Ichthyic

also, just tossing this into here because it seems relevant... I'm running this on a gtx 760, and the bottleneck has never been on the card, even running in forced antialiasing. oddly, the bottleneck is at the cpu, which this game runs very hot (often over 93C). I'm running I7 at 3.7ghz, which is more than enough to run any unity game ever made. there's something wonky with how the game is overutilizing the cpu. just saying, they are overestimating the miminum specs for what GPU this can run on, but that might not be why a lot of people have trouble running it; especially on a laptop say.

malignant cloud appears to be missing at level 5. is it in someone else's grimoire? edit: nevermind, it indeed is in someone else's grimoire; I had already learned it before I hit level 9

you know, I'm not actually sure. I'll try to pay attention next time I hit something with my paly. I'm leaning towards yes. for sure chanter song stacks with paladin fire, I just saw that. not so sure about the fiery lash stacking with chanter song though.

Unfortunate, since some of it is dead wrong. ogres and trolls are very common, not rare. blights are spirits, not primordial. kith vary across the board because they can be any class, and use any weapon or armor, which means some of them can be quite tough. blights are not susceptible to ranged attack, unless it does crushing damage. you know, there's a reason I posted the link to both guides. *shrug*

I mentioned this in my first post. Roy is a statistical anomaly, in that he has high stats all around. I simply don't have enough stat points for him in PoE, so I decided to build him as a traditional PoE tank fighter because I actually want to win the game. I'd like to point out that the actual Order of the Stick is made up of very suboptimal characters, and wouldn't be viable for a Triple Crown attempt if I made them as close to canon as possible: 1. Roy is a single-class fighter in a world where taking more than two levels of fighter is a trap. On the other hand, he either got lucky with his stat rolls or his player cheated, because he has no dump stats at all, like one of my older characters when I first started playing D&D. IIRC, I didn't roll anything lower than 14, which is insane. 2. Durkon uses a weapon his class can't normally use (warhammer), and he wastes his abilities on healing spells when he could go full CoDzilla and wtfpwn the enemy. 3. Elan is too stupid to use his class's plethora of mind-affecting abilities and spells to their full potential, and he wastes his time trying to do chip damage with his rapier which could be better used to crowd control and disable the enemy and buff his party to finish them off. 4. Haley uses a weapon her class can't use (longbow) and can't get the full use out of even if she took a feat to learn how to use it, since Sneak Attack is limited to 30 ft. (which wastes the longbow's range advantage). 5. Vaarsuvius specialized in the weakest school of magic in D&D 3.5 (Evocation) and can't cast Conjuration and Necromancy spells. Conjuration is pretty much the most powerful school in the game, able to replicate the effects of other schools with little to no effort except for Divination (which it doesn't have to since you can't choose Divination as your prohibited school in the first place). It isn't as painful to not have access to Necromancy, but it denies her the use of some potent debuff spells (Ray of Exhaustion, Ray of Enfeeblement, Enervation, etc.). 6. Belkar has a downright terrible build, and the fanon explanation for his combat prowess is that his player is cheating and fudging the dice. He's a halfling ranger/barbarian who fights in melee and has a housecat as an animal companion. Halflings are terrible melee combatants, and his uneven multiclassing gives him -20% XP penalty (though not as bad as Drizzt's -40% XP penalty). He also doesn't have enough Wisdom to cast spells. ALLL of these things suggest highly, that instead of actually building a team really similar to OOS characters, you should just ignore that and build your min max team to win your triple crown. since you appear to be making a very detailed argument as to why these two things are incompatible in your mind. seriously, this is not the OOS team you have built here. an OOS team would indeed not be able to do a triple crown run.

I thought that was brilliant radiance. funny, I use it as a finisher all the time. works fine for me. absolutely demolshes things like shades, and is a good quick finisher if you have a bunch of enemies near death in the middle of your group. edit: ah, they nerfed it in the patch. http://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/31fw9b/holy_crap_brilliant_radiance_sucks_now/ good thing I avoided the first patch like the plague it is. ALL first patches that come out right after release usually are worse than the release itself. wait a month. then patch.

nope, blights are spirit. check the guide.

I think you have it. which is also why kith costs double the others. next to kith... early on spirit is useful, mid game wilder is useful (trolls, ogres, xaurips are common), beast is just about as useful (lions, drakes) and also lategame (dragons). vessel is slightly less useful (pretty much all the non spirit undead, which are common, but not all that tough for the most part) and about equivalent to primordial in my mind. really though, they are all useful at different places and times. kith are by far and away the most common and diverse, so you can't go wrong there. take a look at this: http://orcz.com/Pillars_of_Eternity:_Monster_Strengths_and_Weaknesses and this: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Creature and you will get an idea of what abilites should go with which weapons to be used on various creatures. you'll probably want an assortment of weapons, frankly. but, if you are using a weapon you like, that has lots of room on it for enchants still (like say, a one handed weapon that only has 3 enchant used on it) you can't go wrong with kith slaying, exceptional quality, and an elemental efect (that would be 9 total added to the 3 it already has, for example). but aside from kith... I'd probably go wilder or beast. I friggen hate ogres, and dragons always need the extra damage boost. past that, make a crushing weapon with spirit slaying and frost for blights, as they are susceptible to crushing and cold, so you can give them a triple whammy. plus, high level blights are actually pretty hard to kill. elemental wise, you can't go wrong with corrosive damage, hardly anything is resistant to it (only crystal spiders and blights), and many tough enemies are actualy weak to it (ogres, trolls, sporelings, skeletal undead, stone beetles). ... last but not least, don't bite your nails overmuch about the choices you make here, the game is easy enough with a full party you can choose whatever floats your boat, without worrying too much about optimizing everything. if you're going solo though on hard or better, then I might agonize a bit over the choices. but otherwise? nah, just have fun with it. I often put enchants on weapons just to fit their descriptions, like frost enchant for the estoc that can cast blizzard. it probably would do better with corrosive damage, but frost fits the description better.

you can also stack DR with items. any item that specifically only adds damage reductions, like the blunting belt, can be equipped on a character, and any place that you can save/laod and add stats, the dr will add as well. also, this works if you leave it equipped on a character you leave in the keep. come back in a few turns, and the dr will have permastacked. not saying this is a GOOD thing, mind you. I consider it a very annoying bug, and has caused me to backtrack to previous saves on numerous ocassions, before I figured out just to entirely strip anyone you leave in your keep. this is all the release version, I have no idea if they have tried to fix this in the current patch, which I don't ever plan to touch. I'll wait a month or so, until there actually is a stable patch, and the first serious game balance issues have been decided. then I'll apply whatever that patch is.

how are you going to roleplay belkar? are you going to have to actually take some chaotic evil choices along the way? maybe have belkar randomly kill a villager or two? also, if Roy is the leader, one of his key attributes is his intelligence. he's actually nearly as smart as Varsuuvius. there are plenty of intellect checks in conversations throughout the game... I'd put more points into intellect for Roy if I were you. If I had to guess, statistically translated to POE terms, I would say Roy would have 15 int base at least. maybe take 4 points from perception, and 1 point from con, and move those to intellect. seriously. this roy you have built is too dumb to be Roy.

actually, not being able to see your spell ranges or areas is one of the most challenging features you can add. you really have to pay very close attention when you play in non expert mode, and try to remember exactly what your range should be with any given spell, and somehow also manage to not hit your own guys, or allies, with them. it's harder than you might think. that's aside from any other effects of expert mode that aren't as obvious.

you're not listening. as I said, you can directly test this yourself. otherwise, you probably should just not say anything.

We tested this in beta. The strikes all hit but they don't stack on the target, only the longest duration one takes effect.This thread seems to argue otherwise? http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75468-envenomed-strike/ It's possible I suppose but if it does work it is a bug. Josh Sawyer posted over on SA.that the dots should not stack. (Id find you link but on phone). It does look at first like they do - the combat log shows them all hitting, for example -- but as each one hits it wipes the others, because of the stacking rules,and only the longest duration one *should* stick. One way to test would be mouse over the target and see if they had six dots listed or just one. nope. you can easily test this yourself. you will see that varying levels of hits/miss with envenomed strike on a bluderbuss give you varying levels of stacking poison damage. if it was only one hit, you would not see the damage vary so hugely. I have gotten the poison to stack up to 120 damage per second. thats not over a period, thats PER SECOND. so yeah, it does stack. and not only from one blunderbus, but so long as you wait for the first person's attack to go for a single tick (one second), if you fire another shot from someone else, that stacks on top of the first set of damage... really, not kidding. don't figgen take josh's word for it, try it yourself. shoot one of your companions so you can roll over the damage tick on their portrait. watch the health go down, even though you are out of combat, because the fast regen doesn't even keep up with it.

on the corrode side... ogres and trolls have severe weakness to corrode, also most skeletal enemies, stone beetles, and all sporelings. so it's definitely a good one to have, as some of those are pretty tough enemies at level. that said, all the elements have their time and place. cold is extremely good against blights, especially combined with crushing. also against drakes, and at least one dragon... still, if you only plan to go for a single element binding, corrode is the winner IMO. shock is the loser, with only animats being weak to it, and you do not want to use it on most of the dragons. so... corrode>fire>cold>shock, if you're going on a weakness/resistance ratio across all creatures, though there are definitely some creatures that you will want to have a cold weapon for. handy guide: http://orcz.com/Pillars_of_Eternity:_Monster_Strengths_and_Weaknesses match those up to creature groups so you can figure what slayer mod to add: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Creature

my guess would be the amount of stacking depends on the number of times the glitch that causes the stackign has been cycled. in the release version, you literally could get unlimited stats/health/deflection/damage reduction scores by simply saving and reloading whenever you noticed the glitch. I'm still playing the release version, since 1.03 is even more buggy, and I don't expect a stable patch that includes some sort of finalized gameplay balances to be released for at least another month. in that version, even leaving items that boost stats on your character while they are stored at the keep will cause stats to cycle up. the micromanagment needed to backtrack to avoid noticed bugs is becoming quite a chore. some of the bugs are not repairable via the console, even entirely respeccing does not help. I've taken to simply dumping "contaminated" companions and creating new ones at Inns instead at this point, which of course means I miss out on most of their story dialogue. OTOH, it's incentive to do a replay once they finally get around to fixing it.

well, there are no other rogues in the game, so seems unlikely there would be specific interactions for it with a companion. that said, there might be some variations on quest dialogue if you play a rogue. can't say for sure. I CAN say that either is a fun choice for a player character, and both are entirely viable, even above average as far as combat capability goes. I don't think you would be unhappy with either.

all have same range, pistols and blunderbus have same firerates and reload times, arquebus is a tad slower. if the idea is to do the most damage to a low armored targets with a single shot, go with a blunderbus, and I would also recommend trying out envenomed strike, as that will stack the poison damage per projectile. Pistol vs arquebus for high armor targets is a closer call. considering the game is rather lenient on absolute damage as it is, I don't think you need to agonize over the decision. just pick whichever fits your mood, or the weapon focus your character already has. if the idea is to be able to switch targets rapidly to put debuffs and interupts on them, you're still better off with a hunting bow. I find ranged rogues do best with hunting bows, and everyone else does best with a blunderbus myself. ...oh, and that would be post patch. prepatch, the arbalest outperforms everything for pure raw damage.

actually, the proper way to do this is to use the command: FindCharater [charactername] first. then you use THAT when you specify who will get a talent or ability. so if your player name is Bob, you would type: findcharacter Bob and the result would look something like: player_new_game(Clone)_0 then you use THAT to specify who gets an ability or talent: addtalent player_new_game(Clone)_0 tln_two_handed_weapon_talent also same for addability. sometimes it works if you just type in the regular character name, but sometimes not. it ALWAYS works if you type in the actual name the game uses internally for that character.

it's not the guantlets of accuracy, it's the archer guantlets. not sure how you misread that?? they have no magic aura to them, fwiw. they only work if you continually re-equip them after every load or screen transition.

right, so you entirely ignored what I said. no, it's NOT a freakin good thing. did the Witcher dev need to have an outside party test its patches? no. think about it.

actually the very very best way to get plants is to build the botanic gardens at your keep. your keep chest will fill with plants very quickly. same for buildign the curio shop; you'll get quite a few parts on a regular basis. I've found the chest to be the only reliable way to get vithak brains and drycap, and best of all... they're free!

Most of the minor conversations I'm happy to just read as text, but it is very strange to watch Pallegina talk to Vicent, and she has full voiceover while he responds with dead silence. if someone could kludge in even a hackneyed voiceover for Vicent, it would do wonders to keep immersion in that particular conversation.

lolwut? I hope you're being sarcastic.

during the fight to save vianna, I had kana cast a phantom. at the end of the fight... the phantom stayed. it is now persistent. whereever I go, it tags along. also, the quest did not update after i killed all the enemies and talked to her. I assume it should update to say something like: take notes back to clyven. edit: hmm, interesting... I replayed the scenario, only changing that I put my pet (white wurm) away and had no pet out. quest finished normally. probably coincidence.

I'd wait on releasing mods until after the next patch comes out, if I were you. save you a lot of headaches.