Tigranes

For 10 (+/- will) seconds, twice per rest, yes.

I would pay $100 for a Pingu dubs option.

Yep, the skill checks and variant consequences are awesome and they weren't maximised properly. The number of choices you get for Heodan at the start is one of the few places where previous choices as well as non-skillf actors (like a ranged weapon) come into play.

I've been TCS Wizard'ing with a sword and shield for the deflection. Gaun's Flail was the pick early on, but after a while due to DR you're hitting them for 7 damage and healing 2, making life leech not so significant. I switched to Aattuk for the accuracy, but I suspect there's a better option here, possibly a reach weapon or at any rate an Average speed weapon. Ultimately the weapons themselves don't seem to be the main damage dealers, though.

The bounty that you picked up spawned the drakes, who have always accompanied the kobold king. Maybe the drakes don't appear in Normal mode? Bounties are meant to be difficult - though that fight, even with drakes, is beatable at mid-levels.

Why should wands have limited charges? Shouldn't all wands have per encounter charges too? Going into the next fight gimped because you ran out of wand charges is an arbitrary restriction. If it just makes people spam wand of fireball al day, well, it's an argument for redesigning wands so they aren't so powerful. The way you're arguing it, we could just make everything unlimited. You're coming in with your totally arbitrary idea of what is allowed to be limited and what is not, so of course when reality does not agree with you you're going to think it's stupid and annoying.

I can only hope, but I think it will be difficult due to the way the project uses Unity.

Aha, so you're saying I'm not allowed to play the game, after saying my experience with the game proves you right. Okay!

Try it yourself, come back and tell me if it's seriously unbalanced or just a cool thing you can do if you do everything right in certain situations. You can't even hyperbole around here without a swarm of hyenas trying to scratch their own itches.

Going for TCS Solo... and it's turning out to be a bit of a pacifist run. Took a while to get it sorted but seems doable, I just need to figure out how to handle Thaos. The 1.05 Arcane Veil (+75 upgraded), the 3rd level mirror image (+25) = almost unhittable in the first half of the game, and Moon Godlike healing + Gaun's Flail or Corrosive Siphon also improves survivability. 1.05 boost to wizard health is also important. I basically skipped Ranga, the conclusion of Raedric quest, had the smith's bandits fight the trolls, lured Maerwald to the beetles, and got to Act 2 at level 4. Currently nearly level 7 and heading to Cilaban Rilag with about 55 kills to the main character's name. Athletics isn't necessary for any character in any playthrough. I stuck 3 on him but am regretting it a bit, more stealth would be helpful. Of course, it's hilarious how you can run past 8, 9 enemies constantly engaging you, with Arcane Veil.

The irony is that we're all speaking a language that's basically full of such butchered, uncanny valley words, yes.

No. Fun was patched out in the beta. You will never have it again. Ever.

Perhaps. I've seen Arcane Veil mentioned quite often on the forums, but I agree that many people probably play them as glass cannons. I think it's nice that they tried to provide interesting ways to play differently, and AV with this new buff is made a much more viable choice. Interesting about Earth Talon. The way Petrify works right now as a whole is just a bit weird.

Triple Crowning a wizard at the moment, per rest is just fine, though of course that is the most extreme case of reliance on per-rest abilities, meaning I have to rest more often that I'd prefer (i.e. sometimes more than once a map). "I would love to see them give these classes just a few, say 2-3, per encounter or even spammable things to do in each fight. " They have it already.

Besides the shield, you can (at least could) get another retaliation armour in one of the second round bounties (I wonder how much XP they give now, BTW). But don't tell anyone, lest they'll "fix" those items too. I don't get why some people are so happy about the nerf to cipher's focus. I mean, to each their own and all that, but it's not like the game forces you to spend your whole focus reserve. Nor it used to force you to use the Sanguine Plate if you felt it was too cheesy, but I digress. Uh. Then why not give the Cipher 3000 focus? Nobody forces you to use it all. You can't apply "it's a choice" rationale to everything, or you just become a silly satire of Sartrean radical freedom. "Of course I have a choice when you raise the price of water to a million dollars! I mean, I could just kill myself!"

It's base duration is 10 seconds and you get 2 of them per rest. This change takes from something that was utterly worthless (deflection doesn't stack) to something that might be occasionally useful, but "huge deal"? You can increase the deflection to +200 and it still wouldn't see much use except in melee Wizard builds (which seems to be what this patch is pushing). It's been nerfed to half duration and Petrify is now x3 rather than x4 damage. Unless that's been nerfed too, use the Druid version instead as that's a much better spell that you get earlier in the game and duration was the one advantage the Wizard version had. "I don't see a use for it" doesn't mean "useless". This, for example, is a massive change for solo wizards - and of course melee wizards as you mention. Even for ranged wizards in parties, when you are beset melee by a shadow or some other monster breaking to the back lines, Arcane Veil is now a reliable lifesaver if your deflection is being targeted - in Act 1, for example, you can literally Arcane Veil then run away from 4 guys engaging you. I didn't see that for the Adragan, it's good. It's still an extremely powerful spell, but maybe it'll be harder to kill dragons and end bosses in 10 seconds with it now.

We Are All Josh Sawyer.

Huh. you're saying Orlans and Dwarves look more similar than Caucasians and Asians? Because in Earth we know that ethnicities tend to be attracted towards each other. Also, moon sized plot hole? Um. Just say that you found an interesting oversight and we'd all have agreed with you.

Great patch, most of the changes are excellent and address a lot of issues. Arcane Veil is a huge deal now, since Hardened, it is +75; that's usually enough to make your wizard have more deflection than anybody's accuracy, for the duration of the spell. Definitely makes a big difference. Fan of Flames and Scrolls of Paralysis were basically I Win buttons. It's just a pity they didn't touch Adragan's Gaze. FoF is still the undisputed king of damage dealing spells for early level wizards, but now it no longer makes sense to stock up 10 FoFs to use on dragons and endgame bosses. Ciphers were also Paralysis Machines, able to paralyse at least one enemy every couple rounds and, on later levels, basically able to paralyse entire groups of enemies permanently. Given that monks and chanters start with zero counters, they needed the rebalance.

The major problem is that your party is very one-dimensional in terms of damage output. Everybody is using one-handed weapons, ones which tend to be faster but have a lower damage output. If your thing does 10 damage a hit, that's zero after 10 DR on an enemy. If someone has an Estoc and does 20 damage, they'll do 15 - because all Estocs bypass 5 DR. Of course, then they can't have a shield, but you can't just have everybody line up the same way with shield & small weapon. I don't know why Durance and Aloth both have wands. There's a similar distinction between wands and scepters even amongst the piddly spellcasters. It also seems you haven't been using the various unique weapons available very much. You should have already found Gaun's Flail, a 20% life leech weapon; there are other options like The White Spire which is a unique Estoc in Defiance Bay available for sale, although sometimes you're better off just enchanting a Fine Estoc (found in Act 1, also purchaseable various places). Burning Lash enchantment also adds some punch. Finally paralysis, blinding, and other debuffs reduce enemies' attributes making them easier to hit, which means more crits. Critical hits are more common in POE than other games; e.g. a rogue could get something like every third or fourth hit be a crit, and other classes can also get quite a lot more than the 5% or 10% that older D&D rules would prescribe.

1.05 beta on steam, with many, many changes. Notes: http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-183-patch-notes-105-in-progress/

The simple problem with any time limit is that players are really, really resistant to it. The spirit meter I thought was superbly suited to the setting, but you just had tons of people ready to kill their mother to get rid of it.

That's their motivation, which isn't what this is about. The fact that the game as a whole doesn't give you an option is a choice by the writers, which indicates that your story is not meant to be "I found out gods are not real, now I am free of them!!"

I don't think it's so simple. The player rarely saw atrocities committed by the gods throughout the game - the gods tended to be pretty benign, Durance's ravings excepted. And Iovara gets a say, but Thaos is just as persuasive. The fact that your choices at the end are all given by the gods and you do not have the choice to oppose all of them entirely is indicative of this nuance.

Yeah, Thaos is probably the one entrusted with the mission, an important figure but not necessarily the single mastermind. It certainly seems true that he sees himself as one of the faithful rather than the Godmaker.