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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick ObscuraBeing Evil and Magic.(12 posts)solved(12 posts)solved
(12 posts)solved
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This is my favourite topic
Posted June 12, 2011
It's me again!

I've played a good guy tech person so far and want to be evil and magic. The thing is, I know tech stuff and firearms quite well but when it comes to magic that is like a foreign language to me. What spell classes do I want to do? I figure if I'm evil I would do all the Necro black stuff as I get to summon corpses to fight for me, talk to dead people, and can spam harm--plus I have Virgil to heal me--but the ability to teleport in Conveyance would be handy. Basically what do I do to be magic?

Plus, it seems being good comes naturally to me, how can I be more evil? I know, odd question. I pickpocket and rob places sometimes as my good guy, and even murdered someone in the wild when I was low on cash...but that didn't affect my good standing--so how will I be evil when I actually want to be legitimately bad?
This question / problem has been solved by Starmakerimage
Posted June 12, 2011
I haven't played a mage myself but I hear that Harm is kind of all you need... so I would recommend just picking other spells that sound fun and work in terms of roleplaying the character you want to be. The spell that lets you call back someone's ghost is good for an evil character because you can murder someone and then call their ghost back to find out what they wanted to say to you before you killed them.

In terms of being evil, many quests give you a chance to be really evil, like killing the quest-giver after they've given you your reward, etc. There are also some quests that are evil from the start... look for criminals in Tarant and get quests from them to do nefarious deeds. Also consider random acts of robbery and murder to lower your ethical standing.
Post edited June 12, 2011 by Waltorious
Posted June 13, 2011
I've never played an evil character, so I can't give advice on that. However, in choosing magic, do like Waltorious said and just pick spells that you think you'll like. If I remember correctly, I was able to get all the spells in at least two of the spell colleges (is that what they're called) and get a few spells in the other colleges. I also had a few points invested in some of the skills.

In short, I was able to get what I wanted, plus some.
Posted June 13, 2011
Well the most powerful/easy to use colleges IMO are conveyance, force and temporal along with one point in black necromantic. Conveyance has several good utility spells for combat along with unlocking cantrip and teleport. One point in necromantic black along with max force is all you really need for offense and defense spells. And temporal pretty much makes you, your party and any summons you have get silly amount of attacks before your enemies can respond. Pretty much all three of these colleges are loaded with useful spells.

While max conveyance, temporal and force are pretty no brainer colleges for me I also had a lot of fun with mental, meta, summoning, white necromantic (if you don't have virgil), fire, black necromantic and nature. . These colleges have a couple of duds but are overall really good. The Didn't really try the other colleges all that much but they mostly seem like they have one or two good spells and the rest crap.

If your evil I recommend picking up geoffrey in ashbury by the graveyard and torian kel in the ancient temple (you get the map location if you ask for all the rumors you can get in ashbury).

As for playing a pure mage I find all combat skills to be a waste so I focus on willpower and the main spell colleges i will be using for the first 10 levels. Once will power is at 18 and I have my main attack spell split my points between intelligence (i dont think you really need to be able to maintain any more than 3 spells at a time but you can take more points if you feel like it), constitution (for more fatigue), dexterity (unless I use temporal) and my secondary spell colleges.

As for being evil ive played two evil characters. The first one was a real jerk and picked every bad option I possibly could (pretty much ended up murdering everyone) and it made the game kind of hard to play (all major cities hated me) I used vollinger (not good for mages) and tollo underhill for my followers. My other play though was much more enjoyable as i simply picked the sold my soul background so I could never have positive alignment. This means I could do quests anyway I wanted to without having to be a homicidal maniac and still keep my evil party members. I used geoffre (he kind of sucks) and torian-kel.
Post edited June 13, 2011 by cromwest
Posted June 13, 2011
This is purely personal opinion.
One interesting challenge of being evil is surviving it. With this in mind, it may be helpful to pick spells which help you avoid confrontation. While the Light spells aren't all that handy on the whole, it's only 5 points to master it if you're already mastering other disciplines, and that fifth point gives you Invisibility.
Summoning is interesting. At maximum general magical attunement, you can get some pretty powerful nasties. Once you're good at doing that, of course, I really can't see a reason not to spend the extra point for that crappy yet awfully cute little familiar...

Then there's special evil.
Charm a bear with a Nature spell, walk him back to down, bring him into a house. Lock the door with the Magelock spell (Temporal 1), duck out the window then Magelock that, too. Then release the spell holding the bear at bay and watch it freak out and kill the occupants.
I don't know what else can be done with this. I've never had the heart to do it.
Posted June 13, 2011
All such good ideas! Mackie, the bear is quite evil too!

I am thinking of max Conveyance because teleport rocks, and then I don't know how many followers I will have besides some evil ones (I may do the "sold my soul" suggestion) so I should probably go with some summoning skills and maybe Mental just because I get a huge kick out of Dominate Will from when I've used it as a scroll. Then some Nercro black for hurting fools too. This way I can teleport, mess with minds, and damage people, and I plan to have some Nercro White or Virgil around too for healing.

As a mage I basically need a lot of Constitution, Willpower, and Intelligence? I also like being talky as a good or bad guy so I'll be putting points in Charisma and Diplomacy too. Hrm, hope I have enough points to do all this...
Posted June 13, 2011
If you stay in the back or have a decent defensive setup, you won't need Constitution. Willpower is your main stat, since not only is it prerequisite for your spells but also provides you with HP and FP.
Oddly enough, that makes mages easily good hagglers, but money's plentiful. Haggle at high levels is mostly useful for buying things folks don't want to sell you. Like their clothing. Which can be pretty badass, actually.
Intelligence is handy for a summoner or a master of hoards of undead, but if you prefer to keep just one massive ugly undead badass at a time, an intelligence of a mere 12 should do you just fine. The most obvious tradeoff, however, is the loss of dialogue options.

Note: To be truly evil, you must be able to converse competently. To be merely cruel and brutal, you can just unleash bears on everyone or slaughter the whole town, but to be truly evil, you must be able to speak in complete sentences. This renders some backgrounds less than useful.
Posted June 13, 2011
Me want character speak good so be really evil and smart. Heh. Seriously though, good to know about Willpower and Intelligence.
Posted June 13, 2011
See, I'm not doing this on purpose, it just keeps cropping up!

First, an evil mage is the easiest build ever. Some notes:

1. You're going to lose Magnus, Gar (do not join evil characters) and Jayna (doesn't join mages). This leaves Virgil and Sogg (requires CH 9) as your useful companions until the trip to Ashbury for Dog. GTA (level 12) frankly sucks - he has harm but I've never seen him cast it. The NPCs that you're going to get after the mines are also not stellar, except Z'an Al'urin, who's, well, Al'urin.

2. The good news is that Torian Kel is going to join you at 20.

3. Now, I do not define evil as "doing the most harm". I like doing whatever I want to do. However, if you help a person expecting a generous reward in the form of items, monies, blessings, fate points or plot progression, or if you resolve a conflict peacefully because you do not want blood on your brand-new Caladon Crusading Chain, the game might give you Good points. Thus, I take "Sold your soul", which grounds my alignment at -20.

Note: Sold Your Soul is in fact not necessary to maintain proper evil countenance. To lower your alignment, find a hobo (a shady character who asks for money) and do your best impression of Ayn Rand. you'll get -1 alignment per insult. Giving money to the hobo makes you more Good, +1 point per 10 bucks. Sold your soul just lets me see more game content in a single playthrough.

4. Being evil means manipulating people, which is making them react as you want them to. Sold your soul comes with a negative reaction adjustment, which is handy for those situations when you want to offend people, and the other end of the spectrum is covered by Purity of Water and Charm (both 1st level spells). Buy a red suit, or, if playing a lady, travel to Razors Pointe from Dernholm (look it up) for that nifty dress. Stack three PoW on top of that and see Reaction rise to 200 - but watch out for bugs.

5. For the above reasons, Persuasion is good to have. Exploit blessings and don't forget to steal the ring of influence. Persuasion Mastery will make any NPC join you despite any disagreements they might have with you or other NPCs (except party size), and CH 20 will keep inactive characters waiting for you forever.

6. Intelligence helps to maintain a lot of spells, and doing that for a prolonged time requires Constitution. Which is why you'll do well to keep CN at 8 and set IN to 12 or so (whenever the third spell slot comes online). Plot requirements can be achieved with potions of IN.

7. WP powers your spells, namely Harm and Unlocking Cantrip.

8. Finally, conveyance is awesome - it has Teleport and Unlocking Cantrip, which you'll be using a lot. Take it.

So the Ultimate Build is going to look like this:
Sold your Soul, Dark Necromancy 2, Conveyance 2, Water 1, Mental 1, Persuasion 1, stats to power the whole deal (CH 9 upon arrival at Shrouded Hills and Persuasion 1 upon leaving Shrouded Hills). Then you gradually raise WP and CH to get Teleport by mid-20s and Persuasion Mastery by low 30s. Fire 1 also helps, given that you won't have charged rings, and Temporal is broken in a good way, so take it ;-) I also take Jolt for its wall exploit potential, but you can skip it and walk the dog instead (run away from a monster with Dog behind you getting free attacks on it).

Special note on invisibility:
Invisibility is cool. There's a ring of Invisibility in the game, but it's cursed and can only be used for very short periods of time - so short that you'd better put the ring on hotkey to put it on and remove it, because going to Inventory will get you killed. However, I robbed Kree with this ring, powered the teleport back by staff and got a fate point next time I jumped the fence.
Posted June 13, 2011
avatar
MackieStingray: Charm a bear with a Nature spell, walk him back to down, bring him into a house. Lock the door with the Magelock spell (Temporal 1), duck out the window then Magelock that, too. Then release the spell holding the bear at bay and watch it freak out and kill the occupants.
That's just awesomely creative!
Posted June 13, 2011
Wish I could claim credit for it.
Well, no, strictly I really don't. It's an awful, awful idea, and I'd be a terrible person for thinking of it. And some day I'm totally gonna do that awful, awful thing for the hell of it.
Posted June 13, 2011
Thanks all, I'm going to go be as evil as I can be now!
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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick ObscuraBeing Evil and Magic.(12 posts)solved(12 posts)solved
(12 posts)solved