ex post slarto

With 0 Armor Use, a Blessed Large Shield (listed at 24% protection absorbed an average of 15% damage (range: 5-26%). With 10 Armor Use, it absorbed an average of 28% damage (range: 15-48%). With 40 Armor Use, it absorbed an average of 49% damage (range: 29-72%).

Getting to 10 Armor Use costs a mere 30 skill points for Romans and DOUBLES the value of your armor, at least up to a point. This is the equivalent of having permanent, 50% damage reduction. (Do the math -- it really is.)

Actually, it costs 18 if you train up to 6. Sheesh. 20's very doable. On Normal, with good armor, this means single digit damage all the time.

Elemental and magic resistance can be pumped high as well using Roman Training, Luck, and Endurance.

Throw in some buyable spell circles, enough Strength to carry stuff and hit hard, and the Icy Longsword -- which now heals plentiful amounts of HP, when you don't take much damage -- and I think we have a viable recipe for a Torment singleton.

Today I set out to confirm that stats affect melee the way I thought they did, since I was so off on spells. This time my observations were more accurate, but there's still some interesting data. I tested with the Obsidian Spear and Icy Longsword and recorded drained HP values as well (only striking when not near full health). The base character was again 10 Strength, 10 Melee and Spear skills, 10 Berserker, and NOT Mighty Warrior. The average damage (again, against enemies with no armor):

Stat Change   Obsid  IcySw  Drain  + Obs  + Icy  + Dr
-----------   -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
Base          121.2   82.4   10.9
+10 Strength  166.7  113.9   15.1   45.2   31.5    4.2
+10 Sw/Sp     141.7  103.1   11.0   20.5   20.7    0.1
+10 Berserk   150.0  110.5   16.0   28.8   28.1    5.1
Mighty War.   141.4   99.4   11.1   20.2   17.0    0.2
Bless Spell   136.6   97.1    7.8   15.4   14.7   -3.1

First off, the drained HP varied pretty heavily and is probably entirely random and not dependent on any of these factors.

The Obsidian Spear claims to do 1-7 damage per skill level, and the Icy Longsword says 1-5. However, this only seemed to affect Strength. Strength however favored the Spear more than we would expect from random die rolls (average of 4 for spear and 3 for sword, versus the 3-to-2 ratio observed). That last part could be random variation, as this data was (as expected) less well-behaved than the spell data, and I didn't feel like doing the 400 blows.

I couldn't test Roman Training with a Celt. When I tested it less rigorously with my Roman, it appeared similar to melee weapon skill. That makes sense -- Berserker has to have something better about it, given Roman Training's crazy resistance bonuses.

At level 14 at least, Mighty Warrior appears to be equivalent to TEN levels of regular weapons skills! Wow. That's an amazing bargain.

The main take-home here appears to be that Strength is great; but just how much better it is than the other skills depends on whether you plan on using the Obsidian Spear (or whatever that crazy pike is), or the Icy Longsword.

I killed Raven as a Roman singleton using almost pure hack and slash, though it did require using either an Ambrosia, two summoning scrolls, or a ridiculous number of healing potions. But really, compared to Reptrakos, he was a cake walk. With enough armor and magic resistance not much can hurt you.

I'd bet the scroll is intended to work that way, given that Romans don't have access to Spirit Circle, and that Jeff seems to prefer avoiding those kinds of conflicts entirely rather than having to write extra code to handle them.

I haven't been playing on Torment, but if Torment has the usual increases in monster HP, Darts of Ice must be totally worthless on Torment.

Randomizer, do you have an idea of how much you need to raise magic stats for the charm spells to maintain effectiveness?

Prompted by Randomizer, I decided to do some more legitimate, empirical tests on spell damage. So I now have several pages of Excel tables.

The experiment tested damage from different spells at different levels of Intelligence, Druidism, and the circles. All other factors were controlled for, with the exception that the PC always has the Druid Mastery trait -- its effects are unknown, but anyone using direct damage spells will likely have it.

So, I was WAY OFF before. It's not clear that all the magic stats have the same effect, and it looks like they may affect different spells in slightly different ways. But in general, Intelligence and Druidism appear to affect magic damage identically.

The effect of Spell Circles was a little erratic -- for Lance of Fire and Darts of Ice they had about 2/3 the effect of Int/Dru, but for Heartshock they had the same effect and for Ravage Life they had about 3/2 the effect. I don't think these discrepancies are due to random factors, as the data was remarkably well-behaved; unlike the Geneforge engine games, variance is mostly limited to +/- 10% of the average damage.

Basically, stats are not nearly so relevant for spells as they are for melee. At high skill level, the effect of 3 points of Strength being added is still definitely visible; that's not true of adding 3 points of Intelligence.

So you can be a great fighter early on by pumping stats, but you can't really coast through the game on spells until you get the good ones. Here's the average damage I got (against zero resistance enemies) with each damaging spell (at 10 Int, 10 Dru, 10 of each Circle), along with its mana cost and targets:

1   2  47.4 Lance of Fire1  10 102.0 Ravage Life1  15 121.5 Heartshock1  28 159.0 Doom3  12  59.6 Darts of Ice5  14 110.2 Soul Lances5  30 222.9 Clouds of Night

No, I'm not. As I said, the testing was meager, though it was consistent. I basically tested the duration of War Blessing (which had no variation) before and after raising Intelligence, Druidism, and War Circle different amounts.

It's possible, for example, that duration is not affected the same way as damage is. But it makes sense, given that Strength has twice the effect on melee damage that melee skills do. That was pretty clear from testing.

That's not really a "glass cannon." The vast majority of your protection comes from armor and not skills anyway. So it's really just a "cannon" as opposed to a "cannon with a stick."

From my (admittedly meager) testing, a single point of Intelligence adds THREE LEVELS to the power of each spell. That makes a big difference.

I'm surprised nobody has recommended chitrach muffins yet.

Hint: Slow has no effect if you aren't in combat mode.

Um...

Strength adds directly to damage dealt.

Agility adds directly to your evasion rate.

Luck adds directly to your chance of running.

Vitality adds directly to the HP you gain each level up.

(Intelligence does nothing.)

The stats go up by themselves when you level up.

How the heck is this confusing? This is practically the simplest RPG stat system I've ever seen.

Romans can only do one Hagfen quest, now.

It puts it into the early game for Romans, though. That helm is disgustingly good for Roman singletons.

IIRC, in original Nethergate, the golden pelt was hidden in one of the coffins, and it required doing several actions to find -- I think you had to go somewhere to make wights appear, kill them, and then search. Something like that.

Judith is a guy?

I mean, I know the dragons change genders in Avernum, but that seems like a bit much.

There's only one. You have to choose which reward to get.

Nioca, read the posts. Muffin suggested talking to the guy (which the original poster had clearly already done) and pointed out that the quest he's asking about isn't necessary to finish the game.

Please explain to me how either of those statements are less than completely obvious. And please explain to me how exactly they answer Maledictis's question.

If you want to accuse me of being unfriendly, go ahead; but don't accuse me of saying untrue things.

Presumably this doesn't mean infinite XP, since that will still get capped. What it does mean is theoretically infinite gold via item drops. Now we can see who the true munchkins are, as they will fight endless random battles in order to buy every buyable skill for every character. Whoopee...

Why do you insist on replying to questions you don't have the answer to with information that is obvious and irrelevant?

I think there may be a few more Roman/Celt differences. I tried killing Queen Rit as Romans and she didn't drop anything at all, for example.

The Spider Queen is actually the Widow Queen, and she's listed twice. Sleek is also listed twice -- once in the Circle Warrens (?).

The list also says you can get a Selkie Chief's Skin from Blackfang Woods. Is that true? That's a neat extra if you can, as you can complete the hagfen quest without going evil.

Finally, killing Raven (which requires attacking an innocent) earns you an All Circle Scroll, which grants +3 to all spell circles. A pretty big deal for Romans.

Sylak's Wisdom Rock doesn't help knowledge skills, though it did in the original. It's an item you can use once per day to gain a miniscule amount of experience.

EDIT: Or rather, Sylak's Enlightening Amber did in the original.