AlexDeLarge

And it was a good change imo

I feel the same way about Hylea Challenge (but that's because Vela is bugged right now).

IIRC there is a character who warns you about the deadly basilisk petrification (was it Jaheira?). So if you pay attention, there is no need for metagaming to be protected in that area.

No, I didn't. Well, once, but game crashed (had to reload) and one of my party members was chunked beforehand and I doubt I could have done it w/o him, so I can't count it as valid. I did have the final battle (succesfull, after the reload) on Youtube, but it's gone for some reason. I did roll a vanilla setup once for Grond0's "24-hour challenge"; I was certain I'd beat it - got up to Abazigal, died to Maze. (was a solo). My runs usually ended it late SoA part. Longest run, Cavalier PC, up to ToB Mellisan, where I forgot to prebuff (hadn't come that far in ages). Wiped in several rounds - Bodhi, Irenicus + Fallen Solars....ahhahahaha. After 30+ hours, to see such a defeat was hilarious. Heh..do I remember.. I petitioned DavidW to bring back that fight . My all-time favourite was Eclipse party from Solaufein mod; old Tactics also had it's share of memorable moments (and memorable cheese). Hybrid Irenicus is indeed kinda unique in concept. (imo, much better than standard demon crap being used). I petitioned to bring back that fight too, lol. I get why he removed it, but felt like the community got robbed of one of those most memorable fights ever. Very curious how you forgot to prebuff in the final and most important battle of a super epic trilogy; maybe deep down, your subconscious didn't want you to bring closure to such a magnificent series, so that you would have a reason to continue playing it in the future :D I am sad and somewhat ashamed to say I never installed and played Ascension mod, i feel like i've missed out big time, right? Now i'm feeling nostalgic and kinda wanna do it, haha.

@kreso Have you ever finished BG Trilogy no reload on SCS btw? I got as far as Beholder Lair (fully improved SCS Beholders) in the Underdark, and one of those bastards managed to take down my main Kensage's protections and petrify me. Was a helluva run though, enjoyed it immensely. But the most fun I had was doing full SCS Insane difficulty run with reloads, I don't know if you remember, but there was a period when David W allowed the option for Tactics/SCS Irenicus Hybrid, where he would summon a Dragon, Sword, Beholder, etc. Took me SIX HOURS to beat that fight, but after i finally did it, it was the most satisfying gaming experience of my life.

u can win every fight in that series by pre-buffing and auto-attacking everything to death. in BG1 u just give everyone bows. in BG2, u get keldorn to cast dispel magic occasionally. like, i cant dispute there are builds that can solo the game with minimal input. there are peeps here that spend all their time trying to develop such, but i think its fair to say most of these strats arent immediately obvious to us normal saps. Im unsure why u highlight the examples u do. The ciphers in sss can be dealt with using normal anti-caster strats + aegis of loyalty + intellect resistance. Theyre too squishy to be that hard a fight, nowhere near as annoying as splintered reef imo - those fampyrs take more of a beating. (Praise kyros for chill fog) u can interrupt anyone casting disintegration, and if one lands u can use barring deaths door/withdraw if ur regens not up to scratch. as for the soul mirror match, u alpha strike the back line, leave ur tank til last, debuff their defences and whittle them down. ai dont use the aggressive cheese strats available to a player or else something like bridge ablaze would be like pulling own fingernails out. Like i also find it odd that u could prep enough to stat check everyone to death yet not figure out u could blast every ship to smithereens with double bronzers. like if u crush the ship fights u can proper clean up early game and take advantage of some powerful gear. i dunno man, too much of what ur saying just dont jibe with my experience of game. I didnt feel ready to touch potd until id cleared the game veteran-upscaled and knew the craic. like if ud said 'game too easy, herald kill everything with zero input on highest difficulty' that would have at least backed up what people have been saying elsewhere on this forum but eh... Ah, should have made myself clear. BG1/2 are both easy once you get to know them... but don't tell me you never got a) one-shot critted by gibberling/hobgoblin/random encounter bandit archers spawn in BG1 b) instakilled by Rayic Gethras' Finger of Death in BG2 c) imprisonmented by Kangaxx d) level-drained to death e) petrified by Beholders f) had brain eaten by Mindflayers g) died in Cloakwood spider webs h) blasted to chunks by Thaxy dragon's level drain breath j) paralyzed by Ghasts k) ghasted by Aec'Laetec .... ..... ..... This never, ever happens in Deadfire. Not even remotely close. It's easy even if you don't know squat about it other than stacking Deflection is apperantly equal to God mode, which kind of sums up my knowledge of the game. I didn't have much trouble with Reef, maybe because I went there rather late (only 1 white skull). I don't know any anti caster strats for ciphers, or anything else for that matter (super-bosses aside, and w/o these forum I doubt I'd ever do Spider battle). I only used brute force on everything - which proves my point - the game is so easy that there's just no need to. The whole "strategy" if you wanna call it that was that my PC with Casita Legacy + ugly green shield gets in combat first. From there on, its just counting frames and seeing icy arrows turning enemies into mush... BG on hardest difficulty settings means you take double damage if you take any. Since virtually all damage can be negated in BG2, provided you know the game, difficulty can be irrelevant. I don't want to go into "which game is better" here (both BG1 and BG2 suffer from being extremely cheesable, serious class disbalance, silly OP equipment etc. but that's not the point. Given that I've modded BG2 I'm well aware of it's quirks.) Saying Deadfire is harder than either BG1 or BG2 (provided you never played either BG or Deadfire) is not something I can agree on, quite the opposite. PoEI I didn't like much for some reason, can't comment on difficulty. I don't play BG w/o mods such as SCS, and I only play No-Reloads. Honestly, if it weren't for mods, BG2 would be long dead by now. It's a great game, but it's life wasn't prolonged by it's quality; but by modders' ingenuity. P.S. On topic of dragons- BG2 - meet Thaxy first time - whole party dead in less than 20 seconds, dragon uninjured. Difficulty level - normal (easier than "core") Deadfire - meet the Watershaper dragon - 60% of party dead, 40% half health, dragon dead in cca 30 secons. Difficulty - PotD. Non-upscaled. You do make some compelling points, there was a sense of discovery and forcing you to think outside the box in some unique encounters from BG series, which I've only found in Divinity OS2 since then.

Is it now? K. Next time I'll play blindfolded as well. In all honesty, after level 18 I think I probably could. Developers should probably add this options under "normal difficulty" settings then. When a player with almost zero knowledge about game mechanics (that being me, it's hard to get used to MIGHT not being equivalent to STRENGHT after 2 decades of BG2) finishes the game with virtually no deaths, no reloads, no magic spells, no food buffs - on (what is supposed to be) hardest mode, with virtually no manual imput on game's final battles (not talking Dorudugan here) I'd say game difficulty is deeply flawed. Copmpare this with BG, for example. The game keeps you on your toes from day one to ToB (not me, but I've played BG since '98). Fwiw, I did play with Challenges. Sort of - I never ate food aside Fruit (apart spider battle), and pause is unneccecary. I doubt I ever used it. Same as with fleeing from combat, which I tought is impossible anyway. There were two instances where I felt difficulty to be "as it should be" - namely, S,S,S DLC battle against that annoying disintegrate Cyphers and the one where you fight against your own party. Those were spot-on and required tactics. Naturally, the big lizard afterwards was smooth sailing on autoattack mode again... The second one was in Port Maje, the flooded area. That felt great to beat. I doubt I'll be replaying PoEII again any time soon so no triple crown for me. Unless something drastically changes in combat/XP system. And those ship battles. Not to say that PoEII isn't great - it is. I wouldn't bother posting on it if it weren't. You must wear a seriously thick nostalgia gogles. I don't remember BG or BG2 to be anywhere near as hard as PoE or PoE2 in some places, on hardest difficulty setting both. A very, very exagerated judgement on your part. I have a passable knowledge of the mechanics by now and the game is challenging for me (but take note that I don't min-max and use only story companions, not the kind constructed for ease of play). Firkraag, for instance, is a lot more difficult than anything I've seen in Deadfire, or anything I saw in PoE. I know that there are techniques, but I had to come up with some of them myself. That's one interesting thing: I had to discover a way to beat the dragon. There has been no such necessity in these two games (which are very good, don't get me wrong). BG2 is quite easy without SCS, what are we talking about here? You can literally AFK spam Cloudkill Wand on Firkraag and he dies without you ever seeing him on the screen. Also, the fact that you've been playing cRPG's for over 3 decades probably gave you a lot of expertise on the genre, so of course you will be good at beating Deadfire by default. Thing is, imo, POTD is not even close to the highest difficulty you can achieve in this game. Add full upscale, Ironman + Expert + a few challenges and it becomes brutal to beat. Add all the challenges combined and it becomes almost impossible.

Honestly, it's ridiculous to complain about difficulty without playing on max difficulty settings. Try Triple Crown+3-4 Magran's Challenges and then get back to us.

I have those same problems in new patch. It's just the Obsidian patching way, 1 step forward, 1 step backward

I have the same problems as you, and a very comparable PC spec, even tried most of the solutions proposed online, to no avail. Btw are u guys installing Deadfire on your SSD? Because i also have SSD, but its only 128gb, just enough room to keep Windows 10 on it, installed the game on HDD drive. Maybe this is an issue?

I would personally not recommend ironman unless you can mod in autosaving. Deadfire is way more stable than PoE1 but still not stable enough. In PoE1 I lost a few runs from soft-locks and hard crashes, and I would still prefer doing ironman in PoE1 than in Deadfire because of the presence of autosaves that I can backup easily. (In fact, I may never do ironman in Deadfire for precisely this reason, even though I could count on one hand the number of crashes I've had in 600+ hours of playing. All you need is one to ruin your day.) Also as asnjas recommends, if you have to ask about possible instadeath moments, perhaps you're not ready for an ironman run (especially since you haven't seen the entire game yet. at least see what the crit path is like. sentiments about the game difficulty can be obsolete due to a lot of rebalancing that has occured. Back in 1.0, Ashen Maw/Ukaizo was a cakewalk even at level 14. Now, Ashen Maw requires a little bit more skill and can spiral out of control, especially on Berath's--you could end up pulling an entire section of the map. Depending on what faction you side with, you can end up with a brutal high-level fight just doing that as well. And even at level 20, Ukaizo fight can be a challenge if you're used to just brute-forcing your way through a fight and/or aren't used to the multi-part encounters that become more common in SSS or FS. Though I guess actually you can trivially skip this fight if you don't care about the role-playing consequences to do so.) i think every time you talk to rymrgand you can be instakilled, both in VTC and in BoW. I seem to remember having to reload because I sassed off a bit too much. there's also a few encounters on the world map and one in a dungeon that can result in insteadeath if you don't have the right stats. Sevearl encounters (especially in SSS) are generous with giving you injuries, which can be death if you have too many. Not so many of these just on the critical path though. Thanks for the in depth advice. I have finished Triple Crown in PoE1 and never encountered a crash, if you say Deadfire is even more stable, that gives me confidence. I also generally check out every single detail about upcoming encounters, got like 10 guide tabs open every time i play, so there's little room for surprises. But i think i will finish the game once beforehand, just so i can get a feel of how the very tough encounters in the game are and adjust accordingly (i plan to kill everything in my TC run, including megabosses).

And I thank you for the continuous support of this wonderful game!

Hey guys, I purposefully held off playing Deadfire until all the DLC's came out and the game would be reasonably well patched, started a run on POTD + 5 challenges (Woedica, Galawain, Ondra, Berath, Hylea) and, with the except of Vela constantly dying and forcing me to reload, the game isn't too hard. I'm currently level 11 and reached Dunnage. From what i've read on the forums, it will get progressively easier the more you go up in levels, so i figure i should attempt a Triple Crown run for a real challenge, and dump Hylea/Berath challenges because they're too much of a hazard. Anyone else here completed a TC run without encountering major bugs or crashes and whatnot? Also, if you could point out specific moments where i could insta die, that would also be very helpful (such as scripted text scenarios where the wrong choice could kill you, etc.). Thanks!

I haven't played with this challenge before 4.1 patch, but any light AOE breeze instagibs Vela, googled the problem and apparently she doesn't scale with levels anymore. It's an extremely infuriating experience, had to reload maybe 100 times so far because of this, even with constant Withdraws, when she reappears and i'm not paying attention even for a second, she dies.

Nice patch, but I really hope in the upcoming Definitive Version, you will balance the XP progression, so that encounters remain very hard at every step of the way (the way Larian did in DOS2).

Thanks. I guess i'll keep playing the waiting game.. Doesn't look like there are any new achievements for now.

Is Triple Crown achievement finally included?

So basically, you want Obsidian to make Witcher 3

Ok, i turned Vsync off, it's working now :D

So i get horrible coil whine from my GTX 970 if the graphic demands are too high, i wanted to set frame rate max at 60 in game for this reason, but my steam counter shows it still runs at 100 fps average. Help?

Add your key from the portal, mate. Then you'll find it in your library and an option to pre-load. Easy as pie! If you're less familiar with the Obsidian site, it's here to redeem/manage your pledge: http://eternity.obsidian.net/backer/pledges Then after that, here to get your key:http://eternity.obsidian.net/account/products Enjoy! ^_^ Done, cheers!

Done, cheers!

Can i preload if i pledged on Fig? I don't see the game in my steam library

I'm seriously considering it, just going in blind, only using my POE 1 skills (where i managed to achieved it on my 3rd try), not researching builds or anything. I think it would be the ultimate immersive experience, considering there is no metagame knowledge available at the moment.

This is a better approach. I also think boss fights should focus on you fighting a group of enemies rather than one big bad, cause no matter how big or bad he is there are a number of ways you can make a single entity powerless (CC, tanking, very high single target damage). Group fights also allow the whole arsenal of your abilities shine (aoe, mind control, on kill stuff etc). Most PoE fights do include groups of enemies, but some (dragon fights) are bit too focused on a single entity for my liking. Bounties are much more satisfying and interesting boss fights in this sense. Having a group of enemies with improved AI smartly using skills/spells at their disposal should give a nice challenge. E.g. enemy priests protecting from/suppressing CC, wizards smartly targeting your weakest saves, bruisers intercepting your melee and trying to keep them engaged or going for squishier chars themselves. Couldn't agree more. But wasn't it the case that PoE is incredibly difficult to mod, due to the sh itty Unity engine? But if someone is willing to undertake such a task to create the PoE equivalent of SCS, maybe we can create a fund to support this endeavor. I'd be willing to shell out 10-20$ for a quality AI mod, and i'm sure there's others who feel the same.