Enderal first time, impressions

[badgesareus]

Maybe you can craft good armor at the master level, but you also have to raise your enchanting to master to put a good enchantment on it. And even so, you just put 1 enchant on each piece, whereas the set items have multiple enchants on each, plus multiple set bonuses.

I checked one of my older game saves (level 71). I had a handcrafted Aeterna Bow, upgraded to Exquisite, and enchanted with fire damage. With my archery skill at 109, that bow does 97 regular damage + 64 fire damage. On the other hand, if I summon a Mystic Bow IV, it does 77 damage, and as far as I know, there is no elemental or magic damage done by it (I don't use it so I could be wrong about that.)

It also seems from what I've read that the Keeper discipline is oriented toward heavy armor and shield blocking (depending what you pick, of course). In many of your pics I see you have a 1H & torch, no shield. Perhaps a shield & blocking would help; I haven't tried it myself as I'm not into shields & blocking. I want to kill enemies before they are close enough to shield bash.

No offense, but perhaps you are not being cautious enough. I looked at your pics (just on the 1 page) and it appears in them that you do not sneak. I travel the roads & dungeons in "sneak"; slower, but I rarely get ambushed. Of course, that means dumping more learning points into sneak. However, I go everywhere on foot; I suppose if you ride Whirlwind you cannot sneak.

Re Lord of the Lost Ones,many dungeons have one. Even at higher levels they can often kill you in 1-2 hits, so best to not get close enough for a melee encounter. If I recall correctly (50-50 chance) in the house in Deep Digger-ville, there was a stair or platform you could get on and rain down arrows; their AI doesn't seem too bright.

Good luck in Agnod heh heh heh.

[Ragnarok]

Although I don't want to turn this beautiful thread I am enjoying so much into an advice clinic, I'd just like to suggest investing more on crowd control. You already use the Wolf, which can usually control one target at least, but maybe you need more in the way of stuns and disables. Something that allows you to re-position yourself when startled. Take a good look at spells and also the Memory Trees, especially under the Mage (blue) tree, for example.

Yeah, I mentioned the armor and points in the appropriate trees will help with armor too, but check out for ways in which you can control your opponents more efficiently.

Enderal's combat is far more about how we approach the combat ahead of us than Skyrim was ever able to be. In Skyrim, as long as we were tough enough (level and gear), we could go head on into a swarm of dragons and take them out. In Enderal that will not do. We need position and control and then burst and sustain.

I am enjoying your genuine thread very much, as I am waiting for the DLC to start a new game all over again, and would hate to see you hit a wall when the going REALLY gets tough.

[dyslexicfaser]

Maybe you can craft good armor at the master level, but you also have to raise your enchanting to master to put a good enchantment on it. And even so, you just put 1 enchant on each piece, whereas the set items have multiple enchants on each, plus multiple set bonuses.

I checked one of my older game saves (level 71). I had a handcrafted Aeterna Bow, upgraded to Exquisite, and enchanted with fire damage. With my archery skill at 109, that bow does 97 regular damage + 64 fire damage. On the other hand, if I summon a Mystic Bow IV, it does 77 damage, and as far as I know, there is no elemental or magic damage done by it (I don't use it so I could be wrong about that.)

At the moment, at least, a random Aeterna weapon I find in a dungeon is around -25 damage compared to my bound weapon stuff (not counting the enchantment). Maybe once I'm a master blacksmith I'll be able to temper something to be better than what I can summon.

It also seems from what I've read that the Keeper discipline is oriented toward heavy armor and shield blocking (depending what you pick, of course). In many of your pics I see you have a 1H & torch, no shield. Perhaps a shield & blocking would help; I haven't tried it myself as I'm not into shields & blocking. I want to kill enemies before they are close enough to shield bash.

Well, that would be IDEAL, yes...

Good luck in Agnod heh heh heh.

Thanks! I can always count on you guys to support me with no ulterior, schadenfreude-esque motives.

Although I don't want to turn this beautiful thread I am enjoying so much into an advice clinic, I'd just like to suggest investing more on crowd control. You already use the Wolf, which can usually control one target at least, but maybe you need more in the way of stuns and disables. Something that allows you to re-position yourself when startled. Take a good look at spells and also the Memory Trees, especially under the Mage (blue) tree, for example.

I keep an eye out for psionics spells, but the markets only have Panic.

Entropic Blood has saved my butt a lot in Agnod, though.

I am enjoying your genuine thread very much, as I am waiting for the DLC to start a new game all over again, and would hate to see you hit a wall when the going REALLY gets tough.

Also thanks.

[badgesareus]

Oh, I'm "all in" with schadenfreude! Especially with screenshots! (been there, done that!)

[Ragnarok]

Oh, I'm "all in" with schadenfreude! Especially with screenshots! (been there, done that!)

Nothing wrong with a bit of schadenfreude, only not too much. I am enjoying this, so I would want her to go into "zornaufgeben"

[dyslexicfaser]

- Turns out I was still in the wrong location, and I had to get off the mountain entirely before I could find Agnod.
Some of these attempts were better than others.



- Agnod’s design is pretty cool. It’s half buried in the snow at a weird angle, so you have to do a bunch of platforming up pipes (that look suspiciously like the completed Agnod had spider legs) just to get inside.



It was a bit odd that if you stand on Agnod and look at the path it cut into the mountain it seemed to smash in and then turn left. Maybe it was trying to turn around?
It would’ve been pretty neat to be able to look out and see the hole where the great work of seven decades of starling ingenuity had torn through the world on the way down, that’s all I’m saying.

- Inside, the ground is very uneven. The hull is cracked places, burying parts of entire rooms in snow and what’s left is covered in icicles. There’s a mix of gold hull plating, red emergency lighting, light reflecting off snow and ice and even water. Lots of great set design here, lots of variety.





Although it’s also very dark in parts. I’m very glad I finally figured out I could buy a magelight to free up a hand for double swording. It cuts out every two minutes, which is very inconvenient if I’m left trying to battle a horde of mechanical spiders in the dark, but still worthwhile.
There’s even sections where machines still pump and run and a reddish steam hisses and broils out of still-active ship parts. Agnod’s heart still beats.

- The locals are very, very active, thanks for nothing Pahtira. Mechanical spiders, dwarf balls (I mean sphere guardians, yeah) and centurion giants are the order of the day.
It’s actually the dwarf balls that present the most difficulty.
Centurions are lumbering giants that I can kite around pinging arrows off their chassis all day until I dent them enough to fall over.
Mechanical spiders are weak enough to hit with Entropic Blood, which gives me another (debatably) warm body between me and my enemies; plus they naturally explode in purple lightning when they die, which means that they explode twice when I hit them with Entropic Blood. It’s like fireworks.
Dwarf balls are fast, stabby, and too high level to take over with my talent. They hang out in ball form when not angered by intruders, so I found myself walking by them all the time only to get a sword in the back. Then I found myself shooting every vaguely ball-shaped thing just in case; a lot of urns and pots were irreparably damaged in their name.

- I do start to wonder after a while where all the starlings are. Surely this was a crewed spaceship? There’s not even a skeleton to be found, just endless rooms of starling-tech monsters. There’s one up in the cockpit called The Navigator, even.
Then I start to wonder… see, when mechanical spiders explode on death, they spray out chunks of that starling gold metal and burned-looking soul gem bits, but also what looks like chunks of meat.
The dwarf balls splinter into bits without any such gory mess, but the top humanoid half stays mostly intact… and the centurions just fall over, fully intact. Fully humanoid, if gigantic in size.
Was Agnod crewed only by these mechanical horrors to begin with, or did the starlings do this to themselves?
Did it happen before the maiden voyage, a sacrifice of the individual in the name of the glorious starling master race, each starling crew member carefully closing themselves up in shells of unfeeling metal, Cybermen style? Or did it happen after, when their ship was hulled and they were stranded on the roof of the world with a bunch of deadly snow bears outside and no help coming?
Do sphere guardians bleed soylent green?

- I’ll spare you the horrors of the dozens of careful battles, the hundreds of mechanical spiders, dwarf balls and centurions slain, and the dozens of my own gruesome deaths at their hands (and blades, and spider-tips).
It’s a lot, because Agnod is a goddamn labyrinth. Worker’s barracks, engine rooms, cockpit, generator room, etcetera. I actually popped open a couple of master-class doors with my two Ondusi’s Master Scroll of Lockpicking that were supposed to expedite the whole process, but then I got lost and ended up wandering backwards through a bunch of content anyway.

- I almost have to admire how SureAI managed to cram in a spider section behind one of the master-locked doors. It’s like the ship got torn open in the middle and the little blighters get in anywhere there’s a spare space for them.
The pure blue-white is a welcome break in the color palette, at least.



Well, there’s a couple dozen corpses in here, though they’re all wearing shit hauberks and iron swords instead of starling tech. Where the heck did they come from? If they’re adventurers that are dying in droves to the defenses and the spiders are dragging them back to their lair, who would brave the Great White North with an iron sword? Just how many hapless fools have Yerai and Pahtira sent here to die because they wanted a trinket?
It’s also possible these are the starlings; in the barracks section there’s a couple of iron cages. It’s possible they were keeping the killer spiders as pets for some ineffable reason, and they got out either immediately before or after the crash. And then dined on succulent starling flesh, because who the hell keeps man-eating spiders as pets.
We’ll never know for sure, probably, because there’s a distinct lack of audio logs or helpful notes about the place.

- After far, far too long, I find Pahtira in the generator room.
I kind of wonder how she managed that feat; at least Jespar is a spy kinda guy, it sort of makes sense that he’d make it through a dungeon and meet me at the end.
Do the defenses not target starlings? Is that it? Am I the victim of racism?
She has a cute little line where I go ‘Why the hell were the defenses still on?!’ and she goes ‘What, I did turn them off! I mean, a lot of them. If you had to go through it with all the defenses on, you’d be dead. You should be grateful.’
Not feeling tremendously grateful, but that’s probably just all the deaths talking.

- She has me open a few valves that honestly feels like busywork. Why am I even here?
Pahtira has me go down and grab the core, when of course the defenses turn back on and fry me like bacon.



I needed to be here to get me out of the way, of course.
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Pahtira! Also, curse cutscene defeats.
Pahtira monologues like a Saturday morning cartoon villain as I haze in and out of consciousness, about how Yerai isn’t using the centurion right and if she gets to be the glorious golden god-king she’ll bring the starlings back to their former glory and so on and so forth.
I wonder if she expects to just show up in a centurion suit and be handed the keys to the kingdom? I dunno, maybe that’s how things work with starlings; the blingiest contender gets the crown.

- Now, on the one hand, I appreciate that she understands that I am a dangerous enemy to make, hence turning on what looked like a tiny contained black hole when I stuck my hand into the engine to get the power core.
On the other hand, you guys and I all know this isn’t going to end well for her, because I am already dead, bitch.

- So there’s what might be a thrilling escape from the ship as the glacier melts and the water levels rise (I’m not sure how that happened with the power core gone, but whatever), except it’s not.
There’s no heart pumping music, and there’s no danger: you just tread water for a few slow minutes until the flood levels rise enough to get in the elevator, and then you head back through the still-dry ship to outside.
This would probably work much better on someone who died when you trick them into sticking their hand into a localized black hole.

- Boy is Pahtira going to be surprised in a minute when I teleport back to Ark.

- I bust in with Yerai shouting, ‘What are you doing Pahtira? This is madness!’ to the Pahtira-centurion. Oh sure, when you want to stick yourself in a giant robot it’s a great idea, but when she wants to do it it’s some kind of madness! Typical man.
No but seriously, you’re both fucking lunatics.

- Actually, she mostly sounds sulky from inside Horst when I burst in. ‘Oh great, I knew I shouldn’t have waited’, that kind of thing.
Yerai notices me and goes, ‘dyslexicfaser, watch out! Pahtira has taken over Horst!’ like I’m some rube who has no idea what’s going on and needs explanations.



That’s some quality sass, Giant Robot Pahtira.
So I lead her around the room in her big stompy centurion body while Yerai goes to hide in a corner. Centurion fights continue to be a joke to anybody with a bow, so there’s no tension at all. Horst is bigger than the average centurion, and he’s got a lot of HP, but that’s all.
Ping ping pingpingpingping repeat until dead.
Pahtira died as she lived; spouting cliched villain dialogue: “No, but that’s– impossible–”

- Actually, turns out Pahtira’s consciousness is ‘inactive’, not ‘offline’ per se. Yerai can transfer it into something else – he jokes about always wanting a talking paperweight.
I’m gonna be honest, The Adventures of Yerai and Pahtira the Talking Paperweight would be pretty awesome.


The Takeaway:
So that quest had some good bits, but the funny talking bits were spread out like butter over too much bread. It took forever to find the place, and then the Agnod section was at least twice as long as it needed to be. There were at least four zones in the bloody thing; it was bigger than the average city!
I think it might have gone better if the generator room served as a kind of hub with Pahtira sending me out to various parts of the ship on retrieval missions, rather than having to work through at least 50 difficult fights only to get hit by the betrayal almost immediately.
I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar, but I think I’m going to take a week or two off to recharge my batteries with this mod.
Maybe do some story writing, or try out Witcher 3 or something.

[badgesareus]

I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar,

After Agnod, you'll probably find the next several main quest segments to be relatively relaxing.

Maybe . . . try out Witcher 3

If you do that, we probably won't hear from you again this year. It's extensive, especially with the expansions. Also, you get to ride a horse, no more Whirlwind! (If you do start Witcher 3 and do a "first time, impressions" of it, please let me know where to find them so I can keep reading your interesting writing.)

[Ragnarok]

Real fun to read your thoughts as you play. Ever thought of a video version with voice?

[Buccaneer]

Awesome writeup on a place I had not been into.

I know the feeling of wanting to take a break after a quest/place, there are several like that and it can be draining. But please do not go play Witcher. Do something unrelated and then come back to Enderal.

[dyslexicfaser]

Real fun to read your thoughts as you play. Ever thought of a video version with voice?

I did a bit of livestreaming when steam started letting us do that, but I don't think I'd be particularly witty while trying frantically not to die, particularly in a big dungeon like this with a lot of samey rooms and fights. I'm worried it would drag, you know?