I picked up Titan Quest from Steam this week for $5. Any hints or tips? I just started and choose Nature as my mastery, but I’m thinking of switching to Storm.
They all work well ( a great strength of the game ), but some work in tandem better than others.
Very generally speaking hybrid classes ( combat/magic, like warfare/storm for example ) tend to require a heavy pre-existing investment in equipment and a fair bit of experience at higher difficulties. Assuming you have the expansion ( and I strongly recommend it ), the two most versatile masteries are probably Dream and Defense. Hunting is also very strong but takes a little longer to develop. But truly, they all work fairly well if used properly.
Nature is an excellent supporting class for a variety of builds. “Pet” builds tend to invest heavily in Nature - Wolves ( damage dealers, tanks and physical damage boosters ), Heart of Oak ( health + modest speed boost ) and Plague ( an excellent debuffer ) in particular are highly effective. Rangers ( Nature/Hunting ) are also probably the strongest, most survivable bow class. The Wood Nymph ( or whatever it’s called ) and the Briar skills are widely considered a waste of time, except for real specialty builds.
Storm is not a favorite of mine for hotkeying reasons, but many folks love it. Excellent anti-archery skill in particular and at higher difficulties very little hurts worse than a certain breed of archer.
I can answer more specific questions if you have them AND I remember the answers ;). Love the game, but it has been a little while since I played it.
Oh, yeah - I almost forgot. The company folded before the development team had 100% fixed release issues. You should look on the web for the latest iteration of the Unofficial Patch, which I’ve found pretty stable and which fixes a variety of bugs, including a couple of skills that are otherwise worthless ( you’ll invest points, but they’ll never do anything ). I believe it requires the Immortal Throne expansion as well, which is another reason to get it.
Also re: pets - If you like pet builds ( and I tend to ), one quirk is that due to scaling issues pets are quite effective in the first couple of acts of normal difficulty AND in higher difficulties ( where they get comfortable scaling boosts ), but have increasingly shitty survivability in acts 3-5 of normal. Some people re-spec to them after normal difficulty, some use them at the start of normal ( where a couple of wolves will slaughter most things in act 1, normal ), then re-spec out of them, then back into them again as above. A few hardy souls struggle through with them all the way, but I wouldn’t unless you have a very high threshold for frustration.
Here’s the place that I get most of my TQ informations. The community patch is also there, and I suggest picking it up.
Did you pick up Immortal Throne as well, or do you just have the base-game? It adds in some really good stuff. The Dream tree is my definite favorite. I never know what to mix with it, but it’s so strong solo that I don’t worry about it much.
Has anyone tried that Lillith patch/mod? I’ve been tempted, but I haven’t done it yet.
Yeah, it came with Immortal Throne, so it was a great deal.
First question: Is there a stash or chest or bank of some kind to hold stuff I want to save?
Yep, there’s a caravan guy who will store your things for you. This is only in Immortal Throne, though.
I don’t know if you know it or not, but if you get Immortal Throne then you shouldn’t even bother playing TQ. You can import any regular TQ characters that you’ve made into the IM game. There’s no reason to play regular TQ since IM is really TQ++.
There’s also a third party app that lets you store items and exchange them between characters outside of the game. Real useful to store the humongous stash of miscellaneous booster bits you’ll accumulate, and to keep valuable artifacts you find that won’t help your character but would be awesome for another and take too much space to keep for any length of time in the in-game vault. The more characters you play, the more invaluable this tool becomes.
Great game. Long as hell too.
Tech support question: How do you get the flippin’ game to run on Windows 7? I don’t have any XP machines left in my house.
My copy runs on 7 just fine, but I got it through Steam. What problems are you experiencing?
I install from original discs. When I try to run, I get “Fatal Error: Unable to initialize graphics engine.” Google indicates this is caused by an unsupported graphics card, but I was able to run the game just fine when this computer used Vista as an OS.
This thread prompted me to try again. I’ve completely uninstalled both TQ and TQIT, and have reinstalled TQ. Still got the same problem.
I’m in the process of downloading the 1.01 to 1.3r2 patch, before installing TQIT. Hopefully this will fix things, but I’m open to other suggestions. I’m not, however, in favor of spending $20 to download the bundle from Steam, though - I’ve already paid for this game!
ETA: Patch did not solve the issue.
Keen. Turns out the drivers Win7 was trying to download was over a year old. The new driver from the nVidia site did the trick.
Enjoy the game!
I’ve pretty much gotten over that. I think of it in terms of “will I get $X of value from not having to find discs and codes, and from having a version that I know will work on my current OS?” The same thinking leads me to buy games on GOG.com that I already own as well (Fallout and Fallout 2 updated to run in Vista/Win7? Yes, please!).
Then again, I’m fortunate enough to consider $20 a trivial expense, which is not the case for everyone.
Holy shit.
You just ruined my entertainment budget.
You’re welcome, I guess. 