Pillars of Eternity Thread [Pre-Expansion]

I hate to ask this:

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Where is the waterfall? Is it near Twin Elms?

Also, do you cast Slicken back to back? That what I do for bigger groups

 

Well, tried to ignore that bit because I believed it too obvious that any way to reverse something is easier than a chance to completely lose a character forever without any way whatsoever to get it back. But ok, my bad, should have put a disclaimer in there

 

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South of woodend plains I think it was (just checked south of WP and South East of Stone gorge.) You get it marked on your map after paying 50 to the adventure guild and looking it up on their map. Yes I cast slick as often as I can since the only other spell I normally would use from level one was fan of flames which I did not use against dragons. Maybe its my damage output thats not high enough to slay them fast.

 

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No wonder, I kept thinking it was further east. Thanks

Also, have you tried setting up a bunch of Warding Seals from Durance to take out the frontline filler? You can set up multiple seals while stealthed

 

a chance to if you can't be bothered to move your mouse and take action against enemies pounding your petrified character.
it's also about but not restricted to the whole idea that stone won't turn to flesh on its own again.
it's also quite retarded of me responding to your idiotic arguments.
the game lacks power in magic. no level drain, no real petrification, no death spells, curses... just grinding repetitive combat that in no way leaves any marks.

 

No, I thought I read somewhere here they count as traps and I could only have one (used poison trap). will try thanks.

 

no problem

 

Have I missed

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Grieving Mother

if I'm already on my way to Dyrwood?

 

Nope, at least they have not patched it to be like that yet. I once laid down six for a difficult fight.

 

No shes there.

 

Awesome! Thanks.

 

Talents/powers work very much like kits, especially for the non-magical classes. You pick something that usually gives some advantage with some disadvantage or at the very least locks you out of the other options (a form of disadvantage). Your character having 18 might or 18 resolve has a bigger impact on what you do with that character over which starting abilities you chose mostly because what abilities you do choose are influenced by what works best with your stats, you see how that works?

 

I'm thinking on making a spoiler heavy thread just so as to be able to discuss the game's plot freely, having just finished it.

I feel like the game does a very nice blend of Baldur's Gate 1+2 (and some sweet Icewind Dale/Hordes of the Underdark dungeon crawling, especially in the cave of unending paths) up until its final acts, where it decides to try a bit of Planescape Torment as well, with almost constant INT/PER/RES stat requirements of 17/18 for any for of a satisfactory answer. At that point it felt like too little butter on too big of a slice of bread.

Warning: High-level, spoilerific, ramblings below:

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Hurr the gods don't exist I mean sure they do exist only they aren't exactly gods at least not in the 'omnipotent, allpowerful, wisdom-filled' way. Should I tell everyone else or not actually it doesn't matter anyways history'll sort and fix everything out, woops looks like the non-existing Gods are terrorizing Twin Falls' ass just to get to me, they're causing some serious havoc I might just team up with Durance and do something about it, I sure hope that expansion pack comes out real quick.

I'll try to edit the rest of my complaints/questions in a more breathable manner.

1.Wasn't there supposed to be a siege at your keep after a while, in which all the upgrading would actually pay off?

2.You can't beat the 15 leveled dungeon if your party is under level 9, but when you reach that level the main plot becomes something urgent, making pursuing anything else as something rather illogical/artificial (you're basically losing your mind and there's civil conflict left and right caused by this body-shifting fuck.

3.Not finishing your party members' quests actually come back to bite you in the ass pretty hard. While we're on the subject, I tried to get access to the royal archives for Eder just before entering the royal council, which comes right after you become one of the 3 houses' main man, and the fucking librarian still wouldn't allow me to look through a few of the books.

4.I chose to side with house Lannister Doemenel, everyone constantly telling me that they were the equalizer between The Dozens and the Knights, and lo and behold, during the end credits you find out that they actually do some American 1920s mafioso reign in the city, with high levels of crime, prostitution and poverty, what the fuck. Weren't they supposed to be the guys who knew what they were doing? I'm curious if this happens when deciding to not obey the son's order and actually incriminate the Dozens for the murder.

5.Raedric comes back as a blackguard? Where the hell did that come from? He continues his reign in a slaughtered, empty kingdom. What is this, Darkest Dungeon? I guess hiring a fuckton of genre-fiction writers wasn't that good of an idea overall.

6. Is Hiravias voice-acted by fucking Saul Goodman? I couldn't for the life of me stop asking myself that, a quick google hasn't proved to be of much use. That's about all I can muster up right now, considering it's 4 am.

All that having been said, I did have fun with the game and already I want to restart with a new character. I never would've imagined I wanted to play BG 3 this much. I'll probably wait until they release at least one more bugfixing patch, at which point I'll most probably roll an INT/PER heavy character, just to be able to pick those 'What can change the nature of a man' dialog options in the late-game.
Is the cypher fun/viable in combath throughout the game? I'm hoping he isn't just a buffer/cc-er like the Chanter and that he actually has a few fun nukes up his sleeves. I dint't meet the Grieving Mother, she's the only character I didn't recruit. I've read/seen that the Druid is p. much the most potent caster IG, but I kind of like Hiravias enough to not want to have 2 members of the same class in the party. Same for Durance.

 

On difficulty, I haven't replayed any IE game recently, but Hard seems about as difficult as Normal in Icewind Dale 1 once you get a full party. So, more difficult than BG2 Normal, but not substantially. It's kind of wonky at the beginning when you have like 3 dudes and Shades in the Temple of Eothas keep ganking your casters, but that passes quickly.

Describing Hard as "a difficulty level for IE veterans who've recently replayed the games" is deceptive in the sense that trying to play PoE as if it were an IE game doesn't lead to much success, in my experience at least.

 

Quoting this because the game suceeds in motivating me to save my character from nearing insanity, a problem I can relate to.

Actually one of PoE's strong points is how its story can be easily applied to any background of your PC without feeling forced.

A+

 

Question about od nua level 7

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What's all the prisms for? I've cleared the level and am able to continue on without them, i've put them all in their pedestals and nothing changes.

 

+1 on that. It was "weird" for my character up to that meeting with the old watcher. Then weird became "holy shit fuck, I'm screwed unless I solve that somehow". To some extend, for me at least, you could say that there's too much motivation and urgency and I couldn't find a "quiet time" that would fit proper to go and do some side quests. Hopefully it'll come but so far, unless you ignore the crazy shit happening to your main character and get out of character completely (which is fine, to each his own), there really isn't any logical leeway to do anything else.

 

^ I don't feel that way at all. Luckily, the plot starts picking up in Act 2.

 

Even better then. I'm starting Act 2 right about now.

 

Oh, I meant to ask...earlier I arrived at level 3 of Od Nua but the sketch/map for level 2 was absent. Bug or am I missing something?

 

Double click to equip bug was there in the beta. I noticed the effects, but was never sure what caused it.

 

Several pages ago, but I didn't see any responses to this. My understanding is that it works like this:

The enemy's relevant defensive stat (e.g., deflection for physical attacks) is subtracted from your accuracy. This number is then added to a roll from 1-100, with outcome of an attack based in the resulting number: 0-15, miss; 16-50, graze; 51-100, hit; 100+, critical hit. Basic stuff, stated here for context; I'm sure you're familiar with it by now.

Based on what I've seen in the combat log while playing, a talent (or the hearth orlan racial ability) that's described as converting X% of hits into crits works exactly as advertised - X% of the time that the outcome of a roll is in the 51-100 range, you'll score a critical hit instead of a regular hit. It appears to work by making a second, invisible roll rather than by lowering the crit threshold, as whether you get a 56 or a 97 has no bearing on the conversion; all that matters is that the roll would have normally resulted in a hit. So even if your accuracy is too low relative to an enemy's defense to roll higher than, say, 85, you'd still have a chance of getting a critical hit with these talents.

(I do agree with your more general point about ambiguous wording/inconsistent documentation in several descriptions detracting from mechanical transparency - though the game's still miles ahead of many CRPGs by virtue of even attempting such transparency in the first place.)

 

You're not supposed to go iron man on your first attempt, i'd say if the game devs tried to cater to the needs of the few that try that they'd be pretty fucking stupid.
Disengagement system has a lot of flaws but emphasizing positioning in fights and how your front line can protect your backline while they do damage isn't really rocket science, nor is it a horrid design choice.

Poor pathing and AI take the combat system down a notch though for sure from what i've seen so far.

This is probably one of the stupidest things i've read itt and i've read a metric ton of stupid shit here.
Have you not actually played bg2/iwd and seen how much THAT system pigeon-holes you into maxing out str/dex and ignoring the other stats. Remember how BG2 gave the player an 18cha ring in the first hour of playing the game and how you could even plan to wear a 19 str belt and resdistribute str somewhere else.
Even NWN2's system is worse than PoE's, even though NWN2 actually had a way to make stats like wisdom and charisma not complete garbage after a certain point, but ONLY FOR SOME CLASSES THAT COULD USE SAID STATS FOR COMBAT (i.e. wisdom with monk, cha with pally and the like, etc).

So how does a system that tries to make all stats be relevant both in combat and outside of it from the get-go, instead of having to play a certain class or choose a certain talent to make a stat relevant in combat, curtail to min-maxers and cheesers? I'm not saying the system is flawlless or that you can't min-max or abuse it, but relative to old d&d system it's miles ahead simply through intent of use.

 

hey people who've played a bit further past early act 2, is there a big evil antagonist? there is one guy so far who kinda fits that role but he hasn't done anything too bad so far

 

The guy from the introduction, with horned helmet.