The Gaming Den

If you talk to the first NPC who you start with a handful of times, he'll clue you in on requirements for picking up most of the NPC's. 3~ or so you'll simply encounter in your journeys.

What HAVE you been putting points into? And the Gold-trimmed set isn't JUST poison resist; it does good fire resist and it's got pretty good armor for being, you know, cloth. I think the total armor value is a third of Havel's set. I urge you to give the stats a look when you have a moment, and try it. Good armor for the weight, especially when used piecemeal with heavier stuff.

If you do another playthrough, Miracles are surprisingly handy. I generally got up to 5 attunements slots, and used a mix of miracles and pyromancy.

Almost all of my points are in Vitality, Strength, and Endurance. I put a few into the other things early on when I didn't really know what I was doing. I'll definitely have to sit down and put together a list of what I can carry and the stats for each piece. The wiki will help with that. I just looked up the gold-hemmed black set, and the fact that it doesn't need upgrades makes mixing and matching things easier.

http://chip-and-ironicus.tumblr.com/pos ... -goldmined

This was a fantastic LP, and now people don't need a forum account to read the thread.

rampaging-poet wrote:Almost all of my points are in Vitality, Strength, and Endurance. I put a few into the other things early on when I didn't really know what I was doing. I'll definitely have to sit down and put together a list of what I can carry and the stats for each piece. The wiki will help with that. I just looked up the gold-hemmed black set, and the fact that it doesn't need upgrades makes mixing and matching things easier.

Well, sounds like you're a megabruiser. In which case things like the BK Greataxe and Demon Hammer and all that are up your ally.

Anyone remember Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura? I'm trying to take a level 10 elf mage with Fireflash, Harm, and okay social skills and make him into a credible melee fighter. Any tips? Where should I look for armor/robes?

Also, is there any good way to stock up on lots of light fatigue restoration potions?

I've never heard of that game(s), but now I find myself intrigued. Could you tell me more about it/them, Avoraciopoctules?

http://www.gog.com/game/arcanum_of_stea ... ck_obscura

An isometric RPG that came out like 12 years ago, Arcanum is a world in conflict between the forces of technology and magic. Large and powerful machines reinforce natural law nearby, and strong magic has side effects including little random fluctuations in the coefficient of friction.

The practical effect of this is that magic and technology mess each other up, and every character has a rated affinity for one of the two based on their known skills.

My favorite thing about the game is the manual. It's written rather charmingly in-character, with lots of little mini-essays from in-setting scientists and academics.

It's not especially balanced, and the scripting shows its age, but there's lots of cool stuff to do and a number of fan-made mods that improve the experience. You can breeze through the game as a brain-damaged half ogre who punches everything, play a half-elven debutante who has a small army of henchman that do everything but the talking, any of several varieties of wizard (spamming harm costs one character point and could take you through the whole game with high magick affinity, but there's lots of more complicated tricks), or technologists who rummage through weeds and garbage and cobble together deadly grenades and cocaine-based wonder drugs.

I still want to try a run where I play the Master of Magnets, who attaches a bullet/arrow repelling device to his top hat and blasts opposition with lightning from his tesla rod. Mid-game, I'll have a few suitcases that unfold into deadly clockwork robot spiders that do my bidding. Or a thief who resolves all truly threatening conflict by sneaking up on the enemies and planting lit sticks of dynamite in the toughest one's pants.

I liked making characters in Arcanum more than actually playing the game. That said, Virgil is a fantastic NPC.

My sister played the hell out of it multiple times. Apparently if you're really stupid (dumb enough that the character never gets Virgil's name right), it's impossible to have access to the conversation that lets you actually go and achieve the good ending?

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Anyone remember Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura? I'm trying to take a level 10 elf mage with Fireflash, Harm, and okay social skills and make him into a credible melee fighter. Any tips? Where should I look for armor/robes?

Also, is there any good way to stock up on lots of light fatigue restoration potions?

The typical magical warrior combines haste (is this a spell or am I misremembering) and tempus fugut (Sp) for a broken number of turns.

That said, getting there can be difficult. Arcanum has critical hit table from back when RPGs were retarded and you are likely to critical miss with hilarious consequences. I lost two half ogres after they manged to critical hit themselves for lethal damage. You are in the fire tree, so you should have a buff spell that gives you four dexterity. You can sustain two of those with 9 constitution and that, plus a few levels of melee should get you started. I think expert level melee protects you from critical misses, so you probably want to hold of until then.

I just beat Dark Souls. In the end I used a +5 Black Knight Greatsword and most of Havel's set. +10 Steel Armour gave better protection and I had the rest of the set for Poise. I had enough Endurance that I didn't need Havel's Ring to move, so I used the fire and physical protection rings. It took a few tries for me to learn Gwyn's attacks, but blocking his first attack and parrying the second worked very well. It only took four or five parries to kill him.

On Dark Souls... what exactly does it mean to be a god? Seems like you're just a very strong being that doesn't age that can't fly. If D. Soul's bosses were placed on the D&D scale, they'd be around lvl 6 tops, yeah?

I don't know what was wrong with Arcanum, but I could never find it engaging. It had many nice features, a universe that looked nice on the paper, but it lacked something.

I think it was the problem of being too generic. Yes you could play whatever you wanted, but the game didn't really let you express it. You had to follow the main quest, which was quite uninteresting, and do stuff on the side because XP.

OgreBattle wrote:On Dark Souls... what exactly does it mean to be a god? Seems like you're just a very strong being that doesn't age that can't fly. If D. Soul's bosses were placed on the D&D scale, they'd be around lvl 6 tops, yeah?

Gwyn used to be a LOT stronger.

And given the sheer HP and resilience of some of them, as well as size/damage, I'd give them up to level 11.

I mean, you do kill a couple of nineheaded Hydras over the course of the game. Abd a Gargantuan-sized [dragon].

Seath is a particularly freaky dragon.

This is a not particularly good exercise, since it's hard to separate player skill from character power here. The strongest stuff will shred you if you let it hit.
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Edit: Oh, wait, derp. Of course you went back to the Asylum, you found the doll...

OgreBattle wrote:On Dark Souls... what exactly does it mean to be a god? Seems like you're just a very strong being that doesn't age that can't fly. If D. Soul's bosses were placed on the D&D scale, they'd be around lvl 6 tops, yeah?

Not all of the bosses in Dark Souls lack counters to flight. Gwyn does fly, but he doesn't have any ranged attacks. I've heard Gwyndolin teleports, but I never fought him. The hydras have breath weapons with a longer range than anything you can use. Quelagg is a pyromancer in addition to being fused to a giant spider that spits magma. The Moonlight Butterfly flies and shoots lasers. The Hellkite Wyvern is a flying dragon who will kill you with one or two shots of its breath weapon. There's a manticore in the DLC that both flies and spits deadly needles. Most of the non-flying bosses are encountered in places where there isn't space for you to fly either. They all have attacks with enough area of effect that you'd be in trouble if they swing anywhere near you, so just blinding them or hiding doesn't solve the encounter automatically.

Gwyndolin does teleport. And shoots arrows and magic. he's a kiter.

The Manticore doesn't shoot needles, he shoots lightning. And his tail can poison you.

The DLC also has what's supposedly only True Dragon in the game--Kalameet. Who flies, up until an NPC initiates the bossfight by pinning his wing to his side. With an arrow bigger than you are.

Seath flies, but mostly chooses not to during the fight.

The Giant Fat-Assed Demons fly, but not very well.

And the Harpies fly. But mostly try to slap your head off. Or peck you on the head so hard their beak disappears.

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

This was a much cooler time-sink than I expected.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

This was a much cooler time-sink than I expected.

Agreed, I found it oddly engaging to try and build from such a humble beginning, though I could see how it might get tedious further on.

Maxus wrote: The Manticore doesn't shoot needles, he shoots lightning. And his tail can poison you.

My bad. I knew he had a ranged attack and a very spiky tail, but I forgot what the attack was. He's the only DLC boss I've fought because I kept getting owned by the forest guardian giants and left.

rampaging-poet wrote:

Maxus wrote: The Manticore doesn't shoot needles, he shoots lightning. And his tail can poison you.

My bad. I knew he had a ranged attack and a very spiky tail, but I forgot what the attack was. He's the only DLC boss I've fought because I kept getting owned by the forest guardian giants and left.

Those bastards are a pain.

If anyone's got Metal Gear Rising on the 360, the Blade Wolf and Jetstream Sam DLCs are free this week.

Update: It seems the Blade Wolf and Jetstream Sam DLCs are free on box Xbox and PS3, from now on.

Blade wrote:I don't know what was wrong with Arcanum, but I could never find it engaging. It had many nice features, a universe that looked nice on the paper, but it lacked something.

I think it was the problem of being too generic. Yes you could play whatever you wanted, but the game didn't really let you express it. You had to follow the main quest, which was quite uninteresting, and do stuff on the side because XP.

I broke my teeth on the interface.

I kept ditching the game after really dumb stuff happened. Like the crystal ball quest, where you only find out about the blood curse you got when you tell the questgiver you were cursed later.

Nowadays, I just use the Virgil Debug Conversation and give myself mountains of XP and Fate Points. That makes the game feel much less stupid, you only go on tedious errands if they actually sound interesting.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I kept ditching the game after really dumb stuff happened. Like the crystal ball quest, where you only find out about the blood curse you got when you tell the questgiver you were cursed later.

Nowadays, I just use the Virgil Debug Conversation and give myself mountains of XP and Fate Points. That makes the game feel much less stupid, you only go on tedious errands if they actually sound interesting.

I have played through it the "hard" way (which is to harm everyone to death with 100% magic affinity and have a bunch of utility spells) but I definitely find the game to be more fun when you give yourself maxed all tech skills and you construct your super suit of electricity and blow people up. (Obviously you can get there by just farming, but exploiting gets past the grind, and unlike pokemon or WoW, the grinding isn't particularly fun in Arcanum, and a full power character is not grossly more powerful than a completed tutorial character/first town character).

I always play through it the best way (as a mage with harm, medium magic affinity, and a bunch of companions). I restarted or made significant rollbacks about two dozen times before I found it, and now I can't force myself to start a different character because why would I play a suboptimal character. I tried to find the one true path with technology but got scared of the projected effort and time expenditure.