PrimeJunta

@Luridis Yeah. I did find the bear with Resilient Companion sort of survivable, especially if I let BB Fighter take the first brunt of the attack. Combine that with BB Priest's Consecrated Ground and it's... workable. It's not fun though. I'm fairly confident by now that my dislike of the ranger and especially the shared health isn't just unfamiliarity and "playing it wrong."

The gods of RNG were in a New Year's kind of mood today, and I got my party fully equipped with firearms quite early on. Also, I did Blood Legacy first, which got me three guns to start with. It was fun. I really like the way firearms work here. They're spectacular but not overpowered because the reload time is so slow. From there on out, I started most engagements with a volley against one or sometimes two of the most threatening enemies, taking them out of the game early. Then switched to melee and fought it as usual. This changes the feel of the battles quite a lot. It's not exactly better than the more usual melee-in-the-front, ranged-in-the-back setup, but it's different, and I liked the rhyhtm. BOOM! Switch.Fight. Switch back, watch everybody meticulously reload, then move along. It felt, in a very light and altogether un-obnoxious way that I was actually taking care of those precious firearms. The only fly in the ointment was that the arquebus reload animation stopped my casters from casting until they finished, so I had to switch them to melee weapons too, after the first volley. I long ago floated an idea that it would be nice to have a key command to switch the entire party between weapon sets just for this purpose. I still think so. Warts and all, this is a fun game!

Precisely. However, "not accepting a quest" is pretty second-rate as choices go. There should have been some way to side with the Skaenites from the start. Like this, for example: "I met Trygil the currier of Dyrford today, and recognized him as one marked by the Quiet Slave. He took me to the High Priest, an animancer with a plan to avenge the wrongs one Lord Harond had inflicted on his slaves. He had captured his niece, great with his child. His animancy had the souls of willing sacrifices to the Quiet Slave use her body to slay him and his entire family. Just then, Harond's lackeys entered the temple. I joined my fellows to defeat them. Then, being in Harond's eyes also one of his tools, I myself took Aelys back to his so-called father. I would not witness the Quiet Slave's revenge, but it was as certain as it is that night follows day."

So I rolled up another wizard. Made this one a dedicated disabler/crowd controller. Orlan, pumped Int-Per-Res, dumped Con. Tried to explore the spell selection and use them creatively and in combos with BB Wizard's damage-dealers. It was surprisingly fun and highly effective. The wizard's a lot better than it was in the early builds as well. However... I still think the spell selection is too restricted. It's basically damage, area debuff, and (mostly defensive) self-buff. The latter BTW I find fairly useless; I tried making a front-line wizard using them, and it was not effective at all. I was spending most of my time self-buffing, and I used up my spells really quickly. I would very much like to see a few more summoning-type spells (there's one at this point) as well as some charm/dominate-type ones. They could well be, say, one spell level weaker than the corresponding cipher and chanter abilities, since we wouldn't want to tread on their toes. The wizard however is still limited by the spell selection in the grimoire, and in DnD it was an extremely versatile magic-using class who could do pretty much anything other than heal. I.e., please broaden the spell selection. I would also suggest dropping the possibility to swap grimoires in combat. The cooldown is an ugly wart not in line with the rest of the mechanics; four spells per level is plenty, and there's Minor Grimoire Imprint for emergencies. Edit: also, what's with Bewildering Spectacle and Confusion? By the descriptions they're identical except that Bewildering Spectacle (level 2) has 50% longer duration than Confusion (level 4).

No, it's not. In BG or BG2 it's quite easy to lose a battle even if you do everything right. In P:E I've never lost a battle without knowing how I screwed up. It never hangs on one spell.

Yeh, Stuck is way OTT. So are many of the others. This really is one area that needs revision; it's annoying that they didn't just copy pay homage to IWD2 here; the status FX were clear, looked good, and did not obscure what's going on.

I tried playing through the Blood Legacy quest as a priest of Skaen. I was somewhat disappointed. The only acknowledgment I got was a few lines of dialog. This is IMO a missed opportunity. It would have been cool if e.g. Skaenites have some secret way of recognizing each other, so I could have sided with them from the start after meeting Trygil. As it is, it felt really... wrong to slaughter my way through the Skaenites. There was really no way to resolve Blood Legacy in a way that's true to that choice. If you offer it, IMO it should be acknowledged better. Obviously will only affect the very small fraction of players who will play as priests of Skaen, but still. Normally Obsidian is really good at this kind of thing, so it was a bit of a let-down.

When copying a spell from a grimoire, I can see how much the operation will cost, but not how many CP I have. This is most inconvenient and should be addressed.

To reproduce: equip wizard with arquebus. Fire. Cast a spell. Expected: wizard casts spell immediately after recovery. Observed: wizard is busy reloading arquebus and won't cast until it's done.

That I can agree with, but it's still heavily RNG-driven coin-flip combat resolution. You can do your tactics exactly right and still lose in the opening just because you got an unlucky roll and the enemy caster got a lucky one. I'm already liking P:E's more "scalar" magic much better. I also freely admit to cheesing some BG2 fights with RNG abuse. That is, until I figured out ways to beat them more fairly...

Regrettably true. There's no per-character stealth either. You can do stealth attacks -- I did the Skaen temple with a somewhat stealthy party and did get the jump on them a lot of the time, and it did make things a lot easier -- but the way to do it is to sneak into position, pause, issue commands for the opening volley, and take it from there. Rogues can take the new "Invisibility" talent though. I would like to see this expanded on, with invisibility spells, potions, and perhaps making it a per-encounter talent at higher levels.

I agree on some of those, but disagree about others. I like engagement. I like the way it stabilizes the battlefield in a way the IE battlefield never did, making flanking movements etc. actually doable. It's much less frantic and more tactical. I agree about lisibility, to an extent. Many of the FX are way too obscuring; tall grass is also a problem. Moreso for prone characters, yes. It has been greatly improved over previous builds I've played though; most of the time it is possible to see what's going on. Please please tone down the FX, m'kay? If they're bright enough to hide something (like a fireball for example) they should be much shorter duration than now. I haven't experienced the portrait/avatar link to be problematic. Clicking on a portrait does select the character. I disagree about scripts. These were a later addition to the IE games, and it is IMO far better to design a game you actually have to play rather than one you set up to play itself. I have not had the problem about action feedback since I started paying attention to what's in the little circle in the bar above the avatar. I would not object to having the same displayed as a portrait overlay though. As to micromanagement, that depends a lot on the party composition. An all-monk party would get really frantic; it would probably only be playable in slow-motion, and even then with fairly frequent pausing. I find a party with one high-maintenance character and the rest low to medium maintenance to be pretty enjoyable to play as it is. (Obligatory caveat -- in 392, Hard is way out of balance to be much fun. I'm digging Normal a lot though.)

I don't find it difficult to e.g. circle around a melee group with my wizard, once it's settled down. Well, most of the time.

The maximum zoom level on the Mac build is a good deal higher than on the Windows one. Textures look noticeably mushy on 2560 x 1440.

@Azmodius Wasteland 2 has a 3D world rendered in real time, so they will scale better as you zoom in. P:E's backgrounds are pre-rendered. If you zoom past actual pixels, of course they're going to look mushy. I.e. this game is not going to look its best on 4K, unless you zoom out. IIRC the highest resolution they targeted was 2560x1440. (Also there is no way they're going to change that this late in the process. For the sequel, perhaps, if there is one.)

That's more or less what I did. I had my archers (fighter-mage PC, Coran, Kivan, Imoen) shooting at the enemy casters and my clerics (Yeslick and Branwen) casting Confusion at them. If Yeslick or Branwen got the spell out first, it was an easy win. If one of the enemy casters made their rolls and got one of theirs out first, it was an immediate loss.

I was careless, by AOO's I meant disengagement attacks.

Pathfinding could be better, for sure, but then again it doesn't attempt to avoid hostile spell effects either. You have to path manually around them. Avoiding AOO's is a similar thing. It's not like it was any better in the IE games, either.

How did you handle that one encounter in the Iron Throne upstairs in Baldur's Gate? For me anyway that swung on in which order and how well the spells fired.

The druid rules. I love the spell selection. Spiritshift is kind of derp though. It's fun to go all BWRAARGH IMMA BEAR! at the end of an encounter, but it's not supremely useful or anything. It would need more talents to properly flesh out. (Or maybe I just didn't study them properly.)

This is not true. 32-bit XP won't use the full 4GB. The maximum it can handle is 3.25 GB, of which 2 GB per process. If P:E turns out to be memory-limited -- which is a big if -- upgrading RAM to 8 GB and the OS to Win 7 or 8 64b will certainly help. Win 7/64 with 4GB RAM will probably not make much difference though. Or Linux of course. I think it's most likely that either your rig will run the game fine as it is, or you're looking at a full system upgrade. The good news is that a machine fully capable of running it shouldn't cost all that much these days... and running a Win XP machine in this day and age is not a great idea to start with, so an upgrade has many other benefits as well.

I think you're ALL poopy-heads, but I love you anyway. Happy New Year. I also may have had one drink too many.

Okay, this one I'm pretty sure is a bug, and not the invalid issue I erroneously reported earlier. I was playing with a ranger and bear companion. They got knocked out in combat. When they got up again, the health did not fully regenerate. This time there was no "divider bar" in the portrait, and there was plenty of health left; the bar was yellow but well over the halfway mark.

I tried again with a Ranger. I still don't like it. Did a damage-optimized build, with Pooh Bear as the animal companion. Only defensive talent I took was Resilient Companion for even more DR. Used a War Bow and tried to play to my strengths. It was viable, and easier than with some other party compositions I've tried, but not really fun. The shared health pool just doesn't do it for me, and the animal companion connection also feels gimmicky and forced. Bear was clearly more viable than antelope though; played the meat shield role much better. Oh, and there was also a bug, which I will log presently.

Huh. Okay, I'll try. Still pretty sure it's not working as intended though.