Issues Options

[The Bigg]

I've just finished playing through the mod (well, I've kept the book and killed Tian... I'm half-waiting for some surpise ambush after this act).

The good:
- The movie was absolutely cool.
- Gameplay in general 'felt' well balanced, challenging enough without forcing too many reloads.
- The plot was okay, as well as the writing.

The maybe:
- The Servant, Astral Shard Guardian, and Tian 'felt' slightly hard to me (and I had about 2M XP per character, so I was over the suggested level). This must surely be because I generally suck at tactics. However, in the case of the Astral Shard Guardian, I've taken a peek at the creature file, and IMHO for lesser skilled/patient players the AC and regeneration rate could use a mild decrement (say, AC -5 and no regeneration, but higher HPs to compensate). At the suggested level (13th) your fighters will have a thac0 in the 2-5 range, so you'll likely hit only 1 time per round per fighter (assuming 3 attacks per round and 1/3 chance of hitting), meaning that you are doing little more than keeping up with the regeneration... even without throwing in the various Stone Skins or PFMW's.
- The Chain Lightning Machine could be slightly slowed down as well.
- Most of the loot you get is already identified.
- Balaor seriously looks like a typo, you might want to change to something else (and the creature is even called va#balor)

The bad:
- The va#spy* creatures for checking fire damage are a bit tricky to get right - I caster Agannazar's both against the dryads (making sure I hit both of them) and against the Astral Shard to no avail. While in the latter case enough hints are thrown in that you must use Fireball, in the Dryad's case it isn't so obvious (especially after Agannazar's proves to be useless).
- Install is not nice for people using a Mac, Linux, or WeInstall/WeiGUI (in particular the biffing of the MVE). I had already posted code to fix this.

WeiDU.log and similar stuff are available from my master playthrough thread. In particular, I installed just the 'main' component, none of the 'improved' ones.

This post has been edited by The Bigg: May 22 2008, 04:21 PM

[Valiant]

TheBigg, thank you for your tips, I´ll see what can we do with it. Although I do not suspect the difficulty level will be toned down. Razfallow and Sikret has worked pretty hard to make the mod balanced, they had to make few versions of scripts before they have chosen the final ones. After all, ultimately you have beaten all creatures, haven´t you? So it can´t be so hard. And you haven´t even tried improved versions...

Thanks anyway.

P.S.: about those identified items - I thought it would be nice to have them already identified. This way players that do not have a thief in party can use them without identification. But on the other hand, who is playing without a thief, right? Maybe I´ll change it back to unidentified ones...

[The Bigg]

After all, ultimately you have beaten all creatures, haven´t you?

I had to ctrl-R when dealing with the Guardian, but otherwise, yea (and I'm sure I would've been able to defeat him eventually, I just grew tired after the sixth try). I've already been told to Lern2Play, so I'll shut up on the issue.

P.S.: about those identified items - I thought it would be nice to have them already identified. This way players that do not have a thief in party can use them without identification. But on the other hand, who is playing without a thief, right? Maybe I´ll change it back to unidentified ones...

The only item you find and really need to use to win the mod is the Amulet of Explosions... and that's if you can't cast Fireball otherwise. The weapons you find are likely just free gold anyway since you should have better ones, so IDing them can wait till you get back to town (or you can rest to use the Identify spell and/or the Glasses...).