gkathellar

I might have done that.

Having it as a magic item property is silly. Discuss.

QFT. I'm back on the boards partly to motivate myself to do another playthrough. I almost tried after WM1, but then I saw Twin Shot and became despondent.

Do people say that? Why? Yeah, because Gandalf isn't a 5th-level magic user - he and the other wizards are maiar, immortal spirits that wear power the way you and I wear skin. They're in the same class of being as the Balrog, or Sauron. The whole squishy D&D wizard is a squishy D&D invention. LotR wizards don't bother with anything heavier than robes because they are already stronger than steel. The Balrog wouldn't have cared much - he was just doing his thing trying to kill everyone. That all with the ring is Sauron's business. Balrogs answer to their own boss, and he answers directly to Morgoth.

Anecdotally, I think light armor on a tank monk is kind of a bad idea at low levels, and a perfectly reasonable choice at high ones where it has reasonable DR and you have lots more Endurance. Back in 1.x, I ran a tanky monk in heavy armor, but switched to that red suit of padded leather from the Adra Dragon's hoard before the end of the game. It worked fine, although obviously that armor was superb and so my DR was still pretty decent, and it was in an earlier version of the game - Durgan-forged gear, among other things, kinda incentivizes heavier armor.

Not bad, then. Does Second Chance stack with Unbroken or whatever the Fighter ability is called these days? I know it didn't used to.

Is it actually any good, or does one just get it for the evulz?

I did his quest, he still refused it. Typical of him, really. He's got a god to kill. Leaves a guy kinda busy, you know?

I dunno, I never recall having the same kind of balls-out-crazy moments of my characters taking the long way around in BG that I've had in pillars. Say what you will about X-Com operatives' seemingly total inability to go around environmental hazards - at least they can find the shortest path from point A to point B.

I agree - adding option after option ad naseum - changes the game from a vision of the developers into Monty Halls dial your own game any way you wish - no rules that can't be broken no wish that can't be met - no point in even attempting no theme to be found Anyway, it's what the console/modding is for - and what the console/modding already accomplishes.

For the same reason you don't allow players a set of dials for every other mechanic - the game was intended to be played in one of several ways, and putting every aspect of gameplay on individual player preference does nothing for that intent. Obsidian has no vested interest in working on something like this. To some degree, it also undermines Obsidian's ability to predict and control the end-user experience to ensure a degree of quality, and introduces more room for people to have a stupid (not easy or hard, just stupid) play experience. I'm not passing categorical judgment on the notion, mind - I play BG2 with the tweakpack installed, and I make choices about my play experience in so doing. Nor am I hugely impressed with Obsidian's design sensibilities regarding PoE. Even so, there's something to be said for trusting the developers to know what they're doing, and playing the game as it's given to you, working within mechanical limitations that force you to approach things in a particular way. I can see the argument either way, so it's not something I'm deeply invested in being right about, but that's my point.

Yeah, so it's wrong.

I suggest taking less damage. CC is still king here, although less so than it used to be due to immunity rules that make sense in 1/4 cases. Clearly you are and you do, though, since there are plenty of people telling you that health loss is manageable on PotD without tons of backtracking. That's a consensus I agree with - I don't remember ever needing more supplies than the game gave me on a PotD playthrough. For the record, I'm not a fan of the supplies mechanic. It could be better, and it could be worse, but I think it lends itself to an overall problem Pillars has with encounter balance vs. adventure/strategic balance. That's not an easy problem to solve in any game that tries to use both at once, but it is what it is. The problem here is that you're only seeing tactical difficulty as legitimate, and disregarding the fact that strategic difficulty is intended as a fundamental part of the game. You are backtracking a lot because you are not very good at managing the game's strategic element, which its design places a lot of emphasis on. There are problems with the way Pillars does this - namely, the fact that players can hugely increase their per-encounter power by "going nova" and disregarding the strategic, to which one's main disincentive to doing this is the inconvenience you're complaining about - but the strategic element is there and that's ultimately what you're bumping up against. Woe is you, yo. On the contrary, it'd make such a dungeon necessarily challenging, and require careful, meticulous play. Actually, a situation you can absolutely get yourself into if you climb down the sacrificial pit in the Endless Paths. This is how difficulty works - it forces you to circumvent challenges that you didn't necessarily believe could be circumvented. The main thing is that you can rest far less often by playing well, and that you seem convinced that this isn't the case. Try to understand: "capable of beating PotD with lots of rest-spamming" is not equivalent to "really good at Pillars." I ... what? Break that down for me. Running out of camping supplies isn't realistic? Not that realism would be a justification, mind. But the mechanic's dressing fits what it accomplishes just fine, I think. inorite There's a point at which presenting options negates the entire concept that games are designed with rules, and that players proceed to work within those rules.

Honestly I think it's best not to ask, or even engage directly. Exactly. Do Not Feed the Troll. FTFY

I would argue that other rules of the universe are clearly different because the world is structured in such a way that's close to impossible in ours. Right, but here's the thing: when the changes to reality's underlying rules cause a fictional universe to become totally foreign to our own experience, we lose the ability to apply that experience in any reasonable way. A setting's creator needs to make departures from reality (relatively) clear-cut, or else the setting becomes so totally unfamiliar that literally any sequence of events would make sense within its context. If somebody wants to say, "oh, and in this fictional universe, objects are formed out of the dream images of primal totems, instead of molecules, and therefore points X, Y, and Z are different," great, that's fine - but it shouldn't be a reason to assume A through W are also suspect. If it is, we got us a varmint problem. Specifically with regards to Eora, this means that while there are wizards and monsters and junk, I feel I should generally be able to expect that universe to behave like our own unless otherwise stated. Food rots, things fall when you drop them, people bleed when they are cut, and so on - these are things we expect to be true, and when they're not true, we demand explanations for them. If these things don't make sense in the context of what we're familiar with, there must be internally consistent reasons why they make sense in the context of PoE's universe.

Since all spells are interchangeable and the limit to (uses)/(whatever) is for all spells of a given level rather than a particular configuration of spells-to-slots chosen when resting, they're pretty clearly neither memorized nor forgotten.

Just so. Vancian magic was based on the notion that the heavy lifting of a spell - the calculations and mental work that magic actually uses - are much too complicated to do on the fly. As a result, spellcasters in AD&D learned to hold a spell in their brain as something in the space between "captured mental image of a spell" and "charged spell held inside the cranium for later release." Mages would put their spells together each day by working through the formulas in their spellbook, while priests would petition a god to place the spell in their memory via divine inspiration. In either case, once a spell was cast, it was forgotten and needed to be replaced in the caster's mind. This is not what PoE's casters do. Wizards cast spells out of whatever book they have immediately in their hand. Priests just know all of their spells, period. That's not Vancian.

You actually did that? You're a horrible, horrible person. I do my damnedest. XD

Considering that a Godlike Watcher can disguise themselves with a hood for plot convenience reasons at one point in the game, this is a reasonable request.

Well it is more or less using Vancian magic from D&D 5e That's not actually Vancian magic, though.

Yeah, but we know eatin' souls en masse doesn't make you a god because the Watcher can do exactly this in Heritage Hill, and all they get for their trouble is +1 might and an endurance multiplier.

It didn't stick to a Vancian magic system for even a single class, so I don't really know how to answer the question. Wizards definitely take inspiration from Vancian magic, but only indirectly, as the immediate precedent for PoE's wizard is D&D3E's Spirit Shaman. And that's 1/11 classes - none of the others are even vaguely Vancian. Now, if I'm right in thinking that the OP is actually asking how people feel about resting to replenish spells, then I am somewhat ambivalent. The spell-levels thing doesn't really come into it, since most MP-based systems accomplish exactly the same thing - so really, it just leads to another question about per-encounter spells. And should PoE have been mostly per-encounter? Yes, yes it should have been. Cipher and monk are a lot more interesting than the other classes for a reason.

Yeah, exactly. Attempting to solve problems by creating new problems is the PoE team's whole M.O. It shouldn't be surprising at this point.

Emphasis mine. Omnipotent? Say what? As is clear from the Alpine Dragon, the Adra Dragon was strong, but not improbably so for a member of her species. She had powers of astral projection, telepathy, and possession, but that's a far cry from being an intangible spiritual construct with ill-defined but generally tremendous influence on the physical plane, as the gods are. And he herself noted that once the Adra ran out, she'd starve to death like any other animal that ran out of food.

Come on, Elric, don't you know that increasing the power gap between martials and casters is the main goal of patches at this point?