Men are from Slars

Ghaldring: fair enough about the certain pivotal, tough battles not working that way. However, if the enemies usually move first in random battles, you're missing out on a significant tactical opportunity to get first strikes through clever use of terrain, and what passes for stealth. Edit: Thuryl, it wasn't you, it was Alorael -- my bad.

That doesn't require a pole fighter, though, just a character who closes to melee range. As I recall, you were the one advocating a tank who just uses bows, right?

A4 had 227 chitrachs in the Eastern Gallery alone.

Die, stupid riposting chitrachs. Die! Ghaldring, let me recapitulate my point about flexibility. Obviously, when you are "locked on" to a single, massive HP enemy that does not move away from you, poles will *actually* do more damage. I have asserted this from the beginning... However, this situation occurs in a fairly small percentage of the game's battles. In random battles, you usually lose out on at least one shot at the start of the battle and, depending on how many enemies there are, what their scripts are, which PCs they end up targetting, and other considerations (like body placement to protect weaker characters) you may either miss out on further attacks with a pole, or you may have to start attacking an enemy that wasn't your first choice to take down first, simply because it's in the right location. And some bosses move around erratically, even teleporting; against those bosses poles are about as inefficient as you can get.

I still have not seen the slith bonus HP exceed 4 bonus HP... Bows, unlike in Exile, now all have infinite ammo.

20 Blademaster is the level that grants 100% fatigue reduction, but the curve at which you get it is middle-heavy. I forget the exact results I got, but by the time you get to about 15 Blademaster you'll get the fatigue reduction nearly every round. So you don't need to get to 20 Blademaster. And don't forget that a decent selection of items boost Blademaster by a point or two. Flexibility really is more important than raw damage output, anyway. And the math on bows and poles is not wrong, but unless you do the math poles *will* seem to be doing more damage. It's psychological. Poles will do noticably more damage *when they hit*. You get enough extra chances to hit with bows that in the end the damage difference is negligible. But the little numbers that pop up will still be bigger for poles, of course. Thuryl is right that spells, by and large, are a huge waste of money. Your level 48 calculations are ridiculous, firstly because you won't make it to level 48, and secondly because the vast majority of the game will be spent in the middle levels, between say 16 and 32. And see above about why you don't need 48 levels of EW bonuses. Your "clear case for humans" is bunk. Even if you spurn battle disciplines, which is patently foolish, being human does not boost your other stats, and you end up getting all of 10 more skill points compared to a Nephil over the course of the whole game while missing out on lots of free points in bows/throws/gymnastics. Saving SP, while convenient, is unnecessary, given that you can almost always just go back to town to restore them (or use a cheat-of-convenience-only to do so). For protracted boss fights there are more than enough energy potions to last the game. This was one of the key points of my spurning the spellcaster traits. If you disagree, then obviously the spellcaster traits are for you, but I think it's a pretty solid argument. The calculated damage is probably higher than the actual damage because of resistance, in some form; remember some is indirect. What enemy did you test on? ...now, all of that said, Parry's damage reduction was part of what made me prefer EW for spellcasters; a small part but it was never an overwhelming preference. So I'm not sure where I really stand on this issue now. But, game files that don't use all the opportunities available aren't really going to sway my opinion either.

Thuryl -- are you sure the Anatomy simply adds to the attack bonus against humanoids? We know it increases damage somehow, but that's about it, I think. Also, I thought it worked on missile attacks as well. Thrown Rock is a missile attack used by a monster, I'm assuming. Either that or a leftover from the war trall in G4.

Thuryl reminds me that there is one good excuse to type in all caps: if your name is Zoah.

I would try it as a party first. I always played singletons in Exile, but parties no longer have most of the annoying problems that made singletons so much simpler to play in Exile. Save a singleton run for when you know more about the game mechanics. Also note that Sliths are no longer the automatic best race choice like they were in Exile. That honor tends to go to Nephils these days.

There's nothing evil about all caps, obviously, but it is annoying. The fact is that the vast majority of people who read this forum, and especially the active topics list, do not care about the gold cheat. I don't mean to denigrate the cheat here, but to put it in proper perspective. By the standard you used to make its title so fancy, probably 1 out of 4 or 5 topics here would be in all caps. Drawing undue attention to something is generally considered annoying anywhere, internet or not.

And if you wanted to be really cool, you could even get rid of the caps lock: "New Money Cheat!" It's good netiquitte to not put subjects in all caps without a darn good reason.

The traditional agent builds from previous games (notably DV's glass cannon agent from G3) mostly ignored combat skills anyway, so it would be easy enough to run the new class creationless, like an agent. Right?

I'm surprised more people didn't want to run the new class.

It's an annual sale, actually.

You mean we still don't get to court Litalia? ø_ø

Yeah, I wasn't too hot on the iVlish either. But being able to cast Mass Invulnerability really makes up for it, imho.

Nephil's Gambit had some not particularly explained potential wrong turns in the plot at Flickering Keep that looked like bugs, but weren't. For one thing, depending on what you do in the dream sequence it is possible to have your PCs *actually* die and not come back to life. You may be doing it wrong.

The new class is gonna be the clear winner, hands down -- but we knew this two years ago.

If it was made for G1, why in the world is "G3" in the title?

/9th and final class.

Darn. Well, thanks for checking Ghaldring.

You know, I think I've seen that too. It probably just means the chitrach was assigned riposte skill but not parry skill -- and suggests that Thuryl's assumption about how riposte applied was correct after all.

My goal is to validate or invalidate the hypothesis -- which is NOT that parry reduces the chance to be hit. The hypothesis is that parry reduces the chance of a damage message occuring, for whatever reason.

Parry *did* have an obvious efect on missile and magical damage in A4. That I'm quite sure of, although the effect on magical damage types was a bit weaker than on physical damage. Jeff also reduced the parry chance from 5% per capped-point to 3% per capped-point between A4 and A5, so it's not implausible that that was the extent of his meddling. Particularly because, as you suggest, I think he's more likely to twiddle a few numbers than add and remove effects entirely.

That makes sense. My point is that, even if we can't have complete confidence in the results, they are still more likely than a stab in the dark to lead us in the right direction. Our goal isn't to obtain statistically significant results, our goal is to come up with a theory of what Parry does and what is going on here that can accurately predict what will happen. In other words, even if those results were completely significant, that wouldn't solve the problem, so the fact that they are not significant at whatever level is beside the point. Thuryl, what do you make of this whole mess? What do you think is actually going on with Parry -- best hypothesis?