PIP-Clownboy

I have two monitors set up so I'll be playing PoE and Bloodborne at the same time. No one will see me outside for at least a week.

I don't even find Hard challenging in the BB anymore. Normal is just tourist mode.. if you any IE experience just play at least Hard.

Definitely going high-int Barbarian (Logen Ninefingersish). If you build your party around around carnage they become absolutely monstrous. The story NPCs I'm interested have synergy buff/debuffs tailored made for a carnage build anyways. Durance/Kana/Gina/Mom/Hiravias will be the A-team.

Don't savescum, problem solved.

I'll take a sneaky DW Barb over both.

First playthrough for me, the choice is between Barb or Mage.. really depends how I feel about Aloth. Durance/Moms/Kana/Fro-Paladin are all definite though.

Power outages. Computer crashes. etc... Just because I'm playing in Ironman mode doesn't mean I don't want to save my progress in case **** happens. You can backup your ironsave if you're really worried.. actually a good idea considering all the save/load issues in the beta. But it sounds like you just want to save scum. May I suggest Normal Difficulty?

Here's a strawman because I have no real argument besides wanting Mages to be Goku You're welcome

So I loaded up BG2 for kicks and just killed Mekrath in a few seconds. Very IE like indeed imo

Already gave you example in the Sawyer stream, which you ignored. His party would have been wrecked by skirmishers if he tried to open with all guns.

Level 5 mages shouldn't be able to shrug off 5-6 dudes shooting them with a gun. If the rest of the encounter allows your group to do that unhindered than that's bad encounter design/AI targeting and not really mages being a non-threat problem.

Depends on the encounter design of the rest of the game. The claim you're making is based on playing small of % non-crit path part of the game and your argument is basically 'because BG2'. Comparing BG1 would be more intellectually honest and you already admitted ranged focus fire wrecked Mages there. But if you're asking if I want spell triggers/contingencies -- sure do. In BG2 though, gen pop mages didn't use them until SCS came around as far I can remember.

In BG1 it is. In BG2 with spell triggers and contigencies it's not, if you don't get those down first. I bet my dad can beat up your dad though. Those are absolutely trivial to deal with unless you have difficulty mods that enable prebuffing installed. Even then, you can easily merc the majority of mages in seconds mass ranged or insta gib with stealth. Doubtful. Dad never struggled with vanilla BG2 mage encounters either.

You brought up BG2 in your OP. What I have seen in the BB beta is bad AI targeting/decision making. But you're kidding yourself if you think mass 'ranged volley' wasn't an effective Mage killer in the BG series. Though, that one boss caster in the Sawyer stream looked quite beefy and the amount of initial adds prevented ranged firearms volley to open the fight. In general though, I feel the POE is way too easy on Hard. I'll be playing on Path of Damned regardless, but by all means increase the difficulty Obsid. I'm masochistic like that.

We have only seen a small portion of the game so it's premature to say either way. But the fact remains that most of the mage encounters were a complete joke in BG2 without mods.

You needed one scroll to humilate a lich in BG2. Or breach/dispel to handle 99% of other mage encounters unless you had SCS installed. I agree about melee Gish being a tad underwhelming though. But I did beat the backer beta with zero deaths (or knockouts) on the player character in Path of the Damned with a spell protections focused mage a couple builds back and was still second in kills to 2her BB fighter.. so the tankiness is there in a way.

No, I just hire a 6th dude and usually kill the two adventuring groups for gear.

I did not find Hard very difficult much at all so I have no idea where you're coming from. In fact, I found it quite a bit too easy and not having to rest enough. And this coming from last playthrough as a poorly built Gish. The fact that BB characters come undergeared, with generic builds, if anything, Hard needs to be actually Hard in my opinion. I'm finding Path more my speed.

The "I win" button existed in every IE game in the form of a console command that will kill any targeted enemy. Was you game broken by its existence? Also known as the improved haste button

That's not fun though.

Yup. The system needs fixing, not removing.

Why would we have any faith in Obisidian's 'internal testing' given their track history. Not to mention Avellone can't even get past the first 30 minutes of Arcanum and the backer 'beta' was released in a pre-pre alpha state. There is no way the stronghold isn't going to be completely broken without proper public testing.

Don't see how that could be worse than what backers have now.

Chanter Druid Priest Cipher Paladin Barb All melee. Path of damned, Trial of Iron.

Ok, just went a few hours straight without any items vanishing. Only stopped when BB fighter became stuck and couldn't move. Deleted save folder. Verified cached. The trick is to make no saves whatsover at any time (includes iron man/gamestart). Just left the game running when I needed a break and didn't tempt memory leak fate with alt-tab.