Gothic II: NotR - requesting build advice

[MasPingon]

What always stopped me from using it is the fact that it's unique. I doubt there is another scroll with this spell, I was always saving it just in case. But you are right, it's a bit too overpowered.


Thinking about it, it's not. It suppose to be this way, it's like a "rampage" button you can use only once.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

There's also the fact that it's a bit difficult thing to use in towns. Also those lighthouse bandits are easy to take apart if you walk in on them while you yourself are in bandit armour. You can even talk to them, though all they'll say is Fuck off.

 

[subotaiy]

Nothing beats summoning 8 armies of darkness to get that sweet revenge on the Old Camp at the end of G1 in terms of cheesiness.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Eh, whacking them with normal weapons is just as fun. If you can stop most of them from running.

 

[cvv]

Ok, while googling I just came across a mention that you don't gain HP on level-ups while in a beast form. That would be a sensible tradeoff to the OPness of the spell.

Can anyone confirm?

What always stopped me from using it is the fact that it's unique. I doubt there is another scroll with this spell, I was always saving it just in case.

Ah so there's just one in the whole game? Seems odd then it's so dirt cheap (only 200 bucks).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Never bothered with it, though now that you mention it, sounds like something to try whilst I make my way to the Valley of Mines.

 

[Hobo Elf]

It's a bug and not a real trade off

 

[Murk]

Hrmm I recall there being multiple copies? Maybe I'm just on crack tho...

Dragon Snappers are the single strongest 'monster' in the game not counting trolls, Fire Lizards are pretty damn strong too (their attack, anyway).

I recall going to the add-in area underpowered and being unable to actually damage Raven during the fight. Because he hits you with the magic damage that can't be blocked, I was unable to rely on just dodge/parrying him and wittling his HP down. I ended up using a scroll to transform to Fire Lizard and ended up wrecking his shit.

Side-note; there are bugs about equipped items when ou transform/transform back. It auto-equips the most powerful item so if you transformed with a weaker item then shift back to human, you may get bugged with having 2 of the same weapon equipped. This really only applies to the magic weapons (you use a regular xbow cuz you dont want to waste your magic bolts, but it auto equips the magic xbox on you).

Also, if you have any "bonus to stat" effect, like belt= armor combos, then you may permanently lose an amount of that stat.

It is possible to have your natural state be a negative on defense.

Side-note; no one attacks lambs/sheep. If you find a 'transform into sheep' scroll, save it and use it to scout areas you are curious about.

 

[A user named cat]

Dragon Snappers are the single strongest 'monster' in the game not counting trolls, Fire Lizards are pretty damn strong too (their attack, anyway).

Larger enemies like trolls may have been strong but they were so easily exploitable. I recall doing this exact thing a couple times before I found it incredibly unfulfilling and far too cheap:

 

[Murk]

Oh yeah, I kill all of 'em way before you're "supposed" to.

Note, goblins use the same tactic on you :3

But my comment was meant for more of a "the reason why the dragon snapper transform is so OP is because it's literally the top of the food chain not counting giant monsters/bosses"

 

[A user named cat]

I know but I haven't played through in years and you just reminded me how easy it was to cheap shot spam all the tougher enemies. I also remember baiting stupid orcs from their packs and killing them one at a time even while underpowered. Always bothered me how you can wipe out their entire presence and when you move on with the main storyline, everyone's still talking about the orc threat. Which obviously no longer exists.

Divine Divinity had this same problem where you could massacre every orc on the entire map before moving the plot along, and the dialogue/story were no different than if you hadn't done anything noteworthy yet. I guess the devs didn't account for players pulling such tactics but they should have had some precautions in place or even respawns if need be.

 

[Murk]

Well, in G2 it is assumed that the orcs outside the castle are just the current occupying force and that there are more behind the wall (space dwarf thing not withstanding), so really you just took out the guards and the main army is still there.

If you opt to do the quest for Torlof to keep the Paladins busy, new orcs spawn as well so I guess there's an implication of "more orcs are coming" but for obvious gamey reasons you don't see them until triggered. I guess having dialog "oh, the orcs outside are thinned out or gone" would have been easy but it's a minor nitpick.

DD had a bigger issue; when you walk into the reserve fort and the soldiers get brainwashed. You massacre them all and walk out for some other guards/soldiers to just say "sup" or "on yer way citizen".

 

[ALchymist]

Dragon Snappers are the single strongest 'monster' in the game not counting trolls, Fire Lizards are pretty damn strong too (their attack, anyway).

Larger enemies like trolls may have been strong but they were so easily exploitable. I recall doing this exact thing a couple times before I found it incredibly unfulfilling and far too cheap:

Never so true!

 

[MasPingon]

Dragon Snappers are the single strongest 'monster' in the game not counting trolls, Fire Lizards are pretty damn strong too (their attack, anyway).

Larger enemies like trolls may have been strong but they were so easily exploitable. I recall doing this exact thing a couple times before I found it incredibly unfulfilling and far too cheap:

Dark Souls in a nutshell

 

[himmy]

I'm replaying Gothic 2 NOTR right now and, for some reason, the quest where Thorben deems you to be honorable (IIRC it was paying of a debt for that lady in his house) doesn't start. The Internet says it should start with that Matteo fellow, but I think he was kind of bugged from the beginning, cause I didn't even ask him about becoming Bosper's apprentice when Bosper said he's ok with it.

Anybody have any clues on how to start that quest or, barring that, the next easiest way to learn lockpicking? I'm 20+ hours into the game and I'll have to revisit all the locked chests that I couldn't open, so I'd like to learn it before moving to to the Valley of the Mines, to minimize my backtracking.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Join Thieves guild? Either help thieves send them to jail and get an invite.

I think you should've complete that quest before being a citizen. After you become someones apprentice the others wont give you quests about that.

 

[himmy]

Forgot about the Thieves Guild! Gonna check it out, thanks.

Also, I thought that the whole thing about "every master has to give his approval" was that it kind of forced you into all those quests.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Forgot about the Thieves Guild! Gonna check it out, thanks.

Also, I thought that the whole thing about "every master has to give his approval" was that it kind of forced you into all those quests.

Just 4 of 5 will do.

 

[cvv]

Ok, NotR finished, jesus christ what a long, long game. Maybe almost too long. But extremelly enjoyable.

As always, when I loved something, I rush to the internet with the urge to report what I didn't like about it. So the most annoying little detail that literally drove me up the ceiling was the inter-city banter, you know, the constant stream of banal shit boring utterances like "That's what I said!" or "Well, that's not my problem" etc. I ended up hitting the MUTE button ony my keyboard as soon as I arrived to a town. What an unfortunate attempt to simulate stock conversation. But maybe it's just me, I'm a bit ocd about things like this.

The second thing is a bit more serious but again, it's probably a common problem of all great RPGs - the power curve. I don't remember a RPG where the game stayed challenging until the very end and Gothic 2 is no exception.

I don't know if the decision to change the stat progression to the 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 system was a particularly good one. The consequence is you're saving up all your stone tablets and permaboost potions while very slowly raising your stats just with your LPs, by a few points every three levels or so. That translates into the game being heartily challenging up to the point where you raise your main stat with a trainer for the last time (usually from 89 to 94) and then you just haul it up by 50 points, equipping the most epic weapon and basically faceroll the rest of the game without any challenge at all.

Sure, you can say that's what I get for this sort of metagame minmaxing and you'd be probably right but still, it just is the rational behavior in the given circumstances. If you gulped down all stat boosting potions as you found them you'd behave deliberatelly ineffectively and that seriously screws up with a lot of people's ocd. One thing is sure though - if I ever replay NotR, I'll be doing exactly that, even if it means I won't reach the stat requirement for the best weapons (160 dex for Dragon Bow for example).

And the third gripe is the story, which is pretty banal shit bland generic fantasy fodder compared with the plot and premise of Gothic 1, which has some very original and interesting aspects, despite the part where you're the Chosen One bound to slain an ancient evil, yawn. Sadly, there's absolutely nothing interesting about the G2 story and the addon is even worse in that respect. Luckily the game is so addictive and the hand-crafted world so immersive it almost doesn't matter.

Anyway, next up in my PB run is Gothic 3, I'm extremelly looking forward to this one, I've waited fucking years for the game to be reasonably patched and I'm extremelly curious if I'm gonna agree with the consensus or the VD's review

 

[Revenant]

The Codex consensus is wrong while VD's review is right, I most definitely state with all possible credibility. Have been replaying G3 for the n-th time recetly, BTW. A great game. The best game ever made, to be sure. Fuck you haters.

 

[cvv]

The Codex consensus is wrong while VD's review is right, I most definitely state with all possible credibility. Have been replaying G3 for the n-th time recetly, BTW. A great game. The best game ever made, to be sure. Fuck you haters.

I'm pretty confident I won't hate it but we'll see if I love it as much as NotR. Been watching a few minutes of gameplay on YT and I can at least say compared to G2 it looks absolutely gorgeous.

Anyway since you seem to know your way around G3, any tips, anything I better should know before I start? I don't mind beforehand metagaming tips since due to a huge backlog and relatively little time I can never say I'll get around to a second walkthrough of any game I play.

 

[Revenant]

For a practical tip, consider this: don't invest into melee combat, as it's pretty broken. If it's your first playtime, invest into ancient knowledge so you can get mana regeneration as soon as possible, afterward the game will be a cakewalk for the most part. If you're more of a larper, invest into hunting skill instead of magic, but you will have to play your game action RPG-like. But basically Gothic 3 is the Ultima 10, just play it any way and observe the consequences and be happy for your character making the right decisions as you go.

 

[Tigranes]

My NOTR playthrough has stalled. Very strangely, I'm finding myself wanting to jump to Gothic 3 in a way. That's not to say G3 is better, because it's not. But I really do think they are both flawed but good games with their own strengths.

When I first played NOTR it took a while to get proficient at combat, so I was running away from a lot of things, getting killed by a stray wolf and having to reload 15 minutes back because I didn't expect it, going back and forth and back and forth scrounging the XP and gold to try and get survivable. I loved it. But that kind of gruelling gameplay loses its sheen after a while when you already know where everything is. Of course, now I am, I think, reasonably good at PB combat, and my level 3-4 character was able to freely bash low-level enemies and roam mostly safely in militia / mercs / tavern areas. At which point you realise, man, there are a lot of field raiders and goblins you have to get through before you can cast any spells, go toe to toe with any orcs, or anything like that. There's a very delicate and particular confluence of features and difficulty that makes NOTR so challenging yet addictive, and I feel like maybe I'm done with that now.

The thing with G3 is that there's a lot more different content that is packed into the world that you begin accessing at a good pace, if you know what you are doing. If you know how its combat works you don't have to spend hours in the Cape Dun area first, you can roam across a lot of the world and keep things fresh.

G3 melee combat isn't broken with the community patch, well, I mean there are exploits in every PB game, but it's possible to play melee and get along and have fun. It's also the most viscerally challenging.

 

[cvv]

Good thing you brought up melee combat. I have a question about that.

My first playthrough of vanilla G2, looong time ago, was firemage. My second now, with NotR, was pure ranged. And both times I was thinking - how in the hell people play melee in those games? What do you actually do when 3 Orc Elites descend on you and two Shamans are pummelling you with fireballs from afar? I suppose it's easy with animals, I've seen a video of a guy killing a Dragon Snapper with a lvl 1 character. But the Orcs and Lizardmen? If they're in tightly packed groups you can't lure away just one of them, they usually draw swords and lunge at you en masse. How do you fight more than one Orc Elite or a Lizardman as a melee? And how do you fight Skeletons? I tried to kill them with my Master Sword as a Ranged Merc and they seemed impossible to defeat.

If those fights are really as gruelling as I imagine them to be, I definitelly see Tigranes' point.

(The only PB melee char I played was a Bandit in Risen 1 and I remember having a lot of fun because in Risen 1 you don't have to fight swarms of extremelly tough mobs at once, like you do around the castle in G2.)

 

[himmy]

Even at higher levels it is almost impossible to fight NPCs and some of the humanoids without using block constantly, especially since the chances they're gonna crit-kill you in one blow are quite high.