The Reverend

That would be a nice way to differentiate the different levels of return life. I mostly only used it in combat. Otherwise I'd just run back to town.

There's a Tool Use 13 door in Athron's lair, that you can reach via a secret switch in (his? her?) treasure room. Does anybody know what's behind it? I've never raised my tool use high enough, even with the bonus from the tinker's gloves and necklace.

Yeah, I turned off the "Party always acts in roster order" option ... It just didn't feel right after the way action order was determined in all the previous Avernum games.

I found hard to be just right ... hard enough to present a bit of a challenge, but not so hard as to be frustrating.

I don't think the blademaster skill reduces fatigue at all - I know that the skill description says that it does, but I think that it is not correct. I have not noticed any reduction in fatigue from baldemaster, and I've seen others on the boards make the same comment. However, the spectral falchion is still a very nice weapon, because the +8 to blademaster increases your melee damage by 24%. I would definitely recommend using it as one of your swords.

Personally I was kinda underwhelmed by the effect of endurance in AEFTP. Poison and acid did not seem particularly deadly in this iteration of Avernum. And while the 5 points of health makes a bit of a difference in the beginning when you don't have very much, once you've levelled up a few times 5 points is a pretty small percentage of your total health. I spent maybe 3 points in endurance early on (first 10 levels or so) for my front-line characters, but nothing after that. Hardiness seemed to do a lot more for long-term survivability, by reducing the amount of damage you take.

If you do enough for the Freehold of Kyass, both Hrror (ability) and Evyss (spells) will lower their prices to pretty average. Also, Evyss will start to teach the highest level spells (arcane mage spells and divine priest spells). I did all of the quests for Kyass (including giving him Drath's Tome), and I did the Pyrog quest for Evyss. I'm not sure how many of those were necessary to get the price down to pretty average, though. (I didn't check after doing every quest.)

For the outdoor secret passages, the cave wall will typically have something growing on it that makes it stand out from the surrounding cave walls.

In my hard playthrough I found my dedicated archer useful in the mid-to-late game, although not as useful as my dual-wielder, mage, and priest. But during the early part of the game (which I found to be the hardest part), the archer was probably the most useful character. I also liked having character variety so I stuck with the archer all the way through. If you play with the setting where action order is determined by each individual character's stats (rather than the default setting which just uses party order), the archer will almost always get the very first action of the combat (since if you build them properly they will have a lot of dexterity). With adrenline rush this means you can fire off four shots before any of the enemies get to act - potentially enough to kill off that pesky enemy spell caster before they get to haste the rest of the enemies.

Yes, the orb is the easy way to get there - you can just fly right over the river. You find the orb in a cave off of the waterfall warrens, on the body of one of the first expedition explorers.

Each character with negotiator grants your whole party a 10% boost in the money you get when you sell things. That 10% stacks, so if you're playing a standard four-person party and every member of your party has the trait, you get a 40% bonus.

Another nice thing about archers is that they usually get to act before anybody else (including monsters) because of their high dexterity. This (at least in my experience) appears to result in them getting targeted more by enemies. And (at least on hard, I've never tried torment), their high dexterity gives them a very good evasion chance against melee, and decent against fire and energy as well. My combats often start with my archer attacking a few enemies using adrenaline rush, and then the fastest of them attacking her and missing due to her high evasion, and then my other characters attacking. Of course, this doesn't apply if you play with the setting where your party acts in roster order. I've been playing with that turned off because I prefer the way it was done in previous Avernums (action order based on stats).

I've been using your second build (DW, archer, mage, priest) on hard difficulty, and it's been working pretty well. The archer is probably the least useful of the group, as others have said, but she's not useless and she is fun to play.

Originally Posted By: Tcheedchee Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Tcheedchee By the way… Has anyone succeeded in feeding enough meat to the old drake (who isn't a dragon)? I never have enough. Also he is not eating my meat, poor sod. Seems to be very short-sighted or something. My backpack is still full of meat afterwards. Would have been a nice little gimmick to let all meat really be eaten after the encounter. Where is the fun in it after all? You need three pieces of meat, and they have to be the fresh kind (the one that looks like a ham bone), not dried meat. Actually three isn't enough. I had five. Didn't suffice. He didn't even touch them! I think you tried to pull my leg, the both of you. Well you succeeded. Happy Carnival! I'm sure three of them worked for me ... I swear I'm not trying to pull your leg!!

I think I just had to give him 3 meats. He wants the fresh meat, though, not the dried stuff.

I can verify the Entwhistle does indeed tell you to talk to Scab about stealing something. I just got the circlet in my playthrough, and that's how I did.

A number of the level 3 bonus effects are quite nice. Off the top of my head, healing gives you regeneration, haste gives you a chance of battle frenzy, protection gives you a chance of spine shield (or maybe it's war blessing that does that, I can't remember), fireball gives a chance of also also hitting an adjacent target, etc.

The dialog options can be selected from the keyboard, so it can actually by done rather quickly if you're a quick typist/clicker. Line up the mouse over the innkeeper. Then, do click mouse-press key 2-press key 1-press key 1, click-2-1-1, click-2-1-1, etc... until you run out of money. Then sell the meat at the market just to the south, head back to the inn, and repeat. That said, I made a few hundred coins doing this in my current game and then decided to stop, because the relative scarcity of money in Avernum is part of the ambiance that I enjoy. I just thought it was interesting that it is possible to make a profit here by just trading meat ...

Not sure if anyone has noticed/posted this trick yet ... It's quite tedious, but it appears that with the negotiator trait it's possible to make an unlimited amount of profit (or limited only by your patience) in Mertis. If you ask the Mertis innkeeper for the "finest meal in avernum", he gives you some meat for 5 coins. The meat is worth 25 coins, so normally you could just recoup your investment by selling it back for 5 coins at the Mertis market. But, if two of your characters have the negotiator trait, you can sell it for 6 coins - a 20% profit. Meat stacks, too, so you can even make a profit with just one negotiator trait. The negotiator trait bonus appears to round down (so a sales price of 5 with the 10% bonus would get you 5.5, which rounds down to 5 ), but it is calculated on the total value of the stack, so if you have a stack of 10 meats, you could sell it back for 50 + the 10% bonus, or 55 coins . As far as I can tell the innkeeper has an unlimited supply of the "best meal in avernum", so you can keep buying meat and making money until you're tired of clicking through the dialog options over and over. Also, the comment the innkeeper makes if you keep trying to buy meat after you've run out of money is amusing.