Tigranes

BG2 modders later created Dungeon-Be-Gone to skip Irenicus' Dungeon. It would be nice to have something similar for POE to reach Gilded Vale, while leaving the Bear intact and such. I don't think it's reasonable to get rid of the Stronghold bottleneck. After Act 1 basically 1/3 or 1/4 of the game is done, and you get such a huge jump in XP, loot, available items, etc. in Defiance Bay that all games would devolve into a beeline for non-combat quests in the city. Just like you can't go straight to Underdark at start of BG2, or Baldur's Gate at the start of BG1. It would just break game balance a lot. At a personal level, you could keep a save just after Act 1, and then use IE Mod's console commands to reclass & relevel your protagonist, creating a new party each time. (By the way, Baldur's Gate was three games shortened to two and a half, and no quests spanned BG1/2 except for the Pantaloons gimmick.)

I see. I guess to me upgrading the same weapon to Exceptional, or ditching a +1 Sword for a +2 Sword, is basically the same mindless linear level up. The litmus test is, would the character be OK with just one weapon in their inventory at a time, or are there good reasons to keep several weapons in play? Whether it happens through unique items, the crafting system or whatever else, the game becomes more interesting when you have reasons other than raw power to swap items in and out. And my point would be that POE's uniques don't really contribute to that, and there's really no reason to buy a lot of the uniques. I think overall POE does a decent job, but that there could be more attention to more interesting uniques... which is really impossible to contribute to 'clear gear progression'.

Well, they do at first, but after sometime exploring how they work and synergise with or even enable certain builds, I feel they are quite interesting and stop feeling as bland as they once did. Plus, I don't want unique items to be mandatory. Sometimes a sword is important not because its maker or previous wilder was the supreme blacksmith or swordmaster, but because its current wielder is a great swordmaster. EDIT: And I hate clear gear progression. The problem is that without the diversity provided by unique items', well, unique properties, you have a very linear gear progression, as I posted above. You just jump from Fine to Exceptional to Superb, jack in the attribute bonuses that don't overlap with your other gear, and so on. It's like going from Sword+1 to Sword+2, with the option of 1d4 Fire or 1d4 Cold damage, instead of going between Tuigan Bow and Gesen's Bow, or getting Crom Faeyr, or Staff of the Air to that unique Druid Staff that summons Shambling Mounds, etc. POE certainly has some unique items, the Soulbounds were added, etc. so it's not like there's nothing, but I do think it could be improved upon.

It's true though, POE's unique weapons suck and it would be nice to see some interesting ones. BG1/2 had some wonderful uniques with memorability/flavour as well as gameplay repercussions, though of course that's easier when you don't have crafting. Finding Varscona is a huge deal in early BG; Daystar and Sword of Balduran have specific uses; you have the cursed items sold by Thalantyr; and not to mention the Cloak of the Sewers, all the bonus shop items like Vhailor's Helm, the Ring of Gaxx, that Belt in Trademeet, the missile deflecting shield, bows and slings with unique ammunition, cursed berserker sword, etc. The combination of the dearth of uniques and the way the crafting system (even though I like it) is done is that you have a pretty linear and straightforward relationship to your gear; it's generally a tetris game of maximising the attribute bonuses without overlapping, accommodating the 2 or 3 unique effects you really do want, and then otherwise just tacking on the best bonus you can afford.

From what I've seen torment suffers from low-res assets, poor lighting and uneven art direction (even leaving aside the unfinished, or shall we say "please get rid of the entire thing and start over" UI), recalling some of WL2's ugliness rather than POE. PST was highly focused in its visual delivery. Don't have beta and am happy to avoid spoilers, but my main hopes for the game lie with how they make systems like Effort, the plot, and the setting fit together to create quirky encounters. I don't expect a Tormentlike story but there's plenty they've said about the world and the castoff etc that seem interesting.

Both of your initial ideas will be just fine, especially for non-POTD runs, so you should go ahead and do them. You just may not be quite as effective as the most optimised builds, but if roleplay is what you care about, who cares if some other dude out there in the universe is dealing more damage per second?

Elerond basically covered why it's harder to port POE. I imagine controllers aren't a huge problem for games like MGS5 or DAI because they were released on consoles in the first place.

Actually,

You level up faster with Oddity than Classic, especially during quests, but it might depend on how you play. You have more control with Classic because you can just keep fighting until you level up, but that might take a long time. XP from kills is related to your level vs the enemies, so fighting rathounds and similar creatures becomes a slog if you're doing it for leveling. Plus respawns are fairly slow. I took a break during the Rail Crossing quests to explore and try to level up to craft shields and better armor. You can buy shields, too, if you look around, but they might be pretty expensive at this point. Also, if you do the side quest to disable the Faceless shields/robots, it makes it much easier. And you can do that sidequest no matter which outcome you want. You don't have to do Rail Crossing right then and there. Just go to Core City and do some stuff. Or explore the caverns and other 'wilderness' areas if you like. You should have some kind of shield by the time you've got access to TNT, since by that point you have a ton of money and you'd have looted a couple off enemies. There's a lot of junk to carry, so it's usually a good idea to have somewhere you leave a lot of the crafting junk.

There's one thing where I'll agree with Obama's critics - making the 'red line' statement on Syria wasn't 'strong' or 'weak' (because those words are usually used to describe an ill-defined set of mostly pointless postures), but it certainly was stupid. Once he said it there was only going to be one outcome: embarrassing backtracking. That said, if he declared "Syria sort your own mess out, we are hands off" from the start, he would have gotten at least the same amount, possibly more, amount of "Obama is weak" flak over the years. Obama is weak he is letting Middle East destabilise he is losing the peacemaking work done in the Bush era he is showing America is powerless to save civilians etc etc etc. Even today, with the benefit of hindsight (well considered predictions about Syria were almost nonexistent, at least in publicly available debate, during 2011/2012), I"m not sure what would have been the best course of action.

It's good to know that you at least are basing it off first-hand observation. Racism has a lot to do with stereotypes, and the thing with stereotypes is, you often need them. If in your travels all the Arabs you met were despicable people, for example, and seemed to share some common bad tendencies, then it is hard to blame you personally for being wary of a new Arab acquaintance. The problem comes when people start to scale that up to declarations about the nature of Filipinos or Russians as a whole. Born Korean, and having traveled to over a dozen countries, I often despair at how Koreans treat foreigners, and some tourists develop quite accurate observations of what Koreans can be like to foreigners. That doesn't mean, however, that they understand why those behaviours happen, or whether they are limited to particular subsets or all Koreans, or if it reflects something fundamental about them or is a passing phase, etc. Which is understandable - we're not gods. So again, if that person wants to then steer away from Koreans, well, that's not his/her fault, that's the Koreans' fault, and fair play to that. Reasonable people stop there. Reason stops when people go on and try to fit things into a grand narrative - e.g. the Koreans must all be rude because of their religion, the Japanese must all be sexually depraved because they can't have casual sex as easily as the Americans do, whatever. As I say, the West has already entertained, and ultimately rejected, theories like the natural stupidity of blacks - because despite trying really hard, it didn't turn out to be provable, even when you had learned people bring all their historical and scientific knowledge into the game. After all, when you talk about Indians and Chinese as 'naturally peaceful' and Arabs as confrontational, you will find no end of other equally well-traveled fellows who have the opposite experience. Chinese are openly reviled in some cases because they are seen as predatory, arrogant, rude money-grubbers who only care about money and use it to take over the host country. I can't tell you that you're wrong to personally think less of Portuguese or Kenyans if you had bad experiences - who am I to tell you otherwise? But scaling up from there is illogical, and that's why it's dangerous for people to talk about all those migrants, all those Muslims, all those blacks, etc. as a problem, as if they're so smart and have it all figured out.

So how many of you people have actually talked to a refugee or migrant? If you have, how many of them, aside from that one guy you know? Have you read any proper reports or studies that do that work for you? Darkpriest, taking your post as an example (but I'm asking that question of everybody) - so how do you know any of that? I'm not even asking, "How do you know what Muslims are like" as a religion/culture, although I'd bet a lot of money that most people, in this thread and outside it, know precious little about Middle Eastern culture, government, etc. and are likely to have never been there. I'm asking, what makes so many people think they have this perfect knowledge of millions of different people who move to dozens of different countries over multiple generations from all sorts of different backgrounds for different reasons. I mean, I don't know, maybe people are really impressive flaneurs and go to local migrant community gatherings and talk to them and observe them? Maybe everyone works at some civil society body? A media quote from, say, a Muslim migrant convicted of rape doesn't count, neither does you walking down a street and seeing some brown people talk to each other in Arabic. Oh, and neither does having that one guy on a bus one time rant at you. (Why not? Because then I could say, based on personal experience, that Australians are inherently homophobic and racist, black Americans are inherently of inferior intelligence than whites, that a lot of the whites aren't doing so great on that these days either, and....) Sure, you can't know everything, and you still have to make judgments about them if they're moving to your country. No migrant can complain that Germans or whoever should have a perfect understanding of their home culture. But none of that means you can pretend to know that X people are inherently governed by fear or whatever. Again, for anyone with a bit of historical awareness, the West tried to do that a lot more in, say, the 19th century. People tried really hard to prove black people were less human and more stupid. You even had pioneering scientists make **** up just so they could prove this, even when their data said the opposite. Turns out that wasn't exactly the most intelligent thing to do. There's no question of difference, and as someone who's moved countries multiple times, I think there's no question that there are many people who don't assimilate well and that this is a problem for both themselves and the home country. The problem is when people start to pretend, out of nowhere, that they have some full and fundamental wisdom about millions of people and their unchangeable natures - without even doing extensive research.

Don't sweat it too much about the regulations guys, they're meant to be enabling. Feel free to post your caption submissions here, fan fiction can be serious or funny in whatever way, etc.

"If I had any advice for someone trying to get used to PoE, it's probably to just do a playthrough on easy with all the assist options turned on, use Google to find Maps and guides and other spoilers. Then if you want more after that you can start turning up all the dials until you get a nice balance between challenge and enjoyment." This is indeed the way to go. There can be any number of reasons why you find the combat in a game difficult while another guy blows through it. Make it work for you. When we think about it, it makes perfect sense that you can't "clobber their way through" combat without a lot of tactical control on the highest difficulty setting. (I doubt you could do so on BG2 Insane, either, but eh, I won't argue)

People have their own playstyles, so they think a ranger is crap or a chanter is amazing when the truth is their way of playing just gets the best out of one and the worst out of another. Hence this forum is full of posts about how X class sucks and how X class is OP, but most people going on about how X class is totally pointless, etc. are not really anywhere near a point. Personally I'm a big fan of rogues and monks, who can be built to kill everybody in seconds all game long with a bit of support. Never did figure out how to get the best of priests, since I'm not a huge fan of how status effects / buffs are communicated in POE so end up not keeping as good track of them.

You basically picked 13 out of 22 skills. You can't have your guy be good at basically everything, so you'll need to make some choices. Social skills have their moments, but they are all skippable, and taking 3 is defintiely overkill. Melee is super good, and synergises well with psi, but you'll want to try and build a core competency - i.e. do you go high STR and sledge hammer (in which case, go find a shock steel sledgehammer for some super damage), or unarmed/knives with dex for some rapid killing?

Some people will insist that they are right, and whatever reailty says, they'll just work it into that. As to the most important question, MCA in another interview answered that full-time writing, as say a lead designer, was not possible due to family reasons, which was part of his reason for his departure, and that this continues to be the case for now. So perhaps no "MCA Game" anywhere for the moment, and hence his willingness to do more piecemeal / advisory work.

Ventilation systems are always entirely contained to the room you're in, you can look outside each duct to see where you are, and you can always just exit a random duct if you're somehow lost. Loving the game. Lack of map is annoying but the silver lining is the wonderful episodes when you get lost and try to make it out alive to some friendly settlement without dying. If you persevere after the first couple of quests/areas, i.e. after reaching Junkyard, there's no conceivable way you can run out of anything. You start getting a lot of money, even when merchants don't buy everything (if they did, you'd have literally hundreds of thousands) - to the point where you're soon leaving a lot of loot on the ground and only taking what you want / what is great. If you focus on one weapon style (Guns / Xbow / Throwing / Melee), and one defence style (high CON, heavy armour w/ STR, or dodge/evasion), then you'll be fine on Normal. And then you can throw in Psi, and crafting, etc., as you see fit. As long as you don't split your points across all kinds of weapon skills, or do something like pick guns and low perception, you won't be screwed, though of course you may not be optimal.

Then I look forward to my talking sword.

If there's a 5-gold piece super nuclear bazooka that kills anything in 1 hit, you don't have to use it, but it probably has a bearing on your experience. It's a line in the sand as to when things get prominent enough that they spoil your experience of the game - after all, the enjoyment of a game, in many cases is about playing within the rules and trying to be the best within them. It's not really a sustainable logical rule, but a contextually specific, grey one. Me, I think respec potions should be in the game, especially a few months after release, but there's no need for them to be dirt cheap, which makes it too close to god mode/console commands.

Upscaled Bluffs should be Level 13/14.

Settle down, folks. Katie, if you wanted to enjoy POE and to find some ways to relieve the bits you found frustrating, I think you've found quite a few simple ways to do so in this thread. If you wanted to know why POE was made to require time investment and engagement relatively greater than more 'casual' games, well, it was kickstarted and made exactly for that purpose. Tens of thousands of people gave money because even if they played 20 minutes a night, they wanted that 20 minutes to be with a complex offering. And don't you know, the IE games were immensely complex games for anyone uninitiated to D&D rules. They were at least as bewildering as POE. In that respect, you might be taking your own personal history of when you played these games, and what your life is like now as a 30-something engineer, and sort of extrapolating that across the entire population. If ultimately POE is not for you, that's a pity but that's nobody's fault. We shouldn't have to write you off as being thick or lowbrow for that, and you shouldn't have to write the hundreds of thousands who have enjoyed POE - across all kinds of income brackets and age groups - as losers.

You should certainly contact Obsidian. With backer reward-related kerfuffles in the past they've been keen to offer sensible ways out, e.g. GOG keys for those who are waiting for their DVDs.

Don't be hesitant to make the changes that make the game enjoyable for you, if you do want to keep playing. It's a game, after all. I don't think there's a single reason not to drop it to Easy - it sounds like that is the very first thing you should do to relieve your particular frustrations. And heck, if you wanted to house-rule to yourself, I want to experiment with lots of builds, I'm going to use console commands to give myself gold for those things (without cheating myself unlimited cash for everything else) - why not? It's your game. If Obsidian made such changes across the board, it would be to the detriment of the game's overall vision, which is not a casual romp but an in depth experience, and to the detriment of players who want that. But if you yourself want to make those changes, there are tools to very easily make that happen, and that might improve your in-game quality of life.

It should be AR_0704_Valewood, not valewood, I think. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62420848/poe-areas.txt