Aotrs Commander

Wait... Don't we get the skull of Concelhaut... Rendition of Concelhaut the Demonic Skull...? Wait, dammit, that doesn't scan!

What I liked about ME trilogy was you got to see the friendship develop with the long-time recurring characters (Tali and Liara, but most especailly Garrus). My ME2 playthrough, put out that Liara wasn't back (this was before the DLCs), I went through the romance with Garrus and FemShep (partly becaue I was very surprised it was an option*) which was, I think, one of Bioware's better efforts). But when ME3 came around, and Liara was back, FemShep had to have That Conversation with Garrus - and he was totally cool with it. Which I found was... pretty unfathomable unexpected. Up until now - and I think pretty much every other time it came up, it went badly. But no, Garrus was like "s'alright, dudette, no worries." And then for the rest of the game Garrus was my best mate - and I remember the scenes with him and Shepard just palling around more than I do the stuff with Liara, the Designated (for that run anyway) Love Interest. (And Tali and Liara also rank among my all-time favourite companions, along with the likes of Imoen, Minsc, Morte, Dakkon and Alister.) That level of interaction was what made the trilogy for me. It's that sort of thing I think Pillars would be best to focus on - skip the romantic relationships, but have a good and serious attempt at doing a proper friendship with our companions. (Eder, especially, is standing in a good position already to capitialise from PoE in PoE2.) Because I am pretty sure that would would probably be something we'd basically all be pleased with, yes? *Partly because Turians aren't one of what one might colourfully say the "pretty races." Brandon Keener deserves quite a bit of credit for apparently generating enough of a following to sidestep that trope, largely, one presumes, on the strength of voice-acting alone...

So, I started finishing off White March 2 (because I never got around to it) and I just did Lord whathisdace's quest where he tries to swipe the keep from the Watcher with his amry and stuff. And throughout that quest I was thinking "probably should just have let him have it and then I could have stood back and had a good laugh...!"

Yeah, that sounds about right. Whie I was toying around with the PrC I mentined upthread, I had a serious discussion with folk about really where a partial class ought to be in 3.x, which suggested that they ought only to be a level or two behind, rather than like, half. 75% sounds about right, I reckon.

Sounds legit... Not opposed to them, personally - can take or leave them. (And for the record, I was a big Bioware fan - far more than I was Obs, actually - until after DA:O and they increasingly blotted their copy-book (for unrelated reasons)). But as mumbogumshoe said earlier, Obsidian seem fairly opposed to them (and some of the fanbase can be rather... borderline obnoxiously negative about them). And it really has become a trigger-word now. I laud Bioware for at least making a well-meaning (at least initially) attempt to cater for everyone in terms of diversity; but that led to the backlash (of course), because there are people who didn't like the idea at all (for various reasons), people who rabidly didn't want that diversity and that games should only cater to their tastes*, people who didn't want every character to be player-sexual (which was kind of unavoidable, I fear, when trying to cater for everyone without a ridiculously large cast) etc, etc... So whatever you would do would be BadWrongTerrible to some vocal quarter. So it may be for the best (or at least a quiet life), all told, that Obs doesn't try it this time around. Maybe in another twenty years, when things have calmed down a bit (maybe)...! It didn't do PoE much harm, after all. That said, would WOULD unquestionably like to see is the sort of relationship in PoE2 that developed with the returning long standing characters over the course of ME trilogy. (Which, also for the record I though was fantastic right up to the last fifteen/twenty minutes of ME3 and any point With Kai Leng In It. Mind you, Obs, prior to that, you guys had the award for Worst Ending Ever with vanillia NWN2 with your "rocks fall" - a particular let-down after argueably the Best Final Boss Battle Ever...) Garrus still wins the prize for Best Companion in any RPG I've played - but he had, of course, about 150 hours of game-time over three games to work with. Here's hoping we get something like that with Eder (I say Eder, since he's a bit more... mate-y than Aloth, though he's also cool.) *I recall someone (might have even been around the PoE forums around the run-up to the first game, because it was afte DA2 and I don't think i would have been on a Bioware forum at that time, but I forget), who was rabidly furious that feminists had taken over gaming.... Because he thought one of the female characters in Dragon Age 2 looked masculine (not even sure it was one of the ones you could romance in that game). (So, basicaly, his objection appeared to be, in essence, there existed a female character he did not consider spank-worthy material. The mind boggles. And then sigh and shakes its head.)

This summary of how dual-classing worked in AD&D 2E is correct, or very close to it. It was a very bizarre system that seemingly existed solely for the purpose of enabling players to emulate various literary fantasy human characters who clearly had multiple classes by AD&D standards. As these literary characters (largely from swords and sorcery stuff) pretty much all had a series of careers, rather than pursuing multiple careers at once, the designers created a system that resembled this. Mostly it was just a very unrealistic-feeling pain in the arse, which lead to a lot of "What do you mean you can't pick the lock, you have five levels in thief, don't you?!" "Well yes but I'm dual-classed to fighter now so I'm not allowed to pick locks until I'm a level six fighter..." "Man what?!" etc... I feel like it largely actually existed for the benefit of NPCs, who didn't have to go through the BS. Also I'd note that a not-insignificant number of dual-classed NPCs were actually illegal by the actual dual-classing rules but oh well... Like you'd have a Fighter 6/Thief 4/Mage 4, but his backstory would say he was a Fighter first, then a Thief, and by the MC'ing rules, he should basically only have low-level Wizard abilities - but of course his statblock assumed he had all three. One of my players relates how he did a dual-class Fighter/Mage, by going out with a first (or lwo-level) party as essentially a wizard with a ridiculous number of hit points. Which is pretty cool, if your DM and the other players are okay with it. A quick actual look* suggests it was four classes (including PrC, I think), by the end, at least. (The source seemed to imply that it had been lower previously, but itt wasn't very clear.) *Because I've not got anything else to do today because [expletive]ing TurboCAD won't assemble that thrice-damned A7V tank model and Lichemaster forfend that it doesn't take it's time in not doing so to boot!!! GRAAAAAAAAARGH!!! *lays out nearby minion* Ahem. Sorry, it's been a long and VERY frustrating two days.

I think it was three in NWN2, for memory, but I could be wrong. Though to be fair, I think that's pretty reasonable. The most outlanding builds i've seen in practical 3.x play only hit about four total (Rogue/Ninja/Invisible Blade/Swordwage or Fighter/Ranger/Deepwood Sniper/Crusader) - same player - and I think maybe one one other, but I can't remember which ones it was other tha cleric and blackguard.)

This is pretty much similar to what 5E does with MC'ing, except 5E is more elegant and doesn't require specific classes. ToB tried out a lot of stuff that ended up working well in 4E and 5E. Mystic Theurge was, if you will forgive me, the purest indication of how totally broken both the MC and PrC systems were in 3E. They existed solely as an overpowered band-aid for the mechanics, but masqueraded as an actual PrC! And they weren't even the worst... The whole usage of PrCs as mechanics band-aids (which got heavier and heavier as 3.XE went on) was a total betrayal of the original PrC concept. So I'd say what 3E prototyped clumsily, 5E largely got right. 4E initially did MC in a really limited and kind of bad way, with the multiclass-feat business, which was just tedious and ineffective whilst allowing some serious cheese. The later "hybrid" multiclassing system did a vastly better job and resulted in less-broken characters than both single-class and feat-based multiclassing. It was more akin to a powered-down version of the Gestalt system from late 3.XE. I'm afraid along with the concept of class and anything but meta-game concepts, PrC as anything but same went as well. (In fact, the first PrC to get dimissed from my allowed list are the flavour-heavy ones, since I do not ever for choice play on anything but my homebrew worlds (where D&D's default do not fit) or Golarion nowadays. So for me, PrC were simply misnamed from the get-go and should have been called something like "advanced classes" or something less impressive-sounding than even than that. Them as a concept as a sort of in-game order or group or something (and not just another meta-collection of abilities like classes) was ditched by us even before we ditched the multiclass penalties and restrictions and such. (We also, despite a fairly mid-high optimisation environment, use fairly few PrCs - MT being one of the more common ones, as it happens. But the adjustments I've made been that even stuff like the fighter, monk and rogue can still be effective at high level (for our paradigm of play) and as pure classes, are usually picked by players who want something that isn't too mechanically demanding*. And I say this as we had a party actually reach Epic (21-22ish); the fighter was still a pure fighter, though th monk and rogue had both taken a few levels of swordsage at the end. Both fighter and monk were simply MONSTOUS in damage output. And given the advanture was a ludicrously overlevelled 3.5 version fo Dragon Mountain (this was before Adventrue Paths existsed and I was running on old AD&D modules converted), they were quite able to apply that damage. Actually, tangenitally, this does show the problem with running a high level-campaign. As writing a whole campaign would have taken even longer, we went from an adventure that was 1st-10th dealing with kobolds, to an elite fighting force whose levels ran from about 8-12 and 16-20 for the bosses...! My dragon mountain, had it ever appeared on, say Eberron, probably could have, like, conquered the planet...!)) We play 4E, or rather one of the other chaps runs 4E from some of the official modules. He has a few splatbooks, but none of us were enthused enough to follow it like 3.5, so we've only seen the core multiclassing rules. (But then again, this is the only 4E party we've had, starting at first and up mto about 12th or something now.) Almost everything I've heard about 5E (actually, the exception being what you just said about multiclassing) has convinced me it is not the system that I'm interested in. Especially given that we are now pretty set in our 3.x/PF hybrid and i'm primarily running either PF adventure paths (on a weekday) or my own homebrew (on day games, which is on a world even MORE house-ruled (Vancian casting is replaced by mana, for one thing). *On the other hand, I had to do a table for that attack routines of the last monk PC (at level 15), because he did insist (despite my advice otherwise) on having TWF and wanting to use both unarmed and magic weapons and the various combinations of which ran to about twenty-six lines and require bold, italic, underline and colour fonts. But that was, as I explained the the player, just about the most complicated set of attack routines you could actually get before multiweapon fighting.

That's a bit of a simplification! 3.XE's multiclassing was both great and totally rubbish, depending on what you were doing with it. For doing "Gish"-type characters, it was totally horrible. You ended up being utterly terrible at fighting AND utterly terrible at casting spells, unlike 2E, did a pretty good job of making you okay at both without being OP. Similarly mixing caster classes was a recipe for having a moderate number of low-level spells and generally poor capabilities. But for mixing purely non-caster classes it worked extremely well. Then later on we got all the band-aid classes and PrCs which finally completely unbalanced 3.XE. There were easy-to-obtain PrCs which "fixed" caster multiclassing by simply making you objectively better than a single-classed caster. There were Gish-y new base classes which were open to wild abuse. All in all, it was a mess. It started elegantly simple but really punitive on a lot of traditional AD&D multiclass setups, and ended entirely broken and silly (unless you were a DM who just banned half the stuff out there!) I will be the first to say 3.x has its serious flaws (and I have a vast liteny of my own houserules complied over the yeats which fix the majority of them at least for our play paradigm). It just that the multiclassing system was a case of "it's so obvious, why did we never think of it before?" And it got better the more we looked at it. But yes, the multiclassing system with regard to pure casters was not so effective. In AD&D, multiclass characters got awya with only being (usually) a level behind the single class casters, because of the way the XP increased more-or-less double each level (to a point). 3.x made everyone have the same XP (which was, frankly, a massive relief as DM. I don't even nother with individual XP anymore, it's SO much easier!) In hindsight, it would be fairly easy to deal with, if one wanted to follow the same way Tome of Battle's martial adept did, whch multiclass extremely well. What one would do is say that each caster's caster level was equal to [Caster class]+1/2 other class caster levels, but extend that to (only!) the effective caster class level for number and level of spells, (E.g a cleric 6 wizard 6 would be cleric caster level 9 and have the same number of spells as a9th level cleric.) This would have obviated the need for mystic theurge-type "multiclass" PrCs. (I haven't officially done that, because I a) have a policy of "here is a list of what's allowed" rather than "you can use anything you like" (thus the most abuseive stuff is just not allowed in - years of selecting from Rolemaster's inheritly incompatible optional rules meant that we have rarely adopted a splat book in its entirity) and b) am prepared to do a bit of gubbins to make a MT-like PrC if one is needed (like when we had a character that wanted to be a Cleric/Rogue). I've also allowed MR-like PrC (i.e., those that basically don't give you a lot of features other than "some of this, some of that" of base classes) to be taken earlier, so the classes become what the player wnats at lower level - and it means that the slow-down in spell level acquisition from coming out the oher side of the class effects hgher level spels rather than lower ones. E.g, you can now take MT at level 3 (just need divine 1st and arcane 1st), but you will now finish the class at 12th instead of 16th. You get 2nd and 3rd level spells faster (at 4th and 6th instead of 5/6th and 8th - still behind most pure casters), but the rate at which you get 7th level spells is slower (since by that point, you are back to levelling each class seperately). I could blither about this all day, but I probably ought to stop there....!)

Apologises to the thread at large for a brief (for me!) tangent, but after being accused of "lying spam" ("boring" I'll let pass on subjective), I felt I needed to at least address this comment. To "spam," I do not think I have posted in this thread any more than, say rhiengold has, and I would not presume to say to that gentleman/lady/etc is "spamming" the thread. As to the rest: I am well aware of AD&D with all the bells and whistles. I played it a fair bit (some years, on-and-off, between when I started roleplaying in about 1990 until 3.0 came out in 2000); I even have a the full set of the "Complete [classes]" books. (Though, no, I did not have every expansion, such as the player's option etc - I reserved that level of completeness for Rolemaster.) I went and double-checked the XP totals (out of the BG-2 manual, in fact), before I made that post (beause I ALWAYS do that so as not to rely on memory and to be factually wrong before I post something), so I would be interested to know exactly what you think I was "lying" about. Yes, you could start at higher level than that is you used an XP Cap remover, but that is (what is now termed) a mod, not the base game as was intended. BG2 gave you 89000 XP or 161000 XP as cap if you were importing from vanilla (or a new character, as I recall) or Sword coast, which on the XP tables is level 8 for almost everyone but wizards and bard/thieves (which were 9 and 10 at 161000 respectively). (BG2 enhanced edition may be different - I wouldn't know - but it was not the original design.) I further went and checked by PHB before making this one and I stand by my statement - there are not many classes that have any class abilities granted by level (i.e. things which let you do new and different things from what you could at first level, not the same thing slightly better (e.g. more percentage points on thief skills)), and none of those come much beyond 9-10th level or so (even Druid, which I though did). (I am not going to check every kit, so yes, I will concede there may be kits which do that, and I also recall BG2 itself handled kits slightly differently to the complete books wit more 3.0-like abilites granted at higher levels.) I stand by my statement. As a MECHANICAL SET OF RULES, AD&D was poor*. (Important qualification: this does not mean one cannot have a good GAME from a poor set of rules, but that is independant of the set of rules; especially in an RPG where a good chunk relies on things which have nothing to do with the rules.) It had awkward and occasionally utterly ludicrously counter-intutive rules (I defy anyone to have read the AD&D Compete Psionics and tell me the way psionic skills are rolled is not ridiculously nonsensical - and people complained about 3.0 psionics...!) and needlessly restrictive (especially with regards to race and class). Notably, I played AD&D under about four or five different DMs (plus when I ran it myself) and no-one of them ever used the same sub-set of rules (and I think only one even used the rules as written). When I determined to run it, the very first thing I wrote down was all the houserules I felt required to bang it into shape. For that matter, even BG/IWD/BG2/PS:T also did not use many of the more contrived aforementioned limitations (e.g. class level restrictions), to their benefit. Later years and better understanding of the general theories of game design (which did, of course, not exist back when the first RPGs - which AD&D still carries a lot of carry-overs from) and wargames were written, mean that better mechanical rule-sets now exist (later editions of D&D or PF. (I am not a fan of 4E, but as a mechanical system, I can't fault it - it does exactly what it sets out to do, it's just that what it sets out to do and what I want from my sets of rules are rather disprate.) Many things are improved by building on the basis of earlier ones, because they have the advantage of knowing what worked well or not or what not to do. (This does not preclude the existance of bad sets of rules, of course; especially with wargames. A lot of people think writing rules is easy and that anyone can do it, rather like how people consider anyone can write a novel. The reaity, is of course, entirely different.) But, as I say, this is drifting rather off-topic, so I won't debate the issue of rules quality at length here in this thread, especially since PoE2's is pretty locked in. The point I was making was that a 16th level fighter in AD&D, has no additional abillities from first level other than "higher numbers (or number of attacks) to hit monster with weapon," so is quite easy to predict what it can do. (Throne of Bhaal actually added some in at post-20th, though, as I recall.) At 16th level PoE fighter has a considerable number of abilites to account for in terms of making an optimised encounter. (As a tabletop DM, I have to convert the Paizo adventure paths (for the house-rules and most pertiently larger party sizes) in chucnk, rather than all at once, so that I can at least keep some track of all the extra abilities the PCs get for this same reason.) Too much of a spread of abilities gives you either a massive grey area, or means three or four times the work, as you would have to make each encounter for each difficulty level for each spread of levels. So I can understand their decision, even though I would have preferred them to do something different. (Also, if you wanted me to engage in intelligent discourse, Volourn, it might have helped if you had used the quote button, rather than just quotation marks, as I only noticed you replying to my post by chance.) *In the same sense the the Wright Brother's aircraft was mechanicallty pretty poor. It was the first, and therefore could not possibly have been up to later standards because they did not - could not - exist yet. This does not in ANY WAY diminish the historical importance of said device, nor of the quantum leap of achivement that allows them to make it at all.

Yea, I don't get how stealing part of your soul suddenly makes you forget how to swing a sword or sing a song. Lorewise, your character's powers are soul based. That means getting soul drained is the equivalent of level drain in D&D, except Eora is piss poor in term of soul restoration magic as the first POE game showed (aka it has none and everyone screw things up the moment they start to play with souls). Also, remember that a bîaŵac kill most people and that steal souls from a bodies...except the Watchers, they still end up on their asses and get weird visions because of it though. Indeed. They have set-up an entirely in-universe plausible reason for this, it fits in with the given lore easily.

BG2 'ported you in from a lower level - everybody but mages, rogues and bards were level 8, (9 for the wizards and 10 for the latter if you'd played Sword Coast and had a higher XP cap). That's significantly lower than the cap for vanilla PoE - and AD&D was a very simple system, where there were essentially no real significant new class features for most classes between low and high level; spellcasters getting spells being the most obvious. (And cleric spells were never as good as wizard spells, and wizard spells could be limited by the devs as to where the scrolls could be obtained). (And BG1's level cap was absurdly low compared to play time, and why no game thereafter has followed its lead.) All in all, it was MUCH easier to deal with that than with PoE, which is much more like 3.x than AD&D. (Mercifully - as a mechanical system, AD&D was actually pretty crap. BG2 and PS:T succeeded in spite of, rather than because of, that underlying ruleset) So I can see their rational in not wanting to start a game where you could have a potential level range of 11th to 16th and have to scale the entire game to those levels AND make a very steep curve for anyone who has not played the first one. (Because there is a massive different between an AD&D Fighter and a PoE Fighter at 16th level.) Like I said, I would have preferred them to have split the difference a bit, but that's their decision.

Well, nothing like stealing our levels and experience and smashing all our cool stuff to generate a truly personal grudge against Eothas, right?

I cannot even concieve of how an RPG like PoE (or Torment or BG2) could be "too verbose." I wonderingly pondered the prodigious length of paradigmatic RPG classics like PoE, Torment, and BG2, but within this honored scope found nary a jot, word, or phrase the paring of which could yield (however faintly!) an overall improvement -- and it is truly beyond my ken to imagine such a thing. The problem with verbose writing isn't necessarily length as such, but a lack of economy. I'm not mocking you, because even though I disagree with your statement you expressed it concisely and sufficiently. The travesty I wrote, on the other hand, desperately needs an editor. Pillars wasn't nearly as bad as that, but in my opinion an editing pass with an eye for unnecessary things would have definitely improved it. I take your point, good sir/madam/small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. I was not thinking of it in that regard (I am not, at the moment, running at 100% mental capacity, I am afraid); the brevity of the post I quoted made me think it was more a complaint about "too much readin'" - a complaint I have seen levelled at this sort of game before - (and if it was indeed not, I also apologise for misreading the other lady/gentleman/small furry creature from Alpha Centauri). Yes, certainly editing to make sure that the presented text is not unnecessarily long is certainly important (though at the same time, one feels there is a place for instances of a certain level of rambling verbage...!) (I do tend to ramble a bit myself often, in long drawn-out sentences that go on forever and ever and ever - like this one - so I am well aware of the occasional need for a suitable editor...!)

Given the arguements they made for not doing it last time are exactly as valid, why would they do it different this time? (Planescape Torment is still the greatest RPG of all time and that didn't need it, either.) The only way I see it might be worth doing is if you did a special edition or expansion down the line to fill in the gaps AFTER release (and bug-fixes), when you knew you weren't going to need it anymore. But it's a lot of effort (and pennies) to do that.

Expansions, like last time, would be first thought. It is implied we're getting a stronghold (equivilent) and to be able to create our own additional characters, so beyond that... I dunno, really.

What, less than 24 hours? Not actually all that surprised, to be honest, given both how well PoE was recieved and that it was at 55% when I got the email notifying me about it last night...

So when entering combat and the game pauses it also slows down to "Slow", no matter the speed ("Normal" or "Fast") you had enabled prior to engagement? Hope they give us the option to adjust that to our liking instead of having to manually speed up things EVERY TIME you enter combat. For what I gather, the default "normal" combat speed is now what was before "slow", and apparently with the option to increase the speed as before (presumably the new "fast" is the old "normal.") One presumes the speed toggle is exactly the same functionality as it was before, except they've changed the baseline of what "normal" was. So if you always played on "slow" you would now play at normal, and if you played on "normal" you have the option to play on "fast." (Whether they have a new "slow" or what would have been "fast" in PoE ("fastest?")I don't know.)

I think it's also notable that PoE's "slow" combat speed is the new default. The more D&D 3.x/4E ish set-up of everyone having abilities or spells (and less reliance on just auto-attack) must perforce make everything more compliacted (not just from out end, but from the AI and party AI end). So that would suggest a tacit admission that there was more management than many people were expecting. (I ended up running the whole game on Slow because otherwise I had to have it pauses every second or two. At slow, I could run it more ar real-time.) There may also be logic to the point that a smaller party size (and thus potentially less combatants overall because of scaled-down encounters) might mean they have spare performance capacity to run AI routines that would otherwise be performance detriment with six. Maybe? I mean, I'm a CAD designer, not a programmer, dammit Jim, but the sort of thing I've gleaned from topics posted on stuff like this in other games would suggest that might be a factor.

I cannot even concieve of how an RPG like PoE (or Torment or BG2) could be "too verbose."

I have been lucky enough to play tabletop over the last twenty five-years with a player big enough that six has been largely the size of the parties. We have run with as few as three, during one period, and at one stage, we had nine players. These days, as DM, I tend to convert Paizo adventure paths, which are designed for four characters. But, it took us so long to get started on Rise of the Runelords and Shackled City that the player composition had changed, so I've had to make a couple of passes through my rebalancing. What was clear was that you are correct in that it;s proportional change. Going from four to six necessitated a major jump-up, but going from six to eight (and from eight back down to seven for our current group) was much less of any issue. Now, when we played with three or four characters (I was a player at the time) we REALLY felt the difference, since it made one character going down from a problem to a castatrophy. (If you think about it, it's just maths. One character out of seven goes down, and the party's fighting strength is reduced by 28% (2/7) as someone has to go get them back up. Do that with a three-person group, and youre down by 66%). I would, I think, like most here, prefer six characters, but five is definitely better than four. (I always find whatever the number of characters, there's never enough slots. NWN2 had issues with its ending, but the boss-fight prior remains one of my favourites of all time, not least because it involved ALL of my party, and I can't think of any other games where that's been true.) I think FlintlockJazz is right though - thinking about it, the sixth slot in PoE I varied between Kana and GM, with all the other slots being "locked in." What we're losing by going from six to five is sort of a "nonessential bonus" slot.

D&D 3.x's multiclassing system was one of its best aspects (though to be fair, the old AD&D system had some merits as well). For tabletop at the vey least, I had absolutely no compunction in "class" becoming and entirely metagame construct. Not that I ever really believed in the sanctity of a class being a flavour and not a mechanical choice ever anyway - one of my current 3.x characters is a straight Cleric/monk whose spells have been completely reflavoured into Naruto-style jutsu and who calls himself a ninja. Granted, you can't do the same with a CRPG, but even so. (I have no loyalty or nostalgia to AD&D and earlier as either set of rules mechanics or an expereince, since AD&D was not my first RPG (HeroQuest), my second (Rolemaster - until 3.0 my system of choice and still is a close second) or even my third (Warhmmaer Fanatasy Roleplay), but the distance forth.) I would hope that this would be following the former system, rather then rather pale attempt, say D&D 4E made. Wait, hang-on, didn't we actually get some multiclassing feats like 4E in PoE (it's been a while since I last played)? Or I am just going daft? Come to that, my enduring memory is pretty much playing a duel-class Fighter/Mage every time I've played BG2 or Torment (in the sense I went to about Fighter 8-9 for the hit points, then swtiched to mage).

I feel that, while I would like a ToB-style bonkers-high level campaign, the set-up they've given us is a fair excuse for shunting us down to a more managble level. If it t'were me (and I wasn't going with that former option...!) I'd be inclined to plsit the difference a bit and drop down to some mid-low level rather than level 1 - perhaps, as above, the vanilla cap or somewhere around the single digits game. But I'm not gonna complain if they keep us at high-level...!

Whelp, you guys had me at the intro video. I can't actually repeat, I fear, my actual words on seeing the statue break out of the ground, but they consisted of a string of expletives... I was personally extremely happy with PoE, as I felt I'd gotten basically exactly the game I'd been asking for. So Obsidian, you chaps and chapesses unhesitatingly get my bote - and my pennies this time as well. Really must get around to doing White March part II, actually. Got rather distracted by discovering Paradox Grand Strats last year. 55% already? A promising start!

I presume the decision was made to prevent a party walking through (say) the entirity of WM1's final level or so on a single rest on normal by use of the per-encounter spells. That was, of course, due to the number of "not worth breaking anything out encounters;" contrasted with the outside of Concelhaut's tower (which admittedly I'd tackled first) where resting was required after everny one or two encounters. They've spoken about removing the "trash mobs" in fair number of places, so it may be they are trying to make the game a bit more like "(nearly) every fight is boss fight" (which I think is preferable to a lot of grinding on chaff). It may be the intention is that, as the fights are intended to now be harder - so as to flip the flag that says "don't husband the shinies1" - people would have found they are naturally using more pre-rest resouces (like higher level spells) during fights anyway, so the larger number of lower level spells would become irrelevant. Whether this has actually WORKED, is of course, in the proof of the pudding. 1 Because, intentional or not, RPGs do this for most people and have since D&D started up; a large number of people will always end a game (be it tabletop or CRPG) with dozens of spare disposables that were saved "for an emergancy" that never came, and limited resources functions lke spells fall under the same category. (The structure of CRPGs (notably the old IE games) - and even some recent tabletop RPGs like 4th Edition D&D - has not especially helped this.) The only way to get rid of it in practise is to have the aforementioed "(nearly) every fight is a boss fight" - something I try to do when I'm DMing my tabletop games, with the occasional chaff fight thrown in to ease people back into a party they've not played for a whie, for instance.