Ceiling Durkheim

Guess we'd better break out the blessed bolts and/or mindduel. Because nothing foils the dastardly machinations of nefarious warlocks more expeditiously than compound words.

Quote: Well, as long as you change your custom title before the release of Avernum: Crystal Souls, we should all be fine. We should all be fine? I'd worry more about *i in that case. I don't want to spoil anything, but Click to reveal.. I hear Garzahd dies at the end!

Much obliged.

Quote: I would have to agree wholeheartedly with this, it seemed like there was a gap with little to do after saving the prisoners in the Nephil Fort (not being able to kill the chief), I was kinda at a loss, aimlessly wandering looking for stuff to level up on. I'll third that. I'd call it more levels 7-10 in my game, but in either case the time after one finishes the Formello, Cotra, and Fort Duvno quests seems one of the most aimless. By the time you hit the teens, there are many level-appropriate quests, plus being a level or three under tends to be a lot less crippling in the teens and twenties than in the early game.

Quote: You are taking those other players for total idiots or what? So I'm curious, with your _logic_ who post here and complained about difficulty and are the total idiots you are mentioning? You are the only person in this thread who has said anything about "idiots." All Slarty said was that there are players with varying levels of skill, interest in sidequests/grinding, and information; I don't see how you can seriously contest this claim. I can't offhand speak to the quality of the conversations you two have had on other threads, but the post you quote reads to me as an argument that non-linear games don't necessarily have a sharper difficulty curve than linear ones. I just don't see the connection between that and Slarty (or anyone else) calling some players idiots.

Is anyone planning to write up a list of cheats sometime soon? A lot of them are the same as in previous Averna ('ouchouchouch,' 'imdrained,' 'iampoor'), but there also seem to be a number of new ones.

Given that you read the forums, you could always let other people do the tests and read their results. People like Slarty, who as you say enjoy doing said tests. Also, to echo Lilith: please relax. As far as I can tell, Slarty's comment didn't address you in particular, and was not insulting or inflammatory. Your statements, on the other hand, are insulting and childish. Please either respond civilly to other people, or not at all. Or if not civilly, at least proportionately: I'm not saying you can't respond with anger if someone on here starts insulting your mother and threatening the safety of your friends, but Slarty has obviously done nothing of the sort.

Quote: Someone wearing Mercuric Chain will take approximately 25% more physical damage than someone wearing enchanted plate. This is not acceptable for a front-line fighter, but I don't see how it's such a deal-breaker for a magic-user who does not expect to take as much physical abuse. Well, and 12.5% more damage from fire/ice/magic, which seems problematic given the tendency of bosses and high level enemies to spam powerful elemental attacks. Also, while a deficiency in physical defense is not as much of a liability for a caster, a lot of the harder battles in the game (e.g. the darkened area in the final gauntlet, Grah-Hoth, the entirety of the royal spire) involve the party being some degree of surrounded, making it very difficult for casters to avoid pulling some amount of aggression from melee enemies. That said, I think it also depends a lot on the character. I think it makes more sense to use a mercuric chain/leather on a mage than on a priest. Magi, even with a few levels of swordmage, can only wear so much heavy armor, so mercuric plate is pretty much out. Likewise, having a mage go down (in a standard 2 fighter-mage-priest party) is problematic, but not as devastating as losing the priest. Especially in the late game, when the priest can res the mage easily, while the mage has to use expensive and limited scrolls to do the same thing. Since Triumph originally mentioned mercuric leather for his priest, I was mostly thinking about applicability for priests, but I'll agree that it's a legitimate choice for a mage.

Kreador makes a fair point. You only need the orb of Thralni, which is accessible without entering the abyss, let alone getting the giants' boat.

The mercuric leather's low armor is okay in the early-mid game, but a serious liability later on. Even with the mercuric chain, I found that the equipped character took substantially higher damage (I never found the mercuric plate). The quicksilver sandals are much more worthwhile. Other than the radiant boots (which provide no other bonuses), and the gazerskin sandals (unique, and only available very near the end of the game), boot defense caps out around 8%. That's only a 6% armor difference; compare a piece of variously enchanted plate (34%) to the 10% armor on the mercuric leather or 16% on the mercuric chain. It should take no great leaps of reasoning to intuit that a 24/18% variance in armor makes a lot more difference than a 6% variance.

Yes. There are some in the locked room near the entrance to the shadow road in Penta. Those are the only ones I know of.

Quote: Wasn't that a complaint of A4? You had so much freedom that it became overwhelming? I don't believe so. If anything, a lot of people on the forums have been agitating for a less linear game than Avadon and the recent Avernum and Geneforge entries. Non-linearity is also a quality that has drawn a lot of praise, particularly in comparisons of the early Geneforge games to the later ones.

As in 12^2 (standard notation for 'squared' when superscript text is unavailable) + 14^2 = 216? I'm pretty sure it equals 340. Is this a joke, or just bad math? (Or is bad math, itself, a joke? Coils within coils.)

Yeah. The player can shape them, even.

Another option would be to make pole weapon damage more balanced with dual wielding, such that dual wielders do a bit more damage to one target, and tend to get more passive bonuses, but pole users get the existing (low but not negligible) cleave chance. The first suggestion gives the two specs each a more distinct niche, but would be harder to balance, while mine is relatively easy to balance, but less distinctive. In either case, I think we can agree that the game would be more balanced if dual wielding were nerfed compared to weapon+shield, and especially compared to pole.

TU8 = 8 Tool use (total for the party).

Quote: all three cant raise their right hands. if i ask all three what is 2+2? i will get one right and two left or one left and two right. so whichever one is alone is the sane one. then... Even if we assume you're right, that leaves us with certainty as to one sane one, and no certain distinction between the other sane and the mad. Also, all three questions used up. This solution does not work.

Agreed. Having eyebeasts, kyshakks, and so on appear earlier on would not be the most plausible retcon. One convenient alternative would be to fill out the roster with a third variant of each creation type. This would mean a total of 27 usable creations, which is pretty close to the 30 available in G4-5. For some creation types, there are already workable variants (e.g. the 32 flavors of vlish, guardian roamers, battle gammas), while others have no obvious extension (glaahks, drayks) and would require a bit more innovation. In either case, it seems likely that Jeff will monkey around with the creation roster and skills, to modernize them and sort out some balance issues (parry, vlish, etc.); it will (eventually) be interesting to see how he works the class system this time around.

Well, one can do both. Talk to her, get various useful items and information from her, then kill her. My point was that Superba didn't have to avoid her lair on the grounds of not wanting to fight her.

One litmus test: how hard were the other encounters in the spiral pit? If they were also very hard, you were probably just underleveled. If the non-boss encounters were easy (as I found), or challenging but not tremendously so, then it's fair to say that the boss's difficulty is out of proportion with the rest of the level.

Quote: I reckon that solution sounds a bit too complicated for little or no result. Besides, the insane one doesn't do it at random, she alternates between questions. One question she all answer true with her left, next question with her right, then left again. There has to be a way to capitalise on the definate alternation Wrong. What Dintiradan said was: Quote: She answers all questions truthfully, but after each question is asked, she randomly chooses whether to raise her left hand for "True" and her right for "False", or vice versa. Not, "alternates," "randomly chooses." There is no reason, given the way the puzzle is written, that she couldn't respond the same way twice in a row.

You know, there are ways to interact with Athron other than fighting her.

No. It's more complicated than that, because of the one that answers randomly. Assume we use your implied solution, and ask each one a question of known truth value, e.g. in a decimal number system, does 2+2=4? Either two will answer with the right hand (right and random) and one with the left, or vice versa. Using this method, there is no way to discern which is consistently right/left and which is random. That said, I don't know what the actual solution is. I think it's something in which the answers to your questions are conditional on how the other crones would answer, but I'm not sure what questions of that sort will generate a correct solution.

Asp is in the inn (Darklake Pub). Southeast area of the map.

Intriguing optimization. I'm curious as to why priest spells and divine fire won out over mage spells. It can't be for unshackle mind (the priest spell that everyone loves) for a singleton...is it the sphere (as opposed to cone) blast, or am I not thinking of something at the moment? Especially given the lack of dispel barrier, which even with piercing crystals causes one to miss out on some nice loot. Also, and this is probably something I should have figured out on my own: who makes wisdom crystals? I don't recall those on my playthrough, but I was probably just sloppy in that respect.