Undesirable

Good point, that means a Paladin \ Rogue dual-wielding with riposte can be powerful.

Build a tanky party that has lots of summons, buffs, heals and uses firearms

Does anyone think single-handed pistols with the Rushed Reload modal is a good alternative to dual-wielding? e.g. you boost your mechanics throughout the party and get Scordeo's Trophy as soon as you enter Neketaka, and there you basically have a dual-wielding Superb weapon with bonus hit to crit if you take Single Handed weapons skill?

Animal Companion: Is Active | Not ✔ | Action: Companion | Target Type: Enemy | Prioritize By: Nearest Target If you wish to conserve Bond, set another conditional for Ranger Resources.

Your Faith and Conviction bonus will be impacted if you choose a paladin whose beliefs go against your choices, but I don't think this applies to party members so if you choose something other than paladin for your main character then you can do as you please.

I thought people were reporting that the game is difficult enough now in POTD with scaling turned on? I'm finding it pretty challenging. The op says it's all about leveling being too quick and accuracy, but if the enemies are scaling along with you, surely that makes up for it?

Please tell me in what way a drug that you have physically ingested is arcane and prone to being neutralised by a spell? If this isn't a bug, it's a disgusting nerf. I mean, come on; this should blatantly only affect spell buffs that have been cast on characters. If they need something to detoxify you, barbarians could have a bear hug skill to force the drugs back out of your digestive system.

Is backstab / assassinate full attack now?

I can't think of a compelling min / max stat building reason to choose Human as starting race, and I don't see many / any other builds on this board where they've been used or suggested, outside of RP reasons. Humans should get something like 2 extra attribute points to assign at the character creation screen or an extra talent (yeah, I did get that idea from Legend of Grimrock).

Why would dragons try to hunt whales when there is far more accessible prey on solid ground?

You can go toe to toe with them reliably with a level 16 Dragonslayer + foods. If you didn't get Blackwarden's Breast from the Iron Fort, it's trickier though.

That's one thing I hope they've improved upon in the sequel: erm... loot in general, really, but more about WHEN and HOW you encounter loot. I can think of a number of ancient RPGs that allowed you to improve your lockpicking skill with... lockpicks for instance.

It was me saying it's terrible, I'm aware you didn't make a direct comment on its virtues or lack thereof. You can't think it's that bad if you think it spoils the wonder of the game if someone reads up on it though.

Knowing the ins and outs of a terrible random loot mechanic spoils the mystery and wonder of the game? They should have seeded the loot from the beginning then and made sure that each item drops at least once in the random containers.

It sucks that the only hope of getting a Mechanics bonus is from a random drop, and that has survived 2 expansions + numerous patches. Just to tease us some more they also keep changing up the random loot mechanics.

Are you going for The Ultimate achievement? If so, then you will have to use cheesy tactics at one point or another. Either luring them into doorways or splitting them off. The maths doesn't add up otherwise... no single character can be guaranteed to soak up hits from all directions without having a very weak offense, at least in the early game. Learning which pack of enemies you can or cannot attack in a given area is also tedious. If you're not going for The Ultimate, then you might get away with not splitting packs of enemies off but you'd have to be lucky or save / load a lot which can also be considered cheesy. This game wasn't designed with (primarily) solo play in mind, the solo achievements were added because it is remotely feasible. Now I must plug my own Shaolin Dragonslayer Monk build, which provisions for solo play in addition to end-game dragon encounters. Is it designed for The Ultimate achievement? Not really, but good luck finding fool-proof builds that are.

Actually, yet again Baldur's Gate comes to the rescue as the best RPG series ever, as you can roll attribute points as often as you like at character creation until you get 95+ points to allocate and then you get ridiculous artifact items to increase your stats to godly levels. Also dual-class until you can freeze time and hack enemies to bits before they have a a chance to react. It's a shame Charisma is basically worthless throughout BG2 though. I would say PoE is significantly more balanced, sometimes to the detriment of fun, but oh well; fun is subjective.

I only found one myself, but it may have been widely known and fixed by now. I summoned a LOT of minions in the Adra Dragon encounter back in the early days of the game when figurine summoning didn't expire after a certain period of time. It broke the AI so nothing was moving or attacking and I could destroy everything at will.

If each point of res gave 1.5 or 2 points of deflection instead of 1, I think it might be a viable stat again, since deflection has been horribly nerfed in the past.

I was wrong. ;P

Shock Druid and Chanter are two of the most powerful classes in the game. You just happened across a difficult encounter. Try putting lots of Moonwells down with your Druids.

It's up on the original post at the top, but for some reason you have to disable site protection (turn https off via the padlock icon in the browser bar on this site only) to be able to view the hotlinked YouTube video. Here's the url link: Llengrath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzJZ2weDrHE Alpine Dragon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JohBhITG0mw

I'll put a YouTube video up soon with encounters, but since this build can knock dragons down pretty much every time you use Force of Anguish, and can teleport between mobs at will... you can pretty much guess my tactics. Oh, and if I got turned into a pig or rat, I frantically ran around like an idiot until I transformed back. Anyway, I need to get to bed at the moment, I'll write down the strategy in full later and / or post video.

I fixed the numerical error in the Talents and Abilities list... guess I can't count. The Resolve error comes from the fact that I forgot to factor in Steadfast's +1 bonus to Resolve. I must've switched to fists when I was counting all the stats up. ;P

Now I've tested the build against all dragons, and it is successful at killing slaying them all in under 5 minutes. I have also made some tweaks to the build and included more info, including which equipment to use in the early - mid game to be successful.