Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Sannom]

Spoiler

a bunch of spectres ambush your party while stuck in a choke point and the first in the line will freeze under siren's immobilisation'spells.

Spoiler

Is that the fight behind the barricades after you take the stone key?

 

[Roguey]

Soon. Two weeks until one year from release.

 

[Excidium II]

Do youi know how many people are working on PoE fulltime at this point?

 

[Zetor]

I'm currently looking on youtube for someone who passes the fight on PotD without cheesing. I'm curious to see how it's done. Here is the only one I've found that plays on PotD and he uses a similar tactic.

Spoiler

Oh, there is a guy who passes the fight... lvl 12 or 13 party though (!), and four tanks - a monk PC, Zahua, Eder, Pallegina + Durance and the Devil

Spoiler

These are all the PotD non-solo videos of this battle I could find. If anyone thinks they're very tough, record a video of how you pass this battle on lvl 8-9, I'll be very interested in seeing it.

I did it without cheesing at level 9 (maybe it was 10) basically by stacking everyone in the lower left corner of the forge room out of range of enemy nukes for most of the fight, except for my chanter offtank (who was near the table in the lower part of the map) who took the attacks from 2 other forge guardians. I had my tank trigger the encounter and immediately run halfway between the center point and the corner, making sure to pick up one of the forge guardians too... in the end she and my chanter had all the "aggro" from the enemies even though I wasn't chokepointing them, probably because the rest of the group was out of range*. I dropped some trash summons on the caster dwarves to give my group a breather when shit got too out of hand (and it did, a few times), and had my monk/paladin melee down the guardians that didn't stick on the tank with my druid / cipher staying at max range. Once they were dead, I got rid of the melee dwarf, then the mage dwarf, then the rest.

It wasn't THAT difficult in the end. The guardians don't hit too hard on moderately hard targets, the biggest problem was moving out of / healing up from the AOEs cast by the mage dwarf. I think I also used a lot of blinding debuffs, and some other assorted disables from my cipher... my druid was mostly focused on healing with the occasional sunbeam, nature's mark and call lightning spell.

edit: also, lol at those new achievements. How in the hell are those even doable without cheating (manual backups of save files)? The only class that may have any chance at this is probably chanter, and it'd probably end up a mixture of "lol you got RNG'd to death" and extreme tedium, not to mention shit like respeccing before each major fight.

* this goes back to an earlier observation: it seems that most ranged enemies are not very aggressive about target switching if it requires them to move more than a meter or two. So if you have your tank ahead of the rest of the group, they'll be content to just pewpew the tank from max range. For most tough POTD setpiece encounters, I left the ranged physical enemies for last (casters still had to die early, of course... LOS abuse and/or long-range cipher disables helped there) while my melee dealt with the most dangerous enemy frontliners that tried to flank / get around the tank.

 

[Seaking4]

Managed to beat that Bog Dragon fight. That's one of the harder ones in the game for sure. I actually had Concelhaut kill Llengrath which was neat. The presence of the Xaurips actually makes the fight easier because they can't damage you and they give you a target to confuse. I understand why they are there though.

On another note, the high level content scaling does not seem to have done anything significant.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I did it without cheesing at level 9 (maybe it was 10) basically by stacking everyone in the lower left corner of the forge room out of range of enemy nukes for most of the fight, except for my chanter offtank (who was near the table in the lower part of the map) who took the attacks from 2 other forge guardians.

Well, you still weren't surrounded by them like their composition and the area expect you to be. But at level 9/10 it's still pretty good. What I want to see is a clever succession in which to cast 1) buffs on the party, then 2) debuffs on enemies and finaly 3) combination of attacks for maximum damage.

One of the things that irritated me into cheesing it was that once all 6 guardians had ganged up on my party in the center of the room, it was next to impossible to tell who is where because of the light effects, i.e. the combat became a clusterfuck immediately. Other than that, I was very curious to finish TWM1 already and had grown kind of tired of battles with overwhelming numbers of spirits. I like to clean out every map and like tough combat, but some encounters on the 2nd and 3rd floors were absurd.

I was really impressed with the positioning of camping supplies throughout the map though - I was always just barely able to reach the next camping supplies up until the last such item that was put before the final battle.

 

[Dwarvophile]

Spoiler

a bunch of spectres ambush your party while stuck in a choke point and the first in the line will freeze under siren's immobilisation'spells.

Spoiler

Is that the fight behind the barricades after you take the stone key?

Spoiler

I think so, the barricade creates this choke point.

 

[Sannom]

Spoiler

That one was weird for me. I tried to fight as little as possible as I could in the Battery when going through it the first time and as a result, I left the room with the trolls and the stone key for later on my first try and thus this encounter didn't spawn. Then I took the disc from the troll room (the fuck were they and the wolves doing there, by the way?) and took the long way around trough the mines and so I stumbled upon that group of spirits through the door below them rather than through the barricade. Reloaded there, didn't take the stone disc, took my party trough the barricade, massacred the group of vessels at the second barricade, hid everyone there, went back for the disc with my stealthiest character and stealthed past the group of spirits by using the mine path.

 

[Dwarvophile]

Spoiler

That one was weird for me. I tried to fight as little as possible as I could in the Battery when going through it the first time and as a result, I left the room with the trolls and the stone key for later on my first try and thus this encounter didn't spawn. Then I took the disc from the troll room (the fuck were they and the wolves doing there, by the way?) and took the long way around trough the mines and so I stumbled upon that group of spirits through the door below them rather than through the barricade. Reloaded there, didn't take the stone disc, took my party trough the barricade, massacred the group of vessels at the second barricade, hid everyone there, went back for the disc with my stealthiest character and stealthed past the group of spirits by using the mine path.

Spoiler

When you explore the room you find a hole in the north wall. Obviously pierced from the outside. So yeah, the trolls are just there on a touristic trip. A brave attempt from the dev to introduce sompe variety in the mob. Frankly I don't get this compulsion to stuff the world with foes but I suppose this is what you get with every real time combat system CRPG : quantity for quality.

Yes, it's actually possible to avoid the barricade by passing through the mine's railway, but I realised that much too late.

 

[Maculo]

After beating the game once with Cipher, which class would you recommend for a second playthrough men ?

I would recommend Priest with Eothas as deity. On PotD, you start out rather weak, which makes early game more interesting in my opinion. As the game progresses, the Priest takes off with decent accuracy buffs and disables (Repulsion Seal). By end game, you receive Avatar, Rain of Holy Fire, and strong party buffs. You go from Danny Devito to Rambo over the course of the game.

Another reason to have your main character be a Priest is so that your Holy Radiance benefits from reputation. By the time I reached Heritage Hill, I was able to demolish several undead packs just with Holy Radiance. As for why you should choose Eothas (favors benevolence and honesty), I think it provides some nice dialogue options for the Eothasian ruins, and being benevolent yields good item rewards from my experience.

Also, one fun aspect of Priests is the synergy with Barbarians. It equates to a lot of damage.

 

[Infinitron]

Where all my trash mobs at?? http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85264-301-too-little-enemies/

 

[Athelas]

Talk about first-world problems.

Where did the Xaurips go?

This sounds like it could be fruitful territory to explore in the sequel, Pillars of Eternity 2: Return of the Xaurip.

 

[CptMace]

Can't wait to be able to play 3.xx already, seems the game has changed in the second half, which is pretty much the part I didn't like.

 

[Roguey]

Why is everything happening this week -_-

 

[Infinitron]

It's a GDC talk, it won't show up on video until later anyway.

 

[Excidium II]

That's going to be some interesting presentation, considering how hard PoE failed at that tuning even though it was one of its main goals. Can't wait to watch it in 4 years when it's released to public.

 

[Infinitron]

The consensus right now is that the attributes are all right.

 

[Excidium II]

The consensus right now is that the attributes are all right.

Right now.

 

[Roguey]

That's going to be some interesting presentation, considering how hard PoE failed at that tuning even though it was one of its main goals. Can't wait to watch it in 4 years when it's released to public.

"There need to be exactly six attributes and they need to feel D&D-ish" overruled "no god/dump stats."

 

[Prime Junta]

That's going to be some interesting presentation, considering how hard PoE failed at that tuning even though it was one of its main goals. Can't wait to watch it in 4 years when it's released to public.

"There need to be exactly six attributes and they need to feel D&D-ish" overruled "no god/dump stats."

That didn't quite succeed either. Just listen to the continued whining about Might affecting spell (and firearms) damage.

(From where I'm at, a worse attribute system would've been received better. Just make Might affect melee damage, Perception affect ranged damage, and Resolve affect magical damage, and let people pump and dump. The attributes are there mostly for flavour anyway.)

 

[Roguey]

From where I'm at, a worse attribute system would've been received better. Just make Might affect melee damage, Perception affect ranged damage, and Resolve affect magical damage, and let people pump and dump.

This was unacceptable because he didn't want any specific class to have a must-have attribute, which is what that would have done.

 

[Prime Junta]

From where I'm at, a worse attribute system would've been received better. Just make Might affect melee damage, Perception affect ranged damage, and Resolve affect magical damage, and let people pump and dump.

This was unacceptable because he didn't want any specific class to have a must-have attribute, which is what that would have done.

I know. Which is why I think he would've done better to drop that self-imposed constraint altogether and let the attributes be unbalanced.

 

[ArchAngel]

That's going to be some interesting presentation, considering how hard PoE failed at that tuning even though it was one of its main goals. Can't wait to watch it in 4 years when it's released to public.

"There need to be exactly six attributes and they need to feel D&D-ish" overruled "no god/dump stats."

That didn't quite succeed either. Just listen to the continued whining about Might affecting spell (and firearms) damage.

(From where I'm at, a worse attribute system would've been received better. Just make Might affect melee damage, Perception affect ranged damage, and Resolve affect magical damage, and let people pump and dump. The attributes are there mostly for flavour anyway.)

That is equals Fun == 1 and it is against Banalce

 

[Roguey]

I know. Which is why I think he would've done better to drop that self-imposed constraint altogether and let the attributes be unbalanced.

I predict he'll disagree. He knew going in he wouldn't be able to please everybody.

 

[Prime Junta]

I know. Which is why I think he would've done better to drop that self-imposed constraint altogether and let the attributes be unbalanced.

I predict he'll disagree. He knew going in he wouldn't be able to please everybody.

You don't have to be an oracle to make that prediction.