PrimeJunta

...and, about that sad very early mission you're talking about...

@Michael_Galt IOW you like clean straight-up power fantasies. Nothing wrong with that. I used to like them a lot when I was younger too, but they get old. I don't really care for grimdark for the sake of grimdark -- for my taste, the Witchers tilt a bit too far in that direction on occasion although not all the time -- but I do strongly prefer shades-of-grey stories where good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, villains have understandable motivations, and endings are never entirely happy. As for Pillars, I don't find it depressing at all. Melancholy, perhaps.

Dyrwood has been relatively recently colonised. You know, by colonists. From elsewhere. It's something of a frontier attracting enterprising people much like America did back in the day. As such, it would be weirder if there weren't any people with obviously foreign ancestry or background there.

Huh, funny -- the setting is without any question my favorite thing about the game. One big reason is that it isn't epic; saving the world gets really old -- although saving a realm from Waidwen's Legacy is pretty impressive in its own right. Epic is overdone: I'll take a personal, human-scale story any day of the week. I also especially like the way they broke with some fantasy tropes, like race=culture and wars between races. Instead you have wars for the same reasons people fight wars in real life -- religious conflict, social revolution, conflicts over land with foreign colonizers, that sort of thing. I disagree with your criticism re Raedric and Defiance Bay: Raedric's story is directly connected to Waidwen's Legacy, which is directly connected to the stuff you're doing. Defiance Bay has an ongoing conflict between two opposing factions which culminates in a violent revoluion, where your choices determine the ultimate outcome. And the regions are connected -- people are coming from or going to them, some of which don't even appear in this game; for example I got a pretty good idea of what's up with Rauatai, the White that Wends, and the Vailian Republics from people who came from there. So yeah: I strongly prefer P:E's approach to storytelling over, say, DA:O's or LotR's. I find the story of the Chosen One Saving the World really, really threadbare and hard to do in a way that brings anything new or interesting to it. The last game I've played that managed to pull this off satisfactorily must've been... I dunno, KOTOR maybe, and that was a really long time ago. (I haven't played WoW, and I thought the story in all the DA games was really, really, REALLY dumb. DA:O had some redeeming qualities, but story wasn't one of them.)

That looks very very very very squishy to me. Low CON and RES... ouch. You won't be able to take any hits at all, low RES means you'll be interrupted all the time and low CON means you'll go down really fast. I'm sure there's a way to play it but it's not going to be easy. Dumping them to pump DEX is kind of pointless as the heavy armor will cancel out the speed advantage. Yeah max out INT for the carnage. I'd spread the other points a bit more evenly, maybe de-emphasize CON and MIG a bit, but it doesn't make a huge difference. As to weapon focus, Soldier is the way to go: Tall Grass as your base weapon, Forgemaster's Gloves for ... special occasions. The trick to playing a barb is setting things up so he doesn't get hit all that much. Ciphers, wizards, or priests pair up great with barbs as they can debuff or immobilize the mobs when the barb wades in and does his thing. Tank-and-spank works too but the rogue is a better hard-hitter for that tactic.

There are several. I've locked up... I dunno, three or four at least. Not all in the same game though.

I think it'd be cool if you could carry a brace of pistols. Currently you can sort of kind of build a character around this (e.g. island aumaua with extra weapon slot and quick switch talent), but it's really fiddly to play as you have to manually switch after every shot. It'd be better if they switched automatically after every shot. Ideally this'd need a bit more work, since historically people might carry up to six or so strapped to their chest. Like having each weapon slot count for two small weapons (pistol, dagger, stiletto, hatchet) but that would probably be tricky to do while keeping the UI reasonably sane so maybe not worth the trouble.

I'd expect it to "stabilize" in another six months to a year. While WM2 is in production and being patched, the game will continue to change. After that, they'll be moving on to Pillars 2, leaving Pillars 1 alone.

This sounds very cool. I just got back to P:E after the summer, and finished White March Pt 1. Overally I'm very happy about the direction the game is taking; the immunities in particular make a world of difference as they force you to switch tactics rather than just repeating a good-enough rote one. These new changes -- especially knockout injuries and the changes to Athletics and Survival -- sound like more steps in the right direction. If knockout injuries are done right, they might put the difficulty where it belongs. As it is, I'm finding Hard way too easy while PotD feels about right except that there are too many big mobs which makes the game all about crowd control which gets a little dull after a while. Hard + knockout injuries + a harder endgame sounds like good times. And yay for a non-boring stronghold. Overall, my impressions of the changes in WM1 and version 2: Immunities: HUUUUGE yay. This change all alone makes combat feel more dynamic and varied than anything else so far. No more "spam Slicken to win, every time," you actually have to know what to use against which enemies (instead of the knowledge being an optional bonus, necessary only for the hardest fights on PotD). They really ought to have been in from the start. Per-character stealth: big yay. Scouting finally feels like what it's supposed to be. I'm ambushing enemies like a boss, hiding a party, sending someone out to go "yoo-hoo!", running back to them, and coming out of stealth for great mayhem. Party AI: yay. It's nice and subtle at least at the default setting. Takes some rote clicking out of the game without making the game play itself. Enemy AI: yay. Yeah, they do use their abilities better now. Attribute changes: mild yay. Yeah, there are less dump stats now, and they do make better intuitive sense. Maybe leave them alone now so updates don't screw up builds again, m'kay? Soulbound weapons: mixed yay. Great idea: finally some genuinely memorable and unique weapons. Execution needs work: they're too easy to upgrade fully and too easy to get, which makes them freebies rather than rewards you have to work for. I'd also drop the "always works like you're trained for it" thing; the BG2 uniques are cool among other things because you have to build a character around them. Lockpicking changes: meh. There are already ways to boost your Mechanics; reducing the lockpick cost so much diluted the skill a quite a lot. Maybe somewhere between version 1 and 2? Overall balance: boo. The new levels + new items completely trivialize the late game (and it was pretty easy to begin with). And WM1 itself is quite easy overall, except for that one optional fight. Cross-class talents: boo. They just add noise to the level-ups and dilute the classes without really making interesting multiclass builds possible. This is like lockpicking XP -- transparently a sop thrown to the people clamoring for a particular feature, without really considering how it fits in the overall scheme of things. Respec: boo. Okay, maybe it's a personal eccentricity, but just knowing the option to respec is there detracts from my enjoyment, as it makes my character-building choices feel trivial. Would it be too much to ask to have a PotD-style (only on game start) switch for this? Pathfinding: still boooooo! Come on guise, now hard can this be? I'm still having characters trip over each other's feet and run madly back and forth or in a completely boneheaded direction to get to their target. Combat pathfinding still feels worse than the IE games, which is not a very high bar to clear.

Why not use GoG Galaxy? It'll auto-update it for you. Works for me at least.

Yeah, the Apple fanboys certainly are out in force, letting them off the hook.

It does work on your computer manufactured in 2013. Just downgrade back to Yosemite, and only upgrade to El Capitan once the bugs have been ironed out. [ http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/delete-el-capitan-go-back-to-yosemite-3581872/ ] Again: Apple broke it, it's up to Apple to fix it, and it's not fair to blame Obsidian for it. Have any of you guys even complained to Apple about it? 'Cuz complaining about it here isn't going to help.

I just installed the latest web driver after reading this and I can say that the issue is NOT fixed for me. I still cannot play the game. And I don't want to hear Obsidian passing the buck back to Apple anymore. Please let us know the status of the fix for this. That "passing the buck" is a mite unreasonable. If the driver doesn't work, it doesn't work and Obs can't do much about it: they don't have access to the driver's source code, and finding a workaround to an extremely low-level issue like this can be as good as impossible. It's not like P:E is the only thing affected: I've seen rendering problems all over the place, from the JetBrains IDE to stuff running under Wine to other games. Apple/nVidia broke the driver for El Capitan; they're the ones who have to fix it. I.e., if you want to vent, vent at Apple and nVidia. This really isn't Obsidian's fault, and it's not something they can fix. If this gets them a lot of bad press, all it's going to do is make it less likely they'll even release OS X versions of their stuff in the future -- Mac gamers are a niche within a niche.

Today's nVidia Web Driver release fixed the issue.

Manifests here as well. iMac 27" late 2013, 3.4GHz i5, GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB. (Just tried it out of curiosity as I boot into Windows for gaming anyway; most games including Pillars just perform so much better.) Edit: Shadowrun: Hong Kong is similarly broken, so this seems to be an issue common to Unity.

Is it a rule that picking the most good/lawful/in-character option always has to yield the best reward?

I really like the idea of CON reducing the armor speed penalty. It'd be thematically appropriate and make it interesting for a larger variety of builds. Even the fabled frontline muscle wizard.

IMO PER isn't the problem stat ATM. It's highly useful for pretty much everyone as interrupting is always desirable. Try a high-PER barb for example: with that and Carnage he really makes life miserable for the enemy frontline. CON is a problem though. It's dumpable for most builds; only monks really need it because they have to take damage to use their specials, and even they can get by with above-average.

I didn't have much trouble sticking to my favored dispositions (and avoiding the disfavored ones) when playing "blind" as a Shieldbearer. Just needed to read carefully and think about the context as well. Didn't get a perfect score but close enough.

Pretty sure it'll keep getting patched for a quite a while. If you want to play the final, stable version, I recommend waiting a year or two more.

Nah, I know about the one-hander ACC buff, I just remembered that it would give another buff on top of that rather than just convert graze to hit which really is dumb. Since fighting one-handed is a significant handicap I don't see much problem in allowing talents like that to stack ACC to make up for it. It's not mechanically OP and as a concept it's kinda cool -- picture a Scaramouche type expertly jabbing a dragon in the eye with a rapier.

Have you tried building a mobile party? Hint: Blessed was Wendgridth as he Zealously Chargeth...

Ah right, my bad. I remembered it wrong, I thought it was an ACC buff. Sorry.

Wel-l-l... the added crits are welcome for duelists also, especially as one-handed weapons do less damage to start with (also DR etc.). I haven't done the numbers but I'm p. sure it's not easy to get your Acc so high you're critting all the time, even with the talent.