Madscientist

Some time ago I made this build The fast assassin. I am not 100% sure, but I think you need 16 int to get a peaceful outcome with llengraph and get the stat bonus. Soory, I am not a very good player, so I have not beaten the alpine dragon and Llengraph even on hard. I do not play PotD.

At the moment everything is just speculation, so here are my thoughts: I really like Gothic 1+2. So when you gain a level you get points and you need to find a trainer to get better. There are some trainers who teach some basic stuff but for the advanced stuff you need to join a faction or find well hidden Trainers. Joining a faction or being accepted by a trainer takes lots of efford, so you will meet several of them before you make the final choice. This way you kind of have several different classes, but you select them through your actions in the game, not at the start. Depending on how well defined your character is ( are you a specific person with fixed name and background or can you be anything?) you may select a "class" at the start similar to Tyranny or D:OS2: You select your race, gender, background and starting stats and abilities, but it does not prevent you from learning anything else later.

For me it was different. When I started TW3 I played TW 1 and 2 before. I was confused because I did not know Ciri and my mage friend ( name forgotten, the woman with the black dress, not Triss). Both of them are very importent for the story and Gerald seems to know them well, but I have never heared of them. TW3 is one of the best games ever. But because of my confusion with these two chars maybe it would have felt a little better if I had not played TW1+2 before. In that case everything would be new for me so it would be normal that I do not know everyone. Of course TW1+2 are very good games too, so I do not regret playing them and it helps to understand many other things in the game, not just those 2 chars. Fun fact: very often I played part 2 first and I got part 1 later. for example BG2 was my first big computer RPG I finished and I got BG1 only later. Most games can be played without problems, even if you do not know the previous games. Only exception is when the second game starts exactly where the first ends, For example Trails in the Sky 2, Trails of cold Steel 2 and probably you have to play cold steel 3 before cold steel 4. Those are basically one huge game split in 2 very big games.

Boeroer said that chill fog from grave calling is foe only but scapolous said "How I tested: I went to fight Ikorno, who has one Ironclad Construct with him. I killed the construct with Grave Calling, let the Chill Fog drop, then maneuvered my party into it and watched the stacks build to 10 and then paralyze Ikorno: " which sounds like it hit the party. So is it foe only or not? I used the imp upgrade because the description says nothing about foe only ( I think, not 100% sure) and the normal chill fog hits everyone so I feared I kill and blind myself faster than the enemy.

By the way: Do you know any example where a company invented a setting, made 2 games in this setting and then made a huge game with different gameplay and different name in the same setting? I know examples where they keep the name and change gameplay ( Fallout 1/2 -> Fallout 3 onwards) or the setting ( almost all Final fantasy games are independent of each other), but I do not know an example where they keep the setting and change the name.

You are right and I do not know the answer. Another thing is the kind of text to use. I have written and translated stuff like manuals or other technical texts in german and english, but I could not write an interesting fantasy story. A technical text needs to be clear and easy to understand and you should avoid any emotional stuff in it.

OK, 4 years ago ( shortly after announcing PoE2) he said he wants a sci fi game and something like skyrim. Now we have the outer world, so maybe you are right. He also said “I can make more profit from two Pillars of Eternitys than I can from one [Knights of the Old Republic 3].” OK we have no Kotor 3, but especially PoE2 sold not as good as he hoped. But I can understand his point that using an own IP is better than paying someone else tons of money just to use the name. On the other hand, Larian makes BG3 and the stuff I have seen so far looks great.

Being aware of the problem is the first step, but solving it is something different. In PoE1+2 I have the feeling that the people who made the translation were missing context in several cases and the people who put the text into the game did not check what they got from the translators. Only when the translators can directly talk with the devs the result can become good. RPGs have more complex settings and rules than most other games and this stuff is often hard to understand in the original language. It is almost impossible to translate something when you have problems to understand the original. I guess every developer in the world speaks english. Among other reasons, almost all programming languages are based on english. But the problem is to be a good writer. Knowing a language is not enough to write good texts in this language. And even if you can write well in one language it does not automatically mean you can write good stories in another one, even if you speak several languages. Maybe european companies are more international than american ones? For example Larian is in belgium, so I guess most employees know english, dutch and french and a lot of them know german too. Owlcat has also many employees who know more languages than just russian and english. To be fair, the trails series may be a bad example. They have great translations, but they are translations made for a game that is already finished. So the translators could play the full game in japanese when doing the translation and they could ask the devs if this and that is meant in this or that way. It is something different when you translate stuff when the game is still in developement. At least for germany I can say almost everyone learns english at school and most people learn a second foreign language as well. For me it was french, but I have forgotten everything since then. I know several native english speakers and some complain that its hard to learn german in germany because people automatically start speaking english when they hear that your german is not so good. I do not know much about the US school system, but given the history and the other countries around it would make sense if many people learn spanish and maybe french. PS: I know that Josh knows some basic german, some of his posts are in german. But he admitted it is not good enough to translate complex texts in a very good way so he cannot check the translation. I do not know if he knows other languages.

Is there any info outside this video? At the moment I would say its too early to call it "skyrim clone". OK, in the video we can see a first person perspective, you have a sword in one hand and cast a spell with the other. I did not see mentioning "open world", "levelling up by skill use" or "join every faction at the same time". I really hope they do not use the level scaling from TES, it killed any feeling of progress. I love gothic1+2 or risen1. Enemies stay as they are, but you start very weak and you grow stronger over time.

I played Oblivion in german and it was the worst translation I have ever seen. Some dialogue was not translated at all and that was the best part of it. I never finished Oblivion. Not because of language but because of level scaling. After killing tons of demons I had problems to beat goblins and rats. PoE1+2 had a terrible german translation too. I played both games in german once and reported all errors to the people who made the translation mod, but later I just played in english. Both games sometimes had exactly the same errors. They just took the same text from PoE and put it into PoE2 which resulted in several errors, such as mentioning DR in PoE2. Looks like they just send text files to a translation company without any context and they did not check the result they got because no one at obsidian speaks german. Really bad are those translation errors where you can see what it was in the original language. Like they translated a sentence word by word or the original text was some kind of pun. Example from Wild Arms 1: In a hospital you talk to a person and in english it must have been something like: " I am waiting for the doctor since hours. Now I know why it is called patient." In german it makes no sense because the words for ( being able to wait a long time ) and ( a person seeking treatment in a hospital ) are not the same. P:K had a very good german translation. I did not play it in english. A very good example is the trails series. In an interview for Trails of cold Steel 3 the devs said they had to change some text so it makes sense to a western audience because some texts would require knowledge of japanese culture to make sense or they are just bad jokes that make no sense in another language. Thats exactly what devs should do, but some idiots complained that the game is censored.

Finally my time has come to shine! Here comes the scientist: A flat world and a torus are the same, at least when you look at topology ( a part of mathematics where you look at shapes without regarding distances and angles, the most simple thing you can do is counting how many holes a shape has). Take a rectangular piece of paper and glue together the left and the right side as well as the upper and the lower side. The result will be a torus. In every game with a rectangular world map were you come out on the left side when you always go right ( same for up/down) you are playing on a torus world. A sphere is different than a torus because it has no hole. On a torus it always takes the same distance to come back to your starting position when you always walk right, no matter where you start. On a shere the distance to reach your starting position when walking east is different, depending on how much north/south you are. Of course things look different when flat means the world actually has an end. Then we get this problem: Where does all the water and air come from that falls over the edge? PS: Secret of Mana has a world map without edge and you can look at the world map as a normal map and as a globe. How did they do this? PPS: When scientists say our univers is flat, it means it could be a hypertorus but not a hypersphere. If you always fly straight in any direction you might come back to where you start. But the universe is expanding and it is already so huge that the solar system would probably not exist anymore in the unlikely event that you actually manage to come back by always flying straight ahead.

regarding weapon upgrades: One thing is the improvement of penetration. I do not play on PotD, but even then some enemies are very annoying. In systems with DR you can compensate problems with more damage, in Deadfire your damage is pathetic if your penetration does not reach enemy AR. back to sales numbers: Yes, maybe the fact that obsidian nerved stuff every time players found something powerful might be another factor among many others. RPGs are the type of games with the most complex rules. Even devs cannot predict everything. Players will find combinations of items and abilities that can make some encounters that are supposed to be difficult very easy, up to the point of becomming immortal. I am surprized they did not nerf salvation of time+barring deaths door+brilliant, which seems to be the only way to manage the ultimate chellenge. Lets invent a rule: Every sufficiently complex RPG will have legal combinations to break the game. If this is impossible either its not an RPG or its not complex enough. By break I mean you become almost immortal against most enemies. Deadfire is a complex RPG by this definition. I just finished Mass effect again and it is not. Its easy in general, just shoot stuff and watch for cover. Just to be sure: Just because a game is not a very complex RPG does not mean it is a bad game and not every complex RPG is good.

The devs of P:K said that WotR will have a tutorial and a new UI. There are tons of suggestions for improvement in the forums. This stuff was not implemented in the alpha, but the devs are definitely aware of the problem. Well, the second game uses the same rules as P:K and we will get more classes, more races, more feats and mystic paths, so players will get the power of angels, dragons demons or lichs on top of their class powers when they fight demon lords. Even if the rules will be explained much better, the rules themselves will remain complicated as hell.

I have played many RPGs and I would say that there are only 2 unintuitive rules: - In PoE1 most things that said "action speed" only influence recovery time. Plus the fact that the speed formula is not explained in both games. - Double inversion in PoE2. This gave many players and even some devs a headache. Otherwise the game was very easy to understand, just by reading the tooltips. I had no problems at all to finish PoE1+2 on normal, except the bugs at release which have been fixed later. I am not nearly as good as boeroer or thelee and I have problems to understand many details in DnD 3E/pathfinder, but I play computer RPGs since ca. 25 years, so I cannot say what new players consider complicated or unintuitive regarding those games. The fact that DnD or pathfinder game are still developed makes me hope that people did not become more dumb in the last 20 years.

When you google "pathfinder kingmaker sales numbers" the first hit is 1.2mio, and that number is from 19. march 2020. I play computer games since the mid 90s but I do not play PnP. I do not care what system is used, setting, story and characters are most importent for me. I think that DnD 3.5/pathfinder is insanely complicated just for its own sake. System wise I like PoE2 and I am looking forward to BG3 ( DnD 5E). You have lots of options but it is much easier to understand.

PK is not broken, what you describe IS the DnD 3E system or variations of it. Yes, this is very complicated, it is very hard to understand for new players, it is often unintuitive, some characters can be totaly useless while others are totally OP and it takes normal people forever to understand why it is OP. It is so unbalanced that some classes make other classes totally pointless. For example you want to be a rogue? No problem, play a vivisectionist. They can do everything rogues do ( sneak attacks, a feat every second level including combat feats, rogue feats PLUS alchemist feats) PLUS a mutagen that gives stat boosts that stack with everything PLUS tons of spells for buffs and healing, including the ability to use self only spells on others. The game also rewards meta gaming, which means it helps a lot to know things that new players cannot know when they start playing. You want to play as fighter with a sword? Well, guess if you find a good longsword, duelling sword, bastard sword or scimitar in the next 80h. You are a ranger, I hope you know what favoured enemies and terrain you will meet for the rest of the game. Still, there are some hardcore fans who consider anything less as dumped down. If I understand things right ( I am not a PnP player) pathfinder became popular because DnD moved on to 4E and 5E which are more simple but many players wanted to stick with the super complicated hardcore stuff. To some extend I can understand this. If you put lots of time in understanding a complex system, you don´t want to switch to another system and learn everything from scratch again. What does this mean for PoE2? I would say the success of PK proves that PoE2 did not fail because the system was to complicated, too unintuitive or too unbalanced.

Thanks for the long text. "* I once described PoE by telling a friend that "it seems to have been a game designed around Voltaire's quote that 'if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him'." My friend, who has worked in the game development industry for decades, said "Such a high-minded concept usually isn't a good sign." We agreed that maybe the game worked because Obsidian didn't reveal that notion until well into the third act. " Very interesting. This reminds me of Deus Ex. According to the german wikipedia, the original game sold 1 million copies between 2000 and 2009 and human revolution sold more than twice as many. But Deus Ex was a masterpiece in terms of gameplay and level design. There were several ways to solve every problem. You could finish the game almost without killing anything or you could shoot everything, including killing some later "bosses" long before you are supposed to fight them. PoE was a classic RPG. It had a new setting and the character system was new, but if you ignore the details about races, classes and dice rolls it is exactly like most other RPGs, like the IE games for example. I still have no idea why Pathfinder Kingmaker sold much more. Both games were good RPGs and both games were buggy as hell at release. PoE2 was less buggy at release than PoE1. I had to quit PoE1 because of bugs during my first playthrough. I finished PoE2 on my first playthrough, but it was too easy and many bugs, though many of them helped the player instead of stopping him. I waited several month before starting PK, so I had no problem there. Maybe the fanbase of DnD 3E nerds is bigger than I think, those who think that a game cannot be too complex or too difficult and everything with less than 30 races and classes plus tons of complicated rules and enemies that kick your ass unless you pre buff for an hour is considered dumbed down. So maybe there is a group of hardcore nerds and a group of casual gamesrs and PoE was cought in the middle between them? This does not really sound convincing to mee.

I think that PoE1+2 are relatively easy to understand, at least the basics. Lets look at it: - Hit chance = acc +1d100 - defense for ALL attacks, no matter if physical attack or items. - passive bonusses stack, active or modal bonusses do not stackif they buff the same stat - There are 3 tiers of affliction/inspiration for every stat and they cancel each other out ( any affliction of a stat + any inspiration of the same stat = nothing) - damage done = base damage * sum of all modifiers (but negative modifiers are complicated, more of it later) Things are more complicated when you look at the details and there are probably some weird exceptions, but understanding those rules is enough to play the game, unless you play on the highest difficulty and maybe even more challenges like solo or no reload. I play many RPGs and I am in several Forums. there are some people who think anything less complex than DnD 3E or its variants (e.g. Pathfinder) is dumped down and not worth playing and they demand more races, more classes and more feats. I think that most players who are not complete nerds will be confused by DnD 3E, it takes a long time to understand the basics and it takes forever to understand the details and many players are scared away from a game that can be great, so its totally fine to have RPGs with a bit less complexity. I think that PoE1+2 is a good start for players who want to get into classic RPGs. I would say the confusion of many players comes from the detailed tooltips of PoE. Many games just show the final numbers (for damage in this case) but not how they are calculated. Players simply use the weapon that shows the biggest damage number in their status screen. The confusion of many players in PoE is because the game shows all the modifiers that lead to this result, but not the rule that is applied for these modifiers. So PoE gives you more information than most other games, but not ALL information. PoE1+2 have 2 complicated formulas: Damage calculation and action speed calculation. The speed formula was complicated in PoE1+2 and I admit that I never cared much about it. In PoE1 most things that were called action speed only influenced recovery time and in PoE2 you have to take care if the bonus/penalty influences speed or duration, so it can be hard to say if +20% of something is good or bad. The damage formula for PoE1 was simple. In PoE2 they had the "great" idea to add double inversion. I had to read Thelees guide to understand it. Mathematically its fantastic. But normal players and even some devs have problems to understand it because it is as unintuitive as possible. solution: Please keep the detailed tooltips but show us the exact formulas for damage and speed in the game, plus an example. The game already has a big in game codex (I have forgotten how it is called in game). Please add the exact formula plus an example to this codex to show players that +20% and -20% do not result in zero. PS: I have never played a DnD 5E game, but I started to do some reading for the coming BG3. I get the feeling that PoE2 might be inspired a bit by DnD 5E. You roll a hit chance also for spells and afflictions/inspirations aka advantage/disadvantage cancel each other. Maybe some more things, I am a complete noob for 5E and I just read the players handbook twice online.

Assassin/mage is a good idea. Assassins get a bonus to penetration, acc and crit damage when attacking from stealth. It is only the first hit that gets this bonus. So you can do tons of damage by starting combat with a spell from stealth. It should hit several enemies at once or one enemy really hard. No spells with bouncing or several projectiles because only the first hit gets the bonus. Blood mage is probably a bad idea because assassins take more damage and blood mages have lower defenses and can take self damage. Probably its best to use a default mage, the other subclasses lose so many spells.

When the game was released somebody calculated that there are a bit over 1000 classes ( all single classes and all combinations of sub classes). This was before they added an additional sub class for every class later. I was a little confused too when I read the title. This is not a list of chars who did the ultimate achievement. These are all class builds from the original build thread plus class builds that have been posted later. I think it should get pinned instead of the original thread. A different name might have been better, like "Full list of all character builds posted in this forum" or something like this.

I did not read everything but I think: brilliant: either it just gives 3PL or it recovers one use of the lowest used spell level. That means if you cast withdraw to keep vela save and you did not use a lv1 spell it will only recover one use of a lv2 spell. One problem is that it recovers ALL spell levels at once. It would also recover only one used resource for (multi) classes that have several resources. It would be a nerf, but I am not sure if this was enough. Salvation of time: It does not stack with itself. You can increase the duration of any effect only once. If you have increased the duration of an effect once, SoT does nothing to this effect and it has to run out and you have to apply it again if you want to increase the duration again. No idea about blood mage and draining wall.

I agree. Both systems can be fun and both can also produce lots of problems. I think PoE 1+2 has the advantage that it is relatively easy to get into the game and understand the basics for new players. It gets complicated if you look deeper, but if you play it with a full party on normal it is enough to select stuff that seems to make sense. On the other end are the pathfinder games PM and WotR. Some forum members say they are the new god and everything less is dumbed down, no matter if it is DnD 5E, PoE or something else. Sure, PK was a great game and I believe WotR will be great too, but the system is so very complicated that its very hard for new players to understand it. I play computer RPGs since the mid 90s and even I have problems there. For every buff you have to remember what type it is because only different types stack. There are some combination of feats and abilities that make you god while other stuff does not work even if your commen sense says it should. There are many powerful builds, but it is also very easy to make a completely useless character. The game knows endless ways to show the player the middle finger. You got a good armor and shield, well the next enemy surely uses touch attacks. Later in the game come tons of enemies that can paralyze your whole party every round just by looking at you. I hope you have learned freedom of movement. Sure, the game gives you the tools to deal with such situations, but some things are very hard to find out if you are not a complete nerd. BTW: In DnD you can make a wizard that swings a greatsword well, just like you can do other things that are possible in PoE or classless systems. Its a bit more complicated than just giving him a weapon, an armor and some spells, but almost everything is more complicated there anyway. regarding factions: I do not like that in PoE2 many companions are related to a faction and they will leave you if you side with another one. Its bad when you have your usual party through most of the game and suddenly half of them leave you. But the idea of having several opposing factions to join, support or fight is not bad.

I voted both because I think it is good to have a choice. I do not care because I like both real time and turn based games. The new pathfinder game will have both and you can switch between combat modes while playing. They said its balanced for rtwp, but the TB mod for PK was very popular and it makes things easier for some players. PS: What is the difference between rtwp like in PoE and rtwp like in BG? Do you mean 6 second rounds vs each action has its own action and recovery time or something else?

Nice, but I will use steel garrote paladin instead of unbroken fighter, as in this build The fighter has more engagement, mob stance and more powerful disengagement attacks, but the paladin has higher defenses and I heal myself with almost every attack I make. With the shild you mentioned and the armor suggested by thelee your defense would be really high. In the best case I just stand there and drink tea while enemies die around me and I get healed. I do not play on PotD or upscaled, so I do not know how well a tank can survive there. But for other difficulties it should be more than enough.

WOW. This means its the first one without brilliant+barring deaths door+salvation of time? Its impressive that the ultimate is possible at all and now they do it without the immortality trick. I am not an expert, so even with the video I cannot tell for sure whats going on.