Guidebook work

[Andy Williams]

All, I have been on a trip without internet access for a week. I'll add all your corrections ASAP.

[Andy Williams]

my current female Troll Wizard asks with 11 app, or she's wearing +16 app (+4 helm of beauty, +4 pendent of beauty and gorgeous clothes) ticking in at 27 app (i'd say thats quite decent for a troll )

Pure racial prejudice. Very frustrating.

[Jack the Ripper]

Pure racial prejudice. Very frustrating.

How exactly does the whole price thing work? I'm under the impression that what matters is your charisma/appearance when first entering the place, and after that it won't vary. Can anyone confirm/infirm that?

EDIT: Just did a bit of testing in HMV. Adding 7 appearance on a DE Priest made quite a difference in both buying and selling normal items. However, the price offered by the shopkeeper for Preserver remained constantly the same. I'd also noticed in the past how Waldy always offered the same amount for si's. So I guess the price for artifacts is fixed, whereas the other ones are dependant on charisma and appearance

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Perhaps it could be mentioned explicitly in the GB that if you anger the eternal guardian, you can still go past him by killing the hostile copies generated and showing the RotHK to the (nonhostile) copy that will remain on the stairs. According to the EG himself, his copies are "incarnations of his fury", no less.

[Andy Williams]

Caught up, new compilation posted.

[Grey]

Time for a major skills update, methinks.

Alchemy: I've never seen it fail due to low skill levels. However it's guaranteed to fail if you use the wrong ingredients (or use ingredients for an unknown recipe). This can be exploited with a pile of herbs to boost a drakeling's speed or kill enemies with alchemy-created fireballs, but ToEF-style preparation is needed to minimise damage to health and equipment.

Alertness: Also gives a small DV increase.

Archery: Prerequisite for some nice missile talents. Archers get extra bonus from the skill.

Bridge Nuilding: "If you must build a bridge it is obviously essential" - however freezing water or teleporting are both considered much easier.

Cooking: Hurthling also get high appreciation from saccing cooked corpses, which makes spider and wolf factories a great source of piety if non-neutral.

Disarm Traps: Unreliable at low skill levels except on door traps, against which it is most needed.

Dodge: Hard to train unless you melee a lot without a shield.

Find Weakness - Very nice increase to critical hits. The skill stacks with slaying weapons, and is the only way to score critical hits with ordinary missiles such as rocks, coins and arrows.

Quite incorrect. I've not seen any research that shows Find Weakness stacks with slaying weapons - I've seen the opposite actually. Slayers are considered to always critical against their respective type, making Find Weakness useless. Also without Find Weakness you still have a 5% chance or so of causing a crit with any weapon, so it is not the "only way to score critical hits with ordinary missiles".

Fletchery: Blessed logs produce double results, and arrows are more abundantly produced than quarrels. Small chance of getting ammo with pre/suffixes, like arrows of slaying or penetrating quarrels.

Healing: "Get it if you aren't born with it" - unless born under Candle, which is far more effective than maxed out Healing.

Herbalism: Picking from a withered plant may kill it - it's only certain to kill it if you don't have Herbalism. Higher Herbalism improves the yield of plants, let's you automatically identify herb types, and allows you to monitor the plant's status.

Listening: Never heard of it training perception - where's that from?

Metallurgy: As has been stated already, this is far from an essential skill. Especially if you have the guidebook, which lets you look up the material of any item Only Woodcraft and Haggling rival this skill for uselessness.

Necromancy: Corpses also shouldn't be cooked. Quicklings make great slaves, because they can regen at a decent rate and keep up with you. Non-necromancers will get very very little from this skill.

Stealth: 100 Stealth needed to get the weird tome from the librarian. Worth training with Yergius sometimes.

Swimming: Can easily get this early on by giving Blup 1 blessed or 2 uncursed potions of carrot juice.

Two Weapon Combat: Not recommended early game though, since it lowers your defense (compared with wearing a shield) and makes your attack turns last twice as long - not a good combo against difficult monsters.

Woodcraft: Far from "nearly essential", it just reduces the time spent lumberjacking. Nice, but not necessary by a long stretch.


Under training for Find Weakness, a slaying weapon does actually train the skill extremely fast, even though FW plays no part. Music can be trained by calming or taming.

[Andy Williams]

Time for a major skills update, methinks.

Done.

Listening: Never heard of it training perception - where's that from?

Don't recall.

[Grey]

On Alchemy you say the size of the explosion is inversely related to the skill level - this is incorrect. The ball size is purely affeected by character willpower (same as regular fireballs cast by the PC) and the damage is independent of the alchemy skill.

[Andy Williams]

Please mention the use of offensive alchemy. The power of the explosion is related to the skill training, with lower levels creating more powerful explosions.

On Alchemy you say the size of the explosion is inversely related to the skill level - this is incorrect. The ball size is purely affeected by character willpower (same as regular fireballs cast by the PC) and the damage is independent of the alchemy skill.

I'll let you guys duke it out.

[Jack the Ripper]

Gut is behind the times. Soirana did some testing (not that you're allowed to use his stuff in the GB, but you are allowed to use Grey's ) .It's at http://skillguide.blogspot.com/ .Here's the relevant extract:

Offensive alchemy:
If you are wearing ToEF type gear (fire immunity/quadruple fire resistance and ring of ice/all vulnerable stuff behind fireproof blanket) explosions from failed mixtures will not harm you and blast surrounding creatures away. Don?t forget you can mix two herbs, giving you virtually unlimited fireball power.
Despite my previous statements offensive Alchemy does not depend
on ingredients [various potions or herbs] used in mixing
on Alchemy skill [on test I used same char vs black unicorns damage was very similar on alchemy skill 20 and after wishing it up to 100]
on stupid idea that the first time you mix certain potions bang is bigger, this is not true
status of potion [blessed vs. uncursed vs. cursed vs. some mixes was done].
Willpower does influence radius [as per normal ball spell].

Willpower?s effect on damage seems to be non-existent. [On pilot test I actually got lowest damage with Wi65, while where was no clear difference between Wi1 and values lot of higher.]
On other hand char level seems to be of high importance. Lv50 char [with same skill values] was doing in 80-95 damage area on repeated tests, while lv1 did 6-18.