falchen

If you had him since WM1 you'll need to talk to him again, just go through his greyed out conversation options as one of them should trigger it in WM2.

Unless you're talking about the console Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series, then no they did not have replenishing health and abilities. Everything was recovered by resting in BG1 + 2. Which you could do anytime with no restrictions.

Baldur's gate already had replenishing health and abilities recharging with each encounter though. Pillars tried to address this but they went about it in a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of way, rather than picking one way and see it through.

Having per rest spells when you can rest anytime is just needless busywork anyway, there are enough camping supplies everywhere and if you run out you can always backtrack. If they have to keep vancian-like for any sequels, I'd go back to Baldur's gate system where you have to memorize spells separately. The spells were practicaly per encouter already but since you had a limited amount of spell slots to fill that actually created some decision making, like do I want two fireballs and one dispell magic, or maybe switch one of those out for lighting bolt... The other option would be to actually restrict resting in some meaningfull way but that would create a bunch of other balance issues of their own.

Godlike are pretty much D&D genasi with some twists. Whether it's a blessing or a curse is up for debate I think.

I use defensive with everything else disabled, all I want is characters to start hitting something else in range when their current target dies and this seems to work for that.

Would love this, but think they are done with the game now other than bug fixes etc... would there be any way to mod something like this?

And then you would have to replay the 50 hours of content you already beat to try again? Don't know about you but I wouldn't bother. What's the point of making you redo challenges you already mastered, that's not difficulty, that's just padding out the game so it takes longer.

Getting ready for a new playthrough, how difficult is POTD anyway? Want to make sure it isn't like... half your spells and abilities are useless, only certain builds are viable, and you have to minmax/use custom adventurers?

Personally I'd look at the NPC's you can get and make a class of whoever you won't want to drag along.

Is there a list of all of these somewhere? The wiki is horribly outdated.

Maybe he didn't want to reveal the specifics of how gods can be empowered or depowered, or that mortals can influence the gods by using some ancient machines. Like exposing the leaden key would also expose the "secret" they were trying to hush up and he might not want that.

What is a god then, what would they have to be to be considered real? Curiously Dungeons and Dragon's gods of the forgotten realms are bound by rules, their power actually depends on the belief of their worshipers, they can die or be killed, and it's even possible for a mortal to become one. Most would still agree that they are real in that setting.

I didn't like Grieving Mother, her writting was too image heavy if that makes sense, just too heavy on the symbolism and metaphors, what really got me was how the first conversation you have with her has a quiz, like someone wanted to make sure you don't skim over all that stuff. Doesn't help that she has the least plot involvement and no banter with other companions, it's like she's not even part of the party (i know there's a reason for that but they could have played with the idea of a strange woman hanging around everyone ignores, instead of just...ignoring her).

This bothered me a bit, the actual dilema the game presents is about the gods being man made/where they come from, and asking whether they should be worshiped or if they are even necesarry... all of which are pretty interesting things to ponder... Yet the text presents this as the question of whether they are real or not, which just isn't the same thing and actually distracts from the substance of it all. Like at the climax of the plot you can try to make Thaos admit that they aren't real... which is dumb because they clearly are, I just spoke to a bunch of them less than an hour ago. Like I don't know what they would consider to be real gods, but powerfull entities representing a set of ideals with real influence in the world and over mortals seem to fit the bill, regardless how they came to be. On the flipside of this, I would still be totally down with overthrowing them even if they had existed since forever rather than created x years ago. We know gods can die not because of their origin but because kith already killed one, so people would know it is posible regardless of if the "secret" comes out. Like the gods being "real" whatever the definition of that would be still wouldn't give them moral authority or the right to screw with people in my view.

While I just used the quiver of endless arrows, or that bow that created it's own ammunition - because I didn't want to bother with this ammo/inventory management crap. No offense meant, just seems like a few of you folks played those games with a very different play style than most. (example the above, complaints about lack of kitting, refusal to rest).

I think cyphers should just not start with any focus, or at least start with much less.

Really? What consequences did anything in Baldur's Gate have? The plot is entirely on rails too.

I'm certainly sure maze got hard countered by something like spell immunity:abjuration.

You had very little roleplaying options in BG, most conversations gave you only generic responses and you rarely had choices other than do quest, don't do quest, don't do quest and kill quest giver with no consequences. BG2 your whole reason for doing the game's story was that some douche abducts your foster sister, ignoring that your character just might not care about her. Dragon Age inquisition lets you define how your character thinks and feels about things, lot of quests let you make decisions that actually change the outcome, and the story and characters would react to what you do. Getting to murder random npcs without consequence is not roleplaying.

The encounter still gets decided before combat even starts, and requires metagaming to boot- you need to know you are up against maze/level drain/etc in advance (because you died to them and reload, read a guide, or played the game before), and if you do the boss might as well not have those abilities at all. You can't just make yourself immune to the enemy in advance in PoE, so you have to deal and react to their gimmick during the actual battle. Also there is still the issue of (lack of) an oportunity cost. There's no reason not to use protection against negative energy before a fight if you are facing vampires, and no reason not to use the generic long lasting buffs (protection circle, bless, stone skin etc) before every fight. In PoE you have to decide if you want to buff yourself (and with what), debuff the enemy, CC, or just nuke them with damage. I don't disagree with you saying encounters in PoE could have been better/more interesting, I think more fun and challenging encounters are achievable with the systems in place though.

They deliberately did not have hard counters as it just creates what they call puzzle fights. If you don't use the hard counter you are screwed, if you do the fight becomes trivial, and this gets decided before the fight even starts. Casting the spell that protects against maze when you are up against a boss that casts maze is not strategy, that's common sense.

If you haven't done that quest he speaks gibberish instead.

Honestly, I don't mind crytism of PoE as the game does have flaws, saying it's the worst obsidian game or worse than BG/IWD is what I don't get, PoE is objectively better, if you could put up with the flaws of those games you should be able to enjoy this too.

All I remember about Viconia is that you can cure her nastyness by sexing her, did she actually have a backstory? And Jan Jensen was the craaaazy gnome who kept ranting about turnips, much like Shale was only that golem that ranted about pidgeons, right? It's easy to make any character sound boring or unmemorable if you want to.