aeonsim

The paralyzes spells work really well vs the lions as well. In general the tactics described for taking down the beetles work fairly well against most of the other enemies as well. The lions knock down is annoying but they have less damage reduction than the beetles so ranged weapons work even better.

I've also seen them use AoE spell and nuke there own team, the Adra beetle lightning attack/ability occasional wipes out a couple of less beetles if they're too close to your party when it casts it.

God give the combat XP a rest already. With regards to the Triple Crown solo I suspect that crafting/enchantment will have one of the biggest effects on how doable it is. While your only going to get 20-30% more XP soloing compared to a full party you are still going to get all the loot and gold. This should mean you can afford to invest a huge amount in your equipment. I've never managed to find the right resources to test it in the beta but I'd be interested to see if you can stack multiple different slaying or damage types onto the same weapon (even if it's insanely expensive). A weapon of Humanoid slaying is +5 ACC +1.25x DMG (against kith), add in say Slaying vs vessels and a couple of secondary damage types (Burning lash, Shocking lash, Crushing lash) + a stat boost or two and additional accuracy and your'd possibly have a weapon worth 200,000cp that in can nearly one shot a lot of enemies. The same with amour if you can stack up several stat bonuses, and a couple of different proofs (crushing, flame, freezing etc) you could end up with very powerful equipment that makes for an insanely powerful Char. Think of a high Might (1.3x DMG) Rogue with Sneak attack (1.25x DMG) and a weapon that gives Kith Slaying (1.25X DMG) + Flame lash (+50% Fire damage) + Shocking lash (+50% Shock DMG) + Crushing lash (+50% crushing) with + 4 to Might (1.12x DMG).

Probably not this year, but give it a year or two and they may port it. The newer android tablets have 2-3GB of RAM, and the next generation is expected to be fully 64bit as well (so expect +4GB RAM soon) if OBS can slim the memory requirement down to 2-3GB they could probably pull it off. Ipads are a bit of a different story there they'rd need to get it down to 1GB of RAM or less so unlikely for another iPad generation or two. Performance wise the current tablet CPU's are a lot faster than the minimum CPU requirements for PoE.

That is a different issue, it adjusts player abilities not there underlying stats.

Try telling steam to verify your game installation, some thing may have gotten corrupted.

The general observations above are will help but if you want a more detailed example try the following against the beetles. If your main Char is a Druid, Chanter or Cipher it makes things easier as they all have a range of very useful spells. Configure all your party with a ranged weapon as secondary. On the crossings map put your party into Scouting mode and move north east you should find a group of beetles just above the road, usually a couple of stone beetles and a couple of wood beetles. Move your party back and to the right so you can only just see the one of the wood beetles at the edge of the fog of war. Now position your party so the fighter is in front of every one and between them and where the stone beetles are and activate his defence ability, put the priest next/slighly behind him and your wizard further back along with the rogue and your PC if it's a spell caster. If they're a chanter, Paladin, Fighter or Barbarian they can move up next to the priest on the other side of the fighter. Make sure everyone except the fighter has there ranged weapons selected. Use the Wizard to cast web (or use the Druids vines which is better if you have one) on the Wood beetles but position it so that they're at the edge of the AoE which will allow you to catch the Stone beetles as well. You don't need to directly see both wood beetles to do this if one is sitting at the edge of the fog of war you'll still catch the other one as well and your wizard won't have to run forward to cast it this way. As soon as the spell hits pause the game select every one with a ranged weapon and tell them to attack the first wood beetle, which should now be hobbled so the Rogue will get sneak attacks. You should be able to kill it before it can walk up to your party. When the next wood beetle shows up pause again and target it with all your ranged characters. At some point possibly before this one or two of the stone beetles will appear and move towards the party (one of them will probably be hobbled from the web). With the fighters defence ability on wait until the beetles have nearly reached the party and then order him to attack them. With his defence ability he should be able to engage both of them. You can then use your priest to cast healing circle or watchful presence (if your high enough level) making sure the fighter is in the circle. If you want you can also cast blessing or another buffing spell. If he doesn't manage to engage both of them use either a paladin, Chanter or priest to attack the extra ones with a melee weapon. Hopefully at this point the two wood beetles are dead, if one is still alive use a wizard spell to finish it off ie the Magic Missile equiv. Your Fighter is probably hurt abit at this point but healing circle should be keeping that under control, if not cast a healing spell on to him. You can now switch the rogue to his melee weapons and carefully run him around to the back of the stone beetles along the road and then attack them from behind, they'll now be flanked between him and the fighter and so he should get plenty of sneak attacks. If you have a Barbarian do the same thing his carnage ability will allow him to hit both of them at once. Alternatively you can move your Wizard or Druid around and use AoE damage spells on the stone beetles from the side. If you have a Cipher with the paralysis ability you can use that to paralyse the stone beetles which will allow you to quickly kill them. If you have a Chanter by the time you kill both wood beetles you should have enough chants to cast a Summon Phantom spell behind the beetles to help kill them, also if you have a chanter you should make sure your using the Flaming weapons chant the extra damage helps alot. If it looks like one of your characters can't survive the attacks from the stone beetles you can use the 1st level Priest spell withdraw to make them invulnerable and to heal them the targeted character can't attack in this state but often the enemies will take a little while to realise they can't hurt the withdrawn player and they'll keep trying to attack it for abit. There are a number of other things that you can do to make things easier if you choose a Chanter or Cipher or make one as an Adventurer they both have abilities that are very useful. The Cipher has a second level spell "Mental Binding" that attacks will and paralyses it's target while stunning enemies nearby this works really well as an area of affect around the target and only costs 15 focus so you can usually cast it a couple of times before needing to attack again for more focus. Paralysed or stuck beetles are very easy to kill. Eye strike can also work well as it blinds enemies making them a lot weaker (not as weak as paralysed does but still decent). The Chanter has a chant that adds fire damage to all weapons, you should always chose this and have it as one of your playing chants currently. For there spells the 1st level Phantom is very effective at dealing damage, and there is another one that stuns enemies that can be useful.

So from something awful JS mentioned there are two rather impressive achievements in the game for the crazy ones. The first is "Triple Crown" finish the game with Trial of Iron, Path of the Damned and Expert mode on, the second is "Triple Crown Solo" the same thing but doing so with out recruiting any companions! So who thinks they'll be up for the challenge? I'm certainly planning to play through on PoD, but the two triple crowns maybe beyond me...

Yes, I'd suspect they'rd want it by the end of Jan, so they could be doing it now or in the middle of crunch time for hunting down as many blocking bugs as possible.

At some point in the next month or so they're going to have to try and get a stable gold master build ready for the Physical editions so it can be mastered to the DVD's (unless the physical edition is a box with a card containing a download code ). It will be interesting to see if the beta continues when they get to that point and it's likely to disrupt there regular schedule a fair bit.

Of course the Beta has been enjoyable fairly playable since the last build, so while there will undoubtedly be bugs in the initial release it should be playable. I'll be downloading as soon as possible and starting to play. One of the things about the kickstarter games is because they're primarily sold online and aren't stuck having to interact with a publisher you tend to get a fairly recent build on the release date (possibly the day before) so things should work fairly well even if it's a few days before a patch is released While those who are buying physical editions will find they've got a build of the game that's a few weeks to months older and thus need a day 0 patch or to wait until the first patch is released.

Usually but not always. Example: DA2 on Nightmare. In tougher fights auto-attacking didn't cut it - you had to use cross-class combos all the time so you wanted to have a fair number of active abilities on every character.Still, micromanaging a party of six high-maintenance characters can be overwhelming. Some may like it but I'd rather have passive options too, at least for tanks.I'm well aware there are exceptions though I think DA2 is a pretty poor example for the reason it's a massive move away from PC RPGs that IE style games were towards console or action RPGs.

I think the concept of a "low-maintenance class" is inherently flawed; in the interest of consistency and viability independent of what individual players desire from any one given class, every class should be relatively similar in regards to maintenance. Players can be expected to pick classes more or less blind, going for what they either consider conceptually interesting or in line with what they want to roleplay as. Marking one class or another as "low-maintenance" completely disregards that, and is incredibly unfair to anyone going into the game, expecting some amount of consistency amongst the classes in playability and options. So the idea that all classes should be relatively similar with regards to maintenance/player attention really does not work. Spell casting classes are always higher maintenance than combat focused classes, due to the fact they have a wide range of abilities from which you need to select possible options when using them (Monks being somewhat of an exception here, but then there Chi (as it's often called) abilities are effectively another type of magic). If you were to make them equal maintenance you'll need to do one of two things either work out how to give classes like Fighters, Paladins and Barbarians 30+ abilities that they can use at different times and places or your need to trim a Wizard back to only half a dozen spells many of which it casts automatically. That does not at all fit the common idea of a spell caster and is completely different from the IE games. In the IE games if you have spell casters and want to get the most out of them you have to pay a lot of attention to them, they're squishy so they need to be managed, there abilities are often dangerous to both ally and enemy and thus need to be managed and a lot of there abilities are highly specific. Nearly everything in a fantasy world will take damage after being hit by a lump of cold metal but use a lightning spell on a air elemental or poison on a construct or undead? While you can make a decent game where a wizard is just a character who uses a different type of damage (DS3 for example) it's certainly nothing like the IE style game we are expecting.

I've not used the Paladins much yet so won't comment on much, but I do disagree on the no passives as class abilities bit. Thematic passives make a lot of sense for a class and most classes appear to have them (off the top of my head Wizard: blast, Quicker defence casting; Rogue: backstab, Deep wounds? (the DoT); Chanters: Ancient memory; Barbarian: something to reduce flanking, accurate carnage etc). They allow players to build characters that still do interesting stuff or are more thematic but require minimum player interaction to trigger. I also see Righteous Soul as something fairly decent by boosting resistance to a wide range of negative status effects and reducing there duration as well it allows you to use the paladin in a way you can't with other classes.

We'll have to wait and see, remember at the moment we only have up to level 6ish spells assuming the same sort of power level progression as BG2 and that spell is level 7. If we look at BG2 the top spell level is 9 while here the Grimore does up to 10 already. If we compare BG1 top spell level was 5 (with xpack) well here it is 6 and as I understand it the power level they're aiming for is more BG1 than BG2 in PoE. Alot of the spells I've seen people complain are missing are BG2 lvl7-9 which is pretty much out of scope for this game. It is a bit of a pity that utility spells and some of the wilder options are missing so far but as they're said before wizards already have the most scripting for spells in the game and they only had a limited amount of resource to put into this first game. The ex-pack will likely offer them a chance to expand on the spell lists so until that comes along we can't be entirely sure they've no intention of expanding the role of wizards once they have additional resources.

You can get a barbarian to do a a fair bit of damage but at the moment it's mainly by sending in someone else to attract the enemies so they group around him then use the barbarian to flank them. His carnage ability then allows him to hit 3-4 enemies at once and because the barb is not the main focus of the attackers he'll survive to deal a fair bit of damage. In the beta at the moment they can't really survive just charging in first because most of the creatures will kill them to quickly (beetles, massive damage; Spiders, poison).

It works well for me (one of the main stays in PoD mode) one possible issue for it is that Fetid Caress targets fortitude and a lot of the creatures in the beta have fairly high fortitude. The Ciphers paralysis is more useful in the beta, as it targets will which seems a bit lower in general and you can spam it on a per encounter basis rather than being daily. At least in PoD you need to knock back the fortitude for alot of enemies to get Caress's to hit. At the same time though they don't get dramatically weaker (aside from damage as a % of total targets endurance), your chance to hit an equal levelled enemy stays much the same and the duration of the effects as you pointed out stays the same (it doesn't decrease, and the spell is not more likely to fail). There is also a way to increase there damage as you level, but it requires a choice by the player to specialise in a certain damage type rather than coming for free ( invest in the talents that give + 20% Dmg Type ). After playing through the beta I've come to think that the focus on PoE's magic is on stacking the spell effects and combining them rather than spells damage. If you sicken or weaken the group then drop a spell that attacks the weakened defence then all your hits are suddenly crits or instead use the weakened Fort or Will to paralyse or stun them (-30/40 deflection ) now all your other party members are getting hits or critical hits and your damage has increased by by 25-50%. Also the Implements and carnage start to work very well now instead of hitting just one enemy or a couple for grazes your getting hits or crits on everyone in the area (for the implements can double the total damage) not to mention your rogue (if you have one) is now getting sneak attacks on them all. At this point it's also time to active other abilities that increase attack rates, trade accuracy for damage. The spells enable you to maximise the value of your entire party as well as doing a reasonable bit of damage.

The minimum specs ask for a CPU from 2002 (that's when the 2.6Ghz Pentium IV was released) so just about any machine built in the last 10 years is likely to be able to play it assuming they have a graphics card meets the 512MB and pixel shader 3 requirement. Heck most tablets have fast enough CPU's and GPU's they're just lacking with regards to the RAM.

Are there any classes in the game that can survive an opening volley from 6 guns? It's not that the casters aren't threatening it's the you consider them such a risk that you focus entirely on them at the start, something that I'm not sure any of the classes can survive. As such do you really want to change the casters in such a manner that they have better initial survivability than other classes? Also the positioning of the casters in the Beta isn't that much of a threat they're usually at the front or off to one side which makes them pretty easy to target. If they were further back so your'd have to run into the enemies to target them they might be a bigger issue. Not that I'm completely against caster with getting better seeing they're my fav class generally.

[Description] In fast mode party barks or audio comments to not completely play before being cut off. [Replication] Select your party and order them to move, then tell them to enter scouting mode. One party member will generate a bark about the change, this bark will play through properly. Disable scout mode and change the game speed to fast and order then to enter scout mode, a party bark recording will play however it will cut off ~2/3rds of the way through.

[Description] It's possible to create a saved game where the player character is maimed and that leads to an instant loss when loaded. [Replication] In a dungeon maim the player character then save the game. When you reload the game the player character (and any other maimed companions) will fall over with the death animation usually they will get back up but some times the save gets into state where after they fall over it triggers the "Game Ended" or 'You are Dead' screen. This seems to mainly happen if you accidentally save a couple of times quickly in a row, but the result is that save is no longer usable. [Other] Is the death animation playing on loading a save with maimed characters a separate bug? You can find an example save here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/163580/quicksave.zip

My sneak attacking Rogue on PoD was getting an average of 8x15 for Her opening attack which seems pretty decent ( though has insane perception ) against the temple guards.

So just finished (every hostile killed) playing through the beta content on Path of the Damned, and have a few thoughts and comments. General thoughts are: Difficult is uneven at the moment the Cean Gŵla, and Adra beetles are exceedingly hard as are groups of Spectres with there stunning ranged attack. Everything else is fairly easy and will only kill you if you make a major mistake. If the Adra beetle gets to you while your still dealing with the wood beetles and stone beetles it's likely to be a wipe. Similarly the Cean Gŵla combined with a pack of spectres is a wipe unless played perfectly, as the spectres will work there way through your spell casters which you desperately need to heal your fighters and debuff the Cean Gŵla. There are a fair number of bugs at the moment most of which I see posted in the bug forum, except maybe the sounds clipping when your in fast mode. Biggest annoyance at the moment is the incorrect and badly formatted descriptions for a number of items, and the abilities/spells that don't work. Combat was reasonably fun once I got used to it, I won't sing it's praises but I feel it's at a similar level to BG1 and perfectly playable (once a few more bugs are eliminated). With regards to engagement sometimes I like it (when it works in my favour) other times it's a pain in the arse when I try to run the wrong character past some enemies. It certainly can make it easy to lock down fairly wide areas (the PoE maps seem to be a bit wider on average than BG2) and it makes careful positioning of your spellcasters and there AoE's important once the lines stabilise. It's possibly a little bit to powerful at the moment if someone engages your Wizard and you don't have a spell to break engagement the wizard is dead or will take >50% damage trying to escape (and thus is dead a couple of seconds later). In many ways I've ended up playing the combat in a manner similar to the way I play BG2 (I nearly always play as a Spell caster or Rogue), careful scouting then start the attack with crowd control and ranged weapons, then follow up with debuff and very carefully played AoE. The survivors run into the fighters and the toughest of them get hit with more debuffs and more AoE that generally needs the caster to be carefully positioned so they don't wipe there own team. Add in ranged focus fire from and Sneak attacks from the Rogue and most things go down with the Cean Gŵla + Spectres being the major exception. Once I hit level 6 for small groups or temple guards I could switch to sneaking up and every one attacking at once any group of under 5 would be wiped before they could do any real damage. With regards to the character building I couldn't make either a Barbarian or Ranger that was worth playing with and as others have noted Perception/Accuracy is pretty much the most critical stat. Was very impressed with the Rod/Scepter with blast and penetrating blast and an wizard with decent accuracy they're pretty effective especially when the enemies group around the fighter or secondary tank. Specific comments: Played with 3 customs Chars and Fighter, Priest, Rogue. Wizard: high Perception, moderate to high Intellect & Resolve with the talents Noble Weapons, Blast, Penetrating Blast, Rod Cipher: high Perception, Dex and Intellect, Scoundrel weapons, Dual wielding, punishing whip, Sabre and Stiletto + Rod Chanter: High resolve, Int, Adventurer weapons, Weapon and Shield, Ancient memory At the end of the play through the Wizard had done the most damage (36%) then the Rogue (22%), Fighter/Cipher (13% ea) and Priest/Chanter (7% ea). For damage taken the Fighter soaked up 30% for only 14% of the KO's, Chanter 20% for 20% KO, Cipher/Rogue/Priest about 14% ea with 26%/20%/4% of the KO's while the Wizard took 8% of the damage for 16% of the KO's. The Cipher is a bit of a KO magnet as she was specd with dual weapons to maximise focus generation she tended to be up close to the action fairly often. The Chanter worked fairly well as a secondary tank (Flail & Shield) providing a small amount of healing and useful secondary effects, summons and some control (paralysis) late game. The Cipher with it's effectively unlimited control spells was critical to some of the harder battles where the mage burnt through all his spells and for areas where I chained multiple fights together with out resting. With regards to the party I'd be most inclined to keep the Wizard, Priest and Cipher and while the other roles could be switched around between the different classes. Strategy/Tactics: To deal with the limited starting equipment wiped out both parties for Cat & Mouse in the village, then provoked the Tanner by entering the back room, Entered the temple via tower and cleared the first couple of rooms of cultists (after sneaking past the beetles). The equipment from that is enough to set everyone up with exceptional armour and fine or exceptional weapons and provide enough damage and DR to consider taking on the beetles. After that it's back up stairs and start working the way through the various quests and creatures on the out doors maps. With regards to combat the hardest encounters are the beetles at the crossing while the party is lvl 5 and the Ghost/Spirit clusters in the gorge ruins. Everything else is fairly easy even on PoD. For the beetles the combination of poison, armoured stone beetles and the Adra beetles which can one shot most Chars on a Critical and take out half the party (Wizard, Rogue & Cipher) with one ranged attack if they're too close together. Ended up hammering them with spells (grease, web, rolling flame, and iconic projection) which allows often allows all the wood beetles to be wiped and major damage to be done to most of the others then leave the fighter to occupy the stone beetles and focus fire on the Adra combined with the Ciphers & Wizards Paralysis spells tends to finish them off with out to much issue. I suspect the beetles aren't currently balanced as a result of the armour changes. For the various spirits and ghost it's there stun abilities that are the major problem (and insane stats for the bosses all defs >110) they've a nasty habit of targeting the spell casters which can quickly wipe them from the game and then it's a party wipe shortly after. Ended up having to split them up and drawing them away from the default area then using withdrawal on there initial target and dropping paralysis spells on them until one sticks (Cipher is awesome for this, though the Wizard spell is more powerful) then have everyone hammer the affected individual. Any one else played through the beta on PoD?

The beetles are rather unbalanced in 392 probably as a result of changing the armour system. On PoD mode the Adra beetle can one shot anyone and it's lightning attack can take down half the party if it hit's you when your clustered (Wizard, Cipher, Rogue).

That's not how it's calculated. It's 50/60 * 1.15 * 1.10, so you'd end up with 63.25 and 75.9 Right had been reading the old wiki article need's an update.