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Asanarama

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Posts posted by Asanarama

  1. If you want to truly dedicate to being a buff bot, not debuff or damage, you don't need accuracy. You could give up on being able to hit opponents with anything, dump perception and also have low DEX if you want, use a large shield with shield style to compensate for the otherwise-low reflex, not worry about the large shield reducing your accuracy, and put points into might and con instead for big passive heals and being a pinch-point meat shield, in addition to the usual high intellect for wide-area songs and longer linger. Some opponents are dumb enough to surround this guy and keep beating away at him even though he can't directly harm them. Or maybe they're kinda smart and don't like the fact that he's buffing everyone.

    Usually better to do what @Boeroer wrote, but if you need a meat shield, it works, at least so far;  I haven't gone too far into the game with this build yet. I suspect that some opponents will be quite happy to disengage and go after other targets.

    Writing about this chanter build made me think of "Disaster Area":

    Quote

    A plutonium rock band...generally regarded as not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but also as being the loudest noise of any kind at all. ... Regular concert goers judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves played their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet. Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.

    https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Disaster_Area

  2. Companions and hirelings outside the party each get (about?*) 25% less xp than each character in the party. (I'll just use "companions" after this, but it always refers to both.) Also, the smaller your party, the more xp you get. If you are solo when you gain xp, your main character gets 50% more than it would with a full party. If you remove everyone from your party before gaining xp (a total no-brainer for some quests), companions each get 12.5% more xp than they would if five of them had been in the party, and your main gets the 50% more. This is consistent with the information on the wiki, but it doesn't mention these kinds of results.

    In a party with four companions, each party member gets a 10% bonus compared to a full party, so compared to an empty party, companions get only 2.5% more xp, and your main gets 40% more. In a party with three companions, each member gets a 20% bonus, so compared to an empty party, companions get 7.5% *less* xp, and your main gets 30% more.

    * In my test, which consisted of several quest steps and turn-ins, and location discoveries, my main gained 1455 xp and the others gained 1082, a 25.64% difference, probably due to rounding. Also, the log seems to display total xp given to the party, not including the bonus, but that's something I just noticed a few times, didn't check carefully.

    P.S. Things get weird if you care about exactly four companions and want to lean towards giving them more xp and your main less, to reduce the xp gap. Keeping two in your party with your main for turn-ins results in an average increase, not counting your main, of 13.75% xp instead of the 12.5%. You could rotate members to keep their xp consistent. Very miniscule increase, but mathematically interesting. Same exact numbers for companions if you keep just one in your party with your main instead of two (but your main gets more). 

  3. I've restarted a few times already.

    I ran into one myself: Forest Lurkers doing Stuck vs. Reflex. Kinda like Binding Roots, and guess what? That's another one that, like Slicken, doesn't mention the save in the ability table. It's mentioned only on the ability's individual page. I know I went kinda over-the-top in that post about a database, but having to check each ability's individual page? That's over-the-top too. My arms hurts just from thinking about how much clicking that would involve.

    Oh well. This character doesn't have to change too much to have the amount of reflex that I want. It's a paladin, so it can have pretty low dex+per (to focus on healing, buffing, and being a meat shield) and still have decent reflex, especially with outworn buckler. I'm avoiding item-related spoilers, but it's in the first town, so I I found out about it pretty quickly.

  4. Oh. Disclaimer though: I know of at least one instance in which the table of abilities is missing information. The wizard spells page doesn't mention that Slicken's prone effect is mitigated by Reflex, but Slicken's individual page does. I'm looking into fixing it. Can mostly copy from another spell. If anyone is already signed up though, feel free to beat me to it.

  5. LOLing at my own posts. I'm on a medication that sometimes, well, Boeroer's "K" says it perfectly, makes me think of when someone abruptly ends a conversation with "Okay. Bye."

    In case anyone is interested, I found a work-around for searching the wiki. Although you can't search on the page for the icons for deflection, fortitude, etc., the web addresses of those icons contain the words. Well, at least the one for Reflex does, but they probably all do. For each ability page, I did "view page source" (ctrl-U in Chrome), pasted into Notepad (anything with word wrap works, although an autoformatting html editor would be best), and searched for the word "reflex". It's messy to look at, but it's better than having to go to the page for each ability.

  6. I've searched the wiki. I'm willing to risk a spoiler, mostly because what I learned from the wiki makes it seem like this might be about an overall property of the game system, not something specific to opponents.

    Because I'm asking with regard to a particular build idea, I can ask a less specific question than the issue seems to call for, possibly further avoiding spoilers. This might also make the question seem strange, but I've considered it very carefully:

    Is anyone aware of anything that reflex ever defends against other than prone, stun, or damage? If so, I'd rather not know what it is, just that such a thing exists.

    It's probably difficult to be reasonably certain that no such thing exists, but if anyone is, please say so.

    Thanks.

  7. It seems that prone is the only status ailment that reflex ever defends against, at least when it comes to stuff that player characters can do.* Given that, I thought it might not be too much of a leap to guess that it's the same with stuff that your opponents can do. It sounds like maybe it is too much of a leap though. On the other hand, the in-game description of Reflex makes it sound like it doesn't defend against any status ailments, only AoE damage. I guess it depends on how loosely you interpret their use of the word "harmful": "...allows characters to dodge out of the way of physically harmful AoE attacks (e.g. explosions, bolts of lightning)."

    *Well, standard stuff that players can do. At this point, I'm avoiding looking through the abilities that you get from certain quests, that sort of thing. I'd rather not know about that kind of thing until I play all the way through. Same with abilities that you find only on items. Standard player character abilities, however, I don't consider to be spoilers.

  8. I’m trying to avoid certain kinds of spoilers. The way I’m going to ask this question might seem weird if I hadn’t mentioned that: Does reflex ever defend against anything other than prone, stun, or damage? Looking only for “yes” or “no”, to avoid spoilers. If there’s a “yes”, then I might follow-up.

    I’m pretty sure that the only things that reflex defends against are some sources of prone and all or almost all non-raw AoE damage. However, I’m asking because I’m considering a low-reflex, high-fortitude, high-will coastal amaua build that, with the help of the party, shouldn’t have trouble with prone, stun, or any incoming damage. So, if reflex ever does defend against stun or non-AoE damage, I don’t need to know. The rest of the party is going to have all defenses at least fairly high, so I’m not worried about them.

    I guess that reflex might come up in dialog or scripted stuff, but unless it’s something extreme, I’d rather not know.

    Thanks.

  9. “Part of the fun of RPGs - at least for me - is finding out stuff by myself and don't put too much energy into theorycrafting….”

    Which stuff? To play without knowing the stuff that I don’t want to know, then you have to use a lower difficulty setting, rely more on reloading, and/or build your party based on the kind of stuff that I want to be able to look up efficiently. To me, knowing things like class abilities ahead of time doesn’t feel at all like a spoiler; it’s just stuff you have to know to be able to build reasonably effective characters and parties, especially if you don’t know the stuff that I don’t want to know.

    “With the full-text search you can do a lot of rel. quick research though.”

    It seems that the wiki at least sometimes uses, for example, the symbol for deflection while omitting the word “deflection”. It’s difficult to know how much of a problem this use of symbols is because—off the top of my head, I’ll say that it’s more like an unknown unknown than a known unknown. As such, it’s the kind of problem that even “the old geezers” might not be reasonably fully aware of. They might know the complete answer to a question, but they might not have a good sense of whether a search of the wiki would provide reasonably complete results.

    ‘…which game besides maybe highly competitive ones with a league system etc. do have such data sources for "research"?’

    None that I’m aware of, but they should. Games have gotten too complex for this sort of thing to continue to be absent. Being able to quickly look up the kind of stuff I’ve specified would be extremely helpful, and my best guess is that while creating a game, designers and/or developers create and maintain exactly what I’m looking for, so it’s especially frustrating to not have it. How else do they keep track of all that information for themselves?

    Maybe they even inject database information into their code as a sort of pre-compile step. I’ve done something similar, but a cheesy version. I created a query that created a line of code for each record in a table, each line including, as part of a string, information from the corresponding record. Then I pasted that into my project. It was sort of a work-around, but a great solution for something I knew I’d be doing only once per year. Heck, for a non-MMO, the database could simply be part of the game, used in real time as we play. MMO’s most likely have to be more performance-efficient.

  10. Putting aside everything else, what do you (anyone reading this) recommend regarding the following; it’s similar to what I posted above, but I’ve added to it:

    Normal mode is too easy for me, but it seems that in hard mode, *if*:

    • You don’t already know what kind of attacks each opponent does and would much rather not look up such information.
    • You don’t want to rely too heavily on reloading saved games. (After the first couple hours or so, getting to know the UI.)
    • You don’t want to rely on specific pieces of equipment. (Specific as in stuff that has its own special name, like the Tall Grass Pike I read about in a build. I’d also include stuff that depends too much on luck to obtain.)

    *Then* during combat, each character must:

    • Have good Will and Fortitude (and Deflection?) to reduce the overall impact, on the party, of status ailments.
    • Be good at avoiding damage (Deflection and Reflex), able to take damage without dying more quickly than they can be healed (Endurance (and Health to make this approach sustainable)), or maybe some of each.

    Is that accurate overall? Maybe there’s some wiggle room. Maybe each character can have one low save, as long as one or more characters who don’t have the same low save would be able to, well, I don’t know exactly what, so I don’t know how to build for it.

    Or is a different overall approach possible? Is there some way to keep opponents, even the ranged attackers hanging back, almost completely focused on one or more ~tanks? Except perhaps for occasional fights in which you have to pull out the big guns: per-rest abilities.

    Is there an effective approach to this that includes at least some of the campaign characters?

  11. Which builds would work for me, based on what I wrote above? Or is there another way to address what I'm running into? I'd really like to enjoy the game, not do more research, so recommendations would be appreciated.

    To be clear, a proper relational database of abilities, talents, etc., (one that Obsidian most likely created and updated as part of making and updating the game), would enable efficient research. Instead, whether it's looking through sometimes-poor descriptions of abilities on an apparently user-created wiki (Where is the official, complete documentation for this product?) or reading through character builds, I'm finding that I have to do way too much work to be able to enjoy the game. If anyone can help me skip that part, that would be great.

  12. How can I efficiently look up, for example, every passive that increases Will? How about every per-encounter ability that provides Deflection as an AoE? Can't even do this sort of thing using the primitive (even when this game came out) find-on-page on the wiki, because sometimes, it uses the symbol and not the word. Besides, you'd have to check each class's page, each class's ability page, and the non-class-specific talents.

    If that sort of thing isn’t possible, here's the problem I'm trying to solve: Normal mode is too easy for me, but in hard mode, if you don’t already know what kind of attacks each opponent does (I’d rather not play than have to continually look them up), then during combat, each character must:

    1. Have good Will and Fortitude.
    2. Be good at avoiding damage (Deflection and Reflex), able to take damage without dying more quickly than they can be healed (Endurance and Health), or maybe a combination of both.

    Some of this can be addressed via equipment, but I’m not interested in an overall approach that requires specific equipment, at least not yet. Maybe on a subsequent play-through. Basic concepts are fine, like deciding that a character will be using medium shields and the style, and then adjusting their starting attributes in accordance with the corresponding Accuracy penalty and Reflex and Deflection bonuses.

    Without reasonable access (as specified by example in the first paragraph) to the necessary information, I’d need to know what party composition to use and how to build each character, level by level.

    Thanks.

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