PrimeJunta

Oops, I missed that. Yeah anything at that level's gotta be hard on solo. (But the lagufaeth are still harder. Bleeping lagufaeth.)

Hoo wow, if you're finding the constructs hard to beat at level 14 then there's almost certainly something wrong, unless you have a really weird party that somehow only manages to hit the constructs' hardest defence. I had way more trouble with the lagufaeth the first time I did WM1. I don't recall having any particular trouble with the constructs; just the usual thing of learning their DR's and immunities and then using CC and direct damage attacks that hit their weaknesses. (The traps were somewhat annoying though, I did get smacked by them rather a lot really.)

But... wait, I don't get it. How are immunities stopping you from progressing? You can see what the immunity is, and unless you're playing with a totally gimmick party (um... all rogues equipped with rapiers and hunting bows?) you'll have lots of options to switch to a different damage type. Toggling immunities would only make the game marginally easier, but a lot more boring as you could just repeat the same rote tactic over and over to win, especially with save-spam. So rather than wishing for a new difficulty toggle, why not either -- (a) figure out how the mechanics work and how to beat them, or (b) lower the difficulty? (I'd strongly recommend (a). The game is a LOT of fun that way, up to the point where you blast past the difficulty curve and all the combat becomes boringly easy anyway.)

What level are you? If you head there straight away at level 6 it is... challenging, but should be fine around level 8-10 or so.

Yeah. With Pillars, if you hear someone say "Class C is unusable except in role R" or "You can't make a <role> <class>," read it as "I haven't found a way to use class C in role R" or "I haven't found a way to make a <role> <class>." That's different. (Okay, maybe there are a few things that don't work, or don't make sense -- a ranged barbarian for example, because the barb's awesome ability is Carnage and that only triggers in melee. But there are far more things that do.)

I dunno, I like both gear-centric and talent/ability-centric builds. I've made lots of both, and they certainly work. I think the fun specifically with Pillars and gear-centric builds is that there is a quite a bit of gear with unique properties that would normally fall into the "nice to have but not really all that awesome" category, but if you combine them with each other and certain talents in interesting ways, suddenly you'll find that your whole party has +10 Accuracy all the time, and up to +30 some of the time. There's a particular satisfaction to seeing something like that work. So on balance no, I don't think Pillars is overly gear-centric. There are a few purely gear-centric builds (Boeroer's Spelltongue-based time bandit barbarian tank springs to mind) but most of the ones I've been working with have been based around particular properties of gear (e.g. Marking -- there's a pretty wide choice there), and would still be entirely workable even without it. We do have lots of options in character-and party building, and lots of ways to approach it: concept/role-playing, a particular item or combination of items, a particular role in the party, and so on and so forth. And that's kinda awesome really.

It is. Or not, depending on how you played BG1+2 and what you consider central to the experience. That's... not true. You can build great tanky paladins, 'tis true. But you can also build paladins lots of other ways. It sounds to me that you'd enjoy a Flames of Devotion-based build a lot. It'll do massive, massive point damage and be an excellent support character as well (although not so good at tanking). Funny, in one of my recent playthroughs the paladin in my party was wielding a two-hander named Tidefall, and it worked out great. Nope, dual-wielding paladins work quite well too. I've never built a character around axes but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of good ones out there. I have built dual-wielders around sabres, and they definitely work. Not so at all. I really like paladins specifically because you can build them so many ways and have them still be viable. Paladins can excel at three things: tanking, support, and alpha-strike with Flames of Devotion, and can be competent, steady front-line damage-dealers in addition to that. Some of the support abilities are specifically geared around the front-line role (Coordinated Attacks for example), which means they'll not only do awesome spike damage and respectable constant damage, they'll enhance the entire party while they're at it. I love paladins. I often make room for not one, but two.

FWIW I've never had much luck with Kana either. Others here have had good tymes with chanters, but not me. It's a shame as I really like the way he's written and voice-acted. I'm hoping the revamp the class is getting in 3.0 will help; I'll give it another shot at that time.

If you rest infrequently and/or minimise travel between maps, and build up Security before Prestige, you won't get attacked much. If you build Prestige (which you would want to do to get that stupid Vailian merchant to show up) so that it outstrips Security, you will get more attacks.

I've had the most overall satisfying gameplay with a relatively evenly-hardened party. I think it's mostly due to AI behaviour; it lets me manoeuvre more freely without turning it into a game of protect-the-squishy. The good news is that it's not hard at all to get there -- just build your "frontline" classes for damage and give your "back row" ones some defensive talents and gear. It's totes possible to play with just one or two tanks and the rest squishy damage-dealers; you just need a lot more micro to keep the squishies out of trouble. Zealous Rush helps tremendously for this.

At first probably. But then I'd realise that if I could give everyone Tall Grass, there would be nothing special about it anymore and I would be sad.

@Boeroer not really but it would be something to look forward to

Class and race also matter. If I had to take a guess, I'd say a high-PER, high-RES, high-INT orlan cipher would get the most options. (You could build that into a nice frontliner by the way.)

Auto resolve just immediately resolves the combat, which may result in damage to the stronghold which you'll need to pay to repair. Manual resolve requires you to travel to the stronghold; the option will only work if you're there when you click it. It'll start a combat encounter with the attackers and have you play it through the usual way. The stronghold won't be damaged and you may get some (relatively minor) loot. It's bloody annoying also.

Eothas is pretty good because of flails. There's a very good flail to be had early on, and flails with their graze-to-hit conversion are pretty nice especially if you haven't pumped PER to the max.

Yep, that's quite true, respeccing the stats would require further suspension of disbelief.

If you can't access Defiance Bay, it sounds like you haven't repaired the barbican and taken the south exit from Caed Nua towards Woodend Plains. Pretty remarkable if you've made it to level 13 in Od Nua without that btw. :hattip:

I've seen that problem also but only with that particular helmet (the chain helm). Others work fine.

Yeah, true, there were events or items that could raise/change attributes. (There are two I know of in Pillars as well.)

I am fairly certain you gained attributes in Ice Wind Dale, and I'm pretty sure that IWD was mentioned in the White March description. But, maybe I am wrong. It has been a very long time since I have played those games. I've played IWD recently and no, you don't gain any attribute points. IWD2 does give you 1 point every 4 levels (adapted D&D3 ruleset).

Except that wounds wear down your health, so you'll also want higher endurance and more health. If wizard is the base (low/x4), you'd need to spend two talents to get to monk/barbarian level (very high/6). And it's not suitable for an armoured, high-Deflection fighter because they won't incur the wounds. And if you pick that talent, there's some other talent you're not picking. Okay, then let's make it a requirement to take two chants per Invocation. So to get the phantom you'd need to spend three talents/abilities. Pretty significant IMO. Except melee attackers with low Endurance and Deflection: they'd go down like ninepins when they Rage. Except to use Focus, you need abilities that burn it. You could spend one talent on one first-level cipher ability, but how unbalancing would that be? We could make it so that in addition to the plain level requirement, you'd need at least two powers of the previous level to be allowed a new one. So to get a level 2 cipher power, you'd need to spend 3 abilities. Returning Storm is a level 3 druid spell. To get there, you'd have to be minimum level 5, and have spent enough talents to be allowed level 3 druid spells. As above. You wouldn't be able to take any abilities at any level; they would still have prerequisites. To get higher-level spells of a particular type, you would have to spend most of your ability points building up to them. Not possible. To get L1 spells per encounter, you would have to buy enough talents to get priest spells from level 1 through 5. That wouldn't look much like a paladin anymore. Again, see above: you seem to be assuming that I'm proposing that any character could take any ability at any level, with no prerequisites. I explicitly said that I want to keep the prerequisites as they are: no level 5 spells before level 4 spells etc. Same applies to those per-encounter spells: level 5 spellcasting ability would be a requirement for that ability. Rogue talents don't apply to Carnage, only the primary attack. Problem solved. Armoured Grace would be nice, but all that would give is a 20% faster attack speed when wearing heavy armour. Not unbalancing IMO.

I would guess that they never got around to it. Also the IE games didn't have it.

Nobody says focus, wounds, and chants have to be tied to a class. You could just allow any character to pick a level 1 chant, a level 1 cipher power, or a level 1 monk feat, and they'd get focus or wounds on the side. Can't see how that would break anything. From where I'm at, actually, the only advantage of classes is nostalgia -- they're familiar and comforting and very much part of the experience in D&D-like games. But from a purely design POV, they're not much good. I don't even believe they make balancing any easier.

Can you name an example of a ridiculously overpowered cross-class ability combination? Again, always assuming that they have the same prerequisites as now, i.e. no level 4 wizard spells before you have level 3, 2, and 1 wizard spells, and you have minimum level requirements for each of them. I... can't. The best I can think of right now is stacking an extra 20% damage by combining the cipher's Biting Whip with other damage-boosting abilities, but since presumably you'd need <<Cipher 1 powers>> to be eligible to take that in the first place, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable. That's the thing with the Pillars character system -- it's really remarkably robust and difficult to exploit in genuinely game-breaking ways. There just isn't a kensai-mage or ranger-cleric in there. You can minmax, but you always feel the min in some way in addition to the max, and when attempting that you already have to think very hard about which talents and abilities to pick. Having more to choose from wouldn't really change that. Summa summarum, I just don't see how a classless system would break Pillars.

The "old games" (the Infinity Engine ones, that is) didn't allow any attribute upgrades at all. These were introduced in D&D3 which was the basis for ToEE and the Neverwinter Nights series, which haven't been cited as inspiration for Pillars.