Micamo

You say that like it doesn't make me want to kiss her MORE.

I'm shipping Eder and Aloth and NONE OF YOU CAN STOP ME Haha who am I kidding I already was.

You know, since dragons in this setting gain the features of their environment as they age, I wonder if you took a hatchling and raised it as a pet in a room full of fluffy pink pillows, would it become a fluffy pink pillow dragon?

Hahaha, yes, that was one of my questions! Anyway, I thought it'd be clear to everyone that "Adra, but more powerful" is *not* the point here. The point is you can make healing potions from it so that gives the imperial powers a motivation to expend a lot of blood and treasure fighting it out, both with each other and the locals.

...Did we play different games? Most of the expositional dialogue was optional. If you exhaust each character's dialogue tree to hear their entire life story and then complain they talk too much, well, that's on you.

As for the companions in poe1, there's a very simple thematic thread underlying most of them that's kinda obvious when you think about it. Durance, Eder, Kana, Sagani, Zahua, Devil of Caroc all have one thing in common: They place their existential quest for meaning in something outside of themselves, and they all get burned for it. They all either find some way to deal with that and find a new way to give their lives meaning within themselves or they die in despair. This mirrors both the watcher (or rather the awakened lifetime within them) and Thaos. Thaos so desperately needs validation and meaning to come from a place outside of himself that he's willing to do the bidding of a being whose authority he knows is false just so he won't have to deal with the horror of having to make a decision for himself. His tragedy is that he doesn't realize that placing that authority in a place outside of himself was in itself a choice that he made. The power to decide why he lived was his to give away, not Woedica's.

So, what Durance was supposed to be? Problem with this kind of character is different players will react SUPER differently to them, and if you try to force the pc to react to them the way you intended them you get the most obnoxious kind of railroading, the kind where the DM forces your character to love his edgy pet character. Also can you people please please send me a portal to your alternate universe where fantasy fiction is dominated by awesome masculine women and the dainty elf lady trope is dead forever? Thanks.

Well, this is basically me writing Eora fanfiction, but some ideas off the top of my head: 1. A person whose soul was broken up into a bajillion different pieces and each one ended up in a different insect in a big swarm. Apart, they're just bugs, but so long as they stay close enough together, their twinned souls combine through resonance into a hive mind of sorts. They wear a dead human skin with a bunch of bugs crawling underneath giving it shape. 2. A disabled child who rides in a large, unintelligent animated construct with a hollow space inside. She fights by "piloting" her construct around from inside the hollow. 3. An awakened Xaurip that remembers being a dragon in a past life and wants to find a way to polymorph themselves into one. 4. An Engwithan, sent forward in time by a soul experiment gone horribly wrong.

1. Yes 2. Actually I'm gonna say rank 5 3. 7 4. 8 5. Yes 6. Depends on how encounters are balanced and the amount of resting available but if start at 50% and adjust from there 7. Dunno, literally never touched the monk class in any of my playthroughs. I only messed with Zahua to do his quest.

Maybe I'm misremembering but I could have sworn there were talking xaurips in the endless paths. Those ones that throw you down the well as a sacrifice to their dragon? Note: I haven't actually done the endless paths since my initial 100% run when the game came out Also, even if I am misremembering, not being able to speak doesn't mean they can't express consent. They'd just have to do so through sign language or writing. I myself am non-verbal a good majority of the time.

I'm sure that is illegal in most countries in PoE!They totally won't, but if obsidian put in a xaurip npc (not necessarily a companion) and let you kiss them, I'd do it. I'd kiss a xaurip. Doesn't even have to be a lady xaurip.

I'd love more godlikes but didn't they already get asked this in the Q&A and shot it down? (I'd also love a xaurip companion to death) And I have to agree with the sentiment that content expansion stretch goals are a bad idea. Honestly I'm not entirely sure they should have put Xoti on there.

Some people define their self worth by what game achievements they have, and if anything unbalances the single player game and makes them easier to get, that makes them less valuable.

They're already mostly doing all the things I wanted them to do mechanics-wise so most of my wishlist items are story-based. That's a problem as the bulk of the writing is probably already done, but here it goes anyway: 1. The ending of PoE had serious thematic problems, not the least of which that the Watcher is forced by omission to repeat Thaos's mistakes. My biggest wish for PoE2 is that they correct this problem and at least give you the option to fix it. 2. It was a massive disappointment when, after all the in-game debate and different theories from different characters, Waidwen's Legacy turned out to have the least interesting cause possible. Please don't make Eothas's return "A secret cult of Eothasians did it because they want to conquer the world or whatever." 3. I actually really love the part of The White March where you can make friends with the Ogre clan instead of just murderizing them. Helping the Alpine Dragon as well. It's actually really interesting and powerful to me when you encounter a "monster" and then get to make friends with it. Much more interesting than "choose which of these three human **** gets to rule Defiance Bay" anyway. 4. Speaking of that, actually, apparently factions are going to be a big part of this game. Please please include a "**** all of these people" option like the Yes Man in New Vegas, even if it's obscure and hard to find. (There technically is such an option for defiance bay in PoE1, but it's not really a "**** all these people" option, it's more of a "I somehow screwed up massively please let me continue the game" failsafe.) 5. It's already been designed and knowing how Obsidian works it's probably not gonna be this, but what I would do with the Orlan Baby is that the Watcher raises the baby as their own and he now calls them "Mama" or "Papa." Actually, do this with the baby Lagufaeth too, if you didn't sell it to Taeldor (DON'T DO IT!). 6. Bring back the Devil of Caroc. She's great. 7. This isn't gonna happen, but I'd love to have at least one companion who's a non-kith and advances in a special "monster" class. My preference would be for a drake (who turns into a larger dragon as they advance in their monster class levels) but I'd also accept a Vithrack, an Ogre, a Delemgan, or a Cean Gŵla. 8. You know that quest in The White March where you go around Stalwart reading everyone's souls? Give the player more opportunities to do stuff like that.

I don't see any reason why not. There aren't any actual branching decisions in the game that are based on a particular background/culture/race/class/gender. These things only change your stats and flavor how NPCs respond to you. So it's impossible for changing your character to create a continuity problem. (Only class-specific options that actually change the outcome of a quest I can think of are the Cipher options, but you can usually have Grieving Mother do those for you.)

Indeed: Change the system so that you get 2 points in that class's power source when you level a class, and 1 point in all other sources, then change the power level table to look like this: 0-1 | 0 2 | 1 6 | 2 10 | 3 14 | 4 18 | 5 22 | 6 26 | 7 30 | 8 34 | 9 Then you hit 75% efficacy for an even level split. (7th-level powers for both)

One factor that needs to be taken into consideration is how power distribution actually works. Take, for example, Cipher powers. Taking a single-level dip in Cipher when you're at level 17 would give you access to 4th-level Cipher powers, but wouldn't necessarily let you pick all the powers a 7th-level Cipher would have access to. If it only lets you pick two, then that's much less useful. This would make Priests and Druids very strong secondary classes since they can cast any spell that they have access to, rather than picking their spell selection from a list. Wizards less so because they'd have to learn spells from enemy grimoires rather than getting them automatically. Also, if power distribution works this way I can see retraining being very useful since it lets you shift your secondary class levels to the end, which means you get to trade out weaker abilities for much stronger ones.

Doing some quick math with the revealed math on power levels today, the sweet spots are as follows: 17/1, 16/2 - 9th level powers in primary, 4th level powers in secondary 14/4, 13/5 - 8th level powers in primary, 5th level powers in secondary 11/7, 10/8 - 7th level powers in primary, 6th level powers in secondary All other combinations are either isomorphic to these, or give you lower-level powers in one class. (9/9 for example gives you only 6th-level powers in both classes, but you get 7th in your main class if you take 10/8 or 11/7 and still get 6th-level powers in your secondary. The only benefit 9/9 gives you is slightly better scaling on your secondary class powers, but is this really worth losing an entire power level?)

It strongly depends on exactly what content is in the expansion. The White March Part II's story is severely undermined if you play it after beating the main campaign and already know the twist. It gives the player a context that their character is required to be blissfully unaware of.

You read good novels that include no aspect of love? I doubt that such a novel exists, really. Huh? Lots of the great sci-fi classics have little to no romantic or sexual aspects, though none of them are explicitly aro-ace either. Microaggression much? Look I know what you're trying to do here but you're not helping anyone by going about it this way. Love, even metaphorical love, is far from the end-all be all of human experience and pretending that it is as a rhetorical tactic is very harmful to the people you're trying to defend.

You guys are gonna hate me for saying this, but my reason for preferring large parties has nothing to do with game mechanics. When I leave a character out of my party that I like, and I'm not getting any of their banter conversations or barks in conversations, I feel like I'm missing content and it drives me right up the wall. So, what I'd actually like is a system like Final Fantasy X where you decide who is in combat with you as a mechanical choice, but your whole party is considered to be "with" you at all times for the sake of participating in the story. (With some allowances for say, two party members who hate each other and refuse to be in your group at the same time.)

The problem with "You can be ANYTHING" is that it's not only impossible in practice, it also ignores a fundamental aspect of how non-deterministic storytelling works. Every branching path, by its mere existence, is a thematic statement on the part of the storyteller. And the paths that *don't* exist even moreso. And even if you attempt to subvert this and include as many paths as possible, the ones you exclude by necessity make statements of their own whether you want them to or not. If you don't choose the things you want your story to say, then your carelessness will shine through. What do you think it says that Pillars 1 includes a mechanic where if you have Dex 19 then you're just *so good* at sex that prostitutes give you your money back, but treats Kana with contempt because he wants to date Maneha?

Does increasing a wizard's power source stat by leveling in another class allow them to learn/cast higher-level spells, or does it just scale up their low-level ones?

I'm not sure how that would fit in with the Watcher's ability to hire prostitutes in POE1. (Although I guess you could headcanon that the Watcher was just trying it out and decided it wasn't for them?) Yeah you'd sorta have to, or maybe say that the Watcher was somehow aware of the metagame stat boosts and was only doing it for that reason. There's also the problem of Iovara, but if you can be a different gender in a past life, why can't you be a different orientation too?

You know what I think would be cool? If the Watcher was canon Aro-Ace and this was something the player couldn't change. As far as I know no RPG has ever had an explicitly canon Aro-Ace protagonist before, so this could be a really cool first.