darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) (01/05/89)
Well, I finally finished Bards Tale II; time to do some real work now. Some questions though, that I haven't figured out. What does "Something Odd!" mean??? Also, on the bottom level of the destiny stone, I have a large unmapped area around the last snare. Is there any way to get in there? Or does it just contain the various patterns of the (changing) maze? Do the casinos ever work? They went to a lot of work describing them in the manual. It was very frustrating at the end, since I had to go back and get a second copy of segment 6, just to survive the "final battle". Also, I had to go back and get segment 5, since I (stupidly) lost it. Since snare 5 can't be done with more than 4 people in the party (and I forgot that fact) I ended up struggling through that dungeon 4 times, twice for each segment. Also frustrating were those stupid dark areas, with teleport traps, anti-magic, spinners, etc., next to impossible to map (even after I got the spinning to stop). Compine that with one way doors, dungeons that don't allow "apport arcane", and just getting through a dungeon is tedious at best. Most of the time I always ran from the monsters since I couldn't afford to rethread my way back out to get more HP's and spell points (meaning that I don't have all the experience I normally would have). After dungeon 4 or 5, things got pretty much unoriginal, but I trudged through, because I was "almost" there. I'm not sure if I'll try BTIII or not if it comes out if it turns out to be the same old thing for 28 levels. --- Now a few hints, which may or may not be enlightening. -- SPOILER ALERT -- If you have a mage with a mage staff, then discard your rogue if you have one. A trap zap spell has never failed for me, and the rogue never managed to get a trap open (except those 6 or 7 levels back). It finally dawned on me to do this when I started the destiny stone, so I replaced him with a zero level monk, which quickly went up levels. If one of the front line characters gets killed, your monk can then move up a spot and be a MUCH better fighter than a rogue (10th level monk vs. 30th level rogue). In fact, he did better than my 30th level bard and hunter. (the bard never did much damage, but he usually hit - the hunter rarely hit, did little damage, and critical hits were rare - when I took my hunter to some of the earlier levels, he did critical hits much more often, but not in the higher levels I was at). A mage staff is very useful, a mage can regenerate spell points from withing a maze (not fast, but useful). There is some magic item (I think its a powerstaff - unsure) that lets your mages get more spell points than the listed max. This only happened to me once, so it may have been a bug :-) What happened was that after restoring to the max, I cast a spell that put one of my MU's below the max. I sat around in the daylight waiting for him to restore to full before I went into the dungeon. At the same time, my other MU, who was at full points, started going above! After a while, they were both above max (they didn't both carry a powerstaff). There may be some other reason for this anomaly, so you may want to expirement. Answer the strange mage with each word on separate lines. I had known the correct answer for the strange mage, but I always put both words on the same line, so I assumed I was wrong (until I used diskzap out of desparation). Some of the riddles take 2 words in one line though.. One of the snares had a clue like "words of wisdom are useful, hearing them 3 or even 5 times can be enlightening". Take this literally. One snare needs a complex pattern performed 3 times. The pattern is a-1-b-2-a-3-b-4. You have to figure out what a,b,1,2,3,4 are. Stopping the spinner is VERY convenient (although I forgot how). The last snare is done by following the same path multiple times, although it changes. See the back of the manual for a hint. It helps a lot to map it out (since there are teleport traps, dark areas, etc) before you go for the gold. The phrase "the bold one cometh" should give you a clue :-) Also, answering one of the magic mouths correctly, just teleports you past the dark area instead of into it - it took me awhile to answer it (all the clues are in the snare, the answer is two words) Don't forget about rock-scissor-paper. I thought this was a little wierd, since I never saw these three words given in a clue (I may have missed it). As mentioned above, you may want to have segment six with you when you fight the last battle (this means get 2 of them, one for reforging, and one to use). You probably won't find any until you get to the destiny stone, but a breathring and a nospen ring are very useful. The dreamspell doesn't seem to be good for much, except that you can teleport to any dungeon. I haven't found any other use. ---------------------- Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com) "You can't fight in here! This is the war room.."