Temple of Elemental Evil discussion thread (merged)
- Thread starter Dark Jezter
- Start date
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
Picked it up yesterday, which explains why I'm so sleepy today.
The good:
-Combat! Weeee! It's very well done, although I'm having to get used to not being able to fire effectively into the middle of melee. All the options are fantastic.
-Nostalgia! I ran this adventure for my friends when I was about thirteen, way back when; it's great to see a giant crayfish and say, "oooh, I remember that!"
-The interface is fairly easy to use, with only a few annoying features.
The not-so-good:
-When you enter dialogue, you usually want to do it with the party's charisma-monkey. But when you leave dialogue, the next character in the party seems to automatically receive the focus. (e.g., if charisma-monkey is #1 and you enter conversation, when you leave conversation, character #2 receives focus). If you inadvertantly re-enter conversation without re-focusing on #1, you can get sub-par dialogue choices, and it's annoying.
-I CANNOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO SPONTANEOUSLY CAST CURE SPELLS. My lawful-good cleric should have this capability, according to the game's manual; for the life of me, however, I can't figure out how. Does anyone know how to spontaneously convert your spells? (Cures, inflicts, and for druids, SNA)
-The barter screen is clunky: you have to drag each item across the screen and fit it perfectly within one of the merchant's boxes, or else the sale doesn't register. When you're selling a dungeon's worth of loot, it takes too long. Much better is Baldur's Gate's system, where you click once on everything you're getting rid of, then click the "sell" button once.
These gripes are fairly minor (except for the spontaneous casting of spells one, which annoys me a lot); I'm having a lot of fun with the game!
Daniel
The good:
-Combat! Weeee! It's very well done, although I'm having to get used to not being able to fire effectively into the middle of melee. All the options are fantastic.
-Nostalgia! I ran this adventure for my friends when I was about thirteen, way back when; it's great to see a giant crayfish and say, "oooh, I remember that!"
-The interface is fairly easy to use, with only a few annoying features.
The not-so-good:
-When you enter dialogue, you usually want to do it with the party's charisma-monkey. But when you leave dialogue, the next character in the party seems to automatically receive the focus. (e.g., if charisma-monkey is #1 and you enter conversation, when you leave conversation, character #2 receives focus). If you inadvertantly re-enter conversation without re-focusing on #1, you can get sub-par dialogue choices, and it's annoying.
-I CANNOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO SPONTANEOUSLY CAST CURE SPELLS. My lawful-good cleric should have this capability, according to the game's manual; for the life of me, however, I can't figure out how. Does anyone know how to spontaneously convert your spells? (Cures, inflicts, and for druids, SNA)
-The barter screen is clunky: you have to drag each item across the screen and fit it perfectly within one of the merchant's boxes, or else the sale doesn't register. When you're selling a dungeon's worth of loot, it takes too long. Much better is Baldur's Gate's system, where you click once on everything you're getting rid of, then click the "sell" button once.
These gripes are fairly minor (except for the spontaneous casting of spells one, which annoys me a lot); I'm having a lot of fun with the game!
Daniel
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
On further research, it appears there is some way to spontaneously cast spells, and I'm just missing it. Any advice?
Daniel
edit: further research still tells me that on page one of the manual, I'm directed to shift-click on any non-domain spell in order to spontaneously cast it. Oops! Now, at least, my cleric won't be filling all her slots with cure spells.
Daniel
edit: further research still tells me that on page one of the manual, I'm directed to shift-click on any non-domain spell in order to spontaneously cast it. Oops! Now, at least, my cleric won't be filling all her slots with cure spells.
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I've played it for a couple of hours yesterday.
The Good:
1. Incredibly robust character generation
2. True to P&P combat system
3. Good graphics and character animations (you can recognize an incoming cirtical hit by the way a character swings a weapon) nice environmental (wading through water, etc.) effects.
The Bad:
1. The Quest log is a bit vague, and the direction NPCs give you are pretty hard to follow.
2. There seem to be some issues (remains to see how major) with some of the quests and conversations - I've gotten some strange dialogue choices, none of the sub-tasks you need to complete a quest are recorded in the Quest Log, quest-related dialogue choices are sometimes buried inside the dialogue trees... All in all, this part of the game feels a bit unpolished.
There are also a few things that have left me wondering...
One is the random encounters - they seem to be very frequent (damn near impossible to rest outside of an inn, it seems, unless you do the Quicksave - Try to Rest - Quickload if you get jumped shuffle) and rather difficult. Perhaps that means they're true to the module?
The second is the speed at which my characters have progressed - I've killed four or five giant frogs, a couple of giant vipers, a giant crawfish, perhaps a dozen bandits and a bandit leader, and my characters have hit level 2 with 1500+ xp already - and I'm still in the "opening vignette", or whathever it's called. Which would make perfect sense if this was P&P, but in a CRPG that has a level cap of 10, it worries me a bit, especially given all the random encounters... Maybe I'll just have to start making a lot of magical items.
The Good:
1. Incredibly robust character generation
2. True to P&P combat system
3. Good graphics and character animations (you can recognize an incoming cirtical hit by the way a character swings a weapon) nice environmental (wading through water, etc.) effects.
The Bad:
1. The Quest log is a bit vague, and the direction NPCs give you are pretty hard to follow.
2. There seem to be some issues (remains to see how major) with some of the quests and conversations - I've gotten some strange dialogue choices, none of the sub-tasks you need to complete a quest are recorded in the Quest Log, quest-related dialogue choices are sometimes buried inside the dialogue trees... All in all, this part of the game feels a bit unpolished.
There are also a few things that have left me wondering...
One is the random encounters - they seem to be very frequent (damn near impossible to rest outside of an inn, it seems, unless you do the Quicksave - Try to Rest - Quickload if you get jumped shuffle) and rather difficult. Perhaps that means they're true to the module?
The second is the speed at which my characters have progressed - I've killed four or five giant frogs, a couple of giant vipers, a giant crawfish, perhaps a dozen bandits and a bandit leader, and my characters have hit level 2 with 1500+ xp already - and I'm still in the "opening vignette", or whathever it's called. Which would make perfect sense if this was P&P, but in a CRPG that has a level cap of 10, it worries me a bit, especially given all the random encounters... Maybe I'll just have to start making a lot of magical items.
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
I'm not too worried about the pacing of the game: after about four or five hours of play, I've just hit third level. I'm assuming leveling will slow down further, and at this rate, it should be no problem.
I am realizing that I shouldn't have rushed character creation: I did it in about fifteen minutes over my lunch break, and made some mistakes. My neutral-good druid isn't eligible for MCing into monk like I'd planned, for example; my str7 bard won't be very good at MCing into rogue like I'd planned, either. My barbarian/fighter probably won't ever be very good with a spiked chain.
But that's fine: I can just go in other directions with these characters.
And may I just say that Greater Turning, the sun domain power, rocks nads? It's fantastic!
Daniel
I am realizing that I shouldn't have rushed character creation: I did it in about fifteen minutes over my lunch break, and made some mistakes. My neutral-good druid isn't eligible for MCing into monk like I'd planned, for example; my str7 bard won't be very good at MCing into rogue like I'd planned, either. My barbarian/fighter probably won't ever be very good with a spiked chain.
But that's fine: I can just go in other directions with these characters.
And may I just say that Greater Turning, the sun domain power, rocks nads? It's fantastic!
Daniel
I always forget about that tool.Welverin said:
to execute from select run from start menu then type dxdiag.exe the tool will run and give you info.
Shard O'Glase
First Post
My only problem is the scroll speed even sped to the top notch its a bit slow.
Oh yeah one hint incase this happens to anyone else. But if a monster runs away because I don't know you turned it or something you can find the monster by clicking on his initiative order icon at the top of the screen. I learned this the hard way when fighting some zombies and I had a heck of a time finding the last one and since we were still in combat we moved very slow while searching aorund.
One 3e/3.5 difference is spellcasting time, I thing all spells are 1 aciton spells even sleep and summon monster spells. I'm guessing there initiative system couldn't deal with the 1 round spells. I think this is cool sine it makes summon spells a feasible option.
Also one note the enemies actually use the ready action, I can usually make my con check but I get nailed by multiple arches some times when I try to cast a spell.
Oh yeah one hint incase this happens to anyone else. But if a monster runs away because I don't know you turned it or something you can find the monster by clicking on his initiative order icon at the top of the screen. I learned this the hard way when fighting some zombies and I had a heck of a time finding the last one and since we were still in combat we moved very slow while searching aorund.
One 3e/3.5 difference is spellcasting time, I thing all spells are 1 aciton spells even sleep and summon monster spells. I'm guessing there initiative system couldn't deal with the 1 round spells. I think this is cool sine it makes summon spells a feasible option.
Also one note the enemies actually use the ready action, I can usually make my con check but I get nailed by multiple arches some times when I try to cast a spell.
Just picked it up yesterday, I am amazed at how much of 3(.5)e they've managed to get into this game. When my lvl 1 ranger got Swallowed Whole by a giant frog it took me a few seconds to figure out exactly what happened, at which point I was quite impressed. Also another nice touch was my grappled ranger could not deal damage with his Long Sword, but when my rogue got grappled she was able to attack /w her Dagger, which shows that they actually spent a fair bit of time studing the rules. All this from just the first encounter of the game.
The only quibble i have so far (about 4 hours into the game) is the interface. There is that nowhere on the character sheet does it show me the damage the char does (unless I am missing something totally obvious). During combat I am only able to access the active character's char sheet, which can be a bit of a pain. However, the radial menu, which annoyed me so much in NWN, seems to work much more intiutively here.
So far, its been almost all good.
The only quibble i have so far (about 4 hours into the game) is the interface. There is that nowhere on the character sheet does it show me the damage the char does (unless I am missing something totally obvious). During combat I am only able to access the active character's char sheet, which can be a bit of a pain. However, the radial menu, which annoyed me so much in NWN, seems to work much more intiutively here.
So far, its been almost all good.
Dark Jezter
First Post
Well, my Chaotic Neutral party just hit level 3, and right now I'm trying to clear out the moat house.
I'm absolutely loving how tactical combat is in the game. My party is made up of a human barbarian, a human cleric, a halfling rogue, a dwarf fighter, and a half-elf bard (mostly for social situations). I've started using tactics like setting ambushes by readied actions, and having my rogue move into flanking position during combat so he can utilize sneak attacks.
And I'm also excited to get back to town so my dwarf wizard can use his new Craft Wonderous Items feat.
I'm absolutely loving how tactical combat is in the game. My party is made up of a human barbarian, a human cleric, a halfling rogue, a dwarf fighter, and a half-elf bard (mostly for social situations). I've started using tactics like setting ambushes by readied actions, and having my rogue move into flanking position during combat so he can utilize sneak attacks.
And I'm also excited to get back to town so my dwarf wizard can use his new Craft Wonderous Items feat.
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