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You honestly think the game wouldn't become better if the AI didn't circle jerk the very first person they run into? If they just realised there's some people made of glass just a few meters further, that'd make things a lot harder already. Now it's just: a) get tank in position. b) kill everything. Let me guess: you haven't played PotD, right?

There are events which can apply wounds to the intro characters, depending on your choices. You can get Heodan in MINT condition with the right skill checks.

Damage comparisons are moot if they don't include the following: - actually comparing damage per second between builds, instead of damage per blow - varied targets with low DR and high DR

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78515-enemies-shoot-through-walls/

The only thing that was upsetting about this was the complete lack of a cleric if you tried to actually do a "canon" BG playthrough.

I think an easy fix to the doorway abuse could be to give enemies a ranged weapon to swap to if they can't reach their target within x seconds. People will definitely overthink their doorway-cheesy routines if enemies suddenly start to nail their squishies with arrows.

I don't know why they did away with the party members initiating dialogue on their own. Nobody ever complained about that in BG2, right?

These kind of posts always dazzle me. I've got my butt handed to me on PotD on several different occasions. Be it in a ambush fight at Caed Nua where a group of virthaks (verthaks? the scarecrow-like dudes from the Endless Dungeon) start the fight by paralyzing my whole group before dominating two to three of my characters, or against some of the bounty groups which have so many dudes that they swarm my two tanks and then go straight for my back line throwing around disables and nukes as if they were confetti. Or the fight at the top level of the lighthouse where you just cannot tank the mobs properly and have to rely on buffs/heals/disables to let your squishies survive the onslaught. Maybe it's just me, but on PotD (and even on Hard) the game offers plenty of challenging encounters where I had to think about my formation, setup and some buffs/debuffs/disables to keep the enemies from tearing through my softer party members. Or maybe I just don't remember every fight that I eventually managed to win after five reloads as 'too easy' 100% agree. The bounties and some Od Nua levels are extremely tough. I think the problem most people have with PotD is the critical path... which I agree is pretty easy in comparison.

You mean... exactly like it is now? Do you even PotD, bro?

What?

The PoE system is fine. Just add more variety to defenses and DR to mobs and give them selected immunities against certain CC effects. Even those enemies that should have a clear weakness and a clear strength in PoE had not that much difference in their defenses and DR scores. Just vary those defenses stronger and the play with defenses and DRs will be interesting. In fact, in those few encounters where defenses and DRs actually did vary a lot, the battles where pretty fun. Like Shadows getting absolutely wrecked by fire spells or fortitude attacks or ogres being mind controlled / confused extremely easy. Give us more of that.

What else is there to rise? Lore and Mechanics are about the only two worthwhile skills atm. And Athletics to 4 to avoid early fatique. I spec mechanics basicly on all casters, since they mostly have no use for scrolls anyway, so lore would be wasted on them. That means I always end up with 3 guys for setting traps. And it's amazing how effective higher level traps are with a good mechanics skill. Just don't use those 15 damage traps... I've absolutely not found traps to be a waste of time.

This is not how it works. The game would have been rushed out with only the minimum funding. The extra 3 million didn't go only into the extra content; half of them also went into polishing the game systems and art and increasing the possible production time. And I definitely wouldn't want to see PoE without those extra millions. You can check youtube videos of early backer betas to see how much the animations and effects have been improved in just the last 3 months alone. Art, mechanics, content, dialogue depth, ... everything would have suffered.

You know that this is already how it works, right? Spells are not affected by weapon accuracy. Instead, only the character level affects accuracy. Only very few talents and abilities can raise spell accuracy (like the level 1 mage spell or the elven racial).

not every time, in case i screenshoted, traps didnt triger att all, and i colected them after the fight Might be a problem with the size of the enemies or two traps triggering at the same time. I've been using traps quite a lot and they always triggered for me (though not always on the enemy I thought it would).

It seems that traps trigger correctly, but at a slight delay (around 2-3 seconds). Also, the trap effect is applied not in the trap area, but at the current location of the enemy triggering it first. Especially when fighting fast enemies, this is a minor problem, because the enemies "pull" the AoE effect from the trap with them towards your melees. I always have to compensate for that a little by placing the traps farther out so that enemies can't reach my frontline until the trap effect triggers correctly. Nevertheless traps are awesome!

Then again, I wouldn't think too hard about matching skills with character personalities. I think lore is fine in that regard; it adds some freshness to the auto attacking classes and at the same time makes scroll crafting powerful. I like it a lot. I think the main problem with the skill system is how rarely it's used in dialogues and scripted events. I extremely overestimated, for example, the importance of athletics, pointlessly stacking athletics on a lot of characters (when I didn't have that meta-game knowledge). In most situations, a grappling hook could bypass the athletics skill check for the entire party. This is definitely a flaw in design. Basicly, all characters will want 3-4 athletics to avoid getting fatiqued early and that's it. Rest of the points is better spent on mechanics or lore. There's barely a point in stacking it further. Survival is worse. Basicly it's only useful for tanks... which makes me curious as to why Hiravious has so much Survival skill when you meet him first. So here's my suggestions for improving the skills: Mechanics: remains as it is. It's perfect, because traps are awesome. Lore: Pretty good. I don't see a reason to change it. But there should imho be more skill checks in dialogues about Lore. Stealth: Should also give a big damage/accuracy bonus on the initial surprise attack. Athletics: Fatique bonus removed; instead, athletics grants extra endurance (not percentual like CON, as it has a diminshing returns built-in ... like 5 endurance per point in athletics). Also, way more athletics skill checks in the game that can not be bypassed with hooks. Survival: Grants extra health. 20 health per point in Survival. Alternative: remove the "field medic" talent and instead add it to survival and scale the amount healed with skill level.

Instead of removing skills, I'd rather have the devs improve on them. So far, I liked mechanics. It's an extremely valuable skill to stack for everyone, not just your primary trap/lockpick slave, because it affects trap efficiency and every character can lay only 1 trap. A group with high mechanics scores all across the board can lay 6 traps, which can turn entire battles around (you might laugh about that on hard, but on PotD, especially with the bounties, you are happy to have traps at your disposal). I think mechanics is perfectly implemented and requires no change. I was very pleased to see my acid trap hit enemies for 30-50 damage (after DR) in a pretty sizable AoE. And that was just one trap. I'll definitely accumulate more mechanics on my next playthrough because traps kick some serious ass! Stealth is a little bit one sided. I liked how you can use it to scout enemies and prepare traps without meta game knowledge. It's also great to loot containers in houses or dungeons without having to kill the guards or risking a reputation drop for stealing. But all this can be done with just one character. There is not much to gain with having stealth on everyone ... which is a shame. I think there should be an additional benefit for stealth, like increasing damage when attacking out of stealth mode (so basicly, stealth increases your opener damage). Lore: the idea to use the lore skill to cast scrolls is nice. Makes it interesting to stack for every character. However, certain characters benefit from this more than others (obviously, characters with a low amount of abilities like fighters and chanters will want Lore as it allows them to cast spells when per-encounter abilities are consumed. I loved to stack lore on Eder to allow him to cast fan of flames.). Overall, I think lore is interesting and pretty balanced the way it is. When later encounters become harder due to a rebalancing of the game (even on hard, not just on PotD), people will definitely stack more lore. Athletics and Survival: Those are imho the only two broken skills. It's not that they are useless, but it's just that the other skills are way more effective. Especially mechanics and lore. I haven't used potions much because of the slow animation in time-critical situations. More than often drinking an endurance potion actually killed my character instead of saving it (in comparison to using a quick healing scroll). I think Athletics and Survival should benefit endurance and health. It makes sense and would also give those skills a meaning for all classes. Also, drinking potions should be instant; at least then survival would make sense to stack to increase potion effects.

I like this idea. It would be cool to have some quests in the game that you can actually fail by leaving the dungeon before finishing. I also liked the examples a lot. I hate this idea. To me it just seems like arbitrarily limited my experience and playstyle to fit some pre-determined idea of how I "should" play. I don't abuse rest--but sometimes I get bored and want to go do something else for a while. I should have that freedom. Obviously, that shouldn't be the case for all dungeons or quests. But for some, like the Raedric's Hold quest, it actually makes a lot of sense. BG2 had time-critical quests, but almost all those quests were only time-critical if you had the NPCs related to the quest with you, f.ex. Korgan leaving if you don't do his quest or Nalia going for the De'Arnise keep alone if you refuse to travel there soon. Other than that, it barely matters and that's a shame. I always thought it would have been a cool thing if you could encounter Nalia's mother dead if you took too long or the total opposite: that it was possible to actually save her father if you were fast enough. I think this is a missed opportunity. A certain amount of "urgency" makes sense in several quests in PoE.

I like this idea. It would be cool to have some quests in the game that you can actually fail by leaving the dungeon before finishing. I also liked the examples a lot.

This. I found the random loot to be highly satisfying. I think Obsidian found the sweet spot here between static loot tables and random selection of a fixed list. I just wished there was more of it. And that the items would be more powerful. The gloves are nice, make no mistake, but that's about the only worthwhile items that really have a huge impact on your character. I'd love to see more powerful unique items in the game. Especially weapons... currently, a unique weapon is not really more powerful than an ordinary enchanted weapon, except for 1-2 extra enchants that you can not place on them manually (which also sometimes block manual enchants, which makes them even weaker in comparison). Also, they should add more item slots to the game. At least divide the necklace and cloak slots into two. I'd also love to see a tabard slot or something like that. Basicly a vanity-only item slot that can be worn over your traditional armor. And an option to turn helmets off. Seriously, helmets look awful in this game.

Also, the recovery mechanic in fact works amazing in making guns interesting: Instead of waiting for your arbequs to reload, you can instead switch to a different gun and fire that before reloading. ... you know, just like they did with the first firearms! It's amazing. Holy ****, did we just find something about Pillars of Eternity that everyone likes?

I started playing hard battles in the half-combat-speed setting. It helped a lot. I highly recommend doing that! It also reduces the pause-spam significantly.

I don't really see how a new class would benefit anything... I think we have all the grounds covered and I would rather see a different twist like multiclasses or just new and interesting class talents. So basicly: instead of increasing the number of classes, increase the variety of playstyles within the classes. The mage and the rogue class offer this to some extent already: Mage can be played as a spellsword melee-mage with heavy armor and as the typical glass cannon. The rogue can be played as a typical melee-hard-hitter or as a substitute for a ranger (unfortunately, this build is actually better than the real ranger class). The other characters lack such sub-class decisions completely. I'd totally love to have at least two viable playstyles for every class. Like making shapeshifting for druids actually interesting (currently, only the cat form is worth a damn) or giving chanters something to do besides auto-attacking until summoning spell are available.

I think bounties will be tuned down in the 1.05 balance patch. I'm pretty sure the devs (even while not responding to it) have read these threads and will react according to it. I'm not sure if trap or beastiary XP will be tuned down, but I'm pretty sure they are aware of the ridicolous bounty XP. Bounties are already plenty rewarding in that they provide the only significant challenges in the game (especially on PotD ... holy **** some of those bounties are difficult as ****!) and often feature some unique item drops. I don't see why we need that much XP for that.