This is new...

What does it do?

[edit] I mean, what does it do other than negatively affect virtue?

 

There’s various Monoliths in scenes that can raise or lower virtue. You will need to find them all. The one you found so far, lovers virtue. Just find the one that raises virtue.

 

Okay, so it just affects virtue. Do they all work off of Spindelskog runstones?

 

I have not checked all of them, but I believe it works with any Rune Stone. There’s 3 different ones (Ulfheim, Spindelskog and Vikland).

 

So... we've pretty much given up on the virtues, then? Or is there more to this?

 

Some additional info that may be helpful...

I have seen these virtue monoliths in 3 zones so far: Ulfhiem, Spindleskog, & Vikland (as Anpu alluded to).
The monoliths will either raise or lower one of the 3 virtues (truth, love, or courage).
Monoliths that raise a virtue will have an up arrow engraved on them - the up arrow looks like this: ^
Monoliths that lower virtue will have a down arrow engraved on them.

I never translated the rune on each monolith, and those runes may indicate what virtue will be effected.
But if you walk into the stone circle at the base of monolith, an on-screen message will tell you the virtue that will be effected and whether it will raise or lower the virtue.

Clicking the offering bowl will give the runestone to the monolith and cause the virtue change.
The virtue offering can be done once a day.

I think the point of interest markers for these monoliths only show up when you are relatively close to the monolith.
I am not sure this is the case for all zones that contain the monoliths. But, be aware that if you are far away from the monolith, the marker may not show up on your compass.

Virtue does not seem to impact gameplay very much. I know of only a few things that virtue can effect. The ones I can immediately recall are: ability to enter Jack of Diamonds or Manor of Mystery (neither zone offering anything of substantial interest), shroud color, some NPC responses, Oracle response, and some equip-able item effects (e.g. sylvan gear). None of these are particularly compelling, and I noticed no substantial difference in my experience whether my Avatar was "good" or "bad". I think there is a lot of room to improve on virtue impact on game experience. I have not given up on virtues yet...but, it seems like it is low on the priority list. Perhaps the implementation of the monolith is a precursor to future features in which virtue will have a more substantial impact game play?

 

That's kinda my point; even if they add in more features that relate to virtues, if you can just go raise/lower the stat as needed (admittedly, at once daily, it will take some time) it just becomes another stat to min/max and makes your behavior in the game irrelevant.

 

Nope! Look at your Shroud. Mine stats will go up or
Down based on what I do. I always give a beggar a coin so that virtue will continue to go up!!!!

 

That is one single aspect of the virtue system and takes an action of you to change. Similar how you can decide to avoid waking a sleeping NPC and wait until it wakes up and goes to work, or how you decide if you steal or not.

However if you can simply do what you want in the game and then *abrakazam* fix your virtue score to the one you want, then it becomes practically a yoyo at your whim and not a result with consequences.

I can understand that players would want that occasionally, e.g. to visit once Captain whatever in his airship or the Mysterious library the Mystic Mage talks about which require either bad or good virtue numbers. But that what´s Kobold hackers are there for.

 

Kinda missed my point entirely, but keep on rockin', dude.

 

100% with the changes not long ago about adding in reset items to the store along with items that allow you to simply change has made the meaning less significant over all as you can correct outcomes. Not sure if @Sannio has larger plans to connect this into faction systems down the road or to perhaps use other flags that are long standing to make it so npc's and other things still know your past. As it stand currently though all these things do indeed make things some what irrelevant short of the quests and things you can't repeat that were already don't with your current virtue at the time. this is a great topic on its own that is important imo.

 

@Sannio can say more but as i understand it, these artificial virtue changes can help you get close to the middle if you're far at one end, but you can't use them to push yourself to the far ends. if you want to be really good or bad, you have to actually do the work.

 

Factions? That will be a waste.

 

That makes a bit more sense. Especially given that it's pretty dang difficult to go through the main quest and a lot of the side quests and come out with low stats. Though, a better fix would be giving those quests evil paths to take. (Though I also suspect at this point we won't see big changes like that in e1 quests.)

 

In Mistrendur iirc the NPC’s there are using a new Reputation system. As in the more you help them, the more friendly they will be towards you (and opens other quests).

 

I would argue it was doubly a mistake. With Cabalists being the only source of a number of items beneficial to players no matter their virtue (which also drop very rarely) "bad" players had no choice but to take the courage bump if they wanted to farm Cabalists. It would make more sense if the items they dropped were of little value to low-virtue players, perhaps items with virtue stats that relied on positive virtue. Then there'd be less reason for bad players to want to kill them. (I suppose you could say they were stolen by the Cabalists to be desecrated, and good avatars would want to recover these items.) But everybody can make good use of Wicked King gems, and they are one of the more desirable drops. Not to mention, completists who want the Cabalists hoods and weapons, which are even rarer.

Courage seems like a big problem in general as a reward for killing something. It certainly makes sense as a result in a lot of cases, but the game kinda makes it hard to avoid killing a lot of stuff. (Well, okay, you can do lots of other stuff besides kill things. But I think we can agree that players who play violent games non-violently are the exception and not the rule.) Cabalists aside, I'm sure more than a few "good" avatars have had to deal with the courage hit from fauns who remain aggressive after their masters are taken care of. (Especially if they're using auto-attack.) Ideally, a courage bump for killing should only occur in quests, and then only in quests where there is also a cowardly option.

 

Jack of Diamonds and Manor of Mystery offer the Kobold Deco Weapon quests. The Sylvan weapon parts like the horns offer +7 weapon damage and +9.9% crit chance which I am currently testing to see if it's better than bronze. I do have an alt with all negative virtue which is easier to play without having to worry about killing things.
vj

 

After years of playing and reading forums, I'm yet to see a neat implementation of the virtue system in the game.

It's one of the "good on paper, bad in reality" things. It's a textbook example of parasitic feature.