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Lilith

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Everything posted by Lilith

  1. Quote: Originally written by Cho Dan: Quote: Please explain to me how spending half an hour walking from town to town or bashing your head into every available wall is "challenging". I agree, the repetetivness of such searching could wear down a man with head of steel. The idea of secret tunnels and hidden passages has always been an intrical part to the games. However, perhaps there could be a better way for them to be found, instead of "bashing your head into every availabe wall." What if the party's nature lore opened such passages? There are a few secret passages in the game -- mostly, they require you to be told of their existence by someone in the game, and then walk near them, after which they open up for you. There are also a few other semi-hidden things, which are basically found by watching the screen carefully for little details like mounds of dirt in the ground (which tend to have useful items buried in them -- and require a certain amount of Nature Lore to dig out) or bodies and chests lying in dark corners (which can be quite hard to see sometimes, and also tend to have useful items on/in them). It seems to me that actually requiring the player to look for things is a better representation of searching than charging full tilt into every available surface.
  2. Quote: No money needed for training, no identification, no puzzles, portals instead of walking, no secret doors? It seems Jeff has dumbed down this game to its maximum. The whole reason for these things i thought was to bring in a bit of mysetry and provide a challenge. Please explain to me how spending half an hour walking from town to town or bashing your head into every available wall is "challenging". Quote: 1. It was great to charge for training because not only was it more realistic, but it gave you more of a reason to take rewards and jobs. Don't worry; there will be plenty of things to spend your money on. (And many quest rewards don't come in the form of money anyway.) Quote: 2. Identification of items gave you an extra choice. Something that is unidentified is a mystery, and whorth the excitement of finding out what it actually is. Without it how are you ever going to acidentally curse yourself, or be surprised to find you have a rare item? It's a part of the unexpected that comes out to surprise and interest you. Save your game. Try the unidentified item on. If it's cursed, reload your saved game. If it's not cursed, wear it. Again, I don't see how this is exciting or challenging, and it's only "mysterious" for the few minutes before you take it back to town or cast a spell to get it identified. And I don't see how finding a rare and valuable item is any less special just because you know what it is as soon as you find it. Quote: 3. If you can just transport yourself everywhere by portals, you don't get half the fun of encounters, horses and battles etc. It's just too damn easy, and dull. They better be expensive to use once you find them. See, my definition of "dull" includes having to fight endless random monster encounters, whereas yours apparently includes not having to fight endless random monster encounters. I'm not sure what's so fun about horses either. It seems we are at an impasse here. If you really don't like the portals, you don't have to use them. Quote: 4. Ressurection is something that should stay difficult. Sure it was annoying when someone in your party dies, but once again it provides a challenge. It makes you re-load or move on, but it brings variety into your game or alows you to do something in a smarter or better way. I'm not at all sure that things to which the solution is almost invariably "reload your saved game" significantly add to the game in any way. (Mind you, I usually tend to reload if a character dies even in A4. It's just no longer completely unreasonable to choose not to in some cases.) Quote: 5. Secret doors, i love them. They surprise you when you find them, sometimes they're obvious, but most people always go back to find them. How often have you gone back to a dungeon to find all the secret doors? So you end up bashing your head against every single wall in every single room by force of habit. Instead of pressing 8 for every step you take to the north in a corridor, you press 8134679. Again, I do not see how this is fun. But hey, maybe I'm just jaded after headbanging my way through literally hundreds of BoE scenarios full of secret doors for the sake of having secret doors. Quote: Granted, i haven't yet played the game. However the impression that i'm getting doesn't sound very good. It's as though Jeff's dumbed this one down and removed part of the mystery, and if all this game is just hacking down monster after monster, i'm probably better off chopping up some carrots for dinner instead. The combat is of a much, much higher quality than in previous Avernum games. TM will probably gut me for making this comparison, but let's put it this way. Do you play BoE or BoA? If you liked TM's BoE/BoA scenarios, you'll probably like A4. If you didn't, well, you might not.
  3. They're very sharp and pointy, and your adventurers have delicate feet.
  4. Synergy, didn't you mention a game-ruining bug that cropped up at the Castle? Is this the one you were talking about?
  5. I'm not really having much trouble conserving thrown missiles. Since my thrower also has a lot of Priest Spells skill and a little Mage Spells, I can use Bolt of Fire or Smite on most things, and save missiles for things which resist fire and cold, or for when I need to conserve spell energy. Right now I'm hanging onto 50 razordisks and 15 fine lances, which is about all that my party can haul around without being encumbered. In hindsight, though, I kind of wish I'd just made my thrower/priest a straight mage/priest instead. Buying spells is expensive enough already, but there are times when I'd really like an extra source of Lightning Spray and Fireblast.
  6. Quote: Originally written by Synergy: Torment, any PC construction you like, no cheats, no potions, no wands, no scrolls. Anything else goes. Not being able to use the occasional Invulnerability Potion would make my game more difficult, for sure..though I rarely truly need one. I usually sell wands and scrolls on sight. I'm hanging on to a few potions, but so far the only ones I've actually used are a few armor elixirs and augmenting potions for extra HP before a tough fight. And now that I have both Augmentation and Enduring Armor, I won't even be needing those.
  7. Wouldn't it have to land in the east to do that?
  8. I've been working on the assumption that a point of Anatomy is equal to a point of First Aid for First Aid purposes. I have no direct evidence to support this, though.
  9. Well, in previous Avernums, you could only use First Aid once per character per day. So having multiple characters with First Aid allowed you to use it multiple times per day. Apart from that, though, its effectiveness was based on the skill of the character using it at the time. Having many characters with very low First Aid skill was likely to do more harm than good. On the other hand, in every Avernum game except A4, First Aid is completely useless, so there's no point getting any anyway. It's pretty handy to have at least a couple of points in it in A4, though.
  10. The game only looks at the total level of it in your party, so you should spread them evenly across everyone. Putting 2 points on every party member is much cheaper than putting 8 points on a single member. The same goes for First Aid, by the way.
  11. Quote: Originally written by Ephesos: Quote: anyway, back on topic otherwise the blademasters(shh they are everywhere) will ban us!!! This is unlikely. Unless you are terminally abrasive (as TM has been in the past), ungodly annoying (such as the advertisers), or intent on posting lewd images (I can't remember any examples), you won't get banned. Blademasters can't ban anyone anyway, being as they're mods and banning requires an admin. Also, with regard to your third point, how could you have forgotten EraserHead so soon?
  12. Quote: Originally written by Will wily Wyrmkin wait willingly?: Actually, as of the end of A3 the dragons are still alive and on the surface just like in A3. Unless, of course, you were a lout and killed them in A3.
  13. Sorry for the mild topic resurrection, but since nobody else has, I thought I might as well share what the wishing well does. You can get spoiler if you have spoiler and spoiler . (Hold your mouse over the spoilers to read them in your browser's status bar.)
  14. See, the problem with your plan is that it involves using up an invulnerability potion.
  15. By the way, is it just me or is Lethal Blow distinctly unimpressive in A4? It seems to do roughly what Assassination used to do in the other Avernums.
  16. Probably it's the empty spot that was once occupied by Pathfinder, and Jeff didn't fill it with anything.
  17. Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: Thuryl, what difficulty level are you playing on? Torment, of course. But it hardly seems to matter. With 10 Parry and over 80 armor, my fighter is basically a walking rock -- most attacks just plain don't hit him, and the ones that do hit inflict only negligible damage. Quote: And what was your trick for the Testing Bones? I had a devil of a time with that on my first run through on Normal, and now going back on Torment, it's coming up soon, and seriously ydrad. Two things you probably know already: he sprays ice on you if you're anywhere inside the room, and he won't follow you outside the room. Now, as you also probably know, if you just go and hide around the corner, the test eventually complains that you haven't taken enough attacks and flunks you -- but it only keeps track of his physical attacks, not the icy spray. So if you stand your fighter just one space outside the room and hide everyone else around the corner, he can reach you to attack you, but he can't spray ice on you. Sneaky, but effective. (You know you're in the right position when you've travelled just far enough down the hallway so that you can talk to the bones and start the test.) I used a similarly sneaky strategy to finally beat Nociduas. Before taking him on, be sure to find and drink from the water basin that gives you elemental resistance. Drinking some Armor Potions, and using either Augmentation or Augmenting Potions, is a good idea too -- no harm in having all the HP you can get. Once the fight began, I hid two of my spellcasters just to either side of the gate into his room so that Nociduas could only see my fighter and one caster at any given time. When it was someone's turn to attack, they swapped position with whichever caster was currently in line of sight with Nociduas. This made it reasonably possible to keep my party fully healed at all times. (Casting Slow on him also helps to reduce the number of attacks you'll have to take -- recast it if he uses a hasting potion.) After setting all that up, all I had to do was attack, heal when necessary, and pray that Nociduas didn't use a healing potion of his own. In fact, abusing the line-of-sight algorithm in various ways is pretty much my strategy of choice for most things that my fighter has trouble dealing with on his own.
  18. More to the point, why bother to report that? This is a statistics topic, not a survey topic. On that note, I'm now just past the Tower of Magi and my party's at level 20-21. XP per kill isn't very high -- certainly less than 10 XP each off most things I'm fighting (ogres, lava bats). I'm finding the game fairly easy at this point -- melee-using opponents can barely touch my fighter, and his acid and poison resistance are both around 80%. The main challenge is in keeping my spellcasters out of harm's way, and with the occasional opponent that uses elemental attacks. The biggest problem I've faced in the game so far was Nociduas, who absolutely slaughtered me many, many times before I discovered a strategy which allowed me to beat him within a couple of attempts. I probably should have just left him for later instead of charging in there with a level-17 party, but I'm stubborn.
  19. Actually, I can sort of understand that desire. I've read several walkthroughs for games I've never played and never intend to play, just so I can know how the plot goes. Sometimes it's useful to know these things.
  20. Well, damn. That'll teach me to read the documentation next time. Thanks for the advice. >_<
  21. Quote: Originally written by Abraxx: Enemys selectable via letters. Gone. On a related note, I really miss the Look command. It'd be nice to have a way of knowing if the monster I'm fighting is the sort that sprays acid when hit before I attack it.
  22. Also, sometimes it's in Silvar instead. So if you can't find it in Formello, check Silvar. Why do you want it to attack you, anyway? Pea Eye's quest?
  23. Location: most of the way through the Eastern Gallery (visited every town and done most of the major quests) 4 PCs, levels 15-16 XP Penalties: 23-27% Average XP earned per kill: 2-3 off chitrachs The major variable determining my PCs' experience seems to be how often they die -- my fighter and mage, who are almost always alive at the end of a battle, have a little over half a level's worth of XP advantage over my priests, who are a little more fragile.
  24. I'm pretty sure that Curing can cure acid at level 2, and it may even be able to do so at level 1. It just does so rather poorly.
  25. Personally, I can't honestly say I was ever a big fan of beam and conveyor belt puzzles in the first place, so I'm not sorry to see them go.
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