I am fighting the engineer in the Cursed Abbey. Well, actually I figured out how to beat him, and now I'm killing him over and over to see what kinda loot I can get out of him. Can I get some feedback on how good the gloves he dropped are? And I need to compare them to what I got.

I'm a mage, and so far I use a bow for most everything. I'm level 26, and with my regular gloves on I am INT 194, vitality 222, strength 70, AGI 79, INT 19, constitution 16. All my points so far have gone into AGI and STR.

Wearing leather gloves that are 12/12 durability, 30 weight 140 armor, +3 sight (pretty nice IMO) and +4 INT (24 points in magic for me). With them I have 194 magic.

What just got dropped was gloves that are 14/14, 45 weight 200 armor, +10 defense (takes my 49% chance of being hit to 39%), +6 strength, and +20 spiritual resistance (my only anything so far with that stat).

Neither one has charm slots.

I love the 10 defense and have no idea what spells even check against spirit or who uses them, so I don't know how good that resistance is. Sure is a nice big number though, right? But does it matter?

I think the 10 to defense is probably worth the trade-off of losing 24 magic in the long run, but losing the sight bugs me. I'm not sure how much it will affect me as an archer or in the dark etc.
Any opinions? Or should I keep on mining the Engineer for something else?

I'd keep mining for something that has slots and adds to a skill that you might want to use, but don't want to dump many points in. I do, however, agree that defense vs. 24 magic is generally a better trade off. But I found the extra sight range to be a lot more to my liking, up to a point. If you have nothing else that boosts your sight range, I'd keep those/mine for something else that also has it.

Resistances definitely do something, but there are charms for that, and to use charms, you need slots. I don't recall having much trouble with low resists for quite some time, either.

Just my opinion.

Thanks Kranky.

So far I mined him half a dozen times and didn't see him drop anything with slots. Not sure that he does. Otherwise I'd be going for slots too, for sure. I'll be trying him again tonight though, to see if he does drop anything with slots.

Does anybody know what monsters use attacks that check for spirit resistance, or how often they show up in the game or how important they are? 20 resistance is the most I've ever seen on anything, but if nothing uses spirit attacks, then who cares?

Also, how much in the way of resists would a Large or a Very Large charm give?

Don't know about specific resistance stuff. The skill "Know Creature" tells you some things as you level it up, but I never increased it much so don't know.

Slots are random & some monsters/chests seem to have much better chances of them, but if you're patient enough they'll appear almost anywhere eventually.

IIRC, Large resist charms were +20 and Very Large charms were +40.

In terms of mining for items: since you're already 'mining the boss', I assume you're not against some meta-gaming :) then here's a bit of info to facilitate it: I didn't realize this for a long time (I noticed by accident upon a save reload) but item/chest/bookshelf attributes are determined when your mouse cursor first hits/hovers over an item. So if you can kill the baddie _without_ your mouse "touching" the items that fall, you can then save game (in a new slot, just in case) before ID'ing the item on the ground. Then reload that save repeatedly & all you have to do is move your mouse over the loot to "mine" dropped item attributes, instead of having to fight the baddie each time. Much faster.

I wouldn't advise abusing this aspect of the game very much since, as w/any excess 'farming,' it gets super boring rapidly loading/reloading 100's of times to try & get the "perfect" stuff from every big baddie/box/shelf and can make you too powerful too fast. I just did it on the occasional big chest or special monster. :)

Yeah I don't do it every time, but I think I'm doing it partly to gloat over my control of this baddie. He was polishing me off in maybe two seconds max before, so now I am getting my revenge on his helpless butt. Sometimes you just gotta rub their noses in it, you know? I bring him much shame.

Thanks for the reloading tip. I'll probably mess with him half a dozen more times then move on. I'm sure there will be plenty of good loot still to come in the game, so obsessing over an early monster is kinda fun but not for too long.

I really do like that new glove ... but boy I hate giving up sight.

Also, the amulet next to the Engineer gave me back the exact same amount of mana I lost, so losing the mana from my other gloves is no big deal now. And I do kinda like that monsters my level only have a 39% chance of hitting me with the new gloves. :D