Ananisapta

Sorry for being AWOL. For some reason, this forum doesn't message me when my posts get replies. Also, I've been busy overcoming that damned dragon... and on to Forgotten Sanctuary. I certainly appreciate all the thoughtful mechanics ideas, most of which are totally over my head. Clearly those who hang out here have put a lot more time into the game than I have; I tend to rotate games frequently and have finished over a hundred... going back to something called Corncob that I played on DOS 5.1. This gives me a certain depth of perspective on the gaming industry, though my acquaintance here is shallow. My central concern is that such a fine game as the POE series is unlikely to attract a mass audience when it calls for intensive study by bright players; the disagreements on this thread show how much uncertainty yet remains. Without mass audience appeal, the genre will remain a niche production: much hard work and minimal earnings compared to the ones that boast millions of subscribers each contributing 50 cents a day. I say this without really knowing how many copies have sold, especially POE-II vs the original; I saw a post on Reddit suggesting the investors in POE-II have been disappointed. Part of my personal philosophy is that success is largely a matter of refusing to be defeated. That doesn't mean I don't occasionally lose my temper and ventilate about it; that's better than destroying my system every few months! In this case, I leveled my team several times and came back to pound that ugly dragon into the turf... and that felt pretty good. I went on to the Forgotten Sanctuary (the other expansion seemed to be for nerds only) and again got stomped by the final boss (Wael's Oracle). No more leveling was possible, but after the game finally gave me back Maia, I girded up my loins and kicked that monster right in the eye. Now I'm happy but... I still think the difficulty spike was hard to manage because I hadn't been given enough gradual ramping-up of challenge to inspire me to better learn the mechanics. So this evening I'll be getting into my handy-dandy Unterseeboot and heading off to the mythical land of Ukaizo to see what sort of mayhem awaits me there. Meanwhile, my word to game authors is that if you make it too realistic in terms of frustrating, arbitrary, irreversible choices, most of us will go looking for something that is more like a game and less like real life. I game to feel like a hero; feeling like a schmuck I can get in RW for free! Addendum: The Guardian of Ukaizo was a worthy challenge. I needed all of my skills but there was no ugly surprise to spoil the fun. Guess I'll be talking to the big guy tomorrow AM.

Ahh... Forgot to read all the details in the quest log.

The guide I'm using says I got the duct blown, which closed one of the three inputs. I got the cream but there's apparently an alchemy check that I can't pass; I think our collective score is around 12 and it's asking for 16. Any time I try to go down the hole, my main dies. What am I missing?

As far as I can discover, the only way to get through the upper bowel passage is if you happen to have 16 alchemy. I'm nowhere near that, not having found it necessary up to now. So what can I do to get on with the mission?

This instance of the problem appears to have been remedied. I've been having problems with the Steam downloader for a while, though.

I was asked to forward the crash dump but when I tried, your interface told me I'm not permitted to do that. Every time I try to go down the stairs to the Temple of Revelation, it crashes. Guess it was another Steam downloader problem: eight files were corrupted and had to be reacquired. Same sort of thing happened when I installed the main game. Ugh!

Most of the habit-forming substances I've come across have as one of their properties that a dose will relieve the withdrawal syndrome from a prior dose. Ekkevit didn't have this, which is one reason it caught me by surprise. Another frustrating problem is that taking further doses doesn't seem to alleviate the debuff. I'm getting ready to fight the darned dragon, having leveled several times since my last, ill-fated attempt. Guess I need to experiment with multiple resting sessions to see if I can break the curse. So how would you suggest this discussion be titled? Strangely, I couldn't find any similar discussion on the Net. Addendum: MaxQuest's idea helped! By resting twice... first time with a random food and second time with Glacial Ysae, I got rid of the hangover. Put me down as just an inexperienced tripper... but I still think somebody might have warned me the stuff was habit-forming. Ekkevit, after all, sounds a lot like "Aqua vitae /ˌækwə ˈvaɪtiː/ (Latin for "water of life") or aqua vita is an archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol. The term was in wide use during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, although its origin is likely much earlier." And alcohol I've always been able to control.

There's a new potion in Beast of Winter that gives an eternal debuff to everybody who tastes it with no warning and no cure that I can discover. I'm not sure if it's a bug or somebody's bad joke at our expense. If the latter, it will please only the masochists in the crowd while alienating the majority of your audience.

Bounty - Beina still can't be turned in until the Royal Deadfire Company's questline is completed or failed. This issue has been known more than six months: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/96tij5/nungata_is_missing/ Still no solution?

I invested $10 and a few days of playtime in BoW expansion and found a lot to like, but the final boss defeated me. I researched him and found there were a few skills that might have helped IF ONLY I'd had the foresight to acquire them, but I hadn't needed them up to then and there was no way to get them without restarting the map. To me, it appeared there was a large difficulty gap between this boss and the rest of the expansion... even with the limited help I had from the three heroes I recruited. Under the circumstances, BoW seemed a waste of time and money to me.

I realize it's an article of faith on the far Left that there's no real difference between men and women, but your attempt to reflect this delusional idea in your dialog by using they-them-their in place of gendered pronouns, especially when referring to individual NPCs who are clearly gender-typical, strikes me as awkward and distracting, and sometimes downright incomprehensible.

Not unfair. I think Berath got you good. So you think that the punishment is harsher than it would be for other people because of the choices you made? Interesting. Well, I'm up to 15/75 this AM, so there is hope for my MC getting out from under the bitch-god eventually. But clearly the penalty is harsher for tanks, and that raises at least a question of fairness. Yes, life is often unfair. One reason we play fantasy games is to get away from the constraints of reality, one of which is that we often live our whole lives as thralls of choices we made when we were young and ignorant. But if a game that takes weeks to play is too relentlessly life-like, it becomes another source of frustration, not recreation... at least for some of us. Game designers need to keep that in mind!

My point is that as main tank, I don't actually kill very many enemies (apparently it's a kill only if you strike the final blow). I played several hours today and my count is now 2/75, so it looks like Berath's Wrath is a life sentence if you happen to be main tank. A bit unfair, no?

I got past Yseyr without a fight, which was nice considering he's supposed to be the most difficult enemy in here. It's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking this place is a lot harder than its surroundings. I reloaded an old save and knocked down a Risen Soldier with three red skulls to examine his stats, which didn't look especially high other than Constant Recovery of 44 points/sec. I didn't see any other buffs on him. I still have Berath's Wrath on me. Since I'm tanking, I cleared the whole place without personally sending anybody back to the wheel. So I'm down a whole level in my stats with one soul down and seventy-four to go. I got no credit for all the souls Xoti returned, and no way I can see to release the ones I'm carrying. If I meet any of the Engwithans who are responsible for this mess, be assured I'm gonna send them straight to hel!

Nine on normal difficulty. I'm up to Yseyr now, btw. Some of these fights yield to approaching the area from a different direction, I've found.

I think my sin was in connection with the main quest, where Berath recalls I promised her some souls... the same souls I later promised to Hyleah, I guess. For imaginary gods, this bunch is a PITA. Level scaling is set to "All" but suddenly I have a half-dozen enemies with three red skulls overhead added to a dozen ordinary ghouls in each encounter. Ugh!

Berath is pissed with me because of something I said in Part 1. As I was heading down to the Hanging Sepulchers, she gave me a warning of impending punishment. Suddenly, I'm finding the difficulty of encounters has gone WAY up! Is there a connection?

I'm having trouble understanding the game's ending: I learned that 'the gods' were an Engwithan invention. I made some choices about the fate of souls that had accumulated in the weird Engwithan machine. Then the folks round-about were harshly punished by some of the mythical gods, claiming that I had promised to make a different choice. Do they exist or not? What am I missing?

If you assign Maneha to counsel Odeyna Fyrgest, the ensuing dialog contains the non-word 'realy'. Really!

I took the easy road... dispatching Falanroed and freeing the adra dragon... but I felt bad about it. From what I've read, it seemed the only practical way to protect my investment in Caed Nua, yet Falanroed seemed the nobler person -- but perhaps I'm prejudiced because I'm a human male rather than dragon-kind. I was at level 10 BTW. Ignoble behavior grates on me, even in a fantasy game. [goes muttering into the shadows, cutting the heads off goldenrod as he passes]

I played through this interesting game the first time on Classic difficulty (with scaling off) and found it a bit uneven but with enough challenge to keep me interested and learning. Then I came up against the Guardian of Ukaizo and found it overwhelming at my level of 16. I might have been able to handle him on the Relaxed level with scaling on, but I was pretty tired of the effort before I decided to turn it down, so I wound up besting him on the lowest difficulty level and moving on. Micromanaging each second of combat for the five different toons may appeal to some, but I would favor making the difficulty scale more gradually rather than such a giant leap at the end. Perhaps my experience is atypical?

My main is level 10, crossing open sea, when he falls into a stupor and imagines he's been abducted by Berath. Her realm is announced by "tinkling silver bells" on the ends of grass stalks. They sound like a brass church bell weighing no less than a ton. Since you're normally good at details, you might wish to rethink this. Additionally, this sequence in Berath's realm where all the gods make appearances except Eothas, goes on for about five minutes... which was about four minutes too long imo.