Ymarsakar

Delf has it. It makes the chanters more effective at higher levels, so that they can actually use their higher level spell invocs. It also makes the chant rotation slightly more flexible, without taking away the "longer fight it is, stronger chanters get" vs all the other heavy micro classes or even martial classes with /encounter limits.

That's what they said about HFCS being the same as sugar too. But I get ahead of myself. Back when people needed television to tell them what to think, that is what they would have said if they could think for themselves without the idiot tube. Now a days, of course, they have internet videos for similar purposes, on top of social media. Remember seeing all those Facebook propaganda videos and posts? It's like they think they came up with it all on their own.

Correct, fantasy settings aren't all that accurate due to their own internal constraints. Feudal lords and owners of a lot of property often had second homes and houses, often in the same location as their primary defensive fortress or food production or tax production. A keep is designed to funnel invaders into a kill zone, and then kill them. The lives of a lot of primitives tended to live and work elsewhere. The problem with Caed Nua is that the keep isn't designed with its kill traps inwards, towards the Endless Paths, even though the Steward knows that's where the danger is... Bad design work. Brighthollow would be a land owner's secondary or tertiary housing. Made to be comfortable and easier to heat, than stone. Might be cooler as well depending on seasons. And it lets light in, which can be good for health. Plus there's fountains and maybe fish later on, as the Japanese do their gardens, so aesthetically it might feel better as well.

I had a bigger problem with the narration dialogue lines for resolve and might, still thinking of them as charisma and strength... old DD habits I guess for them to break. As for my logic behind resolve, I think of it as looking straight at a weapon coming at them, or an arrow. If they are afraid or they panic, their body doesn't react in time or freezes. Without willpower, a lot of attacks or defenses can be bungled in physical life. Hunting. Evading blows using dexterity skills, rather than gross motor running. People who are overcome by fear and panic can still do the running, but not the more complicated stuff. I don't use stats to role play. That's never been something I've used, actually. Although I know table top games and other stuff, uses them all the time.

Flaming arbalest, prone procs on crit. Battlemage paladin with might and int? The builds do tend to be limited, although not for player paladins due to the wayfarers and what not choices. The main crit path might be more interesting if you roleplay as a priest for a god, maybe any god. It's not designed that way, of course, because the player's class cannot be assumed to be one or the other, by the narrative designers. So they sprinkle some reactivity dialogue lines, but I still think those resources would have been better spent on Stronghold content and more in depth companion stuff. Replayability for me is enjoying the content I like, over again. Not doing semi random permutations just to get dialogue lines I could have gotten on the first playthrough, but which ultimately doesn't change the plot or the end results of the game in a significantly different line. In a table top game, you replay the campaign with a different class, and the GM and your party has to adopt to that, and maybe it wins or maybe it fails hard on its face. But it's something different at least. CRPGs, don't have that fail safe mechanism in the GM. Pillars has real time pause combat though, that's quite enough to sustain replayability, but not the more role playish elements.

About that tipping point, that's what they said about peak oil in the 21st century, then fracking came along and they are now trying to kill it off by lowering oil prices so the fracking companies lose investors. Human made global warming is an economic con and game. Violence there would normally be used to intimidate scientists into promoting the mass deception, diverting funds to global warming and green credits, so that people can make bank on them. Because it is a con, violence is incredibly effective, because if the earth isn't dying due to carbon dioxide... all someone has to do is to use violence to Make it Happen. Then they can claim that they need power and gold to "solve the problem". The problem that they themselves created. For example, using jets and spraying things into the upper atmosphere can have deleterious effects on the planet's natural water cycle and weather patterns. The violence would be used to get people to shut up about the criticism of so many global warming cultists using planes to fly around the world talking about man made global warming.

Oh my sweet summer child... Not saying that violence is a good solution but just that it is a solution. I do not consider violence, in and of itself, as evil. It is just another tool in the tool box. A really blunt instrument but still just a tool. What problem does violence not solve? From global hunger and over-population to global warming, from shoplifting to insurrection, they can all be solved through the application of violence. Only violence can bring about peace during a war, while having a ceasefire almost always results in further conflict or at least extending the conflict. TFT? H2H? Self Defense training? That tool in the tool box thing sounds familiar. Romanul Half the Dyrwood is racist, and thus evil, by that kind of judgment. They are also classist, ultra nationalistic, and backwards. Referring to killing animancers because of what they do or who they are. That's how mobs are or how passion rules reason.

Wasn't Sensuki one of the beta testers for POE, filing endless lists of bugs plus youtube videos, and pushed for the IE Mod thing? People like that tend to be outspoken. Combination of passion with perfectionism. But even if that was a different person I'm recalling, the people who tend to focus hard on these rpgs tend to form their own sub cultures. Even though the RPG culture itself is a sub culture, it just sorts of goes down further once you get into card games vs board games vs war games vs the ones that use dice vs the ones that don't vs the fantasy x sci fi settings. As for the interview, that's good hearing the design perspective. It allows me to make more informed and better criticisms of their work, if I know what their intent was. "From Torment and BG II both came a sense that the degree to which a story is personal is a strong influence on the impact of the narrative. I don't think our story ended up being as strong in that regard, but it was a guiding principle, and it's the reason we elected to develop a past life backstory rather than having the player be a complete blank slate." Knowing what I know now, my recommendation would probably be that a single narrative style should have been adopted for each of the different personalities, like stoic or passionate, which would then determine the 4 or 6 or whatever number of backstory combinations there was for the main crit path. Instead of giving 4 choices to the player. Why is the player choosing which of his memories are true? That doesn't even make sense and actually breaks the 4th wall, at times. Worst time to do that at. That's why it isn't as strong. Because there's no beginning and end. It's just some random choices you pick up in the middle, due to whatever reasons, and nobody can figure out which is which by the end. There's no consistent vision from beginning to end, concerning player choices and reactions. The plot was consistent, of course, but the way it linked to the player was jumbled around too much. The dispositions were a good touch, but that was all, a touch not a slam dunk or knockout. For example, if the player has 3-5 deceptive ranks in personality, then the soul personality that manifests in the visions would be that of a deceiver, one who wishes to deceive the world about x, y, or z. And that does come up in the central plot point once or twice. But it is consistent from beginning to end, narrative wise, and it is consistently poking the player with reliable gameplay details over time. One of the problems of offering too many (randomish) choices to the player, is that the player will often times choose mutually exclusive things when testing role playing. And that produces cognitive dissonance, if people think about it for a few seconds. There's no way the plot can address the player's own internal doubts and questions either, it's not a reactive intelligence system. That happened with people clicking on Backer npcs too. A lot of freedom, but how do you handle edge cases where players use the freedom to make their experience less fun? "You have to plan your project to make the best of the resources you have. That sounds obvious, but some people really struggle with that when they get excited about a particular idea or feature." People do tend to get spoiled with the potential of technology these days. Which is why when I look at what people did with visual novels, just a basic script engine running text and some 2d backgrounds and sprites, I often recall that that was the kind of barrier Torment was breaking through as well. There was just no industry to support that kind of thing, because it wasn't even classified as a genre much less a sub genre of another genre. Not in the West at least, and not since the days of text adventure games and or MUDDs. "Often you'll look to recent similar games to see how they solved your problems, but in our case, few of those games existed." The Banner Saga was out for some time before, if I recall. The narration was strong there because the initial conditions were limited, but all the gameplay mechanics and stories linked together. In Pillars, I notice a lot of game systems that Stand Alone. Stronghold not connected to the main plot or side quests, main plot not connected to Dispositions, dispositions not connected to Main Crit path background visions, player background visions not connected to player powers, tactical combat, classes, stronghold, etc. They all had their own unique flavors and gameplay bonuses for the user, but they weren't connected in a strong link. That isn't the responsibility of the content creators or the writers, that's more of a very high level design decision. The writing and story craft/lore craft in Pillars is strong, but that alone isn't enough to connect the gameplay details together. And without that, the player's reaction and emotional feedback from the plot and events, is lessened as a result. That may be why some reviewers said this story was serviceable, but not extraordinary. The lore is quite well done, it is merely the way it is transmitted to a player that is playing a game. (Fenster mentioned Maerwald once before) They are not reading a book. There are ways to turn reading a book into an interactive game, of course, but that's not where Pillars went. "We weren't going to build the vision environments (although we'd have loved to if we could have)" Could have reused the stronghold and Endless Paths for some of that, then re used some of the art work, conceptual stuff, and modified it for an adventure text box. Of course, it's better if the player didn't get another load screen at that moment. But it's one way to tie the story around and link it to all of its parts, as it reduces the amount of work to make it visceral. The Engwithans at Caed Nua, was in the same era as when T started his own endless path. They might have had shrines there as well, with peculiar themes to them. Instead of looking at the Stronghold as a separate area, much could have been done if people used the Stronghold as an excuse to tie it in with the main crit plot as well. I mean, how many levels do you have in the Endless Paths to work with here? "Ideally you want to develop that in your side quests, and we did that to a degree, but I don't think we covered enough of it, or made a big enough deal about religion and the pantheon in the first two acts." That's where the PC starting off as a priest of X, would have helped out. Of course, you can't include that in the crit path because you can't assume the PC is class A. He may not be Class A. So the link is broken before it even begins. But there's always dispositions... Link gameplay elements together. And try not to have so much reactivity like all those dispositions, which probably ends up being bigger word count than Durance uncensored. But that was probably Josh's part of systems design. Between disposition A through E, helping me understand the world, and better companions with more "stuff" to do with them, the latter part will always pull me into the plot and world harder than Disposition A through E as they are currently used in game. "It was considered, too, that in BGII, the strongholds didn't have much of a connection to the narrative beyond the quest to acquire them, so I think that was chosen more as the model." That's because in BG2, there were many many strongholds, and you couldn't have all of them without modding and editing files. How do you connect 5 strongholds to the main crit path when the player only uses 1 of them, some of the time? That's like having 5 dispositions that don't affect the critical path of the game's plot... because you can't just have a Game Over due to somebody's dispositions, there's too many (combinations) of them. It is not necessarily the stronghold that needed connections, but the gameplay around it. Something more could have been done with the Steward, adding dialogue options to the UI instead of the stronghold mechanics being in the UI only. This would allow direct dialogue with the steward, which could be rolled into content like the 3.0 stronghold quests. Creating its own miniature narrative. Not using the NPCs that the player already knows about, or rather relegating the steward to a stronghold mechanic and nothing more, disconnects the gameplay from the rest of the world and story narrative. Adding more stuff isn't always better than just improving the quality of what's already there. Takes less time and resources for the latter. "Later on in development, we got kind of a hyperlinked tooltip system that explained certain highlighted words when you'd mouse over them. This was used to explain systems primarily, but if I'd have known about the system early on, I think I could've made a lot of the early dialogue cleaner by offloading those explanations into some database the player has to opt into. Wouldn't have solved everything, but wouldn't have hurt." Check out that visual novel Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning or Steins;Gate encyclopedias. Similar problems and solutions. "I haven't seen what Torment: Numenera is doing, but hopefully they've learned from our mistakes, and I'm interested to see what they've come up with." If I have it right, their quest designers have a pool of backer npcs with specific background, and they will sometimes pick one of the NPCs to tie it into one of their quests. So instead of that npc on the road you kill in Pillars area 2xb, that then ends up dying or getting sent to jail and they then escape, which was their entire content, now there's probably some kind of content onion, where an NPC is involved in more than 2-3 quests in total for that area. But that was often the case with Torment to begin with. There were a lot of NPCs in Pillars, who it would have been interesting to soul read their backgrounds as part of the dialogue, it would have made the Watcher thing more relevant to gameplay since dialogue and combat is like more than 75% of the game there. The backer npc text was very interesting, and I wanted to read more. But there wasn't more. There was just like dozens and dozens of them, all isolated, without context, beginning, middle or end. It was just there. Read a few paragraphs, like a trip to starbucks, go back to what you were really doing. Of course it distracted people and broke up their gameflow. What else could it do? Placing all of the backer NPCs at the STRONGHOLD or the second city would have made more sense. On another note, looking at Carrie's writing and short stories, she is very good at writing short, succinct, pieces that capture strong or vivid images and concepts. Working on GM must have been very problematic, since Chris Avellone is... the opposite, for a similar end result. No wonder, thus, that Durance and GM felt like very different story companions, even though they should all have come from the same source material. The writing felt different to me, not just the content. Asking Durance about all the lore stuff, was great for me, but wasn't in it for GM, for example. "They achieved their purpose at the time, which was to drum up enthusiasm among the backers, but some of the bigger goals probably cost quite a lot more to develop than they brought in - the second city, the megadungeon, and the expansion come to mind. Smaller scope would've afforded us more polish time." Certainly, but there could have been ways to deal with it in a creative sense. Having the second city be Creitum in the past, for example. That would allow a direct development and link to gameplay, questing, combat, and the player's backstory. Caed Nua, also a timeslip back into the past. And all the old excuses that there's no VO or visual art resources for it, are easily shattered by that trace drawing for the adventure box narratives. Which weren't utilized as much as they could have. Ironically, the best parts of the game were the most experimental tech, that people didn't touch much of. There wasn't much of it to consume. " I don't want to tip my hand, so pardon the vagueness. One would be having fewer, but far deeper and more interconnected companions" I agree. Class changing them would also be neat if it could fit within the lore, as it allows people to fill in the party with whatever, without losing flexibility. Less important given Pillar's already good and hybrid like class system, however. More important for reading stories, though since it connects the companion npcs directly to the game fabric, the game lore, and the game mechanics. Which in turn, connects them to the player experience. Even having extra companions sitting back at the stronghold can become a fun mechanic, if you could play from their perspective and do combat or quests, with an instant transition, leaving your main character elsewhere. "But better. More memorable. More like a real group of people. Less likely to be collecting dust in your stronghold." Also less but more impactful dispositions. It's like Josh missed out on all the Fallout new vegas faction reputation points. But there's no factions. And dispositions aren't connected to the backstory, the soul, the plot, the combat (other than paladins), or the gods. Looking at the number of combinations and work put into it, the text lines themselves, that's a lot of work for little inter connectivity. Going back to the subject of Backer NPCs, the reason Obsidian may have been caught off guard was because their backer beta testers saw the content there, but it wasn't clear that these were backer npcs. It was also not explicitly stated that this was ALL the content, always, same style, for the backer npcs, that they would have zero quests, zero connection with plot or companions. Zero. At the time, the testers might have just been withholding judgment, because there were more interesting things to test and talk about. But if the designers had asked them straight out, "how do you think this would work if the npcs were everywhere, but they had no content and were just a paragraph of text, just like you saw in backer beta 333"? You all might have gotten some interesting responses, which would have lead to a more easy way to adapt to the gamefeedback from the public. If you do not ask the right questions, you will not get the right answers, even if most of the answers are wrong to begin with. This got long enough that I reread it and edited a few times. Editing, which is slightly less work than rewriting. (There is a VN called Rewrite, however)

It would make more sense if the stronghold battles were like mini boss fights, for when you entered a new path under Caed Nua. That way when you go up to the top to rest, somebody gives you a little greeting. May be even more hilarious than that first bear cave after Cilant. That way, when you're doing the Endless Paths, it's just one more fight outside. They also probably should have put all the internal regions into the same map area, and used teleportation to get around. Every one of those text adventure boxes, teleports you across the same map. They could have done the same thing with the keep and the brighthall. Would have made navigating it more fun and less tedious. I preferred a circular design, with the throne room and forum in the middle. All the merchants should have been outside as well, with their own little stalls and what not, renting space. It's just a place that was designed without consideration of how players actually play the game. Or how long load times are in POE. The engine difficulty of making areas that changed over time, was probably difficult. But it had far less effect on gameplay than the other things they could have done with that stronghold area. And this without even going into the problem of "no content" in 1.0

I don't use food or drugs on the first playthrough. I just collected them. Enchantments, I also tended not to do. Which decreased my dps since I recall I only used lash effects if the unique already had them. Thus many weapons I was testing didn't have lash effects on, cutting down the melee dps. These days, I use the food for a few attribute buffs, since they are cheap. And I put lashes on weapons I use. It's easier because I know where to buy some missing crafting ingredients as well. And if none of that works, I just console in the stuff. It's not a hassle I want to deal with, vs playing the actual game. By now, I know pretty much what level of difficulty needs certain times. I try to make it as challenging as possible, within the six party framework. But I also like playing games solo, to really enjoy the class tactics. The restriction about food in combat is new. That way you don't need to take up a quick slot with them, just use inventory slots. Easier to look at. For people like me who don't like to spend resources, but tends to hoard/collect them and then never uses them, it's easier to drop the investment cost by consoling resources and money in. That way I usually can try things out and learn how the system works. Otherwise, I just never use them. Since I never used the buffs at the start of the game, I didn't adjust my playstyle to them later on at harder fights either. So I was planning on saving stuff for later, but usually that never works for me, because games need me to learn how to use them early on, certain buffs and tricks. Did you do that with vancian casters like priests/druids/wizards in the past? Use alacrity and pots most of the them before the boss fights.

Okay, I checked, and the tooltip doesn't show up for fighters with 10 int, like Eder. But when modified, the tooltip then shows up for the duration mods. I tested Eder as level 5 fighter, with single handed weapons and rapier with Accuracy 3 enchant on it, and the accuracy bonuses applies to knockdown ability. Makes it easier to make sure knockdown succeeds, on top of disciplined barrage.

There's a modding sub forum under technical, might want to go there first.

Druid's dps is in the lightning spells, aoe spells, and shapeshift. His weapon is more... more of support thing for his other activities. Attack speed makes you cast multiple spells faster, for example. Shields help keep you uninterrupted, use a small shield for no accuracy malus to your spells. The only people I might use sabres with would be rogue/cipher/ maybe melee ranger build. A sabre on fighter/chanter is only a stop gap, it's really a way to bypass higher DR in early game. Every extra max damage on the roll, is an extra damage that could pass through enemy DR. Sabres on monks... maybe, if an enemy is immune to crash and I have dual sabres to proc torment's, but it would prevent me from using fist/shield combo. ALthough recently I don't really need the shield at middle game. Not with a chanter/fighter plus a priest/druid. As for stats on druid, hiravias has a good spread. I like more balanced spreads now. A little bit of min maxing on INT, sure, but the other stats don't need too much min maxing for a druid. 13-14 might, 12 con, 12-13 dex, 14 per, 15-16 INT, 11 resolve can be pretty good. I just guesstimate the numbers, they aren't exact. Of course if you get good at it, you might drop con to 9 or 8, pump it into might, get a higher resolve to not get interrupted, and more dex for shapeshifting and fast spellcasting. Personally, I would go with rogue for sabres. Get escape/backstab/coordinated positioning, and it can really help out with certain fights. I've always wanted an assassin in certain fights, and the cipher doesn't easily fulfill that role. The monk and rogue do.

Andrea is right, that is the one. Although it is 2/rest so slightly limited, but has good damage. So flexible. I was testing it out a bit on a level 14 Eder, to see if the damage and limited cone was worth it. Btw, fighters in my game doesn't benefit from INT for their abilities. Is that a bug? I was waiting for someone to mention it in one of their builds, actually.

I just gave myself gold in game, to test the stronghold. Less stress that way. ALthough I always liked to manual resolve, more tactical action to test stuff out on. I think when Raedric 2.0 came out, I put it on manual and the Kor and some other defenders with high security, easily handled that, with around 30-35 total security. Not sure how they calculate it. The steward really should have had more detailed instructions, even if it kind of broke the 4th wall. If Obsidian refuses to break the 4th wall, then come up with RP elements that can be RPed with an RP explanation from the game system mechanic.

Find terrain bottlenecks, like doorways or boulders or trees, and keep the enemies contained on one front. Problem is casters in the back, but if you have a lot of melee, some monk/barbarian/rogue can kill those guys pretty fast. The other method is to just split pull all enemies away until the casters in the back give up and start turning back. Then you just make sure you only have to take on a few enemies at a time. Kana with movement speed and rime traps, can be very useful for that, or a rogue with movement buff and escape.

You do it by running two games in parallel with identical builds, one in Trial of Iron and one without, and rehearsing each battle in the "normal" version until you find a bombproof strategy, then you execute it in the "real" game. You have to be good at the game, of course, but basically you just need patience. I've played a bit of a way into the game solo, and those hard fights are totally beatable with some experimentation and careful use of consumables; I've no doubt that this achievement is totally doable. It's so not my thing though. I'll give it a week before someone beats it, tops. That's basically what H2H training does, simulate something very close, then act it out in death and life.

I split pulled some marksman dwarf patroller in Craghold when my party was level 5, and got some exceptional chainmail. Don't be afraid of those mercs. Just pretend the land belongs to Caed Nua, because soon it will be.

I think if they made ciphers gain focus by a time tick, like the chanter verses, as well as take a partial focus increase from any damage they take like monks, it might make the ciphers much more flexible in terms of their build. 33% from time ticks, 33% from damage dealt, 33% from damage taken. I also think they should stop increasing the spell levels of a cipher, because they really don't need the same spell power levels of a priest or druid.

I usually play under level against enemies, so the problem with cipher is that when it can't reliably hit enemies, it doesn't get focus. That's where the retaliation build comes up, then it plays more like a monk. But it's still limited by the focus, and doesn't allow for creative tactics. By the time amplified wave is available, it's not when it would make the most difference. The Cipher's self buffs now, they are pretty fun like Wild Leech and psycho shield. But their durations are unpredictable, unlike priest buffs. Again, a lot of their abilities rely on reliably hitting the enemy. And when I'm an under level party against higher level enemies with higher defenses, and without a priest to buff, the cipher falls behind in effectiveness and also due to the playstyle of the class. I much prefer Josh Sawyer's chanter and monk hybrid classes. Monk is like alpha/front built, due to different sources of damage incoming. Chanter is more a compromise, middle of the road, but you can still get good stuff out of it by just running around and kiting.

If there were stilettos with 20% attack speed, it would help out a cipher or rogue. Upping the DR bypass would help as well. As for the game, the bug thread said that you had to have 3 wins more than your losses. So for people who keep losing, it's not merely 3 consecutive wins.

2 cipher spells apply focus, apart from retaliation effects and spark soul priest buff. That would be amplified thrust and detonate's aoe damage if you kill the target, and from the two, amplified thrust is much more reliable.

It's some kind of AI routine that prioritizes people who attack/cast/debuff a target. It state changes them. It also happens for people who do flank attacks, that have lower endurance for some reason or lower deflection. Like for example, my rogue with shield doesn't usually attract aggro I noticed, even when flanking an enemy. But my barbarian does when flanking with my monk, against lurkers and trolls. And it usually happens right as the barbarian's endurance goes lower than the monk, or maybe it was higher, but lower deflection. But when my rogue does the hobbling special attack, then the ogres turn around on the rogue, because of the debuff and or damage they were taking. So the aoe attack from the chanter is not only an aoe ability, but it also procs a debuff. To Zera: To replace a rogue, a ranger is usually the ideal candidate, especially for people who like a pet dps/tank and who like shooting from range. A druid with swift modal and dual sabres, flanking with the pet, can be pretty interesting for those that don't want just range. The other options are barbarian/monk/cipher. Monk is closer to the rogue playstyle, shutting down single enemies that you prioritize. The one thing I noticed that tends to make enemies disengage is aoe debuffs, aoe damage, and just sheer damage. It might also apply to healing, although that was hard to test for.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85131-ie-mod-has-been-updated-with-custom-npc-stat-abilities/ A relink to the custom npc mod updates.

http://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity/mods/1/?tab=2&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fpillarsofeternity%2Fajax%2Fmodfiles%2F%3Fid%3D1&pUp=1 It's been updated as of yesterday March 8, it seems. You need the launcher file for the old patch version and replace the IE mod file with the new one you download.