Blave

In the past, gog got some patches some time later than Steam. Not by much, though. Also, Steam allows beta patches and Achievements (should you care for that kind of thing). Don't know how much that'll change with gog Galaxy, but right now I'd say Steam has slightly better features, while gog has the big DRM-free advantage.

Don't know about the others but Novice's Suffering scales with level. At level 14 it's something like +12 damage (+Bonus from might) and +16 Accuracy.

Well that sucks. Just when I wanted to play a druid. :-/ I don't have any mods except an old version of IEmod which I just deleted. Same error. Guess I'll try a clean install and hope for the best. Thanks for the confirmation!

How did you get those numbers? Even with a 21 Might Amauna I don't get more than 37-58 damage in spiritshape at level 14. The Monk Multiclass Talent doesn't seem to apply at all. Weapon Focus Peasant works, but Novice's Suffering does nothing for my druid's attacks.

I'd like complete Patch Notes as well, but how about doing the second best thing: Let's gather everything not covered in the patch notes! There's been enough talk about Defender being way weaker (maybe even useless) now, but I couldn't find anything about Spiritshift or Animal Companions. I barely remember reading about those things in one of the previews for the expansion. I think they now scale with level or something? Didn't have much time to play yesterday but I did notice that the duration of Spiritshift is now affected by Intelligence. I don't think that was the case before 2.0

gog.com has it http://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_the_white_march_part_1

I never needed/used Blunderbuss-cheese in 1.04. A hard hitting ranged wapon (Arbalest/Arquebus) has always genrated more than enough focus for my needs. Draining whip is now a +30% focus generation. So if you have high DPS, you'll still get focus reasonably quick. And it has nice synnergy with biting whip, since more damage means more focus. In fact, I never took it before because I prefer aforementioned slow and hard hitting weapons. I'll pick it up now Also note that Greater Focus now actually increases your starting focus by 10. Overall, Cipher is weaker now. But it's still a powerfull class and FAR from useless.

Nice guide! I especially like that it (mostly) seems like it could work somewhat decently for Pallegina (with 1.05). I was looking for a good build for her. Thanks!

For those of you worried about Cipher focus, there's a few things that the patch notes don't mention: - Draining whip now increases focus generation by 33% instead of giving +2 focus per hit (according to the ingame description. Haven't checked). That means no more blunderbuss-cheese, but at the same time it got nice synergy with Biting Whip (more damage = more focus). - Greater Focus now increases your "base" focus by 10! Tooltip still only says it increases Max Focus and I assume it still does that, too (haven't checked the max). It's still less focus overall and adds another talent that you might "need", but Ciphers will still be very powerful. Especially since their strongest abilites haven't been touched at all.

Being attacked on entering a new area is extremely rare. Try putting your wizards in the back row. Note that entering a new area will IGNORE any custom formations. You need to put your melee guys in the leftmost slots in the bottom left corner of the screen if you want your wizards to stand behind them in new areas. AoE spells have always hit your own party members in every Infinity Engine game. Try throwing a fireball in close quarters in BG1 and watch your party burn. There where spells that specifically affected only enemies (like Slow, Glitterdust, Horrid Wilting) but most would just blow up your guys, too. Check the spell descriptions in PoE (not just the tool tip! Right click a spell for details). If the effect says "AoE", it will hit everyone in the area. "AoE Friends" will only hit your party (usually buff/healing spells) and "AoE Foe" will only hit enemies. PoE makes using Area Spells quite easy, actually. It shows the exact target area of AoE spells (unless you play Expert mode or deactivate the display of the target areas manually in the options) so you can just aim to only hit enemies. Can be tricky with moving enemies but you can always wait until your tank has engaged them and stopped their movement. Also note that the target area of offensive spells has a red center and a yellow circle around it. The red area is the base area of the spell, the yellow area is the bonus radius you get from having high int. The yellow area will NOT hit your party, only enemies.

Didn't do any testing, but as far as the descriptions go, Mirrored image works against multiple attacks, granting reduced deflection bonuses every time you are hit. I have no idea by how much the deflection it's reduced per hit. Wizard's double will end immediately after you've been hit one. That's also close to how the two similar 1st and 2nd level spells in BG2 worked, by the way.

Don't dump Dex. Yes, you'll get a big speed bonus from alacrity but it's a limited resource. If you want to be in melee, you'll also need at least some kind armor which slows you down. Use dex to counter it. And even if you somehow don't need armor, dex and alacrity stack. Why wouldn't you try to get the most possible attack speed on a melee dps wizard?

That's not true. Just like with weapon attacks, any result of 15 or lower wil miss. 16-50 is a graze. 50-100 a hit. 101+ is a crit. Even spells without damage can graze (-50%) and crit (+50%). For those spells, it will affect the duration. So a graze with a debuff-spell will only have half the normal duration, a crit will last 50% longer. Other than that, ErlKing's summery is correct. (except maybe shields affecting spell accuracy. I haven't checked that yet so I'll just say he's probably right if he did the testing.)

For a Cipher, attacking with a weapon is just a filler to generate focus. There are 2 ways to generate focus: - Deal as much damage as possible (every like 3-4 points damage dealt will grant one point of focus). The talent biting whip is a great help for that, but you'll probably want to take that regardless of weapon choice. - Get the draining whip talent and deal damage as often as possible (which will grant you at least 2 focus per attack no matter how much damage you deal). Personally I'm using an arbalest. Even after the nerf, it's still dealing enough damage to punch through most DR, resulting in high damage per shot and thus high focus generation. It has become significantly weaker since the patch, though. But unlike guns it doesn't come with an accuuracy penalty and the reload speed, while slow, is not as bad as with guns, so the occasional miss doesn't mean you stand around for 10 seconds before you get another shot at regaining focus. The gunner talent and the reload chant help, of course.

More enjoyable is hard to tell. That's something you need to decide for yourself. I'll just say that there is one more NPC who works decently as second tank (not perfect tank stats, but Eder doesn't really have those either). It's the Paladin Pallegina and easily accessable once you have the stronghold. I use her an Eder as tanks for my ranged Cipher and it works out well enough. The things they cant tank easily are usually easy to handle once you throw a few debufs at them (or just paralyze them outright.)

Here's a thought: How about increasing the Phrase costs of higher level Invocations BUT also increase the amount of recources higher level Phrases grant? Like a level 3 Phrase taking long (but not as long as three 1st level phrases) but giving you 3 "Phrase-points" so you could immediately use a level 1 invocation afterwards. Exact numbers need tweaking of course (amount of phrase-points granted, casting time of phrases and cost of invocations) but it would allow both more frequent use of (low level) Invocations at higher level while still not making the high level invocations sooner.

This part of the mod is still not confirmed to work without problems, as far as I know. I'd LOVE to use it to make the NPCs more useful but not at the risk of breaking my game.

Teleporting enemies aside, most foes tend to attack the character nearest to them. With the right abilities and talents, you can get a fighter to engage up to 4 foes at the same time, so anyone walking past him will be enganged. This stops most of them in their tracks. I'm not too far into the game, yet, but I've read that there are some tougher enemies that will just eat the disengage-attack and walk past the tank. In that case, you might want to have a second character at the front so you can block the path to your back row better and get mor disengage-attacks. It's all about positioning, really. If enemies are too close because of a cutscene or something, try delaying their approach with crowd control abilities. Knock downs or knock backs word pretty well, as do stuff like hobble, stuck or paralysed. Should give you enough time to get your formation in order. It's not perfect, though, so always have potions and/or defensive abilities on all characters for emergencies.

Why the hassle? I'd just cheat in the money and give them the XP of my main character. Custom party was free in the IE-games, so it might as well be the same with PoE. Anyway, I like the NPCs. Makes the game more interesting. I think I'll play with them for the first couple of playthroughs. Hoping for a Mod that makes them more useful.

Well, it's faster. Fast spells cast almost instantly so you can blow up a group of enemies before they close in without danger to your party. I don't think that's enough to make it worth using over Noxious Burst, but at least it's something.

It's not over time. it happens instantly, though it does seem to have a delay between you dropping below x% and the actual heal. You'll see like blue circle waves coming from your character. Also, it scales with stats (might for helaing done and Int for radius) AND level. Yes, It'll heal more when you level up. It's probably one of the best racials imo, especially since it can heal your whole party up to 3 times per encounter. It does require you to take some damage befor it even triggers so it's probably best for front liners. Could be awesome for Monks, allowing them to get wounds while instantly healing back a portion of the damage. Note however, that it only heals Endurance. Relying on it to keep you consious might drain your Health rather quickly. Still, a custom party of only Moon Godlike is probably quite hard to kill.

For Heling/Buffing/Debuffing all you really need is Int and you got plenty of that. If you want to focus on those things, I'd try to get a higher Dex to reduce recovery times. Allows you to cast more often, so you can react faster and stack up (de)buffs earlier in combat.

But at least I can fix his spells to make him a better controler. He does have enough Int for that. Also, he does have 12 Might. It's not extremely good, but it's something. An "optimized" Wizard has like 18% more damage. Significant? Yes. But I still think the difference isn't too bad. Might be enough to give Wizards a bad reputation, though.

Some small hints: - The Guardian ability of the fighter is bad. By itself, it's ok-ish BUT from my testing it can't be used with the Defender ability. The latter will allow your Fighter to engange up to three enemies, making him much more reliable at protecting your weaker party members. Teleporting enemies will be able to avoid him but in that case you want them dead as fast as possible which doesn't work with Guardian's -10 Accuracy penalty on your fighter. Also, there's a Talent that increases the defensive bonuses of Defender quite significantly (I think it's +5 deflection and +10 to the other three) allowing the figher to take less damage and shorten or even ignore more enemy CCs. - The Cipher does NOT have any melee cones! I know Mind Wave shows one during targeting and it confused me too at first. It targets one enemy and trigger as cone starting from that enemy. Basically you aim at the front-most foe, hurt him and knock down everything behind him. Ranged Cipher does work great. I'm playing one myself right now. I'm about to hit level 4. Went with Wood Elf for the accuracy bonus against distant enemies (which also applies to your powers), high Int (18) and Might (19) and a SLOW ranged weapon. Currently a Fine Arbalest. With biting Whip and my high Might I can one-shot some enemies (I've seen crits easily go as high as 80) and the high damage will give you more than enough Focus for most battles even after one single shot.

Haven't played around with custom companions yet, but can't you just create a 1st level Wizard with the spells you want (i.e. Slicken) and give his Grimoire to Aloth?