termokanden

Yep, the game is amazing. More than I'd hoped for so far. That said, I do hope they'll be fixing the most serious bugs soon as it's somewhat ruining the fun for me and many others.

I think Aloth is the obvious choice for lore. It's sky-high and I think his background adds a bonus, which means it'll be cheaper to get to high levels. Personally I'm just using my player character Cipher with the Laborer background for it, and I haven't come across anything I couldn't handle so far.

I like the con idea a lot. As it is now, people are playing characters with 3 con and it doesn't really make that much of a difference.

They might be able to yes, considering that talent, class and race choices dictate your passives. Surely, those are still available. I can't remember if I double-clicked to equip anything, but it seems like all the passives are correctly listed. If they are listed, can I assume they are still working?

Agreed. This is terrible. You may say it's not game-breaking because you can technically continue, but it's definitely spirit- and fun-breaking! This is the kind of thing many will completely restart the game over, so it might as well be game-breaking. I have to wonder how that bug works. Wish I could help fix it, I love fixing weird bugs.

Agree for the most part, except about accuracy. I hate having low-accuracy characters, so for me it would just end up being sort of a tax. As you say, int also needs to do more than just AoE. For example, if duration is out of the picture, rogues for example would now have just about zero use for int ever. Now it's a dump stat for single-target builds. This attribute system was always what worried me most about PoE, but now that I've actually tried the game, I feel that even though it's not perfect, it's still a lot better than AD&D was.

I asked the same question earlier. It doesn't appear to work at all. That said, I wouldn't go out of my way to replace it. It'll probably get patched, and even if not, Mental Binding is the only must-have 2nd-level spell IMO. If it does get patched and does what I think they mean, it'll be very good in boss fights.

Very useful information, thank you. Too bad about Quick Switch, they really need to fix those gamebreaking bugs!

I've been thinking about this for a while and trying out some weapons. Like the OP, I'm sitting at 4 trying to choose. Early on, bows are pretty good, but I just have a feeling that DR might become a problem, and bows can't penetrate arcane veil. I decided to go the Ruffian route. For talents, I'll get Gunner at 4 because it seems to shave at least a second off of the reload time for a pistol (and an arbalest if you go soldier). With the way blunderbuss scales with Draining Whip (you get at least 12 focus from one shot just from DW alone), I'll be grabbing that and WF Ruffian as my next two talents. Not sure if WF or DW is best to grab first though. If you are an Aumaua, it may be better to take the Quick Switch and Arms Bearer talents instead of Gunner (4 shots is likely enough for most fights). However, since I'm a wood elf, it'll be a while before I can reach even 3 shots and Quick Switch, so I think Gunner is the way to go for me. In any case, while you pretty much need Gunner or Quick Switch + Arms Bearer for guns, you probably don't want Penetrating Shot; as Voss mentioned, you don't want to slow them down further, and besides pistols have very good penetration for those high DR targets.

They do seem to be a bit overpowered compared to other enemies you'll meet at the same points in the game. Well, from what I've seen so far as a level 4 character anyway

Well so far range hasn't been a problem. The abilities even have enough range that I get the wood elf distance bonus. I did just manage to find a Fine Pistol. So far I haven't exactly been blown away by its performance even with Gunner. Don't get me wrong, by the way, I'm not complaining about firearms taking ages to reload. I get it, just trying to figure out how to make it work

I've been wanting to build a cipher with an arquebus (or three), but I've read some depressing statements about them being kind of bad these days. I have a wood elf (so 2 weapon sets) with Biting Whip and am sitting a level 4 thinking about my options. So... Is Gunner worth it? If I really want to be ranged with firearms or arbalests (always liked those high damage shots, did in New Vegas too). Seems like I need either Quick Switch and Arms Bearer or Gunner. The former means it takes longer before my build is up and running, but the latter may simply be too slow still - I don't have the firearms to try it out, unfortunately. Any advice from someone knowledgeable about ciphers and ranged weapons is greatly appreciated

I'm wondering where to go with my ranged cipher and whether to mix in melee. So far I've been using a crossbow (I'm level 3) and even with 19 dex it's excrutiatingly slow to fire (firearms are supposed to be even slower). Perhaps arbalest/arqueus plus a spear as suggested above? I took Biting Whip so I doubt blunderbuss will do much for me. Or maybe pistols are not too slow. Hmm.

Just went through the temple and man, those shadows are much tougher than everything else. There are some rooms with 4-5 of them. Spells seem great against them though. I managed to AoE 4 of them at once with Aloth and my cipher in one room. Once they spread out though, it's such a pain.

Would be nice to know. At least here you have the possibility of saving all your lockpicks so if you're just one mechanics level low for a single lock, you're not completely stuck. In Baldur's Gate 2, you could unlock the vast majority of locks at 100, but there were a few locks (and traps for that matter) that required more for whatever reason. How were you supposed to know, especially in a dual-classed build, how much you were supposed to take in lockpicking?

Well, after playing around with it some more, I just can't see that it does anything at all. Guess it's time to reload and pick something else.

Oh and there's a warhammer that sets your strength to 25 too That said, I agree that it's more fun to play with poorly optimized party members that have personalities than just pieces of mechanics that make the game easier (probably too easy). Besides, some of us take serious ego damage if our characters aren't more powerful than the companions

I'm really digging the cipher class, but I can't figure out what the heck Recall Agony even does. I can read the description just fine, but I've tried it in combat and can't see anything relevant in the log. Surely it doesn't just do 30% of one blow's worth of damage over many seconds (in which case it actually gets worse with high int)? If anyone could point it out to me I'd be very grateful

Hope it makes it into the final version, even if it's just a little bit here and there. ICE CREAM!

I never liked per-rest abilities, not even in Baldur's Gate. In fact, I think it's one of the big weaknesses of the system, and it's what encouraged rest-spamming in the first place. Per-encounter abilities may be a bit better, though I'd prefer it if only a few abilities were per-encounter (for example, reviving a knocked-out party member is probably not something you should be allowed to repeat). While this isn't going to get much support, I still have to say that I honestly like the typical MMO-like mana system much better. It keeps you from overspending and at the same time removes the tedium of managing your party's rest. It's interesting to compare with Dragon Age: Origins since it's another game that tries to be a "spiritual successor" to the same games. Unfortunately, I think they made many mistakes in their game mechanics. For example, a mage could spam cheap lesser mana potions (since magic increases efficiency of potions and mages have high magic unless you're an idiot) and they would just never run out of mana. I feel that if it had been balanced a heck of a lot more, the system could actually work very well. In any case, I enjoy such a system more than the traditional Infinity Engine formula where you have to rest. That said, I am still looking forward to the new rest system and will reserve my final judgement until I've tried it in the release version. At the very least it's interesting and I haven't tried it before.

Exceptional strength is a terrrible idea, by the way, you couldn't have picked a worse part of the AD&D mechanics

I think the D&D attribute system is being misrepresented as this terrible cheesy system. It was meant for pen and paper roleplaying and as a part of the definition of your character. Your character didn't have 12 charisma because it was mechanically the best thing but simply because that's what your character was actually like. Maybe the problem is actually that the system didn't translate all that well to cRPG mechanics, but the system was not actually all that bad. PS: Yes Arcanum and Fallout are great. PPS: When I was still a teenager and had nothing but time, me and a couple of friends designed our own roleplaying system with the aim of making something far more realistic than the silly AD&D (and other games). In the end we did have a system, but we reached the conclusion that sometimes simple is better. Sure our system was "more realistic", but it was a heck of a lot harder to understand. It's not really the essential part when playing an RPG anyway.

I guess I still don't quite understand why a damage boost should be better for slow, hard-hitting weapons. I don't know so much about the game's mechanics, but surely if a weapon does X DPS and you multiply the damage by 1.2, it doesn't really matter if the weapon is fast or slow, the DPS is going to be 20% higher. Is it because of weapon balancing issues then? Or is it because of a damage threshold?

Maybe equally good, but they are fundamentally very different. I guess at the end of the day it's yet another matter of taste.

Is min-maxing actually a problem? It was frowned upon in my pen & paper roleplaying groups because the point was to roleplay rather than "win", but when we play computer games, I think it's a different story.