jsaving

I think it would make sense to let players portal back to Caed Nua once Thaos is defeated but before the Hollowborn situation is resolved. That way, no NPC dialogue would need to be rewritten, and people with lost/deleted/corrupted "final saves" would still be able to enjoy the expansion content they purchased without having to restart the game.

I would say Lore and Resolve (in that order) are by far the most important contributors to dialogue. Intelligence, Perception, and the Honest reputation (in that order) would be next, though none of them are in the same league as Lore and Resolve. Beyond that, the Benevolent and Diplomatic reputations are at least slightly helpful in certain situations. Class and race can matter a bit but not nearly enough, and not nearly consistently enough, to affect how you might design your character.

It seems to me that Magran wanted her direct involvement concealed because of the sheer audacity and duplicity of her actions. Pretending she merely inspired her followers to thwart a newly malevolent Eothas, when in reality she orchestrated his elimination knowing full well he wasn't acting out of malevolence, was a masterstroke in that it dramatically broadened her worship base in the Dyrwood without engendering ire amongst her fellow deities inclined to obey their collective non-interference rule. But Magran didn't anticipate that Durance would live through the blast, and pretends not to recognize him now because she correctly sees him as someone who could potentially reveal the truth and jeopardize her gains (more than a little ironic coming from a deity who ostensibly reveals truth through fire...)

Well, nearly everyone you encounter in the game (whether kith or deity) believes Eothas was permanently destroyed by the Godhammer. But there are a couple of books, some comments from Eder, and your own statements -- if you play as a priest of Eothas -- that he isn't permanently gone and will return at a time and place of his choosing. The mechanics of PoE provide circumstantial support in both directions. His lack of a symbol might mean he's truly gone, or it might just mean the PoE team didn't want him to have a symbol because if you spoke to him through it then you'd naturally want to ask whether he's still around. His priests still being able to cast spells might mean he never left, or it might just mean their belief in him enables them to cast. At the end of the day, it's just too much of a stretch to guess from those sorts of factors what Josh and the rest see as the final fate of Eothas. That said, it is worth noting that Eothas is the thinly disguised analogue of Lathander and has the same central portfolio of renewal/rebirth. Can we really know for sure that a deity of renewal and rebirth is gone for good?

Regarding mechanics, it is important to remember that most dialogue skill checks look ONLY at your main character, not your companions. If you care about dialogue -- which some players don't -- then it makes sense to have your main focus on lore, which is the main dialogue skill.

No argument here, and I actually like the departures 5e made from traditional Vancian casting. Having to fill each individual slot with a specific spell ahead of time, like you had to do in AD&D and Baldur's Gate, is just too cumbersome. I understand the argument that the traditional Vancian system promotes strategic thinking, but suspect it too often promotes metagaming instead (i.e. looking at guides to see what is coming). Giving a fixed but reasonably large number of spells in your repertoire, as 5e does, is a nice compromise between Vancian and mana-based casting, in my view at least.

In Jack Vance's great Dying Earth series, casters put spells in slots and would forget them once cast. D&D creator Gary Gygax used this as inspiration when writing (A)D&D and this "Vancian" system was later used in Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate. 5th edition scrapped the idea of putting spells in slots and replaced it with one in which you choose a subset of spells at the start of each day and can spontaneously cast any of them until your daily spell slots are gone. In essence everyone casts as a 3rd edition sorcerer except that, unlike the sorcerer, you can completely change your spells known every day. (This is similar to PoE's wizard except he has the additional flexibility of being able to swap spellbooks without resting.) Certainly 5th edition is a distant relative of Vancian casting in that both systems require you to expend resources which can only be regained by resting. But it's only a distant relative.

Resolve gives you marginally better conversation options in PoE but it is far from critical. It's vastly less important than the social skills were in NWN2, which were themselves vastly less important than the intelligence or wisdom scores you selected in Planescape: Torment. I do agree with the broader point about how PoE links combat bonuses to social prowess, however. I personally think it would have been better to even out the conversational utility of the six stats, so that no single one of them would be a conversational "easy button". An alternative would be to toughen the game's stat checks but allow any party member to meet them, rather than requiring five party members to stand inexplicably mute while the protagonist struggles to pass a resolve check (after sometimes having already made an interjection or two into the conversation).

I'm having trouble understanding the argument that PS:T beats PoE because PS:T didn't have choke points. I loved PS:T but numerous places and people, from Pharod to Carceri, were choke points that blocked me from advancing the main plot until I decided to handle them. I also recall the initial part of the game revolving around me being unable to go anywhere until I could get out of a mortuary, which isn't especially different from being unable to go anywhere until I could get out of some ruins. Don't get me wrong -- I think PS:T is one of the best CRPGs ever produced. But it wasn't as nonlinear as people sometimes remember, nor -- I would argue -- is PoE as linear as people sometimes take it to be.

The enhanced edition of Icewind Dale had a story mode in which party members were nearly invulnerable and nearly always hit their targets. It was advertised as a way to experience the game's story without needing to reload. While the exact parameters of PoE's upcoming story mode haven't been released, it would presumably be similar to this, and geared toward the non-RPG gamer who finds battles tedious but enjoys strolling around the game's maps and watching the plot unfold.

Skaen or Magran would be best at low levels because their deity-specific talents are moderately useful for melee/missile combat. You could also consider Eothas if you enjoy the game's lore and want a somewhat more hopeful take on whether Eothas is truly gone for good. But as Wolken said, the power difference from choosing one deity over another is minimal so you should feel free to pick whichever deity you like most.

I'm not sure that anyone would "prefer" that the expansion take place before the end of the critical path. The issue is that doing it this way takes much, much less dev time to implement and hence gives us more PoE content sooner -- the same reason BioWare's Tales of the Sword Coast took place during the main game instead of after it. As to whether you should buy the expansion before or after completing the main game, I see no reason not to purchase it immediately if you know you'll stick with the game, but it isn't *that* big of a deal to wait. If you do the expansion content in the middle of the critical path, you'll be both over-leveled and overpowered for the remainder of the game and will find the rest of the critical path to be a breeze. Much better to wait until immediately before entering the Pit and then click the option to upscale White Marsh content -- but if you are doing that, then you are essentially waiting until the end of the game to do the expansion content anyway and hence didn't need to have White Marsh along the way.

There are a few basic questions you want to ask when building your wizard. First, do you want blights (PoE's equivalent of the minute meteors spell from Baldur's Gate) to be your main attack? If so, you are treated as firing them from a wand so you want to focus on talents that boost your wand accuracy/damage and secondarily on talents that boost your elemental damage (because blights rotate between elements). Second, do you want to be an AoE interrupter? If so, you want to make sure you have high DEX/PER and take the interrupting blows talent. Finally, do you want to be a front-line melee combatant, and if so, which spells do you want to use as your staples to get there? (The build Vorad provided earlier in this thread would be a solid blight/interrupter wizard.)

The "multiclass system" in PoE is vastly different from -- and less extensive than -- the multi or dual classing you might have seen in 1st/2nd edition AD&D (Baldur's Gate), 3rd edition D&D (Neverwinter Nights), or 5th edition D&D. Rather than having two classes be roughly equal partners in your character development (Baldur's Gate) or getting to divide your level-ups amongst classes as you see fit (Neverwinter Nights), you always level up in the same class in PoE but have the option to take a few talents which are scaled-down versions of spells/powers other classes can use. For example, if your character is a fighter and you would like to be a fighter/mage, you could take the wizard multiclass talent which lets you occasionally cast a relatively weak magic missile. If you wanted to take additional steps toward becoming a mage, you would be out of luck. Josh said around the time PAX was held that he would like to implement a 3e-style multiclassing system in PoE2 if such a game were to be made. I hope it is and he does, because of the flexibility that such systems open up for players -- although you do have to be careful as a designer not to front-load classes the way 3e initially did, or else you end up making multiclass characters strictly better than single-class characters.

The best high-resolve character is one where you either don't care about your damage/accuracy or don't care how quickly you attack/cast. I would question whether it makes sense post-2.0 to put either type of character into your party, but on the other hand, you do not need anywhere close to an optimized party to finish PoE. So if you want a high-resolve character, then you should use one.

Among PoE players at large, my guess is that nearly everyone would favor the stash or else would go even further and say there should be a check-box to automatically convert items to copper so that the inconvenience of visiting a merchant can be avoided. Then again, most PoE players are going to miss huge swathes of content and hence aren't likely to have the "too much copper" problem anyway. So if the only people for whom this is even an issue are the small minority of us who visit these forums and remember other RPGs we have played that used more stringent inventory systems, I'm not sure there's much point in devoting dev time to a solution. (I do like the idea of expert mode including no stash or a limited stash, though.)

Pillars is a game where you are often allowed to go places that are best postponed until a higher level -- which is a good thing overall but does cause frustration in the form of saving/reloading if you try to do an area whose difficulty is beyond you at this point in time. Sometimes you can get past this by altering your playstyle and adopting more effective combat strategies. Sometimes, though, you just need to come back later, and it sounds like this may be one of those times. I do agree that placing the only NPC rogue in a relatively tough-to-reach location is problematic given how many players like having rogues in their parties but don't want to roll up generic characters at an inn. One way you can address this problem is to create your own Devil of Caroc at an inn who will be replaced by the real one once you acquire her. Some people shy away from this because they are afraid of "wasting" XP on the inn-generated character, but this is not -- at least in my judgment -- anything to worry about in PoE because of the ease with which the XP cap can be hit even if you replace characters on a fairly frequent basis.

Selling half a million units for a genre widely regarded as dead and buried is a solid accomplishment. More than that, though, Josh and the rest of the PoE team seemed genuinely gratified at PAX by how the game has been received by the marketplace. This doesn't mean PoE was the best-selling game of the year (it wasn't) or that it outperformed some of the games that were thought to be its main competitors (the jury is out), but it seems to have done well enough to get the devs thinking about future projects in the PoE world -- which is what's most important from the point of view of those of us who enjoyed the game.

There is not even any news that there will *be* a PoE 2, let alone when it might be released. But for purposes of comparison, Shadows of Amn was released about two years after the original Baldur's Gate, aided by the re-use of (a modified version of) the Infinity engine and by the fact that some of SoA's plot points had been settled on while creating BG1.

If you want a viable non-melee caster with high resolve, your problem -- as others are hinting at in their responses -- is that resolve has no synergies with the niches a non-melee caster would occupy. So what you need to find is the non-melee caster who is the least dependent on stats, because that is the one who could most afford to "waste" points on resolve. DPS and crowd-control casters are out because they are dependent on too many attributes -- you'll gimp them significantly if you divert points to resolve. Buffer characters are more promising because, depending on class and playstyle, you might be able to live with a moderate amount of might (if you truly are a buffer and not a healer) or perception (if you truly never plan to use your spells for attacking). To me at least, that would point toward the priest class, as a buff-only priest is less of a wasted party slot than a buff-only druid would be.

I was initially excited about the addition of multiclassing (which is what the devs initially called the new system), thinking I'd be able to do 3e/5e style mixing-and-matching. It was a shame when that didn't happen, although Josh has subsequently said he would like to include 3e/5e style multiclassing in PoE2 were a sequel to eventually be made. But I agree that PoE's system falls short of even the stripped-down multiclassing system available in 4e. And yes, I think your guess that multiclassing talents were added for flavor purposes is exactly right. Which isn't a bad thing, in and of itself, as long as you accept that they won't appreciably change your character.

Some of the news coverage around PAX mentioned March of next year as the most likely release date, though the devs haven't publicly confirmed it. I'm not sure where the November 2015 date came from but I do remember a couple of posters guessing Part 2 might be released then.

There is no way to do this in-game and IEMod doesn't yet allow this, unfortunately. The good news is that the game's soulbound weapons don't generally outperform the best non-soulbound weapons and aren't even that useful in typical parties where the tank uses a shield while the off-tanks fight with two weapons and the rogue uses Tall Grass in the second line. Which is a shame, really, given the amount of time the devs invested into developing the concept of a soulbound weapon and the artists invested into producing their impressive-looking skins.

I agree that the Dozens don't live up to the Chaotic Good ideal of a citizen-militia banding together to help the populace because its members too often use anarchy to get what they want. On the other hand, I see the Knights of the Crucible similarly failing to live up to the Lawful Good ideal of a "noble knighthood" because its members too often use rules and social structures to do what they please. Both have the potential to improve and I think the game goes out of its way not to clearly answer which one should be considered the "more virtuous" faction -- emblematic of PoE's general tendency to have the player make decisions in a world of ambiguity.

I see two main problems with chanters. First, they don't "earn" their invocations through combat performance but instead get them through the simple passage of time, which encourages parties to "cower-and-run" after triggering aggro until enough ticks of the clock go by. Second, higher-level invocations generally aren't worth using, making leveling-up an anticlimactic exercise once you're able to summon phantoms.