Mechalibur

It's absolutely a great addition. I want to hear about cultures native to the Ashen Isles in the 3 remake and what their perspective on the war is.

The Takers certainly have a philosophy that can sound reasonable on its own - the Shapers are perpetuating slavery and there's no way to free the serviles (and commons to a lesser extent) without drastic action being taken. The biggest issue for a lot of players, I think, is how awful the Takers are to you personally.

In the first game, your first encounter with a Taker is a spy that asks you to murder Ellhrah, the leader of a faction that's been quite reasonable to you. While most serviles you encounter treat you as either an equal (the Awakened) or a superior (the Obeyers), a significant number of Takers you meet are either violent (requiring leadership or stealth to bypass) or dismissive of you. Only a few actually make an attempt to reason with you like Gnorrel or Eko Blade.

Second game is more of the same. The first Taker you're likely to meet asks you to kill an Awakened guard who's keeping the roads safe from rogues. Unless you do that, you likely have to fight or sneak your way around Taker encampments separating the Taker and Awakened lands who want to attack you on sight. Syros is willing to work with you and explain their philosophy, but even if Zhass-Uss is friendly, several of the serviles there want nothing to do with you.

Now that's not to say they're jerks for no reason. There's definitely a history that guides their actions, but from a player perspective, I can see why a lot of people have an adverse reaction to them.

His resistance is mostly fire damage. You'd be better off having drayks/drakons use their melee attack against him.

2 minutes ago, TriRodent said:

I haven't tried it in this game, but in the originals you could reload one by attacking something with an empty one.  The first 'shot' would be reloading the baton and subsequent shots would work as normal.

 

(save first I'd hope it would go without saying...).  If you 'attacked' a town guard and shot him with an empty baton, it would reload and be ready to go when for when you actually got back to real combat situations without having to spend a round on that when something is trying to perforate your skin.

 

Amazingly the guards never seemed to get upset with you...

OP is asking about unloading a baton (presumably to get ammunition about of batons that come fully loaded), not reloading them.

Yep... it's one of the reasons you can't complete the quest if the Takers are hostile. At least you can continue on with the Sholai quest chain if you have good leadership.

Nope.

I think you can mod in +accuracy as a bonus to equipment, but you'd probably have to manually add it to every weapon.

8 hours ago, alhoon said:

That is not true; he could go to the Barzites and they will welcome him. He could go to the Takers and they would accept him.

 

I highly doubt that. He already picked his side and presumably has bad history with the other factions. The Takers especially would probably try and eat him just for showing his face in Zhass-Uss.

9 hours ago, alhoon said:

Furthermore, the only times Tuldaric stops his research and quest for power is ... to help serviles remove the Shaper limitations to their spellcasting potential. He clearly does not think like the old Tuldaric, but he still cares for the Awakened enough to go out of his way to help them.

Considering the number of magic-wielding serviles at the start of the game, it's quite possible he did this before the canister madness madness started, back when he was still idealistic about the Awakened and very invested in their cause. Even if it was after the canister madness, there's a good chance he did it just to prove it could be done. The Awakened gave him a difficult challenge and completing it was a test of his skill and mastery that no other shaper was capable of until this point. I can definitely see a mad scientist type doing that outside of moral convictions.

I don't think the idea is that Tuldaric is acting more like a Taker than an Awakened. It's that his self-shaping and canister usage have stripped away his principles and his relationships. He only maintains his allegiance with the Awakened because he believes it will give him enemies to test his new power and experiments on, and so that he can have allies that will supply him with materials and test subjects. He clearly did care about their cause at some point, but that doesn't even seem to register to him any more.

It's a bit of a shame he isn't mentioned in any of the endings. His research is a huge plot point in the overall narrative, with his research being vital for the plans of the Takers, Barzites, and Awakened. I'm curious what he gets up to in a post-Awakened victory.

Yep, no use.

That's not a feature in the remakes.

The Find Jeek quest. It's an Awakened-only quest that's given in Zhass-Uss (although I think you can still heal Jeek if you're not with the Awakened).

Yeah optimizing training timing was so annoying. Good riddance.

My understanding is that each individual 3%/4% chance is rolled separately and if any of them are a success, you get a quick attack.

Attacking with Zora counts as making an attack. So you can't beat fights with her if you want the achievement.

Jeff mentioned the Sholai would return back in the Kickstarter, so that wasn't a backer suggestion or anything.

nlambert has the full list of trainers and canisters in this index. Just look for "Create Drayk" and you'll get a list of trainers and whether they're faction specific or not.

For completeness' sake, they have the following armor values:

Frosted Annulet: 2% armor, 8% magic armor

Slayer's Chestguard: 44% armor, 22% magic armor (also has -10% accuracy and 60% stun resist like a shaped breastplate would)

All-Protector: 25% armor, 15% magic armor

Creator's Belt: 8% armor, 5% magic armor

Feisty Slap Gloves: 6% armor, 2% magic armor

Probably the same with Rhakkus then. I think he was consistently male in the originals, but female in Mutagen.

It's 100 7 now, I believe.

Learned Darian and Rhakkus have also changed genders. I doubt it's an intentional change, this kinda stuff happens all the time in Spiderweb games (like the Avernum dragons)

It's worth noting: one downside to the Essence Eater is how it interacts with the Frosted Annulet artifact. If you enhance the Frosted Annulet to improve your melee skills, it gives you a 20% chance for your physical damage to deal the same amount of cold damage to an enemy. With most weapons, that means double damage (unless they have unequal armor and cold resist), but with the Essence Eater, only the physical portion of the attack is getting doubled.

You also don't have to kill everyone in Rising. Stannis can be dueled without turning the town hostile. That makes him one of the best targets for the Helix ring as well.

It was briefly 12 during testing - I'm pretty sure it's 10 in the most recent version. But yeah, it's pretty easy to max out both weapons, and any character should have at least 10 canisters they don't care enough about.

It's 1 damage die per character level and most weapons have 2 base damage, so it's pretty easy to calculate the damage at level 20:

Purifying Blade: 49-237

Essence Eater: 43-129 physical + 43-84 energy

Puresteel Soulblade: 46-222

Guardian Claymore (for reference): 36-172

Purifying Blade can be used to eat canisters, up to 10, although that makes the canister unavailable to you. Each canister improves the damage dice by 2, ranging from 7-27 damage dice.

Essence Eater has a different base attack: unlike most weapons, each level adds 1d3 physical damage and 1d2 energy damage (which is .5 higher on average than the standard 1d5 most weapons get). Each canister you've used (which is retroactive) powers up the blade by one level, ranging from 5 to 21 damage dice. So 16 canisters total, I think.

You can check membership flags with the "gsdf" cheat code. It will return a number 1-3: 1 is not joined, 2 is joined, 3 is joined then left

"gsdf 100 2" - Servants

"gsdf 100 3" - Awakened (although this won't turn Zhass-Uss hostile)

"gsdf 100 4" - Barzites

"gsdf 100 5" - Takers