GulMadred fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Mar 26, 2009

• You can hold down tilde (~) to move your character towards the mouse cursor. It's equivalent to moving by holding down LMB, except that it leaves LMB free (so that it can be mapped to a damage-dealing ability, without accidentally triggering that ability when you're trying to move around in combat).
• Your re-spec potential is very limited; try to decide early on which equipment setup you'll use (e.g. 2-handed weapon vs sword-and-shield) because spreading out your points will reduce your effectiveness in combat.
  • On the flipside, your newbie skills will generally remain useful throughout the game, because they scale with either your level or your weapon DPS (or both). Many of the high-tier abilities have prohibitively high mana costs and/or long cooldowns, so they tend to supplement your old abilities rather than replacing them.
• Don't hoard your socketable gems. Unlike the original Torchlight, you can't upgrade low-level gems into high-level ones, and so the old ones will tend to become obsolete. At all times, you should be looking to apply your *current* gems into your *current* equipment.
  • Blood ember is a good choice for armor, since it gives provides passive HP regen (thus, you'll quaff potions during tough battles, but you can generally just regenerate health between encounters and thus maintain a steady combat rythym).
  • Frost resistance is very important for melee characters, because getting chilled impairs your ability to get to grips with the enemy.
• Enchanting is now safe (never breaks items) but is much less powerful than it was in Torchlight 1 (because you can't stack dozens on enchantments onto each item).
• I've found that the set bonuses are pretty unimpressive; I generally get better results by mix-and-matching a few Unique items and one or two pieces from a few different sets.
• Engineers are tanks, Embermages and Outlanders are ranged DPS, Berserkers are melee DPS.
  • The game isn't terribly forgiving about breaking these archetypes - for instance, you can create a melee Outlander who dodges most attacks and flips around constantly in combat, but you'll be a complete glass-cannon and boss fights will be very arduous (score a few hits, fail to dodge something, die, respawn, repeat).
• Engineers can succeed with a very boring tank playstyle, but the other classes will need a steady supply of Mana in order to fuel their abilities (and stay alive). Embermages should focus on passive regen (Rift ember in armor slots) while Berserkers and Outlanders can succeed with either Mana regen or Mana-stealing weapons.
• Remember that you can teach spells to your Pet. Direct-damage spells aren't terribly effective, but summoning spells can be very helpful (an automatically-replenishing posse of meatshields!). Passive abilities (e.g. Adventuring = increased magic find %) can also be taught to your pet, in case you'd like to reserve your own spell slots for the direct-damage stuff.
• Multiplayer tends to be a bit boring for Engineers, since the other classes will often outpace you and kill enemies before you can come to grips with them. You get experience and loot anyways, but it may be a bit frustrating. YMMV.
  • Loot is instanced. Whatever you can see is yours for the taking.
• The duration of castable buffs/debuffs are unreasonably short (the longest one that I've seen is 30 seconds), and you can easily acquire a half-dozen of them on a single character. Unless you have uber micro skillz, you won't be able to juggle them effectively in combat (alongside movement, dodging, targeting, looting, etc). I'd recommend limiting yourself to 1-2 buffs that you can cast before boss battles, and dumping the rest of your points into passive bonuses.
• Each class has a teleport-like ability which can be useful for emergency escapes, but they generally require line-of-sight. Don't expect to teleport across chasms or through impenetrable walls.

• you *want* to view a battle close-up and micromanage a bit (for fun)
  
• you've put a lot of effort into researching and deploying a new kickass ship design, and now you want to see it PEW PEW some bug-eyed aliens
  
• you've reached a difficult/important battle and you don't want to leave anything to chance
  
• the enemy has deployed a new ship type which is causing a lot of damage to your fleets; you need to see it in action so that you can develop countermeasures

• Save often.
• Be aware that the game includes many player-abusive JPRG tropes.
  
  • It's possible to lock yourself out of optional quests, and even entire optional areas, permanently if you do things in the wrong order.
    
  • Important game mechanics, abilities, tactics, etc... will be absent until you advance the plot far enough to reveal them; the early section of the game is a pseudo-tutorial which you're forced to run through on every subsequent playthrough. If you start grinding early, then it's possible that you'll give up in frustration before the game has revealed its full set of features.
    
  • It's possible to reduce the effectiveness of your characters by failing to specialize them properly. It isn't possible to truly gimp them, unless you deliberately disable ALL of their weapon skill and mystic arts.
    
  • There are hidden statistics and counters for factors such as skill progression, rare enemy spawns, companion weapon upgrades, etc... As a consequence, many gameplay outcomes feel highly random and you may be forced to replay sections (grind) if you're trying to achieve something specific.
    
• If you have a sufficiently-large union (4 members?) all using magic attacks, and they're the correct magic attacks, and everyone has enough AP, then the individual attacks get replaced by a ridiculously-powerful AoE attack (such as Blackout).
  
  • Very rarely, enemy unions will accidentally trigger the same effect (since they use the same gameplay mechanics as your unions). The result is usually a Game Over.
• I'd recommend switching the QTE triggers to automatic. The core aspect of gameplay is tactical; you'll see the various attack animations so many times that you'll probably stop paying attention to them (I sometimes found myself taking my hands off the keyboard entirely after pressing "Go"), and if you're using manual triggers then you'll probably miss them and get annoyed.
  
• Spend a few minutes on the wiki to learn about status effects. Stuff like poison can usually be ignored (since characters won't reliably clear it even when ordered to use recovery abilities, the per-round damage is low enough that you can usually finish the fight normally, and it clears automatically when the fight ends). "Cursed" is a much more serious problem.
  
• After major plot developments, you'll sometimes find that your union capacity has been increased. If you're powergaming, then you'll probably want to deploy as many unions as possible (but with fewer members in each). Large unions are more likely to be flanked, but they have a deeper HP pool which makes them more forgiving (incoming damage is partially divided among members, so the entire team tends to remain standing until the union HP falls below ~30%). Either way, be sure to recruit any highly-skilled mercenaries or special characters that you run across.
  
• Special characters will use their special ablities only when assigned as union leaders. You can organize your team however you want, of course. But if you're looking for "Limit Break" stuff then let the voiced characters take command.
  
• The crafting system is a giant pain-in-the-rear end. Last time that I played, I just used a memory editor to give myself 99 of each component. I don't regret doing so. gently caress grind forever.
  
• If you manage to capture an enemy alive (usually because you used the Knockout effect, but it sometimes happens randomly when dealing lethal damage) then you'll get an option at the end of the battle. "Split" means "split the monster open and harvest its rare components." "Keep" means "take it with us so that we can subsequently sell it to a chef for lots of money." This isn't a moral choice; the monster is going to die either way. Just decide whether you want the components or the cash.
  
• By default, party members manage their own inventory while you can equip only the protagonist. You can upgrade party equipment by performing incredibly tedious fetch quests for them at randomly-triggered moments. At other random times, they'll offer to replace their current weapon with something selected at-random from the party inventory (and you're not allowed to open the inventory to make a comparison; you're given only a Yes/No prompt!). gently caress that noise. You're a PC gamer, you have text editing powers. Assume direct control.

• Many of the words and icons in the various menus have a built-in contextual help; if something is unfamiliar or confusing then try right-clicking on it.
• If you're just starting out, then you should probably choose a Life or Nature wizard (Ariel or Freya IIRC) and use Orcs or High Men. The resulting playstyle is roughly similar to Civilization - you gradually build up cities and armies, use magic to improve both, perform research, and expand until your borders meet those of your rivals.
  • Some of the other races sacrifice a lot of civilization/industry for combat bonuses - to play them effectively you'll need to be very aggressive (hence, wait until you're more familiar with the game).
  • Death magic plays very differently, since it offers few boosts to your cities or armies - it focuses on undermining those of your rivals. It's also fairly weak in the early phase of the game, because a lot of low-level monsters are completely immune to it.
  • The Myrran races each have a powerful bonus, but the Myrran trait is expensive (3 points) and the environmental challenges in Myrror (such as node guardians) are stronger. Again, it's an interesting experience but one which is best postponed until you have a grasp of the basics.
  • Your empire can become multiracial! Just conquer a city of a different race (it can be a neutral city, or one belonging to a rival wizard), choose not to Raze it, and then build it up and start cranking out its specialized units. This approach relies on luck, of course - you might not be able to find a Troll city on your map.
• Your industrial capacity and gold income will grow with your empire, but magical power grows very slowly.
  • The most effective way to increase it is to find an elemental node, defeat its guardians (you may need to gain a few levels or use clever tactics), summon a Magic Spirit (or Guardian Spirit if you specialize in Life Magic), move the spirit to the node, and use the Meld command.
  • Of course, you might also get lucky and find that one of your rivals has cleared a Node - you can swoop in and claim it with a Spirit.
  • Unfortunately, your rivals can do the same thing to you - sending a Spirit to a Node which you've cleared and claimed (note: this is not considered a hostile act, and allied wizards will potentially do it to you). In the mid- to late- phase of the game, you'll probably want to garrison a weak infantry on each of your Nodes in order to prevent opponents from stealing them.
• Magical power that you gain will automatically be allocated into three functions: generating mana (the "currency" with which you cast spells), casting skill (the total amount of mana that you can spend per turn - including overworld summons, combat spells, new enchantments, item creation, etc), and research points. You can alter the allocation by fiddling with sliders, but beginners should probably refrain from doing so until they have a strong grasp of how these three functions relate to gameplay.
  • For example, you might think "I've made peace with my neighbours and I don't need any new enchantments at the moment, so I'll reduce my Casting Skill slider. That will accelerate my research and allow me to build up a big surplus of mana for my next war." That's clever, but if a rampaging monster suddenly attacks one of your cities then your wizard might be able to contribute only one or two weak spells to its defence. If the city is weakly-garrisoned then it will probably fall.
• You can convert Gold into Mana, and vice-versa. You'll suffer a 50% loss in each conversion, unless your wizard has the "Alchemist" trait. Still, it's a useful crutch which allows your industrial economy to boost your magical resources (or vice versa).
• The attack and defense statistics use a binomial distribution. Each attack pip represents a separate opportunity to "roll the dice" and has a 30% chance of scoring a hit. Once you've determined the total amount of damage, the defending unit gets a roll for each of its defense pips, again at 30%. If it makes enough rolls, it may completely negate your damage.
  • There are some skills and attributes (such as "+1 to hit" or "eldritch weapon") which modify the percentages involved.
  • If your attacks are consistently failing to do damage, then it's likely that the enemy either has a very strong defense stat or a special property (such as "incorporeal" or "weapon immunity"). You could consult a FAQ to figure out the exact calculations, but this is basically the game's way of telling you "try something else." Maybe you need to train a unit of Priests and add some ranged magic attacks to your army. Maybe you need a tough unit of Shieldbreak infantry to tie down the enemy while your archers feather it. Maybe you could try hitting the unit with a boosted Lightning Bolt spell to overcome its heavy armor.
  • To maximize your damage output, you should look for a combination of pure "attack boost" equipment/enchantments, and a few "to-hit" boosts. Units will naturally acquire both of these as they gain levels, but you'll sometimes be given a choice (e.g. when crafting magic weapons).
  • Because it's possible to completely negate incoming damage, a Hero unit with very high defense (eg. from the "Dodge" attribute) can become nigh-invincible to weapons even though its HP pool is tiny. Remember that such units will still be vulnerable to magic spells and special attacks.
  • If the attacking unit contains multiple figures, then the attack stat will be multiplied by the number of remaining figures (this effect is not indicated on the unit's information page). At low levels, a lone hero might be defeated in melee combat by a single infantry unit. Multi-figure units will also decline in power as they suffer attrition due to combat damage.
  • The defense and resistance stats are not multiplied by the number of figures in the defending unit, so kiting is a viable tactic (chip away at an approaching unit - maybe knock out half of its figures before it reaches your army - now it's fighting at half strength and you can engage in melee combat at favourable odds).
• The standard powergaming strategy is to devote most of your resources to a single stack of high-level units with a lot of permanent enchantments (e.g. flight, invisibility, regeneration, teleportation, etc). The AI is not smart enough to deliberately spread its forces and attack on multiple fronts, so your doomstack can wipe out its armies and then conquer its cities.
  • This strategy gets boring very quickly because the AI is not clever enough to deploy specific countermeasures (such as "true sight" to neutralize your Invisibility).
  • The real fun in Master of Magic lies in restricting yourself to a particular theme or set of units, so that the AI's weakness is less significant and the "environmental" challenges (such as elemental nodes) require some actual planning and tactics.
  • The simplest theme is one based on schools of magic. If you specialize in Death magic, then try summoning a few Werewolves to accompany your hero. If you've got Chaos, then try fielding a small army with heavy fire-support from your wizard.
  • You can also get creative - perhaps you're playing an anti-social Libertarian wizard who refuses to pay wages to a standing army, so you rely entirely on summoned units ("mercenaries") and flying boats ("privateers") backed up by Fireballs spells ("ICBMs").

• Always try being stealthy. Even if you only stealth kill 2 or 3 guys, then when poo poo goes loud you are dealing with a group with a few less bad guys.
• Don't play it like a standard cover shooter, you're a lot better moving and shooting, and switching it up as often as you can. If you sit in one spot and just pop out to shoot at guys you'll get set on fire a lot.

• You don't need to grind every collectible unless you really want to or you need XP.
  • If you do, look for treasure maps which help a lot in finding them.
• You can backtrack to most places to collect things you missed. Salvage is useful to collect, the weapon upgrades are pretty awesome.
• If you're playing on PC, the QTEs have a reputation for sometimes being a giant pain in the rear end - though I think a recent patch made them less painful.
  • Don't hammer as fast as you can, try matching what's on screen.
  • Also, the shrinking circle QTE wants you to hit the button while the shrinking circle is *inside* the static circle.
  • I thought it was when it *matched* the static circle my first play-through which caused me no end of pain.
  • Once you figure out the QTEs they're not too bad.

• As someone who's playing thru Tomb Raider right now I can back up the worthlessness of the salvage from animals skill. There's a few wolves at the start as enemies but after that the whole hunting thing seems to be forgotten about and it's human enemies (mostly) all the way.
• Arrow retrieval might seem a bit useless as there is an abundance of arrows everywhere but it ties into a tier 2 skill which nets you extra ammo for looting corpses.
• Orienteering was quite useful as using survival instinct reveals nearby relics/documents etc on your map long before finding the treasure maps. Completing the relic sets nets you a good chunk of xp towards another upgrade too.
• Always be looting corpses and ammo caches as they randomly contain weapon parts to upgrade your weapons, and you can't develop them further until you find enough parts.

• It's actually not trivially easy to max out all your skills and weapon upgrades throughout the game, so picking the skills that give you more XP and resources whenever you get some early will come in handy.
• Along those lines, while you may get bored of looking for all the hidden challenge items, it does pay off to look for crates with resources in them. Use the special vision thingy (in fact, do this a lot in general because it's pretty handy) to spot them easily. Sometimes they're hanging in nets which you have to incinerate to fall down.
• Using stealth and killing enemies off one by one without others noticing it (bow, silenced pistol) can really make things a lot more easy, so opt for that whenever you get the chance. If you fail half-way through, you can still hose them down with the rifle or any other gun, but now you'll have half as many enemies charging at you at once.
• Once you get the grenade launcher, make sure to make use of it. I ended up running around with grenades stocked to the limit most of the time and still ran into crates with new ones because I apparently used it far less than I was supposed to.
  • The game is actually pretty good about placing grenades in spots where you will be likely to use them, so do it!

• Good way to find the hidden objects in each level is to think 'if I were a developer, and I wanted to hide something in the most out of the way place that no one would look, where would I place it?' Guaranteed you will find the last object in that spot.

• Don't try to play it like a cover shooter.
  • Move around!
  • Get in their faces and use melee.
  • Use dodge a lot.
  • This makes the fighting much more fun. It also has the most satisfying bow play I've ever seen.

• Join a guild. Guilds receive income from player participation (e.g. logging in, doing quests, exploring) so there isn't too much elitism or exclusivity, and they'll probably be happy to have you as an active member even if you never participate in their scheduled events.
• You can join multiple guilds simultaneously, but that's sort of "advanced feature" and you might get kicked if you don't understand the Representation mechanic. Just stick to one guild at first.
• Always have a food buff. Don't buy food except when preparing for a dungeon raid. Your guild bank will be full of surplus food which was made by various players as they leveled their Cooking profession; grab a stack of <whatever> and chow them down as you're exploring.
• Legendary weapons aren't worth the trouble. It looks neat, but then it mysteriously disappears from your inventory and the Support team just says "the logs show nothing" and _{jesus christ that was months ago why am I still bitter about it}
• If you see a big crowd of players standing around, take a look around. If they have a lot of different guild tags, then there probably a "world event" beginning shortly. Ask about it, and someone will probably take pity on your noob self and explain. You may be able to get some exp/loot just for hanging around with them and participating in a confusing scrum for a few minutes.

• This is a combat game.
  • It starts off with an interesting premise ("Okay, so this is a heist mission? And my party is the fantasy equivalent of Repo Men? And their social status in this world is some combination of 'debt slave' and 'elite special forces operative'? And my tank is a steampunk-satyr and she's being healed by a werewolf?"). The game sprinkles in some tantalizing backstory and character development. It also does a good job of introducing new gameplay mechanics and tactical wrinkles, and includes a good mix of content (exploration, intra-party dialogue, puzzles, optional very-hard boss fights, etc).
  • Towards the end, the writers either slacked off or ran out of ideas, and the game falls into a pattern of "Defeat this group of baddies to unlock the next room. Repeat 20 times. Cutscene." The interesting premise also gets shelved in favour of a generic "save the world from some evil jerk" fantasy script.
  • If you aren't enjoying the combat, then don't depend on the story or puzzles to sustain your interest.
  • I got bored around the 3/4 mark and cheated heavily so that I could stroll through the fights, but I still couldn't bring myself to actually finish the game
• One thing I do remember about the combat is that it's "tough but fair." When the designers wanted to introduce challenge, they did so via the normal game mechanics. For example, instead of just giving the boss a million hitpoints, they'd give him a buff that reduced incoming damage. After losing the fight, you could always come back with a different approach (e.g. interrupt him while he's applying the buff, or strip the buff off of him, or burst him down before he can apply it, etc).

• If a party member dies, you have to use a resurrect spell to bring them back, which is normally going to be from a scroll. You can buy more in town, they're not terribly expensive.
  
  • Resurrecting a character involves two clicks. The first click designates the character; the second chooses a target location (within 10m of their corpse). This game includes many examples of very dangerous traps and instakill environmental hazards, and a resurrected character can be immediately re-killed before you get a chance to control them. Keep the Resurrection "range" feature in mind, just in case you accidentally walk someone into lava.
• Keep in mind that a lot of puzzles and crafting are done by dragging poo poo onto other poo poo, also don't be afraid to move objects in the game around by dragging
  • RPGs may have taught you that crates are object to be looted (if you're OCD) or ignored. Divinity wants you to unlearn that lesson. Pretend that you're a toddler. If you see an object, try moving it around. It might conceal a secret switch. You might be able to setup a crude barricade for the next fight. You can suppress most of the environmental-effect traps by moving objects around (e.g. vent? stack a crate on it. pressure plate? move a barrel onto/off of it. burning puddle? push a water barrel onto it).
  • The Telekinesis ability lets you move items over very long distances. This expands your toddler messing-with-the-scenery potential, but it can also be used to circumvent some traps and challenges. Especially in conjunction with Stealth. Maybe you don't actually need to slay the troll if you can sneakily TK his treasure chest away to a safe location and then loot its contents.
• Take a look around the environment before you start a fight.
  • If there are barrels, mouse over them. Do they contain oil or water? Do you have any spells which can ignite oil or electrify water? Does the enemy have any spellcasters who might do the same to you if you've carelessly grouped all of your dudes around an explodey-barrel? Remember that archers in this game should be considered "junior mages" because their specialty arrows can perform environmental effects.
  • The enemy AI will avoid walking through debuff fields (even the basic Midnight Oil spell) if it can find an alternate path. Hence, you can often encourage a big enemy swarm to walk a circuitous route (and/or force it through a chokepoint), which gives you more time to use ranged attacks.
  • Persistent field-effect spells can be deployed before you actually start combat. Of course, if you approach too closely then you're liable to get detected and start the fight early, so cast from max-range or sneak around.
  • Stealth is actually pretty decent, although it's situational. You'll be outnumbered in most fights, so it's usually preferable to begin with some big AoE debuff or nuke (and you don't want your Rogue in the middle of that, because Friendly Fire is always on). But it's sometimes handy to toss a big gently caress-you Sneak Attack Critical directly into the spine of an enemy mage.
• Equipment damage is incurred whenever an item is used. Low-AP weapons (e.g. dagger) will get used much more often than high-AP broadswords, and will decay much more quickly. If you have a Rogue in your party, pay special attention to their gear. Repair it frequently, and maybe carry a backup weapon just in case the main one breaks in the middle of an important fight.
• You can transfer items between party members during combat pretty cheaply (1 AP IIRC), but it's still a good idea to spread out healing potions so that everyone has immediate access to them during "oh poo poo" moments.
• The Knockdown status effect is very powerful. Aside from completely incapacitating the target, it provides a 100% hit chance for subsequent melee attacks. Many bosses are immune to it, but can be a life-saver when you're facing a high-level enemy who can evade most of your attacks.