JerekKruger

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.

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?