Stargazer86

You know, automated things you can set up, like "If character drops below 50% health, cast this spell" and such. They were really quite useful in Baldur's Gate and would help reduce a bit of the micro-management the game requires. I also find myself pausing after nearly every attack just to make sure everybody is doing the optimal thing. It'd be nice if there was an orders queue where I could queue up a number of actions that'd all be done one after the other. "Cast this buff, then this buff, then this buff" and so on. I know you can sorta do that with the shift key, I think, right? But I'm not entirely sure how that works, and half the time I'm not even sure if it actually went through.

This whole forum has a spoiler warning on it. Or does the "Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)" forum title not count? I mean, it's a little late for me to edit things now, and I do genuinely apologize, but I figured that if people wanted to avoid spoilers about the story they'd stay clear of the forum that's based around talking about the story.

The story gets a tad hard to follow at times, but fro mwhat I've gathered it can be summed up with: Engwithans use animancy to create the gods in order to give people something to believe in and unite them. Thaos spends his entire prolonged life keeping this secret, creating the Leaden Key to make sure no one ever discovers the gods are fake. Since animancy was used to make them, animancers become a threat, so he needs to discredit the whole practice to prevent the secret from being exposed. He does this by siphoning the souls from children and creating an epidemic that they can't solve, using the souls to strengthen Woedica in the process. Eothas notices, marches on Dyrwood, and gets blown up by the Godhammer. So, wait, why was Thaos working with Woedica? Was it Thaos's plan or hers? What part did she add to it, exactly? How does making her stronger help his cause? Was he working with her from the beginning or only enlisted her help after Eothas things and decided to put a stop to them? To me, it only makes sense that Woedica got involved after Eothas started marching an army towards the Dyrwood. Thaos needed help, called on her, and her price was giving her the souls he'd been stealing. But if that's the case, why would Eothas create that much of a mess when another god wasn't even involved yet? From what I've gathered, Eothas only did it to put a stop to Woedica's scheme of gaining more power than the rest of the gods. But that means Thaos was working with Woedica for a while. But why would he when he doesn't need her for his plan to succeed? Create a plague, animancers can't cure it, get blamed, hearings are held, Erl is assassinated by animancers, success is achieved. He doesn't need Woedica for anything except for divine protection from Eothas. Thaos bragged about destroying entire countries to keep his secret and Eothas never intervened before, so why would he now unless Woedica was already working with Thaos? The plot makes my brain hurt just a bit.

Wizards are the best at AOE crowd control. Slicken is by far one of the best abilities at keeping your guys alive in bigger fights. Call to Slumber is just as awesome. They also get plenty of debuffing abilities that help the rest of your party kick butt. Confusion is good, Chill Fog, Blackened Sight, Miasma, you just get solid debuffing abilities all around. And their utility spells are fine too. Essential Phantom, Spirit Shield, and such. Now, the issue as I find it is that their damage dealing potential is not exactly the greatest. Most of their attack spells just seem, well, useless. Rolling Flame is awful, Corrosive Siphon is bad, Necrotic Lance is okayish, the missile spells range underwhelming to bad, and anything that jumps from one target to another just doesn't seem to work. The only attack spells that I use on a regular basis are Fireball and Ray of Fire, and even then I'm not entirely sure about their effectiveness.

I'd be careful about sticking everyone in robes. There are some enemies that are difficult to maintain control of. Spirits like to teleport in behind your lines. Beetles like to dig their way past your tanks. If one of your character gets mind-controlled and starts wailing on your other squishy party members you could be in for a rough time. The damage reduction of heavier armor helps, but without a good deflection/reflex score they're still going to be squishy. So I like to pick somewhere in the middle, giving my mage/ranger/chanter medium-ish armor that doesn't detract from their attack speed all too much but still has enough DR reduction to help them not be one-shot in case something goes wrong.

Same thing happened with me from the ogre druids in Elmshore. Permanent swarm debuff until I saved and reloaded.

The tiny, itsy bitsy little icons beside the character portraits just aren't enough. There needs to be a more visible means of seeing when characters are feared, terrified, ect. As it stands, the majority of the time I don't even bother attempting to remove debuffs since I have no idea they've been hit by them in the first place. "Oh, my guy isn't moving. Why isn't he moving? Oh, he's been stunned." isn't exactly the best way to indicate that they need help. At least that gives me a visual indicator, though. But dazed? Terrified? Sickened? Nope, just a tiny icon that you barely notice. Likewise, I have to mouse over an enemy to see what debuffs are affecting it. There needs to be a more clear indication of what debuffs are in play without needing to go searching for them.