Jayna and the Pyro Axe: what the hell?

Is Jayna accident prone or something?

This has been bugging me for as long as I've been playing Arcanum: why can't Jayna Stiles handle the Pyro Axe?

My party walks into the Black Mountain mines and stumbles upon a vermin. Jayna rushes forward, raises her Pyro Axe... gets a critical miss and kills herself with a single blow.

You could say it happens. But the thing is, it happens to her all the time pretty much. It appears to me that she tends to miss with her hits more than any other follower, and also gets more of those nasty critical misses.

Ok, so she is a half-elf. She has 5% magickal aptitude- but it is well negated by her tech skills. I don't give her a shield, so it's not about lack of strength, either. She has a Dread Armor on- but it isn't supposed to give her any bad luck, is it?

Did anyone else notice Jayne being more clumsy with blades than the rest of the bunch?

 

Try her without the Dread Armour. I've had several problems with it on my tech characters.

 

I always make all my human/elven followers wear Dread Armor. Don't have to worry about it getting damaged, plus it has the best protection-to-weight ratio ever. If it means I have to take the Dread Armor off her, it won't be worth it.

 

It doesn't matter-- you have to choose to wear the dread armor or the axe. Having both will make things like that happen when you critically fail.

 

Does Jayna have any melee skill?

 

Just what I was going to ask, Blinky. Maybe she sucks because of her lack in meele. She's a healer, right? That means she shouldn't have too much in the fighting skills.

 

Three points atm. Magnus has the same three points and he is nowhere near as clumsy. Then again, in my other games she was cutting off her leg even while being an Expert with five points.

 

Then it must indeed be the magic-tech equipment. Let me inform you of something. If you put the Dread Armor in your inventory, you see it's stats, right?

There are stats not in parenthesis, everyone gets them. There are stats in parenthesis, those are magically attributed stats. Each item has a magical aptitude that is required to unlock 100% of it's attributed stats. Meaning that a low magic armor might give you full bonuses for having 30 MA, but Arcane Plate probably wouldn't. A techie gains none of those bonuses.

Alternatively a techie gains more bonuses for their tech items, meaning the pyro axe is VERY powerful in Jayna's hands, and the Dread Armor is weaker than it would be in, say, (insert mage here)'s.

Miss chance is calculated using skill and magic-tech aptitude. But it also factors in other equipped items. Wearing magic items increases the miss chance with tech items, and vice versa. Not only is your armor slot magic in general, armor being pretty much the biggest slot and hence the causing the greatest effect, that armor is VERY magical. Dread Armor isn't Charmed Leather. It's very potent magic, and has a very large effect.