ex post slarto

The logic problem tests such as you can find online aren't real IQ tests, which normally involve a "battery" of different types of tests. Real IQ tests don't test consistently for what we consider intelligence, either, though they do test consistently for certain subsets of it.

Wait, does that mean that a singleton can't complete the fight?

It's a job board quest, and it doesn't show up the first time you look at the board. You need to finish other quests first.

You'll be able to get there later in the game, after a certain event. Until then, you can't get to 'em.

The items he wants are very specific. As I recall, one of them looks almost identical to another item -- maybe a teacup? Check the list against your inventory directly.

Hmm. I think I'll try not taking the geas, and then periodically seeing if I can go back and take it and how it interacts with the cursing, and so on.

So what's the deal with Gladwell?

I know the basic structure: geas gives +1 to primary stats, requires obtaining 5 items later which mostly make towns mad at you. I'm wondering:

1) From a munchkin perspective, does it really hurt to have those towns mad?

2) Is it possible to just wait till the late game to take the geas, teleport around to get the items and rewards, then kill Gladwell and remove the geas, all at once? I ask especially because Gladwell's quests all reward flat XP, rather than scaling it for your level, so you could get a massive amount of extra XP by waiting. Plus at that point it probably no longer matters if the towns get mad.

I like Goethe on censorship. The censors wanted to censor his use of the word "farting", as in "the farting witches." (There are farting witches in Faust, really.) So Goethe allowed them to censor it -- he changed it to "the f---ing witches."

Battle Fury, or whatever it is, only increased my damage by about a third when I tested. Of course that still makes it the best skill by a lot.

The inevitable slartanalytical munchkin topic.

Before making my Torment party, I decided to look at the numbers objectively, since each PC has more skills they need to account for now, in order to take advantage of battle skills. Generally speaking, the damage increase you get out of investing in battle skills exceeds what you get out of putting the same number of skill points into the appropriate attack-based skill -- even for mages. This opens up PCs to a lot of versatility without any drawbacks, if you plan carefully.

I began by doing calculations for about halfway through the game -- I don't want to be miserable for 60 hours of play just to have a mildly easier fight against Dorikas. So I picked about level 20 for my model, and also allowed access to the combat skill trainer at the beginning of chapter 4. However, as I don't want to be miserable, that only applies to buying points towards combat skill; any weapon I use from day one, I train from day one. I also assumed I am dealing with Divinely Touched PCs, but I left Nephil/Slith and the second advantage up for analysis.

At level 20, you have access to about 180 skill points per character. I took off 20 skill points per character to account for easy points to First Aid, Arcane Lore, Nature Lore, Luck, and so on. That leaves 160 to play with. I made the following menu of different skill packages that make sense, listed with cost in skill points:

(50) Regular Melee: 6 points Melee/Pole + 8 points Quick Action

Lets you start with WAB, get Adrenaline around the combat trainer and Battle Fury by the end of the game. Best value out of QA. With a halberd, expect average damage of 65, 78 Slith, 90 Slith EW, before armor (25% is common but not universal) and QA (double hit about 1 in 4 times).

(80) Fast Melee: 10 points Melee/Pole + 8 points Quick Action

Lets you start with WAB and get Battle Fury around the combat trainer. Battle Fury gives by far the nicest damage boost, so this is pretty cool. Best value out of QA. With a halberd, expect average damage of 75, 88 Slith or EW, 100 Slith EW before armor and QA.

(150) Go All out on Melee:

Average damage of 95, 108 Slith or EW, 118 Slith EW before armor and QA.

(40) Regular Bows: 10 points Bows

Lets you start with WAB, get Adrenaline around the combat trainer and Battle Fury by the end of the game. With a longbow, expect average damage of 78 for a Nephil, before armor.

(70) Fast Bows: 14 points Bows

Lets you start with WAB and get Battle Fury around the combat trainer. With a longbow, expect average damage of 86 for a Nephil before armor.

(150) Go All out on Bows:

Average damage of 106 for a Nephil before armor.

(86) Priest Pack: 10 Priest Spells + 6 Intelligence

About what a Pure Spirit PC needs to get all the spells and have some SP to toss around. Expect average damage of about 65 for Smite or Divine Fire.

(96) Mage Pack: 10 Mage Spells + 6 Intelligence

About what a Natural Mage needs to get all the spells and have some SP to toss around. Expect average damage of about 50 for Bolt of Fire, 74 for Fireblast.

(30) Assortment of Spellcraft & Magery

Ups average spell damage to about 70 for Bolt of Fire, 95 for Smite or Divine Fire, 104 for Fireblast.

(56) Tool Use package: 14 points Tool Use

Somebody needs to get this.

Obviously, you want at least one mage, at least one priest, at least one physical attacker, and somebody who knows tools. Each attack type has advantages. Spells are the strongest when heavily invested in and can multitarget, but are limited in quantity. Bows are weaker, but don't run out. Melee/pole is similar to bows, but give you inconsistently better damage (from QA) and also restrict your tactical flexibility.

Also note that everybody wants at least one physical attack package, since everybody wants battle disciplines.

Now let's do the math. Spellcasters obviously want as much extra skill as they can get, since they get a good damage ramp out of it. For physical attackers, it's much less important. Tool Use takes up 56 points, which means it doesn't fit well with magic. So we want one character who just uses bows or poles, with Tool Use.

For spellcasters, the cheap bows package is an obvious fit: it gets them battle disciplines, gives them an attack to use when conserving or out of SP, and doesn't require them to get up close and personal. We want at least one priest and at least one mage, so that leaves the fourth character open. Available options are an all-out physical attacker, which isn't much improvement over our Tool User, or another spellcaster.

Now let's look at that second skill slot. Most skills can be immediately discarded. Fast on Feet sucks with the new AP system. Sharpshooter only ups bow damage by about 10, before armor. The other options:

A mage with NM or a priest without PS has to spend about an extra 40 skill points on their basic package. That knocks out either their extra damage pack, or their bow pack, which sucks. Plus Magical Efficiency is a lot more valuable given the nerfing of First Aid. For a PC who isn't getting all the mage or priest spells though, the value is lower, about 20-30 skill points. The other option is Elite Warrior, conferring several benefits:

- Fatigue reduction via Blademaster

- Damage reduction via Parry

- Encumbrance bonus so you can wear better armor

- For melee attackers, a little extra damage (via Blademaster)

The defensive bonuses make this especially nice for at least one character to have, so whoever stands in front is that much easier to keep alive.

In the end there's a little bit of wiggle room for personal preference, particularly for the combat-centric character. Archery is consistent and predictable; melee combat is slightly stronger in protracted fights, but less flexible. In the end I went with the following setup:

Nephil DT EW - Heavy archer, Tool Use

Nephil DT PS - Light archer, heavy priest

Nephil DT NM - Light archer, heavy mage

Nephil DT NM - Light archer, heavy mage/light priest

I split the last PC to get extra uses of Unshackle Mind and Mass Healing, while aspiring to preserve the flexible damage types (and cheap shots of Bolt of Fire) of the mage. Also to get a second user of Haste, which has such a low duration now that you really need dedicated mages casting it. I think Unshackle Mind especially is worth the mildly lower damage compared to just having a second mage, but we'll see.

The first 3 levels or so were a little tough, with one or two fights I had to reload forever (Dirty Desiree). After that the second level of DT bonuses kicked in, my spellcasters started to have decent SP, and things have been pretty smooth sailing.

My instincts are similar to ADOS's. The three major components of a successful game (or scenario) really boil down to the storytelling, the gameplay (mainly combat) and the technical part.

The "technical part" corresponds to scripting and sloppiness and such, and basically asks: are there any seams showing? Do the typos, dysfunctional scripts, strange combat happenings, contradictions, ugly graphics, bad zonification, or so on interfere with my suspension of disbelief? Or was it constructed competently?

Aran -- I think it would be very useful to have some binary (or trinary, etc.) categories used to describe each scenario as well -- more or less separate from subjective ratings -- and would make it much easier both to organize the scenarios and to learn about a scenario at a glance. For example:

Prefab Party / Any Party

Singleton Required / Any Party

Epic / Regular Length / Short

Linear / Open-Ended

Many Riddles / Few Riddles

Set in World of Avernum / Medieval / Modern / etc.

Combat / No Combat

I'm sure there are others that could be added, or perhaps some of these are unnecessary.

--t

The part where Jeff has your monitor strobe to give you a stroke was a nice touch, I thought.

I do believe this is the best-formatted of your lists yet, and therefore the easiest to use. And a good thing too, because it's gigantic. Nice work Synergy!

I already commented that Quick Action is weaker. First Aid also appears to be weaker. And Elite Warrior appears to increase your encumbrance limit (by 1 pound per level)?

Anything else that's different, in terms of mechanics?

But melee has nothing to do with soaking up damage and tying up monsters! Melee and pole weapons, melee and pole weapon skill, quick action, blademaster, none of those protect you in any way. I guess strength lets you wear heavier armor, but dexterity lets you dodge, so there's little advantage over archery there. Similarly with nephils vs. sliths. (Ha, ha.) Elite Warrior does give you some Parry, but thanks to Blademaster's fatigue bonus, you don't need to be a warrior to pick Elite Warrior.

This is quite true. I went through the defs file earlier and came up with the following list of creature groups with noticeable physical resistance:

ogres

giants

undead

sentinels

lizards

bats

wolves

slimes

vahnatai

golems

wyrms

hounds

chitrachs

fungi

drakes

pylons

Except for drakes and golems, none of those groups resist fire.

This is, alas, yet another argument against melee. If a 1-3 flaming sword beats a 1-4 halberd so often, then so do spells. Fire and ice resistances are less common and magic resistance (acid spray, lightning spray, arcane blow) is very rare.

When you say "extra," does that mean each fatigue check is independent? Suppose I have 10 Blademaster and a 25% fatigue removal item equipped. If both checks succeed, do I go down THREE fatigue, or just two?

I notice several 'fatigue removal' items in Synergy's List, some listed with points and some with percentages. How much do these affect fatigue? And, are they cumulative with the bonus from Blademaster? If so, that is the final stab to the thigh of emperor melee.

The Flaming Sword does 1-3 per level, and slith spears do 1-4, so unless an enemy resists physical damage at at least 20% (and doesn't resist fire), the spears will do more damage.

That said, isn't the Jade Halberd better than the Bloodspear? It does 2 levels of damage less, about 5 damage per hit, but it still does the acid...

When I said "Melee" I was referring to all non-ranged attacks, NOT excluding pole weapons. Broadswords do an average damage of 2 per die, and halberds and slith spears do an average damage of 2.5 per die, an increase of 25%. This isn't huge, although Sliths also get the racial pole bonus to skill which will add another 8% or so in a typical game.

Even with QA, swords just seem like they have too little of an advantage in damage over bows to make up for their lack of consistency (both in terms of attack targetting capability and QA activation). I just can't see having a swordfighter at all. Even the Flaming Sword, while cool, really just casts a somewhat stronger Bolt of Fire at an enemy standing next to you.

I do remember monsters that resist all magical effects. Melee was incredibly useful against the pylons in A4. But again, with QA weakened, melee has less of an advantage over bows. With my calculations, a typical party of four attacking such an enemy physically will do a relative 542 if there are 2 slith pole-wielders and 2 nephil shooters, compared to 432 with just 4 nephil shooters. That's a pretty heavy investment for a less than 25% increase in total damage dealt -- ESPECIALLY when you consider that in round 1, the average damage of the multiracial party will be LOWER since the sliths will lose an attack running up to the enemy. They'll do an average 379 then. Against less hardy enemies that don't take 3 rounds to dispatch, or who come in groups so moving around after round 1 is required, using melee or pole is kind of a joke. So I'm unconvinced.

The best thing about melee skill is the ability to get Blademaster, but I really do think it's cheaper to just get Elite Warrior and spend the points that would have gone to that on archery or magic or whatever.

Melee sucks.

Okay, it doesn't totally suck, but it's at a disadvantage.

That's the last statement I thought I'd be making in a game that introduced the (fairly cool) Battle Discipline system. However, from what I can observe, melee sucks even worse than it did in A4. Battle disciplines are almost irrelevant since they work the same for melee, missile, and magic attacks. (Almost -- see below.)

The problem is Quick Action. Quick Action got totally nerfed. It used to be you could get it to 50% quickly, at about 10 points, and typically to a 2 out of 3 chance of working with a few items and a few more skill points. While that doesn't guarantee you hit every random chitrach twice on the first blow, it's reliable enough to, you know, rely on. Based on my testing, QA is much weaker in A5. QA of 10 gives about a 25% double strike rate. 15 isn't much better. QA of 20 gives about a 50% rate, but 20 is a pretty steep investment, and really isn't worth it. And the easily achievable 10 QA is inconsistent. Even the percent damage added over time against a boss isn't better than what you'd get by dumping some of those points into melee and pole.

If you're going melee, you may as well buy the first 6 or 8 points of QA, since they're so cheap. But after that it just isn't worth it.

QA was melee's one big advantage over archery in A4, as it allowed double damage a lot of the time. Combined with the halberd damage advantage it actually made melee pretty useful, despite archery's targetting advantages (particularly always getting two attacks off of 10 AP). With such bad QA, archery's just better.

Melee does have one thing going for it: Blademaster. Blademaster is better than it's ever been before. A score of 10 in Blademaster lets you recover 2 fatigue instead of 1 about 40% of the time. A score of 15, 75% of the time. A score of 20, you recover 2 fatigue almost every turn. And Blademaster is actually cheaper to acquire than QA is, later in the game. Divinely Touched and Elite Warrior both hand it out generously, so generously that I'm now considering EW for spellcasters and archers. (And if you're going for 20 battle skill, reaching 6 melee and 6 pole isn't the vacuous waste of skill points it was in past games.)

...and that's what actually makes melee start to seem a little better. If you're going to have 13 Blademaster at the end of the game anyway, you might as well have a melee attack. ...EXCEPT that you also have 8 free Sharpshooter and 8 free Magery. And the other problem is that you don't get such an amazing Blademaster bonus earlier, and it doesn't matter as much without the higher power disciplines. Especially the 20 skill one, the only one that stacks effectively with Haste and with bonus AP.

So I did out a few basic theoretical calculations. The values here are not tests and they aren't actual HP, but are what it looks like relative damage output from different investment strategies should come out to.

Without taking battle disciplines into account:

108 Nephil w/bow

125 Anyone w/sword with QA

150 Anyone w/Smite

163 Slith w/halberd with QA

With 20 battle skill and likely levels of Blademaster taken into account:

128 Nephil w/bow

158 Anyone w/sword with QA

177 Anyone w/Smite

207 Slith w/halberd with QA

When you take into account the fact that melee targetting can often make you attack fewer times than ranged targetting, Smite starts to look pretty good. Also, I don't know where you get the Heartstriker in A5 -- and it has been weakened slightly -- but it's still enough to put bow damage on par with melee damage.

This is too long and I need to stop. But somebody who's played through, please tell me if melee is really as unexciting as it appears here.

As of the first hour of gameplay, I've seen some of the best writing in any spidweb game since Exile 2 and Nethergate. Exile feels like Exile again. (Avernum. Whatever.) Anyway, bravo.

Does the flaming sword actually do bonus flame damage in this game? It didn't in A4 (or G2-4).

I haven't opened the game yet, but I read the readme. And one thing jumped out at me:

Divine Retribution has been weakened. Not nerfed, but weakened. It now does only 1-4 per level instead of 1-6, meaning that priests cannot compete with wizards for damage output in the late game (unless something resists both ice and energy). That's as it should be, I think. But I wonder what Ephesos will think.