Starlite

Just discovered I can drag food items onto the character body in inventory to eat (neither portrait works) -- and promptly fed six items to one character by accident!

I'm thrilled to see this game is still being supported with patches. I'm late to the game, but loving it -- in a very completist way (over 160 hours so far, read all the books, etc). I never quite finished BG, though I went through IWD twice. I'd like to share some thoughts, some of which are bugs, some just mildly annoying. Please forgive me if I get carried away. Some things I've noticed that would be nice to see fixed, though probably of very low priority. First, there's quite a few magnifying glass icons in Twin Elms that cannot be clicked. Off the top of my head: Roof of broken tower in centre east of Hearthsong Celestial Sapling, leaves at the top of the lift Both statues in Burial Isle (one can be clicked about 1cm above the icon, the other not at all) Some water somewhere -- can't remember if it's Hearthsong, Noonfrost, near the boat to Burial Isle, or somewhere else entirely. Admittedly, it looks like a duplicate of a message nearby. Honestly, I think these messages should be clickable at any time they're within the full viewing radius of a character (not necessarily in sight), and the character should not need to move towards it. This already appears to be partly true for some. Second, I think it would be useful to run a grammar checker over all your book text, item description text, and at least some of the conversation text. I've read nearly everything I've encountered so far (end of Act 3), and there's some typos, double words, etc. But the really problematic thing is changes of tense -- really takes the reader out of the story. I suspect the text was retasked (or possibly a draft made it into the final game), but it's relatively easy to fix. A good grammar checker can quickly identify the problems for human intervention -- something every game, news article, blog posting, etc could benefit from! Third, there's some issues with some quest text -- not surprising in such a complex game. The one I picked up on yesterday is the stronghold visitor, Geyda. If Geyda is sent away with no escort, she leaves the stronghold twice (two identical lines in the stronghold log), and just 3 days later (all other non-human subject options take 4 days) a message appears that her body was found in Heritage Hill -- even when she's sent to the other locations. I think there's a similar issue with the text on the current events page if you give her money to hire help ... but I was bored after spending over an hour verifying all the quest branches for the wiki -- sorry. Fourth, the party combat movement AI can be *really* annoying. I've often noticed my melee character taking a hugely circuitous route to reach an enemy that can be reached in a straight line. I suspect an ally is usually occluding the straight line path just slightly, but the other side can be totally open and this still happens. An equivalent issue is with ranged attacks across obstacles. The best example is the bounty in Lle a Rhemen (sp?). In theory, the ranged characters can cast AoE spells and snipe from the ledge while the front line chars block the stairs. In practice, the ranged chars spend a lot of time trying to descend the stairs or otherwise repositioning. (I also noticed that summonings refused to project to the bottom level, which totally compromised the second half of the encounter for me). This is partly an issue with visibility from one level to another (need to be right at the edge to see down), and partly a path-finding issue. I'd also like to see characters stick to the target I've assigned them: my rogue archer often stops shooting at distant, paralysed targets in favour of nearby, non-afflicted options (Aggressive AI mode). On a related note, the way inaccessible map areas are revealed is somewhat flawed. Two good examples are the centre section of the south of the Burial Isle, and the high cliff across Stormwall Gorge. Basically, line of sight is handled in a somewhat 3D manner, which makes it impossible to reveal certain sections of maps with vertical walls. I can understand why this is done (eg: dungeons), but I think exceptions are needed for areas like these. Because it ends up looking a bit silly. Also on the same note, one of the things that really frustrated me with Infinity Engine games was that many maps could never be completely revealed. I really wanted to see a "full reveal" switch implemented once a certain percentage of the map was revealed. For example, if the revealable area of the map was 90%, once more than 88% had been revealed, a switch could be saved that revealed 100% of the map. This would also reduce save file sizes! (The numbers might need tweaking.) Frankly, though, this would work better on a section-by-section basis, with some sections marked as being impossible to fully reveal, and when each/most/all sections were revealed above a certain percentage, the "full reveal" flag for that section/whole map would activate. There are less naive ways of doing this, but I suspect my approach could be quicker to implement, with some tweaking. Why do it? Because otherwise some of your artwork is totally wasted. One more combat issue. If Auto-pause activates at the moment a graphics-intensive spell effect takes hold, all user-interface actions are really slow, especially mouse pointer changes and mouse-over graphics. I think I see this a lot because I've activated Auto-pause on Character Ability End (one of the most useful auto-pauses, to my mind). I admit, the fact this is happening suggests a fundamental programming decision about what happens when the game pauses. So it could be well-nigh impossible to correct the mistake. I love the Stash, but I hate reorganising it. I'm trying to keep one of everything, plus enough items to enchant (it's my first play-through...). But I'd like to keep them in a predictable order. While there's many complex functionalities that could be added, the one I'd most like to see (and that feels feasible) would be a grouping function. Fundamentally, clicking the Group Identical Items button (possibly with confirmation dialog, probably limited to the currently-visible type of gear), would move all items of the same type to immediately follow the first item of that type. So if I had 15 flails in inventory, scattered across three tabs, clicking the button would find the first flail and move the other 14 to insert them immediately after the first. Unlike the very useful filter options, this would be a permanent move (not a temporary display). While I would love to also move all Fine Flails to immediately follow the regular flails, I suspect adding that functionality as well might compromise some people's sorting schemes -- a step too far. I also noticed that shift-clicking an item into the Stash moves it to the front of the stash rather than the end. While this adds flexibility for reorganisation, I'd prefer a game option whether to add to the start or end of the Stash with shift-click. (Accidentally) double-clicking an item in the stash appears to equip it and switch the items, inserting the previous item where the old one came from. I nearly lost my main character's armour this way! (When I say "lost", I mean I couldn't remember what I used to have equipped and there was no obvious way to find it, hidden in the middle of the stash.) This is dangerous functionality, to my mind. I don't think double-clicks should be recognised on stash items. It may already be possible, but there's a big pain point with eating food items outside combat. Basically, I have to enter the inventory, move the food item to the character's belt, put the item it replaces back in their general inventory, then repeat for every character, then exit inventory, pause the game, access each character's belt pouch in turn and click the food item, unpause, reenter inventory, switch items back between belt and general inv. That's just crazy! This isn't combat. Surely, dragging the food item over the character portrait in inventory should queue up eating the food (with some kind of instant audio feedback)? I tried that and it didn't seem to work. But I may be missing a less obvious mechanic. If not ... strong request! Finally, my most common frustration is accidentally undoing an auto-pause. The combat log flows by so fast, it's basically impossible to track. So I periodically feel it's been too long since the last auto-pause, and hit Space. Very often, an auto-pause has just happened, so I actually *unpause* the action! On occasion, this compounds, so I end up hitting Space three times in quick succession and still haven't paused the game! The fix to this is very easy -- taken from Blizzard's book with how they handled some of the skills in Diablo 3 recently. Basically, there needs to be a dead period just after each auto-pause. That is, hitting Space up to 1 second after an auto-pause is triggered does not unpause. While the time interval can be tweaked (half a second?), I can't see any good reason why implementing this would cause an issue for any player -- and it would help a lot! Well, 3 bug reports turned into more than a dozen "complaints." Sorry about that. (I prefer to think of them as concrete suggestions.) I hope there's something useful in there. [As a total aside, I'm looking for work. Wouldn't be averse to testing... Currently living in Melbourne, Australia.]

Done the first tranche of bounties, but haven't handed in the last one. I'm thinking I might lock in a branching save and continue. I can come back to this save once I have The White March, and go from there. Or something. Thanks, guys.

Thanks for confirming that. And for the great advice. Unfortunately, I am going to have to turn in at least the god quests to progress the story. But I can defer a lot of side quests, weird as that feels. Hopefully that sale will start soon!

I was thinking of trying to use a solo Paladin to get a few achievements, specifically: solo, no companions, zero knockouts, less than 10 rests, less than 175 kills, expert, and trial of iron. The latter didn't work out very well: I followed the main quest lines without side quests to Caed Nua and was instantly stunned by the spirits -- game over (Easy difficulty). Might need to skip Trial of Iron... Anyway, a few questions that aren't covered above: 1. Is there a list of which quests to do and which to skip for solo, and/or for minimal kills? 2. How do avoid being frozen and destroyed by the spirits at Caed Nua? 3. Is my list of achievements to get in one game reaching for too much? 4. Does getting knocked out but coming back from the revival armour count as a knock-out? (probably important to know that) Thanks in advance.

So I've hit level 12, and my XP reads "66000 - Max". But there's still a lot of game left. I don't want to buy The White March before the Steam summer sale. So do I have to stop playing and wait, or will my XP continue to accumulate invisibly, reappearing in full when I do buy The White March? Or, just possibly, would it actually be more interesting to finish the main game at level 12, without The White March, then play the expansion from there? (I'm playing on Hard.) It goes against my instinct to play without actually earning XP, but it's probably inevitable for a completist like myself. For the record, I'm in the middle of the god quests, with none yet turned in.

Thanks, guys. @Stasis_Sword: I did word my question poorly. I was aware that each class can be built with different roles. But that's kind of why I asked the question: knowing the importance of each attribute to a particular class helps understand whether it's useful for a particular, intended role. @Raven Darkholme: Thank you! That's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Particularly interesting is your note that Constitution isn't all that important (insofar as it affects Endurance). Knowing no better, I built my Cipher with M13, C10, D15, P11, I19, R10. Some of the build guides suggest my Might and Resolve may be too low (I actually didn't realise I could lower stats at all). Also feels like taking Eyestrike was a mistake (the AI script keeps trying to use it on spirits!). Anyway, thanks again. Slowly learning.

Thanks, guys. The two links are a particularly good start. And MaxQuest basically confirms my gut feeling. I had some trouble with the "pinned Builds". Partly because a lot are no longer current with the game version. But mostly because few people really explain the why of things (possibly I didn't read far enough -- there's a lot of material). So here's two follow-up questions: 1) The wiki's Attribute page has an interesting diagram, but I'm wondering if anyone has an analysis of which stats are useful or not useful to each class, and why. (That last is critical.) 2) Do attributes ever affect skills? For example, if I eat something that raises Perception, will that help my scouting Rogue detect and/or disable traps? Will anything?

I'm still quite new to the game (72 hours and still in the first quest of Act II), but not to the genre (completed Icewind Dale on the hardest setting many years ago). I'm playing on Hard with a full party and being fairly completist. I'm using the wiki occasionally but trying to avoid actual spoilers as much as possible. But I'm really struggling to properly understand the combat system. It's very different from D&D, for starters, and the devil appears to be in the details. I know there's lots of information in the gamepedia and the wiki, but it all tends to be very isolated. I'm wondering if anyone has put together a detailed guide that brings all the information together into a coherent whole. In more detail, what I'm trying to understand covers the role of attributes (and hence, which are needed for each class -- also their relation to skills), non-damaging effects (including how they affect the party, how they affect monsters, which are more flexible when the type of monster cannot be anticipated, and the Talents classes should choose and use), recovery and armour type (and flow-on effects), and the sequence of a combat roll. For the latter, it would be great to see a step-by-step walk-through of all the different factors that play a part in each major type of attack. For example: "for a melee attack, d100 is first rolled, this is adjusted by the attack and defense numbers of the attacker and defender, which are affected by these attributes as follows, these are also affected by status effects as follows, then damage reduction is factored in by comparing the weapon damage type to the DR for that type, which is then affected by...". You get the idea. And the fact it would need to be much better formatted! Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I have the distinct impression I'm doing rather a lot wrong in combat!