Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

On that note, its hilarious -
There were only a few female portraits that I liked that weren't dwarf in stature but I didn't choose them because I never play dwarves. (if I want a behemoth, I'll go half-orc; otherwise I go half-elf with a few halflings thrown in)
But then I ended up rolling a dwarf. It was just too good to pass on the racial trait that they don't have a movement penalty for wearing heavy armor.
Oh and I also never play gnomes but I love the way gnomes look in this game so it will happen... It is interesting that dwarves and gnomes get the racial armor bonus against giants but halflings do not. I am sure it would be too powerful when mixed with the halfling's luck bonuses.

Does anyone know if there is a spell list somewhere?

Recreational Villain, I agree - the writing in PoE 2 was much better than in 1.

The classes and skill system is way too complex for me to think about multiclassing. It makes my brain hurt just considering it. And you know how much it pains me to not geek out on multiclassing.

holy crap you're not kidding. just checked metacritic and there's literally nothing. (Well, a bunch of glowing to above-average player reviews, but no actual critic reviews yet).

I guess they were embargo'd until release day and now have to play a 30+ hour RPG post-release?

There were some streams of the beta, I watched enough of one to get a sense that it would be something I would be interested in (basically the prologue).

I seldom read game reviews anymore because there are so few writers left that I trust to represent my tastes, so the embargo or whatever/lack of reviews does not bother me much.

I re-rolled a paladin lady and started over from my first dwarf fighter dude. I may roll a magic user of some sort and have a simultaneous evil play-through going (those usually don't last long, I have a hard time being an evil asshole in a game but they are fun for a little while).

Well, I completed the main part of the game; the character creation screen. Quite tough.
Thassilonian Wizard for someone who do not like classic d&d casters. What could possibly go wrong.

Thus far, there haven't been a lot of moment-to-moment dialogue instances to, appreciably, shape your character beyond cardboard cutout; or at least almost every instance, of worth, seems to be tied to a precursor scripted event. Specifically, the majority of the moment-to-moment "evil" options appear to be on par with:

• NPC: 'Howdy there, I'm Bob and...'
• Player optional response: 'Stop talking Bob, I don't care what you have to say and will kill you! Walk away now!' Dialogue in general is a top-down A,B,C the process.

"Smooth criminal" or "Han likes to talk but he also shoots first" hasn't emerged yet as a consistently viable option. Or, at least, in a way that doesn't compel my eyes to roll a backflip.

Somewhat counter to the above slice, the writing isn't entirely bad. It is, however, drunken carpenter levels of uneven. It's as though a higher-up decreed, 'Make me a screen that says (A) Gimme quest! and (B) Goodbye'. Later on, some enterprising individual under cover of darkness stealthed in and fleshed out random talky bits.

While the mysterious do-gooder above is appreciated, sometimes even that is uncanny valley levels of unnatural convo:

Player: 'Hey, I'm [player name]. Glad to meet you. Sooo, you are?'
NPC Companion: 'I'm virtuous McHaloPants. Reliable person extraordinaire wot carries a big shield. Also a Paladin. Also-also, I HATE MY PATRON DEITY AND EVERYTHING ABOUT MY ORDER which is [paragraphs follow out of the blue].'

Player: 'Oh, uh, hey I think I'm late to go have my eyeballs sandpapered, so..."
NPC Companion: 'I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT\WHO ARE YOU TO CHANGE MY MIND' *sideways glance like I want to talk about it if you choose wisely*
Player: Uh yeah, about that, I don't have any other options here but variations of Goodbye. Sorry about that!'
NPC Companion: is it something I said? DID I MENTION I HATE ART? You hate art too right let's be friends?? Helllooooo'.

Yes a smidge, maybe three smidges, dramatic but, c'mon; it's early going and this template has already shaken out with two NPCs. Are they secretly pals and sharing the same meds?

If I'm b*tchy it's because large swathes, of other elements of this, are SO close and often SO good.

Yeah, so the Challenging difficulty is ... well ... challenging. In a bad way. After the initial tutorial, you're given two missions as your next steps. On Challenging, both of those missions insta-kill your entire party. One is the spider swarms that can't be hit (and if you do kill one, two more pop up). The other is mercenaries that have to be several levels higher than you because they one-shot all of your characters regardless of class or defenses.

So I said, okay, I'll explore a bit and get some experience. First random encounter is two mites - that went well, though I took some damage. Second random encounter is two primal spider matriarchs that steamroll my four characters without taking a point of damage, because I can't hit them. Third random encounter is six slavers with three times my hit points that crush my party without blinking if I fight ... and I lose a member of the party and take an alignment hit if I don't fight back. And while the help text tells you to run away from fights you can't win, here's the thing: you can't. Random encounters don't permit escaping, you can't exit a zone while in combat, and everything else is faster than your characters.

This leaves you with nothing to do except save scum over and over, trying to find encounters that your level 2 weaklings actually have a chance of winning. This is not fun.

Just got to my first spider swarms. Heh, they seem dmg immune to everything for me, including magic. No

to test with though.

Edit: Tried with

Yeah, there are a few enemy encounters, already early on, that are just.. dumb. It's not about strategic placement, or good spell choice, etc so much as some 'puzzle' one-trick-pony gimmick. There's also a lot of trash mob encounters that keep you flush in potions as loot. I had like 15 healing pots, or somesuch thereabouts, after just the intro and then got several more from the Oleg pitstop.

I'm about to hang this up for a deeper dive into Insomnia:The Ark, which recently came off of Kickstarter into delivery. Sure, the camera is a bit claustrophobic (perhaps intentional) and the dialogue is about as deep as the original Fallout, but it's not trying to be something it's not with the talky talk; I can forgive it's functional approach with the aforementioned as trade-off for the sense of Fallout-y atmosphere on a space station as it relates to wandering around and enjoying the WTF weirdness of the experience.

^Yeah, the patch apparently 'fixes' the spiders in that the party is geared up and clued in to the win strategy for the..encounter. Really though, there are plenty of logical approaches that should yield close results that do near-nothing. It's an item based win with a few practically applicable strategies.

There are a good 4 or 5 encounters early on that are more egregious because they are poorly designed. It's not because of some sly composition of the enemy group, it's things like whiffing several times on sleeping enemies that can roll you in a few hits when they wake up. The, perceived, idea of the encounter design, in that example, is that you can get a few hits in for free to even up the odds but, oh wait, the fact they are snoozing didn't include any sort of status malus \effect (oops we forgot or 'our mistake' on not including flatfooted) is disingenuous when apparently a lot of this was eyerolled at in beta and could have been fixed before post-release patching.

Part of this is just hand-in-hand with low level D&D\Pathfinder. No great stock of X per day spell uses yet or enough HP, on either side, to keep a single RNG20 from tipping the battle, again -- for either side, if a person (or monster) is suddenly down from the onset. Getting to level 5ish in the hopes that encounters are no longer bland, largely rock'm sock'm melee or crossbow bolt trading affairs is outdated design approach.

aside: the PSA on the patch dropping is appreciated. I think I'm just coming to the conclusion, with personal preference, that D&D\Pathfinder has some inherent low level problems when it comes to being a platform for CRPGs. The nostalgia kick alone, for me, just isn't enough to overlook things my 20 year ago self would have just accepted.

later edit note: distilled down, it doesn't help that 50% of encounters can be 'won' with zero input from the player other than the downside, of that approach, being clicken' zee potions after. The level of trash mobs for XP hoovering is also, imo, mind numbing throwback design.

Think Im at a point where I can only progress by randomly running around and spawning random encounters for XP (well, or reducing the difficulty, but I'm not there just yet, although it's close - I'm only on Challenge, it should not be that crazy).
I did kill the spider swarm encounter yesterday, even though the patch change didnt work, since I already had the quest - but the idea mentioned in the notes did work... somewhat.
You are clearly supposed to

But nothing else in the area seems doable right now. The next main quest got an encounter with ~5 enemies, each of which seems to 1-2 shot even my tank and I can hit them 5% of the time. Can't even get 1 enemy down before I'm dead. And it doesnt feel like it is something where you can just 'play better' - unlike say Pillars of Eternity, where it nearly always felt like you could improve your strategy and fare much better (although it too had balance issues in the first few levels, but nothing close to this).

Edit: Never mind. The stock is 25000, but each build point costs 80 gold.

Did anyone else notice that a vendor in the capital sells 25000 build points for 80 gold? That can't be right!