Aea

If memory serves, he asks you to look for a knife made of March Steel which would indeed be a White March reference.

I've really got my fingers crossed for Blast as the Wizard talent. I've been itching to do a gimmicky Deadly Implement Monk build, so the ability to add a bit of AoE onto it would be great. Though granted, I'd welcome anything to make implements worth having since the only class that can make full use of them is also a class that really shouldn't be caught doing normal attacks to begin with. It's probably more likely that it'll be some form of basic spell though. An unarmed combat bonus does seem like the likely candidate for the Monk one, and would make sense for any non-Monk people with Weapon Focus: Peasant. On that note, I'd also love it if you got a Wildshape as the Druid's one since that would open some interesting opportunities for more combat-oriented classes, though that may again be wishful thinking. Curious what the Ranger's emulating talent would be as well since the companion is such a double-edged sword. Baby's first Binding Roots maybe? But yeah, whatever the specific talents end up being, it's good to see more of them in this direction. Nice as stacking bean counter bonuses can be, I've always been a sucker for character upgrades that give you access to new things your character can do and I can already think of several uses for out-of-class Sneak Attack and Charm. More talents is of course always nice to have, but I'd expect the cross-class ones to be the meat of it for this expansion. If things were planned differently, the announcements would likely have advertised it a bit harder. I'd also expect it to take a while before we actually get a list, since the entire function of the talents might still be subject to change until QA is done with it. It's far trickier to balance a whole new ability than an incremental buff to an existing one after all.

As already pointed out, whilst you might find them tedious, others like them. It's not like you would actually be giving anything up to max out Survival on a party member, so what you have is an entirely optional gameplay element. If you have any other ideas about how you could make Survival give tangible benefits, I'm sure we would all love to hear them. Thing is, all that's being proposed here is you'd get an advance warning on your upcoming fight with a procedural mob. That's...not all that tangible at all. It's introducing busywork into the game so that we can then turn around and claim that Survival is useful for eliminating the busywork, whereas the skills that currently do matter matter because they have a serious impact on your ability to survive. Mechanics clears traps and locks and lets you set traps for encounters, Lore unlocks the permanent easy mode that is Scrolls, Stealth lets you dodge unwanted encounters and position yourself favorably for wanted ones, Athletics protects you against eating fatigue penalties mid-combat and against needing a rest every time you move from one screen to the next and it's already kinda in the 3-and-done bracket. Without a relevant bonus of its own to match, Survival is always going to feel token in comparison. Now, to look past your token snark and actually mention things that Survival could do to make itself useful? An impact on crafting, at least of consumables, could be a start. If a higher rank in Survival granted you access to crafting higher level foods and potions with better buffs, it would pretty effectively justify itself in a Mechanics kind of niche where you'd have one character highly focused on the skill. To expand it towards more generally viable rather than something you max out on a hireling and make use of in-stronghold, there's the option of having Survival let you get more detailed information on monsters you're fighting (say, specific info on any monster whose level is lower than or equal to your Survival skill), things like specific defenses, accuracy, health totals, special abilities, resistances etc. Heck, I'd even welcome Survival giving a general boost to your visual range or letting you detect hostiles at range with some kind of visual indicator (as opposed to restricting that to event-specific things). At least then it'd have value for letting you get set up for combat or avoid encounters, similar to Stealth. And of course there's also the option of having it impact how many materials you can salvage off plants and dead monsters, on the grounds that a survival expert would be better at harvesting the relevant bits without damage. Y'know, something that actually has an impact outside of specific 'you must have this much survival to pass' things. Like I already said, I'm all for a more engaging wilderness and better use for Survival as a skill. I just don't think a repeating pool of random events would make the wilderness engaging and certainly don't think that Survival would be useful just for the ability to avoid encounters that you can already get a zero-sum outcome of with some dialogue choices.

The trash mobs would be tedious, doesn't make it worth diverting points into Survival and away from skills that actually give me tangible benefits.

I remain unconvinced about the presence of trash mobs. To go back to the idea as presented; Bandit ambush kinda sounds like a trash mob fight or pay to not have to put up with a trash mob fight to me. Encounter a young bear is potentially a trash mob fight once, after which it's a complete dud event because you already know the correct response which makes nothing happen. Knights are either a blank or a trash mob fight, except the outcome depends on what you did outside of the encounter. All three options share the common trait of the trash mob fight being the only actual thing you'd get out of them (unless you count losing what would ultimately end up a trivial amount of coppers). So yeah, that's three glorified trash mobs in my book. My wider objection though is not to having to fight things once in a while (I can deal with that, at least it's something to engage me on the commute) but rather the prospect of having to scrape through an increasingly samey pool of 'random' events every time I need to stop by a wilderness area. Half of these could relieve the tedium all of once...after which you know the correct answers to give and they just become another repeating feature of the tedious commute. This all sounds great for when you picture getting the odd dragon, the quest, maybe one case of the bear cub...but what if you keep rolling bear cub off the table? What if you get nothing but bandits over and over? Unless there's a limit to keep options from re-firing, dragon and quest in particular are going to get very silly very fast, whereas if you do impose limits but not across the board you're narrowing the pool down until we're basically down to the bandits, the knights, and the bears again. As stated, I'd rather have properly scripted and fleshed out content with a similar ambush premise rather than a random dice roll. And honestly, if I'm going to have to deal with trash mobs, I'd rather we got onto the combat rather than having them waste my time by running the same dialogue by me every time first.

The funny thing about this is that unless you go outside of intended options and directly attack the knight, not only will this not break relations with the Crucible Knights but they actually won't even care. Some of the generic NPC knights will remark on it, but you won't actually get any faction reputation penalty whatsoever. If you're already buddy buddy with a faction (i.e. have started doing their faction-exclusive quests) then the other factions will not let you take the alliance-breaking quests for them any more since they'll say you're too invested in the other faction. So yeah, you shouldn't have too many problems there.

If memory serves, Marking only grants the accuracy bonus to allies who are close to the character with the Marking weapon. So yeah, ranged markers like St.Garam's Spark won't do much for you unless you're pretty much shooting at enemies from reach/point-blank range and to the best of my knowledge the effect is indeed silent. The actual effect is unfortunately far more restrictive and underwhelming than its description would lead you to believe.

I do recall those days actually, well enough to not really be that keen on wanting them back. Hammering the reroll button over and over in a desperate attempt to coax a number above 10 out of it is not terribly engaging gameplay in the long run, warm nostalgia fuzzies aside. Goodness knows I um and er long enough at PoE's character creation screen as it is anyway. That being said, it could make for an interesting challenge mode if you had a Trial of Iron type of setup where your stat points got assigned at random once (no rerolls) and then you had to ironman it through the game on what the dice gave you. It's something you could set up yourself with a handful of d6s, come to think of it...hm, kinda tempted now actually. That aside, I'm quite glad to hear that Forton's been brought back in, and that we're finally getting a little bit of Ixamitl into the mix. My last full playthrough was a Monk from Ixamitl and it was a little disheartening to find that that was pretty much the perfect wasteland in terms of background/class-based interactions. Going to be nice to actually see what a character from over there is like. Question though, do we have any word on the price point of this/future expansions? Also, with regards to the Part 1 on the front there, does this mean we're only getting the first part of an ongoing story with this expansion or will the story of White March part 1 be self-contained, if possibly referenced/expanded upon in White March part 2? I'm definitely itching for more content, but being left on a to-be-continued always leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Considering they're already pursuing two options for revenue gain that don't fall under any of those three (TCG Spinoff and adding expansion content to the base game respectively) it would seem pretty obvious that the folks at Obsidian disagree with your assessment there. Also, you do realize that all of these three necessitate major mechanical overhaul, which presents a significant entry cost in both money and development time? Going multi-platform, especially when your game was not designed from the start with multi-platform compatibility in mind, is not just a matter of copy-pasting your existing game data and expecting it to work. The same goes for multiplayer. PoE was designed to be a single player experience not just mechanically, but story-wise as well. Much like with the Baldur's Gate multiplayer options, you'd have one player in the role of the Watcher, making all the decisions and reaping all the benefits, and everybody else in the roles of blank-slate tag-along goobers who are basically just there for the combat. There's also mechanics like disposition which would take quite some remodeling to adapt to a multiplayer setup. I mean heck, right now just NPC priest/paladin companions are already screwed over. This would only get messier with actual active players in the mix. So with regards to the OP's proposition...no, that kind of conversion does not sound feasible or worthwhile. Even setting aside the issues with trying to adapt what is very clearly mechanics and game structure designed for single player for use with multiplayer (let alone to support persistent worlds), maintaining a functional multiplayer of the kind you're envisioning would require dedicated staff to be committed to it and would greatly increase the game update workload Also, while a modder-friendly toolset would be nice, an NWN-style affair is not something the base coding and design decisions of the game (non-tilebased maps in particular) lend themselves to. For something like this to be implemented, it'd likely be less work and less expense to simply create a standalone title designed to accommodate these features from the ground up. Considering that Obsidian have been quite clear on what kind of games they do want the PoE titles to be though (dedicated single player experience with a heavy focus on the narrative) and that their staff is likely already stretched pretty thin between existing projects, I wouldn't hold my breath in expectation of an NWN-esque spinoff anytime soon.

Just continue with the plot and head into Twin Elms. The riots will end once you've had a dialogue with the gatekeeper at Hearthsong (the fact they ended will be indicated in the dialogue), after that point you're free to head back into Defiance Bay for business as usual.

Yeah, the failure to reload outside combat should have been fixed by now (it was reported as such), but if the problem persists even with the latest update then the method above works. As long as your ranged guys are holding their guns when combat ends, they will automatically start reloading. That will give you a way around the problem, just be careful not to give them other orders until they finish reloading since that will cancel the action.

There's no real word of canon on this ingame, but the way I've interpreted it, Goldpact Knights are basically very strict mercenaries. It takes money (likely lots of it) to get them to act, but once they accept payment for a task, they consider themselves duty-bound to complete it without double-crossing or changing terms. So with regard to the situation you posited, if no payment was agreed upon then I'd imagine a Goldpact Knight would not consider themselves to be under any kind of obligation to see the task through, so yeah, if the other party presented themselves as a rational choice and there was no previous agreement to the contrary, there probably wouldn't be a conflict. However, it would seem rather unlikely for a Goldpact paladin to be in that position in the first place, since they would likely insist on a formal agreement of compensation (and of what the task entails, precisely) before they'd agree to pursue a quest on someone else's behalf in the first place. Passionate and Aggressive are both disfavored dispositions, which would indicate that acting on emotion and impulse is behavior that's very much frowned upon by the order. Add in that Rational is one of the favored dispositions, and that would seem to indicate that the basic expected behavior is to be careful and discerning about who you work for, with the understanding that once you agree to start the job you've effectively also agreed to see it through to the end. Ultimately, though, individual paladins will still hold their own interpretations of the code and ideas of how strictly it should be applied, and Paladins draw their power from the strength of their own personal conviction, so roleplay-wise the more relevant factor would be how your character interprets the code of their order rather than what that code actually says.

That's the oldest magic for you, making your stat check problems disappear with the aid of a well-endowed Orlan. ;D But yeah, the boons are a thing and I was happy to find that they're separate from Inn bonuses so taking one doesn't give up the other. There's a lot of stat boosts like that around the game, it just usually takes a bit of busywork to round them all up.

Eeeeh, on the whole I've got to disagree with this idea. I'm all for making the wilderness more expansive and involving and I'd certainly like to see the Survival skill actually be good for something, but these kinds of procedurally generated mechanics - especially in RPGs - tend to devolve into tedious busywork when you put them into practice. Personally, I find the procedural Stronghold events grating enough when I can't travel more than 24 hours' worth in a go without running the risk of one coming and going, temporarily penalizing my rep with a faction on the way, so I can only imagine that having my travel from point A to point B continuously interrupted by the same small pool of randomly decided events, rabid wildlife and suicidal bandits would just be downright infuriating. As said, I do agree that the wilderness could be more expansive and should offer more incentive to explore it, but I'd much prefer it if that incentive was properly written and realized quests, NPCs, and background storytelling (similar to finding Fulvano's gear and journey notes for instance). Using procedurally generated content to fill a void like this usually just makes it feel more hollow and unengaging than the one-and-done approach on display currently.

You are likely seeing the result of your attack grazing enemies rather than hitting them. (check your combat log for the attack to confirm or deny) Grazes do a lot less damage than normal and grazed status has far shorter duration than normal, so if you're only getting a second or two of mileage from your debuff then odds are that you just grazed. To avoid grazes, focus your attack on enemies with a weaker defense (In this case ones who have a low will), debuff their defense before dropping your attack on them, and apply accuracy buffs to your own attacker. The other thing to note with Charm and Domination in particular, though, is that if you apply it to the only hostile target in the fight, the debuff will vanish on its own about a second or two later, presumably because the charmed/dominated enemy has nobody to fight. So if you are getting legit hits, that would be the other likely culprit.