Who's the Ultimate Fighter in Eschalon?

[deathknight1728]

Im not sure if anyone's asked this before as I'm wondering. Im giving a run through of book 2 and I want to know in anyone's opinion what is more deadly-Finesse and graceful fighter of max dexterity and possibly piercing weapons, Brute force fighter or strength and endurance while not hitting as much, packs a punch when he does hit, speedy fighter of max speed who functions like a mix of strength and dexterity: grace and power.

Those are the only ones Ill list that I know have a differentiation. Concentration wouldn't really count as its really like an offensive version of dex without armor bonus and trap disarming.

Notice Im only listing the fighters as while rogues fight with melee, they tend to rely on stealth so its not as much of a fight.

While anyone on these forums knows the system better than me, I will say that I missed a few. To be honest, Ive only tried 2 fighters and pure dexterity and strength are not one of them. I used pure speed and concentration and perception.

I want to really know if having more damage and hit points from strength would make you more lethal than a dexterity build as pure strength has no to hit chance compared to dexterity.

Im always looking for more. Anyone used any different stat combinations that were lethal that I could discuss?

[Randomizer]

Increase a weapons skill and that compensates for low stats affecting to hit. Also most feats always hit so once you get it under every 10 turns you can kill most anything. This allows a strength and endurance fighter to crush foes and survive their damage.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

As Randomizer says, because of the Feats, once you get your weapon skill level high enough, you no longer worry about your to hit numbers. The best for a melee fighter is bludgeoning, because the feat is really good and you get some of the best damage overall. Pump End to start and then Str and just wade on through.

[deathknight1728]

Interesting, I really had no idea.

-I remember reading somewhere on the forums that when you have a really high to hit altogether, your character has much higher chance to cause critical hits. This can be seen much more with my character Im playing right now. When I had my previous character with high damage rating and low to hit, he caused less criticals, whereas my character right now is causing many criticals as his to hit is high.

-Another thing that I will note is that from what Ive seen of the weapon skills, only sword and bludgeoning are a guaranteed strike. Cleaving weapons Has missed on my characters quite a bit, bludgeoning is like you said great, piercing has missed, and Unarmed can miss from time to time.

Unless Im doing something wrong or have the wrong version, I doubt that all strikes are guaranteed. If Sword wasnt a guaranteed strike, it would be really awful as its bonuses offer little else except for minor damage and a round of missing melee damage.

There's definitely got to be some benefits to taking different attributes other than strength on characters.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

All Feats have a guaranteed hit. The thing with Cleaving is that you're guaranteed to hit ONE of the opponents around you, then your normal to hit chance on the others. I make it a policy in Eschalon to try never to allow more than one opponent close to me at a time, so sword and cleaving aren't all that useful to me.

Dex has many advantages. Just not necessarily in straight melee. The great thing about Eschalon is the ability to try all sorts of character builds and see how they go.

[deathknight1728]

I believe the same. You should never close with more than 1 enemy as they can encircle you and deal extra hits to you which normally would be avoided. The only way you can take on more than 1 enemies is if your character is a tank that can take the hits much more so than a lightweight.

I usually try and focus on 1 stat altogether or 2 stats total. So for example, my character right now places 2 points in concentration for trap disarming, combat casting and to hit, with perception enhancing his ability to notice things such as traps and treasure. Normally concentration would be useless to melee but perception makes it not so.

Like you said the system is almost perfect as you can specialize in anything. What about you kreador, you seem to have beaten the game a few times. How would you say you specialize your stats? Do you just focus on dexterity for a ranged combatant, or brute force with strength and endurance?

Im only asking as Im in the midst of starting to write a faq on character creation and builds. Im going to start from book 1 once book 3 is released as Ive gotten better at these games

[Kreador Freeaxe]

Depends entirely on the character I'm building at the time. I love the ability to play with things. My initial character tends to be a ranger, though. I've always liked the play style, feeling out enemies. Sniping them to weaken their defenses. Using the terrain to my advantage. In that case I focus more on Dex for the bow, but I'll spread points all over.

[deathknight1728]

I cant rightly blame you. Ranger was my initial choice as I initially found melee to be boring. However, once I realized that melee can be played in a way similar to your ranger concept, I caved in to melee.

The cool thing about melee and ranged combat both, is that when you separate enemies from the group and pick them apart, its a heck of a lot of fun, and later in the game, its very deadly as well.

[VDK]

This makes almost no sense. I made a fighter that put all his points into dexterity and had a killer armor class and to hit score at lvl 16. I got loads of critical hits and was hard to hit. Are you saying that if it came down to it, in 10 rounds it takes to recharge your feat, me hitting my opponent 9 times in a row and them not hitting me is worse? With just all strength and endurance, you wont be hitting things in between using your feat.

[edge]

and a short trip to the thread graveyard:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4720


^excuse the grammatical errors, and the (very) poor attempt to act as though i wasn't thrilled to gloat. that game took me months to finish, and the ridiculous amount of time/obsession i put into getting everything right wouldn't have happened if i hadn't been confined to my home for about 4 months after having major surgery.

and to answer the original question -- due to the way the game's mechanics work with respect to player statistics, a maxed dexterity/spear build easily wins. personally however, actually playing (grinding) to reach that end takes just about all the fun/challenge out of the rest of the game. having an unkillable fighter that can kill anything in a turn or two is a novelty that wears off fairly quickly.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

Yeah, the grind can get bad. I don't worry usually about "ultimate" builds, but about trying to find build I can have fun with.

[blatherbeard]

Trying to finish the game so i can feel good about buying III, but getting hammered even with pretty high stats in heavy armor, having pretty good heavy armor on, and high str and bludgeoning stats.

i think my prob was i tried going for paladin type with 15 or so points in divine just for healing and bless, (and the occasional lore) but i figured with over 20 points in bludgeoning, 20 points in heavy armor and over a 50 str(with buffs) that id be doing better fighting the taurax.

and i didnt want to have to grind to an obscene level just to survive to the end lol

[Vroqren]

Yeah, I have always felt that there is a rather rough transition from all of the other monsters in the game to Taurax. With my unarmed Combat character, I could easily take two Legionnaires, though I had to camp for a while after that. It certainly helped that I regained 1 HP a turn.

[Randomizer]

If you get the armor over 100 then you can reduce Taurax to hit chance down to 1-3% range. BW decreased the effectiveness of stoneskin during beta testing after I did that and was running a paladin with 20% chance to hit and almost no chance of being hit by Talushorn monsters. I could always use spells if I was in a hurry to hit them.

[blatherbeard]

If you get the armor over 100 then you can reduce Taurax to hit chance down to 1-3% range. BW decreased the effectiveness of stoneskin during beta testing after I did that and was running a paladin with 20% chance to hit and almost no chance of being hit by Talushorn monsters. I could always use spells if I was in a hurry to hit them.

Hence--not wanting to grind to obscene levels. id have to grind out..lets see....3 points per lvl, already around 25.......another 20 or so levels to get to 100.....yeah, ill just forgo the end and wait til III comes out prob and never finish that either, or just go fora different build altogther.

Just a bummer that you get stopped in your tracks like that in a game.

One of the reasons i stopped playing spiderweb games was this kind of a curve.