Emptiness

Speaking of morally questionable actions: You do know that this is a "NO SPOILERS" section of the forum, right?

There is more to the thread I linked than just PoE being in your Steam Library.

You, as a society, can fix that whenever you like. Just eat more Grey Squirrel stew.

If you haven't yet, I would perform the steps listed in this thread: Redeeming Keys and Rewards - How To

Buffing before combat, especially buffing before every combat, was one of the things that made the IE games more tedious. Once you got into ToB, for example, if you weren't resting and then fully buffing before each battle you were probably dying and restarting until you did rest and buff. Limiting rest and removing pre-combat buffing were two changes that were made in the design of this game to try to eliminate that tedium. Permitting pre-combat buffing (or eliminating rest restrictions) would make the game more tedious, not less, because all of the encounters would have to be rebalanced to account for the increase in the party's power level as a result of not being limited - which would mean that one would then have to spend the time pre-buffing in order to be able to face the encounter without a severe disadvantage. The encounters are balanced around the idea that you are not pre-buffing, so pre-buffing should not be necessary. If you are finding yourself unable to win an encounter, and the only way you can think of to win it is to be able to pre-buff, then either you need to try a different tactic or you need to come back later and face the encounter at a higher level.

Two of my active playthroughs are with less-than-good protagonists. One is amoral, the other is outright evil. So far, I haven't had any problem getting the npcs they have chosen to accompany them to happily support their amoral or evil actions. So, I'm not really clear on why this thread exists. Are players asking for an npc option that is evil-only, and won't stay with a good pc? If so, I'm not sure of the point. I think I prefer npcs whose morality flexes to match the morality of the pc, so that the player is not restricted with regard to which companions they can play with.

I don't understand how someone can fail to understand that your brain can initiate an attempt to pause the game when the game is not paused, but then have the game auto-pause an instant before your hand actually pauses the game, resulting in a pause-unpause sequence that is faster than any human reaction time. I don't understand how someone can fail to understand that if you are trying to pause the game and the result is that the game is not paused then something may happen before you can repause the game that you were trying to pause the game to prevent. I don't understand how anyone can have extensive experience with real-time-with-pause games and not have encountered both of these scenarios many times.

I like your suggestions, and agree that what happened was not the ideal behavior for the game, but don't restart a Trial of Iron run on account of the game being weird. It isn't like you knew the game was going to do that, and were deliberately abusing that behavior to win an encounter that you couldn't have won if the game had reacted as it should have.

That may all be true (although in my case I did play most of the IE games), but none of it is a reason not to add the ability to bind Pause and Unpause to different keys. It's okay for newer games to innovate and provide features that were not present in older games.

Take Second Chance as an example. It is so strong that I use a suit of armor just for it, instead of using better armor more appropriate to my character's role. If it was a talent, then every member of my party would have it. It would overshadow every other option. I agree that more diversity is better, but that is not the same thing as saying every possible option is a good option, and it doesn't solve the perception that there are limited choices. There only seems to be limited choices because many of the options have been ruled out as inferior. They could triple the number of options available...indeed, they could even triple the number of classes available...and the system might still feel restrictive as a result of the drive to make only the best choices. I'm not objecting to more choices, I'm just pointing out that it won't solve the problem.

Multiclass

Part of the journey is the mistakes you make along the way and what you learn from them. Don't let fear of mistakes block your enjoyment of the game; embrace your mistakes as part of your story. After you finish you can always play again and make better choices (and new mistakes).

I assume the "try" to which you are referring is to try to increase build diversity by adding or rebalancing aspects of the game. In itself, that isn't bad. A certain amount of balance is necessary to promote the use of different classes and abilities. Perfect balance is impossible, and pointless to pursue, but some imbalance is stark enough to merit correction. For example, is +10 Will worth spending a talent on? If it clearly is not then it is productive to try to determine how much +Will a talent is worth. I don't really see this thread as approaching the question of balance from that direction, however: Retaliation and Second Chance are great examples of very powerful abilities that are deliberately limited to specific items in the game; abilities that, were they available to every character as talents would instantly overshadow most of the alternatives (for appropriate characters). This isn't a "some of the character options under-perform and could use some adjustment to make them competitive" thread, this is a "there aren't enough overpowered choices available, so they should add more" thread. Or, at least that is how I read it. That's where my response comes from: increasing the number of build options by adding more overpowered options is doomed to fail because only the most powerful options will satisfy the need to be the best.

The Tank isn't there to do damage, so enemies who interrupt the Tank are generally not going to be a problem. Strictly from that standpoint, I would say that Perception would outweigh Resolve. Of course, Resolve also increases Will defense, and an incapacitated Tank is a very bad thing, so Resolve may come out ahead of Perception in the end - if you're having to make a choice between the two. Having both maxed on a Tank is very nice. Interrupting with a DPS character may happen more frequently, but investing in Perception to boost the interrupt chance is probably not worthwhile. For a DPS character, interrupts aren't good enough to merit sacrificing other stats to improve. Might, Dex, and in most cases Int are going to be better investments. Interrupts aren't good enough for a Tank to sacrifice stats for, either, but in the case of a Tank the relevant stat is one that they would want to raise anyway.

Nonsense. There's plenty of ways to encourage build diversity by simply offering more diverse benefits. The problem currently is that most of the talents are arbitrary stat bonuses. The class talents are better because many of them add or modify existing abilities, the all-class talents are crud because they just give +10 Will or something like that, which simply won't mean jack against the toughest opponents and will hardly be noticeable in normal fights. Take for example the Monk's talent that reduces all hostile effects by half. This? This is a good talent. This is flexible and can universally help your monk across the board. But no such all-class talents exist. There needs to be more like that. Yes, there need to be more options like the ones that you consider the best. But then you won't be able to take them all. So for the ones you aren't taking to compete, they'll need to be more like the ones that you are taking. Ad infinitum.

That sounds like a bug. I haven't experienced any of that. Edit: You may want to refer to the thread MUST READ: How to Report an Issue and provide the requested information to turn this into an actual bug report.

I have found a high interrupt chance to be most useful on a Tank, for whom the interrupts serve as a form of damage reduction by slowing down the rate that the enemy they are attacking can attack back. Fortunately, maxing Perception is already useful for a Tank due to the fact that it increases Deflection.

Limited build diversity is the child of the min-max mindset. First the system gets torn apart to identify "the best" options available, then all other options are rejected, then the system is criticized for lacking options. This has nothing to do with the system itself; for any system, a given person will only find a limited set of choices to be "the best" because "the best" implies stratification of the available choices and rejection of all but a limited number of them. The only solution to this problem is to be content to make suboptimal choices.

That is pretty remarkable. Maybe some kind of (memory-resident) database corruption. I have seen some odd things happen that go away after relaunching the game.

I had the same thing happen with The Dread Pirate Roberts. Edit: It is really complicating my efforts to manipulate Guilder into a war.

Maybe Greater Lay On Hands is increasing all healing the character does from any source, instead of only increasing the healing done by Lay On Hands.

This is the location in which one would want to post a thread like this: Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)

I have a Level 11 PC Moon Godlike Monk with 10 Might. Her Silver Tide heals for 40 Endurance.

Gramrfel didn't give me an option to capture him, either. Of course, maybe that was because I attacked his group on sight, without waiting for dialog or checking to see who they were...

I have also seen this sort of misbehavior. I have this configuration: □□□1□□□ □□□2□□□ □□3□4□□ □□□5□□□ □□□6□□□ but what I get is more like this: □ □ □ 1 □ □ □ □ □ □ 2 □ □ □ □ □ 3 □ 4 □ □ 5 □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ 6 □ □ □ The character in my #5 slot is Hiravias, who was the last to join my party, and has been manually dragged to slot 5...so it is possible that he is actually in the "6th" character slot, depending on how the game's database handles characters who are dragged to a different position in the party UI.