generally easiest to start with gentle coast, then Kranas Woods, the Low Dhaga, then High Litha). As you clear those zones you'll bump into three fairly tough zone border challenges that unlock the second halves of the Kranas Woods, Dhaga, and Litha respectively. Do those after clearing the rest of the zones and upgrading your gear. Once your team has upgraded bows and can keep "inspiring cry" and "haven's might" up through most fights, you should be able to clear them. Once you unlock the second half of each map, immediately go and upgrade the second fort in each zone. Same drill -- upgrade the four shops in each fort, then upgrade the fort, then once you can afford it, mills and bakeries. Once you've bought every other upgrade, do distilleries last. You are unlikely to have enough resources for every distillery etc. unless you have gathered everything, accepted every possible bribe, missed no resource rewards, have enough popularity to avoid all theft, and in short have essentially finished the game. Money and shopping- Money is *relatively* tight and while you'll probably be able to buy most everything you want by the end of the game, efficient shopping can make a *big* difference in what you can afford; buy only what you need, and buy mills and bakeries first where you can. You will get an additional discount by buying your gear on the first day of each month. The "start" day for each run of the game is randomized, but each month seems to be about 30 to 40 days long, so it can be worthwhile to "save up" for a buying bonanza at the start of the month. Faction choices: generally speaking, supporting the Rokaj will make the game easier, while supporting the Queen gives you reputation that will apparently carry over to the third game. The big advice here is say whatever you think will make the person you're talking to happiest, you're probably right. Supporting the rights of women will generally piss off everyone, both the Queen and the locals. Reputation isn't the only effect of your choices; often (and especially in the Kranas Woods) rare or unique gear will be gated behind various faction choices. Pissing the Rokaj off too much can make the game very difficult to complete -- if you can't maintain your shops, you can't maintain your gear, you'll start getting stacking penalties, and those will hurt your combat performance. found loot: Generally speaking you will find better gear in your built shops than out in the world, but found loot saves upgrade costs. Rings, necklaces, and a few top-end augments cannot be purchased in your fort shops, only found as loot or bought from Rokaj vendors. Tactics: You can, roughly, divide fights into two categories: trash and bosses. The goal in any non-boss "trash" fight is to get through it with as little expenditure of resources (health, energy) as possible. The goal in any boss fight is to get through it with enough gas left in the tank to finish out whatever few encounters might be left in the zone guarding extra loot. Melee weapons do more damage per strike, generally speaking, than ranged weapons. However: because engaging in melee limits your movement to one space per turn, it's much harder to focus fire with melee weapons, and melee-only enemies cannot hit you when you are not in melee range. Net result, you will generally find that missile weapons are much more useful most of the time than melee weapons. You still need melee weapons for the rare instances where you either start in melee range or don't have room to retreat, but they shouldn't be an upgrade priority. For most fights, even "trash" fights, the speed and damage bonus from Inspiring Cry or Haven's Might are worth the energy cost -- combined with ranged weapons focusing fire and a bit of kiting, you should usually be able to cut most enemies down before they reach the party, and you'll end up spending less health and energy, net, if you buff at the start of the fight than you would healing up at the end. You'll usually get a point or two of energy back on each character at the end of the fight, so it can be useful for any character at "max" in the last round to top off with a heal or buff. Conversely, though, you don't want to spend more than one or two energy, average, per character per fight, or you'll blow your budget and be out of gas by the time you hit the boss. For "Boss" fights, these are generally a damage race -- you want to take the boss down as fast as possible before their special abilities can trigger and wipe you out. This makes boss fights the time to start dumping all those special attack abilities. Most bosses will be immune or resistant to some abilities but few are resistant to everything. Right-click them for information and see if they're vulnerable to anything in particular. Stunning Strike is often a good first move as it applies both Stun and Slow and both of those buy you time in the damage race. Brutal Blow is often a very good option -- five stacks of Bleed will rapidly add up the damage on most bosses. Many bosses have a point-blank-range AoE or other powerful short range AoE attack. One strategy that is often effective is to summon a construct or skeleton immediately adjacent to the boss, but on a side away from the party, to distract it and direct those attacks away from the party, then stand at (you guessed it) maximum bow range and plink away.

qw2cnbtftdwfgas was my code I replaced Yvette but not Aato (reasoning being that Aato was just incompetent, appointing a non-Havenite for a governorship seemed too far out of character for my Prince, but Yvette was actively corrupt and thus had to go, period) I thought I had not improved rights for women but I got the slide at the ending saying I had Had a high reputation with the queen at the end and declared hero of haven Fought the Wolf and the Low Dhaga at Prova Krug. Answered the challenge and won it of course. I ordered a cautious approach with the army., Avoided the Nisse entirely. Was generally nonviolent. Completed the Geld Nas test Didn't kill the dragons. Generally supported Sutter etc. General feedback on the game: Overall I liked the writing. There were a few areas o couldn't figure out how to access (e.g. storage bay 2) and I'm still not sure if that was the game leaving loose ends deliberately or me missing something In terms of the tactical game I'd suggest considering, for the next game, setting it such that you cannot use a bow at all with a melee enemy next to you. The focus fire strength of combined bows is such a strong tactical advantage that melee weapons can be almost entirely neglected, and you can almost always take one step away and fire anyway. Alternatively maybe shields and melee weapon bonuses shouldn't function while the bow is active

How do critical hits factor into this math? Is there a point where, say, a +5% critical rune is better mathematically than a + damage rune?

I've been thinking through the same question. Overall I think the best option is *probably* 1 knowledge / 2 industry / 4 rho OR 1/3/3 depending. That assumes you are taking mad flurry and resolve of the rho. That's based on a few assumptions though. First is that you're generally making pro Haven reputation choices and / or pissing off the rho, such that the rho rep is useful to you. Second is that your characters have the spare points for those skills. Third is that your party has an even split between magic and physical damage. If your party balances towards physical damage then industry has a lot of advantages. Edit: seven forts total so seven upgrades. It's probably best to upgrade knowledge first as energy potions are often the difference between a failed dungeon run and a successful one.

You can also ask your butler Stonehouse what people think of you and he'll give an approximate verbal eval of your standing with each faction. Useful for testing just how much you pissed whoever off with the latest court judgement.

Does "+bloodletting" add bleed to your weapon, add damage ticks to bleeds you inflict otherwise, or ?? Mechanically how does it work precisely?

Ok, interesting. Wait though -- by "mad flurry damage" is that damage vs the primary target or damage against the peripheral targets? So, arcane weapon equipped, + magic damage boosts against primary, + physical boosts against peripheral targets of the flurry? Or do you lose +mag damage bonuses against all targets with mad flurry?

So if you're using mad flurry with an arcane weapon, will you get more damage from equipping bonus magic damage items or bonus physical damage items?

hfhfprahbson

A few changes I'm noticing in the demo: mills/bakeries/distilleries give discounts now rather than ongoing revenue, probably so there's less of an imperative to front load building them. The player character gets the opportunity to learn other cultural skills besides those of Haven most of the skills seem broadly similar but there may be some balance tweaks, not 100% sure

Arg, I missed this kickstarter -- any way to "Slacker backer" or sign up late?

Ok, I'm getting close to the end of the game -- around level 28, with mostly just the end game quests left -- and the game is actually continuing to be very, very difficult, probably the hardest RPG I can remember playing, and I've been playing this kind of game since the early Ultima days. In terms of balance, overall the remix achieves its goal as far as the classes tested (swords, polearms, mage, priest). Everything's useful, nothing's really required except priest. Strategically, my sword fighter is front line, and switches between two swords and sword +shield depending on how much offense/defense he needs; the polearm is my heavy hitter; the mage is necessary for area damage and haste; the priest is of course essential. The one change I'd make is that limiting all the mage spells to cones seems like a bit of an over-nerf, especially when coupled with the removal of Frenzy from haste. Some of the item changes are a bit harsh, too: For Torment, going arcane lore is definitely preferable to the sage lore route just because sage lore isn’t really worth it; you can't wait that long to get spell upgrades, and mages have skill points to burn anyway. The various wait-to-get-spells strategies don’t really work because Torment is so difficult you can’t put things off or wait to buy necessary spells or skills. You also need to put about 1 in every 3 stat points in endurance just to keep yourself from getting one-round-killed, but that means you can’t always hit as hard etc; and miss more; need gear. The lack of auto-frenzy with Haste is a huge deal. After a certain point major boss fights seem to require Frenzy to defeat -- the longer fights take, the more chances the boss has to Charm your front line or do something else catastrophic. The battle frenzy discipline is basically a necessity for my fighters and for my two casters I have to use potions and scrolls for just about every boss fight. The hardest battles, though, aren't so much the boss fights as the giant outdoor battles or ones where I can't use terrain for defense. For example, I couldn't beat the Aranea Queen until level 27, I couldn't beat the Fiery Pack until about five levels after I managed to kill the Chasm Drake. The issue is that the -30% penalty adds up when you're facing multiple area-attack opponents at once, and if you can't use the terrain to limit how many you're facing at once, it's a huge issue. You have to save all the various +resistance items and use them; they aren't sale junk. edit: why the hell is north the right-arrow key and not the up-arrow key? After over a hundred hours, that's still confusing.

What's "hostile effect resistance" ? Does it include resistance to everything, including physical damage, or is it just to "effects" like curses and stuns, or ??

Question: is it still possible to get +1 cave lore in the base remix so you don't have to take the skill all the way to 12? It looks like the first expedition ring was one of the things that got changed.

I'm about halfway through my Torment playthrough at this point (level 16) using one sword character, one polearm, one mage, one priest. Again, this is a cold review -- never played this game before at all. So far in terms of game balance: 1) For the sword guy, I found dual weilding was preferable for the first ten levels or so, but after that, once I'd found a decent shield, the added Parry benefit became very useful, arguably even essential, for my lead character. I might go back to dual wielding once I have my Parry skill maxed -- I go back and forth situationally. 2) For polearms overall so far I've found spears preferable to halberds. Part of this is I've just found more, better spears so far, but partly it's that the targeted damage boost is more useful vs. bosses etc; Cleave is just something that randomly breaks Daze, at least in the early game. Reliably does more damage than the sword guy and the two of them can set up backstabs for each other really nicely, but in one-wide corridors this one's useless, so I have to station them back behind a doorway and then have the shield guy "pull" the enemies back to the ambush. 3) Mage is necessary for Daze early on and then for Haste but after that she seems a little underpowered now relative to the rest of the party; she's a walking Haste buff that spits out lightning and cold, basically, and my priest has Call the Storm anyway. Slow is a little useful too, but the whole porting around and point-blank aoe thing is a little underwhelming because it involves getting far too close-range. I probably need to buy some more spells for her but haven't gotten around to it -- in a two-melee, two-caster party the cloaks are less interesting, though I suppose I should go ahead and get them. 4) Priest is pretty cool and the one essential character in the party; the Ward spells are an absolute requirement for survival, return life is crazy useful, etc. She can even stand in for a mage using call storm. Her mana bar is basically my "this much left before you have to return to town" meter. Overall I wouldn't have been able to get this far without the various guides, especially the "What should I do Next" guide - I doubt I'd have ever picked up on how necessary Ward spells are, for example. I really like the very tactical gameplay; this is a punishing game that doesn't forgive mistakes. Tactically, my main strategy so far in dungeons is the aforementioned double-backstab ambush at the openings of corridors. In open terrain I have a harder time; I tend to use daze/snare + call the storm to buy time as a sort of jury-rigged crowd control. In terms of class balance it feels like the "necessary" characters are a tank and a priest, maybe a mage for Haste, and then one open slot. If you go polearm you can set up nice backstab ambushes and trade off hits; it's nice having a second backup tank so the whole party doesn't collapse the minute the front guy falls. Not having tested the other character classes, it feels like if you went archer you (presumably) would have a really powerful conga line for narrow corridors; if you went 2nd priest, especially fighter-priest, you'd have a nearly immortal party; and if you went 2nd mage you could probably clean up with Cloak of the Arcane.

I noticed in one of the slith forts there are broken swords near the anvil. They're fixing them!

The whole rush-stagnant-tunnels strategy seems a lot less viable on Torment just because I can't imagine how you'd ever complete enough fights to level up to that point without buying a certain number of spell levels. I imagine you could still save some cash, especially in a multiple-mage party, but the starting four are not enough -- you need to buy haste, etc., just to stay alive and handle the few level-appropriate quests. I'm on level 9 or so now and yeah Blossthus makes the rest of the neph fort look like pattycake. They should've just been having that dude hang out in front all day. I moved on and left him behind. Hopefully while I'm out travelling he'll step out of his room, realize all his friends are dead, and sink into profound depression by the time I make it back around there in a few more levels.

Good luck! Looks like we're running this together It's a little strange starting with the remix on a first playthrough because all the guides etc. are a little useful but they're all a little bit off too. My party plan is a fair bit more min-maxed than yours but I think I'll have everything I *need*, though I still have a few odd spots to figure out, mostly some extra skill points in my mages that i'm not sure where to allocate. (If I'm making any math errors please let me know!) At the moment I'm up to level 7 and starting to feel like I actually pack some punch. Two fighters setting up backstabs for each other is a really powerful combo, and they're both tough enough to take a hit when they have to. Overall I'm finding the spear more useful than the halberd just because of the potential for really high damage hits against bosses; cleave is nice but anything it'll kill I can just wait a round and kill with a direct hit, plus it breaks Daze. Dual wield is preferable to shield for now but I think once I get my Parry skill up that'll be different. I'm also glad to see the remix doesn't break Steam achievements, which mods sometimes do for some games.

Thanks again! I have read through the forum etc., just couldn't find answers; I think most veteran players just assume this kinda stuff and never explicitly note it. One more question: how persistent is the world? I.e., if I get sick of carrying stuff around, can I just drop it all in the middle of Fort Avernum and leave it all there to pick up later? How much later (is there a running clock in this game?) If I steal something and then drop it in public, is it still flagged as "stolen" such that if I pick it up again I'll get attacked or whatever? Really tempted to just drop all my old stuff in a big heap by the exit from the training dungeon. "Hey newbies! Have some fancy gear on me!" On a similar note, if I sell something to a vendor can I buy it back later?