Matuse

My only real objection to the sneak thing is that it has to be the whole party at once, or nobody. I want to be able to sneak someone into the back of a room, aggro some spawns and then run the sneaker up behind them. But since sneak breaks on combat start, that's doesn't work at all, since it means every monster will immediately wheel around and gobsmack the person who was hiding.

There is a +3 Perception cloak in the Defiance Bay lighthouse. Not a fun item to get, however.

It increases the potency of any healing abilities done by the wearer. I don't believe Constant Recovery on a fighter is improved...but maybe it is, I haven't tried testing that.

Note there is no reason at all to not take a level up as soon as it becomes available. If your plan is to recruit the game NPCs, the level they pop into the party is based on your XP, not your level.

The other solution is to stick primarily to "Foe AoE" abilities. They can be cast wherever you want and will never touch the party - just be careful that nobody in the party has been confused/charmed, because then they WILL get hit.

Aha! I found one with decent drops. In Copperlane there's one named Visceris who wanders around near the bridge between the Inn and the zone boundry to Brackenbury. He's actually pretty tough, it took my groups of level 3s a couple of tries to kill him. He's a druid with a ton of HP. He drops fine hide armor, and a "Stag Helm" which gives +2 Athletics and +1 Dex. There's a commoner that also wanders in the area. Don't fight Visceris with the commoner nearby, or he'll aggro on you.

You only pick talents at even levels. Eder at level 3 gets "Weapon Focus: Brigand" that he doesn't have at level 2. Then when he gets level 4, he gets another talent.

From what I've been able to tell, companion recruitment is based on character XP, not level. What I tried was: Finish starter dungeon, DO NOT TAKE LEVEL UP, go rescue chef dwarf in first area after starter dungeon, then head straight to Gilded Vale and pick up Aloth and Eder. Because you need to talk to the dead animancer, you need to rest in town before the dream shows up. That means collecting the XP for rescuing the chef and the XP for talking to the animancer, and that was enough to push my main character to level 3. Still sitting at level 1, I talked to Eder, and he entered the party at level 3. When in a different playthrough I skipped rescuing the dwarf and still only had enough xp for 2 (although this time I took level 2), Eder entered the party at 2. It's also not always fully beneficial to get them at super low levels. Eder in particular gets a free talent if you get him at level 3 instead of level 2.

Estoc is nice, sure, but it is not unequivacably the best. Leaving aside anything with heavy pierce resistance, the fact that it doesn't have reach means there will be times when it won't be able to hit anything at all. It also means that you'll need to get adjacent to any enemies to hit them, which means they can easily turn away from the tank and smack you (since there is no aggro generation mechanic that forces monsters to stay on the tank, and they do enjoy switching to whomever hits/debuffs them the hardest, which will emphatically NOT be your tank)...which means that any melee character using the Estoc needs to also be wearing something in the way of protection, and the -recovery means you are hitting less often than someone using a Pike/Quarterstaff.

In one of the gameplay movies from some convention, the devs showed a scripted event where the check was against Constitution. Right at the beginning of the game in the starter dungeon there is a wall to break down which you can have Calisca do with her Might and save expending the hammer & chisel that is found elsewhere in the dungeon.

Whether or not you can kill any given BNPC is really variable. Any of them that are near regular NPCs are out - the regular NPC will aggro on you (and then anyone anywhere near that NPC, eventually the whole zone). You can get some of them inside buildings if they are the only ones there (there's a couple in Gilded Vale like this, in a house in the northern part of the town). Outside of that, it's a little wonky. In the northern bridge to Defiance Bay that was washed out, there are 3 NPCs at the foot of the bridge. If you kill the one on the left who is standing near some boxes of fish, there's no problem. But if you kill the two standing right next to him, you take Defiance Bay rep hits, and the guard NPC at the middle of the bridge aggros on you. So, if you're going to do this, I'd save before each fight in case things go south. And you might also expect that Obsidian will be tweaking this in a patch. Best thing about killing the backer NPCs that I've seen is that you get their clothes. They have several kinds of 0 recovery penalty clothing that is different from what you find normally. Nice for a bit of customization. I haven't found any that drop any really nice gear, but I also haven't tried mass murder to see what the options are.

You don't need to delete them, you can just drop them off at the stronghold and leave them there. They can even run stronghold missions for you to get rewards so they still are useful even when not in the party.

Which, after the first time the script had your mage throw a fireball at a single Xvart and do 30 points of damage to your entire party, was immediately turned off. I know it's the very first thing I do whenever I start a BG or BG2 game. The scripting is a laughable joke, when it's not incredibly annoying (like the cleric script that has them running turn undead constantly).

A tactics system could only have the effect of gelding your party's combat efficiency, as well as requiring that you rest about 10x more often. It's a terrible idea that Obsidian should waste absolutely no time on.

Correct. But it is there. If you mouseover the damage profile, it will break down all of the specifics of the attack. Your accuracy + your roll vs the opponent's defense, and it will show exactly how much damage you did from all possible sources. Equip someone with Durance's default staff which has a +25% fire damage bonus, and hit anything with it. You'll see X in crush damage and Y in fire damage in the detailed tooltip.

The PoE game manual: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/291650/manuals/pe-game-manual.pdf?t=1427904081 See page 71, waaaaay down at the bottom.

I have Kana armed with a pistol, and Aloth and Durance with arquebuses, with the rest being melee. The shorter range of the pistol means that Kana positions himself about midway between the front and back, and his aura easily hits both.

You guys need to stop feeding the troll. I mean really now, he's posting in ridiculous font sizes, refuses to listen to anything, makes pronouncements from on high, and slips in a whole bunch of ... to make his posts super incredibly long and annoying to read. About the only thing he's missing is one of the classic flamewar questions like whether the Enterprise could beat a Star Destroyer. Ignore him, and he'll go away.

So your examples of how wizards aren't viable is to show how they curbstomp stuff... Wow, ok.

There's no Dragon Age-esque tactics system that would be worth a damn in PoE. How are you going to tell the tactics system to have your mage cast spell X at Y coordinates (which will be different in every fight, BTW, depending on part orientation and where the monsters are coming from and what kind of opponents they are), but only if there are Z number of enemies who represent a significant enough threat to justify expending one of those precious per-rest spell slots? Impossible. The tactics system wasn't even very good in DA, and that's a much, much more simplistic game. First thing I always do is turn off the idiotic AI, because it's idiotic.