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.

Actually, both of the auras got buffed in the last patch so that's not entirely correct, GoldenAnkh. Zealous Endurance now converts 15% of enemy hits to Grazes, which does offer a limited amount of protection against hostile CC, since the grazes are a lot easier to recover from, so if that's your priority Endurance has the marginal advantage. With regard to the choice though, I'd say go with the bonus you would rather have on at the start of battle. For me, that's accuracy since I place a high value on landing my opening shots and the start of battle is also the time when my party members are the most likely to be clustered up enough to all benefit from the aura. If you're more concerned about what your enemies will do to you, though, then by all means go with Zealous Endurance. Both are solid bonuses in their own right but both are also outperformed by level 1 priest buffs, so in the end their unique contribution to most fights will likely boil down to either 15% of enemy hits converted to graze (Endurance) or 15% of your grazes converted to hit and possibly 5% of your hits converted to crit (Focus). Pick whichever one appeals to you more; neither one is going to make or break you I'd think.

You should be able to stack two 'boons' from the prostitutes in the Salty Mast on top of an Inn resting bonus to get you quite some way. Big Durmsey's Boon should have a Resolve boost, and there's an inn stay in Brackenbury that gives you a major boost to Int (I want to say +4?). For gear, there's Lilith's Shawl at the top of the Lighthouse in Ondra's Gift (+3 Per), the Dunryd Demon helmet for sale in Copperlane (+2 Int), a hat sold by the Dozens' merchant that gives you +2 res at the cost of -1 Int, and a number of armors and accessories that should have stat bonuses. If you can't find one with the stat you need, you can also enchant a +2 stat bonus of your choice to any piece of armor as long as you have the right ingredients (there's a merchant in the northeast of Ondra's Gift during nighttime who'll hook you up if you're short on the necessary gems). Another option for resolve is backtracking to gilded Vale to get the Dyrwood's Pride rest bonus (+2 Resolve). Finally, you can also get Perception from eating Ixamitl Ricepan and there should be similar dishes for Int and Res as well. With that statline, clearing this quest point with stat checks should be doable provided that the option hasn't been patched out since I used it, but you'll likely have to spend a bit of time finding the right combination of prostitutes/inns/gear/food to buff your stats first.

What I like least is bringing along a blank slate Adventurer companion because I need to crack some skill checks, even if that's all I'm bringing them for. One personality-free puppet of self-insertion per game is quite enough for me. Handy when you need a mechanics specialist on hand and don't want to tie up your actual party members with Stronghold chores though. Of the actual written companions though? Eeeeeh, it seems I'm going to put myself in a minority here, but I really rather enjoyed all of them. They all had interesting bits to them in their own right, and while I can name favorites easy enough, trying to pick a worst is honestly a really tough call. If really pressed, I'd have to go with Kana. I like him well enough as a character, but aside from a scant few conversations his arc kind of begins and ends with the first few levels of Od Nua. Pallegina comes a close second for very similar reasons, but squeaks out narrowly ahead because I think there's a lot of potential to the core concept of a Paladin whose personal convictions about what's right clash with the ideals they are supposed to uphold to as a member of their order. It's just a shame that that conflict gets boiled down to you browbeating her into making a single judgement call one way or the other and after that she's just...there. As said though, I find the characters all quite likable in their own ways so this is less a worst and more a most squandered potential kind of deal.

Not sure if you're still looking for info, but the Vailian Republics are basically a league of revolter city-states who broke off from the Vailian empire and band together to protect themselves, so if your character rebelled against the empire themselves they'd probably be pretty well disposed towards the republics, or at least find their existence politically satisfying. Old Vailia doesn't really have a strong voice in the proceedings since none of your party members are from over there, but I'd assume they'd happily swallow the republics back up given the chance. That being said, Verzano himself is not necessarily a credit to said republics. As Pallegina herself points out, he's basically outlived his usefulness and become a drain on resources rather than an asset to them, which is why he's muscling in on the Doemnels' racket in a desperate bid to salvage his profits. So yeah, I'd say the more relevant factor here is how much of a good guy you want your character to be and how merciful they are towards an obvious scumbag who just tried to throw them under the bus and is now pleading for help. Personally, I left him to answer for his own actions, which pleased Pallegina and was pretty alright with everybody except Verzano himself of course. But then, my character was a Pirate whose chief motivation was being pissed at the fact he tried to pass off a high-risk job with a basic fetch-and-deliver rate of pay, so obviously that's quite a different angle to approach it from.

If I recall correctly, convincing the record's Keeper without Defiance Bay rep is actually a multi-stat deal and it's made trickier by the fact that one of the checks is made in secret on the NPC's side rather than one of your conversation options so if you don't meet the criteria, you won't know that the check is there. I am not 100% on the specific stats, but I want to say the requirements are either 15 or 16 Resolve to try to reason with the record's keeper and 16+ Perception to notice a detail in his reaction to your request that opens up the "It's okay, I am a foreigner too" dialogue option, which is what convinces him to do it. Resolve alone doesn't cut it, and the Might option is a red herring since he'll point out that you can't make good on your threats in the middle of a guarded government building. I pulled this off with a character dedicated to digging up dialogue options (14 Per/14 Int/14 Rest) with Lilith's Shawl and a +2 Resolve item equipped, so I'm fairly confident thant 16 res and 16-17 perception together should do the trick. That option itself might require Int on top of the perception, but if so the requirement *shouldn't* be more than 14 since I don't recall having had any Int buffs at the time. So uh...hope you didn't dumpstat Perception?

I also had a very rocky first run with PoE (using a Rogue protagonist in my case), especially where Shadows and Shades were concerned, so I can definitely empathize with that feeling of hopelessness when your party looks just fine but you still have a ton of close calls with ordinary mobs. I recently did a second run, bumping difficulty up to Hard and playing as a Monk, and while I still had some frustrating fights the whole thing felt far more under control and ran a lot smoother. As for why it's hard, I'd say that depends a lot on what playstyle you followed with the IE games (how frequently you rested, what your approach was to exploring and clearing areas, how heavily you relied on consumables, stuff like that) since I imagine that'd have a big impact on what kind of gameplay habits you brought along with you, but to list what personally tripped me up and had to be learned for Poe: *Don't be shy about using your consumables. I have a habit of hoarding potions, scrolls and other single-use bonus items, and while I usually get away with that in the old IE games (aside from chugging health potions and odd oil of speed/potion of heroism/potion of invisibility), that's a habit that can really bite you hard in PoE. Most buff potions and low-level scrolls are both plentiful and fairly cheap and they can make a world of difference for you against tougher fights. In the particular example with Shades you mentioned, for instance, some scrolls for Fan of Flames would work wonders. On that note, consider spreading the Lore skill around your party members, even the Fighters or other characters you normally wouldn't think of as casters. The difference that scrolls (especially higher level scrolls) can make for a fight really can't be overstated. *The number of guys on both sides matters a lot more in PoE. No matter how weak an enemy is individually, they can still be a major threat to you simply by giving a flank to somebody who can hit you hard. As a result, the tide of battle can swing very quickly against a character if too many enemies gang up on them, even though their defenses look solid and they're well armored. To protect against this, focus on trying to hit enemies with controlling abilities, stuns, or status effects that harm their accuracy early on in the encounter so they don't get a chance to gang up on you. Spells like Chilling Fog, Curse of Blackened Sight, Fetid Caress, and Slicken are all good clutch defenses and available to wizards even at very low levels. Also, unlike their BG/IWD counterparts, these spells don't have a sharp dropoff in usefulness when you reach higher level enemies, so they'll serve you just as well against endgame fights as they do in early encounters. Learning to time and position them right will pay off in a big way. *Tanking damage is a lot less viable in PoE than it is in the IE games. The Health/Stamina system effectively puts a hard cap on how much healing you can pile on a character to keep them standing, since there's all of two abilities that recover Health, both of which are underwhelming and no good in the thick of combat. As a result, your best defense is to make sure your characters get hit as little as possible by boosting up their defenses (Deflection in particular), piling on DR to minimize what damage you do take, and to try and make sure the damage gets spread out as evenly as possible between your party members. Hitting the health cap is another way in which enemies piling onto the same target can overwhelm party members fast and it can really catch you with your pants down if you aren't resting regularly. You've probably also noticed that drinking potions isn't the same instant fix as it is in Baldur's Gate/IWD and can be interrupted if your character is under a lot of fire, so there's also an increased importance on making sure your healer is backing up your frontline guys. *Much like your consumables, your abilities are also meant to be used well and often. The temptation to conserve bigger spells and per-rest abilities for later was probably the biggest thing for me to shake, but when it comes to PoE, there are very few fights you'll want to resolve with just normal attacks. In particular, make the most out of your per-encounter abilities. On a similar note, don't be shy about experimenting with the spells you have available. You're right in that a lot of them are situational, but since casters other than Wizards effectively have a Sorcerer setup (being able to use all spells you know, without having to memorize a set) my experience has been that just about all of them have some use, and a core group of them are useful on a regular basis. For Priests, I'd definitely recommend making liberal use of Blessing, Armor of Faith, Withdraw, Consecrated Ground, Suppress Affliction, Divine Mark, and Iconic Projection to name a few. *Class diversity helps a lot in PoE. While I wouldn't call it wrong or impossible to work with the setup you're using, I'd consider bringing in a wider range of classes rather than doubling up. Wizards in particular tend to get more valuable the higher the difficulty setting is, so having two of them in your party on normal difficulty might leave them feeling a bit underwhelming and lacking for useful things to do. Consider replacing Aloth with either a Druid or a Cipher (you can find a Druid NPC in Stonewall Gorge, and a Cipher NPC in Dyrford Village respectively) to give yourself a better range of spells to work with in a fight. Ciphers use a point pool to cast their spells, which they can refill by dealing damage with their normal attacks, so they'll give you a lot more quantity of casts in battle, and Druids are the dedicated area damage guys in PoE so that might feel more comfortable to work with if you like to use mob-nuking/damage-oriented mage setups. Similarly, while two fighters definitely makes for a solid front, having a defense-oriented paladin for a second frontline guy might be worth a shot for the passive Aura buff and access to quick party support abilities (Liberating Exhortation in particular). There's a soft auto-leveling feature for party NPCs to keep them all close to your main party in exp, so you can experiment with different party compositions as you go without worry of having anyone fall too far behind. If your party consistently fails to perform, I'd consider switching it up to see if a different combination works better for you. So yeah, those were the main points that helped me through. I know this might all look very daunting, especially when combined with what everyone else in the thread is already saying, but for what it's worth: yes, your reaction is perfectly normal, and yes, it should get easier with time. I'd say the main reason for difficulty in PoE is that there's a lot to process with battles and gear loadouts, the mechanics look familiar but play quite differently from the IE D&D games, non-caster party members have more options and therefore require more micro-management, and the UI can unfortunately be frustratingly vague and reluctant to let you know what you need to know at times. I'm not sure if/to what extent you're using them already, but for me setting up a set of automatic pause conditions and having the game speed shift to slower every time combat starts was a big help with getting a handle on everything that's going on and something I still make use of quite extensively. That's another thing that could be worth fiddling around with if you find yourself wondering what just happened a lot. I will note though, Spirit mobs are no joke and can be some of the most frustrating enemies to fight unless you're exploiting their weaknesses. As others have noted, spamming fire is your best bet for doing damage, since they have monstrous base DR and quite formidable Deflection (as well as access to a blinding attack) that makes most other attacks do very little if anything at all. Damage-wise they're very vulnerable to fire, which makes Burning Lash enchantments for your weapons and basic fire spells like Fan of Flames very good bets against them. If memory serves they also have pretty puny Fortitude, which makes them easy to stun temporarily with Fetid Caress and the Fighter's Knock Down ability. So yeah, hope the game opens up for you before it wears out its welcome. It's a lot of fun when you get a handle on it, but that can definitely take some time.

First of all, you can use the level 2 Priest spell Suppress Affliction to negate any and all debuffs, Fear included. That should get you through the fight just fine and there are rings with a spellbind for the same effect that you can use if you don't feel like bringing a priest for some bizarre reason. The effect could come from one of the Xaurip Shamans casting Divine Terror, and Dragons also have an aura that passively inflicts that status on you (vs Will) if you're close enough. I forget if Cail has one of those too, but if he does that's your likely culprit. Either way, definitely mouse over the tooltip; if it's an aura then you could well be dealing with a status being constantly repeatedly applied to you rather than simply permanently hanging on. As long as it has a duration listed and it degrades appropriately, it's definitely WAD. If the effect has no duration at all, has a broken tooltip, or persists after combat ends then you probably have a bug.

I'd imagine enemies are not aiming Charm at your paladin because you have another party member with a weaker Will defense and the AI likes to aim where your defenses are the weakest. You should have no shortage of enemies trying to charm your Paladin once it becomes a more prominent effect or if you present your Paladin as the first target for enemies by sending them in ahead. As for Liberating Exhortation, the effect works fine as far as I can see, but Charmed/Confused/Dominated allies are not counted as allied so they aren't a valid target.

By my understanding, staying in combat is more a result of proximity to hostiles rather than visual range of hostiles. It's perfectly possible to be 'in combat' with an enemy on the other side of a solid wall without them actually seeing you or engaging you in any way (I discovered this when working on strats to get around Adra Dragon), so you are probably too close to the skeleton mage on the other side of the wall to leave combat. If this is the approach you want to take, you will either have to put more distance between you or find a way to lure the enemies out of that room so you can establish the necessary distance to break encounter. If you have a move speed enhancer on hand, you can try to make all the skeletons chase you to the east side of the tower, then pop Shadowing Beyond and run for the stairs. Whether this is as Obsidian wanted it to be or simply what they decided to do to avoid encounter breaks due to sketchy pathing or problems with visibility I can't say.

IWD offers interesting combat, large range of options in character customization and multiple options of quest resolution at the expense of an on-rails linear plot progression and a complete lack of party member personalities. DA:O offers the neat concept of actually having a playable background story and a bit more focus on the party members, at the expense of setting depth, having to deal with a cringey ham-fisted 'romance', dumbed down combat and bare-bones character customization as well as having the side-effect of rapidly degenerating into a fantasy mass effect reskin because console sales. Personally, I'd rather PoE stayed on course, polished up the encounter design, shed some of its more questionable inclusions (*cough* Stronghold minigame *cough* stealth sections that need the entire party to come with you to proceed *unconvincing cough*), provided more party member interaction on the level of Durance/Grieving Mother and maybe threw in some more interesting racial abilities for the ones that got the crap end of the stick. The core concepts are all solid, so my hope is that with this game as a foundation, Obsidian will be able to focus more resources on doing some more interesting things with the lore and mechanics they've put in place.