So, taking a break from Titan Quest, I decided to give the first Heretic Kingdoms game another shot. Loading up my save from just after leaving the opening temple area, I immediately entered Dreamform and explored the new map… finding nothing but ~4 Hex marks (which grant attribute points) and a ghost that gave a quest. This seemed a bit strange, so I left Dreamform and found myself being attacked by a lizardman in short order. The starting wand did 1 damage a hit to it, and it had ~25 life, while each of its hits took off about 15% of my health bar.
I only just barely defeated it. Then three more showed up and promptly killed me as I was trying to see if attacking with a halberd would be more effective (it didn’t seem like it). Deciding there that the game is quite clearly much more like the first Baldur’s Gate than Diablo, requiring some serious effort to understand its mechanics (What attributes should be raised? What early-game tactics are effective? Etc.), I decided to go try a different game for the time being.
Enter Nox, which I grabbed some time ago during some sale or other. This game is far easier to grasp and pretty forgiving of wandering into areas unprepared, at least as the class I started out trying (Conjurer). It’s somewhere in-between an RPG and an action RPG, with a somewhat odd control scheme. In most games like this left-click is move/interact, moving you to whatever you may be trying to interact with if you aren’t already near it. Here it’s just interact. You have to right click to move in the direction of your cursor, as though the mouse were simulating WASD (which are used as spell hotkeys), and can only interact with stuff you’re next to. It feels off. The humor too feels off, and the combination made me put it down after getting killed by some bandits I honestly shouldn’t have been engaging.
So back to Titan Quest it was. In addition to my first character, who’s at the very start of Epic (in Sparta at the moment), I made a few more characters:
A lightning-spam Oracle (Spirit/Storm) who’s now in Thebes, a soon-to-be Harbinger (Warfare/Dream) who’s just reached Athens, a soon-to-be pierce/bleed Warlock (Rogue/Spirit) who’s at Delphi, and have plans to start a reflection-death Templar (Dream/Defense) and some sort of class focused on summons (Nature/Earth? Nature/Spirit? Unsure). All three of the existing characters are doing much better than my first, partly thanks to a tighter focus and partly a result of the much larger equipment pool (I have yet to really find any gear tailored to a Diviner), and each play rather differently. So having to repeatedly clear the same areas doesn’t end up as boring as I thought it would be; it certainly helps that there’s such a wide variety of equipment drops (though I seem to be getting an inordinate amount of INT-focused gear).
The Oracle is vaporizing enemies with Ternion, the proto-Harbinger is mincing them with Battle Standard, and the proto-Warlock is doing hit & runs and/or insta-gibbing with Lethal Strike. The first two will only get more powerful in the near future, but I’m a little worried about the Warlock. Automatons and Undead are both resistant/immune to pierce/bleed, so I see some tough going ahead unless I try to rush Deathchill/Necrosis… which will likely cause some severe Energy-related problems.