anameforobsidian

I believe the future will bring PoE 2 in this case I don't know how much you are into this type of games, but even just from the perspective of a case study, I strongly recommend you try out BGII and spend some time in the main city there. Yesterday I was trying to analyze what Defiance Bay lacks compared to BGII's big city, and one of the things was the ambient city sounds, some of them were even district-specific I think. They also vary from day to nighttime. Combined with the music themes starting to play at random times (they are a minute, minute and a half long), and subtle animations like birds flying, chimneys smoking, I think it's especially this ambient audio that created the illusion that there is much more activity and much more people in the city than there were NPCs in the respective game "area". So it's definitely worth it to play some IE games if you haven't tried them, just for spotting the tricks the designers used in those games. I agree with this, but the cities also lack houses. BG I had a lot of useless houses or houses you couldn't go into to. That made it feel like an actual city. They're only in a tiny part of the docks and copperlane.

That runs the risk of encouraging the player to ride the RNG more. I really don't see what the problem is with the system as it stands. I really think just taking the complaints and rolling them into suboptimal talents is the way to go, just like they did with health recovery.

Who knows what the future will bring? BTW, completely off topic (sorry) but I've put more hours into Destiny than any other game I've ever played in 30 years of gaming... Something like 350 hours? Love that game, hate it's RNG and grindy end game. This song gets lots of flack but I think it's pretty good! Ok back to the topic at hand. To be frank, I have lots of regrets about the way combat music was handled. But we did the best we could in the amount of time we had. If I ever get the chance for a do-over, you can bet there will be a fresh approach. I like the music in the game quite a bit. BTW, what would you do differently for the inevitable sequel that everyone knows is coming and Obsidian has accidentally leaked already "if you ever get the chance?"

The vast majority of classes have per rest abilities that are more powerful than per encounter abilities. Not to the extent of casters, but they have less abilities than casters in general. Barbarians have Heart of Fury, Paladins have Deprive the Unworthy, Rogues have Fearsome Strike, Rangers have Binding Roots, Monks have Clarity of Agony. Chanters and Ciphers are the exception to the rule. Even they can get per rest abilities from talents like Envenomed Strike. I don't want to remove per encounter abilities, I think per encounter abilities are great. I think there's something to be said for more powerful abilities being per rest, and weaker ones being per encounter.

This was the first game of this type made since DA:O. The reason it's not used in newer games is because we've had one representative in the genre for five years. D:AO used a mana system that was effectively per encounter. The optimal way to play the game was to cast storm of vengeance, mop up the extras, and wait for mana to recharge. That's more tedious, not less. If all the fights in the game except bosses are repetitive just play on easy mode until you get to bosses. That will also trivialize many fights. The purposes of a system isn't to make the game easy, it's to make it challenging but doable. If you don't like the challenge, then lower the challenge level. The lesser fights aren't some aberration of good design, they are the game. The game is about fighting through dungeons. When they erred, it was normally that the fights needed more variation: that's a level design problem, not a system design one. And the game is built on using limited resources. That's why there's health as well as endurance. That's why there are resting bonuses and four different types of consumable item. Daily abilities are only one reflection of this. Some classes have more, some classes have less. But strategic planning is a core feature. Your final argument is incredibly reductive. Most of the status effects noticeably change gameplay beyond stats: blind - makes you bad at attacking and vulnerable. charmed - makes a character switch sides and autoattack slowly. distracted - less engagement makes you lose some control over the field. dominated - switches sides and lets you use enemy abilities, which allows you to blow through their best ones. flanked - opens enemies up for damage if they're surrounded. frightened - characters run away. hobbled - slows your character way down. maimed - means this character is about to die for good. paralyzed - character can't do anything. prone - character was pushed on the ground. stuck - character can't move but can attack nearby people. That's 11 unique afflictions without looking at stats, and stats do make a difference. Confused, petrified, sickened, terrified, and weakened have significantly different effects in practice. The only two I would change are dazed and confused. Dazed could do with a bit more differentiation, and confused should be more like beserk in BG where the enemy attacks whoever's near it. (And that list didn't even include expose wounds and combusting wounds). Having different spells to cure and prevent them become a matter of tactics. If you know an enemy paralyzes and charms your party, which is more important to protect against in the limited time you have before the first attack? Essentially you want to turn the priest from a character with 20 to 30 valid actions into a character with 10, drastically reducing the complexity of the game and therefore the required thinking.

"Doesn't feel like any sickness you've had before" certainly seems to point to a soul thing.

I don't see an issue with spell mastery because I almost always run out of endurance before spells on higher difficulties, and that's using a couple a fight. Maybe spell mastery could be raised to add two or three more uses per encounter, but I would only feel it pretty rarely. Or maybe improved spell mastery could become a feat that allowed a greater number of uses of the spell. At higher difficulty levels fights only feel like trash if you've significantly over-leveled them, and spells do not trivialize fights - they're necessary to survive them. Six spells to cure six different conditions is more tactical when you have limited time and are worried about two different conditions. Especially when the conditions do different things to your characters. You have a choice to make with benefits and opportunity costs. If you make the right choice the game becomes easier. Furthermore, people do pick a laundry list of spells, but those spells can lead to wildly different playstyles. Off the top of my head, mages can: go melee and drain heavy; use combusting wounds and quick AoEs to pepper the enemy with small damage; focus on debuffs; control the battlefield with spells like confusion and oil slick; go implement heavy interrupting blasters; and go a straight up AoE damage build. The limited spell slots is a way of forcing players to choose a build and it avoids the whole "my mage does everything your class does but better problem." But the real issue is this: if you like chanters and ciphers better, then just run with chanters and ciphers. There are 11 viable classes, and only three of them are Vancian casters.

It's not optimal, but I love the hell out of grimoire slam. My first playthrough I made a point of having Aloth beat other mages to death with a book. It's very satisfying. Try it if you're not doing PotD.

I haven't found a single class that's playing poorly by 3.00. Priests are great and the closest the game has to a necessary class, especially on PotD; athletics frees you to use some of the damage spells if you kept using priests just for healing. Barbarians are fun, and a great option on PotD, their schtick is you run into the center of battle and dish out a ton of AoE damage. They have a mechanic that hides their health for substantial bonuses to stats. I like them a lot, especially as moonlikes, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. Ciphers have a lot of unique dialogues, and they change the gameplay by using lots of dominates to make enemies switch sides. They can also work well in specific melee builds, but normally they're a nice cross between archers and melee attackers. Rogues don't do it for me. I like rangers better for ranged attacks, and every melee class better close up. This is especially true on PotD, when crowds are so huge melee durability is a serious issue.

I had a hard time with Lagufeth when I saw them at first. They spike hard but go down quickly. I've found that you want to target the normal base Lagufeth first, ignore the broodmothers and redfins or cc them out of the fight. Then go after the redfins, then go after the broodmothers. Also, confusion and slicken will help you in almost any battle.

I'd back that. All the same, surely they don't have to use a kickstarter again? After the success of POE, someone should be willing to fund them... Yes, someone is: their fans. It worked out pretty well the first time. It's really a matter of weighting the pros and cons of each funding method. How much money do they need for a sequel? Do they even want a traditional publisher? What other avenues might be worth exploring? I wouldn't automatically rule out crowdfunding just because they have other options now - it's not reserved only for start-ups and desperate people, you know. They'll probably use Fig (since they're founders) and jack the price of the base tier up to $40+. I'm less than excited about that future.

Why? Also, what about food?

I'm going to echo some of the previous answers. 1. A lot of them wiped themselves out. Engwithan culture was probably destroyed for good when they rebelled and killed the king in Caed Nua. 2. Thaos is an Engwithan who was the head prophet of the new religion. His intentions are to create a sense of order in the universe and to hide secrets of souls. His methods are very bad. 3. It's partially Woedica but there are two other big options. One is that Thaos has a heavy soul like yours. The other is that Thaos knows Engwithan animancy. It could be a combination of the three. 4. Probably. It's worth pointing out that the candles still haven't gone out in the church of Eothas. But, as other posters have said, is death really a problem for a God of resurrection? BTW it's worth pointing out that Eothas matches a lot of classical gods here: Baal was a god of farmers (not the sun though), who would die and be reborn. Dionysis was a god of life who had several rebirths, etc. 5. They describe what happened in Caed Nua almost exactly. If you do Heritage Hill first, you can learn Engwithan and speak to the Fampyr in the endless paths. A king of the Engwithans went crazy when his son died, and built a giant statue of his son made out of ardra. His animancers killed thousands of people to put souls in the statue and kinda just did what they wanted to experiment. Possibly using the big machines that caused the hollowborn. They were also looking for his son's soul to grab from death and put back in his body. The normal Engwithans were sick of being killed, so they broke into the castle, killed everyone, and magically sealed the place. Presumably they gave up quite a few traditions and became the Glanfathans.

Fighters are great, but you probably want a more active character for your main first time around.

Hmmm at that escapist review: Combat remains a weak point of the Pillars formula, and it's abundantly apparent in this expansion. On the default difficulty, without allowing the game to scale up the challenge to my party (which was recommended), I still struggled immensely with average enemy groups of lowly cultists, wiping multiple times in some cases. The new monk-class enemies could dodge right past my tanky melee line and go after my squishy damage dealers with seeming impunity, for instance, and had far too much health for me to be able to focus fire them down before they turned the entire encounter into a rout. Conversely, the enemies who were supposed to be big and scary (including the towering Eyeless war constructs central to the story, and the colossal, set piece final boss) were felled with ease, leaving hardly a lasting scratch on my party. Simply put, Pillars still does a poor job of giving you the tools you need to manage basic party tasks like tanking and crowd control in chaotic situations with lots of weaker enemies. So they turned level scaling off, and then were surprised that they outleveled bosses. Have they heard of crowd control or you know, running away kiting? It's weird that they mention MMO stuff without using common MMO tactics. A ton of the bosses in WoW are not actually tank and spank.

Priests and Ciphers get a ton of love with special content, and playing a Barbarian is super fun. Really, I would say most classes are fun. You'll probably want to stay away from a fighter or chanter the first time around on your main, because they have less active abilities.

I think there's a golden mean. I personally found the area Stalwart pretty enjoyable, but that was because you could go around encounters. I don't have a ton of fun running uphill into an encampment of Lagufeth on PotD.

I think it's interesting that as of right now there are a fair amount more votes for PotD than Expert mode. That says that people enjoy a challenge, but not a masochistic one. No.

This isn't an option in the throne room, but maybe the spiders will let you run away. Start the fight, charm one as a sacrifice, and run away. A lot of the TCS I played was made much simpler by running away and picking off large groups one at a time. (If you look at TCS finishes on youtube, they frequently use summons to draw boss aggro out of player range and take them down one at a time. It'll be interesting to see if that still works. BTW I found the shade fight was heavily dependent on making sure you had a couple scrolls of fan of flames and a fair bit of luck. That spell is like wraith cryptonite. Also, if you have to do it again, make sure you have pick up Whispers of Yenwood from the vase at the entrance.

I wish I could get a transcript of the Thaos dialogue. It has so many nuggets of lore, but I hate watching youtube to get it all.

I forget where, but JE Sawyer expressed interest in multiclassing. It could certainly lead to some interesting builds, but there's also the danger of everyone going to the same obvious optimal builds like DnD:Online. (What you're playing a rogue 2 / paladin 12; surely that's because you wanted to play a redeemed character and not because you wanted evasion...) Mind you, I'm not opposed per se. However, the classes are quite unique. There's less of a need for it than in BG, because weapons, stats, and talents are already open to most builds.

I got my PotD solo barbarian to Twin Elms and didn't go any further. I maxed level, saw what I wanted to see, and wasn't enjoying it past a certain point. I got my triple crown solo chanter to Defiance Bay before stopping for similar reasons. Personally I think the fight in the throne room is complete bull****, and surviving it is heavily luck based. But personally I think specters should be mid-level enemies; I've never enjoyed fighting them early game and played through a bunch of times.

I kinda like it the way it is. Honestly, I would like enchanting a little more restricted, like having specific vendors do it or having enchants as recipes you discover. There are some good unique weapons, but most players roll up an excellent flaming sword and think it's equivalent.

I wonder if the Yenwood family is alive and wants Caed Nua back.

You can also just run away from the Xaurip. The vast majority of the classes have escape abilities or pets. I had to run away from enemies all the time when I soloed.