Oneiromancer

It would be really weird if it was intended as it would affect only items that come with a certain amount of used slots. The problem seems to be that the game only checks for current open slots disregarding that quality enchantments override lower ones, which means the item needs the required open slots before the override.

Nope, the ability is working as intended. The druid class is designed mainly to be a strong aoe (area of effect) spellcaster, not a melee. The spiritshift ability is there to help at lower levels when s/he has very few spells or as a last solution/defense at higher levels when you're out of spells (before you get your 1st level, 2nd level spells "per encounter") or need some extra defense if you are wearing cloth/light armor.

Wildstrike only affects your melee damage while spiritshifted. Marksman should technically only affect ranged weapons but after a bit of testing I'm kinda baffled. I did the testing on a 4th level wood elf cypher: his accuracy was 34 and his ranged hits correctly showed a 44 (+5 from distant advantage and +5 from marksman), but for some reason his spells showed 53 (+10 from the spell innate accuracy, +5 from distant advantage and +4 from ???). I'm probably missing something.

This. If you want to use the one-handed style talent with a monk you will have to use a weapon, same as other classes.

I found them to be kind of middle of the pack, though playing on normal definitely lowers the value of support classes like chanter and priest. Withdraw is extremely useful on Path of the Damned to protect engaged squishies and it's just a level 1 spell, but on normal I doubt it's even half as useful. Also I don't know if it's a bug but Holy Radiance does absurd damage to vessels. Durance would basically one-shot ALL those zombie kids in one click, it was pretty hilarious. His stats were normal btw, so it wasn't the stats stacking bug.

Nope. You're throwing points away for no reason. I don't believe backstab works on guns. Melee only, last I checked. But popping out of stealth with blinding strike and penetrating shots with a blunderbuss is hilariously effective on a lot of targets. It does work with guns (and ranged weapons in general).

Deflection > CON The druid form right now is just an "oh ****!" button for when you have someone in your face or you don't want to waste spells, especially at high levels mainly because it has really bad scaling and a short duration. You could definitely make a druid who "mainly fights transformed" as there are talents that support that, but because of the mentioned problems it would be far from being "semi-optimized". Their main deal is doing a lot (and I really mean a LOT) of aoe damage, making a melee druid is kind of a waste (maybe an hybrid would still be decent).

Depends on what you mean by "fairly useless". If you're playing on normal you could technically play a character with all 10 and still complete the game without any problem whatsoever. Perception and especially Resolve are mainly "tanking" stats right now so the only reason you would want them is if you're either expecting to play such a role or for RP reasons, that's it. Especially because deflection becomes better as you stack it while at low values it makes very little difference no matter what. I'd choose either perception OR resolve to RP without lowering too much your main stats or maybe you could give a try to a suave tanking rogue using high deflection and abilities like adept evasion and riposte. Might be cool (or just terrible I have no idea really ) As for backstab... it needs positioning and micromanagement but it's not that horrible especially if you take the talent "Shadowying Beyond" which is an istant stealth 2x rest iirc. Backstabbing with a ranged rogue though kinda defeats the whole point of being ranged: having a glass cannon blowing up people from a safe position. It makes sense to open with a gun if you have backstab even with a melee build just because of the huge base dmg they have, you would switch back to melee as soon as you blew the first enemy into chuncks (highly likely btw )

They don't even need that, the IE games (well the one with the monk class at least) had monk-exclusive gloves that boosted their damage. Have an enchant that gives +acc +dmg on gloves and make it work only for unarmed. Done. You don't even need to metagame to be sure to find them because of crafting.

Intellect, might, dexterity... same as a ranged Cipher really. The only difference is you will probably want to take a reach weapon like a pike to stay away from the frontline.

I think there may be something funky going on with her starting armor. She has abnormally high DR against everything for me. It's supposed to increase DR by ~1.5x while under 25% endurance but I think it's displaying that and possibly granting it all of the time now. Maybe something bad/buggy also happens when you take it off. Edit here's what her DRs are when I take it off - http://i.imgur.com/SkNCutN.jpg O_o My Pallegina has the same problem. I posted it on the "technical support" forum but got zero responses. I guess it didn't help that it wasn't a gamebreaking bug and got pushed to the 7th page in half a day. I tried reloading before unlocking her quest and closing the game/restarting and it didn't change anything so you're probably right, it may be something funky going on with her armor. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72975-pallegina-negative-defenses/

Is this even a bug or is the character sheet just wrong?

I think, more or less, that's what the majority of the people here wants really. And that's what the npcs would have been if the attribute system didn't go through so many weird changes that ultimately it came out as this weird mix of defensive/offensive attributes that made some of them borderline useless for anything but fronliners (arguably even for anyone but tanks). Personally I don't care that much, I'm playing on hard and bringing the npcs along for the banter and that's it. The only thing I did chance is Edér weapon focus. I don't see the reason (not even RP wise) for him to have WF:Ruffian over WF:Soldier or WF:Peasant other than him having gone through a "rogue phase" back when npcs were still subject to changes.

She has fairly good resolve and perception, with an above average constitution to booth so she can be used as a decent tank. She's probably one of the "least worse" Too bad about Grieving Mother having both low might and intellect, I'm still going to use her though!

The game follows an old design style in which zones are supposed to be more heterogeneous, instead of being just small theme parks dvided by a challenge rating. Just because you are in a "low level area" it doesn't mean you won't find extremely hard or even impossible encounters you wil have to avoid: the bear cave in the beginning is a good example of this even though the game itself tells you to stay the **** away if you don't want to get a maulng to the face using a pretty smartly crafted interaction with an npc (smartly because the npc has his own reasons to want you to stay away ) I was able to tackle the temple of Eothas on hard only after getting Durance (the priest), with a party of 4 and I still had to reload a few times because of how difficult those shadows encounters are (incidentally I had zero problems with the "boss", probably because I'm playing a barbarian) As a general rule you should really use that scouting mode to see what you are up against and decide how to position and tackle the fight before the fight has begun. Don't blow your "per rest" abilities on a fight unless you're really having a hard time. Most of the *hard* encounters like the bear in the cave or those boars can be more easily beaten by smart positioning and the use of crowd control spells like slicken or repulsing seal and aoe blinds such as eyestrike or curse of blackened sight (you don't need all of them of course). I'll admit that the shadows in the temple feels wayyyy overtuned though. They have really high deflection, deals high damage and can completely ignore engagement by teleporting in the face of your backline characters. Not to mention they can summon even more shadows (though I heard it could be a bug with path of the damned enemies spawning on lower difficulties?) They seem to teleport less if you bring your ranged characters more close to melee, grouping up your party, but I guess you could consider that AI exploiting? Another fight to watch out for in the beginning is the one with the two elementals at the small shrine of Galawain (don't remember the zone name but it was east of Gilded Vale iirc). They are easy to crowd control but, like the bear, they hit like trucks and can drop anything but your tank (and even him if you don't help him with some cc) in a couple of hits. I had the "great" idea of using my barbarian in scale armor to off-tank one of the elementals, instead of using cc spells, and he got dropped literally in 3 seconds (him being in frenzy didn't help ) Don't give in to frustration, overcoming these kind of fights is the best part about tactical rpgs. Good luck!

Seems to auto-ress him to around half endurance if he gets kocked out.

The fighter is in the same town you found the mage, you probably have already talked to him but he won't join you until you advance the main quest. He's hard to miss. Also some of the encounters you will find aren't necessarily meant to be tackled right away. If you have a hard time just avoid the encounter/area and come back later when you either have more party members or are higher level.

The form itself is decent but it lasts for a short time and it uses your base accuracy, becoming more and more weak as you level up. It's once per encounter though, so you can use it when you're out of spells or don't want to waste any of them on small/easy fights.

Completely dumping dexterity in favor of resolve and perception for a ranged heavy hitter is really sub-optimal. I'm sure you could do fine even with a low dex, low might, high resolve, high perception build "somehow" but I guess it really depends how much RPing is important to you and how much you care about "optimizing" your character (not necessarely min-maxing mind you). Low dexterity, high resolve and perception would make a fine tank character but as rangers are kinda stuck as ranged dpsers (as far as I know) those stats are kinda working against you. Average dexterity (10-12) could still work with a ranger using very slow weapons as you wouldn't hit often enough to notice much of a difference except in very long fights. Perception would help you interrupt enemies from afar so it wouldn't be completely wasted even though I'm not sure how reliable it would be with a slow weapon. Resolve though it's a completely defensive stat and would be almost completely useless for anything but rping. If you're set on this character I would max might and get a bit of dex and then distribuite the rest of your points on per/int/res as you see fit. Use a slow ranged weapon, the slower the better. I'm not sure what advice to give you on talents beside taking the ones that will buff your preferred weapon (like weapon focus: knight if you're using a warbow, or marksman, decent for all ranged characters). A lot of those choices really depend on what playstyle you're going for once you start playing: a lot of talents buff your pet and your synergy with it, which you might not want to focus on.

I don't have much of a problem with how balanced the racials are per se, even though I think racials are usually a bad idea because you need to balance them not just against other racials but for every single class too, which makes it overly complicated imo. I do have a problem with how boring some of the racials are. I wish more of them were like the Island Aumaua or Fire Godlike ones instead of just "You get a small buff at 50% endurance" (Humans, Nature Godlikes) or "You have a slightly higher chance to resist this type of debuff" (Coastal Aumaua, Mountain Dwarf). Some of them don't even make that much sense to me (are coastal aumauas really that much bigger than Island ones?). Just nitpicking I guess

wrong thread

I hope it's not some kind of bug because that would be a pretty cool option to have. Especially if there are some talents to support it.

Should be dual wielding>one handed with free hand>one handed with shield>two handed from fastest to slowest. Weapon types complicate this a bit as I have no idea if, for example, a sword plus stiletto combo is faster than a stiletto plus shield. Dual wielding is the "fastest" melee style because of the off-hand attacks while one handed with a free hand gets an accuracy bonus (15 right now in the beta iirc). As you wrote it also depends on the type of weapon you are using. For example a rogue using a rapier in the main hand and a stiletto in the off-hand will attack much faster than than the same rogue using a sword with a free hand but he will also be (technically) less accurate and thus hitting more grazes and less criticals. BUT because rapiers increase accuracy (not as much as having a free hand though, iirc) and stilettos ignore an amount of damage threshold the difference is not as big as you would think. Except swords, unlike rapiers and stiletto, always deal the most adavantegeous of either piecing or slashing damage thus making them generally more flexible in different situations. Of course we're still in beta so specific numbers will be tinkered with constantly and a difference that might be negligible right now might be much higher in a month or two. I hope they either buff precision or the one handed with free hand combo, making it deal more damage on average than dual wielding but with less interrupting power, making it something of a middle ground between dual wielding and two handed weapon style as far as damage option go.

I don't know if this has already been brought up but another problem with the UI is that because selecting skills is bound to the selection of a portrait, it forces any summon/charmed/dominated npc to be added to the portraits list to be able to use any of their skills causing all sort of problems with the UI. Unless they're all supposed to simply auto-attack.

That's a question in a vacuum. I would assume that if they significantly boosted the Weapon damage bonuses from might, that they would also boost the spell-based bonuses from intellect, the accuracy/critical bonuses from Dex etc., thus every class build can find a way to battle on equal terms with a Might-build, thus maintaining balance without insulting us with these placebo stats as they currently are which don't really do much to any build. Still not a fan. People are underestimating the difference 30% makes. Jack that up to 60% and jack everything else up accordingly and you now have characters who are completely and utterly defined around their stats. I think the bonuses (boni?) could probably stand to be a little larger. But not much. 60% difference in damage from Might 3 to Might 18 would have seemed rather minimal to me to be honest before I saw that it doesn't even do that in project eternity. If you leave an attribute at it's minimum value I'd have assumed your character would be pretty much hopeless at whatever that attribute governs, if you max it out your character should be incredible at it. Giving attributes twice the effect they have right now still isn't that, but it at least means characters with average vs extreme values are differentiated, rather than only extremely high value vs. extremely low values actually being noticable. The main problem is that having a crippling low dexterity or being as smart as a brain damaged goose reflects in no way in combat or the world. Having 3 intellect doesn't make you a blabbering idiot in dialogues (correct me if I'm wrong) or bad at using abilities, it just means your abilities duration and area is a bit smaller than someone who is five times as smart as you, literally. Having 3 dexterity still means you are pretty accurate in melee if you are a warrior or a rogue: you completely dumped an attribute and you're still good at the thing that attribute governs. Having all attributes be useful to all classes is a nice idea in theory but if you have multiple characters people will naturally gravitate towards specialized roles and away from generalist builds using all of those attributes, especially if the game doesn't really care that much if you do or do not. If you want an awesome priest you just have to pump intellect and might, dump everything else and keep him at range: even if he will have lower health, or accuracy, or concentration or interruptig chances than someone with a more balanced build he doesn't really care because it's still good enough. Six base points in resolve still gives you almost +20% concentration, five base points in dexterity still gives you five accuracy which isn't much less than fifteen, ten points into constitution gives you 20% health/stamina which is stil good enough and isn't going to give you much less health than a priest pumping his con all the way to twenty until you reach endgame. And then you probably won't care much anyway, unless you're playing in path of the damned mode, as the game will be balaced around someone with average values, not people stacking health. People would dump intellect, wisdom or charisma in IWD not just because they were useless but also because there were absolutely no penalty for doing so. In IWD2 this problem still existed but was less prominent. Why? Because dumping Intellect meant you would lose skill points and access to some talents. Dumping Wisdom lowered your will, crippling your already low saves if you were a martial class. It wasn't pretty and it didn't really solve the problem (charisma was still useless to almost every class) but it was still something. The problem is that it feels like the game (and who designed the attributes) didn't really want the attributes in the first place. It feels like the classes are supposed to behave and be balanced around certain basic values decided by the designer and anything else is more flavor than a real difference. You can make attributes give higher values or force a higher minimum base value for attributes, but it's still just trying to patch up a flawed system that wants to look like D&D but doesn't want to be like it (which I understand because, popularity aside, it isn't that good). I know that the whole point of the six attributes is to cater to nostalgia and what people are used to, but if the system has to suffer for it it isn't worth it, imo.