kvaak

It seems to (not) work randomly. I have a really hard time reproducing this. Similarly I didn't get the accuracy bonus from a fine pollaxe for some reason. Saved the game, reloaded and now it works just fine. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/322376537626064302/26D82966DB68ED7EA50F011A6E54B2A1D79CD6A0/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/322376537626064125/6856247DBC25A81CFA6731D8B337821E6F5FC49C/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/322376537626063995/6B26BC6F08EB33B0745314785ED77BB436F84C7B/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/322376537626063646/E7B770C3B5810FDA36B92BEB2818F43167BA9A6D/

Most roguelikes I've played (Nethack, DCSS, ADOM, ToME, Brogue, Sil) highly encourage this. They also have a hunger system which prevents you from camping/farming a safe spot by forcing you to explore for food. Now that I think about it the only roguelike I've played that didn't have such a system is DoomRL. Which is why it's horribly broken. As far as CRPGs go there's at least Neverwinter Nights for "rest whenever wherever with no penalties". At least the Infinity Engine games had random ambushes.

Because I have no interest in looking up minmaxed builds for a game that doesn't provide sufficient challenge for them even with difficulty ramped up to eleven. I'm currently running PotD with 35% exp penalty and at times even that doesn't feel sufficient but I'm not increasing it until the significantly increased exp requirements past the first couple of levels kick in. My smartbarian utterly mutilated everything either through Grey Sleeper's direct damage, constant twin stones or paralysis procs. Good enough for me especially considering you can grab and fully unlock it as soon as act 2 starts.

I.E. you're no worse off than you were before finding or binding the weapon. Also, Grey Sleeper.

Most of the voice-acted characters are rather personal in my opinion. I can certainly hear the crazy Russian priest's (no, he doesn't actually have a Russian accent) rambling in my head just as well as Minsc inspiring me by charging... BLINDLY OOOOOON. Okay, not Minsc. He was something else. Some lines being voice-acted and others not on the same character feels rather random at times but I don't find it too awkward in PoE. E.g. Wasteland 2 on the other hand completely butchered their VA with the director's cut, not only do characters still have voiced and unvoiced lines randomly but the additional voiced lines they added in the DC have clearly higher volume from the original ones. It's horribly inconsistent which, among with the awkward camera angles, made me never play WL2DC past the first mission. The base game I finished thrice.

You already get a myriad of bonuses for the weapon being bound to your soul. If that automatically makes you proficient with it why can't a priest with a fully awakened Grey Sleeper still hit the broad side of a barn? Because at the end of the day it's still a sharp stick at its core and you have to know how to swing a sharp stick. If you're proficient with great swords but not estocs does the soulbound estoc magically turn into a great sword in your hands? It certainly doesn't behave like one. More crits is just more damage on average unless you run a smartbarian with Tall Grass or something. I don't know the exact amount of pips that would equate to +6 accuracy but that's largely irrelevant, my point was that it's nothing like +++++ weapon ++ fighting style, or even +++ and ++ for a paladin, and even if it was you can respec in PoE. As for soulbound weapons being inferior to other uniques with durgan steel: raw numbers wise that might be true but soulbound weapons get some crazy on-hit effects which can proc on every hit. Combine that with things like carnage and driving flight... Not every class has access to those, yes, which is why a Paladin would be much better off with a durgan steel enchanted Blade of the Endless Paths than Grey Sleeper.

Oh, now I see what you mean, although I still don't think this is enough of a justification to make proficiency bonuses universal for soulbound weapons. Personally I find priests horribly squishy so the only relevant bonuses would be Magran for arquebus and Wael for rod, although both would probably lose to Skaen's sneak attack. From a powergaming point of view. I went Eothas for my PotD run since he feels the least dickish of the bunch. Anyone but Skaen. Perpetuating an infinite cycle of hatred isn't cool.

"+10 accuracy while wielding a flail or a morning star" applying to a sword makes no sense regardless of whether it's a class/deity-specific talent or a cross-class one. Priests get access to at least five different soulbound weapons three of which are universal. That should be plenty.

As far as I'm concerned it's the second hardest fight in the game, although technically the strongest boss is I'm fairly sure the only thing "hardest enemy vanquished" looks at is the monster's or level, even after beating both vanilla dragons all but one of my party members had random llaguefaths as their strongest vanquished enemy. Can't remember what the one exception was but it was neither of the dragons. Of course it's possible Itumaak stole both kills and they just don't show up under Sagani's stats, he does crit harder than my crossbow-wielding rogue with sneak attack and deathblows.

They do have respecs now, and once you have access to soulbound weapons the retraining cost is pitiful. On my recent run I had 50k-something in cash after emptying every single ingredient shop (which I never ended up even using), without selling a single unique weapon/armour, any magical accessories or consumables and buying a good couple of unique items just because I had nothing else to spend the gold on.

With the option of retraining that honestly makes no sense whatsoever. +6 accuracy isn't big enough of a deal you wouldn't just use the soulbound weapon anyway unless you were a specialized fighter. It's like an equivalent of ++ long swords, or +++ at best. Not +++++ long swords ++ dual wielding.

I never actually noticed this since whenever I bound a weapon I swapped proficiencies (if necessary). If this does happen I'd say it's definitely a bug. I'm not too fond of soulbound weapons in general for a multitude of reasons, although the one thing they do is recreate the excitement when you found a +1 long sword in BG1. Plain metal weapons, which is what you would use for most of the game, could randomly break at any time. Then in BG2:ToB the shop in your starting town sells unnamed, boring +4 weapons which you won't buy because you already have better stuff. In PoE you start at level 1 yet few pieces of equipment recreate that "holy crap this is amazing" feeling. Until your smartbarian's carnage starts to proc Grey Sleeper's on-hit effects.

Well, if there's one thing PoE's weird attribute system did it at least spawned a completely new archetype: The smartbarian. (after all, muscle wizard does need a counterpart, right!?) And yeah, the obvious solution to equipment swapping would be to use base stats for dialogue. If you try to draw the line somewhere in the middle you have to justify why stat bonuses from gear don't qualify but resting and food do, or the other way around. It's possible I'm exaggerating this since it's a major issue in Tales of Maj'Eyal which I've sunk a good couple of hours into. First you put on lightweight strength-boosting equipment, then you use that strength boost to put on heavier equipment that provides a higher strength bonus and eventually with your current and base strength of 10 you're wearing constitution-boosting equipment with a requirement of 50 strength to boost your base constitution of 10 to 50 so you can take a level in a skill that requires 50 constitution. Then you remove it all and put on your +magic gear, some of which might require strength boosts to equip. Finally you swap the last strength boosts from stuff like rings which have no requirement to +magic rings. All that so with your current and base constitution of 10 you could have a fifth level of thick skin which grants 3% global damage reduction and requires 50 constitution. You're very, very heavily encouraged to do this. PoE isn't quite that bad but when you allow renewable, temporary boosts to bypass one-time stat checks this is the kind of horrible mess you can end up in. I wish PoE didn't reward this since while role-playing isn't something I consciously pursue kicking a kitten holding a gold piece in its mouth on a character known for honest and benevolent behaviour just doesn't sit right with me. Of course if the character aims to become a Sith lord not only do I kick the kitten but I also force throw it over the railing because for some reason CRPGs tend to confuse "evil" with "complete ****" as far as player characters go.

See, that's the thing, I found Ultima's bagception ridiculous rather than any of the things you listed, and I know people who share that opinion. I'd say the single most immersive CRPG I've played (if not the best overall) would be Gothic 2 which came out in 2003. You have craftsmen going on their daily routines, you have priests loudly preaching in shrines in the middle of the city, you have highwaymen attacking you along chokepoints on the road with no warning, no cutscenes, nothing. At best they'll throw an insult or two at you. You can't use the forge or the whetstone if the blacksmith is currently using them, and all of this is implemented in a way that doesn't notably hinder gameplay. On top of that you have a fairly sizable world to explore, interesting characters, interesting story, all the good stuff. And then you have the eternally dreaded infinite inventory space with no explanation at all. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Apart from some roguelikes like Sil I can't really think of RPGs where a restricted inventory adds anything but frustration to the game. Ultima's bagception most certainly is not a good example. I wouldn't classify Darkest Dungeon as an RPG but it does a decent job, you have to juggle with gold vs. supplies potentially providing a larger benefit. It's not without its flaws though, you're heavily disincentivized from doing the longest dungeons as you end up having to throw a colossal portion of the loot away. Shorter dungeons fill your bags anyway so might as well do those. There are some decent implementations but generally restricted inventory doesn't add any complexity or force you to make decisions, you just have to dump vendor trash (or equivalent) more often. E.g. aforementioned Sil avoids this by making loot scarce, highly desirable (even stuff like junk weapons can be used as throwing weapons) and most importantly by simply removing anything you don't take with you. If you leave an item on the floor as you leave a level it's gone forever, you can't go back and grab it later when you'd need it. I don't see how PoE could reasonably implement anything like this. You get your own fort, what could ever prevent you from stashing every single piece of Dyrwoodan clothing you find while still using most of your space for useful items? You could add things like time limits, degradation, item destruction etc. but all of those create entirely separate problems while trying to solve a nonexistent one. (Some) modern RPGs still in fact do (some of) these things. The difference is mostly that instead of giving you a practice lute with 100 charges and a 1/3 chance to succeed (invisible to the player of course) you get 33 charges and guaranteed success. Did you also enjoy watching the utterly clueless Owyn fail to pick that lock in Mac Mordain Cadal over and over and over and over again until he's finally a master locksmith, having never touched any other lock in his entire life?

I don't really like how Grieving Mother is presented, a lot of the time it feels like I'm reading some sort of weird novel instead of playing a CRPG (and mind you, this is coming from someone who absolutely loves the narrative of Betrayal at Krondor). It just doesn't work, I have to have a mindset for reading a novel if I'm reading a novel and PoE isn't a game that allows me to reach such a state while playing. She has this aura of mystery but the narrative style put me off to the point where I found her more frustrating than interesting. Everyone's favorite crazed Russian priest on the other hand might just be my favorite video game character ever. As far as I'm concerned he's Chris Avellone's single greatest creation. Heck, Durance was the single greatest source of motivation for my latest playthrough. He's just that great. Who says you can't run two? My PC was a barbarian but I still used Maneha more than any of the other melee NPCs. Carnage + Draining is fun!

I really wish I could agree - I genuinely do. PoE has it all - it has a captivating setting, it has interesting characters, it has brilliant dialogue, it has the single greatest NPC ever seen in a CRPG (Durance), it has a unique combat system (miss/graze/hit/crit is quite possibly one of the best I've ever seen), but it just isn't polished enough to make it the single best thing ever since Baldur's Gate and the original XCOM. I have to spend way too much time staring at loading screens. I'm rewarded for wasting time in a completely pointless secret system that encourages you to sneak around literally everywhere, repeatedly. Who knows whether I missed something the first or 5th time because my mechanics was one level too low? (Tidefall, I'm looking at you.) I have to babysit characters in combat constantly since they might just decide to act on their own if they get interrupted in any manner - yet the game doesn't give clear feedback on this. I have to constantly, manually mouse over a dozen (de)buffs to see whether Aloth finished quaffing that potion, or if he decided to just wand stuff instead. I'm encouraged to constantly swap equipment on my main character so he's optimally equipped for both combat and stat checks in dialogue (in WM2 you can get e.g. a total of +8 resolve (possibly more) from resting and swappable equipment, plus 3 from food which is a limited resource). Combat difficulty doesn't scale properly (WM is mostly to blame) for a good portion of the game. Items/abilities/spells are needlessly hidden behind quirky/messy submenus (again, WM is to blame). Every now and then small bugs pop up. A character turns permanently invisible. Another character refuses to enter stealth mode. Text overlaps on soulbound items. Buttons disappear. Stronghold UI gives false or misleading feedback. Et cetera. PoE has/had potential - a metric ton of it. Even in its current state it's easily one of the best RPGs I've played in the last decade* or so. But the constant, minor quirks and the knowledge how much better PoE could be if it was just a bit more polished is just... infuriating. A lot of these things sound powergame-y but IMHO things like swapping equipment to pass one-time stat checks are just bad design. Maybe I'm just traumatized by ToME. PoE is great and I most certainly don't regret pre-ordering it or buying the expansions, Steam says I have 222 hours clocked in. I certainly hope we'll get a sequel. But most of all I wish they'd iron out the little things. * = I can't really think of a younger title than SW:KOTOR (released 2003/2004) that I'd definitely rate higher than PoE.

In its current state I'd say there's still a decent amount of polishing to do although whether that happens is another matter. Anyway, having just finished a full WM2 game from scratch (on hard, with a PC Barb and no custom adventurers)... 1) Performance issues are still there. Not as bad as initially but every unnecessary loading screen will still make you grumble. As an example I had a bounty in the tower in Heritage Hill. Great. So I walk out of the Warden's Lodge. Loading screen. Enter World Map, travel to Heritage Hill. Second loading screen. Enter ground floor of tower, third loading screen. Well the roof is spacey and all that so I guess that's where I'll look. Fourth loading screen. Oh, nope, better check the second floor. Fifth loading screen. Bounty hunting intensifies. Time to get out of here. Sixth loading screen. How'd I end up on the roof? Well at least it gives me an option to skip to... the ground floor. Seventh loading screen. Exit tower, enter Heritage Hill. Eighth loading screen. ...and finally I'm free to grab my reward from the Warden after two more loading screens. Actually I'll just do the other bounties first just so I can minimize the number of loading screens. Big, open areas tend to have FPS drops, god forbid you have multiple druids spamming lightning. 2) Difficulty scaling. So they added the expansion in the middle of the game which means there's plenty of more experience when you interrupt your hunt for Thaos. Got a raised level cap too which is nice and all but the total amount of available exp also gets a huge spike which means the main storyline is completely trivial even if you enable high-level scaling. I entered WM1 as soon as I got the opportunity to do so yet I was still told I'm overleveled. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Anyway they gave me an option to scale the difficulty for a higher level party - sounds good, right? Pre-Caed Nua was as nightmarish as always. Act 2 didn't feel too difficult since you finally get a full roster. At some point in Defiance Bay I finally got the message about WM1 being available. Okay they said Crägholdt is for... more experienced parties, I got murdered. Time to enter WM1. Well, for the most parts the fights seem fairly simple - I got obliterated a few times but that was pretty much always due to overconfidence and/or lack of preparation. Apart from the optional big boss - who obliterated me again and again until I just gave up - I can't recall a single fight in WM1 that felt genuinely difficult. Meanwhile it keeps pooping crazy equipment at me. Okay, WM1 done. Guess I'll do act 3 for now. Another high-level pop up and... wow. Everything is completely trivial. I could probably have Aloth solo most encounters with no spells. Finished the Endless Paths of Od Nua. I remember how the final (optional) boss completely obliterated my party back in vanilla. Not a single time did I get even close. Not this time, the fight was completely trivial. The poor thing got obliterated. Same goes for the last set of bounties, those were terrifying previously, now they weren't remotely challenging. Mostly done with the main storyline so I guess I'll head to WM2 and... what? I'm overleveled again? Well there's the high-level scaling option again. Hopefully it actually does something this time. Well, this is surprising, these enemies are actively going for my weakest chars. The fights actually offer some challenge and HOLY CRAP this boss is brutal. Ended with five guys down and Watcher at 20hp or something but the final blow strikes true. Damn, everyone just kept going down despite crazy buffs and revive-on-death effects. Got it on the first try but damn, that was intense. Next couple of fights are far and few between (unless you hate sneaking), hard to say anything conclusive. Finally looks like it's another bossfight and... well, I'd say this is the single hardest encounter in the game. Won't spoil more. Time to head for the last area. Chaff hits fairly hard, encounters here aren't completely trivial but far from overwhelming. More chaff, more chaff... I think it's the final boss! Oh wow he went down quick. Guess I'll pay that optional WM1 boss a visit. Huh, he's a wimp. One fairly damaging attack but he only got it off once or twice and Eder soaked most of it. So what's left, Crägholdt Bluffs? I got absolutely mutilated last time. Eh, nothing special. Chaff, chaff, more chaff. Another optional boss, supposedly this one is on par with the dragons and... did my rogue just eat half his HP with a single crossbow crit? Crägholdt Bluffs has a continuation of sorts, it boasts another optional bossfight which might be nasty but stuff just isn't resistant enough - priest-buffed Aloth could more or less permaparalyze everything with shadowflame. Much more notable was the fact that for some reason trash mobs in the last optional area have absurd amounts of HP. Like, "did someone append an extra 0 or something" level of absurd. Their offense and defense (apart from HP) are still pathetic so while the fights last forever they're still trivial. Act 4 also had a high-level scaling pop-up which I'm fairly sure did nothing. I actually ran through most of it with punch Aloth. It was that pathetic. TL;DR: Good: Setting, dialogue, atmosphere Bad: Performance issues (especially load times, and I'm using an SSD), massive XP bloat that high-level content scaling fails to address. If you try to do stuff in a logical order you'll eventually be permanently overleveled unless you deliberately avoid leveling or exp. If you have the slightest idea what you're doing I'd just recommend avoiding difficulties other than PotD. Yes it's ridiculously unfair early but I'd argue that's preferable to the latter half or so of the game being a complete steamroll. That's what it definitely was on hard, with a highly unoptimized Barb PC and default companions (Durance + Aloth + whoever I felt like) There's a decent amount of bugs as well but they aren't gamebreaking for the most part. Although I do wonder how exactly can Bob crit for anything less than 48 as I saw her landing sub-40 crits all the time. Pre-DR.

This seems to happen every time I get a pop-up as a soulbound item is upgraded and sometimes when examining the item in inventory.

Oops, that logfile was actually from a different installation. At any rate either the recent patch (that was fast) or verifying the cache fixed the loot bug. I still have a bunch of persistent guests in Caed Nua (and the Brackenbury inn) though. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j1xnz2znmkrr5j9/boog.zip?dl=0 http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/322376165593029383/2DE2FBF9F7D3AD76C881BEB5DC7F6C2827762008/ I'm not sure if this particular bug was addressed at any point or if anything can be done about it retroactively but here's a save and output_log (the right one this time) in any case. As far as I'm concerned this thread can be marked as resolved since the initial problem it refers to has been fixed, unless OP still has the problem.

The most annoying one is actually extremely easy to reproduce. Step 1: Enter combat Step 2: Attempt to quaff a potion Step 3: Get interrupted while quaffing the potion Expected result: Potion usage is delayed (consistent with other actions) Actual result: Character decides to attack instead. Toggling the AI seems to have little if any impact.

I'm having this issue as well. Attached a save with the bug (and a corpse on the ground), a save without the bug (it didn't occur until I entered the first White March area) and output_log in a zip. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uzkxt2cu6ffymc4/bug.zip?dl=0 On another note a bunch of characters added by WM respawned after I reloaded the area they're in, like the mob outside the great hall in Caed Nua and the soldiers in the inn in Brackenbury. I can't interact with most of them but I can talk to the guy who organizes the battle for Caed Nua - despite the fact he's among the mob outside the great hall whereas he should be inside!? I assume it's because you don't actually talk to the other two groups - the dialogue is triggered when you approach them.