I’m not down on the game exactly, but……okay, so I feel like there are two main draws here:
Interesting, variable tactical combat puzzles you can solve in a wide variety of ways.
An interesting world/plot to explore, discover, and change through your choices and actions.
I think there is just enormous amounts of stuff standing in between you, the player, and actually doing those things. Does anyone else feel that way? Like it’s astonishing how little of those two things I actually accomplish in any one play session, particularly if you consider that speed bump combat encounters probably don’t count for number 1, as they involve little in the way of decision making. You could bump up the difficulty to make them harder, but then there’s the problem that the little encounters offer no real rewards, so beating tons of hard ones would just feel exhausting.
Does this make any sense? I just wish I had more of the good bits and less of the huge stuff that gets in the way, crossing Drezen with multiple loading screens, walking into an inn, finding a quest npc, resting to remove corruption, buying scrolls, casting buffs, building structures, each of which involving several screen loading transitions, just…ugh.
I have a lot of those same complaints.
Another one I have is that I am curious about different builds and whatnot, but the ‘startup time’ to really see how a build is working is like 20 hours. I really like to start at mythic rank 3 with like 6 or 7 levels (whatever level you are at that point) and then start playing there.
It’s an interesting thought but then you need to add one more draw to your list - real rewards. :) Becuase if it’s not on your list, rewards don’t matter and rewardless but interesting tactical combat is what you ask for and get. :)
I do have a caster question, maybe its a lich question. For my next run, I want to do a lich. However, after reading a number of posts and other things I found on google, one constant thing is to make sure your lich has a charisma of 14, even if your an int caster.
Does anyone know why? Is some spell or some feat requiring this stat?
I’m not sure I agree with feeling that so much gets in the way of the good aside from resting to remove corruption in a safe area, needing to transition back to chat with people in the Citadel, and just driving my armies all around the map. What you say makes sense, though. There is a lot of content in this game (just like Kingmaker) and I love how all of it really makes the world-building shine.
I’m confident I’ll play the game again and I don’t worry about trying out a bunch of builds since the story and characters remain the primary hook for me.
I couldn’t tell you if the game itself documents anything. I know in Kingmaker, when you pick up the undead Inquistor, there was a message that said that Undead don’t have a constitution and use charisma instead (which is why most of the Dhampir Subtypes have penalties to Constitution and bonuses to Charisma). And I know that PnP Lich doesn’t have Constitution score.
That’s for that info. I guess that’s why people are reserving charisma for a lich.
It would seem like a sorcerer would be great as a lich if it was not for the fact that lich spells are not added to your known spells list, unless that was a bug.
I was planning on making an extra save where one path would be for the swarm that walks (not that I know if a mage is a good class for that mythic). However 14 charisma would be wasted for that build.
Also I was going to make charisma a dump stat, but that would have been a huge mistake.
Has anyone gone Aeon path? I was going Azata on my previous run and was liking it quite a bit. Not sure if I should go Azata again or try something new. I don’t know anything about the Aeon path/powers, though.
I do, yes. The frequency of random encounters (most of which are pushovers, some of which are absurd), the time spent traversing the map, the timesink that is Crusade stuff, having to rest to tweak spell loadouts for the next encounter, having to travel back to town (and the multiple random encounters you get along the way) to get rid of corruption… it all just bogs the game down. To me it feels like they have a lot of stuff like random encounters that many games would use to pad their playtime but it’s just needed here due to the absurd amount of content in the game.
And god, the buffing. I think I would have quit playing were it not for the Autobuff mod allowing me to script it.
I read that this is something that could be adjusted in the ToyBox mod? Man I really need to set up some mods. I’ve been reluctant to spend my very limited game time setting up the mods, but the time saved would probably pay for itself in a session or two…
I honestly view ToyBox as almost a necessary utility to play the game. It is for me, anyway. For instance, when I ditched my L15 squad to start a new game I really did not want to slog through the prologue and Kenebras again. So I just turned on “always crit”, “enemies roll 1”, and movement speed up to 300% so I could zip through the start and set a save point there before setting those things back to normal. Now I have a save I can fall back to if I want to start again.
Buffbot/autobuff are also huge for me. The game demands that you be fully buffed to the gills for a lot of the encounters and that list of buffs just expands and expands as time goes on and you gain levels. It took a little while to set up my queue but now I can just push a button and all my characters will cast their share of the 34 buffs I go through. That, honestly, should be part of the game and not require a mod. I know that can be mitigated by the time extension mythics but you still do have to rest at times and do it all over again.
Anyway. Get ToyBox. I didn’t see an option to change random encounter frequency itself but I did speed up travel speed on the map which seems to result in fewer rests/random encounters. Works well for me.
That is what I wanted to do first - hear the storyline is pretty great - but I was told that it was best to play another Mythic Path your first play through so you can see how the story is “meant” to work itself out. My understanding is that the Aeon Path can basically change significant events through time travel which makes the events more significant as you know how they were originally supposed to play out.
Ahhh, thanks! That’s good to know. I think I’ll just stick with Azata then since I never saw it out. I’m planning on switching to Gold Dragon so if I ever go back to my Cleric playthrough I’ll just finish with Azata.
Lich and Swarm sounds fun but Evil in these games always feels weird, it’s never done very well. Or at least to my liking. It’s the “Muhaha I kick puppies” kind of evil most of the time.
Consider a dirge bard lich! If I were building one I would pick a kitsune so that I could boost my physical stats with master shapeshifter and probably use a crossbow as a weapon and dump STR without much emphasis on CON or INT. At the second mythic level up pick Elemental Barrage and grab the heavy crossbow in Drezen that does 2 different types of element damage and viola a caster that can actually do damage without the need to cast every encounter. Melee would be a bit tougher at the start but there is an Orc Axe you get in the Grey Garrison that does 2 different types of energy attacks so once again Elemental Barrage triggering. Or you could just go Scion Magus and get the second energy type from that I suppose.
Yeah like most of these games the alignment stuff is blech. Partly it’s a consequence of the old D&D alignment system, and partly it’s due to something as nuanced as world view and moral framework being reduced to binary choices by the need for, well, binary options. It seems especially noticeable here though because the writing is generally pretty good and the decision points often are the sort where alignment could make a real difference. But no, you have to choose some version of utterly un-nuanced insanity of the saccharine goody-two-shoes or maniacal sociopath variety. Or sometimes it makes zero sense. Singing along with a friendly bard is a Chaotic act? Being Lawful means you are supposed to blindly endorse clear abuses of power and lapses of judgment simply because the person involved is some town official? Blech.
I’m still confused by this. I feel like you must be stealing all my random encounters because they’re so infrequent for me! And even when I do get them I always get the option to Evade them.
Edit: I did build teleportation circles all over the map, so that probably cuts down on it some.
The wonkiness of alignments is exactly why I almost always choose a ‘chaotic’ version (good or neutral), since I can go pretty wild with it without feeling it’s out of character. Totally agree with opinions of Lawful and Evil alignments others have mentioned, but I’ve come to terms with the inability of games to support them well.
Had my first crash of Wrath today. Happened twice with the exact same click of the autocast button on Nenio (which I didn’t realize got turned on with a spell I had cast in an earlier battle). I never use the autocast so I couldn’t remember how to turn it off immediately and clicked it, which immediately froze and crashed the game. Loaded up and tried the battle again but the exact same click crashed again. I haven’t avoided it yet, as I gave up for the eve, and it’s likely easy to avoid.
