JerekKruger

One of the very few devs that don't try to oversell their work. Yeah, I wish more devs would recognise the kind of good will this engenders.

I don't disagree that Nyhilla's statement was unnecessarily combative, but just to clarify the Battle of Caed Nua was added at the same time as White March 2.

If someone's up to modding DWS (Dyrwood Strategies) that would be awesome. Not sure how difficult it would be to do using UABE and other tools.

I've got to agree with the people who are against boss immunities. They just reduce boss fights to damage races which are utterly mindless. I don't mind the occasional immunity when it makes sense from a lore perspective (having animats being immune to poison for example) but using them as a crutch to make boss fights more challenging is boring.

Hmm... perhaps it's finally time for me to roll a Mountain Dwarf character. Indeed, thanks for putting in the work to find this out.

If it's true. I'm not certain it is, it's just one of these things that I vaguely remember.

I may be wrong, but I seem to remember raw damage isn't modified by +% damage in the same way as other types of damage (it's either not affected at all, or is affected significantly less). Hopefully someone can confirm or deny this.

Well it can be anyone really. Having absolutely maxed mechanics really isn't necessary. Resting bonuses and gloves of manipulation* will allow you to find everything with no problem. *These are a random drop, but I can't think of a run I haven't gotten them early. I think they appear frequently in the early random loot pools.

Well, to be fair Devil has +3 Mechanics which is the highest bonus possible (only rogues can get it that high). On the other hand yeah, you really don't need Mechanics that high and you can manage with, say, Kana as your Mechanics expert quite happily. That's what I remember. I've never been able to bypass the majority of Galvino's lab even with high Mechanics and gloves of manipulation.

A big change that occurred in patch 2.0 was a change to enemy AI. Previously the AI would basically never break engagement, which meant that ideal strategy was to build a super tough Fighter tank with lots of engagement, send them into an encounter ahead of the rest of your group, then once engagement had been started the rest of your party could start doing their thing. After 2.0 the AI would break engagement to attack weaker party members. I don't think the exact algorithm is known, but generally speaking the AI seems to weigh up a targets defences, proximity and damage output when deciding whether to break engagement. As such having a party of 5 glass cannons and 1 super tank no longer works that well, since the AI will ignore your low damage, high defence tank and go kill your glass cannons. Instead you want your tanks to do more than just soak damage (for Fighters this should be damage dealing, for Paladins it's buffing and for Chanters it's... well chanting) and you probably want at least one main tank and one off tank. You also probably no longer want to dump every defensive stat possible for non-tanking classes, in particular melee dps benefit from being built a bit more sturdily.

I think Twitch is mostly popular for live streams, not for it's VoD service (which has never been great). In fact, when I try to watch the VoD for this stream I get a completely different VoD.

To be fair, the alignments in BG2 were all over the place. There was a mod which fixed as many as possible.

Yeah no. I can pretty much guarantee that that $4 million pretty much did sit in Obsidian's bank and get used to pay salaries, rent and the other costs of making Pillars. Obsidian is too small to weather the short term risks than doing anything else with that money would entail. Things go even slightly bad with your investments and suddenly you can't pay your staff, so they start looking for other work and your projects start falling behind schedule and before you know it you're in a death spiral What you are describing in the behaviour or much larger companies. Now, I dare say Obsidian had other sources of money beyond the $4 million. They may have had non-Kickstarter backers, profits from previous games and, towards the end of development, it's possible Paradox's publishing deal included money. But I can pretty much guarantee that the $4 million from Kickstarter did basically live in the bank until spent.

I thought it was littorally unplayable.

That's a pretty huge question, I'd suggest narrowing it a little to get replies.

Yeah Bittercut is, even with the recent sabre nerf, a top tier weapon. It's a contender for best weapon in the game I think. One of the things that's not at all obvious is that Spirit of Decay adds 20% damage even when Bittercut uses its Slashing damage rather than its Corrode damage. This is because Corrode appears first in it's damage description i.e. it's "Corrode/Slashing" rather than "Slashing/Corrode". If it were the other way round, it wouldn't get the bonus damage even if it was using its Corrode damage (I believe that Durance's Staff is "Crush/Burn" so doesn't get +20% damage from Scion of Flame).

These things happen, don't worry

Suppose they have only 20 employees with an average salary of $50,000 (I can pretty much guarantee both those numbers are lower than reality): that's a million a year on salaries alone. Four million very quickly starts to look pretty small in comparison.

Yep, it looks kind of weird but it is indeed the correct spelling.

In my case at least, I played Baldur's Gate aged 14 and Shadows of Amn aged 16, and I was a lot more impressionable and less jaded at that age. They were also quite fresh new games and they left a lasting impression on me. So much so in fact that even now, when I fire them back up, I still have that feeling despite being able to see all the flaws in them (and there were a lot of flaws). I think it's essentially impossible to be objective about the effect of such nostalgia. Of course your own experience might differ a lot. I get what you're saying, and I do think that PoE doesn't hit the mark as well as BG2 most the time. Companions in particular feel a lot less interesting than those in BG2. That said, having played through it a few times now I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as some people do, and there are some real quest gems in the game (particularly in acts I and II and in the White March). Personally I think if PoE2 is to PoE as BG2 was to BG then it could surpass BG2 in quality.

I suspect that they're a good model for a realistic modern day cult, what with actually existing and all. There's also the Universal Brotherhood in Shadowrun which is meant to be somewhat based on Scientology.

That's zero recovery without armour I assume? I like wearing armour, not particularly for its DR so much as the aesthetics. As we all know, aesthetics are at least as important as performance! Also adventurers say "no!" to Svef!

I am strangely allergic to potions. It's something I really ought to get treated.

How old was the video? Cipher's were super powerful early on and got hit by a few nerfs (they are still powerful now, don't worry) so perhaps it was from an earlier version of the game. In any case, the Temple of Eothas is not usually a level 2/3 dungeon. I usually do a bunch of easy quick quests in Gilded Vale first, then do the Temple when I am at level 4 (perhaps after picking up Kana too). Even then, on PotD there are some pretty tricky fights.

Note that the more recovery reduction you stack, the bigger the difference the attack speed between a Vulnerable Attack and a non-vulnerable attack becomes (unless of course you've got 120% reduction of course). For example, if you have zero recovery without Vulnerable Attack, and 20% recovery with it, then in your situation you're looking at 30 and 36 frames respectively which becomes 12 normal attacks for every 10 Vulnerable Attacks. At that point the 50 points of DR bypass might no longer be better than the 2 extra attacks, especially with high end weapons. Also if you have on hit effects on your weapons then you want to be hitting as often as possible to maximise their uptime (even if they always fire, there's a save against them before they go). I think this is probably the main factor. If I've got a talent point going spare then it's certainly a talent I'll consider.