Crucis

Any projected time frame on the expansion? Late 2015? Next year?

I know that INT affects the duration of the DoT effects (like Deep Wounds), but I don't know that it's really worth spending the attribute points to max it out. OTOH, I would also say that I probably wouldn't suggest using INT as a dump stat because you probably shouldn't want to nerf your DoT damage either. Also, since Perception is now enhancing accuracy, additional accuracy should in the long run increase the number of hits vs grazes, and crits vs hits the rogue gets, which should translate into more overall damage long term. And when you're taking about rogues, this is probably of particular importance since they are considered to be an offensive class.

I'll second this. That said, you aren't required to have a high INT to cast high level spells, though it does help with durations and size of AoE's. Instead, you need a high Lore skill score. Also, I'd be hesitant to be too much of an aggressive scroll-spell casting rogue. My reasoning is this. The number of really high level scrolls for scroll-spell casting is limited, and they're usually spells you want to save for critical major boss battles, rather than against your run of the mill monsters. And yet having said that, it doesn't hurt to have about 3 characters in a party of 6 who have high Lore scores so that in those critical major boss battles where you want to use those scrolls, you have some (Lore) skilled people able to fire off those nasty scroll spells. Just something to think about.

Actually, I found a number of pieces of music to be memorable. I remember the sounding a lot like music from the BG1/2 games.

This sounds a lot more like a sequel than an expansion. And BTW, I agree with you 99%. I'd want to get out of the Dyrwood as well, though not because the Dyrwood doesn't appeal to me. But just because I want to see more of the world.

For crying out loud, just treat back NPC's like regular background villagers, commoners, or nobles. No one says you have to talk to them. If they're breaking immersion, that's YOUR problem and no one else's.

When you cross the bridge on the west side of the Caed Nua map, as Nakia said, you'll meed Kana, who is humming while examining the wall's architecture. The actual entrance to the Caed Nua castle is just to the right of Kana. It's not hidden. Just walk right on through the game, though be careful when you do... The place is not inhabited by friendlies.

Central european? What does that even mean? German accent? Swiss accent? As a german, I can tell you that germans talking english sound just horrible. And if you go farther east, poland, czech, then you'll instantly go back to russian language territory. Most people won't be able to tell the difference between polish and russian accent. Balkan accents don't have that north pole vibe either. Maybe some icelandic accent could do ... fits the theme, at least: http://www.soundboard.com/sb/icelandic_accent_sound Germany isn't "central" european to me. When I hear "central european", I'm thinking the balkans, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, or Poland for the most party. Icelandic could do the trick, I suppose.

I think that there's some value to having every attribute having some value. What that does is force people to make hard decisions about how to balance what they value when building a character. You can see how little CON is valued by how often people dump it so low. Also, I think that having a higher floor value for stats would be good for this as well, because right now, for some builds/classes, you can dump INT and CON to very low values with little to no consequences and give yourself enough stat points to have very high to maxed out values in the other 4 attributes. IMHO, this is not a good thing from a number of perspectives. If you think that the only way to have fun in a game is to have maxed out stats across the board, where's the challenge? What's the point of playing? And so forth? (Oh, I suppose that the calculus is a little different for PotD, given that the monsters' stats have been greatly buffed.) It seems to me that the min value for all stats should be around 8 so that you can't really gain all that many additional points for your build, so that THEN you have to make a real decision about which attributes you want at max, and which ones you can made do with less than the max. And for the people who claim that this would make all builds the same, I disagree. They're already pretty much all the same for extreme min-maxers. If INT doesn't matter much for a class, they dump CON and INT and max out the other four as much as possible. For other class builds, it's similar just with slightly different dump stats. And for people playing PotD maybe just keep the same floor attribute values, but give them maybe 4 more stat points to spend. But for the other modes, have the same number of build points, but with floor attribute values of 8 across the board. -- Back to having all stats matter, I think that it is important as I said above. Otherwise, people will just see no value in putting any points in the attribute, like is done with CON right now. One thing that could be done to buff CON right now would be to remove the Fort save bonuses from Might and double the Fort save bonuses to CON. Will that make a huge difference? Not likely, but it would be a step in the right direction, I think. Another thing that could be done would be to have a CON based bonus that affects how effective healing spells are when cast ON that person. People with above average CONs would get more END back when a healing spell was cast on them, while characters with below average CONs would get less END back from those same healing spells. Anyways, that's all for now...

I guess I can't really find a role that suits me for them. If they are buffing they need to get the buffs out fast, they are slow as it is as the main battle (mage/priest killing) is usually done by then, and it is usually a case of mopping up the stragglers, melee. Some of their seals are pretty good but their only awesome spell, withdraw, needs to be cast ASAP. Too late due to armour lag is really too late. I guess that doesn't suit my play style. I'm not going to tank them, interrupts are a pain when you rely on them on front lines. So what is their role exactly? Tank? no. Off tank? Preferably not for reasons outlined above. Squishy johnny come lately, prolly pretty good in that role. Look I know a lot of people have success with them and I'm glad for it. I personally would happily swap a squishy priest for a squishy offensive caster any day however. Ironman is really where priests would shine I think. What's the role of a cleric .... errr .... priest? Support, medic, jack of all trades. Are they as strong as a real offensive caster? No. But who do you turn to if you need a quick healing spell, or a resurrection (or whatever it's called that revives an unconscious character) spell? Not the wizard, that's for sure. So while one doesn't strictly NEED a priest in a party, IMHO, a well rounded party definitely should have one.

No, and no. And I doubt that you can get sky dragon eyes as a random drop item. That said, I wouldn't stress over it. The game is entirely winnable without using the Sky Dragon eyes to upgrade 1-2 weapons. You can do just fine with Exceptional weapons. Would it be nice and cool to be able to do the upgrades? Sure. Is it critical? No.

I'm with Flintlock on this. Eder made a very good tank even before the ability to manage the Companions' talent, ability, and skill choices.

I suppose that it may depend on the role the fighter in question is playing. If his role is to be a defensive fighter, a tank, then the talent points may be better spent on defensive talents, though if the fighter already seems well skilled defensively, weapon mastery isn't a waste, I'd think. OTOH, if the fighter in question is a more dedicated offensive focused fighter, then I'd say that weapon mastery is a definite yes. An additional 15% (IIRC) damage all the time seems like a no-brainer to me.

I don't think that I've ever used any of the Watcher special abilities, though I can see Dastion's point above that they may be more useful for someone like a Chanter than, say, a Cipher.

Haha yea I think I know the one you're referring to. I was kinda prepared to fail it conversationally as duping someone is always tricky, so I'd positioned my party in a way that the less armored ones would be somewhat shielded. What I wasn't prepared for was actually getting a positive reputation increase after killing the target and no decrease in reputation on killing other mobs. Which is funny because if you tried killing a Defiance Bay noble/citizen, you can be sure your rep is going to plunge. In short I don't consider taking the brawl route as quest failure, its just another way of doing things. The quest completes, you get positive rep and lots of loot to boot lol. To be honest, I don't think it would have been fair to ask for more As for a Paladin being the party face, I don't see it as objectionable or unnatural. Back in IWD2 and older games, Paladins with their high Charisma used to fulfil that role as well, sometimes Sorcerers too. Sure, I agree that it'd be a great addition to have Diplomacy/Bluff/intimidation factored in as well but I found the current system to be workable once I got the hang of it (as in not expecting I'd be getting every single conversation option available). Just realized that this was a "spoilers are ok" subforum... The quest I was referring to was the one in Twin Elms where you have to . With a very high RES you can do it. Otherwise he'll attack you. As for the other thing, yeah, the existing system is sort of workable. My gripe is that because dialog options are linked to PER and RES and INT, it button-holes players who want the extra dialog options into playing classes and builds that are some combo of PER/RES/INT heavy. And that tends to mean classes whose best builds benefit from those stats, and tends to make classes whose best builds depend on other attributes not look as viable for PC's by people wanting to role play and get better dialog options. Oh well.

Speaking of quests, I have a question. There are some NPC's in the basement of the Charred Barrel inn in the Brackenbury district who are called "Ruffians" or something similar that makes one think that they're criminals of some sort. However, in 3 full play-throughs, I have yet to figure out what quest they're related to, and they won't talk to you. So I was wondering if anyone knew who they were and/or what quest they were in, if any. Something about them screams to me that they don't really belong in the basement of that inn, but no one I've talked to has triggered anything related to them. Any ideas?

Inuit would be nice, but as you point out, finding one might be tricky. That said, good voice actors don't necessarily need to be of a certain ethnicity to be able to speak with that accent. All it'd seem to take is a little time to learn the accent. Some sort of central European/Balkans accent might work. Think of Mira Furlan (?) who played D'lenn on Babylon 5, for an example of what this could sound like. I agree that Scottish and Russian accents are probably overused. And there's a lot of variations of British accents. Besides, the most familiar Brit accent seems too urbane an accent for people from an isolated region like Nassitaq. A Brit accent would seem more appropriate for an old, established areas like urban areas of, say, Valia or Aedyr. Seems to me that what one would need is an accent that seems more back woodsey for a back woodsey, isolated place like Nassitaq. But Sagani's utterly bland as vanilla "accent" just doesn't cut it for someone from an isolated region.

a. IIRC, there is one small quest where having a super high RES will give you an option that lets you avoid an all out brawl, but as you say, even in this instance it isn't required to complete the quest. b. Yes, if one is looking for the most dialog options possible, Fighters and Paladins are perhaps the best since they tend to desire strong PER and RES scores. In some ways, it's a shame that these dialog options are tied to PER and RES for this reason. It seems to force one to use certain classes if you want to have the widest dialog options while not sacrificing the build to get those stats. It might have been better if the sort of dialog options that are related to PER and RES were linked to talking skills, sort of the way that IWD2 used diplomacy and intimidation skills. Meh, even so, this is one heck of a good game.

1. Fampyrs' charms: Part of the issue may be that in PoE, even magical attacks don't merely hit or miss. There are hits and misses, but also critical hits and grazing hits, even on a spell like Charm. With regular physical attacks, a graze might be nearly entirely absorbed by your armor, but with a spell like Charm, a graze has 50% of the standard duration. So it's really, really difficult to have a high enough Will defense to produce total misses on will based attacks, even with very high INT and RES for a high base Will save and adding Will enhancing items and talents. Probably the best thing to do is to just try to accept that you'll get Charmed from time to time, but try to have enough of a Will save that you can reduce the duration down to graze level. Secondly, you could counter-charm a charmed team mate to get them back on your team. Or you could have a Cipher zap the charmed one with a Mental Binding so that they can't move for a while (and with some luck, you may bind some real enemies at the same time). 2. Party attacking charmed team mates. There's nothing much you can do with game settings here. The game doesn't have a separate status for charmed team mates that lets your uncharmed ones know to ignore them. You can turn auto-attack off, or you can just pay close attention to your uncharmed team mates and redirect them into attacking the real enemies. Also, what annoys me with PoE is the lack of the "Hold Position" button that existed in the IE games that allowed you to have auto-attack on, but order a given character to Hold a spot on the map that you point to. This was great for telling a tank to hold a defensive position at a choke point, so that you'd know that he wouldn't stupidly run off on his own after killing the enemy in front of him. I really, REALLY wish that the devs would get this feature into PoE!!! 3. Conversation checks. Honestly, I think that it's silly to expect that every character is going to be good enough at everything to get every possible dialog option. As for whether the attributes and skills of team mates should be included in dialog checks, I don't know. There are some examples of this in the game. One that comes to mind is in Sagani's personal quest, the PC has a vision of a cliff overlooking some water, and IIRC, Pallegina is familiar with the location, and interjects into the dialog with this info. 4. Attribute Checks in dialogs being really high. Not exactly. There are a lot of times when the attribute checks are fairly low or moderate. Only once in a rare while are the attribute levels required for a dialog option extremely high.

A character isn't necessarily bad or evil for killing the Sky Dragon. The Sky Dragon can easily be threat to the residents of the area, and killing would be seen as saving them from the threat of the dragon and its offspring. After all, more dragons equals a greater threat.

You should try using the "Quote" button, so that people know to whom you're responding.

Sorry, I'm not buying it, Nakia. Just not.

This is a really harsh attitude. People with legitimate phobias don't just "get over" them, particularly if those phobias are really strong. Someone who has panic attacks, like the OP writes, when they even see a depiction of spiders isn't going to "get over it". But people can have "legitimate phobias" to pretty much anything. What is so special about arachnophobes that singles them out for special privileges? I didn't say that the game should be tweaked for people with this phobia. I only said above that Jojo's comment was unacceptably harsh towards people with a legit phobia. Seriously, it's not like people haven't heard of arachnophobia before. And to tell someone with a legit phobia to get over themselves is quite frankly rather offensive.

Good gawd, the only way that someone could think that Pallegina doesn't have a strong accent is if they were Italian. Compared to the bland American/Dyrwoodan "accent", Pallegina's accent is extremely pronounced. Maybe not as thick as it could be. But if it were a lot thicker, it'd start getting to the point where it wouldn't be understandable for most people. So, I'd say that Pallegina's accent is strong, while remaining understandable. As for Sagani, accents are sort of relative. Everyone has one, relative to other people. That said, I don't buy the logic that Sagani should have a Dyrwoodan accent. That sounds like a total reach and complete BS to me.

I liked that Sagani didn't have some fo-ethnic accent. I couldn't take Dragon Age: Inquisition seriously because all the stupid accents. It reminded me of 'Allo 'Allo*. I was waiting for Leliana to say "Leesten very carefully, I vill say theese only varnce". * An old British sitcom set in occupied France during WWII, in which all the characters spoke with deliberately fake French and German accents. I guess that we differ on this. I think that the NPCs in this game that are the most memorable are those with the least bland voices. And Sagani tops the list of bland voices. I liked the dead animancer that you have to talk to in Gilded Vale. I liked Pallegina. I liked Calisca. In a world where there are clearly different languages and accents and isolated cultures, the idea that someone coming from those isolated cultures has a total non-accent fails the laugh test. It's one thing for native Dyrwoodans to have a bland non-accent. They're sort of the baseline local culture for the immediate setting of the game. But for people coming from thousands of miles away, from different and sometimes isolated cultures, they should never have a bland accent. I also sort of thought that Sagani's voice sounded too ... I don't know ... sweet. I think that a rougher, sort of deeper voice, sort of like Calisca's would have been more appropriate, though with a different accent. Calisca's accent sounds sort of like backwoods Dyrwoodan, but the tone and timbre of her voice are just a little deeper than that of Sagani's.