Boeroer

They should be there after the bounty got cleared. At least that's the case with all other places where a bounty removes other monsters for the time it's active.

Or we can go and watch Demolition Ranch. :|

No need to rub salt into that wound. I would like to see this happening. A minor, cosmetical thing, but a nice one nonetheless.

Patches after release? Count on it!

Sure, it's cool to make it into the game in one way or another. But the gold plated NPCs were all over the place and the stories they had felt totally decoupled from the rest of the game. The stories there didn't offer lore nor any info about the game, the main quest line or anything. And you couldn't do anything with the info you got. If they had any dialogue... There's one npc called "the Vulture" with a very gruesome story. I would have liked to speak to him or just knock him right down to the floor after reading his soul - but this would just lead to the whole tavern aggroing me - unsatisfying. Once I understood that they are contributions of backers you could understand why they have no connection to the rest of the game, but it also completely removed any motivation to read their textual contributions. Because... way too many and too much text. As I said: not bad writing per se - it just felt out of place. That's not the fault of the backers. On the other hand I really liked the backers' items. No spellbinding rogue is complete without Taluntain's Staff. Some of the nicest items come from backers. Obsidian had not much experience with including backer recognition into a game. The tombstones (oh my) and golden plated NPCs were not my favorite at all, but the items and the Wailing Banshee for example were very nice. I also like backer portraits and such. That stuff blends in. Or think about how ol' Gromnir made it into BG2. Very well done integration. I know that the Black Isle Bastards will make a much better impression than "random" NPCs that are just standing at some spot for no obvious reason (some with very weird stories). They'll have a story that's embedded into the rest of the game, they'll have dialogue and thus a connection to the game. And this time OBS had much more freedom when it comes to "fleshing out" the BiBs. I think they will be great. Even the in-game recognition is done in a way that it doesn't break immersion (the ledger that lists the BiB's victims and loot).

If I may suggest a Beckoner/Bleak Walker's to you? Mith Fyr + Shared Flames is so good for your tiny skeletors.

Heheh. :tiny-facepalm:

Yes, drugs get affected by alchemy as well. Tested it 10 min. ago. A certain drug (forgot which one) does +3 to two attributes with 0 alchemy but +5 with 8 alchemy. With the Nalpasca the drug effect lasted more than 600 seconds.

Maybe they will apply those bonuses to crafted potions and this scaling of every potion is just a bug - if they include crafting in the first place. Who knows? I also find it a bit weird that your alchemy skill automatically improves stuff that's already mixed together. But I could live with that as well. At least a skill that's very useful to have. Since drugs also seem to profit from alchemy, the Nalpasca Alchemist suddenly gets more and more appealing.

I wonder why they changed that. It was very useful for testing purposes to be able to attack your teammates in a tavern or so.

Haha - awesome. Now off to building my first char based on potions. I'll name it "Weird Al Chemovich"... Now playing a single class wizard who is addicted to potions of deftness suddenly is worthwhile!

Ah, I see. That is new. I actually never tried to attack a party member outside of combat in the beta. Good to know, thanks for clarifying!

You click on the sword icon (bottom center - left from the buttons that control game speed) and then on the ally. Exactly like in PoE... :D I did it like a hundret times during the beta so far. However: sometimes you can't attack npcs that are in the middle of a conversation (which is new and might be a bug). Try another npc then. Maybe that's what you encountered.

Holy Scarabaeus - what happens at 20 Alchemy?

? Sure you can target allies with regular weapon attacks and also hostile spells.

Well, it's not like Marcel Proust is writing a novel there. It's a rpg that introduced a completely new setting and had a small budget compared to other rpgs out there. I think they did a pretty good job with the writing. The only thing I did not like were those texts you could read when clicking on the golden plated backer npcs. Not that all the individual stories were bad or so - it just felt completely out of place.

Sorry, but that's nonsense (I would have used a softer term here if I only knew one ). Every change to code means that you have to test it afterwards. The code doesn't care if the thing you changed is an "oversight" or a "bug". Every change to code may entail some problems if not everything is seperated/decoupled very well from each other (which it seldomly is). So, for me (in my experience) it's not true to say that it takes more time to fix a bug than to fix a behavior that is overpowered. It totally depends on the individual code that causes the problem. Some bugs are ridiculously easy to fix, some oversights will cause you terrible headaches. For example I think that it was way trickier to fix the Envenomed-Strike-thing I mentioned above than several bugs that MaxQuests adressed in his mod. Also there might be smooth transitions between "oversight" and "bug". For example: Scion of Flame and all the other elemental talents will not affect elemental spells that do damage over time. This could be considered an oversight or a bug. Depends how you look at it. But it's to the disadvantage of the player. Other oversights like retaliation generating focus are to the advantage of the player. Obsidian decided to "fix" the latter with high priority while leaving the first one in - although there was detailed explanation how to fix this. That's their decision and I'm ok with it. The bugs I'm talking about never broke the game for me. It just shows that there were resources to fix things. You have a point there. That might be. They could have said something though.

It was certainly good enough for me when I did my first and also second playthrough (edit: after that I didn't care much about writing of course since it all was powergamer's greatest hits ). What was so weak about it?

Eh? Why that? Actually having single classes adds choice and does not remove it. Even if they happen to be less powerful than several multiclass combos they are still viable choices. The choice is basically "faster ability progression and more powerful endgame abilites vs. powerful synergies and two resource pools". Removing them does nothing good for anybody. If you think they are bad - just don't play them in your game. If you would only allow multiclass chars then it would be wiser to remove classes alltogether and design a classless system (like Josh - and me - like them best anyways). At the moment it's just a matter of balancing. And in my opinion the problem can be easily solved with a) shorter casting times (for our poor single class casters) and b) proper design and implementation of Power Level and how it influences ALL abilites in a meaningful way. That should do the trick.

Nope, does not apply - just as you predicted. Powder Burns is quite underwhelming not only because of the distraction, but also in terms of damage (just did a test with 15 RES).

Haha - I didn't think about a Streetfighter who so to say flanks himself all the time via powder burns in order to activate his bonuses. Nice idea. I think I'll quickly double-check if the lash gets applied, wait a minute...

Same for me. Sometimes followed by one "last" RP-playthrough for the story again after a lot of powergaming.

That would have been a valid point if they hadn't repeatedly fixed the "wrong" stuff at the same time. So there were enough resources to fix things, but they chose to patch slightly overpowered mechanics that were no bugs rather than fixing the real ones that annoyed people.

Yes, the Long Pain scale very well in terms of ACC - and the best thing is that the base damage scales as well (so, no flat damage bonus on top of base damage that doesn't work with dmg mods besides MIG as with Transcentdent Suffering, bust added "real" base damage)! So every dmg mod will become even more powerful with every level-up. That's why I tried to squeeze in every dmg bonus I could find, including hater talents. Speed is also crazy for a ranged weapon I must say. at higher levels it's like arquebus shots with nearly 0 recovery and fastest attack animation. But the best thing for me is that you can apply Torment's Reach and Force of Anguish from a distance at blinding speed. No other class can do that. Only thing is to get the whole Long Pain thing starting - which takes some (casting) time.

I don't know. Tons of bugs were reported in detail and some of the guys that reported them even gave detailed info on how to fix them (see Loren Tyr, MaxQuest et al. - because they decompiled the code and had a look into it) - and still they didn't get fixed. MaxQuest even put out a mod on his own where he fixed most of the remaining and most annoying mechanics bugs. He did this all by himself in his free time and it didn't take too much time - I mean MaxQuest is obviously a genius but I guess it would have been possible to do by Obsidian as well with the use of reasonable (low) resources. They could have taken his solution and pick the parts that would suit them - I'm sure MayxQuest would have agreed to that. On the other hand stuff got "fixed" that was totally uncalled for: like retaliation couldn't generate focus anymore all of a sudden (no patch notes on this) after I posted a cipher-retaliation build that was quite powerful (not game breaking though). Envenomed Strike could be used in an AoE with Blast or Citzal's Spirit Lance or Rot Skulls. This was also removed secretly (no patch notes) after I posted some build ideas around it. Seems there were resources for those somewhat overpowered, but not game breaking or annoying things.