Co-Optimus

[BigBadBob113]

OH NO, GLITCH ATTACK!!!

I was doing one of the main quests titled "Silence Falls", in which you have to destroy three chantries. I destroyed all three but the third one never registered, so I'm kind of stuck at this spot! I've googled it up and there are other people reporting the same bug. This is the main quest! I can't continue with the game!!! Anyone else have this problem?

[coldphirre]

OH NO, GLITCH ATTACK!!!

I was doing one of the main quests titled "Silence Falls", in which you have to destroy three chantries. I destroyed all three but the third one never registered, so I'm kind of stuck at this spot! I've googled it up and there are other people reporting the same bug. This is the main quest! I can't continue with the game!!! Anyone else have this problem?

yikes! that's quite the bug! any chance the nearest autosave can save you? or a previous save from earlier on?

[Macrocephalus]

OH NO, GLITCH ATTACK!!!

I was doing one of the main quests titled "Silence Falls", in which you have to destroy three chantries. I destroyed all three but the third one never registered, so I'm kind of stuck at this spot! I've googled it up and there are other people reporting the same bug. This is the main quest! I can't continue with the game!!! Anyone else have this problem?

Gah! That sounds bad! Besides Coldphirre's advice, is it possible that maybe you're not wearing something you're supposed to wear that the game didn't really make clear you had to wear (or something like that — maybe you stored something in your stash that you're supposed to have with you, for example) like happened to me with the end of the House of Ballads line of quests? I don't know for sure that giving in and wearing it made the difference, but once I wore it, I was able to finish the quest, so it's quite possible.

[BigBadBob113]

Luckily I had a save file from only two hours before, so I didn't lose too much progress. I was able to get all three chantries to register upon being destroyed and was able to advance in the story mission. I guess I just suggest that you make sure you have a extra save file saved up prior to attempting the "Silence Falls" main quest. Here's my thought on what I did that might have caused it:

Spoiler: show

Each chantry is surrounded by soldiers and crystals. I was using the meteor ability with my mage, and I'm thinking that maybe I destroyed the crystals too early. So this time I led the soldiers a bit further away, killed them off, did the dialogue scene, and then destroyed the crystals. Or it could have just been a glitch that just needed a reloaded save file to attempt again.

[coldphirre]

glad you didn't have to start over! and i think you're probably right about what caused the glitch, as i've run into a couple instances where i had to reload to the autosave right before a dungeon because i had done something before i'd been asked to do it in a cutscene. usually though the game just stopped taking input from my controller at that point, so i hadn't made the connection between that and the problem you ran into earlier.

[BigBadBob113]

I'm close to getting the Platinum, but a few trophies are proving to be quite annoying. I am missing at least one ingredient for the "find ten of each ingredient" trophy but have no idea what it is. I do know that it's not the black "pristine" stuff cause I found like ten of those in the later section, not counting what I found during the rest of the game. I'm also having issues with the persuasion trophy. I have no problem winning persuasion checks since it's maxed out, but my issue is actually finding people who will give me a persuasion opportunity. Lastly, I found every one of those stupid lore statues except for two from the Fall collection...they must be hidden inside some dungeon or other since I've torn apart every outdoor map.

So close yet so far...

[coldphirre]

I'm close to getting the Platinum, but a few trophies are proving to be quite annoying. I am missing at least one ingredient for the "find ten of each ingredient" trophy but have no idea what it is. I do know that it's not the black "pristine" stuff cause I found like ten of those in the later section, not counting what I found during the rest of the game. I'm also having issues with the persuasion trophy. I have no problem winning persuasion checks since it's maxed out, but my issue is actually finding people who will give me a persuasion opportunity. Lastly, I found every one of those stupid lore statues except for two from the Fall collection...they must be hidden inside some dungeon or other since I've torn apart every outdoor map.

So close yet so far...

i think i had the persuasion trophy right before i reached the second to last zone, doing about 90% of the quests up til then. the ingredient and lorestone trophies scared me away from trying to get the plat. i might go back at some point, but scouring all the dungeons for the lorestones even with detect hidden maxed out didn't seem very ...pleasant.

[BigBadBob113]

i think i had the persuasion trophy right before i reached the second to last zone, doing about 90% of the quests up til then. the ingredient and lorestone trophies scared me away from trying to get the plat. i might go back at some point, but scouring all the dungeons for the lorestones even with detect hidden maxed out didn't seem very ...pleasant.

I think I'm going to give up on my quest for the plats. I'm at level 39, put in 52 hours, have done 140+ quests and have completed the main quest, but still no persuasion trophy. The trouble is that I don't know exactly where I am with it...I could have 48, or I could have 30. I really wish they had a tracker for it in-game like they do for dispelling and pickpocketing.

[justabaldguy]

While I'm waiting on the price drop for this game (give a shout if you hear of one btw), I have a few questions.

How useful/vital is lock picking? In Fallout I generally felt most locked safes had good stuff, and there were plenty of locked rooms which were shortcuts or secret thing. Dragon Age had good need, but Skyrim felt wasted. Many times I'd break 6 lockpicks on a hard chest to find 10 gold and 2 lockpicks inside. In Kingdoms are there better things inside?

How much does the respec cost? Easy enough process?

What approach would you recommend for a new player: focus on the main quests, focus on leveling, just roll with it, etc?

[BigBadBob113]

While I'm waiting on the price drop for this game (give a shout if you hear of one btw), I have a few questions.

How useful/vital is lock picking? In Fallout I generally felt most locked safes had good stuff, and there were plenty of locked rooms which were shortcuts or secret thing. Dragon Age had good need, but Skyrim felt wasted. Many times I'd break 6 lockpicks on a hard chest to find 10 gold and 2 lockpicks inside. In Kingdoms are there better things inside?

How much does the respec cost? Easy enough process?

What approach would you recommend for a new player: focus on the main quests, focus on leveling, just roll with it, etc?

Lockpicking is very easy to do without having the skill up too high. What I found harder were dispelling chests, because if you failed to successfully complete the mini game (pretty much hitting the button when a ball passed over an icon) you would get cursed, and there were quite a few times where the curse was powerful enough to flat-out kill me. But yeah, there is a lot of loot in the game so you definitely want to be hitting up chests, either by lockpicking or dispelling.

As far as secret rooms go, there are quite a few that can only be found if your "detect hidden" skill has enough points in it. I found this skill to be the best, and I definitely recommend getting it maxed. It will show you where chests, lorestones, hidden rooms, enemies, and more are on the mini-map and becomes very useful.

The respec process is ridiculously easy...perhaps too easy. It's very very affordable and you will definitely not break the bank. The price does go up for each additional respec, but I think by the time I did my fifth respec it only cost me 20,000 some-odd gold, while by that point I had over 1,000,000 gold sitting around.

The game is like Skyrim: just do what you feel like! I think I ended up exploring the first areas extensively, did all the side quests and did as many of the faction quests in the area as I could before deciding to get back to the main story in order to "unlock" the next area. Since respecing is soooo cheap I recommend doing what you want and playing around with the different play styles. I will say that I really enjoyed the mage, and I usually don't like mages. The big difference is that the mages have weapons that enable you to hold your own in combat more so than in most other RPGs, so that you do not have to worry about mana management and spells to be able to survive. The charkams are awesome!

[Macrocephalus]

What approach would you recommend for a new player: focus on the main quests, focus on leveling, just roll with it, etc?

I pretty much second everything Bob said. Follow whatever path through the quests that holds your interests, max out detect hidden, put a lot of points into dispelling, too, because the dispelling mini-game is both tough and annoying, and maybe put a few points into lock picking to take the edge off, but picks are cheap, so you don't have to worry much about breaking them.

Re-speccing is really cheap, too, so you can play around without any risk other than the slightly tedious necessity of re-equipping all your gear and re-allocating all your points. And if you plan to respec a lot, maybe collect some gear for all the different primary classes.

And mages are more fun in Amalur than in any other recent fantasy RPG I can think of, because they wind up being able to wear decent armor and wield cool weapons, so consider trying a mage. But per what Coldphirre said awhile ago, I'd be leery of any build that relies on bows, because targeting can be kind of random.

[BigBadBob113]

But per what Coldphirre said awhile ago, I'd be leery of any build that relies on bows, because targeting can be kind of random.

Now if you're going to go with a rogue build, I would highly recommend the bow. For starters, you get unlimited arrows so you don't have to worry about conserving and buying them. You are limited to a degree with them though, as your quiver only holds a limited number at a time, like maybe five-six when you first start out. Once you use up those arrows you will need to wait less than five seconds for the quiver to magically create new arrows for you. As you invest in arrow skills you will be able to hold more arrows in your quiver.

Yes, the targeting system for arrows is annoying and inaccurate, but only in the sense that you may not target who you want. The arrows are, for all intents and purposes, heat-seeking arrows that will always find a target. There's no need to worry about aiming...just hit the button rapidly to fire off a bunch of arrows and then close in for the kill with daggers.

The other reason I recommend the bow for a rogue type is because, quite frankly, the rogue's skills suck. There are very few useful skills that the rogue can take into battle that will hold their own, especially once you start getting close to hitting level 20. The bow will allow you additional skills (the skill where you send down a rainstorm of arrows was very useful) that the rogue will otherwise be lacking in combat.

Oh, and if you do go rogue, definitely use daggers over fae blades. The daggers are faster, tend to have more of a chance at dealing critical hits, and also allow you to sneak up behind someone for one-hit kills (the stealth in the game is done VERY well.) Fae blades don't let you stealth kill.

[Macrocephalus]

Yes, the targeting system for arrows is annoying and inaccurate, but only in the sense that you may not target who you want. The arrows are, for all intents and purposes, heat-seeking arrows that will always find a target. There's no need to worry about aiming...just hit the button rapidly to fire off a bunch of arrows and then close in for the kill with daggers.

Oh, really? I didn't use a bow long enough to form much of a conclusion about it other than the fact that I thought it was kind of lame and chakrams were way better, but I expected bows would have the same targeting problem spells do — sometimes I wind up shooting spells into empty air, and very often at the wrong enemy. Since the game's mage spells are awesome, it's not critical, but I figured with a bow it'd be fatal. But you definitely have way more experience with the weapon than I do!

[coldphirre]

i guess i played the rogue a little differently from bob, and actually avoided all the bow skills and went with the chakrams instead, since they could hit multiple baddies at once so i didn't need to worry about targeting. the rogue skill tree made it pretty evident they wanted you to use bows, but after using it for 5 levels, it just wasn't for me.

as for the daggers vs faeblades debate, i did go daggers for a while for the stealth kills, but once i got a set of nice faeblades, i seemed to fare better in battles since i was constantly being surrounded and the faeblades would hit the baddies that were trying to lunge at me from behind. faeblades actually can do stealth kills, but i think it may just have something to do with the damage being slightly lower than daggers early on in the game so they aren't one hit kills until later on. faeblades also don't have their own special animation for stealth attacks, or the animation just looks like a regular faeblade attack.

[BigBadBob113]

as for the daggers vs faeblades debate, i did go daggers for a while for the stealth kills, but once i got a set of nice faeblades, i seemed to fare better in battles since i was constantly being surrounded and the faeblades would hit the baddies that were trying to lunge at me from behind. faeblades actually can do stealth kills, but i think it may just have something to do with the damage being slightly lower than daggers early on in the game so they aren't one hit kills until later on. faeblades also don't have their own special animation for stealth attacks, or the animation just looks like a regular faeblade attack.

Ah, that's interesting. From what I read in the "stealth kill" skill's description it made it sound like it would only work with daggers. That would definitely have made the fae blades a bit more tantalizing to me and I definitely would have used them a bit more to see which I liked better.

As for the chakrams, the biggest reason I didn't use them with my rogue build was because I would have had to set points into the mage skill set, and I didn't want to do that. Granted, it would not have been a lot of points but I was always going for the next tier of skills in the rogue build. I definitely like the chakrams, and they complimented the mage so well while still sticking to the same skill tree.

[coldphirre]

As for the chakrams, the biggest reason I didn't use them with my rogue build was because I would have had to set points into the mage skill set, and I didn't want to do that. Granted, it would not have been a lot of points but I was always going for the next tier of skills in the rogue build. I definitely like the chakrams, and they complimented the mage so well while still sticking to the same skill tree.

yeah, i would probably have given bows another look if i had gone purely with the rogue tree. there were a LOT of bow skills in that tree! i had a rogue/mage hybrid for most of my playthrough though, so getting chakrams was a no-brainer for me. that teleport/poison dodge from the destiny bonus was too tempting for me to pass up.

back on the topic of helpful tips, aside from maxing out detect hidden, as everyone seems to agree on, i think the most helpful things for me were the active buffs, specifically the rogue poison and crit buffs and the mage protection buff. granted, i only had something like 20% of my max mana available for use while running all 3 buffs, but i didnt really need to use any skills with those buffs on, and could kill most baddies with regular attacks and the occasional reckoning mode. as i leveled up, that 20% was more than enough to use whatever other skills i wanted.

[BigBadBob113]

back on the topic of helpful tips, aside from maxing out detect hidden, as everyone seems to agree on, i think the most helpful things for me were the active buffs, specifically the rogue poison and crit buffs and the mage protection buff. granted, i only had something like 20% of my max mana available for use while running all 3 buffs, but i didnt really need to use any skills with those buffs on, and could kill most baddies with regular attacks and the occasional reckoning mode. as i leveled up, that 20% was more than enough to use whatever other skills i wanted.

Oh, definitely! I had the poison blades one active 24/7 on my rogue, allowing him to almost always poison enemies. I also liked the shield with the mage, and had no problem running out of mana while using that thing and casting the meteor and lightning spells.

[justabaldguy]

Well surprise, surprise! Wifey snuck out with a little of the tax refund and bought me a copy of KoA!! So I've started my character and made it out of the well, right to the fateweaver or whoever he is. I picked the last race to start with, the one that looks like dark elves. I'm working first on getting detect hidden since I loved that in the demos. I picked the first update thing to the magic one, thinking as much as y'all have liked it I will too. Between sneaking with daggers and blasting with magic, I think this will be awesome!

I've mentioned it already, but if you have any tips or hints for just starting out let me know. Looking forward to comparing notes as I slowly catch up to you!

EDIT: Wow, two days later and no responses. Kinda surprised. I'll mentioned I found the chakaras or whatever they are. Pretty neat, didn't know they were buzzsaw blades you could fling out. So far I'm carrying those and daggers, though I haven't had many chances for stealth kills yet. Nearly everything so far has been out in the open, so I'm guessing by the time I hit some dungeons I'll get more chances for stealth.

On the leveling, you get a point to put in non-combat skills then three for combat skills at every level. Is that right? If so, are there limits to how far you can level the first? For example, can I max out Detect Hidden right away, or will it limit me until I reach a specific level? Any suggestions on which Mage combat skills to invest in first?

[BigBadBob113]

I jumped in here to ask how you were liking the game but found you had edited your last entry with some questions. Sorry I didn't notice earlier.

Since it's been so long I'll assume you discovered the answers to some (if not all) of your questions on your own, but I'll still answer them. As for the stealth kills, you will be able to use them in the open. The stealth system is a heck of a lot more forgiving than you will find in Skyrim, and you will be able to sneak up to people right in the open. If there are three guys standing side by side, you can even sneak up behind them and probably stealth kill all three of them separately without them knowing you're there or realizing you just stabbed their buddy to death.

You're right about the leveling...one of those non-combat skill points and three for your combat skills. There are some level restrictions to how high you can level those non-combat skills. If you look at the level screen there are three or four blocks, with each block containing a certain amount of boxes you can upgrade for the skill. Each "block" has a level cap, so you can only start upgrading those skills beyond the second block after you reach a certain level (I forget what the level caps were, but it will tell you right on there.)

I played through the second half of the game with a mage, and I'm gonna say that Meteor is going to be your best buddy. That spell is nothing but awesome sauce and will destroy most normal enemies around you. The other skill I used was the lightning skill, and I soon found myself using them in combination. I would use the lightning spell first to weaken enemies, and then the meteor spell would usually finish everyone off. I say to use lightning first because it has a quick recharge time, while meteor takes a number of seconds. This way you cast lightning, and by the time you're finished casting meteor lightning will be recharged and ready to be cast again. Those two spells will save you butt. I didn't use the force field or summoning spells (I wanted all my mana reserved for meteor) so I can't comment on how effective they are.

So how are you liking the game? Did it live up to the hype we made for it?

[justabaldguy]

So how are you liking the game? Did it live up to the hype we made for it?

Thanks for responding Bob, I was beginning to feel like everyone already moved on! By and large, yes it lives up. There are a few minor quibbles, but yes it's great.

I love the magic. As Macro and others said, I feel like a mage, blastin' spells right and left. I love the Fire Mark the most, though it's sometimes hard to target. It usually flashes a "1" above their heads, does this mean something? Ice is pretty impressive too, a great animation that feels powerful. The electric was my favorite, but I cannot get it to arc between even though I'm on that level. I have the healing spell finally, which I think should be available much earlier on. What kind of game makes the healing spell unavailable for the mage this long?

The stealth is neat when it works, which is not very often for me. I'm almost never able to get the drop on someone in the open. Occasionally, almost rarely, in a dungeon I'll find them not facing me. Nearly every other time they're standing still and looking right at me. So while the stealth kill animations are miles beyond Skyrim's, at least the enemy in Skyrim would patrol and move around. Here they seem to do so very rarely. Maybe it's easier with more points into Sneak, I don't know. I have the Assassination one maxed out, and a few in Daggers, but so far I'm finding despite getting close and getting the Y prompt I'll just slash at the guy instead of going for a stealth kill, and this is pretty annoying.

I kinda like the inactive quests still being displayed on the map. Many times I'll be in one location and say "Oh, looks like I've got a quest here." I wanted this in Skyrim, so I didn't need to pour through my quests every time I went to a new city.

Many of the quests are pretty boring and predictable, and the story is basic. A lot of "Go to Y, kill X Z's." Yet again, I'm the only one who can do things ("A human on the X council? Impossible! Eh, alright you're in."). I don't feel the personal investment or sense of self I felt in Fallout. It's about as vague as Skyrim, and not quite as many options in speech as Dragon Age or ME offered either. Many times there's a "positive" response and a "negative" response, and that's it. I'm boosting up Persuasion since that's one of my favorites for role playing. So far it's OK, though there doesn't seem to be the same sense of accomplishment when I pass a speech check. It seems kinda drab, I was hoping for more.

So far so good, though if I could change one thing it'd be the stealth system, making it more responsive and useful in the field. Also, why in the world is there not a Wait function?