Crucis

What makes you think that I'm a kid? And for the record, I damned well know what "civil" means. Why don't you get lost? And try to be civil while you're at it.

9 - A custom designed Rogue can be a real asset to a party. For starters, rogues get 2 points in Mechanics due to class. And if you choose a profession that gives a +1 bonus to Mechanics, that's 3 points in the skill before the rogue even joins your party. And even though the rogue may be one level behind your party, it won't be one level behind in terms of Mechanics skill, because of the class advantage that Rogues get with this skill. As for whether the Rogue class requires a lot of micromanagement, yes and no. All classes require micromanagement if you want to get the absolute most out of them. Rogues are no different in this regard. You can just use them as ranged fire support with next to no MM. But this is sorta giving up one of the easier to use advantages of the class, Sneak Attack. You don't even have to run the Rogue around the map, if you have your team casting spells that set up any of the effects which make targets eligible for SA's. One of the simplest ways to get a sneak attack is to fire a shot at an enemy within 2 seconds of the start of a battle. So just have the rogue fire the first shot. I've added a custom Rogue to my party and was completely satisfied by the result. And even a level behind the rest of the party, my custom (ranged) Rogue been more than holding her own in terms of damage output.

I agree that telling you the Companions' futures does seem to make it a lot more difficult to include them in a sequel. Of course, as I said before, I'm not that attached to them, and wouldn't mind a completely new set of companions. It'd be something different from BG2, for example.

Either you enjoyed it or you freaking didn't. If you can't say you didn't enjoy it; it gets a 4/5. Oh, calm down. Not everyone's opinion fits cleanly on a 1 thru 5 scale.

I wanted to vote 9 out of 10, but 4.5 out of 5... same thing. And I agree with your assessment as well.

Has nothing to do with guns, arbalests, or bows. Has everything to do with you acting like a jerk to the OP. Try being more civil.

Don't be a jerk. Plenty of people want nothing to do with guns in a fantasy game. "Another issue" would be making an arse of yourself by trying to deny that there are people who feel that way and waste a lot of posts doing so.

Shh... :D "Rangers with Bow" crew doesnt even care if it works because if somebody is fine with hunting bow's damage on ranger he must not care much anyway Sidenote : Fire Arms are meant to be SWITCHED In battle , for fck sake does it even make sense to reload 17th century firearm in the heat of the battle ? NO But it is always a decent tactic to have 2-3 of them so you can fire them without reloading Do you even Black Flag ;/ Even Weapon Speciality Ruffian suggests you to try some Pirate builds :D Yeah, you can go with Island Aumaua and 4 weapons for initial burst, but 4 shots won't be enough for PoTD fights. That's when reload kicks in. Plus, it's pretty much impossible to find 4 equally good unique firearms of the same type and the setup ends up to be quite "costly" in terms of gear. This is a key point. You can do 3-4 similarly good unique firearms (plus arbalest, I suppose) if you take the best from each type. But that creates a different problem. For starters, you end up with weapons from 3-4 diferent WF groups, meaning that unless you waste a lot talents on different WF's, you're not going to get that consistent +6 to accuracy with all of those weapons. Next, by hording all of the best firearms for a single character, that means that your other characters don't have access to any of those weapons. This may not matter to some players, but I've been trying to make sure that every character has a ranged option so that I can open every battle with a ranged volley at 1-2 enemies before they get into melee range of my front liners. And if the ranger is hording the best high damage ranged weapons, then the rest of the party is stuck with sub standard ranged weapons. There are two other alternatives I can see here. One, you could enchant some lesser weapons to have better capabilities so that you didn't have poach all the best weapons across different types. Of course, IIRC, there are a limited number of enchanting supplies available for doing the very best enchantment upgrades, so this is an issue. Option two could be to simply use generic exceptional or superb weapons to fill up those ranged weapons slots. They may not be as special as the unique weapons, but all they'll cost is some money and you're not denying your other party members access to the best weapons from other ranged types. And you could add some minor enchantments to boost them a little as well. Maybe some lash damage, or just a damaging enchantment. Just a thought.

2/10 , Come Back next term Might > Dex Hunting Bow < Anything Driving Flight - Wasted Skill Vicious Aim>Swift Aim Looms build almost looked like it was meant to generate constant interrupts (if his ranger had a good PER rating). I'm not sure that Driving Flight is useless. Seems to me that anything that does some more damage to other enemies isn't a bad thing. Are there better choices by that point? Perhaps. Yeah, Might may be better than Dex here, a good high action speed for an archer, particularly if you're wearing rather light armor, doesn't seem like a bad thing if it keeps you firing your bow as often as possible. Of course, if you're using a much slower reloading ranged weapon, perhaps it's not as big an issue.

DoT? Enhance the AC? Meh. Personally, I wish that having an AC was a choice for rangers rather than a requirement. Once I learned that having an AC go down in battle gave the Ranger a penalty, I got a LOT more cautious with my AC, which honestly was a pain. My first choice would be to make AC's optional. Second choice might be to do away with the ACC penalty if the AC goes down in battle. Third choice, buff it. Regardless, I still think that the Ranger should be better than a Rogue as a ranged combatant. Seems to me that that's the entire point of the Ranger class, to be the masters of ranged combat. And let's face it, Rogues aren't masters of ranged combat so much as they're opportunists who take advantage of the Sneak Attack ability to do more damage than Rangers. It's OK with me that Rogues do a lot of damage if handled well. It's not so OK with me that they're better at ranged combat than Rangers. Seems to me that Rangers get the short end of the stick in these games. The real short end. But if they're supposed to be masters of ranged combat, then it should be reflected in the game and in the damage they do, AC's be damned. But that's just my opinion. DoT = damage over time. AC offers a sizable advantage to the ranger at low levels atm, it just doesn't scale well. Ditching it seems like redefining the class completely. Leaving it in its current state is undesirable for me - I don't like gimmick features. But if ranger was better than rogue at ranged combat AND provided a decent free offtank rogue would become UP compared to the ranger... DoT: Ahhh. Thnx. Perhaps, but as I said above, I don't really like the AC in the first place and removing it wouldn't bother me. Another reason that I don't like the AC is that the Ranger in PoE isn't really the same as a DnD Ranger conceptually. PoE Rangers don't strike me as forest guardians in the same way as they do in DnD, which in turn seems to me to make having the animal companion feel out of place. The animal companion would make more sense (at least to me) for a DnD style forest guardian Ranger. But I get the sense that the PoE ranger is more of a ranged weapons expert than a forest guardian because so darned few things about the class have anything to do with nature. About the only 2 things that link to nature are the AC and the binding roots ability, and I could deal with not having either of those if rangers were truly masters at ranged combat. But others may see rangers different than I do.

On my first run through the game, I had a little difficult on Normal against 2 or 3 of the later bounty groups. The Ogres were particularly difficult. And the Vithracks were brutal. Ogres become less difficult once you realize that things that charm, dominate, or confuse them and get them to fight each other makes like a LOT easier. I'd imagine that having a cipher in this battle would make like really difficult on the ogres. As for the Vithracks, it took me 4-5 times to finally beat them. I know what I did, but I don't really know why it worked. I moved my archer ranger well away from the rest of the party and allowed the Vith's to work on them, while my ranger used his warbow to pound away on the the Viths. Now maybe the best tactic is to send in one or two guys to suck up the Viths attacks and keep the rest at long range and spread out and just pepper them with ranged fire and spells. I don't really know. Regardless, I did beat them and collected the bounty after a couple of painful massacres.

I don't know about the Valian Republics, but the idea of setting a sequel elsewhere sounds good to me. In fact, depending on how ambitious they were, why not 2 or 3 different areas? Also, while the NPC's in PoE weren't bad, I'm not exceedingly attached to them, plus the fact that the ending made it appear that they each went on with their own lives after the events of PoE. So why not just go with a totally new set of companion NPCs in a sequel? The advantage of this, to reference Luckmann's concern, is that the writers don't have to make any assumptions about who your PC's closest companions were in the first PoE. New adventure, new area(s), new companions. For an expansion, I could see the devs putting its new map areas in the NE of the existing Dyrwood map, because if you take a look, it's rather obviously empty.

DoT? Enhance the AC? Meh. Personally, I wish that having an AC was a choice for rangers rather than a requirement. Once I learned that having an AC go down in battle gave the Ranger a penalty, I got a LOT more cautious with my AC, which honestly was a pain. My first choice would be to make AC's optional. Second choice might be to do away with the ACC penalty if the AC goes down in battle. Third choice, buff it. Regardless, I still think that the Ranger should be better than a Rogue as a ranged combatant. Seems to me that that's the entire point of the Ranger class, to be the masters of ranged combat. And let's face it, Rogues aren't masters of ranged combat so much as they're opportunists who take advantage of the Sneak Attack ability to do more damage than Rangers. It's OK with me that Rogues do a lot of damage if handled well. It's not so OK with me that they're better at ranged combat than Rangers. Seems to me that Rangers get the short end of the stick in these games. The real short end. But if they're supposed to be masters of ranged combat, then it should be reflected in the game and in the damage they do, AC's be damned. But that's just my opinion.

Blovski, IMO Marksman should be considered an essential talent for a Ranger. And beyond that, I'd say that picking whatever weapon focus contains your ranged weapon of choice should also be considered essential. Whatever boosts your Ranger's accuracy will in the long run also increase the likelihood of getting fewer misses, fewer grazes and more hits and more crits, which translates into more damage. (Also, having a WF means that you'll have a +6 acc bonus in some melee weapons for those times when you're forced into melee.) As for Rogue vs Ranger for better ranged combatant, I think that it's sad that Rogues are better than Rangers. IMO, rangers should be the best ranged weapons combatants by wide margin. And their talents should reflect that. Of course, I suppose one problem here is that it's fairly easy for a player to generate sneak attack situations with various spells, etc so that a ranged rogue gets plenty of shots at sneak attack eligible targets. I'm not sure what could be done to counter this for the Ranger, other than allowing Rangers to get sneak attack bonus damage (with ranged weapons only) as well. Also, I agree with your racial choices. Wood elves are an obvious choice for a ranger with the ranged combat bonuses. (This is probably just as true for ranged rogues as well.) Of course, the obvious choice can also be a cliched choice for some. And your "interesting" alternatives all appear to be solid choices for ranger builds, since each comes with a benefit that can definitely come in handy. The weakest option is probably the Island Aumaua, if only because it seems to me that you only benefit from it if you choose to use guns. If you want to be a bow ranger, then having an extra weapons slot is probably less valuable. The Death Godlike's ability lets you be a better finisher. The Boreal Dwarf's ability (+15 Acc vs primordials and wilders) is sort of like a racial enemy, and not to be sneezed at. And the Hearth Orlan's ability to get more crits against enemies being targeted by an ally isn't bad either. The one downside for me to a Death Godlike ranger is that it seems counter intuitive. If there was going to be a Godlike ranger, one'd think that the obvious choice (abilities aside) would be a Nature Godlike. But frankly, these racial abilities that only trigger when you get below a certain about of personal END don't do much for me, other than the Moon Godlike's one which makes some sense. That is, if your END starts getting low, you start healing. That appeals to me. OTOH, if your END gets low, you get more stats (i.e. a Nature Godlike)? Meh. If I'm a ranger, I should be behind the lines trying to avoid damage, thus reducing the chance that I'd be able to trigger this ability. I can see this being valuable for something like a monk, but for a ranger, not so much. Oh well. One downside for a boreal dwarf ranger, at least for me, is that one of the Companions is already a boreal dwarven ranger, Sagani. Kinda seems to make her superfluous, but take that as you will. That's all. BTW, I'm glad to see this sort of thread, talking about a single class, discussing good racial choices for the class, appropriate talent choices, etc. I hope to see more threads like this for all of the classes. IMO, this sort of thread, if done well, ought to be pinned at the top so that new players visiting here can get this info more easily.

(Wish there was a spoiler tag here....) I didn't see how it was possible to avoid violence. The pale elves get violent the instant you go where they don't want you to go. Did I miss someone who was willing to be reasonable? (I suppose I did.)

Or maybe more patience.

I've always kind of thought that the same was true for teams of 6 as well. That is, you'd have that same core of 4. And then you add a couple of others to fill things out. Perhaps a locks and traps rogue. Perhaps a secondary spellcaster, such as a bard or druid or even a second mage. Or whatever floats your boat. The first 4 fill the critical roles, the other 2 flesh out the party.

This is what I was talking about in terms of short-term memory. Most people can micromanage 6, but a statistically significant portion of the population won't. Only a fraction of one percent of people have consistent issues micromanaging 5. Ah, but the way to ease the micromanaging load is to not try to MM all 6 characters. Try to have a couple of "fire and forget" low maintenance characters that you don't need to babysit every couple of seconds. For example, (annoying pet aside) a ranger-archer can be fairly low maintenance in most battles. As long as he's not shooting at charmed team mates, he can't really screw up much by targeting pretty much any enemy in range. You can usually leave him to go about his business and pay attention to other party members, unless there's a specific enemy that you feel is critical that he targets. A front line Fighter can often be "fire and forget" as well. Some people may claim that this is boring. But if you have trouble MM-ing all 6, why would it be boring to lighten the load a little with 1-2 low maintenance characters so that you can focus on the others? Just a thought.

What's the point of this "Engagement" thing? Side note: For quite a while now, when people were talking about "engagements" in PoE, I thought that they were taking about battles, not this "zone of control" thingie.It's only in the past couple days that I came to realize that was really meant, and only because of the context in which whatever post opened my eyes was in. I think that it'd be wise to not assume that everyone knows what is meant be "engagement" because quite frankly, to me, an engagement in the context of an IE-style game is a battle, not a zone of control. And I'm sure that there are plenty of other newbies to PoE who may get confused on this point.

What you could do is create a Save before going to the Burial Isle, or at least before going down into Breith Eaman. Then you could choose to see if you can finish the game at your current level. If you can't, just load up this save file like you never went and go back and pile on more XP and levels until you feel up to the challenge.

I was doing the Gywain (?) quest, and learned after completing it that some girl was supposedly last seen there and perhaps kidnapped. I didn't know anything about an portal that needed closing, and IIRC didn't do anything to close it. Guess it's still chilly in Twin Elms, since I already completed that run thru.

By mission, are you referring to the person you have to "find" in Noonfrost (trying to avoid using a spoiler)? Or is there some other mission?

Honestly, I was annoyed that that warhammer was there. It's got a great looking pic (perhaps the best looking hammer in the game) and would have been a nice weapon somewhat earlier in the game. But IMO by the point you get it here, it's somewhat underpowered.

Pay close attention to the dragon's DR's. (I don't know what they are, for what little it's worth.) Try to use weapons and spells that attack the dragon's weak DR's not its strong ones. Next time you fight the battle, if you get spanked, remember what those weak DR's were. And if you don't have the right types of weapons equipped, switch in ones that are better for the weak DR's. Also, another thing that I've found worked for me in my first run through is this. Some of the toughest bosses have ACC's that are high enough to rarely miss, except against someone with an EXTREMELY high DEFL for the current point in the game. If you have some characters who have only middling DEFL ratings and who are wielding weapon and shield, you might want to consider switching them for a 2H weapon to get more punch. If you're going to be hit anyways, better to have a beefier weapon in hand. In this battle, I made sure to take the dragon's kid out asap. It's a lot easier to kill, and it makes fighting mama easier when you don't have to worry about having junior harassing you. Something else, get your party spread out ASAP. Don't clump up in a way that a single blast of her breath weapon will nail your entire party. And it probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways. This is a fight where you hold nothing back. If you have to clean out your mage's spells, do it. That said, you don't have to dump them in a massive hurry. It may be a long fight, and if you can get a good feel for what spells will work better than others, use those. Look at the dragon's reflex, will, and fort saves, and use spells that target the weakest one if possible. Also check out its elemental DR's to see which elemental spells are more likely to do well. Honestly, this is all pretty standard advice that was true for the old IE games and is still true. But sometimes it bears repeating. EDIT: One last point. In this sort of fight, I've found that it's best to hold Durance out of the melee. He'll probably be using a lot of healing spells. And when he isn't, just use whatever ranged weapon he's got equipped, preferably something like an arqabus.

That would be fine, at least not make it work, but just to a lesser extent. Seems that Dominate attacks are so prevalent in Act 3 so far it's maddening (no pun intended) Interesting. When I did the quest referenced in the spoiler, I didn't have anywhere near that much trouble. Of course, tactics might play a part here. My general tactic tends to be to have every single party member have a ranged weapon, and to open a battle with a concentrated volley. Sometimes on the first thing I see, and sometimes if I see a spellcaster, I focus on that instead. In the area mentioned in the spoiler, I was nuking the spellcasters the instant I saw them, often taking one off the map almost the instant the battle started, not giving them a chance to cast any spell. Add to this, the fact that I armed my lead tank, Eder, with the best blunderbuss available, which is devastating against low DR mages who have no buffs in place. Sneak into room, see enemy mage, ba-ba-ba-boom! Enemy spellcaster chunked! Next customer!!! When you're dealing with an enemy group that has some spellcasters, taking one out at the very start of that battle is a major advantage for your party. It may almost seem like a waste to use that much firepower on a single target. But if you're afraid of what those spellcasters may do, it's better to kill one spellcaster than end up with 2 wounded ones, since wounded ones' spells will be no different from those cast by fully healthy mages. Better to have some overkill and get that first spellcaster pushing up daisies ASAP.