which character are you playing with?

Indeed the BL and MG chew threw ammo like crazy, which is the very reason why I also, as a gunslinger, used the Tesla Gun. Th BL* required too much strenght for my technologist ("If I had muscles, I would work at a quarry, not become an inventor, dammit!"), the MG was great, powerful, made me cause total destruction during a single round for some time, just until I realised that my precious, nearly lifetime suply of ammo mysteriously disappeared. The TG is also great having a +20 cool factor (what can be more fun than a stempunk lightning gun), yet Droch's Warbringer is superior to every single firearm, being the ultimate Vendigroth technology.

* There was a concept to make the Blade launcher fire actual quality daggers, which could be used repeatedly. IIRC, Drog was involved in making this little mod which I surely will try out one day.

 

I'm currently playing an elf with the Raised in the Pits background.

I was going to try to stick with dumb dialogue this time because I've never seen much of it, but as always the thrill was gone by the time I got to Shrouded Hills and tried to talk to Sogg. So, I raised my intelligence enough to get the normal stuff.

I decided to handicap myself by not taking any spells except Minor Heal and Conveyance spells.

I only took the Conveyance spells because I wanted to do some master quests that I hadn't completed in a while and I figured that Teleport would save me some time. Also, Unlocking Cantrip for various chests and things.

As you can imagine, I use a lot of Essence of Intellect potions.

 

Currently i`m playing with half orc bandit. Without any followers except Jaina (she`s my second favourite female follower next to Z'an Al'urin). My first kill was Virgil. - my half-orc wanted his cloak.

 

never finished my idiot play through so started a new game the other day. 2 Int Half Ogre who I hope to make a master in persuasion.

 

"Ugh. No Kerghan. Death be bad"

That must be fun. I could only get to the Black Mountain Mines as an Idiot Savant and T'sen Ang as an idiot ogre. No persuasion with both, though.

 

'Deff bee ver' ver' bad! Nawty Kerggie!'

I wish you could write your own responses that would be awesome :lol:

I just finished my stone throwing halfling and I'm wondering what I should play as next

 

Curious as to what 'kergie' said back to that...

Anyway I think I'm going to start a melee character, I have never really played one that just bashed things; always going for either magick or tech. Might try and handicap him somehow.

 

The majority of my characters have been the bash stuff types

 

I tried it. Even if you manage it, it doesn't work. My current character that I'm slowly working on is an ogre, but I got so sick of the dumb dialogues that I cheated his int into the middle range so that I could, you know, speak. I'm planning on making him a purely melee character, so I don't think this will unbalance the game too much for me.

 

I got bored, realized I had never actually played as a human before and decided to make a female human thief with the bandit background.

Naturally, I found a bunch of fairly decent magic stuff that my character can't use. At least Virgil and Dante are well equipped.

I kind of want to do the spot traps master quest because I've never tried it, but I'm having a hard time convincing myself that it wouldn't be a waste of character points.

 

Consider this a sacrifice for the better good. You will lose character points just for one of many characters you created, but the experience from the game, including knowing the dialogues and quests involved in spotting traps, will be gained for good. Such sacrifices are crucial to maximalise one's knowledge about Arcanum.

 

Among the many things I haven't tried yet: a Dark Elf follower.

Unless you get some different dialogue options when you finally get to Quintara or something, so far all I've really noticed was that getting a set of mystic chain mail in the Bessie Toone mine was pretty awesome.

 

Thanks.

I figured I just picked a good name/race/background combination. I apologize if that was unclear from my last post.

That character gets some decent loot. By the time I found the purchase order at P. Schuyler and Sons, I had two sets of chain mail (magick, I believe, rather than mystic like I said before... sorry), a charmed staff for Virgil, a mystic dagger for me, a respectable amount of gold and a bunch of other stuff that made being only level ten suck a lot less. I've since found a set of medium sized mystic leather and a few other fair to middlin' magical weapons.

Nothing really to write home about, but anything that makes getting out of Shrouded Hills easier is all right by me.

I decided I wanted Sogg in my party, so that made the charisma penalty kind of a pain. But still... That background is a surprisingly good alternative to Only Child, considering that the willpower bonus doesn't really help much.

 

It's a shame we can't abuse the name-based-loot system.

 

One thing I've found in my (way too freaking many) playthroughs is that eventually, everyone will end up with some severely cool stuff. Some just get it earlier than others.

I once had a half-elf called Lahtrebiel, she got nothing more than cursed gear and junk for ages, but as soon as she bothered to visit the Schylers... (I'm almost positive I spelled that wrong.)

 

Actually, both name AND background are relevant.

 

I'm playing Vanilla Arcanum with the 1.07.4 patch, and I've spent way too much time messing around with names and backgrounds. As usual, Drog Black Tooth is exactly right.

Race definitely matters too. Sometimes, just for example, a half-elf will get better stuff early on than an elf with the same exact name and background.

On another message board, there was a guy who was convinced that which avatar portrait you choose can get you better stuff from random chests. I don't know if that's true or not.

 

I almost forgot to say that you made a lot of good points.

Because of this post, I went ahead and did the quest. Then I killed the Spot Traps master and took back that cool staff. It made for a fun evening. Thank you for that.

It was neat to do once, but I still think Spot Traps is a waste of character points. I suppose if you also wanted to master Disarm Traps, it would be a necessary evil. But, really, how many traps do you stumble across in Vanilla Arcanum after you can finally master those skills?

It seems like you can get by just fine with only two or three points in Spot Traps. Expert training and a set of oiled thief's leather was all I really needed to get through places such as the Black Mountain Clan or the Dredge.

Even when I had the skill maxed out, my followers still walked over traps I could see often enough to be annoying. So, really, all it did was make me and Magnus need healing a little less often. That's cool, but you can cope without it when you're traveling around with Virgil, Dante and Jayna.

 

Nice to hear that. : )

As in-game works, spot traps works nice by itself, you can simply walk by most traps once they are spotted, without the need of disarming them. Followers are smart enough to avoid discovered traps as well. However it's good to master disarm traps once one has a trapspotting character, just for the kicks and for knowing how it works and what's involved with it in the game.

If you would ask me, spotting and disarming traps isn't worth taking more than once, it isn't too necessary or incredibly helpful. The two locations with most traps are the dungeon under the disarm traps master and the castle involved in the spot traps mastery quiest of course, while the third is the Black Mointain Clan mine. Spotting traps is hardly ever useful after that, and a trapspotting character propably won't have enough points in that skill for it to be very useful. Later the traps are quite rare and you and your followers have enough armor to make the traps simply an annoyance, not a deadly danger.

There is however one reason good enough to take spot traps repeatedly, and that reason is the Staff of K'an Tau (however you spell that thing) gained in the spot traps mastery quest which enables infinite teleportation without any fatigue points being used, which works even for 100% tech characters. It can be gained by metagaiming, but it's not the same.

You say? For me, spotting traps was useless until I had 4 or 5 points in it. Instead of becoming slowly better and better, I had the feel that it suddenly transformed from very poor to very good at some point.

Sadly, that's how spotting traps with your skill or with the flow spectrometer works. When you spot traps via magic, using the sense invisible spell, both you and your followers spot traps with equal skill.