redbird

people who find minsc and his hamster funny and worthy of emulation have the sense of humor of dull children

a few simple additions to the game would do a lot to improve the economy. the first would be an overhaul of the stronghold. if the stronghold actually felt like a living, breathing location that we cared about and wanted to improve beyond the bare bones of a bed, a vendor, and some free crafting materials, then we'd have actual reasons to sink thousands of copper into it. the second would be a more robust crafting system. why can't we buy / find new recipes? why can't we sink money into research and expeditions to bring back legendary materials? why can't we hire mages and animancers to chill at our sweet fortress and wrack their brains to unlock new enchantments (i.e. new and expensive hirelings beyond simple meatshields)? both these suggestions are well within the scope of the upcoming expansion(s) so hopefully we'll see a rebalancing of the economy in the near-ish future.

resting limited by camping supplies. adds a good deal of tension on longer runs into dungeons / the wilderness, though there would be more tension if the difficulty of the game was increased. i'd also like to see more banters between companions when resting / waking up.

i agree that the game's difficulty curve and xp gain are out of whack but let's be realistic about bg2, because it had the same problem. with tob installed you can gain epic level abilities before facing irenicus and can stand out of his line of sight while letting your elemental princes and devas kill him for you (in the elf city that is, not the hell fight). if anything, the fact that a completionist play through trivializes the remainder of the critical path is simply poe being true to the flaws of baldur's gate. that said, i'd love to see an xp reduction toggle in the options (or in a mod failing that)

several of the doors i wasn't able to open since the patch i was able to open without fiddling with any switches before the patch. seems like a pretty clear bug.

has anyone encountered this outside of raedric's keep? i just finished him off and i'm willing to write off the small amount of loot trapped behind bugged doors if this is limited to this area, but i'll probably stop playing until another patch if this is a widespread problem.

i wasn't aware that any official notes on what the hotfix addressed had been released. regardless, it's making it very difficult to progress in raedric's hold, though i suppose it's better than the crashes that others (i never had any problems with the hold before) were experiencing.

Now the door in the main hall that leads to Raedric's bedroom (with his dead wife) can't be selected or opened. I know there's a dialogue option about finding her corpse with Raedric, so this is definitely a bug. edit: for some reason the door became openable a few seconds after i made this post. but i had spent awhile pixel hunting to try to open it before that with no success, so i'm still convinced there's a bug happening with the doors in the hold.

There's a door just north of the holding cells in the dungeons that can't be opened. It doesn't show up when highlighting interactable objects either. I know from previous times through the hold that it leads to a room that has a stairway to the kitchens. Saving and loading did not resolve the issue. Wasn't having this problem before today's patches.

"the merits of censorship" lol, sure, no bias here

if the stat increase isn't applied, just use shadowkeeper to fix it. alternatively, install the consistent stats components of the bg tweaks mod (along with the rest of those delicious tweaks)

good.

Just entered Defiance Bay and I'm wondering if I'm missing some part of the game. In the journal there's a section for visions that currently only lists the vision I had after being hit by the machine and awakened in the prologue. However, there's a post-rest conversation in which Aloth mentions that I've been having visions of my past lives despite the fact that I haven't experienced any visions since the first. Something similar occurs when talking to Durance; during a conversation with him I have the option to mention how he appeared to me in a vision, a vision I've never experienced. Basically I'm wondering if I should have been experiencing a series of visions. I don't want to miss out on any story content, especially on my first time through the game.

I'm in Act 1 and during a conversation with Durance about his past I was able to mention that his image / soul had seemed damaged when I saw it in a dream. Except I haven't had any dreams featuring Durance. I'm assuming this is a dream sequence that occurs later in the game and that something in the conversation is bugged and not checking some variable to see whether I've had the dream in question yet. There was a thread earlier today about Sagani spoiling the big bad during Act 1 as well, I'd guess that this is a similar problem. Hopefully these problems and any other mistimed conversational cues can be corrected for the patch after 1.03.

"Why couldn't you just make the spell system work like Neverwinter Nights or something like that?" you realize both the PoE wizard and wizards in nwn use the same resource management system (vancian magic) right

including the ones that were literally built to hold prisoners dungeons?

baldur's gate dungeons: bg1: the nashkell mines, the ruined city, the candlekeep catacombs, the frozen wizard prison (totsc), durlag's tower (totsc) bg2: chateau irenicus, the planar sphere, the planar prison, the copper coronet to sewer to slaver hideout quest line, the unseeing eye temple, firkgraag's lair, the entire underdark, spellhold, the shadow temple, the troll-ridden castle, watcher's keep that's off the top of my head, i'm sure i missed some. there are more than a few dungeons proper in bg1 and bg2 is filled to the brim with dungeons (isn't one of the big divisions between fans of bg1 vs bg2 the lack of wilderness areas in favor of dungeons in bg2?). edit: i tried to exclude city themed dungeons, but you did include sewers in your list, so that ups the number for both games.

does this mean the druid's spiritshift will still not be clearly marked as a temporary ability with no clear way to know when it's about to run out? seems like that wouldn't be a difficult fix but it's not in the patch notes. hmmm.

wizards already have a twice per encounter AoE attack & their lower level spells turn into per encounter at higher levels. if you want to spam spells every fight roll cipher.

If it's any consolation, Tinderbox, I found Hard indeed pretty hard before I picked up Eder, and I wonder if I have a stat inflation bug. I'm running with a wizard PC using the story NPCs, not custom ones. I think the real issue for me is that my L5 Eder has, I dunno, over 100 deflection I think, with his "Defender" skill enabled, in Fine Breastplate, with a +16def shield and a minor ring of deflection. I've heard some talk about a bug making stats too strong... I wonder if I've got that, though I'm not sure how to tell. Anyway, he alone makes most encounters easy for me. I just wade him into the middle of almost anything semi-level appropriate for my group, and I believe I could go AFK and if the fight was still going 10 minutes later, he'd still be around 100%, with his endurance regen making up for what tiny damage he might take. Now the other group members feel better balanced. The Paladin Pallegina feels about right for how I think a tank should be. She can go up against nasty things, but not in the carefree way Eden does. She'll get hit and take damage, which means I have to think about tactics over and above "let Eder tank everything while others plink from range." Of course someone could say, "just take the shield away from Eder and don't use his abilities!", but I don't like that kind of artificial difficulty so much. Now having said all that, there have been exceptions. Like the teleporting shade guys - those encounters feel "hard" to me, because they like to teleport over and beat on the weaker wizard. Takes good tactics and creative use of abilities. Anyway Eder feels so imbalanced that I wonder if I've got the stat inflation bug, because it sounds like it isn't like that for folks like Tinderbox. What did all your Eder chars have for deflection at L5? I just looked: Mine is 111, with the above equipment and Defender mode. the deflection formula for fighters is 25 + 3 per each level after first + ability bonuses + shield / gear + defender mode. over 100 at level 5 sounds like you've got statflation.

open the console with ` (button below escape) then type "msaa 0" without the quotes. this disables anti-aliasing. you'll have to do so every time you load an area, even one you've visited before, but you ought to see a pretty big bump in frame rate. i did. setting aa lower every time you load is tedious, but they're probably adding a slider for aa to the graphics menu in the next patch.

i dunno about hard but on normal i've had no problems with the companions. my party (pc cipher, eder, aloth, durance, kana) is gleefully slaughtering anyone who crosses them. also, since this is the spiritual successor to bg/2 seems worth noting that plenty of joinable npcs in those games had subpar stats. it's just part of the fun.

I am having this exact same issue and while it's not making the game unplayable it is extremely frustrating, especially in towns when frequently loading new areas.

the anti-aliasing trick hugely increased my game's performance, but i have to set it to 0 in the console every time i enter a new area. is there a way to make the setting permanent across all areas? is there a file i need to track down and edit (like the config file for the baldur's gate games)? it's massively annoying to have the game slow down every time i enter or exit an inn.