Zariusz
Arbiter
Well it was a 5 days long ride. Ekhm... Before i properly started the game i tried to change resolution with DxWnd using Konjad's guide but since it somehow blocked the game from starting, i tried just forcing it normally in .ini file, it worked but now font was too small and was out of place so i just stayed with 800x600 resolution, i doubt that it would change anything really, besides making everything more annoying to read.
First hours were somewhat uncomfortable because of the small camera zoom height and setting good perspective with that 3D movement was annoying, especially since i had to do this all over again after crashes. After i got used to the camera i started to explore Kellen, search for quests and talk to the every NPC since locating first watcher agent was easy, that gossip dialogue choice was a good way to locate some possible quest givers and areas of interests of future quests. During my first day i was experimenting with attributes, i restarted like 3 times, since this game heavily inspired AoD i expected that my build choice would mostly stay the same until the end and it was mostly true in the early game but thanks to gigantic amounts of exp that you can get in quests you can cover your weaknesses by investing in certain skills.
Most skills give you +1 attribute at 30 points threshold and +2 attribute at 50 points threshold, weapon skills also give you additional combat skill at 40 points threshold, 1-20 points cost you only 1 exp, 20-40 2 exp, 40-60 3 exp etc. i feel like there is no need to invest in your main skills beyond 61 points. It may look like you are going to invest in only few skills past 20 or 40 but like i said PTD is very generous with exp, especially if you try to find the most rewarding solution for every quest, even if you fail to do that you still are going to get tons of exp. I feel like there is no need to waste exp for upgrading speech skill, since skills also grow naturally with usage, and speech skill grows fastest compared to all other skills. Just check speech for starting skill for your main talking leader and try to talk to every npc, even just starting and quickly ending conversations counts, its basically free charisma boost, with this you can negliege Charisma in favor of other attributes during planning your talking character, you will get it back later (During planning your team i really recommend using Help option since every skill has list of every attribute bonus per threshold, besides for some reason magic skills, Thaumaturgy, Flame magic and Goddess spells increase your Willpower with typical +1 at 30 and +2 at 50 skill). You can also learn skills that you didnt know at the start by the same method of just using different weapons, armour, talking etc. though its quite slow and only works for combat skills and few the of non combat skills, if no one in your group knows certain skill some trainers will teach one party meber from zero, besides that hunter in Kellen at the beginning.
For combat skills i think that besides 30-40 points for your main weapon, having at least 14 Dexterity is more important if you want to hit some later enemies. Sarius, wanderer and the face of my team, was planned as main hard hitter with 18 Strength and equiped with two handed Greatsword (needed 18 Strength, 12 Dexterity and 12 Speed, 8-16 strongest dmg in the entire game, sadly no unique holding animation for two handers, and you can literally buy it at the start from Alves in Kellen for 520 something gold), i made terrible decision by leaving him with 12 Dexterity (later 13 since swords at 30 skill give you +1 Dex and at 50 another +2 Dex but i neglieged this skill with just 40 something in favor of other skills at the end) so he was missing for the most of the game. Also he had in practice 12 Speed so he could only use one basic attack because of the high speed needed to use Greatsword (Technically he had 15 Speed but really every good chest armour has -3 speed debuff and good leg armour has -2 Speed debuff, thanks to my investition in Unarmed and Dagger skills during later mid game i nullified those debuffs).
Thanks to that it was my third character, guardian Teodoric who needed to become my main hitter and he was planned as a tank but my God, by the midgame he has becomed a true war machine. When i was making him i have already gave all charisma based skills and literacy to Sarius and all Magic to my hermit Venes, he just had Sword and Armour skill plus Flame ability, magic was really just a filler beacuse i expected Venes to be main wizard and since Teodoric was a guardian i thought that was fitting. By the mid game he has became almost unstoppable, thanks to Flame magic he could boost his Action Points with Chaos Speed and bring ranged death with Spear Of Tius spell and during the end game also with Chaos Ball, since he was planned as a tank with high endurance he could easily parry or outlive 3 or sometimes even 4 enemies at once, he could also use Rings Of Chaos buff that would damage every character around him with over 12 dmg per turn, with his high speed he sometimes could attack with his strongest attacks two times in one turn. And lets not even talk about buffs given to him with Goddess spells.
Now about magic, spells are mainly used in combat, Flame magic for damage and Speed bonuses, Goddess spells for healing and buffing defence, strength and enemy debuffs, you can heal yourself with Mothers Kiss/Breath and there is one early quest where you can use healling magic and thats it for out of combat usage of magic. I didnt really used any Thaumaturgy besides spawning Golem that one time during final fight but probably its just mostly prebuffing items before certain fights. Flame magic can only be used and learned by party members of the Flame bloodline and Goddess spells only by members of the River bloodline, mutts of mixed bloodline can use both kind of magic, according to the Help entry with only half the strength of the pure bloodlines but i didnt really noticed that, maybe because of the autisticly high Willpower and Intelligence of Venes or maybe because my only other druid in the party was also mixed. Compared to combat skills, here skill points matter much more because strength of the spell depends on the amount of your skill points in that skill. I have found 9 Goddess spells plus few ranged variations, 7 Thaumaturgic rituals and 7 Flame spells, each with 3 levels of power unlocked after certain amount of skill points and 4th level that also requires health sacrifice besides magic points with one spell - Spear Of Tius having only normal level and blood powered level. There are two different magic resources available for you characters, one based on Willpower and the other around Endurance, Thaumaturgy and Goddess spells use first one and Flame second one.
For my magic character i wanted to create a pure wizard, and since i focused all my social skills on Sarius i was liberated from the need for charisma, hermit was a perfect choice for his background, it even decreased his Charisma even more to fucking 2 points and since mixed races are not really liked by many people of the Valley, mainly children of the Flame, this was fitting somewhat with the lore. All of this allowed me to create a truly autistic powerhouse of pure magical talent, he know only about magic but nothing besides that, he couldn't even read at beginning.
Thanks to his low Charisma we fucked at least three quests, one in Crossing East, one in Ironwood and second quest for the House Liet where head of this house just looked at him and was so disgusted that he refused to even talk to us, i mean just look at his mug, can this smile lie? Technically i also ditched Charisma for Teodoric so he could also embrace his autistic power but his 5 Charisma is nothing in comparison to Venes. During early and mid game he was the most efficient party member though Teodoric replaced him as the main Flame wizard during late game, thanks to his broken willpower (at the start he had like 20) there was no need for me to buy any potions during whole game. Later i tried some potion that i found in my inventory and i was astounded that you can chug them at any moment without any cost during fight, this probably could be broken but it didnt matter for me since i dint use them.
Combat is quite decent, you can clearly see the roots of systems that were polished in AoD combat. For me the biggest problem with PtD was lack of variety during fights, its just sea of melee fighters, beasts and aliens with sometimes few bandit archers in between. I never saw any enemy magic user, even Darkness abominations didnt have any magic, even just some debuff would make it more interesting, the only NPC that i saw that used magic in combat was during that prologue dream. Maybe you can fight with some users if you choose to ally yourself with rebellion but i overwritten that save long ago so maybe someone can tell me if you can. But dont misunderstand me, the combat is still very fun and satisfying even with weak animations, even with my strong party i had sometimes to retry certain fights, but not much i only died like few times(though most of the retries were because of game crashing or freezing).
Going back to misadventures in Kellen, after finding recently murdered agents body i bumbled around trying to find next clue and more quests, during that i had many random events, generally there are three categories of random events: free loot, some random npc wasting your time and enemy ambushes with some mixes between those categories. Early, if you have some luck, that free loot in the form of random bodies with items lying around can give you nice amounts of money, either by just saving or selling, in terms of rewards really quests in PtD are mostly for exp and learning new spells, you can easily get nice amounts of fresh drachs by just going around, being attacked by bandits and selling their stuff. And you can get many items not available in shops from those random loot events, whatever by devs forgetting to implement them or for other reasons, for example winged helmets and scale armour set. As everyone can see PtD is not a pretty game but i still liked mostly roman inspired quite realistic design for armour sets, while simple they still hit that nice spot for me. Maybe this sounds weird but i think i liked armour design here more than in AoD for some reason.
During trying to give calming potion to that little girl who saw Kellen agant being killed for the first time autistic nature of Venes started to show, with just one quick look at his ugly mug she refused to cooperate and drink, thankfully she could still paint portrait of the criminal. And so the killer butcher got butchered with some heavy crit from Sarius Greatsword, and after finishing every other Kellen quest (besides that old insane fag, even Venes is not going to kiss some old geezer feet, i was not so hungry for the exp... yet) the trio ventured to Watcher's den to give report and from there onwards to The Land's End. That was the moment when i understood that world is seamless so for the first, and almost only time i traveled in those places in real time, later i got bored since every random events happened also normally when traveling using map so i just saved lots of time and used map.
In Lands End i learned that the menacing and secretive rebellion is fucking blind, little girl can see that my other party members look suspiciously retarded but those morons can't see that this suspicious mutt wanting to join The Rebellion travels only with fucking Flames XD. This whole area was very annoying for the first time, village was very open, houses were quite separated from eachother and all of the locations covered a large terrain, this combined with small range of camera view made everything confusing. Later though i learned to orient myself in this place, it felt very sleepy and i thought that it showed really well that silence before storm feeling of infiltrating Rebellion. I did like one or two quests and ventured to the academy, music in that place is very atmospheric and is one of my favourite tracks in PtD, generally speaking music in this game is very nice, it does its job well, almost all of the main locations in the Valley have unique tracks though wilderness music and combat music are going to dominate your hearing for the most of the playthrough.
Going back to Academy, local quest were nice and Venes devoured every Thaumaturgic ritual that they offered though like i said earlier, i was never going to use those rituals, this was also the first place where i started to notice that quest items didnt disappear from inventory even if during dialogue your party returned those items or gave them away, while its nothing serious after some quests it started to clutter my inventory. After clearing local quests and aquiring certain old vase i was able to return to Rebellion agent in Lands End and show my "loyality", technically i could use iron ore that i stole earlier but i used that for prestigious breastplate.
Now i was supposed to go to the Citadel so i went to the Crossing East, it was a quite forgettable place mostly, here Venes autism started to show again and he fucked up that quest with field of some grandpas, apparently i could get a new Goddess spell from that but whatever. Besides that, there was this apparently quite infamous quest from Geric that is available if your leader has 41 Literacy skill, since i was just after the Academy i was excited about learning some new lore about Ancients, sadly i didnt have enough Learning but i could do this later. After getting that quest about love potion i changed my direction and ventured to the Barrier, in my opinion the best location in the entire game. Sure Citadel maybe has cooler layout but Barrier has tons of varied quests and better atmosphere, this was the only place where having different clothes people would react to you different, well it is just maybe one head piece but still. First thing i did was to buy best equipment for Teodoric thanks to good honest money that i made by looting random corpses and bandits, he practically stayed the same until the end. I checked our local codexian walkthrough archive and i had slight paralysis of choice, im one of those people that use such guides to get as much of available content as possible during the first playthrough even at the cost the enjoyment of discovering it by myself. Im not 100% sure but Masseque quest is probably the most complicated side quest in the whole game, with many possible methods of advancement and finishing whole questline, possible reward is also very good since Masseque himself is best possible NPC archer in game with Missle skill at 55 and is the only possible party member that is not of Flame, River or mixed bloodline. Worst part of his whole questline is traveling through the city sewers, path finding is already quite weak in PtD and tight one tile wide corridors with many blocking errors didnt make it easier.
He was the last of the NPC recruited for my party, earlier i got thief Mirilich, mainly for his Tinkering skill that my party lacked and that annoying druid Tauna who i needed because i wanted to train her Nature skill so she could finish certain side quest in the Barrier, aquiring new Goddess spell for Venes. In combat Millirich only during late mid game became somewhat useful with his crossbow criting quite often, Tauna was mostly useless, i only used her to heal when Venes drained his Will points (and that was rare since after every fight thanks to Masseque Medical skill i would get back decent amounts of magic resources), buff someone with shield spell and to ignore annoying combat encounters in wilderness, Masseque on the other hand was very useful in combat, sniping scrubs from 20 tiles away. This was also the point where i learned that backgrounds in practice don't fucking matter, after AoD this was very disappointing for me but well, AoD had to improve on PtD on more than just some miniscule things.
After clearing city from quests i finally travelled to the Citadel to do my FedEx job for the Rebellion, after i gave them message and i got another job to deliver some necklace to the Barrier, i just went to the local shops to check for new armour and i got some ok pants without speed debuff for Sarius and some other stuff for Venes and Teodoric, i continued dagger questline from the Academy and got Dark Path location. This time i leaved Citadel quests for the other time and i went to report this stuff to Watcher, nothing interesting really just do what you have already planned to do, not even 1 exp, really Watcher location was for me quite disappointing, i could ignore all of this and nothing would be different really. So like earlier, FeDex job to Barrier and again to the Lands End where they want me to replace some orders, ok then, sadly while guide said that i needed just 6 Pickpocket it was a lie, 10 was enough though but i didnt have exp since i always forget about leveling pickpocketing in rpgs. So onwards to the Dark Path and then after 2 fights just i reminded myself that arrows here are finite so i had buy some reserves for Mirilich and Masseque, well onwards to the Dark Path... again. Just after entering i found best leg armour for Sarius, good defence but only -1 Speed debuff, this and his already trained to 30 Unarmed skill made him much more usefull (Unarmed only gives Speed bonus at 30, at 50 it gives +2 Strength bonus) and Dagger skill was also close to 30. Dark Path though... well that was a looooong journey full of crashes and freezes, and even worse it was a complete maze, i didnt know about this for the first time but whole cave system had 2 entrances to the Monaster, western one guarded by Leader Cave Dweller, it also gave 2 or 3 exp, jounral entry and Monastery map location, and eastern one that give's you shit, of course i found only eastern one and later i had to walk 3 times through this fucking maze, thankfully almost without crashes since i eradicated most of the local population... well most of them because during that 3rd time i found that western entrance and its guardian.
Monastery was a decent place, it felt for me like it was in some vulcanic area and this reminded me about Risen monastery, ahh that was a good atmospheric location... Well anyway, together with plot i went to the Monastery archives to recover some old manuscript and genocide local cave dweller infestation, fights were quite enjoyable and it felt like a first real dungeon with keyes and stuff, i found the best armour in the game... compared to other sets in the game it looked like during making texture for this they forgot where torso on models ended, and since this was based on lorica segmentata it was really visible in my opinion. At this moment look of my party stabilised and it stayed mostly to the end like this.
My other objective though... well during my searching for that damn book i could probably genocide cave Dwellers like two times more, thankfully there was screenshot of book location in walkthrough. From that whole escapade i also grabbed nice reward from the monks, helmet visible on Sarius, stats wise i probably should give that to Venes but Sarius attribute sheet would look much more
so he got it. After this, local living charcoal man wanted me to hallucinate on suspicious roots but i leaved to do rebellion questline since i felt like i was going to finish mid game. Now i had enough exp to level pickpocketing and replace those damn guardian orders, of course my reward was more FeDex questing but this time only locally, Ironwood sisters went, maybe i could just threaten him but this was a typical goody as fuck playthrough though this also felt very suspicious and i wanted to stay incognito in Rebellion. Thankfully i reminded myself about that love potion quest and i got exp for that so i could preceed normally. Of course during druid assassination i killed that Rebellion guy and Goddess called me to her island and rewarded me with fucking up my River spells, i somewhat regret that i overwritten all my saves from before that assasination.
Here i returned to the Monastery and i used those hallucinogenic roots, i was pleasantly surprised that game didnt bug out and Goddess just asked me why im not on her island yet, reactivity my dudes, reactivity. In Crossing East to build a raft, after some investigation local treehugger was able to give me his tree but i had to buy him a replacement, finally i went to Ironwood but only buy that stuff, i used this occasion to take some more quests and i returned to the treehugger, now that old fag wanted me to clean his Glade from some beasts. I guess i can do that, just some random overgrow... WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS! For the first time i thought that those were some overgrown insects but then i looked at that alien shit more, that shit almost beat me and my last save was made quite long time ago but i survived and healed. Well onwards to the Isle, i didnt expect that i was going to be so quick but at least the conversation with Goddess was interesting, with all that talk about power source and that she was not made to function so long it made me think that she was created by the Ancients, her altar has the same architecture, actually she has this weird glow, almost hologram like, maybe this setting is in reality science fantasy not fantasy and the Goddess was some ancient computer or super weapon. I was just after finishing Lord of The Ice Garden series and this was quite easy for me to think about. Even some creatures of Darkness sometimes are called Aliens so who knows, maybe there was more about that in House Liet Ancient library questline but thanks to certain 2 Charisma character i was blocked from the possibility of doing that questline. She teleported me to the local charcoal man and he wanted me to reforge the dagger and bless it in fire temple.
Now i felt that the true end game started, now it was time clear Ironwood quests. But first i wanted to do that Geric quest, in Citadel there was Literacy teacher that worked only for 200 gold, im not sure if he was supposed to do that every time but that is why both Teodoric and Venes much later learned how to read from 0 to 50. My Literacy skill for Sarius was now over 41 so i could do that infamous quest, at first game crashed at the moment of my teleportation but later everything went much better, i concluded that the probable cause for all the crashes was the area north playable space, if camera even touched space 5 or 6 tiles in that direction it was done, i had only to zoom in during unexpected fight with local red mutants (hmm did Ancients had something to do with Darkness?) and keep my part close so camera wouldn't jump to weird places, few fights later and i got some ancient stuff and cool Golem summoning ritual.
Compared to other lcoations Ironwood felt like i was going into some low level starting area, i did it much faster than i expected. As i visited Crossing East i finished by accident one quest about missing girl that was corrupted by Darkness, then i helped with local bingo problem and killed white bingo for a berserk spell that i never used. There was quest with one guy getting killed by local Beast and it was just only a red mutant, i wonder if that was just placeholder or sign of expanding Darkness corruption. Of course this wouldn't be PtD if my low Charisma party member didnt fucked another quest, this time old man didnt want us to see his wife in coma, one look and he almost used his guards on my party, at least i could gather some exp from other parts of this quest. There was also... fuck i just reminded myself that i forgot to take reward for that casino quest, tbh caling something casino in this fantasy roman inspired world sticked out for me.
Finally i could finish stuff in Citadel (and even better, thanks to the efforts of Fowyr my Goddess spells finally got fixed), it all went too quickly really. It made me think that now i entered the less finished segement of the game, but now if i think about it maybe its beacuse i was supposed to finish all of that earlier and now i was fully developed and maybe OP. I like first House of Char quest, even if many blunt dialogue lines about asking for Maleficium literally screamed "by picking me you will fuck up the quest" made manouvering questions easier it still felt somewhat satisfactory when that guy showed you where you should search for his boss. Second Char quest was finished in seconds because i cleared Barrier long time ago, House Flam was first quest was ok but that second one was just some fucking FedDex quest, yeah you could steal that valuable necklace but like i said earlier, money is easy af in this game so there is no real value in this. First House Liet quest was also simple, go to this guy, buy him a dagger, go there, get teleported to the quest giver, the end, second quest was impossible because like i said earlier head of Liet family just looked at certain member of my part and refused to even communicate, Temple quests were interesting though and worth doing for me.
Really it was disappointing for me that besides great houses quests there are like 2 or something quests in the lower city levels, this area seemed rather dense, i hope i just missed something. There was also certain leather items shop owner in north eastern quarter, and i felt like he was sending me to Ironwood for some bingo skins (for whatever reason my character had option to ask for dog costume or something like that), this felt like it was part of some quest but im not sure if it was followed somewhere.
With that, capital was finished and i could go to Jerrock, the place where all of this started. First disappointment was when i started fight gate guardians by accident, they were basically immortal, i could only make like 1 dmg against them, maybe its beacuse of plot but who cares, this shit was bad in Archolos and its also bad here, actually all neutral and friendly NPC are basically immortal, when some of them got attacked during random enemy encounters they only got uncounscious. Even during finall sequence there is event where guardians in pools of blood are fighting against one of the strongest possessed, actually six of them, this looks like they should be decimated but no, after fight they just stand up like nothing happened without even some unique dialogue. Second disappointment is that there is no trace of the warehouse, i mean the building burned but there should be some trace of this in game, not only it was only like a day before game event but you could say that the burning of that place set the whole game in motion. Yes from the perspective of the whole game its a miniscule thing but it was just weird for me. Now after going inside this mining town, game felt like it was going on rails for me, while probably you can decide if you want to help miners with their uprising or to crush it after getting ore from that place the game changes, now almost only Darkness monsters roam the world, and when you go back to the Kellen to ask Alves to reforge the blade you find village infested with posessed creatures. The smith of course survived but for whatever reason that insane old fag is also alive (i did his quest in meantime after leaving Barrier, certain 2 Charisma magic user had to have close encounter with his feet), literally the last man in the village is him heh, who would guess, maybe he really wasnt insane.
After Alves reforges the dagger now its time to choose whatever Fire temple to get this stuff blessed, first i went to the Barrier but since after that fast travel is disabled and you have to go to Crossing East on foot i reloaded the save and went to the Citadel to get the blessing.
After earlier mentioned encounter with guardians PtD refused to cooperate and started to crash and freeze like 10 times, then after one more encounter with farmers and red mutants i got to the village, i expected massacre like in Kellen but nothing like that happened it felt weird really, i went to the docks and only then event started and 6 greater possessed spawned. At the start of this fight, happened one of my favourite moments in the whole game, from the everyone in The Valley, from all of those people i helped, only one man came to help me, and that man was a fucking necromancer with his zombies from Temple questline. And even better, he and his zombies did quite well against six of the strongest enemies in the game, thank you bald corpse stealing man, you did well
. This fight also repeated those weird screeching events from the prologue dream that happened after killing one of those possessed ones, every time one get killed, i got message that monsters appeared instead of my companions but nothing really happened, i think it only despawned my first and only golem once and then some druid gave back me energy or something, repeat this 5 times and you have whole fight.
Now nothing else is left but to embark the raft again (i wonder how it got back there again after the first time), and to do almost suicide by happily cutting your wrists together in a circle on some ancient altar. And thats the end. Those 5 days were quite good indeed.
TL;DR
Yeah i bet most of you already knew all of that but i still wanted to write this, game is good and its worth your time. Maybe this time is going to be filled with crashes and freezes but a good time indeed. Play it now peasants.
First hours were somewhat uncomfortable because of the small camera zoom height and setting good perspective with that 3D movement was annoying, especially since i had to do this all over again after crashes. After i got used to the camera i started to explore Kellen, search for quests and talk to the every NPC since locating first watcher agent was easy, that gossip dialogue choice was a good way to locate some possible quest givers and areas of interests of future quests. During my first day i was experimenting with attributes, i restarted like 3 times, since this game heavily inspired AoD i expected that my build choice would mostly stay the same until the end and it was mostly true in the early game but thanks to gigantic amounts of exp that you can get in quests you can cover your weaknesses by investing in certain skills.
Most skills give you +1 attribute at 30 points threshold and +2 attribute at 50 points threshold, weapon skills also give you additional combat skill at 40 points threshold, 1-20 points cost you only 1 exp, 20-40 2 exp, 40-60 3 exp etc. i feel like there is no need to invest in your main skills beyond 61 points. It may look like you are going to invest in only few skills past 20 or 40 but like i said PTD is very generous with exp, especially if you try to find the most rewarding solution for every quest, even if you fail to do that you still are going to get tons of exp. I feel like there is no need to waste exp for upgrading speech skill, since skills also grow naturally with usage, and speech skill grows fastest compared to all other skills. Just check speech for starting skill for your main talking leader and try to talk to every npc, even just starting and quickly ending conversations counts, its basically free charisma boost, with this you can negliege Charisma in favor of other attributes during planning your talking character, you will get it back later (During planning your team i really recommend using Help option since every skill has list of every attribute bonus per threshold, besides for some reason magic skills, Thaumaturgy, Flame magic and Goddess spells increase your Willpower with typical +1 at 30 and +2 at 50 skill). You can also learn skills that you didnt know at the start by the same method of just using different weapons, armour, talking etc. though its quite slow and only works for combat skills and few the of non combat skills, if no one in your group knows certain skill some trainers will teach one party meber from zero, besides that hunter in Kellen at the beginning.
For combat skills i think that besides 30-40 points for your main weapon, having at least 14 Dexterity is more important if you want to hit some later enemies. Sarius, wanderer and the face of my team, was planned as main hard hitter with 18 Strength and equiped with two handed Greatsword (needed 18 Strength, 12 Dexterity and 12 Speed, 8-16 strongest dmg in the entire game, sadly no unique holding animation for two handers, and you can literally buy it at the start from Alves in Kellen for 520 something gold), i made terrible decision by leaving him with 12 Dexterity (later 13 since swords at 30 skill give you +1 Dex and at 50 another +2 Dex but i neglieged this skill with just 40 something in favor of other skills at the end) so he was missing for the most of the game. Also he had in practice 12 Speed so he could only use one basic attack because of the high speed needed to use Greatsword (Technically he had 15 Speed but really every good chest armour has -3 speed debuff and good leg armour has -2 Speed debuff, thanks to my investition in Unarmed and Dagger skills during later mid game i nullified those debuffs).
Thanks to that it was my third character, guardian Teodoric who needed to become my main hitter and he was planned as a tank but my God, by the midgame he has becomed a true war machine. When i was making him i have already gave all charisma based skills and literacy to Sarius and all Magic to my hermit Venes, he just had Sword and Armour skill plus Flame ability, magic was really just a filler beacuse i expected Venes to be main wizard and since Teodoric was a guardian i thought that was fitting. By the mid game he has became almost unstoppable, thanks to Flame magic he could boost his Action Points with Chaos Speed and bring ranged death with Spear Of Tius spell and during the end game also with Chaos Ball, since he was planned as a tank with high endurance he could easily parry or outlive 3 or sometimes even 4 enemies at once, he could also use Rings Of Chaos buff that would damage every character around him with over 12 dmg per turn, with his high speed he sometimes could attack with his strongest attacks two times in one turn. And lets not even talk about buffs given to him with Goddess spells.
Now about magic, spells are mainly used in combat, Flame magic for damage and Speed bonuses, Goddess spells for healing and buffing defence, strength and enemy debuffs, you can heal yourself with Mothers Kiss/Breath and there is one early quest where you can use healling magic and thats it for out of combat usage of magic. I didnt really used any Thaumaturgy besides spawning Golem that one time during final fight but probably its just mostly prebuffing items before certain fights. Flame magic can only be used and learned by party members of the Flame bloodline and Goddess spells only by members of the River bloodline, mutts of mixed bloodline can use both kind of magic, according to the Help entry with only half the strength of the pure bloodlines but i didnt really noticed that, maybe because of the autisticly high Willpower and Intelligence of Venes or maybe because my only other druid in the party was also mixed. Compared to combat skills, here skill points matter much more because strength of the spell depends on the amount of your skill points in that skill. I have found 9 Goddess spells plus few ranged variations, 7 Thaumaturgic rituals and 7 Flame spells, each with 3 levels of power unlocked after certain amount of skill points and 4th level that also requires health sacrifice besides magic points with one spell - Spear Of Tius having only normal level and blood powered level. There are two different magic resources available for you characters, one based on Willpower and the other around Endurance, Thaumaturgy and Goddess spells use first one and Flame second one.
For my magic character i wanted to create a pure wizard, and since i focused all my social skills on Sarius i was liberated from the need for charisma, hermit was a perfect choice for his background, it even decreased his Charisma even more to fucking 2 points and since mixed races are not really liked by many people of the Valley, mainly children of the Flame, this was fitting somewhat with the lore. All of this allowed me to create a truly autistic powerhouse of pure magical talent, he know only about magic but nothing besides that, he couldn't even read at beginning.
Thanks to his low Charisma we fucked at least three quests, one in Crossing East, one in Ironwood and second quest for the House Liet where head of this house just looked at him and was so disgusted that he refused to even talk to us, i mean just look at his mug, can this smile lie? Technically i also ditched Charisma for Teodoric so he could also embrace his autistic power but his 5 Charisma is nothing in comparison to Venes. During early and mid game he was the most efficient party member though Teodoric replaced him as the main Flame wizard during late game, thanks to his broken willpower (at the start he had like 20) there was no need for me to buy any potions during whole game. Later i tried some potion that i found in my inventory and i was astounded that you can chug them at any moment without any cost during fight, this probably could be broken but it didnt matter for me since i dint use them.
Combat is quite decent, you can clearly see the roots of systems that were polished in AoD combat. For me the biggest problem with PtD was lack of variety during fights, its just sea of melee fighters, beasts and aliens with sometimes few bandit archers in between. I never saw any enemy magic user, even Darkness abominations didnt have any magic, even just some debuff would make it more interesting, the only NPC that i saw that used magic in combat was during that prologue dream. Maybe you can fight with some users if you choose to ally yourself with rebellion but i overwritten that save long ago so maybe someone can tell me if you can. But dont misunderstand me, the combat is still very fun and satisfying even with weak animations, even with my strong party i had sometimes to retry certain fights, but not much i only died like few times(though most of the retries were because of game crashing or freezing).
Going back to misadventures in Kellen, after finding recently murdered agents body i bumbled around trying to find next clue and more quests, during that i had many random events, generally there are three categories of random events: free loot, some random npc wasting your time and enemy ambushes with some mixes between those categories. Early, if you have some luck, that free loot in the form of random bodies with items lying around can give you nice amounts of money, either by just saving or selling, in terms of rewards really quests in PtD are mostly for exp and learning new spells, you can easily get nice amounts of fresh drachs by just going around, being attacked by bandits and selling their stuff. And you can get many items not available in shops from those random loot events, whatever by devs forgetting to implement them or for other reasons, for example winged helmets and scale armour set. As everyone can see PtD is not a pretty game but i still liked mostly roman inspired quite realistic design for armour sets, while simple they still hit that nice spot for me. Maybe this sounds weird but i think i liked armour design here more than in AoD for some reason.
During trying to give calming potion to that little girl who saw Kellen agant being killed for the first time autistic nature of Venes started to show, with just one quick look at his ugly mug she refused to cooperate and drink, thankfully she could still paint portrait of the criminal. And so the killer butcher got butchered with some heavy crit from Sarius Greatsword, and after finishing every other Kellen quest (besides that old insane fag, even Venes is not going to kiss some old geezer feet, i was not so hungry for the exp... yet) the trio ventured to Watcher's den to give report and from there onwards to The Land's End. That was the moment when i understood that world is seamless so for the first, and almost only time i traveled in those places in real time, later i got bored since every random events happened also normally when traveling using map so i just saved lots of time and used map.
In Lands End i learned that the menacing and secretive rebellion is fucking blind, little girl can see that my other party members look suspiciously retarded but those morons can't see that this suspicious mutt wanting to join The Rebellion travels only with fucking Flames XD. This whole area was very annoying for the first time, village was very open, houses were quite separated from eachother and all of the locations covered a large terrain, this combined with small range of camera view made everything confusing. Later though i learned to orient myself in this place, it felt very sleepy and i thought that it showed really well that silence before storm feeling of infiltrating Rebellion. I did like one or two quests and ventured to the academy, music in that place is very atmospheric and is one of my favourite tracks in PtD, generally speaking music in this game is very nice, it does its job well, almost all of the main locations in the Valley have unique tracks though wilderness music and combat music are going to dominate your hearing for the most of the playthrough.
Going back to Academy, local quest were nice and Venes devoured every Thaumaturgic ritual that they offered though like i said earlier, i was never going to use those rituals, this was also the first place where i started to notice that quest items didnt disappear from inventory even if during dialogue your party returned those items or gave them away, while its nothing serious after some quests it started to clutter my inventory. After clearing local quests and aquiring certain old vase i was able to return to Rebellion agent in Lands End and show my "loyality", technically i could use iron ore that i stole earlier but i used that for prestigious breastplate.
Now i was supposed to go to the Citadel so i went to the Crossing East, it was a quite forgettable place mostly, here Venes autism started to show again and he fucked up that quest with field of some grandpas, apparently i could get a new Goddess spell from that but whatever. Besides that, there was this apparently quite infamous quest from Geric that is available if your leader has 41 Literacy skill, since i was just after the Academy i was excited about learning some new lore about Ancients, sadly i didnt have enough Learning but i could do this later. After getting that quest about love potion i changed my direction and ventured to the Barrier, in my opinion the best location in the entire game. Sure Citadel maybe has cooler layout but Barrier has tons of varied quests and better atmosphere, this was the only place where having different clothes people would react to you different, well it is just maybe one head piece but still. First thing i did was to buy best equipment for Teodoric thanks to good honest money that i made by looting random corpses and bandits, he practically stayed the same until the end. I checked our local codexian walkthrough archive and i had slight paralysis of choice, im one of those people that use such guides to get as much of available content as possible during the first playthrough even at the cost the enjoyment of discovering it by myself. Im not 100% sure but Masseque quest is probably the most complicated side quest in the whole game, with many possible methods of advancement and finishing whole questline, possible reward is also very good since Masseque himself is best possible NPC archer in game with Missle skill at 55 and is the only possible party member that is not of Flame, River or mixed bloodline. Worst part of his whole questline is traveling through the city sewers, path finding is already quite weak in PtD and tight one tile wide corridors with many blocking errors didnt make it easier.
He was the last of the NPC recruited for my party, earlier i got thief Mirilich, mainly for his Tinkering skill that my party lacked and that annoying druid Tauna who i needed because i wanted to train her Nature skill so she could finish certain side quest in the Barrier, aquiring new Goddess spell for Venes. In combat Millirich only during late mid game became somewhat useful with his crossbow criting quite often, Tauna was mostly useless, i only used her to heal when Venes drained his Will points (and that was rare since after every fight thanks to Masseque Medical skill i would get back decent amounts of magic resources), buff someone with shield spell and to ignore annoying combat encounters in wilderness, Masseque on the other hand was very useful in combat, sniping scrubs from 20 tiles away. This was also the point where i learned that backgrounds in practice don't fucking matter, after AoD this was very disappointing for me but well, AoD had to improve on PtD on more than just some miniscule things.
After clearing city from quests i finally travelled to the Citadel to do my FedEx job for the Rebellion, after i gave them message and i got another job to deliver some necklace to the Barrier, i just went to the local shops to check for new armour and i got some ok pants without speed debuff for Sarius and some other stuff for Venes and Teodoric, i continued dagger questline from the Academy and got Dark Path location. This time i leaved Citadel quests for the other time and i went to report this stuff to Watcher, nothing interesting really just do what you have already planned to do, not even 1 exp, really Watcher location was for me quite disappointing, i could ignore all of this and nothing would be different really. So like earlier, FeDex job to Barrier and again to the Lands End where they want me to replace some orders, ok then, sadly while guide said that i needed just 6 Pickpocket it was a lie, 10 was enough though but i didnt have exp since i always forget about leveling pickpocketing in rpgs. So onwards to the Dark Path and then after 2 fights just i reminded myself that arrows here are finite so i had buy some reserves for Mirilich and Masseque, well onwards to the Dark Path... again. Just after entering i found best leg armour for Sarius, good defence but only -1 Speed debuff, this and his already trained to 30 Unarmed skill made him much more usefull (Unarmed only gives Speed bonus at 30, at 50 it gives +2 Strength bonus) and Dagger skill was also close to 30. Dark Path though... well that was a looooong journey full of crashes and freezes, and even worse it was a complete maze, i didnt know about this for the first time but whole cave system had 2 entrances to the Monaster, western one guarded by Leader Cave Dweller, it also gave 2 or 3 exp, jounral entry and Monastery map location, and eastern one that give's you shit, of course i found only eastern one and later i had to walk 3 times through this fucking maze, thankfully almost without crashes since i eradicated most of the local population... well most of them because during that 3rd time i found that western entrance and its guardian.
Monastery was a decent place, it felt for me like it was in some vulcanic area and this reminded me about Risen monastery, ahh that was a good atmospheric location... Well anyway, together with plot i went to the Monastery archives to recover some old manuscript and genocide local cave dweller infestation, fights were quite enjoyable and it felt like a first real dungeon with keyes and stuff, i found the best armour in the game... compared to other sets in the game it looked like during making texture for this they forgot where torso on models ended, and since this was based on lorica segmentata it was really visible in my opinion. At this moment look of my party stabilised and it stayed mostly to the end like this.
My other objective though... well during my searching for that damn book i could probably genocide cave Dwellers like two times more, thankfully there was screenshot of book location in walkthrough. From that whole escapade i also grabbed nice reward from the monks, helmet visible on Sarius, stats wise i probably should give that to Venes but Sarius attribute sheet would look much more
so he got it. After this, local living charcoal man wanted me to hallucinate on suspicious roots but i leaved to do rebellion questline since i felt like i was going to finish mid game. Now i had enough exp to level pickpocketing and replace those damn guardian orders, of course my reward was more FeDex questing but this time only locally, Ironwood sisters went, maybe i could just threaten him but this was a typical goody as fuck playthrough though this also felt very suspicious and i wanted to stay incognito in Rebellion. Thankfully i reminded myself about that love potion quest and i got exp for that so i could preceed normally. Of course during druid assassination i killed that Rebellion guy and Goddess called me to her island and rewarded me with fucking up my River spells, i somewhat regret that i overwritten all my saves from before that assasination.Here i returned to the Monastery and i used those hallucinogenic roots, i was pleasantly surprised that game didnt bug out and Goddess just asked me why im not on her island yet, reactivity my dudes, reactivity. In Crossing East to build a raft, after some investigation local treehugger was able to give me his tree but i had to buy him a replacement, finally i went to Ironwood but only buy that stuff, i used this occasion to take some more quests and i returned to the treehugger, now that old fag wanted me to clean his Glade from some beasts. I guess i can do that, just some random overgrow... WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS! For the first time i thought that those were some overgrown insects but then i looked at that alien shit more, that shit almost beat me and my last save was made quite long time ago but i survived and healed. Well onwards to the Isle, i didnt expect that i was going to be so quick but at least the conversation with Goddess was interesting, with all that talk about power source and that she was not made to function so long it made me think that she was created by the Ancients, her altar has the same architecture, actually she has this weird glow, almost hologram like, maybe this setting is in reality science fantasy not fantasy and the Goddess was some ancient computer or super weapon. I was just after finishing Lord of The Ice Garden series and this was quite easy for me to think about. Even some creatures of Darkness sometimes are called Aliens so who knows, maybe there was more about that in House Liet Ancient library questline but thanks to certain 2 Charisma character i was blocked from the possibility of doing that questline. She teleported me to the local charcoal man and he wanted me to reforge the dagger and bless it in fire temple.
Now i felt that the true end game started, now it was time clear Ironwood quests. But first i wanted to do that Geric quest, in Citadel there was Literacy teacher that worked only for 200 gold, im not sure if he was supposed to do that every time but that is why both Teodoric and Venes much later learned how to read from 0 to 50. My Literacy skill for Sarius was now over 41 so i could do that infamous quest, at first game crashed at the moment of my teleportation but later everything went much better, i concluded that the probable cause for all the crashes was the area north playable space, if camera even touched space 5 or 6 tiles in that direction it was done, i had only to zoom in during unexpected fight with local red mutants (hmm did Ancients had something to do with Darkness?) and keep my part close so camera wouldn't jump to weird places, few fights later and i got some ancient stuff and cool Golem summoning ritual.
Compared to other lcoations Ironwood felt like i was going into some low level starting area, i did it much faster than i expected. As i visited Crossing East i finished by accident one quest about missing girl that was corrupted by Darkness, then i helped with local bingo problem and killed white bingo for a berserk spell that i never used. There was quest with one guy getting killed by local Beast and it was just only a red mutant, i wonder if that was just placeholder or sign of expanding Darkness corruption. Of course this wouldn't be PtD if my low Charisma party member didnt fucked another quest, this time old man didnt want us to see his wife in coma, one look and he almost used his guards on my party, at least i could gather some exp from other parts of this quest. There was also... fuck i just reminded myself that i forgot to take reward for that casino quest, tbh caling something casino in this fantasy roman inspired world sticked out for me.
Finally i could finish stuff in Citadel (and even better, thanks to the efforts of Fowyr my Goddess spells finally got fixed), it all went too quickly really. It made me think that now i entered the less finished segement of the game, but now if i think about it maybe its beacuse i was supposed to finish all of that earlier and now i was fully developed and maybe OP. I like first House of Char quest, even if many blunt dialogue lines about asking for Maleficium literally screamed "by picking me you will fuck up the quest" made manouvering questions easier it still felt somewhat satisfactory when that guy showed you where you should search for his boss. Second Char quest was finished in seconds because i cleared Barrier long time ago, House Flam was first quest was ok but that second one was just some fucking FedDex quest, yeah you could steal that valuable necklace but like i said earlier, money is easy af in this game so there is no real value in this. First House Liet quest was also simple, go to this guy, buy him a dagger, go there, get teleported to the quest giver, the end, second quest was impossible because like i said earlier head of Liet family just looked at certain member of my part and refused to even communicate, Temple quests were interesting though and worth doing for me.
Really it was disappointing for me that besides great houses quests there are like 2 or something quests in the lower city levels, this area seemed rather dense, i hope i just missed something. There was also certain leather items shop owner in north eastern quarter, and i felt like he was sending me to Ironwood for some bingo skins (for whatever reason my character had option to ask for dog costume or something like that), this felt like it was part of some quest but im not sure if it was followed somewhere.
With that, capital was finished and i could go to Jerrock, the place where all of this started. First disappointment was when i started fight gate guardians by accident, they were basically immortal, i could only make like 1 dmg against them, maybe its beacuse of plot but who cares, this shit was bad in Archolos and its also bad here, actually all neutral and friendly NPC are basically immortal, when some of them got attacked during random enemy encounters they only got uncounscious. Even during finall sequence there is event where guardians in pools of blood are fighting against one of the strongest possessed, actually six of them, this looks like they should be decimated but no, after fight they just stand up like nothing happened without even some unique dialogue. Second disappointment is that there is no trace of the warehouse, i mean the building burned but there should be some trace of this in game, not only it was only like a day before game event but you could say that the burning of that place set the whole game in motion. Yes from the perspective of the whole game its a miniscule thing but it was just weird for me. Now after going inside this mining town, game felt like it was going on rails for me, while probably you can decide if you want to help miners with their uprising or to crush it after getting ore from that place the game changes, now almost only Darkness monsters roam the world, and when you go back to the Kellen to ask Alves to reforge the blade you find village infested with posessed creatures. The smith of course survived but for whatever reason that insane old fag is also alive (i did his quest in meantime after leaving Barrier, certain 2 Charisma magic user had to have close encounter with his feet), literally the last man in the village is him heh, who would guess, maybe he really wasnt insane.
After Alves reforges the dagger now its time to choose whatever Fire temple to get this stuff blessed, first i went to the Barrier but since after that fast travel is disabled and you have to go to Crossing East on foot i reloaded the save and went to the Citadel to get the blessing.
After earlier mentioned encounter with guardians PtD refused to cooperate and started to crash and freeze like 10 times, then after one more encounter with farmers and red mutants i got to the village, i expected massacre like in Kellen but nothing like that happened it felt weird really, i went to the docks and only then event started and 6 greater possessed spawned. At the start of this fight, happened one of my favourite moments in the whole game, from the everyone in The Valley, from all of those people i helped, only one man came to help me, and that man was a fucking necromancer with his zombies from Temple questline. And even better, he and his zombies did quite well against six of the strongest enemies in the game, thank you bald corpse stealing man, you did well
. This fight also repeated those weird screeching events from the prologue dream that happened after killing one of those possessed ones, every time one get killed, i got message that monsters appeared instead of my companions but nothing really happened, i think it only despawned my first and only golem once and then some druid gave back me energy or something, repeat this 5 times and you have whole fight.Now nothing else is left but to embark the raft again (i wonder how it got back there again after the first time), and to do almost suicide by happily cutting your wrists together in a circle on some ancient altar. And thats the end. Those 5 days were quite good indeed.
TL;DR
Yeah i bet most of you already knew all of that but i still wanted to write this, game is good and its worth your time. Maybe this time is going to be filled with crashes and freezes but a good time indeed. Play it now peasants.
