Aotrs Commander

Exceptional and kithslayer it is, then, I think. This will make the... third weapon my cipher has used in anger (and I think the first crossbow only lasted a very short time before I found my arbalest). I think I'm beginning to see what people are saying about the magic items. Mind you, it has been a LONG time since I played BG 1, and the loot was pretty muribund there too, as I recall! (I do have to keep reminding myself I'm playing something mechanically closer to BG 1 than the later games, which were able to build on it.)

I concur. Even if they maybe split it into say, two bonuses (say, Might/Con/Dex and Int/Per/Res) each with the associated skills it would be okay. As it is, it's only any cop for a quick rush before you have to go somewhere across the map and find a local inn with a better bonus. This really could use fixing.

Well, in the short term, having a second cipher is horrendously effective! Being able to spam six or seven Mind Blades per encounter is rather nice! I will definitely revist Kana later though - I intend at the very least to take him down into the Endless Paths (I even bought him the chanter amulet...!) Given XP is in plentiful supply, I think I am quite happy to let him sit for a bit until then.

I have just picked up Lead Spitter. I am intending on using it to replace my cipher's current primary weapon (a Fine Arbalest with Burning Lash and Kithslayer.) I have upgraded it to Exceptional (and corrosive lash), but - when money allows - I now have to make a decision on what to do next. As I see it, I can either go with exceptional/corrosive lash/kithslayer as soon as I have some more cash, or I could hold out until much later when I can make it superb/corrosive lash/[something else] slayer. What do you think is the best option? (I'm leaning towards the first one at the moment.)

Hmm. After a bit more research and some thought... I am still no clearer. Though I perhaps am better informed - I haven't been optimising Kana's chants very well, and apparently putting him in heavy armour DOESN'T increase his chanting speed. (Better optimisation of his chants might, though...) I think I will take GM for a bit - at least make inroads into her quest (Kana's very near the top end of the party for XP anyway) and see how I go. Though if I run into any more dragons and the like, I suspect Kana's worth fetching!

I see what you did there. Now, you mention it, so do I. And now I'm stick with the image of this being resolved via a rap-battle, in which Kana turns his turban on backwards and gestures with his arquebus held sideways. (Which he can do because he's a a freaking Aumaua.) (Eder likely cheers them on, Sagani watches with polite bemusement (them Forieigners, eh?), Aloth just facepalms and Durance probably has some form of apoplexy. Win, win, then, really...) That... image may be a strong point in Kana's favour, wanting to double-spam Mind Blades notwithstanding...

I might have made stats not be quite a linear prodecure, if I really want to discourage people from dropping stats to 3 or something, and made the maluses proportionally increase the further below 10 you went. Otherwise, I don't think there's any real way of obviating the fact that with any set of stats, there is going to be optimum stats and less-optimum stats for different classes and yu're going to get "dump" stats whatever, all you can do is change the value of "dump" from "ridiculously low" to "don't put any more than the points you start with in"; and if there was, the choice between stats would be less meaningful anyway.

Fight! Oh, wait, no, that's not what I meant at all...! I have just reached Dyrwood and am about to recruit Grieving mother. I have left it rather late - since I did bascially the entire of Defiance Bay before moving afield. When I picked up Pallegina recently I realised that I ought to grab the last companiosn before I got much higher, so as to be able to not lose my choice of talents/skills so much. (My party is heavily invested in Stealth, for one thing.) Problem is, I'm having a real job in trying to decide whether I should keep Kana (who has been with me since I picked him up) or replace him with GM. I'm playing a cipher (and one rather better built), so I'd be replacing a chanter with a second one (albiet with a different build and powers aside from the important one (i.e. Mind Blades) So, on the one hand, Kana is a fairly cheerful fellow (it's nice to see a smailing face) and I've had him now for most of the game to this point and I have a tendancy to get... attached to character once I've been playing with them a while (I find it harder to replace characters when later or "better" ones come along in RPGs generally - one of the reasons I liked the "party XP" thing from KotR onwards was I felt I could chop and change my party more. On the other hand, chanters are... of moderate use. I've noticed he's slightly better when stripped down to robes instead of armour, but usually (probably because I'm on normal), usually the combat is over before he gets chance to do crack out his Class abilities. He shines rather more in boss fights (like against the first dragon I fought), where the longer battle means he has time to get at least one off... Ciphers are stupid-good, and I'm very tempted to add a second one (since she had a slightly different build to me... though yikes, those stats...) She actually has a better Stealth than Kana when recurited, so it means she's sort of viable. General opinion seems to be she's one of the better companions RP-wise and Kana is less so 9though I kinda like the guy.) The other deal-breaker is I've heard you need to have her in your party for her quest like Durance. So the biggy here is whether this is time-based (as Durance sort of appeared to be, since he talked after rests quite a lot, though we seem to have stalled out on his quest for the moment - I presume it'll progress maybe in Act 3?) Or whether its quest-based, like the Stronghold turns. The former means I could leave her keep-bound and just grab her out to do her quests (as I will doubtless for the others) with some judicious rest-spam, the latter means I basically have to keep her permenantly. Does anyone know what the mechanics for this is (as this will go a long way in convincing me which one to go for.) Related, though more mechanics: why did they not have the personal stats for the characters save when they are removed? I like having those stats and if I hadn't only just realised that it didn't, I probably would have been more circumspect about not removing characters from the party once first recruited. It just seems a daft thing to not do - I never liked that it didn't in BG and onwards, and it's certainly not a technical limitation nowadays... (Esepcially if it's "time in party" that is the factor of Durance and/or GM's quests, as opposed to just after umpteen rests or something.) It's rather silly, I know, but it feels like I'm being mildly punished for not sticking with the same characters or for swapping them around.

Hmm. I THINK it may still be worth my doing, since I cleared Ansalog's Compass after I posted yesterday, and I noted that I was able to get really quite close (maybe 1/4-1/5th screen width) to the Xaurips before even going yellow. But still not hugely conclusive, it just might they have poor detection to start with.

I have been cheerfully sinking most of my party's skill points into Stealth (because I actually do like the mechanic) - most of them are on 8 and the lowest around 5 (Kana...). I've mostly been using it just to close range in formation, with duspatching the odd high-stealth character to do abit of theivery as required. The questrion is, am I actually wasting my time? What I don't know is how much effect a point of stealth has in real money (i.e. how close you can get to the enemy before you start being spotted). The yellow/red circles are... not vastly helpful, since I have not much idea how the interplay of skill verses (presumably) perception on the monsters works. I sort of presume the monsters have a detection radius which compares to a character's individual Stealth skill and the monster's preception... Unless it only checks the lowest? Anybody have some information on the way it all works and/or or how to optimise (as best one can when using the NPCs) Stealth utility? This is particualry coming up as I've picked up a new NPC companion (the paladin) now I'm at level 7, and obviously can't start to get their stealth up straight away and I'm now wondering how much effect that's going to have on my overall strategy.

Balder's Gate had a lower level cap (level 10 if you had the expansions and you were a rogue or bard - less than that for everyone else), and IWD's was pretty low. PoE 2 - which I suspect from the initial success may be be A Thing will likely follow more like Baldur's 2 to Baldur's 1: one assumes that they've probably done it this way at least in part to make scaling in a sequel/expansion less difficult. (Especially as this is a new system and there are no benchmarks to work to.) Now that they have what is the equivilent of Baldur's Gate 1, with some luck they can expand it in the saem way IWD and BG 2 were able to build and improve on it. (Noting you also got way less customisation in BG 1/2 and IWD, because it was AD&D (though WD's expansion moved it to more 2.75.0) IWD 2 was 3.x and thus you at least got things like feats, and Torment allowed you customisation, but only from the default dude.)

As someone who does a bit of 3D modelling (albeit for 3D printing rather than games, but the principles are not that wildly dissimilar), I'll just make this point. The problem with 3D - as evidenced particularly with NWN - is you have to make EVERYTHING. You want a table full of food? Right, you have to make a 3D model of all the food as individual elements. You want a different shaped room? You have to model that seperately. These things are really non-trivial in terms of time. PoE's - and the old IE - way of handling things means that, with the fixed angle, you only have to draw a picture of the table. Draw a picture of the different shaped room. (Obviously, I'm over simplifying, but you get the idea.) Point is, it is FAR less resource intensive to do it this way that to have to model every tree - and why a lot of games, especially older ones, looked to so samey, because they had to reuse assets all the time. With pre-rendered drawing, you can get much more varity of character much more easily. Imagine trying to model PS:T as a 3D game... It's take forever. Yes, if you had an unlimited budget (and time), 3D is great. In the real world I'll take the pre-rendered backgrounds any day of the week - especially if it means get more content out of it at the end of the day. (And, in my opinion, PS:T is the game all other should be striving to beat, since it is still unsurpassed by any contenders since.)

In fact, many of us funded the game explictly FOR those features.

Yep! And the fun's not quite over yet, since I've got to wait for the patch anyway...! Depends if the QA at GOG is due to them processing their own QT is what takes a couple of days, it may take them ANOTHER couple of days to vet the hotfix. As I'm currently (lucky for me!) bug-free, I can afford to hold off if this is the case. (Though to be fair, my main is the locksmith anyway.)

I would shout "nooooooooooo! My Mind-Blade-and-Arbalest-spamming-Cipher!" But it was abundantly clear (on the basis that when I last checked, he'd got the majority of kills and was out-damaing the entire rest of the party (and his nearest competitor Aloth) by five times - 11k to 2k) that it was very likely to get nerfed in the first patch! Because seriously, the amount of damage he's been putting out is quite silly. Hilarious, but silly. (Also, I'm on gog, so I don't have to patch if I do't want too, if it REALLY bothered me... And actually, might be better holding off anyway, if it means a further delay to hotfixing the patch..!) Also, I would just like to note, that compared to say, War for the Overworld that came out a couple of days ago, PoE is actually pretty damn light on bugs. (To be fair to WftO, they are putting patches out fast - unfortunately, this sometimes means they're breaking things as well, but there you go...!)

(First shouting with larger font sizes and multiple colours makes your post harder to read and people will be more inclined to dismiss what you're saying on principle, regardless of the content.) In my opinion, it really wouldn't be. (Even aside the prely mechanical issues which mean it simply isn't going to happen.) I got exactly the game I paid for (for the first time in about two years). I LIKE having the rest system in. It's part-and-parcel of the tabletop RPG experience (at least of all the RPGs I play) and the IE and games and PoE are basically a single-player (for me anyway) version of that. I have already felt steadily squeezed out of the gaming market by "modern" RPGs (the last one I played was ME3 and I haven't touched DA2/DA3, despite owning the former) - not to mentioned the lack of other generas that just stopped existing before the emergance of kickstarter: for the first time this year for the last few years, I actually have some new games to look forward to, instead of replaying 20-year-old games (or re-releases of twenty-year-old-games) constantly, because there is nothing else out I care to play. So if you want to blame someone for implementing the rest system, you can blame me personally, if you like, with my dread old-gamer, Rest-Liking Ways: because essentially, Obsidian actually made the game I asked for. And we clearly have very different tastes in what is good in an RPG.

I think the resting mechanics is so good, I'm more that half inclined to start using it on my TABLETOP gaming, let alone in PoE itself. (Especially for something like 4E, where we have had to come to a gentleman's agreement with the DM to fight for encounters before resting so we don't slaughter the module.) I find it also quite amusing tat we have finally take to calling it "per rest" and not "per day", since I suspect it's only been truly "per day" and not "per 8 hours rest" in the early days of the D&D. (Though they COULD have set it in BG 1 to what the strict reading of the rules said, which was clerics only got spells at sunset or dawn (or some other set time of day), but that would have merely made everyone have to click the button 2-3 times instead of once...)

Which, to be fair, was something that tended to be done, especially where there is essentially unlimited XP and an arbitarily high level cap. (See: Planescape Torment, where on one of my palythroughs (which I call the "Nameless Nutter" run, I basically solo'd the entire game (only having companions in long enough to talk to them for XP and then booting them out again) and squeezed every last drop out of the game to finish at level 64...) So it did make a tendancy of "complete quest, kill all quest givers for a few extra XP" and/or "kill everything everywhere to maximise XP." Making killing stuff not grant XP in and of itself is, I think a good idea in that in makes people less inclinded to feel they have to kill everything or "lose out" on XP that would get then as high as possible. Spoiler:

With all the pets (plus potential animal companions), shouldn't there be a menagerie in the stronghold...? I'm a terrible person (but we knew that already), I keep shoving all the non-dragon pets into my extra dimensional space... Wait, no, can't be worse than Pokemon, right? They'll be fine, its not like it's a bag of holding that doesn't have air inside it, right? ... I'd it some water in, but wouldn't that make all my food and/or loot all damp and unpleasent...?

I am EXTREMELY pleased, personally. I am very much enjoying everything - the only niggles I have are very minor (a few typos, inevitable in a game this size, not so fond of the grave titles, because, while there are a few funny ones, a lot of them are a bit imersion breaking. Still, if a thing I could entirely ignore if it really bothered me because other people playing for the priviledge is what got us the game, I can't really complain! The other kickstarter NPCs are interesting, but it's bit of a shame that's all the interaction is limited to.) I actually, *gasp* really like the group stealth. For probably the first time in... EVER, I'm investing in a rank or two of Stealth for my whole party! (My Cipher can take care of the mechanics, I have one good Lore guy, everything else is a bit of a bonus!) I am enjoying the combat - making resting a finite resource means I'm pacing myself and using the per rest resouces more sparingly (I tended to nona-rest-nova in the older IE games - where you sort of had to.) Here, because you have resources that come back (like endurance), I find myself ALMOST likening it to D&D 4E (only done, in my opinion, rather better.) Having to set the autopause up to go much more often is something I've had to get used to, if for no other reason than the characters not auto-targeting enemies when one dies (and it's not right next to them).

The characters in the keep definitely do gain XP - I did a test myself today.(I put my created mage in with 3017 XP, went and cleared the wilderness area before entering Defiant City and at the inn, dragged her out and she'd gained about 200-300ish XP. I didn't, like an idiot, check how much XP the rest of the activfe party had gained. It does appear to be at a fairly reduced rate, though, so I've no idea how much slower it is.

Okay... I tried following the link, but it wouldn't download. I clicked on the "download" button - both places it was on screen - but it just did nothing. (I even tried signing up for Box and installing the software, which appeared to do nothing.) Any ideas? I also couldn't get it to work. I changed the link. It should work now. Yeah, that worked, cheers!

Okay... I tried following the link, but it wouldn't download. I clicked on the "download" button - both places it was on screen - but it just did nothing. (I even tried signing up for Box and instaling the software, which appeared to do nothing.) Any ideas?

Am I misunderstanding here? I thought the OP appeared to be complaining that Alt-Tab paused the game (instead of task switching), but wiith your post I am wondering ig am just being daft and he meant that he's irritated the game pauses WHILE Alt-Tabbed...? (That does seem to make more sense, since when I Alt-Tab out of a game, it's usually to look something up/have to do some other job, so I sort of want it to be paused, as opposed to letting the game play in the background... I mean, with PoE's autopause set up I guess it's not like you;d be wiped out while you wer off-screen, but still. (I think generally pause (and usually save!) before Alt-Tabbing as a matter of course, mind.)

Dammit, chaps, I think the people who speak Foreign are figuring out our cunning plan to make everyone learn English because we native English-speakers are mostly too lazy to learn more than one language! Quick, look natural! They ought to have gotten the people who translate Asterix from French into English to do it, since that's how you localise right.