Bay 12 Games Forum

Highers make decent enough anything. Iirc, their primary racial scales with willpower, which makes them a pretty solid match with temporal wardens (whose primary stats are will/mag, followed by str or dex (or both) depending on what they're leaning toward). Less so with shadowblades, but SBs will want to build a little willpower to open up some of their more expensive sustains so it's not a total loss. The extended max visual range dovetails nicely with an infravision spec'd SB.

SBs get speed primarily from essence of speed (temporal tree) and momentum, but both are pretty late game due to how expensive they are. Maybe blinding speed and some conditional stuff (Shalore racial, fire harmony). Before that, they're primarily burst melee guys (flurry/sweep with the added darkness damage) with high mobility (controlled phase door), so it's nothing really fancy. Remember the second tier talent in the tree that has willful combat is an instant, so it doesn't take time to use. SBs can also invest in the phantasm tree if they're fully plucky; there's some nice stuff in there.

Alchemist damage output comes naturally; max the bomb tree except shockwave (which is mostly junk), and then invest in two infusion talents (I tend toward fire and acid; most tend to take fire and one of the debuff-able infusions. Fire hits a bit harder, but the crowd control can be useful). Generally you'll want to use the highest tier gem you can get access to, as bomb damage scales with gem tier. Other than that, you just get channel staff to at least 3/5 (initially; you'll max it eventually) and max out staff mastery. Get a nice staff and channel will pretty easily be chunking off 1-200 HP per turn at range by the time you're twenty-ish. You can invest in the heat tree, but it will never do more damage than your bombs can; it's more for supplement while the bombs are cooling down than an actual primary damage source, though there's some utility, too.

Golem durability and damage comes from the first two talents in the basic golemancy tree, the gem and runic golem talents, and supercharge golem. The first two are no-brainers, simple passive boosts. Gem golem allows you to change the golem's base damage type (so a golem with an amethyst in its eye will do arcane instead of physical when it beats on something, ferex.) as well as adjust the golem slightly as needed to lean toward damage (+% alldam or stats) or durability (+% resall), usually you'll gem the golem toward resistance to stack with the golem resilience talent. You'll also want to stick an appropriate gem in the golem's armor with imbue.

Runic massively increases the golem's regen (boosting it further with a verdant/eyal heavy or massive armor is possible! Chainmail of bloodletting is also pretty good.) and allows you to stick extra offensive runes on the golem (I lean toward the fire and lightning one's, but acid wave can be good, too. Don't use frost spear. Rune of the rift is a possibility on a magic-leaning golem, but requires willpower to land easily, so is sub-par.) for extra damage. Know that the golem starts with three inscription slots, same as the player, so 5/5 runic golem actually gives the golem six, total. Get two shield runes (and possibly the rune of absorption or whatev', if you happen upon the troll hedge wizard) and then load up on damage runes.

Supercharge gives the golem massive healing as well as insta-resurrects the golem if it's dead (unlike refit, which takes many turns) -- you can use it two ways, mostly; preemptively at the start of a fight to lengthen the golem's up time, or save it to resurrect the golem after it drops. Sometimes if you do the former, the talent will have came off cool down before the golem pops, letting you very much massively extend the golem's presence in a fight.

Freeze is an excellent single-target debuff and alright damage. Most archmagi stick at least one point into it, more id they've got the points to spare. Stone wall is pretty useful, but somewhat situationally so, and you can get it on a hat. YMMV, I've personally never really used it much.

The +% damage on staves effect everything. Bomb damage, heat tree, channel staff, smacking things in the head, whatever. Doesn't boost the golem (though it does boost the damage on summoner summons! Iirc, anyway.), but that's about it. Vilestaves are excellent on an acid/fire alchemist, especially if it's a greater prefix ego.

Questions are fine, heh. There's also the t4 forums and the in-game chat, if you want second opinions or on the fly advice or answers.

But... if you started reading the bookmark, how would you keep track of where you were up to?

... memory?

Though I guess that varies from person to person. I've had a number of cases where I've picked up a book I didn't finish reading like, two years before and forgot to mark progress and still was able to pick up where I left off pretty easily. Prompts (previously read passages) trigger recollection pretty easily. One of the reasons most tests are kinda', uh. Easy. If they're not built right. Bookmarks and dog earing just save some time, really...

Something something experiencing the previously experienced something weaponized Deja-vu something. I'unno. It's Shakespeare, you might not even care where you were. Just pick a point and read the surrounding awesome.

Yeah... actually looking at it, I'm wondering what sort of shenanigans that W can pull, especially with some CDR. Looks like it'd be trivial to disrupt a minion wave with it (throw your seige minion over a wall or somethin') and bring stuff back, or do something similar with the enemy. What happens if you toss the non-buff golems into the middle of a minion wave? Can you throw the buff critters around? What about dragon? Being able to toss dragon over the wall would be pretty big for blue team. Being able to toss the buff critters around would be useful for either side, really.

Checking, dragon can't. Buff critters can, and the CD on the talent is pretty low. I can almost see a syndra trololol chain-tossing the enemy's buffs back across the river, especially the blues. Know if anyone in PBE's tried that yet?

I think the real question, Soli, is if the teacher will excuse absences if you get arrested and jailed for standing nearby, and if so, whether it will negatively or positively affect your grade. Last I checked, Occupy has been pretty peaceful but law enforcement relatively not-so, so overreaction (and you getting caught up in it) might occur.

When in doubt, ask the teacher. See what dey say.

Mostly as per dice, heh, though I haven't actually seen anything I don't understand (I still recognize the lingo, which is actually a little surprising...), just nothing that I'd be particularly capable of actually constructing myself

Have played, a little. Would pretty much never play the physical game again (at least to the extent of constructing my own deck. Costs way, way too much money.), but there's free programs out nowadays that let you run it hotseat or online so who needs the money sink, eh? Still, it's a fairly interesting card game. More fun to play than poker, anyway

Re: 3: Supposedly there's a difference between functional and fundamental replication. Problem is no one's been able to actually figure out how to tell the difference, so far as I'm aware. You have no way of actually confirming that something that acts in-all-ways identical to one thing is not actually identical. Functional and fundamental replication is identical from the point of the observer, and point of the observer is the best we've really got access to.

2: Hackneyed and arguable. Sapience is a product of physiology, and there's nothing really special about that. It's axiomatic, yes, but it's an axiom posited by biology, not anything more fundamental. Replicate the physiology with different materials or create a functional equivalent and you've got the same thing.

Anywaaay. I'm in the person-is-person-is-person crowd, and don't see anything particularly special about our particular set of matter configuration patterns. When we get around to making something with as much moxie as a man, we will have made something that is as at least as much human as a human, and it would be best that we give them the same consideration as a human, if only to prevent the otherwise inevitable rebellion.

I think my knife broke after one fight and my rifle broke after like four shots.  Is this normal or did I do something strange?  Fighting fungal scavengers with no real skill or weapons isn't very fun.

Semi-strange, unless something changed with the lua conversion stuff. S'been a while since I played, yeah. Anyway, anything you're wearing can take damage if the critter(s) taking swings at you get lucky. Take too much damage, said anything, well, breaks.

Best suggestion for early game if you didn't start with some personal level combat skills (again, caveated by that "it's been a while") is it find a couple of glitter pistols.. or anything with the SCATTER flag on the ammo, really. Scatter ammo has a much easier time of hitting crap, and is very, very useful until you've got the combat capability to get the other stuff rolling. Just roam around the spinners checking out the shopping districts until one shows up, mostly.

Hop of the IRC channel if you can (#tome on rizon) and see if one of the dev-capable folks are on, possibly even DG. They might be able to walk you through a fix of some sort. Alternately, bug report on T4 forum. DG's pretty responsive in general, but particularly about major bug stuff.

That said, if you'd just completed dreadfell, your latest save was when either when you entered or left the joint, unless you've been mucking around with the lua. T4 autosaves in a lot of situations, but even at the absolute least on zone change. The black screen instead of a load does say something probably went bottoms up with your save, though. DG might be able to fix that, yeah.