wackypanda

What happens if you take on Grah-Hoth without Demonslayer in your inventory? He's scripted to do... something (which is also supposed to vary by difficulty), but I don't know enough to figure out what.

In the Spider Cave, one of the GIFTS will go on about their god, the mighty Spider Lord. You have the option to insult the Spider Lord to his face, after which you get a message that the spiders won't forget your rudeness. Also, the dialog options disappear after you make a choice, like reputation questions in Geneforge. So what actually happens?

I found a Charmed Plate (28% armor, +5% chance to evade attacks, -15% hit chance, +3% melee damage, +6% HER) after fighting the humans in the Spire arena, although I'm not sure which of them dropped it.

Interesting. Which type of stun is more common overall?

Important mechanical differences between platforms have appeared before (G4 drayk damage types, A:EftP trainer prices). Granted, those were things that could be patched in theory.

How many ways are there to increase stun resistance?

A tangential observation: - A:EftP does not allow attacking with fists. I would let the pacifist go with an empty sword hand to prevent accidentally attacking anything, but I need the defensive bonuses.

Anyone tried this? And to what extent? Currently running a party in A:EftP with one pacifist limited to healing, summons, and buff/debuffs. The other three are all casters, to keep my DPS up, although as they are also all hybrids, and I'm playing on Normal, this is probably not as important as I like to think it is. Not sure how many pacifists you can have in a party before it starts becoming tedious. Other observations: - Trying to access every summoning and buff spell for a single character requires a profligate use of skill points (14 + 2 trained Mage for Cloak of the Arcane, 17 Priest for Divine Host). The more optimised route would probably be to skip Divine Restoration and Divine Host, so that you only need 14 Priest for Return Life. That's 3 whole skill points saved. Yay. - Due to the above, I can pick one of Hardiness or Resistance to max out (obviously I'll still put points in the other). Which one is more generally useful? - Since healing, summons, and buff/debuffs don't scale with any of the four stats, this character can pump Endurance like it was going out of style. SP runs out quickly without a few points in Intelligence though.

It was worth a try.

Does Blessing Focus affect the Cloak and Ward spells in any way? I'm running an all caster-hybrid party and want to know if I should buy Cloak and Ward training for the character with Blessing Focus, or the character who runs out of SP the least often. Someone asked this a few years ago and the answer was that testing didn't detect a difference, but it's been a few years and perhaps someone has done more testing since.

Walking on to the non-gremlin healing herb patch in the Eastern Gallery (the one on a spit of land in the middle of a lake) doesn't trigger any dialogue, not even to say whether I have enough Cave Lore or whether the herbs are ready. I have 5 Cave Lore across the party. The gremlin healing herb patch works fine. I haven't tried any other herb patches. Edit: Derp. Restarted the game.

Does Intelligence or Spellcraft affect summons or blessings and curses?

Features that I don't want to see removed (as opposed to features I want added): - Closing doors, as above - The ability to see a character's exact HP. I used this very often to gauge a character's level and when I should fight them, if at all. - The ability to attack friendly or neutral characters. I could be wrong, but I don't recall anyone breaking G1 or G2 this way. In G3-G5 any place and time where this would break the game had an auto-kill node. The benefit of this is being able to kill everyone in, say, G4's Rebel Safehouse or Dillame, for kicks after finishing the chapter. - After the first attack when hasted, characters should still be able to move to engage an enemy in melee, but not move freely.

Actually, the G2 Takers had that feather token system that would allow one to reach them from Awakened lands, skipping the Barzites and most of the Awakened quests, and there was more than one way to get it. I agree.

That may very well end up like the "run away" endings in G1 and G2. I think G5, being a return to the multi-faction nonsense of G1 and G2, should allow sequence breaking the way G1 and G2 did. (The "option" to ram your way through Lerman's Pass and Perikalia Orchards does not count.) G1 and G2 generally had people tell you who and where the factions were early on, and if you thought one of them sounded more interesting you could sneak over to them straight away. G2 also handled this quite elegantly: after emerging from the tunnel, the most level-appropriate area is Awakened territory. But if you wanted to join the Barzites, you could sneak over to them - and then the first quest they'd give you is to sabotage the Awakened, pointing you straight back to level-appropriate encounters.

That is, at the shirt and pants stage, your characters are wearing shirts and pants over their own clothing because they're too poor to use real armor, and that extra layer kind of sort of blunts incoming blows. Maybe.

For what it's worth, I always thought armor slots were what your characters wore over their regular clothing. Otherwise, in the latter two-thirds of the game they'd all be walking around in greaves and tights.

Very interesting. What happened to all the people who said all the companions were whiners? I guess the desire to kill Redbeard significantly outweighs that.

In the Windows Humble Bundle version of Avadon 1, at least, holding the delete or backspace key works fine. (Version seems relevant because the Humble Bundle version of Avernum 1 has better support for my keyboard settings than my Steam copy of Geneforge 4. Can't test my hypothesis as there is no game for which I have local copies of both versions.)

My bad. Not sure what should be done about the autosaves and the huge multileveled zones then.

I thought this would be interesting. What did you do in the end? "For" = companion satisfied "Against" = companion dissatisfied "DNF" = did not finish, for whatever reason, e.g. singleton run

Fair enough, but I think departures from the "main level", like going down a trapdoor or up stairs, should trigger autosaves. I personally can't recall any situations where I got into a tunnel and later needed to get out of both the tunnel and the main zone. Another thought. When a hasted/frenzied character can't move after attacking or casting a spell, could there please be an exception for closing to melee with a target? It's annoying to kill someone with a frenzied melee character and end up wasting the second action because the other enemies are one or two spaces away.

The title of the topic is a proper noun, not a criticism of the ending per se. When fighting Redbeard, did anyone actually take the Bad End where you can have your companions executed? I assumed most people who gave up the fight would simply reload and take the loyal dialogue tree. (I modded Redbeard's level to make the fight less tedious, but I overdid it and a Battle Frenzied party of 5 nearly killed him before he got a turn.)

More frequent autosaves? Autosaving on every zone exit was fine in Geneforge, but here when zones are large enough to have a sandwich when moving from point A to point B and can have multiple stairways besides, if the player is forced to use an autosave a fair bit of progress will be lost.

It has been a while since I played, and I've completely forgotten what you can and can't do in the endgame. After you recruit those of your companions who are willing to join you, can you go back downstairs and shuffle their inventories?