Pillars of Eternity

AAAAH! SURPRISE SPIDER QUEEN!!

SO anyway, completed Durance's quest Final part is about convincing him that Magran and Woedica were conspiring to kill Eothas and that Magran tried to kill him along with other godhammer creators and have him swear revenge on both of them. Reason why you need to ask him so many question is that you convince him through things he told you. Not sure what happens if you don't have right questions, but I heard he apparently lights himself on fire

Oh Durance, you so crazy, like a flaming Rasputin

edited 29th Mar '15 9:54:39 PM by SpookyMask

So, only started playing this yesterday and.... oh it's like booting up Planescape all over again. So. Much. Damn. Fun!

So far I've only just gotten to Gilded Vale and I was NOT expecting that tree. Decided to let the lovers go (The spirit emotions kinda clued me in that the wife was likely telling the truth) and it wasn't worth just murdering two more people.

The magistrate is an arsehole, and I've recruited Aloth. Now doing the underground temple - Note to self, find way to make shadows go **** themselves. Got curbstomped in one fight as I'm still trying to work out the trap / death / healing system.

I may re-roll as I just made an Elf ranger as a starter, but crossbows are sloooooow. Aloth tends to die quickly too, so I'm obviously not quite "there" yet with tanking / spells / combat rhythm. Also, I may need to buy more food or potions or something.

I also noted a body in a ruin in the vale-lands, but you can't reach it. I assume it's flavour or you get a spell to get it? Same map with the bear cave entrance.

I'm tempted to restart as I'm not quite "getting the hang" of the ranger, plus the elf doesn't seem to "fit" me. What's the classes / races everyone's trying now? And I like that I can, if I want, make my ranger a swordsman. And that Aloth's default starting secondary weapon is a RAPIER. Gentleman wizard!

Also, is the Cat important in that house with the pregnant lady? I didn't aks about it and the conversation option vanished.

Best thing about the game - because there are SO MANY options, I don't feel pressurized to have an "optimum build" - even Planescape it tended to be "Wisdom or go home".

And I am loving the lore, the souls...

Ok, I'm calming down now. Breathing. In summary - is fun! Need to do more sidequests. Need reroll a character who's all about persuasion! Charm! And stabbing! maybe. Bows aren't as fun as I was expecting.

Did you get Edeir btw?

Also, don't even try doing Temple of Eothas before you get Durance. Trust me its not worth it :p Unless you sneak past all the loot and combat

I kinda like it how you can through disposition have conversation based character without relying on your actual stats.

Not yet - I didn't think you got him until you finished the whole of Gilded Vale? And i need to find mr Durance, I hear he is a rather... polarising character.

I got quite far in the Temple before my TPK after Aloth had died one too many times. Permadeath seems rather... well it's a hazard but not the teeth gnashing that it could be in Fallout at least.

Evidently need more than just 2 people in the party. I was tempted by a God-kind but they just seem too... out there. maybe playthrough 2!

To recruit Eder you just have to rest one time at the Black Hound inn.

You get Edeir after you talk to dead dwarf animancer which you trigger after resting in the inn

Ahhh. Haven't rested there yet. Rested in the Temple and got the vision of the dead woman...

Also loving that torches are an off hand weapon in this.

And can you use a Rapier / dagger combo or is it only two daggers that it counts towards as a rogue?

What's the best party composition people have settle with so far? banter wise as well as skill wise.

Rapier/dagger is totally a thing. It's the default weapon set for an Old Vailian Rogue.

The party I have right now seems pretty good. Eder, Pallegina, Kana, Aloth and Sagani. I haven't met the other two companions, yet, though, so they might interest me more.

Hoo boy, all quest done, ITS FINAL QUEST TIME

Also, funnily enough, the no point of return turns out to be literally jumping into a hole

Anyway, so my comments on rest of companion quests besides Durance and Pallagrine since I already commented on those:

One thing I noticed that quite lot of companion quests have two actual stances the character is wondering between with and sometimes third were you take no stance and taking no stance is almost always the worst option. Like with Sagani it leaves her rather bitter.

Anyhoo, on Sagani's quest, its kinda awesomely tragic that Persoq's reincarnation turns out to be a stag. Thats bleeding out to death to the boot :p

On Grieving Mother Wow, she is almost as, if not more, messed up as Durance is. She didn't mean harm but she did some nasty stuff. Totally didn't let her forget what she did since that sounds like it would end horribly

On Hiravius His quest seem to be about choosing between Wael and Gawain in the end. With latter he seems to become more blood thirsty considering what he did to body of his "other half" or whatever that aumau druid was

Not much to say about Edeir, his quest is pretty sad and I like it, but yeah, good guy.

Aloth Okay, his split personality quest line isn't as interesting as it turning out later that he is/was leaden key member, though funnily enough he wasn't a mole he was there in Gilded Vale for completely unrelated reason and decided to follow you when you mentioned them only to later be horrified by Leaden Key's methods he didn't know anything about, he joined them to get away from where he came from :p

Kana Rua is.. Pretty nice too. Not much to say about his quest I mean, since when are ancient lost civilizations ever completely benevolent? And the tablet turning out to be broken wasn't that surprising either. Still nice potential on how you can convince him on several different things during the quest

Also on endless path questline I decided to take lazy way out and instead of fighting Master Below aka Adra Dragon I helped her escape. Why? Because I realized there is achievement for killing all dragons and I already decided to let dragon in hylea's temple live and I figured out that I might as well see what ending slides happen if adra dragon escapes. Plus I kinda like helping out dragons since they seem so rare.

And finally, nothing major, but I find it kinda funny that for xenophobic race, vithraks are surprisingly easy to negotiate with. I mean, all three(well there is fourth too, but you can talk to that one only if you negotiate with leader) you can talk to can be convinced to not fight you and only one of them is hostile and needs to be convinced with checks to not fight you

Aaaaand game completed

But crap, I noticed too late that before the final choice you had choice to talk to all party members one last time D: So I have to do final boss fight again later to see that dialog! Ah well, at least I figured out after several times a method to cheese the fight... And that gives me excuse to see what other choices would have done

Anyway, the plot twist that will change everything dun dun dun Edit: Actually, I decided to erase the spoiler just in case someone gets tempted to check it out before they get to the final quest :p I do want to discuss it with someone when people get there though

Anyhoo, on final choices I kinda find it amusing that all 6 "What do you do with trapped souls?" choices each align to gods' goals. Even the "Give the souls to Woedica like Thaos was planning to" which is kinda silly even if you are greedy :p Sixth one being Wael's "Send souls to some random unknown location unknown even to Gods just because it'd be mysterious"

edited 30th Mar '15 11:41:11 AM by SpookyMask

Am I un-BEAR-able?

In Endless Paths on the seventh level you find these elemental forges that you can activate with prisms. Do these actually do anything?

Anyway, loving it. They've really smoothed over a bunch of the old gripes I have with the infinity engine games that really didn't bother me back when I first played them when they were new but have stymied most attempts at replaying anything that isn't Torment. Combat is actually enjoyable again. Except for those Shades. Screw 'em Shades.

By the by, for those who've cleared the game: What's the highest level door in the game, Mechanics wise? Wondering if there's any reason to raise the skill past 10.

edited 30th Mar '15 4:13:22 PM by GabrieltheThird

Around the eastern section, you come across a spirit who warns you to turn back. Behind it is a Spectre, and 4 Greater Blights, one for each element, where each one can summon a regular Blight. The forges, if you can activate the cubes with their respective prisms, traps the Greater Blights of the respective element, leaving only the Spectre, an easy fight for mid-level characters.

Thanks. Thought it was probably something like that. Killed everything in the area before I activated the forges so missed out on that.

edited 30th Mar '15 4:27:54 PM by GabrieltheThird

There is a single level 12 door(aka you can open it with level 11 and lockpicks) in endless paths, but mostly over level 10 things you use mechanics on are traps. And yes, there are traps higher than that on endless paths' higher levels at least, not sure if final dungeon of the main game had that high traps, but it doesn't really matter since final dungeon barely has traps besides off path in first area that you don't even need to visit

If you want to be more exact, maybe all doors on that floor are level 12, but since I had max level party without level 11 mechanics, I just had to find the key so I didn't bother checking other locked doors than the first one.

edited 30th Mar '15 10:15:14 PM by SpookyMask

Hahaha yeah, I killed the Spectre and the Greater Blights (nearly died doing so; I was down to my PC Ranger, Eder and Sagani) before realizing what the forges did.

Hate to do it so soon after praising this though, but now I'm mostly just annoyed at the game. The bugs finally got to me. I've been taking them in stride thus far, the most annoying one before the breaking point was the one where my rogue can't actually turn off Reckless Assault even though its supposed to be modal, so using the ability just stacks it. So now she has like four versions of it on at the same time (the newer ones get suppressed by the old one though, so no statistical gains).

But now I noticed that the party members lose items in their inventory either when they're in the keep or when they're sent out questing. I had that plate armour that gives mechanics bonus in Eder's inventory, not equipped and it's gone now and so is that whelp summoning token I got from one of the bounties that was in Sagani's quick slot. Needed those items too.

At least I've apparently avoided the worst one, though by sheer luck. According to posts on the official forums, if you double click to equip items to your characters they might lose their active abilities like racials and such...

Went in expecting bugs, this is a Kickstarted thing after all, those never have enough budget for playtesting, but some of these are way too obvious and pretty critical.

edited 31st Mar '15 5:59:36 AM by GabrieltheThird

Huh, that does kinda explain why I remembered my characters having more stuff before I dismissed them

Anyway, I think you have rather low tolerance for bugs since I was able to complete game completely without noticing or caring about bugs :p

Losing items is a no-no. Also, not like I listed all of the bugs I've run into.

There was that time when the text box kept scrolling upwards so I couldn't read anything past the first line. That time when all the sounds went haywire and started clipping. One time the post-combat dialogue for a quest didn't start so I missed quest progression until I wondered about it, Googled and reloaded a previous save. Or that time when the game just decided it didn't want to create save files any more, so it went trough the motions of saving but nothing actually happened. Lost a decent bit of time there. I also think that the stash is bugged in that it doesn't actually show all items you have there before you sell some off.

Plus a bunch of other smaller bugs and other stuff, like the mild annoyances of lacking documentation (how do Do Ts work, exactly, how does dual wield work in relation to recovery time and individual swings, what talents come available and when, how to tell your wizards level 1 spells have gone from per rest to per encounter, etc., etc.), badly optimised save files or something (it takes me over 2 minutes now for it to find my saves when I start up the game. Used to take me over 4 but then went over and trashed most of my old saves which helped a bit), Grieving Mother's voice lines being messed up so the S' break. The list goes on.

And hell, most of that didn't bother me either. But then I started losing things.

edited 31st Mar '15 6:50:34 AM by GabrieltheThird

Huh, I had none of those bugs

And I didn't really care about losing some items because I got tons of them to replace old ones that would have sitted in stash anyway

I'm starting to suspect that some of bugs have to do with what type of system people have because I haven't seen some bugs at all <_<

edited 31st Mar '15 8:13:13 AM by SpookyMask

Anyhoo, why is someone listing on trope page "game breaking bugs" that don't actually stop the game being able to be finished? Only bug that has danger of that is the Raedric's hold one I haven't seen .-.

LOL, I was too busy adding portraits to the characters' page to even notice that.

Some may be fair, but smaller ones that may cause crashes and frame drops, nah...

edited 31st Mar '15 10:19:16 AM by YoKab

Game-Breaking bugs don't need to make the game Unwinnable. Though crashes and framerate issues probably don't count.

I haven't gotten far because of a review crush. Hard to visit this thread at the moment :p