I have -
A mostly pure 2h warrior - TRP
Cleric 1h w/shield, war, hydro, necro - Lohse
Ranged hunter with some scoundrel - Sebille
Elemental wizard - Pyro, electric, and geomancy in that order - Fane
Fane can heal himself OK with poison spells and wands. With 12+ Pyro and an int over 40 he can two shot some stuff.
I finally ditched glass cannon on my hunter. All the mobs knew she had it and would often take her out for a whole battle.
I’d really recommend Fane as protagonist. Give him Pet Pal and Persuasion and you probably get access to most of the content because he can transform into other races to unlock some quests. This goes double for dual Lone Wolf runs.
Think I’m bringing chapter 2 to a close, least I think I am, it’s hard to tell sometimes.
So while I’ve enjoyed this one, it’s starting to wear me out a bit in the same way the first one did where I’ve run across so much stuff, so many quests, so much crap in my inventory, keeping track of it all just becomes more work than I frankly feel like bothering with (especially keeping track of quests, since they often stretch out all over the place and force me to circle back, sometimes repeatedly).
I’m sure I’ll press on, but for the moment at least, taking a break for some Warhammer 2, where the goal is clear, go destroy the other guys army, haha
I had a bit of a problem with this as well, until I came to the realization that other than skill books and healing potions I didn’t really care about crafting anything so I vendored almost all the inventory. Frankly, I had enough money at the end I could have just vendored everything and if I wanted a combo skill book I could just buy the parts. I also blazed through the final act, definitely skipping some quests and just stumbling along into answers rather than trying to figure it all out.
I did enjoy it though, I just figure I’ll save getting deep into the act 4 quests for my next playthrough when I can breeze through the early parts of the game.
I just move all crafting stuff to the ship. Figure that if I craft anything I will do so there. Makes the inventory much easier to handle.
I have not fought Lohar, but it seems that any boss enemy and sometimes mini-boss enemies do this all the time. I have been pumping wits for my characters, but it rarely seems to matter.
I am suck of the main boss getting like 5 moves, then one character doing maybe something, and then all the enemies go again, and then you can act. This is just like you said and its stupid and unfair. I wish I understood the initiative mechanic. The lowest wits character I have is like 22, yet it seems not matter at all. Am I wasting points? Id love to know.
Here is a tip for making money. I did this with the dwarf in the arena in driftwood. Basically I gave him a bunch of low level stuff (traded for free) to get his faction to 100, with my bartering guy. I think I got to a 54% discount (with a belt of bartering). The prices were do good, I ended up leaving drift wood with like 120k in the bank and all my gear upgraded.
I have not found a good merchant in the next area yet. I do not know if there is one to find. Just a few with very limited selections.
Initiative (wits) determines the order of action for all characters, but it alternates turns between allies/enemies. So you’ll never get all your guys moving before theirs.
So yeah, pumping all characters with wits is wasting points. You only need one to be highest, so they go before the first enemy.
The hell it does. It does NOT alternate between enemies and allies. If it did, I would be OK with that. Instead its enemy -> enemy -> enemy -> etc…
Does it depend on the number of enemies? If there are more enemies, obviously they’ll get a few goes in a row.
Let me give you an example from memory, so I might be off a bit. I have my party of 4, and I am in that vault where Fane has his quest, you know the eternal you have a conversation with. So I am talking to JUST her. and of course a fight breaks out. She runs in, does some massive AoE twice. Summons 2 dogs (maybe 3). Then all the dogs go and attack. Then SHE GOES AGAIN and finally one of my characters gets an action. This kind of shit is very typical for bosses. There were at MOST an equal number of enemies to allies.
I think only on the most mundane encounters does stuff like this NOT happen.
Okay so are bosses playing by different rules that ignores the initiative system? What abilities are they using? Are you sure they’re not hitting you with stuff that’s skipping your turns? Eg, AOE one shreds magic, AOE two stuns? Maybe get a screengrab of combat order when the battle starts, and check the combat log.
I’m nowhere near as progressed as you, but the initiative/wits system works as described in all encounters I’ve seen so far. Kniles the Flenser for example:
Lohse and Fane have 15 initiative, Red Prince and Beast have 10. All enemies have at least 12 (12 wits), and you can clearly see it alternates ally/enemy based on the initiatives within each group.
shrug
Once combat starts going things seem ok. Its just that first round, the alpha strike.
Well regardless of what’s going on there, only one character needs a high wit stat. :)
(for initiative, ignoring that wit also gives crit chance)
I think I have a lot of character points coming back to me then. Ill dump all my guys wits back down to 10 except for one character.
I just bought this game Friday and have, as of last night, played it 20 hours. Good Lord, this game is so much better than the first one!!!
Now I’m gonna pine for it by reading this thread!
Also, I have hours of videos going up this week and have been streaming it constantly.
When asked about the game’s mod scene, Larian’s Swen Vincke said this:
“Somebody made the Noisy Crypt, that was one of the guys that came here, he made a 40-minute adventure. I hope we’re going to see more and more of those come up because I really want adventures that we can play in co-op where I actually don’t know what the story is. That would please me tremendously. But again there’s already loads of really cool stuff in there. We have a couple of things that are in the works but we’ll only announce them when we’re ready. There’s stuff coming, for sure.”
“We have a couple of surprises planned, but we’re going to work on the patch just now, then we’re going to work in silence for a little bit so that we can get our shit together and then… yeah, I’m pretty sure there will be at least one big surprise in there.”
Remember that wits gives crit chance too. I’m going with 100% crit chance on my ranger, and dumping as much as I can into the wizard as well.
Someone posted a handy map of Act 2 by level so you can save yourself aimless wandering. Too bad I didn’t have this until I’d already done 80% of it.
Though this map doesn’t mention that various places have spikes where end bosses are tougher than the rest of the area (e.g. Blackpits Mines.)
The combination of content for a given character level be spread out over the map and having level spikes for area end bosses is that it really shreds the storytelling. I spent all of levels 13 and 14 partially doing an area, hitting an higher-level end fight I couldn’t do, then nopeing out to another area/storyline to see if I could do that instead (or get more XP/better gear so I could do the problematic fight.)
I managed to muddle through to 15, but the whole experience felt very scattered and disconnected.
In my playthrough I feel there was just one problem which messed up all of the pathing on Act 2. Otherwise just following the story I feel sends you in the correct direction; if you choose to ignore the story and explore that’s your prerogative. Even if you decide to take care of that first area across the raised bridge the bridgekeeper tries to steer you back to town saying she’d put in a good word for you there.
The problem came when I got to town and then the west bridge was guarded by source hounds which the game makes obvious are going to detect you. I didn’t want to be discovered, so then went back out the east side and headed north; had those hounds not been there I’d have gone exactly where I should have. Instead I spent a couple hours wandering around content that was a bit difficult trying to eke out a little xp here and there to get that one more level I needed to open things up.
