PrimeJunta

I dunno, maybe he's just really good.

I love the chanter concept but in practice fights barely ever last long enough to get into the Invocations. IMO it needs tuning to be genuinely enjoyable.

Hehe, the writers do have some seriously twisted imaginations. I'm loving it though.

Expert modes switches off helpers that weren't present in the IE games. They didn't have AoE indicators, so expert mode doesn't either. I happily admit to being not an expert.

OP already mentioned chanters. He asked "who else."

It's not strictly useless I think, but it does require something of a gimmick build to really work. Things to note: (1) The 2 x damage multiplier is a Big Deal (2) You need to be stealthed or invisible to use it I.e. if you pump Stealth and use a high-damage two-handed weapon, take Shadowing Beyond, Reckless Assault, and Vulnerable Attack, then use Crippling or Blinding Strike, your backstabs will do scary point damage. Those damage multipliers stack. But that's a lot of talents to spend on something you can only use once per encounter + twice per rest.

Priests and paladins. Buffs are short-duration though, so I don't know how viable your strategy is, at least on the harder difficulty levels.

I'm kinda enjoying engagement precisely because I have to use those abilities to break it, and there are so many ways to do it. I've also gotten better at avoiding it. In fact I'm thinking Shadowing Beyond was a waste of a level-up talent because I barely ever use it; Escape is enough. It does make combat feel very different from the IE engine though. Whether you like it more or less is, to an extent at least, a matter of taste. Personally... it's growing on me. I've just learned to really dig IE engine combat (thanks to Sensuki, Stun, and others here), but I find P:E combat super-rewarding as well. Tactics make a huuuge difference; play an encounter badly and you get wiped, play it well and you barely get your armor scuffed and only use a couple per-rest abilities.

Let me put it this way: if they cave and put in respec, I hope to Woedica they make it a startup option you can't change while playing.

Aloth's Fan of Flames works really well as an opening. If you can get two of them off, that's basically all she wrote. Don't waste your time trying to engage and defend, just hit them hard with everything you've got and they'll go down pretty nicely. (That's actually pretty good advice a lot of the time...) The tougher incorporeals like specters and Cêan Gûla need softening up with a debuff (Fetid Caress, Curse of Blackened Sight, or if you have level 3, Reveal Vulnerabilities). The shades, shadows, and phantoms are fairly easy.

AFAIK you blew it. No way that I know of to forge the weapon without the soul vessel from the matriarch. (If I'm wrong someone please enlighten me too.)

I just gotta say, I tried playing BG2 with a minmaxed party and it was much less enjoyable than working around the limitations of the recruitable characters in the game. I feel much the same about P:E. Respec would ruin that. If it was in the game, the game would have to take its existence in the account. Not using it would be intentionally gimping myself. That's a completely different experience than trying to make the most of what is in the game. (And, again, I have nothing whatsoever against console cheats, savegame editors, or mods that let you respec to your heart's content. Just not in the 'canonical' game.)

P:E is dated in lots of ways. Art style, complex mechanics, lots of text, choose-your-own-adventure panels, music... Which is why it's so bloody wonderful, really.

Nasty. Thanks for the heads-up. Hope they patch if soon. (Technically that's not game-breaking though as you can keep on playing just fine... /nitpick)

@LeBurns counter-arguments? I almost didn't bother but okay, since you asked... let's fisk this. Paragraph 1: I couldn't understand what the OP is saying. Can't he makea viable character at all/true to archetype/not true to archetype? If so I disagree, I've made plenty of viable characters in the BB of both types. Would need more detail about the gripes to be able to answer. Paragraph 2: Yeah sneaking is beneficial. I sneaked a lot in the IE games too, always had my thief scouting up front. I would prefer individual stealth here as well instead of having everybody sneak. Getting the drop on your enemies does help a lot, imagine that. Paragraph 3: Yeah the game would be so much more fun if everybody was a tank. Not. Paragraph 4: RT management of party of 6? Wait what? The spiritual successor of which games was this again? And what's stopping you with running with a party of two, four, or one? (Seriously: if you have a party with lots of active abilities on everyone then yeah it does get hectic, and some of the abilities would have worked better in a TB system.) Paragraph 5: I smell an MMO player here. Spells are a limited resource. If you're spamming them in every little skirmish you'll need to rest too much. Buffs and debuffs do make a huge difference depending on the fight; that level 3 big area buff to all defenses turns many fights into a doddle. Debuffs are even more important as you'll quite often need to apply one to get a damage spell or even just normal attacks to bite. Basically, this just reflects a complete lack of understanding of how the thing works, and/or playing on Easy when fights really are over very quickly. Paragraph 6: Nothing to address here, just a rant. Don't like the monk? Don't play the monk. I don't care for the ranger so I'm not playing one. I've played a monk in the BB and really liked the way it plays, both the concept and the mechanics. 'Pinions, mang.

Right, I wasn't paying attention. I didn't find one of them hard at all, and I just didn't do the two others until I had some help.

Note to self: play as cipher before Josh nerfs it.

Yeah, I dig it also. The lore is supremely well thought-out, much more "relatable" than in any fantasy cRPG I can think of off the top of my hat. Gods that actually relate to human concerns, imagine that! (The prose could've used another editing/proofreading pass though, but it's eminently forgivable given the constraints.)

Josh has said they want to add AI scripts but didn't have time/budget for the main game. (I like it just fine the way it is though.) Lockpicking/disarming XP is a pimple on a beautiful game. But, ultimately, that's all it is, a pimple.

@Ineth You're much further in the game than I am, and I haven't gone actively looking for those fights (much). Barely even dipped a toe into the Endless Paths. I'm sure there are lots. @soedenone Save-scumming generally means "abusing the savegame feature to get around a tough fight." Just saving a lot isn't it, and actually the P:E mechanics aren't that savescum-friendly because there's not a lot of "save or die" type things. An example of savescumming would be to beat Firkraag by having your mage cast Feeblemind at it and reload until the gods of pseudorandom numbers caused him to fail both his magic resistance and saving throw rolls. Reloading to try out different tactics until you found one that works would not be savescumming; on the contrary, it's a normal part of learning the game.

One more that's come up repeatedly. Very basic but still clearly not clear to everyone: Don't go toe-to-toe using a rogue. Instead build up a tank with maximum defenses, have him engage, then move in the rogue to murder the engaged enemies. Don't worry if the tank isn't doing any damage, that's not his job.

But they do! More if you pick them. I gave Aloth Grimoire Slam and Durance Interdiction. With those plus Arcane Assault and Holy Radiance, I find myself dipping into the per-day spells only on the harder encounters.

I'm playing on Hard and have never had to backtrack yet. I got my camping supplies to zero once, I think, and that's because I forgot to stock up when passing by the inn, and while it got a little fiddly to get by until I found more, it was not frustratingly hard. I.e. if you feel like you need 20 camping supplies, I'm fairly confident you're not playing the game very well. Take a deep breath, read up on the mechanics, experiment a little, and it will come together.

There are a total of four belts/bracers setting STR to 18/00 or higher in the game, only two of those are available in chapter 2, and only one of them is available for purchase. There's also a mace that sets STR to 18 but then you're tied to that weapon. The only thief whose abilities you can develop (other than Yoshimo) starts out as a godawful backstabber and you have to spend several levels and allocate items to get around that. Getting the INT 16 casters to develop a decent spell selection requires either savegame abuse or very careful management of scrolls plus potions of genius. All of this contributes greatly to my fun. I've played BG2 with a minmaxed party and it wasn't nearly as interesting. Deciding who gets which item, when to stop to get Jan to memorize spells, and allocating potions is a big part of the fun. I would expect P:E to have similar ways to work around the party's limitations.

Or one druid and one wizard. The druid+wiz spell selection synergises rather beautifully.