PrimeJunta

Funny, I don't remember him saying his friend might still be alive. I remember him saying quite distinctly that his friend got killed by the bear.

Talents and weapons. DEX does not raise your ACC, that's an error in the manual. (They changed it shortly before release as it made DEX overpowered.) Read the talent descriptions: they describe exactly when the ACC bonus applies. Weapon Focus is a no-brainer. Priests get talents which give a massive ACC boost on their deity's favored weapon: that plus Weapon Focus brings their ACC into the top tier when using them. There are other talents that convert a percentage of hits to crits either always or circumstancially. The most immediately accessible ways to raise ACC are to use a single one-handed weapon, Weapon Focus, the rapier (+6 ACC), and use of Fine or Accurate weapons. Many spells or spell-likes also buff ACC, e.g. the paladin's Zealous Focus and the priest's Divine Radiance.

@Kvedulf: (1) As already stated, crowd control. Blind, stunned, paralyzed, confused, charmed, prone. Find out what can confer these and use them to your advantage. (2) Use buffs and debuffs strategically. If you're getting punched too hard, debuff enemy's Accuracy or buff your Deflection. If you're not doing any damage, buff your Accuracy or debuff their Deflection. And so on. (3) Look for synergies. Have one toon use an ability or spell that attacks Will to debuff Reflex, then another to use a spell or ability that attacks Reflex to do damage. (4) Read up on what, exactly, the status effects do. Blinded for example makes all the difference because of what it debuffs. One tank is enough. Edér and Pallegina will both get the job done fine. With the rest of the party it's all about using them strategically. Durance is your secret weapon. His buffs and debuffs are crazy powerful if you just figure out which one to use in which situation.

Yep. The trick with squishy melee fighters is to hang back to start with, and only engage enemies that are already engaged by your more durable characters. Also pick abilities for the squishy that'll get her out of trouble when needed -- Escape and Shadowing Beyond for rogues, spells/abilities that Stun or Paralyze for ciphers and wizards, and so on. And react quickly when targeted to use those, or have another character help.

The game isn't designed to be easy. There's a lot of combat, and it's intended for people who enjoy combat. What you're doing is like, I dunno, taking a Lotus for a drive and complaining that the ride is harsh when you're on cobblestones. That's not what it's for.

Yes it's possible to make a melee cipher. It's going to be more of a striker than a tank though because they're inherently somewhat fragile.

Wait for a "story mode" mod. I'm sure someone will make one at some point. Or look up the console cheats and use those. Or play something else. Edit: Console commands - http://orcz.com/Pillars_of_Eternity:_Console_Commands

If that was for me, no, I don't like the sucker punches in BG2. Except by now I know where everything is so I don't get sucker punched anymore. Going out of my way to look for trouble and then getting my face pushed in is completely different than being actively approach by an NPC with a quest, accepting it, and finding that it's way out of your level. I never had a beef with the difficulty of BG2 quests, only with the way in which the game pushes them on you. I still contend it would have been a far better game had the Chapter 2 content been spread out differently.

I see your problem, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of Trial of Iron. The whole point is that you only save when you're done playing. Change it as you describe and it won't really be Trial of Iron anymore, just a normal mode with a single save.

BG2 writing is like in all BioWare games before and since: shallow, generally between mediocre and bad, with a few memorable high points, and the slightly-tragic comic relief character(s) best of the bunch. Jan Jansen's writing is excellent, Keldorn's is passable, everybody else's is eminently forgettable unless it's grating (Minsc). I've learned to really really love BG2, but it's despite the writing, not because of it, Jan Jansen notwithstanding. Its strength is that it's so incredibly big and has so much stuff in it that you can basically set your own objectives, select the way you want to go after them, and take off. At least my main problem with it was that it took me many, many, many attempts before I knew where everything is so I could actually start doing it. Until then it just felt that it was repeatedly kicking me in the groin for no good reason. I admire the people who got into it from the start; I'm not among them.

Contact Obsidian directly about this stuff. On the forums it sounds just like trolling.

Yeah backstab is not that useful without Shadowing Beyond.

If you don't like getting kilt, reloading, and coming back later, I would suggest this is not the game for you. The bear is just the first of many dark corners with something waiting to bite your head off.

Rogue has to initiate the fight. You either need very high stealth, a ranged weapon, or a reach weapon. Shadowing Beyond is the only way to re-stealth during a fight, and that's 2 per rest. IMO it should be 1 per encounter, it's not that OP.

That was a fairly hilarious rant. I'll rate it a solid 7/10.

Yeah I remember Nyfre's cape, it was pretty hilarious. It's a weird thing for an OS dependent bug though.

Yeah. Also Durance yells "Not even a scratch!" every time he throws Holy Radiance...

I would murder for something that stylish. Come to think of it, I think I did.

@Stun You know, for some reason it makes me very, very happy to hear you say stuff like that. Also, I now dig what you said about BG2 and replayability. I didn't fall in love with it straight away like you did, but I'm loving the hell out of my umpteenth attempt. Thanks for pointing the way.

I've been experimenting with Rolling Flame and I can't figure out how to make use of it. It bounces around so unpredictably that I always end up nuking my own party with it, and sometimes aggroing a mob in the next room for good measure. Have any of you found a way to actually make use of it? The only time it actually did something for me was as a last-ditch measure when a fight with phantoms and shadows was going pear-shaped; it got all of them and some of the party survived to get up again. I can't imagine that's the intent.

There have been a bunch of appreciation threads here. They just tend to drift off the page because there's really not much to add, and the folks who don't think it's so great have had the courtesy (generally speaking) to stay away instead of going NO U R FANBOI. (Yes, it's fantastic.)

FWIW I didn't think much of the BG1 companions. Minsc's humor got old really, really fast, and everybody else was basically a cardboard cutout. BG2 had Jan, Korgan, and Keldorn which count for something, but everybody else is either a waifu, annoying (there's a reason that one guy is named Annoy-Men), or forgettable. P:E's are much, much more to my taste. One thing that I slightly miss is the "assembling my party" phase of a BG2 playthrough. With only eight companions and all of them easy to find there's not much there, there, even if you don't want to spring for the Adventurers' Hall to grab some mercs. I had fun figuring out how to get Mazzy and murder the black dragon before Mazzy spent all her proficiency pips on short swords.

@Alantan Yeah shield+sword is a good secondary combo, the shield will keep him alive for a tiny bit longer if he gets meleed. Just don't use it except in emergencies.

Holding a choke point and mobbing them also works. They have surprisingly low Concentration so if you've got two or more characters wailing on them they'll get stunlocked by interrupts.

A ranger with a bear companion ought to know better than charge into a bear's den alone. Srsly. You were dumb. You died. It's not the game's fault. "No handholding" was kind of implicit in this from the start.