sparklecat

Well who's trying to kill me, then, and why?

I managed to one-shot the Shadow Dragon once with disintegrate. It also disintegrated the Crom Faeyr piece he had, which I didn't know was supposed to be there at that point.

Given that you can create new companions whenever you like, I'd rather they had made all of them more reactive and potentially able to leave under the right circumstances. Just not with your equipment.

I really hope this doesn't happen. With the lack of difficulty in most encounters, making one of the most notable even easier isn't a good thing IMO. Sometimes I wonder if I'm even playing the same game as some of the people on the forums... of course everyone's experience and perception of difficulty is different, but to make such a general statement about a game which has already some challenging fights on hard that require at least a somewhat well-rounded party and some tactics, and a lot of really tough encounters on PotD that actually require a well thought-out and mostly minmaxed group, I think the description 'lack of difficulty in most encounters' is simply wrong (or more bluntly: self-deceiving elitist bull**** :D) "Some challenging fights" and a "lack of difficulty in most encounters" are not mutually exclusive. Hard was not hard; it was generally fairly easy. Some of the fights I did were challenging. Some were hard dependent on your level. One was genuinely hard. I reloaded once due to a party wipe when I went into the temple-dungeon too early, once on some ogres, once in a Defiance Bay location, and seven times on the final fight.

Amazing. Well, after 24 pages of which I read maybe two, I have decided I am in favour of restricting this all to the one thread, like so.

Kana's paralyze invocation, at least, seems to nearly always succeed; it's the only one I've used thus far because it feels not so overpowered with the time it takes to build up enough chants. The way I at least use 'cheese' would exclude taking advantage of limitations/quirks like that; they sound more like straight-up exploits to me than something legitimate but kind of cheap.

In general, if an item or spell trivializes an otherwise challenging fight, I'd consider it cheese. Sure, the game gave it to you, and you can use it if you want, but if there's a giant gap in difficulty between groups that bring this one special item and those that don't, I view it that the intent was for the encounter to be challenging and use a wider array of the tools at your disposal. The Shield of Balduran was a legit tool that BG2 gave you to take on beholders, and I definitely used it when I didn't feel like dealing with them, but it was still cheesy as hell.

Man, a sniper rifle and in-combat sneaking would really help with triple crown solo.

4e, you can use your move action to move normally and just eat the opportunity attack if you start out next to an enemy/move past them during the movement, or you can use your entire move action to shift one square away without provoking an OA (in most cases).

I really hope this doesn't happen. With the lack of difficulty in most encounters, making one of the most notable even easier isn't a good thing IMO. Yes. It is great as it is now

My wizard - Aloth - outdamaged everyone else in the party by the end. Grieving Mother would've caught up before much longer, but still, wizards are definitely not underpowered. Ciphers are simply overpowered.

I used a lot of priest buffs and fireballs, I think? What I mainly remember about the fight was that it was such a laggy, choppy mess thanks to the spell effects that I couldn't tell what was going on half the time, unfortunately. It came down to just Raedric vs Eder in the end, though.

My Aloth dedicated himself to dismantling the remnants of the Leaden Key.

Thanks for the warning; I'll not be updating my drivers yet, then.

Not to be rude? In Philosophy 101 perhaps, not in the real world of finance. I'm sorry, in the "real world of finance" the only two options for your profits are writing bonus checks for developers or hiring VO?

Further if I wasn't clear earlier, the idea of making it big via franchising isn't just for VO. Would you rather see the developers being paid a larger project/year end bonus, or would you rather give some of that pie back to the industry by hiring competent VO veterans - and thus contributing back to a support industry? False dichotomy.

In all fairness though, the implementation of the deceitful reputation irks me. Basically no matter how good I'm at lying, if I do it often enough, people will believe me to be a lying liar whose pants are, presumably, on fire. You can't ever be a successful manipulative bastard, at least not in the long term. Sure you can! You just can't be known for it, too. I was playing Honest, but perhaps the problem is that there need to be deceitful options that don't give the deceitful reputation?

Yeah, I imprisoned him and got the notification that he'd escaped by the time I travelled to the next map.

Got my collector's edition in the UK. Absolutely no customs charges or VAT levied, which was a lovely surprise.

I'm surprised that it took this many posts for someone to say this. Why are we discussing this at all? Let's return to whining about the game. Presumably because we're all very hopeful that they made enough to produce PoE2. For my part, having been in on this since day 2 of the Kickstarter and having contributed feedback, suggestions, and bug reports, I suppose I also feel a bit... possessive of PoE, in a way. It'd make me happy to hear it did well beyond what it means for Obsidian, in a LOOK I VERY SLIGHTLY HELPED GET THAT MADE AND EVERYONE THINKS IT'S GREAT AND WANTS TO BUY IT sense.

Hah, yeah, I fought these guys around level 8 or 9; it was a good fight. I was pleasantly surprised when they started to slaughter my party and I had to pull out all the stops to win.

Please don't. The costs are not worth the returns, by a long shot. Don't even think about it. Seconded. IMO, the move towards fully-voiced dialogue was a large part of what ruined RPG gaming, since I gather it really limits how late into production you can continue editing dialogue, or for that matter how much you can change after the game's out if there's an error or you just decide "this isn't clear enough to players, let's rewrite that." It also makes modding stand out like a sore thumb. Going back to partially-voiced is a wonderful thing.

So I've read your Codex post on this issue and I'm coming to agree with it, to a degree at least, particularly the "No Immunities, Hard Counters or Counterspelling" section. I actually do love the game for non-combat aspect reasons, but as I get closer to the endgame of my main playthru I find myself more and more unmotivated because I'm tired of the combat. It's giving me a "sigh, another fight, get it over with" attitude. I don't really care about immunities or being able to pre-buff, per se (I'm fine with trying other/new ways instead, if they work well) but in PoE combat over the long haul - at least for a full or close to full party - starts to feel rote and tedious. It's all very same-y and wearying, outside of those few special encounters/enemies. All these different spells/talents related to protection/suppression etc. and I use none of them, either because an encounter doesn't last long enough to bother, or because there's not much need to - you'll still win. To quote from your post: Yup. It's a shame really. Combat is never my personal main criteria for enjoying/replaying a game such as this and usually I can overlook - or may not really even notice - that it's not ideal. But something just feels off in PoE. It's not engaging/complex enough to be long-term fun, for me, nor quite "mindless" enough (eg, Diablo-like with less to little micromanagment) for me to not mind that it's not complex, if that makes sense. This is basically how I feel. I want to give it a second playthrough, but I plan to make a high-stealth character to do all my exploring and avoid most of the fights because the combat is simply not inherently much fun, outside of a few major battles.

There's someone you can rescue in Twin Elms (and also a group of people you can rescue); both the questgivers will teach you something as a reward if you like.