bobthe

Am I interpretting correctly that you started tiral by iron mode without having played through once yet?

I reached level 12 just after reaching I was level 11 when I first arrived, but before doing anything there I went back and did a couple bounties. That leveled me to 12. I still had all of (see above) plus two other completely unexplored areas to do and I was already max level. I am not a completionish either. While I do complete most of the side-quests, there are quite a few (a dozen or so) that I have not completed.

AFAIK, it will always say the party leader detects the stashes for some reason. This is definately not the case all the time (if at all) I have had numerous situations where I scouted ahead or covered a room after a battle and it is the scout that gets the credit (of course if the scout is the leader...) I tested this briefly in the BB as well and there were times the BB rogue could find things and other characters (main PC or adventurers) with less mechanics skill could not - altho I did not really check to see if the BB rogue also had more perception. It logs the detection as whoever you have selected at the time, even if they are not the one detecting the secret thing. This defaults to your main character if you have him/her selected along with others. If you have multiple characters selected but not the main, I'm not sure who it defaults to.

I play with them on and I really appreciate the ability to do that. Without this information I would not assume there are dialogue paths that I did not have the ability to try and thus would have less interest in replaying the game with different attributes and reputations. Beyond that, I often don't even have time to play through a game more than once these days, so I appreciate being able to see if there is an option I can increase a stat for temporarily to be able to try.

Stop right there. I DO consider releasing a product without sufficient testing an intentional attempt to "wrong or mislead" me.

Ah, must be another one of those abilities where they forgot to flesh out the details. It took me a really long time to realize that some spells have details you need to know in the "flavor" text at the top. The effect description is NOT complete for a lot of stuff. I really wish they had done a sanity check on this stuff. For example there are a couple spells that say they deal 1000+ damage but don't qualify in the effect description that it only applies to enemies with low endurance, and even where it mentions this in the flavor text it still doesn't DEFINE "low endurance". These kinds of mistakes are frustrating when trying to learn the strategy of a game. Honestly I haven't even tried either of those two spells referenced because I have just assumed that there is more wrong with their descriptions that I haven't caught yet.

I agree that Durance is annoying as hell. He also seems to have some contradictory stances on things and I generally get the feeling that he's a bit insane. I also absolutely hated Aloth initially. When I first encountered him it was very late and I was just about to go to bed. During that initial encounter I really just didn't realize that he might be so I assumed he was just a huge di.ck (really? they censor **** this but not "hell"??) who liked to make trouble and then lie about it. I honestly alomost reloaded to right before I got him since I had just saved to skip getting him completely. Now that I know more about his backstory he's grown from "detested" to "i really just don't care but he's useful in my party". Eder is more boring than a wood post but he gets the job done in combat. I call him "unflavorful generic fighter man". Honeslty I didn't really care for any of the companions personalities or backstories. The wailing MILF wasn't bad. Chanter-dude grew on me but I didn't have much of a chance to get to know him because I dropped him for another companion (combat just wasn't lasting long enough to warrant a chanter). I also wish there were more options for companions. I don't care so much about their backstories and sidequests (generally speaking not specific to these characters), so the fact that I don't like some of the companions doesn't bother me much. But it would have been nice if there were, for example, at least two different wizards with different builds and spellbooks. Same for the other classes. It would have been nice to have some more options for pre-built NPC builds across the classes. The ability to make your own is a very nice touch too but that effectively removes a lot of the immersion in the game world.

Just because you're ok with insufficient testing on a product doesn't mean everyone else is. Also, your examples of old games show how young you are. Those examples are definitely not from the days before games were released with major bugs. You need to go back to the days of the original Nintendo and other early consoles. Sure, many had minor bugs, some had major bugs, but the rate of bugs (especially major bugs) was much lower. Without the ability to issue a patch they had to be sure their game worked on release. These days it's not developers that are lazy, it's the management pushing to meet deadlines to make a few extra bucks and assuming they can fix anything with patches later. It's an insulting practice to be honest.

My point is that, given what I know about certain NPCs and factions and their goals and motivations, some responses/reactions to certain actions/positions were very surprising and contradictory to how they have been portrayed in the game. I'm not talking completely generically.

Is this new? As of last night the description for this ability in my game did NOT say anything about bonus damage, only that you cannot be flanked unless there are 3 or more enemies. Where is the bonus damage from? Is it just missing from the in-game description for this ability?

I think you and I are just very different audiences. I'm not sure who those other characters you referenced are but I am assuming they're from the BG series, which I found terribly boring and never even managed to get all the way through either game. I'm not sure why people keep comparing PoE to BG...it's much more reminiscent of Torment to me (which was a wonderful game). Yes, the banter picks up more than the wolf petting line. I believe that was actually the very first banter line I remembered hearing. It picks up after that. But if you don't care about the characters then you probably also wouldn't care about the banter. There's no "benefit" from it aside from finding it amusing (which I do) and adding some minor character development. The nature of the random banter is primarily just for amusement though. The companions do make comments during dialogue with non-companion NPCs and they do depend on reputation (I believe). What they say during other NPC interactions is more meaningful than the banter but I admit it does not seem to have any real effect on the game.

But it's a possible outcome. I just thought it would be courteous to hide end-game content behind a spoiler tag if the topic isn't clearly end-game related. While this is a spoiler-friendly sub-forum, most of the users coming here are probably not looking to find out endgame content, and seeing a thread titled "Durance", who you get fairly early on in the game, and then the first thing in that thread is endgame content is a bit disconcerting.

Generally speaking, probably medium armor, but armor choice depends a bit more on your party composition. If your 2H char is taking too much damage, use heavier armor. If they aren't taking much, switch to lighter armor for the increased attack speed. See what works best for your party and playstyle. I use medium armor for my barbarian because Eder is my front-line tank but my barbie is the only other melee-er in my party, so he does get attacked a decent amount.

The spoiler tags are not meant for the non-spoiler forums so what would you propose their use is then? I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect people to put spoiler tags around end-game content details when the topic is as vague as the name of a character. If the topic was "Durance end-game discussion" then I wouldn't have asked for the spoiler tag because the topic title would have warned me. Just because it's a spoiler-ok forum does not mean everyone reading this forum wants to see everything spoiled automatically. Have some care for more sensitive topics. That is exactly what the spoiler tag is for.

Ack! Even in the spoiler-ok forums you should still put a spoiler alert around anything end-gamey! It's under "Special BBC Code" - "Spoiler" in the post options at the top of a new post.