one-and-a-half-ivan asked:
Hi Josh, I had a question about skill checks in PoE2. If I understood it correctly, all your party scores are added in order to see if you pass a check or not. Won't it make checks redundant, as it would be easy to max out all the important skills and just steamroll through all dialogues? Could you maybe tell us about this aspect in detail?
JSawyer:
Other party members can contribute to checks, but the contribution is not 1:1. Every other character in the party who has a value in the applicable skill has their skill value added to a pool. The pool grants an additional bonus on a (more or less) triangular progression.
E.g.: John Watcher is in dialogue and one of his replies has a Diplomacy requirement of 8. He has 4 Diplomacy. Pallegina has 6 Diplomacy, Aloth has 3, Eder has 1, Xoti has 0.
6 + 3 + 1 + 0 = 10, which corresponds to a bonus of +4. John Watcher’s effective Diplomacy is 8.
The assists can allow you to make much higher checks than you could by yourself, but that’s also a pretty big investment of skill points to make high checks in one specific skill. If you want to make the Diplomacy Monster Party that makes all of the Diplomacy checks because everyone has maxed out Diplomacy, you can. You don’t receive any special bonuses for being 2x or 3x over the check requirement and you won’t qualify for any of the checks in other skills.