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Joined: Apr 2014
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Me and my buddy just finished the first area and had a quite a difficult time with that last battle. I tried to read some spoiler free strategies, and some of them mentioned to bring lots of summons.

We haven't found even one so far! Are they random or did we miss something?

Also, I think enchanting was mentioned somewhere (or perhaps I just read about it), but again, we haven't seen any of it. Does it come later or did we also miss that?

(We have bags full of ingredients, yet never used any of them.)

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Hello,
my starting character is a Geomancer and I took the spider at the start. It greatly helps. (Well in all RPG game I have at least one summoner, so I'm used to this gameplay as well).

Lots of things are random in this game.
Most scrolls are loots so you must be lucky enough to find one.
You can also craft scrolls. Here again luck enters into the game as you do not control which spell will appear on the paper (you control the base element, not the spell).
As for skill books, as I read, merchants content is regenarted at level up so you should check the merchants at this time and buy the relevant skill book when you see it.

Lots of luck involved, but lots of possibilities too.

Note that summonings will not last for long (well my spider can resist around 3 turns though) so indeed you need lots of them.

As another tip: you can save during a battle. When things are going ok save and if something goes wrong, reload. You will be in pause state at loading right away.
Do not forget you can flee too. So when you kill one or more of the opponents, just flee (if you can), recover and come back.

For crafting, including enchantment, have a look here (search for "resistance"):
http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=524643#Post524643

Note that you need an essence, I have been told they are rare so it is maybe safer to keep them for later.

Imarion

Last edited by Imarion; 24/07/14 12:36 PM.
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There's also a unique summon skillbook in the Cyseal area.

It's usually a good idea (I actually find it fun as well, unlike many who would prefer a different system altogether) checking vendors each level. Each magic school has a summon, as does (kind of) scoundrel.

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Hmm... we've just entered the earth area behind the statue in the end of time, and not even that vendor had a spider summon...

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Are you talking about the fight in the chapel?
Very light spoiler below

Me and my coop buddy just beat this for the first time last night. One hint I can give you is focus down the green guy as fast as possible. I used a summoned fire elemental to distract the others and just unloaded every thing i had on the slimer wanna-be. He accounts for the majority of the spike damage and dot damage in the fight. Get rid of him, have jahan cast rain, figure it out from there smile

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Skillbooks on vendors are random. If you haven't found one yet...well that's simply a case of bad luck. While summons do soak up aggro, they're not strictly necessary. You can get along fine without them. Me and my friend are going double lone wolf on Hard with no summons and are progressing just fine.

As for enchanting, enchanting weapons with any elemental damage requires crafting 5, but basically goes like weapon + fire/water/earth/air essence -> weapon w/ bonus elemental damage. You can also add poison damage to a weapon, which only requires crafting 1: weapon + poison.

My super-generalized combat tip for you is that CC and damage mitigation are king. They are much more important than DPS and work a lot better unless you are going for very specific cheese builds like glass cannon xbow sniper.

Also use environmental effects to your advantage. Enemies generally will avoid fire and poison surfaces like the plague (unless they are immune, or already burning/poisoned); use them to create choke points or split a large group into two. Smokescreen (and smoke in general - create it with poison + fire or oil + fire) is also amazingly useful for controlling aggro (enemies won't bother moving to get vision on someone in/behind smoke if they can see someone outside of smoke) and for creating chokes (enemies will move forward into smoke if they can't see you).

And a final note: all the shield spells (Fire Shield, Earth Shield, etc) are horrendously overpowered, so use them if you're having trouble. The tooltip doesn't tell you that the shield blocks ALL damage until it has taken a certain amount of damage or times out. It's basically a massive HP boost with 100% uptime if your mages have any kind of decent intelligence stat. And the shield's health is restored to full upon re-application, turning the spell into a massive heal as well.

Joined: Jun 2014
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If you like crafting, another way to get summons is to make them.

Finding the scrolls is easier than finding books for a few summons in particular (notably: summon wolf, and I don't know about you but my witch started with a summon skeleton scroll). Then you can put the scroll in a blank book of the same type to make them. If you really gun for it, around level 7 or so you can get to 5 crafting if you take the scientist talent and make an effort to find both a belt and a bracer with + crafting on them.

We did it on our 2nd play-through, in time to make the skeleton scroll our witch started with into a book and learn it. The crafting guide will cover how to make the raw materials, and with recent patches we found a lot of blank pages (and even some blank books) I don't remember seeing on our first play-through.


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