Juan Carlo

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Malical That sounds awful. It would completely ruin the point of different game plays. I agree that DEX is too strong (both ranged and defense) but I would rather have that then a shorter game. It's not as bad as it sounds. The only thing the current stat system achieves is to ruin melee-based builds. If stat gain were automatic, there'd be more viable character builds, not less. I don't like this idea. I think they just need to better balance the positives and negatives of each stat (and also make what each stat does very clear to the player at the outset to ensure that players can play how they want). So if you decide to put all of your points in strength, your attacks should be super powerful (powerful enough that this would be a viable way of playing the game), but you should also be pretty fragile. Deciding for yourself whether you want super powered offense or more longevity is one of the things that makes RPGs fun--as it ensures that you can play however you want. So I don't think SW should consider making it automated as it would make it less fun to play. Especially since, the only real problem with dexterity is that it is almost all positives with almost no negatives at all, whereas investing in any other stat will come with definite downsides. So it's just a poorly balanced stat. The only way that automating stats would be ok, in my opinion, is if SW also GREATLY expanded the number of skills and possible skill paths for each character along with it. That would at least ensure that there was still some customization to the game.

Originally Posted By: Malical The problem right now is that DEX is both an offensive and a defensive statistic. In order to get a 'tank' you need to upgrade 2 statistics (and a third, strength, to get any killing power). I agree that this ought to be dealt with. Perhaps a split in DEX into offensive and defensive would help. That's another thing I thought of: split Dexterity into dexterity and agility and have agility govern dodging and dexterity govern ranged weapons. Although, personally, I always like it when stats govern more than one thing. So I think just adding benefits to the other stats would be a more fun/interesting solution. Or at least add another benefit to strength, anyway. I think Intelligence is powerful enough in later stages that it really doesn't need another added benefit (Nathalie, for example, can really dish out damage if you do nothing but put points in Int--which, in my view, makes up for the fact that she's also incredibly fragile). In fact, if they added another benefit to Intelligence I think it would become the uber-powered stat instead of Dexterity, so they should probably leave it as is.

No. You can easily pass saves around on steam and get the achievements (basically everyone was doing it during the summer sale achievement competition they had). However, I'm pretty sure that steam achievements requires some added programing that the non-steam version of the game lacks (I'm not an expert, but I think it adds extra flags to the save game files to tell steam whether or not the achievements should be awarded). So I doubt that non-steam versions of save games will award you the achievements in the same way that steam version saves will. I could be wrong, though, so you could just try it and see.

I have a maxed out strength blademaster and he does way more damage melee than my maxed out dexterity Shima's range attacks. Although, Shima dodges so insanely well that he basically makes up for his lesser damage with longevity. So I agree that Dexterity is kind of imbalanced in this game. They should maybe have considered giving some extra bonuses with strength in some way to make melee more worth playing--e.g. maybe every ten points you have in strength you get a significant boost in total health. That would make up somewhat for what a damage magnet the melee fighters tend to be. That said, though, it does seem like you can make up for the lack of dexterity somewhat with magic items. I don't know exact stats or anything, so this is anecdotal, but I enchanted a bunch of my high strength blademaster's armor with "hard to hit" gems and he doesn't seem to get hit nearly as much as he used to.

Wow. I've been doing things completely backwards, it seems. I'm playing torment and my main character is a melee focused blademaster and I pretty much just use him, the sorceress, and the other blademaster exclusively. So I take it I've made things way harder for myself? It actually hasn't been all that hard thus far (I just got done with the beast quest and the salamander dungeons were the hardest so far, but they were also really fun and I made it through fine so I didn't mind)--but I hope I haven't made the game unbeatable or something. I just really hate meta-gaming before my first playthrough. And I really hate RPGs that force you to meta-game before your first playthrough (and I'm not thinking of Avadon here, but primarily of "winter's voices" as you can basically render that game entirely unbeatable if you don't have the impossible foresight to specialize in one or two skills at the outset).

I bought it on steam. Count me as another who had never heard of spiderweb at all before seeing Avadon advertised on Steam. I love RPG games, but my biggest complaint is that the writing in most tends to be pretty awful. So since basically every review of Avadon talked about how great the writing was and how the choices in the game tend to be morally complex and very "grey" (rather than the sort of black and white take on moral complexity that you usually get from your typical Bioware style RPG), I thought I'd give it a try based on that. Plus, 8.99 is cheap enough that even if I hate the game I really won't feel burned. I'll try to return to this forum and post my thoughts on what I think of the game (as a total newbie/outsider to the spiderweb universe) after I played it a bit more. I'm hoping it lives up to the hype expressed in some of the reviews I've read of the game (most of which were positively glowing).