Aramintai

Honestly, I found that if I just held my rogue back for a second whilst my fighters engaged, it was easy to pop in behind targets and melee them without concern. The rogue can take a few hits and aren't as squishy as people make them out to be. Along with Invisibility and their disengagement ability, they can easily survive a melee encounter as long as someone behind the wheel is paying attention. Edit: My rogue's stats are 18 12 17 14 14 9 and she has the second highest hit dealt, and damage done, next to the Druid. How did you get your stats that high? That's 84 total, but at the start you can distribute only 78.

So, what would be the best spread on all attributes that you'd recommend?

Yea, blunderbuss is a beast and ranged weapons are much safer bet for the rogue it seems, especially considering PoE doesn't require rogues to go strictly melee for extra damage abilities like in AD&D. I suppose I'll put some points in INT then as well, since there are quite a few skill checks out there that require INT (I don't get why can't we talk to npcs with other characters in the party besides the protagonist, it was quite handy in BG as I recall).

I was playing a rogue with 9 CON and doing pretty well by using ranged weapons.

Is it worth putting points into INT and other attributes or is it better to stick with STR\DEX\PER? Also, does PER influence chances of finding hidden stuff in the game?

Well, since I didn't particualry like any of the female elves portraits for the rogue that I'm planning to play I've decided look elswhere. Found an awesome one on trusty deviantart: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Blackguard-464968307 And after some tweaking (why no white hair for wood elves, Obsidian?) here it is: Ingame pics: Btw, resolution doesn't have to be strictly 210x330 and 76x96, it just needs to be of the exact same aspect ratio.

Game needs more female elves portraits.

Just a little nitpicking - red colored health reduction progression on portraits was bottom->top in IE games, not top->bottom. And gold amount is in a very odd place amongst all those formation buttons, I'd like it somewhere in the lower left corner, near the quick inventory. Otherwise, great work all around!

I want this one in the game Come on, devs, at least consider it for an after-release update. This just looks too awesome to pass.

Sweet!

Not realy. First of all, the picture you showed looks bad since it's with widescreen mod that changes game resolution. BG2 UI looks good in 800:600 resolution, which was the one it was designed for. Second, PoE needs more icons than BG since classes have way more abilities and actions than characters in IE games. Are you gonna play PoE in that lowres? I don't think so, that's why I chose that screen as a reference, if you don't like that one check the other two from EE edition. And it's just a reference anyway cuz I'm not suggesting making it 1:1 BG lookalike. It's just a suggestion to trim unused space and make UI a bit slimmer. As for abilities - if you compare PoE ones to the amount of BG spells and special abilities then there was way more of them in BG. And in any case, they are already neatly covered in Grotesque's UI in the lower right corner.

I think it can be a bit thinner on the sides though, like in BG: Formations icons can be grouped into one pop-up menu and the rest can be lined into one vertical line. Icons that BG UI had on the left side were Center on Player, Map, Journal, Inventory, Character Sheet, Wizard Spellbook, Cleric Spellbook, Game Settings, Rest, Time of Day. I suppose all of them should be useful in PoE as well, except that here spellboks are replaced by grimoires. Also, horizontal bar can be thinned in the BG way as well - there it can change icons set depending on whether you're selecting one character or all of them. Like here: http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2404599-0008.jpg http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/416/4161502/2404598-0003.jpg Also, there were buttons for slide-hiding left or right side.

I really like that you can see spells right away in this UI without the need to click on another button to show them. I don't like using keyboard shortcuts so having so many other functionality buttons visible in the UI is a big plus from me. Keep up the good work, hopefully devs will take notice and improve game's UI to smth similar.

Wow, I like this alot. Would be nice to see smth like this in the game.

Damn...game cant be fun if you have to pause this much I agree. Can't even see one spell animation complete without several pauses. From the side it looks like the guy's playing a game that severly stutters, lol. This should have been a turn based game...sigh. I guess if I ever try it out it'll be on the easiest mode cuz I want the game to be closer to IE games, meaning - much less pausing.

More elves portraits! Especially females.

There will be no AI scripting for the initial PoE release, but they have mentioned that it might be included in the expansion. It's very strange that in this modern day and age it is so difficult to implement them, even though PoE is modeled after Infinity Engine games and those old games had scripts. I guess I'll just wait until release date and if combat's still going to be a chore I'll just wait until that expansion, or better yet, go and play BG/BG2/IWD: EE. It's not necessarily difficult, it's time consuming and many other features were considered more important for the first game. Isn't combat predominant in this game, like in IWD? How making it more manageable for the players is less important than anything else? If I'm gonna spend majority of the game in combat that I can't enjoy, how can I enjoy the game in general?

There will be no AI scripting for the initial PoE release, but they have mentioned that it might be included in the expansion. It's very strange that in this modern day and age it is so difficult to implement them, even though PoE is modeled after Infinity Engine games and those old games had scripts. I guess I'll just wait until release date and if combat's still going to be a chore I'll just wait until that expansion, or better yet, go and play BG/BG2/IWD: EE.

Anything new about the scripts? Do party members have some sort of AI now? I want to try out beta again, but if its combat is still as micromanagement heavy as it was before then I'm not sure I want to bother.

Yea, I agree, some standard IE-like AI scripts would be most welcome, but at the very least devs should make auto attack script. Micromanaging every attack of every character is a real pain.

I've been away from the forums for awhile, are there any news about the scripts in PoE? Will we have to manually do everything and pause like mad, or are there going to be AI behaviour scripts like in other IE games?

I didn't like inventory separation to different characters and stash at all in beta. Why do we need basicaly two types of inventories - stash and per character? Are these characters gonna steal from one another or smth like in Divinity: Original Sin? Because otherwise I don't see any point in making it separate for characters. The stash is just a plain waste of space in the UI. Quest items could just be another tab next to armor, weapon etc. tabs. So I propose one common grid inventory for all characters with sorting tabs by types of items. Look in the aforementioned Divinity: Original Sin for reference.

My personal opinion on WHY its better to have all UI elements at the bottom is immersion. I really dislike UI's that basiclay force me to view through a picture frame. It creates another layer of distance between the player and the action. UI's that let you always see through, means no blocks that completly hide the game make the UI feel lighter. Well, it might have been true for BG in the olden days. Now with widescreen mode, or in enhanced edition the hud is not as noticable because of higher resolutions. But I agree that unused space should not be wasted with solid bars.

You could do that in BG2, both left and right bars had hide buttons.

Why does everything in the hud has to be at the bottom of the screen? Why can't we have something like BG2 hud, where everything was around the screen and optionally could be hidden? We all have big monitors now, vertical+horizontal won't impede the view much.