vyvexthorne

I got Shadow Tactics through Epic's free holiday game giveaway and it's pretty darn great. I had never heard of it before. One mission can feel like an entire game. A lot of experimenting and reloading. I also got TABS and Bad North through that same holiday giveaway which are pretty fun to mess around with. Nothing I have to heavily concentrate on so good for relaxing or beating boredom. Other than that I'm playing through Pillars of Eternity to make a good save for Poe2. I got a new PC about 8 months ago and I didn't bother transferring game saves. More fun to just make new ones.

To me, it simply looks like the first game didn't inspire confidence in a lot of players. If you look at the Steam Achievements .. Not even half the players got through the first act (46.7%) and only 13% actually finished the game. That's not good. When it comes to the second game it was mainly just the die hard fans that bought it. Less people bought the 2nd game but they were bigger fans and the achievements reflect that with 67% at least getting the first achievement and a story completion rate of 19.5%. (pretty much all games have a crappy completion percent. That says more about gaming culture as a whole than anything else.)

Thanks.. I did a bunch of googling myself and found nothing much. Kind of disappoint. I understand the theory behind why they did it.. but it really takes away some of the roll playing aspects. Like if I want to make my main a rogue then I also want to take all the rogue-y skills and I want to be good at those skills so I feel like a good thief. .. not a mediocre thief who has to rely on their friends. "Bert, can you go pick-pocket that guy?.. I know you are a massive burly barbarian with no stealth but you're the one with pick pocket skill because I'm a too dumb and can't fit all that knowledge in my head.. so go get 'em!"

Are skill points per level hard coded or something? I'd expect to find mods that give you more skill points per level but all I can find are overly cheaty ones that max you out right from the get go. All I want is like 2 or 3 points more a level and only for the main character. Also if anyone knows how to just edit a file to get what I want or there's a thread that tells you how to do that I'd be happy to try to do it myself.

Here's a portrait I just made for myself I thought I'd share. I've had this picture for quite a long time and I've used it for Baldur's Gate a few times. Never knew who the artist was so I decided to track them down with tinyeye for this post.. So credit and original art can be found here. https://www.deviantart.com/rainfeatherpearl/art/The-Scout-165202796 Also, credit to this post for teaching me how to create the watercolor portraits.

I feel the silliest thing in this 27 hour world is that your character still only sleeps 8 hours.

no . and story companions are nothing interesting , their builds are limited and their "story" part is shallow and doesnt make up for bad stats , id rather play with 6 interesting characters with interesting builds that i made myself , there are hundreds of builds in PoE that are worth trying and will be way more fun than listening to some crap lines companions have . Stop offering aloth n co to everyone they are trash Disagree. Of course if you play with the classical cheese build pack of 5 hirelings PoTD is a cakewalk. Try to play a PoTD run without a priest. And prepare your anus for the disabling fest. You can beat the game with NPC companions easily, and they add a lot of fun. I like them all, even Aloth. And his stats are not bad for a disabling wizard because you don't need MIG at all. If you play with 5 recruited mercs, you are not playing PoTD. You are playing on easy mode. Everyone can choose their style but I suggest to give NPC companions a try. Some of them have very good stats (Kana, Zahua, Maneha). Others like Hiravias are very funny to have in the party, and his stelgaer shapeshift is very good. Having a party of mercs is not mandatory for PoTD. If you don't know how to use properly NPC's companion it's not NPC's fault. It's yours. I agree.. especially since you can build story companions from the ground up simply by unchecking autolevel. You can pretty much make them as powerful as any companion you can build.. you just can't choose their starting stats so there's no min/maxing. I find the game much more interesting and fun with the story companions. Building your own team is also fun but it definitely makes the game a bit more easy,,,you never have to worry about switching companions out and your team will all pretty much level up evenly.

I found that I didn't really need two tanks by simply having a ranger in the party. The animal companion adds the second "tank" (not really a tank but it keeps the enemies occupied and off the rest of the party.) The ranger I play as a combo of ranged and melee... so she's usually in the front line but won't switch to melee unless it seems necessary to defend the ranged party members. I keep thinking how funny it would be to make a party of all rangers. 6 rangers and their 6 animal companions. (plus your main characters useless pet.) . .13 characters tromping around the country side. My basic party was Fighter (sword and shield) Ranger Rogue (ranged, war bow... Tiny little rogue with a great big bow... I just like the image in my head.) Chanter (mainly using summoning spells and buffing chants... If all else fails, overwhelming the enemy with summoned critters usually works pretty well. Might be considered kind of cheesy) Priest (I always have a priest.. I can't seem to build a party without one... Berath or Eothas.. your basic good guy priest.) Cipher I really like the cipher a lot. I enjoy taking spells that mostly just aid the fighter and I usually give the Cipher guns for some reason. I don't know why.. they seem cooler with guns. In reality you could substitute Wizard or Druid just as easily for the sixth member depending on whatever your favorite class is... I enjoy not having to micromanage spells too much so I like the chanter and cipher.. lots of passive things going on that I don't have to worry about too much. I've yet to create a barbarian or monk. Those classes never interested me in D&D and I guess that's just a left over influence.

Today after an attack I decided to concentrate all hirelings with only security thus lowering prestige. I also hired an ogre that lowers prestige by 6.. Now with a security of 49 and a prestige of 31 I don't seem to be getting any more attacks. I'll have to see how it works out in a couple days. I guess that would make sense.. the more prestige you have the more attacks you'd get. No idea if it really works that way or not. Also, weirdly haven't got any more stronghold quests, supplicants or any other dealings since I completed the stronghold. I find that kind of odd as well.

Really? No penalty for staying with ranged weapons? Wow, I didn't know that. Here I've been busy giving people bonus back up weapon skills when leveling up thinking it'd help them out when they have to go into melee.

Yeah, I recently finished building everything in the stronghold.. prestige and security standing at 42 each. Up until that point I had never had an attack on the stronghold.. (but I had an overabundance of supplicants.. seriously, I created four hirelings just to deal with the escort missions.) After I completed the stronghold.. nothing but attacks. The last two days of playing (real time about 6 hours playthrough each day.) I've had five attacks. It's downright idiotic. Next time I'm totally ignoring the stronghold.. it's really not at all fun to deal with.

But these are all things you can do yourself as you play the game aren't they?. You don't have to grab every little item and sell it.. and you don't have to rest everywhere if you don't want to. The great thing about these games is that you can play in different ways each time through. You can limit your own xp by side stepping certain quests and not killing every creature you come across. You can take a full party with you to make the adventure easier or you can just go it alone to make it harder. Lots of different options present themselves when you stop playing how you think the game should be played and just play how you like to play.

I kind of like it this way.. it takes away some of the tedium. In IWD 1 and 2.. you pretty much had to keep your characters buffed at all times. That meant casting lots and lots of spells right after resting. You'd get into a repetitive pattern. It also really sucked when you're party would get de-buffed during a fight and you'd then have no way of recasting certain spells without resting again. I pretty much abused resting in IWD... This system allows you to go further without having to rest/recast as much between altercations.

Yeah, I'll eventually do both types of runs. I always start off with the given party.. will probably use them for a few runs just so I can play with all the characters. Later on it'll be fun to make an interesting custom party. I always though a fun way to allow for both custom parties and side party plot lines would be to tie character plots to the voice set. I have no idea if that would be easy or hard but it sure would be nice.

You probably accidentally stepped into a parallel universe. Can easily happen when you go through doors wrong or exit from a walk in closet or dressing room. You can try to find the door back but will most likely just end up in another parallel universe further from your original one. I'd just chalk it up as an "oopsy" and continue on here. The differences won't be that noticeable.. just little things like you might run across a t.v. show that will be new here but might have run in the 90's in your universe. No big deal... just don't talk about it too much or the IPUPS (intergalactic parallel universe police squad) might come knocking. I guess it's too expensive to track down your correct universe so they just stick you in a neutral limbo universe.. which is really, really boring..

Pretty much the same as BG/IWD.. You have to actively search for traps. It feels rather normal to me. I always use my rogue for scouting areas anyway. At least in this game you can sneak and search for traps at the same time.

I like playing both ways. I always like to play the game as intended my first run. But then after that.. I usually want to be god on my subsequent plays. It's been a very, very long time since I've played BG without the exp cap remover. Like most people, I really don't like hitting the xp/level cap before the end of the game. However, I think that most of us who are completionists are maybe a niche crowd when compared to how most others play these types of games. So I understand why they base the finale on a level that they'd think we'd be at if we just did the main story and didn't do all the minor quests and exploring. The only way I see that this could be solved is by making two different modes that you could toggle off and on. A "story mode" and a "completionist mode" that would appropriately set the game to allow for more or less xp or up the difficulty of end level enemies or something. Really hard thing to balance out though.

I have personally enjoyed playing on normal mode because it's made me feel more normal in just my everyday life. I like how the game drifts over and merges into my own reality. Others in my life seem to be overly concerned by my overtly normal nature this past week. I've rationally tried to explain that they do not need to worry and a much more difficult version of reality will surely appear in my habits once I've completed this normal run.

I've always first rolled rogues as well. By far my favorite class to play. I think it has something with wanting to get into every nook and cranny, see what's in every chest, room and pocket... That sort of thing. Also always helped in past games with the lead character being able to spot traps.

I'm still kind of unsure what exactly stealth does. Having more doesn't seem to make me any more stealthy than my compatriots who have none.

Sagani just had a conversation with my character after I rested in the catacombs about helping me fight Thaos... Unfortunately I have no idea (in the game) who that is as I haven't gotten that far in the main quest yet. I'm still in Act 1, not sure when I'm supposed to even find out who Thaos is.

Doubtful that anybody is going to use these images for profit.. just a bunch of people trying to find a picture that matches an image in their head. . Just googling images will lead you to tons and tons of images.. You just click "view image" .. there's no artist attributed or anything like that on google images. If you happen to actually go to the page you sometimes find they also don't attribute the picture to the original artist or more likely.. never had permission to put that art on their site in the first place. Sometimes, finding the original artist of an image would take a detective. This is more a case of "the internet is what it is" rather than people consciously trying to rip someone off.

I'm kind of hoping it has some consequence.. I felt they were both kind of evil guys in their own ways after hearing both sides.. (they both might have been fibbers as well..) I was hoping the townsfolk would rally and set things in order themselves. At least there aren't dead people hanging from the tree anymore. I remembered the town had a magistrate or whatever and went back to talk to him. ... He just seems to believe I sided with Kolsc.

So I took Kolsc's quest.. successfully snuck into Raedric's hold and talked with Raedric. I took his quest to kill Kolsc since I figured attacking Raedric would turn the whole compound I had just snuck through hostile. I Went and found Kolsc, killed him easy enough. Went back to Raedric, got my reward and then, just for fun, decided to initiate combat and kill him. It worked, he died.. Amazingly unexpected, no one else at the hold seemed to care. They all just stood around. The only guy who had any dialogue about it was the priest upstairs who said.. "You killed both!, Now what will we do?" (or something along those lines.) Because I had killed Kolsc, my reputation in Gilded Vale had suffered but I got a positive rep in Defiance Bay. After I killed Raedric, my rep with Gilded vale returned and I suffered no set back in the little rep I had earned in Defiance Bay. Anyway.. I decided to keep on playing. But now I'm wondering if this will have any later outcome. Am I going to miss out on some major quests or anything? It's not like the answer will keep me from continuing on down the path I've sent myself. I'm just curious.

I like elves as rogues.. not sure why. I also like to give them bows... which seems to have worked out well for me so far. current character: female wood elf.. from Aedyr (can't remember if that gives you anything. So far it's given me dialogue options.) *()=buffs from gear. currently level 5. 14 11 (12) 18 (19) 12 12 11 I've dumped most my skills into mechanics and stealth but have 2 in lore just so I can throw some low level spells. So far I've taken Marksman Blinding Strike Crippling strike Deep wounds Shadowing beyond. I've enchanted my bow and armor a bit. Bow has Flame, +1 accuracy and is fine.. It is a fine bow. Armor has +1 con... because I thought it'd do more than it did. It's also fine. As I've stated in other posts. She has the highest kill count and has scored the largest damage against an enemy out of all the characters in my party. She has twice as many kills as the fighter who has the second highest kill count. I'm unsure of how this has occurred since I'm not paying too much attention during battles as to who killed what.. but I find it encouraging.