It's true you could find that out by just using sense, but Whisper's damage is pretty high, if he focus fires you you might just die turn one before you can even make use of that sense info. Although post combat rework, I think we have a bit more hp so that might not be the case anymore.
Your gripes with CoC II
- Thread starter Narmlet
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I mean, if you are fully doing "my name is Iñigo Montoya, you made my soul something multiple beings want, prepare to die." you will not ever even use sense
Yes, and you ran into the edge case where your preferred setup apparently doesn't work as well as it normally does. It happens, just the same as characters who play Tease-centric builds have to deal with when they run into the limited number of encounters that can completely no-sell their attacks. It happens, deal with it.
It'd be nice if Evasion was listed on the right column of the stats screen, alongside the other attack evasion stats. It's also infortunate that, for example, Physical Resist and Crushing Resist share the word "Resist", but one is an evasion stat while the other is a damage mitigation stat.
hey if you think being locked out of 2/3 general playstyles and giving them out of place high difficulty in a mandatory fight midway into a dungeon is a great idea then I don't know what to tell you. agree to disagree I suppose.
I play an entirely physical loadout and have never lost to Whisper. It's a hard fight, but with a competent build most characters should be able to beat him. It's not that every build that doesn't do tease damage loses to him, its that a very small subset of pure physical builds loses to him most of the time. Very different problem.
I have also been frustrated with the combat system, but I have found my peace.
I play a lust/tease focused "non-lethal build" for my own headcanon and have been frustrated many times with bossfights in the past. Whenever I would speak up about it, the answer seemed to be a polite "git gud".
Some weeks ago, I finally played the Khorminos quests and got curbstomped in that smuggler fight against
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be winnable, I thought to myself.
In the second part of the quest I won easily aginst
"Hey, maybe this isn't so ba-"
I don't know what it is.
Am I still incompetent in RPG combat systems after years of video gaming? Should I do all the quests I am still missing out on to get powerful unique equipment and min max optimal stats? Should I follow guides on each individual bossfight? Should I read what the META builds are and only stick to those?
I know what I did, though.
I slammed the difficulty to "Story" and I don't regret a thing. Haven't enjoyed the game as much since the early days after the first public releases.
It's a good idea to remind oneself every now and then, that you play the game for your personal enjoyment. You don't get a grade on it. If you don't enjoy a part of it, you can try to leave it aside. Like the combat.
It's like a buffet. You don't need to eat everything.
I play a lust/tease focused "non-lethal build" for my own headcanon and have been frustrated many times with bossfights in the past. Whenever I would speak up about it, the answer seemed to be a polite "git gud".
Some weeks ago, I finally played the Khorminos quests and got curbstomped in that smuggler fight against
multiple waves of imps and that female demon.
After multiple attempts, I just took the loss and let Kas save my champion's ass.
(Since I was romancing Kas I got a nice scene with her, that also kinda took the edge off my frustration, admittedly.)
After multiple attempts, I just took the loss and let Kas save my champion's ass.
(Since I was romancing Kas I got a nice scene with her, that also kinda took the edge off my frustration, admittedly.)
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be winnable, I thought to myself.
In the second part of the quest I won easily aginst
the demon pair.
"Hey, maybe this isn't so ba-"
Hard cut to the faceless blade appearing behind my party.
The fight starts with my champion at half health, Calise and two corpses on the floor, which were previously my party members.
That faceless boss overpowered half my team before I could even see the combat screen. I won that fight purely because Calise is broken beyond belief. While my champion just healed herself, Calise did the actual healing, all the damage to the faceless, tied my shoelaces, picked up my dead party members and carried everyone out of that quest. How was that balanced?
The fight starts with my champion at half health, Calise and two corpses on the floor, which were previously my party members.
That faceless boss overpowered half my team before I could even see the combat screen. I won that fight purely because Calise is broken beyond belief. While my champion just healed herself, Calise did the actual healing, all the damage to the faceless, tied my shoelaces, picked up my dead party members and carried everyone out of that quest. How was that balanced?
I don't know what it is.
Am I still incompetent in RPG combat systems after years of video gaming? Should I do all the quests I am still missing out on to get powerful unique equipment and min max optimal stats? Should I follow guides on each individual bossfight? Should I read what the META builds are and only stick to those?
I know what I did, though.
I slammed the difficulty to "Story" and I don't regret a thing. Haven't enjoyed the game as much since the early days after the first public releases.
It's a good idea to remind oneself every now and then, that you play the game for your personal enjoyment. You don't get a grade on it. If you don't enjoy a part of it, you can try to leave it aside. Like the combat.
It's like a buffet. You don't need to eat everything.
That's true, it's not like he's impossible to beat even with a squishier build. I run agility willpower strength and back when I used to insist on having companions on auto, I just reset until I could kill one of the enemies. Once one of them is dead the remainders aren't so scary, the danger is getting focus fired or disarmed+silenced, and remedies can fix the latter as I've learned (I still don't know how a remedy cures you dropping your weapon, but RPG logic is just like that sometimes, I understand). I imagine someone who actually built toughness could more easily survive the first few turns, and if you have companion control it's probably no big deal even without turn peeking. Sometimes you take an L once in a while and reset, it's the nature of games.
I have a low-toughness max-leadership build with a fairly even mix of all the defensive stats, focused on keeping my companions max buffed and drawing maximum aggro via use of vanguard and shielded stance, so I can approach every fight with the exact same pattern of moves, and Whisper goes down just as easy as almost any other - the only tough ones are if I get unlucky about initiative order and get like triple crit before cait can heal me, so I go down before healing up. I play with companions on auto, standard difficulty. Here's the full build.
It works great - with the amount of leadership I have, Cait and Ryn become extremely powerful, and meanwhile I'm just there to absorb hits and cast blessing. This build was okay before the change to remove resolve, but it really shines after that, because all damage gets normalized into hp, meaning that you don't have to invest super super hard into focus because resolve is hard to recover, and can instead just heal your damage from tease the same way you heal your damage from being smacked. It's great. I don't think I've ever failed with Whisper, not even close. The only hard fights are ones that have massive self-healing or that have a time limit, like the slime in that quest for watercatslimegirl, because the dps isn't amazing, but even then, between a 20 presence/80 leadership flame dancer and an 80 leadership boosted ryn, you do pretty fucking good damage.
Yeah more defensive builds can totally handle this. I had a hard time because up to that point I played a squishy hyper offense character focused on nuking stuff out of existence in 1-2 turns, which was losing efficacy in Glacial Rift and then basically wasn't viable for Undermountain. It was especially hurt by disarm/silence because I was without a doubt the main source of damage. If I were to try and approach this again with companions on auto, but with the same squishy stats and build, I'd probably bring a summon encounter and great heal, then let the summon pull some damage away from me.
That makes sense - I've tried to do a rogue playthrough and found it amazing in midgame but absolutely garbage lategame. Everything has too many resistances, it becomes way too inconsistent to rely on your own physical damage, which is unfortunate.
How would that even be possible with your build? Wearing a shield makes it impossible to be critically hit.
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I guess highrolled?, idk, I honestly don't pay attention to combat dialogue, that's a good point lmao. Didn't think about that
I am not sure if it was mentioned before, but a way to get unique items back after selling them.
Mostly because I sold Hethia's Whitewood Bow because I didn't know there was content locked behind returning it. Or that returning it was a possibility at the time.
Heck, I don't think any of the other unique items have stuff related to not selling them. Yeah they're unique and you aren't getting them back if you sell them, but there isn't any other drawback related to selling such unique items.
So if you play through the game with, say, a melee build, and get the unique whitewood bow, you aren't gonna think that there is any actual content locked behind that bow, since none of the others had, and the really important stuff tend to have the
So if you sell the bow, which doesn't look any different from all the other unique items, you don't see any drawback until hours or days of gameplay later, where you get the possibility of returning the bow, and the game literally tells you 'If you sold it, too bad for you, get fucked.' which is annoying.
Mostly because I sold Hethia's Whitewood Bow because I didn't know there was content locked behind returning it. Or that returning it was a possibility at the time.
Heck, I don't think any of the other unique items have stuff related to not selling them. Yeah they're unique and you aren't getting them back if you sell them, but there isn't any other drawback related to selling such unique items.
So if you play through the game with, say, a melee build, and get the unique whitewood bow, you aren't gonna think that there is any actual content locked behind that bow, since none of the others had, and the really important stuff tend to have the
Unsellable and maybe Undroppable keywords.So if you sell the bow, which doesn't look any different from all the other unique items, you don't see any drawback until hours or days of gameplay later, where you get the possibility of returning the bow, and the game literally tells you 'If you sold it, too bad for you, get fucked.' which is annoying.
I...you literally get warned you're about to sell a unique item. Did you just ignore that too?
I mean, I get the whole 'sell a unique item and you can't get it back' thing.
It's just that I can't remember any other unique item that is needed after you get that isn't also unsellable.
Literally every other unique item do not lock you out of content if you sell them, and you can't sell or drop the unique items that would lock you out of content if you got rid of them.
r4d6 has a point here, I know Sav and co have explicitly said that they don't want players hoarding all unique items (I am anyway, but), and they want us to just sell the not useful ones - that feels contradictory to some of them having further tie-ins to story, even if it's just little things, for not selling them. I think it makes a lot of sense to have a secondary tag applied to unique items that are still sellable but unlock any story things, like "story-linked" - that, or just give the bow and the scythe the unsellable undroppable tags. It just feels bad to lock yourself out of content, and if the game's explicitly attached to the idea that the player shouldn't be hoarding items, getting punished for doing that incentivizes the exact opposite behavior.
The game could always do what Morrowind did and have a museum to sell artifacts to or a collector of artifacts and rare items. They could also do something like Legacy of the Dragonborn and make a tile in the Wayfort the lord/lady's museum, it could also generate a small bit of income or have it be free to the public though that would still be technically hoarding.
I think the main thing with Hethia is that post-Palace of Ice, no content is actually lost if Hethia is mad at you. All her sex scenes are still there, as are her talks, and any quest involvement. You can even dance with her at the Winter Ball.
(Also with Hethia's... unique temperament, there's often not a significant difference between angry Hethia and friendly Hethia)
(Also with Hethia's... unique temperament, there's often not a significant difference between angry Hethia and friendly Hethia)
I think the issue is much more "people want to get to do everything" than specific things they want from getting to do it - it just feels bad to be locked out of content.
I'm not sure I understand? You're not locked out of content, at least not any more than you're locked out of content for never taking the bow in the first place.
You cannot do everything though, no matter how you play. There are one-off scenes that can only be done if you have the right genitals, or the right level of Corruption, or the right companion(s) with you, or the right stats, Background or both. There are mutually exclusive choices everywhere you look. No possible Champ can see all the content on a single run.
You have the choice to take or not take the bow depending on how you resolve Dog Days, you have the choice to sell the bow even though the game asks you if you're really really sure first. Hand-holding to the extent of warning players that they might miss out on some fluff content if they make these particular decisions after already getting one warning is hand-holding to the extent that the devs have been pretty clear isn't of interest to them, particularly as they've been very clear that hoarding all the Unique items is something they don't want to encourage.
But those aren't mutually exclusive though?
You can change your Corruption Levels, your current companions, your genital & stats.
The only really exclusive stuff is from the Background.
As r4d6 says, most of those factors are mutable. Sure, if you lack the requirements for something, you won't see it, but when you become aware of it, you can change those aspects of your character through various means. However, you can't unsell the bow. And you're also unlikely to have a save for when you still had the bow, plus that would undo a ton of progress, whereas when a quest you have a save right before doing has variations, it's much easier to load up that save, go off and tf, and then come back with the modifications.
If they don't want you to hoard the unique items, then don't lock you into game-states dependent on having unique items, is exactly the point I'm making. Obviously you can't do everything, but if someone wants their file to have Hethia friendly with them, then selling the bow, which is the type of behavior Sav and co explicitly want to encourage, not hoarding, locks them out of being able to have Hethia friendly with them. Your decision to describe this as "hand-holding" is frankly just weird as fuck - proper signposting is one of the hallmarks of these games and the ways that they keep player satisfaction fairly high, warning players when doing something will have consequences that are not immediately evident. And it's not like it's immediately evident to a new player that selling Hethia's bow, a reward from a one-off encounter from the start of the game, means that 4-6 levels and potentially dozens of hours later they won't be able to have Hethia less mad at them. Even if that doesn't have a big game impact!!
If Sav and co want less item hoarding, then don't make it as easy for people to lose access to things by not hoarding. That simple.
Granted, a lot of those factors are mutable though you still can't see it all on one run without save scumming, which was my main point. This is not a game where you can do 100% completion on a straight-line progression from beginning to end and it never has been. You're going to miss content no matter what and there's only so much hand-holding that's reasonable. Consider the following cases of much more substantial content-gating that the devs did not think needed explicit warnings:
Whether you have Brint or Brienne is perhaps the most obvious example, and that's really substantial content. The devs didn't feel the need to explicitly lay out what the implications for future content were going to be prior to making that choice, even though. it almost completely changes the interactions the character has with everybody, has mutually exclusive gear sets and basically has a whole lot of content-gating whichever way you go. Yes, we know the implications because they've been in the game for a long time but the game does not lay out for you exactly what you're opting in to/out of.
Or for another example, deciding to push Azzy and Lia into the corrupted honey because you felt like being Stupid Evil and then you realize later that you've enfuckened yourself for the Dawnsword quest and can't see a huge chunk of content unless you unwind your run. The game doesn't explicitly warn you about that either, it just warns you that you can't undo this. Y'know, like the warning you already get when you try to sell something Unique.
For a lesser example, sex before encountering Evelyn can permanently lock you out of her scenes that check for the Champ's v-cards. Should the devs include a warning before every possible sex scene that you might lock yourself out of future content by having sex prior to meeting a character you haven't even encountered yet?
Yes, I recognize that I'm veering towards a slippery slope argument here, but given the amount of things you can already lock yourself out of in a single run (or which require forked saves to handle) that are far more substantial than some minor dialogue changes for Hethia and which the game doesn't explicitly hold your hand and warn you about, I'm not sure that adding warnings that a given item might have content down the line is really a good use of time, especially since the perennial example of the Hornet Ring demonstrates that many players don't read warnings in the first place.
Whether you have Brint or Brienne is perhaps the most obvious example, and that's really substantial content. The devs didn't feel the need to explicitly lay out what the implications for future content were going to be prior to making that choice, even though. it almost completely changes the interactions the character has with everybody, has mutually exclusive gear sets and basically has a whole lot of content-gating whichever way you go. Yes, we know the implications because they've been in the game for a long time but the game does not lay out for you exactly what you're opting in to/out of.
Or for another example, deciding to push Azzy and Lia into the corrupted honey because you felt like being Stupid Evil and then you realize later that you've enfuckened yourself for the Dawnsword quest and can't see a huge chunk of content unless you unwind your run. The game doesn't explicitly warn you about that either, it just warns you that you can't undo this. Y'know, like the warning you already get when you try to sell something Unique.
For a lesser example, sex before encountering Evelyn can permanently lock you out of her scenes that check for the Champ's v-cards. Should the devs include a warning before every possible sex scene that you might lock yourself out of future content by having sex prior to meeting a character you haven't even encountered yet?
Yes, I recognize that I'm veering towards a slippery slope argument here, but given the amount of things you can already lock yourself out of in a single run (or which require forked saves to handle) that are far more substantial than some minor dialogue changes for Hethia and which the game doesn't explicitly hold your hand and warn you about, I'm not sure that adding warnings that a given item might have content down the line is really a good use of time, especially since the perennial example of the Hornet Ring demonstrates that many players don't read warnings in the first place.
I think what they're getting at here is more that there's a conflict between what the devs are saying they want players to do and what the game is encouraging them to do. Devs don't want item hording but including contextual content(even if it doesn't change anything for the overall game state) by hording some items clashes with that, especially when you consider that players who don't use the wiki or engage in the community may assume that there will be other instances where holding onto all your unique will lead to something.
That's the argument I'm taking from this at least. I don't have any strong feelings either way.
That's the argument I'm taking from this at least. I don't have any strong feelings either way.
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