Ok… so it’s not really a flaw, it’s just a very bad UI design. Until today, I had no idea that there were multiple screens in each tab in the stores. I mean, tabs makes sense, screens make sense but screens in tabs just does not make sense. All this time there’s been little arrows and a 1/5 indicator but it never occurred to me that this would do anything other than navigating the tabs.
The only good thing about this is that since I’ve had less to spend my money on (all the good stuff isn’t on the first page), I’ve saved up heaps and even found most of my best items in chests (thanks to the random generation). I went on a shopping spree and picked up 2 katana +3 (replacing 2 katana +2), a 3+3 shield with +6 for dragons (replacing 3+3 shield, handy since I’m about to kill some dragons), a belt with immunity to death magic and fear (supplementing my strength +3 belt when it’s more important to stay alive), a helmet and cloak (replacing my previous helmet, 2 cloaks and a ring). I would have got armour too but I picked up the current best armour (8+3 with freedom) from a chest yesterday.
So I’m now down to 1 vs 2 swords (extra defence vs faster killing), +3 AC amulet vs poison/drain immunity amulet (spiders, ghasts and mummies do poison/level drain) and now +3 strength belt vs death magic/fear immunity belt (handy for the big bosses who always give me fear).
About the swords. I’m as specialised as you can get with katanas. After getting all those feats and the awesome great cleave, I moved onto the 2 weapon feats. Going for pure grunt was good at first (I could clear a room very quickly by combining single-strike kills and great cleave) but I’m finding that 2 weapons tends to be better now (since I can’t kill anything with a single strike anymore). The improved 2 weapon fighting feat gives me 3 hits per round, essential when there’s half a dozen guys all trying to hit you while it takes you half a dozen hits to take out each one.
I’ve noticed that this current level (the one with dragons) is very sprawling and contains seemingly-pointless dungeon crawls. I went through an entire map in the fire giant castle for absolutely nothing. There wasn’t even any good treasure in there and once I was done I just had to walk all the way back out.
I’m now going to have to do the dragons bit again because when you feed the red dragon dead blue dragon, the effect does not last for long. I did that before running off to kill the green dragon and bring it’s eggs back which means I can’t then kill the red dragon to get the gold dragon’s reward. Trust me when I say you’d be more confused if I used their names instead of their colours.
Update 24 January 2007
So I also just found out something even more annoying. Many of the expensive items have features like ‘haste’ and ‘freedom’ but there is NO information anywhere (in the game at least) about what these terms mean. I got a pair of boots that had ‘haste’, figuring they’d let me walk around quicker (which they did) but there was no indication that they’d also give me AC+4. I kept putting on my boots of hardiness (only AC+3) when fighting monsters because I didn’t know about that. Worse, I sold a “ring of power” that I found because I didn’t know what ‘freedom’ was (and it wasn’t any better than my ring of elemental protection otherwise). When I went to buy it back, the store wanted almost 200,000 GP for it!
I’ve now finished the original campaign and am about to start Shadows of Undrentide. I had a quick look and it seems that while I can re-use my previous character, the game isn’t designed for you to start at level 16. The monsters scale so that they’re still challenging but nothing else in the game does. Being the favoured pupil at school when you’ve saved the world from the Old Ones isn’t really believable. Worse, there’s no chance of getting good items from stores for ages. Being able to buy a basic sword isn’t helpful when I’ve already got enchanted +3 swords.
