Hiro Protagonist II

There are weapons that can kill Karoug. A couple of Bastard Sword +1/+3 v Shapeshifters are in the game and the second one is in Ulgoth's Beard. Adding a second sword to the game with the expansion and placing it in Ulgoths Beard is basically saying, you need this sword. I did find it odd that there was a second sword since I already had it for one of my characters, but realised it might be useful against werewolves later on. Even if you didn't find the second one in Ulgoths Beard by raiding one of the houses, you should have picked up the first one earlier in the game (Cloakwood or Baldur's Gate City depending on who you sided with in Cloakwood). The name of the bastard sword gives you a hint it'll probably be effective against werewolves since it has a bonus against shapeshifters. But yeah, having both bastard swords and the dagger with three of your characters might be a low chance if someone didn't connect the dots. I found the fight hard when I first played it but still able to overcome it. Fortunately I had all three weapons. I'm a bit of a hoarder and like to have my front line melee characters with an assortment of weapons including a couple of different swords to use for different encounters. eg. A Fighter will have two swords, another weapon and bow in their weapon slots as well as their shield and maybe another weapon in their inventory.

Don't own and never played any of the Sims games. Not my type of game.

You could probably increase Might to at least 14 and lower DEX or CON to get more dialogue options as there are Might options in dialogue. I don't recall DEX or CON options in dialogue.

Yeah, I nearly played / finished all the IE games in order of release. The exception is PS:T even though I had bought PS:T when it was released. I initially couldn't get into PS:T (quite removed from BG) and put it aside and a few months later IWD was released which I found the game style more familiar with BG and was immediately hooked. It was always marketed as a dungeon crawl where you create your own party so companions weren't going to be in. And not long after that, some months later BG2 was released. So it was a while before I got around to playing PS:T again. My progression was BG, IWD, BG2, PS:T, IWD2. When playing IWD after BG, there were a lot of technical improvements. So it was a natural progression to go from BG, IWD and then BG2 where you see IWD animations in BG2. It flowed really well for me. I really enjoy IWD but not enough to buy it again as there's nothing wrong with my copy of the game and runs on my comp. The mods like unfinished business isn't a strong selling point when I can download that for free, and having been bitten once with the BG:EE with all the bugs, I'm quite wary of Beamdog. Same with Amentep, that I've played IWD more than BG2.

Who said it was the pillar of role playing systems. Not me.

This is exactly how the system is designed. For players who accidently make a character only to find out halfway through the game that the character sucks and isn't viable. No reading of the manual necessary to learn the game. No need to delve into manuals and attributes and skills and waste time learning all that stuff. Every build should be viable. If I randomly select attributes, skills and talents and have no idea what I'm doing, I should have a viable build to finish the game. Not like that crummy stupid D&D system that a lot of posters on this forum go on about where if a player accidently puts an 8 in STR, 10 in Con and 9 in Dex, 18 in Int, 18 in Wis and 15 in Cha, only to realise their fighter is a gimped character. tsk tsk bad D&D! No, those same or similar numbers should go into PoE's attribute system and it should be viable. That's the beauty of this system! Yah! Like a random number generator. Just throw some some stats in and it'll be okay. That's where you're wrong. I do have a dual-wielding melee ranger with bear companion and had no trouble completing the beta a second time through. It was a viable build. And I selected skills that helped my Bear with its attacks. It may not have been the best, but it was viable and he could hit with his dual wielding axes quite easily. And that's the absurdity of it. Making a dual-wielding melee ranger with bear companion, playing the class as it shouldn't be designed and still being able to back up my BB Fighter and BB Rogue in melee and score hits and do damage.

No bad buildsTM

Why should there be bad effects if you dump one stat though? It goes back to what I said about if a new player accidently dumps a stat and then plays a character the wrong way, then why should they be penalised? This has been one of the arguments from those who have been defending this system. And quest base xp has been known for a long time and a lot of people seemed to be all for it.

Yeah, but that's mod approved. So that's okay for the mods and the promancers. So why not okay for xp threads?

Not sure what you mean by attributes need slightly more impact? How would you do that but still have one of your attributes with a 3 and still be viable? If someone mistakenly puts a 3 in an attribute, why should they be penalised? This has been the argument of a lot of posters on this forum for the last 2 years with defending Josh's design of no bad builds. And xp needs to be given out in smaller doses? How would you do that? So now you're not in favour of Obsidian's decision with only Quest Based XP?

What parts need tweaking?

There's really no reason not to dump stats. As Sharp_One said, there are no bad builds so you can dump stats and it's all okay. This is not D&D where if you dump your INT and DEX to 3 for a Mage, you'll gimp your mage. In PoE, you can dump INT and DEX to 3 and max out Might, Con, Resolve and Perception and it's a perfectly good build. This is the design philosophy from the dev's that even if you dump a stat by mistake, you won't get halfway through the game and realise your character sucks. So dumping an attribute is okay. The only reason I see not to dump is to try and get more dialogue choices. But then there's more than one way to solve a quest and you usually have a few dialogue choices anyway with dump stats, so it's okay if you miss out on one of those dialogue choices imo. You'll still have a few dialogue choices available to you to choose from when interacting with NPC's.

Negativity needs to be banned.

@stun. It appears from the log that the Mage took on a lion, killed it. Then is taking on another lion. And has most of his health. He's barely taken any damage. As you've said, the attributes are cosmetic. Different 'builds' may have a small difference but it will be mostly be a placebo effect. The attributes do very little to differentiate builds. Also, another post shows the difference with the Priest casting Consecrated Ground with an INT 3 and INT 18. Even dumping the stat down to 3, the area is still quite large. This is what happens when you design a system with no bad builds for people who don't know what they're doing. Dumping stats like INT and DEX down to 3 still makes a good character. I had to chuckle at this post and picture.

To borrow a post from the Codex, it's been shown that you can create a mage with max Might, dump DEX (accuracy) to 3 and INT to 3 and it's still a good build and can take on a lion one on one. There just seems to be something wrong when you can dump attributes like DEX and INT for a wizard but it's still a viable and appears to be a good build for the game.

Rose also metagamed and took the most optimal route to get to the ogre cave. Avoiding the beetles at the top of the screen at 7.20, the spider at 8.42, avoiding the wolves in the SW corner, avoiding the adventurers near the dragon's egg, and knew where to go. A new player would have been going in other directions and probably have rested a couple of times before getting to the spiders outside the ogre cave. And then in the cave, Rose metagamed again knowing the optimal route to get to the Ogre, avoiding all the other spiders in the other passages and also the spider queen. Not having a go at Rose because she's showing the demo and needs to get on with it. Just showing that metagaming a map and going the optimal route to avoid most trash mobs but still encountering some enemies shows you need to rest for your tank more than once, despite the rest of your party on full health.

And yet in the recent video, Rose does just that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51zR9lKu21s 7.21 beetle fight (2 beetles) 8.55 beetle fight (2 beetles) 10.37 Rest (Fighter at half health after encountering 4 enemies / trash mobs) 10.56 Spider fight (1st spider outside cave entrance) 12.00 Spider fight (2nd spider outside cave entrance) 13.01 Spider fight (2 spiders) 13.42 Rest (Fighter at half health after encountering 4 enemies / trash mobs) Two Camping supplies used on a fairly simple FedEx quest with the Ogre quest. The Fighter lost half his health after a couple of easy battles and the group had to rest for the fighter. You'll also notice Rose avoided the two beetles at the top of the screen at 7.20 and the one spider in the bottom left corner at 8.42 (presumably to get on with the demo and to get to the Ogre cave) and it shows it's not worth getting involved with fighting trash mobs as the Fighter's health will just go down even more while the rest of your party are on full health.

I have beta keys coming out of my ears. I've already played and still playing the Eternity beta, given away one key and still have another to give away. I might have more Eternity beta keys but not sure. With all the cross referencing with Eternity and Torment and Wateland. It's hard to keep track of so many. Same with additional keys for Wasteland and Wasteland 2 beta. I do understand what you mean. I've always had reservations with aspects of the game design and hopefully the bug fixes and other tweaks Obsidian do to the game may improve the overall gameplay quality that some of us aren't enjoying at the moment. Edit: Just gave away another Beta key for Eternity. If I have more, I'll mention it.

So you're not happy with PoE? I recall some of your posts were in the positive for this game, especially the game design. Why the turn around?

IWD1 works perfectly well for me. Rock solid stable. Won't be needing this version. Will be good to check out their bug forum to see how things go when this is released.

There are a lot of cheese tactics already with the Beta and the enemy A.I. One example is you can AoE enemies (eg. Fireball) while they don't notice you standing a few metres away. Would like to see a party of 6 Wizards throw 6 fireballs at an unsuspecting enemy. You can also run away and wait for status effects on your characters to disappear when an enemy (eg. feral druids) hits you with a spell at you. While it might be argued that Obsidian might be able to improve the A.I. as this is only a Beta, I can't see them preventing a fair amount of cheese tactics in the final game.

Yet, you will feel the need to do 'optional' quests to level up. Not when you hit max level. Once you hit max level, you probably won't want to do the optional quests unless there's some uber loot. I know I won't want to waste time on optional quests by that time. Also a problem with the optional quests I found in the beta is when I hit a 'road block' in one optional quest, eg. egg quest and not having enough in attribute/skill to complete it. When I didn't have enough of something with my characters and came back down the cliff and broke the egg, the game encourages me to save scum before every task and encounter so if I fail, I can just reload. Because if I don't reload, then all that work for that quest, the exploration and combat on the map to get to the egg, everything else leading up to it and that unfortunate failure in breaking the egg gave no xp rewards at all. So then I reload, and had to jump to another optional side quest for xp. When I hit another road block in that second optional quest due to not having enough in attribute/skills, I had to jump to a third optional quest (like the ogre quest) to complete it and get some xp rewards. This then presented another problem. That third optional quest I completed did not have enough xp rewards to level up so I have to take a fourth optional quest to complete and get xp rewards. Then I could level up and go back to those first two optional quests to complete them. All I'm doing is jumping from one optional quest to another to get xp rewards so I can level up, because the main quest doesn't have enough xp rewards to hit the level cap by the end - confirmed by Sawyer. Nothing else in the game rewards me with xp. If I hit road blocks on these optional quests, I then have to jump to other optional quests until I'm rewarded and eventually go back and finish those previous 'optional' quests I couldn't before. Talk about tedious. Then I realised something. I can trudge through a dungeon with the game forcing mandatory combat battles onto me. Spending an hour or so before hitting a road block and then having to back track out of that dungeon to take on a third optional easy and quick FedEx quest. The 20 minute FedEx quest I completed yielded more xp rewards than the hour or so in that dungeon before I had to turn back. Then a strategy formed in my head. Gather up all the small quests but don't 'cash them in just yet'. Go on a big quest and when you hit a 'road block', go back to those small FedEx quests, cash them in, level up, put points in those skills so you can do that big quest you couldn't finish before. This is what I'll be doing in the final game. Also, a good game guide will highlight the fact that you will probably need the grappling hook and rope for the egg quest because you may not have the necessary skills/attributes. So leave the egg quest for now. Go to dungeon X, where you'll find grappling hook and rope at location Y, keep it in your inventory so you can complete the egg quest next. These optional quests will probably have an optimal order in doing them. And where talking about 'optional' quests here. Not the main quest. All this running around for optional side quests just so you can level up. Because you won't hit the level cap if you don't do the 'optional' side quests as confirmed by Sawyer. And I suspect players will want to hit the level cap by the end of the game with the end boss.

I agree. I feel I need to do every single quest in the game because that's the only way I can level up. If I don't have the required mechanics or other skill and I'm just shy of completing a quest that I spent the last 30 minutes to an hour doing and it's preventing me from completing it. I have to stop what I'm doing, go and find another quest, complete it, level up, put points in that particular skill and then go back and complete that previous quest that I couldn't before. I'm already finding it tedious to do this in the beta. The optional quests are almost required to do because there's no other way to level up.

It's good to see that the quest was resolved. I let her go and went back and killed them and wasn't awarded anything. So looks like I'll be killing her in future playthroughs to get the xp rewards,

I'd be surprised to see if Obsidian do go back to Kickstarter. I'm wondering if the experience with PoE has made them wary of Kickstarters and they'll be turning to publishers even more now for future games.