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My theory immediately upon seeing the health/stamina system was that they wanted to include regenerating health without going full-blown regenerating health. Game design is moving toward it for a good reason: A saved game should never be locked in a no-win scenario. On the other hand, regeneration removes a level of resource management, so a lot of players feel it dumbs down the strategy. So Obsidian came up with the health/stamina compromise. I think whatever they do should be another form of compromise. I haven't followed all of the details trickling out so I'm not sure what the plan is, but if it's injury debuffs replacing depleting health, that actually sounds pretty good to me. It's much easier to see exactly how the battle has been wearing down your characters. Even understanding the health/stamina system, exact information wasn't really conveyed well. It also might make it a little easier to keep going than it is right now when 1 character has very low health and everyone else is doing pretty well.

Developers tend to understand how "Quick load" button works If they are including the button in their design decisions, they may as well not have permadeath at all. I think the point is that we want the story, just not so much at once. Baldur's Gate 2 was better at breaking it up into bite-sized chunks. It's also possible to say more with less. I realize they must write dialogue the way the character speaks, but in broadcasting, we learn to strike words and phrases that can be removed without changing the meaning of the sentence because there is only so much on-air time to say it. Or change things like "police said the suspect then fled the scene of the crime on foot" to "police said he ran away." So there may be some gains there without sacrificing quality as well.

It's update 9, not 8. I think it only relates to subsequent POE2 playthroughs, like a sort of New Game +.

When characters can die permanently, writing for them becomes a risky use of time. Permadeath and story are not very compatible.

In one of the surveys that went out to POE1 backers and owners, I said vancian casters need a reason to stay awake after expending their per-day abilities. I'm glad to see this. I am sure resource management will still be very important. You're bonkers if you think they are going to make that easier. If anything, Empower adds more resource management challenge to the game because every class gets it. In sounds like the perfect solution: a big gun you only bring out for the big encounters. How is that functionally so different from a big spell you only bring out for big encounters?

Back or back not. There is no but. If they want me to back, there'd better be some butt. Big butts, I like. Deny, you other brothers can't. Back, baby got. -- Sir Yodalot Want none, my anaconda does. Unless buns, you have.

Back or back not. There is no but. If they want me to back, there'd better be some butt.

They have said things may be different depending on what happened in the first game, so I was wondering this as well. Hopefully they also include a menu to let you craft your own world state, in case you no longer have the save you wish to import.

"Find the evil wizard before you go crazy" isn't doing it for me. I mean, I've gathered that his soul-sucking machine is hoovering up all the baby souls, so I guess I'll be saving the world at some point. I'm just not that motivated to find out what happens next. Right now I've got to find two more things seen in the Leaden Key vision (I did the sanitarium one). I assume that after that the factions have me do something for them to earn an invite to the hearings I've heard about.

OK, the graze/hit/miss/crit system, combined with using a d100 instead of d20, is what makes the game work. I won't go into it in depth here, but it's the single best thing in the rules. It makes small stat changes matter and keeps the wheels from falling off at high levels. On status effects... I think real problem is that there are too gosh darn many to remember what they do, and many are similar to one another, both in name and in function. I mean, dazed, confused, disoriented and distracted are practically synonyms. No way did we need both frightened and terrified. Weakened, hobbled and sickened could easily have been consolidated to just weakened. Almost all of them have stat debuffs similar to another effect but with differences of severity. There could have been a system that applied the same affliction but with differing levels of severity. "Applies a strong weakening effect," for example. Yeah, they affect different stats, to some degree. But the differences are not so great that they couldn't have been worked out in design. I wouldn't want to see it dumbed down to two or three, it just almost seems granular for granularity's sake, and I have to look at tooltips to keep track way more than I'd like.

Pity they didn't ask anything about the digital extras. I am usually more interested in those.

Second hardest? Is there some secret one not on the wiki? http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Party#List_of_Companions All of the others can be picked up without any combat at all, unless I am mistaken. Once you clear Stalwart of ogres, I mean, but you have to do that for DoC as well.

Hopefully you'll like the items in the White March then. They tend to be a bit more creative in what they do rather than the rather mundane examples in vanilla. Also Soulbound items are great fun (though sadly not usually as good as normal items, but the game is easy enough that you can use them if you like em). On the subject of extras, installing the White March allows you to select from a list of cross-class-style skills. Much cooler in concept than in reality due to them scaling poorly or not at all with levels, but some of them are nice.

Actually, I know I said "any saved game," but I think I've read that if you are near the end of the original campaign, saved games past a certain point cannot play White March. Like there is a point of no return that won't let you go back to the world map. I haven't finished the game myself yet, though, but I would imagine it is pretty clear when and where that happens.

Playing the expansion is seamless and plays just like it would if it were included in the initial game. You can do it with any saved game without problems. The only "seam" I guess would be that clicking on the White March on the world map opens another world map for that region.

The chief problem is that a weakened party can get into a no-win scenario. Can't travel to safety and can't rest and recover. Load an earlier save (which you can't count on the player having), spam quick load and hope for luck, or game over. A secondary problem is that you could use up your camping supplies without actually resting through no fault of your own. You should never consider reloading a save to be a normal part of designed play outside death.

Well, to be fair Devil has +3 Mechanics which is the highest bonus possible (only rogues can get it that high). On the other hand yeah, you really don't need Mechanics that high and you can manage with, say, Kana as your Mechanics expert quite happily. That, and you only need one character with mechanics higher than 0, so it may as well be a rogue.

In Galvino's Workshop. I know I'm not supposed to go there before the Sanitarium, but the game lets me, and I did.

Finally got her. My party leveled to 5 while I was building the Artificier's Hall for the mechanics bonus, and third-level spells made all the difference. I'm not sure if the southeast secret door has a hidden lever from the outside to bypass a lot of the fighting or not. An unhidden lever on Galvino's side opened it.

9 or 10 mechanics. On the path to get the game's rogue companion. Right. Okay then.

I'm trying to get Devil of Caroc as soon as the game allows so I can have a rogue mechanic without buying one. That means my party is level 4. I handled the ogres in Stalwart and every other room of Galvino's workshop, but the only way forward is through the lab. I don't have enough mechanics to find secret doors. Do you think the +3 gloves in the workshop and a mechanics bonus from resting at Brightholllow would do it? Are there any other temporary ways to boost my score? Do the constructs have a weakness? Is there a trick to this encounter? I thought maybe I could use the unstable constructs to blow up the others, but there are too many to survive more than a few seconds.

I don't see this listed in the 3.04 beta patch notes. Did it get missed?

omg please fix this before you lock down the patching.

As a cipher with 20 perception, I haven't had problems, though I haven't reached high levels. But if wizarding is really like Bleak describes: You shouldn't have to use two or three prep spells to make spells land. We don't get a lot of them per day, and while you're buffing and debuffing, combat is happening. They can have a role, like overcoming a particular defense an enemy has a lot of. But they shouldn't be the norm, like Greater Malison in Baldur's Gate 2.