PrimeJunta

Durance is is seriously good. You can skew him two ways: dedicated pure support, or gunner with massive support abilities. Gunner: pick Inspired Flame and Weapon Focus: Soldier, then give him Kana's arquebus. Now he has the ACC of a fighter of the same level. Then build on that with Penetrating Shot and Fast Reload. Have the loon wear no armor and hang back. Use Inspiring Radiance every time, spells strategically -- the priest buffs are seriously good. Pure support: pick Interdiction and the talents that boost it and Holy Radiance. Only when out of those, Inspired Flame and the gunner abilities. The other weapon from Inspired Flame -- the sword -- isn't that interesting as a basis to build on because he has terrible DEFL and health. A single one-handed weapon isn't great for a damager without the rogue's damage-boosting abilities, and the terrible defenses mean he won't be any good as a tank. The real beef is in the spells though. Read through the descriptions and experiment with them. They are very, very good: if you're in a fight you feel you can't win, the odds are Durance has something that'll solve it.

@Grand_Commander Peasant and Ruffian are rubbish in no way at all. Stilettos are arguably the best dual-wield weapons in the game (DR bypass, very fast), blunderbusses are the best firearms against soft targets and pistols very good against armored targets. The hunting bow is the best fast ranged weapon in the game (faster than the war bow, with Penetrating Shot it's acceptable against armor), quarterstaff combines reach and bludgeoning which is highly useful (plus there are some pretty cool easy-to-access staves in the game).

I am getting increasingly frustrated at the singular lack of tailors, milliners, hosiers, and haberdashers in the game. I am forced to march around wearing smelly armor if I do not wish to look like a peasant. Yet I encounter numerous impeccably attired gentlemen on promenade on the boulevards of Defiance Bay. Do these provincials all have private tailors whose identity they refuse to divulge to me? This is outrageous. Outrageous, I say! I demand the duc of Dyrwood send for a contingent of Vailian tailors to establish themselves in Defiance Bay immediately! The fashion-conscious will not be denied!

@Mazisky I would understand your complaint if you were already playing at the hardest difficulty level. But you're not. Complaining that Hard is too easy but Path of the Damned is too hard just strikes me as incredibly picky, especially as there are other options with which you can fine-tune the difficulty -- with game settings or in-game choices.

So switch on Expert Mode (or any of its components individually), or play with a smaller party, or do any of the other things I listed plus others besides to tune the difficulty for you.

Because forcing people to trek out when they need to rest would be tedious. Limited camping supplies is a compromise to encourage people to play intelligently while allowing them to keep on truckin' even after something doesn't go quite as planned. I know that sitting down around a fire to roast potatoes in the nasty animancer's office is kinda silly when you think about it, but rather that than having to slog to Gilded Vale then back.

Expert mode? Path of the Damned? Trial of Iron at any level of difficulty? Playing any level of difficulty solo/with two, three, four, or five characters? Playing with hirelings that are a lower level than you are? Not distributing your stat points on character creation? Going for a rest-minimization run? Srsly Mazisky if you can't find a way to set up the game with a difficulty level suitable for your preferences, either you're the greatest cRPG god of all time or you're just not even trying.

@Cronstintein IMO another problem with "overly complex" systems where you split the stats many ways between abilities is that it quickly melds into "cosmetic." If you've got all the numbers split across three abilities each, then the differentiation between abilities gets diluted to the point where it doesn't make that much difference anymore which ones you pick. Think of it as a dial where at one end one ability affects one number, and at the other, every number is evenly split between every ability. The former is obviously pumpy/dumpy, the latter is obviously purely cosmetic. The more you move the dial from left to right, the more complex and less impactful it gets. I don't really see any way around this dilemma. I kinda like the dial to be somewhere near the middle where it is now so I actually have to think of what to pick for a bit, even if there are some fairly obvious pump/dumps. AD&D had it way too far to the left. I don't like everything about this system but it's close enough that I'm pretty happy with it.

You most definitely can play without a fighter. You can even play without a tank. It'll be harder, but you can do it. If you don't like Edér and don't want to roll a fighter, Pallegina and Kana Rua are good substitutes when kitted out right and leveled up with tanky abilities. I haven't tried that particular combination but I would expect it to be no harder than with Edér built into a single super-tank.

Good job, MC. I appreciate that. Now, would it be too much to ask for you not to rain on threads where other people are doing that?

And nobody ever was delighted to meet a wet blanket. Even if it was true, does everything have to be about teaching someone something? What's wrong with telling someone they did a great job if in fact they did do a great job?

I actually sketched out something pretty similar before there was a Kickstarter, on RPGWatch around ... dunno, 2007, 2008 or thereabouts, minus the crowdfunding. I compared it to art house cinema. I thought there would be a cluster of mid-budget studios making games with higher production values and budgets than Spiderweb, but much lower budgets and production values than AAA games. The games would be based on open-source middleware, and they would, to an extent, share assets and collaborate on projects, seeing each other as allies rather than competitors. Turns out it actually happened -- only Kickstarter was the missing link which, well, kickstarted it.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you when you've got the Triple Crown achievement. (Path of the Damned, Trial of Iron, solo.)

Yeah I'm sure they're busting their asses on this.

Business executives, bankers, and investors are the biggest herd animals you'll find anywhere. If "nobody wants to play these kinds of games" is the conventional wisdom, nobody will fund them. This BTW is a well-known phenomenon and the psychological and economic incentives are well understood. John Maynard Keynes was among the first to point it out when he said that a sound banker is one that fails in the same way as every other banker.

The reason they haven't communicated is almost certainly because they themselves don't know when it's ready. The dev team might think it's ready now, but it has to be accepted by QA, and if QA finds issues that need fixing, it gets sent back to the dev team. There's no way to predict exactly how long this is going to take. That makes "this week we hope" both honest and as accurate as it can be.

Not for this game.

I'm finding it just about right on Hard. Challenging but not frustrating. (And no, I don't have invincible Edér. I checked.)

During the BB they never got a patch out before Wednesday, and it quite frequently slipped by a week or more. If we're lucky we'll get it this week, if not, it'll be next week.

Yep, it's a good one. I've been loving the hey out of it too. Your problem isn't the dual health bar. Your problem is that you have to rest too much. That's because you're not very good at the game, which is hardly surprising if you've only put 10 hours into it. I clocked about 75 hours in the BB and it still took me a couple of hours to get comfortable with the real thing. I will assure you, though, that once you've got it figured out, you do not need to rest too much. More than half the time I'm resting because of fatigue, not because I'm out of health or spells. I.e., take a deep breath and read up on the core mechanics, then experiment a bit and it'll start going fine. The keys are (1) locking things down with your tank, (2) attacking your enemy's weakest defense (Deflection, Fortitude, Reflex, Will) in order to either do direct damage or debuff a defense that lets you do damage, and (3) the best defense is a strong offense. Give your caster higher Resolve or keep him away from the front line. I bet you couldn't cast worth a damn if someone was trying to stab you in the kidneys while you're doing it. Again, not my experience. Use the per-encounter abilities in every encounter, and bring out the big guns in the big fights. I'm finding that I run out of spells and health usually around when fatigue hits. Then figure out a way to keep him out of trouble better. The incorporeal undead are nasty this way though as they target your wizard first and can teleport in, but there are ways of dealing with those too. I strongly disagree. Nothing is duller than a fight that drags on due to hitpoint bloat. If you're using a good strategy, most fights are over in about 30 seconds with everyone still standing. I've been playing without a priest for a stretch and it's not materially more difficult. I'm extremely happy that Obsidian made fights challenging by having things do more damage rather than having them have more hitpoints. Play better. Fighters get the same number of class abilities as every other class. Yep, you are bad at the game and don't get it yet. There's no shame in that; it takes more than 10 hours to learn for most of us. Stick with it. IME it wouldn't be the same without the frustration. The feeling of achievement is that much more glorious when you figure out something you were doing wrong and turn a formerly unwinnable fight into a doddle. Also... you may be underleveled for what you're attempting. Raedric's Hold is a reasonable challenge for a level 4-5 full party or so. If you're going in at level 3 with a smaller party, you're going to have a hard time.

Yeh I wouldn't want it in either, but if someone wants to grep out the bad words on their copy it's no skin off my back.

It's hard to tell sometimes.

Would not work without rewriting the whole quest. And it's not the only one.

Surprised?

Never even mind when which ranks among the sickest things I've seen in a game since in MotB. (Note: I am not objecting to this content at all. But this is NOT a game for children, teenagers, or the easily impressionable, and the occasional f-bomb is not the reason.)