Aea

Aloth has a few extra things to say for keeping him with you. He has an interjection after Never Far From the Queen that starts his personal Two-sided quest, another one after the end of act 2 (you can get the same dialogue by talking with him at the stronghold, but not the same ambiance) and there's another one if he's with you when you go to Twin Elms and start the Council of Stars quest, provided that you already completed his Two-Sided quest. To the best of my knowledge, the last one will not trigger on its own if he wasn't in your party at the time and it's the big one where you can finally push him to take a stand one way or the other regarding his...personal problem. You may be able to trigger it by talking to the sisters again while he is in your party but I haven't confirmed that. The decision you push him to determines his ending, though if you didn't trigger the conversation he will still make that decision based on which way you swayed him in the conversations you did have. Generally, speaking, he's a good one to keep along if you want his full content. Durance has significant interjections in the Cinders of Faith and Council of Stars quest (the latter when addressing team Galawain). Since his quest is progressed by taking rests with him and talking through key topics, he's good to keep along. You will also need to discover some things in conversation with him to finish the quest. Definitely a pain to clear if he's not a main party member. Grieving Mother's quest requires setting specific triggers in conversation with her then resting with her in the party. Tends to resolve itself naturally if you exhaust all the conversation options with her and keep her along. She's also capable of helping you resolve the last part of Éder's personal quest and reach a more positive ending for a certain quest in Dyrford if she's in your party. Extra conversation if she's with you when you address Hylea in the council of stars. She's the one party member who can permanently disappear (outside of outright telling her or Durance to get lost) so it pays to explore her conversation tree in full if you're not a Cipher. The progression is easier than durance since each time a new event with her is ready to fire, you'll get a note in your quest log telling you that she'll probably say more later. Her outcome depends on what you choose to do based on what you learn about her and how you respond to her final request. Depending on what you do, her attitude towards ending choices and certain other things in the game will also change. Kana's stuff is mostly tied to his quest, but you get to have a few extra conversations with him if he's in your party when you see particularly twisted animancy/Engwithan things (Sanitarium in particular). Sum total of the opinions you push in these conversations affects his ending. Sagani will have an extra conversation with you the first time you interact with a spirit while she's in your party. She also has a number of conversations on rest while she's in the party, first when she joins and one extra for each checkpoint on her quest path. As with Kana, the stance you take on her conversations affects her ending, though what you say at the end weighs the most. Hirávias's ending is entirely dependent on the answers you give him during his quest. He has some banter and short conversations with no particular triggers as far as I know, but they're purely flavor and don't have any impact on endings. Pallegina's ending is determined by which way she goes with her quest and whether the ending you choose creates a weak or strong Dyrwood. She has a couple of encounters outside of her quest as mentioned above and some extra conversation if you bring her with you when addressing Hylea, but that's about it. Éder has flavor conversations for a number of things, including your degrading mental state (these are rest out in the wild specific as far as I know) and some in reaction to events like encountering the Dozens for the first time or having him with you for the end of act 2. He also has a small conversation with you after you encounter a central plot NPC down in the pit and a fair bit of interjection if you take him with you to the Eothasian temple in Gilded Vale. His ending is determined by his personal quest, though it may be affected by which way you go in your overall conversations as well. If you want to catch the absolute most conversations then the favored main party is Éder, Kana, Durance, Grieving Mother, Aloth, temporarily tagging in the others to clear their quest lines and trigger their conversations in the middle. Everybody has their own reactions to the NPCs in the pit and their own parting words to say in the end though, so on the whole you should go with the ones you like the best really. Quality over quantity and all that.

That is 100% certain? Even so that most likely would mean that if people do it at the time you mentioned then you would miss out on cloudpiercer, right? Lle a Rhemen is 100% confirmed. I'm currently playing a Monk and sided with Crucible Knights for extra armor, and the customized spear is part of my weapon set. After act 2, the key to opening the ruins is permanently inserted into its slot so it's wide open to everybody. You're quite right about Cloudpiercer though (and Shame or Glory + Crucible Knights officer armor, if you don't side with the Knights). I completely blanked on the quest reward uniques since I usually go with the Knights and theirs are not terribly impressive but they're definitely a factor to consider.

As much as I've made use of AI in games that do have it, I don't think I'd be using it for anything but the most rudimentary 'If somebody hits you in the face and you're doing nothing, hit them back' type directions in PoE simply because precise positioning of attacks and characters has such a big impact on combat performance, not least because of Engagement. I'd never feel comfortable instructing my party members to auto-apply buffs, heals, abilites etc. or even auto-attack because I'd be concerned about them tripping over a trap, provoking mass disengagement attacks, running into mass flankings or leaving my more vulnerable party members open to attack in the process. Besides, I make such frequent use of auto-pausing that I'd probably end up overriding the AI decisions anyway. What I'd really like to see is significant improvement to character pathing. As it stands, characters choose their paths completely oblivious to zones of engagement, hostile area effects, and even environmental objects from time to time. At its mildest, this leads to taking unnecessary hazard damage or debuffs or one character getting awkwardly engaged in the middle of a tight corridor and preventing other melee fighters from getting in; at its worst the character will awkwardly attempt to vibrate through/around an environmental fixture and either get stuck indefinitely or provoke half a dozen disengagement attacks for the repeated back and forth movement. As it stands, your characters stop moving on engagement so there's a slight safeguard against the disengagement spam for party members, but the AI has no such safeguard and often ends up completely savaged by repeatedly disengaging and getting re-engaged when trying to navigate tighter spaces. If any real party AI is going to be feasible, that's definitely something that needs to be addressed first and I'd say the same goes for improving enemy AI. A smarter, more varied enemy AI would definitely be good as well, but priorities and all that.

Raedric's a deeply dogmatic, paranoid man and definitely not a good person, but even in that he's still very much a man of his word, enough so that he refuses to even consider an exception for his own wife. Given his tendencies I certainly wouldn't want to be in his permanent employ or be one of his subjects, but unlike with Kolsc's case which is based on deception from the start, I have no reason to expect that Raedric would reneg on a deal he's agreed to. If I were playing a conscienceless killer who isn't compelled to action by the suffering of innocents, I could see how his offer would be tempting. If I were playing an aristocratically minded character who takes the divine right of kings before all, I might even see it as an ideological must to defend his rightful rule. If anything, Kolsc is the dubious bet from a purely mercenary standpoint since his ability to hold the throne is questionable at best, you have no guarantees of him having the kind of money to pay for assassinating a landed noble (or the incentive to do so once the obstacle between him and a position of leadership is gone), and especially since he tries to talk you into doing his dirty work by appealing to your conscience rather than your personal interest. Raedric's backing also has political value for you, since mad or not, he's still the rightful ruler of the land and his favor can give you leverage in negotiating your way through Defiance Bay. There's also the possibility of wanting to reason with him rather than simply depose him, which would be the case for a more idealistically minded good character. In particular, if I were playing a Priest of Eothas, I'd consider it the path dictated by my faith that I confront him about the purges and try to either redeem him or convince him to abdicate for the good of his realm (Benevolent and Honest). But then, I already banged on for quite a bit about that missing chunk of the spectrum, so I'll leave it at that.

Considering the amount of alternate paths creating a tailored follow-up to everything would entail, I'd imagine the consequences for your ending basically boil down to: Cynicism aside, Mass Effect has been a series with a desperate need to reinvent itself with each title, not helped by the turnover in writing staff, which would definitely go a ways towards explaining its tendency to retcon and trivialize your past choices. Since PoE is a lot more focused on the narrative and seems to take giving you alternatives quite seriously, I'd like to think that the effects of this game on future installments will be a bit more significant than ME's pick your color approach. The track record for promises like that is definitely nothing to write home about though, so I'm not getting my hopes too high up, especially with how little even the epilogue cares about your judgment call on the single central driving plot of the game.

With regards to the connection, it also bears noting that the Grieving Mother mind controlled the people in her village to shelter their Hollowborn and Durance specifically went out of his way to seek out and destroy hollowborn in his attempts to appease Magran. That seems like a decently plausible way for the two to encounter each other or at the very least impact each others' lives in a significant way and if they have left such a deep mark in each other, the way souls work in this setting would dictate that the two would subconsciously feel the pull to find each other in an attempt to repair whatever damage was inflicted on them. They definitely still have plenty of unpleasant aspects to their personalities in spite of the cuts though. The grieving mother literally mind controlled a woman to the point of working her to death and ruined an entire town, and then attempts to use the same power again to make you 'fix' the problem for her ('I'll be your strength' indeed) and Durance is a self-admitted hollowborn-slaughterer and purger of Eothasians who believes in not just physically killing his victims but in breaking their spirit and turning their life into a living hell because killing is too merciful for some people. Yeah, not exactly stand-up individuals here. That being said, cool as this all sounds in theory, it's easy for a lot of things to sound cool on paper but not work out that smoothly in practice. Durance's and Grieving Mother's quests are already the two most tricky ones to complete as is, so adding in the clause that the two stories are interdependent (and thus presumably require progress on both sides to advance) would be a serious headache for anyone who isn't already committed to consistently keeping both of them in the party. The mental dungeons, on the other hand, are a concept I'd definitely be interested in seeing implemented later down the line. Not only would it add more weight to your status as a watcher, but it'd also create a way for you to learn more about your companions without resorting to the RPG standard compulsion for party members to divulge their deepest, darkest secrets to some stranger they've tagged along with for a couple of weeks. Plus, rooting around in someone else's soul uninvited like that is a pretty morally dubious thing to do, so there's room for some interesting conflict there when you confront a person about things you discovered in their dungeon.

It's literally been 2 hours between your initial post and your bump; that's not much of a timeframe for anyone to come up with a coherent response for you so um...patience please? Anyway, there is no roll for Deprive the Unworthy in your combat log and the ability does not list a defense type for the enemy, so that seems like a pretty clear indication that this is working as intended and you don't need to roll to hit, which makes sense since it's already limited to a per rest power with a relatively small amount of worthwhile targets. Thaos's first form can already be rushed down with Knockdown or any disabling power targeting Reflex as is (Knockdown + Calling the World's Maw kills him so fast it's not even funny), so it's not like Deprive the Unworthy is some great new exploit against him. Play it, enjoy it, the power is limited enough to have earned the few things it does very well.

I've noticed the same thing. You'll also get the same effect by clicking on the weapon slot icon to cycle through your sets, which is quite annoying for most characters but quite convenient for monks since it gives you an unarmed slot for free.

Yeah, I had a similar reaction when I first came across this conversation, though for slightly different reasons. I was playing a Rogue with no particular stake in this conflict either way and had Kolsc pretty much pegged as a manipulative little git from the start, so I came in hoping to confront Raedric about the mass hangings and strike some sort of deal with him for my own safety, but unfortunately your choices are a very stark divide between 'yay Kolsc, boo Raedric' and 'I don't like you Raedric, but I guess I'll do this anyway' when what I was hoping for was a 'Raedric, buddy, I'd love to help you out with your little problem here but you've got to meet me half way.'. I should add that I had already completed the Through Death's Door quest and had probable cause to believe Waidwen's legacy was not the way he claimed it to be, so it was pretty disappointing to find out that I had no option whatsoever to try and talk him into changing his approach. I mean fair enough if he's so set in his ways that he wouldn't listen (and I'd end up having to fight him anyway for my troubles) but I'd have appreciated being able to make the attempt. The same goes for an option to call Kolsc out after the scuffle and possibly turn on him as well. Sure, it'd be a pretty extreme anarchist position to take and not exactly considerate of Gilded Vale's needs, but considering that both of these two had pretty much made it clear that they'd make terrible rulers and that both had caused me trouble, I would have been sorely tempted to take that route if it was open to me.

I can't say whether there's a contingency if you keep him out of your party temporarily, but Durance's quest has two triggers that are parts of other quests. The first one is the Cinders of Faith quest; the quest item you're sent to retrieve will trigger a dialogue with Durance and open up additional conversation options with him which is needed for the second vision. For the second out-of-conversation trigger, you need to clear The Old Queen and The New King quest, then pray to Galawain while Durance is in your party. Durance will have an interjection when Magran speaks and then want a conversation with you afterwards. The Grieving Mother has no out-of-conversation triggers that I'm aware of, but each time you have a vision of her, you need to describe that vision correctly to her to make her recognize the memory, then go through the new topics with her. Whenever a new vision is ready to trigger you'll get a note on the quest to the effect of 'maybe she'll have more to say later'. In general though, clearing both of these quests is more an art than a science to me, so I'd recommend going through the topics for both. If you're not a Cipher (or a character with very high Perception) you also need to go through the Grieving Mother's dialogue options properly. If you don't know the right things about her, you do run the risk of permanently losing her from your party after the final vision.

If this is a case of not having a Cipher in your party, then you do need to go to Dunryd Row to get it read or bring the Grieving Mother (or a merc cipher) with you. However, if this is a case of you not even getting the conversation about the standard piece in the first place, you might be boned. If that's the case, try putting the standard piece back where you found it then picking it up again while Eder is in your party I guess?

I've done a little bit of experimenting, and from what I've found the factions aren't that prickly about interactions so long as you don't pick up heavy negative rep with them and don't accept any of the faction quests that lock your choice in .The one caveat I've found is that the doorman will stop you from getting into the Doemnel house (and to their merchant) if you have a negative rep with House Doemnel or sided with one of the other factions, but you can circumvent that by triggering the burglary quest and then going straight to the Doemnel mansion and telling the guard you're there to show them the note. If you enter with a valid reason once the doorman won't bother you about it again, even if you later pick up negative Doemnel rep, side with another faction, or clear the quest by warning the other noble of the plan. The merchant quests are open regardless of your choices (aside from the aforementioned thing with the Doemnels), and the faction quests don't seem to send you places you couldn't get anyway, so the talent is the only real difference gameplay-wise. A lot of people seem to think that the variable enchantment spear you pick up in that one ruin is tied to the Dozens quest, but I can confirm that that area becomes open to absolutely everybody at the end of act 2 so it's by no means exclusive.

Based off both lore and events in the game, souls in PoE are definitely not atomic. By Maerwald's account - as well as what little is revealed about the cycle of reincarnation from lore books in the game and such - every ordinary soul is actually a composite of fragments shed by countless other souls and the more turns the soul goes through the cycle, the more parts of other souls it picks up. The standard course is that less and less of the original soul remains over time, though some reincarnations are born as 'something more', which I suppose could be those same fragments finding their way back to the soul they split off from in the same way they got removed from it in the first place. A soul making it through reincarnation entirely as it was is an extreme oddity, the only confirmed cases being Thaos and that one village of pale elves. Soul can also be broken down to energy and infused into other souls (as seen in the Strengthening ending and Thaos's original plan for those souls), detached from one body and attached to another (as with the steward, Ethelmoer, and Blights), split between two different births resulting in soul twins (as with Hiravias an the Aumaua, or that Orlan in Twin Elms who shares his soul with a cat), and artificially splintered (as the animancer in the Sanitarium did to one of his patients). So yes, whatever the exact rules are, souls in PoE are definitely composite and subject to entropy of some description. The reason the inquisitor memories become dominant is that that personality is the only one that was awakened during the course of the game, and as with the two personalities awakened inside Maerwald, an awakened personality with unresolved issues will actively invade its host's consciousness until those issues are resolved. Whatever other past lives the protagonist carries with them don't result in visions because their memory hasn't been triggered and therefore they're still dormant. Finding parts of your own soul inside others could be an interesting extension of the watcher storytelling, especially if there was also a moral choice involved where you could reclaim them to strengthen yourself, but since the backer souls were all designed by backers rather than the storywriting team, it makes sense that they're pretty standalone and uninvolved with the central plot.