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Hmm... Doesn't seem a good fit for PoE. It was good enough for BG2, to say the least.

A wannabe Paladin. I came up with this concept of a highly unique and outright annoying manly-man Cleric in Plate armor that is trying to hit on your female lead constantly, bragging about him wanting to become a proper Paladin due to his noble background. He has a sister he is constantly reminding you off and otherwise hates his family, especially his father. He will go on and on about his issues, trying to take the moral highground everywhere and utterly failing in his attempts to get the better of the PC. His quest involves him visiting his family and getting or not getting revenge for the death of his beloved sister. For some weird reason, it's up to you to decide on that. Did I mention that he won't ever shut up about her sister no matter what? My idea was a character that is just outright annoying to have in your group, especially for women. This creates a nice dynamic in which you have to choose between having a potent cleric in your group or have mercy on yourself by killing him off as soon as possible. Name: A. No-Men. Race: Human Culture: Who needs a culture when you can be a powerful Paladin? Background: Stalker. Special Ability: Surpreme arrogance (passive aura): Everyone within hearing range (including party members) has to roll against fortitude defenses once every 30 seconds. Who fails the roll will become stunned for 2 seconds, unable to grasp what he just said. Suggested Attribute spread: STR: 18 DEX: 10 CON: 16 INT: 10 WIS: 12 CHA: 13 (for some reason) Class: Cleric. Additional notes: Comes with a unique Shield.

Thread reaching the magic number of 30 pages... time to rally the "inb4" crowd!

Can you give a research paper on this? Sorry, but I somehow doubt that there is any scientific evidence for this. Sounds like completely made-up. The reason why a game would go with either 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 has nothing to do with people's memory, but very simple practical reasons based on genre: Duo: typical co-op type games. Two is the most practical number for such games, as it's most likely scenario of having a friend coming over to your house. Having two friends come over to play games is much much rarer. Three: typical action-type games with AI companions. Those are usually there for filling the other two roles of the holy trinity setup. Four: this setup emerged from the restrictions of console game controllers, which mostly have buttons placed in groups of 4. Five: this setup comes from early MMO days and is derived from the statistical distribution of holy-trinity roles in most player communities: 20% play tank, 20% play healer, 60% play DPS classes. So this became the standard of intended group setups for allowing maximum community contribution. Six: this setup is a cRPG classic and most likely derived from a statistical analysis of the average player number in tabletop-game sessions. From all the setups above, it's probably the most arbitrary. Eight and Sixteen: these setups are the go-to setups in Squad-based tactical games. It's based on early days of computer-gaming where memory was limited and maximum numbers were mostly determined by integer sizes as base-2 for easier computing. On-topic: On BG2, I mostly played with a permanent group of 5. Not because of personal preference, but for effectivity reasons: it allowed for a temporary sixth member to complete NPC-specific quests to get more XP and items out of the game. Once I finished all the NPC-related quests with all 16 NPCs in the game, I usually didn't fill the last slot permanently as mostly the NPCs in question got outleveled already (So, the sixth slot almost always went to Sarevok or Imoen, which were the last two available companions by default). In PoE, I see no reason not to use 6 party members, as the companion quests yield no significant rewards and the required XP to cap the game can be reached early no matter the number of party members. I'd say this is a major balancing issue that should be adressed, but then again, we haven't seen any intel on possible expansion content anyway.

Ich glaube kaum, dass sowas kommt. Im Original muss da ja auch unterschieden werden zwischen "him" und "her". Da das nicht der Fall ist, schätze ich, haben sie die gleiche Lösung benutzt wie hier: unisex-Formulierungen. Und es funktioniert ja glücklicherweise; ich würd deswegen jetzt kein Fass aufmachen, imho... da gibts echt noch wichtigere Probleme die die Aufmerksamkeit mehr verdient haben.

Is there actually a way? I've tried to delete them but had no joy - I've settled for editing old notes. Double-click on the note (you'll get no feedback that you double-clicked, but its a necessary step iirc) then hit DEL on the keyboard. Told you it was intuitive Then again, it's probably a feature almost nobody would ever care about, since the number of quests is not that big to begin with.

The game is out now for roughly a month and we already got two major patches that fixed the biggest chunk of bugs already. And here's that one guy that complains they aren't working hard enough. Give them a break, really. Making anything open source here won't help anything except your own personal agenda.

What you're discribing is not "casual" vs "hardcore" but "non-completionist" vs "completionist". There are casual completionists and hardcore rushers. Those playstyles are not bound to any stigma.

It is. In PotD, this issue is probably most noticable: Until you reach Defiance Bay, the game is punishingly hard (that's a good thing... it's what I wanted PotD to be!) and then it pretty much becomes a walk in the park. But this has all to do with some OP items and classes and spells and some general undertuned encounters (human parties are way too weak). Nothing that can't be fixed.

I intuitively kept my Orlan away from water. Now I know why.

This is actually what I do in almost every new game: Ignore all quests in Gilded Vale, stealth towards Caed Nua (don't forget to pick up Durance along the road); fight the two Shadow/Phantom packs you can't skip (good thing you get that anti-ghost sword in the first room) and defeat Maerwald. Then stealth straight towards the southern maps and Dyrford to pick up Sagani, Hiravius and Grieving Mother at level 3. I haven't managed yet to pick up Pallegina at level 3, though.

A 30% Grace-to-Hit conversion is comparable to 12 accuracy, unless you are fighting very low deflection mobs. Default grace range is 15-50, so basicly the total range is 35. This means a 30% increase equals 12 accuracy. This is much better than the flat +5 accuracy on precise weapons. Also remember that you can stack this with other +accuracy enchants like fine/exceptional/etc. Mind you that this only applies if the enemies have high deflection scores. As soon as you "hit" your attacks frequently, it practically does nothing. However, all mobs on PotD have bonus deflections, so you'll get a better mileage out of this than a flat +5 accuracy.

This build is over-tuned imho. You don't need those ridicolous PER and RES scores. With the right talent choices, you will hit 100 deflection soon enough to render tanking trivial. Instead, better invest into getting DEX back to 10. Also, a hatchet should only be used if you fight against high-accuracy mobs. And even then it doesn't make much of a difference. Flails are a much better main weapon choice. You definitely want that grace-to-hit conversion. And mind you that enemies that have a high enough accuracy to do anything else but minimum damage are extremely rare (pretty much only lions).

From my experience, it helps a lot to equip your folks with some heavier armor before the fight. Shadows deal pretty low per-hit damage and a healthy DR of 8-9 on every character will make sure that your squishies won't die instantly from teleporting shadows. Check your stash for medium armors that give extra frost DR (fur hides mostly), as all attacks from Shadows and Shades are frost-based, Use Blessing from Durance to get extra DR at the beginning of the fight. Make sure to not spread your guys too much; keep them all within healing range of the AoE ground-based heal (the one that heals your guys constantly over time). Aloth can cast Bullwark against Elements (a level 2 spell) to protect himself from the Shadows almost entirely. Definitely keep this spell memorized for the Shadow fights. When prepared like this, it's pretty much all about getting through the nasty Damage resistance of Shades. Equip Eder and your PC with twohanders. There's no much to gain from using a shield against shadows and shades. You need high DPS to bring the Shades down before they can summon new Shadows. But yes, Fan of Flames is very effective against Shades.

As I said, I think this will eventually come down to a difference of opinion/preference. I have no issue whatsoever with classes having different base Accuracy and Deflection scores. I like it. It makes sense to me that a wizard and a fighter will have differing natural levels of ability to deflect attacks. That's what the fighter class is - a person who has trained to be able to fight better than others. Why in the world would a wizard have a better natural ability to deflect attacks? And it's not like wizards can't make up for it with abilities - fighters may get Defender, but both classes have access to Improved Deflection, and wizards have a whole host of spells that improve their own survivability. In fact, I'd venture to say that wizards have more abilities that provide Deflection than fighters. Many, many more. The different base Deflection scores is part of what differentiates the classes. If fighters and wizards had the same base Deflection, wizards would probably be better tanks (at least from a Deflection standpoint, they still have crap Health). Speaking of Health.. I could actually sort of see an argument for flattening the differences in Endurance/Health before flattening the Deflection differences. It makes more sense. Although I'm not a fan of either tbh. The classes are distinct, and this is a good thing. You can build a tanky wizard if you want - there are tons of defensive wizard spells available to help with that. But I see no reason whatsoever that a wizard should be naturally as good at blocking blows as a fighter. It's nonsensical to me. I actually tried building a tank wizard yesterday (in PotD because I only play PotD) and played it for a couple of hours. Actually, I was pretty amazed at how usable the results were, even at level 4 and below. There's plenty of spells that - while obviously meant as "oh ****"-spells - become really hardcore as soon as you build your wizard in a tanky way. Most of them last long enough to get you through an entire battle (several 60 second duration spells). Arcane Veil is a little bit underwhelming, though, due to it's low duration so I only selected it as an emergency filler as it has no cast time and seems to ignore recovery times. It's extremely fun and I definitely recommend trying it once. Just stack Resolve and Int like there's no tomorrow (you gonna need that extra duration, concentration and extra deflection) and you're pretty much good to go. Also notice that there's a set of higher level talents that buff the cast time of your primary defensive spells that you might want to pick later on. Mentionable first level spells: Spirit Shield: grants +30 concentration and additional +3 DR. Absolute no-brainer. You can either pop it on top of your plate armor or use a weaker armor type for boosted recovery and use it to compensate the DR loss. Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff: nice for the endurance steal, it's basicly a third free weapon slot with +range if you don't need to tank in one encounter. Wizard's Double: +20 deflection until hit... haven't use it much, but it might become interesting at level 9 when your first level spells become per-encounter Second level spells: Bulwark Against The Elements: +15 DR for every element ... HOLY ****! this spell is OP as **** in a tank build. Any enemy with elemental damage (like Shadows) pretty much becomes useless if you pop this (on top of existing DRs from armors). Infuse with Vital Essence: +50 health and endurance... a must have against larger enemy groups, especially since you probably won't take Constitution for this build (with the low base health and endurance, why would you?)... too bad you can't use it to heal yourself once the spell fades (it sets you to the relative health percentage, not the absolute health you have at that time) Mirrored Image: Now we're talking! +20 deflection for 60 seconds, but gets reduced with every hit. Not so great against larger packs but nice to have against single hard-hitters or when you're Llengrath's Displaced Image spell slots are depleted. Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon: Deals damage and replenishes endurance. Nice against hard-hitters, but I found that replenishing endurance isn't that great on a tank wizard, since you have a low health pool anyway... it's better to avoid damage than to heal it. Third level spells: Llengrath's Displaced Image: +20 deflection and extra reflexes unconditionally. Your primary defense spell. Concelhaut's Draining Touch: See Corrosive Siphon... you will probably use all your spell slots on Displaced Image anyway. I haven't tried level 4 and beyond yet, but I see that there's a ****load more spells that come farther down the line, like Ironskin, Flame Shield and Dimensional Shift. So far, from what I've seen, this works pretty good. Obviously, you will use a second tank when using this build, simply to reduce rest spam a little. But still the overall performance of this build makes me curious on how it will play out at higher levels... Pros: - Comparable deflection to a Fighter when buffed (You lose 15 deflection for being a wizard, but you gain 20 from your defensive spells; Fighter still comes out ahead due to defensive posture and the fighter exclusive talent associated with it ... but there's also Improved Arcane Veil for a whopping +45 deflection and the defensive modal (that btw doesn't stack with the defender modal of fighters, so it's actually worth taking on a tank wiz, as they don't have any modals)) - Free third weapon slot with summonable weapon - Higher DR score than any other class; insane elemental resistances (You can pretty much solo shadows and phantoms...) - Swapping spellbooks allows you to cast your defensive spells, then swap to an offensive grimoire to deal damage - It's way more fun than any of the 3 other tank classes - You get all the wizard goodness and still save a tank slot Cons: - You're forced to rest at least every 4 major encounters (one Displaced Image per fight and your health running out pretty fast) ... which makes this build bad for steamrolling through lower difficulty settings. On PotD, you'll probably end up resting every 4 battles anyway, so it won't make that much of a difference. - First four levels are tough. But there's always Eder for that. Good thing that on these levels Shadows are your most frequent enemies and you have Bullwark Against Elements here. - Let's be perfectly honest: a perfect fighter tank build is much easier to play and probably also more effective. But it's also extremely boring.

Alternative: In Sätzen wo es eindeutig die feminine Form verlangt "Paladina" nehmen. Wäre dann also "Die Bleiche Paladina". Aber nur dort wo Paladin eindeutig in der weiblichen Form gebraucht wird und nicht als Gattungsbegriff. Sie würde also sagen "Ich bin ein Paladin", aber jemand, der über ihren Hintern redet würde sie als "Paladina" bezeichnen.

Or in narrative style of online ads: "You won't believe these 12 ways of dying young!" or: "A housewife just discovered this unbelievable new way of getting cancer!"

This. It's not really the system of PoE that sucks, it's just the copy & paste encounter design.

The flipping earth magnetic field won't "kill us all". I don't get where you read that. No serious geo-physicist would ever claim that. In fact, humanity survived lots of these flips already. However, it will cause compasses to fail and possibly increase cancer rates. But who still uses compasses anyway, when any mobile has GPS already?

@ Luckman and archangel979 (Sorry guys, too lazy to quote your posts atm ) I'm not saying that the PoE approach of "no hard counters" is a good thing. If that's what you extracted that from my posts, then there's a misunderstanding here, because what I meant is: - extreme hard-countering is bad - extreme soft-countering is equally bad. The optimum is somewhere inbetween. Let's take Illithids and Kangaxx again: Those fights should still maintain a somewhat basic challenge even if you hard-counter their trademark abilities. In case of Kangaxx, that could be easily done by adding a health regeneration effect to him (or buffing his regeneration, since it seems he already has one) to prevent players from "micro-poking him to death" and giving him some extra spells beyond imprison and wail of the banshee. Is there any real reason why he doesn't use some damage spells aswell? Illithids: same story. Give them something that preserves some kind of "minimum threat" if their psionics are countered. Currently, the only remaining threat on the Illithid encounters as soon as you popped immunity to psionics are the umber hulks... What I wished for PoE was a mixture of both worlds: hard counters and immunities vs. some trademark abilities, to "shape" an encounter towards problem-solving, but also keep a certain baseline difficulty that can not be hard-countered so that the encounter doesn't become trivial as soon as you solved the puzzle. This can be as simple as adding some extra abilities like a stun or knockdown or aoe-attack. The only Illithid fight that was well done in this regard was the final battle against the "brain" at the end of the Illithid dungeon. For a good example of how it can be done, just remember the human parties in BG2: Perfect encounter design, imho. Even if you "solved" the most significant threat (i.e. a wizard with abi dalzim's or the thief with invisibility potions), the rest of the party still makes the combat engaging. Oh how that Kensai dude in the temple district could mess you up if you didn't keep him occupied with holds and immobilizers. Or that one dwarf guy in the sewers with the throwing axes and ridicolous THAC0. Give us hardcounters. But design encounters in a way that using this hardcounter doesn't auto-win the battle. This is what I'm asking for. Nothing more.

I could swear that I've seen Interrupts break Engagement, just that it's not nearly enough to matter. It disappears for a split second, so I've never been able to actually even try to take advantage of it. If that actually happens (never noticed so far) and it's unintentional, then we should definitely petition for this to become an intended feature (with an extended time-span). That would actually make interrupt interesting!

"Der Bleiche Paladin neigt seinen Kopf. Das Sternenlicht glänzt auf ihrer hohlen Wange." ist vollkommen korrekt und verständlich. Paladin funktioniert hier als ein Gattungsbegriff. Ich glaube nicht, dass hier eine Änderung erforderlich ist. Es ist in jedem Fall korrektes Deutsch. Wenn wir es wirklich "schöner" machen wollen, dann bitte eine unisex-Lösung benutzen wie: "Der Bleiche Paladin neigt den Kopf. Das Sternenlicht glänzt auf ihrer hohlen Wange." Es wäre dasselbe wie: "Der Wolf knurrt." obwohl es sich um ein weibliches Exemplar handelt.

Not really. For example: ... harm isn't so much a hard-counter, more a broken spell to begin with, as you can use it almost everywhere, not just the dragons. So I'd say it should imho be left out of the discussion.

Hehe, the slave battle in Sendai's enclave. Probably the weirdest part of the entire series... I still wonder how they got so many slaves... I mean, you are literally wiping out entire city populations there...

Heh, I didn't know this... so this is derived from fluid dynamic models? Pretty interesting. Seems overkill for most applications, though. Also, I'm pretty sure SC2 uses this approach behind the scenes to a certain extend. You will notice similar patterns when walking a mech through a group of marines. It's just that SC2 "locks" the pathing of units once they attack so they don't interrupt their attacks for moving sideways. I think this was a balance decision to make sure units always deal a constant perfectly sustainable amount of DPS once in attacking range.