Seroster01

No they couldn't - Iovara's crusade occurred before the gods existed. Iovara and the Watcher were both non-Engwithian converts from the time that the Engwithians were still alive, and were part of the effort to force convert the world to the religion the Engwithians created. Iovara created her crusade after she learned about the Engwithian plans to create the gods. The ritual to create the gods didn't occur until after Thaos had stamped out all of the non-believers and "stabilized" the world. Ah, then I significantly misunderstood the timeline then. I thought the missionaries were a part of the small fraction of the "leftover" Engwithians "Spreading the news" after the gods were created. We know there was some left over cause they were the reason Ondra tried to drop a moon on Dyrwood & Abadon kinda-sorta stopped her. In any event, that goes back to my general point of "They factually & demonstrably exist now, so who's going to believe you when you say that the ancient ghost of an elf that only you have ever seen told you the gods were made up?"

Yeah I'm aware of the reason the Leaden Key was founded, and ostensibly exists to the current day. My general point was "They didn't really accomplish anything we're aware of that Thaos didn't do essentially by himself" (a case could be made for the folks sacrificing themselves to power the machines, but you don't need a world-spanning millennia-old secret society to find disposable pawns). The last point is one certainly worth considering, and I'm inclined to believe the general gist of "We don't care too much whether you worship us or not". My only real counter-argument to Kith knowing their secret is the line of reasoning that if Kith discovered the methods & mechanisms that were used to produce the gods they could damage or destroy the existing gods, or create new ones, etc. POE2 ending gets into that business a bit from what I understand.

I don't think so. Then we get into inconsistencies in what the gods are capable of. At bare minimum, if Ondra can pull down a moon and/or keep you from splatting after a thousand ft. fall, the gods should at least be able to uproot & throw nearby rocks at your head hard enough to kill you. This is all going to my basic issue with the gods in POE: inconsistencies in actions, abilities, scope, & motivations. We know they are capable of these things because they do/have done things in story that shows they're overwhelmingly powerful, but seem to do almost nothing proactively (expcept for Eothas.)

I agree, they seem to have caused somewhat of a worldwide cultural homogenization. Yet the cultures are still relatively diverse, as we see in the faction war in Deadfire (and comparing Deadfire in general to Dyrwood). Eora in general doesn't seem any crappier than our world is, or at least was in a similar "timeframe". So it's not like the gods are having a huge negative effect on the world AS LONG AS you don't cross them. So trying to convince people they should go against the gods sounds like bad advice, if anything. IDK how to put the next thing I'm trying to say into words well, so I'll just throw it out there. It sucks that people have been worshiping giant amalgamations of a dead culture's souls for thousands of years and have to bow to the whims of beings we know are imperfect to the point of being downright petty and childish. But in Eora, these beings are demonstrably real, have nigh-omnipotent power over your life and soul, and don't like to be crossed. What options do people really have?

Heh, now we're getting into problems I have with the general setting as it relates to the big reveal. The gods have already shown the willingness and ability to kill large #s of people to maintain power all by themselves. Why do they even need the Leaden Key? They could just cause anyone who started researching Animancy to drop dead on the spot, or die in unfortunate "accidents". Then people would REALLY know the gods don't like it, and things would shut down fast. In more of the vein of what I think you're asking; I'm not really even sure what purpose they serve in-universe other than for us to have a super-sneaky secret society to fight against in POE1. As mentioned, the gods could easily do it themselves. And while this may be due to them doing their job properly, I can't remember seeing the Key doing anything major (at least anything that worked) that Thaos didn't do himself. Someone else mentioned Iovara's crusade I think, and my 2 takes on that are 1.) it was a different era, where worship of the created gods wasn't a worldwide cultural staple, so it was easier to convince people that "this may not be true!" 2.) Even then I don't really feel like it makes sense that it happened the way it did & became as big of a deal as it was. I'll bring it up again, the gods seem to be perfectly able to have caused Iovara to spontaneously combust at any moment. If they were that worried about her message, why didn't they? I also kinda bring up my original point that IDK why the masses would believe her when they can see the direct influence of the gods in the world, or pray to them & apparently get a response in some cases. Like, I get that this was supposed to be a Big Deal, and it is at a basic level. But for all intents and purposes, whether they were there at the beginning of creation or not, there are now gods in Eora. They do godlike things, have godlike powers, and seemingly have a large measure of control over reincarnation. Why would you want to intentionally piss them off, even if you don't fervently worship them?

My general outlook on this subject is kinda like one I remember from a YouTube video, I think it was actually Zero Punctuation for PoE1. It said something along the general outline of "Then there's the big reveal that the gods are "fake". But this didn't really resonate with me, as I had spent the last few hours running erands for the "fakes", met and conversed with them and confirmed they are very real and actually have godlike powers. If it walks like a duck & talks like a duck... What does it matter where they came from if they can still smite you out of existence?" Imagine trying to tell people that their millenia-old religion is fake, with no empirical evidence. This hasn't even worked out that well IRL where there's no solid evidence for or against a higher power (not trying to start religious debate so let's not take this statement for more than it is). Now imagine how well it would go over vs a religion based on God-like entities that both factually exist, respond directly to their followers, and have powers equivalent to their titles. People are even born with flaming heads because of their existence! Even if the gods didn't just destroy your soul for threatening their power (if Ondra's willing to initiate a Moon Drop you know they're willing to off you for good) you'd get laughed out of every town you tried to tell people in. Now I agree that it seems you should be able to tell your companions about it, if only to see their reactions. But again, telling people not to believe in gods that factually exist, have godlike powers, and can functionality control a beings' soul simply because they were made in a machine thousands of years ago seems to be missing the reality of life on Eora (during the time frame POE occurs in anyway). Missed opportunity? Sure. Are you really going to be able to change anything while they exist in the state they do? Not very likely.

Another Bug report: I made a small mod to change the base duration of Time Parasite's buff portion from 12s to 20s and hit save. I later got in-game & viewed the tooltip, it read 0% buff w/ the new duration. Looked in the exported file, the value of the buff had been changed from "BaseValue": 1.5 to "BaseValue": 1 without me touching that field at all. To make sure the issue wasn't related to the fact that I'm using 1.1 bundles I closed the editor in my browser & opened a new session, and the base value was 1.5, which is correct for the release version (it was nerfed to 1.25 in the 1.1 version). I then made the mod again, and checked the file, which had the same problem, the value had changed itself to 1. I then realized I could view the export text in the editor itself, and reloaded the editor another time to repeat the process. This time I additionally modded the duration of the Time Parasite debuff. Once again, if I changed the duration to 20 (did not test other values), and the result was the buff was "BaseValue": 1,.debuff was "BaseValue": 0,. Not sure what the deal is here, this doesn't make sense from what I know of scripting.

We have the same view on "I wouldn't want to play a loot pinata game with a realistic loot system". My general outlook is have it be either 1.) ME2/ME3 style where you outfit your group before missions & lootable objects are collected in very rare/specific situations and aren't large physical objects 2.) In the "PICK THEIR BODIES CLEAN, WE'LL NEED THOSE XAURIP TOES LATER!" loot systems: something like the POE stash where you have functionally infinite carry space. I also liked the Witcher 3 inventory system after a few patches: The re-usable Consumables (all of them) and items used in crafting were basically infinite carry, as they had no weight. Equippable items & "vendor trash" were the only things that had weight (most of said "trash" could be refined into crafting goods, but were frequently worth more sold to a merchant than the results of refining them, and since you had to pay a merchant in order to refine them...). Edit: I will bring up that Scenario 1 tends to work better in sci-fi settings because a lot of the "loot" can simply be data that you can use to make new/better equipment, whereas medieval fantasy settings the fanciness is usually that the item you found is unique & powerful, not that you found a sword that was made better/different.

Inless you have a race that has -2 on that stat of course. True enough.

As a follow up, the rules I've seen for 5e won't allow a character to go sub-8 on any one ability score, that's the real reason there's no true dump stats.

Ya, I think some folks take their obsession with certain kinds of roleplays and want that to trump effective game systems. Might is perhaps flawed, but it's a pretty elegant solution to the dump stat problem. Moreover, you don't even NEED high might to be a great Wizard in either the original nor Deadfire. Ya, if you're obsessed with fireballs and magic missiles, sure. But you can do fine just maxing Intelligence and Perception, and cursing your opponents into oblivion for the rest of the party. Except Pathfinder and 5E both eliminated the dump stat problem - 5E by making saves tied to attributes rather than abstract, derived stats (you make a Constitution or Wisdom or Charisma or whatever roll in 5E, not a will/save/fort save) and Pathfinder by tying skills to attributes and then making those skills important. So Pillars' meandering way of "fixing" the problem... had already long since been fixed. And understand, I'm only talking about d20 games because that's the majority of my tabletop experience - I don't have enough experience in systems like White Wolf's Storyteller System or the various d6 systems (Shadowrun, Dark Heresy, Savage Worlds, etc) to conclusively say how they do things. It's like Pillars (and Deadfire) tried to reinvent the wheel and ended up making a square instead of a circle, and each iteration they keep sanding down the edges - they're eventually going to end up with a circle, just through the most obtuse route possible. IDK about Pathfinder (since I've read a lot about the base mechanics, but never actually played a game) but Dump Stats are still a thing in 5E for sure. It's not usually a great idea to dump DEX/WIS/CON because those are the most common saves targeted. But having a -1 or 0 mod for those isn't usually game breaking either, especially since you can get bonuses from Proficiency through different methods to offset low values here. INT/CHA are very dumpable if they aren't your primary stat bc there's so few things that target those saves as to be irrelevant. STR is kinda in the middle, there's a lot of saves that target STR involved in melee combat (push/grapple/knockdown & such) but back-liners can dump it & it won't completely cripple their character usually.

Well, you can edit AI scripts as much as you like. For further clarification, if you just don't want them to cast spells that can damage other party members, take those spells out of the list of abilities available for the AI to cast. Click the little x button off to one side (L or R, can't remember which) for each ability you don't want them to ever cast, and there you go. I'll go back and have another go at it...when I tried to edit it earlier, I could change from active to passive, but when I tried to edit the spell list, it would show all the spells but I was unable to de-select anything. By the way, one item that missed my original list of questions: How do you split stack in inventory? I have a stack of about a dozen healing potions I want to divide up among my party, but I don't see how to split them. In other games you usually click or drag the stack using a key combination (shift-click, shift drag, cntrl-click, cntrl drag, alt-click or alt mouse drag, but none of those allow me to split stack into 2 smaller stacks...is that an option in PoE2? The way you wrote this has raised questions in my mind about what you're trying to do. For starters, what do you mean by active & passive? Are you talking about the AI scripts that are pre-supplied like "Wizard Passive"? If so, you can't actually edit those (which I know is probably a surprise, it doesn't say or that imply anywhere). You have to "clone" the one you want to start from if you're going to use one of those as a base. There's a little copy button next to the name of the scripts on the left, it's a button w/ a square partially inside another square. After it gets copied it'll say something like <Original script title> (Clone). You can then change the title & whatever other changes you want in that list. But yeah, you can't change the originals. The second thing your statement made me think about is it will only cast abilities that you are listed in the "use if" windows; it won't cast fireball unless you add fireball to the things you want it to do in some scenario (or it was there already when you copied it & didn't remove it, obviously). I figure between the two, the first is the more likely cause of your confusion, but I figured I'd add both for clarity.

My issue is less about the weight, and more about most of the weapons people are carting around are 2+ foot long "sticks" of metal/wood that have to be either held or attached to you somewhere. There's only so many places you can put such things and still fight in melee realistically. And by "so many" I mean, 1-2 at most. Daggers/small knives are one thing, can be fit into a belt or some such. But multiple long swords/maces/axes/spears etc. would quickly get in the way far too much to fight in melee and not get hung up on either the items themselves or the belts & whatnot used to attach them to someone's body.

Regarding the stash, i will (once more) repeat myself. But my problem in not with having it. It's having it thrown in the game without any care of any kind for an explanation. As it is, it appears to be just a blatant game mechanic, which no one even tried to hide a bit behind lore or propre in-game implementation. Crafting was done the same way. Though it had many other problems, too. As for the debate around Might... I see, once again, that so many people try their best to ignore everything that was written and explained here, in order to be allowed to go back to what their fantaisies about the problem are, inducing that they can once more spit the same nonsense over and over, while freely ignoring everything other people said. This is a bad habit of these forums. I may become a bit combative here, but, frankly, this habit i see is unblelievably tiresome to me. I never spoke about a wizard by the way... In my case, it was a simulated multiclassed priestess/warrior (7 strenght, 17 spiritual power, ideally). And why people argue AGAIN that it's possible to have an efficient spell caster while dumping Might and investing in Perception? When i specifically, and at lenght, explained that the problem was NOT about being able to KILL THINGS FASTER AND BETTER LIKE IN DIABLO, but it was from a Roleplay perspective, in order to Roleplay a certain Background i wrote? That efficiency of the build was not a major concern (since i played Pillars 1 in Hard and not PotD)? But translating in the character sheet who the character was? I won't rince and repeat everything i said just yesterday. And will ignore, from now on any comment from people who have opinions about a matter they did not care to read about beforehand. One NPC in New Vegas said one thing i love: ''The less people know about something, the more opinions they have on the matter''. In short, before reacting to the Might problem as stated in this thread, read about the said problem as it is brougt up, before drowning this thread with irrelevant stuff. Thanks. It's definitely not about playing your stereotyped and OP flimsy BG wizard ! I will thank Ilathid now. He read what i wrote before answering. Since yesterday, he's the ONLY one who did so. And even so i can't agree that the matter he speaks about and mine are exactly the same thing, i will recognize it's a clever and interesting answer. And i thank you for this. Another side note by the way. Did any of the people who whine about people finding inappropriate being unable to play their flimsy wizard, ever tried to lift an actual medieval bastard sword? I will tell you, it's heavy. And you really NEED physical strenght to be able not only to lift it with one hand, but to sway it at leisure, too. You need A LOT of strenght. It only makes sense that people who would train to be a fighter acquire this strenght naturally along the way. Now, what about wizards? Would you find more natural to consider they would go to the sports ground lifting weights for years, because, you know, they need to be OP during summer at the beach? Where in the world would they acquire the same kind of physical strenght as warriors i spoke about? Do all non muscular wizards forced to bet on perception because if they don't have muscles they can't throw a damaging fireball? To me it's only natural that most wizards won't be as muscular as warriors. Depending on the background you write, you can create an interesting wizard who IS muscular. But i fail to see how having a flimsy one is a problem. And how not being allowed to have one is just obvious? Just because some people don't care about this Might problem (which is something i can hear, really) does not mean they have to dismiss the very existence of the problem. They can tell me: ''ok, i read, i see. I don't care. This may pose a problem to some people who like roleplaying. I play differently, and my true concern about the game lies somewhere else''. And i would say ''yeah, it's fair. Like i stated before, everyone has their thing. Tell me what it is, it may be relevant for me, too.'' And discussion, exchange, become possible. Oh, joy! Langage exists since thousands of years, and it would finally end up allowing people to discuss and understand one another. One of my biggest fantasies in Real Life since forever... I have read every one of your posts in this thread, and I came away with 2 takeaways from them: 1.) I can't really think of any CRPGs that would really fit the amount of RP "preperation" that you do. CRPGs, especially modern ones, have removed a lot of the tabletop-style RP because of install sizes & voice acting (even ones as old as the original Xbox had this issue). Another layer of that is that most of these RPGs have a background already made for the MC, even if that is loosely defined. I guess what I'm trying to say is the process you described seems like a very solid process for playing tabletop PNP games, but seems like for CRPG games you're just going to end up frustrated more often than not. 2.) I understand the general complaint about Might that you have, and I don't disagree entirely. Might currently functions the way it does for 100% gameplay/design/meta reasons. It certainly feels odd that a stat which affects all damage, from any source, is primarily used in dialogue as the ability to lift and/or move heavy objects manually. But at the same time, I feel like you created a character without considering the gameplay mechanics of the setting. It's much like someone mentioned earlier about a "wise Mr. Magoo". It apparently isn't possible to make the character you wanted in the POE setting. Just straight up; not possible. So why not make a new character with the system that actually exists? "Lack of imagination" clearly isn't an issue for you, but that's about as close as I can describe my take on your statements about this subject. Maybe stubbornness would be more apt? You can't make the character you originally wanted due to game mechanics. But rather than thinking up a new one designed with the system in mind, you just decided "it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I hate it!" If that's your approach to video games, I'm not sure you're going to find many you enjoy. In summary, I have great respect for the effort you put into the characters you make, but I feel like you're really setting yourself up for disappointment when you go that all-in for modern CRPGs.

Thought of something that might be relevant: I was loading the 1.1 versions of the bundles to edit since I DLd the Beta already. It didn't seem to be a problem for anything I changed, other than the abilities bundle like I mentioned. But I figured it might be part of the problem so I figured I'd bring it up.

I think what he meant was "Why did Obsidian pick the Godlike we can create to be playable?" IE, why can't we make a MC Avian or Marine Godlike, which we have as companions? Another option is a godlike from one of the other gods; Rymrgand & Abadon themed Godlike would be interesting to me. It also seems like there's different variations of Godlike for the same god, IE Moon Godlike for the MC & Marine Godlike for Tekehu would both stem from Ondra, but apparently have different results. Ultimately the answer is most likely "We didn't have enough time to put all the things we wanted in the game", or that is what it would boil down to in reality.

Well, you can edit AI scripts as much as you like. For further clarification, if you just don't want them to cast spells that can damage other party members, take those spells out of the list of abilities available for the AI to cast. Click the little x button off to one side (L or R, can't remember which) for each ability you don't want them to ever cast, and there you go.

I'm pretty sure i read somewhere this is a known issue. Some quests are buggy at the moment, and dialogue options would state things that makes no sense. I'm confident these problems will be solved one after the other, over time, through patches. Obsidian supported Pillars 1 like they should have. And i'm sure they will do the same will the sequel. Cheers. I don't know. With full VO, resources needed to write/plan/record all lines needed to adjust to every possible quest order seem significant. As I mostly followed the path laid before me I had only once isntance when Queen thanked me for dealing peacufully with a tribe I never met in a place I have never been to. I can easily imagine many such issues showing up, if one was more of an explorer than me. It's not usually as difficult as re-recording every dialogue for every change. I'm not sure what they are called formally, but the way the system works is conversation dialogue & thus VA lines are handled on an individual "slide" and branching "trees" system. Usually a slide is the Queen saying "Thank you for saving x", maybe with notes about how she sas it with a big smile or some such, then a different slide comes up to continue the convo which may or may not be on the same subject. Trees are options where you say to queen: "let's talk about that x I saved" and then have multiple slides about the subject with possibly more trees and options thrown in. So most of the fixes for issues with "dialogue for something I haven't done" are fixed by setting proper parameters for when those slides and/or trees should or should not appear. They don't need to re-record dialogue usually, and even in scenarios where you might think they do they can frequently get around them with clever editing & the use of this system.

Man, I cannot empathize with any of the anti-QoL complaints in this thread. It's unfathomable to me that people would PREFER annoyances that have no direct impact on gameplay, mostly the bit about unlimited stash. I suppose that's probably because I care about that buzzword "immersion" (Cue the Rainbows!) only so far as it applies to what is happening on-screen in normal gameplay, not in menus or travel or whatever else. Quick tip: I have played an ungodly number of CRPGs over the years, and a whopping NONE of them have had realistic inventory systems. It is not humanly possible to carry multiple full suits of metal armor, helmets, weapons, or 50 lbs of any crafting reagent ever invented while fighting in melee or shooting a bow. But that happens in every CRPG. Why complain about something that can't be truly be realistic unless you remove the ability to carry anything other than what you're wearing or can fit into a small pouch? Just for annoyances sake? I'll pass. I'll say this post sounds kind of combative, but to me this is advocating for regression in game design to things I hated & felt had no real purpose. Gets me fired up.

They work completely differently? Carnage is an every-attack AOE hit, now 33% of your base weapon damage, in a radius around the target you hit. Cleave stance is after you kil a mob you get an attack on enemies near you (or after the patch, 1 nearby enemy). AFAIK, carnage should proc off of the attack(s) from cleaving stance, there's no reason why they wouldn't that I'm aware of since they're just normal attacks.. That's a meaningful difference, but I sort of agree with AeonsLegend insofar as it doesn't feel meaningful enough. Without multiclassing, I suppose there'd be a fairly good reason for it to exist, but since you can just make a fighter/barbarian these days, it just feels out-of-place. It isn't meaningful enough that you have to kill a mob with your own melee attack to proc extra attacks, compared to an affect that works for every hit you ever do? I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense to me.

I'm experiencing a peculiar problem: I am trying to change whether abilities are castable outside of combat, which should be as simple as loading the abilities bundle & changing a "Yes" to "No" & clicking save. However, when I do that and go to the "export" window, it says "There is nothing to export". In something that might? be related, while modding the same abilities to allow self-targeting, it was listing/exporting the changes made to the attacks bundle (where you actually determine what targets are eligible) as the abilities bundle, in addition to an additional file for the attack bundle. I haven't fiddled with this situation too much other than to re-load the editor in my browser, so I'll mess with it some more. But it's odd for sure. Edit: Fiddling around more, it seems to be having the same issue regardless of what fields I change, after saving & viewing the export window it's just "There is Nothing to Export". I can then return to the abilities window & the changes are still listed there as having been made. I also realized that the Paladin ability changes I made before had the same issue, the actual text in the abilities bundle that was exported was data from the attacks bundle changes I made instead.

They work completely differently? Carnage is an every-attack AOE hit, now 33% of your base weapon damage, in a radius around the target you hit. Cleave stance is after you kil a mob you get an attack on enemies near you (or after the patch, 1 nearby enemy). AFAIK, carnage should proc off of the attack(s) from cleaving stance, there's no reason why they wouldn't that I'm aware of since they're just normal attacks..

Dw has an innate 30% bonus to recovery speed, so after that & factoring in both DW & 2H talents into their respective formulas, auto-attacking comes in basically dead even. The bigger issue is the full attacks. For testing in the 1.1 patch, I compared the legendary Chromo staff (has a unique scaling bonus to attack speed & weapon damage from Metaphysics, making it the best 2h weapon I could find) to DWing different other legendary enchanted 1-handers. Even with its bonus, when I compared it to 2 1h legendaries without similar bonuses the damage was about 35% higher in the character screen for the DW full-attack compared to the staff. That's pretty hefty considering that it makes the DW option much more efficient for using the limited class resource pools & also opens up more enchantment options, as you mentioned.

I have a zerker I made last night after installing the Beta that was able to take them normally. Unless something has changed overnight, the actual issue (which is actually a pre-existing issue, it's in the release version as well) is that the upgrades don't show up in the Ability Preview window during character creation. They should still be available during the level up process.

So I was messing around w/ different characters to see what all has changed, and I noticed what looks like a change to the Berserker's version of Fury that seems either accidental or a change that is complete over-kill. In the Release version, as a max level Berserker, I recall the Raw damage on self from Fury being in the <15 range (maybe even <10?) even when affected by might & what have you. In the Beta patch, the tooltip now reads as 27.8 raw/3 sec. That's a pretty significant change, and seems to be due to Power Level for the ability giving a flat +18 damage on to the base 2. I certainly don't remember that before, and seems to be affected by Might on top of that. I'd like to think this is some kind of bug, and/or I am mistaken on the numbers I recall from the release build. But as hard-core as the rest of the nerfs are in 1.1 this seems like it was likely intentional, and I would like to say that 27 raw/3 sec is way too much if you also can't see your HP. In a similar vein, I haven't seen anyone mention that Sacred Immolation has had it's Raw damage to self reduced and would like to say that if it has not been changed, the amount of raw damage this ability does to the caster is confoundingly, ridiculously high. Base raw damage is more than double the minimum it can do to enemies. I can only imagine what it does with high Might. Caveat: I assume it scales with might like every other source of damage & self-damage I've seen in the game, but have not verified. Even if it doesn't, the amount of raw damage it does per tick right now should be the damage it does in total, if anything.