curi

250? What inn and what permasummon? Have you even tried the game on solo PotD? he's talking about hiring a chanter and using phantoms. i think you should worry about yourself instead of accusing me of being a nub. i think the people who have gotten the furthest so far would agree i'm able to make some worthwhile comments like figuring out priest stuff. i have experience soloing other games such as BG. just because i'm still testing stuff in multi-party currently, does not mean that i'm too clueless and can't add to the discussion.

what are you playing as now?

something i noticed that could maybe be abused: ranger companions never seem to take health damage (only tested at low level with bear). it takes endurance damage but its health never ever goes down. so with a source of healing, maybe you can abuse that somehow. (not sure how solo, but with a party you could use chanter heal aura and it would be a convenient way to have 100% unlimited FOREVER tanking of a single enemy to stay in combat, for example). when someone in your party gets knocked out, like a second party member or your ranger companion, it seems that they will only stand back up if 1) you are out of combat AND 2) no enemies are near. so i guess one way you can abuse solo is: play ranger. lure enemies away from where they start. have your bear fight while you run away. bear dies. enemies walk home. enemies took a little damage. bear now revives at full health. so wouldn't this let ranger abuse the game even better than chanter summons, because the ranger can "summon" his companion while out of combat? with the downside you have to lure enemies back, not fight them where they spawn. by the way, something to be careful with: even if you fight away from enemy spawn points, if they make a summon (e.g. pyrga guys summoning lesser blights), i believe the summon will last forever (or at least a long time, i don't know) and will stay where it was summoned as its spawn point. so it would be possible to get your dead bear next to a summoned enemy so it can't revive, and you'd have to kill the summon with your ranger. you have to be careful. if anyone is knocked out, including ranger companion, you cannot leave the area, even if you are out of combat. do people think ranger companion thing might be a good way to do solo? slow, yes, but seems like it would work well.

i tested Withdraw more. i ran up to the middle of some beatles and did withdraw. even though i'm right next to them, once they all return to their starting positions, combat ends, withdraw is cancelled, i get my per-encounter abilities back, and combat instantly starts again (from being in range of them). i think that's really interesting that getting back to their default map locations makes combat end. we should try to figure out any ways to force combat to start or end in this game. it's very important. for example if you leave one enemy in a fight attacking your phantom summon, you can now walk your whole party over to the next fight, cast buffs like priest blessing, etc, and do the next fight pre-buffed. this is an important exploit for party play. i think it's even useful for solo play: you could leave one summon being attacked by one enemy, go to the next fight, cast a chanter damage spell on them, run away, get your invocations back, cast ranged damage spell, run, repeat, while the summon tanks something. and if the summon gets low, run back over there and make a new one. another thing you can do with solo chanter i thought of: have 1 wurm tank an enemy, send the other 2 to kill stuff. this should let you cheese almost every map in the game, right? maerwald fight keeping you in combat if you run away is interesting. i want to know what else does. if we can control being in our out of combat, we can spam chanter spells and per-encounter abilities, pre-buff for fights, etc, etc about the horn price and pistol sell price, that is pretty mean of them :D i like it. i'm glad they make the game harder. i like hard games. i think it's good to make the game harder!!!

i don't think you understand how summons work and can be abused. you're saying it's a non-problem because it's a non-problem given your playstyle. but balance issues depend on the best possible playstyle. you get one weak enemy attacking your tank to stay in combat. then you make unlimited chanter summons and clear the whole rest of the map with them, without risking any party members. or you get in combat from maerwald fight, run away, make unlimited summons and clear the map. THAT is the currently optimal sort of thing to do in this game on max difficulty, and it really ought to be changed.

it won't let me edit my post and deleted what i wrote. trying again: i wanted to add: how is abusing seals worse than stuff with abusing summons? and if you were to limit yourself, what would the limit be? what is fair seal use for a priest? is fair use 4 of each seal per character? (5 with talent)? so set up 12-15 seals for a solo priest, 8-10 of which deal damage? that seems to be intended. maybe. they did limit it to 1 trap per party. who knows what they were thinking with seals. devs should change it, i should report it then play to win. (within the game, the only things i'm really against are stuff like intentionally not patching, or exploiting ironman by playing in a virtual machine and backing up the virtual machine periodically. or backing up save files if that works, or killing the game in task manager. i'm against outside of the game exploits like that, but i think that's the only good place to draw a line, and whatever you can do purely in game is legitimate).

http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/31clce/pic_infinite_repulsing_seals/ any level 11+ priest can cast repulsing seal dozens of times out of combat, due to having per-encounter level 2 spells. i would suggest making a limit of 1 of each seal per character to make the game more balanced and fix this.

i expect them to patch the infinite repulsing seal thing, but if they choose not to patch it then i'd consider it fair game. you do need level 11 for that after all, and the opportunity to palce them before the fight stars, so it's not entirely a free win. i won't be at all surprised if they don't patch stuff with withdraw though! i agree it's a really bad balance issue, but i think it's the developer's responsibility to patch it, not mine to hold back.

it's extremely OP now, chanters will still be good with these changes.

i hate trying to decide what's "fair" exploits and unfair exploits. why is splitting mobs up with running/ai-abuse/etc non-cheating, but withdraw spam would be cheating? i think it's too impossible to draw a line, so unless something is really really disgusting (like infinite stacking permanent stat boosts), i have a hard time saying anything against it. the whole point is to find the best strategies possible, not hold yourself back some sorta unclear amount. regarding xp, you should not get an xp bonus in higher difficulty modes. that's a bad idea. the whole point of higher modes is to make the game harder, not to let you get higher level spells in earlier zones!!! if they gave xp bonus for higher difficulty, it would make it partly harder and partly easier, and they'd have to be very careful with game design and balance to make sure it was actually harder and not easier, and they could easily mess that up. i think it's a very good thing you don't get xp from difficulty mode either directly or also indirectly (b/c u don't get combat xp, spawning more enemies doesn't overlevel you - good, more of a challenge). with no xp bonus, harder modes are strictly harder, which i think is how it should be, instead of partly an advantage. honestly, for the same reason, they probably shouldn't give any bonus xp at all for soloing. bonus xp gives solo an upside. it makes it a mixed blessing instead of strictly harder. that's dangerous. it might turn out soloing has some significant advantages b/c you can level faster to per-encounter spells or to a very high stealth skill. and there are also full-party strategies where you level up solo with xp bonus, then recruit companions who are 1 level below you or your current level. then you have a full party at a higher level than is normally possible. that is exploitable in a regular non-solo run. you take chanter or whoever is easiest, solo to level 6 or something (or higher, i don't know) using the 50% xp bonus, then recruit a full party, and it's kinda like the entire party got the 50% xp bonus for what you played so far. (like my old BG strategy, which went something like this: start game, solo basilisks for easy level 5, recruit companions who start at level 5, have a full high level party. whereas if you got a party first then killed basilisks, everyone would be more like level 2.)

in bgee, you control your summons. dunno about IWD. you can't send them off into the fog of war alone, because they have zero ability to see on their own. you need a party member or spell to see somewhere. then you can control summons like normal. this would really help in PoE. just don't give summons any vision on their own, so they can't operate away from party members who give vision of an area. i was really shocked when i saw PoE didn't work like bg, seems like a huge mistake to let summons go scout the map risk-free. they copied lots of other stuff from bg, so i don't get it.

i think Withdraw might be even better to abuse for a solo than repulsing seal. if you can get a priest to level 9. it makes you safe for 20 (base) seconds. assuming you pulled enemies away from where they start, they will walk away. when they get a little ways away, it breaks combat, ends withdraw, and they retarget you again (in my testing with beetles) because they aren't very far away yet. then, due to breaking combat for a moment, you go back up to max level 1 spells (if you're level 9). so you can use withdraw as much as you want and keep healing and get out of combat as needed. if your health gets low, you can just leave, it lets you really easily pick off enemies one at a time. even if you aren't level 9, you could abuse this a lot. with the level 1 spell talent and supplies, you could get 15 casts of withdraw between visits to the inn. i'm on GOG so i don't have the patch with the increased solo XP yet but maybe i'll try this when i get the patch. (i've been learning about the game with a full party for now, and haven't decided exactly what sort of extreme challenge i want to go for.) EDIT: i wanted to add that combat breaks when the last enemy walks a little ways away from you. the result is it's really good at splitting enemies up. you will end up with 1 guy at a good range and most other enemies probably further away.

if you can get a priest to level 11 solo, you can make over 100 seal of repulsing before starting a fight. very good way to cheese fights... http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/31clce/pic_infinite_repulsing_seals/

where do you get a pistol in the starting area?

i feel characters should auto attack anything that's in range without moving. instead, it seems to be a set distance, i think. so fighters will run around stupidly sometimes. and people with a max range weapon will sometimes sit idle, not not attacking stuff that's already in range. could this be fixed?

Please no, the micromanagement is fun element.The fact that you can choose target is why summons are so powerfull because you can focus your power on 1 target or tank with summons. i don't think you played baldur's gate much? you aren't understanding. you can micro control your summons. they just don't grant vision, so you can't use them away from the party (without using a scouting spell at least), you can only control them in the area where you have vision. but this way you can't use summons as scouts or send 6 summons to go fight while you sit at the dungeon entrance.

i think they should handle this like baldur's gate. summoned creatures cannot provide any map vision at all (and you can't click them to go fight at a location you haven't explored). i think that would be a nice way to fix the problem of risk-free exploring by running summons around, and fighting far-away monsters, etc does that make sense to other people? i'd also be fine with limiting duration to like a minute. long but not infinite. but that would not solve the main problem of sending them around the map.

it says it gives enemies x0.2 attack speed for 10 seconds, and does damage. compare with mage's level 3 slow spell that gives x0.7 for 15 seconds, without dealing damage. is this a typo and actually blizzard gives x0.8 attack speed? (a 20% penalty, rather than 80% penalty)? does anyone know? i think it's either a bug or a typo, it can't possibly be intended. it looks to me like the best level 2 druid spell even if it really means x0.8. if it actually removes 80% of incoming attack damage that would be ridiculous.

so if you get an enemy half dead with a wave of summons, then send the next wave, it'll still be half dead right? if enemies would heal up quick when you don't have vision of them, that would help prevent this kind of abuse too. (depending how deadly one wave of summons is. i only just got my chanter to level 6 a few minutes ago so i haven't even tried the wurms yet. and i haven't tested multiple chanter parties. the level 2 druid summon spell seems weak i noticed, not sure about the higher level druid ones though, or the level 4 mage one i saw on the wiki.) another abusive thing i noticed you can do is put out as many priest seals as you want. the game limits you to one trap, but you can put tons of priest seals to prepare for a fight. kinda weird.

could you make the stronghold log in reverse chronological order so you don't have to scroll down all the time? alternatively, when you view it, automatically scroll to the bottom. but i think just put new stuff on top is best. playing on mac from GOG.

oh my god, thank you for telling me you can hotkey with f1-f12. thanks so much. i do really hope they add hotkeys for weapon switching and for loot all. but this helps a lot.

i was losing the fight so i ran my thief away. my fighter went down last, but he graphically he looks like he's standing up, and he keeps doing repeating disengagement attacks vs the troll trying to leave. after that troll died, the next troll walked by, took 1 disengagement hit, and actually kept walking and left. the flame blight stood still near the fighter and combat still didn't end. fortunately my rogue was able to kill the flame blight, leaving no enemies still on screen. but then combat still wouldn't end so i had to reload.

checked combat log for my mage being attacked. it used the same incorrect deflection from the character screen.

this spell also has a really short ranged on certain terrain, i'm not sure why. judging by the targeting UI. usually it's long but sometimes it's tiny.

my wood elf wizard main character is missing distant advantage from active effects. if i make a new level 1 in tavern, it does show up there, so there's clearly something missing. is this getting patched soon and fixed retroactively? does anyone have instructions on what i'd type in the console to fix this?