Gorbag

I'm just gonna stop you there because quite ****ing obviously 90% of things in the game aren't "mandatory" by this standard, so it's ridiculous to define it this way. It is mandatory TO find all secrets/traps, and since there's no in game downside you'll want to do it all the time. But there is a downside, you have to search for them. If you don't want to do it - you don't get them all. You either roll with that or do what is necessary to get them. it's a pretty simple choice about the way you want to play your game. Finding them all is not mandatory, even the items you find are not mandatory. FWIW, you don't even get an achievement for finding every single hidden item in the game.

This will be the case if Obsidian takes my brilliant advice and adds a dungeon that you can't leave until you complete it. So long as players are aware of this fact before they enter it would be reasonable. You mean like Breith Eaman? No cuz' you can't leave that dungeon at all. The game ends. That's an interesting thought, how do they leave that dungeon at all? I'm sure there's a lift in there somewhere, but the gods keep quiet about it. They like to watch that leap of faith thing.

This will be the case if Obsidian takes my brilliant advice and adds a dungeon that you can't leave until you complete it. So long as players are aware of this fact before they enter it would be reasonable. You mean like Breith Eaman?

Nope, then you failed. I went back in Act III to check, so unless I missed him somehow. The only Animancer who might still hand around is Nedyn waiting for you to ask him about the book he needs...somehow he feels safe Yeah, I thought so. This sucks because you have no way of knowing what will happen at the end of Act II. And you can still finish pretty much every other side quest in Defiance Bay in Act III *but* anything involving the Sanitarium or Dunryd Row.

By the way, is the quest still doable in Act III? You know, after the Sanitarium gets... ahem. Does the animancer wait for you outside or is she gone?

The complaint that searching slows the game down is only valid if a) scouting mode is mandatory and b) there's no way to mitigate these consequences. None of these is true for PoE: scouting is *not* necessary (not even for traps, you can just trigger the ones you don't find with your tank) and (as many pointed out), you can scout in fast mode, which brings it to normal speed, if you so desire. On the other hand, if scouting does not slow you down, there would be no drawback to using it. If there are no penalties, there's no reason not to have scouting mode on all the time. If it's going to be on all the time anyway, there's no reason for it to be togglable (it'll just be a frustrating chore to have to turn it on every time it gets switched off, or to miss stuff because you forgot to turn it on). And if it's going to be an automatic skill vs. difficulty check, which does not involve any player input other than spending points on level-up (i.e. does not involve the player actually playing the game), then what's the use of it? Perhaps in the future Obs could make search mode and stealth mode separate and attach a different penalty to searching (like always starting out in recovery if you get caught in combat, because your characters are unprepared, etc.), but for now it works ok.

I guess you are correct. I also recall the gods saying at the end that there are some limits, some kind of code, which dictates how much they can interfere which is why they send you after Thaos. So maybe Eothas did not respect that code in his invasion and Magran did not approve of his invasion coupled with rivalry with him, and boom. Which would make Eothas kind of stupid. Trying to stop Woedica by breaking the code in such ineffective but absurdly overt way means that either Eothas was stupid/desperate, or that Waidwen wasn't Eothas and Eothas was framed (while Magran was used). I'm sticking to the idea that Waidwen wasn't Eothas, which raises the questions "Who was Waidwen?" and "Where is Eothas in all this?". Whoever Waidwen was (if not Eothas himself), he must have known that Eothas wouldn't react, but Magran will.

You need to visit the Temple of Woedica with Aloth. The conversation triggers when you are about to enter the final chamber (where you get the three main quests for Act II). You finish his quest when you finish the deal with the animancer in Sanitarium, but conversations related to the issue continue to trigger way after the quest is done (those matter for the endgame).

Definitely not. Nothing about the release build of PoE says unfinished. There are some bugs, yes, but nothing I could attribute to an unfinished product. FWIW PoE had as much bugs on release as the IE games. Technical support for the game has been great so far, patches are rolling out steadily, so I don't really see what the problem is.

Or you can bump up your Mechanics and roll with whatever you find, if you don't want to bother searching for secrets. It doesn't defeat the purpose of the change, the purpose is exactly to allow people who cba searching but have some Mechanics to find some stuff, while reserving other secrets for those who actually want to search for them. Am I to understand that a smart design choice would be to have anything hidden light up like a Christmas tree the moment you step into the area?

^ This is not supposed to happen, which makes it a bug. Try reloading an earlier save, or dismissing and rejoining Kana. Try getting him to 0 health and endurance (maimed) and resting again. Try getting him to level 6. Basically try anything that could refresh his status. If nothing works, wait for a patch (not sure if the upcoming 1,06 fixes this, can anyone confirm?).

There is another option: He could also be trying to counter-balance the decrease in difficulty caused by over-levelling. While Act I is more straightforward, Act II opens up a huge variety of side content which you may or may not bother with. On the other hand Act III isn't balanced around doing everything in Act II (since that would be too punishing for those who don't care about side content) and difficulty does not scale, so a difficulty switch is in order if you want to keep the encounters challenging.

@OP: I can't answer your question since I rarely check the in-game time, but keep in mind that if you use fast mode, this will also speed up in-game time. Fast mode does not only affect character speed, it affects the speed of the game as a whole (i.e. everything). Also area transitions cost additional in-game time, so it is possible to play the game for 3 minutes in real time and advance the in-game time with a few days, depending on how many areas you visit and how distant they are. Actually area transition is a better way to increase in-game time (for stronghold purposes) than anything else, since fast mode only speeds up time to a degree and resting in PoE always takes 8 hours, regardless of how injured you characters are. Well, you can also abuse the dial at Lle a Rhemen, but whatever.

I play both male and female PCs. Unless I have something specific in mind for a playthrough, I usually pick a portrait I like and make up a character around it. Playing a female PC right now. My party is: PC (f) Eder (m) Aloth (m) Durance (m) Pallegina (f) (I sometimes switch her for Kana (m)) Grieving Mother (f) (I sometimes switch her for Sagani (f)) Hiravias is my benchwarmer for this playthrough.

If people could stfu about anything just like that, we would have a discussion board full of nothing but romances. BTW good job bumping the thread after 5 days of silence, just to tell people to stfu. Attaboy.

The Final Act. It's one of those classic quests with a number of ways to go about them and more than one possible outcome. I wish there were more Dunryd Row quests like that.

There's only one criterion being really important at level 8 and that's tied to the main quest. It's not only that (though the encounter you are referring to isn't really important). The level itself is pretty brutal compared to the previous ones (well, depending on your difficulty level anyway), plus that's where your mechanics gets crappy at lower character levels unless you are putting some special effort into it. You might want to finish most of the stuff in Defiance Bay before going any deeper than level 7. On the other hand, if you intend to turn certain knights hostile while working for a certain dastardly bunch, be sure to finish the "Blade of Od Nua" first. You have to push through to level 12 for that.

Makes him/her pretty powerful

Seals shouldn't be affected by anything else aside from the attributes affecting all Priest spells. If they are spells, they should behave as such, and if they are traps, they shouldn't be in the spell list. It makes no sense to me on a conceptual level.

Those two mostly shine on higher difficulties/solo/Trial of Iron Lore? Free spells! Survival? Pre-buff! Athletics and Stealth are unfortunately not that great, although Stealth is awesome for Triple Crown Solos.

The reason for this is that traps in the environment (i.e. enemy traps) trigger when your character touches any part of the trap area, whereas the traps you place only trigger when the enemy steps right on top of them. It's not about Mechanics scores, it's about player-placed traps having a much smaller area than indicated by the marker. I don't know if this is a technical problem or not (I think it should be), but for the time being, try to place your traps so that the enemy is likely to walk through the center of the marker. As for their effect, traps in the environment are almost always going to be more accurate than the ones you place (even if the ones you place are the exact same deadly traps you disarmed previously). Even more so after 1.05. This is intentional. Traps in the environment are meant to be deadly, while those you place are meant to be moderately useful. You are not meant to roll a BG2 Bounty Hunter, even if your Mechanics is over 11.

Lemme try to help. Once you set a trap, there are two possible conditions of it - triggered and untriggered. It starts out as untriggered and it remains untriggered until someone triggers it. In order to get triggered, an enemy needs to stand squarely on top of the trap. That's all it takes for a trap to trigger. There's no Mechanics check or attack roll or anything. Enemy standing right on the trap = trap triggered. Even if the character setting it has 0 mechanics or its accuracy is -25. Once the trap is triggered, we get to check if it does anything. You get an "attack roll" for the trap, targeting one of the enemy's defences. It features a) how high the accuracy of the trap is and b) how high the respective target enemy defence is. Based on the result you get traps missing, grazing, hitting or critting, just as any attack would. The accuracy of the trap is a result of a) its base accuracy; b) modified by the amount of points the character setting it has in Mechanics. So when you have more Mechanics, your traps should hit more often when triggered, not trigger more often. In any case, once the trap is triggered, it disappears regardless of whether it hit anything or not. Traps in the environment work basically the same way, but their accuracy is pre-defined, not based on someone's Mechanics.

As others said, traps have a small trigger area, so enemies can easily miss them. Furthermore their "hit detection" seems to be somewhat off so the enemy needs to walk right on top of them in order for them to trigger, not just tangentially touch the trap. On the other hand if it does trigger and nothing happens, this may be because a) the trap missed, or b) there's something wrong (a bug). Check your combat log to verify. I wouldn't call traps useless as a whole, as some of them are pretty powerful, but their use is very situational and depends on a dice roll. AFAIK as of 1.05 their accuracy is lowered, so traps are even more likely to miss now.

Companion quests in PoE are more lenghty than those in BG, but you don't need to have all companions with you all the time to complete them all. Some companion quests, like those for Durance, Grieving Mother and (to some degree) Aloth, require you to spend time with said companion in order to trigger or progress. Others (Eder, Kana, Sagani, Pallegina) require you to go to a specific place with the respective companion and do a certain thing. Companion quests do not restart once you finished them, but that does not mean that the rest of the game does not affect your companions.

Either that or just pretend that they are generic NPCs (commoners, nobles, tavern patrons etc.) who just hang around. At least that's what I do. The world of PoE needs population anyway. At first I started reading their stories, but there's just too many of them and (unlike books) they do nothing to establish the setting, so I got bored after some time. I also started out reading the memorials, but after reading a hundred of them and getting only 1 (one) that was actually funny, I dropped this too. The game offers you a lot of stuff to see and do anyway. EDIT: No, not THAT one. It wasn't funny before and it's not funny after.