FlintlockJazz

I don't know, to me it always looked like she was taking a nap, and her eyes were closed. Soooooo.... what you guys are saying is that Maia is taking advantage of Xoti's unconcious state to teabag her?

Pointy hats for wizards are impractical and not historically accurate. Well actually pointy hats were worn, usually in more eastern or central Europe but they were worn, good for keeping the rain off, and there is one major thing that needs to be considered: pointy hats are cool!

As others have said, the themes are all damn good, the setting is damn good, gunpowder good, not too grim not too light, about the only thing I feel is missing is fencing schools and their rivalries.

Didn't realise you could get the White March soundtrack separately for $9! Added it now, and while I was there I had to get the DLC season pass didn't I... well played, well played...

I voted ranged weapon but my actual choice would be between pistol or cutlass. A blade made out of obsidian and decorated with shark's teeth and shells and the like for a cutlass while for a pistol the wheellock firing mechanism made out of obsidian.

My opinion? I think its all intended as a distraction from something else that is happening, but that is just my humble opinion.

Don't give them ideas! There are some people who will take that as a challenge...

Well sex may equal good sex. Just sayin'. It may equal bad sex too. Horrible, eye-wrenching badness. I do need to quantify Bad Sex as separate from Wrong Sex however, as the latter can still be Good Sex if you do it right. I'm, erm, gonna get my coat now...

It looks like Eder is holding Maia by the scruff of the neck there! Its always Eder it seems...I personally can't unsee it as Eder holding Maia's ponytail. Nobody can see the one lying on the bench looking up Maia's skirt? Great positioning, really. I can see it now, and now its all I can see! Before, it looked like she was looking at Serafen, now I can't see how she can be looking at anything else except up the skirt!

Yes, same character as the first game and they have talked about how the Watcher stuff is gonna work in the new game (more emphasis on the ethereal world is the impression I got). Huh, only thing though is that at the end, the awakened stuff goes away.... buuuuttt, it doesn't say anything about the Watchers powers going away, Somehow I thought being awakened was a requirement for being a Watcher. Sounds like being a Cipher (or at least having one in the party) would be an asset. It's more you find a resolution to your past life's issues rather than put it to sleep again. The sleep it mentions is that you are able to actually sleep once more without the nightmares of your past life disturbing it. It implies it may only be a temporary thing though, "but for now" you get some peace. The past life is still awake, it just isn't angsting over its question any more. Kind of, but not really. I think Ciphers requiring a target to manipulate and feed off of to fuel their abilities is quite different from any D&D psychic class from what I remember of them. There's obviously soulknife and psion elements to them, but it seems different enough to be it's own thing. But they really do need to do more to explain what a watcher is, all I got from it is you could see your past lives and read others' souls, which is close enough to what Ciphers did for confusion. Yeah, from what I have read and seen, they have said that they plan on defining the differences between Ciphers and Watchers better, that it was something they had issues with understanding themselves in PoE. They have said that the main difference is that Ciphers can interact with "housed" souls (those in bodies or objects) while Watchers can see "unhoused" souls (Lost Souls and others that are on their way to new lives) and the etherial plane. Watchers can also see Past Lives whereas Ciphers apparently are not supposed to be able to do that (that whole thing about soul lineage in the Crucible Knights was a boo boo apparently, or at least should not have been done by Ciphers). EDIT: Here's the post from MaxQuest that filled me in on this: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/91913-alchemist-class/?p=1895545

one of the more stranger posts I have read It's because, when I take interest on a game, I take interest in a particular feature of it. just that Oh, we know what 'feature' you taken an interest in! Though do they count as one or two features?

ALL parties involve booze. It's like the law or something?

It looks like Eder is holding Maia by the scruff of the neck there! Its always Eder it seems...

Yes, same character as the first game and they have talked about how the Watcher stuff is gonna work in the new game (more emphasis on the ethereal world is the impression I got).

For my Cipher I have already decided that I am going to be taking the three PoE1 companions (Eder, Aloth, and Pallegina) along with Xoti (because I always wanted characters with lanterns in a dungeon, its a fetish of mine) for my current Cipher playthrough. Playthroughs after that may branch out to the newer companions but until I get a feel for them I'mma gonna stick with ma bros from the first to maintain a sense of progression. The Orlan Barbarian/Cipher is catching my eye however, someone may get dropped for his two-pistol awesomeness, but that depends on how his application to join my party goes, his CV looks good at the moment though. Tekehu can die screaming falling into the pit to feed the drake as a sacrifice to the Dwarf Companion gods. How about you? Stick with the ones you already know at least for the first playthrough or has some of the new characters caught your eye?

This is all you need to know. Honestly, I think the main problems I have with him is the lack of information we have on him, the first time I saw him was in the Valentine pictures, and an immediate disliking to him I seem to have that stems from a feeling that he is just a 'special snowflake' character based on him being unique Godlike with pretty much nothing else to say about him other than he is a representative of one of the factions. They should have made him an Aumaua if he is supposed to be a representative, they should release more info about him before my mind fills in more unfavourable blanks about him, they should have made him a dwarf....

I have found that Fantasy has a restrictive status quo that prevents change: some people are unwilling to accept changes to what appears to be an already established paradigm and will complain and fight automatically against anything that changes the status quo. Magic has to work a certain way, you have to have certain classes and those classes must fulfill certain roles and not others. You must have X races and they must be this or that. You must have this stat and it must do that. Quite often it seems to be more restrictive than even historical fiction even. People like familiarity and abhor change. Shame, really, as it has limited growth in the genre for quite some time.

As long as Obsidian did the writing I would buy that, reapers might actually be done right in that case...

Because people don't want mental and physical prowess to be tied to the same stat due to the disconnect it causes with reality. I think it has been said in different ways for quite a few times already in this thread alone. Might indeed works as designed, but people don't like the design in the first place so that point is moot. When you say people, you mean some people. Some people may not like it, some people actually like the consistency of a damage stat being all in one. Might is intended to represent a combination of physical strength and chi power stuff. Some people think they should still be able to do tons of damage while playing a physically weak character, blagging it that they are a master rapierist or something, but in many if not most systems they have to accept that they need strength, and in this setting you have to tone yourself up if you want to channel more of that mystical energy. Cannae change the laws of physics! Or magic in this case. Personally. I think being able to take a perk a la Fallout style that alters the 'balance' between spiritual and physical power in the Might stat: without the perk the balance is equal between spirit and physical, causing the stat to remain the same regardless of whether it is physical blows or magic, while taking the perk allows you to choose between being more focused on spiritual or physical sides of it, giving a bonus to one and a penalty to the other. This would be easily abused though I think, wizards and fighters it would be a no-brainer and allow even greater heights min/maxing, so not sure on balance there. Another option would be to choose the 'source' of your Might stat when you create your character, with the main effect being mainly in dialogue when you take an option unlocked by MIght, changing the line "You grab them by the throat and lift them up" to "You pin them down with your magic, almost choking them with your power" or "You channel your energy through your limbs, enhancing your strength as you grab them...".

Early in development I remember that Intelligence was being considered the Damage stat instead, working on the concept that a more intelligent character would be able to pinpoint what particular weak spots their opponents were exposing the most and go for them. Might then came in as a combo physical and spiritual strength stat. Really? There's an instinctual understanding that when I'm 5 strong, I get -5 to hit and -4 to damage, but when I'm 18/76-90 strong I get +2 to hit and +4 to damage? Do you really believe that people feel more connected to their characters when their character has a "strength" attribute that can be an arbitrary number? At least system in Pillars was consistent - Might made things more powerful. All of them, universally. If you ask me, that's exactly the kind of streamlining attributes need, because as it stands, it's always "This attribute does this, this, this and this, except when that happens, that's when it starts doing this." You have to stretch it for it to make roleplaying sense, but you have to do that with pretty much all abstractions in RPGs. Don't act like an idiot, you're smarter than that and you know exactly what I meant. People have an instinctual understanding what strength is an what it means to have more or less of it. Fun fact: in GURPS Strength is used to calculate a person's Hit Points instead of their Health attribute. Health is used to determine their strain points instead. The Storyteller system by White Wolf uses Stamina instead of Constitution, and have a specific Manipulation stat separate from Charisma in the belief that someone can be likeable without being manipulative whereas other systems have them both in a Charisma stat because those with charisma obviously find it easier to manipulate people even if they choose not to do so. Other systems merge it into one Body stat because if you are quite strong in real life you also tend to be quite healthy as well.

I didn't like Iovara. Too pretentious. Always twisted your answers to suit her own political agenda. Other things too but haven't got to the end in a while to remember them (working on it with my current Cipher of Badassitude), but I just found her insufferably obnoxious. I just wish that there was an option to tell her that she's just a cheeky dickwaffle.

Perhaps you should go back to school so you can learn to use terms like "high probability" in a proper context. A wizard with 18 might and 18 perception does better damage than wizard with 12/12. I really don't appreciate your dishonest arguments. No one every was arguing this but you. So i dont why you keep saying this stuff. If you go back, this line of inquiry started due to an assertion about Aloth being less-optimal as DPS vs control wizard based on stats made against an argument that he was as good a DPS as anyone else in the party, which is where the 12/12 & 18/18 example comes from. Ultimately I'm not sure arguing a normal distribution really gets anyone anywhere. If you follow the system, the statistics tells us that a 12 perception 12 might wizard will deal less damage than the one with 18 in both on average. The formulas will provide a range and if the RNG is truly random that range will provide a normal distribution which, when compared, will have the normal distribution shifted higher on the 18 character when compared to the 12 one. This again assumes the RNG is indeed random. The problem is I think that while the argument made was statistical ('Aloth is just as good at DPS'), I think the argument on hand wasn't about statistics, but about whether the character was "good" or not. Or to put it another way, I think the problem lies in an argument about whether being less optimized for a specific role is a value judgement about that character in that role. If Aloth's DPS is the same as my rogue's DPS, then my rogue - like Aloth - isn't built in a way that maximizes the characters for a DPS role. That to me doesn't mean the character is bad (unless your goal was to build a high DPS rogue). Given the make-up of the party, the difficulty setting, etc., the character may actually be quite serviceable and fulfill a role within the party. So that Aloth is less-optimal in a role doesn't mean that he couldn't have utility in that role relative to the party. Further there's the question of whether the ability to create less viable builds is inherently a problem within the system. I'd argue that its a natural consequence of trying to build characters to not have dump stats. If the effort is to devalue min-maxing, then the value is going to be either towards jack-of-all-trades where the skills show limited variance or building a character towards a specific goal in mind and applying the stats in ways that will least penalize that role. This. I also find that people fixate on the stats that directly affect the role they are going for and neglect other parts thinking that they just want to specialise, not realising the problems that can cause for their role. Someone (I can't remember unfortunately it was some time ago) on these forums once said "You can't DPS if you're dead" and they are right: having maxed out stats for doing damage is great but if you spend most of the battle faceplanted then it is not doing anything. This was something that gave me a headache in the early days of release: people stated that armour was of no use to ranged DPS characters and others who stayed in the back because they would never get hit and the recovery just slowed down their attacks, then complained about the wraiths in Caed Nua teleporting past their meatshields and attacking the squishes behind... Not sure this is all that relevant to the discussion at hand, but I haven't spaffed on the forum for a while so... spaff!

Primary character decided!

What I really want to know is, can I finally build a ranger like this?

Ew, was never a fan of the dual-wielding Ranger stereotype. I always wanted to play the more Strider type of Ranger, one with a greatsword or suchlike, but no, because some Dark Elf ponce got popular with dual wielding suddenly all rangers had to be dualwielders. Fooking Drzzt, gut the pretentious little ****! Sorry, is my Drzzt hatred showing again?