Elizabeth Sterling

Yeah, the fact AI have infinite spell uses gets really *really* old. Anyone who has had a drawn out fight against a party with numerous clerics can attest to this. Unlimited healing and spamming of pillar spells for the AI makes it REALLY tedious.

Yes but that doesn't change that I"ve never needed more than Stealth 4 to loot the town blind. In theory I love the stealth mechanics - you can't just be invisible, you just try to be subtle but a stealth heavy build is almost totally pointless.

I've never found it to be so, though I do have two ciphers, a mage and a cleric in my party atm and they're all busy using their own abilities. The only person who'd have the time to use them would be the paladin and she's busy soaking agro.

I definitely bounced that one [boss] with the spark around gleefully. Actually, with two ciphers with L5 abilities you can pretty much one-hit most bosses and challenge creatures.

Not with you on absolutely all points but overall? Yeah.

Mine: Less cheap, smarter AI. Seems the only truly hard fights right now are when you are hugely outnumbered and/or the enemies pack the party with clerics that spam heals and that stupid OP pillar spell. Less of that crap. More benefits from skills. If you want to restrict leveling make leveling mean more because, frankly, right now spending skill points feels like a total waste of time. Say, a discount on spell learning from lore or a bonus to store prices from mechanics, or a bonus to attacking frozen/fallen enemies from stealth. More meat on the stronghold's bony carcass.

Really? That's too long for you? Similar to Wafflebum I had to load BG1 on a 32x CD player because I only had 1GB HDD space. (Wow, trippy to think I now have 4500 times that...) Or PST, which as I recall was even slower to load. (I also remember the joyous day I made my first upgrade to run BG2 better. 64MB ram to 128MB ram. Damn, that was a revalation.)

Never needed stealth higher than 4 on my thief and 2 on the rest to get the loot and positions I needed. Total waste of time to invest in sadly. (Then again so is Lore for most characters and mechanics for all but one designated trap/lock specialist.) Skills in general are a bit of a waste as they stand.

The lack of holding is extremely irritating, especially as the new targets characters choose are sometimes *baffling*. "So, hey, I just killed this spider and there are five more around me but I'm going to run to the other side of the room to fight that one over there. It bad-mouthed by mother!"

There are some fair criticisms to be leveled at this game. The path is quite linear and (especially early on) the character's 'soul stories' seem to be expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting for lack of more actual conversation and questing. There's also a noticeable lack of musical variation, I agree. Nevertheless both of these aspects can be explained by a lack of budget and time. Pillars of Eternity feels, (and honestly I'd expected from the outset) an exercise in 'what can we realistically do with the money and time we have?' If you went in expecting something as massive and varietous as, say, Baldur's Gate: Shadows of Amn you probably set your expectations too high. Still, I'm hoping for (and I'm sure willing to pay for) some expansions that beef up the existing areas and quests as much as adding more. This game did enough that, personally, I got involved and tthought about how my character might work, abstracted my own ideas and responses, and hat's more than I can say for Icewind Dale. Also, as much as I love PS:T I have to remind people the game is heavily front-loaded. As you progress options and quests seem to dwindle until a totally sparse and sudden endgame. PoE doesn't quite have the same depth and variety of content but it's definitely more evenly spread out.

Except that it's supposedly made legendary by a portion of your essence, not anyone else's. You define what makes the weapon powerful but if you didn't build a character around using spears you're out of luck. Even then it's not an amazing weapon and considering you flirted with genocide and sacrificed a piece of your immortal soul for it you'd think that'd merit something but as it stands it's at best a small piece of extra income and at worst going to make for a few frightening games of lawn darts at the stronghold.

I was going to post this under general but I'm not sure if it'd qualify as 'spoiler' so this seemed the next most appropriate place. I haven't felt quite this disappointed by a drawn out fabled weapon quest since the Equalizer. Perhaps it's just me but all that work and choice seems rather ruined by the fact the weapon isn't that impressive and you don't even get to choose what kind of weapon you get. You get a spear. You get to potentially end a species, sacrifice a part of your own soul and the result is... an above average weapon you're likely not proficient with? Am I the only one who feels cheated here?

Just happened here too.

It has become a constant that no matter what characters will not disengage from combat, even if the enemy is floored or frozen. They will just stand there looking vacant until they're put down and there's nothing I can do about it. This behavior seems to have started recently and now happens at every fight. Current version: 1.03 Specs CPU: i5 - 4570 @ 3.2ghz GPU: Nvidia Geforce 760 4GB RAM: 8GB OS: Windows 7 Professional x64