MountainTiger
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Posts posted by MountainTiger
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The loss of spells combined with their set number of uses per encounter were the main reason I stopped my illusionist after ~3h. Why would I choose a class, that doesn't deal damage and on top of that has such a limited amount of actions per encounter available?
I chose a Cipher-Beguiler instead. Best decision ever. A hex has been interrupted? Not a problem, 2 shots with the bow and I have got my resources back.
But!
To those who defend the loss of an interrupted spell with "you lose the ressources for a fighter's skill, too":
Fighter skills are instant (at least most of them?!) while many spells take a few seconds.
Let's play a game: You try to interrupt my instant fighter attack and I try to interrupt your 3 second animation.
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.
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The thing is: Pillars was a RTwP-game from the beginning, has a strong community (though not so big one, but still), and no one is asked to add TB-mode. I assume someone had looked at Divinity and made such a rush desicion, trying to sell the game to people, who don't like RTwP. Though I've seen some kind of exaltation about TB, during the first two weeks after beta release, but then all has realized, that TB-mode is also kind of broken toy.
As a result, instead of one good RTwP game we have a two broken games.
My understanding is that Sawyer prefers TB, so I assume that TB in Deadfire is his influence.
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Turn-based also has an expanded graze range compared to RTWP, so the ratio will be higher.
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Let me put a different spin on this interesting question.
Are single player games more buggy than online games that depend on a constant stream of revenue? Without any data, let me give my impression from a strictly logical perspective. I think that it's arguable that single player games would be more buggy than online games for this reason. At release, they might be equally buggy, but here's the difference. With single player games, you pay for the game up front, and the developing company may see no massive reason to continue investing in the game (i.e. squashing bugs) when they've made a good chunk of money and perhaps profit. OTOH, with online games, the economic model for the company depends on a constant and ongoing stream of revenue. And if the game is buggy, players may/will migrate away from it to other games if they see no commitment from the developer to fix those bugs. So, the developer has a vested interest in continually fixing bugs.
Now, I don't know if the real life data backs this up, but my case seems logical enough. Thoughts?
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.
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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.
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Having played Obsidian games before the Pillars series, I'm quite confident that the financing model is not the source of the bugs.
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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.
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The Lay on Hands upgrades are very lackluster at the moment. I could buy either a cost reduction or a buff to the effects.
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Deadfire in my opinion has a really lot of improvements over PoE1 and I liked both a lot.
But if speaking about enjoyment... I would answer that subjectively I enjoyed PoE1 more back then, than Deadfire now.
At the same time I don't really know if this would hold true, if I played PoE1 after Deadfire.
P.S. If I tried to pinpoint what exactly I liked more about PoE1... it would probably be:
- longer critical path
- less fanatical Pallegina
- (might be wrong here but had a sensation that) companions had deeper writing about them and more dialogue options
- grimer/darker atmosphere. And gods being rather mysterios, without that incompetent vibe
- stronger crowd-control and debuffing
- enemies having more crowd control and nasty stuff themselves (shades, cean gwlas, druids, those monks...)
- enemies mostly relying on their abilities/defenses and less on inflated health pools
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.
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By going to rounds, all of the balancing is broken because speed is now largely irrelevant. There is no advantage to using dagger, because it doesn't go any faster than a two-handed axe, but it does much less damage.
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).
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At some point, it was reported that only 6.4% of players finished PoE. It would suggest that the game was a whopping disappointment to a huge percentage of buyers. (The figure has almost certainly gone up since then, as it can't really have gone down.)
Deadfire's lack of success is a crying shame, because I recently did a brief comparison of the two and Deadfire is simply so much better than PoE, on just about every conceivable level.
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.
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I'd rather develop Spiritshift and Holy Radiance more for Priests and Druids than trying to make them Wizard-like with trinkets. Those abilities are clearly supposed to at least partly substitute for not having a Wizard's versatility from grimoires, but they're pretty bare bones. Some ideas (some of these were already mentioned):
- Regenerate uses when using Empower to regenerate class resources: I think this would be fine as the default, but if balance is a concern it would be fine to gate it behind a passive
- Spend uses to get back spell slot(s): as an upgrade to the ability. Maybe disable on the Shifter, since it gets multiple Spiritshifts/combat?
- Change Holy Radiance effects: POE 1's Inspiring Radiance was probably too good for when it became available, but turning the ability into a buff you wanted to cast early in combat was a good idea.
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- Get rid of grimoires completely and go back to PoE1 style spells... lots of spells never get used as they are too situational to make worth taking
What does this mean? POE 1 had grimoires, and the mechanics were more restrictive with regards to ready spells since Wizards could only cast from their currently equipped grimoire and switching came with a much longer recovery. Between being able to have some spells always ready and faster grimoire switches, keeping situational spells available is much easier for Deadfire Wizards.
I guess "POE 1 style spells" probably means Wizards learning spells from grimoires with money and Priests and Druids automatically learning all spells on reaching a new spell level? This would fundamentally break Deadfire's progression system; while there were things I liked about the system as implemented in POE 1, it's not at all compatible with POE 2's approach to progression or the Priest and Druid subclasses as they exist.
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I don't really see the case for scaling attribute bonuses/maluses on inspiration/affliction tier. I'd like a few specific conditions to be revisited (Fit and Confused often don't really do anything, Immobilized is underwhelming for Tier 2), but I don't think the basic system needs changing.
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It was changed, because the system was changed. In addition Obs envisioned grimoires as something players would swap in between - something that apparently didn't happen much in PoE1.
As in Deadfire Wizards "memorize" a decent amount of spells when leveling up, there is no need to edit your grimoire as the "core" spells of your character are always available. In Deadfire grimoires are a supplement of your wizard's grimore, rather then his whole spell Bible. I found it to work pretty well. I do liked learning and writing spells thematically, but I don't see the old system as any way superior. I think it would be nice to be able to craft a custom grimoire late game, though to be honest I never felt a need for one.
Now, if you "REFUSE" to adjust to many new systems you will have a bad time, but it's hardly something one can held against the system. Item/ability discriptions are quite unprecise/vague, that is true. not to mention how misleadingly calculated some things are (like various penalties, which I still don't quite understand)
Unless one has prior knowledge of where to obtain, how early to obtain and what is contained inside of the predetermined selection of spells inside of each grimoire, you could be like me, "memorize" chill fog, then find a grimoire that already has it in it....that's a waste of a point spent. Do I get something in return for spending a point into chill fog when I use a grimoire that already has it? Increased power? HIGHLY doubt I get anything, only get screwed out of that point I bet.
You can respec for a trivial cost at any inn.
The biggest thing Wizards get from grimoires is a lesser need to spend points on active abilities than any other class; with two spells/level available at all times and the potential to switch between grimoires in the middle of a fight (so potentially 10 spells/level available with the default number of quickslots; from PL 6 on, this is greater than the number of spells in the game), they can free up a lot of points for passives and/or for the other side of a multiclass. The first game's grimoire system would have pushed this even further because it allowed you to spend copper to learn spells from found grimoires, which would completely eliminate the motivation to spend points on spells at level up rather than just learning them with money.
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Tested Come, Come Soft Winds and it does interrupt, but there seems to be a bug where the combat log filters out the interrupts when only looking at the chanter's actions (https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/108732-character-filter-in-combat-log-drops-interrupt/).
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With a Chanter chanting Come, Come Soft Winds of Death while Energized, the combat log for the full party correctly shows a crit causing an interrupt; however, filtering the combat log to show only the Chanter's actions results in the crit being filtered out. Screenshots of unfiltered and filtered logs attached.
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I was mostly using The Long Night's Drink; maybe only the damaging chants can interrupt? The combat logs clearly showed crits with no interrupt.
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Energized is "Attacks interrupt on crit", not "Weapon attacks interrupt on crit", which means it works with non-weapon attacks like spells (I have tested this and it works correctly for things like Phantom Foes). The chants are apparently not considered attacks, though, either intentionally or as a quirk of their implementation.
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Bashing shields now count as off-hand weapons, so you get the action speed bonus for dual wielding and can get the benefits from two weapon style; this at least partially solves the attack speed problem. But most of them still suffer from not scaling like weapon enchantments. Tuotilo's Palm is an exception: it scales with Transcendent Suffering, so you get plenty of accuracy and penetration, though damage still sucks because the base damage is very low.
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I'm not entirely sure it's a bug, but it's probably worth reporting when I can grab a screenshot and save.
In broad terms the Spiritualist is still doing what I wanted, but I think the plan for the Chanter side is a bit more open without the Brisk Recitation for passive interrupts plan. Spending phrases has been a bit awkward for a character who wants to spam Cipher spells, so I think I will look at a linger-based plan.
Request advice from PoE1 - PoE2. Multi-classing Kind Wayfarer.
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
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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.