dtgreene: I'm playing Bard's Tale 3, and have just reached Tenebrosia. I have bought the NUKE spell for my spellcasters, and am currently hunting for item drops (and experience). The overworld battles are easy; most encounters fall to a single NUKE.

The problem?

The enemies keep dropping Harmonic Gems. In fact, I am basically using a Harmonic Gem after every single NUKE, and there is no shortage of them. It feels rather silly to waste Harmonic Gems like this, but they keep coming! In fact, I've had battles where a single enemy drops 2 of them, and I actually got 3 of them from a single battle!

I know Harmonic Gems are common, but this seems a little ridiculous.

With that said, it is fun being able to NUKE every single encounter. I could probably even get away with using DIVA (which has a base cost of 250 SP) as my sole form of healing, which really does seem ridiculous!

(I believe that Harmonic Gems will become scarce again once I reach Malefia, but for now, I effectively have unlimited SP, and the battles give decent experience (over 10k for most battles for a party of 7), so I am not seriously complaining; it just seems that I keep getting Harmonic Gems instead of more interesting items.)

toreadorelder: Thing is, you only need the good items a couple of times; you burn through gems at an alarming rate. Cuz later on, IIRC, it's double and triple NUKE, and even a DIVA or two to clean things up, REGULARLY.

It has been 30 years, but...my memory of BT 3 was that it became escalatio ad absurdem more than any other CRPG I can recall.