Notes on Spirit Eating

At the beginning of Act II, your character becomes a spirit-eater. You’re now forced to fight the bizarre entitiy within you; it hungers for souls, and grants you some new abilities related to them. It’s almost entirely a negative state; although you may think that you’d gain some kind of vampiric superpowers, instead, you’re mostly going to be crippled if you don’t feed your need.

Like any other sort of addiction, being a spirit eater will let you experience normality (when you’re satiated) and the throes of addiction, when the need for spirits causes you physical pain and suffering, and even death. This is shown for you with two meters: Spirit Energy and Craving.

Spirit Energy

Eating spirits will slowly - or quickly - corrupt yourself.

Spirit energy shows you how much energy you have; you can gain more energy either by attempting to suppress your appetite for spirits, or by devouring enemies that are near death. Devouring Spirits can be done with a new feat that you’ve obtained; you'll want to place it on your action bar so that it's convenient. If you attack a fey spirit, an elemental, or an incorporeal undead creature (such as a shade or wraith), wait until it gets to the Near Death stage and quickly use Devour Soul on it (you may want to command your teammates to switch targets away from it to avoid accidentally killing it in the meantime). That’ll give you a big bonus to your spirit energy, but note that devouring more than one spirit per day will greatly increase your craving. Suppress is another new feat for you; using it will reduce your craving a bit and increase your spirit energy, but not as much as devouring souls will. (See the Feats section of this chapter for more details.)

If you’re going to use Suppress, use it when there are a lot of spirits around you; that’ll indicate that you have extra willpower and will let you gain bonus spirit energy. Unfortunately using Suppress is bizarrely classified as a Lawful Good action (surely the self-interest involved in not becoming addicted to spirits would be a relatively neutral act, alignment-wise?), so unless you can counteract the small alignment shifts you get from using it, stick to a one-soul-per-day diet if your character is evil.

Other new feats include Satiate, which can let you avoid death by feeding upon your experience points (which you should never have to use if you manage your spirit energy correctly), and Provoke Spirits, which will let you cause all nearby spirits to become hostile to you, thus making it easier for you to Suppress for big spirit energy gains. Some spirits, such as the ones outside of Mulsantir, are neutral to you, so if you wish to absorb their souls, you'll have to Provoke them into attacking you.

Spirit energy will drop anytime your character isn’t engaged in conversation. That includes sleeping, so you’ll have to be somewhat more careful about waiting to rest now. Also make sure that your game is paused whenever you need to perform inventory or spellbook management, level up, etc.

Craving

Your craving for spirits indicates how quickly your spirit energy will decline. If you feed your addiction by consuming multiple spirits per day, your addiction will grow and you’ll need to consume more and more spirits just to keep your spirit energy at a manageable level. If you manage to suppress your addiction, however, your craving will reduce and you won’t drop in spirit energy by as much as you would otherwise.

Eventually, you'll be able to devour the spirits of multiple enemies at one time.

Generally speaking, there’s no bonus to devouring multiple spirits per day; all that will do is increase your craving and force you to spend more time seeking out spirits and devouring them. Devour one spirit per day, at most, and use Suppress when you’re near a lot of spirits, and you should be ok for the most part.

If your appetites get the better of you, or you simply prefer to devour all the spirits that you see, you can maximize your craving meter. Doing so will cause your spirit energy to reduce at a rate of six points per five minutes of gameplay or so, which may not sound bad, but can definitely add up. If you choose to go wholly evil and spirit-eaterly, though, you will be able to add enough new feats to your repertoire to usually top your spirit energy off, no matter how bad your craving gets.

Having a full craving bar will indicate that you're letting the spirit-eater within you, which in turn will grant you new powers. Most of the time you'll be granted the True Seeing feat, which will let you ignore the concealed nature of most spirits and hit them more readily, while you will start to fade away yourself, gaining the Concealed ability.

Previous PageNext: Spirit-Eating Feats »