Pillars of Eternity Abilities

Remove all ads!

One of the biggest things I struggle with with this game's attribute system is that high Might actually increases the amount of damage done by guns. What? Are you pulling the trigger harder, thus making your bullets travel more quickly so they hit harder?

That's not how guns work. This just feels funky to me.

 

There's nothing wrong with a little abstraction for the sake of balance. Firearms have always been a weird element in fantasy games. They're hard to balance against traditional fantasy weapons without making things funky in one or more areas.

Might in PoE isn't necessarily just physical might anyway (it affects magic too). I don't know what kind of "might" would affect firearms, but let's put that under creative license.

 

Ah, yes, of course! How did I ever overlook that angle?!

 

The guns in PoE were very early ones and not at all like more modern ones. They did take strength and skill to use. BTA may be joking but he has a point. Load that gun wrong and the shooter is more apt to blow himself up. By the time I was twelve my grandfather taught me to shoot and I could use the single barrel shotgun but not the double barrel one, it would have broken my shoulder and those guns were much more advanced then the ones in PoE.

OE's gift lies not in being innovative but in being able to take the old and add new polish to it. In being able to create a well integrated game, to allow the player to create to a certain extent his or her own game. Intelligent ogres may be innovative and I love it.

I am playing on normal difficulty with expert mod which I find challenging but not overly difficult.

 

Older firearms had quite a kick, yes, but packing powder wasn't really much of a skill to be honest. They were much more like to simply misfire than to blow up in your face.

Also, how about ogre mages or ogres in cyberpunk settings? They're usually intelligent.

 

For anyone interested here is a Wikipedia article on the Arquebus, its history and mechanism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arquebus#History

 

I maxed intelligence with my PC, it did come up but not with the frequency of the other three.

Ogre mages being intelligent is standard fare for fantasy settings, spellcasting requiring mild intelligence is generally the case too.

 

That's odd. Intellect checks come up a lot more often in my conversations. In fact, based on my games, I'd say it's right after Resolve in terms of frequency, followed by Perception. Might only seems to come up as often as Dexterity.

 

I'm experiencing the relative frequency of in-dialog attribute checks similarly to Paracelsi.

The general pattern seems to be this:

1. high RES usually gives you the most "direct" way to get a result, simply by being very persistent/believable/charismatic
2. high INT lets you usually get to the same result via being a smart-ass
3. high PER lets you usually get to the same result via noticing some additional information...
4. high MIG lets you sometimes get to the same result by threatening the person, though obviously that can also go wrong...
5. high DEX lets you seldomly snatch something away from the person you're talking to, or quickly put a dagger to their throat, etc.

 

Actually, Might is a relatively useful and important stat for spellcasters, since it modifies the amount of damage or healing the spell does. (And INT is also important for spellcasters because it modifies the size of a spell's area of effect as well as its duration.)

 

Ooops. My bad for not more closely reading what he wrote.

 

No, the DC of a spell is just an accuracy check against a particular defense of the enemy and there are no attributes that increase accuracy (at least not anymore).

Each spell has an inherent accuracy bonus and the rest is determined by level, equipment, and buffs. Possibly some traits too, but I'm not sure off the top of my head.

 

Nope. In PoE the stat that determines whether a spell's effect lands or not is accuracy. Accuracy is mostly affected by buffs, talents and character levels. Spell accuracy is basically your base accuracy + buffs, and is different from weapon accuracy. Also the higher the accuracy, the higher the chances of a crit (including spell crits). Low accuracy results in a graze, which basically means the spell only works at 50% effect.

In most other ways accuracy is basically the same as spell DC. Accuracy has to bypass the target's deflection/reflex/fortitude/will roll for a spell to take full effect, for example.

On the topic of the Might stat, I've managed to wrap my head around one explanation that works well with how it affects all damage you do - Might is basically a measure of your character's instinctive ability to cause damage/destroy things. Some people are just better at causing damage/knocking stuff down, regardless of the kind of tools they're given. They don't exactly understand how they do it - they might notice that someone is trying to cover a weak spot or wound but they do so on an instinctual level, so a character with high Might and low Perception (which is more a measure of a character's wisdom/memory/ability to connect the dots combined with sensory perception) may not fully understand why they want to hit that particular spot, they just know that they should aim there.

 

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Accuracy

 

I know there are talents and traits which affect accuracy, I'm just not sure if any of them actually effect spell accuracy. I imagine some do, but I haven't checked in-game.

Also, the wiki so out of date in some cases, it's unreliable at best. Then again, so is the information presented in the game...

 

This particular page isn't outdated though. I know because I wrote most of it (based on in-game descriptions and testing in the current version of the game)

It is true that many other pages of the wiki were written based on info from backer updates or beta versions of the game, and thus contained outdated info when the game was released. But since then, there has been a lot of effort to bring it up to date, and the wiki as a whole is shaping up nicely. You should give it another chance.

Yes.