Arcanum vs. The Clock

So I think I have arrived at the playing style that I like the most. I'm only playing on Hard, w/o reloads, trying to do it as fast as possible (ingame time, mind you). I'm trying different characters and comparing the time I need to complete the game with under these settings. I'm using vanilla Arcanum + latest official patch + HiRes patch.

Right now I'm running an Elf (Dark Elf Follower) who only develops Dodge, Melee, and the Schools of Mental Magick, White Necromancy, Temporal and maybe Conveyance. I thought about developing only Mental and Water, but that would have been too tricky even for my taste. Note that AFAIK I'm not abusing any bugs/glitches, aside from the obvious (like Stun being overpowered).

If anyone has done something similar, feel free to post your own favorite/ most effective characters, and the ingame time and settings you used

 

Never had such a playthrough, but I just wanted to point out that if the lowest in-game time is the goal, Conveyance should be a must, not a maybe. The lack of Teleport in a game turns in-game days into months and years, which means that learning it as soon as possible is a top priority in such a game.

 

that's why I'm comparing different characters. Techies are at an advantage in the middle of the game for being able to use trains, but Teleport can clearly offset that.

 

You can get some melee and teleport by level 15, using the Only Child background.

Or the better, get spells in following order:

- Harm
- Full Conveyance
- Full Force

And then you can add anything you want to the mix. Damn overpowered.

 

A speedrun, eh?

There's a huge exploit in the vanilla game that allows you to finish the game with skipping most of the quests. If you force Stringy Pete's location, he will be there, regardless of the plot status, so you can either do his quests or kill him (which is actually pretty easy with Stun + Backstab), and get the ship either way. Then you can go to Thanatos, kill Nasrudin and get straight to the Void.

The UAP fixes Stringy Pete's script, though, so he appears only when appropriate.

 

I am planning on doing a char like this, except instead of Force he'll max out Morph. Disintegrate is nice, but bugged/ glitched, and this char should be pretty much unstoppable even without it.

 

Technologists suffer though if you choose to have Dog with you as you can't use trains with pets.

 

What do you particularly have in mind? The saving throw?

 

yes

which isn't a reason to never use it of course, since there are enough other imbalances/ glitches in the game to make it legit enough again to compare a character with disintegrate to one without it