Fael

Yeah, there are a bunch of areas where I'm not sure if I should just go ahead and clear them or if I'm supposed to wait and get a quest for them later -- the Darksider lair in the Abyss, the giants in the swamp south of Ft. Dranlon, and the chitrach lair. Compared to A4 and A5, A6 definitely makes it trickier to figure out what areas you're ready for and what areas you're not.

Yeah, I didn't get it until I reached the point where my entire party was between Nichol and the demons and he had nothing around him and he went and charged through my line to engage a bunch of demons that weren't threatening anybody. At that point, I got the message that he wasn't going to do anything until I'd fled. But it took a while to get there.

Originally Posted By: Thuryl Gymnastics does have a dramatic effect on turn order, but a little goes a long way. Just being a Nephil is enough to ensure you go before many monsters, and adding some Quick Action or Quick Strike mostly seals the deal. I guess you could put in another three points for dealing with very fast enemies, or give some characters training in Gymnastics and not others if you want to manipulate the party's turn order for tactical reasons. I found that, without it, by the time I reached the Eastern Gallery, my human mage (who, being a mage, had neither Quick Action, Quick Strike, nor much Dex) was going after at least some monsters about half the time. 2200 GP and three trains in Gymnastics later, that wasn't much of a problem.

I stayed and fought for a while -- I knew I was supposed to flee, but it wasn't immediately clear to me that Nichol wasn't, so I spent a little while trying to figure out how to keep the demons off him long enough for him to run away. Eventually, it became clear that he was going to advance on the demons no matter what I did, and I gave up.

Originally Posted By: Thuryl Gymnastics is probably not necessary at all. I don't know, I found Gymnastics to be pretty helpful for increasing my initiative order.

I unlocked Battle Frenzy for my first fighter around the time I got to Mertis, for my second fighter as I was entering the Eastern Gallery, and for my archer/priest around halfway through the Eastern Gallery. Still deciding whether it's worth throwing a bunch of points into bows to get it for my mage (who would otherwise max out with a "natural" battle skill of 12).

I haven't finished it, but I'm mostly through the Eastern Gallery, which I gather means I'm probably about 70% of the way there. So far, it feels much bigger than A4 or A5. I'm not sure how much of that is that there really is a lot more, and how much is an illusion generated by the multi-stage quests and the greater player control over the order that you do them in. Either way, though, I definitely don't see "too small" as a reason not to get it.

I'm still pretty early in my first game, but so far it looks like food's going to be like light was in A5 -- you have to have it, but the game provides so much more than you need and you use it so slowly that it would be extremely difficult to actually run out. Of course, it may be that there's no food at all in later in the game and the stuff you find in the Great Cave is all you'll get for the entire game. But I sort of doubt it. And I'm not sure that it would be all that hard to avoid running out even if that was the case.

Yeah, I figured out to stay in the passage to avoid the area spell after the first time when I walked into the room and three characters died on the first round. But, duh, I probably have been spending too much time killing skeletons. Thanks.

Okay, I guess I get to be the first person to post an A6, "I'm an idiot and I can't figure out Jeff's puzzle" thread. Yay, me! So, I go to fight the Crypt Wight in the cemetery next to the Castle. Kill the Wight, it possesses one of my characters. Hey, just like the Soultaker in A5 (which I also couldn't figure out without reading the boards, come to think of it...)! Beat on possessed character for a while until the Wight leaves, then it reanimates it's old body and summons a bunch of skeletons. Kill the skeletons, kill the Wight, and it possesses one of my characters. Lather, rinse, repeat until bored or dead. Tried Unshackle Mind. Tried not beating on the possessed character and just waiting until the spirit releases him (which also seemed to work). Yawn. So, if I repeat this cycle enough times, am I eventually going to kill this thing? Or, as with the Soultaker, am I missing something obvious?

It's been pointed out elsewhere, that your need Arcane Lore of 15 to read all the books and Tool Use of 12 or 14 to open all the doors/traps, depending on how thorough you want to be. That leaves only item number three -- how much Nature Lore is required to find all caches?

And then you could order 2^99 large pizzas and get $2.00 off each, even with the "one coupon per customer" limitation. Or take 2^100 items through the 10 items or less lane at your local supermarket. Sure, that would annoy your neighbors; but you've got 2^99 Doomguards, so who cares what they think?

Yeah, if you don't know to open the gate before stepping through the teleporter in Shafrir's basement, you can indeed not get back out the way you got in. Exiting the basement of the Giant's spire is indeed the way out in that case.

At this point? None. Reload from your last save point before the fight and, if you want, see any one of the threads below for the strategy. They're kinda spoilery, but it's not really that hard a fight once you figure out the trick. http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=000334#000000 http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=000289#000000 http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=000109#000002

Trinity is exactly right -- Devine Ret is why you're having problems with this. Never use area effects on Doomguards. Concentrate all your damage on a single Doomguard and ignore the others completely. By concentrating like this, I was able to take down the Doomguard in two rounds and finished the battle with only 2 splits. The first time I tried the fight, using area effects, I got swarmed and massacred.

I don't remember off the top of my head, but there are several threads here that give the solution -- just scan back a bit. I think there's a total of six or seven messages, so you probably missed one or two. I know I did and, as a result, had to guess on one of the orbs.

South wall of Tranquility in the SE Quadrent.

Quote: Originally written by Eluctable: Hmm. Time for an empirical test, or preferably two (one for A4 and for A5). I don't have any time at the moment, maybe later this week... Okay, I created a party of identical characters and ran them through the first couple combats in A5. Their XP totals did indeed diverge slightly, but it definitely wasn't based on who got the killing blow. It may, however, have been related to the number of points of damage done by each character.

What I think would take the annoyamce out of the buffs without affecting game balance at all, would be a macro recording system such as is used, for example, in TOME. Sort of the Quick Keys on steroids. Essentially, we could record a sequence of actions, such as: START MACRO Mage casts haste one archer Mage casts haste on priest Mage casts haste on fighter Mage casts haste on mage Fighter casts war blessing Fighter casts war blessing Priest casts shield Mage casts prismatic sphere Mage casts arcane shield END MACRO Then, later on, I press one key and that sequence of actions will be repeated. Still uses the same amount of SP and turns, but eliminates a great deal of tedium, since I only have to re-do my buffs when I gain a new spell (or if I decide I want to forego a couple for a specific battle because I'm low on SP).

Quote: Originally written by Randomizer: Dorikas was a wimp, I actually agree with that. And really dependent on the order you did the Castle. The first time, I started going around the first floor of the keep counterclockwise and walked into his room through the door in the northwest corner pretty early. But, I wanted him to be the climactic final battle, so I reloaded and proceeded to clear out the rest of the keep, saving him for last. Then in the end, with all the monsters in the rooms he retreats through already dead, the battle was really easy, even for me. So much so, that I went back to my earlier save point and re-fought it without having killed anything else, so I'd get the full effect of the combat. I still only reloaded once (after screwing up the room with the orbs) in that string of battles. I reloaded less in Chapter 9 than in any Chapter after 2. It was much more like an A4-style level of difficulty than Chapters 3 through 8. Chapter 8, in particular, seemed like the hardest point of the game. Once you got past the hellhounds at the beginning of 9, it was all downhill to the end.

I didn't say the game was too hard, just that I found Normal difficulty in A5 to be a lot harder than Normal difficulty in A4. A4, I could get through pretty much every battle on the first try. A5, for most major combats after Chapter 2, I had to try once to figure out what the winning strategy was, reload, and then fight it out a second time knowing what to do. Yes, the Easy difficulty was there, but I'd finished A4 on Normal without too terribly much trouble, so I figured I could do the same with A5. And it was a point of pride to me that I did finish it on Normal (just as it's a point of pride to the power gamers to be able to finish with Torment Singletons). And not to have read the board's discussion of an area until after I'd finished it. As to changing "Easy" to "Beginner" that would actually make me less likely to try. I'm 38. I don't stink because I don't understand gaming; I stink because I'm over the hill. Back when I was a l33t p0w3r gam3r, the games were River Raid and Pitfall. Easy, I'll accept -- I'm no longer interested in devoting the time to any one game to becoming good enough to win with a Torment Singleton. But I'm no beginner -- I was finishing Dungeons of Doom on my Mac Plus probably before some of the A5 beta testers were even born. That said, a Beginner level below Easy, might make Easy more palatable to someone like me. Although I'd probably still try Normal first and then switch down if it was too hard. Which, I wouldn't have for A5 because 1) I'd finished A4 on Normal and didn't find it too hard, 2) it wasn't until Chapter 3 that I started having difficulty, and 3) it wasn't until reading this thread that I realized you can switch difficulty mid-game, and damping down the difficulty definitely wasn't worth starting over. Quote: I generally walk around with my fighters Augmented, Steelskinned, and Enduring Shield/Armored all the time, as soon as I have those spells. They last a really long time, so it's almost always worth the investiment. See, this is one of the reasons that I found A5 a lot harder than A4. In A4, I'd cast those spells on my party the moment I left town and they'd stay up pretty much until I'd gotten beaten down, filled up my inventory, and was ready to come back to recharge, anyway. In A5, on the other hand, their durations were really nerfed and that doesn't work. If you know you're going into an area with a lot of combats in a small area -- Lysstak's fortress, the Giant's Spire, Dorikas's Keep, etc. -- then you can cast them before going in. But you can't, for example, just wander around the Dark River with all your enduring buffs up all the time. That meant that I was often going into combat without the enduring buffs, which I pretty much never was in A4.

Others have commented on the specifics. But, yeah, I played both A4 and A5 at normal and found A5 much, much harder. A4, I had to reload maybe half a dozen times throughout the game -- a couple times in the ruined fortress in the north of the great cave where the guy summons the demon, once when I walked up a stairway into the middle of a bunch of spiny golems near Fort Remote, once in the Vahanti ambush near the Surface Portal, once on the lava bats in the same area, and probably one or two others I'm forgetting. In A5, I finished the demo area without reloading. I reloaded once in the Northern Isles when one of my characters died stupidly ("sure, I can go one more round without using a healing spell") early in the Fang Clan test and I didn't want to finish it without him getting the XP for it. Then I hit the Drake Pillers. Went into the lava cave with the fire lizards and lava vents. Died. Buffed and tried again. Died. Went to New Harston and got the basement ambush quest. Died. Headed for Exodus and got the basement ambush quest. Died. Fought the goblin shaman by the road. Didn't die! Went back out and ran into the Unstable Mass. Died. Realized I'd forgotten to save and had to fight the *&*# goblin shaman again. Died. Went back and killed the gremlin in the northern rapids. Died on the pylon quest. Died twice on the ghost warriors quest (once to the tunnel ghosts, once to the warriors themselves). Headed into the main dungeon. Died twice to the rats on the elevator. Headed north and died twice on the lava bats before giving up on that area. Cleared out the first level of Kora-Vyss without dying! Died twice immediately after going up to the second level. Managed to fight my way back to the stairs and tried to continue on, but died to the Slith Temple Guardian and retreated to restore my spell points. Fought my way through the north wing of the Slith Temple. Died twice on the horror before giving up. Died about 6 times on the priest before giving up. Died on the chief. Almost got the chief on the second try, then died when the priest showed up. Gave up on that, too. Headed to Lysstak's fortress. Died on the ogre. Died stupidly when one of my characters wandered too close to a chained beast. Died in the multi-level room full of archers. Amazingly, only died once on the Lysstak combat (which I found to be much easier than most people seem to have). Started searching the rest of the area. Did not die on the golem quest (but didn't realize I wasn't supposed to kill the golem and failed it, anyway). Died on the goblin shaman. Survived the lava bats, but died once to the pit crawler. Died once more on the cave with the fire lizards and the lava bats, then finally figured out the trick and finished it. Died once to the Slith kidnappers. Decided to try the priest in Kora-Vysss again and died a couple more times before giving up. Moved on to Tranquility. The rest of the game went pretty much like that.

Quote: Originally written by Eluctable: Quote: Originally written by Thuryl: Characters who strike the final blow on a monster get a bonus to experience Are you absolutely sure about this? I know this was the case in Exile, and for all I know in Avernum 1-3, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in A4 or A5. There does appear to be significant random variation in the experience awarded to each party member, but as far as I can tell it is completely random and balances well over time. I'm not convinced, either. When I was trying my all warrior party, I had a pair of Nephil archers and they both had the exact same XP total through about tenth level. What finally caused them to separate was when one of them died and didn't get any XP for the combat that killed him.

Quote: Originally written by Thuryl: Come to think of it, having three priests (all with enough battle skills to use Battle Fury) probably had something to do with it being so easy. Yeah, with three priests I can imagine that this wouldn't be much of a challenge. I had the more traditional fighter/archer/priest/mage party, so I was limited to at most two Repel Spirits a round, and that only if I didn't have to heal. The real issue, though is when the shades show up. With only one priest casting Divine Ret, I can't kill any of them the first round and only about half of them the second. So, I have to survive one round of them pounding on my two weakest characters and a second round of half of them pounding on my weakest one again. Plus whatever the horror and the sentinals happen to be doing. That's what was hard for me. But, yeah, two Repel Spirits and two Heals per round for most of the battle and six Divine Rets when the shades show up would likely make pretty short work of this fight.

Your method of killing him may have been the problem. Since the order in which you do Dorikas's is highly variable, the game doesn't end with you killing him, since it's possible that you could do that and still have most of the fortress left unexplored. The trigger for the end of the game is to kill him and then exit the fortress. Since you lured him outside to die, you missed that trigger. Try going into the fortress and then exiting and see if that ends the game. Otherwise, you may have to revert to an earlier save and kill him inside.