My Comeback Party; comments

Looking at this thread made me decide to get the game myself. I have Co8 with the new content installed. Just after starting.

Are the NPCs any way interesting? Do you ever need them to join for a quest? At the moment I've a 7 person crew with one slot left open just in case but I'm tempted to just start again with a full 8 person party. At the moment I'm going for:

Rogue/Fighter 2 - Human, party leader
Paladin/Fighter 4 - Dwarf, longsword and shield
Cleric - Dwarf, dwarf waraxe and shield
Barbarian / Fighter 2 - Half-orc, 2 handed weapon
Druid - Human, longspear
Rogue 1 / Wizard - Elf, longbow
Sorceror - halfling, sling

The Rogue/Fighter has good Dex, Int and Cha. The aim is to use weapon finesse to sneak attack and eventually to get Scather and dual wield. She seems a bit squishy though as as leader she'll spend a lot of time near the front. I'm also worried about her attacks until I get Scather. Any thoughts on her?

My only two archers are the wizard and sorceror. Will they be able to hit anything if I give them the spellcasting feats instead of archery? Not that I expect a whole lot but a -4 penalty to hit will really hurt.

What would be the best weapon type for weapon finesse that can also be an off hand weapon? What is the best two handed weapon? Are there any other weapon recommendations to bear in mind?

 

Most ToEE NPCs are not at all interesting, at least nothing like say BG NPCs. They do have nominal personalities. You may need space in your party to do some escort quests along the way.

You don't really need a designated barterer as ToEE automatically uses the party's highest appraise score in the bartering interface.

 

Thanks. Will 1 free slot be enough or might I need to escort a few people at once?

The rogue/fighter will be the talker and has loads of skill points as I've the wizard/rogue to take some of the thief skills. The paladin is a pure tank, defense first and then just slashing. He does have 15 Cha so with +1 at level 4 he'll be on his way to having +3 to saving throws. I'm not too interested in smite evil or lay on hands so I might just go back to fighter after about three paladin levels.

I was just browsing the srd for the game rules. Does TOEE include tripping with certain weapons? I might give the Barbarian a halberd or scythe if so.

The rapier is a special case in that it can be finessed but I don't think it counts as a light weapon for dual use. Do any of the other light weapons stand out or are they much of a muchness?

 

I think tripping counts as an unarmed attack. Looking at the D&D rules it seems some weapons let you do it armed though. I'm just wondering if this is included or if tripping is always unarmed. Oh well, only one way to find out .

(Well actually I'm just wandering the town talking to villagers for the moment but battle will come later.)

 

You would be generally safe with two open spots, but it's not like it will ruin anything if you don't. You never really have to escort anybody.

The most I can think of would be one unlikely scenario where you would need three open spots in order to get three related NPCs to join you (and not even all at the same time), but that's a rare development (and it's not an escort).

 

The early game NPCs are meh, except for maybe Elmo. The late game NPCs can be fun and change your party dynamic.

 

Thanks guys. I'll stick with 1 opening as I'm happy with the 7 I have. Hopefully in the worst case I just lose out on a minor quest or two.

 

Beat the game this past weekend with my "comeback party." It really was a lot of fun.

Things I've noticed:

• A dex-maxed, finessed Rogue wielding a spiked chain is a hell of a lot of fun to play. You have to coddle him a bit at first, but the reach helps keep him out of harm's way. By level 7 or 8 he does crazy damage. I took Hedrack down to "badly injured" in 2 hits. The animation is cool, too.
• I don't know if I'll bother mixing in Barbarian levels with my Fighters again. I never once used Rage, and I think the free feats could have been gained easily as bonus feats. The bonus HP is nice, but for only 3 levels worth...meh.
• Clerics and Druids do great in melee for most of the game, but ended up being my weakest attackers late game. Guess this shouldn't be a surprise. Oh well, magic time, anyway.
• I'm considering not using Scather in my next playthough. Once you get it the game becomes almost cheatingly easier, I think. It's nice to have someone guaranteed to hit every time, but my Pally with 26 Str and a +3 Holy Shock 2-handed sword was hitting almost every time, anyway.
• Not a single character had a blunt weapon the entire game. Weird. I didn't even use Lareth's club really, as I had better stuff for everyone.
• The combination of Web and Entangle in certain areas was a real game changer. Web plus Sleep especially in Lareth's battle. Picking big bads off before taking on a throng is almost a necessity.
• I kind of feel like item crafting takes all the fun out of finding loot. After a while I found that almost nothing I found in a chest or took off a baddy was nearly as good as the thing I just created from a Masterwork item purchased from Smyth.
  

I may do another run soon with an all new party, this time something themed, like an all-Dwarf party (ala the Hobbit) or an all Holy party (Paladin, Cleric, Cleric, Monk, Wizard, Sorc), etc. Or maybe I'll finally try out classes I usually avoid, like Bard, Ranger, Monk, Sorcerer, Barbarian.

I would like to give big kudos to the Circle of Eight for all the content additions, especially the voices, portraits, game tweaks, etc. The extra content missions felt a little flat story-wise, but I know how hard those can be to pull off, so I just enjoyed the combat and loot finding. They definitely helped as training early on, and if nothing else gave me a reason not to grind Deklo Grove for early experience.

For my next playthrough, I would KILL to not have to identify scrolls, potions and items. I didn't mind for a while but it became such a timewaster after a while. Does anyone know if there is an "Identify Everything" component to Co8 or a mod I can download that's compatible with it? Or would it work to just have a bard, enhance his lore or whatever and have him ID everything?

 

Thanks, DR. I agree about crafting btw ... seems like there are two types of people in this world: crafters and non-crafters. Not really much in between. The anti-crafters sometimes hate that the function is even there at all, while the crafting advocates oftentimes play the game primarily just to craft.

Did you get to all the Co8 expansion areas (Verbobonc, etc.)? I don't ask to debate you on any of that, just for feedback purposes. Honest and intelligent feedback is gold in the modding world.

Analyze Dweomer is a custom 6th level bard/wizard-sorcerer spell that will identify multiple items, though it is not infinite. There are no other ways to get around it.

A couple other tips, if you don't know:

1. You can use Read Magic to identify potions, which avoids the 100 gp fee.
2. Most any blue potion you find that stacks is going to be a healing potion - either minor, light, moderate, serious, or critical. There are a few blue potion poisons floating around but they don't stack. So if you want to avoid identifying healing potions (by far the most common in the game), you can get by just discarding those that don't stack and rolling the dice on how effective the others are going to be. You might regret that though if your life is on the line in a grave battle and you randomly knock back a potion of cure minor wounds for 1 hp before that bugbear carves you in half on his next turn.

 

Yeah, I knew about #1. In fact, it's the only level 0 spell of any use and all my spellcasters load up with it.

I don't want to roll the dice because unidentified heal potions don't stack, and inventory management always tends to be a pain.

As for the later areas of the Co8 Mod, sorry, I never got to them. After the first two, I started to feel like the game balance was breaking, as my characters were all level 8 by the time I started the temple, thanks to the extra experience. Usually I exhaust all extra content (Nulb, Emridy, etc.) by late level 5 or 6, which is when I head to the temple. So I didn't feel the need to do the others this time, I was ready to kick bugbear ass in the temple. I'll give it a shot next playthrough, though...

 

Yeah, that's a known issue. We're slowly migrating all Co8 (major expansion) content to 'part 2' of the game, which will occur after Zugg is dealt with and feature Verbobonc as the primary quest hub. It will generally cover levels 11 - 20, and doing so should restore vanilla ToEE to something much more like the original level 1 - 10 experience.

 

My favorite thing about taking a Barb mixin is 40' movement. I don't care about Rage though.

I agree about Scather. Scather + PowerAttack + Combat Expertise + Fighting Defensively feels like cheating, and makes every non-NC battle in the rest of the game a piece of cake, except for the few battles where you can't use it (Balor). I think I will avoid it too.

You can turn on the console and do "game.party[x].identify_all()" where x is 0 through 5 for party members 1 through 6.

-Max

 

It's been a long time since I've played ToEE. I had trouble playing it on my Windows Vista PC, so I only played it on my XP PC which is now toast. I think I'll try to see if I can get it working on my new Win 8 PC. I only had the original game without any mods.

My first time through the game, I played a non-crafter party. It consisted of a fighter, cleric, druid, wizard and sorcerer. A double fireball in any room usually kills 80% of what's in there. If not, flame strikes finish the jobs if there are still clumps of mobs. Otherwise, slice and dice.

I then got into crafting. My crafting party consisted of two fighters (one ranged and another reach weapon WWA/GC), cleric 7/pal 3, druid and sorcerer. I pretty much made every weapon a +3 holy axiomatic frost shock flaming. Practically everything was chaotic evil, so everything was taking 4d6+3 extra damage before it got to weapon damage and the other energy damage. I admit I use the overflow bug to get practically unlimited gold. This was the only way I could kill those really tough bosses who were magic resistant.