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KickStarter Lords of Xulima

ghostdog

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Eventually you'll get to do big damage with melee. You'll have to specialize to a specific type of weapon for each char. Stunning strike will eventually become OP. Bloody strike is good, (bleeding is OP with shuriken throw) and wounding strike may not seem that awesome at first glance but it can really weaken opponents. But indeed, early to mid game, mages are very useful.
 

T. Reich

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Finally gave this baby a spin and after clearing the first Temple I'm still playing and having fun.

Not many complaints so far, the sounds are some proper 1990s PC Speaker shit and the UI a bit derpy but nothing serious.

My only real gripe - and it's a big one - is melee weapons seem underpowered as all fuck. I'm around lvl 9 and my hardest hitting melee fighter hits for about 15 dmg with a badass 2H axe and my mage hits for 30+ with Stone Arrow. I have no idea how anyone can play this game without a mage. Melee weapons seem way off balance, as if having way too high requirements for the damage they do so fights with the beefier mobs resemble scratching a granite wall with an aluminum knife.

Or I'm doing something wrong, dunno. Apart from that game's grate.

You assume that the current balance of power would stay the same as in the very beginning of the game.

Protip - it won't.
 

Orobis

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This is a good game with great potential but it just drags on too long and can be a bit tedious. Shorten the length of the game and get rid of having to force the player to bring a long a toon (Gaulen). Let us make all 6 party members. I had to quit about 35 hours in after i killed the first major boss (or guardian?) than found out there was 3-4 more and just didn't have the motivation to keep going. Will play this again one day with a powergaming party, 3 mace barbs, mage and cleric should suffice.
 

Lady_Error

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I had to quit about 35 hours in after i killed the first major boss (or guardian?) than found out there was 3-4 more and just didn't have the motivation to keep going.

Same here. Also, it was a bit too formulaic for my taste. Each area had one castle with a bad guy, one witch house, one tower, exactly one settlement, etc. A little bit more unpredictability might have been nice.
 

cvv

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You assume that the current balance of power would stay the same as in the very beginning of the game.

Protip - it won't.

Sure but it's not really about the "very beginning". I'm like 12 hours in and for the majority of my time I felt I would've ZERO chance without a mage.

I was even quite lucky with loot, found a good axe and mace but the requirements were so high by the time I could use them they were already subpar. Maybe the problem is I followed various guides I found and was pumping mainly CON and SPD, with only splashes of STR and AGI. It's probably a bad idea. I'm trying a more even distribution now with my frontliners.
 

T. Reich

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You assume that the current balance of power would stay the same as in the very beginning of the game.

Protip - it won't.

Sure but it's not really about the "very beginning". I'm like 12 hours in and for the majority of my time I felt I would've ZERO chance without a mage.

I was even quite lucky with loot, found a good axe and mace but the requirements were so high by the time I could use them they were already subpar. Maybe the problem is I followed various guides I found and was pumping mainly CON and SPD, with only splashes of STR and AGI. It's probably a bad idea. I'm trying a more even distribution now with my frontliners.

The full game is like 80-100-ish hours long.

Weapons will eventually get much better than in the beginning, plus you will pretty much stop using default attacks and will 100% spam the much stronger special attacks.
Meanwhile, the enemies' elemental resistances will go up noticeably, while your spells' damage will go up at a slower pace, and the dmg-to-mana ratio will become super-horrible, so you will either have your casters sit back doing nothing half the time, or will spend a small fortune on mana pots.
Also, the main damage dealers in the game are not spells or melee attacks, but status effects: bleed, poison, burn. Shurikens are THE strongest weapon in the game if you have the character skilled to use them.
Endgame mages = trash mob aoe softeners, while frontliners with status effects dish out the actual damage.

The recommended stat point distribution is solid, but it also strongly depends on your party member role distribution. Some brawlers (especially in buff-heavy parties with paladins and clerics) can somewhat ignore CON and pump some STR instead. But MAX SPD on each level-up is mandatory for every character, NO EXCEPTIONS.
 

cvv

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. I'm like 12 hours in
In this game, it is the very beginning.

Maybe, relatively, but it's still 12 hours of absolute time of charging panzers with toy swords.

The recommended stat point distribution is solid, but it also strongly depends on your party member role distribution. Some brawlers (especially in buff-heavy parties with paladins and clerics) can somewhat ignore CON and pump some STR instead. But MAX SPD on each level-up is mandatory for every character, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Hm in the last two or three level ups I neglected SPD because I had to pump up that STR and AGI for requirements. Maybe the problem is everyone is recommending to wait with the herb collection until I max out Herbalism which seems prudent but then I had to raise them requirement stats manually.

Also - is being overweight a big problem? I found two awesome plate armors but it makes me so overweight I have -20% combat speed penalty. Problem is I just can't pump everything, I'd have to raise Armors every level up to keep up with loot weight.
 

ghostdog

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More combat speed > more armor

Being able to hit first, incapacitate your opponents and hit again and again, is what you want in order to have an easier time.

Don't worry about loot. There's a lot of loot in the game and vendors always restock after 3 days and good things pop up.
 

Orobis

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Hm in the last two or three level ups I neglected SPD because I had to pump up that STR and AGI for requirements.

You def. want to increase speed every level and the other in your primary stat unless it's for a big weapon/armor upgrade as needed. I found that you didn't have to worry too much about your back row armor wise and double so for weapons on mages. Try to sneak a point into CON between levels here and there but you really want most on your primary class stat but SPD every level for sure.

Also - is being overweight a big problem?

It's not that big of a deal in the earlier stages esp. for your back row, but for the front-liners (and eventually the rest) i wouldn't let it get too bad.
 

T. Reich

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Speed is king in LoX - you want to avoid anything that gives you speed penalties.

Early on, armor is not of great importance anyway. I don't really remember if putting points in it was necessary in the beginning. It's an ok skill dump in the midgame though. And only for front row brawlers who have it for cheap (1SP cost).
Armor-wise, you're much better off shop-hunting for armors with good arm/weight ratio, and plate armors are not good for that. You might want to focus on stat boost enchantments as well.

Do with Herbalism as you see fit, but maxing the skill first will definitely make you real powerful closer to mid-endgame.
 

cvv

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One more thing - do I have to worry about the dogs that hound you every few days? One was fine, now there are two and I can deal with them too but if it's four or five 120HP pieces soon it's gonna be a problem.
 

Berekän

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You can always run away from them, which I do most of the time since they hit my group like a truck.
 

Cadmus

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One more thing - do I have to worry about the dogs that hound you every few days? One was fine, now there are two and I can deal with them too but if it's four or five 120HP pieces soon it's gonna be a problem.
It's up to you, if you can't kill them then run. They can fuck you up real bad if you're coming back to restock supplies. I think reloading before the encounter can make it go away, it seems random on each reload.

I remember being fucking locked in the first area when the guards became hostile - no food, no money, nowhere to go and couldn't beat the guards. Took me such a long time to finally kill them to be able to get back into the town. Good times. This game was amazing despite the tedious endgame.
 

Grunker

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Awww man. I was gonna pick this up again but it turns out it doesn't use cloud saves, so my saves are lost. Damn.
 

roshan

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You assume that the current balance of power would stay the same as in the very beginning of the game.

Protip - it won't.

Sure but it's not really about the "very beginning". I'm like 12 hours in and for the majority of my time I felt I would've ZERO chance without a mage.

I was even quite lucky with loot, found a good axe and mace but the requirements were so high by the time I could use them they were already subpar. Maybe the problem is I followed various guides I found and was pumping mainly CON and SPD, with only splashes of STR and AGI. It's probably a bad idea. I'm trying a more even distribution now with my frontliners.

Many of the guides are written by complete idiots. CON is almost useless because towards end game, it matters absolutely nothing, what keeps you alive are clerics spamming regeneration spells (which you can do if you pump energy and take meditation, both things the guides recommend against doing). These guides also recommend pumping up the learning skill which towards the end game will give you perhaps 4 or five useless levels at the point where it ceases to have any real meaning. Meanwhile you have wasted a shit ton of skill points, and given up real useful skills, gimping your characters throughout the entire game in favor of some marginal benefit at the very end only appreciated by autistic sperglords.

The main effect of these guides written by utterly stupid self proclaimed "experts" is that the game becomes a chore. Your characters suffer from HP bloat, doing very little damage, and combat turns into a slow grind where everyone is slowly and boringly chipping away at massive HP numbers with small amounts of damage.

Warriors doing damage should keep pumping STR with every level. Then your melee will kick some serious ass. Oh yeah and don't forget to take the skill that improves your initiative for the fighters and barbarians. My characters who maxed it out rolled multiple attacks against the end boss before he even got one attack off (the same guides by the "experts" proclaim this skill to be useless). If you keep STR pumped you also won't need a single point in the armor skill.
 

T. Reich

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Call bullshit on your Learning diss.

What learning does is not measured in raw SPs. You're giving up a good few SPs alright, but you also level faster and that means three things:
1) at any given point of the game your chars' SPD and other stat values will be higher than if they didn't take Learning, giving them a bit of an edge in combat.
2) and their non-Learning skills will also be higher than it is expected, which also means more edge in combat.
3) and your chars will have earlier access to powerful skills, meaning that non-level scaled enemies will be less of a threat in general.

It's called balance - you can go either way, and both are legitimate and viable.
 

roshan

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Call bullshit on your Learning diss.

What learning does is not measured in raw SPs. You're giving up a good few SPs alright, but you also level faster and that means three things:
1) at any given point of the game your chars' SPD and other stat values will be higher than if they didn't take Learning, giving them a bit of an edge in combat.
2) and their non-Learning skills will also be higher than it is expected, which also means more edge in combat.
3) and your chars will have earlier access to powerful skills, meaning that non-level scaled enemies will be less of a threat in general.

It's called balance - you can go either way, and both are legitimate and viable.

See this is the problem, when you criticize the learning skill, all those who picked it feel obliged to defend it out of some sort of Stockholm Syndrome.

My current party without any investments in learning (in Cunavarn at the moment) is just absolutely chopping things up. Mainly because I've picked actual useful skills not +tiny% XP. If you happen to be a level ahead, you might have +2 speed. But what is the relevance of this when you can easily find items that give +3 speed? If you need to boost speed just stock up on such items. You can stack multiple such items on a character giving tons of speed.

On my last game that I completed, I had learning maxed on some characters, but towards the end I had so many levels that I actually stopped bothering to level my characters. I had extra, useless, superfluous levels on them. End game is so easy that gimping your characters early on for end game payoff is a totally and irredeemably stupid way to play.

Even if learning gives you at the end game 5 extra levels, what in the world is the relevance of this? 5 levels means +10 speed. But you can load up your characters with multiple items giving +6 speed. You can even farm those birds and get multiple eggs that confer permanent boosts to speed. Makes no sense having to pump huge amounts of skill points in a useless skill to gain useless levels and some points in speed that you can easily get in generous quantities from multiple sources.
 

Celerity

Takes 1337 hours to realise it's shit.
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I find it hilarious because I only used a Mage in my group once, in my very first run. After seeing how horrifically weak the class was, I gave it the boot and never used it again. Also, anyone mocking Learning is a mouth breathing fuckwit of the highest order. It's not one level, or two, or even five. It's about... 15, perhaps even 20. So not only does the skill point cost largely pay for itself, you also get stat gains and new skills sooner and make every level based mechanic stronger (spoiler alert: most mechanics in the game are level based... that includes a spell that instant kills the entire field you stupid fuck and only bosses are immune + a very few other enemies). If you take Learning, you're higher level than the enemies instead of lower. That also means your weapon statuses aren't reduced, so you violently rape bosses with > 1k DoT stacks and 100+ base damage a swing.

It's not like Prophet gear where you get a tiny ass xp bonus in exchange for crippling yourself with a useless item, it's you get 80% more experience from most of the game and you get those skill points back and you get other shit.

So here's how you Lords of Xulima correctly:

Every character levels Speed at every level. No exceptions.
Every low level character also levels Constitution at every level. No exceptions.
Once you have enough life everyone is 3 hit killable at worst (about 70 or so) melee characters begin leveling Str/Agi instead of Con. Caster characters continue leveling Con because Energy is a fucking useless stat, just drink a potion instead of spending 40-160 levels for a single extra spell you retard. This continues until you have 300ish life on everyone.
At 300ish life, you are 2 hit killed at worst. You also have Mass Regen at this point, so you don't die ever because the damage from the first attack is erased before the second connects. You can take whatever at this point, even lol Energy. It doesn't fucking matter. You don't need more life though, all it does is let you wait on a Mass Regen.
Melee characters should have at minimum +200 Attack. This requires either Weapons Master or Agility. This means you deal full damage against anything of 100 defense or lower, which is most enemies. More will counteract higher defense values. If you don't do this, Agi is actually a better offensive stat than Str because Str is only 0.7 damage a point and 1 attack is something around 1%. Since you'll break 70 damage around level 20 something or 30 something at worst, and before that you encounter high defense enemies without having the counteracting attack power this means you want the Agi early. Unless, again Weapons Master. Which is Soldier/Barbarian only. In which case you get that early instead.
Initiative is probably the most important stat in the game. You get 3-5 actions or more before anything else moves, and since you'll also have high speed you'll keep getting those actions.
 

roshan

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I find it hilarious because I only used a Mage in my group once, in my very first run. After seeing how horrifically weak the class was, I gave it the boot and never used it again. Also, anyone mocking Learning is a mouth breathing fuckwit of the highest order. It's not one level, or two, or even five. It's about... 15, perhaps even 20. So not only does the skill point cost largely pay for itself, you also get stat gains and new skills sooner and make every level based mechanic stronger (spoiler alert: most mechanics in the game are level based... that includes a spell that instant kills the entire field you stupid fuck and only bosses are immune + a very few other enemies). If you take Learning, you're higher level than the enemies instead of lower. That also means your weapon statuses aren't reduced, so you violently rape bosses with > 1k DoT stacks and 100+ base damage a swing.

It's not like Prophet gear where you get a tiny ass xp bonus in exchange for crippling yourself with a useless item, it's you get 80% more experience from most of the game and you get those skill points back and you get other shit.

So here's how you Lords of Xulima correctly:

Every character levels Speed at every level. No exceptions.
Every low level character also levels Constitution at every level. No exceptions.
Once you have enough life everyone is 3 hit killable at worst (about 70 or so) melee characters begin leveling Str/Agi instead of Con. Caster characters continue leveling Con because Energy is a fucking useless stat, just drink a potion instead of spending 40-160 levels for a single extra spell you retard. This continues until you have 300ish life on everyone.
At 300ish life, you are 2 hit killed at worst. You also have Mass Regen at this point, so you don't die ever because the damage from the first attack is erased before the second connects. You can take whatever at this point, even lol Energy. It doesn't fucking matter. You don't need more life though, all it does is let you wait on a Mass Regen.
Melee characters should have at minimum +200 Attack. This requires either Weapons Master or Agility. This means you deal full damage against anything of 100 defense or lower, which is most enemies. More will counteract higher defense values. If you don't do this, Agi is actually a better offensive stat than Str because Str is only 0.7 damage a point and 1 attack is something around 1%. Since you'll break 70 damage around level 20 something or 30 something at worst, and before that you encounter high defense enemies without having the counteracting attack power this means you want the Agi early. Unless, again Weapons Master. Which is Soldier/Barbarian only. In which case you get that early instead.
Initiative is probably the most important stat in the game. You get 3-5 actions or more before anything else moves, and since you'll also have high speed you'll keep getting those actions.

I rest my case. Majority of those who want to pump learning are autistic spergs or fools with Stockholm Syndrome.
 

cvv

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Also, anyone mocking Learning is a mouth breathing fuckwit of the highest order. It's not one level, or two, or even five. It's about... 15, perhaps even 20.

Most guides I've read mention about 10 more levels in the endgame. But if what roshan says is true and the endgame is piss easy that would be pointless anyway no? I have no idea what the endgame is like but I've been playing RPGs for 20 years and VAST majority of them suffer from the same derpy top-heavy difficulty curve.

I suppose it's largely dependent on what difficulty you roll with. What's yours roshan? I roll with Veteran and even tho I've picked up learning already I haven't invested much in it. Still time to dump it.
 

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