Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Null Null]

Pool of Radiance guide updated to v1.50: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564785-pool-of-radiance/faqs/73869

• Added link to Null Null's single-character Let's Play.

Flattered, man. Thanks!

 

[newtmonkey]

I have a question about dual classing. My party (taken from Pool to Curse and then to Silver Blades):

Human Fighter
Human Fighter
Dwarf Fighter/Thief
Human Cleric
Human Magic-user
Human Magic-user

I'm finding that my cleric is already pretty useless 99% of the time. I rolled decent attributes for her but she is a poor fighter with only one attack. I find that the only cleric spells I use are Bless, Prayer, and Protection from Evil for tougher battles, since the Cure Wounds spells are so unreliable.

Would there be any benefit to dualing the cleric to a fighter (to get a second attack? would that even work) or mage (even though I already have two pure human mages)? If so, when would be the best level to switch to the other class?

 

[Dorateen]

What about Hold Person? It should be fairly reliable and you get up to three targets? Some of the higher level spells like Blade Barrier cover multiple squares, and the Heal spell is always a welcome addition.

 

[octavius]

You should be able to cast at least one lvl 7 spell (Ressurection, Restoration) before dualing. But depending on just how long it will take to get the Cleric abilties back, I'm not sure if it's worth it. And you would still be limited to blunt weapons.

 

[newtmonkey]

Forgot about Hold Person and Heal, I use those too. I don't think I have Blade Barrier yet, will keep that in mind

Is it better to just stay pure cleric then? Or get a level 7 spell slot then dual to fighter? I understand that I would need to get to my cleric level +1 as a dual fighter before I get access to my cleric abilities again. I understand also that some things (saving throws?) are based purely on level, but what about cleric abilities? Is a, say, level 30 cleric any better than a level 20 cleric at doing cleric stuff?

 

[octavius]

Well, saving throws stop improving at one point; before lvl 20, I think. At one point all you get is an extra 2 HP and maybe some spell slot(s) per level.

 

[newtmonkey]

In that case, I might wait until I get a level 7 slot, then dual class my cleric to fighter. I don't think I'll miss the cleric spells too much for now. On the other hand, I don't think melee combat will really matter much in Pools? My understanding is that combat in Pools is all about magic-user spells.

 

[octavius]

Depends on the enemies. You'll need a mixture and brains and brawn (and backstabbing).

 

[weirwood]

I understand also that some things (saving throws?) are based purely on level, but what about cleric abilities? Is a, say, level 30 cleric any better than a level 20 cleric at doing cleric stuff?

Saving throws also max out at some point. Level 17 for fighters, 19 for clerics and 21 for thieves and magic-users. One thing 1st edition AD&D has, is that caster levels also reduce enemy magic resistance against their spells. That's highly relevant for mages, but less so for clerics. It might affect blade barriers. And you get more spells per level at least until level 29, I believe.

 

[Null Null]

Man, I leave for a week and people are talking about dual-classing away their only cleric?

Your party is F, F, F/T, C, M, M. If we're talking Curse or Secret, you will have adequate fireball-spamming ability and can spare the extra Haste spells to boost your fighters to deal with magic-resistant monsters. No cleric means no healing except by resting, which means the Fix command becomes suddenly less useful--this is going to remove the expedient of resting out a quick Fix in more-dangerous areas that allow a little resting.

But Pools is a different animal. Blade Barrier wasn't even coded in until then--you should get it on transferring characters--and will make your cleric much more useful offensively, as it doesn't have elemental resistances like cold, electricity, or lightning (making it useful against Bits of Moander), can be used to kill any non-magic-resistant monster as monsters are too stupid to move out of it, and can be used to shape the battlefield as monsters will avoid entering it. Also, the mortality rate is much higher in Pools and a cleric will be necessary to resurrect characters killed by Slay Living spells, beholder death rays, and just the much heavier damage enemies can dish out. (And yup, MR is adjusted by level for both clerics and mages, and spells go up by level up to 29.)

Honestly I'd leave your party as is. I think you're already a little mage-heavy (you have two characters that aren't much use in hand-to-hand) but it is fun to throw those fireballs around. If you want you could dual-class one of the fighters to cleric after they hit 17, but you will have a lot of grinding to do. It might even be worth it.

Dualling one of your mages to cleric is generally not recommended as opposed to the alternative (reason being the character keeps the HP gained at lower levels where all the HP is acquired, so you wind up with a cleric with many fewer HP), but might make sense here if you dualled a fighter to mage as well. Plan on lots of grinding if you do this--the mage->cleric will be forever limited in their maximum mage level, which will make them much less effective against Drow and Pets of Kalistes--but it is an option.

 

[newtmonkey]

After much thought and taking all the advice I've received into consideration, I think I will probably keep my party as is. One last possibility I am considering is to dual one fighter to cleric, and my cleric to fighter. The plan there is to level my F/C up throughout the rest of SotSB to get decent healing spells, and get my C/F up to a somewhat decent fighter level. I guess the downside would be that I might need to do some grinding in PoD to get both characters up to speed?

 

[Null Null]

You would need grinding. The other downside is the C->F is going to be under-HPed, which is a problem for a front-line fighter.

If you dual the F to C and you are worried about Pools of Darkness you'd probably want to wait until at least level 13 to get the two attacks per round; of course then you'll have to grind quite a bit in Secret.

My four-game party was: F, F, F, F/M/T, C, M.
I then dualled a fighter to mage in Secret at level 13 and the second fighter to cleric in Pools at level 17.

 

[octavius]

The ultimate character is a Ranger/Mage. Unlike Fighter/Mages they can wear armour while casting spells, although that's not a practical problem once you get Bracer AC 2 and Rings of Prot +4.
When I completed Pools of Darkness my F/M was last man standing. He had 2 APR and was able to cast DBF. And Mirror Image was a life saver.

 

[pjs]

I just did a test run, continuing from GATEWAY to CURSE; with imported characters, I played without a mage until getting rid of the first bond (Dracandros). It was reasonably easy with so much fighting power even without haste and other buffs (I skipped only the room full of otyoghs and the drow cleric and mage quarters). Then I went to Shadowdale dungeons, developed the rangers to level 10, switched one to mage and grinded it up on a good start. I don't recall if went all the way to L11 there or whether I continued with the bonds quests. At any rate with all the superb warriors (now also boosted with enlarge), one cleric and one dual class ranger/mage, the rest of CURSE went very smoothly.

I also played through SECRET again. Very soon the cleric got to L12 (ie. access to two heals), I dual-classed it to mage. Now the healing was at the hands of my two paladins, I had to wait until the cleric/mage reached mage level 13 (ie. 1.125M xp); this was about the same time as paladins got to level 14. To speed up the process (also after switching the paladins) I also did some XP grinding. Drider Base fire giant section seemed ideal for this. Just rest 3-4 days in the right place (a certain corridor provided ideal battlescape properties) and along comes a patrol of 5 fire giants and some hellhounds, which gives you about 10,000 xp. The battles are so easy that I ran them through with Quick mode and maximal speed with melee weapons only; essentially only Vala, my ranger/cleric, and cleric/mage took down the enemies because the other four were still developing as their mage class. Each battle took about 15 seconds, and you could typically Fix right after it (and even if not, the party could take down a couple of additional patrols). Essentially this meant that you could get about 1 million XP in about an hour (including running back to the town and scribing new spells etc). Maybe it would have been possible to grind less, but then the game would otherwise required way more attention towards the end. Now I could just run through most battles towards the endgame with auto, just having to take note if there were spellcasters or some more dangerous enemies.

So if you are interested in maximising the power of your characters in POD, it is actually possible to start with 2 paladins, 3 rangers and 1 cleric in Gateway, run through Curse and SSB and eventually have 4 warriors of two attacks per round, 1 warrior with 1,5 attacks per round, one about L12 cleric (the only drawback here is no direct access to restoration), and all of these dual-classed to mages that get more and more powerful as the game progresses.

For the sake of curiousity, I also completed POD with this party w/ Champion difficulty. Everyone ended up as level 31 mages (before the final battle). The intial levels were 2 x L14 paladin, 1 x L10 ranger, 2 x L15 ranger and 1 x L12 cleric. POD seemed significantly easier with a setup where every character was able to cast the most important and powerful magic-user spells.

The most curious thing was that when everyone had a Globe of Invulnerability in major battles, many monsters ceased to use their special attacks completely or almost completely (for example, dracoliches and blue minions never used their lightning attack) and beholders couldn't do a thing. In some unfortunate cases, a pet of kalistes managed a disintegrate attack. In the final three battles, most of the characters didn't even get hit. Probably some shortcuts have been taken when implementing some of these features (they are implemented as Level 3 lightning bolts?) and game doesn't use anything except melee attacks. Out of several test runs, in the last final battle the green dragons breathed acid only once or twice (not sure why).

 

[Null Null]

So if you are interested in maximising the power of your characters in POD, it is actually possible to start with 2 paladins, 3 rangers and 1 cleric in Gateway, run through Curse and SSB and eventually have 4 warriors of two attacks per round, 1 warrior with 1,5 attacks per round, one about L12 cleric (the only drawback here is no direct access to restoration), and all of these dual-classed to mages that get more and more powerful as the game progresses.

For the sake of curiousity, I also completed POD with this party w/ Champion difficulty. Everyone ended up as level 31 mages (before the final battle). The intial levels were 2 x L14 paladin, 1 x L10 ranger, 2 x L15 ranger and 1 x L12 cleric. POD seemed significantly easier with a setup where every character was able to cast the most important and powerful magic-user spells.

The most curious thing was that when everyone had a Globe of Invulnerability in major battles, many monsters ceased to use their special attacks completely or almost completely (for example, dracoliches and blue minions never used their lightning attack) and beholders couldn't do a thing. In some unfortunate cases, a pet of kalistes managed a disintegrate attack. In the final three battles, most of the characters didn't even get hit. Probably some shortcuts have been taken when implementing some of these features (they are implemented as Level 3 lightning bolts?) and game doesn't use anything except melee attacks. Out of several test runs, in the last final battle the green dragons breathed acid only once or twice (not sure why).

That's a good party (if you're willing to do the grinding), and the ranger/mage is super-powerful as Octavius says. (I might have had a cleric instead of one of the rangers, but hey, you beat it on Champion.)

Beholders' longest-range attack is 7 and they have a move rate of 3 (that's why standing far away and shooting arrows was always the smart strategy if you didn't think you could wipe them out right off the bat in melee).

The dracolich/blue minion thing is interesting--they both have the lightning dragon breath specab in the monster record. I suspect as you say they are using the lightning bolt spell code somewhere (back in Death Knights the blues, as opposed to blacks and reds, could target you at any distance). I remember ages ago when hacking FRUA monsters with dragon breath and beholder attacks wouldn't target an opponent with an MR over 120 for some reason.

 

[Butter]

Has anyone ever encountered infinite spell slots? In PoR my F/MU can memorize 25/25 spells, and memorizing them doesn't actually cause the number to go down. I'm not using GBC.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That's a new one to me. On c64 if you kept 1/2 your arrows or bolts you could end up with weird gear appearring either on top or bottom of inventory by breaking the max slots or something. It depended kn what was either on top or bottom. I'm sure that one is documented. I ended up with a magic decanter one time that gave huge ac bonus snd inflicted a lot of base damage.

 

[Butter]

Has anyone ever encountered infinite spell slots? In PoR my F/MU can memorize 25/25 spells, and memorizing them doesn't actually cause the number to go down. I'm not using GBC.

As a follow-up to this, all my characters' portraits have disappeared from their character sheets. I had just finished the basilisk in the library and dismissed a hireling, but I don't know why that would affect it.

 

[Null Null]

Portraits are only displayed in town. They didn't have the space to put the pictures on all 8 disks. We are talking some serious space limitations--game's from 1988.

Infinite spell slots, yeah, that's a bug.

 

[Butter]

Can someone confirm Paladins use Fighter ApR advancement (bonus at 7 and 13)?

 

[Cael]

Can someone confirm Paladins use Fighter ApR advancement (bonus at 7 and 13)?

Only Rangers have a different ApR (8/15) in GB games. Other fighter types all have the 7/13 ApR.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Nostalgia again on a few of the versions I recall fondly:


I played the hell out of most of the GB on c64 (minus Buck Bogers CTD as I didn't buy it--Countdown to Doomsday was available though)
DQOK, POD, TREASURES, and FRUA wasn't available on c64 to my knowledge.

Amiga I finished DQOK, Both Frontiers, POD. Later I bought them a few times on PC and played through. Good memories on c64 even if slow as fuck with disk turning and all that. What do you do? Recheck maps, notes, and read the manual some more. Lots of time to retool your quick map to a more permanent map.


When sleep spell thunders with that power its a wonder the mobs don't shit their pants.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

minus buck rogers

you should fix this

the video makes me want to get around to making a thread about platform differences in old cRPGs

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I should but I just never played it. I owned a 5.25 of it for PC but never installed. Later HOTU had it and I secured copies. Still, I have never played it or the Sega version.

edit... Oh I see. My run on sentence made it look like Countdown wasn't on c64. Bah.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Some other videos: pc-98, DOS in 4 colors, MAC, appleII, NES