Mea Tulpa

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.

Sigh. Darn kitties. I look forward to many interesting observations and anal analyses in the coming weeks.

In Geneforge 4, luck doesn't add to item drops, and it adds almost nothing to resistances if I remember correctly.

You know those guns-for-food exchange programs? I'm going to start a cash-cow-for-cave-cow exchange program.

So basically, you are saying you don't want to play an RPG, you want to play a text adventure; albeit one that replaces the typical esoteric puzzles with a lot of repetition of tasks.

One major change in A2 is Garzahd's weakness, to anti-demon weapons instead of Mindduel.

I know Synergy mentioned Spiderweb games in his first post, but he knows as well as you and I do that this discussion isn't really about future Spiderweb games. You're right: Avernum is what it is, and it will change and grow but it won't change this much.

Ahonaria... oh my god. Drakey must be peeing himself.

I've always hated Nethack. I feel like Aran also plays that, though...

Quote: Originally written by Synergy: This seems to be the ongoing trend. Instead of having something truly rare and spectacular, we have things becoming more accessible and more nerfed, common, and averaged. I prefer and keep arguing more for the former, with legendary items, super swords, and a couple of super offense/defense spells or wands. That's not necessarily what we are getting, however. Quoted for truth and agreement.

I do find it interesting that Angband is so popular here. You, me, and Alorael, at any rate, compared to Aran's lonely cries of ADOM.

I would vote to keep it here as well. Although it is perhaps of general interest, the length and style of some of the posts makes me worried it may go the way of Synergy's last debate topic. I would actually argue that hack-and-slash is not all filler. Recently I've had occasion (at work, no less) to play a number of RPGs and pseudo-RPGs made over the last 15 years for Nintendo's handheld systems -- the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. All of these games possess some kind of system that scales the potential field of gameplay to a vastly larger size. The Pokemon and Dragon Warrior Monsters games allow you to build up not three or six PCs, but hundreds of them, if you want to. (Pokemon, I was very surprised to discover, also has a battle system with a superb ratio of depth to complexity.) Mega Man Battle Network has a CCG-like system whereby you can constantly improve your character one element at a time, for an exceedingly large number of elements. There are the actual CCG games like YuGiOh, which work the same way. And then there are the roguelike Mystery Dungeon titles that have been appearing the past few years, which feature infinite dungeon exploration. Other games, like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, incorporate a "mission" setup that allows new content to be speedily generated; either slipped into a template by the developers (FFTA has 300+ pregenerated missions), or on-the-fly much as a roguelike generates a dungeon level. This scalability has made these games much more successful than traditional RPGs for the same systems. A lot of this has to do with the environmental demands of a handheld system -- which people often want to play for small stretches of time, but with which still like experiencing a sense of accomplishment -- and the demographics; Nintendo has the younger end of the market and these games are at least partially targetted at 10-year-olds. But this kind of scalability entails infinite hack-and-slash, and this is infinite hack-and-slash that is being enjoyed. It's not like MMORPGs where it's really the only option for implementation. People choose the hack-and-slash option.

Iffy, there is a very real difference between what you said and what I said. "Less likely" is inaccurate, plain and simple. That may be the end result if you are totally careless about how close you are to an enemy; however, since that IS under your control, likelihood never enters into things at all.

Quote: Originally written by Thuryl: I agree that it's a very different type of game from traditional RPGs. I don't think a game where you're expected to finish with the same four to six characters that you started with can plausibly coexist with a world where one well-placed hit can be fatal. One easy way to make that work is to only fight monsters, i.e., creatures that don't wield weapons. This has been done at least twice in a quality RPG (Dungeon Master) and it's fairly reasonable for claws et al. to never kill you in one hit if you're wearing at least a little bit of armor.

It doesn't make them less LIKELY to see you. It raises the threshhold of what is required to make them notice you.

Also note that Hero of Old has an absurdly high casting cost compared to casting each effect individually, and it doesn't last any longer either, nor is it stronger in any respect. It might be convenient at times when you have spell points to spare, but it's honestly one of the least useful spells in the game.

When I went back and looked at my earliest posts here for the relevant topic, I was surprised to see how positive I was about G3. There were things I hated, like the boats; but I was very positive about the direction of the story and even the type of forced choice questions involved. The problem, I think, is that the lack of variety in plot, questions, and game paths, makes the interestingness of G3 quickly fall to the ground when you replay it. And because I didn't quite finish the game but instead replayed it several times for strategy, I became annoyed at all of those things. So I must reluctantly agree: G3 is a good game, just don't play it twice.

I was asking a clarifying question. Given that your sentence was malformed to begin with, it wasn't hard to conceive of your only referring to body armor despite saying "anything," which would explain it. Has anyone else encountered this problem?