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JONNIN

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Everything posted by JONNIN

  1. the portraits we can use for our characters include the same ones from games 20 years old. The lack of images here is just sad. I mean, I like the old pics and am glad some were included, but some new ones would have been nice too. And by new, I don't mean the old ones with a color change or minor edits.
  2. I would rather have a chanter and 5 rangers to get his aura. Just keep chanting to speed up reloads... I did a party with 3 rangers & a chanter. I never did more than 3...
  3. the dozens lets you kill your rival group which nets you some exceptional leather and some goodies, the knights gift you some good plate armor. House whatever lets you kill a number of NPCs as well but I forget if you get anything good. There are minor things.... you can hire NPC defenders from the factions at your keep after making nice with them. Make the wrong faction angry and you will have to fight them at random times.
  4. Fast runner is a waster IMHO. You will find a number of speed increasing items over the course of the game. Some of it is randomized loot, sure, but I am *somewhat* sure that at least 1 such item is on a vendor. Consider carefully before you spend this point -- you are spending an irreplaceable talent for something you can get on gear (and not just on boots, either). Arms bearer -- I never found it to be useful to have more than 2 sets of weapons, but that is a personal choice. 4 spells per level is more than fine for most people. A lot of the spells are redundant ... fireball is redundant since acidball does a debuff and more damage at the same level. He has access to a ton of spells and only about 1/3 of them are really good ... 4/ level is cramped but doable, and the few times you might need an alternate spell book, you can either swap them slowly (its not that bad) or swap ahead of time (knowing a little something about the game in advance or observing the area you are in and swapping based off the most common enemy types...). Aloth would be better off with elemental damage utility talents.
  5. Do what you like but you get tons of it from these fights, and defiance bay is probably not to far away if you have not been there yet ... buying it and enchanting low level items found before DB is probably wasting resources (you will have plenty to spare, so its no biggie long term but early on you might run out of money or enchanting materials if you enchant stuff that you will then replace and re-enchant the new stuff...)
  6. correct, you can proceed without doing the elemental "puzzle". All the puzzle seems to give is XP (?). Correct, you can return with kana and he should be able to do his quest. It would be *best* if you had not yet opened the door where he needs to go... but even so, I think the game accepts it and proceeds as if he were there. This is not a good topic for a no-spoilers section. We have to dance around trying to answer without saying anything.
  7. Straight up, for the price --- well compare it to others. A new title for a console system tends to run you about 50 bucks. An old title runs you 10-20. Look on steam ... new stuff is $50 on the average, some are 65 and up. The graphics are OK -- for a 2-d top down. I was a little disappointed here, I *expected* neverwinter's ability to rotate the screen (even from the fixed top down view, that was huge) and instead its a throwback to older tech that seems to be background images and pseudo-3d. There is nothing wrong with the graphics in terms of resolution and such -- its slightly cartoonish instead of photorealistic but that is also a nod to the older games and genre. There is a fair amount of dialog. It is a ROLE PLAYING game, not diablo. There is a lot of combat, too ... probably too much of it. Once in a while, just for variety, you would think someone could walk thru the woods without being assaulted by something.... You may or may not like this type of game. But the # of hours to play through it once is on par with other $50 games, and it has *some* replay value (even if not trying to master the game such that you can play it with one character, you can still replay other classes and attitudes etc).
  8. It is all in how you think about it. Many of the throws and other moves are a reaction to being attacked in martial arts. Someone throws a punch or kick and they are now off balance and overextended, and there are tons of moves that take advantage of that. But you can't do those moves until you are attacked.... you don't have to take a hit, but you can think of the wound mechanic as avoiding the hit before exploiting the attack if you prefer ... as for the not taking damage thing... the D&D monk never really worked that way... with an 18 dex maybe it did, but the tiny armor class bonus from leveling up was negated by enemy attackers having a higher thaco at higher levels... you were fighting naked and you got hit, a lot, until very high levels.
  9. there is no answer. You can certainly make it easier with certain party makeups (say, 1 pure tank, 2 off-tanks/damage dealers, healer, debuffing caster, and ranged damage dealer) compared to others (no tank at all can be rough for example, if you are not really deep into the mechanics and tactics and builds). But there are thousands of great combinations that will work just fine for a full party led by an inexperienced player. For that matter, the provided companions are not even remotely built for max/min and they are sufficient to take you through the content if you pick a good set of them to complement your main character's class and role. I would even advise this, given that you have not seen all the companion stories yet. A fully hand created party is much less interactive and its actually a pretty short/small game after the first time through it.
  10. Noble exists IMHO to allow a character to specialize heavily into implements. And its useless for anything else.
  11. the worst weapon type would be -- fast. Faster weapons do less total damage because each hit loses a big chunk to DR. Say a mob has 5 dr and you have a dagger that hits 3 times for 10 damage each... total damage done is 15, total damage lost to DR is 15. A 2h axe that hits twice for 15 each does 20 and loses 10. You see this a lot at the extreme ends of fast vs slow. -only do one damage type that is not crush damage (crush is not resisted as much, possibly to aid monk class?) I think pierce is one of the most resisted, possibly to reduce the effectiveness of guns/archers. -uncommon. That is, finding a top notch unique version is difficult or impossible. The opposite of this would be like a greatsword -- every other major fight drops a greatsword. So daggers and rapiers come to mind as "bad" weapons (relatively) while pollaxe comes in as a top weapon. so the ideal weapon would be slow, do multiple types of damage (best of), and commonly found.
  12. you can't spam spells without constantly resting until you reach level 9. At 9, you can cast level 1 spells per encounter -- with the right setups you can cast 5 or 6 level 1 spells per encounter. That is where slicken spam begins to be an ugly tactic that can beat almost everything in the game, and your priest can armor buff you free, etc. Low level per-rest caster are garbage. When you only have like 4 spells total per rest, at the beginning, it just stinks. By the time you have level 4 spells, it starts to become fun to play these classes. Druid works well there because it can per-encounter shapeshift and fight at low levels, swapping to spells later. Priest is OK because his job is to help in tough fights, healing and buffing. Wizard though... you can't do jack until about third level spells, and even then you have ot rest too much. Honestly a well made cipher (not the mother, bad stats) is better for a spell spam build. Level 9 can be reached in defiance bay if you play a lot of side quests but its a long way to go waiting on a caster, esp wizard, to become viable.
  13. Well, there are two things going on here. First, you are imposing your concept of a monk onto this game universe a bit. Here, a monk is a guy that turns incoming damge into outgoing damage and who can, if he so desires, fight without weapons. He might also wear full plate mail and haul a 2h axe around. second.. Armor ... you may need to use something heavier at low levels. Before the end of act 1, actually not to long after entering defiance bay, you should be able to score a set of exceptional leather armor, which is good enough to take a monk all the way to the end of the game. Before you find that, you may have to use a breastplate or such. If you do not want to use heavy armor early on, dual wield hatchets until you get to DB and find a suitable light armor. He could even fight with fist and shield, or hatchet and shield, for a bit. A heavy shield is not very martial-arts but a buckler type (goes around your wrist and is the size of a dinner plate or so) would flow just fine and make sense in a world where blocking a sword with your arm is unwise. There is this hat in the first zone that helps tank... Once a monk has high DR (and modest deflection) you have a high dps tank. They are extremely good but finding the right set of gear for one is more challenging than for other classes like fighters. Finding the right deflection value is also useful, just enough to not get destroyed and not so much that you don't get any wounds.
  14. In D&D-based games my plan is to charge in and roll 20s... but in PoE that sucks ( Ironically iroll20s is the unlock for cheat console commands
  15. I can only think of 2 or 3 fights where you don't get all the enemy at once. Rad's throne room, if you attack them without talking, leaves one paladin and one mage behind sometimes. They aggro, but they can't find you and wander around up top the throne. The really stupidly big kobold /drake fight. Not too many others... there was one other big fight of weak guys but I cant remember it now, one peon got confused, no big deal. But so what? The difficulty of these fights with one more guy is not significantly changed. Of those, the wizard is the only game-changer, he might have gotten a spell off with serious consequences (but the dumb AI wizards have a habit of doing low quality spells most of the time). The rest of them ... one more kobold spear idiot is not going to change the fight difficulty one little bit. For the most part, when an enemy gets lost or confused and does not tag along, the effect is minimal.
  16. I must be doing it wrong-- the few times I whacked NPCs the entire floor, and sometimes the entire building, became hostile, even if no one "saw" me do it they all seem to "know". I only did it a few times though, it was not worth it. 1k copper is just not much after the very low levels. You probably can earn the better part of 100 - 150k without breaking a sweat. And you might use 1/2 of that, unless you want to buy every single vendor item in the game --- most of your expense is just building costs.
  17. You can trade them around and do all the side quests with one party, even if you have 5 inn-rolled characters and one swap-spot. That said... IMHO only ... aloth: boring. Side quest is 99% talking to him after the right triggers. Eder: Good quest. One of the "deepest" and most interactive. Duracne: Meh. Mostly talking spread out so thin that by the time you talk again you forgot what he said last time. Kana: Pretty good quest, fairly short. Sagani: Dumb quest, long and drawn out and boring and a somewhat insane backstory (no one sane would really DO this) Hiravias: Good quest. Makes sense, reasonable depth and effort etc. Mother: Meh. Its not interactive at all, it just happens when it does. Pallegina: Extremely short and lacks depth.
  18. The dissapointer just has a negative accuracy component which makes it miss a lot, and its very rough on POTD enemy. It does plenty of smackdown if you can land a hit with it.
  19. By endgame you can easily have 23 or so might and int both on a non-wood elf with +2 or +3 items (belts and necks mostly) and racial bonuses etc. Int is slightly better than might: bigger aoes hit more stuffs, and longer lasting debuffs are longer lasting. Might just gives a trivial amount more damage so when building favor int over might slightly, for example use a race that has +1 int. Besides, there is a way to get at least 1 might from doing something in act 1... I highly recommend marksman, which increases your accuracy at range. This seems to help land spells. I highly recommend anything you can get to buff accuracy, so a wood elf is a viable race for the ranged bonus, at the cost of not having INT or MIGHT race bonuses. /shrug you gotta choose, stats or accuracy.... both are valid. I highly recommend a couple of the "utility" talents that increase damage for one element significantly. Accuract with your current weapon *seems* to affect spell hits. So buy an exceptional weapon asap and possibly grab the weapon family for it. A bow or wand or something is fine, if you are not going for a melee build. Spells... well learn them all and experiment. slicken is awesome. Having a lot of bonus spells at rank 1 is very strong -- by level 9 you could easily have 6 or 7 level 1 spell uses PER ENCOUNTER allowing a cheezy slicken-spam deathmage -- just alternate slicken and your big booms. There is this ring in a cave that gives bonus spells.... rappel off the cliffs when doing the hunter's search, the first one...
  20. No spoilers but a lot of places seemingly unimportant NPCS are actually tied to a quest. I can think of at least 3 inns where the top floor had a quest that came about later. I can think of a couple of houses where the NPC had a quest later. Also the junk in *most* of these areas is trivial amounts of money. If it is not "enchanted" (including plain "fine" quality items) it is not worth the fuss. Play how you like, and enjoy it, but your character is like a moron thug who robs the gas station to get $50. The money from all the houses in many areas would not even get you a night in a rested-bonus room at the inn... There is only so much gear / money you can use, on top of that. Ive beat the game a bunch of times and always had like 20K or more copper with nothing left to buy.
  21. Well, look at the game time-frame. The entire game is played in about 1 month total game time, roughly. In real life, if you killed every living being in the woods, it would still be desolate a month later. It would still be pretty empty even years later -- it takes a while to recover from decimation. Wildlife exists. If you don;t kill the green deer, they stay there and run around. All your ideas make sense if the game-time were years instead of one month. It would take a family the whole game-time-frame to 1) hear that there was a home available in guilded vale 2) hear that the area was under new leadership and safe again 3) pack up and settle their affairs and wait on a good time of year (not winter, wait on safe roads... etc) 4) actually travel So your settlers are probably on stage 3 of that chain of events about the time you end the game...
  22. BG/IWD NWN all had cheezy ways to play if the player wanted to use them. Some were exploits, some were just abuse of mechanics. They all had pulling, by the way, if you knew how to do it. Not all pulls --- boss fights were linked, but you could certainly split up big fights. The door swings both ways. If they are going to use the cheezy dialog "teleport the entire party to the middle of the room" mechanic, then pulling must also be allowed.
  23. I would be satisified with it lasting for the entire combat without any changes. I would even take a talent to add +2 shifts / combat as an alternative but druids don't get a lot of talents to spare... that would be rough. I would take having it extend say 2, maybe 3 second per level. Other buffs I would not turn down, but one of those would be my choice to improve the class. 15 seconds just is nothing at all...
  24. There's only one criterion being really important at level 8 and that's tied to the main quest. It's not only that (though the encounter you are referring to isn't really important). The level itself is pretty brutal compared to the previous ones (well, depending on your difficulty level anyway), plus that's where your mechanics gets crappy at lower character levels unless you are putting some special effort into it. You might want to finish most of the stuff in Defiance Bay before going any deeper than level 7. On the other hand, if you intend to turn certain knights hostile while working for a certain dastardly bunch, be sure to finish the "Blade of Od Nua" first. You have to push through to level 12 for that. Without saying too much, you can do all the stuff for the disreputable faction without making the others hostile. You would have to work at it (deliberate hateful attitude) to make them hostile --- I have ended up with hero to one and ally to the other.
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