JONNIN

I'd like to see you bring people back to life that aren't full con barbarians or fighters, considering that the resurrect spell kills almost everyone once its initial effects wear off. Paladins have no single purpose, their abilities are unfocused and spread all over the place. Furthermore, its only real tanking ability is again from a level 1 talent that's given to all (PC) Paladins automatically. Its other class skills are downright bad compared to other classes, the only reason why you'd state that the Paladin is alright at support is if you never had a class like a Priest or Chanter in your group. You don't need to play the game on PoTD to see just how lackluster the Paladin is. Sure, you can finish the game with a Paladin in your group, but is that really high praise when you can also finish the game with just one party member? I really recommend you reading through threads like http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/77839-are-paladins-really-not-that-bad/ before you'd reply again. Honestly the resurrect is just to get my priest back up, who then heals himself (ideally) and the fight continues. I don't think it would do a bit of good on most anyone else, as you said. They have other tanking abilities. Lay on hands self heal or to heal your dps buddy is handy. DR aura (sure its only 3, but that is 3/hit over a long fight). It can suppress negative effects -- getting rid of debuffs that make it take damage making it tank better. Another choice buffs F&C. It could be a better class, sure --- going full damage sponge, after those abilites you end up investing the rest of your talents into stuff anyone can get like sword & shield style or other defensive choices. After playing thru the game a few times, no, its not my first choice anymore, but remembering my first play through, the paladin saved the day many a time.

Well, the defination of ranger is a tough one. BG games were using the D&D rules and the D&D ranger paradigm. But ranger means everything from LOTR where it is a race/lineage, to D&D where it is a fighter-druid hybrid, to other games that took the root word "range" to mean "ranged weaponry user" which is what POE has done, along with some other more exotic concepts of the class/term. This game isnt BG based and it isnt D&D based. The ranger here is just a ranged weapon specialist with a pet. That is OK. I agree they should have their own unique style, and they sort of do: ranged attacks. But its a little bland, for all that. as for WS -- noble offers 2 ranged weapons, secpter and rod, which might make an OK build. Most folks seem to be loading up on the slowest, hardest hitting stuff, and those are middle of the road but they do offer ALL THREE damage types (pierce, slash, crush) so one could make a solid build from it.

I think that they were priests of Berath. I didn't use them, in part because I found them ugly. But also because even enchanted to Fine, they wouldn't have enough DR for my taste at that point in the game. I stuck with scale armor, IIRC, for a while before switching to padded armor and eventually some excellent or superb robe. (It might have even been Eder's Scale armor that has the Second Chance enchantment going for it.) Yes, the choice of armor for a monk is going to be something to consider very hard. Early game, you can run nekkid and do just fine going all out damage. Mid game is where it gets tricky -- you don't yet have the best robes and belts and such, so your DR is too low, -- mid game to me was a good time to wear heavier armor and then you can remove it again late game when you find the robes and other items. My level 12 monk still only has an excellent robe (I actually have at least 3 with different DR enchants). If you spend the resources you can enchant the priest robes to have a pretty good DR combined with belt and such all on a very, very low loss to attack speed. Its just an interesting item that worked well for me, ugly as it is, and you can get a bunch of them early on.

I think there is a disconnect on what a long load time might be as well. I do not consider a few seconds to be "long", 10 seconds is getting there but still not worth getting worked up over it. 300 mb might take a moment from the disk, but it should remain in your gigs of ram so enter/leave that zone should be lightning fast. Instead the reverse is true, it gets slower over time. I can only speculate what is going on in the code, but somewhere, someone dropped the ball. Game has a low # of bugs, though, and I prefer a little inefficiency to bug ridden, the developers all around did pretty well all things considered.

the races that require you to be nearly dead before you get ANY bonus are the worst. Orlan (crits to hit version), moon, wood are all extra strong. Pale elf is not terrible for a tank. Amuaua resisting even some of the knock downs can be handy. But all that aside, the real issue is not wood elf. The real issue is balance problems -- accuracy is just about the #1 thing for every character of every class, and deflection follows. I would rather see accuracy and the combat mechanics tweaked than mess with the wood elf, if something just *had* to be changed. Honestly at this point leaving it alone is perfectly valid.

when they work, it is like a free spell, and a powerful one in some cases. Excellent for narrow paths where the NPC must walk on it. Not so good in open areas.

I doubt the item storage for the entire game exceeds 200KB, and that is being extremely sloppy with the storage from a super compact ideal and probably considered being ultra efficent by someone who was in a hurry to just get it done. If they did it casually it could easily eat up a full MB or so.

one interesting item early on are the robes you find for the priests of Bsomething. They have only a 5% reduction instead of 15 (I think, not at the game currently) and can usually be upgraded to give a modest DR with minimal penalty. You get a full set of these robes (at least 6 of them) so you can save some to enchant heavily in the late game and use one right away with a basic 'fine' + slash reduction or something like that. That and some of the other items that provide bonus to deflection and specific DR boosts (usually belts, a few other items as well) can give you nearly nekkid level combat speed with a soild 10+ DR towards the midgame, say nearing the end of act I.

Paladin is *excellent* for its intended purpose. It is a tank. It can heal, "resurrect", buff the party with auras, and be virtually immortal. It is not a high damage class and expert players are able to make the higher damage classes tough enough, making the class less desirable amongst the more hard core players. Folks that just want to play the darn game once, casually, might love to have such a durable character that can bring the priest or mage back up mid fight. I have had one in several parties and there is not a thing wrong with it. Ranger has a major flaw in that loss of the pet has too big an impact on its performance. If that were fixed the class would be fine. Even with this flaw, it does strong dps from a distance, which has a lot of merits. Its not a bad class, it just has a flaw. Honestly, worst class award for me goes to the wizard. Small subset of spells in each book makes knowing a bunch of spells moot, and having to rest to recover them stinks, it lacks endurance, it lacks accuracy (making many spells easy to resist), and it lacks for punishing damage dealing magic; you are usually better off to just use debuffing spells to enable melee attacks because magic damage is too low. Paladins: I don't see them as "excellent" as is. They may be decent at what they do, but in all honesty, I think that the real flaw with them is the concept of paladin as "DnD Warlord". I'd rather paladins be more of a Holy Warrior class where their abilities focused entirely on making them more capable combatants, not in making allies better. Rangers: Agree. If that death of the AC penalty was removed or severely reduced, it'd be a great improvement. Wizards: Oh, boo-hoo. Wizards have to rest to get their spells back, and they have to be a little more circumspect about using the spells they do have, rather than being able to dump their entire bunch of spells each and every engagement. Boo-frickin'-hoo. Paladins, again, are excellent at staying alive and providing a secondary healing capability. One can argue how much that is needed, but that is what they are very good at doing. I would say it is perfect for the guy that just plays the game thru one time on normal and then moves on. Wizards: its the package deal. Any one of these issues is indeed a lame thing to whine about, but the total package is weak. It has no redeeming qualities compared to the cipher until very late game, and then only on 2 or 3 endgame boss fights where you do indeed drop all the spells (from a tailored set for that boss) in the one fight. If it could use any spell known but only a few per rest, that would make it more of a useful choice vs a cipher. As it stands, though, the cipher is simply more useful -- I can clear 2 maps without a rest with a cipher. The wizard lasts about 1/3 as many fights, assuming that I cast 1-2 spells per fight regardless of which caster is in the group. The resting aggravation could be changed and that would be fine -- instead of having to have these mysterious consumed items (what are they, disposable tents??) make it 1 rest per 24 hour period, but do it anywhere you like as much as you like. Trucking back to town because you used your tent up for the wizard is just a timewasting mechanic of extreme annoyance.

Paladin is *excellent* for its intended purpose. It is a tank. It can heal, "resurrect", buff the party with auras, and be virtually immortal. It is not a high damage class and expert players are able to make the higher damage classes tough enough, making the class less desirable amongst the more hard core players. Folks that just want to play the darn game once, casually, might love to have such a durable character that can bring the priest or mage back up mid fight. I have had one in several parties and there is not a thing wrong with it. Ranger has a major flaw in that loss of the pet has too big an impact on its performance. If that were fixed the class would be fine. Even with this flaw, it does strong dps from a distance, which has a lot of merits. Its not a bad class, it just has a flaw. Honestly, worst class award for me goes to the wizard. Small subset of spells in each book makes knowing a bunch of spells moot, and having to rest to recover them stinks, it lacks endurance, it lacks accuracy (making many spells easy to resist), and it lacks for punishing damage dealing magic; you are usually better off to just use debuffing spells to enable melee attacks because magic damage is too low.

Please tell me what this "kiting" means. I don't speak gamer geek. As for keeping the AC alive. I don't so much worry about keeping him alive as much as I don't want him instantly charging into melee and dying in the first couple of seconds of battle and causing my ranger to be gimped almost instantly with the accuracy penalty. Holding the AC back for a bit before letting it go in is usually good enough. Kite is an object which flies in the air attached to a string. Kiting in a game is similar : the enemy is on an invisible "string" (it wants to go in a straight line toward the player and attack it). So the idea is to move around in a way that the enemy is always chasing but never able to catch you, exploiting the game mechanics to never take a hit while slowly killing the enemy with ranged attacks. The strategy is often used in MMO type games to exploit kill enemy that normally take a group of players, using one one player and a great deal of patience. You can, of course, google any term you are unfamiliar with. I am not sure the term is really hard-core gamer geek. I leave you with a video to explain the tactic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aW9-wv6gGg

Need? No. But it is nice to have and sorting is super simple to do. What I would most like to see is stacked items on vendors. I hate trying to find that unique sword that I wanted to buy that is now lost amongs the 8000 kobold shields, spears, hats, and other general rubbish that I had sold to the guy. Nothing like scrolling through 50 pages of spears...

what long load times? I am seeing only a few seconds to load, and my system is a bit dated and is currently using a cheap hard drive instead of a fast one. I would think a raid0 high speed drive pair would be nearly instant. Or a flash drive. If its more than a few seconds to load, be sure your machine is running clean, defragged (assuming windows) and with minimal junkware/background processes etc. Also be sure to re-start the game now and then, about once an hour or so. Its not super leaky, but it does get slower over time, it acts more like it is trying to cache too much per session than a true memory leak? Regardless, restarts keeps it running slick. 2-D, 3-D, its not that. Efficient code is efficent and runs fast, inefficient code is slow and does not. The art of writing fast code is dying; computers are so fast that even garbage runs "fast enough". I can't see any reason to "render" anything --- a game like this could be done with one giant image file that you scroll around, all that is left is to draw the enemy, players, and loot onto the scene. They did not even make the scenes rotatable like neverwinter nights 2, so it does seem to be an old school image overlay / sprites type game which should run so blisteringly fast that the computer should be virtually idle when playing it.

You can build very LOW micromanagement parties but you will always need to do it somewhat. On normal, such a party could beat most of the trash fights just by hitting group up / attack buttons and let them go to it. Here and there you might pause to use a per encounter ability or a heal, and boss fights** will require a lot of micromanagement to cast the correct spells and coordinate, but you can certainly go from constant pausing to almost none for about 90% of the combats. ** boss fights is a loose term that includes the occasionally stupidly large pulls where you can get 15 or more enemy coming at you. Idea for a point and shoot group would be moongod pally X2 frontline damage sponges, monk X 2 frontline killers, priest, cipher. Priest and cipher play ranged dps until a spell is needed, which is rare. You might stop here and there to burn off a monk wound for attack speed. You might stop here and there to debuff the group with the cipher to assist the melee (the level 2 spell that roots and causes paralysis will carry you thru most of the game, and charm anything that gets on the casters, those 2 will carry you all the way thru normal mode play). Its probably wise to stop now and again to position the team, for example split into pally/monk teams rather than all 6 bang on the same victim. Not quite point and click combat but you should only be pausing right when combat starts and maybe 2 or 3 times total in the rest of the fight, not too bad. With this concept, because you are not micromanaging them, you would be wise to armor up the monks and casters. I recommend full plate with +crush enchant.

If the only way to keep the pet alive is to run around avoiding hits with cheezy kite tactics or to burn per-rest spells --- well, the advice and tips are appreciated but I am not terribly keen on this type of play. It just proves the point of the thread... when a melee pet can't melee and is instead expected to kite, that is flawed. When you need to burn per-rest spells every encounter to keep a weak party member alive (normally, I only use priest spells for the biggest, toughest fights) there is a problem. I guess the best bet is keeping it out of combat entirely and avoiding the "whole party group up" button even on trash.

I have not restarted much, but I keep making new parties to try out the classes / races and various things. I deleted my first 2 or 3 games not long after getting my keep unlocked... druid shapechange focused char with really bad build was my first, I need to re-try druid with a better understanding. I think I have nearly 10 different games going.

the monk can *be* the tank, if you strap on armor and reduce his dps a bit. Also, he comes with a skill to wound himself, so you can get the 1 wound cost attack speed skill going without being hit -- which again is solid dps without even mentioning any of the other skills at all. Also, the AI often targets the person wearing the least armor, or so it seems ... the monk has no problems being hit in most fights. It is a little odd to play this way, but the mechanic does not really cause any major problems, it just is not that hard to be hit as a melee character, unless you build it to not be hit, which you wouldn't DO for a dps monk... I looked thru a completed game's beastiery journal and very few things resist crush damage as their highest defense, FWIW. Barbarians and monks are neat in that simply changing their gear out will turn them into pure tanks, raw dps, or somewhere in between the two if your stats support both roles. The other melee can't quite pull this off as smoothly (they can do it to an extent, just not quite as flexible). As for intellect on a monk: the big one here is the passive one, I forgot the name already but every wound gained results in a damaging aoe (its not impressive but at times I have gone from 0-10+ wounds in 1-2 seconds...!!) so he is kind of constantly exploding onto all the enemies around. The class has some other aoe skills, the flying kick and so on, but a build around the passive bomb would be the only reason to try for a 20 int or something weird.

just keep working at it, many things work. Debuffs are key, though, it has too much resist and armor etc to just beat it down with brute force. A melee heavy group may struggle here. First time I tried it, my party just all fell over dead repeatedly and the combat log would not even say why. I had to go away and come back later. An old bumper sticker at the conventions used to read .. "sometimes the dragon wins" ...

well, no. The animal is not as strong as the figurine pets, and when it dies, it causes all kinds of problems for the ranger. A figurine pet dies, nothing else happens. And it does not get knocked out as the fight ends, it is knocked out in the first couple of swings on higher difficulty settings, even on normal that happens enough to make the entire class a bit weaker/unbalanced. I would rather have a 2 or even 3 round stun upon pet death than this neverending penalty to damage and skill use, something that acknowledges the death of the pet in a reasonable way.

before, I could cast the paralysis/root skill twice before earning any focus at all at very low levels, allowing my melee to crit-kill the two most difficult targets in whatever group without a lot of trouble. Now the class is a little more like the chanter, having to build up a little before cutting loose, and I can live with that. The aggravation is that before this change, the talent to add 10 focus was mostly not necessary, now it might be worth having --- that is good from a balance/choice standpoint but bad for established characters that did not take it...

Why, it totally makes sense that a level1 class ability should be as strong as a full-fledged Fighter companion ! A companion bear should outperform Eder at holding a bear ! A party of rangers should be able to kill an Adra Dragon with their animal companions, without firing a single shot ! That's how strong ogres are. Things you propose should make Ranger class take two companion slots. I'm forced to conclude I'm just a much better Ranger player than you. You probably are a better ranger than me (seeing as how I have close to 10 games with a main character of most of the classes), but you (intentionally?) seem to have misread what I said. I have not focused on any one class really -- and if I could claim to have done so, monk would probably be the one I have done the best with. When I said beef it up to ogre status, I meant tank side, not damage side. I don't care if at level 12 the pet is doing 1 damage per swing. But it needs to not die easily if there is going to be massive penalties. You get a debuff AND about 1/3 or more of your skills are borked when your pet dies. And if you know some way of keeping the pet alive after mid-game, *share* that info. yes, I can keep it out of combat, but that is only slightly better than dead and even there it still dies to enemy aoe. If the pet is expected to be alive and in melee combat for skills to work, it should not die from 1 hit in nearly every fight. Period. As for the dragon, well... 5 chanters and a tank could drop 10 ogres on the dragon. That would be a paladin tank/healer to babysit them while they work up the chants. This would be stronger than 6 rangers each with an ogre quality bear, dps and all.... which just goes to show that crazy home-made parties can be unbalanced and very powerful, this is but one example of such. And like I said, as the ogres die, summon more. The bear is not stacking up to that very well. Neither are the deer or the wolf or the rest of them.

Race only matters a little. All races get +2 to stats (zero sum -- dwarf is +3 -1 = 2) and unless you want to totally max one stat, the race does not matter. Ideas for a monk include dwarf and amuaua (spelling?) to get a 20-21 might starting out, but other races may have merits as well. Might is very important, at least 15 IMHO. Con is very important, 15+ dex is very, very important, 17+ int can go either way. A powerful single target killing monk does not need it. If you prefer to use some of his aoe abilities, it is good to have more than 10. per is important because it beefs up durability. (10+) res is important because it beefs up durability. (10+) Pure dps glass cannon monk might go 21/19/18 or something like that (depending a little on race etc) and whatever is left spread amongst int/per/res. Monks work well with no weapons for much of the game. It takes a heavily enchanted weapon to out-dps their unarmed attack, but unarmed is crush so at times you may face crush-resist enemy and want to swap to some other type. Monks take a hit, that becomes a damage over time effect called a wound. Wounds enable damage dealing abilities, some passive and some active. One of the best active ablities increases his attack speed. With light or no armor, high dex, and increased attack speed (and, with talents, extra damage on top of the speed...) that alone will result in high damage output. The monk is fairly durable but without armor you have to play carefully. I use a mix depending on how dangerous the area I am in is --- at times I wear full armor and attack slowly but I prefer to drop the armor for a heavily enchanted robe and go for all out speed killing. Management of the monk is mostly allowing yourself to be hit some but not too much, burn the wounds, and kill stuff, while deciding how much armor you need in a given area. You can change your party makeup at any time. But your standard group depends on your preferences. Personally, I would carry the fighter or paladin or both to tank/damage alongside you. I would have the cipher and chanter and priest in the back, giving buffs, debuffs, and healing. But you could easily replace the priest or cipher with the druid. Avoid the wizard, he is very poorly rolled. The paladin is poorly rolled but it can still tank somewhat in spite of it. The ranger is also fairly weak. You *may* consider rolling your own rogue to add to the group -- there isnt one to join you. melee dps mechanics... accuracy, might, attack speed, damage type or DR bypassing, those form the core of it. Back that up with buffs and debuffs and at higher levels a heavily enchanted weapon(or pair of them). A paralyzed enemy is going to die fast to a monk, and the cipher can paralyze one about as fast as the monk can get to and kill it, making a deadly duo. The monk piles on damage by hitting many times in a short period of time, boosted with talents and class skills, its is nasty. The monk does not seems to perform correctly with unarmed/armed mix, even if the weapon is offhanded. It seems to revert to a 1 weapon equipped mode. Just so you know.

It might handle that, but normal difficulty is normal. Saying that the pet can break even, bearly (lol), on easy-mode is not really making me want to rush out to roll a new ranger. When you face ogres, the pet should be able to take a couple of hits from an ogre. When you face dragons, the pet should be able to take a couple of hits from a dragon. The stupid test I gave aside, the pets don't scale at all and after about level 4 or 5 the pets fall over dead instantly, the ranger is perma gimped with the dead pet debuff, and that makes the class as a whole underwhelming. No matter how you slice it, it makes zero sense that the bard has pet dragons and the ranger has a 1 week old bear cub. Maxmin vs role play ? Ill bite there too. The ultimate ranger for fame is either aragorn, who is nothing like a pure archer with a pet, or for the pet /d&d ideal of the class: drizzit. Drizzit had a cat that could go toe to toe with demons, dragons, the second best swordsman in the universe, ogres, orc-kings, and anything inbetween. My bear can take on a bear cub with a 50-60% chance of success.

stealth is only useful for a stealthy group. If the entire group has high stealth, you can posiiton right up on them without being detected, or walk into a room, take the loot, and walk out without bothering to fight annoying trash. One character can steal loot, but the whole team needs it if you want to position. mechanics: one character needs very high in this to detect hidden loot, deal with traps, and deal with locks. Also setting traps can really swing a tough fight your way. athletics: every character needs *at least* 3 in order to not need to rest all the time after fights. 5 for each character might be a better long term goal. lore: use scrolls. I like to put healing scrolls on various non-healers for emergency use. And you can put damage or crowd control scrolls on your healer in case your wizard/cipher went down. survival: find more plants, supposedly? It also helps duration of a few items that have a duration like regen potions. This can be very handy on anyone, if you craft/have enough potions/scrolls/food.

The chanter is the pet class. His pets scale with level and do not invoke a penalty when they die. Hmm, a bear with 10 DR that does 5 damage per hit or a PAIR of ogres or a dragon? Which, if they actually die in a combat, can be replaced? And the chanter may not have the ranged abilities of a ranger but you can sure build an elven one that can do reasonable ranged dps. The ranger is unplayable for me because of the pet death penalty. The stupid pets die nearly every other fight and penalize the ranger for it. Get rid of that, I can live with the weak pets. Or beef them up .. to say at *least* 1 ogre status, by level 7 or so? Here is a perfect example of how to understand how bad the ranger pets are: a simple little duel you can do at home in about 10 min. Step 1: roll a ranger with a bear pet; difficulty only on NORMAL. Feel free to take any level up pet enhancements you want. Step 2: work your way thru the intro and to the bear cave in the area before the first city. Step 3: duel the bear in the cave with your bear. do not help the bear, just duel bear on bear. step 4: reroll to a working class after seeing how the level 2 bear enemy destroyed the level 2 bear pet. I am NOT saying the pet should kill or significantly damage or anything else the enemy here. But the NPC will ONE SHOT the pet, unscathed. The pet should be able to at least hold him there for, I dunno, 3 or 4 shots with a bow? It can't do that.