gkathellar

I absolutely disagree. Even before 2.0, a speedrunner soloed the game on PotD with a rogue that only got up to level 9 by the Thaos fight. The figurine nerf hurts, sure, but the change to perception is wonderful for rogues. A full party wouldn't be able to skip as much content, but they'd also be able to do more.

I'm curious - do they effect the durations of spells on crit?

Yeah, they're pretty solid now. Pets in particular got a nice boost for 2.0, and the accuracy bonus from perception really helps bring the class together.

You need 15 to get through WM. Rogues start with +2. Background of +1. Resting bonus of +2. 10 points. 15. I'm not trying to make any kind of point about this, but I'm pretty sure I've got basic arithmetic down.

Bug. Odd one, too. But hey, at least it doesn't cause some kind of infinite recursive self-damage loop.

Really? No character could open them without the gloves or only a max mechanic build could open them? It might be possible if you spend virtually all of your skill points in mechanics. Let's see ... a rogue with a +1 mechanics background would only need to reach a true value of 12. You can get a +2 resting bonus, so that's a true value of 10. So that's ... 55 skill points, right? You have that many by 10th level, with 5 points to spare. That's still a lot of points, requires a specific class, and requires one of like 2-3 backgrounds. So it's pretty prohibitive, to be fair.

So, yes. You absolutely can't dump perception anymore, and you can get quite a lot of mileage out of it.

Hehehe. But seriously, they could stand to make non-quest and non-bestiary XP less totally pointless. 10-25 XP for exploration (and exploration being defined almost exclusively as "entering areas," to a lesser degree) and 5-60 XP for mechanics checks is almost insulting. "Sure, we'll give you guys what you want, just not in any meaningful way."

I dunno if I agree, but I can see where you're coming from. What might be cool is an E6-esque system, where levels were capped but experience was not, and could be spent to buy certain minor character bonuses after they reached max level.

There are plenty of ways they already do benefit: Int gives you AoE size and linger duration, Perception gives you accuracy on offensive phrases, and Might affects the damage of the (small number of) damage phrases. I could stand to see Dexterity affect the ratio of phrase:linger, and a greater variety of better phrases, but aside from that, I think the attribute interactions are fine. This isn't really the big problem with Chanters, anyway. Rather, the main issue is and has been that higher-level invocations are harder to access in combat, and that higher level phrases decrease your ability to access any invocations whatsoever. Effectively, a chanter is incentivized not to use the abilities they gain as they level up. That's bad.

This is largely just a result of the way XP cost per level up scales. Since it only takes 1,000 more XP for each level than it did for the prior ones, the value of the XP rewards decreases pretty gradually, and the pace you gain levels at in areas you're too strong for isn't much decreased. Basically, the 3E D&D-esque experience chart works pretty well for linear games or games where a single level doesn't matter as much, but pretty poorly for games with a more open world or games where a single level makes a huge impact on performance (as it sometimes does in PoE).

Well I've never attempted to do so (and never progressed much into Act 3 so far) does it really become a serious drain if you ignore it or just an inconvenience that you think should be avoidable - it would seem to me that if you weren't sinking all that gold into repairing things that your coffers would be overflowing anyway and a small drain would be negligible. I very much doubt it's ever a serious drain, but I just find it strange that Josh cited players who hate strongholds as an explanation for it being bare bones, but at the same tim there's no way to avoid it outright.

Although I would concede the point in the case of Druids, whose spell supply is limited, Chanters can sing forever. Case 1, normal int (I'm using random numbers here) : - 100 damage over 20 seconds Song over ? Chant again for 20 seconds : - 100 damage over 20 seconds Case 2, godlike int (again random numbers) : - 200 damage over 40 seconds Now unless I am sorely mistaken, you get the very same damage output. Therefore, for Chanters, I put forth that Int doesn't increase Chant damage. One could argue in favour of a catastrophic scenario whereby your Chanter gets gibbed, so a longer duration Chant means while your Chanter is down, you'll get more damage done. But then, that seems situational to me, and that will not happen if you allocate these Int points to Resolve and Constitution. Edit: actually scratch that, I think the song's debuff is applied continually over its duration, not once as a long-lasting effect, so when your Chanter goes down, regardless of Int, the debuff wears off. That assumes your Chant just uses that single phrase. The whole point of Int for a Chanter is that it increases the chant's linger duration, allowing you to use two chants at once.

It's not like there's an "Abdicate" button anywhere on the Stronghold interface.

inorite? The whole setup in Gilded Vale really seemed like it was leading to that. The two should really have been blended together. Josh's argument is logical if you look it from point that they didn't had enough resources to polish every feature in the game and as Stronghold turn out to be much more difficult to implement than they expected, so when they had to look features that they don't polish they probably had bias to look reasons not to polish Stronghold (as they didn't really have resource to do that anyway), which lead them notice anti-stronghold faction much more than they noticed other anti-factions (not including anti-romance) and use that as rationale why it would be wasteful to put resources in the stronghold. Their original concepts for stronghold show that they planned to make it much more interactive than what it become at end. As Tim seemed to have planned whole own mini-game around it. Similarly crafting, skills, resting and cooking become much simpler than what their original plans for them were. Right, I get all of that. What I'm saying is strange is that they made it simplistic and bare-bones, but didn't make it possible to ignore. Caed Nua will actively drain your resources even if you have nothing to do with it. You'd think that if it was minimalist and they knew it was minimalist, and they knew some players would dislike it, they would have made it possible to ignore following the first quest with Maerwald.

I agree for the most part altho there may be some times when you might want to do so for RP reasons - In BG for instance Imoen might sneak away and work on her pilfering skills while not under the watchful eye of her Paladin party leader who frowns on such behavior or then there's Kahlid who sometimes walks off in a fog and enters a random house someplace never to be seen again... Ah, yes, Khalid and his odd tendency to leave the party while he's stuck somewhere that he can't talk to the PC to take Jaheira with him. How strange of him!

Are there actually enough superb ranged weapons in the game to deck them out, in the end?

I wouldn't expect it to change. It is, to the best of my understanding, built into the way areas load.

Oh, okay, during the beta. That explains my confusion. I take your point, and I appreciate it.

This was really never a thing in non-trivial fights, except at the farthest end of optimization. C'mon, man, people are still complaining about that. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now.

Have you explored the whole level and talked to all of the spirits on it? There's a very specific oath you need to recite, and you can't do it with incomplete information.

Why would you want less information to be available to people? I get that it's not of direct utility to you, but it is to some folks, and it's not like all of what you're asking for isn't there already.

A party of 6 chanters might have almost as much micro as a whole character of any other class.

I think that's very unlikely to ever happen as part of the base game, but it's already a feature in the IEMod, for those who care. Doesn't mean it's not worth debating, if only for the sake of inquiry. I'd like it if they could start by making the per-encounter abilities of non-casters more interesting. Casters have plenty of abilities - they're called "spells," and they encompass a huge majority of the interesting abilities in the game. Yes, I will keep beating this dead horse forever. I will agree that there do need to be more talents that are actually of interest to casters; in addition, the terribly lackluster per-rest abilities attached to favored weapon priest talents need to be either much better, or per-encounter. As it is, Skaen's is far and away the best, and the others are all kind of crappy.

IIRC, someone ran a party of 6 barbarians prior to 2.0, and was having a blast. Apparently the enemy disintegrated so quickly that the lack of defense didn't matter.