Combat is very routine right now. I might switch to low-damage weapons or something. It really sucks that they made hard mode restart the game, all for some stupid in-game item that I couldn’t care less about. I don’t know if hard mode is the solution, but it’d be nice to try it at least!
Brain Splitter is an exceptionally powerful offensive skill. A [enemy I haven’t found yet] can be killed with just one button press. Use this in conjunction with Vault/Double Vault or the Leaping Stone skill and the Eminence Augment to maximize its power.
Use the Stepping/Leaping Stone skills to set up a combo with Skull/Brain Splitter.
This combo idea from the wiki kind of sucks. The jump off an enemy doesn’t put you directly over their head to use the Skull Splitter, so you have to air jump to line up. That would be cool if enemies didn’t just get out of stun and walk away from me. It doesn’t do much damage either. Maybe it would help with larger enemies.
Anyway, I’ve almost maxed out Strider and then I’m switching to Assassin for the parry skill.
Actually maybe Ill bring Silverhammer back. I do have him saved in a zip file. New plan.
I pick up the two magic defense skills from sorc and mage. Then go to the Warrior line. I suppose my party will consist of 2 warriors 1 mage and one sorceror. I hope that is viable. In playing my other character I discovered that warriors are “aoe” with their wide swings.
I’m not sure what I should do. Switching to easy mode only makes it so I take 50% less damage, so I can’t kill him any quicker. Not having that ‘attack things higher than you’ skill really makes this battle suck. I’m not sure it’s possible to even restart somewhere where I can get to a person to allow a skill change, but the though of having to redo some of this isn’t very appealing either.
Thank you easy mode. It took a while because the dragon was hard to hit with no upward attack, but I killed him. I don’t think it would of been that tough a battle if I had that skill active.
Anyway, no he is alive and well. I restored my game with him and respeced my sorceror into a warrior. Now I fight along side him instead of standing back watching casting bars.
It was definitely a good idea to take a break from the regular world and go to Bitterback Island. I agree with others that the best part of the game is exploring dungeons and fighting those battles. There just isn’t enough in the regular world to make those long trips by foot interesting. Luckily you get some more indoor exploration and battles during the endgame too.
I think there was so much I still didn’t do. I skipped a lot of board jobs and side quest content I think. I think I also only did about 25% of Bitterback Island by looking at the list of areas on the wiki. There were lots of areas where I didn’t explore in the regular world too
A question for those who finished
After beating the Seneschal, is there anything left to do? I roamed around back in the home town area a bit. When you leave via the gate you go back to seneschal land.
The combat was decent. It straddled the line between spammy attacks and having some tacticalness mixed in. I certainly liked the combat better than Skyrim, but prefer the slower pace of Dark Souls like combat. My favorite attack that I used was the fighter’s move that closes the distance quickly for a strike. The regular content did tend to get a bit easy. Even a lot of the endgame content wasn’t that hard - probably a different story playing on hard mode. My guess is that some of Bitterback would have been tough even if I had returned to it after getting to my end game level of the upper 40s.
There are a lot of crafting materials. That part of the game could have been more fun if the UI handled it better. I never knew if I should use ingredient X to make potion A, or if I should use it for something else. After picking the first ingredient it would have been nice if they displayed the other possible uses for the 2nd ingredient on that screen. I got tired of having to close that screen, find the other ingredient and select combine to see what it could be used for. It would also have been helpful to display recipes instead of ingredients and organize those into categories.
I didn’t have any technical problems at all, even with frequent alt tabbing and using an ENB.
Overall, I’m glad I played the game. It had some tedious aspects and UI annoyances.
Is the point of NG+ to go back and do the parts of Dark Arisen that you missed the first time around? Since enemies keep their same level most of the world would be ridiculously easy.
I switched my main to be an assassin and am using bows for the first time. First, bows seem really weak compared to melee.
However there is this super annoying thing and I do not know if it is a setting or what. When I bring out my bow and aim, then when I push an attack my guy doesn’t fire, but then reloads his bow. The 2nd time I push it, it then shoots arrows. Is this a glitch or do you always need to attack twice the first time you bring out your bow?
The 25% or so of Bitterback that I did was probably some of the best content. Maybe I’ll head back in there for a bit until Tomb Raider comes out this month.
How do I double jump and roll? I think assassins can do those things. I am in the bitterback area and I see shelves with chests that are just out of reach. There is also one with a door above it. Just normal jumps are far too short. I know I am supposed to have a vault ability, but I have no idea how activate it.
