omgFIREBALLS

Your diplomatic reputation went up a notch... Anyway, if you are going to play your wizard in a party you don't need to meddle with this melee-mage thing one bit. Maybe not even for solo - I don't play solo so I can't comment. I'm quite opposed here. The math of extra spells vs. harder hitting spells assumes battles last long enough for you to go through your entire arsenal. I find that this is almost never the case - definitely not later in the game. Plus it's more time for opponents to throw fireworks as well. I don't take bonus spells on any caster, because in the Big Fight That Matters, if I lose, it will not be because I ran out of steam. I will advocate taking +freeze damage first. Chill Fog is a great spell, and stacking several of them on top of each other is brutal AoE + constant blind. If you can find good positions to cast Fan of Flames from that might be better though.

Thank you for enlightening me. Not sure about making peace with some of these bugs getting through though, but that's a different discussion.

Hic. Wait, what? I don't even know how to confirm that anymore, I just haven't seen anything saying it's been released and bugs like this one make it still feel like beta. :|

Just making sure: Are you intending to solo?

I did this in 1.03 or 1.04 and I could loot it again. I'm just going to say you're not missing any way of interacting with it - Edér reacts the moment you loot it.

never mind, i suck

Bounty quests are still quite lucrative. Anyway, for perspective, all act 1+2 quests (minus companion ones), 6 levels of the Endless Paths and my six man party is ~25% past level 9. Just the animancy hearing remaining, though it's bugged.

My issue is similar. Already when Lady Webb told me to go get an invitation, I had the option to say I've burned all my bridges. Nevertheless, I went and got one from the knights, but the journal still says I've made all three factions my enemies and should ask LW for advice. I should add, for the record, that I've in creative, violent, and creatively violent ways antagonized House Doemenel, obviously including a meticulous killing spree in their manor.

I'm pretty sure the selection at level up isn't so much to limit your repertoire as to ensure you can at least cast some spells of each level even if you don't know where to hunt down the right grimoire. Eventually you'll know most (I guess all?) spells and the limitation is how many you can prepare.

Might=strength is a risky analogy. I like the might stat, but trying to define what it represents is beyond tricky when it boosts all kinds of damage, including that of spells. Your fireball did only 40 damage? Do you even lift, bro?

That being said, ToI is more aggressive with the autosaving in 1.05. The other day I stole something by accident and wanted to reload, so I force-closed the game (ctrl+alt+del) and it still saved. Today, wanting to explore some conversation options, I turned my computer off to avoid the save.

Haven't noticed any improvements.

"We attempted a dangerous hunt. I was too ambitious, and we weren't ready. Most of the others are dead now." So the guy on the road to the Friendly Arm Inn decided to give Gilded Vale a shot, eh.

Good call making a new thread. I'm annoyed with the nonsensical edit restriction. There are so many threads I might find interesting that I avoid because I know 50% the info is in the OP and the other 50% is littered across ten pages of replies and that info cannot be edited into the first post. Anyway, could you give formatting a go? It's on a phonebook level right now. Perhaps giving classes a color would be a start.

OR the thrice-damned idiotic Stalker's Torc, which from my experience you always find in the temple, but still clearly need a chance to find elsewhere as well.

I actually did that at level 5 yesterday, on PotD. Custom party though. I had auto-pause on for finished abilities and I used a figurine, but nothing fancier than that and my full arsenal of spells and abilities. I place my party in the upper right corner, send my tank in to do the talking and have an off-tank/summons ready for things that don't find him attractive enough, and then pretty much bombard them.

Nope, that's

My prayers for a caster weapon have been heard, it seems. (Retroactively, even)

Oh, so that's what's happening. I think I've also observed some weird permanence about it, with monsters keeping the aura after my paladin has been charmed and broken free of it.

It's not entirely easy doing Cilant Lis with those two rather exhausted. I decided to rest, expecting Calisca to leave, but she didn't. However, waking up, Heodan's endurance was still limited - 25/36. Resting a second time didn't help.

As I said, he was not maimed. I've replayed the intro three times in 1.05b now - I once actually failed ToI to the last Glanfathan group. All three times, Calisca went from no fatigue to moderate at the second group. The last two times, Heodan was at critical fatigue immediately when he joined. Probably the first time too but I only noticed once we were in the ruins. I used the honest -> intelligence conversation path the first and third time and honest -> athletics the second. With sufficient score to take him by surprise.

The real BS is you can't just offer to pay the looters. There has to be this kill-or-lie decision like they had stolen the One Ring of Power. On the upside, I believe they dropped some nice clothes. Also this +1 might hat being mentioned, I looted it off them for sure.

My ToI party doesn't save when I press quit. Disregard that, it's apparently not on ToI. Also, I don't exactly have flawless memory of pre-Gilded Vale events (I try hard to forget them) but Calisca and Heodan seemed to accumulate fatigue really fast. Calisca went to medium fatigue (don't think I saw light) at or perhaps before the second group of Glanfathans, Heodan was at critical immediately as we entered Cilant Lis. He was not maimed. PotD difficulty, the battles went reasonably fast.

I could have sworn I read that lockpicking exp was gone. With formatting quotes it's bothersome to just isolate one line. Remove the line before, no now the whole quote background disappeared (have to backspace the linebreak from the line before ._.). I actually spent 30-60 sec isolating what I quoted from the mega quote block, and then it still added empty lines at the bottom of the quote.

You can load a different party's save, and then load the ToI save again. It's not a huge setback since ToI still autosaves upon area transitions. However, I think this is a rather hopeless battle for Obsidian to fight. Is it still going to force-save if I quit the game? Okay, what if I force close the game? Even then? What if I flick my computer's power switch? Surely the only real solution is to save every second, and that would probably be unplayable on most systems. And even then, you can just backup the save file yourself and put it back when the original gets deleted because you lost. So the next step would be to camouflage the ToI saves, which still can only get them so far because they're still on our hard drives, of which we are the kings and queens. There would be anger, and someone would figure out how to access the save files anyway. Wait, why anger? Because... well, partly because some people can't cheat their achievement, I suppose. But remember also that a reload (or save-game-edit) can often fix a bug. For example, on one ToI run, after the spore fight in Anslög's Compass, my tank was permanently knocked down. I couldn't move him around at all. Perhaps there's a fix, but a reload was one I didn't have to search for, and after a re-enactment of some glorious sporestomping, I could proceed with my adventures... only to have them ended an hour later by a volatile combination of shades and hubris, but still. Reloading just got a little harder. Now I'm certain they won't really take any hefty steps to prevent ToI cheating, because these little hacks, while enabling us to cheat, also let us undo the harm of bugs when we're quick to notice them. And in the end, we have the ultimate power over our saves, not Obsidian. I actually backup ToI saves myself, right after reaching Gilded Vale and recruiting the custom party I intend to use. It's cheating to a degree, I won't argue it, but without it I probably wouldn't play much at all. Unless someone makes a Dungeon-Be-Gone mod for PoE, perhaps. In other news, formatting quotes is annoying on these forums and my signature will need a replacement when the patch hits.