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per level of: Strength / Blademaster / Melee Weapons Strength / Blademaster / Pole Weapons Dexterity / Sharpshooter / Archery Dexterity / Sharpshooter / Thrown Weapons depending on the type of weapon.

First of all, Parry absolutely does offer damage reduction in addition to blocking attacks. It's about 2% per point on top of what shows up on the character sheet. Note that this does reduce damage from area of effect attacks, as well. 5 or 10 Parry won't make or break anything, but taking both reduction and blocking into account, it's way more significant than the Slith resistance bonus, or than the magical efficiency from Pure Spirit. From the middle of the game on, a high Blademaster level will increase your damage WAY more than an extra 6 points in Mage or Priest spells will. With both DT and EW and an item or two you'll be in the 15-20 range by the end, which will DOUBLE your fatigue reduction almost every time. The fatigue reduction items are nice, but very unreliable; high Blademaster is very reliable. Losing 2 fatigue per turn means that you can have Battle Fury permanently active, for a far higher (and more convenient) bonus than just an extra 6 levels of damage. Throw some of the items in and you can typically combine Battle Fury with other disciplines, resulting in truly gross bonuses to damage output. NM/PS juts can't keep up.

No. That doesn't happen. "Diminishing returns" refers to the fact that the same 5% or 1-4 (or whatever) bonus you get from a given skill is less valuable the more of it you have. I can never remember which skills have the 10-cap in which games -- it varies oddly -- but the effect is never split or shaved down, just spaced out. However, you are forgetting that the default to-hit % is not zero. I think it's 50 for most physical attacks. So that 55% is not your "overall % to hit." It is your BONUS to hit. Hit chance = base hit chance + bonus to hit - enemy bonus to dodge In this case 54% = 50% + 55% - ? This suggests that the goblin has a 51% dodge rating, probably achieved from 9 Dex (assigned via level and difficulty) and maybe 3 Luck -- I think goblins might actually have luck assigned to them.

You should never, ever allow yourself to be encumbered. It reduces to-hit rate, turn order, and AP drastically, and makes you extra vulnerable to slowing and stunning.

The default accuracy level, if all your stats and your enemy's stats are zero, is 50%, I believe. Oh -- I forgot about Luck. Luck gives you +2% per point both to hit and to dodge. Do you have 2 points of Luck, Ghaldring? That plus a 2 Dex goblin would get you your result. The in-game descriptions, BTW, are notoriously AWFUL. That is to say, many of them are accurate, but some of them aren't, and all of them are vague. They are not reliable -- do not rely on them!

You didn't list Strength. Strength : Dexterity :: Swords : Bows. Also you didn't list base weapon bonuses (which = the min damage listed for the damage range in the weapon info box). Add up Sword Bonus + Str + Melee Weapons + Blademaster and Bow Bonus + Dex + Bow Skill + Sharpshooter If the Radiant Blade has a listed +10% to hit effect, then add +2 to the sword listing. Now multiply each by 5%; that's the bonus to-hit you'll get with each. I'm guessing the sword has a higher bonus, and you also pumped strength up a few points. You obviously don't have Divinely Touched, which would give you an extra 20% at that level. Getting a few levels of bow skill (presumably you haven't spent skill points on any, since you have 4 for race plus 3 that you could have paid cash for) would get you another 10-20%. And why would you ever not be blessed?

So here's a question Jeff has hinted at, but nobody has asked. This is a good one for you Random. How balanced are the creations this time, particularly the battle creations?

I'm somewhat skeptical that the opening is different depending on your character choice: although neat, it's pretty contrary to Jeff's design philosophy.

The formula for all the games is (Intelligence * Level) * Class_Multiplier + Class_Base Intelligence and level are always the most important factors, but class does have an impact. Also, Matt P's FAQ does not have this information for Geneforge 4. I posted it somewhere here though -- check Strategy Central.

Maybe, but not towards you. I'll always treasure your soft touch.

I love it when Salmon jumps me. It fills me with copious quantities of joy.

No.

Jeff made a point of including some regular characters who were gay and lesbian in the Exile/Avernum trilogy. However, in Avernum 4, this has changed somewhat. Walner appears and references his sexuality vaguely: "loving the wrong people." Elspeth also seems to appear, but there is no Nance and Elspeth has almost no dialogue, so it isn't entirely clear if she's the same person. Either way, all mention of homosexuality has disappeared. There are fewer heterosexual relationships, too. But the gay people may have gone the way of the Daemon spell: nothing wrong with it, but there's no need for Jeff to get that particular set of angry emails from closed-minded parents.

Ghaldring is correct about the slith resistances. And no, I don't hold those resistances to be particularly valuable. You take weapon damage A LOT more often than you take fire, acid, or poison damage. The resistances are nice, but don't make a big difference. If you are min-maxing skill points, the bows bonus is slightly better. Now add in the fact that Sliths lose about 2 levels compared to nephils AND act in a different order in battle due to gymnastics -- which can be extremely irritating -- and the case is closed. But like I said, it isn't totally crazy to use a slith, nephils are just more compelling.

I dunno -- that would apply to villains motivated by greed, power, or the like. It would not apply so much to villains motivated primarily by a specific cause (for example, destruction of humans, destruction of the world) who happen to agree on that cause. And there are good examples of villains who only care about power where it furthers their cause. Rentar-Ihrno and Dorikas may both fall in this category, though obviously their causes are contrary.

It's might be annoying when somebody doesn't realize a topic is half a year old and replies to it, but it's a human mistake. No need for invective, Vergil.

Cue Count von Count...

Thuryl hit the nail on the head. This is the problem with the rising-cost skill point structure: for all the attack skills, every point you train matters less than the previous point, because you are increasing your damage output by tinier and tinier percents. Whether or not the enemies have huge HP totals due to Torment, increasing your average damage output before armor from 80 to 82.5 is not particularly important. Originally Posted By: Ghaldring The fact that pole weapons cost more skill points to train in means that the bonus sliths receive to them is more valuable. Granted, the nephil receives the same number of bonus skill points, but half of these are wasted due to being allocated to throw weapons. Unless you are planning on buying both skills anyway, there is nothing inherently better about receiving the higher cost skill as a bonus. The better skill to receive as the bonus, is the one that helps you more. For a pole fighter this is pole skill, for an archer it's bow skill. Also, it isn't quite half if you are going by effective skill point cost. This table relates the skill point value of the poles or bows/throws racial bonuses, activated to a +4 level, given different levels of purchased skill: Code: Poles B/Ts Slith NephilBought Bought Value Value0 0 18 204 0 26 200 4 18 364 4 26 36 Quote: Quote: This would hand the prize to Bows straight out in my mind, if it wasn't for one thing: Blademaster is an amazing skill in A5 because of its impact on Battle Disciplines, and Elite Warrior is an amazing advantage. I'm not sure I follow you here. While an archer can't train in Blademaster because they don't have the pre-requisite skills, it's not like an all out melee warrior who is min-maxing would either, considering that you need to invest in both melee and pole, which is wasteful. You can get oodles of Blademaster with Divine Blood (which also gives you a bonus to magery and sharpshooter, how convenient!) And even a dedicated archer can still select Elite Warrior as a trait, you really can't go wrong with extra parry and blademaster. Right, this was more or less my point. Since Elite Warrior is useful even for a dedicated archer, a pole attack is worth considering for your DT/EW character; a Slith DT/EW will have a quite usable pole attack without any skill point investment at all, freeing you up to do, for example, Thuryl's riposte ridiculousness.

Properly buffed nothing. Every single buff in A5 increases spell damage by just as much as it increases weapon damage. The issue with hard enemies on Torment is their gross reserves of HP, which can make magic impractical if you don't either (a) have lots of SP, or ( run back to town after every couple of fights. Or © use the SP-replenshing cheat as a timesaving shortcut and pretend you run back to town.

You know, I almost pre-emptively responded to the Flaming Sword comment which was inevitably going to follow Alorael's comment. The Flaming Sword, while certainly useful, is a pretty poor argument in favor of melee. All it does is give you a zero MP Bolt of Fire that uses sword relevant skills rather than mage relevant skills, and which can only target enemies you are standing next to. The mage relevant skills are a little cheaper to increase (and can be bought very early from Shanker), which I think balances out the Quick Action possibility somewhat. The zero MP is nice but not terribly relevant, especially given Magical Efficiency. That leaves us with one big disadvantage, the targeting disadvantage. So the "best" sword, the one that is always held up to explain why swords are useful in A5, is -- not categorically, but on the whole -- inferior to the weakest direct damage mage spell. That makes me want to use swords. Riiiight.

I can't count Nethergate -- that's not an alternative to melee, it's a new ability that suddenly appears at the end of the game and blows all previous abilities away. Though I suppose that's not so different from Ultima 4 (right down to the name of the !#@$@ weapon)...

See also the BoE scenario Nephil's Gambit. No, I can't praise it enough.

Dex, Bows and Sharpshooter contribute EXACTLY the same amount of damage and hit chance to shooting a bow, as Str, Poles and Blademaster contribute to swinging a halberd. The differences are: POLE WEAPONS * Average damage of 2.5 per point in a skill * Investment of about 30 skill points in Quick Action gives about a 1 in 3 chance of an extra hit on the same enemy you hit first * Can't use shields * Must move next to an enemy to attack it * Poles skill costs 4, 5, 6... 2 more per point bought! BOWS * Average damage of 2 per point in a skill (not counting Heartstriker) * No Quick Action bonus * Can use shields * Can shoot at an enemy without moving * Bows skill costs 2, 3, 4... 2 less per point bought! If you factor in the Quick Action bonus, this means a comparably trained Halberd user will deal about 66% more damage than a Bow user, all skills being equal. But note that this is inconsistent and that in most individual rounds the Halberd user's output is only 25% higher. In contrast, the main point in favor of bows is that you can shoot without moving. Halberd users with 10 AP (from Haste, equipment or whatever) can't usually make two attacks in the first round of combat. Bow users always can. Halberd users might lose an attack as well after they kill an enemy and have to target a new one. Or, if you are fighting a boss who moves around a lot, this may happen nearly every round! So during those rounds, the Bow user will deal on average 17% more damage than the Pole user. And of course, being able to shoot from anywhere provides more flexibility, particularly for characters that aren't tanks. This would hand the prize to Bows straight out in my mind, if it wasn't for one thing: Blademaster is an amazing skill in A5 because of its impact on Battle Disciplines, and Elite Warrior is an amazing advantage. I still like bows better, especially for spellcasters, but it makes having one or two melee fighters a reasonable proposition. One is probably still optimal, but two is reasonable.

One of the things that was fairly innovate about A4 was the fact that missile weapons were just as usable as melee or magical attacks. Although A4 was really just translating breath attacks from Geneforge, this is still exceedingly rare in CRPGs. In almost all the other games I can think of that have effective missile weapons -- Might & Magic, Eye of the Beholder, etc. -- the missile weapons still aren't very good, and they are only usable because the game places strict limitations on the number of characters who can make melee attacks, sometimes only 2 out of 6. Ultima 4, in which one missile weapon approaches Cidolfas Orlandu in terms of overpoweredness, would be an exception. Are there any others?

You forced it.