Quick question on skills and dialogue

[Aydrian]

I haven't been able to find this out in any reviews, so if someone can answer this I would appreciate it. Something I really enjoyed about Tyranny is how often your skills and attributes played a role in the dialogue.

Like being particularly skilled in magic can come into play during decisions that can alter the outcome. Tyranny did this a lot and did it very well. Pillars of Eternity didn't. Have they improved upon that in the sequel? I like it when my skills have a use outside of combat situations.

[Altonu]

There are tons of skill checks in dialog in PoE2, but because of how skills and leveling work now (you have active and passive skills, but only get 1 point per level in each of those catagories), I'm finding that most of the time I'm either a little or a lot short of qualifying to use any of them, as such I don't know if they just add flavor to the conversations or if there are meaningful changes from them. In most conversations, party members with the same skills can contribute, but its a diminishing return thing, and even with that, the skill values I have had have been too low to use.

After I have a better sense of what ranges I need to various skills to be worthwhile, I plan to re-spec or re-roll myself and my party members.

Its less common than skill checks, but they have done a better job of making race and background play into more conversations as well (I've seen quite a few for dreadfire background and raider, but less for others, but given the setting, it makes sense to me)

There are also a lot of non-conversation exploration encounteres where skills do matter for what you can and cant accomplish. That part of skill use is done well in my oppinion.

[Efesell]

I've seen a ton of checks involving the use of you or your party members spells.

It's also easier to qualify for a lot of them since it takes in the score from your party as well so the Watcher doesn't have to be perfect at everything to get results.

[kesat]

Compared to PoE1 there are much more checks now, not only for skills though (which was already explained by Altonu) but also more checks regarding the PC background. As an example there are quite a lot of checks regarding your race (sometimes including the origin, e.g. Ocean Folk + Old Vailia is a quite common combination).

But usually most of them (except diplomacy/bluff/intimidation) are just to add some personal flavour or get some more background information. It's not like a dialogue or quest is going to be very different just because you've passed a perception check ;) So far i'd say that those primary attribute checks (resolve, intelligence, perception) are actually less "important" than in PoE1.


While not a skill check, but still somewhat related - your companions also react much more on your choices during a dialogue than in PoE1. As an example if your using bluffs (and shady behaviour in general) there's at least at least one companion who is going to dislike that pretty much all the time ;)