***SPOILER INSIDE*** Spirit Bar

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The manual considers this a spoiler if you haven't played through the start of the campaign so I thought I'd label it as such as well.

Basically I'm wondering if anyone has a decent system of actually using this. I can't seem to maintain my bar at any decent level for any decent amount of time and I've spent tons of time with my casters out of spells just so that I wouldn't have to rest... Kind've annoying that suppress only works once a day and stops me from devouring (all 10 uses) and doesn't recover all the lost spirit from resting...

Devouring twice in one day almost covers it but makes it so you have to devour 8 times the next day which makes it even worse. On top of that suppress increases your lawful by 2 points and good by 1 every use. Don't really understand why since it can easily be a chaotic evil option (I'm chaotic good), for someone that doesn't wish rely on anything or anyone (chaotic).

okay - end of rant. Just curious if anyone has a good system of dealing with this just yet. It seems like they added this incredibly annoying (even if rather interesting at first) to deny us the chance to rest/wait whenever we feel like it.

 

Using Suppress isn't that big a deal. Gaining a couple of Lawful or Good points every day doesn't really make a difference, since there are far more opportunities to gain chaotic or evil points via dialogue or actions. If you summon up a spirit or elemental before you suppress, you gain extra energy, and since you are good you should get the Eternal Rest skill eventually.

 

i have no problems maintaining my spirit meter

here's how you do it:

first of all, make sure your craving meter is at zero
typically, craving is reduced by using suppress a few time

how does suppress work? basically, the more spirits are around you, the more points you recover
also if you have loyal or higher status with okku, your suppress ability becomes improved

spirits are: telthor spirits, okku, summon monster IX, the spirit you can summon from a crystal you get in the barrow at the beginning of the game, etc

furthermore, there is a small trick with unlimited suppress which you can use as soon as you get the spirit eater ability: use the waypoint to the left of mulsantir gate, and fast travel to mulsantir
everytime you do that, your suppress button will be available again, without losing any spirit in the process
so you can repeat this until your craving is 0 for example, or in emergencies (gives tons of lawful and good points though!)

now obviously, if you don't want a bunch of lawful points, you'll have to look for other ways to recover spirit power

most notably skills are devour spirit/soul and eternal rest abilities

the first ones allow you to eat one soul or spirit once per day with no penalty to craving, as long as your spirit meter is <75; depending on the soul eaten, it will fill up your bar to 90+

eternal rest is another nice skill to use, because undead tend to give you a really big amount of spirit energy
one good place to use it in the dead god's vault, where you can rest and often, two death knights will attack you
kill one of them and disable the other with bigby's, then carefully eat his hit points until he is almost dead, then use eternal rest on it to recover spirit to max

evil method with high craving is probably workable too, but right now, it appears to be very bugged
i'll try it with the next char i make

 

Going evil certainly makes things interesting with that bar. During my first run through I had the craving meter maxed out for most of the game. Sleeping was difficult and even traveling was dangerous. However, filling it up again was a breeze(one skill is basically an AoE devour spirit) so taking out large groups was actually a bit easier. If i had known about how miserly id have to be with resting I would have rolled a melee char rather a pseudo-caster.

What would be really nice would be if they could allow you to consume spirit essence. Or even pause damage dealt by the meter when your in conversation. It got a little annoying seeing my char die and be resurrected dozens of times during long plot heavy conversations.

 

I managed to stay alive just barely during the forest portion of the game (had to use satiate once for 5.7k XP when my spirit fell to 2). Once I finished that portion of the game and I played it likea good character everything got suddenly easy. Set my craving to 0 automatically and my spirit bar went up from about 6 to full. The new skill I got there was good and when I went directly to the vault of myrkul I got another new ability to destroy undead that gives me tons of spirit power without increasing or decreasing my craving.

Thanks for that in-depth response Master-Leo. Seeing as I had no idea what I was doing with this spirit bar I got annoyed real fast when I was taking damage and my stats (as melee....) were dropping.

 

you mean damage because of spirit affliction, or loss of spirit energy?

because in my game, the spirit meter stops during conversations (it's greyed out)

 

Damage from the former. The bar itself pauses, but it will keep hurting you if you're too low. And, of course, pausing won't work since it pauses the conversation too. I ended up tapping the spacebar like a madman in order to stay alive.

 

I must say I'm shocked that people had so much trouble with the spirit meter, mine was a doddle. Even as a CG warlock (too much lawful would stop my progression) I found I could use supress enough to keep my craving down at zero. There's a doen points in dialogue where you can fill your spirit bar effortlessly and empty your craving too, like with the tree man and Myrkul's spirit. Plus there's the fact that using devour spirit ONLY ONCE PER DAY does not affect your craving, and if used as a killing blow, can restore LOADS of your spirit meter. Try a few things out, it's really easy.