Super Mega Meta Magic Abuse

Hilarious! Talk about looking possessed.

Just tested this with A:WIP. I couldn't cast Dwoemer Shield on a summoned animal (the way I used to make followers permanent back in vanilla) but Reflective Shield worked perfectly.

 

AWESOME. Permanent conjured spirits! That is great!! Dwoemer shield abuse, thanks Muro.

 

Not-so Permanent, actually. Leave the area and wait a few days (save first, of course). Both the spirit and the body has disappeared.

That being said, I re-tried settling the undead down and for some reason telling them to back off before canceling the spell worked this time.

I now have an undead Gilbert Bates sitting in my mansion alongside king praetor in dernholm as he refused to be dominated.

But now my game keeps crashing in combat as I've recruited all the guards in Dernholm for my own personal army

 

Here is the recipe for many layered spells with zero animations:

1) Using Super Mega Meta Abuse, stack six or seven Energy Shields onto your player character. However many it takes before no more animations appear.

2) Layer any other spells you wish to be permanent on your player character. I choose three of each level one elemental school plus three Hasten spells. This gives maximum physical attributes and speed one hundred for my human mage.

3) This is the tricky bit. DO NOT travel, DO NOT sleep too long. If you wait or change maps, the six Energy Shields morph into a god-awful plasma lamp that I call the Curse of the Golden Aura. For some reason this phenomenon is impossible to shift. BUT if you immediately move on to step four without resting too long, then...

4) a) Summon a beastie, b) cast Reflection Shield on beastie, c) cast Energy Shield at beastie (onto yourself) and, d) cancel Energy Shield spell.

5) Keep on repeating steps c) and d) above, casting a reflected Energy Shield onto yourself and cancelling it. Eventually (a dozen repetitions or so) you will be standing free and clear of any spell animations while simultaneously carrying all of the effects you wish.

Regarding Dwoemer Shield Abuse: This is amazing! Apart from summoned creatures and super-mega-meta-abuse, Dwoemer Shield is far superior to Reflection Shield for meta abuse. It works better and cheaper, and it works with zombies too! Thankyou again, Muro, for this!

 

Confirmed, UAP disallows mind controlled targets in SpellList.mes for Dweomer Shield and Reflection Shield.

 

It all depends how you look at it.
Game mechanics view - it's not permanent, since the body disappears and all.
Roleplaying view - it's permanent, and doing so is probably the most evil thing one can do. The body is only a medium used to summon a spirit. It decomposes, but since the spell is permanent, the soul is to be separated from the Gray Sea and trapped in Arcanum for all eternity, forever experiencing the pain and sharing the fate of Torian Kel's companions.

 

True enough, I guess. My main reason for wanting permenency was to keep that fetcher Gilbert Bates alive incase I had any questions whilst progressing through the story. Seems I've achieved that now anyway, though

 

So very very evil, hahaha. Even when the conjured spirit animation disappears, once it has been done to a follower, and they die, you can still talk to their corpse, including telling them to wait and rejoin.

Truly, if a necromancer does this to your soul you are fucked for eternity.

 

Hiya, I registered to ask this question.

Is it possible to utilize this trick at all with the UAP installed? If so, is there a way to do it without removing the patch, or not?

 

I believe the patch prevents you from casting reflection shield on summoned creatures, BUT maybe you can try using an automaton or mech-arachnid instead... Try it and see.

Set up the robot, summon reflection shield, bounce a spell off it, then shut down the robot.

If this doesn't work, if you can't cast reflection shield onto an automaton either, then no supermegameta abuse for you.

 

Hm, this character wouldn't use technological devices at all... Is there any way to edit the flags in the patch? (I assume there has to be, considering they fiddled with it in the first place. )

 

Drog rewrote the rules concerning Reflection Shield in SpellList.mes, he explicitly forbid it to work on mind controlled creatures.

You need to extract SpellList.mes from one of the dat files (I can't remember which) and somehow override it with a new version (I have all data files extracted for simplicity, that particular file is at data\rules\SpellList.mes)

 

Yeah! My baby lives! Never forget!

For years I spent most of my game time in Liam's Workshop with a collection of unwilling hexperimental subjects persuing countless dead-ends of 'what if..."

WHO'S MAD NOW?! HAHAHAHA!

 

Re:

This would be a good place to mention that in order to make the workaround Frigo's talking about as easily accessible as possible, I once submitted this.

 

I don't recall seeing it mentioned anywhere, but the Brain Builder can be used to exploit this glitch to utter fullness: it gives one permanent point to the four mental stats at the expense of taking a point away from each of the physical stats, BUT it doesn't actually lower your actual maximum limit, so after you've pounded down enough Brain Builders, you can just magic yourself back up until both sets of stats are at 20.

Have I mentioned I love this glitch? Thank you for discovering it!

 

You have to keep up with the times bro. Have a look in here.

 

Re:

So that's how Arbala cursed Farkus and Bregho. What do you know?

 

Hey,

I am looking to share something on top of the topic connected with abusing Meta and other Spell Colleges, seems this one is appropriate discussion.
I was playing Arcanum in the past quite a lot - something I love in this game is that each time I decide to go back and make a few games I end-up with quite new findings.

Sharing few here with anyone still enthusiastic in the game and lover of the Spell characters
(The below is tested with the core version of the game, so not sure how it will work with patches and updates)

Mental Abuse:
1) Cast Reflection Shield on a summon
2) Cast on top of him a Drain Will (that will reflect back to you)
3) Cancel the Reflect Shield
4) Cancel the Summon
5) The Drain Will will stay permanent on top of you lowering your Will Stat significantly, you will ask - "and what?" Well friends in this situation most of the magic are not working as you are loosing concentration. However there are few that still work like Disintegrate, Quench Life, Resurrect and two lower level like Stun and Plague of Insect. The trick is that these 5 spells don`t cost you any fatigue anymore - you could cast them all the time non-stop. Keep in mind that the disintegrate one don`t provide any experience.
6) A Hint - you don`t need to use Dran Will or Meta Abuse at all - in fact you could use two of the hexed items for simulating the same effect and even reverse your Will back to normal.
Just use Chill Shield or Boll of the Chill Reaper for dropping your Will. Once you don`t want to be a machine-gun of Quench Life and/or Resurrect just change the item again

Morph Abuse:
1) Cast Reflection Shield on a summon
2) Cast Flesh to Stone
3) Cancel Reflection Shield (fast)
4) Cancel Summon (fast)
5) You will be put in Stone, the benefits are you are immortal (except for disintegrate but with high stats that`s should`t be a problem). What else - you could move with Spatial Distortion, with Teleportation or even on the global map. You could also use spells like Fireflash or Squall of Ice (without taking any damage from them) and a list of several more. In order to stop this type of form you could just cast Disperse Magic or DwShield on top of you and you are back human.
Few additional effects - you can`t travel obviously by foot and respectively you can`t open chests, doers or travel via portals (still you could destroy the doors and turn-off back to flesh to use portals and open chests).
Finally when you are in this form you could put an item that provide you additional stats (or remove/drop - careful) then get it off and back on etc. and the result will permanently raise your stats (ST/DX/WP etc.). The effect of this one will stay after you get back to flesh too.


Stopping here - there are some others tricks here and there but the post become too long for a game almost 20 years old (even one of the best I ever played).
If there are still enthusiast from the game and some one ping me I will be happy to respond and continue sharing.

Regards

 

Hey Guys,

Saw I got 2 likes on the above and thought maybe the game is not so dead as I thought
Here few other tricks that one could think about as kind of a Spell Abuses:


Body of Air abuse:
It`s well know that once you transform a creature/NPC into Air Element you could Pick Pocket him.
Here some not very known tricks around this one:

1) You could make Kerghan into air element and steal his scrolls (skills) unfortunately not too much use of them - didn`t saw a way how one could use them for real.
Still, instead of taking the Vendigroth device you could just turn Kerghan into air element and finish him like a joke as he is not regenerating in Air Elemental form.
That gives options to close the game for an hour or two after starting - just go to Stringy Pete`s cove, kill him, go to Thanatos kill Nasrudin and you then kill Kerghan in the Void.
(Around killing Pete`s early the best low level character approach that I found is to use the Star of Soul Bonding from The Lair of Bellergorin
in turn-based mode with enough speed one could keep all the enemies in permanent stasis and slowly kill them)

2) With this trick (Body of Air) you could pick-pocket in fact creatures that usually don`t give such an option (these with tooth on the icon).
This is specifically interesting around the Wisps as you could exploit it this way:
- Mind Control them and use meta-abuse to make them permanent
- Make them Kind of Immortal (no cap on the resistances)
- Make them Air Element (temporary)
- Pick-Pocket them and plug-in Shaman`s Staff (for example)
- You have the perfect healer with you (or healers) as the NPCs could use the staffs without spending charges - basically you are almost kind of immortal with these.
(One could also plug-in other type of items in the Wisps that they could use like let`s say Arcane Armor, but not all items works for them)


Stun Abuse (or more like a trick):
You could stun your enemies (in turn-base mode) around and if all of the group that you are encountering are stunned you could leave the battler with the World Map or by teleporting.
Let`s say you are low-level and you travel to some destination on the world map and you encounter 2 gold bears (in turn mode) stun them and quickly go to the world map and continue traveling.
Or in this example if you have enough speed you could kill one of them stun the second one and do the same.


Meta-Hellfire Abuse:
Go to The Pit of Fires and take the Hellfire Medallion (a scroll of invisibility should do the job).
One Dweomer Shield (maybe from Mage`s Staff if you don`t want to spend point or you are low level) and put the Medallion then almost any fight will be a joke - just run around your enemies and watch them dying by mass fire-flashes.


Not an Abuse, but good to know around the Meta-Abuse:
As I saw that there was a discussion around making different NPCs into permanent followers with Dominate Will, thought to share a quick list with some interesting personages that one could try to dominate:
1) Lianna Per Dar - maybe the best one - Expert in Bow/Throwing and Master in Melee/Dodge
2) Sir Garrick - quite similar - if one want to get also the Melee/Dodge quests - when it`s time to confront him - dominate instead. Then go to the Dodge master - kill him there, get Dodge training and resurect him back so you could get both Masters and keep him as minion.
3) Only one more as a final - inside the Grant`s Tavern in Tarant there is a lady with Green Dress... She is an interesting characters as she level up both technologies and spells.
In terms of spells she level up Meta/WNecro/Nature.
(and yes - she level up with you and spend the points, unfortunately didn`t found a way to leverage the tech leveling up for making items for me :/ ).


Enough for today - have a nice holidays guys, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (and stay save).


Regards

 

Really nice. I would like to know if these works as well with the unofficial patches....