Pax_Empyrean

After full reinstall, it's still not working. Might have something to do with playing on Hard; the 'random' items I'm getting are consistent before and after the reinstall, and with new saved games. I have installed IE Mod as a workaround; save scumming to get the items I want is less of a hassle than banging my head on the wall trying to get around this.

I hate hate hate Vancian spellcasting on rest. Doing it on a per-encounter basis with a lower total number of spells is fine. There's just no way to balance per-rest Vancian spellcasters in a boss fight without making them trash in other encounters, and power for inconvenience (which is how Vancian spellcasting interacts with resting) is just awful design and always has been. Nostalgia shouldn't be sufficient justification for keeping mechanics like this.

I tried starting a new game. Playing on Hard. Still not working. Reinstalling...

Okay, so I'm playing 3.03 and WM 1+2, I've saved/loaded my game before opening a chest, and none of the random chests are matching up with anything on the list on the wiki. I've tried multiple days, double checked that I'm opening the right chests, I'm going by the day of the month rather than the game day. I've checked to see if the loot items are just offset some number of days, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In an earlier playthrough it worked fine, but now I've got two games in a row where the random loot chests don't even remotely match up with what the tables say they should be giving me. Like... ever. Anyone else having problems with this, or suggestions on how to fix it?

Two Rogues is definitely overkill, in my opinion. A Rogue isn't just extra DPS that you can throw into the enemy front line and expect to survive it. The AI is better than it used to be, so even if an enemy is already engaged, when you bring your Rogue around behind for flank attacks they'll just turn around and paste you. Throwing enough defensive buffs on the Rogue, and disables on the enemy, lets you get away with this but then you've got two or more characters dedicated to making one character work, and missing a disable means the enemy will eat your Rogue. If you give your Rogue a bow, it will be outdamaged by a Ranger even before the pet gets factored in once the double shots start coming in, and the Ranger gets a pet, which is ridiculously useful. I don't mind starting off with an arbalest sneak attack, but I switch out for melee after that. So what you need to do is focus on their backline. This is where Stealth comes in handy; if the enemy melee is already engaged when your stealth drops, you don't have to worry about getting mauled. Just keep your Rogue away from their front line and focus on eating spellcasters and archers. If you need to help out against tough melee opponents, either use a bunch of disables (Ciphers are great for that, by the way) or use Tall Grass from behind your own frontliners. One of the reasons that two Rogues is overkill is because the targets that you want to engage with a Rogue, you can murder in seconds with just one of them, and there are a lot of targets you don't want your Rogue getting anywhere near. They also tend to be pretty micro intensive and reliant upon disables, so juggling two of them is a hassle. Also, I don't think that Rogues and Chanters synergize well at all. Chanters need to build up a bit to be effective, while Rogues are glass cannons. By the time your Chanter is doing much worthwhile, either your Rogues are dead or the fight is over.

I stand by my decision to call it a "(sort of) exception" since that's exactly what it is. They asked if the bonuses stack. These kinds of bonuses are an odd case which is handled differently from the offensive bonuses native to other weapon types. As such, it's worth pointing out. Responding to calling it a "(sort of) exception" by saying that it's not really an exception seems pointless. That's what the "sort of" part means. As in, it's kind of like that in some ways, but not completely so.

The one (sort of) exception to this is hatchets. They each give a +5 bonus to deflection, so using a pair of them will boost your deflection by +10.

I have a haiku for you: Everywhere I go I hear this laughing jackass Stab him in the face I'm being followed. Every inn, every tavern, every bar I go into, there is this same guy in the background, laughing the most obnoxious laugh in the world. My party includes a wolf named Kitty, whom I love very much, and I would find it more satisfying than anything else in this game to feed this person to them. Not since the dog in Duck Hunt have I wanted to kill a video game character this badly. So obnoxious.

Yeah, been doing that too. Another somewhat unconventional use for it is to target the wolf with Mind Wave so as to knock down all the enemies in front of it. In a typical situation if you get three enemies moving forward to engage the wolf, you likely won't be able to knock any of them down if you target them with the Cipher unless you flank (in which case you'd get two of them). If you just hit the wolf, you can knock down everybody, and Mind Wave is super cheap and fast to cast. Even after the enemy has engaged, you can usually prone three enemies engaging the wolf in melee just by targeting the wolf, and the raw damage inflicted is likely less than you'd take from non-disabled enemies unless they're really trash. You can also use the wolf to precisely target Mind Waves to knock over a somewhat spread out back row on your way in to eating their squishies. Honestly, it's spammy enough that you can knock over their front line with it and then knock over their back row as the pet goes in if you want, but usually that isn't necessary, and I don't like letting their front line past my wolf if I can help it.

So, the bonus spell talents are really underwhelming. I can't see myself ever taking them. If they were spell mastery instead, I could see myself getting use out of them. If that seems too powerful, have them reduce the number of memorized spells by one, so you'd have the same number of spells available if you wanted to dump them all in a single encounter. That way they'd just help you in the encounters where you weren't planning on dumping the entire payload, but wouldn't help at all during the really hard fights. I'd still probably take them if they were like that, but I really don't like Vancian spellcasting mechanics.

Thundercats HOOOOO!!!

Depends on what talents you take and what weapon you use. Vicious Aim works better with Dex. Swift Aim works better with Might. Borresaine works better with Dex (more attacks = more stuns). The Rain of Godagh Field or Cloudpiercer are better with Might.

First play through, playing on Hard. Party is full custom: a Shieldbearer Paladin main character, two Ciphers, a Ranger with a wolf companion, a Priest, and a Wizard. My play style involves very little resting; I hate Vancian spellcasting. The utility of my animal companion in this play style is bonkers. The single target damage is pretty good, but what I like best is all the stuff that having an animal companion enables. For example, animal companions have typical endurance but infinite health, so all those weenie encounters that would gradually wear you down cost you nothing if you can get your animal companion to tank everything. You can set up fights in chokepoints with the animal on point, and just shoot/CC with the rest of your party. There are a lot of fights like this. Pulling enemies with the animal companion doesn't risk a character. The Wolf gets disengagement bonuses; not sure how big, but they seem to be pretty substantial. Combined with the next trick it can eat the initial volley and shrug it off. The animal companion enables Shieldbearer pre-buffing without costing you health. If you've taken the Shieldbearer-specific talents that give bonuses to Flames of Devotion and Lay on Hands, you can drop these on your animal companion and start the fight with +22 deflection on the animal companion, a short lived regen effect, and +10 deflection for the rest of your party. Since these are per-encounter powers, they come back right away since you haven't initiated combat yet. If you did this by hitting an actual character, it would cost you health every time you did it. The animal companion eats friendly fire like it doesn't matter. More infinite Health shenanigans, basically. I park my animal companion (with Resilient Companion) in a doorway, blast a squishy target with a shotgun Cipher, and throw Pain Block on it. Now it's tough enough that I can cast my Antipathetic Fields right through the animal companion, which ignores almost all of the damage because their DR is so high and they're regenerating anyway, but everything lined up to get through the door gets shredded. I could do this with a non-animal companion, but the health damage thing would bother me tremendously. Out in the open, where you can't engineer chokepoint tanking, the enemy loves to chase the animal companion around while the rest of your party shoots at them, so whatever the tactical environment looks like you can do something useful with the animal companion. The animal companion comes with its very own Ranger! That's a nice bonus. Last, and least, the animal companion can eat traps and it's okay. I always disarm them anyway, but if it came down to it, the infinite health thing means not caring about face-tanking random crossbow bolts or whatever.

The bigger your damage bonuses, the more Dex helps you. Rogues benefit more from Dex because they've got sneak attack damage bonuses like crazy. Raising 200% damage to 230% damage isn't that useful. Ciphers benefit from Dex because they're looking at +40% damage to start with once they take Biting Whip, and a lot of their useful CC stuff doesn't do damage at all. I wouldn't dump Might, but raising your damage bonus from 140% to 170% probably isn't as useful as a nearly 30% increase in attack speed (and the Dex helps you cast your crowd control faster, while Might doesn't do anything to help with that). Both are definitely secondary stats to Intellect. Might helps more when your damage is relatively low compared to your target's DR.

Going to toss in my $0.02 here, but add a disclaimer that I'm only on my first playthrough, playing on Hard. Breezing through it so far with a Paladin, two Ciphers, a Ranger, a Wizard, and a Priest. One option you might consider is to give your Cipher a reach weapon: Tall Grass or maybe Llawran's Stick, and both are available early. Ciphers have early and easy access to Paralyze and Stuck effects, thanks to Mental Binding. While the optimal damaging approach isn't going to be using a reach weapon, the ready availability of Stuck targets means you can beat on them without getting into their range. In a chokepoint, you can engage behind another melee character. If you don't have someone else using a pike already, you might get more DPS out of your party as a whole by having your Cipher do that, at least in situations where you can fight in a chokepoint (which is a really good idea, by the way).