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A:EftP - What Encounters Are Too Hard?


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I havent had much trouble with any of the fights in game so far. The fact that you can level up by choosing wild encounters is great. Whats even better is that you can outclass enemies with the bonus experience traits. I originally overlooked that, however with extra experience and extra levels, enemies not only cant hit you as hard, but you can destroy them much easier.

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Originally Posted By: Death Knight
I havent had much trouble with any of the fights in game so far. The fact that you can level up by choosing wild encounters is great. Whats even better is that you can outclass enemies with the bonus experience traits. I originally overlooked that, however with extra experience and extra levels, enemies not only cant hit you as hard, but you can destroy them much easier.

Those wild encounters can be dangerous. A fresh-from-the-surface party can wander down to the Mertis area to find bands of Undead or westward to find bands of Sliths. Both would mean a quick death.

Personally, I like the nonlinear aspect of this game. A quick death just says "don't go there yet." The game is also nice enough to nudge a new party North, towards Ft. Duvno and Formello.
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Quote:
A quick death just says "don't go there yet." The game is also nice enough to nudge a new party North, towards Ft. Duvno and Formello.


Agreed. I don't mind dying often in Avernum, so long as I feel like I'm not stuck. Given that the game loads very quickly (unlike more 'modern' RPGs), doesn't penalize you for dying (as do MMOs and Diablo 2), or, heaven forfend, just delete your save outright like various Roguelikes I could mention...dying feels more like a challenge, rather than a kick in the face.
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The situation with "boss fights" in this version of the game is showing a consistent pattern: the party cuts through the dungeon in a reasonably efficient manner, only to be overwhelmed by the boss. In a few cases, repeated attempts at the fight have produced a hair-thin victory (the Quick Save/Recall function works wonderfully). In others, the group hasn't been able to win with any tactics.

 

This latter situation has been true (so far) for the Underground Fort, Spiral Fort, Island Fort, and the Hidden Aranea Lair (south of Lost Bahssikana). This could be a result of my party composition, my play style, design imbalance, or some combination of the three. It is interesting that, even though the party is now several levels higher than the original encounter, it is still being defeated in the Island Fort boss fight.

 

There have been several boss fights where, usually after several tries, the party has narrowly won with the last member still standing and just a few HP remaining. These fights are certainly rewarding and, to me, indicate a good, tough balance in the fight in question. That's as good as it gets, at least for my personal sense of accomplishment. The ones noted above weren't close.

 

It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues throughout the game.

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Having finished the game now, it doesn't seem like it ever really got harder again. Indeed, this game had a reverse difficulty curve -- it started out really, really hard, and got progressively easier the further you went along. Very much the reverse of other Spiderweb games and, I suspect, the reverse of what Jeff intended.

 

As noted above, the lack of enough low-level dungeons made things pretty tough through about level 10. So much so, that I was really thinking playing on Normal was a mistake and that I should turn the difficulty down to Easy. And the Spiral Pit was very difficult, with, as others have noted, a huge gap in difficulty between the minions and the boss.

 

After level 10, though, things got much easier and stayed that way pretty much all game. On Normal, Tassik-Schai was pretty much the only seriously challenging fight I ran into before the endgame, and even he wasn't terribly difficult. After that, except when I wandered into an area way over my level, the only remaining hard fights were Grah-hoth and the running fight through the Royal Spire (I bribed Sulfras rather than fight him, so there wasn't a hard fight for the Escape ending). And even those didn't strike me as overly difficult. After the Spiral, I probably could have gotten through the rest of the game on Hard.

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Well ive had about enough of the random encounters as i cant level up with a marginal experience. I cant beat any enemies as none of them can be hit other than by my priest. Are there any places where you can hit the enemies? I gain so little experience from the encounters and they're too easy. Yet the only place i managed to get through was the bandit keep at level 2.

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If you can get through the Bandit Keep, you should be able to handle the Goblin Caves as well, if you haven't been there yet (north wall of the Eastern Gallery, just north of the Bandit Keep). You can also handle the first part of the Bat Cave (NW corner of the Eastern Gallery) -- but just the section to the left with the bats, don't go north!

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