I royally can't stand my character and party

[mynameismudd]

I played Avadon 2 with My character a mechanical rogue, a sorcerer, and a shadowalker. The shadow walker, she is good as a melee/ranged hybrid so she's ok, The sorcerer is built the same way I built Nathalie and that is dexterity/intelligence. He is deadly and slowly getting better. Its just my character who sucks so bad its awful.

Jeff fixed a lot of things that were broken but he also never fixed the uselessness of melee. My character takes 2 rounds to get to most enemies while mage and ninja take 1 to get in close and the next round ninja guy can attack in melee. Ocassionaly I get to attack once in a round if close but even then Ranged will always do more damage over time. The damage isn't even better in melee other than for attacks but ranged fixes that with keeping you away.

I usually play Blademasters and Shadowalker ranged but wanted to try a fighter out. I can see jeff didn't do anything about this yet. Is the game still in beta or alpha and will there be another patch to make swords/pikes have a use. I never used them in the older game and likely I can why I shouldn't use them now.

 

Is there a respecialization somewhere because I can't see a fighter getting through this game alive.

[mouton]

Lol, I am kind of happy I never read Avadon forums when I was playing the first game, because I was mainly using a blademaster, a melee shadowalker (I know!) and a spellcaster.

 

Finished it on torment, had fun, came to forums, learned that melee is "useless"

[mynameismudd]

A pure melee fighter can't take Miranda on one on one. Its not possible. A ranged attacker or spell caster can do it they haste themselves and use scarabs and attacks, but they need to be around level 27 or so. I did it at level 26. Im sorry Charlie but melee is about as useless as a corpse

[mouton]

You mean in Avadon 2? Thanks for the spoiler alert, mate.

[mynameismudd]

The game has been out for 4 days. How would I be able to complete it that fast. It took me 1 week and a half on Avadon 1 which is what I was talking about.

[Triumph]

FWIW, there is an opportunity to respec your character, just like there was in Ava1.

[mouton]

The game has been out for 4 days. How would I be able to complete it that fast. It took me 1 week and a half on Avadon 1 which is what I was talking about.

You mean some fight with Miranda in Avadon 1? I don't remember it at the moment but I certainly didn't attack her one on one, I used 3 characters

[Jerakeen]

 

You mean some fight with Miranda in Avadon 1? I don't remember it at the moment but I certainly didn't attack her one on one, I used 3 characters

 

You couldn't have fought her with more than one character, but the fight itself was optional, iirc.

[Lilith]

There's also still a retrain cheat that you can use before you get access to the retrainer: hit shift-D on your keyboard and type retrain in the box that appears.

 

Also, I'm not sure why you're having problems with a melee tinkermage in particular. On the first round, you summon a turret at the end of your movement instead of using your last AP to take one more step toward the enemy. Next round, you and the turret both get to attack. That's two attacks in two rounds, same as a ranged character would get.

[Copernicus]

I think one of the most enjoyable aspects of Avadon is that you can successfully play characters "against type". My favorite run through Avadon 1 was with a sorceress with lots of points in Ward Mastery and a decent amount of endurance. In short, she could take a punch or two before going down. It was fun trying to come up with tactics to make good use of this...

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Edited June 27, 2023 by ...

[Copernicus]

Melee in Avadon basically boils down to building a tank or a damager; there's no real room for hybrid builds.

 

True, if what you are going for is a party optimized for maximum efficiency in battle. Figuring out how to succeed with non-optimal builds is more fun, though, in my opinion.

[Edgwyn]

Lol, I am kind of happy I never read Avadon forums when I was playing the first game, because I was mainly using a blademaster, a melee shadowalker (I know!) and a spellcaster.

 

Finished it on torment, had fun, came to forums, learned that melee is "useless"

 

I used the exact same build for Avadon 1 and enjoyed it, but did not play on Torment. I usually play at Normal level so that I can have the builds that I enjoy as opposed to the ones that happen to be optimized to the engine.

[Necris Omega]

While I'm completely in agreement that Melee really, really needs some love... like, three legged, orphaned kitten strength love, I gotta say that the Tinkermage is easily one of the most powerful things Jeff has given a player.

 

Turrents are INSANE. A massive damage, AoE Cone attack every round? A radiating AoE attack every few rounds? Extremely health? Casual Healing and haste buffs? AoE damage and slow effect? All within the first few levels? ...

 

Come Avadon 3 (I'm assuming there'll be an Av 3, unless of course if Av2 ends with "and then absolutely everyone died") I expect the Tinkermages to be nerfed harder than a small pox once vaccines were a thing. I love my Shadowwalker, but held up against the Tinkermage he... really serves no purpose. The sheer discrepancy in power is... in a min-max world, anything else is not even worth discussing. If I wasn't already well past the Corruption, I'd probably start over with one.

[Lilith]

Melee characters are better than they used to be, mostly because Dexterity is weaker, which makes Strength better off by comparison. They still have problems with knockback, ensnaring and immobilising effects, but in average situations they're no longer outright worse.

 

Tinkermages are definitely very good and probably the strongest class. The fact that you have limited control over turret placement and no real control over aiming makes those cone attacks less effective than they could be, and yet they're still very powerful despite that. The classes almost seem to be balanced around the assumption that players will max out several of their lower-tier skills before even looking at the third and fourth tiers: if you do that they're on more of an even footing, but if you beeline for the top tier on one side, some classes really shine while others get less of a benefit.

[Randomizer]

If you think tinkermages are overpowered now you should look at the screenshot of the original version on the Avadon 2 page. Turret craft used to be a tier 1 ability so you only needed to put skill points in it, the right column, and maybe tool use. No need to put anything in the left and other center column abilities if you just wanted powerful turrets to fight for you.

[Necris Omega]

Eh, I generally try not to consider pre-Alpha incarnations of these things.