Fael

Originally Posted By: Kreador It would be a nice change if it was possible for all non-zero value items dropped by dead enemies in a battle were automatically added to your junk bag. That might be difficult to program, though. The problem with that is that good stuff (i.e., stuff you want to use, rather than sell) would also get added to your junk bag and would be easy to miss. For most players, I expect that this would create more problems than it solves. More to the point, the current system doesn't generate all that much in the way of people writing to Jeff complaining about it, whereas people missing good items would probably result in tons of complaints. The people who are annoyed by the current system are mildly irritated. People who accidentally sold the Jade Halberd because it got added to their junk bag without them noticing would be furious. Therefor, I wouldn't hold my breath on this...

Thanks, Jeff. Just hit level 24 and haven't had problems finding appropriate level things to fight since I was able to start in on the Slith.

I would say: 1) Spiral pit boss. Blew through the rest of the monsters easily enough to walk into the final encounter with over half my spell points left and no mana potions used, and then lost one character per round to the ghoul swarm. Came back several levels later and lived long enough to face the summons, which then slaughtered me. Again, had to go away and come back at higher level. And that black-out area makes this the most annoying of all dungeons to come back to. 2) Definitely agree about the huge and unexpected difficulty jumps in the bat cave. The bats are easy even at low levels, but then you stumble upon the rats... 3) I didn't have the problem with Tassik-Schai that others have. Perhaps I was just higher level when I got there. 4) My big problem, though, was that it just seemed hard to find level-appropriate dungeons in the level 3-7ish range. You've got the Goblin Cave, the Brigand Fort, and I think the Underground Fort (is that the one with the rear entrance by the river?). But, after that, it's really hard to find something to do next that you can handle. Around level 10, you start being able to take on the Slith, and then there's a ton to do. But there was a point between the early Nephil dungeons and the Slith where I had a lot of trouble finding something I could finish off without having to leave sections for when I was higher level (see Bat Cave and Spiral Pit, for example).

The Wards really are useless once you can cast the spell, since you cast it once when you leave town and then they don't wear off. Resurrect, Mass Heal, and Mass Cure are always useful because someone other than your priest can cast them. Useful when you're priest is the one who needs resurrecting, or when turn order (or daze) means you have to have a heal before your priest's next turn comes up. Also, here's a riddle: Q. When is a haste potion/scroll better than a haste spell? Click to reveal.. A. When it doesn't use your mage's attack action for the round to cast it!

Wands are most helpful at the beginning of the game, when their damage relative to your opponents is high. As the game progresses, yes, they become much less effective. But not completely ineffective. They still have three uses. 1) They give area-effect attacks to your non-mage party members. Not very effective ones, granted, but sometimes that's all you need. 2) They give extra actions to characters who otherwise don't get them. If you're battle frenzied or hasted, this is useless. But, if not, you can use one and still make your regular attack. Again, the damage is low -- but over the course of a battle, it adds up. Useful for tough boss fights. 3) Some enemies are vulnerable only to a specific type of damage. If, for example, an enemy is only vulnerable to fire damage, giving your fighters a bunch of Wands of Fire at least lets them do something. The best example of this is a certain lich in Avernum 6 that you had to kill in a certain very limited number of rounds. If you'd been saving all the wands of fire you'd found over the course of the game up to that point, it was a fairly easy fight. If you hadn't, you were really, really screwed...

It does seem that the game gets a lot easier as it progresses. This is contrary to 1) Jeff's usual design practice, and 2) a good marketing strategy, but it seems to be the case. Once you get to somewhere in the level 8-10 range, the "constantly miss every round" problem starts to go away, as long as you've been following the advice of the forums -- not the tooltips! -- as to which stats to raise. Being able to cast ward spells and one of the useful cloaks (i.e., not Cloak of Curses) help a lot, too. As does the fact that there seem to be way more areas of a given difficulty than "needed" for XP, so you'll inevitably hit a bunch of dungeons when you're way too high level for them and blow through them without much effort. This is also arguably not much fun (and a big reason I'm really not a fan of the "big, open world" style of game), but at least it's unfun in a way that doesn't relate to the title of this thread. I suspect it may get hard again at the tend, as leveling slows down and the dungeon difficulty catches up with you again, but I'm not there yet. The problem for it being too hard is mostly at the beginning, before you get enough levels to optimize your stats and when the standard "go somewhere easier" advice is really unhelpful -- you're already in the easiest dungeons in the game and you still can't hit anything. Of course, all of us here, by definition, are in a much better position than the average player -- we read the forums, so we know the Dex tooltip is wrong. Pity the average player, who sees that he can't hit anything with his melee fighters, and keeps boosting Dex to try to fix it. Wonder how far that guy gets before he gives up in disgust?

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Does pretty much everyone steal if they can get away with it? For some reason I haven't considered it. Pretty much never. Although I often make an exception for Wisdom Crystals, Potions of Learning, etc.

Yeah, this seems like the game where Jeff drives away the masses of new players he picked up with Avedon. It's funny that, after all the blog posts about how games are too hard and how as a designer you need to make your game easier than you think it should be and then go back and make go back again and make it even easier than that, he then goes and makes his hardest game in half a decade. I wouldn't say that the problem is that it's too hard per se (although, following the design logic Jeff espouses on his blog, it is). My issue is that every Spiderweb game has the same five difficulty levels with the same descriptions, they really have completely different meanings from game to game. Of the last five Spiderweb games I've played, I'd say A4 Normal = A5 Easy = A6 Normal = Av Hard = A:EtP Easy. The result is that, unless you're an "always play Torment" or "always play Casual" player, you never know what setting you should be playing at when you start. As a long-time fan, I'm kind of prepared for that. But the huge jump in difficulty between Avedon and A:EtP, combined with the fact that there are a ton of new customers who have only ever played Avedon, just does not seem like a good business decision. The one actual complaint I have is that, if the tool tip about Dex improving melee to-high is untrue, that really needs to be fixed. I threw a ton of points into Dex for my melee fighters after noticing they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Which I'm sure now explains why they still can't hit the broad side of a barn. Thanks, tool tips!

Originally Posted By: AaronC I've started as well, and I love the health regen system. It didn't make a game harder having to leave dungeon, run back to town, it just made it more tedious. Yup. Now we just need this for Vitality and we're all set. Fortunately, Jeff apparently screwed up (to hear him tell it, anyway) and characters ended up with way more Vitality than he intended, which is almost as good as regen. Now, we just need to convince him that this is a feature, not a bug.

Originally Posted By: Superba It's only few weeks that I play the game so my experience is far to be complete, but I think I learned this: Shima needs a good balance of Dexterity and Strenght, Sevilin mainly needs Strenght I'll add that a backstabbing Shadowwalker is great for inflicting damage, but it's only really effective if your Blademaster acts before him to move adjacent to an enemy and set up the backstab. Which means that the Blademaster needs to match the Shadowwalker in dexterity. Which, as others have noted, isn't a bad idea, anyway.

Originally Posted By: Vent I think the question was about constant auto centering. If I remember well some Avernum used that, well not sure. You are correct, Avernum did use that; Avadon does not. You can also scroll the map with the arrow keys.

No -- you never learn any more about this than you know at that point.

Yeah, this one drove me nuts, too. By the time I went back, I'd completely forgotten where I met him and searched the whole castle three times before wandering back into the garden.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan In fact, I remember Jeff making a post somewhere about how this happens between different Marine battalions in Iraq. He was addressing the very complaint others in this thread have: that characters saving the world should expect handouts from people they meet. My google-fu failed in locating this post... wasn't able to find it on his blog, this forum, or in "The View from the Bottom" articles. I remembered it was on the blog, which allowed me to scan through titles until I found it: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-people-on-your-side-are-always.html.

Plus, the sparkles also get added to traps, which amuses me.

Took a while, but I'm starting my second play-through and the first thing I did was implement this. Thank you! Very, very nice!

Originally Posted By: DStaal Optimal strategy becomes obvious within about a minute in. From that point on... All you are doing is seeing how long you have patience for. You're not killing anything. You're not going anywhere. You are just stuck there fighting in circles, literally. There's no strategy involved in this fight. No tactics or puzzles to solve. If you have the patience to sit there and slug it out, you'll win (unless you make to many mistakes). I kept looking for something which would let me end the fight, but couldn't find anything. It does occur to me, however, that if your doctor tells you that you only have three hours to live, doing this fight would be a great way to spend them -- they'll seem to last forever, and by the end death will be a relief.

I don't think it's possible to reach the switches until after combat begins. And you probably don't want Nathalie to do it, because she's the one who can do the most damage to the things on the other side of the doors opened by the switches. All things being equal, it's best to have Jenelle hit the switches, because she can't really damage the constructs behind the doors, anyway. However, if she's not conveniently located, it's probably best to just send whoever's closest (even if that's Nathalie...).

One of them. The board split largely between people who play blademaster, shadowwalker, shaman, and those who play blademaster, shadowwalker, sorceress. I'm in the shaman camp, because the healing does become useful later, and the poison cloud is a pretty nice attack. You're right about the summoning being mostly useless, though.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES What CRPGs can you think of that actually have interesting final boss fights? I was quite fond of the final fight in Avernum 6. A5 was fun too, if you did it in the intended order -- clearing out all the areas of the fortress other than the ones used for those fight, then going in to meet Dorikas through the correct entrance and following him as he retreats, fighting each of the encounters in order (and without having killed any of the monsters involved earlier). Fun, but almost impossible to do on your first play through -- you really have to know how the fortress is laid out and how the fight is supposed to go to experience it properly.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES But it sounds like the real complaint is that it's too long and the tactics you have to employ during the fight are themselves not interesting enough, or at least not interesting enough given the length of time you use them. Repetitive. Is that right? Yes!

That's correct. You can't get there until later.

I on the other hand, didn't end up doing this until the end of my second trip through Kva where I was in the high teens and, instead of being one of the most fun and challenging areas of the game like it seems to be for everybody else, it was pathetically easy. Why did I wait so long? Because I didn't see the *# switch. Thanks for making the game more fun with those switches, Jeff!!!!!

Originally Posted By: VCH Similarly, I like playing Magic the Gathering, but have absolutely no interest in building decks. Am I alone in this? No, I like Magic much better if each player just grabs 50 (or whatever) cards at random out of a huge box. Oh, you meant about increasing stats in RPGs? Yeah, you're pretty much alone in that. :-)

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Backstabs are fairly easy to set up with my party (2 melee shadowwalkers + 1 shaman with summons); YMMV. I play the more traditional Blademaster + Shadowwalker + Shaman (although someone -- I forget who -- convinced me to sub Sorceress for Shaman on my second play-through, which I'm just starting) and agree with this whole-heartedly. The trick is, you can't specialize in stats -- to take advantage of the backstab, you have to keep the Blademaster's Dex up with the Shadowwalker's because you always want the Blademaster to go first. But it's certainly worth it for the bonus damage.