Starthief

Con would be more useful if: -- it helped reduce recovery penalty on armor. It'd be worth taking some on heavy armor wearers to help recover some of their lowered DPS, and having moderate CON and light to medium armor could become a good option for second-line DPS, instead of dumping CON and wearing no armor. -- it was used, either alone or in combination with Might, for dialog options that involve physical intimidation.

I'm well into Act 2 and regretting some of my choices (though not so much at initial character creation as later selections). But it's still going pretty well, and I'm too caught up in the story now to want to start over at this point. In many RPGs I notoriously spend more time creating characters than playing them; I want to try everything all at once and I never get far. Or in MMO terms, I have a dozen alts and no main. So I'm kind of proud of myself for only starting Pillars three times, then going back and sticking with the first one.

I actually think Kana is my favorite. I like his voice and his attitude. Eder is a solid guy with an interesting story. I like Pallagina's voice and portrait, and the circumstances of meeting her were kind of interesting; I haven't gone through much of her story yet. Durance makes my skin crawl, and if it was me choosing traveling companions I'd never have picked him up. But he's definitely an interesting character. I haven't used the other NPCs enough to have opinions about them, but I didn't like Aloth during the brief period I had him.

Well, that would put the arbalest about on par with pistols in DPS, yet with strong interrupt, longer range and knockdown crits. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mechanics (engagement and aggro) and choke point tactics both favor the idea that one or two characters are typically going to hold off the bulk of enemies, and it's difficult to switch them once the fight is underway. If you've de-specialized your party so everyone is half DPS and half tank, you're presenting a weaker defensive front as well as doing less damage. (And doing less damage means the fight lasts longer, so you need more defense to survive what's thrown at you...) Let's take a simplified example: your party consists entirely of two-weapon barbarians. Put them in brigandine and they have 10 DR, but their attacks are slowed down by 27%. This means that a fight you would win in 60 seconds if naked now takes 82 seconds... which means your enemy has 37% more opportunity to fight back. Does 10 DR compensate for that? And what if the enemy has DR penetration? Better raise your deflection, which means using a shield (and losing accuracy and speed) and/or changing your stats to favor defense more. Which gives the enemy even more opportunity to hit you... Of course, you can't always perfectly control the battlefield... but it's a question of how much you want to lower your party's overall effectiveness as insurance in case your party wasn't effective enough. It's kind of a trap.

The game is less fun if a single 1st-level spell is the best thing to use for every situation at every level. That's what balance is for in a single-player game. I'm looking forward to the patch.

I actually like the fact that -- even if you ignore the recovery penalty -- armor is much more useful as a buffer for your front line fighters (who get hit frequently) than it is as insurance for your strikers (who shouldn't be getting hit frequently). I.e. if you take 100 damage as 10 hits of 10 damage each, DR does a lot more for you than if you take 100 damage as one hit of 100 damage.

I've seen it happen too, and I don't think there was an interruption at the time, and the target's still alive. It seems to happen more with the longer cast time spells.

The only possible explanation I can think of for this statement is that you don't actually know how to design a tank for PoE. ... which is totally reasonable. The stat system in this game can be depressingly opaque. Nah, the stats make sense when you put D&D out of your mind. Maxed RES and PER and gave some CON. Wearing heavy armor and going sword-and-board, just like Eder. Eder had a headstart in XP and so is usually a level higher than my Paladin. Also, I concentrated solely on engagement and defense stuff for Eder. The Paladin has some party buffing abiltiies. Still, it seems like Eder doesn't take significant damage from anything, where my Paladin will occasionally get beaten to half endurance. It's possible that I have the stat bug on Eder, though last time I checked his defense numbers didn't seem unreasonable.

At the beginning, I actually thought they were a neat introduction to being a Watcher. It varies, like you'd expect. Some of them have obnoxious names or not-very-good stories. A couple of them made me smile, in a good way. Some of them make me grimace. The main problem I have is you can't always tell who are the backers and who are important NPCs you need to talk to. Which is a pretty minor problem, to be honest.

Eh, Eder is a better tank than my paladin that I designed for tanking. The paladin's an okayish offtank but pretty unexciting; I feel like I'd be better off with a tanky Chanter in that position.

Currently: 1 fighter (Eder), 1 paladin (hired), 1 rogue (hired), 1 priest (Durance), 1 chanter (Kana), 1 cipher (main) The fighter is a great tank. The paladin is a mediocre off-tank, nowhere near as tough as the fighter. She'll be replaced when I find the next interesting NPC. The rogue is using a pistol, and is a major single-target damage dealer. The priest is pretty mediocre in combat overall, but I'm sticking with him for his story. The chanter is fantastic for speeding up my gunners, does decent single-target damage, in long fights the summons are helpful, and I like his comments. The cipher is great at CC, and quite good at both single-target and AOE damage.

No, I totally understand the OP here. While many fights are too easy on easy, there are still quite a few that will ruin you if: -- you're just starting out after the sort-of-tutorial area, and don't have companions to back you up. (If you're playing a squishy, this IMMEDIATELY leads to the impression that the game is brutal even on easy,) -- your positioning isn't just right -- you treat it as a straightforward fight when surprise, it's not and you have to approach it more cautiously and with smart tactics -- there are one or two particularly nasty enemies that do something drastic -- the fight is above your level and you just need to avoid it and do some other quests first -- you're used to games where difficulty is fairly even and there are always huge cues and warnings that the next fight will be serious. Honestly I think "easy" gets you used to the idea that all it takes to win is putting tanks in front, targeting enemies, and slaughtering them. And then three fights later there's this massive, overwhelming mess that wipes out three of your party in the first 5 seconds and nothing in the game had prepared you for it. I've been breezing through most fights, but there was one last night where I got it wrong four times in a row and I swear my party was half wiped in seconds. And then the fifth time, instead of going for the choke point I went all-out against a particular enemy caster and scattered my back line instead of trying to keep them all behind the tanks, and it went almost flawlessly.

Yes, bows are pretty inferior unless you're using them specifically for interruption. http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/30rso5/ranged_weapon_dps_some_rough_numbers/ I have a pistol on my Cipher and my Rogue and an arbalest on my chanter (who uses the reload phrase), and it's working out pretty well. If I find a decent blunderbuss, I'll probably give it to my cipher and just not worry about weapon switching. (My cipher does also have an arquebus but I've stopped bothering to use it.)

He says about Pillars, which has a 90% on Metacritic, a 92% rating (and is currently the #4 selling game) on Steam, and has earned millions of dollars in less than a week; and DA: Inquisition, with an 85% on Metacritic and which EA says was BioWare's most successful launch in history in terms of sales figures. How tragic.

I'm enjoying it a lot. I wasn't sure that I would -- I've been playing ARPGs and MMOs so much that I've gotten used to clicking through text and running off to kill 20 rats or whatever -- but the writing has really drawn me in, and I enjoy the mechanics. Doesn't mean there are no bugs or flaws, of course, or that it will appeal to everyone. But I think if you read between the lines you can see a lot of enthusiasm for the game throughout the forums.

I've only used a Moon Godlike so far, but honestly, I would only choose that for a tank (and I wouldn't try to make a Cipher tank). Race doesn't make a huge difference one way or the other. Probably Death is the best of them for a Cipher, but not as good as a wood elf. Helms are mostly just cosmetic. You can't enchant them and they don't contribute any defense. I've found two so far in the game that have any bonuses at all, and one was at a merchant and I didn't think it was worth buying. So don't think of it as "I'm giving up a helm" but "I'm giving up being some other race where the bonus might be more useful."

Chanters are better than Paladins, I think, and I like them more than wizards or priests. "Sure-Handed Ila" is nice to have when your chanter, a rogue and a cipher are all using guns. They can tank decently if you set them up for it. The invocations are just icing, really. -- extra sustain when you need it, which isn't going to be every fight.

I have a Moon Godlike paladin, and it's definitely not "4 Endurance." I would guess it's more like 20 or 30. (My main problem is my paladin is usually the first one to take damage, since my fighter's deflection is much better. So it's rare anyone else gets a taste of that healing wave anyway.)

I'm playing on easy without any regrets or shame. I tried soloing some of the early encounters after several tries (with a cipher). I did the ruined temple with just Aloth and Eder though. After the Gilded Vale I made a beeline for Od Nua and have gotten down to level 8; my party is mostly level 4 with a couple of level 3s. i find that with a full party, most encounters are quite easy but a few present a real challenge, which is the way I like it, at least on a first run through the story. Screwing up will get you killed plenty fast even on easy.

Same here. I was excited about it despite never having gotten very far in Baldur's Gate or similar games for various reasons. It's a different pace from the games I've been playing, and I like it a lot.

Interesting, I don't think I ever had to face 5 shadows in there simultaneously. Maybe because I'm playing on easy, or maybe because I was scouting and managed to catch them separately. (There was one fight with three of them, after which two more showed up unexpectedly, so that was probably it.) I cleared the temple with a ranged cipher plus the two companions from Gilded Vale. I don't remember offhand whether blindness or paralysis lower DR, but I didn't have much trouble with the shadows -- except when stuck in a door with the wizard caught in front and the fighter unable to reach past him.