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The point of Haste?


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Cast Haste level 2 twice and in all the rounds the characters had that attribute only once did one of them get sped up. Nobody is encumbered. This is just the most egregious example. Often it is only my priest and mage who are hasted when it is really my warriors who I want to be hasted. They have to swallow a haste potion to get reliable speed and they are not common and neither are their ingredients. 

 

I have played AEftP a number of times and never noticed it be this bad (playing it Hard). Is this just a sampling thing or what? I'm certainly wondering what the point of wasting spell points on it is. 

 

I'm replaying AEftP because I can use the keypad and keyboard. I've been trying to play Av4 but having to use the trackpad for pretty much everything is seriously hurting my poor abused hands (I have a joint fusion in each one) and it was just getting too sore to play enough to make progress. Long fights? Ouch! 

 

So I have a plea for remakes: don't forget us people with bad hands/wrists and that not everyone on Macs is playing on an iPad and so it really needs two separate versions not slightly tweaked ones. A4 for Mac really is redolent of being a port from the iOS version. Even after playing it quite a lot I'm still hitting a to attack or speak to people or u to find out if there's anything usable around. Instead I have sweep the cursor around to see if anything lights up. Ouch again. 

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7 hours ago, Muscleguy said:

A4 for Mac really is redolent of being a port from the iOS version. 

 

Um, it wasn't.  The Mac version came first.  The iOS version came much, much later.  iPads literally did not exist until a few years after A4 was released.  (And it sure has never been designed for a tiny, original iPhone screen.)

 

I'm sympathetic to your interface woes, but it sounds like what you really want is a game that doesn't require using either a mouse/trackpad or a touchscreen.  Lots of those exist, but it's a very, very different design choice from how Spiderweb operates.  You're not asking for a small tweak, you're asking for a redesign that affects basically everything.

 

AEFTP:

Your complaint about Haste seems to boil down to: "Why isn't this spell stronger and better suited to my needs?"  Haste isn't good enough for your party, and you don't have enough haste potions for the stronger Battle Fury effect.

 

The reality is that even level 1 Haste is already a pretty strong effect.  It's haphazard, sure -- but that doesn't make it weak.  Battle Fury, OTOH, is frequently described as being "brokenly overpowered" by a lot of folks on this board.

 

"Hard" difficulty can actually be somewhat hard if you don't take advantage of the game's mechanics.  If Haste doesn't feel good enough, and you find yourself getting stuck later, consider turning the difficulty down at that point.  No point in making the game harder if you won't have fun that way!

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Haste has been weakened from the older games where it operated every turn and not a 33% chance that you don't know until after your first action. It still helps, but you can't plan for it.

 

A4 has several design flaws that make it harder to play then other games in the series. Worst was no light for seeing objects in dark places and terrains.

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Changing how Haste works in the later Avernums is necessary to compensate for the reworked AP mechanics: in terms of movement in combat, a later-Avernum character can move before attacking about as far as a Hasted older-Avernum character could before attacking; they just can't (normally) attack twice. In a battle with a lot of movement (which is pretty rare in the Avernums), a newer-Avernum character with new Haste is probably going to perform about as well (relatively) as an older-Avernum character with old Haste. Thus, Battle Fury, which operates basically the same as Haste did in the older Avernums, becomes much more powerful than Haste ever was or could be in the old Avernums.

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