Althernai

This is true and therein lies much of the problem. If the patch notes included a line like "Memorial changed after consultation with the backer", there would not be nearly as much outrage. I understand that Obsidian has neither the power nor, most likely, the desire, to do battle with the scum of Twitter and the latter can do a great deal of harm. However, I find it problematic that they tried to sneak this change into the game without mentioning it anywhere. No. Some fires are necessary.

The vast majority of Wizard buffs are either utterly useless or only useful in very specific situations (that you should probably be avoiding in the first place). There are a few decent ones (Eldritch Aim, Merciless Gaze, Deleterious Alacrity) which may be worthwhile in long, difficult fights (obviously, in short or easy fights, don't waste your time or your spells). A "tank" Wizard is one of those things that is theoretically possible, but there's no reason to do it unless you've made a bet with somebody or something like that. It's a complete mismatch between the nature of the class and what you are trying to do with it and basically winds up a waste of one of your six character slots.

We mentioned the range increase, but it's hard to discuss it because we don't know what exactly it is whereas with Chill Fog and Slicken, we know precisely what the changes are. If a range that used to be 5 meters has been increased to 6 meters, that's one thing, but if it has become 15 meters, that's quite another.

Yes, I've tried using it that way just now and it is indeed not so bad, especially if the Wizard has a high INT -- but I still don't see why the nerf was necessary. I guess if they increased the casting range by a lot, it might work out to more or less even. Right now, the only time when I really need to cast it on my own allies is when the enemies have gotten past Eder and are interspersed with the party. If the Wizards can stand further from the battle, this won't be that much of a problem. I partly agree, but if you do the math, 0.4 is pretty worthless no matter how you slice it. Also, any Endurance regen is a double-edged sword: it hides the fact that you're taking damage so you might not break out the big spells and only figure out that you've just spent half of party health on a single battle after the fact.

It's nice to see the bugs fixed, but was anyone really asking for Wizards to be nerfed? Chill Fog and Slicken were two of the three decent level 1 spells and now they're a lot harder to use effectively. Maybe Wizards become powerful at higher levels, but this game is mostly about the lower ones...

I think this is one of the few innovations in this game that they got absolutely right. There's no reason killing stuff should give you more XP than doing things peacefully; that's a holdover from D&D that resulted in the "optimal" behavior being to slaughter everything that has a red circle under it and then some. The way PoE implements it, you still get some XP from combat, but not in a way that makes stealth and diplomacy suboptimal. I hope that this idea catches on and we see it in other games.

I like the stronghold. Sure, it would have been nice to have some builders and other personnel standing around to make it clear how the work is being done, but I don't find their lack too problematic. Likewise, I don't really mind if it serves few functions other than having a nice castle (though it does actually do some stuff in PoE) -- its main appeal is that you inherit a ruin and make it into a home.

The critical thing about Wizards is knowing the right spells. PoE is similar to the IE games in that there are a lot of spells which just are aren't very useful in general or are only useful for specific character builds and then there are other spells which are actually quite good. For example, try using Slicken, Fan of Flames and Chill Fog as your level 1 spells. Slicken does a good job of disabling the enemy, Fan of Flames does a lot of pure damage and Chill Fog is a mix of both with the additional benefit of being Foe AoE (i.e. it will not hit friendlies even in the "red" zone).

Right now, the Pathfinder license is for the card game, though they might make a separate RPG with it later. The expansion was promised as part of the Kickstarter so they have to do that first. I don't know for sure, but given that they must have spent a great deal of effort on developing the PoE world and rules, there will almost certainly be a sequel. I think the current rules are not too bad -- they could use some fine tuning, but it's a much less risky proposition than switching to something completely different.

Look, nobody is stopping you from expressing reservations -- there are plenty of complaints about the game on this forum. I happen to think that the ones you've pointed out are either not too big a deal (the one about having "only" 8 companions), a bug that will be patched (the loading times) or simply not applicable (based on what I've seen so far, there are probably more wilderness areas than there were in all of BG2 and PS:T combined and those were much larger games). Your problem with Metacritic is mostly the result of not speaking the right language. Metacritic is kind of dodgy to begin with because it's completely impossible to summarize a game in a single number -- some of the better review sites have actually stopped giving numerical scores because people don't agree on what they mean. You think that 10 should be reserved for perfection, but since there is no perfection in this world, you take this to mean the best in the genre (which is not an obvious conclusion: I've encountered people who think 10 should be an unattainable ideal). By the time you are done listing the perceived flaws, your rating is a 7... but after looking at the kind of games that get that rating on Metacritic, it actually means something along the lines of "mediocre at best, quite likely trash". TLDR: If you want to argue, go ahead -- but make it about actual arguments rather completely uninterpretable numbers.

These concerns have been brought up elsewhere. The underlying issue is that combat is much "faster". My complaint about it is that this makes most (though certainly not all!) buffs useless due to opportunity cost. You have a point regarding magic and I was complaining about that too for a while, but after finding the right spells, it's not that much of a problem since magical attacks tend to be quite powerful (but again, only a few spells are like that). For example, if your level 1 Wizard repertoire is Slicken (for disabling), Fan of Flames (for pure damage) and Chill Fog (for a mix of the two which doesn't hit friendlies), you'll probably do OK. The other spells on that level... not so much. I think the meaning in the OP is not that the language is unacceptable, but that it's non-standard English and therefore confusing. It's possible to understand "Of Will", but it's certainly awkward and it's not used anywhere else.

For some encounters, yes. For others, it's a straight replacement (e.g. Forest Troll -> Forest Lurker) so having more AoE powers doesn't help. And yes, you are restricted to 2 camping supplies, though so far, most places have one lying around somewhere or other so you can rest once, pick up the free supply and keep going at max capacity.

Because it's not actually all that similar to IWD. Also, IWD was probably the least well known and the least acclaimed of the IE games so it's not a very good reference point.

Eight is enough for at least two playthroughs given that you can only have 5 in your party at a time. As to exploration, you are simply wrong: there are quite a few places you can go, both in the wilderness and in dungeons, that have nothing to do with the main plot. Unless you've been playing the game day and night, I don't see how you could have completed all of it. My guess is that you've skipped a great deal of the content. I think this is a bug. I have an SSD so it's not too bad, but yes, the loading times are longer than I expected them to be. It is better than the original Baldur's Gate. As many people have mentioned, the companion interaction in the original BG was very limited, the combat was low-level AD&D with all of the attendant problems and more generally the techniques that would make the IE games great were not quite refined. Is PoE better than BG2 and PS:T? I'm not done playing yet so I can't tell you that, but so far, it's certainly of the same order -- and that's saying a lot since those games benefit from the fact that most of us were much younger when we played them. I suspect that it won't have as much content, but even so it's a great start. Your criticism is not very fair though: you skipped or ignored most of the optional content and now you're complaining that there wasn't any. Also, it kind if is the rediscovery of a species believed to be extinct: there have not been any games like this for over a decade. We had variations on the theme (e.g. Dragon Age), but there just aren't any IE-like games anymore. The game is certainly not perfect, but I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack given that it is the first of its kind in so long.

Has anybody tried this combination: Deleterious Alacrity of Motion -> Merciless Gaze -> Eldritch Aim -> 2-3 high damage spells? The Alacrity and Gaze last for a relatively long time (30 and 45 seconds base respectively), but Eldritch Aim is only 10 seconds base (still, +15 Accuracy is a lot). It's obviously something you would only use in a serious fight, preferably with Accuracy further buffed by Holy Might or something of the sort. It's the closest thing to a spell combo I can think of in the PoE system, but I'm not sure it's worth it as it consumes both time and spells (i.e. at low levels, it's quite possible that you'd have been able to cast the 2-3 spells twice in the same amount of time).

Yes, for two reasons. First, much of the appeal of the BG series and PoE and similar games is that they're version of our world where the laws of nature are somewhat different, but human beings (and other creatures of similar intelligence) are more or less the same. They're not significantly darker, but nor are they lighter so there must be some nastiness somewhere along the lines of what you hear on the news, but modified to account for the different laws of nature. Second, the premise of all of these games is that you are the Adventurer. You travel to dangerous places where mere mortals (not armed with the all-powerful Save-Load spell) fear to tread, you do battle with various critters and you foil the plans of various evildoers. The very nature of this premise requires you to encounter unpleasantness at a much higher rate than the typical dweller of either our world or the worlds of the games.

I'm not sure that the old games were any more suitable for children. The one I remember best is Baldur's Gate 2. It literally starts with the protagonist and company being tortured for no apparent reason. In the same starting dungeon, you find the clone of a woman who was created to be the stand-in for the torturer's former lover (and you have no choice except to kill her) as well as nearly dead people trapped in glass jars (again, the best thing you can do for them is kill them). At the very first inn after escaping from the dungeon, you can encounter infidelity, drug addiction, cruelty to animals, slavery, gladiatorial combat and, naturally, several flavors of murder -- and this is not the darkest material in the game by far.

I'm in the US and I didn't get any emails (I even went through the recent spam... eww). The Products page status is that it will be "Shipping Soon", but it's been saying that for at least a week.

It's spells per rest. You find as many grimoires as you defeat enemy Wizards (I think I have something like 5 extra ones right now), but they do not allow you to cast extra spells. In other words, a level 4 Wizard will always be able to cast exactly 4 level 1 spells no matter how many times you switch grimoires. Also, switching grimoires incurs a rather long cooldown during which you can't cast any spells at all. On the other hand, finding all of those grimoires does allow you to learn new spells from them (at the cost of 100 gold per spell level).

It's Fast and it targets Reflex. The fact that it is usually less useful than other spells of the same level is not unique to this spell: there are many, many other Wizard spells which suffer from this. Quite a few of them are almost completely useless whereas Fireball is at least tolerably useful.

How many times have you seen a word that is not acceptable on American television used in dialog? I'm trying to think of a single instance and failing so they're certainly not very common.

Out of curiosity, what are your favorite Wizard spells? I agree with you that it is not the be-all end-all spell, but I've found it to be among the better spells on either level 1 or 2 (haven't gotten to 3 yet).

I just finished it on Hard with my Wizard, Eder, Aloth, Durance and Kana all at level 4. It's doable, but I needed to cheese the ending a bit by leaving everyone except Eder a third of the way up the stairs. Allowing the party to be surrounded results in a very fast curbstomp battle: everyone except Eder was down in about 10 seconds. That said, if you're having trouble right after climbing the walls, I'd recommend coming back later. The final fight is much, much harder than the rest of the quest; it's the single largest difficulty spike I've encountered PoE so far.

Other way around: many Wizard spells are either borderline useless or at least significantly less useful than the various techniques of other classes. Fan of Flames and Slicken are two of the spells that make Wizards a viable class and they come with significant drawbacks. Fan of Flames basically requires the Wizard to be just shy of melee range and not behind a party member. Slicken lasts something like 8 seconds and does not do any damage to speak of.

I'm playing a Wizard and while I'm not fully used to the system yet, it's not too bad. You have to be really careful about your spell selection -- there are quite a few spells which are borderline useless and while you can learn spells from the grimoires of allies and defeated enemies, it's expensive. As mentioned above, Fan of Flames is a good spell as is Rolling Fire (you can use the latter before the enemies have even seen you and it can hit them multiple times after rebounding). Also, you get 2 uses of an AoE ability (Arcane Assault) per encounter which does a bit of Raw damage (which appears to be difficult to resists) and inflicts Daze for around 7 seconds.