PsychoBlonde

I distributed my stats pretty well across the board and didn't really run into any severe issues, but I built my character up around interrupting enemy abilities and also getting a higher percentage of crits due to high accuracy numbers. Might/Int is a waste as far as I'm concerned because far more of your damage output depends on intelligently attacking enemy weaknesses than in your character's nominal "pure" damage output. Figure out what they're weak in and hit THAT. Heck, my mediocre underdeveloped NPC wizard managed to one-shot a hideous boss enemy that was DEVASTATING my party up until then. The primary reason to want any particular stat to be very high is so you can use those conversation options, to be honest. Some of them are quite awesome. I really liked having a good Perception/Intellect and there was a great moment from high Dex that I quite enjoyed. High Might tends you toward playing as an aggressive bully. I wish I'd gone for more Resolve, as there are a LOT of options that require a high Resolve from what I could tell.

I've actually found Perception to be STAGGERINGLY useful, particularly with the Interrupting Blows ability. The mindset that MOAR DPS is the "best" build doesn't hold up so well in this game. I found it was much more valuable to actually be able to land proper hits (instead of grazes), and keep enemies from firing off their abilities. Might is also basically useless in conversation except for Aggressive options, so it's a crappy stat to max if you care about roleplaying as other than an overbearing jerk. One of those stats ought to add to Accuracy vs. Deflection, though, probably Perception. Resolve should add to your attack vs. Fort/Ref/Will. That right there would pretty much "fix" this entire "issue".

Learning to time your AOE spells is part of the game. I found that usually if you wait for the combat to be joined before throwing your AOE's, people don't move around nearly so much. So, the trick then becomes to position your melee people so that you can AOE around them. The teleporting ability is specific to ghost-type mobs, it's not a universal thing. Just adopt different tactics when fighting them. I love that the game requires you to not just use the same tactics over and over. It is sometimes necessary to encourage your characters to attack properly, but this is a bit of a trade-off because sometimes you may not WANT them to mindlessly attack whatever they see first. The pathing isn't perfect, but it never is. Different spells have different ranges. If you tell them to cast a short-ranged spell at something that's far away, they'll run up to it in order to cast. The computer can't read your mind, dear. Might be an interesting feature request to allow you to queue up movement waypoints for a character though, so you can move them more precisely without having to babysit them at every stage.

GUESS WHO DIDN'T GET HIT BY IT.

So, apparently Ogre Druids can cast a plague of insects that lasts FOREVER, even 5+ minutes after they are dead, that will inevitably kill everyone in your party afflicted by it. YAY. That's a sarcastic yay, btw. Thank goodness I'm playing on normal and my characters get up again after "dying". Don't appreciate being forced to waste a camping supplies because the duration on this spell is broke, though.

7. Also, the game needs to warn you when you're about to pick up camping supplies and you're already full up. I seem to have accidentally destroyed a number of camping supplies in this way.

So, I'm having a blast. Just a huge, screaming, amazing time. I don't think I've ever had this much fun playing an RPG. I love the endurance/health interaction so much, this system really is just stellar. However, there are a few minor things I'd like to see in Pillars of Eternity 2: 1. More skills. 6 just doesn't feel like enough, although the skills that do exist are quite well-implemented, I think. Considering how lore-intensive this game is, I think the Lore skill at least could stand to be split up into a couple of different specialties. Maybe add a Spellcraft and Religion skill while keeping Lore as a more general-knowledge thing. 2. Soul-o-vision is cool, but to me it feels like there ought to be more to this, like you should get some kind of development for expanding your horizons in this way. I'd like it if you could "react" to the little story in a small way and, say, earn some Personality points in this manner. Or something like that. It's not clear to me whether these memories are of the current living person or of some past life of theirs. Maybe you could put in an option to either suppress or heighten that aspect of their character/past so that it either affects them more or doesn't? It just feels weird reading a little story and realizing, oh, this person is a serial killer, and then . . . nothing. Or maybe you could have a special "personality" stat for how much of a Watcher you are, and this is how you "level" that aspect of your personality, and you run across various challenges and conversation options that require certain levels of Watcherness? I think that would be a neat mechanic and very enjoyable. 3. More usefulness for traps. I think you should let rogues go more on the "trap expert" route by giving them abilities that make the traps they plant better and also allow them to plant multiple traps at one time. 4. I'd dearly love to have some "wall" type spells that'd let you create your own choke points. 5. I'd like to have buttons that let me tell the entire party to switch weapon sets at once. 6. You need to find the person who is responsible for the switching from past to present tense in the middle of a sentence and beat them with a stick. Also, too many adjectives in the descriptive passages. The dialog is good for the most part but whoever wrote most of the descriptive passages really likes their thesaurus and is not shy about inflicting it upon us.

I am enjoying the combat far more than I have in any RPG I've played, I think, ever. It takes a little getting used to, but I'm finally getting to the point where my 6 characters are starting to support each other effectively. Once you "get" how to do that your party can be a devastating powerhouse of destruction. I would like to see an ability to set more than one trap at a time, though. Make it something you have to purchase, not just a freebie.

I found it really hard to figure out how to assign stats for my character. The tradeoffs were completely unclear and there's no progressive point expense so there's zero reason not to run a couple of stats up to maximum instead of spreading your points around a bit. What's the system here, higher = better? Do you actually get a penalty for having a given stat below a certain point? I dumped intellect and I was expecting my character to be a MORON in conversation, but this doesn't appear to be the case. And how do the stats interact with skills? DO they interact with skills? It was really, really difficult for me to tell if there was going to be a functional build difference between different stat expenditure plans other than "you will get different conversation options".

Something like 70% of the loot I've pulled down is "foreign" currencies that I have to get converted to "real" coins by selling them. Annoying. Just give me money. My inventory is filling up with crap fast enough as it is. Also, I can't figure out how to drop stuff I don't want. There doesn't seem to be any "chuck this useless piece of junk" option in the inventory screen. And I've had several items vanish into the ether when I attempted to loot them, including one key that I probably could have used.

It is making me INSANE that I have to use the arrow keys to move the viewpoint because the mouse will freely move right over onto my second monitor even though there's no game being displayed over there. Every other game I play, the 2nd monitor becomes locked off and I have to alt-tab to interact with anything over there. This functionality is really weird and makes moving around a pain in the ass.

I found combat to be quite confusing and really devoid of feedback for what the heck was going on. The font in the text box is HUGE which prevents you from seeing enough lines to get any useful information. I really find myself wishing for some floaty text or at least colored numbers for things like: CRITICAL HIT! CASTING SPELL/USING ABILITY--SUCCESSFUL USE! or INTERRUPTED! MISS MISSED BY ENEMY! ENGAGED BY ENEMY! SPOTTED BY ENEMY! etc. Damage numbers are hard to see. It's really hard to tell who is targeting what.

This would be great . . . if I could actually get to the backer portal.

Backer portal is getting hammered right now. It's not just "right now". My attempts have been days or weeks apart.

I've tried 3 separate times to claim my rewards on the backer portal. All 3 times it got as far as "checkout" and then froze my browser. Now I get "error 403, you do not have permission to access / on this server" whenever I try going to the page.

I don't seem to have one, and I keep getting errors when I try to access the backer portal, too.

oo pretty

The shoulder plates on Dragon Age armor are absurd--if you raised your arms even to be level with your shoulders, you would squish your own head, and, in fact, in many of the animations the shoulder plates visibly clip through the wearer's head even though they aren't prone to make lots of gestures. Medium armor for women also has huge, absurd boob-plates projecting out of it. So, no, I wouldn't consider Dragon Age to be a good example for armor design.

That's good to know. I figured it was just taking some time, and I since none of my rewards will kick in until the game is actually in a playable state, there's hardly a rush.

I haven't been following things too closely, but since I paid in for the highest digital-only tier, I'm wondering whether there was some news that I missed. Any assistance would be appreciated.

I really like how you've described this so far, but one thing to note is that melee enemies WERE a potent threat even without this in, say, Baldur's Gate--one of the reasons why ranged was so useful was that melee enemies like Sarevok would drop you in seconds if you let them close. So while you're increasing melee effectiveness area, you may want to make sure you don't accidentally make them destroy an entire party with a single sneeze. Actually, pretty much any offensive method in the IE games could be so lethal it was absurd, the real problem lay in getting your DEFENSES up against the bosses with Equally Absurd offenses so that you DIDN'T have to kite them in order to survive. Those games were never a matter of "what tactics do I use" but rather "what particular bit of cheese do I pull out now to either WIN INSTANTLY or SOMEHOW SURVIVE THIS INSANELY STUPID FIGHT". I'd like to see *a lot more* of these sorts of tactical options, though, like, say, mages throwing down walls that block ranged fire and make fighters go around, ranged banking shots off walls. But remember that more options in a party based game means you need a REALLY GOOD interface that doesn't make you click through a ton of menus to Make Stuff Happen.

I generally like puzzles of two kinds: 1. Those that are integrated into the game. There needs to be some kind of logical reason for why there's a puzzle here that makes sense in the game context. 2. Those that are completely optional. I'm not that fond of crit-path puzzles that prevent you from going forward until you solve the puzzle, particularly when they're unspeakably fiddly and annoying. I generally *don't* like puzzles that are tests of timing and reflexes. I want to be able to do the puzzle at my leisure. I'm pretty tolerant for having to do the same mini-puzzle to unlock every lock in the game, but I appreciate why some people are not.

In general, I think that D&D crafting systems are crap. Oo, let's nerf non-casters EVEN MORE by giving ALL crafting abilities to casters who have to spend their precious experience points in order to make items for the non-casters! I'm sure the party wizard and cleric will be delighted to drop two levels so that you can have that +5 funky-ass exotic weapon you always wanted instead of using the +5 longsword you FOUND for FREE. Granted, this was still better than what came before, in that it was basically impossible to MAKE higher-level magic items, so where the hell did they all come from, then? Some minor deity poop them out on an off day? I think that when you're talking about a crafting system, first you need to define what you want that system to *accomplish*. Some general goals seem to be: 1. Allow customization. 2. Money sink/generator. 3. Enable the game to dole out treasure continuously a bit at a time instead of "fight your way all the way to the bottom of the dungeon to get one item". 4. Give you a use for the random crap that would otherwise just be vendor trash, so there's a point to finding yet another +1 longsword instead of just a pile of gold. 5. Use up bag space. Although this depends on how the crafting is done, precisely. 6. Give you something to use your skill points on. 7. Allow for much broader options to approaching quests. 8. Scavenger hunt! 9. Hurdle for all the stupidly OP gear. Maybe some other stuff if you want to get really creative.

Did you WATCH the VIDEO? He wasn't talking about having an optional slightly-faster movement rate for your teammates. He was talking about a game with movement mechanics much more like Prince of Persia or Mario. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY you could directly control each of six characters (or even TWO) at high speed doing those kinds of moves. I should know--I dual-box sometimes to level my housemate's characters in a game with jumping/dodging, although still much simplified compared to the game in the video. I can, just barely, move both characters from one location to another at the same time, and that's only because they have an autorun feature, so I can control one using one keyboard and the other using a mouse without having to hold down the "move forward" button for either of them. You can't use Mario or Prince-of-Persia style mechanics in a party-based single-player game. Can you have a variety of movement abilities? Sure. They can even be great fun. What they can't do is require constant second-by-second activation for each character.

Depends on whether they implement it as an integral part of the pathfinding. Due to the party movement requirements they already have much higher requirements for pathfinding than Diablo II did (because if your followers get behind they don't have the option to just TELEPORT to your current location the way followers in DII did), and the code will probably already exist to determine whether it is possible to create a straight-line path between two points. All they would really have to do is have 2 different kinds of blocked out areas--one for "high" areas which cannot be passed over (like solid walls) and one for areas which CAN be passed over. This could even be quite useful, in that it would allow the implementation of different abilities, some of which allow passage through "high" areas and some which do not.