Idleray

1. Loading times. PLEASE if nothing else let's have better load times. In a city you get load times transitioning between areas, in/out of houses, UP DOWN THE STAIRS. This has got to be the priority 1, everyone-can-agree on improvement. Even Angry Joe complained about it in his review, and his loading times were like a quarter as long as mine. 2. Pathing. Another problem Angry Joe brought up. In close quarters I want my guys to be able to smoothly go past each other without going completely bonkers and wandering the hell knows where. 3. Party AI. Especially since your lvl 1 spells become per-encounter, I desperately want to script my Priest to cast his buffs automatically. 4. A hotkey to swap your weapon sets. Unless I'm stupid and you can already do this....(can someone inform me how?) 5. Re-distribute your characters talents. This would address the complaints about pre-leveled characters too. Give us something like a potion that lets us re-level up. 6. More uses for gold. 7. More epic items. Like legitimately epic. We're talking Crom Faeyr, Carsomyr. Weapons so epic that I remember their names today. Feel free to add your own....

Yep. Between the cross-class combos, heaps of ways for the enemies to reach your back line(reinforcments popping out everywhere which was a plus to me) and lack of constant healing, DA2 was a blast to play through on nightmare and I actually had more of an inclination to do that again than play through DAO again with its usual "mages own everything" gameplay. I didn't pay too much attention to that. Suffice to say that whatever keeps it challenging and fun is okay with me. The arcadey aspect... I can see what you mean with it. The whole game had a very "designed" feel, but it was competently designed in terms of combat. As people complaining about it being repetitive because of level designs and other shortcuts the developers took, I can get behind that too. DA2 was by no means a great game. It was serviceable, which meant that compared to its predecessor it was a crushing disappointment. However, whenver I see complaints about DA2 being less "tactical" than DAO I have to laugh and think that whoever says it is a casual.

All I want is the loading times to be smoother when navigating these cities. It's a major pain when doing errand quests and you have to go transition area/houses/stairs

The question is how you solve a systemic issue like that. If you just increase the Accuracy of the enemies, you are only really putting even more emphasis on +Deflection as the go-to way to tank, and the game already suffers from overspecialization in that regard. You either stack Deflection or you go home. Increasing enemy Accuracy would just mean that the importance of Deflection is even higher. I think this might actually be quite hard to solve, at the end of the day, due to the underlying simplicity of the system. Accuracy is a scale that affects everything from Miss to Crit, and the only thing that affects it is Deflection, working in the opposite direction. I don't have a solution, and I'm not criticizing you or anything, I'm just musing on the challenges. I think that instead of tuning tank themselves there should be more ways presented for enemies to threaten your back line. More ranged attackers, ways to knock-back etc.

That's fair, but what I would really like to see addressed is general tuning to keep things interesting all the way towards the end. I wouldn't want them to make it a "slog", but winning a hard battle with all the tools at your disposal is a lot of fun, and I had the most of that during the beginning of my PoTD run. There's always some balance work they can fit in, IMO. It's not like they can throw the balance out of whack when that's already the case in some respects. I'd like to see some simple tweaks, like putting the summoning figurines on a timer, or summoning less guys. Have more battles with a few tough guys than lots of "trash" that you can easily cc, etc etc.

Sorry, having recently finished both DA:O and DA2 on nightmare in preparation for DAI(which I dropped out of disgust in the first hour from console control scheme), I disagree. I liked both. I liked the story and characters in DAO, and the combat and tactics in DA2. Let's not kid ourselves here, DAO's combat was a complete cheese fest once you knew what you were doing. There was nothing tactical about it. My PC rogue literally auto-attacked his way through the whole game coz none of his other abilities WORKED in terms of having better dps than plain auto-attacking. DA2 actually has consistently challenging combat. Just because they implemented non-sucky looking, faster-paced animations does not mean it's less tactical than DAO(the opposite is true). Sure DA2 sucked from rehashed areas and average meh story/companions, but its combat was one of its high points and one where it improved over DAO.

Jokes. Seriously though, the difficulty seems to fall off abit too quickly. Early on in the game it is indeed quite difficult, but once you get a few things that allows you to control the battle(charm spells and Summoning Figurines) it becomes kinda cheesy. I couldn't believe I could keep such formidable foes as the Dragon from Searing Falls and the Drake from Od Nua lvl 5 more or less perma-cced with simple lvl 2 spells like Paralyze and Bewildering Spectacle. Any battle where you could block a narrow pathway with a tank was trivial. Battles out in the open where you're out-numbered were easily manageable if you used the summoning figurines (the placement of which seriously needs work. You get the BEST one - the obsidian lamp- very early on for no effort.) There were only a few legitimately difficult battles like the one in the Lighthouse where you're taken by surprise and the bounty battles against the Spreading Plague-using Fugly-Dryads. My party is Lvl 9 now and I've just cleared Dyrford and it's kinda of a joke now that I realised your lvl 1 spells become per encounter. I hope that there are more epic encounters ahead that justify using ALL of the toys I've got to play with, rather than each encounter being "Oh ok, how can I win this without using any lvl 2 or above spells so I can go longer without resting?"

These are issues that have been around since release. I'm not sure whether they're functioning as intended but regardless these issues decrease my sense of control over my rogue and satisfaction over controlling them properly(and they're very micro intensive). These are: 1. Using Escape sometimes still lands you within the absurdly long engage distances of some enemies(Ogres, Phantoms have done this. Possibly other mobs too), such that you have no choice but to run straight back to them or get targeted by a disengage attack. 2. If you initiate Escape or Shadowing beyond after an enemy has begun their attack animation on you (i.e. their swing) your'e still getting hit even though intuitively you should have dodged/vanished out of sight. It's almost like enemy attacks home in on you.

Most notably this is including aura effects like Zealous Focus that should wear off as soon as an enemy becomes uncharmed, but I would like to see all buffs from the player fall off charmed enemies after they revert back.

Currently if you activate either of these abilities after an enemy has begun an attack animation on you they will still connect even though intuitively you're supposed to have vanished/dodged out of harms way. It may be working as intended, but I feel it would add greatly to the sense of control and satisfaction of playing the rogue if activating these escape buttons allows you to actually "dodge" attacks as long as you do it in time. Would be a great quality of life improvement because honestly speaking some of the pathing problems already contribute to the grief of playing this very micro-intensive class.

I'm trying attach a save but its 2MB and the max upload size is 1MB. Can I email it to you? I can't find an address in your profile

Looking at the spells themselves I only see that they get a bonus to accuracy but not what their base accuracy is based off of. Is it just the same as your physical accuracy?

Hey guys, sorry for being dumb, but where exactly are the saves located? I have a steam install and I looked in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity\PillarsOfEternity_Data\data and also My Documents and couldn't find them

Exactly. No reason. The only reason would be to get into a good enough position for an opening volley with hard hitting ranged weapons like arquebuses.

Out of all the skills, Mechanics is the only one that's essential. Sure you can get Lore on your main for dialogue options, but not having it is no biggie. Using scrolls can be relegated to your wizard or priest. Generally, just dump it into Mechanics. A bit of athletics so you don't have to rest too early. A bit in stealth so you can at least sneak up to shooting range. Leave the other stuff to NPCs

if you're talking about stealth the skill, no. I max mechanics on my rogue coz that's way better. Stealth is basically pointless.

Just because the game tells you it's recommended doesn't actually mean it's good. Int affects AOE, debuff duration and Will. None of which I find particularly useful on my Rogue. You only got one real debuff and that's blinding strike. I don't really care if it lasts abit alonger. Apart from Might and Dex being no-brainers, I have high Per because it gives you interrupt, and interrupt is good coz it works against all actions including an enemy just trying to auto-attack. In this case a good offense ends up being good defense as well.

Also you need to accept sometimes that your Rogue is not invincible. In dungeon areas where you can block narrow pathways, blocking it with a tank and having the rest of your team shoot/bombard is much safer and straightforward.

Aloth the wizard. Level 1 gets you chill fog which blinds (but not very good for setting up sneak attacks because your rogue would have to walk into it. BUT BUT BUT you can get sneak attacks from ranged strikes too) Level 2 you can get Curse of Blackened Sight. I also take Bewildering Spectacle to handle dangerous situations when I'm getting overrun.... Actually Bewildering Spectacle might be a better spell. Eder has knockdown. Grieving Mother has a variety of debuffs that allow sneak attacks, but most of them don't last long enough. Hiravias the druid guy has plenty, but I don't use him so I can't recall from top of my head. In general however most of your sneak attacking should come from Flanking enemies. You only need to debuff them when your Rogue is forced to engage enemies face to face, which if you're playing PROPERLY shouldn't be happening too often, especially against strong melee enemies.

You can have less in Con (I have 8 on my rogue), Intellect and Resolve. My Rogue stats are: 18 Might 8 Con 18 Dex 18 Per 6 Int 10 Res I got the same abilities as you except for Crippling Strike. I have Escape instead of that to get away when I draw aggro to my Rogue. I am playing on PoTD, and I'm having a blast because the damage my Rogue does is epic. In fact he can single-handedly shoulder the task of dishing out damage while my other party members handle tanking, support and CC. Here's what you might be doing wrong: First of all, you don't need to actively TRY to sneak attack. You're AUTOMATICALLY sneak attacking ANY TIME the enemy your rogue is attacking is affected by any of these debuffs: Blinded - from Blinding Strike, Chill Fog(wiz), Curse of Blackened Sight(wiz), Eye Strike(cipher) Hobbled - from Crippling strike(since you took it already), Ranger's wounding shot(i think?), Druid first level spell, Fractured Volition from Ciphers Prone - Knockdown from your Fighter tank, Priest Repulsing Seal Weakened, Stunned, Paralyzed, Petrified which I'm sure you'll be able to find from your partys diverse array of debuffs. and also Flanked, which you can get simply by standing behind the mob (this also applies a -10 Def to the mob. It goes without saying that you should ALWAYS be trying to get a flank with your rogue). You can lose aggro with Escape and Shadowing Beyond (when you get to lvl 6), but the latter is per rest. What you SHOULD be doing instead is focusing down mobs very quickly so that even if they turn around on your Rogue they will still die before doing significant damage to him while your tank keeps other mobs busy. If you can block an entrance way with your tank, you should just hang back with your rogue and shoot things, while your casters do most of the damage with aoe spells.

Have you installed the latest patch? It fixes some of the issues causing increased loading times. I have steam which auto-updates...sooo. I will trying defragging and so on. I have a fairly good rig for playing an isometric 2d rpg with, so I doubt that's the problem.

10 seconds by itself is fine, but in a place like Defiance bay where there's a lot of different game areas close to one another it breaks immersion. I get a quest from guy A that tells me to see guy B. I exit the building, that takes ~10 seconds. I transition to another part of Defiance bay. It's ~10 seconds. I enter the building guy B is in. 10 seconds. Finish the quest and exit building etc etc. You get the idea. It's not very enjoyable.

I'm only 20 hours in and already the loading times are becoming unbearable. There is a clear difference between how long it takes now and how long it took at the beginning. Simply transitioning from room to room, building to building in the many errand boy quests in defiance bay takes upwards of 10 seconds, and using your Stronghold is similarly annoying. I've read somewhere about issues of save data being clogged up by useless information like the junk items you sell to vendors... could this be the issue? How can I optimise the loading times?

So I just looted this and haven't even used it yet but I already can feel that this is majorly OP. The thing I can't decide on is whether this will make PoTD too easy. Between this and the beetle figurine I can summon 6 dudes in a fight... and it's very tempting to just use them to render challenging fights a cakewalk. Are there any tough unfair fights down the road that would warrant the use of this item? Do you think it's as OP as I think it is?

Having clocked about 15 hrs play on normal, I decided "what the heck, it's time to go hardcore" and started a new game on PoTD with a rogue. The combat was too easy on normal and playing hard for 2 hours still gave me that feeling, so I jumped straight to PotD. So far I just cleared the temple dungeon in Gilded Vale (PC rogue, Eder, Kana, Durance, Aloth, + hireling Ranger because I can't access other NPCs yet) and I gotta say it's fairly tough but a lot of fun. I enjoy having to micro my rogue to get the best results, but I'm worried about a few things, namely whether NPCs without their min-maxed stats can handle PoTD. I've not completed an actual playthru on normal yet so I haven't experienced the NPC interactions and their stories, but I also want to do a PoTD playthru because I find tough challenges fun to overcome. The question here is, which NPC setup is the best to do PoTD with? Which talents/skills are must-grabs? How viable is having a PC rogue going to be?