demeisen

I do this somewhat regularly, though it depends on the specifics of the fight. Here are a few examples: I have a primary tank (Eder) and a secondary tank (often Kana). I send Eder charging in first to intercept the enemy's first line fighters. Usually this results in a big ball of chaotic melee. I then keep Kana back in reserve, and if/when enemy units start flanking the main melee and threatening my back line, I intercept those with Kana. Sometimes I'll move some of my CC casters around the side of a big melee battle to use CC on the enemy's ranged attackers. Both enemy archers and casters can really lay some hurt on your party. I'll often send two of my ranged party around the side (map permitting) to wreak some havoc on the enemy's back line. It can be hard to get my tanks back there early on because they're busy with enemy tanks. Sometimes I'll pre-position stealthed Grieving Mother off to the side of where the main battle is going to be, in order to charm a particularly nasty enemy unit as early into the battle as possible. This can be a high-risk high-reward thing. She's off alone, and can tilt the whole balance of the fight... or she can get destroyed. There are plenty of other possibilities, but that's the flavor of it. Positioning can be a key aspect to success or failure in harder fights esp. on PoD. Edit: typos.

Thanks DreamWayfarer. What do you mean by "hard CC"? I usually try to use as much CC as I can in most fights, though what works best differs from creature to creature.

Arrggh! I can't decide between Chill Fog and Slicken for the level 1 mastery. On one hand, most monsters seem to have lower dex than fortitude, so that would argue for slicken. But slicken only lasts a few seconds, where Chill Fog (which attacks fortitude) can blind for a longer time, and blind is powerful. It also adds some DoT into the mix. On the other other hand, I'm expecting many creatures in WM to have high cold resist. What do you all think? CF or S? *Edit* playing, PoD, non-minmax, story NPCs.

I just measured with a stopwatch under V3.01, in act II with both WM's installed, starting when I pushed the "Continue" button at the main menu, and stopping when the game loaded. It was consistently 8 seconds for me over three tries. That's from a spinning disc (no SSD), and it was a mid-high end computer about 2 years ago. Not sure if that counts as "fixed" for you or not, but there it is.

I haven't read the whole thread, but have gotten far enough in V3 to see this change. (PC = Wizard on both plays). IMHO, it would be better part way between where it was and where it is. It's been a while and maybe I forgot the exact details of how it worked in V1, but I remember it being pretty OP and trivializing many encounters, but it feels a bit too restricted now. I'd like to see a single cast per encounter, but let you pick any spell of the given level at the time you cast, instead of having to pick the spell on level up. That way you could pick your strategy to fit each unique fight, but it wouldn't be like V1 days, which I feel did need to be dialled back somewhat.

BTW, for any fans of the original Fallouts, you might enjoy Wasteland 2 by inXile. It's in the spiritual chain of: Wasteland 1 -> Fallout 1&2 -> Wasteland 2 (even though there are different companies in the mix there, a lot of folks consider that the chain of succession). Overall I wouldn't rate it quite in PoE's calibre of CRPG, but it's still a good solid fun game, and I enjoyed playing through it. It has a nice post-apocalyptic vibe to it similar to the older Wasteland's. Decent squad level tactical combat.

9/10 "amazing" from igcritic: http://igcritic.com/pillars-of-eternity-the-white-march-part-2-review/

"Objectively and literally"? Disagreed! Maybe subjectively. To my eyes, PoE is a more beautiful game than any of those you mention. Some are "impressive" in terms of having a lot of post-processing shaders and so forth, but fancy shaders do not artistic beauty make. "Solid" seriously undersells the PoE art, IMHO. I struggle to think of another game I've found as beautiful to behold. I recall walking through some of the PoE areas such as in my first play through and thinking, "That is the most gorgeous CRPG dungeon I've ever seen." And I've been playing CRPGs since this one was brand new, so I've seen a few.

It's not that we think "camping supplies are limited" if you're willing to charge off back to an inn every other fight... it's that we don't consider that style of play much fun. So why do it, if it's not fun? The camp mechanic is clearly there to guide you into a rest-limited play style while not absolutely enforcing it, which would have had people screaming bloody murder. Camps are limited in a RP sense, not in a pure mechanical sense. Sure, you can keep running back for more camping supplies. But that's not very much fun, is it? You end up seriously OP for most fights that way, even on PoD difficulty. So why do it? I've found it more fun to start with the 2 camps, and try to get through a whole area on just those and any others I find along the way. Then you get into these really fun scrapes where you're just trying to finish out the area with your tanks already beat to hell, and 90% of your spells and abilities already expended. You end up scouting the next fight in stealth mode to work out whether you can take that group in your party's current battle-weary state, so eeking a little more mileage out of your last camp. You end up paying attention to the environmental cues. That pile of bones and blood might mean a nasty fight in the next room, so maybe this is a good place to rest up. PoE comes alive when you don't minmax it within an inch of its life. Everyone gets to play in their own way, but I've found it more fun to play the game, not play the system.

I've been appreciating some of the textual descriptions of items (unique swords, armor, etc) and the spots you can click in certain areas to get textual descriptions to enhance your mental imagery of that locale in ways graphics alone cannot convey. Both are optional to read of course, but I like them. It adds to the feeling that the whole world has a well formed history, when even weapons have their own story to tell. I agree with some people above that "verbiage for the sake of verbiage" isn't good, but I also don't want to see too much pandering to the attention-deficit crowd or the folks who believe in-game writing should be at the grade-school level. There are plenty of other genres for that, including other sub-genres of CRPGs such as the Diablo style games. I likes me some mindless hack-and-slash too, but variety is good, and variety was teetering on the brink of extinction for a while. I appreciate that Obsidian didn't chase that trend too far. When the vast majority modern games don't demand more than a gnat-like attention span of the player, it's nice to have a few left that reward reading. Spiderweb Software are also doing some nice literary games. Their graphics are 80's oldschool, but the writing is well done.

Cool. If you have any way to pass along the message "nice work" to said anonymous singer, please do . Nice composition work too: I'm a sucker for that style. That kind of detail (lyrics matching in-game events as a bard might do to deliver news) is the kind of little detail that makes worlds like PoE come alive. I see it a lot in the artwork too: lots of things that might have been left out or not bothered with in a lesser game, but someone put that extra effort into. I discovered that if you pause the game the music keeps playing but all the voices shut up, so you can listen to the music on its own.

I've just gotten to the first WM area and have started to explore a bit. I hadn't experienced any of the new expansion music yet before tonight. I'm digging it. I've heard only a little of it so far, but I was particularly struck by the music in

I haven't gotten far enough into WM yet to have seen the pure combat vs story driven combat thing folks are talking about above, but IMHO it's OK to have occasional bits of hack-n-slashery. I like primarily story driven games, but for example the are sometimes nice for those evenings I don't want to keep all the plot points straight in my head, but rather just go beat some stuff up for an hour before heading off to bed. Then the next night I can go back to the story again, and it's there waiting for me. It's a good mixture, in my view. I like about a 80/20 ratio, but of course that's in the eye of the beholder.

I'm not sure if you're talking about some site's vote or an ad-hoc thing in this thread, but yeah, it's certainly the best game of 2015 in my view. As well as, uhh... many of the prior years as well, come to think of it . I'm playing through WM1 now, and it's a real joy to have more of this world to explore, more companions to meet, more music to enjoy, etc... I'm not sure how well WM sold: somehow I have the feeling it wasn't very well known in the general gaming community compared to the base game. I learned about it only because I got the Kickstarter email and was generally paying attention after PoE was so good. I sure hope it sells well though, because I want producing more sequels, and expansions to sequels, and sequels to sequels, and prequels to sequels to prequels, to be a viable business model. It's always tricky when you don't have a big marketing budget to work with. There's a core group of RPG lovers who'll go out of their way to find your stuff, but your average gamer isn't too aware of things that don't have huge marketing muscle behind them.

It only allows you to take items from the stash in towns or when resting, but still allows you to put items in the stash. Ah, I see. Seems like it should be symmetric. Then it'd be what people are asking for, and that makes sense anyway: if you can't get to a chest to take stuff out, you also can't put stuff in.

I was away from the game since V1, and started a new game at V3.01. I'm sure if I micro-analysed it I'd find changes I like and others I don't, but stepping back from the details and looking at the big picture, I think V3 is much better than V1, and the game is more fun now. In V1 I felt combat was one of the weaker elements of the game, but it's come into its own (at least on PoD). Some absurdly OP abilities got nerfed, some previous weak things I never bothered with, I now use (such as the pre-fight drugs for example). I might be in the minority, but I like the segregation of spells and abilities into per-rest and per-encounter. My memory is fuzzy on the details, but I think there are more tooltips and info in the UI now too? On the balance I like the changes, although I'm sure not every last one. I still feel the difficulties are misnamed and off-by-one: PoD is Hard, Hard=Normal, Normal=Easy, and there should be a true PoD above the current one. But so far I'm happy with the current PoD (I'm playing non-minmax, non-restspam, and it's just about right for me at least up through the end of Act 1).

In the difficulty settings there is an option you can un-check for "accessing the stash from anywhere". I don't know exactly what it does since I've never tried it, but from the name, it sounds like it might restrict stash access to inns or locations where you conceivably would have a big old chest to store things, and not let you access it from dungeons and such. Maybe that's similar to what some folks want to see?

I finished the pre-expansion game in V1 days, and decided I'd get more out of the White March experience starting a new game. You could probably do it either way, but from what I've been hearing, WM is ideally started around char level 7. It has some scaling built in if you start it later, but I'm not sure how that works (e.g, is there just one step from "low" to "high", or what?) Depending on how long ago you played, PoD might be a little harder now. There have been balance changes since I played at V1 which IMHO make combat more enjoyable now, such as monsters being more willing to break engagement and move around the battlefield, meaning you have to use more crowd-control to protect your frail characters. Conceivably you still might find it too easy, but it's improved since V1 IMHO. I'm playing on PoD now, currently at the end of Act 1, and PoD feels just about right for me (meaning I can imagine it being too easy for some other folks - I think there should be another level above PoD for expert players who memorize all the stats and such). There are some non-risky fights on PoD, but also some that I have to really scramble to survive, and some in the middle. My recommendation for getting the most out of it is to play along with the camping mechanic. E.g, don't rest for every single fight, but take your 2 camps and try to get as far into places as you possibly can, conserving resources. Much fun to be had that way: sometimes you push on for that last fight, unsure if you're going to survive it, to be rewarded by another camping supply in a chest after you win, and you get to carry on further into the dungeon. Sometimes you start fights low on health and spells, only to have an "oh **#@" moment when the fight turns uglier than you planned on, and you have to improvise with what you have left. It can be fun.

I didn't use G.M. in my first play-through, but I am taking her along now on my second, and enjoying it so far. She's certainly something different and outside stereotypical RPG characters. It's working for me. Generally speaking, I think the characters and their dialog options with the PC really add richness and depth to this game. They make the world less bland, and it feels like it has real people of all sorts with their own issues and troubles and goals. I agree the Sagani sub-story is great too, and I like most of the voice acting behind the story-NPCs.

I liked and appreciated D:OS, but artistically, PoE is a far superior game, less cartoony and more ... well, just beautiful. I'd say it's one of, if not the most artistically amazing games I've ever encountered. There are many games out there which are impressive in terms of fancy postprocessing effects dripping with lens flares and motion blur and whatever, but very few I'd really call beautiful. PoE is that. It's akin to a master's painting you get to explore, the next corner always holding something astonishing and lovely. The closer you look at it, the more little details you see. I'm not even sure how they pulled this off with the small team they have. It's a bit amazing to me.

I found it just about right. The only bits I didn't read were the books you find in drawers strewn around various places. I did read and mostly enjoyed the soul stories, and the available character interactions. I suppose if you just wanted the combat without the story and literary bits of world-building, you could ignore or skim most of it, but for me it's part of what it means for a game to be an RPG. The first RPG-ish games I played in the 1970's had no graphics at all. They were purely text, and you interacted with them in simple verb-noun text in return.

Yeah! I've been playing V3 on PoD recently after not playing since V1, and that's my experience too. A lot of fights in V1 felt like just "phoning it in" - there was no challenge, no risk, nothing much to worry about. They felt like filler in between occasional huge difficulty spikes, and honestly got a little tedious after a while. Now in V3, a high percentage of the fights I've had have been fun. I haven't even minded the intermittent low-risk fights with smaller groups of enemies. When possible I save those until my party is low on supplies, spells, and health. Then I clean up as many smaller groups as I can before finally resting.

I've noticed this tendency in my V3 run so far too, and I like it. I feel it makes for less one-dimensional play and more positionally dynamic battles than in the V1 days. Keep in mind that casters get some excellent defensive and CC capabilities. I play PC=Wiz, and in V1 I was able to get through the game building him up as almost pure prickly offence. In V3, I'm finding that I have to be more balanced, taking some defensive skills like veil and loading up on defence and crowd-control spells. Different CC is suited to different kinds of monsters. Other classes can help a lot too. I like building up fighter's knockdown. It isn't "great" in and of itself, but if there's a troublesome bad guy taking an interest in your casters, Eder can knock it on its keister for a while . There are other such CC abilities that other classes add to the mix - even some pets IIRC. Add it all together, and you can find strategies for almost any fight. Just not the same strategy for every fight.

To my way of viewing single player CRPGs, "balance" isn't about this-class vs that-class, it's about the player vs the game world. I don't need or want all the classes to feel similar in power or abilities. I'm cool if a squishy wizard would be totally unable to solo the game, because for all his AoE firepower there are no adequate defensive spells and he'll die quickly when he gets beat on. I'm cool if a studly tank can't solo it either, because for all his damage-soaking tankiness he runs out of stamina or whatever before he can singlehandedly beat everybody in a big crowd. But together, the tank can keep bad guys off the caster, and the caster can damage them from afar, and they can do something as a team that neither alone could do. Ditto when you add in the other kinds of classes to the mix. That kind of inter-class synergy is what I like about CRPGs, and it requires there not be too much overlap between classes, or everything becomes nondescript and grey. I want my party taken as a whole to feel balanced with what the game world throws at me. I feel the V1 PoE fell down a little there in some ways, with quite a few overpowered features and abilities. From what I've seen of V3 so far, it feels better for this kind of balance, especially on PoD.

I appreciate what they were trying to do with the camping mechanism, and I consider it a partial success. It doesn't perfectly capture how I might want it to work, but I think it's a real improvement on rest-spam mechanics. I'm playing V3 on PoD now, and I've had some really fun engagements by going with the flow the game guides me into. It's a fun challenge to see how far into a dungeon I can dive with what's on my back + whatever I find along the way. Last night I encountered a nasty fight when my party was already run ragged from a long stint of exploration. Eder was down to 1/3 of his total health, Kana around 1/2, my PC wizard and Durance both about 1/3 of their total spells remaining. The fight turned a lot nastier than I estimated, and dang if that wasn't a whole lot of fun. I had to fight tooth and nail and scrape together every possible resource I had left to survive the fight. At the end Eder had 18 (!) health left out of 600-ish, I had zero spells left in the whole party, and had burned through about every potion I had. But every party member survived, Eder only by withdrawing around a corner in the final 30 seconds of battle so he didn't get beat on any more. That was maybe the most fun I've ever had in a PoE battle. Without the game gently guiding me into this play style, would I have experienced that? I doubt it. So yeah, I don't think the mechanic is perfect or anything, but I appreciate that they were trying to do something to improve the way a lot of prior CRPGs have worked. I hope they keep and refine the idea going forward, or at least substitute something akin to it. It's not perfect, but there are much worse things they could have done.