MoonWolf

Priests with survival. I'm not sure why but we're going to try and build one. Priets normally come with Lore on their class talents. For a background we will take Colonist for a solid 2 Survival. Priests start the game with 1 Athletics and 2 Lore. Survival Talent Options: Level 2 Bear's Fortitude: 1 Athletics, Survival Cautious Attack: 1 Athletics, Survival Envonomed Strike: 1 Stealth, 1 Survival Deep Pockets: 2 Survival Scion of Flame: 1 lore, 1 Survival Heart of the Storm: 1 lore, 1 Survival Spirit of Decay: 1 lore, 1 Survival Secrets of Rime: 1 lore, 1 Survival Potent Potions: 2 Survival Experience Survivalist: 4 Survival Wound Binding: 2 Survival Field Triage: 2 Survival Level 4 Beast Slayer: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Primal Bane:1 Lore, 1 Survival Sanctifier: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Wilder Hunter: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Well we have quite an array of options open to us. And almost all of them are paired with lore or athletics. The pure ones are Deep Pockets which gives us more quick bar slots, Wound Binding for a self Health restore Field Triage for a smaller Health restore on party members and Potent Potions for improved potions. So the pure Survival talents have a very coherent theme. Healing and buffing. Either by having access to more of it, improving it or giving new options for it. Survival priest: Background - Colonist: 2 Survival Talents: Potent Potions: 2 Survival Field Triage: 2 Survival Athletics 1 Lore 2 Survival 6 Survival is probably the best supported and most coherent skill, that isn't athletics. It can enhance core mechanics of some classes, it can provide all classes with more or better access to buffing or healing or it can grant some extra damage under specific circumstances. Lets build two additional priests shall we. One frontline priest and one more dedicated caster priest. We'll go with the Mercenary background to pick up Lore and Athletics. Frontline priest: Background - Mercenary : 1 Survival, 1 Athletics Talents: Inspired Flame: 2 Lore Weapon and Shield Style: 2 Athletics Athletics 4 Lore 5 Suprising absolutly nobody trying to make a priest that hits people with weapons and supports from the front line ends up combining Athletics and Lore Support priest: Background - Mercenary : 1 Survival, 1 Athletics Talents: Inspiring Radiance: 2 Lore Bonus 1st Level Spell: 2 Lore Athletics 2 Lore 7 And since Lore looks like its Athletics of casters and Lore is the priest skill a primary caster priest pumps a lot of Lore and picks up some Athletics on the side.

A rogue that goes for a lot of Lore, perhaps you are a professional fencer and it represents your knowledge of noble affairs and general upper class upbringing. Maybe its your ability to appraise the value of loot. Maybe its just because you wanted a rogue main character and think Lore is going to be most useful for conversation options. Rogues have Stealth as their skill on class talents. For a background we will go with Aristocrat, 2 pure points of lore. The level 1 skill package for picking rogue is 1 Stealth, 2 Mechanics. Lore Talent Options: Level 2 Bull's Will: 2 lore Dangerous Implement: 1 Atletics, 1 Lore Scion of Flame: 1 lore, 1 Survival Heart of the Storm: 1 lore, 1 Survival Spirit of Decay: 1 lore, 1 Survival Secrets of Rime: 1 lore, 1 Survival Quick Switch: 1 Athletics, 1 Lore Lore Keeper: 4 Lore Level 4 Beast Slayer: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Primal Bane:1 Lore, 1 Survival Ghost Hunter: 2 Lore Sanctifier: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Wilder Hunter: 1 Lore, 1 Survival Finally some options. We got a whole 13 Talents here. Well, sort of. Scion of Flame, Heart of the Storm etc are basically variations on a theme giving increased damage and DT for a damage type. Similarly the level 4 set is all about bonus damage against different kinds of enemy groups. The elemental damage type talents don't do much for a rogue, they are mostly caster talents since casters have much more ready access to elemental damage types. The Implement Talent really is only for casters. Lore keeper is well, a +4 skill talent. That leaves us Bull's Will to make our Will save better, Racial Damage is a bit niche but could word and Quick Switch lets use switch weapon ( or spells in a grimoire ) with less of a delay before we can use them. That is a good deal for a rogue who in my eyes are natural skirmishers switching from ranged to melee as it suits them. So I'll take that happily. Will is probably not a rogues worst save, that tends to be Fort. But raising is not bad idea as such. So lets pick up a boost in Will. It feels a little weird to have Lore on that Talent but I don't want to complain for fear of it being turned into athletics. Lore Rogue Background - Aristocrat: 2 Lore Talents: Quick Switch: 1 Athletics, 1 Lore Bulls Will: 2 Lore Athletics 1 Stealth 1 Lore 5 Mechanics 2 We've succesfully made a high Lore Rogue with talent choices that fit our core gameplay. Thats actually pretty good. To bad its the only possible set of talents that will fit our core gameplay. I mean I guess we can take Ghost Hunter at level 6 and hope there is a lot of ghosts in the game. That is a whole different debate though, see the many discussions on racial enemies in DnD. Lets see what happens if we try to make a more generic rogue build. Or rather two of them. A Skirmishing rogue who dances in and out of combat and a dedicated swashbuckler. For both we'll take the Raider background for 1 Stealth and 1 Athletics. Skirmisher Rogue Background - Raider: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Talents: Quick Switch: 1 Athletics, 1 Lore Graceful Retreat: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Stealth 3 Athletics 3 Lore 1 Mechanics 2 For quickly switching weapons and being able to better avoid disengament attacks we ended up with a balance of Stealth and Athletics. Not really a suprise since at this point we've firmly established that doing things with weapons is Athletics and the Rogue skill is Stealth. Swasbuckler Rogue Background - Raider: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Talents: Weapon and Shield Style: 2 Athletics Vicious Fighting: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Stealth 3 Athletics 4 Mechanics 2 Oh hey, virtually the same result we just switched out one point of Lore for Athletics. You won't be suprised at this point when I tell you that a rogue built for backstabbing has a lot of Stealth and a splash of Athletics.

Lets try to build a Cipher with high Mechanics. The Cipher class skill is Lore and I like the idea of combining it with Mechanics to go for a sort of Animancy vibe. But just as with the fighter above this will serve to illusrate the full set of possible talents you can take up to level 4 to enhance your Mechanics skill so part of this will illustrate how wanting to pump Mechanics for other classes works out. For a background we will go with Merchant for 1 Lore and 1 Mechanics. The level 1 skill package for picking Cipher is 1 Stealth, 1 Lore and 1 Mechanics. Mechanics Talent Options: Level 2 Gunner: 2 Mechanics Accurate Traps: 2 Mechanics Powerful Traps: 2 Mechanics Expert Mechanic: 4 Mechanics Level 4 None Much like the Stealth talents we have 4 options available to us. Luckily unlike the Stealth talents these are all pure Mechanics choices so we can actually achieve a decent rating in the skill. Gunner makes us reload guns faster. Great. Personally I wouldn't put a ranged weapon on a Cipher though I realize some have advocated that idea. The bigger problem with that is that it doesn't lead to anything, the only ranged weapon related talent with Mechanics is Gunner. Lets go witht he trap set. Flavourfull, useful. Perhaps a bit limited in application, I'm not sure how much access there will be to traps in the final game. For the beta this is a horrible set of choices though since traps are basically not available to use in 333. However the most annoying part is that there is no set of options here that work to improve the ciphers core playstyle. I've simply tacked on traps. That is great if you wanted traps. But what if you do not ? Mechanics Cipher Background - Merchant: 1 Lore, 1 Mechanics Talents: Accurate Traps: 2 Mechanics Powerful Traps: 2 Mechanics Stealth 1 Lore 2 Mechanics 6 For our efforts we've actually built a character good at mechanics unlike our stealthy fighter. And we've also discovered the big problem with the Mechanics choices. If you want Mechanics on your character I hope you enjoy putting down traps, with a side of guns. This is your only available set of options. Lets build a Cipher without caring about skills and simply picking talents to boost our core playstyle. The cipher uses weapon attacks to build focus and then uses focus to cast spells. The spells tend to be debuffs with a small selection of damage options also available. We'll build two Ciphers. One focussed on casting and preferring debuffs. Another that goes for more of a spellblade style that tries to do damage with both weapons and spells. Debuff Cipher Background - Merchant: 1 Lore, 1 Mechanics Talents: Draining Wip: 2 Lore Greater Focus: 2 Lore Stealth 1 Lore 6 Mechanics 2 Turns out there is no way to boost your debuff spells not with the talent selection open at level 4. So this caster Cipher has a whole lot of focus and the ability to generate it quickly instead. It works, the build is coherent, you end up pumping Lore not a suprise since both these talents are Cipher talents. Gish Cipher Background Merchant: 1 Lore, 1 Mechanics Talents: Weapon Focus: 2 Athletics Biting Wip: 2 Lore Stealth 1 Athletics 2 Lore 4 Mechanics 2 Trying to balance the two aspects of the Cipher leads to a combination of Athletics and Lore. Not a suprise really. Picking a differentiation background would have left us with a more coherent skillset too. Its not bad. It makes sense as a combination. If you went all out for weapon based gameplay you would have ended up with 4 athletics from skills. So these are your options if you want to play a cipher that picks skills based on his core gameplay. A balance of Lore and Atheletics depending on how you value those aspects. More choice than the Fighter at least.

Lets make a Stealthy fighter. Why ? Because Stealth is useful on everyone, not just rogues. If you want to avoid encounters you'll have to get your whole party past them not just the rogue. Should you want to scout around a fighter actually makes a good choice because if you get caught in a bad spot he is mostly likely to survive untill the party can come in and save his butt. Our stealthy fighter will take the Hunter background for its 1 Stealth. In addition a first level fighter gets 1 Atheletics, 1 Lore, 1 Survival. Stealth Talent Options: Level 2 Snakes Reflexes: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Envenomed Strike: 1 Stealth, 1 Survival Graceful Retreat: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Stealthy Scout: 4 Stealth Level 4 None Well we sure have a lot of options here. Lets get the most important one out of the way. I don't like the +4 pure skill talents at all. I do not think that sacrificing the power of a talent is worth another +2 to a skill. And on top of that the +4 skill talents are rather boring. I'm not going to be taking them in any of my builds here. Fighters are about being in the middle of things and throwing down. Even a lighter armored fighter that takes none of the tanky class options is still going to quite the durable character with a lot less of the damage supporting options of barbarians and rogues. So combining snakes reflexes and graceful retreat plays best into the fighters core gameplay. That gives me a higher Reflex Defense and an improved overall defense when it comes to evading disengagement attacks. I'd say this make me a sort of skirmisher fighter running past the frontline to throw down with the backline using things like knockdown to run inteference with casters or archers. At last that is a coherent character idea. Stealthy Fighter: Background - Hunter: 1 Stealth, 1 survival Talents: Snakes Reflexes: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Graceful Retreat: 1 Stealth, 1 Athletics Stealth 3 Athletics 3 Lore 1 Survival 2 For our great investment of 2 talents and a background we have ended up with the a character with just as much stealth as athletics plus a smatter of Lore and Survival. Our skills are all over the place and none of them excell. Which is a problem because as far as the beta has let me know I need high values to get good results in scripted interactions and dialogue. The biggest problem though here is that this is your one approach for playing a stealthy fighter. You could also take up Envenomed Strike instead of one of those and gain 3 uses of a poisoned attack per rest. The poison is not impressive. And instead we would have been 2 Athletics and 3 Survival. And we didn't even really get a good Stealth score out of the attempt. Non melee characters would do even worse with this set of talents. Now lets look at building a tank fighter. You know the type. Sword and board, great at taking a hit does some of damage but nothing exceptional. And for our normal tank build we won't care for skillpoint choices, just see where it takes us. For the background we'll pick one that make some sense for a martial character. Mercenary sounds good. Sword and Board Fighter: Background - Mercenary: 1 Athletics, 1 Lore Talents: Weapon and Shield Style: 2 Athletics Cautious Attack: 1 Athletics, 1 Survival Athletics 5 Lore 2 Survival 2 Weapon and shield style plays into our weapon loadout of choice and catious attack makes us attack slower but improves our defense. Would you look at that, sword and board fighter pumped Athletics. It makes sense. I have plenty of other ideas on how to make a fighter. Here is a list with the resulted skills: Two Handed Weapon: High Athletics Dual Weilding: High Athletics Mobile Archer: High Athletics Blunderbuss right int he face: High Athletics Master of Many Weapons: High Athletics Flamberge DT bypasser: High Athletics Seeing a trend here ? Worst part is that this is all non fighter talents. Fighter specific talents are also +2 Athletics. Actually almost all class specific talents are a single skill +2, though there are some exceptions. A fighter that tries to pick skills based on his core gameplay ends up pumping Athletics. Great variety available there. Now I this post was about fighters, but honsetly its not like a Paladin or a Wizard has different options available for Stealth. This is going to be true for many of the other posts about builds coming up. Stealth is not great, trying to add it to most characters is going to end up with mediocre results

In the new backer beta build skillpoints are different. We used to pick them separately in character creation and during levelup. This process worked but it was a little boring and honestly ended up with deciding what skills your character would use at level 1 and then just increasing those as you went. Now skillpoints come from Talents which will have either +2 to a skill +1,+1 to two skills in addition to the properties of the talent itself. With the exception of 5 talents that provide a straight +4 to a single skill which do not have any other properties. I like many others expressed a dislike of this new system in the Quick Impressions thread but decided that I was actually going to see what I could do with it and give it fair shot, its a beta and part of why its here is to give feedback after all. Looking at something decrying its not to my liking and leaving it at that is easy and inviting but unfair. So lets test this, in the only way I know how as an RPG player. Making tons of level 1 ( well, level 5 ) characters. To do so I decided to think up 5 characters, one for each of the skills and associate them with classes that wouldn't normally get that skill through their regular talents. The reason for that is that is to see if its still viable to do so, if the idea of trying to make a character with the skills you choose instead of the skills your talent progression encourages is still viable, and fun. To that end here is a list of characters I'll be building. And then contrasting them with how I think you would build those classes naturally, ignoring skills associated with the talents. A Stealth Fighter A Mechanics Cipher A Lore Rogue A Survival Priest An Athletics Wizard Why those ? No specific reason, aside from the Cipher and the Wizard these are simply the first things that came to mind. Afterwards I'll write down some conclusions. So lets start, with a Stealthy Fighter.

Ciphers may choose the Accurate Carnage Talent. A barbarian talent. It should not be available to anyone but Barbarians.

I have been doing a thing where I'm comparing and building a lot of characters to play with the skill on talents. I have not had a whole lot of actual playing. So no, i'll get to it, first i have a giant post to write.

Now try it on path of the damned. I dare you.

So firsts impressions from a few bite-sized bits of playing Something must have changed about either my characters or the stats of the enemies because Path of the Damned just became hell to play. Going to look more into this later. So far I have not made it past the beetles on Path of the Damned. Overhauled talents, talents taken more frequently and more talents to play with. Great. Current talent UI is awkward for it though. Add some organization, categorize stuff. Skillpoints tied to talents. Not sold on this one at all. It turns everything into a double choice and not in a good way, and that has been mentioned and debated above in this thread so I won't reiterate it. However I have some other points to add to it. This step has reintroduced some horrible things that exist in tabletop DnD games with feats. Where feats that do drastically different things compete with each other. Small example Linguistics is a feat that lets you learn a bunch more languages, cool, neat, flavorful, useful at least on the face of it. But it competes with feats like Weapon Focus which improves your hit bonus by 1. The second is way more boring. And also much much more useful. And no amount of additional languages of linguistics will fix that. Because the two feats are not operating in the same part of the game. And dnd, like it or not. Features a whole lot more combat than it features needing to know esoteric languages. And the same thing has now been created in PoE. Lore Keeper ( but also the other +4 skill talents ) sound great, I get 4 whole points of lore, that is a lot of points of lore. Except. It competes with Weapon focus or Intense Flames. They are not even part of the same pillar of the game. There is no competition here, its a choice I don't even consider. I'm no game designer but if I wanted to keep the same Idea of tying skill progression to talents in this way then I'd divide talent choices in two. Remove the skill points from direct combat related talents. Separate out talents like Lore Keeper, Fast Runner, Deep Focus into Utility Talents. Then let players pick at appropriate times a talent from those categories.

This is not isolated to enemies. Party members can also fail to play a death animation and then just stand around. Happens very regularly for party members.

I can confirm web is also invisible on the ground.

When shopping at Winfriths the item list shows no item names, only icons. [steps to reproduce] 1) Start a new game 2) Enter Winfriths shop, talk to him. 3) "Show me what you have for sale" [Expected behaviour] Winfriths shop displays item names like any other shop.

This was fixed in bb278.

Also see : http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68792-301-ebony-spider-figurine-summons-leave-and-rejoin-party-during-combat/

Now that is an interesting bug to find.

Yup its still there, its not consistent but its a problem. I have not ever installed any modifications nor done any modifying myself. Before my last test I verified my game cache. You may never see this problem especially if you are only playing a single game/character. It takes me quite a few tries to get it to show up in a new game, but it definitely exists.

Verified PoE'sgame-cache 1 file was replaced. Created 10 games on normal difficulty all unbugged. Created 6 games on path of the damned and then ran into 1 bugged start. So no, it was not fixed, and definitely not hotfixed.

So, still curious I did some testing. I created 25 fresh new games, 5 for each difficultly. Easy: 1 bugged, 4 normal Normal: 0 bugged, 5 normal Hard: 1 bugged, 4 normal PotD: 1 bugged, 4 normal. Now this is a really low sample size, and it is in no way rigorous. But it looks like that it definitely doesn't happen all the time, can happen on any difficulty, and from this sample looks to be about a 20% chance. However I'm not at all confident in that chance since you seem to be getting this a lot more frequently.

I got curious because I did not recall having unusual health or endurance values on my BB character. Checking my path of the damned saves this was not happening for me, or at least not for this specific game. I see no current hp inflation at all. I certainly do not see massive inflation of the current health like your BB Fighter.

Sure but I can only judge and comment on what I have in front of me, and I've tried to lay out my experiences and suggestions based on that. We will see what the next beta update brings, I hope some serious tweaks to enemies. Surely I'm not the only one to tackle PotD, anyone else want to chime in with feedback. Comments, questions suggestions ?

Cean Gŵla crush is another major offender surrounding all targets afflicted in stone finger things:

I did not find any near the Shambeling Mounds but the Wurm/Dragon Egg location is definitively all screwed up.

I've tried reproducing this crash with your exact set of steps and simply cannot. Best advice i can give you is to attach a savegame of everything up to step 6 although I suspect its not related to quest state or anything like that and a savegame will not not record the problem.

Check your rogues stats. I think they might have the bug where they skyrocket.

Approaching The Path of the Damned So over the weekend I completed a run through Path of the Damned and yes, yes it is a fair shot more difficult than normal or hard. And I have some feedback on both the difficulty itself, some things that could be changed for all difficulties and some suggestions on how to approach playing Path of the Damned. As an introduction and a bit of background. I love playing Baldurs Gate 1&2 with tactics ( Tactics, Ascension, Stratagems, CoM Encounters, BP, Revised Battles, etc) mods. I certainly won't play through either without the Stratagems mod installed if I can help it. I've not played either Icewind Dale to completion and certainly have not tried my hand at Heart of Fury but I'm planning to get to that after my current run through a Big World Project Tactics installation. I certainly won't claim to be especially good at it but I manage and I enjoy puzzling out approaches to encounters. The Nature of the Path Lets review what Path of the Damned entails. PoE enables and disables the enemies you find in locations depending on the difficulty you are using. Path of the Damned enables all of them. And also gives enemies a 50% boost in stats. So there is more enemies, there is more varieties of enemies and the enemies are harder. There is of-course some exceptions. Pre-determined groups like Medreths never change composition. Don't worry though, they'll still get that difficulty boost. Path of the Damned on the whole is actually very enjoyable to play. It rewards being careful about how you start and manage combat. Use patrol route timing to break up groups and disabling strike to stagger opponents arriving at your group. The Skaen Dungeon seems built to enable this kind of approach. There is some downsides too though, In theory the 50% across the board boost sounds like a good idea but can lead to situations where you carefully put down a Symbol, then expertly fireball a mass of enemies, kite them across the symbol and throw an interdiction on top of the whole group as it approaches your front line. The fireball managed to hit one enemy for decent damage and grazed 2 for 0.7, the rest didn't care. The Symbol never did anything to any of them and the Interdiction only applied its debuff to one opponent. Great, that effort sure helped make this easier. Back to just murdering things in melee and having the casters throw down debuffs and heals in the hope something sticks. I'd love to target a different defense and exploit that but it turns out after the boost they don't really Have a defense that is noticeably weak compared to my parties accuracy ratings. Instead of an across the board increase I'd like to see a strong improvement ( say the current 50% ) in their stronger points but a smaller boost to their weaker points. This should lead to them being about as effective in whatever role they have but leave open weak-points. The ability to actually target specific weaknesses should lead to more engaging gameplay and varied tactics. Insights of the Path There are some things I noticed while playing, frustrations and the like I think could be improved. Lets talk about what I like to think of as emergency abilities. Abilities like Arcane Veil and Escape. When I press that button I want that, no Need that to activate Now. Not when my delay ends, when my delay ends is probably going to be too late. My wizard will be dead, my rogue will be stuck in interrupts. I'd like to see things like Escape, Healing Consumables and other general emergency abilities to be put on a separate action type that goes off immediately and then resets the delay timer. On the subject of Escape. I frequently have no clue what the real range on it is or what is or is not going to block it. I suggest a line pointer to give feedback on where exactly I'm going to end up. So you fight through a room, open some chest or drawer or check behind a tapestry. And find... more stuff you could have gotten off of the enemies in the room. I'd like to see more things like consumables, rare ingredients and such in chests. Especially consumables since I use quite a few of those in Path of the Damned. Walking the Path Become good friends with BB Rogue, BB Rogue is both your best damage dealer and out of the box your sneakiest character. And you'll want to sneak, you'll want to sneak to plan ahead and to start the encounters on your terms. Learn to love scout mode. You'll be in it a lot. As for how to use a rogue, realize they are skirmishers, do not stick them blindly on the front line, do not simply have them plink with a bow. They fill both roles well and you should alternate as needed. Pulls are often best executed with a bow, single casters on the back line are great to take out in melee. Escape will get you out of trouble if you use it well, but its not just for getting away from things. Use the slow to delay an opponent so you can stagger the arrival of enemies. Don't risk a rogue in melee with a massive unstable brawl going on but once things calm down move in for the kill with your stabbing implements of choice. You know what BB Rogue has on top of all that ? Traps, if you've got any sense you are fighting near natural choke-points anyway to ensure your back line is safe. Put some traps in front of the choke-point. Symbols too, BB Priest has a symbol in each spell level, not all of them equally useful but just throw one down there even if its not that big or doesn't do damage. Because debuffs are key. You'll not land them as reliably as you will in other difficulties but landing them makes a big difference. Debuffs reduce your opponents ability to hurt you and critically a rogue needs debuffs on a target to land sneak attacks. Sneak attacks are the key that turn a rogue into the damage powerhouses they are. On the subject of debuffs, Blinding, Dazing and Hobbling are nice but things that Charm rule supreme. A charmed enemy is a 200% swing of value in your favor not only have they lost power you have gained. Finally summons, though many of the things that apply to summons also apply to charmed opponents. See those statue things you started the game with ? One summons a group of spiders and the other summons a beetle. Once every rest. Summons are great because they'll take hits for you and you don't care at all about their Health. Send them in first, to eat AoE and other nasty things before going in with your actual party. Use them as additional bodies in fights that start off with dialog to avoid your characters getting overwhelmed before you can get control of the situation and on top of all that their damage is not exactly anemic.