firesnakearies

Thanks for the tips, house2fly!

(Not sure if this is the right forum for this post, but due to the potential slight spoileryness of it, I thought it safest to put it here.) Okay, so I'm coming back to Pillars after a many-month break from it, and want to finish my playthrough and also the two expansions. I'd like some advice on what order I should try to play the remaining content in, based on what I've done so far. My party is in Act 3, having cleared Elmshore and talked to all the people in Hearthsong and collected the quests there, but not gone further into Twin Elms or beyond. I was as completionist as possible with Acts 1 and 2, doing everything I could find to do. I've cleared the first 8 levels of the Endless Paths, and have done one bounty quest so far (the ogres in the cave). So here's the stuff I have left to do, and I'm not sure what order would be best to do it in: - Rest of Act 3 stuff - Act 4 - Lower 7 levels of Endless Paths - All the rest of the bounties - New stronghold-related quest stuff - White March pt 1 - White March pt 2 - Anything else I don't know about My characters are level 10 right now, and about 3/4ths of the way to level 11. I'd just like to do the rest of this stuff in the most level-appropriate order that I can. Any suggestions from the Pillars veterans?

I've noticed an odd bug related to enchanting armor. I first discovered it with the plate armor called Sanguine Plate. I enchanted this armor to have shock-proofing, and then enchanted it to have +1 constitution. Combined with the two innate properties on the armor, this gave it 5/12 enchantment slots full. It had no quality enchantment at all. When I later went to enchant it to exceptional quality, I found that despite having the materials and level requirement, and the armor only having 5/12 enchantment slots full, I was not allowed to put any quality enchantment on it. I couldn't figure out why this could possibly be, but I eventually chalked it up to, "Oh, I guess items can only have four enchant properties max, regardless of the enchant slots number remaining." Which I wasn't amused by, but c'est la vie. But then later, I enchanted a weapon, Tall Grass, to have five enchantment properties, so my curiosity was aroused anew. I did a little experimenting with a different armor, the Sun-Touched Mail of Hyran Rath, which, like the plate armor mentioned previously, came with two innate properties, not including any of the player-enchantable enchant types. So I tried enchanting it similarly to the Sanguine Plate, first adding a +1 intellect enchant, then adding crush-proofing. And again, despite having only 6/12 enchantment slots full, it would not allow me to add a quality enchant. So then i re-loaded my save and did it differently, this time adding the fine quality enchant first, then adding the other two enchantments, and it allowed me to do it. So I ended up with the same armor, with six enchant properties, including the two innate to the item, plus a quality, attribute, and proofing enchantment. This is the same item that it WOULDN'T let me make when I put the non-quality enchantments on first. What I think this means is that there's a bug which screws up whether or not you can add a quality enchantment to an item, based on the order in which you enchant it, if there are at least four properties on the item. It has absolutely nothing to do with the enchantment slots (x out of 12) because in all cases, the items were far below the cap of 12.

Really love the videos, Sensuki, Great job on them, and thanks a lot for going to all the effort.

I tested rogues quite extensively in version 392. I haven't played 435 yet, and I know some significant things have changed, so any of my observations may no longer be accurate. Based on my testing though, rogues were amazing. I was able to clear Path of the Damned quite easily with a party of six rogues. Backstab does a heap of damage. Although, at least in 392, you could not Backstab with an ability (such as Blinding Strike). It had to be just a normal attack. If you used an ability, you didn't get Backstab damage. You COULD do it with a ranged weapon, and didn't have to be right next to the target, but still pretty close. Backstabs with arquebuses or blunderbusses (especially Lead Spitter) could be quite spectacular. Even without Shadowing Beyond, you could have one Backstab every encounter, and more or less kill or nearly kill a target right in the beginning of a fight. Sneaking your rogue back to the rear and gibbing an enemy spellcaster at the start of combat is pretty great. Shadowing Beyond is much more powerful than I think people are giving it credit for. I'd go so far as to say it's the single most powerful talent in the game. It's the only thing (that I know of) in the game that actually lets you leave combat/reset combat/escape. This is super good for, say soloing (especially soloing PotD or even Hard). It lets you do things that you cannot do without a rogue who has this ability. Did you know that if you have at least one rogue, you can complete every quest in the backer beta (and level to the beta cap) without killing a single thing? You can ALMOST do this without a rogue (just decent stealth for your whole party), but not quite. Because there's no way to get into the temple of Skaen without triggering a fight. Either against the beetles around the statue entrance, or the leatherworker and his apprentice in the shop. But if you have a rogue, you can sneak up to the statue and initiate the scripted interaction, open the way to the other map, then when you are automatically popped out of stealth and attacked, you can use Shadowing Beyond to exit the encounter. Then you can just sneak your whole party up and hit the map transition before you're detected. You can also do things like get the dragon egg without having to fight or pay the band of mercenaries, by doing the same thing. Sneak up, do the scripted interaction, get pulled into the conversation automatically, but then just Shadowing Beyond your way out of it. If you really want to cheese things, (or you're soloing a high difficulty), you can just sneak up, assassinate a single foe quickly, then vanish with Shadowing Beyond. Repeat as often as you desire, resting every couple of times. You can clear whole maps full of grouped enemies this way. Which can only be done with Shadowing Beyond. Any other class would have to kill all of the enemies of a group once they became aggro'ed, unable to leave the map until they were all dead. But the rogue can hit and run, unlike anyone else. The all-rogue party (or solo rogue) also has the singular ability to duck out of those annoying situations where you get forced into a cutscene/dialogue and then jumped without having the chance to position or open the fight your own way. When that happens, you can just have everyone Shadowing Beyond, and then you can leave or use your stealth opening on the enemies however you wish. Now, maybe there will be other means of gaining in-combat invisibility which drops you out of combat. Like invisibility potions or something. If so, then Shadowing Beyond is much less cool. But if it remains the only way to actually leave combat, it will have enormous utility in many ways throughout the game, most especially when soloing, or doing trial of iron + path of the damned. Being able to complete more quests without having to fight will let you level up more before having to fight. Not for my first playthrough of course, but after that I'd like to run a solo rogue and find out exactly how high a level I can get in the whole game without having to kill anything. Maybe this has all changed in 435 or later versions. I dunno. But calling Shadowing Beyond useless is just plain unimaginative. And Backstab is quite good as well, if you use the right tactics. Of course, some people don't like stealthy, deliberate, planning-intensive roguey gameplay style. In which case, yeah, it's a lot less good. But I think it's amazing.

You stealth before you get into combat. You start the combat by having the rogue attack someone from stealth.

You can Backstab by opening combat with your stealthed rogue, even before getting Shadowing Beyond. And it's very powerful, since it also applies sneak attack damage. You can often outright kill an enemy at the start of battle this way.