Ineth

Great work. Do you know if this also includes scripted interactions?

Most of those Cipher-specific actions could easily be allowed for all Watchers, seeing how the game muddles those two concepts anyway. Maybe someone will write a mod for that.

That's hilarious, because if you're a Priestess of Eothas, he couldn't give any less of a flying ****. You can't react to the fact that he participated in purges against your faith, and he doesn't react to the fact that you are a priestess of a god he considers dead and gone, and good riddance. There's zero commentary, zero overlap, zero reactivity. Really? That sucks. When Durance ranted about Old Valia, I could at least interject "I'm from Old Valia, is that gonna be a problem?" I would have thought that being a Priestess of Eothas would be much more worthy of special dialog with him, than that.

more like: *random hobo puts on Woedica mask, and walks inside Leaden Key's HQ* Hobo: "I'm your new leader." Leaden Key people: "Since you're wearing a Woedica mask, it must be true. All hail our new leader!"

You mean Staelgar?

*grins mischievously*

Yep. And even if that wasn't the case, it would be a rather petty thing to complain about. Not being able to complete a sidequest because you already moved on with the main story line and can't get back, is pretty normal in RPGs.

Kind of true. For the first two acts, I felt the biggest motivation for my character to do the things she did, was curiosity and eagerness to explore the world - not the supposed motivations that the story hamfistedly tries to impart. I was actually more interested in finding out more about Eder's brother (i.e. companion sidequest) than finding out more about the Leaden Key (main quest). Although I have to say, the sequence of events/cutscenes that start act 3 was really cool, and finally got me interested in the actual story.

lol

Some more quote mining from the review Wat. The scripted interactions add a lot of flavor. Yes, they overuse Athletics checks compared to other stat checks, but that doesn't make them half-arsed or un-fun. This is kinda true. You can slaughter everyone in the inn in Dyrford (which is basically 70% of the town population), and how does the remaining population react? They now consider you to have a "Faintly Mixed" reputation, and that's it. Is that what "reactivity" means in RPGs in 2015? If you tried that in Athkatla in BG2, you would be intercepted by wave after wave of guards and powerful mages sent to stop/punish you. And I never considered BG2 to be very good at reactivity - it's just what I would have expected to be used as a minimum standard for PoE development.

My working theory is that Ciphers are easier to play well than Druids & Wizards, and many people mistakenly think that means "more powerful" - especially at the beginning of the game when you haven't gotten the hang of how to play your particular Druid/Wizard build well yet. You don't have to ration long-term limited resources with the Cipher, you can just keep spamming the powers worry-free, so there's not much difference between a naively played Cipher and a well-played one, whereas with the other caster classes that difference is huge. That is to say: well-played Druid/Wizard >> Cipher > naively or impatiently played Druid/Wizard Shapeshifting was never much of an advantage to begin with. The druid's spell selection and generous number-of-spells-per day is where the class shines. At mid-to-late game it starts getting level 1 spells as per-enounter instead of per-rest - like the wizard, but unlike the wizard it has foe-only AoE damage spells in that tier. So at that point the druid can freely spam Dancing Bolts against trash mobs just like the Cipher would spam Mind Blades, except without having to regain focus in between. And with much more varied (and situation-specific useful) high-level spells available for thougher battles.

Some specific quotes from the review that I sort of agree with: I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah, I think that's not a bad parallel to exemplify the "everything is sort of samey, nothing truly unique" problem of PoE's item and crafting system. Yep. The engagement mechanic would probably be much better if engaged characters were allowed to move a little without breaking engagement, e.g. within a certain radius from the foe. It wouldn't even need any fancy UI support - simply make the mouse cursor for move commands look different when clicking it would cause the character to break engagement. Yep, Temple of Skaen is such a drag if you want to explore it fully. Definitely the least fun dungeon I've found so far in the game. In subsequent playthroughs I'll either skip it or sneak/lockpick around 95% of its content, since the loot you can get by exploring it all is not worth the pain. Other dungeons also suffer from this problem to a lesser extent, though it's not quite as pervasive as the review claims. Yeah, I had hoped for more in that regard as well.

Nah, it's Druid > Wizard > Cipher > Priest even if you never use shapeshifting. Druids are very much OP spellcasters once you get the hang of them.

I don't think that term means what you think it means.

You can do that in a second step. My guess is they separated the two issues into two 'steps' of the dialog because it was easier to write/code all necessary combinations that way.

Because Steam sucks at delivering patches. The same patch is only 12MB on GOG. Complain about it to Steam support - maybe if enough people do, they'll finally implement a differential patching system.

Defiance Bay has a bunch of non-violent quests.

And yet, socialists love to pull out the "Hitler rounded up socialists and executed them! This proofs that National Socialism can't possibly have anything to do with Socialism!" argument every time...

And you're in denial if you think the "inhuman meatgrinder" part was a random accident of history, rather than the inevitable harvest from seeds that were part of that "good intentions" ideology, which you hold dear, all along. When you built an ideology on collectivism-over-individualism and end-justifies-the-means, you're bound to arrive at mass murder and mass starvation (provided you're successful in staging a revolution and forcing said ideology on a whole country).

If you mean enchant to Fine/Exceptional + Lash + Slaying, then more than enough (what with the stronghold generating ingredients and stores selling them, in addition to the ones you loot). If you mean enchant to Superb though, then of course not so much

lol, in the rest of the world we call it "hippo".

It already exists. The same stacking rules affect all stats (or are supposed to). I addition to your character's base stat + bonus from the weapon/ability used for the attack itself, you can stack bonuses from 3 different categories: from passive talents / abilities / resting <-- can have arbitrarily many of these from equipped items <-- can have only one of these from modal or active buffs <-- can have only one of these So the reason why Boots of +5 Perception and Girdle of +3 perception don't stack, is because they're both equipped items (category 2). Whereas, for example, the Wood Elf's Distant Advantage stacks with the Wizard's Eldritch Aim because one is a passive ability, and the other an active one. It has nothing to do with one being an attribute bonus and the other an attack bonus.

But the elf avatars in PoE are ugly.

You called?

As FlintlockJazz explained, they are different enough that some players might be irritated to have to dissociate them from D&D-based preconceptions if they were named the same. Also Josh Saywer is a language geek, and he developed Dyrwoodan and Glanfathan naming schemes which most things in PoE tend to vaguely follow, so it's only natural that "classical" monster names would be brought in line with that. Those two considerations are all there is to it I think; not a conspiracy to rip off other works of art and try to conceal it.