Cronstintein

@Ohioastro good question, couple ways you can come at it: -Give marginal xp for side-questing, so you won't go from 5-9 just doing defiance bay stuff. Make the gains more item-orientated maybe? That still increases party strength but incrementally rather than across the board. -Make some side encounters much more difficult than others. Might be a good idea to give the player some warning before ramming them with a difficulty spike for those playing Iron mode.

Ooh smart combo, was thinking I'd need to restart as my party is already pushing 10 but I'll try that first. Edit: What are you guys thinking for numbers? Gonna try double and see how that goes?

Wow this is awesome... I had no idea :D Do you get the item without having to turn in the bounty? Well you get whatever loot they were carrying. I don't believe you get any items from the bounty-giver, just gold and xp.

For those of you avoiding bounties. I believe the xp is given when they're turned in, so you could do the fights (and they are pretty fun, gotta say, most fun I had in act 2) and then just not turn them in.

It begins!!!! (Great job guys )

I believe as of 1.03 you can remove the item and do a save/load to fix it. But the items themselves are still broken.

Do you know what caused it? Mine started as soon as 1.03 went live.

Did you have a save going already when 1.03 went live or did you start a new game since then?

I dunno about the end boss, but definitely throw the breaks on until you start to feel seriously challenged. If I were to do it again I'd stay lv5/6 throughout that first major city. Any higher is overkill. One player said he would do the side quests but just not level up the characters, actually a pretty good idea if you have the self-discipline for it.

No one's trying to force a change on you that you don't want. But those of us who enjoy retrying hard fights are feeling under-served with the current arrangement. Talking about it on the boards is our right. I'm not really expecting Obsidian to do anything about it, but our discussions about how exactly to ramp difficulty could be useful to any modders in our midst. If you don't like it, there are plenty of other threads where you can exclaim about how perfect you think everything is. Honestly, I doubt it's that small a minority. Anyone doing a large amount of side content is going to completely marginalize the difficulty in most of the fights. I literally used one character to clear out several areas without doing any weird cheese stuff (other than using a well-built rogue) . Is that how it's meant to be played? One character + 5 cheerleaders? Anyway, I'm getting tangential here so /rant.

I sincerely doubt any reviewers were playing on PotD, likely not even hard. They are trying to burn through the game as fast as possible since they have a very limited amount of time before release. Expecting them to want the same difficulty as an enthusiast crowd is unrealistic.

Thanks for the reply, Richards.

I totally agree with matt ^ While I would prefer an increase in encounter difficulty, that's going to take a lot of work/time unfortunately. I also beat Raedric's first time on hard without any problems. I've since modded into POTD mode, I really think locking that option is a bad idea. Specifically the human encounters could really use a boost in difficulty. I'm not sure if it's stats or AI or both but I'm able to steamroll human opponents (like the dragon-egg fight) where in BG2 those were some of the most fun and difficult encounters. Enemy wizards should be using slicken instead of web. Use blind, fireballs, etc.. Their tanks should have 100+ in deflection so you need to use debuffs/spells to bring them down, etc.. Rogues should use that invisibility talent and backstab your mages. They don't do any of these things and it makes the fights trivial.

The only way it could be doing anything is if it was changing the d100 roll behind the scenes (making it roll from 15-100). That would be a dumb way to do it, but possible.

While I agree that deflection is overvalued, it's also a problem that fighters really have no weak defenses. My tank has excellent numbers in all 4 defenses! Giving fighters less growth in Will and Reflex, and then giving enemies a high likelyhood of using those types of attacks would really help matters. Also, maybe applying the negative armor modifier to your reflex stat. It seems unlikely you'll be rolling out of fireball-range while wearing full plate after all. As a balancing act, I would give the more cerebral classes boosts to will, and the quicker classes bonuses to reflex. Right now it seems like all the stats grow at the same rate and thus aren't very good distinguishers of vulnerabilities.

I think the smart way to do it is to give huge xp gains for finishing major plot missions and only minor xp for side-quest stuff. So that you can kind of know where the player will be xp-wise at any given point in the story.

Annoying and deplorable?! Definitely seems like a crazy homeless guy which is a refreshing change from the usual tropes. He's the closest to being evil (probably more of a chaotic neutral, tbh) which is something the party is definitely short of. All the characters a little too goody-two-shoes for my tastes. I always preferred the evil characters in BG2, for instance (hamster-holders are the exception )

It's weird because almost all other RPGs already do this (rapidly increased xp requirements), I guess we can see why. Solution 2 definitely sounds like the easier mod.

I agree. Defiance bay -> act 3 needs a serious bump in difficulty, at least on hard/potd. Right now it feels balanced for lvs 4-6 but you can easily hit lv9 before starting act 3. I did it and have 10+ quests I haven't finished/turned in yet.

Also Trial of Iron is a whole different story. In that mode you can't lose even once. I prefer to play a difficulty where I lose often and need to retry hard battles.

Anyone saying this is harder than BG2 is crazy. I never felt I needed to 'make the game harder' when I played BG2. Just played it normally (no internet cheese builds or tricks) and it was an amazing experience. Half way through this game and the combat has taken a complete digger. It feels like the whole middle of this game was designed to be defeated by a lv5 part, too bad I'm lv9 By the time I got to the first big city, every encounter was a walk in the park. I do tend to play fairly thoroughly, but still... It's too bad because the first few levels felt perfect.

Obviously unlikely but the more I play this the more I want to replay BG2 in this engine *sigh* Runs so nice and looks good, just a little over 'streamlined' for my tastes

I can't imagine it didn't occur to them though. It was a conscious choice which is what worries me. Someone actually decided knocking down slimes was a good idea.

I agree about the summon items. They definitely marginalize a lot of encounters if you lean on them. I think just making the summoned creatures weaker in def/hp and giving them a 20sec timer or something would fix them.

I agree, if you go overboard it can get a bit much. For example, I likely wouldn't make anything immune to sneak attacks or something that broad (and class defining). But it would raise my interest level when I fought a new creature and I had to think about what may or may not be effective against it. Right now I just KD, Blind, fireball and that pretty much always works. And I would have given oozes massive DR vs physical attacks but super weak vs magic.