Purudaya

What's really disgusting me is how freaking *many* of these "There are women doing things that I don't like women doing in this game!" so-called reviews have been showing up lately.Really makes me question my self-identity as a "gamer" when I see what's up with parts of gamer culture these days. I just don't understand why of all games it's this one that's getting ragged on for these reasons. So far this is like the least "political" game I've played all year. RPGs seem to be particularly vulnerable to this stuff for some reason. The worst I've seen was the Beamdog forums during the release of Siege of Dragonspear a few years ago. The devs included a minor NPC with two lines of dialogue about gender fluidity and gamergate launched a weeks-long review bombing campaign knocking the metacritic and GoG scores down to 3 (meanwhile: 7.5 among verified Steam purchases). The developer downsized and hasn't released any OC since. Yet it's somehow the "SJWs" who are still charicatured in the gaming community as the unreasonable value crusaders. Goes to show that gamergate was never really about combating censorship in gaming so much as fighting cultural change and representational diversity. I mean, I get it. When games have been made with no care for any demographic but yours for the past thirty years, it's hard to adapt when the industry *finally* notices that other people want to play too. Same thing is happening with comic books – a female Thor and a black Spiderman are always going to cause some people's heads to just explode.

Wait, there's a shattered reef path to Ukaizo?

Control+H will hide the entire UI (HUD elements cannot be individually/selectively hidden). There aren't really any unessential elements aside from maybe the combat log, which is resizable.

I believe the RDC also sends you there. The problem is that I went when Furrante told me to and instead of just rescuing the slaves, I wiped the whole fort. Later, I was unable to finish Aloth's quest because the Wahaki tribe associated with the Huana quest to liberate Crookspur locked me out of certain content. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's messy compared to how other quests in the game are given and resolved.

I've found it helpful to focus on 2-3 passives and 1-2 actives for your main character, then have a few characters each boost 1-2 of the skills you want to use most. For example, my rogue distributed points evenly between mechanics, stealth, bluff, insight, and streetwise. I then made sure that Serafen focused exclusively on bluff and streetwise and Maia focused exclusively on insight and mechanics, resulting in solid party stats for all four. One tip you might want to keep in mind, though - if you are planning on using athletics or stealth to pass skill checks, make sure that everyone in your party has 1 point in athletics and stealth. Attempts to sneak (again, in dialogue/vignette checks) will fail if one character has 0 stealth and a character with 0 athletics will often get injured in a party-wide athletics check.

You can usually tell by what the enchantments are modifying. Let's say you have a flaming scimitar - if one enchantment increases your burn lash at the cost of accuracy and the other increases your accuracy at the cost of burn, you can assume those two are mutually exclusive. It's not always that cut and dry of course, but usually you can tell by what stat is being modified. Other enchantments that add "per rest" abilities in line with the flavor of the weapon are almost always one or the other.

THIS **** again. I guess some people are just determined to see an agenda no matter how you depict gender and sexuality in video games. It must be an absolute nightmare to be a developer in the age of gamergate. 1. Takehu is initially depicted as a self-obsessed narcissist, not an awesomesauce superhero designed to elevate his depiction as gay. He's one of the most flawed characters in the game. 2. Serafen isn't "whipped" by the women in his life, he's an affable scoundrel who doesn't call his lovers back and gets into awkward situations when he runs into them. This has been a media trope for AGES. 3. Eder is generally depicted as self-reflective and good-natured. I can't recall a single line where he comes off as "impossibly stupid." You're looking for stuff that isn't there so you can justify a theory - which you came into the game already believing - that Obsidian has an agenda to elevate women and emasculate or otherwise diminish men. Both the male and female characters in Deadfire are about as varied as the format allows, which is to say that you're going to see a fair amount of standard fantasy archetypes on both sides. The female leaders in the game aren't going to behave like the upper management at your work because no fantasy characters behave like the upper management at your work. In a 50-100 hour game with hundreds of characters, you're often going to find characters with 1-2 singularly defining traits. This isn't rocket science and was never an issue until a certain perpetually aggrieved segment of the gaming community decided that changes in representation aren't simply a natural reflection of a changing culture, but an insidious plot by man-hating queer feminist developers to persecute them and take away everything they hold dear. It's just a game, man. The fact that you put this much effort into weaving a distorted web of prejudices and agendas out of thin air speaks to a straight white male persecution complex that I as a straight white male can never begin to understand.

If you convinced Eder in the first game to question his faith, Bearn ends up moving on from the Lighted Path. Plus, Eder's path through this game is so much more interesting as a jaded ex-Eothasian

Yeah, I'm aware of this option and this is the route I wound up going after finding out that everyone turns hostile no matter what. I really wish you could just decline the quest and have him say "I'll be sending a missive to Furrante about this" or whatever so that you can then handle the rest of the slave liberation the way you see fit. The game really should allow you to take the quest disingenuously, inform Serafen of your ruse, get help from the Slaver's targets to turn the tables on him, and then betray/kill him in glorious fashion. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but eliminating the slavers at Crookspur could have had so many more options besides sneak+fight and talk+fight.

I don't have a problem with him being anti-slaver, but there are some implementation problems with his responses at Crookspur. 1. If you decide to try and resolve things diplomatically by walking into Crookspur rather than sneaking in the back and liberating the slaves by force, you're immediately presented with a slave auction. My character being anti-slaver himself, I bid on and purchased the slave "Handsome Elian" so that no one else could, planning to release him immediately afterward (the game allows you to do exactly this). Serafen responds negatively during the purchase, which is understandable, but you are never given the opportunity to assuage his concerns (e.g. "trust me on this"). 2. Rather than being able to buy Handsome Elian and free him on the spot, you are forced to go into the fort and speak with the administrator to complete the sale. Ok, fine. 3. Once you start THAT conversation, you are presented with the option to take the slavers' quest - f you say no, everyone goes hostile.* Figuring that probably wouldn't be good for the slave waiting outside, I take the quest figuring that I can betray him later like *every* other quest of this type. 4. And that's where Serafen goes off. When he does, you are given no option to tell him that you have no intention of actually helping the slavers and that you plan to essentially nuke the place before the day is out - all you can say is, "I'm sorry, it won't happen again." It's frustratingly limiting. By locking into you speaking with the administrator in order to free the slave and then locking you into taking his quest or killing everyone, the game takes you from trying to help a slave to being a slaver ally in the eyes of your companion with little choice on your part if you're trying to postpone an all-out fight. *you can get out of this by choosing "farewell" immediately after he says "One more thing..." but it doesn't feel at all natural from a storytelling perspective. The whole Crookspur questline is messy as hell.

Yeah, there's a little too much of that in this game, imo. I get that it's interesting for characters to be flawed, but it's frustrating that every potential faction leader has at least one totally irredeemable quality. I missed the presence of at least a few mostly decent or mostly evil characters. Grey area can provide for some much needed nuance in RPGs, but too much of it engenders player apathy.

Extremely interesting. I really hope they make him a full companion in one of the dlcs. In the most recent twitch Q&A, Josh says something to the effect of "I can't say anything about current sidekicks in future DLC, but we are VERY aware that players like some of them a lot" or similar. I think he's referring specifically to Ydwin in that case, but I wouldn't be surprised if other sidekicks get "promoted" to companions as the DLCs roll out. We got 3 new ones for PoE1, so I'd bet on the same or more being added to PoE2. I'm personally hoping for more from Konstanten and Rekke, although the former probably isn't popular enough.

Have you ever met a woman physically stronger than you? Because dude, you need to. The idea that "any man" can perform physical tasks better than "any woman" is self-evidently untrue (and, frankly, a bizarre assertion). The *average* man might outclass the average woman, but that's only relevant if we're only taking into account default muscle mass and physical fitness with no other variables. Fantasy epics are about exceptional people: if a woman really wanted to be the best smith in the city (assuming that smithing is solely about muscle capacity, which of course it's not) or cleave enemies in two with a battle axe, she TOTALLY could. She might have to work harder than the average man to get there, but that makes her more of a badass, not less. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/21/433482186/first-female-soldiers-graduate-from-army-ranger-school Read this. These women completed Ranger training with no special accommodations where several of their male counterparts failed. They could kick both our assess *blind* and get bonus Resolve points for having to do it in a world full of dudebros telling them that it's impossible. I'm not saying that it's necessarily realistic to have an equal number of muscled-up male and female barbarians in a single setting, but the idea that the latter can't or shouldn't exist *at all* or even "often" in a fantasy role playing game is assinine.

Incel is just a new word for virgin. Like thot is a new word for s**t. That's all it means - it's a way of shaming men who haven't had sex, or aren't "studs". Every male who has ever existed has seen this in high school - the sex bragging etc. It's in its way a very teenage word. It's just the rebirth of a very old idea. I'm not sure its accurate to ascribe political ideology to a word that just means you can't get laid. I'd personally be suspicious of any doomsdaying threat narrative article that does so, especially if peoples way of doing so is taking the ideas of some subreddit as an emergent ideological faith. You can't get by a day without some moral panic from the left about some new bogeyman - Nazi's, the far left, the alt-right, mra's, male supremicists and how they are all going to take over the world and bring about the demise of liberal democracy. I guess that's why the handmaidens tale does so well. The right used to do the same thing, banging on about satanic child abuse, reds under the bed, or how d&d turns people into serial killers. They still do sometimes. Maybe sometimes those risks are valid, but most of the time a moral panic seems to be unjustified. Personally as someone who is 40, I've got no time for people who think being a virgin is something to be ashamed of. You shouldn't seek your validation in other people, life will teach you that one way or another. Nor do I have much time for moral panics either - civilisation is probably an instable proposition anyway. Everything from food scarcity as the population grows, war, to national debt causing a global depression, to an asteroid wiping us out is always on the cards. Those threats are always there. Society is changing at a pace, and that itself could be unstable. Easier just to enjoy what you have, support reasonable thinking, and accept that not everything is in your control. There's always darkness in the human heart too. And people who feel jilted, oppressed or hard done by and like other people owe them something for their feelings. People are basically selfish creatures, by and large, and they'll project their negative experiences onto other people if they go the wrong way. I prefer to spend my time amazed and in admiration of those with large stores of compassion and optimism, which is probably more remarkable given how life can be pretty hard. *Actually you know what that all reminds me of? The moral panic thing? The animancy plot in poe1 - how everyone thought they were the end of civilisation. "Incel" is not merely a new word for virgin and it's not something that others have ascribed to this group – it's a name that they have chosen for themselves as a sort of badge of martyrdom. Incels blame women for their singlehood and view the fact that they aren't having sex as an injustice committed against them by a degenerate society that refuses to see their value. They feel entitled to sex, hold beliefs deeply grounded in heterosexism, openly entertain violent fantasies, and have a lot of (not surprising) crossover with gamergate. I'm all for freedom of expression and anti-alarmism, but you can't call a group a "Boogeyman" "invented" by the left once they've actually started killing people. Collier Township, Santa Barbara, and now Toronto were all carried out by angry men active in the incel community. You don't have to believe that a group is actually going to bring about a male supremacist social shift to recognize it as a threat for wanting to.

It's better to have the discussion. Shutting it down makes it look like you don't have an argument and this one wasn't even difficult. I don't know if the OP is a troll or a misogynist or none of the above but we can let the arguments stand or fall based on the facts. I agree with you that ignoring this type of conversation lets it fester and just creates more hatred/frustration. That being said, the OP has little to no argument, so I don't see the point in engaging it with any semblance of dialogue. You don't negotiate with cancer, you treat it. Hating half the population because of its gender is a cancer. The OP answered my question and I responded to the answer. Anyone reading this thread can see the discussion and judge the merits of both arguments. If you believe that the OP has little to no argument, then you should want him to expose his weak argument to everyone. If you are going to label someone else's opinion as cancer and declare it off limits, it will sound, to a lot of people, like you think that opinion is too dangerous, i.e., that it is so solid that you don't have an argument against it. That is both a terrible strategy (for reasons I can elaborate on, if you wish) and an invitation to others to shut down your opinion when they have the power to do so. Respectfully, this is the same logic that drives CNN to give climate scientists and climate change deniers equal time on their broadcast. Some arguments are undeservedly elevated and legitimized simply by engaging with them: by extending the same platform to a flat-earther that you extend to an astrophysicist, you risk amplifying the former rather than diminishing it. Not all opinions are created equal, and OP's isn't exactly new. We've HAD this debate - there's no need to have it again every time someone washes ashore from 8chan with cultural provocation and division-mongering on their agenda.

And every man in that game was a colossal douchebag - those aren't "feminist vibes," those are female characters that are off-putting. Women, like men, are people and can therefore be depicted as aggressive, obnoxious, or otherwise flawed without that having anything to do with feminism, social justice, or the gender of the person they're talking to. OP's post should never have been given the dignity of a response; it was literally just designed to stoke conflict and attempt to reinforce tired alt-right gamergate fragility and reactivity as the default perspective. Also, mods everywhere might want to consider adding "SJW" to their language filters. Would eliminate a ton of ****posts.

The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of character depth and reactivity. In PoE1, you could have a significant impact on characters' paths, perspectives, and even beliefs. I fully expected that I would be able to affect a certain character's perspective re: her faction - and the game seems to hint at this given her personal quest - but by the end of the game she was basically the exact same person she was at the beginning. You're able to convince a god to take various world-altering actions, but you can't convince your friends to meaningfully question their loyalties/views. The character interactions, while nice, were also fewer than I expected. They also seem heavily frontloaded - at the beginning of the game, interjections were common enough that I had high hopes that PoE2's character work would be a step up from the original in the same way that BG2 was from BG1 (remember that early conversation Eder has with you about Xoti?). By around level 15, however, they had pretty much run out of things to say. Sometimes the dialogue icon would even appear over a character's portrait only to reveal no new content once clicked on (maybe this is a bug and there will be more dialogue post-patch?). I will say that the non-interactive audio banters between characters while exploring/walking around Neketaka were great and very plentiful - I never heard one repeated and consistently heard new banter even into the very late stages of the game. I really liked Deadfire and think it's a significant improvement over the original, but I wish the NPC interactions had been developed much further than they were.

If you right-click on the sword in your inventory (while on deck), there should be a button below the description that allows you to recite the incantation.

Have you tried exploring old dialogue options? It might appear greyed out, but asking "how are things around fort deadlight" should lead to the recruitment dialogue.

Heart of Winter?? Are we going to Icewind Dale?!?! Lol BEAST of Winter. Currently playing IWD:EE, so yeah...

Heart of Winter apparently has us going into The Beyond, so that's at least one opportunity to make a more dungeon-like scene.

Whoops, somehow overlooked that. Yeah, in their current state rogues need some serious tuning imo. They have about 4-5 power levels worth of active abilities that range from underwhelming to borderline useless, even moreso once you get persistent distraction. The class should be built around stealth and burst damage: it gets the second part mostly right but largely through passives while giving you several single target debuffs that you have no real need for (what is the point of Sap?). Meanwhile, how does a fighter have an ability that guarantees a critical hit but not a rogue? As for veil, try testing it in fights with 6+ enemies and at least one magic user or possibly chanter. That's where it seems to fail the most (even when you don't have any afflictions, which is why I suspect a bug).

The problem is that right now veil seems to fail immediately almost half the time - you will stealth and then instantly unstealth with no indication as to why. Either it's a bug or there are far too many invisibility-breaking conditions (damage over time is one of them, but there must be more because it often doesn't work even if you haven't taken any damage) that interrupt it. Pre-combat opening backstabs still work great, but if you're planning on making a build based on in-combat stealth you might want to wait for the patch. Granted, the devs haven't yet acknowledged the problem in the bug forum (that I've seen), so who knows. Otherwise, looks like a solid build. I don't know how valuable coordinated positioning will be and so you may want to take Gambit instead despite the high guile cost.

Try unchecking and rechecking the box next to "Rum Runners DLC - Not Installed." Did it for me.

Shattered Pillar/Assassin is a lot of fun, but you might find that you're not using stealth during combat as much as you'd expect since smoke veil isn't very reliable atm. I would choose it anyway to keep your character a tad squishier to balance out the high DPS. Dual sabres, confounding blind, Swift flurry (only as broken as the weapons/abilities you pair with it), thunderous blows, persistent distraction, and heartbeat drumming (deathblows is a tad overkill and comes in late anyway) are the pillars of the build. The trick is to use Swift flurry in combination with "full attack" abilities like confounding blind and crippling strike to increase the chance of triggering a second attack. You will occasionally score chains of 4-5 attacks at higher levels, but it's nowhere near as OP as some of the blunderbuss/frostseeker shenanigans. It's enough to give your character the highest DPS in the party (as a rogue/monk should be) without breaking the game (there are plenty of times when SF doesn't generate bonus attacks). Given that Swift Flurry is all but guaranteed to be hit with the nerf hammer when the patch comes out in a couple of weeks, you might want to hold off. Until then, this build is probably best played on PotD with scale up -> everything.