Ineth

Dude. The guy You can already choose to kill either, neither or both of them. Is that not enough choice? Why would you need an option to pat the guy on the back for what he did.

Some of the best Cipher abilities must be targeted on a ally though, not oneself. Doesn't that make it sub-optimal for soloing? Or did it work with summoned creatures from figurines?

Yeah, the UK is probably the worst problem child when it come to free speech in Western liberal democracies. The downwards slope that country is on in this regard is pretty sad, especially considering that it's the country where, once upon a time, civil rights were first acknowledged.

Indeed, and I think we actually need to break it down by individual (temporally/geographically/theologically distinct) denominations and sects within each religion. There's the Christianity of Martin Luther King and Sophie Scholl, and there's the Christianity of Westboro Baptist Church. There's the spiritual/esoteric/polite Tibetan variety of Buddhism (which has successfully spread to the West), and there's the traditional/hard-core/zero-tolerance variety of Buddhism of some parts of South East Asia that is no stranger to violent persecution of Christians, Muslims and believers of indigenous animistic religions. And so on.

How convenient, since it's pretty much the only choice of "litmus test" that will allow you to defend your radical anti-Western bias. I know this is probably futile in an online discussion like this, but let me try and appeal to your rationality. Why should the freedom of speech regarding a very particular historical issue, which different societies and governments stand in very different relations to due to historical circumstances, be considered the most fair and useful universal "litmus test"? When something has a totally different historical importance and societal meaning to different groups, it should be plainly obvious to any fair-minded person, that it's not sensible to blindly compare the rules those different groups have built around that issue out of context and take them as an indicator for rules they would build around totally different issues. Here's a suggestion for an actually fair litmus test for free speech across different countries: Can a person with no wealth, power or influence publicly disparage the government (or even the head of state him or her-self), even in a crude and foul way, and not have to fear persecution? Unlike yours, this litmus test is fair because the issues at the heart of it apply to every country equally. All countries have governments that would prefer to be glorified rather than disparaged, because the latter could threaten their continued stay in power. Of course, you'll hate it because when applied to every country equally, it won't exactly confirm your anti-Western and pro-ruthless-semidictatorships biases. But deep down, the rational part of you will know that brushing it aside won't change the truth. PS: Which is not to say that most Western liberal democracies would rank 10/10 on that scale. Not even close. But relatively, they'd rank the highest.

The shark people were total pushovers though (compared to what came before and after them). Unless your front-liners were unusually susceptible to stunning arrows, you could just roflstomp through most of that area with select all + click. In the Skaen temple, you have to play out the same "scouting + positioning + engaging + AoE bombarding" game again and again and again.

I was bored, so I made a fictional interview with answers cropped from screenshots of Pillars of Eternity dialog with Edér, since - even when ripped out of context - he's got a way of hitting the nail on the head : --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Edér, do you have a moment? Would you mind answering a few questions? You've been nominated for the "Hero of Dyrwood 2015" public choice award, but the readers of our news site are hesitant to vote for you due to some of your tweets. They want to know: What, exactly, do you have against left-wing progressives? But if a group rallies under the name 'progressive' and even 'Social Justice', does that not indicate that they're the good guys? That they're selflessly thinking about the less advantaged? Sure, there might have been some self-enrichment and collateral damage along the way. But considering the paramount importance of the great struggle for social progress, can't you excuse a few temporary side-effects like progressive decision-makers having to subvert the constitution or curtail some civil rights a little? So maybe the current progressive leaders and politicians are not perfect. But instead of giving up on the idea of effecting social change through expanded centralized power, couldn't we just make sure that this power will be wielded by good, pure-minded progressives whose noble convictions will deter them from abusing it? Well I, for one, am a supporter of equal rights for all - regardless of race or gender!! Oh really? Then what do you think of feminism, and the three waves of progress it has brought? Clearly, you are a hopeless regressive sh*tlord.

Well fighting Raedric's undead form was imo considerably more difficult than fighting the final boss, so in a way he was already the 'true' villain of this game...

Modding has never been very open-source anyway. From what I've seen, most (PC gaming) modders... work alone have huge egos keep their source/work files and tools secret seem allergic to the very concepts of collaboration and sharing I.e. it's the norm for mod authors to forbid other people from even redistributing their mod on other download sites than the one they themselves have chosen. And don't you dare make your own mod even compatible with another person's mod, without personally asking that person for permission first - then all hell will break loose. So yeah, the modding community has a fundamentally different culture and mindset than the open-source community.

"What goes no now"? How is it 'bad behavior' to make a thread for linking a negative review - just because you don't agree with it? Even though I, too, think that the review is needlessly hyperbolic/antagonistic and lacking in perspective and fairness, it did raise some good points and I'm glad that Sensuki linked it here as I would have otherwise not noticed it (since I'm not on RPG Codex). A productive debate about things like how to improve the 'Graze vs Hit' mechanic was starting here, just before you posted (and derailed it again ).

Yes please. Dominate/Petrify grazes are totally OP right now, both when used against your party and when you use them against bosses. Your idea would fix that. For example, here's how my battle against the Sky Dragon went: "round 1", more or less simultaneously:Eder, Kana, Hiravias, Rogue fan out to surround it dragon hits Rogue for a measly 50 damage Cipher uses Scale Breaker, and hits --> several seconds of reduced DR Aloth casts Gaze of the Adragan, and grazes --> a few seconds of petrification "round 2":Everyone hits the dragon with high-damage attacks. They don't even need the full duration of the "grazed" petrify, since the dragon goes down ridiculously fast. I think it took like three to four seconds of virtual time after the petrify landed, for it to die from my attacks. Next time I'll restrict myself to not using petrify. It's just that after fighting the much tougher Adra Dragon earlier, I thought I had to in order to have any chance. In any case, a dragon should not be so easy to kill thanks to status effect "grazes", especially since there were still tough battles at that point in the game, like undead Raedric.

Also, if I remember right, the whole "miss-graze-hit-crit + DR" system was advertised as a solution for preventing the "miss fests" that allegedly plagued the IE games. Yet in those games I have never experienced such hopeless stalemates as in situations in PoE when tank-Eder and random-enemy-boss were the only ones left standing. Miss after miss after miss, with an occasional graze for single-digit damage. Could sometimes have probably gone on for fifteen minutes if I hadn't been impatient and reloaded.

And BG2:SoA has just 23 world map locations. So what? It's not a very good measure of a game's scope, let alone quality.

And the Gloves of Manipulation, though unfortunately as random loot.

Yeah me too. Waiting for a mod to do just that. Nah, it would be in the same league as the existing inns. Defiance Bay has an inn that gives +4 INT, which is incredible for spellcasters (especially since it stacks with "+2 INT while equipped" items). Twin Elms has an inn that gives +2 RES, +2 CON, +2 MIG all at the same time. Letting the stronghold stack its measly +1 bonuses wouldn't be OP at all in comparison.

Sorry, I can't take you seriously if I read something like this. I'd say that both BG1 and BG2 had a pretty weak story, so saying that BG1 was slightly better due to a better pacing is justified. I'm totally okay with that. But saying that BG1 had better quests... really? I mean; really? Name me just one quest that wasn't just "go there, beat **** up" in BG1? Certainly not clearing the endless levels of Nashkel Mines. Or all the pointless dungeons filled with hordes of copy & paste encounters. I can name you dozens of memorable quests in BG2: The Unseeing Eye, the De'Arnise Keep, the Planar Sphere, Getting the dragon eggs in Ust Natha, the Skinner of the Bridge district, the Umar Hills deaths, etc. Literally every zone of BG2 had at least one memorable, multi-stage optional quest that you will definitely remember in almost every single detail. In comparison, I can't even remember almost any of the sidequests in BG1. Like literally, I played BG1 at least 5 times now and I still struggle remembering the quests. QFT. Anyone who says that BG1 had better quests or better dungeons than BG2 or PoE is clearly not talking about BG1 the actually existing game, but rather about BG1 the sugarcoated memory of how playing a fantasy cRPG for the first time as a teenager made them feel (when it had no prior expectations to measure up to).

Make sure you use good debuffs and crowd control. Let Aloth start by casting Slicken on all enemies at once (even if you didn't select that spell on level-up, you should have found it from an enemy's grimoire by now). Let the Fighter make good use of his Knockdown ability once the enemies get back up. Let Grieving Mother cast Mental Binding if she has it. Let Durance cast Suppress Affliction when one of your own party is affected by a hostile affliction.

The high horse, and drugs. Two things you should really get off of, mate.

I'm pretty sure there are no such contractually binding rules. Kickstarter pledges are glorified donations.

You can do plenty of "Exceptional" enchantments though.

Yep. Get the best weapons/armors/shields that don't already have a quality enchantment (but have other unique enchantments), and add a quality enchantment on top of it. There's no real reason not to do it.

They didn't have a publisher insisting on deadlines. They were on their own timetable. So how did they end up "not having enough time"? They didn't have a AAA budget, true. But they could have cut unnecessary things (stronghold upgrades, some levels of the mega-dungeon, etc.) and put those resources into polishing the core game instead.

Technically that's not true; it was a somewhat challenging to remember the durations of all the buffs so you could buff all six characters simultaneously in the right order (long-duration buffs first, short ones last) Ah, good times...

possible nah. This one could actually be pretty interesting.