Finally playing White March (1) and I’m impressed with the amount and quality of substance to this DLC. All of the maps are dense with quests/tasks and interesting creatures, as well as situations that feel dynamic and varied.
One aspect of Pillars 1 that I don’t really enjoy are the weapons/armor - I tend to just stick with the default armor an NPC comes equipped with and enchant it when possible. And once I give a character a weapon specialty I just give that character the best weapons I can find within that category that give them the ability to inflict each of the core piercing/crushing/slashing damage types - the damage variations are too insignificant, and effects of reload/attack speed are too esoteric to make more frequent swapping (and re-enchanting) seem worthwhile, and I almost never remember to use spell effects on weapons/armor that need to be manually triggered. Pillars weapons/armor have more traits to consider, but are also so balanced that they’re just less interesting and memorable than the items in the Baldur’s Gate series (as discussed above), for instance.
But I find a lot of the items in White March to be interesting (and I’m not talking about the new soulbound twist) - maybe that’s partly the result of increased familiarity with the game and its systems, but I don’t think that’s entirely the reason - they seem more creative and imbued with increased utility.
Love the dragon storyline in this one (haven’t done the Sky Dragon quest yet, but have completed the Endless Paths), as well as the stories surrounding the other NPCs and characters out in the non-town areas.
DLC/expansions for RPGs are difficult, since it’s difficult to lure players back for a brief revisit of a game theyve completed, and they can suffer from power creep and being detached from the main storyline, but developers are doing a far better job on expansion content for RPGs over the past 10 years than they did in the early years of computer RPG expansions.
I seem to have a bug and my experience points have stopped, just before my main character would go to level up from 5-6. No matter how many things I kill I stay 10 points shy of leveling up, I am at 20990 and need 21000.
Killing things doesn’t give you experience points every time. You only get XP for kill milestones (coincides with increasing the amount of info in the bestiary)
Complete a quest to be sure it’s actually an issue.
I notice the Quest points in the text screen, but I thought you always got some kind of points for killing enemies. I first noticed not getting the points when fighting Leaden Key assassins when emerging from the area below Caed Nua. I would think they would be worth something.
But I get what you are saying. If I complete a quest I should see when I get the points. I do remember getting them when completing Kana’s quest line not too long before this.
Nope. You only get exp for learning something about enemies, and you stop doing that after you’ve killed X number of them, which is generally well under the number of that enemy in the game. And I think the assassins count as their race rather than a distinct enemy type. Or maybe every human-analogue race in the game is under one entry, I forget.
Yea, I finally found a wiki that spelled out how you get experience points and it seems you two are right. I have been playing this for 30 hours and just figured that out. So I guess killing things is secondary to actually doing something. :)
Well, at least I know the game ain’t broke and for that I am happy. There have been a few things it has taken me a while to figure out (like there are no health potions in the game, what RPG doesn’t have health potions) but once I figured them out I understood what the game wanted. Somehow I just missed this until now.
Is there an optimal way of doing chants? I mean can I just throw all my known verses into a single chant and call it a day or is it more involved than that?
I always felt that different chants (order of the verses) worked for different battles, but ultimately I tended to stick with one that worked best for my party in all cases. Buff the party in early verses, summon and damage later verses. Might depend on the difficulty you play at, too.
I got rid of Kana because I didn’t think he made a good third tank. But maybe I didn’t allocate stats correctly with him. I have done better with a new character developed directly for the job.
I think the devs struggled with that trope a bit. At one point the sequel did put Int back as the stat that boosted wizard spell dmg, but ended up resorting it back.
The enemies really kick it up once you start on the road to Twin Elms. That first area had an ogre fight I stumbled into that just kicked my ass, and I had been doing the ass kicking for awhile.
The Quest regarding the guy trying to re-take my keep, that leads to a battle, is that something I want to mes with?
