1983

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I thought I noticed that too on the damage. Not a bad bug by any means. The constant buff does annoy me for some reason. I have never played a RPG I hadn’t started over in anyway.

1984

I ended up doing your second option shortly after I posted my question. Yeah, the more dialog options related to past choices, skill checks, etc, the better. I love how it makes it more personal.

1985

I care because I don’t want other people’s morality and sensitivities to influence my experience. I honestly can not remember being offended by any kind of entertainment content but if I was I have the ability to not consume that content. Or to stop consuming that content.

An example that comes to mind is The Hangover 2. Andy from The Office fucks a transsexual and he is upset about it after the fact. Is that ‘transphobic’? Fuck no! Should the movie be censored? Fuck no!

1986

The crap being thrown at Obsidian is getting real nasty on twitter right now. Ugh. People are losing their minds in outrage.

1987

Well the developer’s morality and sensitivities cannot be divorced from the creation before us. Whether or not it was Twitter pressure or not, we can only speculate, but ultimately the developers decided to alter the content in the same way they are altering and balancing the game. In the grand scheme of things it is just a tiny memorial thing that most are ignoring anyway and has no impact on the game/story itself. Please note that your outrage and the outrage of others at the change/removal is no more justified or righteous than those that took offense at the content.

Just enjoy this beautiful game we have!

-Todd

1988

Quit telling me what to do!

On a more serious note, the author of the controversial epitaph commented on the official forums. Apparently Obsidian allowed him to “decide the fate of the epitaph.” It was his choice to change it.

1989

Good Firedorn sounds a bit intimidated by the size of the platform he bought with his money.

1990

That thread is going places:

I recall one of the devs in a PoE sit-down/demonstration sounding quite effeminate. If I were to suspect anything it would be that they have LGBT sympathizers from within also pushing this censorship. - just a conspiracy theory.

1991

Same here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be sensitive to other people. It would be different if they changed actual content in the game, rather than one of hundreds of epitaphs I don’t read anyway because they’re nothing more than vanity statements from kickstarter backers. For example, there’s one very prominent subplot that deals heavily with rape. If they took that out, I would be upset.

1992

Take it to P&R if you must, IMO. Lord knows I’d welcome the chance to go off on some idiots, but I know better than to do it in the Games forum. Ya hosers.

1993

Would you kindly?

-Todd

1994

New topic is about killing babies. Feminists want babies to live, everyone else want babies dead.

1995

You got that in reverse, actually.

1996

I miss a big “You are starting Act II” screen

offtopic shit

We need the power to ignore some dumb people and the dumb things they say in Tumbler and Twitter

Specially [we have to learn to ignore] non-problems, and fabricated controversial topics made from thin air

1997

Nope? Read the topic.

1998

Interestingly, I saw the other day that verified twitter accounts has a “Quality” setting, that allows only high-quality twitters through. I have no idea how it works, though…hmm…or have I been 1st of aprilled?

edit: Ha - no - here it is!

1999

It was a joke. This topic reads “Pillars of Eternity”, which is what I wish we were discussing instead of yet another Internet outrage, as if we’re not already drowning on those.

Please don’t mind my tone. I’m just fed up with all the Internet outrage activism.

2000

Started a female, human-form, moon godlike, ranger with a stag pet and an old-v-something hunter background (phew). Only just made it out of the intro ruins/temple thing.

Question about secondary skills (stealth, mechanics, etc)–which ones should I get? I started out with stealth and survival. Lore seems like it would be useful for conversation (and scrolls, of course) and mechanics for, well, the traditionally thiefly duties. How useful is stealth? I can’t seem to really do much with it and I’m not sure that it’s worth it. Should I be trying to avoid encounters? That goes strongly against my BG/infinity engine habits because I want XP and loot, of course.

Not sure if I’ll stick with the ranger, we’ll see. I rather want to do a wizard but people say its tough early going. Thoughts?

2001

Lore is usefull for one or two conversations, stealth is usefull the 100% of the game, but the mechanic start strong enough, … mechanic has a lot to do with opening chests and disabling traps, so I say is the one more interesting.

Avoid encounters? they give XP and stuff that you can sell… you may also meet things otherwise will not happend, so don’t avoid encounters. Get intro trouble.

You either make a very strong tank, a very strong wizard, or a very strong hybrid class, … else you may end have all your team but one guy using bows and pistols, … this game want the game to understand the mechanics before he start playing. This mean might is the most important start in the game by far. I have heard very good things about ciphers.

2002

You definitely want a character with mechanics and assuming you’re not going to game the system to get all the NPCs early it’ll probably need to be you or one of your first 2 companions. If you follow the game at it’s normal pace you might not run into the others away and by the time you do they might be several levels behind making it a challenge to get their mechanics skill up high enough to deal with the stuff you find. I don’t think I’ve ever seen mechanics come up as a conversation option though (I’ve made several characters, they’ve all been either mechanics or lore primary). Since you can’t take advantage of your companions knowledge of lore/survival etc for conversations it might be better to cover one of those yourself if you want to see as many options as possible. I don’t have the option turned on to show what triggers conversation options so I’m not sure what all I’m missing but I’m sure I’ve had at least one lore option.

I’ve never bothered with stealth; I imagine it’s primarily useful for stealing (whenever a red hand shows up as opposed to blue). I put a little on my mechanic so they can get close enough to set a trap in a useful location but a couple points seemed plenty.

As for avoiding encounters, you get a small amount of xp by filling your bestiary (I think it’s either 8 or 10 kills to max out bestiary information, maybe it varies by creature type for some rarer monsters?) and the larger groups are generally going to have treasure you want or be guarding a location you want to scout carefully anyway so it seems like you’d only be able to skip a small encounter here and there and it wouldn’t really be worth it to bother scouting around to find out if you can skip the fight or not, fight’d be over by the time you stealth all the way around.

Ranger is in my opinion the most boring of the classes with most of the class talents seeming to be passive boosts; they can do solid single target ranged dps and the pet can help if you’re careful with the engagement system, using it to engage something that slips past your tanks can keep your squishy alive. I’d still go with any other class though; I didn’t dislike it, it just didn’t seem to bring anything as interesting to the table as the other classes.

Wizard is probably the most difficult class to start with but I still haven’t had any problems with it playing on hard. If you’re on normal I definitely can’t see it being a problem. They got a slight buff with the last patch and a lot of their stuff has a bit more range now, which I think includes their special ability; at least it seems like that got a small range buff. It’ll be slower killing at first if you don’t want to rest/camp a lot but it’s not really difficult.

Minor spoiler re:wizard

The very first companion option you’ll get will be a wizard unless you go out of your way to avoid him, and I believe he starts with 1 in mechanics so he can do that if you’re willing to cart him around. His stats are mediocre, but good enough.