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try2handing

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Posts posted by try2handing

  1. I bought the galleon when I got a strong impression that my party started to get strong no matter where I went. You know, there's usually a point in the game when you feel really confident in the overall power of your party, enough so that you wouldn't need to worry about walking 100 feet from a safe area.

     

    I played on Veteran but without level scaling, so the game started to feel really easy at some point quite early on for me.

     

    From a certain level enemies will start dropping exceptional gear. If your party are strong enough to fight these guys comfortably then just do one or two quests of that level and you'll get your money back in no time.

  2. I mean, if someone has only 50 hp left, they're already dead. Thus, the spell is useless.

    Perhaps, provided he can't quaff another potion of superior healing or pop a Spell Trigger with Mislead + Immunity Divination + Spell Deflection (or something along those lines) before you can actually finish him off. Next thing you know, it takes you another 3 minutes, 2 dead party members, 12 potions of extra healing, to finally get the guy's hp to 0.

  3.  

    The problem with most Wizard vs Wizard duels was that at some point it turned to "who casts Time Stop first?". And the answer was always "me" because Robe of Vecna =)

     

    Nope. I never, ever use or used Time Stop. There's just no need. Most 9th level spells are pretty useless, I would say. In fact, I have never even cast most of them. The ones I use are Spell Trap, Spellstrike and... that's it.

     

    Chain Contingency is good for creating fun combos. Black Blade of Disaster / Shapechange + backstab or Mind Flayer form's brain eating is good for the lol's, once in a while. And the occasional Gate or Wish for the added risk factor. I mean, the game is as fun as you choose to make it.

  4. The problem with most Wizard vs Wizard duels was that at some point it turned to "who casts Time Stop first?". And the answer was always "me" because Robe of Vecna =)

     

    That has never been my problem because, 1) I stopped playing vanilla game after 1st playthrough, and 2) I adjust my spell usage so that it never boils down to who casts Time Stop first, so that there are OTHER things going on aside from Time Stop, so that I get FUN out of it.

     

    If everything a player does is doing everything just to cast Time Stop first, and he gets fun out of that, hey good for him. If he doesn't get any fun out of that, he's playing the game wrong, and it's a shame that he wouldn't bother to try and find ways to make things fun and exciting, since the game actually allows him to do that.

     

    If it's your 1st playthrough, you might play simply to win. From the 2nd playthrough onward, you play the game mostly to have fun.

  5. I didn't say anything about "fighting" druids. I said druids are BETTER at killing wizards than wizards are, so I rarely use wizards and I always have at least one druids. Did you play the game modded? (SCS or Spell Revisions perhaps?) Because I've never seen Insect Plague be reflected.  Also, when did I mention items? You might to actually try and debate with claims I actually made, rather make ones up wholesale.

     

    Insect Plague type spells should not be subject to reflection. In terms of mechanics, they are like fireball - an aoe that won't center on a single target even if you actually click on it.

     

    You fight wizards with wizards if you want a badass duel with counters after counters, with you and the enemy taking turn countering each other round after round. For me this is a source of great joy in BG2 combat. The fun is not in "to kill enemies", but in the HOW. There was one time I did a 2v2 duel with Edwin and Aerie against 2 liches. Now THAT was some good fun. Or, I could've just backstabbed them both the moment they spawned, instantly killing them. But that would be lame as hell. Shame most players these days don't bother with the whole "style" thing.

    • Like 2
  6. It's just one of the elements thrown in to keep the sea traveling bit from getting too dull. It wasn't meant to be any deep moral dilemma. As such, there isn't much point in contemplating about it. It's little more than killing for money, a mercenary kind of job. From the role-playing PoV, you take the job if your character is the type that doesn't really care who lives or who dies as long as you make some profit. You don't do it if you're not that type. From the gameplay PoV, OF COURSE you do it cause why the hell not.

  7.  

    Its actually not difficult at all. Its not uncommon for me to avoid taking a wizard altogether. Why? DRUIDS. I have never seen a wizard able to defend against Insect Plague. No save, splits to multiple enemies, no protections block it, shuts down spellcasting altogether. MUCH easier than any wizard duel. Alternatively, an Inquisiter Paladin, or Wizard Slayer fighter, or Bard (That high level dispel magic). Hilariously wizards/sorcerors are only like, the 5th best class to beat another wizard.

    This is why BG2 needs to be played with Spell Revisions and Item Revisions. Some stuff are outright ridiculous in the vanilla game. Insect Plague, Kachiko's Wakizashi, Cloak of Mirroring, Project Image, PW Blind, Horrid Wilting, Carsomyr,... oof.

  8. You could try switching between Full Screen/Windowed/Borderless Windowed first then try again with Print Screen.

     

    FRAPS is easy to get and to use.

     

    If you launch the game using GOG Client, F12 is the shortcut to take screenshot by default. Screenshots are stored in C:\Users\[Your User Name]\Documents\GOGGalaxy\Screenshots\.

     

    Or if you manage to activate NVIDA's ShadowPlay, the shortcut to capture screenshot is Alt+F1 by default.

  9. The fighter can be decently fun when he's not a full tank. When I first got Serafen and gave him a Barbarian build relying on crit damage and damage increase at low health, it was fun. Let him get to low health then threw Barring Death's Door on him...mmmm. It was one of the few times that I actually got a strong sense of "having a legit AND fun build". But that was before I started to out-level everyone and things got somewhat less exciting.

  10. It's not so much "disable it" but rather "avoid the worst of it".

     

    If your ship has faster movement rate, you can simply turn around and keep running away until you get out of ship combat (once the distance hits 600, IIRC).

     

    Or, do the opposite. Head straight toward the enemy ship by spamming option #1 every turn. When the other ship is within your range you can board them, and have yourself some good oldschool party-based brawl. Unless the enemy crew has overwhelming power, you should at least have a more pleasant time fighting them this way. Just make sure to recruit party members, equip them with decent equipment and level them properly.

     

    Or, you don't even have to manually rush at the enemy ship. Just select option #2 "Close to Board" when the ship combat starts. It does the charging part automatically for you. Your ship and crew will suffer damage - more than if you do this manually. Just don't do this too often in a short time, cause the ship and crew need time to recover.

     

    All in all, it's not THAT bad, though. Take it slow, recruit crew members, upgrade your ship, the ship combat will eventually get pretty fun.

  11.  

    Ascension is great except for the final fight, which is so ridiculous that I uninstalled the whole mod as soon as I saw what it contained. There are characters who, once defeated, should remain so, otherwise they lose all dignity and meaning.

    Do tell...sounds juicy *rubs hands*

     

    As Manveru said. I'd rather not give away too much spoiler. To be fair, by the time you get to the end of the expansion, your party are all godlike (without any cheese). But I'd understand if you dislike the idea itself, regardless of the difficulty issue. Would've been nice if the mod had given you the option to not install the final fight, because aside from that, it does add some nice things here and there, and fixes a few other things too. Just make sure you read through the Readme if you consider installing it.

  12.  

     

    I just started BG2 again based on this thread. The voice acting is stellar. It's actually pretty good in Deadfire (minus the Gods) but BG2 takes it to another level. I'm actually glad not everything is voiced. I think Deadfire focused wayyy too much on it.

     

    However the graphics and animations are rough coming from Deadfire which is admittedly a very pretty game.

    The old game or the Enhanced Edition? The EE retains too many problems from original game for my taste but the new companions and their quests are still nice. The combat in the new content takes after the AI mods for the vanilla game, so it's much more enjoyable than vanilla combat.

    You should play with some of the more essential mods. They greatly improve the experience IMO.

    EE. Which mods are essential?

     

    - BG2 fixpack

    - Tweak pack (now The Tweaks Anthology)

    - Unfinished Business

    - Spell Revisions

    - Item Revisions

    - Ascension

    - Strategems

     

    These are a few that I like to have personally.  The Fixpack fixes a wide range of bugs remaining in the official release of the game. I believe the EE already incorporated a number of its own bug fixes, but it probably didn't cover everything the Fixpack does.

     

    The Tweaks Anthology adds some QoL features and numerous other things that seek to improve the overall experience.

     

    Unfinished Business restores a number of contents that were cut from final release. Most of them are just some extra cool things here and there.

     

    Ascension was made by David Gaider, a designer of the game. His mod expands the story a little bit, adding more options to dialog. It basically tries to rectify the fact that too many things were cut from the final release of the expansion. As he put it, the mod tries to make the expansion "a little more fulfilling". It totally changes the final fight though, making it a lot harder, and some people don't like that, from what I've heard.

     

    Spell Revisions and Item Revisions seek to improve the overall balance of the game by tweaking spells and items. IMO they do an amazing job at that. They nerf or completely change things that were blatantly overpowered and easy to abuse, and buff things that were underpowered. The idea is that every item with a unique name should have something actually unique about it, not just having 1 or 2 point more in damage and to hit compared to a normal item. The net result is that combat has more depth and items/spells are more fun to use.

     

    Strategems is an AI mod that seeks to improve pretty much every single enemy you encounter in the game. At the very least, everyone will be smarter and their combat tactics make a lot more sense. They can anticipate a number of moves players might pull and react accordingly in a reasonably smart manner. Combat in general will be harder and in some instances a whole lot harder. The main idea is to keep combat challenging but fair though, rather than use some ridiculous tactics just to kill you. Spell Revisions and Item Revisions already adjust the AI to account for the changes in spells and items though, so if you're not keen on simply having harder combat, you can skip this one.

    • Like 1
  13. I just started BG2 again based on this thread. The voice acting is stellar. It's actually pretty good in Deadfire (minus the Gods) but BG2 takes it to another level. I'm actually glad not everything is voiced. I think Deadfire focused wayyy too much on it.

     

    However the graphics and animations are rough coming from Deadfire which is admittedly a very pretty game.

    The old game or the Enhanced Edition? The EE retains too many problems from original game for my taste but the new companions and their quests are still nice. The combat in the new content takes after the AI mods for the vanilla game, so it's much more enjoyable than vanilla combat.

    You should play with some of the more essential mods. They greatly improve the experience IMO.

  14. You know what else?

     

    11. TOO MANY ABANDONED PETS. It pained my heart to see so many cute little pets just standing there, in a dark corner of a dungeon, in a burnt down house, or under the rain, with no one to care for them, waiting for you to pick them up. I fitted my entire crew on a dhow but ended up having to buy an extra galleon to house just the pets. What an outrage!

    • Like 11
  15. All I know is that effects with the same name don't stack - like Strong or Smart - even though each effect's duration runs separately (right?).

     

    I also remember there was an instance where I thought two Strength buffs would stack on Serafen, but it turned out they didn't. Like one effect from food and another from some drug - I might recall this incorrectly.

     

    But anyway, info sources on this game are still pretty bare right now. Just the other day I wanted to look up a list of poisons and what they do, and was thoroughly disappointed. A specific summary list like what you're looking for might take a while to show up, if at all. You might as well experiment and write up such a list yourself.

  16. That reason is the story in Bg2 is interesting, the plot is immersive, the narrative is great and the writing is well done. Being able to tap into Forgotten realms lore was also a huge boon. Deadfire absolutely cannot lay claim to being anywhere near as well written. Deadfires narrative is to girly and instead of concentrating on letting the player character build power and influence the world around him/ her it concentrates on a  bizare and boring quest line that seems nothing more then a distraction from the more fun things to do in the game like take on bounties or kill dragons and go treasure hunting.

     

    To summarize BG2 had an awesome Dungeon Master and Deadfire has a Terrible Dungeon master

    Something else really nice about BG2 is that the game takes you to a bunch of extraordinary locations - planar prison, Spellhold asylum, sahuagin city, the Underdark, the lower planes, Suldanessellar, and Hell. You also encounter equally bizarre and intriguing monsters as you progress. The contexts of your getting to all these places and why are well written too, so to me the whole ride feels quite smooth and I never have to feel like I'm forced to go somewhere remote without any good reason. Basically the game does a really good job of letting you explore many major locations within its scope, with a smooth flow throughout.

     

    I'm trying to recall my playthrough with Deadfire and it seems most of the time it's kith, xaurip, spirit, walking dead, then back to kith. There's a bunch of vampires (ok, fampyrs) at two or three locations, I believe? Then there's the occasional animated armors. As for locales, mostly you just travel back and forth among a few islands. I might have missed a few things that are more interesting, though. Only played through it once. I don't deny that some places look very beautiful though.

    • Like 2
  17. What you should have done is not pick the spells already in the grimoire. Having the grimoire equipped means you will always have access to the spells in it. So if you learn two other spells, you will have access to four spells in total: the two you learn and the two in the grimoire.

     

    Since lower levels have a lot of spells, the best thing to do is try to decide which ones you think are the most important, and learn them. This saves you the trouble of having to switch to the right grimoire to cast those spells. Then, equip a few grimoires in quick slots to have access to other spells that you think are also important.

     

    Higher levels have only a few spells, so if you play like I did, equipping Aloth with 5 grimoires in total, you will have access to all spells in any level. From that point on, you will find that there isn't much point in picking one or two spells to learn, since you know that you already always have access to all spells anyway. Again, learning the spells yourself saves you the trouble of having to switch to the right grimoire, but it's not such a big deal.

  18. This system allows you to always go all out in every encounter, without having to worry about either limiting yourself or wasting resources. One less thing to worry about, you know. And because you can always go all out (combined with resting being easier), your "all out" can't be too strong, so you are limited to two casts per level.

     

    As for why wizard alone has this grimoire thing that gives them extra flexibility over other caster classes, I have no clue. It might be purely a concept element and need to be there, and was never taken into consideration as a balance element to begin with.

    • Like 2
  19. D: OS 2 complexity is a myth. Even as half wit u gonna run into one of 20 builds/synergies that entirely break the game and make everything trivial af. Even poe2 is hardcore compared to that. I agree tho that BG 2 writing was far from "immature", especially compared to poe 2, bg 2 was dark af, even into cinematic saying that you were kidnapped "there was no malice or hatred, no mention of an old score, only quick capture and promise of grim deeds to come" and then a sequence of horror like screens and tortured screams... now pair that with poe 2 "yo ho and a bottle of rum, I'ooo chasing god, yo ho".

    This has been touched on in this topic, more or less. How complex the game can be has nothing to do with whether there exists something broken in the game or not. The question is are you willing to play the game on a more advanced level, to spend time coming up with elaborate plans and setting things up. The Original Sin games are games that actually allow you to do such a thing. If you WISH to, you CAN set up complicated (even unnecessarily so) plans or "traps", and they will help you beat combat just fine, without using anything that "entirely break the game". Thing is, it's far easier to just resort to overpowered tools as soon as you discover them, and forget about being sophisticated altogether.

     

    The "combat complexity" of the Original Sin games lies in the fact that environment and terrain play a big role in combat, as well as the dynamic and multi-leveled interaction between spells and abilities. Very few other games offer this kind of experience. In contrast, the most elaborate things you can do in PoE2 are probably something along the lines of having your assassin dash to a mage, smoke bomb, backstab, then dash back out. I'm willing to take this back if you can give me some solid examples of "complex" combat moves you can pull off in PoE.

  20. Strangely, one of the best villains since Irenicus is Loghain from DAO, and you only ever encounter him face-to-face in the boss battle against him. But, he is built up enough as you encounter his schemes and read his lore, that he comes across and dangerous and competent. Plus, unlike Irenicus or Thaos, he actually had good and memorable lieutenants, like Rendon "Roose Bolton ripoff" Howe.

    Good point. SPOILERS FOR DA:O AHEAD: (eh better be safe than sorry)

     

    I loved how the fight with Loghain was a high-stakes duel with an entire court room as your audience. Played a sword-and-board fighter in my first playthrough and the duel with Loghain felt so good. It's really best fought with a sword-and-board build, IMO - more timing and countering involved.  Never liked Loghain myself, but he's really well written, highly charismatic, with an intimidating presence and solid voice-acting.

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