Bards Tale 3 Beta

[Zadkiel]

And where the h**l are your characters getting stats without levels? Levels are anything *BUT* irrelevant.

They are completely irrelevent on the subject of using imported characters. It doesn't matter if you finish BT2 at level 51, level 101, or level 10001, they still have 20 in all stats and will suck.

What is relevant, and which I had not known, is that imported characters get nothing from Brilhasti.

My very first post on the subject in this thread

Because of the huge stat cap difference between BT2 & BT3, taking the 'Overpowered' import option actually results in an underpowered party

I completed BT1&2 without a Rogue, so I needed to create a new L1 rogue to add to my imported party. Once I killed Brilhasti and used the XP boost to level the Rogue to L35, he ended up with 27 dex, 25 con, 25 luck etc, while my 'overpowered' L51 party members are still all stuck at 20/20/20/20/20 and, frankly, suck.

does the gear imported characters bring with them help in any way? Or has the good stuff, like a Paladin's Pureblade (with +8 to hit in BT2) been stripped away and/or nerfed? How about Monks with their astronomical level based to-hit bonus?

I didn't run a monk this time unfortunately, I used to use monks a lot in previous playthroughs and this time decided to take a different path. I went with:

Paladin (for spell resist/run)
Warrior (Geomancer in BT3)
Hunter (replaced with Rogue in BT3)
Bard
Mage
Mage
Mage (Chronomancer in BT3)

I wanted to try 3 mages, and I wanted to try the Paladin leader, and there was no room for a monk.

I was confused about you saying Pureblade was +8 to hit, so I loaded up both a BT2 and a BT3 save where I had a pureblade and it's +0 to hit in both games. Maybe it's only in the beta and it's different in live? But I don't remember it having a good to hit when I played BT2...

Gear wise - I guess the armor was useful for a bit, although BT3 gears you up really fast and I was throwing away adamantium armor in the starting dungeon - the weapons were both 'overpowered' (Spectre Snare, Sword of Zar, etc) and also frustrating that I couldn't hit anything with them. I really wished I'd transferred over a bunch of rings of accuracy instead of shield rings.

Oh, while I think about it - do remember to withdraw your gold and bank items before starting BT3, as there is no banks in BT3 and otherwise those are left behind.

[Zadkiel]

Okay, so, I decided to do some testing.

I started a new game and used the A-Team as my party. Yes, they're not very good, but I think they're a fair representative of "average, non-obsessive player". I then took them in and killed Brilhasti to give comparison stats. I'll provide links for everything, but since we've been focused on the Rogue:

Well, I'm sure if you want the extra challenge of playing with characters like that, then you get what you want Not knocking anyone who uses them, seems like it would be an interesting challenge...

48 in total stats? With a con so low you're actually taking a HP penalty on levelup? I'm pretty sure my rogue had a good 20 stat points at least more, and I wasn't obsessive at rerolling, I'm pretty sure it only took me a minute or 2 to get a good one.

And yet, even though you've started with a gimped character, you've still ended up with 28 dex on a rogue, and I think he would be getting backstab kills more reliably than an imported 20-stats paladin or warrior would hit anything in Arboria or Gelidia.

[Milamber33]

Okay, I'm going to make a few comments here based on what I'm reading, since there seems to be a few communication failures.

• From memory, BT1 caps stats at 18, BT2 caps stats at 20, BT3 caps stats at 31. Any levels you get after all your stats hit the cap do not give you a stat boost. It is not possible to get stats without levels, but it is very possible to get levels without stats. This is only a minor issue between BT1 and BT2 as the cap is so close together, but it can be a major issue between BT2 and BT3, that's what Zadkiel is pointing out.
• If you are under level 35 when you kill Brilhasti, doing so gives you enough XP to get you to level 35. If you are over level 35, you get the normal amount of XP for a fight.
• A newly formed party will get massive amounts of XP from Brilhasti and a lot of skill points, and will frequently end up with at least some stats over 20, maybe even significantly over 20, while an imported party will still have stats maxed at 20.
• Levels make no difference to combat, only stats. If the game is balanced around characters having combat stats in the mid-20s and your party is ~5 points below that, it can become virtually impossible to even hit enemies, let alone win fights.

I can see two possible fixes for this:

• Increase hit chances for under-stat attacks.
• As Zadkiel suggested, on importing characters from a previous game, calculate how many stat increases have been missed out on due to hitting the cap and award these extra stats immediately, so the imported characters have stats in the appropriate range.

Also, since the bank does not exist in BT3, I'd suggest automatically withdrawing all money when importing to BT3, and throwing a warning regarding stored items. Alternatively, make it possible to go to the location the bank used to be in and 'find' all your stored items and gold there.

[Zadkiel]

Okay, I'm going to make a few comments here based on what I'm reading, since there seems to be a few communication failures.

• From memory, BT1 caps stats at 18, BT2 caps stats at 20, BT3 caps stats at 31. Any levels you get after all your stats hit the cap do not give you a stat boost. It is not possible to get stats without levels, but it is very possible to get levels without stats. This is only a minor issue between BT1 and BT2 as the cap is so close together, but it can be a major issue between BT2 and BT3, that's what Zadkiel is pointing out.
• If you are under level 35 when you kill Brilhasti, doing so gives you enough XP to get you to level 35. If you are over level 35, you get the normal amount of XP for a fight.
• A newly formed party will get massive amounts of XP from Brilhasti and a lot of skill points, and will frequently end up with at least some stats over 20, maybe even significantly over 20, while an imported party will still have stats maxed at 20.
• Levels make no difference to combat, only stats. If the game is balanced around characters having combat stats in the mid-20s and your party is ~5 points below that, it can become virtually impossible to even hit enemies, let alone win fights.

100% correct. Well, the BT3 stat cap is 30 not 31 but I think that was a typo.

[KorganBloodAxe]

I would prefer a much simpler solution. The stat cap in BT2 is too low, it should be 24. Half way between BT1 and BT3. That way you would be coming in with straight 24's. Hell, even a stat cap of 22 would be much better.

Having such a low stat cap in BT2 also means when you important your BT1 characters with max stats there is very little character progression in BT2 which actually isn't that fun, at least for me.

[Drool]

The risk, of course, being that raising the cap might unbalance 2.

[KorganBloodAxe]

The risk, of course, being that raising the cap might unbalance 2.

Yeah I was thinking the same, so if 24 is too unbalancing then maybe go 22.

[Zadkiel]

well, you could prevent BT2 stats over 20 from granting a bonus in BT2. Perhaps once all stats are at 20, levelups add a soft stat bonus indicated separately, i.e.

Str: 20 (+1), Int 20, Dex 20 (+4), Con 20 (+3), Luck 20 (+2)

And those would import into BT3 as 21, 20, 24, 23, 22

But that could be confusing for people.

I think the most elegant design is for the Old Man script for killing Brilhasti boosts stats for characters over 35 - I previously suggested 1 per level over 25 and 30, but I guess per level over 35 makes more sense - so a level 50 party would end up at 23s. Still not great but better than nothing

[rakenan]

I was confused about you saying Pureblade was +8 to hit, so I loaded up both a BT2 and a BT3 save where I had a pureblade and it's +0 to hit in both games. Maybe it's only in the beta and it's different in live? But I don't remember it having a good to hit when I played BT2...

Just checked my game, BT2 current patch as far as I know. It's still 12-72 damage, +8 to hit. I think they were adding lots of to hit bonuses when they were working on Destiny Knight, because it was notoriously hard to hit anything later in the game. That's way more both to hit bonus and damage than it had in BT1. I guess they might have reverted it in BT3.

[Zadkiel]

Just checked my game, BT2 current patch as far as I know. It's still 12-72 damage, +8 to hit. I think they were adding lots of to hit bonuses when they were working on Destiny Knight, because it was notoriously hard to hit anything later in the game. That's way more both to hit bonus and damage than it had in BT1. I guess they might have reverted it in BT3.

Hmmm, odd. It's definitely +0 to hit in both BT2 and BT3 in the beta branch

[rakenan]

Just checked my game, BT2 current patch as far as I know. It's still 12-72 damage, +8 to hit. I think they were adding lots of to hit bonuses when they were working on Destiny Knight, because it was notoriously hard to hit anything later in the game. That's way more both to hit bonus and damage than it had in BT1. I guess they might have reverted it in BT3.

Hmmm, odd. It's definitely +0 to hit in both BT2 and BT3 in the beta branch

I think that the to hit bonuses they handed out in BT2 were kind of a weak solution, especially when this thread contains a much better solution - raise the stat caps in BT2 to 24. That would give BT2 characters stats to actually hit enemies in BT2, and let them keep up better with fresh characters in the early parts of BT3. BT2 characters would get way more HP and SP, but given the astronomical amounts of experience you get in BT2 if you don't run from fights very often, they easily get absurd amounts of both anyway.

[Loswaith]

The levels do get quite large, my party (carried over from 1, levels 35-40) at the end of Destiny Knight is slightly over level 100 and I ran from the majority of fights. They would have been much higher had I done all the fights I encountered.

A possibility could be to have an intermediate level to set characters at when importing across from 2 to 3 as well, unlike the full levels or no levels as the import from 1 to 2 had. This would mean decently powerful characters but not a huge miss out on hp/sp for not having those extra +10 to stats (not sure if it really matters though).

[Keighn]

Meh, just toss the option to have stats go to 30 in the first one and people will stop bitching about weak characters. Didn’t matter back in the day... how do you patch a c64 game?

On a side note; unless the game is drastically altered from the originals and/or BTCS, then your THAC0 (or similar should go up). Check the old BTCS manual: https://mocagh.org/ea/btconst-manual.pdf

Yeah you’ll have to read to find it. Now, maybe the originals deviated a bit before BTCS but it should be close. Yeah, the stat limitations suck and a newb in last game could conceivably be better but those that worry about that are min/max pansy asses.