Crucis

This seems like a dumb question, but here goes. How do you get the songbird from the home in Heartsong? In my last party, I couldn't get it peacefully. Every time I opened the container where the bird was, the game instantly, the home owner instantly went into dialog mode and there was no option to get the bird that I could see. Can you get the bird without killing the people in the home? Or is this a quest that requires a high attribute to trigger the only peaceful way to get the bird, like high RES? In my last party, I didn't want to kill the people in the house and risk hurting my Twin Elms reputation, since my Rogue was a nice, heroic sort.

That's because my experience with this class is going against what I am being told......and I am not very happy about that Nah, I think that you're just refusing to see what we're telling you. You're not happy that paladins aren't what you want them to be and you're refusing to see what they *can* do and you're then saying that they stink, when the reality is that they don't. We're trying to help you see paladins for what they are and what they *can* do. But if you continue to refuse to see what's in front of your eyes, there's nothing we can do to help you. Sorry. EDIT: And no wonder you think you can't hit anything with a 10 PER. You have a pally with plenty of HP due to the 14 CON and plenty of Might with which to do damage (and healing), but a reduced ability to hit things with that low PER. Your pally would have been better off if you'd flipped the CON and PER scores.

Mocker, honestly, I don't like this entire AoE thing with barbs. I believe that barbarians should be just like other melee warrior classes and focus on 1v1 combat, and that their class abilities should be focused around that. I tend to think that their central ability should be Frenzy, not Carnage. But that's just me. Having said that, if they're going to stick with this (silly) AoE model of barbarians, it probably would be a good idea if carnage improved another time or two through the levels.

I think that it's a little late to be thinking about something rather big like that. At this point in the process, about all we can hope for is cleaning up bugs before Obsidian moves its people off PoE and onto some other project.

I've said before, whether here or on other recent pally-related threads that I think that the paladin order talents (for the player usable orders) are rather weak, and IMO aren't really worth taking when compared to generic talents or some non-order related paladin class talents. .............................................. They (paladins) are what they are, at least until PoE2 comes out, if and when that ever happens. What would be a good attribute spread for a Pally in PotD, IYO and which order would you recommend other than KW?......honestly just trying to figure out, if I rolled it wrong... And my expectations of Paladins are not too high, I just want them to contribute in one way or the other same as the other party members, but at the moment it seems like the only thing my Pally is good for is zealous aura and that's about it and that's not really much considering I could have a Druid or Ranger in his place with all their abilities at my disposal, as I already mentioned before... Btw Priests do have an ability that removes pretty much all conditions can't recall its name, also charm , dominate and confusion these spells have never really given me much trouble anyway.......and casting Prayer against Treachery right at the start of the battle against enemies who inflict these conditions, takes care of it and by the time when duration is about to run out you can refresh it again if needed, but normally you won't need to refresh it because by that time most of monsters would be dead if not all..... Attribute spread, hmmm. Of course, different people may have different opinions on this, but here's a decent Pally stat build, I'd think. M:16 C: 10 D: 10 P: 14 I: 14 R: 14 If I understated the point total, just throw the final point on either Might or Resolve, or wherever else you'd like. Anyways, this build should give a pally a decent enough stat spread for the necessities. As for other stuff, yes, a priest can cast the Prayer against Treachery. But remember that very few buffing spells can be cast outside of combat now, so sometimes it can be difficult to get such a spell cast before the enemy has whacked someone on your team. They always seem to pull the trigger on this stuff more quickly than your party can. So, having a pally around to clean up the mess is convenient. Also, even if a priest can do many of these things, it never hurts to have someone else who's able to do them around as well. As for your expectations, thanks for saying more explicitly you'd like. Yes, you could have a different character. And while, say, a ranger might have more damage potential than a paladin, the ranger isn't going to be able to Revive anyone, or "fix" a charmed/dominated/confused team mate, or lay on hands to heal a hurt team mate. The paladin can do things a ranger or a druid can't, just like they can do things that a paladin can't. And when you have a party, it's all about taking a number of character's skills (i.e. abilities, talents, spells, etc.) and meshing them together and hopefully creating a group whose overall abilities are greater than the mere sum of its parts. Even in the old IE D&D games, paladins were never the "best' at anything. The point is that they're sort of a jack of many trades class, sort of a class that's part priest, part warrior. A class of warriors who are better suited to standing in the front lines and yet able to do some of the things that a priest could do. In fact, a lot of players think that paladins are more effective healers in combat than priests themselves, due to the speed and strength of their Lay on Hands ability. And also remember that just because one might already have a priest in a party, there's nothing wrong with providing that priest some backup in the form of a paladin. You never know when that backup with be valuable or even critically necessary.

Yeah, one of the challenges with Monks is trying to find the right balance between having enough DR that you still get wounds and having too much DR which can cause you to get too few wounds (and perhaps slow your character down too much to be effective). And when I played my monk PC, it seemed like a never ending adjustment because what might be the right balance at one point in the game might be wrong later on in the game.

Yeah, that hammer spell of Concelhaut's is amusing and effective.

Reaping Knives can only be cast on a team mate. And best to be cast on a fast attacking team mate, like a monk or a rogue, rather than someone who slowed down by heavy armor. But you cast Reaping Knives on a fast attacking character and it's damage galore, and huge amounts of focus for the Cipher who cast it in the first place. Come to think of it, if you cast RK's on a rogue who is able to sneak attack with them, all the more damage!

I was having a similar problem later on in WM2 with my rogue. In the Abbey, the monks invariably started going after my rogue, even though he was in back using a bow. Seriously, he would be standing next to GM, and the monks cared more about the rogue than the cipher. Go figure. Yeah, I know, they were going after the "weakest" character, which probably meant the lowest HP character which may indeed have been my rogue who had a CON of 8. Oh well.

Rogues seem fine to me. But I just don't like barbarians at all. But for me, it's how they're designed. I don't like this AoE damaging barb concept. It seems ridiculous to me. To me, barbarians seem like warriors who are less disciplined than traditional Fighters. Have less formal training, hence not possessing Weap Specialization nor Weap Mastery. *I do kinda wish that the "warrior" classes, like paladin, barbarian, and ranger could have access to Weapon Specialization. And it would be nice if there was an ability/talent for rangers that was the equivalent of weapon mastery for ranged weapons, like maybe something like "Greater Marksman", which was a bonus on top of Marksman and obviously only available if you already had Marksman. But I digress... I suppose that all of the other barbarian abilities and talents beyond Frenzy are meant to further enhance barbarians. But I have to say that i have a strong preference for talents and abilities that are passive and always on, or at least always on, when you choose to turn them on, like Vulnerable Attack. I don't have this strong desire for warrior classes having piles of active, limited per-rest or per-encounter abilities as the means of enhancing the class. Nor do I find a lack of such things boring. My spellcasters eat up enough of my micromanagement bandwidth with their spells (aka their active abilities), without needing to pile on top of that with all of the melee characters being overloaded with them too. Thus, I'd be a lot happier if barbarians were also designed to be somewhat lower MM maintenance in terms of fewer active abilities, and be characters you could just "aim" at the enemy, and not have to guide their every friggin' action with active abilities just to make them effective and useful. But I know that tastes vary on this, and perhaps I'm in the minority. Oh well.

I've said before, whether here or on other recent pally-related threads that I think that the paladin order talents (for the player usable orders) are rather weak, and IMO aren't really worth taking when compared to generic talents or some non-order related paladin class talents. I think that generic talents and non-order related paladin talents just bring more value. But others may disagree, which is fine. For example, I'd rather pick a weapon style or Superior Deflection or Vulnerable Attack or Arms Bearer over any of the player usable order related talents. I think that any of those bring more value to the table. Regarding charm, IIRC, priests don't have any spells that will DISPEL an already charmed team mate. But paladin's do have an ability that does (maybe 2, I'm not certain) do that, i.e. Aegis of Loyalty. As for paladins not having any "close quarters combat class talents", I won't disagree with you. I personally don't really care for how PoE paladins were designed and didn't from the moment I got into PoE when it was released. But that train's left the station, and I have to deal with paladins as they are, not how I wish they were. They're built to be team leaders, to help and support the team. Not to be all about themselves. About the only offensive abilities they have that's all about them is Flames of Devotion and Sworn Enemy. Defensively, Faith and Conviction and Righteous Soul are abilities that help the paladin himself rather than team mates. (And note that there are some talents that upgrade existing talents or abilities as well.) You say above that your pally has trouble hitting stuff (in PotD). Maybe you should have your priest cast some accuracy enhancing spells. Or maybe your pally's PER needs some boosting whether by items or spells, and/or respec his stats to boost his base PER. The thing is though that Paladins are only 5 points behind Fighters in base accuracy before factoring in differences in PER and weapon enchantments and so on. So it's not like they're really all that bad in this regard, cuz they're not. But the more I read your posts and the more posts you write on this, it just seems to me that your expectations of what paladins should be able to do are too high and don't match how they're designed to be able to do. And it also seems, though I could be wrong, that you are so set on not liking paladins because they don't meet your personal expectations of what they "should" be able to do that you're unwilling to bend and attempt to play and make the most out of what paladins *CAN* do. If you can't adapt to what paladins ARE and CAN DO, and insist on complaining about how they can't do what you think they "should" be able to do, then perhaps you should consider setting aside the paladin class and not bother playing them, because they're never going to be what YOU think they "should" be. They are what they are, at least until PoE2 comes out, if and when that ever happens.

Stopped caring after reading this........ So, you said that you've already defined what you felt was an "effective paladin". SO I went back and read all your posts and found not one clear statement, NOT ONE, stating this. And now because I point this out so you, you "stop caring" what I have to say? How mature.

Let's at least get the patch notes first, then we can ask when it'll go live. Personally, I'm more concerned with the release date than the patch notes. Patch notes do little for me now (because I'm not playing the beta version, so I don't really care all that much about knowing what's in the update to compare with how it performs). Having some sense of when the patch goes live is of more interest and value to me. Yeah, well in order to derive reasonable value out of the beta process, pretty sure folks need to know what to look for. Patch notes are pretty key for that. So, you should care about the patch notes at least in so far as they are a key dependency in completing a successful beta test. And this will directly play into when the patch goes fully live. I made it plain that I haven't DL'd the beta and will not. So I do not care about the patch notes for the beta because they don't matter to ME. I understand that for someone participating in the beta they matter. But I'm not. I'll care about patch notes when the patch goes live and not before. Get that thru your head.

Personally, unless you're fighting vessels, I'd put the Redeemer aside and pick another weapon. In my most recent party, I enchanted the Hours of St Rumbalt greatsword to Superb and had Pallegina use it as her alternative to The Redeemer in battles where there were no vessels present.

Hmm....I just wish I could figure out how to make this class effective in comparison to others, I really wanted to play a Paladin, but anyway.... I know what you are saying and I don't disagree with you either..... Maybe you need to start by telling us what you think "effective" means for a paladin. Different people can have different definitions and that creates different expectations. i have already said it....... I just read through every one of your posts and I didn't see anything that defined what you think "effective" means for a paladin. So if you "already said it", you said it too obtusely to be noticed. To me, an "effective" paladin is someone who holds their own in combat, and is able to use their abilities usefully when needed. I've had Pallegina in most of my parties, and I have to trust that her Zealous Focus aura is useful, because its effect is kind of below the radar screen. OTOH, she has other abilities that are more visible, like Reviving Exhortation, Aegis of Loyalty, and Lay on Hands. All of which are useful and have completely visible effects (I.e. RE awakens an unconscious team mate, AoL turns a charmed team mate back to the home team, and LoH heals the wounded). None of these 3 abilities are causing direct damage to the enemy, but I find to be things that a paladin can do that greatly assist their team. Also, RE and LoH cast faster than similar priest spells, which may make a significant difference in battle. As I said before, I suspect that your are setting your expectations for paladins far too high. They're not fighters or monks or barbarians. They're not really meant to be a high damage producing class, though it's possible for them to do well, if built, equipped, and played well. They're not meant to do the exact same things as other normal front liner classes do, and expecting them to do so is wrong.

Hmm....I just wish I could figure out how to make this class effective in comparison to others, I really wanted to play a Paladin, but anyway.... I know what you are saying and I don't disagree with you either..... Maybe you need to start by telling us what you think "effective" means for a paladin. Different people can have different definitions and that creates different expectations.

I'm curious whether people think that it would be ok to start a new PC paladin now, or wait until the 3.02 update goes live, presumably with the F&C fix?

Let's at least get the patch notes first, then we can ask when it'll go live. Personally, I'm more concerned with the release date than the patch notes. Patch notes do little for me now (because I'm not playing the beta version, so I don't really care all that much about knowing what's in the update to compare with how it performs). Having some sense of when the patch goes live is of more interest and value to me.

Yeap. Especially for 2h ones. Since the number of enemies, and hence the number of times this talent has potential to get triggered, is limited. Blood Thirst would be good either prior to when you get to zero recovery via durgan enhanced speed weapons or if you went with a different weapon set up that did not have adequate speed to get to zero recovery. If you went with some sort of max damage per swing type build getting Blood Thirst would be good. On the Rogues - getting distracted when flanking lets you set up your own deathblows merely with battlefield positioning. This is huge if your team does not abuse massive AoE CC in every fight. On Fighters and Ciphers - Ciphers get +40% damage with one class talent that works with every weapon, Fighters get +25% damage in a single weapon group with one class ability and one class talent. Just auto attacking a Cipher does much more damage than a Fighter and uses less resources to do so. I wouldn't be so quick to say that one does "much more damage" than the other based on a +40% to +25% comparison. For comparison's sake, say that each does 20 base damage with a weapon (same weapon for an apples to apples comparison). +25% equates to +5 HP of damage, while +40% equates to +8 HP of damage. That doesn't seem like that great a difference to me. Oh, over the long haul, it'll add up. But in the short term, it's not that huge a difference.

If one is playing with a full party of 6, I don't think that having one character (a fighter) who is solid, durable, reliable, and low micro-management is such a bad thing, even if he may see a little boring. With 6 characters to watch over, it's not a bad thing to have one guy you can count on to do his job without constant baby-sitting. And for what it's worth, before my most recent party where I had Kana in the party about 90% of the time (except when I was trying to do some other character's personal quest before sending them back to the bench), I didn't think much of Chanters. They didn't do much for me. But I have to say that they're a lot better than I realized. They're solid physical combatants, and once you start getting those fire-based 3rd level chants, they really start adding a LOT to the damage output of the party (at least when you're not fighting things that are immune to fire). Most of the time, I never even bothered casting his invocations. Only on the longest, hardest battles would I cast them, and usually I preferred the summoning ones, just to add more warm bodies on my side to do some damage and take some hits. All in all, Chanters are solid support characters, who may not be flashy, but they fill a role and contribute to the party. Yeah I never meant to imply that keeping a low micro fighter in grps are bad,on the opposite infact. I just think managing dmg soakers are boring, a tank is always a tank tho and if your building a pure meatshield I don't think any other class can compete with the fighter. If you build your fighter offensively most of the abilitys you get to pick aren't fun. Weapon focus-weapon expertise-weapon mastery-armoured grace etc etc. No fun stuff such as backstabbing, AoEing (Cept a per rest AoE), or other stuff you will manually work. Atleast not the lvls I've played so far (lvl 10). That don't mean they aren't good tho, just not quite my taste I say chanters are a little above the other classes because you can stack all defensive stuff on him pick almost nothing offensive and still chant everything to death with the dragon Thrashed chant, as long as you don't gimp your Might. With some INT aswell you can get great use out of invocations too and AoE charm stuff or summon things. I guess we have different tastes in what we find boring or not boring. I don't need active abilities to find a character interesting and enjoyable to play. Frankly, I prefer a fighter build with weapon focus/specialization/master/armored grace, etc. because it's a good, solid, reliable character that's not dependent on a bunch of silly X/rest or Y/encounter abilities. I like a nice fire-and-forget type of Fighter. And frankly, I can look at a fairly offensively built fighter as still being a tank, because I define a tank as a well armored offensive character. I don't hold to the silly geekspeak definition. Tanks are armored, offensive weapons in real life and I stick with that definition. And when I build up Eder in my parties, I tend to go with a mix of offensive and defensive abilities and talents. And to date, I've never been disappointed with Eder's contribution to any of my parties. He rarely gets knocked out. And in any battle where there's only 2-3 guys still on their feet, he's invariably one of them. Of course, my play style favors physical combat over arcane combat. I tend to only use spells as a form of tactical fire support, rather than as something to be constantly spammed. Chanters and Ciphers are sort of an exception here. Chanters are basically fire and forget with their chants. And, of course, since ciphers aren't per-rest limited, so you can use them as much as you want with focus being your only limit. As for your comments on Chanters, yes, you could in theory just have the chanter stand around chanting and they'd still help the team. But that's be a real waste of a perfectly respectable character, when they could be doing so much more without in any way limiting their ability to chant.

If one is playing with a full party of 6, I don't think that having one character (a fighter) who is solid, durable, reliable, and low micro-management is such a bad thing, even if he may see a little boring. With 6 characters to watch over, it's not a bad thing to have one guy you can count on to do his job without constant baby-sitting. And for what it's worth, before my most recent party where I had Kana in the party about 90% of the time (except when I was trying to do some other character's personal quest before sending them back to the bench), I didn't think much of Chanters. They didn't do much for me. But I have to say that they're a lot better than I realized. They're solid physical combatants, and once you start getting those fire-based 3rd level chants, they really start adding a LOT to the damage output of the party (at least when you're not fighting things that are immune to fire). Most of the time, I never even bothered casting his invocations. Only on the longest, hardest battles would I cast them, and usually I preferred the summoning ones, just to add more warm bodies on my side to do some damage and take some hits. All in all, Chanters are solid support characters, who may not be flashy, but they fill a role and contribute to the party.

Not "meh" in terms of practical effects; "meh" because it's so vanilla and already available to you via enchanting. Soulbound weapons are meant to be special, as in, more special than unique weapons. Destroy Vessels is the Redeemer's endgame; if you change it to a bland Slaying (Vessels), the sword becomes really uninteresting. Changing it to something else entirely would be fine by me; I'm not particularly tied to that specific ability. But it would have to be something cool, not a Slaying/Lash/Stat bonus that you can already get via enchanting. Heck, Tidefall is a way better sword against any other enemy type already; let's give the Redeemer some love It's so "special" that it's ridiculously OP (situationally, of course). Also, IMO, most of the soulbound weapons are blah. I don't like most of those cast spell X on Y% of hits/crits. I honestly prefer reliability over some random, low percentage chance of triggering a spell effect. Or for that matter, spells that are bound to the weapon for use X times per rest. I hardly ever remember to use them. Maybe they seem vanilla, but I just prefer reliable, constant effects that produce good solid results without the need for them being OP.

It would also make it a terribly bland weapon that isn't worth using in any case. At least right now it's situational: Best weapon against Vessels. If you take that out, it's just another sword with good looks and meh abilities. What could be done is flag Woedica's Judges in the final fight as not killable through Destroy Vessels (suffice to make them level-17 creatures.) It does seem overkill to have two weapons at your disposal that can one-shot the Eyeless—then again I also expected the Eyeless to be higher than level 12. With that said, I didn't use the Redeemer against them despite having it fully unlocked in my last play through because I couldn't be arsed to equip it. I would hardly call the standard +4 acc/+25% damage vs vessels a meh ability. I will say that it might be worth giving it an additional something to give the weapon more oomph, without making it ridiculously OP. Maybe a lash? Maybe a Will save bonus? And yes, it's situational. And it'd still be situational with the above suggested change. To go any other route would change the essential nature of the weapon. That said, if you read through the weapon's "story", there's nothing in it that gives one any reason to think that it should be an anti-vessel or anti-undead weapon. In theory, its effects could be completely different and still be in keeping with its background story.

Honestly, after having Pallegina use The Redeemer in my last run (my first through WM1/2, particularly WM2), I think that the Redeemer is extremely OP. I mean, seriously, in combination with Eder wielding Abydon's Hammer, Pallegina was able to plow thru the Eyeless like a hot knife thru butter. And in the final battle against Thaos, Pallegina nuked both of the Judges with ridiculous ease. IMO, The Redeemer would be a lot less OP if the anti-vessel slaying ability was replaced with the more reasonable anti-vessel ability that you can add to any weapon, IIRC, a +4 (?) bonus to accuracy and +25% to damage. This would prevent those Redeemer shenanigans of one shot killing of monsters like the Eyeless or the Judges. Mind you, I'll be the first to admit that it's amusing to zap vessels with the Redeemer. But after the first few, it really loses its charm because it makes those battles ridiculously easy.

I'm with you, Jerek, on all of these points. I prefer to avoid excessive min-maxing of attributes. And I prefer to stick with bows (preferably hunting bows) for Sagani for the same reason as you. Though in all honesty, I'm not a big fan of guns in this game. Part of it is that they rub me the wrong way in terms of the no-guns fantasy paradigm. But I'm mostly over that. The thing that really gets me for any character who's thinking about using guns as their main weapon is the fact that you really have to invest in one extra talent (gunner), and maybe even a second (quick switch), to get the most out your guns. And on top of that, consider having a chanter in the party to chant the shorter reload chant. That seems like a really, really high cost just to use guns as a main weapon. Oh, if you have a front liner who carries a gun (or an arbalest) as an initial alpha strike weapon then switches to a melee weapon, that doesn't really count. At least with bows, you don't have to put up with long reloads and the need to take one or two extra talents to support your ranged weapon's effectiveness.