About special skills (lethal blow etc.)

[Puksis]

What skills do i need to get them?

[Ephesos]

Alright... it took a bit of digging, since the search function doesn't want to go back into last year (making it slightly useless), but I found the thread most likely to help you. Here. (scroll down a bit to see the full list)

 

Yeah, some of them aren't really train-able, at least not in a normal game without cheating.

[SevenMass]

Code:

Parry:		6 Dexterity(26pt)	+ 6 Defense(18pt)

Quick Strike:	6 Dexterity(26pt)	+ 6 Melee(30) or Pole(30)

Gymnastics:	8 Dexterity(42pt)	+ 6 Strength(26pt)


Blademaster:	6 Melee(30pt)		+ 6 Pole(30pt)		+ 6 Strength(26pt)

Anatomy:	6 Intelligence(26pt)	+ 8 Melee(44pt) or Pole(44pt)

Lethal Blow:	8 Anatomy(44pt)		+ 8 Blademaster(52pt)


Riposte:	8 Parry(36pt)		+ 6 Blademaster(36pt)

Sharpshooter:	6 Dexterity(26pt)	+ 8 Bows(28pt) or Thrown(28pt)


Magery:		8 Intelligence(42pt)	+ 6 Priest(30pt) or Mage(36pt)

Magical Eff:	8 Magery(44pt)		+ 8 Endurance(36pt)

Resistance:	8 Dexterity(42pt)	+ 8 Endurance(36pt)	+ 8 Hardiness(20pt)    

[Critical_Failure]

What i don't uderstand is why an adventurer would need both pole weapons and melee weapons skills for parry, it makes no sense to me.

[Sudanna]

You don't need either, according to the chart.

[Micawber]

s/parry/blademaster/g

[Student of Trinity]

BladeOrPoleIt'sAllTheSameToALivingWeaponLikeMeMaster was too long to fit on the panel.

[Puksis]

thanks for help. My nephil can train sharpshooter, mage magery and pole'er parry and almost blademaster.

[Micawber]

Quote:

Originally written by Ephesos:
Yeah, some of them aren't really train-able, at least not in a normal game without cheating.

I've been pondering what one could do about this. It seems to me there are two sides to this problem: (i) there are not enough skill points in the game to make all the special skills trainable; and (ii) the party runs out of sources of experience at the end of the game. Clearly solving (ii) would help to solve (i), but I would prefer a solution that made special skills available earlier in the game, not just at the very end. So I think it would be preferable to devise a means of increasing the number of skill points available in the middle of the game, so that special skills could be trained earlier.

One, achievable, method would be to increase creatures' base levels (excluding PCs). This has two effects: they become harder to kill; and the party gets more experience for killing them. The first effect is needed to balance against the advantage gained from making special skills more accessible. The second effect gives the desired extra skill points. The downside of this approach is it diminishes the advantages of lock-picking and quest completion.

I was thinking of adding 8 levels to every creature. In theory this would raise the PCs' maximum achievable level by 8 also, giving them each 40 extra skill points by the end of the game; which would go a long way to purchasing some special skills. To prevent the early game from becoming impossible, the effect would be tapered in at floor(50% x current level) for low-level creatures. Examples:

Code:

               Current  AdjustedCreature      Level    Level     Change=======================================Goblin        2        3         +1Nephil        5        7         +2Ghoul         8        12        +4Chitrach      10       15        +5Slith         12       18        +6Golem         24       32        +8Cave Giant    30       38        +8Black Shade   40       48        +8 

Here is a graph of the adjustment to be applied:


This sort of adjustment is mechanically do-able, simply by 'gawk'ing the script av4itemschars.txt like this . The question is, will it have the desired consequences? Testing the theory by playing the game from start to finish could take days...

[ex post slarto]

No, no, no, no, no!

 

The problem isn't the skill points, the problem is the skill costs (and powers). I don't care if you get 200 bonus skill points when you start out, you're STILL not gonna want to train in Blademaster, Anatomy, Lethal Blow, Magical Efficiency, Riposte, or Resistance. Some of the skills are great to train in, because they have reasonable unlock costs AND provide useful abilities. Parry and Quick Strike certainly, and sometimes Gymnastics, Sharpshooter, and Magery.

 

Magical Efficiency is entirely useless AND insanely expensive. Insanely. Anatomy doesn't really do much, at least at the low levels you can get to. Lethal Blow is good if you get a lot, but it's so absurdly expensive (absurdly) that even with 400 bonus skill points, it would be stupid not to invest them elsewhere. Resistance isn't bad, but it's stupidly expensive, stupidly, prohibitively. Riposte is honestly not great -- it doesn't seem to add to your chance of not being hit, it only works on melee attacks, and it does miniscule damage when it does work. Plus, it's ludicrously expensive. Ludicrously! As for Blademaster, you need to invest a vertiginous amount just to break even with the same investment in Strength and one of Melee or Pole Weapons, and given the profuse non-skill-point based boosts to Str/Pole/Blademaster available, you'd never do that. Vertiginous...

 

For those skills, it is pretty much always better to spend the skill points elsewhere. If you want the skills to be buyable and useful, make them buyable and useful, don't throw off the rest of the game balance.

[Micawber]

All true. However the skill costs are hard-coded and I can't change them. Whereas I can change how many skill points I get. And by making the kills harder, the game stays balanced.

[ex post slarto]

Actually, you can change skill point costs, more or less. It would be fairly simple to create a dialogue script that exchanges skill points for skills, at the appropriate, dynamic rate, after checking to make sure you have enough. That would bring us back to Exile-style, talk-to-the-trainer training, but I don't see a big issue with it -- particularly if it's only used for special skills, for which it isn't unrealistic to require a special trainer.

[Micawber]

OK then, putting aside for a moment the utility or otherwise of magical efficiency etc, is it just the unlock costs you object to, or are you saying as well the skill costs, once available, are themselves too high?

 

In the former case one could throw away the unlock criteria and make the skills available maybe on a party level basis. A single training point would be convenient - a good choice would be Vidrain, since one tends to visit him fairly often anyway.

[Alorael at Large]

In many cases its the cost of the skill itself. Magical Efficiency just isn't good. I wouldn't buy it for one skill point even if I didn't have to unlock it first.

 

—Alorael, who can't think of anything that's too hard to unlock but then worth investing in once you've got it. The skills worth an investment are worth it even with high costs.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Stainless Steel Soul:
—Alorael, who can't think of anything that's too hard to unlock but then worth investing in once you've got it.

I'd buy Blademaster and Lethal Blow if they were easier to unlock. Neither of them is exactly an incredibly awesome skill, but a fighter doesn't have that much to spend skill points on at high levels.

[ex post slarto]

Thuryl's right. Lethal Blow would actually useful when you are at very high levels, if you could get enough of it (10+) to make it somewhat consistent. Blademaster would be parallel to Sharpshooter, if not for its craptastic unlock cost.

 

I probably *would* buy Magical Efficiency if it cost 1 and had no unlock cost. However, that's about as high as I'd go. And since you can buy 2 points for gold, that means I wouldn't really buy any with skill points.

 

Resistance would be quite decent without an unlock cost, though perhaps still slightly too expensive (it starts at what, 6?). Reducing nearly all magic damage by 4% isn't bad. If nothing else it would open up new builds for singletons.

[Randomizer]

Some time after I finish up Nethergate: Resurrection and A3 singletons. I going back to finish up a resistance singleton game. It's not a pure case since I do have high dexterity and defense to reduce attacks in the Eastern Gallery. Still it's not that bad except for having to wait until Fort Remote to get your 2 levels from a trainer. Damage reduction works better since it will also affect magical attacks that can't be parried.

[Puksis]

Quote:

Originally written by Randomizer:
magical attacks that can't be parried.

If you have parry skill, you have a tinytiny chance of parrying a magic.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by Puksis:
If you have parry skill, you have a tinytiny chance of parrying a magic.

Not all of 'em. Area effect spells can't ever be parried.

[ex post slarto]

Quote:

Originally written by Randomizer:
Some time after I finish up Nethergate: Resurrection and A3 singletons. I going back to finish up a resistance singleton game. It's not a pure case since I do have high dexterity and defense to reduce attacks in the Eastern Gallery. Still it's not that bad except for having to wait until Fort Remote to get your 2 levels from a trainer. Damage reduction works better since it will also affect magical attacks that can't be parried.

You know, I thought about doing this. However, I did out the math, and even with maxxed skills, armor, and magical buffs, you will never block more than about 90% of damage (physical or magical). And for most of the game, you will be a lot closer to 50-60% than 90%. The thing is that you can get almost as good reduction with no skills, and just armor and buffs - about 80-85%. If you train up Resistance, I'm not actually sure you'd have enough skill points left to get both Mage Spells (for Dispel) and Priest Spells, anyway.

Furthermore, even if you went that path, training Resistance is a huge waste of skill points. Given that you have to invest in 6 points of Endurance, which is almost a complete waste, you have to buy a huge amount of Resistance before it becomes more cost effective than just training Hardiness more than is sensible.

Finally, remember that A4 uses the stun rules from G1-3. If your only way to avoid being hit in melee combat is Parry, stunning is going to be a problem. High stun resistance armor might fix that, but I dunno.

[Critical_Failure]

I apologise fort my earlier question, i meant "why woulkd you need both melee weapons and pole weapons for blademaster?" I must just have had parry on the brain

[SevenMass]

Maybe "Blade mastery" should be renamed into "Melee mastery," and Melee should be called "Sword."

[ex post slarto]

It is somewhat problematic that attacks with melee weapons and attacks with pole weapons are both called melee attacks. There is no difference between them other than the Melee and Pole Weapons skills, though.

[Randomizer]

Slarty -

 

By the time you reach the Great Cave you have the skill set to train for resistance without sacrificing spell ability if you use natural mage or pure spirit to help gain spell casting levels in one of them. I made a mistake and started spending spell points for resistance before reaching the trainer in Fort Remote and never finished my old game.

[ex post slarto]

That's not true at all. You CAN have the skill set, but it requires sinking a BUTTLOAD of points into useless skills first. Dexterity isn't very useful if you are going the Resistance route, as you will never have the skill points you need to pump your dodge rate up significantly. I guess you can use it for bows, but it still costs 42 points. The Hardiness is good, obviously. But buying 6 points of Endurance is a retarded waste for any build. It costs 36 skill points and returns practically nothing once you consider the 2 free (therefore not applicable for Resistance) points of Endurance you can get and the HP bonuses from Augmentation and Essence Armor.

 

After all that, Resistance then costs a huge number of skill points to buy. Those start to add up. Even buying 2 from Thompson, which means you are going a long long time with no Resistance, it will be hard to get over 10 in the score without neglecting everything else. I'm not sure if 10 Reistance actually reduces elemental damage by 40%, or if the individual 4%s multiply and it reduces it by ~30%. Either way, that effect is useful, but not really worth the total lack of effective offences you are left with after such a huge investment.