Legend of Grimrock 2 is worth playing now that there are some good mods!

[cvv]

Ok guise any hint for the two puzzles in the Twigroot Basement? I can't even. There's a room with a big sparkling orb and two blobs - fire and water. Killed both, tried shooting a fireball in the hole where the fire dude was and ditto for water. No dice. Tried the opposite, no dice. Tried a poison bolt and a lightning bolt, nope.

What about that other puzzle in the Basement, with two water tiles and a goodie beyond? There are two gargoyle heads on the sides above the water...and that's all I know.

 

[Andak Raïnor]

The two slimes in Twigroot basement are a fire and an air one .

Spoiler

So you need to shoot a fireball in the left receptor and a lightning bolt in the rigth one.

The puzzle with the two heads require

Spoiler

both the conjure ice spell to fill the water tiles and the teleportation spell to get past the heads (when you walk in front of them they close the door before the reward). Or you can just use the transfer spell and bypass all this mess!

 

[anvi]

Here is a video of that macro I was talking about. It is so nice for this game.

 

[cvv]

The two slimes in Twigroot basement are a fire and an air one .

Spoiler

So you need to shoot a fireball in the left receptor and a lightning bolt in the rigth one.

OMG, it seriously never even crossed my mind the other one could be wind. Constantly checking your premises seems to be the key to these games. The reward is awesome for my barb btw.

The puzzle with the two heads require

Spoiler

both the conjure ice spell to fill the water tiles and the teleportation spell to get past the heads (when you walk in front of them they close the door before the reward). Or you can just use the transfer spell and bypass all this mess!

Yeah, I suspected I can't do anything with this one yet. Gotta wait.

 

[anvi]

I could use a couple of hints too. There is a nice helm behind the locked door that says "Light key". I tried shooting my spit wand thing, and firing fireballs, lightning, frost, lightning grenades, hitting it with light weapons, the light spell, throwing torches at it, etc. Nothing works!

Also nearby is a secret tunnel leading to a secret outdoor area with a pressure plate that says. "Too skinny". I am assuming I have to make all my characters encumbered and go back there? I just want to check before I go travelling all over the world looking for junk loot.

 

[Andak Raïnor]

Light key:

Spoiler

just read the description of the dark bolt spell to understand what to do

Too skinny:

Spoiler

You need to have all your characters food bars filled when stepping on the pressure plate.

 

[anvi]

Thanks

I still can't get over how fun the game is with this mod btw. It is what I always dreamt of from this game but thought nobody would ever make it. I endorsed you on nexus and posted too, let me know if I can do any more.

 

[Andak Raïnor]

Thanks a lot for your feedback

It is nice to see that the mod feels more like a rpg with those spells. I always thought the "square-dancing" combat style of Grimrock was a little frustrating, at least for me, having a long past experience in MMO tanking

PS: something I would like to see is more let's play videos of the mod!

 

[cvv]

Yo Andak, have you considered creating a guide for the puzzles so you don't have to answer our questions one by one? I for one cannot stand not solving them all but my brain capacity is too feeble to do that. I NEED the answers :D

For example the puzzle near the Forgotten River crystal, in the secret area where the fire golem was - I actually opened that one but no idea how and I need to know. I just shot a few different projectiles into one of the holes and it opened (I don't think I shot anything in the other hole, which makes it even more confusing). Is there any hint to this one?

 

[Andak Raïnor]

I will do it one day, probably by copy/pasting the answers I made here and on Steam and Nexus (and with screenshots of the maps to help)

 

[anvi]

Thanks a lot for your feedback

It is nice to see that the mod feels more like a rpg with those spells. I always thought the "square-dancing" combat style of Grimrock was a little frustrating, at least for me, having a long past experience in MMO tanking

PS: something I would like to see is more let's play videos of the mod!

I should have done that from the start but I'll see what I can do. And yeah the square dancing thing is boring. I grew up with games like Eye of the Beholder so I'm used to it, but those games had healing so you didn't need to do it very much, you could mostly just tank. Grimrock reeeeeeally needed healing imo. I was curious if you had some MMO history, I have too. I think it is something RPGs have to live up to.

 

[cvv]

And yeah the square dancing thing is boring.

Really? I'd say it's many things, I always prefer TB combat, but boring? Unlike LoG1 this game constantly keeps you on your toes. Some enemies can strafe (crabs, twig dudes), some can attack sideways, some are so fast they can dance quicker than you (the wasps in Desarune). It's definitely never boring.

Btw I'm now in the cemetery on Hard and so far it's relatively smooth sailing. The only place I CAN'T even touch yet is the Herder's Den (and it's not that those mobs are super dangerous, more like there are just so many of them and I don't have the raw damage to push through them yet).

 

[cvv]

Andak Raïnor, dude, how much HP does Xarant have on Hard? 10 000

I'm tickling him with my people. Problem is my damage potential is close to maxed already (lvl 14), even if I wait 10 levels I don't see my guys hitting twice as hard. Plus he plays smart, never follows your dance. He just waits and the moment you move to his flank, he side-stabs you for 70HP or more. Problem is you can't wait since he periodically summons his HP spongy ghouls.

Seems to me this fight would be completely unfeasible on Hard without the Light spell (undead run for a while) but even then by the time I grind down the ghouls and put some little damage into Xarant he summons three more. I'd have to blow through my entire stock of mana potions and even then I'd bring him to maybe half health. And what then.

I seriously don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this fight.

P.S.: Also have you put the Lightning Bolt spell behind one of your puzzles? I think I should've found it by now (originally it was in the Cemetery, it's not there).

 

[Andak Raïnor]

Yes Lightning bolt has been moved to the Hub so players can get it earlier!

 

[Andak Raïnor]

If you have problems witf too many foes to handle don't forget there are plenty of crowd control spells. Also lvl 14 for the cemetery is very very low level in this mod.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

cvv try using the Time Bolt spell. It does Fire and Lightning damage, then sends the target into a "timeout" for a few seconds by teleporting it out, then teleporting it back in once the spell expires. That gave me time and space to work on his Ghouls, if needed. Otherwise I just tanked him and spammed him with lightning attacks. Ditto with his brother.

I'm mucking about in the Pyramid and the Medusa play rough, one successful gaze animation equals one petrified party member. Unfortunately I haven't found the "Protection from Petrification" spell so I have to pick my fights carefully. Freezing them and Time Bolting them helps loads, though.

 

[cvv]

Yes Lightning bolt has been moved to the Hub so players can get it earlier!

Just checked. Of course, the only scroll I somehow passed over in the Hub.

If you have problems witf too many foes to handle don't forget there are plenty of crowd control spells. Also lvl 14 for the cemetery is very very low level in this mod.

The spells are great, I could easily beat this dude just with the Light spell. It's cheap and effective for this fight. Problem is with energy. In my last try just now I've run out of my entire stock of mana potions (around 15) and I've brought him to about 40% of health. Well the only option is waiting and levelling some more, then we'll see.

(Btw how much HP does Xarant have on Hard?)

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Update: I decided to explore the castle, found 3 weapons which are SWEET.

First there's Aeldra's Rapier which seems to be the endgame weapon for Light Weapon fighters, giving bonuses to Dexterity, Accuracy and is a Dexterity-based weapon. Secondly there are two firearms, a Flintlock and an Arquebus. Both manabound. That doesn't mean that they use mana, but they do not require ammunition. That's not the cool part, the cool part is that they add the character's Willpower stat to their damage roll. My Ratling Alchemist does 49-104 damage with this thing, my Battle Mage would be in the 73-127 range. That's insane for a ranged weapon with no ammo requirements!

There are also new areas with puzzles relying extensively upon the new spells. You'll be using Swap and Transfer a lot. Be warned that there's a secret in there that requires a monster be kept alive, so look carefully before trying to pick off distant targets.

 

[Andak Raïnor]

Xarant has 7000 HP and Orul 9900 HP (at level 1!)

 

[cvv]

Spoiler

 

[anvi]

Get the Scythe, it does enormous damage on bosses, also the haste spell is great. And yeah the time travel spell is uber, my guys all regen so much, the several seconds of no boss is almost enough to regen all my guys to full, and I can just keep using it if I need to.

I think I am in the last quarter of the game =( Over half way for sure anyway.

Some of the bosses have huge HP and take ages to kill but I can kill them easily, I just get them in a gap so they can't move. I just keep Misdirection up all the time, so only my tank is taking any damage, and he barely takes any damage from even the biggest bosses. I can easily keep him healed, and my wizzies both have heals and they both regen mana quickly with the HP leach spell but also osmosis which spreads out hp and mana. So I can kill any boss by just tanking him and keeping my guys healed, and I can do that all day on full mana. So I just use some spells sometimes to speed it up but always leave enough for endless heals and misdirection.

That spell which enchants your gear, you can keep doing it and it gets better as you get higher skills/levels/something, so I redid all my gear and got even more stats. I also got a full set of super good gear on my tank now too, after getting the 2 teleport spells, I just travelled to all the puzzles I had missed earlier and got all the gear from them. He has about 350hp at level 14 but also 181 protection and big resists, and regens 32hp a minute.

I love this game now.... The is the Eye of the Beholder 4 I always dreamt of

 

[Unkillable Cat]

And...I'm done. Spent 40 minutes on the Lindworm boss fight and I'm not even gonna bother trying again, or contiuning.

You create a mod that introduces a lot of new spells, many of them neat and others not. Because of some of these spells, it is now possible to kill the bosses quickly and effortlessly, including the dragon boss. Your solution is the worst one possible: Jack up his HP without making any other changes.

The dragon boss is easily the most boring fight in the game, as it relies on timing and wasting time on killing minions while waiting for a window of opportunity to open to do damage against the boss. With such MASSIVE HP bloat as is going on here, we're talking about a fight that'll take DAYS in game-time and far too long in normal time. No one wants to slog through this.

The dragon fight is broken by default, you only made it worse by making it take much longer. This is a bad design decision on such a scale that it breaks the entire mod. The easiest fix at this point is to drop the shield and have the dragon be a constant factor in the fight, not just something that pops in for a few moments. At least then the HP bloat is justified. If this makes the fight too easy in your opinion, blame the spells you put in the mod.

My verdict for your mod is this: It's too much of everything. Too many spells, too many quick solutions to new problems, too many ways to exploit the spells, etc. It's a great showcase mod and really opens up new possibilities for the game, but it needs balancing work.

 

[Andak Raïnor]

The scaling system makes the boss also deal more damage. But it is true that only the stats are changed, not the fight itself. What level are your characters? (So I can calculate things in case I want to change the balance)

 

[cvv]

The scaling system makes the boss also deal more damage. But it is true that only the stats are changed, not the fight itself. What level are your characters? (So I can calculate things in case I want to change the balance)

I'd second Unkillable Cat for the undead twins boss fight and the rattling boss fight too. The rattling is very easy actually, the minions are dispatched fast enough, it's only those 10 minutes of kiting the cannon rat around the pillar that prolongs it unnecessarily. At that point you can't really lose, the fight is not a challenge anymore, you're just grinding the massive HP pool down, chip by chip.

As for the twins, as I said, they have way too much HP on Hard. Sorry but 9000 HP on level 1 (meaning around 15 000 when you actually fight them) is absurd. I put some good crits in Xarant, hurled a few spicy spells, looked up - and his health bar was hardly affected. That is too much, even for Hard.

You probably thought "people can use many powerful spells now" and that's true, god knows the vanilla is shamefully stingy with spells. But the spells are not THAT powerful, it's not like any of them do hundreds of damage. And more importantly, there's just a point where a fun and challenging fight (which the Xarant fight certainly is) becomes a grindy slog.

Fights should be fierce, brutal and short. I'd say cut the HP pools in half, remove HP scaling for bosses and increase boss damage. There shouldn't be a boss (maybe except the final one) with more than, say, 4000 HP on Hard.

 

[anvi]

I'd agree bosses have way too many hp. The rat boss I had to kite but all the others I have just tanked and spammed my spells as mana regen allows. It takes ages. I still love the mod though.