Mechalibur

Is this QW1 or QW2? In 2 you need to get the recipe from the Erudico Tower.

Maybe more than 1 duel in a throne room (the foreign nation's throne room and Haven's itself... assuming you challenge Sutter)

Agents are pretty good in Mutagen, by my estimation after playing each class on Torment. When you account for the Tombs bonuses, they actually end up with equal or greater points in every stat/skill compared to the Shaper other than Essence Mastery, which Shaper wins by 1 point. They also have a 1.3x hp multiplier which also makes them less prone to random deaths than a Shaper would be in the early game. It's also a bit hard for Shapers to capitalize on their strengths in the early game due to control level limiting how strong they can make their creations. By late game, a Shaper is probably better than an Agent due to the lowered costs of shaping skills giving them a much more formidable army. But by that point, you've got the game breaking dominate and airshock spells that can win you most encounters (and you always have the trusty searer for bosses), so I didn't really find it too much of a struggle. Regardless, I'm pretty happy to hear a battle discipline-esque system may be coming to the next game. Hopefully it's tied to skills in the melee tree so Guardians (and to a lesser extent, Agents) are naturally the best at them. It'll also be nice for Shock Troopers down the line since their medium skills in combat skills were kind of hard to take advantage of in 4/5.

It also affects the ending slides. Even if you don't join a faction, their ending changes if you kill the leader vs left them alone.

I think Jeff has actually mentioned on the Steam forums at some point that there were some essence-based melee and missile techniques planned for the G2 remake.

Yep. If you have some extra energy at the end of a dungeon right before the boss encounter, it can be worthwhile to cast enough blesses to get everyone to 5 stacks for a noticeable damage increase.

Pretty sure it's all weapon attacks and abilities.

They can be a little less obvious in QW compared to Geneforge, to be fair. For example, the Queen says she hates how the Dhaga treat their woman, but actually trying to change that lowers your Queen rep on top of your Ro rep, presumably because even though she disagrees with the practice, she doesn't want to rock the boat unnecessarily. There are also a few checks where not being diplomatic gets you more Ro reputation points. Like telling the chief of Etzae that you don't care what he thinks gets you Ro rep, whereas being diplomatic makes him think you're weak. When you're asked if the blood of the Ro is inside you, you get points for saying sometimes it flows off your sword.

Yeah, it's not a very good weapon by my estimation. Even without the speed penalty, I'm not sure if I'd use it much: the damage bonus is barely higher than something like the Ice Bow, and it requires 3 levels in both combat and magic trees compared to 2 for the ice bow. Vulnerability is nice in theory, but it comes at a point in the game where most enemies are rocking a huge amount of curse resist.

There's way more canister interactions in the later games, but that's because they're built around canisters being optional. Although you can still get your crazy ending in Mutagen

Yeah, that would have been a nice inclusion. It definitely worked well in Mutagen. At the very least all the books we read should be saved somewhere.

It affects one of the 3 major endings in Geneforge Mutagen, and only changes one of the lines. Since canisters are about the only way to learn new spells/creatures in Mutagen (it doesn't have the training system the other games have), I really don't recommend trying to limit your canister intake unless you want to do a challenge run.

Huh, I never really had trouble with the Vlish in the woods. The spawner was really tricky, naturally, but that's supposed to be more difficult than the patrols, I'd guess. Anyway, I definitely report when stuff seems in the beta way too difficult (the Western Wastes used to be even more difficult - you're welcome :P), but the Pentil Woods Vlish never really struck me as notably more difficult. Guess we just had different experiences.

From the game code. Each skill has its own code and each location has its own scripts that can be examined. It's also how I found out about the Strength bonus for interacting with this one pool 9 times.

Queen rep does nothing in-game (other than some dialogue changes). Ro rep occasionally offers more shops, and lets you avoid some fights. Violence only comes up once, I think, and if it's high enough you can threaten some enemies out of an encounter. Sending the governors to different regions is pretty funny, I like that idea.

Nope. It's a key part of the difficulty.

I guess it would have to be Delia after Sutter and I kill each other.

I'm most curious about the role the Nisse will play in the final game. They definitely are up to something, but it's hard to tell what their long-term goals are. Regarding how big Haven is, I don't think it really matters much in the long run. You already get an impression of how big it is when you're solving major problems for your vassals and it barely registers for your family members who are dealing with everything else related to Haven. Having a map showing how much space that takes up in comparison wouldn't really change that imo. Regarding Darmal's clan, I think that is brought up once or twice. Most of the clan seems to have moved to the vassal state to the east, using the money they gained from their influential connection to Haven to fund the expedition. I don't think Delia has any plans on becoming the next monarch. She seems to fully support Sutter as the next in line.

Tombs and South Bridge aren't too hard to reach. I'd recommend keeping the Magic Craft/Blessing Magic/Mental Magic/Spellcraft at 0 until you find them. For Leadership and Mechanics, I absolutely do NOT advise waiting for the sarcophagi. It's pretty far into the game and leadership and mechanics are very useful right out of the gate. You'd also only be saving 1 skill point each which is absolutely not worth the irritation of having 0 leadership/mechanics for most of the game.

Oh is that from the hint book? Looks like an unfortunate typo.

Latest patch added a new cheat "pleasedontsteal" - Resets theft to 0 in all regions

What quest is this for?

I played around with this a bit - you can set yourself to 100% mental resist by adding "cr_resistances 7 = 100;" to the class you're playing in the GFItemsChars file. It isn't retroactive, however, so it will only work on a new game. It's worth mentioning characters have 75% mental resist by default though, so I haven't found Vlish to be that big of a deal (although it does suck that you can't really do anything but wait if you do get afflicted).

Weirdly enough most of them don't matter. Like you can take Yvette's with no penalties at all. Check out the Reputation Thread if you want a breakdown of what dialogue options affect which reputations: https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/27853-qw2-reputation/

I recommend just fighting the dragon until she goes away - she won't hold a grudge. Running east is doable, but way more challenging.