Niclole

Same is happening to me anytime I kill Xaurip Priests. It happens in the Caverns of Xaur Tuk-Tuk and in the Oathbinder sanctum for me. Every single time I kill a priest, the game crashes moments later. Tested it multiple times, tried killing everything else. Works fine, once the priests die the game crashes.

My top damage dealers in my last two playthroughs on Path of the Damned were both melee. 2handed Barbarian in the first and a dual wield flail monk. Flail...monk. Top damage. I think melee is doable, in fact in both playthroughs most if not all of my characters engaged in melee range in almost every fight. My second top damage in the first play through was a mace and shield priest of Skaen wearing padded armor. Admittedly a lot of his damage came from his spells but he was almost always in melee range in fights to cast the shorter range priest spells. In both play throughs I had only two ranged damage dealers, wizard/cipher in the first playthrough and priest/wizard in the second (who still spent more time in melee cause more often than not I just had her cast per encounter Parasitic Staff and beat on peoples faces). But yes, prepare to use Immune spells. Edit: To add to this the most fun Priests I play are always melee range priests. Long Range priests frustrate me cause of the fact a lot of their spells that I want to use have such limited range that they are always running around in already clogged up situations.

Final Fantasy Tactics Icewind Dale Pillars of Eternity If I want a good story I'll read a book. These games do it for me in the mechanics department while having passable stories. Edit: These are the only 3 games Ive ever played through completion more than two times. Which is why I prefer my games to have good mechanics/replayability more than story. I can reread books over and over and over and get the enjoyment of the story. But no matter how good a games story is I can only manage to play through it once, maybe twice. If the story is what draws me to a game I'll never be able to play it again.

Tl;dr No, I don't think they are particularly fun. The idea of being a duelist and riposting and having a good time as a dexterous fighter just wasn't a reality for me. More often than not 1 to 2 hits and the Rogue was down even with high con/resolve shield. I tried a retaliate rogue build on Path of the Damned. By level 8 I had replaced him with a 2 handed Fighter. 2 Handed Fighter was 10x tankier than the Rogue with a shield and all the defensive items I could give him lol. I don't think it works very well, but you could do it. Riposte seems like a skill that needed to be a higher likelihood of going off to me. You don't want your rogue getting hit much and with how often Riposte procs you need to get enemies attacking you to put out any level of damage worth noting. To me its a skill that should have scaling based on the amount of targets hitting you. If you are engaged 1v1 you should have a higher riposte chance and the more enemies engaging you the lower the proc rate should go. Fits the theme better for me, but alas Im not sure it could be done or if you could balance it or even if its a good idea.

It really is a shame those Scion talents don't work with DoTs. Pillars Talents in general disappoint me, but Id say "feats" and "talents" tend to be disappointing in most games. +6 accuracy, yaye.

Love me some Pillars there aren't many games I can play back to back play throughs on and want to play again right after. Only other game that did that for me is Icewind Dale. I imagine there is a reason for that lol.

Well I can't answer this definitively but there are really only two bashing shields I consider using: Dragon's Maw and Badgradr's Barricade but that is more for their additional effects than the bash itself. Maybe Scath Gwennek just cause it comes with inherent superb quality, but that isn't something I'd really do. I find more often than not I don't use bash shields, but some of them have interesting additional qualities. I'm sure Boeroer will be by shortly to point you towards his Barbarian.

Grats

I went in guns blazing at level 16, took a few tries but aoe spam eventually won at. Prep the scrolls of Res and Watchful Guardian. I try most fights this way for awhile until I determine it either wont work or just isn't worth the pain. But he is definitely beatable just going in. Party was Cipher, Barbarian, Mage, Priest, Fighter, Chanter. That was basically my strategy, kill as many of them as I could while revive spamming and once I got it down to a manageable number and regained control of the fight with the front line it seemed I had weathered the storm. Im not sure if NPCs like Concelhaut have limited spells, it seems they do though cause most of the truly outrageous stuff stopped coming out.

Sounds about right really, Barbarian OP.

Everything is good, I barely ever dual wield on Path of the Damned and have done all content. The question is: do you want good, best, or perfect. I tend to actually hate 2 handed weapons in most games but in Pillars I find more often than not half or more of my party is carrying 2 handers lol. I don't know the numbers, I only know what I've experienced: can two handed compete with dual wield? Depends what you mean by compete and what the target is, what the weapons are, what the skills are. Honestly, half my builds are just flavor builds that take relatively poor choices talent and ability wise and gear wise just for theme and I have very few to some issues on Path of the Damned. My personal opinion is that anything is competitive if you play it right. That said, mathematically, there is most likely always a "best case" scenario and from what advice I've seen it is: Dual wield. But again, I've not run into much that just doesn't work and you can get quite creative and have a good time still. Edit: The one weapon I find I use in almost every play through is Tidefall. Its by far my favorite weapon. It looks cool, it feels cool, it has a cool name, it has good lore, and it has good abilities. Love that weapon. In fact I love it so much I wish it didn't exist so I'd be tempted to use other weapon types, mainly cause Greatsword and Pike (Weapon Focus: Talent) both have such a good selection of weapons that its hard to justify not picking that weapon focus and using Tidefall. I have to force myself to use other 2handers. Which is still my biggest complaint, the darn weapon focus talents rather than being able to select 2-3 weapons to focus on yourself.

Cragholdt irritated me to no end. That said it wasn't trouble outside "Fight - Rest, Fight - Rest, Fight - Rest". Mainly cause I was winning fights but through healing and ending up with everyone grey lol. Its a fun area though and its cool to go there early and see how quickly you lose and then come back with all your gear and power and being like "Well, fun". Main reason being there are few areas that feel like this for me. Most of the time all the gear and power I accrue in this game just makes every area a cake walk. Early game: cautious pulling, tactics. Mid game: Swarm. Late Game: Fall asleep watch AI win. White March areas and a few fights break this for me, but that is generally how Pillars felt for me so something like Cragholdt is very welcome, if slightly irritating lol.

Lol. Pull of Eora into Monk with Torment Reach. Just killed like 10 enemies in 3 seconds in a fight I was sure I was going to lose cause everyone in my party but my monk was charmed after I cast Pull of Eora. Sucked them all into one area and my monk had 7 wounds and just unleashed devastation.

No problem, thanks for at least trying lol.

The whole skill itself was suppressed, like when you have one item that gives +5 Reflex and another item that gives +5 reflex you see (suppressed). The skill itself on my character sheet was suppressed. When I leveled up again it was no longer suppressed on the character sheet.

So I picked up deep wounds on my rogue and in combat Deep Wounds debuff pops up but says Deep Wounds (Suppressed). When I clicked on the ability in my character sheet for more information it shows up as 3.7 Raw Damage (Suppressed). I've tested it with multiple weapons and no matter what weapon Im using it remains suppressed. Does it not work with two-handed style or something? Edit: Started working after I leveled up again, dunno.

Here is how I feel about it if you are dropping resolve to 7 or below already you might as well just dump it and put those points back into con. This is usually what I do, I could be wrong but I dislike 6/7 resolve with 6/7 con more than I dislike 3 Resolve 10 con. Just my personal experience. Main reason being that I find deflection easier to buff than +endurance/health in most cases, now if you do lower con to 6/7 I highly recommend just scarifng down cheese all the time on those characters for the +10 endurance. This is what I do with my wizards, particularly the one I have atm that is 6 Con 3 Resolve lol. Cheese is abundant cheap and the +10 endurance for 600 seconds is pretty nice imo, specifically because it is cheap and easy to keep applied. Also lowering con makes me have to rest more which I hate, that 6 con wizard gets hit by 1 spell in 2 fights and its rest time. Infuse with Vital Essence and the talents help with this as well, but those can be equally as annoying if you are relying on the potion variant of Infuse and taking the wound binding talents is always pretty dull to me. But if you have someone that can grab those talents then it helps offset the con penalty.

Blasphemy! Not blasphemy, I'd have to agree Sanguine Plate looks pretty meh. The other plate armors look pretty awesome. Crucible Knight is still probably my favorite though: Simple and Clean.

Im weird, I like Maneha's Armor on my monk. Edit: That or the Exceptional Leather Armor cause it is in my opinion the coolest looking armor in the game.

I dont think it can be legitimately called abuse. If they didnt want you to use paralysis or other CC they had the option of pumping her resistances or just making her immune. But if you stil dont want to use them anything that allows people to come back from knockout will probably be useful as she is pretty one shotty. When I let her get off an attack she was able to take out my 250+ endurance Barbarian in plate armor in one or two attacks. I didnt even pull her or maneuver her in any fancy way, didn't split pull. If anything it is simply utilizing the tools the game gives you to beat a challenge. How her damage numbers are and with how easily she can wipe a whole party I feel it was intended that she must be stopped from utilizing those attacks at all. Even with the Paralysis scrolls easy is still relative. There was some level of challenge in properly positioning the party to deal with the adds and in managing the Adragans that can ruin your day. It definitely isn't, imo, an "easy" fight. While I said originally the fight felt easier that is because it only took me a few tries instead of the 2-3 hours the first attempt took me on hard. By no means would I ever claim the fight was "easy". It was just easier than I remember it to be.

Just like these two my default tactic is simply to drop chill fog on them. But Pull Eora is also useful for setting up cone spells that might otherwise be difficult to get a squishy mage to get off without wrecking your own party. Without it there can be challenge in getting the enemies all nice and clumped while also keeping all of your party safe of the cone.

I can tolerate expert mode, I can't tolerate trial of iron. My advice is if you really hate the modes not to do them. The achievements are cool and all but if you aren't having fun doing it.. That said, dumped resolve barbarian two handed tank/dps Barbarian was probably my favorite class so far. Dude never died after he got Shod-in-Faith and out damaged even my wizard by nearly 30k damage total. Take other when crit items, particularly celebrant gloves if you get them for the +concetration to offset the dumped resolve and you have a really fun front liner imo. But priest is awesome, Id honestly take Wizard over druid but druid is fine too. I honestly think fighters are better than Paladins, that is just my opinion and I love both but once you get charge fighters just become great at getting on enemy backlines and destroying the actual threats to your party. Good luck if you decide to go through with. I'd really look into that barb build though, I think boeror posted one similar to mine.

So I just tested some of the strategies I recommended particular the use of scrolls of protection/defense with an all melee party. Some of the fights that I've previously beat through use of choke points (particularly the spirit fights in Caed Nua) and I can pretty much say that those scrolls alone basically trivialized the fights. If you grab some scrolls of Burst of Summer Flame it gets even easier. All on Path of the Damned, Level 4 Protagonist with Level 3 companions. I will say it was with a full six person party and custom made companions, so it could still be a bit harder without a full party. But yeah, those scrolls made a huge difference. Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, Rogue, Shapeshift Druid, Battlemage.

What are the sources of graze to hit conversion? Flails 30%, fighter confident aim 20%, some unique enchantments and Paladin aura, but are there any others on items?

Is there a particular reason you don't want to use bottlenecks? Early game I find a lot of the encounters are centered around bottlenecks to allow you to use them. Later, access to reliable bottlenecks becomes a bit more challenging to find. You specifically asked about act I though and I don't see a reason why you shouldn't use the bottlenecks provided for you, as long as you aren't trying to rely on them for the whole game. That said: scrolls, consumables, traps, summoning trinkets, eating food all of these things can help give you an edge. You mentioned fear, which frightened is an annoying debuff but also one of the easiest to counter with Lore 2 or a level 1 priest in Prayer Against Fear. As far as blind and stun mobs go...yeah they annoy me too, so I bottleneck them and try to prevent them swarming around my party lol. One person getting chain stunned over and over is not nearly as bad as 2-3 people being stunned. Atleast, that is my experience. Debuffing their accuracy and buffing your defenses obviously help. Personally I am a fan of Scrolls of Protection and Scrolls of Defense and they aren't too terribly difficult to get access to. Particularly with shadows and the like I also find Potion of Bulwark Against the Elements good if you can get your hand on some of those, though Potion of Iron Skin is quite alright in my book too. Obviously, if you have access to spell variants of damage reduction then those can help to. My playstyle might be a bit suboptimal though, but its worked for me on PotD so far. None of these things are necessary, in fact most of them I don't use all too often myself (other than Prayer Against Fear which I use ...all the time...cause I hate Frightened and Terrified and they seem to show up EVERYWHERE), but they are definitely options you could look into if a fight is giving you an awful headache. Potentially some of this advice could be bad, I am no expert and many more experienced players that dive into the numbers game and min/maxing probably know more. But I thought I'd try to offer some of my personal experience. I'd also have to agree with the whole "sturdier" thing others have mentioned. I just don't think its necessary to turn everyone into a plate wearing, shield toting, deflection stacking character. And I don't think anyone has advised that, just be careful you don't push the sturdy thing to far, unless you enjoy the moderately slower, war of attrition play style in which case: go for it! All in all I think there are a LOT of options in Pillars of Eternity and I'd recommend looking at every ability, even ones someone has ranked as "useless" or "not powerful" or "dont use this ability". You can find some hidden gems in your spell book that happen to be the perfect solution to the one problem you are having at the moment, it might be the only time you use that spell or the only situation where that spell is applicable but it could be the one that turns a "What...the...how am I supposed to beat this" into a "Well that was easy". Edit: My last playthrough was: 2 Handed Barbarian "Tank"/DPS, Sword/Shield Fighter Tank, Chanter 2 Handed Off Tank/Support/Scrollmonger, Priest (Skaen, 1hand + Shield support/dps, retaliate items), Wizard AoE Nuke and Cipher Support/Damage. I used bottlenecks when they were to my advantage though, were they necessary? Probably not as I steamrolled a lot of open area fights as well, but again if its there and it gives me the edge and it isn't exploiting a game mechanic Im going to use it. And no bottle necks aren't exploiting or cheese, its a time honored military tradition.