Ceiling Durkheim

And even then, there's a scarab for that.

I'm in agreement with a couple people above that the shaman is substantially underpowered, especially in comparison to the tinkermage. Give a dex-focused TM a group heal scarab and a couple elemental attack ones, and s/he can do everything a shaman can, only with better evasion, the ability to equip a shield without losing out on the best skill bonuses, and overwhelmingly greater damage output. It's especially silly that a player who saves money can get the earthshatter scarab long before a shaman can get earthshatter, and do a lot more damage with it if played intelligently. (I mean, technically a dex shaman can do just as much damage with earthshatter as a a dex TM/BM/SW or an int sorcerer, but the latter four classes don't have to hamstring the rest of their offensive abilities to do so.)

It bears noting that there are certain items available in shops that are arguably the best of their class. One can only get Shadowwalker's Boots from a shop, for instance. Titansteel equipment has the best base stats of anything in the game, though I usually prefer the bonuses one gets from other high level equipment. Shop around and you will find a few things that will stay with you right through the endgame.

Noted. Thanks!

So, given that I'm thinking of starting up a pro-Farlander playthrough sometime soon: what are the correct dialogue options if one wants help from Dheless? I mean, mostly they're probably the obvious ones about supporting the Farlands and opposing the pact/Avadon, so I'm really mostly wondering whether there are any counterintuitive ones.

I felt it fit in with Redbeard's characterization in Av2 (overmatched, tired, a little pathetic), though I can see how one wouldn't be a big fan of said characterization. As for big set pieces, I have to say I'm not that fond. I like them in theory, I certainly think they can be cool story events, but I find in turn-based games they make everything really slow. You have to wait two minutes for your party to take a turn, and if you get a game over part way through the fight, you lose a quarter hour of progress.

The strategy that worked for me involved parking all three of my characters next too the center construct. That way you only have to deal with one group of turrets instead of three. Meanwhile, the other two constructs are within range of missile weapons and circular AoEs, as are the constructs in the center. It's slow but it works. That said, supplementing it with some earthshatter spam from the room's center on the first couple turns would probably help.

It's conceivable, but probably not. There are small unreachable areas in a lot of Jeff's games, many of which never get revisited.

That I always kind of wondered what Avadon's position on relationships and sex was. It's clear that it's not totally forbidden (Miranda and her husband were recruited to Avadon together; when Callan muses on the possibility that Redbeard has a wife and family somewhere, she doesn't seem to think this is a betrayal of his duties), but almost no one in Avadon's employ seems to be romantically entangled. Interesting little world building question that I wish Jeff had dealt with at some point. Ah well, the series isn't over yet.

Hmm. I don't have a save from around that point in the game, but I checked and there are definitely six spots for golems (marked by pentagrams on the floor). I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree until someone can present more conclusive evidence.

Didn't Nathalie say that she arrived at Avadon when she was 16, with the implication that it had been a year or two since she got there?

Aren't there three on each side? For my money, the only way I could find to beat them on torment, with at best 6-4 force distribution (6 golems vs. 1 tinkermage, 2 turrets, 1 wand/scarab summon), was to fight them long enough to kill one or two, run out of the room, leave Avadon, then come back. At this point they had returned to their previous positions, minus any that I'd destroyed. Rinse, lather, repeat once or twice, and you have yourself a manageable fight. Cheesy, yes, but sans cheese I found the fight essentially impossible, harder by a large margin than Vardegras or the tinkermage constructs. The golems are strong enough that they'd make for a fairly challenging fight for a party of three, let alone a party of one.

Looks very good overall. The one bit I take issue with is the advice on stat distribution: putting at least a few points into endurance is helpful on lower difficulties, and basically mandatory on higher ones.

It depends. Summoned allies generally last 10 turns, which gives plenty of time to move around and find an optimal position. I'm mostly with you on buffs, though, especially in the early game, before one has access to much +blessing/curse equipment. Using one party buff (I favor triumphant roar/call of the frenzy) before enemies start tearing you apart can be very helpful on higher difficulties, but use more than that before battle and none of them will last more than a few turns.

Well, at least one of these problems has an obvious solution: you can often summon turrets before combat. Your sight range is generally greater than the range at which combat will begin, so if you see tough enemies (or if you try to fight an enemy, get killed, and have to approach it again) you can summon a turret or two and then lure said enemies into combat. Also, a lot of boss and sub-boss encounters require you to initiate combat by talking to the enemy in question beforehand. This is an excellent time to summon turrets and use any buffs you want to. This goes for shaman summons and wands of calling as well, and is pretty much required if you want to do well with summoning characters on the higher difficulty levels.

I do think there were noticeably fewer high level consumables, especially group heal scrolls. There were a similar number from enemies and chests, but far fewer available from stores.

I think this is a bad example of that sort of design. The class-specific equipment that you get from the character side quests is often some of the best you can acquire for that class in the whole game; this is especially frustrating if you're playing the same class as the party member in question, at which point if you're playing on higher difficulty levels you're essentially locked in to siding with your party member. I think Jeff has even derided this decision (characterization v. in-game benefits) on his blog in the past. I like Avadon 2 a lot in most respects, but if there's any lesson he didn't learn from the first game...

Well, I'm pretty sure you're at least right on the Svorgald count. It seems clear that Jeff intends to focus on each of the countries he's created by the time the series ends, and Svorgalds' pretty much the only one we haven't been to yet.

Ah. I think she started doing that to me, but didn't last long enough for me to figure out what would happen if she continued to.

The Thing In The Basement drops a golden runestone and a necklace of vitality, which gives substantial bonuses to physical resistance and healing efficacy; a very good item for a shaman, given their painfully low physical defense. Aside from that, you get a few low-mid level ranged weapons that you may not have yet (especially if you buy the house before you get to Avadon), and some nice consumables. Overall I'd say it's worth it for the items, more so if you're going for the achievement. As far as I can tell, the house in Dharam gets you nothing in-game aside from being necessary for the achievement.

Regarding Valera: I didn't even realize she had a death gaze attack, I killed her so quickly. She doesn't have all that many HP, and unlike Vardegras you don't have to spend a large amount of time healing. I actually thought she was the easiest of the three bonus bosses, and apparently Jeff agrees, given that you only get a medal for killing her on torment, as compared to hard for Krymhylas and normal for Vardegras.

Looking over the thread: I think there's one aspect we've mostly neglected in discussing length & replay value, and that's diversity of gameplay experiences. Every optimized Avernum party tends to look pretty similar to every other optimized Avernum party. One can run a singleton, an Anama party, and various other challenges and oddball variants, but the overall skill sets that any two 'good' Avernum parties bring to bear are pretty similar. This is not the case in the Geneforge series, in which one can run a solo servile or a shaper with a small army and expect relatively similar efficacy (well, depending on the game; in general the later entries were better balanced). Avadon is somewhere in between, probably a bit closer to Geneforge. This makes me a lot more eager to replay Geneforge and Avadon games than games in the Avernum series, even ignoring the range of possible endings and plot paths in each.

Speaking of recursion: the immortal question, "Is 'is this a koan?' a koan?"

I don't think moral ambiguity is what people are objecting to, per se. Coming back to Alwan, he made plenty of morally dubious calls, they were just on the side of law and stability rather than freedom and instability. I don't want loyalist hands of Avadon to be perfect angels: after all, Avadon is hardly perfect or angelic. I just think the story would be more interesting if there was at least one character who, when everybody else chimed in with "but the Wyldrylm would be nothing without its traditions!/but justice for the Threespears!/but think of all the cash moneys I could send back to Dharam!/" would reply with some variant on "no. The safety of the Pact is paramount, and Avadon is the Pact's guardian." For a game that's supposed to be all about choosing the lesser of two evils, one's party members are oddly univocal. This makes sense for story reasons in the first game, in the second not so much. That said, I do think Davies makes a good point. It's not like Avadon uses its dungeons as a vetting process for potential hands. Plenty of people who are subtly disloyal will make it through. Still, I would think by sheer dint of numbers some genuinely loyal people would become hands.

Spear shadowwalker is a viable route if you're going for a build focused on pure melee damage. That's how I built Yoshiria in my last game, and she performed admirably on torment (albeit I had a tinkermage and tank-specced Khalida, so she wasn't taking much damage; if you're relying on the shadowwalker to tank, definitely stick to sword and shield). That said, the shadowwalker's lance is a pretty unimpressive weapon. Both its base damage and damage bonus get substantially outclassed by other weapons, and the skill bonuses aren't amazing (as with everything else, center column bonuses are optimal). Your current equipment situation is pretty good, and the game won't provide you with any major impetus to change it, but if you do decide to go for a pole weapon, I recommend the jade halberd (which you get from turning in a lot of arcane scrolls/pact papers to Cybele in Serdica) or the Infernal's Halberd (dropped by an enemy early in the Corruption's Core). Both have 30-90 base damage, +20% melee damage, and some other tasty bonuses.