Voss

But, given the nature of the gods.... this is entirely fitting. She is beauty and art and birds and... nothing else. None of the gods have a moral dimension. I'm poking at the different endings (for what little they're worth, sadly, since you can't do the really obvious thing and point out to everyone that the gods are useless creations of idiots), and feel the 'give the souls back to the hollowborn' should actually be a terrible idea, with horrifying consequences. Most of them are _dead_. Others have been in some creepy joining with animals souls. That should all end badly, with crazed corpses and wichts that are even more unhinged running about.

ah. I can't imagine playing a melee heavy party in this game. It punishes you for even thinking about it.

Unfortunately, its very much 'tell not show,' and nowhere does it actually matter. It seemed like it was going to matter (seeing things in the immediate aftermath), but that just...stops, and instead it turns into a useful ability to talk to dead people that makes you the ultimate murder-mystery solver. Personally, this game reminds me a lot of BG1 & 2... in a bad way. The fun and interesting parts of the games are the side quests and exploration, and the main plot is heavy handed grimdark for the sake of being grimdark, without being particularly evocative or interesting. Are the hollowborn the result of blowing up a god? Transparently not. Is animancy evil? The rest of the world seems to lack these problems. And other than Aedyr, no one even cares. Is America Dyrwood wonderful? No, its full of inbred, stupid, murderous religious fanatics who probably deserve their pathetic fates. I've met no one in this country who I find the least bit sympathetic. Was I not supposed to make that parallel? It seems pretty obvious, former colony of England, though the language/culture is more Anglo-Saxon early/middle English than late renaissance England. Is this evil cult interesting? No, actually, its fairly absurd, with a gigantic, self sacrificing membership that is far too huge to actually be a secret cult. And their 'secret' meeting are guarded by dozens of mercenaries with no reason not to talk about the 'secret cult.' Meanwhile the big bad gets special immunity to walk through cutscenes to demonstrate his plot armor/out of game mechanics and complete domination of the railroad plot. The tipping point for me is the animancy hearing. Jump through hoops to 'choose a faction' (which turns out not to even be an effort). You can go through and completely fail to convince anyone, be moderately successfully or be fairly persuasive and... it doesn't matter. The railroad plot just wanders in and decrees your choices as unimportant and irrelevant...as if this were a Bioware game. But yeah. Side adventures and exploration are pretty good. The main plot just has to be suffered to unlock the good stuff.

Yes. The accuracy is a bit nice, but that is really it. It comes down to how combat in this game works- the emphasis is on killing things absolutely as fast as possible, and denying the enemy actions in the meantime. With a couple overpowered exceptions, support in this game is a waste of seconds. Tank (or sometimes tanks) block off enemies, rest of the party burns them down, wizards/ciphers intersperse damage with action denial. Doing anything else is an absolute waste of time. Tanks are easily built to not need healing, and other than blocking paths, do too little to even need support. This makes support oriented classes (priests, paladins and chanters [except the arrows chant]) a waste- they might as well be deleted from the game.

Absurd. Wood elf bonus is easy to get, nearly 100% of the time. Tank blocks enemies, elf stands further back. Ocassionally a spirit will teleport in close, but the elf can still target things farther away, and still get the bonus. Same with the orlan bonus... if you can't have two characters attacking the same target, I don't have any idea how you're playing the game. But yes, they are rather small bonuses. That is how absolutely wretched the other racial bonuses are.

Rubbish, don't bother.Also, fighter >>> paladin Basically they do nothing that someone else doesn't do better. Except the things that aren't worthwhile in the first place.

That isn't how the system works, so it is not true in reverse. The 'main hand accuracy' that is shown is a specific value with some modifiers worked in (shields, weapon accuracy, some talents), but not others (notably marksman, wood elf talent and other cicumstantial ones). But main hand accuracy is not your base accuracy, which shields modify but spears and daggers don't. Tl; dr- check the log for the actual acc on spells with shields and without, and don't forget the acc mod of the spell itself is included. Subtract that, and you can see what your real acc is.

The thing is, they don't really contribute. Paladin abilities are rather awful and lacking.

Oh, is that what that did? It is pretty good, but sadly of no use to my party.

I am, but it sucks. Hence the suggestion. Yes, but you're suggestion is 'I don't like pizza. Gimme a bowl of cereal.' Not change toppings or make it half cheese/half ham, but toss out the entire pizza and eat something entirely different.

No probably about it. They absolutely should have. They were told they should. Having modifiers before and after attribute assignment without any real explanation of what is going on (for new players) is mindbogglingly bad design.

Nah. That isn't her battlecry. This is the translation: "For the economy of the Valian Republics! Also, anyone who was ever judged on their outward appearance! If they're Orlan. Or me."

Per stronghold turn? That is awful, given turns only move when you complete quests.

Why does a level cap make sense when there is a finite amount of exp in the game? Compared to other games there is no way to powerlevel your characters as you only get exp from quests and a small bit from skills/monsters Actually, power-leveling is quite easy. My party is level 10 and I haven't even gotten to chapter 2 yet, (I can, but I'm finishing up all the side quests first, which is... yet more xp). But combat isn't exactly...challenging. I hit the cipher 'win' button for my first character, got bored and started over. Most enemies can't even touch my tanks and only the cheaty spirit buggers get past them.

If you can trust his point of view, which given rather a lot, I would not.

Slicken does it better. Or do you mean enemy CC? Eh. Just ignore it, fades soon enough on its own, usually before being able to break his current action, recovery and then cast minor inconvenience recovery time decreaser. Personally, I also found the priest very useless. Another monkey toting an arbalest, who occasionally dropped interdiction for a really minor free debuff. A couple spells aren't horrible, but I'd rather have a wizard, druid or cipher. As a person, he's a horrid, small-minded little monster that needs a bullet in his brain.

Yes, for what little that term means in the game. Or do you mean special properties that you can't add yourself? Because several drop fine weapons, but I haven't seen unique stuff.

It is a D&D clone, and rogues especially are exactly the D&D trope- damage dealers that are inherently sneaky and inherently better at traps/locks. It intentionally tries to stomp on some aspects of D&D, but only as an extreme(ly petty) reaction to it. 2nd, Even though Durance comes with ranks in mechanics, he can't keep up. There are quite a few places you travel where you can't keep the companions high enough in mechanics to deal with the traps/locks & generally finding things. The bonus from class and background are required to deal with the challenges presented.

I do think they slightly screwed the pooch on this one, at least in terms of mechanics. If you're main character doesn't specialize in mechanics (taking relevant backgrounds at least, if not classes with a bonus as well), you're not going to be able to deal with a fair number of traps and doors. At least not without running some poor fool over the trap first. Shoving some skill points off on durance isn't enough, you really need someone good at it from day zero.

Dispostion is on the character sheet © to the upper right. Dispositions, reputations, then various combat stats- damage done, kills, etc all run down the right side of the 'sheet'

Gilded vale is supposed to feel empty: consider the settlement offer, the hanging tree, bandits in the countryside and the lack of healthy babies. This is a place with serious negative population growth, one that started ~fifteen years ago and only got worse Dyrwood as a whole spent an entire generation on a nasty war, then started Purging the population of anyone following the 'wrong' religion, and immediately started having problems having healthy children. People talk about this all the time, Durance will in fact brag about taking part in the Purges. By the background history, this is a country facing really rough [GrimDark] times and a shrinking population is a major part of it.

I hope so. My custom druid 'only' has a 16 Int, and the difference in AoE between her and Hivaris is massive. She can burn out entire encounters without touching the party and he has a tiny silver of additional AoE that isn't worth squat. It honestly means he can't hit several enemies every time he casts a spell, at least not with also hitting the party. Grieving Mother's poor intellect makes ciphers seem pretty mediocre because her paralyze and dominate don't last at all. Eder can be made to be a good tank from fighter abilities and talents, but if he were actually built for it, it would have made a huge difference in a couple fights. A crystal spider grazed him, and got a lucky petrify, which allowed his bigger buddy to do 120 damage, taking him out of the fight. If he'd had 10-15 more points of deflection, that wouldn't have happened.

You aren't really missing much, though the adventures make a difference (though often all I get is potions. Or even a potion). But you get experience on a chump left behind. The curio shop and the garden give ingredients, which is useful. The dungeon could be useful, but I've only had a chance to take a prisoner twice: once before it was complete, and one was a psycho floating psychic spider-illithid. Taking that prisoner and leaving it alone in my stronghold just seemed like a bad idea. So I squashed it. The bounties give good rewards, however. So the warden house is definitely worth it. But yes, the taxes are... wonky, and don't seem to be related to security much at all. I've gotten more tax out of early tax runs when security was non-exsistant than when my security is around 30. To the point that I'm not sure it is even related to security at all. I haven't had any attacks in a long time, however (just one, a couple days after I took over). The interface is also pretty buggy. Days are listed out of order under the 'turns' (which needs to be explained somewhere that isn't a random loading screen hint (I didn't get it until the very end of chapter 1), sometimes they same day (with 'nothing happens') pops up twice in a turn, and the hireling pay thing just seems completely out of whack.

Reach largely seems to be one of two things: you need to pretty much base the target (circles nearly touching), or for pike and quarterstaff only, you can be almost directly behind another character and still attack. If there is a reach difference between morning star and stiletto, it isn't meaningful.

An odd couple conclusions. They have nothing to do but use weapons most of the time. Personally I can't usually make combat last long enough to use invocations most of the time. And I can't figure out why you'd tank, rather than taking an arquebus/arbalest and chant (only) the ranged attack buff back with the other ranged characters.