Althernai

The people with Collector's editions already got theirs, but since the standard box contains only the DVD, the decided to hold off on shipping it until it has been patched. On the bright side, they've given any Kickstarter backer who was counting on having two editions (one physical and one digital) an extra downloadable Hero edition. If that doesn't show up as part of your rewards, contact support and they'll fix it. Mine wasn't there, but they added it in around half an hour after being emailed.

That's very interesting information and it would have been really useful before I finished my Wizard playthrough -- too bad it is not documented anywhere. If this is the case, then PoE buffs are not quite as worthless as I thought...

It might have some situational usage, but the problem is that the description is just plain wrong. It clearly says "Revive with 327 Endurance" and it doesn't do anything of the sort. If they meant for it to work the way it does, it should say "Revive with either 327 Endurance or character's max Endurance, whichever is lower." As it is right now, this talent is basically a trap for people who haven't played the game before.

If you betray the dragon, the amulet shatters and her soul returns to her body. I would have let her go if it did not require a human sacrifice or at least if the dragon slayer was obviously a bad person, but as it stands, helping her take over someone's body is too evil for me.

No, I never swapped a grimoire in the whole game. I agree with you that at some levels, only one or two spells (that I've found, anyway) have any value at all. Furthermore, I can't see casting more than 4 distinct spells from the same level in a single fight (you can't even do it with certain items or talents) and there are no situations where a Wizard desperately needs a spell that's not already a permanent fixture in your grimoire. The grimoire is a really weird thing given the DR system. It would be one thing if DR was percentage-based, but since it's a fixed value and, with a couple of exceptions who will almost certainly annihilate you the first time you face them and for whom you prepare specifically, not a very high one, you're actually better off just hammering them with your highest damage spell (or a damage-and-debuff spell like Chill Fog) even if it goes against their stronger DR.

I ran across an article today: Baldur's Gate II: The Anatomy of a Sequel written by Ray Muzyka (one of the co-founders of Bioware) all the way back in 2001. It describes the philosophy and mechanics of the development process of BG2 and is sort of an executive summary version of what will hopefully be in the PoE Making-Of-Documentary once the latter finally comes out. It's kind of interesting to see what the main concerns were back then: it's mostly technical issues like leaving all of the Quality Assurance until the end and a lack of communication within the team. Given that nowadays games are being made by multi-decade industry veterans (Muzyka credits Feargus Urquhart, Chris Parker and Doug Avery for teaching Bioware a bug tracking method even back then) who by now must have streamlined and optimized all of these things to perfection, one would expect PoE (or, for that matter, even Dragon Age: Origins) to be much better than BG2... but by practically all accounts, this is not the case. I tried to think about the cause of this. Part of it is probably that PoE and DA:O are both games which use an engine that is new to the developers and is being adapted (or in the case of DA:O, developed) concurrently with the game. However, I don't think that can be all of it. The original Baldur's Gate suffered from the same issue and while the impact of this can certainly be observed in certain aspects of the game, that didn't really stop it from becoming a classic. I think the main problem PoE has is the very thing that made it so popular during the Kickstarter: it is a successor of the Infinity Engine games. Obsidian delivered exactly what they promised and while it is very good, it's difficult for it to measure up to the older games for people who played the latter first precisely because it is not very different from them (by design!). Somebody in the Codex review thread or maybe in the review itself said that BG was a mediocre game and indeed, if you compare it to the dozen or more descendants from Bioware, Black Isle and Obsidian that it spawned, it is far from the best of them. I personally played BG2 before BG and the latter came off as primitive and unremarkable. However, this sort of complaining completely misses the point: when it was first released, Baldur's Gate was original and innovative. I tried to a similar game and there really aren't any -- you can find its various elements spread out across Japanese RPGs, older D&D games and many others, but the specific combination was quite different from anything that came before. Likewise, BG2 is great partly because it is quite different from its predecessor. The engine is obviously only slightly modified, but they deliberately set out not to make the same game again (Muzyka explicitly says this) and they succeeded. Planescape: Torment is in the same boat: it still uses the Infinity Engine, but the game feels quite different from either BG or BG2. On the other hand, PoE shares its most important features with either BG2 or PS:T or both. It certainly has a lot of differences, but most of them are either not that important or arguably not actually an improvement (i.e. I would argue that the old games did many things better). So, assuming that it gets made (and why wouldn't it?), what can be done with PoE2? One way is to double down on outdoing the IE games on their own turf. It should be easier to do with the sequel because there now exists a stable engine. However, it's still rather difficult because the IE games have the advantage of being original and quite a few aspects of them are hard to beat (e.g. BG2 has some great voice acting -- PoE is good, but nobody is quite at the level of David Warner's Irenicus). An alternative is to try to do even more things differently, but this would only work if the changes are almost universally acknowledged to be good (and even then some people will complain).

But it should be an overpowered buff. You spent something like 20000 on it and you need to travel from wherever it is you were and you have to go through at least 4 loading screens. One of PoE's greatest flaws is that it is extremely reluctant to reward the player in any way that makes a meaningful difference. This is much more apparent in the items, but it happens with the stronghold as well. Where the old games elicit reactions of "Wow, this is awesome!", PoE much more often draws "Is that it? Really?"

Petrify is the quickest way to kill her, but Confusion is also pretty decent -- you can get her to fight the Adragans for you. The dragon slayer's ability combined with Eldritch Aim (Wizards cast it, everyone else drinks potions) is generally enough to reliably land the first debuff on her and the rest are easier. You do need to position the party in such a way that she's facing the sacrificial character and everyone else is on the other side of her.

The reviewer is correct about many (perhaps even most) individual points, but he overestimates the impact of the flaws and some of the things he says are just plain wrong. Also, much of the stuff that makes the game good is either not mentioned at all or given a rather short shrift. The review is indeed more or less a hatchet job. Really? Are you talking about KOTOR2 with the fan-made mods that restore the missing content or the final release version? Because without fan-made content, that game was an unfinished mess and the mechanics were intrinsically an order of magnitude less complex than PoE. Even with the mods, I don't think it is better, but in the original condition I don't see much of a basis for debate. If I had to rank Obsidian's full games, PoE would be at the top. Mask of the Betrayer is arguably better, but that's an expansion and thus of much smaller scope.

If you pick the right dialog options, Iovara tells you that while she thought the actions of your past self as an Inquisitor towards her may be the cause of your current disturbed state, now that she has met you, she sees that this is not the case. The real issue that is bothering the Watcher is the nature of the gods -- the Inquisitor came really close to it in that dialog with Thaos, but didn't dare to go far enough.

I wouldn't call it an insta-win button (you don't get many Gazes and the range is small), but it is a very effective boss-killer. I agree that you really don't need it for the Sky Dragon... but the other dragon in the game is basically asking for it.

Yes. If you can run quickly enough and get far enough, most enemies will leave you alone. It works best when you start running immediately upon being sighted. Once you're engaged, it's basically impossible to get away (I suspect you can do it if you cc them, but at that point you might as well fight).

The overwhelming majority of game-breaking bugs were fixed back in 1.03. There are a few abilities that don't work as intended. The most egregious of these is probably the Barbarian ability One Stands Alone which, instead of doing 20% extra damage, actually does 20 extra damage (which is kind of awesome in its own way; I'm almost tempted to try it before the next patch). Obviously, you can simply avoid such abilities. Other than that, you may run into a random quest bug if you are really unlucky (the tech support forum is full of them as is the case for every game of this nature and scope), but there isn't really anything common.

You do have the option you want and you can choose it despite making the promise, but she will have her revenge...

It can be accessed from Northweald; there's an area called Pilgrim's Rest with a climb nearby. Pray to Hylea at the Twin Elms temple and she'll show you a vision of her temple being attacked by a dragon. Alternatively, talk to her priests in the Oldsong district and they'll send you to the same place.

At least one companion quest will become completely impossible due to events about two thirds of the way through the game. Another one seems to rely on the companion being present during a certain scene, but you may be able to work around that with other dialog options. A third may be difficult to find if you did not bring the companion to the location the first time you were there. Two of the companion quests claim to require that you travel with them, but you may be able to work around that as well. Basically, I wouldn't recommend doing this although I only managed to truly break one quest.

I think you are misreading what I said. The CC spells are very useful, it's the purely defensive ones that I take issue with. For example, at level 4, you are almost always (I say "almost" because somebody will come up with some pathological case, but really, I've never seen an exception in the game) better off casting Confusion than Ironskin.

I tried. The overwhelming majority of them are completely and utterly worthless. They are a waste of time (you can't pre-buff and combat is really fast!), they are a waste of spells and most of the time they're not good enough to avoid being clobbered anyway. You are much, much better off using offensive abilities like Slicken, Confusion, Call to Slumber and Gaze of the Ardagan which are both more likely to stop enemies from hurting you and actually do something useful for the party. The same is true of Cipher abilties (I haven't tried Druid yet) -- they have plenty of stuff which stuns or knocks down or something of the sort. Between the limited spell casting and the lack of pre-buffing, the nature of this game is such that pure defense which only applies to the caster is simply not very useful (with a few exceptions). That said, I'm not sure how much impact the change proposed in the first post would have. The situations where tanking basically wins the encounter by itself were usually those in which I park Eder in a doorway and everybody else attacks from behind. It's not a matter of Engagement doing anything, the enemies simply cannot get past him. In the fight which happen in an open field (e.g. most of the bounties), some of the enemies usually do harass my back line (and promptly get crowd controlled in one way or another).

Ah, but it does make a big difference. The problem is not in the gods themselves, but in the fact that to keep up the charade, civilizations that exceed the abilities of the ancient animancers have to be destroyed. During the final confrontation, if you tell Thaos that nothing is worth stealing the souls of babies, he'll tell you that this isn't even close to the worst thing he has ever done -- he had previously instigated a civil war in a peaceful kingdom, replaced an enlightened, benevolent ruler with brutal despot, etc. etc. It is also implied that he's behind the mysteriously disastrous animancy demonstrations throughout the ages (i.e. the stunts he pulled in Defiance Bay weren't the first time). In Eora, the mechanics behind souls are a part of natural laws or what we would call science. I can't think of any societies that have advanced very far in science while being mostly ignorant of one part of it, this more or less sets an upper limit on the development of civilization, particularly since the means of preventing study seem to be widespread destruction and civil war.

I don't think there is any scaling aside from what comes with the difficulty level. Combat doesn't give you much XP: it only gives any while the Bestiary is updated and even that is small compared to quests.

You can talk her out of attacking you immediately which gives you time to position your party properly (or even go back upstairs and pick up a relevant special ability).

Thanks all. I can't find the Starlit Garb, but I did the bounties (yes, it's the Vithrack one and it's easily distinguished by the fact that it's the fight where you get hit with literally every status effect in the game) and got the Gwisk Gilas. Looks... OK, I guess, but the stats are very nice.

There's a bunch of Resolve-increasing stuff in Twin Elms. One of the shops in the market has some medium armor with +3 Resolve, the inn gives you +2 and you can get +3 more from food. All of these stack so if your character has at least 9 Resolve, it should be possible to convince the Pale Elves to go home without hurting anyone.

You can knock the saves down with the no-save ability the dragon slayer gives you. Combine that with Eldritch Aim and you have a decent shot. My Wizard nailed her with a Gaze of the Adragan for the full duration (something like 29 seconds) on the second try (first one missed completely). I'm pretty impressed by the original poster since even Petrified she is relatively hard to take down. I did it eventually, but it took me something like 10 seconds rather than 3 seconds. You need to be countering her Fear aura though -- with the -20 penalty, you'll never hit her.

Early on, it's not too bad. Sometimes you get into a situation where the only reason to rest is because a single character is low on health. Field Triage allows you to keep going with a little more confidence that this character will be OK. Unfortunately, this is one of those abilities that really suffers from the fact that nothing in this game scales with level -- in Act 3, it's basically useless as 50 health isn't going to make a difference even for the squishy classes. I don't think it cures Maimed.