vattghern

It's strange you bring up Arcanum as a counter-example because that was one of the most grimdark (grimdarkest?) RPGs in my mind before grimdark became all the rage. Sure, it has some quirky moments, but the overall atmosphere is very melancholy and depressing, enhanced in particular by the soundtrack. There's very few RPGs that pull that off in a way that has me glued to the screen start to finish (pretty much Arcanum, PST, and most recently Witcher 3).

Seems like the Codex scales to Infinitron's level after all.

1.05 is not compatible with old saves AFAIK

They have it, but it's not affected by Reputation/Dispositions. The same goes for CNPC priests. Only the main character is affected, for some asinine reason. Obviously so your PC's dialogue choices don't interfere with party members' skill bonuses. IIRC the tip during char creation made it sound like it's therefor always maxed out for NPCs; is it actually on the lowest level instead?

Why do people say NPCs don't get Faith & Conviction? Pretty sure my Pallagina has it.

But then what? In other games my load times were like cut in half.

I'm not seeing any improvement compared to previously running the game from HDD. Granted, I haven't migrated the OS yet so saves still go to the HD, but shouldn't general load times still have improved noticeably?

How could you tell? Do enemy resistances increase noticeably in the tooltip?

0/10

Galaxy is the devil. Just like Steam.

If that is the case, then I'm pretty sure it's a bug. Here are my specs: Crucial MX100 512GB (SSD) Core i7-2720QM (2.2 GHz) Radeon 6770M 8 GB RAM Windows 7 64-bit The save file is around 3MB in size. I timed it and it takes around 15 seconds to load and around 5 seconds to save. Area transitions likewise take around 15 seconds. Unless it is doing some heavy compression/decompression under the hood, I don't understand what can be taking so long. Also, if I click through the opening screens on startup, it takes around 3 seconds merely to load the list of saves. The SSD is operating properly in all other contexts (e.g. a cold boot of Windows takes about the same time as loading a PoE game, maybe even a little less) so I think there is something wrong here. That are the save/load times I get on my system - with a 7200RPM HDD. Shouldn't a SSD speed it up by like a lot?

The chant that adds like 26 fire damage? It doesn't actually add a flat amount to each attack, more like a percentage. If you click on the attacks in the log you'll see how much it really added and it's far lower than 26.

I believe the wording "Spell Holding: Consecrated Ground" means the spell should activate itself based on some condition (perhaps low endurance?), as opposed to "Minor Spellbind: Spellname" which grants an active spell in your ability bar. Either way, I couldn't get the boots to work so far.

Yes -- Act II starts when you enter defiance bay for the first time. Ôw, I see. A pity; guess the game is drawing to a close.

... Hoooooooooooooooooow? Seriously, ACT I is over in Caerd Noa, there's absolutely no way at all to gain lvl 10 already before going there simply by lack of content, around 10 or less maps. So I somehow doubt this. I don't think it's possible for a group but what if you solo it? It should be possible then right? Um, I'm at the part where you gather certain clues for a certain lady concerning a certain metallic implement. You saying this is act 2 already and I missed the transition?

4 Acts, but the second seems to be the longest and the fourth is very short. Dropping off after the beginning is normal in games, but keep in mind that Pillars has been out only for a week. Yes, it's Easter, so many people have more time to play - but others spend this time with family. In my country Easter commonly means spending two days sitting at a table. I finished Act 2 yesterday, I'm not surprised others aren't there yet. Which act is the longest surely depends on when you decide to progress the main story. I'm still in Act 1, doing all side content I can find, and my dudes are almost lvl 10.

On hard the trashmob packs are just bigger. I'm with OP here. Encounter design in POE is a massive failure, exceptions are few and far between.

Beastiary xp wouldn't make this ideal, once an entry is full you don't get combat xp. Also, humans never give combat xp. But they should. At a reduced rate after the bestiary entry is complete, maybe 50% or whatever, but they definitely should give XP all the way so killing stuff doesn't feel as pointless as it does now. If it needs to be rationalized, I'm sure you can still learn something about fighting wolves even after you've killed a dozen of them. This is an example of how some people profoundly do not understand why there isn't combat XP. Let me explain - the reason there isn't combat XP, per se, is so that people who avoid combat and try and find rational, safe, clever solutions to problems do not get penalized for not just murdering everything and everyone in sight. Pillars is a good game in that it rewards play that isn't a total mindless slaughter, unlike a lot of CRPGs, especially older ones. Changing it so combat always rewards XP would be completely missing the point, and would turn the game back into that sort of ridiculous "Even peasants are worth 15XP!" butchery. It promotes the sort of idiotic and immersion-breaking play where you're more rewarded for solving a quest the clever way (avoiding combat etc.) AND THEN going back and slaughtering everyone mindlessly for no reason (something common in older CRPGs), than for actually just being successful. I understand the intent, but POE simply isn't the game where such an approach makes sense. POE plays like a hack & slash, yet combat awards no XP. This is wrong. Taking the Skaen temple/ruin as an example, could you name all the creative ways a player can use to get from entrance to endboss? From what I saw you can either a) slaughter every cultist as you explore the place looking for something interesting (and there is precious little to discover there); b) slaughter only half the cultists by using a different path to reach the boss. No thinking outside the box, no puzzle-solving skills involved. Just the number of dead cultists varies. There is no incentive not to slaughter them, nothing changes in the final confrontation, nobody cares in the end how many cultists died during your escapade there. I do appreciate that you can deal with the foozle in an amiable way and not feel forced to kill him afterwards for XP (ofc I killed him anyway for potential loot) but that doesn't make up for the ultimately unrewarding trash massacre along the way.

I'm shocked that people still give a damn about reviews from mainstream media after it's been shown time and time again how worthless gaming "journalists" are.

Beastiary xp wouldn't make this ideal, once an entry is full you don't get combat xp. Also, humans never give combat xp. But they should. At a reduced rate after the bestiary entry is complete, maybe 50% or whatever, but they definitely should give XP all the way so killing stuff doesn't feel as pointless as it does now. If it needs to be rationalized, I'm sure you can still learn something about fighting wolves even after you've killed a dozen of them.

The backgrounds are indeed breathtakingly beautiful. The character models could use some work though.

Yes. Also, massive lobbying by Nvidia/ATI. Curse them all.

Mowing down dozens of copy&paste cultists and getting nothing out of it but trash loot made me sad. Removing combat XP achieves nothing in this case, you'll still mow them down to the last man in hopes they hide something interesting (they don't). On the other hand, you get huge piles of XP for progressing quests in the most trivial manner. Lower quest XP, make up for it with combat XP. Not like you can grind mobs forever anyway because nothing respawns. Lockpicking XP could be removed entirely far as I'm concerned, it leads to the very munchkin gameplay JES supposedly wanted to avoid (pick lock instead of using key to get XP).

If the choice is between slitting his throat or leaving him sick and dying all alone in an empty dungeon (because I slaughtered all his friends) I might decide slitting his throat is the nicer thing to do. This. Though I made it to lvl 5 and still haven't found a cure for him (or his mates) and it seems quite gruesome to leave him where he is.

Not sure if this counts as spoilers but is there anything you can do with him besides slitting his throat?