Wormerine

Shark Soup prevents that Yay! Good to know. I have been trying to minimize damage, by using Dex resistance items. It moves it to paralize, which while still deadly, doesn't insta kill companions when she does her shaut. I ended up cheesing the fight by endlessly spawning summoned weapons with chanter from hinding. Will try to kill her in a more legit way sometime later.

Bah! Yeah, I ended up cheesing the fight by sending Eder to his death, and continually spawning Weapons with my Konstantin chanter from hiding, until all spiders are dead. It seems there are couple ways to cheese the fight. Glad she is respawning. I might experiment with killing her in a legit manner. I usually have trouble surviving once I get to the point of being able to hit her.

Wait.... is Gouging Strike and Brand Enemy indefinite? Once hit they will chip on enemy health until they die? From what I undestand you killed enough small spiders to get her defences low, and the hit her with brand enemy+Gouging strike and hide in a corner until she is dead?

Yup! That's super annoying. Especially, when one of my are getting killed by something, and I can't even see what is causing it.

Ha, interesting. I for one still have to defeat the spider, on veteran. To be honest, i am using my old save and my character builds are a mess, and it seems that I sold some really great items (no Red Hand to be found to my horror). Just finished SSS yesterday, and am considering creating some mercenaries, if I fail too many times with my default companions.

I would say take everything with a grain of salt. It is a change and I found it a bit odd to hear PoE1 music in PoE2. That doesn't mean though that it doesn't work, or that I won't like it once I get used to it.

Purudaya pretty much answered everything. God's Challenges are like difficulty setting - does any of them look like things that would make the playthrough more interesting/enjoyable for you? If yes, use those. Personally I wish they were more flexible (not lock you into PotD/allow mods to be used).

I found mine on a lower deck behind one of my crew on a right side of the big storage space (as if under the stairs you decent into). In another thread one of he devs mentioned that there are some issues if you are using the submarine, and switching to another ship resolves the issue for now.

Giving souls to your new trinket (M....) makes him a better summon.

Yeah, it’s awesome. I hitkey my most commonly used abilities, but sometimes a fight requires regular use of less common ability. Especially useful with mages which swap between 3 or 4 Grimoires on regular basis.

I would like to add my support to the request of keeping the indoor (aka tavern) unchanged. Taverns after all are lively especially at night, no?

Fallout 1 and 2 almost literally let you speech your way out of the end boss (though less so in Fallout 2), and that fact is part of what made those fallout games great (i.e. investing in Speech and Charisma instead of gun skills was not a dead-end for finishing the game). You could kind of do that in F:NV, too. True, but that's not quite the same kind of RPG. I played through Fallout2 as a charismatic, speech oriented character who did no killing (at least himself... he had a small army following him around to do just that if needed). However, PoE, just as IE games, is combat oriented. You can't build character who favours speech over combat, because system doesn't support that. You can opt for pieceful resolution whenever you can. Deadfire ending is a diffferent thing though. My problem with it, isn't that there isn't a mandatory "final combat encounter", but that unknowingly players cut a pretty important content from themselves making a fairly underwhelming finalle even worse. A cool thing would be to fight a weakend Guardian - maybe with some of the heads bitten off as a reactivity.

It would probably work just as well as Old Republic did - so not at all. Personally never cared for an MMO. Those like RPG, but designed to waste your time and suck as much money as possible, while providing little engaging content. Oh and bunch of folk running around and doing the same quests as you, killing any resemblance of immersion and believable narrative.

If you talked to him right after entering (and not signing up to be a contender), your response to him is "I will come back once I sign up for the fight". I came to him after initial fight in the arena. You might be able to go to him even before that, after talking to the caretaker of the arena.

That sounds fun! I would play that. But Deadfire comes from tradition of IE games which had none of it. Long term resource management - good Per encounter resource management - good Fake long term resource management, which requires players do self-imposed challenge to make the system any fun - bad. What Deadfire does is great. I would like if for the next installement Obs would swing into the other direction.

I think you have mistaken DLC with an xp boost. Those DLC give you content to play, not power to make the rest of the game even more unbalanced than it already is. No, you have mistaken this DLC with content. A fight DLC is not content, there are only two reasons to buy it:1) enjoyable and challenging fights (since for Obsidian this lately meant statbuffing enemies and keep the overly sophisticated 'let's bumrush the closest character' combat script, you are guaranteed to not get any of this) 2) rewards (as the level cap is incredibly low and you can reach it halfway into the game already XP it gives is meaningless). So, why buy this DLC? Just go anywhere else on the map and fight mobs, same thing. So... gameplay is not a content of a game? Interesting perspective. I am not far into DLC but I am very impressed with encounter design so far. If the rest of it I on similar level I would say it is absolutely worth the money. Can’t think of a better designed arena content.

That sort of indicates that the game isn't very well designed, though. There is difference between high skill sealing, or high difficulty, and game not explaining its mechanics or having balance issues. If it is a fairly faithful table-top adaptation than it is an uphill battle (don't know the system, and didn't try the game myself - just guessing). Just like with D&D those don't translate elegantly into a digital setting. From the comments it seems much more like a "game problem", rather than "player problem".

That’s... unexpected. As many here I joined the voices raising concern over not having Guardian show up at the end. I try to imagine my previous playthrough and guardian already felt like a weak “end boss”. Without him one misses on some major lore, and simply walks into the end game with only hit&miss scripted battle before as the finale.

I think you have mistaken DLC with an xp boost. Those DLC give you content to play, not power to make the rest of the game even more unbalanced than it already is.

Well, Obs will have to take a look at that save. Those items should show up on the ship.

Yeah, movement in W3 is odd. The first time I started it I thought to my self: “oh no, that won’t do at all”. Oddly enough after a bit of playing I got used to it shortly and never had issue with it. There is always a small adjustment period whenever I come back to it. I would certainly give a shot to W3. Spike in quality is astonishing both in gameplay, and storytelling. It is a more action game at this point that a stat based RPG, though.

That’s what mostly turned me off when watching the beta. I remember someone calling someone else “you dummy” in a way which didn’t feel appropriate in a tone or language. It felt awkwardly modern, in a way Frozen did. Reminded my of Divinity1&2, which directionless over-characterisation made it difficult for me to push through. RPG in which I don’t want to talk to anyone does something wrong. That said I didn’t look too much into pathfinder. What I hear makes me think it might not be exactly my type of RPG.

I'm having this same issue. I have tried different saves, I have tried going to different cities, resting in the sea, resting at an inn, etc. and nothing works. The saves I'm loading are all pre-endgame. My party is lvl 20. Does it matter if I've already played through Beast of Winter? Interesting. I loaded my 2nd character save to check this out: She is lvl 19, done with accessible faction quest, before going to ashen maw. I didn't do Beast of Winter expansion because of a bug which stopped me from progressing it further. With her I got a message that SSS is installed and that I will be contacted by Steward once I progress enough through the story. It might happen after the Ashen Maw. If it requires Beast of Winter that would be very odd as they are seperate DLC - you should be able to play one without another.

None of the review sources I usually follow, dont have a review up. Early access copies not sent? From the the little I saw of the beta, it didn’t look very impressive but don’t judge RPG by its cover. I will wait a bit for reviews.

Did you have those swords in your PoE1 save? At launch there were issues with save imports. However, they are supposed to be all fixed by now.