I am on the third start now :)

First was a fighter, well he worked OKish. But we did too little damage and the fights took too long.
Anyway, after jumping into the blood pool and killing the dragon, we were out of everything and two maimed with no way to make the way back up through the path. They probably still rot down there...

Second was a rogue, only short. He cannot tank and does good single target damage. Fights were shorter and that increased our suvivability more than anything else.

Now I play a Cipher and he rocks the house. Killing groups of monsters in seconds (Eder tanking). The fights are even shorter and I just select the whole group and click on the group of enemies. Few seconds later I select the loot.

Admittedly I played on Normal, but some of those early encounters were pretty tough. Those wolves tore me to pieces too, and at others time the party survived with 5 HP or so. Nuts. It becomes easier, however, and pretty soon, most battle can be won without problems. Had to laugh at a comment elsewhere, which said the combat in this game varied between very easy, easy and [ONE SINGLE TOUGH GUY enemy encounter] (<<--- changed the latter to reduce spoilers, but those who have played the game know which one it is).

Sounds like fun. About to start another game, this time on Hard (hopefully it won't be TOO hard), and with a Cipher. Sounds like an interesting class, so I want to try it out. But would also prefer to not miss out on all those perception or resolve checks again, so may have to build him/her poorly.

Overall I think Pillars is a good game, but don't think I can call it a great one. I think one of the reasons is that the weapons and armour just don't seem to matter much. All that exploring and even assembling some weapons, and they don't have any kind of WOW factor. Not anywhere close like Flail of Ages (even un-upgraded).

Another reason has to do with soft counters instead of hard ones. In fairness it probably reduces reloading and allows us to go into battle without all that pre-buffing from Baldur's Gate, but it also sort of makes all 'bad' spell effects on your party kind of meh, as you can mostly just ignore it. Combined with that, encounter design was a bit lacking in creativity, so in 99% of combat you can do the same few tricks. Very rarely are you assaulted from several directions and so forth. That said, I hated the enemies in IWD2 that would just *poof* up in the middle of your party all the time, so much so that I never completed the game (also because I didn't like the 'new' rules, it was much better in BG1-BG2-IWD1).

Anyway, this may look more negative than intended - I did like the game after all - but I hope playing with a Cipher will be fun. It should certainly be a new experience. And as I love playing with Wizards, one thing this game has going for it is that they're not quite as suicidal as level 1 wizards in the BG-IWD world.

There's no such thing as "dump stats" in Pillars of Eternity. If you want a Cipher focusing on perception and resolve, you can do that. In fact, with these stats, your cipher will be resilient and accurate, so you can even use the class as a front-line damage dealer (ideally with 2 hander I guess) which'll generate focus insanely fast, leading to being able to cast powerful spells quickly - however, due to lower INT and MIG, these spells will be less powerful.

With that in mind, there's a ton of checks against INT trough the game, and quite a few MIG ones as well. So just pick your poison.

Weapons and armor matter massively, there just aren't any overpowered pieces like there were in old IE engine games. Pillars only offers very limited linear progression for its weapons (in other words, finding weapons which'll be more powerful than other weapons), but it offers and insane amount of damage types, secondary effects, procs etc., many of them key elements for certain builds. What I hated about IE games and their inherent lack of balance was the fact that equipment dictated which builds do I use. In Pillars, it's my builds dictate which equipment I'll end up with. Generally speaking, the more you understand underlying mechanics, the more you'll enjoy the game.

Actually, sort of hard counters were introduced by immunities sometime in version 2.02. As for status effects that don't really matter - ignoring the Terrified aura around dragons is one of the main reasons why do people have such a hard time with them.

I've gone with a Cipher with high intelligence and resolve: 14 might, 18 int, 16 resolve, 10 the rest. High dex was recommended, but I ignored that for resolve. I want to check out more dialogue options. Heard sabres were good for ciphers, maybe dual wielding. Sounds like that's a suicide wish, so I'm thinking about using a shield as well. Won't they be unnecessarily squishy and knock-out-able if dual-wielding?

Only level 2 so can go many ways with him, and I intend to make him a bit more badass than in the first time through the game, where I usually try to play the benevolent nice guy that I am (or try to be) in real life. Grimnir Fenrirtooth can't go around helping old ladies over the street :D

They certainly matter, don't get me wrong, but they also left me pretty underwhelmed throughout. I'm used to finding increasingly better weapons and armour while exploring and killing stuff, and we did, but not much to write home about. You have a good point that some of the gear in BG was perhaps overpowered, and it's kind of hard to ignore them when playing. But this game also has a 1-100 dice so e.g. +4 "to hit" with exceptional over fine is pretty weak, extra damage aside. It's not like we need +X weapons to hit stuff either.

Naturally secondary effects can change things a fair bit, like the Bow I used with some type of Touch spell. That said, I spent 150 hours on my first playthrough, spent much time going over various items and comparing, and a lot of it, even the unique fancy stuff, simply felt like "meh".

I'm glad some kind of hard counters were introduced, but it's still pretty easy to just ignore most effects. Yes, it means you are more easily hit or it's more difficult to hit them and so forth, but it doesn't tend to be a life and death situation either. The most dangerous thing is probably charmed/confused party members. I didn't have to worry about instant death spells or anything like that. But as I said, this design also means that people don't have to pre-buff before most encounters, like in BG, so there are positives with it too. It wasn't great fun to spend more time pre-buffing and timing longevity of spells than the fight itself :D

Thinking out loud basically, trying to put my fingers on what didn't "work" for this game. All I know is that it wasn't as grand or great an experience as Baldur's Gate was -- and I played that first time well into my adult years, so it's not like I have too rose-tinted glasses from when I was 13 or whatever.

Well, more importantly, when dual-wielding you probably want high dexterity to actually make use of its main advantage, that being attack speed. High resolve should take care of squishiness since it's the main defensive attribute, so I'd still go for a two-hander to maximize damage output instead, after all you do have decent might. If you do end up grabbing a shield, taking one with bash would probably be advantageous, but generally speaking, you want to be doing as much damage as possible with Cipher to generate focus faster - so dual-wielding or two-handed weapons are the way to go. You could also go ranged, but that would put all that resolve to a waste.

Well, as I said, you pretty much never find an item which is flatout better than another item. You can even upgrade basic weapons nearly to the level of unique or soulbond ones if that fits your build better. I appreciate this approach more over finding "better gear" because I always hated how limiting finding "better gear" is - In most RPGs, finding a new, fancy sword means an end to the old one, regardless of how much you liked secondary effects or such of the old one, simply because the new one has better stats (a piece of metal which somehow hits 100x harder than the previous piece of metal!) Pillars of Eternity has no such limitation and instead of offering you weapons which could be clear upgrades, it offers you with a vast array of choices. As for them feeling "meh", idunno... Didn't feel "meh" to me is about all I can say to that.

It's not, but I think it's worth pointing out that it's not as grand purposefully. Pillars of Eternity is not this epic adventure that BG games were, it's much more grounded, it feels much more ... Real? Some people are going to like the approach, others won't.

I am in the same boat, though I'm on the fence about the gear not having clear upgrades. On one hand, I like the fact that I'm not locked into certain weapons because devs only make really good of one weapon type while ignoring the majority of the types in the game. On the other hand I like finding great artifacts to equip my characters wth, and seeing that progression.

To me, PoE's main failing was in how the last act was rushed and unfinished feeling. The world building and character arcs prior were great, but in the third act, the main story just fell flat. It's to the point that I still haven't gotten around to playing through the main game again in order to hit The White March. I just don't have any interest in replaying it. Meanwhile, I've replayed about a dozen other RPGs since my initial play-through that I've played a dozen times or more.

I am looking forward to PoE2, and my main hope is that they delay it a bit to work on the story a bit more, especially toward the end.