Luckmann

I want to chime in here and say that despite any potential issues with PoE that keeps being brought up, build variety is not one of them. Almost all classes do very well as either melee or ranged, with light weapons or heavy weapons, and with extended weapons or not. Yes, the balance is a bit wonky (I'm looking at you, light weapons) but overall, "Can I do well with X type of weapon?" is a question that is not very relevant in PoE, because the answer is practically always yes. So yeah, a Cipher pikeman works pretty well.

Infiltrator of the Obsidian Order.

Hatchet and Large Shield for pure tank is what I used. 2h for damage - or I've actually had a ranged Paladin just to give +6 accuracy to my casters. What was your attribute distribution? What kind of armor did you use? For my Path of the Damned Paladin tank I used: 6 MIG 16 CON 6 DEX 20 PER 10 INT 20 RES I normally don't take much constitution but I'd figured for PoD this character wouldn't be doing anything significant with mid-high might anyway due to poor accuracy and no damage talent/abilities. His job is to sit somewhere and not die while things beat on him. Occasionally use a Lay on Hands or Liberating Exhortation. What Race/Background did you go with?

I would be very (pleasantly) surprised if the models were changed or added to at this point. Unfortunately.

This happened to me too, so I call bogus on the metagaming accusation. I had no idea that my choices would suddenly be invalidated.

You think that the Naturelikes match their portraits? I just looked them all over and while I think that the currently available Male Naturelike portrait is great (at least if you're a Fighter or Paladin) and the Female Naturelike portrait is rather awful (by comparison, and not fitting at all with the overall art style) they don't actually match the in-game models at all. That being said, I would love it if there were moonlike heads that matched the available moonlike portraits better (because I think that the portraits are nicer than the models).

I don't think anyone minds that, but why does the female heads (well, 2/3) get to look like awesome disturbing and tumorous, while male heads gets 4 horns and a dong? D:

Cipher: GIVE ME YOUR KNEECAPS! Victim: But.. I.. what? Cipher: I SAID GIVE ME YOUR KNEECAPS! Victim: But whyyyy? D: Cipher: THAT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! Victim: HOW?! Q_Q Cipher: This is taking too long. Cipher: *starts hacking into the legs of the enemy*

Eh, fair enough. It could've just been the epicanthic fold that threw me off and got me thinking down the "asian" path and then I just got stuck there. Probably. Though fact is, epicanthic folds are also extremely common among the Polish and Scandinavians. I would not say "extremely", it is in fact very uncommon. The only "scandinavians" I can think of that has epicanthic folds are the sami, but they are ethnically asian, too (although since heavily mixed). But variations do occur, in relatively mixed populations (Finnish, Polish; the relative degree can be argued). But when you say epicanthic folds, I think of the more pronounced epicanthic folds. Obviously, if one mentions them as a trait, it's a characteristic pronounced enough to be worth mentioning. Honestly at this point I get the feeling that we're just talking about epicanthic folds to avoid calling it slanted eyes or something.

I know BG2 gets a lot of praise for it's soundtrack, but I always liked the BG1 soundtrack more. It's much more evocative, feels less repetative, and really, really, really knows how to set the mood for a given area or event.

I would hope so. Anything less would just be insulting. Edit: Since the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings were mentioned, though, I must say that I thought that was a bit ham-fisted. They're practically there just so you'll approach Vegas from the "right" direction and go through the town that the legion burns (because while certain parts of the legion are great, and the writing of Caesar is good, they still just HAD to be hurf durf rape kill hurf). It didn't really feel natural, it felt like an artificial barrier not quite like other areas of the game. But the point still stands.

Eh, fair enough. It could've just been the epicanthic fold that threw me off and got me thinking down the "asian" path and then I just got stuck there.

This. All of this and only this. So sayeth me, myself and I. And even when places were revealed on the map, you still had to actually go there. You couldn't just teleport across the lands to where you needed to go. Once you had explored to there and back (in other words, knew the way) you could fast-travel. Baldur's Gate exploration is superior to anything I've seen ever since, and I hated what they did in BG2. We shouldn't have been dumped in Athkatla to begin with.

Warning. This post may or may not include triggers for triggerable people or social justice warriors with mountainous chips on their shoulders. Brace for incoming involuntary egg-laying and unwanted childbirth.

I would say that you should probably not focus at more than two skills, and maybe, just maybe, consider hedging into one other (probably Athletics or Stealth, or Survival if either of those is a primary to you). With a +4 bonus from Class and Backround (which there is no guarantee that you'll get, depending on what you play, but let's say Wizard (+2 Lore, +1 Mechanics) and Aristocrat (+2 Lore) the maximum skill level at level 12 is 15, if memory serves, and that requires you to pool all your 66 skill points (again, I'm just pulling this out of memory from an old post I made, hopefully I'm not wrong) into a single skill. Do note that each skill level costs a number of points equal to the level (so 2 points for Skill Level 2, etc), but Skill Levels gained from Class and Background does not count towards this, meaning that if you have +4 to Lore, if you place a single point of Lore yourself, that has saved you 14 Skill Points(!).

I always interpreted the savannah folk as ethnically asian-esque, albeit influenced heavily by cultural and geographic tropes that would be alien to them in our world (similar to the Vailians being modeled largely as sub-saharan africans yet clearly influenced by higher Mediterranean cultures and the European renaissance. Edit: Although I just realized that you might have been speaking entirely culturally, in which case, yeah, there's actually no "asian" cultural trope yet. If there ever are, I wonder how it'll be handled, given that all other racial/cultural tropes have been mixed up to a degree. American Indians with Gunpowder Samurais adhering to a strict montheistic religion? ...actually I'd be more than fine with that. Edit 2: It should also be noted that the shaolin-looking monk OP is talking about, Forton, also seen here, is no longer in the game. At least not as a CNPC. To the chagrin of many. I thought he seemed cool (but not as cool as our dear, lost Cadegund, whom we'll probably never see as a CNPC. With Forton there's at least a chance in the future, depending on whether he's in the game at all (maybe as a regular NPC?) at the moment or what happens or happened to him. Edit 3: Also, I find the "finally asians!" sentiment to be odd. I can't think of that many RPG:s where there's no asians or asianesques, except arguably Dragon Age or something. At least not since BG1, although it's not really strange that settings focused on a small area in a pre-industrialized universe wouldn't feature a massive diversity. If anything, it's odd that Yoshimo isn't more of an oddity in BG2 than he is (that is, not at all). ...although Athkatla is a massive port city in the background, so I guess there'd be a greater degree.. but still. But now I'm just rambling.

Alright, so, here we go: Males: Females: They should be properly sorted, so the first is head #1, second #2, etc. It should be noted that the female head #1 is shaped a lot like "backwards bat ears". It does not come across in the lighting on the screenshot, so I should point it out. Also, all of the heads have an ominous black smoke either slowly swirling around or rising from various parts. This also does not come across well at all in the screenshots. Out of these, I really dislike all the male ones, but especially #2 and #3. Also not a fan at all of female #1. I really wish that there'd be something like female #2 and especially female #3 for men. I really love female #3 and female #2 is still really great. Male #1 could look really, really good if it was just "cut off" or topped off at a regular head height with something like the female #2. And like I said earlier, only Male #1 and Female #3 currently has portraits. Man, I wish I could just have something that looks like a bony helmet, like female #2.

It is the egalitarian way. Everyone is created equal. Death to ability scores.

...if by "the standard one" you mean the donghead, I'm sad to say... that's actually the best one. I'm really not a fan of it, and it's the only one that currently has an available portrait, but it is definitely the best one in my opinion. I'll upload a snapshot of all the heads later, Male and Female.

Have you tried playing one? I've played the "blatantly bad" fighter I mentioned, and it was a long way from unplayable. Not as effective as a better-built fighter, but he was getting the job done just fine. I have yet to see a game that becomes unplayable just because you take a trap choice. A trap choice is anything that does nothing to improve the character's abilities or capacities, or makes them actively worse. This doesn't mean that the character becomes suddenly completely and utterly useless. The fact that the game can still be completed with sub-optimal choices doesn't mean that it's balanced. Just because a Talent or Attribute doesn't eat your hedgehog and set fire to your living room doesn't mean that it's not a trap choice.

Man, that power was so damn under-used, though.

Reminds me a lot of my older brother, actually. He played a lot of PC games when he was much younger, Myst, Diablo, Doom, along with me, but he was never really a gamer, and has since regressed into console-based ineptitude. Auto-aim FPS:s that play themselves for him is his bread and butter. He's got cash coming out of his ears while I have a computer just about to turn 10 years old that's just short of catching fire - I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't overheating, there'd be enough cobwebs in it to stop the fans - and I still laughed at him when he showed off the "amazing" physics and graphics of Battlefield Whatever. All I thought to myself was "this is what console gamers peasants actually believe!". There's precisely three things controllers do better. Platformers, Sports Games, and Fighting Games.

First, allow me to emphasize the last part of your post, because goddamn, stop the insane actions of restricting things into uselessness. Expand upon functionality and choices instead of beating game mechanics into submission to "fix" "issues" that are figments of a deranged imagination at best. Second, I think that the restraint comes in part, at least when it comes to the Godlikes, because it's been said expressly that they are supposed to have more powerful racials than others. This makes them inclined to give them something nice, and then restrict it over and over again, looking it over, overanalysing, and ultimately nerf it into submission out of fear that if they don't, it'll be too powerful. I get the feeling that this process of overanalysation and added restriction has been symptomatic of much of development, restricting gameplay and options based on non-existent issues and baseless fears regarding balance or perceived exploits.

Yes.

Yeah, I'm going to join the chorus here in saying that I didn't notice much, but the backer beta is a small slice, content-wise especially, of the full game. You don't really get to interact with any major factions, either, so eh.