omgFIREBALLS

"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.

The dungeon is huge and the endboss is probably the toughest you'll ever face. Come back later. Also it's 100% optional to clear it.

I came here desperately hoping to see something different

I think priests are amazing at buffing up your team's accuracy, and they seem to have a nigh-monopoly of doing so. Paladins have an aura and there are some consumables, but nothing stops you from stacking it all, and I find it's difficult to ever have too much accuracy, at least against bosses. For my priests, buffing is a job and healing is a hobby.

If you'd kept questing for them you would have seen that something motherfornicating happens.

Alright yes, I beat it. Apart from activating Defender on Edér, I recommend you look over your wizards' grimoires. At the very least you should get rid of the "double memos", where ONE wizard has the same spell selected multiple times, I think that was the case with their level three spells. But of course you might also explore a different selection altogether. As for tactics,

C:\Users\yournamehere\Saved Games\Pillars of Eternity\

I will give it a go forthwith. I have some great advice already. You should click Defender on Edér to enable it

Firstly your comment is not even entirely correct, because IIRC the game will put your Watcher in one of the two front positions for this confrontation (or rather for the dialogue) no matter how you arrange your party. I always make my Watchers tanks partly for this reason so I don't know if it still happens. Secondly, as someone who prefers to send his tank in alone while the rest of the party buffs up from some distance, I can tell you the impact made by party re-arrangement is rather subtle when my casters are easily in range of enemy archers and generally close enough that their melee will happily bother to run the short distance past my tank to hack at them, not to mention that we're all gathered nicely for AoE.

There was a pretty big thread about this on the tactics forum actually... Anyway, they seem to be fair game as long as there are no non-backer witnesses.

My anecdote will confirm it! Well, I agree reflex is the easiest to lower, but deflection and will aren't impervious either. Fortitude though...

Actually I find that the larger factor of his difficulty isn't so much his abilities as the position from which you have to start the battle, with all your squishies upfront asking for a beating.

The hole (if you mean the xaurip sacrificial pit) takes you from the 2nd level to the 5th, but you can fight your way up from there. You can access the Master Stairs from the 5th level even.