gkathellar

The change to Sanguine Plate makes Retaliation builds dependent on getting Hiro's Cloak. ... because this game needed moar rng amirite?

It's ... okay. Clearly the writers weren't super-thorough, because there are a lot of things they missed. There's also no list of non-random item locations, which is just like wat

The hell are they changing Sanguine Plate for? QFT.

Right?! Blue and yellow with shark teeth? Practically identical. Four feet tall and covered with a thick pelt? Meh, almost can't tell the difference. White-haired and slender? Good god, how could I have confused it for one of my own?

Luckmann is a troll. This is not something he has tried to hide. Whether or not he's actually an a**hole is sort of besides the point. Whether or not he believes the garbage he spews on this subject has nothing to do with the reason he spews it. DNFT. But he said no, no, no.

It made you die all the time, because you sacrificed the main advantage of being a ranged combatant.

That's no moon.

It reminds me of "stunt" rules from PnP games, where you get points for being awesome. Do an awesome thing, get some points. Spend some points, use a superpower. The other thing it brings to mind is Ys: Memories of Celceta, an action game which uses a two-tiered system of the same type. Regular attacks generate mana for skills. Skills build up your super meter. I love that kind of thing, where taking one action builds up your ability to take other actions. It results in very dynamic play, where you utilize every trick the character has available to them, and it gives play a rhythm of sorts. I do like spell level/memorization systems, but I could stand to see them use this sort of action progression in combination with it - perhaps taking inspiration from D&D's Crusader class,

Aside from the death of a god, I don't really see any parallels. To be honest, I don't really see any resemblance whatsoever between Norse myth and PoE's divine hierarchy. I guess you could argue that Magran is sort of distantly Loki-esque, if you squint and are blind.

My definition has refined over the years. When I was 12 it would have been any game that allowed me to level up and distribute stat points. Today, my expectations are much higher. At it's most basic state, a role playing game has to let me do what I want when I want. It has to provide a living, interactive world that lets me define my character through my actions. Don't get me wrong, I can still appreciate an old school RPG and I still consider them as such. I'll fire up a JRPG or CRPG and have a good time, but they are shallow, story-driven experiences. They, like this game, toss you into a rail car and give you a shove with a "HAVE FUN!". I do, but it's not the grand RPG experience I've come to appreciate. Okay, cause see, I thought a roleplaying game was a game where you play a role.

I've been thinking of starting a solo triple crown run with a druid, and I'm looking for suggestions. I haven't used druids much since the beta, and I've only used tank characters in a solo environment, so any input would be useful. In terms of race, I'm thinking probably Wood Elf, Aumauauauaua, Moonlike ... I dunno. Like I said, any input. For the attribute spread, max Int/Might and minimum Perception are obvious, but I'm not sure whether to bother with Con and Dex. I hear Fast Runner or whatever it's called is good for lighter characters in solo play, as well as Deep Pockets. Is that accurate? Aside from that, should I just stick to the elemental damage bonus talents? And obviously spiritshift trails off pretty quickly, but since it's supposedly good at early levels: what's a reliable shift to start with?

I'm trying to figure out what your definition of role-playing is, but I'm coming up empty.

The word "god" is unhelpful in this context, because it doesn't seem to mean anything besides, "thing with superpowers."

If you're committed to going two-handed, you should definitely grab Zealous Accuracy - there's even an argument for taking it as a tanky solo paladin. 6 accuracy is nothing to sneeze at. But I'd stay away from the critical boosting talent. It's not worth much on this type of character, especially since "hits to crits" works as an extension of the normal Accuracy system.

You just can't stop yourself, huh?

(a) 30 accuracy vs 25 accuracy (b) Fighters actually have offensive things to invest in. © Tanking without Cautious Attack lol

It's not a problem. Just a reality of the genre. In a game like this, an overall time limit serves mainly to constrain play style and discourage meticulousness and exploration. There are games where time limits work. Usually that's because the time limit isn't just tacked on, but is a fundamental part of the game. This isn't one of them. Now, maybe with a lot of thought, you could adapt PoE into something Atelier or Persona-esque (with respect to time use, anyway), using set units of time that progress based on particular actions taken). That might work. But it'd require more than just slapping on a clock and calling it a day.

This is quite a claim to be making without any justification. Gods in D&D are super-complicated, but the short version is that they're sentient agglomerations of concepts and beliefs, and their class of entity has existed nearly as long as the Planes. More important for practical purposes, they're about as far up the totem pole as you can go before the entities you're dealing with are simply incomprehensible.

You summarize the core themes and influences quite nicely. I would add one thing: I think animancy is not necessarily just a proxy for controversial technologies, but for the progress of science and technology in general. Scientific progress is haphazard, misunderstood, and often dangerous (for reasons that have more to do with human nature than the actual attributes of the technology in question). Animancy does present real hazards, but it poses far greater dangers in treading on "the domain of the gods," a domain that Thaos would rather not see trespassed or even known. Just as the work of Galileo or Darwin threatened the religious dogma of their days, animancers developing an understanding of the soul threaten to rediscover what the Engwithans found and worked so hard to conceal. As you say, Thaos is not so much a religious man as an elitist atheist who hates and fears anything even vaguely resembling atheism.

Frankly, FoD is at its absolute worst in PotD, since it's likely to miss. If you're really desperate for retaliation damage, actual retaliation items, Battle-Forged, and/or Mantle of Wreathing Flame are outright better than Fires of Darcozzi Palace. I can totally see Fire helping out up through clearing Caed Nua ... but I've cleared Caed Nua without it on PotD solo, so it's clearly not necessary. And since it's a bad investment in the long run, I don't see much argument for it in the long term. It's one fewer actual defense talent, and the loss of Lay on Hands. ... so? (And of course that's putting aside the loss of Defiant Resolve, which is huge for the game's tougher fights.)

It hinges on what the word is being applied to. In general, whenever somebody says "the gods aren't real" in PoE, what they actually mean is, "they aren't real gods." Which is a pretty significant semantics error, but I guess a sort of understandable one? Although it still comes down to your definition of the word "god." Voltaire said, "If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Clearly, one can suppose just the opposite - if god did exist, it would be necessary to kill him.

It would generally compromise the viability of using scrolls unless Lore is maxed. I do think that a high number in any skill should be rewarded, but I have reservations about the loss of combat utility for players who want to spread their skill points more evenly.

The Engwithan's clearly thought so, bit Iovara shows that not everybody agreed with that. That's the very problem with the robot council controlling the world; it's the Engwithan idea of what is right and proper for a society, and everything else be damned. Iovara came after, IIRC. She didn't see what the world was like without the gods. The entirety of the Engwithan people did this. Think of how hard it is to convince a society of anything. This would be like 100% of America voting for one party. Except they're electing to commit mass suicide. The state of the world had to be absolutely horrendous for them to even consider it. No, the Engwithans had to THINK it was. There have been real-world societies in the past that decided every body else was evil and they needed to conquer/destroy the entirety of the rest of the world to make it less of a hell-hole, they just didn't have the ability to actually do it. I don't recall for certain whether or not their was any implication that giving up their souls to make the gods had to be a 100% voluntary act from every single member of the society; but, judging by what Thaos has been up to with the machines in the modern world, it appears exactly the opposite, ie the machines can do their thing and rip your soul out regardless of what you think or want, indeed without you even knowning they exist. What I'm saying here is that we know that the Engwithans, as a whole, died to make the gods; do we know for certain that every single Engwithan was okay with that? If you judge the state of the real world by what the Pope thought of it in 1120, you'd come to the same kind of conclusion. My point is that we don't actually know what the world was like; we have one picture of it from a group that was clearly not unbiased, and the robot's they made have been continuing that perspective for two thousand years. I think the machines support my point. The introduction to them (coming out of Cilant Lis) shows a group of willing cultists. Thaos has to psyche them up to give in to the device. Also, if they were capable of ripping souls from everyone, then why didn't everyone in the Dyrwood just drop dead, rather than having their children born soulless? I think it's more likely that the machines intercepted the souls, but aren't capable of taking them from unwilling persons. The machine in the city (can't remember the district) would seem to contradict this, but I think it's a different sort of device. It's much larger than the others, being several stories tall, and it turned the population into zombies rather than motionless bodies. The ability to cause varying effects would be useful to Thaos. Furthermore, when you read Thaos' soul after killing him, there's a scene where a vast number of people are gathered in front of the device. Thaos looks at a woman holding her child, and she nods at him. The people are there willingly dying to do this. It seemed more like the people had to be there to activate it to me. The first person to sacrifice themselves their is already dead when you arrive; that person was the source of the biawac that killed the Galfathans at the caravan sight. The second activation that we actually saw ripped the souls out of Calisca and company, in addition to the people that were actually in the ritual. You, the PC, survive and became a Watcher. It seems to me the machine in Defiance Bay is the prototype; remember, it didn't just make zombies, it also held the souls of a whole bunch of people inside it, and you can absorb the power from them if you wish. It's explicitly stated that the Heritage Hill machine is different from the other ones That said, yeah, the Biawac seems to just be the initial activation pulse. It's funny, but Osrya was apparently right about the cause of the legacy - it's a subtle external effect that causes the souls of the newly born to be ... dislocated, I guess you could say?

Sworn Enemy is mainly worthwhile if (a) you've already got a cleric in the party to cast Suppress Affliction, (b) if you've dumped Int so badly that Liberating Exhortation has no value, or © you're playing solo, and need something to bolster your offense to borderline acceptable levels. Otherwise, it's really not worth it. I didn't say it was a smart idea, just that that's what devs suggested. Those stars next to attributes at character creation. Personally I'd rather dump Perception, Constitution even if it means having my paladin with a reaching weapon. A Darcozzi might call for more tankiness, while a Kind Wayfarer more melee power, Might at the cost of Dexterity and so on. If you really like LoH so much, maybe Shielders are for you. The point here is that Fires of Darcozzi Palace is incompatible with its own play style. Skipping out on LoH and investing in Int makes you a worse tank. Fires depends on your tanking. This is the opposite of synergy. Also Shieldbearer LoH talent lol

NO CIPHER? /faint