Baron Pampa
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Posts posted by Baron Pampa
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Thanks for the in-depth replies to my post
. Just to clarify: I see that my post might have given the impression that I'd like to see some formal rules about banning strategies I listed. That was not my intention - my intention was to say that I'd be particularly interested in following playthroughs in which some of those are banned. That ban, however, of course would have to stem from individual player decision, not some kind of community pressure or thread rules. Thanks once again -
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@Alessia_BH, and other no-reloaders,
while I'd love to participate in this thread and challenge, I feel that I have other priorities right now and don't want to devote my time.
However, there are four things I've found inherently imbalanced in this game. I'd love to read a playthrough of somebody who tries to ban some of them in their POTD no reload playthrough. Those are:
- Summons from figurines(especially early - they don't depend on your party level and skills)
- Charms, both from casters and items(especially against strong opponents with higher level. Many strong foes have weak Will defense, and can either soak tons of damage, or damage their allies significantly)- Wizards, Druids and Priests. When things go south Vancian-spam can go a long way to save the team
- Overleveling. Once you know the game it's easy to almost always be stronger than your enemies in a given area. Remedied by delaying level-upsMy personal challenge runs up to now were fully-reload, but with banning more and more strategies over time. Summons and charms went out the window during my current no-Vancian casters and level-delayed playthrough, as I've noticed I were able to handle many encounters at a low level just by using summons and charms strategically...in every single interesting fight. There's at least one ring and one helmet which grant Dominate and Whispers of Treason, both are available quite quickly, though I don't remember where exactly.
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What's your opinion on White March difficulty with and without scaling? I'm considering entering at level 5/6 without scaling, or at 8/9 with scaling enabled, and I'm curious about opinions and experiences.
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Same issue. No workaround known for me. The next questline started upon turning Poko Hokara quest.
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Observation #10: Parting Thoughts
The game offered great tactical battles, grand adventures, interesting moral dilemmas, and enjoyable plot lines. With experience the game became much easier over time, yet I found myself returning for multiple runs.
Gread read in general, but I found this part to have a special resonance with my own feelings. Now I'm a bit bored with Pillars, and the only thing I regret is not spending enough time with the White March content.
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Thank you for the input. At the moment I'm trying a 3-people team and it's good, forces me to rethink the tactics
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Have you tried it? Most of the active abilities inflict statuses, have you considered i.e. Knockdown a debuff?
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I've lost my saves with few nice complete playthroughs, and I'd like to have a completely finished game by the time PoE 2 is up. However, the game got quite easy over time, and I know most of the content by heart. What self imposed restrictions do you have to suggest, to get a man creative again and cause him some problems?
I've tried:
-no Vancian casters party. Things get quite different, it's fun, but I already did it.
-huge leveling delays. A must for me, as after Caed Nua you can outlevel the content very fast
I'm not into:
-Ironman
-Smaller party. I like the banter
Any thoughts? What do you do to keep the game fun? -
For some reason I like to play characters with low Perception(5-6). While such characters keep being useful and viable on POTD, most character concepts emphasize at least average(~10) Perception due to high monster defenses and the need to punch through them with abilities, which sometimes might be critical to winning a fight. This especially applies to tough bossfights. I've started considering what type of builds aren't heavily handicapped by low Perception, and get a good benefit out of other attributes. I'll note what thoughts I had class-by-class, but primarily I'd like some feedback, suggestions and builds from you.
Class-by-class comparison:
TIER A - plays normally/almost normally:
ROGUE - with it's high base accuracy, modal bonuses and hit-to-crit conversion, rogue seems to be one of the most promising classes. Even with Perception set at ~5, he would retain the ability to succesfully land most of the hits and keep his high damage output. Other high scores will benefit Rogue damage, survivability or controlling possibilities.FIGHTER - High base accuracy, graze-to-hit conversion, temporary Accuracy boosts. Fighter too looks like a class with potential to play normally without good Perception score.
RANGER - High base accuracy, plenty of bonuses to Accuracy from modals and animal companion. Probably a melee ranger focused on working together with his pet would be a good bet for a low-Perception build, with spare points boosting the tankiness.
TIER B - easily conceivable builds working around the low Perception:MONK - While the base accuracy of the class seems good enough to let him hitting hard even in bossfights, low perception affects the reliability of monk's debuffs and status-inflicting abilities.
CHANTER - party-buffing chanter should be perfectly all right, but his already poor damage output will get even lower. Also, very good invocations, like the paralysation/charm/, and very good phrases, like Dragon Trashed, get nerfed.
PALADIN - tankiness and support role are fully utilized, at the cost of offensive abilities and damage. But a Paladin doesn't have to be focused on damage in the first place.
TIER C - severly handicapped with no easy way out:
PRIEST/DRUID - both on this classes can easily focus on buffing the party and stay perfectly effective. However, with their brilliant spells and debuffs nerfed, especially in the tough fights, low Perception dimnishes their universality and usefullnes.
WIZARD - offensive class with spells which landing are more often than not critical to win a bossfight.
CIPHER - you really want this guy to build focus as fast as possible. Then, you want him to hit with the spells. Low-Perception seems like a no-go.
BARBARIAN - Barbarian has medium base accuracy. Carnage has even lower. The class bonuses to accuracy are sparse. Lowering the Accuracy seems like a way to make your game tedious and not-fun. -
The thing I liked most in PoE is the theme of dealing with uncertainty in things that matter to us.
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I believe that POTD is challenging enough do that most players have to be careful about camping supplies, or backtrack. If somebody is good enough to breeze through POTD, then it's time for self-imposed restrictions, e.g. postponing leveling...or dismissing companions after their first knockout. Nevertheless, system is meaningful for most players. Ninjamestari writes either about edge cases or lower difficulty levels
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There are buffs in PoE which are being upkept all the time - auras and phrases. You pay in abilities. Personally, I like the variance between strong, short-timed buffs cast in combat out of per-rest resources and the low-maintance paladin/chanter bonuses.
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This discussion is going off the rails. I have few postulates:
-Let's expand it to all caster classes, not only wizards
-Let's put aside our sentiments or resentments towards D&D reality-bending mages and priests
-Let's focus on question:
"How can magic feel more magical without hurting game's design goals or enjoyment flowing from game?"
Giving the wizard ability to do anything he wishes(as high-level D&D wizards used to) might make a fun game with nice atmosphere (BG II anyone?), but is obviously against the spirit of PoE. However, while I wouldn't like to twist commisar's thought*, I don't think he meant we should create overpowered wizards making all classes redundant. The point is to make classes more atmospheric, unique and wild. Just think of the difference between "You can teleport to a chosen point" and "The wizard summons a door out of thin air, and then walk through it to reappear at a chosen point". Then think of animations of a wizard teleporting some random way, and animation of wizard conjuring the door and crossing it. From a mechanichal perspective, it's the same. Which one appeals to the imagination stronger?
It's not about combat and balance. It's about flavour.*or would I...?
P.S. I think that PoE1 did very well on distinguishing that many classes, but due to it's scale it lacked small kinds of reactivity in dialogues in interactions. Again, White March did much better in that regard
P.S.2 Chanter's phrases and invocations names are phenomenal-
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I'd like to strongly support the OP. I don't know if introducing more varied spells is viable in PoE 2 due to economical and balance reasons. I think, that scripted interactions create a great opportunity to substitute for that. The point that magic often doesn't feel magical in video games seems very valid to me. Too often are the mages are reduced to "magical warriors" - whether they are crowd-controllers of damage specialists, their skills are solely battle-oriented. PoE is an example of that - all of wizards competences are seen purely in battle, except for few additional dialogues and scripted interactions. All they do as the students of the arcane is inflicting status effects in AoE or directly, dealing damage and giving some buffs. Too often are those empty numbers. However, that's more or less what the martial classes can do. While I do not deny that there is a distinction, I feel it could be much better.
Examples given by the OP from Baldur's Gate show a few ways in which combat spells can be made very flavoured. PoE has some examples too. However, a game which excelled in that topic was Morrowind. In Morrowind, mages had the standard battle repertoire - summons, damage, debuffs, control. However, they had much more. A mountain is hard to climb? Come on man, you can levitate. You want an underwater treasure? Well, there is one spell to breathe underwater. And other one to swim like a fish. Trouble with a merchant high prices? Charm him, get a discount, problem solved. Teleportation? Well, there were four different kinds of it, rooted in the game lore. Would some item would be handy? Well, you can enchant it yourself. In addition, there was a possibility to create custom spells.
While I don't even dream of achieving the Morrowind level, partly due to PoE being an isometric game, I think there are two ways in which it could be improved: First is just making the spells more flavored, but I think the state of first game is OK. Second is placing a greater emphasis on dialogues and scripted interactions, in which the characters arcane skills can be acknowledged. We could already see a good trend in White Marches. A good and simple example is the possibility of killing the flames in burning house with spells.
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Based on what I remember from dev blog from before release, all the classes abilities come from soul power and characteristics. A fighter doesn't have superior martial abilities only because of his training, but also he has particular soul alignment allowing him to perform superhuman feats. A class isn't about what you can do, but about who you are. Also similar to D&D convention, when even possesing 1 level in a class is heroic in it's own right. I get the impression that this convention have been abandoned later, but it would stand for a good explanation of why anyone represents exclusively one class.
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Background dialogue summary:
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78795-i-explored-all-character-backgrounds-so-you-dont-have-to/
Resolve seems to be the most frequently demanded and impactful attribute, Might is often used for threatening. Ciphers get the most class-specific interactions in maingame. White March does way better than the base campaing in terms of acknowledging your attributes, class and race.Also, don't expect much from priest of Eothas - IMHO the class shouldn't be possible to play, as game quite often joyfully ignores that you are a priest of that god.
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One of the game design goals was to make any class, race and attributes combination playable and fun, and I feel that the goal has been reached. So, unless you want to maximize your battle effectiveness, pick whatever you feel like.
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On my first playthrough I've been really touched by everything related to Eothas and revealed in the first hours of the game. Don't know why, but after exiting Gilded Vale I rerolled as Eothasian priest in the result.
Also, Eder persona and questline. I really liked how they are composed of realistic, down-to-earth motifs - adoration of older brother, conflict between country and religion, lack of understanding among your own society, lack of certainty about past choices. Thanks to that the way game's main theme of necessity to live and make decisions while lacking important knowledge was explored in the finale induced strong feelings in me.-
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Even if PoE lacked memorable moments, The White March has plenty of them, at least for me.
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Also: Less fights. More difficult fights. More meaningful fights. Xaurips be gone; )
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I can't really tell if NegativeEdge is trolling, but I'll bite.
I never got the sense the fanbase was rebuked at all by Pillars - which I presume you mean it missed the mark of our collective expectations.I liked that it gently rebuked us all for refusing to let go. A sequel feels like it dilutes the point.
In some sense yes I would say the game did not live up to expectations, it never could of course, but that isn't to denigrate its quality but instead acknowledge its own message to us about the nature of expectations, especially those born out of nostalgia and memory.
The whole game is suffused with melancholy and many of the characters and quests involve people in some ways trapped in the past to their detriment. The soul reading mechanic seems to exist only to reinforce the idea of the cyclical nature of violence through cultural memory, the dozens misappropriate the collective memory of others to justify themselves, you literally enter GMs memory, Saganis vision quest involves her village memory and she frets about whether her own husband will remember her in her absence.
The game explicitly says 'hey you shouldn't live in the past because it's the past and it's not like you remember it anyway. Don't let your memory of the past dictate your future, things change and it's unhealthy to try and pervert that process'.
Is it a coincidence that a game that was made by strapping our memory of the infinity engine to a table and forcing 4 million dollars into its lifeless husk has so many Frankenstein references in it?
The whole world of Eora is on the cusp of change. The gods are dead, boomsticks obsolete the arcane, people are weary of religious conflict and so modernism is approaching fast. Our heroes solving problems with swords and chivalry are an anachronism. A bunch of people who can't adjust to the changing times, every one an exile in some way, six outsiders marching gamely in lockstep to the next area who can't accept that everything around them has changed. Therein lies the rebuke.
A sequel just begs the question: Is it desirable or right to brute force into existence a facsimile of something that expired not due to evil publisher machinations but simply because it's time had come and gone? to which PoE already answers a resounding no and again no.
As far as whether it makes financial sense because profitable ip or whatever I just find that kind of talk weridly mercenary. I'd expect Obsidians accountant to use that justification sure, but as a customer I can't get excited about the words 'profitable', 'intellectual property' (lol) or any of that nonsense.
Great analysis, but I just can't resist: Haven't you overdosed The Witcher :> ?
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Main story fitting the huge, open world and freedom so doing random quests for random people makes sense for the player whole game(Act III anyone?), or world fitting the main story, PS:T style.
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Nothing like this can happen in book or isomtric RPG, and that's immersion for me, that's why I don't clearly understand why ppl are asking for things like walk toggle or darker dungeons in PoE, like what difference it would really make? People who can be context immersed without visual part wouldn't care about that, right? And those who rely on visual part + sound, like me, see PoE mostly as schematic, so that's what I generally don't understand and needed clarifying for...
I think that most people care for both "context" and sensory input. PoE creates it's atmosphere through text enhanced by visuals and audio, or maybe the other way around. I.E. I've been always fan of portraits in cRPG's, despite the fact they don't add anything to the text and are hardly deal-breakers as far as visuals go.
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I'm not sure if you consider kiting to be a dirty trick, but Harpagornis killed Thaos at level 1;)
. Just to clarify: I see that my post might have given the impression that I'd like to see some formal rules about banning strategies I listed. That was not my intention - my intention was to say that I'd be particularly interested in following playthroughs in which some of those are banned. That ban, however, of course would have to stem from individual player decision, not some kind of community pressure or thread rules. Thanks once again 
Career Question
in Obsidian General
Posted
If you wish to build a portfolio, maybe work on game engines is a good idea? There's a lot of open source projects trying to replace old game engines with more modern ones. OpenMW is for Morrowind. It could use a shader system, performance optimizations and improved shadows. There are also Daggerfall Unity, GemRB for Baldur's Gate, and probably hundreds of others.