Magenta

Here's a tip I just figured out. If you cure Emily's disease before you tell her about her origins, you can still advise her to get away to avoid the wrath of the Shapers.

Dude, you joined the wrong faction.

Awesome!

Yeah, short attention span - I just plain lost count. Oh well, no big deal.

I lost count. Is there a way to tell how many times you have upgraded it? I'm not using the mod at this time.

Not unless something changed recently. I wiped out the Sholai and the Emissary went hostile.

This is actually very helpful. It gives me some simple "rules of thumb" to think about. I know there's more to it than that because you also have to decide whether to put points into the primary stats or the specific skills. But it helps.

Thanks, Slarty. It was Chain Lightning I was most hoping to improve - it's the only AoE attack my solo Guardian has right now. So now I just have to decide if I should put another point in Intellect or I should hang in there because the skill points would be more useful elsewhere

Strength improves melee damage; agility improves missile damage; intellect improves spell damage. Does anything improve weapon shaping?

I STRONGLY disagree with changing the level-up from 1400 to 1700 or penalizing the XP gain based on where you are. I play on normal because it is fun and I don't have to min-max to be successful. (I know others like it - more power to them, but for me it is just too tedious). I doubt I am the only one who would be very disappointed if the game were made harder by slowing down the level-ups. If your skill level is such that normal is no longer a challenge, then raise the difficulty. That's what it's there for. Please don't suggest making it harder for the rest of us who are not so skilled. Or in other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

OK, I accept your challenge. I learned how to do it with Awesome Agent Alyssa. I'll see if I can figure out the other two. I'm starting a guardian run today...

That's actually very possible. At the time, I was wiping out large numbers with Essence Purge. So it's very possible the leftovers were stronger.

OK, @Slariton, you win. I guess that's one reason I don't like min-maxing 😃. Thanks for the clarification. So here's another question for you. I felt like spells were missing more often when the target was melee distance. Was that just a string of bad luck, or is there a reason for it?

Yeah, me too. It took me more than a handful of reloads. The trashy allies do some serious damage if you don't pay attention to them. One dose of EP wipes them all out, but they are back next turn. So Essence Shield first, hoping to get a second attack for Essence Purge to the trash. Then if I got a third try I could try to land something on Dyx. He was a LOT more resistant than his stats showed but I finally landed enough to take him down. Definitely a challenge.

Maybe. But you can probably do better than 2. I've had Spell Mastery kick in 2-3 times in a row after already getting two with essence lash followed by EP. It doesn't happen often enough to bring the average to 3 but it's probably above 2.

Have you met the Eyebeast named Dyx?

This is an interesting exercise. I'm learning a lot from the discussion. Maybe some day I will get good at this game. Some things I am still wondering about: How much Spellcraft is good in this scenario? How much Melee skill should an Agent have? Are there enemies that are immune to all magic where you need a physical attack? Or should she stick with what she does best?

@Hyperion703 The first thing I noticed was the uber-high Spellcraft. Does that make a big difference? No, Taker. Not that I care that much for the lunatics (sorry @alhoon). I like to try different factions just for the fun of it. But the high EP was definitely worth it. I got two from training and don't remember where I got the other two - probably canisters somewhere. By the time I got to GU I was getting 500-600 damage pretty consistently. Except for Dyx. I had trouble hitting him with anything. I need to look at this some more but right now I gotta run. Later.

I did. Two reasons: One, I couldn't resist experimenting with the new weapon shaping. And it seemed like the spells missed a lot when the opponents closed to melee distance. It probably isn't true but it seemed that way.

Right. The highest baton she could use was (I forgot the name - the one that slows.) Some of her combat skills came from the Guardian Cloak. I did not find an Agent Cloak. Some of the magic came from Helix Ring and Gazer Skin Boots. Might have been something else but I'm not thinking of it offhand.

Some of my thoughts on this build: I pumped up Magic since that is the Agent's forte. (But apparently I went overboard on MMagic) I put nothing into Shaping other than healing - didn't even use the canisters. This was to be a solo run so no need. I kept Essence Mastery fairly low until mid to late game when the number of spells cast started eating into the essence. I gave her a moderate amount of combat skills - some of those excess MM points might have been useful here. Or maybe Intellect and duration.

Makes sense. She actually did not use MM much when it got to late game. There's not much need to Daze or charm if you can just wipe them out with Essence Purge.

Oohh, I didn't even think of that. Wow. That's a lot of skill points I could have put somewhere else. Where should I cap it - about six?

@Hyperion703 and @alhoon expressed interest in seeing my Agent build, and doing some comparisons with theirs, so here it is. I hope I did the images right. https://imgur.com/a/qbSiDlw https://imgur.com/a/9vDRvec https://imgur.com/23flMx0 I'm sure this is not an ideal build, but I had a lot of fun with it. I decided to capture where I finished the main quest as I think that might be more meaningful for comparison. After that she went to Gazak-Uss, leveled up to 22, and added some stats from canisters (and still struggled with Eyebeast Dyx).

Touching up?