Titan Quest

[MauxFaux]

Cougar, I tried using Hamachi, could never see my friends game. Good to hear it actually works, I'll have to try again sometime.

[Charlatan]

I just beat Epic with my level 43 Summoner and boy does it ramp up again near the end. That last Telkine must have killed me 20 times last night before I finally gave up. Got him this morning though by fighting a little and withdrawing when it got dicey. He had some sort of vitality or lifedrain which could suck me dry in about 5 seconds if I didn't pay attention to my health bar - plus I found out in Epic that bosses regenerate all their HP if you die or port out of the area (damn them!) so it's not possible to whittle down a boss little by little through suicide attacks.

Typhon took a couple trys but I got him - he started using more of his abilities (lifedrain - and with 4 pets that's a heck of a lot of life he gains; and he finally cast frost liches). I think a good strategy for Epic would be to take out one or more of the statues while you have the Battle Marker going to limit what he does. It also helps that he loves to breathe that fire all the time, which does almost no damage to the Core Dweller.

He dropped 1 epic piece, which seems like a decent bracer with 43% pierce resist on it (among a pile of other mods). But my DPS drops by around 100 when I equip it since almost all my gear is of the +% fire damage - upgrading armor almost always drops my DPS. Oh, and I finally noticed that your pets don't factor into your DPS, which makes comparing numbers a bit difficult. And it gives me DPS envy whenever I talk to anyone else. :)

Gearwise, it's interesting to note that the only gear I upgraded through Epic (until Typhon) was my headpiece and my staff - everything else I was wearing I got from Normal Typhon. Dunno if it was just bad luck or what, but I find it difficult to give up the Pyromancer robe with +1 earth skills (especially when combined with my +2 earth skills amulet, which I put on to summon Stinky).

Epic with pets was pretty easy, with the notable exception of 2 or so bosses prior to the Telkine (the Automaton boss was very difficult). Having only fire damage makes killing fire resistant mobs a challenge.

Still having fun, but all the deaths at the end of Epic definitely drained a bit of the excitement from me.

[DeepT]

At least there is some good news here with my friend. For reasons I can not explain, last night he was able to connect to my box and play although I still could not connect to his box and play. We did play several hours and it was a lot of fun.

There were a few game play problems though, maybe you can bring them up to be addressed.

1. When pets get infected with the pulsing AoE disease that infects others, they follow you closely and you can never let the disease run its course since they are right next to you and you keep infecting each other. The only way to stop this is to dismiss the pet. My wisp never took damage from the disease (a bug?) and therefor would never die from it. I think just having pets follow at a longer range would solve this problem or if there was some AI logic that prevented pets from following its master if it had a contagious disease.

2. Pets interrupt npcs giving long speeches. Several times an NPC would start saying something and the pet would bump them (just doing their idle move around stuff), and they would stop. I missed the oracle of delphi's speech because of this.

3. I would like to be able to pull the camera back a bit further. The reason is that I would like to be able to see mobs before aggroing them. While you can do this, its very hard and you need to inch along, and even then the monster's idle walking around can aggro them. A workaround could be a button that shows monsters by name (like in D2) so you can see them off screen. This would help a lot for setting up alpha strikes with spells like lighting or simply telling a pet to 'go first'.

4. There seem to be missing sounds, or at least sounds that 'should be' there. In D2 whenever an item dropped, it made a sound. In TQ only some items (like rings) make sounds. In D2 I could tell what loot types dropped from the sounds. The problem in TQ unless I hold the alt key down, I do not even know *if* anything dropped, let alone what. Maybe its just my video card or monitor, but its very very hard to see items on the ground unless you use the alt key. I do not remember having such troubles in D2.

[JM]

1. When pets get infected with the pulsing AoE disease that infects others, they follow you closely and you can never let the disease run its course since they are right next to you and you keep infecting each other. The only way to stop this is to dismiss the pet. My wisp never took damage from the disease (a bug?) and therefor would never die from it. I think just having pets follow at a longer range would solve this problem or if there was some AI logic that prevented pets from following its master if it had a contagious disease.

Surely you can just tell your pet to go to a particular spot, as described in the manual?

4. There seem to be missing sounds, or at least sounds that 'should be' there. In D2 whenever an item dropped, it made a sound. In TQ only some items (like rings) make sounds. In D2 I could tell what loot types dropped from the sounds. The problem in TQ unless I hold the alt key down, I do not even know *if* anything dropped, let alone what. Maybe its just my video card or monitor, but its very very hard to see items on the ground unless you use the alt key. I do not remember having such troubles in D2.

I think the sounds are based on the quality of items that drop.

[Charlatan]

1. When pets get infected with the pulsing AoE disease that infects others, they follow you closely and you can never let the disease run its course since they are right next to you and you keep infecting each other. The only way to stop this is to dismiss the pet.
Yeah, I have to dismiss all the pets and resummon them. Sucks. And to the guy above saying just send your pets off.. with 4 pets it's almost impossible to send them all off if you're getting diseased and your health is dropping like a rock.

2. Pets interrupt npcs giving long speeches. Several times an NPC would start saying something and the pet would bump them (just doing their idle move around stuff), and they would stop. I missed the oracle of delphi's speech because of this.

Yes, this is the "bump into the NPC" ability all pets have. Whenever I talk to an NPC I instantly click in the text box so I can see what they're saying even if (when) they get bumped into. You can get the speech by opening up your quest log (Q) and then going to Main Quests and selecting the Dialog tab in the bottom panel. It replays the dialog associated with the quest.

I thought they said they were fixing this in the 1st patch, but obviously they didn't.

[ydejin]

I thought they said they were fixing this in the 1st patch, but obviously they didn't.

I think the problem they fixed on the first patch was, if you the player character was standing too close to an NPC you would bump the NPC yourself and their speech would stop. I ran into it a bunch of times before the patch. That problem, at least, seems to have been fixed.

[DeepT]

You can tell your pet to go to a spot, yes. He will stay there for about 0.5 seconds and come right back. If they want to work that angle they need a richer pet controll system. They would need, goto (with an implied stay), follow, and an attack command.

[DeepT]

Yeah, I have to dismiss all the pets and resummon them. Sucks. And to the guy above saying just send your pets off.. with 4 pets it's almost impossible to send them all off if you're getting diseased and your health is dropping like a rock.

Oh good point, I had not thought about having more then one pet. I think the AI solution would be better, where any pet runs away from other pets / players until its cured.

Or a really simple workaround is that pets can not infect anything else. I would imagine a pack of pets cross infecting each other would be impossible to deal with.

[JM]

Oh OK - Haven't played a pet class, didn't know the pets wouldn't stay where they were told.

[Equisilus]

Ah, interesting. I just encountered this pet infecting me infecting him thing with my Magician (Earth/Rogue). I thought it was a bug as I couldn't figure out how to get it to stop. I ended up leaving the room I was in and it stopped then, but it must have been just because I moved far enough away from my Core Dweller when going through the doorway to end it. Ow, that was taking off health like mad. Hmm, I must not have noticed it with my Oracle because most of the time I had a Liche King (immune to poison?) and a wisp (also immune?).

The cross-infecting thing being removed from the pets would probably work best. Putting more distance between pet and character may end up making pathfinding a little more clunky (since pets seem to mirror your movements, not just follow).

Certainly, I can't wait until they fix pets interrupting dialogue. The dialogue in the quest journal is only good for the main stuff. Anything else gets skipped entirely and you can't get it back (unless it's one of those repetitive ones). It'd be particularly annoying for those on their first run through the game, since they haven't yet read/listened to the dialogues even once.

[Jab2565]

I have a question about bows, all the bows say their speed is very slow, yet I see bows that are at least 20 attack speed faster then the one I have on, but still say very slow. Is there a way to tell without picking it up if it's faster? Also on my nature guy, I just got the nymph, does she get better then the wolves?

[nKoan]

I just picked up this game, rather late (by Qt3 standards) and I am having a lot more fun then I realized. I was sitting there clicking away thinking it wasn't all that exciting, but then looked up and 4 hours were gone in what seemed like 30 minutes. After I advanced through the first few character levels, I'm really hooked.

I'm currently using a Hunter/Earth character around level 12 and I just found my first blue weapon (a spear) which luckily I can use and it matches well with the hunters melee skills.

[DeepT]

When do you get extra bags? Is it just a quest reward? I got one, but I would like to get more if possible.

[forgeforsaken]

You get the bags as part of the main quest. You end up with 3 all said and done.

[DeepT]

Can you get more then 3 for higher difficutly levels or is 3 the grand total limit?

[Chris Woods]

3 is currently the known limit. Unless there is some really awkward way of unlocking a 4th bag, people who have beat Legendary report having only 3.

Chris Woods

[TylerG]

Do spells count as attacks? as in if I have a skill that gives me 20% damage to fire based attacks. Does that effect say volcanic orb at all? or just weapon attacks?

[ydejin]

I have a question about bows, all the bows say their speed is very slow, yet I see bows that are at least 20 attack speed faster then the one I have on, but still say very slow. Is there a way to tell without picking it up if it's faster? Also on my nature guy, I just got the nymph, does she get better then the wolves?

AFAIK any magical speed bonus goes in after the general description on weapon speed. In other words, a magical bow with +50% speed (actually I've never seen anything much over 25%) will still show weapon speed as very slow, becaues all bows have speed very slow. But your magical bow will have very slow +50% which will probably make it's final speed equivalent to a fast weapon.

If you go to the character string right below your resistances you'll see your Average Damage, Damage Per Second, and Attack Speed. I just did a few checks and for a basic character Attack Speed will be as follows for different weapon speeds:

Very Fast = 106%
Average = 93%
Slow = 76%
Very Slow = 72%

If your weapon has Attack Speed bonus, you'll see this number is increased by whatever percent the bonus is for. Similarly if you've got speed bonuses from skills (for example Hunter's Wood Lore increases weapon speed) these will modify this number as well. From a quick back of the envelope calculation of Attack Speed and Average Damage, I think 100% speed = 1 attack per second (I'm a bit suprised Average weapons are actually slower than 100%).

You can buy a weapon at a shop slap it in your weapon slot and see the changes to Average Damage, Attack Speed, and Damage Per Second and then sell them back if you're not happy with the numbers. As long as you do not close the Merchant Dialog while you are doing it, you can sell the weapon back to the Merchant for the original price you paid for it. Just don't close the Dialog. If you do, and then reopen it to sell it back, you'll sell it back at a greatly reduced price.

[ydejin]

When do you get extra bags? Is it just a quest reward? I got one, but I would like to get more if possible.

If I remember correctly you'll get your second approximately when you get to Egypt and the third when you get to the Orient. As forgeforsaken says they're part of the main quest, so you won't need to do anything special to get them.

[Jab2565]

Thanks for the info, one thing that has been bothering me is the +%elemental damage bonus. Does this apply only to weapon, and does it only work if the weapon does that type of damage already. For example, if I put + 6% fire damage on a weapon that only does ice damage.

[Jab2565]

If any wasn't sure about it, pets do need to be re summoned to use any new powers you unlocked for and put a point in on the tree I just got 2 spells for wolves and nymph they weren't using either until they died and I respawned them. Speaking about pets, I would also like to see some basic controls. Like defensive: only attack if I'm attacking. Offensive: what they are now, and perhaps one for not attacking at all, and one for just using spells.

[EvilIdler]

Yeah, I miss pet-controls, too. I also feel that the wolf summoning spell
should summon up to your limit (after all, you've spent a whole lot of points
in the skill) of 1/2/3 wolves, and maybe upgrade (resummon) existing wolves
that aren't up to the upgraded standard.

[Kalle]

I'm bugged about the chat interface. Having to press "t" to get a window that covers a quarter of your screen, that you can't remove except by clicking on the close icon with your mouse, that's just bad design.

What I would like to see is this. I press Enter to bring up the chat interface, I type something, I press enter again and whatever I typed is sent and the interface is gone. And I'd like a drastic scale down of the chat interface too. Optimally, I'd just want the last few lines appear as text directly overlaying the game screen. If I want a chat log, I could use the "t" function as it is now for that.

This is an action game, if you don't have voice chat you just want the bare essentials for typing since it's all about speed.

And on top of that, some Diablo 2 style quick responses (mapped to the num pad) for "yes", "no", "hands off my loot" or whatever would have been good.

[mtkafka]

Thanks for the info, one thing that has been bothering me is the +%elemental damage bonus. Does this apply only to weapon, and does it only work if the weapon does that type of damage already. For example, if I put + 6% fire damage on a weapon that only does ice damage.

I think it applies to any elemental attack you use... be it spell or weapon. So if you are have +50% fire damage it will upgrade all your fire based attacks be it on weapon, wand or spell. It will not upgrade your ice damage from ice wand. As well, if you combine these with ternion attck (w/ + speed attack) you have the most abused stat in game! It's so bad, that I am WAY better off with green items + charms.

Ternion attack is absurdly overpowered. I added it to my 45th level pyro to test it (now a conjurer)... and it was night and day.

But even with all the balance problems I stilll am addicted. I still really like this game alot. I'd even say I'm more addicted to thi game than D2 at release.

etc

[Jack]

Michael, has Iron Lore considered something like giving the mystic an "enchant item" ability -- such as the one in Fate? The player could pay progressively more for each enchantment on normal items (not enchant found magic), run the risk of ruining an item, and possibly even produce a "named" item with the character's name attached (after a given number of successful enchants).

This would accomplish the following:
* Provide a much-needed money-sink in the game
* Give the mystic something more useful to do
* Give the player a reason to use the Z key after level 5

Also, perhaps give merchants the ability to repair broken items and return them to "normal" status for enchanting purposes. Granted, that may not be as useful since the "normal" drops are so plentiful.

[Charlatan]

Playing a bit on Legendary, I've discovered something that surprises and saddens me a bit - purples aren't all that. After busting my hump to get here to get some sweet Purple gear, I'm finding that you don't really want to be decked out in all purples. I luckily found two of the four Vestments of the Battlemage set pieces in the Mycenean Ruins (which is before Sparts) and of course I put em on. However the two piece bonus is only 37% pierce resistance. I looked it up and three pieces would add 37% poison resistance. And all four pieces would add 37% elemental resistance. While that sounds pretty good, remember that in Legendary, you start at -100% resists. And as a magic user, I only have 8 slots where I can use armor (4 armor, 2 rings, 1 amulet, 1 staff). And I also have a set of yellow leggings that have 43% pierce resist AND 20 or 30% fire resist - so by putting on the battlemage feet, I actually LOSE pierce and fire resist.

Yeah, the robe is good for +1 to all skills, but it replaces my Pyromancer robe which has +1 to all fire skills, and +fire damage on it. Or it replaces my yellow robe of something or other that has 45% pierce resistance on it too.

I looked at the armor sets available in TQ, and I don't really see something that would help my Summoner - what I mainly need is fire damage, or + to Nature or Earth.

So I guess the bottom line is: in Legendary, as before, you want to mix and match your items, using a purple here or there, but it seems to me now that the best gear is gonna be some combination of purples/blues and charm/relic enhanced yellows or greens.

The inability to put charms or relics on blues/purples really hurts you at the high end. Other than running out of screen space to display all the modifiers, I don't know why you shouldn't be able to enhance your high-end armor. It doesn't seem that unbalancing (unless the design is to make you have to constantly make difficult choices between damage or resistance).

[DeepT]

My friend and I got to Egypt last night (we ended there), and I can see why people hate that maze so much. Its just a long haul through a bunch of unintresting rooms. Maybe on higher difficulty levels it will be more intense and less boring.

Anyway, last night was my 2nd night of having my pet wisp and I was really trying to activally use him and it was not working out so well. Maybe its the wisp AI because my friend's litch seemed to be more agressive although maybe it was just seemed that way to me. Anyway here are some more pet and pet related issues and a few more bugs for Micheal Fitch.

Things I consider Bugs (my pet is the wisp BTW):

1. Sometimes I would tell my pet to go somewhere, and he would not. Even repeating the command would do nothing.

2. Sometimes I would tell my pet to attack something, and he would not. Sometimes he would run to the spot, shoot / attack the thing ONCE and then come back, although this was very uncommon. The more obscure the path was to the mob, the less likely he would obey the attack command, although sometimes even a strait line with the monsters at the edge of the screen would be enough. MOBs can path to me in these cases, but can my pet can not path or refuses to path to them.

3. Monsters will aggro based on range, not line of site. This is very obvious in tombs / dungeons where the wall fades when you get close, and monsters on the other side will aggro and then path through the dungeon to get to you. Asside from being annoying and a little unfair, I know my computer comes to a halt for a few seconds when suddenly 10 monsters decided to path to me from 6 rooms away.

Finally, a change/tiny feature request: Please either reduce monster aggro radious so you can easily see them on screen before they aggro, OR let us pull the camera back a bit further to give us like 2 inches of screen room where monsters can be on screen and not aggro.

[forgeforsaken]

The wisp isn't really a combat pet like some of the others. It's primary function really is as a buff/stunner. This isn't obvious when you first get the wisp. What you want the wisp around for is to cast Eye of the Storm which boosts all your elemental damage. You can upgrade the wisp a few levels too to have it get Thunderclap which is an aoe skill that does minor damage and stuns. Wisps are virtually invulnerable with their 99% dodge skills.

[DeepT]

Hey, I got that eye of storm spell. It says it lasts 30 seconds and costs x manna to cast and all that. I can't cast it, it doesn't have an icon. As far as I can tell, my wisp never casts it either. I looked for a buff icon, or something, but I can not see any visibile effect that the buff is active.

[forgeforsaken]

The wisp does cast, usually when you get into combat. You should see an icon appear under the wisp and your character when it does. Also, did you resummon the wisp after you got it? Summons don't get new skills until resummoned, and with the wisp almost never dieing....

[DeepT]

It definitely did not cast it in combat, however, I might not have summoned it again after I got the skill, so Ill have to try that.


I was thinking of changing my caster to melee. I originally had considered earth to go with storms, but looking at it there are a lot of redundant powers. IE: Why spam fire bolts when I spam ice already? I have lightning and chain lightning, do I really need the fire aoe? etc..

However, after looking at defense, I got to thinking I could spend most of my points in that, and that storms would complement it well. I could get energy shield and the extra damae shield from storms, as well as storms having, an actual melee line of buffs (Hey devs, why don't the other caster trees have these? I thought spirit should have a few lines to make some kind of anti-paladin character).

There is the PBAoE buff in storms, the mana shields, and a line of weapon damage boosting spells. I still could have my wisp out for its buff and even keep lightning bolt/chain lightning. This looks like a serious combo. Does anyone know if the +Damage stuff from defense works on magical damage? IE: Chain lightning, the storm surge buff, the retaliation buff (storm surge), will get the boost from the defense +damage powers?

I have a lot in INT and Energy, but I am only level 16. I am sure a few levels of pumping str and buying defense mastery will get my strength up to where I can make the switch between caster gear and warrior gear. Ill have to dump my ice spell damage though and put those points elsewhere. Hopefully it will help with my mana problem since even with 7.5 mana regen a second, it is no where close to even allowing me to charge up between fights. I think I would need like 10x that regen for it to be meanful beyond powering constant cost mana spells.

[forgeforsaken]

As a storm caster you would primarly take Earth for it's pet, which is a tanking combat pet.

Storm/Defense is a good combo. What +damage skills are you talking about in defense? You kind of have me confused there, most of their skills are weapon pool so melee combat only. Some are even restricted to weapon class.

[DeepT]

Defensive Reaction, Colussus Form, Pulverize, Shield Smash, and Batter.

[forgeforsaken]

Pulverize and Shield Smash, are all Weapon Pool skills, and have a chane to trigger when attacking with a melee weapon and a shield equipped. Batter is an Active Attack skill, might be boosted by Storm Nimbus but it wont effect any of your lightning bolt skills.

[DeepT]

Colossus form?

[Matthew Gallant]

Keep trying, you'll get it.

[Helmutt]

So I'm playing TQ last night with my level 14 Nature/Offense guy. I was exiting a cave and my computer crashes. Blue screen of death, requiring a hard reboot. Once I recovered, I go back to start the game again and my character is FUBAR- now a level 1 newb with the same name, all items and progress gone.

Anyone know if there's a way to dig into the files and recover the guy or am I screwed?

[Mister Widget]

So I'm playing TQ last night with my level 14 Nature/Offense guy. I was exiting a cave and my computer crashes. Blue screen of death, requiring a hard reboot. Once I recovered, I go back to start the game again and my character is FUBAR- now a level 1 newb with the same name, all items and progress gone.

Anyone know if there's a way to dig into the files and recover the guy or am I screwed?

If you're using the latest (1.08) patch, there's automatically a backup folder with your character data in it. The folder is ..\My Documents\My Games\Titan Quest\SaveData\Main\_NameOfCharacter\Backup. Hopefully you can just copy everything from inside the ..\Backup directory up one tier.

[Mister Widget]

Pulverize and Shield Smash, are all Weapon Pool skills, and have a chane to trigger when attacking with a melee weapon and a shield equipped. Batter is an Active Attack skill, might be boosted by Storm Nimbus but it wont effect any of your lightning bolt skills.

Batter can be a highly effective skill if you have a high base damage shield. With the Rend Armor upgrade, you hit up to 3 enemies at once, and the arc of effect seems much wider than what the text says. The text descriptions makes it sound like these talents' main purpose is to slow enemies and reduce their armor, but it actually does significant damage also. The button refreshes very quickly (2 seconds, maybe 3), and with a high damage shield, it can one-shot multiple enemies at once. My Hunting/Defense character found a blue shield in mid-Greece that had 43 base damage on it, and he Battered his way all the way to the end-game with it.

[forgeforsaken]

Yeah my juggernaut uses it all the time. I wasn't saying it wasn't a good skill, it just doesn't do what DeepT was thinking it did.

[DeepT]

I didn't 'think' it did anything. I had no idea what it did, so that is why I was asking.

So these abilities, like adrenaline will normally be greyed out until you get the chance to activate them, at which point you have some amount of time (how much?) to click the button to turn the power on?

They way I read some powers, it says it has a 5% chance to activate, but then some other power reduces its cool down which is strange for a power that has a % chance to activate opposed to just being able to use it once in a while whenever you wish to.

[ydejin]

I didn't 'think' it did anything. I had no idea what it did, so that is why I was asking.

So these abilities, like adrenaline will normally be greyed out until you get the chance to activate them, at which point you have some amount of time (how much?) to click the button to turn the power on?

They way I read some powers, it says it has a 5% chance to activate, but then some other power reduces its cool down which is strange for a power that has a % chance to activate opposed to just being able to use it once in a while whenever you wish to.

Adrenaline works similar to Shield Smash/Disable/Pulverize. It should happen automatically with no intervention from you. The downside is that you may or may not notice that it's happening. I've got at least 1 point in every skill in the Defense tree and I personally never notice Shield Smash/Disable/Pulverize (not saying they don't happen, just that I'm not noticing it). Adrenaline you will actually notice if you pay attention, because you'll see a little icon appear under your health/energy bars in the far right corner. And I think if you bring up your character window while its active you'll note you have higher numbers until adrenaline runs out.

[forgeforsaken]

I notice shield smash, as it looks kind of like batter. I almost never notice disable which I think uses the weapon and not the shield.

[DeepT]

Oh thats good then. I would have to have powers that required a random chance to activate and then also required you to click an icon once it became available. WoW has this shit for the warrior and rogue and its annoying as hell.

I just wonder if Ill have enough skill points to do what I want. Lots of the defense tree looks sweet, but I wonder if ill end up as a hard to kill brick that takes forever to kill stuff. Hopefully the storm buffs will make up for the DPS since I will be dropping my ice bolts and maybe even chain lighting (I am not impressed with it, the aoe is to small. The plain lightning is good though, its a nice boss-beat down power).

Is it true you can't use runes on blue or purple gear? If so, it makes me wonder why we would even bother with them.

Does TQ have the concept of rares like from D2? It seem like it doesn't and that would be a huge downer. After all, what did you do in D2 after you got to the high levels? You tried to find the perfect set of rares to complement your build. Without that, TQ will have a limited life span for a single character. I was not too impressed with the sets I saw listed on gamebanshee. Some sets were nice, but most of them where 'meh'. I saw a dissapointing lack of +skill stuff. None of that getting +10 skill levels like you could in D2.



Is TQ limited to one game per CD? I was thinking of installing TQ on my other box and creating a level 1 newbie to join my other game just to bump up the monster count for my main character.

[MauxFaux]

Messing around with defence now myself. A lot of fun. If i could ever actually join the qt3 game instead of always losing connection, id share my info on my storm/defense build.

[mtkafka]

Does TQ have the concept of rares like from D2? It seem like it doesn't and that would be a huge downer. After all, what did you do in D2 after you got to the high levels? You tried to find the perfect set of rares to complement your build. Without that, TQ will have a limited life span for a single character. I was not too impressed with the sets I saw listed on gamebanshee. Some sets were nice, but most of them where 'meh'. I saw a dissapointing lack of +skill stuff. None of that getting +10 skill levels like you could in D2.


After the blues there's the purples.. the legendary items. Not exactly up to rare standards in D2... but close. The graphics for them do rock though (the few I've seen).

Problem is you really don't want to use legendary items at higher levels (ditched my archmage set for greens)... greens with attachments seem to do the job very well! You actually have better items from stores than drops!

etc

[DeepT]

Yeah, I saw those, but they really need randomly generated uber magic items.

[KiloOhm]

My 2nd character is Earth / Spirit, maxing out the staff skills in each - so far and I'm nearly unstoppable. I 1-shot most things (normal attack) and the triple staff shot makes very short work of bosses. It's a great build so far. I'm also building up the lich but really he's just kind of hanging around. He's not bad it's just that I kick so much butt he's not really needed. :)

[Kalle]

As a Defense/Storm warrior at level 30 I'm very disappointed with the lack of viable lifestealing gear in the game. Most lifestealing gear I see does a fixed amount of hp over x seconds, but as a melee guy it's not viable to keep enemies alive for 3/5/6 seconds because the damage they do will outpace the heal, and since the heal is fixed at a (usually pitiful) amount it doesn't scale as I level. For instance, right now I have a weapon that does 33 life steal over 3 seconds. I have 1600 hp. So if I hit one monster, don't kill it, and let it whack at me/run away for three seconds I'll regain 2% of my life.

I have only seen one good weapon with % of damage life steal, and sadly that was 30 DPS lower than my current weapon at the time (which I have since upgraded twice), and I have seen no rings or amulets with that tag.

And I can't rely on enhancements either, because my weapon is blue and that's where the lifesteal enhancements I've seen are supposed to go.

So right now I'm getting chewed up and going through potions at a rate of one per every two encounters it seems like. I don't mind relying on potions, but they shouldn't be my primary source of healing when I have no other viable damage mitigation. Four standard white melee enemies can take 1/3 of my life bar. Some more, some less, but on average that is what I'm seeing.

[Backov]

Unfortunately that seems to be how it's done with melee characters. I spent a lot of money on potions with my conqueror. With my Elementalist (current char) - I've had to stop picking them up since I use so few of them.

[Jab2565]

Dumb question but, is


*Spoiler***





there a way point portal in olympus that I'm missing? I see the mark on the select portal screen, but I can't find any.

[ydejin]

(**** Spoilers ****)


Dumb question but, is there a way point portal hat I'm missing? I see the mark on the select portal screen, but I can't find any.

I'm pretty sure the answer is no portal in Olympus. That screen is only there for user created portals.

You might want to add a spoiler tag to your post, as I was very suprised to end up in Olympus. I thought that the end location was very cool (although they should have done more with it), and I would have been sad to have found out about it by reading about it on Qt3.

[ydejin]

As a Defense/Storm warrior at level 30 I'm very disappointed with the lack of viable lifestealing gear in the game. Most lifestealing gear I see does a fixed amount of hp over x seconds, but as a melee guy it's not viable to keep enemies alive for 3/5/6 seconds because the damage they do will outpace the heal, and since the heal is fixed at a (usually pitiful) amount it doesn't scale as I level.

I haven't played too much with lifestealing gear, but Shield Batter with Rend Armor and Shield Charge should both be able to tag multiple enemies at once with them. So you should be able to hit four enemies with life sucking and then feed on them while you're finishing off one of them. May not be enough to make it all viable, but should help a bit.

[Jab2565]

Sorry about that.

Well I think I found a bug with a piece of equipment
The item Warden's Helm, it's supposed to give +2 skill points to the skill Maul
and 1 to call of the wild. It's not giving the +2 . I tried un equipping it and re equipping it. Also restarting the room.

About the lifestealing, I found a relic that one of the random effects it gave was 9% of damage converted to health. I have that on my coursir and it gives a nice amount of health back.

edit: I think I might have found another bug, it's with the item Band of domination. It says +10% attack speed. Yet when I replace it with either ring I have on, I'm not seeing an attack speed boost. And neither ring I have on gives attack speed bonus.

[Saber Cherry]

Diablo II's rares were very well implemented. TQ's rares are very boring - there seem to be only 4-5 affixes per item type, yielding a very small variety in items. For example, you'll never get an XXX Sword of Thunder for your Paladin/Thane, since Thunder only goes with staves.

On the flipside, Diablo II came out with (at most) one unique per item base type, while TQ blue+ all get custom graphics, and there are seemingly more of them. But the fact that blues+ are immune to relics make them all 'meh' to me.

One of the reasons I got tired of WoW was because Blizzard regressed from the best drop system ever implemented to a much worse one. What a dumb company.

@above posters:
Lifesteal (%damage -> hp) - seems to be broken. On the other hand, reports say that enough +HP regen gear will make the matter moot.

[Helmutt]

If you're using the latest (1.08) patch, there's automatically a backup folder with your character data in it. The folder is ..\My Documents\My Games\Titan Quest\SaveData\Main\_NameOfCharacter\Backup. Hopefully you can just copy everything from inside the ..\Backup directory up one tier.

Thanks Mr. Widget- worked like a charm...

You rock!

[Kalle]

I haven't played too much with lifestealing gear, but Shield Batter with Rend Armor and Shield Charge should both be able to tag multiple enemies at once with them. So you should be able to hit four enemies with life sucking and then feed on them while you're finishing off one of them. May not be enough to make it all viable, but should help a bit.

I'm doing that, and the effect is still marginal at best.

[mtkafka]

Diablo II's rares were very well implemented. TQ's rares are very boring - there seem to be only 4-5 affixes per item type, yielding a very small variety in items. For example, you'll never get an XXX Sword of Thunder for your Paladin/Thane, since Thunder only goes with staves.

On the flipside, Diablo II came out with (at most) one unique per item base type, while TQ blue+ all get custom graphics, and there are seemingly more of them. But the fact that blues+ are immune to relics make them all 'meh' to me.

One of the reasons I got tired of WoW was because Blizzard regressed from the best drop system ever implemented to a much worse one. What a dumb company.

@above posters:
Lifesteal (%damage -> hp) - seems to be broken. On the other hand, reports say that enough +HP regen gear will make the matter moot.

Lifesteal does work, but +HP Regen works so much better (and easier to find the items) that it makes it useless. And with blues I agree, there definitely needs to be a major enhancement/rebalance to them. As is, they are mostly for show. Its actually much more of a challenge to play with Legendary items in Legendary!

etc

[DeepT]

How can life regen be better? My character has only ever found a few, very weak, +life regen items. I have found lots of +energy regen. My energy regen is is now 8.9 ticks a second. That is nearly worthless. Its not even enough to regen my mana when I take my sweet time between groups of mobs.

Unless you can get life regen to something like 50 hp/sec I can't see it being usefull at all. Even then, it probably would only be useful as a between combat healup ability and not something that is going to make a lot of difference if you have a bunch of monsters beating on you.

At what level does this game get tuff for casters who might wish they had some kind of melee defense? One concern of mine about going to a melee build with my storms/defense setup is that my buddy will be killing everything before I get a chance to even get to the bad guys. I know when I spam frost bolts, I mow down waves of mobs before then even can get to me.

[Gendal]

I have a hard time imagining HP regen working either, except as a after battle potion replacement. Which makes it next to useless, since potions are cheap and easy to get.

[Chris Woods]

Unless you can get life regen to something like 50 hp/sec I can't see it being usefull at all.

You can get to 200 with some work, and then drop a Rally on top to be getting 300 in critical situations. Mix that in with some sort of damage absorption and you're in pretty good shape.

Chris Woods

[DeepT]

Maybe if some buffs like Adrenaline rush (+25hp a second) get multiplied by the health regen % increase items it could help in battle. Of course I think you might need a total of +400% if the baddies are numerous and hitting you hard to be worth it.

It really is hard to tell though since I am on normal though. I have no idea how it will scale. If I had 50hp a sec regen in normal mode, that would be plenty although the occasional hit I get is like 400pts of damage. If that ends up being 4000pts of damage in legendary mode, I surly will need closer to 500hp / sec regen to make it matter in the least. Somehow I do not think it will ever get that high which only leaves the hope that monster damage will not scale too much.


Anyway, in other news: Do we have a list of cool builds yet? Not all the possible builds seem very good, ie: The elmentalist build seems redundant.

Looking at some skills last night I thought of a few more builds, although the total of intresting ones looks kind of small.

Paladin and Juggernaught - Is there any real difference in how they play? It would seem to just be a preference is visual effects almost.

Hunter(Bow) with Nature pets.

Conjuror with mostly pets, seems kind of boaring. If pets dont scale to legendary, it seems you could be screwed.

Elementalist: Seems weak since you have to spend points on two kinds of attacks rather then focusing on one.

I havent looked at the rouge set yet, a cursory glance didn't make anything jump out at me.

[Enidigm]

I'm trying a Nature/Air build, and we'll see how that turns out. I need some kind of enchantment on my weapons though as i don't see any improvement in damage in Nature. I'm not certain if i really like Nature, it seems completely pet oriented though it has several interesting but secondary abilities.

[forgeforsaken]

By air do you mean storm? Grab Storm Nimbus for your weapon damage modifier.

[ydejin]

Hunter(Bow) with Nature pets.


In my limited experience, this is a very tough build. I've only gotten to level 12, so it may get better. Monsters seem to ignore her wolf and go straight at her. She's getting mobbed big time by Centaur packs out past Megera.

[slantz]

In my limited experience, this is a very tough build. I've only gotten to level 12, so it may get better. Monsters seem to ignore her wolf and go straight at her. She's getting mobbed big time by Centaur packs out past Megera.
Yeah, the only pet which I've seen hold aggro with any success is the Earth Mastery elemental guy. But even that is not quite as good as it seems, because all that attention tends to get him killed pretty quickly in tough situations, and he's expensive to cast with a long recast timer...

I would think as a hunter/nature character, you'd want to focus on that ring of thorns ability that keeps creatures at bay while you shoot them...

[Charlatan]

Maybe you'd want to get the the barbed net, to hold creatures in place so the wolves can chew on them - when that net gets cast on me it's pretty daggone annoying. With pets, though, the key to them keeping aggro is letting them attack first. If you inch forward slowly, the pets (especially the wolves) sense the enemy and take off at them. Once they attack, I have found you can kill them without getting too much aggro (note: this is with the Core Dweller, who has a taunt spell, so if it's just the wolves, this statement may not apply quite as much).

If you have pets, don't forget their additional abilities - when you're starting out, the basic pet is fine. But when you get higher, the extra abilities are crucial (the wolf buff when they get low on health, the howl, the core dweller regeneration, wildfire, and hardening - all necessary). The only pet abilities I'm familiar with that seem a bit superfluous for me as a Summoner are the Dryad thorns spell and her elemental damage (ok, the damage would be nice, but I'd rather not have to pump Nature up to 32 for that - for a Hunter/Nature build, it may be nice).

Last but not least... with Nature, Heart of Oak is a must-have. For a few points you can easily add 50% or more HP to your guy, and buff his runspeed. It's a no-brainer, really.

[DeepT]

Maybe hunter / Earth then? My wisp can't hold aggro for shit. I can let it beat on a mob a little while and then shoot it once or maybe twice before it comes strait for me. I almost would not recomend the wisp unless you are doing a melee build or a pet build. It hardly aggros (sometimes its being attacked and it does nothing, I have stood there for about 15 seconds with several monsters shooting it, and it just sat there). However, if you were to melee it would be a nice asset for its momentary AoE stun and damage buff. I do not plan on pushing my wisp past level 5 unless I have points to burn at some point.

[Charlatan]

I think the real attraction of the wisp is the buff that gives you what, 100% extra elemental damage? With the base abilities of the wisp making it pretty much impossible to kill, I'd think you would only put a few points into it, and max out its' buff.

[nKoan]

When does the Earth mastery get their elemental pet? I'm also running a Hunter/Earth combo, focusing on ranged attacks, but I was finding it real hard once the mobs got larger. Then I found a nice blue spear to use, and re-spec'd a few points to get some better melee buffs.

[forgeforsaken]

Yeah as I noted earlier the Wisp is not a combat pet but a buff pet (that just sounds wrong) You want it around for Eye of the Storm wich can effectively double the damage of all your cold/lightning spells.

[Charlatan]

When does the Earth mastery get their elemental pet? I'm also running a Hunter/Earth combo, focusing on ranged attacks, but I was finding it real hard once the mobs got larger. Then I found a nice blue spear to use, and re-spec'd a few points to get some better melee buffs.

I believe Earth gets the Core Dweller with 10 points into the mastery, so it's not difficult to get it. Heck, in the demo I was able to get it at level 5 by stuffing almost all my points into mastery - it was not fun to go a couple levels with basically no skills but the CD is awesome.

I'm sure I mentioned it somewhere, but the pets DEFINITELY get buffed in Epic and Legendary. I sailed through most of Epic and am in the middle of Legendary with my Summoner - that said, there are some fights which are really tough, since most of my damage ability comes from fire - the last Telkine in China was a bear to kill, since he kept summoning those annoying fire resistant imp dudes, and he had some kickass vitality drain going too. But as long as I protect my moderately squishy body from aggro, my Summoner mows stuff down.

[nKoan]

Ah, that'll do it. I've been maxing out my 1st two levels of mastery skills (the ones I want anyway) and I couldn't remember if the core dweller would be next or a way off.

[Jab2565]

My warfare nature guy is so far blazing thru epic, compared to my coursir. I have 2 wolves, the nymph and if I need to, the ancestrial warrior summon. The combination took out the boss of athens pretty quick, and so far I've only died maybe twice on epic.

[Mister Widget]

Yeah, the only pet which I've seen hold aggro with any success is the Earth Mastery elemental guy. But even that is not quite as good as it seems, because all that attention tends to get him killed pretty quickly in tough situations, and he's expensive to cast with a long recast timer...

True, the Core Dweller (earth pet) doesn't really cut it with just 1 point in it. If you really want an MMO-style pet who can wade into the enemy lines, hold aggro, and not die, you probably need to play a Summoner (Earth/Nature). Pump 7 or 8 points into the Dweller, another 7 or 8 into Heart of Oak (which boosts pet HP, not just yours), and 7 or 8 into the first two talents in the healing line (Regrowth and Accelerated Growth). If you do that, you'll have a Core Dweller who can (with your heals) tank most anything in the game (even bosses) on Normal difficulty.

This is the kind of build Charlatan has described; I found it very fun myself. It leaves you plenty of points to play around with on things like Volcanic Orb, if you want to feel like you're not just sitting around healing the pet, or the various Nature pets. But the heart of the build is the Core Dweller holding aggro and you keeping him alive. Until I realized that and reallocated my points as described above, I found the Summoner to be pretty weak.

[Jab2565]

I've found leaving my pets to fight alone gets them killed, but while they're busy distracting , I usually run in and take out the archers quick which leaves them alive. Also if your going nature it's pretty important to get the skill that lets your healing spell spread across allies. That's how I keep my wolves alive.

[Alex Handy]

I've got a lvl 25 Earth/Spirit pet lover (sounds wrong too). He's got about 8 in the second Core Dweller skill (the one that speeds his attacks and regen) and about 12 in him proper. Getting that final Core Dwelkler power, where he sets the ground on fire? Even one point in that makes a huge difference.

My Lich is at level 12, and he makes a big difference as well. I was able to wander around with the Giant Yeti chasing me while my pets killed him.

Core Dweller is kinda wimpy, but my advice is to dump every earth skill point you have into him. Just overload the damn thing and forget about fire orb and the others. They only take away from a better Core Dweller.

The only other skills I have are some of the passive buff spells and about 4 points in Death Visions. This last one ensures proper crowd control to keep the CD alive when he gets surrounded.

Nice thing about CD is that it basically attracts all the attention automatically.

[Jab2565]

Before I take this build any further, I was just wondering how viable it is.
I'm planning on making an earth/ rogue. Putting points heavly into the rock elemental , and maybe the lvl 32 earth fissure skill. And for the rogue side, focusing on throwing daggers as well as bleeding, poison and pierce damage. I'll mainly be in melee but will have the daggers and fire enchantment to use as range.
I want to know before it's too late, if it's possible to do a hybrid character like that.

[Equisilus]

My current character (now at level 21) is a Magician (Earth/Rogue) and he's actually doing better in melee than my Conqueror (Warfare/Defense) did in my first game. I keep the Core Dweller around most of the time, use Calculated Strike, Blade Honing, Open Wound, Lay Trap, Envenom Weapon, with Earth Enchantment, Brimstone, and some Inner Fire for the Core Dweller. I've stayed away from range stuff for this build, relying on melee to do the work, with all the extra power to my blade alone. The combination of the Core Dweller and the bolt trap seem to do the job of multiple attacks well enough so far (again, only level 21). Masteries are at 17/18 (Earth/Rogue), with the only maxed skill so far being the Calculated Strike (others vary between 1 and 5).

Not sure if I'll need some range stuff later on, but we'll see, I guess.

[Saber Cherry]

I have a level 18 Magician, but more Rougish than yours.

Calculated Strike, Blade Honing, Open Wound, Lay Trap, Rapid Construction, Envenom Weapon, Nightshade, Distillation, Throwing Knife, Poison Gas Bomb, Shrapnel, Flash Powder
+
Earth Enchantment, Brimstone, and Heat Shield.

But I only have about 1 point in any skill.

I decided the game was easy enough that Lava Orb and a Core Dweller would be cheating :) However, my level 19 Paladin has a 55-damage shield, and with Rend Armor (active shield attack on 3 opponents) boosted by Storm Nimbus, the Magician really can't compare. Not to mention that he's much more fragile; lacking Adrenaline And Rally means more red potions. Though I still strictly sell potions with either character.

As far as ranged stuff goes, I absolutely love Poison Gas Bomb + Shrapnel. It will probably be useless after early Epic, since poison and bleed damage don't scale... but until then (or if a fix is released before then), you can't go wrong with putting a point into each Not to mention that if you're already letting Envenom Weapon leech your mana, you may as well grab Nightshade for the -%total speed on enemies - and this applies to distant enemies poisoned by Poison Gas Bomb.

Most of my tactics as a Magician rely on lining up enemies for a good throwing knife attack, since it is 100% penetrating (it goes through all of them). With Earth Enchantment, Envenom Weapon, and Nightshade, you do raw (piercing) damage to the whole row, physical damage (from brimstone), slow them all in movement and attack speed, make them all bleed, poison them all, do fire damage to them all, and set many of them on fire - at a very low mana cost. It's even more fun than encircling a boss with flaming bolt traps :)

P.S. I also highly recommend Flash Powder - it's great, even with just 1 point.

[Jab2565]

I don't know about flash powder, whenever I use it, it never really affects them. Neither does the gas bombs. I love the throwing knives though, and hopefully plan to max out both skills so I can throw around 12 or so knives at once.

[Misguided]

Before I take this build any further, I was just wondering how viable it is.

I'm playing an Earth/Rogue Bow wielder. I'm at level 22 I think, and the bulk of my points are in the Core Dweller. Currently, I'm starting to work on unlocking some of the higher tier rogue skills, like Nightshade. My goal is to focus on doing a large amount of single-target damage with the bow. The CD's wildfire ability helps a lot with softening groups.

I'm having a great time with the character so far.

Does anyone know if Lethal Strike will work with a bow?

[wildpokerman]

Can someone help me with greece, I just got the olive branch and can't find where to go next.

I tried going to the end of the vinyard and can't find any way to go farther. I treked back to the little town before the vinyard and tried to find another exit, I went back to the last town with a portal and explored all around there. I've even tried going back to the cyclopse and killing him again and tried that bridge that he broke but it's still broken.

When I go to the end of the vinyard and town portal out of there I'm highlited in the delphi area where but don't have a portal there yet. Also when I across the bridge out of the vinyard I see centaurs below me and a beach area so I think that's where I'm supposed to go.

Can anyone help put me on the right path?

[Mister Widget]

Go back towards the vinyard. At the villager who owns the vinyard (he talked to you about it being on fire), the road splits into three paths. One path leads up to the top of the hill, where you fought the spider queen. One path leads the back the way you came. The third path goes roughly southwest, and winds back around under the bridge you just crossed. You want that third path.

[ydejin]

Unfortunately that seems to be how it's done with melee characters. I spent a lot of money on potions with my conqueror. With my Elementalist (current char) - I've had to stop picking them up since I use so few of them.

I just went through a rough patch in Knossos on Legendary where I discovered that I was actually spending more on potions than I was making by collecting loot. I actually went back to Epic to try to make some cash so I could keep going.

However, in the end I seem to have gotten over the hump and am making money in Legendary again. It might have just been I was using a lot of potions going up that hill on Crete. I have serious trouble with Mernads (probably my low resistances, particularly poison, but also elemental) so I may have been gobbling up huge amounts of potions to get through them. It was very scary watching the bank account head toward zero every time I went down to buy potions.

On an unrelated note, so far I've found Legendary Egypt to be suprisingly easy (I just got through to Memphis). I'm not sure if somehow my build is just better tuned to Egypt than Greece or if those few pieces of equipment I've picked up in Egypt just make a big difference, but I was having serious trouble getting through Legendary Greece, and I don't remember Epic Egypt being particularly easy either. For the most part nothing in Egypt has challenged me, which definitely wasn't the case at the tail end of Greece.

[Charlatan]

If your bank balance is getting close to zero then I'd have to say casters definitely have it easier than melee - of course character level matters too. I just hit Memphis in Legendary, and while I noticed I'm now a net consumer of potions (rather than having a surplus) it's because I only pick up Divine ones now. But my bank account is somewhere in the 35 million range so if I had to buy some, it wouldn't be a big deal. As far as making cash, I dunno, I don't haul everything back to town to sell - I don't have much space for hauling stuff due to carting bags and bags of stuff for other characters around, so I typically only pick up rings and necklaces, and of course greens and blues.


Incidentally, I did the quest for the poor guys outside Memphis and got a very nice blue ring from it (something of the High Priest). I'm actually using it (probably the first quest reward I've wanted to use).

And as far as pets go, once you get to the top level Core Dweller skill (the one that gives him extra HP and resistances) he almost never dies, except on the rare boss (most notably the Automatoi boss, and funny enough, the Minotaur King). I'd say with all his powers buffed and Heart of Oak at 12 I almost never lose a pet any more, except, of course, to bosses. With addons from amulets and armor I can now cast 3 wolves, and my 5 pets are really a wrecking crew.

[ydejin]

If your bank balance is getting close to zero then I'd have to say casters definitely have it easier than melee - of course character level matters too. I just hit Memphis in Legendary, and while I noticed I'm now a net consumer of potions (rather than having a surplus) it's because I only pick up Divine ones now. But my bank account is somewhere in the 35 million range so if I had to buy some, it wouldn't be a big deal.

It was just a temporary problem. I'm not sure how long it was going on. I didn't notice it until I bought a few items and ended up with only about 2 million left, and that 2 million started dwindling down to 1.5 million over several rounds of hack & slash, gather loot, sell loot and buy potions. I managed to make about 10 million from the end of Legendary Knossos to Memphis, so I'm doing okay now.

I am definitely a big net consumer of potions and have been for quite some time. My guess is since early in the Standard game! I buy them in huge chunks, sometimes 60+ health potions at once (I usually like to stock 70 of them and I try to head back in once it gets into the low teens).

As a melee guy, I figure it's better to have hit the health pot button once your health starts dipping in combat, because once it starts going down, it can drop to zero very rapidly when you're getting mobbed. I don't know if I'm typical or not, but in a large fight (say fighting 10-12 besties including archers and mages) I'll probably end up popping at least 2 or 3 health potions in the middle of combat, and maybe one afterwards. One-on-one fights, might not need any if I hit them first. With 3-5 monsters, I'll probably down one after the fight just to stay topped off -- my margin of safety is low enough that if I'm down more than 20% health, I top off. Plus I go through energy potions as well, though not as often as health potions.

[Jab2565]

I like to have at least 40 of each on hand which usually lasts me a section. I still really wish that a patch allows green and blue items to be modified. That talos boss is a huge pain in the ass, even with pets and soliders out, one foot stomped kill them. Also what is the range of that fire attack? I've swore that I'm not directily in front of his hand, yet I still get hit by it.

[ydejin]

That talos boss is a huge pain in the ass, even with pets and soliders out, one foot stomped kill them. Also what is the range of that fire attack? I've swore that I'm not directily in front of his hand, yet I still get hit by it.

I took Talos down in Epic, but I gave up on him in Legendary -- turns out there's nothing blocking the path to the labyrnth, even if he's still outside huffing and puffing. In Legendary, I went at him in Colossus form and after pounding on him toe-to-toe, basically as long as Colossus lasted, as near as I could tell I did almost no damage at all to him.

The fire attack is nasty. You can be just barely on the edge of the flame (or even slightly outside of it) and you get hit for burn and stun. And the stun effect is awful. Even with stun resistance maxed out (around 100%, thanks to a pendant and "Iron Will", I still ended up stuck like a fly on a wall paper, while burning until my guy croaked).

[Saber Cherry]

I don't know about flash powder, whenever I use it, it never really affects them. Neither does the gas bombs. I love the throwing knives though, and hopefully plan to max out both skills so I can throw around 12 or so knives at once.

When I use Flash Powder, half the enemies attacking me wander away and swing their weapons at the air for a while. It's quite funny :) The other half keep attacking me, but miss a lot. And it gets better with more points. I'm surprised you didn't notice any change! As for Gas Bomb, I admit that I have not paid attention to ranged opponent's aim while under the influence, but supposedly they have a 66% chance to miss.

About Gas Bomb, and Lay Trap: Be sure you "Force Fire" them. If you just "normally" toss a bomb or trap, they have very short range. But if you "Force Fire", you can throw them off the screen, off cliffs, over walls, and so forth... at enemies who have no possible chance of retaliation. With Shrapnel, even if the enemies can eventually pathfind their way to you, they will have taken the full extent of the poison and bleeding damage by the time they arrive.

[DeepT]

Yeah, the non-slottability of blue and purples weapons is really bad. I also hate the fact you can only put one modifier on any weapon. Is it possible to remove a rune from an item once its slotted?

I finally re-worked my storm / defense to a melee build, and he really kicks ass now. I can't kill stuff as fast of course, but I certainly can get a bunch of mobs beating on me without much trouble. To bad good armor is so hard to find. My caster gear is still better then anything I have seen drop or on a vendor.

Does anyone know what the cool-down on adrenaline rush is? Its triggered 5% of the time, but the next power reduces its cooldown time. I have no idea how often it can 'proc' normally, so I can only guess more is better for the cool down. It would be nice to know, so I just do not waste points in the cool down reducer.


Does anyone know if toggle-able buffs stay pumped up if you toggle them while under the effect of a skill shrine? I noticed pets stay higher level when summoned under that effect. It seemed that my toggles did stay buffed, although I can't be sure. Pretty much when storm surge fired off, most mobs tended to die, although bosses sometimes were still alive.

[Jab2565]

I was wondering about that with the buffs and pets after the skill buff. As far I know there is no way to remove a charm or relic after it's been place, but if only you put a fragment into your equipment, you can still add the same fragment until you get a completed one on your equipment.

[DeepT]

I got a jade figurine in act 3, I can't find the NPC who has the quest for it, anyone know where he or she is? I am in the imperial city now, and I am sure I must have passed him somewhere along the way.

Can someone explain this whole life leech / drain thing to me?

I have a weapon that is +18% to life leech. I am not sure what that means unless it only enhances a life leech effect from something else, in itself it seems worthless.

Then I have one with actual life leech, like 84 pts over 3 seconds. This gives me life, right? Does it stack (if I whack the guy 2x in less then 3 seconds)? Does it work if I kill the dude before the 3 seconds is up?

There is %x of weapon damage. This seems to be the diablo old school life drain. However, is this base damage? What if the weapon comes with 15 lighting damage? What if I have a weapon damage buff (like storm nimbus), does that add into it?

Finally, I think I have seen items that simply have life leech percentage (not on a weapon). Does this mean any attack from any source? Spells? On-Hit retalitory damage (thorns, storm surge, etc...)?

What is vitality? There is no vitality stat. I assume its just health, but if that is the case, whats the difference between extra damage and vitality damage or are they the same thing?

Does anyone know the maxium level spread in this game for differant characters? My friend started a level 1 character and I was in a differant act and level 28. We were not grouped, and he got zero xp for everything, including quests.

[ydejin]

I got a jade figurine in act 3, I can't find the NPC who has the quest for it, anyone know where he or she is? I am in the imperial city now, and I am sure I must have passed him somewhere along the way.

He's back in the town with the Great Wall portal. If you go back to the portal, proceed north, or perhaps slightly north east. He's in a courtyard attached to the main area. I think he's tagged as Wealthy Merchant or something along those lines. Talk to him, he wants the figurine.

What is vitality? There is no vitality stat. I assume its just health, but if that is the case, whats the difference between extra damage and vitality damage or are they the same thing?

Vitality damage ignores armor, piercing resistance, and basically everything except for vitality resistance. If you've ever gone toe-to-toe in melee with those medium sized white maggots and noticed they seem to take large chunks of health out, you'll have seen vitality damage in action. Word is the maggots do vitality damage so armor doesn't help you.

[Kaigen]

I would just like to say: Holy shit, this is a long thread.

[Dave Markell]

Vitality damage ignores armor, piercing resistance, and basically everything except for vitality resistance. If you've ever gone toe-to-toe in melee with those medium sized white maggots and noticed they seem to take large chunks of health out, you'll have seen vitality damage in action. Word is the maggots do vitality damage so armor doesn't help you.

Ah HAH. Now I understand why my Conqueror has such a hard time with those buggers. I really, really hate them. Not sure what I can do about it, though. Hmmm.

[Kalle]

Dave, buy a bow, most merchants have a green one with good DPS in stock at some point. The bugs are slow, and you can do hit and run attacks on them with virtual impunity. Same tactic also works on the scorpions.

[Destarius]

Trying to get a bit of internet MP in, my lag is about 7 seconds. =(

[ydejin]

Ah HAH. Now I understand why my Conqueror has such a hard time with those buggers. I really, really hate them. Not sure what I can do about it, though. Hmmm.

You can Shield Charge followed by a high level Shield Batter to slow them to 50% speed. Or you can War Horn them. However, as Kalle says, easiest thing to do is use a bow. I haven't had as much luck with a bow on Scorpions, the big Scorpion men move pretty quickly.

Just make sure to get out fast if you don't take them down on the first hit or two. Getting swarmed by them is bad news. I got killed by them several times on Normal, until I realized exactly how dangerous they were.

[Sam Jones]

Vitality damage ignores armor, piercing resistance, and basically everything except for vitality resistance. If you've ever gone toe-to-toe in melee with those medium sized white maggots and noticed they seem to take large chunks of health out, you'll have seen vitality damage in action. Word is the maggots do vitality damage so armor doesn't help you.


I hated those things with my war/earth Battlemage. My Oracle just laughs as she nukes them from a safe distance.

[Matthew Gallant]

Vitality damage ignores armor, piercing resistance, and basically everything except for vitality resistance.
It seems like the generic "damage resistance" also works.

[ydejin]

It seems like the generic "damage resistance" also works.

That makes sense. I forgot about that. Go Ignore Pain and Go Battle Standard!

[Kalle]

Oh, I wasn't talking about the big scorpion men, those buggers are too quick to take out with a bow. But the actual scorpions won't be a problem.

[Kunikos]

Despite everyone saying that this game is just a "meh" clone of Diablo II, I have to say that it has a lot of hours of gameplay in it if you did enjoy Diablo II. :)

I started up a new Wanderer and am enjoying shooting fire off my staff at whatever foes that my two wolves are keeping busy. :) I think I'll go Earth for my second mastery for some nice kaboom.

My other character is a dual wield Warrior, and I just got a green weapon drop off the Arachnid mini-boss that guards the sacred branch on the way to Delphi. I forget the name of it but it has like +60 poison dmg over 5 seconds, 5% chance for 261% poison, and +8% attack speed. I threw two marks of zeus on it... :)

[DeepT]

I don't think anyone has said its a "Meh" game. Its not perfect and there are some puzzeling game play elements not everyone likes. For me, some things I wish they would change with a patch are:

1. Adding item slots. There is an intrinsic single slot for every item, but it is kind of lame why large items, like torso armor has only one slot. In D2 there was so much you could do with gems and runes, you could tailor an item's abilities to your play style. TQ is totally missing that. Also the runes in this game are very very weak unless they get a lot more powerful (I am still in normal mode).

2. You can't slot blue or purple items. I have no idea why this is in. In D2 you could have a lot of slots on uniques and rares. It is very puzzeling why they choose to limit this. The runes are not that strong (as I said), so I can't see balance issues here. It would be nice for a dev to explain the reason.

3. No 'rares'. Just greens, and fixed blues and purples. Half the fun in D2 was farming to get rares with exactly the modifiers you wanted to. I am sure if Mephisto was in this game, he would be on his knees with gratitude considering the constant beat-downs he got in D2.

4. Speaking of beating bosses down, I have noticed the complete lack of good loot from them. They have the same random chance as anyone else. You would at least think that the end bosses would be gaurenteed to drop somthing phat, if not several somethings. Quite often they drop nothing. How anti-climatic. Even min-bosses should drop something good.

5. No set friendly code. D2 had a smart set loot item. If you owned a certain set peice, and a set piece was going to spawn, the treasure system would pick a set players already had, and a piece they didn't have. I have been after the obsidina set. My friends and I have gotten like 6 greaves and 1 gauntlet. I went online with a game looking for obsidian, and all but two people had greaves. It would be nice to have some kind of set friendly code here to make getting sets a bit easier.

6. I heard the level limit is 64. Very puzzeling. I would not mind if this is going to be raised in an expansion, but I do not want that expansion in a year. I am sure you can come up with other bullet points asside from a level cap of 100 for an expansion. You can always throw in a new mastery at level 100 and raise the cap to 150 if your are hard pressed for exciting new features.

[svenr]

5. No set friendly code. D2 had a smart set loot item. If you owned a certain set peice, and a set piece was going to spawn, the treasure system would pick a set players already had, and a piece they didn't have. I have been after the obsidina set. My friends and I have gotten like 6 greaves and 1 gauntlet. I went online with a game looking for obsidian, and all but two people had greaves. It would be nice to have some kind of set friendly code here to make getting sets a bit easier.

This is not true. For every item drop, D2 would randomly determine the item type, and then randomly determine the "quality" (unique, set, rare, magic, white, grey), the only exception being that if a unique was already in the game it would be rerolled as a rare instead. There was no "set friendly code".

[MauxFaux]

4. Speaking of beating bosses down, I have noticed the complete lack of good loot from them. They have the same random chance as anyone else. You would at least think that the end bosses would be gaurenteed to drop somthing phat, if not several somethings. Quite often they drop nothing. How anti-climatic. Even min-bosses should drop something good.



I am fine not having powerful bosses beating the shit out of me with some weapon just so I can have it drop as loot later. The chests bosses keep nearby have plenty of loot.

[Mister Widget]

Something I'd like to see in a patch is a switch to turn off the spawning of gray and white items. All they do is clutter up the screen and make me waste time tossing them out of my inventory after I accidentally pick them up. If they can't make them not spawn at all, at least let me set a preferences flag so they never get picked up even if I accidentally click on them.

[DeepT]

I am fine not having powerful bosses beating the shit out of me with some weapon just so I can have it drop as loot later. The chests bosses keep nearby have plenty of loot.

Well if you read the design philsophy of the game, that exactly what they wanted.

However, they do not need to drop the god mode weapons, just a few good items. Right now its nothing, greys, or even whites and occasionally thats it. Not even a yellow or green.

[Equisilus]

If you consider the reward for killing creatures to be the xp, then the loot dropping becomes a bonus and you won't be thinking that the better creatures (i.e. bosses) need to drop great items. I kind of like that design, but that's because I'm not a fan of the 'boss-run' for looting. I much prefer just moving along the game, cleaning up every area 100% and taking what comes to me.

[Jab2565]

Something I'd like to see in a patch is a switch to turn off the spawning of gray and white items. All they do is clutter up the screen and make me waste time tossing them out of my inventory after I accidentally pick them up. If they can't make them not spawn at all, at least let me set a preferences flag so they never get picked up even if I accidentally click on them.

Agree, I've noticed that if I start running away from a fight, while I'm clicking I'll accidentily pick up a grey which stops me.

About the issue with loot, one idea I had is to make hero fights more rewarding. On normal, a ornate chest will always be spawned near a hero enemy that needs to be defeated to open. Epic, replace ornate with majestic. Finally on legendary give the hero either a green or blue item which will drop when he dies.

Do you guys think that the 64 cap is set so that an expansion will add a fourth difficulty level?

[Phred]

If you consider the reward for killing creatures to be the xp, then the loot dropping becomes a bonus and you won't be thinking that the better creatures (i.e. bosses) need to drop great items. I kind of like that design, but that's because I'm not a fan of the 'boss-run' for looting. I much prefer just moving along the game, cleaning up every area 100% and taking what comes to me.

If anything, the current loot system is antithetical to what you want. Just going through the game, it's quite possible to never get a good item you can use at all. I have a few characters going who haven't seen a usable blue drop up to half way through the first difficulty level. Both characters are making do with vendor greens. I'd much prefer seeing a guaranteed blue or two drop from the chest on the first time you kill a boss, rather than the current system, where boss chests can drop all crappy yellows even on the first kill.

[Tide]

well I lucked out and got some very nice blue armor thanks to some guards. Was leaving town and the event spawn was being beaten down when I caught one of them throwing a blue. Now that's handy.

[Tyjenks]

Is anyone playing this?

[Chris Nahr]

Never heard of it.

[Equisilus]

If anything, the current loot system is antithetical to what you want. Just going through the game, it's quite possible to never get a good item you can use at all.

I understand what you are saying, but in my experience that's not been the case. Sure, I sometimes get better items with one character than another, but I've not been so unlucky to get no good items at all. Of course, I've not played a massive number of different characters, so my experience is more of a case study than statistically relevant.

As an aside, we know that creatures drop broken items (often). Is there a greater chance for the item to 'break' the longer the creature is in combat with you? That is, if you finish off a creature quickly (as my Oracle tended to do with her ice shards), are you better off because the creature's items will not have had a chance to break, and you'll get better drops? I'm just wondering if that's one of the reasons why my Conqueror received fewer good items than my Oracle, because of the length of time to conclude battles.

Oh, btw, for those of you that have finished Epic, what level do you end at? With half the levels gone after Normal, I'm guessing that Epic would go to 48 or so.

[Charlatan]

My luck with greens/blues has varied widely too. Most of my characters are between 5 and 17, and probably 80% of them haven't found more than two blues (for some reason I keep getting the Captain's Shield with all my non-shield users....). I have a 17 Oracle who has ONLY found the Captain's shield, and maybe 2 other non-usable greens, yet a Level 9 Thane has two blue swords. Go figure.

I don't think the amount of time you battle has any effect on the weapon condition when you find them. Actually, though it was often touted in the pre-release reviews how "realistic" the loot system is, I think in practice it's somewhat of a moot point. So yeah, you won't kill a Boar and have it drop a greatsword, but on the other hand, that just means we have to have 5000 bone piles and chests all over the countryside containing the things we want to use (since all animals drop is animal parts, pretty much).

As far as levels, my Summoner finished Normal at 31.5 more or less, and Epic at 43 or so (and both times the battle with Typhon was decently challenging). I've heard people finish Epic at 40, but honestly, the XP was rolling in so fast, even when I didn't do a lot of side exploring, I was 43 when I got to Olympus. My guy is 50 now and I'm just getting up to the tomb of Ramses in Legendary, so he might hit 51 before I get to China.

[Enidigm]

I have to say this is an awesome game, one of the best i've played in quite a while. It's amazing that it's taken 10 years for a game to almost equal Diablo 2, and even then it's not a complete wash. I do vastly prefer Titan Quest's character building system to D2's.

The thing about D2's multiplayer was that it required me to "save" my skill points through almost all the way through Normal and into Nightmare. Otherwise i'd "waste" points in the lower useless skills. Although this may not have bothered some i couldn't commit 10-20 hours of playing in normal as a crippled gimp before i could start playing the "real" game. In Titan Quest i never feel that pressure knowing i can always, to some extent, respec later on.

I don't really know how to "build" a character yet, although the one i've put together seems to be handling things well enough. I have a Nature/Storm Druid that is, oddly, more or less a melee tyrant. She does over 100/dps in melee at level 15 with a unique runed green item (some spider's leg), and around 50/dps with whatever random staff i find laying around. I've put points into Storm Nimbus and Heart of Frost, and i don't see myself putting much more effort into Storm for awhile. I've got now 7 points into the Wolves, to get two of them, and 5 points into the Sylvan Nymph, and a few into Heart of Oak. So, yea, i pretty much charge straight into packs of Centaurs and melt them with few problems.

I've tried making the Briar Ward but it seems like it will take 20 points into that tree line before it starts to pay off. OTOH, one point into Regrowth has been more then enough for me thus far. I have around 1200 hp and Briar Ward makes 68 hp Briar segments. AKA, it's totally useless. For less mana i can just heal myself for more HP then i would have saved with the Briar Ward. And when one segment "goes down" the whole ward is breached.

[DeepT]

If you consider the reward for killing creatures to be the xp, then the loot dropping becomes a bonus and you won't be thinking that the better creatures (i.e. bosses) need to drop great items. I kind of like that design, but that's because I'm not a fan of the 'boss-run' for looting. I much prefer just moving along the game, cleaning up every area 100% and taking what comes to me.

If you do not like boss runs, then do not do them. Are you one of those people who spend time worrying about what the Joneses are doing rather then worrying about yourself?

Look.... The reason this boss loot thing (even quests) really needs to be addressed is because its very anti-climatic.

From a story point of view (maybe you do not care about it), its is just a big let down. BTW, before you argue with the fact that a boss or some quest giving you phat lewts doesn't have anything to do with story, let me define what I mean by Story.

By story I mean YOUR story, the story of your character, your adventures. It is not limited to the overall PLOT of the game. The story of the game is how you experience the game. From this point of view, each time there is some important element, an encounter, or treasure hunt, it is like letting the air out of the tires. Its just a big deflation of excitement in the game.


Let me give you some concrete examples from the game, as points that took me out of the reality of the game and depressed my emotionally at places that should have amplified me emotional response. As in, these plot points had the OPPOSITE effect they should have.

I played most of china yesterday and here are some big letdowns as far as loot goes:

Example 1:
The general who stashed his weapons and the mage with items of power: In both instances the plot would make you feel like there was some great treasure to be found. It builds this up through the dialog.

What I found: A few chests that drop the same crap every chest drops. The generals loot was particularly pathetic, not a single item was over level 10 and none of it, at any level was something you would have wanted. A mage staff with +5 strength and 4% damage turned into life? A bunch of potions, and craptastic shield, and a ring with 1 to 4 frost damage. OHH THE POWER! No wonder this guy dumped it off.

One of the mage chests only dropped white items and the rest of typical junk loot.

This is very anti-climatic. From a plot point of view they should have had *real* treasures. The generals treasure should spawned only fighter gear, and at least a few greens and maybe a blue. The mages treasure should have dropped all mage gear, with a few greens and maybe one blue.


Example 2:
I am climbing some mountain to the Jade Palace. I find some giant fire hound and have a big fight. He is obviously a special mini-boss. After a while he dies and goes poof, as in, he disappeared, not even a corpse was left. You know what he dropped? NOTHING. Not even a grey crappy item. NOTHING.

This was another very anti-climatic event. He should have dropped something good. Maybe not an epic purple (save those for ACT bosses), but a good green or average blue item would NOT have been to much to ask for.

Example 3: You get those quests where the reward says "A powerful weapon" or "A powerful ring"...

In every case it has been pure junk. I do not mean its not something that is useful for some class, just not my own. No, I mean its like a ring of 10% cold resistance, or a smoldering ring of 1 - 5 fire damage. I just want to beat these stupid NPCs to death. Its very frustrating.


Remember dungeon siege? That game was legendary for its craptastic loot. I kept thinking when you get to the final treasure room at the end, you will finally find some sweet loot (a lot of the plot alludes to this being some kind of legendary treasure vault, they really built it up). When I finally got there, it as the same exact crap that dropped EVERYWHERE. After that, I never played DS again. The game had a lot of gameplay problems, but that was just the final straw.


Diablo 2, so much of which has been stolen by other games, still had a better loot system. Some games stole it too. TQ borrowed from it, but didn't go quite far enough. I am not talking about random phat lewts (which I have already said TQ desperately needs). I am talking about story loot.

It has been several years, so I may get this wrong. The top end category of loot was rares in D2. Ignoring the fact that they were 'rares', but the fact that the loot was simply GOOD, here is what I remember.

In the first town, the lady who gives you the den of evil quest, gives you a reward of a magic ring as well as the extra skill point. The ring, was always a RARE. It might be a level 3 rare, but hey, your not going to find anything better then that for your level.

Magic chests, always had at least one rare if not several. I might not be remembering that correctly, but I can't remember a time something phat didn't come out of a magic chest, even if I could not use it.

Mini-bosses, and Bosses always dropped rares unless the boss was guarding a chest, in which case the chest would drop the rares. IE: The sand-maggot boss didn't drop anything (IRRC), but there was a magic chest near him that did.

Whenever an NPC gave you am item base reward, it was always a rare.


Back to TQ:
It has a lot going for it. There are quite a few things blizzard can learn from TQ and should steal if they make D3.

On the other had, D2 does do a few things better then TQ. One of the big ones is the treasure system. The TQ system is absolutely random, or at least it seems that way. Every chest or monster has the same random chance for everything. The *only* difference seems to be the number of items per 'chest'. IE: a pile of bones may drop 2 items + 1 per player in the game. A magic chest (the most uber chest) will drop 3 items + 5 per player in the game.

While the count part is nice, there is no quality adjustment. They need to add this. Maybe a magic chest should generate one super high quality item , 2 high quality, and 3 good quality items per player. Of course there is should be some randomness to those quality levels. Maybe the super high quality item gets demoted to high quality, or a good quality gets promoted to high quality.

Once that is done, go back and touch up treasure chests for plot 'treasure hunts' to make sure that those chests are not the typical grade you find lying around everywhere. Then retool NPC quest loot generation and make sure special mobs are rated at the right treasure chest level. That giant fire hound I fought should have been at least a magic treasure chest quality.

Remember, my reasoning for all this is because it is such a let down to go to these places and find either nothing or junk. Imagine Indiana Jones going through some cave of traps and when he gets to the end, instead of finding a golden idol head, he finds a picture of Elvis, and not a good picture either. Imagine how he would feel. That is how TQ makes me feel every time my expectations for decent loot are not met.

I hope Micheal Fitch is still reading this thread, even if he isn't responding. I would really like to get a year or so out of TQ play. Character advancement can only take you so far.

[Equisilus]

If you do not like boss runs, then do not do them. Are you one of those people who spend time worrying about what the Joneses are doing rather then worrying about yourself?

Ouch. You totally misinterpreted what I said as some sort of attack. All I meant was that if you consider the reward for killing a boss creature to be the xp (and hence developing your character) then dropping loot becomes secondary. Most people that do 'boss-runs' are not doing so for the xp, but for the loot drops. In other words, they are going for the secondary benefit more than the primary. In a game that is designed like TQ, that's why the payoff doesn't feel as great as it otherwise could be. This is an issue for those that are used to a D2-style, and expect it in a D2-styled game.

I like that design simply because it doesn't matter to me what loot I collect on any particular encounter. Of course, for those that prefer big loot from big bosses, then the loot is going to matter. For those players, I can understand why there is an uproar about poor loot after boss kills. You don't have to explain it; I get it. Really, but thanks for the talk all the same.

[Charlatan]

DeepT, I kinda agreee with you with respect to the payoff for the quests and for boss kills usually not being worth it. I laughed when I got to the General's treasure chests, because I think the first time I got something Green or better was in Legendary (and then only 1 green item). I also thought "gee, no wonder he stashed this crap."

And I agree that fighting the bosses should give you more of a guarantee of good loot. Yeah, you can get one or more Majestic Chests, but way too often there's nothing in there but yellows.

I also think the set bonuses should be much better than they are now - or else someone explain why they're good enough. The Battlemage set, for instance, gives me 40% extra armor and 37% pierce resist for two pieces. It adds 37% poison resist for 3 pieces, and 37% elemental resistance for all 4 pieces. However, consider that in Legendary you start with -100% resists. Consider also that you can easily find a 50% resist yellow item and slap a 30 or 40% resist charm on it. I have a 49% pierce resist yellow legs that I put a 30% fire resist charm on. I've yet to see anything in the game that makes me want to replace it.

Plus, with only 8 slots to wear items, every blue/purple item you wear is limiting your charm/relic ability by just that much more. While hunting for loot is fun, the customizability is a big part of the experience, but at the high levels you don't have much ability to customize your character.

It'd help if you had a "quickchange" hotkey too - as a magic guy, I don't often want to swap my weapon set but I can think of some useful times I wanted to swap gear on the fly.

As for quest rewards being useless - I finally got a blue ring from a Legendary quest in Egypt, and it's a pretty decent ring - I was actually wearing it for a while. Sadly, it's the only reward I've ever gotten from a quest that I didn't immedately sell.

The lack of a real money sink is an issue here too - I would kill to have a random item "enhancer" like the guy in Fate, or a guy to gamble with ala Diablo 2. I mean, with 45 million and mostly purple gear, what's a guy gonna spend cash on? Heck, we don't even have to repair (and even should I start having to buy potions in large quantities, my cash will STILL go pretty far).

[MauxFaux]

Ouch. You totally misinterpreted what I said as some sort of attack. All I meant was that if you consider the reward for killing a boss creature to be the xp (and hence developing your character) then dropping loot becomes secondary. Most people that do 'boss-runs' are not doing so for the xp, but for the loot drops. In other words, they are going for the secondary benefit more than the primary. In a game that is designed like TQ, that's why the payoff doesn't feel as great as it otherwise could be. This is an issue for those that are used to a D2-style, and expect it in a D2-styled game.

I like that design simply because it doesn't matter to me what loot I collect on any particular encounter. Of course, for those that prefer big loot from big bosses, then the loot is going to matter. For those players, I can understand why there is an uproar about poor loot after boss kills. You don't have to explain it; I get it. Really, but thanks for the talk all the same.

It seems like the bosses are good for XP while the catacombs/crypts/tombs are pretty good for items. At least, they are in my game.

[Jab2565]

So far with my magician , I'm having horrible luck with drops. I haven't found a green weapon to use yet, the only blues I have that fit are the theban bracers and the obsidan gleaves.

Here's what pissed me off, I fought the minotaur lord, first telkine, and the first boss of egypt. Not one green or higher item dropped from all the chests near them. Really that is just pathetic, and it's stuff like that , that really kills the enjoyment for me in this game. I know that if I was a pure melee guy I would be completely screwed by now without having any good equipment on besides the 2 I mentioned. Speaking about all the caves and dungeons, one thing I would like to see is a hero mob guarding a majestic chest or 2 in each one, like a miniboss fight.

[nKoan]

Man, maybe I'm just lucky but I've gotten a lot of good stuff compared to these stories. And a lot of it is from chests or bone piles off the beaten path.

I'm just a little into Egypt on Normal. Around Level 21 and I've already gotten pieces from Theban, Oracle and Obsidian sets. A blue mace, two pieces of blue torso armor, one piece of blue headwear, a sweet blue ring, as well as 2 blue spears (which I do use). And also like ~10 green items, which I can't remember all of.

[DeepT]

I do not have a problem with the random nature of loot off of random mobs. Running through a crypt full of mobs and either getting nothing other then junk to sell with the very rare chance of getting a blue or green is fine with me. My grip is purely with climatic events have anti-climatic loot.

As for money sinks... Yea I guess it does need them.

Ideas I have:
Pay for slotting items, with each slot costing a lot more then the last.

A rune merchant who will complete runes you have for a price.

An enchanter.

A gamble merchant like the one in D2. That guy would be a total mony sink. Maybe he was the one with the special set loot logic I was thinking of.

A merc you can hire. These guys were total money pits in D2. Infact, I never kept them long past the normal difficulty due to the cost of rezzing them every 5 minutes. If they were to put them in TQ, they would need to make the AI smarter so they dont die at the drop of a hat on higher difficulty levels.

[Enidigm]

The problem isn't that the game needs a money sink. The problem is that the economics of the game are broken.

They saw that players would pick up every gray and white item, as in the demo, to round up a few bucks. This was the opposite of what they had intended. So they pumped up the cost of a few vendor consumables and then made yellow magical items 20x as common. But this must have been done fairly late in the development process because the game just doesn't seem to have any sort of support for as much gold as players have on hand.

I remember losing money, for example, playing Diablo 2 if i were stuck on a hard level and had to constantly pop potions and buy costly repairs.

The easiest but most annoying solution would be item durability.

Also - i wish the background slot color for items was the same as the color of the text. I hate having to mouse over all those different vendor items to see which is yellow and which is green.

[Misguided]

Also - i wish the background slot color for items was the same as the color of the text. I hate having to mouse over all those different vendor items to see which is yellow and which is green.

Great suggestion!

[DeepT]

Yea that is a great idea, for easily telling what quality an item is. Extend that to inventory too.

On D2's death penalty and repairs... I am glad those are gone. I marked those are things blizzard can learn from TQ.

Repairs were unfair to warriors, and items were so expensive in the end game you could easily get in situations where you had no money to fix things, especially coupled with the death penalty.

All the death penalty (as far as cash went), did was have people dumping piles of gold on the ground so they wouldn't loose it when they died.

I am glad both of these things are missing from TQ, they added nothing to the game-play. Even the repairs in WoW are stupid, totally unfair to melee characters.

Good money sinks give a player value or utility. Bad ones are just arbitrary, such as equipment repairs. It is just a money sink for the sake of having a money sink. Potions, on the other hand, offer utility in exchange for money, which is a good money sink.

[Maenad]

Uh, just a few things about item drops in Diablo II.

Rares were the top end, so I'll give you that, but they aren't anymore. So essentially if you liked the way it worked, oops. Blizzard changed it, and ended up making rares junk. They made them somewhat better again, but uniques and runewords are the only top end now.

Akara almost always gives you a magic ring in normal difficulty. Usually a ring of craftsmanship. It's for a different quest (rescuing Cain) than the skill point.

Sparkling chests and special chests, aka magic chests, are really complex in how they work. The short version of how the chances break down:
38% - One magical or higher item, a few normal chest drops, 5 gold piles, 2 heal potions, and 2 mana potions.
30% - Two magical or higher items, and some gold piles.
20% - Three magical or higher items.
6% - Attempts twice to roll for a rare chest drop, and if it fails both times, does the 38% drop instead.
4% - Attempts twice to roll for a set chest drop, and if it fails both times, does the 38% drop instead.
2% - Attempts twice to roll for a unique chest drop, and if it fails both times, does the 38% drop instead.

Failure is due to the way that Diablo II rolls for uniques/sets/rares/magical. Rather than randomize among the pool of uniques(etc), it rolls instead on the pool of normal items. If the first item it comes up with cannot be unique/set/rare/magical (a potion cannot be magical, also an item there is not a set or unique version of cannot be a set or unique), then the drop fails. The worst thing about this is that a chest drop is normally four items, and if the first item came up a potion and all three of the others were valid uniques (the latter being more rare than the former), the entire drop would still fail.

Most act bosses in DII always drop at minimum magical (not rare). But that's assuming they actually drop something. I've killed Duriel and gotten a healing potion, a scroll of town portal, and a scroll of identify. Quite a haul indeed. Besides randomization taking up all of the potential drops with junk, it's also possible for them to NoDrop. To put this in perspective, one of the most farmed bosses in Diablo is Mephisto, who has 19% chance of nothing on every "drop" in solo play (the more people in game, the smaller the NoDrop chance is).

And there never has been any set logic in DII, from the gambling merchant or anywhere else. The only drop logic in DII at all no longer exists, but when it did, it was that if a unique ring spawned, it would be a Nagelring if there were no Nagelrings already present in the game, and that if there were, it would be a Manald Heal if there were no Manald Heals in the game, and if there were both of those, it would be a Stone of Jordan. If all three were already in the game, it would be a rare ring instead. This is no longer the case, but it was the only time any item that dropped in Diablo II ever depended on anything but chance.

Numbers aside, I've gotten consistently better items in Titan Quest than in Diablo II just running around, and equivalent or better from boss chests and act boss globes. Ask anyone who still plays DII if they have gotten that coveted Venom Ward/Isenhart's Case* from Hell Mephisto, but be ready for them to hit you. At least I tend to find different high tier items, rather than the same one 40% of the time.

Further, chests in Titan Quest actually do randomize quality based on the quality of the chests. Majestic chests drop great items with much higher frequency (as well as more of them) than High Quality and the other lower chests. Just like Diablo II, however, it's random, which means they do not guarantee a "unique" drop every time. Criticizing that is one thing, but stating that Diablo II was/is any different must involve a seriously rose colored monitor.

As far as the general's chests dropping warrior loot, and the mage's wizard loot, I agree. When the story refers to something as specifically as that, it ought to fit the description. Also, it bugs me that I never get the monster parts from the crazy-versions of the monsters (this might just be bad luck). From the description of Monster Charms, they are supposed to come from unusually powerful beasts, hence Monstrous Boars probably ought to drop them way more than plain old Boar types, yet I've never had it happen.

*Explanatory quote: "As the pun/saying goes, "There is no such thing as a Rare breastplate." The reason you get so many breastplates is because they are found in TreasureClass Armor 18, which is a commonly-selected TC for drops to come from, and there are only five items in the TC. Breastplate, Antlers, Heraldic Shield, Horned Helm, and Unraveller Head. These other four all have a 1/3 chance of dropping, so the odds of getting a breast plate if TC Armor 18 is picked is 3/7. You have very good odds of such a low level item being rare, set, or unique, if it's dropped by a high level monster and you have some MF, and that's why Isenhart's Case and VenomWard seem to drop once a game."

[scharmers]

I've gotten shit from hero/boss drops in Titan Quest, whilst the greens, blues, and "gems" have generally dropped from big mob fights or even the occasional primitive chest.

It's getting to be a running joke. "Damn, no wonder I can just run up to you and tank you with health potions. You gave all your pissants the good stuff!"

Still like this game though. I especially like the physics + the menaeds, which on death lead to lots of unintended video game pr0n.

[Rywill]

Yesterday I Volcanic Orbed a skeleton up into a tall tree. That alone is worth $50.

[forgeforsaken]

One of my biggest complaints is that the knockback is related to overkill damage, so once you move into Epic/Legendary you stop seeing the super awesome crazy knockbacks.

[ydejin]

Yesterday I Volcanic Orbed a skeleton up into a tall tree. That alone is worth $50.

Yep, the effect Volcanic Orb has on skeletons is pretty amazing. I've mostly been playing a conqueror, but I experimented a bit with a pyromancer. Tossing Volcanic Orbs into groups of skeleton archers was great fun.

[scharmers]

Also very satisfying to knock shit into endless chasms inside of caves. "Orf ye go, lads!" WALLOP

[Chris Woods]

I'm getting the feeling that people are comparing the "/players 8" version of Diablo II to the single player version of TQ.

Playing TQ online with 3-5 people significantly increases the number of blue and/or green items I see in a game, both from act bosses and just general milling about.

Chris Woods

[Michael Fitch]

I hope Micheal Fitch is still reading this thread, even if he isn't responding. I would really like to get a year or so out of TQ play. Character advancement can only take you so far.
Greetings:
I'm still around, just out of town for most of last week.

The problem with "set" drops, like kill a boss, find a rare or unique, is that it's easily exploitable. I can go and run that boss in under half an hour, and collect up every rare/unique whatever until I've got enough sets to equip a legion of characters, then I distribute those to my friends, and they all go on the forums and complain that the game is too easy.

Wait, I hear you saying, only drop the good stuff the first time you kill him! Actually, we do something like this, but the problem here is that Mr. Exploit just goes into his saved file, backs it up, then goes in and kills the guy, mules the item, reverts his save, does it again, etc. Any kind of fixed event like this just invites exploits.

Purely random produces wide variation, like the time I found four rare staves in half an hour, or the odd character who gets halfway through normal without finding anything rare or unique his character can use. Fixed events are exploitable. Somewhere in between may be a happy medium, you say.

So, let's say we had some kind of background timer, so that as you go along, the likelihood of finding a high-value item goes up. It's not a fixed event, so it's not exploitable, but it does mean no one gets shafted. Except then people complain that the game is too mechanical. Or there's still someone who gets shafted because they always find shields and they're doing a bow-build. And someone inevitably hacks the timer so that it's always maxed out.

Basically, it boils down to there's no perfect solution and no way to make everyone happy. There are probably better semi-random functions, but instead of focusing our attention on that, we worked on making the boss battles themselves more interesting and giving quest rewards that were meaningful (experience, attributes, skills).

We'll definitely revisit the loot functions (and revisit them, and revisit them) in the future, but it's not a high enough priority item to be patched in the short term. There are other gameplay imbalances that are much more in need of attention.

But, we always like to hear suggestions.

Best,
Michael.

[stusser]

Mr. Exploit just goes into his saved file, backs it up, then goes in and kills the guy, mules the item, reverts his save, does it again, etc.
TQ trusts the client, it has open multiplayer. The word "exploit" is meaningless in this scenario.

[Rywill]

I'm getting the feeling that people are comparing the "/players 8" version of Diablo II to the single player version of TQ.

Playing TQ online with 3-5 people significantly increases the number of blue and/or green items I see in a game, both from act bosses and just general milling about.

Chris Woods
This is absolutely true. I've played the same segement of the game (up to Megara) several times in single-player, two-player, and four-player. It seems to make a big difference. I guess it's possible my games are statistical flukes, but my experience is that I get roughly one random blue if I play by myself, but probably 2-4 with more players.

[Jab2565]

Every time I reach the orient in Tq, the game gets horrible. All of a sudden my golem can't take 5 seconds of damage from enemies, and he has 9 points into him. I've yet to find anything remotely useable for my guy. And all the fun seems to disappear right here regardless of my character. I'm not even going to touch my legendary guy, as 2 hits from satyrs takes off around 1000 health..

[DeepT]

Wait, I hear you saying, only drop the good stuff the first time you kill him! Actually, we do something like this, but the problem here is that Mr. Exploit just goes into his saved file, backs it up, then goes in and kills the guy, mules the item, reverts his save, does it again, etc. Any kind of fixed event like this just invites exploits.

You will never prevent cheaters unless you host your own servers like Blizzard does, and even then, people can still slip through. In a game where the server is in the hands of the enemy (the players), don't even bother to try and stop it. It is a fool's errand. If someone wants to dupe or farm items, let them. This isn't a competitive game between players. Right now, I have just finished Normal difficulty for the first time. It was very anti-climatic as far as the loot drops except for the very final boss who dropped respectable loot.

You know what finally killed dialbo for me? It was not the fact that every person had obsidian rings of the zodiac and godly armor of the ages. No, it was town kill and that kind of stuff that made it to annoying to play. However, even without that, my interest in Diablo would have waned in a few more months. D2, despite its cheats and hacks, just ran its course. With its boss runs, phat rares, and all that, the game just ran its course.

Had I been able to kill mephisto only once and not farm him (or Baal), I can tell you beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the game-play life of D2 would have been shortened, not lengthened. I hate to say things like common wisdom or basic game design, but when you look at other games, from EQ to WoW, to any other adventure game where you can play the same content over and over, in every case, you can farm bosses. Its a time sink with the trade off you will get phatter lewts.

Let me ask you this:

In a game where I can't farm bosses for loot, when I reach the level cap, what am I supposed to do?

In the same game, if I get to a point where something is too difficult, and because of bad luck I have crappy gear (which is a prime cause for things being to difficult), how am I supposed to adapt?

If someone wants to run and kill boss X 30 times, fine. You know people have fond memories of mephisto runs. I only did that a few times, and it got to dull for me, but two of my friends still talk fondly about farming him. If players want to do that, why not let them?

I feel its punishing the masses in order stop a few 'exploiters'. These exploiters do not even affect me. Its not a MMOG, so some idiot getting super phat lewts by cheating has no effect on me. It does not hurt my game play that someone else cheats.


Anyway.. how about some comments on if you will consider allowing the slotting of blues/purples and if you will allow items to have more then one slot?

[Charlatan]

Every time I reach the orient in Tq, the game gets horrible. All of a sudden my golem can't take 5 seconds of damage from enemies, and he has 9 points into him. I've yet to find anything remotely useable for my guy. And all the fun seems to disappear right here regardless of my character. I'm not even going to touch my legendary guy, as 2 hits from satyr takes off around 1000 health..

What level Orient? Normal? Epic? And what build is this pfreak? You definitely need the additional abilities for him - the regeneration and the wildfire, and whatever that high end ability is.

Are you depending on him to kill stuff? Because as you go on and on, he's really more of an attention whore than a destruction dealing Thing.... you should be the one killing while all the mobs are trying to kill him. So for Earth, you should have your volcanic orb, or your fire jets or eruption going while all the mobs are pounding on him.

And if this is Legendary - 9 points is not gonna be enough. I have 13 in mine and cast him at 15 with his other abilities close to maxed out - he lasts a long time but still dies once in a while. Mastery shrines are a good deal here too, because they let you max him out.

As for getting 1000 point hit by Satyrs - can you up your defense? Add some evasion? Dunno, there's lots of ways to deal with stuff (depending on your build, of course).

Maybe I'm just lucky, because my Summoner almost never gets mobbed, and when he does, I pop my stone form for a quick respite (and chug potions). By the time it expires, most of the mobs are dead from my pets and/or my eruption spell.

I'm definitely going to try a non-pet build though, to see how the other half live...

[Charles]

You *can* run bosses for items. Almost all the blues I have came from running the end boss of greece about 15-20 times.

[Jab2565]

In the same game, if I get to a point where something is too difficult, and because of bad luck I have crappy gear (which is a prime cause for things being to difficult), how am I supposed to adapt?



That's what I really want to know, and is probably the main reason why every build I have fails around the orient. Once again last night, fought the egypt telkine, and the final egypt boss, no greens or higher from either. I think I actually found white items from them.

I was one of those people who did mephisto runs to see what great loot I could find. I know that for my friend, being able to find, alter and power up the best items in the game was a major draw for him. I don't think he would get the same millage out of Tq as it is right now compared to D2.

[Jab2565]

Right now it's normal orient, with my magician. I have 9 points in golem, 5 points in that regen speed boosting skill. Legendary it's my corsir, and I have about -70% resist on everything. The loot issue is killing me, I'm still wearing the same chest armor I found on normal. For my magician the plan was to keep the throwing knifes as my projectile and use the earth,pierce and poision damage for melee.

[DeepT]

You *can* run bosses for items. Almost all the blues I have came from running the end boss of greece about 15-20 times.

Maybe... I wasn't limiting it to end bosses, but all bosses of sorts should drop something special. For me, when I killed the boss in greece, I just got yellows.

The end boss of egypt dropped 2 greens and all yellows.

The end boss of China dropped 2 blues.

Then final titan dropped 2 blues, two crappy blues, one was level 11 and the other was level 14. The yellow gear he dropped was better then the blues.

[ydejin]

Every time I reach the orient in Tq, the game gets horrible. All of a sudden my golem can't take 5 seconds of damage from enemies, and he has 9 points into him. I've yet to find anything remotely useable for my guy. And all the fun seems to disappear right here regardless of my character. I'm not even going to touch my legendary guy, as 2 hits from satyrs takes off around 1000 health..

I think there is a considerable ramp up in difficulty when you hit the Orient. I felt it in both Standard and in Epic (just got there in Legendary so we'll see how it goes). The Neanderthal's don't seem to bad until you get a cluster of them all shooting bows at you at once, then you suddenly realize they are taking huge chunks of health from you. The tigermen are fast, and their champions are down right nasty.

Part of it may be gear related, but I think partly you need to change tactics when you hit Orient, and really ramp up on tactics. You also need to play more conservatively because everything takes pretty hefty chunks of health, and with the tigermen, they move fast and in packs.

[DeepT]

I'm still wearing the same chest armor I found on normal.

Tell me about it, my chest armor I found by bouncing between thebes and memphis like 90 times (the merchants) was better then anything I have ever found with any character.

You know what else is wonky? How the game spawns the same items (greens and blues) over and over. I have found 5 obsidian greaves, 3 tiger claws (green axe), 4 +1 defense skill necklaces (never have I seen + any other skill), and a myriad of other dupes. So when we do get a green or blue, it seems to pool of greens and blues that drop is small so it keeps hitting the same items over and over.

Yesterday in a trade I got the firewalkers helm and a blue ring. A few hours later I kill a boss, and he drops those two things. What are the odds?

[Jab2565]

Is it me, or is there an unusually higher chance for green staff drops? I think on my magician I must have picked up at least 10-15 green staves from greece to orient by now. Also for melee characters, is strength or dexterity the more important stat?

[Jeff Green]

K I haven't read through this whole thread, so forgive me if it's been covered, but my level 20 Conqueror is getting his arse handed to him repeatedly when trying to take on the first boss in Egypt--that bigass spider thingie.

So it's making me wonder if I just doled out my points in Warfare and Defense mastery too stupidly. Sadly, I am at work and don't have the build in front of me, but I think it's roughly like a 70/30 split so far between the two masteries, with heavy emphasis on War Wind, and various shield crap.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what some peoples have used to successfully kill this thing, since I can't imagine it should be as hard as it is for me right now.(I'm trying to do some random killing to level up and try again, but I'm finding it kind of a pain in this game to do level grinding...) Also, I'm wondering if those with kick-arse Conquerors could share their point allocations stratergies with a looser like me.

[Charlatan]

I've seen almost no duplication of special items - and in fact the only items I can recall seeing more than once are the Deathweaver's Tip dagger, an Icthian Whomper, and two sets of Battlemage Greaves. This morning I got something called a "Rat Clap" off of a Rodent King, and two purple pieces in the same dungeon area. It's all random.

Pfreak, if your Legendary Corsair is having trouble, go kill the Epic Typhon like 5 or 10 times. He's bound to drop something decent, and at your level it shouldn't be that difficult to farm him a bit. Just run through all the trash mobs, hit the battle and mastery shrines and take him down. I'd be shocked if you couldn't get one or two upgrades out of that. You -70 resists are what's killing you - hit the shops, and you will be able to find (eventually) a 50% or so pierce resist piece of armor. Buy it. Use it. Farm the Hags (found outside some of the early Egypt portals I think - Thebes or Fayum) for the Hag Essence monster bit that gives + to pierce resist - I got one that when completed had something like 16% pierce resist, 10 dex, and 40% fire resist on it as the completion bonus.

I wore the stuff I farmed off Normal Typhon up through all of Epic (save maybe weapon and one or two other pieces). The merchants also sell pierce resist necklaces (or you can find green ones). A couple of those will really help your melee guy, IMHO.

[Backov]

I had no problem at all with the spider, so if I had to guess I'd bet it's an equipment deficiency.

I spent all of my points on the passive skills like ignore pain, weapon mastery, armor handling, etc and then some points into the auto shield bash and war wind/lacerate.

I remember pretty much walking through that queen spider.

[Jab2565]

The trick is to avoid that poison spray of his. When he does a kind of getting up on his hind leg animation he is going to spray poison. Also kill his spawns the second they appear to avoid being swarmed.

That reminds me of one other problem I have. I can't seem to find the energy to play this for straight grinding. As in repeating the same section over again for exp.

[Charlatan]

That reminds me of one other problem I have. I can't seem to find the energy to play this for straight grinding. As in repeating the same section over again for exp.

Personally, I've never felt compelled to do this, other than farming Typhon a few times. I think I "farmed" the Gorgons once but it may have been because of a technical issue. At any rate, most of the time I'd just rather move on than kill a boss, save, exit, and restart.

[Jeff Green]

Hmmm. I have some pretty good gear--2 blue weapons, blue torso armor, and even a pretty big poison resistance at this point. He's just bashing the shit out of me. I'll take a good 50/75 percent hit point decrease if he gets in just a couple good hits. Dangit.

[Enidigm]

K I haven't read through this whole thread, so forgive me if it's been covered, but my level 20 Conqueror is getting his arse handed to him repeatedly when trying to take on the first boss in Egypt--that bigass spider thingie.

So it's making me wonder if I just doled out my points in Warfare and Defense mastery too stupidly. Sadly, I am at work and don't have the build in front of me, but I think it's roughly like a 70/30 split so far between the two masteries, with heavy emphasis on War Wind, and various shield crap.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what some peoples have used to successfully kill this thing, since I can't imagine it should be as hard as it is for me right now.(I'm trying to do some random killing to level up and try again, but I'm finding it kind of a pain in this game to do level grinding...) Also, I'm wondering if those with kick-arse Conquerors could share their point allocations stratergies with a looser like me.

With my Nature/Storm Druid at lvl 17, with 7 points in Wolves, 5 in Nymph, and some other places, i beat the Scarab king boss pretty easily. Wolves seem to tank certain opponents strangely well. The Nymph does some crazy damage - while i'm running around dodging the poison spray, she's dishing out minute amounts of damage - but really quickly, like an fully auto SMG.

You can respec your master skill points really cheaply. I've already got 600,000 gold, and each respec only increase the cost by 500. It would only cost me 20-30,000 to completely respec right now. Although i'm not terribly familiar with your build there's probably something to which you can respec.

[Enidigm]

Has anyone gotten any use the Plague skill from nature, and it's related improvements? While it looks fairly effective, it seems like it would take a fairly large number of skill points to get it out of the completely inefficient range it resides in with only a couple points.

The same question for Briar Thorns as well.

[Backov]

Hmmm. I have some pretty good gear--2 blue weapons, blue torso armor, and even a pretty big poison resistance at this point. He's just bashing the shit out of me. I'll take a good 50/75 percent hit point decrease if he gets in just a couple good hits. Dangit.

If your poison resist is high it just means your armor points aren't. I had to sacrifice some nice resists in Normal to get my armor higher on my conqueror.

[Charlatan]

Has anyone gotten any use the Plague skill from nature, and it's related improvements? While it looks fairly effective, it seems like it would take a fairly large number of skill points to get it out of the completely inefficient range it resides in with only a couple points.

The same question for Briar Thorns as well.

I have Plague at maybe 2, the one above it at 1 or 2, and the elemental debuff at 5 or so. Even though the initial effect is only 3 seconds of decreased attack speed and speed, it recharges enough in boss battles that I use it maybe 5 or 6 times.

Since I have pets, I often throw Plague out there first, and THEN lob a Volcanic Orb - so they are more suceptabile to the fire damage (and the earth enchantment damage, etc, etc). Seems to work pretty well.

Briar Thorns, I have no experience with.

[scharmers]

Just going back to Charles...how the hell do you farm a boss like 10-15 times? I would shoot myself in the face from boredom with that kind of pure grindage.

Guess that's why I was never a big Battle.net player or MMO guy :)

[Charles]

Just going back to Charles...how the hell do you farm a boss like 10-15 times? I would shoot myself in the face from boredom with that kind of pure grindage.

Guess that's why I was never a big Battle.net player or MMO guy :)

It only takes about 5 minutes per run, and you are pretty much guaranteed at least one blue drop. The point was simply to make my character more powerful. It was definitely boring to do, but hey, twinking is hard.

[ydejin]

Hmmm. I have some pretty good gear--2 blue weapons, blue torso armor, and even a pretty big poison resistance at this point. He's just bashing the shit out of me. I'll take a good 50/75 percent hit point decrease if he gets in just a couple good hits. Dangit.

I don't remember having too much trouble with him. When I generally have trouble I shield charge followed with batter (this stuns them briefly and then slows them) hit them a few times while their stunned, retreat, and then repeat. However, it sounds like you're dual wielding. If you've got it try taking advantage of War Horn (if he's susceptible). Make sure to slap down a Battle Standard, that can make a huge difference. But at the same time, if he's really kicking your butt, don't feel so attached to your Battle Standard that you aren't willing to book it out of there if your health drops precipitously low.

Also hit the health pot key as soon as your health goes down slightly. Getting a positive health flow from a potion can go a long way to conteract your health going down from battle damage, this is particularly important when fighting monsters with poison, as if the poison is strong enough you'll die even if you're retreating and no longer in contact with the enemy. In a tough fight, I'll just start sucking pots, hitting the health pot key as soon as their timer runs down and just repeat this throughout the fight. (Trust me it will be good practice for melee in Legendary).

If he's hitting you for major poison damage (which you can tell because your health keeps dropping even when you're running from him) Rally can make a big difference. Rally is particular useful when your health pot timer is running and you can't take another health pot hit and your health is still going down from some nasty poison, Rally can give you another health boost. Also, try to keep your health at ~50% or above when fighting critters with strong poison, as a particularly strong poison hit can make your health drop even faster than a health pot dose can raise it.

Some monsters, particularly bosses but some of the larger mobs as well, are nasty enough that as a melee guy you really will have to hit on them a few times, beat a hasty retreat and get your health back up. I've definitely been known to beat a hasty retreat with a huge mob on my tail, hitting the health potion key frantically. Two keys to this "strategy". First, make sure you know where you've been. The last thing you want is to wander into new monsters while retreating with one group already in tow. Second, don't turn around for another strike until your health gets back up. This probably seems obvious but I have a bad tendency to hit the health potion key, assume I'm good to go and head back into battle, only to realize that my health is heading back up, but is nowhere near 100% yet.

[Misguided]

Right now it's normal orient, with my magician. I have 9 points in golem, 5 points in that regen speed boosting skill. Legendary it's my corsir, and I have about -70% resist on everything. The loot issue is killing me, I'm still wearing the same chest armor I found on normal. For my magician the plan was to keep the throwing knifes as my projectile and use the earth,pierce and poision damage for melee.

On the magician, if there's any way possible, get your Earth Mastery maxed then drop one point into wildfire and as many as you can spare into Metamorphosis. My pal CD has a fairly hard time with certain mobs as it is (e.g. big groups of lizard men w/ casters) with several points in metamorphosis. I have no doubt they'd go through him like paper without.

[ydejin]

the first boss in Egypt--that bigass spider thingie

Jeff, I think I just figured out which boss you're talking about. Is this that huge spider thing in the library? I'm pretty sure he's killed me once or twice.

Like pfreak says, you don't want to stand in front of him while he's spraying that nasty lime green stuff. I think I spent some time trying to circle him (although he's pretty good at constantly facing you). As soon as he started spraying, I went around to the side and started hacking on him. Then I pulled out when he stopped spraying so he couldn't hit me.

Some bosses you don't want to try going toe-to-toe with, even as a melee guy, even with high resist. I think you may have to figure out his attack animation moves and then move in on him only when he's vulnerable. For bosses with his type of attack, I generally consider them most vulnerable when they're doing their special spray move -- just as long as you don't attack from the front. While he won't let you get to his flank normally once he starts spraying he should be stationary, that's when you move in. You'll probably need to repeat a number of times.

[DeepT]

Is there any way to get a melee character who will not get whipped by certain bosses if you forgo everything but defensive skills?

One thing I really do not know is how armor / defense works with respect to monster levels.

Yes I know that defense counters offense, and armor has some calculation to see if it sucks up 2/3rds of the damage. However...

How much offense does a mob have per level? IE: VS a level mob 20, is 100 defense good, bad or fair?

If I have 200 defense, and the mob has 100 offense, does that mean the mob only has a 33% chance to hit me?

Depending on how this scales, defense can quickly become pointless. Lets say the formula is something like (Offense) / (Offense + Defense). In this case has as both numbers get higher the defense per point is less and less effective.

If the method is something like 50 + (Offense - Defense) / 5 and monsters get 5 x their level in Offense skill, then as long as you maintained a fixed lead, lets say 100 more defense then an even level mob, they would always have a 30% chance to hit you and even small increases in relative defense could translate into a significant amount of damage you avoid.

Its stuff like this Id like to know because it would make figuring out if some skill that tops out at 75 defense is really worth it or not. In the first example, it is not, in the latter, it is.

My big fear with melee, which I found out numerous Diablo clones, as well as diablo (2) itself, was that in the high end game, melee always got ganked unless you had the most premium gear you could, and even then you still might in some games no matter what you did. Casters had it a lot better because they were not nearly as affected by mediocre gear as a melee class is. I am hoping TQ will be different and the melee classes will not turn into paper on the most difficult levels.


BTW Id like to report several trading bugs. In an effort to get better gear I created a trade game.

If someone's inventory was full and you clicked trade (even if their traded item would give them room), sometimes they would not get the item they traded for. The person trading it to them would lose it, but they would never get it.

If you have an item in a trade window and your game crashes, the server crashes, the person you are trading with drops, you loose everything that was in the trade window.

[Charles]

If someone's inventory was full and you clicked trade (even if their traded item would give them room), sometimes they would not get the item they traded for. The person trading it to them would lose it, but they would never get it.

I thought this happened once, but it turned out the items simply went in to a new bag I hadn't realized I had.

[Jeff Green]

Yeah, I"ve been doing my best to dodge the green slime attacks, but he moves annoyingly fast. I dunno. I was doing it last night and may have just been too tired.

I'm not dual-wielding. Have a blue axe (err, "brain cleave" i think it's called--can't remember off the top of my head) and pretty nice green shield, with a bunch of points put into Batter. I do have War Horn and a Battle Standard and use them pretty well, I think. I dunno. Appreciate all your tips here though--this is good stuff. There obviously is some weakness in my armor somewhere, I gotta go back and check it all. Those big white worm things (non bosses) were also doing *serious* damage to me even though i could tear through everything of a similar level with no problem...

[Kalle]

Jeff, those worms do vitality damage, which we discussed earlier in the thread. Basically, their damage bypasses everything but vitality resistance and untyped damage resistance.

[Charlatan]

DeepT, the back of the manual has some of the appropriate formulae:

For melee combat:

To Hit = random number * (offensive ability[attacker] - defensive ability[defender])

Result: High= critical, Medium=hit, Low=miss (actual numbers not listed).

So if your defense is higher than their offense, they can't hit you, period.

Base Damage= Weapon Damage + Weapon Bonuses + Skill Damage + Critical Damage

Damage = Base Damage * Strength

I believe that Ranged damage always hits - but it can never critical hit, so that's the evener.

Stuff on piercing - has been covered before. Info on elemental damage, etc, is in the back of the manual just past this.

[Michael Fitch]

So if your defense is higher than their offense, they can't hit you, period.

Greetings:
I don't think that's true. The higher your defense relative to their offense, the more likely they will do no damage, but I think your DA has to be much, much higher than their OA to have a reliable no-damage event. What happens much more quickly is that they're doing an insignificant amount of damage, but I'm not sure what the thresholds are, which is, I think, what DeepT really wanted to know.

The best place for questions like this is here (http://www.titanquest.net/questions-developers/). The guys who are actually hands-on with the formulas check in there regularly, as do the guys who wrote the strategy guide.

Best,
Michael.

[Jab2565]

I think if there is one compliment I have to give Tq, is that the tougher bosses require more then just stand right in front of them and left click for 5 minutes. Taking down the epic yeti was great as I kept on getting behind him and lethal striking him while he does his ice breath. I must be really unlucky in this game, I tried farming the centaur boss and the cyclops for my magician and I got crap from them. I'm going to head on now to see if I can get something good from the last boss.

[DeepT]

Charlatan, those forumulas can't be right.

If defense was > offense by 1 point, no monster could ever hit you.

Also that random number multiplyer also make zero sense. I could see something like:

To hit = Random (100) - 50 + (Offense - Defense) * Scalar

That way if you were even, you would have a 50 / 50 chance of being hit. The 10,000 dollar question is what is the scalar in relation to each % to be hit or missed? That would tell us how much each Defense point was worth, although we would still need to know how much each mob gets in offense per level. Its probably Level * Scalar.


Your Damage = Base Damage * Strength is also wrong. My strength is 300, my weapon damage is at 56 to 68. My Average hit is 214. As you can see, the math doesn't even begin to work out for that formula. To make it even more obtuse, how are dots, like bleeding calculated in or are they? Is magical damage from talents calculated in? If I put one more in storm nimbus, will my damage for my weapon go up? I do not think it does.

It would see to me, if a power like storm nimbus adds FIXED damage to a weapon, then the most powerful weapon is the fastest. Take a slow weapon that does 100 damage per swing (base, no strength or anything). Take a fast weapon that does 50 per swing. Lets say the fast weapon, for simplicity attacks 2x as fast as the slow weapon even though I do not think you can get an attack speed that fast.

If I have storm nimbus that adds 75 lighting, and the wisp buff at +100% and static charge (100%?) that means I add 225 damage per swing. The fast weapon does 550 bonus damage in the time the slower weapon does 225 bonus damage.

To bad how all this works is a mystery. I have this tigers claw axe that does like 84 bleed damage over 6 seconds (or something like that). Every weapon I equip does much less damage according to the average hit and dps meters. I have no idea how these numbers are computed.



Are there any high level melee characters here? Do you end up constantly sucking down the healing potions? I hope that isn't the case, that kind of stuff really irritates me. If that ends up being how it must be, Ill make another character. Ill go back to mages. The reason changed my ice mage into a paladin was because he was chugging the blue potions and I was tired of that as well. Half my pack was nothing but potions.


BTW who was saying storm nimbus was so good? Its not. It caps at 75 lighting damage or something like 24 cold (I sure hope that 'chance of' means one or the other, and not something lame like 5% chance to get any effect at all). It doesn't buff elemental damage, heart of ice and static charge do that.

[Jab2565]

Now I'm pissed, not only did I beat the egypt scorpion boss and typhon, I didn't get one blue item from either. In fact from dieing from cheap hits and potions, I'm worse off then I was before fighting them. I even tried the egypt telkine and he one hit killed me somehow. And yes as a melee character my coursir is constantly sucking down health potions.

I think I'm going to stop playing for now, before I break the disc in half and send iron lore an email I'll probably regret in the morning.

[DeepT]

Forumulas: (stolen from the website micheal linked to)

Physical Damage (Str):
(physicalDamageDV*((strengthDV/500)+1))+(strengthDV*0.04)

Each 50 points of Strength adds 10% Physical damage and +2 flat Physical damage.

Piercing Damage (Dex):
(pierceDamageDV * ((dexterityDV/650)+1))+(dexterityDV*0.03)
Each 65 points of Dexterity adds 10% Piercing damage and roughly +1.95 flat Piercing damage

Elemental Damage (Int):
(elementalDamageDV * ((intelligenceDV / 650) + 1)) + (intelligenceDV*0.025)
Each 65 points of Intelligence adds 10% Elemental damage, and roughly 1.625 flat Elemental damage

Elemental Duration (Int):
elementalDamageDV * ((intelligenceDV / 500) + 1)
Each 50 points of Intelligence adds 10% to Elemental duration damage, spread evenly over the duration

Shields:
All shields have a 'recast' block timer of 3 seconds, before other modifiers.
Shield damage absorption takes place after armor absoption, and can totally nullify an attack.


Offense (OA) and Defense (DA):
OA ONLY apply to melee! Ranged attacks and staff attacks always hit, never crit. DA works for anyone against melee critters of course. So anyone using ranged attacks, such as spells / staves or bows, Offense is a worthless stat to you.

The way OA and DA compare, with even values, you have a 100% chance of hitting your target. The scale is very soft, so missing is rarely an issue. Of greater interest is the critical calculations.

Going by the equations in the database, each 100 points of OA over your target's DA gives you a chance to hit the next 10% tier of critical hits. That is, if your OA is 150 and your targets is 50, you have a chance of scoring a 110% hit. 250/50, 120% hit, and so on. Note that these crits cap out at 150% damage.

You can't see these values in the game (though medierra indicated he was looking at adding a display that compared your OA to the last target's DA that you hit, which would make this much easier to calculate), so the only way to get a feel for how your OA is doing relative to your opponents DA is to watch the critical hits (make sure to turn on the critical hit display in the options menu).

(It would seem to me, going for defense in order to not be hit is a lost cause, the only thing its good for is getting less crits against you).

Speed Caps:
Player minimum speed is capped at 60%. Attack speed is capped at 300%, run speed is capped at 166%

Monster minimum speed is capped at 20%, boss monster minimum speed is capped at 50%

Resistances:

Player resists are capped at 80%, and penalized by 40/25% in Epic, 100/50% in Legendary (primary/secondary).


Rare loot: As in D2 style rares....

Farming boss chests is good for unique items, but gives you no chance at all to find monster rare items. You MUST fight monsters of that specific type to find rare monster items, many of which have extremely powerful modifiers (and note that these modifiers DO increase in power in each difficulty level, so the same pair of Sentinel's Armbands from a Gorgon or the suit of Exotic Armor from a Tropical Spider in Normal are less powerful than those found in Legendary). On top of that, monster items CAN have affixes, including rare affixes, potentially a rare suffix and a rare prefix, and they CAN be modified by Relics/Charms, unlike uniques... just something to think about for those of you mercilessly farming Typhon on Legendary.

[ydejin]

Are there any high level melee characters here? Do you end up constantly sucking down the healing potions?

That would be a yes (Conqueror, level 52, just past the Great Yeti in Legendary China). Basically in a fight with a mob of any reasonable size (say any force with both melee and mage/archer support or any large group of tough melee guys -- yellows for example) I start sucking potions from the moment I make contact until the moment the fight is over.

At first it was a bit annoying, but I've since gotten used to it. Plus someone on OO recommended remapping the health potion key to the space bar, and now the action has gotten very automatic.

Frankly I don't know if there is a way -- game design-wise -- to get around it. After all either the monsters do damage to us or they don't. If they don't do any damage, then it's a cake walk. If they do do damage, then we need to suck down potions to counteract that. They could control the amount of damage, but less damage means an easier game. They could leave the amount of damage alone and control the frequency of damage like maybe much fewer hits, but increasing the frequency and damage dealt by critical hits, but less frequent damage means bigger damage chunks per hit, and frankly I prefer not having huge chunks of health taken out at random intervals.

[Charlatan]

I switched to a lowbie Paladin for a bit, and now I completely empathisize with the sucking-down-potion mechanic you guys have been discussing. Whereas my Summoner would hoard potions and only use them in boss fights, or rarely, my Paladin is a potion-chugging machine. It's a completely different feel, and for some reason, feels a lot more like work than fun (that could partly be Paladins or the build I've got so far, which is by no means optimal).

Incidentally, I switched because I ran into a boss in Legendary China (the Mystery in the Mountains barbarian guy) who is just brutal - he demolishes my pets fairly fast, and stuns me for maybe 5 seconds - and it only takes him about 2 seconds to kill me. So I try to plink around the edge of his stun aura, but when it doesn't work I go down like a card table and then I gotta start all over again. And boy is the rebirth fountian far from that cave, so when you die it's not just a bummer, it's a pain in the ass to get back there.

[ydejin]

Incidentally, I switched because I ran into a boss in Legendary China (the Mystery in the Mountains barbarian guy) who is just brutal - he demolishes my pets fairly fast, and stuns me for maybe 5 seconds - and it only takes him about 2 seconds to kill me. So I try to plink around the edge of his stun aura, but when it doesn't work I go down like a card table and then I gotta start all over again. And boy is the rebirth fountian far from that cave, so when you die it's not just a bummer, it's a pain in the ass to get back there.

I ended up skipping him on Epic and then going back, later. He's completely optional. I died repeatedly trying to even get down to him on Epic. Those barbarian heroes living in the upper levels leading down to him were totally owning me. I must have died at least 3-4 times against them.

The wierd thing is I just ran into him on Legendary and took him down no problem. Went down to the caves, knocked off the barbarian heroes, took out the barbarian boss, and then proceeded down the path and took out the gian yeti, no problem.

I'm not entirely sure what's different this time, but those guys were killing me on Epic, and now they're not so bad on Legendary. Could be better skill point allocation. Another theory I have is that potion sucking has gotten to be just another part of my combat routine (I do it pretty much mechanically throughout combat every time the pot timer goes off), whereas before, it was more of a panic thing I only did when I was in trouble, so my potion chugging reflexes weren't as good.

[Misguided]

I ended up skipping him on Epic and then going back, later. He's completely optional.

Yeah, just went up against him in normal and he's the first foe to take down my core dweller while under the influence of a mastery shrine. Egypt's Telkine barely scratched him, but that dude tore him a new one.

[Bee]

Looks like there's a new mod out (vers 4) that includes the ability to slot relics into purple/blue items. I haven't tried it yet, but probably will when I get home tonight.

[Lake]

Quote stolen from TitanQuest.net, made by Iron Lore's Lead Gameplay Designer.

"We had to work out some database source control issues before we could begin adding database changes to the patches to adjust balancing but that has been completed and we will begin work this week. We have been tracking balancing issues and adjustments to melee are one of the top priorities. There will probably be some adjustments to certain melee class skills but one of the biggest problems seems to be caused by insufficient armor scaling in Epic and Legendary. Since physical damage is far more prevelant than any other damage type (even archer attacks are mostly physical damage) this should make a big difference.

I appologize for your current frustrations and grant you rant amnesty."

[DeepT]

Frankly I don't know if there is a way -- game design-wise -- to get around it. After all either the monsters do damage to us or they don't. If they don't do any damage, then it's a cake walk. If they do do damage, then we need to suck down potions to counteract that. They could control the amount of damage, but less damage means an easier game.

It is not really a razor's edge, one way being constant potion sucking, and another being indestructible.

Let say that the defense tree, can make a character virtually immune physical damage because of the AC / Defense / Regen / Whatever.

How does a game counter that? The classic answer, is that is what magic is for. It is the whole RPS thing. Magic bypasses armor, it by passes defense (it always hits), and it does alot of damage and can suppress (through dots or directly via some magical effect) Regen.

Similarly archery with its piercing damage, also bypasses armor, never misses, and can suppress Regen via dots such as poison or burning arrows.

In other words, if you picked the defense line, and it was balanced so that you would take ZERO damage from melee, assuming you spent enough points, the game still has two avenues to hurt you. As a melee warrior you would not be in the least bit afraid of a Cyclops or a group of Minotaur men pwning you.

A group of skeletal archers or frost imps or whatever might be trouble, but most mobs, are not.

Finally, lets say that the clever melee guy says "I want to be untouchable. I want to laugh at spells, and have arrows bounce off my chest." Is this a balance problem? It can be, but doesn't have to be. If it is balanced right, a warrior can get to this level, but at the cost damage. He gets all the rings, amulets, and armor that has resistances. He favors + rez piercing to +damage, gets +elemental Resistance instead of +str, and gets +defense instead of +offense.

The cost, and balance is his DPS is going to be pathetic. Yes, maybe he can stand toe-to-toe with a titan without ever drinking a potion, however, he will take forever to kill it (and maybe at higher diff levels not even counter its Regen).

In reality most players will not do that because they will fill like a gimp even though the gods themselves might not be able to scratch them. They will give up some defense to get some offense. Maybe they will drop some elemental Resistance or simply spend less in the defense tree then in an offense based tree.

So, I disagree with you that you can't make a game where melee guys are nearly, if not downright immune to melee damage. It would be a breath of fresh air, and if I had the ear of the game designer for TQ, I would tell him to closely examine the defense tree as well as gear to make sure that it is possible.


My idea with my paladin was this:
1. Become immune to melee.

2. Get all the reactive damage I could get from storms, so that every hit on me, would have a chance to punish the attacker. There are 3 such ability in storms. It could work real well, but it depends on my having the focus of several mobs. Certainly storm surge is much better with more mobs hitting me since it is an AoE.

3. Stuns and roots could be ignored because my damage would be reactive, and even if I am stunned, these powers still trigger.

Known weaknesses that I would accept were:
All non-melee damage and fire damage. Frost and Ice would be absorbed by my energy shield.

Sounds like a good character idea right? Well it all falls apart if I can't actually take the focus of aggro at higher levels. If I have to start trying to pull mobs one or two at a time, the whole system doesn't work. I ran into those cyclops guys on Olympus. It would take a stroke of good luck for me to beat 4 at a time. At most, for safety, I can tank one and only one. Two is risky and I can die easily, even if I am chugging potions.

Is this a preview of things to come? If so, then this character is totally doomed.

A last ditch effort design idea, is to focus on gear that simply has the abstract reduced damage modifier. If I can get 75% on this and then add in armor, resistances and whatnot, melee might still be doable. If not... its a lost cause without serious love from the game designer.

After reading that web site last night (the one I posted all that stuff from), it is clear to me that stats such as offense and defense on gear should be ignored in favor of anything else. Even character stats like str and dex are somewhat worthless in the long run except to enable you to use gear.

I really do want melee to work out. I tried it several times in D2, but once you got past normal you were a sitting duck. I think I got a barbarian to act 5 on nightmare who was totally going with defense and life leech. Monsters just hit too hard and he couldn't even keep up with damage on the harder mobs and kept dying. I gave up and went back to my sorceress and necro after that.

[DeepT]

Looks like there's a new mod out (vers 4) that includes the ability to slot relics into purple/blue items. I haven't tried it yet, but probably will when I get home tonight.

Are these mods compatible with the basic game? IE: I wont have to start over? Will my friends need to get the mod to play with me?

Maybe Ill wait for the next patch and hope they add that.

[Bee]

Are these mods compatible with the basic game? IE: I wont have to start over? Will my friends need to get the mod to play with me?

Maybe Ill wait for the next patch and hope they add that.

The guy who wrote the mod said it was compatible with the normal game and also with multiplayer. Like I said I haven't tried it yet but I'll give it a try this evening and see if I have any issues.

[Dave Markell]

Looks like there's a new mod out (vers 4) that includes the ability to slot relics into purple/blue items. I haven't tried it yet, but probably will when I get home tonight.

Link to the mod for us lazy types?

[Sam Jones]

Link to the mod for us lazy types?


http://www.savefile.com/projects.php?pid=144027

[Bee]

Oops...sorry about that

Here's the link to the file:
http://www.savefile.com/projects.php?pid=144027

Here's the link to the discussion about the mod:
http://www.titanquest.net/gameplay/5260-tq-enhanced-experience-mod-4-0-add-relics-epic-legendaries.html

[Jarrodhk]

Hmm... now that sounds like a very useful mod! Thanks for the links.

[Dave Markell]

Many thanks. I'm looking forward to being able to slot blues/purples--I complained about that design choice many pages ago and am glad the mod community addressed the problem.

[OrangeCoke]

I had to come back to this thread and mention what a great game this is turning out to be. I feel it's a bit underrated actually.

Each time I think I'm about to kill the last boss and finish the game, a whole new area of the world opens up - complete with new level tilesets, monsters, look, etc. The value for money in terms of raw gameplay hours feels huge.

I have only 1 complaint: I wish you could sell back a mastery - even if it was REALLY expensive (since I'm uber rich). Right now, I have 1 mastery slot totally wasted on Hunting because I'm putting zero points into it and putting them into my Earth Mastery. If I could, I'd sell back Hunting and try something like Defensive for example. I took hunting thinking I'd be using my bow a ton, but I'm using it less and less in the later levels. So I feel half gimped. But then again, my Earth magic is tremendously devastating to monsters :)

[Charles]

Just a note about that 'mod'. It's not a mod at all, but someone who's actually gone in and hacked DLLs to make the changes. I wouldn't recommend touching them unless you plan on only ever playing single player and not patching again.

[Jab2565]

For the defense tree, is it important to put points into the energy reserve skill that increases blocking? Also the skill that lets you use a war horn to add buffs?

[Bee]

Just a note about that 'mod'. It's not a mod at all, but someone who's actually gone in and hacked DLLs to make the changes. I wouldn't recommend touching them unless you plan on only ever playing single player and not patching again.

Looks like there's an exe file that will uninstall the "mod" or hack or whatever you want to call it for future patching, etc. And according to the guy who wrote it, it works for multiplayer so it's apparently not only for single player. Again, I haven't even tried it so I can't confirm any of that...just reporting what I read.

[ydejin]

For the defense tree, is it important to put points into the energy reserve skill that increases blocking? Also the skill that lets you use a war horn to add buffs?

I assume you're talking about the Battle Awareness lines and Rally lines of skills. You'll want at least one point in Battle Awareness, because the top skill in the line Iron Will is super useful it prevents stun and skill disruption. As far as Battle Awareness itself, I don't think the payoff is really great here for putting in more than one point unless you're playing multiplayer. For multiplayer (or players with pets) putting points into Battle Awareness increases the radius of the skill (it affects allies). As far as the middle Focus skill, it wouldn't hurt to put points into it, but I don't consider it critical. I've probably got one or two points into it (after the first few points, the percentage increment per point is not very good -- although that's true of a lot of Defender and Warfare skills).

As far as Rally goes, I use Rally when things are going down the tubes and I've already drank a potion and my health is still going down too fast. I've currently got it mapped to my middle mouse button and hit it when I'm in panic mode and about to die. Unfortunately at the really high levels of the game (Legendary China) the extra health boost isn't very good, unless you've got a huge number of points in it. It's got a fairly long timer, so you can't use it too frequently. I'm relectant to put a ton of points into it, since I don't use it very often, but when I do, I really need it. The follow on skills are also useful. However, I played around a bit with a Pyromancer, and have to say the Rally skill absolutely sucks compared to Stone Form. That skill is just amazing for getting you out of a tight jam.

Another point about Rally, as with Battle Awareness, apparently Rally works for allies.

[DeepT]

pfreak: I have no idea. My opinions on defense keep chaning. It seems to me, only the stuff near the top of the tree are giving you much bang for your buck.

The war horn power itself I have not upgraded since it only gives you healing benfits and the cooldown is very very long, its not like you can spam it for heals. Even when maxed, it is woefully insufficent. Maybe if there were buffs like +100% to healing or something it could work, but I have never seen anything that amplifies healing. 1pt gives you the +150% healing which helps when adrenaline kicks off.

Why spend skill points when potions work better and faster? The second tier and third tier warhorn powers are also not a good buy unless you get a lot of items that vastly amplify thier effects.

I have about 5 pts into adrenaline rish, and 3 into the cooldown (I wish I knew what the base recharge rate for adrenaline was, these points might be totally wasted). Since adrenaline has such a low porbability of firing off, improved recharge is almost wasted. I know with 3 pts into the cooldown reduction its recharge is faster then the shield power (the one that decreases shield block cooldowns). The last power in adrenaline is ok, but the bonus damage is weak. Id consider it much later when something like +10% damage might actually make a large difference.

Ill write more on my thoughts on defense for you after I get back from lunch.

[ydejin]

pfreak: I have no idea. My opinions on defense keep chaning. It seems to me, only the stuff near the top of the tree are giving you much bang for your buck.

Maxed out Batter leads to 50% monster slow down for 8 seconds, which is huge. Also depending on your build Armor Handling can be pretty useful. As far as top level skills go, I don't think more than one point into Colossus gives good bang for your buck. If you've got extra points, sure it doesn't hurt, but how often can you be in Colossus mode anyway?

[Jab2565]

Right now I have 5 points in each shield attack shield. 1 in colussus, 4 or 5 in that skill in the bottom right. At least 2 points in each of the %chance to be use attack skills. None in either the rally, or battle awareness. I have 3 points in the modifier for the shield charge.

Also are there any tips for dealing with the greece telkine's homing shot? I may just take a break from the game until they hopefully make the changes to melee.

[Charles]

Looks like there's an exe file that will uninstall the "mod" or hack or whatever you want to call it for future patching, etc. And according to the guy who wrote it, it works for multiplayer so it's apparently not only for single player. Again, I haven't even tried it so I can't confirm any of that...just reporting what I read.

Yes but your save games will already be corrupted.

[Charles]

Right now I have 5 points in each shield attack shield. 1 in colussus, 4 or 5 in that skill in the bottom right. At least 2 points in each of the %chance to be use attack skills. None in either the rally, or battle awareness. I have 3 points in the modifier for the shield charge.

Also are there any tips for dealing with the greece telkine's homing shot? I may just take a break from the game until they hopefully make the changes to melee.

I was able to just go toe to toe with the Telkine in Greece. Hunter/Defense. Defense has full spec in the light armor, nothing in shield attacks. I have rallying cry and adrenaline, and that's about it for Defense. Then I just bash away with a spear and pop potions as needed.


PS, does anyone have the link to that TQ character builder handy?

[Jab2565]

Forgot to mention that this is with my nature warfare guy that I'm having problems with here. One hit takes off 3/4 health, next one is instant kill.

[ydejin]

PS, does anyone have the link to that TQ character builder handy?

Hey Charles here you go (http://www.titancalc.com/).

[Bee]

Yes but your save games will already be corrupted.

Again, I haven't tried it out but it sounds like your save games will be fine according to what I've read. Of course, there's nothing wrong with being cautious. I don't mind being the guinea pig on this if no one else wants to try it. When I get a chance I'll install it, try it with a new game, existing game and multiplayer, then uninstall it and see if there are any issues with the save games.

[Charles]

Again, I haven't tried it out but it sounds like your save games will be fine according to what I've read. Of course, there's nothing wrong with being cautious. I don't mind being the guinea pig on this if no one else wants to try it. When I get a chance I'll install it, try it with a new game, existing game and multiplayer, then uninstall it and see if there are any issues with the save games.

Save games might be "fine" but they won't be fine -- there's data indicating something that's impossible to the game. Should a patch change something which builds on that assumption that something is impossible, there's a pretty big risk of crashes and corruption.

[Phred]

Or, before patching you could just drop the item and save the game then quit. Bye bye corrupt data.

[DeepT]

Maxed out Batter leads to 50% monster slow down for 8 seconds, which is huge. Also depending on your build Armor Handling can be pretty useful. As far as top level skills go, I don't think more than one point into Colossus gives good bang for your buck. If you've got extra points, sure it doesn't hurt, but how often can you be in Colossus mode anyway?

What is the cool-down on colossus? There are some recharge speed items, maybe if you try and get them, colossus can be up very frequently. If it helps you kill uber bosses, it is definitely worth pumping since 50% damage reduction doesn't suck.

How often can you use batter?

My other tree is storms and heart of frost adds a slow down effect, I do know there is a debuff cap on monsters so the two might not stack very well.

The armor skill is somewhat good to lower requirements, however, in the long run it might be worth untraining once you naturally meet those requirements. I have 6 points into it right now, however, once I am level 60 or get 450 str I just might untrain it some although the armor absorption cap might make we want to keep it. Its too early for me to tell on this skill.

The problem I am concerned about mostly is not single bosses, but groups of mobs. Some skills focus stunning / slowing ONE mob. I need to be effective vs groups of mobs. So if I could stun-lock one mob, its not going to be of much use with the exception of bosses. In your day to day adventuring life, this will not be worth the points. Of course if you end up farming bosses, then yea, it would be great.


Another defense style build was going to rely on stuns. Storms has great synergy with this. Lots of lighting attacks have a small stun. Lighting bolt, chain lighting, thunder ball, storm surge, the wisp AoE all stun. It would seem storm can be very defensive if you can reduce damage by simply keeping enemy mobs stunned a lot of the time. Throw in the obscurement and you got a good damage and accuracy debuff to boot. Between the defense slows and the Storms Stuns, you could avoid lots of damage.

The more I look at it though, it seems that Storms is doing the heavy lifting in protecting you, which is kind of sad.

Using titan calc, and now that I understand the mechanics much better, it seems like the defense tree is kind of gimpy. There are a few nice things in it, but most of it is junk. There are a host of +damage skills for shields (which do low damage) and are based on low chances to hit or are on long cool-downs.

hmm... (tabbing between this and the chart as I write this)

Comments from what I learned and looking at this chart on the skills and changes I think would make defense really good (unless the designers do not want to make melee able to really tank melee). Is there an official feedback channel? Well that would prevent people from telling me I am smoking crack here...

Please keep in mind, the intent is to allow at a melee character to become very close to immune, if not immune to melee damage. If you do not think melee classes should ever get this ability, please ignore this rather then refuting it. If you simply think melee needs help, but not necessarily immune, then some of these ideas might be good for that.

Concussive blow: 5% for a stun if and only if you are using a club? Make it start at 5%, make it finish at 15%.

Adrenaline: Its fine as it is if you buff the next power in the line.

Resilience: Reduces the cool-down of adrenaline. Because adrenaline has such a low chance of firing off, this is a wasted talent. Add a +2% chance for adrenaline to fire off per level of this skill, so in the end you would have a 17% chance to have adrenaline to fire off when being hit.

Defensive reaction: I am not sure why this skill is named thus, there is nothing defensive about it. I suppose if you have points to waste, you can pump this skill for its feeble DPS increase. I would suggest changing the bonus damage to bonus physical defense (melee, piercing, bleeding) while leaving you vulnerable to elemental, poison, and vitality. Maybe you can add stun and root resistance too (makes sense if you're juiced up on adrenaline).

Rally: 1 point is good. The problem is that additional points only give you more initial healing and 1pt of armor. All the other stats are fixed except energy cost. I would suggest increase all aspects of this power reasonably for additional skill points. I think 50% health regen and 2 seconds (maybe more) of duration per point would be good. Also the armor buff is beyond useless, how about +10% armor per point? Considering how armor works, even that is nearly useless.

Inspiration: Uhh, worthless.. First fix the duration to that of Rally, right now 1 second per point is just stupid unless it increases the duration for everything, including the rally effect by one second. 6.8 regen for energy isn't going to do jack. Maybe its meant for your party members who are casters and have loads of +regen energy gear. Make this +25 (same as adrenaline is for health) at the top level. Have speed increase per point, at least 5% per point.

Defiance: A so-so power. It takes a lot of points to make it that useful. I would have the points for the skill and double the effect per point. If this were a constant power, it would totally be worth it, but since it is tied to rally, it not so good.

Battle Awareness: A total crap power. The only reason to take this is to get the next two powers in the set. I would just drop all the abilities it gave you, and add like 2.5% to dodge attacks per point and make it self only or maybe 1% to dodge attacks AoE and +1.5% to self only per point.

Focus: Its a Meh power. Who knows, maybe with items you can push shield block a lot, but in its own right, its only fair. Stacked with other powers it might be good. Maybe push the shield block % to +5% per point.

Iron Will: A good solid power, although due to the difficulty penalty most of this will get used up by simply by the difficulty penalty. Id like to see this power max out at around 125% (maybe increase the number of points needed to get there), so that at least on legendary you will not have to get gear to make up the difference that your main skills should make up for. Also these are not damage resistance, but 'status' resistances, which are far less common and life-threatening then things like damage buffs or debuffs. With that in mind, its ok to have a natural immunity (provided you pay the points) to such status effects.

Quick recovery: Almost a good skill. Its long cool-down and short duration kill it. Simply make this a passive power that is always on, stick a 1pt per sec cost or a flat energy reserve on to it.

Shield Charge & Disruption: Never used them, never will. I am not sure what to say here for these. Maybe if both powers were passive and had a chance on firing whenever you used your shield to block or another triggered shield power such as shield smash. If its based on blocking, then these powers should have a chance to activate, if its based on a power that already has a chance to activate (like shield smash), then these powers always activate.

Batter: This a weak attack with a shield with a weak slow. Make it an auto power based similarly as I have said for shield charge above.

Rend Armor: What is defensive about this? Move it to the warfare tree. Even then its a gimp power. At max level, its a 46 armor reduction. Considering how armor works, even in that tree I would not take this power. Try making it a 46% reduction in armor to have any meaning.

Colossus form: This is a good power, but from what people say the cool-down is really long. I have an interesting mechanics suggestion for you. Make it a toggle. Increased levels (this is to make you commit to the power and not just get one point), decrease the maintenance cost and speed penalties as well as boosting the power as they do now. If you are committed to it, why not allow people to permanently be in it if they can afford the upkeep for the power?

Armor Handling: Good, but I really wonder if it will still be worth while late in the game once the reduced str requirements are no longer needed. Maybe the +18% absorption will make it worth it in the end game, however, in the current state of potion sucking, that bonus isn't worth anything.

Shield Smash: An auto attack. Sticking with the theme tha defense should be about defense, I would remove the damage component and add a stun component.

Disabled: Again its a damage power in Defense. The slow is fine, but I would remove the damage and add a reduce damage effect for the enemy and make it a fairly long duration (maybe 10 seconds because its passive and can affect multiple foes at once).

Pulverize: Another attack in the defense tree. Move to warfare and replace with a powerful defense power. How about an aoe stun / slow / reduce offense (by percent, not a flat number). Unlike disable which only affects the guy that triggers it, in this case, if anyone triggers it, everyone in melee gets smacked. Maybe this should simply be a buff to the disable power that increases the proc chance and makes it an AoE.
(snip message too long)

[DeepT]

Thats all the powers here. You can see my theory of defense here. Nothing in defense should increase damage, and defense should very strongly protect you in melee with little to no help outside of melee. About the only thing I might also add is some piercing residence. Not a lot, just some. Maybe armor handling could add some, and quick recovery could add some, and being in a colossus mode might add some too, but that would be it.

Once again, this is all with the idea that with the right skills, a melee character should be the master of melee and not afraid of another melee npc or monster. Sure, mages and archers might scare the piss out of you, but melee is your home turf, and you are the king.

[ydejin]

What is the cool-down on colossus? There are some recharge speed items, maybe if you try and get them, colossus can be up very frequently. If it helps you kill uber bosses, it is definitely worth pumping since 50% damage reduction doesn't suck.


Best guess is it's 3-5 minutes, might be longer. It's far and away the longest time of any defender/warfare skill and I think it's at least twice as long as Ancestral Horn, which is pretty long as it is. You can reduce it maybe 10-20% with a good item. To get more than that and you'll have to do some serious item farming. I've only seen one or two items with reduced recharge times (although I've done little or no farming).

There are people who are running Guardians (Defense/Nature) and use Colossus in combination with Refresh (instant renewal of all skills) and basically get infinite Colossus -- although I hear it chews through energy pretty quick.

I'm always relectant to pump too much into a skill that's only useful against bosses.


How often can you use batter?

Very frequently. My standard rythm goes something like batter, regular hit, regular hit, regular hit, batter, hit, hit, hit, batter. The timer really is that fast. And when combined with Armor Rend you can hit three monsters at a time, all slowed for 50% (if Batter is maxed) I think it's pretty effective. Plus some shields do pretty hefty damage, and I believe batter adds both shield and weapon damage together.

The armor skill is somewhat good to lower requirements, however, in the long run it might be worth untraining once you naturally meet those requirements.

That's how I use it, I took all the points back out since my strength is now high enough for most any armor out there. I am starting to wonder if it might be worth it to put some points back in for the armor absorption bonus. At this point (lvl 52), I've got most the skills I want filled out with at least a few points, so it's mostly a matter of where to put in the extra points.

The problem I am concerned about mostly is not single bosses, but groups of mobs. Some skills focus stunning / slowing ONE mob. I need to be effective vs groups of mobs.

Agreed. My main crowd control mechanisms are batter for three monster slowing. Shield charge for stunning up to four at a time. Plus War Horn from the Warfare line. I like having a mix of skills so I can use one on a group while another is recharging.

[mouselock]

Actually this is one area in which TQ is a huge improvement over Diablo II. Maybe you haven't found them yet, but there are Mystics that will let you reallocate your skill points for a small fee. You can only unmap skill points, you can't unmap points you've put into a mastery though. Also it tops out at 45k, which I have found through experience.

That seems like a rather arbitrary exception. Or do you mean you can only unmap skill points but can't switch your masteries? (I.e. can you unmap your mastery levels (1-32) if, say, you want to put more points into skills and only go up to the penultimate tier in your secondary mastery?)

[ydejin]

That seems like a rather arbitrary exception. Or do you mean you can only unmap skill points but can't switch your masteries? (I.e. can you unmap your mastery levels (1-32) if, say, you want to put more points into skills and only go up to the penultimate tier in your secondary mastery?)

Nope. Once you put points into increasing a mastery you can't change them. If you pump one up to 32 and then decide that was a mistake, you're stuck, you can't reduce it from 32.

[DeepT]

That seems like a rather arbitrary exception. Or do you mean you can only unmap skill points but can't switch your masteries? (I.e. can you unmap your mastery levels (1-32) if, say, you want to put more points into skills and only go up to the penultimate tier in your secondary mastery?)

I understand it not letting you untrian masteries. It is because the game has no classes.

If you could untrain them, then you would get a single level 64 character and then retrain yourself to experience every build in the game. You could go from a champion (warfare / defense) to an elementalist (storm / earth) to a summoner (nature / earth), etc...

It would severly cut back on replay ability. I suppose they could let you unlearn all but one point though, although you could still bounce between 3 classes. IE: A paladin vs a stormbringer vs a defender. Missing 1 point wont kill you.

(Edit for clarity: It is a good thing you can't untrain mastery skills, it would be bad if you could.)

[Jab2565]

Once again I tried fighting typhon, and only got yellow and white items from him. I did go to the mystic and put points into the armor absorb skill and the stun protect, which helped abit. Still completely stuck though thanks to horrible loot drops.

[Ben Sones]

It would severly cut back on replay ability. I suppose they could let you unlearn all but one point though, although you could still bounce between 3 classes. IE: A paladin vs a stormbringer vs a defender. Missing 1 point wont kill you.

This makes no sense at all. If you feel that such an exploit would hurt replayability, then why would you do it? And if you don't care, then why would you complain?

[DeepT]

Best guess is it's 3-5 minutes, might be longer. It's far and away the longest time of any defender/warfare skill and I think it's at least twice as long as Ancestral Horn, which is pretty long as it is. You can reduce it maybe 10-20% with a good item. To get more than that and you'll have to do some serious item farming. I've only seen one or two items with reduced recharge times (although I've done little or no farming).

There are people who are running Guardians (Defense/Nature) and use Colossus in combination with Refresh (instant renewal of all skills) and basically get infinite Colossus -- although I hear it chews through energy pretty quick.

I'm always relectant to pump too much into a skill that's only useful against bosses.

Holy crap on a stick batman! 3 to 5 minutes? Thats nuts! I am not sure you could keep it up full time with nature unless the nature refresh has a fast cooldown. Colossus only last 30 seconds. The cost is 10 energy a second, that alone is bad enough, the cooldown is absolutely unwarranted. Then again, maybe they dont want melee to be able to tank in the end game. If it was a toggle as it is, you would replace health potion chugging with energy potion chugging until you got enough +energy regen to balance out the cost.

The more I read the more I want to put my pally down and go back to a caster. To think I was going to make a Juggernaut too. Oh well. Maybe a pet class instead of a nuker might be more intresting.

[DeepT]

This makes no sense at all. If you feel that such an exploit would hurt replayability, then why would you do it? And if you don't care, then why would you complain?


Huh? I think you misunderstood the tone of my post. I think its a BAD idea and its GOOD that it is not in the game. Ill go edit it.

[Chris Woods]

Yes but your save games will already be corrupted.

Not to mention that using relics on Blue/Purples in multiplayer games is technically cheating, even if it is ethically different.

Chris Woods

[ydejin]

Holy crap on a stick batman! 3 to 5 minutes? Thats nuts! I am not sure you could keep it up full time with nature unless the nature refresh has a fast cooldown. Colossus only last 30 seconds.

Well honestly, I pulled that number out of my a**, so I went ahead and timed it:

Ancestral Horn timer is 5 minutes
Colossus timer is 6 minutes

So much for my theory that Colossus recharge was twice as long as Ancestral Horn ... Anyway Colossus is on a very, very long timer.

[JM]

DeepT is western version of Kitsune, it seems. Holy overanalysis, batman!

[Enidigm]

Funnily enough my feeling is that the game just seems too easy. Aside from straight melee classes, it's actually hard for me to lose a battle as a caster. And straight casters seem to dish out some pretty wicked damage with
staves even before they switch to a magical attack.

I've almost never been in a battle that i thought i was going to lose. TQ just seems many times less demanding then Diablo 2.

[DeepT]

DeepT is western version of Kitsune, it seems. Holy overanalysis, batman!

Don't insult Kitsune like that :P Did you read my Cuotl By the numbers thread?

Currently I am torn on the issue of weather or not to continue my paladin and verify the suckage (and try and come up with some build that actually works) and starting a new character.

The problem with the latter is that I have two builds 'reserved' for playing with friends. One is the the summoner build (earth / nature) and the other is the ranger (hunting / nature). I have heard the ranger template doesn't work out either in the end game since nature pets do not hold aggro.

Other then that, I can't think of anything that seems cool since all melee templates will end up with you sucking down potions to survive in the end game, which is exactly why I do not want to play my pally.

Other caster templates do not seem to synergies very well. Take storms / earth. If I have fire damage, why do I need lighting damage? Sure, there will be a few mobs resistant to X or Y, but that is pretty feeble reason when most mobs are hurt just as bad by lighting as they are by fire. What I am getting at, is this build isn't interesting.

Spirit and Storms have very few non-caster buffs, in fact storms only has the wisp buff and energy shield. Spirit has only have the anti-undead buff, which is of extremely limited use. There is such a very limited synergy between those trees and anything pet or caster centric.

When you compare the combo of earth and nature, those trees work together extremely well and makes you wonder why you would bother with a different 'pet' combo. If you want to play a pet class, this is it. Nothing can beat it (as far as pet classes go). Its not just a little better, it massively better.

So, aside from my pally which is out because of defense (and therefor all / defense builds), I am left with a pet class, and maybe some kind of archer class. What other builds are there to try in QT that are not completely overshadowed by another one?

[JM]

Funnily enough my feeling is that the game just seems too easy. Aside from straight melee classes, it's actually hard for me to lose a battle as a caster. And straight casters seem to dish out some pretty wicked damage with
staves even before they switch to a magical attack.

I've almost never been in a battle that i thought i was going to lose. TQ just seems many times less demanding then Diablo 2.

How far have you managed to get in the game?

[Enidigm]

I've read that "Ternion Attack" in Spirit is the uber-skill, and that enhanced with the weapon enchant from Storm does some crazy damage. But this is all from what i've read and not experienced.

With all this talk about melee sucking i'm going to have to try and make one myself. IMO, they key attributes is to have some kind of heal. No matter what template i'm making, i've making a bee-line to the healing skills. After that, i'll start piling up the damage skills as soon as my healing rate is satisfactory.

So, for ex., in Defence, my first skills will be Rally and Adrenaline, before anything else.

[Enidigm]

How far have you managed to get in the game?

Oh, only in Act 2 right now.

But i've read of people in the forums blowing through the whole game already with little effort. Some comments indicate they thought it was harder on normal than on epic.

[DeepT]

Casters are very powerful. I made the switch to melee in act 3 on normal. Up until that point, I had 2 deaths. By the time I finsihed normal, I was up to 28 deaths.

That is the difference between melee and casters. It wasn't gear either, I had been collecting a set of the best armor for a long time because I knew I was going to make the switch. I even went into a trading game and by the time I went melee I had all blue or green gear. Mostly blue. My 'caster' had no blue gear and only 2 green peices.

Yea, I think there is a huge balance problem. Or maye act 3 is like 10x as hard as act 1 and 2 and my caster would have been pwnd just as bad. Somehow, I do not think so.

[Enidigm]

Staffs just do too much free damage. Staves are in general better than bows. As a "caster" i do most of my damage - in fact all of my damage - with either enchnated staves or a (lol) melee weapon. Casters have little need early on to pile points into direct damage spells because the staves and energy reserve skills are so powerful and efficient.

[Charlatan]

Well, if you're talking easy I would say this is the ranking:

ternion attack > pet classes > caster classes > hybrid casters > melee > paladin

Did I mention I'm playing a paladin now? :)

But it definitely gets more difficult as you go on, and China ramps up the difficulty (and the Obsidian caverns ramps it up again). Legendary is pretty challenging for my Summoner - not hard as in "I'm dying every 5 minutes" but he definitely can't just stand toe to toe and whack away at the mobs (and heck, I've finally run into a boss who can one or two shot me while I'm stunned, and it sucks).

[ydejin]

Yea, I think there is a huge balance problem. Or maye act 3 is like 10x as hard as act 1 and 2 and my caster would have been pwnd just as bad. Somehow, I do not think so.

I think Act 3 is considerably harder than Acts 1 & 2 -- not 8 to 9 times harder mind you, but definitely much harder. The tiger guys move faster than anything except for maybe the dune raiders. They take more out of you than the dune raiders, and them seem to have quite a number of vicious heroes and champions. Those giant gorilla things (they guys with spears, not the yeti) hit very, very hard and can bring you down very quickly, even in Normal. The Neanderthal seem pretty innocuous until you have a pack of them with archer support, and then you're dead. And the Dragon Lancers are deadly, deadly, deadly unless you can isolate them.

[mouselock]

Anybody played around much with hybrids? I'm tossing around the idea of a nature/warrior hybrid with mainly pets + health boosts from nature and all the defensive skills from warfare. The idea is to equip big heavy armor, throw up battle standards and maybe the briar patch/grove talents, and sit there attacking modestly, letting my pets do the killing, and trying to soak up damage. (I'd have all the dodge/pierce resistance talents, plus the health regen boosts, counterattack, etc..)

It seems like an interesting build, but it also seems like one that could be doomed to failure if the damage ramping is as bad as it's being made out to be here.

[DeepT]

I would not single out the paladin as being gimped. It is all melee. The only possible problem with the paladin (the non-defense issues), is that most of his power comes from chance on hit powers. It is very chatotic, sometimes storm surge will proc twice and everything will die instantly. Other times nothing procs for an entire fight and you can feel it. It really sucks.

I would guess the paladin would be the best melee class to handle swaths of bad guys. He will not kill any one faster then other melee's, but will definitly kill the entire encounter faster. The worst mob for a paladin to fight is a slow, heavy hitting mob.

To bad there are no 'luck charms' that increase the chance that 'chance on' powers have to activate. I think a +10% on all chances would make the paladin a solid DPS machine and not make combat so streaky between nothing happening and everything happening.

[Charlatan]

Yeah, I'm just ragging on the Paladin because I have a lowbie one. At level 12, he doesn't have much in the way of reactive powers, and so I'm having to use some of the low Defense powers (Battle Awareness?) a lot. He should be better when he gets a bit older.

And you're right - his big issues are when I run across a hero (orange name guy) in a pack. If I focus on the pack, the hero often whacks me. If I focus on the hero, the pack whacks me. I've died a few times, but nothing severe (just passed the Parnassus Caves, so I guess the Gorgons are on the horizon - we shall see how he fares there). Plus I'm not at all convinced I am making a good Paladin. Been focusing on gear that has resists, and got a weapon that slows attack speed. It's fun, but I'd rate it less fun than my magic users (and way more potion intensive).

[DeepT]

Anybody played around much with hybrids? I'm tossing around the idea of a nature/warrior hybrid with mainly pets + health boosts from nature and all the defensive skills from warfare....

It seems like an interesting build, but it also seems like one that could be doomed to failure if the damage ramping is as bad as it's being made out to be here.

If your idea is to not be hit, then armor is kind of pointless. Nature pets will not hold aggro, so if you want to attack, you are going to have to deal with taking aggro. The aggro system is wonky and frequently mobs cease attacking your pets and go after you. AFAIK, only the core dweller has a taunt power.

At this point you can write off melee defense (from any source). Take the offense powers or something else.

As an alternate, you can try war / earth. The core dweller will taunt and you should be able to attack in melee as long as he doesn't die.

[ydejin]

Well, if you're talking easy I would say this is the ranking:

ternion attack > pet classes > caster classes > hybrid casters > melee > paladin

Did I mention I'm playing a paladin now? :)

What makes a paladin harder than other melee classes? I'd think the ability to do magical ranged attack, even if you're primarily focusing on melee, would

Legendary is pretty challenging for my Summoner - but he definitely can't just stand toe to toe and whack away at the mobs (and heck, I've finally run into a boss who can one or two shot me while I'm stunned, and it sucks).

What is your health at? Mine's just over 3500 and there are quite a number of bosses who can one shot me whether or not I'm stunned. Most recently, the undead dragon's poison attack took me from full to zero in well under a second; the terra cotta soldier sorceror guy has some kind of attack that one shots me; Talos last time I tried him could one-shot me; and when I went back to Epic mode and try to take on the Manticore, he one shoted me -- that was about 2-3 level increases ago, so I might be able to take him now, but I haven't even tried the Legendary version of the Manticore.

I have discovered, however, that I can stand up to a group of 4-5 Tiger melee guys and go toe-to-toe no problem. Sometimes I don't even have to pop a health pot afterwards. Their archers still take a lot out of me though, and I can get in big trouble with their Heroes and some Champions if I'm not careful.

[Charlatan]

If your idea is to not be hit, then armor is kind of pointless. Nature pets will not hold aggro, so if you want to attack, you are going to have to deal with taking aggro. The aggro system is wonky and frequently mobs cease attacking your pets and go after you. AFAIK, only the core dweller has a taunt power.

At this point you can write off melee defense (from any source). Take the offense powers or something else.

As an alternate, you can try war / earth. The core dweller will taunt and you should be able to attack in melee as long as he doesn't die.


The wolves DO have a nice +DMG buff they cast in most battles (unfortunately, some of the time they cast it at the END of the battle, reminding me of the Elementalist NPC in Guild Wars who seemed to love casting some AOE fire spell as the last mob died).

[DeepT]

It think you should do what I did for my pally. Play a lot of levels as a caster, get decent caster damage, then start pumping defense stuff. Collect warrior gear, and at some point respec out of the caster stuff and switch into melee mode.

[Charlatan]

What is your health at? Mine's just over 3500 and there are quite a number of bosses who can one shot me whether or not I'm stunned.

Specifically I'm talking about the boss Neanderthal for the Mystery in the Mountains quest. I have 5200 HP with Heart of Oak up, but no stun resist, so he stuns me, does some sort of AOE attack on my pets and kills them fairly fast, and while I'm still stunned, runs up to me an whacks me a couple times - boom, I'm dead. I swear one time he stunned me, ignored the pets and ran right up and bap-bap, and I'm being reborn. :)

What's so shocking is that this is the first boss where I really feel like I don't have much of a chance. Go Summoners!

The Legendary Manticore performed a nice overkill on me once - I got a bit too close, and he got me with that lightning AOE attack or something - first time I've ever seen MYSELF go flying up into the sky. Got him the 2nd time though, it was just a matter of getting too close.

The Automatoi boss (both Epic and Legendary) is hard as heck to beat, mostly because I do so little damage to him, but I was able to beat him down. Just took a number of strategic retreats. And the Hydra in the swamp - that took maybe 10 to 15 minutes to kill - he locked onto my Core Dweller and wouldn't stop. But the thing was, he wasn't damaging the CD at all - maybe it was some weird positioning, maybe it was resists, I dunno. I just stood behind them, made Eruptions, cast Orbs and shot with my staff until he died. He's got to have insane resists to fire. But none of the pets even suffered damage from him. It was definitely weird.

[ydejin]

The Legendary Manticore performed a nice overkill on me once - I got a bit too close, and he got me with that lightning AOE attack or something - first time I've ever seen MYSELF go flying up into the sky. Got him the 2nd time though, it was just a matter of getting too close.

That sound familiar :-) I just had a Tiger Champion kill me and blow me off a bridge in China. I ended up slumped over in the water below. I guess they turn off the rag doll physics on player characters unless your health goes to zero, in which case they treat you same as they treat the monsters.

[JM]

Ternion is in line for a nerf, I believe.

[Destarius]

Recently finished the game on Normal, pretty easy with my Storm/Warfare (largely Storm, warfare for resists). There is an AI bug with Typhon, basically I can just shoot him from the steps leading to him, and he can't pursue me. I don't even need to take out the statues.

If anyone is interested, the best farming spot I find is in Chang An. It's two Majestic Chests per farming run, which I normally complete in about 5 minutes. I just round up all the toy soldiers, and let them hit to proc Storm Surge and they all die. Fun.

[Noise]

As it stands the game is far more interesting as a melee character. On Normal difficulty everything seemed reasonable up until the final boss where getting stunned, and various boss attacks, meant inevitable death.

Epic is a bit different. You need to find equipment to balance out the resistance penalty and covering all those resistances is not easy. Pierce resistance and stun resistance are absolutely required but tend to be difficult to find. Bad news if you don't like farming for better equipment.

[DeepT]

What do the statues do? I only killed one afterr I killed him when I noticed they were attackable. I assume, now that you mention it, that they remove certain attacks of his. Only his fire breath bothers me (and I have 66% fire resist too). The statues take almost as long as he does to kill.

[ydejin]

What do the statues do? I only killed one afterr I killed him when I noticed they were attackable. I assume, now that you mention it, that they remove certain attacks of his. Only his fire breath bothers me (and I have 66% fire resist too). The statues take almost as long as he does to kill.

They control which attacks he can do. Generally the most important one to take out is the Hades one. He can do some kind of blood leech attack which will basically refill his health back up to 100%.

[Ben Sones]

Huh? I think you misunderstood the tone of my post. I think its a BAD idea and its GOOD that it is not in the game. Ill go edit it.

No need--that's what I thought you meant. It still makes no sense. If the game let you revise your masteries, and you felt that revising an already levelled-up character would be less fun than playing that character up from level 1, then why wouldn't you just play the character up from level 1? How would the mere existence of an option to revise your masteries be a "BAD" thing? It's not like the game would force you to use it.

[Jancelot]

I've found that his attacks will damage the statues as well. So I generally place the statue between the two us. The best one is when he drops those meteors on you. You can see the shadows and move out of the way before they hit and they'll wind up doing some nice damage to the statue.

[mouselock]

If your idea is to not be hit, then armor is kind of pointless. Nature pets will not hold aggro, so if you want to attack, you are going to have to deal with taking aggro. The aggro system is wonky and frequently mobs cease attacking your pets and go after you. AFAIK, only the core dweller has a taunt power.


My idea isn't to not be hit. My idea is to have my pets in a pack around me, make myself as hardy as possible, use the +health/health regen/local group heal talent, and basically tank while doing minimal direct damage and letting the pets do the real damage. Thus good armor, good resist, good dodge.. minimize the damage to myself as much as possible given that I plan to be the focus of a lot of things.

[Jab2565]

I've heard rumors that they're planning on making a closed server system similar to D2, supposely coming either next patch or after. I'm wondering how that will affect the game.

My last character I'm going to try is a hunter/ storm since until they do something about the loot and melee, my other guys can't really go anywhere.

[Phred]

This makes no sense at all. If you feel that such an exploit would hurt replayability, then why would you do it? And if you don't care, then why would you complain?

Exactly. What kills replayability for me is the unchanging level design, not the ability to completely respec my character. I've played the 1-10 game so much playing with characters I already know where every mob spawns and every chest and what type it is in greece. Not being able to respec trees forces replayability more than encourages it. (actually the chest spawns seem to vary a slight bit but there's always a good chest in the same locations I find, like two tucked away in the cave by the spring in the 3rd village.

I've already been tempted to grab one of the cheat programs that gives you a ton of skill and attribute points to play with but so far I've resisted.

I just hope someone comes up with a hack that forces rare drops off boss mobs and that it's not completely over the top like the rares everywhere hack for Dungeon Seige 2 (yes I bought and played that turkey all the way to the end.)

[Enidigm]

Funny thing though for me is that i think there is too much loot, not too little. By level 10 if not before i'm fully decked in yellow+ gear. By contrast, i'd be using even white gear in Diablo 2 all the way to hell as even magical gear would become very quickly obsolete when facing upgraded equipment from the next tier.

What you guys dislike is a source of reliable loot for grinding.

[Phred]

When you compare the combo of earth and nature, those trees work together extremely well and makes you wonder why you would bother with a different 'pet' combo. If you want to play a pet class, this is it. Nothing can beat it (as far as pet classes go). Its not just a little better, it massively better.


I don't know about that. I'm kind of partial to earth and spirit myself. I think it has good synergy with the lich pet and the elemental pet. Sure you don't get the hp buff and heal but you get tyrion attack, the most overpowered dmg spell in the game.

[Phred]

My idea isn't to not be hit. My idea is to have my pets in a pack around me, make myself as hardy as possible, use the +health/health regen/local group heal talent, and basically tank while doing minimal direct damage and letting the pets do the real damage. Thus good armor, good resist, good dodge.. minimize the damage to myself as much as possible given that I plan to be the focus of a lot of things.

You might have more luck with this if you put points into the thorn patch that keeps mobs away from you. Especially with the currently bugged mob ai that seems to shut off if the mob gets stuck inside the thorns with you.

[ydejin]

Ternion is in line for a nerf, I believe.

Going to be a while:


There will be a bug-fixing patch out in the next couple weeks but a balancing patch won't come out for at least a month, possibly 2 months. We won't be able to give a more solid date until we're further along in the balancing work.

Probably for the best. Given they couldn't balance it properly before release, I can't imagine making a few quick decisions and changes in just a week or two is going to lead to a balanced game. I wonder if they'll release a beta version for us to check out.

[Phred]

Funny thing though for me is that i think there is too much loot, not too little. By level 10 if not before i'm fully decked in yellow+ gear. By contrast, i'd be using even white gear in Diablo 2 all the way to hell as even magical gear would become very quickly obsolete when facing upgraded equipment from the next tier.

What you guys dislike is a source of reliable loot for grinding.

Um no. What I dislike is the complete letdown of killing a boss and getting nothing but crap. Talk about anti-climactic. My Thane killed the titan for the first time last night and didn't get a single green, much less a blue. Half his gear is vendor greens, the other a mish-mash of blues from Greece and Egypt.
I think I saw one blue drop in the whole way through China and I hit every spot on the map.

And I have to call shenanigans on anyone claiming to still be wearing non-magic gear in D2 hell. You could outfit yourself from the vendor in better than that.

[DeepT]

No need--that's what I thought you meant. It still makes no sense. If the game let you revise your masteries, and you felt that revising an already levelled-up character would be less fun than playing that character up from level 1, then why wouldn't you just play the character up from level 1? How would the mere existence of an option to revise your masteries be a "BAD" thing? It's not like the game would force you to use it.

Oh ok, I understand your confusion now.

I switched hats in the middle there. I went from game player to game maker.

As a game player: Sure I would like to be able to change all my stats / abilities and go from a earth / nature class to a warfare / defense calss. Why bother going through everything all over again?


As a game maker: If I let players do that, then a lot of them would. That means they would not re-use the existing content and would not experience all 3 difficulty levels as a champion as well as a summoner. I want players to get more milage out of my game and play it longer. For that reason, it is good that they can't completly repec all thier points. I want players to experience the journey to level 64 as a paladin, as a summoner and as a nuker. That is much less likely to happen if characters were ultra-generic and could become anything by simply going to a oracle NPC.

[mouselock]

You might have more luck with this if you put points into the thorn patch that keeps mobs away from you. Especially with the currently bugged mob ai that seems to shut off if the mob gets stuck inside the thorns with you.

Yeah, I'm just afraid that the thorns will suck all my energy out (plus I'd have to give up the pet buff talents somewhere to get the points), since they only have 400 health.

I guess it'll just come down to giving it a try and hoping it works. The thing that's annoying is that if it doesn't, the combination is going to be pretty crappy. Ah well..