Madscientist

Thanks for the link. Mr. Miyamoto is right. Zelda Ocarina of Time came one year later than planned, but it was one of the best games ever. Looks like Nintendo had much less money problems (at that time) than Obsidian has now. Obsidian is very good in creating epic stories and interesting characters. PoE has also a much better stat and combat system than the IE games. But PoE did no really help Obsidian to lose its nickname bugsidian

I have backed Divinity: Original Sin 2 and yesterday they have reached the stronghold stretch goal. I started a dicussion how to make better strongholds. Link: http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=569166&gonew=1#UNREAD Somebody wrote: In Pillars of Eternity Josh Sawyer created the stronghold as meaningless as possible becuase many players hate strongholds. In PoE you can skip the stronghold completely and do not miss something importand. Many people would complain if we create interesting content that requires the stronghold. 1.) Is that true? 2.) If it is true, why did he create the stronghold stetch goal at all? There is no reason to put an area in a game that is designed to be meaningless.

Once again: Players making their life harder (by modifiing the game or using their own rule set) is no excuse for game design. What you consider difficult or easy is strongly dependent on the player. My point of view: BG1 and IWD1 were good regarding difficulty level and how they give items to players. IWD1 was also much better than POE in encounter design. BG2 (with ToB) was good in being epic. If you like this or not is up to you. PST is still the best story in a game ever. In everything else POE is better than the IE games. - combat system: In POE everything is accurancy+1d100-defense. AD&D is hard to understand and even then some things make little sense. Some stats should be as high as possible, some as low as possible and some do not matter at all. - Character creation: In AD&D many classes have dump stats that have absolutely no use for them. The ultimate example is the sorcerer whose magic power does not depend on any stat, only his level is importand. In POE every attribute has at least some use and you cannot max out every stat by rerolling long enough. As long as you can distribute points some people will min/max their stats. But some systems are better than others. - character developement: In AD&D the only choice after creating your char is to spend weapon profiencies. In POE you select an ability or talent every level. POE did a lot of things right. back to topic: Dear devs. Please do not flood the player with epic items. If you do they do not feel epic anymore. And no slaying weapons please.

@shadowStorm: I completely agree with you. In BG1 you start with normal (non magic) equipment and when you can finally find or afford your first longsword+1 or a normal full plate armor you feel much stronger. But most enemies can still kill you with 2 hits BG2 throws tons of epic stuff at you, even in the starting dungeon (looking at you chaos sword+2, but also some others) I never finished IWD ( or started IWD2 although I own it) because this dungeon crawling with little story became boring very fast. I finished ToB once. Every time I tried to finish it later became boring and I stopped it. ToB is worse than IWD. ToB is just one epic dungeon after the other. But it is very easy because the game trows epic loot at you like there is no tomorrow. If you get flooded with epic stuff then epic = boring

I was not sure if this is a bug, thats why I posted it here. I have the feeling that you should see "Char a hits enemy b for c damage and causes status effect d." instead of "Char a hits enemy b for c damage and causes weapon name." Thats how it is done for many other weapons (like those who cause knock down) The only exception would be if the weapon has a unique effect (the status effect does not exist on another item and it cannot be caused by any spell or ability) Things with a description like this Dagger of painful death: Hits may cause the curse of painful death. curse of painful death = The victim gets x corrosive damage over y seconds. While the curse is active the victim must make a saving throw agains fortitude every 2 seconds. When it fails the victim loses permanently 1 point constitution. But my feeling is not the base for game design of POE. Edit: Forget the example. Even then a hit should cause "curse of painful death" and not "dagger of painful dath". Maybe if both item name and effect name would be "painful death" it could work. But I would consider that bad writing.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6boqfjo5b2euno7/0ee25d71d5054a4a9a9e289f647ae6a9%2014233105%20BezirkUlmenkap.savegame?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/yegh0keuta54vlj/output_log.txt?dl=0 Lots of things happened between the picture and this save. But I don´t have an older one. I have enchanted the weapon in the meantime. If nothing has changed, the effect should happen every time you hit an enemy with this weapon.

Durance hits an enemy and causes the name of the weapon for 6.5 seconds. Is this intended? I would expect a message like "marked for 6.5 sec" or "disoriented for 6.5 sec" Maybe this is also the case for other weapons.

One more thing about soulbound equipment: In single player RPGs I know exactly one good example for such a thing: Dakkons sword in PST. There is a very good reason why only he can use it. You can do whatever you want in a fantasy game, but you should give a good explanation for it (except "its magic" or "its fantasy"). Else we may have an alien invasion in a future expansion of POE. Does anybody have an idea how this soulbound equipment works in the game world? At least there are souls in this world. This is one more reason why I don´t like class specific equipment. Whay can´t a barbarien wear a belt that boost a paladin aura? He will not benefit from wearing it, but maybe he likes it because it looks cool. And he wants to show the the other barbariens of his tribe that he has killed a powerful paladin.

After some thinking you convinced me that random items are bad for a game like POE. This means it will have a lower replay value for me than other games. I dislike building chars around a specific piece of equipment. Some time ago I played BGT again but I stopped playing after some time because I was bored. The game is very good. But I knew everything that will come. Something like: In the next room I will meet a mage and two golems. A conversation will start but we will fight no matter what I say. The mage will drop a staff+3 and some scrolls and there is a hammer in that chest. I have already finished POE. When I play now the biggest fun is to find and report bugs. This has an element of surprise. I am really a scientist and finding out something that nobody has ever known is my version of fun. It feels good to help a good game become even better. Nietsche said something like: Your heart will find no rest where it needs only to find and not to search.

I never use the console in POE and I accept random loot as random. There was exactly one time I used a console in a game. That was in BGT when the item stacking bug made the greater wolfwere immortal. In the character build section I talked about making a fire barbarien tank who uses retaliate gear. I have never seen hiros mantle ( or the man who sells it). But I will not do anything about it except creating the requirements that the event may happen.

When I play RPGs or adventures, story, atmoshere and interesting combat is more importand to me than difficult combat. Thats why I don´t play on POTD. It makes things more difficult, but the system stays the same. The only exception was IWD, but there you get twice EXP if you kill enemies or finish quests on the highest difficulty. But I never finished IWD because it is all combat and little story. Every time I started it, it got boring after some time. POE is very good in story, characters and immersion. (though PST is still a bit better, I think). But combat is often boring because 90% of battles can be won with tank and spank. This is not a problem of the combat system, it is about encounter design. We need ambushes, enemies that attack from different sides or adds that appear during combat. I never saw an enemy chanter summon 2 ogres in front of my backrow mage. The fact that this makes combat more difficult does not disturb me. I have no problem with selecting a lower difficulty when a fight gets too hard. D:OS has my favourite combat system because of 2 reasons - My reaction speed is pathetic so I prefer turn based combat. I pause a lot in POE -world interactivety: shoot a fire arrow at the oil barrel to blow them up. Make them wet and stunn them with lightning. teleport the enemy into a burning inferno. I also like the fact that you can move or take almost every object in the game world. (you can find the key to a door under the carpet, no text needed to explain) And you have huge maps with little loading screens (you can enter buildings without loading screen). I like both games. I think the main difference is the fact that D:OS does not take itself serious while POE does. My favourite joke is when we meet a man from our world in a prison cell. The man is shocked that he has been imprisoned by elementals and he wants to call his lawyer. The player characters think he is insane because he is not used that everybody uses magic. . . . still waiting for the new torment

This is one thing that made BG and POE less fun on later playthroughs. I know where to find things and build chars around gear I will find. The first time I build my char around a concept and it worked. I explored dungeons and asked myself "What great things will I get behind the next corner?" Now I play a barbarien and I knew before where to find tall grass and tidefall and that they both belong to the soldier set. I agree that saying "It is optional. You don´t have to do it." is nonsense. Look at the people who post their character builds (including myself). They create their char around certain items they will find at certain locations. In my very first post in this forum I said that after lots of thinking I came to the conclusion that random equipment is good. In D:OS I can create my char around a concept but not around a specific piece of equipment. I can create a fighter who uses 2 handed weapons and heavy armor. I do not know exactly what equipment I will find, but I can be sure that I will find something. I think, that POE did lots of things better than BG2. But regarding this topic, I think they move in the wrong direction.

Well, I doubt there's going to be a Greatsword of Player Character-Slaying. Also, the chance of the effect firing off will probably be very, very small. You mean something like this: Sword of random killing: - damage done: a random number between 1 and your character level - targets a random defense and does random damage type - 10% chance of inflicting a random status effect on the target - 1% chance of inflicting a random status effect on yourself - 1% chance of dealing a random amount of damage to yourself - 0.1% chance of killing any target (100% hit chance) and just for you: 0.01% chance of killing the player character (dammit, I wanted to hit the troll, but I cut off the head of the guy next to me.)

I do also agree with evilcat. About epic weapons, I don´t like soulbound, class specific or slaying ones.

I don´t like this. About soulbound weapons: The first time I encountered soulbound weapons was in world of warcraft. A new troll entered the game world, beats some enemies and suddenly one of them drops a green axe. he looks at it, the stats look good and he wats to equip it. A message pops up: "This item will be bound to your soul if you equip it". The young troll was shocked, sold it to the next shop and continued with junk equipment. Later I understood what it means. It should prevent that very good players kill the hardest boss at that time and sell the gear to everyone who can afford it. WoW is extremely gear dependent. Players should earn their equipment themselves. Also players should have less motivation to buy game money with real money. All of these points are useless in POE because it is a single player game. About class specific weapons: in BG2 they where completely overpowered. Holy Avenger (paladin only greatsword+5, 50% spell resistance, dispell magic on hit) Staff of the Magi (mage only staff+5, lots of spells that recharge on rest, dispell magic on hit, you become permanently invisible unless you do a hostile action. Selecting the staff makes you invisible again infinite times) You had to beat powerful enemies to get them and it was not required to finish the game. but Once you had them you will never equip anything else (except a ranged weapon with infinite ammo and other special abilities). If you do not know the game and you start to play a paladin who spends his points to fight with axes, you feel that the game punished you for your choice, even though you could not know this before. There is one more very importand thing: POE was designed with the concept that every char can use every equipment. A Mage in plate armor and a greatsword? You can do it. So you play as warrior mage but suddenly the game gives you the staff of the Magi. How do you feel? About slaying items: The mace of disruption was extremely powerful. It was the only thing that allowed me to kill Kangax. Equip this weapon on somebody, cast pretection from undead on him, and he can kill an entire army alone. The wave killed every fire elemental on hit. In ToB you can find a great sword that has a 10% chance of killing any enemy (except bosses) on hit. Those weapons are complete game breaking. summary: - I think it is Ok if you have weapons that are more effective against a certain type of enemy or that cause a status effect on hit. But slaying weapons are too powerful. - POE wasbuild around the concept that everybody can equip everything. Thats why I think that soulbound weapons and class specific weapons are bad. I don´t like the class specific items that already exist in this game too.

Post this as a bug in the tech support forum. You should say where did it happen, what did you do exactly and can you reproduce it. Try to add a save file.

I use the big book "Pillars of Eternity Collectors Edition Guide" On page 310 is written: "You must have Resolve 19 or Intellect 19 to pull this off; otherwise this ends in a battle." But the book was also wrong about the task "Missing Sentries". On page 278 is written that in case of combat you can save the solders by killing the ghost first. In this forum it has been confirmed that you have to kill everybody when it comes to combat. Most likely the book is wrong. It has been printed before the game came out. Many things changed since then, and with 2.0 lots of things will change again (e.g. what attributes do ) Usually I play a game without help for the first time, later I get a guide and play it again to find all the things I have missed.

thanks I thought attack modes are exclusive in POE.

What should I use for a melee damage dealer? If you look at damage, it is clear. If the damage without those modes and before DR is higher than 25, savage attack is better. (SA = +20% damage, VA = +5DR, 20% of 25 = 5) Now we look at the penalties: SA = -5acc, VA = -20% speed A good char should always do more than 25 damage per hit, but accurancy is the most importand stat in this game. I assume that both modes give a damage increase, so its better to use one of them then none. Right now I play a barbarien with max might and tall grass or tidefall. But this is a general question, not specific for this char. my guess: savage attack for 2h, vulnerable attack for dual wield, but thats just guessing.

So it looks like retaliate is a melee attack and all modifiers that are used for a normal melee attack are used as well. Retaliate is a weapon itself (x points pierce damage + all modifiers), it does not use the equipped weapon. This is just my assumption. I have no evidence. back to topic. Retaliate seems to be most useful for barbariens. If an enemy attacks you once, you attack all enemies around you 2 or 3 times.

Mir ist relative egal, wie dieser Schild heißt. In einem Spiel mit hunderten von items kommen automatisch ein paar komische Namen zusammen. Und nachdem man die Sachen angelegt hat schaut eh kaum einer drauf. Als ich den Schild fand war ich beim Namen erst verwirrt, dann schaute ich bei Leo nach. ( Bin weder Wusiker noch der beste Englisch Kenner der Welt). Ich habe mich eine Weile gefragt: "Würde ein "native english speaker" spontan an Musik denken, wenn er die Beschreibung von dem Schild liest?" Ich habe keine Ahnung. Im Forum gibts zwar genug davon, aber sie schauen wohl kaum hier rein. Edit: ich habe etwas nachgedacht und in unserer realen Welt fallen mir nur sehr wenige Waffen mit Namen ein. Am meisten in der nordischen Mythen und Sagenwelt (Arthus + Excalibur, Siegfried + Balmung, Thor + Mjöllnir, die ulfbert Schwerter). Ehrlich gesagt wars das schon bei mir. Ich kenne unmengen griechischer/römischer Götter und Helden, aber ich kann mich nicht erinnern ob einer davon Ausrüstung mit einem besonderen Namen hatte. Mit Kulturen ausserhalb Europas kenne ich mich aber nur sehr wenig aus. Die Galfataner sollen ja so etwas wie die Indianer Amerikas sein. Irgentwann war mal jemand der Meinung, dass in einem Rollenspiel jedes magische Teil einen besonderen Namen haben müsste. In der Nordland Trilogie findet man jede Menge Waffen und Rüstungen, aber um herauszufinden ob es magisch ist muss man einen Analyse Zauber nutzen, einen Experten Befragen oder es genau anschauen ob die Werte anders als sonst sind.

The devs have confirmed that phantom foes is bugged. (see technical support where the bugs are reported) something else: does sneak/death attack from rogues work together with retaliate?

Ich finde, dass der Name dieses Schildes nicht übersetzt werden sollte und weiter "Thy Clef" heißt. Es stimmt das clef auf englisch Notenschlüssel heißt. Das Schild hat aber nichts mit Musik zu tun. Es ist nach dem Berg Dev Clef benannt. Der Berg schützte die Kämpfer. Das Schild könnte also "Dein schützender Berg" heißen (und der Berg heißt Dev Clef). Das ist Galfatanisch (oder wie diese Sprache heißt) und nicht Englisch. Ich gebe zu dass das eines der weniger wichtigen Sachen ist und das andere das anders sehen.

When I load this file, there is a 50/50 chance that a message appears that the quest is completed, but it is not. The message appears only as scroll, the quest journal shows the correct thing. When I use my int>19 to make him drink the poison he attacks me, though the game guide says something different. steps to reproduce: - accept to kidnap and sacrifice the child - accept to poison Simoc - I went outside and got the poison - I went to inside the house with the child and looked at it, but I did not take it. - I returned to the hall of warriors and made this save result: -When I load the save, sometimes a message appears that the quest is completed and sometimes it does not happen. -When I use my int to make him drink the poison, everybody in the room attacks me. According to the game guide you can avoid combat if you have int or res of 19 or higher https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhq94g0sxe0ulw0/0ee25d71d5054a4a9a9e289f647ae6a9%2012256647%20HallederKrieger.savegame?dl=0 After killing them all, the quest is shown as completed in the quest journal. note: If there is an option like [lie] "I accept to do it." [deceptive], I am not sure if I took it or not. Edit: The message that the quest is completed appears only when I do this: - load the game - give him the poison - the game pauses automatically when combat starts - load the game while the game is paused (I loaded because I did not expect a fight according to the game guide) - The message is shown when you load the game when you were in this fight before loading

Thanks again If I ever make a melee rogue he will have the same problem as my barbarien now. He needs to wait until the enemies gather around the tank before he can attack. Then he needs to move after every kill to attack the next enemy from behind. This char alone would tripple the uses of the pause button. At least my barbarien can attack an entire group while standing behind the tank. In the IE games (and now POE) I used one or two melee chars to block enemies while others use ranged weapons or spells. Boring but effective. Individual stealth my increase the use of a melee rogue. In BG2 it was fun to backstab a wizard and see his protection spells trigger on death.