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Emptiness

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Everything posted by Emptiness

  1. I started out with Trial of Iron, thinking it would add something for a first playthough. I did enjoy the feeling it gave me, that sense that everything I was doing was irreversible and thus important. Then I encountered a group of enemies that was too tough for me and boom - all gone. I restarted in the hope that it was a fluke, but again, several hours invested, I ran across a different encounter that ended my game. There are just some places where the threat level of the foes you meet are just suddenly higher than any of the others in the area, and running into those foes prematurely with little to no experience with the game is going to end badly. I lost like 5ish hours to those two missteps, and it was very painful and frustrating. I gave up on Trial of Iron because I realized that playing it means that sooner or later you're going to have like 50 hours invested in a game and lose it to one little mistake. That's not the solution to the OP's problems. No one's going to be able to relax and let mistakes happen when the mistakes carry such a severe consequence. Maybe sometime I will give Trial of Iron another shot. If I do, it won't be until I know every encounter like the back of my hand and I breeze through the game without a drop of sweat.
  2. When I hear you saying things like "OCD", "absolutely cannot bring myself to play the game", "A perfect character", "I quite simply cannot cope with this.", "I'd have to [... craft] a perfect character", and "I've experienced the same feeling before", I do think perhaps you may be suffering from a mental illness. Of course, it could also be that you are simply demonstrating a flare for the dramatic. Start a new game on easy difficulty and pick character creation options that sound interesting to you. Don't worry about trying to design a perfect character, because any character you make will be able to do fine. You're going to find companions to adventure with you, and how you use your party is more important to your success than any of the decisions you make in character creation or when leveling up your characters. The point of playing the game is to enjoy it; focus on the story and the decisions you make related to that. As you play, your character's identity will solidify based on the decisions you make, on how you handle the situations presented to you by the game - so it's okay if your character's identity is a little hazy or not completely established at the very start. Once you finish the game, if you want to play it again on a harder difficulty level then you will have learned in your first playthough the sort of things that you would want to know about the game system in order to design a character for a harder difficulty level.
  3. I finally got around to testing this some more. I gave two of my characters the feat and had them attack each other - there was no sign of any change anywhere in the interrupt calculation for either of them. The only other possible place I could think that there might be an influence would be on the die roll itself. In other words, maybe the die roll was being skewed upwards by 15% behind the scenes, and that increase was not reflected in the combat log in any way. Far fetched and unlikely, but not impossible. To test that, I had my protagonist kill Eder twice: once with Interrupting Blows, and once with Bull's Will (+10 Will, which should have no effect on the ability to cause interrupts). Eder had the same level, health, stats, gear, etc, for both tests. I counted the number of interrupts that occurred: Bull's Will: 62 Interrupting Blows: 54 Obviously this is a very small sample, so it is impossible to draw any statistically significant conclusions from this test, but informally the hypothesis that Interrupting Blows is increasing the chance to interrupt does not look favorable.
  4. A) The way damage reduction works and how the pale elf racial ability interacts with damage reduction from armor are just two of many things in this game that could be explained more clearly. B) It may be easy to stack a lot of burn or freeze resistance that way, but there are plenty of other damage types. The pale elf racial ability won't make your character invulnerable, and there are other racial abilities that are arguably at least as good as it.
  5. Silver Tide should not be healing for that much. Please refer to this thread and provide the requested information and files to assist with determining the cause of this bug. Edit: Also, please check your character sheet and note your current attributes here as well.
  6. I know you put "(minor spoiler)" in the title, but you might want to also put spoiler tags around that information, since this is posted in a section of the forum labeled "(NO SPOILERS)".
  7. I killed the girl, I killed the Skaenites, I killed the Lord...I would have piled up all of their bodies in the center of town and burned them to ash if that had been an option. With a different character I would probably handle the situation differently.
  8. -10 accuracy is significant unless your enemy's accuracy is so high they they will crit you every time even with -10 accuracy (because it will mean that 10% of their attacks will do less damage than they would otherwise do) or so low that your enemy is incapable of even grazing you (in which case casting any spell is a waste...just beat them to death with a spoon and save your spells for worthy foes).
  9. Which spells seem good to you will be dictated by how you play/use your Wizard. If your goal is to maximize the damage output of the Wizard then of course Fan of Flames is going to be at the top of your list. Using it effectively is going to require you to position yourself carefully, however. You may need to lock down all of the enemy melee in engagement and then move around to flank the enemy to get off a good Fan without also roasting your own party. Being able to do that dictates certain choices with regard to party composition (ie you must have several tanks, probably each able to engage multiple targets) and tactics (you can't be fighting in a chokepoint or your Wizard won't be able to move around the flank). This is a generalization of course, but I suspect that overloading the party with tanks and being unable to use chokepoints are disadvantages that probably make up for Fan of Flames being so good. Without getting into an argument of whether that tradeoff is balanced, I will point out that tradeoffs are fundamental to asymmetrical balance. A spell like Minor Missiles may only hit one target, but it is much easier to use because there's no risk of friendly fire. Sometimes being able to burn down a specific dangerous enemy is more important than throwing out a bunch of AoE damage. Since you can take four spells there's no need to pick Fan instead of Minor Missiles; you can take both and use the one that fits the circumstance best. Sunless Grasp is an example of a spell that is intended to be situational. It doesn't do enough to warrant running your Wizard into danger just to cast it - but that's not the point of taking it. If you take Sunless Grasp it should be so that if an enemy does get to your Wizard and starts hurting him, you can throw out an attack that will harm that enemy but also decrease its ability to harm your Wizard. That buys the Wizard more time to kill it first, or time for another character to come to the Wizard's aid. Again, since you have four spells that you can have available, you don't have to miss out on access to more general-use spells in order to have a situational defensive spell like this. Those aren't the only three good Wizards spells, either. The most important thing is to pick the spells that are going to work best for how you play your Wizard, and then realize that the spells you aren't taking aren't necessarily bad spells, but rather may be spells that are intended to work with a different Wizard playstyle.
  10. Being able to win a fight without tactics doesn't mean that tactics are worthless, it just means your party has outclassed that fight. Find a tougher fight and you'll need your tactics.
  11. That profile name...nicely done.

  12. That's exactly how it works, if you adjust your definition of what constitutes the "normal speed" to be "the speed you move with sneak turned on". Look at it that way, and with sneak on you move normal speed and with sneak off you move faster. (To clarify, I'm trying to point out that your suggestion would not solve the problem that others are complaining about. They want to be able to move around at the fastest speed available and still find all the traps and secret things. So making sneak and not-sneak both faster than they are, or making the current sneak mode to "normal" and changing the current "normal" to be sprint mode, wouldn't satisfy them because they would still be "forced" to move slower than the maximum movement speed available to find things.)
  13. It might be that this just isn't the game for you. If it helps any, I too found the combat to be overwhelming initially (despite lots of experience playing similar sorts of games in the past). So many characters with so many options, and me unsure of exactly what they do or when to use them. As I try different things I'm learning, though, and my play is improving. I'm not an expert yet, and I'm sure there's room for me to improve, but I don't feel overwhelmed any more. Hopefully this will be the case for you as well, if you continue playing.
  14. It would be a big improvement if the image would be resized to fit in the window, or at the very least have the default position changed so that when you first open it you are looking at the exit to Caed Nua. I spent a couple minutes frustrated before I finally figured out I had to drag the image around to see the exits.
  15. Is there more than one Disappointer? I found one, but it is much, much later than Durance.
  16. It isn't that you can't spot things without sneaking, it is that you can't spot things without slowing down and looking carefully. This game just happens to combine both of those mechanics - sneaking and moving slowly while looking around carefully - into one button. The IE games had two buttons, one for each mode, but most of the time (95% or more, in my case, I'd estimate) players ended up using them both together. In this game they are combined to streamline the interface and save players from having to click them both on or click them both off every time they want to change states. The way PoE handles sneak and search is a big improvement. To those who can't handle always running around in sneak mode + double speed, I offer for your consideration the alternative available in the IE games, which was sneak mode without double speed. Play like that for an hour and then turn double speed back on and see for yourself how much better things are in PoE.
  17. I didn't say it was uncommon, I said it was potentially serious. Lots of people have untreated mental illnesses. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but if it starts to be a problem that is affecting your ability to live and enjoy your life then it might be time to seek treatment. Hey, from my POV, messy, unorganized, non-completist people are the ones that need to be cured. Hehe, fair enough.
  18. The boundaries of the maps are square, but the maps themselves are not all square. There are some oval maps, for example, where there is nothing in the corners.
  19. The main advantage to sneaking all the time is that it lets you see enemies before they see you, which in turn lets you start the battle on you own terms. Finding traps and hidden things is a side benefit of the fact that you happen to already be sneaking anyway. That's how I look at it, anyway.
  20. I didn't say it was uncommon, I said it was potentially serious. Lots of people have untreated mental illnesses. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but if it starts to be a problem that is affecting your ability to live and enjoy your life then it might be time to seek treatment.
  21. It doesn't sound trivial to me, it sounds like a potentially serious mental illness. Deflecting onto the game may make you feel better, but it won't help you deal with the real issues affecting your life.
  22. This needs to be two polls, since it tries to force you to vote for each question. In my case I think Godlike is the most lacking race, but I feel that the second question cannot be meaningfully answered. Specifically, since you can design a character for any class in a variety of ways, is it really possible to look at a portrait and say "that's a portrait of a _____"? That guy in plate armor could be a Fighter, or a Barbarian, or a Wizard. PS: Also, since I'm giving options, I will state that what this game really needs in the way of new portraits is a function that will generate a portrait for your character from the character itself. For example:
  23. If they're calling it one expansion in two parts then hopefully that means those of you who were backers who qualify for the expansion "free" will be getting both parts for free.
  24. Might would increase the damage each tick of those dots would do.
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