Just under the ability name you'll see something like "1 per encounter" or "2 per rest". You can see some examples in the picture at the top, which features three of my ranger's abilities. The best way to find out you're looking at a rest ability or an encounter ability is to mouse over it. Once these are spent, they're grayed out on your taskbar and you're not getting them back until you camp or rest in an inn. Spells in a wizard's grimoire are a standard example of a per-rest ability. Other actions only recharge when you rest. Common examples include the ranger's Marked Prey ability, the fighter's Knock Down ability, and the wizard's Arcane Assault. Between fights, they recharge, and using them normally costs nothing. Some abilities can be used in every fight. This is really important, and not necessarily obvious to the total beginner. Learn about encounter actions and rest actions A good fighter can trap three enemies in his sphere of influence, and deal lots of damage to fools that try to get away. ![]() Look for moves that stun or use shockwaves to push enemies out of close combat, like the wizard's Grimoire Slam.ĭisengagement strikes affect enemies as well, of course, so make use of fighter abilities that let them engage more than one enemy. The rogue's extremely useful Escape move lets him slip away without penalty, for example. Where possible, use abilities to disengage. If you're taking a ton of damage and aren't sure why, you might be triggering a bunch of disengagement strikes without realising by giving your engaged fighters lots of movement orders. The system punishes careless movement and makes it hard for squishy characters to get away from fighters. During that pause the enemy can re-engage. If you move a character away from melee contact, the enemy gets an instant free attack with a significant damage and accuracy bonus that also forces your character to pause momentarily. This is just a really basic example to show you how the system works. My magic users and ranged-attack people are clustered behind. My front line consists of a central tanky fighter, my ranger's tanky lion and a high-damage barbarian. ![]() Here's a shot of how the formation I've constructed above appears in-game. This is great for angling your tanks toward a charge. You can rotate your formation by holding the right mouse button. The custom formation thumbnails are to the far right of the list, and always look like hexagonal formations-don't worry, when you box-select and move your party in the world, they'll organise themselves according to the custom arrangement you've specified. The little domino icon on the bottom left corner of your taskbar lets you set your default formation. The top edge of the grid is the edge that will face the enemy, so line up your tanks closer to the top. There you'll be able to place character portraits on a grid. You have two slots for custom formations, and you can bring up the customisation menu with the F key. ![]() With all that in mind, let's focus on how not to die.Ī good custom formation lets you start the fight with perfect positioning. On higher difficulties, or if you're playing on expert mode, you don't get the benefit of the maimed status, you just die straight away if your health runs out. There are no lovely magic potions or phoenix downs that will bring them back in Pillars of Eternity. If your main character dies it's game over. If they're reduced to 0 health again, they're dead. A maimed character regains their endurance, but has only 1 health, and suffers severe penalties to accuracy and defense stats. If your health runs out you become maimed. Once the combat's over, the character stands up and their endurance quickly regenerates. If your endurance runs out in a fight your character will be knocked out until the end of combat. Health can be recovered completely by resting at a campfire or an inn. Incoming damage is applied to both pools, but while endurance regenerates between encounters, health damage stacks. Your endurance pool is reflected on your character portrait, and your health pool is shown as a vertical bar next to your character portrait. Endurance measures short-term combat damage, while the health bar shows you how close your characters are to death. It's an unconventional but intuitive system that simulates short-term and long-term damage. Before we get into tactics and team balance, let's look at exactly how health and death work in Pillars of Eternity.
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