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Post by Gando on Jul 24, 2009 0:39:29 GMT -5
Yes they are but my point was convenience. It is not convenient to trek all the way to Ivahla and back to Udor just for bracers.
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Post by Gando on Jul 24, 2009 8:45:28 GMT -5
Ancient Ruins from the Mining Skill appear in the Flow (I guess that makes sense) but they always lead back to the surface instead of a level up.
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Post by Gando on Jul 24, 2009 9:06:48 GMT -5
Sometimes when accidently stepping into a ruins in the flow the game crashes for no apparent reason. It just stops responding and I have to X out. In addition to being annoying this seems like an actual bug.
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Post by Gando on Jul 24, 2009 15:26:59 GMT -5
Final Comments regarding the inefficacy of the Mining Skill.
a) Mining does not really enrich you any more than just diving into dungeons and killing things. Even at 100 mining you won't find more than a handful of gold under any tile and the chances of finding a usable item are very low to nil. Probably nearer to nil. The occasional spellbook would be nice if they weren't all the most common ones in each school. Essentially a useless if fun feat. It is fun to dig to see what shows up. Sadly it is an actual waste of time/effort if you have any goals for your character at all.
b) While Collapse Ceiling is a fine idea in practice it has no real use except to set up weird situations to abuse jump with. IE make a rubble tile behind you and then jump behind it to get away. As a defensive strategy though it lacks anything really good to recommend it.
c) Find Ruins while intriguing in concept has several major flaws. 1) Ruins contain no treasure to speak of (I think 2k gold was the highest I found, with a Mature Black Dragon Guarding it only 2 levels higher than my character but at least 40x harder. 2) Ruins often contain very nasty bosses or low depth monsters. (these might be sources of treasure themselves but it seems an unlikely gamble at best, even with one of the more uberclass combinations. Certainly not something a conventional warrior/defender build can handle.) 3) Ruin entrances suck you in automatically no chance to avoid them. The lack of a confirm really makes this a hose once you get this abilty since you have no control over where you may find the stairs and the higher your skill the more of them show up. 4) Ruins exit out of the flow completely if you enter one while in the flow. 5) If you do encounter monsters in the ruins you are likely to die even to the nonboss ones as they're undead almost all the time and are extremely hard to kill such as the lesser vampires (black vs) which block magic and blows like they were boss races.
I should note that I used a Dwarven Warrior/Paladin/Defender for this test and got him to level 27 before it became too frustrating to continue. This is actually quite the limit where the dungeons become too difficult for conventional characters. Even with a few decently leveled items it is nearly impossible for him to beat dungeon bottom level bosses. With hp in the millions + extra lives when his damage is in the 100ks per blow there is no comparison and great guard as pointed out by Kipar earlier doesn't really help when you are being instakilled. Melee characters ALWAYS have it rough in Port but I figured with some of the changes they might be better. As it turns they are, but not by much.
It seems like the best classes to be are kensai/diviner (easier if you put just enough points in Divine Items to get levelables at random) or kensai/enchanter (though this one is very hard because eventually your equipment falls behind the quality of a suit of levelables) I still haven't tried Marksman/Gunner again as I have had horrendous experiences with them in the past. Bard/Soul Guardian is an ok build but inferior to the good classes. The trick is to not put points into most of the abilities and just concentrate on the few good ones.
Anyway just wanted to update since I am really just done until the next build
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Post by Variaz on Jul 24, 2009 16:06:49 GMT -5
Actually, I did not want to make the treasure finding too powerful, because otherwise, it would be easy to just scum a high level dungeon for valuable items, while staying near the stairs. Or even low level dungeons, if it's just for the money.
That said, it may be underpowered, and might need some improvements.
It's mostly useful in narrow corridors, to stop mobs or powerful enemies from coming at you.
As I said in a previous post, I admit that the Mining ruins were rushed, and probably needs much work. Thanks for reporting the flaws.
For a Warrior/Defender build that can take on high level enemies, while not try something like:
Level 30 build:
-- WARRIOR -- Battle Skill: 5 Weapon Mastery: 10 -- DEFENDER -- Armored Might: 10 Other defensive ability: 5
Focus on Dex as your main level up combat stat, while relying on Armored Might to get high strength. Battle Skill bonus + Armored Might bonus + Weapon Mastery bonus should provide big damages and high hit rate. The remaining 5 points can be spent on a Defender ability to make your defenses better. Keep an elemental weapon for physical immunes(the Ophelia quests can help you here, or an Ice weapon. Ice weapons are especially good if you're a zulgor, as they will do Chaos damages). If playing an Enchanter variant, you could use the 5 points on Essence Fusion instead of a defensive ability, so you can get elemental weapons more easily. 5 points will let you use the ability on most Ice weapons.
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Post by Gando on Jul 25, 2009 4:19:55 GMT -5
Ophelia quests?? I seem to be missing some information.
I can't imagine why a Warrior/Defender build would want Enchanter abilities. I used Alchemy 10 for the branding and that worked fairly well with a potion of Agitated Water giving me +825 water damage. It seems like Enchanter (3 levels of mage then 3 levels of enchanter) is a very sidetracking route to Warrior/Defender at best.
With only 5 points of abilities spent before Warrior 10 your recommendation doesn't sound like a very viable solution. Though perhaps battle skill is better than I thought. My experience with it was not good on a prior character.
I went Paladin to pick up a point of Holy Bolts (before I had the brand) and that works very nicely giving decent damages (3-4x my average with melee) with Spellcraft 20. The point I wasted on Aura of Life was not a good idea on the other hand. Barely worth it for the antipoisoning effect. Never an inconvenience for the undead enemies except the ones I could easily kill anyway.
I also put some points into Crafting early because I realized I really wanted to be able to ID stuff without making short trips in dungeons to carry everything back when alot of purples are worse than junk costing more money than they are worth to id with scrolls. So I crafted enough wisdom to be able to cast Identify. I also had the mistaken impression that with 20 in crafting Id be able make a decent weapon. That was an error I wont repeat again. Craft needs to be an All-Or-Nothing skill.
I did focus on Dex and Con (Needed the hp) with some early points in Str because I was hitting but doing little damage. Mining provided measily damages without decent strength. Even with Str up to 50 something and Mining over 100 my damages never got above 100k per blow though even with 2 points in Armored Might.
Thanks for the ideas though.
I will note that I was very aggressive about making levelables since I found none useful until level 28. I managed to sell enough items to buy a scroll of Item Leveling, Object Eternality and Magic Item and a suit of Mithral Platemail. That helped a bit, then I did the same process for a Steel Pickaxe which eventually leveled to a 7d10 item with + 2300 water brand at level 26 or so. Still not nearly an impressive weapon.
BUG REPORT: I discovered a minor bug that allowed me to wear a shield with the pickaxe if I put the shield on AFTER the axe but since that seems fair based on the poor damages I didn't think much of it. However you should fix this so that Shields and Pickaxes work properly. Either making some pickaxes 1 handed (as you said they would be) or maybe including some buckler style shields that can be weilded with a 2handed weapon.
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Post by Gando on Jul 25, 2009 13:47:50 GMT -5
The game inexplicably freezes sometimes and I have to kill it with abort or clicking the X.
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Post by Gando on Jul 26, 2009 4:46:45 GMT -5
Another Defender/Warrior build (Zulgor this time) and I put 1 point into armored health with an ac of 1400 and gained 100 hp....something seems broken. I should note I am wearing the Artifact Armor Bronze Mail of the Healthy.
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Post by Variaz on Jul 26, 2009 13:23:04 GMT -5
It's a new town in the latest build, straight north of Jindar.
It used to be bad in the past, until I've added a damages increase based on your to_hit. I've tried it, and you can get really high damages with hit. AND good hit rate. It's been there for a few builds now, and I had mentionned it in past posts.
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Post by Gando on Jul 26, 2009 16:50:13 GMT -5
Ok so Battle skill wasn't upgraded in the last download. Which means it is the same as the last time I tried it and had bad experiences. One thing I noted that you didn't respond to is your build suggestion supposes surviving 25 levels or so with just Battle Skill. That is a lot of not killing things to get through to level up. and not just 25 levels but level 10 in 2 classes. That is without splashing any other classes to the build. Care to elaborate?
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Post by Gando on Jul 27, 2009 15:27:59 GMT -5
I am wearing a suit of Black Dragon Scale Mail and it gives me flying (yay?) but that doesn't allow me to climb mountains as a ring of Flying would. Why not?
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Post by Variaz on Jul 27, 2009 16:31:56 GMT -5
Ok so Battle skill wasn't upgraded in the last download. Which means it is the same as the last time I tried it and had bad experiences. One thing I noted that you didn't respond to is your build suggestion supposes surviving 25 levels or so with just Battle Skill. That is a lot of not killing things to get through to level up. and not just 25 levels but level 10 in 2 classes. That is without splashing any other classes to the build. Care to elaborate? Battle Skill, while not that great early on, becomes quite powerful once your hit rate becomes high. The goal is to focus monstly on Dex, not Strength, at level up, as this is what truly benefits Battle Skill. The thing is that you get both damages AND accuracy that way. Sure, early on, the damages increase isn't that high when your hit rate is still low, but it will progressively become pretty high. As for surviving 25 levels with Battle Skill, you will probably reach 500 kills with Warrior before that, and it's not that difficult, monsters are not too tough early on. Once you reach that, you can place points in Weapon Mastery to boost your damages. The move on to Defender, but you already have 5 Battle Skill and 10 Weapon Mastery, and that's quite a bit of damages. Then you can raise Defender level and place 5 points in a defensive ability to help you. That's level 20. From 20 to 30, you keep raising Defender until you can get 10 points in Armored Might. Yes, that's a lot of kills. Then again, that was an example of a Warrior/Defender only build. If you add a mix of Fighter, you can get Sheer Power instead of Weapon Mastery, which will be just as good. There may be more effective variants of Warrior/Defender that would be more effective and take less time as well. You know, I think I'll roll up a Warrior/Defender, and post that build in the Builds thread. Getting back into playing the game will also be a good thing too. The code checks for climbing and not flying I believe. Ring of Flying actually gives both abilities, but not dragon armor. This should probably be changed.
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Post by Gando on Jul 27, 2009 21:03:51 GMT -5
Another thing that doesn't make sense about flying and terrain is that you take damage from deep water with flying. Same for Ring of Levitation. Shouldn't being essentially weightless keep you above the water?
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Post by Gando on Jul 27, 2009 21:58:44 GMT -5
Level 24 current hp 25k AC: 19668 and still I get 2 hit by a level 10 nightmare...sad. very sad. And no I was not currently holding or wearing any misfortune items. I know those are certain death once you are in combat with a nasty. Imho Reds are just insanely ridiculous and should not even exist until you are level 40+.
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Post by Variaz on Jul 28, 2009 10:09:30 GMT -5
You sure? Where did you meet it? There's only one way I can think of you could have met a level 10 Nightmare without reds... One vault DOES have a Nightmare, but there's a little riddle that, if you solve it, should allow you to avoid it. Red items should not be worn early on. Early on, they're a death trap. They become useful when your level is higher and you're capable of defeating lower nightmares, or at least escape. Vengeful Orc is currently the strongest Orc monster in the game. For melee characters, the damages are pretty high, and yes, it can 2-hit you to death, as it can easily deal 10k+ damages. Hit and run is a good approach. (5 combat feats to use Jump as your last blow) The other low level nightmare, Nightmare Scout, is tough, even for level 30 characters, due to them summoning themselves over and over. They can easily overwhelm you(a while ago, I had a level 30+ Young Angel Monster character with like 600k hp, capable of dishing millions of damages, yet she died when facing one, overwhelmed by it's summons(which in turns summons more), high hit rate and damages). So don't feel bad about losing to them, they are not meant to be easy. Nightmares are meant to be fled from, and I make sure they're scary enough so that players will try to flee rather than fight. Defeating them is very difficult, and each of them have their own abilities that often requires a very particular approach(such as paralyzing Restless Dead to avoid it's regeneration). Not all characters can beat all nightmares. If you don't like the concept, then don't use reds. The monsters will not spawn(save in some rare instances of quests/vaults, and in these cases, there will ALWAYS be a way to avoid them...if you can figure it out. )
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