Class presets are so screwy, new players beware

[van the man]

Just a little rant, the class presets are horrible indications of how a character should be built, and gave me somewhat of a hard time getting adjusted to the game. I'm 150 hours in, most of it has been various runs of act 1 on tactician, lot of it has been coop, furthest game isn't very far in act 2.

They do things like putting points into more than one damage scaling stat. Battlemage, inquisitor, cleric, looking at you. It isn't good for very much besides being able to equip a variety of gear in act 1, where beggars can't be choosers (so it's okay for act 1 but don't look at the stat distributions and assume you want to build on top of them in those ratios)

wtf is Shadowblade, suggesting you just run around with an empty hand. Bring something for that hand and unequip it for 0 if you want openhand benefits. It's also the only way to get thievery on a preset, so unless a player character brings thievery, you're getting that near-worthless guerilla talent on one of your origins until the boat.

Or how about Metamorph, which is depicted with a spear at creation screen, and polymorph as the ability set, when no polymorph abilities scale with finesse (another issue with shadowblade - mixing scoundrel and poly only has fringe uses)

The presets aren't horrible, and they aren't a bad place to start the game when you know what you're doing in the system, but you'll be wrong to think they accurately suggest good builds. Some of them actually do suggest good builds - fighter, knight, rogue, ranger, wizard, enchanter, conjurer come to mind as presets that work consistently and get good value if you assume them to be build suggestions. The other ones, okay there's builds to be had from those as starting points, but you'll be changing stuff as soon as you can when you take those.

[raubrey]

I don't know of an RPG that ever proposes a stock solution that is better than a custom one.
If you're not playing tactician level though, it shouldn't be a big deal - especially with a full party and can be just as important to have something fun to RP with.

Additionally, it takes a bit of familiarity with DOS games to know that spells can be hard to get or expensive (more so in DOS 1 pershaps) and selecting your own can give you a better start for that reason above all else.

Poly/Meta morph is often used as a support class or in hybrid builds. I don't see much wrong with it, it's not for min/maxing though.

Shadowblade is often some variation of a rogue hedgemage in games, which is probably one of the harder starts but can also be useful/fun.

So yes, fine-tuning one's stats and starting spells is optimal but given the flexibility of the system I can't think of a profile that is broken.

I don't know why people start new games on Tactician mode but hey, who am I to judge. :)

[van the man]

Fair enough I guess. Mostly I just get annoyed that I'm bringing 1 or 3 presets no matter what if I'm starting solo. Want to klepto? Well it's the personal character then, because shadowblade means the first talent point is wasted if you pick it for an origin (unless it's lone wolf ifan and you're planning to use that bow, then guerilla might actually do work). Can end up with all sorts of junk like pet pal on multiple characters, and none of them have any persuade because I was trying to build some other skill set and it was the only option. Clearing act 1 with a garbage talent or three isn't particularly hard, it just takes the fun of having that particular choice out of act 1. I find mysel sneaking past events/encounters to gather my party so that I don't hit level 3 and they won't come with another civil point decided for me when I recruit them.

On the other hand it gets me to try stuff I wouldn't - comeback kid, for example, is a lot cooler than I expected. And since it sort of wrecks my RP potential to always have to play the thief when I want a thief, I find myself considering the challenge of going no thief, since having a thief seems like easy mode anyway.

I just think the respec appears way too far in, and it's weird that it restricts starting a game with multiple customs for single player for no apparent reason (since there's that oddball workaround with opening multiple game clients anyway).

[raubrey]

I do think they could have a better rogue/klepto start -- though I might be more critical of it as it's my favorite class in most games.

I thought they fixed the PetPal overload (so that's it is only with Wayfarer)-- or maybe it was just removed from Ifan, which was a disappointment to me as he's a good starting character, if not keeper and the one companion I would keep it on.

But yes, I appreciate where your coming from since a lot of players probably like to play Origin characters; it's just that as much as I have my head in RPGs I don't find it that bad of a start.

If I had my way though, I would go back to full customization and make respec a costly thing to do. But the way it is set up, it is a bit far into the game, I concur-- especially considering the game probably drew in a lot of players not familiar with DOS combats -- both the good and idiosyncratic.

[Fendelphi]

An earlier respec option would have been nice for a "new player" standpoint, but it makes sense in terms of story. And to be honest, it kind of helps you from spreading yourself too thin early on, in terms of skillbook allocation(you are forced to dedicate styles).

As for the presets, I wish there was a bit more control of what civic they could start with, since a lot of them share the same civics and some of the civics are quite rare on a preset(I think thievery is only on Shadowblade, for example).