The most powerful background.

Escaped Lunatic.

Nigh-invulnerability with the proper set of armors.

 

I prefer "Born Under a Sign" myself, partly because of the huge list of critical hit effects that it causes in case of a crit. Using that with Filament Sword (bolsters Crit Efficiency) and Master Melee (No critical failure), you get massive criticals.

Most resists can be "almost" capped with Arcane Mails, Shields, Rings and Shield of Protection spell anyways.

 

As mentioned, Escaped Lunatic. Everything can be maxed with either character points, good equipment and blessings, but at the end always the Escaped Lunatic will have the best defence.

 

Whichever the "spoiled brat" one is that gives you +6 to WP is pretty sweet for a mage. Quick access to higher echelons of magickal colleges one your levels permit is hard to argue with. The negatives (-CHA and -haggle or something) are quite negligible and only really interfere if you planned on getting mastery with any of those skills.

 

Sold Your Soul is perfect for an evil mage-type. Bonuses to ones Magic Aptitude are not to be scoffed at, and through experimentation, I have discovered that, while not displayed as such, it's more than possible to get more than 100 MA. (Seriously, I had to learn basically an entire college of schematics to get my MA to drop under 100 with my SYS character.)

 

I noticed it by the repeated application of the Dark Helm trick. With Harm, they drop like flies.

 

I think I'm running A:WIP, but I'm not positive. However, I know that for me, with whatever I'm running, Tough Hide only takes 10% off.

 

Half-Ogres have a damage resistance of 10% as well.

 

It strikes me as interesting that I'm playing a half ogre, and somehow I've never spotted that fact.

 

Now you know.

Balanced, yeah?

 

:double confusion:
Aren't resistances capped at 95%?
Isn't MA capped at 100?
By what has been said I presume that proper backgrounds can get over the cap, right?
I can easily imagine what happens with a resistance over 95%, but what are the bonuses of MA>100?

 

Same as MA>10, more damage with spells, higher chance of tech items failing etc. Harm gets even better...

 

Harm's damage caps at 40. Actually, I believe all aptitude reliant spells have certain caps.

And no, resistances can't go above 95%. They could go above that for monster NPCs in the vanilla version though, but I fixed that, as it was a powerful exploit, e.g. you could summon an Ogre and then cast Shield of Protection on him to render him virtually invincible.

 

40? Has it always been like that? I remember switching floats onto verbose for the first time and being surprised how much damage harm did. Atleast I think it was harm...

 

Harm's damage goes from 3 to 40. It was never rebalanced in any of the official or unofficial patches.

 

You were playing on the "Easy" difficulty level, weren't you?

 

Considering how long ago it was, probably.

 

My medic character ABUSED buffs of all kinds. And ironically, she pretty much never attacked anything. But her allies... ah, her allies. Therapautics + Buff Spells = serious, serious powergamery.

One of these days I'll use those tricks on a character who actually hits things.