manageri

I find I make pretty much 50/50 (on average) male and female chars in all games without even thinking about it, just depends on the character and stuff. In PoE I deliberately try to have maximum variety though simply because of the small amount of voice sets, so having both male and female chars helps you avoid the ones you like the least.

Which is exactly what's wrong with it. If it (whatever it is) does not help you in the most difficult fights, it's worthless. Why the hell would you spec your characters based on what works for the easy encounters? Newsflash: you're gonna win those fights anyway. The only balance discussions worth having are ones that discuss your chances of winning against the difficult ****. Is spiritshifting remotely viable in difficult fights? No, spells are 5 timer better at least. Therefore spiritshifting sucks. End of analysis. Spiritshifting will never be viable with the current version of druids who are full spellcasters and do not need to shift in order to access their most powerful ****. It's a gimmick and that's it.

4 chars is definitely fine. No idea how refusing to pimp anyone's deflection will turn out though. PotD isn't that hard once you figure out most fights are really just about debuffing the **** out the enemy's accuracy and deflection/reflex and then nuking them to bits with your heavy hitters/aoe spells.

The UI in general is very good. I can tell the devs put a lot of thought and effort into it. The most clunky part is definitely spell casting though. It's simply not convenient to drag your mouse across up to six different spell level slots to browse your spells. Furthermore, those icons reside as far away from the action (which is mostly around the center of the screen) as possible, being in the corner. The good news is that you don't have to come up with anything new to fix this because you already did it in NWN2. You hit one button to bring up all your spells, click the one you want, the spell selection UI goes away, and you proceed to target the spell.

Nothing wrong with the overall direction. They should learn from DA:O how outdated, stupid and unnecessary the rest system is though. Edit: Forgot to mention the biggest current big picture flaw is lack of mod support.

Where exactly is the option to make entire groups aggro reliably again? Oh, that's right, it doesn't exist. So I'm stuck with this **** no matter what. And no, this is not the same thing as difficulty, which dictates how hard the fights are. This is about whether that difficulty you chose for the fight is what you get, or whether a large goddamn section of the difficulty you chose had their thumbs up their ass in the corner and didn't get aggroed, often without you even knowing they were there, let alone actively trying to abuse the pull mechanic. It's a buggy piece of **** that should be fixed, end of rational discussion (not that that means anything on the internet).

The game does if my perfectly reasonable and valid strategy is to control where the fight happens, such as in a choke point. So now because of this crap I have to choose from either bugging the game, or derping into a completely retarded position. Why should I as the player have to work to ensure the game presents the appropriate challenge? That's literally the exact goddamn opposite of what I should do.

Yeah, they should really fix this. Not that it matters much in the end when 90% of fights are boring trash that are trivial whether you pull the whole room or not.

It's hopeless. There's nothing they can do to make mauling stuff more attractive than keeping casting those sweet druid spells at high levels, especially thanks to level 9 and per encounter mojo. Not without buffing spiritshift so much it makes all other melee classes obsolete that is. The class simply needs a redesign so the shifting is a vital part of how it plays, like how causing weapon damage is vital to ciphers. I'm fully on board with some of the suggested level scaling etc, but let's be honest, that will not make you send the druid in to maul the big bad bosses when you can be casting instead (and the viability of things is not measured in how quickly they shred a bunch of xaurips, it's the tough fights that count).

If they just made it so that characters don't move to engage a new target when the old one dies, this issue would be reduced like 95%. That's how it worked in NWN2 and I very rarely had this issue in that game. Edit: And to lessen the cases where that would lead to the tank doing nothing at all, there really should already be an icon on the portraits indicating what the character is doing, or at least indicating that they are doing nothing at all.

The voiceovers in combat for crits/misses/whatever are buggy. They were insanely super buggy and spammy at launch, now less so, but still annoying. Oh, and crystal eaters petrify you, that's why you got rekt.

The problem with cipher is that the high level powers generally cost too much for little extra benefit. Charm for 10 focus or dominate for 20 for the exact same duration? Well obviously it's much more effective to use charm in almost every scenario. I think 5 focus jump per spell level was a bit too much. Also some low level spells (mental binding in particular) just need a big ol' nerf in their duration.

Either bug or OP. I'll stay away from this weapon property in either case. Thanks for heads up.

Yeah, i was having a pretty fun time in my PotD playthrough until heritage hill + dyrford and onwards. I really dont understand why it's so hard for devs to balance late game fights with the assumption that the player is actually able to learn something and not build their characters like a drunken monkey would. Isn't that what lower difficulties are for? If the game wasn't so mod unfriendly this probably wouldn't be such an issue either but...oh well.

No, because there are no rest restrictions besides the illusory ones that only matter to dumb people.

Carnage makes Dominion of the Sleepers (the high level watcher self buff ability) apply it's effects to nearby enemies. Combat log example: "Hawk affects Ogre Druid with Carnage. (Dominion of the Sleepers for 23.0 sec)"

Still happening to me too in 1.05. I was fighting some spores and my barbarian insisted on using his staff instead of his greatsword when dominated/confused(whatever they do) seemingly every time. However, when Pallegina was dominated in the same fights, she did not switch away from her dual wield weapons.

Had a similar issue with a summoned blight once.

This makes no sense. Casting more spells in combat = same level of boring as pre-buffing? How?

Yes, but since it's a damage over time spell, it's unclear whether the damage is calculated at once for every tick when the spell hits, or individually for each tick depending on how wounded they are at that time.

"The more wounded the target, the greater the damage". Does this mean how wounded the target is at the moment the spell hits them, or does every DoT tick check the health when it occurs?

But it's not the same because pre-buffing is literally the same exact routine. In combat you may not always wish to buff as your first action, and even when you do, you may not always think the same spell is the one you should cast first. PoE is 6000% better in this regard.

Exactly. I'm using Pallegina as my tank so having the armor aura for her does help, since I don't need to use Durance's armor spell on her. However, if I was to use Pallegina as a dpser, then the obvious aura choise would be accuracy, but because it has such a pitiful radius I'd have to use bless anyway to cover the whole party. This makes auras very niche. Since they are basically non-stacking level 1 spells in terms of power, it would not be in any way OP to simply have them affect the whole party.

I ended up using AddAbility and RemoveTalent (which works for abilities too) to switch it. Reducing XP didn't actually delevel a char. Yes, or in this case, to see if it works at all. Of course doing this with every talent/spell/whatever would be incredibly draining and not fun.

Yeah, the range of auras is ridiculous. More like odors. Don't see why it can't just be basically visual range or so, it's not like the aura buffs are game changing when they don't even stack with anything.