Pelmaleon

Occasionally when I hover over items or spells and the tooltip pops up, the tooltip vibrates very rapidly for the duration of the tooltip being up.

This has probably been said multiple times before, but each time you come back to the game multiple months later, make sure to go through your spells one by one and reread them. It helps a ton to know what exactly is in your arsenal so you can better overcome unique, tough battles. If you come back and only remember a few of them, your party potency will be greatly diminished, subsequently making the battles much more difficult. For a general combat tip, crowd control spells that confuse or sleep the enemy are great to give your party much more time to cast buff, debuff, and damaging spells. Also, remember to use your gold to buy summoning items whenever you come across them and prioritize giving them to party members without extremely important start-of-the-fight spells or abilities.

Video in question: He brings up a lot of good points. Should balance in single player rpgs be more important than forging an immersive, unique semi-sandbox experience? I for one hope to see more ludicrous and idiosyncratic equipment in Pillars 2. Are we losing too much of the special something that makes a "great" rpg versus just a "good" rpg by making the game beginner-friendly (i.e. having fewer and tamer choices and mechanics) even while multiple difficulty levels exist? What are your thoughts?

It wasn't meant to be boring and bare-bones, but they had a release date (limited time) and limited funds so they couldn't accomplish everything they and their fans desired. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda, etc) once said, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." Now obviously things are not so black or white, but this quote veritably holds true for elements of a game (which make up a game), such as Pillars of Eternity's stronghold. I remember hearing in an interview that Pillars 2's stronghold will be more fleshed out.

Doesn't the IEMod break with every new patch? I haven't experimented with it yet, but I thought I remember reading that.

I entered White March at level 5 with my PotD party and beat all of it except the (SPOILERS) Alpine Dragon and Cragholdt area. I went from level 5 to level 9, and am about to attempt Cragholdt. The evidence is in my vods at twitch.tv/Pelmaleon.

I think the devs may have shot themselves in the foot with their leveling system. In the infinity engine games the experience required for mid-late game levels would start to ramp up into extremely large figures, while in this game each subsequent level barely increases the amount of exp required to ding. This causes players who do every side quest and area to be way too overleveled for future encounters/quests because each quest completion gives a large portion of the exp required to level up - enough of these large portions by completing side quests and you become overleveled. They need to take a look at the way the infinity engine games were designed for Pillars 2 (or for part 2 of White March if they decide to revamp the exp system) to realize that they must ramp up the experience required for mid-late game level ups lest they run into a huge problem where completionists and even semi-completionists will suddenly hit an odd, fun-killing power curve in which their party is too powerful for subsequent encounters/quests and the challenge is completely gone (except for the toughest bosses: a couple Dragons and the last boss). And yes, they can potentially scale enemies with your level for the main game, but that is immersion-breaking bull****. I don't want a cadre of lowly bandits to be as powerful as a dragon I slew many levels ago. I really hope Pillars 2 is twice as challenging as this game (maybe just alter how the difficulty levels work, with easy, normal, and hard all modulating stats (or damage taken, etc) while the new PotD alters them a tiny bit more and also throws in all the enemies from the other difficulties) and the power curve issue is fixed. My dream would be for Pillars 2's hard to be as tough as Pillars 1's PotD, and the new PotD to be insanely challenging.

Definitely PotD for crpg vets. I regret my first play through on hard on account of so many encounters being too effortless.

Difficulty settings should be a function of difficulty settings, not one of metagame self-restrictions. This is especially true when options are presented behind a veneer of equivalency, which PoE's are. Saying balance is unimportant in a game where spells are divided up by tiers of power is absurd - balance concerns are inherent to and inseparable from the very mechanics of the game. Moreover, the pejorative and unjustified claim that anyone who cares about balance is a "minmaxing mook," betrays a complete misunderstanding of game balance as a concept. A well-balanced game has a variety of options that are asymmetric but basically equivalent in value, eschewing a game of "correct" choices for "different" choices. Power gaming is less important in such a game, because players know with relative confidence that any coherent set of decisions will give them a fun play experience. Power gaps increase minmaxing, worsen the learning curve for new players, and create opportunities for a player to become alienated from the game or its mechanics. ITQ: "People who disagree with me obviously do so because of deep-rooted character flaws, and should not be taken seriously because I say so." Would you like some retorte with that ad hominem, sir? No, but it helps. I don't really understand why we should congratulate them for including one of the worst things about the IE games after they explicitly said they would avert it. Strawman after strawman after strawman. I'm not going to waste my time debating someone who incorrectly inferred basically everything I said. Edit: I would like to address this one statement though: "Power gaps increase minmaxing, worsen the learning curve for new players, and create opportunities for a player to become alienated from the game or its mechanics." You forgot to mention the plethora of invigorating, unparalleled pros that come with a delicate touch of power curves (lol @ "gaps" - such a pessimistic, partisan load of doublespeak), whilst only focusing on the cons. This is a single player game. Go back to playing League of Legends if you want everyone to be equally trite and vapid. You obviously don't know the first thing when it games to designing a great, timeless single player game.

Yea, let's just make the game even easier for the small playerbase of tactical adventure fans by buffing all other classes. /s. Stop endeavoring to force feed the devs and other players your perfect world scenario where everyone is equal and the land is filled with sunshine and rainbows as you traverse across the land one-shotting dragons and solving all the problems of every village. Classes should be different with varied power curves. Races should be very different and make people react extremely differently to you. Villages should still have unsolvable problems after you are done attempting to aid their denizens. Dark humor on epitaphs should be allowed to add some spice and variety to the game, while simultaneously forcing SJWs to develop a more lighthearted mindset in their day-to-day approach to multifarious situations and stimuli. But no, these things won't occur because the vocal minority wants it their specific, narcissistic way, great game be damned.

Your rationalization is an act of grasping at straws. None of the spells you named are particularly OP, particularly at the levels you gain them. and none you mentioned are broken. The fact that they become OP once you can use them per encounter speaks to the problems with the per encounter use and not the relative power of those spells. Truth is that all RPG systems start getting funky at higher levels because keeping power curves reasonable is very difficult. The per encounter spell system needs to be addressed because it so heavily favors 3 classes at the moment, that Obsidian's only options in the future are to give other classes matching ridiculous powers that will lead to the kinds of nonsense we see at the Epic levels of D&D 3.5, or to reign in the power curve so that the game remains playable and enjoyable into higher levels. Wrong. More resource efficient =/= more powerful or broken. Having a relatively more auspicious outcome per cast = more powerful or broken. The spells listed (and others) are extremely powerful and break (hence the term "broken") the game's challenge, even on PotD. They would still be extremely powerful even if they were per rest; there would be nothing stopping you from going back to town to gather more camping supplies in between relatively trivial encounters - this option and scenario does not alter the present potency of the spells I listed, seeing as you would have the same amount of spells for every battle. All the per encounter to per rest change would do is force players to go through more loading screens to gather more supplies if they were tactically inept (which is a huge portion of the player base), but it would not alter the spells being extremely overpowered. You are most likely just using the aforementioned spells incorrectly. Have you beat the game on PotD before without using Barbarian's pre-patch One Man Standing or are you the one grasping at straws? The design of the game was to prevent the type of 'degenerate' scenarios you describe in your response. Preventing the type of playstyle you mention was an explicit point of Josh Sawyer's original strategy in making lower level spells more potent. You have, by accident, summed up the entire problem with the per encounter spell solution; it runs counter to the gaming design goals that the lead designer outlined in his layout of the gameplay and resource usage system...thank you very much. Wrong again. Per encounter makes the "degenerate" playstyle less likely to occur, as players are more able to stay adventuring instead of pusillanimously trekking back to town to rest and re-up their camping supplies. The only thing which would stop these "degenerate" (I laugh every time I sarcastically type this - it's a blatant appeal to emotion buzzword) playstyles would be to give a reward to players resting less (immersion-breaking stat bonuses or time-based (better) quest rewards) or punish players who rest more often (way higher cost at inns and of camping supplies). But this is beside the point, seeing as my entire point regarding going back to town frequently was to substantiate a declaration regarding the potency of the spells I listed, not convince you that this "degenerate" playstyle aligns with the game's mechanics. You failed to answer my previous question so I'm going to stop replying to you now, seeing as normal conversations are give and take, while you are merely giving extraneous retorts without taking my contentions into serious consideration.

Your rationalization is an act of grasping at straws. None of the spells you named are particularly OP, particularly at the levels you gain them. and none you mentioned are broken. The fact that they become OP once you can use them per encounter speaks to the problems with the per encounter use and not the relative power of those spells. Truth is that all RPG systems start getting funky at higher levels because keeping power curves reasonable is very difficult. The per encounter spell system needs to be addressed because it so heavily favors 3 classes at the moment, that Obsidian's only options in the future are to give other classes matching ridiculous powers that will lead to the kinds of nonsense we see at the Epic levels of D&D 3.5, or to reign in the power curve so that the game remains playable and enjoyable into higher levels. Wrong. More resource efficient =/= more powerful or broken. Having a relatively more auspicious outcome per cast = more powerful or broken. The spells listed (and others) are extremely powerful and break (hence the term "broken") the game's challenge, even on PotD. They would still be extremely powerful even if they were per rest; there would be nothing stopping you from going back to town to gather more camping supplies in between relatively trivial encounters - this option and scenario does not alter the present potency of the spells I listed, seeing as you would have the same amount of spells for every battle. All the per encounter to per rest change would do is force players to go through more loading screens to gather more supplies if they were tactically inept (which is a huge portion of the player base), but it would not alter the spells being extremely overpowered. You are most likely just using the aforementioned spells incorrectly. Have you beat the game on PotD before without using Barbarian's pre-patch One Man Standing or are you the one grasping at straws?

Maybe I am attributing the underlying issues that you list here as being caused by the per encounter mechanic when it is a few specific spells than need to be adjusted. Or not. Yes, the issue lies mostly with the spells themselves, not the per encounter mechanic which (imo) makes the game more fun to play. I suppose there could be an entire removal of per encounter spells, and in exchange give the players a lot more uses per rest for these previously per encounter spells, but they still wouldn't make broken spells not broken, which subsequently remove an excessive amount of challenge and fun from the game.

Well, then do whatever you want im gonna still use per encounter spells even if i have to use a mod to achieve it OK, have fun. Nobody else ever cared about that, you know. Sounds like a case of "the thing I like, everybody likes it, the thing I don't like is the real problem". Isn't it just as valid for someone to complain the other way round? Anyway, I brought up the talents option, but I"m not sure either how big a problem per encounter spells are. They obviously do become quite significant as the levels go up, because they start making the entire class non-vancian, but removing it outright would probably leave glass cannon wizards really bored. When you look at spells like Adragan's Gaze or even Deleterious Alacrity, they clearly weren't meant to be spammed 4 times per battle, whereas even with highly effective spells like Fan of Flames, it's not a huge problem. You could start categorising spells into per-enc and per-rest from the very start, but handling two spellbooks would also get very cumbersome. Understandable? Yes. Valid? Not really. If you contemplate the results of both scenarios (one with per encounter spells but non-broken (and no relatively extremely overpowered) spells and the other with broken (and relatively extremely overpowered) spells but no per encounter spells) then you most likely would be agreeing with me.

Because badly balanced SP is a sign of poor game design. Ok, but a minute sign or hint of worse things to come does not automatically make the rest of the game's elements and mechanics poorly designed. Perhaps one of the devs in charge of the balancing is just not as experienced or bright as the other devs who made other parts of the game? Or maybe he was rushed because of a relatively larger workload during his designing process and didn't get enough time to balance-check the spells' numbers?