Gairnulf

As you can see on the screenshot, The Gray Sleeper is equipped on my character, yet on the model, the sword is not visible. I can also send a savegame if you would need it. EDIT: Once I loaded the same savegame I made after posting this screenshot, the sword was in my character's hand. I was just solving a Stronghold dilemma before that, so I guess sitting on the throne hides the weapon, and then it's not returned after the scene is over.

He makes long comments on PoE, the expansion, RPGs and game design in general, what he would like to improve, certain technical limitations the game faced and forced some decisions, etc. https://soundcloud.com/usgamernet/axe-of-the-blood-god-episode-46-obsidians-josh-sawyer-reflects-on-pillars-of-eternity

I found the thermal pearl in Longwatch Falls. It still has no icon, just the small leather bag that's the default icon for items. I know this is a minor thing, but the game is nearing a final state. Please hook the icon there

My Bleak Walker Paladin

I'm glad to point out that I was asking for beakdowns of stats to be added to the UI. As seen on the screenshot, although my character is carrying a greatsword, the +6 Accuracy bonus from the "Weapon Focus: Adventurer" talent, which shouldn't been shown in the tooltip, is still listed. However, the bug is only in the UI. Adding up the numbers from the breakdown results in the correct 69, if we don't count the +6 from the extra weapon focus. So the irrelevant bonus is not applied, but is still shown in the tooltip.

Barbarians start too weak to make any sense in using that class. Anyone claiming otherwise must justify their having base deflection equal to the Rogue class, and second tier base accuracy. The large health pool isn't comparable to high deflection in how useful it is to keep you from dying, for the simple fact that enemy recovery times (between attacks) are much too short compared to the barbarian's. Unless your enemies are unarmored or very lightly armored, as a barbarian you have to use a large weapon if you want to get through their DR. Once you equip a large weapon your recovery time becomes very slow compared to their recovery times, and you are quickly drained of endurance and often interrupted. And it is supposed to be "their recovery times" because the barbarian is expected to engage groups. The conclusion is that a meatshield tank just doesn't work well in PoE. A high-deflection tank (the fighter) is a much better option.

When I kill Iron Constructs (nasty enemies btw), they have no Beastiary entry and any killed Iron Constructs count as Unstable Constructs, increasing their counter in the Beastiary. Savegame: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2n9OkZ4rwZMOWNiSW1uQkNWRk0/view?usp=sharing

I spoke with Beregan and didn't tell her that I'm sent by Stalwart, just that I'm looking for the Leaden key. She gave me the Leaden Key's expedition's stuff and allowed me to leave in peace. I however attacked her shortly after the conversation was over. Now Renengild's son Uldric acts as if I've went with the diplomatic solution and Beregan is still alive. Savegame to test talking to Uldric and check that Beregan is dead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2n9OkZ4rwZMVEhDVFJwUnBLeEE/view?usp=sharing

I dislike it as well. The Stash doesn't prevent degenerate gameplay. On the contrary, it guarantees it. The existance of the stash combined with the lack of weight allowance per player or a combined one for the party, turns the player into a vacuum cleaner. By extension of the "going back and forth is degenerate gameplay" logic, one could argue that having to go to a shop to sell loot is also degenerate gameplay, because you have to go back and forth from the place of battle to the shop. Why not just make a "Poof!" sound and when you pick up loot with the right mouse button, just turn the loot into money? Now that indeed is degenerate gameplay. In a PnP game, I've rarely had strict limitations on the total amount of loot I can carry, but if you try to exploit it, the DM would smack you down hard, for trying to play a videogame and not an RPG: Since there is no DM in PoE, I would propose that this problem is handled in a way similar to how it was in the IE games. Loot should decay and disappear if it spends more than 10-20 hours on the ground, and inventory should be limited in weight. Any form of stash should be two-ways inaccessible (neither take out nor place items in it) while you are in the wilderness or in dungeon. This way the stash trunk would function as a literal trunk, not as a black hole in Eora's space-time.

Hi Aarik, actually I managed to resolve this on my own last night and today. I tried verify/repair, but it didn't change things. I then uninstalled and noticed that some directories of the game remained. When I tried to delete them manually I got an error "Error 0x80070091: The directory is not empty". I googled that error and it turned out I needed to run a ScanDisk for errors on the hard drive. My HDD is about 5 years old, so I was suspicious of it anyway. I ran the check last night and installed the game again today. It's now working normally. I'm buying a new HDD Monday though

My game froze while I was changing weapons at the inventory screen. It was completely unresponsive and I had to restart via the PC reset button. Now I can start the game, but nothing shows in the news box, and trying to load any savegame, regardless of which, results in a black screen with my PoE hand pointer and no HDD activity. Alt+F4 closes the game, and I can still alt-tab. Task Manager doesn't show it as non-responding. My PillarsOfEternity_Data\output_log.txt shows some "TextXML Parse Failed" and "DataManager could not find field 'Display' on 'ExperienceTableData'" errors. Trying to start a new game results in some disk activity after which I'm thrown into the Main Menu screen again. I hope you can make something out of this and that someone will see this during the weekend output_log.txt

GOG's Galaxy is truly amazing. I had a problem with the 3.01 patch refusing to install from Galaxy, with the result of attempting to install the patch being that Galaxy was crashing to desktop. Since I'm a leet hax0r, I downloaded the patch manually from GOG's site and attempted to install that. It almost succeeded, but finished with an error, sayng that common_audio.unity3d that I had locally was wrong version. Ok. Anyway, I started the game up, and it showed a 3.01 version number. GOG's support guy's solution to my patching problem was... that I should uninstall the whole game, then uninstall Galaxy, then reinstall galaxy and finally reinstall PoE. Great job. That's just like Microsoft's solution to problems with Windows up to Windows XP :D Anyway, I did that, because I'm that crazy, and at my first attempt to uninstall PoE, my computer rebooted shortly after their (GOG's) uninstaller started deleting the game files. I found this quite impressive. In the end, I managed to unistall the game (and the expansions which the support guy had omitted in his instructions). Then I uninstalled Galaxy and installed it again from scratch. Guess what - now it was refusing to install PoE without CTD-ing but with a disk read error. Eventually I figured that maybe having just 30GB of free space isn't enough for this genious invention to do its thing. I freed up more space and the game finally installed correctly. Given that this whole process took a little over 4 hours, I was getting slightly annoyed (only at GOG ofc). What was also remarkable is that the 25 GB download took me around half an hour (6gb/sec guys), while GOG love-able installer took at least an hour and a half to finish whatever the hell it was doing. I guess that's the price you pay for not being tied to Steam...

Intersting, I haven't encountered such behavior. Can you record a video of it, to show it in a post in Tech Support?

Oh damn, I wish I had seen this yesterday. I had only the autosave that I had when entering stalwart. I had made no saves between that autosave and the save I sent you, which I made immediately after finishing the ogre battles. So my inventory and stats would have been unchanged between that autosave and the savegame I sent. What had happened was, in the last battle (where the ogres' attack's leader took part) I went under zero endurance and (I guess) health. After the battle, the party gets teleported to its position where they are asked to help with the burning house. At this point I guess my main character was revived wit 1HP. I made a savegame and went to help with the burning house. I failed there, and decided to reload and try again. Loaded the game and boom, no main character Lost all the progress so far in Stalwart. I replayed the ogre fights the same evening though, so my next most recent save )the autosave from entering stalwart) got overwriten.

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I made the attached savegame after a combat had ended, and my character had been knocked out with zero health. He still got up after the combat and I was able to make the savegame. After I loaded the savegame, my main character was no longer in the party and I immediately got the "You have died" window. Please help, if possible edit my savegame to give my main character some health https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2n9OkZ4rwZMOFU0c2JRNkZLM00/view?usp=sharing Thanks!

I agree with this, but I think that when the tedium results from lack of difficulty, then difficulty should be introduced, instead of slashing the mechanic. I think the camping supplies-based resting is a good feature, because it encourages the player to go through the maximum possible amount of battles before resting. This encourages the economy of actions during combat, and forces the player to choose between trade-offs during combat. It makes combat more tactical and decisions in combat matter more. It's similar in effect to the long-term vs short-term health bar. I have a solution to propose to the tedium problem and will post about it soon.

I on the other hand, never liked it back when I played Dragon Age. It felt too much like the game playing itself. I did write my own behavior script for my BGII characters though, though that was even earlier.

1. ("=") Select all -> (Alt) toggle stealth. I often forget to disable stealth before combat starts, but this does it pretty fast. 2. You can bind this to a function key as far as I know. Autoswitching weapons runs the risk of the other weapon performing worse, or be tactically inappropriate - switching to a ranged weapon will break engagement, and sometimes you really would rather keep an enemy engaged, even with an ineffective weapon. Being engaged from two sides provides the Flanked status effect of -10 Deflection. Also, imagine as a result of some status effect, the enemy becomes temporarily suceptible to the weapon you autoswitched. I think the game preforming such actions automatically can do more harm than good.

Thanks Aarik. I had already written to GOG about the Galaxy crash before I wrote here. I only wrote here after manual patching gave me an error as well I'll try to repair/verify, and I'm waiting for reply from them. I was pretty sure it was a problem on their side, but thought I'd ask here too. Given that the file that didn't match was common_audio, and the game shows the new version when I start it (I have to start it manually, not from Galaxy because of the crashing), I guess there's not a danger I could corrupt my savegames, right?

Galaxy crashes to desktop at the "Getting file list" step. Restarting the computer didn't help with that. I downloaded the 3.01 patch from GOG, attempted to install it manually. It finished with "Some errors occurred. See patch_log.txt". Here is the contents of that file: However, when I start the game, the main screen shows the version as 3.01.977 Did something mess up on GOG's side with processing the patch?

I recently found out that the effects from Faith and Conviction (the Paladin talent that improves your Accuracy and Defenses proportionally to how high and how representative of your order your reputation is) doesn't actually scale the Accuracy and Defenses bonuses according to reputation, as it should do according to its description. Any estimate on whether this will be fixed in the next patch?

I'll make a separate topic about the cities and their weak spots in PoE. From what I know about the development, Defiance Bay's districts were one of the first the team did, so they were sort of learning on the fly with them. You can see for example the uneven size of Brackenbury's map, or the way tall buildings often cover ground that's traversable for the party, and make a map feel claustrophobic. If you notice how the city maps in BGII are designed, tall buildings are usually drawn in the edges of the map, so they don't obstruct the view. The IE games have a slightly different viewing perspective though, with the "camera" being set more from above, whereas PoE's viewing perspective is lower on the Y axis. Regarding the voice sets, I think it's on purpose they sound a bit more in the BG variety of heroic/slightly goofy style of fantasy. There wasn't enough voice sets in the IE games either. I hope they are moddable for PoE2, that should help things and encourage people to either record their own sets, or compose new voice sets by grabbing sounds from other games. I remember I played BGII with a voice set with sounds from Thief The Dark Project and it was great.

I was wrong about the city lacking ambient sounds. Actually there are crickets and owls in the night, but I guess these are also used in the wilderness too, and they are too quiet in my experience. Because "Effects" sounds encompasses sounds from battles and spells which are loud and ambient sounds which are more quiet, I tend to keep that slider at such a level that the ambient sounds are a bit too quiet.

I believe the future will bring PoE 2 in this case I don't know how much you are into this type of games, but even just from the perspective of a case study, I strongly recommend you try out BGII and spend some time in the main city there. Yesterday I was trying to analyze what Defiance Bay lacks compared to BGII's big city, and one of the things was the ambient city sounds, some of them were even district-specific I think. They also vary from day to nighttime. Combined with the music themes starting to play at random times (they are a minute, minute and a half long), and subtle animations like birds flying, chimneys smoking, I think it's especially this ambient audio that created the illusion that there is much more activity and much more people in the city than there were NPCs in the respective game "area". So it's definitely worth it to play some IE games if you haven't tried them, just for spotting the tricks the designers used in those games.