Ymarsakar

I would try to get 15 might and 15 per or split the difference. Cipher needs might to regain focus, otherwise you end up without focus to cast spells in a row. The offensive stats are might, dex, per. Defense or utility are con, int, resolve. Generally a few points in a stat won't make a noticeable difference, but 5+ points will make a difference for most builds. So with 3 resolve, generally your cipher is doing the ranged cipher build. On normal, it's not really the build of the class that matters so much as whether you know how to use the class abilities and armors/weapons well.

The flail of ages took forever to build but was one of the only things that could damage the demilich other than magic missiles. But it's why in BG1 when you got out, people tended to get killed by a dire wolf. Especially if they chose a magic caster as their main.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416939844 If you like text instead of long videos. The game is complex enough that if you come back to it after a long hiatus, it's like summer during school, people forget most of the mechanics.

Nobear, he's got role playing material.

It looks fine. You've already started thinking about many of the mechanical issues in combat, the tactical positioning. If you add different classes, you'll be able to adapt. The Paladin Monk Ranger 1-2 Cipher Chanter Wizard party composition is what I use the most. Chanter's phantom summons will be very useful as semi permanent cc. Aloth gets the most dps from the staff spells, the lance spells, and the blight spell. Slicken is also a pretty good aoe cc spell for emergencies, or buying time.

Some classes have dual or triple use to them, since their base abilities aren't affected by armor or getting higher defenses. The monk or paladin for example, as well as chanter. The paladin can still heal even if it has no dps and a lot of tank, so it is a dual use. It's like two roles in one party slot, freeing up another slot for a specialist. In games where a tank build is the only role something can fulfill, it would be rather limited. In this game, though, many classes are natural multi hybrids of various stuff put together, before one builds a tank build on top of it.

Dog Whisperer vs Whispers of Treason

The beta test with die hard fans and players fixed a lot of Pillars issues before 1.0, but much of it was untapped. For example, per encounter spells were not tested as well due to certain level restrictions or content restrictions. A lot of stat bonuses were changed around, due to balance reasons and lack of extra time. Usually, that's one easy way to fix issues. Once a game gets too popular, they need a different way to collate user input if they can no longer use that model for expansion testing. For Eve Online, that would be the CSM.

Because Obsidian and this community eschews any game design improvement that happened after BG, because BG was perfect. /s Is that why they made rogues the only class that can find and de activate traps.

"My problem with the fight I mentioned in the OP was that I was focused on bringing down those big forest dudes, I allowed the shades to get to my squishies and they dropped my priest pretty quick, they'd managed to multiply loads." Have Durance the priest cast repulsing seal when your front line is broken. The accuracy on that seal is very high and will buy you several seconds of prone crowd control. Paladin + Monk generally holds the front very well and can do a significant chunk of dps. Aloth also has emergency CC like slicken and confusion, which you can pop to buy some time if your party needs it. "I probably don't understand the terminology properly, but I don't know why people want to fit their characters into those neat boxes all the time, instead of adjusting as they go. " A tank is something with a lot of heavy armor plate on that stops incoming hits and damage, shielding the infantry behind it, and a big main gun on it to punch back twice as hard. That would probably be a paladin or heavy full plate user with a big weapon on hand. The monk would be a hover tank, like an attack helicopter with the toughness of a hover tank. Some tank and tank/dps builds would be monk with heavy plate or iron wheel plus lighter armor. The fighter's endurance regen can be substituted by Shod in Faith, the boots you get from the Crucible knights sub quest npc store. Paladin with conviction and full plate is also good for the tanking and melee roles, healing role too. Having 3 or 4 melee (the pet counts) does make it easier to block the enemy from going around you, but you can adapt to that situation using crowd control spells if you time it right. The lurkers and other big hp enemies can be taken down easily with party focus fire. Debuff their deflection, flank them, and/or use fetid caress from wizards or paralysis from ciphers, on them and they will take a lot of damage from the entire party. Also as for level of enemies, look in the creature glossary. If you kill enough of them, they will tell your their stats and weaknesses. The team I like to use has a paladin, 1-2 ciphers, a monk, a ranger, a wizard, and a chanter. The paladin and chanter can hold the main line, and the monk can either penetrate enemy's backlines or defend our own backline, the ranger and the wizard, from enemies like spirits. A nice trick with durance if you are fighting spirits and lurkers, is to bunch everything together, have the tanks aggro the lurkers and face them away in case they had any aoe cone attacks. Then position the priest close enough so that consecrated ground heals everyone. You will have far less trouble from those spirits then. By keeping your people together, it stops enemies from flanking you and focus firing people down. They can only reach the priest with ranged fire, if the priest is surrounded by his fellows.

Use the slow mode instead of all these auto pauses.

Someone deciding World of Warcraft legendary weapons should be added into Pillars is what broke White March patches. (Half of that is a joke, the other half is serious) Also the snow effects may also be part of the issue. I heard Obsidian was able to hire some more staff and programmers. Unfortunately that means unfamiliarity with Unity can have unintended consequences. For example, the people that worked on the old weapon talents, like draining, would have remembered that there was an endurance draining asset in the bundle folders. But a new hire wouldn't necessarily have known or checked. They haven't talked about the development in as much detail as the base Pillars game during and after the Kickstarter, so it's hard to verify one way or another. Other MMOs like Eve Online have dedicated small teams handling certain core game systems, and some of the legacy code is simply incomprehensible to anybody and cannot be changed without breaking the game, so they just replaced the entire code base and obsoleted the old one, in a phase system. This reduces some of the need for debugging since a small team would be able to debug what they broke easier, vs a huge team of coders under one manager and the left hand doesn't quite know what the right is doing.

White march has the more difficult content and trickier AI. They learned a lot from the previous Pillars stuff. White March is doable at party level 9, POTD, high level content, but it is crushing and very demanding of solid tactics and party compositions, maybe scrolls and potions too. White March level 11 party is a lot more forgiving.

BAdler, it is a GOG manual patch issue, since it won't patch old files that don't match certain specifications. They don't overwrite the file. Galaxy just overwrites everything it seems. Generally the manual patching is a GOG side issue, Obsidian can't do much about it. I suggest contacting GOG about this issue or use GOG Galaxy to patch games like Pillars, that have continuous patching in progress vs old games that are already patch complete.

The horror is generally when Mae has enough time to self buff and start casting spells, which is why if he isn't interrupted or killed as you noted, people get hurt. What I usually did was to use the door way bottleneck trick, where I positioned my party along the wall, so that the enemy ends up jamming the doorway itself and clogging the death funnel. I then beat on the fire spirits one by one, as they come unclogged. Since Maer can't even see my party because he's blocked by his own henchy summons, by the time I'm done with his trash escorts, Kana the chanter has a full array of verses and phantoms to summon. Once the phantom was on top of Maer, old boy was going to sleep.

Why don't you send itumaak on a suicide run to trip all the traps? He can't be killed, can he since he doesn't have health... right? Oh I see, your party comp doesn't have a ranger. Generally at 3 athletics, my party needs to rest about every 3 days of travel. Which is like 1 trip from Caed Nua to big city 1 and a return trip or 1 trip to big city 2. If people find that it is wasting their time because they spend so much traveling around like that, and don't want to get hit by fatigue, athletics to 4, 5 or 6 may add enough extra stamina that you won't need to rest, since you won't get minor fatigue yet.

I second the druid option, since it is very easy to use, aoe lightning cc that also does damage. 3 in athletics will minimize fatigue hits at the minimum, since it is -90% fatigue gained. More than that, is for people who don't need per rest abilities, they just go all martial on enemies on and on until they hit critical fatigue or something ridiculous like that. Generally the health on my tank goes red first before they hit any fatigue at 3-5 athletics. At 3, you are already at your max for - fatigue from combat. So any more would just be because you want to keep walking around for days on end on the map or in real time/game time.

I think it is a bug because I've heard 2.01 had similar issues like that one. But which patch are you using 2.0 or 2.02 the beta? If you are using steam, I recommend the 2.02 beta opt in, as it seems to have fixed a lot of issues.

"On a team there are five other team members to consider as far as what is better for the Ranger - dual wield or ranged. With five barbarians you'd be better as ranged, with five wizards you might be the tank so melee would be better. " Right, also in tight corridor fights, it is very difficult to make use of more than 2 melee front liners, the rest have to use reach weapons or ranged, because the corridor interiors are too narrow. They can't focus fire on an enemy very well, but the vice a versa is also true for the enemy. So with ranged, no matter what terrain people fight on or what the battle formation line is or how the enemies are splayed out, effective focus fire dps can be hard with some micro. But for people who use the 3-4 main front line melee tactic, it sometimes gets too crowded in caves and interiors for the ranger to do melee. 1 Paladin + 1 monk + 1 extra + 1 ranger melee pet. The front is getting crowded and they are having a hard time focus firing down the enemy, if the monk has no wounds to use. The ranged ranger frees up space and makes it easier to move, reposition, and change focus fire targets.

"-is this fix truly works for Durance and Pallegina bonus skill interdiction/faith and conviction?" For Pallegina's faith and conviction, yes it does. "Or is this about my behavior whem I'm talking personally with Durance/Pallegina" It's your total disposition, on your character sheet, which includes All your dialogue choices and quest choices. For faith and conviction, you can easily see on the character sheet what the numbers are. If the deflection is more than 5-6, then you have a bonus.

Just pull out of the room and create a bottleneck elsewhere against the spirits. Remember what Sun Tzu's book said and pick your location carefully, where you are strong but the enemy is weak. Also stay away from Fire attacks if you can help it. I did the Maewald fight with a low level party, without doing any of the side content quests before. Just straight from the town to the fortress and past it. For this fight, rogue might want to go shortbow and start interrupting Maer. As you then do a running retreat using kana's speed buff.

"The big block of wounds come from the enemy Alpha Strike, here Lesser Wounds would just hit the ten wound cap faster." Sure, but that tends to happen irregardless of what you pick for wounds. Lesser wounds would apply more to longer fights or when there are artificial ways to damage your monk to give him more wounds when needed. "Usually Itumaak dies, in fact he dies so often I should be hunted by PETA not by the Leaden Key. " The immortal dog fox hybrid is our champion. Reminds me of anime like School Live. It'll become a hunter soon enough once it gets enough exp.

"I think even in a party situation the dual wield would prevail " You're not accounting for lag time to apply dps on target. Ranged apply dps immediately within view, but melee has to spend time re positioning every enemy or so. Melee will have empty seconds due to movement in party fights. Whereas as solo, all the enemies come to you, and your only lag time in melee is if you are trying to push through the front line to the enemy's back line.

". I mean the Monks deflection alone hits almost 20 more than the fighter but his endurance gets blasted away while the fighter is just sitting there yawning it off." Is your monk using shod in faith? Because the fighter already has endurance regen. So in an even contest, the person with an aoe heal over time effect, won't see their endurance dip very far unless they get focus fired.