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Rent-an-Ihrno

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Everything posted by Rent-an-Ihrno

  1. Also, try to discern when to pick them off one by one, drawing them away from the group and burst firing, and when you should clump them all up and take them head on. How and when to do this depends on your healing abilities (yes, poison is cured that way) and your attack skills. Never ever neglect the lower left base attack skill, for any character. Anyhow, don't worry. Widows are supposed to be tough
  2. A spell that has a chance to kill one or more opponents instantly but does nothing if it fails may be a nice addition for Avernum.
  3. I will be frank. After reading and re-reading the OPs statements, to really understand where he's coming from, I can only come to one conclusion - it's arbitrary. A priori, if you will. None of the described "problems" are rooted within the game in any way or fashion, it's that you, Dar, approached the game with a specific set of expectations, and when these weren't met the way you wanted them to, your intellectual negativity started spiraling. I hate to say the words, but I have thought it through quite thoroughly. 1. You insist on playing a certain build, which is not working out. You're aware that you can use characters differently in fights, right? A melee meatshield sword-swinger doesn't need to rush towards hordes of enemies and stand around there alone. Maybe headnut the boss. Ever thought of why ranged attacks are considered more useful? Because Avadon's mechanics are far, fare more intelligent than the early Avernums' or Exiles'. You need to understand what your foes are doing and outsmart them. Crowd-control. Name it what you will. This is the kind of analysis you have to do, no "a priori" whatever on the forums, and I'm sorry, but clever fighting is fun and is not necessarily linked to mathematical min-maxing (which I never ever do. Cause I'm a roleplayer.) 2. You write 'SS' over Avadon's entire face and then complain the story is too... what exactly? Resentable? People are loathsome? If you had played for long enough to actually get to know your companions, they all are victims in their own, unique ways, and all strive to better themselves and - partly - the world. The purpose of Avadon is peace, and Redbeard's as well. The difficult question, that you as a roleplayer have to decide upon for you character, is not - do I want to be good or evil? But - to what extent is it legitimate to strengthen and protect my own power in order to support my purpose of peace? 3. The smaller decisions, like - will I let this or that brigand go for a bribe, or kill him to get his loot? are the finesses of your character. There are many shades and facettes that you can maneuver between, because justice is not an easy concept. You can try to be good and righteous, and ultimately do damage (what's righteous? what's your cause?). But I guess you wouldn't really know about all that since you claimed yourself you don't like reading through all the tedious dialogues. You also wouldn't know that you get plenty of rewards however you choose to be aligned. Usually, all or most options give you something good in return. Still don't get how you can not possibly like your character from the start when you haven't even started deciding why he/she's there. So what's difficulty? Monsters having more or less HP/attack power than you? Is that the way to go? Or is it possibly a more interesting challenge when the combat is somewhat intelligent (I'm sure it could be made more intellectual somehow as well. Maybe the grand hero in Avadon 2 will be Kant)? What's an enjoyable storyline? A standardized good vs evil plot in which your very armor gleams with holiness and all villains are born with an evil gene? I'm sure Avadon would've discovered it already. Or is it possibly more enticing to have realistic intricacies in which the needs and interests of the many people and peoples in the game weave together and battle each other? But maybe I'm deluding myself that my personal preferences and skills somehow produce universally applicable axioms. Oh wait that's not me!
  4. Playing through something far too difficult isn't usually fun. But is that because the game itself "sucks"? As you will easily find, browsing the forums here, Avadon isn't very hard at all to most people. There are lower difficulty modes, after all, and more than enough skills and loot to make you so powerful you can pretty much sit back and just enjoy the roleplaying experience. If this is not to your liking, perhaps you can tell us why? What are the 'deep flaws' in the storyline logic? You know all these things work together. If you reload for hours just to kill one boss, the end dialogue will not be very satisfying to you. If you don't enjoy the game, you probably haven't really discovered many of Avadon's (very helpful) riches... but then, you know, that's what Demos are for.
  5. There's more than enough wins such a character could experience. The empire definately did succeed in stealing the crystal souls, no? Besides, I think fighting a losing battle, getting more and more desperate, could make for a very exciting game. Also, who said you'd have to have the Empires' interests in mind just because you play an Empire soldier? Would it really be unprecedented if you had the option to betray all sides for your own personal gain? Jeff won't ever remake any of the old Avernums with added faction options, but a new game with that kind of story would certainly be interesting.
  6. Sounds good! Have fun, and be sure to ask if you want more advice.
  7. Aye on the Shadowwalker. He was my first choice by intuition, and was very effective and fun to play. Right now I'm playing a Sorceress, with Focus on survivability, if you can say that. It's great. This is on Hard, mind you, but so far I prefer her over the Blademaster and the Shaman. Welcome to Spidweb! Leave your sanity at the door. And your lockpicks. (I finally feel like I've been around long enough to say that.)
  8. You've obviously never been to the Honeycomb.
  9. Her library is on the ground floor, not upstairs. If the one you mean is right UNDER Redbeard's audience hall, then yes, she should be there. Just east of the stairs.
  10. There are a few references to pirates in various Spidweb games. This is already pretty awesome. Then came Avadon with the towels!
  11. I agree with all of the above. I would particularly like to have more mob control spells, like barriers. Also, the necessity of food is something i completely adore. I'd even go so far as to bring in drink and rest as something that causes you problems if you neglect it in really long, volcanic dungeons with no towns around. Partly because it adds realism and such, but mainly because it would give you a great many possibilities for the meta game. Cave adventurers should have to plan at least a little bit.
  12. A rat isn't necessarily a rat. That's like saying a dragon is a salamander.
  13. Edit: Tried to post something in another thread, ended up here. Strange.
  14. There's two things needing to be considered before answering that question, imo. The first is how whether keyboard movement will return, and the second is how frequent I want secret passages to be and what significance they should have. Headbanging was so frequent in Avernum because secret doors were. They could be anything from highly rewarding and essential to the storyline to completely empty. They were friggen everywhere. I don't think it's that bad that the switches are so hard to find in Avadon, because those few that are there are either placed where you know there must be one or really aren't very significant otherwise.
  15. I completely understand people new to the genre and to Spidweb who find wall-bumping and switch-finding tedious. It distracts from the dynamics of the story and the fighting action. It isn't really a distraction though, it's an addition. After all, you're not soldiers - you're adventurers. Special ops. You want to explore. You travel to the darkest corners of every strange pit and every secret fortress, and you want to uncover the truth of things as much as the innards of your enemies. If this was taken away, it would mean a tremendous blow to the very essential feeling of being thrown into a gigantic, mysterious world. It slows things down a little bit, but this needn't be a bad thing. As already has been pointed out, you get quite efficient in the exploration part of the games with some experience. Personally, if I want to run through open corridors and fields against waiting foes, I play Diablo. ..or maybe not. Sigh.
  16. @Lilith: Oh, I got you all wrong. I thought you meant it the other way round, which didn't make sense to me. English, what can ye do. However, I don't think the two must necessarily be linked in this kind of causality. That you need one stat for one skill or build really is simplistic I think it would be possible to make stats themselves more interesting by giving them more complex effects - or, differently put, making the different aspects of a skill dependent on different stats. This could give you greater possibilities of customization with fewer spells and be nicely compatible with traits, I image.
  17. Originally Posted By: Lilith I honestly kind of hope Jeff bites the bullet he said he might bite for Avadon 2 and eliminates manual stat allocation entirely. Why in the world would you hope that?
  18. One minor adjustment I would do were I to change things about Avadon is that I would give some of the skill animations more punch. It just doesn't feel quite right when you blast a horde of enemies with a powerful cone of lightning and it comes out like a lazy, half dripping, half floating spray. This dawned on me more clearly today when I thought about the diversity of spells in Avadon, after reminiscing about the much more aggressive-feeling target based spells of the old Avernums. The effects seem to be categorized in a few, pretty strict groups. While I absolutely love Avadon (almost missed an apartment viewing today because of it), I do feel like a little more specialization and diversity in skill effects in general and, consequently, in animations would do it much good. Lightning really shouldn't be that much softer than a cone of razordisks.
  19. Minor addition: I'd prefer the map to grey out unknown areas as it did in the older trilogies, like the Giant Lands. At least before you've explored it yourself. What I really loved about E1/A1 was the intense feeling of being lost in a strange place. And the humorously ironic way it was told in.
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