mosspit

Not particularly. The character will automatically stop engaging enemies when they are prepping for a skill or in the activation animation. Although sometimes I notice that this happens momentarily even through just normal attacking, which can prompt enemies to move away from your characters without triggering disengagement attacks. Tbh, the engagement system has a certain unpredictability aspect to it.

Inspiring Radiance is nice. It is 1 of the first few buffs I always start with. Zealous Focus on the other hand well... get suppressed by Scroll of Valor amongst other things. Unless of course that 15% graze-to-hit/ 5% hit-to-crit conversion is that sought after.

What? You mean the Barb gets St Ydwen Redeemer AND Tidefall? Tsk Tsk Well, I am partial towards dual wield Barbs Mine currently is having a field day with her newly bought We Toki. Planning to get her the Wodewys soon.

Tidefall. Just Tidefall. A solid 2H weapon in which one don't even need to design a build around to be effective. And yes, it's under WF Soldier.

That's a good read. And I must say your progress is very speedy. When you asked about builds and stuff for your current run, I already started my PotD ToI all-melee playthrough and now you are pretty near my progress point (I only just killed Sky Dragon). Or maybe it is just that my progress is slow - I can only level once every 2 days or so. Well I already done my TC playthrough with a no-caster team and it was quite fun and challenging. That Lagufaeths encounter lead to one of the 5 restarts on that playthrough - it was because 2 groups of them are too near each other and will both be triggered together. It was basically an encounter of enemy size of a dozen or more, and capable of paralyse-locking your team. Fun times :D Well I chickened out of Alpine in my previous TC since my party was just too restricted and I didn't wanna risk the progress that was so far into completion. But I will definitely be attempting it in my current ToI playthrough since I have a Priest. A Priest just makes things so much easier as compared to my previous playthrough without casters. For Durgan Battery, I have my Priest wield a lvl3 Nightshroud so she can Shadowing Beyond after starting the forge and re-join the group near the entrance. Doing so I can split up the Flame Constructs from the other spirits. That was literally the only reason I had Nightshroud soulbound to my priest lol(I have no rogue this time round). I might be using that for Cragholt depending on the situation.

Save file bloat is not related to the decision to nerfs to Rime chant and summons as you think it did. The original thread is this http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/73986-chanter-rime-and-frost-traps-get-saved-causing-mobileobjectssave-to-grow-out-of-control/ It basically investigates the fact that the previous codes were inefficient in the sense that destroyed traps and expired summons were not removed completely. The fix that was posted addressed the issue to reduce the save bloat but it does not actually change the duration of active summons and traps. Meaning to say, this can be (and had been) implemented without nerfing the chant and summons. The changes to the chant and summon durations are likely balancing done by obs and not owing to coding inefficiencies.

Mr Sawyer's comment on SB weapons. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/82687-pillars-of-balancing/?p=1743981

Btw you have the option of taking out Frenzy and using Potions of Deleterious Alacrity of Motion. Although Frenzy is once per encounter, the potions will last longer and offers faster atk speed. Moreover, Frenzy's atk speed component will be suppressed by the potion's atk speed component. The materials for the potion are quite easy to come by too.

Well on the other hand, there is the respec option to replace Armoured Grace with something else.

It looks fine. Maybe there can be some shifting between Might and Int based on what you prefer and whether it a dps or cc focused barb. I always like Int to be above average to get more out of Carnage. But you can also supplement that with the Overseeing item mod.

I used Gallant's Focus previously on Eder and a couple of disadvantageous points stood out: Range - It is about 2-2.5m from what I can see. You will not using it at the same coverage as a proper pally aura. Priest's Blessing - This lvl1 spell has acc bonus and 10% increased dmg. After lvl9, GF will constantly be suppressed. GF can still be relevant for alpha strike situations, but still... Personally, the one I used the most often is Apprentice's Sneak Attack. At this point, these talents seems very tagged on. I kinda miss how games like IWDII handle mutil-class.

@Alex I don't know how viable is a 3 dex 3 per pally is in post-2.0. But in post-2.0, AI was changed to move away from tank-and-spank. I don't exactly know the breakpoint but it means that enemies might judge that the tanks are too weak and will eat a disengagement attack to run past. The converse is also true in which if any party members are too squishy, they might as well have big neon light signboard that says come hit me. I dislike 3 dex on pallies (or anyone in general) because you will still want want them to perform some actions in addition to tanking. 3 dex makes their recovery and actions really slow. To the point where you fall into situations where you need immediate actions from them, but they are still recovering from previous actions. And yes, it is easy to get about 2.2k extra gold from Heodan near the start by selling everything including the pre-purchase dlc ring and Disappointer pistol. If you want to be more efficient in the exp gains, you can In Cliant LIs, make a beeline to the exit via the "collapsed wall" route and sneaking past the Skuldr group. In Glided Vale after the hanging tree scene, you can get to the inn via the slope on the left to avoid the entrance of the collapsed ruins which will give you discovery exp (150exp iirc). Recruiting new adventurers at this point will have their exp bar be slightly more than 2k behind your main PC At this point after resting, your calendar should read 20 (or 19 is you rushed through the beginning). Save and reload and go the inn 2nd flr to grab the Rymgard Mantle. It will spawn on the 20th day. Completing easy quest like "Against the Gain" and going back to Cliant Lis to go through the content there including disarming all traps in the trap room (Mechanics 3) will get you lvl2 on your adventurers and lvl3 on PC and premade NPCs Alternatively, you can do quests and such until you just hit lvl3. Then you recruit new adventurers at lvl2. Twice as expensive, but it will give you the smallest exp gap of 1.5k between them and the main PC And to add to Andrea's comment on food, I will add Ale to it. It costs only 5-6 currency but gives 2 DR, which is equivalent to an armour upgrade. 2 DR is really nice for early game. I basically restarted ToI enough times that the first 10% of the game is on "auto-pilot"

@Alex I personally feel that Triple Crown (or ToI in general) favours consistency in terms of combat performance. Which means dumping stats is unnecessary in general. For a fighter's case, you have your duration skills like Vigorous Defence and Disciplined Barrage, cc durations and aoe of skills like Take a Hit. Also with Will Saves. It depends on your party composition but you would want to avoid being too weak in a certain aspect, which with stat dumping you will likely to be.

Imo, I wouldn't say that the effects of Spelltongue are completely tested out. If my memory serves me correctly, in the earlier parts of post-2.00 didn't Spelltongue stack multiple instances of stolen atk spd? Ofc, that has since been addressed but who knows what about other aspects? In any case, OPness and fun combinations are not necessarily mutually inclusive. Synergies between items, skills and talents creates some sort of depth in gameplay which can be very fun.

Those spots will be "properly" revealed if you have the required Mechanics level. Sneak mode might be required. These hidden spots were present all along, just that one of the later patches made them visible (but not immediately interact-able) when "tabbing". No idea if they are intended or otherwise, and they seem a little inconsistent too.

Lol that's pretty ridiculous

Yeah, the class build index pretty much requires some consistent effort to keep them relevant. Even if they cleaned them up now, 3.0 seems to be introducing key mechanism changes that will render previous build version inaccurate again. I think I might have come across the particular Steam Guide you are referring to. That guide has a pretty good rundown on the finer details of gameplay but yeah the builds in there are all pretty much min-maxed. Which is questionable for builds that are meant for newbies.

Hey, whatever floats your boat

Gallant's focus is definitely viable. But the thing I dislike about GF is that it doesn't stack with some(?) ACC boosting spells. I haven't tested this extensively but, at the very least, it gets suppressed by the Priest's Blessing spell. On a fighter, it will also get suppressed by Disciplined Barrage.

Pardon my ignorance to buzzwords, but isn't "Knowing which fights you can handle and which ones to avoid" an aspect of "meta-gaming"?

Why not Game of Thrones?

Just found out something. It is item related but not really a combination of sorts. Still kinda silly though. For Nightshroud, you can power up the 1st level (getting blind proc to trigger 13 times) by hitting your own party member. Doesn't need to be in combat lol.

Imagine trying to fight your mirror twin... scary!

Actually, that is not a bad idea. Even though, it feels like the AI is cheating... so make it so for PotD? Combine that with better collision detection and we should be onto something.

In a way true. That is common knowledge of how wikis work in which the community drives the content. Numbers is one thing, more importantly it will be the incentive or motivation to do these changes. I for one am a lazy bastard