gkathellar

Monks don't really have anything in particular for use at range, but just about everyone gets decent mileage out of gun shenanigans. Rogue and Cipher are especially well-suited for them, but again, guns are great for opening regardless of class. You probably want Might, and possibly Dexterity and Intelligence. Dexterity does boost weapon reload, so any dedicated shooter will want it. Intelligence boosts the duration of all effects, from Blind to Stun to Knockdown to Whatever, so unless you're not using anything of the sort, you'll want that.

Dexterity does help with firearm reload times, note.

What? But? That ... I don't ... I can't ... Why would they do that? What's wrong with them? Dual wands are awesome. I asked and was told that there were some oddities with the animations and a couple of other system that were built to only support them in the main hand when dual wielding them, and possibly they'd look at fixing it for the expansion. It's starting to seem like Obsidian just didn't realize that people would want to get creative with ranged weapons. /le sigh

Emphasis mine. No. Their racials fall somewhere between "godawful" (Death, Nature), "useful for like one monk build" (Fire), and "okay I guess but I still kinda wish I'd played a Hearth Orlan" (Moon). Not only do you miss out on helms, you miss out on getting a decent racial ability. Don't give Moon Godlike too much credit. In my experience, that Endurance heal isn't nearly as good as it looks on paper.

What? But? That ... I don't ... I can't ... Why would they do that? What's wrong with them? Dual wands are awesome.

They balanced the game around having a 6-man party. Well so did those classics, yet it was doable. It should be very hard, but not impossible. People want these new crpg's to be like the classics after all, right? There are two big differences: In the classic games, XP was evenly split between all of your party. In these games, it's just a 5% penalty per companion, so you don't advance nearly so quickly. A lot of soloing relied on preparation and moving in and out of combat - but in PoE, combat is a binary state, making this kind of manipulation very difficult or impossible.

For what it's worth, Zan, unless you're playing on Path of the Damned, you can use a Paladin as a generic hitter. There'll be better choices, of course, but if you want to play a paladin who isn't all about sky-high defenses, you can get away with it.

Slightly more Flames of Devotion is not going to make the Paladin's offense any less garbage. Their abilities are scattered and confusing, such that they're not really designed to do anything in particular: tanking is the only role that all of their good options seem to support.

It's definitely an option, in the same way that cutting off one's own feet and hopping around on the stumps is definitely an option: it's probably possible to get by in life after the fact, but you're going to discover that you've made life difficult for yourself.

Alternately, you could call on the consensus view of people who have spent a lot of time examining the issue.

We can certainly talk about existing frameworks for presenting romantic subplots, though, if only because those frameworks are identifiable. For instance, if one says, "this NPC has a romance track" in the BG2 modding community, everyone will know what you're talking about, because there's a set of conventions involved (themselves set by Bioware and a few very popular mods). If nothing else, we can talk about Romance Subplots In Games by using existing styles as points of comparison. BG2's romances have a particular flavor and each possesses a discrete and clearly defined narrative structure, spread out over real-time hours of gameplay. Other Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian RPGs, such as PS:T, Jade Empire and both KotOR games, have romances based on exploration of dialogue trees, with progress in the main narrative unlocking new branches and possibly setting deadlines. Dragon Age was very dating sim about the whole thing, with points and a required quest and so on. There are other cases, of course, but these are three "models" of romance subplot that I can think of off the top of my head.

I just want more Visas Marr. Is that so wrong? (Yes.)

Yeah, paladins have pretty garbage offense. They make for the best pure tanks, though.

Mostly in that it's more limited, which might make it worth scaling the penalty reduction from Con faster. I'm not sure I see a problem with that redundancy either way, though.

Except, you know, the Archer kit. Which, aside from the Cleric/Ranger multiclass (i.e. Druid+), was the only ranger worth playing.

Is that really irritating if you're looking to play a character who takes certain dialogue options and does well in certain challenges? Yes. Yes it is. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it.

I hope so, but I'd still appreciate if anyone could tell me about the feasibility of doing it through modding. Just in case, so I don't panic quite so much.

Two points here. The complaint isn't really that things are "are being" min/maxed. The complaint in general is that the game promotes and rewards min/maxing, so to the point that it's hard to even make an argument as to why not do it. All games reward min/maxing without exception. Min/maxing is the idea of exploiting the game mechanics as much as you can to trivialize the content. True. But ideally, there are a greater variety of distinct ways to min-max. Having all characters divided along this Tank vs. Non-Tank line is kind of obnoxiously binary.

There is a spear crafted in the ruins that gets different bonuses depending on your answer.

Danke Bester, danke Karkarov. This is really pretty fantastic. Question: Within the limitations of what modding can do right now, does it seem possible to implement new auto-pause options? Specifically, does an "action complete"/"spell cast" type of auto-pause seem reasonably doable?

I think he was saying that political systems involving agricultural economies in this era tended to have similar characteristics than a slur on any particular continents. I didn't take it as a slur, so much as I took it as the kind of thing that works anthropologists up into a frothing-at-the-mouth rage. "Feudalism existed all over the world," as a statement, is sort of like saying, "cereal grains are a staple crop all over the world," or, "people all over the world need air to metabolize."

Thought: What if cloth/robes/etc. generally did well against magic damage types, and heavy armor was better protection against physical damage types, with light and medium falling somewhere in between? I can see some potential problems in the idea, but if the scaling was well-done, might it produce better results?

This may be useful if you're curious about titles. Obviously, as others have mentioned, all of that mattered less as the transitions into mercantilism and then capitalism took place, but it bears noting that landed gentry in many parts of Europe had (or have, horrifically) additional rights under the law of the land. That's a pretty broad statement, considering that Asia is roughly four times the size of Europe, and at least as diverse.

One imagines that the magical man imbued with a living spirit of fire has some magical things about him. Because magic.

inorite I'm pretty sure you can have two +X enchantments on a suit of armor. Everything else seems to be only one of each type.