Matroska

Thank you! Both for the edits and the mini-tutorial.

If there are still kind souls around making watercolour versions of portraits, I'd really appreciate that magic being worked on these pictures. Also, it'd be great if the character with her hand on her face could have an alternative version done with elf ears, if that's not asking too much.

While I was playing, I kept getting these little microstutters every 8 seconds or so. I just put up with it. After a while, I alt-tabbed and went on the internet for a bit and that's when I found that I couldn't download anything. It turned out c:\ was completely full. I had quite a lot of space so that threw me off. I thought there were just loads of temporary files being made by PoE2 for some reason, but when I checked what was taking up space, I saw what I've attached in a pic below. Any idea what caused this?

Mind blowing that only 4 people have done that so far. I'm still on my first Normal playthrough. Anyway, on a totally different and far more basic note, when the game says "beneficial effects" what exactly does that refer to? Would a summoned weapon count? I'm guessing something like Infuse With Vital Essence (Fit and Smart) would count since it has those bracketed keywords, but what about something without such keywords like Merciless Gaze (15% of hits = crits)? In short, given how games normally work, I'd guess that not all effects that are beneficial (e.g. summoning a weapon) are within the definition of "beneficial effects" as a specific term.

I'm only playing on Normal but if this is the fight I think it is, in Port Maje, then yeah I agree. You don't have enough skills/spells to manage what's being thrown at you. Later encounters may be harder on paper but you have more means to cope. Someone above mentioned the thing in the Sacred Stairs with the constructs. That also stood out to me, the fight took me ages, but we were in a position where I took out the kith character early and then it was just keeping Eder alive while slowly doing damage to the constructs. I had no lightning damage available so had to use certain scrolls, Plague of Insects or whatever it was, to do decent damage. I also had to use that interrupt spell in scroll form to keep interrupting their AoE attacks. It was a really fun fight. I think if I'd run out of interrupts, they'd have eventually won but as it was we could keep wrong-footing them long enough to eventually get their HP down.

I suppose it's a new place so they don't remember you for your amazing acts of cruelty in this place - and also, surely it's fun to terrify them all into fearing you again.

It's not a direct continuation - like for example Fellowship to Two Towers - but there is a general continuation in terms of returning characters and concepts. You play as the same character if you import your character, although you remake them from scratch at the start. You could choose to be the same class but you don't have to. Either way, narratively, you're the same Watcher that did all that stuff in PoE1.

Is Rapid Casting worth it in turn-based? What''s the exact thing it'd do to, say, a spell with a cast time of 5? Not sure about the maths, let alone if it's worth taking that passive.

Is it actually on there, the full thing? I don't have iOS so I can't check. Seems like it might just be a teaser.

I'll try that for the other problematic encounters. What I did in the end for Lord Admiral Imp was... make like a pirate and cheat. I used this mod to make it so you can use console cheats without turning off achievements then used the "giveitem item_quest_head_imp" console command to give myself the bounty's head without having to kill him.

For the record, this is still broken. I have the fan patch off the Nexus too and sadly that doesn't fix this either. Did anyone figure out a workaround other than just not doing the affected quests? For me the civilians get scared straight away, before I've clicked a single thing. I've tried with no one around but people still wander into battle or even appear out of thin air. No auras on anyone, no Paladin in party. I've tried having all of my party on the jetty apart from Edér who initiated the conversation with Lord Admiral Imp.

Thanks for all the responses, it helps a lot. One thing I just realised I should've said before; I'm playing in turn-based mode. Does that change any of the advice above? I've noticed the duration of things, at least in turn-based, doesn't have the blue highlightable text which you'd normally get if it can change based on your stats. For example, Eldritch Aim says it lasts for 1 round and it looks like that's a set thing. If it doesn't go above that, that seems terrible (even though it's a free action, it's still taking up a per-battle cast).

I'm going to do a single class character for my first playthrough. I wanted to do a Spellsword, I didn't even realise initially there's a Spellblade dual class. So how viable to be a pure Wizard and focus on the Conjurer spells to summon weapons, augmented with the odd spell from other schools? And yeah, I know Josh says everything is viable in PoE, but there's viable and then there's scraping by barely after every fight. If so, any suggestions for the starting stats? It's hard to pick. It seems like Intellect isn't that important since it doesn't appear to affect how long your things are summoned for, and AoE doesn't seem to be relevant here. I guess Dex to get things cast more quickly, but then Might, Perception, Resolve, and Consitution all seem important since you'll be getting up close and nasty with the enemies. I'm really not sure what to go for here.

Ah right. I heard you start at level 1 again but assumed it kept the class but obviously it would be the PoE2 version of that class. Well that's cool. Thanks for the reply.

So I've about to finish PoE1 and bought PoE2 and its DLC in advance. I'm really looking forward to importing my character and seeing the various references and things that change. The thing is, though, as much as it was a fun experience the first time in PoE1, I don't want to go all through the sequel as a Priest again. It made a nice change being a support class but I was basically playing as a buff/healbot with high Dex and didn't feel like my character was all that involved. Is there any way to import your save but remake the character itself from scratch? I know you can create a history, like in the DA series and TW3 but I get the feeling there's gonna be a load of little things not covered by those options.

Yeah. I had it with this model. It was pretty creepy. Have you had enemies stretching and skewing really weirdly as well? I've had slimes expand to fill the screen while going transparent. I was just watching this guy on YouTube play and this funny thing happened with Itumaak: https://webmshare.com/PxJj0

I'm pretty sure the combat log doesn't go far back. I recognise and respect you as someone a lot more experienced with the game than I am, but whenever I've checked the log, it runs out of info pretty soon. As for the point about Sawyer, it brings me to a point I've had for a while about RPGs. There are two extremes on a spectrum. One is the idea that things should make obvious sense (e.g. Dex makes an archer do more damage, Str is useless for a mage because what does magic have to to with Str, but it's really good for warriors). The other is that, regardless of how it seems to make sense, it should be a good abstract system regardless , putting game sense above common sense (e.g. Might raises damage and healing for everyone regardlness of any "logic" concerns). In terms of the latter, in reality would the intelligence of a character really make a real difference to the radius of their blows compared to their strength? It's hard to say it would, but it does here because Josh is going for an abstract sense of "all stats are useful". The impassioned yell of a barbarian lasts longer based on the IQ of the barbarian? It doesn't make sense, but it DOES make sense in an abstract way focused on stat balancing. But anyway, my overall point is just that the game does a poor job of relaying what's actually going on and thus you can either be mindless or you can be tactica; but that involves a lot of tooltip-checking and other busywork that doesn't add to the challenge or fun, but just slows eveything down and makes even simple things a bit of a chore.

Hey, Pallegina isn't ugly! But the Godlike have great uses for certain builds, the Moon Godlike seems to be the best for Barbarian, according to a certain build on these forums that I'm a big fan of. That build in particular can solo PotD, so it's not like the helmet thing is a meaningful drawback there.

I think the problem with this game that some players might have is it that the game is awful at conveying what's happening at any given point. Visually the game is a swirl of meaningless visual effects. You want to know what's happening, you check the combat log but there are several problems there. One, it only goes back a very short time. Two, a lot of the info isn't expanded on. You're told a weapon was ineffective but it doesn't say why. You see that a certain attack did damage to several people. Of those it hit, sometimes it does little damge and to the person next to them it did huge damge. Why? Well open the inventory and mouseover everything to try and spot the difference between the two characters. Most RPGs make it clear what's happening as it happens without pouring over tooltips but in PoE things happen rapdiy and people are suddenly on half health and you have to basically research into why. In something like DOS2, you know what's happening as it happens. In every spectrum of RPG from Torment to Fallout (the real Fallouts) to Final Fantasy to Dragon Quest, I never feel out of the loop. In PoE it feels like a lot of **** happens, then you have to stop everything and check into it at length. Even in PnP, you'd see things happening as they resolve and always be on top of things. PoE has less status effects than a typical Final Fantasy yet it's far harder IMO to keep track of who's affected by what, and how to get rid of that effect, than in any other RPG I've played - and I've played a lot, both JRPG and WRPG. Long story short, I llike this game - I just recently bought WM1&2 after buying the base game at launch - but it often feels like a mess. Keeping track of basic info is leaden and clunky, many level up choices are out of context as they only make sense with the knowledge of what you can choose later, the stat system is meant to get past things like dump stats yet ends up feeling totally unintuitive in how you end up with INT being great for barbarians for no other reason than that's how Sawyer decided to define a bunch of stats that have almost arbitrary names (e.g. an ill-defined "Might" making warriors hit harder but also healers heal more, Int increasing how much a crazed warcry spreads out over the battlefield, etc). I'm not trying to bash the game but for various design reasons it ends up feeling messy and badly focused.

Just slightly hijacking to ask this question. Even though I played BG when it came out (and BG2, IWD, NWN...), and even though Torment is one of my favourite games of all time, I'm not a huge fan of RTwP. Actually, I don't normally mind it that much but it really doesn't work with me with PoE. I know PoE2 has a turn-based mode and I much prefer that. Does the turn-based mode work well? At the moment with PoE I feel like I'm kind of putting up with RTwP. To put that into context, I got the game at launch and have made 8 characters since then but have never got into Act 3. Does the turn-based mode feel properly integrated or like an afterthought?

For some reason, even though she said she'd hand it over when I helped her, actually agreeing to help Cassandra O'Malley causes the research data subquest to fail. Is this a misleading thing and it'll "unfail" later, a glitch, or something else? Edit: Ahhh, you can still get it from her. I thought it was glitching out and the data was now irretrievable. Sorry, I'd delete the thread if I could. The quest log is pretty confusing, to be fair. It simultaneously says I failed to get the data AND that I have the data and should return it.

You can enable it in the ini, as well as set the nits, but I don't think it does anything yet. Seems like either an abandoned feature that they accidentally left in the ini, or something they plan on adding later.

Even if it isn't great for combat, as in TES and FO, it would add so much to be able to walk around out of combat while seeing your character. That's what I always do in those two aforementioned series; explore in TPS, fight in FPS. Hopefully a mod will come along.

Can I just hop in and steal OP's question but with the twist that I'd want a rogue PC? What stats would you suggest there?

I didn't know that, but it's good to hear it has such strong origins. When WoW added something similar in the last expansion there were cries of "Facebook crap!" from various fans. Little did they know that it harked back to the grandfather of the genre (little did I know until just, to be fair).