Beginner's questions

[Kajsa]

Hello, I picked up TQ last week and I'm enjoying it a lot! Also you have an excellent forum here, I've already learned a lot from reading. I have a few questions, and I apologize if they have been asked recently, but I couldn't find the information after some browsing through the last month of discussion.

1. Health potions: is it normal to just be drinking these allll the time? I have a low level warrior, and when I went to kill the centaur for permission to talk to Leonidas in the Act I Part II quest, it took me three health potions to survive the fight, even after pulling the boss centaur away from his minions. And when I'm running around from town to town killing stuff, I lose a lot of health from charging into groups of centaurs, and it takes several minutes to regenerate lost health. So is it expected that I drink tons of potions throughout the game, even if it's just to reduce downtime while exploring?

2. Clicking is clumsy-feeling. When I fight groups of monsters, if I click the attack button (Onslaught actually), and I miss the monster with my click, my character runs instead. If I press and hold the attack button to continue attacking, and then click on a different monster, sometimes my character just stands there. Maybe I need to wait a second because my attack is cooling down? Or do most people just clickclickclickclick as fast as they can when attacking anything. :P

3. Shooting and kiting with a bow feels harder than it should, with a lot of excessive mouse movement. I have to click the monster in the corner of the screen, swing the mouse behind my character and click to move a bit, then swing the mouse back to the corner and click to shoot another arrow. If I mis-click, I end up running towards the monster instead of shooting, which is definitely not what I want to do. It makes me wish I could move with the keyboard and target with the mouse, but it doesn't look like the game works that way?

So yeah, three noob questions: potions all the time, efficient clicking to attack, and how best to control the character while kiting with ranged attacks. If you guys have any suggestions or insights I'd love to hear them. :happy:

[Infares]

Yeah, it's perfectly normal to chug a health potion once every other or third fight. You usually have to deliberately build your character away from potion dependency. But first you have to admit you have a problem. :p
When you're about to engage in melee, hold shift and hold down the Left Mouse button (or whichever one you have Onslaught on) and as each monster dies you'll automatically start attacking whichever monster your pointer is over at the time. This makes melee much easier and works great with bows and staves as well. You eventually automatically do the "Shift + Hold LMB" maneuver whenever entering combat.
Reference 2 above. You can get to the point where you can do the shift hold thing on the run but of course you do stop running when you do, so micro will always be a skill you need to develop, but it makes bosses way easier.

[Kajsa]

Thanks for the quick reply, it's good to know I'm not doing anything horribly wrong. I tried holding shift and it helps a lot, so thanks!

I finally got my Dex up high enough to use this nifty blue bow, and it's nice to kill stuff without having my life go way down. Just in time too, I came across some zombies on a beach that killed me twice in like 5 seconds, so I HAD to kill them from range. It just takes a while longer to kill stuff with a bow... guess it's a fair tradeoff.

It seems like while starting a character, it's good to choose skills that add a flat amount of damage (like +30 pierce), and on later difficulty levels to choose percentage modifiers (+8% damage) once I have powerful gear. Is that a sensible rule of thumb?

[Infares]

Yah, the "flat early % late" rule applies to a lot of things, although you can run into some amazing % skills early that make a big difference, but all in all they all really do depend on your base damage.

[Maestro]

Yeah, it's perfectly normal to chug a health potion once every other or third fight. You usually have to deliberately build your character away from potion dependency. But first you have to admit you have a problem. :p
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LOL





2. Clicking is clumsy-feeling. When I fight groups of monsters, if I click the attack button (Onslaught actually), and I miss the monster with my click, my character runs instead. If I press and hold the attack button to continue attacking, and then click on a different monster, sometimes my character just stands there. Maybe I need to wait a second because my attack is cooling down? Or do most people just clickclickclickclick as fast as they can when attacking anything. :P

Actually, a lot of people DO "clickclickclickclickclickclickclick" especially since in the later games things do so fast it's better to just start click and pointing on any enemy in the mob you are engaging. Besides, it's not like having to hit the click button a lot is a hard gaming task :p
I would estimate I've clicked my left mouse button about 10(6) X 10 :p