JerekKruger

Ah that makes sense. Yeah I think that the Raedric fight was meant to be done at the end of act I or even early in act II, so doing it earlier requires a cleverer strategy than a straight up fight.

It's the easiest way to win the fight, but it is by no means required. I prefer not to use it myself. I initially agree to Raedric's demand to confront Kolsc, then I rearrange my party around his dais to make it easier to take down the mages and priests whilst giving some cover to my own squishies, then I talk to him again and attack and run the fight as a fairly straight up fight. I don't know exactly what level I am when I do this, but I first do every quest in Act I and make sure to pick up Sagani, so something like level 4 or maybe 5. I also have a fairly good grasp of combat mechanics so I know which spells to use in the fight. Given all this, I can usually win the fight without any of my party going down (apart from perhaps Ituumak, but his job is to go down).

If you played pre-patch 2.0 (the patch that accompanied the release of the White March part I) then there was a fairly major change to enemy AI which changes the tanking meta. Pre-2.0 it was very possible to get by with a single tank (probably a Fighter) specced as defensively as possible who would glue most the enemies in an encounter to himself with engagement, as the AI would basically never disengage. Post 2.0 the AI will disengage, and has some sort of algorithm for deciding when to do so which judges how dangerous your party members are and how poor their defences are. Thus post 2.0 the AI will happily ignore a low damage, high defence tank, eating disengagement attacks, and go beat up your glass cannons. As such, it's usually a good idea to bring two tanky characters, but also to make sure your tanks are providing more than simply high defences to the group. Fighters will want to spec for single target damage, Paladins for healing and party support, Chanters for... well chanting. Also it may be wise, particularly in the earlier game, not to completely neglect your non-tanking characters defences and DR. Other than that there have been a lot of changes to class balance, as well as the changes described by Fenixp above. As a side note: if you enjoy PoE I'd definitely recommend the White March (both parts). They add some really nice dungeons and quests, as well as a whole range of new items to collect which are generally a lot more interesting than those in vanilla PoE. I always do all the side content of each act before progressing to the next act, though this is far from necessary. The two bits of content that don't fit obviously into this in vanilla PoE are the Endless Paths of Od Nua (the game's super dungeon) and the Bounties. The former can be dipped into periodically as you choose, with a very rough guideline being floows 1-5 are act I, 6-10 are act II and 11-15 are act III; the latter should be left till at least act II unless you want to really challenge yourself, and some of them are amongst the hardest fights in the game (also bounties can be completely skipped if you choose). If you have the expansions then you have the additional question of when to do them. I usually hit up the White March around level 6ish and complete it, then finish off Act II of vanilla before going to do part II. Not quite. You can hire generic companions of one level lower than your own, but this costs money, and it might be a while before you've got enough to hire a full group. If you're completionist about act I then you should have enough by the end of that to hire a full group I'd guess.

I'd be keen to see a build if/when you have the time to post it up.

Exactly, it's one of two mythic weapons in the game, it should be powerful, especially given the effort needed to upgrade it. Soulbound items were a really great idea, but so often they end up under performing compared to regular unique items with added enchants, particularly since Soulbound items can't be durganised. This is a great shame: the process of slowly unlocking the powers and lore of the item is quite fun but having the end product be worse than something that can be obtained more easily and earlier in the game ruins it. Also remember that PoE isn't a multiplayer game. Perfect balance isn't needed or even desirable for a single player game. Sure, when things are horribly overpowered then it makes sense to nerf them, but the Unlabored Blade really isn't one of them. Please don't consign the Unlabored Blade to the pile of Soulbound weapons that live in my stash.

Well I won't pretend I'm not disappointed in the proc reduction for Unlabored Blade. That's one the few Soulbound weapons that actually competes with non-Soulbound ones and this nerf sounds like it'll go a long way to changing that. I'd urge you guys to reconsider if it's not too late. That said, it's great to see you're issuing hotfixes still.

Yeah, my guess is Obsidian will want to avoid going with a publisher for PoE2 for that very reason, unless they can hash out a fairly generous agreement with Paradox.

Ah I see. Well I can understand wanting to read a piece of media in its original language too.

Yeah I can see that. I think Obsidian did a pretty good job of sticking to their own creative vision for PoE though, so I have faith that they'd do so again. Also if they decided to seek crowdfunding for PoE2 then I hope people will go into it knowing that the end product is likely to be pretty similar to PoE rather than their own idea of what the spiritual successor to a series of games from (mostly) over fifteen years ago.

Yeah sorry, I meant to say if their first language is available.

I'd be interested in knowing as well. I think having Od Nua be an infinite stretch goal was a mistake, since they were then committed to making a fifteen floor dungeon and some of the later floors were pretty bad. Also having it be crowdfunded did lead to quite a lot of arguments on the forums, with some people seemingly wanting something almost identical to the old IE games (and complaining about almost any chance) and others complaining when features from old IE games they didn't like weren't changed. It seemed like everyone and their dog had a different idea of what a spiritual successor to the old IE games should be. That said, those two things were a pretty small price to pay for allowing Obsidian to make a game they otherwise probably wouldn't have been able to, and one which I think is pretty damn good. Don't get me wrong, if they can find funding elsewhere I'd prefer them to use that, but if they do go the crowdfunding route I'll happily back them.

If this can be made to work, this is a great idea. There are however problems with it. Obsidian would, presumably, have no way of checking the quality of such a translation. The result could be horribly stilted, elements of the story could be messed up by the translation, or a translator could even insert objectionable content without Obsidian knowing. Of course all these are possible when hiring professional translators, but they are less likely as said translators risk damaging their business if they do a bad job. Translating a game like PoE is a lot of work (remember it's not just dialogue, it's also every item description, every tooltip and all the menus). If the pool of translators is kept small, then they're volunteering to do an awful lot of work for no pay. If you make the pool bigger, essentially crowd-sourcing your translation, then the end product is going to be very inconsistent in style and quality. A translation project like this can't be done pre-release since you can pretty much guarantee that entire story will be spoiled by leaks. A billion people might speak Portugese worldwide, but for about 80% of them it's not their first language. People don't, on the whole, choose to play a game is a language other than their first.

I kinda hope Obsidian will open some Tyranny forums, but I guess they want to keep the official forums in one place.

What a nice post Boeroer. I wouldn't consider myself a fellow builder, having mostly asked for advice, but this forum has been brilliant. I plan to stick around since I am far from done with PoE and can't really justify buying Tyranny this month anyway (possibly not next either).

I'd never thought of it like that, but I think that's probably a big part of why I prefer RTwP as well. I guess there is more micromanagement, but I don't really see the issue since you can always pause and take as much time as you want over it. If you find fights are taking too long, then you can always drop the difficulty down. I am fairly certain fights never take too long on Story Mode.

How is there any more micromanagement in real time with pause than in turn based? You're still controlling the same number of characters, and you can pause the game at any time to issue orders calmly. There's nothing whatsoever forcing you to manically issue orders in real time, that's the whole point of the with pause feature.

This build uses none of those things.

My best ever? I can't remember the exact number, but I had a Monk with a huge unbuffed accuracy. Of course, this was back when there was a bug with transcendent suffering that made it so that each time you retrained you got the bonuses again

That's because you GoG users don't get all the super secret extra content that we steam users get. Our patch included 100 new Soulbound items, the White March part III, the first chapter of PoE2 and a cheque for $1000... More seriously, that is a pretty huge size difference. Is the GoG patch really that small?

Paradox bought White Wolf in 2015 right? I am hopeful that this signals a nice partnership with Obsidian to make quality CRPGs of all types using White Wolf IPs. I feel like, at least at the moment, Paradox will be a great publisher/funder for Obsidian in that they know to let Obsidian do their thing and won't interfere too much. I might of course be wrong about that, I'm basing it purely off the fact that they've done well making non-mainstream games.

A Druid + Chanter pair very much can work, but you'll probably have to build one of them to be tanky. Luckily Chanters are ideal for this, since they lose very little from wearing heavy armour. In fact Chanters are perhaps the one class that gets almost nothing offensively from the weapons and armour selection. If you're willing to take a melee class, then I'll second Ben No.3's Juggernaut Monk + Cipher combo. P.S. I don't know how much you've played PoE yet, but it's worth noting that tanks and tanking are quite different to their usual MMO origins. Tanks need to do more than just take damage to be worthwhile, particularly in a smaller party like yours, so they'll usually either be pretty good damage dealers or good support characters as well.

I wouldn't worry overly. To my mind TToN was selling itself on the legacy of Torment i.e. very weird world and much more story and dialogue driven than most CRPGs. The combat of Torment wasn't really it's big selling point so I can understand them feeling that it was okay to move away from it. Meanwhile, PoE was sold much more directly as a successor to the BG and IWD series, with PotD difficulty being compared to HoW difficulty in IWD2. It's clear to me that they are more obviously tied to the gameplay style of old infinity engine games so are less likely to switch to turn based gameplay.

That's an interesting question. It's possible the assets for them are in all versions of the game, and the only thing that the preorder DLC does is spawn them in your inventory at the start of each new game. If that's the case they'll work fine I guess. If the assets aren't present, then I hope Obsidian implemented some sort of system to avoid major problems. I would probably program the game to make items with an invalid ID default to something like a normal dagger, or even create a specific invalid item item.

And especially when you compare it to, say, Baldur's Gate 2, which had a list of known bugs as long as your arm which never received an official fix, yet somehow manages to be a favourite of many people. But yeah, whilst the bug is annoying, there's a simple work around for non-ToI games (hard save before hand and load that rather than the autosave) and the only ways the bug causes a problem for ToI games is if (i) the player travels to Stalwart then immediately decides to quit and reload or (ii) is using some trick to get around the point of ToI. I'd imagine (i) is fairly rare (wouldn't most people quit before travelling to Stalwart?) and (ii) is, well, bizarre to my mind given that it defeats the purpose of ToI. Then, even if you do fall into one of these two categories, all that is happening is that a handful of encounters are becoming easier. You're not going to lose a ToI run as a result of this bug: if you die in Stalwart after activating the bug then you would have died anyway.

No one who owns PoE on GoG had access to the beta as I understand it. This includes Andrea, so he certainly can't be blamed for not finding the bug.