JerekKruger

Do yourself a favor and get Mask of The Betrayer asap.. One of the best rpgs in the last 10 years I was just about to post the same thing. mark of the Betrayer is really, really good!

Well, there's at least one player who prefers it to both pure real time and turn based (me) so don't be so sure it's a concession.

Rather counterintuitively, the Larder Door is actually worse the a normal, unenchanted large shield. They both provide the same protection, but using the Larder Door will reduce Eder's damage output.

I really hope they don't carry over the exact same levelling scheme into PoE2, and in particularly don't allow simply let us carry on a PoE character with a higher level cap. We ended PoE at epic level. The game might not have done a great job of making us feel epic, but we'd killed multiple dragons, high level undead, arch mages and servants of gods. What exactly will we spend a whole game doing? Killing encounters consisting of multiple dragons? The super high level style of gameplay worked fine for the relatively short Throne of Bhaal, but had we started at that sort of power level in Shadows of Amn it would have grown boring fast.

Yeah, I quite like them too. Eye of the beholder and all that.

Obviously it's rather early for testing, but I'd be very interested in knowing whether the bugs on the items needed for this build have been fixed in 3.04. I was thinking of running this build for Zahua.

Oh, I didn't know that. Obviously we'll have to wait and see how much of the difference the difficulties make, but if it's good then this is a really good sign for PoE2. I was going to make a similar comment in that I agree with AeonsLegend in general, but it depends on the style of the RPG in question. I feel like some RPGs are deliberately going for an over the top feel to them, and in those having a huge difference when levelling up fits. A game like PoE fits somewhere in the middle ground: it's not trying to simulate reality but at the same time it's going for a fairly realistic feeling tone. I will say that my absolute favourite tabletop campaign used a setting where, even with very experienced characters, getting into a fight with a thug armed with a dagger was usually best avoided because it could result in pretty hefty injuries or deathif you were unlucky. I like this style a lot for tabletop, where the emphasis is less on combat, but for a CRPG I feel like combat is always going to be a bigger focus and so letting go of realism for the sake of enjoyment is a good idea.

Oh sorry, I wasn't saying Lotti shouldn't. They certainly should.

Ben No.3's suggestion is a good one, but I will quickly mention that Raedric is definitely a step harder than most act I content. It's not unreasonable to move on to act II, then come back for Raedric later. But if you want to beat him now, that's certainly possible. You don't even need to use cheese, it's perfectly possible to beat him towards the end of act I, on PotD, with standard story companions, without any cheesy strategies.

The amount of experience required for level n is 1000 time the (n-1)-th triangle number, so it's also quadratic (500*(n^2-n)) but AD&D had exponential growth for the first 10 levels (the formula was approximately 1000*2^(n-1), with the somewhat arbitrary exception of level 8 being 125,000 rather than 128,000). Whilst I definitely agree, this requires a disproportionate amount of work by the developer for a feature that the majority of players won't care about (always remember, we who discuss PoE on this forum are by far the minority).

Count me as a member of the "hates level scaling" tribe. My solution to this issue probably wouldn't be very popular. I'd make it so that only story quests give experience, so that the developer can control precisely what level the player will be for given content. Side quests should still reward the player with interesting items (perhaps a bit more powerful than what the player doing a minimalist play through would have at the same time). Beyond that, side quests should focus on interesting stories and challenging encounters. This goes pretty heavily against the norm for CRPGs, which is why I suspect it wouldn't be popular, but it solves this problem in a stroke and I, at least, would enjoy it. It would even make intermediate builds more important since beating a challenging mid game encounter would require the player to use builds lacking end game abilities. I sure as hell did, though mostly because of AD&D's terrible low level (1-3 for mages, 1-2 for other characters) experience. I don't actually mind levelling being slow.

Yeah? Well I play PoE on the huge 286 my dad brought back from a business trip to America in the late 80s. In the snow. Up hill both ways. What do I win?

Cail is often one of the hardest encounters I face in my play-throughs, but that's because I usually pay him a visit early on for lovely lovely Tidefall.

This is particularly true in a first play through, where it's nigh impossible to really understand the ins and outs of the mechanics, and various abilities and items the game has to offer. Once you've finished that (particularly if you try out all the NPC companions) you'll have a much better idea of these things and can try your hand at designing a build from the ground up. Think of it like learning to speak a foreign language. If you refuse to practice until you understand the language perfectly, you'll never speak it; you have to go out and speak the language badly, make mistakes and be corrected, if you ever want to improve.

Avellone might be right, or he might be wrong, and I won't know for certain unless Obsidian do, in fact, get bought up. Until the point (and quite possibly beyond it) I'll happily enjoy any and RPGs (particularly old school isometric ones) that they happen to release.

That's a shame, though not hugely surprising I guess. I guess they provide some (not so) warm bodies to throw at your enemies at least.

Also you'll forever be haunted by the knowledge that you took the easy way out. OR: if you're a role-playing type like myself, you might be haunted by the fact that you essentially stole someone's body for the Adra dragon to escape with, and that by all accounts the Adra dragon was a fairly unpleasant individual to release upon the world (assuming you are role-playing a relatively good character).

Having barely ever used the Grey Sleeper I have to ask, are the summoned vessels any good?

Well as I said before, perhaps PoE isn't for you, and if that's the case there's nothing wrong with that.

Yes, a BG that won't ever mean anything, because in the whole game there are 2/3 referrals to it at most.. Oh I'm not referring to the background you pick. I'd actually prefer it if that wasn't there as it interfers (a tiny bit) with my ability to be completely free. I am referring to the background that I construct in my head for my character.

See, a game like God of War is boring for me because I don't have any choice over who I am. I am forced to be the character the game tells me to be and very often I don't like that character (Kratos, for example, was a terrible character in my mind). The only way I can enjoy a game like God of War is to completely ignore the lore and focus on the gameplay. Meanwhile a game like PoE will never force a background on me (well, okay, it does in a tiny way if you discuss it with Calisca, but you can ignore that option) so I can have any background I want. EDIT: you might be right about never finding a character that suits you, at least if you expect to find one that fits your Kratos example that is. The only thing I can't quite work out is how you ever played through Baldur's Gate.

I'm not sure you're going to find that in any character at the start of the game. Maybe a Cipher, but even there you'll start off fairly unremarkable. That's just the nature of low level role-playing, and for me at least it's a feature, not a bug.

You also form it by choosing dialogue options with particular dispositions attached.

Maybe, but I was not using the German word, I was using the English word

Oh I gave up reading the golden square NPCs ages ago. A few of them are well written and worth the read, but far too many of them are not, and are just a waste of time in my opinion.