Boeroer

Why didn't you summon blights until a rain blight appeared - it would be immune to shadows, shades and phantoms (I think...?).

All but Wildstrike Belt's additional lash. This one's actually an active ability which gets started once you shift. If your INT is very high it can be that your Wildstrike Belt's lash expires before your Spiritshift does (the lash duration doesn't seem to care about INT). A bit stupid that. Nevertheless, the belt adds a lot of damage because of it's weird lash mechanics. Peddroelm once explained how ot works but I forgot. But it's definetely worth it if you want to use Spiritshift a lot.

Shifter: you focus on your Spiritshift form and optimize it. You would take things like Wildstrike, Greater Wildstrike, Two Weapon Style, Weapon Focus Peasant, Savage Attack, Apprentice's Sneak Attack, maybe even Outlander's Frenzy and so on. Non-Shifter: you focus on your spellcasting and never use Spiritshift. That way you have room for a lot of different (e.g. defensive) talents. Stats would be done accordingly, yes.

This might all change by the way. This was the info we got from Josh during the fig campaign.

Sounds plausible though.

That's why I prefer weapons with two damage types. I'm lazy, too.

Good plan. Use reach weapons, they are great for this. All summoned melee weapons of the wizard are reach weapons as well. Durance's Staff is a great weapon in the early game! Stats are fine for me.

I would try Boreal Dwarf. The +ACC against the most common monster groups at the beginning helps a ton. Moon Godlike is also very nice. I never tried (or I can't remember) if Wildstrike also works with Battle Forged (burn retaliation) but I guess not. If you play a shifter I would recommend Sanguine Plate + Shod in Faith (and other spell holding gear) as well. Go in, catch a crit (triggering the spell holdings) and then shift. Frenzy + Consecrated Ground while mauling enemies is pretty nice.

High MIG can make Veteran's Recovery really good. I take it with almost every melee build. Since ciphers have awesome CC and thus don't get pummeled & interrupted a lot I nearly always dump RES. Concerning weapon damage: All damage modifiers (except lashes and raw DoT effects like wounding) work like so: weapon base damage * (1 + dmg_mod1 + dmg_mod2) = damage. For example an estoc (base damage: 14-20 = avg 17) with Soul Whip, Biting Whip and Savage Attack will deal: 17 * (1+ 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2) = 17 + 17*0.2 + 17*0.2 + 17*0.2 = 17 + 3,4 + 3,4 + 3,4 = 27,2 (+5 DR bypass) a sabre (11-16, avg 13,5) would do: 13,5 + 2,7 + 2,7 + 2,7 +2,7 (sharp) = 24,3 Weapon base damage is the damage range of weapon without any enchantment, without MIG bonus and so on. So, a superb estoc has the same base damage as a normal one. So, the higher the base damage, the higher the bonus damage you will get from things like Savage Attack, Soul Whip and so on. You can see that the more dmg mods you can add (MIG, exceptional or superb and so on...), the more the weapon with the lower base damage falls behind. But in the case above it's not much of a difference. (Some summoned weapons have a lot higher base damage than normals weapons. For example Firebrand's base damage is much higher than that of a normal great sword. Therefore all damage mods work really well with it. A cipher with Soul Whip + Biting Whip + Savage Attack who crits with Firebrand - it also has +0.5 crit damage modifier - will deal a lot of damage and thus get a lot of focus. Actually Firebrand is one of my favorite cipher melee weapons until I can get durgan steel). The heavier one handed weapons (like sabres and so on) have the same attack speed and recovery as the two handed weapons. That means that a sabre with shield will attack as fast as an estoc. Now Bittercut has two damage types (corrode/slash) which in itself is a huge advantage over an estoc. But in addition to that it also profits from Spirit of Decay which will add another +2,7 damage and will also boost a corrosive lash from 25% to 30%. This is nice and makes Bittercuts one of the best one handed dps weapons, but an estoc with a lot of damage mods will still deal more damage per hit (if the target is not resistant to pierce damage). But Bittercut is about to close the gap. Now with a durganized shield you can even attack faster with Bittercut than with a durganized estoc. But the Blade of the Endless Paths has speed, too. So your favorite estoc BotEP will still deal more dps compared to Bittercut + shield. Not THAT much more, but still. But with Bittercut + Little Saviour you'll have a lot better defenses of course - and the advantage of two damage types (never underestimate this in PotD if you don't want to switch weapons).

I also don't think those transistions were unedited, but Josh and Adam mentioned several times (in the twitch streams they did during the campaign) that they now have a streaming system that handles area transitions. What this basically means (I guess) is that the parts of the new map (all the game objects that will be visible where you enter the map) will be loaded first and thus can be displayed immediately - while the rest gets loaded while you move/explore. Maybe they even preload stuff while you move to a navigation point, don't know. It's comparable to a streaming video (which you can start watching seconds after you get to the page) or a video file that you have to download completely in order to watch it. So transition times should be a lot shorter than in PoE1.

That portrait with the blonde woman in bronze plate looks really amazing.

Most of the time one: Deleterious Alacrity of Motion. It's smart to cast that one first because it speeds up the rest as well. Then Eldritch Aim if you don't use other ACC buffs like Zealous Focus or Blessing. And when you expect to get hit then the defensive stuff, too. Eldritch Aim should be last because it is very short-timed and is best used right before your first AoE-CC spell. And if you want to use a summoned weapon then that, too. The more you advance the more often you will just skip self buffing and often also a summoned weapon - because it's not necessary for most of the normal fights. You will use Arcane Assault and most of the time that will be enough. Self buffing needs some time - so what you can do to give your wizard (and also your priest) some time for buffing is to lure enemies to your party with one of your scouting frontliners. Encounter will start once the scout attacks or stealth ends - and while the scout is running back to the party you can start casting buffs. Once the enemies reach you you will be prepared.

Hopefully Adam will also explain what Josh meant when he was talking about multiclassing in the E3 video.

As long as you're not doing Trial of Iron there's nothing wrong with save & reload. I did this non-shifting druid build once (Batsh!t Crazy) and although I didn't do a full solo run with him I did some bounties solo (PotD) just to see how he fares. He was one of the easiest ones because some of the mid to high level druid spells are very powerful. Once Relentless Storm is up it's all a cakewalk. But a strong spiritshift build is a lot of fun, too. Speedy melee hits with over 100 damage are very satisfying.

Druids CC spells will also do damage, which is great. Some of the druid's hard CC spells are like they are made for a solo game (Relentless Storm, Overwhelming Wave, Calling the World's Maw and so on). They also have summons which can be very handy (blights have immunities and if you happen to summon the right one it may be that it will become the ultimate tank for that special fight - think of phantoms + shades gainst a rain blight). In level 1 they have Sunbeam which is very strong in my opinion. And Blizzard in lvl 2 is also nice as CC+damage. Of course there's no hard CC like prone or stun, but blind is very good as well. Druids also have pretty amazing healing spells - some of those also strengthen your defenses (e.g. Moonwell). You can become quite the sturdy guy with Veteran's Recovery + healing spells + healing bonuses (survival, items). If you choose the boar form you will also have an additional regeneration effect (while you are shiftet) that stacks with all other healing effects. So, even in that offensive form it will be hard to kill you quickly. And if you don't want to boost your Spiritshifting but concentrate on defenses instead you can achieve pretty nice defensive values with a shield and all the defensive talents while dealing damage with your spells. Immunities can be achieved with scrolls if you must (dragons' fear auras and so on).

That would have been way better. But maybe also non-programmers had to write down stuff - maybe into a database or a readable file format or whatever - or they used some other tool to create game objects without having to know C#. I have no idea, but there might be reasons why they used strings. OBS - they might have great ideas and so on - but as I said a while ago they don't seem to write the most sophisticated code. But on the other hand: who does when a deadline is approaching.

Typical programmer's error that can happen during development. Especially code completion (as awesome as it is) can lead to such an oversight. But it should be easy to fix with a search that you did. A simple "search & replace" in the IDE should do the trick.

Do you know if keywords are case sensitive in PoE? In C# (which is used by Unity) the usual string comparison works with "System.StringComparison.Ordinal" which is case sensitive, but you can use "OrdinalIgnoreCase" as well. Although I like a keyword approach, using case sensitivity with keywords might be a bad idea. In this case, it might not work because the keywords "poison" and "Poison" will not be considered equal if you choose to use "Ordinal" instead of "OrdinalIgnoreCase". And once designers (who don't know this case stuff) and programmers (who don't know the right spelling of keywords) start to place keywords indepentendly things get messy. For example I see a lot of names where designers and programmers used different words although they mean the same (for example in the game object folder: Foregemasters Gloves/Forgemaster's Gloves, Rumbalt/Rumbald and so on). So if you don't have some sort of keyword completition or a spell checking this approach can be very prone to bugs and errors. Last time I used a lot of keywords (or tags, labels or how you want to call it) in a project I had to write a special phonetic search to filter all the duplicates which got misspelled. I didn't test it in PoE, but I suspect that the Diving Helmet will provide no bonus to the poison part of the swamp dragons' breath.

No problem. The subforum "stories" is still the best place for this I think. But of course nobody will be mad if you leave it here. It's just that this subforum is frequented a lot more and if the posts for your story don't come quickly and plentiful it may happen that your thread will be pushed to the second page.

I guess you mean crossbows only and not arbalests? Crossbows have some disadvantages: - a reload phase (bad for dps) - lowest base damage of all reloding weapons (bad for quick switching) - only one damage type (like all reloading weapons) - no special feat like other weapons have (e.g. dr bypass or prone on crit or two damage types - nothing) - not so special uniques (nothing really exciting like wounding or annihilating or whatever) - late uniques (lvl 8 and 15 of the Endless Paths) - few uniques (only 2) - shares weapon focus with only 3 other weapon types, none of them ranged (weakest weapon focus group) Advantages: - normal crit damage modifier (compared to all other reloading weapons) I don't consider Twin Sting a crossbow because it's soulbound and thus works with any weapon focus. It's a good weapon for a ranger but no reason to stick to crossbows until you get it. Because of those reasons I consider crossbows to be one of the worst weapon choices in the game. They are ok for rogues who can achieve a great hit/crit ratio, but even then there are other reloading weapons like arbalest, arquebus or blunderbuss which are simply better (higher base damage = great for damage mods like Sneak, Deathblows & Backstab). For a ranger, a crossbow has no special benefit whatsoever. Sure, with your pet and stuff you can crit a lot, too, but things like Wounding Shot favor highest base damage and other stuff like Stunning Shots needs higher attack speed. Then there are Twinned Arrows for bows and Powder Burns for guns - but nothing special for crossbows. You can achieve an ok attack and crit rate with crossbows and Swift Aim + Gunner + Wendgär - but it's nothing compared to Twinned Arrows or the burst damage of three (or four) guns with Powder Burns, fired with quick switching. It's even worse than using the Golden Gaze (rod) or the Engwithan Scepter which also don't profit from Twinned Arrow or Powder Burns. Actually a ranger with Vicious Aim + Dangerous Implements is pretty nice - because there are so many awesome unique implements. Good Friend has a nice enchantment for ranger & pet who like to attack the same target - but I tested it with a hearth orlan ranger + wolf and even that combination is not even close to Persistance which you get a lot earlier than Good Friend in the same dungeon. And it's still worse than a simple implement. What crossbows lack is some special feat (maybe +0.3 crit damage mod for all crossbows or +5 ACC like rapiers, clubs, spears and daggers) and more uniques to make them worthwhile. I guess Twin Sting was an attempt, but it comes so late and its not a real crossbow for me - nothing to encourage the use of crossbows.

Well, there's a whole subforum for that (and it's not this one): http://forums.obsidian.net/forum/90-pillars-of-eternity-stories-spoiler-warning/

Yes, Borresaine is the earliest weapon you can get that has a disabling enchantment (in this case stunning). Very nice until you get Stunning Shots (which comes pretty late at lvl 11). It's totally useful to have Borresaine before that. You can buy it as soon as you enter Defiance Bay. After lvl 11 I like the Rain (if I use warbows). Sabra Marie is not so great for rangers in my opinion because the pet will always stop attacking a turned enemy and has to run to another one. I like that bow more on rogues.

Ok I really don't get that one. Not even after I read everything about that song that Wikipedia has to give.

Don't get why this should be a dumb question. Totally viable question for me. And from MaxQuest's answer I learned something new as well. Win-win!

true. But it's a nice armor in combo with monk + Aila Braccia if you like to reflect ranged attacks.