JerekKruger

This would be my advice too. In my last play through I went to Stalwart (WM village) at level 6/7 on PotD and it was challenging at first but WM gives you experience very fast so it wasn't long before my whole party hit 8. After this, most of the content was fairly easy, although fights against Lagufaeth and some of the contents in the main dungeon (name kept secret to avoid even tiny spoilers) remained pretty tough. In the play through before that I went at level 9 and found the whole thing rather easy. One thing to consider, depending on how important story flow is to you, is that it sort of makes sense to do WM2 soon after WM1 from a story perspective, but WM2 is a lot harder than WM1, therefore you might want to wait on doing WM1 till later and use the difficulty scaling to make it harder (or just leave it as easy). I've actually never used difficulty scaling, and I'm always a little uneasy with such options in RPGs, but others might be able to tell you whether it seems well balanced and fun or arbitrarily hard. For your first play through though I wouldn't worry too much about things like story flow since it's very hard to know the order in which to do quests to optimise it without having played through the game at least once.

Which, when you think about it, is kind of weird. I haven't attacked many stone pillars in my life, but my sensory experience of them suggests they'd actually be pretty resistance to sword blows.

As far as I can remember, there are almost no occasions where the alternative dialogue options make any difference to the outcome of quests in concrete terms, they are mainly there for role-playing flavour. There might be a couple where you get a little more experience, but experience is not in short supply in PoE, but I don't think you can ever miss out on any items. When an attribute leads to a different resolution of a quest, there is often another way to get the same resolution without an attribute check. Once I realised this, I worried less about having higher conversation attributes. That's not to say it's not cool to have other unique options in conversations, but unlike a lot of RPGs you're not going to miss out on rewards for skimping on them.

Monks are absolutely great fun to play, assuming you don't mind a bit of management. The whole powering their abilities through taking damage makes them ideal offtank/damage dealers, and you can build them more in one direction or the other. Also their abilities are generally good, and also generally fun. Barbarians are, as Boeroer said, quite fragile early on, which can be frustrating for newer players expecting a melee brawler who can take some hits. In the early game you'll probably want to use a reach weapon and/or wait for your tankier characters to gain aggro before engaging. That said, the Barbarian's basic ability is great, and something that might not be immediately obvious to a new player is that the Carnage attacks carry any on hit properties of the weapon the Barbarian's original attack was made with. Thus you can build Barbarians who can be great melee crowd controllers. On top of this, at higher levels the Barbarian gets some tools for survivability that makes them more forgiving, and gain an amazing comb in Dragon Leap followed by Heart of Fury: jump into the middle of a big group of enemies, activate Heart of Fury, laugh as all of them are hit by multiple carnage hits and melt. Whilst Fighters weren't on your shortlist I will quickly mention that they might fit what you're looking for. They are actually (arguably) best build as an offtank/damage dealer (see the Lady of Pain build in the build section) rather than a pure tank. This might not be obvious since in many recent CRPGs, and almost all MMOs, Fighters tend to be mostly dedicated to tanking. The thing is, if you build a Fighter in PoE as a pure tank then sure, they'll be an excellent tank, but they won't do anything else. If you build them more for damage they'll still be a good tank, but they'll also be one of the best single target damage dealers out there. In particularly, if you're not keen on micromanaging your characters, a Fighter provides a good brawler type character who is largely dependent on passive abilities.

Traps are just another source of money in my games. I occasionally keep the petrification traps with the intention of using them on tough fights, but I almost invariably forget. I can't say I mind all that much. Traps in Baldur's Gate 2 were either lacklustre or horribly overpowered, neither of which I particularly want in my games.

Personally I really dislike putting any characteristic under 8. Just feels cheesy to me, and PotD isn't hard enough to need it.

One nice combination with Charge is to target them with the Ectophysic Echo (3rd level Cipher power) after charging them behind the bulk of the enemy. Makes it very easy to catch a lot of enemies in the beam, and that beam does a lot of damage. This also works with the Monk's Flagellant Path. I agree that this sort of tank is much more interesting. Having an almost invincible character who does almost no damage is, to my mind, really boring. Having a tough character who also does damage (or supports in some other way) is much more interesting.

The AI can, and often does, ignore engagement. Back before patch 2.0 the AI would almost never break engagement and a Fighter specced as a pure tank was indeed very effective. Now though, such a class tends not to pull their weight since the AI will simply avoid them a lot of the time and the Fighter won't be doing significant damage or buffing/debuffing. The advantage of Paladins and Chanters is they both also provide party support and/or AoE damage whilst tanking. They might have worse deflection than Fighters, but honestly that extra deflection isn't particularly important most the time. Also Paladins have better non-deflection defences, which is often very important (a paralysed Fighter is a terrible tank for example).

To be honest, to do their primary job a Priest won't be using their weapon much, and if their primary job isn't doing weapon damage then it's not the end of the world if their unique talent matches up with the weapon they're using.

Poor Imoen. I actually felt she became quite interesting in BG2 but I agree that I kinda wanted to drown her in BG1.

AndreaColumbo's Support Priest Build is a nicely non-min maxed priest build that does it's job very well. It's not a dedicated damage dealing priest, but it can pull its weight when needed. Another Boeroer build? I can't wait.

To be fair, Imoen doesn't seem to suffer from the delay, so she can't have needed saving all that much!

Mainly it's just an attempt by Obsidian to make non-human races more than just one-dimensional cliches I think. There are still elements of classic fantasy Dwarfs there, but I think they did a decent job of making them more diverse. It's hard to give specific details, so I'll just say enjoy Durgan's Battery when you get the expansion, it's a great dungeon.

Does Slack83er have much... untapped power?

I think that the good side of humanity is, mostly, a real thing. Of course there are exceptions, but most humans are mostly decent people I think. As an atheist I take the view that this is because, as a social species, it was evolutionarily advantageous to us that we could trust each other to not lie and murder each other, but some believers would argue the goodness comes from their particularly deity. Either way, I think it's there. For the classic view of Dwarfs I'd agree that Berath fits (out of the available deities at least, Abydon is also an obvious choice). If you've not played WM1 though, you'll find that Dwarfs in Eora don't quite fit the standard mould of fantasy Dwarfs and show as much variety as humans, therefore any god can fit. Yeah, unfortunately if you want ranged then your only choices are Wael or Magran or using one of the three soulbound weapons.

Just as planned As for priests and lying, try to remember that priests in Eora aren't Christian priests of our world. The ideal behaviours of priestliness are likely to be different, particularly when the ideals of the priests god are so different to the Christian God. Also try not to think of a priest of Wael "lying" so much as furthering the great mystery of Wael. Lying, to me at least, implies selfish intent, for example lying about how much I sold a piece of stolen item for to keep more of the cut for myself from my partner. Priests of Wael aren't lying for this reason, they're lying because they feel that mystery and obfuscation are good things in of themselves. I actually think Wael is a really interesting deity, and it's a shame that there wasn't more content around him/her/them/it. Fingers crossed for PoE2.

Two months, not weeks. I always used to do every single bit of content available before rescuing her, including things like the Twisted Rune. Actually that's not entirely true, I didn't do all of Watcher's Keep.

Indeed. My first proper play through was on hard and I remember really struggling with the two Shamblers near the hunters shrine early on. That fight must have taken at least ten tries. When I did my first PotD playthrough I expected to struggle a lot with that fight, but I ended up beating it first time without a single unconscious character. Experience (human rather than in game) means a lot in this game. EDIT: my imperfect way of keeping the game challenging is to hold off levelling my characters till I absolutely need to. Anyone who's beelined to Caed Nua at low level knows that the courtyard can be quite challenging compared to doing it after clearing all the side quests in act I. It's imperfect because levelling is fun so it's a shame to have to wait on doing it, and if you're a bit compulsive like me you'll hate seeing those golden + marks on your character portraits all the time. I also try to be conservative with per rest abilities and not rest too often, but that doesn't really add that much challenge and I mainly do it for RP reasons (I always felt guilty for taking literally two in game months to go rescue Imoen in SoA).

Isn't there a limit on how many different mercenaries you can hire?

Surely in Stelegar form.

Yeah, the spell guide alone makes this build post really good. Even if you don't plan to follow the build it's a really comprehensive guide to all Druid spells that any Druid can use as a reference. Excellent work L4wlight!

Well it looks nice and has a good unique enchantment on it. At the time you get it it's probably one of the best pieces of armour around, though by the end of the game you'll have better.

Unfortunately I think in the current meta the answer is you don't really, well apart from role-play reasons.

I believe you need a particular attribute score or reputation for that to work. I save scummed ad nauseum to try every dialogue option and couldn't get it non-violently. It might be the case that you can get it from him before stealing the affidavit, I always forget to talk to him before picking it up. If you kill Penhelm without talking to him first Osric reacts badly and you lose a little bit of rep with the dozens. If you talk to Penhelm first you can't keep the breastplate. This I am sure of unless it was changed in a recent patch.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the existing options, but I don't get why my character can't say "sorry kid, I don't think you should have a White March dagger, you're too young" and not pick up an aggressive or deceptive rep as a result. Also if you have high survival skill you can teach him how to handle the dagger and he doesn't maim himself.