flamesium

1. Game doesn't say. We know for sure life existed before the Engwithans made the gods though. 2. Game doesn't say. As you say, if Eora is in a global Hollowborn crisis as soon as The Wheel is broken the ending slides would / should mention it. There's a theory that there's a reserve of souls which have already been through The Wheel which are ready and still able to transfer into bodies as usual, which would postpone a global Hollowborn crisis. 3. Probably because they expect the situation to focus minds on the task at hands - look at how much progress was made during WW2 for instance. Also because they are anticipating kith having access to the secrets of Ukaizo.

The whole concept of levels only works in the first place if you don't think too hard about it. I think asking for any of it to be explained in story terms is asking too much.

You started with a good approach and then ruined it all with that one silly sentence. I fail to see how these are appropriate responses for something like this. OP just shared an idea, maybe not very well thought out. Since when is that to be shamed and discouraged? What happened with the notion that there are not dumb questions, only dumb answers? We don't live in an era of free ideas. We live in an era of think exactly what you are supposed to think or you will be hounded into submission.

It's a fantasy game, so we can pretend there are no differences between genders. It does show the weird incoherent position of our generation's belief system that it's verboten to suggest a difference between the two genders, but having significant attribute differences between the races is no problem. I can't tell if future generations are going to laugh at us for wilfully denying reality and pretending males and females are the same, or be outraged that we implied a difference between the races.

I've seen them for sale but I couldn't tell you where.

This is a rare occasion where I think adding extra (weakish) enemies to some encounters would help. It needs to be easier for your frontline to be overwhelmed or skipped past entirely. It’d also give your casters more cause to use AoEs (more likely to be several weaker enemies grouped together) and spells to reduce mobility. Cast times can then be reduced to offset the fact casters won’t just be sat at the back in perfect safety.

They still wanted to leave a window for themselves to have events trigger when you leave a building.

Don’t you get the guy just inside the entrance of Fort Deadlight who will take you straight to her?

Sigh. I've no doubt people dislike the resting system. I didn't say otherwise. I said I doubt any significant number of people actually went back to town regularly during dungeons to resupply in PoE1. The limit on camping supplies was the one factor which put me off ever setting difficulty higher than Normal though. It didn't genuinely make the game more difficult, only more annoying. Real challenge added by making the fights more difficult or putting a real limit on the ability to rest? Sign me up. Fake challenge added by making you more likely to have to sit through the load screens and a hike between you and unlimited resting? No thanks. I think both the new and the old resting systems were bad, but I find the new one bad in a less obnoxious way.

I have just done Dereo's quest successfully. He told me where to find Mad Marina. All the pirates are still hostile. I don't know if you can 'unhostile' them once they are hostile. They don't turn hostile if you have reason to be there the first time you visit. If you end up there without reason I think you can sneak out via a rowboat without turning them hostile. If it's for the feeding the Roparu quest there are other ways of doing it.

What difficulty is that on? I'm finding him way more useful as half barbarian. That was on Veteran. I was a Ravager on that playthrough, I might Barb him next time.

At Poko Kahara waystation it’s like this: Luminous <sacrificial souls trapped here Luminous Luminous <sacrificial souls trapped here Corrupted Corrupted Corrupted <machine around pillar causing corruption, souls above can’t pass through Luminous Luminous Luminous <souls flowing through naturally Luminous Luminous Luminous <souls flowing through naturally Luminous Luminous Luminous <souls flowing through naturally I believe the only reason the adra around the Deadfire tends to be luminous is because of the proximity of The Wheel. Souls from around the world are flowing towards The Wheel and reach a higher concentration as they get backed up like traffic waiting their turn on The Wheel.

Unless I imagined it -which would not be unheard of btw- I believe it’s mentioned when discussing Galawain’s plan to use the Hollowborn souls to strengthen the souls of the people in the Dyrwood. If not then during discussion of the Autumn Stelgaer’s role of culling weak souls. New souls can be created, but I believe it is by a process of ‘thinning out’ existing souls as they go through The Wheel, rather than getting something for nothing. Well the first souls must have come from somewhere. Souls seem to regenerate as well, recovering their power without having to consume other souls so souls increasing in number via mitosis that results in two souls equally as strong as the original soul seems valid with 'twinned' souls being the result of the process not going quite right and leaving a connection between the two (otherwise most people in Eora would have to be twinned souls at the very least to account for the increase in population). I believe souls initially formed from a ‘cloud of essence’ surrounding the planet. The super bad ending concludes with this description ‘The world ends as others have begun - a lifeless rock in a cloud of essence.’ which imo is the souls returning to their original state as Rymyrgand desires. There is still loose essence in the world, which iirc is linked to how magic functions. Idk which souls we’ve seen regenerate but they could be using loose essence to do so. I still don’t believe it’s an infinite resource.

This is the million dollar question. We don’t know and I’m not 100% convinced the writers do either. Did the Engwithans irreversibly break the natural cycle when they made The Wheel? Did they make The Wheel *because* the natural cycle was failing? Will a natural mechanism reassert itself with The Wheel broken or has the world immediately plunged into a global Hollowborn crisis? Only the super bad Rymyrgand ending suggests the latter happens immediately and irreversibly. It’s hard to make any kind of informed decision at the end of the game, because the required information is unavailable. We’re just left to make a blind guess, not that it particularly matters in the end, unless you deliberately talk Eothas into ending everything.

Corrupted Adra is ‘blocked’ Adra which prevents a soul flowing through it. You can see this at the Poko Kahara waystation where the machinery has made an ‘off switch’ in the base of the pillar by corrupting the adra, so that the ‘soul energy’ from their sacrificial victim pods on the upper floors will become ‘trapped’ in the top of the pillar - effectively making a battery of the healthy top part of the pillar. Eothas explains that he’s sucking souls out of the luminous adra pillars for fuel, as well as out of people he passes by. He himself is made of luminous adra, being an adra statue rammed full of souls. If you convince Eothas to help kith after he’s done breaking the wheel, the ‘light of thousands of souls’ leaves his body. If you don’t tell him to do anything the souls stay trapped within him and the statue continues to glow. Yes, because it is blocked so the soul will trap, if not the soul will flow through adra. Without manipulation, adra is just a conduit with essence, so people are not mining soul . I think you have fundamentally misunderstood the story of the game if you haven’t realised luminous adra is luminous because it has souls in it. In Poko Kahara the souls are trapped *by* the layer of corrupted adra, not *inside* the corrupted layer. They have been deliberately bottled up in the healthy top part of the pillar and prevented from making their way past the corrupted layer into the rest of the adra network and toward The Wheel.

It is strange that after two games where animancy is a Big Deal in both we haven’t had a full companion who is actively involved in the field and understands it. Pallegina vaguely fangirls for it because the Republics are pro-Animancy, but doesn’t really have a clue what she’s talking about.

I had to stop taking Serafen, he just kept one shotting himself.

Corrupted Adra is ‘blocked’ Adra which prevents a soul flowing through it. You can see this at the Poko Kahara waystation where the machinery has made an ‘off switch’ in the base of the pillar by corrupting the adra, so that the ‘soul energy’ from their sacrificial victim pods on the upper floors will become ‘trapped’ in the top of the pillar - effectively making a battery of the healthy top part of the pillar. Eothas explains that he’s sucking souls out of the luminous adra pillars for fuel, as well as out of people he passes by. He himself is made of luminous adra, being an adra statue rammed full of souls. If you convince Eothas to help kith after he’s done breaking the wheel, the ‘light of thousands of souls’ leaves his body. If you don’t tell him to do anything the souls stay trapped within him and the statue continues to glow.

Unless I imagined it -which would not be unheard of btw- I believe it’s mentioned when discussing Galawain’s plan to use the Hollowborn souls to strengthen the souls of the people in the Dyrwood. If not then during discussion of the Autumn Stelgaer’s role of culling weak souls. New souls can be created, but I believe it is by a process of ‘thinning out’ existing souls as they go through The Wheel, rather than getting something for nothing.

Just to clarify here - it's not souls they mine but soul essence. It's not somebody's grandma's ghost they're desecrating, but formless energy. It’s somewhere in between but much closer the latter than the former. As a Watcher we know first hand that souls remain largely intact throughout the cycle (with some alterations made here and there while on The Wheel), hence why you are able to read a soul’s former lives. The souls marching alongside you in the adra vein during the intro are discrete individual souls, not a river of jumbled up ‘essence’. ‘Essence’ seems like a euphemism to make the practice of grinding soul infused adra into fuel more palatable.

Adra is just a material which can store or manipulate soul, it is not form by soul. If use correctly you can siphon part of soul essence without doing harm, like what you can do to the dragon in Watershaper guild. But yeah, it has high potential to be abuse. However kith will abuse any resource anyway. Adra is that. Luminous Adra is Adra full of souls. That’s why they are specifically mining and fighting over Luminous Adra and nobody particularly cares about regular Adra. It’s also why it’s suggested they could not bother mining Luminous Adra and simply take the ‘soul energy’ directly from living people instead via sacrifice, like the Engwithans did. Eothas (himself made of Luminous Adra) is also using the Luminous Adra pillars as refueling stations if you need further proof, sucking the souls out of them to power his march across the Deadfire. It’s the souls which are providing the energy; the adra is merely a conduit. Presumably the Adra in the Deadfire is ‘Luminous’ because it’s where The Wheel is located. Souls are ‘pulled’ there and bunch up waiting their turn on The Wheel. Kith will abuse any resource, true, but the abuse of most resources doesn’t have the potential to destroy the ability for future generations to have souls. PoE 1 touches on the idea that as the population increases the available ‘soul energy’ has to be spread thinner, leading to weaker individual souls. Taking ‘soul energy’ out of the reincarnation system entirely for other uses (to power an industrial revolution say) will only worsen that effect, even assuming The Wheel were still operational.

I don’t think you want to spread your own points over more than a couple of passive skills. There are quite often multiple check options in the same event, so you’re better being strong at one or two than middling at all of them I think. I spent them them around 2/3 Streetwise, 1/3 Metaphysics. Streetwise comes up a lot. Metaphysics didn’t come up very often, but when it did it seemed to be at important moments. Survival I would leave to a party member you know you’ll always have with you. It’s used all the time in the scripted vignettes but there you often get to nominate a party member to perform the check, rather than doing it yourself. There are a few weapons in the game which improve based on your passive skills, but I wouldn’t worry about that on a first playthrough.

Fighting way underleveled against the old city Cave Grub boss on my first playthrough. I finally finish off the boss with only an exhausted Xoti left standing in a one on one vs the last regular sized cave grub, burning through my remaining health potions in between swinging and missing at this thing. I finally cast Withdraw on myself right before death as a final throw of the dice, feeling pretty comfortable this will take me back to full health for an easy win against the pathetic and almost dead cave grub. Instead Xoti’s vision range gets cut down to nothing from being in Withdraw, the game thinks combat has ended and dumps me straight out of Withdraw, causing combat to immediately reactivate and this special forces ninja cave grub to finish me off.

Best use for 2H I’ve found so far is using the Morning Start modal to lower Fortitude. Makes them dead easy for a Barbarian with Brute Force to hit / crit against. I think 2Hers need bonus damage on Full Attacks. Whatever is necessary to get them comparable to a DW full attack.

What is the reasoning behind Nalpazca Monk? Is it because of the drug use being similar to potions/decoctions? Yeah, it seems like the most ‘prepare by consumables’ class, plus Warrior Monk is a reasonable description of Witchers. Geralt is also very accomplished using his fists. The spellcasting half is the trickier half I think, as the equivalents of the Witcher Signs are sort of spread out over the Deadfire casters. I think Wizard edges it for Arcane Veil and Fan of Flames.