NickAragua

I'm one of those people that always turns on the captions in Mass Effect or whatever and then skips the blathering. When I read, I can read at my own pace (which is much faster than speaking pace). As mentioned by some others, a few tips for making your time in Pillars of Eternity more enjoyable: 1 - Ignore the dumbass gold plated NPCs. They're completely pointless. 2 - Don't bother reading descriptions for named items. 3 - Skip reading the in-game books, unless you're really hurting for something to read. Also, whenever somebody starts explaining to me what the Godhammer Bomb was, I pretty much just skip that entire conversation node. I already know what the Godhammer Bomb was. Next loser that tries to explain it to me gets a flaming axe to the forehead.

I'm in Twin Elms right now and it seems fine. Defiance bay really had 5 major areas, Twin Elms has 4. Compared to the crappy little villages around them, yeah, they're major cities.

Wow, I haven't seen the "spells per encounter" mechanic yet (all my guys are level 8 currently) but man, that sounds unnecessarily overpowered. And this coming from a guy who hates when player stuff gets nerfed in single player games. I've got Aloth pimped out with two rings of wizardry so he's got six usage of most spell levels per rest AND I can give him talents to increase that to seven. Seven fire cones (or fireballs) per encounter is pretty damn ridiculous. What do you guys want to bet that this is some kind of debugging thing the devs left in so that QA could blast through the later parts of the game quicker?

I'm also not a big fan of the auto-leveled companions. Thankfully, I picked up four pretty early on so they're not too awful, and the party works fine on Hard difficulty. There are only two or three sub-optimal feat choices so far - Durance has some kind of "+willpower" feat which is a waste because he dies in about two hits (better than Aloth, who dies when a xaurip two maps away sneezes on him), and the chanter guy has Field Triage (which is actually ok, but considering how little health it heals, it's become pretty useless at the higher levels). The ranger isn't that good in general, but I can already tell I'm going to be pissed off when I get the next batch of guys - we're all level 7 or so, which means it's a total crapshoot. Imagine picking up a guy with four different modal talents!

I like the stronghold and the underlying dungeon. Nothing like a classic dungeon crawl beating up nasties and picking up loot. Here's a list of things that I don't want living underneath my castle (in no particular order) - Little reptilian guys - Ogres - Trolls - Sentient mold of any kind - Baby dragons - Ghosts - Giant vermin (spiders, beetles, etc) - Whatever else I find down there So, I've been plugging away at that dungeon and it's definitely a tactical challenge. Needs more exits to the ground floor though. The castle itself could definitely use a little bit of "ease of use" feature, like a guy standing in the front yard that can let you access all the stronghold features without having to go through three loading screens. Maybe make it so you have to visit the relevant areas at least once before they show up on the guy's conversation screen. Well, maybe somebody will make a mod for it.