MountainTiger

I've never felt comfortable with Sacred Immolation without Barring Death's Door as a backstop. The ticks are pretty big, so even if you have a good amount of healing setup a burst of damage plus a tick can put you in dangerous territory.

I don't think there is any particular advantage for two-handers over dual wielding with full attacks, and for Kind Wayfarers specifically the double heal pushes the other way. But either a Crusader or an Inquisitor with WotEP should get a lot of free damage out of Offensive Parry, which might be a reason to go for the two hander. There is an older Inquisitor build with WotEP on here; while some aspects were nerfed, Offensive Parry building focus for being missed still seems good and Borrowed Instinct is still one of the best all defenses buffs in the game.

Dual wielding full attacks get a damage penalty that keep them reasonably in line with two-handers. Offensive Parry hits the whole AOE and inflicts Dazed (-5 Might, -4 Pen), which is a big survivability boost against attacks that do hit. Both Carnage and CC weapons got hit hard with nerfs. Nothing procs CC on all crits the way Stunning and Overbearing weapons did in POE1, and Carnage is now just AOE raw damage instead of an actual weapon attack, so it doesn't have particular synergy with weapons that proc on hit/crit.

It's been a while since I played that part of Beast of Winter, so maybe this is contradicted somewhere, but my understanding has always been that the Wheel was a parallel project to creating the gods (and it seems that making the gods durable required the Wheel, so it must have been constructed around the same time). The Engwithans who went to Ukaizo would be from the same generation that built Sun in Shadow and the other god creation centers, and they probably activated the Wheel at about the same time as the rituals to create the gods.

The lineage of interrupts in Deadfire goes back through D&D systems where martial abilities were rare and generally uninterruptible; interrupts interacting with casters more than martials is part of the "retro feel" thing.

My understanding is that Sawyer prefers TB, so I assume that TB in Deadfire is his influence.

Turn-based also has an expanded graze range compared to RTWP, so the ratio will be higher.

I think the incentives matter less than you think. Making stable, reliable software is mostly about processes that aren't necessarily more expensive than the alternatives (and are almost always cheaper than trying to reduce the bug count post launch); some companies are good at putting these in place and some aren't. Obsidian, as much as I wish it were otherwise, seems from the outside to be in the "aren't" category.

All of the Obsidian games I've played have been massively buggy; NWN 2 is a particularly bad offender, with a nasty animation slowdown that was never patched. KOTOR 2 was also straight unfinished, though executive meddling apparently played a major role there.

Having played Obsidian games before the Pillars series, I'm quite confident that the financing model is not the source of the bugs.

My first time through POE 1, I got the "Aloth becomes Leaden Key Grandmaster" ending and was confused as hell because I'd never gone far enough with him to find out he was a member. For better or worse, Deadfire doesn't really allow you to come across anything like this. In terms of comparing the games, I would put the first game's Eder, Durance, Sagani, and Grieving Mother arcs well ahead of anything in Deadfire. Companion quests in Deadfire mostly feel like they were thrown in to be able to say they existed, though there are some improvements in reactivity to quests that aren't explicitly for a companion.

The Lay on Hands upgrades are very lackluster at the moment. I could buy either a cost reduction or a buff to the effects.

The gameplay notes here are right on for me. Deadfire's system changes push combat in a direction I find boring in comparison to POE 1.

I mean, wasn't this the case with PnP or even classic IE? A dagger did 1d4 and you didn't get to go any more often than someone wielding a 2d4 bastard sword. I'm not saying that this was a good thing (I only understood it as a role-playing choice in BG/BG2 to be deliberately suboptimal), but how do newer TB or editions of D&D handle this? In 5E D&D, weapon damage follows a fairly predictable formula. First, there are two tiers of weapons, Simple and Martial; Simple weapons start at 1d6 damage, Martial weapons at 1d8. In addition to damage, weapons have various properties, which can upgrade or downgrade their damage die. While not every weapon has a property, they typically get one beneficial property for free. So longswords (bastard swords are no longer separate) have the Versatile property, meaning they can be used either one or two handed; they're still 1d8 weapons in one hand, but they go up to 1d10 two-handed. The Light property, which allows weapons to be dual wielded by default, and the Finesse property, which allows attackers to use Dexterity instead of Strength for their attack and damage rolls, are particularly relevant to this discussion; these almost always comes with a damage downgrade (the only two Light Martial weapons are also Finesse, and do 1d6 damage instead of 1d8, which is consistent with getting one property for free and losing a die size for the second; one is Finesse only and keeps the 1d8 die size; one has Finesse and Reach and does only 1d4. Simple weapons include four Light weapons that take a damage downgrade to 1d4, including the Sickle and Club which have no other properties, but also the Handaxe, which has an additional property but keeps 1d6 damage). Finesse and Light are both fairly desirable properties in this system in spite of the damage die tradeoff: Dexterity is a better stat than Strength outside of melee offense, so sacrificing a bit of damage on your weapon to be able to focus on a better attribute is a worthwhile tradeoff. Dual wielding is good in action economy terms: it's one of the easiest ways to get a damage dealing Bonus Action (you get one Action and one Bonus Action per turn; non-martial classes never get more than one attack per Action and only high level Fighters get more than two attacks per action, so a Bonus Action attack is a big boost to DPR). Daggers specifically are still bad, but this is mostly because they're Simple weapons and any character that frequently attacks with a weapon will find a way to get a Martial weapon. As Simple weapons go they're arguably above the curve, with three beneficial properties, including Finesse and Light, but only one die size downgrade from the Simple weapon base (though things don't really go below 1d4, so they're at the floor).

On Steam at the moment, 12.6% of buyers have the POE 1 completion achievement. To compare to another game mentioned in this thread, 11.1% of D:OS2 buyers have the lowest difficulty completion achievement. I don't know if the D:OS 2 completion achievements are set up as "completed on exactly difficulty" or "completed on difficulty or higher", so it's possible that D:OS2 gains some total completion rate from the higher difficulties, but in general completion rates for large games are quite low.