Tigranes

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Bounty XP is far too high, giving several levels on its own. If you don't do bounties or Od Nua, then even if you do everything else you'll only reach Level 12 near the end.

They're all 1/rest. They're all extremely powerful, pretty much the most bang for your buck.

Of course enemies will start running at you, instead of standing still watching you kill them. Cast your spell estimating where they will be. Same principle as, say, throwing a grenade at a moving enemy in a FPS. If you don't like having to choose between more than a couple of spells and if you don't like reading dialogue, this game may not be for you. But if you do want to give it another try, yes, playing a fighter, ranger, or paladin would be the most straightforward. You can also hire custom adventurers at the inn. You can go entirely without a wizard, or at least carry only one.

I'm devastated that it took half the page for the joke to be gotten.

There's a lot of ways to make area of effect spells work. Basic example: corridors are usually wide enough so two party members can take the brunt, then a mage for instance can stand in line with them to fill the corridor, but not attracting too much enemy attention. With Arcane veil or other defensive spells, the mage is able to stand there for 3-4 'turns', blasting everybody with fan of flames. Summon a creature in the fray of enemies away from your characters' front-line, and as that creature nears death, hit everybody there with AOE spells. Etc. But it seems you want to play without much micro or detailed decision making - fair enough. You'll be just fine with foe-only spells on Normal.

If there was no friendly fire, you would never need to think or make decisions - just fire at them whenever there's more than a couple. Friendly fire is necessary so you have interesting tradeoffs. You can try and jack up the Reflex on your Rogue, for instance, so that if he's surrounde4d by enemies he's still got a good chance of evading that fireball while others get hit (a time-honoured tactic in IE games). It also means it's harder to get a clean shot on things like Fan of Flames, which otherwise would be so powerful that you just use it infinitely every single battle from behind. Enemies also friendly-fire each other. Only 'AOE' abilities have friendly fire. 'Foe AOE' means no friendly fire. And the intelligence modifier as described above applies too.

Just play POTD. In terms of how it feels, it isn't cheaty and it's not annoying. There's no infuriating one hit kills, massive HP bloats or anything. If anything enemies are still too vulnerable to disabling spells. Once you know how the game works, POTD is the Normal.

It's meant to be early Renaissance-ish. Kana does talk of cannons and the like in his homeland.

Sagani can be an extremely reliable and consistent damage dealer. Certainly better than Pallegina's godawful stat spread + Paladinness. I haven't played everyone's quests all the way through. I think nobody's really dislikable but nobody really stands out as amazing, either. There are moments - Eder has a few great lines, Durance is far too convolutedly written (what the hell are you saying man?) but has a fantastic story - but there's a lot of untapped potential, e.g. Alroth let down by poor writing.

Not really. Rather it has to do with their approach to game development i.e. when it's done it's done. You realise that means the same thing, right?

Spell Strike, I believe, is a spell which fires on a critical hit with that weapon, once per encounter.

I like how the OP apparently knows exactly what a 4 million RPG is meant to be like, so that he can judge POE based on it. Tell you what, I - and a number of other posters here - know fairly well what kind of budgets, team sizes, engine choices and development schedules RPGs have had over the years. Why don't you back up your seemingly randomly careening statements with something that's below the clouds?

In-lore, I think Dyrwood itself as a colonial melting pot region makes outright or institutionalised discrimination less likely, though you do see many NPCs talk about other Orlans in a disdainful tone. And of course, the major 'racial' division within the gameworld is with the 'natives'. I'd think things are different in the Republics or Aedyr.

Well, the player voice sets that were "professionally" done are pretty bad. There's maybe one decent one, and one more that's good enough. Plus Aloth sounds racially confused. He keeps jumping between Noble Elven Wizard and Anx infused Dwarven berserker. His lines are all over the map. Not impressed with his VO at all. Some of the others in game are ok, some would better silent as well. I agree with player voice sets. But, uh, Alroth is meant to be that way. (I do think his voice acting is pretty poor, but not because of that.)

Good points, I didn't think it that way, and was struggling to make full use of those Wizard self-defense spells. I'll try that with my current POTD run.

I don't think it's bad practice to demand metaknowledge for some things. Take that to the extreme, and it's like saying WSAD should be taught explicitly in a mindnumbing tutorial because you shouldn't expect people to know that from the start. I mean, what would be a clear way to communicate this? Should the mechanics description say "beware, locks and traps in late game can go up to as high as 11 mechanics"? You might as well also write, "you will require very high deflection in late game." On the other hand, there's a wider point that many aspects of skills aren't explained adequately in the game, e.g. that mechanics governs secrets not perception, or that athletics is often checked in text adventures, or what exactly increasing stealth does. You claimed that companions were inferior mechanics monkeys. I don't need to prove that wrong with statistics, in that case all I need to do is present a case which falsifies. Companions do just fine as mechanics monkeys, even if they don't start by putting all their points in it. There's enough leeway. Early beta was a section of the mid-game, of course you didn't need max mechanics. How is that any more useful information than my silly anecdote?

Exactly. I can't say without actually doing the numbers - which is what I just told you. I'd say it's an equally unsubstantiated claim, though, when you say that many players do not expect they need to specialise their skills. You get five skills. You get six characters. In any well designed RPG you know not to have everyone be a jack of all trades. This becomes especially true when you can see from skill description how scrolls require higher Lore up to 10, and after a few areas of the game where you encounter increasing mechanics difficulty.

Depends on how much you want to minmax. If you mean create the most powerful party possible, I'm sure somebody else can help you, I haven't even tried Barbarian or Monk yet. But another way is, I think you can pretty much go with any class composition, and then try minmaxing to get the best out of them, which is another fun way. I think POTD is winnable with most party makeup. I'm currently going through with PC melee Rogue, Kana, Pallegina and Alroth. Which is technically zero tanks and a couple of widely panned classes. I'm doing just fine. To get back to 'best party composition' though, I think Ciphers' ability to stun and charm indefinitely put them above Wizards. Melee rogues I think can achieve higher damage output on single targets than ranged rogues or rangers, but are of course at greater risk of an early death.

Oh, I'm sure we can do that.

Hmm. First time round nobody bothered with mechanics, then I just pumped Durance once I got him because I realised what was up. He ended at 8 or 9 and I rarely had problems. But I can't say for sure without actually doing the numbers.

Some people like voice acting. Some people don't need it. None of them want to spend effort creating many, many, terrible, terrible voice acting. There's a reason it costs so much and it's so often still crap. We've already had a thread about this, by the way, where people told you exactly the same thing..

actually, the skills curve were a surprise even to many beta folks. is no way to know, before playing poe, that you do not have enough skill points to effective max more than one skill per character. why would it be unreasonable to think that you could be endgame effective with 2 skills? sure, after playing the beta we learned very quick that the game were skewed towards encouraging us to max at least a few o' the skills (+11) on different characters, but with absolute no knowledge o' the system or the game, that isn't a logical assumption to be making. regarding skills, am glad we played the beta. HA! Good Fun! But from the early game, you start to encounter a steadily increasing scale of locks and traps, which teaches you that you should increase mechanics at least every two levels for your mechanics character, right? Otherwise you wouldn't be keeping up anyway. And if you did keep up, you'd end up at 8 or 9 at least. I actually don't remember many 11 mechanics locks, except the ones you can open with a key. Maybe there's more that I didn't find in my first playthrough? I mean, sure, you only need so high for Lore and Mechanics, but that's because the other skills are poorly utilised.

Blizzard is basically the only game developer in the entire world that can afford to bugtest and balance for 2 years.

Wording is confusing. There are two points here: 1) Do all KS backers get the expansions for frree, or does Feargus mean the people who already paid $20 up front for the expansion? I would have to assume the latter, but in that case, it's stupid of him to say it this way. 2) Do KS backers get the expansion "early" as a beta, or does Feargus mean dividing expansion into two parts means everyone gets it 'early'? I assume the latter, but again, it's silly to say it like that.