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.

At certain points you can have your character pretty much quote Buddhist doctrine. The title Buddha itself means awakened one. Rymrgand reminds me a bit of Schopenhauer.

That how it works in D&D 3rd edition (and upward, if I remember correctly). Only the highest item bonus is applied in order to prevent crazy stacking. You can only stack bonuses from different sources (spells, talents, gear, etc.).

Even my paladin with near maximum will defense and righteous soul talent got charmed worryingly often. The priest spell is the only thing that really makes a difference but even then certain bosses roll their fear aura with a +35 bonus or something like that. At least righteous soul cuts down the status duration so he can shake off almost all status grazes.

I'm pretty sure you can prone everything and everyone in this game. Nothing like knocking down some drake out of the sky with a dagger. It most definitely works on Cail the Silent. I wonder if by utilizing weapons that have the Marking and Disorienting properties, using a ranger who has the stunning shots talent and a rogue with the Tall Grass pike, you could just stunlock the dragon even easier.

I would argue it's a callback to Neverwinter Nights 2's famous trial scene which in turn seems to be inspired by a similar scene in Chrono Trigger. Basically a chance to review what you have done up to this point, feedback for when you went out of your way to solve quests and an opportunity to show off your character's abilities. Just about every disposition, ability score or skill opens up new dialogue options.

I'm betting on something like warbows and rapiers for Hylea, spears and hunting bows for Galawain.

I don't understand the talk about cheese either. Cheese is something like climbing on a balcony to shoot a boss from a position where it can't reach you. Scrolls are meant to be used. People do not use them in unintended ways. Clearly, this how developers intended them to be used.

Way back in the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer I played a Favored Soul (a type of cleric) of Kelemvor. If you have played Neverwinter Nights 2, you might know that your patron deity does just about nothing besides influencing favored domains and weapon choices - it's purely mechanical. However, Mask of the Betrayer is about current and former death deities and - I don't want to spoil anything - you kind of run into some folks associated with Kelemvor towards the end. What happens is that you do get some bonus dialogue with huge implications, dozens and dozens of hours into the game. It's one of my fondest memories when it comes to gaming. It's like one of those moments in Fallout where you try to solve a problem in some outlandish manner and the game acknowledges it. So when my first character in Pillars of Eternity was going to be a priest of Eothas. It seemed like a proper ironic reversal of his Neverwinter Nights predecessor. When you walk into Gilded Vale, one of the first questions you can ask is who that Eothas guy is everyone is talking about. That's not supposed to happen. The more you play the wronger the whole thing seems. Once you talked to Durance and Eder and puzzled together how the whole Saints War worked out, it dawns on you that your very presence should be a big deal - and that's without being a Watcher. People should whisper behind your back, refuse to serve you or just be outright hostile. Nothing like that ever happens, though. To me, this is the most disappointing aspect of Pillars of Eternity.

To me it was the hardest fight in the game. You pretty much have to start out using a Cipher's Amplified Wave or a Wizard's Call To Slumber to knock everyone prone and then cast friendly fire-proof AoE spells like Chain Lightning, Firebug and Cleansing Fire. Fampyrs are nasty but they are not very durable. Re-dric is not particularly powerful by himself. He has the poor habit of throwing fireballs at point blank range that can hurt a lot but he will also take full damage from it. In fact, I managed to trick him into killing himself. Nothing could have been more satisfying.

I disagree, the best hunting bow by far is Lenas Êr - Rending and Disorienting means it hits harder and is the most accurate ranged weapon you can get (helps also your stunning shots). Interesting. I never found that one but it certainly sounds better than Persistence.