Celan

I haven't been on here since Deadfire but just logging on again to register my disappointment with this decision. I was mildly interested in The Outer Worlds but now I plan to not buy it, ever. This isn't how you treat the PC players who supported Obsidian with our goodwill and then our Kickstarter dollars.

He gives disapproval for hunting the sea creature for food.

I miss those dense characters, compared to the faction reps we got in PoE2. As for the OP, I've heard people complain about the story in Divinity Original Sin, too. On my first playthrough of PoE1, I found the story a bit dry and just serviceable. I appreciated it more when I delved a little deeper. Probably most critics don't invest the time.

I got some disapproval for choosing to hunt the whale (or whatever it's called) in a sea encounter.

The taiga/ tundra is not just snowy, it's pretty varied.

I chose The White That Wends, for something completely different. For Eastern Reach I chose the Vailian Republics.

The problem is that people like to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of a long, involved game. Going through all that to essentially end up a spectator doesn't give a sense of reward or consequence.

I consider that an exploit and even if I'd been aware of it, not sure I'd use it, since it makes no sense.

So you need a mod to make sense of the casting system? Buffing a few druid spells is not going to fix what's wrong with them IMO. The limitations of level up and restricted casting per encounter are baked in. I guess it would help if there was some druid-specific equipment like the +1 cast rings that priests and wizards get. Or let druids use nature-based grimoires, to get the versatility back.

Your statement that a xaurip fight is harder than a boss fight. Druids were extremely deadly in PoE1, especially with mobs. In PoE2 you aren't deadly and you aren't a great healer, you're just the weak link. I guess you have to play wizard in PoE2 in order to still feel like a spellcaster.

Because the OP asked about changes to the casting system, not just the rest system. And if you like spamming the same few spells every time, if that's an enjoyable player experience for you, I suppose PoE2 is the game for you. This response makes me think you're not really serious. Although granted, the druid toolkit in PoE1 was excellent for mobs. Not so much now that I have to play junior healer all the time. The casting changes more than anything else has killed PoE2's replayability for me. I spent upwards of 300 hours on PoE1, mostly with a druid PC. Also the companion blah'ness. For both reasons I doubt I'll replay PoE2 at all, and I'm even considering not getting the expansions. Still undecided on that.

Are you sure your assumption about what's assumed is correct? I would assume everyone rests before a boss fight. And I see no evidence in PoE1 that boss fights were made easy because of the assumption that players wouldn't have any spells available. I myself found PoE2 pretty easy. The only boss fight I had trouble in was when I left Aloth behind to try to take someone else for rp reasons.

Aside from Arcane Assault, that was all casters got to do in Pillars 1 when you didn't want to cast spells, so I have no idea what you're even talking about. Deadfire has longer cast times and interruptions as a concept. It's not just the casting of spells that's important, it's positioning your spells and being conscious of the threat the caster is under. This is in addition to having to account for what types of afflictions your enemy resists, what types of afflictions you yourself have, and much more. More importantly though, the average fight in Pillars 1 had the much smaller repertoire of 0 because you aren't allowed to cast spells in most fights. And even when you do get to cast spells, there's not much more to it than point and click. Your argument literally makes no sense. It doesn't though, because not only do you not have access to this toolbox the majority of the time, but because if you didn't abuse Fireball and Ninaguth's Shadowflame to win most of the fights in 1, you were doing it wrong. We must have played PoE1 verrrrry differently. I cast all the time, choosing spells that were tactically useful. I used spiritshift when it was advantageous for me to do so, not because I had nothing else I could do. If you mean that you refused to buy or use resting supplies, then that was your choice. I would have been fine with a bit of nerfing of such spells. It's what I expected, for Returning Storm. The whole package in 2, however, has left me unwilling to keep playing a caster, and therefore uninterested in the game.

How many melee players would want to stand around doing nothing for half the fight waiting for the opportune time to hit somebody? So why should casters have to do that? I don't see the fights in Deadfire as a tactical puzzle or engaging at all. They consist of casting the same few spells over and over, because your repertoire is so small. Game design is about engaging the player to think and make choices. What's a chore is when the player is not challenged to do those things. Per rest systems inherently encourage the player to think less, to make fewer choices that are all binary by nature (is this encounter difficult enough to require spells? yes/no). Per encounter systems encourage the player think more, to consider which tools are important to use in every situation they engage with. Because when you have more tools for the player, there are more ways in which those tools can be used, making for a greater number of choices, and a greater amount of thinking to determine which choices are the right ones. And because Pillars 2 has a certain amount of casts per encounter due to its resource system, it's also which choices you are sacrificing. This is exactly what the PoE2 system takes away- choices and tools. In PoE1 I could shape encounters using a large toolkit of spells that had different utility for different enemies. In 2 I'm forced to use the same few spells, and half the fight I know I won't have any spells at all.

I did rest more frequently in PoE1, but hardly after every fight, and I certainly felt in PoE2 that I couldn't cast much. Without multiclassing I would be standing around or reduced to scrolls for half the fight. I don't play a caster to have to play melee half the time. The opposite side of being able to use your favorite spells is that with more limited spells, there are only a couple that are really useful at least for druid. I hated having to spam healing spells because my priest wasn't keeping up and then being out of anything else to cast. I would rather either choose them myself or have the whole toolkit open up like in PoE1. As I said up above, you're just trading frustration almost every fight with an occasional frustration. I don't get it. Also, it may be nitpicking, but the spell animations in PoE1 were cooler, at least for druids. Returning Storm felt like a real storm.

I see this expressed a lot and I don't understand it, since all PoE2 does is replace the occasional frustration of being out of rest supplies with the **almost every encounter** frustration of being out of casts. To the OP, I feel your frustration. Wizard seems to be still powerful enough to make it worth single classing, but druid is boring and feels quite limited in PoE2, whereas it was a lot of fun in 1.

I started getting her negative responses after declining her advances, even though I still had postive rep. Same for Tekehu.

Pallegina can put her in her place, and you can support Pally when she does, but it doesn't go anywhere. On my future playthroughs I'll probably hire a generic priest adventurer.

I think I've had my fill of ship combat with Deadfire, so none of the above.

Or, people just have a different opinion to yours. I found myself skimming the text and skipping ahead as fast as I could because it was so irritating. I think the writing could have been simplified, but it was mostly the over-dramatic presentation drawn out with pauses that didn't help the text.

I was wrong, I misinterpreted a Frostseeker enchantment as taking away stats but it just kept regular stats and added an ability.

I'm more curious why many enchantments make a weapon worse than its vanilla state.

I haven't played it, and don't care for her narration.

I disagree that it's the same. You run out of casts halfway through most battles in PoE2. This rarely happened in PoE1 if I was managing my supplies.

There is a lack of good bows in the game already. No need to nerf others to make ranger suitable.