omgFIREBALLS

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.

I contend that in order to control a six character party anywhere near effectively, you need to pause a lot. But I'm not here to discuss that. I just think that the pausing makes a replay ten times less epic. Imagine if you recorded (with another program) a hard-won victory, one that gave you the nerdchills, or perhaps one that had great plot significance and could give you the same chills. And then you're going to watch it with pauses and cursors and all that junk. Better it were more like a cutscene, no? That's what I think at least. So I gave it a try. This is the result, and it's an inconsequential trash fight in a place I won't even name so I hope there will be no allergic reactions to spoilers: The thing is, it's not only very cumbersome to edit (because you need to find the exact frames for pauses and unpauses), it's also difficult to play this way, unless you want to add more auto-pause conditions (I only had finished actions). I could have the UI showing but I think it would cost too much viewing pleasure, although a narrow victory could be more epic if you actually see your party on the brink of death. So obviously my unlikely dream is that the game, or a spiritual successor would support battle replays. The recording would be from combat start to combat end (which fortunately are 100% defined in PoE), you could choose to have UI showing or not, but all pauses and all commands would be gone. You'd just see the combat. And just in case you're wondering, no I don't play without SFX but I recorded with music on and obviously music doesn't pause so I had to cut out the original audio and slap on the naked combat music afterwards. And now I don't think it even fits the tempo.

Oh come on. So if A and B are attacking the same target, and A has a marking weapon, B won't get the marking effect without fail unless I micro A in stupid ways? Did I get it right? I applaud you on finding a treatment for the disease but the disease is appalling to begin with.

I'm not sure how it's possible to not find him, one of his goons will be at the very edge of your vision range when you zone in. How the hell did you get past without aggroing, let alone without noticing?

If you're just concerned about accessing Lle a Rhemen, that will unlock in act 3 anyway. Ironically you have kind of locked yourself out of progressing to act 3 and getting there, by killing the only guys willing to get you into the hearing so you could get to act 3, in the hopes that that would let you get there now. (This counts as irony, right?)

I see this in a lot of games. To name a few, World of Warcraft: Pain Suppression reduces the target's damage taken by x% for y sec. Heroes of the Storm: Sonya's Ignore Pain reduces her damage taken blah blah. And here in PoE I can drink beer to take less damage. On the one hand, this is asinine. By extension, if I were to acquire a full-body full-effect pain suppressant, I would be immortal? Of course not. But on the other hand, what's a hit point? Does your hit point total represent how much of a beating you can take before you die or just how much you can take before you can't maintain consciousness - at which point your injuries will probably make short work of you even if your enemies don't deliver the killing blow to your defenseless body. Because in that case, being numb to the pain obviously keeps you standing longer, still anything that damages your brain; directly through a blow or indirectly by cutting off its oxygen supply (decapitation, impaled heart) would outright kill you, and a spear through your chest isn't going to be any less fatal regardless of your level of intoxication. Obviously the health/endurance system (which I'm for the record not opposed to) of PoE makes this a trickier discussion but... does pain equal damage?

In that case I imagine a lot of shady players would feel a convenient power surge coming up when they started failing vs. shades. There isn't much point combating the exploits. As long as the saves are on our hard drives, we have the ultimate power over them.

You're gonna have a tough time convincing anyone at all that "Waidwen's Legacy" doesn't start with "Waidwen". On a serious note, doesn't

holy fk dem defenses

I play the fighters with the same setup, so I'm just comparing experiences.