Drakefyre

I've always preferred the Runed Amethyst for the acid effect. You only need to hit each enemy in a swarm once!

The tower disaster comes sooner if you beat the troglos/giants.

Also, there is no Torment in Exile III.

I also go for the 3rd Empire Army or the guards at Lorelei.

There are some strong monsters that have debuffed me, specifically with essence blade.

The game has a time limit, though.

There's also the tinker's bauble and gloves, as well as the infiltrator charm.

It's easy to hide in the locked rooms, though.

Also, if you charm everyone every time you cast Mass Madness, then there's nobody for them to fight! Having a 50% success rate is much better.

Discipline Wands do unblockable damage, so I was doing 200 damage/turn with 3 in missile weapons skill to the Charged Drakon in the challenge area.

I definitely think they're worth it when you run up against monsters that have great resistances.

There's some in the Purity Workshop, and another one that is easier to get to somewhere else in the Reaches.

Discipline Wands are the most underrated weapon in the entire game. They still do massive amounts of damage to monsters that are immune to everything else in the endgame.

There's a lever behind a pillar in the middle of one of the rooms on the left side.

I put too much into Dexterity - I tried to avoid hits at some point in the midgame but it didn't really work. It's easier to just wear heavy armor and pump parry. Parry is definitely worth it in the later parts of the game - pretty much everything else stops helping, but parry seems to just get better, since you are adding 2% chance to parry EVERY attack, and late game attacks do much more damage.

I would say that I never really had much trouble with Charm/Dominate/Mental Madness except in the challenge area. My mental magic was around 9-12 for most of the endgame. 10 AP (you can make those boots pretty early) gives you a second chance too.

I think most people still use this:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/boe/EXSfiles/EXS.zip

I'd been using the symbiotic cloak for the entire game, and you get it pretty early.

I think high QA is more important than high melee ... anywhere above 5 melee you should be hitting every time, especially with some enhancement crystals on intermediate boots/armor/leggings/etc.

I would do about 300 points of damage/turn because I had 10 AP and just cast burning spray twice. 120+120+80 acid damage.

Lerman's Pass was an area I had to come back to several times and test my strength. Eventually I got it by luring the Gazer out of the platform area, so I wouldn't get stunned into no action.

Loading up my last save, my skills were:

Level 51

HP: 626

Essence: 647

MP: 1294

Strength: 17 (12 without items)

Dexterity: 13 (11)

Intelligence: 14 (11)

Endurance: 8 (5)

Melee: 13 (9)

Missile: 3

Quick Action: 12 (7)

Parry: 12 (7)

Battle Magic: 13 (8)

Mental Magic: 13 (8)

Blessing Magic: 12 (7)

Spellcraft: 12 (8)

Fire Shaping: 1

Battle Shaping: 1

Magic Shaping: 0

Healing Craft: 6

Leadership: 10

Mechanics: 10

Luck: 1

Armor: 79%

Fire/Cold: 59%

Energy: 67%

Stun: 81%

Mental: 61%

Poison: 24%

Acid: 57%

Also generally 10 AP from Assassin's Boots.

And no, I never made a single creation. Charmed creatures worked well enough, and so does waiting outside some of those annoying radiating auras. Also, luring out monsters a couple at a time makes killing them much easier (although not quite as much fun).

Ice Spray is also good in the endgame, because most monsters don't resist cold when they resist everything else.

Alwan was the only one who really made any sense to me, to be honest.

I played primarily as a battle magic/melee agent on Hard and didn't really have problems at all. True, I leveled up a lot in the first couple sections, but once I got Essence Blade, everything was easy. Kill was awesome, Burning Spray/Acid Shower were crucial, and Mass Madness and Temporal Webs or whatever were frequent battle additions.

My G5 Agent was averaging about 400 damage on Kill in the last section of the game. Essence Lance and Acid Shower let lingering damage take care of melee enemies that couldn't really do me any damage (I was taking about 20 damage from the most vicious melee creatures I faced, and in single digits from most) while I Killed, Dominated, etc. distance creatures.

Try outputting a simple file to the scenario directory (or what the program thinks is the scenario directory), then checking the Scenario Folder for the file. Or searching for it on your HD if it's not in the scenario folder.

That way you can tell whether it's a directory problem or a scenario reading problem.

I agree with Niemand - 0x2000 indicates that the pointer was never actually allocated, so you're trying to free something that wasn't allocated.

Can't you find the crash with gdb?

I just want to wield me some flaming sword ... artifact-holders, get at me! You can have it back after I make one kill ...

I don't think turning them in does anything ... it didn't in my runthrough with Alwan - I still told the drayk about killing Toroth.

I believe this one is for giving the Helft papers to Shaper Alexie.