Doppelschwert

Had completely slipped my mind. Given that the Devil of Caroc is literally soul-bound to her armour, having it soul-bound to her would probably be even more appropriate than having Durance's Staff soulbound to him. And the progression should be level-based. Just flat scaling; +DR and some stat (since she gets no bonus as a Construct) would be appropriate. I filed a bug report and they replied by saying the missing attributes on her racial are not intended and that they've now taken this bug into their database. Whether they will change the armor is up to the devs, but they asked for some feedback here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/84661-301-devil-of-caroc-inferior-to-all-other-npcs/

Happened for me as well. She left during the scene but on leaving and coming back she and her minions were back again.

Hey, thank you very much for the feedback and the bug report on the attributes! Regarding the immunities, I'm probably not the best to gauge their usefulness (which means I actually don't have a feeling for how often they come up in fights relative to other afflictions, even though I played through several times), but I'll still make four arguments to consider: 1) Role of a Rogue The armor not being unique is not necessarily the problem here but rather the choice of armor. It obviously makes thematic sense with the shock weakness and the material, but clashes with her role as a rogue. Since most rogue builds revolve around dealing damage and not being hit too often, the additional DR is not as relevant as the heavy attack rate penalty of 40% for the classes primary role. In the end, almost every rogue talent is about stacking damage multipliers for a limited time in some way, so attack speed is very important. 2) Potential in difficult fights While there a lot of useful immunities, there is also the trade off of not being able to use food for buffing and drugs. In a way, the immunities are paid for by a lower baseline of stats in difficult fights and no field triage: In a difficult fight, you may want to eat food for buffs and have your priest cast immunity to the relevant afflictions on the whole group and have defensive spells proced when your magical armor is being hit. In this scenario, the immunities don't add anything while you lose the buff to stats and the procs from unique armor. Immunities are handy, yes, especially since I'm usually playing without a priest and scrolls, but there is a definite gap in potential power. 3) Ressources While it is true that one can enchant her armor, there are a lot of superb armors in the base game and both expansions to outfit everyone in the party. I don't know about WM2, but in the base game and WM1 you can only have 2 superb enchantments for armor and durgan steel competes both with all weapons of the party and all armor and shields. You made so much cool loot that I would like to simultaneously use during the endgame that it feels like a waste to use these precious ressources on a plain breastplate instead of one of the cooler items. 4) Presentation This is just a psychological issue, but if you feel like her immunities are enough to compensate both her racial ability and the lack of unique armor, it would feel better if you moved some of the immunities from her racial talent to her armor. The way its presented now, there is no clear connection between the immunities being supposed to take care of the lack of uniqueness. If you move them around, it becomes much clearer to see that 'this set of immunities is meant to be on par with the other racial talents' while 'that set of immunities is meant to be on par with other unique armor'. That and maybe starting the armor out as a fine or exceptional item would go a long way to feel like a special item even though it would have the same power as the current presentation. I'm sorry if these suggestions come off as overly rude, since I'm very pleased with all the hard work you are putting into this great game! I'm full aware that I just suggested a huge increase in power, but I just hope this can help you in some internal discussion. And please don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not a powergamer and expect her armor to be on par with the best available armor for free. But just some way to reach superb without touching the limited ressources and a low passive buff or a weak spell on proc would go a long way in my opinion.

just a thought. you could make the weapon soulbound w/o actual having it improve. have soulbound exclusive to durance. this would allow durance, as a priest who is not particular effective with a staff, to actual make use o' his eponymous weapon. HA! Good Fun! The problem is that soulbound weapon can't be enchanted. So making it simply soulbound would actually make it potentially weaker. It is basically more simple to keep the balance by making it evolving soulbound. fair enough. a weak soul bound weapon exclusive to durance doesn't sound bad. have the thresholds for improvement simple be levels... or levels and companion quest thresholds. that being said, am doubting that fans is gonna be satisfied with a weak soulbound... at least based on past experience with such scenarios. fanbase iwd2 kit suggestions were a low watermark for a game from these developers, but has never improved. HA! Good Fun! To be honest I think it is quite hard to tie the staff more to the narrative. You basically have two options, either you force it on durance or you don't. If you don't force it on durance, the tie to the narrative is broken but the player has total control. If you want to force it on durance for the sake of narrative, you have two options: You make it like devils armor and force him to keep it equipped or you make it unsellable, only usable by him and maybe even soulbound on top. I don't think it is possible on a technical level to force the staff to stay in durances inventory. If it is a forced equipment, people will complain about being locked (just like with the devil), if it is not equiped by force it may as well be in the stash which basically means it is not tied to the narrative anymore. ------------ Personally, I don't think there is a need for soulbound. Make it equipable only by durance and give it the 'universal' property which means it stacks with magrans deity talent (point being this property is already implemented, so an easy change). Making it soulbound or not is just a matter of powercreep then - do you want to hand the player a unique superb item for free or do you want him to spend ressources on it. As long as it is only equipable by durance, it doesn't really matter much except watering down the other soulbound items in terms of uniqueness. That being said, of course it would work very well as a soulbound item tied to his quest. But has anyone of the people complaining about the staff being weak actually tried using the staff with its 'best crush/fire' effect? I think the staff is already really powerful by the time you get access to it. I don't have any statistics in mind but my impression is that there are quite a lot of enemies in the game that have high differences between crush and fire DR: Enemies with high crush DR often have normal fire DR and then fire is a weakness of quite some enemy types as well, yielding a lot of extra damage in these scenarios. People praise the storm bow all the time, and I think a good part of its effectiveness apart from all the passive abilities is that it takes the best of pierce/shock damage. Personally, I think this enchantment is much more powerful than a lot of other custom effects, so the staff is already plenty strong now, even if it is not a fancy soulbound weapon. IMO, complaining about the devils armor suggests itself much more.

I don't see how this is against PoE lore. The binding between the devil and her body goes in both directions - she is bound to the body so her soul can not leave, but the body is bound to her since she controls it. The concept of soulbound, as I understand it, is not that different since fractions of the former owner are bound to the artifacts and give them their magical power. They are called soulbound because they need to make a connection to another soul as a catalyst to be unleashed. I don't think it is that much of a stretch to consider her as a superior soulbound artifact since not only a fraction but her whole soul is tied to her body. Her being able to unleash that power slowly over time herself seems not out of place for me. Besides, making her Armor soulbound would fix a lot of mechanical issues if one wants to upgrade the armor automatically over time. Ideally, the player should know that this is going to happen from the beginning and at the same time he should not be able to enchant the armor before he is intended to have the respective quality. Soulbound solves both these problems. It can also be easily tied to the overall story progression (one upgrade for her personal quest, one for resting in the white forge, for example).

That would be a reason for a bug report I guess, although I'm not interested enough in the color palette to write one myself.

If you look closely at the description of the staff since patch 3.0, it not only has a burning lash but also the property of 'Best Damage Crush/Burn', which is a unique modifier no other staff shares (but is not listed as an explicit enchantment). Further enchanting and exploiting this can make for a ridiculous effective melee weapon that bypasses normal DR for the much lower burn DR on some enemies. It's the same for the robe, by the way - although it has listed a burn-proof enchantment, there is another big DR bonus against burn that is not explicitly mentioned in the enchant window. Making the staff soulbound seems a bit like overkill to me since you can just give it to someone else and the staff is not tied to durance from a gameplay perspective. If they were to make it soulbound, I think it should be only able to bind to durance. On the other hand, I just suggested in the bug forum to make the devils armor soulbound since you are stuck with that thing.

I'm not sure if this is on purpose, but it is a well known fact among the players that the custom character 'Devil of Caroc' has more downsides than upsides. There are multiple threads dedicated to this topic and I'll just highlight two major issues. 1) She only has 76 stat points instead of 78 like all other custom NPCs. 2) Although she is stuck with her breastplate armor, there are no unique enchantments that would make up for the lack of player choice. Keeping the armor competetive would mean spending the most rare crafting ingredients on her while all other characters can just equip the superb armors you find in the game. Before 3.0, there was also the issue of the racial ability not being very useful, but as immunities have been added, this is no longer a problem (at least for me). Why am I complaining in this part of the forum? Because both 1) and 2) have been adressed for other characters in recent patches. 1) The issue of a wrong stat spread has been resolved for Maneha in 3.01. 2) Durance got unique enchants on both robe and staff in 3.00, Palegina got access to 2 exclusive talents as well, and apparently there is also a new talent for sagani. Now I haven't played WM2 yet so I'm not sure if there is some side quest related upgrade for the armor of the devil, but I'll just be bold and petition for some upgrade of her armor and fair stats anyway. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In case there is indeed no armor upgrade for the devil in WM2, I will now make the suggestion that it would be fitting if her armor was considered a weak soulbound armor whose upgrades are unlocked by the devil leveling up. That could grant her the armor quality enchantments on the apropriate level up to superb and maybe a weak passive ability like reduced armor penalty or something else that fits to the typical playstyle of a rogue. If this is too much to ask for, at the very least consider giving her some custom unique ability for her armor for compensating the lack of choice the player has.

You may also want to go through the dialogue to earn reputation which can have consequences down the road, for priests and paladins even on a mechanical level. OPs suggestion is a good idea.

In my recent playthrough I turned on the dev audio commentary. In Od Nua 1, they explicitly adress that the rooms with tougher monsters are meant to push you towards the key to maerwald (apparently, the monsters on the path to the key are supposed to be easier) and that the rest of the first level is meant for coming back later (or something along those lines, at least thats what I remember). That's not meant to tell you to suck it up though, just to get some perspective. My problem with conquering Od Nua on PotD would be that resting is prohibited in a lot of areas, so when I find myself wanting to rest I need to travel away and come back, even if I have some resting supplies.

It could possibly have something to do with the don't-move-while-engaged option, but if it does, it's under the hood of the game. The party members acknowledge the commands, but they either run the wrong way, spazz out, or just stand still - they don't "snag on engagement", for lack of a better term. For instance, in my second example, the entire party was fighting a single mushroom, which was engaged with either Edér or Kana (the two guys closest). The mushroom cannot possible engage anyone in Engagement, yet multiple units refused to move. If I want them to move, I have to move them in the opposite direction, and then back again, in a V-shaped pattern, and then tell them to attack again, manually pathing them to where I want them to go. There's no reason to think this has anything to do with the AI/Scripts, either. They might have their own infuriating issues (or not, I've set them to Defensive and that's it; it appears to be the least aggrevating, even though I still lament the absence of a bloody Hold Position order) but it doesn't seem to affect pathing at all. Sorry, I think my post came across the wrong way. I acknowledge that there is something off with the pathfinding, thats not up to debate, but I think there is some strange behaviour on top as well that your screenshots reminded me of. In your first screenshot, I think there are two things off. First: The option under the 'Game' tab says 'Continue Movement on Engagement' - 'If enabled, friendly characters will continue moving when engaged by an enemy.' If this somehow goes both ways, so also when you engage someone, then it would explain why they don't go over by themselves. Second: Even though the guys on the right side don't attack the left target as you wanted, they should at least somehow attack the right target they are engaged with (at least that is how I understand the defensive AI). But apparently they don't and somehow they are also not closing in on the enemy. I often have this effect if the enemy has a greater range than my own characters and I suspect that engagement somehow mixes up attack ranges or something. I think the very least the characters should be able to do is to cross the distance to a target they are engaged with in order to retaliate. But in hindsight, thats only a tangent to the pathfinding issues at hand, so sorry for bringing it up.

You're welcome. I agree that this system works best for setting up AI how the user wants it to be and I would be very happy if they used it in a possible PoE2.

No, I'm talking about the bug of AI not using per-encounter spells when per-rest abilities is unchecked. Ah, that explains a lot. Thanks.

Sorry to burst your bubble but Final Fantasy 12 was released in 2006 (Japan/US/Canada) and 2007 (Europe) with such a system while it took Dragon Age Origins another 3 years to a release of 2009 with a similiar system. That's even enough time to insinuate that DA:O could have copied the system from FF12 instead of coming up with that on their own.

Multiclassing can and will shut down viable options like nothing else, especially if its not properly balanced. As an illustrative example for this explanation, take Etrian Odyssey 3, a turn based dungeon crawler hommage to wizardry. The game features 11 classes and lets you multiclass them to get a total of 121 combinations (since the order of the classes matters). Yet, if you go the boards on gamefaqs there is a high consensus that most combinations are mechanically strictly inferior to other combinations, which probably yields you at most 25 effective combinations, with single optimal builds for certain roles like tank, healer, CC and so on. Building your party differently will make the game harder for you at best and get you ridiculed at the board at worst.

So, any new robes in WM2?

Since questions on the first page of the board about OS have been answered, I'll kindly bump this thread to crave some devs attention.

I think this was reported before, but I have the same problem and a save can be found in https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjgoizn0a43u1hd/019207729c5e45b1bcb6603a47c0bb33%2017106986%20GreatHall.savegame?dl=0 For me the bribed group in the Charred Barrel is still there and noninteractable as well, you might check that out to see if it is the same for you.

I have the same problems as Luckman and its really aggravating lately since it often ends in my party being killed one after another while they could easily overpower the enemy if they all attacked at once. I do have the feeling though that this has to do with the toogle 'don't move while engaged' (or however it is called in one of the options menus). I'm afraid to turn it off since at this point, I expect my characters to run around being hit by engagement attacks till dead, but I should probably try it. My rogue is set to cautious behaviour (so flanking) and she often attacks one enemy, darts off to the other side of the fight, attacks an enemy there and runs back, which is also a serious unnecessary drop in DPS (even if I tell her to stay). At this point, I would actually like to stop using the AI, but my whole party consists of melee combatants and when they fight a group of enemies in PotD and spell effects start to accumulate I have no idea about engagement and the general combat state anymore, so I use the auto attack clauses of the AI mostly for setting up and evading disengagement.

I've never uploaded a file for this subforum, so I hope this works: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjgoizn0a43u1hd/019207729c5e45b1bcb6603a47c0bb33%2017106986%20GreatHall.savegame?dl=0 By the way, I just encountered a bug where 'Weapon Focus: Peasant' was briefly not applied to Eders Main hand but to his Second Hand (both fists) in the inventory screen, but I've not been able to reproduce it / see it in combat. And thanks for the quick involvement! I'd ask for an ETA for the next patch but I guess you don't know that yourself at this point?

Yeah, I agree with you pretty much, especially the sideways walk and the hold position. I also played the game since release, but this is the first time I'm running an all melee party without reach weapons and the first time potd as well. I think the amount of engagement problems scales way too well with the amount of melee units being present, it was much more bearable with half the party in the back and less monsters. Not that I'm complaining about that, that style of play was my decision, but it makes the problems with engagement much more noticeable.

They said it will be fixed in 3.02 in the other thread.

While I also like the idea of engagement, the execution suffers some time Yesterday I had the situation where a melee character was sitting in the middle of 3 ogres, but not touching their circles. The ogres were engaging my character, so movement would resulted in hits, but my character could not attack the ogres because they were out of range since the circles did not touch. The AI just shut down (because it was told not to break engagement) and the ogres wailed on my idle character. When I notived this and moved my character nearer to one of the ogres for an attack, the character ate 3 disengagement attacks and died. If engagement would only break once you move outside of an enemys weapons reach and characters didn't need to stand next to each other to attack, that would feel a lot smoother while keeping pretty much the same strategic effects disengagement is supposed to have in the first place.

Difficulty and being good at the game is a matter of standards and resting surely has something to do with that. If your standard for being good is beating a certain difficulty somehow, sure, go ahead. But it's also reasonable of people here to expect you to play through a certain difficulty without having to constantly backtrack for supplies. First, that is perfectly doable if you know what you are doing and second, the game is designed that way. If people can play through PotD without having to restock on supplies during dungeons while you need to, then it's only fair to assume you could do something better so the patronizing part is somehow justified. I get the anger but it's just a different design paradigm than the one you would prefer and it surely won't change now at the end of this games life cycle, so sorry I guess.

Thanks for the update guys! Are you on GOG by any chance? I have had endless grief with the patches on their side. And Galaxy is even worse. Sounds like a problem people had with WM1 with the meshes. It could be due to not downloading and installing the correct patches in the correct order... If you are on steam, then sorry no idea.... Even though I had the texture errors at some point during WM1 on GoG as well, his problem can't be happening on GoG since as of writing this GoG does not grant access to 3.01. He also explicitly said he verified the integrity of his cache which should be a steam exclusive term. While I'm sorry for your bad experience with gog and while I also have mixed feelings about galaxy, I can't deny that galaxy at least managed to always download all my games into a functioning state. In particular, that sidestepped the problem of determining the order of patches and installation during WM1 for me and fixed the mesh problems, so I'm kind of grateful for that. What sucks about galaxy for me is the inefficient downloading because it does not compress data before downloading and redownloads all patched files instead of updating the differences. In particular, fixing of that mesh error took several hours of downloads because my internet connection is not the greatest.