JerekKruger

I've been trying to come up with something similar myself so I'll be interested in seeing what comes of this thread. The Deadfire Archipelago would be the the obvious one, since it is where Naasitaq is located and we're told Pale Elves are occasionally found here. The Living Lands is far in the north, whereas I think the White that Wends is in the south, so given their natural disinclination to travel I don't think we'd see many Pale Elves here. Old Vailia is in the south I think, or at least it was "once the crown jewel of the southern seas", so I guess there might be more Pale Elves there. What I want is to a good in character reason for my Pale Elf to have been from somewhere other than the White that Wends. Part of the problem is we know very little about what Pale Elf culture is like. What are Pale Elf settlements like? What do most Pale Elves do? That sort of thing. We've got good insight into Boreal Dwarfs thanks to Sagani, but nothing about Pale Elves.

Just to balance out the OP I feel obliged to say that PoE is the best game ever made, though I won't explain why I think this, and I intend to bequeath my entire estate to Obsidian upon my death...

Depending on your patience you can still guarantee drops with date manipulation through resting. I did so to get a Mantle of Wreathing Flames for my Backlash Bedlam Cipher. It's a painful process however since some of the tables that track what loot drops on what day are no longer correct, but I am fairly certain date still determines loot. Depending on your willingness to go without Weapon Focus on one or both of the weapons, or buy two Wepon Focus talents, the flail Starcaller and the war hammer Godansthunyr are both one handed and have the Stunning property so might work quite well.

That's actually a pretty good question. My first thought was "well the character is just dabbling so won't be as skilled" and that's probably the reasoning, but the thing that makes a non-Paladin who takes Gallant's Focus less skilled is the fact they can't Lay on Hands, or benefit from Faith and Conviction, or use any other Paladin ability. It doesn't seem unreasonable to let the one ability they do have access to be full power. One thing I'd quite like to see change is the Chanter multiclass ability. To me the actual chant is at least as defining, if not more so, than the invocations of a Chanter and it would be nice if the multiclass talent gave access to some form of chant.

I'll mimic the advice of others and suggest turning off Expert mode. You can go into the gameplay options and manually re-enable some of the options if you want (some of the dialogue prompts can be fairly safely turned off if you want to increase immersion for example). Also, whilst Caed Nua is probably doable at your level, I'd tend to agree that it's probably better to do some of the side quests in Gilded Vale first. At level 4 it's going to be a lot easier. I think it's Shades and Shadows, with Shades being the tougher ones that summon the weaker Shadows. Shadows are a minor nuisance whilst shades, at this level, are pretty tough.

Yeah I'd love to see this. I'm also like to see my recruited guards appear in around the place, especially The other change I'd like to see is a replacement of random attacks with a few, interesting, stronghold related quests.

Oh come on! Read your post again: I know tone doesn't come across well in writing but that's about as passive aggressive as you get. If you genuinely want to know about Sensuki's posting history on the Baldur's Gate forums do you really think that was a constructive way to ask? Or you could even go check for yourself. I am sure I will receive a dismissive reply from Zenbane about how I am misreading things, but at some point Zenbane you have to recognise that a lot of your posts get "misread" and the thing all these miscommunications have in common is you. Like Ganrich I enjoy PoE a lot yet I am still interested in Sensuki's criticism and sometimes find myself agreeing with some of it. On the actual topic of the thread: thanks for doing those calculations for us Ineth. I've been thinking about Sensuki's criticism of the camera angles recently as a result of difficulty navigating some battles in the later game. Trying to work out where the various combatants are whilst paused immediately after Relentless Storm has fired is very hard. This is certainly partly due to the camera angle, but a bigger problem in my opinion is the fact that better graphics of PoE make the screen more "busy" and this camouflages the battle area. Spell graphics were never good enough to do this in IE games so characters didn't get lost in them. One thing I think would help is allow me to target an enemy by clicking it's "tab-label" as that's, by definition, easier to see in combat.

I don't know how I feel about removing per rest abilities. There's something I like about having abilities I can't use every combat and having to weigh up whether or not a situation is dire enough to warrant the use of a per rest ability, it adds an extra tactical dimension to the game. I also have to admit a certain fondness for Vancian magic based purely on nostalgia for the IE games, even though I don't think it makes a huge amount of sense (some aspects of traditional Vancian magic are ameliorated in PoE like Wizards not having to prepare every single slot and being able to change spells outside of combat). That said, I am fairly certain I could get over that nostalgia if a suitable alternative was provided. Also chalk me up as one of those weird people who like engagement and don't want to see it removed.

My first playthrough was normal, and apart from a few hairy moments in the very early game it was rather easy. I'd recommend hard for a playthrough where you intend to use the standard companions and don't want to min-max too much (but still want a bit of a challenge) and PotD for a genuinely difficult playthrough that requires some more planning and min-maxing.

Why not make the (perceived) negative effects purely story based? Take too long and rest too often and you'll start getting different dialogues from companions and important NPCs and, eventually, a different ending. Split it into three broad categories: (i) for players who complete the game very quickly you have an ending with very little change to the Watcher's state of mind, (ii) for most normal play throughs where the the Watcher has some changes but nothing major yet, and (iii) an ending for players who take absolutely ages over the game and sees a lot of changes to the Watcher's state of mind.

Hah! I like it.

Can't you respec her and/or doesn't the option to assign her talents allow you to choose Lay on Hands instead of Flames of Devotion?

I can't imagine there being a BG3 as a direct sequel to BG2. Where exactly does the story go after the events of Throne of Bhaal? I suppose they could do some sort of related story but I don't really think there's much room for one. Something unrelated would be no more part of the Baldur's Gate series than Neverwinter Nights was.

"Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?"

I guess it depends on what you mean by caster. All of those builds will cast spells, but I guess if you mean a back row caster who throws ranged damage and control spells then yeah, they're not that sort of caster.

I dunno, you could probably run a Wizard with high(ish) resolve as a tanky spellsword build, there's a Cipher build in the characters subforum that has decently high resolve and I imagine you could run a melee focused Druid with high resolve. These builds might not be the absolute best (although the Cipher build is definitely very powerful) but they're not going to be awful. In fact I'm not convinced min-maxed stats matter that much: a rogue with Might, Dexterity and Perception in the 14-16 range will obviously not do as much damage as with them all maxed, but they'll still do good damage.

Yeah that aspect of 2.0+ is probably one of my favourites. Pure tanks always seem dull and unrealistic to me.

With Might I agree. I can totally accept that a mighty Wizard is one who has more ability to empower their spells with more power. My only criticism is the way Might dialogue options often sound like traditional muscle based intimidation. With Intellect it's just the name that bothers me. Intellect is synonymous with intelligence and I can't untangle the two. In both cases, these are very minor, personal, criticisms and they don't stop me enjoying the game As for the min-maxers I also agree with this. My problem with this sort of thing is I have always sat somewhere between being a role-player and a min-maxer. I want a character who fits some role in my head, but I also want to make them as powerful as I can. The latter usually involves me looking up guides where I am told that to do so I absolutely have to minimise X stat or whatever, and the small part of me that is a min-maxer can't quite let that go. I acknowledge that's a personal fault One doesn't need reality to rationalise. You can rationalise using the internal rules of the setting, checking whether it remains internally consistent. That said my problem with intellect isn't one which is particularly rational as I explain above. It's that I can't quite shake my own personal baggage about what the word "intellect" means.

Yeah, I always found the mage 'duels' more fun in theory than in practice. In theory it gave me the feeling of being a powerful mage with carefully prepared defences and counters but in practice it just involved learning a tonne of spells, always having certain ones memorised and going through the motions of countering each defence. EDIT: Sagani is fairly neutral in her personality, but I like having her around. I have never really used Pallegina because originally she was built horribly, but I hear after 2.0 she is not so bad so I plan to take her in my next run,

I thought BG2 had a nice mix of classic fantasy and more alien weirdness. Firkraag's dungeon and the surrounding countryside was about as classic as it gets, as was the Shadow dungeon; but the things like the beholder nest and the planar prison were far weirder. @Cyseal do you mean BG2 was more non linear than BG or than PoE? In some senses of the word, BG was very non-linear as, apart from the inability to enter Baldur's Gate itself until act IV or V (I can't remember exactly) the only thing stopping you going wherever you wanted to was difficulty. BG 2 had a very open ended first (proper) act, but after that was really quite linear. I think PoE is fairly similar to BG2, although because it is overall a smaller game it feels a bit less open ended.

Yeah, that would probably have been a more accurate statement than the one I made.

Oh I agree. Intellect is the attribute that bothers me most here for the reasons I mention above: it's too closely related to traditional D&D stats. I think even renaming it to something like "Spirit" would solve many of my issues surrounding it, since then a low Spirit mage could still be intelligent and a high spirit barbarian could be dumb. In fact I've always hated Intelligence being a stat in RPGs for this very reason.

It does? I have literally never heard anyone say they have "talent with gunpowder" to mean "I am good with guns".