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Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all
Combat isn't that bad, you big babies. You choose to focus on Block (str and con boost base block) or Dodge (you'll want high dex for better base dodge) as your defense and raise that skill with the highest priority. Your chosen weapon is second priority, a support skill like Craft or Alchemy is tertiary and everything else is to taste. (always take Streetwise)

Then you pretend that you're playing a real human who doesn't want to die and try not to pick fights until you are solid as a rock. Your deadliest encounters are always going to be ones where you're flying solo. There are a fair number of those fights in the first town that are just begging you to step up and get murked before you have the skills and gear to hack it. (Skipping these fights entirely might lose you a grand total of ~6 points to spend on combat skills, so not much)

Block+Blunt or Axes wearing the heaviest armor you can get and dropping a couple points in Alchemy for healing and poison is a pretty solid build. If you want to use two-handers, you're making a Dodge build.

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Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all

Glazius posted:

This almost feels like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books. I guess you've got to manually trek about and combat's a bit more involved than that, but they capture the aesthetic pretty well.

Yeah, that's pretty on the nose. The "optimal" way to play is to not spend any skill points and savescum through scenarios, spending the bare minimum of points to succeed at what you're trying to do by reloading multiple times if you fail and finding the magic numbers to skate through. People complained that the game made them do that. :wtc:

Some people really hate failure. Those are the people who scum through a CYOA the first time.

Pvt.Scott
Feb 16, 2007

What God wants, God gets, God help us all

Jack2142 posted:

Yeah the game is really un-fun if you try to power game it in my opinion, the game really shines when you just try to wing it and then sometimes pull off crazy poo poo... the game always have options even for the most hilariously incompetently statted characters for the most part.

Just modern RPG's even very good ones like the Witcher make people go crazy with "100% optimal completion run"!!! I went through blind on three playthroughs before looking at guides and felt I got a completed game and was astounded at all the poo poo I missed.


Also yeah the Developer is insane. Plenty of stuff is gated, but as mentioned you can pretty easily play your way through the game without min-maxing, just sometimes people hit a hard check and then start beating their head against it to unlock the content. I did that trying to fight a group of thugs for an hour or two in Teron before I just embraced I wouldn't be able to accomplish everything in a play through and this game went from terrible to pretty fun in my eyes.

The reward for any of the "random encounter" combats in Teron is usually just 1-2 points of combat xp, and in almost all of them, having nominal streetwise will straight up tell you "this is a horrible idea that will likely get you killed." At least one of them, you get the same xp for avoiding the trap. I love it.

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