Tigranes

I'm soloing with a monk (Hard) and I find fists are good enough for pretty much anything in Act 2. As Climhazzard says, I expect it will eventually fall behind with weapons with the best enchantments. Unarmoured works well for Act 1 and possibly longer if you use a party, but it seems more pragmatic to use some kind of light armour, which can get you up to 5/7DR early on and more later. Just decent (12-15) DEX and a decent light armour (under -30% recovery penalty) and you're still getting off Torment's Reach almost continuously. Shield? I can't imagine how that would ever be good.

~80-90 is just fine, even on POTD. By 'fine' I mean your guy isn't invulnerable and you can't just stick him up there without a care in the world, but it's certainly enough to survive with some management and to get through difficult battles. Adra's a bit of an exception with that crazy breath.

Being able to enchant every piece of item (e.g. cloaks, too, since people would want to wear their favourite cloak) would quickly destroy the itemisation system as it stands. A more significant reworking would be required. Itemisation is not great, and it would benefit from one anyway. One simple option is to add a cosmetic enchantment where you do the same thing, gold and some ingredients, then transform just the icon and model of a given helm or cloak. I don't think this should be available for armour and weaponry, because there's a point to making them distinctly identifiable and making unique ones look special, but there aren't really any such unique helms/cloaks.

Agreed. Attribute distribution can matter in the early levels before you have any equipment, but in general it's all about learning how to handle your resources, how to collect XP/money, how to control enemy groups. Interesting. I can imagine the 'magic' classes do fare better in late game. My primary fear with Monk is getting disabled (paralysis, etc). The Crystal Spiders are scary.

6 custom characters is the most powerful party you can possibly have, making things way easier. Try 3-4, taking premade NPCs if you want. mazeltov's rules would make things much harder too. I wouldn't take 5,6,7,8 as they are too restrictive, though. I think POTD on ~3 characters can be fun enough.

There's an option 'Don't Restrict Stash'. If your stash is restricted, you can only access it in towns, inns, etc. If you're on Expert Mode, then stash is always restricted. When it's not restricted, just open stash and drag & drop.

Turn off Auto-Attack in options.

We've had a bunch of these threads but they seem to keep going down the pages. Let's talk (more) about solos. I began with a Druid on Hard, focusing on a fairly typical build: Bear shape with Wildstrike Burn, Might-oriented with decent levels of Res and Dex. Act 1 was tough with a lot of close shaves and several restarts. It was hard to get deflection up to sufficient levels not to get hit enough, and when you get hit too much, your healing abilities - leeching from Gaun's flail and Mark of the beast or the actual healing spells like Moonwell - are incremental and don't help for getting beat down upon. On the upside, the druid has some great Level 1 and 2 spells, and combined with fan of flames scrolls and later the Animat horn you can stabilise. I thought I cleared the path to equilibrium by reaching Defiance Bay, since you can easily get 2-3 level ups and a lot of good equipment. I was doing OK before, well, it turns out Second Chance doesn't work with ironman and the game thinks you died. The problem remained that it didn't seem the greatest build for handling situations where you do get damaged, and I wasn't really impressed with the spell selection on Level 3 and 4 as far as solo utility goes. I am now trying a Monk again on Hard, a Moon Godlike to make it easier. It's my first time playing a Monk so I did an even spread of 16,14,14,12,8,14 (I think). This thing is a killing machine. It took me an hour to clear every Act 1 area except Caed Nua, including the Raedric battle. Unarmed and unarmoured and even with 12 Per you are hitting their face every half second and interrupting many lower level enemies half the time, stunlocking them. As soon as they do hit you, even a level 3 monk can crush them for ~60 damage in the twin Torment's Reach hits. Moon Godlike special also synergises well. With the Animat horn the Raedric battle at the doorway became a breeze, after I took care to wear Fine Hide Armour (DR7) for it. I suspect the Monk's superiority has more to do with me now knowing how to handle solo, rather than the Druid being crap, though. What have people's experiences been?

It ain't good business for publishers to sell 300-500k in first week or two. They'll just say, "we were right! Those niche CRPGs don't sell anywhere near enough for us."

You'll have way, way, way too much money. (But then, you did in DA:O too.) "Wouldnt be surprised if 1/4 of peoples play time involved just resting at inn/getting camping supplies" Only if you insist on wasting 1/4 of your time running back and forth when you don't need to, yes. I have almost zero trips wasted, since there's usually a quest reward to pick up or some shopping to do by the time I've used my two supplies.

Obsidian has been interested in D&D in the past, but the reason you haven't seen D&D games recently is because that license is caught up in a bunch of corporate suits who have no idea what they want from D&D PC games and have done a really poor job of greenlighting any major D&D release. Sword Coast Legends was recently announced calling itself the 'return of D&D', but gameplays suggest that it's not using full D&D rules, and it has cooldowns, 'Mordekainen's Sword II' and other oddities. I have no idea if Hasbro/WOTC/etc will get on the wagon anytime soon.

The amount of mercs you "absolutely need" is zero. The moment you hire any, the game gets a lot easier. Difficulty feels pretty OK with 3-4 person parties, though obviously that does prove the game could be made harder. And POTD isn't bloated at all in terms of feel. It's not really hard / boosted enough for you to ever feel "this stupid thing has a million HP" or "this stupid thing just kills you in one hit". That said, I do wish that Hard and POTD were harder, and harder through more genuine solutions like loading enemies with more devastating special abilities or making them use potions and items.

Uh... so are you saying: "I haven't played Pillars a huge amount, just a few hours, but there are people saying it's too easy. Now I'm going to criticise Obsidian, how could you make the game so easy?!"

Minimally, you only need 1 mechanics specialist, and then nothing else. But everything else has its benefits. Athletics is good to bring up to 3-4 for everybody to avoid fatigue. (You could just rest all the time, but if you're doing that, then a lot of the difficulty and mechanics will be irrelevant for you anyway.) Stealth and Lore are situational. It can be important to have a couple of characters capable of using scrolls - they add a lot to your firepower, e.g. scrolls of paralysis, revival, fan of flames early on. Stealth again can be useful if you're the type to actually try and sneak past enemy groups, or if you want all of them to sneak close enough to open with a ranged volley. Survival is actually only about as effective for everyone as those other ones, since the benefit it provides isn't huge.

Nope, you wait for the GOG patch, just like most other games on GOG.

I can never understand why anyone would so be so anally retentive to make several back and forth trips to sell loot, and then complain about it. Limiting merchant gold is an effective solution, though what it does is it makes players feel they have a bazillion loot and annoys them. I'd have been OK with half+ enemy loot breaking upon death, and everything costing a lot more.

Why would you force players to spend a day or two exploring Od Nua when you can let them go to Defiance Bay or do it anyway?

I agree. They made it way too much of a headache. If you actually cared to resist certain damage types, you literally have to swap armor and carry different sets around. It's the same with weapons. It makes me miss THAC0 and the archaic DnD systems of the IE games, they were easier to understand and just much easier to play. It's strange times when people say THAC0 is easy to understand. Armour types aren't actually so crazy that you're forced to cart the whole shop around. Even if you just went by the main DR numbers and thought "I want more armour, I wear plate", you're mostly fine.

I have no idea what "our issue" is, but there's a patch coming literally every week, so maybe it just didn't make it onto this one.

You can pause as often as you like, though, not to mention lower the difficulty. It doesn't help?

Continue in existing thread, just two hours old, piping hot: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/77738-just-discovered-something-with-armor-duh/

That one is the master staircase, which you can access later coming up from below. The stairs to level 2 of the Endless Depths is on the southeast side of that area. Speak to the statue-woman in the ground floor of the Keep to dispel the energy barrier blocking the way to level 2.

You can't leave the area, but when you get far enough away from enemies, combat ends. (Sometimes enemies can be very persistent, though, and the area where you can safely run around might be too small.) Combat actually ends a bit too easily. If you lure forest trolls to fight the bandits who stole the smith's shipment in Black Meadow, for example, then run away, kill the one guy that follows you, you might find that combat ends. You wander back to where they're smacking each other, and combat doesn't begin for you again until one of them decides to engage you instead of each other.

Yeah, see, it's one thing for the foreigners to curse in foreign tongues. But when the game spells "duke" and "earl" as "duc" and "erl," even though the pronunciation and meaning are identical, I kind of feel like the writing is being a little self-indulgent. Just a little. (Now, if it were pronounced "duck," on the other hand, that'd be awesome.) Duke was spelled 'duc' in actual history; duc is the Old French root for duke. Similarly, note how Caesar was transformed into variations like Kaiser, Tsar and even Kayseri for the Ottomans. Earl was also eorl in Old English, and in some cases, was interchangeable with jarl. Such things have never been set in stone. It's not any more "accurate" for POE to use duc than duke, it's a fantasy setting. To me it's interesting that they will set up these variations to insert that extra bit of strangeness. I don't see how it's 'self-indulgent', really. It's better than all the "God-Emperor-King" or "Knight Captain" or "Space Commander" BS. And of course, if all of those things were completely different, and all dukes in the game were Bloopiedooples and all the earls were Wichamagas, then everybody would complain there's too many new words.

I don't care whether the OP 'cheesed' or not. Why bring the inquisition upon him? More to the general point, it's pretty ridiculous that petrify increases damage taken. I think if there's one thing everyone can agree on, it is that Adragan is a stupidly overpowered and stupidly designed 'win game' button. Of course, one might argue that D&D 6th level spells were even more powerful, as disintegrate and flesh to stone were Save v. Death. But in IE games you had very little chance of disintegrating or petrifying a dragon. You could Finger of Death a dragon like Firkraag, but that required you to go in with a proper setup to breach and lower resistance, and keep your party alive for several turns at least. In POE, the only question is whether your Adragan kills it in the first turn or you need to cast it a couple more times, if you have a wizard. Unsure if the trap Adragan has the bonus damage, though, does someone know for sure?