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Pillars of Eternity 2 is one of the most surprising RPGs in years. While the original was great on its own, it was a crowdfunded project that clearly lacked some of the modern polish that most games today enjoy, and with its booming success, Pillars of Eternity 2 was able to deliver an experience that feels in every way like a triple-A RPG should and its dedication to sticking with the styles of old and combining them with modern ideas creates an incredible experience with hours upon hours of content to enjoy.
While I admittedly missed the boat the first time around when it came to games like Baldur’s Gate and Torment, I eventually caught up to the magic of the CRPG with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2, and soon, I was hungry for all the isometric RPG goodness that I could possibly find. I quickly fell in love with the interesting style of fantasy that Pillars of Eternity had going for it, and the sequel turned out to be just as good with way better graphics and even more options for combat than the first game.
As all CRPG players know, playing on PC is the best way to take on these sorts of games due to the ability to play with a mouse and keyboard. Because of this, PC players are also able to download tons of mods that improve everything from the quality of life to completely changing how certain mechanics work. Let’s explore what the best Pillars of Eternity 2 mods are.
Enhanced User Interface
If there’s one complaint when it comes to Pillars of Eternity 2, it’s that the user interface is incredibly complicated and not explained that well at all. The Enhanced User Interface mod works by highlighting different gameplay mechanics like Afflictions, damage, Inspirations, and a lot more. Tons of different abilities, items, and UI features have been overhauled to create an experience that is far more enjoyable and much clearer to newer players.
MQ Portraits Pack
At the start of the game, you’re going to create your character, and during that process, you have to pick a portrait that will represent your character in conversations during the game. The problem is that there aren’t nearly enough portraits to choose from, and your character often ends up looking nothing like your portrait does because of the limited options available. MQ Portraits Pack completely rectifies this by adding over 40 new and gorgeously designed portraits to choose from. Your portrait is seen far more than your character’s actual face, so these make a huge impact on the game as you’ll be doing a lot of conversing during Pillars of Eternity 2.
No Friendly Fire Mod
Pillars of Eternity 2 is a pretty tough game. Not only do you have to manage your whole party all the time, but you also have to worry about your party members dying and being gone from the game permanently. Unfortunately, your own spells and attacks can injure your teammates, and sometimes, this can kill them outright. With No Friendly Fire Mod, your spells and attacks will only target the enemies instead of everyone in the area of effect.
This makes the game a little bit easier, but a whole lot more fun as well as now you don’t have to wait to get your unconscious party member out of the way and can instead unleash whatever kind of spell or attack you had in store without worrying about killing your party members.
POE2 Deadfire Tweaks
If you’ve played through Pillars of Eternity 2 already and you’re looking to have another go around in the game, you might want to tweak the difficulty, try out a new character class, or you might want to get a bit more ambitious and use a mod to spice things up a bit. POE2 Deadfire Tweaks completely changes a ton of things in this game.
The mod pack includes 50+ rebalances and other changes to the game world. These include brand new abilities, new subclasses, and also changes to the existing classes as well. It also gives new companion class combinations as well as sub-class combinations. For Ranger characters, this mod changes the Ranger class up significantly, too, so that class becomes a much more viable one.
Fair Trade
In Pillars of Eternity 2, the merchants are about as brutal as they come. You can actually get scammed by these guys, and sometimes, they can even sell you items for 5x the price of what they normally are. Sometimes, if you need the item, you really won’t have a choice and will have to fork it over to get what you need. With Fair Trade, no merchants will try and steal your money like this anymore. This makes all the shops in the game buy and sell at the value they are supposed to be. It’s a lightweight mod that makes the game more fun to play, as you won’t have to suddenly pay a mountain of money for normal items anymore.
TT1 Unique Items
Sometimes the items and weapons you come across in Pillars of Eternity 2 just do nothing for the style of character you’re going for. Unique items appear in the game, but they seem heavily favored towards certain classes at times, and there are just so many swords and sabers and not nearly enough unique armors and bows. TT1 Unique Items puts a bunch of unique items into the games in the forms of weapons, armor, and also trinkets, and the result is a much more balanced game that has cool things to equip for all of the classes.
Pillars of Eternity I- Voice Sets
Your character’s voice doesn’t matter a ton in Pillars of Eternity 2, as most of the conversations are just reading material, but during combat, you’re going to hear your character grunt and grimace a whole lot throughout your journey. If you’ve played Pillars of Eternity I, you might’ve been attached to the way your character sounded and want to keep that voice while playing through the sequel. With Pillars of Eternity I- Voice Sets, now you can do that. This mod adds 15 voices to the game, and they’re each very unique and give you more options on how you want your male or female character to sound.
Extended Spell Collection
If you’re playing on a harder difficulty or you just want to cause some complete chaos, Extended Spell Collection is definitely a mod you should give e shot. This mod adds a ton of new spells into the game that has been custom-created by the mod author. These are spells that harken back to the Dungeons and Dragons era of games. These spells are based on spells that are already in-game, so nothing here really breaks the rules of Pillars of Eternity 2. It just gives you far more options to play with as a Wizard or any of the other magic users and makes combat look all the more flashy because of it.
Deadly Deadfire 4- Difficulty Mod
If you’re a hardcore RPG gamer and you feel that even the hardest difficulties in Pillars of Eternity 2 aren’t giving you a challenge, then Deadly Deadfire 4- Difficulty Mod is definitely a mod that will satisfy those requirements. You’ll now have to deal with things like Named Enemies, who appear and scale 2 levels higher than a typical enemy would, reworked bosses to give you more of a challenge, and reworked ship combat as well. It is recommended you start with a veteran difficulty or higher to get the most out of this mod.
More Spell Castings Per Encounter
The magic system in Pillars of Eternity 2 is pretty great on its own, but the one downside of it is the frequency you get to use all the super-powerful spells you’ve accumulated. Sure, you can use some awesome spells, but you can’t just go around launching them like you might expect a magic expert would. With More Spells Castings Per Encounter, that’s exactly what you can do. This mod gives the classes Druids, Wizards, and Priest more castings per power level.
That means that you will have more in your magic arsenal for every fight, regardless of what power level you are. For those worried that this might break the game, don’t be, as the mod author balanced it by creating a magic progression system that keeps the magic users structured while also letting the least off them a bit. It’s a unique system that feels right at home in Pillars of Eternity 2.
More Custom AI Conditions
Combat can get awfully hectic in a hurry in Pillars of Eternity 2, and if you’re not paying careful attention, you can find your party getting overwhelmed. Unless you’re using the newly implemented turn-based mode, the real-time combat here can make things pretty confusing, and managing your party is sometimes too tough a task for people to handle. More Custom AI Conditions is a brilliant mod that takes away some of your responsibility and instead allows you to basically program your entire party to act how you’d like them to.
If you’ve ever played Final Fantasy XII, the Gambit system there did something very similar, and it works like a charm here. You’ve got so much leeway here to make party members act like you want, and the result is a more flashy and smooth-flowing battle. You can set AI commands for targeting specific classes, using poisoned weapons, targeting enemies from the back, and so much more. If you take time to properly implement this, you can see yourself not even really needing to manage your party all that much.
Alternate Class Features
The companions in Pillars of Eternity 2 seem to feel much more limited than the main character does, and the reason for that is because their starting classes are just incredibly basic. None of them feel all that unique, and instead of being excited when a companion joins you cause it just kind of feels like adding more of the same to your party.
 Alternate Class Features is a set of mods that replaces the starting class possibilities for your companions and sidekicks with options that make sense for the characters and the game. Subclasses have been changed as well, and this can lead to more varied companions on the battlefield. You have the option to activate this mod or turn it off at any point in time during your playthrough, so if a companion has joined your party and you don’t like what you chose for them, deactivating the mod will have them return to their normal status.
6 Characters in Party
In some fights in Pillars of Eternity 2, you will be going up against some incredibly tough odds. You’ll often find yourself outnumbered, and when that happens, it sure would be nice to add another companion to the party. 6 Characters in Party allows you to recruit even more characters to your noble or not so noble cause. You’ll be able to even the score a bit more with those huge enemy mods, and you’ll have one more line of defense for when things get a little too tough. This is a great way to balance the difficulty on the tougher modes, and now, you’ll feel much more prepared when facing some really tough fights.
Level Cap 33
I’ve honestly never understood the level cap in RPG games. As long as your game has level scaling, which Pillars of Eternity 2 clearly does, why stop players from leveling to their heart’s content? That’s what this mod author had in mind when creating Level Cap 33, and although it just seems like a simple tweak, this mod rebalances the game in a few ways as well.
The Level Cap in the game now raises from 20 to 33, and you can now take your Power Level to 17 for single class characters and 11 for multiclass characters. One thing to keep in mind is that power levels after 9 will not be visible on your level-up screen. This makes you feel far more powerful after putting in hours and hours of work, and the payoff is definitely worth it.
Slower Days And Longer Nights
Despite being more of an indie game, Pillars of Eternity 2 has some extremely impressive graphics and lighting effects. These shine most of all during the daytime, but the nights have some unique lighting of their own to show off. The issue is that these last far too briefly, so neither feels like an actual day or night and the feeling of videogame day/night cycle is far too obvious here.
Slower Days And Longer Nights makes those beautiful days last much longer, and those silent nights go on longer as well. This mod affects nothing else in the game, so you should have no issue trying it out or disabling it if you don’t enjoy it.
Community Patch
RPG communities are very good at pointing out bugs and fixes that need to be made, but the developers aren’t always willing to do work they aren’t getting paid for, and when that happens, it’s modders to the rescue. The Community Patch is one of the more essential mods out there because of the litany of issues it takes to solve.
The list of things it fixes and smooths out is enormous, but some of the biggest ones are fixing the icons, which creates a much clearer UI for the players, changing how weapons work, changing how certain talents work, how equipment scaling works, and so much more that it feels like an official patch for the game. Pretty much everything in the game that impacts your play, whether it be weapons, armor, classes, or items, is heavily affected by this patch, and it’s really a collaborative effort here from all the players in the community that wanted to figure out a way to make the perfect Pillars of Eternity 2 experience.
Faster Casting
I always like to play as a hybrid character in games like Pillars of Eternity 2 because while I like my melee combat, I also want the ability to launch spells from across the battlefield and eliminate my foes that way. In Pillars of Eternity 2, your spells can get interrupted if you’re hit while casting and don’t have a high enough concentration stat. That completely cancels the spells and renders you useless for a few seconds.
We don’t want that, we want spell flinging action of the highest caliber, and that’s what Faster Casting brings to the table. All spells in the game now have a reduced cast time. Average spells go from 3 to 0, Slow Spells go from 4.5 to 2, and Very Slow spells have a cast time of 3 from 6.
This makes combat way more viable and fun for mages, and now you can melee an enemy, then quickly head back and launch a quick spell before continuing to fight. This isn’t just for you, though, as your enemies now have the same ability, too, and the result is a much more flashy and over-the-top combat experience that feels more fun to boot.
The Funnening- Improved Monk
The Monk is one of the coolest classes in the game, and the variety of abilities they have is quite the fun mix. You can use melee attacks, but you can also use attacks for crowd control, and that combination makes them a very versatile fighter. After a while, though, they just don’t seem to unlock anything that is fun to use, and the result is the Monk gets stale about halfway through the game.
The Funnening- Improved Monk supercharges this class by including 17 new active abilities, 7 new passive abilities, and the ability to morph into a massive Astral Projection of yourself. This is an insane overhaul that turns playing as a monk into a whole new experience. Tons of stats are tweaked, as are existing abilities, so give this one a try if you’ve played as a Monk before and are looking for a new spin on things.
The Funnening- Improved Fighter
Everyone loves the magic users in Pillars of Eternity 2, but not nearly enough love gets given to the Fighter class, and they’re often just left to tank enemy damage while having precious little in the way of cool attacks to use. The Funnening- Improved Fighter is an excellent mod that adds a whopping 30 new abilities to the Fighter class. These include abilities in the form of engagement, movement, defensive, offensive, desperation moves, and more.
Some of these moves are awesome to watch, and none of them feel out of place, which is the most impressive part. My favorite of the new moves is the Moment of Truth, which is activated right as an enemy attacks you, and you then leap right into them for +500% damage as long as you’re at your lowest health, and they’re at their highest. It’s these conditions that make these new moves so much fun to use, and it makes playing as a Fighter far more flashy and enjoyable than ever before.
Faster Deadfire
Pillars of Eternity 2 can be a really quick-moving game at first glance, but when it comes to the best attacks in the game and the ones that look the flashiest, the delay in between attacks not only is frustrating as a player but feels pretty awkward to look at as well. Faster Deadfire makes it so that the delay between not only attacks but spells now recharge far faster than ever before.
Very fast attacks now are delayed only 1 second, fast attacks 2 seconds, average attacks 3 seconds, and slow attacks 3.5 seconds. This applies to every attack in the game, so combat, on the whole, takes an incredible leap in terms of speed. This goes for your enemies, too, so now every action on both sides has been supercharged, and it really feels more realistic and brutal because of it.
Trinkets
Trinkets are one of the most bizarre additions to Pillars of Eternity 2. They are clearly a useable slot in your inventory at the beginning of the game, but it’s completely barren for the majority of the game. It’s strange because once you find them, you realize how awesome their effects can be, and they can look pretty cool as well. Trinkets is a mod that adds the thing that was supposed to be prevalent in the game into the actual game.
The Trinkets are basically nonunique items that appear at random when finding loot and some of these have awesome effects that scale with your character’s skills, and others are just cool to equip on you and your party. This gives a lot more flexibility to the customization and adds in some pretty great items that don’t break the game and instead make it more rewarding to explore.
The Funnening- Skill Items
This mod author clearly knows what he’s doing at this point, and every single addition made by The Funnening is not only a great add-on to the game but has become pretty much essential as well. While most of the additions by this mod pack deal with increasing skills and abilities for different classes, this one focuses on the items, of which there are few that are actually useful in the base game.
With The Funnening-Skill Items, we get 19 new magic items that give awesome bonuses and also scale with the character’s skills. They can be bought at Iolflr’ Rainments in Neketaka, or you can try your luck and maybe be able to find them looting a shipwreck or burial site. The items are all able to be tweaked as well, and while the items are powerful, they do nothing to make you feel too strong, so a good amount of difficulty will still be there to challenge you.
Full Respec Companions
I’ve always found in RPGs that there is so much pressure when starting to spec a character for the first time. You’re not sure exactly how the stats are going to play out in combat, and you’re also not sure what abilities you’ll be able to use based on what you picked.
Usually, that just has to do with your main character, but in Pillars of Eternity 2, you’ve got a whole party of characters to worry about, and when you first spec a companion, you might make a mistake without realizing it and if you get past the point of altering it in their initial setup, tough luck.
I never understood why respecting wasn’t available at any time, but thanks to Full Respec Companions, it is now. This mod lets you change your companion’s class at any time during the game. This changes the conventional respec at shops to be companion only. While some may argue that a companion changing their specialty every 5 minutes isn’t that realistic, it allows you to alter your approaches to combat and tailor your companions to what the challenge ahead might be.
No Narrator Updated
I don’t know about you, but for me, the narrator bugs the hell out of me in this game. Every single action or thought your character takes or has is accompanied by narration, and while some may find this very in the spirit of the whole Dungeons and Dragons vibe present throughout Pillars of Eternity 2, it’s just not for me.
Thankfully, No Narrator Updated gets rid of not only all of the narration in the main game, but it gets rid of the DLC narration too. Now that narration can just be read peacefully without having a cheesy voice to talk about every little thing happening in the game.
FAQ
Question: Can I activate these mods midway through a playthrough?
Answer: It depends on the mod you want to use. I personally think it is a bad idea to start mods up mid-playthrough in any game, but if the mod developer says on their page that it is safe to do, then it should be fine.
Question: Are Pillars of Eternity multiplayer?
Answer: No, Pillars of Eternity is a single-player game in which you control a party of characters while fighting through dungeons and engaging in a unique and gripping story. No multiplayer is planned for this game.
Question:Â What is the best way to install mods?
Answer: Some of these mods are best installed directly into your game files as the instructions on a mod page might say, but others might be better served activating through a program like Mod Organizer 2.
Conclusion
Whether you’re looking to play through Pillars of Eternity 2 one more time or you’re looking for a wildly different take on a typical CRPG, mods are definitely worth trying. Some can be subtle and enjoyable, but others can completely change how certain classes work, and others can make companions far more enjoyable. There are a ton to choose from aside from the ones on this list, so good luck, get out there and check them out.
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