Crucis

No, there isn't. I just checked. And just to be safe, I checked while heading between districts in Nekataka, as well as when getting on the ship in Nekataka. So, no, the Supply button "store" does not have access to party management. It would seem OK if you had access to it if you were boarding the ship (since that's where your party reserves are), when you wanted to hit the "Supply" button, but that would probably have required additional programming that may not have felt necessary (as well as a waste of time and resources).

OK. Thanks for the quick replies.

What does the number in the Empower button indicate?

This is probably a dumb question for some of you guys, but just exactly how do you use this Empowering ability? I've tried clicking on the glowy number and get a yellow pointy finger, but it doesn't seem to do anything when I try clicking on any of the active abilities, etc. How is this supposed to work?

Gromnir, I don't recognize the hood, necklace, or the left ring you have on your character. I don't recall seeing any enchanted hoods, and that necklace and left right are visually unique enough that I'd KNOW if I'd seen them, which I haven't (yet). (I'm nearing the end of the game, perhaps leaving Nekataka for the last time, if ya know what I mean.)

Ship to ship combat is do-able in this game, but you really do need to learn the ins and outs of the combat system if you want to be good at it. And from my experience, the little ol' sloop is really fighting an uphill battle when you have to fight well equipped galleons and junks with good crews, because with only 2 guns in a broadside it takes a long time to do enough damage to sink those larger ships, meaning that you're exposed to their gunfire for a rather long time. And the Defiant just doesn't have the sail or hull health to do well in a long extended battle. Besides, I prefer the boarding actions, since it's the game's normal combat system. Thus, it's usually quicker and easier to just charge in at full speed, taking a volley or 2 from the enemy, before you get into range for the boarding action.

No, I do NOT like "real time" combat systems. Never have. never will. Games are much more enjoyable when they're something like turn based or at least very pausible. I like being to THINK about what I'm doing, not win because I can out twitch a computer. This isn't to say that the system they used was great, but it's better than any RTS could ever be IMO.

I have to disagree completely with this. You SHOULD have to go back to your ship to manage your party. Heck, I don't even think you should be able to do it at an inn. You SHOULD have to go back to where your entire party and its reserves are. (Oh, I suppose one can make an argument that if you're in port, your reserves would be at the nearby inn on shore leave, and thus accessible.) I'm honestly quite tired of reading all these arguments in favor of laziness. Boo-frickin'-hoo. You have to travel back to your ship (or inn) to get to where your party's reserves are hanging out. Too frickin' bad! This is a role playing game. And part of the role playing is doing some of the grunt work, like going back to where your reserves are hanging out to change the party's lineup!!! I don't see this as a problem at all. If there is a problem, it's that the devs aren't telling the players to stop being lazy and deal with the role playing aspect of having reserves!!! You're lucky that when you remove someone from a roster that they don't just head back to their personal home base, like say, Pallegina heading back to the VTC HQ, or possibly having all removed party members just hanging out at the Wild Mare, either way forcing you to head back to Nekataka to find them. No reason to be a jerk about it, man. This is a game, people want games to be fun. That's what games are here for. With the smaller party size, I find myself swapping out TONS because there are four faction-specific party members. It would be nice if it was easier, so I didn't have to go "crap, the Vailians are involved here, I probably want Pallegina along" and then run across the world to pick her up. I'm not being a jerk. I find the people defending laziness to be the jerks with the offensive, me me me, self-entitled attitudes.

What does that accomplish? Is there some test of skill involved in walking to a given town? Do you expect players to find difficulty in that? Or do you just insist on wasting players time with trivial content that they have no chance of failing at and just pads time for no reason at all? Why can't you, if it's that important to you, only change your party in a given location? Why does it have to be forced upon you by Obsidian and they have to make sure that nobody else has badwrongfun either without resorting to modding? I don't agree with your position or really understand your arguments from a design perspective. You can restrict yourself if that helps you enjoy the game more. And good for you if it does. Why do you want others to have those constraints if they feel they don't make sense? The thing is that those constraints DO makes sense. All the sense in the world!!! All I see is you defending laziness.

I'm still on my first party, though I'm nearing the end of the game. And I don't really have a truly fixed party, though I definitely have favorites. Eder (pure rogue) and Xoti (pure priest) have been permanent fixtures in my party, alongside my PC who is a pure fighter (Black Jacket subclass). Beyond that my long preferred party also included Maia (Gunhawk subclass Ranger) and Pallegina (pure paladin). Currently, however, I still have Maia in my party, and have replaced Pallegina with Rekke. Not out of any love of Rekke (though he gets the job done), but because I sided with the Rauatai. And though I did not have Pallegina in my party when I committed to allying myself with the Rauataians, I'm afraid that she'll walk out on me. So, I stripped her of her good equipment and have left her in my reserve. BTW, if anyone wants to tell me that she doesn't do so, feel free. I'd love to put her back in my party. I love having the extras that a paladin brings to the party. I think that one of the problems I've had with using spellcasters this time around is that I don't know how the spells have changed. Which ones aren't as good as they were in PoE1, which ones got better, etc. I know that some people wish that there were more spells, but I really wish that there were fewer. The new way that you have to pick spells for Wizards, Priests, and I guess Druids, is a pain to me. I'd rather have access to all of them so that I could experiment. But when you have to choose which ones you want at level ups, it's such an annoying and risky choice when you really don't know which ones to take. On top of that, I'm stuck in the per-rest mental rut with spellcasting of never wanting to just flush all my spells during every battle. I'm just too used to conserving resources to want to cast everything. I just can't bring myself to do it. On top of that, Aloth's AI annoys the crap out of me. Why? Because he has this damned annoying habit of leaving the rear of my formation so that he can run off and cast a god damned bleeping level 1 touch spell that I can't remove because he took it at creation. I want spellcasters hiding in the REAR of my formation, not running off like a bleep bleep bleeping idiot and exposing himself just to cast low level short range spells!!!! Sorry for the rant.

To some extent, but there is a typical, "traditional" D&D adventuring party which the original 1st edition gameplay was designed around, that being--fighter, rogue, priest, wizard. Well, from my perspective that's kind of the traditional core of an adventuring party. I have to say though that I'm happy that spellcasters don't seem to be strictly required in PoE2. To the best of my recollection, I don't think that you could have said that about the old D&D Infinity Engine games, particularly BG2 with its rather unique arcane magic system. I seem to recall a number of high level magical enemies that you'd be super hard pressed to defeat without a high grade spellcaster of your own.

Well, I think that you'd need a good DM to be able to handle party members whose alignments might be outside of the DM's personal "wheelhouse". Not every person might be able to work with characters whose alignments they just can't get a storytelling handle on.

I have to disagree completely with this. You SHOULD have to go back to your ship to manage your party. Heck, I don't even think you should be able to do it at an inn. You SHOULD have to go back to where your entire party and its reserves are. (Oh, I suppose one can make an argument that if you're in port, your reserves would be at the nearby inn on shore leave, and thus accessible.) I'm honestly quite tired of reading all these arguments in favor of laziness. Boo-frickin'-hoo. You have to travel back to your ship (or inn) to get to where your party's reserves are hanging out. Too frickin' bad! This is a role playing game. And part of the role playing is doing some of the grunt work, like going back to where your reserves are hanging out to change the party's lineup!!! I don't see this as a problem at all. If there is a problem, it's that the devs aren't telling the players to stop being lazy and deal with the role playing aspect of having reserves!!! You're lucky that when you remove someone from a roster that they don't just head back to their personal home base, like say, Pallegina heading back to the VTC HQ, or possibly having all removed party members just hanging out at the Wild Mare, either way forcing you to head back to Nekataka to find them.

Best reason to keep Pallegina around, though I always found her to be a useful character in general. But for fampyr fights, she was invaluable.

Game is really easy atm. Paly and some int inspirations should make the fight easy. Fampyrs are the hardest fights in the game, but they are nowhere near what for example Vitracks could do in Original POE if you didn't cc them first, that was insta wipe.... I don't know what it is with Fampyrs but for some reason, 90% of the time, when one of my party members got mind controlled by them, it was Eder, in spite of him having every anti-charm/domination and Will save buff possible, bar drugs. (And his Will save was somewhere in the 110-120 range.) My Fighter PC never got zapped. Pallegina never got zapped (of course, after I smartened up, I gave her the anti-Gaze attack shield to make sure that I didn't lose her to charm attacks). And only occasionally did one of my other characters get zapped. 90+% of the time, it was poor Eder the fampyrs picked on. Didn't matter if he was up front or in the rear of the party, the famps would zap him. Oh, well, any time he got zapped, I'd have Pallegina switch to her bow and nail him with an Aegis of Loyalty attack. (I specifically had her carry a bow during fampyr battles so that she wouldn't have waste time running around the battlefield doing AoL attacks.)

I guess it depends on whether you really want them to be entirely dual gun wielders or only mostly. For example, I could see a fighter, ranger, rogue, etc. (or various MC combos thereof) doing this. But I could also see a cipher (or a MC cipher) going the dual gun route as their primary way of building focus for their cipher powers.

This is good to know. I'm not at the max. I think that I have room for one more in my reserve, but don't really see the need. Normally, I've been kind of cheap when it comes to equipping my reserves. For quite a while, when I'd move a character into my reserve, I'd strip him of the really good stuff, but make sure that he/she had on some lesser armor and weapons. But recently, I decided that I had so much stuff in my stash that I could afford to have my reserves all fairly properly equipped. What triggered this is that I had stripped Rekke of all the stuff I'd given him for a while, but literally forgot to give him a weapon. During a boarding action, I noticed that Rekke (a fighter) was wearing a cheap robe and fighting with his fists. Oops, forgot to give him a dang weapon! Not even a mere club! My bad, Rekke!

This is so true. And on top of some weapon types having very few unique weapon options, some weapon types are even fairly rare with generic weapon drops. Estocs, for example, are annoyingly rare weapons when it comes to generic weapons being normal random loot. It seems to me that the devs put so much effort into the unique upgrades for unique weapons, shields, and armors that they also ended up with a lot few of them overall. I think that I've come across only a single unique plate armor and I'm fairly close to completing the game (with most of my party at level 20). On the flip side, there seem to be quite a few unique breast plates.

I can't speak to the PoE2 details of animal companions. However, if you want to put up with a A/C, they can be quite useful in a number of ways. Don't think of them as DPS monsters or hardcore tanks. They're useful as distractions, allies that can be a damage supplement. To make an A/C useful, first you want to buff the A/C directly with the Resilient and Vicious Companion passive abilities. The Merciless Companion ability (+30% sneak attack damage). Then you want to add abilities like Predator's Sense (+50% damage for the A/C against targets with an active DoT) and Stalker's Link (+10 Accuracy for the Ranger vs any enemy the A/C has engaged). And Survival of the Fittest (+10 ACC vs targets under 50% HP), and Superior Camouflage (+8 DEFL vs Ranged Attacks for both the Ranger and the A/C). Marked Prey and its upgrade, Marked for the Hunt, both give +10 ACC for both the ranger and the AC on the marked target. Also, if you take Predator's Sense, taking Wounding Shot (and perhaps its upgrade, Hobbling Shot) are worth taking to generate the required damage over time effect for the Pred Sense to trigger. In short, there are a lot of abilities you can take to produce a really effective ranger/pet team. But it does take an investment. Overall, it's probably worth it, mostly because if you don't, you'll either have a rather useless pet, unless you take the Ghost Heart subclass. And if you do take the GH subclass, your options for making a really effective GH ranger are quite a bit more limited, in large part due to not needing to take all those A/C related abilities and not having nearly as many left to build a pure GH character around. Kinda makes me wonder if Ghost Hearts are better off multiclassing, perhaps with Fighter, just to gain access to more non-pet related abilities. EDIT: Forgot to include this point. One other value that an animal companion can bring is, *IF* you have a cipher in your party, the A/C can make a handy ally for the cipher to use when casting one of those spells that require they be targeted upon an ally.

I think you meant "totems" rather than "tomes". I wasn't aware of any books causing curses in PoE2.

I think this is a bug. Those curses come from the totems that you find in dungeons near certain enemies. They pulse the effect, but I THINK it's supposed to be cleared upon leaving combat. Doesn't seem to be the case all the time, though, especially if you re-engage in combat to destroy them. Those totems themselves are kind of weird... If you force attack them, your characters will get one attack off, then combat will break until you force attack it again. I don't know if the enduring curse is a bug or not. But resting does make them go away. OTOH, there are a number of beneficial effects that simply do NOT go away, whether you rest or not. For example, I had Pallegina in my party for a while, and of course, she was using one of here Zealous abilities. And it stuck on my 3 characters who've never left the party, my PC, Eder, and Xoti. Even when I have Pallegina leave the party, her Zealous effects don't go away from those other party members. Something's clearly wrong.

The piracy theme is just one party of the greater whole. The setting sort of feels like the Caribbean meets the political intrigue of Renaissance Europe.

Do you guys realize that you can hover your mouse over the Valian words (among other things) during the dialogs and it'll pop up a little window describing the meaning of the word in question? Very nice little feature that I didn't realize was there for quite a while until I noticed that certain words in the dialog text were of a slightly different color.

Warbows seem like the best weapon option for a Devoted/Sharpshooter to me because there are multiple unique warbows, and you get a very good one, Frostseeker, fairly early in the game. Unlike rogues where you might want to have a particularly high alpha weapon for your killing attacks, ranger based snipers don't have to be so focused on alpha and can care more about more general DPS, which means that bows can be quite good for them. Odd thing though... in my party, I have Maia, a ranger, using an arquebus, while I have Eder (pure rogue version) using a warbow. I kept Maia using arqs (and kept her in her special armor) because that seemed the best way to optimize her, given her Gunhawk ranger subclass, as well as her special gun reload related armor. So I just have Eder, who is a no subclass pure rogue, being more of a general DPS sniper, though he can put up some prodigious damaging strikes at times and he does lead my party in damage done, but a wide margin.

I wouldn't call it game play mechanics so much as game balance. The game wouldn't seem very balanced if your starting character had a level 15 (or whatever it "should" be at the end of PoE1) Eder at your side.