Cottonmouth

And for some reason, developers love to make it the unambiguously most powerful weapon style by far

Spells and abilities can be balanced such that their per encounter use is necessary to win regular encounters, or they could be balanced such that you can beat regular encounters with standard attacks, reserving spells and abilities for particularly challenging fights. There is no inherent reason why spells and abilities have to be very powerful, and thus why their use needs to be restricted to prevent them from trivialising combat The downside of this is that abilities cannot be awesomely powerful any more and that you can treat each combat encounter as a self contained puzzle without having to worry about what else there is in that dungeon. The downside of powerful but restricted abilities is that you give players less to do in regular encounters. For what it's worth, I thought spell mastery in POE1 introduced a great compromise between the two.

I think the D&D setting and theme lends itself to epicness more so than the universe PoE finds itself in. PoE hits a different tone A very memorable moment for me in PoE is talking with Cabiros. Most of the Endless Paths, and especially it's overall theme, is very, very good. Hah, I'd forgotten that. Doesn't he return in ToB if you don't kill him? Yes, I thought that was a nice touch too. It's a 'Spectator' beholder and you can arrange with him to duel the Drow Commander in Sendai's enclave with the beholder killing your group or the drow's depending on who wins.

I've played a spellcasting sword wielder since the dawn of time, and the Wizard class allows for that quite nicely. And in fine tradition, the fighter mage hybrid is once again just about the most powerful class.

However morally reprehensible he is, it's clear the Devil surpassed him in terms of being evil.

Windows, unfortunately. I guess I'm going to have to download the entire game and White March I again, it's ridiculous GOG stop hosting intermediary patches after a while.

Hi. I've just bought the new expansion on GOG and I'm having the same problem. I'm on patch 2.01 but the only GOG update available is starting at 2.03. Does anyone know where I can find the 2.01>2.03 for the main game or White March? (Not sure I need both, I have White March I installed, at 2.01)

What we really need is a spell that summons a djinni of immense power who you can negotiate with to make it as if your party had just rested and re-memorised all spells.

Voice acting takes talent and training. Even yelling. That said, if the voice set of the female Barbarian really uses a male voice, that's very odd and should have been fixed imo.

Yeah, two real annoyances that PoE dealt really well with are full inventories and agonizingly long walks.

True but performance is an issue. The White March areas are close to the breaking point for me, combat sometimes brings FPS down to 10-15. By contrast I have no problem with games like Witcher 2, Dishonored, Dragon Age 3, Wlfenstein the new order, etc. The graphic quality options don't change FPS at all, though they do make things look worse. If PoE2 will have lower avg FPS for the same hardware, I won't be getting it.

Clearly, the White Forge should allow players to spend all Durgan ingots into recasting the Devil anew. Infused with Durgan Steel and magic, she would have no armor penalty, 20 DR to crush, slash, pierce and fire, an extra 30 to deflection, 18 dexterity and might and a twice per encounter ability called 'Bronze Terror' which is Gaze of the Adragan with double the AOE, centered on the Devil. To balance things, the transformation would however remove her decorative bronze breasts.

It's not her body, her soul was forcefully transferred into it. technically it is HER body.... she is not wearing the armor. it is her new physical existence... she cannot just get it off, and put it on shelves, can she? But the Bronze body wasn't designed to be Hk-47. Because she looks and sounds cool, is a murderer and is named Devil people assume it's some perfectly constructed killing machine but her story doesn't indicate that she'd be especially deadly. Still, she is worse than a regular rogue and that's bad. I like the basic principle that story NPCs have some unique feature that makes them a bit better than standard versions of their class. Not absurd and envy inducing overpoweredness like Edwin, but there should be something. And in her case, we've only got immunity to disease and poison which is nothing.

It's good. I like the content in White March I, the music, the story, the characters and I'm going to buy the next expansion if it's more of that. But two adons are enough. If you think about it, the White March I is similar to Tales of the Sword Coast. Stalwart = Ulgoth's Beard Durgan's Battery = Durlag's Tower Surely POE2 will continue to the trend and be the modern day BG2.

You seem to know what you're talking about, can you explain how attack speed is derived? Here's an example. I wield an estoc, have dexterity 16, wear the gauntlets of swift action (+15% attack speed), armor with recovery speed penalty -25%. I cast deleterious alacrity of motion. How many attacks per second does that amount to?

I find boots of speed to be extremely useful on my melee mage. You can feasibly break engagement now and actually escape, you can quickly position yourself to hit non-party friendly AOEs, you can quickly flank and target the weaker characters standing at the back, etc. I don't think there are better boots which is why I'm glad I found two pairs of em.

The only thing that infuriates me about the engagement is that I can't move engaged characters around the enemy they are engaged with, allowing another to go past. So often you're stuck and blocked unless you break engagement without actually moving a melee NPC out of melee range. And that's ridiculous. Watch any melee duel ever and it's completely clear that you can circle the enemy without exposing yourself. Within a certain radius around the engaged enemy, movement should be possible without punishment. Taunt makes absolutely no sense against intelligent enemies. I'm fine with a taunt like ability that works only on dumb monsters but intelligent enemies should prioritise dangerous enemies. On the other end of the spectrum, the AI shouldn't be too smart. Imagine the horror if the AI played optimally, like players do.

Sadly, the game runs poorly on my laptop too. White March Areas have my frames dropping to 15-18 in combat. One thing I've found improves FPS is if you remove all save games to a different folder. It seems like if you have tons of saves, things slow down.

Well here's my case: - Barring the gloves the only way you can get to that skill level (rk.13 + resting bonus) is to have a rogue dedicated to nothing else but mechanic, and level the rogue to lv.11. - The rk. 15 traps are placed in WM. Meaning you do them at lv. 7-10. - To even get the rogue companion you need to first get through that dungeon riddled with rk.13+ traps. Or you'll have to possibly game the RP system by making a skill slave rogue you otherwise won't use. - If you go to the dungeon without a skill slave rogue that are no less than 2 instances where you may walk into an otherwise undetectable instant-death trap. On POTD difficulty that means your playthrough is DONE. So yes the gloves are pretty essential. It is doable (I did it) without gaming the system. But the whole experience felt unfair to me, because the game deliberately didn't give me all the necessary tools to get through it. Looks like the traps are too high powered. They should be weakened a little bit so the gloves aren't an essential item.

You need 15 to get through WM. That's a case against having such a high powered trap placed there, not that the gloves shouldn't be random. That said, I thought BG2's non random items were just fine, even if subsequent playthroughs were always going to be about quickly getting all the best gear.

What's the earliest use of gib? I first encountered in either quake or unreal tournament, instagib.

Feeblemind? How anticlimatic. My faovurite method was to cast lower resistance, then doom, then greater malison, then finger of death. There's just something about striking down a dragon with a single spell and seeing its soul disperse. Either Ascension or SCS fixed that though and made dragons challening again.

A further problem with these two items: The requirements stated in the description of the the weapons advances without having been met when the character that wears the item is parked at Caed Nua and then added again to the party. The weapon does not become stronger. Eg, I had Kana with Stormcaller with the requirement being to kill 5 druids or 25 enemies. I replace him with another NPC at Caed Nua and then have him join the party again. Now the requirement says to rest in a Storm Dragon's lair, but the weapon didn't become stronger. The exact same thing happens with Nightshroud, the requirement jumped form having to kill 25 enemies or 10 humans to the last requirement .

Especially amusing was when he [Zherot] complained the spells are all damage, crowd control or buff. Why yes, spells deal damage, alter the enemy or alter the player. So monotone, we can all think of many more types of spells! Cant EDIT: Removed personal attack. Please bash arguments and not each other.

If you really cannot play with suboptimal characters but profess to be deeply interested in their stories and in what they have to say, just use cheats or an editor to make their stats 'optimal'.