Monocause said:
What difficulty level have you chosen, 1eyed? I'm pretty sure that on hard crushing prison wouldn't always work. Sometimes it just dealt spirit damage without the hold effect. It worked like that always on 'big' enemies too (like ogres, dragons etc) and sometimes would fail on smaller ones, even the whites. I also remember that one of my party members also received spirit damage from it without being held. I'd guess that it has something to do with magical resistance stat.
I'm playing on Hard.
Monocause said:
I'd like you to post your source on no-save crushing prison to substantiate your claims. I'll also check it out myself in-game tomorrow.
Spell description, and the fact that only a select few bosses have shrugged it off (without 'Resisted' popping up).
Monocause said:
I'd also be glad if you either gave counterarguments about other things or admitted that you're wrong.
Hmm. Let me get some about combat:
I tested out a Rogue wearing nothing but Massive armor. At higher levels you must consume about 20 mana mushrooms quickly pausing and unpausing the game to recover all of your stamina. Although said mushrooms are very cheap and numerous, it's not a viable strategy as I thought. Still, I curiously found out you can competently waltz around in Medium to Massive armor and pull lots of special moves for about 1/3 of the fatigue penalty if you refrain from wearing Massive
Body armor. Furthermore, the only killer Talent you need to consistently deal incredible amounts of damage is Momentum which requires only an upkeep. I had a Rogue using the Blood Armor (best Armor in the game, DLC - you start with it and the other pieces are available at camp) at about level 10 backstabbing with Starfang (best Sword in the game - acquired after completing DLC Warden's Keep) and Silveredge (good Dagger - DLC) while Momentum was activated and he was nigh unstoppable. I didn't even need to pull off Whirlwinds nor Punishers. Funny you require to get the DLC for both. I wonder why is that...
I stand firm by what I said about the mage build. There's no good reason not to grab all of the instagibbing level 1 and 2 spells. Fling spells around like a maniac and quaff Lyrium potions like you were playing Diablo. It's pretty mindless and extremely effective. As for them wearing armor, just pop 8-10 points into Strength and wear the Light to Medium ones. You can get good armor bonus that way without getting that much of a fatigue penalty. Since you don't need potions to restore mana off-combat, trust me, you'll end up with tons of them during encounters; which pretty much covers which of the crafting skills is the obvious best (as if it wasn't from the beginning).
Cunning contributes to armor penetration, but damage is still minimal if you go with daggers (which is what you would use in a Dex+Cun build). With Strength you get the benefit of wearing uber armor
and longswords. It's a no-brainer.
And now for a very interesting story:
Force Field and Crushing Prison are overpowered. In fact, I had one instance against Majorlaine when the latter was used against my character (I had a 100 mental resistance mage fail the "check") and another random companion by two instaspawning mages effectively reducing my party to half, leaving the other two fending off a couple of instaspawned 800 HP fighters and Majorlaine's instastun song. The game just boiled down to exploiting the extremely dumb AI: as the battle started I immediately went to the smaller room in the back, the fighters blindly rushed in one by one as I herded them
while the rest stayed back, killed them, lured Majorlaine in using the same cheap basic exploit, killed her, and then went for the other two mages (who once again paralyzed my 100 mental resistance mage and Morrigan).
In between the minifights I waited to regenerate my health and mana to full. I was very,
very tempted to uninstall the game for rewarding such dumbfuckery.
) . You may also note that I saw the mention of Friendly fire being possible. The skill just seems unreasonably overpowered, especially comparing it to crushing prison (and considering you can use them both to lock down 2 people). Of course, lower level spells significantly outclassing the higher level ones happens in other cases, but not nearly as much. 2 spell points to disable anything? Yes please.
