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Somewhere in the future, Aztechnology is developing blood magic to make everyone who is A-Negative explode and saying 'That's cute.'
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May 15, 2014 16:54
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| # ? May 17, 2024 08:51 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:Tremere in general are pretty different from their actual tabletop version. For example, blood magic is actually worth loving anything in Bloodlines, whereas in oVamp you basically spend all your XP ever to finally hit level five in blood magic and get the awesome ability to spend a blood point to do like 2 goddamn damage. I don't know which version you used, because Thaum is usually seen as one of if not the most powerful discipline in the game. Which is why they eventually introduced a bajillion versions, so everyone could have it.
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May 15, 2014 17:04
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MonsieurChoc posted:I don't know which version you used, because Thaum is usually seen as one of if not the most powerful discipline in the game. Which is why they eventually introduced a bajillion versions, so everyone could have it. Yeah, Path of Blood was not terribly powerful (though it had some good situational utility--one success on Cauldron of Blood kills any mortal, for example), but some of the "secondary paths" were ridiculously more combat-useful. Lure of the Flames and Levinbolt are just two off the top of my head that are a bit lopsided. Conjuration is another one, especially when coupled with the ritual that magnifies its effects. Oh yeah, rituals. THAT'S the real source of the "holy crap, this is getting silly now" descriptions. Of course, anything against Mage magic will be a pale shadow of what they can do, but on the upside Vamps don't have to deal with Paradox.
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May 15, 2014 17:09
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Koldunic Sorcery was cooler anyway. 
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May 15, 2014 17:12
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Lure of Flames was hilarious because vampires all immediately panic and semi-frenzy and run the gently caress away from fire, and nothing precluded this from happening to you regarding your own flame (at least going by memory), so all you were doing was making yourself freak out and poo poo yourself. I remember Blood having tons of utility...in the description. In reality, you could tell someone had committed diablerie at like level 4 (it was I wanna say level 1 auspex?) and other really minor stuff that was ultimately less impressive, and cauldron of blood could indeed kill a mortal in one hit. But doing that as your ultimate level 5 technique? Meanwhile the Toreador is murdering like ten people with Celerity every round. I played a Tremere for a fair amount of time and I don't recall ANY of the thaumaturgy being that noteworthy compared to the far simpler stuff like "be just completely invisible whenever you want" or "take five actions for every one action other people make."
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May 15, 2014 17:26
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ProfessorCirno posted:Lure of Flames was hilarious because vampires all immediately panic and semi-frenzy and run the gently caress away from fire, and nothing precluded this from happening to you regarding your own flame (at least going by memory), so all you were doing was making yourself freak out and poo poo yourself. That's because you're playing it wrong. Thaumaturgy really shines when you (the player) put your time into research. Of course, this means buying/borrowing/stealing ALL the books that breathe even a whisper about Tremere, but think of it as playing like Constantine with a dash of Batman: sure, you've got the really big gee-whiz magic at your fingertips at later levels, but right now all you have is a couple parlour tricks backed up with a load of rituals. You should be scribbling notes to the Storyteller before every game, taking an extra hour or two each night just as you wake up. Your strength is preptime. Use it. Example: A couple lower level rituals allow you to soak fire damage as bashing instead of aggravated, plus it makes your body warmer, your skin a bit redder. Another, once cast, turns the first stake to touch your chest into dust. You'd like that kind of insurance, now wouldn't you?
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May 15, 2014 19:08
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ProfessorCirno posted:I played a Tremere for a fair amount of time and I don't recall ANY of the thaumaturgy being that noteworthy compared to the far simpler stuff like "be just completely invisible whenever you want" or "take five actions for every one action other people make." Oh I don't know. Path of Blood was responsible for the most hilariously abusive official use of a discipline in any supplement ever: when Kemintiri (4th-gen Setite) used the 3-dot ability to lower her generation by a very conservative three steps… 
Tippis fucked around with this message at 01:30 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 00:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:Tremere in general are pretty different from their actual tabletop version. For example, blood magic is actually worth loving anything in Bloodlines, whereas in oVamp you basically spend all your XP ever to finally hit level five in blood magic and get the awesome ability to spend a blood point to do like 2 goddamn damage. Then you look at the rituals that Thaum 5 enables and go "oh so I can write the name of a person on a glass rod, and as long as I know who I mean, I can break that rod... and they die." E: ProfessorCirno posted:I remember Blood having tons of utility...in the description. In reality, you could tell someone had committed diablerie at like level 4 (it was I wanna say level 1 auspex?) and other really minor stuff that was ultimately less impressive, and cauldron of blood could indeed kill a mortal in one hit. But doing that as your ultimate level 5 technique? Meanwhile the Toreador is murdering like ten people with Celerity every round. Oh, you're missing one of the big things about that Thaum power. Your aura repairs itself after a while (a year, I think?), but thaum 4 has no time limit. 700 year old elder vampire who diablerised one year after they were created? You can detect that. Auspex can't. pun pundit fucked around with this message at 01:36 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 01:18
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Tippis posted:Oh I don't know. Path of Blood was responsible for the most hilariously abusive official use of a discipline in any supplement ever: when Kemintiri (4th-gen Setite) used the 3-dot ability to lower her generation by a three steps… Even high-gen, Path of Blood is hilariously good. Lower your gen and you can ignore Dominate powers from anyone with higher generation than you! You can diablerize someone at long distance! And then there's the Paths in the Supplements, like Path of Neptune which is amazing what with the water wall and Blood to Water.
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May 16, 2014 01:25
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I started a game with the newest fan patch with restored content turned on. I'm a couple hours in, but I'm considering turning restored content off and restarting. I've been enjoying finding skill books and items in new places, but I just beat the Cathayan in Santa Monica and he dropped, like, a ridiculously good melee weapon compared to what I remember having in the first half of the vanilla game. I also don't want to miss any really good trinkets because he moved them somewhere else and I missed them. I dunno yet. Does the bug fix version of the patch actually just fix bugs, or are all the items swapped around too? Also, where did you guys pick up all this WoD lore? The game books? I picked up a requiem tie-in novel once, but it just kind of seemed like Anne Rice-lite generic vampire fiction.
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May 16, 2014 06:26
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There'S a poo poo-ton of books for Masquerade that was published over the years. I have an huge quantity of WoD books (both old and new), multiple bookshelves of the stuff, and I really don't have everything. Of course, over the ~13 years the oWoD lasted, things changed directions multiple times, and that's without getting into how the gamelines all contradict each other all the time. There were also multiple novels for the oWoD, with varying degrees of quality. The Clan Novels series are the only ones I can think of that had an impact on the setting. Requiem is a completely different setting, and is also very good (I prefer it to masquerade, although not by much), but didn't have much in the way of novels. The few there are vary from great (those written by Greg Stolze) to meh (the others). Rites of the Dragon, a book supposedly written by Dracula as instructions to his followers, is pretty good too. I can field almost any questions on the old or new WoD, and what I can't answer the friends I play elfgames with can answer.
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May 16, 2014 06:41
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Thaumaturgy's also great because Tremere effectively have something like thirty clan disciplines instead of the usual three, plus any number of random effects. Like in D&D, preparation and flexibility are the keywords for the wizards.
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May 16, 2014 08:22
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I'm confused about how the online college in the Camarilla mod works. I'm playing a gun-based Toreador. I used the online college to raise Firearms to 2, then used XP to raise Scholarship to 4. Then I trained Firearms two more times in the online college. But when I checked my character sheet, Firearms was still at 2? Am I doing something wrong here?
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May 16, 2014 20:35
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Pretty sure one of the paths let you throw lightning bolts that did like 10 dice of AGG damage like a D&D wizard. Something about weather control? It was the rituals that made it silly, though.
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May 17, 2014 11:59
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Bhodi posted:Pretty sure one of the paths let you throw lightning bolts that did like 10 dice of AGG damage like a D&D wizard. Something about weather control? It was the rituals that made it silly, though. Path of Levinbolt only does Lethal, which is the balancing factor vs Lure of the Flame/Hellfire (which does Aggravated). Edit: Sounds pretty good until you consider a shotgun does 8 plus Margin of Success, and Firearms is much cheaper to raise than a Discipline.
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May 17, 2014 22:15
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Reclaimer posted:Path of Levinbolt only does Lethal, which is the balancing factor vs Lure of the Flame/Hellfire (which does Aggravated). Shotgun only does lethal if it hits the head though (on a vamp). Plus, a shotgun is obvious. No one expects Raiden. 
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May 18, 2014 01:33
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OAquinas posted:Shotgun only does lethal if it hits the head though (on a vamp). That's what dragon's breath shells are for.
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May 18, 2014 04:53
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Whoever designed the sewer area deserves a special room in hell next to Hitler and Stalin.
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May 18, 2014 07:09
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I dunno, there's some rough fights down there, but having been through it a few times, it's fine once you have a rough idea of where you're going. gently caress trying to melee those huge vozhd, though, they can pretty much knock you back and do agg any time you get close enough to punch 'em.
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May 18, 2014 07:12
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No sense even fighting most of those things, they can be run by easily enough.
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May 18, 2014 08:20
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Pope Guilty posted:I dunno, there's some rough fights down there, but having been through it a few times, it's fine once you have a rough idea of where you're going. I mean, yeah, once you've stumbled through the hallway filled with rusty nails and barbed wire a few times you'll probably figure out a semi-optimal way to get through it. Still doesn't make it not absolute hell the first time through, or absolutely atrocious design in general for the hallway of an office building.
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May 18, 2014 08:27
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"Fine" really isn't the word I'd use for those sewers. At best, they're an annoying waste of time traveling through ugly terrain with aggravating enemies. That you can learn where the dead ends are, and which enemies can be outrun doesn't make the design non-lovely. It just means you've learned to cope with it. It could be worse, sure, but that's like comparing Stalin and Hitler. Neither is going to come out smelling like roses.
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May 18, 2014 08:50
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The sewer is why noclip was invented.
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May 18, 2014 09:08
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Haven't played this game in a couple of years and have fond memories of the first maybe 2/3rds of the game. Has the modding community done anything to make the last third of the game any less of a slog in terms of combat and lovely boss fights?
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May 18, 2014 09:32
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Not that I'm aware of.
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May 18, 2014 12:35
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Of course not, they're too busy moving trash cans three feet to the left and re-enabling incomplete quests that were probably used as test mechanisms during development anyway.
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May 18, 2014 12:56
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To be fair, completely revamping the entire last third of the game would be an absurd and staggering amount of work that might not even be possible given apparently the beta engine that Bloodlines runs in is held together with spit and tape.
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May 18, 2014 13:37
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ProfessorCirno posted:To be fair, completely revamping the entire last third of the game would be an absurd and staggering amount of work that might not even be possible given apparently the beta engine that Bloodlines runs in is held together with spit and tape. Sure and I think most people understand that, but I think most people wouldn't mind like, a blanket 30% reduction in hitpoints or something just to make it less of a slog.
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May 18, 2014 16:12
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I came across what is probably the weirdest glitch I have ever seen in this game last night. I'm still not even sure if it's a glitch or not and judging from Google, it looks like only one other person has encountered it. I'm playing the Clan Quest mod as a Tremere. I failed the added Kuei-Jin quest after freaking out over killing a stripper and was dumped into Vesuvius. I headed back to Chinatown and started to work out the alternate route to deal with the Fu Syndicate, and as I was walking around looking for the clues, every so often (maybe 30 seconds or so?) something invisible would attack me using a purple mist (that would freeze me while the animation played) or blue flames that lowered either my health or blood. (And was able to do it even with godmode on.) No matter where I went in the hub, it would follow me. (It stopped if I went inside buildings or went to another hub, and start right back up again once I went back to Chinatown. I didn't try going into the sewers to see if it stopped there.) It didn't stop after I went and did the Fu mission the normal way. Has anyone else encountered this?
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May 19, 2014 00:30
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McSpanky posted:Sure and I think most people understand that, but I think most people wouldn't mind like, a blanket 30% reduction in hitpoints or something just to make it less of a slog. If you don't have the Arsenal mod, that might be just what you're looking for. For the last boss fight I ended it by emptying a single clip into the dude's head from that electric vampire hunter pistol.
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May 19, 2014 02:07
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I recently stumbled over this thread, and then installed my old disc copy again with the QCM. So far I'm having fun and like the changes I've seen. Especially having to feed more often feels right. I expected it to be annoying but it really isn't. I found a really weird thing when I started though. Like, when I rip out the one loose drawer in my Santa Monica apartment, I can talk into the empty cubbord and trigger a conversation about the Giovanni Mansion and finish several endgame quests without ever touching them. Wtf?
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May 19, 2014 13:54
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Tin Tim posted:I can talk into the empty cubbord and trigger a conversation about the Giovanni Mansion and finish several endgame quests without ever touching them. Wtf? This is actually intended behaviour if you're playing Malkavian, a la arguing with the stop sign. It's literally the game causing you to go insane and become your character. (It's genuinely mind boggling how unusally this game can break)
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May 20, 2014 13:23
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goku i won't do what u tell me
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In my most recent playthrough with fan patch 8.9 and base game only, I hit three memorable bugs. Sometimes the sewers broke. If I tried to open a manhole while standing too close to it (from either the top or the bottom) or moved after Using it, I would fail to pass through it and would no longer be able to interact with any manholes. Reloading and being careful would work around it. I forgot to finish a side quest in the Empire Hotel so I went back after opening Hollywood and the entire zone was broken. I got trapped in the geometry every time I tried to come in through the front door, so I had to go in through the sewers. This was extra-irritating when combined with the above sewer bug. When I picked a lock, the camera fell and I started zooming down through the floor but after I finished I snapped back to where I was supposed to be, no harm done. Finally, a whole bunch of random items all over the Empire Hotel were turned into small crates. One of the crates was on top of a quest item I needed to interact with and somehow prevented me from interacting with it, blocking all further progress on the quest. The entire Fu Syndicate vampire testing center/complex was buggy as gently caress start to finish. I finally gave up and noclipped through it.
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May 20, 2014 15:20
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So is there a way of breaking into the Giovanni meeting (not mansion) without causing a mass amount of chaos?
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May 20, 2014 15:44
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The meeting under the mansion? I imagine not since it's a boss fight.
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May 20, 2014 16:12
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:The meeting under the mansion? I imagine not since it's a boss fight. No. The one on the main/upper level. The family meeting.
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May 20, 2014 16:17
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Get an invite from the people out front or sneak past the guard on the back door.
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May 20, 2014 16:26
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KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:This is actually intended behaviour if you're playing Malkavian, a la arguing with the stop sign. It's literally the game causing you to go insane and become your character.  Memorable bugs so far -getting stuck in her room after finally dealing with Janette/Therese -glitching through the lower floors of Pisha's hideout -Having my guns bug out after triggering the hooker rescue in downtown -watching as those two thugs caused all kinds of problems with innocent bystanders while sprinting all over the city -seeing a random streetfight in downtown end with a thug roundhouse kicking a guy into some hazmat suits, which panicked everyone in the area -having ghostly npcs zip by in front me for a few frames while walking through Santa Monica -wondering how one of the dancers in the downtown club can glitch through her cage and hold one to it with a single foot -not a bug, but it was kinda weird watching a random npc get a beejay in an alley before I fed on him Good times! One thing was kinda lovely though, because the painting guardian seems to have been buffed hard. He owned me like three times in a row. I only could beat him by running in circles whith blood heal on. Nothing else in Santa Monica gave me that much trouble 
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May 20, 2014 16:40
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Malek posted:No. The one on the main/upper level. The family meeting. Yeah, you can get an invite out of the drunk couple or just sneak in and until you start doing lovely things it's non-combat. There's even a few interesting dialogue trees in there although I've never seen one to completion since I always either pick the wrong option or get caught loving around. All those loving (blood?) slaves in the various rooms though... 
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May 20, 2014 18:48
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| # ? May 17, 2024 08:51 |
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No, he's talking about the closed doors meeting inside where all the heads of the family are meeting. There is no way to enter that room without immediately making everyone go hostile and the whole party turning into a bloodbath, as far as I've seen... I had always hoped there was, or maybe the CQM would add some option for it in, like you could impersonate some Mafia Don or something and sit in on the meeting and then get a task from the Giovanni Godfather or something, but alas, no.
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May 20, 2014 19:47
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