Ymarsakar

I've noticed this as well, where suppress affliction bugs out against certain status effects that are stacked.

I kind of miss when Path of the Damned had overpowered stats on the beetles. I needed a 100+ deflection tank before because I remember they had like 80-90 deflection and the adra beetles had an accuracy with their shock aoe of 80+. Now it's like 50-65 accuracy for them. I replayed through some of the Dyrford areas on 2.0 White March and it wasn't as dangerous as I remembered from 1.0. Then again, my party was like level 4 when I first fought beetles, and now I'm level 11. Even without using high level spells and abilities, the enemies just fall apart with 2 paladins + 1 monk rushing them. Before, I couldn't even get a hit on the beetle types, let alone a crit, due to the difference in my accuracy vs their deflection. It was only the tank's fighter regen and some spot heals, which over a long fight period allowed my ranged dps to finally kill a few beetles.

I used mental binding in a couple of unorthodox situations, such as interrupting spell casters that I couldn't dps down due to not having a ranger/rogue. I also used it to help the tanks when they were being overwhelmed and healing wasn't ready yet. Using the aoe stuck effect, the enemies can often create temporary bottlenecks in corridors, which can be used to annihilate them without using a melee member. Generally the issue was always the accuracy vs defenses, now it is less of an issue due to perception builds. I'll take more reliable paralysis over longer paralysis generally, since the cipher has a lot of damage to deal for the focus. I tried out antipathetic wave a few times in 1.03 and realized just how much damage it dealt, which wasn't transparent in the tooltips. I did not imagine it would proc six+ times. Using it to kill boss enemies or ogres, was funny. All other spells would just scratch the ogre's paint, but the beam spells just melted them, especially if you used two at once.

Pressing space or other keys while mousing over the hotbinds will also remove them.

It's not just for mac.

A monk or chanter can be useful. But they generally debuff fortitude, not will. The wizard's still the best will debuffer due to miasma. The priest's aoe hazard spells are pretty nice, even though the priest has lower accuracy. Just debuff the enemy's reflex via an aoe and watch them get hit so hard. I think Durance actually had the highest single target damage in the records, 107. The Cipher did more, but it wasn't a single attack and would only come from the special detonate/raw damage spells at higher levels. No rogues in sight. Echo used on summons from the chanter or wizard is hilarious. Try a wizard with essential phantom with all spell bind items like forge gloves, and then put him behind the enemy lines running around, then cast echo on him.

Each class has had least one active ability per encounter, in case they run out of everything else. So in that sense, there's a base minimum of active useful abilities for each class. Paladins and monks have some of the fastest activation of their abilities, whereas spell casters tend to be slower due to the rate at which they act. I normally play(ed) the old 1.03 Path of the Damned in Pillars, which is rather outdated by now. I've played some White March high level content with Path of the Damned, though, so here's some things I've discovered or noticed. Monks with platemail can save the party by becoming more powerful, dealing more dps and cc, the more hits they take. Reminds me of shounen anime shows, but it can easily give them he MVP award for when fights go wrong, the pull fails, some patrol sees you when you didn't predict it. A monk can also act as shock troops or special forces, by penetrating the enemy's main line and attacking the enemy's backline. Chanters often pull the MVP card out when the party is on its last legs health, per rest abilities, and fatigue wise, since the chanter just gets more and more powerful the longer the fight goes on. They can summon a phantom at early levels for 20s or so that stuns on every hit. A drake at higher levels. Their aoe chants buff or do dps/debuff to enemies constantly, like a bard's song except it auto rotates depending on your choice. The chanter I put in plate mail as it doesn't need speed to do chants or invocation summons. So when the tank falls down due to overwhelming damage or the health drops too low to reliably absorb damage, the chanter can help out by distributing damage and even doing some heals or cc. The cipher I use is normally the blunderbuss cipher. It uses paralysis powers to temporarily debuff an enemy's defenses and then uses the shot to deal massive damage, which allows it to cast even more powers. That's about the only class that tends to do the exact same combo all the time, but it still has a lot of extra options depending on the situation. And is the class with the most reliable Crowd Control, due to charm and domination and ringleader. Generally the cipher is very good at pulling as the paralysis hits the main target and the aoe makes everyone else around it stuck, allowing the wizards and druids more time to cast massive dps spells that CC and damage, like overwhelming wave or petrification spells. The micro on the cipher generally affects its positioning, range, and which priority targets it must take down to help the tank or party. The ranger is also another dps class with some useful micro. Its abilities are far more passive and less active, but because it has a pet, it can do amazing coordinated attacks when the pet and ranger attacks the same target. Allowing the player some interesting choices when facing enemies that have a priority or order in which they must be taken out. The paladin is like a main line tank which defends the party by drawing aggro and engaging as many enemies as it can, including people running around at your casters, but at the same time functions as a fast instant healer with a hot and exhortations that buff the dps/defenses of your other characters. Thus it's like a priest that doesn't need to rest, and can deal some good damage with two handed weapons while switching to x/shield for when massive damage is incoming. Compared to a priest that is more squishy like a spellcaster, the paladin has massive endurance and health, comparable to a fighter. The wizard often helps other dps and tank characters out by using aoe debuffs. But later on, it has interesting tanking and melee abilities as well, including essential phantom, which clones yourself, allowing you to duplicate all spell bind items on your wizard, for the clone as well. The wizard offers a wide range of dynamic abilities, and it can still use plate mail. Dimensional shift allows you to teleport to an ally and switch places, which means you can shift places with a summon and let them take all the close range aggro. It's also a useful save for when the tank is unable to handle the waves of enemies, allowing you to shift in, activate instant defenses, buff yourself, and start casting aoe. Then shift back again when you deplete your defenses. The druid is very fun for fighting in corridors and in pull runs where you hit like a guerilla then fade away out of enemy range. Overwhelming wave is hideously powerful, so op they nerfed the stun duration and it's still powerful. Capable of destroying entire formations of enemies and enabling the party to overwhelm them, far stronger than paralysis at early levels, since paralsyis usually only affects one target. Druid can shapeshift into a melee animal form with high DR hide armor and massive dual attack claws, for 20s or so. While casting spells. Their aoe lightning attacks are passive duration, not one time hits. As a CC/AOE class, druids are extremely fun to play with and feels more aoe damage orientated than the wizard.

The breakdown applies to a lot of talents items and effects in the objectbundle folder. The druid lightning spells also conflict with the ai. As for a fix, I don't think they even know yet what the fundamental issue was. They certainly didn't know about why some things bugged out in the White March, like the stash bug. I think that was a prelude to some much larger problem they hadn't uncovered, so when they applied a code patch to fix it, it crashed something else even more vital. The previous obsidian patches seem a lot more stable from 1.0 to 1.03 to 1.05, and so on. Some things needed a hotfix, but it wasn't as systematic a break as it looks now. So I surmise that either the debug coder changed, the more experienced ones are working on White March part 2 perhaps, or there was some incompatibility between the new White March content and the new changes, which hadn't been fully debugged or understood before they tried fixing some things in the code with this patch. The fact that GOG prefers to test their patches for a lot longer, may also have contributed to some issues with their version.

They know about it, work around here for now. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/81899-hiravias-refuses-to-cast-returning-storm/

I have not tried Hours of St. Rumbalt or other crit-focused weapons before; How often does the "crits can inflict prone" overbearing effect fire on crits? Every crit, as far as I know. Or at least majority of them if I missed something. I used to think it was like percentage based to, so I never used them as getting accuracy high enough to get a crit before the Perception buff, was... not so good. Basically, there are ways to convert 100% of your hits to crits, via buffs. Dire blessing, potions, paladin's zealous 2 upgrade, and the rogue is the most popular class for this trick because of the +10% +10% talents it has to convert hits to crit. Borresaine that op bow that STUNs on crit, Tall grass, and st Rum, are popular weapons for the critical rogue which is also the cc rogue. What makes these weapons so powerful is that you can get it in the early game, with enough gold.

That's a bit difficult for tank to last hit something =( It's a little bit easier for paladin given the flames, double handed, and perception dps buff. Bloody slaughter talent actually is beneficial there as well as godlike death. It works better with a combo between blunderbuss cipher, since the blunderbuss cipher does not want to hit an enemy that's almost dead. So it makes more sense for the other people, like the tanks, to finish em off. The party can just sit and watch as the paladin duels people, and against small weak enemies like spiders, it'll happen more naturally. A min maxed 18 con 18 int 18 might, 3 per, 3 dex, paladin may still work, but the more balanced paladin can do about the same with higher accuracy. Before PX1 2.0, my tanks needed extremely high deflection, and probably still do at earlier levels. Now at level 9-11, I find that the extremely high deflection builds I used before, aren't as necessary now. More dps and healing gets me some more flexible options, and paladin still has that ultra fast lay on hands healing and exhortations. A paladin and defensive monk built with cc in mind and torment's reach, can tank lots of fish wildlings in White March, high level content enabled and Path of the Damned. Switching between a large weapon for dps and then using a backup shield for when you need deflection, feels much more natural and efficient now than before. Since the aggro has more chances of changing and sometimes they just ignore the tanks.

Attack speed debuffs and malus only affects weapon speed between attacks, not the reload on crossbows and firearms. The reload animation time is a separate thing from attack speed. Btw recovery is a kind of attack speed, like -50 recovery is equal to about +30 or +33% attack speed, so it doesn't affect reload either. So plate mail goes very well with firearms, you don't lose as much dps. What -20% attack speed normally means for a bow or melee weapon, is that on every 5th attack, if you had 20% more attack speed, you would have been able to make another attack at that time, bumping it to 6. For firearms, attack speed bonuses don't boost your attack rate as much and attack speed maluses don't decrease your attack speed as much since the reload time is the same and think the reload time on firearms is larger than the attack speed delay (which is modified by armor recovery too). An easy way to see for yourself is to attack with weapon X on party member, and count the number of seconds and reload time. Then take the talent penetrating shot and activate it, then do it again to see how many seconds difference with your current build and armor. Then you can reload if you decide it's too much delay for 5 DR bypass. But for blunderbuss, having that 5 dr bypass on the six projectiles per shot, will increase the overall damage substantially. That's potentially 30 points of damage. The party buffs that substantially increase the overall damage per second of the cipher are the chanter's Illya chant. The priest's blessing and dire blessing. The paladin's accuracy aura. The wizard's alacrity buff that gives some crazy +attack speed at the expense of some endurance dots, but is only a self buff, however is something to keep in mind for melee/ranged/super speed wizards. As a wizard using miasma to debuff enemies makes the cipher's paralysis and mental attacks, near unresistable. If you keep paralysis on enemies more, your blunderbuss deals more damage overall and hence more focus gained. So there are various tricks to increase the cipher's dps, as it benefits from party benefits and tactics a lot. I've started using a monk as main tank, though, and it works out much better now that super high deflection isn't needed. Well, it's still useful at times, but there are ways around it. The idea of some guy taking so much damage that it increases his damage output, high risk high reward gameplay, is nice to go with the more patient cipher build. The monk tank used to be something only the main played as it required a huge amount of aggro/.wound management. Now with the AI, it becomes much less of an issue for a monk to die from wounds before you realize it.

The AI in 2.00.76 White March worked pretty well. They didn't disengage unless you manually told them to go attack or move out of the engagement link. The recent patch code did a number on the White March or Pillars system. It's hard to say what will fix it since they probably don't know why X was broken to begin with. They haven't had much time to debug and reverse engineer the issue. Is this an issue from the 2.01 patch or the base 2.00 PX1 release?

Whatever code they used to do the patch, seems to have broken their database inside the game itself, affecting many of the stuff in the objectbundles, including effects, items, even some visual effects, and even the AI it seems. Or maybe it's not the AI but just the talents/spells the AI is attached to. As for the AI system, a more flexible and powerful system would allow if/then logic arguments to apply to auto attacks and individual spell casts. In BG2 and IE games, I often wrote scripts to automate my tactics for certain classes, such as casting a wizard's melee spell if a person gets within x meters or is engaging the wizard in melee. So instead of casting 4 buffs when I want the wizard to do melee, I just have him move near an enemy and it does it automatically. The script initially refused to accept human interrupt commands, until I figured out how to interrupt the script as it was running merely by canceling the current action and giving it a manual command. It then executes that manual command before resuming the sequence ai script. If I recall, the trick was to delay the script update by 3-4 seconds, about the time of a single round in BG2 which was six seconds, which allows one action to proceed without it being interrupted by a script command as the script doesn't even update until the action is done. But I think the Pillars Ai has some of that, it's just not very transparent, flexible, or customizable. Setting individual parameters for each wizard buff, for priest heals, and for various dps/stun effects, can be very useful to help the tactics flow out without a lot of micro. The way they write AI scripts for the enemies is fine, as the enemy just has auto attack and maybe 1-2 special abilities. The AI gets a lot weaker when it comes to player classes which have a number of abilities that must be used in the right order.

"The tragedy was that after retraining back to normal, my Wizard had forgotten ALL spells, including those I'd paid to transcribe from grimoires I sold long ago." Giveplayermoney 30000 But the grimoires act as nice journals, for the amnesiac wizard to remember his past life.

GOG has two patches, and there's some weirdness about what order they need to be used in. 1.06 is still the most stable build, it's the one right before 2.0 and white march came out. The saves will be compatible. You just can't access the new content. If the GOG 2.01 patch was used but your in game still says 2.00.76 something, then it wasn't patched right and it's probably missing files or animation.

Pillars of Eternity\PillarsOfEternity_Data\assetbundles\prefabs\objectbundle All the talents, spells, effects, summons, powers, items are in there. You're looking for something called Nin and PX1, as the PX1 prefix denotes the white march content, and Nin would be easier to find since it's the spell name. You can also search for "grimoire" and see if you can get it via Additem, to see if it has the spells you want in it. I suggest using a notepad and copy pasting the command line from it, after you check it. It's easier to do that than in the console.

2.01 is pretty buggy. They didn't test it long enough or maybe the person they used to fix the previous bugs introduced some overly burning code that interfered with the database of X. I speculate or surmise that their experienced coders are working on White march part 2.

Torment's reach uses your actual melee damage and then applies an additional lash proc on top based on the damage you dealt before or after DR got applied. So the dps on it is pretty good and it will go up the more wounds you get, due to swift strikes. Also stacks with the lightning strikes. Unless PX1 2.00.10 introduced a new bug, then all bets are off.

You're welcome, glad it worked. But the PX1 2.0 white march didn't have this bug, as an FYI to others.

He's probably asking for the complete leveled up stats for all the soul bound weapons, including any differences if you bind it to a different class. Special abilities +, etc.

There's a talent to negate penalties to disposition on the paladin. So you can still roleplay as you wish without taking penalties, and still might gain bonuses from any points in the disposition they like. It's just not extremely optimized. A talent is pretty rare to use on something like that. Then again, paladins are pretty strong, so it won't bother them much having one less talent. Getting huge defenses from the disposition is a power stronger than a talent anyways. If you intend to tank, then your resolve should be pretty high, near 15-16 to 18. Your con may be sufficient at 10, I recommend 12-13. Might is good enough at 14 or above. INT increases the aura of your modals and exhortation buffs, so can be pretty important as leader. PER can be left at 10 unless you plan to wield two handed weapons that stun on crit, but that one's a different build than the tank healer one. The interesting thing about a paladin is that its abilities don't rely on large dmg like a cipher needs for his focus gain. It doesn't even need dexterity since the abilities are fast casts. So the stat differences for a build doesn't affect the tactics as much. Kindwayfers have a healing ability that procs when you kill something. So it's even better as a tank healer, if you can get the last hit in.

The pet is part of your party so it counts as an ally and thus all beneficial group aoe will affect it as well. I haven't used the hearth orlan so I can't provide any more information or test results other than that.

What?? Clearly I still haven't played 2.0 much yet but this, if true... was quite needed TBH *sigh* lol! Don't worry, paralysis is still op if you have party focus dps. It just receives much more benefit from a dex cipher now. It is true that it is no longer all that superior to the wizard's fetid caress. What made it really powerful though was that it could be cast more than a few times per battle, if it missed. But that's actually due to the cipher, not the spell. Chanters and ciphers really don't need spell powers above level six and whatever the chanter's invocations were limited at. That's not how they were balanced. They need faster verses, faster focus gain, so that all their abilities improve. Casters get per encounter spells, boosting the use of their lower powered spells. Why don't ciphers get an option to gain more focus, thus allowing them to use more abilities just like the casters do? That way, you might be able to decrease the overall dps of a cipher in favor of something that allows it to focus on building focus better.

When I first used essential phantom, I saw that spell binded items were reproduced on it. So I thought... how many items can Aloth equip on himself with spell bind? And then I thought, what if my cipher used echo on the essential phantom? Suicide bomber from a spell, here we go. Duplicates or the monk/ninja kage bunshin trick, is pretty fun.