sparklecat

No, thanks to you lot for working to fix this over Easter weekend.

I saw someone suggest that the switch to per-encounter spells should both start earlier and have more space in terms of character levels between getting the next level of spells; this seems like a good idea to me, for the sake of future balance considerations.

I rather like the frost trap + frighten combination, myself. As for invocations, that long paralyze one is amazingly powerful.

Oh, for god's sake. If someone's system meets the game's listed minimum requirements, they can reasonably expect the game to be playable for them, give or take a few patches.

Also you can turn off Steam's autopatching and put it into offline mode if this is a concern for you.

Did they end up dumping level scaling altogether? Because I would've sworn they said they were going to do it like Baldur's Gate 2 did, at least for the main path quests - still get the same basic type of enemy, but which version spawns when you enter the map depends on your level at the time. If they did get rid of this, I think that was a very bad choice.

Uh. I can use a spell or two every fight with Aloth if I want, by which point most fights are generally over, and I think I've run out of camping supplies once. When you have 10+ spells per rest available, there's absolutely no reason you should be autoattacking "most of the time."

You will not render yourself unable to finish the game by making your PC basically useless from a combat pov; your other party members can pick up the slack and you can turn down the difficulty, if need be. Build something that works for you for roleplaying, stick them in the back with a ranged weapon if they're getting slaughtered, and ignore the rest for now.

Mip - you can bind a key to toggle highlighting interactables to be always on, as well.

Said anything about their sales numbers? Not that I've seen.

Yup. I don't know if it's something that can be improved upon, sound people at Obsidian, but it's absolutely horrible with Grieving Mother; as someone with a noise sensitivity problem, hearing her hit those esses at a normal volume for the rest of the voices in game is actually physically painful to me.

Why aren't you complaining about Steam then? In fact, how can a man with your sense of ethics buy anything from a company that patches stuff without you explicitly opting in? Smells like double standards... I got my copy from GOG and neither it or Obsidian have forced me to patch anything, I did that voluntarily. I use Steam because I can buy their prepaid cards with cash and don't have to give my credit card number or info to buy games. GOG needs a credit card. So basically you willingly use a service/buy games from a distributor that auto-patches games, don't turn off auto-patching, and complain about patches being forced on you. Okay then.

Hmm. I'm finding that Eder has a ton of content; he talks to me about what just happened nearly every time I do something main quest related.

Incidentally, I haven't done any of the bounties, or the Od Nua dungeon yet. It's also starting to feel less like I'm overlevelled come Act 3 - we'll have to see if that continues once I'm out of the wilderness - so it's possible that the problem is the tuning of the encounters you typically do in Act 2 around Defiance Bay, combined with the xp available from bounties.

Only time you need to hit sneak so quickly you couldn't just click it, though, is if an enemy pops up unexpectedly; as an alternative, you can set the game to auto-pause on enemy sighted. I think binding the middle mouse button (or whatever) to pause would be enough for anyone who can't easily use a keyboard.

I agree, actually; I think some of the wilderness areas are too densely packed in terms of various creature encounters that are generally not a challenge (on hard), but are simply rather tedious. OP, stick to the roads in various areas after clearing anything along them, then do your scouting and looting of the rest of the map with one party member that has high stealth; it much improves matters. The nice part about only minimal xp from killing things is that you can avoid fighting them without really losing out, unless you want to fill in their details in your beastiary for the benefit of future fights, or you want their body parts for crafting.

If you have a problem with Steam's autopatching potentially "forcing unethical patches" on you, turn it off, take it up with Steam, or buy from GOG.

Quite possibly; I am certainly getting the impression from my playthrough that this is the main problem, though I think encounter design plays a part as well. Like ComplyOrDie said, it's not about how great we are or whatever; in fact, it's quite the opposite. It's that I basically always played the IE games on easy and here I've got it on hard, with the default companions and a totally unoptimized main character, after playing about an hour of the first backer beta build and then watching one combat tutorial video when the game came out, and am finding myself unchallenged in the majority of the fights. And yeah, in the BGs you could go pick up easy quests early and outlevel stuff, but it's beyond that; it's that I had one fight in all of Defiance Bay that I found at all challenging (and that's after skipping Raedric's Hold on the way there, so I don't think I was overlevelled), that I cleared out a pretty large main path dungeon without resting once or ever feeling like I was in danger, etc. Even in the BGs, unless you used some pretty cheesy tactics or understood the systems incredibly well, you still ran into difficult fights in most of the big quests, in my experience, as well as in little encounters in the wilderness and such. And that's when you did all the quests out there.

Yeah I understand that, I just require a controller to play because of my physical disability and would love to play this game.Huh. Do you mind if I ask what it is that makes a controller acceptable for you but not a mouse? Yeah dude, it's not the mouse it's the keyboard as well because I cannot use my left hand very well Okay, cheers. With regard to this game, you might be okay anyway; using the keyboard speeds things up, and if you can at least hit the spacebar to pause that'd probably be helpful, but in general almost all of what you do is easily controlled by the mouse. I really only use the keyboard to pause and to hold a key to highlight interactable objects, but you can bind a key to just toggle highlight interactable objects instead. Come to think of it, if you've got anything more than the standard two buttons on your mouse, you could bind pause to one of them.

Presumably because auto-attacks go for the closest next enemy, which is commonly going to be your own party member in that situation.

Well, I guess time will tell how much this game winds up modded. I'm concerned it'll turn out to be rather more difficult to do so, however.

No, it shouldn't. This game offers so many ways to increase the difficulty. I just don't get what you people are complaining about. Play the game on PotD. If that's not hard enough, play it on Trials of Iron too. If that's not hard enough replace maiming with outright death. If that's not hard enough limit yourself to not using custom party members. If that's not hard enough limit your party size to 3 or 4. The list goes on and on. And if none of it is hard enough, congratulations, you are just too good for this game. Alternatively hard difficulty could actually remain hard even when I'm experiencing the majority of the content. The game offers ways for you to decrease difficulty if a game balanced for people who want to play most of it is too difficult.

You don't need to reach the level cap to complete the game, however, meaning effectively you are not penalized for skipping quests you don't want to do. I believe the main path is balanced so it's possible to finish at level 8.

Go to Hadret House, I think? Someone pops up to talk to you outside.

At some point in the game I rearranged my party members so that even when it forces a dumb formation on me, it's still got the ones who can take a hit at the front.