If you say, wanted to kill bates, and not get the attention of the guards, how would you do it? Also, I found this new item called diseased chain mail. It looks pretty >
You may have answered your own question. One trick to killing someone without bringing the guards down on you is to drop some kind of armor/clothing beside them that does damage to the wearer. Most NPCs walk over and pick up just about anything they see on the ground, so by dropping the diseased chain mail beside Bates, he might pick it up and put it on, and eventually die from its negative effects. I'm just guessing though. I don't know if this trick applies to such a plot-specific NPC like Bates, but it usually works for common NPCs you see on the streets as well as shopkeepers. Give it a try.
Or you can grab a scroll of Teleportation, kill Bates, teleport yourself somewhere else, and a couple of days later, the house will be empty and on sale with the diary in it's proper place.
Good idea. I'm heavily biased towards Technology in this game so I rarely consider any Magickal benefits.
Disintegrate is incredibly useful if there are golems, seething masses, fire elementals, annoying doors and other obstacles in your way you need to kill quick and clean, but for other uses it's so powerful it almost isn't fun anymore.
Yes I've heard of Disintegrate, and Harm, and Teleport, etc... I'm just more partial to the Tech side of Arcanum because I think it's more genuine to the Steampunk setting. But Magick has its place as well. Without it there wouldn't be the Tech/Magick dichotomy that makes the game as unique as it is. I'll just leave that side to NPC mages who would rather waste time buffing each other while I'm putting bullets between their eyes.
You should try out a mage at least once though, it opens up a whole new game for ya, even if most of it includes shameless spamming of the harm spell.
The biggest difference is in how you kill your enemies, regrettably. The main plot doesn't really give a damn about your magick/tech orientation. Well, if you're going black necromancer with a murderous bent, then magick holds a few of possibilities tech doesn't. And there will be a few sidequests you'll probably want to do differently (can't imagine a hardcore technologists wanting to blow up Hervor's steam engine). Also, a mage can't get Jayna.
Well, they could "get her" in the sense that they could kill her and then reanimate her freshly created corpse. But that's not quite the same, though it does carry the advantage of not having to put up with any of her crap.
True, but seeing as she's as weak as a straw and as an undead can't use the only talent she's really good at which is healing those fatigue per second are better spent on ogres.
I suppose it's worth a shot then. Though I have to admit it will feel strange strutting around Tarant without a platoon of mechanized spiders following in toe.
I think Baneful Gauntlets is better, because some characters don't put on the diseased armor, but most seem to do so with gauntlets.
Everyone loves the gauntlets. The only problem characters are the dwarves...it takes forever to kill the dwarves with those gauntlets.
As I recall, Bates has a special character sprite and so won't put on any body armor. Though he may put on hand or foot armor. As for how to kill him, if you prowl and shoot him from the area around his desk you might be able to get away with it. I think I remember doing that before.