I’m currently replaying this on a non-stealing game, but I remember first time around I only stole skill books because I could immediately use them and there was nothing to detect (just don’t let the person who’s going to use the skillbooks be the one that started the conversation).
I’m wondering what happens if you steal stuff you actually want to equip. If I do the thief walk away trick, then give the ubersword of wonder to the fighter for example. Next time I steal something from a different NPC and they search the fighter, will they cause problems about the item stolen from someone else?
Yeah they will but I’ve found you can always pay them off with a few hundred gold which is always worth it considering you’re generally stealing far more than that every time.
Yo so I took the advice here an pickpocketed a vendor. I feel flithy. I kitted out my entire part by robbing the vendor under the tavern in Driftwood. Then I got past that tough magister fight with ease.
I died after that to a fight with some void slimes and magisters trying to kill a Sourcerer. They started as Oil slimes so I lit them on fire, which became Necrofire which doesn’t go out. Then Fire Slimes started spawning and I could not hurt them. I need to rethink that battle, there’s so many slimes.
If I remember that part of the game properly I think you can sneak past the slimes, you can also persuade them if you have the “Dr. Doolittle” skill on one of your characters.
I just polished off my play-through of the new version. The game is still excellent and while I cannot remember Arx, it does seem to me that there is more to do here now. I truly did not notice much different.
Of course Larian still cannot avoid huge bugs and difficulty spikes. The final battle is still a bugger and not much fun. Worse, I ran into a bug where I won the final battle but the game did not register it as so and would not end combat. So I had to do it again, won, and then the game proceeded to give me a different victory speech than the one I chose. Just to be sure I downloaded a trainer to one shot my way through the final battle one last time to see if somehow I buggered it up. No sir, the ending is sadly bugged. A poor end to a great game but one that I enjoyed significantly more than The Witcher 3.
Yikes! That doesn’t sound good at all. Just made it to Arx and hit a difficulty spike. Normally I would keep pounding away but I am getting tired of the spikes at this point. Knowing that my reward for perseverance is going to be another brutal fight, I might just walk away at this point. By this point in a roleplaying game, I want to be a lot more powerful than the mobs I am facing.
For someone who hasn’t gotten into this yet, does the game not have a difficulty slider that can be adjusted at will? The best part of difficulty settings that you can change whenever you hit a wall is that said wall can be bypassed by simply reducing difficulty for a while. Hearing about the uneven combat has me hoping that it’s an easy adjustment.
The balance is wonky, yeah. I’m on my second serious run (got nearly to the end once, and a few restarts in that one), with the new edition/patch. Just left Fort (no) Joy, this time with the full Tyrant’s set.
I’ve found that indeed, one level deficit makes fights brutal, being on level makes them tough, and overleveling them makes them easy or easier but the loot is meh or useless. Lots of save-scumming for sure. I still find allocating attribute and skill points a shot in the dark unless using a build, but those are usually end-game and don’t help much as you are just getting there. But none of this is different from when the game released.
In fact, I’m struggling to find much that is appreciably different in this definitive edition thing. I’m sure there’s a patch log somewhere I should read.
Not sure if this is a new feature as I never got beyond Fort Joy prior to the definitive edition, but you can eventually tweak character attributes and skills as much as you want. On the one hand that is great if you want to smooth the rough edges of a build, but this feature is no substitute for a smooth progression through the game.
I think the biggest change was the heavy nerf to the lone wolf skill. That’s the only one I remember and I did read the change log. Oh, and totems got buffed so they do more damage later in the game and hopefully stay relevant.
Loot is also tied to difficulty? So even if you could reduce the difficulty for hard battles you don’t get the same quality of loot? Sad. Devs should stop worrying over penalizing players with difficulty levels and focus on just making things tougher for those those that want it that way. It’s a non-competitive game, after all.
No, loot is the same level as the enemies. Thus fighting low level enemies will be easy, but the loot will basically just be gold. (Still matters somewhat since shop contents are partially scaled)
I was talking about character level, sorry. I have no idea how difficulty level affects loot, but Mysterial seems to have the answer there. I was referring to gauging battle difficulty based on enemy level.
Ah, understood, that makes sense. In which case, putting the difficulty down (either right at the start, or later, if possible) would certainly be beneficial for someone like me who doesn’t like tough/impossible/long battles in my RPGs.
I completely agree. I really hate it when games (RPGs, particularly) shamelessly expect the player to save/reload over and over until they find that perfect strategy or just get lucky enough to win the battle. It’s nice that this game warns the player when a battle is too high level, but even with that, too many of the typical battles are played out on a knife’s edge, where keeping a fistful of resurrection scrolls is needed to get through it.
