Jump to content

Tigranes

Members
  • Posts

    10398
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    22

Everything posted by Tigranes

  1. ....1/4 Boring Bettle Full Plate
  2. I know we're pushing forward very fast here, but pretty much all I'm skipping is a few filler battles. After another area or two, we get to the Beastlord Harshom, whose reason for being here is so idiotic that I choose to believe he was just invented to make sure we get some XP before the Monastery. Our AOE-Opener kills off most of the spellcasters. The warbears were stronger than I thought, though, and in the end half the party was running around madly trying to avoid their claws while spells whittled away their health. To finish, we cast a skull trap at Harshom, but they have a really small trigger radius in IWD2 and it wouldn't blow, so we cast Animate Dead on top of it to make it go. Yes, that's right, Obsidianites Mach II are pioneers of suicide bombing. Aaaand we end with some character shots. Monty is now 8 Fighter / 3 Rogue, with a healthy BAB (~17), and is predictably responsible for 311 kills. We've mostly invested in stuff like Cleave and whatever makes his tunnel fighting even more efficient. Gromnir, as a single class man, is 11 Monk and has a decent 186 kills. His BAB isn't as good and I'm worried he'll end up too lightweight near the end, but as I never play with Monks I'm not sure what will happen. Mkreku, 1 Pal / 10 Sorc, doing not too shabby at 125. He's actually the most versatile member in the party, and actually a lot more useful than the old Mkreku, who was probably badly designed on my part. The main buffer. Wals is just behind at 116, though I plan to use his transformations more now, and Call Lightning/Static Charge rocks. He's 1 Barb / 10 Druid. Feargus, 1 Ranger / 10 Rogue, again close at 113 kills. He has some nice daggers/short swords + Ambidexterity/Two-Weapon Fighting, and is actually a pretty consistent hitter in melee; I wish he had a poison weapon, though. We've also picked up some nice magical arrows that we're saving for big battles. Finally, Chris Avellone, 11 Wizard, and beating Wals & Fearg at 120 kills. Surely all the fireballs. He's on the cusp of (or already has?) 6th level spells, though we don't have any learnt at this stage. We plan to toy with our enemies by disintegrating everything at every opportunity soon enough. Right, there we go. That was pretty gruelling, but hey, the Underdark is coming soon, and there's some interesting stuff there.
  3. Of course, they decide to pop out of nowhere behind us. I assume this is what they do in caverns, lore-wise. A well placed confusion spell gets a lot of them, but the problem is it's hard to tell which are confused and which are not in the mess. In the end we didn't do so well. It's a warning of what's to come, really. We start to systematically clear out the caves, trying our best not to get snuck up by HHs. Unfortunately, the lags are getting pretty annoying, every fireball lags us now, but I'll just have to press on. We send Feargus in alone to trigger the ambushes. This was very clever, except there was a second ambush behind us. In the end we have to run to a corner and come out with the big guns again. Pretty knackered after that battle and needing a rest, we finally find the key to this fortress and come in. Usually, you get to rest and restock, before discovering some evul things they do and slaughtering them all (same as the Yuan-Ti in IWD1, if you remember). Of course, I forgot Mkreku is a paladin. Yeah, why rest when you can smite? Well, we'll have to make do. We make a stand at the chokepoint, summon monsters, Dire Charm a Duergar.... And after a level up, Wals finally can access his Shambling Mound transformation. Thanks to that, and the short LOS of the enemies, we clear the fortress wave by wave.
  4. Mkreku is ruggedly handsome. Aaaand finally, we solve the mystery of a love triangle, wherein A and B kill C and hide the evidence to live happily ever after. Somehow, it involves us taking out ghost lights that are annoyingly immune to damage and keep popping invisible. The incarcerated C is quite thick indeed. After all that, as a reward, we get a visit from the main villains of the game, Madae and Isair. I thought they were potentially the most interesting characters out of the entire IWD series, but unfortunately, given the style of the game, they remain woefully underdeveloped. Doesn't help that everyone else has good voice acting but these are done by, I don't know, a text-to-speech program. As befitting the golden rule of villainy, they choose to waste their instantly-kill-everyone-and-turn-them-into-zombies-spell on some bystanders, not us. Anyway, after that we can finally be done with the Fell Wood. We fight some Treants, and clear the way forward... ...to some more areas full of enemies, of course. This is IWD2. I've skipped the spiders and whatnot, but here you fight two dragons - one outside, one inside. Sorry, this one's inside. Mkreku's sorcerer abilities come in very useful as we're able to stoneskin and haste half the party. Of course, I didn't think Chris Avellone would need to. Damn fool managed to get frozen... ...then shatter. We're running pretty low on raise scrolls now, and it's a good thing Monty and Grommy made it. Phew. Now we finally approach the Underdark areas, where not everything will be white anymore. That means new monsters, and first up are hook horrors. No problem, they don't have any particular immunities or saves so we throw some AOEs...
  5. Well, thanks to the wonderful crowd, here's another update. I'm a bit amused to see how grindy you guys found IWD2 - it definitely could have done with 20% less filler combat or something, but meh, I always hated the Fell Wood a lot more. IE is well suited to combat but not so much to elaborate puzzles... that said, that's exactly where we're going today. Emerging from the Ice Temple we meet Gromnir's long lost cousin. It's not unexpected that the family reunion rapidly progresses to its final stage, violence. Getting to the small village, we come across Nym, yet another IWD cameo. He's got nothing on Saemon Havarian, though, needs to work on his smooth charm. We pick up some 5th level spells for Chris Avellone - no Breach-style spells though, you never get them in IWDs for some reason. Feargus' quick wit helps Gromnir avoid his extended family. Mkreku's Paladinic Paladinness does come in useful at times. I actually never really figured out how to expose Limha properly - I'm not sure if it's a scripting error or my mistake, though. Voice acting on the little kid is pretty awesome here. And so the great battle begins, by Limha fleeing the tent and leaving her pet ogre to die to buy herself time. Not very sporting, is she? As it is, the trolls are little trouble for us and as usual our arrows/magic missiles disrupt most of her castings. she retreats and summons more powerful monsters, but we've got quite a frightening array of AOE spells now, as well as Feargus' necklace of missiles. They dont' get close. We be heroes. Next we help the villagers with a pissed off undead thing. It's kind of weird, really. Why are they so angry all the time? I mean, they should be more mellow now that they're not really pressed for time. I'll spare you guys the effort of trekking through the fell wood 'maze' (i.e. scrambled exit grids) to find his bloody horn. If only the game adopted the P&P skills of forgery...
  6. Which, incidentally, gave birth to the incredibly insane FLCL, where everyone's heads burst. Spoke to a lawyer and he's very very nicely agreed to help out though I can't afford it. This is pretty stressful since I don't have any experience or knowledge necessary to deal with it myself, but hopefully I'll persevere.
  7. Yeah, it's a pity but I'm still up for it if/when he comes back.
  8. I'm still playing the content of next update, so sure, I'll get character screens at the end of that. I guess it's hard to see their progression at the moment... they're around level 10-11, though. Call Lightning shouldn't ever hit party members in IWD2; probably what happened is an enemy mage (some of the Orc Witch Doctors have it) cast it, and then you were getting hit by that. Whoever casts CL, if it's time for another shock but no enemies are near it fizzles out. Currently I've got myself Static Charge as well. Wild Shape seems to be a bit bugged so I can't transform into Shambling Mound yet, but hopefully that works then Wals will be a machine.
  9. I actually like the fact that each Fallout has a clearly different take on the universe, though for the most part, similar enough that they're not... you know, they're more like different angles that accentuate different things, rather than violating each other's canon. FO1 was the most 'sombre' of them all, FO2 went zany and pop, FO3 decided to put the 50's aspect into very sharp relief. I mean, there are problems in the sense that the FO3 world could have avoided making so many small lore-contradictions, and that they butchered the BOS for no reason other than to make "cool wasteland jedi knights yarr", but I think it did a good job in giving FO3 a strong and consistent identity. It depends on your priorities. As Starwars says, if you were there at the time and/or read up on the developer comments and such, it's quite very clear what the original devs' vision was, and it's quite clear that FO2 diverged a fair bit from that, and FO3 very much from it. I just think that with a game franchise, and a long-lived one like this, you'll never really get a consistent auteur vision even if you get Tim Cain back on the project, and I like seeing the different take each game does, as well as it's well done and is sensitive to what came before.
  10. Thankfully, Lysara then decided to ignore my spellcasters and wander down to whack my fighters: one crit from Monty and she decided to go all emo and kill herself. After that the Golem is just a matter of time. 2 down. We find some necromancers and some free bodies. We stick them in the bag of holding together with the dead cats, because we can. Caged Fury I remember being a tough fight, but this time we picked up his real name off the Djinni that hangs out around here (I think it was him). What? It's Ironman. We then dabble with the Battle Square long enough to open Oria's doors, but don't bother mastering it... it would have earnt us XP, but actually Monty didn't turn out quite so good at this and it is very very tedious. Yes, yes, you want to take revenge for your sisters' deaths. Heaven forbid you'd actually try and help them not die in the first place, right? Oria goes down as easily as anyone... but SHES GOT A BOMB! SHES GOT A BOMB! Unfortunately, if you look closely, she actually is talking to my summoned snake, and summoned snakes don't have high charisma.. And so the staff goes boom. Wals takes a big hit but the only casualties are Oria herself... and the Snake. We hardly knew ya. Finally there is Nickademus. We didn't need his help with Caged Fury, and we dont' mind killing some demons for him later, so we might as well get his help and get some free XP. We free Nathaniel. I don't think we ever found his Ring of the Ram, though... Outside the Ice Temple some reinforcements visit us, but remember the doppleganger in Targos we exposed several updates ago? Well that all comes to help us out as the fake letter explodes in the dopplegangers' faces, revealing their true nature. Awright, next up is the Fell Wood and such. Our party is progressing quite well and getting access to some 5th level spells, which is exciting. Get us to page 5, gentlemen!
  11. And so begins our trek through the Ice Temple. You all know how gruelling it is so I'm going to save you a lot of the filler fighting. To be honest, our party is looking pretty good and most of the fights against Aurilites and such were just whack whack done. Only the Crystal Golems here caused a bit of trouble, Mkreku as usual getting the worst of it. We also ran into the Queen Remorhaz by mistake, who packs a punch, and is immediately followed by a lieutenant, but our whacks are faster than their whacks. We rescue Zack Boosenburry (Seriously? Boose & Burry?) from inside a remorhaz. I suppose the thing doesn't havea ny digestive systems in place. He's quite useful, however, as we can 'buy' castings of Stoneskin off him. In preparation for Sherincal we decide to cough up and Stoneskin the entire party. Sherincal is one of those 'threshold fights' in IWD2, at least for me; if you have a badly screwed up party by this point she's the way the game is telling you you're not doing it right. But if you have built a decent party like I have here then it's not too bad. She actually gets caught by Web, and on the top right we Dire Charmed a Barb Warrior to further cause chaos in their ranks. This allows us to pick off most of the underlings at our leisure, and by the time Sherincal swings her first blow at us we can focus on her exclusively. She dies quickly. I was looking for best way to screencap the insides of the Ice Temple, and ended up, well, not getting a lot at all. Sorry if you were looking forward to it, but really, it's just a long series of filler fights. We go from room to room, clearing and looting methodically. High Priestess Cathin is the first to fall.... Then we take on Lysara, who compliments Gromnir's talent with words. Truly, a lawyer is ever a lawyer. There's an antimagic field throughout most of the area, though oddly it stops when you enter the room or so, I think. Nevertheless it is very annoying, and Lysara has quite a few spells as well. Monty has to hold off the Crystal Golem while everyone else heals back up. Feargus and Chrsi Avellone are tasked with bringing Lysara down, but she has some buff up against spells and also casts fear on Feargus. Meanwhile the Golem just won't go down...
  12. Monkeys are dropping like flies without your moral support, gentlemen. I don't want to resort to undead monkeys, but I will, you hear me? Returning after our exploits at the fortress, we do some shopping, then get on board Oswald's airship... with predictable results. See the evul druids calling up storms in the back there? Nice touch. Oswald is a heavy sleeper. Outside where we must gather ingredients to mend Oswald's ship, we find some new enemies. Of course, we now have some spiffy new spells, like Lance of Disruption. Mkreku is willing to get down to 1hp just to get a better angle. He's dedicated, that man. Gawd i love Call Lightning. Having stopped the giants we can rescue Captain Yurst. We generously give him a magic item to stop his bleeding, because y'know what, he'll die anyway and we'll get it back. This is the life of the munchkin. Mkreku goes all Paladinic on the poor werewolf-masquerading-as-merchant, but in the end we have no option but to say RARGH SMASH EVIL. Pity. We made sure to spend all our money on a Necklace of Missiles before we killed him; very important, it has 50 bloody charges. Feargus puts it on. I didn't get a screen capture but we also failed at diplomacy with the Aurilites(?) blocking the pass. I think you need to be a ranger or something to persuade them, but Feargus was the one scouting... I hate how in IWD2 all conversations kick off even if you're invisible. In any case, we're now done here. IWD2 surprises you with the writing sometimes. If only Purkake was this good, we might have kept him around.
  13. Yeah, thought so. It was the same deal with Jade Empire, really, and it's good to see they got over that particular 'fix' after that. I don't think ME really counts... It would have been very really interesting if the execution was better, though, I liked the fact that they did try to upgrade their narratives.
  14. I recently heard a story about a man who went to Thailand, and they let you jump in and take photos up close and cuddle them and such. Of course, then the tiger went nuts and pretty much picked up a woman in its mouth, and the attendees proceeded to run away. Personally, I say the things we're willing to do now for a good picture is completely out of hand.. wait, hang on, I guess this wasn't a good story to tell just now. Situation with landlord is pretty idiotic, they didn't reply to my email then blamed it on me for daring to use email (heaven forbid), threatened me with eviction during the weekend which I ended up paying the $500 to stave off. $500 for having a electric freaking jug in the room (which they argue.... threatens the life of hundreds via fire? Did these guys even go to school?) And of course they're trying to blame me for the alarm I didn't break and will probably try and extort more $. Anyway it's time to take this passive aggressive BS seriously and go consult a lawyer properly. If international representation was possible I'd get Grommy, but he's probably one of those super expensive hot shots.
  15. So... am I the only one that saw the KOTOR twist coming about 5 hours into the game? Because that sort of ruined it a lot, I suppose I don't have the best perspective on it.
  16. Look, Call Lightning! Finally Wals can do some real damage. He also gets some Wild Shapes now, and I gave him Panther as a feat, which seems quite effective. Inside, the Old Orc who somehow has the HP of 4 ordinary orcs. I guess they're like wine, get better with age. We spy on some plot-relevant squabbling between Sherincal and Guthma. For those who never apparently got this far, Sherincal is the superior ranting about Guthma's incompetence. Biting social commentary about office culture today. Aaaand now it's time to take this fortress down. To avoid being overwhelmed we'll use Feargie-bait and get them one by one at a place of our choosing. First, he kicks off a trap, but thankfully makes the save... And then we clear the first batch with some typical tactics. I did cheese a bit and rest between fights in this section - there's just too much to handle otherwise. Feargus nearly gets a Witch Doctor with a nice backstab, but not enough... And avoids a flame arrow fired at his butt as he runs away. Finally, it's Guthma and his retinue, whom we again lure to our favuored spot. There are a lot of spellcasters in the group so we did use some flaming oils and a lot of spells to disrupt and get them down. And we make it! We did take more damage than that, and healed it back, but it went quite well. I guess things are finally looking up for the group! Tomorrow I'll upload the Ice Temple update. To be honest there was a lot of tedious fighting - there are a lot of groups of 2-3 aurilites who really posed no challenge by that point - so I streamlined to a single update.
  17. So we progress to the second level, and somewhere (I forget) we picked up fireball as well. It certainly makes it a bit easier... now we can breeze past one or two battles before it becomes a fight for our lives. Feargus spots yet another war drum. But it's only defended by two trolls, so... A triple sneak attack takes the drum out, then they bring down the trolls. Monty's rogue levels really are doing wodners. Moving on there is a long corridor of various enemies 'training' by hacking up inanimate objects. We use Feargus as bait to lure all of them at once, and then get them with AOE spells. Most low level critters can't handle a fireball, much less a skull trap afterwards. This is the guy we need to get a letter off if we took Yquog's quest. As it is, we can simply give him Yquog's bracers (only +1 AC, meh) and avoid some annoying fights. I have nothing more to say to you, Chris Avellone. You must leave. Trying to avoid attacking everyone as much as we can, we again use the triple sneak to get to these guys here. Unfortunately, I clicked the bloody gate to the Otyughs by mistake... luckily they fought the ogres as well (come to think of it, Feargus could probably have sneaked the door open and let them fight in the first place) and we get through alright. Finally, we emerge at the exterior of the fortress. By now with our arsenal of third level spells and decent BAB, we are starting to become a reasonably efficient party. We find the very first returning frost dart. As per a reader's wish, it is equipped on Monty.
  18. Yuss! The Goblin Warrens are full of enemies that magically wake up as soon as you are spotted nearby. This is 3rd ed, don't they make listen checks or something? In any case, we can't sneak past every camp, so we might as well get a few out of the way. We experiment with our latest spell, Lightning. Unfortunately, Chris Avellone isn't the best at aiming, and takes out Grommy in one go. I guess we take that spell out of rotation. We still make it through alright with Web, Wals escaping with 1hp. We meet Pondmuk, the goblin who aspires to be questgiver. We are glad to oblige. If you rest with him though, he ambushes you, so best to leave the area and come back refreshed... There is only one war drum in this level, and Feargus can easily take care of it from a sneaky alcove. We continue the Obsidianite tradition of masterful deception. The replacement, Skull Trap, is a lot more satisfactory. I hope we pick up a fireball scroll soon, though. This is Yquog. Usually he gives you a quest - this is the first time I haven't had the option and I'm not sure why, Mkreku as sorc is loaded up with balls of charisma. Well the balls haven't helped, he's dead. Yquog packs quite a punch. If you can see we did manage to put the litle ones to sleep, though, and prevail in teh end. Monty is starting to be a better fighter now as he gets the levels.
  19. I'mr eady, so let's get it over...
  20. OK, it does seem like wrong key but unfortunately there's nothing Obsidian (or us) can do about that - as you'd already know that is solely the domain of Sega. I hope they do get back to you, though, if you're in the US maybe they have a call number?
  21. What was the problem with the statues Slowtrain? They're fairly well organised, but by this time your party is so powerful, you can beat them down with your summons alone - a Deva, an elemental and a few others, and you don't even need to wade in. Great stuff with level one, L2 always pissed me off because of the puzzles but the chromatic demon should be a breeze again.
  22. Let's see... can we get up to page 4?
  23. We can discuss this on PM. As for the vid, I wouldn't know about real guns, but man, I wouldn't ever use that particular ironsight... makes it harder to aim. Definitely like how there's more vegetation around.
  24. Please don't troll other forums/forumites here, it's equivalent to trolling people here.
  25. I'm sure this is terribly hypocritical of me, so I'll think about it more later, but my gut feeling to all this has always been.... ME1 and ME2 are both pot and kettle in the same basket of a particular RPG genre. I find it silly to detest one and love the other. I mean, think about it. From the very beginning, the hallmarks of ME were (a) feel-good space opera story with weird-looking exotic sci-fi locales and with some 80's influences, (b) combat that tries to hit the middle ground blend between squad combat, tactics, shooter games and visceral action, © and in support of those two elements, where appropriate, traditional Biowarian RPG elements. As far as I can tell ME2 simply 'optimised' the model further. Those displeased by ME2, I'd argue, weren't actually happy with ME1 because they loved this model; they liked ME1 because it provided enough of ©, which is what they really wanted, with (a) and (b) as unique elements. On the other hand, those who think ME2 is a clear improvement recognised, or came to like, the ME model for what it is. I think it's all fine, ME does what it does very very well even if I can't care less for it. THe only concern I have is that instead of establishing its own niche or something, it's coming to become the representative and referent halllmark of all RPGs, which is surely going to influence production of other RPGs (see DA2).
×
×
  • Create New...