Tech or Mage?

Tech or Mage?

Other urls found in this thread:

terra-arcanum.com/downloads/
gogwiki.com/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla_Gun
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Charges
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Lemon-Potato_Charges
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Technical_Manuals
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Staffs
rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/arcanum-modesty-mod.70721/
mediafire.com/file/tgh79p1b54dhk44/Muros Arcanum Weapon Database ver. 1.0.5.xls
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Mage because of that instakill spell and the fact that magic gear is better.

Mage is easy route.

Tech is too bugged and requires too much maintenance.

retard strength build

just go melee with gottagofast-tier speed and you'll beat the game with your eyes closed and both hands tied behind your back

otherwise prepare for a month long journey of endless suffering if you go tech

The perception attribute is a pain in the ass.

Are you telling me that if I don't use a gun, I'll actually hit, and do damage?

man Arcanum is busted.

Get Dog and watch him slaughter everything

I thought there was an unofficial patch or something that fixed tech.

Never could get into Arcanum, or PS:T for that matter. Both just rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning, and I've never given them more than ~10 minutes before dropping them. I never had any problem burning through Fallout 1/2, BG 1/2, and IWD 1/2, and thematically both Arcanum and PS:T are games I think I should like, but they just don't click with me.

This, the only problem is it makes those rock monsters a pain because you keep breaking your weapons on them.


There's a patch to fix just about every realproblem Arcanum has.
terra-arcanum.com/downloads/

Tech theif usually. Or magic only dark elf. And by magic only I mean just beat the whole game by spamming Harm. Honestly idk because there are so many options, high intelligence Orc, gunslinging human. Half ogre tank. The choices are as numerous as they are great.

Shit I forgot about the dog, I remember getting stuck with the stone golems because all my weapons broke in the Black Mountain Clan mines and the dog alone saved my ass

magic if evil elf, tech if good human/dorf

PS:T is fun only if you read everything and don't mind the combat. It's not for everyone. I got problems getting into Arcanum too but managed in the end. It gets better once you've forced yourself to play an hour or two.

gogwiki.com/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura
you have literally everything on gogwiki site

Is it possible to make a gunslinger build in this game, and how viable would it be?

Tech requires more stuff to carry around and more skills to develop. Magick is practically self sustaining.

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Doubt.

Misunderstood the post completely, disregard this post.

Tech because who wants to be a filthy mage?

Magic is for fags, tech all the way.

Pirate

Yeah cause you can beat the whole game with only the Harm spell.

Tech because magic is boring.

The magic/tech dichotomy in this is really interesting.

Also tech because that revolver wielding knight in the intro is cool as fuck.

Tech all the way

Any recommended tech builds? I've always wanted to get into Arcanum but I almost never get very far in, the game feels like its very big and there's a lot of skill choices without any solid build guides so I usually get overwhelmed.

You'll fatigue yourself out quickly on anything tough and/or numerous. The only advantage to the Harm spell is that you can spam it as fast as you can click in real time. It's fatigue/damage ratio and AP/damage are both really low


Guns are easily the worst damage dealers in the game. I'd only recommend going tech/guns if you have already played the game multiple times and want to to challenge yourself, otherwise it's just frustrating for no reward.

That's not to say you can't go Tech. The Tech/Melee tree is pretty good, especially early game (a balanced sword right out of the gate will outperform almost any other early game character). The first two ranks of Herbology tech are insanely useful as well early on

Which is why you go the Diablo route and load up on potions.

It's not like there's a junk dealer in almost every town or anything.


Assistant electric and explosives up to at least technician, mechanics and therapeutics optional but highly advised. And don't be a bitch, too many ways to break the game as is.


And surprisingly user takes the lead from the OP and has a real shot of being the dipshit of the thread.

It took me way too long to figure out skill training.

I remember using the Pyrotechnic Axe on them. And on fire elementals. Somehow it wouldn't get damaged.

Also a magical staff is a fatigue container. Have several of them with you to fight longer.

Use this gun:
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla_Gun
Anyone wearing metal armor would get additional damage from electricity. And you have two recipes for making charges, so you won't run out of ammo too easily.
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Charges
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Lemon-Potato_Charges

Abuse these to make anything you want. Stash them somewhere safe, don't carry them around needlessly.
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Technical_Manuals

I meant mana, not fatigue.
arcanum.wikia.com/wiki/Staffs
I have always thought that plural for staff is staves.

Magic and Melee are both far superior to guns in damage. You'll never out-DPS the dog with a gun, let alone someone who has master melee and a good melee weapon. Bows are debatable, but the bow skill bonus (double shot) definitely makes them appealing. Throwing does slightly worse than guns normally, but gives you access to grenades.

I'm not saying you can't use guns, but it is definitely "hard mode".


Axes do not take extra damage when hitting hard objects. This is primarily a "feature" of swords, because swords are "fragile". I'm not sure about other weapon types (hammers, staves etc)

Merriam Webster says both are accepted

A quality revolver will outperform near anything at the start and I'll put up my grenade launcher, vendigrothian rifle, handcannon, flamethrower, warbringer or whatever and usually still come on top.

Bash a normal axe against metal and you'll see it take damage all the same. Bash an arcane (sword) and it won't take any damage.

Or just summon vorpal bunnies and have them rape anything from doors to scenery and traps.

Any, just don't pick guns unless you know exactly who to use your fate points on to steal their gear since only 1 gun is worth your time until you get to a certain point in tech development. I only chose guns because I wanted to be a dashing gun slinging gentlemen, and I went charisma first so I just sent my party to do all the work for me.

If you go the charisma route stick to melee and invest in a magic sword, and get charge rings from a little investment in the right tech tree. Give them to all your party members.

Tech. Because it's interesting. Guns are useless, enemies can just "gotta go fast" onto your character and whack you.

If all else fail, just spam molotov and recruit dog ASAP.

Magic is easy mode.

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You can't do that in this game, play the fucking game plebe.

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Daily reminder to not play this game without modesty mod
rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/arcanum-modesty-mod.70721/

You can't, go ahead and try I'll wait as many times as it's needed for your shit to get kicked in at the very beginning of the game until you get a clue.

There are only a single fucking mandatory fight in a whole fucking game. I finished Arcanum all the times I needed in every fucking possible way.

That's only 1 mandatory fight, in the whole game with random and strategically placed encounters and dungeons with things that won't talk to you which are also the majority mandatory fights.
I call bullshit, or else you wouldn't be saying such retarded shit. The CHA build is the "attack them my minions" build, because the entire game is riddled with monsters and mobs you can't talk down. You have to fight random map encounters to even be properly leveled otherwise you're basically going to be save scumming a lot, which is not fun.

You weren't a frequent customer at general stores, I presume? They are being restocked if you buy them out from merchants. I see no problem there.

Summoning and Temporal Colleges together are as easy as it gets. Summon a demon or several, haste him, and put your opponents into stasis. Done. Works in any battle. You need a character with high constitution for that though. Otherwise you would have to wait too much between battles to recover stamina.

To be fair stealth is very, very powerful even if you don't combine it with traps.


Why'd you ever want to use demons over ogres? Honest question.

rpgcodex is full of autists
religious autists on top of that

First of all, I've never seen lemons or potatoes sold at either general or herbologist stores. Second, the electrolyte + metal plate recipe is better, as you make more charges per recipe, so you have to refresh shops less to get the same amount of charges.

The number of attacks per round?

That's because they're mostly a foragable resource from what I remember. Think random encounter or farm shrubs.


Wouldn't haste on both more or less equalize that? And why not go for summon creature or elementals if that's your main concern?

Because not every casting of stasis is successful and demons would kill faster than to be killed without stasis.

I know there are some lemon trees and potato plants in Shrouded Hills, but as far as I know, no other town or settlement has them. Also, never found any of that in random maps. I found metric loads of herbology and therapeutics ingredients out in the wild though.

I dunno, maybe they are somewhere obscure in the base game, but as far as I know, that schematic is only truly useful in the Vormantown module, there's lots of both plants in it.

That really doesn't make sense but whatever works for you. I mean, ogres are both statistically better and cheaper. And speaking of cheaper and better (((stun))) or (((entangle))) are more effective with the nature having the additional benefit of (((succour beast))) down the line.


I vaguely remember a few areas that have them, but yeah, it's probably a Vormantown meme.

None of this is necessary when you can just cast Disintegrate and instant-kill your target. If Fatigue is a concern at that point chug a potion. Fireflash is also an option.

Both of those ruin gear.

Your point? Majority of the time it doesn't even matter. Who cares if you "ruin" the "gear" of a fire elemental or a spider?

For everything else, there's DOG.

tech

I only ever played the game with a patch and I did fine with tech.

Wait, can you fireflash a fire elemental? Also that's antisemitic. Equipment doesn't matter and shit, goy please. And I'll take your dog and raise you seven vorpal bunnies

Mage

Easy game.

Probably not, but you CAN disintegrate it. It doesn't have drops anyway, neither do most of the wild animals, and if you are playing magic anything a machine drops probably doesn't interest you either.

Get the fuck out of here.

Meme builds can be fun in this game.

What?

I totally forgot about that, but yeah. You can throw any item you can pick up (assign it to one of the hotbar slots, same as a grenade). Assuming it's not some kind of explosive, it will do damage based on weight. There are some ridiculously heavy rocks that are part of some quest to move them.

Breaking things can be such fun sometimes.

Don't even need the quickness potion. Then go with throwing weapons and just kill everything without needing to move.

5000 stone, to be precise. I'm assuming that 1 stone is about 200 grams, looking at different item weights. It's definitely not the same measure of weight as the real-life stone. So a 5000 stone rock is about a ton.

Actually, no, I meant that a stone is most likely 20 grams, not 200. So divide by 10.

STFU or start making sense.

Of course, make sure you install ArcanumXNoNoise first.

No, that's exactly what I'm talking about, too much fucking junk to maintenance your shit when you can just buy a good sword/good armor and go samurai on everyone's ass.

the best melee weapons in the first half of the game are all tech too. Balanced Sword and Pyrotechnic Axe both outperform pretty much everything until you get the Iron Clan Hammer or the Sword (isle of dispair)

Once I figured out that you can stack the same buff, the game because quite silly and torturous until I found XNoNoise

Does this game have any romance options? I want to try actually finishing it this time, but I don't want to miss out on some elf booty and get stuck with Virgil if I pick a female.

Goodies get a qt elf GF. Baddies get a drow GF.

Does it matter if you are male or female though, is what I'm asking.

Yeah no homo stuff.

are they race restricted?
can I bone the elf with my half-ogre meat club?

You now have direct access to his merchant chest. All items sold to him appear in this chest, and every time his stock refreshes about ~2500 gold appears here (the gold moves to Ristezze's inventory when you barter with him)

As far as I know, he's the only shopkeeper that actually has a key to his chest. You can do a similar exploit on most other shops by lockpicking their chest. I'm not sure if they keep respawning after that and/or if you have to lockpick every time.

>inb4 patch 15 years later to "fix" that and keep up with current industry memes

I googled it for a second opinion, and apparently there is yuri anyway.

surely you mean undertones?

It's amazing how their forum is still aliveish so far.

I forgot about the REAL downside to a tech build. Obviously healing magic fails on you, but that's not a terrible problem when you have healing salves (and I don't think potions fail anyway). The problem is that NPCs are retarded and try to heal you anyway. As a result, a heavy tech character is going to want to avoid magic NPCs entirely (especially Virgil). However, that also means that they can't rely on party members to heal other party members. If you give an NPC a potion or salve he will use it IMMEDIATELY as soon as he sees someone missing one point of health. Either you get used to Virgil constantly failing on you and wasting all his fatigue, or you end up being the only one who can heal anyone in the party at all.

Well you CAN still fuck a (female) prostitute, or two. Or a sheep if you'd prefer.

Tech is more fun but it's complete ass to start with. Every time I roll a gun user I spend the first few hours rummaging in garbage cans like a hobo, trying to scrounge up materials for bullets - or looking for plants to make medicinal salves and sell it for money.

Then again, you can completely break the game by using the fate point from killing the bridge bandits to force a pickpocket on a certain NPC in Tarant, who has the second strongest gun in the game. However, because Arcanum is shit with critical misses, you're just going to end up blowing your arms off until you finally get skill points in firearms and advance it to expert. So lots of quicksaves/quickloads. That and DEX breaks combat.

Which gun are you talking about, because the Hand Cannon is far from second-strongest. It comes in behind the Elephant Gun, Droch's Warbringer, Blade Launcher, Tesla Gun, Tesla Rod, and Mechanized Gun, with only an average of 5 damage per AP. It's FAR from game breaking as well.

It felt to me like one of the strongest ones, just in balancing between being able to hit multiple targets a round, having decent range, and high damage. Good for when you're getting swarmed by rats, good for reducing RNG swing, and on top of that, it was pretty lightweight and only needed bullets instead of other ammo (such as charges). It ended up lasting me as a primary weapon until Vendigroth, which is almost the entire way through the game and also the point where combat became a joke anyways.

You might be interested in this
mediafire.com/file/tgh79p1b54dhk44/Muros Arcanum Weapon Database ver. 1.0.5.xls

I can only think of the hand cannon and the sharpshooter's pistol. The pistol is great because of it's accuracy and depending on the point you get into Tarant you might really need it. It's a must have if you don't go tech and still want to be a gunslinger.

if you want to break the game with fate points, you can give the cure for lycanthropy to the father of a warewolf, use fatepoint you just got to pickpocket it back and repeat for unlimited gold

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Anyone have a solution to a certain bug? Or two, rather:

The first is that, when having two enchantments up at once, to deactivate both, I had to do this really weird thing where I would have to turn off one (but it wouldn't turn off), then the other, then the first one again (this time it would).

The other was that the "build" menu somehow came up and wouldn't go away no matter what I did, and wouldn't let me close it, so I couldn't even play the game since I couldn't see anything.

The latter literally broke the game and I never got past the first town. Which is a shame, because it seemed nice until it literally became unplayable.

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Makes perfect sense considering Virgil's past.

CHA will shine immediately in the first town you go to, and you so need some combat skills (melee>guns) I suggest recruiting as many followers as you can as well.

Protip: it's CHA + Persuasion, baddie.

He is talking about the first guy you meet, and I don't think you can persuade him. I started a game with 3 persuasion and like 13 CHA, and I still could only avoid the fight by leaving it to Virgil.

Proceed directly to shrouded hills and recruit Sogg Mead Mug the halfogre drunk (requires charisma). Virgil and Sogg should be able to handle the bridge goons once you level them up by completing quests in the area, you can also help by throwing some grenades (no skill required) found in the cave at the crash site (backtrack after picking up Sogg)

After you leave Shrouded Hills, proceed directly to Tarant, and from there board the train to Ashbury and pick up Dog. Congratulations, you are now set for the rest of the game

You don't even have to fight them.

Can you avoid fighting them and still get the good ending for shrouded hills though (honestly not sure)? My point is that you can do anything you want (accomplish any ending) without needing to ever touch a weapon yourself.

To touch a weapons skill* Unskilled use of fixed-generated grenades is acceptable to me.

P sure you can.

Yeah you can convince them to leave.

Pretty sure you have to eliminate both Pollock and Maug gangs to get the best ending for the Boil. I am unsure whether there is a non-violent way to get that.

By that point though you can have a full party. Shrouded hills is the only real sticking point because you can't get more than Virgil and Sogg before you pass the bridge.

bump

Something I never realized is that your magical/tech aptitude is actually changed by your surroundings, it's not just a lore thing.

I thought it was a bug at first, since it kept changing for my whole party when walking around Tarant. Going near the train station shifts 20 toward tech aptitude, and going toward the magic shops shifts 10 toward magical.

Interesting.

Too bad Tech aptitude doesn't really do anything at all. Magic Aptitude is HUGE for using magic items and for spell effectiveness. The bonuses in ()s on a magic item are multiplied by the "available magic power" which is determined by apptitude, so a melee character might only have 50% for half the stats, or a tech character might get none at all. Spell power is determined by aptitude directly, obvioous for damage and healing, but spells like Unlocking Cantrip require a certain aptitude level (based on target) to work at all

Tech aptitude only determines your chance (or lack thereof) for critical failure using tech items. All you really need is 0 or higher and you are clear there.

Just wanted to point out, I've heard it said a lot that you reach max level around halfway through the game. This is only true if your player character does the majority of the party's damage himself. You get WAY more XP for doing damage than for kills (depends on enemy health, but I've seen it where I could get 3 whole bars off a single enemy for damage, but barely a tenth of a bar for the kill), so a diplomancer will probably struggle to level up at all except by completing quests and might not even get past level 40 by the end of the game unless he grinds heavily.

Tech aptitude is also like a defense against spells. I dunno if there are any battle environments that massively increase your tech aptitude, but it could really fuck up a mage character.

Probably vendigroth ruins

That's why I have some combat skill with my diplomatic character I am playing. I mostly rely on my teammates, but I do enough damage to get decent EXP.

Just saying that any damage they do is effectively lost XP. Doing damage yourself helps of course.

I'm already level 24, and my next quest is visiting the Wheel Clan. It's my first time getting this far so I dunno how far through the game I am, but I feel like I will hit the level cap before the end regardless.

whores don't count

Maybe. After that it's the elves, caladon, vendigroth, and thanatos before the void. Vendigroth is pretty heavy on XP.

On the other hand, Loghaire in the wheel clan is level 34 I think? So if you wanted to recuit him you would be close to 10 levels too low. Of course, Raven in the elf city is only level 32, and the dark elf bitch you can recruit if you are evil (or a master of persuasion) is 28, so the level curve for recruitables is kind of backwards.

Says who?


Don't sweat it. You'll more than likely be capable of wrecking anyshit once you get your masteries and or aptitudes rolling and those are easily done by ~30.

More vexing is that your tech inclined companions have their tech disciplines capped two tiers below the max. How to obtain fixed leveling up scripts for them?

they're a paid commodity , once you pay them you can do what you want with them so they don't count

I can't remember whether drog fixed that or not but I'd still suggest taking a look over nomutantsallowed

So are cooks. Are you suggesting you can't get satiated by a professional?

you installed the latest version of drog's patch and high res stuff right?

u wo