Clintone

I made a level 1 four member party. One of the characters had a priest spells of 2. That character had 2 intelligence. That character cast the protection spell at level 1 fifty times on my four person party. I added up the total turns of protection that resulted in after those fifty casts. It gave a total of 844 turns of the protection spell. Next, I used the give experience cheat code to raise my party up to level 25. I then spent that original protection caster's new skill points to give them 32 intelligence and 26 priest spell skill. I had that original protection caster cast protection 50 times. I added up the total turns of protection my group received. It was 864 turns...20 more turns than when the same character at level 1 had 2 priest spells and 2 intelligence. Next, I kept the protection caster's level at 25 but used the editor to bring their intelligence back down to 2 and their priest spells back down to 2. I had the character cast protection 50 times again. It resulted in 848 turns of protection, only 4 more turns than when the character was at level 1. One thing that was weird, was that this time whatever amount of turns of a blessing one character received, all the other characters received that same number of turns of the blessing. I'd cast blessings in past games and the characters had gotten different numbers of turns of those blessings before...maybe from items or something giving blessing bonuses. I'm not sure. The only thing that really gave me the impression intelligence/level/or priest spells had any impact on blessings was that when I was casting the 50 protection spells with the character with 32 intelligence and 26 priest spells might do anything was that four of the fifty times that character cast protection, the group received 6 turns of protection, rather than 5,4, or 3 turns. The level 25 character with 2 priest spell and 2 intelligence, and the level 1 character had only ever gotten 5,4, or 3 turns of protection. That's assuming I didn't miscount. If levels or intelligence do affect blessings, unless I counted wrong it seems like it affects them in such a small amounts I don't even know why that modifier exists, unless it works better with some spells than others, or it's exponentially better with higher levels of spells or blessings-improving traits and items or something. Your description of damage bonuses is clear. Thanks.

Thank you for checking me. *Apparently I was wrong about healing spells, and you were right. Priest spells do make your healing spells better. Intelligence has no effect on healing spells. I'd just been assuming they did through Avernum games I've played. That was quite a surprise. My bad. Moving on ________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Regarding blessings though, (and by blessings I mean the hast spell, the protection spell, and the war blessing spell) I just had a character with 35 intelligence and 16 priest spells and 10 mage spells cast haste and protection, on my four party team. I'll call him Bob. This party is level 21 and is carrying no items. That character had haste at level 2. The number of turns it listed haste lasting for, for my team were 3,4,4,4 after the first casting, 3,4,3,4 after the second casting, and 3,3,3,5 after the third casting. The aforementioned character (Bob) also cast protection several times on my four party team. Protection was at level 2. The amount of turns that lasted for was 5,5,5,6 after the first casting, 6,5,4,6 after the second casting, 6,5,5,6 after the third casting. Then, I had another character who had haste at level 2, just like Bob. This second character had mage spells at level 3 and intelligence at level four. Just like Bob, he was level 21. Like Bob, he had no items.He had no traits that increased blessing magic either. I'll call this second character Dilbert. Dilbert's casting of haste resulted in the following turns of haste for my four party team: 3,3,3,3, after the first casting, 4,4,4,4 after the second casting 6544 after the third time, Then I had a character, who I'll call Ralph, cast protection. Ralph had intelligence of 2 and priest spells of 3. Ralph was level 21 and had no items, or traits that enhanced blessing. Ralph had protection at level 2, just like Bob. When Ralph cast protection it resulted in the following turns of protection on my four person team: 4,6,7,4 the first time, 5,5,5,5 the second time, and 5,5, 6,5 the third time. If intelligence, priest spells, or mage spells effect blessing spell length, it doesn't seem to effect it much. The only thing that I've found that effects blessings for sure is the traits that make blessings better and items that do the same and buying higher levels of skill of the spell in question. Could you be mistaken about anything effecting the strength of blessings besides the trait that enhances blessing skill, items that do the same, and blessing skill level? (by blessings, I mean protection, haste, and war blessing). Nothing other than those three factors seemed to make any difference in blessing length for be back in Escape from the Pit, and nothing else seems to make much of a difference now either, so far as I've seen. Regarding whether or not level increases affect the length of blessings, I just had a level 1 party cast protection 3 times. The amount of turns that gave my party protection for was 4,4,4,4 the first casting, 4,4,4,4 the second casting, and 3,3,3,3 the third casting. Then, I used a cheat code to bring that same party up to level 25. After that the same character who cast protection the first round cast it three times again. The effect was that the number of turns protection lasted for was 3,3,3,3 the first casting, 4,4,4,4 the second casting, and 4,4,4,4 the third casting. Character level doesn't seem to affect blessing length either. The only things that I know for sure effects blessing length are items that say they do, the traits that enhance blessings, and the level of the spell you're casting. Moving on. I edited my original post. It's better now, hopefully. I'm still not entirely sure I understand how the mechanics of the damage reduction of duel wielding and the damage bonus of nonhumans works, but I'm hoping I got it right. I took out some stuff and added some things in. Much of my comments about humans vs. nonhumans was indeed little more than psychotic babbling. I was just using far to confusing of explanations to explain something that as actually pretty simple and probably common sense that didn't need to be explained. Thanks.

You can beat Avernum 3 on torment without an incredible amount of difficulty...so long as you reload enough. I find it more enjoyable to place a limit on the number of times my party can die though. This forces me to plan things out better and makes ambushes and surprises seem more enjoyable and challenging. This is intended as a guide for that kind of play-through, where your goal is to maximize survivability. Discussion of the four main traits, strength, dexterity, intelligence, and endurance: Strength adds damage and accuracy to melee and pole weapons. It doesn’t do anything else besides increasing your weight-carrying capacity, which will never be a major problem anyway. Your characters won’t need any of it unless they’re using melee or pole weapons. Dexterity gives an evasion bonus of 5%, a speed bonus which makes it more likely for your character to take their turn before your enemy, and improved damage and accuracy for bows and thrown weapons. On torment, if you’re going to get much of this, you should always get as much of it as you possibly can. This means, get all five of the dexterity increasing traits too. This is because dexterity can provide massive evasion bonuses against physical attackers that aren’t using area attacks. With maximum dexterity, you’ll find a large percentage of enemies have a 5% to hit chance with physical attacks. Depending on how you play, this can even include tough, late game physical attacking enemies like alien beasts (keeping in mind that alien beasts don't only use physical attacks). If you’re not constantly pumping dexterity, that evasiveness will rapidly drop down to nothing though. It’ll also boost evasion against some elemental attacks, like fire and energy, although I’m not sure how much. It’ll never boost evasion against cold though. I know dexterity helps evade non-area affecting physical attacks just fine. I think it'll help evade some area-affecting physical attacks too. I just don't know if it'll affect all area affecting physical attacks. Endurance: adds five points of health, and 2% better poison and acid resistance. The lower your level, the better this is. Before you have 150 health, this increases survivability better than hardiness. Keep in mind though, that you can hit as much as 300 health in the late game, and that'll make each additional health point considerably less useful than in the early game. Also, accuracy is a major issue on torment, so of you put too much of your skill points into health and not enough into strength, if your character is a melee user, your character won’t be able to hit anything. Likewise, if you invest too much in endurance and too little in intelligence and you’re a spellcaster, many of your spellcaster’s spells will be garbage. It’s definitely helpful insofar as increasing survivability is concerned, but you need about 2/3 of your points, minimum put into strength if you want your melee or pole user to not have major problems with accuracy, and about 2/3 of your points, minimum, put into intelligence if you want your magic user or priest to be good at casting all spells, so don’t put too many points into endurance, and it’s probably not useful to put any into endurance in the late game at all...with the possible exception of tanks that don't do much because sit around and absorb damage. Note that endurance also increases evasiveness towards cold. That won't matter much for most characters on torment, given how rapidly evasiveness fades into nothing if not constantly being improved, unless you want a tank that puts most to all of their points into endurance. That might not actually be a terrible idea for a character build though, particularly given how many spells work well even with low intelligence. Intelligence: increases mental resistance and makes many of your spells, although not all, more powerful and gives 5 more energy per intelligence. Some spells require high intelligence to work well. Others do not. I’ll list which is which below: Spells that require high intelligence to work: *Daze, howl of terror, domination - none of these will do much without high intelligence. Note that the ensnaring ability of daze is much more likely to affect enemies than the dazing ability of daze. The further you go into the game, the more enemies will become resistant to the dazing effects of daze. Eventually, it'll get likely that even relatively dedicated spellcasters will have trouble dazing much. However, the ensnaring ability will remain pretty reliable throughout the game. *Every damaging spell is affected by intelligence in some way. Most are useless without high intelligence because they become too inaccurate to hit anything. Some can still retain positive effects even with low intelligence. Intelligence increases spell damage too. Damaging spells that still have uses even with low intelligence are call the storm, pool of fire, pool of ice, pool of corruption, and curse the land. *Rain of curses depends on high intelligence for hitting enemies too. Note that spellcraft increases the length of the curses it causes. Spells that work perfectly with low intelligence: *all cloaks, all wards, All summoning spells, capture soul, simulacrum, slow, dispel barrier, haste, protection, war blessing, curing, mass curing, unshackle mind, bless the land, divine restoration, all healing spells. *Note that spellcraft increases the duration of the blessings haste, protection, and war blessing. *Note that the effectiveness of healing spells depend on the level of the healing spell in question, and priest skill. Spells that work decently with low intelligence, but work better with high intelligence: *Pool of fire, pool of ice, pool of corruption, curse the land – these spells have two effects. They deal a large amount of damage to an area of enemies as soon as they’re cast. They also infect any enemies that walk into the areas they were cast with conditions that damage them over multiple turns. The initial damage requires high intelligence to hit. The infectious, lingering damage just affects anyone who walks into the area the spells were cast. *blink – Blink lets your character teleport across the map while in combat mode. It also ensnares nearby enemies. You can use it to teleport with low intelligence, but its ensnaring ability won’t work without high intelligence *call the storm – this blows away enemies even if you have low intelligence. It won’t damage them unless you have high intelligence though. Summary: So, you can actually have low intelligence, spell-using warriors or archers that will work well. They just won’t be able to cast certain spells effectively. For example, you might have an archer priest with low intelligence that’s fast enough to go first and cast mass curing on your team before poison does much damage, or you might have a low intelligence tank with 16 levels of priest skill so they can survive area attacks that wipe out the rest of your team then cast revive to bring their teammates back, or you might have a duel wielder with eight points of mage skill so they can use blink to rush up to enemies to attack them, or escape quickly…but low intelligence characters will never be good at dealing damage through spells, or using mind control or daze because their low intelligence will make them too inaccurate to hit much. Hybrid characters: You need at least about 2/3 of all your skill points put into strength to be able to hit things with swords or spears. You need at least about 2/3 of your skill points put into intelligence to be able hit enemies with most damaging spells and mental attacks like dominate and daze. More than that will increase your success. You need at least about 2/3 of your skill points put into dexterity for archers…and if you want to get any evasion at all from dexterity, you should probably put all of your skill points possible into dexterity. That’s why hybrid characters that split their points between strength and intelligence, or strength and dexterity, or dexterity and intelligence, don’t work well on torment no matter how carefully you try to design them. If you try to make, say, a halberd-using mage by splitting your points between strength and intelligence, you’ll just end up with a character who is only very effective against weak enemies for most of the game. Both your evasion and accuracy do naturally increase with every level. There is about a 3% bonus to evasion per level. I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuracy bonus is something about that amount too. This will result in hybrid characters becoming useful in the late game. They’ll eventually reach the point of having good accuracy against tough enemies…but this could take a long time. This might not happen until level thirty or so. Note again though, that you can have very useful halberd-wielding mages, or archer priests just so long as you only have them use the spells with low intelligence requirements that I I've previously listed. Fortunately, there are enough of those sorts of spells to make those sorts of hybrids useful in at least some ways. More about evasion: There are three ways to permanently get better evasion: leveling up, which gives about 3% better evasion per level, dexterity which gives about 5% better evasion per point, and gymnastics, which gives about 2% better evasion per point. Technically, there are actually four ways. Endurance increases evasiveness towards cold...but that won't amount to enough to affect most characters. Gymnastics sounds pretty shoddy, given that it only increases evasion by 2%, but on Torment enemies will often be very close to having the ideal 5% accuracy due to your character’s evasiveness, but tough enemies will frequently be just a little above that. They’ll often have, maybe 10%, accuracy rather than 5% accuracy. 5% accuracy is the minimum accuracy possible. Keep in mind that though the 2% less accuracy from gymnastics doesn’t sound like much, if an enemy has 10% accuracy, getting an extra point of gymnastics actually makes that enemy 20% less accurate, so gymnastics can actually be quite useful for characters trying to be evasive. It’s just not as useful as dexterity. Note that there is much armor which enhances evasion as well. Note that archers are the only characters who will be reliably evasive...or maybe weird tanks with maximum endurance when someone's trying to hit them with cold attacks...but mostly it'll just be archers. I mentioned previously that if you're not constantly pumping dexterity, evasiveness will rapidly dwindle down to nothing. No one except archers will...or at least should, but investing much in dexterity. Some non-archer characters might get a few points of dexterity to increase their speed, or 10 points of gymnastics to get extra action points, but those miniscule increases to evasiveness will almost never be enough to evade anything but the weakest enemies. Noteworthy skills: Parry: The parry skill is a way for characters to avoid being hit by physical attacks without investing in lots and lots of dexterity. Each level of the parry skill gives a 3% chance of avoiding any non-area-affecting physical attack from anyone. It effects the physical, non-area attacks of dragons exactly as much as it affects the physical, non-area attacks of goblins at the start of the game. It doesn't take your opponent's accuracy into account. It doesn't take the evasion you have from dexterity, gymnastics, leveling up, or other non-parry sources into account. So, if you have 17 points of parry, every single non-area physical attack from every enemy in the game will have a 51% chance to be parried. When an attack is parried, it causes your character no damage. If you get 10 points of parry, wear a good shield, and get a few more points from items and/or trainers you can reach about a 50 or so percent chance of parrying every non-area physical attack. That's quite nice, and it's a great way for non-archers to avoid physical attacks. Keep in mind though, that maxed out dexterity can work ten times that well. If you want a character dedicated to acting as a wall against physical attackers, archers are best. Also, note that archers can use parry too. Parry and evasion use different checks, but they can still work together. For example, if you have an archer with 17 points of parry, through items and maximum skill points put into parry, and enough dexterity for a foe to only have the minimum 5% accuracy, even if that enemy manages to get a lucky hit and pass that evasion check they had a 95% chance of failing, they still have pass the parry check, which they'll have a 51% of failing, and if they fail that, you still won't be hit. Spellcraft: Note that this does more than just increasing your spell's damage. It also increases the duration of your curses, blessings, (at least rain of curses. I didn't test it on any other curses) and may help in other ways too. Hardiness: Just generally good for everyone. Increases all your resistances except mental and curse resistance by 3% Resistance: increases all your resistances by 3% except for physical damage resistance. Note that this skill increases mental resistance, which is very useful for low intelligence characters. This will help keep your massively powerful duel wielders from turning around and swiftly laying waste to the rest of your team when they get mind-controlled. It’s not worth getting unless you’re already planning on getting some of the priest or mage skill that’s its prerequesite, but blink requires eight points of mage skill anyway, and if you get it you can have teleporting warriors, which is always nice. Gymnastics vs. Sniper : Sniper gives a 5% chance to attack again after attacking with a bow or thrown weapon, and a 3% chance to give a negative status affliction to an enemy (such as poisoning, dazing, or slowing) with the aforementioned bow or thrown weapon. So, 10 points of sniper will give a 50% chance to get an extra action. Note that you can find plenty of items that increase your odds of getting a second attack by increasing your sniper skill. With items, maximum sniper skill investment through skill points, and a couple points from a trainer, you might get 16 sniper skill before you've explored a huge amount of the map, which would give you an 80% chance of getting an extra shot off each turn. 10 points of gymnastics will only give you about a 1 in 3 to 1 in 4 chance or so to get an extra action. However, it gives you an evasiveness bonus, and the game shows you when you get extra movement points from gymnastics, so you can see when you’ll get an extra action, whereas with sniper you have to wait until after you’ve attacked to see whether or not you've gotten an extra action. The extra action points from gymnastics aren't particularly impressive unless your character with high gymnastics skill also has an item that gives them an extra action point each turn. That will work with high gymnastics skill to result in the character getting an extra action most turns. Note that with gymnastics, if your goal is to use it to get extra actions, get all ten points of it you can get through putting skill points into it or don't invest anything into gymnastics. This is because the way gymnastics works, the likelihood of getting an extra action increases exponentially the more skill points you invest into it. Note that sniper comes so close to consistently getting 2 bow shots per turn by itself that I don't see it as cost effective to invest in both sniper and gymnastics. It seems like picking one or the other is best. If you want to make your archer better at damaging things, once you've maxed out sharpshooter and either gymnastics or sniper, go after lethal blow next. Archers have pretty easy access to it. Note also that sniper can only give you an maximum of one extra action per turn. So, even if you use adrenaline rush and have 20 extra action points, it won't work for you twice that turn. Also, note that the haste spell gives the exact same ability that sniper does. It just reduces the amount of action points your bow or thrown weapon used so that, assuming you had at least 6 action points before you fired, you do one other action after that, that turn. If your sniper is hasted, your character can either get a one time action point reduction from the haste spell, or sniper ability, but not both. So, don't expect to be able to fire hordes and hordes of arrows because your character is hasted and has high sniper skill. You'll just get one extra shot off per turn, tops. Gymnastics and sniper vs. other ways of increasing actions per turn: *The haste spell: gives you a chance of one of your attacks using fewer action points. So long as you had at least 6 action points left before your last action, you'll be able to do another action that turn. This is the same way sniper works, except that sniper can work more or less often depending on your sniper skill. Haste will always only work less than the majority of the time...although, with haste at level 3 there is a chance it will result in some of your characters being affected by battle frenzy, which will give them 5 extra action points for a few turns. Haste has four weaknesses that can make other ways to get extra actions preferable. #1: it'll never result in your hasted characters having a higher chance of getting an extra attack than not. #2: it costs energy, which can get quite expensive if you're constantly casting it. #3. It's only a temporary boost. #4. It only works within a limited range, so if your characters are spread out all over the map, they might not be within that range and casting it might not help them. *Adrenaline Rush: A wonderful, wonderful battle discipline that you will enjoy greatly with as soon as you get access to it. It'll give you several actions the turn you use it, but it only works once, and then it takes several turns to recharge. *Giving a character 2 items that each increase action points by 1: The best and most reliable way of getting an extra action per turn. These action point increasing items are extremely rare though. *Battle frenzy: Pros: It doesn't require the extra 10 skill point investment sniper or gymnastics require. It gives you five extra action points every turn. It requires 20 weapon skill, but that's not terribly hard to reach. Cons: Activating it counts as an action, like attacking with a sword or using a spell. That costs 9 action points, so it probably ends your turn...which gives all your enemies on the screen who've seen you a head start. It also only lasts for five turns, and it takes 10 turns to recharge. It's biggest disadvantage, to me, though, is that once you use it you can't use the almighty adrenaline rush, which would have given your characters the head start. Characters like polearm users and duel wielders who have lots of skill at removing fatigue (which might come from the high blademaster, or quick action they have access too) can get the recovery period down pretty low, to the point where once the battle frenzy has ended you're almost ready to use it again. They still have to deal with that ending of their turn every turn it's first activated though. The extra five action points are nice for polearm users and duel wielders though, because it often gives them enough action points to run up to an enemy in addition to attacking twice. That said, the 80% or so chance of getting an extra shot off every turn that can be gotten from sniper beats beats battle frenzy in terms of getting extra actions. If we look at 30 turns of a character using battle frenzy vs. 30 turns of a character with 16 sniper: The Battle frenzy character, if they have enough fatigue removal to remove 2 fatigue per turn, can restart battle fury as soon as it ends. Therefore, every six turns such a character would have five turns in which they have 2 actions and one turn of no actions, so they'll have 10 actions every six turns. The character with 16 sniper will have an 80% chance of getting an extra shot off each turn, so every 10 turns they have 16 bow shots. So, after 30 turns the archer has made 48 bow shots, and the battle fury character has made 50 actions, which is a little better than sniper. However, that's only if the battle frenzy character has incredible fatigue removal...which can be achieved, but it takes some investment. Also, that doesn't take into account that the archer wasn't using its battle disciplines for anything yet, so it can still access adrenaline rush. Adrenaline rush gives 20 extra action points and takes six turns to recover. Therefore, every 6 turns the archer would get another two actions or so. After 30 turns, that would give the archer about 10 more actions from adrenaline rush, bringing the archer's total actions to 58 actions in 30 turns vs the battle frenzy character's 50....and the archer always had the head start against their enemies using adrenaline rush, whereas the battle frenzy character had to wait a turn before beginning battle frenzy, giving their foes the head start...and that's about as good as the battle frenzy character can possibly get. Without great fatigue removal, it'll do considerably worse. .That's also assuming the archer doesn't have some nice fatigue removal of its own, or more than 16 sniper. It hasn't hit its ceiling yet. Also, the status affliction ability of sniper is probably a lot more useful for archers than extra action points, and if a character is incapacitated somehow through dazing, charming, stunning, or terrifying them, that fatigue counter on adrenaline rush will be fading away after adrenaline rush will likely already have been used, whereas with battle frenzy, it'll be more likely that the character using battle fury will just be losing turns of battle frenzy. Now...which is better for a priest or mage without good fatigue recovery or much dexterity? gymnastics or battle frenzy? The evasion from gymnastics and the bow skill from its archery prerequesite will both be useless for non-archers, so you'd be spending just a little less than a third of the total skill points you'll have gotten by level 30 on trying to get an extra turn, and it won't even happen the majority of the time unless your character also has an action point increasing item. Priests and mages don't need hand weapons that can hurt things though, which means they're good candidates for things like the discipline blade, which gives you 30% better fatigue recover, 3 pole weapons and 2 melee weapons, If your priest or mage or priest/mage has 10 hardiness, that also means 10 melee or pole skill. They can buy five more points of weapon skills from trainers, also get the recovery trait that removes fatigue by 10%, and there is other armor that helps remove fatigue, so at least one of them can have 20 weapon skill and some decent fatigue removal to help keep the recovery period of battle frenzy from being agonizingly slow. Sometimes though, spellcasters are more useful insofar as doing important things every once in awhile rather than constantly doing things, so maybe many of them don't need two actions each turn anyway and can just go for neither battle frenzy nor gymnastics, but just save their ability to use adrenaline rush for emergencies. Interesting Traits: Good health, perfect health, robust health – The weakest of these, perfect health, increases your health by 3%. That’s as good as hardiness in terms of increasing survivability, and hardiness is great. All your characters should probably get all 3 of these. Negotiator - Get it for all your characters, because it’s really good, unless you play as a singleton, in which case you'll have more money than you know what to do with already, but not enough available traits as you'll want. Challenger – makes it more likely that an opponent will attack the character with challenger, when they're within a certain range of the character with challenger. At times, if you have two characters side by side in front of a foe and your character without challenger is attacking the foe, the foe will still attack the character with challenger. Give it to tanks to help draw attention away from non-tanks. Garbage traits – sure hand, deadeye, strong back Those three traits all eventually go obsolete and don’t do much even before they’re obsolete. Strong back increases how much armor you can wear before losing action points. More strength does this too. Strength naturally increases over time though, and you’ll never have huge problems with not being able to wear enough armor. Deadeye and Sure hand give the same accuracy bonus that strength and dexterity give, but without the damage increase. General tactics: *I consider it generally wise to get 2 characters with revive. This isn’t vital, considering that you won’t get revive until you’re fairly far into the game so you’ll have to get through much of it without revive anyway, but once you get it, it’s nice to not feel totally screwed when your only character with revive is killed off and you’re in the bottom of some dungeon. *Avoid outdoor encounters if you don’t know how tough they’ll be, if possible. Instead, gain levels through dungeons. Rely on your nature lore skill to avoid outdoor fights that seem like they might be difficult. *Run out of a dungeon and back to a town to heal your characters as soon as one of your characters dies. Don’t keep fighting, unless you have to. If you’ve lost one character, that means it’ll be easier for you to lose two or more, and the more you lose the closer to screwed you’ll be if you run into enemies outdoors on your way to a town to heal. *In some outdoor fights, though not all, even once the fight is engaged, you can still escape the fight if your enemies seem too tough. In fights you can escape, you’ll see a shaded section in the northern part of the screen. If you get all your surviving characters into that shaded section the fight will end. You’ll lose out on any loot you would have gotten for winning forever, and the enemies you were in a fight with will just disappear, but your team will survive. To do this, of course, you’ll have to run past the enemy. The ensnaring ability of daze can help with this a lot. Once you get adrenaline rush or blink, this type of escape becomes very doable most of the time. *Wands and scrolls that deal damage are useless and should be sold. The accuracy penalties of torment will make it so that they won’t be able to hit much. Speed potions, healing potions, and sometimes blessing potions and scrolls can be extremely useful though. Only use them when your characters don’t have an easy escape route and you think they might not survive a fight, but use those buffing spells and scrolls as soon as the potentially tough fight begins, because if you wait until one of your characters dies, it’ll usually be too late. Some scrolls cast ward of elements. It’ll be a long time until you can cast ward of elements yourself, so don’t sell them until then. You’ll also find revive scrolls. They sell for a lot, but they’re worth keeping. Don’t sell them, even after your characters learn revive. Instead, give them to a character without revive so they can revive the revivers. *Whenever you come into a new area, do the obviously easy quests first. Generally speaking, the areas you get access to earliest will be the easiest, but even these early areas will have a few unexpectedly difficult fights here and there. Your goal should be to sneak around and try gain experience from a many easy fights as possible until you can’t avoid fighting tougher enemies or enemies you don’t know much about. It’s probably not a bad idea to down some speed potions every time you come across a new type of enemy outdoors just in case it might be tougher than you think. *Physical attackers are probably the most common enemies, but magical and elemental damage tends to be more powerful. Keep that in mind so that your whole team doesn't get wiped out by one fiery blast from some demon or drake you tragically underestimated. Your characters will all have to deal with some kind of elemental or magical attacks eventually, and they can crumple pretty quickly without at least some respectable resistance towards cold, fire, and energy. *Outdoor fights can be much harder without the ensnaring and/or dazing effect of daze. That means having at least one high intelligence mage can make things much easier. Humans vs. Nonhumans: Nephilim get a 10% damage bonus to bows and thrown weapons and a 10% bonus to cold resistance. Sliths get a 10% damage bonus to polearms and a 10% bonus to fire resistance. Humans get an extra trait every four levels. Nobody gets any traits after level 30, so humans will end up with 24 traits. Nonhumans will end up with 16 traits, so nonhumans are trading eight traits for an element resistance bonus and a weapon damage bonus. Note that the way the game mechanics of that 10% damage bonus works, it''ll become less than 10% of your total damage over time, as your other damage multipliers increase your damage by greater and greater percentages. I'd question the value of sliths...but keep in mind that the cold resistance of nephilim is arguably about the best resistance they can get. That's because evasion from dexterity never helps evade cold damage, and archers should have lots and lots of dexterity, so nephilim will be stronger against one of an archer's major weaknesses. Pros and cons of melee/pole weapons, bows/thrown weapons, and spells. Archery – massive evasion bonus, speed bonus, hit enemies at range. One downside is that you can’t hit enemies right in front of your character. The ability to hit enemies at a distance combined with an archer’s impressive ability to evade physical attacks can result in them being quite useful for swiftly picking off mages hiding behind their hordes of minions, and then being relatively immune to the physical attacking minions. Note, however, that in my experience it takes about two or more archers to be effective at sniping mages quickly enough to be useful . If you only have one archer, it’s probably best to just make them a tank character whose primary purpose is evading physical attacks. Note that I have no idea what being skilled with a bow and arrow has to do with being largely immune to swords...but whatever. I suppose there's weirder stuff in this game...actually I don't think there is. I think about the weirdest thing in the game, really in any of the Spiderweb games, is the fact that learning to use a bow and arrow well somehow makes you mostly immune to swords. Thrown weapons – You'll find plenty of crude and iron javelins. These are the only ones that are un-sellable. It seems like bows tend to be as powerful as them, not much less, or even a little more powerful once you get some nice bows...but that might be because I always go for bow skill rather than javelin skill. I wouldn't think that would make an enormous amount of difference though. They still seem less useful than bows, but whereas they used to be completely useless their ability to immobolize and chance of dealing more damage might make them worth it for some characters. Pole weapons – (halberds/spears/pikes) these are more powerful than bows, but of course you can’t use them at a range. Duel wielded swords – duel wielded swords will eventually deal more damage than pole weapons. However, they have a 35% damage penalty and a 35% accuracy penalty. The duel wielding skills and traits can help remove this penality. I’m not sure whether duel-wielded swords with no duel-wielding skill or pole weapons would typically deal more damage, but that 35% accuracy penalty for duel-wielded swords, if nothing else, will definitely make pole weapons stronger in the early game, especially on torment. Once you get enough strength for your duel-wielded swords to become accurate, and maybe a few levels of duel-wielding skill, duel wielding will do more damage than pole weapons. However, if you already have a duel-wielder, there are some great pole weapons lying around so that it can be useful to have a pole weapon user even in the late game. Note that the way the game mechanics work, that 35% damage penalty becomes smaller than 35% of your total damage over time, even without duel wielding skill, as you accumulate other damage multipliers over time that increase your total damage. A sword and a shield – this has no real advantages over either an archer with a shield, or a spellcaster with a shield. However it’ll lack the evasiveness, ranged ability, and speed of the archer and the versatility and mental resistance of the spellcaster. I don’t recommend this as a permanent character type. However, this can be a useful temporary build for duel wielders until they get enough strength…and maybe duel wielding, to make duel-wielding accurate enough to hit anything. Spellcasters – spells are phenomenal at controlling groups, but they can be useful against individual enemies too. They’re much more versatile than weapons. Spellcasters are definitely the most useful type of character, generally speaking. Without any spellcasters, your game will without question be more difficult, even if you allow healing spells. However, spells require energy to use and they’re not as powerful against individual enemies as weapons. Even bows will nearly always be stronger when attacking one enemy at a time. On torment or hard, note that your own characters can be hit by area effecting spells from your own characters. Note that having a character that invests in both mage and priest spells can be quite useful. Pure priests and pure mages will often find themselves sitting around without enough to do. Summary: Archers make wonderful mage snipers in pairs, or tanks alone. Spellcasters can do all sorts of neat stuff, including making great magic and element-resistant, high health sorts of tanks. Melee and duel-wielders can deal lots of damage, although not necessarily more than a powerful archer with cloak of bolts up. I personally think polearm users and duel wielders are, generally speaking, less useful than archers and spellcasters. I think they'd be equal to spellcasters and archers if they had had about ten extra skill points. They deal more damage, but the damage bonus from polearms isn’t a huge amount higher than bows, and the higher damage from duel wielding, while impressive, is countered until the later part of the game by major problems with inaccuracy when fighting the toughest enemies. That's not to say that they're bad. I just think there'll just be fewer circumstances in which they'll be outstandingly useful than archers or spellcasters. That said, they'll be very useful for certain party types. If you just need someone to stab things right in front of it really hard, there's nobody better than a duel wielder or polearm user. Some party ideas I think could work well: 3 archers and 1 priest/mage – strategy: use adrenaline rush to shoot down everything except physical attackers in the first turn, then be relatively immune to everything that remains. 3 mage/priests and 1 glass cannon, offensively powerful, defensively weak duel-wielder – strategy: either blast everything to smithereens with spells, or mind control/daze/terrify enemies into becoming harmless for a few turns and let the duel wielder plow through them 2 archers and 2 priest mages – strategy: use a mixture of mind controlling and sniping at ensnared enemies to slowly pick away at them without ever getting touched. Anama party – 1 tank archer, 1 tank priest, 1 duel wielder, 1 polearm user – strategy: Constantly have ward of blades up. Where there are physical attackers, send in the tank archer. Where there are magic or elemental attackers, send in the tank priest. The tank priest should have lots of health as well as maximum hardiness and resistance skill. The tank priest should have the best element or magical-resisting gear you can find. The tank archer should have maximum parry and gymnastics. Give both tanks 3 levels of the challenger trait. Once the enemies are distracted by the appropriate tank, send in your duel wielder and polearm user to shred them without as many repercussions as most teams would get.

thanks.

I'm guessing what character types are most useful depends highly on your party build. If you have two or more powerful melee characters, they'll presumably be able to work together quickly enough to stab things before it can do much damage. If you have a pair of archers, you can pick off mages quickly and daze becomes more valuable than if you instead had melee users or sword/pole wielders. If you have a couple powerful magic users, you'd be better at nuking a whole area quickly. I found I seldom needed to nuke whole areas. I played a more Ghengis Khan type of way: sneaky sniping/picking people off on the edges of my view, then watching their buddies run at me, but not quite reach me, so I can launch another volley into their foreheads before they can even touch me. Parties with two archers and two mages are definitely less about doing as much damage as possible as slowly picking things off and keeping them from touching you, and quickly getting rid of only the specific enemies you need to get rid of immediately to make it so, after that, you can just pick them off at your leisure because you'll have prevented them from being able to do much against you anyway. It often works pretty well, too. Particularly because of how strong archers are against physical attacks, you can usually win the fight before you've actually won the fight just by knocking out the right types of enemies. Archers and daze go together like...I don't know, two things that really go together well. That is why I'm still wondering if melee weapons are underpowered. Melee weapons can kill things a lot faster than bows, but bows can probably win the fight faster in many cases through shooting down the only enemies that really matter. Also, dexterity is better than parry in every way. It blocks the same attacks, but ten times as well (literally about ten times as often) without having to sacrifice any attack power like you might have to for parry, so archers are probably more durable than warriors most of the time too..but I doubt anyone could say either class is definitely, always better though. Also, I'd be very surprised if two magic users would be as skilled at killing single, important enemies as a pair of archers are too. They could use dominate to mind control it though, which is almost the same thing.

I think it used to be best as a secondary skill. It wasn't powerful enough for much else...unless you wanted to have a very expensive character who constantly used arrows that could otherwise be sold. If you're talking about a archery as a side skill for your mage in this game though, I'm surprised it could hit anything. I had a halberd-wielding mage with almost half its points into strength and the other half into intelligence and I remember it getting really bad accuracy against about everything except the smaller, easier enemies. Against bosses and tougher enemies it'd have under 40% to hit chance. It did get better with time though.

That is the only real way to "beat" the game: enjoying it.

So, what it sounds like is: Option A: a character who hits like a wrecking ball smashing into an origami crane, but can only hit what's in front of it. Option B: Something that hits about half to a third to half as hard, but can hit whatever you want, that is more or less immune to most physical attacks It sounds like they both have their advantages.

I was playing on torment that game. I just re-loaded it and temporarily switched to hard. I'm leaving that game behind now, because I want to try to get through a game without losing a party. I still have most of the world to explore. I've only beaten the cockroach plague and the slime plague and started into the troglodyte quests, so there's still plenty to explore.

I have a saved game at level 20 in the troglodyte temple. The game is at hard right now. There's a cave demon. My glass cannon nephilim archer with maximum sharpshooter just hit the cave demon with three arrow shots. The highest damage was 135 points of physical damage, with 489 damage blocked, without getting a critical hit, with the lemonwood longbow. On second thought, I could see melee/pole using characters being valuable compared to other character types. My group tended to do really well in just about every situation except ambushes that end up with my characters being surrounded by magic users and summoners who aren't grouped closely enough together that I can daze them. That's when their magic users kill off my archers and their physical attackers move in to take out my magic-users. Mostly that's because I don't have enough resistance skill built up yet, but for now that's a problem. When you're surrounded like that, I could see melee characters being quite useful because of how much more damage I know they are capable of dealing. I still wish there was more of a defensive advantage to strength though. I'm trying to get through a game on torment without losing a party. I'll reload if I need to, but I'm trying to plan ahead enough that I don't need to do that. I'm going to have one duel-wielder, for those ambush-type of situations. I'm just not convinced it will be worth it, because of how archers are pretty much valuable all the time, and my melee character will have to just sit in the background sometimes so as to avoid dying, but we'll see. My last party died due to careless lack of preparation in the zombie/spawner ambush part of the slime caves near the beginning of the game. That was irritating, given how relatively non-difficult that part was in my original game...but the reason why my party died was because them being all archers and mage priests meant they couldn't destroy all the summoners fast enough, so I got overwhelmed. That could have easily been solved by better preparation, but it might be nice to have a back up plan of a powerful duel-wielder who can just stab everything to death quickly.

I think Avernum: Ruined World is a very good game. Magic doing damage to one's own team on hard and torment helps keep it from being quite as overpowered as it was in past games. Thrown weapons are better too. They used to be not very useful at all in prior games. Until this game, I hadn't seen any value to thrown weapons after the old, retro Avernum games. They're much more useful now, thanks to that chance to get extra damage and immobilize enemies. . The one negative issue that I see as remaining though, is that melee and pole weapons-using characters don't seem as useful as either archers or magic users. This is a big change from earlier Avernum series'. I remember this being the case in Escape from the pit too...how melee and pole weapons don't seem particularly useful compared to bows and magic. *If I put all my points into dexterity, including traits, on torment, so long as I get gymnastics skill and wear armor that helps evasion enough, by level 30 I can have tank archers, with maximum hardiness and resistance, and alien beasts will have a 5% to hit chance when trying to hit these tank archers, on torment difficulty. I tested this. All that dexterity will also, of course, help their damage a lot too. I can can give it challenger and send it into a pile of physical attack-using enemies, and so long as it has the 3 health % increasing traits, and maybe a couple points of endurance from traits and the best armor, all the enemies on screen that hit with weapons suddenly cease being a problem. It won't be able to evade cold or certain other attacks that don't depend on hitting someone with an object, but it'll still have an impressive amount of cold and elemental resistance due to max hardiness and resistance. If I really want to make enemies' physical attacks completely useless, I can replace half my resistance and spellcraft skill with parry, (I'd have enough points to do that by level 30, if I only focus on increasing the defensive skills of gymnastics, hardiness, and resistance) turning that 5% to hit chance into about 2-3% to hit chance, because even if the archer's evasion fails, there'll still be about a 50% chance for parry to work. *If I put all my points into dexterity and get all the damage-increasing, and action point-increasing skills possible, and maybe have the character be a nephilim, I can have a glass cannon archer that hits like a truck. Combined with adrenaline rush and that above tank archer for back-up damage, this character can be really, really good at sniping mages and summoners hiding behind their crowds of minions. Most physical enemies will miss it 95% of the time. When something does hit it, it'll take a lot of damage, but I can put it behind tanks with the challenger trait so that hardly anything ever wants to hit it. *If I put a third of my points into endurance and a 2/3 into intelligence, I can have a fairly bulky tank mage,priest, or tank mage. By level 30 I can give it max hardiness, max resistance, and max parry and still have 17 more points to spend on mage spells, priest spells, magical efficiency and arcane lore, luck, or maybe riposte. I can have it dive into a pile of enemies and slow them all and use terror to send them scattering, and if one of them isn't terrified, it'll be bulky enough to shrug off most attacks. If I put all or the vast majority of my points into intelligence, I can have a glass-cannon priest, mage, or hybrid that dazes fairly high level enemies and does all sorts of neat stuff, and both these characters will have 90% mental resistance pretty soon into the game, which would be particularly useful for the tank mage/priest, if it's a leading character. *If I put all my points into strength, I have a slightly-tougher-than-glass-cannon melee or pole-weapon user, because it'll probably have hardiness too. If it gets mind-controlled, the first thing it'll do is turn around and lay waste to the rest of my team. If battle frenzy is going on, which there'll be a good chance it is, the rest of my team will be more or less screwed. When this slightly-tougher-than- glass-cannon melee character comes to its senses, battle frenzy will probably be gone, along with the rest of my team, and it'll pretty quickly die too, because it doesn't have much in the way of defenses, and it's not close enough to an enemy to get an attack off, because it's been focusing on hunting down the rest of my team. Also, this character will probably be in front, so it'll probably be the first one brain-washers try to brainwash, and unless I have an archer quick action will probably make it so that it'll be able to chop down at least one other member of my team before anyone has a chance to do anything about it. It will, on the bright side, do a great deal of damage against enemies. However, enemies will also do a great deal of damage against it due to sacrificing health for strength, and maybe sacrificing a shield for the greater attack power of duel-wielding or pole weapons, which in my mind kind of defeats the purpose of having it be a leading character. If I have a tank archer, and have the button turned on that makes your characters take their turns in the order they're placed in, then I could have the not-quite glass cannon melee character attack, and then have the tank archer go next. I could have the tank archer replace him and take damage from enemies instead. That might work well, but still, I don't usually see attacking the enemies closest to my characters as being nearly as useful as attacking the summoners hiding behind them. *If I put half my points into strength, and the other half into endurance, or intelligence, I have a character who can either be bulky, or strongly resistant towards mental attacks, but not both. The spells of a weapon-wielder mage will be less useful than a pure mage, and its attacks less strong than a pure melee/pole user, and its weapon will still only be able to hit things in front of it. Rather than this character, a tank mage without any strength could still hit things in front of it with smite, maybe for less damage, or maybe not, but with better accuracy for much of the game, and it could hit far away things too. If I put half my points into endurance and have a shield, then the character is bulky enough to survive things, and when it gets brainwashed my team will be much more likely to survive it...though he'll get mind-controlled frequently. However, I could have a tank mage that almost never gets mind-controlled, who can also run into a mob and cast terror. So, that's why I don't like melee and pole-weapon using characters, and this annoys me, because the game is filled with really tempting-looking melee weapons, and my players are just selling them all. I feel almost like Jeff just put them all in there...Smite the legendary halberd/fine slith spears/all that neat-sounding stuff, mostly just to tempt people into making their game harder than it needs to be. What are other people's thoughts?

It sounds like your team just mostly focuses on stabbing things as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I don't think all group types would need more health, at least on normal. I bet yours could use some though. If you don't have the three traits that increase health by percentages yet, by about the point you're at those should start increasing health more than endurance does, maybe even the one that only increases health by 3%.

Well, regardless, I've decided the time of Pooperscootie has come to an end. I encourage others to attempt that build. I don't intend to. I remember why I usually don't play as a singleton: the constant, irritating, reloads. I made this decision after dying five times in an attempt to take on the goblins guarding the goblin cave near Fort Remote. With 3 intelligence, 3 mage skills and zero encumbering armor he could daze groups nicely. He just ran out of energy quite fast though. I think it could be done. It'd just take many re-tries. However, I have been inspired towards a new goal. The vast majority of the game is still unexplored, so I'm going to make a four player team and try not to lose any parties on Torment. It's going to be a group Ghengis Khan would be quite proud of. Two archers, two mages/priests, all four with max gymnastics, and all four with at least 8 mage skill for blink, and maybe 10 for simulacrum. I really like Adrenaline Rush combined with blink, because you can actually leap into an area with blink, attack, then leap out of the area, again, with blink. I've heard duel-wielding melee characters are a lot more powerful than other groups. It might be interesting to try a slith or duel-wielder with max strength, blink, and gymnastics, who could jump forward in to take out mages. But, I'm just going to have two archers and two mage/priests. This way I'll get daze and return life in addition to some nice ground-effecting spells. The idea is to kill any mages quickly with adrenaline rush, and then have four teleporters leaping around the map like crickets from a bat swarm, dazing and summoning and sniping and ensnaring, and generally tormenting the hell out of them, while they scramble helplessly to hit my team of what might as well be ghosts.

By level 30, with 2 points of endurance from traits, and the 3 traits that increase health by percentages, if I remember right you can get 249 health. I'll get all five endurance-increasing traits. I'll at least have max resistance skill. I plan on getting to 10 mage skill too so I can use simulacrum to summon undead to distract cold-using enemies. I'll have at least 10 mage skill, so I can summon undead who are invulnerable to cold through simulacrum and use blink. I definitely like the idea of my massive dexterity enabling me to go before everyone else, then using either gymnastics, or a haste potion, or adrenaline rush, or something, to fire an arrow at someone, and then use blink to teleport away before they can hit me. By level 35, I can get my character to have almost everything I want: maxed out resistance, 10 in priest spell skill, 10 in mage spell skill, 6 cave lore (2 bought from a trainer) that'll give me access to the healing, energetic, and graymold herbs close to fort emergence and on the Isle of Bigail, and 7 tool use. (the 2 traits and gloves would get me up to 10). What I don't know is whether I should max out gymnastics, so as to get better evasion and extra moves early, or whether I should max out hardiness for better cold and magic resistance. I can't afford to do both. I don't think I can afford to lose any of my mage or priest spell skill, and resistance would be my main protection from mental attacks, so It'd probably be unwise to lower that. I think I could get maximum evasion without gymnastics for most enemies, if I down a bunch of wisdom crystals, and I'm assuming there are enough items that give an extra action point that I could eventually reach 2 actions per turn without gymnastics, but I suspect without gymnastics the early game would be a lot harder. I think I'm just going to go with maxing gymnastics and only having 6 or so hardiness, including from trainers, by level 35, and hoping resistance increasing and hardiness-increasing crystals and anything else I find, like armor and element-resistant rings will be enough to keep me alive through magic and cold. I may be able to avoid being hit even once, if that shoot an arrow - then teleport way of doing things works well enough. Maybe outdoor fights could even end up easier than indoor ones, with that, due to there being more room to move around.

I don't know if there are outdoor ice drakes or not. If there are though, I think I just thought of a rather nice advantage of being a singleton that might let a singleton archer survive an ice drake fight. Summon undead of some kind, or something immune to cold. Next, use adrenaline rush, or the extra turn from gymnastics or something to get a shot or two off, then teleport away using blink. Repeat as needed. I think I might actually try this build as a singleton. He shall be called Pooperscootie. If I can fit it all, he shall called Pooperscootie the Great. Pooperscootie the Great is an antisocial narcissist. He was originally thrown into Avernum partly because of that, but mostly because he didn't like to wear pants in public. I think I'll make that a requirement for the whole game. He can never wear pants, or any leg/pelvis coverings. Pooperscootie fights for the rights of antisocial narcissists and nudists everywhere. He dreams of one day bringing pride and honor to his people by achieving great deeds. So far, his people consist of himself, because nobody wants to be near him, because he's extremely creepy and unpleasant to be around. Shortly after being thrown into Avernum he was thrown in the abyss. The Spire chased him to Bargha. Bargha tossed him over their walls into giant lands. The giants threw him over a river, and then threw him over a second river, and he found himself back in the Kingdom of Avernum, much to the locals' surprise. He hadn't done anything worthy of execution. Upon noticing his impressive durability, because of his survival of being thrown over at least one river, according to several cave-fishing eye witnesses, King Micah decided to make him one of the surface explorers. That way, if he dies, its not, technically, an execution, and if he doesn't maybe he'll just go away.

Are you talking to me? I'm just going to assume you are. The golems are a pain because they shoot those ground affecting area attacks, but in melee they're still pretty easy. The golem of blades had an 8% chance to hit my archer in melee. The fire golem had a 15% chance to hit my other archer in melee, my bulky archer, who has close to the same stats. Before that, all the regular giants and trogolodytes you find wandering around had a 5% to hit chance. I had just been starting going through that troglodyte/giant area, so I don't know what the tougher, boss-like enemies would be with the troglodytes and giants. This was with ward of steel up (if that affects evasion...I don't think it does) but without any blessings. The stats of my archers are the following, including armor (both of the archers have the same relevant stats, except for a couple different items) Dexterity (including the five dexterity traits,...and also including the dexterity-raising item both archers have the same one of) = 37 luck = 0 gymnastics = 10 other evasion enhancing items - both archers have steel breastplates, giving them +5% chance to evade attacks. My glass cannon archer also has drakeskin bracers, giving him an additional +2% evasion, as well as an item that gives him an additional point in gymnastics. My tank archer has an item that gives him +3 luck, and an item that gives him +1 luck. Right now, in the game I'm just starting the troglodyte/giant quest. My characters are level 21, so I wouldn't be surprised if by the time I arrive at the golems, everything that fights in melee there, except bosses, will be down to a 5% to hit chance too, just like some large percentage of everything else I've faced so far, after a few levels into the game.The accuracy of magic/fire/ and those sorts of attacks that don't involve hitting someone with some hard object are tougher to tell though.. This is all on torment.

Evasion works great on torment. It works better than any other defensive investment, at least for the middle enemies. I haven't tried it past level 21, but based on how inaccurate everything is now, I'd be surprised if the harder regular enemies don't at least have some losses of accuracy. My glass cannon archer has better defensive abilities than my halberd-wielder with four extra points of health, 12 parry, and 10 hardiness. Seriously, he can run into piles of enemies and be fine. The only problem comes from cold-using enemies and whatever else dexterity doesn't dodge. That's after you put everything possible into dexterity though. Yeah, I could definitely see a single player with maximum dexterity, max hardiness, and maybe consider putting points into resistance or parry if you have anything extra...but I doubt you'd have much left after mage spells and/or priest spells. You might have to sacrifice the majority of mage spells that rely on accuracy, but you could keep plenty of priest spells, and a few spells, that don't, even with the loss of intelligence due to focusing on dexterity. I don't know how a half dexterity, half intelligence character would be. Most of the good spells, particularly daze and mind control, need accuracy, and therefore intelligence though. That could be a problem.

By hit ratio do you mean accuracy or evasion? That's all invisible. You can hover your cursor over a weapon or spell to see its damage and any additional affects it does. You can hover you cursor over armor to see its damage prevention and any additional effects it has. I think some of the damage modifiers are completely invisible, though not all. I have two archers. One has ten points in sharpshooter and the other has zero. They both have the same types of bows and the one with 10 points in sharpshooter does much more damage than the other, despite both their bows listing the same amounts of damage done when I hover my cursor over the weapons.

1. I have two archers, a mage/melee user, and a priest/mage. The archers and the priest/mage have all their skills in one stat. The priest/mage is still dazing enemies at level 20. I remember in Escape from the bit Daze becoming more or less obsolete after about level 15 or so, except for the ensaring bonus, so it seems more effective this game. Hardiness and resistance are probably both the best skills out there. I have a tank archer that's going for both resistance and hardiness. I've been putting all of it's points possible into dexterity, so it's more or less immune to physical attacks 90% of the time. It still crumbles to certain area attacks or mental attacks. Magic resistance seems to be extremely useful. My mage/melee character has about half it's stats gone into strength and the other half put into intelligence. It's still useful, but it's less useful than the other characters. It's dazes miss more often than the mage priest's dazes. Its melee works fine for smaller enemies, but it's useless against tougher ones. The main problem with multi-tasking in this game is in accuracy. If you have something like a tank priest, or a melee priest with just a little intelligence you don't need accuracy because of all the priest spells that don't attack anything, but with anything else you'll start to notice problems quickly. I think a decent character with half the stats into intelligence and half into strength might be doable, so long as you also get all the strength and intelligence-enhancing perks, but if you invest much in anything else, I would imagine that, at least on torment, the character would become useless pretty quickly. 3. I know that higher intelligence benefits daze. It used to make slow more accurate. It don't know if that still is the case or not. I know there is a priest spell that drops a cloud onto a group of enemies that curses most of them, and at least its accuracy is not dependent on intelligence. That cursing cloud just seems to have a flat 75% chance to hit everything.

This happened to me in Escape from the Pit a couple times, and once in Ruined World. The first time I spent awhile removing the daggers and tossing them on the ground (I don't believe you can sell them). You can get them all out if you're patient enough. I don't remember if that caused any long term repercussions or not. The next time I just reloaded to an earlier save, before the daggers showed up, and everything was fine. Some random glitch seems to trigger that.

I love archers. My party has two of them, and two other characters. They're level 20. They both have 10 in gymnastics and as much dexterity as they can get. Ursagi, giants, and troglodytes pretty reliably have a 5%-10% to hit chance when attacking them. Of course the way the game works dexterity doesn't raise cold evasion and certain other magical attacks evasion, but they're pretty durable against everything else so far. They also deal more damage than my two magic users. That's on torment. For me, I don't see a real point to having melee characters in these games. That's been something I've seen as a flaw since Escape from the Pit. Other people think melee's great though. I'd prefer to have a tank priest, mage, or archer in front. If they're the archer they'll be able avoid massive amounts of damage though evasion (like the lead character should) and if they're the priest or mage they can use all sorts of neat area attacks on crowds and have strong mental defense. I'm sure melee characters can deal more damage to whatever's in front of them, but why would I want to do that when I could snipe mages behind crowds, or control minds with dominate?...but maybe that's just because I haven't really used melee characters. Other people seem to like melee characters. Against single enemies, my archers deal more damage than my priest using smite that has all the intelligence it can get. This is not counting the critical bonus archery gets, or the multiple attacks per turn archery is likely to get. It is including the cloak of bolts though.

So, far I'm really enjoying this game. It seems to solved the problems of past games I noticed. Sliths used to seem pretty much useless, except for roleplaying purposes. Now with halberds that give armor and with a higher chance to hit multiple opponents, and with slith spears giving a bonus to critical hit chance, sliths seem like they could be useful again. In the other two games in this series, I think Nephilim were a little better, but still of questionable value. Now, with bows giving a bonus critical hit chance and javelins having all sorts of new bonuses, they seem like they might be genuinely valuable. In particularly, I love the improvements to thrown weapons. Those used to be pretty much useless, and now they can immobilize opponents and have a 50% chance of doing massive amounts more damage. Also, for the first time in any Avernum game, goblins seem dangerous for low level characters on torment. They're still pretty easy to beat, but you can't just have one character run in and take on three of them at once anymore. You have to think ahead a bit. More strategy. I also like what they did to spells. Not only did Jeff add the "mine field" sorts of spells from the old retro games that harm enemies who walk into a certain area, he kept all the old good ones like Call the Storm and Blink. I also like how area affect spells can now damage your own players on torment. Spells used to be quite overpowered. Now, they're still as powerful as ever, but you have valid reasons to consider not having an all mage/priest party. I like the changes to shields too. I didn't play any of the Crystal souls game beyond the demo, but I at least like the changes in shields between Escape from the Pit and Ruined Word. They give a heavy bonus to parry, but they also are more encumbering, so they're more specialized for tank-like characters. No tank mages, I guess, at least not without a lot of planning. That makes sense. I always pictured mages as wearing flowing robes anyway, not lumbering around in full body armor, with a shield as tall as a short person. They also, apparently, got rid of a glitch the prior two games in this series had that would allow your character to wield a halberd in one hand, and either a shield or a short sword in the other hand. You'd first equip the shield or short sword into your shield hand. Then you'd put the halberd into your quick slot. Then you'd click it to equip the quick-slot halberd. That was a great glitch. I suppose this is fairer though.

He was more of a sub actually. He wore the handcuffs.

I just tested it on my Windows version and challenger works. It definitely has an affect if your character with challenger runs up close to your enemies. It might not have an affect if your enemies see your character with challenger from far away then run up to it. I used a cheat that I found online after a brief search to get my characters up to level 13 so I could give one of them all three levels of the challenger trait. Then I had two characters, a slith and a human, run into the room where your first combat in the game takes place. Here you fight a giant spider and a giant bat. the human had three levels of the challenger perk. the slith had none. There's a wide hallway before the main room with the spider and the bat. 8 out 8 times when I had my human and my slith standing at the edge of the hallway, which was very close to the spider and the bat, both the spider and the bat attacked the human. The human had the thee levels of the challenger trait. Now whenever I had both my human and my slith further back further into the wide hall, further away from the spider and the bat, the spider and the bat would still see my characters and attack them, but the one closer to the slith would attack the slith and the one closer to the human would attack the human. Therefore, I suspect that the challenger trait is only activated once your enemies are within a certain range of characters with the challenger trait. In other words, if a monster sees your characters from sufficiently far away and runs toward them, they'll ignore the challenger trait for at least that first turn. The next turn, assuming they're close enough for the challenger trait to take affect, they'll be much more inclined to attack the character with the challenger trait. After that first turn though, once the spider and the bat had gotten within close proximity to both my human and my slith, the spider and the bat seemed considerably more interested in attacking the human than the slith. The slith (who lacked the challenger trait) could attack the spider and the bat, and the human (with the three levels of the challenger trait) could just stand there, acting like as a pacifist, never having harmed either monster, and the spider and the bat would usually keep attacking the human.