Caerdon

"Pollaxe" is the correct spelling and the most common one."Poll" is an old word for the top of the head, and here probably refers to the length of the weapon. "To poll" means to cut hair, and pollarded trees are cut at head-height.

Uh... is this the first game you've ever played? Because I've seen much, much worse - and more times than I have appendages to count them with. None of that applies to Galaxy. You decide where to install the games. You decide whether to auto-update or download patches of your own choosing manually. And you own the games you buy - you can download installers and make backup copies, for example. You can use Galaxy purely as a download manager or a patching tool. But clearly that's not good enough for you, because you hate it on principle.

That's certainly true and something that should be fixed. CDPR seems to have some pretty good programmers, one might think they'd be able to handle binary deltas.

GOG Galaxy handles updates just fine. I don't miss the days when I had to find, download and install patches manually.

People that don't check their facts and think D:OS had a smaller budget than PoE are also comical...

Sounds good to me. I never liked how an entire spell level suddenly changes from 4/rest to 4/encounter, that's just too much of a leap. I would've just made the change gradual, i.e. 4/R > 1/E + 3/R > 2/E + 2/R > 3/E + 1/R > 4/E.

http://www.gog.com/game/forgotten_realms_the_archives_collection_two Oh wow. Thank you! Don't thank me, thank CD Projekt. They've done a huge amount of work to gain the rights and to port the games for modern systems despite of how unlikely it is they'll ever make any real profits from doing so.

You still haven't worked that out of your system? Go hit a punching bag or something, there's no need for these tantrums.

http://www.gog.com/game/forgotten_realms_the_archives_collection_two

Happens to me ~50% of the time. Might be related to how I often get "assign" button instead of "recall" button in Stronghold Actions panel, also a purely graphical glitch.

Bump. This should be fixed.

There are other (sub-)forums here?

You're inventing your own lore here. Fire blights aren't made of fire, they're (fragments of) souls bonded with fire. But just because they can channel, control and use fire, that doesn't mean they can necessarily withstand arbitrary amounts of energy and heat. And we know they do have limits, because they can't just create/absorb more fire and grow bigger. Don't get me wrong, I like that blights are immune to their own elements - it does make sense and it's good for gameplay - but it's not something the lore as we know it demands. That said, flat-out immunity to a specific type of physical damage very rarely makes sense. Why, exactly, are earth blights immune to slashing? An axe would still carry lots of momentum and act as a crushing weapon, even if the blade couldn't cut into the rock for some reason. And if the blade hit an edge on the surface of the rock, it would still concentrate all that momentum over a tiny spot, effectively dealing at least some piercing damage. High resistances - even very high - do make sense, immunities don't. Making some of the toughest monsters in the game arbitrarily immune to a specific physical damage type is an example of what I call artificial difficulty.

There's an easy workaround: play normal mode and delete your save files manually when you die.

No, wearing plate armour doesn't require any special strength. Shows how much you know about armour, especially considering how you call it "plate mail". Aloth has perfectly ordinary, lean frame and MIG and CON that give no penalties. Kana is a huge aumaua; Sagani is a muscular, stocky dwarf, a long distance hunter and an archer; both have high MIG and bonuses from CON too, so why on Earth would the not be able to wear armour?!? Museum plaques are notoriously untrustworthy. 200+ pounds seems more than a bit implausible, seeing how most full plate armours weigh less than 50 lb. Armours specifically made for jousting could sometimes weigh up to 100 lb, but they weren't used for combat. -- Seriously guys, go look at some re-enactors. You'll see that the majority of them are perfectly ordinary men, not some hulking mountains of muscle. Typically a good portion of them are outright nerds (no offence) with physique that goes along with the title, yet they have no problems moving about and doing combat demonstrations.

This is just plain untrue. Wearing armour doesn't require any special strength - any ordinary man can do it - and it certainly doesn't require any special skill as in some games. Armour is designed to be easily worn. Yes, it's certainly more tiring to spend a day in armour instead of your ordinary clothes, but any "adventurer" would be fit enough that they can easily function and move about in one. There are two main reasons why mages generally don't wear armour in games: Tradition. Mages are generally balanced by making them glass cannons. Breaking away from silly traditions is only refreshing. The second reason is not a problem if making mages more tanky also makes them less cannon, as it does in PoE. In fact, unless the lore specifically states that using magic in armour is particularly difficult, they should be wearing even more armour than fighters. Why? Because they don't need to move as much. They don't need to dodge attacks, wave their swords and shields around and step back and forth, trying to balance between defending themselves and finding an opening to attack. Mages can just stand behind the front line and call down fire from the sky, so why shouldn't they be protected while doing it? It really sounds to me like you're not taking advantage of all the options the game already provides. There are many, many ways to protect the more vulnerable party members. There are numerous caster-protection spells and stasis shield spells and items and abilities that help movement and disengagement. There are defensive and melee-oriented skills and items. There are lots and lots of CC spells and abilities. There are alternate weapon sets and Spiritshift. There are countless ways you can position your party. You can lump your casters together or keep them apart and bring some characters in only after the combat begins. You can have a secondary tank start combat in the back row with a ranged weapon. You can have a frontline character ready to disengage and move back to protect others. And so on. There really are dozens of ways to deal with these problems, and they're all more tactical/stretegic than having your tank announce to the enemies that their mothers were hamsters and their fathers smelt of elderberries.

Could you expand on this, please? It's a common misconception that giving players more control over the flow of battle automatically leads to increase in tactical depth. This is not true; there needs to be a balance of control and unpredictability. Being able to plan for failure and to adjust to changing combat situation is a major part of tactics. Explicit control over aggro mechanics leads to static, predictable combat flow, eliminating the need for backup plans and multiple lines of defence. I think this was very evident in DA series. It was extremely easy to get every enemy to attack your tank, and if someone eventually broke off and went after your mage, a quick taunt got them back in line. There was no need to protect your back line, and no need to even consider how to protect your back line. What's so "strategic" about that?

I just pick whatever looks good. Many here already complain that the game is too easy, so I see no reason to min-max every little detail.

Could someone please tell me why everyone always assumes that a procedural loot system inevitably results in massive amounts of more and more powerful items like in Diablo or Borderlands? Is it because they can't differentiate between how things usually are from how things can be? I loved how magic items were much more rare in BG1 than in BG2. Varscona, that +2 longsword (with additional +1 cold damage) was, by far, my most used weapon in that game, but you know what? There was absolutely zero reason why that sword had to in possession of Greywolf instead of any number of characters a well-designed loot system could've randomly picked, such as Meilum the Masterful, Raemon, Drasus, Desreta or any of the groups hired to kill you or that you could otherwise pick a fight with. I think people grossly overestimate both the quality of hand-placed loot and the amount of thought the devs actually put into placing it. While the loot in BG series was more or less appropriately placed, it really was nothing more than that. That's nothing that a well-implemented procedural loot system can't handle, but it can also handle arbitrarily large amounts of loot drops while ensuring that all weapon and item categories are well-represented and distributed evenly in a progressive manner. The hand-placed loot in both BG1 and BG2 failed in that regard.

Item randomization mod is one of my must-have mods for BG1/2, and that's just a really naive, simplistic implementation of item randomization. Let's be clear here: "the chance to get different gear than I got last time" is not the reason why I "want to play through something again" - but it absolutely increases my enjoyment of the game. Not getting the Holy Avenger isn't all that horrible really, there are plenty of excellent weapons in the game - especially when you adjust your mindset: you shouldn't take every item for granted and plan your playthrough around the items you know you're going to find, you should plan for the unexpected and find ways to make do with what you get. If paladins are too weak without Carsomyr - another discussion entirely - then that's a problem with class balance, not loot distribution. And, of course, procedural loot doesn't mean that unique monsters can't have specific, unique loot (why do people even keep bringing this up?) About your second paragraph: I totally get that, and that's certainly the upside of non-randomized loot. I just think that the downsides are much more significant. The simple fact is that you're gimping your party if you don't have a paladin, someone with proficiency in flails, another with proficiency in katanas etc. Non-randomized loot discourages experimentation with classes and weapon proficiencies because you already know in advance what the optimal setups are. Of course, BG2 with item randomization mod is far from a perfect example, because the game wasn't designed for that and the item distribution in the game is extremely unbalanced - some weapon categories are just better than others, regardless of loot distribution.

A huge amount of replay value. Just to be clear: I'd love to have more randomized elements in general, not just loot. I want quests with varying elements, even if they were just some NPCs that change location in each playthrough. I'd certainly like to have more randomization in combat encounters, so that I don't always know that there's a lurker lurking behind that one particular tree. All that would make exploration much more meaningful and worthwhile in subsequent playthroughs, but even just procedural loot would be a huge step in the right direction.

Sounds to me like he's actually enjoying the game, unlike those who "need constant stimulation" and access to 100% of loot in every playthrough to get their "satisfaction". Where does this idea come from that you need to be able to open every single chest in the game to consider a playthrough "complete"? Ridiculous. Just move on and play the game. Did I stutter? "Complete" is not an ambiguous word. You do every quest. Get every item. Get the best outcome in everything. Anything less than everything is not complete. If you think otherwise you should probably go back to grammar school. Of course it's an ambiguous word, it has multiple meanings after all, which is very much the definition of "ambiguous". You're just picking a rather extreme interpretation. I'd consider a playthrough "complete" when you've finished the main storyline, everything else is bonus.

Earliest specific use I can remember was when I played Rise of the Triad in 1995, the game would show a "Ludicrous gibs!" message when you destroyed a bunch of enemies with heavy weapons. But I think the term was already well-established at the time.

I'm surprised to see so many people unfamiliar with the term, it has been used for this very purpose for at least 20 years. I guess it's just less common in some circles than in others. Certainly a common term when it comes to FPS's, but I'm pretty sure it was also commonly used on Bioware's old Baldur's Gate forums.

Sounds to me like he's actually enjoying the game, unlike those who "need constant stimulation" and access to 100% of loot in every playthrough to get their "satisfaction". Where does this idea come from that you need to be able to open every single chest in the game to consider a playthrough "complete"? Ridiculous. Just move on and play the game.