So far, I suck at combat. But it’s not coming up that often. If I started over, I’d play Charming rather than Sneaky because there is no thieving, really. Sneaking is something you only do in combat.
I did take out Malaise through dialogue, but the drones in the Lazaret were pretty much all dead by the time I found the third computer. I was not able to deal amicably with the beasts in the Changing Gods chamber mirrors.
BTW, Anechoic Lazaret? Who comes up with these names? I’ve googled on the meaning and it supposedly means non-echoing field hospital for contagious diseases. Why would you need one?
Regarding the Anechoic Lazaret, one of the best ways to quickly get through it:
Rhin is really good at hiding. While the rest of your party distracts the drones, send her hidden to the terminals to override the bad AI and turn the drones to allies.
Well, actually I think that may fit…
Anechoic: meaning it can cancel or purge echoes. And since it’s a mental health facility for machine intelligences, the ability to cancel signals from them comes in pretty useful.
That does explain it a bit better. Never gathered it was a mental health facility though.
Adahn is basically the first name that pops up in TNO’s mind.
But in the multiverse, words have power, and belief too. Tell enough people you’re “Adahn”, and an entity named “Adahn” will spawn into being (in Sigil’s bar IIRC), thoroughly confused about who or what they are. Because enough people believe there *really *is a guy named Adahn out there :). Which, BTW, proves that a) TNO’s forgotten name isn’t really Adahn and b) there, in fact, wasn’t *anybody *named Adahn in the entire multiverse up to this point. But there has to be one since people believe there is, so, pop.
Combat, by most accounts sucks. Turn based makes it even worse.
I have generally been having trouble in combat, on those occasions where I’m forced into it. But I’ve been buying equipment and training people in relevant abilities when talking to people scores me XP. Of the several games that have been bringing back the turn-based overhead view style of gaming, I’d rate Divinity: Original Sin as the best. It’s detailed, but unlike Pillars of Eternity the details don’t become tedious. Wasteland 2 was also quite good, and I’m generally in favor of action points, though the Shadowrun games seemed to have much the same feel in a more streamlined way.
Again, though I haven’t spent much time in combat, this seems like Torment has the worst of the recent lot as far as implementation of this style of combat. Not tedious, but not intriguing. You can’t pre-position your party going into a battle. Most area-of-effect stuff seems to be in these one-time-use cyphers (though I think in the fullness of time I’ll appreciate the way the game demands that I rethink my pathological tendency to hoard in games).
Oh, great! Another time waster I’ll spend countless hours on (I’m not sure how you people spend only, say 35 hours on a game. Typically, I spend 100 hours and I’m still in the first third of the game), start several characters and eventually abandon because I’m fed with it even though I found the game great. And start again one or two years later, with the same result (I’m yet to finish any of the Elder Scrolls games, even though I played all of them. Several times.)
Having been a fan of Planescape Torment, I won’t resist the temptation 
I’m not sure what you mean here : that there’s no subtitles? Because, that’s going to be a massive problem for me since I have a very hard time understanding spoken English.
Turns out it’s not a problem for me at least because the vast majority of the words in the game are in text form.
Nanos get a spammable AE that costs 2 Int to use, but any nano should have 2+ Int Edge in any case. Add to that any of the bondable artifacts that give additional damage for the spells and nanos can do a lot of damage. Combat still sucks though. Thankfully you can mostly skip it by using persuasion or intimidation etc.
One nice trick I found was that if you wear the tentacle armor (sold by a vendor so not a big spoiler), the heal it gives is amplified by Healing skill. Last fight I was in the enemies were all beating me up, then when it came my turn the tentacle healed me for 16. Made it a lot less tedious.
Other than the combat though I’m enjoying this a lot more than I expected, especially since I didn’t much care for WL2. Dialogue and other text continues being interesting and a lot of the choices you get have a nice weight to them, matters of life and death and mind and all that. 18 hours in now, based on what I’ve heard that’s a bit past halfway through probably. Not going to be a GOTY for me or anything but should at least be 25 dollars well spent.
There’s at least one full character that appears in both games - emphasis on “character.”
I don’t care what the devs say: in my headcannon, there is absolutely a door somewhere that links Sigil and Numenera.