New player here, some question about new character

[BeerSeeker]

First thing first: I love this game. I mean, I just played a cuple of hours but I absolutly love it. The art, the atmosphere, the dialogues are absolutly fabolous.

That said, I'm wondering what is the best way to fully enjoy this game. I mean, is it better to choose the weaver for the extra options in the dialogue or is it better to get the valva for the extra challange in battle? Is the hunter some kind of "easy" difficulty option?
And in the end are there different ending based on the "class" you chosed so I should play all of em anyway?


Again, thanks for this great oniric masterpiece and sorry for the english.

[AnubisArc999]

I think only devs could answer the "different endings" question.

Since this game is so new and not even complete, I think it is very hard to say what class is best to play with yet.

Volva class is, even according to the description, the hardest class.

Also, keep in mind if you want to get all the Steam achievements, then you would have to play the Volva class.

I get the feeling that the Huntress class is the most easy, but I have nothing to compare to yet as that is all I have played so far. But, one day, I might go back and play as Volva.

[Wraith_Magus]

I haven't actually played a huntress yet, so I can't say with total authority, but I would assume the weaver actually has a somewhat easier time of things, at least for the first part of the game.

As far as I can tell, the real benefits of your job/class is that it gives you one particular favored stat, and Memory is basically just the "shoot yourself in the foot" stat, since apparently, there are experience point caps you can hit with minimal memory, making the "bonus experience" thing completely worthless. This means the question is between whether Humor or Intuition is more useful.

Intuition gives you a bonus to your range when you use the trap-detecting power, but it's so cheap that I don't find that to be particularly helpful except in some fairly situational circumstances. The bonus to dodging is only really helpful when you can accrue enough bonuses to give you an absurdly high chance to dodge (a +5% dodge bonus is twice as helpful when you can already dodge 50% of the time...). Intuition is also used with some of the special powers, but one of the unfortunate shortcomings of this game is that you are forced to make an unalterable choice on your job and starting stats before you have a chance to look at the skill tree (and you have to beat the prologue to see the upper-tier skills, at that), or have any real clue as to what all your stats actually do, forcing you to just make an experimental character, and then restart the game once you actually know how you want to build your character. In any event, Intuition is, for whatever reason, the stat that buffs your summon critter hit points, which is extremely useful if and only if you go that route (although summon critters are obscenely usable and abusable, so there's certainly nothing wrong with that), but fairly useless otherwise.

Humor, meanwhile, is your "armor" stat. It reduces damage directly, which has obvious applications, especially against those "Harassment" shadows that attack with multiple weak attacks instead of one strong attack, so that your armor works multiple times over. The problem is that it never really adds up to much, at least so far, and as enemies get more powerful, it seems to have had more applications getting through the prologue, whereas I rely more heavily on powers in the later episodes.

Humor doesn't have any good application in powers, as far as I can tell; The good stats seem to be Perspicacity and Willpower, and to a lesser extent Charisma, if you are going the "3 o'clock and 4 o'clock" route of powers selection, since Charisma gives massive boosts to self-healing powers, and those three stats are notably the ones that you don't get jobs for.

All-in-all, I'd guess it would be better to just go with whichever one you want to role-play, though, (a fierce, independent huntress with a perfectly fashioned hairstyle and designer leather coat, or an ordinary woman in way over her head, depends on how unlike-a-normal-RPG you want to play it,) as I went with summon critters as a Weaver, and had no problems once I managed to get Fairy Tale's supporting skills.

[masterjimmy79]

mitigation? what is mitigation? how is it works?

[Wraith_Magus]

Mitigation is a stat that you find in your character sheet (click on your portrait to find that). I am honestly not really sure at all how it works because it, like just about all the mechanics of this game, is not explained in-game, and I just have to try to infer what I can through trial-and-error.

The best that I can guess, however, is that mitigation is an inverse multiplier on the damage that is dealt by enemies, given how it is presented. (That is, -10% mitigation means you take +10% damage.) I have not done enough experiments to tell if this is applied before or after damage dropoff due to range, but I believe that this is applied before your "Absorbtion" (I.E. armor, just a pure subtraction from damage) stat, which you get from having some unknown (but entirely too large) number in the humor stat.

Mitigation seems to be derived solely from level and memory. Memory drops Mitigation 2% per point above 10, while each level you gain raises Mitigation 4%.

[masterjimmy79]

are u telling me that indirectly mitigation is.... a modifier of damage like a reverse armor?

[ben583]

It seems that way. Thanks for the info on that.

[Wraith_Magus]

It only increases damage if it's a negative number, which happens when you have high memory. When the memory stat tells you that it increases damage, the actual effect of it seems to be adding an additional 2% to all enemy damage per point you put into memory, while enemy damage seems to drop 4% per level you gain.

I would suspect, however, that eventually, if you don't put any points into memory, there would be be some sort of cap on mitigation, otherwise, after you hit about level 20, and you manage to get some of the skills that increase mitigation by a good chunk at a time, it would theoretically be possible to have 100% mitigation, and become invincible.

(This is, however, speculation, and I am only inferring what mitigation does by the format and it being the generally intuitive purpose of the stat, which is by no means proof that it does what it logically should do, as these games and their variable names are purely arbitrary, and for all I know, a stat that says "cake" is actually what powers your telekinetic powers if the developer felt sufficiently perverse and wanted to hide what the character page meant badly enough.)

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EDIT:
Oh, and I assume that the absorption (damage reduction due to Humor stat) occurs after mitigation because that's how it seems to work with the Anticipation skill - early enemies deal about 10 damage, and if I hit them with 3 Anticipations in a row (-60% enemy damage), then even having only 4 or 5 absorption result in the enemy not dealing any damage to my character, even from point-blank range.

Incidentally, this marks about the only way that the relatively minor bonus to damage reduction from humor ever really matters at all - any enemy that does serious damage (like the big shadows that deal over 100 hit points in a shot), and isn't having a massive percentage-based cut in its damage output will barely register the minor drop in damage absorption will give you. (What's reducing a 150-hit point "torture" attack by 7 damage really going to help?)

Generally, this tends to mean that Humor is a stat that only helps when you don't need it, at least as far as my trials have been able to prove.

Now, I have yet to really play a Volva character, and I'm not sure I'm going to have the endurance to trudge through this game again to do so, but maybe humor/absorption will apply before the massive damage bonuses that a high memory will give the enemy (enemies will gain +16% damage per level), and if you cut damage before enemy damage is tripled, then 7 absorption means reducing damage by 21, although the 150-point "torture" blast will still be dealing 429 points of damage and probably killing you in one hit, anyway.

[masterjimmy79]

there is a skill that gives u 25% mitigation. It will be added in negative or in positive way?
i have -54% mitigation. If i select that skill i'll go to
-29% so less damage-less (and so less experience???)
-79% more damage

[Wraith_Magus]

It adds mitigation, and makes you take less damage (why would anyone buy a skill that does nothing but make you take more damage?) but does nothing to affect the amount of experience you gain. Unless the game designers are hiding something really important from their players (not that it would surprise me TOO much), then mitigation and your experience multiplier are two totally separate stats that are affected by the same upgradable "Memory" stat.