0rangekun

Small question: Tidefall still drains endurance in my game and doesn't seem to act any differently than it did many months ago. Were the changes mentioned in this build reverted? My game's up to date and everything.

If you want more info on how engagements work, take a look over here - it goes in depth on why engagements were implemented and how do they work. The only other thing I can really think of is that every character has an engagement radius - characters will only engage other characters which enter this radius. I'm pretty sure it's variable and can be changed via talents and equipment. Sadly, this is not displayed anywhere, so it's quite difficult to tell whether you should have already engaged an enemy or not (and I suppose it can happen that an enemy engages you but you don't engage the enemy in extreme circumstances) I think one area I have some difficulty in with engagement is with characters capable of engaging multiple enemies. If Eder has 3 engagement slots, how does the game determine which 3 enemies are tied to him by engagement? Say, for example, the battle starts and three enemies charge at my party. Despite having 3 slots for engagement, Eder oftentimes seems to only hold one of them, and the other two run by - like, right past him, they shouldn't be beyond his range, far as I can tell. I just don't think engagement transfers itself very well to a game with real-time combat, unfortunately. In D&D, attacks of opportunity only really work when it's turn-based. Take games like Neverwinter Nights - rather than IE games, since the latter don't have AoOs from what I remember - and attack of opportunity didn't work very well at all. Fortunately in the case of Neverwinter Nights, an attack of opportunity doesn't have an immense bonus to hit chance and damage, so when the game behaves strangely or in a way you don't expect or anticipate, it might punish you, yes, but it doesn't devastate you. I don't quite have 4th level chants yet. I really like the chanter - it's basically a bard done better - but after a many hours with Kana in my party I've found that it's just not worth bringing one most of the time. Most fights just don't last long enough (I'm sure this is a different story on PotD) and, quite frankly, I'm just not a fan of the character. I was actually going to make my main character a chanter, originally, but I then felt I'd rather have a more active protagonist.

I don't have access to the spell yet, unfortunately.

Typically right after Khalid tried to show off his skills by fighting an ogre... naked, and unarmed am I right? Sorry, Khalid but I can only bring five people with me, and Coran's just way, way better than you are. It definitely has nothing to do with stealing the man's wife, though. Definitely not.

I haven't fought any vithracks in recent memory. Probably not since back in April when I first really got into the game heavily. Can't say I remember what they're like, but your mentioning them specifically now has me concerned, haha! It would be nice if charm spells were susceptible to suppression, yes. It feels a bit unfair how devastating this type of CC is. Not only does it take a character out of your control, but it turns them against you (and most of the time has them waste all of their Knock Down uses, and switch to their firearm so that when Charm finally does wear off you have to waste a 'turn' swapping back to sword and shield, but by then they get charmed again) I get that they're supposed to be powerful effects, though. But they're extremely difficult to counter. No outright immunity to the effect is available, and as far as I can tell there's no way to remove the effect (other than countercharming, which is hardly ideal). When you consider that enemies generally have such high base stats, it gets to the point of feeling unfair. It's hard enough getting my tank's defenses high enough to avoid being hit by Charm, and I can't even imagine raising Aloth, Durance, or Grieving Mother's defenses enough, which is made worse because those three are my only means of actually combating Charm.

I am talking about a certain fight, yes. I won it by placing a trap and a Seal spell on the stairs leading to the fight and had everyone but Eder hide way, way back. Then I made a literal impassable wall with Pallegina, Eder, and my PC. Between them bodyblocking and a line of sight issue due to the stairs, the fampyrs couldn't go charm-crazy before I got some spells off. Even so, Aloth, GM, and Durance all got KO'd eventually. The thing I don't understand, in general, not specific to this fight, is that I have 2 tanks with 3 engagement slots (Pallegina getting a third from Shatterstar), along with my main character having one slot, but also being melee and having solid defenses (she actually has more defense than either true tanks save for Deflection). So there were plenty of slots, often more slots than there are enemies. I might just have a problem with actually getting enemies 'tagged' for engagement, though, but I'm not sure how. Probably. My main character is a demon, especially on fights where I can use Sworn Enemy, when you take into account how resilient she is for a damage dealer but between platemail and a greatsword, she's more of a slow and reliable damage than proper DPS. Grieving Mother can be beastly as well, though I mostly use her for CC and whatnot. She definitely falls apart against single strong enemies (like being nearly incapable of hitting a dragon leaving her with no focus gain) My party is definitely lacking for damage, but I can't help but feel that's at least as much Obsidian's fault as it is mine. They don't exactly provide you with damage-y party members. Sagani, perhaps? If rangers are really better now. I like the characters in my party, though, so it's that much harder to swap anyone out for another. Text is a poor means of conveyance for tone, and I think italics help somewhat in that regard. Ironically I had a much easier time fighting a dragon earlier in the same day. I beat it on my first try. Just sort of stumbled into the area, didn't even rest beforehand. It wasn't exactly easy, but unlike the fampyrs nothing ever happened in the fight that made me feel I'd lost long before it was over. That fear aura, though, is insane. Even with Priest spells, it had 111 Accuracy. Literally everyone on my party except for my main character spent the entire fight terrified; -20 accuracy ruined a good bit of strategy I had for the dragon. Even without -20, a lot of my characters would've been hard pressed to do more than graze when all of its defenses were 100-120. I definitely miss buffs providing outright immunities to certain effects. Personal preference I suppose, but stronger buffs along with more powerful means of dispel (rather than suppressing buffs or debuffs) feels a lot more meaningful, to me. I've used figures, potions, and various spells with mixed results. It takes time to use all of these things, and more often than not, ****'s hit the fan before I'm even halfway done buffing. In case you don't know, the IE mod can remove engagement. Yeah. I don't believe it's up to date for the current patches, though, but thanks for the mention all the same.

Doesn't seem to matter how I position my party (which is, always, casters way, way far back - a mile away - with my two paladins and fighter playing roadblock, a fact which enemies seem to love to ignore, engagement slots be damned). Amusingly, I've regularly found enemies run right down the middle through my melee characters with no negative effect, yet the pathing for my characters is so terrible that telling them to move just a little bit has them decide to run in a massive circle that takes them right past every enemy - just to make sure they all get a fair shot disengage-attacking them. How does flanking work, exactly, though? I understand how it works in D&D, but my understanding of it in PoE is simply when you're being engaged by more foes than you have engagement slots. I.E. It'd take 4 enemies to flank a character with 3 slots. That's just what I've read, well... everywhere. :\ Part of the reason I find the ruleset for the game (it's literally D&D; it's almost identical in every way save for the names of stats) so frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of consistency to some of the rules in it and, given how similar it is to D&D, I can't help but feel like it'd have been far better off just to be D&D exactly instead of D&D-but-not-really. The fampyrs have a tendency of charming my cipher immediately, usually Durance as well and, if I'm especially unlucky, Eder to boot. Unfortunately, the fight in particular was a boss fight of sorts, so there was no way to sneak up on them or get the jump on them with a quick spellcast. I don't have a rogue, as I've stupidly elected to use NPCs rather than player-made drones, since my biggest issue with the Icewind Dale games were the characters or lackthereof. Quick shout-out: thanks a lot for killing off the prologue companions, Obsidian. I liked them, damn it. I do understand how engagement works (at least, I think I do). Seems like it works more or less exactly like attacks of opportunity, only being that this is a video game and not a turn-based one, my experiences with engagements have been wholly inconsistent. I rarely actually command my party to disengage, if only because every time it happens they wind up A) Being hit like a truck B) Stop moving the second they've been hit for some reason. The only time I provoke a disengagement attack is when the AI decides that it wants to take the worst possible path imaginable to a destination and I've forgotten to handhold it every step of the way. The difficulty I'm having with engagement is that it never seems to work as advertised. I spend more time in combat paused than not, and a lot of that time is spent reading the combat log. I've never witnessed my characters making a disengagement attack. Ever. Doesn't seem to matter that Eder's set up to engage an army, it's usually just one foe that stops to fight him, and even if a second or third join in, they skip away to maul Aloth with Eder's full consent it seems. In all honesty, I actually agree. I think that if engagement were handled differently, I'd like it. But it's an all or nothing mechanic, I think, and so with the extent to which its implemented, I'd prefer if it just didn't exist. I'm overall pleased with PoE, but I've yet to actually finish the game (and I haven't started over, either) because I just wind up feeling downright exhausted by it quite easily. Like today, for example. After a long, grueling effort to do a sidequest where I fought a boss and a pack of like 7 or 8 fampyrs, I stopped playing. I might continue tomorrow, or I might go another month before I pick up the game again. I even won the fight, but I did so only by cheese tactics and a whole lot of RNG (on the winning attempt, the fampyrs FINALLY didn't charm my entire back line before I could so much as bend over and beg they be gentle). I didn't feel like I'd overcome a challenge, or in any way rewarded for my efforts (I got a unique suit of platemail that has 'okay' stats, I guess). There are a lot of mechanisms (engagement, health/endurance, spells largely being combat-only - to name a few) that I just don't like. They might not be inherently bad decisions, but they're aspects which exist in this game that otherwise feels exactly like the Infinity Engine-inspired game I want it to be. If there were a mod to eliminate these aspects, I'd install it in a heartbeat. The music, the artstyle, and the general atmosphere of the game has me screaming yes, while some of the nitty-gritty of combat system has me tearing my hair out. I think that IE Mod at least lets you turn off engagement, but I don't believe the mod works with the current version of Pillars. Thanks for the replies, by the way, the three of you. I really don't aim to come across as just another ranting negativity. If PoE didn't get so many things right, I wouldn't feel the need at all. I'd just write it off as disappointing and uninstall it (hello Wasteland 2). But it's because it comes so close to being exactly the game I've been wanting again since I was a kid that the parts I don't care for really grate me.

I like this game a lot. Except when it throws hordes of fampyrs at your party, charms 4/6 characters, then every enemy rushes past your tanks and insta-kills Aloth and Grieving Mother. How do you even combat this? I'm not losing fights against them, but I'm constantly down 2-4 party members due to charm and having 1-2 characters die per encounter. It's not a fun challenge, it's just play infuriating. I don't have Protection Against Whatever-the-name-of-it that grants defenses against charmed yet, and even still that's by no means a guaranteed defense, every bit as fallible as the other Protection Against... spells are - like when Prot. against Fear fails to defend any one of my characters against the fear aura of a dragon for the entire fight. Fampyrs suck. The off-chance of them failing to charm a character, or the charm finally wearing off, and then they just relent and auto-attack for a bit... until I command a character to use an ability, of course, and then the computer decides to be an **** and micro-interrupt the spell before it finishes by charming the character again. Completely unrelated, I hate engagement. I absolutely hate it. If I tell someone to move, they wind up eating a chain of disengage attacks - when an enemy moves past me, I never perform a disengage attack. Eder has 3 engagement slots, yet he gets flanked nevertheless. Pallegina has 3 slots as well, yet she too without fail winds up flanked when fighting 3 enemies. And neither of those characters tries to stop an enemy from disengaging them, either. Engagement feels like one of those mechanics that works well in a grid-based, turn-based game, but just proves entirely frustrating to deal with and terribly inconsistent in a game like this. And I hate to come and rant about this, but my God, there's a difference between a rewarding challenge and a cross-your-fingers-the-game-doesn't-****-you spike. It just feels like I'm playing D&D, only reverse-engineered so that nothing works quite how I'd expect.

Just wondering if multiple sources of this stat will stack. For example, would Zealous Focus with the Critical Focus talent stack with a Potion of Merciless Gaze, and would these then also stack with the Predatory effect on weapons as well?

Don't 1st, 2nd, and maybe even 3rd level spells eventually become cast per encounter for all the casters, instead of per rest? At like level 9-12 or something like that. I guess you'd still have, say, an extra Xth level spell per encounter, with the talent, but I can't imagine blowing through every single 1-3 spell you've got in one encounter and still needing more.

I'm not sure what else to call this. Has anyone else experienced this, and fixed it?

It's probably displaying because, although the effects don't stack, the game displays such things regardless. My main character is a paladin, and while Pallegina was in my party we both had the Zealous Focus aura (she came with it ). I get two icons for the buff, but if you mouseover the buff list, one will be greyed out and say "Suppressed". I imagine it's the same for enemies, but you can't mouseover their debuffs (to my knowledge).

This just appeared for me this evening. Excessively long loading screens, as well, which I suspect to be related. Can't play the game at all, at the moment.

I like it. It's reminiscent of Fallout 1/2 and Baldur's Gate 1, iirc. That said, in the case of the latter, I don't recall any numerous enemies which carried magic (even basic) gear. So finding fine items on everything, past a certain point, feels imbalanced in terms of money. It's not like I'd ever loot and sell all of the generic equipment on every bandit I killed in Baldur's Gate, but I do like seeing that generic equipment drop. As I recall, this was toned down immensely in Baldur's Gate 2, though I do remember a series of generic enemies in Throne of Bhaal who did drop everything, and every one of them was decked out in +3 armour and weapons, which completely broke the economy of Faerun.

Loving the game, though a few encounters with bugs have me a bit soured. Not on the game as a whole, but just on my current playthrough. I've put it on hold at the moment because I don't want to be running around with 150 accuracy at level 6. So far I don't understand the "too easy", "too hard" complaints. The difficulty seems about even. Some things are hard, some are easier. My only complaint in terms of difficulty would be some encounters against boss-type enemies have proven more tedious than genuinely difficult, for me. Fighting something with twice as much accuracy as anyone on my party, dealing four times as much damage, with enough DR to drop my occasional Hit's damage down to ~5. Great game on the whole, not entirely convinced Accuracy/Defense/Damage Reduction is a better system than D&D. Neither is perfect, but I think grazing hits frustrate me more than outright misses. Maybe because grazes are so common, to the point landing a genuine Hit at times seems like a miracle, hah. Quite frankly, it seems like a large quantity of negative feedback is stemming from hype and expectations, neither of which necessarily promoted by the devs. There are points to be made, genuine criticisms, but the bulk of complaints are unfounded "I imagined this game would be X, but although you never said the game was going to be X, it's been released as Y."

I tried that before making the thread. Tried toggling off all auras, removing Pallegina from my party, and any combination of the two. In any case, toggling my Zealous Focus returns the massively bloated Accuracy.

I thought something was odd with my PC's accuracy earlier today, having 106. Short while later, I now have 133. No short-term buffs or anything. Seems to be due to having two paladins with Zealous Focus (I know they aren't supposed to stack; Pallegina came with it, much to my immense frustration). Deactivating the aura brings my accuracy back down to 53, while reactivating it once more bugs it out. Kind of a big deal, when I've talented for Critical Focus.

Oh, there's a hidden lootbox in there? Interesting, I'll have to swing back a bit later. I didn't know the game had any random loot, frankly, regardless of whether or not the sword in question here is. Like, I knew some loot was random, but I thought it was just crafting materials, i.e. an ooze sometimes drops its craft material, sometimes doesn't. Overgrown drake? Way to make me feel like a scrub.

It's a lava cave, yes. I didn't get any bracers, though turning in the quest did award me with a flail that's not too shabby. Alas, none of my party is talented for flails, but I'm early enough in the game that having a +8 accuracy weapon makes up for it. The trapped chest (assuming I'm thinking of the same one as you) just had a pittance of copper and a few gems inside, nothing fancy. I set off the trap accidentally, but was fortunate enough that it missed. Altogether not terrible, but considering the last time I had such a difficult, fun time fighting a dragon was in Baldur's Gate 2, receiving a flail with some generic enchantments doesn't quite compete with getting a +5 Holy Avenger.

After several attempts at this fight, always boiling down to everyone alive but short of spells by the time all the adds are dealt with, and having Cail kill everyone off one by one while my party manages nothing but constant grazes, I finally put this drake down. And there was no real reward, neither on the monsters themselves or in the treasure behind them? Just a handful of copper (240) and a few enchantment gems. I am sooo disappointed. Edit: Just occurred to me to ask, as well. Given how grueling this fight was for me, what can I do to raise my accuracy? There are so many effects that don't stack with one another, while other ones do, that I'm at a bit of a loss as to which buffs/debuffs to use. I noticed, at least according to my active effects list in-game, that Bless' accuracy boost doesn't stack with Zealous Focus, for example.

Dexterity isn't especially high priority for Chanters because it has no effect on their Chants. They can wear the heaviest armour, wield the slowest weapon, and bog themselves down with modal talents that further reduce attack speed and they will chant every bit as quickly as a Chanter wearing nothing at all. I haven't gotten the impression Constitution is all that great of a stat, though, as a whole. Maybe for Monks, who rely on taking some hits to generate Wounds, but the difference between a high and low Con's Endurance pool isn't enormous. I think. I do believe it boils down to what sort of Chanter you want, though. A tanky Chanter wearing plate, stacking up defenses, and sitting there waiting for their Chant counter to build up would need more survivibility of course than, say, a Chanter toting a gun and hanging out in the mid/back line.

Covered a whole lot of points I forgot about while I was typing out my reply. I haven't had any issue with my aura's radius, with 16 Intellect. I don't think I've ever had my ranged so far away that they don't benefit. Definitely agree heavily on the on-kill effects. For a class that is extraordinarily bad at killing, it's immensely disappointing that they have several effects (and in my opinion, some of their most legitimately helpful effects) which require the paladin to land a kill. Maybe if you play a Bleak Walker Death Godlike paladin, either dual-wielding or rocking a two-hander, with 18 Might then you'll see killing blows with some reliability, but that's far too specific. Edit: Oh, and the on-kill buffs you can trigger only affect allies, once again. That's not entirely a bad thing, given the paladin is like a supportive champion to the party, but it makes a mediocre class that much less appealing for, say, soloing. Impossible? Doubtful, but a solo paladin would lose the use of most of their abilities, and almost all of their good abilities.

All of the paladin hate circling around had me very hesitant to make one. They don't suck. I firmly believe they aren't where they should be, however. The auras need some work, for starters. Lay on Hands is just not worth taking. Liberating Exhortation should be stronger - it's per encounter, sure, but virtually every status ailment is an AoE, and Priests have an AoE Liberating Exhortation. With it being single target, it needs to either A) Remove ailments outright, not simply suspend them, or B) Grant immunity to further ailments for its duration. After that, I think most of the other Exhortations are true to the idea (single target, powerful Ally buffs), though I'd love if there were a talent or upgrade of some kind which allowed the paladin to use their abilities on themselves. All in all, it's not a bad class, but it's certainly outdone by others. Faith and Conviction is a cool idea, but it's frustrating because only the player character really makes it worthwhile because Pallegina, for example, doesn't get reputations, and so she can't enhance it beyond the base +5 Deflection, +10 Defenses. Considering Faith and Conviction is basically the entire reason that paladins are tanky (still not as tanky as a Fighter), that's a huge problem. Finally, their Order-specific abilities need tweaking. They're not balanced, basically, and half of them are just awful or extremely niche in their uses. tl;dr Paladin isn't bad. Lay on Hands, Liberating Exhortation, Auras, Orders, and maybe their base Accuracy (they seem to be touted as elite, highly disciplined and organized knights, and yet they're no more accurate than a Chanter or Cipher?) all could use some adjusting, maybe.1

Are there any commands to add and remove talents and abilities from NPC companions? Even following the relevant page on the wiki, the addability command doesn't seem to work ("no command or script addability accepting 3 parameters exists") Asking because by the time I picked up Kana, he had one of those God awful triage talents (in addition to a horrible selection of chants/invocations), and Pallegina has the Zealous Focus aura which... is the aura that my player character has invested in.

Thank you sooo much! I even looked there, I guess I just never scrolled to the bottom, haha... It doesn't seem to list Accuracy, however. Is the animal's accuracy, deflection, and DR based off the ranger's?