Legend of Grimrock 2 annoyances

[eLPuSHeR]

Hello.

This is a list of things that I find rather annoying about LoG2 (which is awesome by the way).

- Combat pace is slow because you cannot outflank enemies anymore. No matter how fast you move, they always hit you. Thus, you must await for the monster to move and then attack, as soon as the monster is entering a new square and you are properly positioned.This is annoying because combat become pretty slow. Forget about doing combos.

- Related to the above issue, is that if you attack while moving, you get 90% chance of mouse clicks not responding at all. It's fine if you attack while standing still. And this issue has nothing to do with your machine specs. You can get smooth movement and framerate, but there will be mouse input lag when moving. I guess it's some issue with the game engine. We all know the many speed drawbacks coming from D3D9.

- Last but not least. The fireball spell feels WAY UNDERPOWERED. I mean, with a fire expert mage, the damage output from fireburst is quite as good as fireball.

List here any things that annoy you about LoG2.

[Ixnatifual]

Perhaps if the monsters were quicker to pick a direction and then move instead of standing about as they sometimes do, it would alleviate the first annoyance. While I don't know if AH has tested this themselves and discarded it, it should be possible to mod in.

[BouH]

Moskito annoys alot, they are quick and randomly moving but that was ok until when I throw fireball in while they atacked, the issue is only my party was damaged, so for moskitos I could use only fireburst. Issue is that you always keep some fireball or meteor storm ready and each time you need to change it. Sorry for my English.

[minmay]

- Combat pace is slow because you cannot outflank enemies anymore. No matter how fast you move, they always hit you. Thus, you must await for the monster to move and then attack, as soon as the monster is entering a new square and you are properly positioned.This is annoying because combat become pretty slow. Forget about doing combos.

You actually just don't understand the monster AI. In fact, monster positioning is much easier to manipulate than it was in LoG1, in almost all cases. Here is a general overview:
- For most monsters: if you are diagonally adjacent to them, and facing the same direction as them, i.e. away from them, they will ALWAYS move directly forward (unless blocked), and never turn (unless blocked). This means you can very reliably backstab the majority of monsters, and manipulate their movement path (if not necessarily their speed) perfectly. This is true of air elementals, crowerns, dark acolytes, fire elementals*, ogres, fjeld wargs, giant snakes**, herders (all 3), mimics, mosquito swarms*, mummies, rat swarms, ratlings (all 4), sand wargs**, shrakk torr*, skeleton commanders, skeleton troopers, spiders, summon stones***, toads, turtles, undead, wyverns, xeloroids, and zarchtons.
This works in many cases where they aren't diagonally adjacent too but it's a bit more complicated; I think it always works if you're 1 square away from them on the axis other than the one they're moving on, not sure about other cases.
If you try to fight these monsters by always facing towards them, most of them will be very, very reluctant to move adjacent to you from a diagonal (zarchtons literally won't move at ALL in certain cases, I've rested while diagonally adjacent to them).

*these are too fast to use the tactic effectively against, though
**snakes and sand wargs turn in their moves so you can't use this to backstab them (but it's still excellent for controlling snakes' position)
***summon stones are just immune to backstabs for some reason

- Magma golems seem to always move directly towards you (along the longer axis) if they're aware of you at all, unless blocked. So you can predict them pretty easily, and their move animation is so slow that you can do a backstab starting from any direction.

- Ice guardians and medusas have a more complicated "ranged AI" that I haven't figured out all of and it's difficult to describe, but you can definitely get a "feel" for it. Also, medusas will always use their gaze attack if you are adjacent and it's not on cooldown, which gives you ample time to circle around and backstab them. Ice guardians' ice shards attack also has a long enough animation that you can circle around and backstab, but the window is pretty small and you don't want to miss the dodge.

- I still have trouble predicting the exact movements of crabs, eyctopodes, slimes, skeleton archers, and a certain boss (or two bosses depending how you look at it), but none of those are really important imo.

- Related to the above issue, is that if you attack while moving, you get 90% chance of mouse clicks not responding at all. It's fine if you attack while standing still. And this issue has nothing to do with your machine specs. You can get smooth movement and framerate, but there will be mouse input lag when moving. I guess it's some issue with the game engine. We all know the many speed drawbacks coming from D3D9.

Wow that sounds like a pretty awful bug. I'm glad it works fine on my PC.

Anyway the things that annoy me most about Grimrock are:
- slow party movement, especially combined with no auto-travel, though Grimrock 2 at least has the teleporters so it's a lot better than Grimrock 1 in this regard
- mechanics that I don't find have a meaningful impact on the game:

• -food: food systems are pretty insultingly meaningless when they give you a literally infinite supply. If it were actually possible to run out of food like in Rogue then I could see the mechanic having a purpose (putting players on a timer of uncertain length), but it's not. Perhaps it wouldn't be a good purpose, but it would be a purpose, which food, as far as I can tell, currently lacks. I guess I should just be glad that the game doesn't also make my characters stop to take a dump every few hours.
  -injuries, poison, disease: played many insane ironman games, even without healing crystals these feel like needless - and essentially inconsequential - complexity. Injuries requiring limited resources to cure also promotes "never get hit, even by trivial monsters" gameplay to preserve healing potions, which is pretty gross imo (but like I said they end up inconsequential anyway since healing potions aren't meaningfully limited, so whatever).
  -carrying capacity. Since items left on the floor don't disappear, carrying capacity limits don't make you lose anything, they just make you do uninteresting backtracking to retrieve the items you left on the floor. Sure there's an exception if you have an equipment set that you want to wear all at once that also exceeds your carrying capacity, but I have never had that situation happen in practice.

- other mechanics that promote tedious, grindy, etc. behaviour:

• - Dead/petrified champions not receiving experience; actually playing with them in your party gives you a permanent penalty, so in non-single use crystal mode it's optimal to go back to a crystal even if you could otherwise easily play without the dead champion(s). It doesn't improve much in single use crystal mode. However, I am really glad that champions get full XP for monsters they didn't damage, unlike in Grimrock 1 - good god, that was annoying in Grimrock 1.
  - The spirit mirror pendant. I was elated to find the willpower/vitality effect on level ups wasn't carried over to Grimrock 2, but I was not so happy when I found that this item, which I find inappropriate for similar reasons (constant equipment swapping for strategic benefit), was still carried over.
  - Alchemist.

- loading times. This isn't really specific to Grimrock, it's true of any game with modern assets, but it does annoy me. I should just stop being such a cheapass and buy SSDs.

[Dr.Disaster]

Moskito annoys alot, they are quick and randomly moving but that was ok until when I throw fireball in while they atacked, the issue is only my party was damaged, so for moskitos I could use only fireburst. Issue is that you always keep some fireball or meteor storm ready and each time you need to change it. Sorry for my English.

I count that as a leason to learn which attacks should not be used in close combat.

In LoG ranged spells are cast and launched on the party's tile to hit a target ahead. Now in LoG2 several monsters are able to enter (new feature!) the party's tile and attack them there which can result in the party tile being the target tile for ranged spells. Since pretty much all spells do AoE damage to the target tile it's good advice to skip ranged spells when fighting specific monsters in close combat.

[Ixnatifual]

I must also add I haven't experienced mouse clicks not working during movement.

[Ixnatifual]

My annoyance is when you are hit by a Darkness spell. It's super annoying not being able to see anything. I'd much rather get hit by damage.

[Numberouane]

Hi

Other Painful thing was food respawn which was absolutely random with such poor yield most of the times I ran all around the world hunting turtle, wolves, fishes and so on...

just my 0.02$

[badhabit]

boah... I'm annoyed by the fluctuating & bad performance the LoG2 engine creates ("outside places")... and especially the fact that timed puzzle parts getting intransparent for the player harder by that. And that you can't do only little by GFX options to compensate that. And, that these are exactly the same things I experienced with Log1 years ago... and updated the HW, but will not this time.

Infact, I stopped playing Log2 currently, hoping for a performance patch, and play Black Guards (from a recent bundle). :/

[eLPuSHeR]

Thank you very much for your input. Nice reading.