Torchlight 2 Catch-All

Finished my first playthrough last night. Level 47 Engineer. Some great level 50+ loot dropped for me in the last section of the game, so I'll definitely be leveling up some more to take advantage of that. I'm also eager to try an Outlander, so another playthrough is definitely in the offing.

Great game. Scratched the itch for a well-designed ARPG with good maps, great loot and lots of replayability. The save system also makes it very accommodating if you can only play 20 or 30 minutes at a time.

I just beat the game with my Ember Mage. If I start a New Game+ will I still have access to the Map Room?

Yonder wrote:

I just beat the game with my Ember Mage. If I start a New Game+ will I still have access to the Map Room?

I wonder the same. I didn't start yet cause I warned to get my 10 maps achievement.

Stele wrote:
Yonder wrote:

I just beat the game with my Ember Mage. If I start a New Game+ will I still have access to the Map Room?

I wonder the same. I didn't start yet cause I warned to get my 10 maps achievement.

No, you won't.

Chesspieceface wrote:
Stele wrote:
Yonder wrote:

I just beat the game with my Ember Mage. If I start a New Game+ will I still have access to the Map Room?

I wonder the same. I didn't start yet cause I warned to get my 10 maps achievement.

No, you won't.

Yes you will, I can still port to it from any world hub wayportal in my NG+

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:
Chesspieceface wrote:
Stele wrote:
Yonder wrote:

I just beat the game with my Ember Mage. If I start a New Game+ will I still have access to the Map Room?

I wonder the same. I didn't start yet cause I warned to get my 10 maps achievement.

No, you won't.

Yes you will, I can still port to it from any world hub wayportal in my NG+

Hrm... I have not tried that.

Confimed that you still have access to the map room.

Up to Act III with an Embermage on Veteran. I have to say, I'm feeling like quite the glass cannon I hit a point where I would go down in just 3 or so hits, despite pumping Vitality hard. Gotta keep moving or you're in trouble!

Where/what is the map room? I have been missing store bought maps from TL1.

fangblackbone wrote:

Where/what is the map room? I have been missing store bought maps from TL1.

It opens when you finish the main quest, in that final town, there's a guy with a portal to the map room. Map room has a guy selling maps, plus the usual enchanter, stash, etc.

Argh, why do we have to wait for that? Oh wait, can we buy maps and put them in the shared stash?

fangblackbone wrote:

Argh, why do we have to wait for that? Oh wait, can we buy maps and put them in the shared stash?

Nope, you have to use them in the map room

I smell a map vendor mod coming soon!

Is that what that smell is? I thought I'd left the toaster on or something....

DrunkenSleipnir wrote:

Up to Act III with an Embermage on Veteran. I have to say, I'm feeling like quite the glass cannon I hit a point where I would go down in just 3 or so hits, despite pumping Vitality hard. Gotta keep moving or you're in trouble!

I've been feeling that in Act II. I don't skimp on the Vitality either. One big damage spike and it's all over for me.

If it weren't for the 0.2 % increase in Armor I'd probably skip dumping points into Vitality altogether. The HP increases are pretty meager. I keep thinking: every little bit counts!

I have a belt that is like +30 Vitality, so I'm not doing too bad. I did take a bad death in the beginning of the Sphinx dungeon, though: traps plus magic wielders plus sentry guns = dead Minarchist

I've progressed my Veteran Berzerker to Level 40 in Act III and am starting to have some real trouble staying alive reliably, even against normal mobs. I am not dying constantly but once every five minutes or so is enough to start getting you frustrated when you have a choice of either going broke or taking the walk of shame every time.

Veteran was easy up to level 20 or so when it started to get challenging and now it is downright difficult. There are a few possible explanations for this: 1) my stat distribution sucks, 2) my skill choices suck, 3) my equipment sucks, 4) I suck, or 5) game design issues. After doing some research I've pretty much ruled out 1, 2 and 4 as possibilities. I think my build and my stat distribution are more than solid. Given that I found Veteran so easy to start with, I don't think I am simply a bad player. That leaves me thinking the issue is a combination of 3 (equipment) and 5 (game design). Unfortunately I can run to the nearest auction house and pick up some new gear so I'm stuck coming here and lamenting about how the designers made the difficultly curve in Veteran too steep. I have spent a significant amount of time trying to maximize my armor/health with the equipment that is available to me but the game seems to care little about my feeble efforts. Bottom line, I was having a blast playing this game and it's just not fun anymore. Maybe I just suck and should just play on normal mode but my pride won't allow it.

Had to start kiting a lot more than I wanted later on.

Also, having pet spells helped a lot. Especially the skeleton one that is on an 8 sec recharge but the summons last for 30-45 seconds. :cooL: A little army of pets makes things a lot easier.

The difficulty seems to spike every now and again. My guess is that is has to do with armor values. Every now and again the enemies will start doing WAY too much damage to me (veteran difficulty). Mostly it's because the items I'm wearing I pick for their stat bonuses and stuff as opposed to straight HP gains or flat armor values. Focusing on armor that's actually good armor as opposed to providing +5 strength usually helps a lot, even if the piece isn't quite as flashy.

Maybe the enemies spike up every 10 levels? I had a hard time for a bit around 20 and at 30. Now at 35 I am (relatively) cruising again but it was pretty tough going there for a bit.

I just got to Act III with my engineer, also around 40 in level, and noticed a definite increase in difficulty. Haven't died from it yet, but have had to pay much more attention and use a number of health potions. Part of it I think is all the poison affects, which likely bypass armor? If a bunch of those little spore things get to you and explode, you can go down quickly. But it might also be that I was getting a little too gungho about wading in with my AOE abilities

Pacman wrote:

I just got to Act III with my engineer, also around 40 in level, and noticed a definite increase in difficulty. Haven't died from it yet, but have had to pay much more attention and use a number of health potions. Part of it I think is all the poison affects, which likely bypass armor? If a bunch of those little spore things get to you and explode, you can go down quickly. But it might also be that I was getting a little too gungho about wading in with my AOE abilities ;)

But flame hammer is so satisfying!

Burning also bypasses armor.

Squee9 wrote:

But flame hammer is so satisfying!

That is true, but I actually tend not to use it. I tend to start with a Seismic Slam, then hit Dynamo Field a time or two to build up charge, and then use those charges with an Overload. For tougher groups I will throw in a Tremor before or after the Seismic Slam.

I have found that I do much better when I am using a one handed weapon plus shield, trying to make sure I have health steal and armor damage on it, and a decently fast weapon. The armor damage seems to help quite a bit on the purple/boss monsters, and the speed makes the health gain and armor destruction more effective.

Pacman wrote:
Squee9 wrote:

But flame hammer is so satisfying!

That is true, but I actually tend not to use it. I tend to start with a Seismic Slam, then hit Dynamo Field a time or two to build up charge, and then use those charges with an Overload. For tougher groups I will throw in a Tremor before or after the Seismic Slam.

I have found that I do much better when I am using a one handed weapon plus shield, trying to make sure I have health steal and armor damage on it, and a decently fast weapon. The armor damage seems to help quite a bit on the purple/boss monsters, and the speed makes the health gain and armor destruction more effective.

That makes sense for soloing. I'm playing in a co-op group of three engineers, one aegis tree tanking, one using cannons and construction stuff, and me on the blitz tree. The bigger the hammer the better. I'm maxing the flame hammer, seismic stomp, ember hammer, the +flame+electric passive and the 2-handed weapon passive. Getting shields and healing bot pulses from my buddies lets me skip some of the more pragmatic engineer choices.

I finally beat the last boss with my melee focused Embermage, and I have to say my only problem with the game as a whole was that it felt about three hours too long. I get that they want give their customers their money's worth, but there were just way too many fetch quests. I suppose there's worse problems to have, but by the second halve of act three I just wanted it to be over, I wasn't getting any new skills and I didn't like the way any of the new armor sets looked.

Overall however these are minor complaints and completely subjective to boot, it's still probably the best ARPG you can get for any price, and I'll definitely be coming back to it later to give the other classes a go.

The patch reset all of the enemies/progress on Act III for me so I gave up...

I was in the same boat as IHateDRM. I think I was just about done with the campaign (with that character at least) and having to redo all of those areas was too much. I'm still super happy with the game. The rest of the pile calls though.

There really isn't "redo-ing" areas... I mean you can play the game that way... but its not exactly designed as a 'once through with one character' experience. One misses the majority of depth in a decent ARPG with that approach.

Pacman wrote:

I just got to Act III with my engineer, also around 40 in level, and noticed a definite increase in difficulty. Haven't died from it yet, but have had to pay much more attention and use a number of health potions. Part of it I think is all the poison affects, which likely bypass armor? If a bunch of those little spore things get to you and explode, you can go down quickly. But it might also be that I was getting a little too gungho about wading in with my AOE abilities ;)

That's about where I am now. I've been quite lucky in that I seem to be finding good, solid gear beyond what I can buy from the blacksmith (that's how I gauge if it's good: if it's better than his junk).

I also use the a cannon quite a bit, kiting large groups or tougher, bigger enemies for a bit before switching to my hammer and flame smashing the daylights out of everything. If that's not enough, I toss out a gun turret. I keep my pet on aggressive, and am not afraid to pound potions as needed. I've died a handful of times so far, but usually it's because I got careless and wasn't paying attention to my health.

Huh guess I haven't played since Fri. That's a long list of patch notes.

Patch 1.12.5.7 Notes
FUNCTIONAL
*Shared stash now creates a backup of itself
*You can no longer 'steal' items from your buyback tab by closing the window with Spacebar
*Can’t drag merchant items onto the buyback tab
*Gambler does not show 'can't equip' X
*CTRL-M will instantly toggle map visibility
*Pet equipment cannot get sockets from enchantment
*Fixed rare crash related to Charming a monster
*Multiplayer logging is reduced, and can be disabled with the NEVERLOG console command (may improve performance for some clients)
*Creating a player in a difficulty other than Normal, directly joining a game, and then exiting, won't revert your stored difficulty to Normal.
*Confirmation box added for quitting without saving
*Fixed a few rare hardware related crashes
*Particle update optimizations
*Various rendering optimizations

GAMEPLAY
*Fixed an issue in multiplayer where non-killing MP players did not receive appropriate XP falloff due to level delta
*Armor Degrade properties now apply properly - degrade armor values were reduced for newly generated item properties to compensate for them working correctly - but don't worry, they will be better than before!
*Zero walkspeed monsters won't attempt to jump down
*Fixed some display issues with Fame level progress
*Wandering (non-town-based) Enchanters have a slightly better range of enchantment strengths. They also now have an approximately 20% chance to get a 'powerful enchantment', which are about 50% better than normal. This is represented by a sound and text message in game.
*Swamp Flier scream debuff will show an appropriate name on debuff icon
*Creep squish blood now has a censored version
*Fixed a few areas where loot from a specific event spawned publicly
*Fixed a few spelling errors
*Act 4 banner should properly display
*Pets can be sent to town from the last 2 boss rooms
*Fixed an issue where occasionally an errant MOUSEUP event could ignore your attack in extremely fast click situations
*DOTs now correctly calculate bonuses from +DMG%
*XP and Fame %bonuses from gear are now capped at +/- 100%
*HP bonus gear will properly be reflected in final health of player to other clients post-zoning
*Game can be saved at any time from the options menu
*Onscreen notification in bottom right of screen when saving takes place
*Console-created items now have an effect that displays that they were cheat-created
*Damage reduction effects on the player are capped to 75%
*Stat expenditures when leveling up are properly synchronized in multiplayer
*When leveling up, your health is properly recalculated on other clients
*Skill cycle keys can now be bound to mouse buttons
*Transmuted items are no longer destroyed if an inventory is full with no place to accept them
SKILLS
*Berserkers are still targetable while performing Savage Rush
*Bramble walls and Ice Prison will properly die offscreen, and if the originator leaves the zone
*Battle Standard's properties are properly exclusive (they don't stack)
*Fixed charged versions of Fire Bash from levels 9-15 using the incorrect effects (weaker when charged!)
*Howl duration fixed (Extended)
*Berserker Wolf Shade master healing property was reduced from 5%+5% per rank to 5% + 2% per rank - and the first rank properly provides healing
*Vortex Hex won't target smashables
*Fixed two ranks of Seismic Slam incorrectly doing electrical damage
*Glaive Throw has had a damage nerf (25% reduction in max damage and decreased growth per rank ) with less additional bounces per tier
*Elemental attunement properly benefits from owner’s level
*Elemental Boon should properly speed up cast time on last rank
*Shadowbind should properly rank up duration
*Blast Cannon’s armor reduction effect no longer stacks and works for both fire and physical damage
*Fixed sped up hitframe for male shield skill anim so that it is never skipped when a subsequent skill is queued
*Outlander Long Range Mastery should now affect wands as well
*Prismatic Bolt gains charge at half the previous rate
*Spider Mines should show debuff icons
*Spider Mine summon duration fixed
*Shadowling procs from wand chaos or weapon affixes properly last 20 seconds instead of 3
*Elemental Attunement shouldn’t attack smashables
*Tremor rank 6 should properly perform its charged effect
*Immobilization Copter damage effect shouldn’t stomp on other damage effects
*Berserker Retaliation can only trigger once per second per given target – and no longer procs/leeches
*Rapid Fire and Venomous Hail now use DPS instead of Damage

SCRIPTING
*Fixed some issues with Grom's arena in multiplayer when another player speaks to the NPC while the main area is completed
*Several boss rooms have had structural changes to make it more difficult to cheese them with certain skills
*Various minor level scripting or layout repairs
*Fixed farmable Gel phasebeast room so that XP gain isn't overblown
*Fixed various other farmable phasebeast unitspawners which incorrectly granted XP
*Fixed a few areas where the player could get stuck

NETWORKING
*Fixed a case where backlog of messages for resend would escalate and disconnect the client
*Friends-only games are fixed to synch correctly across lobbies
*Fixes for various serverside issues
*Erroneous ‘Connection Failed’ messages should be fixed
*Games can now be filtered near your level

GRAPHICAL
*Many wardrobe tweaks and fixes

BORING
*Various alterations were made to better support translated versions of the game, and to detect and deal with other language items during trading