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Yes, likewise! Combat in RTwP can get very cluttered and chaotic, especially on PotD. One of the most welcome side effects of TB is that I find myself making more well-thought out and varied tactical choices. In my past RTwP playthroughs, I'd often just spam spells point blank without any strategic evaluation, not feeling inclined to read through hundreds of lines of combat spam to figure out a better strategy. TB also changed how I play the game outside of combat. Now that brainless steamrolling is no longer an option, I'm much less inclined to seek out battles, choosing to rely on diplomacy and stealth shenanigans instead.

First off, let me take my hat off to Obsidian for introducing Turn-based mode. You guys are awesome! Now, apologies if this has been talked about before, but ability duration, as it currently stands, seems a little messed up. More specifically, every short-term ability now lasts a single round irregardless of its original duration in RTwP, leading to at least three kinds of problems 1. Very short term abilities (5 seconds or less) are now much more powerful. For instance, the Shieldbearer's Lay on Hands can now keep anyone alive indefinitely so long as the paladin has zeal left. It is also now very easy to disable-lock enemies, thanks to the abundance of fast-casting 1 round disables. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Brisk Recitation now gives you two overlapping phrase effects due to the 1 round minimum duration of any effect. 2. Moderate-short term abilities (around 8 seconds) seem unjustly nerfed. For instance, Glorious Beacon now has a 1 round base duration, making it very difficult to use in conjunction with offensive abilities (I'm thinking of Heralds here.) That is, unless the character has an extremely high INT score, which leads me to my third point 3. Having stratospheric INT is now a prerequisite for many classic multiclass builds. Take this popular Herald build which relies on casting Inspired Beacon followed by the Seven Night She Waited invocation. This wasn't difficult to achieve in RTwP - all you needed was 15 or so INT and the two abilities would overlap. In Turn-based, however, you need at least 20 INT to bump Glorious Beacon into the 2 round range, and I'm still iffy whether this is enough for the combo to work effectively. What do you guys think? I'm sure there are a lot more points to be made and examples to be brought up.

This was supposed to have been fixed in the last patch, yet I'm still encountering the issue. I'm playing a multiclass Herald(Paladin/Chanter) Watcher and upon retraining, my original Paladin abilities are retained while Chanter abilities are lost. This includes the level 1 phrase/invocation I picked on character creation. Strangely, my prepared chants are still intact, even though the tooltip in my chant book says no phrases available. Needless to say, this is supremely annoying since I am now permanently 2 ability points behind.

I actually solved the problem by verifying the integrity of the game cache (under Steam); turns out there were a few MB's of files that had not downloaded properly. I've also heard that updating your GPU driver and running the program as administrator might help.

Hey there, Does anyone have experience with Chanter builds that are not tanky but more DPS oriented? If I were to build one, how should I arrange my stats? What type of weapons should I go for? What about chant choices? Or should I just forget about the whole thing and go the cookie-cutter tank route? Any kind of input is much appreciated!

Dear whoever may be reading this, So I just bought and installed the game (from Steam). The menu starts up fine with no hiccups whatsoever, but as soon as I select New Game, pick a difficulty setting and hit OK, the game goes into an infinite loading screen. It does not crash, per se - I can still alt-tab to desktop and according to the task manager, the program is running just fine. The loading screen, however, goes nowhere, and my only choice is to terminate the program manually. I've tried reinstalling, restarting, running the game as administrator, all to no avail. No matter what I do or don't do, the game does not let me beyond the first loadscreen. I am running the game on an old-ish laptop (Thinkpad T420); i5-2540M, NVIDIA NVS 4200M, 4GB of RAM. I am aware that the GPU is below the minimum specs - however, I would still expect the game to start, or to at least crash, if it was because of that. Any help/insight would be much appreciated. EDIT: forgot to mention that my OS is Win7 Ultimate 64bit