Multiple questions about the game

[Curunir]

Hello, fellow gamers, wonderful people at Obsidian!

 

I preordered Pillars last year, played some 25 hours into the beginning of Act 2, then left the game alone as the big patches started rolling in, waiting for the DLCs to finish it. Then Witcher 3 consumed my life but I'm free from this (wonderful) drug now and with the latest big patch out and all DLC in my library, I set off to play Pillars properly, on a new save.

 

Disclaimer: I am familiar with IE games and played BG2 as a kid, currently 1/3 into BG1, which I never played before. However, I am pretty bad at those games and play at the lowest difficulty (half enemy damage, max HP rolls, the works). I played Pillars on Normal first time around and had no major issues, currently about to wrap up Act 1 and still not really struggling, apart from occasional reloads when I mess up badly.

 

However, despite reading bits of information from patch notes, reddit and the wiki, I still have some questions.

Here they are, in no specific order:

 

1. Would heavier armor make sense on Aloth? I'm using him almost entirely as a damage dealer and I'm not sure how much Recovery penalties affect a spellcaster. I mean, I don't exactly need to churn those spells out lightning fast, so I assume it would be ok for him to wear something with more DR on it.

 

2. My main char is a Barbarian. I've been trying to maximize his DPS using the dual wield proficiency and giving him all the attack speed bonuses I can. However, this also means I'm still wearing my starting Hide armor and I'm begging to get more KOs in fights than I want to. Any advice on balancing things out? Scale armor is almost a 100% increase in DR at the expense of just 10% slower recovery. Is that generally considered a good tradeoff?

 

3. What is a good formation to use to be able to reliably land AOE damage spells? This has been my biggest issue with IE games as well, and I actually trudged to the very end of BG2 without a single dedicated arcane spellcaster, just because I always ended up messing up my casts, hitting my party or misplacing AOE debuffs / entangles / etc. The spell area indicators in Pillars are a massive help in this regard but I often find myself struggling with casting AOE spells on time and in an efficient way, before the bunch of mobs are in melee range and on top of my melee guys.

 

I'm sure something else will come up as I found myself wondering about a number of things when jumping into 3.0 after months away from the game and I will post those questions as I recall them.

 

Thanks in advance!