jsaving

I'm glad to see the OP thinking things through in advance as well, but I would offer some comments. Eder works well as a main tank, but recent AI improvements mean mobs will often bypass your tank and run straight to your casters. Because of this, a purely defensive build for Eder is less useful to the party than it used to be. I'd at the very least sprinkle some offensive talents into your build. If you consider the extra knockdown talent, you might consider replacing it with the cipher multiclass talent -- it attacks will and is much more likely to land against the tough melee foes with whom you'll typically be toe-to-toe. Kana is a sound choice for off-tank buffer, if you can take the "boredom factor" of constantly watching for the phase count to hit 3 and then throwing out the same invocation (phantom summons) no matter how many levels he eventually gains. Again, no issue with Kana's power or how you plan to use him, only whether you personally as a player can tolerate the way chanter mechanics work. Durance works well in armor, but priests are much weaker melee combatants in PoE than they have traditionally been in D&D. Moreover, the priest functions best when he buffs the party as rapidly as possible while occasionally throwing out crowd-control spells like repulsing seal. Each round you are swinging a sword is a round where you could have done something more useful for the party, making it a bad idea to spec Durance for melee combat. Aloth's slicken spell works great at low levels and can be combined with chill fog for a formidable one-two punch. At later levels, Kalakoth's minor blights gives you a means to deliver formidable missile damage over a prolonged duration and is a much better choice for 3rd level cast than the fireball you might have grown accustomed to using in Baldur's Gate or D&D. Just note that the blights are considered to be cast from a wand, so you'll want to take the blast feat and possibly interrupting blows or dangerous implement to maximize their damage. For the PC, a melee rogue is a solid choice. You'll presumably be maxing the mechanics skill for traps/locks, which is fine given the very small number of in-game instances where your skills would help you get better dialogue options. (Alternatively, you could use Aloth for locks/traps -- he wouldn't be as good at it as your rogue but you would then be free to raise your lore skill for dialogue/scroll purposes.)

In a game like PoE where it is already possible to have unlimited rests provided you are willing to take 30-60 seconds of time to reach an inn or your stronghold, there isn't a huge distinction between per-encounter spells and per-rest spells. Eventually gaining lower level spells on a per-encounter basis is a nice "convenience perk" for those of us who play the game, but precisely because it is a boost to the player rather than the character, curtailing it is likely to antagonize players without solving any balance concerns associated with caster characters.

I think there are several reasons why they didn't implement it in this game. First, it strongly encourages cheating, either by using a spreadsheet to game who has which items at which times (like people do now to rig their random loot) or by reloading until your pickpocketing attempts are successful. Second, characters who pickpocket end up unambiguously more powerful than those who don't, which means players are rewarded or punished based solely on their character having a belief that stealing is/isn't acceptable. Finally, because pickpocketing success has nothing to do with player skill and really depends more on how quickly you learn to reload the game, having it in PoE would cut against the devs' professed desire to reward game progress rather than metagame/reloading prowess.

I was happy to start a new game when Part 1 of WM was released. That said, surely it would be possible to implement a solution in which your "patron" creates a portal to the game world after the "main boss" is defeated but before the player "deals with" the Hollowborn issue? (Apologies for the vagueness but this is the no-spoiler forum.) I can't think of any NPCs/quests that would need to be rewritten if the player returned to the game world at that point, and it would go a long way toward addressing people's frustration about having to reload their pre-pit save.

As I understand it, the devs considered having random encounters at one point but didn't move forward because of the way random encounters were abused in IE games, such as the ankhegs in BG1 that would eventually drop every 1st and 2nd level spell in the game and give you as much XP as you wanted to get. People used to post screenshots where you couldn't even see the ground because of the hundreds of ankhegs they'd fought (though this didn't prevent those same people from complaining they were overpowered for most of the game's critical path!). Of course, the PoE team could have implemented random encounters with the stipulation that random foes never drop loot and don't help fill the bestiary. But if the devs would have done that, then people would have complained (accurately) that those stipulations are unrealistic. Given these issues, one can see why random encounters didn't make the cut, though I have to say they sure would be helpful for advancing a few of my soulbound weapons...

Well, look -- the stronghold is in the game because it was a stretch goal. While everyone agrees it could have been better than it was, every day spent on improving the stronghold would have meant one less day devoted to other aspects of the game. I certainly wouldn't have wanted the devs to spend less time on joinable NPCs or side quests or the talent system, for example -- I'd like to see those (and many other) aspects of PoE improve too. Nor would I have wanted to see the release date get pushed back so that there would be a better stronghold system in the game. So overall, I think a bare-bones stronghold system was a reasonable design choice for PoE, though I do think there is room for a much richer/deeper stronghold system in WM2 and/or PoE2.

Whether it's worth going depends on what you enjoy about PoE (and RPGs in general). If you like role-playing interactions with lots of choices-and-consequences, clearing a 15-level monster-infested dungeon is probably not going to be a great use of your time, especially since there is more than enough XP elsewhere in the game to reach the level cap. And while it used to offer some of the game's best gear, much of it is now outclassed by White March equipment, making Nua less essential for min-maxers than it once was. On the other hand, Nua offers a wide variety of monsters against which you can battle, as well as some decent loot and some character development for Kana (assuming you have him in your party).

Well, look - there are two XP cap issues that segments of the PoE community would like to see changed. One is that they hit the cap too quickly and therefore need to be able to gain additional power afterward. The other is that they hit the cap too quickly and therefore need to slow the rate of XP progression. It's no wonder that so much of the XP cap discussion is at cross-purposes because the different sides don't agree on why the cap is a problem.

The PoE team did say in the media blitz surrounding PAX that they'd like to let solo characters enter a house while the rest of the party remains on the street outside, as was possible in BG1/BG2.

You miss almost no dialogue if all your attributes are set to 3 and all your skills are set to 0, so it barely matters what you pick. In the few instances where skills or attributes matter, they are mostly Resolve or Lore checks.

I played numerous run-throughs before 2.0 and never experienced this problem. However, the "0" was added to all of my protagonists on the day 2.0 was released and has remained there ever since. Presumably, the "0" is appearing because the engine correctly sees the main character as lacking any resources that rise during combat -- focus, wounds, or phrases -- and then incorrectly thinks it needs to report a "0" on the portrait. Why it hasn't been corrected yet in the weeks since 2.0 was released, I couldn't say.

Hard difficulty feels a bit like Nightmare difficulty in games like Diablo -- everything is the same except it takes a bit longer to end each encounter. Some people like that, I suppose, but others (myself included) just find it dull. PotD, on the other hand, changes some encounters in a fairly significant way and requires players to think more carefully about their strategies if they are going to survive. That's the difficulty level to choose if you want a genuine challenge (with no offense intended to people who play PoE for its story and aren't interested in PotD).

Regarding the OP's point about encounters being too easy months ago, I actually think now might be a great time to give PoE another try. The new monster AI and 2.0's nerfs to deflection make it tougher for tanks to protect the backline, demanding more strategic play for any given difficulty level. Spell/power rebalancings over the last few patches have nerfed several of the most OP offerings, leaving only a few (like ectoplasmic echo) untouched. The changes to perception and constitution have also enriched the character creation process by introducing more tradeoffs for most builds -- dumping constitution, for example, can't be taken as lightly as it could be earlier in the year. Finally, I think encounters are generally better-designed in the White March and are also tougher, which most expansion players seem to welcome.

In Baldur's Gate 1/2, joinable NPCs often came with extra abilities (like Minsc's 1/rest barbarian rage or Edwin's extra spell slots) that you'd lose if you were to create your own party members. In Pillars of Eternity, by contrast, joinable NPCs have no extra abilities (for the most part) and suffer from poor attribute choices that the devs chose not to let you fix through respeccing. This means your party is strictly weaker with joinable NPCs than it would be if you were to simply roll all your characters yourself. Because the game isn't that difficult, my preference is to accept the weakness that comes from using 5 joinable NPCs in exchange for seeing their personalities through the game. A true min/maxer, on the other hand, would roll every party member himself in order to squeeze out every ounce of power he could for the party. As you say, a common compromise between these two views is to roll up one additional party member at an inn (often a rogue, paladin, or wizard) and then use 4 of the joinable NPCs.

I agree that there are some similarities between White March and the Neverwinter series. There are also some similarities between the PoE universe and Realms history, such as the deity of renewal getting his hat handed to him while trying to reshape the world (Lathander's Dawn Cataclysm in the Forgotten Realms, Waidwen's military offensive in Pillars of Eternity). But it would go too far to say that "all" or "most" of the core game or the White March was cribbed from D&D.

Rogues dish out the highest melee DPS in the game while ciphers dish out the best single-target disables in the game. You do need one party member to open traps/locks and it is best that you choose someone who gets initial bonuses to mechanics so they can have the highest possible mechanics level in the game.

It's also worth keeping in mind that, when using a wand with the blast talent, your interrupt chance applies to each foe in the blast radius and not just your primary target. This can make the interrupting blows talent worth considering.

It would actually be quite entertaining to retrain Durance as a priest of Eothas, Aloth as a cipher, or the Devil of Caroc as a Kind Wayfarer.

At PAX and in some of its surrounding news coverage, the PoE team talked about some things they'd like to do better in a sequel. Among the issues they called out were load times (too long), the multiclassing system (too sparse), and spell acquisition (priests and druids getting all their spells at once). They also mentioned how much they appreciate having their own IP. Some people have inferred from this that a sequel is in the cards following the release of Part 2 (and I hope they are right!), although Josh and the other panelists were careful not to say so.

With sneak attack and other class features, rogues dish out the highest DPS in the game. You still want to maximize might and dexterity, as would have been true pre-2.0, but you now want to maximize perception as well for the accuracy bonus. The remaining three attributes aren't as important to a rogue, unless your party configuration will requre your rogue to make his own sneak-attack opportunities (in which case you need a high intelligence to increase condition duration). If you do ultimately decide to dump a stat, 2.0's changes to constitution make it somewhat more valuable than resolve for a DPS character so resolve is probably the one you'd want to take to 3. As far as talents go, rogue weren't affected much by 2.0's deflection nerf because you'd be taking few to no deflection-boosting talents anyway. However, you could reasonably consider the ranger multiclass talent as it enables you to slow your enemies while also making them vulnerable to sneak attack. If your party doesn't include a paladin running zealous focus, you could look at the paladin multiclass feat as well (though at least for melee rogues it would generally be better to have your tank take gallant focus while you flank his foes).

In defense of the OP, it's worth pointing out that a wizard's effectiveness is highly dependent on knowing which spells work best and casting them accordingly. If you have a Baldur's Gate mindset and use Minoletta's (magic missile) as your staple spell before switching to fireball at 5th level, you are going to feel like PoE's wizard is weak and ineffective. If on the other hand you transition from fog/slicken to Kalakoth's at 5th level, you may find yourself wondering whether PoE's wizard makes the game too easy.

Rogues consistently dish out the most damage per strike in the game, so my view would be that you want to max PER for the accuracy bonus as well as might and DEX. Then you decide which two of CON, INT, and RES to lower so you can make that happen. If you are looking to dish out status effects so you can activate sneak attack on your own, then you'd generally need a high INT which would mean dump-statting CON and RES. But if you have other people in the party who can place those status effects on your foes, then you could at least consider dumping INT and having a reasonable RES.

I haven't seen any optimized paladin builds that maximize PER and RES at the same time. The reason is that, on a paladin, PER mainly helps you deal damage while RES helps you tank. The longer reason is that nearly every paladin wants to max might and intelligence, meaning you need to dump either DEX and PER (if a tank) or CON and RES (if a damage dealer). The good news is that the game is eminently winnable on normal or hard no matter what stats you choose. So if you want to RP a good "talker," go ahead, you'll do just fine even though you won't be quite optimized.

There's a really simple reason why WM isn't a continuation. If you could have continued in the game world after you deal with the Hollowborn situation, the devs would've had to update the game world to reflect this. Lots of dialogue would have to be rewritten, which would be even more of a chore than you might think since no two NPCs would agree on whether your chosen solution (being careful to avoid spoilers) makes you a hero or a criminal. You'd also have to rewrite/remove a fair number of quests that only make sense in the context of an unresolved critical path. All of that could have been done, but it would have substantially delayed the release of WM for relatively little gain. More than 90% of PoE players haven't finished the critical path and would likely never even see these updates, and most of the remaining 10% is OK with continuing from their "nearly final" savegame or else sees starting a new game as an opportunity rather than a chore. Yes, that does mean that a slice of the PoE community can't follow their preferred path of ending the Hollowborn crisis and then journeying to the White March, just as a slice of the BG community couldn't defeat Sarevok and then journey to Durlag's Tower. But it isn't as if Obsidian (or BioWare for that matter) opted for an expansion pack rather than a sequel just to vex some of their players -- it was just the best way to quickly give us additional content, with a good chance of a potential sequel down the road that would perhaps explore what happened after PoE1's critical path was resolved.

If you are concerned about being over-leveled, then that is exactly what you should do. Postpone WM until you hit Twin Elms, then click the box to upscale WM's difficulty.