Boeroer

Thumbs up for this. Why don't you guys at OBS hire Loren Tyr as a consultant and pay him for solving all the bug problems on that endless list of yours? You can even name him "The Mend-a-list" or so...

Guns are at the bottom of the list when it comes to damage per second. They are top at damage per hit, but not per second. Obviously you didn't take into account that Sweet Winds only takes 2 seconds at lvl 16 to complete. So after 2 sec you stack another Sweet Wind on top, after 4 secs it's three of them. It depends in your INT how many you can stack, but it adds up to a great endurance drain per second in a very big AoE. And the second thing is: it's raw damage! After 10 seconds (at lvl 16) you can use Seven Nights to substitute the damage of Sweet Winds. Or after 8 you can use Killers Froze stiff for perma-paralyze. Every 6 seconds you could use White Worms. It's absolutely devastating if you already have bodies piled up where you are defending a chokepoint. Can't see how this is worse than a pistol - even if we speak about dps only (which is not very meaningful as Jojobobo said). I have a chanter build who uses Sweet Winds as his main chant. He soloed every PotD bounty with rel. ease but is also superb with a party. Look for "Chillfog" in the build index. You can't judge a class just by looking at the wiki. I mean you can, but then your judgement will be awfully wrong.

Why are you using cheats? You can always retrain at an inn - or did you mean the console? That one I used excessively without breaking anything so far. I also think it's a corrupted savegame.

For the first play through I would def. use the official companions. Then you don't need to bother with the question which hirelings to take. There's one companion of every class - so you don't miss one. For the MC I personally like priest or paladin because they can gain certain bonuses by picking the right dialogue choices. But that doesn't matter too much.

Brisk Recitation is not only great for invocation users - it also increases the damage of Come, Sweet Winds of Death and The Dragon Thrashed because you can stack more of them. It's also very good for the 30pt damage shield because it stacks indirectly: one shield surpresses the other, so you will never have more than 30pts as a shield, but once the first shield wears of because of hits the suppressed one takes it's place with fresh 30 pts. It can be very powerful if you stack enough of those. It gets totally ridiculous if you have more than one tanky chanter and stack several 30pts shields plus Come Sweet Winds and use Seven Nights every now and then. You will vaporize everything, including Crägholt Bluffs, without loosing a lot of health. Did it with three chanters and no rests until I reached Concelhaut. With high DEX and Brisk Recitation you can also perma-paralyze mobs while hurting them with Come SweetvWinds a Jojobobo said. Your phrase counter will be full again before the paralyze effect wears off (if it didn't graze). @hwrd: how comes that you don't know about all the new talents and abilities? They get displayed on the char sheet. Does that mean you judged the chanter class by looking at the wiki and not by playing it? No wonder you think they are not good. Actually it's one of the most powerful classes in my opinion (if you put spell spamming if wiz/druid/priest aside). Their mechanics are just too slow for anything below PotD. They really shine on PoTD and esp. solo PotD - just my opinion. Few rests and easy to play while micro is also quite low for such power levels.

Brisk Recitation is great. Don't want to miss it. And it's also the name of a famous german pomade: "Brisk - Halt ohne Fettglanz!"* - the biggest lie in the history of advertisement. )* good hold without looking greasy

So... do you want to ask a question?

White Worms? Raedrics Castle is the perfect place for that.

The poll options are completely broken. Now you have to pick cipher as least favorite or rogue as favorite. My taste changes, but the class I like least are fighters. They are a bit boring. There are a lot of classes I like. The most fun I have with wizards, priests, monks and barbarians atm. I chose barbarian for the poll because they tend to get a lot of hate from beginners and I wanted to put something against that. Barbs can be difficult, but they are a lot of fun in a party. And not only in a party: you can solo PotD with an offensive barb as well as with a defensive one and do every fight in the game, something you can't do with a rogue or a fighter if you're not a masochist.

One of the best candidates for reaping knives is another cipher. Cast reaping knives on each other and you'll double your focus gain. The raw damage of the reaping knives in your hands does wonders for your focus and at the same time you'll give the same amount of focus to the other cipher and vice versa. Barbarian is also a great option.

Right. In melee a ranger can also make good use of bonuses against flanked targets. He can always flank together with his animal companion. There are items that grant +10% damage against targets (boots, armor, headgear, all not stacking with each other) and there's a survival bonus of 20%. Apprentice's Sneak Attack also works with flanked targets. Flanked also triggers pet's Merciless Companion. So you can add up +45% damage against flanked targets which is good. It also works with ranged weapons of course if you hit targets which are flanked by others than you. There are even weapons which do bonus damage when you hit flanked targets ( +20% damage, stacks) which are called "Vicious". There are also weapons which are "coordinating". They do +4ACC and +25% damage when you attack the same targets as somebody else (like your pet).

DA:O's skill system is not very deep, but the game itself is nice.

You can steal spells from Ogre Druids and most human casters (druid/priest/wizard). Those are the ones I had success with.

I also loved Legends of Grimrock. Sure, it's a bit of a different genre, dungeon crawling and all like Eye of the Beholder was. But I put so many hours into it, trying so many builds despite the relatively simple skill system. DA:O was really nice. I especially liked the feature that you could combine spells to a powerful effect (Storm of the Century wtf?). I didn't even finish DA2. Had a bit of Fable feeling - which I don't like.

High MIG and 12 INT is OK. You can use items with bonus to MIG and INT to boost the damage a bit further. Higher INT is also very useful for Binding Roots. It's a great CC ability. It only works against a single foe, but lasts a very long time. And with 5 uses per rest you can spam it in hard encounters and disable whole groups for a long time. Envenomed Strike not only does more damage with more INT (because it lasts longer and therefore has more damaging "ticks") it also triggers Predator's Sense as I said before (I like to repeat myself - I have three little kids ). So it's not very likely that the enemy which suffers from Envenomed Strike and gets attacked by your pet at the same time will experience the expiration of Env. Strike - because animal companions on Predator's Sense (and Vicious + Merciless Companion) hit like trucks and kill normal foes within seconds. If you plan to have a chanter in the team then you don't need Wounding Shots, no wounding weapon and also no Envenomed Strike in order to trigger Predator's Sense. Just use a damaging chant (Come, Sweet Winds of Death or The Dragon Thrashed) and Predator's Sense is always "on". Wounding Shots and Env. Strike can still be very useful though - especially against tough single enemies. You can always retrain in an inn if you feel that some ability or talent doesn't do what you expected.

Seems to be a problem because there's no limit of how often you can hit in disengagement and that there's no cooldown. Reach doesn't seem to be the problem. That and the stupidness that you eat disengagenent attacks while you move towards enemies. Should only happen if your vector points away from them to some degree. Well whatever - it is what it is - and that's another reason why I completely ignored (and still ignore) engagement (except ogres') and all the abilities and talents around it.

I think they just forgot to properly implement reach + engagement. Why shouldn't I get disengagement attacks when somebody passes through my "threat zone"? It's quite inconsistent that I can pierce somebody with a pike from 1.8 meters, but not engage (in this case threaten to pierce) them. Well - now at least I can retrain and remove Defender altogether. Would have been nice with reach, but without it it's officially the most useless ability ever... Overbearing Guard will go into the trashbin, too.

Hi, I'm playtesting a fighter atm who uses a reach weapon and stands behind the front line while Defender and Take the Hit are on. He also has Overbearing Guard. The base idea was that he takes the raw damage from Take the Hit while he himself doesn't get targeted. He has high CON, MIG and INT so that he can easily regenerate the raw damage from Take the Hit with Constant Recovery and all the healing mod stuff. This part works really well. My front line (barb tank inspired by Jojobobo, charming paladin tank also inspired by Jojobobo, Death's Roflstomper priest (working title) ) only needs 3 CON because DR and Take the Hit work very well together. I wonder how a chanter's damage shield would work with this, but that's another question... I also have two implement blasters with Envenomed Strike: a wizard (Kalakoth's Minor Bligjts) and a druid (Rot Skulls). Those two are pulverizing everything but are total glass cannons (on purpose). The second idea behind the fighter was that he prevents foes from reaching my blasters (and also takes their hits) with the reach weapon and Knockdown, Clear Out, Into the Fray and Overbearing Guard. Maybe I'm stupid but this fighter is only engaging stuff when he stands in normal melee distance, not reach distance. I can attack foes in reach distance, sure, but there's no green arrow or line unless I move him into the normal melee range, adjacent to the enemy. Therefore also no disengagement attacks get triggered when enemies leave his reach weapon distance. So... am I doing something wrong or is the praised "fighter + reach weapon + Defender + Overbearing Guard" build not working?

When I want to have many things that turn the char invisible then I still don't need to increment the invisibility status. It can have a duration that gets overwritten when another ability that would also turn you invisible has a longer duration. I see no point in incrementing the invisible status. If you do something that breaks invisibility it should turn you from invisible to visible and done. It's setting a variable like "is_visible" from false to true and that should do it. I get it that there might be other effects attached to the ability that turns you invisible which can also be attached to other abilities - and which should not be turned off when invisibility vanishes. Your last paragraph is a good answer to that. Or to use decorators to implement afflictions/status effects instead of incremented status variables.

Yes, come to the dark side. Best ranger abilities and talents depend on the build, but for the usual ranger those can be (m=melee, r=ranged): - Marksman ® - Distant Advantage (r, Wood Elf racial) - Minor Threat (r, m, Hearth Orlan racial) - Swift Aim (m) - Twinned Arrows ® - Stunning Shots (m,r) - Predator's Sense - Vicious Companion - Merciless Companion - Driving Flight (r, if you use Stunning Shots and/or Stormcaller) - Resilient Companion - Binding Roots - Apprentice's Sneak Attack (m, r) - Wounding Shot (if you use Predator's Sense and don't use Persistence, Tidefall or Drawn in Spring as weapons) Envenomed Strike is powerful if you a) have high MIG and INT, because those stats influence it's damage and b) if you use Predator's Sense. Interrupting Blows can be nice if you already have high PER, but I don't consider it to be especially powerful if you're not planning your build around interrupts. You will get Stunning Shots at some point - which makes interrupts obsolete. As I said, come to the character build forum. The first post there is a list of builds that is fairly actual, it also contains melee aas well as ranger builds. You don't have to follow them, but usually the description of the builds contain a lot of useful info how certain abilities/talents work best and why.

Nah, incrementing or decrementing something that is boolean in it's nature (being invisible, being alive, being pregnant...) is worth a facepalm. There's no need to beat around the bush. Any solution that uses more than one state of invisibility when in the game you can either be completely invisible or completely visible is a bad solution.

No, that's right. But after that you can still do the other factions' initial quests.

I love fantasy, I hate Terry Pratchett's stuff, I loved BG, IWD and NWN, liked DA:O, hated DA2 and DA:I, liked Skyrim and love PoE. It's complicated obviously. You can't boil things down easily to a point where you can say: "That's why everyone likes it". Unless you don't do a big survey you can only say why you liked or didn't like it. For me, PoE is silly enough (you just have to play a char who's hunting for the clever disposition). It's epicness is good enough for me. I also like it's seriousness and sobriety. I really like it that items don't do things that are too weird and powerful. There could have been more diversity in the effects, true, but it's also cool that most unique weapons don't stand out so much and follow a certain set of rules - or should I say "set of effects" that are put together like Lego. And with WM OBS introduced quite a bit of weapons which have truly unique features like Bittercut, Stormcaller, St. Ydwen's Redeemer and so on. Designing and especially developing and testing such unique features (which you can't reuse in the game) costs time and money. Lets not forget that PoE had a small budget and a rel. short development time compared to many other games of that quality and scale. I also like that they started the rule system as a streamlined one. They only got caught up in too much fuzz on the way. I mean look at the many different ways damage can be applied (direct damage, damage over time which depends on MIG and INT, damage over time which depends on MIG only and so on) and look at the six (?) categories of stuff that influences recovery time. But still I appreciate the effort. For me, PoE is definitely not soulless.

Then it's time for a complete party retraining session.

Ciphers have Psychovampiric Shield and Body Attunement for +25 deflection and +7 DR. They can be played in the front line. Veteran's Recovery is a good pick as well. They even work well with a shield and a sabre (preferably Bittercut because it has two damage types and works with Spirit of Decay which adds another +20% to damage). Pain Link is another great power for a front line melee cipher.