MasterPrudent

Is this a completely new start? It looks like the common save/load bug which causes you to lose equipment but I've never seen that straight after the character creation screen before.

Regardless of who starts the dialogue it's always the attributes and skills of the main player character that are checked. However unlike traditional rpgs there is no single dialogue skill or attribute. In fact all skills and attributes get checked at some point so a character with high might is as likely to have dialogue options to select as a character with high intelligence. Having said that it does appear that lore and perception tend to get checked in conversations more often than other skills and attributes (in the beta anyway; things may be different in the full game). In any case the gated dialogue options are not always the most effective choices. tl:dr: you can choose any build for your main character - as long as two or more attributes/skills are pumped you should have a fair range of dialogue options.

I know that Josh said at one point that there was a good chance they would use the RGB spectrum for the clothing colours. I'm not sure why they opted not to. (By the way you actually can select green hair for Orlan characters in the current build.)

Fighter Talent Swords into Crossbows: Switches the fighter's base melee and ranged accuracy scores.

I don't know if they're any real guide but the ogre and spider queen seemed like mini-boss fights and iirc they didn't have any immunities to any cc abilities.

(I thought it was a good mechanic but I wish it had been a little more punitive. I didn't eat a single spirit but I never had any trouble keep my spirit meter up.) Anyway PoE, ahem, this same bug happens with quest items. You have to drag them to your hero in order for them to go into your quest items and actually register as such when your trying to open doors/hold up severed heads and so on.

I think your specific complaint here comes from a misunderstanding of the system. Any character with points in mechanics can pick locks - as such every character gets the same icon. Lock picking happens automatically as you first assumed. I do, however, totally agree that lock picking could be clearer. I'd like some feedback as to whether the lock can be picked or if a key is required. I'd also like feedback when a lockpick attempt fails. This should only be accessible in towns or upon rest. If you can access it anywhere else it's a bug and you should report it.

If you open up the formation menu, either by clicking on the picture with the formation dots on the middle UI or hitting "F", you'll see that you can switch between three formations. You can also adjust each formation in this menu by clicking and dragging the characters' portraits.

I agree with the posters in the thread who'd like to be able to push the druid down one of the two paths, either through talents or some other means, but I think it's worth noting that you can do that (to a very small extent) as things stand now through attributes. For example if you want a shapeshifter druid you need her to be able to survive melee combat so you'd probably want to pump con, whereas a caster druid could stand at the back ranks so you could safely dump con. Of course this is pretty limited, especially given the small boosts attributes supply, but it's worth a thought.

Yes it is. I think the mechanics check is a seven.

I really hope this is the case. There are consequences along those lines for the Cat and Mouse quest. If you kill Nyfre then Medreth tells you that you should look his House up the next time you're in Defiance Bay.

Well yes, but to be clear my main character was a dissident so I figured it would be in character for her to off an aristocratic family. I reloaded the save and tried out the other endings. It turns out you can kill the girl and let the baron live (or kill him of course). You can also let the girl live and tell the Lord what's been done to her by the cultists. He says he's going to commit her to an asylum. There are resolve and might dialogue options at the point were you say goodbye to the Lord so there might be some minor variations to that ending but they were locked off to my character.

So what are the possible endings for the blood legacy quest? btw I think it is pretty clear what's up with the ogre and the cult leader. The ogre straight up tells you he ate the pigs and if you click on the gore pile that's in the room with you it suggests that he, not the spiders, is responsible for munching on passers-by. Meanwhile when you interrogate the Lord at the start there are several things that don't add up with his story: there are better marriage prospects in other places, not one of the girl's family is accompanying him and he's picked a bad route to get to where he says he's going. I think that suggests that the cult leader's story is true.

If you ask about the pigs it's pretty clear that the ogre is to blame for that one. He punches the wall and says that he had no idea farmers cared so much. Also if you click on the pile of corpses to the left it hints that the ogre has been munching on random passer-bys.

Was it the poor way I phrased it or the sentiment itself? If it was the latter you might want to have a read of this or this.

Oh, you're right, my mistake. Hitting tab just brings it up for all the creatures in the area. Anyway I like it - it makes me a much more effective player - but I can see why others might find it confusing. I think being able to hire mercenaries fits into the world's logic just fine and that having to pay them regularly, or whatever, would be rather tedious and outstrip any benefits gained from added "immersion". I mean, remember how painful it was to keep returning to the thieves fortress in BG2? Sure, it was realistic but it was really tedious. Frankly I think that immersion is a poor excuse for doing anything in a videogame. I mean would you give up that wonderful 4th wall breaking Psycho Mantis moment because it ruins your immersion? Do you think that developers should be transitioning towards full body controls because keyboards and controllers break your immersion? Why are you interested in videogames at all when clearly what your really after is an elaborate LARPG? As for the character stuff I think you've just got to stretch your imagine somewhat. Maybe someone wants to give a female character a male voice because they're role-playing a transgender character or a character with damage vocal chords. Maybe they want to play an Orlan who improbably married his way into the aristocracy or who is carrying out some sort of Nigerian Prince scam.

It's really hard to get a grasp of the health/stamina thing since it's never actually explained to player. Also, i'm not sure i like this whole concept at all. Currently it just looks like complicating things without proper reason - do we really need a second health bar? Most rpgs are doing fine with just one. It's a backer beta; not the full game so you don't get niceties like a tutorial or a manual. I assume that the full game will have one of those in order to explain the mechanic. The reason for the split is that it turns stamina/health into a tactical and a strategic resource that introduces new (and fun!) layers of decision making. Healing a character during an individual encounter now comes with both risk and reward as giving the character more stamina in an encounter is likely going to result in further draining their health. I dig it. Absence of a "roll" feature during character creation just makes attributes feel even more lifeless and mechanical. You end up just distributing points, making a generic "average adventurer" with some equally average abilities. That's not fun. If you really think rolling dice is fun than get out your dice and roll; no one's going to stop you. In any case most implementations of dice rolling in CRPGs have resulted in players clicking a button until they get the largest number of points to spend so I'm not sure what their is to recommend this feature. Perhaps you imagine a system where you roll for each ind attribute? I imagine that could be fun but for the most part I like to plan out my character concepts. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with "average adventurers". Even with the current, relatively minor, boosts that attributes give I've messed around with a few different character concepts. For example I've built both a high int/low might cypher that focuses on spells with debuffs/status effects. Only 5 skills and no perks, really? After ToEE and NWN2 it just feels incredibly shallow, there should be a lot of more options here or else every character of the same class will just feel, well, the same. Josh Sawyer has said that more talents are coming but they're waiting on beta feedback to help them design/implement ones that feel useful to players. It surely feels like PoE is following IE games quite closely here, and unfortunarely that means that caster classes (priest, wizard, druid etc) are just far more entertaining than fighter classes (fighter, barbarian, rogue, paladin). They were dull in BG and IW, and they're still incredibly dull in PoE. There should be much more options for these guys, more unique skills and perks for them to become an interesting choice for your main character. You know, it's not much fun just being able to knockdown someone, while the guy next to you can breathe fire and shoot lightnings from his eyes. They've intentionally kept the number of active abilities some classes have to a minimum because they don't want to overwhelm the player by requiring them to micromanage a party of six characters with large numbers of active abilities. Given that combat still feels a little hectic I think they made the right decision. YMMV Speaking of unique characters: do we really need the Adventurer system? Not only can't i imagine why would anyone prefer a generic custom adventurer to a real character with a backstory and personality, the system just doesn't make sense as it is! Many players find there's a character whose personality they loathe but whose class they want in their party. Many other players just want to experiment with crazy party set-ups (six gish party, whoo!). This system accommodates those people without requiring the designers to create loads of additional content. Freedom of choice is a great thing, but being able to make pointless decisions has nothing to do with it. You hate fun. I get it. Combat controls feel unresponsive. In IE games when you give an order to someone, even during the pause, you immediately get a response from him, both visually and in sound. In PoE you never can tell whether the guy is going to do what you've told him or not. Many times did i tell a wizard to cast some spell before switching to another character, just to find a minute later that he never did it. This is a known bug. It'll be fixed. There should be some other way of presenting combat information about enemies. The box that pops up when you hover your cursor over an enemy is overburdened and should really only tell you his health and status effects. For everything else i suggest an "inspect" button or something like that. This box only comes up when you mouse over AND hit tab, right? It's pretty much already an inspect button. Frankly I don't know what I'd do without it. I love being able to clearly see which defence I'm attacking and which defence I should be attacking. Dialogue system should be thoroughly explained to player, as currently there's no way to tell what do all these "Clever-Minor" things mean. Again dude, this is a beta. You get your fancy documentation and tutes when you get the full game. I suggest that until then you watch one of the many demos obsidian did with the starting area and the beta area; both explain the concept fairly well. The spells/abilities icons are somewhat too small and look too much alike, it's really hard to find a spell you need (especially when you're a priest). Size is a legit complaint but when it comes to style you should know that they're currently using place holders from IWD2. It takes way too much effort to choose a specific character instead of the whole party. Agreed, I'd prefer a single click to the current double click.

I don't have the stats at hand but, honestly, helmets in the beta have been few and far between and those I have picked up have either been purely cosmetic or possessed only very minor buffs. Also Fire Godlike do a small amount of fire damage as soon as they fall below 50% stamina AND gain a bonus to their DT. Nature Godlike recover stamina 25% faster regardless of how they're recovering it.

One of the Kickstarter updates mentioned that are

I could be misunderstanding the system but doesn't improved accuracy increase the likelihood of crits? If so I'm not sure having two stats that do the same thing is a good idea. Either you need to increase both to get a sizable increase or pumping both gives you a character who crits all the time.

The other possibility is that it's something that's related to the main quest that they removed for the beta. On one hand it seems unlikely that they'd hide crit path stuff in such a way, on the other hand the quests in the beta often have multiple solutions/ways to gain additional information.

Hey Gronmir, I recently posted about that bug and someone (EDIT: it was Mayama) mentioned that it was triggered by loading a save game while ingame. Apparently loading saves from the menu screen is an effective work-around.

I had an issue where my journal was wiped clean of all quests and tasks and as such quest updates/completion failed to trigger. Unfortunately it took me a little while to notice that this had happened so I'm not able to pin down exactly where it happened or what steps might be taken to reproduce the bug. Is there any value in logging a bug and uploading a save without any reproduction steps? EDIT: Thanks for the advice. I'll be sure to comb the bug subforum thoroughly next time. And maybe I'll be able to get past dealing with the ogre now.

To allow for the possibility of creating diverse, yet still useful, character builds. It's not at all "tacked on"; it's the main goal of the attribute system

It's worth noting that the experience system was not designed to prevent players who enjoy killing lots of stuff not to kill stuff but rather to ensure that multiple styles of play were catered to. Leaving in kill exp would have meant that the most rewarding way to play the game would be to kill everything thus encouraging players to avoid negotiation and stealth.