Ichthyic

yup. I have Kana using scrolls that do best with intelligence, eder using scrolls that do best with might, and myself (tanky paladin) using all the other kinds of scrols, like immediate disablers. works very well. not only are scrolls relatively cheap to buy, but they are also cheap to make (plus you get 2 at a time). this is the very first crpg I can recall playing where I used scrolls in almost every combat.

just posting to say I have the exact same bug. I have tried reloading outside before I went in to deliver the package, reloading inside before giving the package. letting verazno kill danna. making sure one of my characters killed her. making sure my main killed her. standing around for several minutes afterwards. nothing works. also, I noticed that even after you collect all the treasure, danna's body still sparkles as if there is loot there, but it won't open a container if I click on her. edit: the ONLY way I can progress the quest is by choosing the option to stay out of the fight and let donna have at verazno. then I'm automatically placed outside, and the quest finishes. ...other things that might be affecting the outcome of this: -I have an active aventure at the keep, which does not finish if I choose the "save verazno" option, but DOES finish if I choose the "Let verazno die" option. I have no clue if that has anything to do with it, just noting it.

I'm absolutely sure they are there, because I distinctly remember finding them AFTER i picked giacco's cell, and thinking: "oof! well, that makes sense these would be here"

..plus it makes perfect sense that they are there... you might actually need them to break out giacco! remember to scout with your character that has the highest mechanics skill in that cell.

yup, the game has an instant check to see if all party members are unconscious. if they are, you're dead. seems fair enough to me, since there's nothing that says that the second chance ability is instantaneous (though it kinda is in practice). game only checks if everyone is unconscious. I doubt seriously they will change that.

a survival skill of 4 allows you to also pass at least a couple of skill checks, fwiw (has to be on your main character though). a bit of stealth on aloth is useful, as some of his best spells have short range, so you can sneak up and get them off before anythign is able to respond. like the level 2 paralyze spell. with level 4 or 5 stealth, he can paralyze a tough opponent at the start of a fight by sneaking up first, and doesn't have to worry about getting smacked. very useful against ogre druids, for example.

these gloves are a guaranteed find in Raederic's dungeon.

I found the gloves of manipulation directly across from the cell holding that prisoner in the dungeons under raedric's hold. look in the cell opposite his, or the next one down, for a secret stash. they are in that stash. I have found them there, every time. see this map: http://game-maps.com/PoE/Map-Raedrics-Hold-Dungeons.asp at "3" is where Giacco is, and not the cell directly opposite, but the one just down from that one, there is a secret stash. the gloves are there, guaranteed.

regular ogres have poor will saves. if you have confusion, either via spell or scroll, you can really limit how much damage ogres can do to you. if you have any charm spells or items, now is the time to use them (use them ONLY on the regular ogres; druids have decent will saves). painful interdiction is very useful, as it weakens them quite a bit. fear also weakens them. use aloth's level 2 paralyze spell on ogre druids from stealth (it will allow you to get close enough to get it off without being pummeled first). slick, and the seal spells from durance work well to knock them over. in long hallways you can kite them with ranged attacks, especially if you use something like web. anything that can sicken them works well. focus your firepower on the druids first, and make sure to take them down before they really get rolling, as they are quite a bit stronger than regular ogres in every way. lastly, they are very weak to corrosive damage. again, level 3 aloth spell "noxious burst" is brutally efficient here. I'd say ogres were the second (after early phantoms) good test of your builds and tactics. you should be able to do them at level 5, for a hard challenge, level 6 for a reasonable challenge, and by level 7, they should barely present a problem for you. if they still do... you really need to review your builds and tactics.

laughably, I got the dream finally, while in the endless paths under my keep, AFTER I had actually seen the response for the staff appear in my dialogue options and already gone through all the dialogue for it. this was WELL into the game; somewhere near finishing all the sidequests in the city and my chars were all level 7. it did however, finally move the quest forward. it makes me wonder if you have to camp many times in a row to get it to trigger, and not just once or twice before resting at an inn? because the time it triggered for me was the first time I had camped more than 3 times in a row without using an inn.

When you place and remove the Resolution sabre in the statue's hand on level 3, and then remove it to get it back, it loses any enchantments you put on it.

speaker to the restless is long range now? I'm still playing 1.02 and there it is 2x per rest and short range aoe.

you can also buy a blunderbus (fine) from one of the shops you can build in your keep. also, anything that adds damage to attack as a skill, will add that to EACH projectile. so, for example, envenomed strike. the raw damage boost will stack for each hit you get. and raw damage completely bypasses armor.

ha! it's like you were thinking one day into the future.... given that likely tomorrow there will already indeed be a mod that allows for walking for PoE.

one will happen, the other most definitely will not. wanna bet which?

People *sometimes* tend to have a diffrent perspective. Just finding it hilarious doesn't really justify someone as right. Mockery is also dubious. In cases like this it only marks one dim for the others. So, you're telling me you're not kidding? You honestly believe that the lack of walking in this game makes it unplayable? That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, I was assuming you were joking originally. empathy is not your strong suit. don't consider going into medicine, or anything requiring you to actually understand someone else's perspective.

there is an option in the IE mod to re-roll backer names into something more relevant to the area they are found in. if people are really worried about it, they can try that. all this negativiity towards backers being in game though... people might want to take a step back and consider the implications of your irrational rage. I rather think that a lot of money for this project came from people who wanted to be included in it. you start making that a negative thing.... you're going to lose a LOT of backers. would you rather projects like this never got off the ground? because seriously, that IS the fate of the vast majority of games you never even get to hear about.

good point.

there were some early threads here where people were asking for easy to be more like the "story mode" that was added to the old IE games like Icewind Dale. I thought they had a good point. people playing on easy mode typically do so because they want to focus more on getting through the role playing and dialogue; enjoying the story instead of the combat. there's some good stories in this game. I tend to agree with them, that the easy mode should have been for people who basically just picked whatever they liked and rolled with it, and did not want to nail bite every time they had an encounter. nail biting is for geeks like me, who actually want BOTH story AND combat that requires serious decisionmaking in order to survive, it should not at all be a feature of an "easy" mode.

it entirely depends on the spell. something like brambles sure as HELL does do more damage if the AOE is larger, as you're going to hit enemies moving through it several times instead of just once. it's a huge difference, huge.

I get why they did it that way... they didn't want people to spam fortress events for profit. but this was a very clunky solution to that IMO. surely there are better ways of going about it. as it is, the keep entirely feels like it should have been a DLC released for free a month down the road, after the main game was played and smoothed out a bit, and they had a chance to think of better ways to implement the features in it, and polish some of the content.

you realize why that is never, ever going to happen again, right? WoTC is the one who screwed the pooch on this... ages ago. it's time for an enitrely new fantasy battle system, and I'm actually hoping this game bridges that gap... eventually. it's about halfway there I think. next generation game will probably see something new and solid.

earlier someone noted that the problem with wizards is not that they are flexible, but that when they change roles, they are often BETTER at that role than a pure class of the same role. perfect example: mirror image, plus stoneskin, plus tensers. now you have a fighter that is much better than a fighter.... THIS is what people have always objected to about the classic wizard design in DnD. frankly, I believe this game has taken pains to actually avoid the "tensers" situation. even with fighter like protection spells, the durations are short enough, and checks fierce enough, that trying to use them to make yur wizard into a fighter is problematic at best. check out the build threads where people are trying to plan out their "melee wizards" to see the difficulties. stoneskin doesn't last long and degrades rapidly in this game, mirror image is really just a deflection bonus, and you lose it as soon as you get hit... etc. so, kudos to whoever decided to actually force wizards into not being better fighters than fighters.

This game suffers from taditionitis what I mean by that, is that they wanted to capture what made games like baldur's gate great, and use a similar system of combat to give nostalgia to vets like myself, but at the same time, they both didn't have the rights to use the actual DnD systems and names, and they also wanted to introduce some new aspects to combat. the result is a mishmash of old and new, and some of it is entirely useless except as a nod to traditional DnD play. that said, they DID manage to tweak some new character styles enough to at least make them interesting. while a chanter is kinda like a bard, it also kinda isn't. bards never got the chance to put together their own battle symphonies, though they did have wizard spells. so, like I said, you have the chanter being a throwback to the old bard, but with a new way of generating spell abilities. anywho, this is all in answer to your question of "why is it this way?"

now that is a glass cannon.