Peanuckle

Well, there's not exactly a ready source of things to summon. D&D has planar outsiders, but PoE is a self-contained world. The only summons appear to be ghosts and animals. So there's going to be less variety there.

Engine and graphics aside, what about a FPS view? I think it might be entertaining to have a "view switch" option so that you can set your engagement in isometric, then flip down to FPS and watch things play out on the ground.

I played as a Mercenary, and IIRC Magran made an offer based on that when I spoke to her at Twin Elms.

I had this same bug. I can only imagine that the devs expected you to be further along in the main storyline before you encountered Sagani. A few other conversations "jumped" my progress as well.

"Wait, why can't I kill all these people to improve my character?" I love this community.

I always thought it was an oversight that Thaos didn't speak to her. Totally forgot that she was making herself invisible. Though I wonder how the monsters could attack her...

Escape never seems to work for me. When the rogue gets out of her purple smoke animation, she just falls lifeless to the ground. Invisibility worked, though.

Not like I read the memorials anyways. As long as the game remains fun, I'll keep playing.

You're all chumps. The only true way to play is by editing all your stats to one, use no equipment or spells, solo-only, and punch everything. If you can't beat PotD on this mode, you're an unworthy scrub.

This is a wonderful plan. "Thaos can't steal souls if there's none to be found!"

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I'll put it together and see if I don't wipe on the first encounter.

So I love the guns in this game. The sound, the damage, even the reloading animation. They're great. I kinda want to make a straight line of gunners, right out of colonial-era military practices. I'd probably need one tank to keep my party from being stunlocked, but other than that is 5 arquebuses a reasonable loadout? Or am I setting myself up for failure here? I could give everyone dualies and have them switch for that one-two punch. 10 gunshots before needing to reload, more if I get the extra weapon slots. Good idea, bad idea?

True. I was more replying to others who shifted the discussion to a more traditional "man vs woman" rather than "protagonist vs Thaos."

I think you're coming at this from the wrong direction. Thaos is using Woedica, but he's using her so that she can use him. Thaos' culture built her (and all the gods) to worship them and lead them. Thaos seeks to empower Woedica because he believes in her goals and methods. Rather than a man using a woman, this is a man raising a woman up so that she can take him by the hand and lead him. Thaos' activities throughout his long life are all oriented towards protecting the secret of the gods, protecting Woedica. If anything, this game is hostile towards men. The female gods could be considered crafty witches, but the male gods are just pathetic. There's a slave-god who (slavishly) follows Woedica (the god of rightful rule), Abydon the tool-god who had to build himself a new body (to harp on the Freudian theme, he no longer has the necessary parts to be a man, and is reduced to a tool for women like Magran to use). Galawain is an animal. Rymrgand is an impersonal (and perhaps impotent, given his laxity) force of destruction, Berath is both genders at once and Eothas was actually murdered on the orders of women. In contrast, the female gods govern invention and self-betterment (Magran), Love and growth (Hylea), and Woedica herself is basically the goddess of civilization and intelligent thinking. Clearly we can see that the women are in positions of power, while the men are in positions of servitude.

But that's the thing: you cannot feasibly disprove a God. If I tell you right now there is an all-powerful being watching our every movement and ask you to prove me wrong, you cannot. It can't be disproven because anything you could throw at me, I can argue that my God planned for that or purposefully misled you or whatever. As such, we are left to presume the Engwithians did not actually somehow disprove the existence of gods, but that they simply failed to find proof of one time and time again until that was undeniably the most logical conclusion for them to make. And yeah, his symbol being absent is what I was talking about, not the absence of an altar. Is there a symbol that appears on the floor but does not actually speak to you at some point in time or is Eothas the only one? I'm not claiming to know for certain Eothas is a real god or the like, I'm merely stating I find it interesting that the presentation allows for such an interpretation to exist. You can't prove a negative (prove that something doesn't exist) at all. It's impossible. All you can do is build a body of evidence that suggests something does or doesn't exist. The Engwithans searched long and hard with all their magic and science, and found nothing but the Wheel. If Eothas were a "true god," then why would he have hidden himself from the Engwithans only to reveal himself so blatantly later on? Why would he descend to a mortal rather than using his god-powers (which he must have, if he was the creator) to accomplish his goals? Woedica wanted Eothas dead because he was moving to counter her plot. Magran wanted him dead because by incarnating on the world, he was breaking the rules of the gods removing the need for trials and tribulations; why bother seeking to better yourself if you can just follow the living god? He doesn't have a shrine in Twin Elms because, as was said, he's dead. Anyone still following him isn't getting anything out of it. The temple of Eothas is an abandoned wreck haunted by monsters.

The rest of your post was a bit of a ramble, but I agree with this. Does it really matter if the gods were made from the willing sacrifices of the Engwithan people? They exist and have the sort of power a being would need in order to claim divinity. They desire and reward worship, and manipulate the world according to their own plans. Sound like gods to me, though they're kinda dickish. The real conflict in the game was Thaos harvesting the souls of children to empower Woedica. Maintaining the secret, I think, was unnecessary. There's plenty of real-life religions that involve gods who were created just as mortals were, and they're still worshiped. I think it would've been a better plan to tell everyone that the gods were made to answer the needs of humanity. People would've turned to them all the same.

I don't see how you could come to such a conclusion, really. She, and a lot of other souls, were locked down there forever, barred from the Wheel and doomed to experience eternity in that pit. They even mentioned in-game how you could pray for forgiveness and be lifted up, but that was a sham as Woedica would just trap your soul on the island with the knowledge that you sold your ideals for nothing. Pretty sure the flashback sequences take place after the gods were made. Having actual beings back up your statements would make proselytizing a lot easier, and writing the books about the gods before they existed invites the possibility of getting something wrong.

Did you pay her the money, or use a dialogue option to convince her to give you the amulet? I had to pay her because I didn't meet any of the requirements, and that got me some funny dialogue and made her day. She probably was killed because the game read that as "Player likes this person, assassinate her for maximum feels." Which totally worked btw. My feels were sore after that.

I just built everything because roughly halfway through the game, I had 42,000+gold. Once you get out of Defiance, money isn't an object anymore.

How would a solo character deal with charm/dominate effects? You lose control while the enemy just wails on you. I was constantly getting dominated/charmed, despite having the relevant defense skills and buffs against it. Is there a particular way to defend against these effects?

Just her word choice, really. Referring to the group as "the Pack" and whatnot. Small things really, but I just didn't find her interesting enough to swap out any of my other people. Favorite companion is probably Pellagina. She's an honorable, honest character with a strong moral core and a forward-thinking attitude towards scientific and social progress. She's a patriot and willing to follow orders she doesn't understand or necessarily agree with, but when she sees that those orders will cause more harm than good, she uses her own brain to work out a solution. Like she says, her oath is to the Republics, not the ducs. Or something to that effect. Also, feather-hair is awesome. Kinda wish all of it was feathers, just a big crown of them like a pea**** or something. (EDIT: lol peac-ock is a blocked word). After that, probably Aloth. He's a very small person at the start. A little dishonest, a little manipulative, a little hopeful and a lot afraid. But as you journey together he realizes how much of a dupe he's been, and by the end of the game he becomes a major force for good in the world. He has strong opinions about personal freedom and the responsibility of the strong to use their power wisely. He grows from being a sneaky leech to trusting your friendship and telling you about his connections with the Leaden Key. Both of them are real stand-up people, even if Aloth had to grow into it. I respect that kind of willpower, especially in the face of what the party is fighting against. I'm kinda torn about Durance. On the face of it, he's a man of great conviction, but when you get him talking it becomes pretty clear that he's deluding himself, hoping that if he pretends hard enough that Magran will talk to him again. He bought in all the way, and then she dropped him. He's full of directionless anger and grasps at any string he can see. I like how earnest he is with his beliefs, but I dislike how he's using them as a crutch to avoid coming to terms with reality. Grieving Mother was the one I waffled on most, especially when she asked me to wipe her memories. I definitely think that mindhacking people into thinking their hollowborn children were normal was wrong, but I think you could argue diminished capacity for just about everything she did. She's off her rocker, is what I'm saying. She badly wants to do good, but as she sees it, and she's willing to use her power to enforce her decisions over other people's desires. Being a cipher brings that temptation, but she uses mindhax as the go-to option rather than a tool of last resort. Those guys were my "core" team. The last slot I shuffled around as needed. Either didn't like or didn't care about them. Huh. I think I may have overlooked that. I'll be sure to grab it on my 2nd playthrough, thanks.

Way to deal with shadows, as I've read here, is to put the squishy person in the center of your formation and circle around him like a wagon so they can't reach him. Doesn't help with those icicles, but it makes dropping buffs easier.

The gods were real in the sense that they were exceptionally powerful entities with a degree of control over the world. They weren't real in the sense that they weren't the creator-deities that they were posing as. They're artificial beings made by the Engwithian people to resolve problems they believed endemic to human society. So Waidwen was most likely possessed in some fashion by Eothas.

From what I saw (mostly from the last snips of Thao's soul at the endgame where he's activating the device and soul-draining all those people), the gods are conglomerations of millions of souls mushed together into one being. The fact that Woedica's grand scheme involves eating more soul-juice is supporting evidence, I think. All the written books and lore is suspect, since Thaos' goal is to spread misinformation to create faiths around manmade gods.

Actually, given the amount of dialogue the two have, I think she and Aloth are a thing. There's not many appealing female characters in the game. Grieving Mother is really messed up and the Eskimo-girl was utterly uninteresting to me. Too much animalism and "pack" nonsense. Meanwhile, Pallegina is honorable, honest, speaks her mind plainly and is a patriot to a worthwhile nation. It's really no-contest there.