Zwiebelchen

All the "studies" you linked basicly reference the same research paper. This particular research paper mostly focused on the economical aspects, i.e. likelyhood of being selected among equally qualified male and female applicants, payment, etc. Not only did it feature a surprisingly low number of samples to really be representatitve (only 64 per gender), but it also showed that the differences in payment and likelyhood of getting the job between males and females in science is not larger than in any other field or industry. Yes, there is sexism and unequal payment in science. Is that a problem? Yes. Is it any different in any other business or branch? Nope. Does that have anything to do with the gravestone poem outrage? Hell no.

Just play PoE already. No reason to stick to the past. When you're finished with PoE and still want more, continue with BG2 enhanced and then tell us which one you liked more (it's always great to get an oppinion from someone who isn't biased).

Also note that there is a severe health bug in the game (version 1.03) related to sicknesses and certain enemies, which can lead to unusual large health values.

PotD is painfully hard, but only at the beginning. Once you reach Defiance Bay, the difficulty drops big time.

Balanced? He only pointed out his negatives. A good review points out both good and bad features.

Obsidian should add one of those voice synthesizers to auto-read all dialogue in the game just to **** with the community. Too bad april's fool is over already.

A wise man once said: I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with the discussion, but you will probably find meaning in it and comment hereof.

Monks and paladins don't regerate either.

If your maintank is a fighter (like Eder) with constant recovery, you can run without a priest. You might want to add a paladin or druid, though, as those have some healing spells aswell.

This is definitely true. Epic games should deliver a feel of overpoweredness at times. The problem comes with a completely inverted difficulty curve.

Not correct. There were people who did ask for trap xp. And the dev's listened. Yeah, a LOT of us did, since that's how BG2 did it. You know, BG2....the Greatest of the IE games. This is like picking the worst feature of a game and presenting it as the holy grail. Thieving skills in BG2 were just outright terrible... just like Imoen could open ALL locks throughout the game with her static 75 in lockpicking or how 100 stealth was enough to slice up everyone and their mother no matter what level the encounter was. And let's not even talk about all the weird useless extra stats like detect illusion. If you, like me, played a thief as your MC once, you will notice just how terribly broken the game is in terms of thieving skills. At level 11, you literally just dump all your skillpoints into skills you never use because you've already maxed out everything worthwhile. Backstabbing was the only reason to ever bring a true-class thief. And even that quickly became useless in the lategame when almost all difficult enemies had backstab immunity. Obviously, there was also the lay trap ability. But nobody in their right mind would use that OP-as-**** mechanic as it's literally cheating the game (hello trap poison damage that interrupts the spells of Liches (who are immune to poison to begin with) through all their layers of protection spells). So, no, learning from BG2 is not always good.

Which, you got to admit, was a stroke of genius of the backer in question. The backer in question basicly battled the offended people with their biggest weakness: humour. You just can't blame him for being smart.

@Luckman: thanks for explaining your issue in detail. And I can certainly agree with your standing on "murder-hobo experience" and how beastiary XP is actually not that much different. But think of it from the developer perspective once: There's a whole team of designers working on content and art assets throughout the game developement. Including models for monsters or event scripters for battles. Those guys create the content that makes or breaks your game. Artists want their work to be recognized; they want players to explore the content they created, not skip it. That's the main reason why Blizzard made endgame raiding in WoW so casual: they realized that only 1% of people actually saw that raid content and the amazing dungeon and encounter designs that come with it. They wanted more players to see said content, simply because the amount of work X put into the game is the same, no matter if people see it or not. If only few people actually explore that content, it's a waste of effort and time. If we apply this argumentation towards combat, then designers want players to battle each type of event at least once, so that at least that created content gets acknowledged. Content is very similar to art: a great painting is worth a damn if there's nobody seeing it. That's why, as a developer, you want to incentivize players to try everything at least once (that's btw also why achievements are so popular among game developers). And I'm saying that from my own personal experience with mod-making: I always concentrated on content that people liked and wanted to play, putting less emphasis on stuff that was there and required for the scope of the project, but less popular in general. I still provided incentives to run that content, simply because if I invested my time into making it, I definitely wanted players to check it out.

Fixed. http://www.orderoflaibach.com/blog/screw-you-firedorn-lightbringer Haha... I did read that and I just wanted to quote a comment I've found hilarious: "so at first there's a joke that a group of people found offensive even though it was not directed at them, I laughed my ass off at them and wrote in support towards obsidian and you to keep it, heard it got changed, thought it was sad, read the new one, and bro, gimme a knuckle. Instead of having an innocent story that some people found offensive (anything in this world will be offensive to somebody) you made it into a poem that directly pissed on the people instead, comedy gold my friend." Truer words have never been spoken. :>

From my testing, it's possible to get Sagani and Grieving mother as early as level 3. You can stealth-bypass most of the battles on the transitioning maps, aswell as a lot of shadow battles in Caed Nua. Bring 1-2 custom-made NPCs for the battles you can't skip in Caed Nua (this also reduces the XP gained for every temporary party member so that you don't accidently hit level 4 before picking them up).

And I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know that weapon accuracy does not affect spells. Somehow I just assumed that without checking the combat log. So yeah, the conclusion seems that not a lot of stuff actually has an impact on spell accuracy. That's a bummer, but also an opportunity for cool builds to try out, like a melee tank mage with a +deflection hatchet a shield.

... which I appreciate a lot, for RP reasons alone. The difference between Beastiary XP and trap XP: While the former is a compromise towards the pro-combat-xp-crowd, nobody and I mean literally nobody ever asked for trap XP in the first place... This is something the devs and devs alone insisted on having. Which ties into my belief that Obsidian never seems to have understood the argument between Goal-Oriented Experience and Murderhobo Experience to begin with. They seem to just have seen people requesting X or Y and been like "Eh, whatever" and then do their best to appease both, without really making a call based on the arguments. Why? Beastiary XP is a great mechanic. It allows me to skip some fights that I already figured out anyway without missing much, but still incentivizes me to at least check out the content once or twice (I regard battles as content). There is no point in battle repetition. Dragon Age was incredibly terrible because of this, forcing the same battles onto the player over and over and over. It's great that PoE allows me to skip some battles without making fighting utterly pointless at the same time.

This. After you collected all the beastiary XP from a specific type of mob, just enter the rooms with your best stealther and collect all the containers, then sneak back out and be happy you avoided a pointless battle in-style. Eothas temple. 'Nuff said. You can basicly skip half the fights by having a good stealther and still get all the loot.

... which I appreciate a lot, for RP reasons alone. The difference between Beastiary XP and trap XP: While the former is a compromise towards the pro-combat-xp-crowd, nobody and I mean literally nobody ever asked for trap XP in the first place... This is something the devs and devs alone insisted on having.

I don't get this hyperbole about combat XP. I think PoE nailed it with the beastiary XP mechanic: You have a decent incentive to battle unknown foes. By the time you figure out the strategy to deal with them, the beastiary XP for those is exhausted and you can get creative avoiding those encounters. It's perfect and allows players to not repeat the same stuff over and over. It was cool that I had the possibility to avoid several of the Shadow battles in Caed Nua, as I already had all the beastiary entries from visiting the eothas temple and they mostly didn't drop any loot either. I wished more games would do that. Battling the always same enemies over and over again is just plain boring (Dragon Age).

Can we please apply the same procedure as in the last topic of similar kind? By making it a sausage thread? Here lies Firedina, a heroine in bed. She once was alive, but now she's dead. The last man she bedded, turned out a woman And crying in shame, off a cliff she ran. Hmm... swapping the genders somehow makes the poem more offensive than less... But also hotter.

Can anyone try to confirm if this happens for all sickness debuffs or Guls only?

"People doing stuff for fun are doing it wrong."

I'd love more ... "fantastic" placed. The PoE areas are all pretty down-to-earth when compared with the cool settings of BG2 and TOB. Give us creepy magical places: everyone remembers the planar Sphere, the Astral prison, the mindflayer dungeon, Ust-Natha, the Fire-giant mountains or the Sauhaugin city. In addition to that, I'd like to see more desert or snow areas aswell. And more puzzles. Seriously, the lack of puzzles in PoE is disturbing...

Oh no, they are static. The only spell you need to boost your deflection is Llengrath's Displaced Image and you only use it on hardest encounters, by level 7 a Wizard can cast it 6 times and each time lasts 63 seconds with 18 int. I think resting once every 6 hard encounters is quite reasonable, I wouldn't consider it spamming. I'm loving playing on Hard difficulty with just 2 resting supplies. Yeah, this works on hard, but on PotD (if it weren't for the ****ed up lategame balancing), you are pretty much screwed with that 73 deflection. Plus, I am almost perfectly sure that stacking RES and PER would give you a much better tank wizard build than that weird CON build you have. Considering all that CON only adds 36% extra endurance and that the same amount of RES would net you not only +11 deflection, but also extra will saves you lack (fortitude sucks) and concentration. But ... yeah; I'm definitely gonna try a tank wizard build in my next playthrough, using the spells you mentioned. But I'll probably rather stack PER and RES instead of CON.