Ichthyic

the higher level you get, the less important con is. eventually, even with a con of 6, your endurance will still be high enough to tank just fine. far more protective is deflection and damage resistance. if you're tanking, max perception, max resolve, and wear the heaviest armor you can find, and carry a wooden door. I'm finding on hard, nothing can touch you for any significant damage. scratching you for 1 or 2 points per combat round (if you even GET hit, which is rare enough), when you have an endurace of at least 90? yeah, you can laugh at that. yes, con is a dump stat. I would go further than that even, and say not only is con a dump stat, but you will actually enjoy the game more IF you use it as a dump stat. early on at least, you might actually think the fights are a tad risky. the funny thing is, from my experince you actually need higher con for your casters, since they will have very crappy armor (or none), and their endurance will also be much lower per level. even then, though, you don't need to "boost" it much past default. 1 or 2 points should be enough. but really, I'm telling you, as the game stands now, making con your dump stat for ALL your characters actually makes the game a touch less boring once you get past act 1

the experience mod for solo is 50%. that's pretty significant.

I think the problem is that monster damage is not scaling up enough between the various difficulties. since base levels are low (average attack damage is around 12-15 for weapons?), and your health pool is high, and given it's extremely easy to get damage reduction to at least 10, if not 20, for most damage types.... it looks like hard scales the damage up by 25%? if so, that's like going from 13 to 16. now 50% would be a bit more of scratch. double feels more like what it should be. but, another way to do this would be to scale up ALL damage, so instead of weapons doing an average 13 damage, double that range to 25. so a dagger might do say 13-18 damage, and a sword 22-26 damage say. NOW, you've got some range to play with when you bump damage up by percentage points. with such small numbers to begin with, it makes it hard to adjust ranges by percent, without using huge values for the percentages.

If the Enhanced Edition for BG is anything like what they did for IWD, then that's the way to go; they typically include all the most popular mods built in and fully tested, plus some extra content and other improvements. I was pleased with how they did IWD enhanced. I haven't tried it (BG enhanced), but have been sorely tempted to. will need to take a break after this game though.... too much isometric thumpery! have to go do a first person shooter or adenture game to mix things up.

I left a msg with them.

nope. already using the version of IEmod for the unpatched version of the game. the console does not recognize this command, at all. I'm guessing this is something they added in version 1.03, but you'd think they would make mention of that somewhere. ah well, guess I will either have to manually dump stats to artificially gimp my characters, or run with a smaller crew.

uh, dude, I was the one who posted that command, from the author's page and mentioned it. I also spelled out that I cannot get it to work in the console window, even with IEmod installed, which actually, it shouldn't even need to be since that console command is not listed as requiring IEmod to run. so, either it only works with the latest version (no, I am not going to upgrade my game to 1.03; I never use first release patches, they typically break more things than they fix), or something else is going on. this is why I asked for the person who said they got it working, what they did to do so, because it doesn't appear to even be recognized as a command in the console.

I can't get this to activate in my game. what did you do to get it to work?

fwiw, through the author of the IEmods webpage, I found his console list, which included the command I was looking for: SwitchPOTD kinda obvious in retrospect... anyone try this have any problems? edit: annnndddd... it doesn't work. this is the only console command I have seen listed that doesn't seem to be recognized in the official game, even with the IEmod installed.

obvious statement is obvious. it is, after all, an entirely new combat system, with different mechanics, classes, spells, skills, monsters.... we are ALL newcomers to this. that said, I'm eyeing the IE mod just so I can swith to POTD mode on the fly. that, or lower all my character statistics by 20% across the board. edit: hmm, I'm not seeing where the IE mod allows you to change to POTD mid game?

yup. your own traps appear to be not overpowered, especially compared to the damage undetected traps do to YOU on hard and above. being able to lay more than one would be a good step forward. maybe make the number you can set also dependent on your mechanics skill? so 1-3 can lay a single trap at a time, 4-6 can lay 2, 7-10 you can put down 3, and add another every 3 levels etc.. my own traps do about a tenth of the damage the exact same trap would do if it hit me undetected. hell, even a dart trap on hard can do over 100 damage to me, but when i disarm that same trap, and use it myself... it does like 11 damage to the enemy who hits it. ...somewhere in this game there must be a godlike engineer laying all the traps for poor adventurers to stumble into.

Pause on trap / secret detection exists, you know. uh, the point is, you wouldn't be detecting the trap until AFTER you hit it, so pausing on detect wouldn't really be helping much. that said, pause on detect works perfectly well in this game... provided you're in sneak mode.

the dps measurement's I have seen posted show that the hunting bow outperforms it's nearest competitor. and now that the arbalest has been nerfed, it outperforms that as well. plus, it's also about how many shots you can land while your opponent has a state that allows for sneak attacks. with a hunting bow, you can easily land multiple shots before conditions like hobble or blind run out. not against mages it isn't. blinding mages really hurts their chances to hit you with spells. take both talents, I say.

most of the people posting in this thread, strike me as far, FAR more offended than anything I have seen on twitter regarding game content. ask yourselves... why is that. after gamergate, people should be taking a very hard look at themeselves when they start railing on imaginary "social justice warriors". you sound like the morons from the 60s who railed against civil rights activists. very much so, in fact.

sounds like the font bug ( I had the exact same issue ) check the first workaround in this thread: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72049-workarounds-for-several-known-issues-4-02-15/

VERY minor bug... when I shock proof armor, it only gives a plus 2 bonus instead of plus 3. compared to if I add crush proof, which does add 3 bonus. corrode proof also gives 3, so it's not just a difference between elemental/physical. like I said, minor bug.

righto then, wurms it is. I thought them a bit on the squishy side when I fought them below the keep, but they do have decent deflection scores IIRC, which should actually make them do better against enemies than they did against me. thanks muchly.

there's a couple of good rogue buld threads somewhere in here. it's doable. I myself prefered building a ranged rogue instead of a melee rogue. use blinding and crippling strike, and between those and webs and interdictions, at least half your shots will be for sneaks or crits. boost your int a bit to get your blinds/cripples to last a bit longer so you can get more shots in. use a fast bow like a good hunting bow to maximize your sneak attack damage. works great for me. my rogue has as much damage by herself as the rest of the team put together, and then some.

ah, I looked again. they were talking about using riposte on a cipher (in the rogue retaliation build thread). I'm now assuming the only way to do that is with the console. I had recalled seeing "retaliate" among the talents for cipher, but you're right, it's different than riposte.

the problem with your thinking here, is that you're looking at base damage minus, instead of base damage plus. your damage goes up quite a bit if you get your might up a few points past base. Its the difference between one or two shotting with a spell, vs 3 or 4 shotting with the same spell. best defense being a good offense and all... I still say you're better off focusing more on might. mages simply are not well designed to be battlemages in this game. that's why there are other classes to do this. why force a round peg into a square hole? *shrug*

...and another reason you might actually WANT high int... because you can use scrolls while you chant. and scrolls, even powerful ones, are often dirt cheap to make. and there, your high int has a tremendous influence on what those scrolls can accomplish. there was a thread a while back, where someone thought it would be fun to create an entire party of chanters. I agree. you can create a pure tank chanter, who instead of wasting time attacking, reads scrolls, along with an off tank who focuses on melee offensive stuff, along with a caster chanter who focuses on controlling the field of play and summons things, and a couple of ranged chanters for pure dps. like a choral of chanters. only need 5 (and any more you'd have chant overlap at early levels), but I suppose you could toss in another summoner or ranged chanter. I am very curious to hear what that sounds like... all those chanters going off at once with different chants.

speaking of chanter summons... the phantom starts to fade in usefulness after a bit. are any of the level 2 summons any good?

if you get your deflection high on your cipher, you might consider adding retaliate as a passive talent. others have said you regain focus on retalliation strikes, which means you cast like you're hasted. you don't even need to connect with your retaliation.

Please no, the micromanagement is fun element.The fact that you can choose target is why summons are so powerfull because you can focus your power on 1 target or tank with summons. i don't think you played baldur's gate much? you aren't understanding. you can micro control your summons. they just don't grant vision, so you can't use them away from the party (without using a scouting spell at least), you can only control them in the area where you have vision. but this way you can't use summons as scouts or send 6 summons to go fight while you sit at the dungeon entrance. Oh...was it icewind dale then?When they just run around you looking for targets? yup. having recently finished IWD EE, yeah... your summons will autoattack anything THEY can see. you don't need to be able to see it yourself. so, you can cast a summons around a corner, and it will happily go to town on the first thing it sees, even if you never see what it was, and just poke your head around the corner after the fightings done. that said.... they DO have limited range as well, and will return to the party if they get too far away. also, you couldn't change levels with them, but they would stay on the level where you summoned them until their timers ran out, so they would still be there if you popped back in before their timers were up. I rather thought it was a perfect, rational system. so much so, I immediately modded all the summons to have their own spell tables and abilities I have to say I haven't really played too much with the summoning system in POE. my chanter is the only summoner, and it takes so long to get a summon in that most fights are over before they play much of a role as anything but a brief distraction. I'll have to try playing a chanter solo, or duo and see how that works. or, as someone else suggested in another thread... specialize an entire team of chanters to play different roles. a chorus of chants and summons and blasts. could be quite fun, actually.

you mean... so long as your arcane shield is up. what's your BASE deflection score at level 5? around 45?