Tigranes

No. If that keeps happening, you should (1) lower the difficulty, and (2) if you have done so already, consult some of the many beginner's guides out there to help you get a grip on the combat system, because this would mean your party is struggling with every battle right now.

And to think people complained about IE wizards because they had to stand there and suck their thumbs for the first 5 levels...

If you find secrets without doing anything, they aren't secrets, right? You might as well just have them be normal containers. Traps too. You might as well get rid of them. "I play a very specific way and I would like the game to be changed to make it a bit easier" usually ends up breaking a lot of different things for different people.

Oh, I certainly don't think setting up tactics is super-easy. I just think controlling your party members is a huge part of what IE games and POE are about, and a big part of what sets them apart from other CRPGs. As I've said before, a tactics system would be a nice thing to have for people who do want to play that way. But I can see how it was not top priority for Obsidian, and hopefully it'll make it in in the future. You're randomly bringing in immersion (which can be used to justify anything) and some human evolution fluff, are you wanting people to disagree with you? I mean, I could just go on and on about how the repetition compulsion is wired into the human psyche. Shall we hold a 3-day conference?

Wait, so "balanced" means you shouldn't die? That sounds terrible. If I never die, I might as well play on god mode. If you want to play that way, that's of course fine. Things you can do are to take 6 party members as soon as you can, to play on easy mode, and to keep characters like Eder who tend to be easiest to make durable. Remember you can also craft and eat food when going dungeoneering, as they tend to last a long time and those little boosts do add up. I don't know what that has to do with claiming the game isn't balanced because you die. But hopefully those things help.

Oho, not bad. Looks like they fixed literally every single significant bug, at least the ones I've read about.

Priests can be pretty powerful, though they're unlikely to ever be the super damage dealer in the party like a cipher can easily be. As Anthile said they're unlikely to be as good as, say, Eder in frontline combat, or as flexible as a wizard, but the tools they do have are quite potent, and so it's more about playing to the strengths that a priest comes with. The +10 accuracy talent is an important one (e.g. it can be Sword & Arquebus, and Sword/Shield & Arquebus are good setups for a priest). To me the most obvious way to play the POE priest is have someone who trades deflection & DR for recovery, puts on medium or heavy armour and shield, put some boost into accuracy and concentration, and then sit just off the frontline putting in AOE party buffs, knocking some enemies down, perhaps a weapon with the "bonus for attaacking same enemy as an ally" trait.

Wait, so all you needed to do was travel to the Vale and back (an action which takes 30 seconds), and Brighthollow would have been completed...? I suspect Wait wasn't included so people couldn't just spam wait and finish all the stronghold stuff. But it should have been added anyway, even if it isn't a big deal.

I hear that POE is reasonably moddable, though perhaps not the most accessible or manipulable. It's a pity if we can't have a Weidu-style though. No mod manager for subsequent RPGs have come close to the excellence of Weidu. I'm personally hoping for some mods that improve encounter design and load enemies up with more abilities & potions.

I would be offended if they weren't working on the bugs, or if the bugs were unusually bad compared to other RPGs, or if the same bugs kept appearing in every game they make.

+1 What are you going to do? "I've looked into your soul and NOW I WILL PUNISH YOU because I totally know you're guilty"? I suppose Durance would approve.

http://poedevtracker.net/ Scroll down a bit - it seems they're planning a patch tomorrow, as long as QA testing checks out.

I ignore the backer NPCs and tombstones. It's a crazy solution, I know, but it works! (I do like reading some NPCs every now and then, but there're too many to read all)

Cipher PC, Eder, Durance, Sagani. (Hard) I find 3 or 4 is a good compromise so that the game doesn't become too easy or clusterf***y, and still to see the companion content.

Tactics scripts would be nice for people who don't want to manage the combat. I think Obsidian thought about it, but it couldn't make the cut into POE1 at least. I personally don't see what's so fun about them, though. It's like playing on god mode because you just want the story. OK, whatever works for you, but I'd rather not slice out a big chunk of what the game is about.

Well, if you avoid combat and do a lot of quests, that will give you XP and make the game easier, too, you know? Because you will have 'unnaturally' avoided combat, so for example if you go back to some Act 1 fights at level 6 it will be much easier. But in any case, yes, there's a lot of stuff to do in Defiance Bay without combat.

Wouldn't it be really easy to guess that you are a Watcher, though, once you find you can read souls and you learn a bit more about the lore? it would have been interesting to have only tiny glimpses of such soulreading until Act 2, and instead have the Act 1 plot be more about chasing some more mundane objective - e.g. trying to track down possible solutions to the hollowborn problem, being hired by an animancer, believing Thaos to be a rogue animancer and chasing him, etc. It would have required wholesale rewriting of the plot, of course.

I wish that's how it works, because then no competent game would have any bugs. To put it simply, every time you change any one thing, it can break other things in the code. That means no matter how many times you test things, you will nearly always have some bugs. That's why games get patched; and that's why developers test those patches before releasing them (which is what is happening now, and which is why hotfixes aren't always a good idea); and that's why patches, no matter how well tested, can possibly introduce new issues. Obviously, you want to reach a place where the only bugs and hiccups remaining are very minor, and you want to reach that place before release. But since the point of developing before release is to add new features and tweak gameplay, it's almost impossible for PC games, especially CRPGs, especially (comparatively) nonlinear ones like this one, to not have bugs. Anyway, that doesn't mean it's OK to have bugs. It's a good thing the new patch is coming very soon. It's just that (1) hotfixes aren't always a good idea as they can break new things, (2) bugs in a game doesn't mean devs were stupid or lazy or forgot something - otherwise everyone at Bioware, Bethesda, Ubisoft, you name it, would be stupid and lazy and forgetful.

Those cantrips will either be too weak to be worth using for anybody above level 3, or they'll make the wizard too powerful (and similar to ciphers etc), no?

Ah, interesting, so there's a bug associated with that too. In any case, continue in that thread!

Funnily enough, many people complained that BG1's story was too superimposed, that you never seemed to do anything involved with you personally or the main plot until the very end, that Sarevok was never around till the end, and so on.

That's usually an effect of item filters. Next to your inventory and also in the store & stash screens you see the weapon, armour, potion, etc. icons - if you press any one of them it 'filters' by greying out the others. (Stupid, I know.) Make sure all icons are unpressed.

I really want to hear all of your voices, trying to do good voice acting. Can't wait.

Bladder's Gate!

You keep chant on. You wait for the chanter to complete the required number of phrases. Make sure that you have a chant loop set up in the chant screen, so that your chanter is chanting continuously. See how Kana's set up to do it, if you've got that far.