Mastery abilities and in combat items

[Telmorial]

Are mastery abilities always limited to 4 or do they increase later? EG. Will the max number of spells I can use in combat as a Practitioner be always 4?

And re items, can I use them in combat? Or are usable items auto added to the combat toolbar?

Thanks.

[Toadally Awesome]

Sadly masteries stay in 4 from what I've seen. I've had to replace some of my weapons because they were lore-themed weapons with unique abilities that ended up being worse than abilities I wanted to use so I had to take a hit on my stats (not that it mattered much in the end). Apparently when you equip a weapon with a skill, it forces you to use it...

Items that can be used in combat(potions, grenades, poison etc) can be equipped in a character's trinket slot and are usable by that character in combat.

[Telmorial]

Ouch, that seems a bit limiting. So at high levels when I have (guessing) around 10 spells, I can only choose 4 to use in combat?

[Grymm]

Its not terribly well explained, but you get 4 'Mastered' skills that you can use, 1 Trinket skill / Item (eg. Potions), and move, for your 6 usable abilities in fights.

If you have items (aside from Trinket) that give abilities, those replace one of your 'Mastered' keeping you at 6 usable abilities. So, for my fighter as an Example, has a Spectre Snare, which has an ability, so she has the weapon ability, 3 abilitys from Mastery, Trinket, and move.

I found you really want to specialize your characters, so you're not spending a pile of points into things that you don't use. That said, some builds (especially Archmage) have a massive number of pre requisites meaning you've got a pile of points invested in that end ability.

For Rog / War, I'd pick a weapon, and try to build around that, keeping your Mastered abilities fairly small, and only buy other stuff to achieve the big bonuses.

Also, try balancing your party at least somewhat into Opportunity and Spell cost abilities.

[Toadally Awesome]

I still wish they made the weapon abilities optional. I had to abandon both the dragon staff and the wand of destiny for stat-wise inferior items because their abilities were weak in comparison to my base abilities with scaling.

[Telmorial]

Thanks for the info all. It does seem a bit limited, tactical choice wise but as long as it's fun :)
Hopefully they'll have a toggle for the item abilities, that would seem the easiest solution.

[Aepervius]

Originally posted by Telmorial:

Ouch, that seems a bit limiting. So at high levels when I have (guessing) around 10 spells, I can only choose 4 to use in combat?

Yes pretty much. I had a practitionner I started and had 3 damaging spell, and thought going summon, but I simply abandonned compeltely.

1) you CANNOT respec
2) you CANNOT have more than 4 skills top
3) you DO NOT get to chose what the story PC joining your party have as skills, and so far frankly I found them sucking and non optimized

Yes you can theoretically with a mercenary token make a new char, but then they are in VERY limited numbers and VERY expansive (I saw one 200 skeat) and baring you doing an identical character/voice/name this means you drop the older char, and that means as far as I can tell you drop some of the story banter.

All in all this is VERY limiting, and combined with the save system discourage you utterly to even try anything whatsoever, go through the normal tactic.

I simply abandoned summon for this reason, I did not both trying it for more than a fight because trying new stuff is punishing in time.

BT1-3 allowed to use ALL your spells and skills no matter what. Limiting to 4 is.... another design decision where I think "what the hell they were thinking of".

PS: BT1-3 did not allow respec, but the remaster certainly allow save everywhere which is quite a sign that some design of BT1-3 original are NOT seen as good today. So nostalgia or not, reusing a design which is seen today as bad is idiotic

[ploppo]

Yeh, I really wish there were more Mastery slot things.