Question about skills, attributes, and stuff
 

1. In PoE are skills outside conversations used passively? For example, there's no button in the UI for finding traps like BG had? How do you find traps? Do you have to enter scout mode? Then if the whole party is scouting does it make checks against the partymember with the highest stealth score?

This may be obvious from a tutorial in game, but I hit the ground running with hard mode plus the option that turns off in game feedback.

And while I'm on that subject, I think it's a little much that stat recommendations are not made when expert mode is enabled. Just saying.

2. Re: Attributes: In terms of combat, do all modes of attack benefit from Might? That is, hitting with a missile weapon is not dependent on Dexterity as it was in D&D?

3. And one last thing, is it that my paladin just sucks in combat or is the fight against the Skuldr King on the first level of the temple in Gilded Vale just crazy hard? Now granted I am playing in hard mode, but I had a hell of a time with this one. I eventually won by making them fight in the doorway so nobody got flanked, but my stupid paladin still got knocked unconscious. He's supposed to be a tank, but I followed the stat priorities on the PoE Wiki and didn't inflate Constitution at all. Was the wiki wrong or am I stuck in the WoW mindset of tanks stack strength & stamina?

Thanks

Hello!

1. Stealth mode is used to detect traps.

2. Yes and even spell damage will benefit from Might. Which is kind of cool in my opinion.

3. The real tanks in Pillars of Eternity are fighters. Paladins don't come nearly as close, unfortunately. Barbarians are DPS characters with lower survivability than that of fighters.

paladins can tank, but the optimal tank is a fighter, but don't worry, you'll get a fighter companion like from the start. Paladin + fighter is a good defensive wall for the rest of your group. Also, I also played hard but I left the temple for after I did all the other Gilded Vale quests. The 2nd level in the temple is tough.

Constitution governs how many HP your character has. So yeah, you should have upped it for a paladin.

CON is not worth raising beyond 10 at the moment. Doesn't matter what class you picked.

This and the Mechanics skill. The same is used to detect secrets for some reason, as far as I know (magenta colored).

My melee tankish monk disagrees.

Indeed. 1 point in Con gives 23 HP so it IS worth it to rise it for the melee/tank characters.

Health isn't a good way to determine if Con is good though. Endurance is the key. You will have to rest when your lowest health character goes into the red. It doesn't matter if you have one guy in the blue because of high Con but the rest of the team is in red. I'd still give some Con to fighter types, but it isn't as important as other stats.

My monks gets beat up in every combat and has such a high health due to 17 Con that I never need to rest because of the monk.

Stealth is not used to detect traps; that is the sole providence of mechanics. The only thing stealth determines is how quickly enemies can spot you.

Not in my experience. High Con characters are there to protect low Con ones. In overwhelming majority of cases I have to rest because, after number of encounters, my fighter and paladin need a top up and my magic users still have plenty of HP left.

I just read this about scouting mode from the wiki:
"Scouting Mode is used both to avoid Detection and searching for hidden objects or creatures."

So I think the original intent of my post was to ask: do you have to be in scouting mode to find hidden objects?

I have seen two contradictory responses and I just want to make sure I'm not missing all kinds of stuff because I don't enable scouting mode that often.

And one more new question: I started in expert mode, so there are no Maims. In non-expert mode, if a maimed character's health reaches 0 are they permadeathed or are there temples where you can Raise Dead like in D&D?

Thanks again

PS I am loving this game. I'm not very far so I'm thinking of starting over with my fancy new PC to enjoy it from the beginning with new hardware :)

You have to be in Scout mode to find hidden stuff but skill Mechanics is used for that.

And if you have not been moving everywhere in Scout mode you have missed a lot of hidden stuff.

Yes, you have to be in scouting mode to find hidden objects.

Yes, you need to be in stealth mode to detect hidden objects. It's highly recommended that you do all dungeon exploration in stealth mode, and hit 'D' to speed up movement.

While in stealth mode, your Mechanics skill determines whether you can actually detect hidden items, depending on their hidden "difficulty".

On my first playthrough attempt, I didn't have anybody with Mechanics higher than 2 when I entered the Eothas temple, and no matter how much I walked around a trapped chest in stealth mode, I could not detect the trap. On a subsequent restart I was ready with a 4 Mechanics skill by the time I entered, and detected all traps and hidden loot just fine. But again, if you're not in stealth mode, you won't ever see any of them.

It's a decent enough system, even though I'd like the highest mechanics guy to share his skill with the party, as I've too often walked into traps because I keep him in the back, as he's vulnerable and ranged.

Still, an improvement over the IE games, for sure.

It is not an improvement. In IE games you could have Detect Traps on all the time outside combat and it didn't slow down combat. Its only problem was that it looked for traps only each 6 seconds. Obsidian only needed to change that so it looks for them every 1 or 2 seconds and leave other stuff the same.

1 point of Con is like one hit more that you can take, or less. Far better to just raise PER or RES. But if you don't have anywhere else to dump points ,then I guess it's fine.Cheers.

I found I was walking into way to many traps and also. Plus if I got lazy into combats I wasn't really ready to fight or wanted to bring the fight into a more compacted area.

I found being in sneak or stealth mode, using Sagani's fox Itumaak to always be X amount a paces ahead helped a lot. It slowed down the game but I don't think I missed much this way.