Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Tips on shifters:

A few tips.

1) Get items that have magical improvements to AC, will be adsded with your shifted form: If you wear a +5 armor, your shifted form will get a +5 to AC - Same with bracers of Armor, etc

2) Learn which form to use against which enemy. Some forms have resistances and immunities against certain types of attacks that will make fighting a certain enemy easier - other forms will have certain damage types that can hurt enemies that are immune to mundane attacks.

3) Use special abilities. Especially the petrification ability of some forms is very helpful as there is no immunity to petrification in the game. Mindblast is also very helpful as it does additional damage to creatures that have been stunned by previous mindblasts. Some forms have debuff elements in their special attacks (i.e. green dragon shape, rakshasha staff), that really can help to soften up enemies.

4) Try to pile up elemental damage on your attacks. I found myself using a dagger with additional elemental damage all the time, because the elemental damage will transfer to any form that is using a melee weapon - Example: If you are shifting into a whipmaster, you get a whip with lousy base damage (1d2), but you also get electricity damage and the ability to stun enemies for a short duration. If you carry a weapon with additional fire and acid damage, your whip will have 3 types of elemental damage, making it very hard for monsters to resist your attacks.

Further:
I think Dodge bonus stacks, while for other bonus types the highest of those is taken into account (but that's nothing shifter specific). AFAIK this is "by the book". While testing through the campaign, only Dwarven Defenders in defensive stance had significantly better AC than my shifter in certain forms. One more tip: The mindflayer's psionic armor ability is pretty powerful for a short duration.

David Gaider, Designer

HotU storyline: The HotU story doesn't continue the story of the original campaign any more than SoU did. If the first expansion didn't continue the original campaign, why would anyone just assume the second would? Mind you, that didn't stop a few people from taking their 18th level character from the original campaign into SoU (even though it clearly stated that it started a new character at 1st level), finding it incredibly easy and then coming here to complain.

When HotU's story was first written out, it was a completely new story just as SoU was. We decided a bit later to tie it into SoU and include some old and familiar faces as heroes who had been drawn to Waterdeep by the Council's call. We figured that a few people would probably try dragging their original campaign character all the way to HotU, as well, and there's nothing to stop you from doing that... but we certainly didn't have time to write the all-new dialogues for Deekin, the four original henchmen and especially Aribeth that that would have required, not for the few who would have tried that.