Have read a bit of your discussion, and would just like to give some comments on what I think is a good character. Have only played trough once, but to me it seems that one-handed melee is quite good. Have you considered the benefits from both having a weapon and a shield? Two items give a double amount of benefits, as compared to have just a bow or some two-handed weapon. At the end of the game I had mace that did 6 -11 + 4 damage, plus had a + 15 to hit, a plus 5 acid damage and 2 – 8 disease damage. This combined very well with a small shield: just 2 AC but, + 12 to ice and cold protection and 7 one-handed melee skillpoints, and additionally 9 % fire protection and 9 % to fire damage and 9 one handed melee skill points, and last but not least added 2 points to charisma. I think that just one item couldn’t mach these things combined. I haven’t tried anything else, so it might very well be that I am wrong.
I play a sylvant (I went for a mage strategy, and then sylvant seemed as the best choice), with a divine spirit. My traits are: fire ancestry, one-hander and small frame. These traits create quite good synergy with my tagged skills (one-handed melee, fortitude and fire).
My stats were at the end:
Level 46
ST: 6 (7)
PR: 7 (8)
EN: 5 (7)
CH: 10 (12)
IN: 11 (12)
AG: 9
LK: 5
Fighting skills:
One-handed melee: 230 (tagged)
Evasion: 88 (with full plate armor, minus 15 to evasion)
Thieving skills:
Find trap: 88
Lock pick: 115
Sneak: 53
Diplomacy: 54 (80 to speech)
Magic:
Fortitude: 155 (tagged)
Smite: 128
Fire:141 (tagged)
The other stats aren’t worth mentioning.
I also found it very useful to use the “target” function. When on “hectic” you easily hit the enemy 3 times pr round, and the enemy can only hit you once. Then with a high agility and quite a large amount of skill points (on one-handed melee) you can compensate for less strength. This is good when you go for a mage (which I did), then you can put more points on CH and IN (you need that for mana and skill points).
As I encountered the last stages, there was no problem using magic as ballistic weapon (just before facing the old man I had 1682 mana points (that is maximum) and 108 mana elixirs in my inventory) . At some point I missed a bow a bit, but my fire magic actually did the job without to much sweat. And this potion that reduces arrow damage with 50 % is also really helpful.
And BoF, about the psychology studies, you should read some sociology. There is some quite good positivism criticism in sociology that hits psychology rather hard. Check out Foucault “Birth of the Clinic” for instance. To you seeing all the psychology experiments as rubbish, you might be very right, but the neurologically based research done the last ten years or so, I find hard to reject, and also quite useful. fMRI is a good thing isn’t it?
It seems that you encounter quite a lot of frustration in the “university culture,” check out Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak” to read a well formulated essay that argues that more or less all scientific knowledge (from the U.S and Europe at least) are produced for no other purpose but to legitimate the hierarchy of power that already exists in the world today (the relationship between the North and the South). This text shows a very concrete way to argue against a lot of the “established” science. I miss some concrete examples in you argumentation in why psychology is so bad
Hopefully this was to some extent enlightening to this thread…
Please excuse my wording and gramar, I am no native English speaker.