Kjaamor

lol@thread

While I find their presence to be vaguely irritating, I remind myself that without the people who provided that level of backing, this game would've been unlikely to occur.

I backed the game because of the camera. After NWN2, never a rotating camera again.

I'm glad we're here, and my sense of optimism for the game has returned. I seem to be one of the few who was irritated by the "The Making Of..." released parts rather than enamoured with it. Seemed like they had got the world's smallest violinist in to play over a description of what for all the world looks to be standard running of a development company. Anyway... 1. You're wrong. It might gripe, it might be unfair, and I agree that many of those youtubers I wouldn't trust to play Kandy Krush, but... a) This was Paradox's decision with the marketing, not Obsidian. b) If the steam and gog pre-orders are anything to go by, the marketing strategy worked. Paradox chose people for exposure, not for technical skill or interest in the genre. I think, irritating as it might be for backers, this has been the better way to promote PoE. 2. Whatever. To be honest, I think you and many others have a desperately overinflated view of our importance to anything. 3. Nah. Kickstarter has its own guarantees (and that is to say very little), Obsidian didn't need to put anything more out. No point making yourself any more accountable than you need to be, and no sense making your life unneccesarily difficult when you have a business to run.

My opinion of this entire thread has done a complete 180 since I simply imagined the possibility that the OP might be a trolling clunge ferrret and have no intention whatsoever of playing their first run on Iron Man themselves. If this turns out to be true then I love you, OP.

we see the recent thread where folks is complaining about backer inscribed tombstones in poe being immersion breaking. brings back fond memories o' the meltdown numerous boardies had when they heard that Gromnir would be included in bg2... which were later changed to tob. Gromnir killed "immersion." HA! makes the tombstones seem tame by comparison. "Rats. You got me. I'll concede the road. " nothing to concede. there is no winners, only losers... multiple meanings intended. HA! Good Fun! I am now officially scared to play the ****ing game in case anyone here ends up on the main path. Great.

You're thinking Druid. Druids win battles, Ciphers win wars. Or to phrase it another way... Druids win battles in around 5 seconds, with several party members knocked out and maybe some permadead, Ciphers win the same battles in around 40 seconds, with everyone at nearly full health. I respect Druids, but they are a class that demands a lot of sacrifices - mainly from other members of the team.

To go back to the original point I am absolutely stunned that you regard what is surely the most powerful class in the game right now as needing buffing.

Wonderful works. Absolutely superb. I also can see the reasons for the watermarks, and I respect that you've put the watermarks somewhere they can easily be cropped out. Although having read some of the responses in this thread, I actually dearly wish that they would've been far more intrusive. Some of the entitlement (some of which comes from people who I would've hoped to have been above that sort of thing) beggars belief.

With the greatest of respect to Obsidian, this. This, this, this, this, this. It is one thing to watch 40 hours of gameplay fall down the drain when it is remotely your fault, but when that one save can easily be wiped through no fault of your own... Obviously it's up to the individual, but not only do I have no intention of going near this (even though I don't mind a bit of PotD) I actually encourage those who are thinking of it to reconsider for their own sanity and Obsidian's name.

Those thoughts exactly went through my mind before I decided to pick a cipher. So I played the backer beta twice today. BB party + PC Priest & Companion Druid = Full party wipe at first set of beetles. BB party + PC Cipher & Companion Cipher = Full beetle wipe with less than 20 health taken off the entire party. <3 Ciphers <3

Although thinking about it, if I had two Ciphers I might not need a healer.

Was going to write a huge wad of text for this; instead decided to chop it down. With the companions that I like the look of, I am going to be without a healer, so I shall be a Priest. I'm committed to Eothas, for whatever that means in the Dyrwood, and in battle I wade with my flail and shield on the front lines. I'm not particularly mighty, nor do I possess a hardy constitution. I am relatively dextrous and perceptive however, and possess an extremely high intelligence coupled with a strong resolve. The idea of the build is that I have a support character who has scope to heal although primarily off-tanks. I've tried to spread my attributes a little because I want to unlock the occasional option of dialogue rather than simply buying access to all the clever responses. I may yet actually swap intelligence and perception.

It was fairly obvious that particular ranger build was greatly sub-optimal, and having tried it again (this time specialising in hunting bows, following my Cipher's success with them) I achieved a much more respectable 150 - the highest in the party. Notably, that time the Rogue achieved a damage of 60, so I wouldn't want to give too much credence to anything I've done today.

Just had a bit of a play around with the classes and, while the ranger has come on leaps and bounds from its earlier incarnations, it still remains rather underwhelming. I ran a few fights against Medreth's party, on hard, using my PC and the BB 4. The fighter was set up to tank the group, and then the priest was set up either to off-tank Medreth or dps dependant upon whether the PC was off-tank or dps itself. The party average damage (post fight) sat at around 100. Invariably for all builds, fighter sat at around 60, rouge at 130, wizard at 120, off tank at around 70. On the Ranger playthrough, despite being set up to go full dps, it achieved a magnificent 90. That was less than the BB Priest (with a pike and without using spells) was routinely getting when not tanking. Obviously that performance could easily be the exception to the rule, but I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of a dedicated dps sitting below the party average for damage. I don't doubt that with some management the Ranger can be useful, as Sock says, but it appears apparent that it requires a certain degree of expertise to get the best from it. For the record, the highest damaging class in my messing around was by far and away the Druid, taking home nearly 300 damage. I'm not sure if that included friendly fire, however, since half of the rest of the party had died.

For the expansion or PoE2, they could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of the LotRO approach, which at character naming briefly shows a list of common names and common prefixes and suffixes and naming formations as appropriate. I'm struggling to find a good screenshot of the section, but it isn't huge and offers a rapid and accessible means to create congruent character names for races/cultures. Of course it's completely optional, so as in LotRO you're completely free to call your character 'SEXWITHGANDALF' as you prefer.

Five stars! Would be trolled by this thread again!

This is based around the assumption that there shall be multiple high-quality helmets in the game. Off the top of my head, BG1 had three enchanted helmets, one of which was the Helm of Infravision.

Pickpocketing was terribly implemented in the IE games (and the early Fallouts, for that matter), and consisted of being a reload spam for RNG, didn't offer a remotely useful skill point + time/gold ratio anyway, and was only useful for picking up a handful of items that almost everyone who acquired them only got because they were using a guide. I'm not directly opposed to pickpocketing's inclusion in PoE. I am opposed to its inclusion as it was presented in the IE games, just as I am against anything that promotes reload spam for the sake of pure RNG. It was a blight on Wasteland 2, let it not be a blight on this game too.

o_O what is this I don't even

Probably all started with Heroquest, an old D&D-lite board game that I used to play with my next door neighbour when I was a kid (about 4-9yrs old). I don't think we necessarily played it quite as it was intended, but we played it for years. In terms of crpgs, I always liked RPGs before I really even knew what they were. I used to get PC Gamer magazine for the demo CD, and inevitably I'd spend more time on the RPGs than anything else. The first one that really grabbed me was the demo for Fallout. It was a mini-version of the first Junktown map, although the characters were completely different. If I played it now, I could do every quest and kill everything in about fifteen minutes, but I spent hours in that thing. Unfortunately its release seemed to pass me by, because I never found any more mention of it in PC Gamer, until it eventually showed up in my local games shop when I was 14. I was actually on a pseudo-date at the time, and in hindsight that whole thing might have gone better had I not found the RPG I'd been waiting to play for years. The other one was Final Fantasy VII, of course; a game I devoured so greatly that if you cut me, small droplets of the platinum edition come out. BG came afterwards. I didn't know much about it, but I thought it looked quite Fallout-esque, so I bought it on the back of that. I'd have been about fifteen, I think. I really liked it, but I found it incredibly unforgiving (which it is) and it took an awful lot of approaching it with my jRPG hat on ("This guy is best with two-handed swords, therefore I'll send him forward with his two-handed sword to kill those kobolds") before I switched to the RTS style it needs ("This guy is best with two-handed swords, but that doesn't matter for **** if he's full of arrows, therefore I'll inch forward frame by frame with everyone using ranged weaponry"). All time favourite crpg list is probably... 1. FFVII 2. Fallout 2 3. BG 2 4. FFX 5. KotOR

Can I clarify that was during the very first backer beta, and I haven't tried any of the later iterations on 32-bit, so it may well run fine now.

I had a crap-ton of problems in that regard when I was playing the BB on a 32-bit OS. Switched to 64-bit and gone. I'm not suggesting that specifically is the guy's issue, but certainly a 30% crash rate sounds like something on his particular hardware rather than a general release. I'm not worried. I grew up playing Black Isle games without patches, and the crash rate was inevitably high. Likely still will be after the first two patches. Throwback to the IE games, etc.