Conf on 20/7/2006 at 03:31
Hello, still busy on the same game.
I finally got around to making the trolls independant (I wanted to sell as many gems as possible first). So now they are waiting for me in ambush. (goblin king & co)
As I promised myself to use any spell except fireball, I decided to go with mass lightning projection for a change (I was able to pick the lock in felnor's room). I must say what a bugged spell.
As soon as mass lightning projection hits something everything slows to a crawl (like with the bloodsplatter in earlier patches). It uses a ton of mana. If you have the maximum amount of mana (all int), and still a fairly low casting skill (not even 70 yet), it uses up 1/2 of my mana. The beams miss alot. But even if you get one of them stuck in one of the beams, even then it's only good enough to kill a goblin.
Spending my remaining points on all casting and intelligence. I tried again, with about the same results. This resulted in me having 111 casting. Very disappointing results.
As was putting all points in ethereal link. I had a hard time even noticing the difference. The only way I could tell ethereal link was actually doing something was by casting a forcefield and waiting how long it took before the first line of mana went away. The difference is almost neglictable. Anyway most importantly upping ethereal link to above 100, made no spell self-sustaining that wasn't already self-sustaining.
I must say despite from my dislike for that spell, I'm having a blast trying to kill enemies only using the other spells. But fireball is hugely insanely out of balance with the rest of the spells. What were they thinking when they playtested this. Didn't they notice everyting dropped dead in 1 fireball? And you have mana for like 7 in a row? Poison projection, lightning projection would all still be worse if I could fire them as much as fireball.
i.e. Alternatively I could cast invis, walk to the king and his group of goblins, fire 1 fireball all dead.
Same with when I tried to kill Felnor for fun. At 55 castlevel 1 fireball and he's toast. 4 Lightning projections, 2 poison projectiles, 30 sec inside 2 harm spells. And he's still up and running.
Ironicly the lich in the temple was kinda easy, invis, mana drain, and well any spell that doesn't break mana drain is then ok.
This time the golem gave me ALOT more trouble, no fireball oh shit now what, even a golem drops to one single fireball at low casting.
Invis didn't seem to work. Eventually I slowed him and we took a tour through the temple while I was running 9 simultanious harms. Took a while but eventually he died.
If only there was a mini patch or even a hack that just bytehacked the damage values to more approriate levels. But without fireball it's almost balanced I guess.
But there's still Ysildes coming up :(. I wonder how I will kill those with no fireballs. One shouldn't be a problem, I could slow him, haste myself, levitate, whatever. two at once should proof very interesting :-p
Anyway anyone else think it's too bad the other spells didn't get more playtesting love? :)
