I got through that bit with the robes by bluffing, but the third check required a resolve of 16. Wherever you can, you want to use a doorway to bottleneck your enemies and leave them clustered for AoE. That’s what it took for me to slay Raedric and his cronies.
So far the combat has been very easy on normal difficulty with a few exceptions.
The only fight I’ve had so far that was quite hard was the Wailing Banshee quest Lilith. I don’t know if it’s because I was underleveled, but having no easy choke point with shades summoned right next to the back line was tough. Well that and when I foolishly decided to jump down into a pool of blood in the endless path straight to floor 5 and ran into the drake at level 3.
I have a general question about the plot –
I’m playing as a cipher, and so far the plot seems to be pretty tailored to ciphers, to the point where I’m trying to imagine playing as a, say, barbarian and imagining “barbarian” in the place of “cipher” in all the dialogue so far, and failing. The feel I’m getting from all the dialogue and the world-building is that ciphers and their abilities are super-important to the way this universe works.
So, those of you who are not playing ciphers, what’s your experience been regarding the role your class plays in the story?
I’m playing as a Chanter, and haven’t really gotten anything like that. Most of the dialogue revolves around either having a high resolve or lore, or else is pretty straight-forwardly about being a Watcher.
My fighter has as-yet-undefined “soulish” powers by being the “Watcher”, so at least that part isn’t exclusive to the main character being a Cipher.
Got my physical kickstarter box today. Big, impressive box, though a lot of it is air.
Cloth map is nice, though, makes me want to go closet-diving and find my old Ultima maps. Holy cow, a physical manual!
There are a couple of bugs right now that can make some of your characters incredibly powerful. I forget how they work, but it has to do with them wearing certain ability boosting items and saving/loading multiple times. Check your character sheets.
Hopefully it gets patched soon. I’m not going to stop playing, cause, let’s face it, I can’t 
Sooo good, but do want some of this stuff patched up nicely for my next playthrough (definitely will be cipher).
I’m playing Monk, and it’s been semi-disappointing. No special dialogue choices at all, and I don’t even get many Lore options despite keeping it high, and those that I do are largely unimportant.
Plus, the class itself is… meh. Statistically, it’s an alright class, but it has a pretty narrow range of utility. You have to take damage to get access to your best offensive abilities, but the class a whole is built around having fast action speed instead of tanklike resilience. I tend to either fail to build any points to use my two special attacks, or I am getting clobbered and can barely fight on. Having super-high health is very nice, as it lets me take a lot of punishment without needing to rest, but that doesn’t help much if you’re getting steamrolled when a fight starts and three dudes are pummeling you at once.
We’ll see if improves at higher levels. The special attacks so far work maybe a third of the time, and they’re not impressive. Then again, the fighter’s knockdown seems to work even less, so YMMV.
I also had to finally break down and turn on the meta-gamey-show-me-the-disposition-in-dialogue option. I simply couldn’t figure out what half the dialogue options were supposed to represent, not the least of which is because a number of them are fairly pointless and overlapping.
I find arbalests are better than blunderbusses, even for focus generation with that talent. They hit more consistently, do more damage (which does affect focus gain), and reload quicker.
I’ve seen one Monk dialogue option, but it was in a sidequest.
The Crucible Knight loyalty quest
To be fair, I haven’t seen that many Cipher dialogue options. The only exception is The Grieving Mother’s dialogue is littered with them. I think the most options I’ve seen have actually been for priests of a given god.
I’ve been playing a chanter, and have generally felt that this watcher business is kind of up my alley. I imagine I’d feel even more so if I were a cipher. But I built a bit against type and pumped up Int and Res instead of Int and Con. I don’t know which of those, if any, accounts for the fact that I seem to be able to get phrases off faster than the NPC chanter we picked up.
You do realize that the lower level phrases are shorter than the higher level ones, so if you are using a setup with a bunch of level 1 phrases and Kana uses level 2s then you will be faster? Not sure if armor and/or dexterity matter for them.
I have every character in plate mail. This doesn’t seem to hinder any of them, and with the Paladin’s +3DR aura, they can all take a lot of punishment. Is anyone else decking out their casters in full plate?
I have everyone in scale or brigandines. I find that the cooldown penalty is just not that significant.
I think it matters much more if you’re using lighter weapons, but I haven’t entirely figured it out. Additionally, it doesn’t seem to slow down gunners noticeably. I may try an experiment to verify anything, but it seems like the cooldown on reloading may overlap the action cooldown somehow.
Hahaha groups of Ogres and Ogre Druids can go die in several fires. I don’t think I’ve ever had an encounter where I had to use almost all of my party’s actives. Even when I was fighting a
Dragon
Actually, I find it matters more with two-handers (and spellslingers), since they already have long cooldowns. Especially if they have crap resolve and get interrupted by eeeeveryone to boot. I recently scrapped a run with a barbarian with maxed STR, CON and INT (dumping PER and RES and relying on armour and raaaage to tank hits) which was hellacious : not only did she take forever to swing that pollaxe but anytime a couple guys in the mook pack realized that “hey, why am I trying to hit that paladin with ungodly defenses when I could hit this gal in my sleep ?” she’d basically stop being able to attack at all.
Don’t dump your frontliners’ Resolve, people.
[QUOTE=Jragon]
I find arbalests are better than blunderbusses, even for focus generation with that talent. They hit more consistently, do more damage (which does affect focus gain), and reload quicker.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, the reload is a pain, but that’s why you play as an Anuauauuauauama (the big burly giants) of the subtype that gets an additional weapon sets. And thus, 3 loaded shotguns :D.
For some reason it never occurred to me that having multiple guns meant no reload when you switch. That’s awesome.
Appears to be a bug with the game where you cannot use the Left Alt key to accomplish this. Every other key works. Given my familiarity with Diablo and similar games, I prefer using Left Alt to highlight interactables. I just whipped up a AutoHotKey script to press Tab when I press Alt. Problem “solved”.
Note there’s a chant which steps up reloading, and a talent as well. Ka-bewm.
That’s probably because lalt is bound to sneak/active search. Unbind that first.