Serdan

Use: FindCharacter animal Should return something like "CRE_Lion_Animal_Companion(Clone)"

Write down an exhaustive algorithm that encompasses those behaviours and get back to me. That's maybe a bit snarky, but it's one of those things that are very much not-simple and there are better ways to make fun and engaging encounters than sinking hundreds of man-hours into advanced AI. It's possible to imitate some of what you're asking for with better encounter design for instance. I pretty much agree with the OP though. A BG encounter worth mentioning with respect to trash mobs is Ursa the cave bear. It wasn't that you hadn't killed xvarts and bears before, but the xvarts having a pet bear to protect their village made it memorable. It really doesn't take much.

I just find it strange how there is no racism between elves and humans. Neither race can reproduce, elves dominate the "hut Dweller" culture, and not to mention that elves can live longer than humans. You would think that last reason would give some elves a superiority complex. Humans and elves are united in their distrust of orlans.

Resolve gives you Concentration, Deflection and Will. As a ranged character you're mostly concerned with Will, so dumping Resolve and putting the points into Intelligence is a pretty good deal.

It's every other level, if I'm not mistaken, but the point stands.

Just FYI, I think you can see enemy immunities by referencing the Beastiary (maybe even with cursor hover?). Immunities are listed under abilities, which is the last thing that gets filled out.

Yup.

It's not absurd, it's the truth. Replay value is already quite low in PoE, and Attribute Scores are basically the only relevant qualifiers. If you can change Attribute Scores at will, those qualifiers cease to matter. Not rocket science. Combined with the fact that PoE has some real issues in dialogues as to what you can and cannot even attempt entirely based on your Attributes, there's some good incentives in there to do it, to boot. Your way of playing the game is not the only way. I play with unqualified interactions set to hidden. Respeccing multiple times for every conversation on the off chance that I missed something interesting would be utterly ridiculous. Not to mention that I'm roleplayng a specific character, so I won't want to try options that make no sense for my character. Exploring every dialogue option is also not the only reason to replay the game. Some people enjoy replaying with different classes and party compositions. That you are so completely oblivious to the experiences of others is rather worrying. Btw, claiming that it can be done "at will" is dishonest at best. The screenshot clearly shows that the retrain button is part of the Inn UI, so it's not as simple as loading to a point just before the dialogue. For dialogues outside the cities that alone makes it prohibitively tedious in my opinion. No, I never made that argument. I was obviously talking about the process of levelling up, which is definitely not a laborious or time-consuming process. Like AndreaColombo, I think you've equated tedious and boring to laborious and time-consuming. One is true, the other is not. Have you actually taken the time to respec a level 12 character from 1 to 12? I've done it, many, many, many times. First during Beta, and then a few times in the full game, for testing purposes (the former to test/check Abilities, the latter using ChangeClass). It's not some long and arduous process. Half the levels, for many of the classes, you don't even do *anything*, and you don't even have to jump between the levelling screen and the game focus. You only place Skill Points once; the final level you qualify for. What is supposed to be the time-consuming and laborious process, exactly? *Ahem*: "whereas respeccing in PoE is likely the press of a button and a some shekels trading hands." I just assumed that wasn't hyperbole either. You've done it many, many, many, many, many times going all the way back to the beta... Do you seriously not get that your familiarity with the system is a factor here and that the experiences of others may differ? Not obtuse, I was referring to the same thing. He didn't refer to the vast amount of additional work (especially since it's been hinted at that we are the ones forging it to begin with; reforging would simply be a reset). If it was a workload issue, that would be a good argument in the interest of not being hypocritical, but that's not the argument that was raised. For whatever reason, it is more important to keep the soulbound weapons un-reforgable, than the actual characters. Personally, I tend to find the characters of a game far more important than the weapons, but perhaps we simply prioritize differently. Either way, it's a valid argument to make. There's no solid reason not to accept reforging of soulbound weapons, or any enchanted weapons, really, if characters themselves are so malleable they can be reshapen at the local inn. Oh ffs. The conversation is about reforging the weapon into a different weapon type. It's not just a simple reset. Since you seem to have trouble remembering what was said, here it is again: "We are not going to implement a system to reforge a soulbound weapon into another type, throwing out its unique appearance and effects, unique icon, and unique illustration, just to force the player to fit it into their pre-existing Focus/Spec categories." Resource allocation is always a concern for Sawyer. You should really know this by now. You think characters are so important that respeccing to explore every dialogue option is something you consider to be reasonable. "There's no solid reason not to accept reforging of soulbound weapons" You just, as in the previous paragraph, acknowledged that resource allocation is a valid reason.

What Gromnir said. You're being utterly ridiculous. Just so we're clear: You didn't just claim that it would diminish replay value, which I guess a case could be made for, but that it would render replay value "virtually nil", specifically because one can respec to get all the options in every dialogue. If you don't see how utterly absurd that is, then I don't really know what to say. Wait... Do you seriously think that it is the activation of the respec mechanism he referred to as time-consuming? Are you daft? He was obviously talking about the process of levelling up, which does indeed take time if you don't already know exactly what you're going for. It's a subjective matter obviously, so at most he can be accused of generalising a bit. You are being obtuse. He is referring to the unique artwork, lore and design in general that is associated with each weapon. Allowing reforging would require either a vast amount of additional work, for very little pay-off, or scaling back on the uniqueness and making them rather bland.

*snerk*

I believe you can use the add XP console command with negative numbers to delevel. IE Mod also adds a respec command.

I dont know what you measured but it sure wasnt hdd performance, physics prohibits it as of today(maybe yesterday), no matter SATA version, especially for any several years old 5400rpm drive. Maybe you saw a zero too many? 30MB/s is more realistic. Yes, I'm sure. I can read and access the data in less than a second. I just did an additional test where I tell it to write the last byte to screen. Works fine. I've handled large files before (specifically Wikipedia, which is several gigs in a single file) and 30MB/s would have been absolutely torturous, so I'm pretty sure I would remember that. Btw, why do you assume it's 5400rpm? Those 7200rpm drives have been around for a while. This is pretty academic though. I think we can agree that load times of 10-15 seconds has little to do with read times (especially considering that even people with brand new SSD's experience the same thing).

But then what? In other games my load times were like cut in half. We have to wait for Obs to optimise.

Nope. I think it has been well established that load times have little to do with HDD read times.

Your sample is marked as private.

You would be wrong. Long load times for some computers is a known problem. I get ~10 sec load screens on my fairly decent rig. As Sensuki points out the largest area file is something like 312 MB. Any modern HDD can read that in less than a second. This post is so ridiculous i just couldnt resist. That average reading speed of a modern HDD can be as low as .7MB/sec for a fragmented HDD. It would need 7 minutes to read 300mb, not one second so you just exaggerated by a factor of x450. Realistically speeds of about 50MB/s are to be expected, so would still need at least a couple of seconds just for reading such a file. And if you apply a hammer to your HDD it won't read the files at all! I obviously assume that people keep their HDD's healthy. I.e. defrag regularly. Btw, It isn't something I just pulled out of my arse. I actually wrote an app specifically to test read times on my own HDD. It's several years old and has often been completely filled with data. I timed 300MB at less than a second.

Do you happen to have Pillars installed in a strange location? We were able to see the error, but only after we manually moved the PIllars folder into another location. The EmptySteamDepot folder is really strange and shouldn't be there. Is that folder in the root of the game directory? No, I have Pillars of Eternity installed on my game drive like all the other games through Steam. So nothing unusual about the location. Yeah, the EmtpySteamDepot is at the root and it was there when I first patched the game. The PillarsofEternity_Data was missing, or I assume it was because that's what the error was about. The EmptySteamDepot is exactly the same size and seems to hold the same files as well. Based on the dates however, it seems that the EmptySteamDepot file holds some of originally installed files as they have dates that go back to March 26th. Soooo.. the old data folder was.... renamed? I don't know. Is it safe to delete now though? It does eat quite a bit of space. I'm guessing it's supposed to be a temp backup during the update. I had the same folder, though it was empty. It should be safe to delete.

Agreed. Fortunately that means it's something that can be optimised.

You would be wrong. Long load times for some computers is a known problem. I get ~10 sec load screens on my fairly decent rig. As Sensuki points out the largest area file is something like 312 MB. Any modern HDD can read that in less than a second.

It doesn't stay useful for very long tbh. I'd recommend selling it in the camp.

Why did you start a new thread for this?

Maybe you should consider that your preconceptions don't accurately reflect reality. I care about social justice (you'd definitely call me a "SJW") and I have no problem with a game having sexist, racist or even child-molesting characters. As long as it's handled well. Which I think PoE does. One of the reasons I liked Aloth's line is because he told Durance off for being a sexist bastard.

They always just get the bonuses obviously. Anything else would be silly...

I'm not saying the game is short, or long. I haven't finished it yet. However, all the 'hours played' as indicated by Steam indicates is how long you've had the game running, not how long you've actually played the game. Maybe he looked at his savegame? Mine says 53 hours and I've just entered act 3. Steam says 164 hours, but that's over multiple characters.

"Cruel" in this game actually means being a right bastard. You won't get "cruel" points just for engaging in some righteous butt kicking. "Cruel" is telling the orphan that his parents never loved him. Stuff like that.