Newb Help.

[Duke]

you gotta get gear that will help you with criticals. as in villains leather armor....the more critical enhancing gear you have, the higher your chance to land those wonderful critical hits.

[Beirlis]

I can see by your stats that you're not using any ATM

Zukero, can you kindly tell me what this "ATM" is of which you refer? That usually means "at the moment." ATack Modifier? Andor's Trail Mix?

Also, thanks Loki for this thread, it was very helpful for me. This game *really* needs either:

• Better in-game information on what is what, e.g.:
  • skills and their progression paths
  • what general "level" an area of the game is / some type of warning when you are wondering into death
  • when aquiring a quest (or at least viewing them), what the level of the quest is so we can know if we should even try it or just move on until later
  • A per-encounter detail of your chance to hit, average expected damage inflicted as well as chance to be hit and average damage received. (Perhaps similar to Wesnoth?)
• A good strategy guide/walkthrough that explains useful skills and progression paths, where to level and what to not try until you are level x, etc, or
• both

A non-spoiler approach is always fun, but a "blindly wonder around until OOPS! you died and lost 200xp" approach is NOT fun. There should be a ballance.

I'm going to start a new character now that I've learned a little bit. It seems like this game involves a lot of grind.

Thanks.

[Zukero]

ATM means At The Moment as you knew already
I'm not a fan of having a too specific vocabulary... even in the AT world, AC means both attach chance, and actor condition...

I think the trial and error works fine in AT, as long as you remember to save early and often ! Giving away too much information in-gmae would ruin the immersion. There are some places where NPCs would block for "some reason", that is indeed meaning "you are not strong enough".
I'd vote against having too much... ruins the Level 1 challenge

This game can indeed involve a lot of grinding, especially in two occasions :
- The beginnign of the game
- The legendary items

For the first one, we are working on it, by trying to add more beginner-level quests.
For the second one, well, these items were created for the most hardcore players to begin with...

[fiernaq]

Heh, we had an idea a while back to create tomes with an in character style of explaining gameplay that we would then spread around the world in appropriate places. If I remember correctly, I was supposed to be writing some of them but I seem to have dropped the ball on that. Keep reminding me and maybe one day it'll actually get done

[Beirlis]

Thanks for the response guys!

Your selection of the "More critical" skill may not have been the wisest, as for now, you will not find that many critical-enabled weapons (required to use critical hits). I can see by your stats that you're not using any ATM. It IS a good skill however. I have invested 4 skill points in it

Hah! I was taking it out of context. Your "any" here referred to the afore-mentioned "critical-enabled weapons," I get it. I thought your "ATM" was some acronym for something in the game, like "I can see by your stats that you're not using any ATM (Active Telemarketing Matrix)" .... yeesh.

Heh, we had an idea a while back to create tomes with an in character style of explaining gameplay that we would then spread around the world in appropriate places. If I remember correctly, I was supposed to be writing some of them but I seem to have dropped the ball on that. Keep reminding me and maybe one day it'll actually get done

LOL! OMG! You sound like me!! Are you sure you aren't just the me I've never met?

Yeah, in-game tomes sound like a great idea since you don't have to search the web (the answers are there in the game), you can discover them at the rate that you'll need the information (i.e., wiggle around a little, kill a rat, eat some bread, do a quest and die first) and it keeps the whole game experience more cohesive. And I know this isn't an "I want a pony!" thread, so sorry for the topic shift, but might I suggest a few tiny thingies?

• When you enter a game region where you are in a little over your head, maybe print a console message that says something like "This place looks a little dangerous." Even better would be Angband-like progressively cautioning messages, like "This place looks scary.", "The inhabitants of this region look lethal" and "You can feel the cold hand of death gripping your heart.", etc.
• In the quest view, perhaps in the header (the expandable portion) put the level of the quest. I don't know much about the Android gui APIs (I know they killed ATW and maybe still have Swing?), but preferably it would be in a smaller font than the name of the quest, but whatever.
• Also, a cool adjunct to the tomes would be if NPCs occasionally spouted out hints about skills & such.

Anyway, this thread has been helpful for me to figure out how to play this game. My new toon is level 7 now and I trained the Fortitude skill as soon as I hit level 5. So now I'm trying to sort through what gear to use. I can get to the Vileguard town where the one lady (theif?) in the tavern or something sells cool items (there's that one 2k-ish short sword with criticals on it there), but it all costs so much that it takes a while to save up for it.

Oh also, where's a descent starting shield? I'm probably going to get the +1 BC shield for now (crude shield I think), but it would be nice if there was a better one (that didn't have huge penalties to attack chance) at a vendor accessible to a newbie. Also, what level should I be before trying to kill those bandits that the lady wants you to kill at the crossroads? I tried it on my earlier character when I was level 9, but the whole area was just way too leathal.

[fiernaq]

Ooh, I like the console message letting you know the comparative danger of the area you just entered. Unfortunately, for that to work I think they'd have to do something like permanently show the combat log and use it for stuff other than just combat (like these messages). Not too difficult but would probably take a bit of work.

Quests don't actually have levels and that's one of the reasons I like this game so much. Sure, various people might recommend various stats to make things easier but I remember at one point there was at least one person who had completed every quest while staying at level 1. In other words, when we say stuff like "You should probably be level 15 before going there" we mean "At level 15 it should be relatively easy even if you don't have the absolute best build for that area".

Similar to the first suggestion about area danger levels, showing the combatlog full time would also allow us to have NPCs say stuff in passing. Personally, I'd be in favor of this but I don't know how much work it would take to do this.

For gold, your best bet early on is to farm the stuffing out of the snake caves. We're currently working on several suggestions to improve the beginning game experience to make it slightly less grindy but for now you pretty much have to grind out the meat drops to sell or if you head just east and north of Crossglen I've heard that the boars have a pretty high drop rate for leather boots which you can sell for some decent cash too. Either way, there really are a lot of vendor items early game that are worth saving up for.

There currently aren't many good shields. That's something I hope will change in the future (I took the Fighting Style: Sword and Shield skill) but for now you're rather limited. I too used the +1 BC shield for the longest time just because I didn't want the penalties that nearly every other shield came with. Later on, you'll be able to get a Remgard shield which is basically the best shield in the game currently but who knows, by then we might have something better.

Anything north of the Crossroads guardhouse I tend to recommend level 15ish. I put that area at about the same difficulty level as the Prison to the far south-west. There are some builds that make those areas much easier but you don't really need to worry about specializing unless you just really want to.

[Beirlis]

Ooh, I like the console message letting you know the comparative danger of the area you just entered. Unfortunately, for that to work I think they'd have to do something like permanently show the combat log and use it for stuff other than just combat (like these messages). Not too difficult but would probably take a bit of work.

Cool, glad you like it. I would suggest something a little flexible and extensible, maybe something like the typical logging framework where you have the producer/consumer design pattern, allowing you to have different kinds of messages and allows the user (at some point) to descide which messages go where. In this case, you could catagories like:

• combat
• quests (new, updates or completed)
• experience
• gold & items received or lost (dropped, or whatever)
• NPCs
• etc...

Of course, you don't have to put the other stuff in there now, but if it's re-designed to make it easy to add later, then half of your work is done. And you may want to consider multiple message "consumers" as well (so theoretically more than one "log" where messages go to).

For gold, your best bet early on is to farm the stuffing out of the snake caves. We're currently working on several suggestions to improve the beginning game experience to make it slightly less grindy but for now you pretty much have to grind out the meat drops to sell or if you head just east and north of Crossglen I've heard that the boars have a pretty high drop rate for leather boots which you can sell for some decent cash too. Either way, there really are a lot of vendor items early game that are worth saving up for.

There currently aren't many good shields. That's something I hope will change in the future (I took the Fighting Style: Sword and Shield skill) but for now you're rather limited. I too used the +1 BC shield for the longest time just because I didn't want the penalties that nearly every other shield came with. Later on, you'll be able to get a Remgard shield which is basically the best shield in the game currently but who knows, by then we might have something better.

Anything north of the Crossroads guardhouse I tend to recommend level 15ish. I put that area at about the same difficulty level as the Prison to the far south-west. There are some builds that make those areas much easier but you don't really need to worry about specializing unless you just really want to.

Thanks again! So I had some down time today and I got to level 14 now! I still need a lot of equipment though. I'm trying to find those bandits that the lady at the crossroads wants you to kill. This is really quite a fun game. Thus far, I've got this character mostly in attack damage, with 15% (from leveling) into attack chance and I got Fortitude right at level 5, quickly followed by regneration, which I love! I should probably post a new thread with my current character, but I need to figure out how to actually dump your character (I think I saw a thread on that somewhere) and I'll probably do that tomorrow night.