Deraldin

Aw, I'm not on the list. I could have sworn I was above 2500. I know I was above 2000 at the very least. It's odd knowing that I have more posts here than I did at BIS.

Is it actually possible to not kill anyone in Deus Ex? I could have sworn there were a few people that had to be killed. Still, this is good news and I'll definitely being trying this out when I finally get my hands on a copy.

Only on PC.

My ranger just hit level 13 after the first quest in Ust Natha so I've switched over to Cleric and managed to grab a few extra levels by sending Minsc into the fighting rings in the taverns. Next stop will be the Beholder city with a certain shield and a slightly insane ranger in order to pick up some more experience. It's going to take some time before I get my ranger abilities back. One tank will have to do until then.

Link?

Web worked almost too well in BG1, especially when combined with the lethality of ranged combat. Not to mention the number of times that those damned invisible web traps in the cloakwood got me.

Who are you calling old? Last I checked you've got a full decade on me.

Someone needs to go back and edit that guy's mask. Once it is seen, it can't be unseen.

Charm spells are absolutely horrible in BG1 because there isn't much that you can use to counter them that I can recall. In vanilla BG1 there is a single Helmet of Charm Protection and with TotSC you get the Greenstone Amulet, but that's it. That only covers two characters, which should be enough for your big fighters, but sometimes you get unlucky and they target someone who isn't immune and the only way around it is dispel magic which tends to remove all of your buffs as well. As a bonus, if they do manage to get someone other than the big fighters, it's almost always the only character that has dispel magic anyway. There is only one pair of Boots of Speed in BG1 and they are found about half way through the game at the Cloakwood mines. Doesn't do much for running away, but it gives you a great distraction character against melee opponents who will never be able to catch him unless hasted, but you can double boost with haste or oils of speed yourself. You can change the voice if you really want to, but it looks like it takes some work editing some of the files. NWN2 forum topic

You just need to give everyone a ranged weapon. Ranged combat in BG1 is godlike. Slow walking speed + low hit points + extra attacks per round = lots of dead enemies. When looking at spells, unless you are attacking really high level enemies, don't even bother with direct damage spells. Disablers like Horror are amazing. Heck, when all else fails, you can always run away. There are very few things that actually run faster than you and once you get the Boots of Speed you can run one character into sight range of the enemies and then kite them around while the rest of your group fills them full of arrows. Finally, wands. Wands of sleep, wands of paralyzation and wands of monster summoning. These are your friends. Sleep for the mooks, paralyzation for the big bads and monster summoning for your meat shields. BG1 is tough, but it's not impossible. Unless you are playing a mage with 3 con on Insane. Then it actually is impossible. That 1 damage flame arrow at the start does two damage and a 3 con mage only has 2 HP.

Just entered the Underdark. Things have been going pretty well. Just 150k experience from getting my last 1/2 attack and then I can dual over to cleric which will probably make the rest of the Underdark a huge pain in the ass for my level 1 cleric. I did manage to pick up the Shield of Balduran so I suppose I can go kill some Beholders to grab some experience once the time rolls around. Spellhold was a huge pain in the butt. Minsc ran through the outside of the asylum smashing all the shadows and wraiths with his trusty mace of disruption and an application of improved haste. One of the wraiths managed to get in a lucky hit and level drained Minsc and I didn't have access to Restoration spells of my own. Instead of jumping back to town and the temple and pressed on. Eventually I ended up getting dumped into gauntlet and within moments all 5 of my characters were below 50% health and I had no healing spells left. The Ring of Regeneration takes far too long to heal 5 people from near dead to full. Later on Minsc ended up getting level drained again by Dace so I was stuck with a level 4 Minsc until I could get back to the town and the temple. A level 4 Minsc when you are fighting Minotaurs, Trolls and lots of Golems is just not much use. I got through the dungeon with a lot of patience and plenty of Improved Haste on my ranger.

I ended up missing all the TotSC stuff when I played a couple weeks ago. Supposedly Durlag's Tower is a huge pain in the ass, but also the best dungeon in the series. I ended up running away when I got my butt handed to me by the battle horrors outside the tower.

Even worse than political threads?

Continuing my game of BG2 with my Ranger, soon to be cleric. I managed to clear out the Umar Hills last night, but I ended up resorting to cheese to kill the dragon. I tried about 5 times to take him out with my group of level 9-11 characters, but my lack of remove fear was really my downfall. If I had been able to protect myself from that I probably would have been able to take him out properly, but not once did Minsc or I make our saves against that spell leaving me with an under-equipped Mazzy, Yoshimo, Jaheira and Kelsey who was 5000xp from learning his second level 5 spell (lower resistance to go with breach). As you can imagine, things did not go well. I managed to get the dragon down to badly injured 3/5 times and once got him to near death with only my main character still running around in hasted fear. In the end I used Yoshimo to lay down a bunch of traps in front of the dragon that did around 100 damage to him as soon as he went hostile. Myself and Minsc were promptly sent running in fear again, but a couple acid arrows from Yoshimo and several Flame Arrows from Kelsey took the dragon down before he managed to cause too much trouble. The worst part though was coming outside, beating the crap out of the Shade Lord and then as soon as the area transitioned to sunlight having a group of people show up to kill me (Thank you Jaheira side quests. ). Having them spawn right in the middle of my group was a complete pain in the ass and in the end I glitched past them as well, although not intentionally. The third time they spawned as soon as the shade lord died, before the area transition. When the transition was made, the group didn't reappear with me so I missed out on some loot and a stupid annoying fight. Currently about to clear out the graveyard and then I'm off to Spellhold!

Recently had a netbook arrive in the house and we've been spending some time getting this thing up and running properly on the wireless network. Overall everything except the wireless is running quite well. I've only spent about 2-3 hours trying to diagnose the issue, but it seems to be working properly, even if it is a little slower than expected right now. For some reason, when we first started it up, it was having a lot of problems connecting to the wireless network. It would tell me that it wasn't connected, yet allow me to still use the network for about 3 minutes before it would go down again. Disconnecting from the network and the reconnecting might give me an extra 3 minutes. I seem to have gotten it working now though. The down speed is about 1/3rd of what the other wireless connections in the house are getting, while the upload is running at full speed. I'm honestly not entirely sure what the issue was or how I got it to go away. I uninstalled the wireless network adapter and had Windows detect and reinstall it automatically. After doing that it seems to have fixed the problem, but the only way to be sure is to keep it running. A nice excuse to get the netbook away from my dad for a little while to play with it myself. It's an HP Mini 110-1030 for those that are interested.

Bio's post-release support is pretty good Cheers MC Apparently not so good if you own MEPC. ? I own MEPC. What support problems do I supposedly have? There has been all of one patch (or have they released the second patch?) so far and the first one apparently created nearly as many problems as it fixed, with the biggest issue being the black textures on certain planets that could cause you to drive into invisible lava and die. If you haven't been having issues then there is no problem at all. If you do have issues, then Bioware hasn't done much of anything (visibly) to fix those issues and you've been stuck with a broken game for months. It's been awhile since I've checked out the MEPC forums, but that's what I recall it being like.

Woo! I finally managed to beat BG1 without cheating! I also showed those bastards outside the temple that they can't push me around this time. After 5 failed attempts I said screw it, went back up to the city and bought 40 arrows of detonation. 1x fireball = nice. 3x fireball per round from a character that is hasted and has boots of speed = OMG YOU GOT PWNED! Sarevok went down a lot easier than I thought he would. Didn't even need summoning cheese. One casting of monster summoning II, 3 hasted tanks with cloud giant strength and my archer with an initial arrow of dispelling followed by arrows of piercing. I lost one of my summoned ogres and Ajantis was near death, but Sarevok went down first. Now I can take my character over to BG2 and cheese the Ranger/Cleric dual class! :D

All the major ISPs around here suck. Faster would be nice, but I'd hate to give any of them more of our money. Edit: Except for Hurlshot's Wildblue, my Sympatico is tied with Kor's Telus for lowest ISP rating at 2.6. Woo! Go us!

Ambushes have been really tough on me on this run because I'm going through with only two characters. My main is currently a level 7 ranger and Imoen as a level 8 mage. Imoen is much better at ranged combat and while my ranger is pretty good in a one on one fight, she can't stand up to multiple mid-high level fighters at one time. I came to the conclusion that just the two of us won't be able to take on the final couple fights so I've been picking up a few other characters to help out on the final slog. They're all considerably behind the XP curve as I'm sitting at around 130k and everyone else is joining with no more than 35k. Enough that most of them are only a level behind, but when that level gets your melee characters an extra half attack it's pretty annoying.

Didn't you read the latest post by Sannom? They are backing out of the always online stuff. I read the post, but I'll wait until I see something official. I couldn't find anything on the official forum or any other articles that confirmed this. I'm still annoyed by the lack of base building, the population cap and the new method of harvesting tiberium.

Playing BG1 with SCS really gave me an increased appreciation for limited use items like potions and wands. Potions of Absorbtion are so much fun when battling clerics. "Just try and hit me! I've got a -21 AC versus blunt weapons!" I'm not entirely sure how but potions of _____ strength seem to double my damage. Somehow that hill giant strength potion took me from doing 7-11 damage to 20-24 damage per hit. Very helpful when you've only got 2 melee attacks per round and 3-4 hard hitting enemies.

I have no idea how that Ogre Mage got inside Candlekeep. I was really hurt when I showed up on this map so I didn't even bother trying to fight the 4 Ogre Mages right outside Candlekeep and instead I just ran up to the Keeper of the Portal and went inside leaving the enemies outside. Somehow one of them managed to follow me inside the library despite all the watchers and the giant stone wall between him and me.