esquivalient.abacot

this was my idea originally hehe i'm so proud now proof: http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/17244-avernum-remix/#entry227948

food is routinely used in rpg's as a mechanism of setting a pace to the game. it forces a time dimension onto you so you have to take time as a resource too. in a game of limited resources such as aeftp this would mean that you'd have a limited number of turns to complete the game. or, if food respawned it would mean that you'd have to come back for it all the time (since you spend a lot of time in remote areas in this game and there's no town portal scroll here). or that cave lore would slowly produce food for your party to eat. or a create food spell (always loved those... not.) or something else either way, i never liked food in any game. didn't bring anything meaningful...

make the number of varying summons shrink as the spell power goes up with 4-5 monsters at lvl1 (including unstable mass), 2-3 at lvl2 and just 1-2 (the strongest ones) at lvl3. and get them different damage types for different spells, for example the first summoning spell could get you either a poison or acid monster at lvl3, the second would get you fire/cold, and the most powerful spell would get you either a monster that deals a lot of energy damage or one that deals pure physical damage w. battle frenzy. some geneforge right thar edit: woops, mages have 4 summon spells... never used summons in this game, didn't find them useful.

yeah, having decent first aid is a great thing that saves your most valuable reasource - your actual RL time. and it keeps the game fresher and more fun without the boring patching up routine. not for minmaxers but for more casual playing, i'd even recommend it.

i found food useful on a couple occasions early on. i just stick with mushrooms and sell the sellables. not useful later.

try not to wear stuff that penalizes you too much and get your tank to hit stuff (he'll still be tanking just fine don't worry) because being able to hit stuff consistently in melee can be pretty important for strategy.

start spending it on spells and skills and you'll forget about money caps pretty soon

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S And by all means, please give feedback! just started, playing windowed and noting stuff down. i'm only at lvl 5 so nothing much to note yet. but i'm loving it already:D. great work! i'm playing the following build on hard 1. SW - semi-tank + heal (also, i think i'm gonna use that spirit echo spell for easy repositioning for those crazy spawns and teleports; also, will try not to neglect melee offense) 2. archer - pure offense (hope he won't aggro too much and get killed by casters all the time; gonna get him 10 QA for those extra skill points later) 3. priest - pure caster 4. mage - slightly tanking (will go for hardiness instead of resistance and 10 QA just to see how that closerange instakill-ish spell works out) it's definitely not a very strong party build, but it will be fun and manageable i'm sure. looks like spell changes are going to mean a world of difference, it's gonna be an all-new strategy for those tough fights i can tell already...

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I hadn't tested Parry. I just did. Mercifully, I just finished the BATTLE DISCIPLINES: I'm excited about these. I think they are really going to add a lot to the game. super excited! i think it will turn out great. did you change fatigue cost too?

dying is ok. it's an integral part of the experience. this is a smart game. it makes you appreciate, like most great pc games do that it makes no sense to implement hardcore play balance (i.e. avoiding that situation of being unable to avoid death and utter failiure in a first couple of attempted playthroughs despite using common sense) in a game that enables you to reload. take it as an adventure game. "a quest for quests". branch out, meet people, make ends meet. you'll be over the hump and around lvl15-16 i think. almost any party build is able to get through this adventuring middle part and sliths will become easy all of a sudden as you get some nice rewards, some important spells and even buy some cheap skill points. after that, the difficulty level really comes into play and it should be a breeze on normal and on torment... it will be torment if you don't know exactly what you're doing. 'hard' is a very nice difficulty level that corresponds with the innate toughness of a game that wants you to die and die again.

you could make all the best swords in the game even better, and too heavy to wield in the off hand - and all the other swords a class below in power (but not quite weak). i think this is better than reducing damage. this way, SW would do acceptable damage (it does not now), but DW would still remain the way to go for the heaviest damage output. you could fine tune it so that DW doesn't become uninteresting. it's woefully overpowered compared to SW now. the gap needs to be narrower. @ceregon: the ability to play a sword-and-shield character focused on tanking and melee damage doesn't exist currently because everything melee-related is pretty miserable compared to dual wield. you just want to have a very decently tanking character that, at the same time, does nice damage while dual wielding. even then compared to the spellcasters, melee offense isn't all that powerful either. you can beat the game comfortably without really focusing on melee damage at all. i want more powerful melee offense (at the expense of tanking). @kinsume: it wouldn't be a dramatic turn for the worse if shields parried. right now, everyone tanks by default (who doesn't go for hardiness AND resistance?). the whole stat system is defense oriented with aoe dominating the damage department. monotonous as hell. edit: i'd even say give some nice riposte to magical shields, that skill/mechanic is underrepresented anyway.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I wouldn't be surprised if that changes in the sequel. Major changes like that are pretty much out of the question for this release, which has already had two long beta testing periods, and has been out on its first platform for 6 months now. Yeah, I was thinking along those exact lines. I have some feeling that fewer things will change in the future games than they did in the past (with jeff focusing more on both the writing, content and technical aspects of avadon, trying out new things there etc.) so pointing out those critical bits to the developer might be the only way to get them fixed in a sequel. Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S What do you guys think? the general idea sounds really cool, i think that it would work and that it would make the game much better and that it's worth the effort characters can't wield 2 broadswords. so, you could make broadswords much much better than shortswords. this would reduce the difference between SW and DW because DW could now only wield 1superior + 1inferior weapon compared to the current situation where the both weapons can be more than satisfactory as a primary weapon dwarfing the sword-and-shield in damage. this wouldn't affect DW but it would make SW stronger. also, you could add a bit of offense to magical shields such as a significant riposte boost (probably bad) or umm.. dunno, maybe +4 blademaster?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Hmm... Any disciplines that deal damage are currently useless for dual-wielders, since they will always ignore the second strike (and second weapon) that dual-wielders rely on. I can't change that. However, now that I've made the other weapon attacks more powerful... no time for lengthy response wow you've thought this through very well so fast the underlined part struck me most making me think that any attempt at this is probably worth postponing until we get some response from the developer whether this is going to get changed sometime in the future. because it's a bit absurd.

EDIT: woops, didn't see your post, gotta read it now thanks for the welcome:) (this was the reply to kreador:) that's correct. so if cost of most BD's was 2 or 3 points, having a 50% chance from QA + 10-25% from equipment to recover a point would be a pretty rad boon, right?

*i think* that the BD's could be tweaked so that high QA gets you around 50% more BD use in combat. That could possibly be further tweaked so that this specific BD spamming feature is an important distinction between a quite powerful damaging and cursing offense and a moderately powerful offense. But maybe that's not possible.

Hi Since you can't alter skills, and with Quick Action probably being the most troubled skill (making DW and Lethal Blow not viable) you could make the QA fatigue removal effect much more useful by making a radical reduction to the fatigue cost of some Battle Disciplines. That would require the power of those Battle Disciplines to be reduced, but on the other hand, fighters could use more and a greater variety of those special moves in a battle which could add more tactical depth and fun factor. Many different Battle Disciplines could have the same, low fatigue cost. You could reduce/remove the fatigue removal effect from some equipment to make investing in this skill worthwile. The possibility of pretty much maxing both DW and Lethal Blow would enable an interesting assassin/barbarian-ish melee build that is much more offense oriented then it is defense oriented - which doesn't work now i think (because you're better off just pumping your basic melee skill and ignoring the offensive tier 2 & 3 skills). As of now you can either have a heavy-tanking melee-healer or a balanced defense/offense melee character which totals 2 viable melee builds and is maybe a little limiting and boring.