A guy walks up to you in a bar....

and decides to attack you. He's 30th level. Outcomes?


WHAMMO! You're a 6th level Gnome Mage with all stats at 8 except Willpower which is 14; you summon a 30th level Ogre, Stun the man, and watch as the Ogre rips him to shreds, spamming a few harm spells for good measure. Total combat lasts: 2 seconds.

BLAMMA! You're a 10th level tech Halfling Gunslinger with a Hand Cannon and Expert in Firearms with a Dex of 12, Perception of 14. You lure him outside (losing half your health to two hits with his sword as you lead him away) and then hit him with a stun grenade, four molotovs and then blast at him with your gun .... only to die a hideous death.... over and over and over again.

I'm starting to remember how hideously unbalanced Arcanum is in reality. I don't want to play a mage again, but damn a tech character gets frustrating if you are trying to play a true techno-lover gunslinger.

Sigh.

 

Personally, I think the game designers put a lot more thought into ways to make the game fun for technologists.

A mage with the right spells is unstoppable as long as he or she has fatigue potions. But playing as a mage can be really boring once combat gets easy and really frustrating in situations where you don't have enough fatigue left to keep spamming Harm.

Then all of a sudden, your awesome mage is reduced to making crappy attacks with a katana (or whatever your backup weapon is) and hoping you don't get killed by some loser you could normally take out with two or three spells.

Meanwhile, a technologist can take advantage of all sorts of dirty tricks that almost always kick serious butt.

Your best moves don't stop working just because you got tired, or because a bad guy hit you with a spell first.

So, yeah... It's frustrating at first because you have to devote a lot more energy to problem solving and figuring out ways to exploit game mechanics.

But once you start figuring out stuff that works for you, you'll have a great time.

Without getting too much into hints and tips... There are all sorts of ways to lay the smack down on that hypothetical mofo. Charged Swords, for example, get nice results with random electrical damage. It's always nice taking some jerk down with two good hits.

And the Charged Sword isn't even the best melee weapon you can learn how to make.

There are several guns you might like more than the Hand Cannon. You just need to stick with it for a while.

My biggest problem with technologists is that I've never messed around with Smithy so I've never gotten to use some of the good armor. So, my defense usually isn't as good as my offense. But even then... it's not a big deal if you kill the other guy first.

And technologists can do a lot more stuff that isn't directly related to the plot. So, that keeps things interesting. When I went back to playing mage characters, I missed things like being able to do more of the thief jobs or wasting time making stuff to see what it does.

 

Using both magic and technology is probably the best deal, though. There are quite a few powerful spells that remains useful in spite of your technological aura. Take haste, stasis, the entire meta block, disintegrate, stun, the summoning spells (and so on and so on).

The temporal collage is especially useful if you want that "fastest gun in the west" feeling

 

Oww thats gotta be one of the worst sports fails ive seen in a long time. I mean seriously how do you manage to chin whack yourself in hurddels.

 

It's easier than you'd think. If you don't successfully clear the previous hurdle (such as the tongue of your shoe getting caught on the hurdle), especially in the 100m, you can easily faceplant yourself into the next one.

 

actually tech users can be pretty lame if well played(even tho, even playing on hard mode, arcanum is still pretty easy)

combining tranquilizer gun + Mustard Gas grenades, pretty assures you the win. The target gets his fatigue cut down, and falls on the ground tired. At this point you can either switch gun and fire him, or throw some fire obstruction on him and see him burning, or let your comps stomp him. Or throw some acid if you are that mad.

Also, against well plated shitters, always throw some acid to destroy their armor(ofc be sure to have a good throwing skill, or u'll destroy your own gear)

This is what i usually play: chemistry/explosive/gunsmithy and maximize dex/throwing/firearms. Other comps are used to carry stuff for me, so i'm less encumbered. Pretty useless on the combat side, since i solo anyway.


Mage is boring; just get disintegrate and wtf annihilate the whole story, bah. Tech is way more fun, it got waaaay more gadgets and funny shit to use, it's just >>> magic.

 

I saw this thread and thought that it was a misplaced joke thread.

I began reading this thread and thought it was an obnoxiously misplaced role playing thread and was about to spam some harm of my own.

I read on and found that it was a clever critique of Arcanum's balance. Congratulations you fooled me twice!

I need to play the game as a magic user just so I can see how easy it is. I just finished the game for the first time a couple of months ago and I did so as a technologist. I am not a even a mechanics-exploiting meta-gamer and I must admit that I didn't find it that difficult. Granted, years ago I got stopped and gave up in the BMC caves, but this last playthrough provided no such speed bumps.

I'm a conservative player and tend to hoard resources, always saving gold, recovery items, and ammunition for that super boss battle that just might be around the next corner. Suffice it to say that I had I known how close I was to the end of the game, I would have simply walked through..

Spoiler

the Void

...electrocuting everything in my path.

Perhaps Arcanum isn't unbalanced in favor of magical characters as much as it is against particular builds. Without trying to make one's character useless, is there a reasonable magical build that might struggle in Arcanum as much as the gunslingers I've heard struggle so much?

In summation, I'm confident that my bookish half-elf electrical engineer can steamroll through Arcanum with his Shocking Staff once he loosens his purse strings and splurges on electrical charges, but have my doubts that my lovely and persuasive human debutante will be able to charm and summon her way through the dungeons of Arcanum. Still, I find the level of customization of Arcanum too tempting not to try a playthrough with this build that I suspect might be at a disadvantage.

Perhaps the designers underpowered gunslingers because guns versus swords sounds too overpowered in the first place.

 

The only builds I can think of for magic that will struggle are support type builds where you focus on healing and buffing your team members because you'll be gaining less experience since it's assumed they'll be killing everything. Though as long as you have the INT to sustain the spells, even a support character and their team can steamroll through the dungeons.

 

Arcanum would've been a very different game had it been more balanced. Magic seems more of an "Easy way out" then the lore implies. There should be more unpredictable spell failures, like maybe turning into a newt or accidently causing rifts in space-time.

There should be more items that would be dangerous to mages too. Using the idea that technology relies on consistently reliable laws and magic relies of throwing those laws out the window, something as simple as a door handle could explode in your hands, sending a spring into your palm as you open the door. the Locomotive should explode if you so much as step near it. Pretty much the whole of Tarant would be a walk in a minefield for a mage character.

One thing I cannot understand is this.. It makes sense taht technology would experience problems around a magical field but I can't understand how the presence of technology stuffs up magic!? How can you have a field of more physics then other places?

 

A newt?

 

Well I got better.

 

The way I see it, you've got a bit of magical background radiation. Around complicated technology this radiation thins out, around powerful mages this radiation thickens, which causes various problems. This is also why you don't immediately die if you happen to walk into a fireball.

 

But how does technology do that? that was my question.
It makes sense that technology is disrupted by magic but the other way around never seemed to make sense as technology doesn't have a "Field"
I can't quite grasp why!

 

The manual explains that technology reinforces the laws of nature, where magic bends them.

 

reinforces? that's the explaination? *sighs* I guess you can't deny established canon

 

How would you like it explained? Technology acts as conduits for the laws of nature to strengthen and repel magic which bends the laws thus weakening them. I suppose you could think of magic as a parasitic power, the mage requires there to be a flow of magic in the area in which they can harness and use. Some mages become powerful enough that they become beacons of magic themselves and create fields of magic which other mages can then use. However that explanation would mean technology doesn't really strengthen the laws of nature, it simply acts as a repellent to the fields of magic that are trying to get a foothold.

 

It's like nailing irons to a wall to fortify it. But not as tangible.

 

I see the magick/tech dichotomy like this: There are two schools of thought in Arcanum, two groups of opinions about what Reality will do next. For techs, it is Reliable Causality, and for mages it is Whatever I Wish For. This expectation upon reality has a field effect. Whether from people or their artifacts, the perception of reality reinforces the reality. The problem is of course, that you can't have reliable causality and still have whatever you wish for. So, after n thousand years of magickal philosophy radiating from the oh-so-smug elves, people started to think "reality should be reality, it should follow rules" and so it did.
From this point of view there is no difference between technology and magic, they are both altering physical reality somewhat mystically in a field effect around the observer. You could say tech is a kind of magic which unifies the physical laws of causality throughout Arcanum, or you could say that magick is a kind of technology which puts the laws of reality at the discretion of the individual.
If I were a muggle among wizards, I'd be wishing for a reliable and honest universe too. So the rise of technology seems like a kind of consensus magick from all the poor muggles put together.