pi2repsion

I have been thinking of trying a companion-only PoTD game as my second playthrough but as I haven't finished my first yet, these are just the thoughts I have made with no PoTD experience to back them up. More enemies and buffed stats means that doubling down on blasting is probably going to get me killed rapidly, so the challenge will be battlefield control and keeping my own team buffed to the gills in the tough fights. That also means that per-rest abilities are fine as expect it to be unlikely that I'll be able to win any fights that are tough on hard without being fully rested on PoTD anyhow. That means I want a fighter, priest, and wizard, no questions asked. Fighters are the best tanks with the highest engagement limit and I don't want to go without. Priests have the best healing and buffing. Wizards have the most CC and after a few levels have a superior resource system to Ciphers, as they don't have any downtime regenerating resources to cast spells in combat but can keep on casting so long as their spell slots hold out, and moreover wizards can cast spells much more quickly than anybody else due to Deleterious Alacrity of Motion. So if I'm not playing one of those three classes, that means Eder, Durance, and Aloth are guaranteed a spot, and even if I am playing one of them, a second might be worth having. For the remaining two slots, it is much harder and will depend on my main character. Practically the only one guaranteed to NOT get a slot is Pallegina. While an interesting companion and one I am enjoying while playing on hard, she and her auras just don't cut it when compared with e.g. a Chanters chants and invocations or a Cipher's paralyzation/domination abilities, and since I'm planning on a spells/rest heavy party anyway, how about the our druid friend? Then again, the ranger's fox might be excellent to catch the attention of half the mobs, leaving them on a wild fox-chase, and she's a pretty good ranged damagedealer herself... But fighter, priest, wizard. Those are the classes I definitely want covered in a companion PoTD.

I took a look at an ongoing adventure. What seems to happen is that when an adventure is in process the adventurer is listed as assigned in the top-right corner but has the ASSIGN button present directly under the text saying he is assigned, and pressing the button cancels the assignment and hence the adventure. In other words, either the button shouldn't be present while the companion is on the adventure or it should say RECALL rather than ASSIGN.

Please upload that save game somewhere and provide a link to help tech support.

The proper stats for a player wizard used as a classic glass cannon are 18+ MIG, DEX, INT. If he's only going to be used for debuffing and crowd control, he can do without the MIG. You can dump CON and PER to 3, investing whatever is left over after maximizing the three important ones in PER, to give you conversation options and make it harder for your spells to be interrupted. The proper armour for said classic glass cannon wizard is Berathian Robes. You will come across these fairly early in your adventures. They have DR2 and only -5% recovery penalty, which is to my mind a better tradeoff than DR3 and -15% for normal Robes or DR0 and -0% for clothing. They also have good-looking graphics, especially for women, which may or may not influence your decision. Don't worry about dumping CON. When the going gets tough, cast the level 2 spell Infuse with Vital Essence for a +50 endurance bonus. It is king of the fast-cast protective spells. The result is a wizard who is capable of casting spells really fast, and who when you gain access to the wonderful level 3 spell, Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, pretty much requires you to fight in slow motion if you don't want to waste any of his uptime but just want to keep blasting away until the enemy is dead or he's out of spells. I'd sooner shaft Might than I'd shaft Dexterity for a classic glass cannon wizard, since while Might is the better stat for damage purposes, Dexterity is the stat that allows you to cast frequently, and sometimes you just want to cast a defensive spell NOW because some nasty is attacking the wizard, but best is maximizing both and there's little reason not to. For a heavily armoured fighter-mage type, it would be a harder choice, but if I wanted to play such one in Pillars of Eternity, the Cipher and Chanter were made for that purpose and are better at it.

I quite agree. It is remarkably idiotic for the other party members, who surely know about the existence of confusion spells and abilities in the world and quite possibly also use them themselves, to focus on killing their enspelled companions rather than their attackers. So let's assume that it is an unintended side effect rather than something deliberate and hope that it gets fixed.

For talents, Scion of Flame for the very first talent. Your primary direct damage spell for most of the early game is going to be Fan of Flames, you are only going to be using it when matters are serious (due to spells/rest and CC/debuff often being a better use of spell slots), and having it deal 20% more damage is great, whether you are casting it to take out an entire flank of the enemy forces you are engaging or in desperate self defense to kill the shadows that are attacking your wizard. For second talent, Blast. The AOE damage is low, but nice, and you'll always be using plenty of ranged wand/sceptre/rod attacks on all the trash encounters. Once could certainly make an argument for taking these two talents in reverse order, as you'll be fighting trash fights more often than serious fights, but, well.... trash fights aren't the ones that might result in TPK. With regards to early game spells, I cannot recommend the 2nd level Infuse with Vital Essence highly enough. It gives you a 50 endurance buffer for a limited time, so is of very little use in trash encounters, but against serious opposition being able to put up a 50 endurance shield while your group kill off the first few enemies and some enemies decide to take potshots at your wizards can make the difference between a wizard that gets knocked out of the fight early and one that gets to stick around to cast his spells. It remains useful as a pro-active and re-active defense for the entire game, though obviously the 50 endurance provide the greatest survivability early in the game when incoming damage is lower. No Wizard should go without this defensive buff.

1) Protect your squishy targets. 2) To protect your squishy targets, keep them far in the rear until you have the battlefield under control. 3) Teleporting enemies are able to bypass most of your control mechanics, so prioritize killing them. 4) And so are ranged enemies, so prioritize killing them too or keep your squishies out of their range. 5) "Kill the one in a dress" is generally good advice to everybody in a RPG - and that includes the enemy. Don't be surprised if your vulnerable characters get targeted; You do the same all the time and turnabout is fair play. If you continually need to rest because your wizard's health depletes, your problem is not that your wizard is unreasonably being targeted, it is that you are using bad tactics in the face of a very reasonable threat to squishy characters. The very nastiest enemies in the early game for wizards are the teleporting Shadows, but those have low damage reduction and low endurance, so you should be able to pick off one with your first ranged volley of combat (assuming a full party) and then whittle them down one by one while one or two melee keep the rest of the group occupied. For particularly nasty encounters, whether it is vs. Shadows or in general, it is often worth spending a single second level spell on casting what is the wizard's single best general purposes defensive spell: Infuse with Vital Essence. 50 bonus endurance makes for a really good damage buffer. For what it is worth, I use a custom formation with tanks in row 1, offtanks row 2, offset from centre, high-endurance ranged/support row 3, squishies row 5. It has done wonders for the survival of my squishies that except when I decide to send them closer to the front line to cast short-range spells or get perfect positioning for e.g. the rolling ball of flaming death they are out of range of most ranged abilities. You cold also try a V, inverted V, or curve setup - the custom formations are there for you to use, and not making a custom formation that supports whatever group composition you are using and what your plan is for combat is a strategic mistake. That said, teleporting enemies are just plain nasty. Kill them on sight.

To return to the original question, the point where for me my wizard main character really started to stand out and I no longer spent half the time thinking that I'd have been better off with a druid since I spent most of my time blasting was when I got access to level 3 spells. Other wizard players will know this, but as the OP is asking about whether wizards get better, let me try to explain. I don't really mind my wizard not casting many spells in the frequent short encounters where just autoattacking with everybody does most of the work, and as I'd taken Scion of Burnination as my first talent, I could help flame groups with Fan a bit of positioning and also had fun with the the flaming bowling ball of death* and the occasional bewildering, but still... there's no hiding that for blasting purposes in important fights, a druid would have been better, full stop. * mmm, I can understand people who don't like these due to the danger of friendly fire, but I find that they really are great for a level 2 blasting spell once you've got a a bit of experience in aiming them, well worth the occasional friendly fire incident. And, of course, there's a bit of a sport in angling them right to hit several enemies 2-3 times. And then I got level 3 spells and Deleterious Alacrity of Motion, and from then on my Wizard became a ridiculous powerhouse in the important fights, you know, those fights where you show up rested to face powerful enemies, while autoattacking, using arcane assault, and casting the occasional spell in trash fights. My Wizard is a 18 INT/19DEX/19INT build with an additional +2 INT, +1 DEX from gear and wears enchanted Beratian Priest Robes for a -5% recovery speed and 2 DR more than clothes would give. (And as a bonus, those robes look good on a female wizard.) As I were to find out, once DAoM is cast, that means that spells that are listed as merely "fast" are "ridiculously fast" and "average" are "pretty darn fast". So I had to either enable auto-pausing after spell-casts or play on slow speed in combat to be able to hit the pause button to waste as little time as possible between casting spells. That meant that casting the best defensive spells was an option (I particularly like the 2nd level +50 endurance spell - it provides a very useful buffer early on) either pro-actively or reactively, as was casting eldritch aim and merciless gaze before unloading the arcane arsenal of spells. It was even possible to do things like trigger start of battle, cast DoAM, cast two rolling balls of flaming death, and move out of the way before any enemy could manage to close with slow and some normal enemies (but not fast enemies). Or once another level was gained, cast several fireballs in a row mid-combat in a few seconds, which does wonders. We are not talking BG2 Robe of Vecna + Improved Alacrity levels of cheese, but you become able to cast a lot more spells in a given period of time than druids and priests, and you aren't forced to observe breaks between spells due to using a regenerating resource like Ciphers are - you are only limited by how many spells you have to burn, and as you increase in levels you get more than enough. Deleterious Alacrity of Motion - probably the single most powerful spell in the Wizard's arsenal because it addresses the question of "how do I actually find the time to cast all these spells".

Well, this is pretty ridiculous. We've got a game where Obsidian's vetting process for its own content is fine with prostitution, incest, bestiality, rape, and torture, not to mention theft, violence, and mass murder, not to mention the manipulation and destruction of souls, played both for fun and for jokes depending on which in-game character is speaking, because the audience is supposed to be adult enough to deal with adult themes, but they now send out a kickstarter backer message mentioning how the limerick about a man sleeping with a man whom he thought was a woman and rejecting it, was obviously something that couldn't have passed the official vetting process, so now that they have properly vetted it they had to replace it. I find it slightly ridiculous to make such a change in a game as a result of somebody looking for things to get outraged by got outraged, since pandering to the easily outraged is an endless task, but on the other hand, if they deem that it is better business to cave in and move on, fine. They are a business first and foremost and it would be even more ridiculous to expect them not to put their business first. I just wish they wouldn't top their decision by a whopper like stating: "It has come to our attention that a piece of backer-created content has made it into Pillars of Eternity that was not vetted. Once it was brought to our attention, it followed the same vetting process as all of our other content. Prior to release, we worked with many of our backers to iterate on content they asked to be put into the game that didn't strike the right tone. In the case of this specific content, we" checked with the backer who wrote it and asked them about changing it. We respect our backers greatly, and felt it was our duty to include them in the process. They gave us new content which we have used to replace what is in the game. To be clear, we followed the process we would have followed had this content been vetted prior to the release of the product."" THAT is the most ridiculous claim of them all. It may well be true, but, if it is, one has to wonder how Obsidian's own content survived its vetting process... unless its own content was held to a lower standard than their backers, of course.

What can I say? I am a sucker for the huge chanting radius I get with 18-20 Int on ranged non-tanking chanters as it means less issues with positioning in combat and maximum versatility with applying respectively buffing and debuffing chants (which is one of the reasons that I consider Kana to be the best of the companions with respect to stat build).... but I can certainly see the argument for optimizing a chanter for less versatility, going with less intelligence, and placing him where you want the shorter range auras to work (e.g. covering melee and enemies or covering ranged and melee when it when are closer to ranged)

Your party is fine. Hard mode is harder than the average CRPG experience these days, but it is certainly not something requiring optimization to succeed at and can handily be completed using the default companions, who are ALL considerably worse optimized for combat than anything you will make when you create adventurers yourself. Unless you are planning to play ironman or path of the damned, you really don't need to bother much about optimization.

Max level is 12 so you get 6 talents through from levelups during the game, not 4.

Mmm, I have completed it siding with Verzano, but that was by taking the conversation option leading to killing Dana already when she accosted me in the inn rather than fighting her back at his place, so not really relevant to this bug report, but it is a way of completing the quest without siding with the Doemenel,

Okay, in that case: After the first level you alternate between gaining a new chant and gaining a new invocation when you increase in level, so you are not going to learn everything. Second level abilities start at character level 5, and IIRC third level abilities start at character level 9. You receive a talent on every second level.

First of all, maximize your Int unless you are going for a tank build, where you'll want to focus on the defensive attributes. The Chanters chants are much too good to not take advantage of the huge AOE radius otherwise. For something warrior-mage like, you might want to consider making a chanter that mostly relies on the damage chants, even though the level 1 chant is unimpressive, as it is thematic as all hell and, later on, quite useful as well. The Chanter should in this case obviously fight ranged from the middle of your formation, probably with the largest gun you can get your hands on and two-hander in his spare weapon set for when enemies break the front line. If you use a custom formation that is five deep (tanks rank 1, offtanks 2, chanter and other non-squishies 3, squishies 5) and you have high int, your AOE radius will overlap both your entire team and most enemies engaging your tanks, which is really helpful: You'll be providing constant endurance regeneration to your party while changing between chants to either buff or debuff as appropriate and firing away with the weapon of your choice. For such a character you can maximize MIG, DEX, and INT by tanking CON - you can even get halfway decent RES conversation options if you are also willing to dump PER to boost RES. ...or you can use more sane non-min-maxed stats, but hey, it is an option. ...or you can use the diametrically opposite approach and make the Chanter an excellent tank or offtank - it is an amazingly versatile class due to the chants and starting with high deflection. It is damn hard to go wrong with the chants, because they are almost universally good, do exactly what they say, and do it all the time without player input.

1) The "official pillars of eternity wiki" is a place where players write information about the game, not a source of information from Obsidian, and not something you should take as gospel or expect to be up to date, and most certainly not something that you should trust over what you read in the manual or in the game. Much of the wiki was last updated more than half a year ago when the game was nowhere near finished; Many people are helping out bringing it up to date based on the release version rather than what used to be the case months ago, and at some time in the future it might be an accurate reference, but it most assuredly isn't now. 2) That said, in this case it is right. The chanter DOES have a long-range large radius AOE. That this is a large radius for buffs and debuffs is readily realized once you use AOE buffs and debuffs in the game and find that those from other classes are mostly puny by comparison. That you expected an even larger radius based on the radius of other abilities in other games that use different combat engines does not make the radius the chanter gets in PoE small. 3) The chanter CAN affect the entire party and enemies - so long as you build for it and position him appropriately. So again, you were let down by your assumptions and not by the game. These things happen. Deal with it now that you know that what you wish most of all (affecting everybody) is possible even if it isn't possible the way you wanted it to be and place the Chanter in the position where he logically belongs for that role when his AOE is centered on himself: in the middle of your formation. He'll still be in a perfect position to use his ranged weapon, so I really, really, really don't understand where your reluctance to play him like a PoE Chanter rather than your idea of what Chanters ought to be comes from. The Chanters are fine as they are; Their main problem is really that most fights in PoE are so short that they don't get to use their invocations before the battles are over. Unfortunately one of the extremely powerful thing about Chanters currently, their permanent endurance regeneration for all allies in chanting range, is getting reduced in accordance with the 1.03 patch notes. But then, it is currently very, very, good, and it is something you get passively so long as you are chanting anything. I guess they wised up to the fact that a Chanter with the Ancient Memories upgrade passively giving all party members in range something approaching the Fighters' endurance recovery passive was perhaps being a bit too generous.

The biggest shame - apart from the many bugs in the release of PoE, which will be fixed - is that the game is so short. It is a good game, perhaps even a great game, but it falls short of the amount of content in Baldur's Gate I and far short when compared to Baldur's Gate II. I'm not complaining: You work within the constraints of your funding, wishful thinking won't result in a larger game, and it is all about making the most with what you have - but the result is a game that has small zones and is short, feels short, and lacks much of the grand sweep of those two Infinity Engine games. As it doesn't manage to pull off a spectacular story like PS: Torment did either (but then, that really is a high bar to set!), I just don't see it having the same status a decade and a half from now as BG1 and BG2 do today. Still, between Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, Shadowrun Returns and SR: Dragonfall, all of which I and many others backed, these last two years have been a paradise for party-based computer roleplaying compared to the parched desert of the late 00's and early 10's, and if Torment: Tides of Numenera is also a hit, it'll be a clean sweep. Best of all, the financial success of the games have been noted, so crowdfunding or no crowdfunding we are likely to see more top-view isometric party based CRPGs. *Dreaming* Given that the financial environment doesn't seem to allow for really long CRPGs even when making games that are only minimally voiced, all we need now is for somebody to launch a brand corresponding to the old Gold Box games, licensing their CRPG game engine. *Dreaming*

Your thinking that the Chanter's chants will be able to affect all enemies and friends while standing in the rear rank most certainly IS an idea that you came up with yourself and something which isn't supported by the class description or the class' starting stats. Their descriptions are that that they chant magic continually with a variety of effects and have access to powerful spells called invocations. Nothing about being able to buff the entire party and debuff all enemies at the same time or that you should be able to do this regardless of how you build your Chanter. Their stats are low endurance and high deflection - something suggesting that this is a class that can stand being exposed to attacks but isn't intended to tank. That the Chanter is, in fact, able to use his chants to cover both front and rear ranks if you build him right is something that is great, but it is certainly not something that is suggested by his class description. Furthermore, the Chants that are available while creating the character either harm enemies or buff the defenses of friends, the second being something of more importance to the front and middle rank. FINALLY, the game puts a GOLD STAR for highly recommended for both intelligence and constitution and a silver star for resolve, so even if you DO follow the game's recommendations (which I personally find is a bad idea in general for anybody who has a specific role for his main character), you'd realize that the game's idea of a Chanter is somebody who is in a position where he'll be taking damage rather than in the rear and that high intelligence is a good idea. So, YES. Creating your Chanter to be able to cover your entire group and all enemies with your chants at the same time, while certainly a worthwhile thing to do, is not in any way, shape, or form something that is suggested by the class' stats or its description, nor is the inability to do this without a high intelligence that surprising. You wouldn't realize that the high constitution is a trap since the constitution stat is to a large degree a failure as a game mechanic, but if you DID follow the game's recommendations you'd end up with a Chanter who'd do decently in the front rank in melee while affecting enemies and your melee group with his chants AND do decently when standing in the middle of formation using ranged while affecting friends and some enemies with his chants. I do wonder where you "read the original "LARGE, AoE low-level buffs and debuffs chanters' description", though. It isn't the description in either the manual, the game, or the update#78. I mean, it is true: true - Chanters have a huge AOE range when compared to other AOE buffing and debuffing spells - but I do wonder where you read it that would give you the idea that the chants would affect an even larger area and larger and would allow you to stand at the back and still affect everybody, be they friend or foe.

You create one with 18-20 Int like most everybody else and have no problems? That still leaves you plenty of points to play around with to buff resolve if you want those conversation options. For the love of God, even the default NPC Chanter KANA with his starting 17 Int and a +1 Int turban does the job of chanting to cover both front and rear well enough so long as you set up a custom formation with him in the middle so you don't have to fiddle too much with his position in combat. And since you are not going to be using him as a front-liner, I don't see why you want to boost his Con in the first place unless for roleplaying reasons. You could dump it all the way to 3 and still be an excellent ranged Chanter-buffer/damagedealer. The game's recommendations for stats are thematic and intended for people who don't have a clue, resulting in a Chanter that has an easy time staying alive in melee, but since YOU are designing your Chanter for a specific purpose, following the game's recommendations slavishly when you are building a character is silly. For what it is worth, I use a custom formation of: 1. Tank - front and center 2. Two melee offtanks - offset to either side from the tank 3. Chanter - center 4. -- Empty --- 5. 2 casters -- offset from center If you want to run 5 ranged instead, just run with 3 ranged including Chanter in the middle in row 3 instead.

Obsidian has invested a lot of money and effort into the new IP, the game has had really good sales, and both Paradox and Obsidian have been talking about expansions/sequels, so let's just say that it would be a huge surprise if this is the end of the line. See for instance this link: http://gamingbolt.com/pillars-of-eternity-cities-skylines-earn-18-5-million-in-three-weeks

Level based. It says so in the in-game class descriptions for Wizard, Cleric, and Druid when you create your character, right down at the bottom where people might easily overlook it.

The rational man, upon observing this phenomenon, concludes, "perhaps I shouldn't stay at maximum range, then; This isn't a failure of the class, this is a failure of tactics: After all, the Chant circles are really, really, large, just not quite large enough to do what I want them to do". So do the sensible thing like the rest of us who use ranged Chanters. Make a custom formation where the tanks and melee are in the front, the chanter in the middle, and the squishies in the back. Tadaa - the Chanter's HUGE AOE radius will now cover your entire party and everybody who is attacking the party in melee so long as you are using a high intelligence Chanter, and you have the added benefit that anybody bypassing your front line is likely to get caught up with the Chanter rather than a squishy while being directly in the line of fire of the squishies.

I love the level 2 bowling ball of flame. Angling it just right so it bounces off walls and hits the chosen targets two or three times is fun when it is doable. In general, though, with the wizard getting a huge selection of CC and debuffing spells, he's often more gainfully employed taking control of the situation to work as a force multiplier on the party than blasting. I do find the short-time buffs combined with a lack of pre-combat buffing to be rather annoying, though.

No, I am not pissed off. I am merely pointing out a fairly obvious, though minor, problem with the named backer NPCs. If we ignore your failure to understand this, your general point about how it prevents me from using my knowledge of how the game genre works is spot on. Breaking genre conventions is not something to do lightly. There's a reason that all those no-name NPCs are generally not given names in CRPGs, and it isn't because the designers can't think up names. It is because they know that obscuring what is important and what is not in the name of immersion results in players interacting with everybody and his donkey to find out who is important and who is not, and that doing that and mostly getting back negatives until they luck out and click on somebody who has something to say that is important is something that is only attractive to the most obsessive compulsive gamers. Which is why all the irrelevant non-backer NPCs in PoE have generic names, because Obsidian's designers aren't incompetent.

That seems very likely as both Paradox and Obsidian have expressed a strong desire to make at least one expansion/dlc adventure and a sequel. Let's just say that between Cities: Skylines and Pillars of Eternity, Paradox has had a very good month, and Obsidian probably doesn't mind sales figures that are off the chart either.