Ineth

What if Obsidian wants to make them though?

Same here

Rogues have 30 base accuracy though, whereas Barbarians have only 25. Will that make much of a difference?

It's also untrue that he has to do that. The "Party Member Finishes Ability" auto-pause option works wonders. If people prefer to play without auto-pause, that's their choice, but they shouldn't complain about the space bar then...

Speak for yourself. People choose to use smaller parties in these kind of cRPGs for all kind of reasons. Me, I do sometimes complete a dungeon with fewer party members as a challenge, but I also enjoy seeing some kind of reward for that at the and. Other times I play a whole game with fewer characters for role-playing reasons or simply because I don't want to do so much equipment micromanagement. Are you looking for some kind of "realism/verisimilitude" explanation here? That's easy: Winning the same battle with fewer people pushes each of them much more to their limit. They will have to be much more resourceful and flexible, i.e. each of them will be using every last ability they've got, and all of them will e.g. have to tank sometimes. Whereas in a big party each char can just follow their specialized routine (without being forced to try new things) and weaker members can even be left standing on the side-lines sometimes - which I'm sure you'll agree is not a realistic way to gain a lot of life/combat experience. That's what my table shows, I merely expressed it in the "bonus percentage" form that matches the way PoE handles it, to make it easier to compare. e.g. if you were soloing in IWD1, you'd get six times as much XP ("600%") as each character in a full party ("100%") - which corresponds to a 500% bonus. In IWD1, all XP was divided among party members, no matter where it came from. In BG2, combat XP and normal quest XP was divided too, but there were a bunch of special quest XP rewards that were a fixed amount for each character no matter the party size. But those were far and in between. When playing with only 4 chars, you would easily hit the level cap in the original BG2:SoA quite a while before the end of the game.

Or that you haven't read up on the Rogue-specific talents very diligently, because there is in fact one called "Backstab", and it does in fact suck as a result of the party stealth mechanic.

So in the 1.03 patch notes it says: Raised the bonus for having fewer than six party members from 5% per character under the limit to 10% per character under the limit. Even with that "buff", that's still pitifully low compared to the Infinity Engine games, assuming I interpret that number correctly. Here's a comparison of the amount of "bonus XP" each character gets in a small party, compared to what a character in a full 6 person party would get, as far as I understand it: party size | Infinity Engine | PoE | -----------+-----------------+-------+ 5 | + 20% | + 10% | 4 | + 50% | + 20% | 3 | + 100% | + 30% | 2 | + 200% | + 40% | 1 | + 500% | + 50% | (In the Infinity Engine, this was not actually called "bonus XP" - instead, it was simply the natural result from fairly splitting incoming XP among the party members. Also, I know that in BG2 not all XP rewards were split this way, although most were. And in IWD1, all of them were. Not sure about the other IE games.) Are those numbers right? I guess small parties are really disfavoured by this game then.

Yeah, Backstab kinda sucks right now.

Even ranged ciphers get swarmed by enemies sometimes.

Instead of collecting this info in a forum thread where you can't edit posts later (and thus the info will inevitably spread out and be more difficult to find), why not edit the wiki instead? It has one page per weapon type (e.g. http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Club), which also list unique weapons and their locations, but are quite incomplete and thus could use more editors.

Barbarians are only effective in melee though, right? Whereas Rogue can do things like open an encounter with an Arquebus sneak attack or even backstab (which can easily insta-kill a weaker enemy on hit and, with good crit damage multiplier, probably even a stronger enemy on crit), and then switch to a melee weapon and join the fray once Edér has locked down the enemies. In what way is it bugged?

Do tell

It already is, though not as a patch - they simply updated the archive for the Linux version so you'll have to download the whole 6.4GB again. It shows as "version 1.1.0.2" on the download page but that's just the GOG version number; it's actually the "1.0.3.0530" game version. PS: Someone on the GOG forum has turned it into a 130MB patch and hosted it on some inofficial download site, in case you're impatient (or paying for bandwidth).

Thanks for the hint. I can't edit my last post anymore so I'll list them here: Talents: Vicious Fighting [Rogue] (+10% hits to crits) Bloody Slaughter (+20% hits to crits and +0.5 crit damage multiplier while attacking enemies with low Endurance) PS: Does anyone know the effect of dual-wielding on Accuracy?

Here are a few relevant build options I know of: Race bonus: Minor Threat [Hearth Orlan] (+10% hits to crits while attacking same enemy as an ally) Class abilities: Dirty Fighting [Rogue] (+10% hits to crits) Faction ability: The Merciless Hand [Doemenel] (+0.3 crit damage multiplier) Weapons: Battle Axe (+0.5 crit damage multiplier) Dagger/Rapier/Club/Spear (+5 accuracy) Gear: Rabbit Fur Gloves (+0.1 crit damage multiplier) Those all stack, right? Too bad there's no accuracy-increasing attribute anymore, tough...

The game binary file is just 20MB though, so that's no excuse for a 600MB patch. The reason why patches are so ridiculously big on Steam, is that Steam does not support true incremental patches. I have no idea why they don't implement it - it's not rocket science, in fact the technology has existed for a long time and is used all over the Internet. Steam could probably save a sizeable amount of their server costs if they used it, not to mention increase customer satisfaction through shorter download times.

I wonder if it makes sense to build a DPS Rogue to maximize critical hit damage & probability. i.e. choose Talents, items, etc. that increase the crit damage multiplier, or convert more hits to crits. Would it be a powerful build? What weapons combos (ranged and melee) would work best with it?

Except most encounters are already over by the time the chanter can cast those things, or shortly afterwards. At least that was my experience with Kana.

Cipher. You're welcome.

Well, maybe that's your problem right there... Looks like this game is not afraid to (sometimes) punish mindless meta-gaming and reward role-playing & careful choices. That's a good thing imo.

Same here. Even though my cipher has similar deflection and lower DR than Aloth, enemies much prefer to swarm Aloth. I wonder if the enemy AI is coded to specifically target wizards, and why. Is it because the Infinity Engine AI did it? It made sense there, as wizards were much more "special" and pidgeonholed into the "squishy nuke" role. But in PoE it makes much less sense imo.

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@Bollockoff It was like the in BG2 too, though. Your own party members would interject warnings/advice in conversations with certain NPCs like Bodhi, without them noticing it, apparently.

Only in the sense that, like every other limerick or joke ever written, it is "clearly, unambiguously" capable of offending someone in the world. Not in the sense that it's unusually offensive, or that offending someone in particular was the author's motive for writing it. For example, the lame "tomato crosses the street and becomes ketchup" joke? Clearly and unambiguously offensive to someone who is grieving for a loved one lost in a traffic accident. Offensiveness is always in the mind of the beholder, and depends on their frame of mind, beliefs, and prior experiences. The question is to what extent do authors have to minimize the chances of such offense taking place? Imo courtesy is a two-way street. People should not be deliberately offensive d*cks in what they say and write, but people who are easily offended on certain topics should also try to avoid them or otherwise deal with them on their own, rather than expecting the whole world to always cater to them and assuming malice if it doesn't. And the extent to which authors should be expected to not hurt certain feelings, should be tied to how reasonable those feelings are. Consider "offense" that is taken as a result of having internalized conspiracy theories or having developed chip-on-shoulder syndrome from excessive participation in echo chambers like parts of twitter and tumblr. No, it suggests that accidentally sleeping with someone contrary to one's sexual preference is awkward. Which is neither bigoted nor "anti inclusive", it's pretty common sense. Straight cis people should respect LGBT people's identity and sexual preferences, but that does not mean that they should be expected to deny their own sexual preference. Refusing to hire a gay person or voting against gay marriage is intolerant and bigoted; feeling grossed out by the thought of f***ing another man yourself, isn't. Of course the "protagonist" of the poem completely overreacted to that awkward situation by jumping off a cliff, so ultimately the joke's on him. Even if you interpret the "woman who turned out to be a man" in the limerick as a trans person, despite the fact that this interpretation is not the most obvious in context and that the author has denied it - why does constructing a fictional situation automatically have to mean promoting the idea that all people of some category are always like this? Which brings me back to the chip-on-shoulder thing. It appears that certain theories about an alleged violent persecution campaign of cis people against trans people, are very popular and strongly believed in the "twitter/tumblr trans community" echo chamber - including the belief that certain stereotypes are actually weapons employed by this campaign to ultimately murder or harm trans people. So of course it's understandable that they would be emotionally triggered when confronted with a fictional situation that could (with a little squinting) be interpreted to reflect one of those stereotypes. It's not political opportunism as some commentators have claimed; those are genuine feelings. However, people on the outside of that echo chamber do have reason to be reluctant to cater to those feelings, because from the outside those theories seem like conspiracy theories and the resulting feelings rather unreasonable. The "progressive" forum members seem to want the "outside" majority to blindly accept every whim of the "echo chamber" minority, as a matter of courtesy. I think a more sensible solution would be to expect both parties to meet each other half way. Don't intentionally propagate stereotypes that you know others are afraid of as part of their belief system (even if you think it's nuts), but also don't go around the world (or Internet) with a chip on your shoulder throwing a tantrum and accusing people of malice whenever you find something that superficially matches a taboo of your echo chamber. PS: Let me reiterate that I don't think Obsidian did anything wrong here, and that the people who are now calling for boycotts and refunds should calm down and get some perspective. The game was not made worse in any way by this change, and it's silly to fear that the game's mature themes are now at risk of being edited out. Also a change is not self-censorship if it aligns with the company's own values, even if you don't agree with them.

Eder is the best so far, all around. Sagani's character/story/quest is cool too, but I'm put off by her portrait (looks like a child's face) and voice acting (doesn't come across as fitting or believable to me). Durance and his crazed pseudo-philosophical monologues, not sure yet. Feels like he suffers from "trying too hard to emulate Planescape Torment" syndrome. Though of course he could turn out actually interesting in the end. Aloth and Kana, are okay I guess but not someone I'd miss role-playing wise. Haven't gotten the others yet.