Althernai

It does change how you play, but is that really a bad thing? It helps prevent the gameplay from becoming too stale. Also, only really changes how you face fights with weaker enemies. In a serious battle, you'll want to break out the higher-level stuff in any case.

The waterfall in Northweald is moving water, but I wouldn't say it looks perfect.

They're not entirely independent. The game performs an auto-save on every area transition which contributes to the area loading times. I'm pretty sure that the auto-save is what is causing the increase in transition times. But that's just the thing: it doesn't work like Baldur's Gate did. In the old games, the area loading times were dominated by reading the area from disk. That means that when you were going to a small area (like a house), it only took a short time. In PoE, I don't know what is dominating the loading times: it's definitely not disk (or people with SSDs wouldn't be getting much slower times than those with HDDs) and it's probably not CPU (I tried letting mine overclock itself and it makes practically no difference). Every area in the game takes roughly the same amount of time. It wouldn't be so bad, but the game is obviously not designed around this -- there are quests which amount to you running from the second floor of a house (two area transitions) to a house in another part of the city (two more) and then back (so 8 total). It really breaks the flow of the game.

I kind of felt bad about killing her, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to deal with this situation. She murdered a lot of people (check out all of the piles of bones lying around) and has absolutely no compunction about continuing in the same vein. Sorry dragon, but if that's how you want to be, there's no place there for you. I'm curious about how you can chase her away though. I guess you have to spare the wyrmling until the dragon is down to Near Death? I might give it a try on my next playthrough.

I'm playing a Wizard and this is only limiting for the first few levels. You have 2 per-encounter uses of a irresistible damage + Daze Foe AoE effect which you should generally start with at low levels (save your spells for when it matters). Once you reach level 5, you have enough spells to cast 1 or so per easy encounter and run out at about the time you need to rest anyway because your characters are low on health. At character level 9, the level 1 spells become per-encounter and health becomes the limiting factor.

Chill Fogs stack even when you use the same caster.

When you first approach the locked door, Kana mentions that based on whatever is written nearby, this must be the study of Gabrannos. Given that there is nobody else around, the Skeleton Mage must be him by process of elimination (although I suppose it could also be some random mage that got locked in the study, but Kana does not consider this possibility). The forges are mostly there for flavor -- if you don't activate them, there are more enemies near the staircase going down to the next level.

You are missing the point. The "imbalance" of the games from 15 years ago was not a mistake, it was, in most instances, something deliberately created to make the games more fun. People loved those old games -- if not for them, PoE would never even exist in the first place. Let me give you an example of what I mean: Finding one of the more powerful, named items in BG2: Holy moly, this thing is awesome! Finding one of the more powerful, named items in PoE: *Compare to inventory of relevant party members* Looks like this is marginally better than what I was using before. It's not the same feeling at all and the BG2 one is much better, though to be fair, the issue is not specific to PoE. It's the same in practically every MMO (if they have named items in the first place), NWN, DA:O and most other games I can think of.

This sounds very reasonable and if not for one small fact, I would believe you. The fact is this: it has experimentally been proven to be completely wrong by the very existence of series such as Baldur's Gate. I don't remember BG1 too well, but BG2 was most certainly not balanced. Even the default spells and abilities included some which were extremely powerful, but if you knew how to combine them, you could get some that were so ridiculously overpowered that MMO players should probably be sitting down before they are discussed. You'd think this makes the game boring, but BG2 was awesome. PoE, with all of its attempts at balance, is decent, but IMHO not as good. In fact, one of the things that BG2 had that PoE does not was great items. It's been over a decade since I've last played it, but I still remember them: the Robe of Vecna, the Flail of the Ages, Carsomyr... there were a lot of items that would never make it into a modern game because they were ridiculously overpowered. Maybe I haven't gotten to them yet (currently near the end of Act II), but PoE does not have such items. It has a few named items that have enchantments which you can't add yourself, but none that really make a significant difference to the party as a whole. Hilariously, the most discussed item on the forum appears to be a pair of gloves that add +2 to Mechanics (people have a hard time finding them since it's random loot).

There is some, but much less than in say, Baldur's Gate 2. Eder has some funny interactions with animals -- one with your pig and one with Sagani's fox. Other companion interactions are also occasionally humorous, though it seems none of them quite rise to the point where I can recall a particularly funny one off the top of my head.

Short answer: come back when you have more than 2 companions (which will happen very soon if you follow the main plot). Longer answer: it is possible to win with just Eder and Aloth, but it's a royal pain in the neck. Fan of Flames is the only serious means of dealing damage you have so both Aloth and your Wizard should use it. Keep in mind that only the "red", inner area hits friendlies -- if you have a high INT (Aloth does), there will be a substantial fraction of the cone which extends beyond that and Eder can be inside that without any harm. Kiting works to some extent, though not perfectly and as Anthony said, you can trick the shadows into wasting their teleport. Honestly though, just come back with a bigger party.

You don't need to even unequip a party member's grimoire to get their spells. As long as the adventurer is in your party, you can right click on the grimoire and then cycle through your characters via the menu on the top left. Any Wizard in the party will be able to copy the spells. Since you pick up Aloth early on, he should be getting the spells that you don't have and then you can copy from each other.

Yes, they definitely went over the top with that. Among the many missing conversation options in this quest is the option to respond to the chief cultist's description of how he's going to bring down the evil lord with something along the lines of "Dude, your temple has a pool of blood from human sacrifice and now you're telling me that you've mind-raped an innocent, pregnant girl in an attempt to turn her into a murderous psychopath and get a lot of people (including herself) killed. And you're somehow convinced that what you're doing is right? Seriously? "

I also loved the BG2 Sorcerers, but I'm pretty sure that there will never be anything like them again. Ever. Games have developed an obsession with balance and the casters of BG2 (both arcane and divine) are anathema to this. There was just a thread on this forum complaining about level 1 spells becoming per-encounter at level 9, but in Throne of Bhaal, you could semi-reliably get every single one of your spells from all levels back for the entire party during combat. And divine casters were hardly better -- Clerics could completely heal and restore everyone with a single spell and Druids had that no-save mass blindness spell. Even in NWN, casters were a whole lot weaker and then came MMOs which basically convinced everyone that all abilities have to be balanced for the game to be fun (even though it definitely wasn't true in the older games!). That said, give PoE Wizards a chance. I started with a Wizard and while I found it hard to play at first, once you learn what the good spells are and how to use them, they can be reasonably powerful. PoE spells do not scale with level except that your Accuracy increases (which improves the odds of all spells working well), but nor are they artificially restricted like Sleep from BG so some of them remain useful even at high levels. Also, level 1 and 2 spells become per-encounter rather than per-rest at character levels 9 and 11 respectively so you can cast them without worrying about long term resource management. And there do exist some turn-the-tide spells, like the level 4 Confusion. No. Most damage-type spells scaled with level, though some of them (like Magic Missile and Fireball) only scaled up to a certain level and then stopped. A few (e.g. Skull Trap) scaled all the way up to level 20.

All you need to do is restore N spells at the end of combat. At the moment, it restores all of them all none, but unless the game is coded in a really strange way, the number restored can be arbitrary. Alternatively, you can set the number of available spells to N if the number is currently less than N.

First of all, the natural increases are not that large -- by level 9, you have a grand total of 14 spells (plus whatever you get from talent and items) across all spell levels. Since other classes also "come into their own" (e.g. by level 8, Eder was basically indestructible as far as non-boss encounters are concerned and Grieving Mother starts with 2-3 spells per encounter and can easily get more with ranged attacks) and I don't know when the spells will be useful, the optimal strategy is to hold them in reserve until they are needed. This works, but it's not very interesting. Being able to cast level 1 spells per encounter spices non-boss fights a bit.

I don't think it necessarily means anything for the expansions. They don't have to make level 3 spells per encounter at level 13, they can make it higher so that it's balanced.

Pathfinding was, is and, barring a dramatic advance in computer science, will be a weak point of all such games. It's really, really hard to do with 6 player controlled characters and of order 10 enemies. I haven't seen an instance of enemies passing through small gaps, but everything else is more or less expected. Try giving pausing and giving orders to move in straight lines without any obstructions.

I agree with you that it is a substantial jump and it fairly dramatically changes the nature of the game for Druids, Priests and Wizards. From levels 1 to 8, the default behavior for all of these classes is to not to use spells unless you are reasonably confident that the alternative is either defeat or a significant loss of Health. You start off with the per-encounter abilities (if any) and maybe put in a spell if the situation for it is perfect or if things aren't going as well as you expected. At level 9, the strategy for all of these classes suddenly switches to starting with your level 1 spells every encounter. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not -- on the one hand, it's certainly a huge difference, but on the other, it does keep the gameplay from becoming stale. Choosing one individual spell would be very annoying -- the spells are not abilities, only a few are non-situational and this would make them even more powerful. Regenerating one spell from that level at the end of combat would be a much better idea assuming the regeneration started earlier (e.g. you get 1 level 1 spell back at level 6, 2 at level 7, 3 at level 8 and all of them at level 9).

There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet so chances are that any combination of 3 of them is already being used for something. With things that are named A of B, this is probably even worse since you only have 676 possibilities and some letters are much more likely to occur at the beginning of a word than others. Like Cantousent says, you need to use context -- Pillars of Eternity is sufficiently different from Path of Exile that using the same acronym should not result in confusion.

No, you can maximize the stats you need without lowering the rest to the point where it becomes an issue. The companions are more or less "roleplaying" type characters and, depending on when you pick them up, some of them have talents which are not exactly the best out there. Basically, you can do a whole lot better. What I don't understand is why anyone would want to -- the game is not very difficult even without this.

Why not? My first character was a Wizard with 15 Might, 15 Int and 13 Dex. Since the character's background was Scientist and by nature of the game he is a leader, it seemed that at least some points should be put into Resolve and Perception and there are only so many to go around. Playing on Hard, the game was moderately challenging until I figured out the rules at which point it became easy (I'm using only the companions that have personalities). If you min-max your character and create a full party, I think the game will be easy even on Path of the Damned.

It doesn't matter. The files are are 1-5MB so even with an HDD it should be fast (and it is for some people). I have an SSD and for me it is a constant 15-20 seconds regardless of the size of the area. The 1.04 patch notes include "Optimized Save/Load game system for better performance." Hopefully this will fix it.

I don't agree with you. They've already fixed all of the critical bugs in the last patch. For me, this is by far the most annoying problem with the game remaining and it seems to be getting worse and worse the further I go.

We have this discussion almost every day (see, the one from yesterday here) and every day somebody comes to point out that for them, it only takes 2-3 seconds. At this point, this is not very helpful -- we know that for some people it works fine and we know that it is more or less hardware independent (some hard drives take 2-3 seconds, some solid state drives take 15 seconds).