Fael

I think Avadon 3 is a better game than 2, but not so much better to be worth playing out of order, I don't think -- 3's better than 2, but I expect you'll enjoy 2 more if you play it before 3. I'd say play 1 and, if you like it (and I hope you do!), buy and play 2. 3 will still be there when you get the money for it.

Golden Crystals are always good for anybody and should be saved for equipment you expect to keep around for a long time. Dexterity and evasion bonuses are good for Dexterity-based characters in Avadon 1, but they're not as good in the sequels. Most other enhancements are filler.

I also like to give Int-boosting orbs to my spell casters.

Definitely easier. Even more important -- less annoying. This is the only one of the three Redbeard fights that I actually bothered finishing. In 1, I fought for about an hour without either side gaining much of an advantage, got bored, and reloaded a pre-fight save to do a non-violent ending instead. A gave up on 2, as well, although I didn't spend nearly as much time at it; after my bad experience with the Avadon 1 Redbeard fight, I gave up on the Av2 one pretty quickly (maybe too quickly?)

The third one was long, but not THAT long. More importantly, I felt like I was making progress -- albeit slow progress -- the whole time. I didn't find the teleporting away too irritating, because he usually ran bad before any of my characters acted anyway, while the fake Redbeards just sat in their corners sulking about how nobody respects them anymore.

Depends -- are you using cheats to replenish your mana, or going back to town every time you need to recharge your spell points?

If you're playing with unlimited spell points, then two attacks are probably better. If you're not, then the boosted magical damage will make the game less annoying.

Less defense, more offense. Melee skill, Blademaster (which is way too low), and Dual Wield will all help you hit. By this point in the game, I was up to 95% hit chance against most enemies (though I wasn't playing Torment). But I also didn't have nearly the left-column investment you did.

The mage in the Castle -- I forget his name.

Here's the can't fail, don't have to remember/recognize anything method:

Alternate alternate point of view: try the demos first. Lots of people here -- Jeff included, according to his blog -- swear by the Eschalon series, but I hated every minute of it. I bought Book I and thought it was terrible; I only played the demo of II, but it didn't seem any better. Try the demos, if you like them, great; if you come out of them with reservations, realize that the game doesn't get any more interesting as it progresses.

Did you find a boat?

It's probably another switch you've missed -- there's a lot in that area. I can't tell from that which one you might have missed (as if I'd remember the locations, anyway!), but if you look carefully, there's gotta be one there that you've missed.

It is annoying, and I did it about a million times, but the problem is, it's not that annoying. I wouldn't call this a feature that "regularly makes the user angry;" more like a feature that "regularly makes the user mildly annoyed." Are you going to ask for your money back over this? Will you not buy Jeff's next game because of it? Yeah, me neither.

Not saying I wouldn't like to see it fixed. I just get why it probably won't be.

Stick with it. The game gets significantly easier as it progresses. It takes a while, but you will get back to the point you're used to where your characters are rarely missing (I think it was around level 15, but maybe it was more like 20). I was one of the first "this game is too hard" whiners and by the end I was blowing through the final battles without reloading.

My suggestion for right now is, if you haven't already, take advantage of the fact that you can go everywhere to do a bunch of the delivery quests, which let you rack up some XP for little risk.

I don't want to pick on Soul, but every time someone complains about difficulty, the really good players come out of the woodwork with this advice. The thing you're not getting is that those of us who are complaining about difficulty are doing it right at the beginning of the game. We're already in the easiest areas of the game and we're still frustrated by the fact that we're only hitting 20% or 25% of the time. There is no easier area we can go to. The problem isn't that we're wandering into areas we shouldn't be. The problem (until Jeff addresses it in 1.0.1, of course) is that the easy areas are still too hard for us.

Not only can you cast it in combat, it usually fully heals the affected character AND the character retains all statuses (like haste, battle frenzy, etc.). If you organize your party roster correctly, you can have characters die, get raised, and not even lose an action.

Yeah, I completed all three bandit quests (four if you count the secret tunnel). But, of course, I can't remember which was which or exactly where I went. I believe, though, there's two dungeons, and a third that's just an outdoor encounter with a group of bandits hiding in an alcove behind a fake wall on the main map. That could be the one you're missing. Or I could be confusing this with a different quest and what I'm describing doesn't really exist. Either is equally possible.

If you can get through the Bandit Keep, you should be able to handle the Goblin Caves as well, if you haven't been there yet (north wall of the Eastern Gallery, just north of the Bandit Keep). You can also handle the first part of the Bat Cave (NW corner of the Eastern Gallery) -- but just the section to the left with the bats, don't go north!

Having finished the game now, it doesn't seem like it ever really got harder again. Indeed, this game had a reverse difficulty curve -- it started out really, really hard, and got progressively easier the further you went along. Very much the reverse of other Spiderweb games and, I suspect, the reverse of what Jeff intended.

As noted above, the lack of enough low-level dungeons made things pretty tough through about level 10. So much so, that I was really thinking playing on Normal was a mistake and that I should turn the difficulty down to Easy. And the Spiral Pit was very difficult, with, as others have noted, a huge gap in difficulty between the minions and the boss.

After level 10, though, things got much easier and stayed that way pretty much all game. On Normal, Tassik-Schai was pretty much the only seriously challenging fight I ran into before the endgame, and even he wasn't terribly difficult. After that, except when I wandered into an area way over my level, the only remaining hard fights were Grah-hoth and the running fight through the Royal Spire (I bribed Sulfras rather than fight him, so there wasn't a hard fight for the Escape ending). And even those didn't strike me as overly difficult. After the Spiral, I probably could have gotten through the rest of the game on Hard.

I prefer doing +2 AP for my priest. Being able to do Group Heal and something else (Unshackle Mind, Divine Fire, etc.) is often very useful. So is being able to do an extra heal if your party is too split up for Group Heal, or being able to do two Unshackle Minds. And, if you don't need any healing, two Smites or Divine Fires never hurt anyone. Well, anyone on my side...

I think it's a badly written line of text.

What does appear to be a bug is that there's no way to clear the quests from your list after you've read the book. With the Pyrog quests, you give the papers to one of the three and then tell the other two that you don't have them anymore and those quests go away. But with the Drath spellbook, I'm no seeing any dialog options for telling people I read the book myself and they can't have it, so I appear to be stuck with those quests on my quest list forever.

Oh! I thought you meant all fights, not just the open world ones.