swordofthesith

Following from suggestions on this thread, here's my revised plan for my Barbarian main. The idea would be to provide melee DPS to the tanks in the party and avoid engagement as much as possible. This character is not built for taking damage, instead it dishes heaps of it out through Carnage, Death's Usher, Bloody Slaughter, Blood Lust and Blood Thirst. Role: Off Tank DPS Race: Death Godlike Death's Usher x 1.2 damage against enemies with low Endurance Barbarian Level: 15 Mig: 18 Con: 3 Dex: 18 Per: 18 Int: 18 Res: 3 Abilities: Level 1 - Frenzy - A Level 2 - Accurate Carnage - T Level 3 - Wild Sprint - A Level 4 - Bloody Slaughter - T Level 5 - Blood Lust - A Level 6 - Savage Attack - T Level 7 - Blood Thirst - A Level 8 - Two Weapon Style - T Level 9 - Barbaric Shout - A Level 10 - Greater Frenzy - T Level 11 - Heart of Fury Level 12 - Weapon Focus Ruffian - T Level 13 - Eye of the Storm Level 14 - Powerful Sprint Level 15 - Echoing Shout Equipment: The Flames of Fair Rhîan The Unlabored Blade [WM2] Gwisk Glas Pensiavi mes Rèi Gwyn's Band of Union Bracers of All-Consuming Rage Finreah's Grace

That would be awesome! Would love to see your build Boeroer! - Sith

Thanks for your insights Boeroer! So, let's say I'm just stubborn as a mule with my stat setup. Anyway I can mitigate my Con and Res with buffs from my party or with equipment? How would retaliate work with a two handed weapon setup?

Thank you for the feedback KDubya and Boeroer! I am returning to the game on a normal play through with the following setup: Fire Godlike Barbarian Level: 3 Mig: 18 Con: 3 Dex: 18 Per: 18 Int: 18 Res: 3 Talents: Accurate Carnage I am hoping to setup this character as an extremely fast off tank DPS with the ability to fend off adds through retaliate. Is the above stat spread viable? Would talents and items should I consider downstream? - Sith

Yo PoE Meta Gurus! Is the Fire Godlike Retaliate Barbarian still viable in 3.2? - Sith

How does this build with OSA now fixed?

ooOOooooOOOoo. Got try it with a monk!

Wow, now that is a really awesome strategy. I'd be inclined to try a 2nd tank instead of 2nd rogue for PoTD but still, that sounds ungodly. Yeah. You can drop the 2nd rogue. Put in a Priest and you've basically pressed the Auto Win button for Pillars of Eternity. Very, very few encounters can wipe you with that setup. With my Ciphers protected by Consecrated Ground the Lighthouse was absolute cake. Cail the Silent and his horde of drakes from Cinders of Faith quest line got WTFPWNED. I don't think there's many fights I could lose with this party configuration.

You pretty much thought of an awesome strategy I was too lazy to come up with myself, but I saw the theoretical capability of EE, thats why I opened this post. As to FF, as soon as somebody said"Echo doesn't do FF", I was like wtf, didn't it do FF before? Many people denied it ever was, but I'm pretty sure it was at least in 1.03 maybe in 4 also. Hey Raven! Keep in mind that the range for Escape is quite short. There are times when it's better to slap Boots of Speed your designated EE magnet and have them run around the enemy line as they engage your fighter. But the Escape teleport with EE is extremely bad ass. You should try it sometime. ^_^

PUMPED.

I run a party with a Dwarf Fortress (Fighter) 2 Rogues (one setup for a 2H spike damage build, other setup as a DoT/DPS build)... and 3 Ciphers. Combat begins. I engage with the Dwarf Fortress, flank with one of my Rogues and then hit the Escape power while at the same time targeting the rogue with Ectopsychic Echo from all 3 of my Ciphers. Ectopsychic Echo triggers, Rogue teleports behind the enemy line around my fighter and absolute carnage ensues. I am ROLFSTOMPING pretty much everything in the game with this setup. Ectopsychic Echo = Easy Mode. They ought to change it back to being capable of friendly fire at least. Right now, without friendly fire, it's just too easy to position and clear out fights with this power.

Champion stuff! Go OE!

+ 1 for this proposal too.

Awesome suggestions Katarack! Voted up!

Yes, but the imbalance in XP isn't what matters - only the imbalance in level matters. With the same exponential formula the BG games used, you could have three times the amount of sidequest XP as story XP and still have no more than 2 levels difference between a total completionist and a completely critical path player. Ever. The reason severe imbalances in XP translates to severe imbalances in level is the quadratic level curve. Exponential simply doesn't have that problem. It allows for severe imbalances in XP to only translate to very slight differences in power. That's why I suggested it. Then you're just replacing XP with % content completion. Looks different, but is for all intents and purposes almost the same thing. With tons of sidequests with differing levels of difficulty, you'd have to weigh each one differently... and then you're basically just back to XP. Not to mention that doesn't solve issue with completionists overleveling unless you just don't give levels for sidequests at all. Which is something you can do with an XP system anyway. Like I said though - it certainly could work. But as I mentioned above it doesn't really offer much beyond an XP system and still runs into a lot of the same challenges. It's also very very different from the IE games, which would piss a lot of people off. And from where I'm sitting I see no chance that it will happen - I prefer to make suggestions I think actually have a chance of being implemented, that's all. Thanks so much for your XP insights Matt! There's just no refuting the logic behind your concerns with the current XP system. I hope Josh & Co. do the math and re-balance the XP distribution in the next patch. ^_^

Spam, tbh.

Got to go with Matt on this one Sens. Pillars of Eternity, for all it's flaws, is still 100x times more entertaining than BG1 and BG2 for me. However, there are areas where it definitely can still be improved. Namely, the XP spread through the game, the stronghold mini game and mob AI. However, I do believe the developers were very open about how this first game would feature very basic AI. Heck, most of BG1 and BG2 featured completely lobotomized mobs as well. It wasn't until the very end of the IE engine, with Icewind Dale 2, when they were able to pull off some nifty tricks with their mob encounters. Give it time, give it an expansion or two and a sequel (all of which I'll happily) pay for and I am sure all those issues will be sewed up.

Great, thanks for that information Leferd! Clears things up for me. ^_^

Same confusion here. In my orders it lists: 1 Digital Download of Pillars of Eternity 1 Digital Download Plus But under products it simply lists: Pillars of Eternity - Kickstarter Hero Edition Pillars of Eternity - Kickstarter Hero Edition I have no idea which product is tied to which order and it's a source of great confusion for me, seeing as how I plan to gift on key to a friend. I want to make sure I gift them with the base game and keep the Digital Download Plus version for myself. - Dork Sith

Sens. Without a shadow of a doubt, you are the nuttiest squirrel on these forums and have an ego just a little bigger than Australia. But there is no denying it... You've been an absolute soldier during the Backer Beta. I am sure that the Obsidian Q&A team has been glad to have you as an unofficial part of their army during the development of PoE. It's been an exciting run. All of us who can still remember the initial Kickstarter video Josh & Co. are pumped that we're finally at gold release. Thanks for the passion. Am sure that, you helped move the needle in the right direction for us all. ^_^ <3

War Team PoE! <3

I think what they'd want to hear is the design of actual talents with a clear vision of how they are supposed to make a class more viable in a new situation it wasn't before, without it stealing the role of another class. For example, you could give the monk an ability that converts wounds into healing for everyone around him except himself, attenuating the necessity of a priest. Or, which has already been mentioned, giving the monk a taunt-like ability to make his class ability work better. That is also a good suggestion. But it would still be helpful to map out the talent sets through an imagined class specialization, otherwise it will be a complete mess of random abilities that don't do much to expand play options with the class.

Bang on. Josh has been pretty open about need additional ideas for class talents from us Testers. I think we need to re-double our efforts with that kind of feedback.

Hey Indira! Great suggestion. I think it would be excellent if the Dev team could sit down and map out multi-fork development specializations for all the classes. Given the amount of classes already in-game, the easiest thing to do would be to gift the specialization with boosts to derived attributes and select talents and gift the character with a free specialization talent every 4 or 5 levels. Would you recommend that classes receive both a core class talent AND a specialization talent - or one or the other Indira?

Hi BBs! Hat tip for Josh for always coming to the Beta Backer forum first with the important details about the development of PoE. We know where his loyalties lie. He provided us with a great list of stuff that he and the rest of the team are hoping to work on over the coming months and I figured we could try and put our collective thinkmeats together for the greater good of PoE! Here are two items at the top of his list currently: 1) Improving Class Advancement * Restructuring class advancement to allow more options, both within the selection of core class Abilities and through the (many) Talents that we implemented based on backer feedback. 2) Improving Class Features * Modifying some class features to be more transparent or just fundamentally work better. Monk wounds (and many of their abilities) were very confusing previously. We've revised them to make what's happening much clearer and easier to use. So, gurus of Eternity, how would you go about improving class advancement and class features? Let's get the team the kind of feedback they need! - Dork Sith