Lords of Xulima

Gilgamel_sl said:

It's okay. I feel some classes are underpowered massively, at least early. Pretty much all my damage came from my mage and barb. Gaulen, bard, thief did literally nothing.

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Melees just need good stats to do damage, once you get some items that give +str/agi their damage and special effects goes way up. My Gaulen cripples the enemies with the wounds his axe does and is one of my better dps'ers, thief doesn't hit that hard but daggers attack quickly so it adds up. Bard is ok later, early on the songs are too short to be very useful. I regret not having a mage though, I'm at lvl 19 and my team still has no AE or burst damage to speak of. Divine Summoner is sometimes great but enemies who do a lot of AE or attack the back row can kill off her summons and then she's completely useless. At least I have a paladin, a healer with infinite mana and AE heals and a huge group +def/evasion buff who melees decently well is great.

It's the usual CRPG annoyance - once you know how to make the perfect party you've played so long you can't bother to reroll.

Nwodaz_sl said:

It's the usual CRPG annoyance - once you know how to make the perfect party you've played so long you can't bother to reroll.

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Picked this up and enjoying it about on the same level as all the other recent CRPG's. Like MMLX and Grimrock 1/2 I spent about 5x as long making the ideal party as I did actually playing the game once I made the party. The first 10 levels or so are pretty brutal but after that it becomes pretty cakewalkish, even on the hardest difficulty.

If anyone picks this up let me save you some time.

- Don't play on hardcore difficulty. Seriously. The only thing that really changes is that you can't save outside of town and you have to spend 300ish gold every time you visit town to buy blessings to buff your guys to compensate for how shit you are until you hit level 8 or so.

- Bards are shit. Divine Summoners are shit. You don't really need a thief since you can brute force chests and if a trap kills you you shouldn't be in that area yet. Mages kinda blow late game. Paladins are strictly inferior to soldiers and arcane soldiers since the only way to make them useful is to build them for evasion and there are better ways to not die. Barbarians only usefulness really is having a lot of HP and that becomes meaningless around level 10.

- Best party I've found is 4x Arcane Soldier and a cleric. The Arcane Soldiers can stack burning damage really quick which destroys most early game enemies. Then you get wounding strike and max it around level 17 at which point you become unkillable. Wounding strike applies wounds to enemies you hit and if you wound an enemy enough it can't hit you anymore. Works on every boss.

- Another viable party is 3x soldier, 1x mage and 1x cleric. You get wounding strike earlier (can max it by level 12 instead of 17). The mage is there because late game they get an armor debuff that works well with soldiers.

- Have Gaulen run from every fight so he doesn't get a share of the xp. He is absolutely terrible no matter how you build him and getting your other 5 characters to level 10 as quickly as possible is key.

Bards are actually pretty damned good later on. The AE death thing works great on trash (and you fight a lot of trash) plus the all-buffs-in-one song actually is worth more than another melee or whatever.

Summoners don't totally suck but they aren't the best later on. It mostly depends on how you value the turn-enemies-into-cash guy though, most of the summons suck other than the healer very early on (who is useless later). Thieves on the other hand absolutely rape but mostly because shuriken are actually quite powerful. Mine was about tied with my Barb for damage and came out ahead on any bleedable enemy. I went maces rather than axes last run though so results may vary.

Gau actually is pretty good in that window where poison strike is maxed up until its damage becomes crap comparatively. I just use him as a utility soak for movement, hunting and other silly shit. Having him flee might work out better I suppose but I maxed learning on everyone asap and ended up well out-levelling everything anyhow.

I got distracted by Baldur's Gate EE but this wasn't bad. Doubt I'll ever go back to it. Damn you Steam sales!

Problem with bard is you have to suffer through 30 levels of them being entirely useless and you already have dead weight in the form of Gaulen. By having Gaulen retreat from every fight your other 5 guys level faster and that's far more important then the meager damage he brings for a few levels. 4x arcane soldier is just brutal killing speed. Not really viable on hardcore though because you need maces early game to survive reliably.

Divine Summoner I really tried to like but if you build your party right you just don't need that much money.

Got this recently, and playing on veteran difficulty it's really brutal. I didn't want to duplicate any classes, so I went with:
arcane soldier, paladin, thief
mage, cleric, gaulen

Been having issues early on with accuracy, I miss way more than I hit in fights. I'm probably in the wrong area, but trying to fight the mushroom ambushes in the forest at level 1 isn't working so well, especially since if I rest more than once or twice, I'm totally out of food and get the hungry debuff or whatever. I enjoy a good challenge, but man it feels like the devs went overboard.

Shrooms you shouldn't really fight until about level 3. There's a rat cave near the shrooms that you should clear out first. Then there's a bunch of goblins out the west gate. If you kill all of those + all the random encounters you should be level 3. One of the dudes in town should be giving you quests for this.

Don't be afraid to use blessings either. The cleric chick in town will buff you with +5 of any stat for some gold. They make the early game significantly more tolerable until you can start affording +stat gear from the vendor. It's almost required on hardcore difficulty.