I was wondering if this is possible? For instance not making a character dumb and dumping his Int to 3 or not making my tank a rusted bucket that has no flexibility (dump stat dex) or do most of your builds have to be power gamey dump stat builds?  Not that there is ANYTHING wrong with that I am not criticizing.  My current tank has Dex dumped I am just curious. 

If you have a party, you can pretty much do almost anything and complete the game. Characters optimized to that level are really more about being able to solo. Optimized stats might make some of the really end game (Adra dragon, etc.) content easier, but it is all doable even without that.

Currently on my first play through on hard and I am cruising...no spoilers please.  I am on Act III  I have killed the Fire Quest dragon and Sky Dragon pretty smoothly but that Adra Dragon is scaring the hell out of me lol

Look. If you're using spells and ranged weapons you're using a power build.

I am playing PotD with a party of non min-maxed chars and it's not that hard. 

I don't even use Slicken :D

Alright cool thanks for the input guys.

Path of Damned is too easy and this is Obsidian fail I think. It should be much more harder.

If you have a party, you can pretty much do almost anything and complete the game. Characters optimized to that level are really more about being able to solo. Optimized stats might make some of the really end game (Adra dragon, etc.) content easier, but it is all doable even without that.

 

This is true to the point that I feel the game was designed in such a way that they made sure that the game could be completed solo PotD so people could get the achievement or something. Just played with a custom min-max party for the "No Rest for the Pro" achievement. Even with those resting restrictions it was insanely easy on PotD, I only needed 7 rests in the end. So, yes, you should be able to do it with any party if you rest enough, when using non-min-maxed party for a game which feels like it was designed for solo play is easy.

 

I mean if I think back to a game like Baldur's Gate I think the game was designed to be played with a party and going solo was something a few players would attempt without any achievements to motivate them. I did BG2 with a Barbarian and I heard Kensei/Wizard was also solid, but I doubt it was designed that every class could do that on the hardest difficulty and a number of fights needed some fine co-ordination between party memebers. 

 

(I also did BG1 solo, but that was in the enhanced edition and I exploited bounty hunter traps... )

Edited June 7, 201510 yr by Omnicron

In PoE if you don't solo you pretty much powergame no matter what your stats.

As to BG I don't think soloing the vanilla game was hard.

The first solo I did on BG 1 and 2 was with ScS difficulty mod and though I did not understand the vanilla game perfectly I breezed through it with a blade. Keep in mind, that unmodded BG is nothing compared to SCS.

 

The big mistake they made with PoE difficulty, they missed out on increasing monster damage, going from normal to hard. They should have increased monster damage by 50% on hard and maybe even increased it by 100% on PotD.

I know better AI would be a better buff, but since all unmodded games go the damage route, they should at least have done that too.