jsaving

Same here. I wasn't aware of PoE's existence until after the Kickstarter was over, but loved the IE games and was very happy to purchase the $25 expansion bundle today. PoE is a great game and it's heartwarming to see you guys taking such a respectful attitude toward your customers!

Yes, the patch is up. Expansion is expected to appear around 7:00AM Pacific time.

If I understand you guys correctly, Shieldbearer tanks are probably the best choice from a purely defensive point of view while a Darcozzi tank would sacrifice a modest amount of defense in exchange for somewhat better personal and party DPS, with Goldpact Knights a potentially entertaining alternative. How do these differences hold up over the course of the game? Would a Shieldbearer be noticeably less squishy than a Darcozzi toward the end of the game, and would the extra DPS from a Darcozzi tank (both directly from the flame shield and indirectly from the accuracy buff) be enough to compensate for that?

Hello everyone, I have no experience with a paladin as my main tank and thought I'd give it a try as an alternative to the fighter I've used in my other run-throughs. However, I'm having a hard time discerning which paladin order(s) would be best for the tank role. Any thoughts on this? And on the other side of the coin, are there paladin order(s) that would be especially poor choices for a tank?

Ive been interested to see how this was received by players. I greatly dislike random loot so I was wondering what people do to combat this. Do you save before every container and then open them, reloading and camping until the timer reaches the item you want? Unique items should always be nonrandom -- either the highest priced item in a shop or else taken from the body of a powerful foe (I mean, if the item really is that good, doesn't it make sense that well-informed enemies would have previously found and equipped them?). It makes no sense to throw 5% of players a special item that no one else is able to acquire no matter how skillfully they play the game. For everything else, random item generation is fine.

I think of Raedric's castle as more of a wake-up call than anything else. Low-level parties can beat him and his retinue, but not by just running up to them and using the tactics that work on a randomly encountered wolf or bear. That encounter forces people to "up their game" and improve their tactics if they're to have a shot, which some people find interesting and others find quite frustrating! If you arrive there but don't feel you are ready to defeat him yet, you have a number of options. One is to leave. Another is to embrace Raedric's cause and go after Kolsc. Another is to lie about embracing Raedric's cause and pretend you will go after Kolsc, only to return later for a confrontation with Raedric. But when you stop and consider that Raedric has eyes and ears all over the Dyrwood, I don't know why it would be better from a role-playing perspective to claim to be on Raedric's side, demonstrate repeatedly over the next few weeks of game time that you are not, and then eventually wander back into his castle without incident. To me, it would be less immersion-breaking to just leave his castle now and hope that Raedric won't have the funds to improve his defenses while you are gone.

I think, or at least hope, to eventually see a Pillars 2 that turns an already-good series into one of the all-time greats, just as BG2 did for Baldur's Gate. The Pillars team was small, had a tighter budget and timetable than one might hope for, and was hamstrung to some degree by the need to complete a few of the stretch goals at the expense of other aspects of the game (individual stealth, much deeper companion quests, etc). But despite this, Pillars largely delivered on its promise to reinvigorate the isometric real-time-with-pause RPG genre, and I for one and looking forward to the expansion packs and eventually a sequel.

The ranger is a hard class to get right -- it is one of the few to have been panned in 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition D&D (no small feat since most 5th edition classes have been well-received). The main reason has always been a lack of distinctiveness -- not so much that it is "weak" but that nothing stands out as saying "I need this class in my party". I see this as being the major problem in PoE too, as rangers make perfectly competent party members but can't out-DPS the rogue or barbarian and aren't nearly tough enough to make a reasonable defender. (Potentially with the rogue multiclass feat they'll be able to leverage their pet to move up the DPS food chain, but only time will tell on that.) Depending on the edition, there have also been significant issues in D&D about how strong their pet or their spells should be, and how much melee/martial power to take away in exchange for those other class features. I'm not sure this is a huge issue in PoE, but I would say the exceptionally weak (with one exception) pet talents drive rangers toward only a few builds and make investing in your pet a sub-par option. A debate where the only choices are "the ranger is too weak" or "the ranger is fine" isn't useful in my view. The class works as it is now, but giving rangers more strategic options in combat and improving some of their weaker talents to increase build diversity would be welcome additions to the game...

While it looks like Eothas is gone for good, there is a little bit of ambiguity over whether Waidwen was a fraud rather than really being Eothas. One NPC also raises the possibility that Eothas might perhaps be reborn as mortals are (and as Eothas' Forgotten Realms analogue Lathander has been on more than one occasion). It's also worth mentioning that Eothas' main portfolio is renewal, something not inconsistent with some kind of rebirth down the road. Maybe the devs deliberately omitted Eothas as a "choice" toward the end of the game because they didn't want to give definitive answers to these questions?

Think of the expansion as Tales of the Sword Coast -- it provides new content and raises the XP cap but does not change the endgame. If you already beat Pillars of Eternity, you will need to reload from the automatic save made just before the end of the game, just as Baldur's Gate players had to do when TotSC was released. (Or you can just make a new character.)

I actually thought the deities had reasonably well articulated and differentiated points of view that left no clearly correct answer about how to best handle the Hollowborn issue. Certainly Hylea gives the answer that is most compassionate, but other deities make a reasonable case that her approach is pointless or even counterproductive. Making the best decision you can without all the evidence you want is one of the strengths of this game, and the choice of which deity/deities to embrace is definitely no exception. Regarding the deities being a bunch of Ao's -- that is what they claim, but they do virtually nothing when one deity (Woedica) repeatedly subverts human history over a multi-century period of time and then they blow to smithereens the one deity (Eothas) who apparently tries to stop it. What does it mean to have a mutual agreement not to interfere if those who break the agreement can do so with impunity?

The cipher is PoE's warlock, though as others have mentioned the flavor has been changed fairly substantially to accommodate PoE's gameworld.

To me, this is the big unresolved mystery in the Pillars timeline. Why would the god of renewal suddenly change his lifelong tactics and start a war? One possibility is that new facts on the ground compelled Eothas to adjust his tactics. Thaos' plan regarding the Hollowborn makes sense as a precipating cause because a) he is a uniquely powerful threat who would b) need to be able to operate freely in the Drywood so that he could c) stop the death-and-rebirth renewal cycle knowing full well that d) his possession powers would enable him to control and then subvert any mortal who might lead an effort to oppose him. With Eothas' portfolio endangered and any mortal follower susceptible to Thaos' powers, perhaps Eothas felt he had no choice but to take personal command of the effort. (Alternatively, it could be that Waidwen's tactics seem out-of-line with Eothasian principles because Waidwen wasn't Eothas at all, but rather someone who framed Eothas for a failed war knowing Eothasians would be persecuted in its aftermath. This seems unlikely given the nearly universally held belief among mortals and divines alike that Waidwen as Eothas, but given the PoE team's occasional tendency to turn expectations on their head, it probably deserves at least a mention...)

It's one thing to bar people from respeccing every 30 seconds in dungeons so they'll always be optimized against the foes in the next room. But it's quite another to say, we're going to periodically alter the fundamental rules under which you developed your character build, but because it would break immersion to let you respec, you need to either stick with your build or else start over. The folks at Wizards of the Coast had a couple of articles about how to handle periodic rules updates that might adversely impact people's builds. The gist of what they had to say was that every time we make a rules change, we are altering your character sheet without your permission, possibly in a way that takes your character away from whatever vision you might have had for that character. And when you decide that a respec best enables you to realize that vision -- or that you need to try a fundamentally new vision because your old one just can't be done under the new rules -- then it is incumbent upon DMs to let those respecs happen rather than making players stick with the same-on-paper-but-drastically-different-in-spirit character sheet they were using before the rules changes were made. I think they're right and am happy respeccing will soon be available for a modest fee. But I do hope respecs will only be available in certain game locations, so you have to leave your current dungeon in order to change your build. Is this how it works in the beta patch, or can you respec on-the-fly wherever you happen to be?

I agree with those who say the current mechanic -- in which chanters aren't generally able to use high level invocations unless they counterintuitively run/cower from enemies until enough time has passed -- isn't working. But I don't agree that the solution is to let every chanter access higher level invocations more quickly regardless of the actions they take during combat. Rather, chanters need to be able to access higher level invocations faster if they earn it by helping the party . Given that the chanter's main claim to fame is the automatic buffs he doles out to party members, this could perhaps be based on the amount of damage party members inflict on enemies while under the influence of the chanter's buffs -- a thematically similar though less selfish extension of the way ciphers earn focus through greater personal melee/missle damage on enemies.

I have trouble understanding why having perception affect accuracy is automatically a bad thing, provided the size of the increase doesn't make perception a must-have. Certainly something needs to be done to avoid the BG2 situation where you dump-stat INT/WIS/CHA on most characters, and we're perilously close to that with PER and CON in 1.06.

Raedric certainly portrays himself as a lawfully minded character who will neither exempt themselves nor anyone else from the law. But there are questions raised in-game about whether this is an accurate perception. One can also ask whether his legal framework is sensible and whether Raedric's personality and temperament make him a suitable ruler. My character answered "no" on all counts and ultimately concluded the Vale was better off without Raedric. But a great thing about PoE is that it doesn't definitely answer any of these questions, so I can see how characters on the "yes" side of the equation might support him instead. Regardless of where one comes out on these questions, I think having Raedric as a party member would be a great idea. Guiding him toward the realization that his rules don't make sense, or that even if they do he isn't the person to implement them, would be one possible outcome of his character development. Another might be to reinforce that draconian methods are needed to deal with the problem at hand and that critics those who don't understand this truth simply lack the insight or discipline to see things through and do what must be done. This wouldn't be entirely dissimilar to some of the ways you can "guide" Grieving Mother in PoE, for example, or even Anomen and Sarevok in BG2.

This is good advice. On tactics, one common mistake I've seen people make is to use their melee rogue to tank foes, pretty much guaranteeing he'll be the first to fall in most battles. Rather, you want to selectively pick off foes who've been engaged by Eder, opting for the highest-DPS build you can arrange and then using micromanagement to ensure you don't get surrounded. I haven't seen a pre-2.0 rogue melee build that prioritizes PER over INT and am puzzled as to why this would make sense, because you wouldn't typically be fighting any single foe long enough for interrupts to matter very much.

I too struggle to understand the "harsh but fair" label that is sometimes applied to Raedric. I *think* what people are getting at is that they see him as a Lawful Neutral character who may lack compassion but is still obviously preferable to a Chaotic Evil character like Kolsc who pretends to be Chaotic Good in order to win popular support. But I have to say, I actually thought *both* NPCs were pretending to be something they're not. Raedric in my view dressed up his cruelty with a professed commitment to the rule of law while Kolsc dressed up his inherent power-hungriness with a professed commitment to liberating the masses. Neither is remotely close to being Good-aligned (a sentiment my PC also felt in Defiance Bay when choosing a faction with which to align). But I have to say these uncertainties illustrate the strength of PoE's narrative rather than being a weakness. We've all played games before where it is completely clear what people's alignments are and who one ought to side with if one is Good-aligned -- heck, many games let you infallibly know someone's alignment by casting the proper spell on them. While I wouldn't say role-playing is impossible in those games, it's a much richer experience to make the best judgment you can with the information you have, all the while not being entirely sure whether the group you've chosen to help will do a better job than the group you've decided to oppose.

This isn't Baldur's Gate where you're in a lot of trouble unless you have an unlocker (rogue) and a negative plane protection caster (cleric) in your party, nor is there a knock spell in this game that lets your wizard automatically handle the game's locks. Moreover, PoE's endurance system negates the need for post-combat healing and its casting system doesn't allow you to do much pre-combat buffing, reducing the importance of wizards and priests relative to BG/BG2. You can beat this game on any difficulty level with any party composition you want, in other words. If you think it would be entertaining to use a paladin as your frontline rather than a fighter, go for it! One tip I would offer, though, is that if you are a completionist who does every quest before hitting the end of the game -- and it sounds like you probably are -- then you will hit the XP cap earlier than you expect and will get 0 XP for the last part of the game. (Even with a 6-man party, you'll hit the cap, though not as early.) If you want to 4-man the game because you think doing so would be more fun, great, but I wouldn't suggest going that route solely to squeeze more XP out of the game.

A deity whose main portfolio is renewal perhaps shouldn't be counted out too quickly, no matter how definitive or final his end might seem.

Well, no two pedestals offer the same answer for what ought to be done to resolve the main quest line -- something the Pillars team appears to have done by design. So if Eothas *did* have his own pedestal that you could interact with, then it would have to be because he had a different suggested course of action than those offered by the other deities, which seems unlikely. And from an in-game point of view, the deities who share a pedestal all seem to have been natural allies, which doesn't appear to have been true for Eothas any more than it was for his Forgotten Realms analogue Lathander. There's also the issue of Eothas' current fate. We know from the game that Waidwen claimed to be Eothas and was destroyed, after which time no one has seen or heard from Eothas. This sure makes it *look* like Eothas is gone for good, something most of the characters and deities in the game seem to accept as true. Yet there are questions raised in the game about whether Waidwen really was Eothas, whether Eothas' post-Godhammer silence might be motivated by something other than his being dead, and whether -- even if he really did die -- he might yet be somehow renewed (renewal being his main portfolio after all). It could be the Pillars team didn't want to make a pedestal for Eothas simply because they didn't want to provide definitive answers to these questions.

You can complete Pillars and experience nearly all of its content no matter how you design your character. You do not need to worry about missing huge chunks of the game because your wisdom was too low (like Planescape). Nor do you need to worry about poor choices seriously gimping your combat prowess (as could happen in Baldur's Gate). The first thing to realize is just how similar this game is to 4th edition D&D. If you understand 4e, then you won't have a tough time jumping into Pillars. The second thing to realize is that Pillars can be completed with any party composition. This isn't BG2 where you're crippled unless you have a thief and a negative-plane-protection caster, for example. You can be successful with an all martial team, or an all caster team, or anything in between. That said, the game's classes do play differently from each other and you will likely find yourself gravitating toward some of them (and away from others) over time. One party-building strategy that would let you experience much of this variety would be to start with a "sticky" tank whose main purpose is to dish out small amounts of damage while physically blocking (through the game's engagement mechanic and by taking advantage of map chokepoints) as many enemies as possible from rushing your casters. You'd then add an off-tank or rogue to actually take down those enemies, a wizard for crowd control, a cipher for stun-locking individual foes, a druid for regeneration and elemental damage, and a priest for healing/raising/symbols. Until the expansion's companions are introduced, you'd probably be best off creating a rogue or barbarian as your main if you went this route. Or you can try something completely different and beat the game with six rogues (great synergies), six wizards (ditto), or anything else that sounds good to you. Just be aware that there is only one joinable NPC per class so if you're the kind of player who enjoys intra-party banter, a more diverse party might be the better option for your first run-through. Good luck!

If you pick the right dialogue options after defeating Atris, you can learn much of Kreia's plan, and most of the rest comes out during the final conflict on Malachor V. Kreia believes the Force actively seeks to control the direction of the universe, and manipulates its users -- Jedi and Sith alike -- to do what it wants done. She wants to put an independent person in the position where they make the call about being Jedi or Sith, fighting the secret Sith empire or not fighting it, etc. She would just do it herself, but she can't be sure her own decisions are truly independent since she is a Force user. She discovers that only one person in the present, past, or future -- the Exile -- has this independence. So she finds him and then manipulates his life so he will be in a position to make the call on Malachor V. Which he does, for good (Light Side ending) or evil (Dark Side ending). Many people get confused because they remember Atton saying she was a Sith Lord. But he was wrong...

For story reasons (which are revealed at the end of KOTOR2), Kreia needs to stay halfway between light and dark. Everybody else will eventually move to 99% light side (if you achieve light side mastery) or 99% dark side (if you achieve dark side mastery).