gkathellar

1. Generally, you don't have to worry about buying equipment - most of the good stuff is found. There's exceptions to made for the unique pieces of gear at various merchants, but that's just a question of keeping your eye out for things you think look good. 2. Dual sabers are great and can easily carry you through the whole game. 4. Generally, just pay attention to your environment, talk to everyone with a name (other than the gold nameplate guys), and bear in mind that PoE offers a lot of strange or nonviolent solutions to problems.

I'd like to know whether Effigy's Resentment or Gift from the Machine have any story impact, myself - like are they even acknowledged? I generally can't bring myself to get either in a playthrough, but if they don't even earn a mention, I might console them onto the character I'm playing now before importing. And what about Mental Prowess, from the Llengrath encounter?

See topic. I've got a soft spot for psychic kickpunchers, and I'm curious about people's experiences with or thoughts on them.

I can certainly understand the concern about micro, as PoE is heavier on that than most of the IE games were. But it strikes me as solving the wrong problem - PoE's problem was never that the fights had a lot of micro, but that there were a lot of boring, insignificant fights where all of the micro felt like a waste of time. Eliminate those, and it ceases to be a problem. (I will never stop beating this dead horse, shut up.) Bad argument. You were never forced to take 6 and the previous game didn't have the current AI implementation (which we all asked for way back during the POE kickstarter) Combat was balanced around a party of 6, so that's a bit unreasonable.

Was there ever even a stated reason for the change?

Yep yep yep. Chanter's problem was always that it had more abilities than it could actually ever use, long stretches of being forced to rely on mediocre basic attacks, and anti-synergy between its high-level chants and invocations. Getting fewer, lower-level abilities with a chanter isn't even a penalty. It's an action economy thing: having more abilities than you can use doesn't make you stronger. As a result, it's almost always best to take either one class with lots of good actives and one with lots of good passives, or two classes that have a few strong actives but not enough to get through a whole fight. Druid and wizard have such focused play styles that you can't really multiclass to perform better in those roles - you can, however, add wizard or druid to another class to complement its playstyle.

He's dead, Jim.

I've been replaying over the last few days, and I've not encountered any sort of blurring or graphical bugs. Looks to me pretty much exactly as it did when I played it a couple of years ago. My experience is anecdotal, of course.

Creed? CREED? CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED *ahem* ... woops, wrong fandom

I really don't like this attitude of "other games have buggy launches, so it's not that bad". As a big fan of Obsidian, I'm no stranger to horribly buggy releases. But I hope that they realize that this reputation is not a good one to have. Especially now that they are pushing crowdfunding and pre-ordering so hard. Deadfire is the first and last Obsidian game I will buy before the several months of patching that are always needed for each one of their games. I know, I should've known better, but I loved PoE1 so much I couldn't resist. It's not just an Obsidian thing - horrifically buggy releases is becoming the new normal at the Triple A level, so it's just sort of normalized. Me, I blame Skyrim's widespread popularity combined with the Ubisoft Game Mill. Obsidian was known for this in the past, yeah, but I think at this point it's just standard industry practice to have bad QA.

Obligatory, really.

Those elements are definitely there, but I think there's a mix of inspirations in all of them. Old Vailia and the Republics don't map specifically to Italy so much as the old Mediterranean powers in general, complete with Turkish and North African influences. Aedyr is mostly England but looks to have some French and German influences as well, at least to my eyes (the Dyrwood likewise has some Germanic/Central European elements). Eir Glanfath is a bunch of Welsh psychic Sioux elves. In the White That Wends, Sagani's people have some Inuit elements, but the pale elves we encounter from that region are harder to place. Rauatai strikes me as Spanish and Portugese as much as Polynesian, and Kana pretty explicitly states that it's going through some social convulsions we'd recognize in the modern developed world. Ixamitl seems like a mashup of Central American (certainly reflected in the naming) imagery and other stuff from all over. Deadfire and the Living Lands strike me as more distinctly fantastical.

Since when was being able to talk down the bad guy a prerequisite for being a CRPG? Should I have been able to talk down Sarevok, murderous fanatic that he was, in BG1? Or Irenicus, a man willing to sacrifice his soul, his life, and everything he loved for power, in BG2? Yes, Fallout 1 famously allowed you to do it, but only if you had access to very specific information which happened to undermine the viability of the villain's thesis - there was no persuading him or getting him to "see the light," because that's not how people work. PS:T let you avoid a fight only by way of threatening to kill yourself and take the villain with you. After 2000 years, Thaos knows what he believes. You're not going to change his mind.

Right, the problem isn't that the combat in Pillars is bad: when it's hard boss-fight kinda stuff, it's really cool, with chokepoints and lures and timing and a whole bunch of things to pay attention to. But because the combat is intricate and TTRPG-esque, it's a really bad system for fighting trash mobs, because you have to pay way too much attention to fights that are entirely trivial and accomplish nothing. At least in BG and IWD when the combat was easy you could basically just click the things and watch them explode and get a little something for your trouble and then get back to the interesting things you were doing. In PoE that's just systematically not the case, and the answer here is and should always have been not having trash mobs. But then I've been saying this since the Backer Beta.

PF would be an absolutely godawful choice, considering that PoE makes many design decisions wholly to avert things found in D&D. Healing spells, teleportation, resurrection, divination - all are things PoE goes out of its way to avoid. Eora needs either a rules-lite game or something crunchy and original to it. I'd be interested in seeing how such a system would resolve PoE's rather complex attack resolution and round mechanics. A direct translation could easily dip into Exalted levels of obnoxious complexity.

Come on, OP. If you want to pull a brimsurfer, you've gotta take it seriously. Troll smarter, not harder.

It's been said that fighting with a pair of swords is one of the quickest ways to get both you and your opponent killed simultaneously. I guess that's pretty much how this build works, eh?

"You must be this tall to troll."

Mind, there are a couple of Superb shirts - Gwisk Glas, from the Vithrak bounty; Vengiatta Rugis from the Adra Dragon's hoard; Wayfarer's Hide, from Flames That Whisper; and Golden Scale, from Cragholdt Bluffs. So, it's not nothing. Just ... almost nothing.

I hear you, but in fairness, Superb is a lot less useful on armor than it is on weapons or shields.

Two things to bear in mind. (a)PoE's cutscenes render in real-time. That means the game engine is having the models actively use a walk animation, rather than playing a movie. (b) IEMod already figured out how to do a walk toggle, so it's clearly pretty easy to do.

Honestly, this is a pretty good way to look at it. Your Resolve lets you focus more on the battle and on keeping your defenses up, instead of jumping at things. You're able to keep your nerve as well as someone who's seen many more battles than you actually have. Also the spiritual forcefields.

Since the animations already exist, and they could just nab the button UI from IEMod without real problems, I don't see why asking for this bothers everyone. It's a reasonable request, IMO.

IIRC, Critical Focus also doesn't stack with either Dire Blessing or Merciless Gaze, so it caps out at 85%.

Really, while there's nothing inherently wrong with having a lighting system in place, I think it risks being a tacked-on inconvenience unless it's fundamental to and inseparable from a game's general exploration mechanics. The IE games would not have been improved by a lighting system, due to the style and structure of their dungeons. Neither, I think, would PoE.