Quiconque

This is a very, very good point that hasn't come up. Even in recent SW games where the timing was less of an issue, knowing that it was counterproductive to spend money on anything other than training was a little silly. Terrific change.

OK, while we're at it with corrections, the following errors also appear above: Avernum never had Quick Travel Magery is +20% not +30% Ability list - Some abilities in the list state added status duration at level 2, others also have this but do not say so Ability list - Bull Rush stuns for 1 round, not 2 Ability list - Battle Frenzy's Haste is the regular +40%, not +50% "I've rarely an attack miss even on torment difficulty versus a boss monster" - I guess this isn't technically an error but I find this pretty hard to believe The explanation of armor pieces having "a percentage chance of blocking" appears to be incorrect - see armor thread Haste reduces the time between turns, it does not give you a chance of a bonus turn. Slow increases the time between turns, it does not cause you to miss a turn. Reputation - this is not quite right. There are 8 reputation scores. - In each of the 3 vassal areas, there are two different reputation scores. The distinction in which is used often feels a little arbitrary to me, but one of them seems to be more of a local kindness indicator, and one of them is specific to the factions in that area - The "Haven" scores are actually global and are affected by things everywhere. One is a kindness/harshness indicator - how do you treat people who are at your mercy - and one is affected by supporting or eroding Haven's power in Sacramentum. In many cases, the same action will move BOTH scores, so it is a little trickier to be a kind imperialist than it is to be a brutal imperialist, for example.

No, that's not misleading. It's a pretty direct statement of what Haste does. That tooltip is very different from "you go earlier and have a 40% chance of an extra set of 5 action points." Mainly, you creatively extrapolated the "chance" part of it. Not a reproduction I just have the same request as I do for every game. Let's make a clear distinction between when we are stating known facts, and when we are making conjectures about how things might work. We all remember the urban legend about the invisible -36% penalty that somehow persisted through like 5 games before we realized it didn't exist at all...

Yeah, I had the same thoughts about the main PC's cultural abilities. That said, I also find the level 2 combat AoE a lot better than either of the Ukat active abilities. Not sure how frequently the Haven aura improves, but it starts out at +1/+2 damage (lv 1/lv 2), and rises from there. I'm at level 8 now and sometime recently it went up to +2/+4.

Per testing, that is still incorrect, Random. Slowed monsters do not "lose" attacks and hasted characters do not "gain" attacks. If that were the case, what you would see on testing would be a regular pattern of "rounds" where each character gets an attack, and sometimes within that pattern, hasted characters would get a 2nd and slowed characters wouldn't get any.* Additionally, the "extra" and "missing" attacks would not be evenly spaced out -- sometimes you might get them several rounds in a row, or have a dry spell for several rounds. In QW, that's not what happens. You only see a regular pattern of "rounds" if everyone has 100% Speed. If not, characters with higher Speed get their turns faster, so you'll see them gradually advancing relative to the normal speed characters, until they eventually end up having had more turns. Because of how randomly initiative is set when the battle starts, it's actually possible for this to happen right away. *I also note that in previous Spiderweb games, when slowed monsters missed a turn, the game would still go to them, and you would see a message indicating that they missed their turn. This was critical because that's also when statuses tick down, poison procced, etc. Here, the turn is simply delayed, so statuses just don't tick down until the longer wait time is over. EDIT: Also, what tooltip are you talking about? The Haste spell reads "Provides 12 turns of haste to one ally. You will get turns in combat more often."

Based on my testing, it seems pretty clear that is inaccurate, yes. This is a change from previous Spiderweb games so it's possible that earlier in the beta, it did work as explained there. (Actually, maybe there was no misleading tooltip and I am just remembering the tip in that thread? I think so -- the status tooltip for Haste just says "Act in combat 40% more often." And the PC stat says "The higher this is, the more turns you take in combat.")

Now that I'm finally in all 3 areas, I'm curious what other people have found useful here. Probably most people just take 1 of each, but some seem better than others. I was somehow expecting Mindsteal to cost 3 energy, maybe because the Haven cultural abilities are so expensive. But at 1, it's really a steal. 1 energy to cancel 3 attacks against you, and get 3 outgoing attacks instead? That's pretty good. I've been running around with 3 Ukats for a while and it's pretty clear that the passive Bloodletting ability does stack with multiple characters. I think it's multiplicative, but you can still get up to just about a 50/50 chance of attacks causing 1 turn of bleeding. Bleed damage depends on enemy level, which seems to track quite closely with player level. So Bleed damage is going to range from 3 to maybe 14 over the course of the game. Stacking Bleed is definitely fun, but even the endgame value is like 20-30% of an endgame hit. Cut it in half for the odds, that's an extra 12% or so damage per attack... with three Ukats and 6 skill points into those passives. Admittedly it's 12% for the whole party, but I'm still not convinced this is that fantastic. With a single Ukat, that's 2 skill points for a passive 4-5% damage boost to the whole party. I think I like the Vol better? Or at least, I will when the bug gets fixed. It's hard to say without knowing for sure how evasion works. If that 10% really means 1 in 10 attacks, it definitely smells better than the Ukat power. One consideration for the Ukat: Bleed isn't affected by armor. On the flip side, it doesn't work at all on some enemies, like ghosts, and that seems to include a lot of enemies that have heavy armor, where otherwise it would be very useful... Right now I think I'm leaning Vol/Vol/Ahriel. Which is a pity, because the Ukat are a lot less obnoxious 😛

Yeah, that tooltip tip is misleading at best. Likewise the one for Slow, which reduces the Speed Bonus, rather than causing random skipped turns. There's a small random factor, but basically, the number of turns you get in a given period of time scales with your Speed Bonus. It's not a chance of a bonus turn, it's earlier arrival of your next turn every time. And stacking it is very good.

It should 8 slots now, instead of 7.

BUG / TOOLTIP ERROR Tower of Might only affects Physical Evasion, not Magical Evasion. True for both levels. So much for the Vol...

Looks like the basic damage formulas are: BASIC ATTACKS: Damage = Weapon Level + Weapon Type Base Damage + PC Damage Bonus + Die Roll Die Quantity = ( PC Level / 2 ) + 1 Die Size = Set by Weapon Weapon Level is hidden but rises from around 4-15 as your weapons go up in power level. Weapon Type Base Damage is usually 1, but is 0 for a few weapon types. The PC level division rounds up, so you gain an extra point of damage on odd levels. SKILLS: Damage = Weapon Level + Skill Base Damage + PC Damage Bonus + Die Roll Die Quantity = ( PC Level / 2 ) + 1 Die Size = Set by Weapon Note that not all skills are flagged to count weapon levels. Physical damage skills are, but note that Whirlwind Attack and Steel Darts will look to your ranged weapon, not your melee weapon. DIE SIZE BY WEAPON d2 - Dagger, Bow, Longbow, Wand d3 - Sword, Axe, Arcane Blade, Staff d4 - Fool's Shot d5 - Spear, Halberd, Arcane Spear (d4 for Cleaves) In previous games, the vast majority of damage came from the die roll, since you got dice from level, multiple stats, and the weapon itself. That is much less true in Queen's Wish. Early on the die roll contributes a very small portion of damage. Even at the highest reportedly possible level, the average damage difference between a dagger and a sword will be only 6.5 damage. This isn't nothing, but we're talking about maybe 40 damage vs 46 damage. Two-handed weapons at that point might be doing 59. Staves are awful. Yikes. DIE SIZE BY SKILL d2 - Poison Rain, Shockwave d3 - Icy Wave, Whirlwind Attack*, Barbed Lance*, Steel Darts* d4 - Fireball, Bull Rush* d5 - Shock * uses weapon Weapon level damage is not insignificant here, but the magical abilities sometimes have higher base skill damage to make up for this. "NEARBY PC" PASSIVES Range seems to be 6 squares in a diamond (i.e. any combination of vertical or horizontal totalling 6 or less) for those that do not specify 4 squares.

*blinks madly* I do believe there will be some legit additions to this list for Queen's Wish. Something we haven't had in a long, long time, thanks to the name generator style names that showed up all through Avadon. Woo!

Haven't tested the passives, but I can confirm that (at least for some skills) using items to gain extra skill level will have an effect. For example, getting to level 3 in Inspiring Shout adds 2 rounds to the base duration (before percentile multipliers) on top of the 2 rounds added for getting to level 2. If it's just a power level or duration increase this is visible in the ability info box.

I emphatically do not admit that. It's not a perfect system, but I don't think the system you want is achievable. I think this one is perfectly good.

And I'm pointing out that all CRPG rules are like this: general rules that the game uses unless an exception is programmed in. Exceptions are great, but in reality there are an infinite number, so they can't all make it in.

Then I'm confused as to what the it was: "It's actually something that happened A LOT in previous Spidweb titles." (if not "have 100% hits repeatedly flying around in the middle of a melee.")

I don't think any Spiderweb game has had 100% hit chance ability on regular physical attacks...

I mean, that's one extreme edge case. There are lots and lots of edge cases where any of these highly abstracted, generalized rules are not going to fit. You have to fit for the broad majority of cases first. Then you add exceptions for edge cases to the degree that you can. But you can't catch all of them. You do not throw out a general rule that applies most of the time because of edge cases. It would be far less plausible to not have a hit cap at all, and to have 100% hits repeatedly flying around in the middle of a melee.

This is exceptionally clear and on-the-nose. Excellent read for anyone coming to Queen's Wish from other Spiderweb games.

If there's no other combat going on, I'm with you. If there is other combat in the immediate vicinity, I don't buy it. The highly skilled warrior still has to pay attention to other things, dodge other enemy attacks or make sure they aren't placing themselves in a vulnerable position while they garrote the zombie. In an action game, we expect a 1:1 correlation between pixels on the screen and what actually happens, but in an RPG there is a huge layer of abstraction -- people don't actually stand around in combat waiting for their turn, rather everyone's turns happen at once and combatants attack and defend themselves simultaneously. So unless the warrior and zombie are truly far from the rest of the fray, it's not as simple a case as it looks. The random die rolls represent a multitude of different things that affect the battle; they may be fed mainly be two stats, but the randomness is the result of more than those two stats.

Muscleguy, this is not a chat room. Please at least attempt to not make multiple 1-2 sentence long posts in a row. Especially when you repeat the same thing in both and they are 3 minutes apart. Friendly mod request. Thanks.

Steps are 1) build a building - click on the marker next to the building 2) "buy" the thing you want to place there - button in lower left of screen 3) place the thing you bought, in the building you built - button just to the right of #2 button

This is interesting. Some things have been simplified on the surface, and that leads to two responses from players: (1) "this is actually deeper, because now the focus is on the choices that actually matter" and (2) "this is dumbed down." You don't get xp from random encounters anymore, so you can't grind. Yes, this was a deliberate choice. (Jeff has been complaining about grinding on his blog for I think over a decade now...) The roster order affects the marching order. That's the same thing it's always done. I believe it does still break ties when it comes to initiative -- which is all it ever did in other Spiderweb games, at least for the last 15 years. The main reason you're not seeing a fixed turn order is that there is no longer a strict "1 turn per round" setup. If you increase (or decrease) your Speed Bonus, you'll get more (or fewer) turns than other combatants. It might be easier to see what's going on than it is for you. But man, congrats on having a 2010 laptop in full working condition, that's pretty amazing. They have tooltips (with an apperance delay of zero). The tooltips tell you what they do. You have to do those two buildings first and report back to Miranda. Which the game tells you, repeatedly. After you report back, you can build whatever you want.

That's fleshy-drones-of-Almaria territory, there!

Holy wow. Speed bonuses really do give you turns more frequently, just like the tooltip says. It's not a question of acting "earlier in the round" -- you act more often, period, with a similar frequency. Rounds are no longer the primary measurement of time. Things just got a little deeper...