Well - blockade negating yes. But they don’t teleport or break engagement. Shades summon shadows behind your frontlines (and do it constantly). But engagement mechanics are entirely functional.
It’s just really confusing to figure out what’s actually happening when you’re being overrun by Sthings summoned in your backside by other Sthings that you may not even notice are named differently.
No, shadows have a blink power, a short range combat teleport. They absolutely can pop through blockades to the back line. It happened to me many times.
Huh, I didn’t notice that at all, probably because they were on their asses via Slicken from the very start. I never ran into any issues until shades showed up, who have notably higher defenses and hang back a bit, and also have that nasty ranged ice attack that lowers defenses.
Yep, those little teleporting, mage-murdering bastards are happy to skip out of the Eder lockdown.
The other problem with having them in the first dungeon (astute point there, gurugeorge) is that you may well lack good tools to deal with them. If you don’t have a priest and a druid, you’re going to have a bad time. I guess Ciphers maybe murder them okay like they murder every other damn thing.
They’re not the end of the world, just another weird thing that made this game more of a struggle to get into than I expected. Hopefully I’m set now that I don’t have any distractions.
Yeah, my playthrough might have been an aberration, I see.
I started with a druid, so slicken from Aloth and sunbeam from me -> shapeshift pretty much took care of everything down there easily (excepting the groups with shades - I used a fireball trap or two there).
It’s interesting that you’re tossing around random optimal strategies. With my party at level 5, I’ve barely looked into them or even wanted to. I’m still in that early phase where everything feels chaotic. I have both too many and too few options.
Maybe I should expand the combat results window to explore the details, understand what all the resistances mean, and try out some new spells.
Like I said, weird game so far. I’ll dig into it more this week.
Yeah, I struggled with them quite a bit early on when I was still feeling my way around the combat system and didn’t have a great sense of what my characters could do and what the threat levels of various things were. Hell, I don’t think I had fully grokked engagement yet.
Totally agree with what y’all are saying–the one-two punch of (1) having the first dungeon be harder than the stuff at, say, Anslog’s compass, and then (2) having it be full of shadow cheese was a terrible design decision. Because you certainly didn’t learn enough about the combat from the introduction to realize what was going on.
I’m doing better already tonight. Those huge fights in the woods after Caed Nua provide some interesting tactical decisions and crowd control exercises, even though there are a few back-rank summons there as well. The game is slowing down a little for me.
Thanks for the tip on the Slicken spell for Aloth. So handy to set up huge groups with a fireball.
Follow-up question: what are the useful priest spells? All I use are heals and an occasional single-enemy attack spell. The traps are nice but have a very low diameter.
Halt can be handy for quick crowd control, say if someone is making a beeline for your mage.
Circle of Protection rocks.
The various defense buffs vs specific debuffs are great. Prayer against Fear or whatever when fighting undead that like to fear you is a game-changer.
There’s a single-target fire damage spell I am forgetting the name of that’s pretty good.
Blessing and Dire Blessing are pretty decent damage boosters. I never regret casting those, or the ones that give everyone bonus damage reduction.
Yeah, I pretty much have Durance lead off every tough fight with the one that gives a defense buff to all my dudes (I believe it’s Circle of Protection, like Adam said).
Haven’t tried blessing yet, probably should give that a shot.
I talented Durance into Interdiction and boosted it with some other talent, that thing is a monster too. Such a great encounter power.
I think I went with one that boosted his aura thing, and then the Magran one that give a flame spell (as well as accuracy with the arquebus). Maybe I’ll look into this interdiction business.
I like Iconic Projection, which does an AoE damage and heal.
Ooh ooh, Crushing Faith IIRC is the small-AOE pillar of damage and knockdown. That one’s good too.
How good is dire blessing exactly? I looked at it again and it is one of those convert-hits-to-crits things–I’m generally skeptical of that sort of thing but maybe it’s because I haven’t given it a shot. Also we need to bring back the screen-shake with a crit because I hardly know when they happen (sometimes I’ll see an enemy knocked over for apparently no reason, then scroll up the log and see that Kana nailed him with his arbalest).
I’m not sure how I feel about weapon specializations. +6 accuracy isn’t that much, but it’s enough that I feel like I’m missing out if I switch Eder from this not-too-shabby saber (his specialization) to this pretty-damn-sweet flail I just got.
I tried all those priest spells out. I have some options at least, thanks.
These random name generator names are still killing me. The Dozens??
Did they never fix the engagement attack bug when using the Rogue’s Escape ability? I deftly rolled through a Forest Troll and got hit. :(