Purudaya

I thought the same thing, but it's kind of hard to plan a "drunk" build when it's impossible for the Watcher to have more than 1 lager in an 8-hour span. There's always creative license, I guess But seriously. You give me new booze effects, a drunken character pose, and a drunken sidekick and yet I still can't build my swashbuckling rogue around booze the way monks can around drugs? Come on, Obsidian...let me have this.

Now that the free DLC actually added some more worthwhile expensive alcohols (+25% crit damage is pretty awesome), it's kind of disappointing that you can only use them at rest rather than during combat. It was kind of weird to begin with — I understand having to sit down and rest for a meal, but if you can drink a potion you can drink an ale. The current implementation also creates some issues immersion-wise: the effects of alcohol last indefinitely (until next rest) and it's literally impossible to consume it at taverns of all places. Characters shouldn't have to run off into the woods in order to have a swig of X. Tl;dr: It would be nice if the more powerful and expensive alcohols could be categorized alongside drugs as opposed to food. Or at least allow players to assign food and drink at taverns (perhaps only in barebones rooms) to better customize their bonuses.

In my playthrough she placed barrel bombs in the water around Ukaizo in addition to the storms and it's pretty well insinuated that she means for no one to claim it, not even herself. She also doesn't steal the Hangman, I think it's assumed that you no longer need it given that you're heading back to the Dyrwood. I actually found this to be the best ending, not the worst. All the others require you to either side with a demonstrable faction or throw the region into total chaos.

If you help her unseat Furrante and side with the Principi, Captain Aeldys takes an interesting turn and restarts the storms on Ukaizo so that no one can lay claim to it. Who would've thought siding with an anarchic band of bloodthirsty pirates would yield the most balanced (and imo rewarding) ending?

Well, the trade-off was that female representation in those games was mostly garbage, though. Respectful discourse is good - maybe the discussion helped the player to find the content less immersion-breaking and increased her ability to enjoy the game. If not, it caused me to think about a perspective that I'm unfamiliar with (even if I didn't agree). It's good exercise, although more than a little off-topic. Also, I don't think she was "offended" by the content so much as she found it unrealistic. Again, from her perspective. Rum Runners DLC!

At level 18-20, It won't be. At least not before the patch.

Do you play the game in english or with a localization? I have heard that some of the translations have problems. I play a female character in english and havent noticed weird things, but im a man so its possible im just blind to those because of it. Je joue en français. Mais tous les sons sont en anglais, donc cela ne change rien. Je ne parle pas de mauvaise traduction ou je ne sais quoi. Je parle d'interactions sociales, comme quelqu'un qui me tape le dos, comme si j'étais sa compagne de beuverie. Je suis une femme et non... juste, non. Il me semble qu'Edèr (entre autres) fait souvent ça. Et je déteste. Comme il dit lui-même au début de l'aventure : il n'est qu'un "pauvre fermier qui suit (aveuglément) la Gardienne et prend les coups à sa place". Ce n'est pas pour que lui m'en colle. Et puis, c'est déplacé. I play in French. But all the audio are in English, so it does not matter. I'm not just talking about a bad translation or whatever here. I'm talking about social interactions like someone who hits my back, as if I were his drinking buddy. I am a woman and it's a no-no. Edèr often does that. I hate it. As he says at the beginning of the adventure: he is a "poor" farmer who follows (blindly) the Watcher and takes the blows in her place. And then he slaps me (the back, the arm...) ? No, it's out of place. Maybe it's a personal/cultural thing? I know several women who are perfectly comfortable with some friendly roughhousing/backslapping/whatever. Also, women in Eora appear to enjoy greater equity with men than women in real life - everything in the PoE universe is less gendered, with a few exceptions for political roles. Part of that is probably for ease of narrative design (it would be costly to write separate minor behaviors for every character on the basis of gender), but I prefer to just chalk it up to "hey, this is just how things are in this world." The real-world cultural mores that make you feel like Eder's behavior is out of place might just not be present in Eora.

Level scaling (at least in PoE2) doesn't mean that all enemies are matched 1:1 to your level. It means that, depending on your level, they are boosted a set number of levels above what they would have been without scaling. For example: if you enter a level 12 scene at level 18, a +4/-4 scaling system (which is what they're looking at implementing in the patch) would convert it to a level 16 scene. So it will still be possible to be over-levelled for content, just not as frequently/drastically so.

Side note: make sure you're moving your injured crew to the resting crew slots on the bottom right. This will stop the morale loss.

I guess we have different definitions of fun then. It's not balanced for melee weapons either. There are multi-projectile and cleaving melee weapons too. Ah; I haven't run into a lot of these, so it's possible I missed something particularly game-breaking (aside from flagellant's path + dual wield, which seems to trigger chain strikes on every enemy in the path while swift flurry is activated). Anything specifically?

I can't agree with the idea that the content isn't there, it's just spread out/structured differently than the first game (which we tend to remember with White March/Battle of Yenwood added). PoE1 at release was actually quite short, with two cities that were virtually lifeless and a 15 level dungeon where about 10 of the levels felt copied/pasted. Deadfire's quests are more focused but come in smaller bites, which means that the format is going to suffer badly from something like, say, ridiculously bad difficulty balancing at release. It would be nice to have both, but I'll take a Neketaka over a Raedric's Hold any day. I have plenty of criticisms about Deadfire, but if the contest is between PoE1 and PoE2 *at release* then PoE2 is the richer game. If my guess is right and the DLC adds some significant single-location content, maybe the lack of multi-level dungeons won't feel so glaring.

I hope they're smart about how they nerf it, though. It feels about right for melee weapons... maybe just add an upper limit on the amount of times it can trigger or change it to a fixed recovery bonus (the latter would kill the fun of landing a chain, though). 1 mortification is definitely too cheap for what it does currently.

Is it cone from caster? Cause that seems a little strange considering it's a ranged weapon Just tested. It's a cone from the caster and the base cone AoE does affect allies. Still a great weapon. Tried it on Serafen and he was generating focus more reliably than with his blunderbusses. Ranger/cipher and ranger/monk would have great synergies – a ranger/monk with Swift flurry and twinned shot would fire 6 projectiles, each with a 33% chance to trigger 3 more.

In the same way I despised vampires and other level-draining creatures for the way they'd force me to have to re-select my spells to memorize all over again. Really? It was that bad? I played the original BG2 and other IE games back in the day, but having played the Enhanced Editions ever since they came out, I had completely forgotten about this. Wow, that was a major inconvenience. Regarding gear being dropped on death, it's always fun to have 3+ party members die in battle in the IE games. The rule I've set for myself is that I'm not allowed to load if one or two party members die, but I will load if 3+ die in the same fight because I don't want to spend 5 minutes re-equipping my characters. Not having having any means of resurrection with me makes it worse because I need to haul all their gear back to a temple. Level drain wiping your spells was one of the best things the EEs fixed, imo (that and dual wield/sword+shield swapping). That said, I actually wish Obsidian's fampyrs would do more to sap your character in addition to just dominating everything all the time. Incrementally greying out certain abilities during combat by draining your power level (maybe on crit?) would be more interesting than other effects like Terrified that disable all of your abilities at once.

Fort Deadlight, Engwithans Waystation, Oathbinder's Sanctum and maybe Drowned Barrows going by the wiki (I haven't explored it yet). Either you are blind or your memory is distorting the actual size of Raedric's Hold. That's unnecessary. Perhaps a lot of those dungeons will feel longer once the difficulty is improved, but as of right now not one of them takes as long as Raedric's Hold, Durgan's Battery, etc. I don't personally mind the smaller dungeons and think they probably lend themselves better to the theme of Deadfire than, say, an Endless Paths-style dungeon would, but that doesn't mean it isn't an accurate observation.

I agree with all of OP's points. The main thing missing from PoE2 was a strong antagonist: Thaos from PoE1 (absent though he was most of the time) at least made you feel like you were tracking someone who had personally taken something from you. Yes, Eothas destroyed your keep and took a part of your soul, but not out of malice - he's more like a force of nature. Chasing after him was like chasing after a hurricane or a tornado, and a fairly sympathetic one at that. A secondary kith antagonist like a pro Eothasian fanatic trying to prevent you from reaching him would've made the main narrative a lot more compelling - s/he could've been the person to raid your ship at the beginning instead of some inconsequential pirate, for example. That said, PoE2 is still a strong contender against Mask of the Betrayer for best post BG2 RPG imo, especially once the bugs, difficulty, and balancing issues are worked out (and once the DLCs are released). The world-building is top notch, the quests are numerous/varied/interesting (albeit short), and Neketaka is by far the best RPG city since Athkatla, hands down.

It's one of (if not the) best bows in the game. Try it with a ranger/monk multi and Swift Flurry And yes, whenever you see "Foe AoE", that means that it only affects enemies.

Assassin would be a good subclass if smoke veil didn't completely fail half the time. At level 19, the only rogue active I used in my assassin/shattered pillar multiclass was confounding blind - would've been better off taking vanilla rogue/shattered pillar in the long run.

Could you elaborate? I can perhaps see the "chore" part, as combat required more of the player's attention in the original. But, since most fights in Deadfire do not reward or punish the player for paying attention and actually using tactics, I'm failing to see how most combats are actually interesting in Deadfire? POE2 combat seems to require more micro something I really enjoy. POE1 really did not. Agreed. One benefit of PoE2's per-encounter system is that it encourages you to make liberal use of a variety of abilities - which, once difficulty is fixed, will probably make encounters more strategic/fun in the long run. In PoE1 there was a LOT of auto-attacking.

They're probably releasing minor free content (Sawyer said there would be more to come) to keep interest going for upcoming dlc. I would expect that there will be beefier content in the future. Some of the companion/romance interactions are missing/bugged and are being fixed. As for dialogue pronouns not correctly identifying your character as female, I believe this has been identified as a bug and is also being patched. Bonne journée

Really? The only food I bought was from those super cheap farms you find around the world. All the rest of the food you find when exploring. By the end of the game I was traveling with over 1000 food and water in consumption space with over 700fruit in storage. A fully manned gallon costed me under 50 gold per day, which is low. While the cost of ships might seem like much early on, once you collect higher loot, it’s a non issue. I upgraded everyweapon I wanted to highest level and was still left with over 400000 gold. And galleon was the first purchase I did. I don't like selling uniques, so maybe that's my problem. After around level 10, enemies start dropping so many generic exceptionals/superbs that it completely breaks the economy and maintaining your ship/crew becomes trivial even without selling uniques. I actually wish daily wages were significantly higher so that player resources wouldn't blow up quite so quickly. I think I finished the game with around 500k cp, a fully upgraded ship, and a queue of 3 or 4 thousand +1 morale food/drink items for my crew.

If you bought Deadfire and are upset that there's a lot of ship/pirate content, I don't know what to tell you. It was clear as day that this would be an aspect of the game. The problem isn't that the ship mechanics exist, it's that they need to be improved. It isn't just 'cause of lore', other than that what really matters for a company, the commercial, business side of the choices were right as well. It just happens that this time the lore and market opportunity overlap. True, the casual majority market does seem to not care and still enjoy it, so the marketing and general business direction were a success. It's nothing to be proud of though - relying on people to help fund your projects and keep you going, like kickstarting PoE 1, then once you release the game and are no longer financially dependent, going mainstream and leaving those kickstarters behind, because they aren't the majority market for the biggest potential profits. Get them to help you get started, then leave them in the dust while selling out to chase even more money. Nice 1. Except Obsidian didn't do that. They crowdsourced the sequel and even gave backers of the original a discount iirc. After PoE1 was released, they could have left the game as it was after a few patches – instead, they listened to customers' criticisms and added significant content to the stronghold for free, added new skills, revamped stealth, etc. etc. Given what Sawyer has said in recent Q&As, there seems to be no reason to assume that the same won't happen with Deadfire. The community's biggest complaints – difficulty, the relationship system, and ship combat – are already confirmed as being addressed. If they put similar effort into the ship stronghold as they did for Caed Nua, we can probably assume a significantly improved outcome vs. release. Isometric RTWP CRPGs do not have mass market appeal – you can't "sell out" to "casuals" the same way you could with an indie shooter or adventure game. Casual players aren't typically interested in games that involve learning buckets of lore and passing dialogue checks, they're interested in crushing candy and blasting zombies. If the developers were aiming to leave the fanbase behind in an attempt to appeal to a casual demographic, they wouldn't be focusing their first major patch on making the game significantly *harder.* There's a lot of things about Deadfire-at-release that I don't like (and much more that I do like), but that doesn't always have to mean that it's some insidious plot by the developers to screw the fans and cash in somehow. Given the developer's track record, it makes more sense to assume that they had good intentions for the fans and fell short in some areas than that they had bad intentions and don't care.

I would argue that current boarding numbers aren't necessarily a bad thing. When you board, your recruited allies and sidekicks join the fight with full health even if your crew is injured - because they're passengers, not part of the crew. I just assume the same for the enemies: even if you decimated their *crew,* that doesn't mean that there aren't still other people on the ship to resist you. There's still all kinds of problems with lack of interaction between boarding and ship combat and they should probably add a merit/malus system that reflects the latter (injured fighters, damage/fire hazards, etc), but I don't think the game should tie the number of boarding combatants 100% to the number of sailing crew...it's no fun to board a ship with one enemy on it.

Or just keep the current system but restrict rest to safe zones (inns, ship) and fully cleared dungeon levels. BG's "You cannot rest here...monsters are about" was one of the few rest mechanics/restrictions that encouraged me to soldier on with an injured/depleted party. The only way to really prevent rest spamming in an area is to fully disable it on a conditional basis, imo.

@yoyolll Hey, did you get a chance to do Splintered Reef during your playthrough (far SE corner of the map)? It's an undead city about the size of Dunnage - an island rather than a dungeon, but it kind of plays like one. You said you played everything so I figured you've already seen it, but I almost missed it finishing up my playthrough and thought it might be up your alley. About as much content as Drowned Barrows, I would guess, although the boss fight is less challenging/hilarious.