Pixies

Yeah, the appearance of the Pallid Knight isn't currently externalized as far as I can see.

UPDATE: Seem to have found it. For the curious, this appears controlled by characters.gamedatabundle. Search for one of the subrace names and you should find it. Anyone localized the file/parameters controlling the options in the character creator? For instance, giving all the races the option to choose from all the hair colours. And since pale elves can have beards, it should be possible to add them to wood elves as well, and so on. I've looked around in global.gamedatabundle and there are a lot of values that seem like they should be affecting this, e.g: {"Subrace":"Meadow_Human","HairVisualDataPath":"prefabs/hair/male/a_m_hair12.asset","FacialHairVisualDataPath":"","HeadVisualDataPath":"prefabs/heads/m_hum_head01/a_m_hum_head01.asset","HairColor":{"A":1,"R":0.3490196,"G":0.2235294,"B":0.1333333} {"$type":"Game.GameData.AppearanceVariationSettingsComponent, Assembly-CSharp","SubraceSkinVariationTags":[{"Subrace":"Meadow_Human","VariationString":"HUM"},{"Subrace":"Ocean_Human","VariationString":"HUM"} So far though, the results are meager. By swapping out the prefabs you can give e.g. a wood elf the preset face of a pale elf, but that disappears as soon as you try to select any of the other head presets.

That's not the problem. The problem is that there is only one kind of minmaxing, and it is unintuitive and dumb. Well, I think all min-maxing is dumb, but whatever floats your boat. Not any dumber than the notion of being able to assign stats at random and still be effective, really. Like in RL, if you want to be good at a certain job you will require the skills and/or the attributes for it. "Hey, I can't run, I'm 5'1 and my hands are too small to hold a ball, but I think I'll go for the NBA because none of that matters!"

I don't see how it's silly; it's the case with most professions in life and actually makes a lot of sense. Would Usain Bolt be helped by a 180 IQ? Quite likely - but his capacity for running fast is without a doubt the defining characteristic that makes him what he is - and you can be sure that's also why he devotes all his training towards that goal, rather than to be able to, say, perform surgery, calculate mechanics of materials or wrestle someone into submission. So not only are certain attributes necessary for success in a certain field; development within that field also tends to lead to fulfilling as much of the potential of those attributes as possible, quite likely at the cost of others. Complaining that most D&D warriors have high str and con seems like complaining that most basketball players are tall, explosive and have good ball handling skills.

What it seems like is that if anyone attacks you from behind you get the flanking debuff, giving you -10 deflection from all sources. Certain spells also produce flanking.

The reviewer clearly isn't a big fan of those games, but also not entirely unacquainted. If you read the full review I don't think it's unfair, he does give it 8/10 and brings up some fair points. I too reflected on that while I like some of the NPCs in PoE, there's no one there with the impact of Minsc, Jan or Viconia.

Agree in full. The main reason I didn't play ToI yet isn't the difficulty factor (I too tend to leave a playthrough if I wipe or if the main character dies) but rather the lack of control. Without multiple save files I would never have been able to repair the damage caused by the stat-stacking bug or focus gain bug, and would be stuck waiting for a patch instead of enjoying the game. Also I enjoy playing around with conversations, seeing what happens if I try various options.