Alesia_BH

Monk!

Best of luck with Thaos, Semiticgod! I'm looking forward to the battle! Best, A.

No! I totally wasn't expecting that. (I feel terrible for suggesting Od Nua now. I had no idea it would be dangerous for Jaz Wit . I've never been past level 5.) Please tell us you'll be running another character. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been enjoying your posts. Best, A.

I know. Sorry! It's the same session. It's just taking me forever to write it up- partly because I've been playing and partly because I've been doing other things. I'll finish up soon. Best, A.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: The Wrath of Pallegina Remember that curio shop? Pallegina does not approve. If Pallegina lived in our world, she'd probably spend her evenings sipping wine, listening to opera, and ripping on people's Etsy shops. That's the impression I'm under, at least. Needing somewhere to direct Pallegina's rage -and with the construction workers clearing undeserving of a hate storm- we descended into the Endless Paths, seeking things to kill. If your caustic aunt had 15 levels of dungeon in her basement, maybe Christmas would be more tolerable. We started with some ogres. The first batches were killed using per encounter abilities, with bloodthirsty Pallegina in the lead. We took a moment to test whether we could stack two Marking weapons on one character. That was a no go, it seems. Eder's 98 here is 68 base + Inspiring Radiance + Coordinated Attacks (paladin) + Marking (Shame or Glory). St Garam's Spark, wielded by Cassia, over Eder's shoulder, isn't showing up. We didn't start casting until we saw druids. Alena was the hero in this fight, charming an ogre druid, pre-Blizzard, pre-Calling the World's Maw and then baking the fallen with Shinning Beacon. Go ahead, Pallegina: this one's all yours. We had some spells left over for the second ogre druid batch. Iconic Projection continues to be useful. Onto Zolla. We had a cunning and subtle plan worked out here, but Pallegina, in her unbridled rage, charged ahead. Happily, she realized her mistake soon enough to reach buffing range before getting walloped. Her adra beetle, dropped near the druid, is taking the abuse. By the time the ogres arrived, we were buffed and ready. Our beetle wall, which had been reinforced by Eder, had fallen. Here we see Alikae sneaking in a fireball as Arcadia calls some tentacles to replace the beetles. With a Pull of Eora in place to relieve pressure on the tentacles, the ogres are by now completely helpless. Bombs away. Dropping a Moonwell in our Pull was a smart move by the ogre clan, but it was too little too late. We insist, Pallegina. We're doing this for you. After clearing level 4, we were ready to move on to Twin Elms. It was 7:00am. I was still awake. And instead of going to sleep, I had breakfast. We didn't make it to Twin Elms until 8:30am. It will show. Best, A.

I'd like to see some Endless Paths, but please feel free to do whatever you think is best! Best, A.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: Blood Legacy It was 4:00am. I was already showing signs of sloppiness. The sensible thing to do would have been to go to sleep. Did I do the sensible thing? Of Course not: I did the opposite. I undertook a lengthy, trap filled quest, populated with dangerous enemies: Blood Legacy. Forgive me Arcadia for I have sinned. All things considered, this went pretty well. We did suffer a knockout, but only one- and it was a harmless one at that. Had I stopped playing after this quest -had I read the signs that were by now all too clear- all would have been fine. I didn't do that, sadly. This session still had hours to go. The opening temple battles went smoothly. In the interest of economy, we used few spells in these fights. The Skaen Temple offers one free set of camping gear, leaving the player with 3 rests. That's enough -even for a caster laden party like ours- but care is required. In the first fight we used out per encounter abilities only, supplemented by an item cast Arcane Dampener, intended to squelch Devotions for the Faithful. That was enough. With Alikae's Mechanic score too low to disarm, we had to carefully manage our position in the second encounter. It wasn't a problem, in the end. No spells were needed. On the bridge we let Pallegina summon Firebrand. Since Pallegina has neither Intense Flames nor Scion of Flame, her Firebrand criticals are less impressive this run. She can still pack a punch. Eventually, we reached a crew worthy of some spells. Happily, our grimoires were loaded. Eder, wood beetles; Pallegina, adra beetle; Cassia, Circle of Protection; Alena, Devotions for the Faithful; Arcadia, Arcane Veil->Eldritch Aim; Alikae, Arcane Veil->Eldritch Aim. Blindness + Fireball + Iconic Projection x 2, while the tanks hold position behind the beetles. With our enemies' numbers thinned, we switched to low level stuff and physical weapons. Chill Fog and ranged weapons ended it. Shortly thereafter, we took our first rest. In our next fight, blindness on the front liners and Chill Fog on the backline were all we needed. Chill Fogs are a great way to bottle up ranged ciphers By this point we were closing in on the free camping gear. And so we decided to let Eder and Pallegina's bars stay yellow, rather than wasting Potions of Infuse with Vital Essence. I was almost proud of our progress when I did this: I knocked-out Alikae by opening a trapped chest -a chest that I absolutely knew was trapped- but somehow, inexplicably forgot. It was a silly way to end our knockout-free streak. But it was, sadly, just the beginning. Ok. Onto Wymund. In all my other playthroughs, I brought Grieving Mother along for the Skaen Temple. I wasn't really sure what would happen if I didn't. As it turns out, completing this quest without a cipher is deeply unsatisfying- unless you're playing evil (or evilish), that is. I won't spoil it, for those who haven't tried it. Just know that I wasn't pleased. Frustrated, I instructed Alikae to attack Wymund- despite the fact that our positioning was all wrong. It's hard for me to reconstruct the battle from the screenshots. I see no discernible strategy. I was by now exhausted. My actions weren't making sense. We had a full spell book. And yet we seem to have cast very few spells, save a Withdraw for Alena. Our positioning was awful. Our timing was worse. And yet somehow we muddled through. Hooray for us, I guess. If I only I had celebrated by going to sleep. Best, A.

Were the other reports on the PotD battle? It's possible that Dominate is crowded out by higher level spells on PotD/scaled PotD. Another possibility is that he only uses it in certain circumstances and your behavior never triggered its use. Best, A.

On Blesca's Labor. I agree: it's great. It's a particularly good choice for a low level character attacking Thaos. My inclination would be to keep my rogue ranged, if I had the party to do so, but if you intend to let Frost engage Thaos in melee, it's a great option for her. In that case, I'd skip the lash and go with Kith slaying for the final 4 enchantment points

NW: Although I do distinctly recall party members aggressively pursuing each other for long periods of time (seemingly not Confused behavior) in the Hard battle, from this screenshot alone I suppose we can't rule out the possibility that Thaos reflected Gyrd somehow. I'll run another test as soon as I'm able.

I noticed him viewing once- in the "X user(s) are reading this topic" field below.

I just ran a test to confirm, using Ashoka's save. On Hard Thaos uses Dominate in addition to Confusion. The duration is long, too. It's more than an annoyance. (I can't comment on PotD, since I haven't faced him on PotD yet, but I'd be surprised to learn that he does it on Hard but not PotD.) Best, A.

Agreed. I'd like to try PoE II soon. I have two technical hurdles to clear, though: 1) downloading 25gb over a slow internet connection; 2) running PoE II on an aging MacBook Air. The latter seems dubious: my Air struggles with PoE I.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: Minor Encounters in and Around Defiance Bay You're getting sleepy....Actually, you're probably not. I'm not sleepy either: I just drank a pot of coffee. I was getting sleepy, past tense. I was getting sleepy around the time when Arcadia returned to Defiance Bay. You'll start to see our play slipping soon- soon but not yet. Our saving grace in the return to Defiance Bay was the ease of the encounters. Had we fought more challenging battles, this would have looked a lot worse. Ok. First, Anslog's Compass. This is a trivial fight, but I'm inclined to post on all the central story line stuff. Standard buffs, no scrolls. Pallegina breaks north to intercept a line breaker. Eder holds position in the south, while the casters get ready to fire it up. Notice how our casters are a little disorganized. Their positioning is inelegant. Two of the four are ready to cast, and yet they're not casting. Arcadia is auto-attacking some unimportant bloke. That's a sign: I was getting tired and sloppy by this point. This battle is easy enough that it didn't matter, though. In fact, our beetles and Iconic Projections alone ended it before we got to do anything interesting. I hate fighting forge knights- I really do. They spam AoE spells and their knockbacks screw up your positioning: it's hard to keep everyone happy and safe. They rarely make much progress, but they are annoying. We did a reasonably good job in these fights, I guess, but I did make a key mistake just as I thought I had them figured out. I'll do better next time. The opening battle started with our tanks getting knocked around and our casters, taking some AoE damage on account of getting too close. Everyone except Arcadia is injured here, albeit slightly, with the exception of Eder. A plan is emerging for future fights, however: 1) send in the tanks, under Bulwark; 2) wait until the battle field settles down before bringing the squishies into play; 3) have the squishies prioritize disablers, and then get to work with long range, party friendly stuff. it makes sense. We hadn't quite figured that out yet, though, but this point. The casters are way to close here, using stuff like Concelhault's Corrosive Siphon. Fortunately, the forge knights didn't make us pay. By battle 2 we had it right. Tanks first->Curse of Blackened Sight->ranged damage spells. Cassia got nicked by a lightning bolt, but aside from that everyone was fine. We used Iconic Projections and Minoletta's here, due to range. Onto the final battle. We knew what to do by this point. We just didn't do it. Everything started our fine. This makes sense: Curse of Blackened Sight from the buffed wizards, Iconic Projections from the distant priests. But everything is about to go downhill.The priests are using Shinning Beacon in this shot, which isn't a great idea, since the range is so short. And even if we wanted to use Shinning Beacons, we surely should have pulled the priests back ASAP after release. Instead the priest hung out, watching their handy work and casting long range stuff at short range. I'm getting sleepy. And we paid the price. That's way more yellow and red than we've seen for a long, long time. Sorry, everyone! After that humbling event, I summoned enough concentration to get the assassin ambush right. Our execution is on point here. But soon, we'd suffer out first knockout since the Temple of Eothas at L3 (Eder, 1). That's coming up next. Best, A.

Great work, Enuhal! Congrats! The Thaos battle can be tricky with low level parties. That's one of the reasons why I like to limit side questing: it saves the drama for the end. I also agree that ranged parties fair better in that fight and most spells are of limited use if your level is low. I know you have a BG run active, and so another PoE game probably isn't in the cards (at least for now), but it would be great to see you run another team, if and when you're in the mood. Please do stay around, in any case! Best, A. Btw, can you post final character records for all of your team members? I'm interested in seeing their base defense/accuracy scores, just to calibrate my minimal needs for the final battle on PotD. Btw II, I'm glad to hear that your rogue faired well in the final fight. I suspected that rogues would be valuable there. As a matter fact, that was the logic behind running a rogue, Aotha, in my prior run. It's a shame that the White Forge battle prevented her from getting there.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: Through Death's Gate Something weird is happening with Caed Nua this run. We have, by now, built everything except the curio shop. Nonetheless, Pallegina keeps telling me that the castle must have "seen better times." Either Pallegina really like curios or something isn't right. While Pallegina isn't impressed, we can't keep the raiders away. Each and every quest, it seems, has been interrupted because some gang of thugs is scaling the walls or climbing up from the dungeons. Dear Steward, can't you just reseal Od Nua when I'm away? And wall-scalers: Read the news- when you get in, all that happens is that you get served a heaping plate of hot death. Go play Scrabble or something instead. And, yes: I mean you Raedric's undead army. Play Scrabble. Shortly after murdering Korgrak (who apparently just wanted to be our friend) we found ourselves falling back on Caed Nua in defense of the construction workers, slaving away on Pallegina's Curio Shop. It was skeletons. We killed them. I'll skip the pictures. To Cliaban Rilag. We tried a few different things this time. Most of them worked. And the ones that didn't work nearly did. We almost have Cliaban Rilag down, I think. To begin with, we tried to use a Rite of Youthful Spirits to prevent injury on the bridge leap. That didn't quite work. Alikae -whose base Athletics score is 0- still got hurt. Next time we'll try stacking a Caed Nua bonus, too. Anyhoo. Since Alikae can still cast with a sprained wrist, we decided to proceed. We thought we could at least make it to the Pwgra showdown on per encounter abilities. And we did. Eder and Pallegina suffered some cumulative health damage, making their bars yellow. We could have fixed that, but since we intended to rest soon anyways, we decided to just let it be. Time for the first druid battle, also know as the test run. We dropped our beetles, took our buffs (including Devotions for the Faithful) and then went to work. We noticed that Iconic Projections were kind of awesome here since they could be cast at a safe distance from the arthropod horror-show happening up front. Um, Pallegina: You've got some maggots on your shoes- just thought you'd like to know. Just one more druid left, the slacker. We dropped him quick with targeted spells. No injuries here (maggots don't do any harm if you haven't been hurt). Ok. Let's try that again. Beetles first. And while we're on the subject of beetles, I'd just like to say that I appreciate you, beetles. You have, like, the worst job ever. You spend most of your time in a figurine -all bottled up and minuscule- and when you're released, it's always to do something terrible. I imagine you're thinking. "Frack! I'm alive again. What is it this time? Oh. I get to be eaten alive by locusts and maggots. Great." Worst job ever- except, maybe, building a curio shop for Pallegina. Can you imagine working for Pallegina and in particular, building something stupid for Pallegina, which you know she'd take way too seriously. Does it beat being eaten by maggots? This time we went all in on the Iconic Projections. That was the right call. They worked beautifully, what with the need to maintain distance and the narrow corridor. Finishing off the laggard menpwgra and a remaining blight. No injuries here. Time for mushroom heaven. Hoping to disarm the traps pre-combat, we tossed Alikae, who wears Lilith's, a Rite of Walking Shadows. Stealth 6 wasn't enough, however. She ended up getting chased and tagged with confusion. Fortunately, she used very few spells against the pwgras, so she was able to bail herself out once Pallegina liberated her. Arcane Veil->Llengrath's->Maura's Writing Tentacles->Combusting Wounds. The priests pitched in with a couple Shinning Beacons. Not a scratch. Onto the spores. Eder with the Hermit Hat. Followed by Pallegina, in the Hand and Key. Back to Eder for the last (no screenshot). With Alika's mechanics score at 9, we had to fight little on L2. We did some of the side rooms, nonetheless- including the most disappointing encounter in all of PoE. I mean, am I the only one who still expects to find something cool here, what with the forge, and all? Ok! It's time for me to eat breakfast. I'll continue catch up coverage after that. Best, A.

I'm sure a poverty run is doable, Semiticgod. I also think it would be interesting to watch. I'm sure I'd learn a lot from it. (I can't picture myself trying one anytime soon.) Best, A.

Interesting. I just mentioned his leg injury and he freaked out. It didn't seem like a confrontational remark. I'll try something else next time. Best, A.

Items can be helpful, too. We lured out the sporelings and then had Eder solo the western dank spore wearing the Hermit Hat. Pallegina then took down the swamp spore wearing The Hand and Key. We went back to Eder again for the southern most dank spore. We skipped the dank/swamp pair on the east side of the room: you can stealth buy them and they're more trouble than they're worth. Do you know what mech number you need to reveal those traps in particular outside of stealth? We tried to use Lilith's + Rite of Walking Shadows to disarm them under stealth pre combat. No go on that with a base stealth score of 1. It would be great to be able to see them and disarm them in combat. Best, A.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: Dyrford Sidequests I've gotten in the habit of doing all the Dyrford Sidequests. They're fun, satisfying and safe. We started with Farmer's Plight. Most of the Farmer's Plight battles weren't worthy of mention. I'll note, though, that the spider queen fight was slightly awkward, since our positioning allowed the spider queen to target us while we couldn't target her as easily. Fortunately, Consecrated Ground and Iconic Projections solved that problem. Following the spider queen battle, we took a detour to Caed Nua to fight off some Doemenels. Then it was back to the cave. Is it just me or does virtually everything in PoE seem to have an analog in either Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age? The Sanitarium, an asylum where you fight a battle involving your arch-nemesis, is Spellhold; the animancy hearing, a required, semi-pointless pow-wow with big-wigs is Landsmeet- you get the idea: everything is something to me. Korgrak is Madulf's short-tempered cousin. We sent in the tanks and then took some buffs. We followed with Curse of Blackened Sight and Interdiction. Combusting Wounds + Concelhault's Corrosive Siphon + Iconic Projection did most of the work. I've really come to appreciate Iconic Projection in this run. It's just an annoyance when enemies use it. In the players hands, it can be highly effective. The best thing about it is the unlimited range. It casts fast, too. A pair of lightly armored priests can pump out a whole lot of them super-quick. Victory. We did Nest Egg next. And as an FYI, it's good to kill these people. They look scary, but they're pushovers, on the level with The Parable of Wael crew. Most of the party fights are pretty easy in PoE. That's one significant difference between PoE and BG. In BG, the party fights are toughies. In PoE, they're usually just there for flavor. We have L4 priests spells now. That means Devotions for the Faithful is part of our buffing routine. It also means we can melt things with double Shining Beacons. Arcadia finished in melee while Alikae made things burn. Through Death's Gate is next, followed by Blood Legacy. Best, A.

Arcadia, Moon-Godlike Wizard: Od Nua Level 2 After completing the Ondra'a Gift quests, we decided to reward ourselves with a xaurip hunt. Why, you ask? Why not: It's always a good time to kill xaurips. Always. This holiday season, when the whole extended fam is gathered together, remember this: if the conversation turns to Brexit or American politics -or whatever awful is happening in your country- just unleash some xaurips. Everyone will thank you for it. We fought most of these battles using per-encounter abilities only. That was a questionable call. Our slow progress meant that our tanks were exposed to repeated wurm blasts, and that left us chugging Potions of Infuse with Vital Essence (3 IIRC, we drink when we reach yellow). Camping gear is cheaper and more plentiful than booze. So, yeah. Here we see Pallegina up all night, indulging her drinking problem. But completing the level without resting was more satisfying. Choke points and spacing kept the party safe. By the time we got to that, like, McDonald's playground where the priests hangout (never a good place to be...) we were ready to cast. Free fire zone here. We dropped our beetles first, and then positioned Eder and Pallegina behind the beetles. They just chilled, waiting for line breakers. Buffing as our foes approach. Right side first. And to the left. Melee finish, under a refreshed Inspiring Radiance Yay! Best, A.

Wow! That was a crazy fun read. I'm glad everyone survived. (Everyone except the spores, that is) Best, A. Btw, there are two spore types in that battle: dank spores and swamp spores. The neon-y ones are dank spores: they confuse. They aren't terribly dangerous. The strawberry-shortcake looking ones dominate. They're wicked. Their accuracy is in the 90s! Btw II, those traps are vicious- until you disarm them and get them in your inventory that is- then they magically become useless. I'm unfond of that asymmetry .

Interesting. I can't decide whether that would be cool or annoying. I guess I'd have to try it to know. (I will acknowledge that PoE quest peeps are a little too obvious for my tastes)

We didn't not look for him we just weren't super pro-active. I had assumed we'd run into him. Also, I had read that finding the killer has no effect on Odda, the mother, and so it wasn't a high priority. Arcadia's run is still active, of course. We'll swing by Ondra's the next time we're in DB. Best, A.

Yikes! As soon as you mentioned Pallegina's knock out to a trap I thought about the spore area. I hope everyone made it out ok! (And, btw, I noticed the druid's susceptibility to spell wastage via summons, too. I was never comfortable doing that in BG but since I'm still learning PoE I'm letting myself do it here- especially in that encounter!)