Jerakeen

Not quite equally. And you can step up to the switch, hit it, and step away on one turn without tripping the mine.

Yeah, the graphical glitch can throw you off and make you reflexively hit 'w' until you realize what's going on. I've done that.

Turrets are highly resistant to mental attacks, but not immune. Just hover your cursor over them to see what status effects they're under. Also, I find that often they act very quickly, almost simultaneously, so it's possible to miss their actions if you're not watching closely. Snare turrets don't do a really noticeable amount of damage against higher-level foes, who may also be resisting the status effects; hit 't' to bring up the text log and scroll back to see what's been going on. Really, other than the occasional stunning, I've never had my turrets fail to act when enemies are in range.

Yes, the enemy has to be within attack range of the turret, not just of your characters. Placing them close enough without getting yourself swarmed can be a little tricky sometimes, but in most cases you can let the enemy come to you. It helps to remember that a turret will always be placed in the space immediately north of the character if there's room for it. If not, it will go in the next available space counterclockwise. And turrets will never be triggered by, or aim at, mines. Though they may hit them incidentally while aiming at something else. ETA: It's also possible for turrets to get stunned.

No, that shouldn't happen. I notice that the character graphic sometimes switches to showing the melee weapon in hand after using an ability (with all classes), but if the default attack was set to missile, then that is what should be used, regardless. Are you sure you're not accidentally switching it?

Way to introduce yourself, ZD! Welcome to the boards! I'd tell you to leave your sanity at the door, but clearly it's far too late.

If you're too far away when they die, the orbs won't be transferred. Teleportation might come in handy if you keep getting stuck.

Yeah, I would have said "pack animal" before the invention of the junk bag. Because why couldn't you shape a d'ornky?

Whoops, my bad. It's Konstina's Lair, not the ogres.

Relax, you won't be able to do the next phase until you have the Ogres of the Kva quest from Avadon. Carry on with other quests in the meantime.

Plus battle disciplines. But this forum is really just for announcements, so I'm locking the topic, kay?

Well, that's one way to go, certainly. But high-strength melee characters aren't going to make the best use of offensive scarabs either. I actually like to give them the passive bonus and/or group heal type of scarabs. And when you say "casters", I'm assuming you just mean Shamans. Because as far as I'm concerned, Sorcerers are all about making things dead.

You can rent that room for the night.

I'm finding my second full play-through (on Torment instead of Normal) to be a lot more fun, too. I'm trying Alcander as a melee tank with about 1:1 strength and endurance. The point of strength is mainly just so he can wear good armor - melee damage is a bonus. I like being able to send him up front without worrying he'll be killed in the first round. Main character is another TM, but I'm taking advantage of the fact that raising turret skills doesn't actually raise turret level to build her a little differently. With the Fancy Toolbelt, she only needs to invest a few points in the right branch; as long as she raises Turret Craft, her constructs will be just as powerful as Alcander's. True, she won't have access to the level 6 turrets, but so far two freezing turrets combined with a healing and a blessing pylon have been an unbeatable combination. When Al gets access to inferno turrets, so much the better. Just finished Miranda, piece of cake.

Probably the worst thing about the shaman is the relative uselessness of his main attack. Magic is too commonly resisted compared with other types of damage. There's also the fact that you'd have to pump Dex rather than Int to get the best effect from his top-tier attacks, which does nothing for his default attack - and javelins are a joke*. So basically the shaman is the only class that has no decent cooldown-free attack. Granted that BM and SW also have to choose between two stats (Str and Dex), but both of those come with a good default attack, melee or missile. And for those two classes, offensive scarabs key off Dex. For Shamans it's Int, which gives a high-Dex shaman another whole area of uselessness. This is not to say that a healing/summoning Shaman can't be useful, it's just that there's not much for him to do once he's called up his drake. *At least they were in Ava1. I admit I've barely used Dedrik in Ava2. But there's still no skill to improve them, so...

All we need is a big enough box; he comes with his own gun.

I use predictive text instead of autocorrect, which works pretty well for saving keystrokes and seldom causes embarrassment. Swiftkey will suggest words even before I type anything in; for amusement I will sometimes pick a random letter and then take every suggested word until it starts to repeat. The results can be very surprising.

It's mentioned in the dialog box that pops up after the fight. Another example of how skimming can get you into trouble in Spiderweb games.

Yeah, straight south. Even if you beat them, more will spawn, so there's no point. If you find you can't outrun them for some reason, sacrifice a pet or even a party member to keep them busy. As long as one character makes it to the exit you can escape.

Uhhh, no, I've never had any trouble duplicating a file on a Mac. If right-click and "duplicate" doesn't work, then I have no idea. But you can always download the demo from Spiderweb, scoop out the Resources folder, and delete the rest. But if your Mac won't even let you duplicate anything in the Avadon folder, will it let you replace a file?

It's meant to be Redbeard's personal access. There's nothing there, really.

In your graphic, yes. Use light grey if you want to depict something white.

You can use any existing graphic as a template, just cut out the cell contents and paste (or draw) in your own. Make sure you use the correct type; creature graphics are a little different than character graphics. The particular shade of white in the background of the existing graphics is transparent to the BoA engine. You'll want to avoid using it in the graphic itself. If you're on a Mac, you'll probably need Niemand's Graphic Adjuster to look at the .cmg files.

I have to say, this was probably my favorite fight in the whole game. The key, I think, is not to pay too much attention to Miranda, just try to keep the mobs down. But what really cracked me up was realizing that the winds were also sweeping up everything that wasn't nailed down, so you end up back in the meeting hall in a big pile of potted plants and bags of coal. There are certainly some fights where luck will determine the outcome (please direct your mental attack at my turret, thanks), but I've never gotten really stuck on a main line quest. Which means that there is usually the option of coming back later. Oh, and yeah, #$@*/ rats.

And perfunctory testing indicates the same pattern applies to Tinkermage summons. There is literally no difference* between a Bolt Flinger built with level 1 skill and one built with level 8. They both have about 75 HP, same armor (as far as I can tell). Hit rate and damage are hard to compare with the small sample size (testing vs. ogres, the turret dies in one or two rounds), but seem unchanged. Raise Turret Craft to 8, however, and the difference is dramatic. It's impossible to know the exact HP, because they regenerate a little every round, but a level one Bolt Flinger made with 8 TC took 230 HP of damage over 5 rounds before dying. Armor is vastly improved, somewhere around 50% as opposed to maybe 10%, getting missed twice out of 15 strikes as opposed to never out of 26. Offensively it went from almost never hitting (again, small sample size) to never missing, total damage about double, though not that much penetrating (automatic War Blessing that comes with Turret Craft obviously a factor here as well). Bottom line: Don't waste your skill points raising turret skills any higher than level 6 (or actually level 4/5 with the Fancy Toolbelt). The tooltips lie! (as usual) GRRRR