GameBanshee Forums

I'm trying to become a Cabalist. But, there are some pressing questions facing me;
Is it worth it?
Can Nether even rival Arcane?
Or even Celestial, for killing power?
Or, perhaps, could it beat them ...?
Does Alchemy spawn enough Katals to make creating spells somewhat easy?
What's a reccommended Alchemy level?
And, I know a -lot- of spells in the game dont quite work ... What're the Nether ones? Sofar, Choking Cloud is the only one I've found, (Perhaps Poison Touch) but I havent gotten very far at all in the spell skills yet.

I've played the game quite a lot, made an maximized several characters, and am rather familiar with most of it, just havent tried Nether much yet. Also, since summons' kills dont count as your own, what's the best way to make sure you get a hit on all enemy monsters when using summons to kill? I thought Blast Nova at low level, but I want my char to be Rogue/Mage/Trickster/Sorcerer/Cabalist, since there dont seem to be many +% Nether heralds at all, so I need the Learn Bonuses from Sorcerer even more, making Blast Nova a bad idea vs summons that dont really have alot of health.

Also, I'm playing v1.4.

Specs:
Dell Dimension 4600
256MB video. nVidia GeForce 6600.
2.4 processor. Pentium IV.
1600x1200 resolution.
1GB RAM.

I haven't really bothered with Nether Magic. I find it somewhat of a waste...and tend to just go mono o mono, or just sling out arcane/celestial/rune spells, or use long range weapons...as recharging of magic is a much better route than trying to get together all the ingrediants to cast Nether spells. I think what they should have done is have some kind of nether katal farm that grows nethal katal pieces sort of like a laboratory. And with this Farming skill you can grow nether katal pieces in your backpack up to a certain amount depending on your Farming skill.

In the beginning of the game, it's almost pointless to concern yourself with making nether spells. Usually, I'll have a crapload of easy to get nether katals (ie:snakeskins, batwings, rat tails, ect), but be short on the one ingrediant to make the actual nether spell.

I remember for my Mage/Sorc/Thief/Enchantress/Wizard female elf character that I had Alchemy around 4 and when I picked up wolf skins...I only noticed that per each wolf skin picked up I either only got 1-2 extra pieces...and somtimes 0 extra pieces. So, I guess you might have to take alchemy up to 10, if you don't mind not buying nether katals in the stores. I hate the spell setup in this game. With a high "Honor" and high "Bargain Skill", you can literally buy as many "whatevers" as you want and still make money from the shopkeepers. It's all very stupid to be able to get basically an infinite amount of spell books, crystals, runes, katals. And I avoid the mage classes generally...as i don't want to be tempted to make my character into some God...as it gets boring quick and I also then feel guilty as hell for doing that.

Booyah,
Planet_Guardian

Yeah, making the nether spells is very very time consuming, tedious, and often frustrating, as I've found. I just got out of Fargrove, and started questing for my Tier Two classes (Trickster+Sorcerer). And, also, I hate hate hate how DL works on spellcasting sometimes. Like, I was doing the Custard Mansion quest for my Rogue Guild, and casted a few Summon Undeads versus the Brute boss, and then I went to cast Slow/Weaken/Soften on him, but, after I finished my string casting, I noticed ... That the stupid skels also had all the debuffs! I think, certainly, that debuffs should be friendlyfire disabled. And, when I was in the Catacombs for the Horn, I casted Summon Undead once more, to deal with a spawnwave of other enemy Undeads (Zombie Warrior type things, basic spawn, rotting corpses with Rusted items, yada yada) and ... You know what happened? My undead? Rushed up to them. The enemy rushed up to mine. AND STOOD THERE. Facing eachother. Just throwing their heads back and making that wierd half-laugh gesture. NOT FIGHTING. I watched them for a full minute. I spawned some Rats, just to see what would happen. The enemy undeads killed the rats, en masse, instantly. Then ... Went back to standing there acting like a bunch of highschool jocks in tandem with my skels. It really, really pissed me off. My skels would attack any other unit type ... Just no other form of undead. They didnt like to attack the Tomb Mummy things either, tho the Tomb Mummies had no such reserves about returning the favor.

Also, with Nether having few of any type of applied damage effects, having 30% of the spells not work, which, yes, 20-30% of the rest of the Magic class's spells dont work either, but for Nether, you NEED every spell! There isnt just a few ownage spells that you can use for every situation, lkike for Blast Nova in Arcane ... Really feeling the frustration there.

Yeah, summoning stinks in this game, and so does those Rune buff spells that only last for a little bit. The Celestial Summon, Divine Intervention, is probably the best summon in the game...and all you have to do is wait for it to recharge to cast again. But, it's a God-Summon...and I've found that I usually have to kill it off myself when I defeat all the enemies in an area, as I'm not sure if it will slow my game down by having the summon exist on the game map. I prefere the Necromancer from Diablo2 for those summonings and spells (even though his selection of spells and summons were limiting compared to DL, but at least they were workable and recharged without having to find STUPID ingrediants).

The ingrediants for building Nether spells was a nice touch from an artistic point of view...but, makes the physical gaming experience dry and tedious.
They should have just done the same with the Nether spells as they did with Arcane, Celestial, and Rune...have all of them just recharge. And they should have had a limit to the spells according to your current character level. Sort of like when the company, Heuristic Park, made Wizardry 8, where you gained more capacity to cast more spells per level you gained. That was a much better setup, imho.


Booyah,
Planet_Guardian