TheUsernamelessOne

I think the biggest difference between D&D (besides 4th Edition, anyway) and the mechanical system in PoE is that the former, however clunky, is designed to provide a bundle of numbers and rules on what to do with them which simulate your character and the things they do. It answers questions like "Are you stronger than Joe Orc?" or "Do you know enough about Knowledge(whatever) to answer some question?" The stats and whatnot are (theoretically) designed to be intuitive. If you pretend THAC0 is intuitive, anyway. Pillars of Eternity's rules and mechanics are just an arbitrary game, more like Clue or Monopoly (albeit way more complicated). Why does Might determine both your physical strength and the power of your spells and the effectiveness of your healing? Who knows. Maybe it's the same reason that the distance you move per turn in the mansion in Clue is random. Why is it that two guys swinging away at each other can only attack every couple of seconds when, depending on their relative speeds, one character fleeing from another can potentially be subjected to near-infinite attacks in the course of a few frames? Why is it that being strong-willed and charismatic (Resolve) helps you dodge bullets but being physically fast and coordinated (Dexterity) doesn't? Why is it that casting Slicken on an ooze makes it trip and fall prone? PoE is weird and jarring to me, maybe because I was expecting something more along the lines of any of the other RPGs the folks at Obsidian have ever made. In PoE one half of the game is roleplaying and one half is story and never the twain shall meet. Now, much like in Planescape: Torment, your stats inform the options you have available to you in roleplaying scenes. Unlike PS:T, none of your stats are actually designed to model a person, they are arbitrary video game notions that have no basis in reality. So I'm roleplaying a wood elven Cipher right now (or I was until the Horn of Moderation bug borked my game, leaving me the free time to write this post), a scientist who studied and dissected souls until their strange obsession forced them to flee their homeland and travel to the Dyrwood, where they got mixed up in plot. My character uses a bow because that's what they grew up with and they slice their enemies' minds apart because hey, might as well put all that study to good use, right? So, naturally, this character has maxed out Might (and Intellect, to be fair) and poor to middling everything else, right? Because if I want to deal lots of damage with my powers, I've got to have high Might, which according to the roleplay sections of the game means that I'm really really strong--stronger than any of the NPCs I've come across so far, in fact, including the front-line fighter types who march around in plate armor. Apparently my character's enormous muscles come in real handy when using psychic attacks or shooting a gun, in addition to helping bust through solid stone walls like the Kool-Aid Man and rip iron bars out of castle windows. But my psychic character who specializes in perceiving and manipulating the very stuff that souls are made of obviously isn't very perceptive and has average charisma and willpower. Those things are of no benefit to a psychic. PoE is very much a game, not a roleplaying game. It's an arbitrary system of arbitrary rules that has little to no connection to reality, fictional or otherwise. When you hear lore or Watcher souls about battles in the history of the PoE world, it's plainly obvious that the events they describe could not happen in the framework of the game mechanics, any more than you could recreate the colonization of the Americas in a game of Settlers of Catan. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. It does mean that there are people who (apparently very loudly and irascibly, judging by the OP) don't like the game. To me, it's a tedious chore, plain and simple. I'll do it, if only out of spite, because I like the writing, pretty much the same attitude I have towards Dragon Age 2. If you do love it, hey, more power to you. If there's a point to this post besides me just being frustrated and bored because a game-breaking bug (hopefully temporarily) ended my current playthrough ten hours in, I guess I would request that attributes either be more intuitively mapped to the roleplaying qualities of your character, PS:T-style, or else not be used in roleplay at all? Also I understand the OP's frustration, though I don't think yelling at people on the internet is very productive or polite. PoE is an interactive story with a miniatures wargame welded onto it, and even if you don't enjoy the miniatures wargame you have to get good at it if you want to experience the story. Why is that a problem? How is that any different from any other video game ever made? I don't know. I mean, I'd be playing it right now instead of rambling about it if my Cipher could regain Focus in combat. Oh, and to everyone bragging about playing on Hard: please stop. Hard mode is not actually any more challenging. All it does is increase the number of enemies. If you know what you're doing then numbers seriously don't matter. By the same token if someone does not understand how to play the game, condescendingly telling them to turn down the difficulty is useless. As an alternative, tell them to just Pillars of Eternity better, since that is actually helpful, if non-specific.

Make sure you understand that as of this writing, some of the game mechanics (like Engagement and Interruptions) only serve to make it easier for the monsters to kill you. In the case of Engagement, for instance, all the monsters are at least as fast than you, so if you try to run away it's basically giving them a million free attacks per second at your butt. When you try to use Engagement to manage the battlefield, on the other hand, you will quickly discover that most of the really dangerous enemies in the game can ignore Engagement if they want to, either by spamming at-will teleport abilities or because they are so tough that they don't care if your tank smacks them in the butt. Engagement only works for you if the enemies are programmed to allow themselves to get locked down by your tank. Otherwise you've got to have some other strategy to protect the rest of your party. The best defense is a good offense, and the best offense is to get all the abilities that inflict save-or-suck effects like stun, paralysis, or prone, kite the enemies toward you so they get all bunched up, use your save-or-suck spells on the enemies, and then shoot the enemies with guns and/or bombard them with the decent AoE damage spells. This sort of strategy is overpowered in D&D, where it's actually easier to successfully resist such effects. In D&D, all other things being equal, you've got a 45% chance of totally resisting any hostile effect (default DC is 10 before modifiers), while in Pillars you only have a base 15% chance of totally resisting a hostile effect--and scoring a graze on a save-or-suck effect like prone or paralysis is still a death sentence in practice, especially since many such effects in PoE cripple your defenses and leave you susceptible to follow-up attacks that can extend the time that you're left helpless and unable to act. It's also worth mentioning that almost every effect in Pillars works regardless of what type of creature you're fighting. Slicken trips up floating intangible spirits as easily as it does amorphous oozes (how exactly do you tell when an ooze is prone? Or blind?), and mindless skeletons get afraid from Chanters singing the spoopy song just like everything else. So there is absolutely no reason not to spam stuff like Slicken and the Cipher's Mind Crush like it's going out of style, especially if you also take advantage of the "everyone is proficient with everything" and "everyone with Lore can cast Wizard spells" rules in Pillars to load up everyone with guns and damage spells to unload on their prone, paralyzed faces.

Turns out it's actually really hard to die. I keep waking up again in this mortuary with all the zombies. Please send help at once. Getting stunlocked by monsters is usually what kills me at the moment. Apparently someone didn't get the memo that having save-or-die effects everywhere was something that could make D&D absurdly unbalanced.

In a word: no. The game does not react to your choices. You are in fact attempting to play a block of enchanted wood even as we speak on the internet.

It's funny, I was just about to post about how I hate the spirit-type enemies. Shades, spirits, specters, phantoms, whatever, they're all utterly obnoxious in about ten different ways. My first playthrough, they kept stunlocking my party to death; alternatively my Chanter would summon a phantom and it would solo the encounter by stunlocking the enemies to death, and that was every fight. My current playthrough, the mob of spirits in the lighthouse spam ranged icicles to murder my Cipher in the first two seconds of combat before teleporting around the front-liners and murdering everyone in the back row. My plan to counter this currently is to use Slicken and Mind Binding to make them trip and fall down and paralyze their muscles. Because apparently disembodied spirits have legs and muscles(?). Usually in D&D clerics and paladins are the anti-undead specialists, but that doesn't seem to be the case in Pillars of Eternity.