MasterPrudent

You can get additional choices from any given attribute or skill. Your main pc does all the talking, all the time.

Try a chanter. Be sure to use summons. Oh and I haven't tried the new build yet but if they've improved Druids' melee toughness they might be viable too.

You can hotkey spells and abilities. I've never tried it myself and I'm not sure how to go about it but Josh mentions it at 30:45 here: (Oh and you can select all your characters with backspace.) EDIT: Turns out it's just a matter of hovering your mouse over the ability and hitting whatever unassigned button you want to be the hotkey.

They have said they intend to enable preloading so it'll almost certainly be before the 26th.

No once a character is down enemies will shift targets. Health is only intended to be a long term resources. Yes. Wizards can only cast spells from their active grimoire but they can, as you write, switch out grimoires when not in combat. As you say some are foe only and some affect everyone caught in their radius. The spell's description should tell you which one it is. The additional catch is that any additional aoe radius that you get from having increased intelligence will never harm allies regardless of the spell. Whenever you select an aoe spell you'll notice that it brings up two circles inside of each other to show the area the spell will hit. The space between the circles is the foe only area. If you want to use a low deflection character in melee I'd advise holding the character back until the front lines are engaged and relatively stable. At that point you can get the character to attack someone who's focused on another of your characters. If you get into trouble you can use the rogue's escape ability to get away and then pick a new target. You could also use a weapon that allows you to attack from behind another character, like a pike or a spear. I think it's worth spending points in two or three skills per character. So far there aren't a lot of skill checks that can only be surmounted with one maxed out skill and I think giving everyone a few points in athletics is helpful to avoid severe fatigue. Also I like having more than one party member who can use scrolls. When it comes to dialogue every attribute and skill will be checked at some point and apparently they've made the spread pretty even. There's certainly no point in choosing an attribute solely for additional conversation options although on the skills side lore does seem to get checked a lot in the beta. (Who knows if that will carry over into the game.) For the scripted interactions (the storybook sequences in which you can use your whole team) it looks like you do want to have a party that covers most or all of the attributes and skills between them. If you want more feedback on combat strats and other things I suggest posting in general discussion. There are a lot of more knowledgeable people on these boards than me and they'd respond to a post there.

Are the requirements posted on Steam not official?

Nope and I'd be very surprised if you could get there without cheats. Is there any chance that the bugs you're encountering are the result of it not being intended to be reachable in the beta?

A vessel is a category of enemy. They're creatures which are souls bound to bodies or constructs. Think undead and machines animated by souls. When fighting characters get fatigued. Fatigue lowers your maximum endurance, accuracy and defenses. The higher your athletics, the longer it takes to be fatigued. Healing is the amount of healing your character does when s/he uses a healing ability like Lay on Hands or whatever. Athletics affects how quickly you get fatigued. Lore affects how quickly you gain bestiary entries and gain the associated xp as well as which scrolls you can use. Survival affects how long bonuses from potions and food last. You read right. The damage done. Yep.

I would guess that you inadvertently sent the note to your stash. You can open up your stash from your inventory screen and take a look (it's the chest icon). Dryford Village, Dryford Crossing, and Stormwall Gorge are indeed the sum total of the backer beta so assuming you've resolved the troll, Nyfre, the Lord's missing daughter and the dungeon in Stormwall Gorge you've seen everything there is to see.

Maaaybe? I think it would be very difficult but while monks aren't the most obvious solo character (hello chanters) they are pretty solid all rounders. I wouldn't try it on your first play-through unless you're a really good rpg player - the game is designed for, and balanced around, a party.

Forgot about that one, although I didn't die to it just stuck watching health bars go down until I gave up. If you guys do get the bug again you should know that they're still targetable with aoes and they'll even pop up after being hit with a few

Discussion and links to a twitch archival version and a youtube version are in here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70814-link-to-pax-east-stream/

Every time they present Pillars at cons they get people worried about how much pausing goes on in combat. I wouldn't be surprised if Josh was minimising his use of per encounters in order to spend less time with the game paused.

It's just someone's personal blog - not a professional news or reviews site. In any case I don't think they actually did claim to have played the beta.

There is a little bit of class reactivity in the beta location for Kind Wayfarer paladins. I had a few npcs respond positively or attribute the fact that I was helping them out to my paladin order.

They haven't gone into much detail on this but Josh Sawyer did say in a recent interview that the most challenging content was not on the critical path. in addition the game has an optional massive dungeon that probably contains some of the game's harder fights.

That time for Australia is for those states wise enough to observe daylight savings time. For the rest of us it's 7:30am.

I think it's fun to include one or two achievements that the devs think might be possible. It's a nice challenge for the powergamers out there and it might mean that the devs learn some new things about their game.

Oh right, I see it now. (It's obvious in the enlarged image.) I'd guess that we can loot it but its value isn't going to be as high as might be expected from the size of it.

I must be going blind because I cannot, for the life of me, see any gold whatsoever in the drake pic.

To clarify Pillars of Eternity is scheduled to be streamed at 4:30pm EST on Saturday 7 March on the Official PAX East Albatross Theatre Stream (twitch.tv/pax2).

Based on the current backer beta balance I'd say the game will be pretty hard but manageable playing on normal with four NPCs. A good alternative might be rolling with a full party but with four or so of them spec'd so they don't have any active abilities to manage.

This is the current state of play: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69992-mod-support-thread/

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69992-mod-support-thread/

I can't believe a fellow Australian capitulated and spelt colour without a u.