Crucis

Read the freakin' description of the Ranger class. The class is all about ranged attacks and their animal companion. These are not DnD rangers who might be melee combatants as much as they might be snipers. PoE Rangers are Snipers with Pets. Period.

I'm going to give some different advice than the others. 1. I have no problem with Eder and Pallegina being in the heaviest armor you can get, and using one handed weapons and shields. However, you should try to go for carrying more than a single type of weapon. Put another way, you need to be able to cover at least 2 different types of damage (i.e. slashing, piercing, or crushing) when you're a melee fighter, because you WILL come up against enemies who have high DR against 1 or 2 of those types, so it helps to cover at least 2 of them. I suggest slash or pierce, and crushing. For Eder, it might come down to carrying a sabre and a club. A single example. If you come up against a enemy fighter who's wearing plate, the saber will have problems because plate has high DR against slashing (and piercing, IIRC). So you switch over to a crushing weapon. This is why you're quite likely doing so little damage per hit. You're not paying close attention to which melee damage DR's your melee enemies are strong in and switching weapons to attack their weaker DR's. (The same is true for the elemental DR's as well, when you're casting damaging spells at enemies.) 2. I see a lack of hard hitting ranged weapons, such as crossbows, arbalests, or guns. I won't suggest that everyone should use them, but it doesn't hurt to have at least a couple people who do. Also, a trick that I do is to have EVERYONE carry a ranged weapon to use in the initial salvo at the enemy. And for my melee fighters, like Eder and Pallegina, I'd use guns or arbalests/crossbows. Why? Because I almost always intend for them to only take a single shot before switching to melee weapons, so why not use the hardest hitting weapons, since I don't worry about these guys reloading. 3. I'm sure that you'll realize from points 1 and 2 that I'm potentially talking about melee warriors having 2 different melee weapons and a ranged weapon. I am. I believe that the "Arms Bearer" talent is highly valuable (except if your character is an Island (?) Aumaua, and gets A.B. as its racial benefit. Also consider that there is one other way to get two different melee damage types, and that's to use weapons that do 2 different types of damage, i.e. "slash or crush", "piercing or slashing", etc., where the damage type applied is the "best" one for the target. These weapns aren't always the most potent weapons, but they are a way to cover a couple of damage types using a single weapon. 4. Durance. I always put him in fairly heavy armor and play him as an off-tank who prefers to stay off the front lines, but can get in there and mix it up if pressed. Also, as a priest of Magran, Durance will have (if you haven't seen it already) a class talent that gives him a +10 accuracy with swords and arquebus. IMO, this is a must take talent for Durance. And it basically shapes his weapon choices from there on out, but I think for the better. It's hard to throw away a +10 acc bonus, IMO. But if you haven't taken that class talent yet, I'd still have Durance using a slow loading, but hard hitting ranged weapon. Personally, I might suggest a crossbow or arbalest, because they don't come with the accuracy penalty that guns have. But this is pretty much until you've taken the Magran class talent which will at least offset the acc penalty of guns (arquebus in particular). Also, Durance doesn't necessarily need to be in the absolute heaviest armor you can put on him (after doing so for the 2 front line tanks, etc.). Really good chain mail or a breast plate can be good enough, and have the benefit of a slightly better recovery time. IMO, the benefit of putting frontliners in the best plate armor you can find or buy is to try to give them as much staying power as possible. A battle-priest who prefers to stay behind the lines but will mix it up in melee once in a while doesn't need to fully maximize his staying power, but at the same time shouldn't feel completely naked, armor wise, either. 5. Wands. Wands/Rods/Sceptres (I'll use the word wands to cover all three types of magical implements) on wizards can be very nice, particularly after they take the Blast talent that lets their "magical implements" do a small area effect of damage around their target. OTOH, I'm not a huge fan of lesser wands on non-wizards, due to their lack of this ability. But OTOOH, once you start finding some of the high level wands, they have some really nice special effects that are quite useful, IMO. Perhaps my favorite is the effect called "Marking" which gives allies attacking the same target a +10 bonus to Accuracy. 6. Kana: I'd suggest arming him with a Arquebus or Arbalest and a greatsword or pike, but mostly try to keep him behind the lines using the ranged weapons. 7. Your PC cipher. It looks like you have a good handle on your cipher's weapons. A blunderbus is a great weapon for charging up a cipher's focus. But when charged, if you're not casting spells, I sort of like using faster firing ranged weapons, such as a bow or a "wand", and only switching back to the "shotgun" when it looks like the cipher needs another powerful. As an aside, I like having a mix of faster firing ranged weapons and slower firing, but harder hitting ranged weapons, not counting the hard hitting ranged weapons I love putting on my front line tanks. The hard hitting ones are great for putting a big hit on an enemy, but if you're in a situation where you'd really like to get some ranged fire on a particular enemy NOW (such as an enemy spellcaster or a nearly dead enemy you'd like to get dead ASAP), faster firing ranged weapons give you that option. Anyways, these are a few thoughts.

Really? In all the games with companion NPCs and all the quests related to those NPCs, Kana was the worst? Over the top much?

Personally, I think that all items are "underserved" by a considerable margin. I'd love to see 2 or 3 times as many unique items. There don't have to be a huge number of top level items. But it would be nice to see a nice array of low and mid level items. Right now, there's a rather low number of unique items, IMO, particularly in some categories. Robes, quarterstaffs, etc. In fact, there's a real lack of two different groups of robes and Qstaffs, with the 2 groups being mage robes and staffs, and non-mage robes (probably mostly for monks, I suppose) and melee Qstaffs (i.e. those not really meant for mages so much as combatants who wish to simply use staffs). Speaking of staffs, why the heck are they slow weapons? Or reach weapons? They should be neither. Qstaffs aren't meant to be super long like pikes, not meant for engaging enemies at great range. They're normal ranged melee weapons of average speed. Well greatswords are pretty fast too to be honest. And hatchets aren't particularly good for parrying. And the morningstar's spikes are specifically for transferring trauma through armor. I mean I could keep going on but you get the picture... I don't think of great swords as being particularly fast. Frankly, I always thought of them as fairly slow. Not sure why they'd think that hatchets were good for parrying. I'd think that daggers would be better suited for parrying, though IIRC wasn't there a specific type of dagger designed for parrying as an off hand weapon? As for morning stars, I'd think that they should be one of those "crush or piercing" damage types (and one handed, to boot). I get the picture that some of the weapons' design details seem very iffy.

For your average character, 3 is enough. But it doesn't hurt to have at least one with a higher level of Athletics, for those occasional instances where there's an Athletics check. It's worth noting that one or two of the Companions may start with fairly high Athletics scores for their level, so this may not be an issue.

Personally, I think that all items are "underserved" by a considerable margin. I'd love to see 2 or 3 times as many unique items. There don't have to be a huge number of top level items. But it would be nice to see a nice array of low and mid level items. Right now, there's a rather low number of unique items, IMO, particularly in some categories. Robes, quarterstaffs, etc. In fact, there's a real lack of two different groups of robes and Qstaffs, with the 2 groups being mage robes and staffs, and non-mage robes (probably mostly for monks, I suppose) and melee Qstaffs (i.e. those not really meant for mages so much as combatants who wish to simply use staffs). Speaking of staffs, why the heck are they slow weapons? Or reach weapons? They should be neither. Qstaffs aren't meant to be super long like pikes, not meant for engaging enemies at great range. They're normal ranged melee weapons of average speed.

I think that the issue with letting AC's get "too good" is that it would effectively let you get an additional significant member of the party for free.

Why would you use a Rogue as your Mechanics expert anyway? Rogue's can benefit from stealth, so pump that instead. Max out Mechanics on another character, who doesn't really need the other skills (like a cipher). Why? The answer's easy. You get 2 points in Mechanics to start with a Rogue. Then if you pick a Laborer or Merchant background, you get another point in it. That's 3 points to start with when the best anyone else can hope for is 1 point for the background. On top of that, remember that the first point you "buy" when leveling up will only cost 1 point whether you start with 3 or 0. This means that Rogues can get to a high level of skill in Mechanics cheaper than anyone else. All that said, given the number of skill points the game gives you, you can't get a character up to 10 points in 2 different skills over 12 levels, even with a head start like Rogues get. So it comes down to whether you want your Rogue to be superb in Stealth or Mechanics. In my current party, my Rogue went for Mechanics, while my PC Monk went for stealth. I did this largely because I intended for my rogue to be a ranged rogue rather than a melee rogue, so I saw no real point in having her stealth be high enough to get into melee range unspotted. OTOH, there was some value in doing that for he Monk since her best combat abilities are melee based.

Meh, I'd rather have no animal companion and replace all the AC related class abilities with additional class abilities aimed at improving Rangers' ranged abilities, since that's how the class is presented in the game.

This is a very nice portrait. That said, why do so many of the female portraits have them wearing lipstick? These are adventurers, not girls going out on the town for a night of clubbing or employees at the Salty Mast!

I think that this goes off the rails of the topic a bit. Instead, I'd have said that the more isolated the community, the more likely it is to have an unusual accent and/or speak a different language. This is why I said above that I wish that the PoE devs had gotten someone, or asked the Sagani voice actress to go for a much more exotic accent, instead of this really bland, homogenized (non) accent. She sounds like she should come from Gilded Vale or Dyrwood Village (or middle America), rather than an isolated community on Nassituq.

There's another good robe that hasn't been mentioned above, called Rundl's Finery. It's a robe that gives +2 INT and +2 Lore, but without any Fine/Exceptional/Superb enchantment, though of course you can add that yourself. Not a great robe, but not bad either. And IMO it looks pretty good too. I do agree though that there seems to be a lack of decent Robes, whether they're mage robes or "robes" meant for monks.

I don't like dissing on the actual voice actors, because I'm sure that they all did a fine job. That said, I found some, not all by any stretch, but some of the voices used for the primary Companions to be rather bland. On the flip side, some were fine. Eder and Aloth seemed fine to me. Durance was great (though I still believe that the character should have been a dwarf, since his gravely voice and portrait positively SCREAMED "I'm a DWARF!!!"). Hiravias, despite how little I've had him in my party, seems to have a nicely distinctive voice. Pallegina's voice was wonderful. She sounded both foreign (to the Dyrwood) and exotic, which in my view made for a great fit for the character. OTOH, despite liking Sagani's character, I find her voice more than a little bland and homogenized for the character. This isn't a rip on the voice actress. Her voice is nice. It just doesn't fit how I perceive the Sagani character. I'm thinking that voice with a good strong eskimo/inuit (?) accept might have been better, a little more exotic. Heck, some other accent that was created a sense of being both foreign (to the Dyrwood) and exotic, with a touch of being from a frontier-ish land, would have been nice. Sagani sounds too much like she's from some village not that far away in the Dyrwood, if one sort of accepts that a rather homogenous American sounding voice/accent is the local Dyrwoodan accent. Kana's big deep voice sounded fine for the character, though perhaps a stronger foreign/exotic accent on top of it might have made the character sound even better. Grieving Mother, being from someplace in or near the Dyrwood (at least as I understood it), probably has an appropriate accent and her voice does seem to match how I perceived her. As for Thaos, his voice sounds OK, but I wish that there'd been a more pronounced foreign accent to it to make it more exotic and memorable. One other place where I have a gripe about the voices is the voices you have to choose from for the custom built characters. At least to my ear, each of the female and male voices all sound about the same for each gender, with only some slight tweaking by a single female and male voice actor to try to fit the voice type called for (i.e. mystic, stoic, etc.). I wish that there'd been different actual voice actors for each type to create some seriously distinctive voices. Right now, it just feels like there's 2 voices, one male, one female.

I'm sure that the Mafia says the same thing, but it's still just a rationalization for evil criminal behavior. Define evil. Was Capone evil? Oh puh-leeeeze. If you don't know what evil is, go ask your mom or dad.

It occurs to me that I skipped over GM in my previous comments. I've been playing her in my current party as a replacement for Aloth, and for the most part, it's worked out quite well. I like her abilities, and how her paper doll on the inventory screen looks. OTOH, I gotta say that I don't particularly like her personality and personal "quest"/story. Her "quest" is far, far too grim. I won't say that it's actually boring, per se, though the fact that her "quest" is nothing more than a small number of grim conversations with the PC isn't exactly exciting. It feels more like the PC is dragged into playing the role of shrink for GM, to help her resolve her mental problems. Just friggin' great. Maybe it is boring after all. And too freakin' grim. And her portrait is pretty darned grim too. (Actually, it would have been a nice touch if the devs had a second portrait for her that replaces the first one after you resolve her quest and make her a much happier person. It's sorta bites that the eventual "happy" GM remains stuck using the grim GM portrait. I won't say that she's my least liked character, particularly since I haven't played Hiravias beyond picking him up and dumping him in the stronghold, and thus don't have much idea what his personality is like (other than rude and raunchy, I think) or what his quest is like. I will say though that I do kinda wish that the devs had used a more upbeat cipher, rather than one who's so freakin' grim.

There's also the fact that they're (I think) floating in mid-air. When you 'knock them down' they sort of just hang a few feet off the ground like they're drunk. I don't think many people would have assumed, first time, that it would be possible to knock down a spirit. I agree with the last point, and it applies to mobs too. Someone mentioned it was silly that vampires couldn't be harmed without +2 weapons. But isn't that the point of having mystical and arcane enemies? Why should you, a bunch of murderhobos, be able to walk into any ancient and eldritch tomb and pummel everything to death with mundane pointy objects? Because you're the player and your build always has to be relevant? No, it was and remains just plain corny and stupid. Nothing more, nothing less.

What does this "proc" mean?

I'm sure that the Mafia says the same thing, but it's still just a rationalization for evil criminal behavior.

As for the rations, I was just thinking that it's imposing a cost on spending time that has some plausible justification. Not enough to be punishing or require much management (pretty much just a metaphorical gas tank) but it at least adds some additional reason to be thoughtful about resting. As for #6, a fortress or other orderly kith-run area isn't a dungeon filled with random critters or the undead. Once you start tangling with guards, you're pretty much committed to see it through, or it strains the bounds of plausibility (though retreat could be possible, at the cost of failing the quest, losing the advantage of stealth, etc.). Having the occasional area where you can't rest is good, for a change of pace if nothing else, so long as it's clear up front and it's balanced accordingly. Regarding rations, I just don't see the point to it. It seems to me that the camping supplies system is sufficient, particularly if there are some areas where you can't rest (or shouldn't be able to do so) and some areas where resting is possible but the chances of being discovered are high or variable. I have no problem with the idea that you shouldn't be able to rest in Raedric's castle. None at all. I'd assume that the castle guard would be doing regular rounds, and would eventually come across you resting. The only logical counter argument I can see to this is that some players might find it tedious to have to withdraw from the castle to rest. But frankly, that wouldn't be enough of an argument for me to prevent resting in the castle. As for "Once you start tangling with guards, you're pretty much committed to see it through, or it strains the bounds of plausibility" comment, so what? If you require players to work on a clock or prevent them from leaving the castle once you enter and have engaged the castle guard, I think that all you'll end up doing is tick off a large portion of the players, as well as greatly increasing the difficulty of completing the castle "mission". If you can't rest and can't withdraw to a safe location to rest, it becomes a suicide mission for all but the best players with the most OP parties. I know that in the few times I've done Raedric's castle, I've always had to withdraw a few times before being able to complete the job. Furthermore, games like this reward clearing each level, killing all the bad guys (and looting them and the area in general), before eventually dealing with the big bad. However, with what you're suggesting, it would run counter to this meta. It would seem to force players to have to find the quickest way to complete the mission and deal with as FEW of the castle guards as possible on your way to the leader. Also, the way that the Raedric's castle "mission" is set up, you're supposed to search and find that semi-friendly priest, free someone in the dungeon, and probably deal with the animancer in the dungeon. And this requires that you do a lot of exploration and dealing with the inevitable encounters with the castle's various defenders, which just makes it even more difficult to be able to complete the castle mission without resting. No, IMO, what you suggest for the castle runs counter to the way that these games are played and designed. And I'm fairly happy with the way things are now. I don't really care if leaving the castle and coming back later strains credulity for some. I'm more interested in the game being fun, and not being unreasonable hard and/or tedious just to indulge some people's sense of credulity.

I don't want any sort of time limits. As for Random encounters, I liked the old random encounters while traveling and while resting in less than perfectly safe locations. And wouldn't mind seeing them back in the game. They made the idea of adventuring seem more "realistic". Traveling around the Dyrwood seems to have no dangers whatsoever. And resting in the wilderness seems uncommonly safe. It really should be a lot riskier, IMO. As for this whole thing about rations vs camping supplies, I want to play a CRPG, with some dialogs, exploration, and combat. I'm not so sure that I'm interested in playing the party's quartermaster as well. As for #6, you need to be more clear, as what you're trying to say seems as clear as mud to me right now.

Honestly, I don't really care nor want a time limit. I don't want any "actual sense of urgency". I want to play and enjoy the game. I want to be able to explore and do as many of the side quests as I feel like doing. To me, this is a total non-issue.

It bugs me that the game's AI just isn't smart enough to know the differences between real enemies and team mates who have been charmed, etc. Members of the party should be smart enough to NOT blindly attack charmed team mates, at least without a direct order from the player. And it should be possible to heal charmed team mates as well, I suppose.

Because saying that vampires can only be hit with +2 (or better) weapons is really corny, IMO. I like the PoE model better. Far less corny and for the most part, seems more logical.

From reading just the first page, it's quite clear to me that Luzarius is unhappy that he can't play an OP per0encounter wizard, is unhappy that very few people agree with his PoV, and wants the devs change the rules to punish players who play the game as intended. That is, punish the players who use the rest system judiciously (as intended) and who seem most likely to be those who disagree with him.

Without arguing in favor of immunities, I will say that I think that this is a good example of why more generalized builds, particularly for spellcasters, are better than specialists. From a melee perspective, it'd be like building up a warrior who specialized in swords (i.e. slashing weapons) and then coming up against some bad guys wearing plate armor, which is highly resistant to slashing weapons. If you don't carry a single blunt weapon on this character, your swordmaster is going to be in for a really difficult fight trying to use the very weapons your enemy's defenses defenses are strongest against. Whether it's a swordmaster or an fire wizard, eventually you will run up against an enemy whose defenses are strongest against your specialty. And if your character refuses to be at least a little more generalized, those fights will be rather difficult for him/her. Pretty much. But in case of no complete immunities you're not completely screwed in this case. If immunities were a thing, said situation against fire/slash immune opponent would be much more punishing. Very true. Heck, even in PoE there are some enemies whose DRs are particularly high against a certain type of damage, such as Fire Blights against fire damage. And it's not surprising if those DRs are so high that they can feel nearly invulnerable, even if they're not 100% invulnerable. I mean, if a swordmaster runs up against a monster with a DR of 35 against slashing weapons, he's not likely to do any significant damage to that monster unless he gets a crit, and possibly only with a 2H'd edged weapon. In the case of melee combatants, this is why I always try to carry weapons covering at least 2 different damage types, such as a sword and a mace, for a simple example. It's always nice to have options. For that matter, if you're going to dual wield, it may not be a bad idea to use weapons of 2 different damage types, i.e. mace in one hand, sword in the other.