My recommendation: Choose your faction(s) for story/lore reasons only, not for the fighting mechanisms. I tried all factions in several playthroughs and found, that each of them has specific lore, additional side quests and story aspects. That said, look at the plasma/energy weapons of the Albs, some of them have specific strengths against robots, for example. I personally preferred bows for far reaching ranged fights and shotgun for melee range, comletely regardless of the faction I was playing. I only used other weapons for robots or ins specific situations.
What IS the respawn mechanism? So far, nothing has respawned except maybe rats and their ilk. Do they respawn at the chapter marks?
To answer my own question: yep. I went ahead and moved to chapter 2. The places with stronger enemies before now have even stronger enemies. I wonder if it's scaled to level, though. I think I likely got to ch. 2 later than most players and yet the levels seem just right.
I still haven't found any ranged weapon that has sockets. I've bumped into two legendary energy weapons with no sockets, too, so I'm pretty sure that learning point was wasted. (Never burn a learning point until you know you'll need it!)
Not quite. Energy weapons are Dex and Int, magic is Int and Con. (Dex and Strength for bows and crossbows.)
I don't think it's scaled to the player's level because I remember some of the companion quests being way harder than others at the same level. I could be wrong though.
Yeah, those certainly don't! Hey, let's go talk to the Clerics with Nasty... and get a squad full of robots attacking!
Sounds right. Iirc, some mobs only partially respawned at first? For example, if a particular spot had 6 mutants, and you cleared that area, a few days later there would be 2-3 mutants back.
I enjoyed it through the beginning and middle. It wasn't until the endgame that I started to burn out because of the repetitiveness. I still finished it, but it's one that I probably wouldn't replay. I've finished all of PB's games except Gothic 3.
The big mutant groups fully respawn after 5 or 6 days, same for the skyands in the formers. Some areas respawn trolls every 5 or 6 days too. Have to get lucky there. Trolls won't have a chance to respawn unless you kill what did spawn.
