Mask of the Betrayer - Your Favourite Features?

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Soo, the boys in Red are in? Fitting, fitting. It's interesting that the new release indicates that there are going to be 2 new core classes. That can get interesting.

 

I'm looking forward to epic levels after the enjoyable über-characters I built in NWN.

I make my human rogue fighter to become a weaponsmaster at lvl-7 (Staring level rogue - 4 fighter levels - 1 rogue level rogue-> there you are, with one excess feat even, which I invested on lvl-1 into 'able learner') -- there is plenty of room to the top, and for a second prestige class (like.... shadowdancer, assassin, divine champion, blackguard).

And Red Wizard of Thay sounds good, but the two new base classes sound even more interesting. To speculate what that might be:

• Duskblade (-) Too similar to eldrich knight in practical gameplay.
• Hexblade (-) After getting the Warlock....
• Knight, Marshall (-) Too much like Pally, Divine Champion, Fighter, Blackguard.
• Dragon Shaman (-) We already have the fragon disciple.
• Scout (?!) Fits right between monk and ranger and rogue....
• Warmage (?) I mean we got the Warpriest....
• Favored soul (?!) Would be the divine equivalent to a sorcerer....

My best guess it's one of the last: Scout, warmage or favored soul.

I'd like the Scout especially, I have always had little inclination to take advantage of the druidic abilities of a ranger, much less of animal companians and the like. Who needs those anyway? And then, I always found my rogues to be insufficiently warlike, so that I inevitably multiclass them.

 

NWN2 xpack @ gamespot:
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverwinternights2maskofthebetrayer/news.html?sid=6169920

i really hope this is some sort of a bad joke from obsidian

what good is a NPC if i can't even equip him anymore??? and i HATE AI in NWN2, it's HORRIBLE, and now they will even force you to use it, if your influcnce with a NPC is too low

bollocks

 

The dark craving after the shard from the chest is removed resembles the Slayer avatar thing from BG2. Generally, the beginning seems to be going to be some combination of the Irenicus dungeon and perhaps the after-shadows beginning of HotU.

I just hope the companions' fates are resolved and there's nothing like a new romance without explaining what happened to Elanee or Casavir.

The new base classes look interesting, even if I won't be taking them anyway. They add to the flavour of the campaign, making it a bit more specific than the general run-of-the-mill Forgotten Realms D&D. Also, 50 epic feats doesn't look bad. Can't have all, which is good. Hope for some worthy prestige classes. Wonder if you can still pick epic feats for Divine Champion like you did with CoT in NWN1.

 

If their AI is as in plain NWN2, good night. Long live xUI.

 

For core classes, I've also wondered... I hope it's not the CAdv ninjas - they might find an okay role mechanically, but, you know, ninjas in the Realms... I know it's close to the Shou expatriates, but it's still a bit weird. Spellthieves might be an interesting class to put in, imo.

 

I agree with Blackthorne, if implemented right, a system wher Npc's stop listening and following your orders if you threat them bad, sounds cool and with the added flavor that Npc's can actually die, this might add to realism.

i hope fewer npc's = more indept npc dialog and stories. and i hope we can finally multiclass npc's

basically I currently like everything i hear about this expansion.

 

When NPC dies, you just reload previous save...
Does that add realism??

 

they're doing it the wrong way, because the loss of AI control and inventory will be a huge annoyance, particularly on missions where you are forced to take a certain character with you (if they implement this thing into the xpac)

i think the game shouldn't punish the player if he has low influence with npc's, but instead they should reward the player who keeps very high influence with certain npc's - it'd add more replay value for sure

they just took the easier path, because it's always easier to punish the player, than it is to reward him...

it forces you to be more carefull i think...right now, you can just let the weaker character(s) die and they auto-resurrect at the end of battle which is pretty lame

 

by the way. Spirit shaman and Favoured soul has been confirmed as two of the new baseclasses. and elemental genesai/gensai/whatever has been confirmed as four new races (one for each of the classic elements)

 

Interesting - and fitting, although I'd expect to see the spirit folk and their like. Where did you see that? It doesn't seem to be in the third community broadcast. I've heard that Duskblades will be one of the two new base classes.

Edit: according to comments posted at NWVault, the Duskblade, SShaman and FSoul will all be added. Also, apart from genasi, we get half-drow as well. Which, imo, is a bit weird. AFAIK there is only one place with a notable half-drow population on Faerun, and that's Dambrath. It might be fun to have a game set in the south, now that I think of it. Oh well, variety is the spice of life, even "variety" limited to darkvision instead of LLV. Maybe it's something to do with the underground location, but humans tend to be in short supply there... I could understand half-drow half-minotaurs, though, but I doubt we'll see that.

Still, bear in mind I can not vouch for the validity of the comments. I haven't chatted at NWVault for a long time. The chatboards at the offical site, though, seem to confirm that.

 

basically from this QA with Josh sawyer (nwn2 lead designer) following a showing of parts of MOTB

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Articles.Detail&id=232


and from this thread on MOTB official forum, where Josh sawyer comments both on a false information he gave and also gives some aditional information (he accedently said red wizard PRC woud be open to all races, which is not true, it will be for pure humans as pr Canon D&D).

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=567433&forum=121&sp=0

 

Hmm, there seem to be more than a few rumors of a female Red Wizard as a joinable NPC, even some mentions of her as a romantic interest... That has potential. Edwina, anyone ?

 

well its confirmed that one of the very early npc's that join you is indeed a red wizard, the gender hasn't been mentioned...i actually think it is in one of the links from my previus post. another of the early npc's is a half fiend called "one of many" which is described as being Morte's darker brother in spirit

 

The only bug I've encountered with NWN2 thus far is that the toolset randomly crashes and wings don't work on PC models. Otherwise, I've found the whole thing to be reasonably bug free. I'm not running it on Vista though, so that might play a role.

I'd be happy with a better toolset. Although the one we have is far more powerful than the original game had, it's much less user friendly. Even that would be tolerable if it wasn't buggy.

Being able to script without needing to know C and a compiler that works independently of the toolset would both be nice, but these aren't really requirements.

I really hope they don't make the companions uncontrollable. The AI is good (once you modify the scripts), but uncontrollable party members seems too much like a fall-back to NWN. I also don't like when companions are forced on me.

 

I knew about the class that worked like a sorcerer, but used divine magic, but I was unaware that Genasi woud be implemented. This is great! I've always wanted to have Genasi characters in the game and in modules.... Air Genasi here I come

 

Ok, so we also have a half-celestial cleric. Sweet, but I get the feeling that she will be one of the romantic interests. Why do I get the feeling that clerics, and divine-casting classes in particular, have been rather overexposed in that regard? Someone in Black Isle/Bioware/obsidian must have a nun fetish or something

 

the romantic interest will be the female red wizard, who is the first npc you meet, for male players and an so far unamed male barbarian for female players.

a little update on the female romance http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=576734&forum=121&sp=0

wow im kinda sad to say that the female interest sounds more cool than the male one

 

Have they specified that there will be only 1 romantic interest per gender? A pity. It would be interesting, btw, if your character could bond to people outside of your merry party.