Jojobobo

I'm playing a Barbarian currently, so I'll share my thoughts: (i) Frenzy is fine to take early, so long as you don't so something weird like dump Con so you're super fragile. The natural huge health and endurance of Barbarians means they can take a beating, so if you stick them in heavy armor and take Savage Defiance (which heals a ton and is per encounter) you shouldn't really have survivability issues. My Barbarian is Resolve 3 and I'm playing solo on PotD, so they have about the worst Deflection you can get, but they managed just fine - even being interrupted with that low Resolve isn't as much an issue as you'd imagine (I still haven't had to take a Spirit Shield potion and I've got to WM part I). (ii) It's hard to say, it depends what you're looking for. An idea I came up with was to have a shield Barbarian so their Deflection would be much better (which sounds to be pretty much what you're looking for), then when you think about Frightened and Terrified they both debuff accuracy which in a way more or less makes them a 25 Deflection base class minimum with these effects (as well as assisting your entire party), especially when you add in the Daze from Dragon Leap. However if you're not looking to have high defences, you don't necessarily need either. Boeroer is currently developing the idea further, so hopefully you'll see a class build of it soon (Threatening Presence and the Executioner's Hood is another great way to keep enemies frightened, so you could always respec these out when you get that). (iii) I much prefer One Stands Alone, it's much more consistent and pretty much entirely stops you being flanked. However, if you're trying for Vengeful Defeat, you're kind of looking to get low health anyway - so it really depends. There's many ways to build a Barbarian, so how much mileage you get from a particular ability varies. (iv) I think pretty much all of them should take it. Even if you do a Vengeful Defeat build, you can use something like Second Chance to revive them and then get pretty much all your endurance back with Savage Defiance - or if you're going pure DPS it keeps you alive long enough to do heavy damage (it's pretty much instant cast). (v) I've taken both, but honestly I think you could forgo Bloodlust and just use Deleterious Alacrity of Motion Potions or strap on the Sanguine Plate. Blood Thirst on the other hand I would say is one of the best Barbarian abilities - it literally makes encounters a blood bath. Most mobs consist of a few tougher guys and loads of weaker ones - if you concentrate on the tougher one the weaker ones will die from Carnage. Once you pick off the first weak enemy, you instantly attack again, making it very likely you'll pick off another weak enemy in the process (seeing as all the weak guys have similar health), and then another - before long you've landed about 6 consecutive hits on the tough enemy and all the little guys are dead. If you take one ability other than Heart of Fury, make it this one. (vi) I wouldn't say so as Raven mentioned, Barbarians have high enough endurance that you don't really need to try and optimise their DR (though you are correct, it is now +3). Stick them in decent armour if you want DR, as mentioned with Blood Thirst you can often produce an extremely rapid succession of hits regardless of what armour you are in - so long as you are taking on a group. (vii) It's not something I've ever taken, however Boeroer has mentioned previously it's a great means to get right to a caster as you don't get any disengagement attacks. Personally, I'd just use something like Dragon Leap to get there instead. (viii) I guess you can take it if you need the extra CC, and the damage is good, but it is only 1 per encounter and you've got to wonder whether just taking talents to up damage has more worth at the level you can finally take it. It's pretty decent, but not exceptional. I hope that was some help, and good luck with your Barb!

I like Cthulhu as much as the next man, but isn't the point of cosmic horror to be esoteric? To try and replicate it never really works in the same way as when you read the stories. I mean I've read a lot of Cthulhu mythos stories in various collections, but as none really capture the slow building dread and utter hopelessness in the face of adversity that's incomprehensibly overwhelming and horrific as Lovecraft did I don't really see how a game developer can replicate that - especially in a graphical sense. I never did play the PnP game, so maybe players would tell me that feeling can be replicated, but as Lovecraft stories have such a unique tone, pace and voice it does feel unlikely. I just don't see Lovecraft as ever really being truly replicable in any medium, he picked a writing style that was thoroughly outlandish to even his contemporaries so to try and ape it when it was odd for the time has never really in my opinion worked. I guess I'm just not a fan of bastardizations of Lovecraft's work, I find even C M Eddy Jr and Robert W Chambers don't have quite the same effect.

Well either roleplay as you were and enjoy meaty consequences, or pre-google quests to avoid such eventualities. I still don't get the problem, if you're Trial by Ironing for consequential gameplay I would feel almost satisfied someone had died to re-affirm my gameplay choice - even if it was due to a scripted event; if you're Trial by Ironing for the difficulty/achievements I would pre-search the outcomes to avoid pitfalls. If you're going in blind to a perma-death run and you aren't satisfied with people dying by scripted events/glitches/extreme misfortune, then I'm not really sure what you were looking for with going in such a difficulty setting. Besides having just one guy die out of the plethora you can hire doesn't sound like a dramatic setback, even if you do lose their equipment.

I think the difference is an extra 2 DR or 3 points of Deflection is more negligible by that point - end game enemies have high accuracy and high damage so a little more DR or Deflection is going to be a drop in the ocean of what you already have. Comparatively, I'd say that as legendary enchantments add both accuracy and damage they make much more of an impact - so it's a lot more fun to get to use them against the remaining boss monsters after the Kraken. Even so, I think it does need to be a little tougher (more than just DR added) - it's just important not to go overboard and make it just as tough as the Bog Dragons or maybe Alpine Dragon, etc. From the sounds of things it seems like they're pressed for time, so likely DR will be the only thing added.

I actually kept a save for it on my last play through right before, so it'll be interesting to try it again post patch. It was rather a wimp, however I'm not a 100% sure on what difficultly to pitch it at however as you kind of want its eyes to legendasize (a legit word, obviously) your end game weapons to attempt the other tough fights. If the Kraken is made much tougher than the dragons, then there isn't really much point it making its eyes the thing that upgrades your weapons as you're not going to get to use you legendary weapons on anything interesting.

They were for me, as you can't Confuse them like most dragons - and there's two of them, and you occasionally seem to get turned into a piglet no matter how high you buff. Something I've always wanted to try with the pair is dominating Gafonercos, he's not immune to it like Turisulfus. I'd imagine if you could fire fast enough with a Wizard, Priest or Druid and Gyrd Háewanes Sténes you could let Gafonercos do the fighting for you. Something that I've only recently realised is that Carow Golan is probably better than Llengrath potions for most boss fights, Llengrath potions boost Deflection higher than Carow Golan but they both boost Reflex by +20. As most monster boss fights don't target Deflection, Carow Golan frees up a load of quick slots that would normally be filled with Llengrath potions for figurines, offensive scrolls or whatever else you fancy - plus you only have worry about reapplying your Scrolls of Defence (I found there was almost inevitably a time where I wouldn't have both on at once, you can of course reapply prematurely and suppress the previous but you will at some point take a heavy hit in these battles and then you have to heal - scuppering your plans to reapply one or the other). Though the Carow Golan Int penalty is quite hefty, it can be perfectly offset for a while with the Mind Grubs and Whiteleaf combo I've mentioned previously. Even on a 3 Int character the Carow Golan/Whiteleaf/Mind Grubs combo is suitable as you can still obtain 11 Int for reasonable Scrolls of Defence durations: +4 from Gwyn's Band of Union, +2 from the Dragon's Lair in Dyrford (assuming you want the +2 Might/Con, otherwise you can go for the Forum resting bonus or whatever) and +2 from Aldwyn's Boon (though Lyrinia is usually better, such a low Int usually means higher scores in Might and Con, so on balance it plays out fine). As long as you don't have lengthy recovery (which you shouldn't as armor is practically worthless in the face of enemies who are going to way exceed your DR anyway in a single hit) it shouldn't be a problem to keep them maintained. While I'm still playing solo, I imagine for team play if you buff just one tanky guy on your team like this and give them Drawn in Spring you should be able to take down the Bog Dragons, particularly if you manage to score some decent hits with your team mates before they're knocked out.

I found the upscaled Sky Dragon easy, I didn't even do any consumable buffing for it - just used a few Scrolls of Defence and Llengrath's Potions. It's not hard to get decent positioning with Boots of Speed (north west on the map behind the stone structure) with it and so keep it at arms reach, plus most of the trash mobs are left behind. It also doesn't attack very fast, so while it can Stun you it can't usually make good on hitting you again while you're debuffed. I found the Adra Dragon to have similar bulkiness to the Alpine (in terms of how quickly they died) - so possibly it's effected by upscaling? Either that, or its base for PotD is already pretty good.

When I play a build that uses the Coil of Resourcefulness I might give them a try as the accuracy would be better with decent Mechanics too, until that point I can't be bothered.

Great, thanks guys!

As you say, probably a bug then. Never hurts to rule out the obvious.

I think even if it's not massively adaptive, the lack of any sort of filter does make the dialogue a bit poor. I'd say most people don't want to read through 5 different irrelevant dialogue options to get to the one or two relevant ones, yet they would enjoy a bit of tailoring in the dialogue that reflect their character. Drilling down into it further, though I don't like the Fallout Karma system I do like how actions rather than words more often than not add to your Karma rating. Taking Cruel and the opposite Benevolent, more often then not this is all based on dialogue and all are presented to you at once. It's not subtle, as every Benevolent person doesn't need to say, "I'm doing a nice thing right now," and every Cruel person doesn't need to say, "I'm going to kick your puppy now" - if these concepts were represented through actions (maybe even in the scripted events) then that would go a way to establishing character. Actions speak louder than words, etc. I guess I feel the dialogue and the disposition system lacks something organic and natural feeling. Whether that could be more scripted events and less shoehorned dialogue dispositions, or an adaptive system where your character starts to develop what they're going to say - I don't know. Something feels artificial currently, likely that the devs wanted the disposition system so there's (a) too much leading dialogue where the disposition is easily flagged and so it feels crude and (b) dialogue where a disposition is attached where it doesn't necessarily feel sensical. Both of these things being present, which I do think they are to an extent even though they are opposite positions (likely because of too many dialogue writers), makes dialogue in the game a little jarring at times - too scripted.

IIRC you only get them outside in the Caryon Scar map (i.e. not whilst inside the Lair of the Eyeless in the middle), have you been there yet? There not a permanent feature to use willy-nilly.

It's usually after two, but sometimes won't activate until three are killed, and will sometimes activate after just one. Could be how the game defines a group of enemies for the purposes of combat.

I wouldn't say it's removing choice, as all the options would be available to your character at the start, but as you select certain options more often you get access to fewer irrelevant options. The only option it is removing is the option to play someone who schizoidly picks conflicting options all the time, to me that doesn't sound like denying people freedom. Further, dialogue checks (i.e. New Vegas style checks that see if you have a certain rep or skill/attribute level) are extremely commonplace, and that's all an adaptive system would do. I think the best way to do it would be checking at a greater than or equal value. So say if your doing a very slight benevolent favour for someone, that could be blocked to cruelty 3 or greater (really cruel people wouldn't do something that doesn't help them even if it's minor, but semi-cruel people might still do something outside of their own interest). Then say there's a huge, altruist sacrifice you make for someone - that might be ruled out to people with any cruel nature at all. In this way, your dispositions get reinforced giving your character personality, wildly inappropriate options for how you've acted up until now aren't displayed and it gives a level of consequence for acting consistently in a certain way.

Apologies for harping on about it, but I still think the Stun on crit durations on weapons should be fixed - currently it is way too easy to keep an enemy stunned with such a weapon (e.g. you can do it with 18 Int, 10 Dex and in full plate, without any other speed modifiers). This has quite a large impact from Barbarians using such a weapon, but really any tanky build with decent positioning can abuse it to stun lock enemies indefinitely - killing them more or less one by one. Stun naturally provides more crits due to the deflection debuff, so after the first crit keeping the effect up isn't exactly hard. Loren Tyr did mention a coding fix that sounds easy enough to implement, so it shouldn't be a costly change. EDIT: Ninja'd by AndreaColombo, didn't realise that was the "this" he was talking about as I didn't follow the link.

A lot of the time your personality in Fallout 4 was SHAAUUUN! though... More seriously, the voiced protagonist really hurt Fallout 4 for me, because the conversations didn't follow a natural tone, you could be blandly inquisitive one line and then passionately angry the next and then right back to bland to tail off. I never felt like the player character was a defined personality any more than they were in any other Fallout game, if anything they had too little personality because most of the voice lines were delivered in an amazingly bland tone except when they were about SHAAUUUN! Yeah I hated Fallout 4 for a wide variety of reasons not limited just how crap the main character was. Easily my least favourite modern RPG, made more annoying by the fact I think it could have been great. I still think an adaptive system would be better, in some ways after a point you want you character to be reacting in an organic way - so the addition of loads of options to read through late in the game when your character's personality is by then set in stone doesn't make much sense. Later options could be gated in that if you have a cruel option you can only access it if you already have say 2 cruel disposition or if you have a negative enough reputation with that group (and vice versa with benevolent and positive rep). You can even make them quest state or narrative locked, for example if you play a cruel character but then there's some massive quest where you pledge to redeem yourself you can start accessing options for and developing a benevolent reputation again. Providing multiple means to access such an option (by disposition or by faction rep) takes into account not only your personality but also whether or not you get on with a group (a cruel character doesn't need to be benevolent to help a group he gets on with), it would also have greater subtlety which is my main beef with the current system. While Pillars does this a little bit, doing it to a much greater extent would have removed a lot of the noise from late game dialogue. As you say, the muddled and inconsistent allocation of dispositions is likely from having too many writers tackling the dialogue.

I think I'm almost alone in not really caring for mods at all, I like to play the developers' creative vision rather than some random guy's. There are some exceptions, like when a RTS is modded to such an extent you're pretty much playing a different game entirely (mods for the Total War franchise are a good example of this) or mods that restore cut content (Arcanum, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines), but otherwise I keep well away even when it comes to simple things like weather mods. However, as most people like mods, I can appreciate that providing easy to use modding tools will likely prolong a game's lifespan and drum up more interest for future entries - so it seems like a good idea in principle.

I'd be interested in seeing World of Darkness as an isometric RPG. All those games are party based, so I think it could work. It would also be a very different setting to what's been in isometric RPGs before (especially if set in a modern era) so I think that would make it pretty interesting and give it a unique selling point compared to just another fantasy RPG. Then again, I'd also want a 3D World of Darkness game, or failing that any kind of World of Darkness game at all.

Glad you followed that idea through, sounds like a great character build. Well for the most part this is true, but for the later medieval warfare wikipedia kindly tells me Redcoats were able to reload 4 times a minute. I think it's the purpose of fantasy games to retain realism while being fun to play, making guns reload at as fast as a slightly later stage of technological advancement may be more rewarding - after all even though people enjoy grounded fantasy more liberties can be taken in the sake of fun, especially when the kind of liberties taken in such a rigorously mechanical system as Pillars are never going to be that liberal in the first place. Overall, I'm not casting a vote on this one. I think there's enough of an argument on both sides to make it a difficult thing to have a hard ruling over. Besides, if someone can play solo with firearms like I did, it becomes tricky to say it isn't a viable option. Chanters do have natural advantages in terms of high DoT with Dragon Thrashed - but what I didn't mention in my class build was that I did the same thing with a Paladin that I sacked in after 50 hours after realising a Chanter was better. Point being, if you can make something work even non-optimal on the highest difficulties (Paladin, which would have also assuredly worked because of their massive defences) it's a bit tough to suggest a legit rebalance argument.

It could be that on that build I sometimes targeted the melee mobs hitting my lower Deflection first (thereby blinding them and making the situation better), but on the whole no I really don't remember seeing it that much at all. Regardless, to me it still screams situational compared to other weapon bonuses - arbalest prone on crit is a much more ubiquitous benefit for example.

As someone who played solo with only guns - I'm not really sure. I kind of appreciate how such a long reload cycle makes them more or less historically accurate to our world's standards, however I do think there's something lacking. I've never really seen an NPC Wizard use Arcane Veil, so the whole "they pierce the Arcane Veil" schtick doesn't seem worth much. I guess buffing Gunner, decreasing reload slightly in general, or letting any speed enchantments (as Kaylon said) effect reload might make guns more of an appealing option. It is worth pointing out that some guns still are very good (Silver Flash I would say still stands out, as it casts the decent damage Divine Mark very regularly which negates the Blunderbuss accuracy penalty and also blinds groups). I still think their principle usage should be quick switch with a set of them, like how traditional pirates would carry several pistols pre-loaded purely so they wouldn't have to reload, but that doesn't mean the reload cycle currently isn't also overly punitive.

The Black Path is fine in the long run, though a little underwhelming (the -10 Accuracy improves your defence rolls naturally). If you're really after DPS, +corrode would be better with the Bittercuts - if you're not using two Bittercuts possibly +burn would be better instead, particularly with the sabre nerf coming 3.04.

As others have said use custom portraits, there is the means to do so and so if you find the current selection limiting do that. However, at the same time more portraits originally would have been nice. I remember playing Icewind Dale 2 and I think there's three separate male Drow pictures, which is just one sub-race. Here we're limited to one or two for most sub-races, which is a little restrictive if you like to only use the in game resources (which I do). Then again, I'm not bothered much by aesthetics so I don't really care. I think what bothers me more is a lot of the female voices seem to be covered by the same voice actress who has a faint lisp and says S sounds in a very sibilant way. While I don't mind the pronunciation, the fact that it's in quite a few of the different options makes the voice choices seem less unique to me.

I guess I way prefer this game to Fallout 4, where you have a prescribed personality more or less and it sucks away player agency. I think the trouble with Pillars is the disposition system, in that a large majority of conversations will be presenting you with every disposition option available regardless of your past choices and so I think this in turn makes the character come across as someone with an indistinct personality (as in, you read through all these choices when they're presented to you, and while it is to provide options in a way it does seem like the character is having all these incongruent ideas running through their head at the same time). I think an adaptive system would be nicer, where if you keep picking Cruel options your opportunity to pick Benevolent becomes less and less. Personally, I never really enjoyed the disposition system and found their to be a lot of logical flaws in it (for example, during The Final Act if you agree to side with Lumdala and then snitch on her in the end you get honest reputation, which is because you are telling the truth about the events that happened, yet you have also lied to Lumdala at the same time) - and more tellingly if you do play on Expert you'll find you just gain a lot of dispositions that you feel have nothing to do with anything you said. Too much of it is way too subjective, like I remember talking to Vithraks in the Endless Paths and getting Diplomatic disposition for no reason I could recognise - I reload (as I was playing a Bleak Walker at the time) and through some quirk I made in the dialogue that I didn't even pick up on (still going non-combat) I didn't get the reputation second time round. I think if I game has to tell you what disposition you're getting from a certain dialogue option, then that's already failed as a concept as the intent of the dialogue should be apparent from the off - and even people on Expert should be able to "get it" without being explicitly told "this is the literal disposition you will get". For me, I really enjoyed the Fallout: New Vegas system where it was attribute, skill and faction reputation based only - no need for spurious dispositions. Within those confines, you actually play to dispositions more organically as you aren't trying to fish for them - you answer in ways you think your character would rather than playing to a stereotype. For example, many of my characters were calculating mercenary types, but when they were thrust with others into the grim and hopeless situation of Dead Money they often acted more compassionate to their fellows as they were all in the same miserable boat together. In that way, there was a nuanced idea of a character, someone who reacts based on circumstance and not solely "well my character is cruel so I've got to be a **** in every conversation." However, I mainly play these games for the setting, and in Pillars I think it was quite rich. Overall, the Watcher was way better to play than the restrictive Sole Survivor in Fallout 4, but a far cry from the Courier in Fallout: NV - and I think the main reason why was the disposition system. I guess if you're looking for a more character driven experience there's always other games you can try, when I'm being prescribed a character I prefer really story driven games like BioShock Infinite.

I certainly have misunderstood you, I have little experience with Druids on the whole. Yes then one per encounter for their shifted abilities definitely sounds like the obvious thing to do, they're situational enough as it is.