Beta Is Still Up

I was in a hurry yesterday, still continuing my playthrough but getting to a point where the DL would be available sooner rather than later over the weekend, and I not only screwed up the links, but neglected to mention it's on a different server. So my fault, here are the corrected links:

My email: oldirtywick@aol.com
Bouncy Rock
The Citadel

Also, a known and corrected for future/final release versions issue is the enter scripts sometimes fail to fire if you enter an area with a companion. So if you're playing 3.0 try and enter all areas with the PC character and not a companion or weirdness may result (in which case you can probably exit/reenter using the PC).

It's fixed though, so no worries.


Anyway, I've been meaning to write a more substantial blog entery for quite a while, so here are my overall impression of my own mod, after playing through it with a Warlock from Ch 1 and a Druid from Ch 2:

The combat isn't really easy at many points, and pretty difficult at others even for the guy who made it, but never impossible; most notably the beetles in the catacombs, a certain thieves ambush, Deadwood, the city attack, and the final siege. The warlock had a harder time than the druid combat wise even though the druid was noticebly more poorly equipped just using a character builder, but the lack of speech skills makes avoiding/getting desired non combat results from quests more difficult. Elephant hide is almost as overpowered as Chilling Tentacles, one you can get from like level 6 and the other at like 11 though. People who don't like difficult combat are not going to like this mod at points. Hopefully the rest will make up for that for them, otherwise it is what it is.

It took me 22 hours to finish Chapter 2, and I know the most efficient routes for doing quests and my warlock had Flee the Scene in the city and Warlock Buddy. But I'm also a bit OCD about inventory management and hot buttons and all that, I like to have everything just so, so I adjust things frequently. So it's really long either way. Also there's a slew of other quests if you do things differently. How much content? I have no idea, probably at least 25 hours for the average guy on one play through for Ch 2 and at least 8 for Ch 1. That's over 30 for the whole campaign, easily.

I think if you just follow the flow of the quests starting with the House Locke quests you can get most of the sidequests. Some of them maybe not, but they're mostly marked with map pins and it's a matter of tracking down the right NPC or saying the right thing, there's nothing really hidden except for the easter egg item hunt; I put 15 items in the mod that are essentially worthless unless you find the right NPC who wanst them. You'll have to look for them. I wanted to do more but it's pretty tiresome actually.

There's a lot of loot, you'll probably be decked out. Thing is, a lot of it is situational and not super good. You won't be wearing +3 of much, there's maybe three +3 items and you can't get them all (I think a +3 STR belt, a +3 heavy shield, and a +3 chainmail is all). The rest is +1-+2 with some special powers or bonuses, there's also a lot of scrolls and wands to find. There's also a huge variety of items in the random loot and stores, so you probably won't be able to afford everything you want; also because of the combat challenge your companions will need some gear as well, hand me downs probably won't cut it for the most part. I'm going to exploit this, as most of the items are X/day or X/charges per use, so in Ch 3 there will be almost no stores and you'll need that stuff to get from one point to the next.

I went from level 8-11 in both play throughs. So the starting level for Ch 2 will be 7-9 and ending 10-12. That's not a bad spread, you get to spend a lot of time on levels where your character has a lot of options.

Alright, so that's what I got out of it, biased towards awesome as I am.