Mongoose

not really. it had more to do with wanting to use the characters in my party more often that, otherwise, would have just sat on the ebon hawk. i rarely ever used bao-dur or t3 off the ebon hawk, but because their skill came in handy, i actually brought them along on a couple of missions. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I agree. This is an issue of PC skill use versus party use. If you "fix" the workbench and lab station to use only the PC's skills, you make the PC's skill points more valuable and the Sentinel more powerful. However, this also makes some party members who have skills as one of their strengths, like Bao Dur, less useful. The more you focus on the PC's skills, the more party members with good skills get marginalized. It's a Me vs. We issue, PC class differentiation vs. party member usefulness.

was that a joke? we has a hard time telling with some folks. akari seemed to be telling us that he not know how we got what we got, but that he wanted it one way, and the developer in charge of workbench wanted another... and we got something else entirely... so we still not know if final workbench were bug or purposeful. go figure. HA! Good Fun! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The first sentence of my post explains which part of that is probably the bug. The rest of my post was just useless exposition. -Akari <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So the way it was intended to work was you only used the PC's skills at creation as well? Not that it makes a big difference; because you can't get much in the way of components without a good breakdown rate from high Repair, you can't build anything at a high level anyway due to not having enough parts around, regardless of whose character's skills the workbench is using. If the workbench is really intended to reflect only the PC's skills, however, then its item creation is bugged, as well as the item creation and breakdown for the lab station, which depends on the using character's skills and not the PC's. (Which would royally screw my current character over, as Repair and Treat Injury are the only two skills he doesn't have.) <_<

Yeah, discovered that one to my dismay a while back. All those skill points as a Sentinel, and what happens when I don't put points into one of my few cross-class skills? Can't regularly use item creation at all.

Don't follow. If you have a rapier (18-20) that is keen (15-20) and improved critical the threat is 12-20. Do you mean critical damage multipliers stack like that? Sure, but that has nothing to do with keen. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I believe he's talking about threat range multipliers, which is how Keen works. In your example, Keen is a x2 multiplier, and Improved Critical from NWN is also a x2 multiplier, so it comes out to a x3 multiplier using D20 rules (add together, then subtract 1). The rapier has a base threat range size of 3, and after using both Keen and Improved Critical the range size is 3 * 3 = 9, or 12-20.

Okay, here's a simplified explanation: Say you have a weapon that has 19-20, x2 listed in the description. The 19-20 is your threat range, and the x2 is your critical hit multiplier. The game creates a random number from 1-20 when you attack. The threat range represents the chance that you might score a critical hit, which does double (and sometimes more) your normal damage. The size of the threat range is your chances out of 20, so a 19-20 threat range means you have a 2/20 = 10% chance of a crit, because you will possibly get one on either a 19 or a 20. (Your chances are actually less than that, but that's a good estimate.) The bigger the range, the bigger your chances at a critical. When you use a Keen weapon, or use Critical Strike or Sniper Shot, you're increasing the chance that you score a critical. All of these multiply the base threat range by a number, so a weapon that has a bigger threat range works much better than one with a small threat range. A weapon with a 19-20 threat range works much better with Critical Strike/Sniper Shot than one with a 20-20 threat range, and a weapon with a 17-20 range would work better still. When you score a critical, your normal weapon damage is multiplied by the critical hit multiplier. In the example above, it's x2, so you'd do double damage on a critical hit. If the weapon had x3 as its critical hit multiplier, it'd do triple damage. If the weapon has massive critical damage, that damage gets added to your total damage on a critical hit (but not on a normal attack).

Look, regardless of how important you consider combat as part of the game, the fact remains that combat (and skills, and Force powers, for that matter) is buggy for the implemented system. These aren't just spelling errors or anything; these are bugs that have major effects on a number of feats and powers in the game. No one should get a pass just because the bugginess doesn't totally ruin the game as a whole. They're still glaring flaws, and they're still something that should easily have been caught during the testing of the game.

* Sometimes when there's a hologram during character conversations, that hologram stays around afterwards. I've had this happen both with T3-M4 and G0-T0, where the hologram shown as part of the conversation was still around on the Ebon Hawk after the conversation, standing near the entrance. These holograms will move, too; I had one attack Visas Marr when she appeared on the ship, and they persist between level loads. It seems to happen when during the dialogue when you trigger the same dialogue tree that shows the hologram more than once in the same conversation.

A critical hit threat range is the range where the attack roll threatens for critical hit damage. Attacks rolls are from 1-20, so a threat range of 19-20 means that if the attack roll is either a 19 or a 20, you make a second "threat" roll, and if that roll hits the target, you do critical hit damage. (If you miss the threat roll, you just do normal damage.) Most of the time a critical hit is double damage (the weapon will have xN after the range, where N is the damage multiplier), but some weapons or modifications allow you to do more. Keen adds a 2x multiplier on the critical hit threat range of a weapon. If you have a 20-20 threat range (i.e. a threat range of 1), with Keen the threat range is now 19-20, or a range of 2. If the original threat range was 19-20 (range 2), with Keen it would be 17-20 (range 4). When stacking with things such as the Critical Strike or Sniper Shot feats that also add critical hit multipliers, Keen adds 1 to the other multiplier. So, if you have a base threat range of 19-20 (range 2) on a melee weapon and you use Master Critical Strike for a 4x multiplier, the threat range for the attack would be 13-20 (range . If the weapon was also Keen, you'd add 1 to the multiplier, so it'd be 5x for a threat range of 11-20 (range 10). As a side note, the weapon you're wielding makes a huge difference when using Critical Strike/Sniper Shot. If it's not Keen and/or doesn't have a base threat range of at least 19-20, it's not going to hit for a critical all that often.

* I've also had the game freeze on me a couple of times while trying to access the shopping screen for Kodin, the droid parts merchant on Nar Shadaa. * The Twin Suns drop their swords every time after being defeated, so since you fight them twice, you can get two copies of each of their swords (four swords total) if you go back to the cantina on Nar Shadaa.

It's bugs. <_< He's supposed to be sitting close enough to the ship controls to look like he's pressing on the buttons, and he's supposed to remain seated at all times while at the controls.

It's pretty simple to find. The game has combat message logs that detail the actual attack rolls, just like the first KotOR. All you have to do is analyze the combat logs to notice that when enemies attack someone with a Speed or Armor power on, the defense bonus is not being added to the Jedi's defense numbers for the ToHit calculations. Same way players found the double-bladed weapon bug in KotOR 1, I imagine. Oh, and besides the big defense bug for Force powers, the Power Attack series has no knockback calculations, and the Master Flurry still gives you a -1 penalty to attack like the KotOR 1 version. Both of those are, again, disagreements with the power descriptions. And for all those that are gloating because the PC version will likely have less bugs, think: if Obisidian had managed to finish the Xbox version with no bugs, perhaps they would have had time to add new content or features to the later versions, rather than spending time tracking down bugs. A buggy game helps no one.

* Cutscenes consistently show another scene before loading the fade-in or fade-out. When loading cutscenes, it needs to stay black completely before the scene is loaded. * Any time you get too close to someone and start a dialog, the camera ends up clipping into one of the characters, so you end up seeing half a face or some other glitch. * Cutscenes need to place characters before they start. Sometimes you can get characters still moving or facing in a different direction than the devs seemed to want, which screws up the camera angles and causes animations to snap, where the character does the scripted animation and then snaps back into their previous position between animations. * For the two escaped fugitives on Telos, I told Grenn that I'd seen them, but he needed harder evidence than my word. However, they never showed up on the planet surface like I know they're supposed to, before you get to Atris, and Grenn never has anything else to say about them. * I've also had the mentioned problem where the Twi'lek in the Czerka surface base won't follow my party past some obstacles, so I couldn't save him because of the pathing. * The Ithorian you can save from the Exchange base didn't give me any Light Side points. * I've had one save game with Mira where she was not wearing the environment suit when she visits Visquis, which makes the game totally confusing when everyone is surprised it's Mira instead of my Jedi. * For the quest involving a dancing girl for Vogga, if you wait until after picking Mira up to do it, then have both her and the Handmaiden in your party and ask Mira to be the dance girl, she'll agree, but when you get to Vogga's lair, the Handmaiden will step forward instead. When the cutscene switches to the part where Mira is supposed to be dancing, no one is there.

According to the combat logs, Master Flurry still has a -1 penalty to all attacks when used, just like the original KotOR. It does not allow an extra attack with no penalty as stated in its description. I couldn't tell whether it was also applying a -1 to defense or not, however. Also, Power Attack at all levels is not making any checks whatsoever for knockback. I'd have to check, but I'd assume that the ranged equivalents of Rapid Shot and Power Blast have the same bugs.

Er, you do realize that the artists who make board avatars are not the same people responsible for tracking down bugs? Not every Obsidian employee is a programmer, y'know...

Well, this deserves to be in the spoilers section (use the spoiler tags otherwise), but...