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Yeah, alchemy is a major gold generator. Most of the potions are gold-positive, and the high-end ones (like Potions of Renewal that cure the Drain status) are quite lucrative. It's mostly only needed if you have a Bishop along though and thus have to buy every new spellbook you see.
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Aug 31, 2020 20:05
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The underwater section fills me with dread even after all this time. I remember hitting some nasty (and one VERY nasty) encounters down there.
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Sep 1, 2020 11:36
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Nemo2342 posted:The underwater section fills me with dread even after all this time. I remember hitting some nasty (and one VERY nasty) encounters down there. Oh yeah, the underwater section is potentially one of the nastiest parts of the game because a lot of your crowd control is likely to be fire magic. Thankfully this party is exceptionally physical heavy, so that gives me a leg up, but certain high-level psionic enemies are baaaaaaaaad news if you don't rock Soul Shield.
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Sep 1, 2020 12:36
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Yeah the underwater section is pretty rough. Can't wait to see how you handle it.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:28
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The thing that always, always trips me up about the underwater section is that I never remember that Haste is a Fire spell, so I'll use my bard's Rousing Drums and get a failure message identical to when you just flub a cast normally and be incredibly confused for a round of combat or two.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:41
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Zurai posted:The thing that always, always trips me up about the underwater section is that I never remember that Haste is a Fire spell, so I'll use my bard's Rousing Drums and get a failure message identical to when you just flub a cast normally and be incredibly confused for a round of combat or two. Hilariously enough, however, your bard is perfectly capable of getting the right tune out of a saxophone underwater.  Actually now I wonder what instruments actually would, realistically, produce something we could call music underwater.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:07
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PurpleXVI posted:Hilariously enough, however, your bard is perfectly capable of getting the right tune out of a saxophone underwater. Theoretically, every music instrument working by vibration should work normally. Stuff like drums or triangles. They'd only sound different, because the waves propagate through a different medium.
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Sep 1, 2020 21:54
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Part 010: The Wet Update  Welcome to the Mt. Gigas underwater caves. As mentioned before, we're locked out of using fire magic, which is of course what most of the locals will be weak to, so the physical fighters will be lifting the heavy load for this one. If you had a magic heavy party, this area could get really gross to fight your way through.    This first section is mostly a same-y looking blue-green corridor with the occasional branch(which always ends up rejoining the main corridor later, so there aren't any actual alternate routes or blind corridors with stuff in them). Mainly what keeps this interesting at all is that there are some exciting new enemies here to try to kick our rear end.  Here's a look at the automap for this area so far. It should give a good idea of what exploring looks like.    First up, Squids and Depth Dwellers. Squids can, of course, blind us with ink spit(though thankfully our resistances makes it very rare they land it) and have a melee tentacle attack with an odd side effect of "chaining" to other party members if the first hit lands. I don't recall any other attacks in the game functioning like this. Depth Dwellers are mostly just melee goons, but high-level versions of them tend to have psionic spells to add to the mix.  Interestingly, the squid in this game actually move "correctly," that is to say they swim towards us with their heads, then once they come to a halt they flip over and present their mouths and tentacles.  Depth Dwellers are weird mutant fellas. I could swear I remember them being asymmetric with one side having 3 tentacles and the other side 2, so I'm wondering whether I'm misremembering or whether it's just the psychic high-level variants that have that model. I guess we'll see! Because it's not quite the last time we'll see the water tunnels.  Baruta Fish are generic swarming melee-only enemies. They're somewhat difficult to deal with because of our lack of broad-target spells. About the only thing we can hit them with is Noxious Fumes from Stony and Werdna, and while it helps mess them up with Nauseate and the occasional KO effect, the damage is just small chip damage over time.    And the one group of enemies I feel bad killing, these cute manta rays. They're like bigger, badder Baruta Fish that can also spit energy bolts at the team. Missile Shield deflects most of them, so they don't really present a real threat, but they do represent a huge lump of hit points to work through. In the end, this place is really just a pathway to...    The Bayjin Shallows are where we get the real fun of being underwater. As the name implies, we're now a lot closer to the surface. We arrive on this scenic overlook of...   Nessie's Lair. Now, I've said before that single big enemies in this game are rarely much of a threat, Nessie is one of the exceptions to the rule. If the Southeast Wilderness and Nebdar's Crew were the two nastiest group battles in the game, Nessie is the nastiest single opponent in the game. She's also... semi-optional. You have to go through the Bayjin Shallows at some point, but with a bit of luck, a bit of skill and a lot of casting Chameleon, you can dodge around the edge of the area and the worst of it. Of course, I gently caress up and get her attention.    On the bright side that makes her turn around and you can see her lovely face!    Each of those columns of rising bubbles is a jump pad leading up to one of the area's exits. Aside from the way back to Mt. Gigas, there's a path to Bayjin and a path to the Sea Caves.    We also find part of the remnants of the Umpani expedition near the jump pad up to the Bayjin path. If I remember right you can turn these in to either Yamir or Balbrak for a sad comment.   Up top on the Bayjin path we find one of the game's fixed encounters. I'm not sure if these guys respawn, because I've never been back, but I kind of hope that they do because, like the Hoarder Slime in the Northern Wilderness Retro Dungeon, they have an exclusive drop list with several rare weapons you can't find anywhere else, among them lightsabers(or *LIGHT* *SWORD*s) that do double damage to androids and would be nice to have for a certain later area.  They're not exceptionally scary, though. If you can handle the other ghosts you'll have run into in the past, they have no extra tricks, just higher numbers. Lots of mental spells, putting you to sleep, trying to scare you, etc.   One of their more common drops that I've gotten every single time(this time I get THREE) of them is the VapoRizer, a Gadgeteer gadget that doesn't need assembling, instead coming pre-made. It just tries to cast Instant Death on a single target, which, at this point of the game, is kind of an ineffective thing. A single-target "condition" spell will bounce off a lot of things. Also is it just me or does it look like a cartoony bundle of dynamite with a scope and an "underbarrel" bayonet?   The second thing we run into here is, once again, the Rynjin.   Scavengers and Thralls tend to be the lowest-tier troops the Rynjin have, with the Thralls often starting out neutral and not aggressively picking fights like the rest of them. Battlelords, conversely, are the nastiest thing they can bust out. If you don't have Magic Screen up and put up Soul Shield on the first round of combat, you can expect to get pretty well hosed.  Pretty much anything they hit you with has a chance to cause Afraid or Insane status effects, and I do not want an insane Twinkles or Chewbecka to reduce the rest of the party to paste for a laugh. Still, down here, they're easy enough to meet on your own terms. Trigger combat mode around the corner, queue up Soul Shield and Elemental Shield(plus any other in-combat buffs you want), step out from around the corner, target them with something long-range so you're sure battle's joined and then it's usually a sorted situation. Without their spells to mess you up, the Rynjin usually can't do much.    Once the ghosts and the first squad of Rynjin are out of the way, nothing else is in the way of you entering Bayjin proper.    Sadly, the "civil war" that RFS-81 tells us about doesn't actually show up. There are no non-hostile Rynjin NPC's at all, nor any infighting between them. His quote suggests that there was more planned for Bayjin than what we get to see in the end. Still, for anyone arriving here earlier than with us or without Soul Shield, Bayjin nonetheless easily becomes memorable, simply as a result of the absolute hell which it can be.   Bayjin is a crescent-shaped island, and when you come from the Shallows you emerge "inside" the crescent while if you come from the Swamp you arrive at the outside of the curve. If you follow the path laid out for you, you'll be walking right up into the middle of the Rynjin settlement, which is a bad place to go. You don't want to head in there without approaching it more tactically. So the smart thing to do is to keep your scuba gear on and hop off the path into the water to your right and arrive at one of the "ends" of the crescent.   The other main residents of Bayjin are crabs, and one of them is the top-tier type of crab, the Curare Crabs. They're actually quite dangerous because, in addition to being beefy blocks of HP with strong melee attacks, they can also blind, KO and paralyze. For extra laughs, their melee attacks are also Extended rather than Short range, so if you walk up to them to get the melee crew into range, they'll reach over your front line and go snipty snop on your casters.  There are a lot of crabs on this stupid island.    This is probably the source of the wreckage that washed up on the beach in the Swamp.   Now this thing we can combine with the Microwave Chip we got all the way back in the Monastery, in the second update, to make...  And it's actually pretty decent! It may be single-target, but since it actually does damage, it has a status of being other than yes/no, which means you don't need to punch 100% through the target's resistances. In top of that, fire resistance is in fact the weakness of a lot of the creatures on and around Bayjin.   And now we also have an intact Black Box for the reader back at the Arnika spaceport. Sooner or later we'll actually get a reason to go there and plug it in.    The only real terrain feature of Bayjin other than the water and the sand is this little cliff "range" along the broadest part of the crescent. It is, like every single other bit of raised terrain in this game, populated by sprites. loving sprites.  A slight overview of the Bayjin situation. Once you've collected the stuff from the wreckage, the main important thing to hit up in this place is the two green spots, the only two NPC's that'll talk to us rather than click clack or hiss. Unfortunately it's more or less impossible to reach them without genociding the Rynjin.   These little idols are all over the place and I presume they're meant to be objects of worship. Probably not Nessie, though, since she doesn't have big floppy rabbit ears.   The biggest challenge here is sneaking up on the pixies without anything to really hide behind, but there are a couple of dips in the path that you can sneak into and then when the pixies come close enough you can jump over and bat them into the horizon. Screenshots of it will be absent since I didn't feel like editing out little pixelated pixie tits a second time. Goddamn horny videogame developers.  They're guarding a little stash of decent gear which we loot after evicting them.   I slide down the side of the cliff to the rear side of the village. There aren't a lot of patrolling Rynjin around, most of them are in their little shacks, so I can step off to the side, open the door, activate combat mode, step inside and gut them like the walking fish they are.    Then I can hide out in their empty houses and rest up between each massacre! Hm, it sounds a bit evil now that I'm narrating it...   In one of them I gib this Battlelord and his cronies and collect the spellbook behind him, which sets me up with a third Portal caster. Considering that I have an Upper Mt. Gigas portal and a Marten's Bluff teleporter portal, I don't have a good place to put it right now, but once we visit the Rapax Rift I'll have something to use it for.  In another hut I find what's presumably the looted scuba gear from the Umpani expedition. It gives you a way into the Shallows and off to the Sea Caves even if you don't align with the Umpani, since without going through the Umpani training course you don't have an access to the UTU.   Now, of course the hut with the prisoners in it has its door facing towards the Rynjin Chieftain and his buddies. So I sneak around the back and prepare to ambush them  Anyone watching the minimap better than me can tell that I have completely missed the pair, thankfully only pair, of Curare Crabs sneaking up behind me. They could very easily have made the battle go south.    Kills with the Microwave Blaster are appropriately dramatic.  I also even up the fight with an elemental. The reason it's a small one is because Aurora can summon them now, too. Your max # of elementals is one per caster, so having multiple summoners can help even out the game's nastier fights, attract fire, lay down some punches and so on. Still, this is a relatively low-level group of Rynjin, being pre-placed. None of them are even as powerful as a single Battlelord and I've laid the smack down on almost half a dozen of those at this point. The crabs enjoy one whole round on my back lines where they whiff every single swing at Stony and Werdna.  Let's get heroic.   Ooooooooooooh, a cage full of loot! I break into it before I bother to save either of these two losers who got themselves caught. It contains another magic instrument, another pair of Mantis Gloves and an outdated spear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjlBPHrQJfM Now Jan-Ette doesn't ever actually say it, but the Helazoid Banner she gives you is meant to go to Braffit in Arnika, where it earns you an XP bonus. She also drops a Frontier Phaser, a decently strong gun running off Power Paks that has a chance to one-shot-kill. If Power Paks were more broadly available, it might make a decent off-hand ranged weapon for someone. But as it is, likely your only character with Modern Weapon skill will be your Gadgeteer and their Omnigun is still a better choice.    Now for Glumph. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HChyxQ3TqpA If you get here without the quest, Glumph just grumbles at you and makes his way back to Mt. Gigas on his own(somehow), not sure how this interacts with later actually getting the quest. Secondly, he'll really only tolerate the most direct path back to Mt. Gigas. If, say, you attempt to head overland with him, he'll eventually lose his poo poo and go aggro on the party. Thankfully returning his dog tags to Yamir also counts as a successful completion of the quest.  However, some clever lad called me has a Portal set up at Upper Mt. Gigas so we'll just warp our way back.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIEL3seAqwU lol Glumph, what a loving coward. Thankfully saving him gets us a truly MASSIVE XP reward. We will, of course, not destroy the T'rang. Instead we'll teleport back and get Z'ant's last quests. Then we'll see where we stand.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njCIBpkcIxc Now, if we hadn't already done so, we'd need to reach Trynton and get the "shiny metal ball" from the Hogar cage, then tromp off to Bayjin and score the black box from the crashed Helazoid ship. Since we've already done that, all we need to do is pop off to Arnika, though I do a bit of shopping on the way.   Also I wanted to hear some nice words from Sadok, he's a good spiderslug just like Z'ant.     Then the usual teleport to the house and quick skip across the lawn to Arnika(of course with the requisite pummelling of wildlife along the way).   I also stop by He'li's since she's got a brief dialogue bit for us advancing the plot some in various ways. Thankfully if you miss one it doesn't get overwritten, instead it just gets buffered so first you get the oldest blurb, then the next oldest, etc. until you're at the most recent.    It's a shame that the only NPC's that have updating dialogue like this are often ones you likely won't revisit. For instance, He'li has nothing in her store inventory that'll matter to you pretty much ever, and doesn't give out any quests either. Likewise Braffit's inventory also quickly gets outdated. Meanwhile the few NPC's whose inventory remains somewhat endgame relevant(Bela, Croc, and one we've yet to meet) don't have much updating dialogue. Sadok does, as we see, have a little, though, and while he's not the best merchant he is an unlikely source of some of the nicer bow ammunition that can be purchased rather than found. Someone also wanted me to try handing Rattus Rattus' note to Lorrac, the clerk at the bank... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97BH6zSvxw0 It's sadly not all that dramatic, and Lorrac and the bank guards even have their own Higardi Bank faction so murdering them doesn't piss off the rest of Arnika. On the one hand it makes sense to not completely gently caress the player for getting their heist on, on the other hand it also makes sense because who the gently caress likes banks?   Anyway, let's revisit the spaceport.   I accidentally do things the wrong way around and pop up the tower first.    Now it can scan ships' orbital locations based on coordinates we extra from black boxes downstairs. I strongly believe you were originally meant to have been able to visit one or more of these ships, possibly using the Mooks' Callisto to get into orbit, and that's why this functionality exists for other ships than the Dark Savant's.     Then we just pop upstairs and enter the complex code "1 1 2" into the tracker...    And then back to pass those coordinates to Z'ant.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyy9WROdLFo Of course, we won't actually be destroying the Umpani Galleon atop Mt. Gigas(in a canon update, anyway), since everyone preferred the Alliance ending to teaming up with the T'rang or Umpani(or destroying both). Though once again I feel like it speaks to the T'rang being the smarter of the two forces by the fact that they actually infiltrate the other side and have prepared a way into their very sanctum rather than requiring their recruits to just storm headfirst into the enemy fortress. So it's time to get the endgame ready. Off to pick up Saxx, then next update I'm going to go fight Nessie just to show that I can, before heading to the Sea Caves to recover the Destinae Dominus. After that, it'll be a straight shot to Rapax Rift to get access to Ascension Peak(and accidentally unifying the T'rang and Umpani along the way). Tune in next update to watch a rhino play a trumpet while a robot punches an underwater dinosaur in the face.
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Sep 2, 2020 02:10
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My first time through I ran head-first into Nessie, then right into the middle of the Bayjin camp. That was not a good time.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:16
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PurpleXVI posted:rather than requiring their recruits to just storm headfirst into the enemy fortress. The way to destroy the T'Rang is, however, right out in the open. You don't need any kind of special passcard to reach it - you've already been there, at the very computer console you use to sabotage their ship and destroy it.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:20
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Did I miss you looting the Bayjin Good Chest? I mean, half the time it still has junk despite the name, but I was half expecting you to luck into all the good poo poo that I've never seen.
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Sep 2, 2020 04:50
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Zurai posted:Did I miss you looting the Bayjin Good Chest? I mean, half the time it still has junk despite the name, but I was half expecting you to luck into all the good poo poo that I've never seen. It had juuuuuuuuuuuunk, and the only others who roll on the same table are the Buccaneer Ghosts. I try not to waste screenshot space showing off trash drops unless they're hilariously trash. I got like two scrolls and a pair of pants.
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Sep 2, 2020 11:52
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Libluini posted:Theoretically, every music instrument working by vibration should work normally. Stuff like drums or triangles. They'd only sound different, because the waves propagate through a different medium. Stringed instruments (guitar, harp, violin, voice, piano kinda) would work best because you can't get water inside a string so they work basically the same way regardless of the medium. However, if you're lost in an underwater forest and you start hearing banjo music it's going to sound like a hundred times creepier. You can play brass (trumpet, trombone) and reed (saxophone, clarinet) instruments just fine, too, because you fill them with air from your lungs. I feel like you'd have to replace the felt pads fairly often. Tuba might be difficult unless you have Michael Phelps lungs. Non-reed woodwinds like flute and piccolo, not so much, the body will be filled with an uncompressible substance a thousand times denser than air and intensely more echoreflective. But your typical flute player is terrified of water anyway, with the exception of Herbie Mann who took 3 medals in the 1954 European Aquatics championship. However, once the sound is produced water is so echoreflective that distortion occurs almost immediately. And, of course, air bubbles. Our buddy Saxx would die inside a little bit every time he had to play a tune. - Naturally the Japanese have this covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPGPmOVNj7s - There are certain challenges playing drums underwater: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1688018577929011 - You could even put a band together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ-OkKOJVkI edit: improper number of X's in "Saxx" Araganzar fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 11:54
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I like how you can rely on the Japanese. If there's something people could potentially do, never mind if they should or would, one of their game shows will feature it. Thank you for adding content to the thread. New update coming before too long.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:39
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Part 011: Real Ultimate Knowledge Alright, I've got a quick errand to run in Arnika before we're off to the wet part of the gameworld again.    Bringing the Helazoid Banner to Braffit is +30k XP for everyone, which is in the region where it's never a completely forgettable amount, but it's obviously far more if you manage to do it early. Technically you could probably manage it as soon as you have access to Soul Shield and/or Magic Screen, but sequence-breaking is actually bad in some ways, because a lot of chests and other drop lists have "level sensors," i.e. if you crack them open at a sufficiently low level, some of the better gear on the list is just deleted before it rolls for drops.  Then it's time to get Saxx underwater. We can't do it without teleporting him in or bringing him in KO'd. I wasn't smart enough to set a teleport marker last I was underwater and I'm too lazy to go back and do that, then warp back out to pick up Saxx. Instead I just make him play the Dulcimer until he collapses from exhaustion, then slap scuba gear on him and haul him into the caves.  He isn't very happy about it.  He'll also keep repeating this voice line as long as he's anywhere he doesn't like being, which will be a good deal of the remainder of the game. In any case, the Mt. Gigas Underwater Caves have some updated hostiles to deal with.  Death Rays. Which are like Mantas except they spit out every single instant death spell in the game at you, more or less. Instant Death and Death Cloud get bandied about quite a lot, and while Soul Shield deflects the former, the latter gets in one lucky roll in one fight and wipes out Aurora and Werdna.  I'm also amused that summoned water elementals still drip water underwater. I end up being a bit disappointed that I never come across the last class of underwater monster, Psi Sharks(and their upgraded version, Omega Sharks), as I wanted to show them off. But fighting underwater is hell so I don't feel like trawling through encounters until I turn some of them up.  Time to slay us a dragon.    The most important part is to keep Soul Shield and Elemental Shield up all fight, no matter what happens, because while Nessie has a nasty physical attack and breath weapon, her spells are probably the worst thing she can bust out. 50% of her actions will be spells, rolled on the following list: 10% Acid Bomb 10% Armormelt 10% Element Shield 10% Body of Stone 10% Hex 10% Blizzard 10% Draining Cloud 10% Concussion 20% Earthquake Her armor and resistances are already massive, so I don't care much about her defensive casts, but Earthquake and Blizzard are huge target-all damage dealers, and Concussion is a really nasty single-target damage dealer(with a side order of Insanity if not resisted).    First round is me getting up my buffs and Aurora summoning an elemental, second round I get lucky and Nessie starts the fight by busting out Acid Bomb. Still some annoying damage-over-time, but not the nastiest thing she could bring to the table.  And this is what the damage from her breath weapon looks like. If she'd had just a bit of support, say from a few Depth Dwellers or Death Rays, the battle could have turned out much nastier.  I keep chipping away at her and summon a second elemental, and I think the elementals actually end up accounting for close to half her total health by the end of the fight.  The spookiest moment is when she casts Earthquake. Look what it does to Werdna. If I hadn't already had a heal-all from Stony queued up, the Acid Bomb damage over time would have melted him at the end of the round.    But in the end, RFS lands the killing kick to Nessie's jaw and sends her to the seafloor for good. So what's the big reward for killing Nessie, considering that you can circumvent her on the one occasion when you need to visit her? Well, firstly she's worth a lot of XP, secondly, in a corner of her lair you can't just sneak to lies...     It's a high-level chest with its own chart of what you can roll up, stuff like Excalibur and such. Let's see what I get, because usually I have about the same luck with this chest as I do with the Buccaneer Ghosts. And, sadly, chest drops are pre-rolled when you first enter an area, so they're not gameable like monster drops are(though reading some folks' attempts at getting a *LIGHT* *SWORD* from the ghosts it seems not uncommon for it to take upwards of 40 rerolls).  A lot of trash and ONE rare item!  Actually a pretty excellent misc. equippable.   Then there's another shallow path up to the third exit from the Shallows. Nothing exciting happens along the way except that a random encounter finally gets Werdna to his level 7 spells. I've been saving picks so he now knows Nuclear Blast(high Fire damage to all visible enemies), Asphyxiate(attempt to kill all visible enemies) and Concussion(attempt to detonate one very specific enemy's brains to mush).      Welcome to the Sea Caves. They're... mostly alright. Now, funny thing. Every single guide, everywhere, says that Saxx will not go to the Sea Caves. This is theoretically correct as there's stuff between the Sea Caves and anywhere else that he does not want to go through. But once he's there? The complaining stops and the maluses vanish. He even has "welcome to the Sea Caves"-dialogue like RFS!    The Sea Caves really consist only of a long strip of beach, winding back and forth, and a cliff wall with the titular caves drilled right into it. If you start at the wrong end, you may well have some running back and forth to do. So go right, and left, and head to the very end of each side, before attacking the middle.     A theoretically powerful item, but I have no idea whether anything in the calculations for Gadgeteer/Bard toys functions as a stand-in for Power Cast. Some of the theoretical equations I've seen consider it to be the case, but I don't, as I've generally felt like their high-level functions are pretty unreliable.   The reason you want to start at the ends of the area is because you'll have to trip back to them before you can finish the middle, as they contain some important puzzle-solving bits and bobs. For instance.   Next to this chest, a hook and line we'll need.   Also take note of these holes in the ceiling as you explore the outlying caves. That should indicate what the fate of the insufficiently supplied is: dropping down pits to start over again. Though in fairness to the game, the drops will generally deposit you near some of the items you need to complete the main cave.  Also for some reason it's always night when I come here. I wonder if that's just a coincidence or scripted to set the time of day when you come up out of the shallows.     So that's a piece of string with a hook and a sledgehammer. We've just got one more item to collect further down the beach.    Time for an actually not bullshit puzzle. Which doesn't feel like something I need to praise, but videogames are generally bad at providing the player with puzzles that aren't somehow jackassery.  Reach the end of the beach.   Reach this cave that looks a bit more like a cleft into the rocks than a hole into the rocks, at least at first.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNiYlFqcwvs So you don't really need to do this at all. In fact there's no purpose to it in any way, shape or form. Though bashing down that wall does feel somewhat cool.   Because you can never go this way. Instead what you need to do is go into the side tunnel and take the first branch...    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlrtgwX0h0 Don't mind me setting a portal as I'm unsure if I remember right.   And then fighting almost two dozen Dank Beetles. They're just physical attackers with no real tricks, and, here's the thing: they're too big for the area. Only one of them can attack you at once. If they'd had the size of the small mites and bugs we fought back in Trynton, they could have hit you with multiple beetles and perhaps been a challenge. As it is, Chewbecka, RFS and Twinkles chew through them so fast that often one of the three will have no target in a given round because the other two already flattened whoever was in reach. Meanwhile Werdna and Stony let loose with Asphyxiate after Asphyxiate which takes down three or four beetles in total.  Just look at this!   In any case, once I'm no longer hip deep in crushed beetle husks, I enter this little widening in the caves. On the right is a way to hop down to beach level, though it's raised just enough that you can't get up from down there without climbing the previous cave and dropping down. But it gives you a way out if you come here without the string-and-hook. Enter the middle of the room and...    The game is pretty generous about giving you hints.   Climb up and you arrive behind the door that couldn't be opened from the other side.    Also the sound behind you is just a powered-up Death Lord called the Keeper of the Crypt. Despite his boosted stats and level, though, he lacks a lot of the nastier Death Lord tricks like casting Death Cloud and Death Wish. Which is pretty fair, considering that as far as I recall all Death Lords in the game are skippable while this fellow is not. He's backed up by a couple of no-account rebel ghosts. This encounter is one of those that would be scary if you beelined here, but as it is, we bop these goons into the afterlife quickly and get to poking at the room. It's got five entrances, counting the locked one behind us and the hole in the floor. So let's look at the remaining three.  One would, currently, just slide us down to where we came in.  Across from that is the path we need to take, it's littered with these skeletons that contain a few items and spawn a ghost when poked at. Since it's a single ghost of the type we just effortlessly killed four of, it's not very scary, but...  The first one also aggros some nearby buddies.   loving Adamantium Slimes. I hate these things so much. They're no real threat, BUT, BUT. They're 100% resistant to all elements except for fire AND they have a hidden 90% resistance to physical damage, too.  Look at what my beautiful damage numbers have been reduced to! It's a travesty. Really the only way to wear these assholes down is lucky rolls on Boiling Blood from Stony's Microwave Ray or lucky instakill rolls from Chewbecka, Twinkles, RFS and Aurora. Thankfully as long as they're by themselves they're just incredibly annoying, not dangerous. If they came in bigger groups in open areas, or as big globs of HP you couldn't safely turn your back on as smaller enemies flooded around you, they could actually be scary. In any case, there are two skeletons we want to loot.   This guy for an important key.   Not this guy, though I'm amused by it spawning the resulting ghost literally on top of me.   But this guy half-hidden behind the pillars. As long as someone in the party is wearing these boots, the sliding effect on the greenish floor textures is negated and we can walk across them safely. It allows access to a couple of chests(though of course they drop nothing nice for me, great stuff I had a pure Fighter along, though) and to progressing the game.  Back in the big room, I check out the last branch before continuing. It contains only one thing of note(though if we came here earlier it would also have had a nice bow upgrade for Aurora), which is another instrument for Saxx. This one casts Restoration, a cure-loving-everything-except-being-dead single-target spell. Great in case one of your frontliners gets piled up with conditions.  Now that we no longer slide into the chasm, we can carefully walk down to the edge and...   Make ourselves a bridge with the plank, then walk up the other side.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xnKHOyefbo So this is why you need the Helm of Serenity. If you just drop it in the party inventory, it counts as "everyone" carrying it and everyone thus becomes insane. You could also drop it on a single character who would then become insane. The only person not made insane by it, is the wearer of the Helm. Technically you could come here without it, if you didn't mind one character being permanently insane until you got your hands on it. The key Marten hands us at the end of the conversation is really just for opening the door we saw the back of on climbing up earlier. Nothing prevents us from just dropping down a hole or using a portal to get the hell out of here. Before we do so, though, let's admire the collection.    Now we just need to be able to access Ascension Peak. If we've paid even the slightest bit of attention, we know what that means.    Welcome to the Rapax Rift. The second-to-last major area in the game, though it does have a pretty drat big sub-area attached to it.
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Sep 4, 2020 04:15
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I can say from experience that the Negatair is quite reliable, particularly in encounters where you're dealing with large numbers of weaker enemies (i.e., the exact situation mass save-or-die spells are made for). I don't know offhand how it compares to actually casting Asphyxiate with higher spell circles, but I can't say I saw a huge difference in effectiveness between the gadget and the spell in my playthrough.
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Sep 4, 2020 05:31
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I really need to pay more attention to the LP forum, can't believe I missed this one for so long. Anyways, very late, but that Poseur's Cap aaaalll the way back in the Monastery isn't for cross-class characters, it's to give parties without a lockpicking class just enough skill in it to muddle through low-end locked doors so they don't get stuck before things like Knock and Knock Picks come on-line(or someone with max Strength to very patiently bash doors until the 1% chance finally kicked in and they opened). I was sorta there for the retro dungeon thing, but only on the sidelines; from what I can recall people were driving themselves up the wall because they kept trying high-level end-game items, and... I don't recall if one of the devs popped in with another clue, or if someone just tried it on a whim, but once the first unlock was found the rest didn't take that long. The very first time I played through the game, I got the *LIGHT* *SWORD* out of the Good Chest. It wasn't until later that I learned that it was a 2% drop. Needless to say, I've never seen another one, not from the chest nor the ghosts(which, if memory serves, also have the drop rate set at 2%, though whether it's 2% for the sword or 2% for the Wiz 7 Helazoid Vault drop table, I don't know). A Fighter with the sword mulches just about everything, and other classes aren't too shabby with it either. Oh, and from what I can recall, Ascension Peak doesn't actually get the blockage until you enter the area with at least one of the three plot items; though maybe talking to He'li with two items counts? I dunno. Fortunately, the Barrows is right nearby, so you can pop by and drop them off in one of the chests to drop a portal first if you want to bypass a certain bit of the game. You still need to go into Rapax lands to take care of something else, but the unsavory bit is skippable(ask me how I soft-locked my first solo run!).
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Sep 5, 2020 00:34
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IIRC the state of Ascension Peak actually depends on the current state of the quest items in your inventory. The game prevents you from dropping key quest items so it operates on the assumption that once you have 2+ of 3 artifacts you will always have 2+, but you can put them into chests to duck back under the trigger which I believe will actually clear the route for you.
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Sep 5, 2020 00:39
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Unoriginal One posted:Oh, and from what I can recall, Ascension Peak doesn't actually get the blockage until you enter the area with at least one of the three plot items; though maybe talking to He'li with two items counts? I dunno. Fortunately, the Barrows is right nearby, so you can pop by and drop them off in one of the chests to drop a portal first if you want to bypass a certain bit of the game. You still need to go into Rapax lands to take care of something else, but the unsavory bit is skippable(ask me how I soft-locked my first solo run!). What's the matter, aren't you looking forward to when the game becomes UNCOMFORTABLY HORNY in more ways than one? Guess who had to learn how to make censor bars in avidemux.
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Sep 5, 2020 05:31
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So if the Destinae Dominus makes the carrier insane, could you circumvent this by bringing a Psionic? Their entire deal is being immune to mental effects, after all. This way you wouldn't need the helmet of serenity.
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Sep 5, 2020 12:07
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Libluini posted:So if the Destinae Dominus makes the carrier insane, could you circumvent this by bringing a Psionic? Their entire deal is being immune to mental effects, after all. Huh. Hm. [one quick test character and a savegame edit to drop the DD into her inventory later...] It does work, but it lets you skip less than you'd think since A) you need to go through Trynton for the Astral Dominae anyway(unless there's some mad physics glitch to get up the back entrance without going all the way through) and B) you need a letter for the Mook to let you in to steal the Chaos Moliri, which requires you to either do a number of run-back-and-forth faction quests or bust into Marten's Bluff and kill Z'ant for the T'rang version of the letter(guess they did sort-of safeguard themselves against sociopaths softlocking the game). So much for the newest frontier in Wizardry 8 speedrunning strats with an all-Psionic party(and no RPC's).
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Sep 5, 2020 14:28
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PurpleXVI posted:So much for the newest frontier in Wizardry 8 speedrunning strats with an all-Psionic party(and no RPC's). Maybe it's not good for skipping parts of the game, but I'll definitely will give the thing to my Psionic, just because. The helmet of serenity will of course go to someone who can actually use the 30% mental res bonus. Edit: Found something. Steam posted:I killed Marten without the helm of serenity and picked up destinae dominus and quicksaved my game foolishly 3 times without realising that im screwing up so hard. Was stuck with insane party and not sure what to do next. Read the walkthrough after that and realised i had to find the shaman and get martens idol or something before this but i cant win any fight now because my party just kills themselves when the fight starts. Can anyone help me with this? 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Sep 6, 2020 |
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Sep 6, 2020 11:39
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Oh my God that's amazing. I think the only hope that guy has is to save-edit the DD out of his inventory and then re-add with a save editor once he's got the Helm of Serenity. Either that or bouncing off random easy enemies until he gets a win and can cross-class someone to psionic and give it to them.
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Sep 6, 2020 21:58
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh my God that's amazing. I think the only hope that guy has is to save-edit the DD out of his inventory and then re-add with a save editor once he's got the Helm of Serenity. Someone gave him some tips, and he "solved" this by giving the mobile insanity causer to the character he needed the least, then sleeping off the insanity from the other characters. Then he trekked around with that perma-insane character in tow and dealt with the missing quests until he got the helm of serenity, hardcore-style. Edit: I just realized, if he had had just one level-up on his way, he could have cross-classed that one into a psionic. The question is, what is more annoying to deal with: Doing the missing quests with a party permanently reduced by -1, or by dealing with the added complication of unwanted multiclassing?
Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Sep 6, 2020 |
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Sep 6, 2020 23:24
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Part 012: The Hell of Being In Hell  Welcome to scenic Rapax Rift. It's hell, but not for the reason you might think. I mean, yes, there's the lava. And every single inhabitant has horns and is evil. But that's not why it's hell for you, the player.    In any case, the path immediately splits left and right. There's nothing you need to the left, but an exciting cutscene and a bit of lore beckon. Also this place is swarming with low-level Rapax patrols that I'm sparing you having to see me chopping my way through.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDbj_kxtUh8 Warning, this video is a waste of your time as a viewer in the same way it's a waste for anyone playing the game. Let's go see what that was all about.    Looks like that guy just arrived from and vanished back into the magma after visiting this prison area.  It only has one actual cell and prisoner, however, the room on the right holds monsters instead.   Rapax corpses and revenants are relatively un-scary, but they do have a mild chance of diseasing someone, which sucks if you don't have a disease healer. I do, though, so who cares. They get flattened in like one combat round.   We could bruteforce this code lock easy, but there's no reason to do so yet since this guy can't actually leave at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nKBLq7_0sA I feel like there was originally going to be more of a storyline about not all of the Rapax being insane genocidal maniacs. Anyway, now we have a subquest for the Rapax Rift, finding the Staff of Ash for this guy. It's actually completely skippable, but it gets us a fat whack of XP(even for this stage of the game), and plus he asked us nicely.   The gate on the far side of the prison I haven't commented on is a shortcut for getting back here quickly later once we have the Staff of Ash. A nice little quality of life thing. Time to take the other path away from the entrance.    I unwisely decide to do a bit of sightseeing.   Let's get some nice screensh-  gently caress me. So, let's talk about why the Rapax Rift is really Hell. See, it's got very broken terrain, and in some parts of the game, with broken terrain/height differences, enemies can't aggro across them(like the switchback leading up to Bela in the Mountain Wilderness), but the Rift has no such barriers. Now, this is one of the less annoying ones, because the enemy can still path to us from there and we can actually fight and kill them(we will need to path to each other since killing enemies entirely via magic and ranged attacks takes forever).    Enemies who can't reach you for long enough eventually de-aggro so you can get out of the fight, but it's very inconsistent. Theses veterans de-aggroed until I reached them, and then re-aggroed.   Finally, mulched them.  Nice view from up here.   And instantly another encounter. The Rift has EXTREMELY high spawn rates for enemies.  At least this time the presence of a small squad of Rapax samurai adds some marginal challenge and requires me to pay attention to the fight.    Now we're getting to the real bad parts of the Rift. Because once we aggro someone who's on a differently elevated platform and can't get to us, disengaging is going to take like two or three minutes every single time.    This is another prison, and a competently built one, too. No one's getting out unless they feel like jumping over lava pits or someone comes by and folds down the grated floors over the lava flows. Sadly we can't save the prisoners here, even if we let them out, they just moan about how everything is doomed and Al-Sedexus is going to kick our asses and theirs, too. Not that we actually can let them out from here, the actual buttons for opening their cells are like half a kilometer away. Again, competent security design from the Rapax.   Another type of enemy that's almost unique to the Rift and its sub areas are Rapax initiates and priestesses. They're pretty unscary casters, though, and I think in two hours of stomping around the Rift the worst they managed to do was silencing Chewbecka and Lady a couple of times.   In addition to the constant spawns and borked engagements, the Rift has a couple of small one-way paths that can waste you some time if you take them at the wrong point. Though some of them don't feel like they're intended to be one-way. For instance, the path on the left here is just a little bit too steep to climb again, while I feel like it was probably meant to be climbable. Still, we'll hit this level first. There's actually something here we want.  Also looking down the cliff to our right we can see our eventual goal for this area.   This area has several small rooms and the buttons to open the cells back in the prison.    Each room has some combination of Priestesses and Initiates and some pre-placed loot around the edges. Most of this loot is just generic scrolls and potions.   Oh and this wand that has the exact same 3D model as every other generic wand, you'd be excused for thinking it was just a pair of Knock Picks or something. But is it? Nope!   If we want to get the Staff of Ash and free our Rapax prisoner buddy, we need this thing. Also if you were real hard up for a decent secondary weapon, you could do worse.   Another room holds another item we'll need if we didn't do the thing where we climb Ascension Peak with less than 2 of the trinity and set a portal in advance. Also we'll want this key because it unlocks some areas where we can potentially get some good loot. I then loop back quickly to listen to the prisoners whine.    Real bunch of downers. I also hope we don't meet this Al-Sedexus, they don't sound fun to deal with.    The little slope leads to four paths. The one straight ahead is just the quick path back to our prisoner buddy.  Immediately below the drop-down is a prison containing only Rapax undead. There's nothing important there and the pre-placed loot is garbage, too.  Then there's these two corridors. The one on the right is blocked by a locked door, the one on the left is open. Obviously we have to go where we can.   As soon as you get this far the screen starts shaking like crazy and a few small rocks fall from the ceiling. The cleft in the wall on the right heads to the other corridor we couldn't enter, but the bottom of the cleft is full of lava and so it remains uncrossable, for now. Up ahead is a Rapax spa where we murder the customers.   After a quick dip we then realize there was no reason to, as the spa contains nothing we're interested in(except for the delicious, delicious XP contained inside the previous occupants) and start heading back.   If I remember right, you can skip across the magma on the left without dying ENTIRELY if you're real fast. Alternately you might notice that you can interact with the bent support on the right...   This blocks the passage behind you and lets you easily cross over here. I think you could potentially softlock yourself here if you set a portal behind yourself and teleported out at this point. At the very least you'd doom yourself to having to navigate Wizardry 8's awful slope-related physics as you tried to cross some magma channels to skip ahead to where you were meant to go. I remember once I fell into the magma and it wasn't an instant kill but it took me like thirty seconds to actually wrangle myself out by grinding myself against the sides of the stream. So don't be an idiot, just cross over into the next corridor and continue.   Locked door one way, passage the other way. Obvious choice.  This time, rather than immediately busting into some poor unsuspecting Rapaxes' suites and mangling them, we start by climbing upwards. Windy twisty stairs until we're at the highest point we can reach in this particular area.    Up here we've got a long corridor to get to the end of, with three rooms on the left, and this time we have(probably) to bust in and murder the occupants as the rooms have no doors and if we just strolled by in the corridor they'd aggro and we'd need to go beat them to a pulp anyway. Once again, they're mixed groups of priestesses/initiates with one small squad of low-level melee rapax assisting the last group as I beat them up. These aren't guarding any important(or interesting) items, however. Priestesses can drop some nice things, they just seem intent on not doing so.  There are two portals at the end of the corridor, both taking us to places we've seen before(from a distance).  One takes us to a high ledge containing a door(which the key from earlier is for) and the portal we came through.    The other takes us to a foreboding portal and a mountain pass(the latter of which being where we need to go to actually progress). So obviously I hop back to the ledge because gently caress progress when there's looting to do and demon hooters to be checked out.   So, one ominous hallway with a side passage where some enemies have spawned. Or have they?  In yet another repetition of the endless Rapax Rift Bullshit, half the squad has spawned on the other side of the door, and after beating the one member on this side to a pulp I need to pass like ten combat rounds before the rest of them gently caress off and disengage from combat.    If you don't heed a warning from a party member(and someone with high Senses), those big ol' frog demon heads will spit bullshit at you as you pass by.    Fiddle with this panel and you can close them up and make progress safe.   Obviously what we want is upstairs and, before anyone asks, no, all the loot I got from this place was garbage once again despite the number of goddamn chests. I swear this game has it out for me.   These guys have a unique priestess among them, the High Priestess. She drops a special staff that isn't a quest item, but it is an extended-range 2-handed weapon with a chance to blind and decent damage which anyone can equip, so if you've got someone in the back row lacking a decent combat option, it's a good backup. It could also be a decent off-hand for a Monk so he ran reach into combat when someone's out of punching range. Anyway, let's go pound these guys to dust.   Despite their numbers, it's not much of a challenge. Soul Shield, Element Shield, then let the melee goons go to town and the battle's over in a short number of rounds.  Cumulative chip damage from AoE spells cast by the Rapax do wear the fellows down a bit, but nothing in the dangerous range of things.     Nice pad, really. Huge tub. Shame we can't go for a dip and wash off all the blood.   This is what we're here for, though. We've got us a pointlessly complicated magical lock to open in a bit. Two, in fact. Also, because of all the talk about multiclassing I decided that I would in fact take advantage of Werdna's upcoming level-up to see what happened now that he has his max-level spells.  It turns out that he loses zero effectiveness on his current spells when this happens, so that's nice, it's at least better designed than AD&D dual-classing. He probably won't get enough level-ups to get all the level 7 spell access before the end of the game, but he'll pick up some broader access for certain. In any case his increased power before the end was likely to mostly come from training up Power Cast anyway. Plus it'll also slightly broaden the selection of equippable items in case I come across some more nice gear for him before the end of the game. Plus if he wasn't already wearing the Helm of Brilliance he could pop on a stylin' mitre.    I turn around and head back to the door that the Rapax were stuck in a bit ago. Thankfully they've hosed off by now.  Though at this point the game starts trolling me with getting aggroed by Rapax on a different elevation. I can't take five steps without it happening.   Why couldn't they just have put in a goddamn ladder rather than this loving switchback above the magma.  I run down and hide under the section the Rapax are using to cross over. But as soon as I poke my head out...  It took me five minutes just to make it down to the fire shack at the end of the switchback because of this.  This is what you need the Flamequencher wand to open, by the way. And as soon as you do...   He's thoroughly unscary as he just as the usual single semi-big attack and can summon wimpy miniature fire elementals to back him up. According to data-scraping sites he does have a list of(unimpressive) spells, but spellcasting was apparently disabled in his script. Considering that his spell-list is entirely psionic and doesn't have a single Fire spell in it, I presume it was a placeholder.  Again, this place definitely feels scaled as you coming here considerably earlier, probably prior to doing the water sections and Sea Caves, maybe even prior to visiting Bayjin and cleaning up the majority of the faction quests.  Big fella, though, certainly looks imposing.  And of course as soon as he's dead I aggro the loving rapax on top of the ridge again are you loving kidding me game. Come on. whatever let's loot this drat hut and then hide behind it until they gently caress off.   It contains the Staff of Ash, which is only for using on our prisoner friend, and a key. The key unlocks the door we bypassed by walking through the rift between the two passages. I have no idea why it's here since you can't actually get here without using that bypass passage and one of the two teleporters UNLESS you, again, somehow manage to skip across the lava which is very clearly very unintentional. Whatever, let's get back to our buddy. Good thing I set a portal to get around this poo poo.    Set/Return to Portal is a godsend.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1A68FwuYCM Altruism is worth fat loads of XP. Hell yeah. Now, one short saunter and several cut murders later...   Let's play around with magic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VrFcdXiqls   So this guy can actually be moderately scary. He's overpacked on 100+ resistances to all magic, so even Power Cast won't save you this time. 50% of his actions also pull from a potentially nasty spell list: 10% Energy Blast 10% Magic Missiles 10% Crush 10% Element Shield 10% Body of Stone 10% Purify Air 20% Boiling Blood 10% Turncoat 10% Earthquake It's watered down by stuff like Energy Blast and Magic Missiles, but Crush and Boiling Blood can gently caress up a single target good. If he sticks a Turncoat it can really, well, turn the fight around, and as the only thing that can really gently caress him up is physical damage, him casting Body of Stone would make him a lot harder to wear down before he wears you down.  Of course, these badasses can handle him. What we can't handle is the yet another pack of rapax on a high bridge that have been aggroed. So as soon as El Dorado is down, I duck into the tunnel behind him and wait them out.  Have to wonder what's down here, anyway...   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQA4s2PxKHA I'm sure you'll all live without seeing oversized naked demon breasts. Al Sedexus is, uh, a thing. Like, generally there's nothing offensive about Wizardry 8, but I can absolutely see her putting some people off and understand it. Thankfully we won't be seeing (much more of) her again.    Let's get the hell out of the Rift. We'll only be seeing it one more time in this run.    Past those two archers lies the Rapax Courtyard which is one of the slightly more puzzling areas in the game, because of how pointless it is. I suspect it was originally intended to have been more expansive, but it ends up as a sort of weird appendix area that should either have been part of the Rift or of the Castle proper.   All it consists of is this one Z-shaped trench with a bunch of archers and samurai up top, which will aggro while in positions neither of you can fire back from, while you try to make it to the end and climb up to kill them all.    I get lucky this time and Chameleon gets me almost to the end before I end up aggroing someone.    And it's just so much chaff. Asphyxiate and the NegatAir really pull their weight here, though, with the large number of enemies they actually manage to weed out a decent amount of them.  It's always a slog, though, especially as the area has literally no rewards for clearing it out. Even the gatehouse contains nothing of value except a bunch of healing potions which we've long outgrown.  I do wonder if they originally intended for the Rapax samurai aesthetic to go further, though. They've got the katanas, the naginatas and a bit of the architecture, but I wonder whether it was a conscious decision not to carry it any farther or whether they just ran out of time to complete it.    And with that, we're in the Rapax Castle proper. It's at least as big as the Rift itself, plus it has an upper level that's a separate area. It'll definitely fill out an entire update on its own. It's also a lot less annoying to fight through than the Rift, so that'll be great, too.
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Sep 7, 2020 10:33
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My first time through the Castle, I ended up hunkering down in the smithy and just camping until most of the wandering patrols walked into me.
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Sep 7, 2020 12:58
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Oh yeah, interesting note about resistances. So, caster level vs. target level plays a role in magic resistance calculations. But the thing is, the level that's listed on a monster's stat screen is a lie. The game uses a separate, internal number for monster levels which varies depending on difficulty setting, so on Expert you're facing enemies that are technically ~2-3 levels higher than on Novice even though the game will display the same level regardless. For most monsters, even on Expert the real level is going to be at least a couple levels lower than what's reported. You might see "level 17" rapax wandering around that are actually somewhere between 12-15 depending on difficulty. But named boss enemies virtually always have their internal level numbers fixed at whatever the display number is. So while randomly spawned Rapax might display levels on par with the set bosses here, the bosses secretly have an edge of several "real" levels. Since levels matter for spell resistance, this effectively gives them a little edge in resists across the board above and beyond their usually already-good resistances (and lets them chip away at your own resistance, too.) If El Dorado's levels were in the mid-teens like comparable "level 18" enemies you might be able to chip away at him with magic a little more (at least with Power Cast), but at level 18 you can forget it unless you came here at a much higher level. No, I have no idea why they went to all the trouble to obfuscate this instead of just reporting levels consistently and letting bosses actually appear as several level higher than the random spawns for their area.
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Sep 7, 2020 14:20
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Generally Wizardry 8's biggest sin(aside from the loving Rapax Rift which is a war crime against my patience), is obfuscated mechanics. For instance, nowhere does it tell you explicitly how dual-classing works, or what goes into spell effectiveness calculations. When you tell a character to swing a sword or jab with a spear, you're not told what the odds of a hit are. When a mage dials up a spell, you're not told what the expected damage against a given target is or the chances of resisting once everything is taken into calculation. But most of it's hidden in a way that you don't really need to know it, because you know that bigger number means bigger effect, and you have to be unintentionally obtuse to not know which numbers weigh into a given thing, even if you don't know the exact recipe.
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Sep 7, 2020 19:35
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I'll note that the intended route is to into the caste, do a certain quest in there, then double back to punch-splode Al-Sedexus to tie up loose ends. The less efficient but more satisfying way is to mop the floor with her on the way in, skip the quest because ew, paint the castle's interior red as a consequence of skipping the quest, and then bug out and never return once you've wrapped up the other objective. Well, never go back if you're running solo; a party might want to drop a portal by the smith. As for obtuse mechanics, I'm still not entirely sure how Stealth checks work(Straight roll? Opposed vs. enemy Perception?), but however it shakes down it's disgustingly overpowered.
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Sep 7, 2020 21:33
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Unoriginal One posted:The less efficient but more satisfying way is to mop the floor with her on the way in, skip the quest because ew, paint the castle's interior red as a consequence of skipping the quest, and then bug out and never return once you've wrapped up the other objective. I mean agreed, but for an LP I feel like I should be showing off content rather than skipping it. So fun as it would be... we'll have to get out even more censor bars.
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Sep 7, 2020 21:35
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean agreed, but for an LP I feel like I should be showing off content rather than skipping it. So fun as it would be... we'll have to get out even more censor bars. I just felt like mentioning it for posterity's sake.
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Sep 7, 2020 21:36
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One mildly interesting note about the Al-Sedexus quest is that having an all-female party won't lock you out of the (temporarily) peaceful solution. You can't usually select a woman from your party, but if that's all you have, the devs included a contingency to allow it.
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Sep 8, 2020 03:40
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I've forgotten why we're visiting the Rapax in the first place. If we have all three Dominae, why can't we march up Ascension Peak like we did earlier? (Thanks, I'm sure this was explained earlier.)
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Sep 8, 2020 03:44
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Kacie posted:I've forgotten why we're visiting the Rapax in the first place. If we have all three Dominae, why can't we march up Ascension Peak like we did earlier? (Thanks, I'm sure this was explained earlier.) Because the second anyone attempts to Ascend, the Dark Savant will use the tower he stuck in Arnika to blow up the planet, unless some way is found to disable the device. I don't recall exactly what was in the Rapax Rift that was relevant to that quest, but it was something, pretty sure.
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Sep 8, 2020 04:16
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Kacie posted:I've forgotten why we're visiting the Rapax in the first place. If we have all three Dominae, why can't we march up Ascension Peak like we did earlier? (Thanks, I'm sure this was explained earlier.) Once you have two of the endgame artifacts the Rapax seal Ascension Peak with a landslide, so you have to go through their territory.
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Sep 8, 2020 04:17
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Sum Gai posted:Once you have two of the endgame artifacts the Rapax seal Ascension Peak with a landslide, so you have to go through their territory. There are workarounds for that, like placing a portal on Ascension Peak before it gets blocked, which is what PurpleXVI did.
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Sep 8, 2020 04:20
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Pretty sure it's blocked off the moment you enter with even one of them, but yeah, if you don't take one of the workarounds you need to use the portal you get access to once you complete that quest. The bomb, meanwhile, involves a completely different part of the castle; so while you still have to go to the castle, you don't have to interact with the other bits if you don't feel like it.
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Sep 8, 2020 06:47
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Kacie posted:I've forgotten why we're visiting the Rapax in the first place. If we have all three Dominae, why can't we march up Ascension Peak like we did earlier? (Thanks, I'm sure this was explained earlier.) Right now we've got everything we need to go to Ascension Peak, but there are 2 problems: 1) the Dark Savant has a huge bomb in Arnika that he's threatened to use if anyone but him tries to ascend and 2) the Rapax themselves have closed off the peak. We don't have any leads on the bomb, other than that we've been told a couple times that the Dark Savant has allied with the Rapax. Since we can't visit the Savant, our only real option is to poke around the Rapax's place. Plus the game is railroading you there anyway, outside of people on subsequent playthroughs trying to cleverly sequence break.
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Sep 8, 2020 09:14
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EclecticTastes posted:There are workarounds for that, like placing a portal on Ascension Peak before it gets blocked, which is what PurpleXVI did. No, I did not. I just talked about it and how you could do it, but that it would be skipping content, which we aren't doing for this LP. I also don't think anything ever indicates that the path to disarming the bomb is in the Rapax Castle except that the Rapax and Savant announce they have an alliance. Also the scope of the bomb varies from who you talk to, sometimes it's described as blowing up Arnika, in other cases as blowing up the planet. The latter is cooler, but also makes less sense because then the Savant blows up his own path to Ascension. I've also never actually tried to walk up the Peak without disarming the bomb first, so I may set the necessary portals to easily hop back and disarm it, and then try sauntering up the Peak to see what happens.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:33
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PurpleXVI posted:No, I did not. I just talked about it and how you could do it, but that it would be skipping content, which we aren't doing for this LP. You definitely need to show it off; it does count as an ending after all.
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Sep 8, 2020 13:08
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