Anthile

To be more specific, they improved Wizards that use buffs to become warriors. Wizards that are played as standard IE casters appear to have actually been nerfed in the undocumented changes (e.g. to nobody's surprise, Gaze of the Adragan has been severely nerfed). RIP one-shotting the Adra dragon. We hardly knew ye.

The health buffs for casters were necessary. Spells like Stag's Horn (also nerfed) could easily one-shot them before and I doubt that was ever supposed to happen.

I noticed the burial isle thing as well, in the easter egg thread. The game is full of references to the other IE games and that is mostly certainly a deliberate nod. Remember, the Fallout series also featured "natives" prominently.

I am genuinely surprised to see so many people defend the faction choice. It's one of the most baffling quests I have ever seen in a game. It's so strangely designed that instead of simply being bad, it almost seems to be like this on purpose. Here's what's the issue. You enter Defiance Bay and get a very vague idea of what's going on. The first problem is that the game does a poor job at establishing the factions - and why they are mutually exclusive. I know when I joined the Dozens I had never met a Doemenel and had no idea there was even the possibility of joining them. The whole faction quest is essentially backwards. Unless you're a very strange person, you will join any of the factions long before you know that it ties into the main plot. This doesn't strike me as very elegant. Ideally the faction choice would have been the very first main quest in act two. This way it would have been a good way to establish the sociopolitical landscape of Defiance Bay while still giving the player the opportunity to do free questing. Instead, choosing a faction is just about the last thing you are told to do. Did Obsidian really think people would wait this long? This leads us to the second backwards issue. Once you've done some work for the Dozens, you can easily end up being a member just by accepting a quest. The very act of accepting makes you a member, which makes no sense. This is highly questionable for a very obvious reason. What happens here is that the quest breaks causality. Because of what you will be forced to do in the future, you are no longer a viable candidate for the other factions. The funny thing is that the Dozens recruiter knows that because he set it up that way. However, the other recruiters could not possibly be aware of this setup - but the game treats it like they are. The quest railroads you into doing something terribly stupid with no way of talking your way out of it and is just about the only quest to do so. Thus, there is no logical reason merely accepting this quest should change your relations to the other factions. It removes agency from the player and is therefore poorly designed. Imagine if the child sacrifice quest in Twin Elms worked like this: once you accepted it there would be no way of any other solution but sacrifice the child.

No, a priest is not necessary but it helps. Generally, the more often you expect to get hit, the more useful a priest becomes. Besides from heals and buffs, the priest also offers powerful debuffs as well as decent if limited offensive spells. Magranite priests also make for decent fusiliers. In my opinion there's basically there's two ways to spend talents as a priest. The first is to pick your deity's special talent and pick other talents that compliment the use of your favored weapons. This usually means turning the priest into an off-tank but pure melee DPS is also possible if not exactly spectacular. Priests make poor frontline fighters but most of their spells have only a short range so just standing back and using a bow or gun isn't optimal either. Magranite and Waelite priests are an exception due to them actually having ranged weapons favored. A reach weapon would be the best choice but the only such weapon is the quarterstaff, favored by Waelites, but the magic quarterstaffs in the game are rather poor. The alternative would be to pick talents that boost your holy radiance and interdiction abilities, and concentrate on casting while using some kind of ranged weapon to take potshots when you don't cast spells. In that case you probably want to take Scion of Flame as well since almost all of your offensive spells are fire based. What is more effective will depend on the rest of your party. If you have, say, two tanks and a barbarian then a melee priest would get in the way more often than not.

Yeah, I had no idea that is even possible. Foes in this game have very little regard for their own safety and will gleefully use AoE spells at point blank range. In this case I simply gave Kana a Moonwell scroll and had him use Gaunt's Share one-handed. Not much Wymund can do about it once you got him engaged.

I managed to trick Wymund into suicide. Wasn't so hard after all. Your inventory is disgustingly clean. You really need more alternative weapons and armor. Also more scrolls. You also want more crowd control for your casters. On top of that, invest in talents that boost the accuracy of those characters who rely on their weapons. In the end you probably want a weapon focus for everyone and for Durance his special Magranite talent.

The Saints War is basically the US Civil War. Or as they call it in Readceras, the War of Southern Aggression.

It's one of the most difficult encounters in the game. Wymund is a high level priest, most certainly higher than your party when you first meet him. He has access to some of the most powerful spells in the game such as pillar of holy fire, which can easily end your party. You have to take care of him first via some sort of crowd control spell or ability, then get rid of his entourage and finally take him out for good.

Ancient Chinese technique.

In most Obsidian games, being evil rarely has any immediate payoffs. I do mean going out of your way to be evil, not just being aggressive or greedy. It's mostly for flavor and roleplaying. In the Fallout games you could do absurdly evil like giving addictive drugs to children or becoming a slaver but the rewards were rarely worth it. Think of it as an inversal of the saying virtue is its own reward: it's good to be bad. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think, Few come within the compass of my curse,— Wherein I did not some notorious ill, As kill a man, or else devise his death, Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, Accuse some innocent and forswear myself, Set deadly enmity between two friends, Make poor men's cattle break their necks; Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, And bid the owners quench them with their tears. Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves, And set them upright at their dear friends' doors, Even when their sorrows almost were forgot; And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, 'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.' Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

It's just a game, you should really just relax. As any decent roleplaying book will tell you, any number in a game is always an abstraction and can potentially mean a lot of things. Generally it's whatever is most interesting for the story.

Am I missing something? Why no Righteous Soul?

I don't want to spoil for anyone but let's just say the gods are not exactly the agree to disagree types.

Somebody must have really have a thing for burial islands. Another one was also prominently featured in the first Icewind Dale expansion, Heart of Winter. Both times it is there that you figure out that somebody is not quite what he pretends to be. Heart of Winter also introduced Heart of Fury, an advanced difficulty setting. In Pillars of Eternity it's reincarnated as a Barbarian skill. The shady tanner in Dyrford is likely a callback to his equally shady counterpart in Baldur's Gate 2, who is responsible for one of the most memorable sidequests in that game. The fantastic "It's possible. I kill a lot of people." line is, of course, borrowed from The Princess Bride.